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[Sheb]

Trollheimig is back!

Well, that shouldn't make me happy.

Anyway, can any of the pro-gun people explain to me why making killing easier is a good idea? We can't make it impossible to kill people unless we have a cop behing each of us. (And still, cop kills people too). But we can make things harder. That's why we got stuff like burglar alarm. Not because they make burglary impossible, but because they make it harder. Not having easy acces to a wand that shoot little pieces of emtal real fast make it harder to kill people.

[RedKing]

First off, wouldn't it be more appropriate to look at a graph of firearm-related homicides, rather than all homicides? This seems to be a popular conflation among pro-gun folks, because it makes for a convenient strawman.

No one (other than the NRA and their shills) is making the argument that stricter gun legislation will reduce all forms of dying or even all homicides. But it WILL reduce gun homicides, which is kinda the whole point here.


As I've said before, you don't see a whole lot of mass stabbings or mass whacking-people-with-a-baseball-bat or mass archery massacres. Firearms (especially automatic and semi-automatic) firearms are unique from almost every other readily available form of weaponry in that they allow a person to kill multiple people very quickly at a distance.

As to your hypothetical battle in DC....I think you underestimate how well trained and armed the DC Metro Police and Capitol Police are. And the fact that there are substantial military and National Guard facilities in the area. Your 20,000 armed insurrectionists would find themselves overmatched, dispersed and disabled/disarmed/dead pretty damn quick, as they well should be.

Attempting to take the capitol by force of arms is the kind of bush-league bullshit you see in the Third World. You got a problem with the people in charge, take it up at the ballot box. That's kinda the whole point of this "democracy" thing you claim to be defending.

[penguinofhonor]

Here's the exact same argument from last year, with a different graph showing pretty much the same thing. I knew I was getting deja vu.

[Loud Whispers]

Drive by archery would certainly improve the quality of criminals. They'd be getting chivalrous up in here.

In any case if the citizens are disarmed the police need to follow the same restrictions. For those who wan't more gun control; don't leave that out. Have your SWAT armed, but in a disarmed society those who uphold the law need to follow the same law.


*EDIT

Oh and forgot to mention, the spike in homicide those years is a result of suicide bombers on 7/7. Don't politicize that. It is quite insulting.

[Nadaka]

Not really Redking. If you look at ONLY at gun related homicides, then bans may seem effective. But if that just means that people switch to a different form of killing, you have not actually done anything productive.

[Trollheiming]

Trollheimig is back!

Well, that shouldn't make me happy.

Anyway, can any of the pro-gun people explain to me why making killing easier is a good idea? We can't make it impossible to kill people unless we have a cop behing each of us. (And still, cop kills people too). But we can make things harder. That's why we got stuff like burglar alarm. Not because they make burglary impossible, but because they make it harder. Not having easy acces to a wand that shoot little pieces of emtal real fast make it harder to kill people.

Of course it should make you happy when I pop in here. Someone has to play the lamb for this progressive slaughterhouse. 

Anyway, the thing is, guns are a separate kind of crime. Gun crime is a made-up name. All those crimes still happen without guns, so why choose guns as the defining criterion is categorizing them? It may be easier to use a gun, but actually, people don't kill on a drop of a hat. When people kill, it's because something built to a breaking point, and "Is it easy?" has nothing to do with their decisions. The husband that shooting a cheating wife could beat her to death. The situation and his mental state caused the murder, not a fake "gun violence" compulsion.

Trollheiming, given past experience, source your graphs.

In an ideal world, people would point out contradicting information rather than airily dismiss data with nothing of their own. No one has ever pointed out how any of my data has been wrong in the past. Cast doubt continually, yes; make a solid case against, no. The big controversial graph was the revenues-to-GDP chart, and that was drawn from data presented on the Whitehouse website itself!

So drop the nonsense with these claims that there's a real "past experience" where my data was bad.

[Loud Whispers]

So drop the nonsense with these claims that there's a real "past experience" where my data was bad.

Can we start claiming that your data is bad right now? Because I'll think that's what I'll do.

[RedKing]

And yet, the crime rate in the UK went steadily downward over the last couple of years.

Crime doesn't happen in a vacuum of "guns/no guns". There's a lot of other variables at work, especially economics and poverty.

Not really Redking. If you look at ONLY at gun related homicides, then bans may seem effective. But if that just means that people switch to a different form of killing, you have not actually done anything productive.

I understand what you're saying, but again...it's like judging a policy that regulates spinach to prevent E. coli outbreaks and saying it's ineffective because people are still getting E. coli from hamburger. Qualitatively, I stand by the argument that if a would-be mass murderer switches from an AR-15 to a fire axe...mission-fucking-accomplished. He's not going to be able to get more than a few victims before the rest flee and/or he's taken out by law enforcement or even bystanders.



And guys...Trollheiming is right. While I agree with the prevailing sentiment that his graphs are about as useful as the ones showing an inverse relationship between pirates and global warming, attack them by presenting counterpoint data or objective arguments about the data or the assumptions underlying them, not just saying "lolz another dumb graph".

[Nadaka]

Trollheiming, given past experience, source your graphs.

In an ideal world, people would point out contradicting information rather than airily dismiss data with nothing of their own. No one has ever pointed out how any of my data has been wrong in the past. Cast doubt continually, yes; make a solid case against, no. The big controversial graph was the revenues-to-GDP chart, and that was drawn from data presented on the Whitehouse website itself!

So drop the nonsense with these claims that there's a real "past experience" where my data was bad.

Actually yes, in many cases you data has had a solid case made against it, mostly because it doesn't show what you mean. This may be an exception where you actually posted something that supports your assertion.

[Loud Whispers]

And guys...Trollheiming is right. While I agree with the prevailing sentiment that his graphs are about as useful as the ones showing an inverse relationship between pirates and global warming, attack them by presenting counterpoint data or objective arguments about the data or the assumptions underlying them, not just saying "lolz another dumb graph".

Then twice I will say it; the spike in homicides is because the police data included the casualties caused by suicide bombers in a terrorist attack on the London Underground. It has been decreasing consistently.

And on review the graph data isn't even correct.

[Nadaka]

And yet, the crime rate in the UK went steadily downward over the last couple of years.

Crime doesn't happen in a vacuum of "guns/no guns". There's a lot of other variables at work, especially economics and poverty.

Not really Redking. If you look at ONLY at gun related homicides, then bans may seem effective. But if that just means that people switch to a different form of killing, you have not actually done anything productive.

I understand what you're saying, but again...it's like judging a policy that regulates spinach to prevent E. coli outbreaks and saying it's ineffective because people are still getting E. coli from hamburger. Qualitatively, I stand by the argument that if a would-be mass murderer switches from an AR-15 to a fire axe...mission-fucking-accomplished. He's not going to be able to get more than a few victims before the rest flee and/or he's taken out by law enforcement or even bystanders.

Violent crime in the US has also gone down steadily over the last few decades as well.


And if a would be mass murderer switches to a scoped hunting rifle and kills people over the course of a few weeks instead of all at once? Or he switches to a truck full of fertilizer and diesel? Or if he switches to burning down apartment buildings full of kids? "Assault Weapons" are not the most effective tools available for mass murder.

[mainiac]

And if a would be mass murderer switches to a scoped hunting rifle and kills people over the course of a few weeks instead of all at once? Or he switches to a truck full of fertilizer and diesel? Or if he switches to burning down apartment buildings full of kids? "Assault Weapons" are not the most effective tools available for mass murder.

Because if we know one thing about your typical killed it's that they are patient and completely think through their actions.

[mainiac]

If even a small fraction of gun owners, like 0.1% of them, happened to view one pivotal act as a "shot heard round the world" you could get 20,000 armed people in front of the whitehouse and capitol building before Obama had finished signing an executive order to ban their guns. It would be like a flash mob, except this one is bristling with guns. Can you imagine a battle in DC around the national monuments and government buildings? The president would not call in heavy strikes to destroy DC. If he even saw it coming to begin with.

Normally I'm against violence but I would dearly love to see this happen just because of how shocked the "freedom fighters" would be upon their asses getting handed to them in slings.  The mass delusion they had prior to the 2012 election wouldn't even compare to the mass delusion making them think they'd actually think they could put up a fight or even more hilariously keep it under wraps.

Please, please, please.  Mobilize your brethren.

[Loud Whispers]

And yet, the crime rate in the UK went steadily downward over the last couple of years.

Violent crime in the US has also gone down steadily over the last few decades as well.

"The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1991 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010, is still among the highest in the industrialized world."
Not fast enough.


As for the UK:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Banning guns has indeed cut down homicide rates dramatically. The spike in 2003/04 & 2005/06 homicides is as it says caused by the possibly over 250 victims of Harold Shipman and terrorists. Pointing at that graph and saying "BANNING GUNS DIDN'T DO ANYTHING" is just highly insulting.

[Trollheiming]

And yet, the crime rate in the UK went steadily downward over the last couple of years.

He's not going to be able to get more than a few victims before the rest flee and/or he's taken out by law enforcement or even bystanders.

I'll grant that, but it's been so long since the ban, it would be hard to claim that the ban caused declines recently. I'd put it down to steadily aging demographics that's also taken the wind out of American murder rates since the 1990s. There are thousands of variables at play. Freakonomics famously saw abortion as a cause of falling crime rates, for example. What we can definitively say, however, is that the ban had no overall effect on homicides anywhere near its implementation date.

As for axes and guns, if you prefer one weapon to the other on an assumption that it can kill fewer people, but then trivialize any data putting them together in one figure that could measure the validity of your basic assumption, then you have made the assumption iron-clad against any dispute at all!

And guys...Trollheiming is right. While I agree with the prevailing sentiment that his graphs are about as useful as the ones showing an inverse relationship between pirates and global warming, attack them by presenting counterpoint data or objective arguments about the data or the assumptions underlying them, not just saying "lolz another dumb graph".

I never claimed, when presenting a chart or some other data, that people would read the tea leaves the same way. I do, however, say that the data is not straight-forward in concluding the prevailing assumptions here. Fewer guns do not equal less murder. People have compelling reasons to snap, and they will snap regardless of ease or difficulty.