Huh?
I don’t get it.
He is saying that the Constitution(Bill of Rights) is a threat to the Constitution?
The Constitution is a threat to the Constitution?
Justice Stevens sounds more like a second grader, or maybe a pre-schooler?
Can you explain that part in light of the first graph on this page from the Bureau of Justice Statistics?
Looks to me like gun related homicides from 1975 to 1993 rose and did so kind of dramatically (with a dip from 1980-1985).
Also from that link:
Crime rose in general between 1975 and 1993. It was expected that by this time, the US would be a crime-ridden hell hole. In the book Freakonomics, it was posited that the reason the continuing rise in crime didn’t continue is because of abortion decreasing the number of single mothers. I’d personally argue that it’s also or mostly thanks to the rise of three-strikes you’re out laws – if you look at data, the number of people in jail has increased impressively since 1990ish.
As for why use guns? Why not? That people will use a gun to kill someone preferentially may certainly be true. Whether he actually goes through with the crime doesn’t seem to depend upon it. He’ll just use a hammer, club, knife, poison, or whatever else is handy instead. I know that because otherwise you’d see a correlation between the availability of guns and murder.
What this means for us is that whereas there’s no particular correlation between guns and homicide, there is a correlation between poverty (single mothers) and the effectiveness of crime prevention (three strikes laws). Doing things which work on correlated data is effective. Effective things are worth doing.
Nope, that’s not the argument I was making.
The easy of gun ownership in the US has lead to an abundance of guns, lots owned legally, lots owned illegally. The illegal ones are spilling over into Canada and Mexico, making them more available, making gun violence more of an issue.
Is your point that gun violence would go down if more Canadians owned guns, or would it just make the stat look better?
Did you just say three-strike laws were preventative?
ETA: And certainly I’ll agree that the line wavered significantly between his start and end points. He may well have chosen a point that was high before things started to expand and a point that was low after the bubble deflated. But as the extreme variation of crime shows, a linear plot of before and after is a bit untenable to begin with. If the waves and buckles aren’t related to one another, then there’s no correlation. Even if the waves and buckles do match up to one another, there’s no saying that the correlation goes the direction you think it does. As crime goes up, people buy weapons to defend themselves.
But it’s certainly true in either case that the rate of crime and ending the high rate of crime was unrelated to gun law. Overall, the laws and the availability of legal guns hasn’t changed through the history of the US. What waves and buckles there are don’t appear to have a relation to that.
A deterrent is preventative. Detaining a person who would be liable to re-offend is preventative.
What do you take from the fact that the UK had the same low murder rates and high overall crime rates (relative to the US) before it banned most guns in the 1990s as it does now? I’ll spoil it for you: If it’s anything besides “gun laws and gun ownership rates have absolutely no effect on crime or murder levels” then you are not looking at this correctly.
So why hasn’t this made the US particularly crime ridden? Why hasn’t it made Switzerland or the countries around Switzerland particularly crime ridden? Italy and France both have a higher homicide rate than Switzerland. Germany has a lower crime rate than Switzerland. There doesn’t seem to be a correlation.
My issue with this is the gun laws in the US (at least as relates to the availability of handguns) are so pathetic and easily gotten around as to be worthless.
It is like having a thousand holes in the dike and we try to plug two of them and then everyone proclaims the water level did not change noticeably.
So you make guns illegal in Chicago. Big deal when someone can make a short drive to somewhere that does sell them and cart them back in. It is pathetically simple.
So I am not surprised gun laws do not show a variation because they cannot be expected to. Handguns need to be made illegal in the US period (not including military or law enforcement) if you ever expect to see any effect.
Rifles and shotguns people can keep for hunting and home defense.
That will do it. Every reason to kill someone will go out the window once handguns are banned. Do you really believe that? You don’t think that the weapons of choice would just change to rifles and shotguns whose differences from handguns are only a few inches of barrel easily shortened up?
If so then why are handguns far and away the weapon of choice in crimes?
Of course people will still kill people. Just handguns are so efficient and impersonal as to lower the bar substantially to doing it.
I guess we could turn into Japan and totally ban guns, send police to people’s houses for spot checks for guns, and remove the sort of due process protections that, thankfully, make it pretty easy to break any sort of victimless-crime law as long as you don’t call too much attention to yourself. But aside from bringing totalitarians like yourself closer to orgasm, this likely won’t accomplish much, since guns don’t cause crime. The end of the Bill of Rights will definitely bring us closer to the Japanese “justice” system–cops will be able to beat suspects with impunity, anyone charged with a crime will automatically be convicted, and those who have the misfortune to be of the wrong class or ethnicity will receive absolutely no protection from the law. I know we’re sort of in that situation now, but at least we have to pretend it’s not the ideal.
And all of this because some people think their irrational freakout over an inanimate object should dictate the rights of everyone else. To the anti-gun psychos, I can only say: get over yourselves.
I think it has. Are you saying it isn’t?
I don’t have a readily available answer to this. As an engineer it seems to me we’re dealing with more than one variable. Which is why I pointed out that trying to compare the stats between the US and UK aren’t going to show you what you think they are.
First: Are there any stats that go one step further and show homicides using legally owned guns vs illegally owned guns?
As I said before, gun violence in Canada isn’t about gun ownership or registration, it’s about illegal weapons being smuggled in from the US.
So to use stats comparing violence with gun ownership seems kind of pointless. Heroine is illegal in both countries but still used, it’s brought in from some where else. I feel like you are bringing stats about legally acquired codeine usage as a comparison.
There is ownership as one factor, gun availability as another, I think population density seems to be a huge factor, as do socioeconomic factors.
And the end of the day, I’d wager dollars to doughnuts that gang related violence makes up the bulk of the stats we’re viewing. So small town Kansas, without rival gangs but lots of gun owners, won’t have nearly the level of gun violence than areas of LA.
Is Switzerland the country where all men over a certain age are required to keep a rifle at home?
If you did that in Canada today, you would suddenly see gun ownership up, and violence the same. Does that prove anything? Or does it tell us the violence isn’t related to the rifles people keep at home. Eventually one of those rifles would be used in a crime, but that’s not the issue. You’d still have the same issues of gang violence using non-rifles in Toronto, where the guns are illegally brought in from the US.
Comparing the US to the UK is “farcical”? Probably the country most similar to the US is the UK (Canada might be closer in many ways but I think the UK has more minorities). It is certainly a better comparison than, say, Colombia or Yemen. Granted there are some differences, which you ably point out, but to call the comparison “farcical” indicates to me that you have an agenda.
Personally I’m on the fence. I’ve lived in very rural America (southern Utah) and I understand the rational and importance of owning a gun. On the other hand countries like the UK and Japan indicate that if a society is serious about gun control then it can lead to a low homicide rate. Anti-gun bigots ignore the first, pro-gun bigots hand-wave away the second.
Wow…yeah! You totally got me! That is exactly what I am on about! You can see it in all my posts! :rolleyes:
Talk about over-the-top, Chicken Little sky is falling claptrap. Look in the mirror to see which one of us is frothing at the mouth with paranoia.
Pot, meet kettle.
Then get a gun, it is your constitutional right.
[quote]
A city is powerless to control gun violence, because it is powerless to control guns. And without that power it descends into lawlessness.{/quote]
I think you are overstating the case. Cities can still outlaw cop-killer bullets and assault rifles if it wants to it just can’t make it so onerous to own a gun that it borders on a prohibition.
The only threat to the constitution is when people think they can cherry-pick which parts of the constitution to observe and which parts to ignore. We see a similar phenomenon in religion where fanatics can recite all the hellfire and brimstone parts of their bible/quran and entirely overlook the love thy neighbor parts of it.
We should never ever allow private citizen to own firearms because Bricker smells like toe-cheese.
:dubious:
I don’t think that’s a liberal affliction, I mean its not like the gays invented gayism in the 60’s, its not like taxes were lower than they are now before 1968.
I could similarly say that the Republican mantra of blaming the housing crisis on FNMA and FHLMC (which have been around for 70 and 40 years respectively) or the CRA (which has been around for about 40 years) is pretty stupid too.
The problem the liberals have with gun rights is that they don’t want guns so they don’t see why anyone else should have them either.
Well to be fair its only a theory at this point. I don’t think there is really a correlation between crime and gun ownership. But I don’t understand why the pro-gun side has to bear any burden of proving the social benefit of gun ownership, there is a constitutional right to it, so the burden falls the other way. Just like the pro-life folks (like me) bear the burden of proving the harm of abortion, the anti-gun folks have to prove the harm of gun ownership. I think iot inconclusive.
Why does the burden fall on the folks asserting a constitutional right?
If there were a constitutional right to drive cars then that would be an apt analogy.
You don’t have any more of a right to guns than food, in fact less. If you can’t afford food, you can get food stamps, if you can’t afford a gun there is no food stamp equivalent for guns.
In other areas where you have constitutional rights, the state expends resources to ensure your ability to exercise those rights. Right to counsel means the state will pay for your attorney, if guns are the only “thing” that the bill of rights gives you a right to, shouldn’t the government pass out guns to all its citizens? I bet everyone would be a lot more polite.
It doesn’t appear to be true for Switzerland, Norway, Finland, or anywhere else with wide ownership of guns. The stance of the US as regards weapons hasn’t changed in the last 200 years and yet crime has risen and fallen by significant factors. When it has risen, that’s been directly linked to increases in poverty, and ended with a decrease in poverty.
If I can’t show any causation, why would I believe that there is one? If I can show that any increases or decreases must be based on factors that are unrelated to gun availability and that gun availability doesn’t cause crime anywhere else, why would I suspect that there’s a causitive effect that only manifests itself here and only at random times unrelated to the overall unchanging availability of guns?
Statistically speaking, I’m pretty sure my wife would use it against me.
And Damuri Ajashi, you rock. That’s what a post is supposed to be.
Huh? Didnt Hitler try to pull that stunt? Disarm the jews but allow the German police and German army to keep their guns? I dont think that worked very well.
That does not make any sense to me at all - Why would you not disarm the police?
Seems to me, that if we are ever to make guns illegal, then we should disarm the police first…for 10 years or so…and see if it works before trying to talk civilians into disarming.
If the United States is safe enough for people to go about unarmed, then police, Secret Service, private guards, etc should all be prohibited from having guns. Try that for 5 or 10 years, and then if it really works, then come back and make the argument that people who are not police should also not carry handguns.
Not only would it be easier to disarm police, since they would be ordered by their bosses to disarm, but it would be a much better example for the public if the government could actually show us that our county is so safe that our police dont need to carry handguns.
It is just totally absolutely crazy to arm police, and disarm civilians.