That and the fact that accidents happen and guns are absolutely nothing other than machines that are exquisitely well-designed for the sole purpose of killing people and animals.
When you have auto accidents, everyone is able to work to try and minimize harm. Cars aren’t designed to run the most people over the fastest. Whereas a semiauto assault rifle with a 30 round magazine could easily “accidentally” kill a dozen people in a minute or less in the hands of a toddler. And if it does, that’s only because we’ve made it so easy to use an AR-15 or an AK pattern rifle over the years, even a brain damaged paraplegic can use it to help fight a war.
Child soldiers are possible because of the simplicity of use and durability of mechanism of the AK and AR platforms. They don’t hand those kids a Beretta, or a G36 or a FAMAS. They give them an M16 or an AKM because they’re so easy to use and so effective and so simple to maintain and so durable even marginally competent children in jungle conditions with no supervision can use them to devastate a whole village of people.
not to mention it decreases the risk of suicide for loved ones going through a rough time.
Breaking down the suicide rates by state, there is a positive correlation between states with stronger gun-control laws and a lower suicide rate. Of course, this relationship does not prove that stronger gun control prevents or even reduces suicides, but it does show that the two are linked in a potentially important way.
that’s a specious argument, and i think you know that.
there was no blame implied about getting guns stolen. what was said was that by not having guns in the house, it decreased the risk of guns flowing into criminal’s hands.
that should be pretty obvious. if no one had guns, no one would be robbed of their guns.
victim blaming would be: this guy owns guns, and he was shot by one of those guns during a robbery: it’s all his fault, stupid human.
nobody is saying that.
at any rate…
maybe it would be cool if somebody started a donation for this guy to offset the money he lost by giving the guns up. i would chip in a few dollars if there was a way to ensure he was the actual person getting the money.
Actually, .22 LR ammo is quite deadly and is one of the most commonly used in crimes worldwide. One big reason is there are so many made, they can be difficult to trace ^^’.
The latest mass killing was perpetrated by someone who, up until he started shooting, was apparently the NRA’s notion of a “good guy with a gun.” If only he had stopped himself!
Did you actually read what he was claiming is a myth, because there were multiple points made? Hell, did you read your own fucking article - it clearly says that the church shooter was subdued and then the guy ran out and grabbed his gun (when it was no longer necessary). So your debunking is… debunked?
Leaving aside the issues the original poster brought up, the idea that we can divide people, at the point of gun sales, into “good” and “bad” people is absurd. Most mass shootings are domestic in origin, and about half the shooters had no previous serious criminal record, according to some counts. (At least in some states, most killers had no felony convictions in the previous decade.) So they were apparently “good guys with guns.” Until they weren’t. It’s essentially a “No True Scotsman” fallacy, but with added racism.
The irony is that this notion was perpetuated by an NRA lawyer who himself had a history of serious gun violence including armed robbery (let off with a slap on the wrist) and murder (he was on the road to being convicted when the cops botched the case and he got off). But he was white and the “bad guys” he wrote about were black, so…
… and end up shooting someone himself, in the meantime. A whole lot of people get guns for self defense and then end up using them in domestic arguments, escalated by ready access to deadly weapons, after all.
I saw some research that had done into claims of self-reported self-defense with guns. Not only did people wildly exaggerate the situations (cough fabricate cough), it turned out, that, in a good percentage of the cases, the people reporting that they had stopped something were actually the only threat in the situation. It was some guy criminally threatening people with a gun and retelling the story as if he had prevented a crime. So… yeah. Not terribly credible, really.
No, what the evidence shows is that guns are unique for escalations of violence - that when only knives and similar items are available, angry people are less likely to use them in the heat-of-the-moment and far, far less likely to kill someone with them. This is a core issue in the dynamics of gun violence that you seem to repeatedly ignore/deny in these conversations.
Yeah, New York has long been safer than most small cities and towns. Even Chicago, when you look at it per-capita, isn’t as bad as significant areas of the US (where, not coincidentally, gun laws are lax).
i’m lazy tonight. do you have any reports or studies which talk about that?
like you, i have no firm statistics ( because, as mentioned, the govt. isn’t allowed to collect such statistics ) but it seems just as often people without guns somehow manage to stop all those crazy “bad guys with guns”.
just for the sake of argument, let’s called those people without guns, not just “good guys”, but “really good people.” and, again for the sake of argument, let’s call “bad guys” instead “people, or people related to people, formerly known as responsible gun owners.”
these “really good people” stopped the “people, or people related to people, formerly known as responsible gun owners”… without any gun of their own. they are true, selfless heroes. not that other kind who want to be a clint eastwood movie character.
if any of this sounds like i’m being dismissive, it’s partially because – full disclosure – last week i had a police officer who was trying to convince someone standing near me into a questionable action by pointing a gun at them, and – coincidentally – me.
i was scared because it was impossible to know what was going to happen next.
what did happen next was an unarmed crisis response team showed up and actually bothered to talk to the person in question.
things were resolved, and the person was brought into custody… but not because of the person with the gun.
guns are designed to kill people. lax gun laws help to enable situations where people are killed by homicide, by suicide, or by accident.
statistics bear this out.
anecdotes promulgated by the nra and the right-wing don’t.
if you can’t choose whom to believe – trust in the science. and, don’t trust in those same folks who discount the science of global warming, and believe in trickle-down economics, abstinence as a birth control, creationism, and that some white supremacists are no doubt good people… the list goes on.
these people have no credibility. don’t believe them.
I wanted to top this by linking a youtube video of a person actually destroying their gun, so I searched for “destroying my gun”, and I found… nothing! Zero. Except a few kids destroying their plastic toys.
If not, all those inconvenient suicides, and attempted suicides, that regularly get dismissed are actually more ‘bad guys with guns’. You don’t get to ignore them because they’re unhelpful to your delusional narrative.
Pring’s guns are likely to be resold due to an Arizona state law forcing local police departments to resell turned-in firearms, instead of destroying them.
No one here at this point is arguing that there haven’t been cases where one person with a gun stopped another. They are arguing that, in aggregate, more guns in more hands causes more problems than it solved. They pointed to at least one article showing data to make that point.
And you know, we might have even better data about that question if congress hadn’t been blocking gun violence research funding for decades. That isn’t the action of someone who wants to know the truth, and it wasn’t the action of gun control advocates.
Arizona GOP legislators trying to ensure that people who try to do the right thing can’t. You’re surprised?
You’re missing the important bit: what kind of firearms were they? We need a derail involving detailed descriptions of cartridge calibre, muzzle-velocity, mag capacity, etc. to distract from the fact that his action was an effective public statement from a responsible gun owner reacting to yet another mass shooting enabled by the NRA.
The CDC still tracks gun deaths. That law was put in place because they went from data gathering and analysis to what some considered propaganda. They are free to continue data gathering if the want. The FBI and other departments and other federal orgs do stat tracking. Several state and cities do more detailed stat tracking. NOTHING is stopping private orgs from studying it. Where is the massive anti-NRA where if one votes one way they can insure the will see less votes.
I still find it funny that for every other rights issue every one is doing that squinty eyed thing, wary of government intrusion. In one breath we are claiming the government is becoming more facist and in the other we are calling for more government control. Which is it. If one really had a fear we are seeing the rise of the next Hitler, the last thing I’d do is give them more power.
That’s a good point, especially since Holy Hand Grenades are classified as explosives and are hard to get.
Look, I know this stance makes me an uncaring asshole, but people who practice self harm are doing so of their own free will. I’d rather they didn’t but you’re asking to restrict others for s small minority who want to are doing what they want to do. I have to concede a wait time might stop some people from killing themselves, but once they have them nothing will stop the next time. No law would stop someone 100% determined, as evidenced by places like Japan.
Counter question, how many people would be saved by limiting social media or pro suicide web sites.
Oh there most certainly was: "the range of gun owners will include the less responsible " implies that less responsible owners didn’t do enough to prevent theft. This has been implied on multiple occasions.
That is true. If no one did drugs we wouldn’t have an illicit trade that promoted and offered opportunity for a life of crime. If no one prescribed opioids we wouldn’t have an epidemic.
I don’t know how often it is used in crime. Like I said it is used some times in pocket pistols. The article with its language used things like “tactical” made it sound like it was something akin to an AR-15, which is it no where near. Like I said it is playing dress up. I have a 10/22 and it looks like a boring hunting/plinking rifle.
ETA - this is what makes it more or less a nice gesture. I will make a similar one: “I swear I will not commit murder, either in mass or singular.”
I openly concede that is a problem with any self reporting research. I said we don’t have hard data. There are still a lot of reports of self defense in the home many times with out anyone getting shot.
Source for that statement? You say guns are more likely to cause one to use violence when the stats show the opposite is true because assaults happen WAY more often (though less likely to end in death). I do concede if you look at some of the large cities reportsarguments are high on the list.
This is where per capita doesn’t tell the whole story. Example there was a murder suicide in my parents town. The first one in 50 years. Being there was only 15000 people and if we go ahead and count both deaths it would be 13.33 per 100K people. If we just counted the one murder it would be 6.66. Chicago has a rate of 15.65 and New York 7.0. So looking at those numbers it looks like that little town is awash in violence. But that isn’t the actual case. Even in places like Chicago the huge numbers hide how bad it is in some places. That rate of 15.65 is way too high or way too low depending on which district of the city you look at.
Exactly! The idea that it’s only “evil doers” who hurt people with guns is juvenile. “Regular” people do it all the time: the desperate, the angry, the frightened, the impulsive. Humanity doesn’t come in two flavors: good and bad. That’s the real myth.
The whole business of “good guys” and “bad guys” seems to originate from kid’s simplistic views of media, which often split characters into clear hero and villain camps for sake of drama. I had a hell of a time trying to avoid that trend for my kids, and mostly had to resort to explaining it away.
The basic idea is impossibly stupid, and when people grow up to believe that it shapes discussion about firearms, one might hope that we’d pick up on the fact that such media framings have consequences.
