John R. Lott – Bruksela myli się w sprawie broni

W sobotę na łamach The Wall Street Jurnal pojawił się artykuł Johna R. Lotta, którego redakcja została dokończona w polskim Sejmie. John R. Lot po wykładzie pt. „Jak broń w rękach obywateli wpływa na przestępczość” czynił ostatnie poprawki w poniższym artykule.

*Broń samopowtarzalna i samoczynna jest popularnie określana półautomatyczną i automatyczną. Oba terminy są używane i zrozumiałe, ale są nieprecyzyjne.

** Zakaz broni szturmowej w USA

tłumaczenie za stroną redneck.pl

The proposed Firearms Directive would, among other things, ban various semiautomatic guns and magazines greater than 10 or 20 rounds, depending on the length of the gun. The goal appears to be to ban semiautomatic guns that can “easily be converted” to automatic weapons.

But the directive completely misunderstands how guns work. Semiautomatic guns can’t be easily converted into machine guns. The firing mechanisms are different.

Semiautomatic weapons fire only one bullet with each pull of the trigger and then reload themselves, making them good for self-defense. With a single-shot rifle that requires the user to manually reload, you could be in trouble if you miss your first shot or are faced by multiple attackers.

High-capacity magazines, regardless of any ban, can be made with very simple tools or mass-produced with 3-D printers. Another way around the ban would be to use multiple guns, which killers in terror attacks often do.

None of these bans would hinder a determined terrorist. The eight who attacked various sites in Paris in November 2015 were armed with automatic AK-47s and explosive suicide belts. The February 2015 Copenhagen attack was carried out with an automatic M95 assault rifle. In the January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris, the terrorists were armed with automatic Kalashnikov rifles, a loaded M42 rocket launcher, semiautomatic handguns, smoke grenades, Molotov cocktails, a hand grenade and sticks of dynamite. All the weapons used in these attacks were already illegal.

The proposed regulation is similar to the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994. Criminologists and economists have found no evidence that the U.S. ban reduced either ordinary gun crime or mass public shootings. In 1997, criminology professors Christopher Koper and Jeffrey Roth hired by the Clinton administration wrote, The evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect (i.e., that the effect was different from zero).

Seven years later, Messrs. Koper and Roth, with fellow criminologist Daniel Woods, published a follow-up study for the U.S. National Institute of Justice and concluded, “There has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

A better idea would be to allow and hopefully mandate off-duty police and military personnel to carry concealed handguns. Jesse Hughes, the lead singer for the band performing at Paris’s Bataclan Theater that November night in 2015 when 89 people were killed, has said that eight off-duty officers were in attendance that night as part of the audience. Had these officers had their firearms, the outcome might have been very different.

But France at the time limited the ability of off-duty officers to carry concealed guns. Belgium, Denmark and other EU member countries don’t allow concealed carry by off-duty police officers or soldiers, as if these dedicated men and women aren’t to be trusted as soon as they leave work.

Off-duty officers will almost certainly find themselves at the center of an attack again. It would be foolish to refuse the free protection that so many of them want to provide.

Mr. Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author of “The War on Guns” (Regnery 2016).


 

Mój komentarz. Eksperci prezentują stanowiska. Zdrowy rozum nakazuje sprzeciw. Brukselscy urzędnicy prą niezmiennie ku zakazowi posiadania broni w Europie. Powód? Ideologiczny obłęd. Świat powoli zaczyna myśleć nowymi kategoriami, które wyraźnie widać po wyborze Trumpa na prezydenta USA. Mam wrażenie, że wraca konserwatyzm. Niestety w Europie lewaccy obłąkańcy wciąż są u władzy. Europejskie instytucje są przez nich całkowicie opanowane.

Ci lewacy zupełnie nie słuchają argumentów, tylko  realizują swoje ideologiczne plany. Nie twierdzę, iż nie trzeba prezentować argumentów. Trzeba, ale rozwiązania nie będą podejmowane w oparciu o argumenty. To dla mnie zupełnie oczywiste. Moim zdaniem sprawa jest bardzo trudna. Po ludzku rozumując racjonalne rozwiązanie jest niemożliwe, ale z Bogiem możliwe jest wszystko. Tylko problem taki, że to moje zdanie jest przez ogromną większość traktowane z politowaniem.