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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

There are many things that are curious in the UK legal system. This week, a guy has been sentenced to 30y in jail for gun trafficking. I'm not condoning gun trafficking but in my book smuggling is much more venial offense than rape or murder, and smuggling items that are not even illegal in countries like the US. I am sure many murderers took a lot less than that.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36446462

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Someone smuggling heroin into the US would expect a sentence of at least 30 years. We happen to think that automatic weapons are at least as dangerous as heroin.

I think smuggling is a less serious crime than murder.

Would you be happier if they had been convicted of attempted murder.

Smuggling weapons that will surely be used for crimes including murder, and likely enabling many more murders than the smuggler is personally capable of?

And if the guns are used in a Charlie Hebdo style massacre or a stade de france style attack?

America is lucky in that its home grown terrorists have ben to be blunt a bit crap.

A gun being smuggled into the UK is only going to be used by a criminal (and by criminal, I mean they're committing violent crimes other than ownership of a gun) for killing someone - a gun smuggler, therefore, is providing a killer with a murder weapon with full knowledge of what it's going to be used for.

> There are many things that are curious in the UK legal system. This week, a guy has been sentenced to 30y in jail for gun trafficking [...] items that are not even illegal in countries like the US

If you tried to smuggle this:

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/0B22/production/_...

and this:

http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/11A62/productio...

into the USA, you'd be facing about 630 years in jail, not 30.

My point is that you wouldn't even need to smuggle it in the US, like you wouldn't even need to smuggle alcohol in the UK or pot in California.

We do things differently here. As a result, we have only had one mass shooting incident in the last 20 years. Our per-capita murder rate is about 1/4 that of the US. We had three fatal police shootings last year, one in 2014 and none in 2013.

You might not like it, but we do. Our system of gun control is overwhelmingly popular.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5 http://www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/fatal-police-shootings

I don't want to make it another gun control debate, but I do not think it is the prohibition of weapons that make shooting rares. Drugs are equally prohibited and are by no mean rare. Everyone has an assault riffle at home in Switzerland and I have never heard of a mass shooting there. I think it's more a behavioral thing than a gun law thing.

This may well be true. However, it's better to have a behavioral problem without guns than a behavioral problem with guns widely and easily available.

A drug dealer cannot legally import automatic firearms into the US.

The only way they could be imported is by a licensed dealer, for sale to the military or law enforcement.

It's likely you just meant to make a more generalized comparison of the laws, but most people wanting to import the weapons in that article into the US would need to smuggle them.

Alcohol is routinely smuggled into the UK.

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