Sure. But they will use that excuse anyway. They will use that feeble excuse until we have 100% international gun control, then they will try another feeble excuse.
The USA is on the same continent as Mexico and El Salvador. It’s an American colonial nation. Why would it resemble Mexico and El Salvador less than the so-called “First World”–which is basically Western Europe?
That said, understanding the Americas in our era means understanding the USA’s imperialism. I wouldn’t put it past yanquis, government and private, to smuggle guns into Latin American countries for a variety of reasons.
I concur. There is something, possibly in the geography itself, that prevents gun control laws from either being passed or from being followed if passed. I think it may be a great malevolent spirit that rules the Western Hemisphere but has no power in the Eastern Hemisphere. That’s clearly the simplest and best explanation.
Before anyone decides to argue about why gun control laws don’t work in America, I think it’s fair to first establish that they do in fact not work. I submit that they do, and my evidence is the gun death rate discrepancy between blue and red states.
First, I think we can all agree that red states tend to have less restrictive gun laws, and blue states tend to have more restrictive gun laws. The deeper the red or blue, the higher the trend is. With a few outliers like Nevada (which has gone red and blue about equally in federal elections, but has very lax gun laws) the deeper the red or blue, the more pronounced the discrepancy in gun control laws.
Here is a convenient list of the gun death rates in America. If you’re on a desktop, you can even click the “rate” button to sort from highest to lowest. Doing so reveals some interesting trends.
The five states with the lowest firearm death rate are all very, very blue. HI, MA, NY, CT, and RI. Indeed, expanding to consider the 15 states with the lowest firearm death rates only adds 2 purple states and 2 red states.
The five states with the highest firearm death rate (which are all at least 3 times the rate of the any of lowest 5, and in some cases are 7 or 8 times the rate of their counterparts) are all the deepest red. AK, LA, AL, MS, WY. In fact, expanding this list to consider the 15 states with the highest firearm death rates adds 0 blue states and 1 purple state.
The list very clearly demonstrates that gun deaths are more likely to occur in Republican states, even when considering that places like Chicago and Detroit are in more Democratic states. Gun control measures are more likely to find support in Democratic states, where there is a correlation with a lower rate of gun death.
The gun death rate in places like Chicago and Detroit is overstated, and the gun death rate in more conservative places is understated, for the sole purpose of confusing the issue. Actual data shows the real gun problem isn’t in the inner city, it’s in conservative rural areas where gun control is weak and guns are more prevalent.
Now, armed with this information, the gun advocacy side should abandon the “gun control doesn’t stop gun violence” argument, because it very clearly does. That doesn’t mean gun advocates have lost the larger argument about whether we ought to embrace gun control, though. Plenty of freedoms come with an associated risk to the public, like alcohol and fatty foods and pesticides and automobiles. Just don’t pretend the risk doesn’t exist.
Canada?
You don’t have any gun control laws in any meaningful way. There are hundreds of millions of them and they are easy to acquire…correct?
And you can compare that list to this map: Gun Ownership Statistics by State. I would say there is a pretty strong correlation between gun ownership rates and gun death rates.
Why is this an excuse, and not an actual, factual reason? It is in fact what is happening. It’s like saying that damns and levees don’t work, and the excuse that they only don’t work because you only bothered to put up the levy across 100 feet of riverbank. Then you use the excuse that levees just don’t work here in America.
Aside from the fact that, with the data that we are able to get against the desires of the gun advocate crowd, gun crime is much lower in states that have stricter gun laws than those without, which completely invalidates your thesis, what is the basis for your belief that gun laws simply don’t work here in America, when they have been shown to work elsewhere?
Do you have a cite for this? Above posters conflate suicide with homicide which is a nonsensical grouping, but here you talk only about crime.
From my reading, the assertion that gun crime is much lower in states that have stricter gun laws is not supportable.
Well, how are all those bad guys with a gun going to be shot, unless both the good guys and the bad guys have guns?
And for all the scary talk about cities like Chicago, funny how the states with the highest firearm death rates are pretty rural compared to the U.S. at large.
Nope. Incorrect. Instead compare states with the toughest gun control laws vs those with the highest murder rates. Not “firearm death”, *Murder rates. *
Several cities tried to ban handguns and several states and cities have made it rather difficult to buy a gun. In some states, quite easy, in others hoops must be jumped thru, waiting periods, classes, etc.
Lets compare murder rates, not “gun death rates”. :rolleyes:
"*But if we do look for now at correlation, it seems to me that the key question should focus on state total homicide rates, or perhaps (for reasons I describe below) total intentional homicide plus accidental gun death rates. And it turns out that there is essentially zero correlation between these numbers and state gun laws.
To begin with, here’s why I focus on total homicide, rather than gun homicide or all gun deaths. First, few people care much about whether they are stabbed to death or shot to death. And even if gun restrictions do decrease gun homicides, that effect may well be offset (or more than offset) by an increase in other homicides:…Now of course you might think this won’t happen, and the 100 fewer gun homicides will be only slightly offset by, say, 20 extra knife homicides. But to determine whether that’s true (to the extent that correlations can determine such things), you’d want to see how gun laws are correlated with total homicides, not with gun homicides. If you’re right that the stronger gun laws will yield this net 80-homicide decline, that should show up in stronger gun laws being correlated with total homicide rates…The correlation between the homicide rate and Brady score in all 51 jurisdictions is +.032 (on a scale of -1 to +1), which means that states with more gun restrictions on average have very slightly higher homicide rates, though the tendency is so small as to be essentially zero. *"
In other words, gun control laws do not reduce murder or violent crime rates.
As I said, you don’t have any real gun control laws, certainly none that make is difficult to get a gun and none that seek to reduce the number of guns overall.
Did you bother to read my post 34?
MANY states have laws that make it quite a bit more difficult to get a gun, and several, such as CA have tried to reduce the number of guns, with “assault weapon” bans and confiscations. Not to mention, Chicago and DC for many years effectively banned handguns.
So you buy a gun from a state or a city that doesn’t have regulations. you cross no borders. Did the criminally inclined in those places have any difficulties getting a gun?
You are not allowed to buy guns outside your home state. Pretty much you have to thus, cross a state border.
No, but the criminals can get guns even in Britain or Canada.