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LA Theater Shooting

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by rocketsjudoka, Jul 24, 2015.

  1. CometsWin

    CometsWin Breaker Breaker One Nine

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    Freer access to guns will most certainly stop gang killings in Chicago. LOL. Good call.
     
  2. StupidMoniker

    StupidMoniker I lost a bet
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    Who cares about that one specific thing? If gun deaths are replaced with other deaths, does the methodology of the death matter to anyone but the gun control advocates. Also, I don't think I said banned, but I might have let one slip in.
     
  3. CometsWin

    CometsWin Breaker Breaker One Nine

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    Yes, please explain.
     
  4. Remii

    Remii Member

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    What about gender break down...??? What about women who carry guns who may feel that females shouldn't need tougher gun control laws because it's predominantly men who do crazy shyt with them.

    What about social class...??? Is it poor, middle-class, or rich...

    It would also be interesting to know _ what type of facilities do the mass shootings happen at because metal detectors could help a lot. You ever wonder why you don't see a lot of school shootings in poor minority neighborhoods ----> metal detectors.

    I asked because your chart was lacking information... We can't make this place like Mexico where only cops and criminals have guns without looking at everything.
     
  5. StupidMoniker

    StupidMoniker I lost a bet
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    Switzerland is less diverse than the US in terms of skin color, but more diverse in terms of culture and language. rocketsjudoka said that it was the cultural difference between the US and Switzerland that causes there to be significantly more criminality in the US than in Switzerland. As the only was the US is significantly more culturally diverse than Switzerland is in skin color, the implication is that the greater number of non-whites is what leads to more criminality.
     
  6. CometsWin

    CometsWin Breaker Breaker One Nine

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    Probably not. There are many more important factors.
     
  7. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    Not knowing specifics but I would guess there were many mass shootings during Sadam's rule. Not carried out though for the same reasons that we see here in the US.
    Probably not but socio-economic factors are and Switzerland's population income education and other levels are far more even than the US, Australia, and the UK. In terms of ethnicity while Swiss have different language groups culturally those ethnic groups are far more similar and have existed together for much much longer than the US or Australia even have as countries.
    You do have to consider the differences in population size of Australia and further that Australia even before the gun ban had fewer guns already than the US so clearly total crimes are going to be less given differences in population size. If you look at population rates and crime rates the gun ban did lead to a slight drop in crime by percentage, unlike what many pro-gun people have argued. This addressed quite will here:
    http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp

    If you look though at a list of mass killings in Australia in the 20 years prior to the gun ban there 8 mass shootings in Australia with 3 in the 5 years just preceding then. In the almost 20 years since there have been 2.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_mass_murders
    In the US in just this past month alone there have been 3. Even factoring in differences in population size that is quite a difference.

    Not disputing your statistics but this matters because people might be turning to heroin not because it is easier but because it is cheaper and it is cheaper because it isn't as refined as oxycontin. As my own stats show though there is a greater abuse of the legal, although regulated substance.

    Tying this back to guns yes if more guns were more highly restricted there would be a black market. Again I don't know about you but I would still find it difficult to get heroine than I do oxycontin, for whatever reason. Further if guns were regulated as much as Oxycontin I wouldn't have a problem with that.

    Bottom line here is that we've now had several mass shootings carried out by people with mental illness with plenty of warning signs that they were potentially violent. They were still able to get there guns legally.

    Your argument basically boils down to we shouldn't do anything about it and just accepts this situation. Perhaps you are comfortable with that. I am not.

    As I said earlier this is a sign of how f^%ed up our society is that we can't even agree that the insane shouldn't have legal access to guns.
     
  8. StupidMoniker

    StupidMoniker I lost a bet
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    I guess I just don't understand the fixation on mass shootings. They make up a very tiny minority of murders. Why change policy or expend vast resources fighting that problem. Dealing with the run of the mill murderers should be a much more pressing issue.

    As for the Australia stats, your own link shows that the increased gun control had negligible effect on homicide rates ("the overall homicide rate in Australia has changed little over the past decade and actually dipped slightly after the 1997 gun buy-back program") and doesn't dispute that other crime rates increased. So, imposing sweeping new firearm restrictions didn't significantly reduce homicides and may have actually led to an increase in overall crime, but because it reduced gun related crimes it is somehow worthwhile? Why? If the same number of people are getting killed, and as many or more people are getting assaulted and raped, how is that a win for gun control. As to the reduction in mass killings in Australia, if the number of mass killings went down, but the homicide rate remained the same, doesn't that mean that individual homicides just went up to counterbalance the reduction from mass killings?

    There are enough countries in the world that have implemented strict gun control regimes that it should be trivial to point to them and show that gun control caused a significant reduction in crime and/or homicide from before the gun control measures to after. Why can't that be done?
     
    #68 StupidMoniker, Jul 29, 2015
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2015
  9. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    Reviving this thread since this was the last thread that discussed the Australia gun buy back program and reform of gun laws. This topic has come up in the Hangout thread about the on-air shootings in Roanoke with several Aussie posters weighing in. Rather than clutter up that thread with D&D material or starting a new thread think it is better to post this here.
    http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback

    Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted.

    The on-camera shooting of two Virginia reporters Wednesday morning seems bound to evoke, like so many shootings before it, some sort of national conversation about gun control. Which means there will likely be some of debate about whether it would even be possible for the US to limit its millions of privately held guns — by far a higher per capita gun ownership rate than any other country.

    It is worth considering, as one data point in the pool of evidence about what sorts of gun control policies do and do not work, the experience of Australia. Between October 1996 and September 1997, Australia responded to its own gun violence problem with a solution that was both straightforward and severe: It collected roughly 650,000 privately held guns. It was one of the largest mandatory gun buyback programs in recent history.

    And it worked. That does not mean that something even remotely similar would work in the US — they are, needless to say, different countries — but it is worth at least looking at their experience.
    What Australia did

    On April 28, 1996, a 28-year-old man with a troubled past named Martin Bryant walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, a tourist town on the island of Tasmania, and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle. He killed 35 people and wounded another 28.

    Australia's prime minister at the time, John Howard, had taken office just six weeks earlier at the head of a center-right coalition. He quickly drew a very clear conclusion from the Port Arthur killing: Australia had too many guns, and they were too easy to get.

    "I knew that I had to use the authority of my office to curb the possession and use of the type of weapons that killed 35 innocent people," Howard wrote in a 2013 op-ed for the New York Times. "I also knew it wouldn’t be easy."

    Howard persuaded both his coalition and Australia's states (the country has a federal system) to agree to a sweeping, nationwide reform of gun laws. The so-called National Firearms Agreement (NFA), drafted the month after the shooting, sharply restricted legal ownership of firearms in Australia. It also established a registry of all guns owned in the country, among other measures, and required a permit for all new firearm purchases.

    One of the most significant provisions of the NFA was a flat-out ban on certain kinds of guns, such as automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. But there were already a number of such guns in circulation in Australia, and the NFA required getting them off the streets.

    Australia solved this problem by introducing a mandatory buyback: Australia's states would take away all guns that had just been declared illegal. In exchange, they'd pay the guns' owners a fair price, set by a national committee using market value as a benchmark, to compensate for the loss of their property. The NFA also offered legal amnesty for anyone who handed in illegally owned guns, though they weren't compensated.

    There were fears that the mandatory buyback would provoke resistance: During one address to a crowd of guns rights supporters, Howard wore a bulletproof vest. Thankfully, fears of violence turned out to be unfounded. About 650,000 legally owned guns were peacefully seized, then destroyed, as part of the buyback.

    According to one academic estimate, the buyback took in and destroyed 20 percent of all privately owned guns in Australia. Analysis of import data suggests that Australians haven't purchased nearly enough guns in the past 18 years to make up for the initial decline.
    Australia's program saved a lot of lives

    In 2011, Harvard's Daniel Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis reviewed the research on Australia's suicide and homicide rate after the NFA. Their conclusion was clear: "The NFA seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved."

    What they found is a decline in both suicide and homicide rates after the NFA. The average firearm suicide rate in Australia in the seven years after the bill declined by 57 percent compared with the seven years prior. The average firearm homicide rate went down by about 42 percent.

    Now, Australia's homicide rate was already declining before the NFA was implemented — so you can't attribute all of the drops to the new laws. But there's good reason to believe the NFA, especially the buyback provisions, mattered a great deal in contributing to those declines.

    "First," Hemenway and Vriniotis write, "the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."

    There is also this: 1996 and 1997, the two years in which the NFA was actually implemented, saw the largest percentage declines in the homicide rate in any two-year period in Australia between 1915 and 2004.

    Pinning down exactly how much the NFA contributed is harder. One study concluded that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides. But as Dylan Matthews points out, the results were not statistically significant because Australia has a pretty low number of murders already.

    However, the paper's findings about suicide were statistically significant — and astounding. Buying back 3,500 guns correlated with a 74 percent drop in firearm suicides. Non-gun suicides didn't increase to make up the decline.

    There is good reason why gun restrictions would prevent suicides. As Matthews explains in great depth, suicide is often an impulsive choice, one often not repeated after a first attempt. Guns are specifically designed to kill people effectively, which makes suicide attempts with guns likelier to succeed than (for example) attempts with razors or pills. Limiting access to guns makes each attempt more likely to fail, thus making it more likely that people will survive and not attempt to harm themselves again.

    Bottom line: Australia's gun buyback saved lives, probably by reducing homicides and almost certainly by reducing suicides. Again, Australian lessons might not necessarily apply to the US, given the many cultural and political differences between the two countries. But in thinking about gun violence and how to limit it, this seems like a worthwhile data point. If you're looking for lessons about gun control, this is a pretty important one.
     
  10. StupidMoniker

    StupidMoniker I lost a bet
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    Bit of a bait and switch. Grand claims about a reduction in homicides, then provide only data on firearms homicides. The fact that the author of the study quoted went on to admit that the results were not statistically significant doesn't lend much credibility to the grandiose claims either. If you want to implement gun control as a suicide prevention tool, this is good info. In terms of murders, not so much.
     
  11. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    The data point though is compelling
    [rquoter] There is also this: 1996 and 1997, the two years in which the NFA was actually implemented, saw the largest percentage declines in the homicide rate in any two-year period in Australia between 1915 and 2004 [/rquoter]

    Another data point that he doesn't present but which I cited earlier is the precipitous drop in the amount of mass killings in Australia with 3 in 5 years just prior to the gun law and only two in almost 20 years since. Compare that again to the US where recently we have been having about two a week. While you might dismiss mass killings why they are important is that they graphically show the ease and power that firearms allow a single person to kill several people.

    Anyway if a goal is to reduce deaths overall then the article does show a large benefit to Australia with greatly reducing suicide deaths.
     
  12. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Contributing Member
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    Gun deaths don't get replaced by other deaths. That's a rhetorical argument that has no substantiation with any kind of data. And it doesn't even make sense.

    You are far more likely to kill someone with a gun than a knife. It's a lot harder to do it first of all. You can't do a drive by "stabbing" as easily. It's just silly to say that without guns some other weapon would replace every murder as if murder has nothing to do with guns.

    And yes, you did say banned. But it's ok ;)
     
  13. StupidMoniker

    StupidMoniker I lost a bet
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    Where is the drastic reduction in homicide rate then? There are several countries around the world that went from permissive gun ownership to restrictive. It should be easy to pull up many examples of countries where there gun control laws were followed by a massive decline in murders. Where are those examples. As we have seen, they are not in Australia.
    According to the FBI in the US you are about 5.5 times as likely to kill someone with a firearm as with a knife, though knife murders are more common than all long gun murders combined. As for the assertion that without guns those murders would not be committed with other weapons, where is the evidence to back up your point?
    If I did it was accidental, I meant severely restricted.
     
  14. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Contributing Member
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    Check this study out - it concludes that the availability of guns in the U.S. is the reason we have the highest 1st world murder rate.
    http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031914-122516


    What do you mean by "all long gun" murders? Are you saying that knife kills more than rifles? Ok, I believe that since it's not that easy to use a rifle rob someone at close range. But why do you think that getting rid of guns will only replace all those murders with knives? You are the one making the assertion here.
     
  15. StupidMoniker

    StupidMoniker I lost a bet
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    No it doesn't. It makes an assertion that such is the case, with no references. Then it goes on to study the effectiveness of various laws on the books in preventing violence. It is right in the title of the study, "Effects of Policies Designed to Keep Firearms from High-Risk Individuals." There is no comparative analysis done between the US and other nations. It doesn't consider and eliminate any other factors. It makes that simple assertion based on no evidence and moves on.
    That would be murders committed with rifle or shotgun. It isn't clear how the FBI classifies murders that are committed with a firearm that doesn't fall into either of those categories that is also not a handgun (submachine gun, carbine, smoothbore musket, etc.) Maybe there are no murders using any of those other weapons, though I doubt it. Anyway, the FBI classifies three types of guns in it's murder count, handguns, rifles, and shotguns. I was simply combining rifles and shotguns.
    Rifles plus shotguns (and probably carbines).
    Because passing laws to get rid of guns did not appreciably lower the murder rate anywhere that it has been tried that anyone has been able to point out to me.
    That is a matter of perspective. You are making the assertion that gun control will reduce murder. So far I have provided an example in support of my assertion. Chicago and Washington D.C. are two more examples of areas that have passed strict gun control laws with no attendant reduction in murder or violent crime. Where are the examples of gun control leading to a statistically significant reduction in murder or violent crime after it was implemented?
     
  16. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Contributing Member
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    That is your opinion.
     
  17. StupidMoniker

    StupidMoniker I lost a bet
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    No, that is my observation. Feel free to be the first to post an example of a country (or even a city or state) where there was a gun control law passed that caused a statistically significant reduction in murder and/or violent crime. As I have said several times now, if gun control is the great force for reducing murder and/or violent crime that people claim it is, then providing examples should be easy.
     
  18. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Contributing Member
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    There is a STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT correlation between gun laws and murder rates - that has been shown.

    As for gun laws causing a statistical difference - you forget that many gun laws have been around for only 10 or so years and some gun laws are more effective than others. There hasn't been a lot of studies done, and in many cases the volume of murders in a region hasn't been high enough to show a significant drop.

    If gun murders drop from 25 to 10 for a country that's not statistically significant. For many places, it's not possible to meet that criteria of statistical significance in the time period since the law passed. So you are intentionally using a disingenuous argument.
     
  19. RedNation97

    RedNation97 Member

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    In 1996, there was a massacre in an Australian town called Port Arthur, killing 35 people, 12 in the first fifteen seconds. Directly after this, the Australian Prime Minister at the time, John Howard, passed legislature that banned all forms of assault weapons, rifles etc in the country. In the 19 years since then, there has not been one massacre in Australia (constituting of three or more people at once).

    As an Australian, I do not know one person who owns a gun, as they are only used on farms and by police. I've only ever seen one gun shop, and it is very big news when someone is killed by firearm here.

    As for the knives argument, 'thugs' here sometimes wield knives but very rarely use them, and they are pretty useless against a police officer's gun.

    I don't understand how American conservatives continue to insist that guns increase protection of citizens. The biggest killer of Americans are, in fact, Americans. We are often in disbelief at American inability to pass basic gun restrictions, as it has been so remarkably effective here.
     
  20. Bandwagoner

    Bandwagoner Contributing Member

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    We don't care. You feel free to walk around Gunspoint at night while not packing. In america you have a choice.
     

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