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I Used To Think Gun Control Was The Answer

"Hi!! Welcome to the Bellagio! Set your bags on that conveyor belt and step over here to the body scanner, please!"
 
RabidAlpaca said:
It kind of reminds me of that thread a few weeks back about some scientific study that was like "Study finds a higher number of guns leads to a higher rate of gun related crime". It's like yeah... no ****... anyone willing to be honest will admit that, regardless of your views. I just think maybe we shouldn't worship guns to the level we do and not be jam packed with so many that a dozen fall out when we bend over.



I know you're not interested in an honest discussion
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Sure I am, but it's only a matter of time before you get mad and start posting insults.

I'm interested in reducing all violent crime.
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Great! Me too! I suggest mandatory death sentences for gun murders; mandatory life for gun crimes where no one died.

My point is simply that yes we should have the basic right to own a gun for self-defense and hunting, but we've let it get too far out of control.
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Paddock only needed one gun to do what he did. Someone can own 167 guns, but can only shoot one at a time.

If you have two identical societies, one with 10 guns per 100 people and one with 200 per 100 people, you're probably going to have a lot higher rate of gun related crimes and mass shootings. If you find yourself in a desperate mind state, as people periodically tend to do, you're more likely to become violent if you've got dozens of guns in arms reach.
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Demographics, economis and education don't play a role?

Access to a gun doesn't make someone more prone to violence by some kind of magic spell. This is the real world, not "King Arthur", or "Lord of The Rings".

100 million gun owner won't kill anyone today. That fact blows the "access" argument out of the water.
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The problem with your post is that the GOP won't allow us to focus on people, especially those who have mental problems. To them it is all about how the NRA looks at their voting record and the fear of having the NRA run someone against them in the primaries. A vote to stop anyone, including "people" from buying guns is not acceptable. Look at how in many states they are pushing to allow felons to own guns. When you look at how many felons end up back in jail for other crimes after serving their sentences, you realize how stupid it is allowing them to have guns again.
 
Critter7r said:
"Hi!! Welcome to the Bellagio! Set your bags on that conveyor belt and step over here to the body scanner, please!"
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It makes me think about when I stay in a hotel, I'm not leaving my gun in my vehicle.
 
independentusa said:
The problem with your post is that the GOP won't allow us to focus on people, especially those who have mental problems. To them it is all about how the NRA looks at their voting record and the fear of having the NRA run someone against them in the primaries. A vote to stop anyone, including "people" from buying guns is not acceptable. Look at how in many states they are pushing to allow felons to own guns. When you look at how many felons end up back in jail for other crimes after serving their sentences, you realize how stupid it is allowing them to have guns again.
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Let's focus on punishing people who commit gun crimes vice punishing law abiding citizens.
 
apdst said:
You're not interested in stopping all gun crimes, just the mass shooting?

That confirms my original claim: Liberals aren't interested in saving lives, only banning guns.
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I think it's a valid question.

You're answer to gun violence is stopping illegal immigration and mandatory death penalty. So what about American citizens who are planning murder/suicides?

Going by your nonanswer, you are the one not interested in stopping all gun crimes.
 
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apdst said:
Sure I am, but it's only a matter of time before you get mad and start posting insults.
Great! Me too! I suggest mandatory death sentences for gun murders; mandatory life for gun crimes where no one died.
Paddock only needed one gun to do what he did. Someone can own 167 guns, but can only shoot one at a time.
Demographics, economis and education don't play a role?
Access to a gun doesn't make someone more prone to violence by some kind of magic spell. This is the real world, not "King Arthur", or "Lord of The Rings".
100 million gun owner won't kill anyone today. That fact blows the "access" argument out of the water.
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Owning a gun doesn't make you violent, but it gives you a lot of power and opportunity if you do become violent. As a theoretical example, if you walked in on your wife in bed with another man and there were a dozen loaded guns within arms reach, the outcome might be different than if there weren't. Crimes of passion and insanity happen and being surrounded by guns will obviously amplify the violence.
 
americanwoman said:
I think it's a valid question.

You're answer to gun violence is stopping illegal immigration and mandatory death penalty. So what about American citizens who are planning murder/suicides?

Going by your answer, you are the one not interested in stopping all gun crimes.
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Not the answer, but rather a couple of steps in the direction of the solution.

Gun murderers get the death penalty. Suicides? Well, that isn't illegal. Good luck passing a law making it so.
 
RabidAlpaca said:
Owning a gun doesn't make you violent, but it gives you a lot of power and opportunity if you do become violent. As a theoretical example, if you walked in on your wife in bed with another man and there were a dozen loaded guns within arms reach, the outcome might be different than if there weren't. Crimes of passion and insanity happen and being surrounded by guns will obviously amplify the violence.
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Bad people will find a way to do bad things. There's no way around that reality.

But, again, make the death penalty mandatory for gun murders.
 
apdst said:
Highly restrictive gun laws didn't stop it, is the point.
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That was not the allegation. This was

Quote Originally Posted by KevinKohler View Post
Any law or laws that might have been able to stop a couple, most likely would have had the side effect of causing more death, just spread out over a larger area and time span.
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I then asked
Can you provide me an example of that?
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And you responded with the link to the Paris attacks.

So where is the evidence from YOU that gun laws caused more death?
 
apdst said:
Not the answer, but rather a couple of steps in the direction of the solution.

Gun murderers get the death penalty. Suicides? Well, that isn't illegal. Good luck passing a law making it so.
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So you also agree to dump in large sums of money to provide the man power to prove gun murders beyond a reasonable doubt? Look at Chicago, which has large violent fatal gun crimes and how many of those actually get solved.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/04/chicago-gun-violence-unsolved-murders-deadly-year

As violence rises, an increasing number of shootings and murders are going unsolved. Through 28 August, the police department had only made arrests in 73 of the nearly 2,000 non-fatal shooting incidents so far this year – or just under 4%, according to a department spokesman.

The clearance rate for murders is not much better. Last Sunday, police swiftly charged two brothers in the murder of Nykea Aldridge, a 32-year-old mother of four, who was shot to death the Friday before while pushing a stroller on her way to register her kids for school. Her shooting had made national headlines because she was the cousin of NBA star Dwyane Wade, who mourned her death publicly as “unreal” and “another act of senseless gun violence”.

But the quick charges in Aldridge’s case are an exception. Police have only made arrests in about 16% of fatal shootings through 28 August this year, according to a department spokesperson. Through June, the clearance rate for all murders was 22.2%. That’s lower than last year’s rate of 30.4%, and dramatically lower than the national average of 64.5%, according to the most recent available national FBI data.
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KevinKohler said:
I know that those big cities have increases in GUN crime rates that are in direct proportion to increasingly strict gun laws.

I know there are other big cities without such strict gun laws that have decreasing gun crime rates.
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Please provide that data and the causal link between increased gun laws and increases in gun crime rates?
 
maxparrish said:
As the NRA (and others) are only responding to the actual fraud that this tragedy was caused by a lack of gun control and the NRA, well...it seems your contempt has led you to spewing wrong-headed nonsense. Look who draws the nexus between this killing, gun control measures, and the NRA.

Hillary Clinton "Our grief isn't enough. We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again."

Jimmy Kimmel: “I’ve been reading comments from people saying this is terrible but there’s nothing we can do about it, but I disagree with that intensely because, of course, there’s something we can do about it. There are a lot of things we could do about it, but we don’t. ... The Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell [R-Ky.] and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan [R-Wisc.]and a number of other lawmakers who won’t do anything about this because the NRA has their b*lls in a money clip."

The NRA is responding to those who claim that the tragedy was due to a lack of gun control law and NRA lobbying against that law. The only intellectual fraud afoot are those who exploit a mass killing tragedy and then push control policies would have little nexus to that tragedy.

That should be self-evident.
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Not one thing you wrote there spoke to the point from me you reproduced and were pretending to be replying to.
 
Moderate Right said:
We need to address the problems and the people, not the guns themselves.
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And how exactly do you think you address people? Maybe start by keeping guns out of the hands of bad people?

I firmly agree that part of the solution needs to be address people, and the attitudes people have in this country about guns. I think of it a lot like cigarettes. We didn't have to ban cigarettes we just helped people understand that smoking cigarettes doesn't make you look cool it makes you look like a ****ing idiot. I would advocate we do the same thing about guns. Make sure every gun nut in this country understands that guns don't make them look tough or badass they make them look like cowards. When I hear someone tell me they have a conceal and carry permit the first thing that comes to my mind is "wow, what a chicken ****." How sad it must be to go about your daily life with such irrational fear that you can only walk out your front door if you're strapped with gats.
 
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RabidAlpaca said:
Let's see, looking at the murder rates of the US and France: [1]
US - 4.88 per 100k people
France - 1.58 per 100k people

So the US has a 3 times higher murder rate, so how do you know having less guns in a country doesn't prevent a lot of massacres? Nobody, literally nobody has said that ALL killing will stop with gun control, but if every man, woman and child is armed to the teeth they're going to be a lot more efficient if they decide to snap and go on a killing spree.

I do support the basic right to a firearm, but this argument is just dishonest.
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Thank you for those figures . Apdst is clearly wrong in his claim and you proved it so.
 
SouthernDemocrat said:
Any gun control measures at this point would be pointless (other than maybe a ban on bump stocks). The time it would have made a difference is 50 years ago, not today when you got hundreds of millions of guns in circulation. The cat is out of the bag.
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Ahhhhh.... so then maybe we should institute some control measures today so at the very least our grandchildren and great grandchildren aren't dealing with this problem in the future.
 
KevinKohler said:
I know that those big cities have increases in GUN crime rates that are in direct proportion to increasingly strict gun laws.

I know there are other big cities without such strict gun laws that have decreasing gun crime rates.
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You don't know that.

You believe that.

Big difference.

In spite of the HIGHLY effective misinformation campaign waged over the last 30 years by the NRA (and their handmaidens in the Republican Party) the actually gun death rates are consistently higher in states with the more relaxed gun laws.

https://content.njdc.com/media/media/2015/12/04/guns-mainchart-1203.png

Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence - Annual Gun Law State Scorecard 2016

And the simple FACT is that studies have consistently demonstrated (for decades now) a strong correlation between relaxed gun laws/gun ownership rates and becoming a victim of a gun crimes of all types (as opposed to ever acting as a deterrent), from homicides and assaults.....to suicides and random incidents/accidents.

Firearm possession and violent death: A critical review - ScienceDirect

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17070975

http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Firearm-Ownership-and-Violent-Crime.pdf

http://annals.org/aim/article/1814426/accessibility-firearms-risk-suicide-homicide-victimization-among-household-members-systematic

https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=206421

And when it comes to the #1 cause of gun deaths in this country (i.e. suicide, 60%), the evidence doesn't just stop with correlation. There is also strong evidence of causation:

More Guns = More suicides: https://econpapers.repec.org/article/eeeirlaec/v_3a37_3ay_3a2014_3ai_3ac_3ap_3a180-188.htm

Furthermore, we already KNOW that restrictive gun laws have worked FANTASTICALLY in other western democracies around the globe. In Australia, they banned and initiated a federal buy-back program of all assault and semi-automatic weapons after a mass shooting in the mid 90's, and reduced the estimated weapons stock in the country 20%......cut the gun death rate in the country by 50%...........and reduced the suicide rate by 80%.

https://www.loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/australia.php

https://academic.oup.com/aler/article-abstract/12/2/509/99272/Do-Gun-Buybacks-Save-Lives-Evidence-from-Panel?redirectedFrom=fulltext

So the bottom line is that there really are no credible arguments AGAINST common-sense gun control laws in this country. There are only ideological ones, mostly based upon misinformation and lies gleaned from within the right wing/fake news media bubble.
 
ultmd said:
You don't know that.

You believe that.

Big difference.

In spite of the HIGHLY effective misinformation campaign waged over the last 30 years by the NRA (and their handmaidens in the Republican Party) the actually gun death rates are consistently higher in states with the more relaxed gun laws.

https://content.njdc.com/media/media/2015/12/04/guns-mainchart-1203.png

Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence - Annual Gun Law State Scorecard 2016

And the simple FACT is that studies have consistently demonstrated (for decades now) a strong correlation between relaxed gun laws/gun ownership rates and becoming a victim of a gun crimes of all types (as opposed to ever acting as a deterrent), from homicides and assaults.....to suicides and random incidents/accidents.

Firearm possession and violent death: A critical review - ScienceDirect

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17070975

http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Firearm-Ownership-and-Violent-Crime.pdf

http://annals.org/aim/article/1814426/accessibility-firearms-risk-suicide-homicide-victimization-among-household-members-systematic

https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=206421

And when it comes to the #1 cause of gun deaths in this country (i.e. suicide, 60%), the evidence doesn't just stop with correlation. There is also strong evidence of causation:

More Guns = More suicides: https://econpapers.repec.org/article/eeeirlaec/v_3a37_3ay_3a2014_3ai_3ac_3ap_3a180-188.htm

Furthermore, we already KNOW that restrictive gun laws have worked FANTASTICALLY in other western democracies around the globe. In Australia, they banned and initiated a federal buy-back program of all assault and semi-automatic weapons after a mass shooting in the mid 90's, and reduced the estimated weapons stock in the country 20%......cut the gun death rate in the country by 50%...........and reduced the suicide rate by 80%.

https://www.loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/australia.php

https://academic.oup.com/aler/article-abstract/12/2/509/99272/Do-Gun-Buybacks-Save-Lives-Evidence-from-Panel?redirectedFrom=fulltext

So the bottom line is that there really are no credible arguments AGAINST common-sense gun control laws in this country. There are only ideological ones, mostly based upon misinformation and lies gleaned from within the right wing/fake news media bubble.
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I'm from Texas, and though I'm for gun control, There is no doubt that criminals think twice before they enter the home of a gun owner. They might get shot and that is a deterrent.

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Dirt Sands said:
I'm from Texas, and though I'm for gun control, There is no doubt that criminals think twice before they enter the home of a gun owner. They might get shot and that is a deterrent.

Sent from my Z833 using Tapatalk
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Do most (or any) gun owners have "Guns on board" signs hanging on their front doors so the criminals know beforehand and can make an educated decision?
 
haymarket said:
So from that comment you then concede they may have been able to stop or limit others?
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I might concede that if you tell me which ones gun control would have stopped.
 
JasperL said:
I more or less agree in a lot of ways. Fact is we do have a 2A, and there are hundreds of millions of guns out there, so 1) there is little that can be done legislatively, and 2) even if you banned gun sales entirely (or highly restricted and licensed ownership) it would take decades to see a real impact. So I don't worry about gun control a whole lot anymore. I have some preferences, but it's not going to be a factor that decides any vote for me.
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Funny thing is that when it looked like the left might try enacting gun control legislation under Obama (and possibly under president Hillary), gun sales exploded. Under Trump, gun sales have plummeted.
 
Moderate Right said:
I might concede that if you tell me which ones gun control would have stopped.
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Was simply asking a question about the statement that proposed laws would not stop A MAJORITY of these events. That left open the implicit suggestion that they would've stopped or lessened a MINORITY of these events.

here it is from you

Quote Originally Posted by Moderate Right View Post
This is me. I also used to be very big on gun control, even after switching from being a liberal Democrat to a conservative Republican. I used to donate money regularly to the cause. Now, I just get pissed off at the left for not addressing the real problems of gun violence (people), instead focusing on gun control legislation that won't make much of a difference at all, mainly only effecting law abiding gun owners. Their rallying cry of "gun control" is nothing but a feel good talking point that gives them a false sense of security in thinking that their proposals will actually do much when they won't. Time and time again if you look at all of the gun control ideas the left has they would not have been able to stop the huge majority of the mass shootings we have had.
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I simply asked a question about your own statement.
 
JasperL said:
It seems to me another intellectual fraud is concluding that literally NOTHING can be done to lessen gun violence.
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Perhaps, but my point was that you can't complain about the NRA changing the subject WHEN it didn't. Those bemoaning the tragedy and then ranting for gun proposals irrelevant to the tragedy are going to get pushback on those specific points. (Watch the cup and pea moves, folks).

NOW if the subject is generalized gun violence (versus a specific type of violence) and those who say there is literally NOTHING that can be done, then that is really a bit of a straw man. Most folks know something can be done on some types of general gun violence, but the question is will "doing something" make a substantial impact and/or is it worth the cost to the liberty of the innocent.

Just for example, if this guy was Muslim and the NSA learned through various means (such as a centralized gun registry) that he was acquiring an arsenal of guns, 10s of thousands of rounds of ammo, with no apparent need for any of it, he'd have been put on a watch list and hopefully his movements tracked, and when he showed up with a couple dozen guns and enough ammo for a small war in a hotel in LV, likely his room raided and him arrested. And we'd all cheer and think NOTHING about it.
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As no one has proposed a national gun registry (other than the left), your conjecture on the imagined hypocrisy of right's reactions are unsupported. What we do know is that the only proposal that smacks of such prejudicial action is the advocacy by some on the left for not allowing those citizens on the terrorist watch list to own guns (or at least not allowed to board planes). And be reminded, the smackdown on that idea came from the RIGHT, not the left. Remember?

What's offensive to the pro-gun crowd is this guy was by all accounts so far a law abiding citizen and white guy with no ties to Muslim terrorist groups, and so we can't imagine anything we can do that to detect this plot and stop it that wouldn't infringe on our rights. Well, fine, but that's entirely different than believing nothing can be done. We spend $10s of billions trying to stop these attacks by extremists. Is it an intellectual fraud to believe those efforts might make a difference?
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The problem is not a failure of imagination on the pro-gun crowd's part, it is your failure to acknowledge that their are different kinds of shooters and shootings, only some of which are of the type that can mitigated by legal intelligence efforts. Someone without known ties to radical Muslim groups, domestic terrorists, international sources, felony police records, 5150 mental health commitment, internet threats, etc. is going to much less vulnerable to added "efforts" than those that are.

That is a reality you need to accept.
 
Your original comment was,
Moderate Right said:
"they would not have been able to stop the huge majority of the mass shootings we have had."
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Implying that some may have been stopped, because a "huge majority" isn't "all".

To which haymarket said ...

haymarket said:
So from that comment you then concede they may have been able to stop or limit others?
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And then you turned around and asked him the same question he asked you.

Moderate Right said:
I might concede that if you tell me which ones gun control would have stopped.
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Recap ... haymarket asked if you would concede that gun regs may have stopped some mass shootings, and you said you might concede that gun regs may have stopped some mass shootings if he told you which mass shootings gun regs could have stopped.

How much wood could a wood chuck chuck, indeed.


LATER EDIT: I see haymarket was confused with your answer too ...
 
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