Argeable - which kinds of shootings are we talking about?
You mean, like these?
Just curious.
God help me, but I’m gonna jump in here against my better judgement.
In a related thread (thanks weirddave for steering me over here), I demonstrated that it’s easy for both sides of this debate to get emotional about it. It wasn’t pretty and led nowhere. I’m anti-gun, to be sure, but I’m also guilty of letting my feelings get in the way of rational debate. This thread is refreshing by comparison, so thanks, folks.
And, humbly admitted, my lesson is learned. On the upside, even after being called “stupid,” a “gun-nazi,” and my personal favorite, a “shivering hoplophobe” (that means coward, BTW, I looked it up), here’s some admittedly broader points I’ve learned:
[ul]
[li]Guns are a fully entrenched aspect of American culture - realistically, they’re here to stay.[/li][li]No matter what extreme either side of the debate espouses, see point 1.[/li][li]Much gun-control legislation is already on the books, but is not and/or cannot be enforced.[/li][li]People die, good and bad, old and young, because of bullet trauma - people kill people, guns kill people, whatever: in the U.S., the people/gun/bullet combo kills in numbers that pale in comparison to other industrialized nations.[/ul][/li]
If anything, I can agree with the pro-gun standpoint that even more legislation will do little to stop the growth of gun-deaths in the United States. Again, see Point One. But by the same token, seeing pro-control sentiment being brushed aside by the “should all men be barred from eating shellfish?” argument is, if you’ll pardon the pun, hard to swallow. So is equating it with “treason.” Stuff like that gets us nowhere since it ignores the central issue, but we post it anyway because the stakes are life and death and fundamental rights. Not trivial matters, these.
Those that have guns want to keep them. The fact is, as long as they stay within the letter of existing law they have the right to. Also, I’ll admit that with each new law it gets harder and harder for lawful gun owners to stay legal. But precisely because of Point One, I personally do not believe that such rights are as at risk as some in the pro-gun camp perceive. Yes, I know that there are lobbies/factions who profess that getting rid of all guns is their primary objective. There is a substantial number of people who believe the earth is flat, too. I simply don’t believe that’ll happen since the scale of such an effort is neither practical or possible in the U.S.
And probably the biggest change of heart I’ve had revolves around the statistics themselves (BTW: thank you MysterEcks for going through the trouble to research and post them): as much as the substantially lower gun-death numbers in other countries point out that the U.S. has a problem (to which I believe the pro-control lobby justifiably, if not effectively, reacts), they also point out that “other countries” don’t have a gun-culture either. So, I’ll admit that there’s an element of not comparing apples-to-apples here. Conversely, I’ll use the same argument to state that, as far as society’s reaction is concerned, gun-control efforts undertaken in other countries (England, Canada, and Australia seem to get bandied about a lot) get nowhere near the reaction as similar legislation would get here in the U.S., ie: these governments can willingly enact such controls since the political impact is less (broken record: see Point One).
Finally, while I believe more education and enforcement are positive things, the same approach has done little to stem the growth of the drug use in our society, so I have little faith in that approach making a significant impact. And other than Chris Rock’s humorous proposal to cure the gun problem by making weapons free but charging $50,000 per bullet, I’ve seen little in the way of innovative thought that might actually deal with the problem in an effective manner. Therefore (and to come back to the subject of this thread), in spite of what change will come of it, I applaud the Moms of the March, pro and con. FWIW, they at least feel the issue important enough to actually try and do something about it. Otherwise, I’ll have to default to accepting the US’s position as the world’s leader in gun-deaths as a cost of personal freedom.
I realize that the odds of everybody encountering a situation that involves a gun is slim. However, I know I would feel better if everybody treated their lives like the chance was still there.
Why do children play with guns? Because they are curious. Why do some teenagers have sex while they are too immature to handle it? Because they are curious. Why are they curious about guns? Because parents/guaderians don’t see a need to teach children about how to handle/use a gun properly * “We don’t own a gun. I am strongly anti-NRA. Besides, they are so young, when would they even be exposed to a gun? *
My perception comes from living in both a rural and an urban areas. In the rural area where I grew up, I never head of a single “accidental” shooting. Why? Because everybody had the proper education. The education that essentially said * Guns are not toys children. Guns are used to kill people and other living things. Don’t play with them unless you plan on killing something. Don’t point them at people unless you plan on taking a way your friends life.” *
Children aren’t stupid, teenagers aren’t stupid either. They understand the simple logic behind this statement.
Gun education is like sex education. The only way to halt the problems is to fight ignorance.
Sex kills people to (AIDS other STDS), and the only way to stop is to educate people about the possible harmful effects of sex.
Guns kill people due to other’s mistakes. I think gun education should be mandatory.
Finally, if someone is intent on killing somebody, they will do it. Guns or no.
This is what I don’t understand. Why on earth should a child be taught to handle or use a gun? From where I sit the only sensible gun education program for children would be one that teaches them NOT to pick up a gun and to go tell an adult if ever they find one where children can get at it. Children may be curous about guns, but they are curious about cars too and we don’t teach them how to drive. Instead we teach them how to be careful around cars.
We do teach them to drive cars when they reach the appropriate age. By teaching drivers ed to children, it cuts down on accidents. It would be ludicrous to NOT teach teenagers about cars.
School’s teach sex ed to promote safe sex. Therefore cutting down on STDs. But the main birth control they teach is absitence (SP?)
If schools teach students how to safely handle guns. ** Handle Guns ** There’s more to handling a gun then knowing how to fire it. I’m not advocating target practice, or how to load and clean a gun. I am advocating teaching how to handle them safely. Would you rather have a child find a gun and pick it up out of ignorance? Or would you rather have a child find a gun, and be able to make an educated decision about what to do about it?
The rules of gun safety drilled into people who are learning how to shoot is something like this:
[ol]
[li]Treat all guns as though they are loaded, even if you’re sure they’re not.[/li][li]Keep the barrel pointed in a safe direction at all times.[/li][li]Do not put your finger inside the trigger guard unless and until you are ready to shoot.[/li][li]Keep the safety engaged, if the gun has one, until you are ready to shoot.[/li][li]When not shooting, keep the gun unloaded[/li][li]When not shooting, open the action or swing out the cylinder so that the gun cannot accidentally go off.[/li][li]Never point the barrel at anything you don’t intend to shoot. (This is an addendum to rule # 2 above.)[/li][/ol]
This sounds like a pretty good list for learning how to handle a gun, even when you don’t want to shoot it.
I agree with Tracer. Now why not implement that into a health/decision making class in High School? Heath/decision making is already a recquired subject in most schools.
Would you like to know how the gun lobby tries to make gun use “safer” in in Oregon? Let me give you a couple examples:
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The NRA tried to push for a manditory(no exemptions) gun safety class in the public schools here. The law they tried to push through required the schools to use the Eddie Eagle program solely. It failed to make it through.
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If you buy a gun in Oregon, you have to go through a background check, unless it is a sale from a private owner.
You should see all the sales made at gun shows from “private collectors”! When threatened with the closure of this loophole, the gun show dealers offered to run a voluntary background check booth at their next show to exibit good faith in dealing with this problem. At this 4 day gun show not one single background check was made! When the state government tried to close this loophole again, the coffers opened up, secret meetings were held, and the bill died in committee.
Also, it’s somewhat hypocritical for the gun lobby to spend millions to weaken those bills that they couldn’t kill outright, then claim that the laws don’t work, so more laws surely aren’t needed.
I have read this thread, and the others re: guns.
There is one inescapable point.
There are roughly 250 million guns in the US.
If you gunbanners can do some Star Trek mumbo jumbo, and
make ALL guns in the world vanish, you can have mine too.
But until you do that, I will keep my guns, because EVERY
gun control measure, or law, or whatever, applies to LAW ABIDING CITIZENS.
Until you convince the rapists, pedos, psychos, robbers, and
assholes to give up THEIR guns, you can’t have mine!
Klaatu- You are the problem! Where the hell do you think the criminals, rapists, etc. etc etc. are getting all their weapons? They steal them from people like you. There are not too many “secret” factories out there cranking out .357 or .45 caliber bang-sticks. Criminals have easy accesss to weapons precisely because the NRA is promoting this “I need one because everybody else has one!” mentality.
What’s the point of debating this issue with people who make outrageous claims??
“You??” ‘You’ who? Nobody here’s advocating taking anything from anyone, that I’ve seen. If my recollection is incorrect, feel free to quote the offending parties. Otherwise, I think the ‘you want to take our guns away’ claim is verging on trolling.
Try this page:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchswww/data/nvs47_19.pdf
You’ll need Adobe Acrobat first, if you don’t already have it.
Slythe: Just of curiousity, can you prove that a significant portion of criminal guns are stolen? According to the “Survey of Felons and Their Guns” most guns are purchased illegally on the black market or illegally bought by straw man purchase. Enforcing these laws has been shown to make a difference in gun violance. The laws are there, they just need to be enforced.
Momo: First, I didn’t call you a “shivering” hoplophobe. I just said “hoplophobe”. Second, I doesn’t mean coward it means “afraid of weapons” or “afraid of violence”. Third, I initially didn’t direct it towards YOU. Initially, I was saying that the civlized man is naturally a hoplophobe. They have a natural repulsion to weapons and violence. The rest of your posts suggested to me that, in fact, you are a hoplophobe. I bet, like most people, if they put a gun in your hand your first reaction would be one of repulsion, sweaty palms, butterfly in the stomach, etc. It isn’t an insult. That’s why I said “feel free to take it as an insult if you like”.
Oh, are we talking about teenagers now? I thought we were talking about little kids. Isn’t that who the NRA’s “Eddie Eagle” program is targeted at?
Yes, but guns are made to be fired, aren’t they? What’s the point of learning how to handle a gun if you never intend to use one?
You’re setting up a false choice here. The only options are not 1) never tell your children anything about guns at all or 2) teach them how to hold a gun. You can teach your kids that they should not pick up a gun at all, and that they should tell an adult if they ever find a gun lying around. If some parents want to teach their kids how to handle a gun then that is their right, but I would not want my hypothetical children going to school and being told that it’s okay for kids to handle guns. It’s not okay with ME, and I’m their hypothetical mother.
Hi Glitch.
Insult or no, it matters not. FWIW, my dictionary says the following: "Hoplophobe, n., from the Greek hoplo, “hopeless,” and phobe, “bastard or coward.” If that wasn’t what you meant, then at least use your definition to make the point. In any event, my point here was that name calling (on my part as well as others) does nothing more than show that the poster has a closed mind. Additionally, holding a gun doesn’t make me wanna puke, but it doesn’t make me wanna go out and get one either. But yes, I dislike weapons enough that I don’t own one. And if I ever feel there’s a need to do so in order to protect myself or my family, then my first reaction will be to move someplace else, or do what I can at a community level to fight the threat. You choose to arm yourself for that possibility, which is your right. I choose not to become part of the gun cycle. What I don’t understand is how my position is considered to be somehow defeatist.
Also, how do you regard the U.S. stats (overall deaths by handguns, regardless of category) when compared to other industrialized nations? Are the higher U.S. numbers acceptable to you? (before asking me to back up the numbers, they’re readily available in this thread).
Klaatu
Does anyone have any statistics on the number of people who successfully defend themselves or their family or property because they had a gun? More to the point people who were able to defend themselves only because they had a gun (i.e. a baseball bat wouldn’t have sufficed)? According to the stat I listed above 670,500 people faced a gun during the commission of a crime in 1998. Out of that number surely some must have had a weapon nearby (I know that isn’t necessarily true but I think it’s a safe assumption). Why did or didn’t they use their gun? I’m not trying to be pedantic…I’d really like to know. I’m sure people can throw an anecdotal story or two at me but how about some meaningful statistics.
Personally I’m hard pressed to come up with situations where a gun would be truly useful. In most cases, to be useful as protection, you’d need the gun on you and loaded. Even in this case I’m not sure how much good it’d be…
Example
You’re walking down the street and a robber points a gun at you and demands your wallet and jewelry. You have a gun. You can either hand over your valuables or you can go for your gun. If you have brass-balls or are an amazing quickdraw maybe the gun is an option. However, considering the robber has the drop on you, you stand a very good chance of getting yourself shot before you can bring your weapon to bear. If the robber takes your stuff and starts walking away and then you shoot him/her you are guilty of assault with a weapon (or murder if the person dies) under our current law. The robber will go to jail for 2 years for robbery and you’ll spend ten in the pen for ‘defending’ yourself.
For home defense you’d need the gun nearby and loaded. Even the NRA doesn’t suggest keeping loaded weapons around your house. Anything else you’d need to get to where your gun is, get your ammo and load the gun before the intruder found you and did whatever nasty things they had in mind for you. Seems like hiding around a corner with a bat would be more effective.
The alternative is everyone carrying weapons around. While some advocate this approach I don’t see it as an improvement. How many times have you been really pissed at the guy who just cut you off on the expressway or had some jerk in a bar pick a fight with you or a friend? Does having both parties armed in these situations seem like a bad idea to anyone but me?
On the Gun Homicide Statistics thread, junebeetle links to a number of statistical sources, most notably the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It includes breakdowns of the 1998 homicide stats here.
junebeetle summarized what he found as follows:
Glitch - how do we enforce these laws? I mean, a law on the books doesn’t always equate to being able to identify specific violators. We know that ‘straw man’ purchases are occurring, and we can often identify particular gun shops where we know many such purchases must be happening. But how easy or hard is it for the cops to come in and muster the evidence to support an indictment so that it will hold up in court?
Unless the handoff between the straw purchaser and the ultimate purchaser takes place inside the gun shop, and is captured on their video cameras, I’ll bet it’s a real challenge to identify such people.
A simpler solution, IMO, is one proposed by the Moms: to nationalize the one-handgun-a-month laws. It would certainly limit the number of times one person could be a straw purchaser.
The other source of illegal guns you mentioned was guns bought illegally on the black market. In order to have any idea whether it’s viable for the law to crack down on this, we’d have to have an inkling of what such a transaction looked like, and how the gun left the world of legal guns in the first place. Again, the ultimate question is, is there a realistic opportunity for enforcement here?
momo: I apologize for the unintended insult. I have never seem it definied in any dictionary as “hopeless coward”. Hoplophobia is the fear of weapons or violence (you can read some papers on it on the net). A hoplophobe is somebody who has hoplophobia.
I was not engaging in name calling in the slightest, although you can continue to pretend I was if you wish. The reality is that many people do not understand weapons and are irrationally afraid of them, even just contact with them or seeing them. Once I had a person pass out in my school when I handed him my gun. Granted he was an extreme case but almost NOBODY ever gets handed a gun for the first time and not feel somewhat repulsed.
These people invariably do not recognize the value of the gun to the law abiding citizen for self defense. These people oppose guns from an irrational fear that is common in the modern day civilized human. It is this same irrational fear that cripples people under the adrenal stress of violent attack which is why I am very familiar with it (feel free to read various books on adrenal stress and self defense to find out what I am talking about).
Who said that? I did say that you tried arguing from ignorance about weapons, which certainly seemed to be the case. If you wish to prove otherwise then feel free to do so, with sound reasoning and evidence where necessary. You made many claims without support.
Also, you will note momo that I have posted on MANY occasions that there many good reasons for not owning a gun (see “The Best Defense” for a recent example). You will also note that people like Massad Ayoob, an advocate of firearm self defense, also points this out. In fact, almost anybody who supports the notion that firearm ownership is NOT for everybody and is in fact a liability for many, to state otherwise is plain stupid. However, it is equally foolish to not recognize the legitimate and ethical use of a firearm for self defense for some people who are prepared to handle that responsibility ethically, lawfully and responsibly, and in a nation that his considerable criminal ownership of firearms it is a terrible notion to take that portion of the self defense spectrum away from the law abiding citizen.
So what kind of bullshit question is that.
[sarcasm on]You know I think the death by handgun rate is too low in the US. It isn’t nearly acceptable to me at all[/sarcasm off]
Of course, handgun death rates aren’t acceptable. No fucking kidding. Gee, that is a brilliant piece of insight.
However, will gun control reduce this rate? No. Study after study has shown this to be untrue, and that in fact the converse is true. Private gun ownership in the US reduces violent crime. What also works is enforcement and prosecution of the laws that keep criminals from owning or using firearms.
So, please, don’t try some bullshit “You are a gun owner, so you must not care about all these gun deaths”. That is just pure inflammatory rhetoric. I want gun death rates to go down, that why I support those things that actually work.
Somebody asked about defensives uses of handguns. The estimates are between 3 and 6 million defensive uses of handguns a year. The commonly accepted number is 3.6 million from research by Gark Kleck. I don’t know of anything that breaks it down into “what would have sufficed” because it isn’t a valid question. It is effectively impossible to determine what would have sufficed.
Also, citizens kill 3,000 violent criminals a year with handguns, and wound another 17,000 more (police by comparison kill about 1,000 and wound 5,000 with their firearms, the injure FAR more with nightsticks and such).
Certainly the Bureau of Justice Statistics stats indicate that we’re at greater hazard of being killed by mostly law-abiding gun owners who happen to get angry enough, than by people involved in criminal enterprises (and, as I indicated earlier, I’m including your unfriendly local rapist in the latter category).
It’s always been clear that increasing the number of people packing heat would lower the risk of being killed by someone who’s already a violent criminal, but raise the risk of being killed by an otherwise law-abiding citizen having a bad day over some trivial confrontation.
What the BJS numbers do is give a strong suggestion of which of those factors is likely to be larger.