But all those illegal guns in Mexico start out as legal gun purchases at US gun stores. If, and I am in no way advocating that this be done, guns were to be banned in the US, and it would be gun sales, every person that already owns a registered gun would still be able to do so, if history can be our guide, then where would all of the guns come from? There are no more gun stores selling guns.
And don’t say something like there are no cocaine stores, since there are also no gun farms, and no meth stores, since there are meth stores, they’re called pharmacies. Guns are manufactured. The cartels are not manufacturing guns. They are buying them at gun stores in the US.
So you still haven’t explained why our suicide rate is dead fucking average. Why doesn’t the hundreds of millions of guns floating around in our society result in much higher than average suicide rates if the access to guns has such an impact on suicides? Would we otherwise be an incredibly non-suicidal nation?
Well thats not really answering my question.
I don’t see from your cite where the number I presented was highly questionable (I’m getting this number from the Department of Justice NCVS) in fact there is a lot of reason to believe that the number is too low. I also don’t see evidence that most of those incidents was against other people with guns but if they were, then I would suggest that the gun was even more valuable to self defense.
That same study that said that people who lived in homes with guns had a higher rate of homicide also said that they couldn’t really tell if the guns were causing the increased homicide rate or if people who were more likely to be killed went out to get guns to defend themselves.
That same study also said that you were more likely to be murdered if you rented your home than if you had a gun. You were more likely to be murdered if you were single than if you had a gun. You were significantly more likely to be murdered if you sued drugs than if you had a gun in the home. We should probably outlaw renting and being single too.
And despite the fact that the number of guns has been skyrocketing, our murder rate has been dropping. Lets take a look at states with lots and lots of legal guns per capita and compare their murder rate with state that have very few legal guns per capita. Guns are hard to come by in Illinois and California and yet these places have much higher murder rates than places like Wyoming and Utah that have very high gun ownership rates.
Homemade guns are your fantasy, tbey are not the guns being used by cartels. Guns manufactured in Brazil, or Germany, or Italy, or China or anywhere else are legally imported into the US, aold legally in the US and illegally brought into Mexico. It’s a fact. It is so much easier to make a legal gun purchade in Texas, and smuggle that gunto Mexico, than it is to buy a gun in Rio.
Your response does not address l0k1’s claim. Yes, they are even sold in the U.S. It doesn’t matter where they’re manufactured; it matters where they’re sold. How many of the guns manufactured in Brazil are originally sold to non-police and civilian residents of Brazil and how many are sold in the U.S.?
You still haven’t explained the statistics I quoted previously where it’s been shown that the vast majority of suicide attempts with all methods except guns result in survival, and the vast majority of suicide attempts with guns result in death. This is direct and clear-cut, whereas general population suicide death rates are obfuscated by many other factors. In fact the study I quoted independently verifies exactly the same facts:
*Victims of suicide living in homes with guns were more than 30 times more likely to have died from a firearm-related suicide than from one committed with a different method. Guns are highly lethal, require little preparation, and may be chosen over less lethal methods to commit suicide, particularly when the suicide is impulsive. *
No, the study doesn’t “say” anything like that at all. Anyone familiar with scientific papers would understand that a disclaimer of potential extraneous factors is standard scientific protocol. If there was reason to believe that those factors were dominant then the paper would be worthless and would never have been published. Instead, it quotes independent sources that corroborate the same results:
*After they controlled for a number of potentially confounding factors, the presence of a gun in the home was associated with a nearly fivefold risk of suicide (adjusted odds ratio = 4.8) (13) and an almost threefold risk of homicide (adjusted odds ratio = 2.7) (14). Other case-control studies have also found an increased risk of suicide for those with firearms in the home, with relative risks ranging from 2.1 to 4.4 *
That’s the largest load of unmitigated crap I’ve ever seen in one paragraph.
the murder rate has been dropping because the overall crime rate has been dropping – all over the western world
you can’t compare murder rates vs. gun laws in different states because in many cases high crime rates were precisely the reason stronger gun laws were enacted in the first place
you can’t compare murder rates vs. gun laws in different states because the culture and demographics in different states is often completely different
you can’t compare murder rates vs. gun laws in different states because gun laws don’t make a hell of a lot of difference anyway when there’s no border control between states, which is why national laws are the only laws that work
The only thing missing from that entire pile of excrescence – including your strawman about banning renting and banning being single – is the favorite pro-gun argument that says cars cause more deaths than guns so why don’t we ban cars. I’ll tell you why. Because cars have a use. If all cars disappeared tomorrow we’d have a transportation crisis and very quickly an enormous economic crisis. If all guns disappeared tomorrow, we’d have… what? As far as I can tell, a much safer nation, 30,000 lives saved a year, many of them children – the US has more children dying from gunshots than a dozen other comparable countries combined, according to the CDC – and tens of thousands of ER admissions of injured gun nuts prevented.
I really don’t know why I allow myself to get drawn into these gun debates.
I don’t understand what we are talking about anymore. Are we still talking about the USA or are we saying that the only reason Mexico is such a hellhole despite strict gun laws is because of gun running from Texas. If you are proposing a gun ban with Australia type confiscation then I don’t see why would look more like Australia than we would Mexico.
Well mostly because that’s bullshit. Are you under the impression that Japan achieves such a high suicide rate with high failure rate methods?
The vast majority of suicide attempted by hanging or jumping off of high rises or jumping in front of trains result in death.
And yet despite all that our suicide rate is just average. What general population obfuscations are you talking about? The fact that people with guns tend to use guns for suicide is about as remarkable as businessmen in high-rises killed themselves by jumping out their windows during the great depression. How much preparation do you need to jump out a window?
Oh, my bad. I thought you were linking to a popularly cited study by Kellerman.
So you’re waving away the fact that they don’t know if the guns are causing the deaths or whether the fear of death is causing the gun ownership as an extraneous factor? It seems kinda important to me but I’m not a scientist.
Yeah, that’s from the Kellerman paper I was talking about. I don’t doubt for a second that the population of people who have a gun in the home have .01% chance of getting murdered while the population of people without a gun in the home have a .0033% chance of getting murdered. But the question still remains whether these people were murdered because they had a gun in the house or despite having a gun in the house.
So what? You said that more guns = more murders. We have more guns but not more murders. In fact our murder rate has been falling at about the same rate as other countries despite a rising number of guns floating around in society.
And yet you think that if we ban and confiscate guns from law abiding citizens a la australia, it will improve the situation.
So wait, NOW culture and demographics might have something to do with it? well maybe America has a different culture than the rest of the world and would have a higher murder rate with or without guns.
Are you saying that all those murders are being caused by people who would surrender their guns in an Australia type gun ban/confiscation?
Well if you are literally going to argue against something I didn’t say and admit that you are arguing against something I didn’t say then I would suggest that you just have a laundry list of talking points that you are trying to regurgitate into this thread. So go ahead and get it over with.
So you don’t think that people would find other ways to commit suicide or kill each other? About half our suicides are by gun. You honestly think our suicide rate would drop in half if we could magically get rid of all guns?
Yes thats right the pro-gun side are baby-killers. Its a well known fact.:rolleyes:
Probably because you have a strong opinion about the topic. You should probably get some facts from someone other than Rachel Maddow, John Oliver and the “Other 98%”
Ok, but this is different than your OP. It seems that you have accepted the difference between laws with directly touch upon the evil to be done away with an prior restraint laws which intend to stop behavior which leads to the evil.
That’s why your “why don’t we just legalize bank robbery” hypo is misplaced. Bank robbery is the evil that those laws are trying to prevent. There are no “law abiding bank robbers” or other bank robberies that may not harm anyone.
Laws against guns, or lock picks, or open containers of alcohol in cars are attempting to prevent the next step from those items which are murder, robbery, and drunken driving respectively. The actions by themselves are not harmful. An open beer in my console that I’m not drinking or a gun or lock pick in a safe at home is not harming anyone. It’s the next step that I might take that is harmful.
That’s not to say that all of these laws are bad. Society must look at the tradeoffs. We’ve almost universally held that the freedom that we might like to enjoy by having one beer on the drive home (or our passenger having 10 beers on a road trip) is outweighed by the enforcement tools used to prevent drunk driving by banning the activity entirely.
Is banning simple possession of guns a good tradeoff to prevent murders? Well, that’s the crux of the debate. And part of that debate, just like one for open containers or lock picks, would be if the law did anything good anyways.
If studies showed (conclusively and without dissent) that open container laws did nothing to prevent drunk driving, then what possible need would they serve? We would all vote to repeal those laws, right?
IOW people who commit suicide who own a gun commit suicide with that gun. People who commit suicide who don’t own a gun commit suicide in other ways. Both kinds of suicides are dead, however.
Yes, by all means, let’s just ignore ALL of the previously cited facts if they don’t fit our preconceptions:
[ul]
[li]The attempted suicide death rate is somewhere between 4% to 10%. The use of firearms results in death 90% of the time.[/li][li]The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval)[/li][li]From a different study but mentioned in the same cite as the above: the presence of a gun in the home was associated with a nearly fivefold risk of suicide (adjusted odds ratio = 4.8)[/li][/ul]
That’s exactly the principle that should apply in formulating gun laws. The problem is that it’s so easy to psychologically delude oneself that you yourself are a “responsible gun owner”, that nothing bad will ever happen with your gun, and that stronger laws are therefore unnecessary and onerous. The last “responsible gun owner” I heard about was an intelligent upscale responsible suburban mother in Newtown, now deceased, along with her son, 20 children, and 6 other adults. It would almost certainly not have happened in most other nations because none of the three guns directly involved would have been available without great difficulty, especially to an ordinary suburban mother, and even the fourth weapon which wasn’t used – a shotgun I believe – would have come under ordinary but stringent firearms restrictions and in most countries the ownership of one in those circumstances would have been unusual and I daresay not socially acceptable even if legal. The US is so mired in gun culture that it’s hard to appreciate this from the inside. In many countries guns are rarely seen, and a gun enthusiast would be considered at least to be an eccentric, and perhaps a dangerous one, and in many circles shunned as a social pariah.
And there is also this misguided sense that guns have some great intrinsic value, for which various justifications are proposed ranging from self-defense to the fanciful colonial notion that they can be used to overthrow a bad government. These delusions make it hard to objectively judge the tradeoffs of gun control. If one really objectively thinks through what would happen if all civilian-held guns were to vanish – not that anyone is proposing such a thing, and none of the countries with even the strongest gun laws have even come close to doing so – it’s hard to see anything but benefits. Which is precisely why other nations have so strongly restricted guns and enjoyed the consequent benefits.
If the same kind of preventative thinking that governs drunk driving laws was applied to gun laws, there would be thousands of fewer deaths every year.
But studies DO show just that with respect to guns, and so does evidence from other countries all over the world. The pro-gun crowd just dismisses the evidence, as we’ve seen in this thread. There are more than 82 gun deaths and many more injuries in the US every single day – more than 30,000 a year, about two-thirds of them suicides and the rest homicides and accidents – and people just shake their heads and wonder why, as if it was some great mystery. We’re supposed to believe that the fact that the US has the most guns of any first-world country and the most lax guns laws of any first-world country is not in any way related to the fact that it has by far the most gun deaths of any first-world country, which is apparently just some bizarre coincidence. One wonders just how there comes to be an argument here at all, and then one hears the truly deluded gun nuts claim that the problem in the US is that there aren’t enough guns, and that if everyone was armed there wouldn’t be any shootings. The mind boggles.
Latecomer to this thread so sorry if this has been addressed already; but to reply to the OP, you can punish misbehavior but only rarely prevent it. To use the OP’s analogy, there’s no way to stop people from speeding, except by the deterrent of being punished for it after the fact. Similarly, those who commit murders (with or without guns) are facing lengthy prison sentences, but only after the fact.
The analogy with guns breaks down because gun control advocates see punishment after the fact as insufficient. It would be like someone saying “OMG! Someone did 50 in a school zone again!! We’ve got to DO something!” And then proposing forbidding most people from owning automobiles, or banning any car from having excessive horsepower, or demanding that all cars have electronic regulators that make it impossible to exceed the speed limit.
The problem is that short of vastly restricting the right to possess weapons, there are very few “reasonable” laws that would be successful in preventing gun crime before the fact. Ironically this is a point of agreement between the hard-core gun rights people and those who would scale back the possession of guns to almost nothing.
Wrong. The analogy is exactly appropriate, it’s just that your hypothetical “solutions” are utterly ridiculous and have absolutely nothing to do with the analogy.
The analogy with gun control is having appropriately low speed limits in school zones. That’s usually sufficient, problem solved. Speeders will likely be few and far between and will likely be caught sooner or later – this is how laws and law enforcement work. If there is chronic violation of the speed limit such that it puts kids at risk, then you set up radar monitoring and nail the bastards. But in order to do that you need the speed limit laws in the first place.
That’s because you seem to have a view of what kind of gun law is “reasonable” that is unlike the views held, enacted into law, and enforced in every other civilized country in the world.
Guns are not the only effective means of suicide. Hanging or jumping in front of high speed trains is a pretty effective means of suicide as well. So is jumping out of a skyscraper. Other countries with far higher suicide rates have almost no guns at all. You can’t try to blame guns for some sort of epidemic of suicides without explaining why we don’t actually seem to have an epidemic of suicides.
Our suicide rate is dead fucking average. Guns are used in about half the suicides in this country. You seem to be saying that our suicide rate would be about half the average suicide rate of wealthy industrialized nations if we didn’t have any guns.
Well, its easy for us to feel that way because there are tens of millions of us law abiding gun owners and we account for a minority of or the 12,000 gun murders that occur every year. So maybe its not a delusion. Sure bad things can happen, 700 accidental gun deaths every year and you try to mitigate those accidents and weigh whether the benefits of owning a gun is worth the risk of an accidental gun death. There are about 300 justifiable homicides every year, that is 300 times a citizen was sufficiently in danger of death or severe injury that they were justified in killing someone, there are over 100,000 defensive gun uses every year (some people think the number is much higher). These risks are not evenly distributed across the population. If you live in a high rise security building in NYC, your chances of needing a gun are a lot lower than if you live in a shitty neighborhood where you can’t go out at night.
That doesn’t mean we can’t have better (not necessarily more stricter) gun laws, it just means that we shouldn’t get hysterical about it.
Incidents like Newtown are not really useful for crafting policy unless you are trying to confiscate all guns. Is that what you are trying to do? because that woman would have passed every background check known to man and I think we have established long ago that assault weapons bans are utterly retarded.
By civilian, I assume you are also talking about magically getting rid of guns in the hands of the criminals right?
But of course gun ownership by civilians is extremely useful. See LA riots. A crowd of looters didn’t need to be armed to overpower a store owner and loot his shop and burn the source of his family’s livelihood to the ground but a store owner had to be armed to stop them.
What do you think is the gun equivalent of an open container in a car?
No they don’t. Not conclusively and without dissent. In fact its pretty controversial.
When your statements are countered with evidence, it called rebutting, not dismissing.
We’ve already discussed suicides and why they don’t count.
Why does it matter that a suicide is committed by gun or jumping off a building when our suicide rate is dead fucking average?
And considering how few gun murders are committed by law abiding citizens, are you sure that a gun ban and confiscation would reduce the gun murders aas much as you seem to think?
Has anyone here said that? Where are you getting this?
And what would you consider to be a gun control law analogous to having school zone speeding laws? What more are you looking for exactly?
Or its because the stuff that has been pushed by the gun control crowd have generally been either retarded (see AWB) or possibly unconstitutional (see references to Australia).
I think licensing and registration could provide benefits (by restricting the flow of guns to criminals while allowing law abiding citizens to continue to own guns). The problem is that any time the gun control crowd MIGHT have the political capital to try to pull off something like that, they do something stupid like try to pass an AWB. They’ve been making this same sort of mistake for generations.
Okay, very good. We can have Gun Debate XXXIV thread, but I was just responding to the OP who analogized banning guns to banning bank robbery. I was simply pointing out that it was misplaced because one was regulating something directly and the other is indirect.
But at least you are being honest. The problem I have with this debate is with those who propose “reasonable regulations” on firearms but who still “support the second amendment.” Obama is a perfect example. I would bet my paycheck that he feels exactly the way you do about guns, but he simply won’t admit it for political purposes.
How can we be expected to side with him when we know he is lying. Pro-choice people are in the same boat. When people like me propose 24 hour waiting periods, mandatory ultrasounds, or a ban on partial birth or sex selection abortions, do you see that as reasonable regulation?
Of course not; you know what our side is up to with those things and if you agree to one of them, we won’t stop there. Next week we will ask for more. Same with the anti-gun side.
Well, thanks for tying up the loose ends, I think we’re done here. Here’s how I understand that position: you consider any gun control proposal to be part of a secret underhanded conspiracy that, if not stopped at once, could eventually lead to the possibility of the US having gun laws similar to those in the rest of the civilized world. You believe that the objective instead must be to keep it as the complete outlier that it presently is with, relatively speaking, virtually no meaningful gun laws at all.
Sounds extreme, yet it’s hard to put any other interpretation on what you just said. And the trouble with it is that it argues for the unconditional defense of the Almighty Gun no matter the cost in lives and bloodshed. This is a fundamental difference in values, though I must confess that I cannot fathom a system of values where the right to get shot is guaranteed but the right to health care is not.
No conspiracy, just a realization. When someone proposed safety training, for example, as a prerequisite to owning a gun and calls it a “compromise” then it is no such thing. You’ve admitted that at least you feel that way. If our side agreed to safety training, would you pack up and go home? No more gun laws being proposed? Of course not. I don’t have to put on a tin foil hat to realize that.
There can never be a good faith negotiation on gun laws when you admit that the end goal is what the rest of the world has: basically a gun ban.
I suppose you aren’t in favor of outlawing cars. Is your right to run over a 4 year old kid greater than my right to defend myself with a gun? See I can set up straw as well.
