Sure, guns are more dangerous than knives- but not as dangerous as bombs. But stil- once you’re dead- it doesnt matter whether is was a knife, a gun or a bomb. Murder is murder. If somehow you reduced “gun homicides” to zero but the overall homicide rate increased, there would be no gain.
And guns do get special attention as extra prison time is tacked on.
This is not true. The CDC can study all they want, as long as the *purpose *isnt to *advocate for gun control. *
No mass shootings have been with “assault rifles” since they can fire full auto, mostly banned in the USA. Perhaps you mean that nebulous and undefined (except poorly by legal code) “assault weapon”?
Do note that the Runger RANCH Rifle is considered by some to be a “assault weapon”.
Standard anti gun control argument- let’s quibble over definitions! Tell you what- you can have whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t hold more than 6 rounds. Sure, maybe you need to kill a predator or vermin, but you don’t need to kill 50 animals in a minute. So for my purpose, an assault rifle is a weapon designed to shoot over 6 rounds in a very short time.
So, ‘assault rifle’ by your definition is essentially every gun except one shot derringers, some shotguns and black powder weapons. Got it. Good luck with getting that passed.
That would even exclude double-barrel shotguns, as competition skeet shooters, etc can reload those very fast.
The Lee-Enfield, a WW 1 bolt action rifle could get off 30 shots in a minute, with practice.
A *muzzle loading musket *can get off 4 shots in a minute, again in the hands of a skilled expert.
A expert bowman can fire 10 arrows in about a minute.
As to the OP, other countries have very restrictive access to guns for most citizens…and most of their citizens are perfectly fine with that, not having any sort of tradition of allowing them in the past. I know it’s popular on this site to say Americans are just like everyone else, but really, they aren’t. Our attitudes towards guns (and health care) are just different than every other nation. It’s why there is such a vast disconnect on these issues between Americans and people from other countries, and why both sides are often scratching their heads that the attitude of the other side. Our attitudes on free speech are also different than most other countries.
Basically, to answer the OP, I don’t think that what other countries do would really relate one for one to things that could be done in the US. IOW, if we implemented, say, the UK’s gun laws exactly as they are, well, you’d run up against a lot more issues trying to actually enforce them here that you don’t have there…and this leaves aside just doing that in the first place. Attitudes of the average American are just different than the average citizen in the UK, or Europe, or Japan or…well, anywhere. Even Canada, which is closer to us than most other countries has a markedly different attitude on any of this stuff than Americans do.
We can set the exact specifications later, but I think some limitation of x number of rounds per minute is valid. We just need a realistic value for x that could minimize Las Vegas type rampages. Should it be 6 or 10 or 15? I don’t know. I just now 100 and above is ridiculous.
I suspect most standard-issue police sidearms are capable of firing 50+ rounds per minute. The police aren’t carrying them because they suspect they’ll have to mow down crowds of people but because they are suitable for self defense.
Can you accept that private citizens might also want to own firearms similarly-suitable for self defense?
For hunting and in some states (CA), any magazine over ten rounds can’t be used, or bought.
I dont see any reason not to ban sale of magazines over 10 rounds.
I see reasons not to ban them.
Where do we go from here?
I’m sure this is part of your plan, but just to be clear, if you limited a firearm to, say, 15 rounds a minute you’d be taking something like 95% of all guns in the US out of the picture. That would include all revolvers, all shotguns (you could fire even a single shot shotgun at 15 rounds a minute or better), all rifles that use a cartridge…basically everything except muzzle loading black powder guns. Hell, even trap door Civil War rifles can be fired quicker than that. While I’m sure you’d love to do that, it doesn’t seem reasonable except as a mental masturbation exercise, since it’s literally not going to happen.
Now, if what you meant was magazine sized limited to 6, 10 or 15 that’s another matter. I honestly don’t think it would make that much difference and would really be a ban to annoy people without practical effect, but it would actually be possible, as opposed to what you seem to be proposing.
Well, I’m going to mention mental health support again.
You don’t feel great about life, you visit your GP, you get referred (it’s problematic atm because of austerity but its still there. The prospect of support remains).
At no point is ‘buying a gun’ part of the process, or even an option.
Is this scarcasm?
Fwiw, there’s no wall proposed to the north.
The ratio of UK population to US is roughly 1:5.5, how do these stats stack up in light of that?
So on 3 of these there is not much difference in the rate of occurrence once we allow for the size of the population.
For beating it seems to be 3 times higher, for burning (again…burning?) 2.5 times higher. So we should expect the murder rate by firearm to be somewhere in that ballpark yes? I mean the USA may seem slightly more violent judging by those figures but not massively so.
No, as it happens in the UK we have about 50 murders by firearms, in the USA you have about 8000. That is a ratio of 1:160, 8 times worse than even the beating figures. Either there is something special about firearms or you are a much more violent society but only when it comes to killing people in a certain way.
Curious, is it not? that all the methods of murder to which the citizens of each country have equal access provide a murder rate within an order of magnitude. The only real outlier is the method which you have access to in spades and we don’t.
So what you’re saying is that terrorists and crazy mass murderers only exist in the United States, right? No one’s has ever murdered a bunch of people in the UK, France, Norway, India, Pakistan, Germany, Belgium…?
Guns have never really been commonplace in the UK, and never really commonly used for personal self defence, so ‘before gun control’ was not so very different from now.
The homicide rate of Switzerland is lower than the UK, while the gun ownership rate is 3.7 times larger. The homicide rate of Findland is lower than the UK, while the gun ownership rate is 5.2 times larger.
Is it more likely that the US has a higher homicide rate than the UK because of gun ownership rates, or because of discrimination and income inequality?
I think we’re still talking about guns.
Fwiw, I remember three attacks from this summer; a home made bomb in Manchester (ISIS trained), a car on Westminster Bridge and a car/stabbing frenzy at Borough Market. No guns.