129 New Victims of Gun Control in Belgium Gun laws work. Once a law is made to establish control over private guns, criminals obey it. When guns are banned, criminals refrain from getting guns. When there is a process for getting a license, criminals go through the process of getting that license in order to legally own guns, in order to use them in their crimes. When a criminal legally has guns, and when he uses them in a crime, the government finds out about it because a criminal will always obey the law and will keep a good record of his guns and how he has used them.
Ahem.
May be not.
Belgium has one of the toughest laws in Europe for owning guns. So tough, actually, that only 4 out of a hundred private citizens in Belgium are registered to have guns. Which makes Belgium safer than, for example, Texas, where 4 out of 1,000 do not have guns. After all, tougher gun laws make people safer.
May be not.
Six people were dead and 123 wounded after a gunman opened fire and threw hand-grenades at a Christmas market in Liege, Belgium. The killer, Nordine Amrani, of North African descent, has been arrested before for illegal possession of firearms, drug dealing, and sexual assault. Many times. In any decent country where justice prevails, he would have been executed by now. But not in Belgium, where criminals enjoy enormous rights. (After all, Brussels is full of them, in the offices of the European Union.)
The gun laws in Belgium did not stop Amrani from acquiring guns, and even hand-grenades. Criminals, apparently, refuse to abide by the law. Predictable, isn’t it? They don’t call them criminals for nothing.
What the gun laws succeeded to stop, though, was an adequate reaction from the thousands shoppers at the market. People were running away, and some were being wounded and killed, because there was not a single decent citizen who would draw a gun and shoot Amrani immediately. Amrani was like a wolf among sheep; and the sheep were sheep only because their own government made a law to turn them into sheep. If there was no gun control, there would have been quite a few good watchdogs among the crowd. The wolf would have been stopped before it was too late.
The 129 victims were victims of the gun laws in Belgium; victims of a mentality that devoid of any realistic assessment of the nature of man, and especially of the nature of criminals. Amrani only took advantage of what has been offered to him for free: the opportunity to indulge in his murderous passions among a crowd of unarmed people. If someone is to be taken to court it is the Belgian government and the Parliament; those that are safely protected by the guns of the police but refuse the same protection to their own citizens. Apparently, many more people will have to die in Europe until reality finally opens the minds Europeans to understand that the only thing that stops an armed criminal is an armed law-abiding citizen.
