Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem has said the EU can "no longer watch on without acting" as 1,000 Europeans are killed in gun violence each year. She is proposing unified, stricter rules for the whole bloc.A little comparison here, the EU Comprises 28 nations and has a 2012 population of 507,890,191 whereas the US has a population of 316,915,000. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, killers used guns to murder 11,000 people in 2010 in the U.S., the latest year for which statistics are available. Twenty-thousand others used guns to commit suicides that year, and another 73,000 people were rushed to hospital emergency rooms for gunshot wounds (Source VOA).
Using those numbers, the EU has a larger population, but 9% (0.090909) of the gun violence, yet they admit there is a problem. Although officially, the US admits it has a problem as the VOA article I mentioned about is titled: Experts: Gun Violence Is Public Health Crisis in US.
The DW article goes on:
The EU's home affairs commissioner wrote that one problem with the open-border bloc was "the danger that criminals try to get hold of their guns in the countries with the most lax laws" on gun ownership.Let's also put out this bit of info:
The annual Small Arms Survey report in 2007 sought to estimate gun ownership per capita around the world. According to these results, Germany had 30.3 registered firearms for every 100 inhabitants – putting it above average in European Union terms, but behind countries like Finland (45.3), Cyprus (36.4) and Sweden (31.6). The US topped the global list by a considerable margin, averaging just under one gun per person, according to the research institute based in Switzerland.The rule changes which are reported to be under European Commission consideration include revising which guns are eligible for home ownership, tighter regulations for the sale and ownership of antique weapons and air rifles or air pistols, and a possible ban on selling weapons or ammunition on the Internet.
I know the usual excuse is to blame the Second Amendment, but any interpretation that goes against the public welfare goes against the spirit of the constitution (and you don't need to go too far into the document to see that).
We have consistently seen that the conservatives in the U.S. simply deny facts that dispute their positions. They deny evolution, they deny paleontology, they deny climate change, they deny that there is a problem with gun violence.
ReplyDeleteThe real difficulty is that dealing with conservatives is like dealing with children who scream if you challenge their belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. They are not the adults in the room. They are not fact driven. They are not responsible or accountable (they save that for other people).