School shooting reported at a Community College in Oregon

[Lonestar]

To the anti gun control crowd, a general, not specific to increased gun control guns question. What would you be willing to change (or to give up) in order to decrease gun crime and in particular random mass shootings?

I favor a universal background check and mandatory reporting to NICS in principle. The problem is that there has yet to be a serious proposal to come down the pike for a universal background check at the national level without a backdoor registry("we pinky promise we aren't creating a registry" is not a way to convince me it's being prevented), and that screams to me that the goal isn't screening, it's creating a registry to ease confiscation later. It's something that would be fairly easy to address but no one is proposing it.

But if you don't vigorously enforce existing laws I doubt the claimed reasoning of "we need to add more ink to the barrel". Check this shit out. Illegal gun dealer with 55 counts of giving false information on the 4473 and illegal gun dealing , up to 5 years with each instance, and gets one years probation. The VP is on record saying "we can't be bothered to send someone to check when a prohibited person tried to buy a gun and fails a background check". Virginia actually did have a program that vigorously enforced existing laws called EXILE(Backed by the NRA but not the GOA) but it was eventually ended because of accusations that it was inherently racist.

[Patroklos]

The right to bear arms isn't a right that is accepted across the western world. Thus it's not comparable to freedom of speech which is generally accepted. Other nations don't feel the need to label weapons ownership as a right, why does the United States feel that this is so essential?

When the right to bear arms was codified here neither was freedom of speech, assembly, religion, or life itself for that matter. You guys will come around

But more seriously, you are a walking/talking example of why there are no gun laws as you propose or those far more moderate than you. Keep the above, that's a winner!

[Simon_Jester]

The reason that gun registration is NOT a slippery slope fallacy is because of what has happened in New York City. The city government passed laws saying that all long guns needed to be registered, and then, years later, used the registration lists to confiscate the weapons from people, without adequate compensation. It has happened before, and people that support gun rights never want to see it happen again.

It is a slippery slope fallacy as presented.

You provided an example where gun registration lists escalated to attempts to confiscation. Now please provide an example where gun registration lists, or any other means of regulating firearms, have led to any of the potential scary scenarios listed by Simon Jester, such as attempts to limit free speech, or the right to a fair trail, etc.

Whoa whoa whoa. I never said that.

I literally did not say "abolishing gun rights leads to abolishing free speech."

What I did say is "Okay, you are willing to say that a right should be revoked if it becomes (arguably) costly and impractical to keep it. Does that apply only to the right to bear arms? Or does it also apply to other rights such as freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial?"

Please do not strawman my position.

---

To the anti gun control crowd, a general, not specific to increased gun control guns question. What would you be willing to change (or to give up) in order to decrease gun crime and in particular random mass shootings?

I don't consider myself a member of the anti-gun-control crowd, so I'm not sure I should answer this. But I will if people are interested.

It's like, I think guns should be more controlled, but I find that the debate (at least on a forum like this) contains so many people who utterly fail to even comprehend why the debate has two sides that I spend most of my time trying to explain one side to the other. I guess I'm weird like that.

The "citizen's rights" argument is really the least convincing argument to the opposition, because - as Simon Jester mentions - it's not an argument about consequences - it's an argument about rights. And rights are abstract and often subjective, so it's really a non-starter.

It's interesting, from an academic point of view, to understand why someone might strongly hold to this philosophy about firearms and citizen's rights (going back to Medievel serfdom), but it's not very helpful in terms of implementing practical solutions to the problems we're dealing with now.

As long as you're consistent, and consider arguments about free speech, the right to privacy, the right to a fair trial, and the right to vote equally "interesting, from an academic point of view."

See, the thing is, for democracies to function, people DO have to take their rights seriously. The 'gun rights' issue may be a false alarm where it really doesn't make much difference whether people retain that right or not as a practical matter. But it's hardly a foolish or irrelevant argument to say "people have rights and this matters even when it's inconvenient or when we could construct an argument justifying ignoring those rights."

Regardless, I suspect people's opinions about this issue more or less revolve a lot around personal experience, rather than some firm ideology about citizen's rights or crime stats.

Mine don't- I don't own a gun, have no serious plan to own a gun, and have never been in a situation where I feel owning a gun would have made my life better.

But I'm a firm believer in at least listening to the other side in any debate I participate in. And watching the gun debate I've become convinced that there are a lot more pro-gun people who understand the anti-gun arguments than there are anti-gun people who understand the pro-gun arguments.

That seems to be where Lonestar is coming from, and I confess my views about this are heavily influenced by personal experience. I regularly visit one of the most dangerous cities in the country, sometimes late at night, and yet I have never needed a gun. So it's just really difficult for me to sympathize with the idea that everyone walking around with guns for personal safety is a net positive. In fact this city is ravaged by gun violence due to gangs, and most shootings that occur are over stupid things like "you stole my girlfriend, now die, etc.". In other words, most of the violence that occurs has nothing to do with random crimes that could be prevented by a heroic citizen with a handgun. Most of the violence occurs between people who know each other and want to kill each other (mostly over petty reasons).

Entirely true. On the other hand, there are plenty of places in the world where lots of murders over such issues happen (and have happened in the past) without anyone owning any guns at all. So that aspect of the personal experience, in my honest opinion, does not really address the issue.

Granted, that's not an argument for a national firearm ban either, as disarming law-abiding citizens is orthogonal to the causes of violence in Newark and elsewhere. The causes are more directly related to widespread poverty, obviously, but the wide availability of guns certainly exacerbates the fucking situation - and getting a pro-gun advocate to admit that is like pulling teeth.

Because getting an anti-gun advocate to admit "disarming law-abiding citizens is orthogonal to the causes of violence in Newark and elsewhere" is also like pulling teeth. The typical gun control advocate tends to start with measures that will disarm law-abiding citizens faster than they disarm criminals. And the refusal to acknowledge that this is a reality, or that some of the law-abiding citizens have a legitimate interest in being armed for their own safety and security, creates a sense that it is not worth trying to engage, compromise, or negotiate with gun control advocates.

Anyway, I understand the argument about personal safety, and protecting one's home, etc. - but this argument remains stubbornly theoretical. How many times has owning a firearm actually prevented a crime? I'm sure it happens, and when it does, it probably makes for a feel-good story. But again, most actual gun violence has nothing to do with some evil masked robber breaking into your suburban house and stealing your Pokemon cards. Most gun violence occurs between (poor minority) people who know each other and have reasons to kill each other.

One issue is, there are a lot of people in America who have at least tangential contact with this world of highly violent poor people. A lot of people don't actually get to decide that they're just not going to deal with violent assholes. Maybe their income forces them to live in areas where violent criminals can realistically get to them. Maybe their job forces them to interact with violent criminal types, even to the extent that the violent criminals form personal grudges against them. Maybe they have relatives who are violent criminals, and cannot easily or casually disown those relatives.

So while you personally might be made safe by socially divorcing yourself from the people likely to kill you over random petty things, not everyone else can follow that model.

Britainistan?

Its my way of mocking American (and I assume British) conservatives who think the UK from shore to shore has become some Sharia ruled hellhole where entire sections of the country are no go zones for proud white Christians. Its the same reason I can Iran "Iranistan", because the same conservatives think all ME countries are uniform evil brown shitholes.

Ironically, "istan" is from the Persian for "-land," so that for example "Uzbekistan" is literally "Uzbek-land." So calling the Iranians that is just recursive.

---

You are still missing the point here which is that it's not actually an argument from consequences, it's an argument from rights. From the point of view of the opponents of gun control in the US, the argument you just made sounds very similar to "Why do you feel the need for freedom of speech in the first place? What could go wrong? Aren't there nations that lack freedom of speech whose economies are growing rapidly under efficient governments?"

The right to bear arms isn't a right that is accepted across the western world. Thus it's not comparable to freedom of speech which is generally accepted. Other nations don't feel the need to label weapons ownership as a right, why does the United States feel that this is so essential?

See, the point here is that there are large numbers of American gun owners who simply are not going to concede that the government should confiscate all the guns, because they view bearing arms as a basic right of full citizenship and they're not going to sign it away any more than they're going to sign away their right to free speech.

They're being selfish. Unless they can show a net positive that comes from the right to bear arms they don't have a leg to stand on.

Do you apply the same standard to other fundamental rights? Do I have a right to vote if I can't prove that my vote is a net positive? Do I have a right to free speech? A right to a trial?

And granted, quite a few countries do not agree that "bearing arms" is a fundamental right. You have yet to convince me that they are correct to not think this.

People that believe they need to be armed are unreasonable and don't fit in with a modern western society. This can be evidenced by looking at nearly any other western nation, none of them feel so strongly about guns as the US and most are objectively better places to live.

This is you repeating yourself.

Also, don't I remember you being very resentful at the idea of having to listen to local customs that disagree with you, in other threads? And yet strongly opposed to having other people's idea of how a good government ought to work imposed on you?

Bluntly, I think the problem here is that you are "being selfish." You are unwilling or unable to accept that other people might believe and desire to live differently from how you think you ought to live. So when they don't act as you wish, they're 'being childish' or 'being selfish' and are obviously wrong because you and your designated pool of People Who Are Correct don't do things that way.

If someone constructs a glib enough case for why the nation would be better off if we had automatic monitoring software to stop anyone from saying anything nasty on the Internet, does that mean we should abandon individual freedom of speech?

Yes! If something produces positive outcomes for a population it is entirely acceptable to restrict the rights of the individual. We've seen this with anti-catcall laws, hate speech laws, laws against inciting panic, preaching violence, and bullying others in person or online. All of these laws restrict free speech to some degree and very few would argue that they should be stricken from the books.

Except that all these laws restrict the time, place, and manner in which you may speak freely. Or they refer to specific acts of harmful speech where the harm caused by the speech can be documented.

You're not proposing such relatively minor restrictions on the right to bear arms. You're proposing to abolish it- as if we were to formally go into our national constitutions, remove the free speech provisions, and create a paragraph or two empowering a Ministry of Truth to decide what it is and is not acceptable to say to each other.

And yet the difference between the US at large (with unsafe high gun ownership) and a place like New Hampshire is not the number of guns. Taking away the guns isn't going to change the issue nearly as much as spending the same amount of social and political capital in other ways.

I don't value reelection and thus don't value political capital. I think politicians should aim for one effective term where they follow through on campaign promises and push their vision as hard as they can. If that means not getting re-elected so be it.

You are... totally politically illiterate, aren't you?

It's irrelevant whether you value political capital. The point is, regardless of what it's worth, you're spending it inefficiently. Whatever amount of resources it would take to get rid of all guns in America, you would do far more good by spending those resources in some other way.

So... in other words, it doesn't matter that this law needlessly penalizes law-abiding citizens, because the goal is to create an indirect risk for criminals.

It's not ideal but how else can you see decreasing the number of handguns floating around the US?[/quote]In other words "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it."

Or, more realistically, to give everyone an incentive to leave guns loaded all the time, which will greatly increase the rate of accidental shootings.

Carrying a loaded weapon or the easy means to load a weapon would be grounds for a fine and confiscation of your weapon. That should create and incentive for law-abiding citizens not to load or even carry a weapon unless they intend to use it. If they intend to use their weapon it had best be for target shooting or hunting or they're going to be up shit creek.

So... to be clear, you want there to be laws both against carrying a gun that is not loaded, and against carrying a gun that is loaded.

You dishonest, treacherous little fuck.

I have literally never heard a more bullshit-riddled, passive-aggressive approach toward legislation than you. I cannot recall having heard anyone from a democratic society with less respect for the basic principles of functional democracy than you show, except perhaps for Wisconsin Republicans.

Got any more hypocritical self-contradictory legal requirements you want to impose?

Where's the limit, though?

I mean, as a pure thought experiment, would you be okay with dragging ninety people on a list out of their homes and shooting them, personally, with the goal of hopefully averting 100 deaths later on?

That's too steep a cost, but I seriously doubt that being armed could ever skew the numbers that far.

Because in that case I have to ask... what if your calculations are wrong? What if you're underestimating the effectiveness of your strategy? What if your finely calculated strategy for avoiding deaths doesn't work? Now you've got a lot of blood on your hands.

Please point to a case where increasing the number of armed civilians in a modern society has ever increased safety overall. Being armed has some merit in a frontier or in the wilderness where animal attacks are an issue, but I'm going to have to ask you for hard numbers that show an uptick in actual safety due to a proliferation of weapons.

Well, as noted earlier, gun ownership is awfully high in northern New England, and violence is awfully low...

I mean, seriously, you're treating this as an axiom, that if you make the guns go away, the crime goes away. And you seem totally indifferent to whether or not people die as a result of this, because "oh well, they died for a good cause."

I could respect this if you cared, but instead you've got this bizarre refusal to even acknowledge that human beings might rationally and justly desire the ability to defend themselves against violence.

[to Broomstick]

You're an anecdote, a blip on the radar when it comes to the harm caused by removing guns. I wouldn't wish anybody harm, but my choice wouldn't hinge on the outcomes for any given individual. If some are lost in the transition, and some nearly always are, they should be remembered but progress shouldn't stop because some will be harmed by it.

Except, you arrogant dishonest little shit, that there are many thousands if not millions of people like Broomstick in similar positions. Broomstick's husband is not the only disabled person in America who lives in a neighborhood where crime is a factor. Broomstick is not the only middle-aged woman worried about being assaulted by twenty year old brutes. Physically less-able people make up a large fraction of the population, and their ability to survive being threatened by thugs with butcher knives and tire irons is a legitimate concern.

Except you will not acknowledge this, because you are a smarmy dishonest arrogant little shit.

I wish you'd stayed banned. Can't for the life of me remember why that ever changed, come to think of it.

[Jub]

Do you apply the same standard to other fundamental rights? Do I have a right to vote if I can't prove that my vote is a net positive? Do I have a right to free speech? A right to a trial?

And granted, quite a few countries do not agree that "bearing arms" is a fundamental right. You have yet to convince me that they are correct to not think this.

The right to bear arms isn't a right in Canada, you've yet to convince me it should be.

Also, don't I remember you being very resentful at the idea of having to listen to local customs that disagree with you, in other threads? And yet strongly opposed to having other people's idea of how a good government ought to work imposed on you?

Go ahead and try to mine a quote that you could twist into me bitching about something like that. I've only been to three countries outside of Canada (the US, Fiji, and Australia) and never complained much about my experience or the customs of any of them. I actually take that back, I did complain that LAX was by far the worst airport I've ever been in, with the rudest staff, and most intrusive security. I doubt that counts though and I never vented about that here.

Bluntly, I think the problem here is that you are "being selfish." You are unwilling or unable to accept that other people might believe and desire to live differently from how you think you ought to live. So when they don't act as you wish, they're 'being childish' or 'being selfish' and are obviously wrong because you and your designated pool of People Who Are Correct don't do things that way.

At least my argument doesn't boil down to 'these is mah rights and they's impertant to mah way ah life'. Seriously, you've yet to explain why the United States is better off with the right to bear arms. Can you honestly say that being the most well-armed nation on earth has made the nation safer in a statistically significant way? Has the right to bear arms positively impacted the political landscape in some way? Do you support the uprising for that rancher who didn't want to pay his land usage fees, because that what the right to bear arms means.

Except that all these laws restrict the time, place, and manner in which you may speak freely. Or they refer to specific acts of harmful speech where the harm caused by the speech can be documented.

You're not proposing such relatively minor restrictions on the right to bear arms. You're proposing to abolish it- as if we were to formally go into our national constitutions, remove the free speech provisions, and create a paragraph or two empowering a Ministry of Truth to decide what it is and is not acceptable to say to each other.

How is creating laws against carrying a loaded gun outside of a gun range or hunting situation any different than banning certain types of speech in certain places? Because that and banning the selling and resale of handguns is really all I'm proposing here.

You are... totally politically illiterate, aren't you?

It's irrelevant whether you value political capital. The point is, regardless of what it's worth, you're spending it inefficiently. Whatever amount of resources it would take to get rid of all guns in America, you would do far more good by spending those resources in some other way.

Executive orders seem to laugh at political capital if your party is willing to back you using them. Hell even if they don't you'd have to go pretty far to get impeachment or no confidence votes going.

So... in other words, it doesn't matter that this law needlessly penalizes law-abiding citizens, because the goal is to create an indirect risk for criminals.

It's not ideal but how else can you see decreasing the number of handguns floating around the US?[/quote]In other words "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it."

So... to be clear, you want there to be laws both against carrying a gun that is not loaded, and against carrying a gun that is loaded.

I assume you're getting this from here:

Doesn't matter. The goal is to give police a reason to check any gun they see if it's loaded, or the owner has the means to load it on their person, the owner no longer owns that weapon and faces a fine. Long term this will effectively mean that there's no reason to carry a weapon on your person unless you're heading into or out of a range or in an area where you intend to hunt. It should at least force criminals to be more careful with how they hide/carry weapons, combined with harsher sentences for crimes where guns were used it should have an effect on gun crime.

More specifically this horridly mangled line:

The goal is to give police a reason to check any gun they see if it's loaded, or the owner has the means to load it on their person, the owner no longer owns that weapon and faces a fine.

This should really read more like:

The goal is to give police a reason to check if any given weapon is loaded. If a gun is found to be loaded or the owner is found with rounds or magazines that would allow for easy loading of the gun, the weapon is to be seized and the owner fined. This rules are waived for legitimate uses and in areas where a firearm would be expected to be load. Examples of types of areas and usages would be gun ranges for target shooting, hunting areas for hunting, weapons repair and manufacturing facilities.

The correct way to carry your weapon to a from a site would be in a locked weapons case, or unloaded with ammunition stored in such a way that it is not ready for immediate use.

-----

Does that clear up the fact that people should be fully able to carry unloaded weapons and that police stop and search would only levy a fine and seize weapons if they are loaded or in a state where they could be quickly loaded?

Well, as noted earlier, gun ownership is awfully high in northern New England, and violence is awfully low...

Now please show the role guns play in this state of affairs. You'll note that I've never said that guns are the root cause of violence. I'm for their removal as part of a way to make the United States safer, I've also noted that my plan wouldn't be immediate and would take place over decades, or as I put it, a generation or two. I would also seek to put in place better social safety nets.

Now please, instead of just repeating that guns don't always cause increased violence show that they have utility and actually make the United States a safer place to live in any statistical sense.

Except, you arrogant dishonest little shit, that there are many thousands if not millions of people like Broomstick in similar positions. Broomstick's husband is not the only disabled person in America who lives in a neighborhood where crime is a factor. Broomstick is not the only middle-aged woman worried about being assaulted by twenty year old brutes. Physically less-able people make up a large fraction of the population, and their ability to survive being threatened by thugs with butcher knives and tire irons is a legitimate concern.

Except you will not acknowledge this, because you are a smarmy dishonest arrogant little shit.

So people in say Toronto, Vancouver, Kelowna (the crime capital of BC, and former crime capital of Canada) are never sick or disabled? Or are the criminals in Canada just a kinder gentler breed who go easy on the less fortunate?

If old, weak, and disabled people universally need guns why don't you see these categories of people in other nations clamoring to be allowed the right to arm themselves? Maybe it's because people outside of the United States are correct in assuming that a reduced number of guns, especially handguns, leads to a safer society.

I wish you'd stayed banned. Can't for the life of me remember why that ever changed, come to think of it.

Vendetta much Simon. That has shit all to do with the debate and, if you'll recall, I was the one to come clean about it when I had no reason to do so. The mods could have and still can ban me at any time if they so choose and thus far they have chosen not to. If you have an issue I suggest you take it up with the staff in private as per board rules instead of dragging this thread off topic.

[Lonestar]

Factcheck.org posted something interesting about some of Obama's and Carly whatsherfaces claims:

For 2013, the 10 states with the highest firearm age-adjusted death rates were: Alaska (19., Louisiana (19.3), Mississippi (17., Alabama (17.6), Arkansas (16., Wyoming (16.7), Montana (16.7), Oklahoma (16.5), New Mexico (15.5) and Tennessee (15.4).

The 10 states with the lowest firearm age-adjusted death rates were, starting with the lowest: Hawaii (2.6), Massachusetts (3.1), New York (4.2), Connecticut (4.4), Rhode Island (5.3), New Jersey (5.7), New Hampshire (6.4), Minnesota (7.6), California (7.7) and Iowa (8.0).

But when suicide was taken out of the equation...

[/quote]
Firearm deaths, however, include suicides, and there are a lot of them. In 2013, there were a total of 33,636 firearm deaths, and 21,175, or 63 percent, were suicides, according to the CDC. Homicides made up 11,208, or 33 percent, of those firearm deaths. The rest were unintentional discharges (505), legal intervention/war (467) and undetermined (281).

Homicide data for 2013 don’t give us a clear picture of homicides only by firearm; however, 70 percent of homicides for the year were by firearm. The 10 states with the highest homicide rates were: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, New Mexico, Missouri and Michigan. That lists includes six states that also have the highest firearm death rates.[/quote]

So, of the listed 10, only Maryland could be considered a strongly anti-gun state. Maybe MI as well. Seems to favor the argument that loose gun laws are a driver of homicides, right? Let's see what's going on with the lowest homicide rate states:

The 10 states with the lowest homicide rates are: North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Utah, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts and Oregon.

Hmm, how odd! Once again, we have only one state that could be called anti-gun(MA), the rest are exceedingly gun-friendly. Northern New England and Wyoming share the "most gun-law friendly states" crown with Arizona and Alaska in that the laws regarding acquiring firearms and carrying rights.

Like I said, it appears that lax gun laws do not make you substantially more vulnerable to homicide. If anything, it appears that it has zero affect. It does seem to increase the odds of you killing yourself with a gun though.

But suicide is an important distinction to make, as the pro-gun control people don't push that as a reason whenever something like the UCCC shooting happens, instead they focus on "gun violence" and mag bans(because I guess if you're gonna kill yourself you need more than 10 rds...).

[Zaune]

Just for a change of pace, I actually have a constructive suggestion to make it harder to acquire guns illegally without significantly inconveniencing the law-abiding.

Mandate that everyone applying for a permit demonstrate that they have a proper gun-safe, and have an occasional inspection by county officials -with adequate advance notice- to make sure you're not getting sloppy about failing to keep them secure. If a weapon ends up being stolen through your own negligence there should be criminal penalties, especially if that gun ends up being used to commit another crime.

Can anyone think of any reasonable objections to that, besides the admittedly formidable logistical challenges?

[Simon_Jester]

The most likely response is that gun safes are quite expensive and so this greatly increases the minimum wealth required to be armed. It also severely inconveniences people who happen to collect firearms, though in those cases at least the cash value of the guns will be dramatically less than the cash value of the safe(s).

Now, I'm actually fairly agreeable to this objection- gun owners are responsible for securing their weapons in my opinion. Although I think it should be implemented at a local level, not a federal level- because there are parts of the country where gun thefts and shootings with stolen guns simply are not that common, while in other parts they are far more common.

Which is a major general issue with gun control in America, really- there are parts of the country where you can make a good case for it being needed, and other (quite large) parts where it is definitely not needed, and so there is literally no such thing as a universally acceptable solution to the problem.

[Zaune]

Alright, so let's say "an adequate means of securing the firearm against theft". A closet with a solid door and a padlock of reasonable quality, a consumer-grade strongbox... Sufficient security to stop some junkie who's climbed through a window looking to walk off with your stereo pocketing it so they can cut out the middleman and stick up the pawnshop, you know?

[Grumman]

Just for a change of pace, I actually have a constructive suggestion to make it harder to acquire guns illegally without significantly inconveniencing the law-abiding.

Mandate that everyone applying for a permit demonstrate that they have a proper gun-safe, and have an occasional inspection by county officials -with adequate advance notice- to make sure you're not getting sloppy about failing to keep them secure. If a weapon ends up being stolen through your own negligence there should be criminal penalties, especially if that gun ends up being used to commit another crime.

Can anyone think of any reasonable objections to that, besides the admittedly formidable logistical challenges?

- You are demanding that people forfeit their constitutional right to not have their house searched without probable cause if they want to use their constitutional right to bear arms.

- You want to keep a registry of all gun ownership, allegedly only so that you can make sure they are where they're supposed to be, but easily abused to help you confiscate guns.

- The threat that you might shoot a home invader helps secure your firearm against theft. A would-be burglar who knows you are unarmed can afford to be more brazen which both puts you in greater danger and gives him more options for how to get access to your guns.

[Channel72]

I literally did not say "abolishing gun rights leads to abolishing free speech."

What I did say is "Okay, you are willing to say that a right should be revoked if it becomes (arguably) costly and impractical to keep it. Does that apply only to the right to bear arms? Or does it also apply to other rights such as freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial?"

Please do not strawman my position.

Okay, fair enough. The answer is yes, it applies across the board.

Rights are not some sacred endowment owed to us by the mere fact that we exist. Rights are just an illusory abstraction, propped up by often-arbitrary legislation and centuries of political discourse, mostly favoring the views of whichever party has historically had the most success in cementing its influence. There are many rights that most high HDI nations have decided are important. Usually, freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial are among those.

But more importantly, both freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial have solid political arguments propping them up. Even so, they are not sacred cows, and they are not absolute. There are no absolute rights, and any political theory has endless edge cases. Freedom of speech is important in a democracy, because (A) historically, tyrants have abused their authority by oppressing people who said things they didn't like, and (B) freedom of speech is vital in the democratic political process. But it's not absolute and it's not sacred, and there a billion edge cases where freedom of speech is curtailed. Not just in the cliche "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" scenario (has anyone actually checked if that's even illegal?), but in various average, everyday circumstances. You may have no freedom to speak openly about company secrets if you signed a contract with your employer, or state secrets if you work for the government, or saying anything that tarnishes someone's reputation (libel laws) etc. Again, there are many edge cases, and no right is sacred or above reexamination or debate.

So, I really have little sympathy for the idea that simply because we currently have the "right" to own firearms, it means this is actually a good idea that shouldn't be challenged or modified. And this applies to all rights. Yes, if a right suddenly starts causing all sorts of unintended problems, then it should be reexamined. Obviously, we need to weigh these problems against whatever benefits the right provides, but that doesn't mean any right we currently enjoy is a sacred, untouchable, holy cow. Rights need to stand up to scrutiny, and they need to stand up to a rational cost/benefit analysis. It is not enough to simply say "rights are sacred", and end it at that.

Regardless, I suspect people's opinions about this issue more or less revolve a lot around personal experience, rather than some firm ideology about citizen's rights or crime stats.

Mine don't- I don't own a gun, have no serious plan to own a gun, and have never been in a situation where I feel owning a gun would have made my life better.

But I'm a firm believer in at least listening to the other side in any debate I participate in. And watching the gun debate I've become convinced that there are a lot more pro-gun people who understand the anti-gun arguments than there are anti-gun people who understand the pro-gun arguments.

Your views about gun control may not be based on personal experience, but it certainly appears that the expectations and preconceptions you bring to a gun control debate are heavily influenced by your experience with, for lack of a better phrase, "rabid, unreasonable anti-gun type people". At least, this definitely seems to influence the direction you take your polemic.

I've personally never engaged with these "rabid, unreasonable anti-gun type people". I have no doubt they exist, as it's a touchy issue, but the way I approach the debate is more influenced by the opposite side of the spectrum. I'm more influenced by what I've seen from pro-gun conservatives who say stupid bullshit like "too many gun-free zones are the reason for school shootings", etc. (This is, apparently, manifestly false, as "gun-free zones" don't even factor in to whatever twisted calculus is going on in the mind of a school shooter.)

Entirely true. On the other hand, there are plenty of places in the world where lots of murders over such issues happen (and have happened in the past) without anyone owning any guns at all. So that aspect of the personal experience, in my honest opinion, does not really address the issue.

Yes, but more advanced weapons technology only increases the stakes here. A poor, poverty stricken hellhole where the local thugs run around with clubs and knives is likely to see less casualties (and certainly, less innocent bystander casualties) than the same, poverty stricken hellhole with modern firearms. I mean, you obviously agree (I assume) that it probably wouldn't be a good idea to import and distribute thousands of RPGs throughout Detroit or Newark, or even allow law-abiding citizens to legally own RPGs, so clearly the level of firepower and ratio of effort to destruction-factor on the part of a criminal (or inept operator) plays into your thought process here.

Because getting an anti-gun advocate to admit "disarming law-abiding citizens is orthogonal to the causes of violence in Newark and elsewhere" is also like pulling teeth. The typical gun control advocate tends to start with measures that will disarm law-abiding citizens faster than they disarm criminals. And the refusal to acknowledge that this is a reality, or that some of the law-abiding citizens have a legitimate interest in being armed for their own safety and security, creates a sense that it is not worth trying to engage, compromise, or negotiate with gun control advocates.

Fair enough. Again, I haven't really engaged this "rabid, unreasonable anti-gun" type crowd.

One issue is, there are a lot of people in America who have at least tangential contact with this world of highly violent poor people. A lot of people don't actually get to decide that they're just not going to deal with violent assholes. Maybe their income forces them to live in areas where violent criminals can realistically get to them. Maybe their job forces them to interact with violent criminal types, even to the extent that the violent criminals form personal grudges against them. Maybe they have relatives who are violent criminals, and cannot easily or casually disown those relatives.

So while you personally might be made safe by socially divorcing yourself from the people likely to kill you over random petty things, not everyone else can follow that model.

Yes, and personal safety is at least a reasonable argument to make in favor of firearm ownership.

But as long as we're having a discussion about society in the long-term, the personal safety argument is mostly just a band-aid response. The long term solution would be to mostly eliminate the need for firearm ownership by instituting measures to reduce poverty and crime (and this includes finding and confiscating the thousands of illegally circulating firearms in inner-cities.)

But it's telling that the loudest pro-gun voices are usually not people who need to interact with violent criminals or impoverished neighborhoods. The loudest pro-gun voices are not people from Newark or Detroit. They're from rural places, or places with very low amounts of gun-violence, who believe that firearm ownership is something to be valued in and of itself, for its own right, regardless of any benefits it may bring (like personal safety).

[Ziggy Stardust]

There have been several claims in this thread about registries being abused to help the government confiscate guns, with New York being pointed to as an example. Would one of you mind providing some evidence that this happened? A Google search only comes up with articles on right wing blogs and FOX News, which I am not inclined to take at face value. The closest thing I can find is this example from Buffalo, but it is an utterly disingenuous example to use for reasons that should be obvious to any individual with a functioning frontal lobe that reads the story.

So, can these people provide more authoritative sources for their claims?

[Zaune]

- You are demanding that people forfeit their constitutional right to not have their house searched without probable cause if they want to use their constitutional right to bear arms.

I'm not sure what the legal precedents are Stateside, but I should point out that so far as I'm aware, visits from the fire marshall are considered compatible with the 4th Amendment. I fail to see how a compliance inspection would be substantially different.

- You want to keep a registry of all gun ownership, allegedly only so that you can make sure they are where they're supposed to be, but easily abused to help you confiscate guns.

And this is worse than everything else the US government is blithely tracking about your day-to-day activities how exactly? The deterrent value of untraceable privately-owned firearms when it comes to unconstitutional shenanigans has so far been rather disappointing, so far as I can see from an outside perspective.

- The threat that you might shoot a home invader helps secure your firearm against theft. A would-be burglar who knows you are unarmed can afford to be more brazen which both puts you in greater danger and gives him more options for how to get access to your guns.

So keep the gun-safe in your bedroom and the key on the nightstand.

[LaCroix]

The most likely response is that gun safes are quite expensive and so this greatly increases the minimum wealth required to be armed.

I don't know, I (in Austria) can pick up a good certified gun safe for about 250 dollars, a cheap one for 150, and a pistol safe for ~30 in a local hardware store...
http://www.hornbach.at/shop/Tresore-Kas ... liste.html

And frankly, I bought mine, equal to the 105A model, for less(about 150$) in another hardware chain who don't have an online shop.

If that kind of money is unaffordable to you (30$ for a pistol case - my brother has one of those), then you probably can't afford having/firing a gun.

[Broomstick]

As for home defense, that's a symptom of the problem. People in other nations don't feel the strong need for home/self-defense guns because they're already safe enough. That folks in the US don't feel this way shows that you feel every criminal will have a gun and thus you must as well. It's a cycle that self-propagates very strongly.

No, it's not about "every criminal will have a gun". It's also about people who can't physically defend themselves bare handed or in close melee with a typical criminal.

We also still have substantial areas where the wildlife is hazardous. Alaska is the famous one, but places like Montana and the Dakotas still have large predators that can and have attacked humans. Unless you have a provision for people to defend themselves in areas where wildlife is an actual threat I can't go along with your notions. That is an area where North America differs significantly from Europe.

It's also not just about firearms - a lot of places want to or have banned things like pepper spray or tazers for civilian use. These situations are lost against the louder noise of the anti-gun crowd, but there is a segment of the population that wants to take away the ability of large groups of people to defend themselves.

I'm sorry - I'm not "consenting" to be robbed, beaten, raped, or killed for your social agenda. I do believe people have a right to self-defense.

When did I say a firearms ban was the only reason for change? It plays a part, as do other policies.

Wait, wait, wait - I thought you were going to allow existing firearm owners to continue to own their weapons? I thought you were going to allow for hunting and target shooting? Which is it, regulation or ban? Continued use or ban? Make up your mind.

Banning guns won't end crime and I've never stated that it would, what it does is mean that violent crime needs to happen at arms length and with less effective weapons. That in itself is a small victory.

In other words - fuck women, the elderly, and the disabled who can't defend themselves against the typical young, male criminal. Fuck you. I don't consent to be collateral damage in your agenda.

It would be interesting if healthy, young men were banned from owning handguns and they were allowed only for women, disabled, and elderly people at physical disadvantage. Not sure it would be better but it's an interesting notion. Will never happen, though, because too many men regard their gun as an extension of their penis (yes, I know, that's part of the problem).

The right to bear arms isn't a right that is accepted across the western world. Thus it's not comparable to freedom of speech which is generally accepted. Other nations don't feel the need to label weapons ownership as a right, why does the United States feel that this is so essential?

Because we started as a small, weak nation whose population had to deal with dangerous wildlife, hostile natives they had displaced, hunting was the major or only source of meat for many, and for a time had to deal with a colonial power that wanted us to be a subservient colony again. It's not because Americans are crazy. There is an actual historical context for this.

People that believe they need to be armed are unreasonable and don't fit in with a modern western society.

So you're saying people who live in Alaska and Montana aren't part of modern western society?

If someone constructs a glib enough case for why the nation would be better off if we had automatic monitoring software to stop anyone from saying anything nasty on the Internet, does that mean we should abandon individual freedom of speech?

Yes! If something produces positive outcomes for a population it is entirely acceptable to restrict the rights of the individual. We've seen this with anti-catcall laws, hate speech laws, laws against inciting panic, preaching violence, and bullying others in person or online. All of these laws restrict free speech to some degree and very few would argue that they should be stricken from the books.

There is restricting and there is banning.

Contrary to rumor, it is NOT a free-for-all for guns in the US. Guns are regulated and have become harder to get within my lifetime. You seem to alternate between "more regulation for guns" and "ban guns". You might want to get more consistent with how you express your thoughts because, honestly, you seem pretty reasonable most of the time then every once in awhile "BAN GUNS!!!!" pops through. It's a bit disconcerting to those of us who think there are legitimate reasons for some people to own weapons.

Once again - the vast majority of Americans are in favor of some sort of regulation, many think current regulation could be improved (either through better enforcement, better regulations, or both). Our positions are (usually) not as far apart as you seem to think.

And yet the difference between the US at large (with unsafe high gun ownership) and a place like New Hampshire is not the number of guns. Taking away the guns isn't going to change the issue nearly as much as spending the same amount of social and political capital in other ways.

I don't value reelection and thus don't value political capital. I think politicians should aim for one effective term where they follow through on campaign promises and push their vision as hard as they can. If that means not getting re-elected so be it.

They should slavishly adhere to campaign promises even if circumstances change or new information comes to light? How is that a good for society?

But aside from that - political capital is something that has to be considered. Otherwise, you might as well say you don't care how much money something costs. In reality, money counts, you need money to build something or hire people to do something. Also in reality, political capital has a lot to do with what can and can't be done in society in regards to changing laws and culture.

So... in other words, it doesn't matter that this law needlessly penalizes law-abiding citizens, because the goal is to create an indirect risk for criminals.

It's not ideal but how else can you see decreasing the number of handguns floating around the US?

While I do agree there are handguns than needed floating about the US, I also think removing them is treating the symptom and not the cause of violence. Treating the fever of someone with a raging infection has some merit, but it still leaves them horribly ill. Treating the cause of the infection is what will cure them.

That's why I brought up instances where, even with no guns involved, me and mine have had to deal with violent and threatening situations.

If they intend to use their weapon it had best be for target shooting or hunting or they're going to be up shit creek.

What, you're going to criminalize someone using a weapon in self-defense? I'm not talking about purchasing for self-defense, I'm talking about using a weapon bought for hunting or target shooting for self-defense. That's like saying if you use your chef's knife, your main cooking tool, to kill someone who broke into your house you're going to be up shit creek for defending yourself.

Now, if you say it's OK to use a weapon you store in your house to defend yourself but not carry it on your person that's a little different. After all, I'm not allowed to carry my kitchen knife everywhere I go, either. If I'm carrying a concealed knife I can already have my weapon confiscated and be arrested in many places.

You really think that willingness to accept the death of oneself or a loved one as "the price we have to pay" for some abstract social initiative is unusual?

Other nations have made this choice, so I'd say that it is.

I'd say that your viewpoint is unusually extreme on that point.

Actually, the US used to have a MUCH higher rate of gun ownership and use and a much lower incidence of gun crime. In the frontier days guns were pretty essential. Gun ownership has fallen since the founding of the nation.

So... you have to ask, why is the amount of gun crime going up while the percentage of people owning guns is going down over the long view?

Obviously the main factor related to the increase in gun crime, and crime in general, is population density.

No. It's not. It's poverty combined with crowding. Armed rich people living densely in high rises don't have nearly the rate of gun violence as poor people living in single-family houses.

In Chicago, it's not the Gold Coast and River North high rises full of upper middle class and wealthy individuals who are shooting each other. It's poor people in much less densely population outlying neighborhoods.

Your premise is false. Population density alone does not create violence or gun crime.

(I do wish to say that I am fine with gun laws being different for dense, urban environments than for rural or wilderness areas. Cities require different rules than more scattered habitations, from parking to trash handling to noise limits to a dozen other things I could name)

Gun crime is a symptom. Guns in and of themselves don't cause murders and crime, they are tools that can be used to commit crimes just as knives and baseball bats can be so used. Shouldn't we be asking (in addition to "can we better manage guns?") why these sorts of crimes occur? What drives crime?

You must have missed the bits where I advocated for better social systems as well. Just taking guns away will only have so much impact.

I think a difference here is that you seem to want to start with taking guns away and some other people want to start on the social systems first.

You see, for most of us, we don't worry about getting shot on a daily basis. Most of the gun violence is in particular inner-city locations that most of us can easily avoid. Some of us look at that and say it's not the existence of guns that's the problem because guns are everywhere but this problem isn't happening everywhere, there is clearly something else driving this phenomena. Maybe we should find out what that something is and fix that, because not only would it take care of the gun violence problem, it would also avoid/fix other forms of violence generated by that something as well.

So... you just purchased a gun and you're walking out of the store the police can confiscate it because you're not on the way to the range or to hunt? You can't bring your gun in to a professional if you're having a problem with it, meaning you can never have it repaired? You can't legally sell your gun to licensed dealer should you no longer desire to own it? You can't have an accessory like a new scope mounted or a damaged stock repaired? (The average person does not have the tools or skills for that sort of thing)

See, that's the sort of kneejerk rule making that pisses people off. Your rule has zero provisions for such mundane concerns as repair. You're not thinking this through. You're putting people in a position where they may not be able to safely maintain their guns. Gee, thanks.

Keep in mind, too, that traveling to and from a hunting area might entail cross-country travel - that's why US airlines have clearly delineated rules for transport of firearms on airplanes for the safety of both crew and passengers (locked cases in checked baggage, basically)

Where did I ever state that I was giving a complete, ready to be passed into law, statement about weapons control? I'm spitballing shit on a message board without anybody to bounce ideas off of.

Then make it clear you're "spitballing", that you haven't thought it all out or that you thought would require fine tuning.

It's not like crooks run down the street waving handguns in the air and firing them off like Yosemite Sam. What makes you think criminals - who are by definition lawbreakers? - are going to give a fuck about your new law? Has mandatory sentencing and harsher laws had jackshit effect on any other aspect of crime in the US?

Counterpoint, if gun control has no effect why don't larger percentages of Canadian, British, German, Japanese, etc. criminals carry guns?

Actually, in parts of Canada there are just as many guns per people as the US. Those are, of course, more rural and wilderness areas than the built up southern region of Canada but that's an example of a country where they acknowledge different environments should have different rules regarding guns. Canada also has a much better social safety net than the US, which is probably a significant factor.

With Britain, being an island without (I presume - correct me if I'm wrong) major gun manufacturer it's a lot easier to control the import of handguns. Chicago tried to ban them, but since it was trivially easy to walk to Indiana next door and buy one it didn't work so well.

Japan long had a tradition of the common people NOT being armed. It was one of those societies where it was the elite that were allowed to be armed, not the masses. Much of Europe historically has been the same. It makes it culturally easier to restrict weapons. Contrast this to the US where, in frontier times, not owning a gun or not being willing to own one would have marked you as crazy because how would you defend yourself from wildlife, hostile people, or get meat for your family?

Yes, times have changed for all of those nations but that doesn't mean the culture has kept up.

And finally, the US does have control and regulation of firearms, it's is not the free-for-all you imply that it is. You might want to argue the US needs more gun control, or more effective gun control, or better enforcement, but this notion there is no regulation is a myth.

So... why the hate for a legitimate request for self-defense? What if it's some guy in a wheelchair able to safely handle a gun but unable to run or otherwise defend himself who lives in a bad neighborhood? Just sucks to be him, I guess. What if it's some petite woman who's stalker-ex has tried to kill her twice, she should just wave a court order piece of paper in his face the next time he shows up?

Why aren't these things large enough issues in other nations to cause people to ask for the right to bear arms? You're looking at this from a very closed off view where you can only see the worst case situation. The fact is that these situations aren't as common as you make them out to be and other nations get along fine without guns.

There ARE people in places like Australia and Britain who think the current laws there are excessive and would like them loosened. I've spoken to them out here on the internet.

I doubt you would feel that way if it were you on the wrong end of the barrel. Do you volunteer to be the first shot?

Sure. If my death would mean something the world can have my life, or my mom's life, or my brothers. It would be a tragedy for those close to me and/or myself, but if the end result is a better world who am I to selfishly stop it.

You do realize yours is very much a minority viewpoint in the world?

Most people would find that trade-off unacceptable.

Mind you, if that is your position I can deal with it - I've got some neighbors who are so anti-violence they won't even physically defend themselves from another human being. Just don't expect everyone else to agree with your position because we don't. Most people are a lot more selfish than your stated position.

It won't clean things up over night, it might even have negative effect short term, but how do you start fixing the issue with guns in America if reducing the number of guns isn't on the table?

The issue is more one of crime than guns. We didn't use to have such high level of gun crime and random shootings, even when more of the population owned and used guns. You can start fixing the issue by addressing the root causes of violence rather than the symptoms.

Sorry, as someone who has had someone attempt to break into my home in the last year or so I want a self-defense option. We didn't run out and immediately buy a shotgun, but it was one option we looked at. Of course, I couldn't possibly carry a concealed shotgun (there's no way I could hide it on my small person) and we wouldn't be taking it anywhere, but it is a very effective home defense tool. We have opted to keep the crossbow, the garden shovel we used to fight off the would-be burglar last time, and fully charged cell phones for calling 911, but the local cops have told us that we have a right to defend ourselves while in our own homes and while they'll get there as fast as they can they can't be there instantly.

Oh, about the crossbow - last used on a human being when a would-be truck thief threatened the life of my spouse with a knife that, based on length, could be described as a short sword. Which just goes to show that even with guns so readily available there's plenty of crime that occurs without them, some of it quite hazardous. Get rid of guns you'll still have violent crime, which is a legitimate concern. My spouse is disabled, he can not run away from a situation, he is not as strong as he used to be and less able to physically defend himself. What is he supposed to do? Maybe YOU don't care if he's injured, more disabled, maimed or killed but I sure as hell do! Likewise, I don't particularly want to suffer any of that myself.

You're an anecdote, a blip on the radar when it comes to the harm caused by removing guns.

Where did I say we even owned a gun?

Would you like to try reading what I actually write rather than listening to the voices in your head?

I gave those as examples as incidents that might lead people to arm themselves with a gun due to personal fear, and because they feel a need for self-defense. It's also an illustration that removing guns will not make people safe - no one in those above incidents had a gun. The kid who tried to force his way into our home was unarmed, he was relying on being young and fit and strong to overpower the two middle-aged people, one female and one visibly disabled, he was confronting. We looked like easy targets. If we had not happened to have something readily at hand to use as a weapon we would have been easy targets.

The truck thief was armed with a knife, not a gun. After getting his description, and his fingerprints off the weapon he dropped when he fled, the police were able to identify him as someone who had severely injured others who had surprised him during a robbery, during which he always carried a knife and never a gun.

No guns involved, but certainly crime and danger. Now, as it happens, both of the people in this household have never been the sort to carry a gun everywhere and have the wits to use alternatives that are on hand, but we have certainly had to physically defend ourselves in the past. If we have those sorts of things happening now, with guns being available, then banning guns will in no way reduce those forms of crime and violence. Yes, I'd like to see less gun violence but I'd really prefer less violence and crime overall.

I wouldn't wish anybody harm, but my choice wouldn't hinge on the outcomes for any given individual. If some are lost in the transition, and some nearly always are, they should be remembered but progress shouldn't stop because some will be harmed by it.

I find that position callous and immoral.

Yes, it is. What else do you expect from Americans?

Maybe something resembling rational thought and a sense of community-mindedness instead of behaving like children and making the rest of the world wish the Brits had properly kicked your ass when you were still a colony.

How about, instead of dismissing a difference of opinion as "childish" you actually consider the historical reasons for the 2nd amendment? How about you consider the notion that the problem isn't gun violence it's a problem of too much violence in any form in a society? How about you don't expect Americans to be British just as you wouldn't expect someone from Thailand to be like someone from Japan?

I agree, it accounts for a lot of fucked up stuff. The problem from my viewpoint (as one of those liberals that would prefer better infrastructure, universal health care, a real society safety net, and so forth) is that is the environment in which I currently live. I might greatly prefer something else, but my reality is I live in a "I got mine, fuck you" society and I have to find a way to survive in it.

So nothing can change because that change might hurt poor old Broomstick.

Nice way to miss the point, shithead.

Since I, personally, don't have a way to change my environment I have to find a way to survive it. Fuck you if you don't understand that. I can't change the culture in this country by waving my hands and chanting. I can not emigrate to another country, they don't take middle-aged women with disabled husbands with little money and no amazing special skills. Oh, wait - I could go to Canada. If I'm willing to abandon my husband who is NOT welcome there. If I was truly as selfish as you claim I would have done that but the fact I've stayed because of that silly family loyalty thing should be proof otherwise.

So I am stuck here. No other country is going to take us in. I mean, fuck, Europe is showing a distinct lack of willingness to take in people with a LOT more compelling need that the two of us here. Saying "go elsewhere" is mockery of advice when in reality there is no other place for us to go.

Thus, we must find a way to survive here. I don't care to lay down MY life to make YOUR point.

You are part of the problem with America because you'd rather eek out a miserable existence than allow for the chance that you end up worse off.

What makes you think my day-to-day existence is "miserable"?

There are certainly some negatives in my life, but right now I have what I need and even some of what I want. I'm actually pretty happy most of the time. What makes you think I'm miserable?

However, it is a reality of the environment I'm in that there is a risk of violence. It's sort of like the risk of tornadoes. You take reasonable precautions and consider how you would handle the situation, then go about your life. I no more worry about violence on a constant basis than I worry about tornadoes on a constant basis, but I'd be an idiot not to consider either a potential to be a real threat in my life. Sure, it would be great if I didn't have to worry about either, and finding ways to reduce the risk is a good thing, but because I live here I have to deal with the risks that are here.

Frankly, sitting there where you have to worry about neither tornadoes nor violence and arrogantly proclaiming me to be part of the problem because I can neither move nor magically fix the situation just shows what an asshole you are.

[Broomstick]

The most likely response is that gun safes are quite expensive and so this greatly increases the minimum wealth required to be armed.

I don't know, I (in Austria) can pick up a good certified gun safe for about 250 dollars, a cheap one for 150, and a pistol safe for ~30 in a local hardware store...[snip]...If that kind of money is unaffordable to you (30$ for a pistol case - my brother has one of those), then you probably can't afford having/firing a gun.

I think we're stumbling over a language issue here.

In the US, a "safe" implies a large, heavy, metal box, something that probably weighs 50 or 100 kilos or more and is sure as hell not portable unless you're idea of "portable" includes a truck and forklift to get it into the truck.

I gather, from participating in far too many of these debates on line, that in many other places a "gun safe" is some sort of lockbox that most able-bodied people can pick up and carry.

When someone in the US says "secured for transport" they might well mean what someone outside the US means by "gun safe". I suspect that an Austrian "gun safe" is something that a US airline would consider acceptable to check in baggage, but Americans would probably call it a "locked case" rather than a "gun safe".

So perhaps we should define what we mean by "gun safe" to avoid any further misunderstandings?

[Joun_Lord]

Guns do cost society as a whole. Every time a person with a table leg or a cap gun gets shot because police fear a gun it costs society. Every time a kid gets a hold of a gun and causes harm with that's a cost. Every suicide that might have been put off if a gun wasn't handy is a cost. Every time a stolen gun is used in a crime that's a cost. None of these costs taken alone are very large, but together they add up.

Cops still shoot people whether or not they look like they have a gun. Children harm themselves with knives and chemicals. Someone who wants to commit suicide will do so any way possible. Crimes are committed without guns. Those costs would be paid whether or not guns were available. Whats more none of those are the result of just having guns, they are the result of people doing bad or stupid shit. A gun is a tool, a tool that can be misused but a tool none the less. Removing that tool does not remove the reason for the misuse. Corrupt or poorly trained cops will still murder people for being black, homeless, or crazy. Poorly supervised children will still die. People will still commit suicide. Violent crime will happen.

Taking away the guns does not stop that because taking away guns did not take away the reason for those things happening. It will arguably make things worse because idiots will think something WAS done and will be less vigilant towards stopping those things.

As for home defense, that's a symptom of the problem. People in other nations don't feel the strong need for home/self-defense guns because they're already safe enough. That folks in the US don't feel this way shows that you feel every criminal will have a gun and thus you must as well. It's a cycle that self-propagates very strongly.

Safe enough doesn't equal safe, especially when someone is stealing your stuff, hurting you and your loved ones, and snuffing out your existence. Maybe Americans value their lives more then you enlightened self sacrificing saints but they greedily want to be safe as possible and relying on perpetually delaying law enforcement, the kindness of criminals, or the tried and true practice of shitting oneself in terror does not cut it.

And nah, Americans don't feel every criminal has a gun. But they do feel any criminal can have one or a knife or just be bigger and stronger. They feel that thye can be attacked, they can be hurt, and its reasonably intelligent to be prepared in case that does happen. Its akin to wearing a seatbelt or buying home insurance. People who wear seatbelts don't feel they will wreck but know its a possibility and not doing anything about it is Darwinian. Insurance doesn't mean they know their house will burn down but feel its a good possibility so they wish to be protected.

When did I say a firearms ban was the only reason for change? It plays a part, as do other policies.

Then why are you harping so bad on gun control at any cost? The goal should be public safety and societal improvement, not just banning guns. You don't start at guns and work your way backwards from there. You start at public safety, freedoms, improving society, all you can eat tuesdays, and increasing the standard of living for all and looks for way to do so. Banning or regulating firearms might be part of it but might not be if the research shows it to be because again disarming bears should not be the goal.

The UK is a good comparable to the US in terms of wealth equality, population density, job creation, etc. so it makes for a good comparable.

And the UK also has a completely different history, different environment, different demographics, different measuring system, different teeth, the Queen, Queen, and system of LAAAWWWWWWWWWs. The same things that work in that land of tea drinkers and a series of tubes underground that didn't actually work may not work in the land of the freezer burns and Atlanta Braves.

Yes, for a nation its size it is a crime ridden and violent place, but without guns it lacks the mass shootings and gives victims a chance to fight back or flee more reliably than if criminals were armed with gun.

So wait, just banning guns didn't end all crime as they knew it and make the country a happy and safe place with gummy bear unicorns and beautiful bouncing bare boobies? I'm shocked that a poorly thought out slap dash effort to fix crime didn't actually fix crime and bring over adorably blue footed seabirds that were shaved while leaving the still existing victims of crime at even more of a mercy to the criminal elemets, so very shocked.

Banning guns won't end crime and I've never stated that it would, what it does is mean that violent crime needs to happen at arms length and with less effective weapons. That in itself is a small victory.

The only crime it did was stop a incredibly tiny amount of crime while doing union jack and shite about most crime while disarming people of the ability to defend against the crime, rather allowing them to face their attackers on equal footing because I guess having grandma fight some 20 something punk is just the civilized thing to do.

[K. A. Pital]

Gun safe is actually a metal box that should be (not sure whether this is uniform across Europe, but I often found it to be so) bolted to a wall so that the possibility of escaping with it from the house/apartment is reduced.

So I am not sure a "locked case" is a safe, in European terms.

Having a safe does require spending additional money. It is also one of the instances where these additional expenses are quite justified.

[LaCroix]

The gun safes I posted are ~130 pounds (or more), hardened steel and have to be bolted into the (brick or concrete) walls of the house.
Bar using a truck or hours with an angle grinder nobody is going to open those.

Even the pistol box is to be bolted to the wall, and would take about half an hour of angle-grinding to open.

Hardly something a burglar would attempt in a home robbery.

[Zwinmar]

You do realize that most homes are made of pine around here...not steel I beams? All it takes is One of these to get at anything bolted down in most. Not to mention they are readily available to just about anyone.

[TheFeniX]

Mandate that everyone applying for a permit demonstrate that they have a proper gun-safe, and have an occasional inspection by county officials -with adequate advance notice- to make sure you're not getting sloppy about failing to keep them secure. If a weapon ends up being stolen through your own negligence there should be criminal penalties, especially if that gun ends up being used to commit another crime.

Can anyone think of any reasonable objections to that, besides the admittedly formidable logistical challenges?

Gun thefts from private individuals represent the least common ways criminals get guns to use for further crime. This is for a few reasons:

1. Gun owners already tend to armed. Unless you already have a gun, burglarizing a house where you know there are guns is a dangerous prospect. Hell, it's dangerous anyway and criminals actually prefer not to get in shoot-outs with armed anyone.
2. You don't know if the house you are entering even has guns.
3. When you need to commit a crime, you don't have the time to commit a pre-requesite crime to get a gun. You instead buy it from a dealer or shady FFL.
4. Gun owners tend to buy more expensive weapons than those used in crime. A Kimber is more likely to be sold/pawned and/or kept as a collectable or "Show-off" gun, than used to rob someone. When you consider those guns go for $1,000+ retail, the street value has to still be high. Why rob $20 with a thousand $ pistol when you can pawn it or sell it to a buddy, get a .38 Special for $20-$50 and rob someone with it? Or not rob anyone because you just made $100+. Also of note, the fancier the gun, the more identifiable it is.

It's too easy to commit a straw purchase from illicit dealers than worrying about armed home-owners. The majority of guns stolen from private citizens are done as crime of opportunity. Someone left it out when they weren't at home and left it in their car (like an idiot). These are still the most rare way guns get on the street.

At best, I think you "might" stop 6,000 gun thefts a year and many of those will never turn into future crimes. Whereas targeting illegal FFLs will stop hundred of thousands of illegal purchases/thefts of guns that have very low times-to-crime because they are usually bought specifically to commit further crime.

[TheFeniX]

Ghetto edit: I should add, it's likely a lot more than 6,000 now considering how much gun ownership went up under Obama (for no good reason). That said, the rate of FFLs selling to criminals has likely gone up as well. The studies done are ooooold (1994) and Congress had made sure it's going to be stupidly difficult to get more current information.

[Civil War Man]

Cops still shoot people whether or not they look like they have a gun. Children harm themselves with knives and chemicals. Someone who wants to commit suicide will do so any way possible. Crimes are committed without guns. Those costs would be paid whether or not guns were available. Whats more none of those are the result of just having guns, they are the result of people doing bad or stupid shit. A gun is a tool, a tool that can be misused but a tool none the less. Removing that tool does not remove the reason for the misuse. Corrupt or poorly trained cops will still murder people for being black, homeless, or crazy. Poorly supervised children will still die. People will still commit suicide. Violent crime will happen.

Most of this is true, but it's short-sighted to dismiss how firearms contribute to these problems by saying they are just tools. Yes, they are tools, but the purpose of a tool is to make doing a job easier or more efficient. And, when talking about how when guns are used to kill (whether through murder, accident, hunting, or suicide), they are the ultimate tool in that they have a very high lethality-to-ease-of-use ratio. Crimes are committed without guns, but the costs are not the same. Knives, for example, are just as easy to use as guns, but are significantly less lethal. It takes a lot more effort to kill a dozen people with a knife than it does with a gun, which is a big reason why you don't see too many swords in the army anymore. Bombs, on the other hand, have a lot more lethal potential than guns, but are also significantly harder to use since it requires more specialized knowledge to build, plant, and detonate a bomb (especially when you have to do all that while avoiding being discovered by law enforcement) than it does to use a gun.

Also, the specific part about "Someone who wants to commit suicide will do so any way possible" is, from what we've been able to determine, largely not true. A majority of people who try and fail to commit suicide don't make a second attempt, and even minor inconveniences have been known to prevent suicides because it gives the person time to reconsider. A big example of this is the Ellington and Taft bridges in DC. The two bridges are a short distance from each other, and the drop from them if you were to jump off is about the same, but people attempting suicide were disproportionately going to the Ellington bridge. When an anti-suicide barrier was put up on the Ellington bridge, however, it did not result in a significant increase in suicides at the Taft bridge (likely due to the Taft bridge having a higher railing than the Ellington bridge did, making it more difficult to jump off), and the overall suicide rate went down. Basically, when people were prevented from killing themselves by jumping off the Ellington bridge, most instead chose to not try to kill themselves at all. So if, hypothetically, we were to somehow magically make it impossible to kill yourself with a gun, what would more likely happen is that the number of suicides every year would drop by about the number of gun-related suicides we currently have (not exactly, since some would seek alternate methods, but most, statistically, would not).

[TheFeniX]

Conversely, before Australia overhauled their gun laws around 1996, the most common form of suicide was firearms (long-guns IIRC). The year after the laws went into effect, gun suicides plummeted, but the actual suicide rate went up a little. Australians just switched to hanging. You really can't cast a wide net and say "removing this avenue will stop the underlying cause."

[Thanas]

Do not use this thread to bring up old vendettas. Anybody doing so in this thread will be warned and/or tempbanned at the discretion of any passing mod.

[Joun_Lord]

Most of this is true, but it's short-sighted to dismiss how firearms contribute to these problems by saying they are just tools. Yes, they are tools, but the purpose of a tool is to make doing a job easier or more efficient. And, when talking about how when guns are used to kill (whether through murder, accident, hunting, or suicide), they are the ultimate tool in that they have a very high lethality-to-ease-of-use ratio. Crimes are committed without guns, but the costs are not the same. Knives, for example, are just as easy to use as guns, but are significantly less lethal. It takes a lot more effort to kill a dozen people with a knife than it does with a gun, which is a big reason why you don't see too many swords in the army anymore. Bombs, on the other hand, have a lot more lethal potential than guns, but are also significantly harder to use since it requires more specialized knowledge to build, plant, and detonate a bomb (especially when you have to do all that while avoiding being discovered by law enforcement) than it does to use a gun.

While its certainly true a firearm might exacerbate a problem, my point was they are not the cause of it and the problem shall continue in their absence. And they are still just a tool being misused, even if they are the most efficient. Without someones intent to misuse them they are no more deadly then a shoe and nobody throws a shoe, really. A gun becomes a dangerous instrument when someones taking in in their flippers and decides to use it. Just the same with a knife, a car, a hammer, a crossbow, a mounted moose head.

The problem is not the tool, its the intent. Even if banning guns was a good thing (its not, not even Hi-Points and Desert Eagles) it still leaves the intent intact infact.

Also, the specific part about "Someone who wants to commit suicide will do so any way possible" is, from what we've been able to determine, largely not true. A majority of people who try and fail to commit suicide don't make a second attempt, and even minor inconveniences have been known to prevent suicides because it gives the person time to reconsider. A big example of this is the Ellington and Taft bridges in DC. The two bridges are a short distance from each other, and the drop from them if you were to jump off is about the same, but people attempting suicide were disproportionately going to the Ellington bridge. When an anti-suicide barrier was put up on the Ellington bridge, however, it did not result in a significant increase in suicides at the Taft bridge (likely due to the Taft bridge having a higher railing than the Ellington bridge did, making it more difficult to jump off), and the overall suicide rate went down. Basically, when people were prevented from killing themselves by jumping off the Ellington bridge, most instead chose to not try to kill themselves at all. So if, hypothetically, we were to somehow magically make it impossible to kill yourself with a gun, what would more likely happen is that the number of suicides every year would drop by about the number of gun-related suicides we currently have (not exactly, since some would seek alternate methods, but most, statistically, would not).

Did the overall suicide rate go down at just the Duke Ellington and William H Taft bridges or overall in the area? As you said the Taft bridge was in the same area but was passed up because it was harder to go kersplat from so even if the Duke bridge was a no go that doesn't automatically mean people would go to the Taft. Beyond that there was no reason to believe that those planning to go skydiving without a parachute would be limited to these two bridges.

A study performed on some Canadian bridge in the cold and icy frozen hellhole of Toronto that when a suicide barrier went up the rate of jumping deaths remained unchanged (though they were jumped from new and exciting locales) even if the overall suicide rate went down. Because of the fact the overall suicide rates went down while jumping splattery rates didn't means probably it was a illusory correlation, the suicide rate changes doesn't have to do with the changes to the bridge. The suicide rates went down because of others factors.

The articles also makes mention of studies done in the wake of the Canadians and New Zealanders getting their guns pried from their still warm alive hands that while gun suicides went down (which is to be expected, fewer guns means fewer gun suicides just like fewer cars means fewer cars accidents and fewer clowns means fewer accidents in peoples pants from the terror.......TERROR!!!!!!) but was met with equal increases in other forms of suicide such as jumping.