This is why you should always have 100K rounds of ammo on hand, or the supply to make them. 
Yet somehow businesses manage to knock them out using the same kind of labor that has a machine shop in their basement. We’re not talking about making IC chips.
Somehow the debate in the USA is about a false dichotomy; guns or no guns. In the rest of the world you can still shoot a gun on a range, hunt with a gun, law enforcement still has guns. We just require meaningful licensing and registration.
Maybe you should try first to remove the manufacturers lobby from its insanely powerful position in your public debate?
It’s about halfway down the page.
If this is about how rather than why, why not try pitting one lobby against another: make it compulsory for each individual weapon to be insured against third party damage and theft (with, of course, much higher premiums for more powerful weapons)? You do it for cars, after all. You’d have also to tie it to strict liability for what’s done with a gun you’ve been careless enough to let someone else use, or even steal.
And by the same analogy, you could have a prior fitness/competence test for owners/users.
And that gives you, however incompletely, the nucleus of a registration system and an incentive to reduce the number of guns around, especially if coupled with a surrender amnesty and a buy-back scheme (financed out of a special levy on the insurance premiums and registration tests - that way there’s a double incentive, since in the long run, you get money for surplus guns, you end up paying less in premiums and levies and if you have fewer guns, there’s less risk of liability for damages).
Or would the insurance lobby be agitating for more people to have guns? Maybe at some point there’d have to be a shift towards tighter regulation of the categories of purpose for which people want a gun, and of the type of weapon suitable for those purposes, and not so much in the way of positive financial incentives as simply a no-questions-asked amnesty for surrendered guns.
Long-term, this is about cultural change: I don’t suppose it’s going to be possible to educate people out of the idea they need a gun for fear of crime for a very long time, if at all. Very, very few people in the UK would take that seriously as a permissible reason for being allowed to have a gun: but it wasn’t until the 1930s or so that that was ruled out in law and regulation. The situation we have now didn’t happen all at once, but stage by stage as public opinion demanded it, and fewer and fewer people have any contact with guns other than those who have a particular association with them.
Recently there was another toddler shot in Georgia, and a poster expressed that they hoped the gun owner went to prison for letting it happen. That made me wonder if there even is such a law in Georgia, and nope.
Laws meant to prevent minors getting hold of guns are called Child Access Prevention laws. There’s evidence that unintentional gun deaths are less likely in states where gun owners face a felony charge if a minor accesses their gun. The laws need to be enforced, though, which reportedly doesn’t always happen. This is understandable because the person who’d be charged with a felony is likely a grieving parent. Tough shit, though. They belong in jail until they pay their debt for being an irresponsible jackass.
I thought you were linking to the stats, that’s just a headline. What constitutes a death by poisoning? Are drug overdoses included?
You’re basically arguing that Prohibition will work. That people would rant and rave - and then hand over the booze. Then once the saloon owners and distilleries are out of business, the artificial “drink culture” will rapidly die. I call bullshit.
How is this gun ban/confiscation/whatever going to make people surrender their guns? The overwhelming response to such restrictions would be passive resistance, people continuing to keep guns hidden in their homes and carrying concealed. This is more or less the case in states that currently heavily restrict guns.
And 2/3 of those gun deaths are actually suicides, not violent murders.
That’s the thing- 11,000 deaths out of 300+ million people is a relative drop in the bucket, and IMO, not worth the time, effort or money that it would take to significantly change the situation.
That is how I look at it and behave now
Can you guarantee that this will apply to all law enforcement with the same penalties, investigation, no cover ups?
Can you guarantee that anyone who enters my home without a warrant does not have a right to life or may I defend myself if I even think I may be in danger?
Another Canadian here. IMHO I honestly don’t think that anything would work because of the mentality of Americans regarding guns and the apparent (to us) near-religious fervour about them.
I don’t think that any policy implemented in the US would change anything.
GusNSpot, I hope the majority of gun owners are like you, but I’m not very trusting. As a citizen, I’d be a lot more comfortable that gun owners are taking appropriate steps to secure their weapon if they will actually be held accountable and have insurance to cover issues that might arise.
The bar for law enforcement officers is already, in general, orders of magnitude higher than that of private individuals that procure firearms. Do you disagree? Police departments and their municipal owners already have insurance, procedures in place, etc. One can argue how well these work, and since the US is a republic there are State to State differences and differences between municipalities. But they already have a lot more in place than private firearm buyers. Not a fair request than a "“no cover up guarantee” is required before raising the bar from the absurdly low altitude it is now.
Anyone entering your home without a warrant has jack squat to do with my proposal that you carry insurance and will be criminally and/or legally liable if your firearm is used in a non-legal manner. If your jurisdiction allows the use of deadly force to someone invading your home without a warrant, then that’s a legal use of your firearm.
Again, I think we are on the same page: secure your piece and use it responsibly. It sounds like you do. If you don’t, then it’s on you. That also means unfortunately on whatever “collateral” damage that may occur, except if that visiting 4 year old manages to blow off siblings head, then at least the survivors will have some sort of monetary compensation instead of the TS rule.
And again, I don’t think Uncle Sugar should be telling you how to secure your weapon in your home, but if shit happens you’re on the hook. This simple approach shouldn’t change concealed carry either, except that the insurance companies will probably charge a premium for concealed carry. It’s a free market solution. One swears they only have a gun at home for protection, then the associated insurance is x; if it’s home and target practice, insurance is y; if it’s home, target and concealed carry, then you’re in the z band. It’s how the actuarial tables play out, and much more effectively accounting for the total cost of someone that owns a piece.
Would it be practicable to argue that, for “the better regulation of the militia”, registration details of insured guns should be notified to the National Guard… ?!
Of course, if you don’t already have such provisions, there would also have to be some sort of additional penalty on crimes committed with guns, or possession of uninsured/unregistered guns, or possession of guns without evidence of adequate training in their safe use.
While part of me agrees with you about those statistics, another part of me says that something has to be done about the mass shootings we have. Not necessarily gun control laws only, but some better gun control like better training, and also in conjunction with other measures like better mental health. It is a very complex, multi-variable problem, not an easy problem to reduce to acceptable levels.
I hold CCW licenses from other states. Watching the other shooters on the range with me is a little scary because of their poor safety habits and their very poor marksmanship - and mind you, this is at the range where you will perform much MUCH better than you will at home in the dark of night when you’ve just heard your downstairs window break and hushed evil voices – try fumbling with your weapon when the holy sh*t! adrenaline is pumping furiously and you keep your lights off so as to not give away your position.
Also, in the Marines it was drilled into us that you take your weapon with you wherever you go - when you sleep, shower, shave, sh*t, eat… your weapon never leaves your side until it’s locked back in the armory, or unless it’s guarded by someone else charged with guarding weapons. Now as a civilian, I see how easy it is for some to lose track of a pistol - darn, was it left under the pillow? … or in the backpack? … or in the car trunk? We need much better training for gun owners.
But I don’t want any city like mine recently did requiring my guns to be always locked up in a safe.
Want to clearly state that we MUST address this problem. In a reasonable and wholistic manner.
What would better training do to reduce mass shootings? Do you think the perpetrators need better marksmanship or trigger discipline?
What does “better mental health” mean, and for that matter, what are acceptable levels to you?
How do you prevent the guy from reaching you? Contrary to Hollywood, guns don’t stop people. Guns put holes in people, and the holes cause the people to bleed, and the blood loss stops people. Bleeding to death typically takes about two minutes. Let’s suppose that you’re really good at putting holes in your attacker, so he dies four times as fast. That’s still 30 seconds in which he’s bashing your brains in. I don’t want someone bashing my brains in for 30 seconds, and it won’t matter to me one whit that the guy doing it is going to die shortly thereafter.
As for homemade guns: Yes, some people have the skill, tools, and other wherewithal to make their own guns, just like some people have the wherewithal to make meth. And some of those people will doubtless sell their guns to other criminals. But that’s still a big improvement over the current situation, where anyone has the wherewithal to obtain guns. The home manufacturers won’t be able to crank out weapons as quickly as the professionals. Their products will be of inconsistent quality. They’ll need a base of operations (a milling lathe is not trivial to move around), and they’ll need to get raw materials, both of which will give the police a chance to track them down and shut them down. There will be more connections between criminals, which will mean that one arrest is more likely to lead to more.
The problem with that idea is the fact that most rank-and-file military are extremely conservative and would balk at any type of order to fire on regular civilians. They support the idea of an armed populace. The chain-of-command would break down. At that point, you could not count on the “loyalty” of individual soldiers. Significant portions of the military would defect to local militias.
It is much-beloved on the part of anti-gun sorts that
- The military and the police will act with complete loyalty.
- The military, particularly, has virtually unlimited resources which they will happily commit the enterprise.
- Gun-owners are uniformly stupid and will obligingly do things like stand in the open and shoot at an Abrams tank with their deer rifle.
- Everything that happened in Vietnam and Iraq was anomalous.
Why they cling to these misconceptions is a puzzlement.
We could start by ending wars.
visit; Veterans for Peace
they advocate the end to wars. esp. wars for Oil and Empire.