Summations Only

I thought I'd clarify the topic just a little bit, since my opening post was a bit terse.I wanted to discuss how or if we can reduce gun deaths in the US. I wasn't expecting that some would question that gun deaths are proportional to gun ownership, but that seems like it should be part of the discussion. Gun possession's impact on crime seems relevant, too, as do a host of related issues.But single motherhood's and welfare's impact on crime is clearly not part of the topic.Of course, I'm not a moderator in this thread and have no enforcement power.--Percy

Personally, I think even the death of the shooter is a tragedy - I'd much rather see nobody at all die. If the shooter was mentally ill, he belongs in the care of a skilled psychiatrist, possibly restricted to an institution, not dead.(I absolutely agree that, once he starts shooting, shooting him is a perfectly acceptable form of defense to stop worse loss of life - but in the best of all possible worlds, there was no shooting and no dying at all)"More people with guns" sometimes ends well, and sometimes doesn't...but generally, people who don't have guns cannot fire them. I think of recent anecdotes of the "stand your ground" laws, like one in which a man told some kids in a car to turn down the volume, thought he saw one reach for a shotgun, and emptied his pistol into a car full of actually unarmed teens killing one of them. If we allow ourselves as a society to escalate firearms posession by private citizens, we need to be ready to accept the consequences.Even in a gun rights supporter's ideal world...guns kill people. They might be used to kill the aggressor, but we still have people being shot to death. If the aggressor never had a gun to begin with, there's no reason for the defender to escalate to using a firearm himself.I don't distinguish significantly between a criminal and a victim killed by a gun. Yes, self-defense is perfectly valid - but I still see both as merely symptomatic of the disease of violent escalation. I think if we could find a way to de-escalate, whether that takes the form of a gun ban or something else, human lives can only be saved.

that's a great story, but FFS even your screwed up country isn't that fucking bad...And having just checked it out... like WHAT THE FUCK ?????? And Crash is here defending these twats with their guns. I'm sorry, but as far the USA is concerned, I'm with Riply and Hicks.

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I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

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Sort of neatly gets around your fucking second amendment.Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

While I appreciate the general "WTF" reaction to such an abhorrent event......let us not make the same mistake as crash in disproportionately assigning weight to anecdotes over statistics. Just as individual school shootings are statistical anomalies rather than a solid basis for policy making, that single event can only ever be a single event and is not itself a trend.It is possible (though I think improbable and counterproductive in any case) that possession of firearms by the general public can be more frequently used to prevent deaths than to cause them via the threat of lethal resistance. Just as I assign very low weight to crashfrog's example of a robbery foiled by a man with a gun, he would be absolutely justified in assigning low weight to my own anecdote. This is why we use statistics, after all.ABEI'd just prefer there to be fewer guns so that fewer people could be shot, and so that we wouldn't need every cop to be prepared for urban warfare. I don't want to shoot a thief, and neither do I wish to be shot by one. He can have the goddamned TV, and we can catch him to stand trial later.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

Rahvin, people are idiots. That includes you and me at particular moments in our lives. You do not put guns into the hands of idiots. It is that fucking simple. If you have the problem that plenty of idiots already have guns, then giving more guns to more idiots is possibily not the smartest of moves...

This happened three weeks ago. This is not just some anecdote. And coming on the back of Trayvon Martin. But it's not these incidents. It is the fact that you have idiots like the two fellons involved in these two cases wandering around, armed. These are the people to whom you are giving guns. Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

I agree with you. I just don't want to give crash (when he returns) a reason to continue to argue by anecdote. The fact that these incidents happen at all says something rather negative about firearms kept for defense, but I'd rather try to focus the debate on statistically lowering the number of people who needlessly die every year, particularly in gun-related incidents, rather than the "oh yeah, what about that one time..." back and forth.

They are good questions, though.

You seem very authoritative in making such a claim when the facts and stats oppose you so overwhelmingly.The experts are still debating the extent of the impact abortion has had along with other efforts to reduce violent crime in big cities, like NYC:"Social scientists and criminologists have endlessly debated the extent to which effective policing was truly responsible for the drop in crime, compared with other factors like the higher incarceration rate, improved economic conditions, the lessening of the crack cocaine epidemic, a relative reduction in the numbers of 16- to 24-year-olds (through abortion), and even the abortion rate.Why Did Crime Fall in New York City? - The New York Times

????What more do you guys want than the source following each stat I listed????Like here are some of th Stats I posted:63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. (Source: U.S. D.H.H.S., Bureau of the Census).90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes.
85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes.
(Source: Center for Disease Control).80% of rapist motivated by displaced anger come from fatherless homes.
(Source: Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol. 14, pp. 403-26).71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. (Source: National Principals Assoc. Report on the State of High Schools).etc, etc

Hi crashfrog So logically, anything outside what is necessary to form a well regulated, trained, organized militia is open to regulation.This could include the availability of ammo and certain kinds of guns, while the arms for militia use beyond that can be kept by militia storage compounds.Enjoy

Hi Catholic Scientist, Actually it does. To be constitutional they are regulated by the states.Enjoy.

The document you linked has dubious content.
When you get time to read it, I doubt you will be impressed.
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Since at least 1965, the false assertion that the United States has the industrialized world’s highest murder rate has been an artifact[sic] of politically motivated Soviet minimization designed to hide the true homicide rates.

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Conspiracy much?
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Since well before that date, the Soviet Union possessed extremely stringent gun controls3 that were effectuated by a police state apparatus providing stringent enforcement. So successful was that regime that few Russian civilians now have firearms and very few murders involve them.

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The number of firearms held by civilians in Russia is ~12,750,000.
1 in 10 Russian civilians own a gun.
(I am unable to find out how many murders in Russia involved guns, despite a thorough search. It appears Russia does not publish those numbers.)
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Armed crime, never a problem in England, has now become one. Handguns are banned but the Kingdom has millions of illegal firearms. Criminals have no trouble finding them and exhibit a new willingness to use them. In the decade after 1957, the use of guns in serious crime increased a hundredfold.

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That is completely made up - it even argues against itself: the last sentence contradicts the first.
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America remained very well armed yet homicide remained quite low for over two hundred years, from the earliest settlements through the entire colonial period and early years of the United States.

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That is because killing blacks, chinese or native americans was not considered homicide.
Not that I believe that there are any statistics available - and the article provided none.
.The amount of erroneous, flawed or baseless claims in your link is too much to be covered in one reply.
The document is nothing more than an 'opinion piece' disguised to look like a real research paper.
The authors' bias is showing.Edited by Panda, : No reason given.

Its not so "clear" to the authors of Freakonomics, though:Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner attribute the drop in crime to the legalization of abortion in the 1970s, as they suggest that many would-be neglected children and criminals were never born.Crime in New York City - Wikipedia

The more I read the posts on this thread the more I worry about the disaster coming if Americans are disarmed.Much of the thinking here is absurd. You know that when the UK and Australia were disarmed crime went up, particularly home invasions, but all people here care about is the specific number of deaths, other kinds of crimes are treated as trivial although they victimize innocent people and can ruin their lives. You have the nerve to suggest that's caring too much about "things." No, that's caring about personal security, FREEDOM, safety, JUSTICE, a civilized society. You all want barbarianism and social chaos apparently.And you aren't even asking WHAT deaths, do you include criminals killed in the act or what? And someone actually says he cares as much about the death of the criminal as the victim. It sounds like you guys have a terrible time telling the difference and you really don't care. The guy killing someone in the defense of his house is as bad as the guy breaking in. This is crazy. No wonder the west is going down.To prevent the murders we've been seeing more and more of the solution is NOT gun bans and gun control. The solution is to have some kind of security in place to stop such things from happening, whether that means allowing the arming of personnel or hiring security guards.The crazies are choosing the locations where guns are not allowed because they can get away with their murders there but everybody irrationally screams MORE GUN CONTROl anyway.In two of those cases there were initial reports of a second shooter, at Connecticut and at Aurora. Anybody wonder why those second parties disappeared from the news? Let me guess that the second party could be a provocateur and the intention was to provoke the murderous rampage by the first and then disappear, and the ultimate objective is to kill the second amendment, to disarm the country and set us up for government or other tyranny. Yes, I suspect a conspiracy, could be wrong, could just be lone crazies, but I suspect it, largely because of this illogical but predictable cry for gun control after every such incident.And now it looks like they are going to do it to us, they've got the momentum they wanted from this evil murderous rampage, they've got people crying for gun control over the most hideous nightmarish murder imaginable so they've got the excuse they've been looking for and they're now going to take some of our guns away from us.In reality preventing such occurrences really is as simple as I suggest above, and gun control is only going to set the country up for more crime and probably some horrible kind of really really serious curtailment of our freedoms in the near future.To reduce crime you need to protect the rights of the citizens who do have guns. Instead we're stupidly restricting their rights and criminalizing them when they defend themselves. Yes sometimes people overreact but that's a matter of training. MORE TRAINING< fine, more training in judging situations, when to shoot, protecting people in the background, keeping guns from people with mental instability, all of that. But crime would GO DOWN if citizen gun owners' rights were defended instead of restricted to the point that guns aren't available or usable when needed.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.