Correct.
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Apologies, I was wrong - NVDRS is not a source for the PRC report. Those sources are listed in full here. And those sources - to the best of my knowledge - are not affected by statutory requirements.
They didnât actually ban guns in Austraila. Hell, there werenât even that many gun owners to begin with there (7% in 1996). It is now down to 3%. Woo.
Really hard to compare that to the United States which has several times more gun owners than Australia has people.
Iâm not against gun control like Australiaâs, but our problem is a wee bit more complicated.
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itâd be nice if it were so simple.
any time a new drug enters a market you can rely on: a) people to declare thereâs an epidemic of crime and crazed users; b) a rush to pass new tougher laws to end the scourge; c) more people arrested for breaking said laws; d) violence to go up as new illegal markets are established.
itâs actually very difficult to tease out whether drug use and crime are directly linked, or ( what i think is more likely ) linked to common underlying issues of economics and opportunity.
itâs a bit old, for instance, but i stumbled across these statistics from the us dept of justice which does correlate drug use and crime, but ends with the following:
In face of problematic evidence, it is impossible to say quantitatively how much drugs influence the occurrence of crime.
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not only just harder to get, harder to keep as well.
we track cars, we require licenses, we expect people to renew, we require both proper maintenance, storage, and insurance.
owning and maintaining fourteen cars is expensive. itâd be great if it were at least as expensive to own fourteen guns.
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According to the gun lobby, each use of a gun in âself defenseâ means one less member of the criminal classes.
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At a rally in suburban Nashville on Saturday, Trump mentioned his New York state handgun carry permit and added that anyone who attacked him would be âshockedâ, because he would emulate Charles Bronson in the vigilante film Death Wish.
âIâm a very, very big second amendment person,â Trump said in Tennessee. âThis is about self-defense, plain and simple.â
Trump reminisced about the Bronson-starring 1974 film and got people in the crowd to shout out the title in unison. In the movie, an affluent, liberal architect embarks on a vigilante mission after his wife is killed and his daughter raped.
âToday you canât make that movie because itâs not politically correct,â Trump said.
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Iâd love to believe the same thing could happen, but I donât think the parallels are there.
One, unlike SSM, in which the courts basically pushed the political envelope, in gun control, the constitution is pretty clearly on the side of gun owners.
Two, SSM is talking about giving something to people, while gun control is trying to take something away they already have.
Three, SSM is pretty much meaningless to most people who opposed it and now itâs legal, itâs still pretty much invisible to most such people. Banning guns will directly impact millions.
Four, hatred of SSM was not a major part of the oppositionâs cultural heritage. Sure, politicians capitalized on it, but few were spending much time each day involved in opposition to it. Guns, on the other hand, are a significant component to a large number of peopleâs identity.
Five, hatred of SSM has not been a significant component of the countryâs mythology. Guns, on the other hand, are central to it.
Six, there arenât billions of dollars to be made from banning guns. There were at least millions to be made by allowing SSM.
Seven, for the core of SSM advocates, SSM was their life. It had meaning to them in a way that it could never have to their opponents. For gun advocates, guns have a meaning to them in a way that it could never have to those fighting for gun control. There are likely a thousand Americans willing to kill or die to protect their guns. How many are willing to kill or die to take them away.
Given all that, Iâm not optimistic for the chances meaningful gun control in the US in the next century or so.
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Give it time. It will and the gun folks wonât like it when it happens. Smarter people would work to get reasonable legislation passed now before unreasonable legislation starts drastically limiting gun ownership and putting more hurdles on their purchase (and then folks can fight it out up to the Supremes for a decade or two).
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Legislation could be passed and then people would be forced to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court. Do this over and over.
Well, yeah, if youâre going to have gun free zones, youâre going to have mass shootings, itâs inescapable.
Yeah, because mass shootings never happen in non-gun free zones. Not to mention that UCC wasnât a gun free zone. Care to try again with another partisan talking point?
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Doing it right the first time is crucial.
The Justices are very choosy on what theyâll hear based on how each case can be dismissed before it even comes down to the bigger questions, and if they feel theyâve already answered a question they can simply elect not to put the case on the docket. Theyâre not actually obligated to hear any given case.
âOver and over againâ is a poor Supreme Court strategy.
Australia had no gun manufacturing industry to speak of - at the time of the ban there was literally one private gun factory in the entire country. Leaving aside all of the other valid and manifold concerns for the moment: the U.S. gun manufacturing industry employs around 209,000 people and generates anywhere between $6 billion and $30 billion a year - depending on who you ask - with a few big names (Ruger, Smith & Wesson, etc.), and then a whole slew of small businesses. (For perspective, General Motorâs 110,000 jobs warranted a federal bailout.)
So yeah, sure: Australia Did The Thing, and put hardly anyone out of work, and took no economic hit to speak of.
Donât get me wrong - I think the yoking of so many jobs and that amount of prosperity to the gun industry is problematic, just like the yoking of so many jobs and so much prosperity to the military-industrial complex as a whole is problematic. But that doesnât change the reality of the situation, or make the Australia/U.S. comparison more apt.
In addition to the manufacturing base, the culture, and literally over 400 times the number of guns, the other thing the U.S. has that Australia doesnât is NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, who is not a born gun nut. He didnât even own or know how to use one before he took the job in 1991. What he is, and always has been, is an industrial lobbyist who has made a personal fortune by throwing red meat out on behalf of a multi-billion industry, and he has amassed an incredible amount of political clout while doing so. His absolutist Second Amendment rhetoric - much of which I think comes from expedience rather than conviction - is mustered in defense of that political power, and, more specifically, of the money that girds it.
With all that said: I think itâs facile to compare what Australia did to what might be done in the U.S. What President would have the courage to put 209,000 people out of work with a stroke of his or her pen? What Congress would have the courage to permit it?
Personally, I believe that weâre not going to see compromise on this until LaPierre and his cohorts die or step down. My sense is that weâre rapidly approaching âpeak gun,â generationally, and that younger, more flexible leadership within the industry is required. And even then, the whole mess remains enmeshed in the current lobbyist cultureâŚthe NRA takes advantage of the same political mechanisms as General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and all the other companies whose profits depend on the manufacture of machines designed to kill people and blow stuff up.
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It reminds me again of the whole action movie narrative where the bad guy has the whole base/entire planet rigged to blow up when the good guy inevitably kills him. Getting away from the action movie as a social model, needs to be a priority iny opinion.
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Whatâs weird to me is not only are they killing themselves, but so many of these shootings happen at schools. Why is that? Are they returning to a source of pain and humiliation in their lives and exacting vengeance? We can talk about guns all we want, but we seem to have become a perfect factory of entitled homicidal assholes who want to âmake them all pay.â
The flawed study-
http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/images/dogbreeds-a.pdf
fake âobjectiveâ website( one of many)-
http://apbtpeople.webs.com/cdcstatistics.htm
List of fatal dog attacks in the US-
analysis of the study, I donât know for sure if the authors have an agenda,
but there is a lot of convincing data there, and it is pretty well
annotated-
One thing that people may not realize is that the NRA didnât even do political lobbying until after the passage of the Gun Control Act in the late '60s, which caught them by surprise. Their red line is mandatory gun registration, which they see as the means to all-out confiscation in the future.
The Instant Background Check currently in place was fully supported by the NRA as a reasonable way to keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldnât have them. Unfortunately, several Presidential administrations have been very lax in prosecuting people who are prohibited from getting guns who are rejected by the system, like convicted felons, and in this day of heightened data collection and creation of super-agencies like DHS, somehow a lot of people are not getting added to the prohibited list. Youâd think someone who was turned down for the armed forces for being mentally unstable would have been flagged. This type of system also is an unfunded mandate for the states, and you can imagine some are less likely to supply data than others.
It serves both parties to point to the failures of the system rather than to fix it. Whether the party line is âsee, gun control doesnât workâ or âsee, we need stricter laws,â politics are getting in the way of making things better. Until politicians are actually funding and enforcing the laws in place, itâs impossible to know which ones actually work.
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See This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated. The NRA are one leg of the MPAA tripod, the others being Mormons and Catholics.
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In the world of crime statistics âurban gang violenceâ basically means âthe shooter was black.â So this not-exactly-original argument boils down to, âThere ought to be a way to disarm black people in a way that does not result in seizing guns from white people.â
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What cannot be overstated here is that each of those groups is flush with cash, and they get the best lobbyists.
Theyâve been very clever about making money flow in ways that maintain their power.
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