If you combine average people with lots of guns and then say 'people are the problem, not guns', you're missing out on an important fact.
People are not a constant. They're not #defines, they may be sane today, insane tomorrow and sane the day after that.
They are impulsive, prone to error and there are a thousand circumstances in life where otherwise perfectly normal people do things that we later label insane.
Temporary insanity is a plea that is heard sometimes in the courts. The basic idea is that during the act the person was insane but is now sane.
This is usually to either get a reduced sentence or none at all. The concept hinges on the fact that we are prone to mood swings, sometimes extreme ones. And that in a fit of anger or worse than that someone can do things that they would normally not do.
And that's the sane people, claiming that. Imagine those that are not 100%. So if you mix a large number of guns with a large number of people without much training, oversight, discipline or checks you're asking for trouble. Some of them are bound to be unstable, and even they don't know about it, yet. But you'll read about it in the paper when they do find out.
The 'right to carry arms' is a card played by people that are afraid they will no longer be a allowed to play with their toys, and cynically used by politicians to get them to vote against their own best interests.
There is no way that an armed revolution will be initiated by them, or if it were initiated would be won by those with their guns. Even a large number of them vs the military is a foregone conclusion. If that were the case it should have happened when that was still possible. Now it's just a relic, a symbol of a nation born from violence unable to let go of its past. The only way to win a conflict like that is to get the military to side with you, or to fracture it to an extent that the outcome is no longer a certainty.
And every year a hundred or so (or even a few thousand if you count the injured) people will die because of this stupidity.
In incidents of 1 or 2, or 28.
In a civilized country individuals do not need guns, should not need guns and should not have guns. If you do insist on that then you should also take responsibility for every time an insane person managed to get hold of one (note that the kid that did this didn't use his own guns but the guns legally owned by his mother, now murdered with her own weapon).
edit: this thread has already been flagged off the homepage.
Are we going to play this game? How dare you call guns toys. Do you have any idea of how many crimes guns stop every year? How many rapes, how many robberies, how many homicides? This is not a small thing, some estimates put the number of rapes per day stopped due to the potential victim being armed or thought to be armed at more than a thousand. Per day.
The naive math of no guns = no gun crime is so easy, and so mentally satisfying to people who have no experience with guns. People who live in safe neighborhoods where crime is uncommon. People who have never been faced with life or death situations where having a gun could save someone's life, or save them from being raped, or robbed. But when the math becomes a more complex question of potentially trading off rape, or even homicide vs. potentially reducing one kind of mass homicide then the answers aren't quite so pat and easy are they?
Is it really naive math if it's informed by statistics from other countries? (Incidentally, statistics are something completely missing from your comment).
The article linked has the right conclusion. Banning guns works. The US saw something like 12,000 gun related homicides in 2008. The UK, with a 6th of the population, saw 39. Adjusting for population, that's over 50 times fewer deaths.
The grim truth is that banning guns in the US probably wouldn't do much. The UKs low gun crime is a result of a hundred years of high levels of control. It would take decades for any gun ban to impact on gun levels. However, statistics does show that if there's very few guns available, there is very little gun crime.
Rather than call something naive because you don't like it, why don't you provide statistics that support your argument? Do you have any idea how many crimes guns stop every year?
> This is not a small thing, some estimates put the number of rapes per day stopped due to the potential victim being armed or thought to be armed at more than a thousand. Per day.
How does that work in the rest of the world then? I don't see thousands of people being raped here per day, so clearly something else must be stopping those rapes.
Really, guns are toys. Get over it.
The chances of you facing a life-or-death situation where a gun will help you are ridiculously overblown.
We're not trading off homicide vs one kind of mass homicide, that just brings things to the attention of a larger audience. The real trade off is citizens murdering other citizens with guns versus them not being able to do so or to do so easily. Sure there will be criminals with guns, they're not going to magically disappear. But there will be far less of them.
>I don't see thousands of people being raped here per day
Because no one reports on it. No one reports on the impoverished of India killing each other when someone cuts in line at the water pump in the morning. No one reports on the gang murders in Eastern Europe that happen everyday. Rape goes on all the time. Just because the West has NGOs and charities dedicated to women's issues and run campaigns and just because they have statistics (such as they are) showing that rape incidence might go down, that doesn't mean that rape doesn't happen on a massive scale on a daily basis.
The mere presence of my shotgun in my 5' tall female friends hands prevented her from being raped. A knife wouldn't have worked... need a bit of skill and strength. Kung Fu wouldn't have saved her... she's 5' tall and not strong. A gun is a force equalizer.
People like you bemoan the fact that anyone can pick up a gun and use it to deadly effect without any training. I can say without reservation that that makes me very happy.
For this to make sense you have to look at statistics, not individuals. Statistically speaking your argument holds no water, but I'm happy for your friend. In her case it worked out well. But that's the exception, unfortunately.
The anti-gun studies tend to be pretty terrible as a rule. Including that one. Have you looked into any of the studies on the other side?
Suppose a woman in an isolated place avoids a rape via one of these methods:
- credibly yelling "go away - I've got a gun!"
- brandishing a gun
- aiming a gun at the attacker
- firing a "warning shot"
- firing at the attacker, but missing
...and the attacker runs away.
She's not likely to report this to the authorities. The attacker certainly isn't going to report it. So a study of "shooting incidents" won't include it. A study that starts by looking at cases where somebody was actually shot is counting most of the social costs but only some of the social benefits of gun ownership.
You can fantasize situations until the cows come home, but until you get some hard numbers involved it doesn't amount to anything. Are we going to count cases where people were wounded? Where guns were used but no shots were fired?
How many dead people is worth how many raped women? And so on.
And when you've done all that you're going to have to compare with countries that have gun control in place, look at the rape incidence before and after the change (if there was one) and do a plain comparison of rape incidence in countries with and without.
Those studies have been done, but since you're going to dismiss those with 'anti gun studies tend to be pretty terrible as a rule' it probably won't matter much.
Keep at it. How many dead will it take? Until one of your family is murdered? Or will you still stand by your claim even then?
In other words, you didn't even look at the details of your own study and whether it related to the post you were responding to, you just did a keyword match to see that it reached "the right conclusion". Got it.
If you never look at anything the other side is saying about your side, you're doomed to talk nonsense. Like Kellerman's "43-to-1" claim.
Pro-gun people consider it a win if a gun deters a murder, deters a rape, deters a theft or other nastiness. But anti-gun researcher often run studies that assume the only benefit of guns is if they actually kill a bad guy. (They also have been known to occasionally interpret "the victim knew the attacker" as "the person shot was a family member or loved one".) Given those sort of assumptions, it's trivial to generate "some hard numbers" that are useless, like a 4-to-1 or 12-to-1 or 43-to-1 ratio between "bad" things happening and "good" ones happening to those who own a gun.
The study you gave also assumed a dubious direction of causality - if people who know they are in danger of being attacked tend to go buy a gun, that alone could adequately explain the discovered correlation between being shot and carrying a gun.
(A nice orthogonal issue is that most murderers and most murder victims have multiple prior violent felony convictions, so this Philly study is probably telling us mainly what happens within and among the criminal class. If you aren't a violent felon and don't know any violent felons, the chance of you being killed goes waaaay down.)
In a dysfunctional society, one where there is no law and where you have to take matters into your own hands to get a modicum of safety guns have their place. That was America a few centuries ago. If you still feel that unsafe than you have another problem than the one you're trying to solve with your guns.
Try living in a country with gun control laws for a bit and see where you feel safer. And be sure to ask the women there too if they feel safe or not.
Fear is an incredibly powerful motor behind a lot of stupidity, if you're so afraid that you can't walk around for fear of being robbed or raped if you're not 'packing heat' then why don't you do something about that problem, rather than to go around and compound it by escalation?
And yes, I read those studies, and quite few besides. The consensus is very clear (outside the NRA and their stooges, that is): guns in large numbers in society make that society a more dangerous place. Period.
So you can talk until the cows come home, the facts simply don't support your conclusions.
> Try living in a country with gun control laws for a bit and see where you feel safer.
You mean like the UK? The UK has a horrendous violent crime rate - four times that of the US. So if people were "afraid" in proportion to actual risk, they should be more afraid there than in the US, no?
Or do you mean like Sweden? Sweden's reported rape rate is about twice that of the US.
I actually do live in a country with gun control laws. I live in New York City. And I don't own a gun. But that doesn't mean I have to accept unfounded claims about how bad guns are.
The truth is that the statistics are ambiguous. Every time gun laws change in the US, partisans claim it'll have a huge effect but the actual effect is hard to measure. Florida didn't become "the gunshine state" when they liberalized CCWs. (Rape rates did somewhat decrease there, but it's hard to connect that reliably to the change) On the margin, neither tightening NOR loosening gun laws is a panacea.
I'm not sure whose "consensus" you're referring to, but it's not the consensus of criminologists. The gradual loosening of CCW restrictions nationwide came only after very careful study repeatedly determined there's no significant increase in violence when more people are carrying hidden guns. You're free to believe there's some sort of "threshold effect", that if we got gun ownership levels below some magic number X, that suddenly everything would be better then, but at this point that's just an article of faith - there's no math supporting it.
Using Sweden as an example to argue high rape incidence is ridiculous because Sweden classes things as rape that are not counted as rape in any other country in the world. See also: Julian Assange, aka the trouble of travelling unprotected in Sweden.
Check out the statistics on Australia pre and post the gun laws.
And if you have nothing better to do, a nice bit of reading on the trouble with flatly comparing the crime figures from various countries:
> the trouble with flatly comparing the crime figures from various countries
Hey, I'm with you on that one - I only mentioned a couple specific countries in response to you bringing the subject up as if it meant something important.
What a ridiculous thing to say. Let's arm all the kids, they're defenceless. Let's arm all the old people too, they're defenceless. In fact, let's arm everybody because after all, when kids and old people have arms everybody else is defenceless.
And then we'll both sit back and watch the world burn while the defenceless people try to come to terms with their new-found power and slaughter each other.
What's despicable is that there is a country full of people that are so insecure and that have such little faith in their law enforcement that they feel the need to stockpile ammo and weapons as if there is going to be a shoot-out any moment. And guess what, they're all surprised when there is going to be the occasional shoot-out and when people that shouldn't have access to guns find it all too easy to get their hands on them.
The power to kill is bad enough when we pass it on to the state but that's a necessary evil. It isn't called the state monopoly on force for nothing.
If you're so insecure that you can't live without a chunk of iron under your pillow then you should look at how you can improve your society to the point where it is safe enough to live a normal life without having metal detectors at grade schools and armed shopkeepers.
Keep the poor as poor as they are, keep the insane living on the streets, give everybody access to as much hardware as they want and you will reap exactly what you sow.
-What a ridiculous thing to say. Let's arm all the kids, they're defenceless. Let's arm all the old people too, they're defenceless. In fact, let's arm everybody because after all, when kids and old people have arms everybody else is defenceless.
I don't know what to make of this silly argument.
-And then we'll both sit back and watch the world burn while the defenceless people try to come to terms with their new-found power and slaughter each other.
So in your world view a populace given the responsibility or defending themselves from bad people will inevitably lead to wide spread slaughter. You are an idiot and apparently have no love of your fellow humans.
-What's despicable is that there is a country full of people that are so insecure and that have such little faith in their law enforcement that they feel the need to stockpile ammo and weapons as if there is going to be a shoot-out any moment. And guess what, they're all surprised when there is going to be the occasional shoot-out and when people that shouldn't have access to guns find it all too easy to get their hands on them.
People who shouldn't have guns will always have access to them because they don't care what law there is to prevent them. You can make it more difficult but you can't make it 100%. You can however make it 100% for those who are responsible and capable of owning a gun without going on a power induced rampage. Your goal seems to be to make the responsible law abiding person weaker in a confrontation with the law breakers. That is why I don't like you.
-The power to kill is bad enough when we pass it on to the state but that's a necessary evil. It isn't called the state monopoly on force for nothing.
It's a monopoly on the initiation of force. No one has the right to initiate force against others but they do have the right to fight back. Removing a persons ability to use force to defend themselves by law makes them a slave to those who do not care about following the law.
-If you're so insecure that you can't live without a chunk of iron under your pillow then you should look at how you can improve your society to the point where it is safe enough to live a normal life without having metal detectors at grade schools and armed shopkeepers.
I've tried and I'm still trying to improve the world around me but there are way too many people like you that think there is strength in making others weak.
-Keep the poor as poor as they are, keep the insane living on the streets, give everybody access to as much hardware as they want and you will reap exactly what you sow.
I think you are projecting on to me somehow. I don't believe in any of what you wrote. I believe the poor should not have impediments put int their way. I don't believe in giving them a hand out. I have no idea what to do about insane people. If they are violent and hurt others then lock them up but other than that I'm clueless about what to do. I don't believe the average person should have a howitzer in their garage.
I probably shouldn't have called you despicable because I'm sure you mean well. The end result of your ideas would be awful but you obviously don't see it.
In my opinion, no guns definitely will mean gun-related criminal cases will be lesser, but this doesn't make it safer to stay. Take Malaysia for example, a country that I am quite familiar with. In Malaysia, guns are banned, however, machet-wielding robbers and windshield-crashing bad guys abound. Violence is so common that newer houses are built gated-and-guarded (G&G) where locals literally live in cages in certain areas in central and south. Those who are interested about this and would like to see real-life examples could search YouTube for 'robbery in Malaysia'. The OP takes the relatively low crime-rate of UK to 'prove' no gun is a good choice. My opinion would be it holds true so long the overall crime rate isn't high. When the crime rate shoots up and more crazy/violent people go around the neighborhood, I would bet having fire-arms would be a good idea.
You're comparing wildly different situations. I'm honestly not worried at all about the US equivalent of machete-wielding robbers. Plus, even if I was, I'd prefer a thousand criminals with machetes to a thousand criminals with rifles (all other things being equal). There's no reason why US law enforcement would become less efficient if people's guns were taken away tomorrow.
Trouble with firearms boils down to their utterly disproportional power -- a single madman sporting a gun is capable of killing dozens of people before intervening forces can end the spree. A single madman sporting a knife may kill one, two, five, ten others, but not more. Knife-attacks are horrific yet self-limiting.
I do agree these two are different situations. However I would think banning firearms in the states would be next to impossible, given how widespread firearms are, and the strength of the weapon makers in lobbying the congress. Instead, I would say having teachers trained in shooting and equipping firearms in schools for emergency access could be easier to realize (compared to outlawing firearms). I kept wondering if the teachers were armed, would the death toll be any lesser?
> I kept wondering if the teachers were armed, would the death toll be any lesser?
No, the total will be higher.
From all those cases where right now there is no weapon a weapon, so no incident at least one suddenly becomes available. The number of incidents would go up, but in case of an incident the death toll would go down.
I don't know about this, why would the number of incidents go up if teachers have weapons? Especially if they are trained to handle situations.
Another post on HN talks about a school district in Texas allowing teachers to carry firearms, but it takes a lot of training in both using the gun and hostile situations. This is a recent thing, so it's still undecided if it will help, but I feel like it helps to have the teachers trained.
The fact that through an unfortunate twist of history you even need to consider arming your teachers is simply incredible. There are a lot of great things about the US, but sadly the gun ownership fiasco is not one of them.
While this is true, banning guns makes it harder for a single crazy person to kill many people at once and could prevent some of these US public area mass killings.
By some measures, it began in Lexington (the linked Economist column is "Lexington"), when the British government moved to seize citizens' arms.
We must better understand how it is that those who would choose to harm many people reach such a decision. Guns are a tool. So was anthrax, in the post-9/11 mail scare, and it could have been much worse. Mutual respect, understanding, education, kindness, and vigilance are our greatest bulwarks against tragedy.
My perspective is different since I come from a country with a different culture. Here in Australia there is essentially zero gun ownership by private citizens. We also had a gun buyback (1996) and changes in legislation after the Port Arthur massacre[1]. Basically, I would feel really nervous just being in the same room as a gun.
So from my perspective statements such as 'Guns are a tool' just don't wash. They are the only tool that comes to mind that are specifically designed to kill humans. There is no other use (besides sport shooting) that I can think of for a handgun. The same goes for high powered fully automatic military style rifles. Zero use for hunting an animal, perfectly tailored for hunting humans. That's disturbing to me, and I wouldn't want to live in a society that vehemently fights for the right to bear these arms.
Of course it is better to fix the root cause (mental illness, lack of empathy, education etc). Fighting the root is really hard and will take America generations of effort. Removing semi and full auto weapons can be done over night (the actual effectiveness could be argued ad nauseam, but at least the laws could be in place and some claw back of the 300 million odd weapons could begin).
Psychos would still rampage, but there's a lot less damage you can do if you only have a knife, or you have to reload after each shot.
PS: I'd be happy to be corrected, but from the little I know about the issue, the meaning of 'right to bear arms' in the US constitution has been twisted away from the original intent of organised and well disciplined militias, to: hey look ma I bought a M16 from Walmart today hur hur
There was a study released on the effectiveness of the gun reform in australia after Port Arthur, with a pretty clear result. In the 18 years prior to the reforms, there were 13 mass murders, and in the 10 years from the reforms to the study's publication, zero mass murders. People will take what they want from that sort of data (one person basically told me that the study was unreliable because it didn't take into account lead poisoning), but hopefully it might be useful to some.
> The same goes for high powered fully automatic military style rifles. Zero use for hunting an animal, perfectly tailored for hunting humans. That's disturbing to me, and I wouldn't want to live in a society that vehemently fights for the right to bear these arms.
> hey look ma I bought a M16 from Walmart today hur hur
It's a sad thing that your opinion will soon be discredited on the basis that you do not know the fact that automatic weapons are much more strictly controlled in the US, and that they are very rarely used by criminals.
I also live in a country with a strict gun control (to get a gun, apart from a plausible reason to own one, doing an expensive course on gun usage and safety, tons of paperwork, psychological tests and similar stuff, you also need to have one of the 16 county sheriffs to approve, and they usually don't). The result is 20 homicides using guns last year, in the country of 40 million. Recently I was having a lunch in a bar, during which two policemen entered the bar, also for a lunch. I have seen their guns at their belts, and it made me feel just as uneasy as when taking night bus home, with drunk people shouting insults at each other, even though I knew that they would only use guns to protect me.
Thanks for the correction. I'm clearly showing my ignorance when it comes to some of these issues.
I based my M16 bought at Walmart caricature on the little I've learned from news media and documentaries like Bowling for Columbine.
You can substitute M16 for shotgun, and Walmart for Corner Gun Store and add in a mandatory 24 hour waiting period, which maybe doesn't make for quite as nice a sound bite, but is just as ridiculous.
Please educate yourself about American gun availability before you give the wing nuts a reason to discredit your point. We do not sell automatic weapons without a whoooole lot of paperwork and money, we could not remove the weapons overnight, and your Walmart example is tasteless.
Automatic vs semi-automatics is brought up frequently. The simple fact is that for killing a bunch of people in an enclosed space a semi-automatic is the 'right' kind of weapon, full-auto would actually be a lot less efficient. You'd run through your ammo quicker and you'd put many rounds into the walls and the ceiling.
As I mentioned, I'm from Australia, so if I misrepresented anything about the US then I'm happy to be corrected.
In my original post I described an exaggerated caricature of gun ownership. The point still stands though: that any private citizen (regardless of the amount of paper work they filled out) can choose to sleep with an assault rifle (or shotgun or semi-auto pistol etc.etc.) under their pillow at night is rather .... disturbing.
> We do not sell automatic weapons without a whoooole lot
> of paperwork and money
Availability of money has zero bearing on mental health and fitness to carry a weapon, so that criterion goes right out the window. What kind of paperwork is required? Does it entail thorough background checks etc.?
Erecting barriers isn't sufficient; we need the appropriate type of barrier.
The short answer is that it is very hard to acquire fully-automatic weapons in the US today. Aside from the fact that anything available for sale to civilians will be both prohibitively expensive (1-2 orders of magnitude more expensive than a comparable semi-automatic weapon) and most likely an antique (only weapons manufactured before 1986 are available to civilians), the acquisition process itself is pretty arduous (e.g. FBI background investigation, signoff from head of local law enforcement, etc.). From my understanding, these weapons are almost never used to commit crimes.
The real danger are handguns - something like 3/4s of gun deaths are from handguns.
Another revolution that worked: the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia - non-violent, no guns. And another: the Egyptian revolution last year. Or the 2003 revolution in Georgia. Or 2005 in Kyrgyzstan, and I could go on.
All successful, all non-violent, all more recent than the American Revolution.
Seriously, if you think you need guns to defend yourself, you're basically saying you live in a state which has failed worse than communist era Czechoslovakia or Egypt under an effective dictatorship.
That's a lovely notion, but time and time again, harm minimisation has been the only successful method to deal with issues like this (eg needle exchanges for IV drug users, allowing abortion to prevent women dying awful deaths from botched backyard attempts).
I'm happy for you to start a worldwide movement to end violence and abolish mental illness, but until then, I would rather that nobody has the ability to murder large numbers of people when they feel like it.
And seriously, how many people can successfully weaponise anthrax?
Guns are tools that kill. They have no other purpose. How anyone can defend the concept of gun ownership in a civilised society is genuinely beyond me.
> Guns are tools that kill. They have no other purpose.
The other† purpose is to keep countries and people in check. The mere ability to immediately use firearms is enough to stop a lot of possible troublemakers.
A country keeps armed forces: military and border guard to keep external actors in check, police to keep unruly citizens in check. A private person keeps arms to keep in check potential burglars, assailants etc., and any other actor who could come in force, of which there are some historical examples discussed in other posts.
† aside of the sporting, hunting and collector activities.
I have no problem with the military and police having access to weapons. They are (or should be) highly trained, Psych tested and they work within a regulated, highly structured, hierarchical organisation. All of this serves to keep the wanton violence (almost completely) in check.
The issue arises when every schmoe off the street can go in and purchase a fully automatic, purpose built people killing machine.
I also don't buy the people vs. the government scenario you allude to. Could you really picture a reality where a group of citizens could overthrow the US government just because they had some AK47s?
In the event of run-away government, a far more rational and realistic scenario would be for mass protests that essentially halt the economy over night. There are countless examples of almost completely bloodless revolutions happening in exactly this manner (Polish Solidarnosc and more recently Egypt during the Arab Spring immediately come to mind). The alternative is a bloody coup which usually ends in civil war or military dictatorship.
America was made from violent revolution against tyranny, so as part of its 'DNA' (constitution) it includes a simple inoculation against that sort of tyranny in the future in the form of the right of private citizens to be armed.
It was technology that threw the founding fathers the unforeseen curve ball. What seemed like a simple question of allowing or disallowing private weapons was really an un-enumerated, technology restricted question of the form "should a private citizen have the means to deploy deadly force against 1 to 3 others".
Today we ask a different question. "How many other citizens should a private individual be allowed the power deploy deadly force against." Now the answer can be 0, 1, 5, a classroom, a neighborhood, even a small town. But the top end is getting higher every year.
The 2nd amendment is useless to us in answering this question. All that's left is haphazard whack-a-mole bans on emerging technologies.
The founding fathers didn't mean to give us a binary choice between total forced disarmament and allowing red-necks to have their own black-hawk helicopters.
Your history is wrong, and the killing power of your average citizen hasn't gone up significantly since the end of the 1920s. Look up the Bath school bombing in 1927-near double the casualties of the current tragedy.
Your interpretation is interesting, though.
Edit--Okay, say, the roaring 20s with the Thompson.
The 2nd amendment: 1791. The first practical automatic repeat firing weapons didn't show up until almost 100 years later and they still required a crew to operate. There was a touch of progress in that first 100 years.
I'm going to go ahead and make the weak point that bombings, poisonings, and sabotage are a slightly different animal than purpose build firearms and would likely be treated differently in the law. There is a huge element of luck to those attacks.
The crux of it is, that rampages last 5 to 10 minutes. This is probably going to be true whether the first responders are armed citizens or police. We're going to have to decide how many people we're going to allow a private citizen the capability of killing in that time. We're going to have to very explicitly choose or technology will choose "a whole damn lot" for us by default.
I'm thinking your point just indicates that we should have started addressing this long about the time Swing was King.
There is an important fact that is always missed in the gun control debate. People like to get caught up about minutiae - who and what type of guns should we be able to own, if at all.
Not sure how people miss this - the largest groups of murders in human history are governments by a long shot - events that typically take place some time after guns are confiscated. Ultimately, the right to bare arms is about a last resort against tyrannical government.
This article does a fairly convincing impression of being reasonable and balanced. However, a typical sentence is this one:
"And my hunch is that the model found in places like Japan or Britain—no guns in homes at all, or almost none—is on balance safer."
My hunch is that the author did very little real research or any analysis beyond the attempt to compare statistical enumerations that do not seem properly comparable. He's entitled to his "hunches", but they are not useful to me.
> My hunch is that the author did very little real research or any analysis beyond the attempt to compare statistical enumerations that do not seem properly comparable.
Assuming it could be carried out, what research would you find convincing?
Hypothesis: removing guns from a society can be done to a tolerance of X within Y years.
(i.e. there will always be some guns, but you can restrict them to rare status)
Hypothesis: doing so reduces deaths from A to B.
... assuming there could be a study of the above, and it came up with yes in both cases, and A >> B, would the case for gun control be made?
The question I'm asking is whether there is a study that would be acceptable, and gun control simply depends on whether this can be proven, or whether the question of reducing death is a red herring, and gun ownership is believed worth it regardless?
Are these your proposals for research, or are they hypotheses that you claim the author was examining and that I somehow missed? If the former and you're looking for a critique, I would start by saying that I don't think hypothesis #1 is well posed. Do you mean any society, or the USA? And do you mean by any means at all, or only using legal, constitutional means?
In examining hypothesis #2, do we have available a sample of societies where guns were removed and nothing else changed, so we can perform a statistical analysis of the change in "death" rate following the sudden removal of guns? I think that's extremely unlikely, and therefore I don't see how we can reach reliable conclusions. Also, I'm confused about what you're proposing to look at: by "death", do you mean murder by gun? All murders? Suicides? Accidents, illness, etc.?
Of course we can be confident of tautologies: if all guns were made to disappear, including those in the hands of the government, there would not be any gun murders. But this does not seem very illuminating. Even in that case, how do we know that murders by other means, and other violent crimes, would not increase?
Your question is "whether there is a study that would be acceptable". I think the answer is clearly yes, and there are studies on this subject in the literature, of varying quality. My point was that the author seems not to know or care much one way or the other, and prefers to sling "hunches".
I'm not sure I understand anything that follows "acceptable", but I think you're wondering whether some people would be against a gun control measure even if it could be known that said measure would lead to a net decrease in murders. The answer to that (and I'm sorry if that's not what you were asking) is obviously "yes" in some cases. As an analogy, many people are harmed, even driven to suicide, by speech. This harm could possibly be reduced by enacting speech controls. But there are people who, even if they agree that a particular speech control measure would reduce harm caused by speech, would nevertheless be against it.
I trust my neighbor more than the governemnt we elect - just 60 years ago, America rounded up our ethnic Japanese citizens and stuck them in concentration camps. What would gave happened if the war didn't go so well for us in the Pacific?
So why wasn't there violent armed response to the American concentration camps back then? Presumably you were at least as well armed.
What kind of event would it take for you to take up arms against the government now? And whom exactly will you be shooting at?
Let's say that somehow a 100% tax on income above $50k gets passed through legislation tomorrow -- who are you going to shoot to revert this? Or perhaps the next president will order an invasion of Canada to take their natural resources (without which many Americans would die: it's either us or them, and voters agree).
In what countries in the world now would you say that access to guns is helping to maintain democracy and liberty? How well are things going for Palestine or Syria?
Let us discuss facts and now weird hypotheticals. In the last hundred years, millions of people were killed when governemnts stripped the citizines of their weapons and subsequently murdered them.
To think it "can't happen here" is is not historically unsound - gernocide came frightengly close here in America, and it happened in 'civilised' socialist Germany and communist Russia. The diference that I can find, is we had an armed population tht would have revolted had our Japanese citizens been murdered. To think that we're just better people is hubris.
Criminals take what they need to commit a crime. If the victim is will be armed then the criminal will bring a gun. If the victim is unarmed there is no reason for the criminal to bring a gun.
Discussing whether or not technology (guns, in this case) can be considered morally neutral? Whether freedom to own and operate any technology of your choice is a fundamental right? What kind of hacker isn't interested in those questions?
> What kind of hacker isn't interested in those questions?
At a guess, those that flagged this so it's no longer on the homepage. Or possibly the last thing they want is a rational discussion about this, after all, imagine having to actually defend your position in a rational rather than an emotional way. You might even have to change your mind...
I assume you don't live in the USA (neither do I, in fact).
However, the gun debate has a number of parallels with topics that hackers obviously do care about, irrespective of geography. It wasn't all that long ago that cryptography was considered to be a "weapon" which should be regulated. I would not be surprised to see attempts at classifying some pieces of software as "weapons" at some point in the future - botnets, say, or certain "security" tools. In the fairly near future we can expect debates about synthetic biology, 3D printing and "cyberwarfare", and we'll reach for our existing legal traditions as the means to resolve them.
For hackers to offer meaningful input to these debates, we need to understand how other difficult problems have been resolved. If someone tries to frame "botnet control" as being "like gun control", we really need to understand how and why gun control works, or doesn't work, and how and why the analogy can be applied or refuted.
The future is almost certainly going to involve legal disputes over what we are allowed to do with the technology that we create, own and operate. Some of this technology will be dangerous. In the wrong hands, plenty of technology already is! If you advocate gun control, you need to have a clear understanding of why guns are different from cars, even though cars can kill people too. If you argue against gun control, your arguments may be useful to those who argue against cryptography control, or synbio control. 3D printing could attack some of the fundamental premises of gun control (that it's possible to control the physical flow of weapons and ammunition in a modern society) and the attempt to re-assert control could undermine a number of basic freedoms if done incorrectly. At this moment, I'm not even sure what the 'correct' regulation of 3D printing would look like, but we need to have an answer soon, before someone comes along with a much worse answer and tries to impose it. Sooner or later, someone is going to kill someone with a 3D-printed weapon, and if we don't have good, well-researched and discussed answers to how we deal with this, we'll end up with bad, poorly-researched laws.
Guns kill people. Knives kill people. Rocks kill people. Truth of the matter is if people want to kill people they will use any weapon available, even their bare hands. Sure if governments all around the world ban guns people will kill less people, but they still kill. Now, how do you stop all this killing? Because, that's the point. Right?
People kill for different reasons, even with no reason at all.
Guns greatly amplify the power to act out a killing urge. That is, after all, their purpose.
I am, by most measures, a strong man.
But given a rock or a knife, I would not, within 2 minutes, be able to kill 20 people and injure 12 in a crowded cafe in Port Arthur, before going on to kill another 12 people and injuring 3 within the following hour.
Neither could I, with a rock or a knife, visit Utøya and kill 69 people and wound 110 within one hour.
These acts are physically beyond me. I suspect they are physically beyond anybody.
The only other way for me to kill so many people would be to use high explosives. And guess what? High explosives are regulated out the fricking wazoo.
Yes, I could also poison the food supply, start a plague or crack an ammonium tanker truck near a school.
But the statistics show that people seem to find that using devices ergonomically designed for maximum killing efficiency much more attractive when they decide to entertain their particular psychopathology.
Actually, the statistics show that governments with too much power have killed orders of magnitudes more people than have ever been killed by individuals with guns.
Australia has had zero (0) gun massacres since Port Arthur. The major leading cause of gun deaths in Australia is suicide, around 300 per year from among the ~750k gun owners in this country.
I agree that totalitarian governments have been the leading cause of death in the 20th century. But it's an orthogonal point. Look around: guns do not prevent tyranny. Neither do high explosives. What counts is institutions. The United States inherited a set of institutions (cultural norms, the rule of law) from the British that went a long way to assuring economic success and a culture of freedom.
So did Australia. Our freedom has never been guaranteed by the kind of constitutional mechanisms the USA has; it has always been reliant on culture and history. The freedom of the people of the United Kingdom is not guaranteed by any written constitution; it is reliant on culture and history. And so on and so forth. Widespread gun ownership does not banish shitty governments (ask a Saudi).
We are not going to agree, and nothing I say will change your mind. Please feel free to leave another triumphal remark below this one and let's both get on with our lives.
Yes but the horrible truth is guns have a higher mortality rate than all the other killing methods you listed. Also there is a lot more physical effort in killing someone with a knife, rocks or bearhands and it its more likely that you can fend someone off or dodgy whats being throw at you. I don't think its as easy to dodgy a bullet.
Try dodging a 100kg man armed with 5kg rock. I had to do it once while wandering the streets of a big South American country. If I had a gun I certainly would have not killed the bastard as just waving it should've solved the situation. Instead I had to keep cool, pull a Jedi mind trick, and literally run for my life. Yeah, guns kill. So rocks too.
Again, how do we stop all this killing?
Either way, I think we should start by banning cars. People kill much more people with cars than with any other tool. Maybe except for voting, but that's another matter.
People are not a constant. They're not #defines, they may be sane today, insane tomorrow and sane the day after that.
They are impulsive, prone to error and there are a thousand circumstances in life where otherwise perfectly normal people do things that we later label insane.
Temporary insanity is a plea that is heard sometimes in the courts. The basic idea is that during the act the person was insane but is now sane.
This is usually to either get a reduced sentence or none at all. The concept hinges on the fact that we are prone to mood swings, sometimes extreme ones. And that in a fit of anger or worse than that someone can do things that they would normally not do.
And that's the sane people, claiming that. Imagine those that are not 100%. So if you mix a large number of guns with a large number of people without much training, oversight, discipline or checks you're asking for trouble. Some of them are bound to be unstable, and even they don't know about it, yet. But you'll read about it in the paper when they do find out.
The 'right to carry arms' is a card played by people that are afraid they will no longer be a allowed to play with their toys, and cynically used by politicians to get them to vote against their own best interests.
There is no way that an armed revolution will be initiated by them, or if it were initiated would be won by those with their guns. Even a large number of them vs the military is a foregone conclusion. If that were the case it should have happened when that was still possible. Now it's just a relic, a symbol of a nation born from violence unable to let go of its past. The only way to win a conflict like that is to get the military to side with you, or to fracture it to an extent that the outcome is no longer a certainty.
And every year a hundred or so (or even a few thousand if you count the injured) people will die because of this stupidity.
In incidents of 1 or 2, or 28.
In a civilized country individuals do not need guns, should not need guns and should not have guns. If you do insist on that then you should also take responsibility for every time an insane person managed to get hold of one (note that the kid that did this didn't use his own guns but the guns legally owned by his mother, now murdered with her own weapon).
edit: this thread has already been flagged off the homepage.