Topic: Guns - page 27. (Read 22189 times)

There is afcourse another factor that could tip the scale. Let me put it this way;

Yes, there are instances where having a gun on you will prevent harm, where otherwise harm would have certainly come to one or more people.

There are instances where having a gun doesn't alter the outcome in any way

There are also instances where having a gun on you actually makes things worse, meaning (serious) harm has been done to on or more persons where otherwise no, or very little harm would have occurred.

This are all the options, of which it is easy to think that they just occur between attacker and defender, between criminal and innocent civilian. And might make you think that it could be worth is anyway.

But these instances als happen between one (usually) normal innocent civilian, and another, when people don't act rationally like I've described in my earlier post. Almost all of these encounters usually happen without serious harm being done to either, but with one or more guns added to the mix, suddenly it can end in irrevocable disaster. To make this a bit less abstact, an example;

imagine just to guys getting into an argument, they didn't like eachother very much to begin with, but let's say one looked at the other his girlfriend the wrong way. Neither of them backs down. What normally happens is that a few punches get thrown and a 2 minute wrestle occurs. In the end they go home with a bloody nose, a few bruises and a black eye, and probably a bruised ego. Add one or more guns in the mix; suddenly one is dead and the other in jail.

It's excactly these frequent, but mostly harmless situations that suddenly have very grave consequenses where people act just human, or even fairly stupid, that illustrate where the real danger resides with being permitted to carry a gun.

Just to make it clear: I'm not anti-gun, I'm just playing on that side of the argument because it's the minority. I haven't yet formed a solid opinion.
What I'm looking for now is unbiased historical data which isn't cherry-picked. Simply showing one side of the data (people with gaping holes in vital organs die) isn't enough when the other side of the data may be stronger (people with guns are victims of crime less often).

There is no statistics to prove either way, because each situation is special. What works for one city, may not work for an another one. IF conceal carry worked then the crime in Detroit would be lower than in NYC, but stats shows that Detroit leads in violent crimes while NYC doesn't even make top 30.

Except there really is no debate, not amongst honest, peer-reviewed academics (professors, researchers, statisticians, economists, epidemiologists, etc) at least. As I understand it, there were initially three camps:
Unbiased academics
Honest anti-gun academics
Dishonest anti-gun academics paid by, or simply, criminal safety advocates

The honest anti-gun academics proved their own prejudices wrong with science, and retracted any flawed studies they had published. The dishonest anti-gun academics refused to publish their methodology, data sets, or respond to peer review & criticism.

So that leaves us the only honest debate being between those who can show guns in the hands of innocents don't increase crime at all (which should be obvious, as innocent people don't commit crimes), and those who can show more guns decrease crime overall, and the exact degree of how much of a decrease.

P.S. If you are figuring gun suicides as a reason to ban guns, then either 1) you must not believe people have the right to control their own destiny 2) you believe people don't commit suicides without guns, when in fact less guns usually equals more suicide with everything else

Assuming firearms are more harmful them helpful, banning them isn't going to do much good for the US. As of right now, if you were to ban guns from the US, there is still millions of firearms across the country. For a new country just starting off, it would be helpful since there are no firearms introduced to the population. I personally don't think banning firearms in the US will have much of an effect on gun related crimes. And according to this statistic:

It's not very high on our list of concerns. If we banned smoking for one year, we'd save more then ten times the amount of people that would die from gun violence in a year.



Wiser words have hardly ever been spoken. Guys, we can argue all day about gun control. The fact of the matter is, smarter people then us have been debating it for years longer then we probably ever will. Since they are still arguing about it, I highly doubt on a little forum like this that we'd find a solution.

Repeating memes might indicate that to argue your case, you can't think on your feet, can't post original arguments, and are victim to group think.

Even the best defense can be defeated, but whatever you say about Afghanistan, you cannot say that it was a "soft target."

Um that didn't help Afganistan against like few invasions?

Well, to be honest, the points you make about professional crime fighters and other, more attractive opportunities are spot-on. When options other than violence are available, people tend to take them. But the real reason that people need to be armed is not to ensure they are safe from crime. It is to ensure they are safe from oppression. The "rifle behind every blade of grass" quote, though mis-attributed, has a grain of truth to it. A well-armed populace is the best defense against invasion.

Tyrants can do plenty against information, unless you have a route to the internet that doesn't require any infrastructure and can survive radio signal jamming. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/bart-pulls-mubarak-san-francisco

Against a crowd of defenseless innocents? All options are open, including genocide.

Against a crowd of armed innocents? Suddenly, they have to switch tactics and wait to pick off victims individually who've separated from the crowd.

Source 19 of the wiki.

Anyway, giving guns to people to reduce crime is not solving the source of the problem, the crimes. We could argue about it all day long, each side will probably find sources and statistics data that prove our point of view.

I think, to reduce crimes rates, we should find the sources of the crimes first. A big majority didn't dream of becoming a criminal, but circumstances in life brought them at that point. It's not news that poor neighborhood have a higher crime rate than richer ones. Schools makes wonders long-term to reduce crime, but the effect of guns on crime rate is debatable. Why do you think there's a lot of people that think armed citizens is not a good idea? Because the effect is not as strong as you think, and doesn't solve the root of the problem.

Yeah, I agree than in certain countries in the world, I would prefer having a gun with me. But it's only a short-term solution, that only provides me self-defense in an hostile environment. Humans didn't evolve only by self-defense, but also by adapting their environment. In my country, we worked to provide free education and free health care to any citizen, while developing a strong police force. Since people have opportunities, they find crime less attractive and want to cooperate with the police force. Instead of having n00bs fighting crime, you have a group of professional that take care of it.

There is many solutions, but I don't think guns is useful on a long-term perspective. A bullet doesn't build, think or create. What you invest on bullets is lost opportunity to develop something else. Sure, you need a minimum of protection. But, let's say that one day, you succeed and everybody owns a gun. Ok, now what? What did you achieve with every citizens owning a gun? You really think crime will disappear? That the guy who need to steal or sell drug to survive is going to stop?

I think that until you make a safe society, you need guns for the time being, so that your citizens can survive. But I really think you should put energy to make a society where your citizens can feel safe without a gun. I mean, I'm lucky and I live in a society where I don't feel the need to have a gun for my safety. Here, having a gun is more trouble than anything, especially if you get caught.

And if you live in a society where you're more afraid of the corrupted police force or the governement than criminals, get a cellphone instead of a gun. Governments always have more guns than you, but can't do anything against information

Anyway, I know I'm against the majority here, and I simply taught that you could find interesting of having a complete opposite point of view of somebody who lives in a society where guns are irrelevant.

"Poor people kill people, but never in self-defense because that requires bribery, so ban guns now!"

In other words, Guns don't kill people, people kill people?

ROTFLMFAO, Hemenway... http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2006/03/hemenway-and-co-authors-refuse-to.html
http://johnrlott.tripod.com/2007/01/problems-with-latest-miller-hemenway.html
http://www.saf.org/LawReviews/KleckAndGertz2.htm
http://www.saf.org/journal/11/kleckfinal.htm

Canadians are nicer for sure. Few points : a tiny town's stats mean nothing. I can point out few countries with few crime and no guns laws. Except they are fucking rich, society creates crime. Poor countries have more crime - guns or not.

Still no evidence that the rate was dropping before the law. But let's even go one step further an assume I'm wrong. The guns did nothing to lower the crime rate. That still means you're wrong. The guns also did nothing to increase crime. So all that chart up there proves is that overall, Canadians are nicer people than Americans. Not exactly Pulitzer-prize stuff there.

While we're cherry-picking our data:

Hmm.... No, that says that there was no evidence that it reduced the rate of burglaries. Says nothing about the general crime rate, nor about the rate dropping prior to the law enactment. So... Try again. For reference, the original statement:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_death#Leading_causes_in_the_United_States

Smoking tobacco    435,000    18.1%    
Being overweight and obesity    111,909    4.6%    
Alcohol    85,000    3.5%    
Infectious diseases    75,000    3.1%    
Toxic agents including toxins, particulates and radon    55,000    2.3%    
Traffic collisions 43,000    1.8%    
Firearms deaths (regardless of whether self-defense, self-inflicted, accidental, murder or 'unknown') 29,000[3]    1.2%
Sexually transmitted infections    20,000    0.8%    
Drug abuse    17,000    0.7%

So there you have it, the only two things that "shouldn't" be banned sooner than guns are sex and drugs. At least if prohibition did anything other than empower criminals...

Say goodbye to your motor vehicles, say goodbye to living in anything but a lean-to in the middle of nowhere, say goodbye to being able to have human contact, say goodbye to libation, say goodbye to eating anything other than food pellets or NG tube food, say goodbye to knowing who's an asshole by their lighting up in front of asthmatics, at gas stations, and near pressurized gas tanks. Then you can say goodbye to innocent life, exterminated by genocidal tyrants and lesser violent criminals.

Just there.