Government regulation of our food supply is fucking us over right now (farm subsidies? politicians obeying the meat and dairy lobby? the fucking food pyramid, for Christ's Sake?), so there you go.
If you want to go back to having children pack human flesh in your canned meat products, go ahead and make your case. Don't worry. I'll wait. Your issue is not government regulation. It's ineffective government regulation.
And finally...Corporations are made up of people. Stop trying to demonize them and acknowledge that we are fucking ourselves!
The difference between a large powerful corporation and a large powerful democracy is that you can influence the government with just your vote. If Shell wants to drill in front of your beachfront condo and you have no government to regulate their activities, what are your options? Do you think they will acquiesce to your complaints instead of netting a few billion dollars?
The argument that the government is bought off with lobbyists is not an argument for stronger corporations. It's an argument for stronger government.
Art. 50. Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.
You think they should have phoned up James Bond...
What the fuck are you talking about? The soldiers did not want to find out if they represented a danger. They didn't even wait to see if armed men got out of the van, they just opened fire.
clearly can't even understand the stats you're quoting.
All of those statistics cite the numbers counted in media reports and official statements by the US military. The Iraq Body Count, specifically, states that there are at least 80,000 civilian deaths by violence which are confirmed. The Lancet study is the one that talks about above average death rates in the neighborhood of 600,000. Which has nothing to do with the regular death rate you cite in America.
Your mind is a sad little place.
Listen, I know you mean well, but you're clearly a bumper-sticker thinker who hasn't bothered to put any real thought into the subject
This is the third time you'll ignore that the US was in Iraq illegally and for reasons having nothing to do with self protection. You may not be an American, but you sure know how to shill like one.
The people of the United States are often the most ignorant of the atrocities being carried out in their name.
The real problem is that once they found out, they rationalize their brutality and pretty much pretend that it doesn't exist. That's why the guys who fire from gun ships a mile a way are heroes, and the suicide bombers are terrorists. It's why 24 is a number one show. It's why we can see gun violence 24/7 on American television, but a single nipple is a national tragedy of exposing our children to immorality.
Fighting the good fight has nothing to do with the courage it takes, or how much you put on the line to defend your country, especially if your home country is Iraq. It's entirely dependent on what side you are on, and Americans of course always have God on our side. We're always right. We'll never apologize for our crimes. We live in the greatest country God ever gave Man, according to the top three TV personalities on Fox News, which is the top "news" source on American television.
Until we suffer an invasion on our home soil, someone is going to be angling to send our standing army off to die to make a buck or two invading someone else's. And that's not a good prerequisite for becoming a prosperous and peaceful nation.
Yep, you're right. Clearly they should have landed those helicopters, walked over, and said "Hi! We're with the US Military, and we'd really appreciate it if you could tell us: are you the bad guys?".
Don't assign me your poor reasoning skills.
They should have confirmed with intel before they opened fire. If this is outside of their capability, they shouldn't have opened fire. This is if they gave a shit about killing civilians, which they didn't.
The result is a huge decrease in civilian casualties, but results in MORE bitching by uninformed simpletons.
I won't mistake your planet sized ignorance for malice. The US Military doesn't keep a body count for a good reason: they kill a lot of innocent people.
The Brookings Institution has used modified numbers from the UN Human Rights Report, the Iraq Body Count, General Petraeus’s congressional testimony given on September 10-11, 2007, and other sources to develop its own composite estimate for Iraqi civilians who have died by violence. By combining all of these sources by date, the Brookings Institution estimates that between May 2003 and August 22, 2008, 113,616 Iraqi civilians have died.
Finally, the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (ICCC) is another well-known nonprofit group that tracks Iraqi civilian and Iraqi security forces deaths using an IBC-like method of posting media reports of deaths. ICCC, like IBC, is prone to the kind of errors likely when using media reports for data: some deaths may not be reported in the media, while other deaths may be reported more than once. The ICCC does have one rare feature: it separates police and soldier deaths from civilian deaths. The ICCC estimates that there were 43,099 civilian deaths from April 28,2005 through August 22, 2008.
How you can possibly defend driving out 2.5 million people from their own country and killing hundreds of thousands more for oil resources is beyond me. I'm sure someone will be along shortly to applaud you for your capacity for evil, but they'll call it patriotism.
As I've said elsewhere, I hope the next empire deploys troops in your neighborhood, and I hope you are there to watch your loved ones die. I hope they suffer and I hope you have to watch helplessly.
Then talk to me about people just doing their jobs. And while you're at it, you can explain to me why strapping a bomb on yourself and trying to kill just one person sharing their uniform would be cowardly.
The Geneva Conventions clearly delineate willful killing as a grave breach of the agreement.
This video encapsulates the entire problem of American foreign policy: a bunch of idiots who are too scared to put themselves in harm's way to confront and confirm what they think is an enemy, so they make rash decisions that end up killing innocent people and creating more problems for themselves.
Then they lie about their stupidity and cowardice and cover it with words like collateral damage, and try to cover their dishonor with words like freedom and democracy.
You can't see the forest for the trees. The proof is American crime rates because the problem is American law.
The US, UK, Canada, and Australia are pretty similar. Same language, exposure to similar media, largely democratic, largely Judeo-Christian, and except for the UK, sparsely populated.
Murder Rates per 100,000: 5.4 United States 2.0 United Kingdom 1.8 Canada 1.2 Australia
It could also be that there is no safety net to help people get back on their feet in the US, or the fact that we have the highest incarceration rate in the Western world which have been shown to create criminals instead of treat them, or that violence is more celebrated in our culture, and sexuality more repressed, or that our wealth inequality is ten times more severe, but the easy access to guns doesn't seem to be helping.
Castro did this in Cuba, Hitler did this in Germany, Stalin did this in Russia, Mussolini did this in Italy, and on and on.
If you believe in the slippery slope argument, you can't be helped. There are dozens of nations who have strict gun control registries that haven't turned into dictatorships.
It's far more dangerous to have a standing army susceptible to being overtaken and used for coups d'etat. Yet I see no arguments for that particular point of view.
All of your arguments are made from the assumption that guns should be unregulated. You have to ask, should guns be regulated, look at the data for countries that do regulate guns -nationwide and with real consequences for breaking the law - versus those that do not, and then you have a chance of arriving at a useful answer.
Here in America, the right to own and bear arms is very much a deeply rooted ideal that stems from the founding of this country. It is statistically proven over and over that here in America, states and cities that allow their law abiding citizens to carry firearms have much lower crime rates than in states or cities that restrict gun ownership by law abiding citizens.
I live in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm quite familiar with the standard issue backwater responses to gun control. Canada has even more guns per capita and less homicide rate due to their strict enforcement of gun laws. Same goes for most of Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Local gun control policies don't work because they are local. It's like having a dry county. People are still going to drive a few miles and get liquor.
Those who would give up essential liberties for a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security." - Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin owned slaves, and the most modern gun technology during his day allowed a person to fire a round every twenty seconds. He had some good things to say, but treating the founding fathers with any sort of reverence would be something they abhorred, since most of them believed that dogmas are evil and that reason was the path to enlightenment.
Then there are legions of useful idiots who don't understand what's wrong with that. They mean well, and they sincerely but naively believe that gun-control is a great way to stop crime.
And then there are legions of idiots who ignore all of the data available from around the world that prove that strict gun control rates are associated with very low homicide rates, and engage in worthless speculation to claim that guns don't make it much easier to kill people.
If guns weren't so effective at ending human life, the Army would still be using bayonets. Give one idiot a gun, and he can kill half dozen people with virtually no prior training. Give everyone a gun, and they kill each other and themselves on a more regular basis.
You can prove me wrong by pointing to a nationwide enforced gun control policy that has resulted in higher homicide rates.
Ayn Rand: "Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue."
L. Ron Hubbard: "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion."
Steve Jobs: "I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five and it wasn't that important because I never did it for the money."
Reasonable gun control laws aren't synonymous with disarmament. There are people who can't drive because of the danger they present to other people on the road. Similarly, there are people who shouldn't have access to guns because of the dangers they present to others. The controls only work if everyone is required to follow rules and restrictions when it comes to purchasing, keeping, and using weapons and ammunition.
And if you don't want to fill out the paperwork or spend the money on the proper gun safe, guess what... who gives a fuck. The privilege of owning deadly weapons should have a certain bureaucratic cost, just like anything else that give you destructive power, like becoming a doctor or driving a tractor trailer.
I had no idea believing in reasonable gun control laws and backing that up with statistics was called trolling. Thanks for reminding me to get back to wrapping things up, and getting the hell out of here.
You've got the right to buy a gun without a permit and watch people get murdered on television and your choice of chain fast food restaurants, but you can't see a nipple or have a reasonable discussion on the merits of socialized services or have any time off from work without the fear of getting fired.
They're trying to cover their ass, after lying the first time. That's the number Mexico gives, and the number the ATF gives. Factcheck throws up their hands and claims that "no one can no what the number is." Everyone else, except for Fox's failure at basic math, agrees with the number.
And you're right, I shouldn't have called you a racist. You're probably just ignorant. The two tend to go hand in hand.
Correction, April 22: We originally concluded that Obama’s 90 percent figure was “not true” and based on a “badly biased” sample of recovered guns. We are retracting both those characterizations, and we apologize to our readers for this error. We have rewritten the article throughout to correct this. Our error was to think we had confirmed that Mexican officials submit for tracing only those guns they believe likely to have come from the U.S. Law enforcement officials say they don’t know if that’s the case.
Of all guns that can be traced that were submitted, with no selection bias (the Mexican officials didn't send information that makes them think they were of American origin), 90% came from the United States.
The high murder rates in the U.S.A. occur in areas with subcultures that have breakdown of family structure. No father to raise and keep young males in line means a sufficient number of them act as savages to turn a neighborhood into a lawless war zone.
The logistics of supplying troops in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Somalia are what caused their defeat. There are hundreds of military and national guard installations, a huge reserve of oil, and years worth of supplies located on a national network of well-maintained roads and bridges, railways, and thousands of airports.
Curious to note that Switzerland, with high gun ownership levels, is a very low-crime zone. The UK, by contrast, is the most violent country in Europe.
The swiss are trained in a national guard and allowed to keep their semi-automatic weapon. In America there is no prerequisite to gun ownership. Here are the Swedish requirements via Wikipedia:
To purchase a firearm in a commercial shop, one needs to have a Waffenerwerbsschein (weapon acquisition permit). A permit allows the purchase of three firearms. Everyone over the age of 18 who is not psychiatrically disabled (such as having had a history of endangering his own life or the lives of others) or identified as posing security problems, and who has a clean criminal record (requires a Criminal Records Bureau check) can request such a permit.
To buy a gun from an individual, no permit is needed, but the seller is expected to establish a reasonable certainty that the purchaser will fulfill the above-mentioned conditions (usually done through a Criminal Records Bureau check). The participants in such a transaction are required to prepare a written contract detailing the identities of both vendor and purchaser, the weapon's type, manufacturer, and serial number. The law requires the written contract to be kept for ten years by the buyer and seller. The seller is also required to see some official ID from the purchaser...
Basically, the sale of automatic firearms, selective fire weapons and certain accessoires such as sound suppressors ("silencers") is forbidden (as is the sale of certain disabled automatic firearms which have been identified as easily restored to fully automatic capability). The purchase of such items is however legal with a special permit issued by cantonal police. The issuance of such a permit requires additional requirements to be met, e.g. the possession of a specific gun locker....Ammunition sales are registered only at the point of sale by recording the buyer's name in a bound book.
Curious that you don't know the difference between "reasonable gun controls" and "let's have unregulated gun bazaars, give every idiot with $1000 a semi-automatic assault rifle, and see what happens."
Unenforced legislation is no different from no legislation. If that reasonable law were enforced, then all of these people wouldn't be dead.
Meanwhile, France and the UK and most of continental Europe do enforce gun control laws, and have much lower murder rates. But don't bother with the facts. Use your biases to pretend that you already know the truth.
Slashdot Mirror
Government regulation of our food supply is fucking us over right now (farm subsidies? politicians obeying the meat and dairy lobby? the fucking food pyramid, for Christ's Sake?), so there you go.
If you want to go back to having children pack human flesh in your canned meat products, go ahead and make your case. Don't worry. I'll wait. Your issue is not government regulation. It's ineffective government regulation.
And finally...Corporations are made up of people. Stop trying to demonize them and acknowledge that we are fucking ourselves!
The difference between a large powerful corporation and a large powerful democracy is that you can influence the government with just your vote. If Shell wants to drill in front of your beachfront condo and you have no government to regulate their activities, what are your options? Do you think they will acquiesce to your complaints instead of netting a few billion dollars?
The argument that the government is bought off with lobbyists is not an argument for stronger corporations. It's an argument for stronger government.
Art. 50. Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.
http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/7c4d08d9b287a42141256739003e636b/fe20c3d903ce27e3c125641e004a92f3?OpenDocument
Which stats? All you've done so far is assert your opinion. That's the opposite of being a skeptic.
If you're unable to offer any specifics in the form of a falsifiable hypothesis, I can only assume you're full of shit.
You think they should have phoned up James Bond...
What the fuck are you talking about? The soldiers did not want to find out if they represented a danger. They didn't even wait to see if armed men got out of the van, they just opened fire.
clearly can't even understand the stats you're quoting.
All of those statistics cite the numbers counted in media reports and official statements by the US military. The Iraq Body Count, specifically, states that there are at least 80,000 civilian deaths by violence which are confirmed. The Lancet study is the one that talks about above average death rates in the neighborhood of 600,000. Which has nothing to do with the regular death rate you cite in America.
Your mind is a sad little place.
Listen, I know you mean well, but you're clearly a bumper-sticker thinker who hasn't bothered to put any real thought into the subject
This is the third time you'll ignore that the US was in Iraq illegally and for reasons having nothing to do with self protection. You may not be an American, but you sure know how to shill like one.
The people of the United States are often the most ignorant of the atrocities being carried out in their name.
The real problem is that once they found out, they rationalize their brutality and pretty much pretend that it doesn't exist. That's why the guys who fire from gun ships a mile a way are heroes, and the suicide bombers are terrorists. It's why 24 is a number one show. It's why we can see gun violence 24/7 on American television, but a single nipple is a national tragedy of exposing our children to immorality.
Fighting the good fight has nothing to do with the courage it takes, or how much you put on the line to defend your country, especially if your home country is Iraq. It's entirely dependent on what side you are on, and Americans of course always have God on our side. We're always right. We'll never apologize for our crimes. We live in the greatest country God ever gave Man, according to the top three TV personalities on Fox News, which is the top "news" source on American television.
Until we suffer an invasion on our home soil, someone is going to be angling to send our standing army off to die to make a buck or two invading someone else's. And that's not a good prerequisite for becoming a prosperous and peaceful nation.
Yep, you're right. Clearly they should have landed those helicopters, walked over, and said "Hi! We're with the US Military, and we'd really appreciate it if you could tell us: are you the bad guys?".
Don't assign me your poor reasoning skills.
They should have confirmed with intel before they opened fire. If this is outside of their capability, they shouldn't have opened fire. This is if they gave a shit about killing civilians, which they didn't.
The result is a huge decrease in civilian casualties, but results in MORE bitching by uninformed simpletons.
I won't mistake your planet sized ignorance for malice. The US Military doesn't keep a body count for a good reason: they kill a lot of innocent people.
The Brookings Institution has used modified numbers from the UN Human Rights Report, the Iraq Body Count, General Petraeus’s congressional testimony given on September 10-11, 2007, and other sources to develop its own composite estimate for Iraqi civilians who have died by violence. By combining all of these sources by date, the Brookings Institution estimates that between May 2003 and August 22, 2008, 113,616 Iraqi civilians have died.
Finally, the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (ICCC) is another well-known nonprofit group that tracks Iraqi civilian and Iraqi security forces deaths using an IBC-like method of posting media reports of deaths. ICCC, like IBC, is prone to the kind of errors likely when using media reports for data: some deaths may not be reported in the media, while other deaths may be reported more than once. The ICCC does have one rare feature: it separates police and soldier deaths from civilian deaths. The ICCC estimates that there were 43,099 civilian deaths from April 28,2005 through August 22, 2008.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS22537.pdf
How you can possibly defend driving out 2.5 million people from their own country and killing hundreds of thousands more for oil resources is beyond me. I'm sure someone will be along shortly to applaud you for your capacity for evil, but they'll call it patriotism.
As I've said elsewhere, I hope the next empire deploys troops in your neighborhood, and I hope you are there to watch your loved ones die. I hope they suffer and I hope you have to watch helplessly.
Then talk to me about people just doing their jobs. And while you're at it, you can explain to me why strapping a bomb on yourself and trying to kill just one person sharing their uniform would be cowardly.
The Geneva Conventions clearly delineate willful killing as a grave breach of the agreement.
This video encapsulates the entire problem of American foreign policy: a bunch of idiots who are too scared to put themselves in harm's way to confront and confirm what they think is an enemy, so they make rash decisions that end up killing innocent people and creating more problems for themselves.
Then they lie about their stupidity and cowardice and cover it with words like collateral damage, and try to cover their dishonor with words like freedom and democracy.
It's a sad fucking joke.
When the next empire happens to want the resources near your grandchildren, I hope you are there to watch them die.
Provide links to your sources. Worldwide homicide rates are widely available.
PS I live near Kennesaw. Their police department is largely a crock of shit.
You can't see the forest for the trees. The proof is American crime rates because the problem is American law.
The US, UK, Canada, and Australia are pretty similar. Same language, exposure to similar media, largely democratic, largely Judeo-Christian, and except for the UK, sparsely populated.
Murder Rates per 100,000:
5.4 United States
2.0 United Kingdom
1.8 Canada
1.2 Australia
It could also be that there is no safety net to help people get back on their feet in the US, or the fact that we have the highest incarceration rate in the Western world which have been shown to create criminals instead of treat them, or that violence is more celebrated in our culture, and sexuality more repressed, or that our wealth inequality is ten times more severe, but the easy access to guns doesn't seem to be helping.
Castro did this in Cuba, Hitler did this in Germany, Stalin did this in Russia, Mussolini did this in Italy, and on and on.
If you believe in the slippery slope argument, you can't be helped. There are dozens of nations who have strict gun control registries that haven't turned into dictatorships.
It's far more dangerous to have a standing army susceptible to being overtaken and used for coups d'etat. Yet I see no arguments for that particular point of view.
All of your arguments are made from the assumption that guns should be unregulated. You have to ask, should guns be regulated, look at the data for countries that do regulate guns -nationwide and with real consequences for breaking the law - versus those that do not, and then you have a chance of arriving at a useful answer.
Here in America, the right to own and bear arms is very much a deeply rooted ideal that stems from the founding of this country. It is statistically proven over and over that here in America, states and cities that allow their law abiding citizens to carry firearms have much lower crime rates than in states or cities that restrict gun ownership by law abiding citizens.
I live in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm quite familiar with the standard issue backwater responses to gun control. Canada has even more guns per capita and less homicide rate due to their strict enforcement of gun laws. Same goes for most of Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Local gun control policies don't work because they are local. It's like having a dry county. People are still going to drive a few miles and get liquor.
Those who would give up essential liberties for a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security." - Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin owned slaves, and the most modern gun technology during his day allowed a person to fire a round every twenty seconds. He had some good things to say, but treating the founding fathers with any sort of reverence would be something they abhorred, since most of them believed that dogmas are evil and that reason was the path to enlightenment.
Then there are legions of useful idiots who don't understand what's wrong with that. They mean well, and they sincerely but naively believe that gun-control is a great way to stop crime.
And then there are legions of idiots who ignore all of the data available from around the world that prove that strict gun control rates are associated with very low homicide rates, and engage in worthless speculation to claim that guns don't make it much easier to kill people.
If guns weren't so effective at ending human life, the Army would still be using bayonets. Give one idiot a gun, and he can kill half dozen people with virtually no prior training. Give everyone a gun, and they kill each other and themselves on a more regular basis.
You can prove me wrong by pointing to a nationwide enforced gun control policy that has resulted in higher homicide rates.
Yeah, I missed that in the proof read. However, the article correctly links to Switzerland.
Ayn Rand: "Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue."
L. Ron Hubbard: "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion."
Steve Jobs: "I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five and it wasn't that important because I never did it for the money."
Who said I wanted to disarm the population?
Reasonable gun control laws aren't synonymous with disarmament. There are people who can't drive because of the danger they present to other people on the road. Similarly, there are people who shouldn't have access to guns because of the dangers they present to others. The controls only work if everyone is required to follow rules and restrictions when it comes to purchasing, keeping, and using weapons and ammunition.
And if you don't want to fill out the paperwork or spend the money on the proper gun safe, guess what... who gives a fuck. The privilege of owning deadly weapons should have a certain bureaucratic cost, just like anything else that give you destructive power, like becoming a doctor or driving a tractor trailer.
I'm not well versed in all the novel ways there are to kill humans. But thanks for the correction.
I had no idea believing in reasonable gun control laws and backing that up with statistics was called trolling. Thanks for reminding me to get back to wrapping things up, and getting the hell out of here.
You've got the right to buy a gun without a permit and watch people get murdered on television and your choice of chain fast food restaurants, but you can't see a nipple or have a reasonable discussion on the merits of socialized services or have any time off from work without the fear of getting fired.
And you think you're fucking winners. Way to go.
They're trying to cover their ass, after lying the first time. That's the number Mexico gives, and the number the ATF gives. Factcheck throws up their hands and claims that "no one can no what the number is." Everyone else, except for Fox's failure at basic math, agrees with the number.
And you're right, I shouldn't have called you a racist. You're probably just ignorant. The two tend to go hand in hand.
Who should I quote instead?
Sorry kid. I've had this argument before.
Correction, April 22: We originally concluded that Obama’s 90 percent figure was “not true” and based on a “badly biased” sample of recovered guns. We are retracting both those characterizations, and we apologize to our readers for this error. We have rewritten the article throughout to correct this.
Our error was to think we had confirmed that Mexican officials submit for tracing only those guns they believe likely to have come from the U.S. Law enforcement officials say they don’t know if that’s the case.
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/counting-mexicos-guns/
Of all guns that can be traced that were submitted, with no selection bias (the Mexican officials didn't send information that makes them think they were of American origin), 90% came from the United States.
The high murder rates in the U.S.A. occur in areas with subcultures that have breakdown of family structure. No father to raise and keep young males in line means a sufficient number of them act as savages to turn a neighborhood into a lawless war zone.
Your thinly veiled racism fails to impress.
Read my other post on the very real, and very strict guns laws in Switzerland.
Denmark's homicide rate is per 100,000 per year is .88
The US homicide rate is 5.4
Gun control laws do absolutely nothing to stem violence, a fact that anti-gun people tend to ignore.
You're quite simply full of shit.
The logistics of supplying troops in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Somalia are what caused their defeat. There are hundreds of military and national guard installations, a huge reserve of oil, and years worth of supplies located on a national network of well-maintained roads and bridges, railways, and thousands of airports.
Curious to note that Switzerland, with high gun ownership levels, is a very low-crime zone. The UK, by contrast, is the most violent country in Europe.
The swiss are trained in a national guard and allowed to keep their semi-automatic weapon. In America there is no prerequisite to gun ownership. Here are the Swedish requirements via Wikipedia:
To purchase a firearm in a commercial shop, one needs to have a Waffenerwerbsschein (weapon acquisition permit). A permit allows the purchase of three firearms. Everyone over the age of 18 who is not psychiatrically disabled (such as having had a history of endangering his own life or the lives of others) or identified as posing security problems, and who has a clean criminal record (requires a Criminal Records Bureau check) can request such a permit.
To buy a gun from an individual, no permit is needed, but the seller is expected to establish a reasonable certainty that the purchaser will fulfill the above-mentioned conditions (usually done through a Criminal Records Bureau check). The participants in such a transaction are required to prepare a written contract detailing the identities of both vendor and purchaser, the weapon's type, manufacturer, and serial number. The law requires the written contract to be kept for ten years by the buyer and seller. The seller is also required to see some official ID from the purchaser...
Basically, the sale of automatic firearms, selective fire weapons and certain accessoires such as sound suppressors ("silencers") is forbidden (as is the sale of certain disabled automatic firearms which have been identified as easily restored to fully automatic capability). The purchase of such items is however legal with a special permit issued by cantonal police. The issuance of such a permit requires additional requirements to be met, e.g. the possession of a specific gun locker. ...Ammunition sales are registered only at the point of sale by recording the buyer's name in a bound book.
Curious that you don't know the difference between "reasonable gun controls" and "let's have unregulated gun bazaars, give every idiot with $1000 a semi-automatic assault rifle, and see what happens."
Unenforced legislation is no different from no legislation. If that reasonable law were enforced, then all of these people wouldn't be dead.
Meanwhile, France and the UK and most of continental Europe do enforce gun control laws, and have much lower murder rates. But don't bother with the facts. Use your biases to pretend that you already know the truth.