| Rath said: It's not so much gun ownership that's a problem, it's gun culture. You can have high gun ownership rates where guns are almost never used on humans. In New Zealand we have a lot of guns around but almost entirely they're used for hunting or sport - nobody carries guns around for self-defence and they're kept in locked cases when in the home. I believe this different idea of what guns are meant for is the reason why gun crime in New Zealand is so much lower than in the United States. By and large even the criminals here don't use guns and the police rarely use guns as well (and don't carry them with them normally). |
Well maybe that's a partial indicator of how American society is regressing and/or why we're failing as a society.
These days police patrol cars in virtually every American city have both the old standby shotgun as well as an AR-15 readily available. I for one won't condemn the policy because of crazy things that happen like the infamous North Hollywood shootout of '97.
A part of that is influenced by popular media from film to video games. They do influence the easily influenced. I'm inclined to think the beforementioned North Hollywood incident must have been influenced by Michael Mann's '95 film Heat, due to the similarities.
But American gun culture itself has nothing to do with crime. Certainly not the NRA culture that promotes safety, responsibility and personal accountability. I'm more inclined to think the NRA itself exaggerates the self-defense angle in the interest of gaining more support from members (donations) as well as that of the small arms industry as a whole (it's a multi billion dollar industry). The core of the NRA membership really just consists of sport/competitive shooters and hunters.
