> Gun owners consistently misrepresent and come up with inconsistent interpretations of any gun control.
Maybe sometimes, but there's also gun laws like in California that affect large populations of gun owners. I don't think they're making their dissatisfaction and confusion with the gun laws up. Owning a gun in the US isn't very simple; different states have wildly different laws you have to observe, and those are in effect at airports as well.
I don't think it's wise to say, "they just don't understand" to the people who actually have to live with the laws.
As a gun owner, I do think there's reasonable forms of gun control. I don't mind having my background checked or paying a tax stamp. I don't mind psychological evaluations or closing gun show loopholes. Restricting guns, ammo, attachments, magazine sizes etc are not effective forms of gun control imo.
> Restricting guns, ammo, attachments, magazine sizes etc are not effective forms of gun control imo.
Of course restricting magazines and accessories is not effective. They're only brought into the argument by people who don't want effective gun control.
But restricting guns and ammo is absolutely effective. The UK has a sixtieth of the rate of gun deaths compared to the US. And the UK is no paragon. Its rate is much higher than it should be, in my view, because a lot of gun crime is gang related so does not get the attention it deserves. A more reasonable rate would be closer to Japan's which is about a quarter of the UK's. Much lower and you likely start requiring genuinely authoritarian regimes such as Singapore or HK.
The US could absolutely get to saner gun crime and homicide levels if there was any real will to do so but there isn't. Of course it wouldn't happen overnight but it doesn't have to.
The real problem, in my opinion, is that the US is so de-sensitised to extreme violence that they can never have the equivalent of the collective traumatisation that the UK had after Dunblane. That was the spur we needed to put rational gun laws in place. The balance in the US is so far out of kilter that the seesaw is buried in concrete. Even biblical massacres of innocents can't shift it. So very very sad.
> Of course restricting magazines and accessories is not effective. They're only brought into the argument by people who don't want effective gun control.
If you're not very well educated on guns or the laws around them and you're contributing to a topic on guns, then you are not here in good faith. I would say that you and several other commenters on this thread are exactly the embodiment of that.
For the shining example of knife-crime that is the UK, there are also examples like Germany and Switzerland that have very low gun violence. I'd rather focus on what underpins gun crime in the US and get at the source rather than allowing it to be certain peoples pet topic that they vapidly spew misinformation on.
Knife crime in the UK unacceptably high. So high in fact that it's something 60% of the benchmark for unacceptable crime rates. The US's.
Being anywhere near as bad as the US in any violence categories is a genuine cause for shame and is the reason why knife crime is a big topic in the UK.
Obviously, it's not a big topic in the US because it pales into insignificance compared to gun crime. Not because the US has low knife crime; it doesn't it's terrible.
And I genuinely don't know why you'd bring up Germany and Switzerland. Their gun crime stats are bad. Switzerland particularly. Obviously they're not as bad as the US because no country outside central America, the Balkans or South Africa comes even vaguely close to the US. That doesn't make them good though.
And I lived in Switzerland long enough to understand pretty well why the gun crime is low compared to the volume of arms in circulation. I lived in Kandersteg for a bit so I saw the training first hand. But you can't reasonably argue that the US mess isn't because of gun ownership because Switzerland isn't as bad.
And as to your point re the senator from Arizona. I could have worded that better. They're not trying to pass a law for effective gun control. They're trying to make baby steps on the road to effective gun control that are sufficiently small to have a vague chance of succeeding. The intention is laudable. And it is likely that they do want effective gun control eventually. So I accept the rebuke.
On one hand you decry the actions of meaningless gun control by those acting in bad faith but then as soon as it's democrats doing the exact same thing it's "baby steps" and laudable. Can you explain why you're doing this?
I didn't say it is meaningless. I said it isn't effective. Because it isn't effective. We have plenty of examples of effective gun control and these aren't they.
And I couldn't care less what party they represent. Democrats can presumably be against gun control.
Right, but then you go on to pat the people doing it on the back, followed by an "acceptance of rebuke". This kind of doublespeak is what's disruptive in these conversations and makes people not trust each other or their intentions.
If we do end up in a place where we ban guns, the backlash of that will probably be to ban things that other interest groups like that "cause harm" with similar statistics. I find that expressly illiberal, and I'm not really a fan of what a small minority of vocal liberals really want, which is to ban them or make the system so frustrating that no one can enjoy them.
Guns murder a lot of people in the US. Having fewer and less potent guns is better. Not good but better. I applaud people who are trying to make things better because the status quo in the US is shockingly bad.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with your second paragraph. I'm not really that bothered if people stop being able to enjoy weaponry. I also don't particularly blush at being called illiberal. Or indeed liberal.
I do care that a country that was once admired and respected has become a thing of pity and disgust. I take no pleasure in that. That the beacon of democracy is also a beacon of wanton violence is something to be saddened by. And I am.
But there are more people involved than just those killed. Think of the effort, time and trauma involved in years and years of active shooter drills. We can’t just centre the tragedies and ignore the deeper effects of them.
If the government banned new and bought back every magazine over 10 rounds, would people stop having these drills?
I doubt they would. (If they make sense to have in a world with 20 round magazines, they make exactly as much sense in a world with 10 round magazines and a fantasy that no 20, 30, or 50 round magazines remain.)
I mean mostly because a hand gun will do just fine if you're shooting kids in a classroom who can't escape. An AR-15 is overkill unless you're wantong to kill many people in more open areas like Breivik did.
There isn’t? I don’t think you’re considering the mental impact of that sort of preparation and drilling. Particularly on young children. Particularly when it hits the more extreme simulation end of the spectrum with role played shooters and trying to trick classes into opening doors with screaming classmates outside.
I’d expect people to deflect, minimise or argue that the trade off is worthwhile but blanket denial is pretty odd given the circumstances. There are after all plenty of articles interviewing parents and kids who have been affected as well as research.
Unlike you I remember being in school. Almost any activity like that was thought of as a joke by kids and a waste of time. People endure actually hardships all over the world and come out fine. A couple hours of sitting in a corner won’t hurt anyone. But i doubt it works fwiw
Extrapolating from your own experience is a poor way to generalise particularly when the experiences of others are easily accessible and directly contradict you.
The majority of mass shootings take place in minority neighborhoods, not in schools. By the OP's logic we should just ban minorities from owning guns and we would reduce mass shootings and gun violence by over 50%. Perhaps you can see why that is a stupid way of going about things.
Because a criminal will just get illegal attachments or larger magazines anyways. I haven’t looked, but I’d imagine it’s pretty easy to find some online from overseas. Or criminals can steal them from legitimate places.
I'm sorry if I'm asking a stupid question, and I'm genuinely curious. I hear that line of reasoning often, "well criminals would do it anyway", but is that really true?
In the UK, guns are heavily restricted and we definitely have criminals but our gun crime is very low. There must be some reason these criminals are not using guns?
I'd wager that it's because most people do not have guns, so they're harder to access, less chance of criminals being able to access. Wouldn't that be the same in the US too?
US already has a lot of weapons, and getting them illegaly is a lot easier, than in UK, where they literally have to smuggle them from abroad, and being an island makes it even harder.
I live in the balkans, and getting a gun here is very hard, almost impossible. People still get shot, and during the "wild 90s" here, there were a lot of shootings, even mass ones (not during the war, but after, or in in-war areas).
The only difference is, that we have "different criminals" here, so when someone gets shot, both the shooter and the shot person usually know why they're shooting and why they're being shot, and it's rarely without a good reason.
>The only difference is, that we have "different criminals" here, so when someone gets shot, both the shooter and the shot person usually know why they're shooting and why they're being shot, and it's rarely without a good reason.
No, you don't.
The overwhelming majority of murders in the US follow the same pattern. Basically the drug industry DIYing the the kind of violent enforcement of business disputes that "real businesses" use courts and state violence for.
I do agree, that it is very possible to reduce the number of guns around and that then it is also harder for criminals to get one.
But as far as I know, now it is also pretty much illegal to carry a knive around in the UK, as the crime with knives were and are very high (but still lower than the US).
But in general I do not agree to the idea to reduce the problem to the number of guns.
Germany for example has a quite high number of guns per capita (higher than one would expect) and so has switzerland, but both have lower homicide rates than the UK.
I would rather focus on the reasons, why someone goes homicidal.
> a criminal will just get illegal attachments or larger magazines anyways
The point is to frustrate those efforts.
> I’d imagine it’s pretty easy to find some online from overseas.
Good! Now you've added new points of failure. It would just be terrible if that high-capacity magazine they bought from a sketchy vendor were to jam in the field.
> criminals can steal them from legitimate places.
...which increases the risk of getting caught before anything worse happens.
It is comically easy to modify or manufacture magazines. A lot of 10 round magazines are just standard mags with a spacer. I used to live in California. Every time I went shooting in Nevada, I'd remove the spacers, turning my 10 round magazines into 50 round mags, then change them back before I returned.
If you look at photos of confiscated guns in California, very few have 10 round magazines. Scrolling through SFPD's twitter, I can only find photos of illegal guns with illegal magazines.[1][2][3] The second photo is of a Polymer80, which is a pistol you can make at home using a dremel and a hand drill. They're compatible with Glock parts and quite reliable.
These laws do nothing to reduce violent crime. The main effect is to annoy law-abiding gun owners. When I moved out of California, it took me maybe 30 minutes to undo all the CA-specific modifications on my guns.
A criminal, in a gang, with access to the black market, might do that. It's still much more friction than simply going to a gun show or a state where there are no questions asked when you purchase a weapon.
A school-age kid very likely not.
Gun control isn't supposed to stop all criminals from getting guns, if there's a will, there's a way.
As Jim Jefferies puts pretty well: there's almost no reason to own a gun if you aren't a hunter except for that you like guns. That is ok on a personal freedom level but has pretty harsh consequences to a society when at scale...
> As Jim Jefferies puts pretty well: there's almost no reason to own a gun if you aren't a hunter except for that you like guns.
There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year in the United States, and evidence to suggest this actually lowers the rates of various types of violent crimes (including "hot robberies", where the home owner is still in the house when it is being burglarized).
The right to self-defense is a foundational human right, and logically entailed from that is the right to effective means of self-defense.
> There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year in the United States, and evidence to suggest this actually lowers the rates of various types of violent crimes (including "hot robberies", where the home owner is still in the house when it is being burglarized).
> Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2013. Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/18319.
Why not? You are upstairs when an intruder with a statistical 30-40% chance of being armed on an unknown mission that is hopefully just robbing you with a 7% chance of causing your family harm. Police are 10-30 minutes away. Most people don't sleep in the same room as the entirety of their family so if you hunker down and hope they go away you are leaving for example your kids exposed and hoping the intruder doesn't hurt them. If you startle them they could open fire sending a stray bullet into your kids room or they could wander into your bedroom in search of more loot and end up in either a struggle or a hostage situation.
Worse than all of the above they will do it again and again with few opportunities to get busted because statistically few of these crimes actually solved.
Your families safety is the only thing that matters here. If playing Rambo will increase the risk to your family you shouldn't do it. If shooting the intruder will increase the safety of your family by even the smallest fraction of a percent at the cost of certainly killing a burglar you should absolutely do so.
Lets say the harsh truth. The only people prowling around invading other people's homes are awful people of negative value to humanity. From a purely utilitarian perspective you shooting them today would just mean that they stop hurting actual people of worth tomorrow.
For your own moral health you shouldn't hurt them if it is possible to avoid it and preserve your other goals but there is no situation in which you ought to prize any number of burglars over even 1% chance of your family members getting hurt.
Your outrage isn't moral its a plea for greater harm in service of a dysfunctional moral code where your children are less important than the meth addict who is terrorizing your neighborhood.
You're taking random numbers pulled out of your ass for a fully hypothetically situation which you've made up. Can I make my numbers up too, or can we have a productive discussion about some actual solutions rather than "he might shoot me I saw it in FBI reports"
Here's the reality of things:
- 3 out of 4 burglaries happen with no-one home
- 7% of that remaining 25% show "a form of violence". It doesn't mean shooting. Even a fistfight counts in there. So, 1.75% of burglaries happen with violence. This is even lower in countries which have already regulated guns.
- There are approximately ZERO burglars that want a confrontation when stealing from you. It is infinitely more trouble than it is worth to be caught. Even if they know they will win a fight. A fight means noise, it means being potentially seen, caught, etc. Burglars will abandon ship the moment anyone is up. Once again, gun ownership makes the likelihood of things getting violent much higher. If you know you can easily run away, you don't come armed. If you know you can get shot, you come in armed and ready to shoot
- The meth addict is deserving of treatment and help, not being shot. Do you think people fall into meth for the lulz?
- Utilitarian perspective on human lives is absolute dogshit and a show of a rotten society and mindset.
The meth addict is deserving of treatment and help, not being shot
Not to detract from the rest of your points, but this framing isn't helping. Even if we all were to agree that addicts deserve help, it does not fall to the victim of a burglary to extend that help, at that moment, at that time.
To add context the prior discussion the attack by the drug dealer/addict that I expressed concern about already happened a few hours ago. Because no lethal force was used in defense I now have to worry about the criminal coming back with a gun. If you see me stop posting in next week its probably because I got shot.
28% of the time someone was home during the burglary
7% ended in violence. Not 7% of the 28% 7% of the total or 1 in 4 people who found someone home victimized them. Let me quote the report for clarity.
> A household member was present in roughly 1 million burglaries
and became victims of violent crimes in 266,560 burglaries.
The most common crime is simple assault but rapes, shootings, and murders happen.
Lets rewind for a moment and re-center the discussion on what was said.
>> There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year in the United States
> In all civilized countries, these are called murders. Someone entering your home does not give you the right to shoot them.
We were never talking about what to do if someone burgled you while you were away. The entire sub discussion was whether shooting a burglar was a morally permissible response. The background facts are that you are going into the situation with a 1 in 4 not a 1.75% chance of being victimized.
Furthermore your burglar will keep doing what he is doing and he is going to crap out sooner rather than later and hurt someone else because he's going to keep putting himself in other people's houses with their kids.
At the population level helping addicts and shooting invading addicts aren't mutually exclusive. You offer all the help you can to people so you don't come into your house to steal your shit to sell for drugs. I'm absolutely on board with offering people help and I absolutely don't want to do harm to people.
While you are speculating I actually dealt with a fellow forcing his way into our home. He pushed his way in knocking my wife down in a position where she couldn't retreat. He didn't respond to a threat of imminent death in a rational way because he was on drugs. Nobody is dead nor even broke a bone because I opted for minimum violence and beat him him instead of trying to murder him. Furthermore we supported the prosecutors diverting him from prosecution into a drug treatment program because fucking his life after the fact wouldn't make us any safer.
Had it been the best choice to kill him I would have absolutely done it and I wouldn't have worried about his interests if they conflicted over much with me and mine. I certainly wouldn't render my family unsafe in order to preserve his life nor should I. Nor should you!
With that user's interactions with me hopefully in the rear view mirror. I'm looking at the drug dealers/users coming in and out of the building mostly en route to the schizophrenic chick who runs her apartment like a drug flophouse handing out electronic keys to the "secure" building like sticks of gum. Her druggies and dealers have started making trouble about getting in now that the door is keyed for one key per person so their "keys" don't work any longer.
Myself and my wife have both been threatened and they tried to burn our building twice in the last 6 months lighting a fire in the stairwell that threatened the life of everyone in all 56 units. Despite being obvious arson with the wall and floor of the stairwell lit by someone who lit then fled on camera twice in the same spot a month apart this was classified as a accidental warming fire set by homeless people and nothing was done.
I have already been told "snitches get stitches" by the druggies and I fully expect for someone to make an attempt at violence that ends in fatality one way or the other in the future.
Forgive me therefore if I don't have sympathy for bleeding hearts that want to extend the warmth of human sympathy and kindness to folks who are already inside their house robbing it while they are in it! My sympathy is so far past zero the counter has rolled over.
"an intruder with a statistical 30-40% chance of being armed"
add gun control into the mix and this chance goes WAY down.
"If you startle them they could open fire sending a stray bullet into your kids room"
As could you by opening fire in an attempt to stop the attacker. Noting the majority of gun owners never use them, they are far more likely to cause harm them prevent it.
The "protection" argument is best served by reducing the number of weapons in circulation, not by arguing your ability to use one to protect yourself.
You are certainly correct but one is usually in a stronger position to control your individual situation than your societies. Logically reducing weapons in circulation makes sense but if one cannot actually do that then it may make sense to arm yourself even if on net your society is less safe for the decision you are all collectively making.
"Defensive gun use" does not necessarily mean "killed someone". It could be merely brandishing the weapon.
And while a home invasion does not necessarily give the right to shoot someone per se, it makes it quite a bit easier to satisfy the conditions for self-defense that I have laid out elsewhere in this thread.
I believe the individual you responded to is stating that from a moral perspective it's murder, not from a legal perspective. I would agree with them as well.
That only removes the duty to retreat, in states where such a duty is imposed (which is very few). You still have to meet the other criteria for self-defense.
> It's still much more friction than simply going to a gun show or a state where there are no questions asked when you purchase a weapon.
I really wish people would stop repeating this falsehood. If you live in a state that allows private sales without a background check, and you sell a gun to a non-resident of that state, you have committed a felony. Non-resident sales must go through an FFL, which means background checks and whatnot.
Most criminals get their guns through theft, self-manufacture, or straw purchases (often via a spouse or close relative). They're not acquiring them through legal loopholes.
Self manufacture is a legal loophole because you only have to manufacture the receiver and even then you can get a properly sized blank and let a CNC machine do the finishing work.
Except most mass shootings are not done by criminals, they are done by people that walked down to the shops and bought them selves an assault rifle to commit these acts with.
Not to mention making these kind of things makes the criminals that are doing this stand out, and that is something they generally want to avoid.
But it’s not what one would typically class as “the criminal element” committing mass shootings in churches, schools, or other community spaces. It’s the whackjobs right?
Those gun people just knows because at this point they've fought and (lawfully) circumvented those restrictions for larger fraction of the last century. Notice how quick and comprehensively he listed them.
IMO a lot of them just wants the "real thing" and not necessarily wanting a lethal instrument, so leading majority to non-firing/less lethal subgenres makes sense. They don't need a real working three-stamp Stormtrooper AR9 for 9mm Monday, but that's just my opinion.
>but there's also gun laws like in California that affect large populations of gun owners.
Is your rebuttal that there are laws?
>"they just don't understand" to the people who actually have to live with the laws
No, I just don't care. Guns should be a utility.
>As a gun owner
So, I guess my question to you is: aside from home defense (which surely requires a limited amount of rounds) and practice (which can be done by a range selling and enforcing no carry out of rounds, like in many other countries), what is your daily use case for firearms?
1.) No sometimes, looking at those debate basically always.
2.) Gun owners defined as "people who own guns" have actually quite high support for regulations. There is strong lobby and minority that does not support them, but they dont represent all or even most people who own guns.
I don’t think this is that difficult. Don’t bring a gun to an airport. If you must for transport, arrange for a professional to do it for you. If you can’t afford that, you don’t have a good reason to travel with a firearm.
I somewhat disagree with it being straightforward. 99% of the time it can be, but there's some notable edge cases that are missing from that website. There's been a handful of cases where people have flights with connections through NY/NJ, miss their flight (or have to divert to NY/NJ for mechanical problems and transfer to a new aircraft), collect their luggage that has a firearm in a locked container, and then get arrested for possessing a firearm without the mandatory NY/NJ state permit (which IIRC are only available to residents)
Anyone carrying a gun in an airplane, or any public transportation method is either a security officer, or a criminal. There are no good reasons as a regular-ass Joe to carry your Glock in an airplace. Not a single one.
Maybe sometimes, but there's also gun laws like in California that affect large populations of gun owners. I don't think they're making their dissatisfaction and confusion with the gun laws up. Owning a gun in the US isn't very simple; different states have wildly different laws you have to observe, and those are in effect at airports as well.
I don't think it's wise to say, "they just don't understand" to the people who actually have to live with the laws.
As a gun owner, I do think there's reasonable forms of gun control. I don't mind having my background checked or paying a tax stamp. I don't mind psychological evaluations or closing gun show loopholes. Restricting guns, ammo, attachments, magazine sizes etc are not effective forms of gun control imo.