Advocates of gun control often point to countries were strict gun laws seem to be working and argue that those same laws would be just as effective in the US. But upon further examination we find that many of these policies aren’t even very effective in the country its being used as examples, or at the very least that there’s no proof they are.
The three big ones are Australia, the UK, and Japan. In Australia gun crime was plummeting at an identical rate before the buyback. In the UK gun crime got worse after the ban and isn’t currently declining any faster than the U.S. is. And Japan is a small homogenous country with an extremely different culture and low crime rates in general, so it’s not a good comparison.
And if the country’s gun control advocates tend to use examples to promote gun control that tend to reveal that gun control isn’t all that effective, what can we learn from the examples of gun control that they’re not using. Even if Australia, the UK, and Japan were good examples, which they aren’t, why would that be the end of the story? Why wouldn’t we weigh them against Nazi Germany Communist Russia and Maoist China? Banning guns before becoming tyrannical is a pretty relevant example considering the second Amendment was written with the express purpose of preventing a tyrannical government. Also, it’s not as if there’s just a couple bad governments here and there with strict gun control laws. Literally all of the most horrific, terrible governments which have ever existed have strict gun control laws. And that’s not a coincidence because you can basically do whatever you want to an unarmed population.
Now some people might say that was a long time ago, things have changed and even thought it wasn’t that long ago, I can pick a more recent example, mainly Venezuela. In 2012, just two years before it’s humanitarian crisis, Venezuela banned private gun ownership. And as you’ve probably guessed, the Venezuelan government didn’t get this legislation passed by saying, “we want it to be easier to oppress our people” or “we foresee civil turmoil and would rather you be afraid of us than us be afraid of you”.
The BBC reported, “The ban is the latest attempt by the government to improve security and cut crime”. Well, they certainly did improve security, but not for the citizens, just the politicians. It’s a lot easier to eat steak while your people starve if you’ve got guns and they don’t, and overall the murder rate actually rose after the gun ban. And because the police were the only ones in Venezuela allowed to own firearms, citizens actually started to target and kill police officers to rob them of their guns. And if it wasn’t clear enough that Venezuela gun control was being weaponized against opponents of their Marxist regime, in April of 2017 Maduro gave 400,000 guns back to private citizens, but only the ones to pledge their loyalty to him. So, when the Venezuelan government banned guns in 2014, was it because they were secretly planning on oppressing their people? Honestly, it doesn’t matter, because it’s still allowed them to do it.
