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[delphonso]

A crime that no one is willing to prosecute even when it happens.

Then why even bother enacting gun laws if there's no will to follow through?

Bumber this is childish and sadly extremely Republican - "things are bad and trying to make them better probably won't work so don't do anything."

I'm certain there are studies that say otherwise, as well.

[Lord Shonus]

There is a reason that school shootings are an epidemic in America.

They're not. When CNN (which is generally anti-gun, to the point where a lot of gun control myths originated there) decided to do an in-depth analysis of the commonly cited school shooting figures, they had to throw out almost 90% of them. Either the incident never happened, didn't actually happen at a school (empty lots that used to have schools and are still zoned that way are a common cause of this), or it didn't actually involve a shooting (early media reports are often wrong). After that huge cull, a huge percentage had zero fatalities or injuries, many were on-the-job suicides, and the majority of the ones that did involve a student being shot were targeted hits. Actual "go into a school and blast anything that moves" shootings are an incredibly small proportion, not much more common (when population adjusted) than any other major nation.

And this right here just convinces me you aren't listening anymore. No one said "ban guns". The republican fear mongering is leaking out of your brain.

Except for the people you started this by defending. The law you consider "special treatment" that should be repealed was enacted specifically in response to a "create a total ban on guns by piling anybody who dares to sell them into oblivion with bad-faith lawsuits" initiative.

[Magistrum]

Mostly, I am just triggered at the "Designed to kill people" rhetoric.  Again, a rifle is designed to fire a projectile. Nothing else.  How you use it, is another matter.

I know I'm a bit late, but, what a weird distinction to make. Surely something designed to kill bears would also kill humans, and thus need whatever restrictions and regulations other potentially human-killing tools have.
By your later post I see you don't mean gun ownership should be adopted broadly, but rather that it shouldn't be completely outlawed to the detriment of those who actually need it. Which seems reasonable enough.

Yes, people willing to commit crimes are my primary concern here... If they don't have a problem shooting people, I doubt they give a shit about driving to the next state to get a gun.

I think the objective lies in how it is considerably easier to catch someone in the meantime of driving from another state to get a gun illegally and shooting someone than to get them in the space of removing the gun from their holster and shooting someone.


While on that, what do y'all think about guns as a deterrent to oppression? I mean, even if you fancy yourself quite pro-current-government, certainly seeing how close you guys get to an actual coup attempt you have considered this?

[Micro102]

There is a reason that school shootings are an epidemic in America.

They're not. When CNN (which is generally anti-gun, to the point where a lot of gun control myths originated there) decided to do an in-depth analysis of the commonly cited school shooting figures, they had to throw out almost 90% of them. Either the incident never happened, didn't actually happen at a school (empty lots that used to have schools and are still zoned that way are a common cause of this), or it didn't actually involve a shooting (early media reports are often wrong). After that huge cull, a huge percentage had zero fatalities or injuries, many were on-the-job suicides, and the majority of the ones that did involve a student being shot were targeted hits. Actual "go into a school and blast anything that moves" shootings are an incredibly small proportion, not much more common (when population adjusted) than any other major nation.

I'd have to see a link to what you are talking about, but at face value it seems like a pointless point to make. Some cases being false or miscategorized doesn't mean that America doesn't have disproportionately more school shootings than other countries. No one dying from a shooting doesn't mean it didn't happen, or is not a problem that needs to be addressed (like holy shit, imagine if we counted everyone who fired a gun at a person as a murder statistic. It's unreasonable to do this.).
A student being targeted by someone with a gun is still a fucking problem with guns being brought to school to shoot people with.

Except for the people you started this by defending. The law you consider "special treatment" that should be repealed was enacted specifically in response to a "create a total ban on guns by piling anybody who dares to sell them into oblivion with bad-faith lawsuits" initiative.

I did not say a law should be repealed, I said "giving gun manufacturers the same defenses as other manufactories is protection from civil litigation.". It is. They need different protections and different regulation. The way guns are lobbied and advertised in this country is wrong, and something needs to change. I don't know about this group that you think is trying to ban guns, but don't decide I'm part of it.

I think the objective lies in how it is considerably easier to catch someone in the meantime of driving from another state to get a gun illegally and shooting someone than to get them in the space of removing the gun from their holster and shooting someone.

I have driven across multiple states every year. Not once have I been pulled over. I imagine there is very little risk of transporting a gun.

[nenjin]

While on that, what do y'all think about guns as a deterrent to oppression? I mean, even if you fancy yourself quite pro-current-government, certainly seeing how close you guys get to an actual coup attempt you have considered this?

It's kind of a nonsense argument IMO. Proving it is in the same realm as conspiracy theories. "Ah, well, Norway would totally oppress its people if some of them weren't armed." The US is the only place that seems to grapple with this Boogieman on a national scale in the 21st century. Most of Europe has very restrictive gun laws, none of this open carry stand your ground stuff. They deal with terrorism on a scale that would make Americans go insane. And their governments haven't oppressed them, at least in the opinion of the majority of people that live there. Russia is its own beast, and is by no means a disarmed nation at all. Yet they have one of the more authoritarian governments among the first world nations. The Islamic states? I don't think they have any shortage of weapons among their populace. Nor the African nations. Nor the South American nations.

Besides....anyone else see the videos of "the government" marching through neighborhoods during the Floyd riots, shooting into people's windows to keep their heads down? The idea of a mass armed resistance to "the government" is in the realm of apocalyptic thinking. There's no winning on either side of that scenario, just a protracted struggle where, even if "someone" wins, society as we know it is over and some new weird beast emerges.

That's why I don't buy any of it. The thinking that we need guns to protect against "Tyranny" is really "When the time comes for the new order to established, I want to be holding a gun." It's an admission that they don't believe in the current society we have anymore, regardless of who is currently in power, to the degree they're willing to go to war over it. That's treason to me.

And even beyond THAT, the argument is false on its face. The average middle ground of the gun control lobby isn't saying you can't own "a gun." What we're saying is that keeping an arsenal of automatic weapons against the day one "might need them", combined with Americans' willingness to shoot people for a variety of reasons, scares most law abiding citizens and we want less of that. Guns are cool, I don't think anyone can disagree with that. But we're unstable as a country, politically, emotionally, ethically......that is the wrong environment to not only celebrate guns no one honestly needs, but belligerently shoving the best hardware you "legally" can into as many hands as possible. It's almost like some parts of this country want the American Apocalypse.

[Micro102]

I always thought "If the military wanted to fight back against a militia of guns, they would have to bomb their infrastructure and destroy any wealth they hope to hold onto". But then I realized that getting to that point would require a government that doesn't give a shit about optics, and nothing would stop the worlds biggest military from flooding a city with deadly gas. Boom, infrastructure intact. Not a single bullet would need to be fired to wipe out an armed insurrection.

[McTraveller]

So I meant to say earlier:  I am puzzled by the fact that guns are the target of so much ire, when the real focus should be on public mental health and eliminating the kind of systemic disparities that foment cultures of violence.

History has proven many times that people really bent on violent crimes with firearms aren't going to be deterred by laws that say you can't have firearms or make it more difficult to get firearms. You're just going to get (more) black markets and the like.

From a quite nicely presented website: about two thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicide (23k in 2019).  It's unclear how many of those would still be suicides by another means.  Also in 2019, there were 14k homicides*.  It's unclear how many of those were "crimes of passion" or heat of the moment versus organized by mafia or gangs or premeditated.  32k were in "metro" areas, only 7k in "non-metro."

Also interesting from that site is that gun deaths have not been anti-correlated with background checks. Background checks started in 1998 according to that site, increasing to 40M "presently".  But firearm deaths increased over that period, not decreased. Doesn't seem to have the desired effect, and just adds bureaucracy.

Spoiler: * (click to show/hide)

So if you discount suicide, cars are more than twice as likely to kill you than guns. Heck even if you include suicide, and I don't think there are that many "suicide by car accident" cases, guns and cars kill roughly the same number of people per year in the US. This is kind of startling, and it does support the idea that guns just get a bad wrap.  If we're doing data-based analysis, I just don't see the oversized focus against guns.

NOTE: I don't own a gun, don't see a need for it personally. I don't see any particular reason to get rid of them either, though.

[Magistrum]

I have driven across multiple states every year. Not once have I been pulled over. I imagine there is very little risk of transporting a gun.

Still considerably easier, my dude. That said, now I'm curious. Do you guys know who has a gun or not? Are gun purchases public record? Checking the net tells me it depends on state and you guys have no federal database for this.

Here in Brazil it's possible to track every weapon to the guy who purchased it last, so it's easy to identify an illicit weapon by it's scratched off serial number during police stops and such.

So I meant to say earlier:  I am puzzled by the fact that guns are the target of so much ire, when the real focus should be on public mental health and eliminating the kind of systemic disparities that foment cultures of violence.

I agree here. In Brazil we got a very cool and pleasant drop on homicides right after the "Estatuto do Desarmamento" which tightened restrictions on gun ownership, but the problem of gun violence is still far from solved. While cutting ease of access to guns stops crimes of passion, like the drop in femicide in domestic situations, the majority of violence comes from deeper socioeconomic problems.

What I'm trying to say is... It's Capitalism's fault we can't have guns. 

[WealthyRadish]

The "any rebels would get flattened by the clearly superior US military" argument that often gets put out is I think the wrong way of looking at it, especially after... you know... the unbeatable US military having just lost another war against insurgents. "Gun proliferation as deterrence against tyranny" is bunk in my eyes for other reasons.

For one, even if the country erupted into armed insurgencies everywhere, only a very tiny proportion of the population would participate directly (like 1% of adults tops, with a large amount of that violent "participation" not requiring firearms at all) and the breakdown of authority that insurgency implies would suggest that guns could be easily smuggled in regardless of the the laws or existing state of proliferation.

More likely, it seems to me that widespread proliferation of guns is used to justify something closer to actual tyranny, like a heavily militarized, trigger-happy police force that gets away with treating every encounter as life-or-death (whether one thinks private guns everywhere can co-exist with a less-armed police, the contrary argument is certainly politically persuasive in practice), contributing not just to the immediate killings but further building the infrastructure for actual authoritarianism.

It doesn't help that the dominant gun culture is one that by all appearances would support an authoritarian takeover, given that right-wing philosophy in the US curiously doesn't seem to think democracy is particularly essential or even beneficial for protecting their liberties (and, in fact, seems to think that it's their guns, the cops, and the troops that are what protects them from "mob-rule", particularly as they become more conscious of being a voting minority).

[Micro102]

History has proven many times that people really bent on violent crimes with firearms aren't going to be deterred by laws that say you can't have firearms or make it more difficult to get firearms. You're just going to get (more) black markets and the like.

History? Right now in the present we have many examples of countries with gun regulation and fewer gun crimes. Your average person doesn't have access to a blackmarket. Regulating guns, without a doubt, decreases gun-related crimes. And when people have to rely on a knife instead of a gun, less people die.

So if you discount suicide, cars are more than twice as likely to kill you than guns. Heck even if you include suicide, and I don't think there are that many "suicide by car accident" cases, guns and cars kill roughly the same number of people per year in the US. This is kind of startling, and it does support the idea that guns just get a bad wrap.  If we're doing data-based analysis, I just don't see the oversized focus against guns.

Please tell me you aren't using car crash deaths in this comparison. We don't have people using hundreds of millions of guns each day to get to work. And we heavily regulate cars as is. I would love guns to be regulated like cars are.

Still considerably easier, my dude.

That's why I said we have to make it more inconvenient. A drive with low to no risk isn't enough of a deterrent. Make regulations federal, have people fill out paperwork and take a course to teach them to not leave a gun around where their kid can get it, and you suddenly save a bunch of lives.

This conversation is really reminding me of that onion article: https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1819576527

[Lord Shonus]

History? Right now in the present we have many examples of countries with gun regulation and fewer gun crimes. Your average person doesn't have access to a blackmarket. Regulating guns, without a doubt, decreases gun-re

Funny thing about that. The "death by shooting" statistics in Australia are identical in the 30 years after their ban to those over the decades before. Well, identical in the statistically significant sense, they might be a few tenths of a percent higher. The same is true of every nation that has adopted strict gun control. Many nations where the laws have historically been as lax or even laxer than the US's have had much lower rates. All evidence is that the countries with low gun crime would have low gun crime if there was a pistol in every cracker-jack box.

[Micro102]

History? Right now in the present we have many examples of countries with gun regulation and fewer gun crimes. Your average person doesn't have access to a blackmarket. Regulating guns, without a doubt, decreases gun-re

Funny thing about that. The "death by shooting" statistics in Australia are identical in the 30 years after their ban to those over the decades before. Well, identical in the statistically significant sense, they might be a few tenths of a percent higher. The same is true of every nation that has adopted strict gun control. Many nations where the laws have historically been as lax or even laxer than the US's have had much lower rates. All evidence is that the countries with low gun crime would have low gun crime if there was a pistol in every cracker-jack box.

Well I'm going to need a source for that, because a quick google search gives me this study, which says that gun related deaths decreased after Australia's National Firearms Agreement, and several reports about how they stopped having mass shootings. At best, there seems to be an argument that gun deaths were dropping a bit before the agreement, and that the current trend was going to happen anyway, but that's simply not good enough for me, and certainly shouldn't be good enough to argue that it won't have an effect on America's gun deaths.

[feelotraveller]

Guns are cool, I don't think anyone can disagree with that.

I can.

runs zig-zag path for nearest cover

[feelotraveller]

History? Right now in the present we have many examples of countries with gun regulation and fewer gun crimes. Your average person doesn't have access to a blackmarket. Regulating guns, without a doubt, decreases gun-re

Funny thing about that. The "death by shooting" statistics in Australia are identical in the 30 years after their ban to those over the decades before. Well, identical in the statistically significant sense, they might be a few tenths of a percent higher. The same is true of every nation that has adopted strict gun control. Many nations where the laws have historically been as lax or even laxer than the US's have had much lower rates. All evidence is that the countries with low gun crime would have low gun crime if there was a pistol in every cracker-jack box.

Got a source for that?  In the meantime I'm calling bullshit.  Although Australia never had anywhere near the gun death problem of the US, after the 1996 gun reform laws (tighter restrictions, mass buy-back) gun deaths dropped substantially going from 500-600 a year to 200-250.  Here's a nice graph.

[Lord Shonus]

How does the RAND corporation sound?


https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/1996-national-firearms-agreement.html

None of the studies reviewed in McPhedran (2016) found statistically significant evidence that trends in firearm-related homicide changed after the NFA. Since then, two additional studies failed to find an effect (Baker and McPhedran, 2015; Gilmour, Wattanakamolkul, and Sugai, 2018), but three other studies have produced mixed results. Chapman, Alpers, and Jones (2016) found evidence that the decline in total and nonfirearm homicides after the NFA was steeper than prior to the NFA, but the authors found no evidence of either a step change or a change in slopes for firearm homicides. The greater declines in nonfirearm homicides led the authors to doubt whether any changes can be attributed to the NFA.