Does no one remember Kent State?? Soldiers are trained to follow orders or suffer the consequences. To believe that they wouldn’t is very naive. And very dangerous.
BTW…
Those at Kent State were just National Guardsmen.
a small point Demise, in the studies you cite about the rise in crime in the UK. A “rise” in crime, even the substantial numbers you cite aren’t a good comparison without the backing raw data. If the UK originally had a very low crime rate (say 10 violent crimes per 10,000 capita annually), and it increased even 100%, the raw numbers of crimes would still be of little statistical significance. Much is made of the stats regarding murders, but in most mid sized cities, they vary so wildly, they really do NOT tell the true picture.
and, a more generalized point on the OP - with all studies about society, it is nearly impossible to isolate a single item as being the “cause” of anything else. crime stats in general across the US have been going down (some individual cities/states post a rise in specific indicies, but as a generality, crime is down).
So, I fear that the study cited will no more convince a pro gun control person of the futility of the Brady Bill, than the #'s of persons STOPPED from buying a gun under the Brady bill did anything to convince the anti gun control folks.
you may now resume your debate.
Asmodeus wrote:
Sometimes, though, they buck this training. (Not very often, though.) Witness the failed coup attempt by the Soviet hardliners in 1991.
Folks, I know of people that will use guns at the slightest provocation, not to brandish, but to shoot. It may work to have a gun if you live in a more or less deserted area. But you want everyone to have a gun in New York, where people shoot over parking spaces, cops shoot people who say “no” to drugs, people shooting up bars over being refused entrance? Hell no will I favor “everybody having a gun” nonsense. That’s right, nonsense!!!
About being out-numbered: The Spanish Conquistadores were outnumbered at least 1000 to one against the Aztecs.
capacitor wrote:
Now that’s a new one!
“Would you care for some drugs?”
“No.”
BANG!!
**
I hope you don’t hang out with such dangerous people.
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I live in Dallas and it seems to be working for me. We’re not as crowded as NY but we’ve still got plenty of folks.
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How about people who have no criminal record and can pass a written test?
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The Spanish had two advantages. To begin with they brought with them disease which killed off a signifigant portion of the native population. And secondly the Spanish had native allies that hated the Aztecs.
Marc
The point is that crime did not decrease whatsoever. Not at all. It went up, even if a little. Getting rid of guns did not reduce the crime rate.
Yes, I realize that if, say, one person were killed in a certain area one year, and two were killed in the same area the next year, it would mean that the murder rate increased 100%. However, we aren’t talking about Assbump-on-the-Thames. London has enough crime that a 20% increase is a relevant number of people.
Here’s some backing raw data (links are posted below):
There were 38.5 burglaries per 1000 households in 1998 in the US.
There were 75.6 burglaries per 1000 households in 1998 in England and Whales.
This is hardly a “low crime rate”. Unless maybe you live in South Central LA? In fact, I would say that England has a pretty high crime rate compared to the US, at least in burglaries of a habitation.
I used burglaries as an example because the UK sorts their data differently, and this category of violent crime is generally the same in both countries. While I could easily find “violent crimes” data for the US, I could not do so for the UK.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/xsdataset.asp
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/proptrd.txt
I would like to add one small point to this debate.
To some extent, the battles over gun control are a battle of cultures. In southern and western states, guns are part of the culture, and even if it were true that the overall impact of having guns available is to increase deaths, it is not much different than other parts of our culture and society which do the same. The overall impact of having cars is a greater number of increased deaths than guns, but no one would use that fact as an argument to ban guns.
An urban person arguing increased deaths to a person who has been brought up with guns, is akin to an Amish person arguing for the abolition of cars due to the increased deaths that they cause. The main difference is that there are alot more non-gun owners than there are Amish people.
I’m rather disappointed in the lack of discussion on this thread. Were my points so overwhelming that no one can dispute them?
Maybe I should start a new thread with this data? I’d really like to see more discussion on this topic.
Here is the actual study.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v284n5/full/joc91749.html#a3
exerpt
**boldingg mine
any of you who have questions of liberal bias in the media , I will pint you to NY Times reporter Fox Butterfield who duplicitously reported that the study concludes “the Brady Bill does not go far enough.” THey said no such thing. Nor did they say it redeuced suicides. They said it reduced gun suicides among those over 55.
The point here is that one can resist gun control legislation on the basis of its ineffectiveness. THe NRA said all along that this would only harass the law abiding and not effect the criminals. As you can see, they are still getting their guns on the black market, which can’t be regulated.
Can you imagine the outcry if congress passed a law to outlaw all violent movies just to see if, maybe, it could reduce violence?
Sorry for the long post. Big Bro is watching.
Demise wrote:
Burglaries in whales? What, somebody stole Captain Ahab’s corpse out from under Moby Dick’s nose? <rimshot>
More importantly, the effects of primary-market gun regulations may depend on the extent to which the secondary market in guns is regulated. Secondary-market sales account for about 40% of the approximately 10 million gun transfers <snip> and are the source for the large majority of guns obtained by juveniles and criminals.<SNIP>
This is just what I said, and i’ve also told yo why this is the case. The ATF has been underfunded as it relates to the secondary market. But i also agree with the other posters who rightly ponted out that teh Brady Bill wasn’t to reduce crime put to effect a cool down period for those having decided to buy a gun in the heat of the moment.
Demise:
Your UK cites aren’t truly comaprable since gun control has been in place in the UK for something like 50 years, and becoming even stricter in the 60’s You’ll have to establish a pattern longer than two years for your arguement to be meaningful.
However your argument is not without some merits vis a vis using the UK as an example. One interesting statistic:
59% of burglaries in the UK are against an occupied home while the figure is 13% in the US. It’s reasonable to assume that fear of being shot by the homeowner accounts for significant portion of the difference.
That being said, I still favor a better form of gun control than we have.
First, I would say that theft is a much larger reason that criminals have guns. I hope that criminals selling guns to other criminals is not included in the “Secondary-market sales” statistic.
Second, it’s already illegal for juveniles and convicts to purchase guns. Maybe these laws should be enforced more aggressively instead of further useless and unconstitutional legislation being passed.
I’m not sure what you mean here. You say that there has been gun control in the UK for a long while, then you say I need to establish a pattern longer than two years? Please clarify.
I imagine it does. It’s one of the reasons that I own handguns.
Whales, Wales, whatever. I must have been drifting off into my cetacean fantasies again… 
Again, it’s a difference in cultures. I’d be quite upset if my home was burglarized - a risk that can be reduced drastically by proper use of deadbolts, lighting, and secure windows - but the risk of having hot metal slugs rip through the body of a friend or loved one upsets me far more.
Compare those riskes between the UK and the USA, or Canada and the USA, or France and the USA, or Australia and the USA, or Norway and the USA, or…you get the idea.
Obviously accidents will happen more often in a country where there are more guns. That said, an accident like you describe has a negligible chance of occuring compared to the amount of rapes, robberies, assaults, and homicides that occur daily in ALL countries.
Fine, you don’t want a gun because of a one in a million chance of shooting a loved one on accident. I will risk that my judgement would preclude such an accident, and I will be far safer against the crimes listed above.
How about the risk of a friend or loved one bleeding or burning to death, trapped in the twisted metal wreckage of a car accident? It happens a thousand times more often every day. 44,603 people died in traffic accidents in 1997. Only 981 people were killed accidentally with a firearm during the same time period.
Where are the people screaming to ban cars? There aren’t any (not counting lunatics). As a society, we have become numb to the death that cars bring to us because we have accepted their usefullness, and cars are a familiar quality.
As pointed out by several posters above, many people are not familiar with firearms, for whatever reason. They are scared of guns because they have no real knowledge of guns.
Isn’t this ignorance? Isn’t fighting ignorance the reason this board and this website exist?
Don’t be ignorant. Learn about guns. Learn how to use them safely. Educate your children. An educated child is going to be far less likely to die from an accident than a child whose overwhelming curiousity has not been satiated. A gun ceases to be a forbidden fruit when a child is shown how to use one and fires a few rounds themselves.
Qoute:
More importantly, the effects of primary-market gun regulations may depend on the extent to which the secondary market in guns is regulated. Secondary-market sales account for about 40% of the approximately 10 million gun transfers <snip> and are the source for the large majority of guns obtained by juveniles and criminals.<SNIP>
First, I would say that theft is a much larger reason that criminals have guns. I hope that criminals selling guns to other criminals is not included in the “Secondary-market sales” statistic.
------------------------------------------------------------I didn’t say the above, it came form the study itself. Are you now claiming the study is wrong 
Your UK cites aren’t truly comaprable since gun control has been in place in the UK for something like 50 years, and becoming even stricter in the 60’s You’ll have to establish a pattern longer than two years for your arguement to be meaningful.
I’m not sure what you mean here. You say that there has been gun control in the UK for a long while, then you say I need to establish a pattern longer than two years? Please clarify.
You’re using a recent uptick (robberies in 98) in crime as an illustration that gun control doesn’t work. Since gun control was not a recent occurence there, you should be using a larger period of time to justify your point. Maybe say the year period between 68-77. I chose that period because in 1967 Brittain changed its gun laws so that “self defense” wasn’t a sufficient grounds to apply for a permit. But any overall trend of an showing an upswing in crime rates since that time would also be sufficient.
The part I question is the assumption that the secondary sales market is “the source for the large majority of guns obtained by juveniles and criminals”. Unfortunately, the sources quoted in the JAMA study are not available online.
Besides, That was not the main point. It’s already illegal for juveniles and convicts to purchase guns. What do you want? Maybe it should be double-super illegal for a convict to own a firearm?
As far as I am aware, I am not quoting a “recent uptick”. Why do you think it’s a recent uptick? I used the data for 1998 because it was available online, and data for others years was not. I could pay £22.40 for a copy of the criminal statistics for each year, but it isn’t worth it to me. Do your own investigation if you want to prove me wrong.
You could also read the Australian study I quoted in an earlier post. It shows a mild increase in crime. It also shows that outlawing guns had no effect on suicide or homicide rates. Substitute methods of death were implemented by criminals, i.e. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
This is also from the JAMA study (bolding mine):
“The only previous study of the association between homicide and the national Brady Act found a statistically insignificant reduction in the murder rate of 2.3% in the treatment states compared with control states, and statistically significant increases in rape and aggravated assault equal to 3.9% and 3.7%, respectively.”
Quote:
The part I question is the assumption that the secondary sales market is “the source for the large majority of guns obtained by juveniles and criminals”. Unfortunately, the sources quoted in the JAMA study are not available online.
Besides, That was not the main point. It’s already illegal for juveniles and convicts to purchase guns. What do you want? Maybe it should be double-super illegal for a convict to own a firearm?
The secondary market they refer to are for the most part gunshows and so called kitchen table dealers (called that because there are a lot od dealers who use there home as their place of business. Because private dealers at gun show are not required to perform background checks, it’s a fairly simple way of getting a gun if you’re not legally able to purchase one. The ATF did a study on guns used in crimes and traced a fairly large number back to said type of dealers.
quote:
Originally posted by stuffinb
I didn’t say the above, it came form the study itself. Are you now claiming the study is wrong?
The part I question is the assumption that the secondary sales market is “the source for the large majority of guns obtained by juveniles and criminals”. Unfortunately, the sources quoted in the JAMA study are not available online.
Besides, That was not the main point. It’s already illegal for juveniles and convicts to purchase guns. What do you want? Maybe it should be double-super illegal for a convict to own a firearm?
quote:
You’re using a recent uptick (robberies in 98) in crime as an illustration that gun control doesn’t work. Since gun control was not a recent occurence there, you should be using a larger period of time to justify your point. Maybe say the year period between 68-77. I chose that period because in 1967 Brittain changed its gun laws so that “self defense” wasn’t a sufficient grounds to apply for a permit. But any overall trend of an showing an upswing in crime rates since that time would also be sufficient.
As far as I am aware, I am not quoting a “recent uptick”. Why do you think it’s a recent uptick? I used the data for 1998 because it was available online, and data for others years was not. I could pay £22.40 for a copy of the criminal statistics for each year, but it isn’t worth it to me. Do your own investigation if you want to prove me wrong.
Im not trying to prove you wrong, I was just trying to point out the problem with using the numbers you used to support your argument.