I don't get liberal gun laws.

[MrWaeseL]

So...uh...wouldn't making guns hard to obtain reduce the percentage of crimes involving guns, whereas giving everyone guns would result in lots of messy situations? Or am I completely off on this?

[Crissa]

That's what any peer reviewed study shows, yes.

-Crissa

[Josh_Kablack]

1177797463[/unixtime]]So...uh...wouldn't making guns hard to obtain reduce the percentage of crimes involving guns, whereas giving everyone guns would result in lots of messy situations? Or am I completely off on this?

You're completely off on this. Saying that you will support ANY sort of gun law immediately makes the NRA give truckloads of cash to any nutjob running against you in the election.

Americans want to be sure that not only our military, but also our citizenry are adequately armed to shoot the Redcoats the next time they invade. As an American, I support such a position - mainly because I wouldn't want the NRA paying spambots to register on this board and contradict me - although it does have to do with historical and cultural issues that differ between America and Europe (as well as between different parts of the US)

[Catharz]

Even though RAW is dead, the Guns and Dope Party will live on!

[Username17]

There are essentially two things that drive up deaths from violent crime:

• More violent societies have more violence.
  
  
• Societies where there is easier access to weaponry have more fatal violence when their violence happens.

No matter how calm and reasonable your society gets, there will always be the occassional guy who goes off the deep end and runs amok. No matter how difficult it is to get a weapon, anyone with sufficient dedication and patience can get one - if by no othr means than making one themselves.

When the problems of violence come up, noone really wants to be told that the reason that their country has six times the murder rate of Switzerland is because their culture is bad. Yeah, Switzerland has extremely easy access to firearms and when some guy flips his lid and starts attacking people it always goes down Like This. But Switzerland has a lot less people flipping their lids and going all crazy than does, say, the United States.

Part of that is economic disparity. If you have a lesser difference between Rich and Poor, you have less murderous frustration, and less violence in your society. Part of that is the cowboy and Southern cultures which glorify violence present in Texas and Kentucky.

But yeah, one ofthe main reasons that gun control doesn't get more impetus than you'd think it would from a purely utilitarian standpoint is that the issue is actually much more complicated - and the real thing that people have to give up to bring violent crime down is the Southern Baptist Council. Until people are willing to do that, purging firearms from the nation would only drop the murder rate by 10-20%.

-Username17

[power_word_wedgie]

I agree with Frank that it is more complicated, and they roughly cover this in "Bowling for Columbine." They go into why Canada, who have a plethora of guns as well, doesn't have the same death rate as the US. Hey, we share a common border, so it shouldn't be a huge "curtural" thing as well. However, Canada has more social programs and, apparently as shown in the movie, a lot of Canadians don't even lock their front door. Now, does that mean *every* front door in Canada is unlocked? Heck no, but these days having an unlocked front door in the US is unthinkable.

Now, in recent years, Canada is "catching up" to us in violent crime:

Robert Pickton - Serial Murderer

Ken and Barbie of Murder and Mayhem

If Canada is Perfect, Why Have an Unsolved Murder Site

Canadian Gang War Murders in Vancouver

Bodies Found of Gang Murders in Ontario Farm

And I can do the same thing for Brazil, were laws are more "socialized" by the inequity between rich and poor makes the USA look more socialist than the USSR.

Also note that Japan, that has unbelievably strict gun control laws, just had the Mayor of Nagasaki assassinated by the Japanese mob.

[Draco_Argentum]

Well there goes any point I had to make. But for an echo, the high murder rate in some places has a cultural basis. Guns being available makes them the simple option to carry out murder. Take those away and theres always knives, cars and simple bombs.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I can teach you how to make a bomb out of a roll of toilet paper and a stick of dynamite.

[User3]

I tend to agree with Frank, that it's the violent culture more than the guns that causes our huge murder rate.

At any rate, gun control is pretty much a lost cause here. The country is already full of guns. And, I believe surveys of gun crime convicts found that very few of them had purchased thier guns legally anyway.

[PhoneLobster]

And you know, its odd.

As much as gun laws in the US are very possibly pretty much a "lost cause" no matter how much they would help such changes are ALSO overwhelmingly supported by the majority of your citizens. Edit: Even self identified gun owners.

Similarly welfare and economic/social equality programs similarly likely to help are unrelentingly popular EVEN in the commie paranoid USA.

So much for the leading light of democracy huh?

[power_word_wedgie]

1177842615[/unixtime]]
As much as gun laws in the US are very possibly pretty much a "lost cause" no matter how much they would help such changes are ALSO overwhelmingly supported by the majority of your citizens. Edit: Even self identified gun owners.

Actually, I would say that this is accurate to a degree - people are for waiting periods and background checks but are against sweeping bans. If the sweeping bans were popular, the leading presidential candidates would be hammering home more stringen gun control laws. However, at the present time, it is the last thing that they want to do.

edit: Besides, we all have problems, which was the jist of my previous post. Australian Mass Murders

Australian Murders Due to Firearm (Some Old, Some New)

[Modesitt]

So...uh...wouldn't making guns hard to obtain reduce the percentage of crimes involving guns, whereas giving everyone guns would result in lots of messy situations? Or am I completely off on this?

When guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns. And they WILL have guns. There are over 200 million guns in American households. It doesn't matter what you do, there will always be criminals with guns in America. There are two choices.

A. Outlaw guns and let criminals feel safe when they victimize others.

B. Keep them legal and keep the criminals in fear.

England tried option A. They're currently enjoying rising use of guns in the commission of crimes.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Personally, I think Frank has the right idea here.

I don't know people very well, but I do know bugs. Allow me to give an example here.

I have a small colony of Padinus imperator, commonly known as Emperor scorpions. Now, as long as I give the scorpions plenty to eat, they get along fine. They play with each other, they snuggle up together to go to sleep, the coexist peacefully.

However, if the food supply is not sufficient, they turn violent and cannibalistic.

It makes perfect sense that Humans operate on a similiar level, that if a human feels he is lacking in something he needs, whether it's spending money, food, proper health care, education, or whatever, it makes said human more aggressive and more likely to ignore the laws of society. (After all, why follow society's rules if you're getting fvcked over by society? If I was starving, I wouldn't feel to bad breaking the law to eat.)

[Crissa]

Please check your facts at the door.

While UK gun crime did increase after 1997 (when handguns were banned; although few were allowed to own them before)... It is down from 2003 numbers now.

Crimes involving a firearm were less than half a percent of all crime recorded in the UK.

In the US, our crime is twice that in the UK - and firearm crimes are ten percent of nonfatal violent crime. It's hard to compare the statistics without doing alot of work, as we seperate out violent and non-violent crimes, but... You can go get the statistics:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/crime-vict ... tatistics/
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/welcome.html

Yes, gun crime did increase drastically several years after the gun ban in the UK. However, all crime increased during the same period. As the soaring change was from 1999-2003, one would not immediately attach it to a change which happened in 1997 (although a newer amnesty program and importation controls were implemented in 2003).

One might just say the soaring crime had more to do with the downturn their economy took, being closely attached to the tech crash in the US.

-Crissa

[power_word_wedgie]

Actually, Crissa is right that though there was a rise in crime in Great Brittain, the homicide rate has gone back down to 1997. >HERE< is a more direct link.

The only thing that is conjecture is that it is due to gun control. One could argue that it has more to do with tightening security after 9/11 and and that the "violent" ones were sent to fight in Iraq (which would have happened closer to 2003) more than gun control. Also, though the murder rate is the same, it didn't go down after gun control laws were enacted.

On a different note, keep in mind that there is a sub-culture that has started to take off that people don't even report crime, and they don't "snitch" even when it comes to murder. The best advice that can be given is to not hang around a rap star. If you're snuffed, they'll never find your killer. I guess my generation slightly started it with the term "narced" for turning in someone dealing with narcotics, but we wouldn't even think twice about turning in someone for murder.

Then you have people that don't even care about people's life just to get what they want: case and point the kids that killed Michael Jordan's father just because they wanted to drive his car.

Then you have those that kill because they want to be famous: cast and point Mark David Chapman.

Finally, you have those that have everything and still kill for whatever reason: case and point Michael Skakel.

[Username17]

When guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns.

This is a common piece of rhetoric, but it is totally inane. Nuclear weapons are outlawed, and yet for some reason relatively few outlaws have nukes.

The fact is that the state has more weapons than can possibly be required for any task involving any crime one could reasonably imagine. The threat that keeps people from stabbing other people in the back ofthe neck and rifling through their pockets is not the chance that the potential victim might have iron-hard skin, it's not the chance that the victim might have prescience and pull a weapon out during the approach - it's that society in general takes a really dim view of that shit.

I think it's time to quote everyone's favorite Conservative - John Locke:

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.

And indeed, in the state of all against all, do you honestly think you are any safer if more of the all are armed? Fvck no! They are all against you!

And yet, if all are armed, how then is there to be a power that can make all stand in awe? How can the war of all against all be put to rest if the state is not more thoroughly armed than are the rest?

---

Now, personally I am too much of a Socialist to sincerely believe in the dire prediction of Leviathan. But if you don't hold to those principles there is even less incentive for any particular citizen to be armed.

Seriously, we don't send private citizens to fight rabid bears, we call in the foestry service. We don't send private citizenns after crazy men running amok with a weapon, we send in the police.

Even in the circumstance where you draw a wapon on another armed man, you aren't any safer. The danger to everyone in the room just went up by more than double now that there are two guns showing.

----

Fundamentally, regardless of whether you have a Conservative viewpoint where order and civility is maintained with fear, or a Communist viewpoint where order and civility are maintained with the rewards of cooperaion - asking private citizens to police themselves is a threat to order and civility.

Think of the Count's scorpions for a moment. If you remove the stingers from some or all of the scoorpions, would they eat each other any more?

-Username17

[tzor]

The biggest problem with any discussion on gun control laws is that everyone wants to go to the extreme edge of their positions. There are many people who use guns responsibly; hunters, people who have to protect valuable assets, and of course law enforcement and the military. Then there are people who would use abuse guns at the first opportunity; criminals and the mentally unstable.

It is the latter that caused this current debate, even though there is a system in place to prevent it from happening. That system has holes in it because many states do not or can not report all potential people who qualify under the law as not suited to purchase a firearm. When the system fails it doesn’t matter one way or the other whether there is a law in pace. There was and it happened.

The former is another problem. I heard over the radio that many are saying it is “open season” on police in New York given the number of recent shootings of officers on duty. Some want to reinstate the death penalty for shooting and killing a policeman.

We need reasonable approaches, reasonable laws that are reasonably enforced, not extreme “give me X or give me death” speeches.

[Modesitt]

This is a common piece of rhetoric, but it is totally inane. Nuclear weapons are outlawed, and yet for some reason relatively few outlaws have nukes.

The difference is that nuclear weapons are not in wide distribution and are non-trivial to manufacture. The amount of guns already in the world is so vast and their reliability so great that it will take centuries for us to just burn through the stockpile of guns we have, ignoring the new guns that will be manufactured in that time. If an outlaw in the United States wants a gun, he can pick from any of the 200 million that are conveniently available from private citizens. Even if you could somehow put the genie back in the bottle, manufacturing firearms from scratch is a trivial feat that has been successfully done by people locked in federal prisons.

Fundamentally, regardless of whether you have a Conservative viewpoint where order and civility is maintained with fear, or a Communist viewpoint where order and civility are maintained with the rewards of cooperaion - asking private citizens to police themselves is a threat to order and civility.

It's not about policing themselves, it's about the people protecting themselves when the police aren't around. Real life is not like 24. It takes a significant amount of time for the police to get where the victim is. During that time the criminal can do whatever they want to their victim without fear. You would disarm the victim and leave them at the mercies of criminals. I would give the victims a fighting chance of protecting themselves.

[Catharz]

1177953741[/unixtime]]

This is a common piece of rhetoric, but it is totally inane. Nuclear weapons are outlawed, and yet for some reason relatively few outlaws have nukes.

The difference is that nuclear weapons are not in wide distribution and are non-trivial to manufacture. The amount of guns already in the world is so vast and their reliability so great that it will take centuries for us to just burn through the stockpile of guns we have, ignoring the new guns that will be manufactured in that time. If an outlaw in the United States wants a gun, he can pick from any of the 200 million that are conveniently available from private citizens. Even if you could somehow put the genie back in the bottle, manufacturing firearms from scratch is a trivial feat that has been successfully done by people locked in federal prisons.

I'd guess the real issue isn't so much difficulty of manufacture as utillity. Baically, you can't rob a grocery store with a nuke ('improbable threat'). As a result, nukes are only any good to people who want to steal from nations rather than grocery stores.

[Username17]

It's not about policing themselves, it's about the people protecting themselves when the police aren't around. Real life is not like 24. It takes a significant amount of time for the police to get where the victim is. During that time the criminal can do whatever they want to their victim without fear. You would disarm the victim and leave them at the mercies of criminals. I would give the victims a fighting chance of protecting themselves.

What? This is the modern world, you don't have a fighting chance if someone wants to shoot you. If someone shoots you, you've been shot. Shooting back doesn't actually solve that problem at all.

I hate to use the Virginia Tech shooting example because it has already gotten more press than it deserves. I use it in this instance only because the details are available right now. The victims were in many cases gun owners. It didn't help them, because owning guns does not help.

Seriously, you don't "fight back and win" when someone spray paints your house. You don't "fight back and win" when someone runs into your car. And you don't "fight back and win" when someone points a gun at you and demands your wallet. Picking up the pieces after these events can be difficult, but you really do pick things up afterwards. You don't make things any better by shooting people in the middle.

Even Bruce Lee said that if a man points a gun at you and demands your wallet you should give him your wallet. Why? Because even if you're a better fighter, even if you have a better weapon, if someone has a deadly weapon at all, it isn't worth fighting them. Taking even a small chance that you'll die is never a good plan.

So the whole "we need weapons to fight back with" is not a decent argument. You don't need to fight back. At all. That's what we have police for. Not that fighting back doesn't have a chance of "working", it's that it has a chance of not working. And if taking peoples' guns away encourages people to not try to be Die Hard heroes that's actually great. Because it turns out that average citizens don't die hard. They are really fragile and having them pull dumb heroics just gets them killed.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

And people wonder why my gaming group tends to parlay before fighting.

Fighting should at all costs be avoided; since it can result in death.

If you do have to fight, fight so fvcking hard that your target is undone.





Which makes our Eberron DM and our V:tM ST annoyed that we don't want to fight everything.

The hilarious thing is that they're the 'story' and 'narrative' players. =/

[User3]

Frank, you were the one who said the "unavailability" of firearms could be solved in one's own house - sure the same can't be said about nukes. About the "shooting back" issue and Virginia Tech, I hazard saying that, with commonplace firearms, the thing becomes less about the target shooting back and more about any of the other people with a dim view on this (your words) shooting the assailant - and count me among the ones who doesn't understand how the guy wasn't captured by the lots of people in each corridor he walked across (especially when Professor Liviescu - all honor on him - delayed him unarmed, for, I suppose, enough time for anyone to put a hole through his head). Also, if anything happens in a somewhat occupied place, shooting people from the back - perfectly feasible for anyone but the target - if far from "dumb heroics" (I'd call it "exactly what needs to be done"). Finally, there's the "fun" case when police is about as trustworthy as drug dealers (wait, they're often the same people here in Brazil). What do you do when there's no one to perform the rescuing?

[RandomCasualty]

1177949925[/unixtime]]
This is a common piece of rhetoric, but it is totally inane. Nuclear weapons are outlawed, and yet for some reason relatively few outlaws have nukes.

Totally different story, because nukes aren't commonly available already. In fact, mostly we don't restrict the production of nukes, but rather people who are researching how to make them. Guns are commonly available and everyone knows how to make them.

I mean how many criminals buy their guns legally?

Those are the only guys you might stop and chances are, if they want the gun bad enough, they'll get it illegally. And then the gun won't even be registered.

So you've succeeded in:

-giving a profit to illegal arms dealers
-Weakening the police's knowledge base when investigating murders

[Modesitt]

The victims were in many cases gun owners. It didn't help them, because owning guns does not help.

No, it didn't help because idiot bureacrats banned them from carrying their guns. You almost got my point when you said "...If someone has a deadly weapon at all, it isn't worth fighting them." - Which is the exact logic I'm trying for you to get because it cuts both ways. If you're a criminal and there's a strong possibility any given citizen will have a deadly weapon, why would you rationally victimize anyone?

[Username17]

If you're a criminal and there's a strong possibility any given citizen will have a deadly weapon, why would you rationally victimize anyone?

You can't play the game theory card without playing the whole card. As long as police exist then the costs and risks of victimizing anyone exceed the potential rewards by a substantial margin. Victimizing people isn't rational, whether the victims are armed or not.

So the question becomes not one of disincentivizing people to run amok with a hand gun shooting people - that pretty much always ends in those people dying and is thus as disincentivized as it is possible for it to be. The question becomes instead complicated and multipronged:

• How do we convince people that obviously incredibly bad plans are things that they shouldn't do?
  
  
• When people have irrational urges to do destructive things, how do we delay them from acting upon them long enough for them to be identified as a threat or get over it before they actually hurt anyone?
  
  
• How do we make society a nice enough place that people are not consumed with hopelessness and anger in the first place and never become a threat to those around them?

If you shoot people in the face it doesn't work out for you. People who do that go to prison for a long time or die in a hail of gunfire almost without exception. Rhetoric about scaring people who have already committed themselves to killing people until they die is quite empty.

-Username17