Self-Defense Network

e-mail by boris karpa to the control arms website

Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2003 18:56:29 +0200
From: Boris Karpa <karpa@netvision.net.il>
To: contact@iansa.org
Subject: The Control Arms website

Good day!
I am a citizen of the State of Israel. In my country, the possession of arms is heavily regulated by law. According to your site, regulation of the possession of arms by states and their citizens would increase peace and security around the world - and especially in troubled areas like the Middle East. But it seems to me the your argumentation is a little faulty. Here are a few examples:

  1. You claim 500,000 people a year are killed by small arms. Where does that come from? These people disagree:
    http://www.davekopel.com/2A/Foreign/Global-Deaths-from-Firearms.htm
  2. You also claim that nothing good comes out of unregulated trade in firearms. Yet currently, there's no factual proof that regulations on arms trade do any good at all - despite various attempts on national arms regulation tried by nearly every known nation in the last century, there's no concrete evidence to support arms regulation. At best, it's useless and harmless - you'd think that if it worked, we'd know by now. Some researchers believe gun control is even harmful - but even if they are wrong, why waste money on an effort which has not proven itself - despite 100 years of trying?
  3. You claim that the "uncontrolled spread of small arms" is harmful to civil rights. I believe that it's not so. In fact, no act of genocide has ever been committed against a well-armed population. We might not know how efficient gun control is, but we do know this: "If every family on this planet owned a good quality rifle, genocide itself would be on the path to extinction"
    http://www.davekopel.com/2A/Foreign/Brown-Journal-Kopel.pdf

I am extremely interested in your opinion on these issues.

Greetings,
Boris Karpa, Self-Defense Network

P.S. More information may be found on these sites: