Thanks, but I suffer no delusions about the delusions suffered by gun owners.
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Maybe, but so what? Is there some legislative impact to that, even if it is true?
LOLā¦ logic and facts! Who uses those in making political arguments anymore? So old fashioned!
Seriously, Iām not sure it mattersāthe āotherā guy made some noise that might possibly come close to looking like itās a counter to their position, so time to hit the panic button cause the āotherā guy is in charge, so FEMA camps and āthey took our gunsāā¦ etc and so on. We seem to live in a partisan based world, not a fact based one.
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If you acknowledge that a specific kind of weapon is more likely to take an innocent life than to save one, that impacts the cost/benefit analysis of whether society should attempt to limit the availability of said weapon.
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Sure, because that rifle which is difficult to conceal and inconvenient to carry around in public is also just as hard to find space for in your bedroom closet or carry into the kitchen when you go to investigate that bump in the night, right? Do you even think about these things before you type them?
Letās see what a quick internet search brings up from news stories this year:
http://www.libertynews.com/2013/01/teenager-uses-ar-15-to-defend-home-from-intruder/
http://thearmedcitizen.net/iraq-war-vet-stops-gas-station-robbery-with-his-ar-15/
http://www.webcitation.org/6ESh5q8zV
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Do you really believe that that incident would have unfolded differently if that person had chosen to defend their home with a shotgun instead of an AR-15?
Even if that was the case, youāve listed a grand total of maybe 3 people whose lives might have been saved by an AR-15. Care to compare that list to the number of people who have been murdered with one?
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Would you grant the premise that āsocietyā should go around making cost/benefit analyses of everything trying to determine if āsocietyā will permit individuals from having them if those things werenāt something you wanted to get rid of yourself for your own reasons? Iām sure that would never be abused, right? Besides, everyone knows the Koran, pornography, liquor, high power laser pointers, lockpicks, Sudafed, and secure encryption do far more harm than good when just anyone is allowed to have them.
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What does that have to do with your original claim? You wrote
āthe odds of an individual personās life being ended by a privately owned AR-15 are pretty slim, but theyāre greater than the odds of an individual life being saved by a privately owned AR-15ā
I showed that that is just ill-informed, kneejerk hopolphobia and now you want to move the goalposts and pretend weāre talking about something else. For all I know those people might have been able to successfully defend themselves with a large rock or a stick sharpened on the sidewalk. Maybe you could ride a unicycle to work everyday. If you canāt carry on a conversation for more than 2 posts without trying to throw up some distraction then please just leave your caps lock on so the rest of us can more easily identify you.
I see now youāve added another paragraph about how many people have been killed vs. saved. The reports I pulled up were from a quick internet search that revealed 4 incidents within about 3 months time period that 1) made the news and 2) I happened to find. How many times was an AR15 used to defend someone and the type of the rifle not mentioned specifically? How many people were saved by brandishings that didnāt make the news, or even get reported? Heck, how many people were just burgled instead of robbed or home-invaded because āpeople in this neighborhood all have guns and would just as soon shoot you as look at youā? I donāt have the statistics and neither do you, so that is moot. My lunch hr is over and Iām going back to work. If you want to come back with hard numbers on the number of people murdered with ar-style rifles vs. number of violent confrontations that were ended, defused, or prevented because of the sameā¦ then I will gladly look at them after work and admit so if you can prove your statement wasnāt just offhand ignorant jibberish. But if you donāt have that information to throw down right nowā¦ then isnāt it just luck if you turn out to be right? Because it sure isnāt logical that the things which make a rifle inconvenient for someone going out to someone elseās home or business and commit a crime unnoticed would pose the same problems for someone who wanted to store their varmint rifle at home or in their business and pull it out of the safe or off the mantle if they hear a bump in the night.
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I donāt advocate āgetting rid ofā guns or liquor or cars or any of the other things you listed.
I DO think itās worthwhile to do cost/benefit analyses for how we should regulate the sale and use of potentially dangerous things including (but not limited to) motor vehicles, alcohol, drugs, explosives, radioactive materials and firearms.
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This morning I saw a bumper sticker on a truck:
GUNS SAVE LIVES
Discuss.
Tell you what: you compile a list of individuals whose lives were saved by a privately owned AR-15 and Iāll compile a list of individuals who were murdered by a privately owned AR-15. If your list is longer than mine Iāll take back my previous claim.
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The snowmobile stuff is clean up law because of some strange loophole or need for one. There where a lot of areas where the sherifs did not have to say why they denied a permit or just sit on applications forever, again they cleaned it up to require an explanation. Both of those examples I would not consider a loosening of gun laws.
Wonder who the poor sap was that got busted for carrying a firearm on his snowmobile on his own property there cant be a huge docket of offenders on that one. Sounds like they almost made the biathlon illegal
I guess thatās true, but the precedent in this country is not to prohibit things in general because they cost slightly more lives than they save. On those grounds there would be no particular reason that āmilitary style weaponsā should be any more restricted than āracing style motorcyclesā. Plenty more people die in motorcycle accidents every year than are killed by AR-15s, but it is still generally accepted that people are allowed to own them and to make their own decision about the risks they are willing to accept.
I see youāve amended your previous position from an āindividual personās lifeā to an āinnocent lifeā, which presumably removes most accidents from consideration and might make my motorcycle comparison moot, but it also really limits the scope of the damage here. The most recent statistic I can find is that in 2011, all of 323 murders were committed with rifles of all types (as compared to 6,220 with handguns). Even if you suppose that half of those rifle murders were committed with AR-15s (and given the number and variety of rifles in the US, Iād guess itās actually much lower than that) that leaves all of 162 murders committed with them that year. I would actually be surprised if there werenāt at least that many home defense situations in which someone used an AR-15 to their own benefit, potentially saving their own life, in the same time period, and Iād only make that claim because the number is so astonishingly low. Itās comparable with your risk of being killed by lightning.
The other problem with talking about AR-15s as a āSpecific kind of weaponā is that theyāre really not. Itās a semi-automatic 5.56 rifle. It is not inherently any more destructive than this one, and so thereās not really any particular reason to consider the two as separate classes of weapons. One is blacker than the other, but functionally, they do pretty much the same thing.
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Iām totally fine with regulating weapons (or other potentially dangerous things) based on lethality rather than cosmetics. I only used the AR-15 as an example because someone else brought it up.
Like @tkaraszewski said, there is a lot of variability there. Itās certainly riskier to be irresponsible with guns than without guns, but if youāre a responsible person, you can be a responsible, low risk, gun owner.
The accidental deaths, deadly domestic violence and the suicides facilitated by guns donāt scare me much - the gun owner has complete control over whether or not those take place. Itās the scenarios that are out of the individualās control that give gun ownership a potential benefit; an extra degree of preparedness.
Itās all about taking your particular situation into account, and figuring out your personal best compromise between risk and benefit. And, as a note: it may be that in your particular situation, itās best not to have a gun in the house. If you have young children, if you live in a studio apartment in the city, or whatever else, those carry certain added risk.
But there are also times when it may make sense to have a gun, and thatās something that one has to evaluate on oneās own (or, of course, with oneās spouse or partner).
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That is hilarious, indeed, it must have been a busted, illicit biathlon practice that spurred that legislation.
Well, of course. Violence has been dropping since the early 1970s, but gun control keeps the āRegan Democratsā voting republican, and thus we end up with a situation were the Democrats are to the right of 90% of the public!
Seriously, get over legal gun owners, prior to a year ago, it seemed like gun owners were starting to realize the Republicans were not really their friends, but thatās mostly gone now.
I should have made the point that though thereās a pretty small chance of it happening, if it does happen, and youāre not prepared, the consequences are severe, maybe even life-or-death.
I buckle up when Iām on the road, in case I get in a car accident, because the consequences of that could be deadly. On the other hand, I donāt bring a harmonica wherever I go, in case thereās a spontaneous jam session. Though thereās a small chance of either one happening, the potential consequences from the former are much more serious than the potential consequences from the latter.
EDIT: Corrected punctuation mistake.
Their purposes are significantly different.
Most people who buy a motorcycle do not do so because they think they could someday need it in order to wound or kill or threaten to do so.
The same cannot honestly be said about guns.
But, of the two, the only one that everyone agrees must require passing a test, begin registered as an owner, and having a license that the government can revoke, is theā¦ motorcycle. Makes sense?
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I find the argument of using an objectās āpurposeā against it to be disingenuous. There are many things we use that had their beginnings as weapons, or developed for military applications, that have gone on to be used in non-destructive ways. Letās look at how an object is ACTUALLY being used and go from there. If you compare the number of guns harming others, vs the ones harming no one, itās such a small percentage itās hard to not call the argument against them over blown.
While I am sure some people buy guns with the idea of defense, most are bought to shoot pieces of paper, steel plates, and pop cans.
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