gun control

Funky, this is from one of your articles:"Guns were used in 9,974 reported crimes in the year to April 2002, up from 7,362 the year before, the Home Office said. The number of people shot dead jumped 32 percent to total 23."The total number of gun deaths "jumped" to 23.Can you imagine any state in the US having a comparable population to the UK having a gun death toll of only 23? We would think that was miniscule, yet the Brits are freaking out. Seems they take the death of their citizens much more seriously than we do.As for your other link, I notice that it makes a bunch of claims but provides no references or sources for the information. So, I have no way of checking if their claims are accurate or not. I tend to pay little attention to articles like this because they could be pulling anything out of their ass.[This message has been edited by schrafinator, 02-23-2003][This message has been edited by schrafinator, 02-23-2003]

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I honestly don't think that guns are the cause of the violence, obviously a tool of the violent, but not the cause.

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I don't think that either.I do think that our love afair with guns is an integral part of our violent society.Guns are the very symbol of power with their potential for violence. That's why people like them.

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We do not solve the problem of violent behaviour by removing guns.

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However, we make it a lot harder to actually DO a lot of violence if so very many guns are not around.It's a lot easier to do violence to yourself or to others with a gun.

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I have a feeling that drugs/alchohol play the largest part in violent crime today.

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Also depression. More people take their own lives with guns than are murdered with them.Also domestic violence. There are plenty of perfectly sober husbands/boyfriends who murder their wives/girlfiends.

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So far I have not found the stats to support it, (i think stats are a flawed form of evidence anyway).

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Considering statistical analysis is what all of science is based upon, you would have to discount all of science if you discount all stats. The stats just have to be good ones.

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In order to solve the problem of violent crime, we have to look at the causes. People were murdering each other long before the gun became the weapon of choice.

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...and it was much more difficult to do so without lots of guns around.

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If we can study the motives in violent crime, and find what drives people to committ these offences, we can make the social/economic changes necessary to drastically drop the violent crime rate.

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In the mean time, everyone should have easy access to guns, so the death rate remains high and the answer to people's anger and frustration can always be to get a gun?If you have a depressed child in your house, do you keep a loaded gun in the house, or do you get the gun out of the house until the depression is cured?

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Gun control will only hinder honest people from owning weapons, I do not see how it will stop criminals from getting their hands on guns.

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If we stop producing cheap handguns and armor-piercing sniper rifles, and eliminate the loophole of not requiring background checks when a priovate seller sells a gun, things would get much better.Right now anybody can go a few miles down the road here to a big trade center, which is a lot like a giant flea market, and buy any kind of gun or kife they want, no questions asked, because the sellers are not dealers, but private citizens.

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Maybe we should work on minimizing poverty as well as drug and alchohol addiction.

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Then there is always mans great flaw GREED and jelousy.

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I will never register any weapons, I will not comply to any laws to do with the control of firearms.

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Then you are part of the problem of gun death.

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Gun control does not solve anything, the problems run much deeper than the fact that people own guns.

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I don't want to stop people from owning legitimate sport firearms.I ask again;If you had a person in your house who was obviously violent or depressed, would you keep a loaded gun in a place where they could get it easily?Yes or no?[This message has been edited by schrafinator, 02-28-2003]

[This message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-03-2003]

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Because unless you can remove guns already in the hands of criminals (you can't) or remove ALL guns that they could steal (you can't) you will never control them.

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That's why we have to stop producing cheap handguns in the copious numbers we have been.Also, if we imposed stricter laws about how people must store their guns and ammunition we might make it harder for the crimials to steal them out of nightstands and garages. IOW, requiring all gun owners to be much more responsible with their weapons, and hold them liable if they did not secure them properly.You know, we regulate every other consumer product in this country, but not guns.

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You can talk all you want, but take a walk on the streets of any major (or minor) city at 04:00 and see if you feel the same way when you run into those who would do you harm. With or without a gun.

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Any major city? I have walked in London, Paris, Bern and a couple of German cities at that time of night and felt perfectly safe.All of those countries have strict gun control, too.To drive a car, you have to study and take a test, you have to pay to register it every year, you have to purchase insurance in case you do damage to people or property with your car, if you sell your car, you have to pass on the registration to the new owner so the vehicle can be tracked, etc., etc.We don't have to do any of this for guns, and guns are manufactured espressely to kill.You have also ignored the fact that more people use guns to kill themselves than are used to kill others.

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Sorry to only respond to one section of your post, but this seems silly to me. You keep blaming guns for killing, and here you blame them for suicides. Obviously a person does not decide to commit suicide just because they have access to a gun. There is problems in their lives, and they feel hopeless and lost. This is not the guns fault.

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Again you are ignoring the real problem, placing the blame on guns.

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If your wife was severely depressed and suicidal, would you keep a loaded handgun in your house where she could get it easily?My point is not that guns cause violence.My point is that the ready availability of cheap handguns and military-style guns make suicides and impersonal, long-distance, very quick violence and death very, very easy to do.If we have this problem with violence, WHY in the world do we make the things that make it easy to do violence to ourselves or each other so ridiculously easy to get?It's like making an alcoholic sit in a room surrounded by dozens of bottles of liquor, and then saying, "Alcohol doesn't cause alcoholism, alcoholics do."It goes against all reason and sanity.[This message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-12-2003]

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Hears a novel thought... How about we hold the criminals responsible for theft and illegal use of the weapon rather then punish the law abiding individuals that choose to arm themselves in order to fend of the multitudes of repeat offenders that our court system releases every day?

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We do hold them responsible.But a gun is not a toy. It is a highly specialized device designed to kill living things at a distance.Please give me one good reason why there shouldn't be some pretty stringent laws in place for how they should be secured from people who might want to steal them?Why should people who decide they want to own a extremely dangerous (yet highly portable and concealable) devide such as this bear no responsibility whasoever for keeping out of the hands of people who might misuse it?No comment on my car analogy?

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First of all WE don't have a problem with violence. Blanket statements like that are always problematic for me.

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In our (that is American) society there are many who are prone to violence, more so than in other countries.

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Such stats do not mean that (in the US) there are more people prone to violence than not, or that guns made anyone more prone to violence.

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I never said that. I said that having lots of guns around makes the kind of violence done to each other more likely to be gun violence than if so many guns weren't around.

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Given the generally peaceful daily routine in america (violence is not the norm), it should be obvious there are many more people with self control in the US than without.

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Do you really know if this is true? How many americans use corporal punishment with their children compared to other countries? How do we compare with other cultures in verbally abusing one another? How many people drive aggressively or are dangerous on the roads? How many people support the death penalty when they wouldn't ever lift a hand to anyone personally?

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Thus WE don't have a problem with violence, only a certain selection within the population does. One group casts no shadow of guilt upon the other.

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But we are all part of the culture, and those who aren't prone to violence still live in the culture with those who are. Who is to say how many people are more prone to violence because they live here than they might have been if they lived in Japan, let's say?I don't think, IOW, that the groups are that easily separated.

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And this may be the closest your alcoholism analogy comes to the violence problem. Some people have problems, while others do not. They are sufficient in number that we are concerned (regardless of whether they use guns). What then should be done?

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The actual history of our solution to the "alcohol problem" indicates why we should NOT base legislation of this issue on "our problem" style reasonings.

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The last time we did this (blaming crime and intoxication on alcohol) we got prohibition which didn't solve anything.

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No kidding.You are taking what I said out of context.I have never advocated banning all guns.

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In this day and age, due to the lessens we learned during prohibition, we do not keep everyone separate from alcohol until they prove they CAN handle it.

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Instead, we separate particular individuals from alcohol when they prove they CANNOT handle it. If their problem is sufficiently great, we may remove these individuals from society until their problem is addressed.

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The emphasis is on an individual's responsibility and not on the alcohol, no matter how seductive and delicious that nectar may seem to some, or to the culture as a whole.

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Except we don't regulate gun manufacture and ownership at anywhere near the level that we regulate alcohol manufacturing and consumption.Also, there is a lot more at stake with gun ownership than with alcoholism.

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Much to the contrary of your conclusion, alcoholics (or perhaps their genes)DO cause alcoholism and not the other way around. The onus is rightly placed on the individual to control their own problem.

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You are taking my analogy too literally. The important part about it was the illustration of the alcoholic being surrounded by bottles (we surround violent people with easily-gotten guns) and then the play on the NRA bumber sticker.My point is that we currently have a system of nearly non-regulation of guns which makes it very easy for the most vulnerable to doing gun violence to get the firearms.

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Your reference to suicides falls apart along these same lines. The use of guns by suicide victims is interesting as a statistic on method of choice, but does not mean that people are seduced into suicide by the "ease" of gun use, or wouldn't have accomplished their goal otherwise.

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I disagree. It is clear that having guns in the house increases by many times the liklihood that people will commit suicide at all. This is the data.

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In fact, if we use the latter statement's logic, are we going to say sleeping pills are "better" than guns because they are one of the least effective methods?

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I am not sure what you mean.

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Realistically, if a person truly wishes to kill themselves they will do so, guns or no guns.

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So, why then do you reject the evidence of the fivefold risk of suicide in homes with guns compared to those without guns?

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Firearms do not make that choice any "easier" or "attractive", only faster in execution. To think otherwise is to shift responsibility from a thinking individual to an inanimate object.

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I disagree. I very much do think that guns make the choice easier, just as the choice to shoot someone rather than stab or strangle them is made because it is safer and easier to kill from a distance if you can, rather than in a one on one struggle.

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It is the changing nature of weapons themselves, which has come to necessitate proper training and greater responsibility for users of our modern, ADVANCED WEAPONS.

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Just as cars and planes differ so vastly from human legs and horses that they require more responsibility and education to use, modern weapons require much more than ball and powder muskets.

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Agreed, basically.

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This is the only argument which needs to be made. It is sufficient.

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The irony in this statement is amazing.[This message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-13-2003]