Topic: Guns - page 28. (Read 22182 times)

Where, exactly? For ease of pointing out where, I have copied the entire section of the article on the gun law:

Bonus quote:

He later added

The wiki says that the law changed nothing, the crime rate was falling rapidly prior of the law enactment.

I wish my town would do this! But we already have nearly no crime. We are all country folk with firearms up here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw,_Georgia#Gun_law

I assume that more criminals know how to use firearms in the US compared to other countries? Where did they learn? I blame Call Of Duty. Lets ban video games too.

I mean, just banning them isn't going to help. This is quote right from where the graph is:

So the majority of these crimes aren't from legal gun owners. Removing firearms from the legal gun owners is hardly going to have an effect. I can't find the graph right now, but in the US, crime has dropped an average of 8% in States that started issuing CCW permits. And firearms are used in self defense more then eight times more then they are to commit crime. Like I said though, I have to find the source on that.

Why?

a few per 100,000 is nothing..

Swimming pools kill something like 2 per 100,000 per year.

I don't see anyone calling for banning of swimming pools.. 

... without using a Straw Man?

Is anyone going to respond to that graph?

LOL. You assume that police doesn't have access to heavy hardware?

Guns don't increase or reduce crime. It's a myth.

The only thing guns do is increase accident rates and *possibly* suicide rates.

Excellent observation.

Way too many assumptions in that paragraph...

Sometimes the general case of "defense against state abuses" is quite relevant, even if we're not talking about revolutions.

For ex., some months ago, maybe an year already, the state of São Paulo in Brazil proceeded to evict hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, living illegally for years in a land they apparently didn't own. Putting aside whether they were legitimate owners of those houses or not, it is a fact that police brutality during such eviction process was shocking. Among many atrocities, some people even got killed by the police if my memory doesn't betray me. It was on the national news for a while.

I bet with you that, if 20% of those people had guns in their homes, at least the eviction process would have been conducted in a much more civilized manner. The police wouldn't dare to do it the way they've done it.

Indeed. WE'RE smart enough to make laws for the rest of you idiots who can't be trusted with pointy things. Everyone finds themselves in the smarter half of the population. There is a word for this: paternalism.

I think the important question isn't "should these people have guns?", it's "will the rules we create save more lives and respect human rights?" It's the effect of a law, not its intent, that matters.

Personally I don't see the millitia/revolution argument as relevant. A modern insurgency would have no trouble acquiring guns, and they could even get the job done with just IED's and cell phones.

Great post.

I'm quite certain that the people here are equally vulnerable to what you have said in the same proportion as the rest of the population. There is no need to convince the members that post here that they are special.

Say that for yourself.
I have several friends who have been threaten by armed criminals. Friends who had armed criminals entering their homes, robbing them on the street during daylight, flash kidnapping them at night. I have multiple friends who have been the target of guns multiple times in their lives. When I was in high school I was robbed by a criminal with a knife, in front of the school. And my mother once was surrendered by criminals that waited her get back home, put a machete on her throat and demanded her money.
And important remark: all this happened in a country with draconian gun laws. A civilian bearing a gun on the streets is always illegal. And even civilian legal ownership of firearms is extremely difficult to obtain.

I bet that if my mother was allowed to bear a gun with her all the time, those criminals wouldn't have dared to threat her like that. At most, they would try to break into the house while nobody was there. Same thing's valid for most cases.

Sometimes I make a comparison that's not very popular, but IMHO it makes some sense: individuals bearing guns are comparable to states which have weapons of mass destruction. No single state with such weapons has ever been military attacked. India and Pakistan used to make war, once both got nukes, both got "calm". I bet the cold war wouldn't have remained cold if it wasn't for the fact that both sides had nukes. Going to war against a state which has weapons of mass destruction is almost suicide, even if you're also a state with such weapons. Trying to assault/rob/etc somebody with a pistol on his waist is also very dangerous, potentially suicidal, even if you also have a gun (okay, okay, I know ambushes and alike remain possible but these are premeditated murders, not general for-profit aggression... it's more rare).

OP, I used to be against armed civilians for years, probably due to all the propaganda I used to listen to.

But once you dig more into the subject, you understand that not only there's no conceivable ethical justification to the use of violence against someone that's merely bearing a gun, as there are also studies showing that a society gets safer once it gets more armed, and get less safe once it gets less armed. Instead of comparing different societies with several different variables that may influence in violence rates, if you compare the same society before and after a legislation change that decreases or increases the amount of guns in the hands of civilians, you'll probably reach the conclusion that "More Guns, Less Crimes".

It's true that criminal can get hold of guns regardless of gun the gun laws for the lawabiding citizens. There is a tremendous amount of how difficult it becomes even for criminals, esspecially the much more common small time crminal.

When you give a person a gun and do background checks on him, and make him do all the paperwork, what you are actually asking from this person is that he acts responsible with the power he now wields for every second of every day, year after year, for as long as he is alive. For some people thats enirely possible. For many people however somewhere in their lives are at least on or more events where they act irrational. When you are extremely angry, afraid, jealous, depressed, or whatever. The chance becomes for irrisponcile behavior becomes even greater when you add the perfectly legal substance of alcohol to the mix. What you have now, in the perspective of an entire lifetime, a fairly likely event that is possibly dangerous, and now you are adding the free acces to a gun. Decades of voilent-crime statisics show that this is a very bad idea.

The moments where a gun is a very dangerous object far outweigh the moments it prevents danger. Both in frequency as in severity.

What is mostly overlooked in the pro-gun argument is that people are just people, and the amount of people who are -unlike most of the people here- pehaps not particularly bright, or not (fully) aware of the responsibility it actually takes to be able to point a kiling device at someone, are the vast majority of the people who'll have and use a gun. That should clearly be a bad idea. And unsurprisingly almost ever piece of credible information supports this.