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发帖数: 29846 | 1 by Jammie
There are an estimated 280 million to 300 million guns in private hands
in America—many legally owned, many not. Each year, more than 4 million new
guns enter the market. This level of gun saturation has occurred not
because the anti-gun lobby has been consistently outflanked by its
adversaries in the National Rifle Association, though it has been. The NRA
is quite obviously a powerful organization, but like many effective pressure
groups, it is powerful in good part because so many Americans are
predisposed to agree with its basic message.
America’s level of gun ownership means that even if the Supreme Court—
which ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment gives citizens the individual
right to own firearms, as gun advocates have long insisted—suddenly
reversed itself and ruled that the individual ownership of handguns was
illegal, there would be no practical way for a democratic country to locate
and seize those guns.
Many gun-control advocates, and particularly advocates of a total gun
ban, would like to see the United States become more like Canada, where
there are far fewer guns per capita and where most guns must be registered
with the federal government. The Canadian approach to firearms ownership has
many attractions—the country’s firearm homicide rate is one-sixth that of
the U.S. But barring a decision by the American people and their
legislators to remove the right to bear arms from the Constitution, arguing
for applying the Canadian approach in the U.S. is useless. |
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