Most gun control advocates have mental problems but they usually avoid contradicting themselves in the space of two minutes.  Mayor Street can’t even manage that:

The illegal guns – about 1,500 of them – covered most of the floor of the Mayor’s Reception Room on the second floor of City Hall.

Mayor Street, who said they had been confiscated since the start of 2006, used them as a platform yesterday for launching another gun-control campaign in Harrisburg.

“This [effort] isn’t going to go away,” Street said at a news conference. “When the General Assembly goes back into session, we will be there. I expect to be joined by mayors from other areas.”

“… If we can have gaming in the commonwealth, then we can restrict the flow of guns.”

…

“When you are out on the street and someone points a gun at you, you have to do something,” Street said. “We believe we have a well-managed Police Department.”

…

This was echoed by Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson: “To kill or be killed often involves only a split-second decision. When cops are confronted by a person with a gun, they have to react.”

The cops “have to do something” when someone points a gun at them.  But private citizens don’t have the same need?  These people need some help from a mental health professional.

After the big collection and destruction of firearms in Australia we have some more numbers:

Tasmanian Auditor-General Mike Blake produced a $63,000 report on the impact of the reforms last year.

It showed that in 1994, of 2364 crimes against the person, firearms were used in just 69 cases. In 2004, the level of crime against the person had soared 90 per cent to 4492, and just 56 of those instances involved firearms.

I have Just One Question.

Compare the mindset of these Jersey City professional victims (emphasis added):

(CBS) JERSEY CITY Jersey City Police today released surveillance videotape of a known Bloods gang member running away after shooting a man twice in broad daylight on Easter Sunday near Grant Avenue and Martin Luther King Blvd.

He’s identified as Jamal Ebron and he’s still on the loose considered armed and dangerous.

“The individual who he shot refuses to cooperate with the police,” Jersey City Police Chief Robert Troy said.

Investigators say this video shows how important it is to enact tough Federal gun legislation.

Just last night, police confiscated the guns and a thousand dollars in cash.

Four suspects have been charged with bringing the guns here from Georgia, where police say gun laws are laxed and where gun owners aren’t required to report stolen weapons.

“This gun here is marked a hundred and ninety-nine dollars, this gun sold in Jersey City last night for five-hundred dollars.”

Investigators say the weapons were found in a car that had a secret compartment, where the trunk can be accessed quickly.

With the mindset of a gun owner:

I have been completely baffled by the content of many letters to the Cape Argus and other newspapers in response to the antics of “killer cops” in the past week or so.

Some call for the police to be given higher salaries. Others call for the police to be provided with better working conditions.

Even more call for civilians to be more sympathetic towards “overworked, underpaid cops”.

Sympathetic? Higher salaries? Better working conditions? Surely when somebody goes on a killing spree, society should call for the trial, conviction and imprisonment of such criminals instead of increased perks and sympathy?

It did not make any sense until I discovered the definition of Stockholm Syndrome. Stockholm Syndrome can be described as “bonding to one’s hostage-taker as a survival strategy or mechanism”. The term was coined after the world witnessed the bizarre behaviour of several hostages in a botched 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden.

While the hostages were held, they bonded with their captors to a point where they actually defended their captors and resisted attempts by the police to rescue them, despite the fact that they were strapped with explosives and victimised.

In a hostage situation, the hostage instinctively understands that any harm to the captor could cause the captor to harm or even kill the hostages. The hostage hopes that as long as the hostage taker is alive and his demands are met, he will see no need to harm the hostages. Hostages’ survival strategy is to persuade the hostage taker to have as many reasons as possible to keep his hostages alive.

The relationship between killer police and sympathetic citizens could be described as some sort of variation of this syndrome.
The police are seen by many helpless and defenceless citizens as the only barrier between themselves and violent criminals.

As with the Stockholm hostages who overlooked the fact that they had explosives strapped to their bodies, it would seem that unarmed and helpless South Africans are prepared to tolerate immense abuse from the police for the mere promise of survival and protection.

This may also explain why several firearm owners, who have made successful use of their personal firearms in defence of life and limb, refuse to adopt similar soft-hearted approaches towards killer cops. Such firearm owners will simply call for the immediate dismissal of such rogue cops.

This could be further explained by the fact that the traditional barrier – police – between gun owners and the criminal thugs has been replaced with, in their own opinion, a stronger and more reliable barrier in the form of a shotgun or two.

Hence the popular saying among gun owners that “a gun in the hand is worth 10 cops on the phone”.

The people of Jersey City are mentally ill and need to be asked Just One Question again and again until they figure it out.