No law, other than perhaps a ban, is going to stop suicides. Unless you’re an ex-felon who is suicidal you can just go buy one at a store. Japan has a very high suicide rate and nearly no guns. Where there is a will there is a way. Sadly I read a few times a year people who just go to a range and rent a gun to end it. You can’t always stop someone determined to do that.
At any look at where criminals get their guns (granted thie DoJ survey is old, but but numbers are still similar).
• 39.6% of criminals obtained a gun from a friend or family member
• 39.2% of criminals obtained a gun on the street or from an illegal source
• 0.7% of criminals purchased a gun at a gun show
• 1% of criminals purchased a gun at a flea market
• 3.8% of criminals purchased a gun from a pawn shop
• 8.3% of criminals actually bought their guns from retail outlets
Nearly 80% of the times those people are buying from someone who has a pretty good inkling they are up to no good. Assuming the person buying isn’t of legal age or is a felon, 80% of the time they are already breaking the law. I don’t think we need to focus on the drip out the faucet, when the mainline going into the house is what is burst open.
And again, someone who right now isn’t worried about selling to someone they don’t know and is acting weird, isn’t going to care about selling privately if it were illegal.
If they have a uniform, or a government-issued ID, then I tend to discern them to be shady characters. Unfortunately, these are precisely the groups many people deliberately outfit with weapons.
I think people who are unfamiliar with modern hunting don’t understand the cold hard realities of mother nature.
In nature there are booms and busts. When you get too many rabbits and not enough things eating them, you end up with rabbits starving to death through the winter. I remember one year when I was little it was like that. The summer before there was a huge boom and now those poor bastards were literally skin and bones and starving to death in a pretty snowy winter.
Same with deer and other animals. There are only so many resources and if you don’t manage those resources the animals start dying of hunger and disease. There was local park that was so bad with deer, they all had some funky STD and they brought in bow hunters to cull them.
It isn’t all sun shine and rainbows in nature. When an animal dies it is usually a slow, crappy death from disease or hunger, or from getting eaten by a predator. Sometimes while still alive. IMHO, a bullet is a quick an humane death.
Now I hate poachers, but those who follow the rules and abide by the limits placed by the Conservation Departments all help keep things running smoothly. And their license fees go to fund that department.
Agreed. Nature is incredibly cruel, and our human systems are great at obfuscating it. Human morality is a condition of the well fed, in many ways.
Vegans, vegetarians, etc. are probably a few missed meals away from eating Mr. Snugglebunny raw, is my belief. This is sort of what “Life of Pi” was getting at. But don’t get me wrong; I don’t begrudge folks who want to live that way.
Also completely agree on Poachers. I have great respect for the DNR, and what they do.
They get lots of bad press, but the outfitted government representative gun bearers are not the ones doing the vast majority of the killing, by any accounting.
4473 11.f. says differently. If you’ve been committed, no gun for you, and that should show up on a background check. Unless you were to buy from a private seller, in which case that private seller pretty much only has to say “she didn’t look mentally ill to me” to avoid responsibility under Federal law.
Look at the legal patchwork of state firearm laws concerning the mentally ill - there’s no reason why we can’t have a national discussion about mental health and gun ownership, except the NRA lobbying has precluded even the most basic of fact-based discussions about the subject.
Thats why I want to regulate guns the way we regulate driving: You take a class, you pass a written and a practical test, you get a license to buy, possess, and carry a rifle or shotgun. You want a handgun or something bigger, you take a longer class and pass a more intensive test, just as you would for a motorcycle or CDL. You renew every few years.
You want to buy a gun, you just show your license at the store, and they do a quick check to make sure it’s valid. Maybe you never buy one, but get your license just in case you ever decide to.
Cops see you with a gun, they ask to see your license, and can cite you or put you under suspension if you do something stupid like leaving it unsecured or walking into a crowded area brandishing like you’re a member of Open Carry Texas going to use it any second. If you’re behaving responsibly and have a valid license, they send you on your way.
End result is that everyone with a gun is qualified to use one, without the big national “they’s-comin-ta-get-yer-guns” database (since it tracks qualification, not possession).
The closest I could find to quantify that was the gun violence archive. I think their numbers aren’t 100% since they seem to count things like “report of shots fired” as an incident, but even if they’re goosing the numbers a little bit, the deaths/injuries seemed to match up with their sources for the ones I spotchecked.
In the 77 days of this year: 2,510 deaths, 4,231 injuries.
There were 874 officer-involved shootings, so unless each cop shot north of 7 people, it’s sounds like there’s a good chance that if you get shot, it won’t have been by a policeman. Also, there have been slightly more incidents of accidental shooting than defensive use (thanks, Wal-mart mom, for tipping that scale).
I missed out on the speed, agility, claws, and teeth to take down a deer without mechanical aid. As luck would have it though, I ended up with the intelligence and opposable thumbs to produce and use projectiles. It evens the odds a bit- a little less against moose.
How many people who commit suicide are actually committed to a mental health facility?
Again, you’re focusing on a small percentage. And while I’d rather not see people commit suicide in many (most) cases, this is an act of free will by that person that they are doing to themselves. I don’t think we can legislate that away.
Definitely hunting. Eating meat will be a much longer tail (I unabashedly love eating meat but I try to make the most ethical choices I can) but I think ultimately humanity will decide the we don’t have the ethical right to subjugate an animals and end its life for food when we can survive well without it. I for one welcome out vat meat overlords. If there were safe, economical and vaguely tasty vat meats I would switch to them in a heartbeat.
Our consumption of other mammals is basically sustainable by most counts
My understanding is that only chicken (or, I presume other small poultry) is sustainable on a world-scale moving into the future, presuming everyone has equal access to meat. Australia and America already eat far more than our share of the supply if it were to be under a threshold that is sustainable.
You might be surprised to know that rural Australia is in many ways a lot like America. Deer are not common in Australia but I’ve seen them up in the Snowy Mountains of NSW where you can snowboard. They’re an introduced species, though. Where you guys get deer we have wallabies, kangaroos and wombats. I’ve been in one accident involving a wallaby but you see them standing at the side of the road all the time. You rarely see them about built-up areas but almost all of Australia is not built up. We’re as big as continental Europe but there’s only 24 million of us.
They do the same thing here for population control of different species but I have a problem with that concept because the people who decide the numbers are doing a balancing act between the actual numbers needed for conservation and hunters who want to hunt which, IMO will mean that the number of permits issued will be higher than necessary. That, plus let’s not pretend that illegal hunting doesn’t happen on a ridiculously large scale, not to mention there are plenty of things you can shoot that don’t require a licence.
But, if you were by yourself with no research tools, can you confidently say that you would be able to mine and refine the materials required and use them to produce a gun and its ammo? That’s what I’m getting at. We cheat by standing on the shoulders of giants.
What worries me is the guy- and you know there were a couple- who had the opposite reaction.
“This particular gun is the one that James Holmes used to shoot 82 people in a movie theater in Aurora CO…”
“I’LL TAKE IT.”
“Uh… The thing is…”
“WOW. The same one? I mean, just knowing, you know? I have to have it- How much?” * eyes glaze over *
In all seriousness, though, every time I heard “This was used by a kid to…”, I thought “well, I hope the parents were prosecuted for their gross negligence…”
I have to assume you are not American (I am probably making an ass of you and me). Wait a couple more months and witness the full frontal stupidity when the U.S. 2016 elections season starts. One party really frowns upon helping poor people, or starting anything with “Socialized” in the title, and they really dislike any regulation relating to firearms, and they think prisons are a good place for the mentally ill, although they might actually like the compulsory military service as long as their offspring are exempt from fighting in actual wars. I won’t spoil the surprise as to which party that is.
Would you like a ladder to get off that high horse? Which parts of my commentary smacks of what your saying? You don’t have to be into hunting to know things about it. I pride myself on learning about everything, even things I hate, because how am I supposed to decide for myself without actual information and hearing the arguments of both sides and otherwise how am I supposed to participate meaningfully in discussions like this?
Whats your feelings towards 18 U.S.C. § 922(d)(4) - the part that says you can’t sell to those who have been committed…do you consider that government overreach?
How many people who commit suicide are actually committed to a mental health facility?
I can’t find an exact number, but they estimate around 90% had a mental disorder at the time of their suicide.
I found an interesting study that thinks long trend of reducing public psych hospital beds has led to an increase in suicides. Again, just going off my state since that’s what I know, we have 37 crisis beds in the best scenario across the entire state. So how many people should have been hospitalized but couldn’t? To me this is part of a bigger socioeconomic problem, but part of the puzzle involves keeping potentially dangerous people, either to themselves or others, away from firearms.
This is true, but is it not a talent that we should treat with responsibility? It’s also not an ability that’s necessarily restricted to humans. If/When we find other species that have developed as far as we have, humanity will have to rethink that line of reasoning.
in answer to your question, yes
This is BB so I don’t doubt it but what do you think your chances of doing so are, without seriously maiming yourself
