Do you believe, if we eliminated firearms in the US, that other forms of violence would take the place of firearm violence?
Rate your response from
10-20% as much
20-50%
50-75%
75-100%
100%+
as the current violence inflicted through gun violence.
To what would you attribute the increase/decrease in violence?
Is it the disconnect between the killer and killed?
Why or why wouldn’t other projectile weapons (crossbows, bows & arrows) take up the slack?
Do you feel that the horribleness of melee inflicted wounds makes them more or less harrowing than firearm wounds?
Please limit the conversation to these topics - I don’t want to look at accidental shootings, mass shootings, or the like. Not that those aren’t relevant topics when talking about gun control, but rather that is not the heart of my inquest.
Are you saying if we put gun bans in effect, or if we magically eliminated every gun in the country? If you simply put gun bans into effect then the number of guns will probably decrease, but they will still be millions of them, some percentage of which will be in the hands of gangs and other criminals, so I don’t see a large decrease in the already dropping gun deaths per year. If drugs can get into the country then guns would be no problem. If we are talking about magically getting rid of all guns in the country and keeping the guns magically and forever out of peoples hands, then I’d say you’d have an increase in other types of violence (and your crazy loony types would probably use bombs or something else to spectacularly kill lots of innocent victims), but there would be an overall decrease. Not sure how much though…I seriously doubt that, even if we removed all firearms from the country (something unlikely to happen in any reality), we’d never get down to the levels of violent death that some of our European brethren and sistren, or countries like Japan (or even Canada) get to. It’s just not in us, at least not any faster than such things are already dropping. We have a crazy quilt mixing pot of people and cultures, and we have large gang issues that aren’t going to go away simply because we ban guns. Now, maybe if we legalized drugs that might be an actual, measurable drop in violence, but I don’t see that happening either, and with the governments constant attempts to try social engineering to make us do what’s best for us you might see drugs legalized only to have cigarettes or other tobacco products AND drugs still sold on the black market…and still have gang violence over that illicit trade.
If you were to wave a magic wand and make all privately-owned firearms disappear, and another wave of the wand served to make it impossible to manufacture, distribute, import or sell firearms for private use, I believe the amount of violence would go down a bit, and all the violent fistfights, baseball-bat bashings and stabbings would get a lot more press. I think the overall level of violence would be lower, the number of deaths would be lower, and the number of suicides would be a lot lower.
I suspect the actual number of violent incidents would be about the same or edge up some since the threat of guns would be eliminated. However, the number of deaths would decrease due to the much lower lethality of other means of violence.