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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[GavJ]

most gun owners own multiple guns [in australia]

Poor argument for 2 reasons:
1) Americans also can own multiple guns...
2) Not only that, but statistically, there should be MORE ownership overlap for 100 guns per 100 people than for 15. Imagine drawing 100 boxes on the wall and throwing 15 vs 100 darts. In which situation will more of the darts land in the same boxes more than once? The 100 dart version, by a LOT.

If this isn't intuitive to you, imagine a more extreme example: 1 vs 101. In the 1 dart example, it is guaranteed that nobody owns more than one gun, whereas in the 101 example, it is guaranteed that at least one person does own more than one gun.

So if anything, we should make a naive statistical prediction that there is LESS redundant gun ownership in Australia than in the US unless specific data is available proving otherwise.

yeah sports shooters are required to store the guns in the gun clubs

This is a much more important detail.

Are all guns owned in Australia by civilians sports guns? Or is this only a subset of the 15/100? If so, what proportion? Also, how rigorously are records kept on exactly who signed out which gun and identity verification, etc.?

The comment about farmers implies that most of the guns are not sports guns?

[wobbly]

Wasn't really my point. You were saying 15 guns/100 is still a lot of people owning guns. Of course American gun owners also own multiples guns. Why edit the [in Australia] bit in to the quote, just to refute it? The fact of the matter is at 90 guns per 100 people even if the average gun owner owns 3 guns that's still 30% of the population, if 5 guns that's still 18% of the population owning guns.

Edited my shoddy maths

[Reelya]

Not true, because Australia has a very rigorous gun licensing policy. Someone who already owns one gun finds it much easier to get another gun. So the "darts" are not random.

USA has background checks: any can get a gun unless they trigger something on the blacklist. Whereas Australia has a licensing system, and the licenses are not for life, they must be renewed and you need to show continuing reasons that you needs guns. It's a whitelist system, and someone who already has a firearm license will find it much easier to obtain more guns and their licenses than someone new to the system.

For example, this is one states system:
http://www.police.vic.gov.au/content.asp?Document_ID=34468

So in your boxes and darts example, each time that a box is hit for the first time, that box expands to 10 times the previous size, evidence for that assertion below.

Here's an example from the laws covering collectors:

Applicants for a Category 2 Collectors Licence must be able to provide evidence that they:

    Have held a Category 1 Collectors Licence for at least two years before submitting this application;
    Are a member of an approved collectors organisation.
    Have their application endorsed by the nominated officer of their club
    Possess more than 10 handguns manufactured before 1 January 1947 (and continue to own more than 10 throughout your licence)
    Provide a statement regarding the theme of their collection.

So to get a general handgun collector's license for handguns made after 1947 (the only thing not covered by a category 1 license), you have to own AT LEAST 11 vintage handguns made prior to 1947. That's just the law here.

So, for a collector to buy e.g. a 9mm Glock or Beretta made after 1947, he has to end up owning 12 registered handguns.

[GavJ]

Wasn't really my point. You were saying 15 guns/100 is still a lot of people owning guns. Of course American gun owners also own multiples guns. Why edit the [in Australia] bit in to the quote, just to refute it? The fact of the matter is at 90 guns per 100 people even if the average gun owner owns 3 guns that's still 30% of the population, if 5 guns that's still 18% of the population owning guns.

I didn't refute it, I was just clarifying for those who don't remember the whole quote...

My point is that 15/100 can be meaningfully compared in a direct linear fashion to 100/100, and multi-ownership has nothing to do with it.

Or if anything, multi-ownership happens more in America, thus making the gap between the two numbers SMALLER in terms of actual number of gun owners. I.e. inflating the number of actual owners in Australia and/or deflating the owners in America beyond what those ratios themselves imply.

So the 15 vs. 100 can be taken to be a meaningful measure of about 1/7 as many gun owners OR MORE if anything in Australia as in America. Which implies still a lot of gun owners. Plenty enough for gun laws to have a reasonably expected influence.

@Reelya

The law you quoted doesn't tell us about actual ownership... Without posting ratios of category 1 vs 2 license holders, what's that have to do with anything? It's just a legislative threshold, not a reflection of any real trends necessarily. There might be like 2 guys who hold a collector's license for all we know, etc. etc.

The licensing vs. just background check is a decent argument, but how much it affects things is unclear. If we assume that every gun owner wants to and can afford to own multiple guns "if only the law let me!! *shakes fist*" then it's a strong point.  If that's not true, then it's a weak point.

So it may or may not counteract or overwhelm or undwhelm the basic statistical skew. Without more info, I'd probably guess that it just counteracts the statistics, and brings us right back to 15 being basically directly linearly comparable to 100.

[Reelya]

That's why I brought up handguns before. 5% of guns in Australia are handguns.

There are 172,000 handguns estimated in Australia. 1 per 135 people - which is assuming 1 gun per person, only.

There are 114,000,000 handguns estimate in United states, 1 per 3 people, assuming one per person.
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states

We're looking at a 40/1 difference with "up to" 1/3 hypothetically packing heat in the USA vs 1/135 in Australia.

"Proportion of households with handguns" in USA is listed as 22%.

whereas those 1/135 in Australia, lets assume that that's just 1 gun per household, and that there are 4 people per household, is more like 3% of households with 1 handgun. but even then they're mostly either club members with their gun stored at the club range, or collectors with a pre-1947 handgun, not a handgun ready to shoot people with.

[Morrigi]

I was reading that some of the guns that they restricted back in 1986 shot up in value, to the point that they were worth about $10000 each on the black market, and that was even at a time that other guns were seeing reduced restrictions.

If you're looking for dampening effects on gun crime, look right there. That's a price where it's more profitable to sell the gun than to commit most crimes with it, which risks losing the gun if you're caught. That's something not often taken into consideration in gun control debates: changes in availability are definitely going to have big impact on market prices, hence the viability of a lot of crime.

One example of that are certain individuals who like to throw a fit over rifles chambered in .50 BMG, despite weapons of that caliber having been used in fewer than three homicides, ever. There's no real point in using a $9,000, 30 pound rifle for anything except having fun on the range (at several dollars per shot), extreme-range sniping, or as an anti-materiel rifle, applications that criminals tend not to have a use for.

Well the standard talking point is that all those guns are *why* we haven't seen a land invasion since 1812. (And cheerfully ignores those two rather large bodies of water to our east and west, and our cultivated good relations with our neighbors to the north and south, and our crazy high military budget since WWII...)

Do people really believe that?  I guess the US navy isn't needed, then. I mean... what has it done to protect the US territory that civilian handguns couldn't?

Well no, I don't think we need the Navy to repel an invasion, but it would certainly help. These days, the Navy is primarily used for power projection and nuclear strike capability. That said, for the invading/occupying force, it'd wind up being far, far worse than anyone's recent misadventures in Afghanistan or Ukraine.

[Sergarr]

I was reading that some of the guns that they restricted back in 1986 shot up in value, to the point that they were worth about $10000 each on the black market, and that was even at a time that other guns were seeing reduced restrictions.

If you're looking for dampening effects on gun crime, look right there. That's a price where it's more profitable to sell the gun than to commit most crimes with it, which risks losing the gun if you're caught. That's something not often taken into consideration in gun control debates: changes in availability are definitely going to have big impact on market prices, hence the viability of a lot of crime.

One example of that are certain individuals who like to throw a fit over rifles chambered in .50 BMG, despite weapons of that caliber having been used in fewer than three homicides, ever. There's no real point in using a $9,000, 30 pound rifle for anything except having fun on the range (at several dollars per shot), extreme-range sniping, or as an anti-materiel rifle, applications that criminals tend not to have a use for.

Well the standard talking point is that all those guns are *why* we haven't seen a land invasion since 1812. (And cheerfully ignores those two rather large bodies of water to our east and west, and our cultivated good relations with our neighbors to the north and south, and our crazy high military budget since WWII...)

Do people really believe that?  I guess the US navy isn't needed, then. I mean... what has it done to protect the US territory that civilian handguns couldn't?

Well no, I don't think we need the Navy to repel an invasion, but it would certainly help. These days, the Navy is primarily used for power projection and nuclear strike capability. That said, for the invading/occupying force, it'd wind up being far, far worse than anyone's recent misadventures in Afghanistan or Ukraine.

An army capable of invading mainland USA despite the Navy protecting it would surely have enough firepower to simply erase half the US cities from the face of Earth, and what's left will crumble by itself.

[~Neri]

Well if they lose most of their offshore firepower to the Navy, and end up with groundtroops and vehicles primarily, they will lose a huge amount of soldiers and vehicles to civilians.

[Helgoland]

-snip-

Hey, chlorine trifluoride does too have legitimate uses!
...
Mas shootings in Germany are quite interesting: A while ago they were all the rage, with one happening every year or so. But now that fad seems to have died down, and gun laws weren't changed AFAIK. People are weird like that.

[Sergarr]

Well if they lose most of their offshore firepower to the Navy, and end up with groundtroops and vehicles primarily, they will lose a huge amount of soldiers and vehicles to civilians.

Artillery. Artillery is a god of war. Guns cannot save you from getting blown up.

[RedKing]

One example of that are certain individuals who like to throw a fit over rifles chambered in .50 BMG, despite weapons of that caliber having been used in fewer than three homicides, ever. There's no real point in using a $9,000, 30 pound rifle for anything except having fun on the range (at several dollars per shot), extreme-range sniping, or as an anti-materiel rifle, applications that criminals tend not to have a use for.

Same could be said about owning a tank. Or a surface-to-air missile. Pretty much sure nobody's ever been killed by a SAM outside of a conflict zone. Doesn't mean that civilians should have the ability to own them.

[Loud Whispers]

Well if they lose most of their offshore firepower to the Navy, and end up with groundtroops and vehicles primarily, they will lose a huge amount of soldiers and vehicles to civilians.

Artillery. Artillery is a god of war. Guns cannot save you from getting blown up.

That's because you're Russian Sergarr, ask a survivalist and they'll tell you going innawds is the way to go, ask a westerner and they'll tell you air power is the way to go e.t.c.

[GavJ]

That's why I brought up handguns before. 5% of guns in Australia are handguns

Why should I care about handguns in particular? The only reason I've seen to single out handguns in this thread is based on AMERICAN data about handguns being used more frequently for crimes. But I see no reason to assume that this trend also applies to Australia, because it's entirely possible that with lesser access to handguns, people in Australia who wish to commit gun-related offenses simply substitute long guns instead, which would make all of those handguns-specific data pretty irrelevant.

[Sergarr]

Well if they lose most of their offshore firepower to the Navy, and end up with groundtroops and vehicles primarily, they will lose a huge amount of soldiers and vehicles to civilians.

Artillery. Artillery is a god of war. Guns cannot save you from getting blown up.

That's because you're Russian Sergarr, ask a survivalist and they'll tell you going innawds is the way to go, ask a westerner and they'll tell you air power is the way to go e.t.c.

..."innawds"? Google reveals nothing useful.

[Loud Whispers]

Figuratively it means to run away from civilization to survive in remote areas away from the worst of a disaster/fighting, so going into caves, mountains and remote regions and that like. Literally it means to go into the woods, or the forests.