Summations Only

The existence of legal firearms only makes it easier to acquire firearms - legally or illegally.Besides, current gun control laws have loopholes you could drive the Death Star through - like the gun show exception.Does it really matter if they were acquired legally? In the case of school shootings, most times the guns are legally owned by a parent and stolen by the kid who shoots up the school. Is that "legally" or "illegally" acquisition?If the guns had never been legal in the first place, the parent wouldn't have the guns to steal. The gun shows wouldn't have the guns to sell. Only criminals would own guns...but there would be fewer guns, and school shootings aren't generally perpetrated by the same people who participate in gang violence or other centers of illegal firearm possession.

"Make guns illegal" is a one-line simplification, not an overarching policy. Of course simply making firearms illegal wouldn't magically remove guns already in existence...and there are many, many guns already in the US.But it would limit the ability to move guns. You couldn't just go to a gun show and buy one. Ammunition would no longer be legal. Spare parts would no longer be as easy to get. The basic ban of firearms would be a step, and possibly the largest step, but it wouldn't finish the job. We'd still almost certainly have mass gun violence in the short-medium term. Over long enough periods of time, gun possession would decrease on its own.But why use confiscation? Use a gun-buyback program. Allow gun owners to voluntarily surrender firearms and ammunition and be compensated at least partially for their value. Combined with the threat of steep fees or even jail time for being caught owning guns (without the necessity of a door-to-door search), such an incentive would cause at least some percentage of gun owners to follow the new law.Again - not a total solution. Just an acceleration of the reduction in firearm availability. And it bypasses any issues with the Fourth Amendment.You don't need a police state and door-to-door warrantless searches to ban something.

Unfortunately I agree. The gun lobby is extremely strong. It would be a stretch just to close the gun show loophole - a big stretch. Gun control threads are always an intellectual exercise in wishful thinking. I believe that, as jar demonstrates, nonviolent people who own guns prioritize their own "rights" over solutions that would have a real effect. I believe that Constitution-worshipers refuse to alter what they consider an important part of that document regardless of the reasons. I believe that it's extremely easy to rationalize reasons to keep guns, like "protection against the government," even though those reasons also fall to pieces under even slight scrutiny.I think that even great tragedies like school shootings are always "someone else's problem" because they happen to strangers for the vast majority of us, and it's difficult for a person to give up a certain extant right to lower the possibility of a potential future tragedy.There are a lot of reasons, dronester. I think the "violent, hateful society" bit is essentially hyperbole. It makes for a neat soundbyte, but it offends more than it convinces.I don't think most people are hateful, I think they're apathetic. Most people simply don't notice an ethical problem until it's directly pointed out to them, that's simply an unfortunate fact of the human mind.

Only for dealers who regularly buy and sell firearms and are licensed to do so. Individuals can buy and sell firearms at gun shows without performing such checks. That's what the gun show loophole is.

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Unfortunately, current federal law requires criminal background checks only for guns sold through licensed firearm dealers, which account for just 60% of all gun sales in the United States. A loophole in the law allows individuals not engaged in the business of selling firearms to sell guns without a licenseand without processing any paperwork. That means that two out of every five guns sold in the United States change hands without a background check.

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Though commonly referred to as the Gun Show Loophole, the private sales described above include guns sold at gun shows, through classified newspaper ads, the Internet, and between individuals virtually anywhere.

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Unfortunately, only six states (CA, CO, IL, NY, OR, RI) require universal background checks on all firearm sales at gun shows. Three more states (CT, MD, PA) require background checks on all handgun sales made at gun shows. Seven other states (HI, IA, MA, MI, NJ, NC, NE) require purchasers to obtain a permit and undergo a background check before buying a handgun. Florida allows its counties to regulate gun shows by requiring background checks on all firearms purchases at these events. 33 states have taken no action whatsoever to close the Gun Show Loophole.

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From here.Again, I never claimed it was a full solution. It's simply an incentive. It's a way to accelerate the attrition of firearm ownership after banning them, beyond just letting owners die and guns break and ammunition be expended until there aren't any more. I don't follow - how does a ban and buyback program increase the ownership of guns? The government becomes the owner of the sold firearms, not private owners, and new sales are banned. How could that result in anything other than reduced private ownership, which is the point? Strawman. I propose no such thing. If a person carries a gun in public and it is reported, they can be arrested. If a person is served a search warrant and a gun is found, that's an additional charge that can be filed even if the warrant was for something else.Again, you don;t need a police state to ban something. You dont need door-to-door searches unless you think we need to get rid of all guns right now, and I don't see that as a requirement. I see the requirement to be reducing gun ownership by private citizens. A ban would go a very long way, and could even achieve that goal in the very long term alone; a buy back program would accelerate the process, and other ideas might help as well, but I never suggested anything like what you're suggesting. A ban doesn't necessarily have to mean jail time - it can simply be a fine and confiscation. You need an incentive to surrender firearms, but that need not be the threat incarceration, and neither need the ban be taken to the extremes of the so-called "war on drugs." Reduction is the goal, not full elimination.And, you know...guns don't just grow like pot, and it's harder to make a homemade gun than it is to cook meth. And those you can make at home don't tend to be fully automatic weapons with boxes of ammunition.You haven't really presented an argument, crash, other than strawmanning my positions.

This is a compelling argument to focus our attention elsewhere, on ways to minimize death and injury from more likely sources that can be more easily curtailed.But that's not an argument against gun control. It's a red herring. Even if our attention is better focused elsewhere...none of us are policy makers, we're just people on a debate board. Whether a kid is more likely to die from a gun or diabetes has no bearing on whether or not gun laws in the US could use some changes.Besides...gun violence and gun control isn't limited to school shootings. School shootings simply provide an emotionally impactful reason to bring the topic to our attention.

Except that this would do nothing for shootings where a legally owned firearm is taken by an unauthorized individual for a rampage, like is the case in most school shootings. Accountability does nothing for murder-suicides, either. It's a good idea, but it would require a lot of bureaucracy for little reward.And ammunition of some types can be made at home, much more easily than the firearms can.And many "single-shot" firearms are modified autos or semi-autos, and a skilled individual can modify them back to their more military design.

Again...this is a discussion thread. You're presenting an argument to not bother debating the issue, which is different from debating how we can improve firearms legislation.If you think the topic is unimportant...well, feel free to not bother debating it. Feel free to start a thread on how to make the roads safer.

yes.What's the per-capita gun death rate in Norway as compared to the US?I'll do it for you.Norway is 1.78 per 100,000 people.
The US is 9.You're making a simple error - you're suggesting that gun control on the level of Norway's is intended to eliminate gun deaths.It's not.It's intended to reduce them.Those numbers suggest that Norway is doing a better job at preventing gun-related deaths than the US is. A much better job.Crazy people will always be out there. But we can take some actions to reduce the amount of harm they're capable of doing.

I never once contended any such thing.In fact, I've repeatedly stated that my goal is the reduction of gun violence, not the elimination of school shootings.Perhaps you should restrict yourself to debating my actual positions, rather than making up strawmen or arguing that we shouldn't worry ourselves about such a minor problem in the first place. Evidence?From gun violence statistics, it would seem that these points are likely false. I've already posted a comparison of per-capita gun deaths from the US to Norway; I can provide more, if you like. The data is freely available, and it clearly shows that countries like Japan, the UK, Norway, Sweden, and so on all have significantly fewer deaths per capita due to gun violence than the US.You have also contended repeatedly that a ban on firearms necessitates a "war on drugs" level of prohibition, which I have repeatedly deflated. Your continued insistence does not make it so - we manage to ban private ownership of hand grenades without a "war on explosives," we manage to ban lead paint without a "war on paint," and so on.Again - you seem to have nothing to debate aside from strawmen, red herrings, and bald assertions.Perhaps you should attempt to debate actual positions your opponents have actually stated, and back up your arguments with actual data as others have done. Provide evidence for this assertion.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

You argued that, since a gun ban would not stop all gun violence, there's no reason to ban guns.That's not and never has been my position. My position is that a ban would reduce gun violence, and that's the goal.See. here's what you said: You referred to a few well-known anecdotes to demonstrate that gun violence still exists in countries with strict gun control. You claimed that the gun control "didn't stop them."Nothing can stop them completely. No system short of a time-travelling oracle will be able to prevent all of them.But the statistics, you know, real data as opposed to simple anecdotes, shows that countries with strict gun control have a FAR lower incidence of gun-related death than the US.I presented that data to back my argument. Of course not - human behavior is too complex to be able to tell what the actual cause was in most cases of gun violence.But while correlation is not causality, it's one fuck of a big hint.And it's pretty hard to argue that fewer guns can do anything but reduce gun violence. It's hard to shoot a gun you don't have. I've been advocating a gun ban for years. I'm the last person who says "save the children!" I hate emotional appeals.I simply note how many people die every year from gunshots, and I think to myself "Guns don't kill people, people kill people... but people with guns kill a lot more effectively than people without guns, and I'd much rather face a lunatic with a knife than a lunatic with a pistol." I completely agree that mental health care in the US is worse than abysmal. Instead of fixing the hellhole institutions, we just closed them and threw the sick people onto the street.But not all gun violence is due to the mentally unstable. There have been several recent "stand your ground" incidents in the US where people were killed for no reason at all...because a perfectly sane person had a gun and felt a little threatened when no threat was present. Just as an example. The vast majority of gun-related killings do not occur in a classroom, and are not related to media-frenzy-causing crazy people.You;re just arguing red herrings and straw men. Yet those two were individual incidents, and when you look at the actual statistics, the frequency of gun deaths...your argument falls to pieces.Again: nobody says bans will eliminate gun violence. Only that they'll reduce it.It would appear, given that Norway has less than 1/4 of the gun-related deaths of the US, that their gun laws may have prevented more people from going Breivik by restricting their access to firearms.

I agree with crash and CS on assault weapons.Banning assault weapons doesn't do any good. If I can;t get an Uzi, I can still get a handgun. Rapid-auto-fire is dangerous for police engagements, but in an incident like a school shooting, an Uzi would just expend its ammo faster.If you ban assault weapons, history has shown that the regular sort of firearm still works perfectly well for making a large body count.That's why I support banning ALL firearms. No hunting rifles. No handguns. No shotguns, no pistols, no revolvers, nothing. No ammunition, no guns.Fewer firearms can only ever result in fewer deaths due to firearms, in our schools and in our streets. Some will still happen, we can't magically disappear all of the existing guns, and we'll have a black market rise up overnight based on the sale of guns and ammo...but the number of guns on the street will slowly decline, and gun violence will decline with them.It's politically untenable. It would require a Constitutional amendment. Nevertheless, I still think it's the best option by far to reduce gun violence. Whenever I look to the UK or Norway or Sweden or, really, almost anywhere in Europe, I know that we can do better than we are today.

And what would have happened if the assailant had not had a gun available in the first place?

Certainly a possibility. If he knew how. If he was able to get the materials in large enough quantities.But let's test the prediction. In nations where guns are less available, does the number of bomb-based attacks increase after firearms legislation is passed?You've speculated, but the real world already has examples. What do those examples show us?

According to a 2012 study, the murder rate in the US is still significantly higher than in the UK.The murder rate in the US is 4.2 per 100,000 individuals.
In the UK, it's 1.2.But then, your argument seems to be that an alleged increase in petty theft justifies allowing "self-defense" weapons that demonstrably increase the murder rate. That strikes me as rather odd, considering that I'd much rather lose my TV (and have insurance replace it) than lose my life or the lives of my loved ones.

Compare theft to murder, and perhaps you'll see the difference.But crash, you've focused on hyperbole rather than the argument.The murder rate in the UK is almost ONE FOURTH that of the US!I'd trade double the non-murder crime rate to cut the murder rate to 1/4 of its current value any day of the goddamned week.Why wouldn't you? You'd rather have more murders and less stuff stolen? Really? Apparently stuff means more to you than human life.Edited by Rahvin, : Whoops, switched the UK and US in a sentence...