Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 14 – Only 10 percent
of the 5,000 to 6,000 crimes involving guns in Russia each year involve weapons
that have been officially registered with the authorities, according to Svetlana
Ternova of the licensing department of the Russian Guards (mbk-news.appspot.com/suzhet/redko-no-metko-kakie/).
Those statistics reflect both the obstacles
the authorities impose on those who seek to own guns (other than hunting rifles),
obstacles that Anastasiya Olshanskaya of MBK News describes and that clearly
discourage many, and the relative ease of obtaining a gun in the shadow economy
if someone wants to do so for criminal or other purposes.
Officials like Ternova say that
Russians are now purchasing fewer handguns, although they are buying more
hunting rifles. (The latter, however, are almost never used in the commission of
violent crimes, these officials report.)
But ever more often, Russians are waking to stories about violent crime
involving guns.
The
latest occurred this past week when a student in Blagoveshchensk shot and killed
a fellow student and wounded four others
before turning the gun on himself (siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/college-shooting-kills-one-injures-four-in-the-far-east-of-russia/).
The
number of such cases does not begin to approach that in the United States, but
it is such a departure from the past, both in terms of the use of weapons in
the commission of crimes and of massive reporting about them, that has put many
Russians on edge concerning the risks involved even with legal gun ownership.
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