The numbers I saw had Utah’s murder rate just a little bit higher (around 2 or 2.4, IIRC). Your “youth hypothesis” might be reasonable, though I’m not sure it would explain Idaho or other high-percentage-white states’ higher murder rates than Canada and the UK – I think it’s foolish to dismiss the possibility that the ease of acquiring guns might have an effect on the murder rate. If chemical weapons were as easy to get as guns, there might be at least a slight increase in the chemical weapons use rate; same with nukes or biological weapons – I don’t see why it’s not reasonable to think this might be so with guns.
I have no interest in banning guns, but I think it’s unreasonable to dismiss the possibility that the ease of getting guns might have something to do with the statistics for murder.
Don’t be silly. It’s quite a bit harder to cross a national border with a trunk full of guns than a state line where the only check is whether or not you’ve seen the “Welcome to This State !” sign.
Also a bit harder for the average gun enthusiast to go to Mexico from the DC suburbs to get strapped.
As I said, the problem will never be entirely solved, nor does anyone expect it to be. But there’s a significant difference between “serious gun control” and “no gun control at all, let’s give up”.
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That’s a silly analogy. Gun control folks always have reasons why gun control didn’t work the last time or the time before that. The grand daddy of them all is that gun control didn’t work because we only made them illegal in some places and not everywhere.
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Well it makes absolute sense, might be why the argument is popular.
Toothy prohibition/restrictions of handgun and semi-automatic sales along with melting any and all illegal guns seized by the police to slag would perforce would reduce the supply over time. Obvious enough ?
True enough, but then any *serious *attempt at gun control is always jammed by the gun manufacturer profits’ lobby, I mean the NRA, so.
Read for comprehension. I said we had 30,000 illegal guns floating around. Not 30k guns total. Despite its reputation as gun grabbing central, France is actually one of the most armed states in the western world at 0.3 per capita.
But because we control guns, those ~20 million guns are mostly twin-barrelled hunting or clay pigeon shooting shotguns, 22 LR bolt actions, and the odd handgun among people who have enough time and money to waste to jump through the eleventy billion hoops to secure a carry permit. And nobody, but I mean *nobody *has an AK at home outside of criminals and terrorists. Which makes it pretty easy to identify criminals and terrorists.
BTW, our modern gun control was enacted in 1949 - back when France was positively awash with WW2 guns and ammo and every two-bit Resistance group (many of which were run of the mill criminals who just happened to shoot at Germans once in a while or said they did) had stockpiles squirrelled away.
I’m sorry, was your “we have 300 million guns and they’re never ever going away !” not to be understood as “just give up” ? What, then, did you mean ?
I still fail to see what that has to do with gun control in any way, shape or form. Please advise.
The 2nd Amendment was written before the US had a standing army, which it was meant to avoid. Seen any well regulated militia lately ? Since those are evidently not necessary to the security of a free State*, seems to me the amendment is obsolete.
You could actually, like many of the Founding Fathers, argue that the existence of a standing army in fact precludes or at least threatens the security and freedom of a State. Which is pretty much true. But then again I don’t really see any of y’alls calling for unilateral disbanding of the armed forces, so.
The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788 and personal ownership of arms for self-defense has been a founding principle since that time. There have been several fear-based attempts to ban, restrict, register and confiscate, firearms but the 2nd Amendment still survives after 227 years.
There’s this thing called the “National Guard”. So, since my Dad Served in the National Guard for decades, yes, indeed, I have. And several States have their own Militias, on top of the National Guard.
Amazing you can argue about the “militia clause” and not know anything about militias.
Next the Supreme Court disagrees and sez that the 2nd Ad is not just for Militias.
I’m open to “the possibility that the ease of acquiring guns might have an effect on the murder rate”, but I don’t think it’s been proven convincingly yet.
I picked 2013 because it was the latest year UNODC had data for Canada and the UK. This PDF from Utah’s BCI has a lot of information about crime in Utah. On page 52, it has a chart that shows Utah’s murder rate has meandered around quite a bit in the last 10 years, from a high of 2.23 in 2005 to a low of 1.43 in 2008. The average is 1.8. I’m quite certain that the change from 2.23 to 1.43 (and since then rising a bit) was not accompanied with any appreciable change in the ease of acquiring firearms in Utah.
At a macro level, the United States has been flooded with more and more guns, year after year, for decades now, and yet our crime and homicide rates have seen a rather steady decline since the peak in 1980. I believe 2013 and 2014 had the lowest murder rate on record.
Over 30,000 people die a year from falls. 3x the number from firearm homicides. 85% of those fall deaths are to people 65 and over. More than 2x number from firearm homicides. Maybe we should enact a law requiring all retired people to wear helmets all the time.
That analogy is so ridiculous that it makes it sound like you never read the 1st Amendment, or at least never read it thoughtfully. The wording of the 1st Amendment makes it the most expansive of all the rights, guaranteeing freedom of religion, freedom of “the press” (meaning journalism), and freedom of speech and expression of all kinds, whether journalistic or not. Whereas the 2nd Amendment narrowly, uniquely, and rather bizarrely speaks of the right to possess an object, which is why it’s become the most dated of all the rights, not just irrelevant in today’s world but clearly counterproductive. It’s a lot like if the 1st Amendment really did explicitly grant the right to an 18th century hand-cranked printing press and nothing more, in the mistaken notion that this would somehow resolve all freedom of speech issues, and moreover in a situation where such a device not only became irrelevant in the modern world, but was killing thousands of citizens every year.
Which is why almost all modern democracies get by just fine with no such constitutional guarantee, and none at all – not anywhere in the developed world – have the absolutist interpretation that the 2nd Amendment has acquired, to the great and worsening detriment of public safety. Britain once had a constitutional “right to bear arms”, too – it originated with Henry II in the 12th century, and has long since been wisely abandoned. The idea that a gun makes anyone safer is one of the enduring American myths, symbolized by images like Rambo and John Wayne and the ubiquitous fiction of the “Good Guy with a Gun™”, and promulgated by a brazen gun lobby and an apparent contempt for even the most blatantly obvious statistical facts.
Yep. Have you read the strongly worded dissent? Have you read the opinions of constitutional scholars which suggest a limited lifetime for such an ill-advised interpretation?
The dissent by Justice Steven hinges strongly on a collective vs a individual right, and he has a point, but was over-ruled . Justice Stevens did not try the idiotic concept that only a 1789 musket was protected.
No ad hominem. A reading of the 1st Amendment reveals no mention of a “printing press”. It does, however, reveal – as I said – a clearly broad and expansive protection of every form of speech and expression. Your analogy with the 2nd – which grants a right to a specific object – is absurd.
Why? You provide an opinion with no reasoning. That’s what “specious” is.
I never said that “only a 1789 musket was protected”. I said that this is what existed at the time, just like the concept of national defense by armed citizenry was what existed at the time, and that what is ridiculous is trying to argue that such a right automatically confers an unconditional right to any and every weapon technology subsequently developed. Why stop at high-capacity magazines or automatic weapons – why not argue that the 2nd Amendment grants citizens the right to have tanks, long-range missiles, and nuclear weapons? Aren’t they important to the stated goal of “the security of a free State”? What defines the cutoff? At what point does public safety become relevant?
I don’t know what you’re on about as I never said any of the things I’ve been accused of saying and your inchoate quotes seem irrelevant to any of it, nor do you address my question of where one should draw the line of what weaponry ordinary citizens should be allowed to own (and under what conditions) – which is the absolutely central question of gun control.
As far as your favorite Heller decision is concerned, I offer the following:
Not everyone agrees that Heller was the most Solomonic ruling in the history of the universe:
In a narrow sense, the Constitution was vindicated in Heller because the Court reached an easily defensible originalist result. But the Court’s reasoning is at critical points so defective—and so transparently non-originalist in some respects—that Heller should be seen as an embarrassment for those who joined the majority opinion. The Second Amendment, Heller, and Originalist Jurisprudence | UCLA Law Review
The gun death statistics across developed nations indicate such incredibly dramatic differences between the US and everyone else that it’s pointless to keep repeating it. This is not a matter of arguing about a few percentage points difference perhaps being accounted for by other factors. We’re talking about something close to one or even two orders of magnitude difference in gun death rates. At some point I feel like I’d be better off arguing with my dog about Wittgenstein than arguing gun facts with gun advocates residing in the only country in the industrialized world that actually has more guns than people (or very close to it) and virtually no meaningful restrictions on them.
Apropos the comparison between the US and other industrial countries: I’ve been brow beaten since at least grade school with the bromide that “diversity is strength”, and variations there on. Perhaps what the Western world needs is at least one nation that bucks the trend, that doesn’t (at least in the area of guns) sacrifice the rights of the individual for what may or may not increase the safety of the multitude. Maybe the diversity of the US vs. the other industrialized nations is strength.
There’s nothing militia-like about the National Guard.
Great. Make gun ownership contingent on active membership in those, then.
The Supreme Court is wrong on historical, textual and sanity grounds alike. Which is unsurprising, considering the partisan hacks it has been packed with.
And here I thought you said you read Heller. And the post you are responding to, #195. Did you miss this part (added the second section)?
Heller was very clear on the types of weapons that were protected. They were not so clear under what conditions “bear” applied to as it was not at issue.
Right on. And did you read my cite that “the Court’s reasoning is at critical points so defective—and so transparently non-originalist in some respects—that Heller should be seen as an embarrassment for those who joined the majority opinion”?
Of course, only time will tell how this all unfolds. Meanwhile, the extraordinary, awful gun deaths will continue. So your #195 is duly addressed. But the funny thing is, I initially misread that as being your #159 which I had a look at again. It was quite a gem:
… my side is winning. We don’t have to convince anyone anymore. One of your preferred topics is to bring up comparisons of the US to Canada, and other countries. Except that the people that you need to persuade couldn’t give two shits about those comparisons. I know I could give zero fucks about it.
So, yes, you want your guns, and facts be damned. Who cares what the reality is in the rest of the civilized world? Or, to be more explicit, “Fuck you world, we don’t need no steenkin’ facts an’ lessons, because we all is better’n you!”.
As a resident of a bordering non-US country, the only solution I can think of in the short term is, unfortunately, rather self-serving: ramping up border security to keep the guns and carnage out, which we’re already doing with a fair amount of success. Meanwhile, God bless you guys down there and best of luck. Try to shoot all the Bad Guys™ before they shoot you first! And by gum, if you every get a really bad federal government, by all means, go in there and shoot them, too. Let me know how it works out for you.
ETA: I think I’m pretty much done here on this topic. And anyway, my dog wants to talk about Descartes vs. Wittgenstein, so he’s got my attention now.
The USA does have a rather high murder rate; 3.8. That’s far too high, but there are 120 nations with higher rates. Venezuela, South Africa,Colombia,Brazil, Mexico not only have a murder rate around ten times the USA, they even manage to have had more murders. Only Japan (of major nations) has a murder rate so low that the USA is ten times higher. The USA is actually pretty much in the middle.** So, again- wrong. **
The only other major nation which is close to 1/10 our rate is Switzerland, which is also the nation where every able-bodied man must keep a assault rifle at his home.
Yes, Japan has very few guns and few few murders. The Swiss have lots of guns and very few murders. The Venezuelans have few guns and lots of murders. Hmm, maybe that means that the Japanese and the Swiss and the Venezuelans and the Americans are quite different nations. Oh and Venezuela has very stiff gun control (likely ignored, sure) but extremely high murder rate= 53.7. (Honduras has a 90.4 murder rate!)
The USA does have a lot of guns, 270 million of them or so, by a high estimate. And 322,014,853 people. So- again, wrong. But not as wrong, if that makes you feel happy.
Sweden also has a lot of guns per capita, but a murder rate of .07. Serbia has more guns per capita than any other European nation, but a murder rate of 1.2.
In fact of the top 20 nations of guns per capita- NONE are in the top 20 murder rates. The number of guns per capita seems to have no correlation at all>Honduras, #1 in murder is #87 in guns. Venezuela , #2 in murder is #58 in guns, and so forth.
