jaw drops to her toes as she reads december’s post
I can’t believe it. Allende, who was elected, freely, believed in democracy and the will of the people-to such an extent that it cost him his very life-was the bad guy?
The SHORTAGES were caused by the US backed oligarchy, who were holding back supplies, the US refusing to recognize that the PEOPLE voted for ALLENDE. I think I’m gonna start crying. Seriously. I mean, it just SICKENS me when I read what went on…and to think people STILL believe Allende was the monster, and Pinochet the savior…it’s a sick sick thing!
Because WE support people like Batista and Pinochet, people like CASTRO gained support. The people get SO sick of the US backed thugs, the US policy of neo-colonialism, corporatism and imperialism, that they turn to the people like Castro.
Marxism, as practiced by Allende, was only a threat to our POCKETBOOKS, not anyone’s freedom. Unless you call exploiting the poor “freedom”.
Dear gawd, this thread is all over the damned map.
Since Australia’s gun ban has been held up as a sterling model, and not signficantly challenged, I feel compelled to point out its spectacular failure. I really do not think this is is something we should attempt to emulate here in the U.S. Let’s examine some facts, shall we?
Crime in Australia has been rising since the enactment of the sweeping ban on private gun ownership. In the first two years after (1996 & 1997, I believe) gun-owners were forced to surrender over 650,000 personal firearms, government statistics show a dramatic increase in criminal activity.
[ul]
[li] Homicides are up 3.2%[/li][li] Assaults are up 17%[/li][li] Armed robberies are up 73%[/li][li] Unlawful entries are up 8%[/li][li] Kidnappings are up 38%[/li][li] Manslaughter is up 32%[/li][li] In the State of Victoria, homicides with firearms are up 300%[/li][/ul]
Sources:
[sup]1[/sup] The Australia Bureau of Statistics, 1998.
[sup]2[/sup] The Australian Institute of Criminology, a government funded think-tank, 1998.
Now, pro-rate these numbers and apply them to the 80+ million U.S. gun-owners and their 200+ million firearms. Sounds like a recipe for a rousing success to me. Especially, given that everyone assumes U.S. citizens to be so much more naturally violent than citizens/subjects of other nations.
Before I even ask for his definition of ridiculous, I’d like him to tell me exactly “The number of deaths due to firearms in the US.” I’d be willing to lay a large wager he has no idea, or can even come close to guessing.
Two years is kind of a small sample to be making sweeping generalizations about the effect of gun control on crime, don’t you think, UncleBeer? Especially when there are all kinds of other reasons that could lead to a rise in crime.
Dammit, Uncle Beer, there you go again messin’ up a perfectly good debate with your facts again!! (I’m still waiting for the beer-swilling, 42-round-shotgun-totin’, Montana militia man reference.) As for the children argument, these stats are directly from the CDC.
Fatal firearm accidents among children (ages 0 to 14)
Fatal firearm accidents fell to 138 in 1996, an all-time low; motor vehicles (3,015), drowning (966), fires (761), suffocation on ingested object (211), falls (111), poisoning (109) and medical mistakes (94). Since 1975, fatal firearm accidents to children have decreased 75%, 24% since 1995.
Perhaps. If that’s true, though, then using those same couple years of stats to make sweeping generalizations that gun bans are helpful is equally ludicrous. Possibly, even more ludicrous, in light of the facts to the contrary. Additionally, why don’t you attempt demonstrate just what those “other causes” might be instead of being dismissive?
Or I can turn this backwards, if you wish. Gun ownership in the U.S. in those same years increased while we saw a decline in crime overall and gun crime specifically. One exapmle is the 134 percent increase in the murder rate in Washington, D.C. since the enactment of one of the most restrictive gun control schemes in 1976. This increase in D.C. came all while we had a 2% decline in the national murder rate. (Source: 1997 FBI Uniform Crime Statistics)
Additionally, in Washington D.C., where gun laws are stringent, the per capita murder rate is 56.9. Just across the river in Arlington, VA, where gun restrictions are nearly non-existent for law-abiding citizens, the per capita murder rate is a mere 1.6. (Source: FBI, Crime in the United States, 1998.
Or how about other large cities? 20% of homocides occur in just 4 large U.S. cities which comprise only 6% of the U.S. population (New York, Detroit, Washington, D.C. & Chicago). These four cities also have a near virtual prohibition on handgun ownership. (Source: 1997 FBI Uniform Crime Statistics)
Or how about Kennesaw, GA? Kennesaw passed a law in 1982 requiring heads of households to keep at least one gun in the house. The following year saw an 89% decrease in the burglary rate. (Source: Crime Control Through the Private use of Armed Force, Social Problems, February 1988 - by Gary Kleck.)
So we have less guns and more crime, for you to explain, as well as more guns and less crime. Care to give it a shot? There’s a mountain of evidence for you to counter.
My, UncleBeer, you do like to draw sweeping conclusions from small numbers, don’t you? I’m not dismissively claiming that less guns equals less crime, but I’m thoroughly unconvinced by your statistics that more guns equals less crime.
According to the web page ofKennesaw, GA, the population of Kennesaw in 1980 was 5,095 people. That’s such a tiny sample that the arrest, death, or moving away of even a single serious burglar could dramatically swing the burglary rate.
So exactly how many Kennesaw burglaries were there in 1982, and how many in 1983? How many in other years, before and after the gun ownership ordinance? Did people actually comply with the new law, or was there a perception people were complying with it? Without answering these questions, plus many others, the 89% drop in burglaries is statistically meaningless.
Washington, D.C. is also piss-poor example of the effect of gun control laws because, as you admit, “Just across the river [is] Arlington, VA, where gun restrictions are nearly non-existent.” It’s not very persuasive to claim that gun control increases crime when the gun control measures at issue are incapable of effectively restricting access to guns because they can easily be purchased elsewhere and brought into D.C. Same thing goes for New York and the other cities you mentioned. At most, the high murder rate in those cities shows that ineffective gun control measures are ineffective at reducing homicides. Big surprise, right?
Again, perhaps, though I’d rather say that I’m not drawing a conclusion from any isolated fact; I’d rather say that I’m drawing my conclusions from the sheer mass of facts. The quantity of which is overwhelming. Do you wish me to post more? I’ve got hundreds of these things.
Anyway, the fact remains that you cannot show that greater restrictions will reduce crime in the future, or that they’ve had that effect in the past. I can show otherwise, hundreds of times. At least I’ve got something. If each single incident or fact is insignificant by itself, how do you counter the sheer number of those incidents and facts? How can you, as a presumably rational thinker, continue to deny the magnitude of evidence? Simply put, while the validity of any isolated incident may be argued, and while that incident in itself may not be statistically significant, the vast preponderance of evidence does support my position.
Anyway, I shouldn’t even be playing the game in this fashion. I should not have to disprove your position. As a proponent of gun control, it’s entirely up to you and your ilk to prove that the restrictions you wish to enact would serve the greater good. To make law otherwise, is immoral.
You may have hundreds of such studies, UncleBeer, but I’m not likely to be impressed if they’re all as flawed as the Kennesaw and Washington D.C. statistics you pointed out earlier. Mountains of flawed evidence are no more persuasive than molehills of flawed evidence.
Besides, I’ve read quite a bit of both sides in the past few months. Serious statisticians and social scientists haven’t managed to come to any sort of consensus on whether gun control reduces or increases crime. Everybody critiques everybody else’s data and methods, and good points are made on both sides. Since I’m not a world-famous statistician, I’ll take that as a sign that the only rational position for a layman to take is that the effectiveness of gun control and gun ownership are still open questions.
As for the immorality of changing the status quo without first proving that doing so would be beneficial, that’s a first class red herring. Am I to assume that you oppose all attempts to repeal existing gun control and gun safety measures as immoral because it has not been proven that doing so would be beneficial to society? Remember, the experts differ quite strongly over whether gun control is beneficial. So unless you just want to assert that your experts are right and everybody else’s experts are wrong, I think we have to conclude that it has not been proven that relaxing existing gun control laws is beneficial.
You’re a criminal. As such, you really don’t give a rat’s ass about the gun laws. You got your gun on the black market. You need some loot 'cause you owe Louie and he wants his money now. You live between two towns, one that has banned firearms and another in which purt near every law abiding citizen packs a piece.
Now get in your stolen car. Which town are you gonna head to?
Ooh, so I’m an NRA fantasy criminal in an NRA wet dream hypothetical! Nifty! As such, I will blithely disregard all other self-interested considerations except the prevalence of handguns in the respective communities, then proceed to ransack the unarmed community, plus rape their women and send their unarmed religious minorities to extermination camps. Because in the NRA’s Magical Kingdom, there are no such things as self-defense, crime prevention, and the ability to resist despotism in the absence of private ownership of high powered assault rifles.
Feh. There are so many pitfalls between the hypothetical and the knee-jerk answer you seek that it would take Harrison Ford and a $50 million special effects budget to get to the other side.
For instance, as a rational criminal who desires to be neither caught, confronted, wounded, or killed, I ain’t going anywhere near any house that’s occupied. So the prevalence of guns only enters the decision making process as something to consider on the long-shot chance I’m mistaken about whether the residents are home.
Next, how about the effectiveness of the local police forces? If Disarmamentville has Chuck Norris for a police chief, while NRA City has Clancey Wiggum, I’m much more likely to point the car towards NRA City.
Which town is likely to be the more lucrative target of a break-in? The marginal increased risk of armed residents is easily offset by the promise of greater rewards.
You get the picture. There are many considerations that a criminal takes into account when deciding on a course of action. Gun ownership may be one consideration, but I seriously doubt it is a significant one in most circumstances.
The proper questions to ask are not whether guns serve as a deterrent to crime, but how much of a deterrent they are, and whether that deterrent effect is offset by any added crime caused by the easy availablity of firearms.
The misrepresentation of Australian statistics in your post is simply breathtaking !
650,000 firearms handed in ? the actual figure was about 60,000.
It is not hard to get dramatic percentage increases in gun homicides when the original number (as here in my home state of Western Australia) is in SINGLE figures. The number for the whole damn country was only 54.
The new laws were enacted in the first place because one ‘gun enthusiast’ with 2 semi-automatic weapons killed 35 people all by himself. Had he been (as now) unable to obtain them, the statistics would be even lower.
You seem to be quoting the same NRA crap that prompted the Attorney General of Australia to write the letter in the first place.
It is also fundamentally untrue that our guns were all taken away. LICENCED firearms of non-military type were essentially left untouched, and there was NO new legislation pertaining to handguns.
As to other forms of crime showing increases in Australia, this is unfortunately true, but has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with firearms. It is simply the fact that we are slowly catching up with the USA and its endemic drug problem that is at the root of it, fortunately our drug dealers don’t have easy access to military style firearms.
Our politicians are looking carefully at the long term effect of putting vast numbers of people in prison as in the US. If it proves succesful, we may go that route here too.
The vast majority of gun homicides in this country were in domestic situations where the killer was known to the victim. Random acts of gun violence, or deaths during the execution of another crime are very, very rare. After the Port Aurthur massacre we decided to do everything in our power to prevent it happening again.
In spite of what the NRA may be trying to sell Americans, the vast majority of Australians (including responsible gun owners) fully supported the new legislation. A vociferous, but tiny minority of essentially right-wing survivalists and political fudamentalists got a lot more publicity than they really deserved because our media learned its trade from yours. For the NRA to clutch at our situation for support is frankly pretty sad.
It is interesting to note that Uncle beer seems to naturally assume that “Armed Robbery” indicates the use of firearms. That may be true in the USA, but here the most common weapons used here are knives or a blood filled syringe.
To be fair, RE, I’m sure the effect UncleBeer is referring to is the effect gun ownership has on deterring crime. The argument is that bad guys are significantly more likely to commit a crime–whether with a bloody syringe, a rocket launcher, or no weapon at all–if they don’t have to worry that their victims might be armed with a gun. Whether the criminal himself is packing heat is irrelevant to that argument.
Sheesh! How far we have strayed from the OP (which even pro-gunners have agreed is pretty whack). Why are we covering this ground again?
I can understand a bit of rehash for newbies, but c’mon people! I’m seeing the same people again! The same old arguments, thoroughly debunked, trotted out again.
Okay, top-to-bottom:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Some say “State!”, others say “People!” (for newbies, I’m firmly entrenched in the second category).
Who passed English in school here? I did, barely, and even I get it. The “militia” clause is a preamble to the main clause, or “the right…”. Or call them dependent and independent clauses, respectively. The preamble lays out the reason why the main clause is necessary; we need people, who are the militia, to keep and bear arms to keep the state free and secure.
So what is the militia? Open a dictionary; I’m tired of posting it here. But the current law concerning the militia makes it abundantly clear, in classical republican tradition, exactly who the milita are.
What does “regulated” mean? Again, open a dictionary. Since Article I, section 8 of the Constitution already gives Congress the power to:
it would hardly be necessary to again grant Congress that power in another part of the Constitution (The Bill of Rights), so the “to bring under the control of law or constituted authority” definition of regulated would not seem to apply here.
Unless someone can argue otherwise, I think that the “to bring order, method, or uniformity to” definition is the most applicable.
Or Alexander Hamilton screwed the pooch, and I can’t read or understand the english language. In response to a charge by anti-Federalists that we should “…apprehend danger from the militia itself, in the hands of the federal government. It is observed that select corps may be formed, composed of the young and ardent, who may be rendered subservient to the views of arbitrary power.”, he said:
Note the highlighted phrases. Seems to me that ol’ Al is trying to say that the militia, being the entire corps of able-bodied male citizens, would be too cumbersome to assemble regularly and train, and trying to do so would cause too much disruption on the economy, being as the militia is comprised of “…the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens,…”.
Sounds to me (and a growing body of legal scholarship as well) like he was trying to say that the militia is comprised of the people; the people are the militia.
Now, who here thinks that just anyone can walk into a gun store and buy a gun? Raise your hand if you can tell me which form, by which agency, must be filled out, and some of the provisions on that form.
Who here, advocating more gun control, has ever even been to a gun show? Much less tried to buy a gun at one?
Czarcasm says
Shame on you. Our very reason for being here is the eradication of ignorance, not the exposition of it with a dollop of vitriol and rhetoric. Read the Gun Control Act of 1968. Coincidentally enough, it has many of the same provisions, that is proscriptions against classes of citizens that cannot purchase, sell or transfer possession or ownership of firearms, as the armed service’s proscriptions against enlistment.
You know; that “militia” thing biting you on the ass right now.
For the people who want to change our Constitution: you betray yourselves with your very words. Either that, you’re just carelessly tossing off phrases w/o regard for their meaning. Why alter (amend) the Constitution unless you intend to totally abolish the right to keep and bear arms?
Most amendments added to the Constitution have been an expansion of civil liberty, often against the majority of public opinion (excepting the 18th). Emancipation, Woman’s Sufferage, Universal Sufferage; all of these were unpopular in the views of the majority. Yet our leaders and high courts held that these issues (slavery, unequal sufferage) were wrong, and took measures to enact amendments and laws to expand liberty, enact more freedom to more classes of people.
Abolishing the 2nd through amendment would be second instance of restriction of personal liberty through constitutional amendment, and the only from the Bill of Rights.
Nor do I, any other pro-gun person here, or the NRA oppose further restrictions should circumstances warrant it.[ But we seem to be of one mind, maybe out of necessity, that there should be no further restrictions until such time as current restrictions are regularly, if not rigorously, enforced.
I don’t care what Australians, Brits, Israelis, the Japanese, or anyone else do within the confines of their own borders concerning possession of firearms. Please reciprocate the courtesy.
Unclebeer I am not sure if you posted your blithe objection to my statement that the rate of firearm-related deaths in the US is ridiculous because you had any idea about the figures, or if you just wanted to throw sand in the argument for the sake of it. Either way, I stand by my statement. A quick search yielded several pages that discuss this issue. I don’t have time to go through all of them, but I found a summary from the American Academy of Pediatrics that was dated April 3, 2000. Here is the link.
Obviously the AAP is concerned primarily with children and that is the focus of their statement, but the information is interesting. I copy and paste here their summary on that page. Note that they refer to US data:
Now if these and similar data are reasonably accurate, is there any way that you can object to the term “ridiculous” when looking at the numbers? Not simply from the senseless waste of human life, but also considering the enormous cost of medical treatment.
Ex-Tank, you hit a sore spot when you bring up gun shows. As I have mentioned many times before, here in Oregon there is a loophole a mile wide concerning background checks. As long as someone declares himself to be a private seller and not a dealer, he can set up a table at a gun show and not do a single background check. When state legislators threatened to close the loophole, the gun show operators promised to set up tables for voluntary background checks. While they did indeed set up the tables at the next gun show at the Portland Expo Center, over a three day gun-buying frenzy not one person volunteered for a background check!
Please note that the statement of mine you quoted took place after RubberEntropy tried to explain how the right to own firearms was handled in Australia, and two posters promptly jumped on him, telling him that because Australia doesn’t handle it the way we in the U.S. of A., he really doesn’t have the right.
Freedom mocked my question (which was only one of many) based on the tragically inadequate conclusion that I was making a “wacked out post”. Actually, I was attempting to understand the gun culture and why people with guns are allowed to cause so much damage to the country.
What I and many foreigners to your country see in the US is gun worship. There is huge emphasis on firepower (from historical films to Sci-Fi) in much of the American film industry. I did not say that this emphasis promotes violence (been discussed before on this board) but I am asking whether it is possible that it encourages gun-worship, which can lead to gun possession for non-recreational purposes–and really, how many Americans use guns to go hunting, and how many Americans go hunting with handguns?? Do the problems arise solely due to poor regulations and/or instruction? Is law enforcement inadequate? If you think my post is “wacked out” perhaps you can explain why the US is in such an extreme (certainly for a developed country) situation with gun violence, especially when you look across the border to Canada or to any other developed nation. There are people outside the US who are eager to understand this strange problem–and this willingness to seemingly tolerate firearm related violence.
Anyhoo, to get back on the original topic-If I am to take the question at face value, I think that Professor Xavier would use the Sue Storm to sneak him as close to the White House as possible, Kitty Pryde would use her powers to get him into the Oval Office, and he would do a mind-wipe on the Prez. Doctor Strange would then do mass hypnosis on Congress to convince them that someone else was really the President.
Look, if you’re gonna give us a scenario that reads like a badly written comic book, this is the only answer you deserve, IMHO.
