The U.S. citizens aren't the only ones looking at the U.S. gun laws, but the whole world is. Other countries criticize the U.S. gun law and said that the gun law was costing peoples lives. 'While some focused blame only on the gunman, world opinion over U.S. gun laws was almost unanimous: Access to weapons increases the probability of shootings. There was no sympathy for the view that more guns would have saved lives by enabling students to shoot the assailant.'
I think something needs to be done. In Britain handguns are actually banned. They are even prohibited from the Olympic ceremonies. Other countries are looking to America to do something about this ridiculous law. The French daily Le Monde said it leaves a 'blotch on America's image'. And Corriere wrote “The latest attack on the U.S. campus will shake up America, maybe it will provoke more vigorous reactions that in the past, but it won't change the culture of a country that has the notion of self defense imprinted on its DNA and which considers the right of having guns inalienable." This is ridiculous. The whole world is talking about how we should change the gun laws, but America will probably, once again, ignore them.
Do you think the gun laws should be changed? Do you think anything will come from this horrible story?
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I agree that the gun laws in this country should be changed. The U.S. has one of, if not the highest death rates by firearm in the world. Yes, it may say in the first amendment that American citizens have the right to bare-arms, but too many people are dieing from firearms to really allow this law to stay in effect.
In the case of students being allowed to carry a concealed weapon; that has to be the dumbest thing anyone has ever come up with. We do not need someone to be the hero and go vigilantly a college campus or any campus for that matter. Yes, some students may be a very good shot, but nobody is perfect and going after a suicidal gunman and accidentally shooting bystanders just does not cut it in my book. No body other than the campus police should have a weapon on a college campus.
Some thing interesting I heard today about the gunman is that he was committed to a mental institution in 2005, but he was “voluntarily committed”. If someone in Virginia was involuntarily committed than they would not be able to purchase a firearm as easy as this gunman did. How dumb is that?
In my opinion anyone who is sent to the nut house should not be allowed to purchase anything dangerous without a red flag popping up.
Anyone want to comment on this?
I believe the right to own a gun is a second amendment right, not first. Also, according to your statement, "not allowed to purchase anything dangerous...", can they buy a car? More people die every year in automobile accidents, should we ban cars too. I agree that something must be done, but jumping off the deep end and eliminating guns all together is not going to happen. Also anyone who goes through the process of getting a concealed weapons permit, is more than likely not the kind of person that is going to go "vigilantly".
there really is no reason a citizen should have a gun, but our constitution says otherwise. I don't think that firearms would be an issue if there were not crazy people doing crazy things like the VT shooting. America is suppose to be the dominate world power and other countries look at us as role modles. This could have happened anywhere. what was the ethnic backround of the "man" who did this. not american! It is really society's falult. I'm sure that this boy didn't wake up and say he wanted to kill everyone. Society pushed him, he cracked.
I think you can't put the blame on any one person. The main person to blame is the shooter, but no one knows his story. The main point of this story is that guns are dangerous and need to be harder to get ahold of one. For those who say that other things are dangerous like a car, well, once someone drives a car around campus or anywhere else and kills tons of people then I'm sure we will have a story about cars. Until then the main problems on campus are shootings..WITH GUNS..
Firstly, the article may be correct with it's assertions that the world's OPINION is that access to weapons increases the probability of shootings, and that world OPINION doesn't support the theory of armed self defense, but don't overlook that word and assume it's talking about facts... it's not.
>In Britain handguns are actually banned
http://www.guncite.com/journals/okslip.html
"Have all these controls and abusive enforcement of controls actually made Britain safer? Armed crime in Britain is higher than it has been in at least two centuries. Armed crime is literally one hundred times more common than at the turn of the century when Britain had no weapons controls. Crime victimization surveys show that, per capita, assault in England and Wales occurs between two and three times more often than in the United States. These same surveys demonstrate that robbery occurs 1.4 times more, and burglary occurs 1.7 times more.[168]"
"The raw statistics do make some facts clear: when Britain had no gun control (early in the twentieth century) or moderately-administered gun control (in the middle of the century), Britain had virtually no gun crime. Today, Britain literally has substantially more gun crime, as well as more violent crime in general. From 1776 until very recently, the United States has suffered a much higher violent crime rate than Britain, regardless of whether British gun laws were liberal or strict. In recent years, however, the once-wide gap in violent crime has disappeared. This gap was closed by a moderate drop in American crime rates, coupled with a sharp rise in the British rates."
For anyone who's wondering, murder rates are still higher here, but at last count our crime is going down while Britain's is increasing, so we'll see what the future holds. Besides that, Britain's rates are *supposed* to be lower than ours; they have since the birth of our nation, and compared to the U.S. Britain has less class and race stratification than our "melting pot," and suffers less from other violent crime proponents such as street gangs and drug/organized crime organizations.
All things considered, there's quite a bit of difference between Britain and the US that makes rate comparisons tricky, but the US has a example of gun control vs. no gun control within it's own borders. Washington D.C. essentially banned handguns in 1976. After that, crime, including handgun crime, rose astonishingly, and even continued to increase when the rest of the nation was experiencing decreases. (Conversely, Florida, which has been a pioneer in the field of reducing concealed carry restrictions, practically missed the crime wave that spiked in 1991 that the rest of the country suffered from- murder rate 36 percent above national average in '87, 4 percent below in '91. http://rkba.org/research/kopel/shall-issue.html )
http://www.justfacts.com/gun_control.htm
"Between 1976 and 1991, Washington D.C.'s homicide rate rose 200%, while the U.S. rate rose 12%."
"But the long-term changes in crime rates before and after the ban are difficult to ignore. In the five years before Washington’s ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. During this same time, robberies fell from 1,514 to 1,003 per 100,000 and then rose by over 63 percent, up to 1,635."
And for those who will surely say that neighboring states with lax gun control (Virginia being the most lax and the major target) are to blame for D.C.'s failure...
http://www.gunowners.org/sk0601.htm
"If the availability of guns in Virginia is the root of D.C.'s problems, why does Virginia not have the same murder and crime rate as the District? Virginia is awash in guns and yet the murder rate is much, much lower. This holds true even for Virginia's urban areas, as seen by the following comparison on the 25-year anniversary of the DC gun ban (in 2001):
City Murder rates: 25 years after DC's ban
Washington, DC
46.4 per 100,000
Arlington, VA
2.1 per 100,000
(Arlington is just across the river from D.C.)
Total VA metropolitan area
6.1 per 100,000"
>In the case of students being allowed to carry a concealed weapon; that has to be the dumbest thing anyone has ever come up with. We do not need someone to be the hero and go vigilantly a college campus or any campus for that matter. Yes, some students may be a very good shot, but nobody is perfect and going after a suicidal gunman and accidentally shooting bystanders just does not cut it in my book. No body other than the campus police should have a weapon on a college campus.
Well, I suppose I'm "dumb" then. You mention police being able to carry as if it weren't a problem, yet civilian gun owners are likely to go "vigilante hero" and shoot a bunch of innocent bystanders? This is simply not supported by evidence. Police officers are over 5 times more likely to accidentally kill the wrong person or a bystander, than civilian gun owners are.
(In defense of cops, I don't think police officers are inept, nor do I think this is evidence of such; civilians with concealed weapons merely have advantages the police don't, including often being in their own home or workplace where they know their environment, not being in uniform, having the element of surprise to pull a concealed weapon when it's not expected, and having the option NOT to do anything in an extremely dangerous situation, when the police officer is obligated to use his gun and do something.)
>Some thing interesting I heard today about the gunman is that he was committed to a mental institution in 2005, but he was “voluntarily committed”. If someone in Virginia was involuntarily committed than they would not be able to purchase a firearm as easy as this gunman did. How dumb is that?
In my opinion anyone who is sent to the nut house should not be allowed to purchase anything dangerous without a red flag popping up.
Here we completely agree, (of course, if deemed "fixed" or "sane" again his rights should be reinstated) and I'm pretty sure Virginia does have laws about restricting gun ownership to those with mental illnesses, as most states do. The problem here is that his illness was never recorded on his criminal record or any record the gun shop's instant background check system had access to, or possibly never even diagnosed.
>The main point of this story is that guns are dangerous and need to be harder to get ahold of one.
First, it was already illegal to carry a gun onto campus at VA tech, Thus, any law-abiding and responsible students or faculty were disarmed... but do "illegal possession" laws deter someone who would break *murder* laws? I think we have seen the answer is no.
>For those who say that other things are dangerous like a car, well, once someone drives a car around campus or anywhere else and kills tons of people then I'm sure we will have a story about cars. Until then the main problems on campus are shootings..WITH GUNS..
But is it right to base legislation on only what is the currently hot news story? School shootings are incredibly RARE, and even if they all killed 32 innocent people it would still be on the bottom of the list of things that can kill you. Thus, it's news (even *because* it's rare), but it's not necessarily a good picture of what risks you face in your life. Conversely, when is the last time anyone paid this much media attention to an automobile fatality? Princess Di? Yet it happens every day, to totally unsuspecting and innocent people. Personally, I think there's a lot more to be said, as far as for saving innocent lives, for drastically increasing penalties for DUI and DWI, since those people kill a heck of a lot more innocents than gun owners who responsibly obey nearly unenforcible laws.
I think that this story has some validity to it, but who could have predicted this? When you sell guns to people, you don't know that they are going to go kill 32 people almost a year later. If we are going to change the law, what would be the criteria for allowing someone to own a firearm? There would be some immediate racial profiling and soon our country would go into another heated debate on race and ethnicity. I believe that the gun laws are fine and that no one could have seen the worst school shooting in American history coming.
I think that this story has some validity to it, but who could have predicted this? When you sell guns to people, you don't know that they are going to go kill 32 people almost a year later. If we are going to change the law, what would be the criteria for allowing someone to own a firearm? There would be some immediate racial profiling and soon our country would go into another heated debate on race and ethnicity. I believe that the gun laws are fine and that no one could have seen the worst school shooting in American history coming.
Well put Dan,
also, the US does not have the highest gun murder rate.
Here are a few countries with more murders per capita than the U.S:
South Africa
Columbia
Guatemala
Zimbabwe
Thailand
Barbados
Brazil.
Oh yeah, which one of you guys is going to volunteer to start collecting these guns?
Something should be done about the United States gun laws. It is terrible what happens to innocent people that get critically injured, or lose their lives from gunshot wounds. Guns cause so much pain, and I wish that there was a way for guns to be banned, or only belong to the police force or the U.S. armed services that will heavily guard the weapons.Guns instill fear in people. Those in the police force and armed services carry weapons to protect the citizens.However, I wish that there were another way to protect people without the use of guns. People are able to purchase guns, but what about a child that could possibly get a hold of it, or someone who is angry, or mentally ill? There should be something done to keep people safe without the use of guns.
>Guns cause so much pain, and I wish that there was a way for guns to be banned, or only belong to the police force or the U.S. armed services that will heavily guard the weapons.
Guns don't cause pain, guns are inanimate objects. A gun is exactly as good as its user. Bad people use guns as tools to cause pain and do bad things, good people use guns for innocent purposes or the defense of themselves and others. Bad people with guns take lives, yes, but good ones save them also. Civilian gun owners defend themselves with guns between 2.5 and 2.73 million times per year in this country... compare that to the amount of harm done and you could easily make a case that "guns prevent so much pain."
>Guns instill fear in people.
They also instill fear into criminals, which is why the vast majority of those defensive gun uses never involve firing a shot. No harm done, just a fleeing or surrendering criminal and one less crime.
>Those in the police force and armed services carry weapons to protect the citizens.
How are police so different? An AA degree and a few weeks training doesn't make you superman. Like I mentioned before, civilian gun owners, who have the advantages of surprise and discretion, are less likely to shoot at the wrong person or hit innocent bystanders.
>People are able to purchase guns, but what about a child that could possibly get a hold of it, or someone who is angry, or mentally ill?
You should know that letting a child get ahold of your gun while alone, is not an innocent mistake. It is a crime, even though based solely on negligence. With power comes responsibility, and with gun ownership comes the requirement to see it remains secured, and not used based on a lack of control of your anger or other emotions.
**NEW INFO ON SHOOTER**
http://www.comcast.net/news/national/index.jsp?cat=DOMESTIC&fn=/2007/04/20/641798.html
It's been found that a district judge ruled that Cho, the shooter, was mentally ill before he bought his guns. Thus the gun control laws already in place at the federal level, would have prevented his gun ownership if properly enforced. The reason it wasn't enforced is reportedly that state and local agencies that kept is psych records, claim they do not have enough funding to send every record they get to the federal government. This should immediately be corrected, so everything will get sent, and everything will wind up on the Instant Background Check System. Like the pro-gun side has been saying since it's creation, don't rush to make new laws but properly enforce the ones we already have.
(For any who actually read the article, don't let them fool you into thinking McCarthy's bill would close this loophole, it's a completely different animal and they're just pandering by trying to link it to this.)
>I agree that something must be done, but jumping off the deep end and eliminating guns all together is not going to happen.
This is a straw man argument, the only person who has suggested this is Shakari, who is not, of course, a policy-maker. Nobody is eliminating guns in the U.S.
>Also anyone who goes through the process of getting a concealed weapons permit, is more than likely not the kind of person that is going to go "vigilantly".
The problem isn't that most people are going to do something like this, it's whether or not the few people who are going to go vigilante going to make things worse for everyone.
>I think that this story has some validity to it, but who could have predicted this? When you sell guns to people, you don't know that they are going to go kill 32 people almost a year later.
As far as I can tell, it wasn't a year later, the earliest purchase was in February.
>There would be some immediate racial profiling and soon our country would go into another heated debate on race and ethnicity.
Very bad example of a slippery slope. Racial profiling wouldn't have anything to do with it. You would use criminal and mental health profiling.
>I believe that the gun laws are fine and that no one could have seen the worst school shooting in American history coming.
You didn't have to see the worst school shooting, all you had to do to prevent this was see that Cho was a person who should've never have had a gun, something that was quite easy to see.
>Well put Dan, also, the US does not have the highest gun murder rate. Here are a few countries with more murders per capita than the U.S: South Africa, Columbia, Guatemala, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Barbados, Brazil.
This is a terrible argument. You are comparing apples and oranges. This is like saying that poor people have higher gun violence rates that rich people. Of course they do. You have to make the comparison to countries in the same bracket -- wealthy, industrialized countries. In that case -- the only way valid international comparisons are made -- we do have the highest rate. According to the CDC -- "The firearm-related homicide rate in the United States was nearly 16 times higher than that in all of the other countries combined"
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00046149.htm
There are so man statistical sleights-of-hand in the articles you cite that it is clear that the authors are engaging in intellectual dishonesty.
>"Have all these controls and abusive enforcement of controls actually made Britain safer? Armed crime in Britain is higher than it has been in at least two centuries. Armed crime is literally one hundred times more common than at the turn of the century when Britain had no weapons controls.
Doesn't control for other factors, such as industrialization, economics, the rise of drug use and other factors that explain, much, if not all of this increase.
>Crime victimization surveys show that, per capita, assault in England and Wales occurs between two and three times more often than in the United States. These same surveys demonstrate that robbery occurs 1.4 times more, and burglary occurs 1.7 times more.[168]"
Straw man. The argument isn't that gun control stops crime, it's that it stops gun crime.
>"The raw statistics do make some facts clear
Raw statistics never make anything clear, because they don't account for other factors.
>All things considered, there's quite a bit of difference between Britain and the US that makes rate comparisons tricky, but the US has a example of gun control vs. no gun control within it's own borders. Washington D.C. essentially banned handguns in 1976. After that, crime, including handgun crime, rose astonishingly, and even continued to increase when the rest of the nation was experiencing decreases. (Conversely, Florida, which has been a pioneer in the field of reducing concealed carry restrictions, practically missed the crime wave that spiked in 1991 that the rest of the country suffered from- murder rate 36 percent above national average in '87, 4 percent below in '91. http://rkba.org/research/kopel/shall-issue.html )
All of this leaves out, of course, other factors, most notably poverty.
>"Between 1976 and 1991, Washington D.C.'s homicide rate rose 200%, while the U.S. rate rose 12%."
Incredibly misleading. The info comes from the NRA and does not include the absolute numbers. Sample size makes a different. Let's say, for example, if a city had one murder one year and three the next year, that would be a 200% increase in murder. Comparing D.C.'s numbers to the countries is not quite that extreme, but the samples sizes are so different as to make the comparison meaningless.
>"But the long-term changes in crime rates before and after the ban are difficult to ignore. In the five years before Washington’s ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. During this same time, robberies fell from 1,514 to 1,003 per 100,000 and then rose by over 63 percent, up to 1,635."
Crime rates aren't the issue, the gun violence rate is. That isn't discussed in these numbers.
>"If the availability of guns in Virginia is the root of D.C.'s problems, why does Virginia not have the same murder and crime rate as the District? Virginia is awash in guns and yet the murder rate is much, much lower. This holds true even for Virginia's urban areas, as seen by the following comparison on the 25-year anniversary of the DC gun ban (in 2001):
Because there are many other factors besides just urbanization that are important. Like, for instance, how many convicted felons live in each area? Also, is law enforcement distracted with other things (like protecting the government, for instance)?
"Dumbest thing" is an extreme exaggeration. I'm sure we could easily come up with a whole lot of things that are dumber than concealed weaponsn laws, such as laying down in traffic.
>Police officers are over 5 times more likely to accidentally kill the wrong person or a bystander, than civilian gun owners are.
But is the sample size of civilian gun owners who shoot back during the commission of crimes large enough to make these numbers valid? Unles there are several thousand examples, then probably not. I also don't think the point is that the average user will hit bystanders, but the average college student. If legitimate levels of training were required, then it would be unlikely that civilians would hit any more bystanders than police.
>I'm pretty sure Virginia does have laws about restricting gun ownership to those with mental illnesses,
The problem is that too much of this data is either not kept in government databases because it is deleted after a period of time or that the systems for reporting these things to various agencies (and sellers) that might need it is inadequate to the job.
>First, it was already illegal to carry a gun onto campus at VA tech, Thus, any law-abiding and responsible students or faculty were disarmed...
Do we know they were "disarmed"? They were certainly unarmed, but disarmed suggests someone took them away. How many students/faculty were bringing guns to campus and then were prevented from doing so. These would be the only people disarmed and I'd wager that the number was very low.
>School shootings are incredibly RARE, and even if they all killed 32 innocent people it would still be on the bottom of the list of things that can kill you.
But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be rarer or that they couldn't be avoided altogether.
>Conversely, when is the last time anyone paid this much media attention to an automobile fatality?
Yes, but basically all cars are registered and basically all drivers are licensed. When something bad happens in this area, we know who is responsible. That is often not true in terms of guns.
>Personally, I think there's a lot more to be said, as far as for saving innocent lives, for drastically increasing penalties for DUI and DWI, since those people kill a heck of a lot more innocents than gun owners who responsibly obey nearly unenforcible laws.
There is no reason we can't deal with both problems.
>Guns don't cause pain, guns are inanimate objects.
Really, I think you are mixing up your talking points here. If guns don't cause pain, then why not just throw bullets at someone attacking you? Because guns do cause pain. They aren't the prime mover behind the event, but we use guns exactly because they cause more pain than other methods.
>A gun is exactly as good as its user. Bad people use guns as tools to cause pain and do bad things, good people use guns for innocent purposes or the defense of themselves and others.
Actually guns are often better than their user. Someone who is not a particularly good shot can still do a lot more damage with one shot than someone punching you in the face.
>Civilian gun owners defend themselves with guns between 2.5 and 2.73 million times per year in this country...
These numbers are definitely not a "fact," they are highly subjective and come from very questionable methods. The National Crime Victimization Survey (a measure that usually overstates crime rates) puts the number around 100 thousand a year, which is almost certainly too low, but the high end estimates are as well. They come from one time phone surveys and many of the purported uses come from people who are gun owners and have a political agenda, leading to some of them reporting things based on faulty interpretation or out-and-out dishonesty in service of their political agenda. As with most things, the real number is somewhere in between. I'm wagering it's closer to the NCVS numbers because their statistical methods are more sound. (read more in Gun Self-Defense and Deterrence, Jens Ludwig, Crime and Justice > Vol. 27 (2000), pp. 363-417)
>An AA degree and a few weeks training doesn't make you superman.
This applies to almost no working police officer. Experience and continued training are also major factors that civilians don't have.
>Like I mentioned before, civilian gun owners, who have the advantages of surprise and discretion, are less likely to shoot at the wrong person or hit innocent bystanders.
Like you didn't mention before, the sample size here is likely to small to make these numbers valid.
>You should know that letting a child get ahold of your gun while alone, is not an innocent mistake. It is a crime, even though based solely on negligence. With power comes responsibility, and with gun ownership comes the requirement to see it remains secured, and not used based on a lack of control of your anger or other emotions.
This is certainly true, but are we willing to let irresponsible people have something like a gun that carries such a great cost if they are negligent.
>It's been found that a district judge ruled that Cho, the shooter, was mentally ill before he bought his guns. Thus the gun control laws already in place at the federal level, would have prevented his gun ownership if properly enforced. The reason it wasn't enforced is reportedly that state and local agencies that kept is psych records, claim they do not have enough funding to send every record they get to the federal government. This should immediately be corrected, so everything will get sent, and everything will wind up on the Instant Background Check System. Like the pro-gun side has been saying since it's creation, don't rush to make new laws but properly enforce the ones we already have.
This is true, but pro-gun forces have been in charge of the federal government and the majority of state governments for a long time. Since then, federal assistance for enforcement has declined. You can't say the only solution is to enforce the laws on the books in order to prevent new laws and then not enforce the laws on the books. (This isn't direct at you, Dan, since you didn't do this, but it is what has happened).
>This is a straw man argument, the only person who has suggested this is Shakari, who is not, of course, a policy-maker. Nobody is eliminating guns in the U.S.
Handgun Control Incorporated has expressly stated this is their ultimate goal. Liberal members of state legislative bodies have also responded to letters from residents claiming that making *some* guns illegal was not enough, by reassuring them that certain 'common sense' gun control was just a small step toward the future, and that eventually they would try to accomplish a total gun ban through such small steps.
>Doesn't control for other factors, such as industrialization, economics, the rise of drug use and other factors that explain, much, if not all of this increase.
Absolutely, but I'm not trying to claim gun control is the sole reason Britain is so much worse off. The original/typical claim insinuated that Britain has lower murder rates BECAUSE of gun control, which is clearly not true.
>The argument isn't that gun control stops crime, it's that it stops gun crime.
But if such a substantial amount of substitution for other or illegal weapons occurs, it may not be worth reducing the self-defense capabilities of the law-abiding and responsible.
>Incredibly misleading. The info comes from the NRA and does not include the absolute numbers. Sample size makes a different. Let's say, for example, if a city had one murder one year and three the next year, that would be a 200% increase in murder. Comparing D.C.'s numbers to the countries is not quite that extreme, but the samples sizes are so different as to make the comparison meaningless.
IIRC the info comes from per 100,000 "RATES," and it came from university and government researchers; the NRA usually just repeats this stuff.
>Crime rates aren't the issue, the gun violence rate is. That isn't discussed in these numbers.
One of the more often-touted facts is that gun crime increased also, as did handgun crime. But again, if the same number of people get robbed or killed the tool used matters little.
>Because there are many other factors besides just urbanization that are important. Like, for instance, how many convicted felons live in each area? Also, is law enforcement distracted with other things (like protecting the government, for instance)?
Undoubtedly. But you'd be hard pressed to find me any other comparison that shows D.C.'s gun laws actually helped it. The city government itself concedes that there has been no evidence to suggest the gun bans worked.
>But is the sample size of civilian gun owners who shoot back during the commission of crimes large enough to make these numbers valid? Unles there are several thousand examples, then probably not.
If you combined the low % of shooting instances with the low number of defensive gun uses, it would be 50,000 per year [2,500,000 x .02](72,000 if you used the lowest percentage with the matching figures). John Lott was of course lambasted for claiming such a low % of shots fired per defensive gun use, so anti-gun critics claim a higher number of civilian defensive gun uses involve shootings.
>I also don't think the point is that the average user will hit bystanders, but the average college student. If legitimate levels of training were required, then it would be unlikely that civilians would hit any more bystanders than police.
Actually, at best it's the average gun-carrying college student. NOW you're talking sample size problems, but all things considered I think there wouldn't be much different. Sure, there's an average age difference, but there's also like 70% of the population who are less educated and/or less driven. And obtaining a concealed carry permit does require proof of training. In my case it was a DD-214 (proof of military service) but most people have to go out and take a class.
>Yes, but basically all cars are registered and basically all drivers are licensed.
Basically is the key word there. Not all cars are registered, not all drivers are liscenced. I can buy any car I want, despite it being designed to break every speed limit known to the government, despite being a convicted felon and mentally ill minor, not register it, not insure it, not get tags, not get a liscence, and drive it in any insane fashion I want to... as long as I'm not on a government-owned road. The truth is, cars are regulated less than guns; this would not be the case only if gun control laws did not apply anywhere but government-owned shooting ranges (or if one were to ignore the purpose-built attribute, government property).
>When something bad happens in this area, we know who is responsible. That is often not true in terms of guns.
I'm sure if you controlled for 'mens rea', these would be equal. When something bad happens with a car, the guilty driver usually stops and waits for the police; rarely is identification made through a paint transfer or license plat impression. If the same percentage of gun violence happened the same way, the rates would level out.
>Really, I think you are mixing up your talking points here.
No, no mix up. The root word in there that justifies the "don't" is CAUSE. Guns are inanimate, they don't CAUSE anything to happen. People cause things to happen, and people use guns to cause things to happen. Guns sit still until manipulated by people.
>Actually guns are often better than their user. Someone who is not a particularly good shot can still do a lot more damage with one shot than someone punching you in the face.
Noone doubts that guns are tools that increase the force of an attack or defensive action. I said "bad" on a moral/ethical level... guns don't have morals or ethics, they do as much harm or as much good as the psyche of the person wielding them.
>These numbers are definitely not a "fact," they are highly subjective and come from very questionable methods. The National Crime Victimization Survey (a measure that usually overstates crime rates) puts the number around 100 thousand a year, which is almost certainly too low, but the high end estimates are as well.
Actually in "Targeting Guns," Gary Kleck discusses hordes of different values that the NCVS *understates*, even those the gun lobby would lament. Also I didn't state the high end, the high end is around 3.6 million. I used Kleck's, which the criminology community considers the most comprehensive, and the runner-up for the most comprehensive (the 2.73 one). By the way the next-lowest study of this kind besides the NCVS, even with statistical faults Kleck points out, is SEVEN TIMES THE NCVS's NUMBER. The NCVS isn't even a starting point for this issue, it's a joke.
>This is true, but pro-gun forces have been in charge of the federal government and the majority of state governments for a long time. Since then, federal assistance for enforcement has declined. You can't say the only solution is to enforce the laws on the books in order to prevent new laws and then not enforce the laws on the books. (This isn't direct at you, Dan, since you didn't do this, but it is what has happened).
Firstly, we're talking about state governments paying to send away documents- something they ought to do without federal assistance (and of course they would do if it were a conviction instead), and which has little to do with the (sometimes) pro-gun stance of republicans (which I'm not, so I wouldn't take offense). Secondly, no pro-gun government forces have ever deliberately infringed upon the exclusion of the mentally ill and convicted felons from having gun rights. That's always something the NRA and gun lobby have agreed with. And have you ever heard of Operation: Ceasefire or Project Exile? Because these enforcement-heavy anti-gun crime actions were fully supported by (some have said pet-projects of) the NRA. The NRA helped fund Exile, and lobbied extensively for Ceasefire, and celebrated when the president (Bill Clinton!) asked congress for $280 million dollars to this effect, the largest sum of money ever requested to aid gun law enforcement.
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