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May 2007 Latest News

May 22, 2007

California legislative move

California has long had the reputation of being the American state where legislative wishlists are exercised. Bill AB 1471 is soon to receive consideration there.

This is a move to require gun manufacturers to place a microstamp on the inside of the chamber of every semi-automatic handgun sold within the state. These are to be recorded. The intention of the move is to leave spent cartridge cases with a unique serial number stamped on them by the expanding gases released during firing.

In theory, this would allow the authorities to collect the spent ammunition found at a crime scene and use it as a means to trace the registered owner of the gun.

However, in practice, reliance on gun registration as a means of reducing crime is notoriously ineffective. Statistically and worldwide the numbers of registered guns used in crimes are so low as to barely figure. But this does not mean that registration works as an anti-crime measure, either. In this instance, defacement of the number is easily arranged, previously stamped cartridge cases can be salvaged and used, criminals prefer use guns in regular circulation in the underworld and have no trouble obtaining their supplies - there are many reasons why this proposal if successfully installed in legislation would have no useful effect. Inquiries made to sporting arms manufacturers would soon have disclosed the reasons why.



May 6, 2007

More pressure on Swiss to change gun laws

An article has been run by Spiegel Online highlighting further pressure from anti-gun interests, such as a women's magazine, directed at the Swiss militia keeping military arms and ammunition at home. Attempts have been made in the past to somehow restrict the historic Swiss access to lawful firearms, but these have been unsuccessful. Now, however, according to the article, a parliamentary initiative is soon to offer a compromise in the form of a proposed ban on keeping ammunition in the home. According to Spiegel, this has some likelihood of success.

The article implies criticism of the high rate of guns lawfully held in private hands, and suggests the number of "gun deaths" somehow follows from this. There is as usual no objective assessment of murder rates. ("Gun death" figures invariably involve a conflation of suicide and murder rates, both of which figures need to be reviewed independently in their own right before reliable information is yielded. Switzerland has a very low murder rate.)

In addition, the number of suicides is also linked by the article to gun availability. With a suicide rate of about 19 per hundred thousand, it is higher than the European Union average of about 14. However, the Spiegel article does not mention that there has never been a recorded case of suicide rates falling in response to more restrictive gun laws.



May 1, 2007

Even tighter gun laws in Japan

Following the shooting murder of the Mayor of Nagasaki, Itcho Ito, the Japanese government has announced the introduction of even more stringent gun restrictions. With legal handguns virtually banned, and with legal longarms very heavily controlled and in the hands of only a small number of hunters, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hakubun Shimomura has outlined measures requiring incoming ships and aircraft to make available even more detailed inventories of their cargoes, passengers and crews.

These legislative changes follow hard on the heels of new laws introduced as recently as February of this year.

Despite the hard-line attitude of the Japanese authorities to any gun ownership, shootings amongst the underworld have been a continuing cause for concern.

The Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, shortly after the shooting called it "a challenge to democracy," and said "The (Prime Minister Shinzo) Abe administration takes this seriously and we want to respond".

It is very common for governments to quickly impose new gun laws after high-profile shootings.

International Herald Tribune

Alertnet.org


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