We can’t say strong gun regulations are ineffective in the U.S. because we’ve never actually tried them.
Regional gun restrictions are a joke—it doesn’t matter if a city, county or state makes it difficult to buy a gun when they’re still freely available in the adjoining region. The only kind of gun regulations which might actually make a difference would have to be nationwide, and they’d have to be strict enough to impact law-abiding people as well as known criminals. (Just like the laws regulating cars and explosives and anthrax impact law-abiding people as well as known criminals.)
he only kind of gun regulations which might actually make a difference
would have to be nationwide, and they’d have to be strict enough to
impact law-abiding people as well as known criminals.
So laws like Canada and Mexico have, right? I don’t think regulations like that are possible in the US because to many people the cost of the solution is greater than the cost of the problem it solves. It gets back to what I was saying - forcing cars to drive no faster than 20 mph would save 30,000 lives a year but the cost is too high.
Making guns difficult to own wouldn’t save enough lives to make the regulations worth while.
I get why people want strict gun laws. It’s easier than actually fixing our society.
BTW, this came out a couple of days ago and has some very nice visualizations:
I would freaking LOVE America to have a gun death rate on par with Canada’s. Or the UK’s. Or Australia’s. Or any other first-world country.
You mention Mexico too, and it’s worth remembering that our gun death rate is pretty much even with Mexico even though that country is plagued by poverty, corruption and a violent drug war largely of the United States’ making (supplying both the demand for the drugs and the source of many of the guns). Making guns harder to obtain in the States would likely help them too.
That’s where you and I have radically different value judgements. When automobile deaths were a steadily growing concern in the early 20th Century Americans made the collective decision that saving lives was worth the cost of stronger regulations, and we enacted regulations aplenty. Nowadays people see situations like Sandy Hook and say “that’s a shame, but it’s not worth preventing similar events in the future if it means I might be even slightly more inconvenienced when buying a dangerous weapon I don’t really need anyway.”
You think gun laws are a significant factor? All of those countries are more equitable and provide better social services to their citizens. Like I said earlier, I think the problem in the US is uneven wealth distribution. We have a tremendously productive economy and a big chunk of people aren’t getting a reasonable share.
I wasn’t really trying to state my personal opinion, I think there’s a pretty big chunk or politically active voters who feel that way though. Right now, regulations are loosening and I think it would have to have to get much worse before regulations increase. Since gun violence (excluding suicide) is actually trending in a good direction, I doubt much will change.
I get why people want strict gun laws. It’s easier than actually fixing our society.
You know … its a complex problem that doesn’t have an easy single fix, right? So do both - control access to firearms, and work on fixing your society. Restricting access to firearms immediately will impact your suicide rate, reduce the number of illegal weapons in Canada and America, ad over time reduce the number of firearms related homicides. Fixing your society … well. The value of that should be obvious. Oh, and by the way: restricting access to firearms is NOT orthogonal to fixing your society.
Using the NTSB value of ~$10M per life, your budget is $300 BILLION. Every year. Go!
I know you’re an ardent Second Amendmentist, but you might want to give yourself at least a couple of days waiting period before deploying such callous strawmen. This isn’t an otherwise “good” gun owner who “snapped.” This is an asshole who had clear warning signs going back 15 years.
We’re not the only first-world country that has problems with wealth inequality and mental health and so on. We ARE pretty much the only first-world country where a violent, mentally unstable person can easily obtain an AR-15.
I don’t see that. It said that 22% of workplace fatalities for women were murder, whereas only 8% of workplace fatalities for men were murder. Women are much more susceptible to being murdered at work, in comparison to other causes.
Keep in mind that while it is true that women are less represented in the most dangerous occupations, they’re also statistically more careful about safety. I’d be interested in seeing the level of work-related injuries and deaths in the same jobs so as to compare apples to apples.
I personally don’t really care one way or the other. This place is such an echo chamber, that I was just trying to explain how I understand the opposition’s point of view.
Unfortunately $300 billion per year probably isn’t enough for a lot of people. The right to own firearms is as fundamental to many as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc… How much of a boost to the economy would you need to justify trading those rights away?
And yet you know without a doubt that they wouldn’t work.
No, I don’t know without a doubt. I have lots of doubt about guns and gun violence in the US. Check out that link I posted in the same comment. It presents lots of information in support of gun laws.
I don’t think regulations like Mexico has are possible in the US because of our constitution.
Sure, you understand it by describing a strawman. No surprise there.
How much of a boost to the economy would you need to justify trading those rights away?
heh. That’s funny.
I don’t think regulations like Mexico has are possible in the US because of our constitution.
Dude. That’s true of every country in the world! Do you know how all those many countries who are as free or freer than the US AND which have much much lower firearms violence managed it? It’s not a secret: they changed the law.
The comparison has nothing to do with it, where the article claims that this represents some war on women. That may well be the case, but men are much more frequent victims and the idea that men taking dangerous jobs (apart from army/police etc.) means that we should also expect them to be homicide victims more often doesn’t make any sense. Similarly, insinuating that the larger number of overall deaths by homicide or accident makes raw numbers of workplace or domestic homicides less significant is not reasonable. 93% of black homicide victims are killed by other black people, but this doesn’t mean that BLM are wrong to protest against killings by white police officers. The numbers stand for themselves, and aren’t influenced by the relative likelihood that someone would have died a different kind of violent death. Anything else is victim blaming - Adam’s death was as tragic and senseless as Alison’s.
As I said, it’s nowhere close (more like 68 men to every 5 women - apparently there would need to be 14 dead men lying next to Alison for someone using this statistic to admit that men were even equally affected by workplace violence). On the other hand, the article is correct in that relatives and domestic partners were the largest single assailant group for women (36%, or 23 people), but not for men (1%, or 3-4 people).
In other words, women have (assumption here!) comparable rate to being murdered on the job as men, but got it quite better for the other causes.
The statistics can lie quite well. Say we have a sample of 100 men and 100 women. 5 of each gets murdered. 5 women and 15 men succumb to a workplace accident. Voila, suddenly the apparent risk of being murdered on the job can be spun as 4 times higher (but only if you don’t look at the base numbers).
Could be interesting.
Also, there are flavors of jobs with the same name, and tendency of not sending women into the more dangerous job aspects so much. One of the less-unlikeable aspects of social biases, isn’t it?
So the best would be data broke down not by just gender and job type but also injury cause.
Classical with-us-or-against-us?
Those in the middle keep getting flak from both sides. No wonder the’s not so many.
If you believe that, maybe you’ve either been watching too much ‘fair and balanced’ news on Fox, or you went to one of those odd ‘teach the controversy’ schools which think one book written a couple of centuries ago represents an argument as equally valid as all scientific research and evidence combined.
The same phenomenons show on all the sides of the spectrums, in all kinds of discussions. You can be halfway on side A and still be accused of being on side B by those full-A.
The problem is the “you’re both wrong” along with feigned superiority and adding nothing to the conversation. Somehow it manages to rob the discussion of even more nuance than the traditional polarizing discussion.
The appeal to “principled moderation” while offering no evidence or effort is just another smokescreen.
At least if I’m talking to someone who can cop to caring any way at any position in the continuum but “exactly the middle”, I have the slightest possibility of learning something.
