I don’t know what you mean by “gun nut,” but if you mean a person who carries a gun, the evidence goes the other way.
Next time in a univerity library, check out:
Is an armed society a polite society? Guns and road rage
There’s a bit of a summary here:
and here:
Like black jacks and atom bombs. Your post is a little too obnoxious for me to think it’s worth responding further.
Your link doesn’t work, so I’m not sure what it was supposed to prove, but I’d be curious to compare the U.S.'s stats on gun ownership and violence to, say, South Africa’s.
Well, not curious enough to go ahead and actually do the work, but whatever. And the rest of your post is pretty much gibberish.
Is it that neo-nazis have to own guns, or that they can’t be felons? If guns were outlawed, I think they’d get over the first, and as for the second, I would be quite surprised to find that they had such strict entrance requirements that they wouldn’t allow a felon into their ranks. Besides, if guns were outlawed, then they could actually ease up on the second, as nobody needs to own guns any more. A win-win situation, as it were.
Presuming that guns can be made so rare that no one would in turn need a gun defensively is unrealistic.
First of all if guns magically simply couldn’t exist you’d still have the outnumbered and the weak being victimized. A gun makes an 80 lb woman and a 250 lb attacker equal in a confrontation; and it makes a lone victim substantially dangerous to three or four attackers, even if they all have guns, whereas without them four people are virtually omnipotent over and invulnerable against one person.
Secondly you can’t get rid of guns if a substantial portion of the population wants them. The NRA is politically influential because millions of Americans want to hold onto their guns, despite well-funded opposition. There’s no way that hunting guns would ever be completely banned, and even if they were regulated up the wazoo they could still be diverted for criminal use.
Thirdly, let’s say for the sake of argument that the Constitution could be amended to nullify the Second Amendment: A 2/3 majority of Congress and a voting majority of 3/4 of the state legislatures ratified such an amendment. Depending on distribution of votes, that could mean as little as a bare majority of the public supporting outlawing guns. Where would that leave us? The biggest scofflaw culture since Prohibition would hoard hidden guns, a steady trickle of guns would be smuggled into the country along with narcotics, and you would have a vast underground of illegal gun manufacturing.
There have always been amateur gunsmiths with basement workshops; in recent years CNC tooling has decreased the expertise needed to produce quality metal working, and 3D printing hobbyists are working constantly to perfect a workable printable gun. In WW2 the demands on industry and the bottomless need for more guns led to several designs like the British Sten that could be made from stamped sheet metal with minimal machining; those designs are public domain*. And finally you would have people making and distributing guns motivated by ideology rather than profit; it would have more in common with La Résistance than a cartel, and be equivalently harder to eliminate.
*http://thepatriotperspective.files.w…heap-quiet.jpg
Saying “if there simply were no guns” is as unrealistic as saying if there simply were no roaches.
Positive effect: you shoot someone
Negative effect: someone shoots you
Someone shooting you is almost always a negative effect. On the other hand you shooting someone else may or may not be a positive effect.
Sorry if the link was wrong above.
There’s a quarter billion guns in the US that aren’t used in crimes.
So self defense is not a positive effect?
And what do you suppose happens in the meantime while we wait for all the guns in criminal hands to be confiscated.
And yet America’s suicide rate is typical of NATO or EU countries despite a much higher rate of gun ownership. So how do you figure that gun ownership is significantly increasing the risk of suicide (I know it increases the risk of gun suicide and I know that guns are a particularly lethal form of attempted suicide but how do you explain the absolutely typical suicide rate in our country). I also once assumed that the abolition of guns would greatly reduce suicides, then I looked at suicide rats in other countries and I don’t think it would make much of a difference.
It wouldn’t disarm any of the criminals that already have guns. You’re just saying that it would reduce the flow of guns into criminal hands. And what do you suppose those criminals will do with those guns now that they know that the populace at large is disarmed?
My point is that any politician that hopes to win an election anywhere other than deep blue districts is going to have to appear friendly to guns generally and being “caught” duck hunting is a time honored method for liberals to show that they are gun friendly without offending their liberal base.
And yet assault weapons bans are the sort of things that the gun control side spend their political capital on.
I suppose the trick is to decrease the negative uses without decreasing the positive uses (I proposed licensing and registration of handguns (on a “shall issue” basis) as a method of reducing the negative without really decreasing the positive all that much.
Having the facts on your side tend to make you a more effective lobby. It also helps that the other side is so incredibly clueless and incompetent.
The 10th amendment is virtually meaningless in the face of the commerce clause. Federal law pre-empts state law.
That would only deal with about 75-85% of the violence in this country and the gun control activists would howl about the other 25%.
Too many gun control activists aren’t really as concerned about violence as they are about guns specifically.
Other than the right to vote, why would you put one of the constitutional rights over the other? Why is the right to effective self defense any less important than the right to free speech?
Don’t worry. The gun debate isn’t one sided (at least not money-wise). If the NRA started picking on small communities, then mayors against gun violence would step in to fund the defense. All you really get are a few test cases that force the courts to define the state of the law and any jurisdictions that run afoul of decided law deserves to be bankrupted if they obstinately cling to their personal version of the constitution.
I always wondered why gun control advocates (and moderates) didn’t just try to take over the NRA. Every once in a while the NRA will have a sale on lifetime memberships (normally $1000) for as low as $300. There are about 5 million NRA members but only about 1 million of them are eligible to vote (either a member for at least 5 years or you buy a membership at life level or above). Only about 100,000 of them actually bother to vote. This is in large part why the NRA is more extreme than its membership, the 5,000,000 members are represented by a board that is elected by about 100,000 members.
So for about $30,000,000 you could buy enough voting memberships (if you get it on sale) to control the NRA board in three years (I think the board member terms are staggered over three years).
He probably means people with CCW licenses.
Well, congratulations, Columbus, you’ve discovered the continent of misplaced priorities. Let me give you a nice slow round of applause. Bra-vo.
I started to write up responses to your other comments, but then I remembered the last time I tried discussing this issue seriously with you and life’s just too short.
No guns here or here, either. :rolleyes:
When swords are banned, only orcs will have swords.
I was being a bit facetious. Of course a reduction of 75% of violent crime would be great.
And I was mildly making fun of French Canadians in the pit fer chrissakes. Noone actually thinks that all French Canadians eat those pine cones. 
Don’t forget, they’re collectible as well. Of the people I know with guns, about a quarter are actual collectors, and another quarter are de-facto collectors.
They’re also a surprisingly non-crappy way to do something with spare money. By that, I mean that as physical objects go, they retain a lot of value, especially if bought used.
Semi-long-time lurker, finally registered to jump in.
Haven’t a few studies of gun ownership vis-a-vis gun deaths found that Americans living in homes that contain at least one gun are more likely to be killed/wounded by a gunshot than those living in gun-free homes?
I distinctly remember reading a source (perhaps here on SDMB?) asserting that the number of “home invasions” that end up with someone’s drunk teenager getting shot or a dead spouse outnumber the ones where ski-masked thugs get dealt some street justice.
Regardless, I find the best way to deal with NRA types railing against some (usually imaginary) liberal that wants to take away all[ the guns in America by inviting them to consider what they, sometimes explicitly, state as their preferred alternative would accomplish - would you really feel safer if every American age 18 and up owned a gun, much less carried it in public?
We can all agree that, while it’s not a good idea to completely disarm the public, it would be an equally terrible idea to require that EVERY American carries a gun with them everywhere they go. Even with the logical restrictions on violent felons/the incarcerated, minors, the mentally incapable, etc. it should be clear that even those proposing that MORE gun ownership would somehow cause less gun violence would admit that. The ideal rate of gun ownership (and statutes on how, when, and where it is acceptable to carry them) is somewhere between 0 and 100%. Reasonable minds can disagree on where the various lines should be drawn, but in no way does suggesting light-to-moderate restrictions on gun ownership and use make one a fascist.
Well… that’s what some hardcore libertarians DO think would be a good idea. Not require because that would be absurd, but allow, yes. Presumably there would be a learning curve as the Darwin Award winners discovered the limitations of going armed. One would hope that after a generation or two people would be intimately familiar with what’s wise gun behavior and what is not. For now I’ll chalk up universal armament as a (currently?) unobtainable ideal.
It’s not as far off as you think, though, depending on where you live:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1818862/posts
Not professional sources, I know, but a quick google on Kennesaw, Georgia will turn up lots of hits about the town’s controversial gun law.
Note that this is a town of some 30,000 people - it’s a bit more systematic than the citizens of some neighborhood watch signing a blood pact around somebody’s backyard pool that they would all go buy a gun the next day.
The wiki states that there are exemptions for the impoverished, mentally unstable, felons, and those who “oppose maintaining firearms as a result of beliefs or religious doctrine:” i.e. anyone who doesn’t want to buy/own a gun, basically, and I can’t find any examples of citizens faced with legal action for failing to comply with the law, so in reality it seems no different than any of the various silly unenforced laws still found in the codes of some states - no sex with your wife on a Tuesday (in the shower!), and such. Regardless, it’s still surprising to me.
As to whether or not the law (in “effect” since 1982) has had any tangible effect on violent crime (and gun crime in particular), well, that’s a bit murkier.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, a variety of guns are legal in many, I think most, countries, despite lack of a second amendment. Saying that without the second amendment our guns are outlawed is the kind of wild exaggeration I would expect from a politician, rather than from a Straight Dope Charter Member 
All it takes is a swing of one vote on the Supreme Court, and the second amendment goes back to being pretty close to a nullity. Even with the current Supreme Court, it may be that the type of carry permit regulations found in New York City, where it is quite difficult to get one, would be upheld.
Demography is destiny. And that destiny is nationally long-run favorable for the Democrats. This doesn’t mean someone is going to come and grab your guns. But it does make it likely that our poorly worded second amendment will go back to being a nullity, and without any need for repeal.
