Opening statement by Waldinger

The best away to lower the crime rate in the United States is to make the possession or sale of all handguns illegal.

The United States has more murders per person than any country in Western Europe or Canada. Ineffective legislation against handguns is a major component of why the United States has such a high crime rate. In 2007 90 guns were owned for every 100 U.S. Citizens. Canadians posses 31.5 guns for every 100 Canadians. The United States has 5.9 murders every year for every 100,000 citizens. Canada has a murder rate of 2.01 murders for every 100,000 citizens. The Canadians own one third as many guns per person as the U.S. and their murder rate is also one third of the U.S.

While those figures show a correlation between number of guns per person and number of murders per person they fail to show the disproportianate affect that handguns have on crime. The Homicide rate in the United States was in a state of rapid increase during the 1980s and into the early 1990s. While homicides involving handguns resulted almost entirely in this increase most homicides involving other murder weapons actually experienced a decline in prevalence. With homicides involving firearms handguns were by far the most prevalent. In fact, 75% of firearm related homicides involved a handgun. This compares to 4% with rifles and 5% with shotguns. The rest of the percent was where the type of firearm was unknown.

Like the U.S., the Swiss have a high rate of gun ownership. In fact, all male Swiss citizens between the ages of 21 and 50 are issued fully automatic weapons and ammunitition so that they may perform there annual military obligations. However, unlike the United States, the Swiss have strict laws against the possesion of handguns. Also unlike the U.S., the Swiss have a fairly low crime rate.

Handguns are used almost entirely for self defense. Unfortunately they fail miserably at their one task and in fact significantly contribute to the problem which they try to prevent. For the betterment of the peoples the possesion and/or sale of handguns in the United States should be made illegal with strict punishment for people who break this law.

Note: Source is Wikipedia and the sources provided by Wikipedia.