Well, yes. If you pass laws that do no good, but put otherwise law-abiding citizens in jail, that’s a bad thing.
Useless laws just for the purpose of making some gun-phobics feel a little safer dont do any good and if you then pot the “violators” in prison, you do nothing but make the private prison businesses rich.
The War of Drugs, Prohibition, the Sedition laws are all examples of bad laws.
Except they can do some good as has been shown to you in this thread. You just choose to keep ignoring that part because it undermines your entire argument.
Highly disputed and my cites show otherwise.
I ran those numbers myself - but gun deaths rather than gun homicides because I think any death by a gun is bad. And the R2 on it came to .61 - which is pretty darn high given the social nature of the data. Correlation is not causation and there could be conflating variables, but it is CERTAINLY, IMHO worth throwing federal dollars at to study.
There’s that “otherwise law abiding citizen” bit again. Are there any other laws you think it would be o.k. to deliberately break and yet remain in this extralegal category?
Your original claim would have benefited from your new adjective, “otherwise.” I just ask for sensical argument. If not for 4, 2+2 is otherwise 5. If not for murder, tax evasion and conspiracy, Al Capone was otherwise law-abiding. Not just your example criminal gun-owner, but many criminals would otherwise not be in prison if they hadn’t committed a crime.
Why do you hate freedom?
Not really at all. The cards may look similar, but there are a lot more hoops to jump through in Canada.
Based on the Illinois web-site, it looks like the application is self-reporting, and based primarily on actual adjudications for past convictions, mental health issues, etc. (Plus, giving up US citizenship? why is that a red flag on a firearms application? 
). So the person who wants to get a FOID fills it all in themselves and sends it in. That system of self-reporting relies on the person who wants to get a gun to be completely honest in filling out the form.
The Canadian requirements for a PAL (Possession and Acquisition Licence) are different. It’s not based on adjudicated events, and it’s not entirely self-reporting:
[ul]
[li] You have to show that you’ve completed a gun safety course. [/li][li] You also have to answer a lot of questions about your personal background not limited just to actual court adjudications, either criminal or mental health. You have to declare a lot more things that are designed to indicate if you might be a risk, including having been treated for a mental health issue including depression.[/li][li] You have to advise if you’ve been charged with a violent offence in the past five years, or a drug trafficking offence, or an offence involving careless storage or handling of firearms.[/li][li] You have to advise if you are aware of any formal reports against you to the police or social services for threats of violence, in the past five years.[/li][li] You have to advise if you’ve been treated by a doctor for a mental health or addictions issue in the last five years.[/li][li] You have to advise if you’ve gone through a divorce or spousal break-up in the last two years.[/li][li] You also have to declare if someone in your household has been prohibited from owning a firearm, in the last five years.[/li][li] Your spouse has to sign the form, indicating that he/she is aware of your application and has no objection to you getting a gun. You have to give your spouse’s contact information so the Mounties can check with her/him.[/li][li] If you have a former spouse (ie someone you lived with, either married or common law, in the last two years), you have to get that person to sign off on the application as well, and include her/his contact information, so that Mounties can check with the former spouse.[/li][li] You have to have references from two individuals, with their contact information, vouching that they don’t know of any reason why you can’t own a firearm.[/li][li] And, the Mounties can contact all these people, as well as running your name through their criminal records database, and checking court and police/social services records for matters that didn’t result in a court adjudication against you, but qualify under one of the above requirements. [/ul][/li]
That strikes me as a much more onerous process than the FOID in Illinois.
Oh, and it’s national, too, unlike the FOID, which only applies to residents of Illinois. Someone from say Michigan can go to Illinois and doesn’t need an Illinois FOID to buy a gun, according to the Illinois state web-site. That’s not the case in Canada. The requirement for a PAL is federal, not provincial, so you can’t hop over to another province with a laxer system to get a gun.
<n.m.>
Dickey’s Amendment (1996): “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
This effectively stops the CDC from federally funding any research that may potentially give support to the idea that gun control could save lives or reduce injuries. Thank the NRA for supporting deliberately making it easier for anti-gun-control types to dismissively point out the dearth of evidence supporting gun control in the US.
Also thank the NRA for their support of the Tiahrt Amendment, which prohibits Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from releasing information from its firearms trace database to anyone other than a law enforcement agency or prosecutor in connection with a criminal investigation, which also means prohibiting the gun trace data from being used in academic research of gun use in crime.
To me they appear to be about the same.
No. You cant buy a gun in another state. Only residents of a state can buy a gun. That’s a federal law.
Well, that’s because the CDC issued a number of “studies” that had- as their stated purpose- to increase gun control.
And, that’s not the job of the Center for Disease Control, the FBI can cheerfully put out a real study, by criminologists, instead of doctors and nurses. However, the FBI is not run by anti-gun people.
As the other thread showed, the critics of the CDC had to scrape what some researchers had said outside their conclusions or papers.
That is fine, as the other thread showed researchers do not gave the critics much of any support, there is need for more research as even they reported; but, as I noted on the other thread, it is the NRA and others the one that do fear that the numbers will go against them.
If you sell a gun to someone, and don’t ask him what state he is from, are you breaking any laws?
The CDC also produces studies about pool safety. Should they not do that? I was not aware that they had a number of studies that had as their stated purpose to increase gun control. I am aware of one from 20 years ago that ended with the controversial recommendation that having a gun in the home increased the chances of gun violence befalling members of the household, but that still didn’t have as it’s stated purpose to increase gun control.
Oh, and while the CDC does have quite a bit to do with medicine, and as such, does employ people with doctorates, some even with doctorates in medical fields, to say that it is run by a bunch of doctors and nurses is, to be most gracious, an extremely ignorant statement.
Also, the FBI is most certianly run by people who want to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, even when everyone else is trying their best to supply them with guns.
Still, they were public admissions of their stated goals, which is very unprofessional and unscientific.
Yes, and the guy buying the gun also.
Why Can't the U.S. Treat Guns as a Public-Health Problem? - The Atlantic like that of Mark Rosenberg, then the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. In response to the early ’90s crime wave, Rosenberg had said in 1994, “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes … It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol—cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly—and banned.”…
that is only one of several.
*We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths. We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities.” (P.W. O’Carroll, Acting Section Head of Division of Injury Control, CDC, *http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/261307-why-congress-stopped-gun-control-activism-at-the-cdc
Yes, and so why doesnt it run gun studies? Maybe because the few CDC studies were biased and based on bad science.
So, if I walk up to you, and say, “Nice gun, I’ll buy it from you.” You are required to check my ID to see what state I am a resident of?
We will have to disagree here. You are playing the same, pull some statement from 24 years ago from a specific individual out of context and use that as a basis for everything you believe about anyone who wants to look into guns. I will note, as well, you do realize that cigarettes are not exactly banned, do you not?
It is almost as if you have to pull these quotes from last century, because they are literally the only thing that you have to hold onto that even remotely supports your argument. The rest is just insulting government agencies that have dramatically improved the lives of everyone in the country, and in the world, because you know that, with them being tasked with improving the health of people in the country, they may find that improving the health of everyone in the country may involve making recommendations that you just don’t want to hear. It is very literally a perfect example of an ad hominem attack. You cannot attack the data, so you attack the source, and just to be sure, you shut the source up, so that you don’t have to be bothered by any other information that may be inconvenient to your mindset.
You cant sell guns to anyone from out of state, and out of state people cannot buy guns.
Yes, those statements are old, and so are the studies. What is shows is the evident bias on the part of the “researchers”, who used a doubtful method of study, and tweaked the groups to show what they wanted.
The CDC does fine work, but at least back then, several of it’s top leadership were unabashedly and publically anti-gun.
Yes, but if you sell a gun to someone that you do not know is from out of state, have you broken a law?
These were bureaucrats who had opinions on the matter. Not the researchers.
I say let them do research, then look at it to see if it holds up. Attack the studies, the methods, the data, if you feel it is in error. Putting an effective gag order is just hiding from the problem.
If studies are showing that guns contribute to negative public health consequences, then it makes sense to be of the opinion that guns are a problem. Letting them do studies would allow us to find where the real problems are, and work on those. You could say that they were anti-tobacco too, that doesn’t invalidate their studies on that.
I am not in favor of a gun ban, I am in favor of tighter laws that prevent guns from getting into the hands of criminals, as well as some level of screening to ensure that gun owners do not become criminals. I think it would cut down on suicides, as the main reason that I contemplate getting a gun is because I know that criminals have them. If criminals are not likely to be coming at me with guns, then I am less concerned about my safety on that front, and have no need of one myself. A reason that I don’t want a gun is that I don’t entirely trust myself not to make an irrational and irreversible decision one day if things are going poorly. I have to balance those.
I think that there are many people who may make irrational decisions in the heat of the moment that a gun makes convenient to make. And I do think that many of those people would not have had a gun if they were not concerned about criminals having guns.
So yes, I am strongly of the opinion that gun control measures would reduce the number of suicides, and the people that ended up not commiting suicide by gun are able to get back into a better state where they are happy to be alive.
Therefore, while suicide by gun can certainly be considered its own catagory, with its own issues as to the right to take ones own life and methods of prevention, I certainly do not consider it to be just a bogus stat to pad the numbers.
As we are not a dictatorship yet, people have the right to give opinions outside research. The problem comes when critics turn that into the main reason to oppose science or research. That is what it is the real unprofessional and anti-science position. As pointed before thare is one side that does not like research to be done, that is even worse than what climate change deniers have done at the federal level.