Then why don’t ALL criminals in Australia, New Zealand and the UK carry guns?
This is an old canard -
the less guns there are in society, the greater the responsibility on the individual to “take proper care” of a gun, the less access a criminal will have to said gun, and the less likely he will be to carry one.
The “rarer” it is to have loaded weapons lying around the house, or for people to be carrying guns in public, the more likely it is for the gun toting criminal to be caught for carrying a gun and taken off the streets - or to have the gun taken off him.
It seems like you see gun ownership as a dangerous hobby that society tolerates because enough of us want it. It is more than that. There are significant benefits to private ownership of guns.
I don’t think anyone has said that there is no cost to legal ownership of guns. Several people argue that the costs are outweighed by the benefits.
What is the benefit in the cost benefit analysis of tobacco or alcohol?
There are clearly cases where the legal right to own guns has been beneficial.
Its not like you can outlaw guns and the guns just disappear. Criminals will keep their guns and the law abiding citizens will turn them in and the vast majority of gun homicides will continue to occur.
Of course there are more guns, the rate of gun sales vastly exceeds the rate of guns being destroyed or breaking even in normal times.
The claim that gun sales increased due to fears of gun control are not just claims. The price of a $1200 AR-15 more than doubled the month after Sandy Hook. This was over fears of an AWB.
The price of a 30 round magazine went from under $10 to $100 over fears of a high capacity magazine ban.
The store shelves were empty and the only things still left for sale were overpriced junk guns that were cobbled together from spare parts.
I think there is a growing level of background radiation on the gun issue. People are becoming more aware of the issue and while the gun control side controls very few votes (how many single issue gun control voters do you know? I know more than a handful of single issue gun rights voters) but that can change if the gun rights side overplays its hand.
Regularly? Probably less than 50%. I go to the range regularly and I probably fire my pistol once a month, if that.
At 21 feet you can hit the center target fairly well with very little practice. Trying to get really tight groups takes a lot of consistent effort to maintain. Many people get “good enough” then put their gun away for an emergency.
To some extent he is just being argumentative. But what he really seems to be trying to do is say that the gun rights side is just making shit up (and only being correct by happenstance) and imply that there is some sort of conclusive science on his side of the argument.
Gun control folks have been trying to capitalize on the increasingly partisan nature of the gun control debate and portray the gun control debate like its the climate change debate for years and it doesn’t work because it isn’t true. The gun control side do not have the facts or the science to support stupid ideas like an assault weapons ban.
When you say momentary, you don’t mean a fleeting moment lasting seconds, you mean a moment that lasts hours and days or at least a few minutes, don’t you? That’s long enough to jump off a roof, isn’t it? You are making it sound like there is some large number of suicides that would be avoided if people had to take the elevator to the roof or tie a noose with bed sheets rather than reach into a safe and pull out a gun.
Can you explain why Americans commit suicide at about the same rates as other industrialized countries if guns are such an effective facilitator of suicides that might not otherwise happen?
Why are the suicide rates in countries like Israel and Switzerland so low despite their relatively high rates of access to guns?
I think these are things that you have to address before you can claim that guns are such a driving force behind our totally average suicide rate.
There are ~500 accidental gun deaths every year, I don’t know if you would call that “very” common, more people get struck by lightning every year. Accidental deaths are going to track gun ownership pretty well, just like car accidents are going to track the number of cars on the road and are a clearly avoidable cost of legal gun ownership.
Mass shootings are likewise a tiny tail that is wagging the dog.
The murder rate in this country is clearly above average for a wealthy industrialized nation. The majority of those murders are being committed with handguns. The bulk of those murders are committed by people who are not legally allowed to possess a gun, so gun control laws would not affect their behavior. There is some portion of gun murders that are committed by people whoa re legally permitted to purchase a gun; these are the only murders you can reasonably expect to reduce with stricter gun control laws.
The way I see it recreational enjoyment is the one *undisputed *benefit of gun ownership. A very large number of US citizens enjoy using guns for recreational purposes.
The other claimed benefit of private gun ownership - an increase in public safety - can hardly be called undisputed. Personally if find arguments that claim guns increase public safety to be unconvincing.
As for the LA riots - I am not sure what you are trying to tell me by mentioning them. Do you believe they would have been a safer affair, if everyone involved had brought a gun?
Pretty much the same: recreational enjoyment. Isn’t that obvious?
Individual cases? I am sure there are. But what does that tell us? If I could find a situation where a gun in the hands of a ten year old has prevented a crime, would you advocate arming kids? The question is not whether guns have brought safety in individual cases but whether they are bringing a net-benefit in safety overall.
That is true. Any kind of gun ban in the US would probably have a small effect in the short term. It might even cause problems, because some of today’s law abiding citizens might not want to be as law abiding any more, if that meant giving up their guns. And handling that would draw police capacity that could better be used elsewhere.
On the pro-side: If law abiding citizens do not carry guns and criminals do, the police might find it easier to lock away the latter.
But again - I am not trying to talk you into gun control. Just saying that as pro-gun arguments go I find the “Guns are fun” argument more convincing than the “Guns make the world safer” one.
The LA riots were violent riots that took place over several days. The police were sent to protect wealthy neighborhoods like Beverly Hills and Bel Air on the principal that the riots were occurring in largely commercial areas (of course there were as many people living in those largely commercial areas as there were in wealthy areas like Beverly hills and Bel Air) and everyone else was left to fend for themselves. You literally saw police driving through crowds of rioters and looters on thyeir way to richer neighborhoods telling storeowners to go home and wait it out while their livelihoods were stolen and burned to the ground.
On the first night of the riots, the rioters looted and burned down half of koreatown. On the second day the Korean storeowners armed themselves and there was no more rioting or arson in koreatown. It is clear that the presence of armed resistance is what deterred rioters and looters from burning down the rest of koreatown.
So in this case, the Korean store owners were much better off for having guns. A clear benefit that goes beyond recreation. Now you can weigh it against the costs of legal private gun ownership but you can’t say its recreational enjoyment versus a lot of dead people
You are ignoring a lot of other benefits.
And when you only count the individual cases where a legal gun ownership imposes a cost and ignore the individual cases where there is a benefit from legal gun ownership it is easy to reach the conclusion that the costs of legal gun ownership outweigh the benefits of legal gun ownership.
How so? Only criminals carry guns in NYC, Chicago, San Francisco and plenty of other places and it doesn’t seem to provide police with much of an advantage at finding and locking away criminals.
Of course. It is MUCH more controversial to say that guns provide a net safety benefit than to say that recreational hunting and target shooting are fun. But it doesn’t mean that legal guns are not a net safety benefit.
I have not followed the news on the LA riots. If your account of events is accurate, LA police have - for whatever reason - entirely failed to do what would have been their duty, which is to protect citizens and uphold the law. Should it not be the first order of business to find ways to get them to do their job, instead of arming civilians to do it for them?
As for the effect of the Koreatown armament there may be a few questions left:
Did the riots continue elsewehere? If so, could it be that the armament simply deflected the violence to easier targets instead of actually *reducing *violence?
Also you seem to be describing a situation where the lawful citizens are armed and the criminals are not. Is that the norm?
Not sure if this is relevant to a gun thread, but what are the benefits of tobacco and alcohol I am ignoring? Are these benefits relevant to keeping the two legal?
True. Both sides of the discussion can point to long lists of incidents that support their position. If you want to establish whether or not guns provide a net benefit to public safety, looking at these individual incidents will not contribute much.
I admit to not knowing all that much about US policework.
Today a criminal who commits a gun-related crime can only be apprehended by the police after the fact. In countries with tight gun control the process of acquiring the weapon already constitutes a crime. Criminals can be apprehended for arming themselves even before they actually use their weapons. That *should *provide the police with some leverage. To what extent it actually does that in the US I do not know.
No, it does not mean that. The point I was making when I replied to XT earlier is that a nation might decide to allow guns for the (undisputed) recreational benefit, even if there is no added safety benefit of even a safety hazard. Living with the hazard would then be the price to pay for the freedom to enjoy the benefit.
Your own approach is to claim that there simply is no price to pay in terms of public safety. Of that I am not convinced.
Frankly, the police couldn’t have stopped the riots. There simply aren’t enough of them, there never are. They had bring in the military. We had armored vehicles rolling down the street to reinstate peace. I think you have a misconception about what a policeman’s duty is and what their aspirational goals are.
This is just a guess but I suspect you have never lived in a high crime neighborhood. Police are mostly there to catch criminals AFTER a crime has been committed. They are not likely to be there as a crime is being committed. So a cop might be able to catch your rapist but they are highly unlikely to stop that rapist from raping you.
It is entirely possible that the rioters went somewhere else and burned down the stores of unarmed storeowners. So?
The rioters were not unarmed, they just didn’t want to get shot at. But to be fair the majority of rioters were unarmed and they avoided looting and burning down stores that had armed defenders.
People just want them.
I have not found comprehensive information that breaks down how many gun crimes and gun murders are committed by people who are legally allowed to purchase firearms (IOW the universe of crimes and murders that MIGHT be avoided in the absence of a legal right to private gun ownership). There is a LOT of disagreement over how frequently guns are used defensively, the numbers range from about 100,000 times a year to over 2 million times a year.
Prohibited persons (which includes among other things: felons, wifebeaters, and the adjudicated mentally ill) are not allowed to own a gun. In places like NYC, virtually no civilian is allowed to own or carry a gun at any time. If you are caught with a gun in NYC, you are subject to a minimum of a year in jail. It doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference. YMMV.
Where do I say there is no price to pay? Are you sure you are not caricaturizing my position? Every gun rights proponent I know will say that gun accidents harm and kill people and that these deaths would not occur but for the legal right to own guns, they acknowledge that legal gun owners can commit crimes that are exacerbated by their gun. The gun rights argument is that the benefits of legal private gun ownership outweigh these costs.
It was not my intention to misrepresent your position. Guns are a precondition for gun violence and gun accidents, and I know that you are not blind to that. But you are saying that the positive effects on public safety outweigh the negative ones. So if I say that a net-negative effect on public safety is the price society pays for the freedom to own them, your position is that that price does not exist.
You are right in your assumption: I have never lived in a high crime neighborhood. Moreover I live in Central Europe, a region where violent crime is generally less prevalent than in the US. My perception of what police work is or should be about has certainly been shaped by this.
Over here most countries have police units that specialise in riot control. Of course that does not mean that these units are capable of preventing all riots, but backing away from violent riots, basically leaving citizens to fend for themselves is never an option. Neither is deploying the military internally to fight civilians - that would be illegal under most circumstances over here.
But even though crime rates may be lower, crime of course does exist and European police would agree that it is much harder to catch a criminal before the crime is committed than after. But that is not the same as saying that crime prevention is not an important part of the job. And in the US? I seem to remember that L.A. police aspire “to protect and to serve”. With an attitude that amounts to “can’t do anything about it anyway” they would be aiming quite low.
I don’t know if it does or not. Neither does the gun control side. Perhaps the negative effect of guns in society is greater than the positive effects but we can’t get rid of all guns only the ones owned by people who would obey the law.
I do think that there is currently no NET cost to the continued legal private ownership of guns.
Deploying the military is generally unacceptable here as well but there is a hybrid entity here called the national guard that can be deployed to Iraq and the streets of LA.
That is not their attitude so much as it is the reality. What can a cop do when you are being raped in the underground garage? They can’t be everywhere.
The LA riots were a real eye-opener for me. Any argument about gun control, in my eyes has to address the LA riots and the aftermath 9where they confiscated many of the guns that the shopkeepers used to defend themselves and their property.