Gun Policy News for
20 December 2008

Daily gun news, gun control news, small arms policy and firearm injury prevention news from global mass media. Editor, Philip Alpers.

Africa

Decades of Progress Reversed by Millions of AK-47s Dumped in Africa

Strategy Page (USA), Web Page
20 Dec 2008

Angola, whose long civil war ended six years ago, is trying to curb decades of violence by collecting and destroying weapons, especially the cheap AK-47s that have flooded the region in the last two decades. So far this year, the government has collected over 50,000 illegal weapons, many of them AK-47s. These are publicly destroyed, several thousand at a time, and reduced to scrap metal. The AK-47 has become as much of a curse for Africa as many major diseases. Not just in the places you hear about, like Somalia, Angola, Congo and Sudan, but in many others as well. Easy availability of firearms has produced a murder rate in South Africa that is, per capita, ten... ( gunpolicy.org )

United Kingdom

Scottish Club Shooter 'Obsessed' with Guns, Smuggled 'Mini-Arsenal'

Scotsman (Edinburgh)
20 Dec 2008

Police found a mini-arsenal of illegal weapons in a raid at the home of a student who had become obsessed with firearms. Ramsay Scott, 20, a former pupil of Edinburgh's Merchiston Castle School who had shot competitively for Scotland, used his mother's credit card to order components of prohibited guns on the internet. He turned his bedroom in the family home in Longniddry, East Lothian, into an assembly plant, but denied there was anything sinister about it, even though he had researched the 1987 Hungerford massacre in which 16 people were shot dead. The High Court in Edinburgh was told yesterday that Scott had always been interested in making... ( gunpolicy.org )

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