Except that " some of the most restrictive in the United States" is still a lax in comparison to laws in other places around the world.
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Yes, I do agree that allowing guns makes it much easier for a psychopath to cause death. Guns are also used multiple thousands of times each year to defend innocent people (it is on Wikipedia â look it up). Would banning all guns save a few lives? Quite possibly. Would it cause a LOT more victims who are otherwise incapable of defending themselves? Yes.
Sorry, but if you put a middle-aged woman against a 20-year-old criminal, the woman is at a disadvantage. Give her a gun, and she has a chance, even if he has a gun too. Nothing exists in isolation. Change something here, it may have a greater impact over there.
This was an exaggeration. Full disclosure: I have three adopted children who are black. I am in no way for racial profiling. What I am suggesting is that by allowing the police to have random searches, or to search just based on a hunch, without getting a warrant, would do a lot more to reduce crime than any gun laws. Sorry, but to me, the entire US Constitution is non-negotiable. I am against any sort of warrant-less searches or surveillance, and I am against weakening the 2nd Amendment too.
I know from my experience interacting with some open carry people in California that they want to normalize the sight of people carrying guns. That is part of their goal. It is stated on their websites and forums.
They also like to argue that people carrying weapons are good for businesses because they keep bad people with guns away. Or if they arenât kept away, they will get shot by the good people with guns who are in the business.
In the recent Vegas shooting. The two officers had weapons, but were killed.
One of the people at Wal-Mart had a weapon and he was killed.
Has the proliferation of guns and the open carry movement desensitized people at the Pizza store to their presence? Have we heard from witnesses on that topic?
So, for example say a counter person at Ciciâs saw the Millers enter the store with their guns. Did they just ignore it? Did they say something? If they said something might they have alerted the police to the people entering the pizza place with a gun so the police could be on guard?
The Millers then went to Wal-Mart, walking across the street and across a big parking lot. Did people who saw them on the way call the police or just ignore them because open carry of weapons is now normal?
The Millers shot into the ceiling and told people to get out. What if they did not do that? Have people been desensitized to guns so much that they would they just keep shopping after seeing someone walking with a gun?
Is the Open Carry movement helping future shooters by making people less wary of people with guns?
We know that âcriminalsâ will not follow the rules. But does it help or hurt people in the future by making the sighting of a gun no big deal?
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Do you think there is anything that can be done to reduce the rate of homicide in the US or are you satisfied that the current trend is heading in the right direction and weâll get to a good place (perhaps later than other countries)? What course of action would you suggest? Iâve seen these gun control discussions where it turns into this "Well, this country is vastly different from this other country, therefore your proposed solution is a bad idea (or alternately âyou have no way of knowing it would workâ) thing. Sometimes it can feel like someone is just saying âThe problem is too complex, letâs just not do anythingâ because the person proposing a measure is unable to control for every conceivable variable between different countries. The discussion goes from âLetâs find a way to fix this problemâ to âLetâs talk about why your proposed solution is no goodâ. I think that more than controlling guns, people are concerned about lowering the rate of homicide. Therefore, it seems like finding a way to reduce the rate of homicide would do more to convince people that gun control is unnecessary than just coming up with reasons why it might not work.
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Never had them, but âHydroxâ certainly doesnât sound appetising. Who the hell decides to call their bloody biscuits Hydrox anyway? Are they bleach-flavoured or what?
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How to tell the difference? Play the odds. 99.9999+% of the time, youâre dealing with an Open Carry Patriot. Donât play into the media hysteria, you are far more likely to die of diabetes and/or heart disease than by any kind of firearm injury (self-inflicted, run-of-the-mill robbery/murder, and especially a âmass-shooting incidentâ). If youâre really, REALLY concerned about being taken out in a mass shooting, stay away from places that explicitly ban legally-carried firearms - this will drop your already-miniscule odds of being the victim of a mass shooting to homeopathetically low percentages.
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Fuckinâ A.
Not recommended if youâre black, however.
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[quote=âBrainspore, post:80, topic:34180â]
You were the one who brought up Canada. Why is it OK to compare U.S. crime rates to Canadaâs when it suits you, but inappropriate when the vast majority of statistics donât?
[/quote]What I am saying is that I was looking at TRENDS. Does crime trend up, or down? If so, by how much? Did almost banning guns reduce murder? By how much? What happened to the overall violent crime rate (assault, rape, etc.)? That sort of question seems valid.
At this point, I am beginning to think that you are driving trollies me. I doubt that you really are as dense as you appear to be.
It means he has a time machine*. Which would be really weird because physics.
*Hydrox has been off the market for more than a decade.
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Depends if thereâs a bayonet attached or not, I guess.
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You could just do it in a Deadpool cosplay outfit, with a âHail Hydraâ sign.
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Last fall I plotted statistics of mass murder in United States versus the number one killer, heart disease, over the previous 50 years or so.
At that time, if the trends continued, mass murder would overtake heart disease around the year 2140.
Welcome to the future!
So, youâre fundamentally saying that you donât confer respect to someone holding a weapon?
First, as I have said recently, Canada has a VASTLY different population
Are you familiar with the term âflyover country?â Most Canadians, like most United Staters, live in urbanized, or semi-urbanized areas.
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âPlottedâ
âMass Murderâ
NSA Keywords, check.
Distance to each other 1 word (ignored âofâ)
Terrorist watch list: Definitely
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If I were to make a fair comparison, Iâd compare that lone recent mass murder in Canada to the multitude of recent mass murders in the United States. Weâre at the point where âshooting leaves five deadâ is barely even a national news story in the U.S. anymore.
Lone mass killing? Kevin already mentioned the one with a knife:
Itâs hardly the only one, though. For instance:
Thatâs just this year. There are plenty of other such events, such as the Ăcole Polytechnique and Dawson College shootings that are very well known up here. Mass killings happen in all countries, so pretending itâs something unique to the US may be perceived to be a little disingenuous.
The two examples you use of âplenty of other such eventsâ in Canada â Dawson College and Ecole Polytechnique â are from 2006 and, amazingly, 1989.
Your basic intent to deceive is duly noted.
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I suppose this comic comes down to our philosophical nature: Should we practice to deceive?
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Well, the overall homicide rate is down by almost 50% over the last few decades.
OMG: less people are being killed! We need to do something!
This is a complex topic. Changing the gun laws may reduce murder. It may not. Keep in mind that your odds of being a victim of a mass shooting are about the same as being struck by lightning. You do not make a policy based on rare events. If you did, you could point to a person trapped in their car by a seat belt and argue that seat belts are a bad idea.
OK. What would you suggest that would actually stop criminals and psychopaths without being a burden on HONEST people? Seriously? An honest man can own an AR-15 and/or AK-47 and never kill anybody. Taking HIS gun away will help approximately nobody. Background checks are a popular item, but the recent killer in California pass all of his background checks with flying colors. Closing the âgun showâ loophole is hard to do when dealers are afraid to do background checks. You can loose your license for stupid things like putting âyâ instead of âyesâ or âFlâ in place of âFlorida.â Because of this, if there is no sale involved, dealers are generally unwilling to do a background check.
You could try to ban certain types of weapons. However, a recent school shooting involved a double-barrel shotgun. The Navy shooter from a couple of months ago used a pump-action shotgun. Bill Clinton banned all high-capacity magazines when he was president, for a period of 10 years. What did this do to crime and the murder rate in general? Almost nothing. The vast majority if murders only use a few shots, so magazine limits would accomplish almost nothing.
I have plotted the numbers myself. There is a wikipedia page that has murder rate and gun ownership rates. I dare you to copy this data into a spreadsheet and plot a trend line. You will find that the numbers look pretty random, but there is a weak trend that more guns = less murders. So it is not true that guns cause murders.
I have actually tried to find this data, but I would love to get data by zip code for median income and murder rate. It is well-known (but I canât exactly prove it without zip-code data) that more poverty = more murder. So, what is the solution? For common, every-day murder, working on poverty would help a lot. For the lone psychopath, we need to do something about mental health care. These are approaches that would actually reduce crime and murder, take away nobodyâs rights, and help everybody. This is the type of solution that nobody could complain about (well, as long as the solution is actually affordable, which is another discussion).
