Russian roulette
Politicians love crime. The issue is an emotive one, especially among the nation's elderly, and playing up to it is a sure vote winner in any country. Crime figures are regularly massaged in all societies by politicians eager to win elections by being tough on criminals.
No surprise then that the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) has already jumped on the crime bandwagon ahead of this year's elections. But instead of mouthing the usual platitudes about zero tolerance and more community policing, this month the party pledged to liberalize Poland's handgun laws. Anyone over 21 years old feeling threatened or vulnerable should be able to keep a gun at home to defend themselves, party sages say.
Regardless of the moral questions at stake here, it would be a good idea for SLD members to take a closer look at other countries with liberal gun laws before it recklessly opens up a Pandora's box in its own backyard.
In the United States there are an estimated 200 million guns in the home, one for every man, woman and child. Some 43% of homes with children have guns and there's a loaded gun in every one in 10 households. In any single year, average estimates for children killed by firearms in the industrialized nations are: none in Japan, 18 in the U.K., 57 in Germany and 5,300 in the United States.
Endless research has confirmed that the most likely person to shoot you is someone who already owns the keys to the front door. According to a New England medical journal, it's 22 times more likely to die in your own home if you own a handgun. Older children are more at risk through horseplay when guns are around, while teenagers more often use guns for impulse suicides or rage attacks. In terms of protecting your home, a gun is used for less than 2% of break-ins. Even the FBI noted in 1996 that there were only 176 justifiable handgun homicides in the United States compared with 9,390 handgun murders.
Australia is an example of a country that clamped down on gun ownership after the Tasmania massacre of 1996. Some 660,000 firearms were handed in and within two years guns used in murder, assault and robbery had dropped dramatically. In 1998, 54 Australians were killed in shootings, while in the United States the figure was more than 13,000. Interestingly, the country's National Rifle Association condemned the introduction of tough new gun laws in Australia as unjust.
In Poland, 114 murders were committed in 1999, increasing to 166 in 2000. The numbers are a tragedy, but such statistics hardly justify the wholesale introduction of lethal weapons up and down the country. For short-term political gains, the SLD could be playing a deadly game of Russian roulette.
