Asia Times Offers Insight on Chinese Gun Laws

The usual argument by liberals and other anti-gun zealots is that if you get rid of the guns, crime will follow. After all, the argument is made, without guns there can be no way to shoot each other. So close the gun show loopholes, ban handguns, tax ammunition, make it impossible to own a gun. But time and time again the anti-gun zealots are wrong. Gun sales are up, crime is down should be proof enough. But alas, it isn’t.

So let’s look at the situation in China. As reported by the Asia Times Online, it is noted that since 1966 China has banned the sale, private manufacture, possession and even import and export of bullets and guns. The exception is for government owned companies that can export firearms. But the point is that individuals in China, the land that invented gunpowder by the way, cannot own guns. The news site offers this statement on the harshness of the penalties for those who break the law:

“Possessing a single gun can yield a three-year prison sentence, while perpetrators of gun crimes are often executed.”

We would stress that this is a three-year prison sentence in China, not some country club jail either. A three-year sentence would likely be a hellish time indeed. So clearly gun crime must be non-existent, but alas this isn’t the case. Asia Times Online notes:

“Yet despite harsh penalties, China’s Ministry of Public Safety (MPS) has said it increasingly faces armed suspects. In the most recent high-profile case last month, a security guard in Hunan province in southerly China, apparently upset by a court-imposed divorce settlement, shot and killed three judges and wounded three others before turning the gun on himself.

“It was not an isolated incident. In early 2007, a man in northeast China killed five family members and neighbors in a rampage with a homemade pistol. In September 2007, a man in Guangzhou city in southern China was sentenced to 19 years after using a replica gun to rob a bank customer. And in December 2008, a guard at a munitions depot shot and killed a colleague over a chess match, and was shot to death himself by police two days later.”

The news site further notes that guns are routinely smuggled into China, even as the nation is one of the largest gun manufacturers in the world. So the point of all this is that criminals will always find a way to get guns, and law-abiding citizens shouldn’t be punished as a result. Guns are not the problem; it is the criminals with those guns that are the real problem, and tackling crime should be where energy is spent. Not making new laws or trying to turn law-abiding citizens into criminals.