Oh, Shoot (Connecticut)Follow

I suppose the "we didn't do anything to them that they weren't doing to others" answer to the savage and heinous crimes committed against Native Americans would make you feel a little better about yourself. If you are about four and a half years old, that is...

Edited, Dec 20th 2012 12:42pm by Belkira

Just an inch, but that's enough right?

I don't understand how anyone could argue that having more guns is the way to prevent people being killed by guns. It contradicts ALL the real evidence - that evidence shows that the US has the highest rate of gun ownership among developed countries and the highest amounts of gun-related homicide. It's bizarre that anyone could actually argue that lack of guns is what is killing people in America. I mean, crikes, when a country like Japan can have as few as -2- gun related homicides in a year?!?





Edited, Dec 20th 2012 12:14pm by Olorinus

It was likely made more than than it is today. The US government had various treaties with different tribes, alliances with some, states of war with others, etc. It very much treated them as individual entities. There was, of course, blanket policies put in place (more so as the number of tribes dwindled) but the distinction between tribes was very much made.

I'm not going to look up a bunch of stuff for ya on this (sorry) but you might want to independently read up on it. It's a fascinating and not often discussed* part of our nation's history.


* "Discussed" as in looking into its breadth and complexity. As opposed to "Trail of Tears, reservations, maybe Little Bighorn, now moving on..."

Because it's a lot easier to lose your temper and kill someone with a gun, then with a knife for a bat, you ignorant ****. Guns are designed to do massive harm to the target, You don't have to hit someone right in the heart or brain to kill them. With a knife, it's a lot harder. If you lose your temper and stab someone once, you'd have to hit something really vital to kill them. With a bat... WTF carries a bat around with them?

But you go ahead and live in your personal little fantasy world where we all carry guns and are "safe".

It's currently 4.2/100k in the US, but you're also comparing two different countries with different cultures and base levels of crime and extraneous factors which would likely exist regardless of gun laws.

Compare what happens within a country when it enacts a strong gun control measure, and you'll get a better idea of the ineffectiveness of such laws. The Brady Bill here in the US had absolutely no statistically relevant effect on crime at all, much less gun related crime. In Australia, after their infamous forced buy back program, most crime rates have increased relatively speaking, especially crimes committed against the most vulnerable (sexual assaults on women, and robberies against the elderly).

These are more significant because the question isn't "What if the US magically changed into Japan?", but "what if the US adopted <some gun control measure>?". The social and geographical realities of the US don't change if we pass such laws. So we should ask just what those laws will change. And the answer tends to be that things will either get worse or stay about the same by enacting stronger gun control laws.




Irrelevant to the point I was making, but since mass murder has been committed with a knife, the point is doubly moot. You know what makes it even harder to commit mass murder? If there's someone with a firearm in the area around to try to stop you. Think about it. If you were planning on killing a bunch of people and you want to be able to kill as many people as possible, which of these would you prefer:

1. You are armed with an assortment of legal firearms of your choice (shotguns, handguns, and semi-automatic rifles), and no one within a quarter mile has any sort of firearm.

2. You are armed with an assortment of bladed or blunt weapons of your choice, and no one within a quarter mile has any sort of firearm.

3. You are armed with an assortment of legal firearms of your choice (shotguns, handguns, and semi-automatic rifles), but there are 2 random people in the crowd who are armed with concealed handguns.

4. You are armed with an assortment of bladed or blunt weapons of your choice, but there are 2 random people in the crowd who are armed with concealed handguns.


It might just kinda be in that order, wouldn't it? You'd prefer to use firearms in locations where no one else has them. Then you'd prefer to use any other weapon as long as you knew no one else had a firearm. The last place you'd want to go, regardless of what weapons you had available was somewhere where someone else might be armed. The problem with our current laws, is that we actually create the ideal choice for mass murderers and we put our kids in them every time we send them to school.

Insane, isn't it?

They are too busy tentacle raping school girls. (And they don't kill them, because they become sex slaves after that)

Culture? Geography? You do realize that Japan is a set of islands, right? It's a lot easier to control who comes into their country. You could just as easily ask why the homicide rate is twice as high in Luxemburg as in the United Kingdom, or why Belgium has twice the homicide rate as Denmark. There are far far more factors involved than just what sorts of gun control laws are in place. There are countries with very lax gun control laws and very low homicide rates, and countries with very tight gun control laws and very high homicide rates.


To suggest that more restrictive gun control means lower crime is completely fallacious.



You're being selective in your bias and only looking for correlations which support your position and not those which don't, I could just as easily ask you why a nation with far more strict gun control laws than the US also happens to have the worlds highest murder rate in the world (that's Honduras btw). Or why Greenland, which has gun control laws just as strict as the UK or Japan has a homicide rate nearly 5 times as high as the US?

We can sit here and pull out single cases, or we can conclude that gun control laws don't really have much at all to do with total crime statistics.



No, it wouldn't. Because the crime differences between different nations has to do with a whole hell of a lot of other factors and not much at all with what their respective gun control laws are. As I said earlier, this tells us nothing about what changing those laws will do within a single country. That's the question we're asking here. And when we look at the specific conditions in the US, it seems more likely that crime will either stay the same or increase if we pass tighter gun control laws than the other way around. Each nation is going to be different. You can't assume that the effect of a legal change will be the same everywhere.

The killer has the advantage. The element of surprise. Unless you aren't a serious killer and announce beforehand that you are going to kill everyone and then fire 60 rounds randomly, not hitting anymore, before running downstairs and shooting yourself.

So how many bullets is a killer going to get off with their legally obtained semi automatic assault rifle with huge clip of bullets before the lucky citizen who happens to be carrying and not be shot gets a shot off the take out the criminal?

Not at all. As shown, it's had no effect on events the FBI considers to be "mass shootings". You can play the hypothetical game all night long where every guy wit a gun stopped would have really killed a million-thousand others but the fact remains that even in actual mass shooting events where a person with a firearm attempted to intervene in those events, they failed to stop it (and were often wounded or killed in the process).

Can you explain why armed civilians failed in every one of these events? Surely they should have popped off the guy with a well-executed headshot or something at least some of the time, right? Does killing four people first give you magical invulnerability to bullets?