Summations Only

The answer is so obvious... Clearly we have to uninvent the gun.

I was being facetious because nothing is going to undo this and it's about as functionally useless as saying we should just uninvent the gun. There's no way you could disarm the bulk of America at this point without massive bloodshed and civil unrest. So some more common sense legislation is necessary.

If you had your way, how would you tackle the issue?

It's a dangerous proposition for any politician to undertake, because the people within the military are almost entirely composed of people who support to the 2nd Amendment. A president could literally be ousted by insurrection and uprising if they didn't play it cool. Moreover, the culture is simply too engrained and too armed at this point to capitulate.So instead it would be advisable to introduce legislation that restricts or at least clearly defines what constitutes legal arms.

Homicide Rate in the US: The U.S. homicide rate declined by nearly half (49%), from 9.3 homicides per 100,000 U.S. residents in 1992 to 4.7 in 2011, falling to the lowest level since 1963.Homicide by Gun Rate in the US: The rate of homicides involving a firearm decreased by 49% from 1992 to 2011, while the percentage of homicide victims killed by a firearm (67%) remained stable.Source: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hus11.pdfAs for the numbers, self-defense by gun is 80 times higher than that of homicide, suicide, and accidental shooting combined. Don't hear about that in the media though, because it's not sensational enough.Source: Guns in the United States Firearms, gun law and gun controlAdditionally, there are 130,000 knife attacks in the UK alone, which goes to show that in the absence of guns, other means are not only available but also utilized. This goes to show, once again, that it's not about the tool being used but the intent of the person utilizing it.

They aren't cherrypicked, they are relevant to the place with the highest collection of arms in the world. And still the rate of both crime and gun crime are half of what it was and continues to fall. So if guns are truly the problem then we should be seeing an increase not a decline. You're missing the point entirely, but the murder rate is 4.5, the lowest since the 60's. That's about 10,000 out of a population of 318 million, which is approximately 5 times higher than the UK at 65 million or so. So, you're comparing apples to oranges.My point in using the UK is to demonstrate that whether there is access to guns or not, the heart of the issue is that violence still occurs regardless. And the real metric is how sane or insane your society is.And America is a rather violent society. That's the issue.If guns themselves are the reason for the violence, then countries like Switzerland should be off the charts and countries like Russia or Mexico should be low. But it's actually the opposite. That means there are other factors at play and that guns and gun laws cannot account for the disparity.

That's a truly awful argument in favor of strict gun control, as if there aren't millions of ways a person determined to die can kill themselves. Would you outlaw tall buildings and bridges for jumpers? Rope and sheets for hangings? Razor blades? Eradicate all medication in the off chance someone might them to commit suicide?There are other legitimate focuses for gun control than suicide, since suicide is so tenuous and unpredictable by its very nature. Homicide and aggravated assault would obviously make better arguments in favor of tighter gun control.

That's really nave to think that if guns weren't available that magically suicidal people would lose interest in killing themselves. They would simply find another way, just as people who don't have access to guns figure out other ways to kill people.This is the fundamental problem with gun control advocates; they think changing things externally will fix what is ultimately an internal problem. Maybe we should be figuring out why people want to kill either themselves or others rather than trying to create some falsely sanitized world free from bad things.I'm certainly not suggesting that the world is better with guns, because it's not. But we have to deal with reality because short of uninventing the gun, they are here to stay, so we might as well have a common sense approach. And since bad people will do bad things with or without guns, there might as well be a strong deterrent. Edited by Hyroglyphx, : No reason given.

I'm sure an isolated incident involving an idiot behind the wheel of a car wouldn't compel you to do away with cars altogether in response.

And as I stated, in the absence of guns suicidal people will still commit suicide. So what's your point?

That is literally the worst and weakest argument for gun control possibly ever. We should deny ownership of guns on the off-chance that someone might kill themselves with it. We should likewise ban buildings over two-stories and ban access to bridges and ban all pills and ban razor blades and ban knives and we should ban vehicles and so on...Hell, the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom should relinquish their arms because suicidal troops coming back from Afghanistan might kill themselves with their issued arms. OR you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.The bottom line is that people intent on killing themselves will find a way. People intent on harming others will also find a way.

Haha, I'm wrong, huh?Answer this simple question: Do people kill themselves without the use of guns? Yes or no. LOL, right, so inconveniencing suicidals is the solution for suicide prevention! Holy fuck! C'mon, that's an absurd argument to be making for a reason to unilaterally ban guns.

I thought of one other thing, even at the risk of this derailing in to a debate on suicide; and that is that the statistics show that men prefer the gun because of its higher percentage of lethality. They damn sure don't want to survive and become an invalid, so a gun is a safer method than slitting one's wrist. Plus it is a quicker death. However, women rarely use guns comparatively, and that's because they are more worried about what their corpse will look like when they are dead. They are more content with going to sleep and never waking up again.The point is that, like everything else, its variable. Not that it's a good reason for a unilateral ban on firearms because, lets be honest, the percentage of people that purchase handguns with the intent of killing themselves is astronomically low when juxtaposed by people who buy guns for recreation and defense. Edited by Hyroglyphx, : No reason given.

Then I cannot be wrong for which you quoted me. What I think is that it is completely and entirely irrelevant since people find other means. Had you said that suicidal people tend to choose the more lethal method, the gun being a more effective method, I would have agreed. But even that is a specious reason for a unilateral ban.You could make a better argument that car manufacturers should not allow any vehicles to go above 60mph, since high speeds statistically result in more deaths than slower speeds. I know, so you've said, the inconvenience of popping blister packs has saved untold millions! No, the latter would actually be a good argument in defense of stricter gun control. That argument at least has a basis measured in reality. The suicide argument is literally the worst argument that I've ever heard for an anti-gun position... And that's saying a lot.

Well, first of all you really cannot control for something like that since a high number of people who were suicidal, but didn't go through with it to completion, would not report it.Out of 41,149 total suicides in the U.S., 21,175 were committed by the use of a gun -- about half, which perfectly represents what I've stated -- that people find other methods or prefer other methods.Source: FastStats - Suicide and Self-Inflicted InjuryRegardless, I still don't see how that is a good reason for banning guns anymore than we should be banning razor blades or ropes or whatever other tool people might use to kill themselves.But I digress, as we're going around in circles.