if it was easier to hit them with a car, he would have hit them with a car. but a gun is about the easiest and quickest way to kill somebody. guns are designed to kill. it would be much easier to kill someone with a gun than a knife, sword, car, pipe, etc. to deny that is just silly.
(i say this as a gun owner. there's a reason i want a gun to protect my house as opposed to a pipe or a sword or a car).

[Edited on August 31, 2015 at 1:48 PM. Reason : ]

8/31/2015 1:47:48 PM

Quote :

" If you wanted to kill 2 people, you are going to kill those people by any means necessary. Whether with a gun, knife, sword, car, pipe etc."

I see why you'd think that, but this is not borne out by the studies.

8/31/2015 1:48:37 PM

Yeah he could have hit that camera guy in head with a hachet and he would be just as dead

8/31/2015 1:50:34 PM

Its not about the speed or the ease, its about the fact (I assume since I'm not crazy) that if you've got in your head to kill 2 people, you are going to do so by any means necessary. Maybe you do it by the easiest means which may be a gun, but if guns didn't exist I'm sure that fuckwad would have picked up a samurai sword (or the next best thing) and chopped them to death.

8/31/2015 2:13:16 PM

I'm still waiting on your data of how murders by sticks increased dramatically following Australia's gun control measures.

8/31/2015 2:32:55 PM

Quote :

" Wouldn't it have been easier to hit them both with a car than walk up stairs and shoot them? I know that's an extreme comparison, but still."

nah, its a lot easier to dodge a car than a bullet.

example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_UNC_SUV_attack
Attack type
Vehicular assault
Deaths 0
Non-fatal injuries 9

8/31/2015 2:54:27 PM

is it really that difficult to admit that it's easier and more efficient to inflict harm/kill with a gun than any other tool?

8/31/2015 3:00:30 PM

Easier, yes. Most efficient? I'd say no. I've never heard of a knife misfiring, for example.

But most people who go out and shoot multiple people probably aren't gonna say "Well I really, really want to murder these people. But...I can't get a gun, so I guess I'll just let them live."

8/31/2015 3:09:14 PM

^^I have no problem admitting that inflicting harm on another being is easy with a firearm, that's why I carry a concealed handgun and defend my home with a shotgun instead of a ax. What I do have a problem with is the thought process that if guns were to all of a sudden disappear, so would the desire to kill people.

[Edited on August 31, 2015 at 4:11 PM. Reason : .]

8/31/2015 4:10:23 PM

I really am curoous gun owners. Im more aligned with modern european society and The love affair with guns truly does baffle me. 4 big qiestions.

A: What is in your home that you feel you need a gun to protect?

B: why dont you just put it in a safety deposit box to be sure?

C: do you even insurance? Alarm system?

D: do you value your materials over the lives others?

[Edited on August 31, 2015 at 4:16 PM. Reason : K]

[Edited on August 31, 2015 at 4:17 PM. Reason : This isnt 1700. No one can just ride up and take your home besides the bank]

8/31/2015 4:15:50 PM

Quote :

"What I do have a problem with is the thought process that if guns were to all of a sudden disappear, so would the desire to kill people."

Of course the "desire to kill people" would not disappear, but the means to do it would. I sincerely believe that if a lot of these people didn't have guns, they wouldn't go through with these rampages. I know it's cliche, but I think a lot of these crazies are cowards, and wouldn't go into a crowded school, or a crowded movie theatre, or crowded sidewalks, and certainly not an army recruitment station and start trying to stab people... some would, but not as many.l

Quote :

": What is in your home that you feel you need a gun to protect? B: why dont you just put it in a safety deposit box to be sure? C: do you even insurance? Alarm system? D: do you value your materials over the lives others?"

are you retarded? the only thing in my home that i would use a gun to protect is my life, and i don't sleep in a safety deposit box. i would never use a gun to protect an object in my home. but if someone takes a chance and breaks into your home while you're home and sleeping, chances are they'll resort to violence if you awake. i have a few personal stories about this.

[Edited on August 31, 2015 at 4:32 PM. Reason : ]

8/31/2015 4:18:21 PM

^I guess I could see where you are coming from. I think both sides of the argument will never see whether their ideas would play out in real life so its pretty useless.

^^

A) My life, my wifes life, my future unborn childrens life.

B) Cant put life in a safe deposit box.

C) Yes we have insurance, no alarm on this house however.

D) I do not, I would never shoot someone for stealing or harming "stuff". However, I would not hesitate to end someone elses life that means to do me or my family harm. This is the simple basis of self defense.

I will repeat this again, I would NEVER shoot someone for touching/stealing/harming stuff, and I'd bet 99% of gun owners would agree.

8/31/2015 7:18:59 PM

Quote :

"Maybe you do it by the easiest means which may be a gun, but if guns didn't exist I'm sure that fuckwad would have picked up a samurai sword (or the next best thing) and chopped them to death."

Not nearly as fast, or efficient...plus I'd bet a higher chance of just injuring and not killing.

Quote :

"What I do have a problem with is the thought process that if guns were to all of a sudden disappear, so would the desire to kill people."

That's what's called a strawman argument.

8/31/2015 7:23:45 PM

About the desire to kill and the ease of guns:

Not referencing Flanagan, but just people in general: Yeah, it's a lot harder to kill without a gun, and I'm not just talking about the use of the weapon; I'm really talking about the abstraction of the weapon. I mean, using a gun is easy--you just pull the trigger. I think that abstracts the concept of what you're doing by a great deal.

Knifing someone to death is a lot less abstract; you actually have to thrust the blade into the guts/arteries/wherever. Barehanded is even less abstract. If you're committing the act with a knife or barehanded, it's much harder (I expect...not talking from personal experience here) for your mind to ignore the consequences of what you're doing.

I expect many (though certainly not all) murderers have fairly strong regrets immediately after the act. Before the act it's an abstract concept; after the act it's a reality, and the boundary between the two is more blurred if the method is especially easy. For many (not all), the thought that the murder is going to require you to (for example) get messy with the victim's entrails, that's gonna give quite a pause (if not stop the murder entirely) before crossing the boundary from abstraction to reality. For an extreme example, suppose we all had assassin drones and could kill anyone with the click of a mouse. That's extremely abstract; imagine what the murder rate might be in that reality.

This kind of debate always reminds me of the Star Trek episode where the crew come in contact with two warring groups that fight their battles on computers. Like a nuclear bomb is modeled on a computer and the simulation says such and such group of people were killed and they need to report to the execution chambers.

The two races said this method of war was superior because the infrastructure is preserved. Kirk's disgusted so he destroys the war computer; the alien leader tells Kirk he has assured the mutual destruction of both races because this will lead to an all out physical war. Kirk tells him you've sanitized and abstracted war so much you don't even realize how horrible all this is (at this point it's basically become a perpetual war); call up the other leader because I guarantee you he's just as terrified as you are and maybe you can finally come to some peaceful terms with each other.

Anyway, </armchair sci-fi psychology>.

8/31/2015 8:18:56 PM

Quote :

"I mean, using a gun is easy--you just pull the trigger"

Lots of untrained people would have trouble hitting their target at greater than 20 or 30 feet. And even if they did, there's no guarantee it's a fatal shot. Injuring someone with a gun is pretty easy, but injuring someone with any weapon is pretty easy.

8/31/2015 9:48:26 PM

I have no argument with that, but that's really beside the point I was trying to make, anyway. The point being the abstraction between the physical act (just pull the trigger) and the (intended, anyway) consequence of causing injury or death.

There's nothing violent whatsoever about just pulling a trigger. There's a violent consequence, sure, but it's not a violent physical act, not like throwing a punch or thrusting a knife.

8/31/2015 9:59:01 PM

And by the way, I'm not really trying here to argue for strict gun control or anything. All I'm saying is I think the argument, "Well, if he couldn't get a gun he'd have just found another way to do the killing" is bullshit. For lots of people, I'm sure that's true; in some cases a person wants to murder so bad they'll use any method they can get their hands on. However, I also feel sure there are lots of people who might be able to stomach shooting a man, but can't stomach the more intimate/less abstract action of stabbing a person to death.

8/31/2015 10:09:13 PM

Quote :

" If you wanted to kill 2 people, you are going to kill those people by any means necessary. Whether with a gun, knife, sword, car, pipe etc."

In a fairly small percentage of cases, yeah. In the vast majority, no.

Cabbage's points about what he calls "abstraction" are a good starting place. Pulling a trigger is relatively easy. More importantly, it's instant (the infliction of injury, that is, not the death). There's no real window to reconsider your action between squeezing the trigger and seeing the result. A person can draw a gun and pull a trigger in all but the shortest flashes of anger. On the other hand, stabbing or bludgeoning someone requires a few seconds to close the distance, and almost certainly many more seconds to actually complete the violent act. Single stab wounds are rarely fatal; still less so single blows with blunt instruments. You've got to be going at it for a while which, I suspect, feels like a very long while to both parties involved. And that's a lot of time to think "What the fuck am I doing?" or at least "OK, I think I've made my point, maybe I don't need to kill him."

And that's just the act itself. Planning and weighing your odds is another thing entirely. I'm big, but I'm not very strong. Probably a lot of people on this board could kick my ass even if I came at them with a pipe, and a fair number could fend me off even with a knife. But I could shoot the biggest and the fastest of you. And I could do it at the drop of a hat. For any other means, I'd be forced to carefully plan an approach that gave me the advantage -- and during that planning period, there's a lot of time to cool off.

---

"If we got rid of guns, would the violent crime / murder rate go down?" is not really a serious question. Of course it would. Essentially all the evidence in the world points us to that. The serious questions are these:

1) Is that a valid reason for attempting to get rid of guns? We don't seem to apply this logic to anything else. In 2013, around 12,000 people were either murdered or accidentally killed with guns in the US. (A great many more killed themselves intentionally) Around 33,000 died in motor vehicle accidents. A third of those were alcohol related, but drunk drivers don't face lethal injection or life in prison. Some 41,000 people were killed by other peoples' cigarette smoke, if the CDC is to be believed, but if I light up next to you about the worst I can expect is someone telling me to leave.

A thing being dangerous is not actually considered sufficient reason to ban that thing. It's usually not even a reason to notice that thing. The flu kills three times as many people as gun-related homicide, and Barack Obama didn't say that the greatest regret of his presidency was his failure to implement mandatory vaccination.

But let's say the logic is valid. This brings us to...

2) Is getting rid of guns possible in the United States? I have my doubts. Yes, other countries have done it. Other countries have had rather fewer guns, smaller criminal organizations, and less overall demand for guns, too. Look at the surges in ammunition and firearm purchases when Obama was elected. He hadn't even made a big deal out of gun control, let alone proposed any sweeping legislation, but even law-abiding citizens freaked out and started hoarding.

If Bernie Sanders were elected tomorrow and zombie James Brady were his vice president and Congress was filled with Young Democrats from UC Berkeley, there'd be an initial rush on guns before they were inaugurated. Then there'd be another rush on guns when they proposed gun control legislation. Then there'd be another rush just before the law took effect, and another rush when (inevitably) a Supreme Court case put it on hold. It's impossible to say with any certainty, but I suspect that for a while there would be considerably more guns in the US, that it would take a long time for numbers to decrease significantly, and that they would never decrease to nearly the extent that they have in other countries.

Of course, both 1 and 2 there are assuming that we ignore the Constitution, which -- though it may allow some wiggle room on the question of gun regulation -- is pretty clearly set against gun bans.

Quote :

" Im more aligned with modern european society"

You mean the immigrant-hating, Romani-expelling, neo-fascist shitbird Europeans? Or the always-beloved Scandanavian ones who claim the the most devastating mass shooting in recent memory?

9/1/2015 5:07:13 AM

^ Responding just to say I agree with everything above. Props.

Quote :

"A thing being dangerous is not actually considered sufficient reason to ban that thing. It's usually not even a reason to notice that thing. The flu kills three times as many people as gun-related homicide, and Barack Obama didn't say that the greatest regret of his presidency was his failure to implement mandatory vaccination."

Also, people trying to use similar logic on soda--they want freedom where they think they are competent to have a choice on judging the risks.

9/1/2015 12:08:50 PM

Quote :

"If Bernie Sanders were elected tomorrow and zombie James Brady were his vice president "

just wanted to point out the humor of this sentence since sanders voted against the brady bill

9/1/2015 12:32:37 PM

Quote :

" For any other means, I'd be forced to carefully plan an approach that gave me the advantage -- and during that planning period, there's a lot of time to cool off."

On the other hand, pretty much every high profile shooting recently has been conducted by individuals who engaged in long term planning and did no cooling off. The Charleston shooter had weeks to months of planning depending on when you think the idea got into his head. The Aurora shooter started gathering his weapons months before. The Sandy Hook shooter may have been largely spontaneous, but it's pretty clear (in retrospect) he was going off the deep end for a while.

Some crime might be helped with perpetrators having to cool off, but for these high profile incidents, I don't think it would simply because these people all tend to have slow growing rage rather than impulsive anger.

9/1/2015 12:47:36 PM

but there are only a few of the stories that make major headline news compared to the tens of thousands that do not

9/1/2015 1:23:21 PM

Sure. But that starts getting into "what do we actually want to solve" because "gun violence" is far too nebulous and implies that somehow non gun violence is inherently better (I've heard from more than one doctor that they'd rather treat gunshot wounds then knife wounds when dealing with non-fatal injuries). If we want to stop the high profile, mass killer shootings that make the news, that's a different problem than the gangland shootings that do not which is a different problem from the suicides which is further a different problem from accidents and that's different from crimes of opportunity and passion. And I'd bet very strongly that each one of those has a different elasticity when it comes to the weapon of choice.



[Edited on September 1, 2015 at 2:19 PM. Reason : dfgj]

9/1/2015 2:17:07 PM

you try to reduce the statistically significant kind of gun violence, and there are things that can be done that most americans already agree about

some of the high-profile mass killings can be better handled a if considered a contagion similar to suicide clusters, some others will be impacted by gun laws that target regular gun crimes, some are related to mental healthcare, some percentage will probably always happen

9/1/2015 2:22:39 PM

Quote :

"This is hardly novel. There's government paperwork involved in setting up a business, which is about as fundamental a right as you can find in American thinking. Permits are required for certain kinds of demonstration, which fact does not seem to have put a damper on Americans protesting. We have a boatload of requirements that come with selling food, but there's no shortages of restaurants or grocery stores. And of course in NC there already is a permit required to buy a handgun, which does not seem to have caused a massive decline in handgun ownership. A license is not an unacceptably onerous burden when it comes to public health and safety, even when it pertains to a right. All the more so because a gun license would not need to expand its scope beyond:..."

If you think I'm OK with extent of those, then you've got another thing coming. And your point about what the scope would need to be is all fine and dandy, until we let emotion take over and inevitably expand the scope beyond "reasonable" (as you call it) restrictions. That's why people like me are against such foot-in-the-door techniques. Because the end state is more dishonesty by the anti-gun nuts who will throw their hands in the air at the initial ineffectual laws and declare "WE NEED MORE!!!!" And the end result is that, by pragmatism, you've lost everything. Fuck that.

Quote :

"But those events bring down 99% of the heat on guns"

Which is absurd. We're letting pure, unadulterated emotion drive the decisions here, and to hell with using any rational thought. These school/theatre/what-have-you shootings that are getting everyone all bent out of shape are rarer than fatal lightning strikes (which is supposed to be the epitome of extremely rare and random), yet people want full-fledged gun confiscation schemes and massive new legal frameworks to deal with them. Meanwhile, as you pointed out, few if any give a shit about the other shootings, except to lump them in with other shootings when convenient to try and score political points and attack the 2nd Amendment.

Quote :

"The GrumpyGOP position: all firearms legal with reasonable licensing to ensure that the buyer isn't a violent criminal or crazy"

If a person is too violent or crazy, then he shouldn't be in society in the first place. To hell with whether or not he gets a gun.

And these other shootings are either drug-related, which necessarily has a completely different solution (read: legallization), or suicide, which, again, has different solutions. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicides, for fuck's sake, yet people use those numbers to suggest that there is a massive gun violence problem, where people are running around randomly shooting other people to the tune of 30k a year. Suicide sucks, yes, and it's a shame when someone kills themselves, with a gun or by any other means. But confiscating guns and attacking a fundamental right seems to be a bit heavy handed instead of, I dunno, better funding for suicide hotlines and outreach, things that will actually have a much better chance of stopping suicides.

9/1/2015 6:36:11 PM

Quote :

"On the other hand, pretty much every high profile shooting recently has been conducted by individuals who engaged in long term planning and did no cooling off."

Very true, but besides the point. The claim was made that, if guns were banned, murderers would just use other weapons. I was responding to that claim alone. Though since you bring up mass shootings, we might point out that it's a lot easier to shoot a dozen people in one spree than it is to bludgeon or stab the same number.

Again, I don't think this is adequate reason to ban guns, and I am not in favor of banning guns, but it I am also not in favor of the sort of intellectual dishonesty or self-delusion that causes people to say "getting rid of guns wouldn't make any difference anyway."

Quote :

" we let emotion take over and inevitably expand the scope beyond "reasonable" (as you call it) restrictions."

I'm not sure you've got any evidence for "inevitably" there. A license is not necessarily a "foot in the door technique." In the hundred or so years that we've had drivers' licenses there hasn't been a shrinking pool of people permitted to drive.

Quote :

"yet people want full-fledged gun confiscation schemes"

Who, exactly, wants this? I haven't seen a call for gun confiscation or bans from any of the Democratic Presidential candidates (they may have made them, I guess, but they're not getting any serious press). Nor have I seen it from the current administration.

Quote :

"If a person is too violent or crazy, then he shouldn't be in society in the first place. To hell with whether or not he gets a gun."

So just to be clear here, you're in favor of having people committed against their will when they might be crazy, but opposed to preventing them from having a firearm?

Quote :

"And these other shootings are either drug-related, which necessarily has a completely different solution (read: legallization), or suicide, which, again, has different solutions. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicides, for fuck's sake, yet people use those numbers to suggest that there is a massive gun violence problem"

I doubt that "drug-related, suicide, and mass" are the only kinds of shooting deaths in the United States. And maybe "people" include the suicide figures but you'll notice that I explicitly left them out.

Then you go on to reference "confiscating guns" one more time which, to reiterate, I don't think there's any serious call for.

---

The "Not one inch!" philosophy is not an acceptable basis for democracy or really even a civil society. Human ability to compromise is pretty much the main thing preventing us from all just murdering each other. We can see examples in famously non-compromising societies, like ISIS. We aren't faced with a choice between "all guns are verboten" and "all guns cheap and freely available to anybody who wants one." We have options.

Government actions and regulations are not guaranteed to expand in scope. Americans are pretty good at scaling back or throwing out regulations. We tried banning alcohol. It didn't work. We got rid of it. We've tried banning marijuana. It hasn't worked. We're getting rid of it. We tried putting restrictions on savings institutions making investments, decided we didn't like it, got rid of it, and maybe that hasn't worked out so hot but at least it's an example of retreating regulation.

Several people have alluded to the real issue here, which is America's mental health system, and I would love to see some discussion of that.

9/2/2015 10:03:24 AM

Quote :

"Who, exactly, wants this? I haven't seen a call for gun confiscation or bans from any of the Democratic Presidential candidates (they may have made them, I guess, but they're not getting any serious press). Nor have I seen it from the current administration. "

additionally, a full confiscation would require a constitutional amendment so it wouldn't even matter if there were candidates or even a full party calling for it

9/2/2015 10:25:00 AM

Quote :

" A license is not necessarily a "foot in the door technique." In the hundred or so years that we've had drivers' licenses there hasn't been a shrinking pool of people permitted to drive."

But, the licensing system has allowed, or made easier certain encroachments on rights that would (in the absence of nearly universal government issued licensing) be much harder. For example, implied consent to breathalysers or various "stop and identify laws". Government expansion of power is pretty much inevitable, especially in a legal system that operates on precedent, and is why despite it being a logical fallacy "slippery slope" is a valid legal argument.

Quote :

"So just to be clear here, you're in favor of having people committed against their will when they might be crazy, but opposed to preventing them from having a firearm?"

There's a very valid argument that if a person is dangerous enough to the general public that they should not have access to a firearm, that they are dangerous enough that they shouldn't be wandering the streets unsupervised either.

Quote :

"The "Not one inch!" philosophy is not an acceptable basis for democracy or really even a civil society. Human ability to compromise is pretty much the main thing preventing us from all just murdering each other. We can see examples in famously non-compromising societies, like ISIS. We aren't faced with a choice between "all guns are verboten" and "all guns cheap and freely available to anybody who wants one." We have options."

You're right, we do have options, and we've implemented many of those options. What a lot of the "not one inch" folks would like is to stop giving more inches than they already have.

Quote :

"Government actions and regulations are not guaranteed to expand in scope. Americans are pretty good at scaling back or throwing out regulations."

The problem with scaling back bad regulations is the after effects last for decades or more and in the mean time plenty of people are hurt. Prohibition gave massive amounts of power to organized crime and it took decades to undo that damage (and we still have terrible alcohol laws around the country). The war on drugs has destroyed thousands of lives and families and even after it's finally scaled back, that will never be undone.

9/2/2015 11:01:58 AM

Quote :

"There's a very valid argument that if a person is dangerous enough to the general public that they should not have access to a firearm, that they are dangerous enough that they shouldn't be wandering the streets unsupervised either."

that's actually a really shitty argument

9/2/2015 11:03:36 AM

How so?

9/2/2015 12:01:49 PM

is this a trolling "I'm going to stick to this argument to the end" kind of thing or do you really not see how there are people who manage their condition sufficiently to participate in society but shouldn't be allowed to own a gun

9/2/2015 12:07:51 PM

Quote :

"The war on drugs has destroyed thousands of lives and families and even after it's finally scaled back, that will never be undone."

I'm not sure that "destruction of lives can never be undone!" is an argument you want to be using in this context. OK, gun control that goes a step too far before getting reversed might have lasting negative effects. The status quo has definitely had lasting negative effects, ie, all the people who got shot. It's a wash.

Quote :

"There's a very valid argument that if a person is dangerous enough to the general public that they should not have access to a firearm, that they are dangerous enough that they shouldn't be wandering the streets unsupervised either."

I'm not sure I agree, but that's not the point I was making, which is that his position seems to imply that we can check on whether or not people are crazy so that we can lock them up. That would be acceptable. But checking on whether or not people are crazy before we give them guns, well sir, that's completely unacceptable. It's not consistent.

Quote :

"Government expansion of power is pretty much inevitable"

I have provided examples of government power and regulations receding. Their expansion is demonstrably not inevitable.

9/2/2015 12:12:01 PM

If there was no second amendment, and we were crafting gun laws from scratch using facts and evidence from the past hundred or so years of private gun ownership in modern societies, does anyone truly think we'd up end up with anything as unrestrictive as we have now? We know, for example, that a gun in the home makes you demonstrably less safe under basically any circumstances. That they serve no lawful purpose in our society other than recreational hunting/shooting. That regions of the country where gun ownership is highest also have the highest number of gun related crimes and casualties. Would this even be a debate? Take away the 2nd amendment as a backstop for advocating gun ownership and what are you really left with?

9/2/2015 12:13:55 PM

Quote :

"I have provided examples of government power and regulations receding. Their expansion is demonstrably not inevitable."

To quote the climate change argument, local weather patterns are not indicative of global trends. I don't think anyone could reasonably argue that the overall scope of government power and regulation has gone anywhere but up over the years.

Quote :

"Take away the 2nd amendment as a backstop for advocating gun ownership and what are you really left with?"

The fundamental human right to liberty? The big disconnect here is you don't appear to believe that people have a right to do or own things that you don't want them to do or own. We'd also have the fact that despite years of increasing gun ownership the total rate for ALL violent crimes across the country is (and has been) going down and that you are (on average) safer now than at any time since the 1960's. Meaning at the absolute best that there are much stronger drivers of violence and crime than the number of or access to guns.

9/2/2015 12:29:44 PM

Quote :

"There's a very valid argument that if a person is dangerous enough to the general public that they should not have access to a firearm, that they are dangerous enough that they shouldn't be wandering the streets unsupervised either."

huh?

what about people who are bi-polar?

9/2/2015 1:02:58 PM

^^That's almost as good as when Rand Paul answered a question about an Obamacare alternative with "freedom". Almost. You're not quite ready for the national fox news audience, but I bet you'd do great on the local level!

9/2/2015 1:24:18 PM

Quote :

"despite years of increasing gun ownership the total rate for ALL violent crimes across the country is (and has been) going down and that you are (on average) safer now than at any time since the 1960's. Meaning at the absolute best that there are much stronger drivers of violence and crime than the number of or access to guns."

But... feelings! Knee-jerk reactions! Media outrage!

9/2/2015 2:05:54 PM

Recent FBI statistics show in the past 40 years violent gun crimes and gun murders are down by 40% (I think thats the number iirc), while the US has added 170 Million guns.

And a claim that the areas of the country with the most guns are more dangerous than ones without, maybe I'm missing something. Chicago, New York, LA, etc all have sweeping gun legislation, bans and laws but all of those seem like pretty violent cities to me. Especially compared to Raleigh where guns are pretty common for instance.

9/2/2015 3:04:41 PM

Quote :

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

9/2/2015 3:14:05 PM

Quote :

"maybe I'm missing something"

it's this

9/2/2015 3:16:48 PM

Quote :

"what about people who are bi-polar?"

Are you suggesting every bi-polar person should have a legal restriction from owning a gun? I'm not talking about people for whom owning a gun might not be a good idea, I'm talking about legal restrictions. As a rule, I wouldn't suggest bi-polar people be teachers either. I'd also be against a law preventing them from being teachers.

Quote :

"That's almost as good as when Rand Paul answered a question about an Obamacare alternative with "freedom". Almost. You're not quite ready for the national fox news audience, but I bet you'd do great on the local level!"

So to be clear, you do not believe people have a fundamental right to liberty, one of the founding principles of this country? I mean it's fine if you don't, but I just want to be clear what your actual position is.

9/2/2015 3:24:42 PM

^^Enlighten me then. Chicago for example has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, however isnt it something like 30-40 people per week get shot there?

Maybe thats what I'm missing. Cities or areas with gun bans or where you cant have guns seem awfully high in crime compared to cities/areas where you can have guns.

9/2/2015 3:31:02 PM

^^^^ I wonder if the population of the USA has increased since 1976?

9/2/2015 3:50:03 PM

8K handgun murders aren't that big a deal because they're spread across an extra 100M people!

[Edited on September 2, 2015 at 4:32 PM. Reason : !]

9/2/2015 4:31:05 PM

Quote :

"So to be clear, you do not believe people have a fundamental right to liberty, one of the founding principles of this country? I mean it's fine if you don't, but I just want to be clear what your actual position is."

People? Of course. People who want to own and traffic guns? No, they can eat shit.

9/2/2015 5:06:59 PM

Quote :

"As a rule, I wouldn't suggest bi-polar people be teachers either. I'd also be against a law preventing them from being teachers."

has a teacher ever taught anyone to death?

9/2/2015 5:15:47 PM

Quote :

"8K handgun murders aren't that big a deal because they're spread across an extra 100M people!"

Straw man.

The point remains: Handgun murders are, and have been, on the decline. Posting a graph omitting a key factor like population and thinking it counters that is pretty funny though.

9/2/2015 5:25:25 PM

How do those of you who are anti-gun feel about alcohol? Death rates attributed to guns vs. alcohol are comparable in number. Also, many gun related deaths involve alcohol in varying degrees...

Are you fighting to see alcohol abolished? Are you looking for more strict control on alcohol purchasing and consumption? Do you want to see stricter punishment for DUI convictions? Do you want to see stricter punishment for underage drinking?

9/2/2015 5:32:30 PM

Quote :

"I don't think anyone could reasonably argue that the overall scope of government power and regulation has gone anywhere but up over the years."

As may be, that's not what I was arguing against. I objected to the word "inevitable" and I still do because it has already been demonstrated that the word does not apply here.

Quote :

"Cities or areas with gun bans or where you cant have guns seem awfully high in crime compared to cities/areas where you can have guns."

Let's not confuse cause and effect here. Chicago does not have high crime because it has restrictive gun laws. It enacted restrictive gun laws because it has high crime. I grant that they don't seem to have helped much anyway, but that isn't really helpful for a national debate. Chicago and other big cities are islands of harsh gun control in a countrywide sea of relatively light gun control, and it's not like they've got customs inspections at the city limits. I know a guy who, years ago, worked for a gang as a driver. He did a circuit bringing guns to Chicago from a southern state, then taking drugs back. He said that once you got over the initial stress, it was the easiest job in the world. He ended up getting out of it because it was boring.

9/3/2015 5:08:41 AM

Quote :

"We know, for example, that a gun in the home makes you demonstrably less safe under basically any circumstances."

Actually, no, we DON'T know that. Anti-gun nuts played with statistics and trumped up the study you are referencing a couple years ago, and it was roundly discredited because it failed to account for the crime rate surrounding a person who owned a gun, thus possibly confusing the cause and the result. Namely, people who live in a dangerous area (and are thus more likely to be victims of crime) would be more likely to own a gun, as opposed to what the anti-gun nuts would have you believe, that gun owners are more likely to be victims of crime.

9/9/2015 10:45:49 PM