Gun control

I agree that you shouldn't say it's zero. You also shouldn't say it's frequent enough to be a strong pro-gun argument either without any supporting evidence, though, and yet that's done all the time.

Also, another stupid part of that article

"Myth #2: Guns don't kill people-people kill people."

Then it compares gun deaths to gun deaths. Of course if people have less guns or no access to guns, then gun deaths will decrease. The question is whether other crime will just increase to compensate for it.

Soysauceonrice_sl said:

The buybacks really aren't geared towards someone like you. It's not meant for people who have guns and are perfectly content with their guns. It's meant as an extra push for those people who have guns and are already contemplating getting rid of their guns. If they already want to get rid of their guns and can now do it and get some extra bucks in the process, why not ?

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Ohh i know, and i have no problems with them at all. Especially if it can get a few guns out of the hands of the criminal element. I was more or less commenting on the private buyers showing up.

The only problem i have with gun buybacks is when they actually end up with a rare or valuable gun they have to be destroyed. Usually according to department policy. I did talk to a local LEO that mentioned they had 3 pre WW2 Lugers come in (about 5k each) and one WW2 issue 1911 (2-20k) a few years back. He said a few of the guys got together and rescued them by swapping them with some crap pistols bought a pawn shop. Sucks that they had to do something like that to preserve some wicked cool pistols.

Duppin_sl said:

It's not a perfect article by any means, but it is absolutely filled with citations and, despite Tuco's laughable assertion, covers most of the things that I hear gun owners/advocates actually say, over and over again.

My biggest quibble with it is the claim that no mass shootings have been stopped by the presence of a gun carrying person, and that's mostly because I have zero idea how you would actually measure that. I'm quite sure that the amount of times that has happened is massively overstated by gun advocates though.

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They (MJ) wrote an article claiming that but used their own arbitrary number of the shooter having to be responsible for at least 4 deaths. Discounting the fact that when an armed civilian engages a mass shooter they often stop the shooter from reaching that number of kills.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2972741/posts

Duppin_sl said:

You also shouldn't say it's frequent enough to be a strong pro-gun argument either without any supporting evidence, though, and yet that's done all the time.

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Well, the argument goes that if it is greater than zero, at least that is better than giving people no chance to defend themselves at all.

You have schools now educating their teachers to proactively react to a shooter. Don't just sit passively and let yourself or your students die. For example, attack them with scissors, throw books at them, etc. At my first teachers conference at university they mentioned both of those in particular. Yet it is seen as beyond the pale to allow CC holders to bring firearms on campus.

http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/201...-and-analysis/was an interesting read for me, though obviously from a pro-gun source.

khalid_sl said:

Well, the argument goes that if it is greater than zero, at least that is better than giving people no chance to defend themselves at all.

You have schools now educating their teachers to proactively react to a shooter. Don't just sit passively and let yourself or your students die. For example, attack them with scissors, throw books at them, etc. At my first teachers conference at university they mentioned both of those in particular. Yet it is seen as beyond the pale to allow CC holders to bring firearms on campus.

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Can we not rehash this teachers with guns argument ?

opiate82_sl said:

They (MJ) wrote an article claiming that but used their own arbitrary number of the shooter having to be responsible for at least 4 deaths. Discounting the fact that when an armed civilian engages a mass shooter they often stop the shooter from reaching that number of kills.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2972741/posts

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Is this the part where I don't even read the article and just complain about it being a link from Freep?

aychamo_aycono_sl said:

You gotta love the whole "spend 1 second posting link to retarded article, demand people spend time reading said article and then formulating a response, declare victory when no one falls for the tard bait" argument.

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Yeah, it was pretty dumb how opiate did that, wasn't it?

Trolling aside, I don't think the idea of teachers trying to go commando against a shooter is a good idea. I would prefer the NRA-pushed idea of more armed guards in schools over that.

Teachers are there to teach, not to try to be Rambo. Especially considering that it's hard enough to attract and retain quality teachers in the first place.

Duppin_sl said:

Well, this whole thread is a hilariously one-sided circlejerk anyway...

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Kinda like the Politics thread?

To an extent, but there are more dissenting voices in that thread than there are in this one. This thread is 99% self-congratulatory nonsense as opposed to 95% in the politics thread.

We had dissenting posters, but they are mostly gone now. People just don't feel like arguing over the same points again.

Duppin_sl said:

Yeah, it was pretty dumb how opiate did that, wasn't it?

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If you maybe had kept up with the thread you would have seen everything in that article refuted with evidence posted and we wouldn't have to rehash this again. But since you are obviously jumping in late, here you go, peer reviewed Harvard study on the matter.
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/...useronline.pdf

The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence." Contrary to conventional wisdom, and the sniffs of our more sophisticated and generally anti-gun counterparts across the pond, the answer is "no." And not just no, as in there is no correlation between gun ownership and violent crime, but an emphatic no, showing a negative correlation: as gun ownership increases, murder and suicide decreases.

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Gaahaha. The lead author of that is from PRI.

Anyway, to an extent, I get it. Guns have an undeniable cool factor, and if I had a bunch of them, I wouldn't want to give any of them up either.

Duppin_sl said:

To an extent, but there are more dissenting voices in that thread than there are in this one.

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I do find it encouraging that on this liberal of a forum in general, where Obama was voted for very heavily for example, that so many of the posters are pro-gun.

However, saying this thread is a circle-jerk is pretty silly, when the early parts of the thread were filled with some pretty heated debates.

I think it's an accurate representation of the current state of the thread.

opiate82_sl said:

If you maybe had kept up with the thread you would have seen everything in that article refuted with evidence posted and we wouldn't have to rehash this again. But since you are obviously jumping in late, here you go, peer reviewed Harvard study on the matter.
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/...useronline.pdf

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My inclination every time an article is posted and referenced as authority is to be skeptical and do some digging. I really find the claims made by you on this article questionable. First, it doesn't look like this article is a "Harvard" study at all. The only connection it has to Harvard is that it is published in a STUDENT law review journal. When I went to the journal's website, this is how they describe themselves:

http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/_sl said:

The Journal is one of the most widely circulated student-edited law reviews and the nation's leading forum forconservative and libertarian legal scholarship.

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That to me speaks volumes about the article's impartiality. Secondly, the authors themselves have nothing to do with Harvard. From the article itself:

The article_sl said:

Don B. Kates is an American criminologist and constitutional lawyer associated with the Pacific Research Institute, San Francisco.

Gary Mauser is a Canadian criminologist and university professor at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC Canada.

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Lastly, nowhere on the journal's website does it ever state that their articles are peer reviewed. For example, if it was peer reviewed, then someone would have likely spotted that the article blatantly cited the wrong statistic for the murder rate for Luxembourg before publication (a decimal error cited the murder rate as 9.01/100k, when the real statistic was more like .9/100k) The authors themselves have admitted to this error.

So you basically have an article written by 2 dudes that have nothing to do with Harvard itself that is published in a student managed journal that has a stated libertarian/conservative slant. Color me unimpressed.

PRI is like a half-step away from the Cato Institute, if that. Absolutely shocking that one of their contributors would write a pro-gun article.