All Americans join the world community in mourning the horrific loss of life from the Norway terrorist attacks. We can only imagine the void left in the lives of the victims' families. The staggering toll of young lives taken by a gunman at the Utoya youth camp reminds us all, once again, that guns are the enablers of mass killers.
For those who are quick to argue that "guns don't kill people, people kill people," it is instructive that the Norway killer took many more lives with his guns than with his explosives. Violent individuals intent on inflicting multiple fatalities don't choose knives or baseball bats. With few exceptions, they choose guns.
There are some in the American "gun rights" community who will no doubt use this shooting to assert that Norway's strong gun laws don't work, or to support the National Rifle Association's campaign to make it easier for Americans to carry loaded guns on the streets, and into restaurants, coffee houses, bars, college campuses and other public places. Does this mass shooting in Norway suggest that Western Europe's restrictive gun regulations are futile, while America's practically non-existent gun regulations make us safer?
Such a conclusion approaches absurdity, when we consider some well-established facts. Press reports indicate that as many as 70 young lives may have been taken in the Norwegian youth camp massacre. Whereas that number of shooting deaths in a day is treated as a historic event in Norway, it is less than the death toll from guns every day in America -- which is now in excess of 80. Whereas a mass shooting in Norway is an extraordinary tragedy, described by that nation's prime minister as a "national disaster," it is a regular occurrence in America. Within 48 hours of the Norway shooting, there were at least four mass shootings in our country: six dead at a skating rink in Texas, nine wounded during a fight between teenagers at a birthday party in Central Florida, a 15-year-old killed and eight wounded at an outdoor party near Stockton, California, and seven wounded in a casino shooting near Seattle.
As awful as the Norwegian youth camp shooting was, the average resident of that nation would have difficulty imagining life in a society with gun violence even close to what we experience in America. In 2005, for example, there were 12,352 gun homicides in the U.S. In that same year, Norway had five. The homicide rate in the U.S. is over eight times what it is in Norway because the U.S. rate of homicides with guns is 38 times higher than Norway's.
Norway has a restrictive gun licensing system, with a requirement that a prospective gun owner provide a written statement justifying why he or she wants one and stiff restrictions on how guns are stored. The fact that one gunman, driven by violent fanaticism, was able to get a gun to commit mass murder no more justifies weakening Norway's gun laws than it justifies weakening its law against murder itself. No law is a guarantee against the evil it was passed to prevent. We can say with certainty that Norway, with its strong gun laws, is a far safer place than the U.S., with its weak gun laws and its permissiveness toward carrying guns in public.
It is reasonably certain that the Norway youth camp shootings will lead to determined efforts to further strengthen that nation's gun laws. In contrast, America has suffered through Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Tucson and too many other similar events with little action taken to prevent more tragedies of this kind.
The youth camp shooting is neither a reason to condemn Norway's gun laws, nor to praise our own. Instead, it confirms, once more, that the well-known bumper sticker could not be more wrong. Actually, guns do kill people.
For more information, see Dennis Henigan's Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy (Potomac Books 2009). Visit the Brady Campaign on Facebook.
This blog is also posted on the Brady site.
Golnar Khosrowshahi: How to Talk to Your Kids About the Norway Attack
No, but the laws advocate ARE a garantee that law abiding cititzens will be rendered defenseless sheep in the face of the evil that is NOT prevented.
Nope.
The NRA is a paper tiger and gun ownership is at an all time low in america according to Josh Sugarmann's scientific phone survey. Send the Brady Campaign the largest donation you can afford and we will have a gun-free america is less time than you can shake a stick.
We have the media, the white house, the congress and the judiciary in our pockets. We just need to be patient and capitalize on the next member of congress to get shot in the face. We learned from our mistakes after the Gabby shooting in arizona and will do it right the next time.
Think about the illegal things most often associated with guns; murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, etc. All of these crimes share in common the fact that they carry far harsher penalties than obtaining or possessing a firearm illegally. If these harsher punishments don’t deter these crimes, why would another law? Especially when one remembers that the simplest definition of a criminal is a person who doesn’t obey the law, the futility of gun control as a meaningful solution to our gun crime problem becomes clear.
You make a decent analogy with drugs, I don't have all the answers, but I do know that everyone in this country should make large regular donations to the Brady Campaign.
That is a common misconception. The secret service are all trained in kung-fu and do not carry guns as a routine. They only carry guns when the president travels overseas.
Way to jump out of the gene pool like this guy: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2011994648_accident31m.html
"The homicide rate in the U.S. is over eight times what it is in Norway because the U.S. rate of homicides with guns is 38 times higher than Norway's."
Is it not more realistic that our homicide rate is 8 times Norway because our population is 307 million as opposed to Norway's 5 million people?
Our chronic 'gun problem' is for the most part gang and income related. Which is part of a much bigger problem: loss of a manufacturing base in this country to keep low income youth out of trouble via careers. Detroit, Camden, South Central... all towns with high murder rates that lost a major industry. All working class towns where youthful shenanigans turned into deadly lifelong activites. Not a coincidence!
Coupled with drug laws that make illicit drugs a high profit industry, what can anyone expect?
Concentrating on gun laws is like arguing over how big the bandaid should be on a severed limb.
I'm actually glad guns have been kept out of the coverage. It's allowed us more time to examine the real issues behind this, i.e. Breivik's motives, acceptance of minorities in homogenous societies, cultural and immigration issues in Europe, political extremism, and to focus on the mourning and healing.
Our usual reaction is to immediately question the implements of destruction, rather than the motives. Funny how some call us the 'crazy pro gun Americans.'
More equal societies have less violence, drug abuse and imprison fewer citizens.
But addressing economic inequality in the US would be even more difficult than putting reasonal controls on guns and gun ownership. Can't you hear the "socialist!" chants now?
The same people in the US who advocate gun owners not be incumbered with any of the responsibilities of citizenship are the one who support every policy leading to a growing gap between the rich and working Americans and the utter despair of the poor.
They want the scary poor as an excuse to brandish guns in church, school and other public places puttign the entire population are risk.
"BRANDISH"? Do you even know the meaning of the words you spout?
http://tinyurl.com/4k346he
To me, this incident shows criminals will get whatever guns they want and use them however they please, regardless of gun laws.
ECS
On the other hand, people would have been able to fight back with clubs or their own knives. The thing is, people being able to fight back. Your position sir is absurd from the start, it is the policy of disarming victims that causes these tragedies.
We need to support their endeavors.
So as you see the police have no duty to protect an individual
The 2nd Amendment, BTW, is to defend the country and the government, not to attack it.
Please don`t bother to respond if you can`t understand this.
-- So, historically, no government has ever needed to be addressed?
You`d have to have weapons on par with the military, fighter planes, armed drones, nuclear bombs...
--So, no indigenous people have ever used guerrilla tactics to thwart a larger, better equipped foe?
The 2nd Amendment, BTW, is to defend the country and the government, not to attack it.
--The 2nd Amendment enumerates the right of the People to keep and bear arms. The People are the militia, and if the Government becomes tyrannical, do the People not have the right to force dissolution and 'reboot' as it were?
Please don`t bother to respond if you can`t understand this.
--Many of us understand it just fine, the question is, do you?
"...The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."
Why should we argue, when that is exactly what the founders and those who helped to shape this country said the right to keep and bear arms is for?
By the way, when the 2A was drafted, and ratified, the People did have weapons that were on par with the military's of the world. The militia had some weapons which were better than the strongest army in the world. They had rifles, while the British were armed with muskets.
In your own words, "Please don`t bother to respond if you can`t understand this."
The right of revolution is recognized and the rememdy if the constitutional convention in Art. 5.
This video if of a law enforcement veteran, with 25 years experience in firearms training and competition, demonstrating the differences between fully-automatic "assault rifles", semi-auto "assault-weapons" and semi-auto hunting rifles. In this video he demonstrates exactly how each of these weapons operates, and how the latter differ simply by cosmetic appearance. He even takes a common hunting rifle, removes it wooden stock and replaces it with a plastic stock showing how it becomes a so called "assault weapons"
I challenge anyone intellectually honest enough to educate themselves on this issue to watch this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STeyS6LYIx4
The gun industry complied with the ban by removing these cosmetic features that anti-gun legislation used to define the firearm as an "assault weapon" and anti-gun side's reaction was to say the gun industry was "skirting the law." This is proof that they want the weapons themselves banned, not their cosmetic features, yet can't properly define what makes these firearms any different from semi-auto hunting rifles.
Once they get weapons of an evil appearance banned, they'd come back and say the common hunting rifles possess the same power and technology as banned weapons, now they have become the new weapons of choice for criminals, and demand they be banned too.