Depends on if you are including suicides. If so (I assume so as the number is scarier) my SWAG is a bit over a million and a half since 1980. If you aren’t then it’s more like 400-500K.
That sure sounds like a lot, but I’ve seen figures higher than that during that same time period for changing the speed limit from 55 to the current maxim. Certainly tobacco and alcohol deaths are a lot higher (I think both get to those levels in just a couple of years verse 39), as well as tons of other stuff.
To me, if we are really talking about ‘too dangerous’ then those things are clearly ‘too dangerous’ if we are talking about simply the body count compared to firearms deaths. It’s all about what you (and we as a society) are willing to tolerate. Clearly, we are willing, as a society, to pile up millions of deaths to let us continue to drink, smoke and drive fast as well as to keep and bear arms.
Technically, I asked about people dying from bullet wounds, which is more like 30k a year, but I’m not going to quibble.
The exact scale of the number is less important than the comparison to other countries. Our comparison to a place like the UK is about 30k deaths to 100. If the UK had 10,000 tobacco deaths compared to our 500,000, I’d be a hell of a lot more interested in fixing that problem than anything related to guns. Same with any of these other things that kill us. But other countries haven’t ‘cracked the code’ on those deaths like they have with guns.
There is actually an answer to gun deaths, it exists, we can see it operating every day in other countries, with the people there generally pretty happy about how well it works. If some other country figures out how to cut drug deaths or cancer deaths by 90%, you can count on me to want that in my country too.
The UK has a lot smaller population. Overall, the USA is smack dab in the middle of murder rate of all nations. Of course, when you cherry pick, you can come up with any number you like.
And most other nations didnt have a gun culture or one gun per resident before they instituted gun controls. GB already had a murder rate far less than the USA before they instituted nationwide gun controls.
I’m not sure why a comparison between countries is so meaningful to people. The UK has higher deaths per capita in both alcohol and tobacco than the US because they have different rules and laws. They accept those deaths as the price of doing business in their society…as we do with our rules and laws (we have a higher deaths per capita from cheeseburger for instance).
Certainly there is ‘an answer’ to gun deaths…don’t have any guns. End of problem. Except, it isn’t, as our society doesn’t want that. Yet. Perhaps not ever. Just like we accept that by allowing alcohol and tobacco then people WILL die, we have to this point accepted that by allowing citizens to keep and bear arms that means people will die. Other countries can do what their citizens want (in those lucky enough to allow the citizens to have a say). They can allow smoking in public buildings or ban smoking all together. They can allow drinking at various ages and various places, or ban it. They can allow their citizens to have guns or ban them. Whatever floats their boat.
Anyway, I would say that you should change your answer to the same one Ashtura mentioned, as that too is a valid answer to the OP. If you feel as you do then really ALL firearms are ‘too dangerous’ wrt your threshold. Personally, I look at other things our society allows and gauge ‘too dangerous’ based on those things. If we basically had very few deaths due to alcohol, very few due to tobacco, very few due to heart disease (a.k.a. cheeseburger), and very few due to driving really fast, then I’d say that fire arms were an outlier…FOR US…and that would put it past the threshold…FOR US and into the ‘too dangerous’ category. But firearms aren’t an outlier wrt other things we allow simply because we like them or want them. YMMV of course.
I don’t think that’s really it. I think a lot of it could possibly be remnant frontier attitudes and practices that are still floating around out there.
Think about it- big parts of the US were literally the Wild West a little more than a century ago. Even in parts where that wasn’t the case, the settlers often faced angry Native Americans who would raid their settlements.
100 years ago is essentially my great-great-grandparents. My grandmother’s grandparents. That’s not far in terms of cultural transfer- if we have tales and legends that could potentially date back thousands of years, I don’t find it at all unlikely that cultural attitudes could persist for at least 150 years after the impetus for the attitudes went away, especially if the adherents just transferred their impetus to another group/behavior.
In other words, it was hostile indians and lawless people back in the day, and now it’s all this perceived crime that they need the guns to defend against.
I suspect that in the firearm age, European countries never really had an analogue to the hostile Native Americans or Wild West era, so things like gun control have had a much less uphill battle than in the US.
I think it is pretty undeniable that it is definitely attached to culture, probably going back clear to the Revolutionary War (the “we need them to overthrow a tyrannical gub’mint!!” argument probably stems largely from that) - another reason I’m not surprised that there is a difference in attitude between an American and a Brit.
There is also the fact that controlling guns from the citizens (read peasantry) was a real thing for a lot of European history, while it wasn’t ever a thing in the early colonial US…quite the opposite. Hunting was also a restricted in many European countries (again, for the peasantry) for at least part of their history, and, again, that wasn’t a thing in the US. Then there is the fact that guns were a symbol of our revolution and part of our collective national mythos in the US, while they weren’t as much in other European nations…even those that had similar revolutions (like France) didn’t associate their revolution with firearms or enshrine this right as part of their revolution and national identity. The US is not a standard, traditional European nation in a lot of ways, despite the fact that the majority of Americans have ancestry from Europe. To paraphrase Bill Murray, we are the ancestors of the folks who got kicked out of the Europe (even me, much as I hate to admit it…though I’m less than 50% European ancestry, so there is that :p).
Sort of. Hunting was never historically restricted in the US because it’s a huge country and until recently there was no shortage of game animals. In the UK, France, the areas that are now Germany, Austria, and Italy, etc, hunting large game like deer with packs of dogs was restricted to the wealthy, but peasants still hunted small game. I mean, hell, the whole reason that firearms became popular was that you could easily raise large armies from the peasants and teach them how to use firearms quickly, whereas swords, lances, bows and arrows, etc, all took many years of intense training to master. I’m sure many of these peasant soldiers were allowed to keep their firearms when they returned from wars, and used them to hunt - and for the local militia or whatever small defense force the town may have had. It’s a little bit of an exaggeration to act like the gun restrictions were that draconian in early modern Europe or that only “gentlemen” could own them. Even today all over Europe people own firearms for hunting. Hell, the best guns in the world are still made in Italy and Belgium.
Um…those are fine guns. And they cost a lot of money. So, not ‘everyone’ can own them, even today (certainly not in Europe ;)), and certainly not in the past. I didn’t say all of Europe (which is a lot of countries) for all of it’s history (which is a lot of history, even if we are just talking firearms), but I think that generally it’s true that guns were restricted in much of Europe for much of it’s history for most of it’s (non-noble) population, while that wasn’t the case in the US…which is why there is a difference. That’s why I think comparisons to Europe aren’t really all that interesting. The US is kind of unique in this aspect. Canada and Australia, which are similar in some respects to the US, didn’t have a revolution like the US did, and they are the most similar to us of any other countries (IMHO and all that).
I think (and this is just my notoriously bad memory) that the last guillotine execution by France (not in France) was in the early 1980’s, so it’s kind of like the boards slogan…it always takes longer than we thought it should…
I think any weapon with full auto capability is too much for civilian hands.
The problem with debates like this is that there is near 100% perfect overlap between “Suitable to murder innocent victims” and “Suitable to stop home intruders/rapists/murderers.” It’s virtually impossible to come up with a weapon that does 2# but not 1#. Even a revolver is enough to kill many people in a school shooting. Yet anything less than a revolver would probably be inadequate in some home-defense or self-defense scenario.
It’s simply impossible to find a happy medium. There is too much lethal overlap. You might as well ask a chemical company to come up with “cyanide that is strong enough for industrial purposes but not strong enough to be poisonous to humans.”
This is why I compare it to other things that a society accepts it’s citizens can do that also have non-zero deaths associated with it. To me (IMHO and all) that is a more apples to apples comparison of risk that a society is willing to accept wrt deaths for some right or action. YMMV.
Okay, let me see if I can define my terms closely enough for you.
I would allow civilians to have firearms which can fire one shot, then have to be cocked, or racked, or whatever term you use so that you have to manually perform an action separate from just pulling the trigger to place the next round in the chamber and ready the gun to fire again.
No, I don’t believe that will solve every gun-related problem. A regulation like that wouldn’t have stopped Charles Whitman, Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby, or the DC Sniper. It would have reduced, but certainly not eliminated, the Columbine killers’ firepower.
On the other hand, a regulation like this might keep a group of gangbangers from firing 60 shots at each other on a Sunday evening. It might have reduced the firepower the Columbine killers and the Dallas police shooter brought to their own suicide-by-cops. It might even stop a four-year old from accidentally shooting his baby sister because even though a stupid parent left the gun in the open and the kid figured out how to pull the trigger, he didn’t know how to cock it.
Equally as important, it wouldn’t infringe on the rights of a deer hunter, a trap shooter, or a homeowner who hears a window breaking downstairs and knows it will take 20 minutes for the sheriff to get there.
It’s actually a huge step (that 200 million+ figure) and one that would, if you got it through and didn’t grandfather in existing weapons would have the practical effect of eliminating (in theory at least) a huge amount of guns in the US. Basically, just about every firearm currently existing in the US would be illegal or not meet the statute, so, sure, if you could magically do this it would have a dramatic effect, not a small one.
I think the “small one” conclusion was assuming that the people who currently own those guns would promptly replace them with other guns that meet the new statutes. (Possibly with the money they got for trading in their older guns.)
