Guns don't kill criminals, criminals use guns to kill people

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In b4 lock.

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you understand a gun’s value lies in its potential to be fired, no? everything looks like shit after it hits the fan

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Killing someone isn’t the only defensive use of a firearm. What an odd (and entirely useless) statistic.

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NRA: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”

Only the insane believe that BullShit!

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All you’re telling gun nuts is that criminals target people without guns.

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Nor is it the only offensive use of a firearm. So if your problem here is that the statistic above omits all the cases of a firearm owner scaring off a crook, then keep in mind it also omits all the cases where a crook used a gun in a holdup but didn’t actually kill anyone (which probably makes up the vast majority of gun crime).

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“But not MY guns…” —Every gun owner

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I guess while Statistics are being used, I would like to point out that there are over 300 million guns in circulation, so the amount of firearms used for crime is less than 1%. Considering that guns are more available now than 20 years ago due to reformed conceal carry laws around the country, and the amount of gun violence has decreased in that same period of time, you can’t conclude that more guns = more violence. Since Correlation does not imply causation, you couldn’t conclude the opposite either, but that requires an intellectual honesty rarely scene on either side of this debate.

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Interesting use of statistics to solve nothing.

Unless we are prepared to enact a change to one of the first ten amendments then all of this is academic. My sniff test tells me the political will is nowhere near what is needed.

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The percentage of high-explosives used for crime is far less than 1%. For every would-be terrorist there are thousands of good-hearted, responsible people who might want to remove a stump or help build a tunnel.

But we still carefully regulate the production, distribution and use of high explosives because they are especially well-suited for causing harm if they fall into the wrong hands.

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In point of fact, we regulate them because they are not an ‘arm’ and thus have no second ammendment protections. In other words, we regulate them because we can. If you want the same regulations for guns, then you will need a constitutional amendment.

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The Constitution doesn’t say that firearms are protected and other kinds of weapons aren’t. The Second Amendment doesn’t even mention guns by name, it just says “arms.” That term could be interpreted to mean anything from a wooden club to a thermonuclear warhead.

The only reason you can buy an AR-15 but not a hand grenade is that the NRA has lobbied to protect one and not the other. It has diddly-squat to do with the Constitution.

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Remember! It’s not the bullet that kills you, it’s the hole.

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Yeah, it seems ironic how closely this post’s title echoes that ubiquitous NRA canard.

Wait, the point in this article is that we have to shoot more criminals? Or, that we need more guns to shoot criminals?
By the way, criminals not use only guns to kill people, but knives, clubs, crowbars or even rocks too. Especially if they know that you are not armed because the Law not allow you do.

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In all the talk of guns, I’ve not seen anything else quite like Cracked’s “5 Mind-Blowing Facts Nobody Told You About Guns” – which could well mean that the article is tripe.

Since 2005, [gun murders] are down even more – for instance, handgun murders dropped all the way down to 6,220 in 2011, having plummeted by more than half since their peak in the early '90s and another 20 percent from what you see on the graph there.

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Absolutely. Gun advocates say that merely having a gun visible on a person deters crime. And of course this statistic doesn’t include injuries that don’t result in death. So it is hardly persuasive. I’d be interested in seeing statistics comparing crime in otherwise demographically similar areas in open-carry, concealed carry and fully regulated states. Is that even possible?

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Come on, we all know guns don’t kill people. It’s those bullets that do the job. If criminals couldn’t get guns, they’d find some other way of getting those bullets in people. Probably a hammer or something.

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Whenever this comes up, it’s pointed out that the vast majority of guns in this country are not used in crime - but does the existence of all those legal guns drive the usage of guns in crime?

It feels like an arms race.

In the UK (scary, scary knifecrime island), most people don’t carry weapons, and the police don’t either, so most criminals don’t - they don’t need to, and they’ll just end up with extra convictions for offensive weapons if they do get caught.

In the US, there’s a fairly high chance that when committing crime, you’ll encounter an armed civilian. So it makes sense that criminals carry a gun and are prepared to use it - on top of the police repeatedly demonstrating that they’ll shoot to kill even if you aren’t armed or a criminal.

I don’t know what the solution is - I don’t think the 2nd amendment is needed, I don’t think carrying a gun is needed, but I do think an armed population encourages armed criminals and makes the police extra jumpy. But even if you banned handguns like they did in the UK, you’d face unprecedented resistance, and the sheer number of guns in circulation would make it trivially easy for criminals to continue to get them.

I’m sure @shaddack will be here to point out how easy it is to make your own anyway - but I think if you want less criminals to use guns, you need to give them less incentive to carry them, which means a disarmed population. Which I’m sure won’t be a popular suggestion. Mass buy-back of guns (Which would lead to people making them to hand them in?), amnesty for people to hand in guns?

How do you turn the clock back and put the genie in the bottle? And some people don’t want to (althought I question how realistic this is)

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