An example is a story, not a statistic. If we use your example as a statistic, then you are saying that those saved in your link are the total number, and I don’t think that’s the idea you are trying to convey, is it? If you want to give a link that points out that are large number of lives are being saved via private gun use, try to avoid the use of anecdotes in the future.
Would it be too much to suppose you could rewrite that so it actually makes some sort of sense? That was one of the most incoherent things I’ve ever read on this site.
Thanks for the info Czarcasm! I aways enjoy it when you come around to nitpick the pro-gunners. I’ve come to expect that from your side. If I wanted to give statistics I could do that too…
…but I like examples like this…
…better because your side seem to always claim the statistics are lies, even if they are your sides own statistics.
Sorry to ask for a cite, but that sounded so bizarre I Googled it. The best match I found is that Illinois doesn’t require people who are so disabled (or senior) to purchase a special license, and I think they get longer seasons. My eyes didn’t find anything on Indiana DNR.
Not that I saw. Not in terms of how much time the potential suicide has to change his or her mind. And a little googling will show that your second tragic idea has a still terrible, but nonetheless lower, case fatality rate than bullets.
I agree with the vice-president that if you have to have an anti-burglar weapon, a shotgun might be a better idea. I know it depends on what kind of shotgun, but, generally that’s a lower case fatality rate.
The wisdom of taking away guns is highly debatable. I’d even say that the idea you need a gun to stop a future US holocaust is debatable, since there’s no way to prove what won’t happen. But the relationship of gun in the house to suicide? Not much question there. Why do you think the leading US states for suicides are Montana, Alaska, Wyoming, and Idaho? Is it because rural people are more depressed? Actually, it’s the opposite. The gun prevalence is so strong an influence on suicide that it overwhelms the general anti-suicide influence of rural living.
I was guessing what you meant in #35 about “hours or days.” I should have first asked you to clarify.
Iowa allows crossbows via permit for disabled hunters only. Here is a list of state regs re: crossbows.
http://www.huntersfriend.com/crossbows/crossbow-state-regulations.htm
Not to be too crass but if someone wants to kill themselves and the choices are give him a gun or have them jump in front of a train…
I will entirely disregard the suicide rate from the effects of gun ownership for now (It is much of the CDC argument for gun control).
Shotguns are the king of home defense and I agree that everyone should have one, I have 5 (if you count my taurus products) but they are not really comfortable for everyone, especially for smaller women, for them an AR-15 with frangible rounds might be better.
Have you been to these places? Nice places to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there, especially if you’re gay. Perhaps what these places need are greyhound bus tickets to larger more diverse metropolitan areas.
cite?
I found this but it seems to say that people from rural areas are slightly but significantly more depressed: Rural-urban differences in depression prevalence: implications for family medicine - PubMed
No doubt that guns are very lethal and provides a very high success rate for suicide. I just don’t give suicide a lot of weight.
There are a lot of countries in the world with registration where there is no confiscation. This is, for the nine billionth time, a post hoc error. And there are countries where, without registration, there have been confiscation of guns. The government in this country cannot confiscate property without just compensation. The government isn’t going to suddenly confiscate 200 million guns from 75 million gun owners without just compensation, or even with it. If either of those conditions start to happen, then perhaps you have something to worry about. The government registers all cars. You would be surprised how difficult it is to remove the driving privileges from someone who is elderly and dangerous behind the wheel.
Paranoia is not a good basis of civic interfacing.
Registration, for whatever reason, whether to make a confiscation list or just to have a handy gun-owner ID program, is essentially a transgression, or infringement, since registration can be denied by authorities that have no right to deny the people (that’s us) the right to keep and bear arms.
This won’t get settled righteously by appointed judges, because they’ll dance to any tune the president who appointed them plays. It will just be another example of “Left vs Right”, “Liberal vs Conservative”, just another way to divide us so we don’t scrutinize the elite while they go about their agenda, whatever that is, behind their gated, guarded walls.
The gun-frightened will so rarely be converted to gun-realists, and the gun-loving will almost never switch sides and join the gun-haters, so it really is a never ending debate. Since very few will concede, it becomes an excuse to simply berate the other side, a useless pursuit if your hope is to change hearts and minds.
The so-called gun vs anti-gun debate can’t be won by either side, so we are forced to ask ourselves, we do we continue to argue? I think it’s just a convenient way to attack folks who have a different perspective than ourselves, and a way to feel that we might ultimately exert control over others.
There is one very big difference between the pro-gun and anti-gun folks, though. Gun people really don’t care if folks that are afraid of or nervous around guns decide to neither own nor carry guns … they don’t want to change the lives of anti-gunners in any way. However, anti-gunners want to change the lives of pro-gun people in a very significant way … either banning guns, limiting them, or otherwise hampering the right of the people as clearly stated in the 2nd amendment.
In the ninth line of my previous post, it should read, " …WHY do we continue to argue?"
Oops.
I’m afraid I was just plain wrong about this.
Lowest gun deaths are in Hawaii and Massachusetts, which I guess someone could attribute people having time to chill while sitting in the monumental Boston and Honolulu traffic jams, but I’m gonna attribute it to the great majority of people in those states not arming themselves. From my last link, and highly recommended:
http://election.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/gun_ownership_deaths_500px.jpg
The most rural states, in terms of where people actually live, are Vermont, West Virginia, and Maine. The most urbanized are California, followed by New Jersey, and, yes, Hawaii.
I guess the lesson is to move to a low crime, dense, suburb, but don’t bring a gun.
This really sums up my issue with registration. I can think of three modern day examples where registries were established and later closed. Two of which led to confiscation or destruction of previously legal firearms. A national registry is not a guarantee of confiscation, but the track record in the US is not particularly a good one.
Not if everything is “shall issue”
Of course it will be setlled by judges. That is how we have been settling constitutional questions in this country for over two hundred years. We recently settled the question whether there was a personal right to bear arms.
Not true. As I pointed out, scotus just recently ruled that we have a right to effective self defense in our homes and the court is going to be hearing a case regarding the right to carry.
If you replaced the right to bear arms with the right to abortion, you sound almost exactly like some pro-choice posters on abortion.
It happens to the best of us. And the best of us acknowledges when it happens.
I would think that in order to be fair to the argument that high gun ownership provides a sort of herd immunity from crime, you would want to compare gun ownership with violent crime not just gun deaths (which seems to be largely suicides).
The nfa is an 80 year old gun registry. I dont think it has ever been used for confiscation. Sure California has done some unconstituional stuff and the NRA has been unwilling to test their cinvictions in court, but that has changed now. We are fighting back in the courts and we are winning.
The NFA registry was closed in '86 when FOPA was passed. Any full auto gun not on it became illegal. Either give it to Uncle Sugar or destroy it. There was no other option. That is a bad thing and proof that registration by the Feds can have extremely bad consequences.
An interesting point with the passage of FOPA is that the creation of any national registry of non NFA guns was made illegal.
I thought the NFA imposed the registration requirement in 1934. FOPA closed the registry so that no NEW guns could be added to it. You were supoosed to register all along werent you? So who had their guns confiscated? And how was it such a bad thing?
We have had very few gun crimes committed by nfa weapons in the last 50 years. This is a good thjng and proof that registration by the Feds can have extremely good consequences.
And yes, any new registration requirement would effectively repeal that part of fopa that prohibited a registry.
Until FOPA, anyone could make a new MG and get it registered. Any war bring backs sitting in the attic found after grandpa died, could be registered, and kept in the family. Once FOPA was passed, anything that hadn’t been registered was either to be destroyed or turned in. The reason that it is a bad thing is that legal firearms that only needed paperwork and a few fees paid became illegal overnight, for no reason whatsoever.
I am dubious of the effects of a nationwide registry using NFA as an example. NFA guns are extremely expensive and are not often transferred from owner to owner. The last I saw, there were 250,000 guns on the registry. That is not even a 10th of a percent of the current 400,000,000 guns in private ownership today. The thought of the bureaucracy required to add NFA requirements to every gun in private possession is beyond overwhelming and is a unworkable suggestion accordingly.
Not wanting anecdotes to be used as evidence makes me anti-gun? There are numerous anecdotes on both sides of this issue, so that approach obviously isn’t going to work, which is why I don’t like them.
They became illegal because they weren’t registered. FOPA wasn’t passed in the middle of the night when noone was looking. You have a month after FOPA was passed to register your machine gun and it wasn’t a surprise when it was passed. I don’t see that as a bad thing.
NFA guns are extremely expensive NOW. They weren’t that expensive in 1985.
A national gun registry wouldn’t be anything like the NFA registry, that would be ridiculous. A national gun registry would be largely automated with information typically entered by FFL dealers much in the same way they are entered now except with more gun identification. It would require very little more effort on the part of the FFL and would largely be a software upgrade on the part of the ATF. I would repeal FOPA and NFA (other than the parts pertaining to FFLs) and jsut register all guns the same way, permit teh sale of machine guns in those states that want to permit it.
They became illegal because there was no way in which to register them. Any gun could have been added to the registry prior to passage of FOPA. That is a bad thing and since you have been pushing a national registry in about every other post, you need to come to grips with the fact that anytime a registry is created, there becomes the possibility that it can be closed. I just gave you three examples of same atht State and Federal level.
And if you look at the history of the bill, the closure of the registry was passed under dubious circumstances at best. Not quite middle of the night, but very similar.
Which makes no difference. They are what they are. If you are going to tout the effectiveness of the NFA registry, you need to examine why. For the last 30 years, the registry has been stagnant due to no additions and extremely high prices. In addition, it is so effective because only a subset of states allow ownership, and only a subset of owners can even afford to get in the game and clear the hurdles to ownership. This is an apples to oranges comparison at best to any non NFA registry plan.
Then you really cannot assume similar results can you? The “success” of the NFA registry is due to much more than a just list of guns owned.
Just register them before the registry closes. Maybe I’m missing something. The NFA required that all machine guns be registered from 1934 on, didn’t it? In 1986, FOPA stopped the sale of new machine guns to the public and closed the registry. So if your gun wasn’t registered, it was your fault, wasn’t it?
You seem to be saying that they can use the registry requirement to effectively ban the sale of new guns entirely. Well, if they want to violate the second amendment by restricting the sale of all new firearms, they don’t need a registry to do that. So I’m bnot sure what EXTRA concern the registry presents other than the fear that they will use it to confiscate firearms and we have an 80 year old registry that has never been used for that purpose. You’re not seeing shadows behind every tree, youa re practically looking for them.
The house passed the bill knowing exactly what was in it, there is some controversy about how that provision got in the bill but people were free not to vote for it. The senate also knew what was in the bill and they voted for it too. President Reagan ALSO knew what was in the bill and he signed it into law. Not middle of the night at all. Everybody knew what was in it, they didn’t have to vote for it.
They were effective BEFORE the extremely high prices kicked in.
Are you saying that a gun ban could work?
These guns were under $500 in 1985.
Almost anyone with a CCW and $200 (plus the price of the gun) could clear the hurdle to ownership.
Its not a perfect analogy but its pretty damn close. Keepingn track of where the guns are severely constrains the criminal’s ability to get their hands on them.
The only difference is that criminals don’t try to get machine guns because they can get other guns so easily. If we make it hard for them to get ALL guns, they will still get their hands on SOME guns but not nearly as many as they would without licensing and registration. The burden to the law abiding citizen is minial, the risk of confiscation is fantasy and the risk of using it as a mechanism for a total gun ban is redundant.