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[Owlbread]

You say kneejerk, I say sensible.

On paper they were sensible, yes. I believe that gun control is necessary and should be restrictive. These bans were forced through though with very little time to debate them in a bid to calm down the tabloids.

The hasty nature of the bans has resulted in strange anomalies like the fact that .44 magnum or .357 magnum (pretty much any caliber) revolvers are legal in the UK if they have a long barrel and a hand brace. Saiga-12 semi automatic shotguns with drum magazines are perfectly legal in this country, while our police would probably make the sign of the cross and hiss at the very sight of something like an SKS.

There's so many loopholes and weird nuances to the laws that I can't list them here, but those would only have come about if the laws had been forced through in a kneejerk reaction, as they were. The biggest shafting the government gave the British gun owners was banning .22LR pistols in 1997 purely in response to tabloid newspapers, going beyond the recommendations of the Cullen Report that proposed .22LR be exempt. As a result, as Farage stated, our Olympic team must go to other countries to practise shooting. It's just unnecessary.

Whilst mass shootings in the USA should not be called a tradition, there is something anomalous about how many they have compared to other nations with comparable levels of wealth, gun ownership, education and population density. Maybe it is some odd function of the stated variables, or something being just over a tipping point which it is not elsewhere.

But there are few other nations with comparable levels of wealth, gun ownership, education and population density. The USA is a very unusual country. What countries did you have in mind?

[10ebbor10]

Yeah, gun ownership is Switzerland is so high because of the unique nature of the Swiss army. As one of the few nations in Europe it still has a conscription army, and therefore a lot of people who're legally obliged to own a gun. And yes, they'd don't get any ammunition for it either. Additionally, as these are technically army weapons, there're severe restrictions on what you can do with them. Basically, the only thing you're allowed to do with them is keep them at your home, unloaded. Great for confusing statistics, but certainly not having a meaningful effect on the actual situation.

[Steeled]

In the US you could give every man woman and child a firearm and still have guns left over, however there were only around 32,000 homicides in 2011, which amounts to a piddiful amount of firearms used in actual crimes. In fact, discounting suicide, Guns probably wouldn't even crack the top 40 causes of death.

[10ebbor10]

4 million guns left over, actually. And that's not including military weaponry.

In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 67% of all homicides in the United States were conducted using a firearm.[5] Two-thirds of all gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides. In 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicides, and 11,078 firearm-related homicides in the US.[6]

Total homicides: 4.7 per 100 000 inhabitants

Gun homicides accounted for 2.4% of all homicides in the year 2009

Total homicides : 1.2 per 100 000 inhabitants.

[Owlbread]

Yes, and those murders would be committed using illegal guns 99% of the time.

I think if people understood just how restrictive the licensing system is in the UK they'd feel a lot safer about having certain firearms made legal again.

[GreatJustice]

Actually, according to recent data our violent crime is apparently very low compared to other data generated over the last decade, but that was government data, so judge its reliability carefully. As for the gun control argument regarding Washington/NY, here in the UK we have even stricter gun control laws and almost no gun crime compared to the US when judged as a per capita rate - 5000 or so incidents over the last 12 months. The armed response unit (yes, just one, for the whole of the city, not every badly trained donut muncher, just a elite unit) of the London Met has only opened fire a handful of times in the last DECADE. So go fish. As far as ownership in FInland/Switzerland goes, whilst ownership numbers are high, it takes no account of either the form of gun (mainly rifles in the 2 countries mentioned, unlike handguns in the US, which is the weapon most often used in gun related crime incidents), or restrictions/requirements/responsibilities on ownership, which IIRC are fairly strict compared with most parts of the US. This lack of guns in the UK does of course elevate our knife crime somewhat, but still below levels of gun crime in the US - that is a compromise I am willing to accept, for reasons I am not going to fill this thread up with.

Of course, UK gun crime was never very high, even when guns were basically unrestricted, and the gun control laws put into place had basically no effect on homicide rates overall, or even the portion of which were committed by guns. Meanwhile, most other forms of crime (Robbery, rape, etc) are reported as being quite a bit higher in the UK, though you could quibble about how they're reported compared to murder.

[Funk]

The swiss do get a limited amount of ammo in a sealed tin just in case the moon Nazis attack.

personally i think that in the UK our gun laws are to restrictive, now i agree that there need to be some gun control.
A level of training, a need to keep gun is a safe place and to keep them away from the mentally unstable are a must and are covered by the basic shotgun ownership rules.

Still there are loop holes, i.e. shotgun ammo can be freely owned by all as long as it's shot and not slug.
propellant are legal for all but gunpowder need an explosives licence.

[miauw62]

The group of people living on the social help is growing, thus gaining more votes, and politicians start targeting them by giving them more and more, which makes decline actually faster

I am strong supporter of the -  "If you want to have any kind of social help, trade it for your right to vote." solution
If you don't contribute to the wealth of the nation why the hell you should decide the course of the nation?

This seems silly. It's not like these people don't WANT to contribute, they just can't because of massive unemployment or other circumstances. As ebbor has repeatedly said, living on the money you get from social help isn't easy and it certainly doesn't let you afford much in the way of luxury.

[10ebbor10]

Also, once you start with the social help <-> right to vote system, it becomes a benefit for those people who don't need social benefits (ie the rich) to push those people that are barely making ends meet into poverty, so that they to need social benefits. Additionally, it allows and encourages them to make social benefits just enough to survive, in order to lower costs and reduce the chance that people can stop social benefits, in order to keep the poor voter group small.

In essence, you're looking at a broad plutocracy, not a democracy.

((On a side note, you'd be surprised how much people get some sort of a social benefits. It's 15% + in most nations ))

[MetalSlimeHunt]

As for the guns issues:
There are two cities in the USA which are most dangerous when it comes to gun-related violence, and those are Washington, DC, and New York. Guess which two American cities has most strict policies outlawing gun ownership?

Something in the south, I presume? In states of Texas, Arizona etc?

Arizona is in the southwest, not the south. Texas flips between the two depending upon who you're talking to.

The group of people living on the social help is growing, thus gaining more votes, and politicians start targeting them by giving them more and more, which makes decline actually faster

I am strong supporter of the -  "If you want to have any kind of social help, trade it for your right to vote." solution
If you don't contribute to the wealth of the nation why the hell you should decide the course of the nation?

Because that is the path to dictatorship. For somebody who claims to want freedom for his people and be against oppressive laws, that's one hell of an oppressive law you're supporting. Once you knock down the idea that voting is a right instead of a privilege traded for production, is status is weakened and can be steadily weakened further because it is no longer hypocritical not to. You can't just exclude the poor and the unfortunate. For one thing, it only takes a single economic downturn to scour the voting base and limit it to the more wealthy. If you thought Ukraine was being sold to Putin before... There would also be the problem of people who would not give up their voting rights for anything, even if they're dying in the street.

As for your standard of contribution, what about students? Retired people (and don't give me "they already paid their dues", because a person could be productive for years and then fall into poverty short of retirement)? Absentees? The sick and injured? If you work in a job that sends money out of Ukraine?

But if that's not enough for you, I'll go on to say that your standard is flawed because that isn't how economy works. If you're a restaurant server, are you really producing anything? You're taking orders and moving plates around, a computer and some conveyer belts could do that. Despite this, you could still avoid taking any social help. If you're, for example, a miner, then you're producing things, but what if the pay is so low that you need social services anyway? No voting rights, but producing. What if you were born to a rich family and could go your entire life without producing anything for the nation? Furthermore, economy is much about the movement of goods as it is the production of them. Production is fairly stable just about everywhere, and has been for some time. Good economy is about a stable flow of money. 2008 was bad for a lot of people all over the world, but those who sold and horded did well. (That's what you want to avoid, and that's the idea behind things like basic income and expiring currency. Everybody is going to spend in a more or less stable flow without hording.)

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I have social benefits because nobody seems to want to hire me.

It's not just 'People living on benefits don't want a job!', right now, certainly, it's 'People living on benefits cannot find jobs.'

That's another thing. Total employment means you still have lots of people who could work without jobs. The simple fact is that it is not possible to reach a point where everybody who can work is employed, even if you fill every single slot. That's not going away, either. It's only going to grow with the advent of the age of automation.

[GreatJustice]

Actually, since employment is effected by supply and demand (same as any other "product"), "full employment" could be achieved with ease assuming people were willing to work for significantly less money, at least initially. You'd be hard pressed to find a business not willing to hire someone with a starting wage of, say, $2.50.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

You're missing the point. Even if we had everybody working on slave wages, and in the most desirable position possible to employers, there are still going to be lots of unemployed people. That figure will only grow. That is the point, and that is why it is a deeply flawed idea that the unemployed should be "punished" for "being unproductive". And, of course, we don't want people working on slave wages because that'll ruin the economy as well (see:economy is a function of movement). 

[10ebbor10]

Also, people on extremely low wages would require welfare anyway. Removing the minimum wage wouldn't help that and in fact, would make it worse. Actually, Germany has such mini-jobs. Turns out, they don't work. People receive up 400 EUR a month, which isn't taxed or liable for social benefits. However, this also means it doesn't contribute towards pensions. Germany also has/had no official minimum wage (Minimum wage is negotiated per sector).

Turns out, what happens is that real jobs are split up into several mini-jobs, lowering efficiency and costs, damaging the social framework and trapping people in a low skill, low wage environment. It hasn't lowered unemployment, and is one of the causes of the severity of the European economic crisis. Because mini-jobs dropped labour costs, Germany became a major exporter within in the European Union, fueled by credit based purchases in the South.



Also, low wages stifles innovation into more work efficient systems. Don't sabotage the AI overlord Communist Utopia.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Now now, we're not going to need AI to bring about the Cybercommunist Utopia. It's more about robotics than computing at this point.