For example, FBI homicide stats last year show 350 killed by rifles of any kind, assault or otherwise, while 750 killed by hammers. I keep waiting for the groundswell of public support for hammer control.
Which stats are you looking at? The 2012 UCR isn't out yet, and the 2011 stats show 323 by rifles, 457 by "blunt objects" which includes but is not limited to hammers. There haven't been 750 people killed in homicides by blunt objects in 2007 through 2011.
AKs in the US have been semi-automatic for a long time. It takes an experienced gunsmith to restore fully automatic firing to an imported AK. They have been sold this way in the US for decades and are a cheaper alternative to the AR-15.
Then it isn't an AK-47 in the same way that an AR-15 isn't an M16.
The point is, nobody is making or importing full auto AK-47s and selling them to gang members. A semiautomatic-only AK-47 is just the functional equivalent of a hunting rifle.
The M16 has been semi-auto (single fire and three round bursts) since the Vietnam war with the rare exception of special forces weapons[1]. Fully automatic mainline rifles are inaccurate, wasteful, expensive, and less effective.
Burst fire IS semi-auto, despite the other commenter. Automatic firing means that when you hold down the trigger it continues to fire until either the trigger is released or the ammunition supply is exhausted.
The federal government does not consider burst to be semi-auto. Semi-auto rifles are legal for civilians without any special license. Automatic weapons require a Class III license and no civilian can buy one manufactured after 1986. Three-round burst falls into the later category, and any gun store in the U.S. will use the same terminology as the ATF.
I've been in many gun shops, never heard them referred to as automatic weapons. At least in the midwest, I've heard them referred to as either "burst" or Class III weapons.
Do you have a citation for that? AK47s became popular with many hunters and target shooters because they're rugged, cheap, and have really cheap ammunition for target practice with a rifle.
Popular with gangs for the same reason. They're also pretty intimidating. Citation? Go to a search engine and type something like "AK47 chicago gang" or search the news websites for any large city with a high murder rate for 'ak47'
> The AK-47 is a select fire fully automatic rifle. It has been illegal to import or manufacture fully automatic rifles for civilian use for decades.
Don't do this. You know I meant 'AK pattern weapon', we'll use the WASR you can get at any sporting goods store for an example. You can get/modify all the parts to convert over a civilian AK to full auto without problems, unless the ATF finds out.
You'll get a lot of hits on that because the media calls every long gun an AK47. No criminal in his right mind would use one, it's expensive and objectively terrible.
Fully automatic weapons are exceedingly rare. I know everyone thinks gang members are just flush with first-world armaments but most are using handguns. Easy to get a hold of (either stolen or straw purchases) and easy to conceal. Other than organized crime, street gangs have very few contacts for illicit imported weapons purchases.
I would say you are wrong because legal AR15s, even California legal AR15s with bullet buttons, have become popular among all types of gun owners. It's the #1 selling rifle. There are many variants and styles for hunting, such as the 6.8, 6.5 and .308 (also known as the AR10).
It's tough to kill at a distance with a hammer, unlike a rifle. I suppose that's why people fear rifles more, but honestly I think the hammer killer is more frightening. If someone decides to randomly put a bullet through my head from half a mile away, I'll never even hear it coming. But if someone decides to crush my skull with a hammer, I'm going to be around long enough to know that I'm going to die in a really stupid and wasteful manner.
750 were killed by hammers or clubs which includes any blunt force attack (vase, bat, golf club, etc. I am assuming that you're accurately quoting a number, though last I saw that number was more in the 450 range). Secondly every home has numerous objects that qualify as "clubs", many of them serving valid, functional roles (for instance to hammer, or to hit balls, etc). In many households a firearm has one single purpose, which is to kill or maim (given that hunting is rare, though I suppose that's a weird exception I make given that hunting is ultimately about killing, food pyramid and all).
So that's the first gross misrepresentation that you've made.
The second is that few argue for "rifle control", but instead want "gun control". Those guns that kill 30,000+ Americans per year (whether homicide, suicide, or accidental).
I'm a hunter (albeit here in Canada), but just as I despise misrepresentation of facts one way, it doesn't justify gross misrepresentation the other way.
>The second is that few argue for "rifle control", but instead want "gun control".
Except that's not what was actually happening. Most of what was hotly debated over the last few months has been over an "Assault Weapons Ban", that is a ban on certain semi-automatic rifles, very rarely involved in crime.
It was only after that was defeated that people started talking about universal background checks.
>Those guns that kill 30,000+ Americans per year
60% of those are from suicide. If you look at suicide rate by country--there is no correlation with gun ownership. How is gun control going to help our suicide rate? The best information we have shows it's not going to help because there are too many easily available alternates.
"They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that only a madman could be guilty of it; and other insipidities of the same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person."
Motherjones also fails to recognize that MANY states already have mandatory "cooling off periods" where if you buy a gun on say Monday you can't pick it up until later in the week.
"As with many states, Illinois has a mandatory 72-hour wait period between the time a person purchases a handgun and the time he can take the gun home from a licensed dealer."
In most cases, these waiting periods are for handguns and not rifles or shotguns. The law is not to prevent suicides but to prevent 'crimes of passion'. There would be very little difficulty in someone killing themselves with a rifle or shotgun, although it isn't as easy as putting a handgun to one's temple.
>Except that's not what was actually happening. Most of what was hotly debated over the last few months has been over an "Assault Weapons Ban", that is a ban on certain semi-automatic rifles, very rarely involved in crime.
That's because they knew that the nuts in NRA and other pro-gun lobbies would never in a 1000 years accept a total "gun control" law. So they scaled down their proposal.
Plus you also have this BS amendment about the "right to bear arms" that you treat as some kind of holy scripture.
I wonder what would have happened if some part of the constitution called for the "right to own slaves".
Nice. Not an American, so not familiar with this case.
Which reinforces my point: no damn reason to keep the constitution, the founding fathers and 200 year old amendments as "holy scripture". You can fuck "the right to bear arms" and change the laws.
>You can fuck "the right to bear arms" and change the laws.
You could, via constitutional amendment. There are 2 methods to do this, a constitutional convention (hasn't happened yet). Or the amendment can pass both houses with a 2/3 vote, and then be ratified by 3/4 of the states.
This is the legal procedure for changing the constitution. However, the anti-gun control crowd doesn't have anywhere near the support for this.
Ignoring the constitution and confiscating all guns via dictatorial fiat would result in civil war/mass uprisings that would kill far more people than currently killed via firearm.
Most people who are anti-gun, such as yourself due to your "BS amendment" comment, are usually very ignorant or fearful of guns.
As a very middle of the road type of guy, I joined NRA and 2nd Amendment Foundation for the first time a few months ago because of too many people like you who are too easily influenced by the media in the past 6 months.
>Most people who are anti-gun, such as yourself due to your "BS amendment" comment, are usually very ignorant or fearful of guns.
I actually went through a compulsory one year long army training (and got to be a sergeant) but nice try anyway.
>As a very middle of the road type of guy, I joined NRA and 2nd Amendment Foundation for the first time a few months ago because of too many people like you who are too easily influenced by the media in the past 6 months.
I'm from another country, I don't even read your media that much.
I just feel that selling guns to anybody in a society with so many wackos (with the highest gun crime rates in the western world, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the highest number of nutjob serial killers) is wrong.
And I'm also against the "protecting my private property means I have the right to kill any trespasser" cowboy logic.
I prefer to be robbed and let the police handle it, than kill people.
> In many households a firearm has one single purpose, which is to kill or maim (given that hunting is rare).
Kill or maim criminal intruders (given that murderers are rare). I'm not sure where in Canada you are, but hunting is far from rare in Canada and most areas of the US.
I'm not comfortable with the parent posters assumptions.
I live in Wisconsin and last I heard 15% of residents hunt regularly. I'd estimate for every 5 people I know who have guns for hunting, one has a handgun. I don't personally know anyone who has a handgun and does not have guns for hunting.
5% of Canadians hunt. That qualifies as pretty rare to me. I don't know what the percentage is in the US, but just gut feeling is that there's a wide gap between gun ownership and hunting.
It doesn't to me. You're factoring in all Canadians of all ages (newborn->elderly, men, women) in all areas. 1 in 20 of every single human being regardless of age/gender seems pretty common in context.
If I were to perform the same sort of blanket percentage on Americans that actually watch baseball games regularly, I bet I'd reach a similar percentage. That doesn't mean that baseball fans are rare.
A citation for your 5% figure would be nice, because it might contain some meaningful context to lay a better picture than it does by itself.
I live in the Toronto area, and around here the percentage is, unsurprisingly, incredibly low. Out of the thousands of people that I engage with, I know one other person who hunts.
It's also worth noting that while blunt objects such as hammers and baseball bats find uses in construction and non-violent sports, guns do not necessarily share such innocent use cases. Sport shooting is the major exemption (I'm quite a fan, myself) but at the end of the day guns are designed to put holes (some messier than others) in objects very far away. When a gun is pointed at a living organism and the trigger is pulled, its chances of survival plummet.
If you are looking at banning something because it causes deaths. You want to look at how many deaths are caused per item.
Reducing the number of items by X will result in Y fewer deaths.
Baseball bats kill more people per baseball bat than do "assault weapons".
What other reason could you have for banning something other than reducing harm. Looking strictly at the numbers banning baseball bats would prevent more killings than banning "assault weapons".
- The number of baseball bats available,
- The number of baseball bat homicides,
- The number of assault rifles available,
- The number of assault rifle homicides
Please provide the actual numbers, and sources. We can't compare H_bat/A_bat to H_rifle/A_rifle without these.
Baseball bats kill more people per baseball bat than do "assault weapons".
What font of imaginary statistics are you pulling this ludicrous claim from? Do you know how many hundreds of millions of baseball bats there are in the United States? If we're discussing the confused, exaggerated stats that originally kicked this off, add in the billions of other "club-like" objects in circulation.
Do keep in mind that the parent was specifically referring to assault weapons, which are presumably much more rare than other firearms, and also very rarely used in crime.
I have no statistics, and I have no clue how many baseball bat deaths occur annually. I just thought maybe this would be a useful reminder.
I haven't looked up the stats lately, but IIRC, the number of times a legally owned actual assault weapon was used in a crime in the US was something like 3 or 4... ever.
It's hard to find definitive statistics on that. If you go looking around you'll see a few cases that pop up. In the early 2000s a police officer (and member of the SWAT team) used his issued MP5 to murder a few people, and sometime in the 70s a police officer found his wife in bed with another man and killed one (or both? I can't remember) of them.
The point is, like you said, it's exceedingly rare.
You're right, the stats on that are somewhat hard to find, or hard to qualify as definitive. I've seen articles that say "NO legally owned fully automatic weapon has ever been used to commit a crime" and I've seen a few articles that say the number is < 10. I don't think I've ever seen anything that even tries to argue that the number is higher than that however.
Guncite only comes up with two cases, one of which may one of the same ones you just mentioned:
There is no real definition of what an "assault weapon" is, and few restrict that to only automatic weapon.
I would say that an AR-15 is most certainly an assault weapon. It is a high power weapon (ignore the rather ignorant people who fail to understand the difference between a .22 and a .223) designed and built for military purposes. Being automatic fire or not has remarkable little relevance to its deadliness.
There is no real definition of what an "assault weapon" is, and few restrict that to only automatic weapon.
Right, because "assault weapon" is a made up term, created by the people at the Brady Campaign and other radical anti-gun groups, to promote their fear-mongering approach to advocating for more gun control. An "assault rifle" OTOH, does have a technical definition, and it does involve a full-auto or select-fire capability. A civilian AR-15 is not an assault rifle. Calling it an "assault weapon" makes as much sense as calling it a "gandering gillifrous".
It is a high power weapon (ignore the rather ignorant people who fail to understand the difference between a .22 and a .223)
Meh. A .223 is still a relatively low-powered round in the grand scheme of things. A typical .223 round has less kinetic energy than a standard 30-06 round which is used for hunting all over the United States. In fact, .223 is illegal for hunting deer and other large game in some states, because it isn't lethal enough.
Calling it an "assault weapon" makes as much sense as calling it a "gandering gillifrous".
It's purely coincidental that it is a weapon enamoured and used by so many spree killers. Purely coincidental. It's a high capacity, fast-action semi-automatic (not all semi-automatics are created equal, and the AR15 allows a practitioner to achieve automatic-rate fire) that is military built to empty clips effortlessly. Totally the same as a hunting rifle.
Meh. A .223 is still a relatively low-powered round in the grand scheme of things.
And then you point out a MASSIVE bullet used by almost no one but in bolt action rifles. A bullet that is essentially never used in the commission of murders.
Yes, and that bullet is relatively low-powered compared to a 120mm M1 KE round. Which is completely meaningless patter.
It's purely coincidental that it is a weapon enamoured and used by so many spree killers.
May be. Spree killings are actually fairly uncommon, so trying to draw any inferences from such a small data set is fraught with risk.
Totally the same as a hunting rifle.
Nobody said it was. But I, and many others, refute any assertion that an AR-15 is especially deadly compared to many (most) other commonly available civilian semiautomatic rifles.
And then you point out a MASSIVE bullet used by almost no one but in bolt action rifles. A bullet that is essentially never used in the commission of murders.
The point is that .223 is not an especially lethal round. Bringing up something like a 120mm mortar round is silly... 30-06 is a commonly used, generic-as-can-be round, which sits in boxes and boxes in stores and houses all around the USA. And it is a more "lethal" round than .223, but the anti-gun fringe jump all over .223 and the AR-15 to evoke an emotional reaction. It's pure fear-mongering and appeal to emotion.
After all, it's not just a "gun" it's "a high power, fast-action, semi-automatic assault weapon"! Which one sounds scarier and is more likely to get people all riled up? FSM forbid that the thing might even have one of those evil pistol grips or a bayonet lug, or even gasp be black...
The .223/5.56/variations is the round of choice for military units around the world. For killing/maiming people.
It's powerful (dramatically more powerful than a .22), relatively light, and can be loaded in high capacity magazines.
Just to be clear... I'm not saying that you can't kill somebody with a firearm chambered for .223. Of course it's potentially lethal. Pretty much all firearm rounds are potentially lethal, even something like .22 Short rounds.
What I'm saying, is that the .223 is not particularly more dangerous than other common rounds, to the point that there's any reason to single it out for special attention. And the fact that military forces choose it doesn't dispute that. There are a LOT of reasons why military forces make the choices they do, and they're as likely to be economic forces as purely strategic ones.
When the military chooses it as the round of choice for killing people, it's pretty nonsensical to try to hold it as some sort of weakling.
If sheer lethal effectiveness were the only criteria used to select a round, .223 would not be the first choice for killing a human being.
Of course you can make any point with relative comparisons. Compared to a bb and a slingshot, .223 is deadly-as-fuck. But compared to many other rounds that you can commonly find firearms chambered for, it's average at best.
I love trying to find numbers for random claims. This one is a little bit tricky because none of the four numbers are readily available.
The closest numbers I can find so far are:
Number of murders committed with blunt objects, 2010: 600 [1]
Number of murders committed with 'rifles', 2011: 323 [2]
Number of 'assault-style' rifles: 3.75 million [3]
Number of baseball bats produced per year: > 1.6 million [4]
So we don't know what fraction of blunt object murders are bats, and we don't know what fraction of 'rifle' murders are 'assault-style' rifles. We also don't know for sure how many 'assault-style' rifles there, are just a random reporter's guess. We also don't know how many bats there are, just how many one company of many makes.
All this together makes me believe that no one has any basis to make any claims about the deadliness of guns versus bats, because no one knows anything about the deadliness of guns versus bats.
I certainly can't come to any conclusions either, but I can at least sketch out the bounds. If we assume that every blunt object murder is a bat and every rifle murder is an assault rifle, then there are twice as many bat murders as assault rifle murders. But the question is murder per bat versus murder per assault rifle. So how many bats are there? There are probably somewhere between 2 and 5 million bats sold each year, depending on how much of the market Hillerich & Bradsby have. If the average lifespan of a bat is 5 years and 2 million are sold per year, then we have around 10 million bats in the country. If the average lifespan is 10 years and 5 million are sold per year, then we have around 50 million bats in the US. This puts the bats : assault-rifles ratio at between 2.5 and 13.
So the way I see it, as long as no more than twice as many murders are committed by baseball bat than assault rifle, I feel comfortable saying that assault rifles are more deadly than baseball bats, using the metric of people killed / weapon. For me to feel comfortable saying that bats are more deadly than assault rifles, at least ten times as many people would need to be killed by baseball bat as are killed by assault rifles.
The numbers I could find would still allow for either conclusion -- there's just too much uncertainty in them -- but IMO it leans heavily towards the conclusion that assault rifles are deadlier.
If we assume that every blunt object murder is a bat and every rifle murder is an assault rifle, then there are twice as many bat murders as assault rifle murders.
That assumption definitely does not hold for the technical definition of "assault rifle" which includes full-auto capability. Murders committed with fully automatic weapons are very rare, and with legally owned ones, almost completely unheard of.
Now if you use the Brady Campaign definition of "assault weapon" - which basically just translates to "scary looking gun that I don't like" then you may find different numbers.
The number for assault weapons you're using is AR-15 type rifles. That doesn't include AK-47 variants, Ruger Mini-14s, or many others that are considered "assault weapons".
There are estimated to be around 1 million Ruger Mini-14 rifles alone.
Adding all of those rifles to the number and the total number of "assault weapons" and baseball bats are likely to be fairly close--at the very least more than half of your estimate for baseball bats which would put baseball bats ahead.
Fantastic point. Considering the rifle's primary purpose, and the number of them out there, it certainly suggests the typical rifle owner must be pretty responsible.
Compare to the 200 kiddie pool deaths every summer, which have the unfortunate side effect of almost exclusively killing kids despite mostly non lethal purposes, and rifle owners start to seem extraordinarily more responsible than kiddie pool owners.
At some point, I think we might as well cut through the hyperventilation, acknowledge potentially dangerous things are potentially dangerous, and let people choose their own risk profiles.
Compare to the 200 kiddie pool deaths every summer
You have a very loose handle on facts. There are about 20 "kiddie pool" deaths in the United States in an average year. There are many more swimming pool accidents, which is exactly why there are endless regulations and safety actions around swimming pools, and it remains a serious tragedy that absolutely needs action. It is completely and outrageously unacceptable that children continue to die tragic deaths in swimming pools, and whether it's increased safety measures, or more education starting at a younger age, it is untenable and at some point in the future people will look back and marvel at the stupid risk taking that occurred.
Of course it's a garbage analogy anyways. Swimming pools provide recreation and physical activity for tens of millions of people. Guns generally sit in closets until that day it's used to commit a suicide, a robbery, a murder, etc.
I have a baseball bat in my house and it's not there to hit balls but to hit anyone who attempts to come into my home without my permission. I doubt I'll ever need to use it, but there you go, it's one single purpose is to "maim or kill", which in reality is actually protection and I'd be happy with fear itself being the deciding factor.
I don't come down on either side on gun control, they're mostly banned here in the UK and that's just how it is. However, I think you'll find most people actually consider protection is a legitimate reason to have a weapon, so you shouldn't so easily write it off.
At least it used to be the case that many school children played rounders, and you typically use a baseball bat for that. (I don't remember what you call the bat you use for rounders - probably just "bat", as it's usually obvious from context you're not talking about cricket or golf.)
Perhaps most UK people posting here don't expect Americans to have heard of this game.
You're doubtless right that most are probably purchased for hitting people in the face, perhaps without necessarily even waiting for them to break in to one's house first.
You are correct, but it's a matter of degree. It's much, much easier to maim or kill with a gun than with a baseball bat and that's why I'm glad no one has guns in the UK. If someone comes at me with a baseball bat I can run away. If someone comes at me with a gun, I'm dead.
Not to belittle your point, but you're not necessarily dead if someone comes at you with a gun. Many factors dictate if the shooting will be fatal. For example, in far too many cases police officers and others defending themselves have had to fire multiple shots to disable or kill an attacker. And in some cases have failed. So you might not be dead.
With that said, people do have guns in the UK, just not law abiding people. Gun crime is apparently up 89% the UK since the ban as well, so there are guns in the UK:
1) you may survive an attack with a firearm, according to the OP it appears a majority of gunshot victims do (30k shot vs 8k killed in the US)
2) there are guns in the UK, and more gun crime since the ban went into effect. Infer from that what you will.
I read somewhere about a study which suggested that some ridiculous high number of gun uses (90+% if memory serves) were resolved without discharging the gun. The thing is, these situations were rarely, if ever, reported (and if they were, it's often up to speculation if the situations would actually have led to a crime), leading to a systematic difficulty in accurately deciding the effectiveness of guns in crime prevention.
The point is, if someone pulls a gun, and you run away, they have very likely achieved their goal, and are unlikely to discharge the gun.
Bingo, and it's many studies; amusingly, the first was done with data collected by gun grabbers, and it had lower numbers since it didn't ask if the respondent had used a gun in self-defense more than once during the year.
Current numbers put self-defense gun uses at something like 2.25 million per year, with indeed way over 90% never involving a gun being discharged.
There's also a systematic difficulty in the other direction, I'm pretty sure most criminal uses of guns also don't involve it being discharged. And some fraction of those don't get reported to the police or then reported accurately, you'd need to start with the national crime survey data.
It's already been said, but if a woman or elderly person wanted to attack me with a stick, I'm pretty confident I could disarm them. If it were a gun, I would run. This is a great equaliser and in the context of me being a potential threat by trespassing into their property, I have no arguments with people owning and using a gun.
Where things get murky is those defending themselves aren't always resonable. There are countless other cases where the "victim" steps over bounds within the UK, and presumably elsewhere, and whilst I don't really support protecting criminals, I don't entirely the idea that you can murder someone for stepping on your lawn, stealing from you, or any other reason besides you feeling that you or others are going to come into direct harm.
Personally I think the US has some very strange rules with regards to guns, standing your ground and protecting your property, but we are obviously largely divided on what constitutes resonable force, which is why I don't exactly endorse guns ownership.
Anecdotally, from what I've heard and what I observed in the Missouri CCW class I took, the demographics of concealed carry are strongly biased to the older, mostly middle-aged and older.
For exactly the reason you point out. Grandma and grandpa have gotten too old to even think of holding their own in hand to hand combat, but a very large fraction can safely use handguns. And, anecdotally, in my CCW class it was mentioned they had only failed two people, one guy who couldn't observe Rule 2 (was pointing his handgun everywhere, can't remember if he was really old), and one old lady who wasn't strong enough to rack the slide of Glock (unfortunately she gave up at that point instead of finding a solution that was within her physical capabilities).
Do you have a source for that 30,000+ figure? The FBI statistics link in this thread mentions around 8600 firearm-related murders for 2011 (but not suicide or accidents). That's the only hard data I've seen in this thread so far though.
In these sorts of threads, anecdotes and hyperbole can quickly overrule data and thoughtfulness, so I'm just hoping that numbers like "30,000+" aren't being pulled out of thin air. I'm not saying that's what you did, I'd just like to see people actually source their claims in threads like this which tend to devolve quickly.
Fatal firearms accidents are running at about 600 per year.
While the population and number of guns owned by them has increased ~50%, the absolute number of fatal accidents has dropped by 1/4th, from around 800 per year.
I suspect not all of this is due to medical advances, a lot are hunting accidents where getting to a trauma center in the "Golden Hour" (for what that's worth) isn't possible.
As others have mentioned, a hefty percentage of those deaths are suicides. Would those suicides have happened if the option of a firearm wasn't available? Perhaps.
I have to say, with no evidence to back it up, that if you want to die enough to put a barrel in your mouth, if that gun is taken away, you can find another way.
Dunno about the downvotes but is the best argument we have for reducing suicides, well if we make it more awkward then less folks will top themselves and instead will lead lives of miserable desperation?
I don't have a moral problem with suicide. Like I mention elsewhere, in my country euthanasia is sometimes administered to people with certain types of depression. I think that's fine (if weirdly bureaucratic).
Thing is, often people who are depressed do get better. And I think a lot of people who end up killing themselves would have gotten better if only they hadn't. I think this is all the more the case for teenagers.
That's why I think it's worthwhile to take away opportunities to kill yourself. That means making gun possession illegal, installing safety nets, etcetera. (Within reason, of course.)
The suicidal find a way. Where guns are not available, in at least one major comparable example, the suicide rate is different by being higher (by a lot). Sure, guns make it easy...but there are many other easy ways.
I don't think Japan and the USA are very comparable. In fact, I think insofar modern countries are concerned you'd be hard pressed to find two countries that are more different than Japan and the USA!
We're both "high trust" societies. Compare to the Chinese stereotype/archetype of not trusting someone outside the family to run part of the business, which helped to kill Wang in the US and abroad outside of the PRC tends to limit firms to simple types like trading companies.
I agree, we are in many ways very different, many of them fundamental, but many fundamental are similar enough.
> We're both "high trust" societies. Compare to the Chinese stereotype/archetype of not trusting someone outside the family to run part of the business, which helped to kill Wang in the US and abroad outside of the PRC tends to limit firms to simple types like trading companies.
Sure, but I explicitly excluded non-modern countries. (I have lived in China.)
> I agree, we are in many ways very different, many of them fundamental, but many fundamental are similar enough.
Okay, but you're not controlling for any variables. Like you say, there are many differences even if there are similarities too.
The incidence of suicide (and related-party homicide) in households with guns is significantly higher. Unless we believe that there's a correlation between gun ownership and suicidal tendencies, the answer seems to be, mostly no.
Having a highly-effective killing device in the home turns attempts into suicides - and a gun is an order of magnitude more effective than other common methods.
Americans would go bonkers if someone started selling a do-it-yourself euthanasia machine. But we're ok with lots of handgun sales, despite that being one of their most common uses - more common than self-defense.
People in their first week of gun ownership kill themselves 57 times more frequently than the general public. That suggests to me that people who are determined to die are buying guns for the express purpose of suicide, and would probably select some other method if it was too difficult to obtain a gun.
I don't eat McDonalds and I wear my safety belt. Other people having guns is not something I can control though, hence the justified need to control who can be given them. I don't worry about my freedom to gun people down, it's not a freedom I really want.
Firstly, I don't think anyone is advocating for their freedom to 'gun people down.'
More importantly, I don't think your interest in particular freedoms should arbitrate which ones others receive. I can understand that you don't wish to exercise your 2nd amendment rights. No one is force-handing you a gun.
Freedoms are about choices for people. "I don't want this freedom, so no one should have it," is misguided. Plenty of others are minimally interested in freedoms you enjoy. Support freedom.
A point I've made in a previous discussion is that we clearly draw a line between directed and undirected weapons, and therefore claymores and grenades are verboten, but something like 250,000 full auto guns are legally in the hands of US citizens.
I don't know if politicians are in on this, bit of a conspiracy that I don't want to get into. However, crime and murder sell. My mother loves to watch the 10 O'Clock news every night but luckily she reads the paper and surfs the web, otherwise I think she might lose her mind. Those nightly news programs are awful. If I only watched local or even cable news and used them as my source for staying in touch with the world I'd think we were living in a complete hell hole. I live in a major city with several local news channels and they are all the same. Just murder and crime and usually some human interest piece at the very end of the broadcast. They report the worst of the worst.
Many would be better off not watching any news or reading any newspapers. Even relying on the Internet makes things tough since there's a firehose of data, and this leads to confirmation bias having a huge affect.
Yes, I agree with that. Although I have to say that I think reading the news is far better than ever watching it. When you read it you can take your time with it and selectively choose what articles you want to read rather than having a bunch of crap thrown at you at a high pace.
Because of course people are interested in this. And it doesn't have to be a stereotypical, cowelled people meeting in caves conspiracy. Instead it's an "auto-conspiracy", simply a large group of like minded people doing things in the same direction. Not even a "conspiracy" in the usual "it's secret" sense, many if not most gun grabbers are open about what they're doing enough of the time and often about their intended end goals.
That's one of the things that's driving the "counter-revolution", the gun grabbers have let their masks slip so much, have expressed so much hatred towards gun owners, that they and many many people who were just thinking about buying a gun have been buying everything useful in sight.
E.g. Illinois FOID card applications have quadrupled; that's a absolutely solid metric of people who haven't legally owned a gun up to now.
These all seem to be qualities we see in the "mass public." Whether it's consumerism, mercurial emotion, or a "save the children" mentality to politics, no one has common sense or the capacity to rationally analyze anything anymore, which is extremely sad.
I'd have to attribute this to the general attitude of ignorance that seems to infect and grow and devastate minds.
When I was in 3rd grade, I asked my teacher why the sun was an inexhaustible resource even when it would eventually collapse and implode, and she said, "Well, it's not going to collapse in our lifetime."
Again, cultivating an attitude of "Just take everything for granted and don't overthink and introspect at all," which, fortunately, I wasn't a victim of. This attitude leads to political ignorance, emotion > reason, consumerism, and also effective advertising.
If it weren't true, The "Learning" Channel, MTV, VH1, Fox News, and MSNBC would not exist today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ooa98FHuaU0
Fear is a powerful weapon. The media and politicians know this and selectively choose which crime stats to promote.
Emotional outrage > rational analysis when it comes to selling pageviews and building political support.
That is nothing new. Fortunately the internet is helping to temper that imbalance.