Is there a middle? Countries that have reduced gun violence through gun control have only ever done it through confiscation. Our own gun control methods have never made a dent in gun crime. And we were a lot stricter in the 1970s and 1980s than we are today. Yet those methods aren’t even on the table. And what little gun control legislation liberals want, they don’t want to put anyone in jail for a long time for violating it. So I’m not sure what the point is.
Yes, that’s exactly the reason the UK bans guns, knives, tasers, pepper sprays and so forth - because they “really don’t like self-defense”. That is definitely the rational conclusion a normal, unbiased person would come to, rather than that there is ample evidence that the more weapons that are available to the general public the easier it is for the bad guys to obtain them and thus the greater the need for “personal protection” in the first place. The more guns you have, the more guns you end up needing. It’s a vicious cycle.
The “fight fire with fire” approach (or rather, “fight firepower with firepower”) has its (limited) place but there’s a reason that most fires are effectively fought by simply putting them out.
No, they actually hate self defense. There was never an epidemic of criminals running around with pepper spray and tasers that needed to be solved. Such weapons are useless for most crimes. No one’s emptying the safe because you might pepper spray them if you don’t. Pepper spray and tasers are primarily defensive weapons and there is no legitimate purpose to banning them other than hostility to civilians protecting themselves without permission.
Yes, there is no possible reason to ban people carrying weapons other than hatred of self-defense. :rolleyes:
With guns banned, the current focus is on reducing knife crime. Do you think it’s sensible to wait until, as knife crime diminishes, criminals move onto other weapons before tackling those weapons one by one, or do you think that perhaps the police are smart enough to realize that being proactive now will reduce assaults with those weapons sooner and in the long run?
Unlikely. Got a real cite? You cite even says " Even with the internet it is very difficult to track down and report the participation level of illegal aliens in crime because NOBODY IS KEEPING TRACK! " and is a rabid & racist zenophobe hate site.
Here’s a Cato study:
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/immigration_brief-1.pd :
CONCLUSION
Legal and illegal immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated
than natives. Our numbers do not represent the
total number of immigrants who can be deported under
current law or the complete number of convicted immigrant
criminals who are in the United States, but merely
those incarcerated. This report provides numbers and
demographic characteristics to better inform the public
policy debate over immigration and crime.
Are the people in those nations cowering in fear in their homes, afraid to go outside due to all the criminals who are the only ones that are able to obtain guns?
But that presupposes that the success of the NRA is due to it being a ‘powerful lobby’ somehow separate from the will of voters. I didn’t fail to read the OP. I simply disagree with its premise. Resistance to national gun control in the US has been highly politically successful and more so in recent decades than earlier. The reason IMO is voters, not the NRA. If voters felt differently, specifically if key swing voters weren’t so often highly motivated against gun control, it would be feasible and the NRA wouldn’t seem as ‘powerful’.
This is a general observation of US politics. It isn’t going to proven with a ‘cite’ of a ‘study’. One of the whole problems IMO is pro gun control people failing to realize the severe shortcomings of polls on questions like this. They don’t measure intensity (accurately, even if they try). They don’t measure cross coupling among issues, as in a divide in cultural identity running across different issues. A lot of the people who won’t vote for gun control Democrats in swing districts won’t say ‘gun control is my only issue’ (which sounds narrow minded). However they still identify pro control with a host of other culture views alien to them. The idea that’s a result of the ‘NRA drumming ideas into them’ is just dumb, besides sounding condescending, and reinforcing the whole culture reason they won’t vote for Democrats ‘like that’.
If I really cared a lot about the gun issue, I might wrack my weak brain to come up with a way around this. 
I don’t have one. It’s just obvious to me how off track it is conceive of the issue as ‘one side has a powerful lobby, why don’t we?’
Well the number of developed countries where either one of the statements “had high gun violence” and “had little to no gun control” is very small to begin with, so it’s very hard to find a place where both of those statements are true and then they implemented modest gun controls.
It’s much easier to find examples of countries with a high number of firearms, but with licensing and controls on what kinds of firearm can be purchased or carried, and with low gun crime.
Then the burden of proof is on you to say why the US could not transition even a little towards being such a country.
I think it’s more like they don’t want ineffective punishment just to make conservatives happy. If long sentences really work as a great deterrent against gun violence then lets do it. However the data for almost every crime is usually the opposite; put people in jail for a long time for minor offenses and you end up with more criminals, not fewer.
Knives are lethal weapons. Pepper spray and tasers CAN be lethal, but mostly are not. You can rob a place with a knife. You can’t do it with pepper spray or a taser. No one’s emptying the register for you if you’re brandishing pepper spray. They are purely self defense weapons and there is no rational basis for banning them.
Fear of crime is actually higher in some countries than in the US.
France and Italy top the US in this category.
And banning all those personal safety devices has done nothing to reduce crime in Britain.
Most countries with high levels of gun ownership and low crime are just safe places to live in general. That’s why Vermont is NRA country even though it’s very liberal otherwise. There’s just no reason to take Vermonters guns away. They aren’t using them for evil. Same goes for the Swiss and Israelis. I’ve never seen a country prone to violence successfully use “sensible” gun controls to reduce gun crime. Confiscation has been the only effective policy in those cases.
I think even most conservatives are now in agreement that putting people in jail for a long time for minor crimes is overdoing it. But violent criminals who prey on the weak deserve to go away for a long time. And who “deserves” what aside, you can’t have effective gun control if there is little cost to having an illegal gun. It’s not about deterrent, it’s about getting the illegal gun owners off the streets.
When conservatives say, “criminals don’t care about laws”, it’s usually BS but on the gun issue it’s completely legit. That’s because if you pass laws but don’t enforce them, all you’ve done is ensured that law abiding people continue to abide by laws. Enforcement is what makes the bad people abide by them, or gets them out of society.
The developed world is a safe place to live in general; even the impoverished parts have a rather low homicide rate compared to the United States. So I don’t see any basis for drawing the inference that you have here.
How many developed countries have their been that a) had a significant gun violence problem and b) tried to implement licensing and rules on carrying firearms etc and c) found such laws ineffective?
If there were lots of examples I might agree with you, but instead the transition is more or less unknown territory, but we know that the destination – a country with firearms licensing and low gun crime – is possible.
This is bait and switch several times. I wasn’t saying violent criminals shouldn’t go to jail, just that breaking some firearms offenses could be a comparatively minor offence and while still may deserve a jail sentence I don’t think locking someone up for years will have the desired effect of reducing such crime.
It’s not that simple. For example, if you make a certain kind of firearm illegal, period, then it does become much harder for criminals to procure them. It doesn’t matter whether they care about the law, stores do, manufacturers do, other people around them may do.
Also it’s not a binary good / evil thing. I might be a law-abiding guy who happens to think AR-15s look cool so I buy one just for novelty. But then one day I flip out.
It just makes sense to make acquiring a gun something difficult, even for the law-abiding, and limit what guns people can buy IMO.