I never claimed that and my argument doesn’t depend on that. Obviously there is a spectrum through the population of people very likely to misuse guns, people very unlikely to misuse guns and a middling percentage. What I claimed is that the people who are very likely to misuse guns can or already have obtained them- that we’re categorizing the results of gun ownership on the basis of a biased sample. IOW, I see no evidence for the claim that a majority of the population are “one bad day” away from homicide. This was basically the “blood in the streets” argument against Shall Issue, and so far every loosening of gun restrictions has failed to produce the plague of homicide that gun control advocates are certain must be the result of more guns. To use an often cited example, take permit holders as your sample population and you get a completely different picture of the results of gun ownership.
Essentially this argument amounts to a proposal for social engineering; that if you only discourage gun ownership enough eventually the [del]proles[/del] public will come around. Speaking for myself I find this an incredibly arrogant and condescending proposal. Only the self-righteous assurance that your position has moral authority on its side, and that anyone who disagrees with you is either misinformed or willfully wrong, could justify that degree of absolutism. When carry advocates promote open carry as a means to desensitize the public against the fear of guns, it’s derided as impossibly foolish; when gun control advocates promote delegitimizing firearms ownership it’s called “dismantling the gun culture”.
To address your specific points above, no one is saying that guns should be used in anything but in an instance of justifiable force; and in fact people who have “blown their head off” of trespassers have been tried and convicted of murder. As for the statistics quoted it’s beyond me to research the cite for the sake of one post, but I would ask if they are perhaps based on the same biased sample I mentioned earlier. If it includes for example every person who owns a gun illegally because they have a felony conviction, or every person who was killed by something other than the gun in that household- like a visitor’s gun- then the numbers are going to be skewed. Let me put it this way: if people who don’t currently own a gun were for some unimaginable reason forced to keep a gun in their home, would this result in a skyrocketing number of homicides? I would suppose a few more; but a doubling of the ownership rate resulting in a doubling of the homicide rate? Nuh-uh.
MORE guns hasn’t worked. Making it easier to get and carry guns in more places hasn’t reduced the violence.
And in “no true Scotsman” fashion - I don’t think you’ve seen “real” gun control in the US, not a concerted effort to get guns off the street.
Most criminals carry guns because they’re simply so easy to get. Make it hard, make an illegal gun a large expense, make it so that it’s simply not economic for a criminal to try to buy one.
It will take time, it will take resources, but as the number of guns comes down, so will the gun violence
There’s no correlation between gun laws/ownership and crime rates. However, crime and murder have, in fact, fallen in the U.S. over the past decades. You can keep barging into these threads and announcing that you aren’t aware of that basic fact because Salon told you that there are mass shooting everyday, if you want.
I maintain that more guns as in more law-abiding people with clean records carrying hasn’t been tried on anything but a small scale yet. In those places where it has, the preliminary results are encouraging.
No we haven’t; but if the example of illegal narcotics is anything to go by there is substantial room for doubt. And while countries like Australia are held up as shining examples of the benefit of banning guns, there are counter-examples like Jamaica, where it achieved little or nothing. Also you have to consider that unlike narcotics the underground market for guns would include otherwise law-abiding people, the die-hard gun rights proponents who would be an ideologically motivated La Résistance. In fact, ten or twenty years from now an illegally fabbed gun may be cheaper than heroin or cocaine is today.
<sigh> Again, of course if no one could obtain guns (doubtful) there would by definition be less gun violence; but what about violence overall? Guns give the small and weak the ability to defend themselves against the large and strong, or a lone person against a gang. If you think that crime-ridden urban areas would become oases of peace and safety once the guns were gone, the centuries of experience before guns were invented tells differently. It’s naive to think that you can take the current death and injury toll of guns and presume that not a single one of those would have happened if there somehow were no guns.
So you keep saying. At least six times now, I think. And yet you are the one accusing others of not understanding statistics, and lecturing us about independent variables! The irony is rich here. :rolleyes:
Correcting the misapprehension that crime is going up by pointing out that it’s going down is not a test of the effect of a variable. I do so enjoy whenever you talk about this subject, though. It’s a way more effective takedown of the anti-gun mentality than anything I could post.
Protect constitutional rights by not having any restrictions what so ever on gun ownership, ammunition, carrying, etc., while at the same time prohibit the criminal and civil prosecution of a person who kills a gun owner, gun carrier, gun seller, or gun manufacturer.
[/QUOTE]
This must be one of those reasonable, common sense gun control proposals I hear so much about.
Naw…if it was really common sense it would have included the optional immediate death penalty clause for owning a gun. I mean, allowing open season on gun owners and gun store operators is certainly a step in the right direction, but you would really need to follow that up with sanctioned death penalties by the state to really get to the level of common sense.
And I haven’t heard anything about allowing for the rape and murder of the gun owners families yet, either. Or anything about their pets, for that matter. All of those need to be covered as well.
They’re not hard to reconcile. It’s clear that nothing can be done federally in the present political climate, because essentially nothing has been done, despite countless mass-shooting tragedies and the ongoing dull roar of daily shootings that don’t even make the news. But the way forward is clear – progressive states have been able to take some actions, and other countries have taken definitive ones. There is no reason to believe that the political climate cannot change with time. It’s mostly the noise of the NRA that keeps churning the fear.
Another poster argues that Australia has more guns than ever, so you guys need to get together and make up your minds which it is.
What I’m supportive of – and what Australia, the UK, Canada, the rest of the Commonwealth and most of the civilized world have done – is put reasonable licensing restrictions on guns, rated and licensed by type for those who have been appropriately screened and qualified.
That’s a very strange interpretation indeed of what is obvious sarcasm – on Maher’s part and mine – that is clearly making a point about the dangers of guns. Meanwhile you have lunatics like Wayne Lapierre, the voice of the NRA, whose solution to mass shootings in schools is to flood all the schools with guns, because “the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”. Right, because this is what elementary schools have always been about: reading, writing, and a hail of gunfire. It’s no wonder that the New York Times called Lapierre’s speech about the Newtown tragedy a “mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant”. This is the guy who recently raised fear-mongering to new heights, throwing red meat to the gun nuts by claiming that American society was collapsing and descending into uncontrolled violent chaos – setting the gun fanatics and survivalists off on another gun buying spree. This is the guy who urged everyone listening to him in another interview that they have to buy a gun or they risk being killed. Now tell us again who is really promoting a state of fear that is going to result in more guns, more gun violence, and more deaths. If you’d like to rephrase or withdraw your comment, go right ahead.
Really? You think there’s something “arrogant” about believing that government has a responsibility for public safety? It’s one of the major reasons that governments exist! This is no more “social engineering” than product safety or environmental legislation, restrictions on controlled drugs, or licensing to drive a car or fly a plane, and less so than tax codes that incentivize certain kinds of individual and corporate behavior in the public interest.
Thank you, and I enjoy your posts, too – for the same reason – especially since you bill yourself as an expert on statistics. Please support your assertions by enlightening us about the following:
1. Where in this thread have I ever stated that crime rates are going up – in the US, or in general?
You stated (for about the sixth time) the complete irrelevancy that “crime and murder have, in fact, fallen in the U.S. over the past decades.” Where did I say otherwise? I clearly stated in #206: " … 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."
So I would ask you to please stop claiming I said things that I did not.
2. And I would ask again why you have seen fit to mention about half a dozen times now that general crime rates are going down in the US, since it has absolutely nothing to do with guns, which, as you may have noticed, is the subject of this discussion.
So nothing can be done, federally, until something can be done. Got it. There’s a lot that’s being done at the state level. So far this year, 28 states have enacted legislation which expands protections of Second Amendment rights, and one state has enacted legislation to reduce those rights.
Do you understand that while some guns were confiscated, the total number could have increased over time? From the wiki:
But, as with the great nation of Canada - gun laws in Australia have no relevance to gun laws in the US. My only question was if you supported confiscation. You neglected to answer. Do you support confiscation?
Yay, Canada!
If you want to call your comment sarcasm, okay. Poe’s law in full effect. I wonder if Muffin would take the same out. Other than that, I find your characterizations of the NRA and statements by LaPierre quite poor.
The price may not be worth it. You think it is, I think its not. Fortunately we live in a country where we have developed a method for determining who wins these arguments. Its called democracy. If you think the second amendment is outdated then just repeal it, all you need is 2/3rds of each house and 3/4ths of the states.
How is the benefit side of a cost benefit analysis irrelevant to the discussion?
OK, if all gun control folks were like you, I think we could get somewhere but too many gun control folks think that any gun control is just one stepping stone on the way to MORE gun control.
Recent history tells us that the GOP knows a lot more about guns than the Democrats. Have you followed the discussions about the assault weapons ban?
I think the question should be, is it reasonable for gun rights folks to feel that way? And I think it is pretty clear that the view is justified. Heck, the most vocal proponents of gun control on this board clearly want to ban guns.
I’m not really sure what you are saying? I never thought you were trying to say that background checks would stop all gun crime. That would be silly.
Thats not what I’m asking. I’m asking why let cops have guns at all? In the face of an armed criminal element, there is a value to a gun in the hands of a cop. Why isn’t there also some value to a gun in the hands of a security guard or a law abiding citizen?
Why the hell wouldn’t criminals be using guns just as frequently? Chicago used to have a total ban on guns. And yet their criminals didn’t seem shy about using them (the same can be said of plenty of places that had a total ban on guns.
I don’t get your point? Are you saying that crime still exists despite the private ownership of guns?
So guns come in from neighboring states? Into whose hands? Criminals right? So how many examples of gun bans doing nothing to decrease violence would it take for you to admit that gun bans might be ineffective in some situations.
You’re just saying that with a national ban criminals would not have an influx of guns and we would see a steady decline in violence (after some period (perhaps a century long) of increased violence), aren’t you? Do you want to conduct a decades long experiment (during which we are all subjected to armed criminals without being armed ourselves) because you THINK that it will have some dramatic effect on gun violence?
This country has over 300 million guns. There is no realistic way to make a significant dent in that number without confiscations. We know that gun bans didn’t really work in places like mexico, so why are you so sure it would work here?
Is the current system abusive? Why not extend it to all gun purchases and not just ones at gun shops? Why does all information have to be destroyed?
They do it with real property, they do it with cars, why not with guns?
In order to attach criminal penalties for failure to report a gun theft, I think the threshhold would have to be pretty high. It seems to me that you would have to satisfy the elements of criminal negligence.
[sarcasm] Ah yes, the NRA;that totally alien foreign power that forces unwanted guns upon the helpless population of the USA.[/sarcasm]
Ah yes, the NRA: the chief national lobbying arm of the millions of Americans who want guns to stay legal.
It’s arrogant that a government should set out to ignore what the people actually want, as evidenced by the representatives they vote into office, and decide that it’ll tell the sheep what’s good for them; and if the sheep don’t agree, tough. You call that democracy?
