Since guns in the U.S. is in the news, let’s imagine that Iran legalizes firearms.
Copying North America, it would enshrine the individual’s right to keep and bear arms as part of its Constitution, and, at best, allow about a third of its population to have about 300 million guns, as PolitiFact reports.
Better still, there’s be no federal bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Iranians would be allowed to hoard the following: semiautomatic assault weapons, military-style .50 caliber rifles, handguns, and large-capacity ammunition magazines.
Each province in Iran would have its own laws, with some provinces being more flexible than others.
Of course, gun dealers would have to purchase a license from the Government, and, in turn, conduct background checks of prospective buyers. Still, anyone can squirrel around these restrictions, as occurred with the mentally ill Texas guy who shot his grandmother-in-law and 25 others in the 1st Baptist Church, in a small town southeast of San Antonio, November, 5, 2017.
Unfortunately, and quite by the way, you’d be totalling your victims as America does. The Gun Violence Archive says some 13,286 people were killed in the U.S by firearms in 2015 and 26,819 people were injured. Those figures rose by thousands from then till today. Let’s not forget the mass shooting a month ago – considered the deadliest in America’s history – when a gunman opened fire on a crowd at a concert in Las Vegas, killing 58 people.
PolitiFact shows that so many people die each year from firearms in the U.S. that the death toll between 1968 and 2011 eclipsed all wars ever fought by the country. There were about 1.4 million firearm deaths in that period, compared with 1.2 million US deaths in every conflict from the War of Independence to Iraq.
According to the US Department of Justice and the Council on Foreign Affairs, about 11,385 people died each year from guns in the U.S. between 2001 and 2011.
In that same period, 517 people were killed by terrorists.
Of course, you can excuse each of these homegrown gun incidents by quoting Donald Trump who told South Korea: If he didn’t have a gun, instead of having 26 dead, you would have had hundreds more dead.”
That’s America’s president for you.
Here’s what really happens in Iran…
The country’s Islamic Consultative Assembly prohibits Iranians to possess guns.
If you really want that gun, you’d need to go through a lengthy background check that investigates your criminal and mental records.
You would need to graduate a firearms safety course. You would also need to take a firearms training test. And pass that, too.
Expect to go through these steps for three types of licenses: possessing a firearm, carrying a firearm and using a firearm.
If you pass – congratulations! Statistics show Iran grants guns to seven in 100 people. You’re one of them.
Yet, your woes don’t stop there. Iran is notorious for its rigorous gun safety rules. See the GunPolicy website.
Results?
“Terrorist attacks in Iran are rare and gun crime is zero”, says Esfandyār Āryānpour from Iran.
Reason enough, you see, why America should learn from Iran about how to deal with guns.