AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Many countries already ban private gun ownership. Rwanda and Sierra Leone are two notable examples. Yet, with more than a million people hacked to death in those countries over seven years, were their citizens better off without guns?

What about the massacres of civilians in Bosnia or Darfur? Would that have been so easy if those people had been able to defend themselves? And what about the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II? Wouldn�t it have been better if they had more guns to defend themselves? All the well-deserved publicity for the movie Schindler�s List not withstanding, the movie left out how Schindler, an avid gun collector, stockpiled guns and hand grenades in case the Jews he was protecting needed to defend themselves. During the 1980s, the proposed rules would have prevented the American government from assisting the Afghanis in their fight against the Soviet Union.

There is a second reason to reject a ban on small arms. Even in free countries, where there is little risk of a totalitarian regime, gun bans all but invariably result in higher crime. In the U.S., the states with the highest gun ownership rates have by far the lowest violent crime rates. And similarly, over time, states with the largest increases in gun ownership have experienced the biggest drops in violent crime.

Research by Jeff Miron, now at Harvard, in which he examined homicide rates across 44 countries, found that countries with the strictest gun control laws also tended to have the highest homicide rates.

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Granny loses rocket launcher: "An amnesty program designed to reduce the number of illegal and unwanted guns in British Columbia has also turned up an unexpected weapon, a rocket launcher. An elderly Vancouver-area woman turned in the weapon that she and her husband had kept hidden in their attic after discovering it while renovating their house in 1973, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said overnight. The couple had been too afraid to tell anyone about the weapon earlier, police said. The month-long program in Canada's westernmost province allows people to give police unregistered or prohibited guns without threat of prosecution. It has produced more than 1,000 firearms in its first three weeks."