Firearms Licensing Hurdles Around The World

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Speedo66

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Saw this article today about the licensing requirements for 16 countries around the world. It's a NY Times piece, so naturally the thrust is to show how easy it is to obtain a gun in the US. Needless to say, I don't believe any of the countries they compare us to have it written into their constitution as a right, not a privilege.

They document the Russian experience, then side note that people there generally ignore the regulations and estimate there are 3 illegal guns for every registered one. They also somehow manage, by accident I'm sure, to leave out the countries with less stringent requirements, such as the Czech Republic.

Still, it's an interesting look at the difficulties people have to deal with, some make getting a pistol license in NYC seem easy by comparison. Worth a read.

Here's the article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/02/world/international-gun-laws.html?module=inline
 
Can't read it because NY Times is behind a paywall. Care to give us more details?
Came up fine for me and I don't pay them anything. The details are, in a nutshell, it's harder to legally buy a gun in other countries than it is in the US. I assume that surprises no one.
 
Well, for instance, here's the requirements for Japan:

1 Take a firearm class and pass a written exam, which is held up to three times a year.

2 Get a doctor’s note saying you are mentally fit and do not have a history of drug abuse.

3 Apply for a permit to take firing training, which may take up to a month.

4 Describe in a police interview why you need a gun.

5 Pass a review of your criminal history, gun possession record, employment, involvement with organized crime groups, personal debt and relationships with friends, family and neighbors.

6 Apply for a gunpowder permit.

7 Take a one-day training class and pass a firing test.

8 Obtain a certificate from a gun dealer describing the gun you want.

9 If you want a gun for hunting, apply for a hunting license.

10 Buy a gun safe and an ammunition locker that meet safety regulations.

11 Allow the police to inspect your gun storage.

12 Pass an additional background review.

13 Buy a gun.
 
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OK, I did that, and was able to read the article. My general comment is that the article is too bare-bones to be useful. These are all formal requirements, and say nothing about how difficult it is to get a gun in practice. For example, in Japan, the reality is that practically no one has a gun. In other places, the formal requirements are just ignored, and it's easy to get a gun on the black market. The U.S. is unique for several reasons: (1) it has a (supposedly) constitutionally protected right to own guns, (2) the American population is generally law-abiding and takes the formal requirements seriously, and (3) despite this, criminals have no problem getting guns. Therefore, any comparison, like the one this article attempts to make, is invalid.
 
Very few places in the world actually ban things, including firearms. Yet we know and have recognized them as such because that is the intended purpose.
Yet in reality they simply require special permits or licenses that are more or less challenging to acquire.

Yet we recognize that most of the world does not have a right to bear arms, nor a right to firearms.
It always has been natural for empires, kingdoms, or any large entity concerned with controlling vast areas to control who is armed in those areas, for controlling many with few always requires force multipliers and arms control is that force multiplier. That is what government itself does, arm those that carry out its orders and disarm or reduce the arms of everyone else.
It is such a natural thing to do that it has had to be secured as a right by force with great cost to life and limb more than once in the legal history of the USA and England where it stems from.
Government will always come for your arms, always.
And they are not trying to eliminate arms, they are just trying to make sure the arms in society are held by those taking orders, and those not taking orders have inferior arms to those that are. Which is why you have to have a way for some people to be licensed and permitted even in societies where the average person has little chance of approval, or of approval for many types of firearms.

Tying possessing of firearms to hunting for civilians as is done in many nations turns them into a harm versus recreational benefit balance that always leans towards more restrictions.
While recognizing them as arms for use in violence against other humans is recognizing that you are giving your citizens power, and a level of power the government likes reserved for itself. Indeed life is precious and we should all be concerned with who has items designed specifically to take it, but that is not the prime motivation for reserving that power. Government wants to limit sources of power to those under its own control, and random civilians are not well controlled.
Bearing arms as a right is very different than having a method to obtain a hunting firearm. The end result of both might be a gun in your hands, but one is recognized as empowering you, and the other is to be restricted as much as possible to reduce its risk as a mere recreational enjoyment.
 
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The NY Times never wants people to remember that before the Holocaust, Jewish people in Germany, Austria (were they not?) were denied gun ownership before the horror began.
Jewish people were denied arms going back to Roman times. This restriction, and others (such as not being allowed to own land), reached a crescendo in the Middle Ages. In spite of these restrictions, Jews adapted and prospered. Because of this, gun ownership was not part of the Jewish ethos even before the Nazis came to power. In Germany and Austria, as well as in the rest of western Europe, Jews were city people and were not familiar with guns. Few actually owned guns. Therefore, the so-called "disarmament" of Jews was not a factor in what happened to them in the Holocaust. The Jewish Resistance tried to arm itself as best it could, but by then it was too late.

The seminal history of the Holocaust was The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg (1961). To quote Hilberg, "In exile, the Jews... had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies...Thus over a period of centuries the Jews had learned that in order to survive they had to restrain from resistance." In fact, the one factor that was strongly correlated with the rate of Jewish survival in the Holocaust was the Jewish community's degree of assimilation with the local Gentile population. So, in Denmark -- where the Jews were totally assimilated -- almost all of them survived, whereas in Poland, where they were traditionally at odds with the local population, most of them perished. In Greece, the Roumeliot Jews, who had been there from ancient times and spoke Greek natively, mostly survived, while the Thessaloniki Sephardic Jews, who came from Spain after 1492 and spoke Ladino, were almost totally wiped out. (Ladino is to Spanish what Yiddish is to German.)

See also The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry by Nora Levin (1968) and The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 by Lucy Davidowicz (1975).
 
AlexanderA: What you described in the first paragraph makes plenty of sense as a cultural/social background for the need to keep low profiles.
So ironic that when the Bubonic Plaque killed all groups of peoples, the Jews were still often blamed for it.

The JPFAO (Jews For the Protection of Firearms Ownership) seems a bit ironic, but maybe membership is quickly growing.
 
Remember that the pre-Holocaust Jews could not have imagined the Holocaust. Garden-variety antisemitism was endemic throughout Europe, and was something they were prepared to handle using their traditional coping methods. But industrial-scale extermination was unprecedented, and the Jewish mindset could not deal with it. After the Holocaust everything changed. The survivors that gravitated to Israel armed themselves to the teeth, scrounging guns wherever they could find them. Even today Israel remains a garrison state.

American Jews apparently still haven't gotten the message. They are imbued with a kind of optimistic liberalism that puts a lot of stock in the goodwill of their neighbors. But if antisemitic incidents such as the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting proliferate, they may start to arm themselves too.
 
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American Jews apparently still haven't gotten the message. They are imbued with a kind of optimistic liberalism that puts a lot of stock in the goodwill of their neighbors. But if antisemitic incidents such as the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting proliferate, they may start to arm themselves too.
Not entirely optimistic. There were some robberies and beatings in an orthodox area of Brooklyn, Crown Heights. The Jewish residents there started a citizen's patrol, not armed, hey, it's NYC.

But they have also come under fire a few times for allegedly roughing up some people they accused of attempted robbery, vandalism, etc. rather than just reporting the incident to the police.
 
-Of course, this only covers the publicly visible Jews. The hidden Jews have a different set of traditions.
In my area there are a large number of hidden Jews of Hispanic ancestry, sometimes called "Marranos".

Some have been hidden so long that they have forgotten their roots but still retain certain of their traditions. For instance, food preparation is often kosher, though few know why.

Cabesa de Vaca found some villages of these Marranos during his wanderings in south Texas in 1526-27. One town that I know of, Las Penitas, is still in existence.

One of the traditions that the Marranos quickly lost was the disdain for weapons and self-defense... .
 
The British paragraph considerably abbreviates the true procedure.
Curious what people in Britain have to go through, popular image in the US is that it's very difficult to obtain and possess a firearm there.

Can you give us an insider's view of the procedure?
 
Curious what people in Britain have to go through, popular image in the US is that it's very difficult to obtain and possess a firearm there.

Can you give us an insider's view of the procedure?


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Considering the Brits can't buy kitchen utensils until the age of 18, I imagine obtaining a firearm is rather difficult.
The issue of how stringent gun control in some countries doesn't surprise me any longer.
What I wonder about mostly now is how does the mentality of a population change so that such laws can ever be overturned? Or are they just lost causes?
 
Remember that the pre-Holocaust Jews could not have imagined the Holocaust. Garden-variety antisemitism was endemic throughout Europe, and was something they were prepared to handle using their traditional coping methods. But industrial-scale extermination was unprecedented, and the Jewish mindset could not deal with it. After the Holocaust everything changed. The survivors that gravitated to Israel armed themselves to the teeth, scrounging guns wherever they could find them. Even today Israel remains a garrison state.

American Jews apparently still haven't gotten the message. They are imbued with a kind of optimistic liberalism that puts a lot of stock in the goodwill of their neighbors. But if antisemitic incidents such as the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting proliferate, they may start to arm themselves too.

Honestly with passage of wonderful H.R. 672 there is nothing to worry about.
If we want help with defense of beloved Second Amendment perhaps we should reach out to LGBT community? Gay people had to wear pink triangles on their uniforms when held in German concentration camp system.
 
Anybody else here notice that if you are an elite, with a couple lawyers, and a lot of money, these regulations won't slow you down much, no matter what the country? These regulations only make it harder for the average hardworking Joe.
 
Anybody else here notice that if you are an elite, with a couple lawyers, and a lot of money, these regulations won't slow you down much, no matter what the country? These regulations only make it harder for the average hardworking Joe.

That's because they run countries by controlling politicians. The reson conservative billionaires don't support gun owners is because it's not in their best interest. Politicians take up gun legislation because it takes time from issues that would cost money ie living wage, healthcare reform, saving social security,....... The reason new gun regulations are so popular is that they are less costly than enforcement of existing laws.
 
Honestly with passage of wonderful H.R. 672 there is nothing to worry about.
If we want help with defense of beloved Second Amendment perhaps we should reach out to LGBT community? Gay people had to wear pink triangles on their uniforms when held in German concentration camp system.

My experience with Jews has been that, regardless of their political leanings, they remember the Holocaust. That memory isn't a minor thing to them, for that matter. Many/most of them, however, have not drawn what I would consider to be the obvious conclusion from that: you can't trust your own government not to try to exterminate you at some point in the future, so you need to make sure that you have the means to resist long before that day comes. (Because they'll take your guns long before they take your lives.)

My experience with every other group that was a target in the Holocaust is that they either never learned they were targeted or they've forgotten. Never talked with any Roma about it, so they might be an exception.

If people drew reasoned conclusions from history then the lion's share of Jews would be members of JPFO. It appears to me that is far from the case.

I'll welcome anyone to the cause, but I don't think teaching history is going to work very well.
 
That's because they run countries by controlling politicians. The reason conservative billionaires don't support gun owners is because it's not in their best interest. Politicians take up gun legislation because it takes time from issues that would cost money ie living wage, healthcare reform, saving social security,....... The reason new gun regulations are so popular is that they are less costly than enforcement of existing laws.
That's exactly right. From the point of view of the plutocrats, gun control is a useful distraction, preventing the public from focusing on the real economic issues. (The same is true for all social issues generally.) Billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz, etc., are liberal on social issues because it's a way of keeping the government out of their business affairs.
 
There have been periodic movements for Jews in the USA to arm themselves. Every Jew, a 22 - was a slogan of a rather unpleasant rabbi. The non-resistance strategy of the Jews was well known. I recall that it was said, if the Cossack rapes Emma and we kill the Cossack - the Cossacks come and kill everyone in the village.

Also, this is rather blunt but conservatism was and still has a strong antisemitic belief system. This certainly true in the USA and discrimination was powerful. Relief from such came from what would be considered liberal politics
 
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