Cat Sci writes:
So we're not even talking about the same thing. And your question wasn't even an honest one.
"How would you reduce gun deaths?" was a very honest question. You just don't like the implications of its honest consideration, so you proposed known ineffective solutions and pretended to yourself that they'd work.
And you just purposefully brought up examples that couldn't be prevented by any other way than removing the gun from the equation.
But all examples work that way. No gun, no gun death. Those examples
*were* the obvious ones, but that's not all I said. For example, I mentioned the failure of deterrence. The evidence tells us that the death penalty does little to deter murder. Our overflowing jails tell us that the threat of jail doesn't deter drug use. Deterrence is a myth - crime just pops up in some other way. Crime is a social issue - you don't turn people into productive citizens or solve their drug problem by throwing them in jail. You only make them more of a criminal. The only way locking people up works is to keep them locked up until they're too old to be effective criminals anymore.
The reason we have too many gun deaths is not because we don't have enough deterrence, and it's not because there's not enough firearm education, and it's not because psychologists are failing to detect who's going to commit murder. The reason is too many guns.
Are we talking the difference between 0.0000001% and 0.00001%?
You're saying this yet again? Are you math challenged or something? That's a difference of 100X. That's enormous. If we took that and applied it to non-suicide gun deaths they would be reduced from 8000 to 80 annually.
Think Alaska, Montana, the Dakotas... Think dangerous wildlife, think hunting.
Think giving some hint that you're veering out of context. We were talking about your justification of guns for defensive use. No one in this thread is talking about hunting rifles or is arguing that we should take hunter's guns away. The NRA's original target audience was recreational gun owners like hunters, and they should stick to that.
I'm using the stat as a metric for making the decision for myself in whether or not I should have a gun.
Yeah, I know, you have no wife or children, but you still have family and friends. You still have people around you, and if you have your gun then these people are also around your gun, perhaps unwittingly, and are in greater danger than if you had no gun.
I stand by the fact that it is not your decision to make for other people.
Your right to defend yourself stops at my right to be safe in my daily life.
Well, sure, criminals could adjust to more people carrying in other ways. For example, they might just sneak up from behind and club you unconscious with a baseball bat rather than deal with the possibility that you might be armed.
Or they might decide to just not commit the crime.
You're still living the myth. You're correct in that there must be at least some criminals who decide not to commit the crime, but by and large we know it doesn't work that way. Deterrence doesn't work. The fact that you might be armed just becomes another factor the criminal takes into account.
The point is that you're wrong to believe that more people carrying will deter crime. It won't, or at least not much.
I don't believe that, nor do I believe that it is something that you know.
Actually, that's something we really do want to nail down: Does deterrence work? Check out the
"Effectiveness" section of the Wikipedia article on Deterrence. One interesting excerpt:
quote:
Some research has shown that increasing the severity of a punishment does not have much effect on crime, while increasing the certainty of punishment does have a deterrent effect. "Clearly, enhancing the severity of punishment will have little impact on people who do not believe they will be apprehended for their actions.". Similarly, enhancing the certainty of punishment will have little impact on people who do not believe that the sanctions to be imposed will be severe.
When I think about the burglary example and consider whether more severe punishments would have a deterrent effect if we started arresting, indicting, trying and convicting folks who kill an innocent (or at least not guilty of a capital offense) person when they only thought they were protecting their family, then I think you're right, it would have a deterrent effect.
But is anyone really going to sentence grandpa to a lengthy jail term for killing the granddaughter when she tried to sneak back in after curfew? Of course not. Ain't going to happen. It's bad enough the granddaughter is dead, now the law is going to lock up grandpa, too? No way. The legal system will never achieve enough such convictions to create a social awareness that possessing a gun is a deep and profound responsibility that gives one the power of life and death. That's why the deterrence you keep talking about is a myth.
People are just people. Sure, there are people who are really into guns, and they maintain the guns and lock up the guns and practice with the guns. But most people are not gun people. They hear or read or see the scary news and they go out and buy a gun for self-defense, and whatever their initial intentions regarding training and safety, within a year the gun is lying forgotten somewhere. Until one night there's that strange noise and they remember the gun, and they get it out, and groggy and untrained and frightened they descend the stairs. Boom. Who'd they shoot? Who knows? Did they get a burglar? Or junior sneaking back in after meeting his girlfriend?
Deterrence and intimidation has a long and honored record of failure. Threatening someone with incarceration or violence doesn't necessarily deter them. It often makes them sneakier or more violent or something else, but it doesn't deter them.
It worked for drunk driving. Since MADD, drunk driving incidents have halved. Part of the solution was stronger punishment.
But drunk driving isn't the same thing at all. Drunk drivers mostly kill other random people on the road, not ones they know and love. It's easy to put a drunk driver in the dock and throw him in jail, not so easy to do the same thing to grandpa.
That attitude encapsulates the whole problem. You gun nuts only care about keeping your guns and not about the lives and safety of others.
That's absurd, and hypocritical.
If someone brings up driving deaths then you reply that you are capable of caring about more than one thing. But if someone disagrees with your idea for gun control, then they are only capable of caring about one thing and one thing only. Get real.
Prove me wrong and start making expressions of caring about all the needless gun deaths. Start showing that you care about New Town and Columbine and Charleston and Aurora and Lafayette by getting serious about how you would prevent them. Don't give us more of the same cold, emotionless and wrong arguments like "Just the cost of freedom," or "Just the cost of being safe," or (worst of all) "We need more guns."
--Percy
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