Jan. 9, 2015 6:29 pm
Four hundred homemade guns, 24
crossbows, and 360 "electro-fishing" kits were put to the torch on
Tuesday by police in Cambodia's Banteay Meanchey province, reports
The
Phnom Penh Post. The weapons were mostly voluntarily
turned over for destruction as part of "efforts to reduce crimes
such as robbery, illegal hunting and illegal fishing," according to
the local top cop. That's pretty interesting, considering that
civilian ownership of firearms has been illegal in
Cambodia since 1999. Apparently, the memo is taking a while to
make the rounds.
Then again, maybe the memo did make the rounds, and is being
used as wadding in hand-loaded shotgun shells. When Rachel Louis
Snyder checked out Cambodia's illicit gun markets for
Slate in 2004, she found that the 1999 law had successfully
driven the price of an AK-47 from $40 to $100—with ready supplies
available via back-door deals from the army.
But Steve Lee's
experience is probably more closely relatable to that story from
The Phnom Penh Post. In 2013, the Australian fancier of
things that go "BANG" paid an enterprising Cambodian hunter for an
opportunity to pop off a couple of shots from a hand-crafted
muzzleloader. "Came across this guy near the Cambodian/Thailand
boarder where guns are completely illegal. I decided to do a review
on his home made rifle," he wrote. "It shows that even with total
gun control, people will still get firearms even if they have to
make them themselves." (He's since been back for
more illicit
firearms fun.)
I've actually shot scarier looking experimental weapons, though
I don't recommend the experience.
With a thriving black market and a creative local gun industry,
I'm going to make a wild guess that the bonfire in Banteay Meanchey
wasn't the end of the story, and that nobody who wants to be armed
was feeling terribly deprived afterwards. Which is, of course,
completely predictable, and pretty much what you'd expect looking
at the
history of firearms regulations everywhere.
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