Apparently it’s not working too well. And this is in a country with total prohibition, and where gun trafficking will get you a bullet in the back of your head:
Yet gun crimes continue to grab headlines. Early last year, a man in the northeast went on a rampage with a homemade pistol, killing five family members and neighbors. In September 2007, a young Guangzhou man was found guilty of using a replica gun to rob a bank customer of $218,000, and drew a 19-year prison sentence. In December, a guard at a munitions dump machine-gunned a colleague over a chess match. Two days later, he was killed, too, in a shootout with police.
Who would have figured. When guns are prohibited, criminals still find a way to find them, or make them. Here’s a handy timeline of the history of guns in China.
In a country where Capital is forbidden, the Govt. decides how many children you can have, your Union decides on your job, and the Govt. owns the Bank – where does $218,000 come-from (??) and maybe that’s why are people in poverty are so disaffected? China is breaking-down.
Chinese are not actually communists. Since like the 1980s. The government does have a heavy hand, but there is lots of capitalism there.
I also predict the Chinese are going to drift further and further away from gun control if only for cost efficiency reasons. Once they realize that middle class hobbyists aren’t going to overthrow the government, they will promptly cease to give a shit.
They are corrupt bastards but very predictable ones at that- anything that doesn’t interfere with their political power they don’t care about.
China is still a communist dictatorship at its core, but it emulates enough aspects of a capitalist and free-market society to keep the bulk of its people lulled into a false sense of feeling that they aren’t actually living within a communist dictatorship.
Deng Xiaoping figured out that this was the most effective way for communism to consolidate its hold on China about 30 years ago. This was just a few years after the turmoil of China’s “Cultural Revolution” of 1966 through 1976, and the overall tyranny of Mao Zedong in general.
Tyrants and oppressors like Mao Zedong and his successors in China cannot tolerate having a lawfully armed citizenry. If the people of China had had the right to keep and bear arms back during Mao Zedong’s time, I’d be willing to bet that China would have had yet another armed revolution at one time or another, and that China might even have become a true democracy by now.
I don’t have that much optimism for China. Capitalism is not Capitalism without free markets and China has a much more thoroughly and heavily regulated “market” (if you can even call it that) than most places – although we’re gettin’ there with this bailout…
Obama actually said sometime back around the last Olympic Games in Beijing that we Americans have a lot to learn from the Chinese.
I would say to that, “Like what, Obama? How to put blanket bans on people’s guns, nationalize our whole economy, and force the redistribution of our wealth?”
No thanks!
The lessons I learn from China are probably very different ones than Obama is learning. I see the competitive benefits of unregulated industry and no minimum wage or unions. He probably sees the benefits of the eternally unchallenged one party political system.