I fail to see the inability of Mexico to enforce its laws as entirely relevant. I bet Nigeria's fraud laws are as strong or stronger than the US. Since Nigeria's fraud laws have not had much success in stopping 419 scams - does it follow that the US should not consider more fraud laws? I doubt it. Yes, I noted this, and it does it without any emprirical evidence. It's rather absurd. If nobody obeys gun laws in Mexico - I highly doubt that the "law abiding" mexicans are cowering in fear becaus they are too afraid to violate the non-enforced laws to buy guns to protect themselves and turn Mexico into a pistol-packing mutual deterrence paradise. See Iraq for why this is not true. Every Iraqi family has a gun. Has that deterred gun violence at all?
This is a good and legitimate point. But it seems to me that your argument is exactly the same thing, but in the other direction. You have thrown out some relative murder rate numbers as a 'proof' without accounting for all the variables and said that it proves something about the relationship between gun availability and murder. See this post, which I believe was your first in this thread.
What you are ignoring though is this question: What would the murder rate by firearms in the UK be if more lenient laws were applied? Last year the UK had 50 murders by firearms in a country of 52 Million. That's astounding. That's a success story. In the U.S.? We had more than 11,000. Think about that, that's 200 times more murders with only 6 times the populations. Or a net effect that you are 35 times more likely to be murdered here than there. This should be alarming to everyone. I've showed you that gun laws do result in less gun shootings and less crime. Now - can we stop this and move to more restrictive controls on guns? At the very least, how can you oppose psychological and background checks for guns? I think I would support gun ownership under these conditions (so you see I am compromising from an entire ban): 1. Gun owners be required to attended federally approved training and usage, including when to use a gun in self-defense, and proper storage and safety. 2. Psychological background checks. Must show no history of mental illness, outbreaks, or other signs of depression, anxiety, or anger. 3. Attend anger managment class 4. Have quarterly psych visits - failure to show up results in revoking of license and requirement gun be turned in. 5. Listed on a registry of legal gun owners. This list should be made available to law enforcement in a database. All other guns should be banned and carry a minimum of 5 years of prision for having one in possession.
1. I can live with this. This is similar to what a CHL holder goes through. 2. This, too, I can deal with. 3. This is can be a part of #1. 4. Quarterly psych visits? Paid for by whom? I would suggest this be paid for by the anti's. Aside from that, Poor people that pass all the other criteria but can not afford to pay for a psych visit will not be able to own a handgun? 5. Personally, I have no problem this.
This is a completely vapid supposition not in any indicated or supported by the facts. The UK had more lenient laws. They tightened them. It did not affect the murder rate. Changing the policy does absolutely nothing to that steady increase. Your supposition would require that there were an extreme and anomalous lasting increase in the murder rate caused by another factor which coincidentally happened at the same time that the gun ban went into effect. There is no plausible mechanism that could be accounted for to explain this lasting increase in murders. You are trying to fit the facts to your position, rather than basing your position on the facts. For instance, the burglary rate in England is 2x that in the US. If I cared more about my personal position than the truth, I would claim that the burglary rate could be attributed to the lack of a deterrent. But the burglary rate appears to be unaffected by the presence or absence of guns. It was high before guns were outlawed. So because I believe that what the evidence says is more important than how I can spin it to make my position, I won't try and fit the evidence to meet my expectations. The difference in the burglary rate, as with the murder rate, is due to other cultural factors, not the availability of guns. I have brought this particular objection to this argument before. You have not responded or tried to refute it in any way, but you keep returning to the argument. This makes me wonder.
THe article is somewhat selective and as Sam pointed out there are a lot of other factors. Singapore has very strict gun laws but a low murder rate and no thriving black market in guns.
No no no - 50 firearm murders last year in the UK doesn't support any case you wish to build. What are we discussing - the overall murder rate or firearm murder rate? My supposition that handing everyone in the UK a gun would likely result in higher firearm murder rate isn't vapid - it's so obvious a blind man can see it. Are you saying if you poured 30 million guns in the UK and distributed them to people to "protect" their homes, the number of firearm murders would stay the same? Is that what you are saying?
No - it's part of the cost of a gun license. Driver's licenses are for free - why should a gun license be for free? The license cost should include the cost of the visits to a psych to evaluate wheter or not the owner is stable and is using a gun for legitimate threats and not out of paranoia and does not show signs of impulsive behavior. Having the power to kill someone at distance by just pulling a trigger is a serious and dangerous power. If a person wants that power, than the government must take the proper actions to ensure that person can be trusted and that the person's state is monitored to ensure nothing is happening in their life that would make it unwise to let them have such power. You can always give a gun license back to someone after 6 months. A human life - once lost - is always lost.
There is one key difference though between owning guns and driving is that gun ownership is a Constitutional right but driving isn't. That doesn't mean that there can't be limits placed though.
Murder is murder. Nobody says "the murder rate has tripled, but we only had 90% as many gun murders as last year. Horary for us." I categorically reject any argument that states one method of committing murder is any more murderous than another, or that reducing gun murders with a concurent and equal increase in other types of murder can be seen as anything but robbing Peter to pay Paul and can not viewed as anything particularly positive.
That's open to interpretation. Most people know that the whole right to bear arms thing is irrelevant in today's world. Gun owners don't want guns to defend themselves against tyranny - it's for other reasons.
Like what? Divorce? Losing a job? Losing a loved one to a violent crime? Any of this can happen the instant someone leaves an office. Sorry, but that psych thing is just an inconvenience, and while some of the other suggestions make sense, I don't see it happening.
I think reducing firearm murders is a huge success. You are assuming that other murders are a "replacement" murder for the firearm quite incorrectly. You don't know what the total murder rate would have been had the firearm murder rate been higher.
I think it's up to a professional to make an evaluation that determines is this person stable enough to be trusted with carrying around a firearm. Police are required to undergo extensive training, and I believe they have psych evaluations as well. I don't see why it should be any less for anyone else. If you have the enhanced power to kill - the state needs to monitor and ensure public safety. One's person need to have a gun shouldn't endanger the rest of the public. If this can not happen - then I support a full ban on all non-hunting guns.
Three days of violence leave 8 dead http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4738341.html This last story is particularly sad. Somehow I imagine, without a gun the man would not have died. Explain away, gun crazies ... We are all ears .... not ....
That pretty much is the telling quote of the thread. I could present 5,000,000 pages of well documented evidence adhering to the highest scientific standards, and you would still not care. You are right, no matter how wrong you are. You are just like the people who say Al Gore is stupid, so anthropogenic global warming is not real because Rush told me so.
What is wrong with that post? Guns are less accessible in the UK, and have been for quite some time. The murder rate (regardless of what direction it has been trending) is also much lower. It's quite obvious to me that, given taht the US and UK share a lot of common cultural and demographic characteristics (more, IMO than the UK and Switzerland, or the US and Iraq, e.g.)- that there is probably something here. Again, I didn't say it's the ONLY reason, as I said earlier in the thread. But it seems glaringly obvious to me that the lack of available guns probably helps hold gun violence down. What is your problem with this intution precisely?
For the 257th time: <marquee>The murder rate was lower when guns were very accessable, also. Removing guns had no effect on the murder rate. Thus, the binary variable of legal guns does not alter the outcome or solution for total murders. If you alter a variable and it doesn't affect a change on the solution to the equation, then the variable is not linked to the solution.</marquee> You make exactly the same argument that you condemn. You arbitrarily decide, based on expectations and a limited set of statistics comparing two disseperate objects without accounting for all variables that there must be a relationship between national murder rates and gun ownership. The article which you condemn argues just as arbitrarily that the same statistics applied to other countries indicate no relationship. The first thing they teach in Statistics 101: Correlation does not imply causation. It is clear, at least based on the UK evidence that removing guns from society did not alter the murder rate trends. How, then, can prohibitions against guns, which didn't alter murder rates, be the reason that the UK has a much lower murder rate. There is an apples to apples comparison of UK with guns and UK without which doesn't link presence of guns to per capita murder rate. You selectively choose to ignore this and instead choose the statistics which are apples to oranges, but make intuitive sense to you. That is the classic Observer Expectancy Effect. I have nothing against intuition. But keep in mind that it brought us such Gems as the earth is a large flat disk. The earth is the center of the universe and all the stars rotate around it. There is a face on the surface of Mars. Baptists rely on intuition to tell them that homosexuality is wrong. Dubbyah relied on intuition that god wanted him to invade Iraq. Etc. etc. Intuition is inherently untrustworthy. I hope that you would not argue that your intuition is in any way more accurate or special. You can no more make valid statements based on intuition than you can for any other epidemiological decision. For instance, sickness is bad. Antibiotics kill the causes of sickness. That means we should give everybody antibiotics. Sounds intuitive, right? Unfortunately you end up with secondary factors like selection for resistance to antibiotics. It turns out that giving antibiotics to everybody who is sick only makes diseases stronger. Intuition fails. I have no problem with intuition, I have no problem using it as a basis to explore things and quatifiy them in a valid way. I do have a problem with using it to dictate public policy.
