the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) conducted
by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The survey has been ongoing since 1973:
for the Bureau of Justice Statistics see www.bjs.gov Official enough for you?
From the linked paper:
According to the NCVS, looking at the total number of self-protective behaviors undertaken by victims of both attempted and completed violent crime for the fiveyear period 2007 through 2011, in only 0.8 percent of these instances had the intended victim in resistance to a criminal āthreatened or attacked with a firearm.ā11 As detailed in the chart on the next page**, for the five-year period 2007 through 2011, the NCVS estimates that there were 29,618,300 victims of attempted or completed violent crime. During this same five-year period, only 235,700 of the self-protective behaviors involved a firearm. Of this number, it is not known what type of firearm was used or whether it was fired or not. The number may also include off-duty law enforcement officers who use their firearms in self-defense"
So actual detailed research carried out by an official organisation puts the number at under 50 000 per year, or between 40 and 60 times lower than you state. Iāve linked to a real study: where are yours?
**see the linked paper.
The whole paper is interesting, but sadly people like you wonāt read it. To put it bluntly, you are either uninformed, misinformed, or knowingly spreading lies.
Itās pedantic, in the worst way possible. The only way you pretend that there isnāt an āassault weaponā is by willfully ignoring that the country has adopted that name. So you argue that āassault weaponsā donāt exist because there is no technical specification that makes one weapon āassaultā and another ānormalā. There is a reason behind this beyond just being a dick - the gun manufacturers would love for āassaultā weapons to be technically defined - because they can just change a single feature or spec until the current best seller no longer meets the technical definition and then go on like nothing changed. The term being nebulous and applied by the average person to groups of weapons that are obviously meant to mimic military hardware and run right up to the current āmachine gunā ban without stepping over that line worries them - because without a technical definition any legislation could actually be wide enough to really restrict sales.
Hereās what I donāt get. It seems to me that half the argument for continued support of the current interpretation of the 2nd amendment is based on the people being no weaker than the government. That ship sailed long long ago - thereās a laundry list of weaponry the US govāt can have that individuals and militias cannot. I understand the underlying argument and it is not without merit. But at this point, comparing what you are allowed to have, and what the government is allowed to have, you might as well be armed with a butter knife at this point.
āI guarantee if the Founding Fathers had known this gun would have been
invented, they wouldnāt have rewritten the Second Amendment, they would
have fortified it in stone,ā
Iām not sure anyone can āguaranteeā what the Founding Fathers would think of the AR-15 (or any modernity), unless this guy owns a time machine and has actually been back there talking to them. The Founding Fathers didnāt have experience with any kind of repeating firearm, and didnāt have mass killings by lone nuts on a regular basis, let alone citizens stockpiling naval cannons and enough ammunition to start a small war while boasting they had the Constitutional right to overthrow the government.
I canāt āguaranteeā it, but I think itās self evident that if the Founding Fathers knew of any of our modern problems they would have re-written large parts of the Constitution to be more clear, including the second amendment, which is vague and can be interpreted to mean we can own nuclear missiles. But history doesnāt work that way, the Founding Fathers arenāt here, we are the ones who have to live in these times, and we should be interpreting and making our own laws, not trying to decipher the intent of guys who owned slaves and didnāt think women should vote.
We have a lot of knowledge they didnāt have, why canāt we actually use it?
Why are ammosexuals such frightened little cowards?[quote=āRichZellich, post:27, topic:80156ā]
Iām not going to bother to reply to the rest of your nonsense
[/quote]
In other words, āOops, I agreed to this duel, but now I see that I donāt have any bullets!ā turns around and runs away
Judging by the number of elderly people I see still driving Buick LeSaberās Iād say a lot of them filed that scenario away in their subconscious and thought it was a durable, dependable vehicle.
The most frequent instances of ādefensive gun useā is waving a gun to threaten people you are in an argument with, not actual self defense. There has never been an instance where a mass shooter was stopped solely by an armed amateur. In fact unarmed civilians have stopped more mass shooters than police have.
Imagine what a great nightclub scene that would be.
So in addition to a mass murderer running amok you would have potentially hundreds of innocent bystanders killed in the crossfire by trigger happy amateurs. People who the cops would start shooting at as well since they canāt distinguish the mass murderer from the other people joining in.
Damn, you should call the Defense Department and tell them theyāre wasting their money on all those M16s, when they could be just as deadly a fighting force with a bunch of .22s.
Compare the damage an AR-15 and a 9mm handgun can do to the human body: āOne looks like a grenade went off in there,ā says Peter Rhee, a trauma surgeon at the University of Arizona. āThe other looks like a bad knife cut.ā
I see a few people making insane claims about how AR-15s are just handy things to have sitting around and not really dangerous at all while everyone else is quoting actual facts disproving them. Rational ādebateā, not so much, but I see tons of rational thought countering the irrational.
The NRA and those who agree with them see mass shootings as something we just have ā¦ itās just the small cost of living in a society where guns are allowed. Itās kinda like ā¦
how beach houses sometimes get washed away into the sea ā¦ should be ban beach houses?
how 30k or 40k or 50k people per year are killed on our roads ā¦ should we ban cars?
how some people die in hospitals ā¦ should be ban hospitals?
The difference is ā¦ thereās something between banning and doing nothing to improve the current situation To some itās black and white - allow everything we do today, or do nothing. And weāve chosen again and again, do nothing. So job well not done America.
Edit: On top of that, arguments generally go like this. āOh, you want to [ new regulation ] ? That regulation wouldnāt have stopped [ mass shooter ] because he didnāt [ do whatever new regulation introduces ].ā aka ā we canāt stop them all, so donāt do anything that would have stopped any of them.
Iām sure itās opposed by the NRA ā and by Repubilicans who cater to the āgun peopleā of the country ā because it place an restriction on purchasing and/or owning a legal weapon. No Republican is going to vote for something that is going to cost every gun owner in the country $$ each year like that.
But other than the issue of getting i passed, itās (not joking) a great idea. You want a gun that can hurt people (like cars, boats, airplanes, and owning a business can hurt people) then put some $$$ up.
it would seem to me that, if your facts hold, there are 800,000 āgoodā uses by civilians, so are there not also about 800,000 offensive uses by other civilians? Assuming that defensive use implies preventing deadly force with deadly force, and not the shooting of the unarmed.
So, for 800,000 good guys with guns there have to be at least 800,000 bad guys with guns, right? Assuming that every good guy only gets to off one bad guy. And because most of those ābad guysā, so far, have used legally purchased weapons, itās pretty safe to assume they were civilians.
So, with more guns, there will be more bad guys with guns, too.
And so, I can only assume your answer is to make more good guys with guns?
How would you propose to make those? To change the current ratio of offensive and defensive uses of guns by civilians, weāre going to need more good guys. Whatās your plan?
