Firepower

[gekko]

Americans need to wake up and take a good long look at their gun control laws.

You probably should too, if you think gun control laws have any relevance to the situation Doc describes.

Even if the guy could get an AK47 legally, do you think he would do so if he was planning to rob a bank with it?

I agree completely. This is why I've been so vocally against the gun registry my own home province (ON, Canada, btw). Registered, legal guns don't kill people.

However.

I still refuse to accept that the answer is more, bigger guns for the police. The bank robbers in question will find, acquire, and use whatever weapons they can, so long as the gain is greater than the cost. Now, were I a bank robber planning a heist, one of the first things I would consider is "what kind of weapons will I be up against?" The better equiped the police are, the bigger the guns they will face. Consider England, were the local equivalent of "beat police" do NOT carry guns. Consider how rare it is to hear of an armed robbery in England. That's more than just coincidence.

I understand it's not an easy thing to just make it tougher for the criminals to acquire these weapons. However, if the only other solution proposed is to equip police officers with military-level weaponry, thinking they'll be able to outgun whatever opposition comes their way... yikes. So long as the bad guys can steal more than it costs them to fund their strikes, it won't matter what weapons you give law enforcement agents.

As to the well armed citizen and how his high powered handgun saved the day: what would have happened if everyone in the bank and nearby had such a weapon in their hands? The bank robbers would most likely have opened fire into the crowd at whatever opposition they see. So I don't buy that as an argument for why the american need to own guns makes the population safe.

Guns don't make people safe. Not in the hands of bad guys, not in the hands of the cops. Turn this into a contest to see who can have the biggest guns, and sooner or later the headlines won't read about how the police were so baddly outgunned. The headlines will be talking about the dozens who died in a wild gunfight.

gekko