Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Nakura on June 27, 2013, 04:33:25 pm
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I happened to write a five-page essay to foster a healthy debate. I wrote it up in a period of about 45 minutes, but after proofreading it, I like the way it's turned out. I would, however, like feedback on the essay, if you wouldn't mind. Of course, we can also use this topic to discuss the right to bear arms and efforts by authoritarians to limit that right. Below is the essay I wrote:
Let me start by saying that I am a gun owner and NRA member, but I’m open to some gun control, namely background checks, but only with the provisions that we have further constitutional protections of the right to bear arms.
Let’s look at a ban on semi-automatic firearms and/or so-called “assault weapons.” What is a semi-automatic firearm and what is an “assault weapon?” A semi-automatic firearm is a firearm that can fire one bullet each time you pull the trigger; this differs from a fully-automatic weapon, which continues to fire as long as the trigger is held down, or ammunition is depleted. An “assault weapon” is a semi-automatic (or occasionally bolt-action) rifle that has certain cosmetic features, such as a barrel shroud, telescoping stock, bayonet lugs and/or pistol grip. The so-called “Federal Assault Weapons Ban” in 1993 banned these so-called “assault weapons;” the ban later expired in 2004.
Why does the gun control lobby call these rifles “assault weapons” when they are no more or less deadly than other semi-automatic rifles? In fact, there is no difference between a semi-automatic firearm and an “assault weapon,” aside from certain cosmetic features. Bolt-action rifles are actually more deadly than a so-called “assault weapon,” such as the previously banned AR-15 rifle; this is because the AR-15 (and other firearms like it) fire .223 Remington rounds, which are considerably smaller than your average hunting rifle ammunition. To say that so-called “assault weapons” aren’t used for hunting is an incorrect statement, in fact, the AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the United States, in part due to it’s .223 rounds, which are considered better for hunting small game (such as rabbits) and even some deer.
The Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 was considered a failure by both criminal experts and the United States Department of Justice. A 2004 report from the Department of Justice showed that only 2% of all firearm murders were committed with semi-automatic rifle. That same report concluded that: “Should it be renewed, the ban's effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. [Assault weapons] were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban.”; source: http://crim.sas.upenn.edu/jerry-lee-center-criminology/
In 2011 the FBI released statistics that show that you’re more likely to be murdered with a hammer, than you are with any kind of rifle, including so-called “assault weapons;” source: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8
In addition, semi-automatic rifles were banned in the United Kingdom (since 1988) and Australia (since 1996), and both of such bans have been failures. A 2005 report by the Bureau of Crime Statistics in Australia reported: “Gun ownership is rising and there is no definitive evidence that a decade of restrictive firearms laws has done anything to reduce weapon-related crime, according to NSW's top criminal statistician.
The latest figures show a renaissance in firearm ownership in the state - a 25 per cent increase in three years. And the head of the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Don Weatherburn, said falls in armed robberies and abductions in NSW in the past few years had more to do with the heroin drought and good policing than firearms legislation.
Even falls in the homicide rate, which have been steady, began long before the gun law debate provoked by the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.
Nationwide, the proportion of robberies involving weapons is the same as it was in 1996, while the proportion of abductions involving weapons is higher, the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics fiures reveal. They show a mixed result in firearms-related offences since the mid-1990s. There has been a fall in firearms murders (from 32 to 13 per cent) but a rise (19 to 23 per cent) in attempted murders involving guns.” Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/gun-laws-fall-short-in-war-on-crime/2005/10/28/1130400366681.html
And in the United Kingdom, violent crime (including homicide) rates have been on the rise since the 1960s, correlating ominously with the 1968 gun control law, which heavily regulated civilian gun ownership. Of course, correlation does not equal causation, but it is rather telling that gun control isn’t a solution to violent crime. In fact, statistics show that, if anything, gun control actually increases violent crime rates.
(http://www.justfacts.com/images/guncontrol/england.png)
Source: http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp
Meanwhile almost no other first-world country (including Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Finland, France, Greenland, Ireland, Italy, Republic of Korea, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, San Marino, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, etc.) has banned semi-automatic rifles or handguns, yet they don’t have mass shootings or high crime rates. Source: http://www.gunpolicy.org/
So what about mass shootings? Will mass shootings stop if we ban semi-automatic rifles and/or so-called “assault weapons?” Both Australia and the United Kingdom experienced mass shootings after their gun bans. In Australia there was the Monash University massacre in 2004 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monash_University_shooting) and in the United Kingdom there was the Dunblane massacre in 1996 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre) and Cumbria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria_shootings) massacre in 2010. Prior to the 1997 Hungerford massacre in the United Kingdom, which led to the 1988 ban on semi-automatic firearms, there were zero mass shootings in Great Britain. In the United States we experienced arguably the worst school shooting in American history, the Columbine High School massacre, which was committed during a time in which both “assault weapons” and so-called “high capacity magazines” were banned.
Okay, so banning semi-automatics won’t stop mass shootings, but will banning magazines stop them? Not according to the United States Department of Justice, (cited from the previously linked to report):
“It is not clear how often the outcomes of gun attacks depend on the ability of offenders to fire more than ten shots (the current magazine capacity limit) without reloading.“
During the Columbine High School massacre, a massacre that took place when so-called “high capacity magazines” were banned, the attackers used thirteen magazines. In the Viriginia Tech massacre, the attacker used nineteen magazines. These attacks show that magazine bans do not work.
Why are “assault weapons” called that, when they are no more or less deadly than non-“assault” weapons? The gun control lobby is surprisingly open about why; they released this statement in a 1988 report and said report is currently readable on their website:
“Assault weapons are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”
Source: http://www.vpc.org/studies/awaconc.htm
As you can see in the above document, the gun control lobby openly admits to intentionally misleading the public, by conflating semi-automatic rifles with fully-automatic rifles. Fully-automatic machineguns have been heavily regulated since the 1930s and the sale of new fully-automatic machineguns has been virtually banned since the Hughes Amendment in 1986. Even still, there are over 60,000 legal owners of fully-automatic machineguns in the United States, and there have been no crimes committed with such firearms.
Now that we’ve covered semi-automatics, let’s discuss handguns, shall we? Handgun bans have been tried before both in the United States and around the world, and resulted in dismal results each time. Handguns were banned in the United Kingdom in 1997 and homicide rates have rose 15% since the ban. Handguns were also banned in Chicago and the District of Columbia, and homicide rates also rose drastically on both occasions; the handgun homicide rate in Chicago by 40% since the ban and the homicide rate in the District of Columbia rose by 73% since the ban (http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp). The Center for Disease Control released a study showing that handguns were used in self-defense up to ten times more than they were used to commit crimes, saving up to three million lives a year (http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2013/Priorities-for-Research-to-Reduce-the-Threat-of-Firearm-Related-Violence.aspx).
What about background checks? The national background check system was created in 1993, with the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. This law mandates that any firearm transaction between a firearms dealer and a private citizen, result in a background check being performed on the buyer. This does not, however, mandate background checks for private firearms transactions. In other words, I can give a firearm to my best friend as a birthday present, without requiring a background check.
What is the so-called “gun show loophole?” The “gun show loophole” is the (factually wrong) idea that firearm sales at gun shows are not subject to background checks. Any regular dealer at a gun show is required to perform a background check on the buyer. However, if I’m a normal person visiting a gun show and happen to run into someone who wants to buy a gun, and I happen to own that gun and want to sell it, I can sell it without a background check, so long as I don’t do it on a regular basis.
Some laws have been proposed to ban the so-called “gun show loophole.” These proposed laws, however, are not aimed at background checks at all. It would criminalize all private firearms sales, regardless of whether or not they take place at a gun show. Then there’s the proposed “universal background check” idea, which would have created a database of all gun owners who obtained their firearms from a private individual. This proposed law was far more strict than the current law concerning firearms dealers. The law concerning firearms dealers requires that information regarding the background check be deleted within 48 hours, provided the background check goes through; however, the proposed “universal background check” law would have required that firearms obtained through private sales be de facto registered. A report published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics states that less than 2% of criminals who committed firearms related offenses obtained their firearms at a gun show. Source: http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fuo.pdf
In conclusion, it is clear that gun control is not going to lower violent crime rates in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter. Rather than harming law abiding citizens and discarding the fundamental rights we hold dear, I propose we work towards fixing the underlying problems that lead to violent crime. The underlying cause of violent crime is not firearms, it is social and economic factors; and the underlying cause of mass shootings is poor mental healthcare. Rather than focusing on the symptoms, we should work on improving our education system, healthcare system (including mental health) and eliminating the poor economic conditions that cause people to resort to violence.
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Yep. We had one "mass" shooting since the assault weapon ban. Look at the rate of them drop off at the same time. Gun control worked in Australia, there's very little legitimate doubt about that.
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so yeah can we not indulge this guy, i don't think this is really within the scope of what can be considered reasonable discussion on HLP
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Yep. We had one "mass" shooting since the assault weapon ban. Look at the rate of them drop off at the same time. Gun control worked in Australia, there's very little legitimate doubt about that.
Actually, Australian scholars and statisticians have deemed the Australian gun ban an utter failure, as mentioned in the original post. The ban didn't lower crime rates and you still experienced another mass shooting. Australia had widespread gun ownership, a strong gun culture and lenient gun laws up until 1987, yet they never experienced any mass shootings and had traditionally had low crime rates. It wasn't until the mid-1980s that you experienced any sort of "mass shootings," which were sparked from motorcycle gang wars. Seeing as you had virtually no strict gun control laws until 1987 and no mass shootings or violent crime until that time, it would be ridiculous to blame guns and law abiding gun owners for Port Arthur and the like.
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so yeah can we not indulge this guy, i don't think this is really within the scope of what can be considered reasonable discussion on HLP
You're right, we can ignore him until he goes away.
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Sooo...why are we ignoring someone who stated an opinion and proceeded to back it up with references and discussion, exactly? Isn't that the sort of thing we want more of around here?
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It's not the sort of thing I want more of. Don't want to speak for anyone else though.
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Well when the alternative is one-line drive-by ****posts, I should think that anyone would go with this option.
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Sooo...why are we ignoring someone who stated an opinion and proceeded to back it up with references and discussion, exactly? Isn't that the sort of thing we want more of around here?
Because the people who would engage on this sort of an opener are either on (self-imposed?) hiatus from the forum or just don't feel like having this discussion. You can't make people post if they don't want to post.
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I sincerely hope this "essay" isn't for submission for a grade or use in a formal setting, because your tone and language use throughout is quite informal and poorly assembled. That's all I'll say on stylistic commentary.
As to the meat of your argument, cherry-picking wins you no points. You appear to discuss bans in the same breath as other countries with significant gun cultures - countries which don't use bans, but instead have strict (compared to the US) firearms regulations in place. You've set up a strawman argument. While I'll give you points for a single CDC citation, I'd deduct points for citing interest-group sites like justfacts.org and open-encyclopedias like Wikipedia (as I frequently say regarding wikipedia - good for background info; not acceptable sourcing for an argumentative piece).
You get kudos for giving it a try, but your writing style requires improvement generally, and your critical analysis is flawed from the outset. This isn't so much an essay as a somewhat poorly-constructed opinion piece without a great deal of credibility in terms of overall content because of how your argument has been constructed. (I gave you a "bad essay" vote - sorry, but this wouldn't get a passing grade as a piece of serious critical commentary in any formal venue).
Also, posting to prove NGTM-1R wrong, though I don't know if this actually counts as engaging since I'm not bothering to try to counterpoint. :P
Nakura, being a registered and licensed Canadian firearms enthusiast, I can tell you that a number of your citations don't paint a full picture of the regulatory facts, and I'd encourage you to do some further (unbiased) reading of the statistics from other Western democracies without relying on advocacy websites to summarize for you.
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(From Australia)
I own a Mosin Nagant 7.62x54R rifle, 1942 construction.
That's a decently large round compared to what most people in my area shoot, except for those few guys who sound like they are using cannons. :/ I don't use it for hunting, only bench-rest shooting.
I summed up a discussion like this recently, based on my views of course.
But a lot of people living in the suburbs and city areas are scared of firearms, why?. They have not grown up with them and the media is full of gun-crime in Sydney (for example) from the gangs (always in the media as the Bikie gangs). So naturally they would be scared and want them banned/severely limited.
Were as a lot of people out in the country, have grown up with firearms. We use them rather regularly for our lively-hood (farms for example) and have little gun-crime when compared to the cities. We are comfortable with them and have practical uses for them.
Then again.. the guy I was talking to went off on a huge rant about asylum seekers and such sooo.. yea.
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Sooo...why are we ignoring someone who stated an opinion and proceeded to back it up with references and discussion, exactly? Isn't that the sort of thing we want more of around here?
Because this is not an honest attempt to engender discussion. This is him trying to bait anyone who disagrees with his opinions into a 'debate', which he will probably 'win' because he has a vast pool of prepared waffle and dubious or misrepresented sources, and there's only so much time worth spending on a forum idiot. It's a very common tactic (creationists, for instance, are adept at it) and we're all better off if nobody engages with him, unless you find the idea of an endless game of musical bull**** to be entertaining.
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Sooo...why are we ignoring someone who stated an opinion and proceeded to back it up with references and discussion, exactly? Isn't that the sort of thing we want more of around here?
Because this is not an honest attempt to engender discussion. [...]
As opposed to say, the following, which is totally an honest attempt to engender discussion and is completely inoffensive to the thread-starter whose primary (stated) goal was to receive feedback on an essay?
so yeah can we not indulge this guy, i don't think this is really within the scope of what can be considered reasonable discussion on HLP
:no:
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Not to be a bother, but where is Snuffleupagus?
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There he is.
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Excellent. Smithers, jot down a tally for me
we have further constitutional protections of the right to bear arms.
This is generally where I stop in gun related topics
http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3295&context=wmlr
http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/guns.pdf
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we have further constitutional protections of the right to bear arms.
Why do you Americans think you have a right to a bear's arms? :P
homocides reported to the police in UK
Have you even considered that the most obvious explenation of the rise of reported crime is simply because people have started reporting more and more?
Rather than focusing on the symptoms, we should work on improving our education system, healthcare system (including mental health) and eliminating the poor economic conditions that cause people to resort to violence.
DUe to the weird political divide in the US, the party that supports gun rights is also the party which happens to NOT do these things you mention as solution, and in fact have worked very hard the past few years to abolish the laws that take care of these issues.
What about New York and Hawaii, where these laws do seem to work very effictively?
They show a mixed result in firearms-related offences since the mid-1990s. There has been a fall in firearms murders (from 32 to 13 per cent) but a rise (19 to 23 per cent) in attempted murders involving guns.
How is this a mixed result? I see a rather large fall in firearm murders but only a small rise in attempted murders.
Meanwhile almost no other first-world country (including Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Finland, France, Greenland, Ireland, Italy, Republic of Korea, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, San Marino, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, etc.) has banned semi-automatic rifles or handguns, yet they don’t have mass shootings or high crime rates. Source:
Dude.
Seriously?
You don't have any idea about how strong the gun control in those countries are. I can personally attest for the Netherlands, which has very strict gun control laws, and many other countries mentoined do actually have strict gun control laws as well. THe nations you mentoined mostly are an argument for, and not against, stricter gun control. Heck, the very site you linked as a source nullifies your claims (http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/netherlands).
tl;dr: Your essay is full of factual inaccuracies and misinterpretation of sources, it's very bad, and you should feel bad. You should also not own a handgun, as you are clearly delusional. Moving on...
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I sincerely hope this "essay" isn't for submission for a grade or use in a formal setting, because your tone and language use throughout is quite informal and poorly assembled. That's all I'll say on stylistic commentary.
As to the meat of your argument, cherry-picking wins you no points. You appear to discuss bans in the same breath as other countries with significant gun cultures - countries which don't use bans, but instead have strict (compared to the US) firearms regulations in place. You've set up a strawman argument. While I'll give you points for a single CDC citation, I'd deduct points for citing interest-group sites like justfacts.org and open-encyclopedias like Wikipedia (as I frequently say regarding wikipedia - good for background info; not acceptable sourcing for an argumentative piece).
You get kudos for giving it a try, but your writing style requires improvement generally, and your critical analysis is flawed from the outset. This isn't so much an essay as a somewhat poorly-constructed opinion piece without a great deal of credibility in terms of overall content because of how your argument has been constructed. (I gave you a "bad essay" vote - sorry, but this wouldn't get a passing grade as a piece of serious critical commentary in any formal venue).
Also, posting to prove NGTM-1R wrong, though I don't know if this actually counts as engaging since I'm not bothering to try to counterpoint. :P
Nakura, being a registered and licensed Canadian firearms enthusiast, I can tell you that a number of your citations don't paint a full picture of the regulatory facts, and I'd encourage you to do some further (unbiased) reading of the statistics from other Western democracies without relying on advocacy websites to summarize for you.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my post. This is not for a grade at all, but rather a quick essay I wrote up in about 45 minutes to send to a friend of mine. I never intended it to be formal to begin with, I should have stated that to begin with, sorry.
I really don't see how I'm cherrypicking or comparing unrelated data. I merely looked at the laws and statistics of various countries, analyzed the data for over a year (firearms law is a bit of a hobby of mine) and merely shared (in the essay) the results of the particular law in that country. I did this, because the number one argument against gun ownership that the gun control lobby puts forth is that "Europe banned guns and they have no crime," when both statements are clearly not true. So I deliberately analyzed that claim and proved it to be bunk, as it's a claim that my anti-gun friend often uses. You yourself said that you're a Canadian and you are a legal gun owner, thus disproving his theory that people in other countries don't have guns. If you would like, could you please elaborate on where exactly I am cherrypicking data that supports gun ownership, while ignoring data against it?
As for sourcing, you raise some valid points. I've been using justfacts.org as a source for quite a while and from my experience, they aren't an interest group out to push an agenda; they seem to do a good job presenting the data in an unbiased manner, letting the reader draw their own conclusions, and they always cite their sources. You're absolutely correct though, Wikipedia isn't a valid source for any sort of scholarly material. I wasn't using Wikipedia to acquire any statistics or specific firearms laws, but rather to simply prove that these mass shootings did occur. For instance, the only paragraph in which I sourced Wikipedia was this one:
So what about mass shootings? Will mass shootings stop if we ban semi-automatic rifles and/or so-called “assault weapons?” Both Australia and the United Kingdom experienced mass shootings after their gun bans. In Australia there was the Monash University massacre in 2004 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monash_University_shooting) and in the United Kingdom there was the Dunblane massacre in 1996 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre) and Cumbria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria_shootings) massacre in 2010. Prior to the 1997 Hungerford massacre in the United Kingdom, which led to the 1988 ban on semi-automatic firearms, there were zero mass shootings in Great Britain. In the United States we experienced arguably the worst school shooting in American history, the Columbine High School massacre, which was committed during a time in which both “assault weapons” and so-called “high capacity magazines” were banned.
I fully recognize that my writing style needs serious improvement. When writing academic essays, I try to write formally and use the Chicago style of citation, but even my formal writing needs serious improvement. I suppose this is largely because I practically taught myself formal writing, rather than ever actually taking a class and learning the proper way of doing things, instead I developed my own quirks and own manner of writing.
I thought that's what I was trying to do, as a large portion of my original post covered gun control laws and crime statistics from Australia, the United Kingdom and mainland Europe. Sorry I didn't touch on Canada, I wrote this rather quickly and it's by no means all-inclusive. I am somewhat aware of Canada's firearm laws, but please correct me if I'm wrong on anything:
-Handguns are legal but need to be registered and licensed, but long guns do not require registration.
-Handguns can be carried in public if you have a permit to do so, but permits are rather difficult to obtain.
-Semi-automatic rifles are legal, provided their magazine holds five rounds or less.
-Fully automatic machineguns are banned, but owners prior to the ban can keep their weapons, which have been grandfathered in.
Thanks again for reading my post and taking the time to constructively reply. :)
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I really don't see how I'm cherrypicking or comparing unrelated data. I merely looked at the laws and statistics of various countries, analyzed the data for over a year (firearms law is a bit of a hobby of mine) and merely shared (in the essay) the results of the particular law in that country. I did this, because the number one argument against gun ownership that the gun control lobby puts forth is that "Europe banned guns and they have no crime," when both statements are clearly not true. So I deliberately analyzed that claim and proved it to be bunk, as it's a claim that my anti-gun friend often uses. You yourself said that you're a Canadian and you are a legal gun owner, thus disproving his theory that people in other countries don't have guns. If you would like, could you please elaborate on where exactly I am cherrypicking data that supports gun ownership, while ignoring data against it?
So you're trying to disprove a massively hyperbolic statement? Not any real facts?
I mean, of course there's gun crime in other countries. Even the strictest of laws won't prevent that (because criminals, as a rule, don't obey the law). That you took the assertion that other countries do not have gun crimes at face value speaks more to your gullibity than anything else.
But all statistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate) I have been able to find point towards guns being used way more often in the US, whether in crimes, suicides, or lethal accidents, than in any other first-world country.
I am a strong proponent of gun control, given that I believe that guns do not have a place in daily life for the vast majority of people in my country (Germany, btw). I concede that it's a different issue for more frontiery countries like the US or Canada or Oz, where guns (subtype: Hunting rifles) still have legitimate uses. But the bottom line for me is that the vast majority of people cannot be trusted with the kind of power guns represent. That isn't meant to be a slur against anyone's character, it's just the simple matter that handling a gun responsibly and safely at all times requires discipline and training, and that is something that takes time to acquire. There are far too many incidents of kids playing with guns and killing themselves or others for me to ever be comfortable with the idea of keeping firearms inside a home.
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I really don't see how I'm cherrypicking or comparing unrelated data. I merely looked at the laws and statistics of various countries, analyzed the data for over a year (firearms law is a bit of a hobby of mine) and merely shared (in the essay) the results of the particular law in that country. I did this, because the number one argument against gun ownership that the gun control lobby puts forth is that "Europe banned guns and they have no crime," when both statements are clearly not true. So I deliberately analyzed that claim and proved it to be bunk, as it's a claim that my anti-gun friend often uses. You yourself said that you're a Canadian and you are a legal gun owner, thus disproving his theory that people in other countries don't have guns. If you would like, could you please elaborate on where exactly I am cherrypicking data that supports gun ownership, while ignoring data against it?
You've made a disingenuous argument because you focus on the idea of weapons bans in the United States while pointing out that other countries don't have weapons bans either, but then completely fail to look at the stringent regulatory regimes in those countries (which do work - the problem with the statistics you're using is that they focus on homicide, instead of all firearms-related violent crime and death rates). The US propensity toward greater rates of violent crime and firearms-related violence is due in part to a cultural difference between the US and other countries with gun-culture, and lax firearms laws in the United States. This is particularly notable in the rates of firearms-related deaths, because accidental deaths in the United States due to firearms causes are leaps and bounds beyond any of its comparator nations.
Anyone who is arguing Europe has no firearms-related crime is being a moron anyway, but that doesn't excuse the glossing over or misrepresentation of statistics and the legal framework in those countries. Looking at the experiences in most Western democracies, firearms bans don't work but firearms regulation sure as hell does. One day the United States might catch onto that.
I thought that's what I was trying to do, as a large portion of my original post covered gun control laws and crime statistics from Australia, the United Kingdom and mainland Europe. Sorry I didn't touch on Canada, I wrote this rather quickly and it's by no means all-inclusive. I am somewhat aware of Canada's firearm laws, but please correct me if I'm wrong on anything:
-Handguns are legal but need to be registered and licensed, but long guns do not require registration.
-Handguns can be carried in public if you have a permit to do so, but permits are rather difficult to obtain.
-Semi-automatic rifles are legal, provided their magazine holds five rounds or less.
-Fully automatic machineguns are banned, but owners prior to the ban can keep their weapons, which have been grandfathered in.
What you neglected to do is look at all firearms-related violence and death statistics, and that's where the flaws in your argument come from.
For Canada, our national firearms-related violence and death rates are considerably lower than the US. Regionally, some American states fare better than some Canadian provinces, and vice versa. Where this gets confounded is because you cannot compare provinces to states, you must compare legal jurisdiction to jursidiction (this is where your argument also falls down in talking about other countries). In the United States, the regulatory system is partially federal but primarily at the state level. In virtually all of the comparator countries, the regulatory system is national. This is very important - States with lax regulatory regimes (Idaho) often have lower firearms-related crime than some of the States with greater regulation that are nearby. Why? Demographics and mobility. It is really easy to cross a state border illegally with a firearm and not get caught - it's really hard to cross a national border. Similarly, Idaho (which is oft-cited when debating Canada vs US) is not a socially-diverse state, and doesn't experience the same general crime rates as other states. That has nothing to do with guns. So, when other countries talk about their regulatory regimes, they get to impose them on an entire country which breeds consistently and makes the law much clearer and easier to enforce. This is not true in the US.
In terms of actual Canadian laws, the short version:
- All owners and users of firearms require a license. The licensing system has mandatory background and criminal record checks. It is a national system. In order to obtain a license, you must take a mandatory safety course.
- There are three license endorsements: non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited. They correspond to three classes of firearms. Long guns fall into all three categories, depending on the weapon. Handguns are all either restricted or prohibited. Prohibited licenses are only available to people who owned prohibited-class weapons when the law came into effect and their direct inheritors.
- The regulatory system imposes several requirements on the handling, transport, and storage of all firearms. These requirements differ by firearm class and get progressively more stringent.
- All restricted and prohibited class weapons are individually registered by owner. Non-restricted weapons are not.
- Restricted class weapons require permits for transport, are subject to transport conditions, and generally may not be carried under any circumstances. Use is legally confined to private property and gun ranges, typically (there are some exceptions). These same basic requirements apply to prohibited-class as well.
- Fully automatic weapons are all in the prohibited class.
- Semi-automatic magazines above certain capacity are either restricted or prohibited.
- Semi-automatic weapons may be non-restricted, restricted, or prohibited depending on the weapon.
So you are correct in stating Canada does not have a ban on certain weapons, because we actually don't have a ban on any weapons. What we have is a stringent classification and licensing system. Some prohibited-class weapons are for all-intents-and-purposes banned because no one has a license for them any longer, but prohibited-class does not automatically mean a weapon is banned in Canada. I carry prohibited weapons legally for work, as do many other types of law enforcement and some other occupations (most police and armed security organizations issue prohibited weapons to their employees).
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I concede that it's a different issue for more frontiery countries like the US or Canada or Oz, where guns (subtype: Hunting rifles) still have legitimate uses. But the bottom line for me is that the vast majority of people cannot be trusted with the kind of power guns represent. That isn't meant to be a slur against anyone's character, it's just the simple matter that handling a gun responsibly and safely at all times requires discipline and training, and that is something that takes time to acquire. There are far too many incidents of kids playing with guns and killing themselves or others for me to ever be comfortable with the idea of keeping firearms inside a home.
Firearms are a tool, and I generally contend that as long as a deadly tool has strict regulation, training, safety, and possession requirements, the risk is manageable. Where firearms use falls apart is when you mix arrogance, lack of training, ideology, availability, and/or criminality together.
I think some countries have gotten their firearms policies generally right (since the abolition of the non-restricted registry, I place Canada in that category). Other countries have gotten it wrong for a long time (the United States being example number 1).
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more guns, bigger guns, better guns and the right to bear nukes to all!
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(http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mej39z5XrY1qje6oyo1_400.jpg)
Like this?
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Technically speaking, if you use the whole "Right to bear arms" claus...
Nukes are arms. See, it doesn't specifically say "Firearms" and "arms" is more short form for "armament"
And what are High Explosives but armament? Swords? Americans have the right to bear swords too!
So each American has a right to bear nukes in the basement if they so wanted to!
-Handguns can be carried in public if you have a permit to do so, but permits are rather difficult to obtain.
An Authorization To Transport (ATT) is actually a fairly easy to obtain permit which allows DIRECT transportation to and fro your house and a firing range. Your restricted and/or prohibited firearm must be trigger locked and in a locked container (double seal) in order for it to be transported *legally*
http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cfp-pcaf/fs-fd/restr-eng.htm
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I saw the title of this and immediately thought that there is no way this thread goes anywhere but downhill.
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I saw the title of this and immediately thought that there is no way this thread goes anywhere but downhill.
Whether it does or it doesn't, please don't encourage it with a post such as this.
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Technically speaking, if you use the whole "Right to bear arms" claus...
Nukes are arms. See, it doesn't specifically say "Firearms" and "arms" is more short form for "armament"
And what are High Explosives but armament? Swords? Americans have the right to bear swords too!
So each American has a right to bear nukes in the basement if they so wanted to!
While I've never heard of people owning nukes, I do know about this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IeEa8tqUkE
Another point to this discussion- how many firearms used for crime are legally owned, by people who have permits?
How many people on a shooting spree respect gun free zones?
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As MP-Ryan mentioned, it is terribly easy to read statistics the way you want so that they support your opinions.
From Finland (Actually, Fennoscandia in general), I can tell that we have very little firearms related deaths or accidents, but our homicide rates are comparatively high. This is because firearms are generally NOT used in the homicides - culturally you are much more likely to die because of a drunken fight where possibly knives or rocks are used. But no firearms, that's a sort of no-no here. There are very few actual murders, but lots of killings; the difference between these two is that murder is pre-planned, while killing is a more random event. Even an officer has lot to answer for if he draws and fires a weapon. Every shot by the officers is investigated meticulously, and god forbid if the result is that it was unnecessary to do that (I don't recall seeing that).
Actually, even poaching has very strict punishments, meaning that if you are caught hunting an animal out-of-season, you'll lose everything that you used to commit this crime to the government. And I mean literally, everything, including the gun, vehicle, snow mobile, etc. etc. They'll sell your stuff for a profit then, and you'll never see a dime of that money. And on top of that, they'll issue you a fine. A very hefty fine, I'd say.
Sometimes I wish they'd take similar position for drinking under influence - do that and you'll get a fine and lose your car!
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Technically speaking, if you use the whole "Right to bear arms" claus...
Nukes are arms. See, it doesn't specifically say "Firearms" and "arms" is more short form for "armament"
And what are High Explosives but armament? Swords? Americans have the right to bear swords too!
So each American has a right to bear nukes in the basement if they so wanted to!
While I've never heard of people owning nukes, I do know about this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IeEa8tqUkE
That guy could easily have used some simple mathematics to hit that damned trailer
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Another point to this discussion- how many firearms used for crime are legally owned, by people who have permits?
That depends: Are you counting suicide?
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that is... not a crime
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that is... not a crime
But does frequently get you locked up.
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Sure it is, it's just one that can never be prosecuted for a successful incidence on the part of the victim.
To wit, people are not allowed to commit suicide, the same way people are not allowed to steal. It happens anyway.
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It's quite a difference if somethings illegal/a crime or if it's just a taboo/socially forbidden...
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While that's true, suicide is not "socially forbidden" as much as it is illegal, because you can and will get locked up (granted for your own safety) for it.
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It's quite a difference if somethings illegal/a crime or if it's just a taboo/socially forbidden...
Suicide is defined as a criminal offense in many/most Common Law-derived jurisdictions. This is slowly changing.
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While suicide itself, in the United States, is not treated as an illegal act (I believe some states still have law on the books against attempts), it will still get a person who fails locked up in a great many circumstances and in the case where a person had help, will get anyone who aided said person charged with manslaughter. I'd argue that while there's nothing on the books, it's still very much considered a crime in The United States.
As others have said, it is still illegal in other countries.
And my main point was that suicide gets thrown in with a lot of those statistics because it beefs up the numbers.
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Guess it's kinda nitpicking, but i'm really surprised about this. Around here suicide itself isn't illegal. You'll be locked up if you attempt to (and survive, of course), but on another legal basis - suicide is not seen as a crime, but as a symptome of mental illness. Basically, you loose your right of self-determination because you're not considered sane anymore, and that's why you're locked up - you aren't considered to be able to make rational decisions anymore, and might pose a threat to yourself or others.
Didn't know suicide is considered as an actual crime in some other nations...
And my main point was that suicide gets thrown in with a lot of those statistics because it beefs up the numbers.
With the gun-policy debate in mind, it might be interesting to see how much the numbers of successful/attempted suicides differ between nations with strict weapon regulations and nations with more liberal ones.
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They want to off themselves let them
So long as they're doing it somewhere that doesn't involve other people
Like bridges. How many people caused so many traffic problems because they were having second thoughts about jumping a few hundred feet off a bridge...
Sidenote: If I recall, the majority of firearm related deaths in Canada are attributed to suicide
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This is generally where I stop in gun related topics
http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3295&context=wmlr
http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/guns.pdf
Every legal reference in history to the right to keep and bear arms has referred to it as an individual right. The first recorded use of the 'right to keep and bear arms' comes from the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which referred explicitly to an individual right. Fourty-four of the fifty states protect the right to keep in their state constitutions and this right refers to an individual right in all fourty-four of them. The right to keep and bear arms has always referred to an individual right in the constitutions of other nations as well. Islamic law also calls for governments to respect for the individual right of the people to bear arms, though this right is not generally respected by Muslim countries in practice. The ancient religion of Zoroastrianism also called for the people to take up arms against unjust governments. The Second Amendment does not create any new rights, it only protects a pre-existing natural right that all sapient beings have. This has been proven time and time again by the Founding Fathers, the United States Supreme Court, John Locke and countless classical liberal philosophers.
Now lets look at United States case law and legal precedent for the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms in general. As previously mentioned, the first recorded legal usage of the right to keep and bear arms comes from the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Prior to the formation of the United States, the Thirteen Colonies also had a long-standing history of having a right to bear arms, which included the right to self-defense. Prior to the United States Constitution being formed, states that had declared their independence from Great Britain had protected the right to bear arms in their state constitutions and it included the right to self-defense. For instance, the 1776 Constitution of Pennsylvania states that "the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state." When the United States Constitution was being drafted and ratified, the Founding Fathers stated explicitly that the right to bear arms was a right of the people, not a "right of the militia" as some gun control advocates claim. In fact, many of the Founding Fathers wanted to require every free citizen to own a gun, viewing it as a civic duty. I will provide a list of these quotes from the Founding Fathers towards the end of this post.
Interpretation of the Second Amendment has always been that of recognizing it as an individual right. In fact, it was most commonly interpreted as a right that cannot under any circumstances be restricted or limited. Even foreigners held this view, including William Blackstone, who wrote about it in his Commentaries on the Laws of England. The Second Amendment uses the term "shall not be infringed," which not only states that the right to keep and bear arms is a pre-existing natural right, but also that it shall not be infringed upon. In fact, the only real criticism levied against the Second Amendment, was by those who thought it didn't provide enough protection to the right to bear arms. St. George Tucker and William Rawle, two lawyers and abolitionists (and in the case of Tucker, a Virginia Supreme Court justice) were among those who criticized the Second Amendment for not protecting the rights of gun owners enough. Tucker and Rawle argued that the Second Amendment needed to have provisions in order to help the poor be able to exercise their right to bear arms; they viewed this as difficult under the current laws, seeing as how many poor people couldn't afford firearms. Joseph Story, an early federal Supreme Court justice wrote in his work, Commentaries on the Constitution, that: "The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them." Story also wrote that the right to bear arms is a natural right. The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that all restrictions placed on the federal government also apply to state and local governments. One of the main reasons this amendment was added to the Constitution was because former slave states would often times refuse to allow freed slaves to bear arms, which violated their rights as protected under the Second Amendment.
It wasn't until the late 20th and early 19th century that racist Democrats tried to re-interpret the Second Amendment to mean a collective right to form state militias, in order to prevent blacks from owning guns. Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that the Second Amendment is an individual right, however it also ruled that the Second Amendment did not apply to slaves. United States v. Cruikshank, Presser v. Illinois and Miller v. Texas ruled that the Second Amendment is an individual right, however, it also ruled that the First and Second Amendments only limit the federal government. United States v. Miller ruled that that: "These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense," which is to say that the people consist of the militia. United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez ruled that the Second Amendment (and the Bill of Rights in general) was an individual right that also applied to non-citizen aliens. United States v. Lopez ruled that the so-called "Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990" violated the Second Amendment and was unconstitutional. United States v. Emerson, District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago reaffirmed that the Second Amendment refers to an individual right that applies to state and local governments, as well as the federal government. Moore v. Madigan ruled that the ban on concealed carry in Illinois violated the Second Amendment and was thus unconstitutional, requiring Illinois to adopt concealed carry.
Lets also take a look at what the Founding Fathers had to say about the Second Amendment and right to bear arms:
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks." -Thomas Jefferson
"One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them." -Thomas Jefferson
"We established however some, although not all its [self-government] important principles . The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, in all cases to which they think themselves competent, (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves, in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved,) or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed;" -Thomas Jefferson
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -Thomas Jefferson
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin
"To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character." -Alexander Hamilton
"[The Constitution preserves] the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation...(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." -James Madison
"To suppose arms in the hands of citizens, to be used at individual discretion, except in private self-defense, or by partial orders of towns, countries or districts of a state, is to demolish every constitution, and lay the laws prostrate, so that liberty can be enjoyed by no man; it is a dissolution of the government. The fundamental law of the militia is, that it be created, directed and commanded by the laws, and ever for the support of the laws." -John Adams
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive. " -Noah Webster
"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man gainst his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American...[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people." -Tenche Coxe
"[The new government] shall be too firmly fixed in the saddle to be overthrown by anything but a general insurrection." -William Symmes
"[A standing army] if raised, whether they could subdue a nation of freemen, who know how to prize liberty, and who have arms in their hands?" -Theodore Sedwick
"[W]hereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them; nor does it follow from this, that all promiscuously must go into actual service on every occasion. The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it." -Richard Henry Lee
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined." -Patrick Henry
"O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone...Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation...inflicted by those who had no power at all?" -Patrick Henry
"[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually...I ask, who are the militia? They consist of now of the whole people, except a few public officers. But I cannot say who will be the militia of the future day. If that paper on the table gets no alteration, the militia of the future day may not consist of all classes, high and low, and rich and poor..." -George Mason
"[T]he people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them." -Zacharia Johnson
"That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power." -Virginia delegation to the constitutional convention
"The whole of that Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals...t establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of." -Albert Gallatin
"[C]onceived it to be the privilege of every citizen, and one of his most essential rights, to bear arms, and to resist every attack upon his liberty or property, by whomsoever made. The particular states, like private citizens, have a right to be armed, and to defend, by force of arms, their rights, when invaded." -Roger Sherman
Sources
http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/beararms/statecon.htm
https://supreme.justia.com/us/92/542/case.html
https://supreme.justia.com/us/116/252/case.html
https://supreme.justia.com/us/307/174/case.html
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1521.pdf
https://supreme.justia.com/us/60/393/case.html
http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/153/535/case.html
http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publishing/preview/publiced_preview_briefs_pdfs_09_10_08_1521_PetitionerAmCuHeartlandInst.authcheckdam.pdf
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689
http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndfqu.html
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Nakura:
So you're basically saying that, because some people involved in a civil uprising 2 centuries ago in a country with vast stretches of wild land who didn't want a standing army thought that guaranteeing the right to keep firearms would be a good idea, it is now the absolute right of anyone living in a modern city to carry around fully automatic rifles?
The question of gun control is ultimately one about "how many guns does one person need?" Does the average american really need a gun (given that according to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country), there are 94 guns for every hundred citizens)?
I submit to you that this plethora of firearms causes more problems than it solves. It certainly hasn't kept the government in check, except when it comes to the issue of gun control.
Lastly, let me comment on some of those quotes you used.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin
Define "essential liberty". Is the ability to kill someone else part of the essential liberties every citizen should expect to have?
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive. " -Noah Webster
Funny, given that America has not struggled one little bit against the foreign (arguably inhuman and inhumane) invaders that have taken it over (AKA corporations).
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Yep. We had one "mass" shooting since the assault weapon ban. Look at the rate of them drop off at the same time. Gun control worked in Australia, there's very little legitimate doubt about that.
Actually, Australian scholars and statisticians have deemed the Australian gun ban an utter failure, as mentioned in the original post. The ban didn't lower crime rates and you still experienced another mass shooting. Australia had widespread gun ownership, a strong gun culture and lenient gun laws up until 1987, yet they never experienced any mass shootings and had traditionally had low crime rates. It wasn't until the mid-1980s that you experienced any sort of "mass shootings," which were sparked from motorcycle gang wars. Seeing as you had virtually no strict gun control laws until 1987 and no mass shootings or violent crime until that time, it would be ridiculous to blame guns and law abiding gun owners for Port Arthur and the like.
(Bold mine)
No, they really haven't. (http://theconversation.com/faking-waves-how-the-nra-and-pro-gun-americans-abuse-australian-crime-stats-11678)
I should know better than to wade into another gun control argument, especially one framed as 'argue with me so I can drown you in citations' (http://url=http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=84920.msg1696495#msg1696495), but it's a pet topic of mine so I can't help at least calling you on blatant misrepresentation of statistics. Gun control worked quite well in Australia - it resulted in a significant reduction in suicides (this is an issue which is often ignored in gun control debates) a marginal reduction in homicides, and we haven't had a mass shooting since.
Given we're talking about the US where you almost have one gun for every man, woman and child, it's almost a pointless comparison. Your country's idea of gun control is to tut-tut someone if they leave a loaded handgun where the kids can get it.
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Nakura:
So you're basically saying that, because some people involved in a civil uprising 2 centuries ago in a country with vast stretches of wild land who didn't want a standing army thought that guaranteeing the right to keep firearms would be a good idea, it is now the absolute right of anyone living in a modern city to carry around fully automatic rifles?
The question of gun control is ultimately one about "how many guns does one person need?" Does the average american really need a gun (given that according to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country), there are 94 guns for every hundred citizens)?
I submit to you that this plethora of firearms causes more problems than it solves. It certainly hasn't kept the government in check, except when it comes to the issue of gun control.
Lastly, let me comment on some of those quotes you used.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin
Define "essential liberty". Is the ability to kill someone else part of the essential liberties every citizen should expect to have?
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive. " -Noah Webster
Funny, given that America has not struggled one little bit against the foreign (arguably inhuman and inhumane) invaders that have taken it over (AKA corporations).
"They did this a long time ago, therefore it is bad." That is never a valid argument. Also, it seems you are unaware of firearms law in the United States, despite me posting a five page essay educating you about it in this very thread. Fully automatic rifles have been heavily regulated since the 1930s and were effectively banned in the 1980s. In addition, even prior to the 1987 Hughes Amendment, which banned machineguns, it was still illegal to carry them in public.
Why the hell does it matter how many guns someone owns? Owning more guns doesn't make you more prone to become a criminal. Who in the world has 'logic' like that? "I have five guns now, whereas I used to only have three, so now I'm going to go mug that kid down the street." Yes, every citizen should bear arms, it's their civic duty to defend freedom. Not to mention the fact that, as previously pointed out, firearms are used for self-defense up to ten times more than they are used to commit crimes, and how statistics show that higher gun ownership rates result in lower crime rates.
There is no "right to kill someone," kiddo. The fact that you even believe that owning a gun makes you a murderer is rather telling of your views. You do, however, have the right to self-defense.
Seeing as most corporations operating in the United States are American corporations, not British/French/etc. ones, I fail to see your point. Also, you fail to understand politics. Corporations in their own right aren't inherently wrong, but I'm sure you don't believe that. The only problem is that some corporations and yes, labour unions as well, have considerable influence over our government. Despite what you may believe, a number of Americans, myself included, are strong proponents of campaign finance reform.
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"They did this a long time ago, therefore it is bad." That is never a valid argument.
Neither is "they did this a long time ago, therefore it is good".
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Why the hell does it matter how many guns someone owns? Owning more guns doesn't make you more prone to become a criminal. Who in the world has 'logic' like that? "I have five guns now, whereas I used to only have three, so now I'm going to go mug that kid down the street."
No, but it certainly makes you more likely to kill yourself. (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923)
Yes, every citizen should bear arms, it's their civic duty to defend freedom.
From who? What are you and your tacti-cool AR-15 going to do if China invades? Or are you worried Obama will come to put you in a FEMA camp somewhere?
Not to mention the fact that, as previously pointed out, firearms are used for self-defense up to ten times more than they are used to commit crimes
If you're talking about the Kleck figures, they've been pretty thoroughly discredited by now. (http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1144020?uid=3737536&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101640053813)
and how statistics show that higher gun ownership rates result in lower crime rates.
No, statistics may correlate between higher gun ownership rates and lower crime rates, but this doesn't actually mean anything. It's a bit like how ice cream sales correlate with murder rates.
Gun ownership tends to be high in rural areas where there is very low population density. Funnily enough, those same areas have low crime rates (because of the lower population density). This is a common-cause relationship, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_causation) which you have mangled to fit your worldview.
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"They did this a long time ago, therefore it is bad." That is never a valid argument. Also, it seems you are unaware of firearms law in the United States, despite me posting a five page essay educating you about it in this very thread. Fully automatic rifles have been heavily regulated since the 1930s and were effectively banned in the 1980s. In addition, even prior to the 1987 Hughes Amendment, which banned machineguns, it was still illegal to carry them in public.
My real argument was more "They did this during a time that had vastly different social values, a vastly different societal structure, and a country to establish". I am unsure whether laws created to help during that time are still applicable today, or whether they need to be amended to reflect actual reality.
As for me being unfamiliar with US firearms law: Guilty as charged. I'm a commie european, I do not like guns, and I do absolutely abhor the idea of allowing everyone to have one.
Why the hell does it matter how many guns someone owns? Owning more guns doesn't make you more prone to become a criminal.
I must have missed the part where I made a connection to gun owners being criminals, or having a tendency to be. I am reasonably sure that the vast majority of gun owners are perfectly ordinary and decent citizens; still, that does not mean that they can actually be trusted with the power represented by a gun.
Guns are incredibly dangerous tools. Can you guarantee that every single one of those citizens who owns one has the ability and inclination to handle them responsibly? Accidents will always happen, that's a matter of fact. With guns, those accidents will have a higher-than-average rate of being deadly. Combine that with large numbers of people, and you get a ****ton of preventable accidents that didn't need to happen.
Who in the world has 'logic' like that? "I have five guns now, whereas I used to only have three, so now I'm going to go mug that kid down the street." Yes, every citizen should bear arms, it's their civic duty to defend freedom.
Right.
Yeah.
About that. What does "Freedom" mean? Cos I'm pretty sure that my definition differs from yours.
Not to mention the fact that, as previously pointed out, firearms are used for self-defense up to ten times more than they are used to commit crimes, and how statistics show that higher gun ownership rates result in lower crime rates.
Really? Do they show that? Globally? Because last time I checked the crime stats for my country, crime rates were going down across the board while gun ownership rates went down or stayed stable.
There is no "right to kill someone," kiddo. The fact that you even believe that owning a gun makes you a murderer is rather telling of your views. You do, however, have the right to self-defense.
So "right to kill in self defence" is not "killing"? Good to know, that.
Also note that I spoke about the ability to kill, which is distinct from the right to do so. Yes, I know, technically an unarmed human has all the tools he needs to kill others, but guns, as tools purpose-built to end lives, make this much easier.
Seeing as most corporations operating in the United States are American corporations, not British/French/etc. ones, I fail to see your point.
Look at the public behaviour of corporations. Any corporation you care to name will show up under a psychological profile as a high-functioning sociopath. Corporations, as a rule, do not care about human beings, or even other corporations. Their interests are not aligned with that of society at large. As such, they can certainly be classified as inhuman and inhumane entities, regardless of where they are incorporated.
Also, you fail to understand politics. Corporations in their own right aren't inherently wrong, but I'm sure you don't believe that. The only problem is that some corporations and yes, labour unions as well, have considerable influence over our government. Despite what you may believe, a number of Americans, myself included, are strong proponents of campaign finance reform.
Good to know. When are you going to use those guns of yours to make that change? Seriously, wasn't that the reason for allowing you to have them in the first place, to give the citizenship the ability to overthrow the government if it became too corrupt?
Oh, and just so you know? I think that Corporations as legal persons is one of the worst invention in the history of mankind.
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Corporations as people is one very interesting concept. Makes it abundantly clear what kind of a "human" these law makers really think "humans" are. And if we are to believe The_E's take on their psychological profiles (I for one agree), then we do live in an age where the human being is mostly defined as a psychopathic egotistic rational agent.
I'm rambling OT, sorry (then again, I have trouble accepting this gun conversation is worthy per se).
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No, but it certainly makes you more likely to kill yourself. (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923)
If you ban guns, people will just kill themselves by other means. Besides, I thought you supported the right to die? Also, despite what the media would have you believe, firearms-related accidents have been on the decline for years, while at the same time gun ownership rates have been rising.
From who? What are you and your tacti-cool AR-15 going to do if China invades? Or are you worried Obama will come to put you in a FEMA camp somewhere?
Nice strawman. For defense of themselves and of freedom, from enemies both foreign and domestic. Every citizen should also serve society in some manner (such as military service) before making decisions for society (voting or running for office). The only people who deserve freedom are those willing to defend and die for it.
If you're talking about the Kleck figures, they've been pretty thoroughly discredited by now. (http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1144020?uid=3737536&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101640053813)
I covered this in my original post, didn't you read it? It was a study from the Center for Disease Control: http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2013/Priorities-for-Research-to-Reduce-the-Threat-of-Firearm-Related-Violence.aspx
No, statistics may correlate between higher gun ownership rates and lower crime rates, but this doesn't actually mean anything. It's a bit like how ice cream sales correlate with murder rates.
Gun ownership tends to be high in rural areas where there is very low population density. Funnily enough, those same areas have low crime rates (because of the lower population density). This is a common-cause relationship, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_causation) which you have mangled to fit your worldview.
Correlation doesn't equal causation, but it certainly can paint such a picture. I wasn't referring to urban vs rural areas, though that is a valid argument. Virtually everyone in small towns and rural is a gun owner, yet there is no virtually violent crime; whereas virtually nobody owns a gun in urban areas, yet there violent crime is commonplace. If you don't like rural communities, then take a look at urban areas, such as the District of Columbia and Chicago, where gun bans correlate with higher violent crime rates.
Also take a look at the United Kingdom, which has seen higher violent crime rates since it implemented strict restrictions on gun ownership in the 1960s. Violent crime rates rose even sharper in the United Kingdom after the gun bans in 1987 and 1997. In addition, countries that have higher gun ownership rates (Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, etc.) have lower violent crime rates than those with very few gun owners (Belarus, Lithuania, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, etc.).
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The only people who deserve freedom are those willing to defend and die for it.
What kind of fascistic crap is this?
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My real argument was more "They did this during a time that had vastly different social values, a vastly different societal structure, and a country to establish". I am unsure whether laws created to help during that time are still applicable today, or whether they need to be amended to reflect actual reality.
As for me being unfamiliar with US firearms law: Guilty as charged. I'm a commie european, I do not like guns, and I do absolutely abhor the idea of allowing everyone to have one.
Fair enough. America is still a society that values it's freedom and guns, and we still believe in the classical liberal values that this nation was founded upon. Today around 50% of all families have a gun in their home and that rate is much higher depending on where you live. In addition, gun ownership rates have actually been on the rise over the past 20 years, plus more and more women (a previously underrepresented group) are starting to own guns.
I must have missed the part where I made a connection to gun owners being criminals, or having a tendency to be. I am reasonably sure that the vast majority of gun owners are perfectly ordinary and decent citizens; still, that does not mean that they can actually be trusted with the power represented by a gun.
Guns are incredibly dangerous tools. Can you guarantee that every single one of those citizens who owns one has the ability and inclination to handle them responsibly? Accidents will always happen, that's a matter of fact. With guns, those accidents will have a higher-than-average rate of being deadly. Combine that with large numbers of people, and you get a ****ton of preventable accidents that didn't need to happen.
You said that the problem is how many guns people have. Why does it matter if a law abiding citizen owns 1 gun or 20 guns? Owning "a lot" of guns doesn't make someone more prone to go on a murderous rampage. Thank you for pointing that out, this is what it really boils down to; gun control advocates think people are too stupid to make decisions for themselves. High schools in the United States used to teach gun safety, but it was the gun control lobby that put an end to gun safety. Meanwhile, the NRA is the largest gun safety and training organization in the country.
About that. What does "Freedom" mean? Cos I'm pretty sure that my definition differs from yours.
This is the tragedy of Europe. Everything has changed on the surface, but nothing has changed deep down. They're still a society of serfdom and oligarchy, but the oligarchs of today have enough sense to hide their affluence.
Really? Do they show that? Globally? Because last time I checked the crime stats for my country, crime rates were going down across the board while gun ownership rates went down or stayed stable.
What country?
So "right to kill in self defence" is not "killing"? Good to know, that.
Also note that I spoke about the ability to kill, which is distinct from the right to do so. Yes, I know, technically an unarmed human has all the tools he needs to kill others, but guns, as tools purpose-built to end lives, make this much easier.
You can kill someone with anything. In fact, you're far more likely to be killed with a hammer (in the US) than you are any kind of rifle, including the "scary looking rifles" that the gun control lobby is trying to ban here. Firearms have a ton of uses other than killing people. And yes, you do have the right to kill someone in self-defense. I hope I never have to, but if necessary, I would kill someone to save the people I care about.
Look at the public behaviour of corporations. Any corporation you care to name will show up under a psychological profile as a high-functioning sociopath. Corporations, as a rule, do not care about human beings, or even other corporations. Their interests are not aligned with that of society at large. As such, they can certainly be classified as inhuman and inhumane entities, regardless of where they are incorporated.
The primary goal of a corporation is to generate money for it's shareholders, I'm not denying that.
Good to know. When are you going to use those guns of yours to make that change? Seriously, wasn't that the reason for allowing you to have them in the first place, to give the citizenship the ability to overthrow the government if it became too corrupt?
Oh, and just so you know? I think that Corporations as legal persons is one of the worst invention in the history of mankind.
Sorry, I shouldn't have said that you don't understand American politics, that was unnecessary and rude. I suppose I got a little fired up back there, no pun intended.
I hope I never have to use firearms to bring about change; as a general rule, I believe firearms should only be used to bring about change as a last resort. As long as there are peaceful means to change the system, we should remain peaceful. The government has "become" corrupt, but we can still change it through democratic means.
To be honest, I don't have enough information on laws surrounding corporate personhood to form an opinion one way or the other. Perhaps once I have studied the subject more in depth, we can have a discussion on it?
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The only people who deserve freedom are those willing to defend and die for it.
What kind of fascistic crap is this?
I see you're using that word, I don't think it means what you think it mean.
I believe that the root of many of society's problems is that people always focus on their "rights" and "privileges," but never on their duties and responsibilities.
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It is fascistic and self-contradictory. You aren't the one who is going to define what freedom is and what criteria the society should have wrt who "deserves" it or not. Freedom either exists or doesn't, and if it does, then it matters little if people are or aren't "worth it" by some kind of blurting out on how they themselves will "risk their lives" to protect their own freedom and how others aren't worth their freedom because they haven't said some magical words or agreed to buckle up their own american armory on their belts.
Or perhaps the problem is that you haven't defined what you mean by freedom. Because it clearly isn't "freedom" as I understand it, it's more like a right of citizenship where you are being given certain freedoms and duties like showing off you have lotta guns in your armories so everyone knows how patriotic you are. Or something.
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Every citizen should also serve society in some manner (such as military service) before making decisions for society (voting or running for office). The only people who deserve freedom are those willing to defend and die for it.
And when did you serve, might I ask? This is a terrible idea. The fact that people aren't willing to waste their time in military service (or if they're not capable) doesn't make their opinions any less valuable. The entire reason that our military deserves are respect and gratitude is because they've volunteered their time and their lives so that other people wouldn't have to. Mandating military service would devalue that, but much more importantly flood the military with people that have better things to do and aren't needed. If the US ever needs oodles of conscripts that are incompetent and don't want to be there they have selective service. Don't like the idea of people that wouldn't join the military are voting? Tough ****. The entire point of democracy is letting everyone have a say in what's going on, being willing to die for it is something else entirely. I don't know how else to put it, but I'm just utterly disgusted by that last sentence. If you're willing to defend and die for freedom, military despotism should be the last thing you would support.
What kind of fascistic crap is this?
I see you're using that word, I don't think it means what you think it mean.
I believe that the root of many of society's problems is that people always focus on their "rights" and "privileges," but never on their duties and responsibilities.
No, that's exactly it. Rights and liberties are never contingent on fulfilling duties or responsibilities because the government is not allowed to take them away. The only acceptable reason to take them away is because the exercising of those rights or liberties somehow infringes upon someone else's rights or liberties. Interpret this how you will, me not joining the military is not hurting anyone's rights.
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Someone just had an overdose of Starship Troopers or smth.
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Correlation doesn't equal causation, but it certainly can paint such a picture. I wasn't referring to urban vs rural areas, though that is a valid argument. Virtually everyone in small towns and rural is a gun owner, yet there is no virtually violent crime; whereas virtually nobody owns a gun in urban areas, yet there violent crime is commonplace. If you don't like rural communities, then take a look at urban areas, such as the District of Columbia and Chicago, where gun bans correlate with higher violent crime rates.
Also take a look at the United Kingdom, which has seen higher violent crime rates since it implemented strict restrictions on gun ownership in the 1960s. Violent crime rates rose even sharper in the United Kingdom after the gun bans in 1987 and 1997. In addition, countries that have higher gun ownership rates (Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, etc.) have lower violent crime rates than those with very few gun owners (Belarus, Lithuania, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, etc.).
/me throws penalty flag and blows whistle
Hold it. I already talked earlier about the statistical problems of these claims about high gun ownership = less crime on page one.
First off, you can't compare apples to oranges. US firearms regulation is by state. Every other place you just named does it by country. You cannot compare the statistics of a state to an entire country. The United States figures have no meaning when compared against any other nation when it comes to gun ownership and its relationship with crime. Even comparing internally, crime rates have more to do with demographics that gun ownership. I think I mentioned Idaho before - Idaho has high gun ownership, and a low violent crime rate. Chicago has low [legal] gun ownership and a high violent crime rate. Does that mean the high gun ownership makes for lower crime? Absolutely not - this is a false correlation. There are other variables at play that have more impact on crime rate which are ignored by these simplistic two-factor statistics (which is exactly why the gun lobby uses them).
Second, every country defines "violent crime" differently. The violent crime rate in the UK is defined differently in the States, and addition measured offences have been added since the 1960s. The blip on the graph is not representing the UK as a more violent place than the United States, or even more violent than it was pre-gun ban. It represents a change in the statistical measurement of violent crime (also, crime rates overall have trended downward since the 1970s, but violent crime rates account for more of the total crimes in several countries because some crime is now measured as violent versus property offences when it used to be the opposite. Canada has experienced this same shift, though not as pronounced as the UK). Furthermore, this also ignores the effect of changing demographics again - the UK has undergone a major demographic shift since the 1960s.
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The gun lobby regularly trots out these same talking points as if it somehow advances their argument. Those of us who argue for stricter firearms regulations - myself included, despite being a licensed firearms owner/user - can see them for what they are in the first place, and know they're irrelevant anyway. Gun regulation has very little impact on crime rate in some places, and very great impact in others. Thee primary purpose of regulation is not to eliminate all crime; it's to make firearms ownership safer and more responsible. Firearms regulation - in every place it has been implemented - results in the following:
1. Reduces the number of accidental deaths in absolute terms, particularly of children, attributable to firearms.
2. Reduces the number of suicides (in absolute terms; suicide rates drop).
3. Is part of a larger societal shift that reduces the overall homicide rate (countries that have better firearms regulations tend to have lower homicide rates overall. The US cannot generally be included because of piecemeal state regulation).
Also, the next 2nd Amendment crusader that trots out that Ben Franklin quotation will be summarily shot, then shot again just to emphasize the point. It is virtually always used in the context of the gun debate, which is NOT the context in which old Ben used it in the first place. Stop it!
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And when did you serve, might I ask? This is a terrible idea. The fact that people aren't willing to waste their time in military service (or if they're not capable) doesn't make their opinions any less valuable. The entire reason that our military deserves are respect and gratitude is because they've volunteered their time and their lives so that other people wouldn't have to. Mandating military service would devalue that, but much more importantly flood the military with people that have better things to do and aren't needed. If the US ever needs oodles of conscripts that are incompetent and don't want to be there they have selective service. Don't like the idea of people that wouldn't join the military are voting? Tough ****. The entire point of democracy is letting everyone have a say in what's going on, being willing to die for it is something else entirely. I don't know how else to put it, but I'm just utterly disgusted by that last sentence. If you're willing to defend and die for freedom, military despotism should be the last thing you would support.
I have not proposed mandatory military service, but rather, I have proposed that in order to vote, run for office or teach any form of civics, you must first serve the state. Those unable to perform military service could perform a civil alternative. Also, before you bash conscription (which is not what I am proposing), please note that a number of first-world countries require their citizens to serve in the military before voting, such as Austria, Finland, Israel, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland and Taiwan. The United States required that every citizen own a firearm and undergo routine military training prior to 1903. The system I propose, which is loosely based on Robert Heinlein's ideas, is a democratic one in nature.
No, that's exactly it. Rights and liberties are never contingent on fulfilling duties or responsibilities because the government is not allowed to take them away. The only acceptable reason to take them away is because the exercising of those rights or liberties somehow infringes upon someone else's rights or liberties. Interpret this how you will, me not joining the military is not hurting anyone's rights.
Our nation was founded the premises that in order to enjoy freedom, you had to fight for it. The Founding Fathers required that every citizen own a firearm and undergo regular training. I am proposing something much more moderate than that. Those who do not wish to serve society will not be forced to do so and they will not be discriminated against in any way; the only thing they won't be able to do is vote, run for office or teach civics.
As for your question, I am enlisting in the military in the near future.
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Firearms have a ton of uses other than killing people.
Yeah! Like... killing animals. Or target shooting. Yeah, I'm out of ideas.
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No, but it certainly makes you more likely to kill yourself. (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923)
If you ban guns, people will just kill themselves by other means.
Sorry, pretty much all data suggests that making suicide even slightly more difficult makes people think twice and not go through with it. If a particular bridge is a popular suicide spot, and they put in a suicide rail or whatever they do these days, people don't just walk to another bridge; they change their minds, and keep on living. Making it harder for depressed people to get their hands on guns really does cut down on the suicide rate.
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Those who do not wish to serve society will not be forced to do so and they will not be discriminated against in any way; the only thing they won't be able to do is vote, run for office or teach civics.
:wtf:
So yes, the country would be a military despotism.
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methinks someone took starship troopers a little too seriously
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Our nation was founded the premises that in order to enjoy freedom, you had to fight for it. The Founding Fathers required that every citizen own a firearm and undergo regular training. I am proposing something much more moderate than that. Those who do not wish to serve society will not be forced to do so and they will not be discriminated against in any way; the only thing they won't be able to do is vote, run for office or teach civics.
As if we establish things according to the precepts of some folks living in the 18th century FOREVER. Come on that's ridiculous.
And this idea that you can only vote, run for office or have a specific job only if you go to the military? You would only enforce that **** in my country only over my dead body.
As for your question, I am enlisting in the military in the near future.
Never asked this nor do I care. Like, zero atoms inside me are driven by this curiousity.
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Correlation doesn't equal causation, but it certainly can paint such a picture. I wasn't referring to urban vs rural areas, though that is a valid argument. Virtually everyone in small towns and rural is a gun owner, yet there is no virtually violent crime; whereas virtually nobody owns a gun in urban areas, yet there violent crime is commonplace. If you don't like rural communities, then take a look at urban areas, such as the District of Columbia and Chicago, where gun bans correlate with higher violent crime rates.
Also take a look at the United Kingdom, which has seen higher violent crime rates since it implemented strict restrictions on gun ownership in the 1960s. Violent crime rates rose even sharper in the United Kingdom after the gun bans in 1987 and 1997. In addition, countries that have higher gun ownership rates (Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, etc.) have lower violent crime rates than those with very few gun owners (Belarus, Lithuania, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, etc.).
/me throws penalty flag and blows whistle
Hold it. I already talked earlier about the statistical problems of these claims about high gun ownership = less crime on page one.
First off, you can't compare apples to oranges. US firearms regulation is by state. Every other place you just named does it by country. You cannot compare the statistics of a state to an entire country. The United States figures have no meaning when compared against any other nation when it comes to gun ownership and its relationship with crime. Even comparing internally, crime rates have more to do with demographics that gun ownership. I think I mentioned Idaho before - Idaho has high gun ownership, and a low violent crime rate. Chicago has low [legal] gun ownership and a high violent crime rate. Does that mean the high gun ownership makes for lower crime? Absolutely not - this is a false correlation. There are other variables at play that have more impact on crime rate which are ignored by these simplistic two-factor statistics (which is exactly why the gun lobby uses them).
Second, every country defines "violent crime" differently. The violent crime rate in the UK is defined differently in the States, and addition measured offences have been added since the 1960s. The blip on the graph is not representing the UK as a more violent place than the United States, or even more violent than it was pre-gun ban. It represents a change in the statistical measurement of violent crime (also, crime rates overall have trended downward since the 1970s, but violent crime rates account for more of the total crimes in several countries because some crime is now measured as violent versus property offences when it used to be the opposite. Canada has experienced this same shift, though not as pronounced as the UK). Furthermore, this also ignores the effect of changing demographics again - the UK has undergone a major demographic shift since the 1960s.
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The gun lobby regularly trots out these same talking points as if it somehow advances their argument. Those of us who argue for stricter firearms regulations - myself included, despite being a licensed firearms owner/user - can see them for what they are in the first place, and know they're irrelevant anyway. Gun regulation has very little impact on crime rate in some places, and very great impact in others. Thee primary purpose of regulation is not to eliminate all crime; it's to make firearms ownership safer and more responsible. Firearms regulation - in every place it has been implemented - results in the following:
1. Reduces the number of accidental deaths in absolute terms, particularly of children, attributable to firearms.
2. Reduces the number of suicides (in absolute terms; suicide rates drop).
3. Is part of a larger societal shift that reduces the overall homicide rate (countries that have better firearms regulations tend to have lower homicide rates overall. The US cannot generally be included because of piecemeal state regulation).
Also, the next 2nd Amendment crusader that trots out that Ben Franklin quotation will be summarily shot, then shot again just to emphasize the point. It is virtually always used in the context of the gun debate, which is NOT the context in which old Ben used it in the first place. Stop it!
Where did I compare crime rates in the United States to those of other countries?
Every country may define violent crime differently, but the graph I posted was of intentional homicide, which is rather consistently defined across the board. In fact, all of my sources were of homicide rates, not overall violent crime rates.
I think you'll find that it's the gun control lobby that trots that nonsense. The gun control lobby cannot win an argument using facts, so they lie and misrepresent data to fit their anti-gun agenda. For instance, it's always the gun control lobby saying that "Europeans have no guns and they have no crime" and it's always the gun control lobby making up blatant lies to push their agenda, like the "40% of firearm sales don't undergo a background check." The gun control lobby is STILL using that slogan, even though all of the fact-checkers claimed it to be a complete lie over six months ago.
1. Not true. Gun ownership rates have been rising in the United States over the past 20 years, while firearms accidents have been on the decline.
2. If someone wants to kill themselves, they can do it just as easily with a knife or overdosing on aspirin or jumping off a bridge or countless other means.
3. You just got done saying that you can't compare statistics in the United States to those of other countries, yet you did just that. Also, that's not true, as I covered in an above post. Countries with higher gun ownership rates and/or looser gun laws often times have lower homicide rates than those with ultra-strict gun laws and/or low gun ownership rates.
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2. If someone wants to kill themselves, they can do it just as easily with a knife or overdosing on aspirin or jumping off a bridge or countless other means.
You keep asserting this despite the fact that it is demonstrably false.
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2. If someone wants to kill themselves, they can do it just as easily with a knife or overdosing on aspirin or jumping off a bridge or countless other means.
You keep asserting this despite the fact that it is demonstrably false.
If it's demonstrably false, then demonstrate it. Why don't you slit your throat and let us know what the results are?
User was warned for this post: Far outside the lines of civilized debate.
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I'm not entirely convinced it should be the government's duty to prevent people from commiting suicide. I can see a case for it, but not entirely.
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I'm not entirely convinced it should be the government's duty to prevent people from commiting suicide. I can see a case for it, but not entirely.
It's quite shocking seeing as most of these anti-gun people claim to be "pro-choice," yet they oppose the right to bear arms and the right to die. Doesn't seem very "pro-choice" to me.
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Let's not confuse matters here, okay? Don't bring up irrelevant discussion themes.
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Let's not confuse matters here, okay? Don't bring up irrelevant discussion themes.
Sorry. I was under the impression that the right to commit suicide an important part of the pro-choice/pro-life debate. I often see pro-choice people arguing in favor of suicide being legal, whereas pro-life people often argue for it to be banned.
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Let's not confuse matters here, okay? Don't bring up irrelevant discussion themes.
Sorry. I was under the impression that the right to commit suicide an important part of the pro-choice/pro-life debate. I often see pro-choice people arguing in favor of suicide being legal, whereas pro-life people often argue for it to be banned.
No, it really isn't.
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Outlawing suicide is probably the stupidest law that exists anyway.
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Let's not confuse matters here, okay? Don't bring up irrelevant discussion themes.
Sorry. I was under the impression that the right to commit suicide an important part of the pro-choice/pro-life debate. I often see pro-choice people arguing in favor of suicide being legal, whereas pro-life people often argue for it to be banned.
No, it really isn't.
Okay, well the pro-life group at my college is very active in campaigning against suicide. Of course, that's just to distract away from the fact that they're an anti-reproductive rights group. And I always see pro-abortion Facebook groups sharing pro-suicide stuff as well.
Anecdotal evidence, I know.
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Where did I compare crime rates in the United States to those of other countries?
You haven't gone there yet, but you've started down the statistical slope when you began talking about correlations and invoking DC and Chicago. That was me heading you off at the pass. The only valid comparisons that can be made which include the US are comparing particular America States to other countries, but its a flawed comparison because States do not have enforceable borders the same way countries do.
Every country may define violent crime differently, but the graph I posted was of intentional homicide, which is rather consistently defined across the board. In fact, all of my sources were of homicide rates, not overall violent crime rates.
I was responding to your assertion that the UK has a higher violent crime rate since its firearms regulation changes.
I think you'll find that it's the gun control lobby that trots that nonsense. The gun control lobby cannot win an argument using facts, so they lie and misrepresent data to fit their anti-gun agenda. For instance, it's always the gun control lobby saying that "Europeans have no guns and they have no crime"
I have never, ever heard this from a rational advocate of firearms regulation. Then again, I don't swim in the toxic circles of the hyper-partisan firearms debate in the US.
1. Not true. Gun ownership rates have been rising in the United States over the past 20 years, while firearms accidents have been on the decline.
Not sure where you get that idea, but the CDC data disagrees with you: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/FIREARM_DEATHS_AND_DEATH_RATES.pdf All firearms death rates in the US are stable, particularly accidental deaths among children. Regardless, firearms regulations have been proven to reduce the number of deaths attributable to firearms accidents (without necessarily impacting the ownership rates significantly). Canada's regulatory exercise didn't dramatically change ownership levels, but new safety, storage,. transport, and use requirements have dramatically impacted the death rate.
2. If someone wants to kill themselves, they can do it just as easily with a knife or overdosing on aspirin or jumping off a bridge or countless other means.
Sadly, no. The link is not absolute nor particularly well understood, but there is a documented link between the accessibility of firearms and suicide rate. (http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/jsp-sjp/wd98_4-dt98_4/p4.html#a46)
3. You just got done saying that you can't compare statistics in the United States to those of other countries, yet you did just that. Also, that's not true, as I covered in an above post. Countries with higher gun ownership rates and/or looser gun laws often times have lower homicide rates than those with ultra-strict gun laws and/or low gun ownership rates.
Actually, I said you CAN'T include the US in that data. And I just got finished saying that the correlation between high ownership and crime rate is completely confounded by other variables that cannot be dismissed, and you have acknowledged none of those variables.
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You haven't gone there yet, but you've started down the statistical slope when you began talking about correlations and invoking DC and Chicago. That was me heading you off at the pass. The only valid comparisons that can be made which include the US are comparing particular America States to other countries, but its a flawed comparison because States do not have enforceable borders the same way countries do.
Chicago gangbangers don't exactly have the money to fly to other states, hence why they're gangbangers in the first place.
I was responding to your assertion that the UK has a higher violent crime rate since its firearms regulation changes.
Okay, I thought you were referring to the graph in my original post. Either way, both violent crime and intentional homicide rates are on the rise and have never come close to their pre-1968 levels.
I have never, ever heard this from a rational advocate of firearms regulation. Then again, I don't swim in the toxic circles of the hyper-partisan firearms debate in the US.
It's commonly regurgitated in the left-wing American media, unfortunately. It seems like many people in Europe think guns are completely banned in every European country as well though (on another forum I go to).
Not sure where you get that idea, but the CDC data disagrees with you: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/FIREARM_DEATHS_AND_DEATH_RATES.pdf All firearms death rates in the US are stable, particularly accidental deaths among children. Regardless, firearms regulations have been proven to reduce the number of deaths attributable to firearms accidents (without necessarily impacting the ownership rates significantly). Canada's regulatory exercise didn't dramatically change ownership levels, but new safety, storage,. transport, and use requirements have dramatically impacted the death rate.
That link only shows data for children between the ages of 1-14, not overall firearms accidents. And even your own source shows a decline of firearms accidents from 0.2 (per every 100,000) to 0.1. Almost all responsible gun owners keep their firearms safely stored anyway.
Sadly, no. The link is not absolute nor particularly well understood, but there is a documented link between the accessibility of firearms and suicide rate. (http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/jsp-sjp/wd98_4-dt98_4/p4.html#a46)
The most obvious explanation being that it's easier [psychologically speaking] for most people to simply pull a trigger and end it all, than it is for someone to slit their own throat. This doesn't matter though, as it's the person's choice to end their own life and if they want to die, they could end their life through other means. If you actually care about suicide rates, then you should focus on the actual cause of the problem (alcoholism, depression, mental instability, etc.).
Actually, I said you CAN'T include the US in that data. And I just got finished saying that the correlation between high ownership and crime rate is completely confounded by other variables that cannot be dismissed, and you have acknowledged none of those variables.
You obviously didn't read the last paragraph of my original post then:
In conclusion, it is clear that gun control is not going to lower violent crime rates in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter. Rather than harming law abiding citizens and discarding the fundamental rights we hold dear, I propose we work towards fixing the underlying problems that lead to violent crime. The underlying cause of violent crime is not firearms, it is social and economic factors; and the underlying cause of mass shootings is poor mental healthcare. Rather than focusing on the symptoms, we should work on improving our education system, healthcare system (including mental health) and eliminating the poor economic conditions that cause people to resort to violence.
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2. If someone wants to kill themselves, they can do it just as easily with a knife or overdosing on aspirin or jumping off a bridge or countless other means.
You keep asserting this despite the fact that it is demonstrably false.
If it's demonstrably false, then demonstrate it. Why don't you slit your throat and let us know what the results are?
Suggesting that someone should slit his troath eh?
*sigh*.
The tendency to commit suicide is a fit. A blinding rage which overrides your sense of self preservation. It is a struggle - the part of you that wants to live versus the part of you that wants to die. Eventually, the part of you that wants to live will win due to the part of you that wants to die is exhausted (rage ends after a while). Those moments are quite horrifying experiences in which you try to stop hurting yourself, whilst another parts hates yourself and keeps hurting yourself (or the world around you) out of pure hatred.
Clearing a house of sharp objects and that sort of stuff is standard procedure for suicide preventers, simply because it actually does help - Giving that part of you that wants to damage yourself less to work with increases the chance of you surviving those fits.
Pulling a trigger on a gun can be a split second decision of your enraged self, and after that it is over. Actually walking to a bridge and jumping off? There's a lot more points there where you (or other people) are able to calm yourself. Knifing is rather hard too - There are always 'hesitation cuts' on corpses of suicide victims.
It is a myth that people who want to commit suicide will be very determined to do so - they are not. People who are suicidal are not determined - they are desperate to get out of their current situation. Suicide is simply a last ditch effort.
It's why signs along railways advertising suicide hotlines actually DO help, as people at that point do realize that there may be a slim chance of another way out - and they are happy to jump at the chance.
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Chicago gangbangers don't exactly have the money to fly to other states, hence why they're gangbangers in the first place.
And yet state borders are completely porous to firearms trafficking.
Okay, I thought you were referring to the graph in my original post. Either way, both violent crime and intentional homicide rates are on the rise and have never come close to their pre-1968 levels.
Demographics and measurement changes. The measurement of what constitutes violent crime has changed since 1968, and so have the demographics. Look at the WHO and WHERE of violent crime in the UK versus the WHO and WHERE of American States. You'll notice a remarkable trend (which I shall not spoil for you as the data is educational. In the US, look to the CDC; in the UK, the NHS, I believe).
That link only shows data for children between the ages of 1-14, not overall firearms accidents. And even your own source shows a decline of firearms accidents from 0.2 (per every 100,000) to 0.1. Almost all responsible gun owners keep their firearms safely stored anyway.
Err, no it doesn't, a shift from 0.2 to 0.1 is not statistically significant, and you need a citation for your last sentence because there are still plenty of accidental deaths attributed to improper storage and handling of firearms across the US every year. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20571454)
The most obvious explanation being that it's easier [psychologically speaking] for most people to simply pull a trigger and end it all, than it is for someone to slit their own throat. This doesn't matter though, as it's the person's choice to end their own life and if they want to die, they could end their life through other means. If you actually care about suicide rates, then you should focus on the actual cause of the problem (alcoholism, depression, mental instability, etc.).
Or you can focus on the causes of suicide AND making it more difficult for the primary means of expedient opportunity to be used in a suicide. The other problem with your statement is that it implies the political will exists for more public funding of mental health services. In my experience, the "conservatives" most opposed to firearms regulations are also the most opposed to public funding of health care.
Actually, I said you CAN'T include the US in that data. And I just got finished saying that the correlation between high ownership and crime rate is completely confounded by other variables that cannot be dismissed, and you have acknowledged none of those variables.
You obviously didn't read the last paragraph of my original post then:
In conclusion, it is clear that gun control is not going to lower violent crime rates in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter. Rather than harming law abiding citizens and discarding the fundamental rights we hold dear, I propose we work towards fixing the underlying problems that lead to violent crime. The underlying cause of violent crime is not firearms, it is social and economic factors; and the underlying cause of mass shootings is poor mental healthcare. Rather than focusing on the symptoms, we should work on improving our education system, healthcare system (including mental health) and eliminating the poor economic conditions that cause people to resort to violence.
Oh, I did. See, the trouble with your analogy is that you want to focus on the cause of the illness while the symptoms are busy killing your patient. BOTH approaches are necessary, and work - as several countries can attest. The American hang up about the 2nd Amendment is only hurting you. The rest of us just shake our heads and wonder how many people have to die for no reason until Americans finally realize that a little more legal responsibility when it comes to firearms ownership is not the end of the world. Sure, total bans aren't the answer - I can totally agree with that. But you can't tell me, in light of all the evidence to the contrary, that responsible regulation of firearms is not useful or necessary.
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And yet state borders are completely porous to firearms trafficking.
And what should we do about that, if anything? Why is it a problem?
Demographics and measurement changes. The measurement of what constitutes violent crime has changed since 1968, and so have the demographics. Look at the WHO and WHERE of violent crime in the UK versus the WHO and WHERE of American States. You'll notice a remarkable trend (which I shall not spoil for you as the data is educational. In the US, look to the CDC; in the UK, the NHS, I believe).
Measurements for 'violent crime' may change, but measurements for 'intentional homicide' do not.
That link only shows data for children between the ages of 1-14, not overall firearms accidents. And even your own source shows a decline of firearms accidents from 0.2 (per every 100,000) to 0.1. Almost all responsible gun owners keep their firearms safely stored anyway.[/quote]
Err, no it doesn't, a shift from 0.2 to 0.1 is not statistically significant, and you need a citation for your last sentence because there are still plenty of accidental deaths attributed to improper storage and handling of firearms across the US every year. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20571454)
Which is a strong case for my earlier proposal to institute gun safety and training classes in high schools.
Or you can focus on the causes of suicide AND making it more difficult for the primary means of expedient opportunity to be used in a suicide. The other problem with your statement is that it implies the political will exists for more public funding of mental health services. In my experience, the "conservatives" most opposed to firearms regulations are also the most opposed to public funding of health care.
So we should ban guns, just because a few people out of over a hundred million might have suicidal tendencies at some point in their life? Even if you have extremely strict registration and licensing laws, there's no way to prevent suicide with a firearm. And you still haven't given me a strong reason as to why we shouldn't respect people's decision to die.
Gun rights aren't a left/right issue, they're a civil rights issue. Much like slavery and gay marriage, left and right have nothing to do with it. I have avoided using terms like "liberal" and "conservative" in this thread on purpose.
Oh, I did. See, the trouble with your analogy is that you want to focus on the cause of the illness while the symptoms are busy killing your patient. BOTH approaches are necessary, and work - as several countries can attest. The American hang up about the 2nd Amendment is only hurting you. The rest of us just shake our heads and wonder how many people have to die for no reason until Americans finally realize that a little more legal responsibility when it comes to firearms ownership is not the end of the world. Sure, total bans aren't the answer - I can totally agree with that. But you can't tell me, in light of all the evidence to the contrary, that responsible regulation of firearms is not useful or necessary.
Except the symptoms aren't killing anyone. Violent crime rates have been on the decline for decades and during this same time, we've had higher gun ownership rates and more lenient gun laws. You seem to have this negative impression in your head that America is a war-zone akin to Somalia and it simply isn't true. What exactly is your idea of "responsible regulation?" We're doing just fine without massive regulations and/or total bans and things are getting better.
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And what should we do about that, if anything? Why is it a problem?
I talked about this earlier. It renders jurisdictional regulation pointless. Chicago has lots of regulation, yes. States near Illinois do not. Pretty easy to get firearms from one lax state into a more stringent state and bypass the regulatory safeguards. The same is not true on a national level.
Demographics and measurement changes. The measurement of what constitutes violent crime has changed since 1968, and so have the demographics. Look at the WHO and WHERE of violent crime in the UK versus the WHO and WHERE of American States. You'll notice a remarkable trend (which I shall not spoil for you as the data is educational. In the US, look to the CDC; in the UK, the NHS, I believe).
Measurements for 'violent crime' may change, but measurements for 'intentional homicide' do not.
I love how you ignored all the rest of that. And in fact, "intentional homicide" is an American term that comes from this very kind of debate, and the definitions in fact do change. (For example, Canada has two separate Criminal Code offences that capture "intentional homicides.")
Which is a strong case for my earlier proposal to institute gun safety and training classes in high schools.
Or how about mandatory safety and training classes for all gun owners and users, coupled with legal requirements on storage, handling, and transport? Might that not achieve the same objective among the target audience and ensure their is legal backing to that training? (The suggestion I just gave you is Canada's exact firearms laws).
So we should ban guns, just because a few people out of over a hundred million might have suicidal tendencies at some point in their life? Even if you have extremely strict registration and licensing laws, there's no way to prevent suicide with a firearm. And you still haven't given me a strong reason as to why we shouldn't respect people's decision to die.
Who said ban guns? And Canada's suicide rate has dropped since more stringent regulation and background checks on ownership were introduced. As for people's decision to die; that decision if made in sound mind is euthanasia, with which I wholeheartedly agree. Suicide is more often the result of mental illness and is the result of a mind in need of help, not a bullet.
Gun rights aren't a left/right issue, they're a civil rights issue. Much like slavery and gay marriage, left and right have nothing to do with it. I have avoided using terms like "liberal" and "conservative" in this thread on purpose.
And good on you - my point is merely that the "conservative" end of the spectrum is the side where your argument usually falls, and that side vehemently disagrees with mental health public funding. If you are not on that hypocrite's bandwagon, kudos.
Except the symptoms aren't killing anyone. Violent crime rates have been on the decline for decades and during this same time, we've had higher gun ownership rates and more lenient gun laws. You seem to have this negative impression in your head that America is a war-zone akin to Somalia and it simply isn't true. What exactly is your idea of "responsible regulation?" We're doing just fine without massive regulations and/or total bans and things are getting better.
The hell they aren't. Read the abstract of that PubMed link in my last post (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20571454). The United States is light years behind other democracies on this issue - your violent crime rates are far higher, your homicide rates are higher, and your accidental death by firearm rates are all higher, particularly among children.
Canada has managed pretty sensible and responsible regulation in the area of firearms. Most Americans of your ideological bent have a problem with it, but it works, which is a great deal more than can be said for the piecemeal regulatory disaster currently ongoing in the United States.
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I talked about this earlier. It renders jurisdictional regulation pointless. Chicago has lots of regulation, yes. States near Illinois do not. Pretty easy to get firearms from one lax state into a more stringent state and bypass the regulatory safeguards. The same is not true on a national level.
You have yet to argue why we "need" to have strict gun laws at any level of government. Especially seeing as violent crime rates have been on the decline for decades and all of the data shows that firearms are used for self-defense up to ten times more than they are used to commit crimes.
I love how you ignored all the rest of that. And in fact, "intentional homicide" is an American term that comes from this very kind of debate, and the definitions in fact do change. (For example, Canada has two separate Criminal Code offences that capture "intentional homicides.")
But I wasn't comparing intentional homicide or any other violent crime statistic between different countries, I was comparing the United Kingdom's intentional homicide rate before and after the 1968, 1988 and 1977 gun control laws.
Or how about mandatory safety and training classes for all gun owners and users, coupled with legal requirements on storage, handling, and transport? Might that not achieve the same objective among the target audience and ensure their is legal backing to that training? (The suggestion I just gave you is Canada's exact firearms laws).
That would create a de facto gun registry of every law abiding gun owner.
Who said ban guns? And Canada's suicide rate has dropped since more stringent regulation and background checks on ownership were introduced. As for people's decision to die; that decision if made in sound mind is euthanasia, with which I wholeheartedly agree. Suicide is more often the result of mental illness and is the result of a mind in need of help, not a bullet.
We have background checks on gun ownership as well. No amount of registration, background checks or licensing can stop someone from becoming depressed, gun owner or otherwise. Okay, so you're on board with my earlier proposal to improve mental health services then?
And good on you - my point is merely that the "conservative" end of the spectrum is the side where your argument usually falls, and that side vehemently disagrees with mental health public funding. If you are not on that hypocrite's bandwagon, kudos.
The hell they aren't. Read the abstract of that PubMed link in my last post (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20571454). The United States is light years behind other democracies on this issue - your violent crime rates are far higher, your homicide rates are higher, and your accidental death by firearm rates are all higher, particularly among children.
Canada has managed pretty sensible and responsible regulation in the area of firearms. Most Americans of your ideological bent have a problem with it, but it works, which is a great deal more than can be said for the piecemeal regulatory disaster currently ongoing in the United States.
Guns don't kill anyone, Ryan, people do. Imposing restrictions on law abiding gun owners isn't going to stop a gang war in Chicago. You seem to think that strict gun regulations is the only way to get lower crime rates, when in fact, it's not even a way to get them at all. Gun control correlates with higher crime rates, whereas gun freedom correlates with lower crime rates. You keep saying that we have a higher homicide rate than Europe, and while that is true in some cases, there are industrialized European countries that have higher homicide rates thane we do, such as Estonia, Lithuania and Moldova. Estonia and Lithuania are very telling, as their neighbor, Latvia, has an extremely low homicide rate (3.1, which is lower than that of Taiwan) and yet one in five people in Latvia is a gun owner; compared to less than one in ten in Estonia and less than one in one-hundred in Lithuania. It should be noted that Lithuania has the highest homicide rate of the Baltic States, by far, while simultaneously having the lowest gun ownership rates.
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/estonia http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/latvia http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/lithuania
You brought up demographics earlier, so I'm going to say this. The white homicide rate in the United States is 2.6 (http://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/LHI/accessibleAnimation/IVP_29.html), which is the same as South Korea and Luxembourg. Obviously I'm not saying that race has anything to do with crime, but the black homicide rate is nearly 20%, which skews crime statistics in the United States. This is because many in the black community live below the poverty and are engaged in gang wars.
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Guns don't kill anyone, Ryan, people do
They sure as hell make it easier.
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Guns don't kill anyone, Ryan, people do
They sure as hell make it easier.
They also make it harder. Guns are called the 'great equalizer' for a reason. A 60 year old woman can defend herself with a gun every bit as well as a 20 year old MMA fighter.
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You have yet to argue why we "need" to have strict gun laws at any level of government. Especially seeing as violent crime rates have been on the decline for decades and all of the data shows that firearms are used for self-defense up to ten times more than they are used to commit crimes.
Really? You haven't posted that data. Yes, violent crime is on a long-term downward trend, but firearms-related crimes are still at exceedingly high levels in the US versus all other democracies. (And yes, that is a valid comparison because we're not talking about high ownership = less crime).
But I wasn't comparing intentional homicide or any other violent crime statistic between different countries, I was comparing the United Kingdom's intentional homicide rate before and after the 1968, 1988 and 1977 gun control laws.
And you still didn't go back and look at the WHO and WHERE like I suggested, nor have you addressed the evolving definitions of certain criminal acts (you started off talking about violent crime in the UK, FYI).
That would create a de facto gun registry of every law abiding gun owner.
So? What does that matter? You have a Constitutional right in the mix; a registry is not a bad thing, nor can it be legally used to seize guns. And before you trot out Nazi Germany, I have heard quite possibly every nutbar objection to firearms registries ever conceived and written in the English language, and there is no compelling rational argument against them, though I have no doubt you're going to try to come up with one anyway. If the words "seizure," "confiscate," "Germany," "Nazi," "freedom," or "overthrow" or any of their synonyms appear, I won't respond to it anyway. If that sounds condescending, it's because I hate conspiracy theory and this realm of discussion is always in that realm. Nothing personal.
We have background checks on gun ownership as well. No amount of registration, background checks or licensing can stop someone from becoming depressed, gun owner or otherwise. Okay, so you're on board with my earlier proposal to improve mental health services then?
I never said I wasn't. And in fact, registration, background checks, and licensing do reduce the numbers of suicides by firearm and reduce the overall suicide rate. I already provided the source earlier.
Guns don't kill anyone, Ryan, people do. Imposing restrictions on law abiding gun owners isn't going to stop a gang war in Chicago. You seem to think that strict gun regulations is the only way to get lower crime rates, when in fact, it's not even a way to get them at all. Gun control correlates with higher crime rates, whereas gun freedom correlates with lower crime rates. You keep saying that we have a higher homicide rate than Europe, and while that is true in some cases, there are industrialized European countries that have higher homicide rates thane we do, such as Estonia, Lithuania and Moldova. Estonia and Lithuania are very telling, as their neighbor, Latvia, has an extremely low homicide rate (3.1, which is lower than that of Taiwan) and yet one in five people in Latvia is a gun owner; compared to less than one in ten in Estonia and less than one in one-hundred in Lithuania. It should be noted that Lithuania has the highest homicide rate of the Baltic States, by far, while simultaneously having the lowest gun ownership rates.
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/estonia http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/latvia http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/lithuania
****, I knew I forgot to ban another catchphrase.
OK, we already talked about why that correlation is bull****. I'm not repeating myself for the third time.
I keep saying the US has a way higher homicide rate that its comparators. That is, demographically-similar, economically-similar, politically-similar nations of relatively close levels on the HDI. Which it does. See link provided earlier. Also, the correlation is a T-test between two variables and is statistically invalid in this context. ANOVA or multi-variable analysis is the appropriate test.
You brought up demographics earlier, so I'm going to say this. The white homicide rate in the United States is 2.6 (http://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/LHI/accessibleAnimation/IVP_29.html), which is the same as South Korea and Luxembourg. Obviously I'm not saying that race has anything to do with crime, but the black homicide rate is nearly 20%, which skews crime statistics in the United States. This is because many in the black community live below the poverty and are engaged in gang wars.
Oh thank God, you aren't missing the demographic point. OK, this is a valid point. It doesn't justify no firearms regulations, but you're starting to at least look at the issue with some critical analysis.
Look, Nakura, this quotewall is getting out of hand. The point I've been making since the first page is that this issue is a hell of a lot more complex than what either side of the American debate wants it to be. Neither side has a monopoly on rational argument, or statistics, or facts, or patriotism, or love of liberty, or whatever the hell else Americans want to accuse each other of not having when they argue this issue. Both sides make some legitimate points. The problem with this debate is that it is immensely oversimplified into a two-position issue: "gun control" or "FRRRREEEEEEDDOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM!" Neither is accurate. Put aside the ideological arguments for a moment and look at the actual raw data - all of it, not just what suits your personal position (you do have a tendency to cherrypick, but we all suffer from confirmation bias, even me :P)
What we see when we just look at data is a few things:
1. Firearms and their relationship to crime is confounded by demographics and social factors. None of these can be separated from each other as policy matters.
2. Comparable[/i] countries on social indices which have implemented similar regulatory regimes around firearms have seen reductions in deaths - be they criminal, suicide, or accidental - as a result. The magnitude of this reduction ranges.
3. Those same comparable countries have much lower homicide rates than other comparable countries that have not implemented similar regulatory regimes around firearms.
4. Firearms death and injury rates attributable to all causes are highly related to demographics, and therefore regionally vary within countries.
5. Accurate and valid (the stats terms, not colloquial) statistical analysis of correlative and causative relationships between variables related to this issue is extremely difficult.
If this looks like I'm framing this as a concluding post, it's because I am. While you still fundamentally disagree with me on a number of points, you are definitely looking at this in a more comprehensive way than you were in your OP. Good on you for that. I don't expect you to change your position entirely, but I strongly suggest you cease approaching it in the "us versus them" fashion that you've taken to date, and you are starting to do that.
I'm pretty sure I've sourced all the relevant points at this juncture, but if I've missed anything I'm sure someone will let me know. I may chime in again if anything else piques my interest, but it's time to go attend to real world matters =)
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Not to go back to a previous statement made about suicide, but I have to put in my two cents about the following:
2. If someone wants to kill themselves, they can do it just as easily with a knife or overdosing on aspirin or jumping off a bridge or countless other means.
No, they can't. Putting a knife to your throat, overdosing on drugs or jumping of a bridge are *not* as easy as putting a muzzle to your head and pulling a trigger. The end results for all are the same, but shooting yourself is infinitely less of a scary thought than putting a knife across your throat
It's a psychological thing. You look over a bridge and you see this insane height. The body naturally goes "oh **** me" and your brain throws a red flag (perhaps the thought of what happens if you survive crosses the mind). You consume profuse amounts of drugs, but realize that you didn't actually want to and start to panic the **** out. You slit your throat but realize that it takes a significantly longer time to die than you originally hoped for. None of these are easy to go through even if you're willing to go through it to the end. The thoughts behind each of them are less pleasant, and undergoing through it isn't a nice way to go either
A bullet on the other hand, is a pull of the trigger, and done. Your brain matter ends up all over the room. One tends to think less about the process, and more of what happens afterwards
Just a question though:
Why do you own a gun? Be it pistol or rifle. I'd like to know
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I love how gun registration is such a hot issue when it's done with a lot of other, even more widespread items.
How come we never hear about car registry conspiracies?
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Guns don't kill anyone, Ryan, people do
They sure as hell make it easier.
They also make it harder. Guns are called the 'great equalizer' for a reason. A 60 year old woman can defend herself with a gun every bit as well as a 20 year old MMA fighter.
I vehemently disagree - If you are not packing a gun, you are in huge trouble (thus forcing everyone to carry a gun - wasn't this whole thing about freedom?). Additionally, good luck defending yourself against someone armed with a gun - the best you can do is return fire, which tends to get you shot before you are able to pull the trigger - someone threatening you with a gun usually has the drop on you.
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I love how gun registration is such a hot issue when it's done with a lot of other, even more widespread items.
How come we never hear about car registry conspiracies?
How in the world is it a conspiracy? You had Ryan in this very thread advocating for such a thing.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but there is a car registry (in the United States anyway).
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Guns don't kill anyone, Ryan, people do
They sure as hell make it easier.
They also make it harder. Guns are called the 'great equalizer' for a reason. A 60 year old woman can defend herself with a gun every bit as well as a 20 year old MMA fighter.
I vehemently disagree - If you are not packing a gun, you are in huge trouble (thus forcing everyone to carry a gun - wasn't this whole thing about freedom?). Additionally, good luck defending yourself against someone armed with a gun - the best you can do is return fire, which tends to get you shot before you are able to pull the trigger - someone threatening you with a gun usually has the drop on you.
Apparently not, the CDC rules that handguns are incredibly effective for self-defense and save up to three million lives a year.
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I love how gun registration is such a hot issue when it's done with a lot of other, even more widespread items.
How come we never hear about car registry conspiracies?
Gun-rights advocates would respond to that with the fact that firearms ownership is a constitutionally-protected right, whereas car ownership isn't. Your mileage may vary on whether or not that means anything.
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Gun-rights advocates would respond to that with the fact that firearms ownership is a constitutionally-protected right, whereas car ownership isn't. Your mileage may vary on whether or not that means anything.
Ironically the actual legal interpretation of the Second Amendment as providing a right to individual gun ownership dates to the '90s.
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I'll reask since Nakura didn't even bother with it
Just a question though:
Why do you own a gun? Be it pistol or rifle. I'd like to know
Apparently not, the CDC rules that handguns are incredibly effective for self-defense and save up to three million lives a year.
Why is the Center for Disease Control ruling that sort of thing? Or am I confusing that with something else
And basically what that tells me, is that three millions lives were in peril and had no other option other than to use their gun
I'd like to say that's bull****, but do enlighten me on the second question I have
In these three millions lives that were saved, what were their respective situations for having used the handgun for self defense?
Ironically the actual legal interpretation of the Second Amendment as providing a right to individual gun ownership dates to the '90s.
But not according to all of dem quotes from dem founding fathers which may or may not have actually happened and/or been meant in such a context!
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I love how gun registration is such a hot issue when it's done with a lot of other, even more widespread items.
How come we never hear about car registry conspiracies?
How in the world is it a conspiracy? You had Ryan in this very thread advocating for such a thing.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but there is a car registry (in the United States anyway).
Maybe I should have spiced the sentence with more commas, but it seems the swooshing sound you heard was the point going over your head.
You accept things such as car registration without batting an eye, but when it comes to guns, oh noes...
I love how gun registration is such a hot issue when it's done with a lot of other, even more widespread items.
How come we never hear about car registry conspiracies?
Gun-rights advocates would respond to that with the fact that firearms ownership is a constitutionally-protected right, whereas car ownership isn't. Your mileage may vary on whether or not that means anything.
But a registry doesn't impact in any way ownership.
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Except that in this train of thought, it does, because a registry implies a government database of all current gun owners, which would make it far easier for said government to (theoretically) disarm said owners in the future, which undermines the (presumed) anti-tyranny function of private firearms ownership in the first place. I'm not saying I agree with that myself, but that's pretty much how you'll see it argued.
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Except that in this train of thought, it does, because a registry implies a government database of all current gun owners, which would make it far easier for said government to (theoretically) disarm said owners in the future, which undermines the (presumed) anti-tyranny function of private firearms ownership in the first place. I'm not saying I agree with that myself, but that's pretty much how you'll see it argued.
:snipe:
*BOOM!headshot*
/me summarily executes Mongoose for using a synonym of confiscation and tyranny in reference to a gun registry argument.
Oh crap. I said I would ignore Nakura, not summarily execute anyone doing it.
/me commences CPR on Mongoose.
Apologies for the inconvenience caused by your death, sir.
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Well that'll be an interesting scar.
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Hey Ryan, remember that Long Gun Registry Canada had?
Yeah
That was fun
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No, but it certainly makes you more likely to kill yourself. (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923)
If you ban guns, people will just kill themselves by other means.
Actually, no they won't. They address that in the article. Did you even read it?
Here's one by Cracked, if that helps. (http://www.cracked.com/article_20396_5-mind-blowing-facts-nobody-told-you-about-guns.html) You want #3.
For defense of themselves and of freedom, from enemies both foreign and domestic. Every citizen should also serve society in some manner (such as military service) before making decisions for society (voting or running for office). The only people who deserve freedom are those willing to defend and die for it.
So you're in favour of reintroducing conscription then?
It was a study from the Center for Disease Control: http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2013/Priorities-for-Research-to-Reduce-the-Threat-of-Firearm-Related-Violence.aspx
Yes, and the upper bound numbers are the Kleck figures. We simply don't know what the actual figures are, because the NRA sponsored legislation called the Tiahrt Amendment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Tiahrt#Tiahrt_Amendment), along with the ban (http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.208207) on gun violence (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-07-27/opinions/35486709_1_gun-violence-traffic-fatalities-firearm-deaths) research (http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/08/opinion/halpern-gun-research/index.html), prevented anyone from actually collecting accurate statistics on defensive gun use.
Correlation doesn't equal causation, but it certainly can paint such a picture.
And what a pretty picture it paints...
Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high-income countries (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11130511)
The association between the purchase of a handgun and homicide or suicide. (http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.87.6.974)
Firearm availability and suicide, homicide, and unintentional firearm deaths among women (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11937613)
Firearm availability and female homicide victimization rates among 25 populous high-income countries (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11991417)
lso take a look at the United Kingdom, which has seen higher violent crime rates since it implemented strict restrictions on gun ownership in the 1960s. Violent crime rates rose even sharper in the United Kingdom after the gun bans in 1987 and 1997. In addition, countries that have higher gun ownership rates (Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, etc.) have lower violent crime rates than those with very few gun owners (Belarus, Lithuania, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, etc.).
Let me re-iterate: Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high-income countries (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11130511)
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Hey Ryan, remember that Long Gun Registry Canada had?
Yeah
That was fun
Much as I disagreed with the non-restricted registry, it never led to the seizure of legal weapons from owners who followed the law, which is the primary objection of registry opponents in the US.
Furthermore, what Nakura mentioned was a de facto reigstry of OWNERS, which we still have and which remains excellent public policy. I have always been an advocate of regulating the owners rather than the weapons themselves. In fact, that's what the majority of Canadian gun owners said about the non-restricted registry - you already have all our information, why do we have to go through an expensive bureaucratic step for an ordinary rifle or shotgun?
Truth be told, if the non-restricted registry was free to register firearms in from the beginning and it was easy to do so (rather than the PITA validation process etc it had) I probably would have been OK with it. It wasn't so much that the idea of the registry was inherently flawed - other than it being a duplicated step with ownership requirements - it's that the implementation was botched from day one.
However, I reiterate for the Americans in our audience - despite that historical bureaucratic mess, it never led to this confiscation idea that some of your countrymen get so worked up about.
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Gun-rights advocates would respond to that with the fact that firearms ownership is a constitutionally-protected right, whereas car ownership isn't. Your mileage may vary on whether or not that means anything.
Ironically the actual legal interpretation of the Second Amendment as providing a right to individual gun ownership dates to the '90s.
I guess you didn't read page two, where I went over this in detail.
This is generally where I stop in gun related topics
http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3295&context=wmlr
http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/guns.pdf
Every legal reference in history to the right to keep and bear arms has referred to it as an individual right. The first recorded use of the 'right to keep and bear arms' comes from the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which referred explicitly to an individual right. Fourty-four of the fifty states protect the right to keep in their state constitutions and this right refers to an individual right in all fourty-four of them. The right to keep and bear arms has always referred to an individual right in the constitutions of other nations as well. Islamic law also calls for governments to respect for the individual right of the people to bear arms, though this right is not generally respected by Muslim countries in practice. The ancient religion of Zoroastrianism also called for the people to take up arms against unjust governments. The Second Amendment does not create any new rights, it only protects a pre-existing natural right that all sapient beings have. This has been proven time and time again by the Founding Fathers, the United States Supreme Court, John Locke and countless classical liberal philosophers.
Now lets look at United States case law and legal precedent for the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms in general. As previously mentioned, the first recorded legal usage of the right to keep and bear arms comes from the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Prior to the formation of the United States, the Thirteen Colonies also had a long-standing history of having a right to bear arms, which included the right to self-defense. Prior to the United States Constitution being formed, states that had declared their independence from Great Britain had protected the right to bear arms in their state constitutions and it included the right to self-defense. For instance, the 1776 Constitution of Pennsylvania states that "the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state." When the United States Constitution was being drafted and ratified, the Founding Fathers stated explicitly that the right to bear arms was a right of the people, not a "right of the militia" as some gun control advocates claim. In fact, many of the Founding Fathers wanted to require every free citizen to own a gun, viewing it as a civic duty. I will provide a list of these quotes from the Founding Fathers towards the end of this post.
Interpretation of the Second Amendment has always been that of recognizing it as an individual right. In fact, it was most commonly interpreted as a right that cannot under any circumstances be restricted or limited. Even foreigners held this view, including William Blackstone, who wrote about it in his Commentaries on the Laws of England. The Second Amendment uses the term "shall not be infringed," which not only states that the right to keep and bear arms is a pre-existing natural right, but also that it shall not be infringed upon. In fact, the only real criticism levied against the Second Amendment, was by those who thought it didn't provide enough protection to the right to bear arms. St. George Tucker and William Rawle, two lawyers and abolitionists (and in the case of Tucker, a Virginia Supreme Court justice) were among those who criticized the Second Amendment for not protecting the rights of gun owners enough. Tucker and Rawle argued that the Second Amendment needed to have provisions in order to help the poor be able to exercise their right to bear arms; they viewed this as difficult under the current laws, seeing as how many poor people couldn't afford firearms. Joseph Story, an early federal Supreme Court justice wrote in his work, Commentaries on the Constitution, that: "The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them." Story also wrote that the right to bear arms is a natural right. The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that all restrictions placed on the federal government also apply to state and local governments. One of the main reasons this amendment was added to the Constitution was because former slave states would often times refuse to allow freed slaves to bear arms, which violated their rights as protected under the Second Amendment.
It wasn't until the late 20th and early 19th century that racist Democrats tried to re-interpret the Second Amendment to mean a collective right to form state militias, in order to prevent blacks from owning guns. Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that the Second Amendment is an individual right, however it also ruled that the Second Amendment did not apply to slaves. United States v. Cruikshank, Presser v. Illinois and Miller v. Texas ruled that the Second Amendment is an individual right, however, it also ruled that the First and Second Amendments only limit the federal government. United States v. Miller ruled that that: "These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense," which is to say that the people consist of the militia. United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez ruled that the Second Amendment (and the Bill of Rights in general) was an individual right that also applied to non-citizen aliens. United States v. Lopez ruled that the so-called "Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990" violated the Second Amendment and was unconstitutional. United States v. Emerson, District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago reaffirmed that the Second Amendment refers to an individual right that applies to state and local governments, as well as the federal government. Moore v. Madigan ruled that the ban on concealed carry in Illinois violated the Second Amendment and was thus unconstitutional, requiring Illinois to adopt concealed carry.
Lets also take a look at what the Founding Fathers had to say about the Second Amendment and right to bear arms:
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks." -Thomas Jefferson
"One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them." -Thomas Jefferson
"We established however some, although not all its [self-government] important principles . The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, in all cases to which they think themselves competent, (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves, in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved,) or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed;" -Thomas Jefferson
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -Thomas Jefferson
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin
"To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character." -Alexander Hamilton
"[The Constitution preserves] the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation...(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." -James Madison
"To suppose arms in the hands of citizens, to be used at individual discretion, except in private self-defense, or by partial orders of towns, countries or districts of a state, is to demolish every constitution, and lay the laws prostrate, so that liberty can be enjoyed by no man; it is a dissolution of the government. The fundamental law of the militia is, that it be created, directed and commanded by the laws, and ever for the support of the laws." -John Adams
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive. " -Noah Webster
"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man gainst his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American...[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people." -Tenche Coxe
"[The new government] shall be too firmly fixed in the saddle to be overthrown by anything but a general insurrection." -William Symmes
"[A standing army] if raised, whether they could subdue a nation of freemen, who know how to prize liberty, and who have arms in their hands?" -Theodore Sedwick
"[W]hereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them; nor does it follow from this, that all promiscuously must go into actual service on every occasion. The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it." -Richard Henry Lee
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined." -Patrick Henry
"O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone...Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation...inflicted by those who had no power at all?" -Patrick Henry
"[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually...I ask, who are the militia? They consist of now of the whole people, except a few public officers. But I cannot say who will be the militia of the future day. If that paper on the table gets no alteration, the militia of the future day may not consist of all classes, high and low, and rich and poor..." -George Mason
"[T]he people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them." -Zacharia Johnson
"That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power." -Virginia delegation to the constitutional convention
"The whole of that Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals...t establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of." -Albert Gallatin
"[C]onceived it to be the privilege of every citizen, and one of his most essential rights, to bear arms, and to resist every attack upon his liberty or property, by whomsoever made. The particular states, like private citizens, have a right to be armed, and to defend, by force of arms, their rights, when invaded." -Roger Sherman
Sources
http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/beararms/statecon.htm
https://supreme.justia.com/us/92/542/case.html
https://supreme.justia.com/us/116/252/case.html
https://supreme.justia.com/us/307/174/case.html
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1521.pdf
https://supreme.justia.com/us/60/393/case.html
http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/153/535/case.html
http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publishing/preview/publiced_preview_briefs_pdfs_09_10_08_1521_PetitionerAmCuHeartlandInst.authcheckdam.pdf
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689
http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndfqu.html
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Hey Ryan, remember that Long Gun Registry Canada had?
Yeah
That was fun
Much as I disagreed with the non-restricted registry, it never led to the seizure of legal weapons from owners who followed the law, which is the primary objection of registry opponents in the US.
Actually, there have been numerous cases of firearms confiscation after registration. Obviously during the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide, but also in modern times. Take a look at Australia and the United Kingdom, which have banned and confiscated firearms. "It can't happen here" is a poor argument, especially when we have politicians and bureaucrats who are openly advocating banning and confiscating guns (such as Dianne Feinstein, Michael Bloomberg, etc.).
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Just a question though:
Why do you own a gun? Be it pistol or rifle. I'd like to know
Sorry, I didn't see your original post where you asked this. I'm only 20, so I can't legally purchase a handgun yet. I own and use firearms predominately for target shooting. Once I'm old enough to own a handgun, I'm going to carry for self-defense. In philosophy though, every citizen should be educated, armed and informed.
Why is the Center for Disease Control ruling that sort of thing? Or am I confusing that with something else
And basically what that tells me, is that three millions lives were in peril and had no other option other than to use their gun
I'd like to say that's bull****, but do enlighten me on the second question I have
In these three millions lives that were saved, what were their respective situations for having used the handgun for self defense?
Obama forced the CDC to treat gun ownership as a disease (without clearing it with Congress first), hoping it would support his anti-gun agenda. They released a report that backfired, showing that handguns are useful for self-defense and the ownership of semi-automatic rifles isn't a problem. Oddly enough, the mainstream media completely ignored the report, since it didn't fit their agenda.
In some of those cases, there may have been other means, but there's no way of knowing how many. Also, the vast majority of self-defense cases involving handguns don't involve anyone being shot. The criminal almost always surrenders or runs away upon learning that their would-be victim is armed.
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confiscation Holocaust Genocide banned confiscated banning confiscating guns
:snipe:
*BOOM!*
I did warn you.
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Obama forced the CDC to treat gun ownership as a disease (without clearing it with Congress first), hoping it would support his anti-gun agenda.
The CDC has been studying gun violence since long before Obama was elected. It's part of their statistical analysis of death trends. Also, the CDC doesn't "rule" on anything; they provide a summary of statistical data in the form of reports.
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Obama forced the CDC to treat gun ownership as a disease (without clearing it with Congress first), hoping it would support his anti-gun agenda.
The CDC has been studying gun violence since long before Obama was elected. It's part of their statistical analysis of death trends. Also, the CDC doesn't "rule" on anything; they provide a summary of statistical data in the form of reports.
Deathfun is the one who used the term "ruling," not me.
The CDC was banned from treating gun ownership as a disease, as it should have been. Obama is the one who ignored the ban and issued an executive order for the CDC to treat gun owners as a disease: http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/16/obama-to-announce-gun-control-proposals-shortly/
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Deathfun is the one who used the term "ruling," not me.
Apparently not, the CDC rules that handguns are incredibly effective for self-defense and save up to three million lives a year.
Orly.
The CDC was banned from treating gun ownership as a disease, as it should have been. Obama is the one who ignored the ban and issued an executive order for the CDC to treat gun owners as a disease: http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/16/obama-to-announce-gun-control-proposals-shortly/
14. "Issue a presidential memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence."
Come on, it was in the article you linked. Nowhere does it say he wanted it "treated as a disease." (edit for clarity)
The point of this is not ridicule; it's to demonstrate that you are using politicized versions of events to try to argue your position. It's called rhetoric, and you appear to have fallen for it.
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Once I'm old enough to own a handgun, I'm going to carry for self-defense.
The RCMP called me up asking me why I was interested in getting a restricted firearms license
My response was naturally, that I wasn't interested in it as that was the truth
However, had my response been "For self-defense" my license would have been denied and I wouldn't ever get myself even a rifle
But I suppose everyone who carries the gun for self-defense does it because they don't feel safe within their respective city so they need to take matters into their own hands
I could purchase a pistol if I wanted to, but I don't really want to. I have no need for a handgun
The criminal almost always surrenders or runs away upon learning that their would-be victim is armed.
Know what that tells me? That tells me criminals aren't out there to kill you
I was always under the impression that a gun is a final resort
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I guess you didn't read page two, where I went over this in detail.
I did. I also find it singularly unconvincing. Your discussion of it does not address it as an individual right under any of the laws, cite its supposed quotations from the founding fathers that are actually on-point to the amendment, and tosses out a bunch of quotations that have nothing to do with the amendment except as a tangent. You made assertions without evidence.
And it is oddly Orwellian, because the actual Supreme Court decision that first spoke of it as an individual right was only five years ago. (While lower court decisions in support of it being an individual right are numerous, ones not reversed on appeal date to the late '90s.) I actually remember the ruling and the discussion of it that resulted. You are not denying history, but instead denying the existence of living memory.
But for your education: US Supreme Court decisions on the subject.
US v. Cruikshank, 1875 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Cruikshank) held that: the "right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second Amendment means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government."
US v. Miller from 1939 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Miller) held that: the Second Amendment only protects arms that have a "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia". (The "right to bear arms" has obviously shrunk considerably from the last ruling.)
And it isn't until 2008 that the US Supreme Court actually held the 2nd Amendment "protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home", in District of Columbia v. Heller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller).
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The criminal almost always surrenders or runs away upon learning that their would-be victim is armed.
Know what that tells me? That tells me criminals aren't out there to kill you
I was always under the impression that a gun is a final resort
Say what? Criminal finds that his crime might cost him his life, runs away or surrenders, and it means he/she's not out to kill you??!
No, my dear fellow, I do believe all that that means is that he places the value of his own life above committing whatever crime(s) he was about before being confronted.
For example, his / her life was not worth more than the money in your wallet / your credit cards. Or perhaps the satisfaction of beating you up. Or perhaps raping you. And then perhaps just taking your life as well.
All that this means:
The criminal almost always surrenders or runs away upon learning that their would-be victim is armed.
is that the mere threat of an impending death penalty works wonders. Makes sense, right? Why waste your life on that?
What is does not mean, is that they place your life at a value anywhere close to theirs. Because, let's face it, if they did, perhaps they wouldn't be attempting to commit a crime against you. Although there are other reasons (stealing out of desperation). Also, using a weapon in self-defense wouldn't work if they valued killing you as worth their own life (say, if they were bent on getting revenge for you testifying against them in a trial, or perhaps some form of cheating with their partner or what have you).
So, to summarize, bad guy running away at sign of perhaps lethal resistance = bad guy doesn't think it's worth risking his life to continue. Not your life.
Honestly, if they used a firearm (or knife, for that matter), they already are risking your life. Weapons safety (yeah, they probably didn't bother learning that since it'not taught to everyone anymore) dictates that you must never point a weapon at anything you do not intend to shoot. (Doesn't mean you can't change your mind, but basically means that unless you have legitimate cause to use the threat lethal force, with the intention of following up on that threat, don't point!) It would follow that holding a knife to someone's neck/back is also in the same category.
Think of it this way: they are willing to risk your life to commit a crime. What gives you any reasonable idea that they will not just as easily decide that your life threatens / inconveniences them?
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Obama forced the CDC to treat gun ownership as a disease (without clearing it with Congress first), hoping it would support his anti-gun agenda.
This is a blatant lie. You spend too much time listening to NRA talking points.
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Think of it this way: they are willing to risk your life to commit a crime.
Considering nothing here has asserted they have a weapon, and indeed their running away rather than attempting to stop you drawing your own suggests they don't, this statement is kind of questionable.
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Think of it this way: they are willing to risk your life to commit a crime. What gives you any reasonable idea that they will not just as easily decide that your life threatens / inconveniences them?
Because people mug other people for money. Usually to fund a drug habit. They rarely do it for fun, and they very rarely do it with the intention of killing people.
Adding firearms to a confrontation like that just winds up getting people killed, and it isn't always the 'bad guy'. If there was even such an easy way to characterize people like that.
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I won't lie, I suspect most of the self-defence and ~resisting tyranny~ scenarios proposed by gun nuts are more juvenile power fantasies than anything particularly relevant to the real world.
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I won't lie, I suspect most of the self-defence and ~resisting tyranny~ scenarios proposed by gun nuts are more juvenile power fantasies than anything particularly relevant to the real world.
Except for the fact that, you know, the government has become increasingly authoritarian over the past 50+ years and that firearms are used in self-defense ten times more than they are used by criminals. You've obviously never been to Chicago or even my own city, St. Louis, if you think self-defense "isn't particularly relevant to the real world."
The anti-gun lobby can't have it both ways. You can't say that "violent crime is too low to justify gun ownership," while simultaneously saying "violent crime is too high to allow people to own guns."
Just last year one of my co-workers was almost raped in the city, but she used a firearm to stop the criminal and hold him prisoner until police arrived.
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Are you claiming that a majority of americans will, over the course of their lifes, have need to use (or threaten to use) firearms in defense of themselves or their posessions?
You're pointing to local maxima for the relevant statistics and formulating an opinion on what the rest of the country should do based on that. I'm pretty sure that that's not a good idea.
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Are you claiming that a majority of americans will, over the course of their lifes, have need to use (or threaten to use) firearms in defense of themselves or their posessions?
You're pointing to local maxima for the relevant statistics and formulating an opinion on what the rest of the country should do based on that. I'm pretty sure that that's not a good idea.
Will most Americans need to? I hope not. Will most Americans need Obamacare? Nope. Will most Americans need amnesty for illegal aliens? Nope. Will most Americans need an abortion? Nope. You can't just take away everyone's right, just because not everyone will exercise that right.
Three million people a year in a country that has three hundred million people. Your average person lives to be about eighty years old, so multiply three by eighty. That's 240 million cases of self-defense. Apparently the average American will need firearms for self-defense at some point in their life.
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You can't just take away everyone's right, just because not everyone will exercise that right.
Point of order: no one is saying that.
Three million people a year in a country that has three hundred million people. Your average person lives to be about eighty years old, so multiply three by eighty. That's 240 million cases of self-defense. Apparently the average American will need firearms for self-defense at some point in their life.
I'm pretty sure using math that way gets you put on the naughty list. I'm pretty sure.
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(For reference, Nakura is assuming that incidents where firearms are used for self-defence are evenly distributed throughout the population and across all ages.)
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Nakura, if you actually read the report, it doesn't say that three million lives were saved. It says there is an upper bound of 3 million uses of firearms as self-defense.
It doesn't say that these were situations where their lives were in danger or if it was actually a successful case of self-defense. It also doesn't mention if the use of firearms as self-defense raised the threat level.
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Think of it this way: they are willing to risk your life to commit a crime.
Considering nothing here has asserted they have a weapon, and indeed their running away rather than attempting to stop you drawing your own suggests they don't, this statement is kind of questionable.
What, they just said pretty pl0x hand over your wallet // lie down and let me rape you?? They usually at least pretend that they have a weapon of some sort, or they resort to bodily physical violence (again, or the threat thereof) to perpetrate their crime.
...how were you under the impression that crimes are committed?
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What, they just said pretty pl0x hand over your wallet // lie down and let me rape you?? They usually at least pretend that they have a weapon of some sort, or they resort to bodily physical violence (again, or the threat thereof) to perpetrate their crime.
Know what that tells me? Is that people are stupid by drawing their guns
Criminal makes it seem like they have gun hidden. Idiot draws their own gun to call bluff
Not actually a bluff, guy being mugged gets shot
Say what? Criminal finds that his crime might cost him his life, runs away or surrenders, and it means he/she's not out to kill you??!
The point flew past your head
My point is that it's excessive in nature. There's plenty of other NON-LETHAL self defense techniques out there
Mace, tazer, good ol' Taekwondo.
Here's a nice snippet regarding self-defense in the Canadian Criminal Code
34. (1) A person is not guilty of an offence if
(a) they believe on reasonable grounds that force is being used against them or another person or that a threat of force is being made against them or another person;
(b) the act that constitutes the offence is committed for the purpose of defending or protecting themselves or the other person from that use or threat of force; and
(c) the act committed is reasonable in the circumstances.
Marginal note:Factors
(2) In determining whether the act committed is reasonable in the circumstances, the court shall consider the relevant circumstances of the person, the other parties and the act, including, but not limited to, the following factors:
(a) the nature of the force or threat;
(b) the extent to which the use of force was imminent and whether there were other means available to respond to the potential use of force;
(c) the person’s role in the incident;
(d) whether any party to the incident used or threatened to use a weapon;
(e) the size, age, gender and physical capabilities of the parties to the incident;
(f) the nature, duration and history of any relationship between the parties to the incident, including any prior use or threat of force and the nature of that force or threat;
(f.1) any history of interaction or communication between the parties to the incident;
(g) the nature and proportionality of the person’s response to the use or threat of force; and
(h) whether the act committed was in response to a use or threat of force that the person knew was lawful.
Note section 2g when it talks about proportionality
He wants to mug you. He has a knife but isn't going to use the knife if you just do as he wants
You pull out a gun
He didn't have intent to stab you, he just wanted your money. You've now escalated past which is considered lawful defense for what, a couple credit cards and maybe some cash?
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I'm fairly certain brandishing a knife at someone and threatening harm if they don't hand over their possessions is both armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. I don't know about Canada but in America I'm reasonably sure they're both felony-level offenses. Brandishing a firearm in self-defense under those circumstances seems entirely reasonable to me.
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34. (1) Every one who is unlawfully assaulted without having provoked the assault is justified in repelling force by force if the force he uses is not intended to cause death or grievous bodily harm and is no more than is necessary to enable him to defend himself...
...(b) he believes, on reasonable grounds, that he cannot otherwise preserve himself from death or grievous bodily harm.
http://www.lawyers.ca/statutes/criminal_code_of_canada_assault.htm
Otherwise cannot preserve himself
If someone is mugging you, and you don't give him what he wants, you've crossed past self-defense and into assault yourself
You HAD another option, but you chose not to do it and opted for pulling out a weapon yourself
Also note the bolded italicized
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Uh, I think that, if a person is mugging you with a knife then any legal right he or she has to defend him or herself is void.
The concept that not giving a mugger what he or she wants then makes you the one committing assault is ****ing idiotic.
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No, I think the point deathfun is trying to make is that its okay to defend yourself against lethal force, but only so long as you do not resort to lethal force yourself, which I find equally stupid.
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34. (1) Every one who is unlawfully assaulted without having provoked the assault is justified in repelling force by force if the force he uses is not intended to cause death or grievous bodily harm and is no more than is necessary to enable him to defend himself...
...(b) he believes, on reasonable grounds, that he cannot otherwise preserve himself from death or grievous bodily harm.
http://www.lawyers.ca/statutes/criminal_code_of_canada_assault.htm
Otherwise cannot preserve himself
If someone is mugging you, and you don't give him what he wants, you've crossed past self-defense and into assault yourself
You HAD another option, but you chose not to do it and opted for pulling out a weapon yourself
Also note the bolded italicized
Oh dear god no. No no no.
Case law says you can use force proportional to the force used against you. Case law establishes that brandishing a knife or other weapon with which a person can kill you is a level of force that equate to intent to inflict death or grievous bodily harm Case law and the Criminal Code says you can use sufficient force to stop that person. That can include force intended to inflict death or grievous bodily harm.
In other words - if someone brandishes a knife at me and a reasonably person in my place would believe that (a) the person intended to use it or could use it, and (b) that an attack with that weapon could cause death or grievous bodily harm, I am absolutely within my legal rights to shoot his ass dead or crush his skull with a handy nearby rock if my intent is to stop his attack.
Where you are confused is that your primary obligation is to retreat or stop the offense. If you are attack and you do not have a reasonable option of escape, you are absolutely allowed to defend yourself, with force intended to cause death or grievous bodily harm if necessary. And just so we're clear - brandishing a knife at someone is ABSOLUTELY force intended to cause death or grievous bodily harm. What I cannot do is brandish a weapon of my own, cause my assailant to disengage, and then chase him down and attack him. That's assault. Where self-defense becomes assault is when a reasonable person in the same circumstances would have disengaged, and you instead continued your attack.
This is how all law enforcement is trained in Canada, and these defense provisions apply equally to law enforcement and the public. It's the same message I hear from use of force instructors every year during my re-certification, and backed by court decisions in every province in Canada and among the Supreme Court.
TL;DR: deathfun's interpretation of the Criminal Code is incorrect. Stopping an assault with proportional force (which can actually be greater than the force used in the assault, FYI), which can include force intended to cause death or grievous bodily harm, is perfectly legal under Canadian law.
deathfun: I think you may have quoted an old version of s.34. Here's the latest Criminal Code version. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/index.html For the full picture of self-defense, you have to look at s.25, 26, 27, 30, and 34. They all work together.
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34. (1) Every one who is unlawfully assaulted without having provoked the assault is justified in repelling force by force if the force he uses is not intended to cause death or grievous bodily harm and is no more than is necessary to enable him to defend himself...
...(b) he believes, on reasonable grounds, that he cannot otherwise preserve himself from death or grievous bodily harm.
http://www.lawyers.ca/statutes/criminal_code_of_canada_assault.htm
Otherwise cannot preserve himself
If someone is mugging you, and you don't give him what he wants, you've crossed past self-defense and into assault yourself
You HAD another option, but you chose not to do it and opted for pulling out a weapon yourself
Also note the bolded italicized
If someone is within 20 feet (arguably even 60 feet) of you with a knife, then they may very well pose an imminent threat to your life.
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If someone is within 20 feet (arguably even 60 feet) of you with a knife, then they may very well pose an imminent threat to your life.
I'll keep that in mind when my father brandishes a knife while cutting meat
I'm more of less just attacking your wording there as you don't make a clear point of establishing intent
deathfun: I think you may have quoted an old version of s.34. Here's the latest Criminal Code version. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/index.html For the full picture of self-defense, you have to look at s.25, 26, 27, 30, and 34. They all work together.
Woops
That'd do it
Either way, in Canada, brandishing a loaded handgun in public concealed or otherwise would be breaking more laws than your assailant
If you weren't someone who was supposed to be carrying a loaded firearm in public IE not John from accounting
Hence my other point where I'm saying "There are other means of self-defense that don't include a handgun"
No, I think the point deathfun is trying to make is that its okay to defend yourself against lethal force, but only so long as you do not resort to lethal force yourself, which I find equally stupid.
And no, that's not what I was saying in the slightest.
It's about determining intent. They intend to stab you if they don't get your money, but will leave you alone otherwise. That's a choice that you have to take
No sense escalating the situation, give them the damned money. You walk away without a wallet, but it's better than taking a chance and getting yourself killed
If they intend to kill you
Defend until the death
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Since when should it be a victim's responsibility to submit to an attack?
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Technically, the example is a mugging. No one has been attacked physically, but the threat has been made
I'm not saying they're obligated to give up their wallet. I'm just asking on whether or not you have something really all that important that you're willing to risk your own life to defend
EDIT: To add to that, is your wallet really worth that much to justify carrying around a firearm in the name of self-defense on a situation that happens on an uncommon to rare basis?
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Technically, the example is a mugging. No one has been attacked physically, but the threat has been made
I'm not saying they're obligated to give up their wallet. I'm just asking on whether or not you have something really all that important that you're willing to risk your own life to defend
EDIT: To add to that, is your wallet really worth that much to justify carrying around a firearm in the name of self-defense on a situation that happens on an uncommon to rare basis?
It's more infinitely more rare for said person to "suddenly go crazy and start killing people [with their legally carried handgun] out of anger," which is the only argument the anti-gun group puts forth against concealed carry. Studies have shown that concealed carry saves many lives and takes very few, if any.
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Link us to these studies so we can point out the obvious flaws in the methods or your misrepresentation of the results like every other study you've mentioned in this thread.
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I won't lie, I suspect most of the self-defence and ~resisting tyranny~ scenarios proposed by gun nuts are more juvenile power fantasies than anything particularly relevant to the real world.
Bingo.
The whole thing is just a power fantasy held by predominantly white men who are upset about their steadily decreasing privileges as a political class. First you fantasise about defending your home from invaders, and invent all sorts of fantastic scenarios in which you will use your guns to save the day. Next you get a CCW permit and walk around fantasising about the time you'll be able to stop a spree shooter in his tracks, or save a young damsel from being raped. Finally, you buy a bunch of semi-auto civvie variants of military carbines and some STANAG mags, and fantasise about overthrowing the government with your militia buddies and installing a new government 'for the people' or whatever tortured interpretation of founding father rhetoric you choose to use.
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Studies have shown that concealed carry saves many lives and takes very few, if any.
No, studies have shown that there is little to no impact of legalising CCW, in either direction. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15128143)
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I won't lie, I suspect most of the self-defence and ~resisting tyranny~ scenarios proposed by gun nuts are more juvenile power fantasies than anything particularly relevant to the real world.
Bingo.
The whole thing is just a power fantasy held by predominantly white men who are upset about their steadily decreasing privileges as a political class. First you fantasise about defending your home from invaders, and invent all sorts of fantastic scenarios in which you will use your guns to save the day. Next you get a CCW permit and walk around fantasising about the time you'll be able to stop a spree shooter in his tracks, or save a young damsel from being raped. Finally, you buy a bunch of semi-auto civvie variants of military carbines and some STANAG mags, and fantasise about overthrowing the government with your militia buddies and installing a new government 'for the people' or whatever tortured interpretation of founding father rhetoric you choose to use.
And then you go to an island and kill a bunch of communists having a party.
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....or a bunch of zombies. They're the same really.
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zombunists!
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Either way, in Canada, brandishing a loaded handgun in public concealed or otherwise would be breaking more laws than your assailant
If you weren't someone who was supposed to be carrying a loaded firearm in public IE not John from accounting
That really depends on the circumstances. You are legally allowed to use any weapon of opportunity to inflict the legally-allowed level of force. If someone is brandishing a knife at me and I happen to have a loaded handgun in my pocket and shoot said person dead, I'm not going to be criminally liable for the death - self-defence applies.
I WILL be criminally liable for breaking a half-dozen Canadian laws concerning firearms use/storage/safety/possession/transport if I don't have a very good explanation of why I was carrying a loaded handgun, which is probably where you're getting confused.
Hence my other point where I'm saying "There are other means of self-defense that don't include a handgun"
Absolutely. The fact that Canadian law supports self-defense doesn't mean we should all be carrying handguns around, or that it's an appropriate means of ensuring one's safety here either. That said, if I am confronted with someone with a knife who I believe is about to or is considering using it on me and I have access to my hands+feet, a knife, a baton, or a gun at that exact moment, I pick either the baton or the gun depending on the distance the assailant is away (>20 feet, gun; <20 feet, baton because I'm not getting the gun off before I get stabbed *this is support by law enforcement studies*).
It's about determining intent. They intend to stab you if they don't get your money, but will leave you alone otherwise. That's a choice that you have to take
No sense escalating the situation, give them the damned money. You walk away without a wallet, but it's better than taking a chance and getting yourself killed
If they intend to kill you
Defend until the death
That's not just your opinion, that's the law in Canada (and most* American states). Your primary responsibility in any use of force scenario is to ensure your own safety with the minimum amount of proportional force used. THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU HAVE TO GIVE A MUGGER YOUR WALLET. What it does mean is that if you are mugged and have the ability to safely get away (you can escape, whether or not you hand over the wallet) OR shoot the guy, your legal obligation is to safely get away. Self-defense is invoked only when there is no option to disengage.
*This is part of the controversy of Florida and other states and the "Stand Your Ground" legislation. It removes the legal onus to disengage.
Technically, the example is a mugging. No one has been attacked physically, but the threat has been made
I'm not saying they're obligated to give up their wallet. I'm just asking on whether or not you have something really all that important that you're willing to risk your own life to defend
EDIT: To add to that, is your wallet really worth that much to justify carrying around a firearm in the name of self-defense on a situation that happens on an uncommon to rare basis?
I know the point you're trying to make, but you're saying it really poorly. To clear this up:
Scenario 1: You walk down the street late at night. A person about your size and build walks up to you, shows you a knife, and says "Give me your wallet." You hand over your wallet, the assailant flees, you go home. You are safe and you also have not broken the law.
Scenario 2: Same situation. You do not hand over your wallet, instead choosing to try to leave. Assailant attacks you. You defend yourself with a brick from the side alley and your assailant suffers serious head wounds. You were not safe, but successfully defended yourself. You have not broken the law.
Scenario 3: Same situation. You do not hand over your wallet and instead stand your ground. Your assailant turns and runs. You go home. You were not particularly safe, but you're unhurt and you didn't break the law.
Scenario 4: Same situation. You do not hand over your wallet. Your assailant attacks. You fear for your life, pull out your concealed handgun, and shoot him dead (unrealistic, but go with it). You are protected by self-defense laws, but you may be liable for firearms offences depending on your jurisdiction concerning the carrying of a concealed weapon. You stayed fairly safe.
Scenario 5: Same situation. You hand over your wallet. Your assailant tries to stab you anyway. You take a knife to the lungs and bleed out in the street. You have not broken the law, but you're dead anyway.
Scenario 6: Same situation. You hand over your wallet. Your assailant flees. You pull out your gun and shoot him dead. Congratulations, you have just committed murder. Enjoy prison.
Scenario 7: Same situation. You do not hand over your wallet. Your assailant yells at you, then tries to leave. You pull out your gun and shoot him. You're going to prison for this one, too.
Scenario 8: Same situation. You hand over your wallet. Your assailant tries to stab you, but you have ample opportunity to run. You have not broken the law, but your safety was in jeopardy.
Scenario 9: Same situation. You hand over your wallet. Your assailant tries to stab you, and there's nowhere to run, but you're a ninja and you manage to disarm your assailant and then sit on him to hold him down. He's incapacitated. Then you stab him with the knife. Prison time, again.
Scenario 10: Same situation. You hand over your wallet. Your assailant tries to stab you, but you have ample opportunity to run. You instead pull out your gun and shoot him in the face from 50 feet away (you're a marksman apparently). Jail time.
TL;DR: In most Common Law jurisdictions, the legal requirements on self-defense only permit the use of force if there is no other option but to defend yourself or another person (and sometimes property), and the level of force must be reasonable. If someone waves a butter knife at you from 50 feet away, you cannot shoot them dead on the spot. Alternatively, if someone 5 feet away picks up a large rock and brandishes it at you, you are perfectly justified in hurling a brick at their skull before said rock even leaves their hand. For that matter, if a guy twice your size clenches his fists and continually closes distance on you as you're trying to run away while uttering words like "I hate your guts and I am going to ****ing kill you where you stand," I suggest you find something with which you can stop him (and possibly kill him, if you have no other choice or if it happens as a consequence of the force you need to use to stop him) with immediately.
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Found this (long) article, read, discuss, Profit!!
Jan 20 2012
Larry Correia
An Opinion On Gun Control (http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/)
I didn’t want to post about this, because frankly, it is exhausting. I’ve been having this exact same argument for my entire adult life. It is not an exaggeration when I say that I know pretty much exactly every single thing an anti-gun person can say. I’ve heard it over and over, the same old tired stuff, trotted out every single time there is a tragedy on the news that can be milked. Yet, I got sucked in, and I’ve spent the last few days arguing with people who either mean well but are uninformed about gun laws and how guns actually work (who I don’t mind at all), or the willfully ignorant (who I do mind), or the obnoxiously stupid who are completely incapable of any critical thinking deeper than a Facebook meme (them, I can’t stand).
Today’s blog post is going to be aimed at the first group. I am going to try to go through everything I’ve heard over the last few days, and try to break it down from my perspective. My goal tonight is to write something that my regular readers will be able to share with their friends who may not be as familiar with how mass shootings or gun control laws work.
A little background for those of you who don’t know me, and this is going to be extensive so feel free to skip the next few paragraphs, but I need to establish the fact that I know what I am talking with, because I am sick and tired of my opinion having the same weight as a person who learned everything they know about guns and violence from watching TV.
I am now a professional novelist. However, before that I owned a gun store. We were a Title 7 SOT, which means we worked with legal machineguns, suppresors, and pretty much everything except for explosives. We did law enforcement sales and worked with equipment that is unavailable from most dealers, but that means lots and lots of government inspections and compliance paperwork. This means that I had to be exceedingly familiar with federal gun laws, and there are a lot of them. I worked with many companies in the gun industry and still have many friends and contacts at various manufacturers. When I hear people tell me the gun industry is unregulated, I have to resist the urge to laugh in their face.
I was also a Utah Concealed Weapons instructor, and was one of the busiest instructors in the state. That required me to learn a lot about self-defense laws, and because I took my job very seriously, I sought out every bit of information that I could. My classes were longer than the standard Utah class, and all of that extra time was spent on Use of Force, shoot/no shoot scenarios, and role playing through violent encounters. I have certified thousands of people to carry guns.
I have been a firearms instructor, and have taught a lot of people how to shoot defensively with handguns, shotguns, and rifles. For a few years of my life, darn near every weekend was spent at the range. I started out as an assistant for some extremely experienced teachers and I also had the opportunity to be trained by some of the most accomplished firearms experts in the world. The man I stole most of my curriculum from was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Special Forces, turned federal agent SWAT team commander. I took classes in everything from wound ballistics (10 hours of looking at autopsy slides) to high-speed cool-guy door-kicking stuff. I’ve worked extensively with military and law enforcement personnel, including force on force training where I played the OpFor (i.e. I got to be the bad guy, because I make an awesome bad guy. You tell me how evil/capable you want me to be, and how hard you want your men to work, and I’d make it happen, plus I can take a beating). Part of this required learning how mass shooters operate and studying the heck out of the actual events.
I have been a competition shooter. I competed in IPSC, IDPA, and 3gun. It was not odd for me to reload and shoot 1,000 rounds in any given week. I fired 20,000 rounds of .45 in one August alone. I’ve got a Remington 870 with approximately 160,000 rounds through it. I’ve won matches, and I’ve been able to compete with some of the top shooters in the country. I am a very capable shooter. I only put this here to convey that I know how shooting works better than the vast majority of the populace.
I have written for national publications on topics relating to gun law and use of force. I wrote for everything from the United States Concealed Carry Association to SWAT magazine. I was considered a subject matter expert at the state level, and on a few occasions was brought in to testify before the Utah State Legislature on the ramifications of proposed gun laws. I’ve argued with lawyers, professors, professional lobbyists, and once made a state rep cry.
Basically for most of my adult life, I have been up to my eyeballs in guns, self-defense instruction, and the laws relating to those things. So believe me when I say that I’ve heard every argument relating to gun control possible. It is pretty rare for me to hear something new, and none of this stuff is new.
Armed Teachers
So now that there is a new tragedy the president wants to have a “national conversation on guns”. Here’s the thing. Until this national conversation is willing to entertain allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons, then it isn’t a conversation at all, it is a lecture.
Now when I say teachers carrying concealed weapons on Facebook I immediately get a bunch of emotional freak out responses. You can’t mandate teachers be armed! Guns in every classroom! Emotional response! Blood in the streets!
No. Hear me out. The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened over and over again.
Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. After Colombine law enforcement changed their methods in dealing with active shooters. It used to be that you took up a perimeter and waited for overwhelming force before going in. Now usually as soon as you have two officers on scene you go in to confront the shooter (often one in rural areas or if help is going to take another minute, because there are a lot of very sound tactical reasons for using two, mostly because your success/survival rates jump dramatically when you put two guys through a door at once. The shooter’s brain takes a moment to decide between targets). The reason they go fast is because they know that every second counts. The longer the shooter has to operate, the more innocents die.
However, cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. They simply can’t teleport. So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back.
So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do?
The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.
The teachers are there already. The school staff is there already. Their reaction time is measured in seconds, not minutes. They can serve as your immediate violent response. Best case scenario, they engage and stop the attacker, or it bursts his fantasy bubble and he commits suicide. Worst case scenario, the armed staff provides a distraction, and while he’s concentrating on killing them, he’s not killing more children.
But teachers aren’t as trained as police officers! True, yet totally irrelevant. The teacher doesn’t need to be a SWAT cop or Navy SEAL. They need to be speed bumps.
But this leads to the inevitable shrieking and straw man arguments about guns in the classroom, and then the pacifistic minded who simply can’t comprehend themselves being mandated to carry a gun, or those that believe teachers are all too incompetent and can’t be trusted. Let me address both at one time.
Don’t make it mandatory. In my experience, the only people who are worth a darn with a gun are the ones who wish to take responsibility and carry a gun. Make it voluntary. It is rather simple. Just make it so that your state’s concealed weapons laws trump the Federal Gun Free School Zones act. All that means is that teachers who voluntarily decide to get a concealed weapons permit are capable of carrying their guns at work. Easy. Simple. Cheap. Available now.
Then they’ll say that this is impossible, and give me all sorts of terrible worst case scenarios about all of the horrors that will happen with a gun in the classroom… No problem, because this has happened before. In fact, my state laws allow for somebody with a concealed weapons permit to carry a gun in a school right now. Yes. Utah has armed teachers. We have for several years now.
When I was a CCW instructor, I decided that I wanted more teachers with skin in the game, so I started a program where I would teach anybody who worked at a school for free. No charge. Zip. They still had to pay the state for their background check and fingerprints, but all the instruction was free. I wanted more armed teachers in my state.
I personally taught several hundred teachers. I quickly discovered that pretty much every single school in my state had at least one competent, capable, smart, willing individual. Some schools had more. I had one high school where the principal, three teachers, and a janitor showed up for class. They had just had an event where there had been a threat against the school and their resource officer had turned up AWOL. This had been a wake up call for this principal that they were on their own, and he had taken it upon himself to talk to his teachers to find the willing and capable. Good for them.
After Virginia Tech, I started teaching college students for free as well. They were 21 year old adults who could pass a background check. Why should they have to be defenseless? None of these students ever needed to stop a mass shooting, but I’m happy to say that a couple of rapists and muggers weren’t so lucky, so I consider my time well spent.
Over the course of a couple years I taught well over $20,000 worth of free CCW classes. I met hundreds and hundreds of teachers, students, and staff. All of them were responsible adults who understood that they were stuck in target rich environments filled with defenseless innocents. Whether they liked it or not, they were the first line of defense. It was the least I could do.
Permit holders are not cops. The mistake many people make is that they think permit holders are supposed to be cops or junior danger rangers. Not at all. Their only responsibility is simple. If someone is threatening to cause them or a third person serious bodily harm, and that someone has the ability, opportunity, and is acting in a manner which suggest they are a legitimate threat, then that permit holder is allowed to use lethal force against them.
As of today the state legislatures of Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma are looking at revamping their existing laws so that there can be legal guns in school. For those that are worried these teachers will be unprepared, I’m sure there would be no lack of instructors in those states who’d be willing to teach them for free.
For everyone, if you are sincere in your wish to protect our children, I would suggest you call your state representative today and demand that they allow concealed carry in schools.
Gun Free Zones
Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period.
Think about it. You are a violent, homicidal madman, looking to make a statement and hoping to go from disaffected loser to most famous person in the world. The best way to accomplish your goals is to kill a whole bunch of people. So where’s the best place to go shoot all these people? Obviously, it is someplace where nobody can shoot back.
In all honesty I have no respect for anybody who believes Gun Free Zones actually work. You are going to commit several hundred felonies, up to and including mass murder, and you are going to refrain because there is a sign? That No Guns Allowed sign is not a cross that wards off vampires. It is wishful thinking, and really pathetic wishful thinking at that.
The only people who obey No Guns signs are people who obey the law. People who obey the law aren’t going on rampages.
I testified before the Utah State Legislature about the University of Utah’s gun ban the day after the Trolley Square shooting in Salt Lake City. Another disaffected loser scumbag started shooting up this mall. He killed several innocent people before he was engaged by an off duty police officer who just happened to be there shopping. The off duty Ogden cop pinned down the shooter until two officers from the SLCPD came up from behind and killed the shooter. (turned out one of them was a customer of mine) I sent one of my employees down to Trolley Square to take a picture of the shopping center’s front doors. I then showed the picture to the legislators. One of the rules was NO GUNS ALLOWED.
The man that attacked the midnight showing of Batman didn’t attack just any theater. There were like ten to choose from. He didn’t attack the closest. It wasn’t about biggest or smallest. He attacked the one that was posted NO GUNS ALLOWED.
There were four mass killing attempts this week. Only one made the news because it helped the agreed upon media narrative.
- Oregon. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter confronted by permit holder. Shooter commits suicide. Only a few casualties.
- Teas. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter killed immediately by off duty cop. Only a few casualties.
- Connecticut. GUN FREE ZONE. Shooters kills until the police arrive. Suicide. 26 dead.
- China. GUN FREE COUNTRY. A guy with a KNIFE stabs 22 children.
And here is the nail in the coffin for Gun Free Zones. Over the last fifty years, with only one single exception (Gabby Giffords), every single mass shooting event with more than four casualties has taken place in a place where guns were supposedly not allowed.
The Media
Every time there is a mass shooting event, the vultures launch. I find it absolutely fascinating. A bunch of people get murdered, and the same usual suspects show up with the same tired proposals that we’ve either tried before or logic tells us simply will not work. They strike while the iron is hot, trying to push through legislation before there can be coherent thought. We’ve seen this over and over and over again. We saw it succeed in England. We saw it succeed in Australia. We’ve seen it succeed here before.
Yet when anyone from my side responds, then we are shouted at that we are blood thirsty and how dare we speak in this moment of tragedy, and we should just shut our stupid mouths out of respect for the dead, while they are free to promote policies which will simply lead to more dead… If the NRA says something they are bloodthirsty monsters, and if they don’t say something then their silence is damning guilt. It is hypocritical in the extreme, and when I speak out against this I am called every name in the book, I want dead children, I’m a cold hearted monster (the death threats are actually hilarious). If I become angry because they are promoting policies which are tactically flawed and which will do the exact opposite of the stated goals, then I am a horrible person for being angry. Perhaps I shouldn’t be allowed to own guns at all.
But that’s not why I want to talk about the media. I want to talk about the media’s effect on the shooters.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of these killers. One nice thing about playing the villain and being a punching bag for cops, soldiers, and permit holders is that you need to learn about how the bad guys think and operate. And most of the mass shooters fit a similar profile.
The vast majority (last I saw it was over 80%) are on some form of psychotropic drug and has been for many years. They have been on Zoloft or some serotonin inhibitor through their formative years, and their decision making process is often flawed. They are usually disaffected, have been bullied, pushed around, and have a lot of emotional problems. They are delusional. They see themselves as victims, and they are usually striking back at their peer group.
These people want to make a statement. They want to show the world that they aren’t losers. They want to make us understand their pain. They want to make their peer group realize that they are powerful. They’ll show us. The solution is easy. It’s right there in front of your nose.
If you can kill enough people at one time, you’ll be on the news, 24/7, round the clock coverage. You will become the most famous person in the world. Everyone will know your name. You become a celebrity. Experts will try to understand what you were thinking. Hell, the President of the United States, the most important man in the world, will drop whatever he is doing and hold a press conference to talk about your actions, and he’ll even shed a single manly tear.
You are a star.
Strangely enough, this is one of the only topics I actually agree with Roger Ebert on. He didn’t think that the news should cover the shooters or mention their names on the front page of the paper. So whenever the press isn’t talking about guns, or violent movies, or violent video games, or any other thing that hundreds of millions of people participated in yesterday without murdering anybody, they’ll keep showing the killer’s picture in the background while telling the world all about him and his struggles.
And then the cycle repeats, as the next disaffected angry loner takes notes.
They should not be glamorized. They should be hated, despised, and forgotten. They are not victims. They are not powerful. They are murdering scum, and the only time their names should be remembered is when people like me are studying the tactics of how to neutralize them faster.
Mental Health Issues
And right here I’m going to show why I’m different than the people I’ve been arguing with the last few days. I am not an expert on mental health issues or psychiatry or psychology. My knowledge of criminal psychology is limited to understanding the methods of killers enough to know how to fight them better.
So since I don’t have enough first-hand knowledge about this topic to comment intelligently, then I’m not going to comment… Oh please, if only some of the people I’ve been arguing with who barely understand that the bullets come out the pointy end of the gun would just do the same.
(cont'd next post)
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(cont'd from last post)
Gun Control Laws
As soon as there is a tragedy there comes the calls for “We have to do something!” Sure, the something may not actually accomplish anything as far as solving whatever the tragedy was or preventing the next one, but that’s the narrative. Something evil happened, so we have to do something, and preferably we have to do it right now before we think about it too hard.
The left side of the political spectrum loves it some gun control. Gun control is historically extremely unpopular in red state and purple state America, and thus very hard to pass bit stuff, but there’s a century’s accumulation of lots and lots of small ones. There have been a handful of major federal laws passed in the United States relating to guns, but the majority of really strict gun control has primarily been enacted in liberal dominated urban areas. There are over 20,000 gun laws on the books, and I have no idea how many pages of regulations from the BATF related to the production and selling of them. I’ve found that the average American is extremely uneducated about what gun laws already exist, what they actually do, and even fundamental terminology, so I’m going to go through many of the things I’ve seen argued about over the last few days and elaborate on them one by one.
I will leave out the particularly crazy things I was confronted with, including the guy who was in favor of mandating “automatic robot gun turrets” in schools. Yes. Heaven forbid we let a teacher CCW, so let’s put killer robots (which haven’t actually been invented yet) in schools. Man, I wish I was making this up, but that’s Facebook for you.
We need to ban automatic weapons.
Okay. Done. In fact, we pretty much did that in 1934. The National Firearms Act of 1934 made it so that you had to pay a $200 tax on a machinegun and register it with the government. In 1986 that registry was closed and there have been no new legal machineguns for civilians to own since then.
Automatic means that when you hold down the trigger the gun keeps on shooting until you let go or run out of ammo. Actual automatic weapons cost a lot of money. The cheapest one you can get right now is around $5,000 as they are all collector’s items and you need to jump through a lot of legal hoops to get one. To the best of my knowledge, there has only ever been one crime committed with an NFA weapon in my lifetime, and in that case the perp was a cop.
Now are machineguns still used in crimes? Why, yes they are. For every legally registered one, there are conservatively dozens of illegal ones in the hands of criminals. They either make their own (which is not hard to do) or they are smuggled in (usually by the same people that are able to smuggle in thousands of tons of drugs). Because really serious criminals simply don’t care, they are able to get ahold of military weapons, and they use them simply because criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law. So even an item which has been basically banned since my grandparents were kids, and which there has been no new ones allowed manufactured since I was in elementary school, still ends up in the hands of criminals who really want one. This will go to show how effective government bans are.
When you say “automatic” you mean full auto, as in a machinegun. What I think most of these people mean is semi-auto.
Okay. We need to ban semi-automatic weapons!
Semi-automatic means that each time you pull the trigger the action cycles and loads another round. This is the single most common type of gun, not just in America, but in the whole world. Almost all handguns are semi-automatic. The vast majority of weapons used for self-defense are semi-automatic, as are almost all the weapons used by police officers. It is the most common because it is normally the most effective.
Semi-automatic is usually best choice for defensive use. It is easier to use because you can do so one handed if necessary, and you are forced to manipulate your weapon less. If you believe that using a gun for self-defense is necessary, then you pretty much have to say that semi-auto is okay.
Banning semi-automatic basically means banning all guns. I’ll get to the functional problems with that later.
We should ban handguns!
Handguns are tools for self-defense, and the only reason we use them over the more capable, and easier to hit with rifles or shotguns is because handguns are portable. Rifles are just plain better, but the only reason I don’t carry an AR-15 around is because it would be hard to hide under my shirt.
Concealed Carry works. As much as it offends liberals and we keep hearing horror stories about blood in the streets, the fact is over my lifetime most of the United States has enacted some form of concealed carry law, and the blood in the streets wild west shootouts over parking spaces they’ve predicted simply hasn’t happened. At this point in time there are only a few hold out states, all of them are blue states and all of them have inner cities which suffer from terrible crime, where once again, the criminals simply don’t care.
For information about how more guns actually equals less crime, look up the work of Dr. John Lott. And since liberals hate his guts, look up the less famous work of Dr. Gary Kleck, or basically look up the work of any criminologist or economist who isn’t writing for Slate or Mother Jones.
As for why CCW is good, see my whole first section about arming teachers for a tiny part of the whole picture. Basically bad people are going to be bad and do bad things. They are going to hurt you and take your stuff, because that’s what they do. That’s their career, and they are as good at it as you are at your job. They will do this anywhere they think they can get away with it. We fixate on the mass shooters because they grab the headlines, but in actuality your odds of running in to one of them is tiny. Your odds of having a violent encounter with a run of the mill criminal is orders of magnitudes higher.
I do find one thing highly amusing. In my personal experience, some of the most vehement anti-gun people I’ve ever associated with will usually eventually admit after getting to know me, that if something bad happened, then they really hope I’m around, because I’m one of the good ones. Usually they never realize just how hypocritical and naïve that is.
We should ban Assault Rifles!
Define “assault rifle”…
Uh…
Yeah. That’s the problem. The term assault rifle gets bandied around a lot. Politically, the term is a loaded nonsense one that was created back during the Clinton years. It was one of those tricks where you name legislation something catchy, like PATRIOT Act. (another law rammed through while emotions were high and nobody was thinking, go figure).
To gun experts, an assault rifle is a very specific type of weapon which originated (for the most part) in the 1940s. It is a magazine fed, select fire (meaning capable of full auto), intermediate cartridge (as in, actually not that powerful, but I’ll come back to that later) infantry weapon.
The thing is, real assault rifles in the US have been heavily regulated since before they were invented. The thing that the media and politicians like to refer to as assault rifles is basically a catch all term for any gun which looks scary.
I had somebody get all mad at me for pointing this out, because they said that the term had entered common usage. Okay… If you’re going to legislate it, DEFINE IT.
And then comes up that pesky problem. The US banned assault rifles once before for a decade and the law did absolutely nothing. I mean, it was totally, literally pointless. The special commission to study it said that it accomplished absolutely nothing. (except tick a bunch of Americans off, and as a result we bought a TON more guns) And the reason was that since assault weapon is a nonsense term, they just came up with a list of arbitrary features which made a gun into an assault weapon.
Problem was, none of these features actually made the gun functionally any different or somehow more lethal or better from any other run of the mill firearm. Most of the criteria were so silly that they became a huge joke to gun owners, except of course, for that part where many law abiding citizens accidentally became instant felons because one of their guns had some cosmetic feature which was now illegal.
One of the criteria was that it was semi-automatic. See above. Hard to ban the single most common and readily available type of gun in the world. (unless you believe in confiscation, but I’ll get to that). Then what if it takes a detachable magazine! That’s got to be an Evil Feature. And yes, we really did call the Evil Features. I’ll talk about magazines below, but once again, it is pretty hard to ban something that common unless you want to go on a confiscatory national suicide mission.
For example, flash hiders sound dangerous. Let’s say having a flash hider makes a gun an assault weapon. So flash hiders became an evil feature. Problem is flash hiders don’t do much. They screw onto the end of your muzzle and divert the flash off to the side instead of straight up so it isn’t as annoying when you shoot. It doesn’t actually hide the flash from anybody else. EVIL.
Barrel shrouds were listed. Barrel shrouds are basically useless, cosmetic pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally touch it and burn your hand. But they became an instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. Nope. EVIL FEATURE!
It has been a running joke in the gun community ever since the ban passed. When Carolyn McCarthy was asked by a reporter what a barrel shroud was, she replied “I think it is the shoulder thing which goes up.” Oh good. I’m glad that thousands of law abiding Americans unwittingly committed felonies because they had a cosmetic piece of sheet metal on their barrel, which has no bearing whatsoever on crime, but could possibly be a shoulder thing which goes up.
Now are you starting to see why “assault weapons” is a pointless term? They aren’t functionally any more powerful or deadly than any normal gun. In fact the cartridges they normally fire are far less powerful than your average deer hunting rifle. Don’t worry though, because the same people who fling around the term assault weapons also think of scoped deer rifles as “high powered sniper guns”.
Basically, what you are thinking of as assault weapons aren’t special.
Now, the reason that semi-automatic, magazine fed, intermediate caliber rifles are the single most popular type of gun in America is because they are excellent for many uses, but I’m not talking about fun, or hunting, or sports, today I’m talking business. And in this case they are excellent for shooting bad people who are trying to hurt you, in order to make them stop trying to hurt you. These types of guns are superb for defending your home. Now some of you may think that’s extreme. That’s because everything you’ve learned about gun fights comes from TV. Just read the link where I expound on why.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/carbine-vs-shotgun-vs-pistol-for-home-defense/
I had one individual tell me that these types of guns are designed to slaughter the maximum number of people possible as quickly as possible… Uh huh… Which is why every single police department in America uses them, because of all that slaughtering cops do daily. Cops use them for the same reason we do, they are handy, versatile, and can stop an attacker quickly in a variety of circumstances.
When I said “stop an attacker quickly” somebody on Twitter thought that he’d gotten me and said “Stop. That’s just a euphemism for kill!” Nope. I am perfectly happy if the attacker surrenders or passes out from blood loss too. Tactically and legally, all I care about is making them stop doing whatever it is that they are doing which caused me to shoot them to begin with.
The guns that many of you think of as assault rifle are common and popular because they are excellent for fighting, and I’ll talk about what my side really thinks about the 2nd Amendment below.
We should ban magazines over X number of shots!
I’ve seen this one pop up a lot. It sounds good to the ear and really satisfies that we’ve got to do something need. It sounds simple. Bad guys shoot a lot of people in a mass shooting. So if he has magazines that hold fewer rounds, ergo then he’ll not be able to shoot as many people.
Wrong. And I’ll break it down, first why my side wants more rounds in our gun, second why tactically it doesn’t really stop the problem, and third, why stopping them is a logistical impossibility.
First off, why do gun owners want magazines that hold more rounds? Because sometimes you miss. Because usually—contrary to the movies—you have to hit an opponent multiple times in order to make them stop. Because sometimes you may have multiple assailants. We don’t have more rounds in the magazine so we can shoot more, we have more rounds in the magazine so we are forced to manipulate our gun less if we have to shoot more.
The last assault weapons ban capped capacities at ten rounds. You quickly realize ten rounds sucks when you take a wound ballistics class like I have and go over case after case after case after case of enraged, drug addled, prison hardened, perpetrators who soaked up five, seven, nine, even fifteen bullets and still walked under their own power to the ambulance. That isn’t uncommon at all. Legally, you can shoot them until they cease to be a threat, and keep in mind that what normally causes a person to stop is loss of blood pressure, so I used to tell my students that anybody worth shooting once was worth shooting five or seven times. You shoot them until they leave you alone.
Also, you’re going to miss. It is going to happen. If you can shoot pretty little groups at the range, those groups are going to expand dramatically under the stress and adrenalin. The more you train, the better you will do, but you can still may miss, or the bad guy may end up hiding behind something which your bullets don’t penetrate. Nobody has ever survived a gunfight and then said afterwards, “Darn, I wish I hadn’t brought all that extra ammo.”
So having more rounds in the gun is a good thing for self-defense use.
Now tactically, let’s say a mass shooter is on a rampage in a school. Unless his brain has turned to mush and he’s a complete idiot, he’s not going to walk up right next to you while he reloads anyway. Unlike the CCW holder who gets attacked and has to defend himself in whatever crappy situation he finds himself in, the mass shooter is the aggressor. He’s picked the engagement range. They are cowards who are murdering running and hiding children, but don’t for a second make the mistake of thinking they are dumb. Many of these scumbags are actually very intelligent. They’re just broken and evil.
In the cases that I’m aware of where the shooter had guns that held fewer rounds they just positioned themselves back a bit while firing or they brought more guns, and simply switched guns and kept on shooting, and then reloaded before they moved to the next planned firing position. Unless you are a fumble fingered idiot, anybody who practices in front of a mirror a few dozen times can get to where they can insert a new magazine into a gun in a few seconds.
A good friend of mine (who happens to be a very reasonable democrat) was very hung up on this, sure that he would be able to take advantage of the time in which it took for the bad guy to reload his gun. That’s a bad assumption, and here’s yet another article that addresses that sort of misconception that I wrote several years ago which has sort of made the rounds on firearm’s forums. http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/45671-My-Gunfight-quot-Thinking-Outside-Your-Box-quot So that’s awesome if it happens, but good luck with that.
Finally, let’s look at the logistical ramifications of another magazine ban. The AWB banned the production of all magazines over ten rounds except those marked for military or law enforcement use, and it was a felony to possess those.
Over the ten years of the ban, we never ran out. Not even close. Magazines are cheap and basic. Most of them are pieces of sheet metal with some wire. That’s it. Magazines are considered disposable so most gun people accumulate a ton of them. All it did was make magazines more expensive, ticked off law abiding citizens, and didn’t so much as inconvenience a single criminal.
Meanwhile, bad guys didn’t run out either. And if they did, like I said, they are cheap and basic, so you just get or make more. If you can cook meth, you can make a functioning magazine. My old company designed a rifle magazine once, and I’m no engineer. I paid a CAD guy, spent $20,000 and churned out several thousand 20 round Saiga .308 mags. This could’ve been done out of my garage.
Ten years. No difference. Meanwhile, we had bad guys turning up all the time committing crimes, and guess what was marked on the mags found in their guns? MILITARY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY. Because once again, if you’re already breaking a bunch of laws, they can only hang you once. Criminals simply don’t care.
Once the AWB timed out, because every politician involved looked at the mess which had been passed in the heat of the moment, the fact it did nothing, and the fact that every single one of them from a red state would lose their job if they voted for a new one, it expired and went away. Immediately every single gun person in America went out and bought a couple guns which had been banned and a bucket of new magazines, because nothing makes an American want to do something more than telling them they can’t. We’ve been stocking up ever since. If the last ban did literally nothing at all over a decade, and since then we’ve purchased another hundred million magazines since then, another ban will do even less. (except just make the law abiding that much angrier, and I’ll get to that below).
I bought $600 worth of magazines for my competition pistol this morning. I’ve already got a shelf full for my rifles. Gun and magazine sales skyrocket every time a democrat politician starts to vulture in on a tragedy. I don’t know if many of you realize this, but Barack Obama is personally responsible for more gun sales, and especially first time gun purchases, than anyone in history. When I owned my gun store, we had a picture of him on the wall and a caption beneath it which said SALESMAN OF THE YEAR.
So you can ban this stuff, but it won’t actually do anything to the crimes you want to stop. Unless you think you can confiscate them all, but I’ll talk about confiscation later.
One last thing to share about the magazine ban from the AWB, and this is something all gun people know, but most anti-gunners do not. When you put an artificial cap on a weapon, and tell us that we can only have a limited number of rounds in that weapon, we’re going to make sure they are the most potent rounds possible. Before the ban, everybody bought 9mms which held an average of 15 rounds. After the ban, if I can only have ten rounds, they’re going to be bigger, so we all started buying 10 shot .45s instead.
You don’t need an assault weapon for hunting!
Who said anything about hunting? That whole thing about the 2nd Amendment being for sportsmen is hogwash. The 2nd Amendment is about bearing arms to protect yourself from threats, up to and including a tyrannical government.
Spare me the whole, “You won’t be happy until everybody has nuclear weapons” reductio ad absurdum. It says arms, as in things that were man portable. And as for the founding fathers not being able to see foresee our modern arms, you forget that many of them were inventors, and multi shot weapons were already in service. Not to mention that in that day, arms included cannon, since most of the original artillery of the Continental Army was privately owned. Besides, the Supreme Court agrees with me. See DC v. Heller.
Well we should just ban ALL guns then! You only need them to murder people!
It doesn’t really make sense to ban guns, because in reality what that means is that you are actually banning effective self-defense. Despite the constant hammering by a news media with an agenda, guns are used in America far more to stop crime than to cause crime.
I’ve seen several different sets of numbers about how many times guns are used in self-defense every year. The problem with keeping track of this stat is that the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop.
Clint Smith once said if you look like food, you will be eaten. Criminals are looking for prey. They are looking for easy victims. If they wanted to work hard for a living they’d get a job. So when you pull a gun, you are no longer prey, you are work, so they are going to go find somebody else to pick on.
So many defensive gun uses never get tracked as such. From personal experience, I have pulled a gun exactly one time in my entire life. I was legally justified and the bad guy stopped, put his gun away, and left. (15 years later the same son of a ***** would end up murdering a local sheriff’s deputy). My defensive gun use was never recorded anywhere as far as I know. My wife has pulled a gun twice in her life. Once on somebody who was acting very rapey who suddenly found a better place to be when she stuck a Ruger in his face, and again many years later on a German Shepherd which was attacking my one year old son. (amazingly enough a dog can recognize a 9mm coming out of a fanny pack and run for its life, go figure) No police report at all on the second one, and I don’t believe the first one ever turned up as any sort of defensive use statistic, all because no shots were fired.
So how often are guns actually used in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any recent year, only 10k of which are with guns. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So basically, the guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about only account for a tiny fraction of all our murders.
But let’s not go with the high estimate. Let’s go with some smaller ones instead. Let’s use the far more conservative 800,000 number which is arrived at in multiple studies. That still dwarfs the number of illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number once put out by the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was still around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad.
So even if you use the worst number provided by people who are just as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net positive. Or to put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much that they are totally cool with the population of a decent sized city getting raped and murdered every year as collateral damage in order to get what they want.
Doesn’t matter. I don’t like them. We should ban them and take them all away like a civilized country.
Well, I suppose if your need to do something overrides all reason and logic, then by all means let’s ban guns.
Australia had a mass shooting and instituted a massive gun ban and confiscation (a program which would not work here, which I’ll get to, but let’s run with it anyway.). As was pointed out to me on Facebook, they haven’t had any mass shootings since. However, they fail to realize that they didn’t really have any mass shootings before either. You need to keep in mind that mass shooting are horrific headline grabbing statistical anomalies. You are far more likely to get your head caved in by a local thug while he’s trying to steal your wallet, and that probably won’t even make the evening news.
And violent crime is up in Australia. A cursory Google search will show articles about the increase in violent crime and theft, but then other articles pooh-pooing these stats as being insignificant and totally not related to the guns.
So then we’ve got England, where they reacted swiftly after a mass shooting, banned and confiscated guns, and their violent crime has since skyrocketed. Their stats are far worse than Australia, and they are now one of the more dangerous countries to live in the EU. Once again, cursory Google search will show articles with the stats, and other articles saying that those rises like totally have nothing to do with regular folks no longer being able to defend themselves… Sensing a trend yet?
And then we’ve got South Africa, which instituted some really hard core gun bans and some extremely strict controls, and their crime is now so high that it is basically either no longer tracked or simply not countable. But obviously, the totally unbiased news says that has absolutely nothing to do with people no longer being able to legally defend themselves.
Then you’ve got countries like Norway, with extremely strict gun control. Their gun control laws are simply incomprehensible to half of Americans. Not only that, they are an ethnically and socially homogenous, tiny population, well off country, without our gang violence or drug problems. Their gun control laws are draconian by our standards. They make Chicago look like Boise. Surely that level of gun control will stop school shootings! Except of course for 2011 when a maniac killed 77 and injured 242 people, a body count which is absurdly high compared to anything which has happened America.
Because once again, repeat it with me, criminals simply do not give a crap.
That mass killer used a gun and homemade explosives. Make guns harder to get, and explosives become the weapon of choice. Please do keep in mind that the largest and most advanced military coalition in human history was basically stymied for a decade by a small group using high school level chemistry and the Afghani equivalent to Radio Shack.
The biggest mass killings in US history have used bombs (like Bath, Michigan), fire (like Happyland Nightclub) or airliners. There is no law you can pass, nothing you can say or do, which will make some not be evil.
And all of this is irrelevant, because banning and confiscating all the scary guns in America will be national suicide.
You crazy gun nuts and your 2nd Amendment. We should just confiscate all the guns.
Many of you may truly believe that. You may think that the 2nd Amendment is archaic, outdated, and totally pointless. However, approximately half of the country disagrees with you, and of them, a pretty large portion is fully willing to shoot somebody in defense of it.
We’ve already seen that your partial bans are stupid and don’t do anything, so unless you are merely a hypocrite more interested in style rather than results, the only way to achieve your goal is to come and take the guns away. So let’s talk about confiscation.
They say that there are 80 million gun owners in America. I personally think that number is low for a few reasons. The majority of gun owners I know, when contacted for a phone survey and asked if they own guns, will become suspicious and simply lie. Those of us who don’t want to end like England or Australia will say that we lost all of our guns in a freak canoe accident.
Guns do not really wear out. I have perfectly functioning guns from WWI, and I’ve got friends who have still useable firearms from the 1800s. Plus we’ve been building more of them this entire time. There are more guns than there are people in America, and some of us have enough to arm our entire neighborhood.
But for the sake of math, let’s say that there are only 80 million gun owners, and let’s say that the government decides to round up all those pesky guns once and for all. Let’s be generous and say that 90% of the gun owners don’t really believe in the 2nd Amendment, and their guns are just for duck hunting. Which is what politicians keep telling us, but is actually rather hilarious when you think about how the most commonly sold guns in America are the same detachable magazine semiautomatic rifles I talked about earlier.
So ten percent refuse to turn their guns in. That is 8 million instantaneous felons. Let’s say that 90% of them are not wanting to comply out of sheer stubbornness. Let’s be super generous and say that 90% of them would still just roll over and turn their guns when pressed or legally threatened. That leaves 800,000 Americans who are not turning their guns in, no matter what. To put that in perspective there are only about 700,000 police officers in the whole country.
Let’s say that these hypothetical 10% of 10% are willing to actually fight to keep their guns. Even if my hypothetical estimate of 800,000 gun nuts willing to fight for their guns is correct, it is still 97% higher than the number of insurgents we faced at any one time in Iraq, a country about the size of Texas.
However, I do honestly believe that it would be much bigger than 10%. Once the confiscations turned violent, then it would push many otherwise peaceful people over the edge. I saw somebody on Twitter post about how the 2nd Amendment is stupid because my stupid assault rifles are useless against drones… That person has obviously never worked with the people who build the drones, fly the drones, and service the drones. I have. Where to you think the majority of the US military falls on the political spectrum exactly? There’s a reason Mitt Romney won the military vote by over 40 points, and it wasn’t because of his hair.
And as for those 700,000 cops, how many of them would side with the gun owners? All the gun nuts, that’s for sure. As much as some people like to complain about the gun culture, many of the people you hire to protect you, and darn near all of them who can shoot well, belong to that gun culture. And as I hear people complain about the gun industry, like it is some nebulous, faceless, all powerful corporate thing which hungers for war and anarchy, I just have to laugh, because the gun industry probably has the highest percentage of former cops and former military of any industry in the country. My being a civilian was odd in the circles I worked in. The men and women you pay to protect you have honor and integrity, and they will fight for what they believe in.
So the real question the anti-gun, ban and confiscate, crowd should be asking themselves is this, how many of your fellow Americans are you willing to have killed in order to bring about your utopian vision of the future?
Boo Evil Gun Culture!
Really? Because I hate to break it to you, but when nearly six hundred people get murdered a year in beautiful Gun Free Chicago, that’s not my people doing the shooting.
The gun culture is all around you, well obviously except for those of you reading this in elite liberal urban city centers where you’ve extinguished your gun culture. They are your friends, relatives, and coworkers. The biggest reason gun control has become increasingly difficult to pass over the last decade is because more and more people have turned to CCW, and as that has become more common, it has removed much of the stigma. Now everybody outside of elite urban liberal city centers knows somebody that carries a gun. The gun culture is simply regular America, and is made up of people who think their lives and their families lives are more important than the life of anyone who tries to victimize them.
The gun culture is who protects our country. Sure, there are plenty of soldiers and cops who are issued a gun and who use it as part of their job who could care less. However, the people who build the guns, really understand the guns, actually enjoy using the guns, and usually end up being picked to teach everybody else how to use the guns are the gun culture.
The media and the left would absolutely love to end the gun culture in America, because then they could finally pass all the laws they wanted.
Let’s take a look at what happens when a country finally succeeds in utterly stamping out its gun culture. Mumbai, 2008. Ten armed jihadi terrorists simply walked into town and started shooting people. It was a rather direct, straight forward, ham fisted, simple terrorist attack. They killed over 150 and wounded over 300. India has incredibly strict gun laws, but once again, criminals didn’t care.
That’s not my point this time however, I want to look at the response. These ten men shut down an entire massive city and struck fear into the hearts of millions for THREE DAYS. Depending on where this happened in America it would have been over in three minutes or three hours. The Indian police responded, but their tactics sucked. The marksmanship sucked. Their leadership sucked. Their response utterly and completely fell apart.
In talking afterwards with some individuals from a small agency of our government who were involved in the clean-up and investigation, all of whom are well trained, well practiced, gun nuts, they told me the problem was that the Indian police had no clue what to do because they’d never been taught what to do. Their leadership hated and feared the gun so much that they stamped out the ability for any of their men to actually master the tool. When you kill your gun culture, you kill off your instructors, and those who can pass down the information necessary to do the job.
Don’t think that we are so far off here. I recently got to sit down with some fans who are members of one of the larger metro police departments in America. These guys were all SWAT cops or narcotics, all of them were gun nuts who practiced on their own dime, and all of them were intimately familiar with real violence. These are the guys that you want responding when the real bad stuff goes down.
What they told me made me sick. Their leadership was all uniformly liberal and extremely anti-gun, just like most big cities in America. They walked me through what their responses were supposed to be in case of a Mumbai style event, and how their “scary assault weapons” were kept locked up where they would be unavailable, and how dismal their training was, and how since the state had run off or shut down most of the gun ranges, most of the cops couldn’t even practice or qualify anymore.
So now they were less safe, the people they were protecting were less safe, the bad guys were safer, but most importantly their leadership could pat themselves on the back, because they’d done something.
Well, okay. You make some good points. But I’d be more comfortable if you gun people were force to have more mandatory training!
And I did actually have this one said to me, which is an amazing victory by internet arguing standards.
Mandatory training is a placebo at best. Here is my take on why.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/mandatory-training-for-ccw/
In conclusion, basically it doesn’t really matter what something you pick when some politician or pundit starts screaming we’ve got to do something, because in reality, most of them already know a lot of what I listed above. The ones who are walking around with their security details of well-armed men in their well-guarded government buildings really don’t care about actually stopping mass shooters or bad guys, they care about giving themselves more power and increasing their control.
If a bad guy used a gun with a big magazine, ban magazines. If instead he used more guns, ban owning multiple guns. If he used a more powerful gun with less shots, ban powerful guns. If he used hollowpoints, ban hollowpoints. (which I didn’t get into, but once again, there’s a reason everybody who might have to shoot somebody uses them). If he ignored some Gun Free Zone, make more places Gun Free Zones. If he killed a bunch of innocents, make sure you disarm the innocents even harder for next time. Just in case, let’s ban other guns that weren’t even involved in any crimes, just because they’re too big, too small, too ugly, too cute, too long, too short, too fat, too thin, (and if you think I’m joking I can point out a law or proposed law for each of those) but most of all ban anything which makes some politician irrationally afraid, which luckily, is pretty much everything.
They will never be happy. In countries where they have already banned guns, now they are banning knives and putting cameras on every street. They talk about compromise, but it is never a compromise. It is never, wow, you offer a quick, easy, inexpensive, viable solution to ending mass shootings in schools, let’s try that. It is always, what can we take from you this time, or what will enable us to grow some federal apparatus?
Then regular criminals will go on still not caring, the next mass shooter will watch the last mass shooter be the most famous person in the world on TV, the media will keep on vilifying the people who actually do the most to defend the innocent, the ignorant will call people like me names and tell us we must like dead babies, and nothing actually changes to protect our kids.
If you are serious about actually stopping school shootings, contact your state representative and tell them to look into allowing someone at your kid’s school to be armed. It is time to install some speed bumps.
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Really? You found some tl dr **** and decided to steal it and just dump it here? Are you really expecting anyone to read that ****?
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I read your **** when you post it. So, yeah. I actually want to see if MP-Ryan will dissect it. I like reading reasonable back-and-forth. It's mentally stimulating. I think there are others here who also enjoy this. :P
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I'm not only complaining about the size. I wouldn't be insulted at that if at least it was your original material. But overright stealing it and dump it here and expect reactions from it without any material effort from your part? Come on.
Personally I'm just lurking this thread, seeing the conversation I don't feel prepared to jump in. Wouldn't a link be sufficient? With a quote from the two most stunning paragraphs and so on?
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Yeah, no, people have a tendency to just dismiss links I think. If it's right there, you can read it, or if you skip it, and the conversation after it is interesting enough, you can go back and read it. At least, I like it when you guys copy the text over. Much easier.
Yeah, I dumped it here cause I wanted to see your opinions, like I said. Especially seeing how this discussion is pretty civil.
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I read your **** when you post it. So, yeah. I actually want to see if MP-Ryan will dissect it. I like reading reasonable back-and-forth. It's mentally stimulating. I think there are others here who also enjoy this. :P
I read that when it was first published, thoroughly dissected it for another forum back then, and have no desire to take it apart point-by-point again.
That said, I have posted a number of things in this thread that thoroughly debunk a great deal of that opinion piece already. Anyone who wants to do so can go back and read them. Notably, the author engages a number of politicized fallacies when he talks about banning guns and the regulatory regimes of other countries, and neglects to examine a number of the statistics showing the variation in firearms-related injuries and deaths in various countries with different legal frameworks. Furthermore, he acknowledges none of the peer-reviewed research on the subject and instead engages in folksy "Common-sense" analysis, which is a term I hear from 'conservative' friends of mine in the US who are notorious for invoking it when they run out of meaningful sources and academic citations.
What people such as that author never acknowledge, constantly deflect, and frankly don't want to discuss is the hard-and-fast numbers: the numbers that show the United States as a whole has an epidemic of violence around firearms that is due largely to the confluence of the following factors which are not nearly as pronounced in its comparator nations, namely:
1. Lax and/or piecemeal regulation of firearms.
2. Historical cultural attitude toward firearms (2nd amendment).
3. Highly diverse population.
4. Large marginalized population in rigid socially and economically immobile classes.
5. Poor public support for funding of mental health services.
The NRA and their ilk are absolutely correct that firearms are not evil. Firearms are tools. Unfortunately, in the United States firearms are an altogether easily-available tool that allow people to commit extreme violence with ease based on a number of causal factors. If all democracies - nevermind just the US - could meaningfully address and mitigate those causal factors, you could put a firearm in the hands of every man, woman, and child. Unfortunately, a number of political factors in the US in particular make meaningful progress in those areas of policy difficult if not impossible. The result is that deaths and injuries due to illegal, improper, or unsafe use in the US are astronomically greater than any comparator nation. I previously provided a citation for this.
Once again, in the event it was not clear earlier - I am a firearms enthusiast. I do not believe in the "ban guns" paradigm, and it infuriates me that "ban guns" is always the way pro-firearms advocates want to frame their counter-arguments. There are a hell of a lot of very reasonable and very effective changes that can be made to firearms regulation in the United States that fall well short of banning guns that would put a serious dent in the injury and fatality numbers. Unfortunately, it seems the vocal crowd wants to talk about the merits of the "Ban Guns! vs 2nd AMENDMENT!" debate, which is entirely a false construction explicitly designed to ensure nothing is ever done about this issue.
At this point, I'd love to see a social experiment - every government in the US should simultaneously repeal every piece of firearms-and-weapons-regulating legislation in the entire country. At this point, I think it's the only course of action that might inject some sense in this absolutely moronic debate.
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I won't lie, I suspect most of the self-defence and ~resisting tyranny~ scenarios proposed by gun nuts are more juvenile power fantasies than anything particularly relevant to the real world.
Bingo.
The whole thing is just a power fantasy held by predominantly white men who are upset about their steadily decreasing privileges as a political class. First you fantasise about defending your home from invaders, and invent all sorts of fantastic scenarios in which you will use your guns to save the day. Next you get a CCW permit and walk around fantasising about the time you'll be able to stop a spree shooter in his tracks, or save a young damsel from being raped. Finally, you buy a bunch of semi-auto civvie variants of military carbines and some STANAG mags, and fantasise about overthrowing the government with your militia buddies and installing a new government 'for the people' or whatever tortured interpretation of founding father rhetoric you choose to use.
Yes, let's just denounce all gun owners as "crazy lunatics" because they refuse to be easy victims. Another brilliant deduction from the "women should tell rapists that they're on their period and throw up on themselves" camp.
And because what you just mentioned has happened so many times in the past 237 years, right?
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Another brilliant deduction from the "women should tell rapists that they're on their period and throw up on themselves" camp.
And because what you just mentioned has happened so many times in the past 237 years, right?
wtf is this
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I read your **** when you post it. So, yeah. I actually want to see if MP-Ryan will dissect it. I like reading reasonable back-and-forth. It's mentally stimulating. I think there are others here who also enjoy this. :P
I read that when it was first published, thoroughly dissected it for another forum back then, and have no desire to take it apart point-by-point again.
That said, I have posted a number of things in this thread that thoroughly debunk a great deal of that opinion piece already. Anyone who wants to do so can go back and read them. Notably, the author engages a number of politicized fallacies when he talks about banning guns and the regulatory regimes of other countries, and neglects to examine a number of the statistics showing the variation in firearms-related injuries and deaths in various countries with different legal frameworks. Furthermore, he acknowledges none of the peer-reviewed research on the subject and instead engages in folksy "Common-sense" analysis, which is a term I hear from 'conservative' friends of mine in the US who are notorious for invoking it when they run out of meaningful sources and academic citations.
What people such as that author never acknowledge, constantly deflect, and frankly don't want to discuss is the hard-and-fast numbers: the numbers that show the United States as a whole has an epidemic of violence around firearms that is due largely to the confluence of the following factors which are not nearly as pronounced in its comparator nations, namely:
1. Lax and/or piecemeal regulation of firearms.
2. Historical cultural attitude toward firearms (2nd amendment).
3. Highly diverse population.
4. Large marginalized population in rigid socially and economically immobile classes.
5. Poor public support for funding of mental health services.
The NRA and their ilk are absolutely correct that firearms are not evil. Firearms are tools. Unfortunately, in the United States firearms are an altogether easily-available tool that allow people to commit extreme violence with ease based on a number of causal factors. If all democracies - nevermind just the US - could meaningfully address and mitigate those causal factors, you could put a firearm in the hands of every man, woman, and child. Unfortunately, a number of political factors in the US in particular make meaningful progress in those areas of policy difficult if not impossible. The result is that deaths and injuries due to illegal, improper, or unsafe use in the US are astronomically greater than any comparator nation. I previously provided a citation for this.
Once again, in the event it was not clear earlier - I am a firearms enthusiast. I do not believe in the "ban guns" paradigm, and it infuriates me that "ban guns" is always the way pro-firearms advocates want to frame their counter-arguments. There are a hell of a lot of very reasonable and very effective changes that can be made to firearms regulation in the United States that fall well short of banning guns that would put a serious dent in the injury and fatality numbers. Unfortunately, it seems the vocal crowd wants to talk about the merits of the "Ban Guns! vs 2nd AMENDMENT!" debate, which is entirely a false construction explicitly designed to ensure nothing is ever done about this issue.
At this point, I'd love to see a social experiment - every government in the US should simultaneously repeal every piece of firearms-and-weapons-regulating legislation in the entire country. At this point, I think it's the only course of action that might inject some sense in this absolutely moronic debate.
Except for the fact that, you know, the gun rights side won the argument. Gun laws are the loosest they've been in decades and gun ownership is the highest it's been in 30 years, all the while crime rates are plummeting. And as we've been over, even strict "non-ban" regulation increases homicide rates; take for instance the Gun Control Act of 1967 in the United Kingdom, which instituted strict licensing and registration for firearms, while leading to higher homicide rates.
You keep saying "the NRA does this, the NRA does that," it's not the NRA that is framing the discussion in terms of "gun ban vs Second Amendment." It's the gungrabbers that are doing that, and yes, that includes President Obama. The gungrabbers don't want firearms regulations, because they HATE guns. They view gun owners as a disease, they think of them as being no different from the "God hates fags" and "pro-life" crowd. They don't care about stopping criminals, they care about stopping law abiding gun owners, because it goes against their ideology of "guns are bad." The NRA and gun owners are arguing predominately to keep what they have. Sure, it would be nice to get a few more gun laws repealed, such as the ban on campus carry and the ban on machineguns, but overall, we just want to keep the rights we have now.
Also, how does supporting the Second Amendment (viewing firearms ownership as a right/responsibility) cause higher crime rates? That makes no sense whatsoever and is not supported by facts. Plenty of other countries view firearms ownership as a right and/or responsibility and they have extremely low crime rates (Switzerland for instance). If anything, having a responsible, armed populace lowers crime, as we've seen.
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Yeah, no, people have a tendency to just dismiss links I think. If it's right there, you can read it, or if you skip it, and the conversation after it is interesting enough, you can go back and read it.
I absolutely refuse to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of text that were simply copied and pasted from somewhere else, even if it is on a topic that is of great interest to me or I agree with, because it is abhorrently lazy of the poster. I also feel the exact same way if someone simply makes a link without writing any of their own words about it. (And I've called people out for doing this crap in the past).
A better way to do it is to write your own material and then use your link as a reference or as extra supporting material, perhaps with a few quoted lines to provide substance. Or if you want to talk about the source itself then mention/link it, talk about what it says, and quote some important lines. If people are interested in checking out your source more thoroughly, they will do so. I will always check a link if it is provided in that kind of framework.
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Another brilliant deduction from the "women should tell rapists that they're on their period and throw up on themselves" camp.
And because what you just mentioned has happened so many times in the past 237 years, right?
wtf is this
Even you should be disappointed in Hoover, given that he just accused gun owners of being psychopaths and wannabe-superheroes.
Little does he know that gun control started in the United States as an attempt by Democrats to prevent former slaves from defending themselves against the KKK and lynchers. Or in the United Kingdom as an attempt to keep the working class subjugated.
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I'm not even going to ask for citations on that, because you have more than burnt through that goodwill by now. Hey Nakura what happened to guns having nothing whatsoever to do with suicide rates? Or concealed carry totally reducing homicide rates? How about actually having the humility to acknowledge when your talking points get demolished rather than seguing onto the next little package of blank assertions and linkspam?
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Except for the fact that, you know, the gun rights side won the argument. Gun laws are the loosest they've been in decades and gun ownership is the highest it's been in 30 years, all the while crime rates are plummeting. And as we've been over, even strict "non-ban" regulation increases homicide rates; take for instance the Gun Control Act of 1967 in the United Kingdom, which instituted strict licensing and registration for firearms, while leading to higher homicide rates.
The homicide rate has fallen in every democracy in the last 30 years, regardless of changes to firearm laws. Injury and deaths of all kinds related to firearms have fallen in every country that has enacted tougher firearms controls. Homicide rates in the UK today are not higher than they were 30 years ago (https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html). The death rate by firearm in the United States is significantly higher (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20571454) than its comparators, all of whom have more stringent firearms laws. Furthermore, homicide rates also have a statistically significant correlation with the availability of firearms (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11130511). You are demonstrating classic correlation/causation fallacy when you say homicide rates are now lower, gun ownership is higher, and regulation is lower. None of these factors is directly causal to the others; all of them have changed in every democracy; and all at them have changed at different rates.
You keep saying "the NRA does this, the NRA does that," it's not the NRA that is framing the discussion in terms of "gun ban vs Second Amendment." It's the gungrabbers that are doing that, and yes, that includes President Obama. The gungrabbers don't want firearms regulations, because they HATE guns. They view gun owners as a disease, they think of them as being no different from the "God hates fags" and "pro-life" crowd. They don't care about stopping criminals, they care about stopping law abiding gun owners, because it goes against their ideology of "guns are bad." The NRA and gun owners are arguing predominately to keep what they have. Sure, it would be nice to get a few more gun laws repealed, such as the ban on campus carry and the ban on machineguns, but overall, we just want to keep the rights we have now.
This entire paragraph is ideological and has not one scrap of evidence associated with it. Furthermore, the common arguments against firearms controls from the NRA-side - such as the piece jr2 posted - virtually always talk about firearms bans.
Also, how does supporting the Second Amendment (viewing firearms ownership as a right/responsibility) cause higher crime rates? That makes no sense whatsoever and is not supported by facts. Plenty of other countries view firearms ownership as a right and/or responsibility and they have extremely low crime rates (Switzerland for instance). If anything, having a responsible, armed populace lowers crime, as we've seen.
I invite you to do a little research on Switzerland, actually, because it's gun laws are not what you obviously think they are (http://www.loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/switzerland.php). The notion of the 2nd Amendment has prevented the United States from ever implementing effective regulation of firearms on a nation-wide basis and it is piecemeal firearms regulation that results in so many of the problems you have as compared to other nations that do it nationally - I previously provided reasons why in this thread, and am not repeating them.
I have noticed a disturbing trend in this thread - every time peer-reviewed statistics are posted, they are rapidly ignored. This is unacceptable. Please respond and explain precisely how your position can be reconciled with the NCBI studies linked in this thread, both of which I re-linked in this post. Your posts have always been thinly-veiled conservative/gun-lobby talking points; now we are going to talk about actual data from actual studies with actual scientifically-derived methodologies instead. I expect any future sources you include to conform to those parameters. If you make a claim, I will now expect a citation to a reputable source. If you don't, I will highlight that claim and ask for a source. I will not respond to unsourced claims beyond that. If following these reasonable rules of rational debate does not appeal to you, please indicate that and cease making claims without credible sourcing behind them. You lost any benefit of the doubt you had from me on page 7 with the bull**** claims about the CDC.
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Another brilliant deduction from the "women should tell rapists that they're on their period and throw up on themselves" camp.
And because what you just mentioned has happened so many times in the past 237 years, right?
wtf is this
Even you should be disappointed in Hoover, given that he just accused gun owners of being psychopaths and wannabe-superheroes.
Little does he know that gun control started in the United States as an attempt by Democrats to prevent former slaves from defending themselves against the KKK and lynchers. Or in the United Kingdom as an attempt to keep the working class subjugated.
Citations required.
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I'm not even going to ask for citations on that, because you have more than burnt through that goodwill by now. Hey Nakura what happened to guns having nothing whatsoever to do with suicide rates? Or concealed carry totally reducing homicide rates? How about actually having the humility to acknowledge when your talking points get demolished rather than seguing onto the next little package of blank assertions and linkspam?
Talking points?
The only thing I said that was wrong, was that the CDC "ruled," which it doesn't. A more accurate statement would be that the CDC "came to the conclusion that," not "ruled that." This was a grammatical error, however, not a flaw with my empirical data or logic. Concealed carry has been proven to reduce homicide rates, as cited by the CDC and countless independent studies. Even the studies conducted by the gun control lobby show that at the very worst, concealed carry has no noticeable affect on crime.
What MP-Ryan refused to point out in his link, is that the decision the NRC released 10 years ago regarding self-defense wasn't unanimous. There was dissent in favor of concealed carry lowering crime rates (http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10881&page=269). The NAP study admitted that there wasn't enough data to draw a conclusion, and a further study was released in 2013 by the CDC, which I linked too on page one. In addition, studies show that 'Stand Your Ground' laws have led to a 9% drop in homicide and an 11% drop in overall violent crime. (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/493636.html)
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Oh look, you segued into the next little package of blank assertions and linkspam!
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I'm not even going to ask for citations on that, because you have more than burnt through that goodwill by now. Hey Nakura what happened to guns having nothing whatsoever to do with suicide rates? Or concealed carry totally reducing homicide rates? How about actually having the humility to acknowledge when your talking points get demolished rather than seguing onto the next little package of blank assertions and linkspam?
Talking points?
The only thing I said that was wrong, was that the CDC "ruled," which it doesn't. A more accurate statement would be that the CDC "came to the conclusion that," not "ruled that." This was a grammatical error, however, not a flaw with my empirical data or logic. Concealed carry has been proven to reduce homicide rates, as cited by the CDC and countless independent studies. Even the studies conducted by the gun control lobby show that at the very worst, concealed carry has no noticeable affect on crime.
What MP-Ryan refused to point out in his link, is that the decision the NRC released 10 years ago regarding self-defense wasn't unanimous. There was dissent in favor of concealed carry lowering crime rates (http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10881&page=269). The NAP study admitted that there wasn't enough data to draw a conclusion, and a further study was released in 2013 by the CDC, which I linked too on page one. In addition, studies show that 'Stand Your Ground' laws have led to a 9% drop in homicide and an 11% drop in overall violent crime. (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/493636.html)
Concealed carry may CORRELATE with lower crime rates, but it certainly doesn't cause it. I'm dubious about that claim too, as your source is an interview with John Lott and not state or federal statistics departments, which I assume you will look up and post immediately after reading this. And I'm not sure what link you're referring to or what I refused to point out. And your other link about dissent - there is always dissent on criminal law policy - again references the work of Lott. Lott is an economist. He is not a statistician. He is not a criminologist. He is not a lawyer. His work is not all peer-reviewed. The gun lobby loves to try citing the man for all these reasons. His research is biased to a political objective. Find some actual statistics from an actual research institution.
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The homicide rate has fallen in every democracy in the last 30 years, regardless of changes to firearm laws. Injury and deaths of all kinds related to firearms have fallen in every country that has enacted tougher firearms controls. Homicide rates in the UK today are not higher than they were 30 years ago (https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html). The death rate by firearm in the United States is significantly higher (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20571454) than its comparators, all of whom have more stringent firearms laws. Furthermore, homicide rates also have a statistically significant correlation with the availability of firearms (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11130511). You are demonstrating classic correlation/causation fallacy when you say homicide rates are now lower, gun ownership is higher, and regulation is lower. None of these factors is directly causal to the others; all of them have changed in every democracy; and all at them have changed at different rates.
Nakura: Please respond to these points.
On a general note, this topic is on the verge of being closed. It is increasingly apparent that both sides of the debate have given up on trying to convince the other and are just repeating points ad nauseum; this is not what we call "constructive" around here.
I am pretty sure that the possibility for reasonable, enlightening debate on this topic exists, but this thread isn't it.
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Another brilliant deduction from the "women should tell rapists that they're on their period and throw up on themselves" camp.
And because what you just mentioned has happened so many times in the past 237 years, right?
wtf is this
Even you should be disappointed in Hoover, given that he just accused gun owners of being psychopaths and wannabe-superheroes.
Little does he know that gun control started in the United States as an attempt by Democrats to prevent former slaves from defending themselves against the KKK and lynchers. Or in the United Kingdom as an attempt to keep the working class subjugated.
Citations required.
For the United Kingdom:
As World War I came to a conclusion, the labor strife of the pre−war period again reared its head, with one additional ingredient in the caustic stew: Communism. An August 1917 "Memorandum by Professor E. V. Arnold of Bangor University" was circulated to the Cabinet at the request of Lord Milner, warning of "Labour in Revolt." Professor Arnold warned of a movement of younger workers that did not follow the trade union leaders. Professor Arnold's "Labour in Revolt" described a doctrinaire revolutionary Marxist movement. While the words "Communist" and "Bolshevik" never appear in Arnold's memorandum, his language leaves no doubt that he was describing this movement. Arnold also carefully distinguished this movement from the Labour Party itself.
In addition to the Communist workers, an additional faction became a recurring concern of the Government: soldiers. In September 1917, Lord Curzon circulated to his fellow Cabinet ministers a letter from the Bishop of Oxford, warning of "Alleged Disaffection Existing Among British Troops at Home." The Bishop's letter warned that hunger, low pay, and a refusal to allow leave caused British soldiers to secretly put up a placard "to say that they were going to imitate the Russian soldiers" and that they engaged in "open sedition in speech."
The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, late in 1917, certainly added fuel to the fire of fear in the Cabinet. As World War I dragged to a close, conditions in Britain created increasingly serious strikes. The strike by the London police force on August 30, 1918 was one of the most frightening such industrial actions of the time. Out of a force of 19,000 policemen, 10,000 failed to show up for work. Lloyd George later claimed Britain "was closer to Bolshevism that day than at any other time since." Sir Basil Thomson, Scotland Yard's Director of Intelligence, wrote in late 1918 that "England would be spared the full horrors of Bolshevism" yet also believed that the nation could be severely damaged by "serious labour disturbances, carried on with the sympathy of the Police." Thomson also believed that "serious labour disturbances" were beyond the control of the police in big cities.
Immediately after the war, a wave of Communist revolutionary actions took place on the continent. In North America, a series of disturbances and strikes were widely interpreted as evidence of Communist subversion. These events created increasing levels of fear within the Cabinet and the British intelligence service. One report passed up the chain of command in early 1919 with an approving cover note asserted:
I now find myself convinced that in England Bolschevism [sic] must be faced and grappled with, the efforts of the International Jews of Russia combated and their agents eliminated from the United Kingdom. Unless some serious consideration is given to the matter, I believe that there will be some sort of Revolution in this country and that before 12 months are past...
The events of early 1919 seemed to confirm these fears of Communist revolution. A general strike in Glasgow
led to the raising of the red flag over city hall. The Glasgow Herald called it a first step toward Bolshevism, and the Secretary of State for Scotland called it a Bolshevik rising. The army was mobilized, but the police restored order without the military's assistance. In retrospect, the general strike in Glasgow was not the first step of revolution, but it is certainly understandable that the intelligence service, the Cabinet, and the king, misread it as such.
The concern about revolutionary violence appears to have motivated similar firearms control laws in the
Dominions. In Canada, the Winnipeg General Strike in May 1919 led to violence. Thomson's "Report on Revolutionary Organizations in the United Kingdom," January 22, 1920, described it as: not an industrial dispute but really an attempt to overthrow the constitutional government and to replace it by a form of Soviet Government planned and fashioned by the Industrial Workers of the World.
The "alien scum" were blamed for the labor strife. In response, the Canadian Parliament passed a law in 1920 requiring a permit for anyone to possess any gun. The Canadian Parliament repealed the permit requirement for Canadian citizens for rifles and shotguns (though not for handguns) in 1921.
New Zealand adopted a mandatory firearms registration law in 1920 because returning servicemen had brought pistols and automatic weapons back to New Zealand. "Revolution had occurred in Russia and there was a fear that large scale industrial demonstrations or even riot could occur here." At least one scholar claims that Australia's gun control laws, adopted on a state−by−state basis during the period 1921−32, were adopted for similar reasons.
How should the British government respond to these fears? There were differing proposals within the Cabinet. On February 27, 1919, Cabinet Secretary Thomas Jones wrote to Sir Maurice Hankey about the increasing problem of labor strife, and told how several Cabinet ministers responded to his proposals to defuse the concerns of the working classes with social policy changes. According to Jones, his proposal drew "rather long faces" from several Cabinet ministers: "It was blank nonsense to talk of a bagatelle like [sterling]71,000,000 −− a cheap insurance against Bolshevism."
Crisis after crisis increased the Cabinet's fears of revolution. When the Triple Alliance of miners, railway workers, and transport workers demanded higher wages and shorter hours in February 1919, Prime Minister Lloyd George appealed to patriotism, asserting that the government would fall if they called a general strike: I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon... In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us.
Throughout 1919, fear of revolution rose and fell, depending on the events of the moment, but the undercurrent of fear never went away. The Cabinet's Strike Committee responded to a railroad strike on September 26, 1919 with orders to the army to secure railroads and power stations against sabotage. The Committee also concluded that a "Citizen Guard" was now necessary to deal with the danger of a general strike. Though the Cabinet abandoned the Citizen Guard plans when the railroad strike was settled on October 5, 1919, this proposal −− and the fears it represented −− reappeared in 1920. (Perhaps indicative of the Cabinet's belief in the power of armed civilians, the British government reacted with anger at a 1920 plan by the Soviet government to impose a "civic militia" of armed Polish workers on defeated Poland, for the apparent purpose of bringing about a Communist coup.)
As 1920 opened, the Cabinet's fear of Communist revolution was again on the rise. The January 7, 1920 report "The Labour Situation" from the Ministry of Labour warns of a leftist newspaper that: announces an attempt is to be made within the next few months to overthrow democratic government and to set up some form of `Soviet' rule, by means of a "general strike," and anticipates that this strike will be accompanied by an upheaval in Ireland.
The workers were also described as increasingly unwilling to listen to labor union leaders, with the more radical labor newspapers distinguishing between "reactionary Trade Union officials" and radical parts of "political Labour." Director of Intelligence Thomson's January 9, 1920 "Report of Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom" warned that while miners were losing faith in the strike as a tool for achieving their ends, "There is abundant evidence that the great mass of Labour is drifting steadily to the Left."
Cabinet Secretary Sir Maurice Hankey's letter of January 17, 1920, to Jones discusses a Cabinet
meeting about: the industrial situation. C.I.G.S. [Chief of the Imperial General Staff] also is positively in a state of dreadful nerves on the subject. Churchill is the only one who is sane on this subject... From a meeting yesterday evening I came away with my head fairly reeling. I felt I had been in Bedlam. Red revolution and blood and war at home and abroad!
While many of Thomson's intelligence reports seem to fit into the concern about Communist revolution, others suggest that he did not consider this a likely occurrence −− unlike the Cabinet ministers. Thomson's "Report on Revolutionary Organizations in the United Kingdom" of January 22, 1920, acknowledged that reports were circulating in London "that a revolution is to be expected within the next two months." But Thomson's report also insisted "the minority that would like to see a sudden and violent revolution is ridiculously small." Instead, his concern was about "The flow of Bolshevik propaganda, which is very ably written, will inevitably be greatly increased when trade is opened with Russia..." Thomson proposed new legislation instead to deal with such propaganda; he worried more about the pen than the sword.
Read more: http://dvc.org.uk/dunblane/clayton_1.pdf
As for the US it's well-documented everywhere. Here's a pretty comprehensive and well-sourced study on gun control being used to suppress freed slaves: http://www.guncite.com/journals/cd-reg.html
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I am pretty sure that the possibility for reasonable, enlightening debate on this topic exists, but this thread isn't it.
I'm not. I've done this on a half-dozen forums in the last dozen years, and none of them have been particularly reasoned or enlightening. I'm not sure why I thought this one may be any different. I gave up when the peer-reviewed data was posted and promptly ignored. Now I'd just like Nakura to provide a substantive response.
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Read more: http://dvc.org.uk/dunblane/clayton_1.pdf
Who is Clayton Cramer, and why should I care about what he says or what a site set up by some random guy on the Dunblane massacre say? I am getting exceedingly tired of asking for reputable sources. I can go find some random guy on the Internet that says guns are the spawn of Satan - that doesn't make it credible.
As for the US it's well-documented everywhere. Here's a pretty comprehensive and well-sourced study on gun control being used to suppress freed slaves: http://www.guncite.com/journals/cd-reg.html
While my head explodes at the fact you've pulled it from Guncite, the analysis is at least from reputable authors it seems, so that's a plus. It makes for an interesting argument; but recognize that it is an argument and - like most history - it's an interpretation based on facts, not a fact unto itself. Good reading, though, and seems to carry some academic validity at least in how its constructed.
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This thread would, I suspect, have evolved much faster had people pressed Nakura on the first few points he started arguing about, like gun control in Australia.
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I'm not even going to ask for citations on that, because you have more than burnt through that goodwill by now. Hey Nakura what happened to guns having nothing whatsoever to do with suicide rates? Or concealed carry totally reducing homicide rates? How about actually having the humility to acknowledge when your talking points get demolished rather than seguing onto the next little package of blank assertions and linkspam?
Talking points?
The only thing I said that was wrong, was that the CDC "ruled," which it doesn't. A more accurate statement would be that the CDC "came to the conclusion that," not "ruled that." This was a grammatical error, however, not a flaw with my empirical data or logic. Concealed carry has been proven to reduce homicide rates, as cited by the CDC and countless independent studies. Even the studies conducted by the gun control lobby show that at the very worst, concealed carry has no noticeable affect on crime.
What MP-Ryan refused to point out in his link, is that the decision the NRC released 10 years ago regarding self-defense wasn't unanimous. There was dissent in favor of concealed carry lowering crime rates (http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10881&page=269). The NAP study admitted that there wasn't enough data to draw a conclusion, and a further study was released in 2013 by the CDC, which I linked too on page one. In addition, studies show that 'Stand Your Ground' laws have led to a 9% drop in homicide and an 11% drop in overall violent crime. (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/493636.html)
Concealed carry may CORRELATE with lower crime rates, but it certainly doesn't cause it. I'm dubious about that claim too, as your source is an interview with John Lott and not state or federal statistics departments, which I assume you will look up and post immediately after reading this. And I'm not sure what link you're referring to or what I refused to point out. And your other link about dissent - there is always dissent on criminal law policy - again references the work of Lott. Lott is an economist. He is not a statistician. He is not a criminologist. He is not a lawyer. His work is not all peer-reviewed. The gun lobby loves to try citing the man for all these reasons. His research is biased to a political objective. Find some actual statistics from an actual research institution.
There is no way to measure the effect of any crime, only to correlate it. The same goes for the affect of economic factors on crime, it's all just correlation, because there are an infinite number of factors that can affect the data. John Lott is generally considered to be one of the foremost firearms statistics expert in the world, having quite literally wrote the book on firearms statistics. Unfortunately, it seems that he is the only person who has actually studied the affects of stand-your-ground laws on crime. Seeing as he mentioned it in his book, we'd have to find the citation in the appendix or ask him. I don't own the book though.
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I WILL be criminally liable for breaking a half-dozen Canadian laws concerning firearms use/storage/safety/possession/transport if I don't have a very good explanation of why I was carrying a loaded handgun, which is probably where you're getting confused.
Just because I'm curious, what good explanation would pass in that circumstance?
Because I can't think of any good excuse why you have a loaded handgun in your pocket and you're Joe from Accounting
I know the point you're trying to make, but you're saying it really poorly. To clear this up:
Yeah
I know
Never said I was intelligent
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Read more: http://dvc.org.uk/dunblane/clayton_1.pdf
Who is Clayton Cramer, and why should I care about what he says or what a site set up by some random guy on the Dunblane massacre say? I am getting exceedingly tired of asking for reputable sources. I can go find some random guy on the Internet that says guns are the spawn of Satan - that doesn't make it credible.
As for the US it's well-documented everywhere. Here's a pretty comprehensive and well-sourced study on gun control being used to suppress freed slaves: http://www.guncite.com/journals/cd-reg.html
While my head explodes at the fact you've pulled it from Guncite, the analysis is at least from reputable authors it seems, so that's a plus. It makes for an interesting argument; but recognize that it is an argument and - like most history - it's an interpretation based on facts, not a fact unto itself. Good reading, though, and seems to carry some academic validity at least in how its constructed.
Note that both sites provide sources for all of their data. Also, his article was primarily about the 1920 Firearms Act.
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Just because I'm curious, what good explanation would pass in that circumstance?
Because I can't think of any good excuse why you have a loaded handgun in your pocket and you're Joe from Accounting
"I found it lying on the street, there were kids nearby, and I was taking it to the police detachment a block away from here because when I called the non-emergency police number I was on hold for 20 minutes."
Also, it's not a problem of intelligence, it's a problem of wording =)
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Note that both sites provide sources for all of their data.
No; both articles provide references that they use to make their arguments. Cramer is just like me - some guy with an interest who has a bunch of sources he is using to make an argument. His writings are not facts in and of themselves. Similarly, though the second pair of authors may be professors, their footnotes acknowledge theirs is an interpretation of a series of facts they are using to present an argument.
You are trying to make an argument based on an argument someone else made based on a series of historical points they looked at and referenced in order to show why they made that argument. You are not taking raw data or a study of raw data drawing conclusions and making an argument from it. See the difference?
If I say "the sky is green with purple polka dots," nobody would take me seriously. If I say the same thing and then say "because that guy over there says so too, and he actually looked at it" someone might take me more seriously but still be pretty damn skeptical. If I say the same thin and then say "and I know it is because I have a series of photos which I took and I have analyzed the wavelengths of the particular colours, and I have also checked my camera to make sure it was working correctly and I have other photos or other objects which show their correct colours which you can plainly see..." it's going to be much harder for someone to argue with me. Right now, you are alternating between the first and second types of statements in your sourcing.
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Cramer is just like me
Where's your wikipedia page?
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Note that both sites provide sources for all of their data.
No; both articles provide references that they use to make their arguments. Cramer is just like me - some guy with an interest who has a bunch of sources he is using to make an argument. His writings are not facts in and of themselves. Similarly, though the second pair of authors may be professors, their footnotes acknowledge theirs is an interpretation of a series of facts they are using to present an argument.
You are trying to make an argument based on an argument someone else made based on a series of historical points they looked at and referenced in order to show why they made that argument. You are not taking raw data or a study of raw data drawing conclusions and making an argument from it. See the difference?
If I say "the sky is green with purple polka dots," nobody would take me seriously. If I say the same thing and then say "because that guy over there says so too, and he actually looked at it" someone might take me more seriously but still be pretty damn skeptical. If I say the same thin and then say "and I know it is because I have a series of photos which I took and I have analyzed the wavelengths of the particular colours, and I have also checked my camera to make sure it was working correctly and I have other photos or other objects which show their correct colours which you can plainly see..." it's going to be much harder for someone to argue with me. Right now, you are alternating between the first and second types of statements in your sourcing.
If not Cramer, then look at Guncite again:
The third undermining factor was the development of government mistrust of the people, as in the 1920 fears of Bolshevism. We may hear echoes of this today in the United States government's fears the militia movement and its allies. Certainly, however, the dangers posed by the modern militia movement are much smaller than the dangers posed by Soviet communism and its United States agents in the 1950s or by violent anarcho-syndicalism in the early twentieth century. Consequently, the related suppressions of civil liberties have been smaller.
Source: http://guncite.com/journals/okslip.html#fn252
Or even left-wingers themselves:
Backing up these mass meetings there had also been a slow but steady preparation by workers for the coming conflict with the government. Unlike today, it was still lawful for any person to hold arms in Britain, much like the current US constitution. This right was later removed by the British government through the 1903 Pistol Act and 1920 Firearms Act, the latter quickly passed during a period of working-class militancy and radicalisation. But in 1838, the purchase of firearms was readily available, and workers up and down the country had begun to accumulate arms as part of their preparation to ensure that the demands of the charter would be met. The extent and range of firearms accumulation is quite staggering: for example, with caltrops (spiked iron balls to throw under the feet of charging cavalry) being mass produced secretly at the Winlaton ironworks in Tyneside, or the caseloads of rifles purchased in Sheffield by Staffordshire Chartists. In the south west, William Potts was amongst others who was later found by the authorities with an arms cache and who had displayed in his shop window bullets with the label ‘pills for the Tories’ – he was a chemist!
Source: http://www.socialismtoday.org/129/chartism.html
It's pretty well documented that early gun control laws in the United Kingdom were aimed to stifle opposition from left-wingers and labour unions. I can somewhat understand what you're trying to say, but there are some things that are just facts. For instance, "Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address" is a fact. It's not open to interpretation, it simply happened and is well documented. Sure, nobody from back then is still alive, but it's a pretty safe bet that it still happened.
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Cramer is just like me
Where's your wikipedia page?
Mmm... maybe?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Leef
:D
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It's like I'm talking to a wall about sources here. (And no, no wiki page for me :p I have big career problems if I end up on Wikipedia)
Look, Nakura, I can appreciate that you're at least trying some sourcing now, but you're still missing the point. Whenever you go to a source that has special interest in a topic area, you immediately call it's credibility into question - bias plays a huge role in any political argument and Lott and gun cite area huge red flags. You want raw data presented with as little bias as possible, something you aren't going to get from either of those places, or many of the others you're using. Peer-reviewed work can contain biases, yes, but they are usually interpretive versus methodological.
Now, all that aside, the historical crux of the point of where some firearms laws began to originally emerged has been basically satisfied, so that's good.
What is not good is you still have quite a number of matters earlier in the thread which you have not dealt with. This post should clarify a couple of them: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=84920.msg1698321#msg1698321
Random observation: posting from an iPad keyboard sucks
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I am pretty sure that the possibility for reasonable, enlightening debate on this topic exists, but this thread isn't it.
I'm not. I've done this on a half-dozen forums in the last dozen years, and none of them have been particularly reasoned or enlightening. I'm not sure why I thought this one may be any different. I gave up when the peer-reviewed data was posted and promptly ignored. Now I'd just like Nakura to provide a substantive response.
Yeah this. Gun control is a pet topic of mine, and I've had this argument on dozens of forums. It never goes anywhere productive when arguing with pro-gun Americans, because many of them believe that 'common sense' trumps peer-reviewed research and empirical evidence.
You also get guys like Nakura, who claim to be in favour of evidence-based policymaking (when the evidence supports their worldview), but when the evidence is shown to support gun control they either ignore it and refuse to respond, or move the goalposts.
It's exhausting, and largely a massive waste of time for all concerned.
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As for the US it's well-documented everywhere. Here's a pretty comprehensive and well-sourced study on gun control being used to suppress freed slaves: http://www.guncite.com/journals/cd-reg.html
While my head explodes at the fact you've pulled it from Guncite, the analysis is at least from reputable authors it seems, so that's a plus. It makes for an interesting argument; but recognize that it is an argument and - like most history - it's an interpretation based on facts, not a fact unto itself. Good reading, though, and seems to carry some academic validity at least in how its constructed.
It's also not the only interpretation:
The Hidden History of the Second Amendment (http://www.saf.org/lawreviews/bogus2.htm)
(Summary of it here: http://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2013/01/was-second-amendment-adopted-slaveholders)
That's by Professor Carl Bogus of the Roger Williams University Law School. He argues that the origin of the Second Amendment was to support slave patrols in the southern states - that is, that it was enacted to support slave owners, not for individual citizen's self-defence needs.
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With a name like that, you have to trust him!
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Oh come on, that was too easy. ;)
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If you're parading around with a name like that I have no sympathy for you.
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Honestly, don't see what's so difficult about adopting a similar system that's being used in Canada
Is there seriously something so wrong with that idea?
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Honestly, don't see what's so difficult about adopting a similar system that's being used in Canada
Is there seriously something so wrong with that idea?
Something something Hitler fascism tyranny.
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Because people like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pOiOhxujsE&t=27s) exist and are politically influential.
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Oh man that video is gold.
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If you're parading around with a name like that I have no sympathy for you.
People don't choose their names. A person's name should have no influence on what you think of them. Unless they actually have selected their own name, then it says something about them.
:warp:
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It's a screen name. He chose it. Unless you think the admin mafia gives us all the names on this forum or something?
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It's a screen name. He chose it. Unless you think the admin mafia gives us all the names on this forum or something?
Carl Bogus?
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With a name like that, you have to trust him!
Maybe his parents just really liked the Bill and Ted movies. :p
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With a name like that, you have to trust him!
Maybe his parents just really liked the Bill and Ted movies. :p
Then his middle name should be Dude. :D