Nah, there’ll be some (not most, but some) who’ll say “In my day, the right to bear arms meant you had a fuckin’ Right To Bear Arms!”
Spiny Norman, yes I wrongly used the term “other countries” when I should have said “some other countries”. Doing a search on Human Rights Records for various countries outlines prison conditions and levels of brutality. I in no way meant to suggest that Europe was included in “pro-torture”
zwald, yes, if some specific types of guns are banned, many people will switch to a type that is still legal.
(By the way, what happens when a formerly legal gun is banned as of a set date? How do people dispose of the suddenly illegal guns? Does the govt reimburse them, or are they just out whatever they spent on their newly-banned guns?)
But that’s not what I was talking about. By “a ban” I meant just that, a complete ban on the pvt ownership of guns. All guns. In a situation where pvt citizens are not allowed to own guns at all, I think that most current gun owners will disobey the law. If records exist re what guns they own, they may well turn those guns in – and then buy new guns on the black market ASAP.
And the popularity of gun ownership might go up; some people who’d never owned guns before might well also go out and buy black market guns, in the belief that no one has the right to tell them they can’t own guns.
well it’s funny you should ask this because i just got done (i hope) debating about this. in the case of california’s assault weapons ban, they gave gun owners a chance to register their pre-ban weapons so they could legally keep them after the ban went into effect. after a certain amount of time, they stopped allowing registration, presumably so no new assault weapons could be brought into the state and old ones could not be transferred. unfortunately, i believe some weapons were banned outright, without the registration option, so those owners were completely out of luck.
Zwaldd
slight hijack
Apparently you have conceded I was right.
Finally
Thanks.
If you cannot sell the weapon and cannot will it to your heirs, since they cannot register it,and they cannot own it since they don’t have permits for banned weapons your only option is to turn it in or render it inoperative. Confiscation.
so you’re saying that if you could re-register it then you would be able to transfer ownership? so you’re in favor of a continued registration period? now you’re confusing me. i thought you were against registration. i’ll tell you what, if you want to clarify, post in the old thread so we don’t totally hijack this one.
Quote Justwannano
Also you have said repeatedly that gun registration is the only way you can keep your gun. Because they would ban them and you would not get to keep them. Who the hell are they??And who the hell do they think they are??
If you folks want to see how zwaldd answers I invite you to go to the Why Guns thread.
TD replied to “me”: *“No, I can’t agree that the evidence is currently strong enough to support widespread liberalizing of gun laws as an experiment.”
32 of 50 states… with other states continually attempting to pass similar laws due the fact that it has worked in other states… and many of the states having had these laws in effect for over 10 years now, at what point is it no longer an experiment? *
It is an “experiment” until such time as we have conclusive evidence showing a definite causal relationship between lax CCW laws and reduced crime. Just because we have 32 states that have relaxed CCW laws and seen a subsequent drop in crime, that doesn’t mean that the one caused the other, especially in light of the fact that places that didn’t loosen CCW laws saw as much or more crime reduction. (For example, from 1996 to 1997, crime rates fell an average of 2.1% in most states with loose CCW laws—but they fell an average of 4.4% in most states with strict CCW laws. Now as I keep pointing out, crime rates are very complicated things, and I would definitely be wary of accepting this as reliable evidence that loose CCW laws encourage crime; but it certainly doesn’t indicate that they discourage crime.)
As I pointed out before, Lott’s book does not succeed in demonstrating such a causal relationship in any conclusive way. Even criminologist Gary Kleck, who is pretty pro-gun and seems to agree with most of what Lott says, has criticized his book for not adequately isolating the different factors that influence changes in crime rates. I agree that that’s a very difficult thing to do; but until we have reliable, comprehensive statistical studies that manage to do it, we cannot say that the evidence really shows that such policies “work”.
*No, but since they do take [car theft] as a personal loss, anti-car theft measures are continually being adopted. The goal is to reduce the amount of car theft. With guns, the goal is to reduce the amount of guns. *
Well, I would be happy to see the focus shifted to reducing gun theft and all other illegal access to guns, rather than further reducing the guns that non-criminals can own. But since guns are much smaller and more portable than cars, legal measures to reduce illegal access to them (e.g., mandatory use of gun safes, mandatory background checks on buyers, annual or biannual inspections to check that legitimately owned guns haven’t “gone missing”) would be much more invasive than anti-car-theft measures.
*“And I think there’s no question that the social costs associated with stolen guns are pretty considerable, certainly greater than those associated with stolen automobiles.”
When you show me some numbers for the social costs associated with stolen automobiles, I’ll accept that. Until then, I will meet you halfway, only because I cannot disprove your statement, even though I disagree and would lay money that the opposite is true. The only numbers I have is that it is estimated that 1.1 million cars are stolen annually. I’ll bet that not nearly that many guns are stolen.*
Well, the 1995 BJS report “Guns in Crime” said there were over 340,000 gun thefts in 1993. Given that many cases of firearm theft involve more than one gun, there might be close to half a million guns stolen per year. That’s only about a quarter to a half of the annual number of car thefts, but that doesn’t prove that the costs of car theft are worse. Lots of car theft incidents merely involve “joyriding”, and lots of others involve just selling the car for parts—not a good thing, but IMHO nowhere near as bad as shooting or even threatening to shoot somebody. You’re right that we can’t compare the costs conclusively until we have hard evidence about what really happens to most stolen guns, but considering the comparative harmlessness of what happens to very many stolen cars, I don’t think the money you want to bet on this is as safe as you may believe.
*“All it [i.e., criminal use of a particular type of gun after it’s banned] proves is that the ban didn’t eliminate their use in crime.”
Which is the point of the OP. Banning a certain gun does not take them out of the hands of criminals. *
But you’re not paying attention to my point, which was that the failure to eliminate criminal use doesn’t mean that the ban didn’t reduce criminal use. A significant reduction is a good thing, even if it’s not as good as total elimination. Now of course, that argument doesn’t constitute evidence that gun bans do significantly reduce criminal use of the banned guns, but neither have you shown that they don’t.
*“Nor does it prove that a ban on any other gun would have no effect on reducing its use in crime.”
So in light of the fact that its proven that banning a certain gun does not remove it from the criminal equation, we should continue to ban various certain firearms until a statistic pops up for proof that it does work, only because it might be used by a criminal? *
Same missed point. I do not consider that a gun ban is necessarily unsuccessful simply because it fails to completely eliminate criminal use of the gun, or what you call “removing it from the criminal equation.” If we refused to consider any policy successful unless it was absolutely 100% effective, there’d be no point in having annual car inspections or trying to teach kids to read.
*Cheap guns were among the list, but not a large part of that list. *
? Table 6 of the ATF report lists the top ten handguns among the traced crime guns in their data, and #2, #4, #7, #8, and #9 were all made by “Ring of Fire” manufacturers (Lorcin, Bryco, Raven, Davis) who do “Saturday night specials” and other cheap guns. I think that does count as “a large part of the list”, unless there’s some aspect of this I’m missing.
I cannot provide numbers, but based on personal experience, the criminals that USE a gun in a crime, as opposed to having a gun in a pocket, or under a car seat, or a bedroom closet when arrested (all of which are considered as “possession”, prefer the more expensive shotguns, fully automatic weapons, semi-automatics and revolvers (Smith and Wesson doesn not make cheap guns) over the “disposable” ones.
I don’t dispute your personal experience, but of course we need numbers if we’re going to be able to draw real conclusions. The numbers we have in this report bear you out that criminals do prefer Smith and Wesson guns (#1, #5, and #6 on the top ten handguns list), but they also indicate that criminals also like the cheap guns.
*"(I do agree with spooje that simply banning their sale within one city is not likely to have much effect, though.)"
Again, the point of the OP. Banning a certain gun only means that I, as a law abiding citizen, cannot have it, nothing more. *
That, I think, is too sweeping a conclusion. A sort of “cosmetic” ban on sales of a particular gun in only one city may be pretty useless, but if a ban is sufficiently widespread, stringent, and well-enforced (nobody’s allowed to manufacture them, nobody’s allowed to sell them, nobody’s allowed to buy them, nobody’s allowed to own them), then that gun’s availability is likely to be significantly reduced in practice. At least, a lot of police officers have said so, and I assume they have some knowledge about criminals and guns.
If they [I’m not exactly sure who “they” is here] were really that concerned with doing what was best for society, then they would focus on the problem, which is the criminal and why crime is a viable option without much consequence, rather than just putting on a dog and pony show for the voters.
I agree that the problem of crime is much more fundamental and much more serious than the problem of guns (although we probably differ in how the problem should be addressed, with me being much more on the reeducate-and-rehabilitate-and-eliminate-poverty side of the fence, as opposed to the lock-em-all-up side). But I can’t agree that there’s solid reason to believe that the crime problem isn’t exacerbated by the gun problem. Gary Kleck and others have shown that the link between the two is a lot less solid than the ban-ban-ban extremists would like to believe, but we are still a long way from being able to conclude that guns don’t worsen crime.
*The better information does exist, but the anti-s, rather than using this information and working WITH the pro-gun folks like the NRA, who have continually pushed for stronger crime bills and better enforcement of existing laws,[…] *
What I don’t understand is why the NRA, if it really wants better enforcement, isn’t pushing for increased funding for BATF—at least, I can’t find on their website any evidence that they are. If you want more enforcement, you need more enforcers.
Instead, it’s easier to invent numbers, use skewed studies and deliberately misinform people to reach a personal agenda.
There’s too much of that going on on both sides of the debate, not excepting the NRA.
*Again, each new restriction, is simply one more step towards a complete ban, which IS a re-writing of the constitution, something that our “leaders” are supposed to support. *
I hear a lot of that from gun advocates, but I’m kind of skeptical about the statement, at least in such an absolute form. I seriously don’t think there’s a large base of public or political support for banning basic hunting rifles, say, or high-quality revolvers. I know quite a few people you’d doubtless consider rabid anti-gun zealots, and I’ve never heard one of them assert that we just shouldn’t have any privately owned guns in this country at all.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Kimstu *
It is an “experiment” until such time as we have conclusive evidence showing a definite causal relationship between lax CCW laws and reduced crime.
So in the meantime, we should experiment with gun bans?
{i}As I pointed out before, Lott’s book does not succeed in demonstrating such a causal relationship in any conclusive way.*
Does it reduce total crime rates? Correct, the data is inconclusive. However, according to Lott in his final report:
Sorry, I’m an idiot and didn’t proofread, otherwise I would have caught the blown quote in the beginning.
Kimstu
Quote
Even criminologist Gary Kleck, who is pretty pro-gun and seems to agree with most of what Lott says, has criticized his book for not adequately isolating the different factors that influence changes in crime rates. I agree that that’s a very difficult thing to do; but until we have reliable, comprehensive statistical studies that manage to do it, we cannot say that the evidence really shows that such policies “work”.
Here is a site that gives a sort of bio on Gary Kleck
http://www.guncite.com/gcwhoGK.html
It in part tells how he ,once a gun control believer changed his mind.
Then if you access The Guncite you will find lots of very pertinent information on gun control issues.
TD: *So again, in light of any “real” evidence either way, the best course of action is to take away something that is mine, “just in case”? *
Well, we have to keep trying to address the problem in whatever ways we can, and IMHO that will doubtless include some bans as well as tougher enforcement and self-protection. Remember also that gun technology and commerce aren’t frozen in one particular configuration, either; manufacturers keep developing new ways of making and selling firearms, and many legislators (e.g., in those 32 states you refer to) are also working to relax gun control. So it’s not really as though the only development in gun ownership is “something being taken away from you.” U.S. gun owners have a great deal of liberty when it comes to firearms, particularly compared to almost all the other countries of the world. I’m not objecting to states liberalizing CCW laws if they want to, nor am I objecting to states and communities banning certain guns if they want to. All I ask is that we not overstate what the evidence really shows.
*Of that 29%, 13.8% of the most preferred guns are the cheap guns. What this means is, according to this report, the “cheap guns” which are in the most preferred list, (that you support the banning of to help reduce crime) account for a total of 3.8% of all guns traced to crime, and again, this includes possessed guns that were not used in a crime. 3.8% is not what I would call a preference among criminals and hardly a menace to society. *
But don’t forget that lots of the other 71% of traced crime guns, the ones that aren’t in the 29% comprising the top ten, are also cheap guns. Your 3.8% figure is derived from considering only the top ten and assuming that there are no cheap guns farther down the list, which is not true.
Also, though I think that a ban on “Saturday night specials” is not unreasonable and might reduce crime, it seems to me that a better reason for the ban is simple safety considerations. According to the OC Register report I linked to, most “Ring of Fire” guns are pretty crummy and don’t meet reasonable safety standards for things like not blowing up in the user’s hands and so forth. If we require cars to meet very stringent safety requirements, I don’t see why we shouldn’t do so for guns.
*“if a ban is sufficiently widespread, stringent, and well-enforced (nobody’s allowed to manufacture them, nobody’s allowed to sell them, nobody’s allowed to buy them, nobody’s allowed to own them), then that gun’s availability is likely to be significantly reduced in practice.”
Which is precisely the end goal of anti-gun groups, to the total number. *
I don’t quite know what you mean by that sentence, but now you seem to be agreeing that gun bans can reduce gun availability in general. I don’t see how you can argue that a ban that significantly reduces gun access for the law-abiding can never have any significant effect on gun access for criminals, and if you do so argue, I’d like to see some hard evidence.
*The criminals, rather than taking a chance on going to a Federal jail, moved away to neighborhoods that believed that it’s better to give probation and teach them that murder, rape and robbery is “just plumb wrong” while blaming their now higher crime rates on guns. *
We are obviously not going to agree on most issues about the criminal justice system, so I’m not going to continue arguing about it. All I can say is that if an anti-gun-control approach to reducing crime requires one to support the punitive harshness, and the contempt for community/prevention/rehabilitation measures, that you seem to advocate, then it’s not likely to succeed in getting my vote.
*This is a direct quote from Sarah Brady, as reported by The National Educator, January 1994. She has never rebutted it, nor has she ever asked for an extraction. Believe me, I wish this was not true, but it is. From the mouth of the founder and chair of the leading anti-gun group in the country, which all other anti-gun people flock to for their statistics and their “good intentions”, and which Bill Clinton and Dianne Fienstein hold in such high regard when passing each additional gun ban. You make the call. *
THAT is why us pro-gun folks get a little on the defensive side immediately.
snort Well, you pro-gun folks are sometimes a little too credulous, maybe. You do know that the National Educator is a hyperlibertarian antigovernment publication, right? (E.g., its stated mission is to “help you to understand and appreciate a host of government regulations and policies designed to intrude into our lives”, and a downloadable sample front page from 1997 contains lead articles that are uniformly anti-liberal and antigovernment.) Do you really think that the National Educator (a “kitchen-table” paper put out until 1996 by a couple of retired schoolteachers) would be likely to obtain access to actual comments made by Sarah Brady to Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (which is what the NE claimed that quote to be) that no more reputable journal has (AFAIK) ever repeated or confirmed? (And by the way, an actual scan of the relevant page of that NE issue, shown here, doesn’t even include the first two sentences of your version of the quote, which seem to have been stuck in by a later source.)
Moreover, do you really think that the wife of a former high official in the Reagan Administration advocates “creating a Socialist America”, or that if she did, she would choose to say so publicly, knowing that it would shock and repel the vast majority of the people on both sides of the gun debate? Do you think that perhaps Baker’s (and Metzenbaum’s) refraining from commenting on this story might have been due not to its truth, but to the fact that they considered it too silly for anyone but “wacky gun nuts” to believe and therefore felt it unnecessary to draw more attention to it by repudiating it officially? Even the folks in the discussion group at freerepublic.com (where I got the above link) conceded that this was just a hoax!
Mindful that this is the Straight Dope, I really want to be openminded and honest with the evidence in this debate. But if this is a representative sample of the bias and credulity on the other side, then I’m very discouraged about the potential for useful discussion on this issue, and I think I can find more worthwhile arguments elsewhere.
Missed another point, sorry. If you feel I am a poor debater for taking a line from what you feel is not a credible area, I will concede that. But she did say say that she and HCI felt that the only course of action was to “get rid of all guns” on the Phil Donahue show, in 93 or 94, I can’t recall which year exactly. In the early part of her “crusade” with HCI, she made many statements like that. Only after she and HCI began to lose a great deal of political backing, for obvious reasons (a great number of voters are gun owners) she began to rethink and rephrase much better. But even though she has changed her tactics after that period, I will never believe that her end goal has changed. Again, your opinion may be different.
TD: Fair nuf. I didn’t mean to write you off, but that particular Sarah Brady “quote” seemed to me pretty far into “wacky gun nut” territory. I won’t take it as typical.
*First, I would ask you to define both [basic hunting rifles and revolvers]. Many rifles that were designed and created for hunting purposes, and marketed to hunters, are now on the ban list. More are being added due to cosmetic reasons only. The Ruger mini-14 is simply one example. A rifle made for varmint hunting that is now banned not because it is used in crimes, but because it looks similar to some “assault” weapons… Full length hunting shotguns have been banned for the sole reason of having been manufactured with a pistol grip, because a pistol grip is defined as a "part of the makeup of an “assault” weapon.
So we are banning certain guns not because they are used by criminals, or are easily concealable, or are of low quality, but because they look scary.*
Well, I am not familiar with the rationales for such bans advocated by organizations like HCI, nor, to be honest, do I know jack sh*t about the advantages and disadvantages of various features on various types of guns. But just applying naive common sense, I would think that one valid reason to ban “scary-looking” guns is to make enforcement easier. If I were an enforcement officer, I would sure like to know whether somebody I see carrying a gun is toting a legal hunting weapon or an illegal “assault” rifle, and I would like to be able to make that call from a reasonable distance, rather than having to postpone it till I’m staring right down the weapon’s barrel. So wouldn’t it make sense to require legal weapons to be as distinct as possible from illegal ones?
To turn the question around, what exactly is the disadvantage, from a firearm owner’s point of view, of having legal weapons be visually distinct from illegal ones? I realize that it is doubtless a big pain in the neck to have to keep track of which features are currently legal and which are not, and to have to get rid of your formerly legal weapons as the design of illegal weapons undergoes inevitable changes. But it seems to me that that’s not an unreasonable price to pay for the advantage gained by enforcement officials in being able to tell the different kinds apart more easily. If we do want tougher enforcement of illegal gun use, and we admit that it’s reasonable for some types of guns to be illegal, then I think it’s reasonable to accept some limitations on cosmetic features to make enforcement easier.
Something that has been proposed to the anti-gun legislators is something that would end the discussions, but they are unwilling to do so for the obvious reasons. “Put down as law exactly what models, manufacturers, calibers, cosmetic appearances, accessories, etc that are deemed as “acceptable for ownership” and you can ban all the rest”. This would take away future options on what can be banned, however.
Well, natch. I can’t see why we should be willing to “freeze” gun control legislation in any one particular place unless we also put a moratorium on all future changes in gun design and manufacture. If we could get manufacturers to agree to make no further changes to the appearance or capabilities of any guns, I certainly think it would be reasonable to stipulate that lawmakers identify once and for all which of those are “acceptable for ownership”. But as long as guns change, gun control legislation has to be able to change.
*I’ve asked this before and I’ll ask it again. Why is it illegal to own a gun with a bayonet lug? Does this reduce violent crime? Are people being bayoneted to an extent that this is an issue? *
That one also sounds pretty easy, although again I’m only using naive common sense on it so I may be missing something. The only types of guns that are commonly manufactured with bayonet lugs are military small arms (hunters, as you point out, don’t do a lot of bayoneting). And the current international proliferation of military small arms and light weapons has a lot of people worried (see, for example, this International Security Forum report). It makes sense to me that we would want to keep this unsavory arms proliferation as far away from the legitimate US firearm trade as possible, so we ban the types of weapons that are most likely to be involved in it.
To turn the question around again, why is the lack of this feature a problem for most legitimate gun owners? Why do you need a bayonet lug? Again, I think putting up with the minor hassle of having such features banned doesn’t seem like an unreasonable price to pay for making it easier for enforcement officials to separate legitimate gun commerce from the international small-arms-and-light-weapons market.
Anybody know if there was an effort to ban guns after Lincoln was killed? Since he was the first President to be murdered while in office one would think that there was some movement at the time to restrict gun ownership. Or is that merely a symptom of our own misguided era?
Tuckerfan
One of Grants concessions was that both sides could keep their guns.
I think that gun posession was too common back then for anyone to really consider giving them up.
IIRC wyatt Earp began a no guns in Tombstone policy. Don’t know if he was first though.