Gun Control Will not work!

[aztek]

Ok slap a gun on and save the world. No really give every person a gun and see if that effects crime. To me it seems just more shootings.

we are not out to save a world with our guns, just ourselves if needed.actually yes gun to everyone does affect crime, big time, texas, vermont, are great examples. so are DC, and chicago.

not to mention, we see how good drug control works, and alcohol control in 20s worked well too.

Edited April 16, 2013 by aztek

[Jeremiah65]

Of course it does not work...laws of prohibition have always failed. All prohibition regulation does is feed and grow the black market. I wish our supposed "well educated" legislators were smart enough to know this...but apparently they are not. Anytime you tell someone "you cannot do this"...they will go out of there way to do it and try to find out why they cannot. Seriously...it's like dealing with children. Curiosity killed the cat...but satisfaction brought him back.

Folks are going to do whatever they want and the "for profit" prison industrial complex population will continue to grow. We already have the largest population of prisoners and inmates in the world so why stop now?

Anyone and everyone who has studied prohibitive laws can tell you straight up they never "stop" anything...they just increase the profitability of doing it.

Oh well, just my opinion I suppose...though I think it's pretty clear that I am not off base here...

[aztek]

We may be looking at a pressure cooker ban now too.

lol, good luck taking that away from my mother, she might give up guns, but pressure cooker, noway.oh wait, they can't, it is not regerested, and they don't know she has one.

[aztek]

Taking away guns is a BAD thing? C'mon...

not if you are brit it ain't

[Kowalski]

Of course it does not work...laws of prohibition have always failed. All prohibition regulation does is feed and grow the black market. I wish our supposed "well educated" legislators were smart enough to know this...but apparently they are not. Anytime you tell someone "you cannot do this"...they will go out of there way to do it and try to find out why they cannot. Seriously...it's like dealing with children. Curiosity killed the cat...but satisfaction brought him back.

Folks are going to do whatever they want and the "for profit" prison industrial complex population will continue to grow. We already have the largest population of prisoners and inmates in the world so why stop now?

Anyone and everyone who has studied prohibitive laws can tell you straight up they never "stop" anything...they just increase the profitability of doing it.

Oh well, just my opinion I suppose...though I think it's pretty clear that I am not off base here...

Great post!

[F3SS]

So its not that you wont have access to guns if you decide you have to fight in a revolution... its about wanting them cheap. That means that the argument shouldn't be "We wont have guns to fight a tyrant government", but rather it'll be "Guns would be too troublesome and expensive to obtain to fight a tyrant government". Are we in agreement?

I fully relay that trust towards those who are sensible and responsible with firearms. I'm not for banning any type of weapon --- I'm for meaningful gun control which would actually help the situation.

Yes, in your scenario I agree it would be. But why do you insist on making it as hard and painful as possible? The whole damn point is to have them when you need them.

So yet again you prove yourself a fool and think god has anything to do with guns and guns are a god givien right. Take a gun and use it. Leave god out of the gun debate as I`m sure Jesus might take issue with you.

Forget god. It's about being born with the absolute right to defend yourself, your family and your freedom. Evil exists in the world and doesn't always use hands and feet. How else is one to defend themselves when evil doesn't follow the rules? Call these rights what you will. Natural, god given, inalienable. I'm not so religious but I doubt Jesus would have insisted you kneel down before oppression and take what's coming. There are steps to take. Run or talk. If those don't work you survive at all costs. I just watched the Bible on history channel and I'm pretty sure if there's god that he isn't above eradicating evil by use of force.

[+DieChecker]

It may not solve the problem but it will go a long way towards preventing massacres on such large scale.

BTW anyone can pull statistics out of their ass to provide evidence for their hypothesis .

So we should give over hundreds of millions of guns to prevent less the 30 massacre deaths per year? That is simply reactionary. And naive.

As for proof that gun control can work look at Australia and the laws resulting from the Port Arthur Massacre and the result it had on gun related violence.

354 victims in 1996, but only 260 victims in 2010, a decrease of 27 percent

The proportion of homicide victims killed by offenders using firearms in 2009–10 represented a decrease of 18 percentage points from the peak of 31 percent in 1995–96

Firearm suicides have fallen from about 22% of all suicides in 1992 to 7% of all suicides in 2005

That is my point, I am not advocating gun eradication but gun control. There will always be accidents, deaths and stupidity but gun control is about minimising these.

Around 80-85% of the Australian population is located in urban areas, most of Australia in uninhabited.

To get a better perspective of gun related incidents we should be looking at gun deaths per capita:

Australia - 1.05 deaths per 100,000

USA - 10.20 deaths per 100,000

So the USA has roughly 10x the amount of gun related incidents compared with Aust.

http://www.captainsjournal.com/2012/07/23/do-gun-bans-reduce-violent-crime-ask-the-aussies-and-brits/

Actually, if the Australian Bureau of Criminology can be believed, Americans would be insane to concern themselves with what non-Americans think about American gun rights.

In 2002 — five years after enacting its gun ban — the Australian Bureau of Criminology acknowledged there is no correlation between gun control and the use of firearms in violent crime. In fact, the percent of murders committed with a firearm was the highest it had ever been in 2006 (16.3 percent), says the D.C. Examiner.

Even Australia’s Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research acknowledges that the gun ban had no significant impact on the amount of gun-involved crime:

In 2006, assault rose 49.2 percent and robbery 6.2 percent.

Sexual assault — Australia’s equivalent term for rape — increased 29.9 percent.

Overall, Australia’s violent crime rate rose 42.2 percent.

Moreover, Australia and the United States — where no gun-ban exists — both experienced similar decreases in murder rates:

Between 1995 and 2007, Australia saw a 31.9 percent decrease; without a gun ban, America’s rate dropped 31.7 percent.

During the same time period, all other violent crime indices increased in Australia: assault rose 49.2 percent and robbery 6.2 percent.

Sexual assault — Australia’s equivalent term for rape — increased 29.9 percent.

Overall, Australia’s violent crime rate rose 42.2 percent.

At the same time, U.S. violent crime decreased 31.8 percent: rape dropped 19.2 percent; robbery decreased 33.2 percent; aggravated assault dropped 32.2 percent.

Australian women are now raped over three times as often as American women.

[RavenHawk]

Anyone and everyone who has studied prohibitive laws can tell you straight up they never "stop" anything...they just increase the profitability of doing it.

What we need to do is to reintroduce the concept of taking personal responsibility. That one’s actions have consequences. Our educational system is failing in this. Now this won’t stop anything completely either but it starts putting the onus where it needs to be and removes government out of the picture and the desire to nanny the people.

If I may divert to a religious/morals view point. The Bible contains what most would consider prohibitive laws. But what if that is not the case? The Law found in the Bible is known as the Mitzvah and it contains about 613 individual laws. The Ten Commandments can be considered a representative subset of the whole and if you analyze those 10, you see you can categorize those into 3 groups. They are respect yourself, respect others, and respect GOD. And Jesus reinforces that when he gives us a new Commandment – that we love one another as ourselves and to love GOD with all our heart and mind. Jesus tells us that he did not come to do away with the law but to fulfill it. The law is no longer written on paper but on our hearts. When children are growing up, the parents put limits (prohibitive laws) on them to teach and protect them. In time they mature and no longer require these limits but they respect and understand them. The laws are no longer prohibitive in maturity. But government is no longer guiding the children to maturity and the fact that one’s actions have consequences but keeping them in adolescence and dependent on the government. And that leads to more and more massacres.

Oh well, just my opinion I suppose...though I think it's pretty clear that I am not off base here...

Crystal!

[Kowalski]

Australian women are now raped over three times as often as American women.

That's weird, because I have been reading that rapes in England are going up as well. I believe it was a BBC article.

[+DieChecker]

What we need to do is to reintroduce the concept of taking personal responsibility. That one's actions have consequences. Our educational system is failing in this. Now this won't stop anything completely either but it starts putting the onus where it needs to be and removes government out of the picture and the desire to nanny the people.

I agree.

And consider that nations that have banned guns altogether still have a 1 in 100,000 rate of gun related deaths. Even after banning guns the murders... the massacres... continue.

[Resh]

a persons perception on the use of a gun is relative to that persons experience with them.

Obviously farmers in texas, who have grown with guns as means to protect their lands against wild hogs (for example)

will have a different reaction to guns being banned to say, a family in east LA, who see drive-bys and murders frequently.

[RavenHawk]

a persons perception on the use of a gun is relative to that persons experience with them.

Obviously farmers in texas, who have grown with guns as means to protect their lands against wild hogs (for example)

will have a different reaction to guns being banned to say, a family in east LA, who see drive-bys and murders frequently.

In a good Hollywood Western, we see that the hero’s family had been gunned down by outlaws. His view of guns doesn’t change. They are still just a tool to him. He doesn’t go after Colt for making them. He doesn’t curse society for being harsh, he understands that that’s life. He goes after the men that killed his family and extracts justice (or vengeance).

[Kowalski]

In a good Hollywood Western, we see that the hero's family had been gunned down by outlaws. His view of guns doesn't change. They are still just a tool to him. He doesn't go after Colt for making them. He doesn't curse society for being harsh, he understands that that's life. He goes after the men that killed his family and extracts justice (or vengeance).

Yep. God, I miss old westerns like that...

[Dark_Grey]

That statement comes from a man who doesn't live in a society where just anybody can own a gun and where there isn't a new news story every week of some nut case shooting a dozen kids dead in a school rampage.

Sorry, in the last let's say 10 years how many school shootings were there?

You're right, though. You don't live in a society where anybody can own a gun - you live in a society where the entire nation is being taxed back to the stone age, the average citizen is caught on surveillance cameras 335 times a day and your rights are....well, you don't really have any, do you?

Edit -- Sorry, that was harsh. I meant to illustrate my point, not personally attack. The point being that the need for firearms in the hands of citizens goes far beyond just protecting yourself from thugs (which is really the message behind this thread, I believe)

Edited April 17, 2013 by Dark_Grey

[IamsSon]

In a good Hollywood Western, we see that the hero's family had been gunned down by outlaws. His view of guns doesn't change. They are still just a tool to him. He doesn't go after Colt for making them. He doesn't curse society for being harsh, he understands that that's life. He goes after the men that killed his family and extracts justice (or vengeance).

Unfortunately, in today's American society, the hero is now a victim. He is being victimized by the gun manufacturers, the ammunition manufacturers, the transportation companies that hauled the guns and ammo from their production sites to the evil gun sales locations, the gun sales locations, and all those pro-gun nuts that run around shooting up innocents and handing out guns and ammo to bad guys so they also can go shooting up innocents. Of course, our hero can't go after the guys who killed his family because he understand they also, are simply victims.

[Resh]

In a good Hollywood Western, we see that the hero's family had been gunned down by outlaws. His view of guns doesn't change. They are still just a tool to him. He doesn't go after Colt for making them. He doesn't curse society for being harsh, he understands that that's life. He goes after the men that killed his family and extracts justice (or vengeance).

Yeah but hes a hero in a hollywood (a make belief person, a character) western in what? the late 1700s?. A cowboy stereotype.

Edited April 19, 2013 by Palmy-Ra