Well,yeah.If you find someone with a handgun after a ban, it's an offence then so of course the number of offences will rise.
I mean,duh.
I mean,duh.
Gunman opens fire at Oregon mall outside of Portland
- Thread starter Neki
- Start date
Well the context of the original post was traffic laws and your counter-argument ALSO included a potential violation of traffic laws. I assumed you were addressing that point specifically as PART of your larger point because doing so is sort of important. Why? Because if he can establish cases where freedom is increased by government regulation, that sort of throws a wet blanket on the general applicability of your wider point (and the worldview it's based upon).
BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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Even if this were true (I don't know if is) murder follows almost the same profile.
If gun control is some sort of panacea for crime then we should expect a drop in murder after a huge ban right?
chaos
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Yeah, sure. You need body armor to protect you from all the crazy motherfuckers with guns who like to go shoot up movie theaters or political gatherings in grocery stores or school campuses. The idea that owning a weapon is ok, but owning something to protect you from that weapon, with no other purpose, somehow crosses the line, that is just crazy to me.
Tmac
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I have a post dedicated to why giving up the freedom to drive where I want, when I want, how I want creates safer roads and highways... If you look at the post I quoted, you'll see what my point was directed at. He didn't mention driving, he mentioned freedom/liberty, which was the broader point I was focused on.
Sorry for the confusion.
Tmac
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The biggest issue with people who believe in gun control is that they're not making a rational argument, they're making an emotional one. That's why we get to read so many emotionally knee-jerk driven posts in response to a psycho path shooting people. Things like cause/effect, truth, and reality are totally lost on them, because they "feel" differently. Great post though.LOL, you just linked an article with a graph that is one of the best arguments against the effectiveness of gun control that anyone can make.
Chart from above BBC article:
You know what year the UK banned all handguns? 1997. Worked great didn't it?
Isn't it much easier for bad situations to escalate into a dangerous or deadly one with greater accessibility to guns? I saw a stat that showed that in domestic abuse cases where the household had a gun, the female was 12 times more likely to be murdered than those houses without guns.
Anyway, this is boring. The point is, if I take you at your word now you still haven't addressed his argument that it's trivial to find cases where the security created by government regulation increases freedom rather removing it. Your whole counter-argument has to do with the the ways that you are made less free (and therefore live a less enriching life fucking around on a farm or whatever) but you utterly fail to address the other side of that (which is the entire crux of the argument made by the example of traffic laws). Specifically, you do not address the fact that the government is not the only entity capable of infringing on your freedom. Security (at least in a non-cynical sense) is the protection of your freedoms against those entities. While, in a very crude sort of direct way, you might make the claim that age-based driving constraints constrain your freedom (in that they constrain your freedom to drive a car), it is quite apparent that they provide a degree of emancipation along a different vector (the ability to drive without constantly getting into accidents) that is quite obviously more important. You can say that "giving up the freedom to drive where I want, when I want, how I want creates safer roads and highways" but that's not the point. The point is that you have morefreedombecause of safer roads and highways.
Eomer
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What exactly constitutes an "offense" in that chart? If handguns were banned in 1997, it stands to reason that you'd immediately see a large uptick in "offenses" as people are caught with no illegal handguns. And that's exactly what you see there. Am I missing something?
If that graph were for gun murders or robberies committed with firearms I'd see your point, but as it stands I don't see how that chart proves much of anything in either direction.
Perhaps. Should it be instantaneous though? I'm not criminologist or sociologist, but it stands to reason that it would take years, if not decades, for the supply of illegal handguns to dwindle after they've been banned. Lo and behold, about 5 years after the ban, the murder rate drops pretty precipitously. Is that because of the handgun ban? Hard to say. I'd wager other factors would likely be bigger influences, but it's certainly possible the handgun ban also helped.BrutulTM_sl said:
Considering that only about 7% of homicides in England are by firearm as of 2011, compared to 60% in the US, I'd say gun control is working quite nicely there. However I didn't have a chance to look at the historical rate of homicide by firearm, whether at the total population or percentage of homicides. It would be interesting to see how that's changed since 1997.
Edit for other stats:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ted_death_rate
US: 9 people per 100,000 are killed by firearms (murder or suicide)
UK: 0.22 per 100,000
Working as intended? Kind of shocked to see the Swiss up there, but surprise surprise, they have some of the highest gun ownership rates in Europe.
BrutulTM
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Comparing UK to the US is apples and oranges. England's murder rate was far below the US before they banned guns as well. The US murder rate has declined far more since the UK's gun ban than the UK's has. Show me where violence has significantly decreased after a large gun ban. (Hint, the Australia gun ban of recent years did not reduce crime either, so don't waste your time on that). I've done a fair amount of research on the subject and I have never found a case where the murder/gun crime/violent crime rate shows much difference after guns are banned. The supply of illegal firearms will never run out for people who want them. Gang bangers will have them regardless and they do the vast majority of the murdering in the US. Bans only effect law abiding citizens that want them for self defense or recreational purposes.
Could we use the same line of argument for "people who've spent a day at a gun-range?"
gogusrl
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Go get a paintball gun if you wanna shoot shit. Owning a deadly weapon for entertainment isn't an argument a reasonable person can make.
Also, I'd like to see some numbers on bystanders killed by stray bullets compared to I dunno, stray ninja stars or dagger throwing gypsies.
Shooting a paintball gun is not like shooting a real gun and reasonable people own plenty of other deadly things for entertainment.
There is always one person who tries to argue for some pacifist panzy bullshit after events like this to abolish guns.
Gun's serve a role in society as has been pointed out. There are better ways to control them though.
It doesn't appear to be anything the gun sellers or system did wrong. It was the person who owned the gun.
The shooter used a stolen gun from somebody he knew. Does anybody have statistics on how often stolen guns are used in crimes? I'm interested in how the person had the gun stored and how long had it been stolen.
There should definitely be some sort of storage requirement I think, and a required responsibility to check on your gun periodically. Heck with technology these days, I bet it isn't even that expensive to put a smart phone app to monitor for disturbance of a gun case or locker.
If a person fails that, then they should be somewhat liable for what happens, that would encourage people to be responsible.
There are some pretty common sense storage options out there that aren't mandatory, and people definitely should be responsible storing their weapons at home.
Gun's serve a role in society as has been pointed out. There are better ways to control them though.
It doesn't appear to be anything the gun sellers or system did wrong. It was the person who owned the gun.
The shooter used a stolen gun from somebody he knew. Does anybody have statistics on how often stolen guns are used in crimes? I'm interested in how the person had the gun stored and how long had it been stolen.
There should definitely be some sort of storage requirement I think, and a required responsibility to check on your gun periodically. Heck with technology these days, I bet it isn't even that expensive to put a smart phone app to monitor for disturbance of a gun case or locker.
If a person fails that, then they should be somewhat liable for what happens, that would encourage people to be responsible.
There are some pretty common sense storage options out there that aren't mandatory, and people definitely should be responsible storing their weapons at home.
Sulrn
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