Bahrain doesn’t allow gun ownership and possession unless specifically authorised by the Interior Minister himself. So the only ones who do carry guns about their person are mostly members of the police and members of the military police (who I suspect are allowed to take their guns with them at the end of their duty?) Therefore, gun crime in Bahrain is extremely rare.
But for an incident last night which was reported in the GDN this morning stating that some yahoo with a friend decided to shoot someone who “wronged” his sister in a row about a bloody mobile phone! Fortunately the bozo missed.
Are there any laws for owning guns in Bahrain then? How is that implemented? Are the police not required to hand in their firearms at the end of their shift? More importantly, what are the police doing about this trend? So far all attacks (as far as I know) were non-fatal, but it’s only a matter of time before they turn really bad.
Comments
Armed Thuggery
I don’t think gun is the problem per se in the case. Those who wish to commit acts of violence will do so with what ever means are available to them. No guns.. try a knife. No knife whip up a car bomb. Can’t do that? Grab some rope. Ever play the game “CLUE”? The gun is just an object. The evil is with the person. But crimes with firearms make for good press and if it bleeds it leads in todays media.
In the US the police do not leave their guns “at the office”. They carry them 24/7 and often 365 as well. I treat my gun like the American Express card. I don’t leave home without it. As a gun owner in the US the actions of these perps makes me sick and they MUST be punished to the maximum extent of the law.
Armed Thuggery
With all due respect, the US allows poeple to have guns, even normal people have guns with a licence, I agree that guns don’t kill people, it’s people who kill people. However, the case in Bahrain is different, no one is allowed to own a gun for whatever reason unless, as specified by Mahmood, it’s authorised by the minister of interior himself. The case here is simple, since it happened in Hamad Town, it would be none other than some of those fucking “Syrians” who work in the army, those who were “brought” into the country and given half of Hamad Town houses ahead of other poor bastards who have been waiting for more than 15 years to get one.
Eversince those pieces of unproductive shits arrived, there have been more and more robberies and the armed ones will appear to grow. Things will get out of control 🙁
Armed Thuggery
“More importantly, what are the police doing about this trend?” – Hmm.. Since when do we have a proper police force? The ministerial bureaucratic system needs to be reorganized in order for this issue to be addressed.
“Those who wish to commit acts of violence will do so with what ever means are available to them.” – True, but guns lead to more fatalities and I think that is logical! I believe that society does not need such weaponry as guns, except for military defense. It’s better if a burgular steps in a house with a knife than a gun, because there is a lesser chance of the victim being murdered!
Peace!
Ahmed
Armed Thuggery
San Francisco voters recently enacted Proposition H which confiscates all handguns and bans purchasing of all guns. Unfortunately this is based on the unfounded belief that the more guns in an area the more violence will occur. If that were true, the United States, with 280 million guns today, should have a far higher murder rate than after WWII when we had only 48 million guns. Instead, the murder rate is the same.
During the intervening decades, murder rates varied dramaticallyâ€â€Âbut not because of rising gun ownership. In the last 30 years the number of guns owned by civilians more than doubled, yet murder declined by one third.
Accepting the mythology that guns cause murder, areas with high violence rates ban guns. But violence stems from basic social factors, not the mere availability of one among the innumerable deadly instruments in the world. In a study published last December, the National Academy of Sciences, having reviewed 43 government publications, 253 journal articles, 99 books, and its own research, could not identify even one example of gun control that reduced murder or violent crime.
Proposition H: Mythology Instead of Criminology
Armed Thuggery
Ahmed,
Some food for thought.
If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a death rate of 60 per 100,000 population.
The rate in Washington D.C. (among others) is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our nation’s capitol, [b]which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation,[/b] than you are in Iraq.
Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of Washington.
I am not aware of any stats that can show that guns lead to more fatalities, in fact there are stats that say legal gun ownership reduces violence overall. Home invasions included. Case point Switzerland which has one of the highest gun ownership rate per capita in the world and has one of the lowest crime rates. You must seperate LEGAL ownership of firearms VS ILLEGAL thuggery. These are 2 seperate issues. You can have all the gun laws in the world to ban the ownership or restrict ownership but the criminal element will not abide. Of course Bahrain not having ANY private gun ownersip makes this situation unique to a certian degree and the solution rests with the removal of certian “foreign” elements from this soil.
At the end of the day Sen Ted Kennedy’s car has killed more people that my LEGAL gun. BTW… Ted never went to jail for his crime. Don’t forget no one is forced to own a gun.
Armed Thuggery
I totally agree that this is nothing but the fruits of all those syrians and jordanians who got the bahraini citizenship on a plate of gold. i have nothing against them but i have something against having unbelieveable amounts of arabs or asians being handed the bahraini passport, given a house, a job in the army, a good pay and all the services that Bahrainis are entitled too, i have met MANY of them and they act as if they own the damn country. What is the police going to do? nothing, most of them are from syria and jordan anyway! and yemen off course.
These individuals come here and retire within a few years, getting their pensions from the goverment or whatever is it called while working somewhere else. living off the money they need and sending the rest over-seas to their relatives and they are known to be trouble-some. i bet you its one of them anytime.
Armed Thuggery
“[..] the United States, with 280 million guns today, should have a far higher murder rate than after WWII when we had only 48 million guns. Instead, the murder rate is the same.” – Many other factors could have caused the murder rate to remain the same OR maybe even decrease with the availability of more guns. For example, it could be the case that due to the development of the educational system in the years after WWII, the murder rate decreased substantially. Furthermore, a stronger police force and more solid law enforcement could have also lead to this result. I could go on and on about other reasons for this result, such as economic enhancement and political stability, but I hope you get the point by now.
I stand by my belief that guns lead to more fatalities.
Peace
Ahmed
Armed Thuggery
“If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths […]” – I guess you are referring to the deaths among US troops, because otherwise the number would be much much higher than that (according to some sources over 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths resulted as of today due to military intervention by US coalition forces and its allies). Moreover, the US troops have armors, bullet-proof shields, and a very sophisticated military intelligence to protect them and thus reduce fatalities.
I stand by my point that guns lead to more fatalities.
Peace!
Ahmed
Armed Thuggery
In a way, in the US, people are more civilized, so the crime rate stays the same with the 4 fold increase in firearms, here though it’s a different situation. The Syrians and Jordanians we’re talking about are not the civilized ones, who are engineers, doctors and teachers, they are the lowest of the low in their countries who are of bedouin nature and tend to kill for the silliest of reasons, that’s our concern, in Bahrain recently, people have developed a sense of hostility and this -with the availability of guns- would lead to fatalities caused by firearms. So it IS guns in our case that would cause problems, of course there are the non-firearms killings, but it would be nothing compared to a clean easy kill from a gun, and with all the beaurocratic interior ministry one might not even get a deserved punishment after killing with a firearm. Add to that, that every national day, we get a handful of society’s lowlife prisoners released back into our streets in the name of the national day. Need I say more?
Last thoughts, it’s the combination of Syrians and Jordanians in the army, the angry crowds of normal citizens who feel frustrated. It is highly likely that owning guns here would result to a bloodbath and only then you would see what I mean, they must NOT own guns under any circumstances.
Armed Thuggery
Mahmood it looks like there is a business opportunity here for you. You can start a shooting club. First thing you do is build a barn for target practice as it looks like the bozo in your post can’t hit the side of one.
billT
[Modified by: billT (billT) on November 28, 2005 11:15 PM]
Armed Thuggery
I read this early morning and I was shocked. This guy is an idiot and he needs to be jailed for attempted murder, it doesn’t matter if he’s high, he needs to be behind bars so that he can learn that you can’t take the law in your own hands and do whatever you want. And the sister, stupid, I hate people like that that don’t understand, the guy is not there whos supposed to fix it, so be it. The phone wasn’t workin for a while and one extra day doesn’t make a difference. Demandin to get it fixed at the spot at that moment is crazy, who the hell does she think she is.
Well what to expect, some people.
Khalid
Re: Armed Thuggery
That’s the extremely surprising thing, they’re actually building a shooting range opposite one of the king’s palaces in Sakhir. No doubt it will cost several million but the real question is who will use such a facility? My son Arif is infatuated with guns (as any normal pre-teenager is) and would love to have a shot (! pun intended) at using that facility. I wonder if he’ll get the chance?
Armed Thuggery
Gun laws don’t work because criminals don’t obey laws. The only thing gun laws effectively do is disarm law-abiding people. Any process that arms bad guys while disarming good guys is bad. Gun laws are bad, in general.
There is no correlation between the number of guns in a country and the number of gun homicides. As pointed out earlier, you have places like Switzerland where each household is required to have an assault weapon and supply of ammo, yet the gun homicide rate is minimal. Likewise for Israel which has a high gun ownership rate and low gun homicide rate. By contrast, you have other nations like South Africa, Estonia, and Brazil which have high gun ownership and high gun homicide rates, much higher than the US. Gun ownership does not lead to gun homicides.
Culture is the prime determinant in gun violence. The Swiss simply do not commit homicide, not with guns or anything else. Their non-gun homicides are low along with their gun homicides. Non-gun homicides are high, along with gun homicides, in South Africa, Estonia, and Brazil. Their cultures tend toward homicide more than others, whatever the weapon at hand.
If you take people from a culture that does not have high gun homicide rates, like the Swedes, and plant them in a country with a lot of weapons, like the US, their gun homicide rate does not go up. It stays the same. That’s why Swedes in Sweden have about the same gun homicde rate as Swedes in Wisconsin, regardless of the guns at hand. It’s not the availability of weapons that leads to murder, but character. I might point out that a lack of guns did not hinder widespread slaughter in Rwanda, which was accomplished mainly with machetes.
In the US, gun homicides are not evenly distributed through the population, but concentrated in the criminal classes, which tend to be violent. In most encounters leading up to a gun homicide, the chief of police here in Washington pointed out that you would not be able to predict who would be the victim and who would be the perpetrator. Most gun homicide victims in the US are criminals, people who have a criminal record of multiple arrests. Most of these victims are clustered about the drug trade. In New York City, for example, 38% of the homicide victims had cocaine in their bloodstream.
The fear that guns in the hands of the law-abiding population will lead to more homicides is unfounded. The facts point the other way. Guns in the hands of the law-abiding are shown to prevent crimes in progress from escalating in violence and to persuade criminals to abort a criminal act. By contrast, criminals are more likely to escalate their violence against a defenseless victim. This trend can be seen in the case of Australia, which abruptly banned handguns a few years back only to witness a spike in gun homicides, mostly in the commission of robberies.
Any free person has the right to defend themselves, their family, and their homes against predators. Every democracy should guarantee the right to bear arms to free citizens to carry out that defense. Those who don’t, are giving a monopoly on firearms away to the worst among them who respect nobody’s rights nor property nor lives.
Steve
Armed Thuggery
You guys have to understand, the US can never ban guns.
Once guns are introduced into society, they can *NEVER* be removed, ever. Doing so would only be taking the guns out of legitimate peoples’ hands and do nothing about illegal weapons that criminals already use.
Besides, i’d like to see the day where thousands of career criminals willingly comply with a law banning firearms.
In Bahrain, it can still be turned around by banning all firearms except from the police and military.
-HalloweenHarry
Re(1): Armed Thuggery
If Bahrain does not have much violent crime now, then making guns legal will not have much effect on the homicide rate. If Bahrain has a lot of violent crime, making guns legal will bring the rate of homicides down slightly. That’s the experience of other countries.
If you are not homicidal, having a gun in your home will not make you suddenly murderous. If you are homicidal, legal guns are likely to stop you from expressing that impulse.
Steve
Armed Thuggery
Can you imagine the massacre that would result from Bahrainis being able to own guns!
Re: Armed Thuggery
baaaal then beating-ups with non lethal objects would be obsolete, then if someone doesn’t like anyone else all they have to do is shoot them between the eyes!
laaa laa we don’t deserve guns, then the issue will mix up with the other [url=https://mahmood.tv/index.php/blog/2043]article[/url] and we will defenitely have an unwanted bloodbath.
Armed Thuggery
The issue isn’t the availability og firearms, but more so the accountability of those that they are made available to. The problem lies in that the playing field is uneven. Clearly most law-abiding Bahrainis have little to no interest in owning a firearm (most of us can do more damage with our cars).
But we can’t do much about idiots like this one with little interest in anything but getting his way. Remember his first option was to ram the windowpane. Which backs up the point made about stupid people being stupid. If you look at gun contol as being about saving stupid people from themselves, then it doesn’t hold up, because you can’t. But if you look at it as helping keep society at large responsible, then gun control is a must.
And that’s the point Mahmood was trying to make, that because there is NO concrete government policy on the ownership and responsible usage of firearms that we have incidents like this. Not to mention the armed robberies that happened last year. It’s because the government has a head in the sand attitude about it that the potential for abuse becomes elevated.
Re: Armed Thuggery
Thank you.