The most extensive mass murders have occured in nations with very stringent gun control and regulation:
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: 13,000,000
National Socialist Germany: 12,000,000
Peoples Republic of China: 2,000,000 (by most estimates)
Cambodia: 1,700,000
North Korea: (unknown with estimates as high as 1,500,000)
The only incident I can find is this:
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2002/0131/2805352609HMPISTOL.html
Apparantly children who aren’t terrorists do have access to illegal guns in Ireland. Yes, air pistols, but still illegal guns, according to the article.
Is an air pistol something that has the potential to cause widespread deaths and mayhem? Nope. But neither is a starting pistol, and yet in Leeds they went absolutely apeshit when a physics teacher brought one in to show students for an experiement. According to that article, the students needed “counseling” after witnessing the teacher just holding the starter pistol, whilst trying to explain that it was for an experiement on the speed of sound.
Curious how they don’t need “counseling” after playing untold days of violent video games, sitting through hundreds of murders in the cinema, and seeing atrocities committed every single day on TV.
Or, maybe, they do need it…
Maybe. Everytime I dip my toes into one of these gun threads, I find some um, surprising or exagerated claims made by gun control opponents. Claims which (in the past) have not survived my 15 minutes of scrutiny.
Not wanting to make a larger project out of it, I make my post then basically say the hell with it. An example is on the previous page.
Disclaimer: I’m not making any evaluation here about which side makes the greater share of dubious claims. Again, I limit my exposure to these sorts of threads.
Finally: With all due respect, Anthracite, using the phrase “lies” raises eyebrows. That implies that claims are being made that are self-consciously devoid of a factual basis (as opposed to say “misused, blatently misleading statisticis” which implies something else). “Lies” is a very strong claim which promotes skepticism in the reader. (Hm, how about “partial, blatently incomplete analysis”.)
“Ignore the intangibles”. - Interesting point. Those intangibles can be difficult to weigh. But, alas, we haven’t yet done a particularly good job with the measurable elements.
Examples? Your supposed ‘15 minute’ debunking of my cite of the ICVS failed miserably (I didn’t notice it until now because of the second page popping up) - I cited the 2000 study, not one of the older ones (which is especially relevant since US violent crime has been decreasing for years while Commonwealth and European rates have been rising over the same time) which you used for your debunking. This seems typical of hoplophobes; I will make a specific claim, and they will jump all over themselves to tear into some strawman. Just a hint: “violent crime rate” and “murder” are not synonymous, and the 2000 version of a study is not the same as an older version. It’s especially noteworhy that the statistics you’re using to ‘refute’ my claim come from before the big UK/Aus gun bans.
It’s pretty clear that the gun-control side makes the most dubious claims, we’re constantly hearing about ‘assault rifles’, ‘7 times more likely to be injured’, ‘1 million kids per year’, and all kinds of other nonsense from the hoplophobes. Meanwhile, the hoplophobes neglect to actually refute claims from gun-rights advocates, doing things like attempting to ‘refute’ claims by ignoring the actual claim (like you did).
Some outright lies from this thread:
Certainly, this event shows that there is a need not only for gun control legislation (it doesn’t show any such thing, and casually assuming so is just absurd)
Charleton Heston: “If only those 17 other people had been packing heat that day…” (While the quote was obviously not intended to be taken as a real quote, I challenge the poster of it to find an incident of Charleton Heston (or the NRA in general) asserting that school children should carry concealed firearms)
Perhaps because knives serve many, many purposes outside of violence, which guns simply do not? What uses do you find for a handgun as a tool?
Short story: The US is more dangerous.
Oh, Quixotic, the CNN page you kept using is OBVIOUSLY incomplete, see (also on CNN’s site) http://www.cnn.com/1999/WORLD/europe/12/07/dutch.shooting.03/ which isn’t on the ‘complete’ list you posted. The CNN cite also has a glaring inaccuracy, calling the Columbine shooting “the worst incident of school violence in U.S. history”, which ignores the 1927 incident in which a farmer in Bath, Michigan set off a bomb in a local school killing 43. Of course, it doesn’t involve guns, so I can see why it might not be useful to you…
Why has there never been a school shooting in Vermont? They have the least restrictive gun laws in the United States.
How does Ireland manage that? The UK and Australia haven’t, and I’m not feeling energetic enough to look for information on how hard it is to acquire an illegal gun in your country. Given the constant mess in Ulster, I’d guess that it’s far from impossible.
Riboflavin: Could you get me a link to those 2000 numbers again? Better yet, how about giving me some sort of breakdown?
More generally, as Europe has had stricter gun control than the US for many years, I would think that a 1995, 1991, 1987 comparison would be relevant.
I fail to see how a brief analysis of your study (albeit in earlier years) is a straw man. Seems to me that the original claim was that the US had lower crime and lower violent crime.
Finally, I know that “violent crime” and “murder” are not the same. Furthermore, it would appear that the international study excludes murders, as it is based on survey data and does not appear to report “murder in the family” (at least on the table I looked at). But that’s a guess.
But now I see that you say the US is more dangerous. Terrific. I agree.
Ribo"The ‘crime vicitm’ number MaxTorque referred to is, in fact, the number of violent crime victims. " Retraction accepted. Strawman claim rejected.
“Lies”:
Flowbark, on the other hand, cautioned against such behavior on p. 1.
Calling this a “lie” is a bit of a stretch.*
I do recall some NRA types suggesting that armed teachers might have prevented the Colombine assault. But, hey, that’s just my recollection. Perhaps Ribo doesn’t remember that; surely an good analyst might mention that fact in passing when assessing the honesty of the Charleton Heston wisecrack.
*Disclaimer: The fast and loose use of this term is a bit of a chestnut for 'ol flowbark.
I see now that “Short story: The US is more dangerous” is a quote from yours truly on p. 1, bottom. Perhaps Ribo made a typo. Sorry about any confusion that occurred.
Oh, I get it, “The US is more dangerous”, is a lie. Huh. Really? And how does that claim square with the 1988-1995 data? As for the year 2000, I repeat my request for a link to the data.
I might note that I substantiated my claim that the US was more dangerous with data from the website of the International Crime Survey. If you are saying that my analysis or presentation of the data was dishonest, then perhaps a pit thread is in order. For the time being, I am assuming that you did not mean that.
Please note: if the table from that website presented the 2000 data, I would have included it in my analysis. Again, I made a quick 15 minute spot check on claims made here and found them problematic. And guess what? I didn’t even intend to show a debunking. Empirical data has this strange tendency to be mixed, a tendency ignored by ideologues everywhere.
But let’s accentuate the positive. On the whole I agreed with Anthracite’s methodological observations. Indeed, I extended them, methinks. And ExTank’s post (2041084, p.1) seemed fair-minded. (Although I didn’t look at the latter’s link).
I suspect (note: this is a guess) that the simple (univariate) stats favor gun control advocates.* And that most (not all) of the intangibles and unmeasurables favor gun control opponents. Which must make the debate frustrating for NRA defenders.
Nonetheless, overstatement leads me to suspect that faith is trumping evidence in this debate. But I must also aknowledge that it may be connected with the awkardness of some of the debate positions.
AND I saw a report that the kid got all adults, like in teachers and the sort and only one student. does not seem random to me. He was pissed at the system and went after the system, not just a terror spree.
Good gun control, he shot mostly the ones he wanted to. I bet he could have done better with a knife with a bit of planning. Nice and quite, could have probably got most that he wanted to and then used a gun on himself. Say, you think he got the ones he wanted and that is why …?
And it just piles up. I’ll try to address all that I can.
Johnny LA makes a valid criticism of the Bureau of Justice Statistics victim survey statistic (saying ~85k DGUs annually)–it’s likely that some crimes were prevented by firearms, hence no victims, hence they are precluded from the get-go. What does NOT constitute a valid criticism is something along the lines of, “More hoplophobic nonsense from the Brady Bunch!” It’s cute, but a little juvenile, yes? Give us something we can sink our teeth into.
Sparculees posts a link to a pro-Second Amendment Rights site (this one). Right off the bat, very first table, we see that the US has (1995 data) 6.0 firearm homicides, whereas second place is Canada at ten times less. One would think that this establish (almost) conclusively that more firearms available = more homicides from firearms. I offer, without proof, that Canadian culture and American culture are not vastly different… or at least Canadians are as close to Americans as you’re going to find. If you want to insert your favorite Western European country to minimize what you perceive to be the cultural differences, go ahead–the firearm homicide rate will be at least 10 times greater in the US. Incidentally, a great deal of the rest of the page is devoted to either: (a) explaining away the number by including suicides [personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass how you kill yourself, and so it seems irrelevant] or (b) comparing to countries where there are indisputable cultural differences.
Phoenix Dragon, in order to debate those numbers, you’ll have to provide some sort of insight as to their source. It’s been demonstrated time and time again that the numbers in this debate are severely skewed, depending on the goal. I (well, Sparculees) offered up a pro-Second Amendment site, and it seems to establish that, among roughly comparable countries [i.e., Western civilization], the US has by far the most murders at the end of the gun barrel. Certainly, a less biased site than the NRA or something else, IMO.
Riboflavin, you keep insisting that my cite isn’t complete, and therefore it’s invalid. You seem to keep missing where I add my disclaimers: (a) It’s only since 1979 and (b) it’s only lethal school-related violence. It doesn’t indicate that it’s complete, but it also doesn’t indicate that it’s incomplete. Do you have a list to trump mine? If so, then share it with the group! If not, then please debate the argument it supports rather than its completeness–to wit, there have been more school-related shootings in the U.S., since 1979, by far. [Incidentally, I just checked the cite, and they’ve severely trimmed it from when I originally posted it. I hope that’s not the cause of the confusion. You can see the breakdown by region I did on the first site].
Most of the rest of what you had to say to me ignores my cite because it’s “incomplete,” something you expect us to take as given. To reiterate, if that’s what your claiming, then by all means, back up your claim.
On the tangent of HS football, you say:
**
Well, I don’t think you meant to comment on any stance I might have on a right to suicide. I won’t go down that alley, as it’s a huge tangent. My point was that it’s not a fair comparison to compare the lethality of a mandatory activity (i.e., school attendance) and one that’s strictly voluntary (i.e., HS football).
Can you offer me a link to your Clinton DoJ “1.5 million DGUs annually” statistic?
As for non-violent uses for handguns, you somewhat curiously offer:
(1) Self-defense – Explain how this is a non-violent use for a gun?
(2) Sporting equipment – If this is distinct from your point 4, hunting, how exactly? Are you referring to items such as flare guns, starter’s pistols, and the like? If so, then that is such a ridiculously small subset of the millions of firearms owned in America, and I have nothing to say about it.
(3) Collector’s Item – You’ll forgive me if I’m not exactly wowed by this point. You don’t care about death toll, so long as you have something right purty to look at?
(4) Hunting – Well, I guess I learned something in this thread: people hunt with handguns. Interesting.
**
The relevance of my question is that I’m questioning where you’ve chosen to accept the limitations in weapons ownership. You ask me why I expect guns to be severely restricted, but not knives. I ask you why you expect chemical weapons to be severely restricted, but not guns. Furthermore, I again assert that ownership of chemical weapons is severely restricted. “A [pesticide a] small way away” is not a chemical weapon, nor is bleach, and I don’t believe that tear gas is particularly lethal.
With respect to how we can “prove” our point to the other, I asked for a decade of severe limits in gun production, and you asked for a decade where there are very few limits in gun ownership. Clearly, neither side is going to get that. So, I again contend that the only way I can demonstrate my point is to direct you to countries with are “similar” to the US, with one large difference being gun availability. Just to clarify, my thesis would succinctly be: the greater availability of guns in the US leads to more homicides in the US as compared to, say, Western Europe. This trend is poignantly illustrated in both statistically verifiable homicide rates as well as instances of school violence.
I’ll admit that I’m a little confused about which country has a greater rate of violent crime. MaxTorque and Riboflavin gave, without a citation, one side, and flowbark contends the opposite. Could someone (I’d do it, but YEESH this post itself has taken a long time) perhaps regroup and settle this discrepancy?
Anthracite, I don’t get the gist of most of what you’re saying. You seem to be calling for support for a ban on those who post “lies”? Especially when they’re part of “the same old SDMB GD circle-jerk”? FTR, this is my first gun control debate here at SDMB, and I have had a cite for every number I’ve posted. The merits of those numbers can be debated (and, you’ll see I started this post by willing to grant that some of them were not as strong as I had thought). I have not, however, posted any numbers without a reference, or “lied.” I have seen the pro-Second Amendment side post a number of statistics without a link. Again, I’m not sure what the hell you’re trying to say, so I think I’ll just defend myself and leave it at that.
Riboflavin, your first post on page 2 is nothing but “hoplophobe” basing, rhetoric, and a list of “lies” that includes a joke and me stating my opinion and then asking a question. I’d like to learn your trick of lying by asking a question.
Well, that’s enough for now, I guess.
Quix
Since it can be presumed that if there is any such thing as “American Culture” it would exist in, say, America, and since we know by inspection that different states have different levels of gun control, it would seem the issue could be laid factually to rest somewhat easily.
If such statistics existed. (And I believe someone has already broached this view in comparing Vermont and Massachusetts).
Quixotic: Part of the problem was that I could only get data from 1987 - 1995, whereas our friends were quoting 2000 data, unfortunately without a link, unless I missed something.
I found an interesting link:
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvinco.html
It shows that the US is pretty high up on the homicide list, among industrial countries. (Certain third world countries or regions experiencing terrorism are a different matter.)
BTW, the link also notes, "There are many, many factors, some much more prominent than gun availability that influence homicide rates and crime in general… Due to the many confounding factors that arise when attempting international comparisons, this approach would appear to hold little promise for determining the influence of gun levels (or handgun availability) on violence rates. "
flowbark: one of the recurring arguments in favor of gun control is the death rate from firearms. This is the combination of all accidents, suicides, homicides, undetermined, and legal interventions, as defined by the Center for Disease Control’s National Institute for Health Statistics annual report on the causes of death in the U.S.
Fair 'nuf. To this I have said before, and will condense again here:
1. Accidents: Between the above report and the National Safety Council, Death Due to Accidental Discharge of Firearms is WAAYYY down on the list of accidental causes of death. And an accident, any accident, is, by definition, preventable.
A child will drown, choke to death, burn to death, be poisoned or run over by a motor vehicle long before being shot by a firearm.
So where’s the emphasis, the media hype, the political hysteria to protect children from water, small fiddlybits that they can easily put in their mouth, matches and lighters, household cleaners, and automobiles speeding through residential areas?
Automobile accidents are by far the greater accidental killers than accidental firearms discharges, and yet someone decides one is acceptable, while the other is not.
If I’m a child standing at a school bus stop, does it really matter whether I’m killed by a speeding car jumping the sidewalk or a stray bullet from a hunter? Both accidental deaths are, again, eminently preventable.
But guns are bad and cars are good, yes?
No. Neither the car or the gun are either bad or good; both the hunter and the driver are culpable of negligent homicide, manslaughter, whatever, regardless of the instrumentality used during the commission of the crime.
And the little body in the chalk outline on the ground probably had no opinion one way or another, before being crushed or pierced to death, over which one is socially more preferable, and why; and it makes no real difference to the parents hoping the mortician can stitch their kid back together enough for an open-casket funeral.
Both are bad; both are needless, both are preventable; one happens quite a bit more often (say, at least two, maybe three orders of magnitude more often) than the other.
And yet one has inordinate (and even more often innacurate) media coverage, special interest activism and political hype.
Guess which one that is.
[Sarcasm Mode: ON]
(Imaginary Conversation between a reprter and Sarah Brady)
Reporter: “Mrs. Brady, a child was killed in your neighborhood today. She was run over after getting off of a school bus by a drunk driver who failed to stop for the school bus.”
Brady: “What a shame. But these things happen, you know.”
Reporter: “And another was beaten to death by her abusive parents.”
Brady: “Yes, such a tragedy.”
Reporter: “A third child also drowned in your neighbor’s pool.”
Brady: “Oh dear.”
Reporter: “A fourth died after drinking DRANO ™ she found under the kitchen sink, in spite of child-proof caps.”
Brady: “How sad.”
Reporter: “A fifth burned to death playing with his parent’s cigarette lighter.”
Brady: “Poor child.”
Reporter: “And lastly, one died after accidentally shooting herself playing with her father’s handgun.”
Brady: “STOP THE PRESSES! Get me the President on the phone. Call CNN, I’m holding a press conference. Get our lawyers going, I’m suing the gun manufacturers, the gun distributors, and the gun dealer. Get Chuck [Schumer] and Diane [Feinstein] on the phone, I want a Mandatory Storage and a Mandatory Trigger Lock and a Mandatory Smart Gun bill before Congress tomorrow morning. Call Susan [Sarandon] and Rosie [get real] and line up a speaking engagement for both, I’m sure they’ll freely donate their time to my cause.”
[Sarcasm Mode: OFF]
2. Suicide: About 60% of the firearm fatalities in the USA in any given year are suicides. The International Journal of Epidemiology published a report of a study attempting to establish a causal link between firearm ownership and suicide rates around the world.
The study found quite the opposite. Japan, with near-zero ownership of firearms, had the almost the same per-100,000 rate as the USA (Japan’s was just a tad higher) and one of the Nordic countries (I forget which one off of the top of my head), with the same near-zero rate of firearm ownership, had a per-100,000 rate 39% higher than the USA’s!
Bottom line: there is no causal relationship between firearm ownership and suicide rates. It suggests that a person willing to kill themselves will find a way to do so, regardless of the instrumentality available to them.
Hence: Gun Control proponents are potentially using artificially inflated statistics to make an argument for more gun control in the face of evidence that 60% of the people they claim to be trying to save may not be affected one-way-or-the-other by increased gun control.
3. Homicides: here’s the real nitty-gritty. The raison d’etre for the gun control movement. Yet all is not as it appears. A quick look at the NCHS breakdown by age and race shows something remarkable. Black Males between the ages of 17 and 24 (IIRC) alone commit 3 times to total national rate of all firearms deaths; 6 1/2 times after suicides are removed!
The Dept. of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that this activity is largely crime/gang related.
This suggests underlying social causes of firearm violence; if proliferation of guns affected all of society equally, then rates would be similar across-the-board. Instead, they are concentrated in a tiny demographic.
My question: why should the majority of US society be forced to suffer further restrictions, and possibly give up a Constitutionally guaranteed right, because of the misdeeds of a few?
Gun control proponents would have you believe we live in a zero-control state vis-a-vis firearm availability. We haven’t been since 1934, with further restrictions coming even more quickly since then.
So their attacks upon anyone who opposes them, labeling us as “unreasonable,” and suggesting we’re sexually-challenged, mentally-ill types who have substituted firearms for our missing penises, or who otherwise worship firearms as if they were some deity because of our study of history, our admiration for well-crafted machinery, our reverence for our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the Founding Fathers for the wisdom and intelligence they dislayed in crafting those documents (in spite of whatever human faults thay almost certainly had; who doesn’t?) are especially vicious, malignant, and above all, deceitful.
4. Undetermined: why would this be included? It’s non-data, noise. Those may just as easily have been self-defense shootings, or even suicides that for one reason or another made the investigating law enforcement agency suspicious.
Since this is a relatively small percentage of firearms fatalities, though, it’s a relative non-issue. I object to it because it simply doesn’t belong, and if they can include this category, then what other specious categories may be included?
Sure, it’s a slippery-slope argument, but I’ve watched the proliferation of junk science over the last decade, so I believe it to be justified.
5. Legal Intervention: this is defined as the lawful discharge of a firearm by a law enforcement official resulting in death of the victim.
While this is the willfull taking of a life, it is doing so in upholding the laws of society. It is not a murder (usually; our police system investigates such shootings to make certain).
So why do gun control proponents include these numbers in their “X people die per-day from guns” statistics?
I have seen the numbers, flowbark. If anyone’s house-of-cards comes a-tumbling down with the merest scrutiny, it’s invariably been the pro-control’s.
Eris: Detailed crime statistics by state and even county have been constructed (with some effort).
Unfortunately, any local regime of gun control can be circumvented by buying the guns in, say, Virginia and smuggling them into (say) NYC. As long as state borders are oodles more porous than national ones, any meaningful gun control would have to be done at a national level.
There has been some work on concealed weapons laws, though. The evidence is mixed. One researcher has found that allowing concealed weapons lowers crime. Alas, (IIRC) his results collapse when more stringent statistical tests are used. So we are left with some evidence that within a plentiful gun regime, allowing citizens to pack concealed heat may save lives. I don’t know what sort of magnitudes we’re talking about though.
Appropos nothing, Eris’ approach should be valid, however, in a death penalty context, IMHO.
quix: “Sporting” includes target shooting, with everything from custom-built single shot pistols as used in certain Olympic events to more run-of-the-mill, over-the-counter firearms. It also includes trap and clay shooting events and activities, as well.
I use non-custom firearms (pistols, rifles and shotguns) in my target shooting on the assumption that hitting the 10 ring consistently with your standard firearm is much more difficult than with an expensive, custom-built target firearm. And I am hardly alone, as you can see at the International Practical Shooting Confederation and the International Defensive Pistol Association. Also quite popular (and growing ever more so) is the Single Action Shooting Society, of which I am proudly a participating member.
And yes: Handgun Hunting is quite popular, also growing ever more so. Look at the proliferation of large caliber handguns such as the .44 Magnum, the .454 Casull, and the new .480 Ruger.
Even if a hunter doesn’t use the handgun as the primary hunting weapon, it is often used to administer the mercy shot on mortally stricken animals from close range.
You seem to be displaying a conceit prevalent in a non-participant of a particular hobby or activity: that few people participate and enjoy those hobbies and events. It’s like, perhaps, if you were into symphony music, or NASCAR. I can’t tell you who has the best symphony orchestra, who’s the first-chair cello for a particular orchestra, who’s the best symphony condusctor, which symphony hall is the best, what Jeff Gordon’s car number is, what’s the fastest qualifying time on a particular track, etc.
But rest assured, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, who will happily and willingly tell you the answers to these questions. Because they dig symphony music or NASCAR.
It’s their thing, whether I am into it or not.
Sporting events with firearms are legal, sanctioned events, just as the daily automobile commute and racing are to cars, and listening to symphony music is to music lovers.
We don’t ban cars and music because people speed or drive without insurance, or because Rappers brag about drug deals, rapes and homicides, and urge others to do so to be hip and cool in the name of “artistic integrity” and “Freedom of Speech.”
Because the vast majority of car owners don’t recklessly speed, and the vast majority of Rap Music listeners don’t commit drug deals, rapes or homicides.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by quixotic78 *
So did it have extra, incorrect information before, or did the ‘trim’ cut off actual information? That alone makes it pretty clear that it’s a completely worthless cite for your purposes. And fine, I cite the CNN article that kicked this off to show that the only school shooting ever has been in Germany. After all, it doesn’t say that it is either a complete list or an incomplete list!
You’re the one who made the claim that there were more school shootings in Europe than in the US, so the burden of proof is on you. When the site that you’re citing as a complete list to back up your core argument is adding and removing entries even as we speak, it’s pretty clear that it is not a good cite.
Just remember that it’s a ‘tangent’ if you get tempted to post numbers that include suicides later on.
Sure, look at the NRA or GOA sites listed in my previous message. If you’re going to quote Brady Bunch sites as sources, like the ‘gunlawsuits’ site, then I’m not going to bother going outside of pro-gun sites unless you can show them to be incomplete.
sigh for anyone who believes this nonsense, I explicitly said:
And I later mentioned self-defense only in response to the ‘gun as a tool’ question, not to the non-violent part, after clearly disagreeing with the requirement of ‘non-violence’.
Now my question for you - are you saying that self-defense is NOT a valid use of a gun?
Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick, I’m referring to shooting sports like Bullseye, Trap, IPSC, Skeet, Biathalon, Bowling Pin, SASS events, and a host of others. I mean, come on - Biathalon and Skeet are both Olympic sports, have you really never even heard of them?
What death toll? How many guns owned for collecting are used to kill anyone? If defining ‘collector’ is too hard, how many of the legally owned guns in this country have been used to murder someone?
I never cease to be amazed by the raw ignorance of hoplophobes and how they revel in it. Yes, people do indeed hunt with handguns, despite your sarcasm. Do you want me to cite some state laws regulating handgun hunting, or point you to pistol license forms that include hunting as a reason for owning a pistol, or did you really learn something there?
You were the one who started talking about ‘expect’-ing, not me.
If it’s just expecting, I’d ‘expect’ chemical weapons to be restricted because people like passing laws against Bad Things to make themselves feel better, but it’s kind of a silly and irrelevant question. If you’re talking about supporting, I don’t think there’s a good reason for the restrictions on them today (as evinced by the list of chemical and near-chemical weapons), and the laws restricting them tend to be loose enough to include just about anyone (‘materials for chemicals weapons manufacturing’ could include possessing a couple of household cleaners) and follow the familiar pattern of not being very good at stopping their use. It’s not something that I feel as strongly about as gun control laws, and isn’t really relevant to this debate, so that’s pretty much all I’m going to say on it.
Ammonia and bleach mixed together make chlorine gas, which was one of the big chemical weapons used in WW1 and has been used occasionally by armies since then. (I tried to avoid explicitly stating the two chemicals since the mods don’t like ‘how to make a chemical weapon’ directions, but this one is a common consumer warning and has been allowed on here before so hopefully this won’t bother them too much. Kids, don’t clean your toilet with bleach, then piss into it before you flush it).
Though your knee-jerk response to experiment by yoking people with more restrictions rather than permitting them more freedom is pretty telling.
Do you want me to go and dig up some of the newspaper stories and police reports on gun availability in the UK and Australia? Considering that pistols seem to be available on the street for the high end of (US) retail prices in Australia, and seem to be pretty easy to get in England, I’d be VERY interested in knowing about these countries with low gun availability. I’d also be interested in knowing how their passing of more restrictive laws has affected the murder rate.
Correlation does not equal causation. Washington DC has gun laws comprable with the Enlgish laws and was (haven’t checked lately) the murder capital of the US. Vermont has the least restrictive gun laws in the US, and one of (if not the) lowest murder rate. It looks like your thesis doesn’t really stand up.
I gave a citation, but I’m not suprised by your claim.
‘Bashing’ by simply listing observed behavior.
One can easily lie in a joke; just think about all of the ‘negros is lazy and criminal’, ‘mexicans is good at pickin’ lettuce’ and ‘gays screw anything that moves’ jokes, and ask yourself whether you would be willing to call such a joke a lie if it was directed at you and thrown into a debate. (For example, if someone tossed a joke about gay scoutmasters molesting kids into a debate on gays in the scouts, I think most people would be willing to call said joke a lie).
It’ much ado about fear also IMO. One way fear can be conquered is with knowledge and experience. Nothing will keep a person ignorant as surley as contempt prior to investigation.
Rolls Eyes ah yes, that’s why illegal guns are now so hard to come by in the UK and Aus and (apparently now) Germany, those stringent national laws. And you also realize that someone has to committ a felony to buy any handgun out of their state of residence, right? Been that way since 1968.
Are you talking about Kleck? I’d like to see the ‘more stringent statistical tests’ applied to his data. The only one I’m aware of involved cherry picking individual counties without rhyme or reason until enough counties with lowered crime were removed to show an increase.
I also don’t see why this is at all a suprising result; CCPs only allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons, they don’t prevent the arrest of a mugger or gang-banger.