Right - it’s just that when you write stuff like …
… well, that sounds like a huge damn straw man. That’s why I answered - you were misrepresenting the people you were arguing with. I did not ask you about handgun vs rifle statistics. That’s a whole 'nother can of worms.
Well, I wouldn’t put it exactly in those words…
I’m sure they exist, but they don’t get nearly as much travel as the approved narratives.
hmm… maybe child-proof caps on every bullet? 
actually, it would be really interesting if you had to have a reason to buy ammo. file all sorts of paperwork if you run out and its not accounted for. it’s kind of amazing the legal framework we’ve built up around drugs – for good or for ill – so i guess never say never.
i’d love to see licensing and insurance if for no other reason than – as a country – at least acknowledging there’s a problem and trying to improve things in a way that doesn’t trample on people’s rights. ( i’m looking at you “no fly list” )
Oh, I think a shotgun would usually do, but if you had a large herd to protect, and therefore occasionally needed something with some distance and accuracy, a rifle could come in handy.
ETA:“Neighborhood dogs” was probably not the best way of phrasing that, as it implies a much smaller farm, which would not always be the case.
The Army actually has a process for checking ammo in and out of the bases here in the States for training. You might be surprised at how much gun control they exercise on a daily basis over trained personnel.
The best part about that is that it isn’t a law banning trampolines and infringing on your freedum. Its an insurance company saying, “you are welcomed to do that, if you are an irresponsible idiot, but we won’t bail out your ass if you do”.
Because they are acutely aware of how freaking dangerous they are and how dangerous it would be everyone walked around the base armed.
It’d be pretty damn relevant to me if I was living with someone who regularly threatened me with deadly weapons. o_O
Okay, then let me rephrase my last response: You need any kind of gun to deter dogs? When I visited a friend working as a dairy farmer in the Swiss Alps, big sticks were all the farmers there needed.
Most other countries still do! Maybe electric fences but that’s more to keep the cattle from escaping than anything from coming in.
Look, maybe the hugest farms in regions with actually dangerous, wild animals would need to protect their livestock with guns. But how does that justify easy access to handguns for everyone?
and for really aggressive canine intruders the ultimate deterrent
I fear the day Scotland and Switzerland combine forces and conquer the world with bagpipe&alphorn shock troops
In my neighbourhood (Australia), yes, actually you do. Although for “dog” read “pack of wild dingo half-breeds”. They’ll quite happily kill every sheep they can get at, and aren’t particularly scared of people.
[quote=“SpookyFM, post:274, topic:80545, full:true”]Most other countries still do! Maybe electric fences but that’s more to keep the cattle from escaping than anything from coming in.
Look, maybe the hugest farms in regions with actually dangerous, wild animals would need to protect their livestock with guns. But how does that justify easy access to handguns for everyone?
[/quote]
It doesn’t, of course.
Which is why the only folks around here with handguns are cops and security guards. And the farmer’s rifles are normally bolt-action .22s.
Guns are tools, not toys. Dangerous tools, best kept under tight regulation to ensure that they are only available to well-trained responsible adults who have a genuine need for them.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I meant when I mentioned [quote=“SpookyFM, post:274, topic:80545”] actually dangerous, wild animals [/quote].
But your argument (and, apparently, gun legislature in Australia) is reasonable which is why I’m unsure it will resonate with most of the strictly pro-gun people in this thread. Ah well.
Well, speaking from my personal experience on a modest family farm, yeah, the occasional gun came in handy. It was not possible to have one person, let alone more than one person, constantly guarding the animals, which were kept in more than one enclosure around the farm. However, when a dog started messing with them, you could definitely hear it and know exactly where you had to rush to. If you ran out there with your pointed stick, the dog would probably see you and run off, only to come back later when there’s no one about to protect the animals. They tended not to do this after they got shot.
[quote=“Humbabella, post:251, topic:80545, full:true”]
The majority of murders are committed by friends and loved ones [/quote]
Source? That doesn’t sound right at all unless you’re counting suicides as ‘murders’ and the suicidal individual as their own friend or loved one. You might be thinking of sexual assault, which has a very different pattern.
I think that’s a really good question.
No laws get 100% compliance, but I can see how this one might have a specific group of resisters who look for ways to intentionally go uninsured.
I think there would be something of a PR battle that would ultimately take a generation to win. Kids growing up with the common sense idea that if you have a gun you need insurance to protect society from accidents (just like car insurance), are going to come to the conclusion that the resistance against the idea is composed of entitled idiots. There will always be a few cranks, but it will become socially unacceptable to be one of those cranks.
We still have people who think it’s fine for them to drink and drive because they can hold their liquor or because they are great drivers. But drunk driving has been greatly reduced because we don’t see irresponsible driving as acceptable. America still sees irresponsible gun ownership as acceptable.
You got me. It’s not the distribution I thought. Family is only about 13% (although it’s probably more since a full 44% have unknown relationships).
However, here is the part that confirms my basic point even my perception that family members are usually killers is the result of watching too many cop shows:
Of the murders for which the circumstance surrounding the murder was known, 42.9 percent of victims were murdered during arguments (including romantic triangles) in 2011. Felony circumstances (rape, robbery, burglary, etc.) accounted for 23.1 percent of murders. Circumstances were unknown for 38.0 percent of reported homicides.
42.9% of murders where cause was known were the result of escalated arguments while only 23.1% were the result of non-murder felonies. By contrast, about 0% of robberies are the result of escalated arguments and 100% were the result of non-murder felonies. Obviously being facetious there, but the point I’m making is that robberies aren’t heat-of-the-moment crimes and so there isn’t a reason to think that easy access to a weapon would turn a non-robbery situation into a robbery situation.
Murders are very much heat-of-the-moment crimes, at least about 42.9% of them are. I would have overestimated this, but it’s still a really sizable chunk where the lethality of the situation is tied to the ability to make a split second decision to kill. Using another stat from the same sheet (Handguns comprised 72.5 percent of the firearms used in murder and nonnegligent manslaughter incidents in 2011), if that category of murder is as sensitive to the presence of guns as suicide is, then you could reduce murders by about 24% by taking arguments away from situations where guns are at the ready (I doubt it is as sensitive as suicide to the presence of guns, so that’s more like an upper bound, but I feel like it’d be a stretch to guess it’s near 0%).
Yeah, I can imagine that it does make things easier. However, I still don’t see how that justifies unconditional access to guns for everyone. Are you really arguing that not having to shoo dogs away more than once or maybe losing a sheep or some chickens is justification enough to risk human deaths such as those in the story of the original post (and similar ones)?
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[quote=“Humbabella, post:280, topic:80545, full:true”]
Obviously being facetious there, but the point I’m making is that robberies aren’t heat-of-the-moment crimes and so there isn’t a reason to think that easy access to a weapon would turn a non-robbery situation into a robbery situation.[/quote]
The point doesn’t actually counter my point though. I assert that most murders by firearm are with illegally owned firearms, thus circumventing gun control laws. Whether heat of the moment or planned in advance, a murderer may still use an illegally owned firearm.
There don’t seem to be good stats that divide murder by firearm into a neat illegal/legal breakdown, but one point I can make to support my assertion is that most murderers have prior felony convictions that would prohibit firearm ownership. (58% by 1998 DOJ database). Outside of felonies that outright prohibit gun ownership, many more murderers have other convictions and arrest records that would make purchasing a firearm difficult (70% other convictions, 81% arrest records). I haven’t found anything that aggregates more recent statistics so neatly, but I think it should be clear that we’re usually not talking about moms snapping and gunning down their children and two buddies getting mad over a game and gunning each other down. We’re usually talking about repeat offenders that take it a step farther.
I think we’ve already hit the low hanging fruit for gun control. We’re doing the things that are reasonable and practical to do for the most part. Even outright bans don’t seem to work if we look at say… Britain. I believe further effort into gun control should be on improving the reasonable and practical enforcement of our current laws. I suppose if we actually got control of the terror watch list and added a fair process of consideration and appeals, it might make sense to use that, but in the current form, it’s less than useless (unless you just don’t want brown people legally purchasing firearms?).
The insurance idea seems useless for actual gun control, but it might help the victims of legal firearm owners turned criminal. Maybe it’s worth considering for that aspect. The insurance rate will be very low on that, nothing like car insurance. It comes down to the probability of harm. Most people that own cars have accidents. Only a tiny fraction of people that own guns will never misuse it in a way that results in harm to anyone. Insurance companies will compete on price until the policies have a negligible cost in line with the low risk of actually owning a firearm. It might encourage even more illegal firearm ownership in economically disadvantaged areas, but probably not by much more than already exists.
In what way don’t they work?
