I’m not expert on the country, only what I’ve read in newspapers while there and from the outside. The only weapons I witnessed were carried by police and licensed guards, but newspapers regularly reported gun crimes. From a Philippine government website:

http://www.pctc.gov.ph/laws/basicFA.htm

From what I’ve read there is some gun control, but there are also a lot of armed criminals. And there is supposedly a large industry of “homemade” or zip guns. And given rampant corruption in the Philippine government (and probably military and police as well) there are likely “legal” guns finding their way into the hands of criminals or islamic extremists, much the same way US guns are ending up in the hands of Mexican gangs. Here’s one recent news item, and one from 2010:

http://manilastandardtoday.com/2012/09/11/us-austria-probing-gun-shipment-to-ph/

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-05-09/world/philippines.elections.violence_1_maguindanao-ampatuan-family-high-powered-firearms?_s=PM:WORLD

There are also many news stories of kidnappings and murders in the Philippines, many involving guns.

I hate it when clueless Americans talk about “socialism”. Socialism = communism, as you might get the clue from the former USSR, “Union der Sozialistischen Sovietrepubliken”. Although what they tried had nothing to do with either, it was a party capitalism, where the party elite dictated the rules.

I was a Marxist/Leninist at one time in the distant parts with some study of Marx and Engels as well as Lenins and Mao’s work., and living close to the “socialist workers paradise” that was the former GDR.
So the conflation of Social Democracy or Social Market economy (as in Germany) with Socialism is nothing short of infuriating

At maximum Israel is a “social democratic country, a capitalism with some restrictions on exploitation and with a social safety network. That is all.
And actually – that social democracy is turning into a social nightmare:

http://www.acri.org.il/en/2012/12/16/acri-situation-report-2012/

“Throughout the country, public housing – the issue that was at the heart of the social protest of summer 2011 – has seen no improvement. On the contrary: the government opposed the promotion of affordable housing legislation while continuing to systematically eviscerate the current pool of public housing units. Likewise, the fundamental right to water was significantly harmed when rates were allowed to rise sharply without any mechanism in place to protect people with limited means and elderly or disabled people.

In the West Bank, the right to shelter and water is even more tenuous. The Israeli military regularly issued and executed demolition orders for homes and humanitarian structures such as cisterns throughout Area C. These efforts, coupled with proposed legislation and the government-commissioned Levy Report (which claimed that the West Bank is not an occupied territory), indicate a creeping de facto annexation of Area C, in which Palestinian and Jewish residents are subject to two different legal systems.”

Wait, are guns legal there or no?

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/philippines

http://humansecurityconf.polsci.chula.ac.th/Documents/Presentations/Jasmin.pdf

I was on vacation there a few years ago and read a news item in a paper. Two police officers had an argument and pulled guns on each other inside their police station. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that happen in the US; there are already many incidents of confrontrations between cops (usually different deparments or jurisdictions).

Yeah, I meant to address that with the little parenthetical about exemptions, but point taken.

Interesting ad campaign. 😛

There are a couple of funny consequences of the universal draft/armed state though. Like how carrying around an assault rifle about the least suspicious thing you can do. Or an ad campaign to get former soldiers to return military equipment that included a video of a man going through a bag check, and the security guard pulls out a rocket launcher from his bag and basically says “you know, you really shouldn’t have taken this with you.”

Yeah, I’m not arguing that they have nothing in common, and I agree that they have that particular aspect in common. But that commonality has nothing to do with gun violence or gun control.

That’s a point that I think is often missed for a lot of various arguments, not just gun-control: some things are harder to scale up than others, and US is a big country compared to Israel, and also European countries that are often used as comparisons for healthcare, economy, education, etc…