Here in Maine, we had a background check referendum turned down by the voters. The idea was to require the same check for private sales and transfers, as if you had bought from a dealer. One of the biggest reasons for opposition was that it wouldn’t accomplish anything. IIRC, 18 states already have similar measures. What effect did it have in those states?
I think you’ve missed the point of gun control.
No, he’s probably already aware that the point of gun control legislation is to decrease the levels of violence in this nation to something approaching that of the rest of the civilized world. He might even know that this particular sort of gun control legislation used to be supported by the NRA.
Thank you. Maine has been a source of trafficked guns because they are so easy to buy here. I even know some people who are NRA members and supported this initiative.
This discussion is more directly related to gun control than to eections.
Moving from Elections to Great Debates.
Except gun control legislation doesnt decrease the levels of violence in the USA. Areas with strict gun controls often have more violent crime that areas with open carry, open CCW permits etc.
Not because more guns= less crime, but because we are America, and gun ownership is part of what we, as a nation, are.
Other nations have do have less violent crime with more controls yes- Western Europe for example. But they never had a high rate of violent crime as compared to America.
Other nations, such as Mexico, have strict gun control, and out of control violent crime.
It seems more sociological than guns.
Access to guns in American just doesnt seem to have any significant effect (one way or the other) on violent crime rates.
Possibly because there are just so damn many guns, and so few are used in a crime.
Go on then, what is the point of gun control? I always thought it was about reducing violence.
One problem with background checks is that they do nothing to stop a first-time criminal. Every criminal has a clean background prior to committing his/her first crime.
“We have to do something, this is something, therefore we have to do it.”
The point of gun control is to do that something.
Regards,
Shodan
I used regression analysis to develop a Java application where you can play around with various statistics and see how it affects the homicide rate. The ones that I found which had the most predictive quality were income disparity and ethnic diversity. In general, a high income disparity causes homicides. Ethnic diversity is a strange one in that, if it is very low, the homicide rate will be low and, if it is very high, the homicide rate will be low. There’s a weird intermediate zone where homicide increases.
Though, these are all dependent on the state of the other variables - those just seemed to be the two largest predictors. For some countries, more guns brought the homicide rate down, for others it brought it up. Generally, it’s fairly flat. In the case of the US, higher gun ownership is predicted to decrease the homicide rate.
I wanted to wait until there wasn’t just a big shooting that happened to post the application. I’ll do so tonight when I get home.
Misplaced fear leads to dumb over-reacting. People should not be afraid of guns. They especially should not try to legislate their fear of guns into the political discourse of a country so well-armed it would scare the hell out of Genghis khan, were he looking at the prospect of a modern-day North American conquest.
No, that would be violence control. The point of gun control is to reduce the number of guns. And though that is very difficult to do, when it does actually occur, we find that it has exactly zero effect on rates of violence.
While it’s true that Australia doesn’t exist, and it’s also true that States with gun controls in effect that are geographically surrounded by States with similar gun laws have astronomically high rates of gun violence, one shouldn’t be hesitant to point out that any day now, Obummer is going to take all of our guns, declare martial law, and commence the white genocide.
You’re absolutely correct, but why stop with only half the truth?
Spoilering since this is an executable. You’ll just need to trust that it’s virus-free, I guess, but it was developed by me and has been modified by no other. Since it’s a Java jar, you might have to look on the web to see how to run it, though. It might not run straight off the bat, depending on how your system is set up.
It starts out with the USA dialed in.
The stats on which the polynomial regression was run are:
http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/GII
For the gender ratio, I subtracted 1 from the value since it doesn’t add anything.
Some things to note:
- The formula will pick a best-fit curve regardless of whether there was actually any real correlation.
- Everything is a curve, since it’s based on polynomials. This performed better (i.e., the average difference between prediction and reality is closer) than linear regression, but that doesn’t mean that everything curves all nice like it does. A flat, horizontal correlation will end up as a bump or a dip, no matter what. (See point 1).
- I remember noticing, back when I developed this, that Colombia was predicted to have a far lower homicide rate than given in the original data. However, I then later saw in a different set of data - for a different year - that the homicide rate in Colombia was basically what had been predicted. I’m not sure if the year that is listed on the Wikipedia was a bad year there (gang killings?), but it does seem plausible that countries on the edge of a metric are more likely to fluctuate wildly, so you might take that into account if you try dialing in different countries.
So overall, this is possibly indicative of general ideas, probably not very good for real predictions, but also not horrible. It’s cold, reliable, math, but it’s not magic.
I am not pro-gun; I think we have too many guns, but I am pro facts. Australia has not had a single mass shooting since they banned guns, but there was no statistically significant change in firearm homicides after the gun ban. Gun homicide rates did fall, but so did rates of other types of homicides.
Are there any numbers from background check states about how that may have effected rates of gun violence and trafficking?
boffking, did you vote on the referendum? If so, why are you asking these questions now?
Regards,
Shodan
The FBI compiles statistics for each year on violent crimes. I believe they have a table specifying the number of homicides broken down by “means”. You could probably go fiddle with those numbers and pick a control group (neighboring states, region, similar demographics, all 50 states, etc) and time frame that tells the story you want it to. Welcome to the “post-truth” society.
I voted yes on the referendum. The opposition had a major push at the end claiming that background checks are ineffective at stopping crime. This led to it being turned down by a narrow margin.
Just curious, which county do you live in? Did your sheriff take a position on the referendum?