Gun control

[swan_tower]

Sure, let's go ahead and play with fire. I trust my readers to be civil to one another in the comments.

***

I simply cannot. understand. the state of gun laws in this country, and the direction they're headed in. That people think private gun ownership should be legal, yes; that people think civilians ought to be able to walk around with a semi-automatic rifle, no. That you should be able to go hunting, yes; that you should be able to carry a concealed handgun anywhere you like, no.

And yet our current progress is toward less regulation of guns, not more.

I've seen the usual pro-gun arguments, and very few of them make sense to me. Hunting! Do you need an AR-15 to kill a deer? Defending my home! How many lives have been saved by shooting the intruder, and how many have been lost due to those guns being put to another purpose? If only somebody in that theater had been armed, they could have stopped Holmes! It's a nice fantasy, but do you really think one or more civilians shooting in a darkened, panic- and smoke-filled, chaotic room -- against a guy in body armor -- would have resulted in fewer deaths, rather than more?

I could go on. Even if we ban guns, criminals will still find ways to get them. So this means we shouldn't try to regulate them, to keep an eye on who's buying what, and to keep the really dangerous things out of the hands of people without black market connections? People will still kill each other, just with different weapons. Weapons that can't easily take out their victims in mass quantities; I'd call that an improvement. You're far more likely to die in a car accident than from a gunshot! True, and I'm also in favor of improving automobile safety, as well as regulating guns.

But treating those two as equivalent is nonsense. Cars serve an absolutely vital purpose in our society that has nothing to do with inflicting violence on others. If we banned motor vehicles, this entire house of cards we call a country would fall down. Furthermore, there's a balance point between minimizing risk and the costs thereof, and it's hard to decide where that should fall. Most people agree that making cars incapable of going over twenty miles an hour would be an unacceptable cost, no matter how many lives it would save. We make calculations like this all the time, even if we don't like to admit it.

But right now, we're saying -- as a society -- that this is an acceptable cost for gun rights. So are this, and this, and this. And a bunch of this, though I can't find a list that just covers the United States. And we're saying that minimizing that risk would cost more than we're willing to pay. That waiting periods, background checks, mandatory training, prohibitions against carrying a concealed handgun in particular places, bans on weapons that serve no purpose but to slaughter large numbers of people at high speed -- those would take away something so precious that it's worth the lives of all those people.

We'll ban costumes at movie theaters instead. Because we all know that guns don't kill people; people wearing costumes do. (With guns.)

And yeah, yeah, Second Amendment! This post is a very rational assessment of that, and I agree with a lot of what it says (including the follow-up). Our private gun ownership laws, in their current condition, are not providing us with "a well regulated militia," nor are they contributing to "the security of a free state." Quite the opposite, I'd say.

Mind you, I do agree with the guns versus cars post that we're doing a terrible job of promoting solutions. Those of us who favor gun control need to find new tactics, a way to change the conversation to one the NRA hasn't already won. I don't know how to do that -- but I do know we need to actually talk about it, and not just mouth platitudes about tragedy and then go our way as if Aurora was no more preventable than an earthquake.

I do take comfort from the statistics that say gun violence has actually declined in recent decades, and so has gun ownership. That's good to hear. But when smallpox deaths declined, we didn't celebrate that and stop there; we went ahead and eradicated the disease completely. Do I think we can eradicate gun violence? Of course not. But we can do better, and should.

Comments

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Your last URL has an error.

I'm neutral on gun control, leaning to be more favorable of it. So to play non-crazy devil's advocate:

* AIUI, in the language of the time "well-regulated militia" meant "the mass of able-bodied males, able to hit what they aim at"

* AIUI, the substantive differences between hunting rifles and "assault rifles" like the AR-15 aren't that great. The assault ones seem to be shorter -- more portable, I suppose, an less accurate -- and look more military. The hunting rifles are at least as deadly -- meant for larger animals -- and also come in semi-automatic form. Which is a lot different from automatic: one shot per trigger pull, without having to cock or rotate a chamber, vs. indefinite shots per pull a la machine guns; those are basically illegal.

* Rifle shootings like this are unfortunate but also rare. I'd guess the mass of gun threats and deaths are with handguns. Of course, that's also the form useful for imagined self-defense outside a home. The US isn't so distinctive in long gun ownership, but is distinctive in handguns. A nuance that gets lost when people invoke how many guns Canada or Switzerland have.

* "waiting periods, background checks, mandatory training" -- none of which would have prevented this tragedy, AFAIK, or several others, and which have costs, in both inconvenience and actual money spent to implement them. What's the lives saved per dollar? "minimizing that risk would cost more than we're willing to pay" might actually be true; without numbers we can't say one way or the other.

* "How many lives have been saved by shooting the intruder, and how many have been lost due to those guns being put to another purpose? " Good questions, but with unobvious answers. Crimes deterred by the brandishing or even anticipation (concealed carry) of a gun would also be relevant; you don't need to shoot the gun to have a benefit.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

* AIUI, in the language of the time "well-regulated militia" meant "the mass of able-bodied males, able to hit what they aim at"

Not quite, I think. I'll defer to any Revolutionary War historians wandering around, but colonial militias were organized things, with regular practice, leadership, and oversight.

* AIUI, the substantive differences between hunting rifles and "assault rifles" like the AR-15 aren't that great. The assault ones seem to be shorter -- more portable, I suppose, an less accurate -- and look more military. The hunting rifles are at least as deadly -- meant for larger animals -- and also come in semi-automatic form. Which is a lot different from automatic: one shot per trigger pull, without having to cock or rotate a chamber, vs. indefinite shots per pull a la machine guns; those are basically illegal.

I freely admit that I'm not well-versed in the mechanics of guns, so I defer to people with more knowledge on the subject. Though I do wonder why we need semi-automatic weapons -- or at least semi-automatics with 100-round magazines.

* Rifle shootings like this are unfortunate but also rare. I'd guess the mass of gun threats and deaths are with handguns.

I do not see how either of these are an argument against regulation or oversight.

* "waiting periods, background checks, mandatory training" -- none of which would have prevented this tragedy, AFAIK, or several others

But there are tragedies they would prevent. A waiting period means the person buying a gun to commit suicide or murder has more time to stop and reconsider; I believe it's well-established on the suicide front that making somebody climb a fence to jump off a bridge will, in fact, deter some percentage of the people who would otherwise jump. A background check means we have a chance of noticing that the would-be purchaser has a history of criminal activity or mental illness. Mandatory training means promoting responsibility among gun owners -- and while I will freely grant that there are many gun owners right now who are responsible, they aren't the whole population. We require training to drive a car; I think owning a gun should require some, too.

and which have costs, in both inconvenience and actual money spent to implement them. What's the lives saved per dollar? "minimizing that risk would cost more than we're willing to pay" might actually be true; without numbers we can't say one way or the other.

True -- but that's not the conversation we're having in this country. Instead we're arguing over whether preventing somebody from having the gun they want, when they want it, where they want it, is an inexcusable affront to their Second Amendment rights. I'd much prefer to talk about the logistics and costs of gun control . . . but the window of acceptable discourse has been pushed far enough to one side that that conversation is almost impossible to have.

* "How many lives have been saved by shooting the intruder, and how many have been lost due to those guns being put to another purpose? " Good questions, but with unobvious answers. Crimes deterred by the brandishing or even anticipation (concealed carry) of a gun would also be relevant; you don't need to shoot the gun to have a benefit.

But they are the next thing to impossible to document. The best you can do is to argue from correlation: this place has widespread gun ownership and less home invasion, while that place has less gun ownership and more home invasion. tchernabyelo mentions something of the sort below, but we can counter with places where there are lots of guns and lots of crime, so the entire thing ends up more or less unanswered.

[tchernabyelo.livejournal.com]

Context: I'm a born-and-bred Brit now resident in the US (And this is going to be long so I'll post in two parts).

I therefore grew up in a nation that did not see gun ownership as a normal part of culture. I lived in rural parts of the UK and shotguns were not uncommon as part of "pest control" and minor hunting (pheasants, rabbits). I also, as it happened, learned how to shoot a rifle at school and have even been out on "live fire" exercises (yes, unbelievably, they did send a bunch of 15-year-old kids out with rifles that had real bullets in them, though we were only supposed to fire up in the air; presumably, the bullets were told not to come down again).

Now, I live in a nation that was literally founded on the gun. It gained independence by armed insurrection followed by open warfare. It expanded by the simple means of shooting those who disagreed with its expansion. And America is pretty close to unique in all the world in that. Certainly it's unique in terms of major world powers.

America is the only major mation I know wherein, culturally, violence is not seen as a problem; it's seen as the SOLUTION to problems.

I live in the West. People out here hunt, and need to hunt (I know of families out here who didn't have meat on the table, growing up, unless they went out and shot it). Gun ownership is perfectly reasonable for these people.

And I'm not aware of anyone who is trying to take away that right. But that's never how gun control is presented. The NRA, TEA party, and the like are very quick to spin the "threats" of gun control to a populace that's always ready to believe those threats (one of the fascinating things about the US, as a momentary aside, is how ready it is to champion its form of government - dto the point of emanding, again at gunpoint, that other countries adopt it - while at the same time constantly decrying the dangers and perils of the government that it champions as a paragon of democracy).

There are studies, incidentally, that show significant deterrence effects of gun ownership on crime - i.e. that there would be far higher instances of home invasion if the (would-be_ perpetrators weren;t worried that the inhabitants might be armed. I'll also agree I'm somewhat sceptical about those studies, given just how rampant US crime is compared to other countries which do have strict gun ownership laws and therefore where an armed robber need have almost no fear of retaliation. But when we do look at gun crime statistics in the US, one conclusion that's easy to draw is that availability of guns is NOT the only factor that's at play. The US has horrendous levels of gun crime that are not replicated in other countries without rigid gun control laws.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

The US seems to be more violent, period. E.g. we have more homicides per capita due to knife stabblings than other countries have total. Which is an argument against "guns cause violence" though maybe an argument for "you shouldn't let these people have guns".

But then, that's not evenly distributed. Lots of the violence is urban criminal-on-criminal gang violence. Some is in the same areas, maybe not involving professional criminals, but people who live where police don't go or aren't trusted, and more primitive ways of keeping order are used; honor culture and 'respect' and reputation. Some is in the South, which also supports honor culture and settling scores oneself, even if the police are trusted more; Pinker said the higher rates of murder in the South weren't from higher rates of muggings or home invasions but from higher rates of escalating fights among friends or acquaintances.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

There are studies, incidentally, that show significant deterrence effects of gun ownership on crime

As I say above, deterrence isn't easy to prove. I will freely grant that the availability of guns isn't the only factor; it is, however, a relevant one.

[tchernabyelo.livejournal.com]

(Part two, and apologies if this is all hijacky - also, reposted as it hit the wrong part of the thread first time))

All of which is not to say I don't favour modifying the gun laws here in the US. As noted, you don't need an AR-15 to hunt (hunting in the US is primarily stalk or hide hunting, not "la chasse"/"battue" as I saw brought up in a Twitter conversation recently. Indeed, many hunters out here use muzzle loaders, not even breech loaders. Fire rate is NOT the priority; accuracy is). And there is no reasonable rationale for the concept of the "fun gun".

Responsible gun ownership is the keystone to moving forward, but America is not a noticeably responsible society. I'd have no objection to all my neighbours owning guns if I knew they regularly went to the range (many certainly do; our local outdoor range is busy most weekends); if I knew they understood the laws and disciplines of gun ownership.

But the fact that pretty much every rural roadside sign I see is peppered with the dents and holes of people practicing their marksmanship leads me to believe that a lot of people out here really aren't responsible about gun use.

The irony, then, is that I'd be a minority - a highly responsible gun owner.. but I'm not. I don't have a gun, and I don't have any particular desire for a gun. I don't think I need it in the wilderness for "protection" (as some do); I don't think I need it for "home defense". And I'm yet to be convinced I need one to deal with my government taking away my fundamental liberties.

Ultimately, those who most want to own guns are in all likelihood those who are least suitable to do so.

My feeling is that there will be no progress in gun control until and unless there is a cultural change about guns in the US. ANd sadly, I don;t see that happening any time soon. In real life, who are our heroes? They're the firefighter who puts his life on the line to save someones home. They're the people who stand up when someone's shooting and bar a door (happened in Auruora and Virginia Tech). They're the police who have to deal with tripwires and explosive/chemical devices. Our real-life heroes are the people who save lives.

But our heroes on the TV screen? In the movies? In computer games?

They're the ones with guns. They're the ones for whom violence is a solution, not a problem.

That's an integral part of US culture - and a part of US culture it[s desperate to sell to the whole planet.

If that doesn't go away, gun control isn't going to find enough traction to make a difference.


So ultimately; yes. Columbine and Virginia Tech and Aurora?

These are the prices that America pays for being what it is. And tragic though it finds those incidents, it does not (IMHO) have the will to change its culture.

Until it does, it's going to keep paying that price. Gun control or not.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I note whimsically that Canadians seem prouder of supposedly having burned down the White House in 1812 than of being the terminal for the Underground Railroad. At least they celebrate it more.

My impression is that most gun owners, especially long gun owners, are pretty responsible, with a whole safety culture the average urban gun-shy liberal doesn't appreciate.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Not hijacky at all. You're right that this is a cultural issue as much as, or more than, it's a legal one; in fact, that's where I agree with the "guns versus cars" post. I never knew a time where drunk drivers were a comic figure instead of a scary one. But apparently we managed to change the general cultural view on that topic -- so my question is, how do we do the same thing for guns?

I have no idea. But the lack of willingness to discuss it is part of the problem, and that's why I decided to post.

[dorianegray.livejournal.com]

Even if we ban guns, criminals will still find ways to get them.

Well, this is true, but I think irrelevant to the specific issue of people randomly shooting large crowds of strangers. Because people who randomly shoot large crowds of strangers seem generally not to be criminals, at least up to that point. (Terrorists are a different beast, IMO, from random shooters.)

And speaking as a citizen and resident of a country with pretty strict gun laws, I can tell you that that kind of mass-murderous rampage just doesn't happen here. (Gun crime is increasing, but it's mostly criminals shooting each other over drugs or gang warfare.)

If guns aren't easily and legally available, people don't choose that particular method of dealing with massive anger and frustration, because getting hold of the gun and the ammunition, particularly for an otherwise law-abiding person, is difficult to impossible. They find something easier and cheaper to do.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Exactly. If James Holmes had only been able to purchase a shotgun or a handgun, fewer people would be dead and wounded. If he'd only been able to purchase a knife, the number would be smaller again. We are so far from instituting the latter situation that I'm not even particularly interested in debating the logistics and philosophy of that -- but it distresses the hell out of me that our national conversation is so unwilling to even discuss making the former situation a reality.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

My family's big love for loose gun control was that my grandfather always believed, had the Jewish people been armed, they would have fought back against the Nazis and not gone like sheep to the slaughter, as the bible so elequently put it. My grandfather lost two sisters, a brother, his parents, four nieces, a nephew and his sweetheart in Auschwitz, so he has his reasons.

And a lot of my beliefs is that if guns are made illegal, that will just feed the illegal gun market, but I'm wondering if there's a solution that would involve tightening restrictions on more dangerous grade weapons, while allowing smaller grade guns for self protection?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Most people arguing for gun control aren't arguing for an outright, across-the-board, no-exceptions BAN. They're arguing for regulation and oversight. But the window on that keeps being pushed in more and more radical directions: if people are allowed handguns, the lobbyists push for them to be allowed to carry concealed. Once people are allowed to carry concealed, they push to overturn prohibitions against carrying in certain locations. Etc. Anything that in any way abridges the rights of gun owners gets treated as an unacceptable limitation.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

And gun rights advocates like to say the first thing Nazis did was disarm conquered populations.

OTOH, the Nazis invaded the USSR, not to mention everyone else like Balkan populations to disarm, so the idea that they'd be deterred by civilian guns seems a bit weak on consideration. Plus, AIUI, the Jews weren't led away to slaughter; they were led away -- with cooperation from their own leaders -- to mystery camps that turned out to involve surprise slaughter. But how many armed Jews would shoot it out with the SS over forced relocation to camps, with a hope of survival?

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

But the Jews did resist. There were uprisings both in the ghettos and the camps, there were Jewish partisan groups. So first of all, weapons were acquired despite their general lack of availability. Second, the uprisings by and large were not successful in stopping the mass slaughter of the Jewish people. To me this says that the free availability of weapons in untrained hands couldn't have kept Jews from being rounded up into camps by well-organized, heavily armed regular troops.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Note that Germany never invaded Switzerland (admittedly, they had significant influence on the government and businesses there during WWII). That's likely because if you invade Switzerland, you'll have to take it house by house and then deal with significant guerilla action.

Every Swiss male is required to do a few years of military service around age 20, with yearly refreshers until age 50. They're also required to keep firearms and ammunition at home (when I lived there, my landlord showed me the closet with rifles, pistols, grenades, etc., asked if I knew how to use any of it. I replied no. He replied that I shouldn't go into that closet, and I agreed). Recreational target shooting is popular.

And they have very few armed crimes or shooting sprees, even compared per capita to the US.

So it is possible to have a civilized, low incidence of gun crimes, society even when the number of guns in circulation per capita is higher than US standards. For whatever reason, it doesn't seem to happen in the US.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

What makes me see utterly red is the conflation of "we have to have responsible gun ownership" with "THEY'RE COMING TO TO TAKE THEM AWAY, AH-HA!" Frankly, if you are an irresponsible yobbo, the guns SHOULD be taken away. Your freaking Second Amendment rights stop where my right to life liberty and pursuit of happiness begins - you don't get to shove your "rights" up my mose so long as they are being used to mow down innocents who just happen to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time - or worse, if you decide that your Second Amendment rights now suddenly extend to your being absolutely entitled to shoot somebody whose actions, ideas, or face you happen not to like.

I am very much afraid that America is a lost cause on this, and it it only going to get worse, not better. But as long as you get people foaming at the mouth trying to convince others that "it woudl have been BETER if those people in that (dark, smoke-filled theatre) had guns to shoot back" - well - you can't argue with insanity. There's this idee fixe and nothing penetrates that.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Except we've had idees fixes* before that we have managed to change. Yes, we still have a lunatic fringe in this country that thinks slavery wasn't so bad -- but the percentage is down by several orders of magnitude from what it was a hundred and fifty years ago. We've changed attitudes on race, gender, sexuality, and more. Have we solved any of those problems entirely? No. But I refuse to give up, on those matters or this one.


*My apologies to French speakers if I pluralized that incorrectly.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Scale note:
The homicide rate for modern 'civilized' countries is down around 1 in 100,000. 0.35 for Japan, 0.8 for a lot of Western Europe, 1.2 for Australia or UK, 1.6 for Canada. US is 4.8, world is 7.9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

So, say we got down to the 0.7 of Spain and Norway. With our population, that would still be more than 2100 homicides a year. Probably a base rate of humans snapping -- I wonder how much of that is domestic violence. If we somehow became Japan, that'd still be over 1000 homicides/year.

What's our averaged death rate from rampage shooters? I'd guess well under 10/year.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

163 a year, actually. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/20/dark-knight-shooting_n_1689505.html?1342809145) And that number has risen slightly over the last thirty years.

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

I haven't read all the comments, so forgive me if I've missed this. What's your source for the dropping gun-ownership claim?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The link earlier in that sentence; it discusses both topics. I'll change the link code to make that clearer.

Doing the math

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Use a high value for American live, $10 million. Then the 160 "mass shooting" deaths a year 'costs' $1.6 billion. You can readily justify spending up to that to prevent such deaths... if you can prevent them all, not just reduce them a bit. Reduction justifies less spending. Say 100 million gun owners. Spread evenly, that'd justify up to $16 of costs imposed on them, or maybe 45 minutes of inconvenience, per year -- or less, because there's also the administrative costs of whatever program you create. If you target just owners of semi-auto rifles, or of "assault" such rifles, you can boost that somewhat, I don't know how much.

I suspect the most sensible thing to do would be to put a $30/year tax on such guns, and use the money to save lives in other ways, like vaccines or traffic safety.

For overall gun homicides, that's 15,000, or a cost of $150 billion. Accidental deaths could add a bit to that; I wouldn't count suicides, believing most suicides could find other means. (Lack of guns sure doesn't stop Japanese suicide.) $1500 per gun owner! A lot of room to play with, there.

OTOH, let's look at another aspect of the car comparison: the risk of killing someone with a car is roughly even distributed. Some humps with young and old people, and SUV owners, and of course drunk drivers, but everyone driving on public roads is at some real risk of hitting someone, with even more evenly distributed risk of being hit by someone. So evenly distributed training costs or mandatory safety features makes a lot of sense.

OTOH, the gun homicide distribution isn't very even at all. Maybe half the guns are handguns, but most of the gun crimes are with handguns. And also in cities. Targeting rural rifle and shotgun owners to reduce urban handgun crime seems like a poor bet and use of resources.

We've got the complaint above about rural roadside signs being used for target practice, as a sign of irresponsibility, but how many deaths does that actually have anything to do with?

There is that unspecified accident rate, which might have more to do with long guns. And $1500 is a lot of value one could use to justify testing and training with. OTOH you're probably not abolishing such deaths. If you can plausibly accomplish 10% reduction, that'd be $150 per gun owner. Still buys you a few hours of testing or instruction time; this actually sounds like a potentially plausible program.

I didn't expect that conclusion when I started typing. Math is good!

Re: Doing the math

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

More:

Per use, or per hour used, guns are probably a lot deadlier than cars. But comparing deaths per gun owner or per car owner, they seem about the same, maybe even a slight safety edge to guns. And that's with universal testing of drivers but no testing of gun owners. (Though there is federal background check if you buy from a dealer.)

That (no testing) could mean there's unharvested low-hanging fruit we could pick by putting in minimal testing. Or it (comparable safety) could mean people aren't idiots and non-criminal gun culture is effective and thus it's already as good as it can easily get.

Oh, accident data: http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.html says 554 accidental firearm deaths in 2009. Surprisingly low. But that's the ceiling on how many accidental deaths you can prevent by additional measures.

[jesse bangs (from livejournal.com)]

At the risk of being obvious, I should point out that the symbolic value of guns far exceeds the actual practical value of guns for people on both sides of the debate.

On the one hand, people in favor of gun control are more likely to be urban, and probably have a mental archetype of "gun" which is a handgun, and an archetypal use case which involves crime. When these people think of "gun control", it seems like an obvious good idea.

On the other hand, people against gun control are more likely to be rural or suburban, and have a mental archetype of "gun" which is a hunting rifle, and an archetypal use case which involves a weekend out in the woods with your buddies. These people are obviously defensive about the possibility that this could be taken away.

Then add in the fact that gun ownership enters into an entire complex of cultural signifiers, and the case for gun control starts to sound like an attempt to regulate away the cultural identity of a whole segment of the population. The result of this is, as someone mentioned above, gun owners don't trust gun-control advocates. Sure, they may be asking for reasonable controls now, but where will they go after that? First they come for our automatic rifles, then they come for our handguns, then for our hunting rifles, then...

IOWs the gun-control crowd is unlikely to get very far so long as their cause is perceived as part of an elitist, urban agenda which is opposed to the entire ethos of people who are likely to own guns. Good luck getting your gun control arguments out of that cultural tarball.

FWIW, I think that prudence is on the side of moderate gun control, but the Constitution is on the side of the gun-rights crowd. The history of interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is actually fairly complicated, but the general trend (with this right as with others) has been towards a more expansive interpretation of the right, as the recent Heller ruling demonstrates.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Well, and that lack of trust goes the other way: the push for ever-more-permissive gun laws is steady, and alarming to those of us who think concealed carry in a bar is a really bad idea.

But I agree that there's a fundamental breakdown in communication that needs to be resolved before any kind of effort at control will succeed.

OT: banned?

[(Anonymous)]

/houseboatonstyx here/

Why am I banned from your LJ? This can happen by accident; I hope I haven't actually offended.

I came in to agree with you about guns, btw.

Re: OT: banned?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Huh -- I have no idea how that happened. It certainly wasn't deliberate on my part, nor through any fault of your own. My apologies!

Anyway, I dug through LJ's back end until I found the place to unban people. You should be in the clear now.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

When I was a fair bit younger and a lot trollier, I wrote an essay on the topic. (http://icedrake.livejournal.com/99346.html) Most of the links -- most significantly the ones linking to the statistics -- have succumbed to bit rot, so you'll have to take my word for it that I haven't made the numbers up out of whole cloth, but it's still (well, in my opinion) not a bad essay :)

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Well of course I'll lend my 2 cents. :)

I grew-up with guns. My father hunted and shot and was a minor gunsmith. So when people started attacking guns and gun ownership, why yes I felt attacked.

Ah.

See it's not the inanimate object that is causing the problem. Thus when you attack people who own inanimate objects and tell them that they are wrong and "shouldn't need an AR-15 to hunt" well, really? Who are you to tell me what I need/want? There are lots of law-abiding, peaceful gun owners and attacking them and denying them access to their hobby is well, not going to work. Not only is bigoted and uninformed on your part, these many gun owners are not causing problems or trouble or hurting you. So why attack them and tell them their needs aren't real? Hmm...

This also makes me wonder about the "culture wars" and bigotry in our country. See, I'm a big time liberal and I hang out with big time liberals. And what really interests me about big time liberals is how bigoted and hateful we can get when discussing guns because they are owned by those "rednecks". So we end up demonizing people we don't like. Sound familiar? *sigh*

As for gun violence why stop there? Why is gun violence so much a focal point? Why not violence in general? Last I heard, according to the FBI, more people die per year by fists and feet than by guns. Should we ban those too?

Alas, if gun control actually worked, I would be all for it. It doesn't, so I'm not.

So, I am back to my usual statement on gun control: We cannot blame guns for the problems of the human heart.

How do we solve the human heart problem? Well that's another post. :)

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

"according to the FBI, more people die per year by fists and feet than by guns."

http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.html
2009 homicides due to guns: 11,493
2009 homicides, all causes: 16,799

So in fact 68% of homicides are by gun.
(Also 1.7/100,000 Americans were killed by non-gun means, which is in fact higher than the total homicide rate of most civilized countries.)

If you care about suicides, that's another 18,000 killed by guns.

"Alas, if gun control actually worked, I would be all for it. It doesn't, so I'm not."

What kind of gun control, working in what way? Localities in the US banning guns doesn't work, since you can just go to a looser state and bring guns back in your car. Nationwide bans on guns do make guns and ammo vanish from stores and thus make them much harder to get, and nations with gun control don't have big gun problems. The US isn't an island... but Canada's not a big gun source, and Mexico's illegal guns come largely from us in the first place. (Thus the Mexican drug war floats on US dollars and is fought with US guns...)

Replace 'gun' with 'handgun' or 'semi-auto gun' to taste. If the only civilian guns in the US were manual-action rifles and shotguns, you'd still be fine for hunting and home defense, yes? But crime, sprees, and gang war would all be massively curbed.

[cepetit.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

I don't have links for these statistics available; they're in my library, which is still in storage here while I finish arranging housing, etc. But:

(1) The leading (not majority, but most-prevalent) cause of firearm-related injury is accidental discharge. My sources do not go far enough into that to distinguish between firearm-related injury and firearm-related death... but a quick review of any newspaper outside major US metropolitan areas should convince you that this is at least a significant issue.

(2) The leading -- and probably majority -- cause of death and serious injury in intentional firearms discharge incidents (yes, it's a mouthful, but don't blame me for governmentese) is euphemistically described as "improper target acquisition." That ranges from thinking that a hunter is a deer to thinking that soon-to-be-canonized neighbor kid A is spawn-of-the-devil gangbanger neighbor kid B; it also includes failing to note and account for "collateral damage," such as correctly identifying one's target as gangbanger neighbor kid B... and missing, instead hitting six-year-old neighbor kid C who was playing on the porch that happened to be behind neighbor kid B.

What these two items mean for the gun control/restriction/whatever debate is up to you. I do not, however, think they can be ignored.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/nfirates2000.html
2000 numbers: 48,000 intentional (assault) gun nonfatal injuries, 23,000 accidental ones

(edit: http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/nfirates2001.html is more recent; only 14,000 accidental non-fatal injuries in 2010).

http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.html
550 accidental gun deaths, 12,000 gun homicides, 18,000 suicides

I haven't seen anything addressing (2)

thoughts on gun control

[livejournal.livejournal.com]

User prosewitch referenced to your post from thoughts on gun control (http://prosewitch.livejournal.com/1363770.html) saying: [...] posts from LJ friends of mine at the opposite end of the spectrum are 's pro-regulation post here [...]