I bring up the drug thing 'cause many people think that banning guns will get rid of them, but it won't. Just like banning drugs hasn't kept them out of this country. I just needed an example of how it would be "easy" to smuggle guns into the US. Assuming every gun in America was destroyed it would only take a few years for the "gun trade" to fully develop and then you'd have gun dealers right next to the drug dealers.
I think that really is also a question of mentality as you already mentioned. We were not raisede with guns present in our daily life, so we don't have an afinity to them. I think it is how a whole society is handling that subject and how it is part of their thinking and life-style. It is not that we are living in a cage with no borders here. The EU doesn't have controlled borders inside since a while anymore. So if you want to bring something from Germany to France, just sit in the car and bring it there. No checkpoint you have to worry about. But since the laws about guns are pretty much the same in the other countries of the EU that isn't really problem. The real problem for us (and Germany in particular) is the border to the former east-block, especially Poland. There is gun smuggling from Russia, where you can buy a gun for a few bucks with loads of ammunition. Since the borders are "open" to the former communistic countries, we have of course an increase of illegal guns in Germany and also criminals who use them. But still not as bad as in the US. I still believe that banning guns would help in the long run, but that's something you guys have to decide.
And I totally agree that a society w/o firearms is a safer place, but there is no way to remove every firearm from the US and make sure no new firearms get smuggled in. And I don't feel that a society where only criminals have access to firearms is a safer place.
But less firearms are making it a safer place. Less firearms -> lower possibilty of someone using them. Even if 20% of the criminals don't have access anymore and therefore can't use them i would consider that a big success.
And about not getting us... Well, in some aspects, we're from very different cultures (you're German or living in German, yes?). I don't expect people from other countries/cultures to understand Americans (especially when it comes to firearms). Americans, as a society, hold individual freedoms paramount and we are nearly paranoid about those freedoms being eroded away.
Paranoid is maybe the right word. All internet traffic in and out the US is controlled by the government/intelligence and nobody seems to give a sh*t. But when it comes down to firerarms people literally freak out. That is also shizophrenic in some way. People don't mind to be profiled by companies, like when you a have a "member card" of a grocery-store chain, but taking away their guns makes them upset. That is really kind of strange for me. Here in Germany we have very strict laws to protect the privacy of people, much more harder than in the US. Privacy is what I call freedom, because even a gun can't bring it back to you, once it is lost. Maybe it would be interesting to define the word freedom?
The police in London have closed circut cameras all over that city an no Londoners seem to mind. At at Superbowl a couple of years back there were cameras using face recognition technology in and around the stadium and when people found out they went ape sh*t. I swear every other word on the news was either "Orwell", "1984", or "Big Brother." Many Americans want to have their cake and eat it too. They want complete security/safety and complete freedom. Yet the fail to realize that it's a give and take. Personally, I'd be willing to give up a little bit of my freedom so the cops could have an easier time getting the bad guys, but I might be a little optimistic that the "extra" power given to the police/government woudn't be abused. I know it's all a balancing act, and in the end if we are going to err, I'd rather we erred on the side of too much freedom than too little.
Of course they don't mind, because it is regulated exactly by law, what they are allowed to do with the collected data. If somebody is not a suspect they have to delete the data right away again. So if you are not a criminal, you don't have to fear anything. As I said before, they can track and profile you just by the use of your credit-card or the use of your cell-phone. They can do that easily and they do. The question is, if there are the laws to protect privacy of the individual. And as far as I learned it the regulations on that subject in the US are much "lazier" than in european countries.
Sorry for this OT rant...
It's OK, but maybe we really should get back to the original subject! 😉
groovebuster
