Re: Society safer when good guys have guns.
Letter writer Bob Sherman asserts "we live in a violent society, especially in the United States."
To some degree he is correct, certainly when it comes to the U.S. However, he neglects to mention that violent crime, and crime rates in general, have quite dramatically dropped for several decades, even in his home country, where the availability and mania for guns seems to have no rational limit.
He feels safer in the U.S. armed with his pet Glock than he does in Canada, where he must leave his weapon safely (we hope) locked up. One has to wonder why he continues to live here.
He must be a fearful person, as the chance of being threatened and killed by a gun in Canada compared with the U.S. is substantially less.
Based on population and government figures, gun deaths in the U.S. account for one in 25,108 deaths. In Canada, it's one in 663,130.
These figures make it is easy to see which is the safer country. The figures for the U.K., since the Dunblane school massacre in 1996, when strict gun laws were put in place, is one in 7,830,125. There has not been a mass gun killing since. The same story in Australia after that country drastically revamped its gun laws after a madman slaughtered 36 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, about a month after Dunblane.
Sherman also claims that "society itself is in a time of crisis." When has it not been?
And is that sufficient reason to arm everyone to the teeth? Or would it be better to learn from the experience of Britain and Australia?
His suggestion that if you are sitting at home and someone breaks into your home, having a Glock would protect you, is highly questionable. The chances are you'd be watching TV and not realize someone had entered your house or your gun would be in another room, maybe under the mattress, and you'd be too late to retrieve it.
But, then I suppose Sherman, ever vigilant ex-cop, would have his gun always in his lap, ready to blast the intruders before they could even begin to steal the silver.
As with so many Americans, and too many Canadians, this appears to be a paranoid man who trots out all the tired old arguments against gun control. Pretty well everything he says is typical NRA fear mongering and should not be given serious consideration.
On one point, he is definitely correct. Any new restrictions on guns in the U.S. are unlikely to make much difference, but that is only because the pro-gun lobby is so strong that any new laws will likely be so weak as to be almost useless.
Guy King,
Kelowna