MYTH.
I would think that banks and schools are the most common places where people get shot in the US.
Your dad must be a moron.
God I love living in England!
Yeah, i’ve thought about this. i’m very close with someone who has a concealed carry permit (no small feat, given that we live in a city with some of the strictest gun laws around). i’m not sure what to make of it. i guess it makes him FEEL safer, but i wonder if he actually IS safer. In some ways, i think he might be making everyone else a little LESS safe, so he’s being selfish.
That’s basically the reaction i have to it as well.
You know there’s no such thing as pickpockets in the US right?
It’s because of these…
Dude, that’s so not true. And a glock isn’t going to stop a pickpocket. i’ve told you about my concealed carry friend? How he got mugged on a night he happened to not be carrying his gun, and how even HE admits the gun wouldn’t have helped him anyway, since the guys who did it came up behind him and put him in a sleeper hold. They got his wallet with a huge wad of cash, his ipod and his cellphone. Had he been carrying his gun, they would’ve gotten THAT too. Again, even HE admits that.
Anecdotal evidence.
He worries that if somebody happens to glimpse his gun, it is more likely to cause a scene in those places than in other places.
Military stand offs between more or less equally matched foes, vs. wholesale slaughters when an unarmed populace has something a potential invader wants.
I think it would probably depend on what you mean by 'suffer'. If "They broke into my house and stole all my shit" is treated as 'suffered a crime' and "They broke into my house, I shot at them, and they didn't get any of my shit" is also treated as 'suffered a crime', then I suspect not. I also suspect that most crime statistics probably treat it that way. I don't want to mix up causation and correlation, but it does seem to be a trend that the most heavily armed places in the U.S. have lower crime rates, since you asked. But of course, they tend to be rural.
I would think it's a foregone conclusion that a person who is willing to break the law to get a gun will be more likely to have a gun than somebody who is not- and that that discrepancy will widen the harder it is to get a gun without breaking the law. That said, I do agree with you that criminals, crazy people and so on shouldn't be allowed to have guns, and enforcing laws like that (which already exist) is a very good ideas.
Seems like statistics should be considered here. I think that the single greatest contributors to crime are population density and multiculturalism. The presence of lots of guns in climates that have those two factors I suspect will lead to more violent death, but I highly doubt it will lead to more violent crime. That’s what I predict statistics will show: areas with high population density and lots of different ethnic/religious groups intermingled will have assloads of crime. Guns will make that crime more likely to turn deadly, but not noticeably affect the actual number of violent crimes. Also, speaking of statistics, I don’t think you’ll find statistical evidence that there is actually an existing problem that further gun restrictions will solve.
They are certainly not urban examples, but I know plenty of people that use guns to feed themselves, and no they are not robbing grocery stores. And an armed populace doesn’t need weapons parity with the US government, because a tyrannical US government is very unlikely to bomb itself. What’s more, we have examples of armed civilian populations holding their own against tyrannical governments going on right now.
I think it’s up to the people who are going to potentially have this reaction to decide that, not up to people who would rather we didn’t have any guns whatsoever.
Had an old guy at Dairy Queen tell me a story like this just today, in fact. He was driving down the road, stopped at a red light, and some crazy fucker started waving a gun at him from inside his car. There was a lot of traffic, so the old guy couldn't leave, but the kid gets out of his car in the middle of the street, abandoning the vehicle, waves the gun around. Old guy gets out to confront him (didn't want the kid to go off somewhere and kill somebody), the kid puts his gun away, attacks the old man, they get in some kind of fist fight. Cop comes over, breaks it up, hauls off the weird guy to jail. Right in the middle of the street, huh.
That kid shoulda had more tact. See though, I’m the old man in that situation. It’s the fucking kids with the invincibility complexes that you have to point the gun at. In the times in my life where I’ve had young people point a gun at me, I usually make a crazy face and start screaming mean horrible things at them, theb I say hold on a second fuck face lemme show you mine, then they run away.
But then again, there is that other issue of carrying a gun to prevent killing. Isn’t that why the police carry guns?
Of course, the police are holy saints of the fatherland, so maybe they don’t count.
In a manner of speaking perhaps, but you know it’s not as simple as that. As i see it, police carry guns as a means of getting people to cooperate with them. Police must be threatening enough that people will do what police tell them to do. So obviously, police kill people all the time. They have to. Notice they also carry guns all the time. That’s not just coincidence. Carrying a gun increases the likelihood that you will shoot somebody, which in turn increases the likelihood that you will kill or maim someone, which in turn increases the number of people killed or maimed. i don’t care how skilled you are with your weapon, if you carry a gun you are simply more likely to shoot someone. Fewer guns means fewer people shot.
i’m no fan of cops, but they and their firearms are a necessary evil.
I don’t think that has much effect on the AMOUNT of violence either way. The US and England were more or less matched with the Germans but their war was far bloodier than, say, Germany’s relatively easy takeover of Poland. i don’t dispute that an armed populace is better prepared to fight - in fact, that’s part of my point - but the claim that everybody being armed results in less violence doesn’t follow.
Actually i have heard that before and, yeah, it’s a correlation vs. causation issue. Relatively sparsely populated places are generally going to have less crime, and can safely accommodate more people owning firearms. i’ve always believed that gun control policies should vary from place to place.
Depends what you mean by “gun restrictions”. But yeah, if we just look at statistics, then 20 or so schoolkids getting shot while in class by some nut with an assault rifle or two happens relatively rarely, so banning assault rifles probably won’t lower the overall rates of gun crime much. So what, though? The nut in question probably couldn’t have pulled it off if the only thing he could get his hands on was a 9mm. Is it worth banning assault rifles to prevent or at least mitigate those types of incidents which only occur once or twice a year, as opposed to handgun related crimes which probably occur multiple times a day? i think so, but then i don’t own any assault rifles and i don’t ever want to, so it’s easy for me to say. i think gun advocates really need to examine their ethical position when they lobby for the right to own ever more deadly and advanced killing machines.
Then there’s the issue of better enforcement of existing laws, which is never popular with the gun lobby - in fact, they would do away with most existing laws given the opportunity.
Sure, but the govt also has tanks, trained soldiers, and shitloads of other stuff that even a populace as well armed as the US’s couldn’t ever hope to resist.
Sort of. But most of those armed populations are getting significant military aid and tons of weapons from elsewhere. It’s not like the Syrian rebels are just fighting with stuff they kept around prior to the uprising.
Hopefully without sounding like too much of an asshole here, i have to say i wonder why i should care much about the feelings of people who are going to have that reaction.
Well yeah, it’s an anecdote, and it’s not central to my central argument, but it’s also a true story that i think offers a lesson.
As a gun owner I don’t think all humans are mentally equipped to own guns. Some gun owners that previously were responsible can become irresponsible and dangerous. Will I become dangerous to the innocent? I don’t know, I don’t think so. Yet I support ownership of guns.
I know a guy who’s accidentally shot a hole in some wall or another of every place he’s ever lived.
So do the other robbers and mobsters, just less organized. So why give guns only to the robbers?
Well, you know. He’s one of those with his face all pierced up and covered with tattoos and shit, and the old man said he was probably on something. Who knows what was in his head, if anything. I come from that school where I wouldn’t point a gun at somebody unless it was going to be immediately followed by pulling the trigger- using it as a form of social expression is very odd to me.
Well, if the US and England stood together right away, I don’t think that part of the war would have ever happened- it wasn’t clear then that the US would do anything if England was attacked (and indeed we did not).
It seems logical to me that if you have a gun and your aim is to start robbing people, you're going to be more apt to act in a community where you feel like you're the only one with a gun than in one where you know plenty of people walk around armed. I'm simply saying that being defenseless invites violence unto yourself. Still, I think the statistics will show that population density and multiculturalism are bigger predictors.
I think there should be some leeway on this, sure. It’s easy to overstep the bounds of the Constitution though.
Well, so you need to have some sort of actual reason to justify a gun ban, or change to registration, or other law. If, statistically it's not actually going to improve anything, then you don't have an argument for inconveniencing people, or taking their property, or whatever downside the law would have. Ethically, it's just sensationalism; handguns kill way more people, even more kids, than assault weapons do. A school shooting is like a plane crash- a big event where loss of life is concentrated in one moment. But as horrible as a plane crash is, and as much publicity as they get, I think we all mostly accept the adage that it's far safer to fly than to drive a car, because statistics. The idea that nobody gives a shit and it doesn't make news when one person dies in a car accident or one gangbanger shoots another, and it makes all sorts of news when there's a plane crash or a school shooting creates a perception that there's a problem that isn't there. I know shootings are intentional and plane crashes mostly aren't, but if you're going to put a moral question to gun owners regarding school shootings, I think it makes just as much sense to put a moral question on people who buy plane tickets regarding plane crashes.
To the contrary, I always see gun lobbies saying that what we need to do is enforce existing laws, that’s practically their mantra. I’m not sure about other organizations, but the NRA, the big one, supports restrictions on criminals and the mentally ill not being allowed to own firearms, and the background checks that facilitate that. I think they are against renewing/passing assault weapons bans though.
But forcing the State to go that far to enforce its will is a victory in itself! If a tyrant can't get the job done with police and the national guard, and actually has to break out tanks and so on, it's far more likely that they will back down due to the expense, or at the very least the international community will take notice.
No, but the fact that they have firearms as part of their culture certainly helps facilitate that training, makes them more effective with the aid and such they get. And again, being able to fight back to the point that their Government had to bomb them and gas them is what drew the attention that got them that aid.
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Well, because in the absence of any actual statistics that show that an assault rifle ban would accomplish anything, you appealed to the moral sense of those people in this post. Also, if seems like what we’re discussing is a justice issue, and not caring about the people affected by a proposed law seems like a poor path to justice.