Why Should Guns Be Legal?

Great Debates
141

You already said that, and I conceded it might be true, which is as far as I’ll go without any proof or hard evidence. If you’re trying to convince me, you’ll have to do more than repeat the assertion.

I’ll try again. Banning high capacity clips would effectively reduce the carnage inflicted by a spree shooter, don’t you think? You think a ban on bump stocks will work, so how about banning the high capacity clips favoured by spree shooters?

Okay, understood, but why would banning them work when other bans won’t? That’s what I asked.

I sure can’t disagree with you about reducing accidental deaths, but to use your reasoning, we can’t prevent all accidents, so there’s no point in trying. Right?

Neither do I. If you got that impression about me, it’s mistaken. According to this Pew Research poll done before the LV shooting, the majority of gun owners favour universal background checks, preventing the mentally ill from owning guns, barring sales to those on the no-fly list, creating a federal database to track gun sales, and they’re against allowing concealed carry without a permit. I don’t consider that irrational at all.

It’s the vocal, more forceful minority that I’m worried about. They’re the ones calling the shots with gun legislation and getting their way through Congressional inaction. How did that happen?

Wiping all that dripping condescension aside, I can’t know more about your position if you won’t answer questions. So here, in the interest of getting educated, I’ll ask again: Why would a ban on bump stocks work when other bans supposedly won’t? Would banning high capacity magazines reduce the number of victims in a spree shooting?

These aren’t trick questions, honest. They sprang straight out of your comments. And why on Earth do I need to be a gun owner to understand your answers? Imagine all those students in classrooms unable to understand their teachers because they aren’t mathemeticians and historians and such.:rolleyes:

142

Esox:

I don’t know how big an effect magazine restrictions would have on mass killings, but I don’t think it would be much.

There are a lot of alterations to guns that are very difficult and finicky. A magazine is not one of them. Let’s say you limit magazines to 5 rounds. There are already tons of you tube videos and how-tos that tell you how to modify a magazine to make it bigger. With a 3D printer, you can even print them.

143

The Virginia Tech shooter used a whole bunch of 10-round magazines.

144

You can’t think of one, but the thing is, a lot of other people can. The short answer is, they are legal because society, as a whole, wants them to be and accepts the risks that by having guns be legal a non-zero number of citizens will die directly from that decision. It’s similar to the decision to allow alcohol and tobacco to be legal. There would be people, if asked, that would say the same thing you are saying about those things as well…they probably couldn’t think of a single compelling reason either is legal. They cause a lot more deaths as well (in fact, alcohol actually causes a non-zero number of gun deaths a year due to its use). Yet they ARE legal. And they are legal, in short, because a large number of citizens want them to be.

145

I own 10 guns. I didn’t buy one of them. They where all handed down to me from my family. With that said, they do have some personal historical significance to me.

Selling them could possibly put them in the wrong hands. Destroying them would be hard for me to do (see above).

I’ve only used them for target or skeet shooting. Or three times, I have scared bears away that where stalking my property. Pots and pans and yelling at them doesn’t always work. A large caliber shot in their direction has done the trick. [aside]Crushed mothballs helps keep bears away from trash (we keep it in our shed, and take it to the landfill twice a month, learned the mothball trick after getting the door to my shed torn off twice.)[/aside]

And, shrug, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. Or in my case, more like 20 or 30 minutes.

My Wife and I don’t have children, BUT maybe every other year, a younger niece or nephew will come with their parents. The guns are stored securely.

I think that really, the only thing I could do to satisfy those opposed to guns is to destroy them. And I just can’t bring myself to do that.

146

I’m pro gun but for me, when I hold an AR-15 or other similar weapon I do get a kind of macho, Rambo like high. Very different when compared to holding a traditional deer rifle.

Same as when I’m holding a 30-30 lever action Henry or Winchester. I feel like I am John Wayne.

Or when I have I held a black powder old cap and ball replica or flintlock replica I can imagine myself standing shoulder to shoulder firing a volley.

147

Fine. Make them work for it. The lack of restrictions just enables mass killers by making it easier for them to inflict maximum carnage. Is that what America wants?

I still think it would make a difference, on the general principle that the more difficult something is, the fewer people do it. There’s a reason that more people have climbed Kilimanjaro than Everest. Your reasoning, that they’re just going to do it anyway, smacks of resignation.

I have no idea what that single data point is supposed to indicate. If he had larger clips, there could well have been more victims. If he was limited to five- or three-round clips, there could well have been fewer.

Are those pesky emotions getting in the way of thinking clearly like they always do with us naive yoghurt slurpers?

148

It was a data point intending to illustrate the fact that it’s certainly possible to kill a significant number of people with relatively underpowered handguns and limited-capacity magazines.

149

Here, I believe, is the complete list of reasons that guns should be legal for everyone to own, as compiled from what I’ve heard from pro-gun people. I do not intent to imply that all of these reasons apply equally to all gun owners.

  1. Shooting them is fun.

  2. They have things they need to kill, often in a hurry and perhaps with little warning. Non-primates, generally.

  3. They believe that guns make their owners safer from roving bands of home invaders.

  4. Civilization’s about to collapse in some fun and interesting way and being armed to the teeth will be super-helpful in the lawless state that will follow.

  5. They already have some guns and don’t want to be suddenly a criminal just because they own them.
    My responses to these reasons:

  6. This is a reason to want guns, but not much of a reason for them not to be banned. We ban lots of fun things that might negatively effect others, like drag racing through elementary school parking lots and public nudity.

  7. This is a reason to want guns - and in my opinion, it’s a good enough reason that even if guns are generally banned, exceptions could be given. However all such ‘exception’ guns should be registered and strictly tracked, and ballistics information should be recorded on all of them so the magic CSI people on TV can tell if your gun is used to shoot people. If you lose track of your gun that should be a bad thing, and selling it to anyone should be subject to the same restrictions and oversight as you went through to get it.

  8. I believe that the belief that guns are defensive weapons is based on lies told by lying liars who profit from selling people guns and fear and macho fantasies. As I belief this belief is based in lies it is not a good reason not to ban guns.

  9. This belief is just a scaled up version of of the prior belief. Similarly it is based on lies and is not a good reason not to ban guns.

  10. Regarding what to do with people who already have guns, I would offer them a few different avenues:

  • sell them to the government.
  • have them confiscated by the government if they don’t sell in time and are caught with them.
  • if you have an heirloom gun you could have it permanently modified never to fire again, have the alteration registered, and then be allowed to keep it.
150

What sort of evidence would persuade you that guns are / can be defensive weapons? If I showed you cases where guns were actually used to defend hearth and home, would that convince you that you’re wrong on this point? Or is this a belief you hold near and dear and therefore won’t be amenable to factual correction?

151

I’m not interested in cases - I’m dead certain that you could find cases where a man without a gun overpowered a man with a gun, which by the ‘cases’ style of argumentation would be rock-solid proof that having a gun makes you more likely to be overpowered and that owning a gun is equivalent to handing your family over to terrorists.

You want to interest me? Show me stats. Specifically, the stats on who is more likely to be killed by a gun? Home invaders, or residents? Yes, we will be including suicide here. Additionally we should compare gun-owning houses to the ‘control group’ - people who don’t have them. What are the home invasion rates, the murder rates, and the suicide rates there? And do home invasions tend to be deadlier when the homeowner owns a gun or not?

The goal here would be to avoid arguments that could similarly be used to indicate that blowing the entire house up every time a door or window is opened is a good home defense tactic.

152

Why include suicides if you aren’t trying to cherry pick the data to show what you want to see? Just curious what your rationale is here. Are you claiming that without guns those deaths wouldn’t have happened? :dubious: If not, then you acknowledge that a percentage of them would have happened anyway, so it’s going to skew the results right there. If so then, well, that’s more than a bit disingenuous, don’t you think?

153

Fewer people would do what exactly? Commit mass murder? That only works if the only way to kill a person is with a gun.

154

I included them in my required data because I’m concerned about human lives, because I’m not a monster. And because I don’t have a vested interest in disingenuously skewing the data by leaving out a major subset of gun uses.

I, and the data, do in fact claim that a significant number of suicides would no have been carried out at all if the ready and easy method for killing themselves wasn’t available. This is accepted fact regarding suicides - even tiny increases in difficulty and inconvenience reduce suicides by a LOT.

And, as you’ll note, I explicitly said we should compare with the suicides in non-gun-owning houses as well, to preemptively answer and destroy the argument you just attempted. If the presence of guns honestly didn’t increase suicide rates, then that would be worth knowing, because then we wouldn’t reference suicides while deciding whether or not guns make a house safer.

But they DO increase the rates of suicides, and do in fact make the house less safe. All things accounted for.

155

begbert2,

I think you misunderstood. The belief I was interested in dissuading you from was the one you outlined when you said “I believe that the belief that guns are defensive weapons is based on lies told by lying liars who profit from selling people guns and fear and macho fantasies”.

What do “who is more likely to be killed by a gun” / suicides have to do with that belief of yours?

Also, do you understand the principle that “correlation != causation”?

156

(bolding mine) This is the most insightful real world answer. I would wager perhaps 500,000 Americans are similar to yourself enipla? Perhaps even 5 million? Who knows how many but your comment serves to remind people, guns are objects which often get handed down as heirlooms. No background checks, no mental health tests…

If you’re going to argue for greater gun control at the ‘retail level’, the Las Vegas shooter still would have passed with flying colours, and then some.

If you’re going to argue for greater gun control at the ‘retail level’, based on the ‘perceived lethality’ of various guns, it will do nothing to remove the millions of firearms already in circulation which cross any arbitrary threshold you might care to apply.

These threads, these debates, they always pop up AFTER a mass killing spree. They never pop in the middle of a slow news week with the headline “We just lost another 129 people nationwide to firearm deaths. Somebody needs to do something!” To which I respond, it’s pure luck if a mass killer has popped up in your neighborhood or not. They can use a truck like Bastille Day in Nice, or a light plane loaded with gasoline on board. They could release poison into your air conditioning ducts, or they might use guns.

But, if you’re wanting to stop the relentless drip drip drip of firearm homicides in the USA? Well, here’s a wake up call for you… even in Australia the steady drip drip drip of firearm homicides is still happening. Even AFTER the gun controls laws were introduced.

157

But you are skewing the data, and you know you are. Hell, you are admitting you are but you don’t care. Nicely played though with the between the lines ‘but YOU are a monster’ part btw.

So, the US with a lower suicide rate than many other ‘industrial’ nations, would have an even lower suicide rate without guns then? I’m frankly skeptical. Now, if you said there would be, perhaps, a lower number of successful suicides if we didn’t have easy access to guns I might accept that, but your claim here is bullshit IMHO. In most other ‘advanced’ or ‘industrial’ nations people seem to be able to figure out how to kill themselves without the benefit of guns, after all. In Japan, a country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world AND very strict anti-gun laws and bans they figure it out pretty well.

So, again, I think that you know you are skewing the data and you are good with that because without that your request isn’t going to look like nearly the slam dunk you want it to look like.

Yet we know the numbers for non-gun owning homes verse gun homes wrt suicide and you seem unwilling to use that data to normalize the figures and give an honest take on them, right? You could just take the non-gun owning rate and use that as a rough take on what it might look like in your ideal US without any guns at all (discounting the fact that even in countries like Japan they STILL use guns for suicide sometimes, it’s just not the primary method there). If normalizing the data honestly wouldn’t affect your argument, I’m curious why you didn’t suggest it.

Do they? Do they in every country, or only in the US? Why do many countries with very restricted access to guns have a higher suicide rate as a percentage of the population? Seems curious, as does the claim that the US without guns would be one of the lowest nations wrt suicide per capita than any other country on the planet, since WITH all those guns we are only in the middle of the pack now.

158

begbert2,

Could you perhaps explain how these two headlines by the NYT impact your analysis, if at all:

Share of Homes With Guns Shows 4-Decade Decline (March 9, 2013)

U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to 30-Year High (April 22, 2016)

159

Wait, was this a semantic argument? My recognition of suicides as being relevant pertains to the theory that having a gun in the house makes the house and its occupants safer (spoiler - it doesn’t, barring your house being constantly invaded such as in a war zone or an ursine feeding area) The argument that guns aren’t “defensive weapons”, specifically, is simpler:

They generally don’t include a riot shield.

Guns are purely offensive weapons; holding a gun doesn’t make you safer, and guns don’t protect you from attacks by other weapons. You can’t parry in a gunfight.

So they’re not defensive weapons. This is objective fact.

As for whether owning one makes you generally safer, well, that depends on how you use it. If you shoot everything that moves the instant it comes into sight you’ll be momentarily safer, but that’ll stop once the cops arrive in force. Whereas if you responsibly lock it up in a gun safe you’ll only use it “defensively” when you hear a prolonged series of noises in your kitchen and it’s probably your cousin trying to find his way to the bathroom.

Because people use their weapons so differently from one another, we refer to statistics to find out who people are generally shooting. And the answer, to an overwhelming degree, is “members of the household”.

Yes. I don’t understand why you’re bringing it up now, though. I mean, I hope you’re not trying to imply that the increased numbers of people getting shot in gun-owning households is entirely unrelated to the fact guns were present. That would be a hard sell.

160

Also, do you understand the principle that “correlation != causation”?

I asked for actual stats matching up gun-ownership with suicide rates for a reason. Sure, suicides are going up. The economy is in the shitter and we have a senile sociopath for a president. It’s probably not happening because people are missing their lost guns and are so forlorn about their absent firearms that they just can’t go on.

I mean, that would be stupid.