Boys and Guns...

[Bigred]

Two Men Dead In Michigan Road Rage Shootout, Police Say (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/two-men-dead-in-michigan-road-rage-shootout-police-say)


Police said two men with concealed-carry permits died Wednesday after a shootout allegedly motivated by road rage, the Grand Rapids Press reported.

The initial police investigation showed Ionia, Mich. residents James Pullum, 43, and Robert Taylor, 56, pulled into a car wash parking lot after a confrontation on the road. They then exited their vehicles, drew handguns and exchanged fire, authorities said.

Police found both men at the scene with gunshot wounds, and the two were pronounced dead at an area hospital soon after, according to the newspaper.

The costs of 2nd amendment rights?
Social Darwinism?
Lax gun-safety training?
Driving is SUPER-stressful?

Discuss...

[Denzark]

It was a genuine duel...

[Rissan4ever]

Some numbers from Gun Control - Just Facts (http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp)

Home Defense vs. Accidents
In 2007, there were 613 fatal firearm accidents in the United States, constituting 0.5% of 123,706 fatal accidents that year.

A 1993 nationwide survey of 4,977 households found that over the previous five years, at least 0.5% of households had members who had used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone "almost certainly would have been killed" if they "had not used a gun for protection." Applied to the U.S. population, this amounts to 162,000 such incidents per year. This figure excludes all "military service, police work, or work as a security guard."

Handgun Ban vs. Homicide Rate: Washington DC
In 1976, the Washington, D.C. City Council passed a law generally prohibiting residents from possessing handguns and requiring that all firearms in private homes be (1) kept unloaded and (2) rendered temporally inoperable via disassembly or installation of a trigger lock. The law became operative on Sept. 24, 1976.

On June 26, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, struck down this law as unconstitutional.

During the years in which the D.C. handgun ban and trigger lock law was in effect, the Washington, D.C. murder rate averaged 73% higher than it was at the outset of the law, while the U.S. murder rate averaged 11% lower.

Handgun Ban vs. Homicide Rate: Chicago
In 1982, the city of Chicago instituted a ban on handguns. This ban barred civilians from possessing handguns except for those registered with the city government prior to enactment of the law. The law also specified that such handguns had to be re-registered every two years or owners would forfeit their right to possess them. In 1994, the law was amended to require annual re-registration.

In June 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (5-4) that Chicago's ban is unconstitutional.

Since the outset of the Chicago handgun ban, the Chicago murder rate has averaged 17% lower than it was before the law took effect, while the U.S. murder rate has averaged 25% lower.

Conclusion
The DC handgun ban saw a rise in the murder rate, but the Chicago ban saw a drop. There are 25% more incidents of gun owners scaring off intruders than accidental shootings.

Personally, I don't know anyone who has repelled a home invader with a gun. While I don't own a gun myself, I do know responsible gun owners, and I've done target shooting with them. It's fun.

Perhaps the problem isn't guns, but the culture in the US that says it's ok to solve problems with violence. If at least one of the guys in the original post had just taken a deep breath and backed off, they'd probably both be alive.

With regard to mass shootings (Columbine, VA Tech, Sandyhook, Navy Yard, etc.), I don't consider it a failure of gun safety laws, but a failure of the mental healthcare system.

[Lukas The Trickster]

Perhaps the problem isn't guns, but the culture in the US that says it's ok to solve problems with violence.

Contrast the US with countries such as Norway and Switzerland which have equivalent rates of firearms ownership but very low incidences of gun crime. They also have a far less concentrated population density and rates of poverty, though, which I would venture are probably also contributory factors. Have to say as a firearms owner myself, I find the whole notion of legalised 'concealed carry' in the US utterly bizarre - both of the dead men probably 'carried' because they felt it made them safer, yet had they not been armed they would probably both be alive now.

[Kirsten]

Perhaps the problem isn't guns, but the culture in the US that says it's ok to solve problems with violence. If at least one of the guys in the original post had just taken a deep breath and backed off, they'd probably both be alive.

yup.

[Rissan4ever]

If the problem is not the guns, but the culture, how do we solve it? What do we do about this problem?

[Kirsten]

america admits that independence was a bad idea :p

[Rissan4ever]

Lol!

But seriously, the best way I've been able to come up with is to teach my kids to be decent people. I try to get them to see all sides of a situation before they come to a conclusion, and to always be open to new information that may change their opinions. That's the goal, anyway. One of my kids is 3, and the other will be 7 soon, so we're just starting out.

[scadugenga]

I love that just the facts study. Use it every time a anti-gun nut starts preaching.

That being said, it was Michigan. Not much good comes from there any more. Just look at the state arguing that they have the right to regulate procreation...

Perhaps a more thoughtful response when I'm not at work.

[Mr Mystery]

Have they measured the men's tackle?

Because I'm willing to bet they're pretty under endowed to start any kind of fight over driving.

[YorkNecromancer]

This story is a level of poignant and pathetic in a way I can't quite articulate.

I suppose that this is the real horror of American culture, that it has normalised gun violence between its citizens so thoroughly that this tragedy is neither remarkable nor ridiculous any more. This is just what happens when you tell people that violence solves everything.

I sometimes think of moving to America; there's a great romance to the land all of its own, which, when confronted with by the entitles generation of upper-class toffs who rule my land like their own personal game preserve of peasants, can be very appealing.

Then I remember things like this, and just think

no.

No, never.

America has some great, great things about it, but the gun thing is just bonkers. I've read so many justifications for "hey, guns are okay, it's only..." and that kind of makes it worse; like a battered spouse defending his violent wife. He's just so used to the nightmare that he's in complete denial that one day, for no reason, she's going to kill him. It's like, yeah, okay guy, it's great you've got this thing that feels so good, and you think you can handle it better than all those other guys, but really? She ain't no good for any of you, and she gonna kill you dead and us? We ain't gonna mourn 'cause we done used up all our concern tryin' ta get ya ta stop in the first dang place.

[Wolfshade]

It sounds like both of those people would have attacked each other with or without guns.
The fact that they were legally owned plays into the whole gun control fans. But then you look at Switzerland and see that high gun ownership doesn't relate to gun crime.

For me I think the issue is that guns are seen as a deterrent but then two people both armed are not as safe as two people unarmed, so they don't cancel each other out.

[YorkNecromancer]

two people both armed are not as safe as two people unarmed

Well, as this proves, really. Two people armed is nothing but a disaster waiting to happen.

[Rissan4ever]

I agree. If they'd had the same incident without guns, they'd both probably be alive.

I support people's right to defend their homes, but there are safer ways to do it than with guns. Baseball bats, for example. They're big, intimidating, easy to use, totally legal, waaaaaaaay less lethal than guns, and when you're not pummeling an intruder, you can play baseball with your kids. It's win-win!:)

[Rissan4ever]

Also, I know I sounded pro-gun in my first reply, but I'm really not. I guess you could call me... gun tolerant? I'm ok with responsible people owning them, but I'm not ok with idiots like the two road-ragers, or people with a history of violence and mental illness like the Navy Yard and VA Tech shooters. And I don't think they should be just carried around by regular citizens; there's too much temptation to use them thoughtlessly or out of fear or anger. When someone's got a gun, they may feel safer, but I sure as hell don't, nor would I if I were carrying a gun, too.

[Marshal2Crusaders]

Also, I know I sounded pro-gun in my first reply, but I'm really not. I guess you could call me... gun tolerant? I'm ok with responsible people owning them, but I'm not ok with idiots like the two road-ragers, or people with a history of violence and mental illness like the Navy Yard and VA Tech shooters. And I don't think they should be just carried around by regular citizens; there's too much temptation to use them thoughtlessly or out of fear or anger. When someone's got a gun, they may feel safer, but I sure as hell don't, nor would I if I were carrying a gun, too.

“Anyone who clings to the historically untrue -- and -- thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never solves anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler would referee. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor; and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.”

Western Normative thought about violence is deluded. Those two gentlemen firing off rounds in the street are *******s for doing it in an unsafe arena. Both should've decided that the disagreement needed a violent solution, and should have removed themselves to an area where collateral damage would be impossible, agreed upon how the fight would proceed and gone at it there. Violence is perfectly reasonable when executed properly. Bar fights and the ones Ive barely made it through were stupid. We should've stepped outside, fought, and settled it reasonably. The police should only be involved to referee, not arrest both parties. Violence isn't the problem, its the idea that uncontrolled violence is acceptable.

Two men with no option but to engage in combat to prove the stronger should remove themselves to a private area and fight until a winner is established. There is no shame in losing a well fought fight, and no glory in beating someone who put up a valiant defense. Change society to reflect this, and you see stupid **** like mid street brawls and convince store showdowns decline. Change the perception, change the effects.


You are more likely to be killed by law enforcement than a criminal in this country. I should carry guns to protect myself from them.
Simple as that.

[DarkLink]

If the problem is not the guns, but the culture, how do we solve it? What do we do about this problem?

I was about to rant the crap out of this thread, and then I started reading and I was like "oh, hey, someone gets it".

Incidentally, someone, I think the Department of Justice but it might have been the Center for Disease Control, just published a study on gun violence in America. For a while there was this big thing that they couldn't fund research into this with government money, but Obama overturned it as part of the democrat's gun control strategy, since they expected the studies to find that gun control stops crime and that guns are rarely used in self-defense. Instead, after a couple years of work, the study found that there was no real statistical evidence that gun control itself had any effect on crime (either positive or negative), and that guns were used significantly more frequently in self-defense than in the commission of a crime.

[eldargal]

It really is a cultural thing. Though it seems America needs to do more to keep guns out of the hands of people with mental illnesses. Something else to bear in mind, though, is that while guns seem to reduce crime they actually increase the risk for women. A woman who owns a gun is much more likely to be killed by an abusive spouse than a woman without a gun and a woman in a relationship with a gun owner is eight times (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447915/) more likely to be killed than a woman in a relationship with someone who doesn't own a gun.

So guns might protect households, but they endanger women.

[Bigred]

Can one of our Australian friends give us a rundown of what happened there with guncontrol legislation?

I have a hazy memory of some incident happening that forced the government to enact some basic regulation of types or arms available that were generally recognized as sane and protecting the rights of hunters/sportmen.

I think it was something like bolt action rifles, no pistols and other details.

I'm sure our Aussie friends can fill in the details.

Whatever happened, it is often held up as an example by gun control advocates in the United States.

[Gotthammer]

Reading from here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#The_Port_Arthur_massacre _and_its_consequences) will give you an idea of what happened. No automatic / pump action weapons, barrel length restrictions etc.

As a purely personal statement we are currently having a problem with gun crime from smuggled in guns and such, but to me I actually feel safer knowing only police and criminals have guns since gun related crimes almost all involve illegal guns means the police just have to worry about them for the most part (and can take actions to stop the smugglers etc) rather than thinking that a random person will be hard pressed to flip out and go on a rampage.

[Morgrim]

Can one of our Australian friends give us a rundown of what happened there with guncontrol legislation?
In the late 1980s to early 1990s there were a rash of mass shootings (I think a mass shooting was formally defined as more than 4 people being shot in the same event by the same individual), most of them gang related. This led to calls for tighter gun restrictions but the gun lobby resisted. Then in April 1996 the Port Arthur Massacre occurred. An insane man went on a shooting spree with the cause still unknown, but he killed 35 people and wounded 23 more. It is widely agreed that others being armed would NOT have helped because of the speed of the killings (22 were shot within 15 seconds before people realised what was happening) and the fact most were tourists.

Despite voracious protesting from lobby groups this prompted the government to enact strict gun laws, along with a buyback scheme for the weapons in question. I think automatic weapons may have already been illegal. Looking through the literature it looks like self loading and semi-automatic rifles were banned and very tight restrictions were placed on pump action shotguns. Also ALL firearms require a licence, a background check, and for the owner to store them unloaded in a secure gun safe when not in use. (Handguns were already restricted, and you need to have an occupation requiring them or to be a member of a shooting club to have them, I think.)

I was only a kid at the time of the shootings so I do remember there were a lot of threats made by gun nuts and that the prime minister was openly wearing a bullet proof vest for some time after the new laws were passed. However there has not been a single mass shooting since and overall gun crime has dropped (By 47% according to Wikipedia). The requirement for gun cabinets is credited with gun theft being quartered as well. The people that still need rifles (hunters and farmers) can still get them, they just have to take the time to reload after firing which doesn't seem to be an issue to me because, well, if you miss the animal is going to move and ruin your next shot anyway and being a little slower to shoot animals seems a worthwhile payoff to stop criminals being able to kill a dozen people before anyway can react.

[DarkLink]

It really is a cultural thing. Though it seems America needs to do more to keep guns out of the hands of people with mental illnesses.

The laws already exist, the problem is enforcement. There isn't very good communication between whoever reviews background checks and whoever determines mental health.

[eldargal]

Hence 'doing more'.;)

[daboarder]

The interesting thing about gun control in Australia.

A pro-gun nut has just been elected as a senator....yeah he opened his trap and started going on about how arming the residents of western Sydney would lower crime rates and shootings.....then these last 2 shootings in america happened and he's promptly shut the **** up.

he was going on about arming "good guys" to stop gun massacres by "bad guys" and someone apparently asked...."what mass shootings?"


I'll put it this way. we have had a single massarce in over 10 years since the port arthur massacre, and that was achieved by burning a bloody building down.


Reading from here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#The_Port_Arthur_massacre _and_its_consequences) will give you an idea of what happened. No automatic / pump action weapons, barrel length restrictions etc.

As a purely personal statement we are currently having a problem with gun crime from smuggled in guns and such, but to me I actually feel safer knowing only police and criminals have guns since gun related crimes almost all involve illegal guns means the police just have to worry about them for the most part (and can take actions to stop the smugglers etc) rather than thinking that a random person will be hard pressed to flip out and go on a rampage.

THIS so much this.

Ah and you should watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pOiOhxujsE&list=PLOKWcH1zBl2kfnCwyyZWk5MW28lgaNa7L&index=1

[Morgrim]

Socially it helps that almost all the shootings are gangs shooting each other. During the gang wars a decade or so ago a police officer got in serious trouble for pointing out that while he hoped for a sudden outbreak of common sense in the criminal underworld, as long as gang members were confining themselves to killing each other discretely and avoiding collateral damage the police weren't feeling all that fussed about it.

[Wolfshade]

The thing is that it can end up with an arms race. If I am to break into a house and I expect that the owner will be defended with a gun, to level the playing field I go into that house similarly armed. Then because there are more armed criminials more home owners have guns themselves and it is cyclic.

Looking at gang violence, you look at why they carry weapons (not just guns) and it is to defend themselves incase they are attacked in a rivals area.

[Wildeybeast]

But then you look at Switzerland and see that high gun ownership doesn't relate to gun crime.


The issue isn't the guns nor societal violence, it America's attitude to guns. America as a society believes it has a god given right to carry weapons because of the almost biblical reverence they give to a 250 year old document drawn up by a bunch of privileged white men to maintain their own interests. What no one really gives voice to is that the 'right' to carry arms carries with it the inherent implication that you can use said weapons against those who annoy you (redcoats, natives, former co-workers, your mouthy wife, that guy who cut you up and so on). Otherwise, what's the point in having them? The nations with similar rates of gun ownership have very different attitudes and attachments to their weapons.

[Rissan4ever]

Changing the American attitude toward guns is next to impossible. If it is possible, it will take a very, very long time; generations, perhaps. What we can change right now is access to guns. The fact is that if fewer people have guns, then incidents like the one in Michigan and our recent mass shootings will be dramatically less likely to occur.

[Wildeybeast]

I agree entirely, but tighter controls won't happen until the attitude to guns changes. If a couple dozen little children being gunned down isn't enough to inspire a nation to tighter gun controls, I fail to see what will. The uk and Australia both bought in gun control legislation after massacres, but that was only possible because the majority of the public called for it. The simple fact is that too many Americans are too attached to having the power to kill other Americans. What you do about that, I really don't know.

[Morgrim]

Also can I just point out anyone using Switzerland as an example has probably been misled? Yes, they have a high rate of firearm ownership because of the compulsory military service, and because the population is expected to act as a defensive army should they ever be attacked. However, ammunition is hugely restricted. Most of those people that have guns don't have any bullets to put in them; the idea is that if the nation is attacked the government doesn't have to arm and train the population but instead just needs to coordinate the locals and distribute ammo.

[Marshal2Crusaders]

The problem is, I have guns. I assume most of you are from somewhere where you can't or don't want them. Most law enforcement around me believes that I have the right to a gun, most of the entirety of the US military thinks we should have guns.

So the people who don't want us to have guns are going to ask the LE and Mil to take guns from people who do have guns. Which they are not inclined to do and would have the perfect and legal authority to refuse such an order by constitutional law.


In the end people who ***** about guns can fill their mouths with dicks. I'll be at the range.

[YorkNecromancer]

So the people who don't want us to have guns are going to ask the LE and Mil to take guns from people who do have guns.

Actually, a lot of us just kind of wish you'd give them up in the name of sanity. I believe, after all, it a key maxim of gun ownership that there are no people who haven't had an accident with a gun; just those who haven't had an accident yet. Of course, I could be wrong.

Don't know if I'd want to take the chance myself. Especially if I wasn't the one who got shot:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/10/27/boy-8-shoots-self-with-uzi-at-gun-show/

I remember feeling sick to my stomach when I first read that story. :(

Also, with statements like this


In the end people who ***** about guns can fill their mouths with dicks. I'll be at the range.

You're not really convincing me that gun owners are calm, non-aggressive type who won't use them. As a free hint: raging at the internet and spraying us in the face with your testosterone? Kind of counterproductive as a debating technique.

If you literally can't imagine your life without free and easy access to kill people at range, I put it to you that it says more about the paucity of your own imagination than anything else.

[Nabterayl]

I always thought this was a good discussion of American gun culture, and an example of how you can glorify weapons in a more responsible way than America does:


http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-myth-of-the-gun

[Marshal2Crusaders]

Actually, a lot of us just kind of wish you'd give them up in the name of sanity. I believe, after all, it a key maxim of gun ownership that there are no people who haven't had an accident with a gun; just those who haven't had an accident yet. Of course, I could be wrong.

Don't know if I'd want to take the chance myself. Especially if I wasn't the one who got shot:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/10/27/boy-8-shoots-self-with-uzi-at-gun-show/

I remember feeling sick to my stomach when I first read that story. :(

Also, with statements like this



You're not really convincing me that gun owners are calm, non-aggressive type who won't use them. As a free hint: raging at the internet and spraying us in the face with your testosterone? Kind of counterproductive as a debating technique.

If you literally can't imagine your life without free and easy access to kill people at range, I put it to you that it says more about the paucity of your own imagination than anything else.

I'd say the same thing if you told me I should give up my jeep, which I've spent years fine tuning and lovingly modifying for the environment. Or that I should give up beer because of drunk drivers. Or my nice shower for water conservation.

I don't think that anyone or any group has the right to dictate what I buy or how I spend my time. If you don't like guns, I won't ask you to come shoot with me. In the same way if you don't drink I won't ask you to come out for a pint. But the minute people make arguments for the good of humanity at the expense of my own personal freedoms I side with my own personal freedoms.

I would never ask you to stop doing something you find pleasurable because I felt a moral argument to do so. I imagine if I did you tell me to stick a dick in my mouth as we'll.

[YorkNecromancer]

I'd say the same thing if you told me I should give up my jeep, which I've spent years fine tuning and lovingly modifying for the environment.

False equivalence. A jeep's main purpose is not to kill. A M4 assault rifle with 250 round ammo drum chambered with hollow-point ammunition is not to hunt.


Or that I should give up beer because of drunk drivers.

False equivalence. Beer's main purpose is not to kill. A M4 assault rifle with 250 round ammo drum chambered with hollow-point ammunition is not to hunt.Also, an entirely different debate, and not relevant to the one we are discussing here.


Or my nice shower for water conservation.

False equivalence. Logical fallacy: appeal to ridicule. A shower's main purpose is not to kill. A M4 assault rifle with 250 round ammo drum chambered with hollow-point ammunition is not to hunt.Also an second entirely different debate, and not relevant to the one we are discussing here.


I don't think that anyone or any group has the right to dictate what I buy or how I spend my time.

False assumption. Appeal to wishful thinking.

Certain groups have exactly that right: the government, the police, your family. You live in a civilised society. That means you agree to abide by certain rules, as do the rest of us. Those rules we obey are called your rights. Those rules you obey are called your responsibilities.

If you choose to ignore your responsibilities, you invite social censure. Your family will not talk to you. the police will arrest you. The government will ship you off to Gitmo for the rest of your life.

Rights and responsibilites are not set in stone. If society advances to a point where enough people feel change is necessary, they will enact change.

If enough people feel and activity (say use of heroin) is of greater detriment to society than benefit, they will pass laws that render it illegal. If, at a future date, enough people feel those laws are counter-productive (say, prohibition of alcohol), they will repeal those laws. The constituition of your United States is a living document, after all (that's why it has 'amendments') and about as permanent as Ozymandias' kingdom.

If your government chooses to ban guns for the safety of the American people, there will be nothing you can do, other than to fight for the repeal of those laws. That's how a civilised society works.


But the minute people make arguments for the good of humanity at the expense of my own personal freedoms I side with my own personal freedoms.

There is such a thing as functional addiction. But we banned heroin and opiate derivate drugs for the good of humanity nonetheless. One day, your people and government will do the same to guns for the same reasons.

Your desires for the freedom to own guns directly contribute to the deaths of American civilians. This is because, in order for you to own guns, so must the people who have killed, and will kill, American civilians. The price of your right to the personal freedom to carry a gun is the responsibility, however small, for the continuing deaths of civilians. I would not be comfortable paying that price.


I imagine if I did you tell me to stick a dick in my mouth as we'll.

Relativist fallacy. You have no idea what I would say or do.

Your behaviours extend no further than yourself.

Addendum: interesting article
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-4-most-meaningless-arguments-against-gun-control/

[Marshal2Crusaders]

Your failing to grasp I'm resisting being told what to give up via the threat of violence, not the object I'm giving up. Regardless of the object/activity itself, I will not be told what to do by a 50+1 majority. Laws created by the majority that infringe the minorities rights are invalid.

[DarkLink]

The issue isn't the guns nor societal violence, it America's attitude to guns. America as a society believes it has a god given right to carry weapons because of the almost biblical reverence they give to a 250 year old document drawn up by a bunch of privileged white men to maintain their own interests.

You really don't know what you're talking about.

If you think rich white gun owners are the source of the violent crime problem in America... I really don't know how to express my opinion of your competence on this subject without being insulting.

Look at the global distribution of violence, and the only possible explanation you can come up with is that violence is exclusively cultural. Look at it in relation to gun ownership, and it's pretty quickly apparent that the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other at all.

The USA has the highest gun ownership in the world, by a long shot. And, while there is more violent crime than in parts of Europe, in the grand scheme of things the USA is still a very safe place to live.

The next set of countries on the list are Serbia, Yemen, Switzerland, Finland, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. With the obvious exception of Iraq, those nations are some of the safest in the world, if you look at gun violence. Jump around the list a little bit, and you see nations like North Korea, where there is basically no gun ownership, but a much higher violent crime rate that the USA. Or El Salvador, with very low gun ownership, but it's the murder capital of the world. Mexico has the same gun ownership levels as Australia, but about 24 times as many intentional homicides.

Even within America, this idea makes little sense. Cities like Washington DC, LA, Stockton, Chicago, are heavily democratic (the party, not the political process), with extremely strict gun laws. There isn't a gun store in all of Chicago. Handguns have been completely banned for a long time until recently in several places. California has the strictest gun laws in the nation, with all sorts of stuff banning large magazines and "assault weapons" and the like. Yet this is where you see a lot of the highest violent crime rates. Washington DC, the one that completely banned handguns for several decades, has a murder rate literally almost an order of magnitude higher than the next most violent city.

Now, there are some cities with loose gun laws and plenty of crime. I'm not saying more guns prevent crime. What I'm saying, and where you're massively wrong, is that there's no causation between gun ownership and violent crime. There isn't even a correlation between the two.

So why all the inconsistencies? Because different cultures treat violence differently. America has problems with gang violence. That jacks up our violent crime rate a lot. But guess what? Britain has some similar problems. They have a pretty low murder rate, but they are one of the most violent nations in western Europe. Switzerland, as mentioned above, has a very high gun ownership rate, but treats their guns very differently and has a very different culture than America, hence, extremely low violent crime rates.

Your argument is based not on actual logic or evidence, but on the preconceived notion that gun owners are inherently evil. I'm glad you have a good opinion of me, buddy.



What no one really gives voice to is that the 'right' to carry arms carries with it the inherent implication that you can use said weapons against those who annoy you (redcoats, natives, former co-workers, your mouthy wife, that guy who cut you up and so on).

Blatantly wrong. You are projecting your preconceive biases onto someone simply because you don't understand them.

I'm sure there are some ****bags like the two guys in the OP that think like this, but the vast majority of gun owners, and non-gun owners, would be insulted by your attitude. I know I am.



Otherwise, what's the point in having them? The nations with similar rates of gun ownership have very different attitudes and attachments to their weapons.

Because shooting is fun. Shooting sports and hunting are huge nation-wide. And, yes, because guns are used more frequently in self-defense than to commit violence. Not that I expect you to actually bother to factor this in to your opinion at this point.


I believe, after all, it a key maxim of gun ownership that there are no people who haven't had an accident with a gun; just those who haven't had an accident yet. Of course, I could be wrong.

You'd be massively wrong. Shooting sports are extremely safe, you're literally like a hundred times more likely to be seriously injured playing football (both American and European) than hanging out to a shooting range.

Does negligence happen? Yeah, but the actual accident rate is really low. When you've got so many guns, eventually some idiot is going to hurt them self with one, but cars, hammers, ladders, light bulbs, lawn mowers, etc, are all far more "dangerous" than guns.

The vast majority of people who own or use guns will never get hurt with one.

[DarkLink]

Addendum: interesting article
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-4-most-meaningless-arguments-against-gun-control/

There are some factual errors and/or biased misconceptions in a couple of these points. While I do agree that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" isn't a meaningful argument, it's not really meant to be. It's a snarky bumper sticker. There are plenty of anti-gun quotes that are equally silly. It doesn't really have much bearing on the argument either way. More importantly, the author dismissed the statistics regarding defensive use of guns, claiming it was only one study and thus unreliable. Well, yeah, that one particular study on its own probably isn't. But the half-dozen other studies that can think of, including ones from the Department of Justice, the Center for Disease Control, the latest congress funded one I mentioned earlier, and even ones from the Brady Campaign* all point to very widespread use of firearms in self-defense.

Plus... we've never even come close to modifying any of the original 10 amendments. Some of the others may change, but those ten are literally the foundation upon which all personal rights in the USA are based on. Probably not going to change anytime soon.

*The Brady Campaign is the biggest anti-gun non-profit in the USA. Whenever gun control issues come up, it's pretty much the NRA vs. the Brady Campaign.

[Nabterayl]

Some of the others may change, but those ten are literally the foundation upon which all personal rights in the USA are based on.
You just made me cry a little. I'm with you on gun control, but I certainly do not hold - and most Americans, including most of the Framers, did not hold for the first hundred years or so of our history - that without the first ten amendments to the federal constitution my personal rights would have no foundation.

[DarkLink]

Well, ok, I guess it's more accurate that they're the expression of that foundation. What I mean to say is that, fundamentally, as a human being, we have the right to [insert rights here], and the government can't take that away from us. The ten amendments are the core of the list of, I guess, official conformations that, yes, the government recognizes that we inherently have these rights and that they agree to respect those rights.

I guess what I was trying to say is that we have these fundamental rights, and since those aren't going away anytime soon the amendments that protect those rights aren't going away anytime soon, either, and certainly not without a fight.

In fact, I think that ties in with the video you posted earlier. Europeans, with their history of monarchies and empires, tend to see rights as something granted by the state. Which is kind of messed up, but whatever. American see rights as something fundamental to the human condition, and the government had better recognize those rights or else. Conversely, America wrote Japan's constitution, so guns are still banned over there because no one wanted Imperial Japan running around with guns, and because of the fallout of the war most Japanese are culturally allergic to guns, and to an even greater extent nukes. Which just goes back to the fact that this is entirely a cultural issue.

[scadugenga]

I am also a gun owner.

I have never had an "accident" with a gun, nor has my father, who owned guns all his life, or any of the rest of the extended family. So, literally hundreds of combined years of no accidents. And given the number of people on my dad's side of the family, that range could easily push past a thousand or more combined years of accident free ownership.

York, while you're calling our other people's fallacies, you're blatantly practicing emotional fallacy yourself.

I personally know people who have used firearms defensively to save lives--their own, or others.

In fact, studies have shown that defensive use of firearms is staggeringly high.

But the media won't say anything about that.

You never hear about the mass murder spree that was prevented in Clackamas by a CCW holder.

But the media won't say anything about that.

In fact, Big Red only posted about 1/4 of the story for this incident in MI.

Which people are band-wagoning about, without having all the facts.

[scadugenga]

And, lest I forget, it's also important to know that in the US, the courts have repeatedly upheld that the police have no responsibility to protect you from being attacked/hurt/raped/killed by an assailant.

And suggesting the use of a baseball bat for self-defense? Unfortunately an idea with little merit.

The guy coming at you with a knife or a gun will kill you, and then go off and pop pills from the bruises you *may* have inflicted on him before he stepped over your corpse to finish robbing your house.

Why is a gun an important tool for self-defense?

Because it is the great equalizer. Otherwise, if someone like me, Dead, or Dark were actual evil scumbags with the intent to do harm, there would be absolutely nothing an average person could do to stop us from doing whatever we wanted.

[Wolfshade]

It is a simple fact that you cannot shoot someone without a gun. Oscar Pistorius could not have shot Reeva Steenkamp, or if you prefer and go down the Switzerland route, then you would have cocnerns not with gun control but illegal ammo possession.

I don't think you can really make any equivalences with Switzerland, either for or against gun control, the Swiss culture is very different from any I have been to. Indeed, a colleague of mine who lived there spotted his neighbour checking the treads on his tyres because he thought they looked a little low.

Mass murders in Switzerland:
- 4 killed by a Kosovo asylum seeker, 2013
- 14 killed, 2001
- 7 killed perpentrator declared insane, 1912

3 mass shootings in 100 years, I think any civilised nation would be thankful for that, 1 by a non-native, 1 by a person who was insane, the other while never diagnosed (he killed himself) actions showed him to be paranoid and deluded.


Guns ownership rates vs. Homicide is again frightfully miss leading
Honduras has the highest homicide rate in the world 91.6/100,00 with a gun ownership of 6.2/100
United States at 4.8/100,000 with gun ownership at 94.3/100

Though the gun ownership rates are dubious, it is a straight forward number of guns/number of people. Some research has suggested that this leads to an overestimation has those who own a gun are more likely to own more than one rather than most people likely to have one. Obviously, this only refers to legal ones.

As for the fundamental rights, if you look at the Magna Carta (1215) this was the equivalent to a bill of rights, but by half way through the 19th Century most of it's laws and statues have been repealed. To consider the bill or rights to be a permanent fixed stone is to say that society does not change or evolve. I am really glad that I do not live in Napoleonic era... (Also 1215, people demand of the state rights "but whatever")

The studies which post to guns being used in self defence, surely the same self defence could be achieved through non-leathal means, I mean otherwise why would police start carrying tasers and then let due process win out? Also, consider if I am going to burglarise someone and I expect them to be "packing" then to level the field, I would also "carry heat", but I don't want level the playing field I want to dominate, so instead of a revolver I go for something bigger or with a higher rate of fire. It is a vicious ciricle and a fallacy to assume that the best defence to a gun in another gun.

What I find most worrying is if what Scad says is true that the police have no responsibility to protect the populace.

[Nabterayl]

Well ... Scad is sort of right about that. The police do not have a duty to protect you, personally. That is a pretty settled point of American law. However, that is not to say that the police have no duty to protect people, generally. The court case that gives rise to claims that the police have "no duty to protect" involved three female housemates whose house was burglarized by two men. Through a series of fairly staggeringly inept actions on the part of the police, their calls to 911 were mis-categorized and otherwise not properly routed to response officers, with the result that the three women were held captive and raped in their own home for fourteen hours.* Understandably enraged, the three women sued the police for failing in their duty to protect them. The upshot of the case was that, while the police were certainly incompetent, the police owe no duty to individual victims of crimes to protect them, and so the three women had no basis on which to sue the police.

Most people who hear about that case, and the decision, are horrified (me included), but it's important not to overstate the holding. The police don't owe you a duty to protect you from crime, so if they fail so to protect you, you can't sue them even if their failure to protect you resulted from mind-blowing incompetence. That is not the same thing, however, as saying that the police don't have a duty to protect people in general from crimes, or to stop criminals found in the commission of crimes. Cold comfort to the victim, but on the other hand, you can imagine what it would do to the cost of law enforcement if every victim of a crime could sue the state on the theory that if the police had been more competent, he or she wouldn't have been victimized. Even if 99% of the claims were fallacious, just getting them all thrown out of court would be a tremendous burden. I'd be shocked if in the UK, a crime victim can personally sue the police on the grounds that they failed in their duty to protect that victim.

* The victims made two calls to 911. The first was improperly categorized for severity, but a cruiser did respond. One officer merely leaned out the window of the car; the other knocked on the door while the rape of one woman was actually in progress, but left when he received no answer. The second call to 911 was not even routed to units on the street at all. Both times, the two women who had managed to escape initially by climbing onto the roof (and called 911) had been assured that police were on the way, and actually blundered into the attackers because they believed police were in the house, with the result that all three were captured.

[Denzark]

I don't trust civvies at the best of times, but giving them automatic weaponry? Jeez. Whilst I can fully acknowledge someone can become technically proficient at something if practised, doesn't mean I can see any need for high magazine capacity weapons.

Restrict calibres, fully automatic modes, bob's yer uncle.

[Wolfshade]

Ah I see what you mean. Yes, it is a technical distinction to immune them from liability.

The Police over here have a "duty to protect life" how far that duty goes legally I am unsure. I imagine that any individual officer would be immune though negilgence cases could still be brought about

[Denzark]

Ah I see what you mean. Yes, it is a technical distinction to immune them from liability.

The Police over here have a "duty to protect life" how far that duty goes legally I am unsure. I imagine that any individual officer would be immune though negilgence cases could still be brought about

The chief constable of a force can be held legally responsible if his troops don't protect an individual's right to life under ECHR.

[Wolfshade]

You'd then end up needing to prove that what was done was inadequate given what was known and knowable at the time.

[Nabterayl]

The chief constable of a force can be held legally responsible if his troops don't protect an individual's right to life under ECHR.
Held legally responsible by whom? Like, can the estate of a victim sue the chief constable, or would the action have to come from a government agency?

EDIT:

I don't trust civvies at the best of times, but giving them automatic weaponry? Jeez. Whilst I can fully acknowledge someone can become technically proficient at something if practised, doesn't mean I can see any need for high magazine capacity weapons.

Restrict calibres, fully automatic modes, bob's yer uncle.
Wait, what are you objecting to here? Automatic rifles and machine pistols (what are called "machine guns" over here legally, though of course the legal definition of a "machine gun" bears almost zero resemblance to the military definition of a "machine gun")? Automatic (i.e., self-loading) pistols? Magazine capacity? You threw out a lot of terms here that cover a pretty huge amount of ground.

[YorkNecromancer]

Otherwise, if someone like me, Dead, or Dark were actual evil scumbags with the intent to do harm, there would be absolutely nothing an average person could do to stop us from doing whatever we wanted.

Guns don't stop evil people doing exactly what they want. Evil people always find a way.

All that changes when they have access to weapons is the way they do it, and the increased potential for peripheral damage.

[DarkLink]

Guns ownership rates vs. Homicide is again frightfully miss leading
Honduras has the highest homicide rate in the world 91.6/100,00 with a gun ownership of 6.2/100
United States at 4.8/100,000 with gun ownership at 94.3/100

Is it Honduras? Thought it was El Salvador. Oh, well, they have like ~5/100 guns and a pretty similar murder rate.


I don't trust civvies at the best of times, but giving them automatic weaponry? Jeez. Whilst I can fully acknowledge someone can become technically proficient at something if practised, doesn't mean I can see any need for high magazine capacity weapons.

Restrict calibres, fully automatic modes, bob's yer uncle.

The problem with this is that it's detached from reality. The vast majority of all crimes are committed with handguns. Conversely, in the history of the United States of America, there has been one single crime committed with a .50 BMG caliber rifle, and that wasn't a murder, not even an attempted one. Similarly, despite the fact that the AR15 (civilian M16, which is not​ fully automatic) is pretty much the most common rifle in America, only about 2% of crimes are committed with an "assault weapon". Go in your garage and pick a random object. I pretty much guarantee that more people die every year from whatever it is you picked up than from an "assault weapon" with high capacity magazines.

Also, automatic weapons are illegal. Or, more technically, they are extremely heavily restricted, and in the history of the USA, I can literally count on one hand the number of times a legally owned automatic rifle was used in a violent crime. And the main case that I'm thinking of was committed by an off-duty SWAT officer. Now, occasionally there are some crimes committed with fully automatic weapons, but those are basically all smuggled in by drug cartels in places like Miami.

So, no, restricting calibers won't do anything, and the laws regarding fully automatic weapons already work extremely well, so... you might want to rethink your strategy. Stop basing your opinions on what mainstream media spoon feeds you, they really don't know what they're talking about.

[daboarder]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australia)


All the argument that should ever need to be made.


And as for Switzerland, they may have s shed tonne of guns, but they also have conscription, changes a persons attitude to weapons and crime I reckon.

[Morgrim]

I find anyone from the USA saying 'guns make us safer' or 'we need guns for protection' or 'how can I defend myself without a gun' to be rather naive, because surely all of those people can look at the rest of the world and see they manage to do a perfectly good job of all of the above without guns. Guns are not defensive weapons. Guns are offensive weapons. How do you stop someone using a gun? You kill them. That is their purpose. If you're worried about being mugged or your home invaded then tasers or pepper spray will be just as much use as a gun is, and if someone wants you dead a gun will not help you unless they are an idiot.*

I have no problem with sports shooting. But if you have a handgun for sport then treat it like Australia: if you are not at the range then it is unloaded and locked in a case and many ranges have lockers so you can leave your gun there and it won't be stolen.

And anyone who claims that owning weapons designed to kill from a great distance is an unalienable human right looks rather crazy to the rest of the world, you do realise that don't you?

[YorkNecromancer]

anyone who claims that owning weapons designed to kill from a great distance is an unalienable human right looks rather crazy to the rest of the world, you do realise that don't you?

This. This so, so much.


Stop basing your opinions on what mainstream media spoon feeds you, they really don't know what they're talking about.

Personally, I base my opinions on the fact I come from a very different culture to you; one that has empirically, measurably less gun violence that yours, due entirely to massive restrictions on the availability of guns.

Perhaps you should stop listening to non-mainstream media, and consider our alternate viewpoints? Ones tried and tested over decades, and proven to work. Of course, you won't, no more than I would ever listen to yours. But, you shouldn't patronise those of us who despise guns as though the only we hate them because we're told to by your media, and incapable of thinking for ourselves. Because I wasn't told to hate guns by anyone. I grew up loving action films and Marvel comics and 40K above all else. But real guns? No. I mean, if I want, I can own a shotgun, or go sports shooting, or black powder shooting - it's not like I'm not allowed to shoot stuff here. No, I hate them because they're just absurdly dangerous, stupid things. There's a reason we have a huge taboo against firearms in the UK - years and years of not having them easily available. We used to allow any idiot to have a gun, but then we got rid of them, and life here has been pretty sweet ever since, and all the "hey guys, guns are great" in the world would not get us to go backwards.

It's a totally different mindset, and from where I sit, all the "guns are great" stuff just sounds really, really weird. Are Americans all just really scared of each other? Because if you really need to own a gun to feel safe, that's insane. That is just completely insane.

I now look forward to the myth that America and the UK are so different culturally, and what works here wouldn't work there because reasons.

[DarkLink]

I find anyone from the USA saying 'guns make us safer' or 'we need guns for protection' or 'how can I defend myself without a gun' to be rather naive, because surely all of those people can look at the rest of the world and see they manage to do a perfectly good job of all of the above without guns.

So... why are guns used so often defensively? I've brought that up multiple times in this thread already? Do you people not read?



Guns are not defensive weapons. Guns are offensive weapons. How do you stop someone using a gun? You kill them. That is their purpose.

I bet you think the only way to use a knife is for stabbing people, too. And cars were designed to go fast, right, so who cares about speed limits, drive as fast as you want.

A lot of people in America own guns, and the vast majority of them are not using them to kill people. Simple observation shows some flaws in your argument.

The purpose of an inanimate object is arbitrary. That's why Leathermans are one of humanity's greatest achievements, you can do practically anything with them. I've got two, and I've used them from everything from converting models to hammering nails to working on a car. Similarly, some people drive cars to get places, others drive them for fun, usually a little of both. Some people use the internet for email and news, others... for other things. The user decides what the purpose of the tool is.




If you're worried about being mugged or your home invaded then tasers or pepper spray will be just as much use as a gun is,

They're options, yes. That doesn't mean they can do everything a gun can do, not by a long shot. Heh, pun. But seriously, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. The only real disadvantage of a gun, though, is that you need a responsible owner.



and if someone wants you dead a gun will not help you unless they are an idiot.*

So... why are guns used so often defensively? I've brought that up multiple times in this thread already? Do you people not read?



I have no problem with sports shooting.

I thought you just said the only purpose of guns was to kill people?



But if you have a handgun for sport then treat it like Australia: if you are not at the range then it is unloaded and locked in a case and many ranges have lockers so you can leave your gun there and it won't be stolen.

How is this so different from leaving it in a locker at home? That's what most people do. Gun lockers are big business here.



And anyone who claims that owning weapons designed to kill from a great distance is an unalienable human right looks rather crazy to the rest of the world, you do realise that don't you?

And anyone who willingly allows a monarchy to exist seems pretty crazy to us.

[DarkLink]

Personally, I base my opinions on the fact I come from a very different culture to you; one that has empirically, measurably less gun violence that yours, due entirely to massive restrictions on the availability of guns.

Gun violence is irrelevant. Overall violence is what matters. And there's no way anyone with half a brain can objectively look at the big picture and retain any real conviction that gun control stops violent crime. You realize that the UK has some major violent crime issues relative to the rest of Europe, as well?



Perhaps you should stop listening to non-mainstream media, and consider our alternate viewpoints? Ones tried and tested over decades, and proven to work. Of course, you won't, no more than I would ever listen to yours. But, you shouldn't patronise those of us who despise guns as though the only we hate them because we're told to by your media, and incapable of thinking for ourselves.

I'm not patronizing you for not liking guns. I'm patronizing you for not knowing what the heck you're talking about. When your arguments amount to "assault-murder-machines are bad and think of the children", and I respond with "well, actually, semi-automatic rifles are only very, very rarely used in crimes", and you evade and respond with another, different, equally poorly thought-out and supported argument that displays some very significant ignorance on the subject, I'm going to have a tough time taking your argument seriously.



No, I hate them because they're just absurdly dangerous, stupid things.

If you think guns are dangerous, I shudder to imagine what you think about cars. Or kitchen cleaners. Or ladders. Or lawn mowers. Or hammers. Or knives. Or sports. Or any one of the numerous things that are far more common and far more dangerous, statistically, than guns.




It's a totally different mindset, and from where I sit, all the "guns are great" stuff just sounds really, really weird. Are Americans all just really scared of each other? Because if you really need to own a gun to feel safe, that's insane. That is just completely insane.

I now look forward to the myth that America and the UK are so different culturally, and what works here wouldn't work there because reasons.

Your first statement here shows there's more of a cultural gap than you think. You really don't understand why we have so many guns.

However, have you ever heard of culture of honor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_United_States))? When you get people who live very independently in relatively harsh conditions, it's something that develops. It's pretty big in many areas of America, particularly the South, but it also occurs in other cultures (including the Scottish and northern Englishmen). In such a culture, reputation matters, a lot. You are supposed to settle your scores yourself, and involving others (such as the police), is dishonorable. You can't back down, even from minor insults, or you'll look weak and lose respect. So areas with a strong culture of honor, like large swaths of America, have a bunch of people who are more than willing to get into a fight for relatively minor reasons. There's going to be a lot more violent crime in one of these areas, regardless of how many potential weapons might be floating around.

And that's just one of many complex cultural aspects that can very strongly influence violent crime rates. Poverty and race relations are another big one, just look at anywhere with gang problems. The wars in the middle east are almost completely fueled by poor relations between different religious groups.

[YorkNecromancer]

And anyone who willingly allows a monarchy to exist seems pretty crazy to us.

Yeah, the idea of dynasties of rich nobles ruling when one man takes over after his father is really weird.

Rome was so scared of a King, they called their leader "Caesar", after their most successful dictator and told themselves that made it different in practise. You Americans call your kings "President" for the same reasons.

I'm not saying I want a queen; quite the opposite. But I do find it a little rich that Americans act like their system isn't exactly the same in practise as ours. The royalty haven't been relevant to the governance of the UK in living memory. They do act as useful tourist attractions and figureheads for charity. Plus the DoE award does huge amounts of good, so there's that.


equally poorly thought-out and supported argument that displays some very significant ignorance on the subject

How is thirty five years of living in my own country a poorly thought-out argument? We have no guns here; it's pretty good. That's my argument in its entirety.

As for violent crime? You won't get rid of that without changing human nature. What guns do is elevate crime to a whole other level of lethality. Yeah, I can kill you with a cars. Or kitchen cleaners. Or ladders. Or lawn mowers. Or hammers. Or knives. Or sports. But a gun?

Guns are real good at killing, or you wouldn't talk about how they're so great for defence.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree.

I am so bored of these arguments. Everyone already knows what they think. We're all just shouting at windmills.

[daboarder]

And anyone who willingly allows a monarchy to exist seems pretty crazy to us.

we have a constitutional monarchy that has no part in our government, its fantastic, the elected PM is NOT our head of state and as such has vastly limited power in comparison to your "commander in chief" furthermore our "head of state" is on the other side of the planet and if she tried to actual use her legal powers she'd be laughed at and ignored. I'd hate to imagine Kevin rudd, julia gillard or tony abbot as the president of Australia and having a monarchy means we don't have to put up with that bull****.

And quite frankly all one has to do is look at the treatment of people such as Lindsay lohan, to realise that america has an aristocracy in all but name. There are no equal rights and justice for all in America.

[Rissan4ever]

Interesting. I didn't know that. But the other, perhaps more crucial difference is that Swiss gun ownership is for the purpose of defending the country against foreign invaders. In America, the purpose of the Second Amendment to the Constitution was to give the citizenry the means to mount an armed revolt against our own government, should they become corrupt. However, the modern era, a few thousand citizens with guns wouldn't last 5 minutes against the US military, so the whole idea is pretty moot.

[scadugenga]

It is a simple fact that you cannot shoot someone without a gun.

Incorrrect. ;P

I can shoot people with my long bow, recurve bow, and/or crossbow.

Granted, not as concealable as a handgun...but there you go. ;)



Well ... Scad is sort of right about that. The police do not have a duty to protect you, personally. That is a pretty settled point of American law.

Actually, I'm 100% right about this--in the context of what we are discussing--which is personal safety. And it's not just the 2005 SCOTUS decision (which you're slightly factually incorrect on. It was a rooming house. The offenders broke into the second floor room, sexually assaulted the occupant, while the two women in the third floor room called the police, who royally effed up. After the police deigned to return to the house, they abducted all three women, bringing them back to Kent's apartment, where they were repeatedly raped over fourteen hours) but several other court cases too. There's Castle Rock v. Gonzales, Lozito v. NYPD, Davidson v. City of Westminster--just to name a few.


Guns don't stop evil people doing exactly what they want. Evil people always find a way.

All that changes when they have access to weapons is the way they do it, and the increased potential for peripheral damage.

The facts actually say otherwise. Personal anecdotal experience says otherwise. Hell, interviews of convicted felons who were muggers/armed robbers, etc have stated they would think twice about attacking someone in a concealed carry state.

And again, Clackamas says differently.


I find anyone from the USA saying 'guns make us safer' or 'we need guns for protection' or 'how can I defend myself without a gun' to be rather naive, because surely all of those people can look at the rest of the world and see they manage to do a perfectly good job of all of the above without guns. Guns are not defensive weapons. Guns are offensive weapons. How do you stop someone using a gun? You kill them. That is their purpose. If you're worried about being mugged or your home invaded then tasers or pepper spray will be just as much use as a gun is, and if someone wants you dead a gun will not help you unless they are an idiot.


And anyone who claims that owning weapons designed to kill from a great distance is an unalienable human right looks rather crazy to the rest of the world, you do realise that don't you?

Yes, clearly, the rest of the world, like the majority of Africa, almost the entirety of South America, let's toss in Mexico as well. Wait--of the top 20 murder "centers" of the world--only two are US cities. Oops, guess that means the rest of the world doesn't manage so well after all.

Guns are weapons. Offensive or defensive is determined by how they are used. People have been killed by a taser. And I'm sorry--pepper spray is largely a joke to anyone who's already seriously motivated to hurt you. That's unfortunately ignorance rearing its head again.

And again--the statistics show that a gun absolutely helps you if someone wants you dead. I believe the term I used before was "staggeringly high" number of defensive uses of a firearm in the US annually. Reference the "Just the Facts" study for the numbers.

And your last bit is amazingly hyperbolic. And incorrect. Let's not forget that as well. The only inalienable rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.


Yeah, the idea of dynasties of rich nobles ruling when one man takes over after his father is really weird.

Actually, I consider it ridiculously ironic since your dynasties of rich nobles originated because the progenitors of said dynasties were king of the hill when it came to killing other people ruthlessly and with great efficiency.

[daboarder]

And yet the statistics in every other western nation say otherwise.....

[scadugenga]

Say otherwise to what? And which statistics?

Pretty vague, man.

[daboarder]

That a lack of guns in homes leads to an increase in danger to ones family from criminals.

[scadugenga]

So--despite the fact your statement is flawed from the get go...

Show me some statistics.

[daboarder]

.......well Australia has had zero gun massacres since 1996.....PRETTY BIG ONE!


http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide/weapon.html

HEY LOOK HOMICIDE USING FIREARMS DIDN'T INCREASE!!!!


http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html


http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html


edit: And how the hell is my statement flawed?

[scadugenga]

.......well Australia has had zero gun massacres since 1996.....PRETTY BIG ONE!

1. That's a statement, not a statistic.

2. "gun massacres" amount for an infinitesimal portion of actual gun violence. They are, however, media magnets. Which is unfortunately the point of a gun massacre.

3. Since when is Australia a "Western Nation?" Last I noticed, you were at the deep south end of Southeast Asia. ;P

[daboarder]

1. That's a statement, not a statistic.

2. "gun massacres" amount for an infinitesimal portion of actual gun violence. They are, however, media magnets. Which is unfortunately the point of a gun massacre.

3. since when is australia a "western nation?" last i noticed, you were at the deep south end of southeast asia. ;p

EDIT: whatever, I added the actual statistics above, gun crime down, rape down, home invasion, only thing up is assualt and that corresponds to an increase in the "drinking culture" of Australia.

But I'm done, I don't care is America sorts its **** out or not as at the end of the day I live in a country with reasonable gun control laws, where I wont be shot walking through the shops.

[scadugenga]

Oh, goody!

Now you can add ad hominem to the list of the flawed statements and arguments you've been making. Huzzah. And, on top of that, an ad-hominem for something clearly marked as a joke. Kinda stupid, but don't worry--looks good on you, though.

Oh, nice editing of a post after-the-fact to actually include some statistics...wait, nope, just one statistic, linked twice. For one country. For homicides only, and not violent crime. Goodonya.

So, why is this
That a lack of guns in homes leads to an increase in danger to ones family from criminals. a flawed statement?

Well, let's count the ways, shall we?

1: It's a straw man.

2: Having a gun in a house has no bearing on the home being a target for criminal activity. Unless you have a big sign out front loudly proclaiming "We have guns here!!!!" the criminal will not know if the home has a gun. So the danger is already there. Having a gun in the house is just potential mitigation of said danger. And even that has several factors that need to be considered.

3: Danger does not always occur at the home. In fact, violent crime tends to happen outside the home as often, if not more so, than a home invasion.

However, let's answer the flawed question anyway: studies show that there are damn close to 1 million defensive uses of a firearm per year in the US. (Again, just read the damn Just the Facts study already.) So yes, it's very personally clear to at least one million people (because we don't know how many people were in each household) that legal ownership of a firearm made their lives safer. So, like at least 5% of your country's population. That's fairly significant, statistically.


Edit: Okay, so you removed the ad hominem, and added another statistic. Still just for one country, though.

[daboarder]

you know I edited that to be polite and take out my initial reaction to what I thought was gross stupidity on your part, would you like me to put it back in?

And you are a ****ing idiot, especially if you can't just look across the ocean and see how much of a fallacy all your stupid statements are.

Enjoy your unsafe schools, dead children murdered soldiers and bullet ridden innocents.....

I mean out of the other what, 26 ammendments to your constitution the only one you give a **** about is the "god damned right to bear arms, 'MERICA"

[eldargal]

Gun violence is irrelevant. Overall violence is what matters. And there's no way anyone with half a brain can objectively look at the big picture and retain any real conviction that gun control stops violent crime. You realize that the UK has some major violent crime issues relative to the rest of Europe, as well?
Except it isn't. Gun violence is more likely to result in fatalities, more likely to harm bystanders, more likely to result in multiple deaths and the effects like gunshots wounds are more expensive to treat.

Anyone who claims gun crime is equal to, say, knife crime is ****ing delusional. It is much, much harder to kill someone with a knife, it is much harder to kill multiple people with a knife and it is much less safe for the aggressor. The same goes for virtually any other weapon.

I'm not disputing the fact it is cultural, but that really just says America is ****ed up. Also worth nothing that if people get fed up with rampant gun violence perceived or otherwise they will change it. We are already seeing gun violence become a much bigger issue than it has been in the past.

As to the monarchy, the US president is an elected monarch with more powers than the Queen. Not only that the US president is elected through money, no money, no chance at being president. It's a far more abhorrent system than having a hereditary monarch act as a fundamental balance to the power of politicians while wielding little power herself. It always amuses me that America is supposed to be anti tyranny yet the head of its executive is also commander and chief of it's standing army, standing armies historically being the greatest threat to liberty. Even the founding fathers knew this.:rolleyes:

[scadugenga]

you know I edited that to be polite and take out my initial reaction to what I thought was gross stupidity on your part, would you like me to put it back in?

And you are a ****ing idiot, especially if you can't just look across the ocean and see how much of a fallacy all your stupid statements are.

Enjoy your unsafe schools, dead children murdered soldiers and bullet ridden innocents.....

I mean out of the other what, 26 ammendments to your constitution the only one you give a **** about is the "god damned right to bear arms, 'MERICA"

More ad hominems. And more straw mans. Yay.

You've never asked me what I think about the other amendments. Which really aren't even germane to this specific topic.

And I'm the idiot?

[DarkLink]

No, we're pretty pissed off with Obama about the 1st and the 4th and however many others he and the NSA have trampled over. The 2nd just kind of stands out a little bit because it's so unique.


Interesting. I didn't know that. But the other, perhaps more crucial difference is that Swiss gun ownership is for the purpose of defending the country against foreign invaders. In America, the purpose of the Second Amendment to the Constitution was to give the citizenry the means to mount an armed revolt against our own government, should they become corrupt. However, the modern era, a few thousand citizens with guns wouldn't last 5 minutes against the US military, so the whole idea is pretty moot.

Actually, there's a quote from the new Riddick movie that's perfect for this. Riddick's got the maguffian buried, and as he's digging it up he pulls out his bonesword and kills a bad guy with it. The guy with him asks "wait, was that sword for me?" Riddicks just like "nah, just whoever happened to deserve it".

It is worth noting, though, that a significant percentage of military and police are gun owners. Like, a huge percentage. So if there was some sort of corrupt government bad enough to warrant a public revolt, then that revolt would be coming from within the military and police as much as from the general public. Plus Iraq is a classic example of how difficult it can be to control an unruly populace if you're not simply carpet bombing it, which would kind of defeat the purpose of a repressive government. So it would probably be a lot more effective than you might think. It would be better than nothing, at the very least.

[daboarder]

More ad hominems. And more straw mans. Yay.

You've never asked me what I think about the other amendments. Which really aren't even germane to this specific topic.

And I'm the idiot?



You seem to be unable to comprehend the fact that we went from having a major gun massacre almost every year for ten years, to none in almost 15 years since we introduced gun control legislation...yes you are a ****ing idiot.

[eldargal]

It is worth noting, though, that a significant percentage of military and police are gun owners. Like, a huge percentage. So if there was some sort of corrupt government bad enough to warrant a public revolt, then that revolt would be coming from within the military and police as much as from the general public. Plus Iraq is a classic example of how difficult it can be to control an unruly populace if you're not simply carpet bombing it, which would kind of defeat the purpose of a repressive government. So it would probably be a lot more effective than you might think. It would be better than nothing, at the very least.
Assuming the police and military don't approve of said corrupt government. History has shown it isn't hard for dictators to get the police on side by promising order and delivering strong justice against criminals and whatnot. The same for the military, promise strong leadership and no compromises for national defense etc. Of course it is never as simple as 'obviously tyrannical/corrupt government' there will always be a split along ideological grounds (especially in America) and it can be much more insidious than overt brutality at first. By the time a complacent population realises it's being oppressed by its government the corruption can be too well entrenched in the armed forces and police force, with good leaders and officers forced out in favour of cronies.

Not to mention that Saddam was able to control the Iraqi populace very well for some decades, it was America that struggled because America had no ****ing clue what it was doing or how to do it.:rolleyes:

[DarkLink]

I think at this point it's probably worth adding that there's actually a lot of gun control measures that we gun nuts actually support. A significant percentage of gun control measures that pass do so with the NRA's approval. They're usually things like restricting mentally ill patients from owning firearms, or increasing sentences for criminals who use a firearm. Stuff like that.


Except it isn't. Gun violence is more likely to result in fatalities, more likely to harm bystanders, more likely to result in multiple deaths and the effects like gunshots wounds are more expensive to treat.

What I mean is that what matters is if the homicide rate goes up or down, and similarly if the non-homicide violent crime goes up or down, and if muggings and burglaries and the like go up or down. So I guess to put it more accurately, what I care about is how many people were murdered, how many people were assaulted, etc, regardless of source.

And, yeah, a lot of times it does work like you say, but sometimes it doesn't. It's kind of inconsistant. But, yes, America specifically has a higher murder rate, but we actually fare significantly better if you consider non-murder violent crimes.



We are already seeing gun violence become a much bigger issue than it has been in the past.

Nah, not really. It comes and goes in cycles here. The last time Clinton got a nationwide assault weapon ban through, which lead to massive political backlash that lost the Democrats Congress for like a decade. Already now some Democrats at various levels have felt more backlash from their political support for gun control. Colorado just recalled two Dem senators, pretty much for introducing a couple of gun control measures, though I don't know there could be more to the story as well.



As to the monarchy, the US president is an elected monarch with more powers than the Queen. Not only that the US president is elected through money, no money, no chance at being president. It's a far more abhorrent system than having a hereditary monarch act as a fundamental balance to the power of politicians while wielding little power herself.

Well, see, here's the thing. At least the president generally did something to earn his position. The Queen was handed it at birth. That's the part we don't like. The rest of what you're talking about is all well and good, we just accomplish it a little bit differently with the checks and balances between the President, Congress, and Supreme Court. Our president certainly isn't a figurehead, but he's not as powerful as a lot of people think.



It always amuses me that America is supposed to be anti tyranny yet the head of its executive is also commander and chief of it's standing army, standing armies historically being the greatest threat to liberty. Even the founding fathers knew this.:rolleyes:

That's why Congress is supposed to be the only ones who can declare war... yeah...

[daboarder]

see thats all well and good darklink, but if your responce to a shooting in a school is to arm the teachers......there is just something so wrong with that, whether its cultural or legislative, something needs to change there.

also, gun control doesn't mean you don't get to OWN a gun, it means that you need to both have a justification for owning one other than "MERICA" and you need to have a secure place to keep the gun, such as a gun locker (and no boxes in the wardrobe aren't the same). Furthermore a restriction on owner ship of military firearms isn't a breach of your rights either, it's just sensible.

[scadugenga]

You seem to be unable to comprehend the fact that we went from having a major gun massacre almost every year for ten years, to none in almost 15 years since we introduced gun control legislation...yes you are a ****ing idiot.

So that's three ad hominems. A hat trick for you!

Define a major gun massacre? 4? 6? 25? And of course, with your much smaller population, that does make up a large percentage of your murder rate. So I can see why you fixate on high profile talking points.

But you know what? Your murder rate hasn't changed a whole lot (trending downward, yes--but so has the US' violent crime rate for the last 22 years...with gun ownership) since your murder rate for knives, and other weapons have increased. In fact, according to your own statistic link, knives and other assorted methods of murder in Australia have always been the more popular form of homicide for every reported year before and after your gun ban except for 1995.

Of course, banning guns on a freaking island makes it much easier to control illegal guns coming into your country. We have Mexico, which is rapidly devolving into the Americas' version of Somalia.

And, of course--we know that banning guns is just going to make all those illegal gun-owning criminals just step right up and turn them in with a look of chagrin on their faces and a sheepish "sorry!"

[daboarder]

More that 4 fatalities.


You do know most mexicans smuggle their guns in from the US right?


Edit: sigh really guys im out. Darklink its always a pleasure discussing things with you mate. As to you scad. Have fun in the bed you make

Edit 2: sigh after calming down im removing the part of this post that unintentionally sounded like a threat

[eldargal]

Fair enough, I agree the priority needs to be dropping the murder rate regardless of the cause, but when the majority of murders are firearm related you can't deny it isn't an issue.

I'm not focusing so much on the political push, but the growing number of anti-gun lobbies and grass roots protests and whatnot.

It's true the Monarch inherits their position, but you can't say they don't earn it quite quickly. HM The Queen hasn't had a day off since 1953, a pay rise since 1990 until the last year (still well below inflation) and she has something like 400 official engagements every year. On top of this she is briefed on major policies by the government and keeps on top of all that. She works harder than any president and can't even look forward to a cushy retirement. I personally don't consider winning a money fuelled popularity contest any more guarantor of merit than a hereditary monarchy, but the monarchy at least has people who are raised with their duty drilled into them and have an apolitical support structure around them to prevent them from ****ing anything up.

Weren't the republicans having a fit about Obama damaging the office of president by leaving a declaration of war to Congress?:p Not to mention a president would need to declare war to become tyrannical.

[scadugenga]

I think at this point it's probably worth adding that there's actually a lot of gun control measures that we gun nuts actually support. A significant percentage of gun control measures that pass do so with the NRA's approval. They're usually things like restricting mentally ill patients from owning firearms, or increasing sentences for criminals who use a firearm. Stuff like that.

Careful, Dark. You might give some people the thought that we might actually be rational gun owners...then how would they be able to respond? :)


And, yeah, a lot of times it does work like you say, but sometimes it doesn't. It's kind of inconsistant. But, yes, America specifically has a higher murder rate, but we actually fare significantly better if you consider non-murder violent crimes.

We're actually pretty far down the list of murder-riddled countries in the world.



Well, see, here's the thing. At least the president generally did something to earn his position. The Queen was handed it at birth. That's the part we don't like.

Let's be honest. We largely don't care about a monarchy as a governing system. It has almost zero bearing on our day-to-day life. Much like I'm sure the rest of the world largely doesn't care about our electoral system--except around election day. ;)

In fact, we have a huge number of Anglophiles here. And the Queen did support Marriage Equality, which far too many states here can't quite figure it the eff out.




That's why Congress is supposed to be the only ones who can declare war... yeah...

The Pres can authorize military action for 90 days. (and why am I stating this when it's painfully obvious you already know? I'll blame being tired.) Which is why everyone is freaked about Obama deciding to play reindeer games in Syria. Congress can just make him stop it after 90 days without a formal declaration of war. Thankfully (so far) Congress is not behind getting militarily involved in Syria.

[scadugenga]

More that 4 fatalities. And never come here you ****ing redneck.


You do know most mexicans smuggle their guns in from the US right?


Or you'll do what, exactly? Ad-hominem me to death? Straw man me? Heap more vague and unsupported statements than any one person could possibly try to lift? Try to intimidate me with your Aussie accent? Scare me with a barbie? Boyo, I've been threatened by far more scary and dangerous people than you. Piddle off.

And do you even know what a redneck is? And why would you even begin to think I am one? Because I'm more intelligent, rational, and logical than you have any evidence of hoping to be?

And weren't you supposed to "be done" with this thread like 5 ad-hominems ago?

Or are you just trying to get the thread locked?

[Lukas The Trickster]

you know I edited that to be polite and take out my initial reaction to what I thought was gross stupidity on your part, would you like me to put it back in?

And you are a ****ing idiot, especially if you can't just look across the ocean and see how much of a fallacy all your stupid statements are.

Enjoy your unsafe schools, dead children murdered soldiers and bullet ridden innocents.....

I mean out of the other what, 26 ammendments to your constitution the only one you give a **** about is the "god damned right to bear arms, 'MERICA"


More that 4 fatalities. And never come here you ****ing redneck"


Seriously, how does he get away with making comments like this? The moderating team on here should be ashamed at themselves for persistently allowing him to insult pretty much anyone who doesn't share his opinions. His behaviour would not be tolerated on other forums. Mods, please grow a pair and ban this idiot; BOLS would be so much better without him :(

[Deadlift]

We've had this debate time and again, and it always comes down to this. Those who have guns want to keep them. Those that don't have guns don't want them.

I don't want a gun, although I have had a shotgun license for years I'm talking handguns for protection purposes, I sure as hell don't want my kids growing up around guns. But I don't live in America, because if I did then I would own a gun.

A lot of this argument is looked at from our own perspectives without looking to see why our American friends are so attached to their firearms. We're all free to express our opinions (politely would be nice) but I suggest trying to ban guns in America is impossible and if you did you would just end up with law abiding citizens without guns and scumbags with them. The parts of America I have visited gave me a real love for the country, and the only thing stopping me from living there isn't the guns but the vast amount of really bad food easily available. I'd be dead in 5 years, not from being shot but more likely a heart attack :)

Gun reform would be great, but health care, poverty and especially obesity (here to) should be a much higher priority. Burgers kill more people than guns.( I'm guessing )

[Nabterayl]

A lot of this argument is looked at from our own perspectives without looking to see why our American friends are so attached to their firearms. We're all free to express our opinions (politely would be nice) but I suggest trying to ban guns in America is impossible and if you did you would just end up with law abiding citizens without guns and scumbags with them. The parts of America I have visited gave me a real love for the country, and the only thing stopping me from living there isn't the guns but the vast amount of really bad food easily available. I'd be dead in 5 years, not from being shot but more likely a heart attack :)
Along the lines of the "why so attached?" issue, I think it's always worth remembering the form that these things take in America. I am of the opinion that our Second Amendment jurisprudence is shamefully dishonest. I think the Second Amendment itself, as intended, is indifferent to bad social policy, and was founded on a set of assumptions that were demonstrably untrue at the time of drafting and are even less true today. I think the Second Amendment as currently interpreted is somewhat worse social policy.

But.

It's still in the constitution. I have no problem changing the federal constitution (something we do roughly every fifteen years on average, I feel I should point out), but there are no serious efforts to have that debate. The debate is always framed in terms of legislative or executive, rather than constitutional, action, and that feels ... well, underhanded. The form of the debate matters to me, and I expect it matters to more Americans than have the legal vocabulary to articulate the concern. I don't care about gun ownership, and I certainly don't hold with what I perceive as this American notion that you can own a gun without turning yourself into a martial artist,* but I do care about rule of law. If the essence of the problem is that the constitution is flawed, then I expect the response to be to grapple with changing the constitution. If the response, instead, is, "Well, let's attempt an end-run around the constitutional issue because, let's be real, we'd never get a constitutional amendment on this subject ratified," well, that tells me all I need to know.

To the extent this seems crazy to the UK, I wonder how much of that is down to the fact that the UK constitution is simply an agreed-upon canon of documents and principles. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but it seems to me like the UK doesn't really have a sense that, "We had a deal!" And that's really what's important to me about the constitution. I know there are plenty of Americans who feel like the Framers were possessed of some sort of unusual political wisdom that entitles their work to great deference in itself, and I think those Americans are clearly idiots. But the constitution still represents our deal with ourselves. Honoring that deal, good or bad, matters a great deal to me, for the same reasons that Socrates gave to Crito. There is nothing magic about the substance of the deal, but I simply cannot hold with becoming a people that doesn't honor its own word to itself.

* DarkLink, I think, disagrees with me that America views guns as empowering, at least when it comes to actual American gun owners. I've yet to decide for myself if that's because I just know worse gun owners than he does. For the moment, I still think that the country as a whole, and even most American gun owners, do not have the proper martial respect for or response to the weapon.

[Cap'nSmurfs]

Just to say, Nab, that's a great post you've got there.

[Denzark]

Held legally responsible by whom? Like, can the estate of a victim sue the chief constable, or would the action have to come from a government agency?

EDIT:

Wait, what are you objecting to here? Automatic rifles and machine pistols (what are called "machine guns" over here legally, though of course the legal definition of a "machine gun" bears almost zero resemblance to the military definition of a "machine gun")? Automatic (i.e., self-loading) pistols? Magazine capacity? You threw out a lot of terms here that cover a pretty huge amount of ground.

Yes, this legal piece can be done following a witness protection failure. There has t be knowledge etc - but once the police are involved they need to make every effort.

Wrt what I mentioned ought to be restricted, allow me to define better. High mag capacity = over 10. Civvies have no reasonable sporting grounds for more - if you can't defend yourself with 10 you are adanger to others from collateral. Automatic = a mode of fire that, after making the weapon ready (cocking it) once, keeps firing from one squeeze of the trigger, until the ammunition is depleted. Civvies don't need anything more than semi-automatic for sporting/self defence purposes. Ie cocck once, squeeze once, bang once. High calibre - why do civvies need anthing over .22 except for licensed hunters etc? Which can be bolt action - you can do your conservation piece, kill hapless deer to show how manly you are, and will find it hard to go postal in MacDonalds.

Simples.

[Morgrim]

I feel Denzark has it right. You want a handgun? Fine. A revolver, 6 shots, manual reload, small calibre. That covers all the 'defensive' uses of it (which seem to be waving it around and threatening to shoot somebody, and/or actually shooting somebody) and means that the maximum number of people you can kill is 6. Weapons that are slower are good, because the longer it takes the bad guy to kill the five or six people he wants dead the more time other people have to stop them. If they want to shoot up a school then that gives more time to get the kids out of there or for every teacher in the building to dogpile them while they reload.

There is absolutely no reason for any human to own a weapon that they can comfortably carry and that can kill an entire room full of people in seconds. And yes I am definitely including the military in that because if you have an entire room full of people you want dead then sending a single armed soldier to do the job is very bad tactics.

[Marshal2Crusaders]

The best part of this discussion is that anyone who wants gun control is too much of a ***** to actually try to take guns away.

Cowards all.

[Denzark]

What an idiot thing to say. You are clearly a clueless civvy who couldn't be trusted with anything with more firepower than a supersoaker.

[Marshal2Crusaders]

What an idiot thing to say. You are clearly a clueless civvy who couldn't be trusted with anything with more firepower than a supersoaker.

Funny, Ive never shot anyone in my life. And I've got the same rifle and sidearm as anybody on Afghanistan. Except mine is semiauto though, but that's fine with me. I don't expect any of the frequent home invasions perpetrated out where I live to be shoot outs worthy of john woo.
Also I don't really care what you think man. You're nobody important. I'm nobody important. I only care about the things I've studied. This forum is hardly a bastion of thoughtful discourse and problem solving.

It's just fun to come here and watch self reverent false intellectuals feel important and act as a 'Stephen Colbert Larry the Cable Guy' and watch everyone run around like I just blew a load in their Cheerios.

[scadugenga]

Okay, now trying to bring the thread back on topic a bit:

Turns out it wasn't the OK Corral as being hyped by media pundits and anti-gun people everywhere.

Pullum, the driver of the front vehicle, was the subject of a road rage (following too closely/tailgating) action by Taylor. Pullum pulled into the parking lot and got out of the car. Taylor pulled into the parking lot behind Pullum, pulled the weapon and opened fire.

Pullum, having his wife and mother in the car, reached in pulled his weapon and returned fire.

Both men died.

Here's the rub: Taylor had his CCW revoked for three years prior to this incident--for having a DUI while carrying a weapon in the vehicle. Why Michigan didn't follow normal procedures and revoked his CCW permanently, I have no idea.

Except, well...it's Michigan.

[scadugenga]

Civvies don't need anything more than semi-automatic for sporting/self defence purposes. Ie cocck once, squeeze once, bang once. High calibre - why do civvies need anthing over .22 except for licensed hunters etc? Which can be bolt action - you can do your conservation piece, kill hapless deer to show how manly you are, and will find it hard to go postal in MacDonalds.

Simples.

Um...are you suggesting that a civilian should not be able to own anything larger than a .22 handgun? Because that's not going to stop anyone determined to harm you unless you have your @#$@# together in a high anxiety situation and manage to shoot your attacker in the head/heart. Especially if they're high on something.

Unless you're talking about .223 rifles, which is a completely different story.

Most firearm self-defense trainers over here really don't recommend anything less than a .45 handgun for personal/home self defense. Many of them (among the more conservatives, who hate to agree with Biden) state the best self-defense (home, obviously) is a shotgun or a rifle, as you are more likely to end a confrontation with one hit rather than requiring several.

Edited for homophones.

[Marshal2Crusaders]

Um...are you suggesting that a civilian should not be able to own anything larger than a .22 handgun? Because that's not going to stop anyone determined to harm you unless you have your @#$@# together in a high anxiety situation and manage to shoot your attacker in the head/heart. Especially if their high on something.

Unless you're talking about .223 rifles, which is a completely different story.

Most firearm self-defense trainers over here really don't recommend anything less than a .45 handgun for personal/home self defense. Many of them (among the more conservatives, who hate to agree with Biden) state the best self-defense (home, obviously) is a shotgun or a rifle, as you are more likely to end a confrontation with one hit rather than requiring several.

Which is why I've got a 12 gauge pump an arms reach from my bed. My girlfriends daughter isn't strong enough to chamber a shell and pulling it out of my gun locker is part of my nightly ritual.

After sacrificing a dove on my alter to bald eagles and burning a Koran while Skynard plays.

[Denzark]

Which is why I've got a 12 gauge pump an arms reach from my bed. My girlfriends daughter isn't strong enough to chamber a shell and pulling it out of my gun locker is part of my nightly ritual.

After sacrificing a dove on my alter to bald eagles and burning a Koran while Skynard plays.

Is that like an Altar? Jeez genius IQs and guns a winning combination.

[Marshal2Crusaders]

Is that like an Altar? Jeez genius IQs and guns a winning combination.

Now your getting it.


I like my women like I like my ordinance. Explosive.

[Denzark]

Now your* getting it.


I like my women like I like my ordinance*. Explosive.

*'you're'

*'ordnance'

Lose 2 house points.

[Lukas The Trickster]

Yes, this legal piece can be done following a witness protection failure. There has t be knowledge etc - but once the police are involved they need to make every effort.

Wrt what I mentioned ought to be restricted, allow me to define better. High mag capacity = over 10. Civvies have no reasonable sporting grounds for more - if you can't defend yourself with 10 you are adanger to others from collateral. Automatic = a mode of fire that, after making the weapon ready (cocking it) once, keeps firing from one squeeze of the trigger, until the ammunition is depleted. Civvies don't need anything more than semi-automatic for sporting/self defence purposes. Ie cocck once, squeeze once, bang once. High calibre - why do civvies need anthing over .22 except for licensed hunters etc? Which can be bolt action - you can do your conservation piece, kill hapless deer to show how manly you are, and will find it hard to go postal in MacDonalds.

Simples.

A ban on anything over .22 would rule out target shooting on anything over about 50-60 yards - I have shot on the 1000 yard range at Bisley, where only a .308 calibre would have a change at hitting the target. As regards your comments about culling deer, you are opening another can of proverbial worms, its something I still do now and then, and despite the protestations of those from the likes of the League Against Cruel Sports (who have just as blinkered a view of the world as any right wing extremist), there is a definite ecological and biological imperative to cull deer since we lost top end predators such as Wolves in the British Isles, who used to do the job of taking out older, sicker deer and territorial competing males for us. Its not everyone's cup of tea though, and I can appreciate why it is misunderstood.

This argument can and will drag on and on, but the bottom line is that those of us in the UK will never fully comprehend the American mindset surrounding firearms, I know I cant and I am a member of the shooting community. I appreciate for many it is the cornerstone of your civil liberty to be able to own a firearm and is seen as essential in protecting you home and family, and a large civilian gun owning population is also considered from a historical perspective as a check against bad or oppressive government from Federal Authority or foreign power (us redcoats originally!). In my opinion though, I would imagine that the founding fathers who enshrined the 'right to bear arms' in the US Constitution would be turning in their graves if they could see two men kill each other with legally held weapons in front of their families over a driving dispute.

In the UK, firearms can only be legally owned for target shooting or for vermin control and deer culling (you have to have use of land with the owners permission as well) - any mention of 'Home Defence' in an a Firearms Certificate application would get it swiftly thrown in the bin. If my home was broken into by burglars, the last thing I would do is go for one of my rifles, by the time I got one out of the locked cabinet and loaded it (the bolt is in a separate compartment too) I think it would be too late anyway.

[DarkLink]

see thats all well and good darklink, but if your responce to a shooting in a school is to arm the teachers......there is just something so wrong with that, whether its cultural or legislative, something needs to change there.

No one has actually passed legislation requiring teachers to be armed. A few places have allowed teachers to go through special concealed carry training at their own discretion, as long as they follow some safety rules. But really, you're missing the big picture. Even if we banned all firearms tomorrow, there would still be a lot of guns just floating around for one reason or another.



also, gun control doesn't mean you don't get to OWN a gun, it means that you need to both have a justification for owning one other than "MERICA" and you need to have a secure place to keep the gun, such as a gun locker (and no boxes in the wardrobe aren't the same).

The old "you don't need guns" argument.

http://thedaleygator.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/ar-rosa-parks.jpg?w=490&h=383


You don't really need anything. MP3 players damage people's hearing because everyone probably listens to music way too loud. Excessive dietary sugar causes adult onset diabetes, which kills a lot more people each year than guns do. Sports cars and massive trucks get terrible gas mileage and really aren't particularly useful unless you're hauling like a boat or something. And a lot of people drown each year boating, so why do we even need boats in the first place.

Large houses are extremely wasteful. We could be much more environmentally friendly if we just made an eco-barracks style home for everyone. And who needs privacy, anyways. It makes the government's job of spying on you much easier, after all.

If you really stop to think about out with an open mind, the "you don't need X" is massively flawed. It makes for a great red herring for the narrow minded, but it's ultimately irrelevant.

The question you should be asking instead of "why do you need an AR" is "does you owning an AR put other people in excessive danger". Ultimately, the answer is, not really. There are dozens of common household items that don't serve any real purpose other than pleasure and comfort which are significantly more dangers to the population of a nation than a semi-automatic rifle.

If you asked "does owning a handgun put other people in excessive danger", then I can see the argument for yes even if I disagree with it. But people like you are so preoccupied with pointing fingers at red herrings that you can't focus on the real issue long enough to have an intelligent, coherent discussing about gun control measure that would actually do something without also massively infringing upon citizen's rights.



Furthermore a restriction on owner ship of military firearms isn't a breach of your rights either, it's just sensible.

I've already said it like five times in this thread, but;

Fully.

Automatic.

Weapons.

Are.

Already.

Heavily.

Restricted.

So much so that there's effectively zero crime with legally owned machineguns. And there actually are a fair number of legally owned machineguns out there, but you have to know that they're extremely expensive. Between all the taxes and permits and the cost of the machinegun itself, you can literally buy a nice car for less than a fully automatic firearm. Turns out criminals are too poor to afford that sort of firepower.

Our current regulations on fully automatic weapons work extremely well. While there are plenty of issues with other types of firearms, namely handguns, you cannot fault the way we handle fully automatic weapons.



The Pres can authorize military action for 90 days. (and why am I stating this when it's painfully obvious you already know? I'll blame being tired.) Which is why everyone is freaked about Obama deciding to play reindeer games in Syria. Congress can just make him stop it after 90 days without a formal declaration of war. Thankfully (so far) Congress is not behind getting militarily involved in Syria.

When was the last time we actually declared war again? WWII. Technically, practically everything we've been involved in over the last like 50 years has been a "police action".


Seriously, how does he get away with making comments like this? The moderating team on here should be ashamed at themselves for persistently allowing him to insult pretty much anyone who doesn't share his opinions. His behaviour would not be tolerated on other forums. Mods, please grow a pair and ban this idiot; BOLS would be so much better without him :(

Usually he's cool. Every once and a while, though...


I don't want a gun, although I have had a shotgun license for years I'm talking handguns for protection purposes, I sure as hell don't want my kids growing up around guns. But I don't live in America, because if I did then I would own a gun.

And I will admit that there are a pretty good number of parents who probably aren't responsible enough to own a gun and raise kids. But then they're also not responsible enough to raise kids and own a pool, or keep chemical solvents under their kitchen sink, or have a trampoline, or any one of the dozens of things that kill or injure far, far, far more kids each year than firearms.


The parts of America I have visited gave me a real love for the country, and the only thing stopping me from living there isn't the guns but the vast amount of really bad food easily available. I'd be dead in 5 years, not from being shot but more likely a heart attack :)

And violence in America is really overblown. Our media has a propensity for publicizing it, and even most Americans think we're a really violent place, but violent crime has been steadily dropping since a peak in the 80's. America is the safest it's been in a very long time, and while, yes, it is a little more violent than most of western Europe, that's still saying that overall it's a very safe place to live. I've lived here all of my life, and even spent a lot of time in relatively sketchy areas of cities like Fresno and Sacramento, and I've never once had to worry about anything more than maybe getting my car broken into. I'm confident that crime in America is very, very concentrated to a comparatively limited number of bad neighborhoods and specific dangerous circumstances, and any person with half a degree of common sense will never be in fear for their life at the hands of a criminal.



Gun reform would be great, but health care, poverty and especially obesity (here to) should be a much higher priority. Burgers kill more people than guns.( I'm guessing )

A lot more. Guns only get so much press because a very small number of highly publicized events each year. More people probably died in car crashes today than in mass shooting this year.


"Well, let's attempt an end-run around the constitutional issue because, let's be real, we'd never get a constitutional amendment on this subject ratified," well, that tells me all I need to know.

And that's the core of it. Every time widespread gun control measures pass, there's massive political blowback for the party the wrote it, even in very stereotypical liberal districts. And that's even circumventing the strong legal protections in place for gun ownership. And with so many guns floating around already, how do you actually track down and take all of them? There are just so many massive legal, political, and practical hurdles to overcome that the type of discussion we're having here probably won't ever lead to anything more than pissing off some hunters for raising taxes on ammo or something equally stupid that doesn't actually meaningfully address any of the issues with violent crime.





To the extent this seems crazy to the UK, I wonder how much of that is down to the fact that the UK constitution is simply an agreed-upon canon of documents and principles. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but it seems to me like the UK doesn't really have a sense that, "We had a deal!" And that's really what's important to me about the constitution. I know there are plenty of Americans who feel like the Framers were possessed of some sort of unusual political wisdom that entitles their work to great deference in itself, and I think those Americans are clearly idiots. But the constitution still represents our deal with ourselves. Honoring that deal, good or bad, matters a great deal to me, for the same reasons that Socrates gave to Crito. There is nothing magic about the substance of the deal, but I simply cannot hold with becoming a people that doesn't honor its own word to itself.

There are plenty of things I would do differently if I wrote the Constitution myself. But as a framework for a set of rules to keep society functioning, it works well enough that it's worth sticking to even if it's not perfect, I think.



* DarkLink, I think, disagrees with me that America views guns as empowering, at least when it comes to actual American gun owners. I've yet to decide for myself if that's because I just know worse gun owners than he does. For the moment, I still think that the country as a whole, and even most American gun owners, do not have the proper martial respect for or response to the weapon.

I do know some people who I probably wouldn't trust to go shooting with. But I know a lot more people who I wouldn't trust in the driver's seat in the car I was riding in. And I think in the areas where we have a lot of irresponsible gun ownership, gun ownership isn't core issue and it kind of pisses me off that this random idiot might ruin my chances at owning a firearm. So I wouldn't disagree with you, I just think that even within America, you'll get a lot of different... I don't know, subsets of our gun culture, for lack of a better term. Some better, some worse, and some that definitely need some help, but ultimately gun control measures like banning semi-automatic rifles don't do anything at all to address these issues.



Wrt what I mentioned ought to be restricted, allow me to define better. High mag capacity = over 10. Civvies have no reasonable sporting grounds for more - if you can't defend yourself with 10 you are adanger to others from collateral.

This is one that sounds good in theory, but in practice there's little reason to think it would actually stop crime. The vast majority of crimes are committed with compact weapons, which means handguns. They basically never involve a long shoot-out, and on the rare occasion that they do, it's virtually always in circumstances that allow ample time for plenty of reloads, rendering a ban on high capacity magazines irrelevant to crime prevention. And this has played out across the nation, because there are a lot of places that do have a high capacity magazine ban in place. California*, for one, and it's had zero effect on crime as far as anyone can tell.

If it doesn't stop crime, which it doesn't, why bother?

*I live in California, and all the ban has done is made it awkward to buy certain types of firearms legally. I own a Springfield XD handgun, but it's an older model than the new (well, new at the time I would have bought it) XDm. The only reason; the XDm has an 11 round magazine, and they don't make 10 round magazines for it, so that particular model is illegal in California. I guess I could have gotten a .45 instead of a .40, but I wanted a .40. So, yeah, it's pretty inconvenient.



Automatic = a mode of fire that, after making the weapon ready (cocking it) once, keeps firing from one squeeze of the trigger, until the ammunition is depleted. Civvies don't need anything more than semi-automatic for sporting/self defence purposes. Ie cocck once, squeeze once, bang once.

Addressed above, and several times earlier in this thread. There are no issues with our laws regarding fully automatic weapons.



High calibre - why do civvies need anthing over .22 except for licensed hunters etc? Which can be bolt action - you can do your conservation piece, kill hapless deer to show how manly you are, and will find it hard to go postal in MacDonalds.


Shotguns?

This is an even bigger fallacy than the high capacity magazines. Did you know that of the violent crimes committed with rifles, which are extremely rare, the vast majority are committed with small caliber rifles?

High caliber rifles are used for hunting and sports, not for crime. That's not my opinion, that's a fact that comes from even a cursory glance at the statistics.

In fact, I mentioned earlier, they've tried banning .50 caliber rifles before. In the history of the USA, there has been one whole crime committed with a .50 caliber rifle (not counting muskets back in like the 1800s, I'm talking about modern rifles, and the .50BMG has been available since before WWI).

So, again, no effect on crime, so why ban it?



That covers all the 'defensive' uses of it (which seem to be waving it around and threatening to shoot somebody, and/or actually shooting somebody)

No, it doesn't.



Weapons that are slower are good, because the longer it takes the bad guy to kill the five or six people he wants dead the more time other people have to stop them. If they want to shoot up a school then that gives more time to get the kids out of there or for every teacher in the building to dogpile them while they reload.

Why are you assuming the criminals are playing by the rules? I mean, schools are already gun-free zones normally? So wouldn't the criminals just leave the guns behind and try and punch a bunch of people to death?

Mass shootings are almost universally carefully planned by the perpetrators. Making certain types of firearms more difficult to find will just mean that it might take a little longer to get the firearm. Or even worse, the perpetrator could just bar the doors to, like, a movie theater and light the place on fire. There are only so many doors in or out.



There is absolutely no reason for any human to own a weapon that they can comfortably carry and that can kill an entire room full of people in seconds. And yes I am definitely including the military in that because if you have an entire room full of people you want dead then sending a single armed soldier to do the job is very bad tactics.

...so even soldiers shouldn't carry firearms with high capacity magazines? That... I'm... I can't think of anything nice to say about your understanding of military tactics. You are completely detached from reality. You clearly don't know anything about firefights, house clearing, and close quarters combat.

I want you to watch this video. It's a SF soldier clearing a house with ANA. He would be dead if he had been required to reload.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUmpl4JnDdA

You are a couple of decades out of touch if you really think that an individual soldier is irrelevant to a fight. Heck, when I was at USMC OCS, they talk a lot about The Strategic Corporal, a concept put forward by Marine Gen. Krulak where it's not generals or even officers that make the important decisions in what he called the Three Block War (which is essentially what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been conceptually), it's the corporal on the ground. Since I'm guessing you don't know, corporals typically lead fireteams, which means they're in charge of like 3 other guys.

My platoon commander at OCS once said that in all of his tours in Iraq, he never once ran into a situation where he was not confident that a single Marine rifleman squad could not handle themselves with minimal support.

There are two things that matter in modern warfare. One is precision air and artillery strikes, which allow a small unit to bring massive firepower to bear against a superior enemy. The other is a Marine and his rifle, or whatever equivalent we're talking about, with his boots on the ground interacting with the locals and engaging the enemy in close quarters. You can't clear houses with airstrikes, at least not without destroying the house and everything inside. Since we didn't want to simply bomb Iraq and Afghanistan completely to the ground, the single well-armed soldier/Marine was absolutely vital.


Okay, now trying to bring the thread back on topic a bit:

Turns out it wasn't the OK Corral as being hyped by media pundits and anti-gun people everywhere.


Well, hey, what about that.


Edit: almost forgot this:

https://scontent-a-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/q71/970433_649367825096895_1875025813_n.jpg

[Cap'nSmurfs]

It's true, owning a gun is exactly the same as taking a principled stand against racism.

[Deadlift]

I think it's obvious from the posts and what's been in the press over the last year, most Americans are quite happy with gun ownership as it is. I could be wrong but I'm guessing that most of those forum members that are against it aren't Americans. Now whilst I'm kind on the fence myself I think its fair to say looking in from the outside doesn't qualify me to be an expert as many posters here seem to be ;)

We can all google statistics and profess to be experts on the social ramifications of guns and crime but unless you live in America, how can you really know ?

Darklinks last post I think really emphasised my point and the last picture whilst a poke in the eye to those against his views, was really funny :D

[Marshal2Crusaders]

I think it's obvious from the posts and what's been in the press over the last year, most Americans are quite happy with gun ownership as it is. I could be wrong but I'm guessing that most of those forum members that are against it aren't Americans. Now whilst I'm kind on the fence myself I think its fair to say looking in from the outside doesn't qualify me to be an expert as many posters here seem to be ;)

We can all google statistics and profess to be experts on the social ramifications of guns and crime but unless you live in America, how can you really know ?

Darklinks last post I think really emphasised my point and the last picture whilst a poke in the eye to those against his views, was really funny :D

When I was in Australia the group of locals I hung around with all thought it was cool I had guns and when one came to visit he had a great time blowing **** up

[DarkLink]

A girl from Spain came over on exchange for six months a year or two ago and lived with one of my neighbors. We took her shooting, and she loved it.


I think it's obvious from the posts and what's been in the press over the last year, most Americans are quite happy with gun ownership as it is. I could be wrong but I'm guessing that most of those forum members that are against it aren't Americans. Now whilst I'm kind on the fence myself I think its fair to say looking in from the outside doesn't qualify me to be an expert as many posters here seem to be ;)

And there are a fair number of Americans who really don't like guns, either. They tend to live in San Francisco. And I don't mean that as some sort of roundabout anti-gay dig or anything, I mean literally, it seems like San Francisco specifically doesn't like guns. But gun control is one issue where Democrats tread very, very lightly, because it's blown up in their face every time they've pushed it too far. Even after stuff like Sandy Hook, they get a few weeks worth of momentum before they lose it again. Sometimes it isn't even about guns directly. For example, a lot of background check measures have been defeated not because they were related to guns, but because there were privacy concerns and people didn't want the government analyzing every aspect of their life just for going to the store.

But, again, there are certain types of gun control measures that get bipartisan support, or sometimes just Republican support. After Sandy Hook, the NRA backed legislation that would fund the National Background Instant Check System, which is the thing that's supposed to check to see if people have, say, a history of mental illness. Currently, it's massively underfunded, and it's rarely enforced, so it's amazing what slips through the cracks. Joe Biden dismissed the effort, saying 'we don't have time to prosecute violators'.

So it's often a lot more complicated than you might think looking in from the outside.



Darklinks last post I think really emphasised my point and the last picture whilst a poke in the eye to those against his views, was really funny :D

I just had to post it.




Edit:
Also, I wanted to add that most of the time, the debate devolves down to "let's ban all those murder-death-assault-machineguns, that'll allow for world peace and cure cancer all at the same time", and then "no, that actually won't help, like, at all, we need to..." "oh, so you hate children, then? You evil, vile little gun nuts".

Doesn't lend itself well to actually tracking down the real core of the problem and properly addressing it when all these red herrings about semi-automatic rifles, high caliber firearms, and high capacity magazines get tossed about when they're not the problem. If we stopped wasting time on that, then we could actually do something to try and address violent crime directly.

[Morgrim]

Why are you assuming the criminals are playing by the rules? I mean, schools are already gun-free zones normally? So wouldn't the criminals just leave the guns behind and try and punch a bunch of people to death?

Mass shootings are almost universally carefully planned by the perpetrators. Making certain types of firearms more difficult to find will just mean that it might take a little longer to get the firearm. Or even worse, the perpetrator could just bar the doors to, like, a movie theater and light the place on fire. There are only so many doors in or out.


Over here getting those weapons is not a case of 'might take a little longer', it's 'this is damn near impossible without robbing an army base', so that could well be a cultural difference. The few large gangs with the resources to actually smuggle in the types of weapons used in mass shootings also tend to be the ones that get their clubhouses raided by the police with drug dogs every three months. I guess I feel that if the culture changed and those weapons were gradually removed from the country - Australia did a good job with the gun buyback during the Howard years - then you can do a lot to sidestep the 'only criminals will have these weapons' issue, or at the very least make it so that the ones mostly likely to have them are the ones that are likely already on watch lists.

I'm not sure how much being an island helps with this, mind. Our customs tend to already be very good just because we need the biosecurity and if you're searching every crate for small bugs I guess you're likely to trip over most of the big weapons as you do. On the other hand the USA only has two land borders and while I doubt Canada is a hive of illicit weaponry all the stats I've seen suggest most of the southern gun trade is USA weapons heading south to Mexico, because they don't have the factories to build them there.



Doesn't lend itself well to actually tracking down the real core of the problem and properly addressing it when all these red herrings about semi-automatic rifles, high caliber firearms, and high capacity magazines get tossed about when they're not the problem. If we stopped wasting time on that, then we could actually do something to try and address violent crime directly.

Again, this one might be another cultural issue. I have to judge by the media, and from what is reported it seems the three big issues are 1) larger weapons* being used in mass murders that often target schools and in drive-by shootings that have significant collateral damage; 2) lots of concealed handguns being used to shoot other people for silly reasons in urban areas, often related to gang violence; and 3) lots of police gunning down people for reasons that would get them locked up here, presumably because they're accustomed to point 2.

*I'm not sure what kind of gun they're classified as, the only firearms I'm really familiar with are the farm rifles designed for a couple of long range shots against small to moderate sized vermin and they're clearly not that.

So from my perspective it looks like "semi-automatic rifles, high caliber firearms, and high capacity magazines" are actually a problem that should probably be dealt with. I'll freely acknowledge that it is possible that isn't the case and that the widespread ownership of handguns is the source of the majority of the violence, but other than coming up with more efficient forms of non-lethal defence and encouraging people to use it in order to drop the total volume of guns available to criminals I'm not sure what the solution is.

[Nabterayl]

Over here getting those weapons is not a case of 'might take a little longer', it's 'this is damn near impossible without robbing an army base', so that could well be a cultural difference. The few large gangs with the resources to actually smuggle in the types of weapons used in mass shootings also tend to be the ones that get their clubhouses raided by the police with drug dogs every three months. I guess I feel that if the culture changed and those weapons were gradually removed from the country - Australia did a good job with the gun buyback during the Howard years - then you can do a lot to sidestep the 'only criminals will have these weapons' issue, or at the very least make it so that the ones mostly likely to have them are the ones that are likely already on watch lists.

I'm not sure how much being an island helps with this, mind. Our customs tend to already be very good just because we need the biosecurity and if you're searching every crate for small bugs I guess you're likely to trip over most of the big weapons as you do. On the other hand the USA only has two land borders and while I doubt Canada is a hive of illicit weaponry all the stats I've seen suggest most of the southern gun trade is USA weapons heading south to Mexico, because they don't have the factories to build them there.
Last time we had a major gun debate down here I dredged up some Justice Department studies that concluded that the overwhelming majority of firearms used in the United States for crimes of any sort were owned illegally. I don't know exactly where the failure point is, but I think everybody in American law enforcement agrees that for whatever reason we do have a massive problem with illegal weapons trafficking. So I think you're right that it's a cultural difference - over here, it is a reasonable assumption to make that criminals will obtain illegal guns, because they already are obtaining illegal guns. Making more guns illegal clearly won't stop that. Strengthening our illegal arms trafficking efforts might, but precious little of the American gun control debate is about that.


Again, this one might be another cultural issue. I have to judge by the media, and from what is reported it seems the three big issues are 1) larger weapons* being used in mass murders that often target schools and in drive-by shootings that have significant collateral damage; 2) lots of concealed handguns being used to shoot other people for silly reasons in urban areas, often related to gang violence; and 3) lots of police gunning down people for reasons that would get them locked up here, presumably because they're accustomed to point 2.

So from my perspective it looks like "semi-automatic rifles, high caliber firearms, and high capacity magazines" are actually a problem that should probably be dealt with. I'll freely acknowledge that it is possible that isn't the case and that the widespread ownership of handguns is the source of the majority of the violence, but other than coming up with more efficient forms of non-lethal defence and encouraging people to use it in order to drop the total volume of guns available to criminals I'm not sure what the solution is.
I'm sure DarkLink has the federal crimes data more available to hand than I do, but that really isn't the case. The overwhelming majority of gun-related deaths, and the overwhelming majority of gun-aided crimes, in this country are caused by modest-caliber semi-automatic handguns in incidents in which less than 10 shots are fired (often only one or two) at very close ranges where cover is not a significant factor. Our mass shootings have actually been on the decline, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for somewhat over ten years. Even what mass shootings we do have don't really fit the "semi-automatic rifles, high-caliber firearms, and high-capacity magazines" trend very closely. This is really only common sense - a modest-caliber semi-automatic handgun mostly closely fits the profile you would want for most crimes - but the data bears it out.

If you want to look for media evidence of that, I'd suggest two alternative things to look at. The first is that while the FBI reports our mass shootings are on a steady decline, your impression from watching our media is that they are on the rise (which I think has more to do with the changes in media over the past ten or twenty years than it does with changes in gun violence). The second is that if you look at our art, the handgun clearly has pride of place as the "sword" of American violence culture. The handgun has very little significance militarily; I can't think of any of our well-publicized real-world American war heroes who have used a handgun in their heroics. It isn't even particularly Freudian when compared with a rifle. But it is the handgun with which we choose to arm our action heroes; long guns are generally reserved for the bad guys. Ask an American kid to draw a gun and he or she is probably going to draw a handgun. In our videogames, the first firearm you get - the metaphorical foundation of all firearms - is a handgun. For better or worse (and personally I think it's kind of silly), the modest-caliber semi-automatic handgun is the quintessential American firearm if you judge by our art.

As DarkLink and I have said in prior debates, neither of us denies that America has a gun violence problem. What we deny is that we have a problem with semi-automatic rifles, high caliber firearms, and high capacity magazines. I won't speak for DL, but from my perspective, the SARHCFAHCM argument (at least when made by people who should know better - I don't expect foreigners to be up on the nature of our domestic problems) just makes me want to shake my head and say, "Children, children [read: Congresspeople] - see these good folks over here? They're in law enforcement. You may notice they are standing next to several decades' worth of data on what kind of guns are used to commit crimes in this country, how those guns were acquired, and who they were used by. Can we maybe talk about that instead of some f*cking news report you saw this morning?"

[Kaptain Badrukk]

I see no reason to disagree with anything you've said there directly. I'll instead ask you a simple question.
If a couple of squirrely teenagers had access to firearms through initially legal means, do you think they'd have gotten them from the hardened criminals who import them for "serious" crime?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
I'm not an American, so I don't get the gun thing for the most part, but as an Englishman, and a logical thinker, I can't help but feel that firearms don't even belong in the hands of general law enforcement. Let alone the populace.
Again, just my opinion, I'm not here armed with huge reams of statistics. If we want to play the stats game i'll oblige though.

EDIT - Just thought I'd trot one out for a laugh
The figures from Congressional Research Service, plus recent statistics from icasualties.org, tell us that from the first casualties in the battle of Lexington to recent operations in Afghanistan, the toll is 1,171,177. By contrast, the number killed by firearms, including suicides, since 1968, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, is 1,384,171.
So there you go, statistically America is undergoing an armed uprising :eek:

[Wolfshade]

I think Nab. that you actually get the heart of the debate quite succinctly. The issue is those guns which are used in crime and that they are overwhelmingly illegal. The knee jerk reaction to hearing gun violence is that the issue is the gun itself. So to ban the gun is a good thing because it stops the guns being available, only it doesn’t as the key fact that the guns which are used in crime are themselves illegal so a ban on guns would not have that much of an issue on crime. It would reduce the likelihood of the “I grabbed my parent’s rifle” type crimes but I imagine that they are very small though often receive a lot of media attention.

So if a ban of all guns was enacted what would the result be? Crimes with guns would probably still continue. The amount of use for self-defence would obviously decrease, but this could easily be replaced with a non-lethal weapon, tazer perhaps? But would robbers be less likely to use guns in crime if they “know” that their target is unarmed? Perhaps, and in doing so would this reduce the fatality rates? Again, perhaps. Though this is a lot of perhaps and conjecture isn’t enough to build a solid argument from.
In a society where crime, especially that perpetrated by gun is very low, the rationale for having a gun as an equaliser is again very low. It is very much seen as it works for us so why wouldn’t it work for you. Completely ignoring the cultural differences after all we are all English speaking, western types…

For me, the biggest issue with gun ownership is that each side having a gun does not make a balance of power, the gun is an offensive weapon and cannot only be used to “defend” by being on the offensive. To make a true balancing one would need to an “anti-gun” that renders a gun useless without having offensive properties, which is and of itself is a complete fallacy.

[Kaptain Badrukk]

http://www.businessinsider.com/americas-gun-problem-explained-2013-4?op=1

These stats are quite interesting. Again I'm not going taking sides I just looked for a set of statistics. This guy presented them in an inherently biased way, but you've got to admit the correlations are fairly convincing.

[Nabterayl]

For me, the biggest issue with gun ownership is that each side having a gun does not make a balance of power, the gun is an offensive weapon and cannot only be used to “defend” by being on the offensive. To make a true balancing one would need to an “anti-gun” that renders a gun useless without having offensive properties, which is and of itself is a complete fallacy.
Speaking of cultural differences, I'd be curious to know how the UK and America, generally, view the purpose of violence. I don't think I can speak for America on this point, but to illustrate what I'm wondering about, in my mind:


[Nab philosophy]

... there are only two successful outcomes to any violent confrontation in a self-defense or defense-of-others scenario:

The attacker is physiologically incapable of continuing to attack, despite his or her continuing desire to do so, and the defender (and defendee, if applicable) disengages from the danger zone, or
The attacker ceases to desire to attack, disengages from the danger zone.
Only #1 is within the defender's power. A defender can attempt to disincentivize an attacker to continue attacking, but at the end of the day, whether an attacker wants to attack is only in the power of the attacker. While it is always possible that a person will escape danger because an attacker decides to stop attacking (and this is, in essence, what most of us do every day - like most Americans and I expect most people in this discussion, I don't carry a weapon around), a defender can only directly influence the outcome of a confrontation by attacking. That's simply the nature of violence.

[/Nab philosophy]

I wonder how closely my view corresponds with general American attitudes towards violence, and to general UK attitudes towards violence. Do you think there's likely a significant difference there?

EDIT:

I see no reason to disagree with anything you've said there directly. I'll instead ask you a simple question.
If a couple of squirrely teenagers had access to firearms through initially legal means, do you think they'd have gotten them from the hardened criminals who import them for "serious" crime?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
I don't know what our black market for guns looks like in any sort of detail. So ... from hardened criminals? I have no idea. But yes, I do think that if a person in America doesn't have legal access to firearms and wants to obtain one, he or she can illegally obtain one or more modest-caliber semi-automatic handguns with a 10-round or smaller capacity with a relative ease.

[Wolfshade]

I don't think any of us can speak for our culture really.
I would agree in principal to the Nab philosphy.

I have read a variant on 1 (though I cannot find the link) a Commando, while of course extremely capable of defending himself shouted at an assailant and bombarded them with audio stimuli until they submitted to his will. So I think you could amend 1 to include physcologically as well.

[Nabterayl]

Well, I don't mean to downplay the utility or the scope of #2. Even most gunshot wounds fall under #2. It's extremely difficult to incapacitate somebody with a gun; your only targets are the heart, the spine, and the brain, and even those aren't absolute. A person shot through the heart still has a good two seconds or so during which time their body is capable of responding to their will (and thus, killing you), paralyzing somebody through a spinal injury doesn't necessarily incapacitate the part of their body they're using to kill you, and even if a bullet manages to penetrate the skull and pass through the brain, the resulting wound isn't guaranteed to incapacitate. And if you don't hit one of those targets, and most of the time you won't, all you're really doing is inflicting horror upon your target in the hopes that they stop wanting to attack you.

Most violence falls under #2, I think. But I wouldn't want to level a weapon at somebody without knowing it was capable of #1.

[DarkLink]

Again, this one might be another cultural issue. I have to judge by the media, and from what is reported it seems the three big issues are 1) larger weapons* being used in mass murders that often target schools and in drive-by shootings that have significant collateral damage; 2) lots of concealed handguns being used to shoot other people for silly reasons in urban areas, often related to gang violence; and 3) lots of police gunning down people for reasons that would get them locked up here, presumably because they're accustomed to point 2.


Well, there's you're problem (emphasis mine). They are massively inaccurate, mainly because they simply don't know what the hell they're talking about, and they play up the story to make it sound as bad as possible to earn ratings. Just take a look at the article Kaptin Badrukk posted, I'm about to tear the **** out of it. And at least his article makes a coherent argument, with graphs and everything. Most mainstream media just skips that part.

Even better, they often literally make up stuff. The new claimed the Sandy Hook shooting was done with an AR15. Then, when they realized it wasn't, the story changed to 'well, he still had an AR in his car, he just didn't use it'. In reality, there was no AR at all. He had four handguns. That's it. No rifles, no shotguns, no high caliber high powered assault weapons.



*I'm not sure what kind of gun they're classified as, the only firearms I'm really familiar with are the farm rifles designed for a couple of long range shots against small to moderate sized vermin and they're clearly not that.

So from my perspective it looks like "semi-automatic rifles, high caliber firearms, and high capacity magazines" are actually a problem that should probably be dealt with. I'll freely acknowledge that it is possible that isn't the case and that the widespread ownership of handguns is the source of the majority of the violence, but other than coming up with more efficient forms of non-lethal defence and encouraging people to use it in order to drop the total volume of guns available to criminals I'm not sure what the solution is.

It's very much not the case. You identify three issues, semi-auto, high caliber, and high capacity magazines.

High caliber is a myth. The media refers to basically all rifles larger than a .22LR, just about the smallest commercially available bullet, as either "high caliber", "high powered", or "assault weapon". All three sound really nasty, but the reality is, the AR15 that people get so worked up over (the rifle used in, say, the Batman shooting), is a .22 caliber rifle. It's a different chambering than the .22LR, so it is a bigger bullet, but it's still a pretty small caliber. You can't even legally hunt deer with a standard AR15 in most places, the bullet is too small. There's been massive debate within the US military ever since Vietnam about whether or not the AR is even a powerful enough rifle to reliably put people on the ground, though with advances in ballistics and quality marksmanship training, it's served us well ever since we got the initial problems ironed out. The average hunting rifle caliber is a .308.


http://i922.photobucket.com/albums/ad67/pilotdane2/2012/Shooting/BulletLineUp.jpg

The .308 would qualify as a medium caliber bullet, realistically. The .223 on the right is a very low caliber. And as rare as rifle murders are, of those they are almost always with a low caliber bullet like the .223. Because the .223 is extremely common. Ammo is cheap, because it's what our military uses. Conversely, as I've said before, there's literally never been a murder in US history with the .50BMG.

So much for the "high caliber" myth.


High magazine capacity is a little more reasonable, but it simply doesn't pan out, for one main reason. It's pretty easy to reload, and rarely are people shooting back to stop the shooter. The Sandy Hook shooter had multiple handguns. Run out of ammo? Swap guns. Police used to do that back when they carried revolvers, rather than wasting time reloading. A backup revolver was pretty standard. Once you've put your 40 rounds downrange quickly, you've probably done enough damage that you can move on and reload in relative peace before shooting again.

And remember, mass shootings typically last a remarkably long time. Often 30 min or more, sometimes even hours. I can tell you right now, I can easily put a few hundred rounds downrange with nothing more than a single 10-round magazine in 30 min. With multiple 10 rounders, my target wouldn't have a chance to wait for me to reload and try and rush me. High capacity magazines simply don't have a significant effect when you don't have people shooting back. So, for a soldier, magazine capacity matters. For a criminal, it really doesn't, at least not until the police arrive, but it can take the police far too long to get on scene simply because America is such a big place. Police can't magically instantly teleport wherever they want. Police have never been able to reliably stop a shooter before he does his damage, and they never will be able to without pure luck. Trained individuals or guards with Concealed Carry permits, however, stop criminals on a surprisingly regular basis. You'll just never hear about it in the news.


As for the idea of semi-automatic rifles as a problem, do you want to know how many murders were committed in 2011 with semi-auto rifles? 323. Out of the entire nation, for the entire year. More people were killed with hammers. More people were killed with improvised clubs. More people died falling off ladders.

The idea that semi-automatic rifles are some sort of murderous plague that haunts America is pure myth. Murder via semi-automatic rifles are extremely rare. Banning them to reduce crime would be like banning the safest brand of car on the market in an attempt to stop car crashes. Kind of. It's a weak metaphor. But hopefully you get my point.





Basically all gun murders are committed with cheap handguns. Basically all defensive uses of guns are with cheap handguns. As far as crime is concerned, America does not have a gun problem. We have a handgun problem*. If you think that any law banning any non-handgun firearm is even remotely relevant, you are so blatantly wrong that I cannot take your opinion seriously.

*Though, as I've said before, simply banning all handguns is not only now explicitly unconstitutional, but probably wouldn't help reduce crime very much. It's a pretty complex issue. But at least I hope people can stop going on about banning rifles or crap like that.



As DarkLink and I have said in prior debates, neither of us denies that America has a gun violence problem. What we deny is that we have a problem with semi-automatic rifles, high caliber firearms, and high capacity magazines. I won't speak for DL, but from my perspective, the SARHCFAHCM argument (at least when made by people who should know better - I don't expect foreigners to be up on the nature of our domestic problems) just makes me want to shake my head and say, "Children, children [read: Congresspeople] - see these good folks over here? They're in law enforcement. You may notice they are standing next to several decades' worth of data on what kind of guns are used to commit crimes in this country, how those guns were acquired, and who they were used by. Can we maybe talk about that instead of some f*cking news report you saw this morning?"

Pretty much this. Anything regarding anything but cheap handguns is utterly irrelevant to the actual gun control discussion. If banning any type of firearm will work, it would be handguns, and only handgun. That's a hell of an acronym, by the way.



EDIT - Just thought I'd trot one out for a laugh
The figures from Congressional Research Service, plus recent statistics from icasualties.org, tell us that from the first casualties in the battle of Lexington to recent operations in Afghanistan, the toll is 1,171,177. By contrast, the number killed by firearms, including suicides, since 1968, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, is 1,384,171.
So there you go, statistically America is undergoing an armed uprising :eek:

Just for reference, 3.5 million have died in car crashes.



For me, the biggest issue with gun ownership is that each side having a gun does not make a balance of power, the gun is an offensive weapon and cannot only be used to “defend” by being on the offensive. To make a true balancing one would need to an “anti-gun” that renders a gun useless without having offensive properties, which is and of itself is a complete fallacy.

Until someone invents a personal force field like in Dune or something, then the best defense is a good offense. Whether perceived or not, if you look difficult to mug, they'll probably move on to weaker prey. If everyone looks tough to mug, then most criminals will probably just give up. There will still be some hardcore criminals, but it's better having just the hardcore criminals rather than both the hardcore and casual criminals.


http://www.businessinsider.com/americas-gun-problem-explained-2013-4?op=1

These stats are quite interesting. Again I'm not going taking sides I just looked for a set of statistics. This guy presented them in an inherently biased way, but you've got to admit the correlations are fairly convincing.

Not only is the author biased, but the stats themselves are extremely biased.

I'm strongly of the opinion that every single person should take fairly advanced statistics, rather than, say, calculus. Unless you're an engineer or something, calculus isn't particularly useful. But journalist manipulate data so often, as is the case here, than unless you understand some basic statistics, you're being duped.

The first graph is zoomed in, to make the violent crime rates look high. In reality, you're more likely to be injured or killed in a car crash than by a criminal. It's a manipulative matter of perspective, because the idea that America is really violent serves as a plea to emotion. "Something must be done!"

The next series of graphs are technically accurate, but the author himself falls into the massive logical fallacy that correlation implies causation. He conveniently winks and nods that guns are the cause of crime, without presenting any of the requisite evidence required to determine that causation. Mistaking correlation for causation is a cardinal sin of statistics. Correlation means "study this more closely", and nothing more. In fact, every single argument the author makes is riddled with this fallacy, as far as I can see.

Now, breaking it up state-by-state has two problems. For one, how "loose" a states gun control laws are is fairly subjective. Keeping in mind what I've said above, a place like California has a ton of restrictions on "assault weapons" and high capacity magazines, but handguns are readily available. If you were to look at it through that filter instead, you very well could get a very different picture. But you don't know, because the data is biased.

Secondly, it doesn't differentiate between rural areas and cities. I've yet to see a good study that does this. While many states with "loose" (subjective) gun laws have high murder rates, city laws matter as well. Washington DC is the most violent city in America by practically an order of magnitude, yet for several decades they completely banned handguns. Chicago doesn't have a single gun store within its limits, yet it's all over the news for recent crime sprees. Once you start digging a little bit, the supposed strong correlation between gun control laws and murder rates pretty much falls apart.

And back out a little bit and look globally. Quite literally, there is a fairly strong negative correlation between guns and violence. . Using the author’s logic, just taken on a different scale, I could easily conclude that guns prevent violence.

Moving on a bit, there’s another flawed argument in correlating gun ownership with other OPEC nations and violence. America has roughly 3 times as many murders nowadays as other nations. But from the chart, that’s clearly on a steady decline, even while gun sales are up significantly (even if gun ownership is becoming slightly more concentrated). Oh, wait, he failed to mention gun sales are on the rise? Huh.

Anyways, for having 3 times the murder rate, we have about 40 times as many guns. I’m not exaggerating. The “average” gun ownership is probably about 2-3 guns per capita. America is just shy of 90. I’m pretty dubious of the correlation once I put it into perspective. If you do the math according to the logic presented by the author, then if we divided our gun ownership by three, we’d have an average murder rate, yet we’d still have roughly 10-15 times as many firearms as the average OPEC nation.

Disclaimer: I didn’t actually go and find an average for the OPEC nations. It might be 4-5, for all I know, but that doesn’t make that much of a difference, and I’m pretty sure it would be under 4 guns per capita.

The next chart, where America is displayed as a massive outlier, is also massively misleading. There are so many nations left off of this list that it’s not even funny. If you were to graph the whole world, you’d get something that looks like this:


http://augmentedtrader.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/corr-gunvhomo.png

There’s a maxim in statistics. You can make anything look like anything else, if you play with the numbers a lot. This is a classic case of a dishonest, manipulative use of statistics.

Then it goes on to talk about how the NRA simply buys gun protection, the implication being it’s against the will of the American people. To this, I will simply add that the NRA makes the vast majority of its money off of not large donations, but simple membership dues. The NRA isn’t powerful because there are a handful of rich white guys propping it up, it’s powerful because it has the backing of a very, very large number of Americans. In fact, right now, the NRA is more popular than the President is. Obama has something like a 48% approval rating, and a 43% disapproval rating. The NRA? 52-38, if I recall correctly. A president with a 52% approval rating is generally considered to be doing a pretty frikin’ good job, with how divisive our politics can sometimes be.

Then the article does two funny things. For one, it actually manages to acknowledge that violent video games aren’t a problem. Bravo, you are officially smarter than the vast majority of journalists.

Second, it goes and undermines itself by pointing out how few people are killed by guns. While most of the earlier arguments relied on presenting America as some sort of murder capital, it then points out that, actually, America is a pretty frikin’ safe place to live, really.

And then it just goes downhill. It falls into the classic “but assault weapons are evil” problem I addressed earlier. I take back the bravo I just gave them, the author really is an idiot, or maybe a liar. One of the two.

It then goes and undermines itself again when it shows a graph pointing out that handguns are used in the vast majority of crimes. Rifles? 4%. Except that’s all rifles, not just assault rifles. Which really aren’t assault rifles, they’re just small caliber semi-automatic rifles, but that’s a whole ‘nother subject.

It presents the idea that the gun show loophole causes crime, yet provides no evidence linking the “loophole” (which really isn’t a loophole, it’s just that people are allowed to exchange personal property without government interference) to any sort of crime. Driving around with expired tags is illegal, too, but it probably doesn’t cause many car crashes. Another superficial argument with no real support.

And… finally I’m done. The article was riddled with logical fallacies and a complete lack of any actual argument beyond “correlation obviously means causation”. The statistics are often heavily manipulated to present a heavily biased argument.

[DarkLink]

Double post. Chrome glitched, or something. I'll replace my post with this funny picture:

http://www.sanctuarybailbonds.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/light-saber-stun-gun.jpg

[Morgrim]

So I guess the issue becomes how do you reduce handgun crime? The problem seems to be a glut of illegal handguns, so the problem is twofold. First, where are they coming from and how can you stop this? Things about not allowing gun shows to sell weapons 'off the books' and tracking weapons like cars are tracked seems a reasonable option. After all cars can be dangerous but they've got a well established infrastructure around their regulation. You need to be of a certain age and not have particular medical conditions that render you a risk and to pass a test in order to get one; swap the medical conditions around and change the ages and this is what it takes to get a gun licence here. And then don't most firearms have serial numbers? When you sell your car you transfer the registration. When you sell your handgun you could do the same thing.

I have a recollection that some states already have this sort of thing going? It could be interesting to see if it helps, because at the very least it gives police an idea of how many guns are in an area and they can tell almost instantly if a particular gun found in a search is legal or not and confiscate it if it isn't. But the results would probably be inconclusive if neighbouring states didn't have similar things in place because, well, your states are weirdly independent and obviously the borders between them are leaky.* So you could grab a gun in North Dakota without registering and just take it to South Dakota. (I don't know US geography, I'm just grabbing two random states that sound like they should be next to each other.)

Getting the existing glut of illegal handguns out of the market is a lot harder. I'm guessing that police already destroy the ones they find, which would help. I dunno, maybe a buyback scheme? If people could get half the price of a weapon no questions asked from whatever group was running it that might be incentive.

*(It is irrelevant to the argument, but can I just comment that the idea of state police having to stop at state boundaries is a little odd to me? If the NSW cops are chasing someone that drives across the border to Victoria then the cops KEEP FOLLOWING and are just as likely to haul them to the local lockup in that state once nabbed.)

[Wolfshade]

Then it goes on to talk about how the NRA simply buys gun protection, the implication being it’s against the will of the American people. To this, I will simply add that the NRA makes the vast majority of its money off of not large donations, but simple membership dues. The NRA isn’t powerful because there are a handful of rich white guys propping it up, it’s powerful because it has the backing of a very, very large number of Americans.

I am not sure 1.6% is a very large proportion of the population...
NRA believe they have somewhere in the region of 5,000,000 members, population of the USA 314,000,000 (http://www.census.gov/popclock/)

The Scouts have half that number of youth members but you wouldn't call them a very large number of americans

[DarkLink]

For a lobby organization, that's huge. Those are the people who pay membership dues. There are a lot more people who have a favorable opinion of the NRA even if they aren't a member. This isn't a magazine subscription we're talking about.

In America, probably the two most common bumper stickers nation-wide are these:

https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTsAg11TbnffSPXKLHKr5O9lJhw_1YMI UPjMcqQBHk7tBaX9ShY-A

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRLfhUTF4wbnY-uNZ60m-IfdboIUEcE8XXEZG-qYhCktHrfp2CV

[Wolfshade]

Not really, consider the trade unions in the UK, they lobby labour and their membership is approximately 12% of the uk.

[Kaptain Badrukk]

Reading the numbers out there, decided to go to the source rather than the interpretations. The major issue seems not to be gun ownership or gun control, but a society which solves its problems with violence.
I mean just combing through and it seems that gun ownership CAN impact the number of crimes committed with guns but it doesn't stop the american public killing each other in huge numbers.
WTF is going on over there?

[Nabterayl]

Something I've always wondered when Britons describe us as killing each other in huge numbers ...

The following is not meant to excuse the American homicide rate as somehow evidence of moral superiority or anything; I'm just looking to shed some more light on these "cultural differences" we keep alluding to. To me (and I think to DarkLink), the fact that Britain has more violent crimes per capita than America is kind of horrifying; from the statements our Commonwealth friends (is there a word for "citizen of a Commonwealth nation?") have made, I gather that the fact that America has a higher homicide rate per capita is equally horrifying. I have a hard time believing that is just down to the availability of guns (as I understand it, the survivability rate for handgun wounds and knife wounds are both approximately 75-80%*), so ... how come you guys beat yourselves up more than we do, but we do it more extremely than you do? I wonder, does America just have a cultural tendency towards extreme violence, however often it occurs?

Is there a cultural difference about the sort of violence we subscribe to as cultures? Here's a personal example: I plan on teaching my daughter not to ever deploy force against a person - not even to shove somebody or punch them on the playground - unless you're willing to kill them. You can deploy force without wanting to kill somebody, but in my mind, you had better be ready to go farther than your target, or you shouldn't raise a hand at all. Similarly with weapon ownership. Whether it's a handgun, a dagger, a longsword, or a rifle, my kids get taught that you don't even get to own a weapon unless you're willing to kill somebody with it. That's what a weapon is for, and if you aren't ready for the moral challenge that represents, you aren't ready to own it.

Again, I can't speak to the culture, but I feel like this is a fairly typical American philosophy towards violence, of any scale. I think you see it in our public opinion about military action, too - I don't think Americans really understand why you should ever deploy troops with a goal other than "utterly destroy X" (college roommate's course on all the good that UN peacekeepers do that has nothing to do with obliteration was a real eye-opener for me).

Thoughts?

* I do understand that there are a lot of ways you can spin these numbers. What counts as a stab wound? How deep is the wound? Where is it incurred? Where is the gunshot wound incurred? Etc. But intuitively, from an understanding of the wound mechanics of a handgun bullet and a knife blade, I'd be surprised if one type of wound was drastically more lethal than the other.

[DarkLink]

Not really, consider the trade unions in the UK, they lobby labour and their membership is approximately 12% of the uk.

For something that's essentially just a hobby for most people, and a vastly overrated crime problem, it is. The NRA is far larger than its opponent. Even so, you're missing the point. Remember, the NRA is more popular than the president. More than half of Americans have a favorable opinion of the NRA, even if they're not members, and despite the divisiveness of gun control, only a comparatively small number of Americans dislike the NRA. It's not some fringe movement.


To me (and I think to DarkLink), the fact that Britain has more violent crimes per capita than America is kind of horrifying; from the statements our Commonwealth friends (is there a word for "citizen of a Commonwealth nation?") have made, I gather that the fact that America has a higher homicide rate per capita is equally horrifying.

But wait Nab, I thought Americans were a bunch of violent psychotic gangsters? And that America was an incredibly violent and dangerous place, much more violent than anywhere in Europe. Or anywhere else. I mean, it's practically Iraq over there, right? That's what Mr. Newscaster told me.



Is there a cultural difference about the sort of violence we subscribe to as cultures? Here's a personal example: I plan on teaching my daughter not to ever deploy force against a person - not even to shove somebody or punch them on the playground - unless you're willing to kill them. You can deploy force without wanting to kill somebody, but in my mind, you had better be ready to go farther than your target, or you shouldn't raise a hand at all. Similarly with weapon ownership. Whether it's a handgun, a dagger, a longsword, or a rifle, my kids get taught that you don't even get to own a weapon unless you're willing to kill somebody with it. That's what a weapon is for, and if you aren't ready for the moral challenge that represents, you aren't ready to own it.

Weapon Safety Rule #2: Never point your weapon at anything you do not intend to shoot.



* I do understand that there are a lot of ways you can spin these numbers. What counts as a stab wound? How deep is the wound? Where is it incurred? Where is the gunshot wound incurred? Etc. But intuitively, from an understanding of the wound mechanics of a handgun bullet and a knife blade, I'd be surprised if one type of wound was drastically more lethal than the other.

This is one of the things that skews defensive use of gun statistics a lot. There are very few cases in which the criminal is killed by the individual they attacked, so on the surface it seems very rare. But it turns out that if you widen the definition to include cases in which the criminal was basically scared off by the individual demonstrating that they were armed, then not only are defensive uses of handguns far more common than violent gun crime is, but more importantly that defensive use results in no one getting hurt. Despite the rhetoric about how defensive use of guns only escalates the situation. Criminals aren't usually looking for a fight, they're looking for easy profit.


So I guess the issue becomes how do you reduce handgun crime? The problem seems to be a glut of illegal handguns, so the problem is twofold. First, where are they coming from and how can you stop this? Things about not allowing gun shows to sell weapons 'off the books' and tracking weapons like cars are tracked seems a reasonable option. After all cars can be dangerous but they've got a well established infrastructure around their regulation. You need to be of a certain age and not have particular medical conditions that render you a risk and to pass a test in order to get one; swap the medical conditions around and change the ages and this is what it takes to get a gun licence here. And then don't most firearms have serial numbers? When you sell your car you transfer the registration. When you sell your handgun you could do the same thing.

Gun owners have been burned by registration programs in the past. During Hurricane Katrina, instead of doing something meaningful like, y'know, actually helping evacuate flood victims, New Orleans police were busy visiting every person they thought owned a gun and confiscating it. In fact, I'm always a little dubious of gun ownership statistics here because a lot of gun owners will not tell you they own a gun, because liberals are such massive douchebags about it, and it's scarily common for police to come knocking on your door for no good reason.


I dunno, maybe a buyback scheme? If people could get half the price of a weapon no questions asked from whatever group was running it that might be incentive.

Problem is, buyback programs don't tend to catch the firearms we're interested in. Criminals aren't going to give up their status symbols and tools of the trade. Meanwhile, your average law abiding citizen is probably just going to use it to get rid of old junkers. I know if I could get $100 or so for my old .22, I would sell it and buy a brand new one. It'd be like upgrading my cell phone.

[Morgrim]

Gun owners have been burned by registration programs in the past. During Hurricane Katrina, instead of doing something meaningful like, y'know, actually helping evacuate flood victims, New Orleans police were busy visiting every person they thought owned a gun and confiscating it.
But clearly that is a failure of police, not of registration. I don't see how blaming a political party works for that either given in my experience police tend to do what they want and ignore whichever of the two parties is in power unless directly impacting them.

[DarkLink]

It's a failure of practicality. It's kind of like how communism is so massively different in theory than in practice. Some laws sound good on paper, but in practice they aren't implemented or enforced or they're ignored. There is a very persistent effort from a minority of politicians to completely ban guns, and they're not going away anytime soon, and they've repeatedly and regularly openly expressed their willingness to disregard legal and constitutional protections on gun ownership. Better not to give the guy who's threatening you a weapon, especially when he says he's going to use it against you as soon as he can.

[Nabterayl]

I'm a little less skeptical of strengthening registration requirements than DarkLink is. [EDIT] While it's true that there are American politicians who are simply anti-gun (which I'm fine with in principle, but I'm not fine with a politician who really wants to change the constitution but never actually tries to do so), from my point of view we already have lots of registration requirements, and they haven't resulted in a rash of illegal confiscations. Again, this might be a case of DarkLink and I having personal exposure to somewhat different slices of the American gun-owning community. I have plenty of relatives who like to froth at the mouth about how, "The only reason to require something to be registered is as a prelude to taking it away!" and I admit I have a bit of knee-jerk reaction in favor of registration because that's such an obviously hyperbolic argument. Also, I've had a lot more stories of police being cool about responsible gun ownership than I have of police being hostile towards gun ownership on principle.

There are certainly "gun control" efforts in this country that I oppose, on the grounds that they burden the innocent without addressing the very real gun violence problem we actually have, and certainly some registration requirements could fall into that category. But I have no opposition to registration in general, so my attitude towards efforts to strengthen the registration regime is to take the proposals on a case by case basis.

I might point out, also, that the Justice Department has a higher opinion of "buyback" type schemes than many Americans might think. One of the odd things about gun ownership among American criminals is that most of them, when surveyed in prison, say they carry guns for self-defense, and not against law enforcement officers (this goes back to the point we've made a few times now that if you eliminate gang-related firearm deaths, our numbers drop pretty drastically). There certainly are people who acquire guns as part of a specific scheme to commit a specific crime, but there are more people who just feel like they live in a dangerous, gang-ridden neighborhood (often particularly dangerous because they are themselves part of a rival gang), and thus they "need" protection. Individual American cities have had success in disarming neighborhoods, but only if the buyback scheme is more sophisticated than throwing money at people to put down their arms. Factors that seem to contribute to success are the police department having personal relationships with the people or organizations they want to disarm, getting the rest of the neighborhood involved to bring pressure on the organizations to go along with the program, and most importantly, getting agreement with the local prosecution officials that nobody will be prosecuted for showing up with an illegal gun.

Now, this sort of scheme obviously wouldn't work for the people who are planning to commit a specific crime with a gun. But according to prison surveys, there actually are a lot of American "criminals" who feel like they're locked in a localized arms race, and can be induced to give up their cheap, illegal handguns so long as they can be convinced that their enemies are doing the same thing.

[DarkLink]

It's more a commentary on common opinions from gun owners who wouldn't be too happy about registration programs. It would take a lot of work to get a registration program to pass, especially right now with all the revelations about how Obama and the NSA are spying on everyone. People aren't too happy about the government getting involved in the details of their lives.

And, just anecdotally, I've heard of gun buy-back programs that mostly just turned up a bunch of junker firearms. For what that's worth.

[Wolfshade]

It's more a commentary on common opinions from gun owners who wouldn't be too happy about registration programs. It would take a lot of work to get a registration program to pass, especially right now with all the revelations about how Obama and the NSA are spying on everyone. People aren't too happy about the government getting involved in the details of their lives.
But it's for your own good. Honest guv'.