The Big Gun Control Rant

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But Drew, don't you understand? The registery is only the first step of disarmament and tyranny. First they'll make a registry of people who own guns and then slowly go forth with systematically disarming the population!

 

1: So why a gun? Only last weekend I caught someone breaking into my garden shed, my cricket bat did its job quite nicely and without any serious injury.

2: already been nicely covered.

3: Im ex forces, never really considered shooting fun.

4: Rifles and hunting are still legal in the UK, you dont need a handgun for hunting, and infact even in the situation you mentioned earler I would still use my rifle because I like to drop an animal with one shot.

to answer your question, I dont see that anyone should be allowed to own a tool which has a sole purpose of killing. People then argue about people having knives, kitchen knives are practical tools, craft knives have very short blades. A gun kills thats all it can do.

Yeah, these people who accidently shoot their wives when they get up in the night to take a piss.

And what about that woman who shot a man as he approached her from behind to return the purse she had dropped on the ground.
My simple argument, melt down all guns into a pile of slag.

 

Simple, if the other guy had had a cricket bat as well, you'd be at real risk of injury. Even in the US, a petty criminal having a gun is far less likely, so you're more likely to be better armed than them.

Well, to each his own, though I can understand why it may be the case for you.

In an ideal world, I would completely agree. Unfortunately, this isn't an ideal world.

If you mean all guns, even those of the world's militaries, you are nieve. If you just mean the general public's guns, then only criminals will have guns. As long as there is any supply of guns, though, I expect criminals will get their hands on them.

 

Heh, this is America my friend...that isn't going to happen. It's a good idea, but when you have states like CA and UT which have totally opposite views on gun ownership, you can imagine the political nightmare that would cause. If the US ever adopts a federal level license system; the rules, regulations, fees, training, etc, would be so over the top that no one would bother getting one.

 

An interesting email I just got. It's not so much relevant to the topic, but it does put a few things in a bit of perspective:

 

That, to me, is the crux of this whole issue. I cannot repeat this enough. No registry will stop criminals from getting guns. The only thing that will stop them from getting guns is imprisonment or execution.

The deterrence factor is highly debatable as well, and here's why. When we argue capital punishment, proponents like myself argue that knowing that you might get hanged would stop you from comitting a capital offense. Then the civil rights extremists trot out statistics that show that criminals who commit violent crimes do not consider the possibility of getting caught, so deterrence doesn't work. Fair enough. But then when the gun control issue comes down the pike, all the sudden the idea that they will get caught because they are using a traceable weapon is supposed to be a deterrent? I don't think so. I have yet to see any convincing, reliable statistics to show this.

The bottom line is that there are thousands if not millions of responsible, decent gun owners in the US and Canada. If the powers that be want to lower crime rates, they need to educate the young so they don't turn to crime, provide jobs to make crime less attractive, and actually punish those who commit crimes instead of focussing on keeping tabs on the decent people.

 

Well, I dont know about the US, but gun control in the UK works. There were only 42 gun deaths in the UK last year and in 2007 that figure was 51.
I have never found myself worrying that a person Im about to face may be armed.

I have seen other statistics but I post these because they came from The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College London which I consider to be a reliable source.

 

Shoshino, actually, the UK is a wonderful study on this. They basically banned all guns everywhere (except for shotguns in rural areas, I think). Even ex-military members may have trouble getting a gun. As a result, gun violence dropped significantly, but didn't go away. Violence using bladed weapons, though, skyrocketed, to the point that some were considering banning katana-like blades, as they had become the new favorite of gangs.

Overall, I have never seen a single statistic that the crimerate dropped, just that the tools used in the crimes changed.

Also, realize that the UK is an island, meaning it's probably pretty easy to restrict the flow of guns into the country. Even if you banned all guns in the US, there'd still be a huge flow of illegal guns coming in from south america, if only to support the drug trade. Odds are, guns would become like drugs in the US: illegal, but obtainable in any city and most towns if you know where to look.

 

80.6 per 100,000 per month? Are you sure that's accurate?

The way they calculated the rate in Iraq was 2,112 deaths, divided by 22 months, divided by 1.6 to correlate it to a base of "per 100,000".

If we do the same calculation in reverse for the DC number, we can get the total firearm death rate in DC. It's 80.6 X DC population in 100K form X 22 months. The population of DC is estimated at 600,000 people. So it's 80.6 X 6 X 22 = 10,639 deaths. (Note: I did some research, and gun deaths are not necessarily all murders - suicides and accidental kilings account for more than half of the total firearms deaths in the US each year.) Even with this caveat, I find it difficult to believe that over 10,000 people in DC died from being shot in less than 2 years. That would mean thier annual firearm death rate would be over 5,800 people.

Wiki states the US's total annual death by firearms per 100,000 people to be 14.2, so with a population of approximately 300 million, that would mean we'd have 42,600 deaths by firearm each year. If that DC statistic is true, then over 13% of all firearm related deaths in the nation occur in DC.

 

I think whoever wrote that piece probably has his annuals and monthlies confused with each other.

 

I'm much happier at the thought of facing a knife than a gun. Not that I want to face either but if I had the choice I'd take the knife.

Guns can come into the UK the same way the drugs do. As a matter of fact the smugglers often throw a handpistol or two in with the drugs as a little bonus. That doesn't mean there's much demand for them though, they're pretty much the preserve of crime gangs.

 

I'm sure drugs and guns come into the UK just as easily, but that's gotta be harder than either come into the US.

Another thing to remember that I just realized (watching a BBC show where, ironically, a man was shot) is that the US still has plenty of large predators in many places. In the UK, there aren't really any bears or wolves or large cats or other predators that could be a threat to people. I'm not exactly sure about the situation in Europe, but I'd bet such things aren't common there, either. Here in the US, things like that occasionally show up even in urban settings, and are not at all uncommon in rural ones. As a reference, here in Virginia Beach, we usually get several sightings of blackbears every year, and deer sightings are common (deer aren't exactly predators, but when cornered and/or injured, they can be nasty). You may want to face a knife on your mugger any day, but I'd much rather face a blackbear with a gun in my hands.

 

Finland has its share of bears and during the last hundered years a bear has killed ONE human being in this country. So I don't know about the US, perhaps the bears there are more aggressive but one death in a century is a very bad reason to own a gun.

 

A quick google search shows that, between 1991 and 2001, the US had 1943 deaths by animals. 39.1% were from venomous animals (including bees, wasps, spiders, snakes, etc. so probably not detered by a fire-arm) and 60.9 were from non-venomous animals (meaning lethal bites, claws, gorings, cursh injuries, etc. so fire-arms probably are deterants). Of those non-venomous fatalities, 71.5% were from “other specified animal”, which looks like it means wild animals or very unusal pets.

I got the data from here.

I'm guessing the difference is the numbers, not the ferocity. Remember, large predators in Europe have been hunted down, mostly without restriction, for millenia, while in the US, they've only been hunted for a few hundred years (varies with location), and a sizable minority of that time has seen restrictions of one kind or another. That leads to vastly different wildlife populations between the Americas and anywhere in Europe.

 

I believe you are guessing wrongly since there is a cathegory for "other mammals" which includes 197 deaths. 197 deaths in ten years, hardly an impressive amount. I don't know what the "other specified animal" refers to but it does not appear include mammals, which in my opinion are about the only type of animals (along with perhaps alligators) a gun would do much good against.

You are making the mistake of putting entire Europe in one basket. For example the United States has 32 500 bears in total which is quite a few, but then if we compare that to Russia which has 120 000 it starts to seem somewhat smaller. Finland has approximately 1000 bears, which means that we have a lot more bears compared to population than the United States. However I'll grant you that we lack many of the predators that exist in United States such as Alligators and bigger Feline predators.

EDIT: Now of course I did the same mistake and put the entire US in the same basket.

EDIT2: And in addition forgot that black bears are actually far more common in US than the brown bears, which sort of skyrockets the bear population and actually makes it proportionally larger than in Finland. Still, I maintain the point that attacks by these animals are rare and the only ones who I think have a rational reason to have a gun against these animals are cattle hearders, which might need to protect their stock against attacks from wild animals.

 

Considering that the wording is "other specified animals", I'm guessing they went for the common groups like mountain lions, black bears, grizzly bears, and alligators.

Also, by and large, I don't group Russia in with Europe, but rather in with Asia (for continents, not cultures), but I'd guess Russia is an exception for wildlife even in Asia, simply because of the amount of unsettled wilderness in it (then again, grouping it with China and India...).

Yes, I know eastern Europe may have different numbers from western Europe, but both have still been settled by aggressively expanding cultures (those most likely to eliminate large predators) for over 1,000 years, probably over 2,000 years depending on the specifics of definition and areas. Comparing that to America, and you really don't get the same kind of effect until the Europeans come in, and then you can follow it moving west, though some significant jumps are made in the middle US.

Anyway, my point is that most any farmer farther west than the Appalacian mountains will probably carry a large rifle of some kind or another with him whenever he roams his land, because encounters with threatening predators are a very real possibility. I imagine this helps cut down on the animal deaths considerably. Also remember that farmers are not the only ones with a likelyhood to run into these creatures. I can't even remember how many cases of mountain lion maulings of joggers have popped up in northern California recently as development expands into the mountains. Remember, there's still a massive amount of expansion into untamed wilderness going on in the US. Probably much more than anywhere in Europe or Asia at the moment, though I don't have any statistics.

 

They have alligators separately though. If that's supposed to represent a group that basically consists of only mammals then they are presenting the results of their survey very very badly. Now It's basically anyone's guess what that "other specified animals" mean. Even more so when they have the "other mammals" cathegory.

I was talking more about northern europe and not eastern europe. Northern Europe has a lot of land that is not very suitable for farming which also makes expansion difficult. Predators have not been hunted down in nearly the same proportion as in Central Europe for example and their amount has been more or less stable until very recently when their living space has been compromised by the expansion of urban areas. But this is not really the point here.

EDIT: I took another look on the article and noticed this.

So the number we should be looking at are indeed the other mammals. In which case I stand by my point. A few hundered attacks in a decade in a country of 300 million people is not a rational justification to carry a gun in most places. Granted there might be individual places that are far more dangerous than most locations in the country which might justify such protection, but I'd say these places are quite few.

 

That's not attacks, that's deaths. I'm guessing attacks are far more frequent. I'm also not arguing it's going to top the charts on causes of death, but it is something to seriously consider.

 

Aldeth's scepticism is well founded. Assuming the numbers are correct, it seems there was a very serious problem in D.C, a manageable problem in Iraq, or some combination. Puzzling, isn't it?

That interesting 'mail' is an Iraq war propaganda meme from May 2006 that went viral. Obviously, it aimed on ridiculing the case for withdrawal from Iraq. The death schmtatistic meme was complied by Rep. Steve King, R-IA, or first distributed by him. It can still be found, for example, on Newsmax.

The argument is peculiar in many ways. In focusing solely on guns it ignores that most soldier fatalities in Iraq have been due to IED, and not gunshots. That has iirc only been different in high intensity urban fighting operations like in Falluja or Najaf. Read TruthOrFiction's take on it. Or SadlyNo!'s. King's numbers don't add up.

Sort of amusing to see it pop up here, still virulent after so long. Viral indeed.

 

Ah, thanks for that, Rags. I did know D.C. had a massive problem with crimes, including murders, and that Iraq had settled down recently, so I wasn't too surprised to read numbers like that, but it's nice to know the background behind it.