I agree with this post.
I agree with this. Guns in America are here to stay, at least for the short and medium term, no matter what the laws are. Just like it’s incredibly easy to get drugs when drugs are everywhere, it will be incredibly easy to get guns as long as guns are everywhere. And guns don’t get smoked or consumed like drugs do. But I think it’s reasonable to look at whether the incredible amount of guns has something to do with gun deaths and gun violence to see what could be done about it in the short, medium, and long-term.
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Really frustrating when both sides end up contesting statistics. Hard to tell what stats are reliable, or even that they are counting the same things - or the RIGHT thing.
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Basically, everyone here is spinning the stats to bolster their argument and either make it look more or less scary. That’s why some are lumping in things like suicide because it pumps up the gun deaths, etc etc. People have a hard time grasping large numbers or evaluating relative risk or putting numbers into context, so it’s a good tactic that works for both sides equally well, and boils down to one’s view point on this (or any) subject.
It’s all horseshit. In the end, the only thing that’s important is whether US society as a whole accepts the non-zero risks/deaths associated with allowing for the private ownership of guns. The rest are just the details wrt gun CONTROL legislature and whether it has a small but noticeable effect (say, registration, background checks and restrictions on very vertical types of weapons) or is basically just political horseshit and hot air (such as the Let’s Ban Scary Guns, or AWB). As long as American’s accept that by allowing people to keep and own guns in the US, just like allowing people to buy and use alcohol, there WILL be a non-zero number of deaths, including occasionally headline grabbing ones, all the stats in the world are just so much hot air. Telling American’s that ‘advanced’ or ‘civilized’ nations don’t have guns or restrict them much more than we do is equally a waste of time, except to those already convinced…in fact, it probably does more harm than good, wrt gun control (but then, the gun control types seem bound and determined to shoot themselves in the foot every chance they get, so why not on this too?).
Every time this subject comes up (usually after another sensational mass gun shooting) I have to shake my head at the discussion, which can practically be set to music it’s so predictable. Just like on the political stage. Gun control types come out of the wood work, yammering for (in most cases stupid) tighter controls, pointing out Europe and other ‘advanced’ or ‘civilized’ nations don’t do what we do and don’t have the deaths we do and generally make a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing, since the American people, a.k.a. the voting public isn’t ready for large changes to this. And, predictably, this causes the pro-gun types to come out of the wood work and just grasp those guns even tighter, bringing out all of their irrational (and in some cases rational) fears of the gun grabbers taking their right and their guns away from them. Any reasonable, sane and more importantly realistic solutions or legislature gets pushed aside by these opposite forces and in the end, just like all the other times, nothing will come of any of this…or whatever does come will make little or no sense and basically do nothing at all to address any problem or issue.
But yeah…let’s see MORE stats on guns! That works out so well and is so refreshing and new in this debate! Can we see more on how bad we are wrt the rest of the world? How barbaric and uncivilized and un-advanced we are??
Why are so many gun control folks under the ridiculously ignorant impression that there is “no gun control at all” in this country
This is why some gun rights folks think that gun control folks will never be satisfied, they act as if there isn’t already significant gun control in place.
No it doesn’t. In the context of the shooting we are talking about. All those guns were obtained in the state of California. No one had to smuggle guns from Nevada to arm those shooters. What law is it that you propose that you think would stop all or even most of this gun violence?
Unconstitutional. Read Heller.
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What is it about semiautomatic weapons that you think is dangerous?
Are you under the impression that cops seize guns and then turn around and sell them to criminals? Why melt down the guns? Are those guns more likely to be used in crime than any other gun?
The NRA is not omnipotent. They are not the reason that you can’t pass the sort of gun control that you want. You just don’t have the political capital or credibility (and when you did have the political capital, you wasted that political capital on retarded shit like an assault weapons ban).
Claims that the NRA is a lobby for the gun manufacturers does not help with your credibility. The NRA is no more a lobby for the gun manufacturers than NARAL is a lobby for Planned Parenthood.
Write more clearly. It will help your arguments. What do you mean by floating around?
How do you identify criminals and terrorists when they keep their AK 47s at home?
And what you have is not gun control. It is effectively a gun ban. It would be unconstitutional in America. I have trouble believing that there are 20 million civilian guns in France even if they are all 22lr bolt action.
Yes and we could have done this after WWII as well but we didn’t. As I have stated previously, that was probably the last time we could have rounded up the guns.
I think our disconnect is that you think gun control means a near total ban on civilian ownership of guns and confiscation of any guns that you personally do not approve of. I think that there are plenty of effective reasonable forms of gun control that would not involve banning guns or the mass confiscation of guns.
Licensing and registration requirements, for example.
It didn’t. It was about terrorism in France.
You are reading the second amendment incorrectly. See Heller v. Washington DC.
EVERY constitutional scholar agrees that the right to bear arms is not limited to fucking muskets. Lets say we adopt the notion that the second amendment is only limited to minutemen who can come to the defense of their country when it gets invaded. Are you saying that those minutemen would have to use fucking muskets? Can we move on from this ridiculous bumper sticker argument?
What obvious statistical facts?
You do realize that by its very nature, a dissent means it is NOT the law, right?
Whatever criticism you might hurl at Heller (and it is not immune from criticism) would apply equally (or even moreso) to decisions like Roe v Wade. You undermine the legitimacy of our judicial system at significant peril to the stability of society.
It is absurd that you think the analogy is absurd considering how many legal scholars have used similar analogies.
Sure, the drop in murders is probably the result of some other factor having to do with changes in the population but that only reinforces the notion that it is the people and not the guns that are the primary driver of violence.
And are you seriously advancing statistics on mass shootings (a tiny sliver of murders committed in America as evidence that violence is getting worse? Are you fucking kidding?
You know that the stuff you write in the board doesn’t disappear, right? You specifically refer to muskets and how they can only fire one shot at a time to define the rights protected by the second amendment.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18915787&postcount=145
And you refer to hand crank presses as the analogy IF the first amendment referred to an object rather than a concept.
Automatic weapons are highly regulated and virtually inaccessible to anyone who isn’t relatively wealthy.
And the second amendment argument doesn’t apply to tanks and nuclear weapons because they are not covered under arms. There was a case about sawed off shotguns that kind of lays out what we mean by arms and it was generally restricted to stuff that a common soldier might carry.
Why does that prove? I can dig up articles poking holes in every controversial SCOTUS opinion ever written and quite a few non-controversial ones too.
Those orders of magnitude difference shrinks significantly when you compare murder rates instead of only focusing only on gun murder rates. 2/3rds of all murders in America are committed with guns. Are you under the impression that if guns were illegal in America, our murder rate would drop by 2/3rds?
As for “virtually no restriction”:
You mean the partisan hacks who upheld Obamacare?
Damn XT - you’re making me compliment you again for another reasonable post. Curse you! 
I guess I wonder what people think about in terms of the society they wish. I really don’t have significant objections to ostensibly law-abiding folk owning just about any weapon they want, but I don’t have any idea how we can permit that while trying to restrain the availability of guns to “evil-doers.”
Personally, the idea of reverting to some sort of wild-west scenario where everyone goes about armed, is not what I would hope for in this day and age. But if that is where we want to go - maybe we shouldn’t just permit concealed carry, but require it universally! I realize we do not have to model ourselves against any other nation, but when I think of nations where large numbers of folk go about armed, I generally think of parts of the Mideast and Africa - not exactly what I would think Americans would aspire to.
Yeah, every few days there is another shooting - nothing we can (or want to) do about it. And fuck global warming, or the sucky schools, or income inequality/the lack of unskilled decent-paying jobs… I got mine, and am only going to be around for another couple decades. Sucks to be young. Or poor. Or uneducated…
once again that article by a fairly libertarian (almost Ayn Randian) law professor is basing his criticism solely from the originalist perspective. Non-originalists shouldn’t give a shit what he has to say. Are you an originalist?
I think he is saying that we live in a constitutional democracy and there are plenty of avenues for you to change things but as things are, You are the one that needs to make a convincing argument for change.
Honestly, I think there is stuff we can do about these things, and in fact I think that slowly society is shifting on this (as well as on Global Warming, sucky schools and income inequality, etc etc). I think the problem is that some folks what it all to change right now, today, and that’s simply not reasonable or going to happen…at least not to the extreme and radical way they WANT it to change. Also, it’s not reasonable to think that America will ever be Europe…or Canada…or Japan…or whatever. Just as it’s unreasonable to think they will magically become America or Americans. Personally, I’m in the middle of the road on this…I have no real issue with sane gun control measures, with things like universal background checks or registration, as long as they aren’t clearly slippery slopes designed as a step in the process of banning them or severely restricting them from the public…as long as the public still is in favor of that personal ownership. IOW, I’m against a fiat ban or against legislature that would lead to a fiat ban. Restrictions that work within both the spirit and the letter of the 2nd, however, I’m good with…after all, we have restrictions on other rights protected in the Constitution, as long as they don’t violate the spirit and letter of the document. The problem has always been those folks who want it all and want it now, and want it regardless of what the majority of their fellow citizens say…and want it before the majority of the population is really ready for it. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing…civil rights, gay marriage (though I think in both of those examples the population was on the cusp already). But in this case I think the gun banners (as opposed to the genuine gun control folks who really just want sane regulation and not simply a way to get large horizontal fiat bans regardless) have actually had the opposite effect to what they want and have done vastly more harm than good wrt getting sane legislature through.
Have you considered the notion that SCOTUS might be reading it incorrectly ?
Proving that even if California is considered by the gun crowd to be an anathema and a pit of abusive gun restrictions gone amok, it’s still toothless to curb gun acquisitions. Besides, from what I’ve read the enforcement of Californian gun control laws is spotty at best in practice.
The ability to pour round after round into a crowd in a short amount of time even with precious little training would spring to mind.
When more than half of its operating budget is made up of straight contributions from gun manufacturers, when the overwhelming majority of its board of directors are also on the boards of gun companies or affiliated with them, I think that’s a fair and factual assessment.
And it’s not just “gun grabbers” who feel that way.
The way all criminal investigations proceed, I suppose : denunciations, criminals rolling on each other and so on. Followed by a search warrant. Of course, it’s even easier when they’re dumb enough to use those illegal guns in the process of committing a crime. In which case the entire law book can be thrown at them with great force.
Not my fault if you miss salient adjectives.
By floating around, I mean floating around - we don’t know exactly who owns them or where they are at any given minute ; but we do have a rough idea of how many there are based on an analysis of both their use in the commission of crimes and seizures at the borders.
Nonsense. As I said, our 60 million people have 20 million guns among them - my family owns two. They’re not all hunting weapons, either - we have a very active target shooting crowd as well.
Cognitive dissonance is, indeed, a bitch.
Pot calling kettle.
LOL, sure, but he might be your nominee in 2016. best if you walk away from this fight.
Yeah but some of his ideas disqualifies him from consideration and yet he is still being considered. LOL, part of me wonders if Trump is just punking all of us.
Cite? I have said that there is not a strong correlation between guns in a state and the number of murders in a state (even a 0.1 correlation is still a correlation). I have said that there likely it s correlation between guns in a home and the likelihood of murder in those homes. Where do I say that the two are entirely uncorrelated?
The idea that “both sides are spinning stats” is the worst kind of false equivalence bullshit.
The only way it remotely makes sense is if you equate peer reviewed science with back of the napkin calculations, holding a thumb up to a scatterplot and squinting, or cherry-picking comparisons from rough data sources.
It reflects the same kind of anti-science bullshit on every topic shown by current republicans in congress. It’s roughly equivalent to countering the evidence on global warming by bringing a snowball into the discussion.
Naw, it simply reflects your standard disingenuous tendencies in any discussion, Hentor. Oh, and an attempt to paint anyone who disagrees with you with an ‘anti-science’ paint brush…going to call me a climate denier next? Perhaps go for bear and say I’m a CTer? Maybe call me a racist, just to cover all your bases? 
Once again, you need to carve out gun murders to make the claim that more guns =more gun murders. What about overall murders and gun ownership rates. I suspect there might still be some sort of correlation but not nearly as clear as the graph in that article.
Seriously who gives a shit about the method of murder. How is that relevant?
The rate of gun suicides is much higher in the US than everywhere else and yet our suicide rate is pretty fucking average. And people still focus on the gun suicides and blame the guns for the suicides.