Summations Only

But with 3-D printing, the genie has clearly left the bottle.

How about inventing "phasors set on stun"??

These statistics force us to really look at the big picture in terms of spending more money on security/bombs or spending more on education and quality of life in the US.

I was being facetious because nothing is going to undo this and it's about as functionally useless as saying we should just uninvent the gun. There's no way you could disarm the bulk of America at this point without massive bloodshed and civil unrest. So some more common sense legislation is necessary.

Far-right wing, fundamentalist Christian, NRA.Halloween was more then a month ago but this scary trifecta is still here all rolled into one in the Republican party. We can dream of "common sense" gun control but right now we are in the midst of an unending nightmare.

If you had your way, how would you tackle the issue?

If I had my way, if I were the Emperor, the 2nd Amended would be gone. But that is just a pleasant dream.The Republicans need to be kicked off Capitol Hill. But I fear too many people in the electorate have succumbed to the fanning of the flames of fear and the drumbeat of war the Republicans habituate.Overturn both the Citizens United v FEC and the McCutcheon v FEC decisions to stop big $$$ from warping political speech? It will take decades for SCOTUS to correct those errors. Modify DC v Heller will take even longer.This is how it starts. The religious right-wing rose up and has fashioned the political landscape after their own desires. Now the extremes of that movement have taken control of the Republican party with their hatemongering bigotry and their fearmongering penchant for war. Civil liberties fall in the name of security. Individual rights succumb to majority fears.Where is the body politic of moderate America? Disgruntled, disgusted and sitting on their thumbs.The only course open is the long hard struggle to educate, jawbone, protest and oppose. Maybe, just maybe, if we're lucky, the Moderate Majority will get up off its ass and stop this shit.Voice ... Volunteer ... Vote.

It's a dangerous proposition for any politician to undertake, because the people within the military are almost entirely composed of people who support to the 2nd Amendment. A president could literally be ousted by insurrection and uprising if they didn't play it cool. Moreover, the culture is simply too engrained and too armed at this point to capitulate.So instead it would be advisable to introduce legislation that restricts or at least clearly defines what constitutes legal arms.

There are plenty of weird folk in our military as it reflects our society, but, since a president (even with a supportive congress) cannot unilaterally repeal a Constitutional Amendment, if done constitutionally (congress passes the repeal, resolves it to the states, 3/4ths of which adopt the resolution) then the "military" will have no objection. But, again, this is only a pleasant dream and I cannot see such a movement taking hold in this society for some generations yet. Thus my rant against that far right-wing, NRA-driven Christian fundamentalist religious cult we call the Republican Party. Effective limits on firearms can only be accomplished with them pushed to the side. And for that to happen we need the Moderate Majority to stand up in unison and kick some republican ass.That will not happen easily or soon. Though, if the Republicans continue to flirt with either of their two leading candidates and bring one of them to the dance we may all enjoy the spectacle of the Republican Party imploding into political oblivion next November. They can't be that stupid ... can they?Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Top Constitutional Lawyers Explain What the Second Amendment Really Says About Gun ControlMoose

Last week the New York Times ran an article titled In Missouri, Fewer Gun Restrictions and More Gun Killings. The article best describes itself, so here are some excerpts that get right to the point:

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In the past decade, Missouri has been a natural experiment in what happens when a state relaxes its gun control laws. For decades, it had one of the nation’s strongest measures to keep guns from dangerous people: a requirement that all handgun buyers get a gun permit by undergoing a background check in person at a sheriff’s office.

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But the legislature repealed that in 2007 and approved a flurry of other changes, including, last year, lowering the legal age to carry a concealed gun to 19. What has followed may help answer a central question of the gun control debate: Does allowing people to more easily obtain guns make society safer or more dangerous?
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It is difficult to isolate the impact of gun laws in a single state, given the pervasiveness of interstate trafficking and illegal markets, but a variety of measures, including a marked increase in police seizures of guns bought in-state, suggest the changes in Missouri’s laws have had some effect.

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Research by Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, found that in the first six years after the state repealed the requirement for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, the gun homicide rate was 16 percent higher than it was the six years before. During the same period, the national rate declined by 11 percent. After Professor Webster controlled for poverty and other factors that could influence the homicide rate, and took into account homicide rates in other states, the result was slightly higher, rising by 18 percent in Missouri.

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Federal death data released this month for 2014 showed a continuation of the trend, he said. Before the repeal, from 1999 to 2006, Missouri’s gun homicide rate was 13.8 percent higher than the national rate. From 2008 to 2014, it was 47 percent higher.
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The article at this point mentions that for the first time in our nation's history, the gun death rate equaled the motor vehicle death rate.

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Other measures suggested that criminals had easier access to guns after the permit law was repealed. Professor Webster analyzed data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and found that the share of guns that were linked to crimes soon after they were bought doubled in the state from 2006 to 2010....

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This is followed by the obligatory paragraph stating that other opinions about causation exist, but it's reminiscent of the tobacco industry:

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In interviews, researchers cautioned that causation is hard to prove, and that just because the gun homicide rate rose after 2007, it does not mean the repeal was the reason. Still, most of them were convinced that the data suggested an effect.

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Mass shootings get the most attention but form a small proportion of all gun deaths. Where gun laws really help is in reducing the many more but less attention-getting killings:

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But supporters say mass shootings, while attention-grabbing, account for fewer than 2 percent of the more than 30,000 gun deaths in the United States each year. They say tougher gun laws help reduce the slow, steady stream of killings that pile up quietly in communities like this one, often poor, often of color, and cut down on suicides, which make up two-thirds of all gun deaths in the United States.

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About the impact of the gun law changes in Missouri, Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, has this to say:

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There is this idea that law-abiding citizens’ rights are being secured. In fact, it’s the people most inclined to do harm whose privileges are being secured.

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--Percy

Homicide Rate in the US: The U.S. homicide rate declined by nearly half (49%), from 9.3 homicides per 100,000 U.S. residents in 1992 to 4.7 in 2011, falling to the lowest level since 1963.Homicide by Gun Rate in the US: The rate of homicides involving a firearm decreased by 49% from 1992 to 2011, while the percentage of homicide victims killed by a firearm (67%) remained stable.Source: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hus11.pdfAs for the numbers, self-defense by gun is 80 times higher than that of homicide, suicide, and accidental shooting combined. Don't hear about that in the media though, because it's not sensational enough.Source: Guns in the United States Firearms, gun law and gun controlAdditionally, there are 130,000 knife attacks in the UK alone, which goes to show that in the absence of guns, other means are not only available but also utilized. This goes to show, once again, that it's not about the tool being used but the intent of the person utilizing it.

All crime rates with the exception of cybercrime - have fallen all round the developed world by 50% or more since the mid 90s. There are longwinded reasons for this. You need to compare relative rates not cherrypicked crime rates. In the UK there were 537 murders or 9 per million population. Care to tell us the US rates?It's worth asking yourself too, given a choice would you prefer your gangs armed with knives or guns? I've said this before here, we have a problem with knife crime and gangs, so we brought it tougher knife laws, I'm not sure whever that has made any difference, but what we didn't do was allow more people to carry knives - that would have been insane wouldn't it.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

They aren't cherrypicked, they are relevant to the place with the highest collection of arms in the world. And still the rate of both crime and gun crime are half of what it was and continues to fall. So if guns are truly the problem then we should be seeing an increase not a decline. You're missing the point entirely, but the murder rate is 4.5, the lowest since the 60's. That's about 10,000 out of a population of 318 million, which is approximately 5 times higher than the UK at 65 million or so. So, you're comparing apples to oranges.My point in using the UK is to demonstrate that whether there is access to guns or not, the heart of the issue is that violence still occurs regardless. And the real metric is how sane or insane your society is.And America is a rather violent society. That's the issue.If guns themselves are the reason for the violence, then countries like Switzerland should be off the charts and countries like Russia or Mexico should be low. But it's actually the opposite. That means there are other factors at play and that guns and gun laws cannot account for the disparity.

Which still has the highest murder rate in the developed world. If ALL crime rates are falling all over the developed world, the US murder rate would be in double the trouble it is in if it too hadn't fallen. No, you'd expect gun crime to fall too, unless something exceptional was also happening - particularly as a major cause for the fall was a reduction in the drug epidemic that created the increase in crime starting in the 70s. No, murder RATES compare apple with apples. Where you're going wrong is comparing the UK 9 per million with the US's 4.5 per 100,000. Gun laws alone don't account for the disparity, there are certainly other factors but you can't avoid the simple causation of guns and gun deaths.You also need to factor in gun death and injury by accident and suicide....how many are those?Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.