You’re making it sound linear. If we reduced the number of lawful gunowners by half, we would not reduce gun crimes by half. Not even close.
So how much gun crime is committed by people who legally possess guns? For example, what percentage of gun murders were committed by people who lawfully possessed guns?
Why wouldn’t it? The risk/reward just changed significantly. I can rob a bank and the security guard will have to try to stop me with a whistle maybe. I can rob a convenience store with some assurance that the clerk will not pull a gun on me when I look away for a second. I can invade someone’s home and take them hostage with relative assurance that there is not a gun somewhere in the house.
Does the security guard at the bank deter bank robbers?
Your solution is not pareto optimal. You seem to think that it is an unmitigated good to get rid of guns. There is a benefit to having legal access to guns in society and you have to weigh those benefits to the costs of having legal access to guns in society. Considering that most gun crimes are committed by people who are not allowed to have guns, the cost to having legal ownership of guns is not as high as you seem to think and the benefit of having guns is probably higher than you think.
Of course I can. There are videotaped cases of people who wanted to shoot someone being deterred of killed by someone with a gun.
Gun violence? I don’t know. But do you have a cite that fewer guns in this country will lead to less violence (cun related or otherwise)?
You mean guns are correlated with violence in homes (Did the study you linked correlate with gun violence or just violence generally? Was the gun violence committed with the gun that was kept in the home?)
To answer honestly, no, but I assume the amount of people armed on a base would be higher than the general population. However, I would also assume that armed personnel would be closer, so the expectation of a more heavily armed populace to deter would-be shooters would still be present. Plus also, it was an army base, most people would think that you’re just going to just face women and children and would expect some resistance. So therefore the face that even in the face of that a shooter was undeterred makes me believe that no amount of gun deregulation would be a significant deterrence
That’s not the only thing the law would affect. We’re not simply taking out half the guns from a population and leaving in place everything else. A full gun ban would criminalize every private gun use so that people would even be able to use it legally. I believe that would make people less likely to use it, as any use in public would notify law enforcement that you had one. And unless you wore big jackets and had hidden gun holsters, you couldn’t even bring handguns out into public or else it would be reported and confiscated. More people would have their guns hidden and not within arm’s length, rendering even the hidden ones less useful.
Meanwhile, like I’ve mentioned in previous gun threads, guns aren’t as easy as drugs to smuggle. You can’t hide a gun in your rectum and pass through security. You can’t secretly grow your own guns in your closet. With guns being illegal, the availability of them would decrease even in the hands of criminals. It may not immediately reduce gun crime, but it will in the long run and I’m perfectly fine with some initial violence leading to a long term reduction
Considering that the GOP has banned for some years the ability for the federal government to do data collection on gun stats, there will be lots of competing studies. Let me answer that by asking you this: what amount, percentage, or stat will you accept as a reasonable amount that the US should have without doing more for gun control? How high does it have to get for you to take steps, whatever they may be, to reduce gun crimes and what steps would those be? I want to know that this isn’t just some rhetorical question about gun crimes, that there is some amount that will move you to action. If this is one of those questions where I answer and you reply that freedom is worth more, then its a pointless sidetrack.
I’ll admit my desire to ban guns go farther than most people, but that’s because I’m talking about what I would do if I could. There’s a lot of middle-ground solutions I’d be willing to settle for. For example, even with no gun crime or as little as Japan, I’d still want full background checks for all purchases and incentivize companies to make so-called “smart guns” that can only be fired by the owner. I think those are natural progressions towards future gun safety and am unwilling to simply stay at the status quo no matter the level of violence
The fact is that criminals don’t go into situations thinking that they’re going into a gun fight. Even places like Texas have bank robberies. The thing that’s always ignored in these debates is this: Right now, the US has pretty lenient gun laws. As a security guard, you can carry. Why are there still bank robberies? If your logic is absolute, shouldn’t there be absolutely no bank robberies at all? And since most places have lax gun laws, shouldn’t there be absolutely no home robberies in red states? But it still happens because people don’t care that others might be armed, its simply not something they take into account. So I’m fairly confident that even with a total gun ban, crime would not significantly go up
Possibly, but I’d argue its probably his presence there more than anything. A security guard that’s unarmed probably deters just as much criminals as an armed one.
Maybe in a society that isn’t as violent as the US. For example, its always brought up that countries like Switzerland has many guns but few gun crimes. Contrast that with Japan which has little guns and little gun crimes. For some reason, the US is the worst of both worlds: lots of guns and lots of gun crimes. I cannot readily explain why we have so much but to me, it doesn’t seem like we’re ready for it somehow. Maybe get rid of the 2nd Amendment, wait a 200 years until everyone who’ve lived in this time period who has free access to guns and are obsessed with it to die, then we bring it back slowly.
You mean like during a crime, when someone else has a gun pointed at them?
No stat will be perfect. Why don’t you tell me what it would take for you to accept that a decrease in guns would lead to less gun violence? Again, simple history shows that I could bring up any stat I want but it will suffer from not being perfect. There’s always an excuse why that particular stat doesn’t fit.
The “simple history” in question is the forty-year trend of year-on-year drops in crime and murder in the U.S. even as gun regulations have been rolled back, and the fact that gun bans in other English-speaking countries had no effect on their crime and murder rates.
The “excuse” is that the data shows gun laws and gun availability have no relationship to crime or murder levels. To you, reality is a diversionary tactic from your agenda. Change your thinking.
This is not necessarily a study, but more of an aggregation of past studies, including the one you referred to earlier. In that sense, it suffers in some repsects from those same similar weaknesses, as well as others from various other studies it included. Some of the more prominent studies included in this analysis was the 1986 and 1993 Kellerman studies which concluded that varying rates of increased risk of homicide and other bad events ranging from 43 times to 2.7 times, with each of these figures laughable when the study methodology is examined, like having a control group dissimilar to the test group, not controling for guns brought into the home from another source, and finding that many other factors presented greater risk factors than firearm existence.
Ultimately I don’t think anyone disputed that firearms present a risk - of course they do. As I said before, a more meaningful question is whether those risks are outweighed by the benefits. This study also makes no attempt to address that question.
Cite? Define used, if I have a gun in every single room of the house 24 hours a day for decades but none are fired in the house, have they been used? Are you distinguishing between use by the resident non-prohibited person vs. others?
What argument of mine do you think isn’t being supported? I’d be glad to oblige.
This analogy doesn’t really work and here is why: When gun control advocates call something reasonable, the argument then becomes whether it is reasonable or not. When a person proposes regulation, the argument is not whether it is in fact regulation.
I was trying to avoid further interaction here because there is just no point, but I’m going to wrap up my contribution to this topic with a couple of closing comments. First of all let’s cut out the pretending that lax guns laws have anything to do with reduced crime, since we all know that demographic factors have been causing crime rates to fall all over the industrialized world that was affected by things like the post-war baby boom, and we’ve made other improvements in social conditions and law enforcement, too. The factors hold across almost all western nations.
Secondly let’s stop trying to pretend that there is some subtlety about the numbers that requires careful statistical analysis and nuanced interpretation. There isn’t. For instance as I cited in #123, the per capita mortality from handguns in 2011 was: Great Britain 0.13, Germany 0.51, Canada 1.5, United States 34.4. It’s beyond a freaking order of magnitude!
Or as I think I’ve mentioned before, pick any year for handgun homicides – I happen to have 1998 but the proportions are much the same for any year:
In 1998 handguns murdered:
373 people in Germany
151 people in Canada
57 people in Australia
19 people in Japan
54 people in England and Wales, and
11,789 people in the United States
But do enjoy the fine opportunity I offer here to point out for a second time that I’m an idiot with no understanding of statistics, since I didn’t adjust these numbers for population. So why don’t you go ahead and do that. Adjust them to per-capita numbers and see what you get. I think what you’ll find in a comparison with the rest of the world on any basis, no matter how you slice it, is what Rebecca Peters, a Johns Hopkins University fellow specializing in gun violence, described as “a public health emergency”, an ongoing epidemic of gun violence like nowhere else in the civilized world in peacetime.
When numbers are this far out of whack, in the face of the absolutely staggering numbers of guns that exist in the US, you don’t need a “control group” – as you suggested the first time you kindly asserted my alleged ignorance of statistics – to establish that this is no statistical happenstance, but an obvious causation. It’s just a transparent attempt to deflect attention away from the clear answers. It’s like if you gave an experimental drug to a random group of 50 patients and the next day all of them were dead, you wouldn’t ask “and how is the control group doing?”. It would be pretty damn clear to anyone not trying to avoid the issue that the thing was seriously harmful. This is motivated reasoning at its worst and most insidious.
I rarely involve myself in gun debates any more, so forgive me for expressing one more time some honest frustration. America has so much gun violence because it has more guns by far per capita than any other civilized country in the world and it has virtually no laws to regulate them. It’s just that simple. The CDC once established that children die in the US from intentional and accidental gunshots at a rate higher than the total in all the other 12 countries studied combined. Conventional lawn darts were banned – banned outright – after three children died. Hundreds of kids die every single year from gunshots, but absolutely nothing is done. It’s completely insane. I’m not talking about whether gun laws are “too strong” or “too weak”, I’m talking about the fact that there are virtually no obstacles to anyone getting any kind of gun at any time, for any reason, no matter how deranged they are. Sure there are some ineffective token efforts at gun laws, but by typical world standards, gun laws are virtually non-existent.
Neil McDonald, a long-time CBC reporter based in Washington, recently wrote an emotional farewell when he left his long-time posting and came back to Canada, in which he praised and defended many aspects of the US and said that in many ways, it had a lot to teach the rest of the world. This is true. He also said “the tolerance for guns here, frankly, borders on insane”. The problem isn’t that the statistics are somehow “flawed” or that there isn’t some mythical control group to compare anything – the real problem is that this has become entirely a religious issue that’s impossible to discuss rationally.
It seems that it doesn’t matter how absolutely awful the numbers are, how horrifying the carnage – someone is always going to find a way to spin the numbers – “they’re not as bad as traffic accidents”, “the US is different from other countries”, whatever. If there was ever in the past any gun argument moored to logic, it has broken its moorings and long since drifted away to a place that has never been illuminated by the slightest glimmer of the light of rationality. The gun culture has the fanatical devotion of an Islamic theocracy, with just as little reality, and wreaks just as much harm. Which is why I rarely bother with such debates any more. I really just came in here to point out – in #121 – the glaring fallacies in your original argument about alleged home invasions.
I have clearly stated that there is NO CORRELATION WHATSOEVER between gun laws and crime. Read.
These are MAGIC numbers that don’t follow mathematical or scientific laws. You can look at them and just decide what they mean, just like you can look at an autistic child and know vaccines did it, or look at a banana and know it didn’t evolve, right?
Sound statistical practices don’t apply to big numbers.
Clearly.
The issue is not “population,” it’s that you don’t understand what an independent variable is.
The “ongoing epidemic” is killing fewer and fewer people each year. I guess catching a case of handguns from an unwashed doorknob isn’t as easy as it used to be.
You always need a control group if you are trying to show the effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable. Any 9th grader knows this. There is no “unless the numbers involved are really big” exception.
Every time you post, you’re doing more than enough asserting for the both of us.
That’s exactly what you would ask. Well, probably not what YOU would ask, since your mind apparently boggles at the concept of two-digit numbers. But it’s what anyone who knows the first thing about experimentation and statistics would ask.
I don’t see you involving yourself in any debates here, just loudly asserting that your magic rock keeps tigers away.
The data do not support this assertion. Especially the data about American violence drastically declining every year for the last 40.
The concepts of control groups and experimental design actually are pretty simple, in that they are successfully taught to average high school freshmen every year. I’ll let you figure out the implications of your inability to grasp them.
Actually, you were talking about your spectacular failure to understand the positive data, and slipping into the shrieking normative argument about what the laws should be only when shown that you lack a high schooler’s ability to use mathematical reasoning.
It’s not markedly harder to get a gun in Canada than the U.S., and a great deal of Canadians do in fact have them. This is evidence that gun laws and prevalance alone are a poor explanation of differing crime rates, as opposed to other differences between the countries. That you and Neil McDonald are unaware of this just shows that you live in a bubble of people who aren’t interested in learning anything about guns in the first place.
The statistics are fine. Your interpretation of them is based on a creationist-level understanding of science. The religion is yours, which states that if reality doesn’t match the way you believe things to be, reality is wrong.
The numbers have gotten much less awful every year for the last 40. Your religious belief in the existence of ever-escalating “horrifying carnage” notwithstanding.
Go take a 9th grade math class and then get back to me about rationality. You’re constantly on the verge of a shrieking, think-of-the-children breakdown in this post. It’s unbecoming.
[QUOTE=wolfpup]
It seems that it doesn’t matter how absolutely awful the numbers are, how horrifying the carnage – someone is always going to find a way to spin the numbers – “they’re not as bad as traffic accidents”, “the US is different from other countries”, whatever.
[/QUOTE]
Ironic, since you are doing the same thing, only spinning them to make your own argument. Personally, I’d compare them to alcohol related deaths, and then go back and look at those countries you showed us an ask you a serious question…do you feel equally as passionate about alcohol prohibition in the US and those other countries? I mean, look at the carnage and think of the children! A hell of a lot more folks are killed every year world wide by alcohol than evil nasty guns (literally millions…somewhere between 2-3 million world wide if I’m recalling correctly). In most of those countries you listed the deaths per capita that are alcohol related are pretty comparable to death per capita from guns in the US, so, are you crusading against that too?
The thing about this subject is that it underscores societies decisions and how they have a real world impact on deaths. Societies decide what they will allow and what their tolerance for death is for a given action or right. We tried prohibition of alcohol, and it even worked…the deaths per capita in the US during prohibition dropped substantially, especially those caused by chronic drinking (liver disease and the like). Despite that, as a society we chose to repeal prohibition and allow our citizens to buy and use alcohol again, even though we KNEW this would have a (very large) non-zero effect on deaths related to alcohol use. No doubt banning guns would (eventually, after decades or more) have a similar effect…gun deaths would eventually drop significantly, since most citizens wouldn’t have them anymore, once you managed to get them out of circulation, get them rounded up and assuming you could get US citizens to cooperate (probably about as well as they did during prohibition :p). But I doubt we WILL try and prohibit or ban guns, even hand guns, and if we did I doubt it would have the profound effect folks like you think it would, since really the underlying causes of violence in the US isn’t guns, it’s more structural. And, even if it DID have a similar effect to the alcohol prohibition we had in the 20’s and 30’s, as a society we probably would still repeal it eventually anyway, since societies make choices even knowing there will be a non-zero number of deaths associated with those decisions.
You really came in here to rant and bellow and also to shake your head at how stupid and deluded Americans are, and to use statistics to show how much more civilized other countries are and how uncivilized and stupid Americans are. You used BIG SCARY NUMBERS and statistics to do it with and rub our noses in it. 11,000! Big Number™!! Kids killed…hundreds!! Carnage! Think of the children! As if Americans are too stupid and ignorant to know that people die in the US due to guns.
Sure you are. Good grief. And you are using stats and hyperbole to make your point, as well as painting the US with a broad brush, as if our gun laws are the same coast to coast and they are all ‘ineffective token efforts’ and ‘virtually non-existent’. :rolleyes: But the bigger issue is you are still hung up on using other countries as a yard stick that the US has to measure up to, which they aren’t and which we don’t and don’t want too. We, as a society have made this choice about allowing guns to be owned by private citizens. It’s a choice that has a tangible cost. Perhaps one day that cost will be considered too great and we will decide to change that more than we already are. Or perhaps not. WE will decide, and that decision will be what we collectively want, not because we need to conform to what other countries have decided to do.
In the mean time, those other countries on your list are welcome to do what they like. But they should know that they have their own glass houses and should perhaps consider that their own choices on various things also have a non-zero cost in lives…and some of them cost them more lives in those categories than our choice to allow guns costs us. Japan, for instance on your list there should perhaps consider their suicide and alcohol deaths stats before getting TOO smug. The UK should consider that while 11k US deaths due to hand gun violence is a lot (in a country over 300 million) that 8k deaths due to alcohol related causes in a population of 64 million is kind of a bigger deal. And so on. I’m sure you will hand wave this away, but to me it’s all about choices a society makes and how those choices have real world consequences that have to be lived with.
IIRC you are from Canada…well, I got really nuffin there, so you can continue to be smug if you like.
So you discount a study, but you didn’t really bother to look at it? From my second cite:
[QUOTE=The Accessibility of Firearms and Risk for Suicide and Homicide Victimization Among Household Members: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis by Andrew Anglemyer, PhD, MPH; Tara Horvath, MA; and George Rutherford, MD]
We found strong evidence for increased odds of suicide among persons with access to firearms compared with those without access (OR, 3.24 [CI, 2.41 to 4.40]) and moderate evidence for an attenuated increased odds of homicide victimization when persons with and without access to firearms were compared (OR, 2.00 [CI, 1.56 to 3.02]).
[/QUOTE]
And what difference would it make if the gun violence was committed with the gun that was kept in the home? If the mere presence of a gun in the home increases the risk for gun violence (perhaps because confronting an armed person with a gun escalates the violence), the result is the same.
[QUOTE=Bone]
Ultimately I don’t think anyone disputed that firearms present a risk - of course they do.
[/QUOTE]
So why are you trying so hard to discount the studies which support this conclusion?
This is what I was referring to when I said that you should do your own research, which prompted you to write this
You’ve twice suggested that a better study would look at the cost/benefit comparison of keeping a gun in the home, which suggests that you believe that they are more beneficial than they are risky. If that’s your belief, than show what data supports it. Because I suspect that it is a myth that you tell yourself, and is not true.
[QUOTE=From the link, since nobody bothers to look at them unless they are quoted]
For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.
[/QUOTE]
Now, I’m sure you will quibble with the study. It only looked at 3 cities over 12 or 18 months. And a review of “police, medical examiner, emergency medical service, emergency department, and hospital records of all fatal and nonfatal shootings” in those cities invites reporter bias, fails to account for alternate explanations, and is not definitive.
Blah, blah, blah…where’s the data to support your own belief system?
As I’ve taken pains to point out, guns aren’t my hobby, but I’m fine if they are yours. I like to spend time in the outdoors, too, but I’d rather be camping than shooting things. But if getting bloody is your idea of a good time, knock yourself out.
Or maybe you like guns because you like shiny expensive toys. So do I; boats, planes…I get that sort of interest, too.
But don’t put a gun under your pillow because you think you are going to John McClane the bad guys who take your dog hostage. It’s not a way to make your home safer, and that’s not a sensible reason to own a firearm.
Hardly. When a person proposes regulation, the argument is whether it is a violation of the 2nd amendment, as if that is the only special amendment not subject to rules and standards.
Do you agree with HurricaneDitka’s magnanimous sentiment that there are “lines” that can be drawn that you can live with?
[QUOTE=HurricaneDitka]
I think full-autos should be legal to own in the same way that semi-autos are, but I’d be willing (here’s a line I am willing to accept) to do all the NFA paperwork and deal with the associated delays and pay the additional fee if it meant I could have full-auto version of modern sporting rifles. The 1986 machine gun ban should go away and the NFA registry should be re-opened.
The NFA has provisions for handling “destructive devices”, and I think those are working just fine (there’s another line I can live with).
[/QUOTE]
Gee I wish I could take one tiny fraction of what the other person says, misconstrue it, and build up a bad argument based on that and pretend I have contributed to the discussion. Wait…in fact, I CAN do that!
In fact I’m the only one who gives a damn about reality. That you cannot see that “guns” are essential in “gun violence”, in fact by definition they require it, is a sad state of the power but utter lack of valid discourse in the pro-gun side. Why would you even say bazookas only harm guilty people like some kind of court-justified homing missile? And your claim that bullets fired from law-abiding citizens curve around innocent people to hit a crack dealer is sadly lacking in citations. For you to even suggest that quirk of physics as the basis of all gun deregulations shows that they didn’t bother to even cover that subject in your masonic temple upbringing :dubious:
Just because I acknowledge that firearms present a risk doesn’t mean that any agenda driven study data must be accepted. I discount them because they are poorly done and should be discounted.
Yes, I stated that I believe a better study would attempt to address that question. That isn’t an argument so there is nothing there to support. Identifying weakness in data presented does not require presentation of contradictory data. If you told me it was raining outside because a ouija board told you so it would be a valid criticism to say that ouija boards are not good predictors of weather. There is no need to check the weather service or go outside to determine if it is actually raining or not. Of course the counterfactual is great evidence, but not necessary where the initial claims are poorly constructed.
Well yeah. Kellerman is notoriously agenda driven when conducting his studies. We can argue about the nuances of each but essentially he has little credibility in the field of firearm studies. When a Kellerman study is presented, I know two things. First is it will be bad. The second is either the person presenting the data is on one side of the debate, or they are unaware of Kellerman’s history.
Which belief system do you think that is? I think the data is on my side, but that’s not the basis of my support of gun rights. Ultimately I think I should have the right to defend myself and family with one of the most common and effective means available should I so choose. The utility gained from that outweighs nearly all alleged costs.
Yog poses an interesting question in asking what level of firearm crime by people who legally possess them is acceptable before greater gun control would be acceptable. And once that point is crossed, what steps would those be? It’s interesting because I don’t know. I think that any law that prevents me or people similarly situated (not rich, not a celebrity, law abiding, etc.) from obtaining and carrying firearms for lawful self defense would never be acceptable. I’m okay with background checks in theory, but in practice opposition is multi fold - there is no reason to concede here, and even if such a concession was made, it would be ripe for abuse. As for the question of where the line is on quantity of gun crime - I don’t know. It would simultaneously have to be very high, and the methods to address it would need to be shown as effective.
Again, I think you’ve missed the point here. The point was that the word “reasonable” has been co-opted. It’s because it has a subjective definition and both sides to an argument can claim the other is being unreasonable. The word “regulation” does not suffer from the same weakness - there is an objective definition of the word and no one argues if something is or is not a regulation. Yes there are arguments whether such regulation is or should be permissible, but the word itself isn’t argued over. That’s what I mean when the word has been co-opted. It’s use derails debate, IMO. The word regulation does not suffer from the same weakness. You tried to draw a comparison between the two but the distinction renders the comparison meaningless.
Of course! Hurricane and I may not agree to a T, but I’m thinking there’s more alignment between he and I than me and you.
We don’t have to believe or wonder because we KNOW that lots of American gun owners are willing to risk jail time to ignore or skirt gun regulation that they disagree with.
New York passed a “landmark” gun control law in 2013. It was called the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act of 2013 or the “SAFE” Act for short. It did a lot of really stupid things like limiting magazine capacity to 7 rounds, required background checks for ammunition purchases, and (this is the part that is relevant to your post) required the creation of an “assault weapon registry” and gave owners of assault weapons in New York one year (4/15/13 - 4/15/14) to register them ). Note that this is considered (by many gun grabbers) to be a fairly non-intrusive law. It doesn’t require the “assault weapon” owners to get rid of their guns. It’s just asking them to register them. That’s all. No biggy, right?
New York State had a population of just under 20 million people in 2014, according to the Census Bureau estimate). A bit over 20% of those are under 18, which leaves you maybe 15 million adults in New York. It’s a solidly blue state, having voted for the Democrat in every Presidential election since Reagan. Now, no one knows exactly how many “assault weapon” owners there are in New York, but the NSSF has estimated it at one million, “based on numerous surveys, consumer purchases, NICS background check data and also private-party transactions”.
Any guess as to how many of those one million assault weapon owners complied with the registration requirement?
No public data was released at first, and many of us suspected it was because the number was quite low, and that would embarrass New York. Gun rights groups filed a lawsuit asking for the release of statistics. They won, and New York complied, but not many gun owners did:
only 44,485 assault weapons have been registered by 23,847 gun owners under the SAFE Act. That means that there was roughly a 98% non-compliance rate. This isn’t just a problem with extra-rebellious New Yorkers either. When Connecticut tried something similar, they got an 41,347 registrations out of an estimated 350,000. California had equally-dismal results in 1990.
The bottom line is that most gun owners seem unwilling to register their guns. How many do you think are going to turn them in when ordered to do so?
BTW, it’s a real PITA to compare homicide rates and firearm statistics across countries. John Lott does a pretty good job of explaining some of the issues here, but anyways, I took a look at the UNODC statistics.
According to them, every year the US has roughly 60% of it’s 12-17K murders committed with firearms, and 40% with other means. That means that our murder rate of 4.7 could be broken down to a 2.8 firearm homicide rate and a 1.9 “other means” homicide rate. England has a total homicide rate of 1.0 and Australia’s is 1.1.
In short, if you could wave a magic wand and make every gun it the United States instantly disappear, and not a single one of the would-be gun murderers said, “screw it, I’ll just get a knife and do it that way”, the US would still have a murder rate almost double our English and Australian brethren. “Evil guns” are certainly not the whole explanation of the US’s high homicide rate. Even without guns, we’re a very homicidal nation when compared to Australia and England.
Honest question here, no snark: Is it automatic that you have to assume abuse or some kind of slippery slope when discussing gun control? Is it not enough that I simply want to know what your ideal level of gun control is? Because it feels like to me that every time the discussion might go somewhere, somebody will bring up that the government just may somehow go too far and that shuts down rational discussion.
Think of this as an intellectual exercise: For current levels of gun violence, you get to create and implement any or no gun control. It will never be abused. Just accept that as part of the exercise. Then would you accept something like universal background checks? Or the development of smart guns? Or any number of regulations on the restriction and/or sale of firearms?
If you’re just going to say it can never be done without abuse, feel free to ignore this question and not respond. I feel there’s a level that we can accept imperfection in our laws, like all laws, where we’d still be ok with the law in existence and work to reduce errors (while accepting there always will be some)
It’s difficult to answer in only the hypothetical because to do that reality has to be bent in such a way that doesn’t make sense, or isn’t possible. At that point it’s a flight of fancy rather than reasoned debate. I often find it’s a trap set by the person posing the question, the response will be something along the lines of, ‘why don’t we strive for that then’.
Smart guns are a good example. In theory, this would be a great safety improvement. In reality, it’s used as a tool to ban guns. I think you live in CA and are not a gun owner, but if you somehow wanted to purchase the Gen 4 Glock 26, you would not be able to because it does not contain smart gun technology - a technology that doesn’t exist, effectively banning this gun in CA. Unfortunately I had to settle for the Gen 3. And it’s not like smart gun tech is being restricted from being developed - anyone can do it legally if they want to. There just happens to be no market for it.
So yes, we could engage in a theoretical exercise assuming perfect behavior from all parties, but when that happens can’t we also wish away crime all together? In any event, you asked in good faith, so I’ll answer.
Hypothetically assuming that no system will ever be abused, universal background checks are fine. Mandatory NICS reporting is fine. Registries would be fine. I’m sure there would be other things that would be fine. Magazine limits, any bans, restrictions on carry (unless security is being provided), and things like ammunition sales limits or zoning tactics would never be okay. Like above, I’m sure there would be other things that would never be okay as well.
So I did both, I said what you said, but I answered your question. But here’s the thing - it’s not that there would simply be errors like *‘oops, Johnny got listed as a prohibited person and now he has to go through some paperwork’. * No, not errors. Abuse.
Like, I can’t buy any newly manufactured model of handgun in CA. **At all. ANY of them. ** That’s abuse, not an error. Most of the things that gun rights advocates rally against are not errors - they are abuses. An error is a mistake that upon scrutiny would get corrected. Abuse is deliberately creating a system to restrict gun rights.
And this is why when gun control advocates propose something, I always ask what they are willing to give up or concede. If the answer is nothing, they are not serious. Because abuse is rampant. So unless there is something on the table that addresses those things, then there is no reason to believe the other side is acting in good faith.
Give me a constitutional amendment that treats gun ownership and those who carry as a suspect class subject to strict scrutiny, and I’d go for quite a bit of controls.
Terrific, and I agree. So why do you and others keep insinuating into the conversation the fact that crime rates have dropped over past decades? I was trying to explain that this has nothing whatsoever to do with gun laws, because crime rates are lower everywhere in the western world affected by the same demographics. And yet you bring it up again and again, at last three times in the same damn reply! Why do you do this? e.g.—
[ol]
[li]The “ongoing epidemic” is killing fewer and fewer people each year. I guess catching a case of handguns from an unwashed doorknob isn’t as easy as it used to be.[/li][li]The data do not support this assertion. Especially the data about American violence drastically declining every year for the last 40.[/li][li]The numbers have gotten much less awful every year for the last 40.[/li][/ol]
Perhaps you’re not aware that Neil McDonald is an award-winning journalist with a 40-year career in international reporting, and was based in Washington as the CBC Washington correspondent for the past 12 years. I don’t think he “lives in a bubble”. I would venture to guess he has a better understanding of American politics – gun and otherwise – than most of us. Lord knows, he might even understand statistics!
As for how hard it is to get a gun in Canada, you really need to understand the vast legal and cultural differences, unless you yourself want to live in a bubble. If you want to talk about “bubbles”, I think it would amaze many Americans to see the purely cultural differences – as well as the very considerable legal ones – that are such a factor in the international gun statistics. I realize that it’s regionally very variable, but the way that in many places in the US guns are treated as common commodities like power tools – compared, collected, and bragged about by hobbyists – is just perplexing and chilling to most of the rest of us. Most of us cannot even begin to imagine such a thing. The things that some of these nutcases do, like parading around in public places armed like South American revolutionary guerrillas, would in most countries result in jail terms, possibly lengthy ones if the things were actually loaded.
Of course, and what you may see as preaching is really just the occasional humble gasp of irrepressible astonishment from outside your borders.
I do, however, have my doubts as to whether there can possibly be changes in any foreseeable future. It is just astounding to me that nothing was done after Sandy Hook despite well-meaning attempts to at least do something, nor after Aurora, or any of these mass shooting tragedies, or the cumulative effect of all the lesser ones. I mean really, nothing.
Except maybe the NRA arguing that the solution is for everyone to be armed so they could “take down” the bad guy. What better solution to gun violence than more guns? And after blowing away the bad guy, one imagines them blowing the smoke off the barrel, and twirling the gun down into the holster, with a grim smile that’s some sort of cross between Wyatt Earp and Clint Eastwood.
I’m trying to figure out the logic here. It seems to me that the logical conclusion is that we should have no laws at all, since people disobey them. Just give everyone a gun and let them take care of things themselves. What could possibly go wrong?
John Lott is a mendacious lobbyist for the gun industry and gun culture and a walking, talking exemplar of malignant obstructionism to gun policy reform. Lott never met a fact he couldn’t spin in favor of more guns.
The relevant factor here isn’t the overall homicide rate or overall crime rate which are different problems, but rather the percentage of those homicides attributable to guns, and in particular, recognizing that the combination of a high gun homicide rate with a high overall homicide rate is a particularly lethal combination that tends to be associated with failed public policy in the backwaters of the developing world, and not among major developed nations.
First, there are a significant number of people who would like to see the lowest possible number of guns in society, and are on record as saying so. Evidently their working premise is that firearms are at best a necessary evil, and should be subject to a strict “need” standard- ideally ending in a Britain-level prohibition on guns. It’s not paranoia that such proponents have said that the US needs to be “weaned” off the “gun culture”, and that a program of gradual acclimatization to this ought to be carried out.
Second, governments are inherently power machines and will inevitably, inexorably seek greater control in every area they aren’t actively opposed. This is as automatic as water flowing downhill or smoke rising. To a large extent governments exist to exert power, and making something illegal is a straightforward way of doing this. This institutional interest happily aligns with movements that seek to “reform” society- the moralistic “progressive” movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, or the “liberal” agenda of the later 20th.
Is this a joke? The real problem with these discussion is that whenever you (the collective you, every gun rights opponent) reach the end of a full analysis of a point, showing that the gun-confiscation position is baseless, you immediately retreat into “no one wants to take your guns, why are you so paranoid?”
In this very thread, you have voluntarily labeled yourself a “gun banner” and said you support a “complete gun ban.” These are not words some exaggerator from the other side is putting into your mouth.
The problem with talking to gun confiscators is they are incapable of arguing in good faith and will deny believing things they plainly chose to say.
I just read YogSooth. It seemed pretty clear to me that he or she wanted to ban all shooting, at least outside one’s residence. I don’t agree with that. We here in Pennsylvania would be overrun by deer much worse than we already are. Also, most gun deaths are suicide, and obviously a law against shooting won’t deter that.
However, I fail to find evidence that YogSooth wants to confiscate guns. Maybe I missed it, but everything I saw indicates he or she would allow people to keep their existing arsenals.
My objection to the position of YogSooth, and that of gun enthusiasts, has a common thread. Both propose to solve social problems with force. I think force should be a last resort.
The gun people think they can stop crime with threat of deadly force. The banners – I don’t think there are a lot of them, but I can see YogSooth is one – want to turn a large portion of Americans into criminals. I’d prefer to stop changing laws and instead look at how to change hearts. Ridiculous? That’s what they would have said about cigarettes in the 1950’s. And today we see fewer places to buy cigarettes and fewer buying them – even though buying and selling them is legal. I doubt a campaign to ban cigarettes would have gotten so far.
Because it directly contradicts the message of gun control advocates. It’s not necessarily causal that these dramatic decreases in violent crime occurred along side of wide spread expansions of gun rights. But it is at least a counter to the claim that expansion of gun rights would lead to increased gun violence. Early on in the Shall-Issue movement one of the arguments against expansion of rights was that there would be “blood in the streets” or cities would turn into the wild west and there would be gun fights over parking spaces. When all of these predictions of doom have failed to materialize, it’s informative to point out the predictive failure of gun control advocates.
Maybe, just maybe, gun violence would have decreased even more than it did if gun rights weren’t expanded or were restricted even further. But there is no evidence to suggest this. We can rightfully conclude, that expansion of gun rights has not led to increases in gun violence at the levels predicted by gun control advocates.
