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Gun Control
- Thread starter Janenmori
- Start date
1. Guns exist.
2. Humans exist.
3. Humans are the only being capable of that level of mechanical engineering.
Conclusion: Humans first invented guns, continue to invent guns, and will be capable of inventing guns in the forseeable future.
Corollary: You are an idiot for believing otherwise.
Just because you're personally ignorant of how to manufacture a weapon does not mean they are not manufactured by someone. I imagine you can't build a toilet either but don't ponder their impossibility when you take a dump.
Yes, guns are produced in industries, in large scale, demanding a lot of machines, workers and money. Nothing that someone in a backyard workshop could create just by searching in google for "Firearms DIY".
UGGGHHH DUUUUDE and i'm telling you it's the principle of the thing. you can't compare them because they are in different realms. When did i ever say that making drugs illegal will get rid of them? And it's not just a matter of whether or not people will obtain drugs it's the effects of obtaining drugs. It's a matter of morals that drugs should be illegal. As for therapeutic reasons there are millions of better ways than illegal drugs.
You also make the assumption that my parents are Republican. Which is interesting. But i decided for myself to have my ideas leaning to the right. Just because they happen to fall into the republican realm of morality doesn't make me one.
EDIT: Pirika i suppose it was large industries that first created the gun huh? The AK 47 only has three parts. Guns would be relatively simple to create. Of course it wouldn't be the best quality out there but still DK brings up a good point.
Hah no, but is the ratio similar or completely different? I will argue pedophilia is mostly a men phenomenom, you could thus tell me Debra Lafave isn't a man?
If not stopped can we agree on hampered?
A significant proportion of guns on the black market come from theft. Guns that wouldn't be there if guns are illegal.
All armed robbers are 'murderers' once you become a threat to them by trying to grab your own gun. You now put their lives in danger and it becomes a matter of who gets who first.
So am I, I lock my door, I carry little money in my wallet, I have the option to install alarms, I can have insurance and I can call the cops.
Grabbing my own gun is playing russian roulette with him/them. I can't know how many they are, I can't know if I'm not going to miss him and get shot then. You feel protected knowing the gunmen will try to kill you while they likely wouldn't if you were clearly unarmed?
If someone steals my car, I get it back from insurance, same for my computer, I'm even likely to get a better one. If my wallet's stolen, I may have lost 40 bucks and credit cards that cannot charge me more than 50 if I report them stolen right off the bat.
You believe you are protected, but what you do is actually decide to play with fire for very little. You are more in danger than I ever will be.
Which seems like quite the hard way to replenish black market stocks ;(
While guns are banned in Canada, I haven't heard of too many of those found on the black market to be artisanal work.
By making it harder, you are purging out those not willing to make the effort and those that don’t have the resources to.
There are whole countries 'posted' as a gun free zone, is the message sent the door is unlocked, just wipe your feet on the way in?
Realistically however, those gun free zones should be able to insure nobody actually gets in armed, otherwise it is pointless. Whether metal detectors, a quick check-up of whoever enters or something else.
Even a simple firearm like AK-47 could not be built in a backyard workshop. Ak-47 has only 3 parts, but still it's nothing that you could find in a supermarket or junkyard. We don't see many people building their own cars, cellphones or televisions. There is no point for a criminal creating his own handgun, this would demand too much time, money and effort to make one single piece.
Also, modern firearms like machineguns and automatic pistols were only created after the Industrial Revolution, by people who had acess to the means of production of the large industry.
If you ban the production of handguns, you ban the means of production (machines, usually). If you ban the machines, you ban the machine parts as well. Therefore you ban the machines that make those machine parts. You see where I'm going with this? It won't work.
Also, to everybody above, if robbers/muggers act under the assumption that nobody is armed, they will continue to do so. If the situation changes to everybody becoming capable of being armed, there will be a substantial change in crime demographics. I strongly disagree with the fact that simple crooks will start killing people who they believe post a threat to them. They will instead pursue different methods of making money, that pose less risk to themselves. I don't feel like copying my statistics from a previous post...
Ummm... so people would be completely incapable of making a gun the same way they made the first gun. It is impossible for a person to go and make a gun in their backyard with simple tools even though that was how the first gun was made. You are just delusional if you seriously think a person cannot make a gun in their backyard, very very delusional. The first runs were made in the backyard so to speak and some people do actually have metal shops in their backyard that they could easily make a very efficent, high quality rifle. Not to mention that if guns were to ba banned we would still have the same number of guns in the US in circulation that were there before they were banned. People would still be able to sell those guns outside the laws controll as much as they want. And people could still get guns from the other countries around us. And if you seriously think the gov could keep people from getting guns into the US from other countries then I highly suggest you learn about a little thing called the black market.
My response to that 80% of guns in crime are obtained illegally.
It'd be interesting to see a proper breakdown on that statistic for the following reasons.
1. I'd have to assume it is guns that are *recovered* - a random gun point robbery in a random alley in a random city is quite unlikely to ever be resolved whereas a bank robbery or a hostage situation is more likely to be resolved.
2. How many are smuggled in as opposed to stolen from someone who owned them legally.
3. What counts as illegally attained, I mean technically if a kid takes his Dad's gun to school tomorrow without permission and kills 5 people, that's 5 homicides caused by an illegally attained weapon.
It's a very misleading statistic.
It'd be interesting to see a proper breakdown on that statistic for the following reasons.
1. I'd have to assume it is guns that are *recovered* - a random gun point robbery in a random alley in a random city is quite unlikely to ever be resolved whereas a bank robbery or a hostage situation is more likely to be resolved.
2. How many are smuggled in as opposed to stolen from someone who owned them legally.
3. What counts as illegally attained, I mean technically if a kid takes his Dad's gun to school tomorrow without permission and kills 5 people, that's 5 homicides caused by an illegally attained weapon.
It's a very misleading statistic.
If building artesanal guns would be so easy, countries where guns are banned for the civil populations, like Japan, would have thousands of artesanal handguns. Thing like the trigger mechanism are not so simple that anyone could create in their backyard. Guns development took centuries, it's not like someone in his workshop yelled "EUREKA" and showed to the world the first gun.
I live in Brazil, where there are laws that prevent most of people of having guns, yet, I ensure you that nobody forge their own guns in their backyards. All the illegal firearms are provided by the Black Market (not only here, but in the whole world), there isn't any kind of domestic workshop where people build their own guns, machineguns, rifles, etc.
Go on then, make one. That won't blow your head off.
Explosives, on the other hand, are fucking easy to make. So is cyanide.
..don't see many people using them, esp. the latter.
Where do you think the Black Market gets their supplies from? Raids on Smith & Wesson?
I submit that the Black Market and Congress are the same thing: People believe their resources self-generate from nowhere. While its possible an arms dealer has inside contacts with a gun manufacturer or seller, it's much easier to avoid detection if your entire operation is extralegal. Big-time criminals are not poor unfunded vigilantes operating in makeshift shelters and caves, they are generally exceedingly wealthy and have vast resources. Osama bin Laden and his family were millionaires before we froze his assets. The idea a criminal enterprise is as limited in their knowledge and resources as the average Smogon user is quite frankly insane.
I do not understand the leftist obsession with projecting their own technical and mental ignorance onto everyone else worldwide. Is everyone in the hive mind equally unskilled, unambitious, and incapable of personal development? Good criminals are exceptionally brilliant people who use their intelligence towards evil ends. No, Lexite, I, or anyone else on Smogon cannot build our own firearms: We are not criminals running a drug cartel, arms dealership, or narcoterror cell. We have neither the motive, time, nor resources. Those outfits do.
I'm not touching this with a 10-foot pole. This is some of the most chauvinistic garbage I've ever read.
They're not geographically comparable, though. Burlington, VT is nothing like London, England.
I hope you didn't misunderstand me, I completely agree with you. I'm just saying that to have a public park in, say, downtown Buffalo to be a "gun free zone" is the silliest idea in the world. Who's making sure of this? It can't be reasonably enforced.
Aside from the fact that you're referring to a slippery slope that you yourself made up... why not???
So you'd rather have robbers go after defenseless young women than a burly young man like myself? How chivalrous of you.
Which is why we need to legalize all drugs and take away their reason to have guns.
Why would a gun ban require people to make their own guns? Couldn't they just smuggle some in from the hundreds of other countries that make guns? How would the police get guns? Couldn't they get them the same way?
This "its not easy to make a gun" argument is missing the point.
Also, "I can't find out how to make a gun online with 5 seconds of Google searches" does not make it impossible to build a gun. Many mechanical engineers could easily build something that fires a projectile at a few hundred feet per second... I could do it with pneumatics if you really want.
Where would the police get their guns if they were illegal in the US? What about armies? Other countries? All sources of guns.
Making guns illegal is an idealistic pipe dream. Even if they were banned it wouldn't solve anything. Not to mention it'd be slightly scary if people were by law at the mercy of the government since they can just shoot you and you can't.
This "its not easy to make a gun" argument is missing the point.
Also, "I can't find out how to make a gun online with 5 seconds of Google searches" does not make it impossible to build a gun. Many mechanical engineers could easily build something that fires a projectile at a few hundred feet per second... I could do it with pneumatics if you really want.
Where would the police get their guns if they were illegal in the US? What about armies? Other countries? All sources of guns.
Making guns illegal is an idealistic pipe dream. Even if they were banned it wouldn't solve anything. Not to mention it'd be slightly scary if people were by law at the mercy of the government since they can just shoot you and you can't.
Yes, and your average private citizen who owns a handgun for self defense must regularly fight off the hordes of narcoterrorists, drug cartels, and mafiosos beating down his door. I had no intentions of throwing my hat in the fray, but this is an absurd argument. Banning handguns is not meant to combat organized crime, and as already mentioned there are more efficient methods of doing so. Your average petty crook, homocidal manic, or small time dope dealer is not going to build his own firearms. Do you have any idea of the equipment and skills requisite for such a task? As akuchi said, those psychopaths who would premeditate their crimes to such an extent could easily find cheaper, less troublesome methods of eliminating their victims. Arming everyone in an Old West free-for-all is hardly an effective solution to crime of any sort.
Well, althought this doesnt concern to me at all(since I live in Mexico), I think guns should be banned, Deck in right, guns dont kill people, people kill people, however, it is much easier to kill someone using any kind of firearm than killing someone with say, a knife. The reason for this is that, with a knife, you obviously need to approach your target, giving him/her some kind a small to defend themselves, however, with a gun you can stay at say, 6 meters, and he/she willl have no chance. Sure, people will ALWAYS find ways to get guns, but at the very least you can make it harder for them.
Now, lets say pro-guns associations win and weapons are not banned, at the very least they should keep a better control, give people a wait of 3 days between buying and reciving the weapon, using that time to conduct an investigation of his(her records
Now, lets say pro-guns associations win and weapons are not banned, at the very least they should keep a better control, give people a wait of 3 days between buying and reciving the weapon, using that time to conduct an investigation of his(her records
Every year, people in the United States use a gun to defend themselves against criminals an estimated 2,500,000 times- more than 6,500 people a day, or once every 13 seconds.
This means that, each year, firearms are used 65 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.[There: all of your arguments are now void.
After Canada's 1977 gun controls prohibited handgun possession for self defense, the "breaking and entering" crime rate rose 25%, surpassing the U.S. rate.
Two-thirds of the people that die each year from gunfire are criminals shooting other criminals.
Less than 1% of all guns will ever be used in the commission of any type of crime (much less violent crime).90% of all violent crime in the U.S. does not involve any gun of any type.
As of 2000, Florida ranked #4 in population but ranked #21 in suicides. Since the right-to-carry law was enacted in Florida the following changes occured. The homicide rate dropped 36%, firearm homicides dropped 37%, and handgun homicides dropped 41%. You can't claim that this was the result of its population, because the population didn't change that drastically that fast.
Cbf posting more, I think you get the idea (though probably not).
This means that, each year, firearms are used 65 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.[There: all of your arguments are now void.
After Canada's 1977 gun controls prohibited handgun possession for self defense, the "breaking and entering" crime rate rose 25%, surpassing the U.S. rate.
Two-thirds of the people that die each year from gunfire are criminals shooting other criminals.
Less than 1% of all guns will ever be used in the commission of any type of crime (much less violent crime).90% of all violent crime in the U.S. does not involve any gun of any type.
As of 2000, Florida ranked #4 in population but ranked #21 in suicides. Since the right-to-carry law was enacted in Florida the following changes occured. The homicide rate dropped 36%, firearm homicides dropped 37%, and handgun homicides dropped 41%. You can't claim that this was the result of its population, because the population didn't change that drastically that fast.
Cbf posting more, I think you get the idea (though probably not).
I'd like to address a few issues here, although I haven't the time to look into each statistic provided.
Well, as you provided no sourcing to substantiate these claims, I did some googling and found that they come from Second Amendment Sisters. The problem with many of their "FACTS" is that most of them are either not adequately sourced (providing only the name of an organization and/or a year, or no source at all) or based on laughably antiquated studies (they cite a study from 1979, for instance).
The claim that more guns are "used" for self-defense than for murder is specious at best. What constitutes "self-defense" is a circumstancial and nebulous notion. Was there really no recourse but to firearms in each of those situations? How many of them were simply robbers running away because they discovered someone was at home, regardless of the presence of firearms? How many were actually life-threatening? How many other non-life-threatening situations turned sour at the presence of a weapon? Not all shootings require death; how many were seriously injured as a result of firearm-related crimes? I find those statistics to be rather questionable, as well. According to more recent statistics from the Justice Department
1. See Tables 2.15 and 2.16, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/murder.html.
2. See, e.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9715182
Well, as you provided no sourcing to substantiate these claims, I did some googling and found that they come from Second Amendment Sisters. The problem with many of their "FACTS" is that most of them are either not adequately sourced (providing only the name of an organization and/or a year, or no source at all) or based on laughably antiquated studies (they cite a study from 1979, for instance).
The claim that more guns are "used" for self-defense than for murder is specious at best. What constitutes "self-defense" is a circumstancial and nebulous notion. Was there really no recourse but to firearms in each of those situations? How many of them were simply robbers running away because they discovered someone was at home, regardless of the presence of firearms? How many were actually life-threatening? How many other non-life-threatening situations turned sour at the presence of a weapon? Not all shootings require death; how many were seriously injured as a result of firearm-related crimes? I find those statistics to be rather questionable, as well. According to more recent statistics from the Justice Department
[d]uring 2004, law enforcement agencies provided supplemental data for 666 justifiable homicides [out of a total of 29,569 firearm deaths]. A breakdown of those figures revealed that law enforcement officers justifiably killed 437 felons and private citizens justifiably killed 229 felons.[1]
While all statistics are easy to manipulate, this certainly suggests that life-threatening situations necessitating lethal defensive force are much rarer than you would have us believe. Moreover, if we are engaging in a statistics-marshaling contest, guns are much more likely to be used in crimes than in self-defense[2].
1. See Tables 2.15 and 2.16, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/murder.html.
2. See, e.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9715182
What do justifiable homicides have anything to do with it?
All of the statistics are sourced to government studies.
Also, look here for adequately cited sources for the same (and even more) statistics: http://gunowners.org/fs9901.htm
And you find that to be a good thing? That's pretty sickening.
because there is a big difference between waking up from a noise in the kitchen and going out to find someone is robbing your house and waking up to find a gun shoved in your face and getting asked to hand over all the fucking jewelry, cash, and other valuables in the house.
basically, this.
your point being...?
luduan just called you out for posting ""laughably antiquated reports, so you decided to post something a decade old. nice.
I link you to this, which details many, many cases of what you seem to be incapable of understanding: some people actually manage to use firearms for self-defense.
http://www.claytoncramer.com/gundefenseblog/blogger.html
And he said that none of the statistics were cited, when they obviously were, at least where I got them from. Mostly to FBI/other government agency studies.
Not laughably antiquated by any means. Find the same statistics for recent years and you'll see that they haven't changed all that much (per capita).
What? You really think that if guns were banned, people would start making their own guns to the point where our murder rate would be where it is today?
Actually, I'm not arguing that at all. I am saying that if I drew a gun on someone and they drew a gun back, I am far more likely to react out of fear and shoot them to protect myself.
Law abiding citizens who have guns arent the problem (although that's not to say that they will always obey the law). Immediate self-defense is the only reason I can see that would make someone want a gun, but simply owning a gun will not save your life. If this country was filled with responsible people who have training with guns, I wouldn't have an issue...but we are far from it.
This idea that "guns dont kill people, people kill people" is not a defense of guns. That's like saying "glasses dont see, eyes see" and then not wearing glasses. Guns are tools used to kill people.
Oh, and about that "personal safety" notion:
http://images.google.com/imgres?img...org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=N&start=72&um=1
Personal safety indeed
Thank you for bringing up Britain and Australia, where gun laws have immediately and significantly reduced the amount of gun deaths in those countries.
The availabilty of guns is directly correlated to the astronomically high murder rate in the US. If you outlaw guns, less criminals will have guns. Is it that hard to understand?
Again, from the same source:
Banning handguns greatly reduces the amount of death, end of story.
Let me address your argument about the UK with actual facts. Yes they still have gun crime, however, since they banned handguns it has been drastically reduced. More from the same source, this time about the UK's handgun ban that was enacted in 1997 and the Australian gun buyback programs:
The presence of guns does not deter crime. The presence of guns does not guarantee your safety. Banning guns does not increase crime, banning guns does not make people less safe. There is no statistical evidence to suggest that anything pro-gun people are saying is true, other than fallacious safety concerns.
Jrrrr I'm not going to go into a point-by-point rebuttal of everything you said because I've already cited statistics that show otherwise for everything but foreign nations, because the argument was within the US. I found in the course of my research that the majority of crime rates went UP in Britian and Australia.
This link shows that you basically lied (or made up) what happened after Britain instituted gun control.
http://johnrlott.tripod.com/op-eds/BritainToyGunsWSJE.html
You keep insisting that banning guns will somehow remove the ones that already exist from circulation. You haven't submitted a proposal for confiscating all the illegal firearms floating around. Unless you think the criminals will hand them in?
This link shows that you basically lied (or made up) what happened after Britain instituted gun control.
http://johnrlott.tripod.com/op-eds/BritainToyGunsWSJE.html
You keep insisting that banning guns will somehow remove the ones that already exist from circulation. You haven't submitted a proposal for confiscating all the illegal firearms floating around. Unless you think the criminals will hand them in?