Ok, this is scaryFollow

But you must admit I've got the whole telling you you suck at running a country down pat. Ad nauseum.

Sorry for dissing your team so much, babe.

Wait...you don't know?

That was a funny argument. He tried to pass off CC as being a key factor in stopping mass shootings, and managed to actually prove it was luck.

The difference is that I'm using a set of developed nations created independently (for another body) and you're combing the sheets trying to find countries that support your end goal and declaring them "developed" and insisting I include them. "Ohh! Moldava! This one is good! Hey, how come you didn't include Moldova!!"

But I'm the one cherry-picking

I didn't think it was so much of a punishment argument. IIRC, the thought was more along the lines of getting past some sort of security. So instead of the policeman stopping you at the gate, you could take the gun into the crowded stadium and go on a killing spree or something.

What policeman? What gate? Crowded stadium? When has there been a mass shooting in a stadium? We have security at stadiums Joph. We don't have them checking everyone who walks onto a school, or in a park, or in a shopping mall, or a fast food restaurant, or just a busy street corner. Are you proposing we turn ourselves into a police state, with checkpoints every block in order to pat everyone down to make sure they're not carrying an illegal weapon? Perhaps we'll make it illegal to congregate into groups so as to reduce the likelihood of being targeted? Hell. Let's divide our cities into zones, and require papers and authorization to move into an area you aren't supposed to be. I mean, while we at it, why not?

Seriously? You'd rather go the path of greater police power and authority over our lives instead of giving people greater freedom to defend themselves and their neighbors? That's insane. How irrationally afraid of guns do you have to be to allow this or even think this? Crazy!

I just want to point out that of the last ten mass shootings in the United States, six of them were in Shall Issue Permit states, two were California so "three" were May Issue, and one was in a state that doesn't even require permits to carry concealed. Maybe if they were actually defending themselves you might have a point.

An example of a guy planning a shooting spree changing his mind because it was illegal for him to carry his weapons concealed? There are no examples of that happening. Which is why it's a silly claim to make.



It's a completely irrational concern though. And I did address it. I said it's silly because no one who's planning a mass shooting is going to be deterred because it's illegal to carry his weapons concealed. The only people deterred by such things are people who *aren't* planning to do anything illegal with their guns.



Sure. But that's not the point here. I'd trust a police (patrol) officer with a car over a stranger too. But that doesn't mean I'd support making it illegal for anyone but trained police pursuit drivers to drive cars on public streets. That's just not a good enough argument IMO. Part of living in a free society is the risk that someone might harm you while enjoying their freedom. A kid might run into your with his skateboard or bike. You might get beaned in the head with a baseball while enjoying a local park. You can get hit by a car that jumps the curb. The point is that we don't outlaw any behavior that *might* result in you getting hurt, or we'll end out with no freedom at all. There has to be a balance and strong consideration of the impact to liberty when even considering such sorts of restrictions and regulations.


Allowing concealed weapons is only really dangerous if we assume the person with the concealed weapon deliberately decides to shoot someone. The odds of an accidental shooting from someone carrying a concealed firearm is about as close to zero as you can get. I'm sure it's happened, but when compared to your odds of getting hit by a car, or having a meteor fall on you or something, you're really quite safe. And the intentional thing is pretty silly. Again, the guy who's going out to commit a crime with his gun isn't going to bother with getting a concealed permit. He's just going to carry his gun illegally. He's the one you should be worried about. The people who go and get their permits are far less likely to harm you than the average person on the street because they have a lot more to lose if they do so.

It's an irrational fear. Restricting concealed carry to an extreme degree does nothing to protect you from being attacked on the street (via firearm or otherwise). I guess I just really don't get why anyone would think that loosening restrictions on CC would somehow make it easier for a mass/random shooting to occur. That makes no sense at all. If anything, it'll reduce the likelihood of such things because there is a greater chance that someone else might be in the area to interfere with a shooting. A total ban on concealed weapons means that the criminal who's carrying illegally anyway is almost certainly the only person in the area with a gun. Is that really what you want?

I did data crunching earlier in the other thread. You should probably go re-read it.

And yes, I dorked up the columns initially and changed them (before I'd seen your response btw). Interestingly enough, the lack of correlation is much easier to see when you sort by homicide rate rather than gun ownership rate because the gun ownership rate differences are much more stark and thus stick out. In the Eurozone, for instance, we get something like this:

 
NAME                    Guns/100    Homicide/100k 
Austria                 30.4        0.6 
Slovenia                13.5        0.7 
Germany                 30.3        0.8 
Spain                   10.4        0.8 
Italy                   11.9        0.9 
Malta                   11.9        1.0 
France                  31.2        1.1 
Netherlands             3.9         1.1 
Ireland                 8.6         1.2 
Portugal                8.5         1.2 
Greece                  22.5        1.5 
Slovakia                8.3         1.5 
Belgium                 17.2        1.7 
Finland                 45.3        2.2 
Luxembourg              15.3        2.5 
Estonia                 9.2         5.2 

High gun ownership rates are all over the list. The second highest gun ownership rate results in the lowest homicide rate. The second lowest gun ownership rate has the highest homicide rate. Of the 5 nations which have single digit gun ownership rates, 4 of them are in the highest half in terms of homicide rate. Again, there's just no correlation.

But by all means, you come up with a list of nations that have some magical socio-economic correlation to the US, and I'll be more than happy to show you that there's no correlation among them between their gun ownership rates and homicide rates. It just doesn't exist. As I said earlier, it's a myth.

Edited, Mar 8th 2013 4:30pm by gbaji

You don't think?

It was exactly that claim to which I was responding.



How? It's easy to claim this, but I want you to back it up with more than vague fears you've been taught to have.



The issue of security perimeters was not part of the initial claim. I'll again point out that someone planning to shoot a bunch of people is unlikely to have or obtain a concealed weapon permit first. Additionally, he'll pick a location where there isn't security searching people to commit his crime. So our options are to make all places subject to security searches *or* acknowledge that this is a really stupid direction to go and decide to let people who can prove they're not criminals to carry guns around.



Which is pretty much the definition of an irrational fear.



I suspect if you were in such a situation, you'd care a lot whether the shooter was the only armed person in the area or not.

Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. Why would that matter? The data I'm looking at pretty clearly and objectively disproves the claim that high gun ownership causes higher homicide rates (among otherwise similar nations). That data is the same regardless of what my status is.