When Homeowners Walk Away New Research Reveals More Than: Fill & Download for Free

—C H O O S I N G—Tips that will help you decide which home to buyKey takeaways:Make a list of why you’re looking to purchase a home and prioritize your needsDetermine a budget for your purchase and take overlooked costs into accountTo decide on a neighborhood, look at daily commute times, local culture, research school districts and the home's proximity to amenities and other points of interestWhat are some important considerations for buyers?Buying a home doesn’t need to be an overwhelming process. With proper planning, you too can find the home that will make you happy for years to come.Since the typical homebuyer lives in their home for an average of 13 years, it’s important to plan for possible future lifestyle changes. This may have an impact on the type of home you choose to purchase, such as a single-family home, a condominium or a home with investment possibilities.A better understanding of your reasons for wanting to buy a new home will simplify your search. Some of the most common motivations for buying a new home are:Adapting to lifestyle changesDesire to move to a different neighborhoodMoving closer to a job or familyAccommodating a growing familyImportant home features to considerSize of the homeSchool districts and programs offeredNumber of bedroomsFloor planNumber of levelsYard and lot sizeDistance to amenitiesMaking a list of your goals and ranking them in order of importance may help you in selecting a new home.How do I determine how much home I can afford?When determining a budget for buying a home, you need to:Set aside a fixed amount for your down paymentIdentify and plan for your estimated monthly mortgage paymentsYour mortgage lender can help you set realistic expectations for these two figures, but only you know what your month-to-month budget is really like. What you qualify for and what you can actually afford may be entirely different—it’s ultimately your responsibility to avoid spending more than you should.Additionally, when buying a home, many people plan on making changes to the property. This is a great way to turn a house you like into a home you love. But it’s important to keep in mind recurring expenses associated with homeownership, especially if you are including renovations in your budget.Home expenses that are often overlookedUtilitiesMaintenanceUnexpected repairsProperty taxesHomeowners insuranceHomeowners' association (HOA) feesEveryone has different goals when shopping for a new home. These financial factors can help you realize your goals and narrow the search for your purchase.How do I choose a neighborhood?As the famous phrase goes, it’s all about location, location, location! A property’s location usually has a huge influence on its market value.As you become serious about buying your own home, it’s important to narrow down your search to locations that match your specific lifestyle and personal preferences. To do this, you’ll need to take into account variables like the property’s proximity to stores, highways, busy roads, schools, airports and other points of interest. If you have children, it’s a good idea to thoroughly research the area’s school districts—GreatSchools.org can help. For general neighborhood demographics, take a look at the latest US census. For neighborhood walkability, you can use WalkScore.Once you’ve figured out where you want to live and how much you can spend, you’re ready to move on to the next step! It’s time to get pre-approved for a home loan.—E V A L U A T I N G—What is a home inspection?Before buying a home, you should retain your own professional home inspector to inspect both the home and property, even if the seller provides you with existing reports. A home inspection by a trained inspector will reveal any safety issues and major or minor defects that could lead to problems or repairs in the future. The inspector will check the condition of the home in areas you may not be able to see or easily access, like the roof. Choosing a qualified inspector is critical and sites like Angie's List can provide you with accurate reviews to use in your search.A typical home inspection lasts between two and three hours. It’s a great idea to be physically present during the inspection because:You can get a in-person explanation of any issues found by the inspectorYou will have the opportunity to ask questionsYou can see any concerns in person rather than in pictures on the reportMake sure to discuss the final home inspection report with the party who prepared them so that you fully understand any faults that were found.Inspections will vary depending on the inspector, however, the most important areas of an inspection are:Electrical: The inspector will look at the home’s main electrical panel to test the breakers and also ensure the use of safety outlets where appropriate.Plumbing: The inspector may take a look at the pipes, check drains and also check the home’s water pressure.Water heater: The inspector will inspect the water heater to investigate its current condition, its age and if it's properly secured.HVAC: The inspector will examine the heating, ventilation and air conditioning units to ensure their functionality and will also note any repairs that might be needed.Roof: The inspector will check the condition of the roofing material and look for any gaps in installation which could lead to water damage inside the home.Walls: The home inspector will check for any cracks which could be signs of unsettled ground. They will also look for any general damage to the walls or missing wall panels.Garage: The inspector will check the ventilation, foundation, lights and the garage door opener to ensure they’re all functioning properly.Drainage: The inspector will check the gutters of the home as well as the grade of the land to ensure the water drains away from the home and not towards it.Areas that may not be covered by the inspectionThese things may be beyond the expertise of your home inspector. For that reason, it's best to have a specialist take a look, if applicable.SewersTermitesChimneysGeological abnormalitiesAsbestos issues (in homes built before 1978)How can the results of a home inspection affect negotiations with the seller?When the inspection is complete, you will have good insight into the overall condition of the home. If major problems are found, you can:Ask the seller to fix the problems prior to the close of escrowNegotiate a lower purchase price due to the cost of repairsDecide against purchasing the homeWatch out for these potential deal breakersAsbestos: Left intact, undisturbed and unexposed, it's usually not a problem. However, if deteriorating and exposed, it is a serious health concern. Consult an asbestos abatement contractor for an expert opinion.Outdated electrical system: Replacing a home's electrical system can get expensive fast. Exposed or damaged wiring can make this even worse. It's best to pass on a home that needs significant electrical work, unless the seller is willing to reduce their price accordingly.Termite damage: Anytime the structure of the home itself is in question, you should be very wary. It's smart to move forward with a warranty from a termite company.Is the seller required fix problems identified during a home inspection?No. The seller is not required to fulfill the requests made by the buyer due to the results of a home inspection. If the seller refuses to accommodate your requests, a home inspection contingency ensures that you reserve the right to cancel the contract as long as you are still within time period defined by the purchase agreement.—N E G O T I A T I N G—Making sure your dream home doesn’t slip awayKey takeaways:Increasing your offer price isn’t the only way to stand outKnow when to walk away—just because you can buy it doesn’t mean you shouldIf it comes down to price, Home Savi can help!It’s not uncommon for homes to sell at or above asking price, especially in hot markets. While increasing your offer price is one way to win a bidding war, other factors can affect the seller’s decision as well.Beyond purchase price, a seller may be motivated by convenience or even emotion. If you’re in a competitive market and are looking to buy the home of your dreams, here are some tips on how to come out on top when there are multiple offers on the seller’s table.Get your financial ducks in a rowBefore you engage in a bidding war, it’s crucial to be pre-approved for a home loan. Sellers want to see commitment from the buyer and getting pre-approved is an excellent way to show that you’re serious about purchasing a home.Be disciplinedBe careful not to bid much higher than the market value of any property. If you're using an escalation clause that automatically increases your offer in response to other bids on the property, be sure to set an upper price cap and a limited time frame.However, just because you can outbid other buyers, doesn’t mean you should. If the final home price is significantly higher than the appraised value of the home, your home loan could be put in jeopardy. Be disciplined and know when to walk away from a bidding war, or it may just cost you in the long run.Reduce the hassleSellers care about convenience. Generally speaking, the fewer contingencies on your offer, the better. Try to reduce contingencies, but also know when to stand your ground. For example, never waive your right to a home inspection. You don’t want any surprises once you’ve committed to the transaction. Your goal is to find a balance between making the sale as efficient as possible and mitigating your risk level.Use the power of emotionSometimes, cash isn’t king. Sellers like to feel good about the people buying their homes. It’s in your best interest to be as cordial and likable as possible throughout the entire home buying process. Refrain from being overly demanding or critical of the home or its owners.Personalize your offer by attaching a letter about why you love the home you’re attempting to purchase. Include pictures of your family or a relevant personal story if possible—you never know what could strike a chord with the seller. Make the seller feel good about their home and even better about you.Home Savi can help!Our contracts are designed to put you in control of your savings. One useful way to use your savings is to up your offer price by the amount you're saving in commissions. Essentially, this could allow you to increase your offer price by 3% and outbid competing offers. For example, on a $500,000 home with multiple offers on the table for that asking price, you could offer $515,000 without actually paying more than someone offering $500,000 through an agent. In a competitive market, this puts you at a huge advantage.Learn to prioritizeDecide what your priorities are before negotiating and keep them private. Conceding on something that isn't a high priority could gain you valuable leverage elsewhere. Don't get hung up on every little detail because you usually can't have it all.Don’t hesitate to ask for what you want, but also keep in mind that the fewer contingencies you have, the more likely you are to successfully close the deal.How to get your priorities in orderThe easiest and most effective way is to simply make a list. Concentrate on listing the things that absolutely need to happen for you to purchase the home. During the negotiation process, focus on these things and be willing to let other things go. Compromising on areas that aren’t on your list will help you close on your home quicker.The art of negotiatingThere's no surefire way to get what you want from the seller, but there are some ways you can increase your chances.Be niceSometimes it really can be just that easy. Sellers are more likely to negotiate with someone who's likable and courteous, so it's smart to treat others like you'd like to be treated.Be transparentYes, keeping your cards close to your chest is a good tactic, but revealing certain information can greatly help with building trust. The trick is to be selective. The things you reveal don't necessarily even have to be related to the deal. As long as they help create an environment that promotes collaboration and mutual agreement, you're doing it right.Be willing to move onGetting too attached to one home can greatly reduce your negotiating power. Sometimes, no matter how appealing the home, it's best to walk away. If you really, really want to buy a home, don't let the listing agent or seller know that it's your dream home. This is a surefire way to throw all your negotiating power out of the window.—F I N A N C I N G—What does getting pre-approved mean?Being pre-approved for a mortgage means that a lender has reviewed your credit history and will likely approve you for a home loan. This pre-approval will tell you how much the bank is willing to lend you, as well as how much time you have to accept their offer. Getting pre-approved for a mortgage will help you in the home search and negotiation process.What are the advantages to being pre-approved?There are multiple advantages to being pre-approved for a loan including:Identifies a realistic home cost: Being pre-approved for a mortgage will allow you to know exactly how much you can borrow. This will save you time by identifying which homes you can afford and which are outside of your budget.Improves your image as a homebuyer: Being pre-approved shows the seller that you are a serious buyer and not simply another person looking around. It also tells the seller that you are capable of affording the home and that your offer probably won’t fall through due to lack of funding.Saves you time: Applying and getting approved for a mortgage takes time. If you get it out of the way before making an offer on a home, it will speed up the purchasing process allowing you to close the offer before another competing buyer steps in.Enhances your negotiating power: Pre-approved buyers have an advantage over offers from buyers that are not pre-approved. The seller is more likely to accept your offer, even if another offer is slightly higher. That’s because being pre-approved shows financial certainty. You can negotiate for better terms or better pricing.Once you’ve been pre-approved, you’re ready to start searching for your new home. When you find one you like, the next step is determining the correct offer price.Learn more about what documents you need to get pre-approved and contacting your lender to get a pre-approval letter.What to do if you get rejected for a home loanIf at first you don't succeed, try, try againKey takeaways:Make sure your credit score and debt-to-income ratio are the best they can beTake advantage of down payment assistance and low down payment programsDifferent lenders have different criteria—shop around til you find the best one for youGetting denied for a home loan, although inconvenient, is not the end of the world. The important part is to understand why you were rejected and work toward fixing the problem.Top reasons loan applications are rejected:Subpar credit scoresHigh debt-to-income ratiosInadequate down payment amountsLow appraisal valuesCredit scoreA poor credit score is the most common reason loans get rejected. To even qualify for most conventional loans, a score of 620 is required. If you have a lower score, you may be eligible for a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan. Don’t worry if your credit isn’t perfect; there are ways you can repair your score.Although errors can be difficult to find, they could very well be wreaking havoc from the depths of your credit report. Finding and fixing them can boost your score noticeably. Remember, you're entitled to a free annual copy of your report and should take advantage of this to sniff out potential discrepancies. It can take a month or longer to correct mistakes, but you can speed up the process by filing for a rapid rescore.If your credit score has no errors, it may just need some TLC. Make sure you’re borrowing within your means and paying your bills on schedule over the coming months. Eventually, with some discipline and time, your score will improve.Debt-to-income ratioThis ratio is as straightforward as it sounds; a ratio of monthly debts compared to monthly income.Simply put, lenders don't like to see high ratios. It signals to them that you're already up to your elbows in debt and that more debt on your plate may be too much for you to handle.At this point, you have a couple of options: attempt to pay off some debt and try again or speak with other lenders. Different lenders have different debt-to-income ratio requirements, which means that while one lender may decline you, another may be completely willing to loan to you. Don’t throw in the towel after talking with just one lender. Shop around until you find the right lender for you!Down paymentMost lenders prefer a 20% down payment. However, if you can’t scrape together 20%, there are ways around this long-standing (and some say outdated) tradition.Lenders like to see larger down payments because it signals that you're personally invested in the property, and therefore, more likely to keep up with payments. Agencies such as the FHA and Department of Veterans Affairs can help you lower your down payments.In general, the higher your down payment, the better. Dipping into retirement savings, receiving money from family and using down payment assistance programs are all ways to get funds fast, but should always be used responsibly.AppraisalA lower-than-expected appraisal value could also result in loan request rejection. When the property’s value isn’t high enough to back the loan, the lender will most likely decline your loan request.Unfortunately, appraisals tend to vary due to their subjective nature. Even though this is a reoccurring issue, a second appraisal is typically not allowed during the loan approval process. You can ask for an appraisal rebuttal, but they rarely end up working in your favor as a buyer.A common next step is to apply with a different lender, as you'll also get a new appraisal. Don’t be afraid to play the field with lenders until you find the right one for you.Time for one more shotIt's no secret that using Home Savi is a great way to significantly reduce home buying costs. Representing yourself and saving big could be the final push you need to make your home ownership dreams a reality.Ready to give it another try? Before you go, learn more about how to find the best mortgage lender for you.

“WAR IS HELL”“It’s like the war never ended.”And the Price we still pay for itWar is hell a phrase attributed to General Sherman, and figure wrongly attributed to him alone, since many men from the beginning of time knew that, to be so.I guess you got to judge that on an individual basis, every person would have a different opinion, regarding his own circumstances, and also you have to take in account about what generation you are talking about?During my childhood we were fed WWII, a thing its not longer true today, most people who write here in Quora about the war do for several reasons, maybe interested in History, or fascinated by war and heroism, some even discuss the merit of this weapon, over that one, some even come with the common: If, to propose different outcomes, like if they are not happy as things unfolded, hey, the reasons can be so many as to why?I got to confess my interest in WWII was born in my childhood fed up by Hollywood, and later by reading war books, now I hardly see a movie, or read a war book, mainly here in Quora, were it seems to be a hot topic, but of little relevance to many others whose life its far removed from thinking about WWII.Whenever write about any other topic of interest to me, it seems get small views, compared to topics involving WWII, and therefore the reason why I do write about WWII, I figure if I had spent so much time in the past reading about it, I may as well use it.After all if I gone do an effort of writing something, I want for people to read it, otherwise I feel I am wasting my time.However the only psychological effect for me about WWII has being to turn me into an staunch Pacifist, and make me a cynic of war, and politics.Notwithstanding my personal sense of justice, and the ideal, we may find a way out of the ignorance, hate, and every other malady we Humans suffer, as hard this is to conceive, if anything it helps my attitude towards life.War doesn’t solve anything, not good for the defeated, neither for the winner, who later on will pay a price for it, even if most people cannot perceive, or understand it.Here its the first movie that I remember seeing it as a child, and it just happen to be a War related movie of WWII, one of the hundreds I saw after that one.TEN SECONDS TO HELLAnd yes, War is Hell, even after it, as the movie itself, not of the war, but the aftermath, still taking lives, even if war was over.And only in this issue alone there’s a lot to be said, not counting so much other damages.The US Army Air Force and Royal Air Force dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe during World War II. Every year, an estimated 2,000 tons of World War II munitions are found in Germany, at times requiring the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents from their homes.[1] In Berlin alone, 1.8 million pieces of ordnance have been defused since 1947. Buried bombs, as well as mortars, land mines and grenades, are often found during construction work or other excavations, or by farmers tilling the land.More than 70 years after the end of the war, unexploded bombs are regularly found buried on German land.Later in 2001 remember seeing a British production named:Danger! Unexploded Bomb. by Carlton TelevisionThe men who ran towards the bombs: The Blitz heroes who saved countless lives defusing UXBsBy James OwenOn a chill December evening in 1940, Captain Max Blaney was overseeing the extraction of an unexploded bomb from a vast crater in Romford Road, East London.An experienced, careful officer, he had taken every precaution before hoisting the 550lb weapon out of the ground.Its two detonating fuses had been identified: one was a clockwork time fuse with an 80-hour limit, the other a motion-sensitive fuse with a 60-hour shelf-life.Against the clock: Two actors play members of the BD work to diffuse a half-buried bombOn a chill December evening in 1940, Captain Max Blaney was overseeing the extraction of an unexploded bomb from a vast crater in Romford Road, East London.An experienced, careful officer, he had taken every precaution before hoisting the 550lb weapon out of the ground.Its two detonating fuses had been identified: one was a clockwork time fuse with an 80-hour limit, the other a motion-sensitive fuse with a 60-hour shelf-life.Against the clock: Two actors play members of the BD work to diffuse a half-buried bombAs several days had passed between the bomb landing and the team reaching the site, it seemed that both were now harmless.To be sure, Blaney used a clock-stopper, a newly invented device that clamped around the bomb and used a magnetic field to jam the time-fuse's mechanism.He had hoped to use another innovation, too, a steam sterilizer that dissolved and pumped out the bomb's explosive, but the lorry bringing it had got stuck in traffic - perhaps because it was Friday 13th - so Blaney decided to proceed without it.He had to remove the clock-stopper briefly to get the hoist around the bomb, but as the fuses had expired this did not appear risky.When the bomb was hauled up from its tomb, Blaney stepped forward to steady it.As he did so there was a huge explosion. In a microsecond, the bomb was transformed into a searing blast of noise, light and heat that tore outwards, clawing flesh, pulverizing bone.Danger: A policeman keeps the public away from a German bombBlaney, the eight men who had been pulling on the rope and a watching policeman were all killed.The day after the explosion, a button from the policeman's uniform was found embedded deep in a door frame away down the street. Very little else that was found was so easily recognizable.There Are Still Thousands of Tons of Unexploded Bombs in Germany, Left Over From World War IIMore than 70 years after being dropped in Europe, the ordnance is still inflicting harm and mayhemFlying Fortresses of the 303rd bomber group (Hell’s Angels) drop a heavy load on industrial targets in Germany. (Bettmann / Corbis)By Adam HigginbothamShortly before 11 a.m. on March 15, 1945, the first of 36 B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 493rd Bombardment Group of the U.S. Eighth Air Force thundered down the concrete runway of Little Walden airfield in Essex, England, and rose slowly into the air. They headed east, gradually gaining altitude until, assembled in tight box formations at the head of a stream of more than 1,300 heavy bombers, they crossed the Channel coast north of Amsterdam at an altitude of almost five miles. Inside the unpressurized aluminum fuselage of each aircraft, the temperature fell to 40 degrees below zero, the air too thin to breathe. They flew on into Germany, passing Hanover and Magdeburg, the exhaust of each B-17’s four engines condensing into the white contrails every crewman hated for betraying their position to defenders below. But the Luftwaffe was on its knees; no enemy aircraft engaged the bombers of the 493rd.B-24J bomber 'Old Sack' and crew, of USAAF 493rd Bombardment Group, at RAF Debach, England, United Kingdom, spring 1944 ww2dbaseAround 2:40 p.m., some ten miles northwest of Berlin, the city of Oranienburg appeared beneath them, shrouded in a mist along the lazy curves of Havel River, and the sky blossomed with puffs of jet-black smoke from anti-aircraft fire. Sitting in the nose in the lead plane, the bombardier stared through his bombsight into the haze far below. As his B-17 approached the Oder-Havel Canal, he watched as the needles of the automatic release mechanism converged. Five bombs tumbled away into the icy sky.Between 1940 and 1945, U.S. and British air forces dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe, half of that amount on Germany. By the time the Nazi government surrendered, in May 1945, the industrial infrastructure of the Third Reich—railheads, arms factories and oil refineries—had been crippled, and dozens of cities across Germany had been reduced to moonscapes of cinder and ash.Under Allied occupation, reconstruction began almost immediately. Yet as many as 10 percent of the bombs dropped by Allied aircraft had failed to explode, and as East and West Germany rose from the ruins of the Reich, thousands of tons of unexploded airborne ordnance lay beneath them. In both East and West, responsibility for defusing these bombs—along with removing the innumerable hand grenades, bullets and mortar and artillery shells left behind at the end of the war—fell to police bomb-disposal technicians and firefighters, the Kampfmittelbeseitigungsdienst, or KMBD.Even now, 70 years later, more than 2,000 tons of unexploded munitions are uncovered on German soil every year. Before any construction project begins in Germany, from the extension of a home to track-laying by the national railroad authority, the ground must be certified as cleared of unexploded ordnance. Still, last May, some 20,000 people were cleared from an area of Cologne while authorities removed a one-ton bomb that had been discovered during construction work. In November 2013, another 20,000 people in Dortmund were evacuated while experts defused a 4,000-pound “Blockbuster” bomb that could destroy most of a city block. In 2011, 45,000 people—the largest evacuation in Germany since World War II—were forced to leave their homes when a drought revealed a similar device lying on the bed of the Rhine in the middle of Koblenz. Although the country has been at peace for three generations, German bomb-disposal squads are among the busiest in the world. Eleven bomb technicians have been killed in Germany since 2000, including three who died in a single explosion while trying to defuse a 1,000-pound bomb on the site of a popular flea market in Göttingen in 2010.Early one recent winter morning, Horst Reinhardt, chief of the Brandenburg state KMBD, told me that when he started in bomb disposal in 1986, he never believed he would still be at it almost 30 years later. Yet his men discover more than 500 tons of unexploded munitions every year and defuse an aerial bomb every two weeks or so. “People simply don’t know that there’s still that many bombs under the ground,” he said.And in one city in his district, the events of 70 years ago have ensured that unexploded bombs remain a daily menace. The place looks ordinary enough: a drab main street, pastel-painted apartment houses, an orderly railway station and a McDonald’s with a tubular thicket of bicycles parked outside. Yet, according to Reinhardt, Oranienburg is the most dangerous city in Germany.image:“It’s becoming increasingly difficult,” says bomb-squad leader Horst Reinhardt. (Timothy Fadek / Redux Pictures)Between 2:51 and 3:36 p.m. on March 15, 1945, more than 600 aircraft of the Eighth Air Force dropped 1,500 tons of high explosives over Oranienburg, a cluster of strategic targets including rail yards that were a hub for troops headed to the Eastern Front, a Heinkel aircraft plant and, straddling the rail yards, two factories run by the chemical conglomerate Auergesellschaft. Allied target lists had described one of those facilities as a gas-mask factory, but by early 1945 U.S. intelligence had learned that Auergesellschaft had begun processing enriched uranium, the raw material for the atomic bomb, in Oranienburg.Oranienburg Bomb site after explosionAlthough the March 15 attack was ostensibly aimed at the rail yards, it had been personally requested by the director of the Manhattan Project, Gen. Leslie Groves, who was determined to keep Nazi nuclear research out of the hands of rapidly advancing Russian troops. Of the 13 Allied air attacks eventually launched on the city, this one, the fourth within a year, was by far the heaviest and most destructive.As one squadron of B-17s followed another into its run, almost five thousand 500- and 1,000-pound bombs and more than 700 incendiaries fell across the rail yards, the chemical factory and into the residential streets nearby. The first explosions started fires around the railroad station; by the time the final B-17s began their attack, smoke from the burning city was so heavy the bombardiers had difficulty seeing where their bombs were falling. But where it cleared, the men of the First Air Division watched three concentrations of high explosives fall into houses near the road over the Lehnitzstrasse canal bridge, around a mile southeast of the rail station and a few hundred yards from one of the chemical factories.These bomb loads were unlike almost any others the Eighth Air Force dropped over Germany during the war. The majority of the bombs were armed not with percussion fuses, which explode on impact, but with time-delay fuses, which both sides used throughout the war in order to extend the terror and chaos caused by aerial attacks. The sophisticated, chemical-based fuses­—designated M124 and M125, depending on the weight of the bomb—were intended to be used sparingly; U.S. Army Air Force guidelines recommended fitting them in no more than 10 percent of bombs in any given attack. But for reasons that have never become clear, almost every bomb dropped during the March 15 raid on Oranienburg was armed with one.RAF ground crew handling the TallboyScrewed into a bomb’s tail beneath its stabilizing fins, the fuse contained a small glass capsule of corrosive acetone mounted above a stack of paper-thin celluloid disks less than half an inch in diameter. The disks held back a spring-loaded firing pin, cocked behind a detonator. As the bomb fell, it tilted nose-down, and a windmill in the tail stabilizer began spinning in the slipstream, turning a crank that broke the glass capsule. The bomb was designed to hit the ground nose-down, so the acetone would drip toward the disks and begin eating through them. This could take minutes or days, depending on the concentration of acetone and the number of disks the armorers had fitted into the fuse. When the last disk weakened and snapped, the spring was released, the firing pin struck the priming charge and—finally, unexpectedly—the bomb exploded.image:Oranienburg in 1945 (Luftbilddatenbank)Around three o’clock that afternoon, a B-17 from the Eighth Air Force released a 1,000-pound bomb some 20,000 feet above the rail yards. Quickly reaching terminal velocity, it fell toward the southwest, missing the yards and the chemical plants. It fell instead toward the canal and the two bridges connecting Oranienburg and the suburb of Lehnitz, closing on a wedge of low-lying land framed by the embankments of Lehnitzstrasse and the railroad line. Before the war this had been a quiet spot beside the water, leading to four villas among the trees, parallel to a canal on Baumschulenweg. But now it was occupied by anti-aircraft guns and a pair of narrow, wooden, single-story barracks built by the Wehrmacht. This was where the bomb finally found the earth—just missing the more westerly of the two barracks and plunging into the sandy soil at more than 150 miles per hour. It bored down at an oblique angle before the violence of its passage tore the stabilizing fins away from the tail, when it abruptly angled upward until, its kinetic energy finally spent, the bomb and its M125 fuse came to rest: nose-up but still deep underground.By four o’clock, the skies over Oranienburg had fallen silent. The city center was ablaze, the first of the delayed explosions had started: The Auergesellschaft plant would soon be destroyed and the rail yards tangled with wreckage. But the bomb beside the canal lay undisturbed. As the shadows of the trees on Lehnitzstrasse lengthened in the low winter sun, acetone dripped slowly from the shattered glass capsule within the bomb’s fuse. Taken by gravity, it trickled harmlessly downward, away from the celluloid disks it was supposed to weaken.Grand Slam bomb exploding near Arnsberg viaduct 1945Less than two months later, Nazi leaders capitulated. As much as ten square miles of Berlin had been reduced to rubble. In the months following V-E Day that May, a woman who had been bombed out of her home there found her way, with her young son, out to Oranienburg, where she had a boyfriend. The town was a constellation of yawning craters and gutted factories, but beside Lehnitzstrasse and not far from the canal, she found a small wooden barracks empty and intact. She moved in with her boyfriend and her son.Abandoned ammunition and unexploded bombs claimed their first postwar victims almost as soon as the last guns fell silent. In June 1945, a cache of German anti-tank weapons exploded in Bremen, killing 35 and injuring 50; three months later in Hamburg, a buried American 500-pound bomb with a time-delay fuse took the lives of the four technicians working to disarm it. Clearing unexploded munitions became the task of the German states’ KMBD. It was dangerous work done at close quarters, removing fuses with wrenches and hammers. “You need a clear head. And calm hands,” Horst Reinhardt told me. He said he never felt fear during the defusing process. “If you’re afraid, you can’t do it. For us, it’s a completely normal job. In the same way that a baker bakes bread, we defuse bombs.”“In the same way that a baker bakes bread, we defuse bombs.”In the decades after the war, bombs, mines, grenades and artillery shells killed dozens of KMBD technicians and hundreds of civilians. Thousands of unexploded Allied bombs were excavated and defused. But many had been buried in rubble or simply entombed in concrete during wartime remediation and forgotten. In the postwar rush for reconstruction, nobody kept consistent information about where unexploded bombs had been made safe and removed. A systematic approach to finding them was officially regarded as impossible. When Reinhardt started work with the East German KMBD in 1986, both he and his counterparts in the West usually found bombs the same way: one at a time, often during construction work.But the government of Hamburg had recently brokered an agreement to allow the states of West Germany access to the 5.5 million aerial photographs in the declassified wartime archives of the Allied Central Interpretation Unit, held in Keele in England. Between 1940 and 1945, ACIU pilots flew thousands of reconnaissance missions before and after every raid by Allied bombers, taking millions of stereoscopic photographs that revealed both where the attacks could be directed and then how successful they had proved. Those images held clues to where bombs had landed but never detonated—a small, circular hole, for example, in an otherwise consistent line of ragged craters.Around the same time, Hans-Georg Carls, a geographer working on a municipal project using aerial photography to map trees in Würzburg, in southern Germany, stumbled on another trove of ACIU images. Stored in a teacher’s cellar in Mainz, they had been ordered from the archives of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency by an enterprising American intelligence officer based in Germany, who had hoped to sell them privately to the German government for his own profit. When he failed, he sold 60,000 of them to the teacher for a few pfennigs each. Carls, sensing a business opportunity, snapped them up for a deutsche mark apiece.image:Photo analyst Hans-Georg Carls (Timothy Fadek / Redux Pictures)When he compared what he’d bought with what the German government had copied from the British, he realized he had images the British didn’t. Convinced there must be more, held somewhere in the United States, Carls established a company, Luftbilddatenbank. With the help of archivists in Britain and the States, he brought to light hundreds of cans of aerial reconnaissance film that had gone unexamined for decades. Crucially, Carls also found the maps made by the pilots who shot the film—“sortie plots” showing exactly where each run of pictures had been taken—which had often been archived elsewhere, and without which the images would be meaningless.Supplementing the photographs and the sortie plots with local histories and police records, contemporary eyewitness testimony and the detailed records of bombing missions held at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, Carls was able to build a chronology of everything that had happened to a given patch of land between 1939 and 1945. Examining the photographs using a stereoscope, which makes the images appear in 3-D, Carls could see where bombs had fallen, where they had exploded and where they may not have. From that data he could compile an Ergebniskarte—a “result map”—for clients ranging from international consortiums to homeowners, with high-risk areas crosshatched in red. “He was the pioneer,” said Allan Williams, curator of Britain’s National Collection of Aerial Photography, which now includes the pictures once held in Keele.Carls, now nearing 68 and semi-retired, employs a staff of more than 20, with offices occupying the top three floors of his large house in a suburb of Würzburg. Image analysis is now a central component of bomb disposal in each of Germany’s 16 states, and Carls has provided many of the photographs they use, including all of those used by Reinhardt and the Brandenburg KMBD.One day in the Luftbilddatenbank office, Johannes Kroeckel, 37, one of Carls’ senior photo-interpreters, called up a Google Earth satellite image of the area north of Berlin on one of two giant computer monitors on his desk. He closed in on an L-shaped cul-de-sac in Oranienburg, in the area between Lehnitzstrasse and the canal. On the other monitor, he used the geolocation data of the address to summon a list of more than 200 aerial photographs of the area shot by Allied reconnaissance pilots and scrolled through them until he found the ones he needed. A week after the March 15 raid, photographs 4113 and 4114 were taken from 27,000 feet over Oranienburg, a fraction of a second apart. They showed the scene near the canal in sharp monochromatic detail, the curve of the Lehnitzstrasse bridge and the bare branches of the trees on Baumschulenweg tracing fine shadows on the water and the pale ground beyond. Then Kroeckel used Photoshop to tint one picture in cyan and the other in magenta, and combined them into a single image. I put on a pair of cardboard 3-D glasses, and the landscape rose toward me: upended matchbox shapes of roofless houses; a chunk of earth bitten out of the Lehnitzstrasse embankment; a giant, perfectly circular crater in the middle of Baumschulenweg.A small German firm offers a unique service to the country's construction industry: It uses historical British and American aerial photography from World War II air strikes to determine the location of unexploded bombs. Thousands of tons of bombs still lie in the soil and the duds are becoming more dangerous.Yet we could see no sign of a dormant 1,000-bomb concealed in the ruins of the neighborhood, where, soon after the photograph was taken, a woman would find a home for herself and her family. Kroeckel explained that even an image as stark as this one could not reveal everything about the landscape below. “Maybe you have shadows of trees or houses,” he said, pointing to a crisp quadrilateral of late-winter shade cast by one of the villas a few hundred yards from the canal. “You can’t see every unexploded bomb with the aerials.” But there was more than enough evidence to mark an Ergebniskarte in ominous red ink.Then, and Now Bomb CratersPaule Dietrich bought the house on the cul-de-sac in Oranienburg in 1993. He and the German Democratic Republic had been born on the same day, October 7, 1949, and for a while the coincidence seemed auspicious. When he turned 10, he and a dozen or so other children who shared the birthday were taken to tea with President Wilhelm Pieck, who gave them each passbooks to savings accounts containing 15 Ost­marks. At 20, he and the others were guests at the opening of the Berlin TV tower, the tallest building in all of Germany. Over the next 20 years, the Republic was good to Dietrich. He drove buses and subway trains for the Berlin transit authority. He was given an apartment in the city, and he became a taxi driver. He added to the savings the president had given him, and on an abandoned piece of land in Falkensee, in the countryside outside the city, he built a summer bungalow.But in 1989, Dietrich turned 40, the Berlin Wall fell and his Ostmarks became worthless overnight. Three years later, the rightful owners of the land in Falkensee returned from the West to reclaim it.In nearby Oranienburg, where his mother had lived since the 1960s, Dietrich met an elderly lady who was trying to sell a small wooden house down by the canal—an old Wehrmacht barracks she’d lived in since the war. It needed a lot of work, but it was right by the water. Dietrich sold his car and mobile home to buy it and began working on it whenever he could. His girlfriend and Willi, their only son, joined him, and slowly the house came together. By 2005, it was finished—plastered, weatherproofed and insulated, with a garage, a new bathroom and a brick fireplace. Dietrich began living there full-time from May to December and planned to move in permanently when he retired.Bomb exploded at Autobhan 3 near OffenbachLike everyone else in Oranienburg, he knew the city had been bombed during the war, but so had a lot of places in Germany. And parts of Oranienburg were evacuated so frequently that it was easy to believe there couldn’t be many bombs left. Buried bombs had apparently gone off on their own a few times—once, just around the corner from Dietrich’s house, one exploded under the sidewalk where a man was walking his dog. But nobody, not even the dog and its walker, had been seriously injured. Most people simply preferred not to think about it.The state of Brandenburg, however, knew Oranienburg presented a unique problem. Between 1996 and 2007, the local government spent €45 million on bomb disposal—more than any other town in Germany, and more than a third of total statewide expenses for unexploded ordnance during that time. In 2006, the state Ministry of the Interior commissioned Wolfgang Spyra of the Brandenburg University of Technology to determine how many unexploded bombs might remain in the city and where they might be.Frankfurt defuses massive WWII bomb following Germany's biggest evacuation since war era 3 Sep 2017, 11:52amTwo years later, Spyra delivered a 250-page report revealing not only the huge number of time bombs dropped on the city on March 15, 1945, but also the unusually high proportion of them that had failed to go off. That was a function of local geology and the angle at which some bombs hit the ground: Hundreds of them had plunged nose-first into the sandy soil but then had come to rest nose-up, disabling their chemical fuses. Spyra calculated that 326 bombs—or 57 tons of high-explosive ordnance—remained hidden beneath the city’s streets and yards.And the celluloid disks in the bombs’ timing mechanisms had become brittle with age and acutely sensitive to vibration and shock. So bombs had begun to go off spontaneously. A decayed fuse of this type was responsible for the deaths of the three KMBD technicians in Göttingen in 2010. They had dug out the bomb, but weren’t touching it when it went off.image:In January 2013, Paule Dietrich read in the newspaper that the city of Oranienburg was going to start looking for bombs in his neighborhood. He had to fill out some forms, and in July, city contractors arrived. They drilled 38 holes in his yard, each more than 30 feet deep, and dropped a magnetometer into every one. It took two weeks. A month later, they drilled more holes in back of the house. They were zeroing in on something, but didn’t say what.It was nine in the morning on October 7, 2013—the day Dietrich turned 64—when a delegation of city officials arrived at his front gate. “I thought they were here for my birthday,” he said when I met him recently. But that wasn’t it at all. “There’s something here,” the officials told him. “We need to get at it.” They said that it was ein Verdachtspunkt—a point of suspicion. Nobody used the word “bomb.”They marked the spot beside the house with an orange traffic cone and prepared to pump out groundwater from around it. When Dietrich’s friends turned up that afternoon to celebrate his birthday, they took pictures of the cone. Throughout October, the contractors had pumps running round the clock. They started digging at seven every morning and stayed until eight every night. Each morning they drank coffee in Dietrich’s carport. “Paule,” they said, “this will be no problem.”It took them another month to uncover the bomb, more than 12 feet down: 1,000 pounds, big as a man, rusted, its tail stabilizer gone. They shored up the hole with steel plates and chained the bomb so it couldn’t move. Every night, Dietrich stayed in the house with his German shepherd, Rocky. They slept with their heads just a few feet from the hole. “I thought everything was going to be fine,” he said.On November 19, the contractors were drinking coffee as usual when their boss arrived. “Paule, you need to take your dog and get off the property immediately,” he said. “We have to create an exclusion zone right now, all the way from here to the street.”Dietrich took his TV set and his dog and drove over to his girlfriend’s house, in Lehnitz. On the radio, he heard that the city had stopped the trains running over the canal. The KMBD was defusing a bomb. The streets around the house were sealed off. Two days later, on Saturday morning, he heard on the news that the KMBD said the bomb couldn’t be defused; it would have to be detonated. He was walking with Rocky in the forest a mile away when he heard the explosion.Two hours later, when the all-clear siren sounded, Dietrich drove over to his place with a friend and his son. He could barely speak. Where his house had once stood was a crater more than 60 feet across, filled with water and scorched debris. The straw the KMBD had used to contain bomb splinters was scattered everywhere—on the roof of his shed, across his neighbor’s yard. The wreckage of Dietrich’s front porch leaned precariously at the edge of the crater. The mayor, a TV crew and Horst Reinhardt of the KMBD were there. Dietrich wiped away tears. He was less than a year from retirement.image:Paule Dietrich had spent more than ten years renovating his house. (Courtesy Paule Dietrich)Early one morning at the headquarters of the Brandenburg KMBD in Zossen, Reinhardt swept his hand slowly across a display case in his spartan, linoleum-floored office. “These are all American fuses. These are Russian ones, these are English ones. These are German ones,” he said, pausing among the dozens of metal cylinders that filled the case, some topped with small propellers, others cut away to reveal the mechanisms inside. “These are bomb fuses. These are mine fuses. That’s just a tiny fingernail of what’s out there.”RAF Grand SlamAt 63, Reinhardt was in the last few days of his career in bomb disposal and looking forward to gardening, collecting stamps and playing with his grandchildren. He recalled the bomb in Paule Dietrich’s yard, and said his men had had no alternative but to blow it up. Sallow and world-weary, he said it was impossible to tell how long it would take to clear Germany of unexploded ordnance. “There will still be bombs 200 years from now,” he told me. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult. At this point, we’ve dealt with all the open spaces. But now it’s the houses, the factories. We have to look directly underneath the houses.”Late the following day, as the wet wind slapped viciously at the plastic roof overhead, I sat with Paule Dietrich in what had been his carport. A few feet of grass separated it from the spot where his house once stood. The bomb crater had been filled in, and Dietrich was living there in a mobile home. He kept the carport for entertaining, and had equipped it with a fridge, a shower and furniture donated by friends and supporters from Oranienburg, where he has become a minor celebrity.image:Dietrich now uses his former carport to entertain visitors. (Timothy Fadek / Redux Pictures)Sitting at a small table, Dietrich chain-smoked Chesterfields and drank instant coffee. He produced an orange binder filled with photographs of his former home: as it was when he bought it; when he and his colleagues were decorating it; and, finally, as it was after the bomb had reached the end of its 70-year fuse. Dietrich said he realized that he and his family had been lucky: Every summer, his grandchildren had played in a plastic pool near where the bomb had been lying; at night, they slept in a mobile home beside the pool. “Directly on the bomb,” he said.By the time we met, Dietrich had been offered scant financial compensation by the authorities—technically, the federal government was required to pay only for damage caused by German-made munitions. But among a pile of documents and newspaper clippings he had in the binder was a rendering of the new home he wanted to build on the site. It had once been the best prefabricated bungalow available in East Germany, he said, and a contractor in Falkensee had given him all the components of one, except for the roof. Even so, more than a year after the explosion, he hadn’t started work on it.Outside, in the afternoon gloaming, he showed me why. In the grass at the bottom of the embankment of Lehnitzstrasse was a patch of sandy ground. Men from the city had recently marked it with two painted stakes. They had told him only that it was a “double anomaly,” but he knew precisely what they meant. Paule Dietrich had two more unexploded American bombs at the end of his yard.Nearly 70 years have passed since the last shot was fired marking the end of World War II. But to look at headlines that emerged out of Germany this week, it may comes as a surprise that there are still bombs left behind from the conflict still waiting to go off.Earlier this week, a 550-pound American-made bomb dating back to World War II was intentionally detonated in a controlled burst after its discovery by construction workers in the city of Oranienburg.Although it was a managed explosion, officials still evacuated some 2,500 residents surrounding the blast area. The explosion shattered windows near the site and set roofs ablaze. But thanks to careful planning, the bomb didn't claim any lives.But that's not all. On Thursday, a second bomb that was discovered was also detonated in the same city near the train station. It, too, had to be detonated, because moving the explosive was simply too risky.Though it's uncommon for two WWII-era bombs to be found and detonated in the same city within 24 hours of one another, it should come as no surprise that these explosives are lurking beneath what are now quiet urban or suburban areas. During WWII, when the whole nation was turned into a battlefield, some 22,000 bombs were drilled by the Allies on Oranienburg alone.DNEWS VIDEO: Divers Plumb Depths for U-BoatsSince 1990, when officials first began searching in Germany for unexploded ordinances, more than 130 such weapons have been uncovered. After the war, Germany recovered, but did so unevenly.West Germany enjoyed the support of the Allies from the United States and Western Europe. The country developed into a commercial and industrial force. East Germany lagged behind, however, until the two states were reunited following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then, East Germany underwent massive redevelopment efforts to catch up to the West, all funded by German taxpayers. These development efforts can lead to the discovery of unwanted historic artifacts.In some cases, bombs can be moved. In other instances, they have to be detonated because the ordinances are simply too deteriorated and fragile to risk moving them. In the case of the 550-pound bomb, the device was equipped with a chemical trigger instead of a mechanical one, making simple defusal much more risky.As Rose Eveleth writes on the Smithsonian the 550-pound bomb isn't even the largest recent discovery. Last year, German officials discovered a 1.8-ton explosive dropped by the British Royal Air Force during World War II near Koblenz. In that case, however, bomb removal experts defused the device simply by wrenching off the fuse.A bomb after deactivation in downtown Augsburg, Germany on Dec. 25. The nearly 2-ton bomb was dropped on Germany by Britain's Royal Air Force during World War II.Credit: Michaela Rehle/ReutersAn unexploded British bomb from World War II forced 54,000 people out of their homes in Germany on Christmas Day, the country's biggest such evacuation since the end of hostilities.The huge operation on Sunday in the southern city of Augsburg took 11 hours, involved 900 police officers and it ended successfully around 1800 GMT, local authorities announced.The 1.8-ton explosive was found on Tuesday during work at a construction site in the Bavarian city, but authorities waited until Sunday to coordinate the logistics necessary to make it safe.More than 70 years after the end of the war, unexploded bombs are regularly found buried on German land, legacies of the intense bombing campaigns by the Allied forces against Nazi Germany.Augsburg, the third-largest city in Bavaria, was targeted several times during the war.A 1,500-meter exclusion zone was created for the operation in case the bomb exploded while engineers were trying to deactivate it and sandbags were set up all around.Two experts defused the explosive, which was described as a "mega bomb" according to police spokesman Manfred Gottschalk cited by DPA news agency.Police checked house by house to ensure they were clear of residents before giving the go ahead.The effort to defuse the bomb only started around 1400 GMT due to a larger than expected number of bedridden or disabled people that had to be removed from the area, said Augsburg mayor Kurt Gribl.About 100 buses and trams were deployed for the evacuation.He had earlier urged "everyone concerned to leave the area, if possible by themselves," in a video message posted on the city's Twitter account.Gribi also called for "each person to verify that their relatives, parents and friends have found places to stay outside the (security) zone... Look out for one another."All clear givenBut pictures later showed the bomb disposal team calmly standing around the cylinder shaped bomb, around two metres long, smiling after their task had ended.Citizens were then given the all clear to return to their homes.Emergency shelters had been set up in schools and gymnasiums to handle those displaced, especially the elderly who had been unable to find accommodation at relatives or friends.Ambulances were called in to transport the infirm to a safe location.Admittedly this was an unusual Christmas day in Augsburg, a city spokesman told TV channel n24, adding that hopefully people would voluntarily leave their homes given the expected "force of the explosion" that could occur during the defusing of the bomb.Bombs are often found during digging work at construction sites.German authorities estimate there are 3,000 sunken bombs in the Berlin area alone.The biggest previous evacuation caused by the dismantling of an unexploded bomb in Germany took place in December 2011 in Koblenz, in the west of the country.Some 45,000 people had to leave their homes on that occasion.Although these latest cases have made headlines, unexploded ordinances are discovered all the time, as the Atlantic's Alexander Abad-Santos notes In fact, some 5,500 bombs discovered in Germany are defused every year, an average of 15 per day. During World War II, the Allies dropped some 2 million tons (or 4 billion pounds) of explosives, with experts estimating that anywhere between 5 and 15 percent did not detonate.World War II Shipwrecks Pose Oil Spill ThreatGermany isn't the only European country dealing with unwanted reminders of a war that took place generations ago. In fact, officials at Amsterdam's Schipol airport, one of the biggest transportation hubs in Europe, had to close down part of the facility following the discovery of WWII US aerial ordnance.And in Poland, a 1.5-ton bomb brought Warsaw to a standstill, according to a Reuters report Unlike the other explosives, this bomb was of Nazi origin, rather than dropped by the Allies.Thankfully, given how much practice bomb defuse teams have had with removing unexploded ordinances dating back to WWII, no injuries or deaths have been reported of late, and property damage has been kept to a minimum.German Bomb disposal unit doing their work, just like another day baking bread.

Was the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 a good solution for gun control? If so, why did Congress not renew it?There isn’t a single researcher that in good faith has claimed the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban (AWB) had any measurable effects. It didn’t improve crime, it didn’t result in fewer fatalities, and it didn’t lessen mass shootings. Congress did not renew the ban because it was pointless and a politically costly move, functionally Democrats couldn’t renew it because they didn’t have the votes. Not only was the 1994 AWB a political disaster for Democrats, removing many from office the following term, but it also flung the AR-15 into its current popularity, making it the “gun of America” when it was a relatively unpopular novelty before the AWB. The popularity and widespread circulation of the AR-15 is due in large part to the AWB, trying to pass another AWB to try to control the “problem” the first created is a farce. Let’s make the case anyway and see how much of a problem these firearms really are in the US.The AWBThe 1994 Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) ended in 2004 and made the AR-15 the most popular single firearm design in the US. Not a single researcher argued the 1994 AWB actually had any positive impact on crime or violence, until Louis Klarevas in 2016,Until Klarevas came along, virtually all researchers had concluded that it was impossible to discern what, if any, positive effect the ban’s prohibition of rifles with “military-style features” had on crime or mass shooting incidents. This is why many gun-control advocacy groups, including Sandy Hook Promise, do not include a ban on their list of legislative priorities. The last ban was politically costly for Democrats and, as a ProPublica investigation reported in 2014, gun control experts said there was no evidence it saved lives.“Rampage Nation” has energized proponents of a new ban by making the spectacular claim that, contrary to the consensus, the original was responsible for a remarkable 37% decline in mass shooting fatalities.But there’s a serious flaw in Klarevas’ result: There are few actual “assault weapons” of any type in his dataset, either pre- or post-ban. Klarevas and his allies are taking an apparent drop in fatalities from what are mostly handgun shootings (again, pre-ban as well as post) and attributing this lowered body count to the 1994 legislation.I say “apparent” drop in fatalities because, as Klarevas admits in a footnote, if you use the most widely accepted threshold for categorizing a shooting as a “mass shooting” — four fatalities, as opposed to Klarevas’ higher threshold of six — the 1994 to 2004 drop in fatalities disappears entirely. Had Klarevas chosen a “mass shooting” threshold of five fatalities instead of six, then the dramatic pause he notes in mass shootings between 1994 to 1999 would disappear too.Op-Ed: The assault weapons ban didn't work. A new version won't, eitherSo the 1994 AWB did have an effect on mass shootings if you only count certain mass shootings, and it has to be a very specific criterion of six fatalities, any more or any less and it doesn’t work. There’s a term for such a “demanding methodology”: cherry-picked. That research also shows another fault, failing to make material differentiation, by implying all fatalities were due to the banned firearms when handguns were mixed in as well. This happens all over the place and this fallacy is the basis of most gun-control claims.So in reality, the 1994 AWB, the very thing being called to be renewed, had no positive impact at all.What About the World?No one can seriously argue the 1994 AWB actually did anything positive in terms of crime or violence, but what about other countries? Australia banned certain firearms in 1996 and is touted as the poster-child for gun control (confiscation). According to the narrative, gun crime and homicide should be greatly reduced in Australia and since Australia is an island nation with relatively few points of entry smuggling shouldn’t be a problem. That has not been the case,Charges for crimes involving firearms have increased dramatically across the island nation's localities in the past decade according to an analysis of government statistics conducted by The New Daily. It found that gun crimes have spiked dramatically in the Australian states of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania. In Victoria, pistol-related offenses doubled over the last decade. In New South Wales, they tripled. The other states saw smaller but still significant increases.Experts said that the country's 1996 ban on most semi-automatic firearms has actually driven criminals to those guns. "The ban on semi-automatics created demand by criminals for other types of guns," professor Philip Alpers of the University of Sydney told The New Daily. "The criminal’s gun of choice today is the semi-automatic pistol."Law enforcement said the rising gun crime was in relation to increased efforts to crack down on guns, especially those used in the drug trade."In recent years police have been more proactive in their targeting of illegal weapons, particularly in relation to known or suspected criminals," New South Wales Detective Superintendent Mick Plotecki told the paper. "We often find a link between firearms offences and mid-level drug crime."Regardless of the reasons for the jump in gun crime, the numbers reveal the true size of Australia's illegal gun market. "Taken together, the data suggests that despite our tough anti-gun laws, thousands of weapons are either being stolen or entering the country illegally," The New Daily said. "The fourfold rise in handgun-related charges in NSW in the past decade points to the existence of a big illegal market for concealable firearms that seems to have been underestimated in the past."Australia Sees Spike in Gun Crime Despite Outright Ban - Washington Free BeaconNotice the weapon of choice of the criminal is semi-automatic pistols, not semi-automatic rifles as are targeted in the US. There will be more on that below. What does the research say about the gun ban itself?University of Melbourne researchers Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi concluded their 2008 report on the matter with the statement, “There is little evidence to suggest that [the Australian mandatory gun-buyback program] had any significant effects on firearm homicides.”“Although gun buybacks appear to be a logical and sensible policy that helps to placate the public’s fears,” the report continued, “the evidence so far suggests that in the Australian context, the high expenditure incurred to fund the 1996 gun buyback has not translated into any tangible reductions in terms of firearm deaths.”A 2007 report, “Gun Laws and Sudden Death: Did the Australian Firearms Legislation of 1996 Make a Difference?” by Jeanine Baker and Samara McPhedran similarly concluded that the buyback program did not have a significant long-term effect on the Australian homicide rate.The Australian gun-homicide rate had already been quite low and had been steadily falling in the 15 years prior to the Port Arthur massacre. And while the mandatory buyback program did appear to reduce the rate of accidental firearm deaths, Baker and McPhedran found that “the gun buy-back and restrictive legislative changes had no influence on firearm homicide in Australia.”Australia’s 1996 Gun Confiscation Didn’t Work – And it Wouldn’t Work in America | National ReviewLots of taxpayer money out the door for no discernable impact. It doesn’t look like gun bans actually work, even on an island nation with first-class law enforcement.Future American Gun BanLet’s consider the proposed American gun ban that has been the hot-ticket item recently. This ban would target certain models of firearms, namely the AR-15, but others have suggested the AK-47 and all semi-automatic rifles. Criminals in Australia favor pistols, so is it different in the US? Not at all,In 2017 there were 7,032 homicides with pistols and 403 with rifles of all kinds. The rifles targeted for a ban are a subset (certain semi-automatic rifles) of a subset (semi-automatic rifles) of all rifles. That means the firearms targetted to be banned are responsible for less than 0.75% of all gun deaths. It’s only common sense that you can’t solve a problem by targeting less than 0.75% of it. So why aren’t handguns the target for a ban? They certainly were, and that was a primary focus of the Brady Campaign until the Supreme Court established handguns may not be banned and backed it up with data of the defensive utility of such firearms, which also led to the end of the Chicago and D.C. gun bans, a huge blow to gun control groups. With the Heller decision, another layer was added, firearms that are in popular use for legal purposes may not be banned, and the AR-15 happens to be the most popular single design in the US. The AR-15 has a misuse rate that can only be described as “non-zero”, meaning it is possible but about as close to zero as possible any given AR-15 will be misused (assuming all rifle homicides are from an AR-15 a rate around 0.00002).We must also consider the feasibility of such a ban. Simply put, a ban on AR-15s or semi-automatic rifles simply isn’t feasible, nor is it responsible. There are an estimated 15 million AR-15 rifles alone in circulation, although all this talk of “Hell Yes” has driven up sales recently and increasingly extreme rhetoric will most likely increase sales further. Just targeting AR-15 pattern rifles and pistols would cost billions of dollars, $7.5 billion if the insultingly low valuation of $500 per firearm was given, and that’s just the reparations (by law the government must give fair valuation for seized private property) there are also administrative costs, storage costs, destruction costs, and so on. That money would come from you through your taxes instead of going to law enforcement, suicide prevention programs, and community programs shown to reduce gun violence to actually enforce the laws and save lives. Then there is the issue of facilitating the program. That would take law enforcement away from their duty to enforce the law in order to collect firearms from lawful people and do all the administrative tasks. Gun “buy-back” programs in the past have been conducted in communities,“Experienced police officers will have a sense that [gun buybacks] are likely to be of marginal value,” says Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing. “I think that’s safe to say that the primary function of a gun buyback program is to do something symbolic.”Moreover, the firearms that cities do collect aren’t likely to be the types used in crime. “The main drawback to gun buyback programs is that they tend to get junk guns or guns that have been with a family for a long period of time,” says James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. “They’re not catching the nine-millimeter and forty-caliber semiautomatic handguns that are so prevalent in violent crime today.”The Problems with Gun Buyback ProgramsHere’s the opinion of an officer that ran gun buybacks,And yet for some reason, even though I’ve worked probably 50 of these damn programs, I have yet to see a felon walk in and say, “you know what? Lemme get a Walmart card for this .40 I stole from my boy.”Nine times out of 10, those selling us their guns are law-abiding citizens getting rid of broken or unused weapons.It’s entrepreneurship at its finest. So for that, I need to give some serious props to state leaders. While they failed at the whole “gun handover” thing, they sure succeeded at giving people a side hustle.A Missouri man sold his firearms made out of scrap metal and garbage to a gun buy-back program… and then used the money to buy a real gun.Man Sells Junk Guns To Buy-Back Program, Buys New Gun With CashThen there’s this case that really should be read in its entirety to get the full picture: Gun Buybacks Don’t Work (if you Believe in Math)This isn’t a new revelation, research from 2004 showed buybacks simply don’t work.The people most likely to commit crimes are also the people least likely to be turn in their weapons, research has found. And the highest-risk weapons are the least likely to be traded in at buybacks.“The theory underlying gun buyback programs is badly flawed,” a 2004 report by the National Research Council found. The study pointed out that replacement guns can be easily found for guns turned in for cash, and the ones that are turned in are often old or malfunctioning.Gun Buybacks Mostly a Waste of Time and Money, Experts SayThis is where the “mandatory” part comes into play. A “mandatory gun buyback”, which is not confiscation somehow, requires compliance, right? Not exactly. The New York SAFE Act had two major gun-control provisions, limiting magazines to 7 rounds and registering all firearms defined as “assault weapons”. The first provision was struck down by a judge after cursory research showed most firearms did not have magazines available that were 7 rounds or less. How about the registration portion,That data shows massive noncompliance with the assault weapon registration requirement. Based on an estimate from the National Shooting Sports Federation, about 1 million firearms in New York State meet the law’s assault-weapon criteria, but just 44,000 have been registered. That’s a compliance rate of about 4 percent. Capanna said that the high rate of noncompliance with the law could only be interpreted as a large-scale civil disobedience, given the high level of interest and concern about the law on the part of gun owners.“It’s not that they aren’t aware of the law,” said Capanna. “The lack of registration is a massive act of civil disobedience by gun owners statewide.”Massive noncompliance with SAFE ActGiven it’s the law were all those found not in compliance fined, jailed, or otherwise punished? No, the provision was quietly dropped. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, the government doesn’t know who “they” are or where they are. The government is barred by Federal law from creating a gun registry, so law enforcement doesn’t know which doors to knock on. Second, due to Fifth Amendment protections, one cannot be prosecuted for not expressing they are not in compliance with a law, meaning you can’t have charges filed for lying or failing to report yourself for noncompliance with a law. If an officer were to ask you point-blank if you have an offending firearm you do not have to tell the truth and there is no way for them to know or any legal repercussion. If the goal is to collect more than 5% of these firearms door-to-door confiscation is required but without knowing which doors to knock on (or perform a no-knock entry at four in the morning) there is no way to complete the task within a century. This door-to-door confiscation would inevitably cause bloodshed; many people have firearms solely for self-defense in the event someone kicks down their door in the middle of the night, and unless all firearms are made illegal there are still plenty of options to defend oneself, even if the targeted firearm is hidden. Courts could very well side with the homeowner that they reasonably feared for their life and acted in self-defense. This raises another question; “Would law enforcement even conduct such actions?”. Without a doubt, police are happy to conduct voluntary gun buybacks, but at the end of the day, everyone wants to go home to their families, making door-to-door confiscation very unappealing. Some in law enforcement have refused to enforce lesser orders and some have even named their communities “gun sanctuary cities” with a promise to not enforce laws they see as Unconstitutional.While there is much talk now about a renewed ban history shows such a move would most likely damage the cause of gun control in the long run as shown by the results of the 1994 AWB and the attacks on handgun ownership on the Chicago and D.C. gun bans. It defies all logic to target firearms that are a tiny fraction of the problem and claim that is the solution. There are many other uses of billions of dollars that give us much more positive results. A nation-wide gun confiscation (or mandatory gun buyback if you want to make it sound flowery) is an infeasible, inefficient, and unenforceable measure that wouldn’t benefit us. Expanding that outside of a few models of firearms multiplies the difficulty of getting such a measure passed and executing it. More importantly, who are you going to trust? The people that research these topics for a living or politicians on their campaign? Gun bans work unless you look at the data.This doesn’t even touch on the overall topic that shows all of this talk of more gun control policies being required is deeply misguided. For more on the overall situation see: Fred Lead's answer to When are we going to say, "Enough with guns already"?