The right to own guns: would you support such legislation in Poland?

SO since Poles CAN own guns, including assault rifles with hi-cap mags, I'll throw out some possibilities as to what "restrictions" could be loosened or eliminated. Referring to the US examples, the following sort of issues vary by state in multiple combinations.

1. Possession at home of certain types of firearms rather than locked in sporting club facilities.
2. Transport in vehicles, openly or concealed, loaded or unloaded.
3. "Carry" (Open or Concealed) by citizens. Open carry is in view, concealed is under clothing or in purses/cases.
4. Location restrictions - IF carry was allowed, are there places where they should not be allowed? (Bars, Restaurants, Courts, Schools, Churches, Jails, Military Installations, Banks, Post Offices, Hospitals, Government Offices)

5. Home storage requirements and inspections. (Construction, lock mechanism, fire-ratings)
6. Ammo purchases. (Limited numbers, limited types, permits to buy in some cases)
7. Requirements for "permission" to purchase firearms.
8. Magazine capacity.
9. Weight restrictions on weapons.
10. Attachments on weapons (bayonets, forward grips, scopes, lights, etc.)
11. Limits on numbers of weapons allowed
12. Restrictions on barrel lengths. (Shorter lengths are generally prohibited or require a special license.)

13.There is also a concept to consider regarding licensing the ability to carry or not.

You can have "May Issue" - which leaves authorities with discretion to require things like cause or just generally gives the local police authorities the right to decide yes or no on the carry permit.

You can have "Shall Issue" - which forces the authorities to grant the permit unless one or more of the stated grounds for refusal is applicable.

14. Property Rights Issues come up as well.
- Should a business have the right to refuse entry or to serve a customer with a firearm?
- Homeowners rights as to their residence or land area.

What changesm small or large, might or might NOT, make sense?

How would Poland benefit from any changes in attitude or policy in regards to offensive weaponry? The idea is to keep people safe, isn't it? I mean, that's the main priority of any legislation, personal liberty non-withstanding. With less than 400 gun deaths a year, including self-harm and accidental shootings, what would be gained from ANY new legislation? I submit that the answer is, "nothing whatsoever".

Of course they should!

Any idiot with a firearm should be arrested...

If you're not in the army or an armed response unit you shouldn't be carrying a firearm...

Guns are not toys...

People need to grow up and learn this...

You would have to ask the OP why they posed the question in the first place.

Is the idea "to keep people safe"? For some perhaps, but others view it as a right which gives them a measure of control over their lives and a check against government tyranny. If the intention was to keep people safe and preserve life then why isn't more being done to save the thousands dying due to medical errors, speed limits being lowered or automobiles being built to only reach a top speed of 70 or so through gearing and engine governors?

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, "nothing whatsoever" is yours, others may feel differently for various reasons.

Without digging through twenty pages of what I'm sure is the typical internet bickering rehashed, I'll just say that the lack of meaningful restrictions on gun ownership was a factor in my decision to leave the U.S., and the extant gun control legislation in Poland was a factor in my decision to come here as opposed to other places I considered.

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Who cares what Poland or any other country would support? This is America's problem.

Are you drunk? How legislation in Poland is an American problem?


By whom? Who is that good daddy who would keep you safe?

Legislation in Poland should be changed as to change licensing rules and make them more transparent and more egalitarian. So far too much depends on individual decisions of officers.

Legislation in Poland is Poland's problem.

Owning guns in America is America's problem. So who cares what Poland thinks.
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Read the topic!
This thread is about Poland!

Just for the sake of discussion I'll point out that a few weeks ago I saw the news report that some guy who murdered a couple in front of a tourist night club/bar in Lodz last summer was being sentenced and then last week three people are killed at their home in a gangland-style execution less than 150 meters from my building.

I certainly don't feel any safer here than I do in the States, London, Baku or Kyiv. For that matter, I hear stories from a variety of expats across Poland (and Ukraine and Azerbaijan for that matter) concerning a higher than I would expect number of fights among teachers. Questioning some of my students and Polish acquaintances it seems that wariness and avoiding certain areas here is just as prevalent as back home.

So, on reflection I have to say that I clearly see the actuality of the statistic that violence is more prevalent in Europe.

My suspicion is that when you remove the firearms statistics involving youth gangs along with about 8 or 10 cities which are recognized as out-of-control, it's fair to acknowledge that it is at least as, if not more, dangerous than the US. This seems in line with the published statistics. Roughly 20% of our cities and population (in the States) account for approximately 60+% of the homicides and violent crime actions.

The context of this was not so much the firearms issue as a general question of "Do you feel safer in Poland or back home?" which a couple of westerners were discussing in the last couple of days.

Oh, here is the text of the article about the murders in Gdansk this last week:

Family executed in Gdansk old town

Gdansk police have described the discovery of the bodies of three members of a family including that of a small child as the most brutal crime they can remember having to deal with.

The bodies of a man, woman and 18-month-old child were discovered in an apartment overlooking the main pedestrian street in Gdansk, ul. Dluga. The man has been named as Adam K., who TVN24 sources claim is one of a number of people named in a case concerning the trading of weapons being led by the Department for Organized Crime and Corruption Appellate Prosecutor's Office in Gdansk.

Amer, I really hope you don't drive, cuz Polish roads are far more dangerous than Poland's streets ;)

Half a million people in Gdansk, Poland's 4th largest city. Can you imagine a triple-homicide being "the most brutal crime" any city of that size and age in America experiencing?

jasondmzk


Uh, double, execution murder with an 18-month old beaten to death with a pistol, yeah, absolutely.

When you go cherry-picking for crimes that fit your preconceived template, you will find examples that match your criteria, sure. Go to any kentucky.com; al.com; iowa.com newsfeed on any given day and just peruse the news feed. This isn't even a two-day headline for Madison, Wisconsin; or Gary, Indiana.

Fayetteville Tn has a population of less than 5000:
foxnews.com/us/2012/10/25/tennessee-alabama-border-town-shaken-by-six-unsolved-killings

Yeah, I "cherry-picked" a triple murder with an 18-month old victim, 150 m from my apartment. The amazing Kreskin is coming by this afternoon for a lesson on precognition and mental influence a little later today.

In fact, the only person "cherry-picking" is you with your quoted links. That this happens in Poland, with a population roughly 1/9th of the US and supposedly peaceful, in part due to disarmament, you manage to prove my point rather than weaken it. The tourist murder sentencing was publicized less than a month ago and goes into my perception f violence since I was simply sitting and enjoying a beer in a Mexican restaurant rather than feverishly searching for a link to establish a point. You get many news broadcasts from Kentucky or Iowa at your place Jason?

Thanks for the contribution of irony to the discussion.

For others, my comments are clear. In 50+ years of living in the US, I have never had a murder within a half mile of my home, much less one like this one is described. The statement(s) is simple; "I feel no more safer in Poland than I do in the US, particularly in light of all the boasting and bragging about the bar fights and confrontations on TEFL and expat forums."

My statement is even more succinct: Personal feelings of safety don't trump the greater good. I'm not the only one that matters. Does my peace-of-mind come at the expense of others? If so, then it's not worth it.

Explain the one thing to me please. In America all you have to do to retract the right to bear arms is hold a Constitutional Convention and strike the right off the Bill of Rights with an amendment. Why don't gun grabbing psychopaths do this instead of incrementally sneaking in regulations over the years until they can impose their will on others and disarm them without a convention as the Constitution describes?

As I understand, it is because if they put it to people that way, nobody but Europeans would be dumb enough to surrender their arms. All gun grabbers are neurotic sociopaths and control freaks who want to disarm people so they can assf*ck them and then have somebody else shoot them dead. The only way to get people to lower their guard is through incrementalism. If you just came out and said, "I want to assf*ck you all," it would be obvious you were sick and nobody would listen to you. So sociopaths talk about the common good and the public's need to be disarmed so they can be assf*cked at will and introduce these measures gradually so as to arrive at their assf*cking goals in the long term without arousing too much suspicion. It's all part of the assf*cking continuum of politics within the global marxist postmodernist framework, which all comes down to making people totally helpless so you can dominate them utterly and then assf*ck them. Guns in private hands stand in the way of the assf*cking imperative.

Yeah, thank God it's people like you standing in the way of us "gun-grabbing psychopaths". I'm a sociopath because I don't want every guy like yourself that writes "assf*cking" SEVEnTIMES in ONE PARAGRAPH to have a lethal weapon around my kid? My


is to keep kids safe and gun-related deaths to a minimum. What's your agenda? To make sure that every single person that wants one can have a gun, any time, any where? Yeah, okay. Every gun used to murder a kid was held


. And which is it, I'm a psychopath, or a sociopath for trying to keep killing machines away from people like you? A sociopath wouldn't care. Who does that sound more like, of the two of us?

You are pretty much on target regarding your analysis of their strategy. They know that repealing the 2nd Amendment is a long shot. It's also worth remembering that the Right to Bear Arms is acknowledged in a statement as opposed to being granted by decree. The Constitution was designed to limit the government, not the people, and this has been the legacy of our founders through the years. The one attempt to limit the people (Prohibition) was a miserable failure.

Instead, they have used the illusion of compromise to make those incremental moves.

The fact remains that just because some people are afraid of guns there is no particular reason to limit them. This is a clear example of rule by law versus rule of emotion. 99.99% of the guns out there are not involved in supporting criminal activity. Even now, people in America are beginning to question why it is that the immediate impact of passing poorly-designed gun laws has been to criminalize law-abiding citizens and remove them from people without criminal records yet there have been no prosecutions of criminals or crimes which failed due to their passing.

Really Kondi, work in some other descriptive phrases or action verbs to describe possible outcomes or objectives. There are some innocents and easily-offended individuals who happen into this discussion. I'd also back away from using the terms of sociopath and psychopath. While some of these undoubtedly exist in the anti-gun lobby, the masses are generally simple, easily-manipulated sheep who hope that the nanny will make the boogieman go away. They ignore the dead children the government kills, their inability to protect their citizens from violence and hypocrisy of politicians and "important people" being protected by armed bodyguards.

YOur choices of words aside though, you pretty much understand what is going on in terms of anti-gun strategy and tactics.

And you ignore the dead children that every single other psychopath with a legal handgun kills, which is exponentially more than anyone wearing a badge ever has or could kill.

What has kids safety to do with gun-related deaths? Surly gun-related death overshadows greatly those instances when kids have been victims of some mentally-sick individuals.

The main fallacy of authorities is to let mentally ill individuals ream streets unchecked and nobody seem to be responsible. Are those medications do not procure side effects? Why psychiatrist are not scrutinized or punished for falling in their duties.

Those aims can be realized by others means than disarmed of society or total gun control by a central government. Are politicians agree that is not possible? Why don't they step down then and let those who can do their job properly?

The right to own guns is aiming further than to keep gun-related deaths to minimum. Its aim to keep society free from any force that would change society into slaves a master could kill at will.

Then what a woefully misguided aim that is, indeed. All these men, women, and yes, children laying in graves are just the price we have to pay to ensure anti-government zealots can feel like they have a fighting chance (which they don't) should Uncle Sam turn ugly?


And how are we to know whom is sick and whom is not? Or whom will not become sick? There is no way to control the people, so we must control their access to deadly weaponry. Of course it won't happen over-night. Over-night has come and gone. But it will happen, and is happening, because there is no other path forward. The more the bodies stack up, the less the pro-gun and anti-government people can pretend that "guns make us safe". Gun control will happen, it's only a matter of time.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Well-regulated.... means regulations.

Key word Militia, however the individual citizen still has the right to own and bear arms, any regulation passed by individual state shall not infringe upon that fundamental right, meaning it can't out right take away that right.

Well, first of all people armed have better chance to defend themselves than unarmed. Also they can defend themselves aghast criminals who would have been armed regardless of what regulations you have in mind cause they do abide by the law.

Second of all attack at schools are due to unregulated health services and rules about mentally ill individuals. Why nobody campaign for better control and regulation of drugs, psychiatrist and their patients? Because nobody-care? Why pick on gun?


Well evidently most if not all of those who attached children had been diagnosed with one or the other of mental illnesses.


Only people that need to be controlled are criminals, mentally ill and politicians the rest is just fine. I wonder why would you put your trust into hands of politicians who proved to be untrustworthy many time over than in your fellow men.

Total control of weapon including criminals would mean a total control of people because you cannot have one without the other. i would rather than some people where controlled than all cause it would means totalitarianism in which you are safe or not. It is up to you masters to decide that.


Well regulated in the language of 18th century - mean - well trained.

What a ridiculous statement
If they removed all the US gun death stats it would turn out that the US has no recorded gun deaths making it safer than Europe.

Most violent crime anywhere happens in cities that is a fact of life.

And in certain cities too. I know that I'm at least twenty times more likely to be shot dead in Warsaw than in LA.

Poles certainly would have appreciated owning guns in the years 1939-1945. Taking away guns from private ownership allows tyrannical governments to operate uninhibited. As Hitler noted; [i]"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms."

Well said. It's not about guns but about control.

The government doesn't want to talk of concentration camps, gulags, massacres and killing fields where millions have died by conscious decision of supposedly rational minds. Instead, they want to stand before you and remind you of the infinitely smaller number of children killed by what they bemoan as "senseless" violence. Notice the tightened lips, the stalling silences, quivering blustering and attempt to portray righteous indignation as they attempt to deflect contemplation of those instances when their fingers were on the triggers which resulted in dead children.

Notice how none have any sort of answer about no prosecutions of criminals on gun charges? Nothing to say about a man arrested for driving burglars from his home? Attempts to search a family home because of a picture of a gun? How about my personal favorite, suspending a child from school because he chewed a breakfast pastry in the shape of a gun.......?

Real problems call for real solutions, not photo opps, nor ill-thought laws that divide the population further by turning law-abiding citizens into criminals while crime continues.

Moving back to the immediate events, has anyone seen any more on the triple murder? I heard they arrested a Russian national in Elblag but that is strictly hearsay.

Is that because you have no intention of visiting LA or does Warsaw have a higher gun death rate?

The Amendment entire is in the language of the 18th century. You want people to be allowed to only have weaponry that was envisioned being available at the time that document was written? That would please me to no end.


Right. Because none of those things are pertinent to the rational mind. People ARE being killed needlessly day after day by the glut of guns that are out there to protect us, they are NOT being subjected to any of the paranoid nonsense you list in any of the same numbers.


How do you control those people? You don't want a police-state, but you want people to labeled as fit and unfit to have access to guns? Sounds like the people that would make those decisions would be in the government, would they not?