Already stipulated in the OP, o.k.? Do you have any ideas on how to decrease these violent tendencies?
That seems like a reasonable definition of extremist. I don’t think it applies to most gun owners though.
The problem starts in the home. If you are raised in an environment where bad guys are the nails and a gun is the hammer, you are never going to look for another tool for the job, or try to turn the bad guys into screws.
There’s also Serbia, #2 in the world with 58 guns per 100 citizens, and an intentional homicide rate that’s almost a quarter of the United States’ (1.2 per 100,000 versue 4.2).
This is not that debate.
Any thoughts on how to decrease gun violence in the U.S. that doesn’t infringe on the rights of Americans to bear arms?
This could suggest that Serbians are intrinsically less violent than citizens of the US, or that they export most of their violent criminals.
Meh, not really. Canadians get exposed to the exact same media (and it’s not like any of the intensity gets lost in translation) and given the number of Canadians who work in the American entertainment industry (because the money is better), it can’t even be said to be some foreign influence - your pop culture is essentially our pop culture.
And yet we don’t have nearly as much gun violence.
Just responding to issues raised in the thread.
It comes down to culture and economics. Gun violence is a symptom, the root causes are poverty, destruction of the family unit, and a culture of violent, self-destructive behavior. Blaming the existence of firearms or violent movies is a way of avoiding addressing the root causes, which are much harder to solve and can get into uncomfortable racial issues.
We know that government bans work, since it’s impossible to find marijuana in this country. There are about 280 million guns in America, do you really think the government can ensure that it isn’t just the criminals who end up with them after a ban?
To the OP: A lot of what we can do has already been done, and is paying off now in the lowest violent crime rates in 30 years. Welfare reform keeps more families intact, and legal abortion caused some of those likely to become criminals to never be born at all. Our homicide rate is high relative to some of our peer nations, but it is dropping, and compared to the world at large, is quite modest.
Going forward, if you want less crime, you need less criminals. Identifying what causes people to become criminals, and how to prevent that, should be the focus.
Gun violence in the US is never going away. You will never repeal the second amendment. As long as hand guns are available they will be used for their intended purpose: to shoot people.
A survey from 2007 shows the rate of homicide by firearm in the US to be 2.97 per 100,000 people. In Canada the rate was 0.51.
Our cultures are pretty much the same. The difference is the availability of hand guns. You will never, ever, curb gun violence without getting rid of guns. And you will never do that. The problem is unsolvable.
This is the exact argument I used in a recent debate with a friend who advocates banning all guns. The entertainment industry in America has a very strange love/hate relationship with guns, yet they form our opinions about the destructiveness of guns and the glory of violence at the same time. It is almost unbelievable that people can watch hours of violence every day, violence that glorifies vigilante justice and fighting in every form, and come away with the conclusion that it is only guns that are a problem.
I can turn on my TV and within minutes find images of someone being blown away by a gun and other people, the “good guys”, cheering about it. We could try to solve the problem of violence by taking one of the weapons or maybe we could first try not glorifying violence so much. I mean, if we don’t like violence, why watch it all the time?
Well, there is a difference. Guns are manufactured in factories with known addresses, managed by people with MBAs and mortgages who are regular upstanding members of society, and gun manufacturers have in-house legal staff who make sure that companies can be served with papers and generally comply with the law. Guns manufactured outside of the US are shipped in openly, in compliance with regulations. It would be much easier to regulate the manufacture and sale of guns that it is to regulate the manufacture and sale of marijuana.
Do you really think that Smith & Wesson is going to go underground?
There is admittedly more of a problem with the enormous number of already existing guns, many of them already “off the grid” and untraceable.
That’s a interesting point. Why do you consider the intended purpose of a gun is to shoot people, when so few of them are used for that? Many handguns are used for target shooting, which is fun all by itself. Others are used for hunting. Others are simply for a collection. Quite a few are bought ‘for home defense’ but even those who do hope devoutly to never use them to shoot another human. If the purpose of a handgun is to shoot people, they fail at this miserably, as not even one gun in 10000 is used for that.
Being in the SCA, many of my friends have large medieval weapon collections- swords, battle-axes, maces and what not hanging about the walls. Originally a sword was meant to kill people. But are they still?
In any case, controlling the number of guns doesn’t seem to have any effect at controlling violence in this nation. Areas with very strict gun control often have higher violent crime rates than areas where guns are often carried commonly.
If it could be shown to me that reasonable gun controls would significantly reduce the violent crime rate, I could see discussing whether or not I should give up some rights for the common weal.
But I don’t see any reason to give up rights to assuage someone’s phobia .
Should it be profitable to do so, black market guns could be manufactured in a basic machine shop. Amusingly, a blowback full-auto that fires from an open bolt, think of a Sten gun or a MAC, while being exactly the kind of thing that makes prohibitionists shit their pants, is also among the easiest to manufacture.
The cultures in Canada and the US are very similar, yet homicide rates are 3 to 4 times higher in the US. It would be preposterous to attribute this to anything other than the difference in the control of hand guns between the two countries. These are indisputable facts.
The homicide rate in Mexico is nearly six times that of the USA, despite the fact that México has strict gun control laws. Bermuda has a Homicide rate that is 3 x the USA. In fact the 4 nations of North America have widely disparate homicide rates, despite that fact that only in America is handgun ownership moderately easy and legal.
These are indisputable facts.
Of course we should look for ways to curb gun violence. The problem is there don’t seem to be any that haven’t already been tried short of outlawing all guns, and it’s arguable even that wouldn’t work. Discounting suicide, the overwhelming percentage of gun deaths are due to gangs, drug dealing, and participants in the urban “street” subculture in which any slight is taken as an insult demanding retribution.
I didn’t say that gangsta rap is the root of the problem. I said, as to my own experience, and what I’ve seen, that it helped reinforce this mentality and promote it further. It also influences the impressionable youth who wouldn’t ordinarily be drawn to destructive behavior.
I wouldn’t support a film studio, or advertisers who promoted a film like Birth of a Nation. The 1920 film helped rejuvenate the Ku Klux Klan and was used a recruitment tool.
We would protest a major record company like Sony, Warner, or Universal if they started marketing white supremacist music.
In the city I used to live in, gang crime and homicides went up when a new rap album was released in the stores there. It was a group rap album comprised of gang members from Northern California. The whole album was intended to both unify the northern California street gangs, as well as instruct them to increase the violence against they’re rivals in the cities. It turned out that the album was funded by one of the bigger prison gangs here.
I remember even kids in my school who didn’t associate with gang members were listening to that album and repeating the gang lyrics.
Is there any chance at all of getting back to the topic at hand: finding a way to decrease gun violence in this country without infringing on our 2nd Amendment rights?
I realize that the possibility of being imprisoned doesn’t deter some people, but I’m sure it does deter others. What percentage of those who commit violent crimes are caught?