I still believe it to be a worthy goal, a direction we should be slowly heading towards. We’ll have to agree to disagree on that.
I am a scientist and I understand the difference between correlation and causation. Which is why I am not convinced that there is no causal relationship at all. The way you separate causality from correlation is by doing a controlle study to isolate only the causal relationship. Has anyone done that for gun control? What is your evidence for claiming a complete lack of causality in this issue?
I can offer theories on why I think there is a causal relationship: it takes much more motivation and effort to rob a bank or kill someone if all you have is a knife. A gun is only a tool, but a tool that makes a certain task easier. It’s hard to argue that making a task easier does not lead to more people doing it.
Of course gun control isn’t the only cure for school violence, and probably much less effective than many others. Nevertheless I feel it is one of the many right things we can do to make our society better.
Whoops! Watch out for that there slope; it’s mighty slippery.
How many statements like this do we have to see (from Joe Citizen; from the various gun control groups and their officers; from local, state & federal politicians), before you the very people advocating crap like this will finally admit that the slippery slope exists? Really guys, you show such great evidence of holding a complete cognitive disconnect it’s almost laughable.
No matter how many people die in the process. Eureka! Great fucking plan, man. Let’s implement that immediately. It should initially get rid of lots of the anti-gun activists as the armed thugs shoot 'em down. And then us law-abiding gun owners will be free to arrange things more to our liking. Perfect.
I can understand the idea that gun control will not reduce gun-toting criminals, and only hurt our ability to defend against them. But you seem to be suggesting that even those who do not carry guns in the first place will be at an increased risk. Why would this happen? Are you saying that right now, armed citizens are playing an active role in keeping the “armed thugs” under control?
Yep. Just as an armed police force helps keep violent criminals under control, an armed popluace has a deterrence effect. If a criminal is more certain that a person, or home, has no firearms, that person, or home, is a more likely target.
Exactly like criminals avoiding homes with dogs and burglar alarms.
Well, for two things they are not immersed in the culture of violence that this country has been building since we first started shooting our way west from Jamestown, nor are they immersed in the whole right to bear arms thing that all of us are from the first moment we grow aware of what the Constitution is.
It’s a different culture there, as should be expected - it’s a different country. That’s all I’m saying, and I don’t understand why that should be hard to grasp.
Well, I’d like that too. I’d like to be sure that a cop climbing in my darkened second floor bedroom at night won’t kill me because he sees the glint of a soda can on my nightstand. (Actual recent occurence.) But there are one hell of a lot more issues that need to be addressed than just the availability of guns for us to reach that stage.
Stranger, I really liked your post about changing social attitudes. I’ll just say that I couldn’t agree more, and that I’ll also add you to the list of firearm carriers I know who haven’t yet robbed a bank or murdered anyone in cold blood.
Well, I think the abolition of the abominable and horrifically soul-destroying sport of golf is a worthy goal, too, but one only shared by like-minded malcontents and asylum inmates.
I won’t go so far as to say there is absolutely no causative effect of firearm avaibility to crime, but I would argue that it is in no way the primary causal mechanism, as is often claimed by gun control advocates. I and many people I’ve known have had open access to firearms all of our lives. Not one person I know personally (voluntary acquaintance) has committed a violent crime using a firearm. (I’m stating that with the conditional because many have violated carry regulations, often unintentionally.)
I’ve known plenty of people who have committed violent crimes barehanded or with improvised weapons, though. In fact, in every case when I felt compelled to use a gun for defense, it was against someone who was using something other than a firearm (knife, car, bulk physical mass) to threaten me. If I had not had firearm, I would have been on the weak side of the occasion, and at least in one case, the perpetrator was interested not just in my wallet but my life.
The distiction to be made here is that the gun is a tool, to be put to uses good, bad, or indifferent. The intent (or carelessness) of the user is what makes it dangerous; and even barring firearms from public ownership wouldn’t alter the intent. It would simply give the advantage to someone larger, more aggressive, or willing to use other implements to give form to his attitude.
I guess I fail to see how banning firearms inherently makes society “better”, unless your definition of better is a society in which firearms are unavailable, which is a tautological claim. One might make the analogy that society would be better if people didn’t drink Lite beer; but as long as in drinking the beer they aren’t getting drunk and driving or becoming violent, that argument is purely an esthetic one. I think society would be better if people didn’t feel the impulse to enact violent impulses and would show more compassion and curtesy to each other. This, of course, can’t be mandated by law, and therefore is not good fodder for political promises.
Yes, all police forces have firearms-trained officers that are quickly deployable in such a situation. Anything they couldn’t handle would invlove the SAS who have a team on 24 hour standby at their base in Hereford.
However, a policeman who you pass on the street will not be carrying a firearm (with the possible exception of at a high risk site, I think you can see armed officers at Heathrow at least some of the time).
Which is a pivotal difference IMHO between UK and US police forces. Millitary being brought in for police work is only in the most dire circumstances like mass rioting that would totally overwhelm a police department. Otherwise even the best equipped, most heavily armed criminals would still be dealt with by local police SWAT teams or assistance from state police agencies.
That’s not a difference, exactly the same would be true here. Maybe my description wasn’t very clear!
Of the top of my head I can’t think of any sort of incident that one would class as policework that the military were involved in in Great Britain (I exclude Northern Ireland for obvious reasons) since the SAS ended the siege at the Iranian Embassy in 1982.
But that’s not true. According to the 1996 Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics (warning: PDF), Miami is worse off than Chicago in all respects. Floridians can carry guns, can’t they? I don’t see much of a correlation between an armed populace and less crime, and I would imagine that an armed populace has the added effect of successful robberies resulting in more armed criminals.
Sorry for the 10 year old statistics, I can’t seem to find a current tabulation in the same handy-dandy breakdown by city.
For anyone who’s interested in more info on UK policing, here is a link to some details about SO19, the firearms section of the London Metropolitan Police.
So? Chicago is far worse than Jacksonville, FL. And worse than Phoenix, AZ. And Dallas, TX. And many other cities on that list in states where concealed carry is permitted.
It sounds like you’re asking me to show how often violent crime is not committed because the would-be perpetrator suspects his victim might have firearm which could be employed in self-defense. I’m not quite sure how to go about that - except with logic. To assume a criminal would attack a potential victim suspected of having a viable means of defense, when other equally likely victims present themselves, just doesn’t meet that test. These guys are, after all, predators; predators ply their trade on the weak.
In any case John Lott’s book, More Guns, Less Crime, reaches an entirely different conclusion than yours.
I say there isn’t a correlation between the amount of crime and whether or not one can carry a gun. Some places are worse than others for crime, and whatever causes the better places to be better, it isn’t firepower.
John Lott’s a fraud. He’s ideologically inclined to favour CCW and intellectually dishonest enough to misrepresent himself in order to defend his work and detract from his critics. He also makes some weird leaps of logic, like assuming a 10% increase in gun purchases equates to a 10% increase in firearm ownership as if none of those purchases were made by people who already own guns and assuming that a weapon that’s fired defensively but innaccurately hasn’t been fired. I’m not going to believe anything on his say-so.
Obviously they do. Otherwise Miami’s crime rates would be a fraction of Chicago’s, and Pittsburgh would have a lower rape rate than DC to go along with its lower murder rate, which catsix tried to tell be was due to Pittsburgh’s allowing concealed carry. Miami has a smaller population than Chicago, and it certainly has a larger armed population than Chicago, yet there are obviously more likely victims per 100 000, because the crime rate is higher than in Chicago. Apparently having a gun doesn’t make you less likely to be a victim; something else does.
Criminals, actually. Perhaps criminals smart enough to arm themselves - not a difficult task in a place where people can carry or store guns freely - thereby removing any equalizing effect caused by the general public being armed, or smart enough to shoot a potential victim in the back and rob its bleeding corpse if they figure their victim might have a gun. Or just smart enough to make a grab for the purse that might contain a gun. Calling them “predators” makes it sound as if the same rules apply to them as to real predators, which are animals that run on instinct and don’t actually think about the best way to bag their prey.
All this weak/strong stuff doesn’t wash when you look at a place like this city, where crime rates are a fraction of those in an American city of the same size. Unless you think all Calgarians are 6’6" masters of self defense and bulletproof as well.
Bold statements - of unsupported opinion. Meaning I’m not inclined to believe them simply on your say-so.
Mebbe; mebbe not. But giving us a couple examples of statistical anomalies (and the example you gave here is an anomay) doesn’t prove anything. For either side.
In any case, I don’t really know how we ended up traveling down the narrow lane of concealed carry. Nor do I really care. Nor am I interested in the gun laws and their effects, or the “culture of violence” (whatever that is), or the lack of it outside the borders of the United States. It was not my intention to get off the broader highway of general gun ownership here in my country.
Fact is tho’, there are far, far more guns in the United States today than there were 35 years ago. And the segment of the market that has shown the most growth is handguns - the very segment that is most targeted for abolition. Overall, as the total number of handguns has escalated rapidly, violent crime has decreased. Of course, this in itself doesn’t prove that more guns does indeed equal less crime, it certainly proves that more guns does not equalmore crime. And that alone is enough reason to question—vigorously and relentlessly—the calls for outlawing them. It’s nothing more than an attempt to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
You’re free to research the subject on your own. But the fact is he’s a member of the American Enterprise Institute, and the fact is he did create a persona for the sake of criticizing his opponents, and the fact is he makes some interesting leaps in his logic. These things are not a matter of opinion.
I don’t see them as being particularly anomalous, but suit yourself.
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You stated that an armed population deters crime, that’s how. But since it is a hijack, this’ll be my last post on the matter.
That handguns cause crime isn’t something I read very often, just that the crimes are more violent than they would be otherwise. There’s also accidental deaths, crimes of passion that still would’ve been committed but wouldn’t have involved firearms, and other variations on the theme that if you can’t get a gun, you can’t fire a gun. I haven’t checked, but maybe there are fewer, but more fatal, crimes.
Personally, I don’t favour outlawing handguns. I do, however, favour other forms of gun control, the least of which is making sure that it’s incredibly difficult to get to a gun without the owner’s permission. All it would have taken to prevent this latest school shooting is a safe.
