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[Arrkhal]

One of the things is, the criminals tend to have even worse training than your average Joe Citizen or cop.  As heavily the deck is stacked against a law-abiding citizen if they've got a gun and the criminal has a knife, it's even worse if it's vice versa.

Seriously, hand-to-hand training trumps pretty much everything, at that range.  At longer range, it's harder than it looks.  Most criminals are phenomenally bad shots, though there's always the rare exception.  In any case, though, shooting someone is hardly easy, both in terms of technical skill and emotional impact.

And criminals will indeed still have guns.  Maybe not as many, but, you generally end up stacking the odds against the law-abiding people.  Remember the Germany statistic?  It's more like 10:1 the other way around in the USA.  In Jamaica, possession of a handgun is punishable by life in jail.  They still use handguns.  But those comparisons are meaningless.  Different cultures.

"Needing" guns, or any other weapon, is a symptom of a social problem.  No amount of bans will ever make crime go away, or really even have a significant effect on crime, given that close combat weapons have worked for millenia, fists and feet for even longer than that.

Actually, against cops in PA, anyway, you're better off with a frying pan or unarmed, statistically.
http://ucr.psp.state.pa.us/UCR/Reporting/Annual/pdf2008/a184r001.pdf

Couldn't find national data, but PA tends to be really close to average.

What you should really do is look at England's crime rates, from multiple sources, and put in dates where gun control laws were passed, as well as dates where social things were passed, like better health care and education in poor urban areas.  See whether social stuff correlates to a slow drop in crime over a period of 13-16 years, followed by a relatively sudden sharp drop (assuming English gangsters join gangs young, too).  Gun control, if it works, should produce a permanent increase in the rate of crime reduction, and reasonably quickly.  And if it actually works, it should reduce all violent crime.  Reduction of "gun crime" is meaningless, if criminals switch to butcher knives and cricket bats.

Nothing like that's ever happened in the USA.  Just correlation to social stuff.

[Dwarf]

I... I love you. Your reasoning...

You are my today's hero.

[Neruz]

Ideally what you're trying to reduce with Gun Control is the same thing you're trying to reduce with Car Alarms; spontainious crime. You're trying to avoid the angry husband whipping out the pistol in the bedside table and shooting his spouse, in the same way that Car Alarms are trying to avoid the random person wandering past your car and deciding he likes the radio.

Serious criminals can get past any reasonable defence, there's no point in trying to stop them, because any measures you take that would be successful would also be rediculous to live under.

Of course it's a bit murkier with Guns than it is with Car Alarms, but you get the idea. Gun Control doesn't aim to stop the criminals from getting guns, it aims to stop the idiots from getting guns.

[Lord Shonus]

Except that pushes for gun control are almost always the responce to well planned crimes, such as columbine.

[Neruz]

That's because the politicians involved know that the real reason won't work; Americans have shown pretty solidly that they love their guns, so any politican that seriously wants to try and introduce some sort of gun control will have to do so by riding a wave of outrage, and nothing generates outrage quite like organised crime, especially if innocents get injured as a result.

[Arrkhal]

You're trying to avoid the angry husband whipping out the pistol in the bedside table and shooting his spouse, in the same way that Car Alarms are trying to avoid the random person wandering past your car and deciding he likes the radio.

Problem with that kind of reasoning is that non-gang related murders tend to be committed with anything handy, and at the risk of repeating myself, a knife or frying pan doesn't make you any less dead than a gun.  One cop has been quoted saying, in seriousness, "we get a lot of barbecue fork murders in the summer."

Also, guns have probably killed at least as many abusers as abusees.  It's not like they've got fingerprint locks on them.

While it would be nice if the controls on guns actually made sense none of the laws in the USA have ever been genuinely related to public safety.  The first laws in the 1800's were to keep slaves from getting guns to escape on the underground railroad.  I.e., a black guy traveling at night with a gun couldn't just say something like "oh, just out hunting rabbits for the master's breakfast."

The second set were to keep black freemen from owning guns.  The third set in was blatantly anti-Italian, since everyone was blaming them, rather than Prohibition, for the high crime rates.

The 4th major set in was anti-poor, making it so that guns require completely worthless "safety" features, but then those standards are selectively applied only to the guns that poor people can afford.  Funny thing is, the Glock, which something like 60% of police departments issue (it's been as high as 80% in the past), has none of those features.  Actually, the smaller Glocks have throwaway sights put on them in Austria, which are then replaced with the normal sights in Georgia, all to meet the importation requirements.

Then the 5th set in was anti-"tactical," banning high capacity magazines (except you could own one of the millions of existing ones already out there), protruding pistol grips, bayonet lugs, grenade launcher hardpoints, ventilated heatshields, flash hiders, etc., on semi-auto rifles (ironically, it specified semi-auto, so if you legally owned an actual machine gun, it could have however many "assault weapon" features you wanted).  So the "post-ban" version of the same gun would be exactly the same, just cheaper to manufacture, and it would have a 10 round magazine in the box.

At no point have any of those laws really been successful at anything, except making life difficult for people who obey the law.

Prohibition-era crime didn't go down until prohibition was repealed. 

[Neruz]

I never said whether or not it was a good idea, nor did i say it would work, i even pointed out that the issue gets murky. I merely said what the idea behind the concept was.

You're seriously overreacting there Arrkhal.



To be fair though; regardless of how you may feel on gun control, you have to be a complete loony to think that it should be acceptible to issue assault rifles to civilians. You can make a decent case for self-defence with side arms, but there's no way in hell that case is going to fly for assault rifles.

One would assume the reason the law doesn't also cover full automatic machine guns is that such weapons are rarely very portable and tend to be somewhat unwieldly.

[Arrkhal]

I'm just saying you put too much faith in the politicians.  If their real concern were safety and preventing crimes of passion, would they have passed those laws?

[Neruz]

I don't really put any faith in your politicans, since i don't live in America i don't really give a damn.


Who knows, maybe American politicans have completely different reasons for trying to pass gun control laws to every other politician on the planet, i don't know. But then again i completely fail to understand the rampant levels of sheer terror and paranoia that average American seems to live his life in, so it doesn't surprise me that i don't understand their politicians.

[Arrkhal]

Cultural ambassadors.  America's main media exports are cop shows and hardline conservative blather.  Those are what sell, and it's what other countries want to see/hear, because it plays to their preconceptions.  The latter also tends to clog up 4chan and Youtube, making it look worse than it is.  Americans call them the "tinfoil hat" types.  "Gotta block out the thought control rays!"

I don't know what country you're in, but I'm using England just as an example, because that's the one I know the best.

England's main media exports to here are comedies.  Mr. Bean, Monty Python, etc.  So that's what Americans think England is like.  Also, we tend to hear about people trying to pass laws over there, like an attempt to require cricket bats to be kept with the police, and one that wanted to ban all knives with a sharp point, and even had 3 chefs saying that a sharp point isn't necessary to cook, and some grisly photos of slashing, not stabbing, wounds.  Of course, those bozos are pretty marginalized and not taken seriously (I hope?).  But those are the main legal propositions that Americans hear about; the ones that are crazy enough to make it across an ocean.  If that were 90% of what you heard of England, what would you think about them?

[Vester]

Cultural ambassadors.  America's main media exports are cop shows and hardline conservative blather.  Those are what sell, and it's what other countries want to see/hear, because it plays to their preconceptions.  The latter also tends to clog up 4chan and Youtube, making it look worse than it is.  Americans call them the "tinfoil hat" types.  "Gotta block out the thought control rays!"

Hey, I like Law & Order.

To be fair, though, Philippine culture is pretty conservative, with immense American influence, so yeah. Except we apparently think all Americans are lily-white and rich.

[Neruz]

Actually i base my view of Americans on my interactions with Americans, i don't think i've actually watched TV in nearly four years now, and it certainly wasn't some crappy cop show. While admittedly many of the Americans i interact with are online and thus a poor sample space, i do have an Uncle currently living in California, and my interaction with him and his friends has, if anything, reinforced the apparant paranoia.

Nice try though.

[Cthulhu]

Cultural ambassadors.  America's main media exports are cop shows and hardline conservative blather.  Those are what sell, and it's what other countries want to see/hear, because it plays to their preconceptions.  The latter also tends to clog up 4chan and Youtube, making it look worse than it is.  Americans call them the "tinfoil hat" types.  "Gotta block out the thought control rays!"

Hey, I like Law & Order.

To be fair, though, Philippine culture is pretty conservative, with immense American influence, so yeah. Except we apparently think all Americans are lily-white and rich.

We're actually mostly made of orange leather now, at least the "hot" ones are.

[Arrkhal]

Actually i base my view of Americans on my interactions with Americans, i don't think i've actually watched TV in nearly four years now, and it certainly wasn't some crappy cop show. While admittedly many of the Americans i interact with are online and thus a poor sample space, i do have an Uncle currently living in California, and my interaction with him and his friends has, if anything, reinforced the apparant paranoia.

Nice try though.

Nice try ignoring the references to Youtube and 4chan.  Those two sites are completely clogged with tinfoil hat types, as are a ton of other places.  Anywhere that allows open responses to things, really.

And CA really isn't the best place to look for normal people.  The only place worse is Vermont.

--------------

To be fair, though, Philippine culture is pretty conservative, with immense American influence, so yeah. Except we apparently think all Americans are lily-white and rich.

Yay, I like the Philippines.  And yeah, the only Americans you're likely to see will fit that description, plus fat and gullible.

[Neruz]

Nice try ignoring the references to Youtube and 4chan.  Those two sites are completely clogged with tinfoil hat types, as are a ton of other places.  Anywhere that allows open responses to things, really.

Actually i place YouTube in the same category as "TV"; something i don't really care for or interact with.

4chan is amusing, but you have to be borderline retarded to take anything that comes out of there even remotely seriously.

And CA really isn't the best place to look for normal people.  The only place worse is Vermont.

I believe i already stated my sample space was less than ideal.



I feel i should clarify; the 'paranoia' part is mostly founded in comments like this;

I'm just saying you put too much faith in the politicians.  If their real concern were safety and preventing crimes of passion, would they have passed those laws?