What agency with the skills and staff to do such research on a national scale would you suggest take up such studies?
FBI. ATF.
National Crime Information Center.
I don’t dispute for one moment that gun-related violence would plummet significantly if guns were banned. But the 2nd Amendment is the 2nd Amendment. Until it’s abolished, it’s the law. Don’t like gun violence? Then repeal it.
You are in a crowded dance club. Someone on the other side of the club starts firing.
Every time they shoot someone, it furthers their agenda.
Every time they miss, they further their agenda.
Every bullet you fire back that goes through him & hits someone else furthers his agenda.
Every bullet you fire back that misses and hits someone else furthers his agenda.
If the person shooting back has a crystal clear shot, and if the bullet will definately stop inside of the gunman, then its a good thing.
Any other result leads to a very bad thing, IMHO.
You know we are not just talking about theories here right? what i said wasn’t an opinion.
But where do the guns used by those emboldened criminals originate? Id wager a majority of the guns used by criminals were originally purchased legally and thru whatever means wound up in a criminal’s hands.
But would violence? (Who gives s hit about "gun violence’ what we care about is* all violence*)And other nations have strong gun controls but higher violent crime, such as Mexico.
Right. Because the only time guns are dangerous is when they are being used by Bad Guys in the comission of a crime. Law-abiding gun owners never accidentally shoot themselves while looking down the barrel of their loaded gun, or shoot their spouses because they thought they heard a burglar, or leave their guns out where their kids can play with them. :rolleyes:
Gun violence is not just about criminals - it’s also about accidents, and simple human stupidity. It’s a public health issue, which is the answer to:
Yes. Nothing to do with Bad Guys. Lots to do with mental health, because access to guns positively correlates with suicide. Don’t believe me, believe Harvard.
Public. Health. Issue.
What about homicide/suicide rates? Are they also higher in these countries with stronger gun control?
Suicides: Japan is much higher than the USA.
United Sates come in @ #108 in murders. Brazil, South Africa & Mexico are much higher.
Here is a table which breaks down gun deaths by suicides and others, and also has a column for unintentional deaths. Let’s look at France vs the US - these are per 100K people.
France: Total: 2.83, 0.21 non-suicide 2.61 suicide. 0.04 unintentional
US: Total: 10.54, 3.43 non-suicide, 6.69 suicide, 0.18 unintentional.
So we have almost three times more gun suicides, make of that as you will, but 15 times more non-suicides. And 4 times more unintentional deaths thanks to guns.
This is per 100K - you’d have to have a lot more terrorist activity than there is to close this gap - even assuming that the current level of guns in the US could stop them all, which it can’t.
If we had enough guns to really make terrorists scared, these numbers would of course increase.
BTW, I believe I read yesterday that more 4 year olds have been killed by guns last year than cops - but I can’t find the reference right now.
I bet some of the gun lovers actually assume that there are weekly mass shootings in one area, and so this plot is reasonable. Though I did read somewhere that since not too long ago (1990?) more people have died by gun than died by gun in the entire Civil War. Maybe all wars. So we may be heading to a world where your story makes sense.
Using data from the World Health Organization (for suicide) and UN Office on Drugs and Crime (for homicide), for the year 2011 (since not all countries have reported data for subsequent years yet), and adding together the “rates” from those two sources (which is probably not strictly correct; suicide rates are age-adjusted and homicide rates aren’t, but in both cases they are rates per 100,000 population):
U.S. “combined suicide/homicide” rate for that year was 16.0. That’s somewhat better than Belgium (17.3) or Finland (16.4), and somewhat worse than France (14.3). It’s rather noticeably worse than Canada (11.0) or Australia (10.2), but rather better than the combined suicide/homicide rate of Japan (18.5), substantially lower than the rates for South Korea (26.8) or Mexico (27.3), and way, way lower than the combined suicide/homicide rate for Jamaica (43.0).
So, in 2011 Japan was way less “violent” than Jamaica but a bit more “violent” than the USA, and the USA was more “violent” than Canada, a bit less “violent” than Finland or Belgium, and not nearly as “violent” as South Korea and Mexico–which were both about equally “violent”. And nobody was a “violent” as Jamaica. (Jamaica has very strict gun control laws by the way. Also, nearly all of the combined homicide/suicide numbers for Jamaica are in fact homicide, not suicide.)
Of course it probably makes no sense whatsoever to look at homicide and suicide together like that–it’s a classic “apples and oranges” lumping together of things which shouldn’t be lumped together. It has, however, become very standard for gun-control proponents to lump together homicides perpetrated with firearms and suicides committed with firearms as “gun deaths”.
One incident every 20 years or so is much better odds than ten incidents per week.
Here’s an example of how the more people who carry, the more reckless shootings there will be. Recently, a woman used her legal weapon to shoot a fleeing shoplifter at Home Depot.
Shoplifting from Home Depot is not a valid reason for her to use her gun in the first place, and certainly not when she’s shooting into the parking lot where bystanders could be hit.
It could be that one day she will actually stop a BGWAG, but in the meantime there will be numerous incidents like this where innocent people may get hurt.
Well, presumably not, since if you behave like this your firearms licence is revoked . . . surely?
this is one reason why concealed-carry permits shouldn’t be allowed. Ever. For any reason. It’s the stupidest idea I have ever heard of. Stable, reasonable people don’t get concealed-carry permits, which means only crazy superhero wannabes trigger happy people get them, which means that a lot of innocent or at least mostly innocent people are going to get shot.
The stats very clearly show that owning a gun does not improve your safety or the safety of your family; quite the opposite. Guns in the home ending up killing inhabitants of that home is such a problem the medical community considers gun ownership to be a public health problem, like a disease.
The increase in shall issue concealed carry laws, combined with the significant decline in violent crime is a problem for your story. As far as fairy tales go, it’s not very good either.
Oh, yeah. Florida wasn’t actually the first state to go “shall issue” but it was the first state to really bring the issue to public consciousness, back in 1987. Back in '87, there were like 20,000 murders and non-negligent manslaughters in the U.S. (out of a total population of 242 million, for an annual rate of about 8.3 killings per 100,000 population). But by 2012 there were estimated to be as many as 8 million Americans with concealed carry permits. Not surprisingly, by 2012 there were 8,014,173 murders and non-negligent manslaughters that year–an annual rate of over 2,561 homicides per 100,000.
I live in a red state–and I have relatives in Texas; just got back from a family reunion out there–and it’s pretty bad down here. Everyone I know has been murdered, many of us more than once. I’ve been murdered myself five or six times. Hell, I was gunned down in cold blood just last week after I took some guy’s parking place at the Super Wal-Mart.
Maybe the problem will take care of itself: 2 Concealed Carry Holders Kill Each Other In Road Rage Incident