Summations Only

See post 417.I don't understand this attitude.Nothing we have tried worked so lets not try anything else.There is nothing we can do so lets not do anything.Let bury our heads in the sand.

That's an invalid inference from the statistics. In fact, you're a lot less likely to survive a home invasion in the UK than in the US. Because it doesn't apply, here. The UK didn't reduce their murder statistics at all by allowing criminals to break into homes unfettered. It's being ignored because it's irrelevant; the UK didn't reduce their murder rate four-fold. That's the comparison between the US and the UK - not between the UK pre-gun control and the UK post-gun control.But the UK did vastly increase their rate at which criminal prowlers menaced people in their own homes. That is comparing UK-to-UK.

Please show the stats and your reasoning.

Firearms were used by burglars on only 151occasions in the UK in 2011. That number has been falling year on year since 2003 (533). I feel pretty safe and getting safer every year - how about you?Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Evidence?It's already been shown, repeatedly, that gun bans are strongly correlated with a dramatically lower murder rate when comparing nations. You'll need to provide strong evidence to support the claim that this correlation should be disregarded. I'm afraid your bare assertion is insufficient. And of course that's a lie. Nothing but hyperbole. Home invasion is still a crime, and Brits can still defend their homes...they just can't do it with a firearm. You can still use a taser, or a stun gun, or a baseball bat, or pepper spray, etc. You can still call the police. If caught, the invader still goes to jail. It's not "open season" for criminals in Britain. Evidence for this survival statistic? Again, your own bare assertion is unconvincing. It might help your argument if you'd stop this nonsensical translation of all "crime" to "home invasion." You make it sound like British criminals are exclusively invading people's homes, and that they're doing so without consequence, and you and I and everyone else all know that that's absolutely not true.You do also realize, crash, that gun ownership does not and has never worked as a deterrent to prevent home invasion, right? A criminal has no way of knowing whether a given home contains a gun owner or not; most home invaders try to commit their crimes while the victims are away, so as to avoid the police or any form of confrontation. For the remainder...the possibility of a homeowner with a gun being present simply escalates the threat.

Hey crash, all arguments aside for the moment - do you believe there is or is not a gun problem in the USA?I look at your Message 19 and think so. I look even more at your Message 307 and think so.But if not, bye bye. But I somehow think you do think there is a problem. Therefore, assuming you do, what do you think would be cool to do now to implement the points you make in Message 307?Does this get back to the filibustering issue in the Senate?Your friend,

I don't understand it, either. You implicitly understand that people want drugs and don't particularly care if they're legal, that you don't get enforcement of drug laws "for free" but rather at a steep human cost, demand for drugs drives a vast, underground importation network, and that the War on Drugs has been a manifest failure.But then we talk about guns instead of drugs - also something people want and are willing to pay a premium for - and suddenly you think exactly the reverse: the people who wouldn't be dissuaded by the law against murder will be dissuaded by the law against getting weapons; enforcement of gun laws comes at no cost of imprisonment, expansion of the prison industry, police murder, government overreach, misuse of asset forfeiture laws; perfect interdiction of weapons coming in from Mexico to fill the "guns vacuum"; that we can enact a "War on Guns" with basically no problems at all.I don't follow that. It's amazing to me to see the people who complain about the encroachment of "law and order" government power into our schools and private lives, who complain about the enormous human cost of mandatory sentencing and "zero tolerance", who complain about how all politicians are "tough on crime" but nobody ever stops to think about the rights of those we're getting tough on, turn around on a goddamned dime and evince such utter faith in the power of government not to completely misuse the exact same rights they've already misused, because now we're getting rid of guns instead of drugs, and that's totally different, right?

Robbers don't need a gun if they're protected by civil law as they rifle through your house.

Three things which can be easily smuggled into the United States from Mexico (or elsewhere, living in Arizona a lot of the drug trafficking I hear of comes from Mexico, hence my predilection for mentioning that country), so it will create a market for these three things to come over because it will profitable. I will agree that the casings do not last for an unlimited number of reloads, although these also can be smuggled.......or even better found. I go camping up north in the National Forest a lot and there are simply shell casings laying around everywhere in the woods. I agree that the majority of reloaders are not potential risks. However, if there is a motivated individual who wants to wreak havoc, we need to realize that banning guns and ammo will not stop him or her from acquiring what they need. Crash keeps mentioning the War on Drugs and it is a good analogy. The market exists and so some sort of smuggling will occur to ensure that these products are never removed.Now, what we are left with is an unarmed populous with those motivated individuals still able to find access to the products they need to make ammo and fire it. Not sure that this is what we need instead of better regulation and holding individuals responsible for the damage that is caused by a gun that they legally own. My fault for simplifying it far too much.Also, a quick question for the thread about this topic. I was attempting to find statistics on how many crimes are committed with stolen guns and I could not find anything I felt was super reliable. I found percentages ranging from 60% to 90%. Even if it is at the low end of this spectrum, wouldn't proper locked storage go a long way toward diminishing this statistic?ABE - Now I have even found Stats from California that say stolen guns are as low as 4%....so it really seems that there is no good spot for this information. This one was from a gun crime report from the Attorney General's office though.PS - If someone can find a better site for stats on this, please let me know.Edited by Tempe 12ft Chicken, : No reason given.Edited by Tempe 12ft Chicken, : Added a new percentage that was found.

It is orders of magnitude easier to produce drugs than it is to manufacture firearms and ammunition. Many drugs just grow out of the ground, no effort needed. For others, a "lab" can be constructed in an average kitchen with minimal cost and using ingredients easily available.Firearms and ammunition require far more specialized materials. Yes, there would be an immediate "black market." It already exists. But reducing the legal availability makes it more difficult to acquire guns and ammo...and without a method of production as simple as planting a pot clone in some soil or making a meth lab or swilling up some bath tub hooch, a simple ban will actually be able to create the attrition that substance prohibition has never been capable of. Nobody here has even once suggested that we should pattern a firearms ban on the "war on drugs." Not once. Except you.Bans don;t need to take that form. We don;t need those kinds of searches, and we don't need "zero tolerance" or mandatory sentencing.Once again: you should probably stop arguing against straw men that exist only in your own mind. Doing so does not help your argument. At all.ABE You do know that most of the guns in Mexico come from the US, right?Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

Rahvin argues: You shoot your own foot here! The fact of 300 million guns in a country of 360 million means that the potential home robber would intelligently have TO WAIT until the gun-talented people in the house are gone (like on vacation). Or else he's already berserk and doesn't care to live so much. He NOT going to take a chance that this house is unarmed, like he would in Britain, perhaps. He might be totally wrong in his calculations, but he will still calculate to NOT try. That is all that matters. An NRA sticker on the window - regardless of whether there are any actual guns inside - may be all he needs to move on down the street to the next house he has been casing.

But that's nonsense. It's been shown that the US has a high rate of murder regardless of what gun control laws are in place, because of our high rate of homicides of all types, with all weapons. The US has a higher rate of stranglings than the UK; is that because the UK bans hands, neckties, and piano wire? Tasers, electronic "stun guns", and pepper spray are illegal in the UK. So I guess you'd better use a bat - but don't hit that guy too hard, or he might sue. Already provided. Burglars in the UK are four times as likely to invade your home with you present as they are in the US, thus placing your life at risk. I'm not now, nor have I ever translated "all crime" to "home invasion." It was pointed out - by you, I think - that the English find the American "obsession" with access to firearms "insane." I'm simply responding with what we find insane about England - that being menaced by burglars in your own home is now accepted as normal, no big deal, certainly nothing so objectionable as killing a person!Insane. Absolute insanity, and I wonder why you can't see it. If you can't be safe in your home, where can you be safe? But that's exactly wrong, exactly according to your "country to country" comparison (which, yes, I did previously reject as invalid. This is for purposes of argument.) By exactly the same measure you claim that the UK gun ban reduced murders four-fold, one has to conclude that the UK gun ban made home-invasion burglary with the occupants present four times more likely.Now, country to country, that makes no sense. But even comparing the UK pre-ban to the UK post-ban, banning guns and overturning your "castle" laws emboldened burglars to storm homes with the occupants inside, placing them at considerable peril. Sorry, that absolutely happened. Yes - except in the UK where they know they'll encounter no resistance.

I see you're dancing around the issue again. Never mind, it looks pretty.In the UK we protect every individual as best we can in all circumstances.Victims of crime have an absolute right to defend themselves and their property and may use reasonable force to do so. Reasonable force may include killing the robber with a weapon. And to make sure that everybody really understands that, we've just (unnecessarily) changed the law to say it explicitly.There is an assumption in UK law that the victim of crime always has the benefit of the doubt and it's highly, highly unusual for a victim to be charged with an offence whilst protecting himself or his property.It's even less usual to be found guilty if a case actually gets as far as to trial (do you think juries think any differently about this that you or I do?).And in the extremely rare occasions where a victim has blatantly committed a crime himself and ultimately been found guilty by a jury, the penalty is usually a suspended sentence. ie he walks out of court.You're exaggerating as usual.

Well, yes. For instance you protect criminals in the act of crimes.That's the issue, here. Not that homeowners aren't afforded equal protection under your law, but that criminals are. The notion that criminals have a right to safety, to not being assaulted, as they invade homes and put others at risk is insane. It's the insane notion that criminals should be expected to bear the physical risk of their crimes. I guess, except for all the cases I googled where the homeowner who assaulted a burglar got a longer, harsher sentence than the invader he'd assaulted.

This may not be true for very much longer. There are lots of efforts going on here to produce guns using 3D printer technology.The 3D-printed gun: When is high-tech too hot to handle? - ExtremeTech