@ Cymric
There are many things that, to an outsider, may seem
moronic. ;-)
The other thing you should do is check where your country stands in the international arena as regards the victimisation rates per 100 people. I hate to tell you this, but the processed data from the 1996 and 2000 sweeps of the International Crime Victimisation Survey show that the Netherlands has a higher crime rate than the USA (when looking at a range of crimes) and is ranked only 2 places lower than the USA for very serious crimes (England is number 1, Australia number 2, USA is 3rd, Sweden is 4th and the Netherlands is 5th). You may also want to check the number of homicides per 100,000 in Amsterdam compared to any city in the USA you like. I think people often fall into the trap of looking only at crime totals, but ignoring the percentage crime relative to the population. This may result in confusion and the erroneous assumption that one speaks from a more righteous or moral platform than is actually the case. (In case you are wondering, the relevant statistics are available from the Dutch Ministry of Justice or if you want something instantly digestible you can get tables from the University of Leiden. This a well-known survey involving the ministries of many countries including the Netherlands.
Crime is universal. If that wasn't the case and if crime wasn't a threat to the safety of the population then the world's police forces would not need to be armed. The same applies to the general nature of us humans. We fight, we squabble, we do each other in, and that is why we often have things like armies and weapons to threaten one another (and occasionally use against each other too). This has always been the case and I am afraid it is likely to continue to be the case. Now if I could press a magic button and instantaneously vaporise every weapon and every utensil not designed as a weapon, but nevertheless capable of being a weapon, I would do it gladly. And for about an hour or two we would all be equal and the law-abiding righteous citizens would be on an equal footing with any kind of criminal you care to specify. But I fear it wouldn't be very long before somebody realised that if he ripped up a fence post he could use that as a weapon to threaten somebody for money or indeed to do him in. There will always be weapons and there will always be one human who wants to have an advantage over another for purely nefarious reasons.
Now, as for the gun debate...we agree on one thing...the kid at the school should not have had access to the particular firearm he used to kill those people. We could debate whether he would have subsequently used another kind of weapon to kill somebody, and we could also debate how many people he could have killed if he had a different weapon that was not as efficient a killing tool as the gun. However there are a few things we need to consider:
1) There are only three classes of illegal firearm deaths: homicide, negligence ('accidental') and defective (accidental). The incidence of accidents whereby the root cause is a genuinely defective weapon is almost miniscule in the toatal number of deaths by firearms. One could argue that the owner should make every effort to study the recalls and warnings literature for his particular firearm, but I will acknowledge that there must be a few incidents every year where a firearm is defective and causes the death of an individual by accident even if there is nothing wrong with all other items of the same batch. Like every other tool in existence, such as hair-dryers, microwave ovens or any other kind of tool or implement accidents will happen that are not the fault of the user but are a manufacturing fault. It is not reasonable to sweep all those tools into the bin as a precautionary measure to prevent a possible death by genuine accident, especially when regarding firearms and the very low incidence of genuine accidents due to defective equipment. But other events that are called 'accidents' such as a dropped gun, or an incident while cleaning a gun are acts of negligence and are not true accidents.
2) That leaves us with only two ways that a firearm can be involved in an illegal death and both of these are user-precipitated. One is negligence (mentioned above) and the other is criminal. In both instances the shooter should not have had access to the firearm. In the first scenario he is not competent to have a firearm and in the second case it is not appropriate for him to have a firearm (even if he is competent).
Unfortunately for us the majority of firearms deaths are due to criminal activity where the intent is to use the firearm to gain an advantage over another person for nefarious reasons. There are more of these incidents than the type of mass-killing that took place at the school. Of course a mass-killing by a deranged individual is news-worthy and individual cases are not as news-worthy.
You could argue that if there were no firearms legally available, then no firearms could be acquired illegally, but then I could argue that if my aunt had balls she would be my uncle. There will always be firearms used by police and for military reasons (even if you look at only sidearms). Furthermore even if all production of firearms ceased world-wide today, there are sufficient quantities of firearms in existence for a genuine criminal to get hold of. Banning doesn't help: we all know the situation in England where gun crime has soared since the ban. Only the law-abiding citizens have been disarmed and the criminals have continued to import their firearms.
I agree that prospective gun owners should undergo thorough background checks, and physical competency checks and possibly psychometric testing too. I don't mind having gun registration although I know others are against this. In the case of the kid who shot the people at the school, I believe that the firearm owner should be charged over those deaths because I see negligence on his part that resulted in his firearm falling into the wrong hands. Of course the kid was criminal in his actions and the behavioral patterns that lead to his homicidal actions are of grave concern and that needs to be looked at more carefully. Whether it is a Chav shooting a toddler dead in Scotland with an air-rifle or a maniac stabbing 5 or 6 different people in London, the problem is with that person's mindset. As many have already said here, it is not enough to have access to a weapon: you have to want to kill somebody before you use it. If that wasn't the case, I would have killed several people by now because I have two firearms. You can look at me with suspicion because I have those guns, but I stopped a man from stabbing me and several other people simply because I happened to have one of those pistols on me when I was walking out of a shop one day with my groceries.
Having said that, I am against people having guns because it is 'cool' or a fashion statement or any other reason besides protection or sport, or a necessary item as part of one's job. On paper it is evident that I don't need to be armed here in London (and I am not: my guns are locked away in SA) but I sometimes wish I was. One such occasion that sticks in my mind is the incident last year where two chaps on a motorcycle shot two people outside the hospital and all I could do was watch them riding merrily away. Would it have been useful if I was armed that day? Definitely. Would it have been useful if a random selection of bystanders on the pavement were armed that day? I don't know. Maybe none of them meets the requirements of a responsible gun owner. Maybe one of them does.
What is clear is that the shooters that day were not bound by any law or sense of morality, and are free to enjoy the fruits of their ciminal activities. They have guns and I have guns, but that does not equate us.
