This one(italics added):
Ah ok.
I’d agree with it; punish the evil. In this case, if you shoot someone, you’ll get jail, or suchlike. But restrictions on gun ownership are not motivated (at least to me) by a desire to punish, but a desire to prevent future crimes from occurring. So that perhaps someone else won’t be able to shoot someone. Now, if we could seperate out the people who will shoot someone if they have the opportunity from the people that won’t, then certainly it would be no problem to create one law for one and one law for the others. But we don’t have that capability. So, regretably, people who will act lawfully would need to be restricted as well as those who won’t.
So we restrict people in advance for something somebody might do? That method of doing things is too authoritarian for my tastes.
It’s certainly a matter of opinion. But I’m willing to accept that encroachment of my liberty if it means less crime and death. I feel that which I’m giving up, while certainly of value, is worth less than what i’m getting in return. That it’s a fair trade. I don’t personally think there is any act that can be measured solely by its affect on one measurement, or judged taking into account only one thing.
No, I freely concede that it is completely morally indefensible to restrict access to ownership of anything, anywhere. Like the government of the UK, I am a soulless ravening monster who wishes only to deprive you of your holy right to posess live smallpox culture and enriched uranium.
Government restricts certain things because they are inherently dangerous. A gun is inherently dangerous. That’s exactly why they were invented, not as a series of collectors’ items. That’s why they’re “badass.” This equation is not rocket science. You can’t decorate your property with land mines either. Why should it be a crime to decorate your own private property with badass metal sculpture? Am I harming anyone else with my own personal collection of powdered anthrax?
Yeah, that’s pretty much it for me. I feel that my right not to be gunned down ought to trump your right to collect and distribute shiny bangy things for no goddamned good reason. Technically I’m afraid of guns in the hands of irresponsible people, so if you can guarantee that your guns can’t be fired by one, I’m fine with them.
Actually they’re set up so that they can be amended to guarantee pretty much anything at all. I think that’s the whole point of the OP. What happens in a worst-case scenario, if the US population goes crazy and starts thinking like British people?
I’d like to own a nuclear weapon.
Signed,
Iran.
Gun Deaths - International Comparisons
Gun deaths per 100,000 population (for the year indicated):
Homicide Suicide Other (inc Accident)
USA (2001) 3.98 5.92 0.36
Italy (1997) 0.81 1.1 0.07
Switzerland (1998) 0.50 5.8 0.10
Canada (2002) 0.4 2.0 0.04
Finland (2003) 0.35 4.45 0.10
Australia (2001) 0.24 1.34 0.10
France (2001) 0.21 3.4 0.49
England/Wales (2002) 0.15 0.2 0.03
Scotland (2002) 0.06 0.2 0.02
Japan (2002) 0.02 0.04 0
I got these statistics from http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm and yes it’s an anti-gun site, but going on these figures it appears you’re more likely to top yourself than murder or maim anyone else. These statistics don’t show the number of guns per capita, but I think the Swiss own quite a lot - and look at their suicide rate - just below USA - but the Swiss rate is much lower for murder. Finland is up there.
It appears to me that guns are most dangerous to their owners and the friends & family of careless owners. In the green and pleasant land British farmers have a high suicide rate and do use their guns to do it.
From the site:
“The reasons for this are likely to be complex, but may include easy availability of firearms, stress related to work, financial difficulties, and family problems.”
Malmberg, A; Hawton, K; Simkin, S ‘A study of suicide in farmers in England and Wales’ in Journal of Psychosomatic Research; 43 (1) Jul 97, p.107-11
It’s sad reading and shows that gun suicide would account for more British press than gun murders - even if it doesn’t make the nationals. It’s easier to kill yourself with a gun.
That’s absurd. I’m almost certain Schwarzenegger accepted scripts with RPGs in them.
You argue that crazed killers are too rare to use RPGs, and criminals just won’t bother? That’s a pretty broad assertion. No criminals have ever forseen the need to evade helicopter pursuit? No crime cartel ever thought it would send a stronger message to its rivals by taking out an enemy gang’s HQ?
What about terrorists? They seem to get a lot of use out of such gadgets in other countries. Why have our domestic terrorists not jumped on that bandwagon?
What about fringe religious groups? Anti-tax radicals? People who like to make things go “boom” for no particular reason? America is full of all sorts of diverse groups that amass private arsenals for all sorts of reasons. Homemade pipe bombs, fertilizer bombs… there was even that one guy killed by that explosive collar a while back, and there’s a movie scenario if ever there was one.
Yet not one single RPG- or SAM-related crime has emerged? Where are they? Where are our military-issued grenade deaths on the streets? Not one kid and his drunken buddies ever dragged out his dad’s bootleg munition and fired it off at the neighbor’s house, or blew themselves to pieces? Either all these groups have a very strange blind spot, or else banned armaments are indeed less likely to be used for crime.
This quote is from several days ago, but it seems to have been ignored.
I’m an American and I don’t know how crime rates in the UK have changed over the past few years, but I’ve read in the past that the UK has lower rates of rape and murder than the US but equal or even higher rates for other violent crime. Looking at NationMaster just now, this seems to be correct. In 1998-2000 (the site doesn’t have more recent figures) the US had 0.301318 rapes per 1,000 people, a little more than double the figures for the UK, 0.142172 per 1,000 people (cite).
The per capita murder rate (that’s all murders, not just firearm murders) in the US for 1998-2000 was 0.042802 per 1,000 people. The US is #24 on the list of countries with the highest murder rates, right between Bulgaria and Armenia. That’s about three times higher than the murder rate in the UK (#46), which is 0.0140633 murders per 1,000 people (cite). The rate for firearm murders in the US during those same years is 0.0279271 per 1,000 people, more than half of all murders in the US. The US is #8 in the world here, between Costa Rica and Uruguay. The UK is #32, with the lowest firearm murder rate of any of the listed countries: 0.00102579 per 1,000 people (cite).
The per capita rates for assault during the same time period is very close, 7.56923 per 1,000 people in the US and 7.45959 per 1,000 in the UK (cite).
NationMaster itself cites all these figures as coming from the Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, covering the period 1998 - 2000 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention).
So, during a three-year period beginning shortly after the UK banned handguns, a British person was less than half as likely to be raped as an American, about 1/3 as likely to be murdered, and about equally likely to be assaulted.
You’ve used this example of a woman defending herself against a rapist several times, but I have to say that I’ve never heard of such a thing happening. I’m not saying it’s never happened, I’m sure it has, but while I can remember hearing any number of news reports about rapes I don’t think I’ve ever heard one about a woman who successfully prevented a man from raping her by shooting him.
Perhaps it happens all the time and just isn’t widely reported, but if so then the rate of attempted rape in the US must be very high indeed. Remember, the rate of actual rapes in the US is more than double that of the UK, so it doesn’t seem as though the possibility of the intended victim owning a legal handgun is a very effective rape deterrent.
I don’t think that changing US gun laws would magically bring all American crime stats in line with the UK, but it does look like the innocent 100-pound women of America would be safer from rapists (and murderers) if they all moved to the country with the more restrictive gun laws.
Terrifel,
You have it backwards. RPG-type stuff isn’t unavailable on the black market because it is banned. Black marketeers aren’t smuggling it in because there is no demand. If there is enough demand for something, a ban will fail because of black markets every time. Drugs prove that every day.
More later. Doing this from a iPod is tedious.
Really? No demand in the US? None. Okay, I suppose that’s plausible. So all those military aficionados out there, who collect guns, uniforms, guns, memorabilia, guns, restore old vehicles and guns-- their interest magically vanishes when it comes to explosive munitions. Why is that, do you reckon?
You, Scumpup, find guns “badass” and despise others’ attempts to restrict them-- but RPGs and the like, they are not badass. You wouldn’t buy one if it were offered. No. If somebody told you that you could go down to the firing range and shoot off an SAM at a heap of junked cars for a fee, you would say: ‘No indeed, [sir or madam], I find that prospect to be not at all appealing!’
Just to be clear, do you think private ownership of SAMs and RPGs should be restricted at all? Assuming that anyone wanted to buy one, that is.
Argent Towers: I owe you an apology-- looking back over the last page, I guess I kind of hijacked your thread. I’m sorry for the conversational derailment. I think the earlier contributions were among the more interesting offerings I’ve seen here on this subject.
Gun smuggling is a problem.
Seems the IRA liked to go shopping in Florida.
The IRA was quite fond of importing handguns from the US.
Seems to me that if organised criminals could get hold of SAMs and RPGs then they could have turned a nice profit selling them to the highest bidder.
You, also, have me confused with Argent Towers. He’s the fellow who finds guns “badass.”
If there is a demand, black marketeers fill it. That is a fact. Whether it is drugs, gambling, prostitutes, high flush-volume toilets, or software; if there is a ban on an item or an activity, black marketeers will meet a demand high enough to net them a profit. If there is no appreciable US black market in RPG’s and SAM’s, plainly it is because there is no appreciable demand here. RPG’s, especially, are easily and cheaply available enough in the Mid-East and Africa that black marketeers have ready supply channels. They could just as easily smuggle them into the US as they do heroin. Why don’t they, then? Is it because the would-be smugglers are being apprehended by the cleft-chinned enforcers of government bans? If so, I challenge you to cite me any significant cases of such weapons being seized by the authorities. No, if they aren’t doing it, it is because the demand isn’t here for them to turn a profit by smuggling such weapons into the US.
I’m all in favor of you and me and anybody else who wants to own any item or perform any action being able to do so AS LONG AS HE ISN"T HURTING ANYBODY ELSE. If Bill Gates wants to spend his pocket change on SAM’s and spend the afternoon shooting down target drones, why should I care? If you want to spend your paycheck on toot, why should I care? If Argent Towers wants to spend his allowance on hookers, why should I care? If I want to spend my paycheck on RPG’s and old refrigerators to blow up, why should you care? As long as nobody is getting hurt in any of this, the answer is nobody should care what anybody else has or does.
Pants-wetters of all stripes can never really make a case for the banning of anything except that the item or activity makes them afraid or disgusted. When they get their way and get something banned, they create a black market if there was any significant demand for the item or substance in the first place. Who supplies the balck market? The criminal element, of course. Pants-wetters have done more to enrich criminals than they ever have to keep society safe or make the averag person’s life better. See Prohibition for details. See The War On Drugs, for more details.
Do I personally want an RPG? Not really. Years ago, I fired the LAW in military training. It was basically the US equivalent of an RPG. It was fun, but not massively so. If I could go down to a commercially-run RPG range, rent the launcher, and buy the grenade for what I consider a reasonable price, and fire it under safe conditions at some kind of interesting target, I might do it once or twice. The thing about getting one through the black market, is that one pays greatly inflated prices, deals with unsavory people, and has to worry about LE bumbling onto your particular transaction. After I had it, I’d have nowhere to fire it without endangering others and without attracting attention I don’t want.
If I did think I had some use for an RPG, I’d have one despite all that.
Right now, this board is loaded with people who don’t let laws prohibiting the use of various recreational chemicals prevent them from having and using such. I’ll bet there’s more than a few who also have (or had) unlawful guns. There are quite likely some who lawfully possess guns but have carried them in places the law prohibits.
Bans are only as effective as a general populace wishes them to be. The UK and Australian gun bans are as effective as they are because they were put in place on populations largely willing to follow them. As I’ve said over and over, this is the US, not the UK. I see no reason to try to be like them or to think that we could or should be like them. If you admire them so, it makes far more sense for you to move there than to try to force everybody here to be like them.
Woops. Sorry about that, both of you.
You mistake my intent. I agree that it is impossible for the US to become like the UK.
I’d like to own a fully tooled up M1 Abrams tank, and a decent sized Aegis cruiser with all the toppings.
Why can’t I? Why can’t you?
Meet me at midnight, in the car park behind the Nag’s Head and bring a pony.
You ain’t seen me right.
I also already explained (though it seems to have been ignored) that I personally use the word “badass” to describe anything that I think is great or interesting. It’s not “badass” like “he’s a bad-ass motherfucker.” It’s badass as in, “I like that.” I would just as soon call a leather bound volume of Shakespeare’s works or a Charlie Chaplin movie “badass” as I would a gun.
It’s not like I’m some 13 year old kid who’s like “cooool! I want to make loud noises and blow shit up, fuck yeah! Badass!” It’s just a catch all term that I use for things I like.
I’m making a mental note to myself to never use this word again in an argument because it’s way too unprofessional.
taps nose
Struan and Szlater are mildly amusing, in the same sort of way as if you had a comedy duo comprised of Joe DeRita and Joe Besser. Their comic stylings do not change the truths of bans and black markets.
pats Scumpup on the head
Actually, have you anything to say about my desire to own some serious weapons?