Summations Only

It used to be that no British police were allowed to be armed, but that changed. I want to say that changed in the 1990's but it might have been earlier.

No, they remain routinely unarmed now. As per the 2006 survey DrA cited police officers themselves prefer it this way.We civilians don't have guns and nor typically do the police.

If that is the case, then I graciously concede that point.

The point you keep missing with regard to suicide is that the more convenient to kill oneself it is the more people actually go through with it. The stats tell us that people do NOT, as you keep insisting, just find other methods. It seems that even a minor inconvenience such as opening individually wrapped pills gives people enough time to reconsider.The stats suggest that most suicides are not dedicated attempts to kill oneself but impulsive and short lived moments of despair.Thus having deadly weapons to hand leads to more suicides. It's obvious really.And as for the ropes and cars and buildings etc - This is an idiotic comparison that Percy has already comprehensively addressed.

But is that a good enough reason to deny people the right of self-protection? But surely they DO given the fact that people commit suicide by other means. Well, since we're on the subject of impulsivity and deterrence methods, perhaps having a handgun has additionally saved lives. I could just as easily glibly say, "less availability to protect oneself leads to more deaths."So how do you measure the good with the bad? No more idiotic than saying we should get rid of handguns because people might use them to kill themselves. Percy's argument went over the utility of those things. Well, a gun has a utility to, specifically to protect when one's life is in danger. People will use various objects to kill themselves with, but we don't ban those things because their purposed use outweighs the minority instances of misuse. Edited by Hyroglyphx, : No reason given.

The other example was conversion from town gas (highly poisonous) to natural gas (non-poisonous). Method availability and the prevention of suicide — a re-analysis of secular trends in England and Wales 1950—1975 | SpringerLink

Do you now understand that the evidence contradicts your assertions regarding suicide and that you have been factually wrong on this point? For fucks sake. Which part of this are you failing to understand?The evidence tells us that somebody with a suicidal impulse and a gun to hand is far more likely to actually kill themselves than if they don't have a gun to hand and they have to find other means. Which part of this is confusing you?And as for guns saving lives - Again the stats are against you. If guns made you safer the US would be the safest nation in the world. It isn't. Statistically you are more likely to use a gun against yourself or a family member than against anyone else. How is that making anyone safer?By your logic the UK where even the police don't generally have guns would be more dangerous than the US. Do you want to compare international homicide rates?

Right, "marked reductions in suicides by gassing," which means other methods are explored as evidenced by the fact that people every single day kill themselves in many, many different ways. You close a door, people go through a window. You close a window, people break down a wall. You put up a fence, people climb over it. You put barbed wire up, people crawl under it.Many cities have put up fences to help mitigate the amount of bridge jumpers. Has it worked to a large degree? Yes, it has! But has it stopped suicides by other means? No, it hasn't.Therefore, again, as is evidenced by the thousands of people who commit suicide every year, different methods are utilized. People determined to die will succeed eventually. So if you get rid of guns, people will kill themselves by other means. That is absolutely, positively an indisputable fact so obvious that I feel silly even stating it.Lastly, how can you control for people who were once suicidal but changed their minds if they never reported it? How can you truly know the efficacy?

The part where you keep overlooking the obvious. If outlawing gun ownership was the solution, then Mexico and Russia should be at the bottom of the list. But their homicide rate is much higher than even the United States. If the accessibility of guns alone could account for the reason why there are so many homicides, then Switzerland should be the Wild fucking West. But it isn't, which means there are other factors at play that you are intentionally overlooking just so you can claim some kind of moral victory.There are a myriad of reasons why one country is more prone to violence than another. To suggest that the availability of guns could alone solely or even greatly determine that is intellectually bankrupt, because it simply is only telling one piece of a very complex story.

Well yes, of-fucking-course. Some people really, really want to kill themselves and will find a way no matter what. Surprisingly - to you alone it seems - nobody is saying that if you remove guns from the equation that people will no longer commit suicide.What we're saying - and producing the evidence to support the claim - is that when convenient methods of suicide are removed, suicides are reduced in total. Not stopped, reduced. Given that nobody is arguing that point and that I have already explicitly agreed with you on it, you are right to feel silly repeating it. Please at least try to understand the point actually being made, not the point you think is being made. You measure the before and after suicide rates - as was done for both paracetamol and town gas.

An argument over laundry escalated into murder on New Years Eve. Here are a couple quotes from news reports:

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A man who owned hundreds of guns shot and killed two women and one man at a Rowland Heights home, before he was shot to death by his son, deputies said Friday.

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The dad was a heavy drinker with a large gun collection and authorities had made dozens of previous trips to the home, police said.

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Links to the articles:

• Rowland Heights family massacre: Dad kills 3, then reportedly slain by son
  
• California man shoots three after dispute over laundry, then killed by own son

Are there any pro-gun people out there who don't believe the police should have the right to separate someone like this from his guns before he hurts someone?The state takes away a person's license to operate a motor vehicle when they accumulate too many points. Any objections to having something similar for guns? For instance, one's guns could be taken away if the police had to visit your home for a disturbance some few times.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

This is a consolidated reply to several of your recent posts to me. I'll only respond to points others haven't already addressed.The arguments on suicide are not based upon data gathered by having some agency "count the number of people who didn't report having been suicidal." The absurdity is obvious and no one made that argument. The arguments are based upon the numbers of successful and unsuccessful suicide attempts. Suicides go down when suicide is made more difficult.You are exhibiting little sense in resisting the obvious fact that suicidal feelings are not a constant. Mood swings do exist, forgetting to takes one's meds does occur, and recovery from depression is something that does actually happen regularly.Anyone who has for convenience opened a 30-count blister pack in hard plastic all at one time knows how long it takes and how tedious it is. Is pushing them out individually easier, or cutting them with scissors? Whichever way one does it a few of them always squirt out onto the floor or into crannies, and it takes a while to locate them. If suicide is the goal, it's going to take a good deal longer than a gun, and in that time one might change one's mind, someone might come home, the phone might ring, a reminder might pop up, comforting email might arrive, etc.And if the number of pills in a single package has been reduced so that it's no longer sufficient for suicide, which was Tangle's actual example, then more of those who are still resolved to kill themselves after getting through the packaging will fail, and as I earlier reported, only 15% of failed suicides are successful in a later attempt, so 85% go on to live the rest of their normal lives.What you want is an argument that isn't based on illogic, misstatements of others' arguments and false data, and one can be found in this List of countries by suicide rate at Wikipedia. Someone alluded to this data earlier, maybe it was you, but if guns play a significant role in suicide rates, then why do some countries with fewer guns have higher suicide rates than the United States, like France and Belgium? I suspect that the high religiosity of the US and the correspondingly greater reluctance to classify a death as a suicide causes the US suicide rate to be greatly understated, but we could delve into this in greater detail, and in that case at least we'd be talking about real data. Parading one's open carry around the streets of Houston or lounging at home with gun on hip (does no good in the bedside table upstairs in the event of a sudden home invasion) is not in any way contributing to "a well regulated militia." I never mentioned the 2nd Amendment and I don't believe it is in play here, except in the imaginations of many people and, unfortunately, the current Supreme Court. I'm dumbfounded. Are you daft? Did you misread what was said? Are you attempting to divert discussion down meaningless ratholes? Are you not interested in serious discussion? What is it? How could there be "no significant difference" between someone who is alive and available for treatment for what you called an "internal problem", and someone who is dead? Please tell me what I'm missing, because in my reading of your point you are not making any sense. Tangle has already greatly diminished his replies to you because of nonsense like this, and I'm verging on the same. You and Cat Sci seem to be doing the same thing at the same time, making a show of support for guns while spouting nonsense. Again, I haven't mentioned the 2nd Amendment. Given how much the world changes over time, arguments that change isn't possible make no sense whatsoever. Your time might be better spent rebutting arguments I've actually made instead of making ones up. You're again not making any sense. Ah, come on, now you're just severely misdescribing the discussion. There's no one here idiotic enough to claim that people do not "kill themselves by other means." Tangle never said they didn't, and so he never had to "concede" that they did. Go back and read Tangle's Message 4539. You replied to it twice, it's written in clear and straightforward English, you'd think you would have understood it by the 2nd time. How does restating your position yet again comprise an argument? Do you have an argument, a rationale, some data, for why reducing the prevalence of guns wouldn't reduce gun deaths? If you do then this is the right thread. You have a marvelous talent for misstating people's points. Did anyone here state they believed it possible to "do away with suicide or homicide?" Certainly not me, and I don't recall anyone else stating such a belief. Could you please end this ceaseless production of fictional positions that you assign to the other side?The goal is to reduce suicide and homicide. Seems a reasonable goal given that many countries have lower rates of suicide and homicide. If the responses you're receiving were truly asinine you wouldn't be failing so spectacularly to find lucid and evidence-based arguments against them. I think your assignation of the asinine label is a more a reflection of your emotional reaction when faced with the prospect of having your access to guns put under some form of greater control. It's extremely gratifying to hear you say this.--Percy

What is a good enough reason to deny people the right to safety in their homes, on their streets, and at their places of business? It would not only be glib, it would be completely unsupported by any evidence. Oh! Oh! I know! I know! Me! ME!With evidence. I'm running out of superlatives to describe how incredibly dreadful your arguments are. There isn't a single human activity that doesn't involve risk. What makes guns unique among all consumer products is that it does the opposite of its supposed intended purpose. Guns are supposedly intended to make people safer, yet they place them at greater risk of injury and death. The analogy to an automobile is not one that can be involved in an accident, but one that does the opposite of what it was intended to do. If cars were like guns then they would take you in the opposite direction more often than not. If cars truly had this quality of mostly doing the opposite of their intended purpose then people would stop purchasing them in droves and would demand improvements.But cars take people where they want to go the vast majority of the time, so this problem of cars doing the opposite of their intended purpose does not exist. But guns *do* have this problem, and it's time we did something about it.--Percy

If I had a gun in the house, I'd probably be dead right now.

The thing is ammosexuals do not care about people that commit suicide. They will not even concede that reducing suicides should be considered in the debate. Basically their attitude is fuck 'em, they are losers anyway.