You may want to reread my last few posts. You’re making some sort of generic gun control point but ignoring everything I said.
Spree shootings are negligible. I’m not comparing across countries, I’m saying as a cause of death they are almost nothing, even in the US. I’d be surprised if there are more than a dozen deaths a year, you could come up with a list of hundreds of unnatural ways people die that are more common, including murder with just about every other type of weapon.
Making policy because of the emotional impact of an isolated spree shooting is stupid. Having this discussion because of the emotional impact of an isolated spree shooting is stupid.
Those figures tell me that something has gone badly awry in the USA, even when mass shootings are discounted. It’s bad today, it was bad the day before Aurora.
The real stupidity, IMO, is the futility of gun debates. The usual suspects turn up saying the same things again and as long as the Second Amendment is around it’s all meaningless. I gave up a long time ago. But the question “what would it take to get the US to change its basic approach to firearms” is sort of interesting. To me, anyway. Don’t know why you opened the thread.
Maybe it’s the ignorant foreigner, but to me it would make a massive difference. If I’m confronted with a guy with a machete, If things escalate I’ve got a chance of living. With a gun pointed at me, I’m fucked.
I don’t have a dog in the fight, I was posing a question that was of interest to me. I think this particular argument though is pretty spurious.
If you didn’t read all the previous posts, you probably missed the posts that showed why, when gun control advocates say they don’t really want to ban guns, nobody believes them.
If you like, I can pull up some quotes from prominent politicians who have indicated a desire towards reducing or even eliminating private firearm ownership, be it a handgun, a rifle, or a scary “assault weapon” (a made up term, which means nothing).
And as a side note:
Most of what the US Military uses is semi-auto. They are termed “Battle Rifles” by the military. Assault weapon is, as I mention above, a scary term that was created to push the AWB, and it worked like a charm.
Thats not true. Since the M16A2 through the M4 that most are using now, the US military personal weapon is select fire. Semi-auto or three round burst. US assault rifles no longer have the capability to fire full auto. It wastes ammo.
Yes, many US military rifles fire semi or burst. I would not call burst semi auto as it fires 2-3 rounds per trigger pull.
Battle rifle is a term for a rifle firing a “full size” round. In US/NATO, this usually means 7.62x51mm aka .308 (not identical but close enough). The majority of soldiers for the past few decades use 5.56x45mm aka .223.
Yes, “assault weapon” is a loaded term. “Assault rifle” is a real term but people can nitpick what it means.
ETA: Battle rifles are usually select fire as well. Things like M14, H&K G3, FN FAL.
And who have a nation next door to then that pours a flood of guns into their country. It’s quite the dysfunctional relationship; we get cheap labor, they get guns and criminal gangs with vast amounts of money from selling drugs to Americans.
I agree. Both that it’s a bad basis for the law, and that’s it’s really rather odd that there are so few.
Nice figures. :rolleyes:Totally worthless and cherry picked. It’s not even real stats it is “The movie Bowling for Columbine reported the number of people killed by firearms per year. Director Michael Moore showed statistics on gun-related deaths per year for a few major countries (ordered here by deaths per 100,000):” in other words, it is what Moore said in a movie.
But “gun deaths”?:rolleyes: Cherry picked. Includes suicides and excludes bombings, knifing and other murders. Let us talk about homicide rates.
But yes, of North American it’s highest, other than Bermuda. Because they only put Canada, USA & Bermuda in NA.
Most of South America has a higher rate, despite Gun Control= Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela.
The USA has a lower rate than pretty much all of Africa & the Caribbean, and much much lower than all of Central America.
Well over 110 nations have a higher murder rate. 50 or so (of those with reliable data) have a lower rate, mostly in Asia (5 higher)) & Europe (but still 8 are higher).
But what is really interesting is you compare date by the three mega continents. Eurasia is lowest, true. Africa is highest (no surprise). But then of the Americas, the USA comes in at the lowest end of the scale with only Canada & Chile (of the larger nations) having signifcantly lower rates (Argentine reports bogus dat, it excludes areas they consider under civil unrest, which have a very high rate)..
So, basically, it’s not guns. It is who you are. Yes, Eurasia (guns or no) doesnt turn to murder much- Africa (even without guns) is deadly and the Americas are fairly dangerous in spots- of which the USA isn’t- guns or no.
Congratulations, USA, for having relatively few homicides compared to countries like Bolivia.
Yeah.
The list is homicides by firearm, not gun deaths. It said as much at the link and, oddly, at the top of the bit you quoted. How’d you miss that?
Seeing how you don’t like Moore’s list, let’s go with the lower numbers reported by the UN here, and, judging by your cite, you’re comfortable with as a source. I’ll average out the figures as not every country has entries for every year. (“%” is Percentage of homicides by firearm, “#” is Homicides by Firearm, “100K” is Homicide by firearm rate per 100,000 population, “Years averaged” should be self explanatory.)
% # 100K Years averaged
USA 59.30% 9741 3.3 2003-2009
Canada 32.90% 183 0.6 2003-2009
Germany 28.20% 199 0.2 2004-2010
France 9.60% 35 0.1 2007
Austr 12.30% 33 0.2 2003-2009
Japan 3.90% 29 0 2002 & 2008
Long story short, it looks similar to Moore’s list. I suppose I should’ve added some third world countries in the interests of-- wait, no, that wouldn’t make any sense at all. We’re talking about firearm homicides in a first world country, not comparing countries with disparate per capita GDPs in order to sweep a serious problem under the rug-- although I see the latter is a popular sport.
Dave, shouldn’t you have a column there that adjusts the homicide rate per 100K by the preference for firearms vs. other methods? Seems to me, by those numbers, the relevant stat for the US is a little less than double Canada’s, not five and a half times as it might seem. (That is, I’m far more concerned with the likelihood of being killed at all than with the choice of weapon.)
Bolivia yes- and just about every other nation in the Americas.
Again, I dont give a rats ass about homicides by firearm- I am sure elsewhere they may be higher in “homicides by bolo knife”. Picking out firearms is cherry pick #1.
Picking out the list of nations you do is another cherry pick as we have around 150 nations in the world. You picked 6. I picked all 150.
First, I think that as women get more involved in government, there will be more a voice of reason towards guns. Sure you have people like Palin and right wing women who have to represent their people but as time goes on and they are able to actually influence, I can see less gun support.
Also I think time will show that the generations after the baby boomers have less and less interest in archaic ideas like the right to bear arms and are more interested in critical thinking and analysis.
See Mr. Beef, I propose that you are the emotional one. The reasons to keep a firearm are purely emotional ones. Either you are scared of something or it is fun to shoot them.
Basically, anti-gun people see the absurdity in the fact that this killer could amass weapontry like he did. There are literally no good reasons for Americans to have guns.
It’s cute that you would think that. While I’m not one that shakes his fist at the young kids “these days”, the reality is that the young today are being raised in an anti-science, anti-critical thinking environment that staggers my mind. When I was a kid we had Carl Sagan on TV every weekend, and Mr. Wizard, and later Bill Nye.
While we have Neil Degrasse Tyson, he’s not on a regularly occuring show. And yes, there are Mythbusters, but even then that show is not focused on science so much these days as it is on making a big explosion and being exceedingly cool.
And I’m not even going to touch on your loaded statement of gun rights being archaic", other than to say that I know of far more folks my age interested in competitive shooting than I do folks my fathers age.