Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Location: Anchorage Suburbanites and part time Willowbillies
1,708 posts, read 1,862,281 times
Reputation: 885
Now back to my original question.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hogfamily
Can anyone honestly explain how banning responsible law abiding people from purchasing semi-auto firearms, (misnamed as assault weapons), and high capacity magazines is going to stop criminals and the mentally ill from misusing firearms?
No emotional responses; statistics / facts only please.
Keeping in mind that there are already millions of semi-auto firearms, (misnamed as assault weapons), owned by responsible law abiding citizens.
What is there to admit, doesn't every one understand what the purpose of gun restrictions is...Is this a big secret?
of course. politicians use the behavior of criminals to limit the law abiding citizens ability to protect themselves and therefore have to rely on government to protect them instead. even though the scotus has already ruled that neither the feds nor the police have a duty at all to protect any individual person.
You incorectly believe gun control legislation is to "stop" crime. Gun control legislation is not anymore going to stop crime than do drunk driving laws stop drunk driving. Should we do away with all laws and restrictions that dont "stop" or "prevent" a criminal act from occuring?
well what we ought to have is a rational discussion about the legislation before the nation today.
1. Assault Weapons Bans.
2. Magazine size limits.
You seem a likely candidate to discuss the goals of these law changes. Lets get into the nuts and bolts and talk about what the goal is and what the expectation is.
That's because I'm a researcher (epidemiologist) in real life.
elle, I find that alot of the stats that are collected by groups concerning firearms usually get their facts from cities.
as you are a researcher, i am a firearms instructor, and teach women mainly on how to use and shoot all types of firearms safely and while they are at home, with or without family.
822 women and 120 men taught in my classes in 13 years and none of my students have ever shot themselves with their own firearms, or had their firearms taken from them. more than just a few women from my classes have stopped crime just by letting the crook know that they are armed and willing to use the firearm.
I know because I still keep in contact with them all. email works great.
The numbers for suicide here are interesting but only as a matter culture in America. We have a wide body of evidence that clearly indicates no link between national gun laws and suicide rates. Japan has a high suicide rate and very strict gun laws.
As for homicide, this study I am afraid, doesn’t really show much of anything. It deals ONLY with homicides in the home of the decedent. While statistical evidence may say a person is more likely to die from a firearm, if there is a firearm in the home, there are a whole host of factors that were not considered.
Causation was not factored here.
Nowhere did I read that previous legal trouble was taken into consideration. While there is indication that drugs and alcohol was considered, the study does not indicate if those things have a greater correlation.
The study itself points out that they did not consider the neighborhood (socio-economic) the decedent lived in. Is that a greater correlation? Could there be causation hidden here that would point to other factors as being primary over the existence of the gun? What about firearm training? Further, while taking “education into consideration digging into the numbers show this only considered if the decedent completed high school or not. Higher Education was not considered. I wonder what that would do to the statistics.
And we are also talking about infinitesimal fractions of percentages. The data comes from 1993 considering the population of America at somewhere near 250 Million at the time, there were a grand total of
490 people died in their home from gunshot. 188 had a gun in the home 339 died from gunshot but what is missing is the number of people who died from a gunshot in their home where they did not store a firearm. We know 188 did, but we cannot assume all of those 188 died from gunshot. Only that they were killed. We know that 339 died from gunshot which means even if we could show the 188 total were killed with guns, there was still 151 killed with guns that did not store a firearm in their home.
Consider 250 million in the population, even using incomplete numbers and assuming all 188 who had a gun in the home were in fact killed by a gun, even considering this to be a 10% sample of the deaths in 1993 we are talking about a difference of 37 people in a population of 25 million people. The numbers are so small as to have virtually no real meaning in the context of who dies from what. If we are going to have a discussion about saving lives, which is what this discussion ought to be about, I think I could come up with a few hundred other topics that have more value and will save vastly more lives.
Statistically gun control works to some degree, but I still don't agree with it. We are a society that values freedom over security and there is a price to pace for that; I am willing to pay that price.
You can't say that nobody can have a scary black riffle because some whackjob killed a bunch of people with one just like you can't say nobody can drink because some drunk caused a 10 car pile up on the freeway.
Elle, you seem to be a person who at least wants to learn the truth.
The research you quoted has multiple problems which even the authors admit (see their section of limitations). One big issue is to blame suicide on gun ownership. There's no better way to counter this argument by comparing suicide rate of Japan (21), China (22) and Korea (32) with that of USA (12). If gun ownership caused suicide, there's no reason that they have so much higher rate of suicide - those countries have almost no civilian owning firearm.
That took out a big piece of "gun death".
The second major flaw is mixing lawful ownership of firearm with unlawful ownership. It has long been established that within lawful gun owners, the homicide rate is 1/8 of the general population. The main reason is lawful gun owners are mostly model citizens to begin with; otherwise, they wouldn't be able to pass background check and legally own a gun.
Does gun control really reduce crime? By definition, it doesn't, it can't and it won't. This is because the current "gun control" only controls law abiding citizens - law abiding citizens just don't commit crimes that often.
The only way to make real gun control works is to control criminals.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
