Right. Overall, I think more guns have very little effect on the crime rate. Perhaps less rapes and armed robberies, but more crimes of passion.
Less guns also do not seem to effect the crime rate here in America.
What seems to have a more profound impact on crime in America are, well, Americans. ‘Into the pot everyone. Now…melt, damn you!’.
Seems like the best place to look is Chicago and Illinois in general which has had a significant drop in crime and almost every gun purchase and ccw is new since guns were basically illegal before.
Are you kidding?!? Of course gun owners claim it will make people safer! Look anywhere at the national conversation, its 1 part rights, 1 part safety! Protection, self-defense, getting bad guys, that’s all part of it! On this board, maybe, possibly, I can believe that we discuss the rights aspect more, but don’t tell me in the back of most people’s lizard brains they’re nothing thinking “this makes me safe from all the bad guys!” Whenever a “good guy with a gun” saves someone in the news, people don’t say “its a good thing that guy’s got his rights”, no, they say “see? guns make people safer!” Its the same argument that national figures like those in the NRA and Congressman use when they say we should have guns in church, or in schools, or arm teachers, or whatever. Its almost never about the rights when you get out from this board, its almost always about the safety and being able to defend yourself. Remember how the GOP or gun rights people on Fox News said after the Aurora theater shooting? We had a guy with body armor shooting people in the dark and the first thing a lot of people said was “people should be armed”, as if shooting back at someone you don’t know where they are in the dark is a good idea. So no, its possibly about rights here, but a HUGE component of the national conversation is about defending yourself. Don’t try to frame this argument in another way because I’m not falling for it
rant over
Of course it does, because not having something that makes it easier to kill makes killing less likely. Not only do guns escalate violence against others, but suicides in this country affect a lot of people as well. There’s ample studies to show something like half the suicides are by firearm because its easy and quick, presumably. And we’ve seen in places like Australia which banned assault weapons (and yeah, I know gun rights people hate that term, but its become ubiquitous like “xerox” being a synonym for “copier”) and their mass shootings dropped to zero. And sure, you can point to places like Switzerland which have guns and low violence, but they are very strict about their guns, much moreso than the almost casual attitude we have here. And if less guns lead to more stabbings, I’d say good, because you’re more likely to survive a stabbing and its much harder for someone to do inflict it.
At least in America, we don’t have a gun free zone to test it, unless you want to claim the inside of a courthouse or the prisoner yard of a jail as gun free zones. Cities are not a good place to test it, first because there is no border patrol and second because guns are never seized from existing supplies.
Of course guns are useful, I never said they aren’t. They’re good for committing suicide with. Good for shooting someone you know. Good for accidentally having a child injure themselves or others. What you think they are good for, defending your life and family’s from intruders, is not what its typically used for. A good security system will probably prevent more of that than a gun. Calling the cops will probably be easier and more effective. Its your job to determine if the tiny chance that you could use it for someone beneficial to you outweighs the bigger liability that it will be useless or be used against you
Hrmm. My bad. I was thinking PPT purchases from strangers a la craigslist.
My numbers are a little old. I am a little shocked by the steep increase.
And McAulliffe championing gun rights.
It wasn’t willingly, that’s for sure. He was under significant pressure and reversed to stave it off. He ran on a gun control platform in part, and independent of anything else his administration has done, he’s been totally impotent on gun control. Took all of Bloomberg’s money and couldn’t get anything done - I think they had a falling out. Bloomberg actually ran ads against McAullife after he caved.
By the standards of this board, I am a gun rights guy and I vote for gun control liberals all the time. I haven’t voted for the more pro-gun candidate during a general election since Dole.
I know a LOT of gun owners who don’t even get close to Wayne LaPierre on gun rights. And most of the slippery slope arguments are undergirded by the fact that the elimination of gun in society is in fact the objective of many on the gun control side of the debate. They only concede that it is politically impossible but still think that a total gun ban is desirable and they would take it if they could. I know PLENTY of gun owners who would NOT want to remove all regulation of guns.
I think you might have misstated what you meant to say.
When you are trying to restrict rights, why does anyone have to show the extraordinary benefits of legal gun ownership? Why isn’t it enough to show the lack of significant benefit from restricting those rights?
Yes, gun owners say that owning a gun will make them safer, but that’s not what was asked. Gun owners generally dont claim that more guns overall will make everyone safer.
True, America has more tribalism than most other countries. Particularly among the poor and disenfranchised. And this leads to gangs and that leads to gang violence and that accounts for a pretty big chunk of our extraordinary murder rate.
I would think that loosening of gun laws would lead to more impulsive uses of guns, such as road rage, workplace anger, settling disagreements, use in family disputes, etc. When a person is so angry that they aren’t thinking straight, I would think they’re more likely to use a gun if it’s in easy reach. If anyone can go into any Walmart and buy whatever they want, it’s much more likely that guns will be readily available and be used rashly.
One thing I would like to see for tightening of laws is to make it harder for impulsive people to get guns. One proposal I read was that to get more powerful guns, you had to demonstrate more proficiency. For example, anyone 18 or older could get a 22 rifle. To get a 22 handgun, you had to have a certain marksmanship score. As the guns got more powerful, you’d have to have a higher score. This would tend to filter out those people who were impulsive since they would be less likely to go through all the training. It was one proposal which I thought could actually make a difference in one category of gun tragedies.
Another benefit I would see to more training is that I think it would make the gun owner be more responsible about the gun. So rather than treating it like a fun toy, they would use it in a more mature manner and have more respect for it and it’s use. This could also lead to the person not using it impulsively even when they do have it available.
As long as guns are readily available, even with more training requirements, true criminals will be able to get guns regardless of the laws. Someone who is a mugger, robber, burglar, hit man, gang member, etc, will be able to get a gun regardless of how hard it is to legally purchase guns.
That “more power” proposal is foolishness. Can you point to any particular impulse murders where you can say “Oh, if only he had been armed with just a .22, things would have been so much better!”
It’s possible that there’s a saturation effect. At some point, gun control becomes loose enough that virtually any criminal that wants to buy a gun is able to do so. Any loosening of gun control beyond that point has no further noticeable effect on crime.
It’s not to stop all gun crimes. It’s just to lessen the situation where someone is so mad that they reach for a nearby gun and shoot someone. The guy with no training would only have a 22 rifle, so it’s not very likely that he can just pull that out of his pocket in a moment of anger and use it.
An example might be road rage. A driver gets cut off and he pulls a gun out of his glove box and shoots the other driver. If he only had a rifle (or no gun at all), then he wouldn’t have killed anyone.
Our laws make this distinction between first and second degree murder. First degree is premeditated. More training may not lessen those because the person is more dedicated and will take the steps necessary to kill their victim. But second degree murders are what would likely go down with more training. The angry person would be less likely to have a gun handy and even if they did, they might be less likely to use it.
Yes, there are definitely some gun rights advocates that say that a well armed society is a polite society and that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. shit like that. But frankly the burden isn’t on them to justify the legal ownership of guns.
It really depends on who has the guns. Eliminating the legal ownership of guns does very little to eliminate the illegal ownership of guns. I don’t know why gun control folks keep glossing over that fact but it is a critical fact.
We have discussed at length in several forums how remarkably average our suicide rate is compared to other wealthy industrialized western countries. About half our suicides are committed with a gun. Are you saying that our suicide rate would come close to being cut in half over the long term if we made guns illegal? That would give us one of the lowest suicide rate in the developed world. Look at all the countries like Brazil, Honduras, Columbia, Philippines, etc that have a lot of guns and very low suicide rates (much lower than ours). Look aat the high suicide rates in countries with almost no guns like Japan and South Korea. It is almost as if there were other reliable ways of committing suicide (like hanging or jumping off a tall building) and that there may be other factors other than the availability of guns that affect suicide rates (like culture and religion).
And the mass shooting rate in new Zealand also dropped to zero over that time period. And their lax gun laws didn’t change a whit. http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/Mass_shootings.pdf
At this point I can’t believe anyone is still trying to defend the retardedness of a ban on a subset of a subset of firearms.
That assumes that the murders that would turn into stabbings are committed with guns that are legally owned in the first place. Considering that the majority of murders committed with a gun are committed by people who do not legally possess those guns, its hard to imagine that any law prohibiting guns is going to prevent those murders.
And its almost idiotic to assume that there would be a significant effect on the murder rate if you banned a subset of a subset of guns.
Even a nationwide ban won’t provide us with gun free zones the way you are describing it. Criminals simply won’t comply with a nationwide gun ban any more than they comply with a ban on guns within the city limits of Chicago. It almost sounds like you acknowledge the futility (if not the counterproductivity) of local gun bans.
It is up to each of us to determine if the benefit is really as tiny as you say and if the liability is as big as you say. For some people yes, for others no. There is a reason why households with children in gated communities with private security patrols tend to have lower rates of gun ownership than households without children in poor violence ridden neighborhoods.
You’re fine, I wasn’t debating you.
I really don’t think its as many as gun rights people claim. There’s Feinstein. Possibly a few others. Me, but I have no power. Who are these powerful gun-banning boogeyman that keeps otherwise liberal leaning voters away from Democrats because they fear a total ban? I fear some of the more restrictive censorship that Clinton and before her, Gore has supported. But they’re not realistic and censorship isn’t in my top 10 issues. It seems like for many people, based on how passionate they argue, have guns as their first or second most important issue when you’re more likely to be impacted by banking policy and health care than anything to do with guns. Put it this way: do you think there is a sizeable number of gun rights people who didn’t vote for Obama and has Obama ever tried to ban guns?
That is a decent topic for another debate. There’s no reason to try and shoehorn in that conversation to every topic about guns. We can talk about specific aspect of guns without dragging in everything from the history of guns to the desire of English monarch to disarm their colonies. I believe that asking that when we’re specifically debating things like safety is a non-sequitor. It gets us off the topic of safety. If I were more conspiracy minded, I’d point out that its a tactic gun rights people use to try to derail gun debates. It would be nice if you kept that tangent to its own topic
I’m not sure how many of these impulsive road rage murders occur every year.
This is probably true and I certainly don’t have a personal problem with requiring at least some training but the constitution might disagree with us.
I just watched a documentary on where illegal guns come from and a non-zero number of them are smuggled into the country to prevent any tracing. This documentary was about guns from the phillipines.
At this point the saturation point probably going to be there for a few generations even if we banned all further guns sales in this country and told everyone to turn in their guns for the bluebook value.
When I asked for examples, I meant some shootings that actually happened where your proposed changes would have made a positive difference.
Obama has pushed a number of gun control measures: Live Updates: What the President is Doing to Keep Guns Out of the Wrong Hands | whitehouse.gov. Some of those include a ban on certain types of firearms (“assault weapons”), common rifle ammunition (M855), banning social security recipients with representative payees from buying guns, etc.
[quote=“YogSothoth, post:55, topic:753127”]
There is really no way to confirm that you aren’t Barack Obama. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the both of you in one room.
Bloomberg?
Most of the Kennedies?
O Malley,
And even if they don’t advocate a complete ban now, their stated positions will shift if it becomes politically possible.
I agree that there are a lot of single issue gun voters who just stay home and yell “a pox on both their houses” unless guns are at stake.
I think there is a shit ton of gun rights people who didn’t vote for Obama. And I think there is a shit ton of gun rights people who DID vote for Obama.
Obama supported the assault weapons ban before it became clear how retarded it was.
I thought I was responding to something you said.