Gun sales jump following election

[Formless]

Ah... miscommunication, then. I was arguing In this case that collective punishment is innapropriate as a means to curb gun crime. I concede that there are times at which it is a justifiable as a solution to a problem; that is why, say, hard drugs like meth are banned, and rightfilly so.

[Darth Wong]

Ah... miscommunication, then. I was arguing In this case that collective punishment is innapropriate as a means to curb gun crime. I concede that there are times at which it is a justifiable as a solution to a problem; that is why, say, hard drugs like meth are banned, and rightfilly so.

Okay, so if we agree that collective punishment can be a good idea in some situations, then you cannot dismiss an idea simply by pointing out that it is collective punishment. A more logical argument would be to show (if possible) that it would not work.

[Formless]

Or by showing why it would be unnecessary in light of less harsh alternatives, but I see where you are going with that. Unfortunately, I'm drawing a blank right now on anything original to add that has not been said already. The problem of the black market and the fact that guns do not have a monopoly on violent crime come to mind as reasons why a ban would not work, but that has been said already by myself and others. That the society needs to change such things as economic problems and racism and the rest will probably follow, but again, that has been said already.

Oh well...

[Broomstick]

Wouldn't the proper comparison be between either licensed drivers and licensed gun owners, or between number of cars and number of guns, but not between drivers and number of guns or licensed gun owners and number of cars?

[erik_t]

You could make that argument. I ended up deciding that guns are much less of a major investment than cars, and more to the point, are easier to transfer ownership (legally or illegally).

I don't think it really changes the point, though. The claim that cars are much more lethal than guns is unfounded.

[Formless]

Well... if you want to argue lethality, one could make the argument that a car crash is more likely to lead to death due to the high speeds involved, number of victims per incident, the fact that guns are in fact designed to wound as much as to kill.

[Glocksman]

Some rambling thoughts:

1. There exists in the USA a right to own firearms, enshrined both in the Federal constitution and in many state constitutions.
As far as I know, not even California has a right to own an automobile in its state constitution.

2. Firearms by design are lethal. Sure, punching holes in paper or shooting 'reactive targets' such as expired cans of soda* is fun, but any firearm can be used to kill.
Automobiles can be used to kill as well, but their primary purpose is transportation and not killing.

3. Because firearms are lethal, as Broomstick pointed out, they are useful for self defense when attacked by someone larger or stronger than oneself. Despite having an Indiana CCW, I rarely carry a pistol anymore because I no longer work until 1 AM at a bowling alley in an area noted for an above average mugging rate and because since I'm over 6 feet tall and stocky, I don't look like an easy mark.

If I were a 4'11 female who weighed 100 lbs soaking wet and worked late, I'd probably carry a gun more often.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is that many gun rights advocates tend to gloss over the negative effects of the US's widespread gun ownership while gun rights opponents gloss over the positive effects.

The most cherished gun in my collection isn't a pistol or so called 'assault weapon'.
It's a modest Remington Nylon 66 .22LR rifle.

Why?
Because it's the gun my father taught me to shoot with back in 1974 when I was 8 years old.
To me, that rifle is a symbol of the times in my childhood (my parents were divorced) that my dad and I spent together doing 'guy things' and bonded.

The question is much more complex than 'everyone should carry guns' as the extremists on my side would have you believe and the 'ban them all' extremists on the other side would have you believe because of the cultural and historical (even if the 'history' is part Hollywood) significance many Americans attach to guns.


I'm very progun, but I do recognize the complexity of the issue.









*Shaking the cans up and then plinking at them with a .22 pistol is entertaining.

[His Divine Shadow]

Well, in Germany you can only own them in theory, in practice it is nigh impossible. You have to show a need for self protection or hunting or scientific reasons. If you can demonstrate any of those, you then have to show why a smaller weapon won't do the job, in addition to paying a heavy fee. Plus, the rules are so stringent that being caught in a misdemeanor will disqualify you for life. For example, if the police catch you with 0.3 blood alcohol, you are out for life and all your guns are confiscated by the state, with your licenses for them being pulled retroactively.

Hum, the germans I have spoken to seemed to indicate it wasn't that big a deal, just lots of paperwork. I'd have assumed it'd not be that difficult to own guns in germany seeing as Germany has the european ebay of guns and also europes very own domestic AR-15 manufacturer, Oberland Arms.

[erik_t]

Well... if you want to argue lethality, one could make the argument that a car crash is more likely to lead to death due to the high speeds involved, number of victims per incident, the fact that guns are in fact designed to wound as much as to kill.

I suppose you could argue that if you actually spent five minutes on Google and looked up the numbers to see if your claim is correct, incorrect, or outright laughable.

[Darwin]

The most cherished gun in my collection isn't a pistol or so called 'assault weapon'.
It's a modest Remington Nylon 66 .22LR rifle.

haha, I've got a Nylon 66. It's great.

[Glocksman]

The most cherished gun in my collection isn't a pistol or so called 'assault weapon'.
It's a modest Remington Nylon 66 .22LR rifle.

haha, I've got a Nylon 66. It's great.

Aside from sentimental value, the Nylon 66 is a very reliable firearm that was literally years ahead of its time when first introduced back in the late 1950's.
Out of curiosity, I asked my dad if he remembered where he bought it, and he said he really wasn't sure but he thought he bought it at K-Mart in 1974 along with an 1100 shotgun.
Sure enough, when I looked it up, the serial number was in the range of weapons manufactured in 1974 and K-Mart turned out to be a major reseller of Remington firearms at the time.

IMHO, if Remington reintroduced the detachable magazine version of the Nylon 66 with a stainless steel barrel and internal metal parts, it'd be very competitive with the Ruger 10/22 in the marketplace.

[Coyote]

Is it okay to "collectively punish" the owners of some hypothetical item in which 50% of the owners do something wrong? How about 999/1000? There is presumably a point at which it is sensible and legitimate, right?

Collective punishment is, in my opinion and according to the law, wrong under any circumstances. If you have 1000 people, and 900 of them are doing something wrong, you jail 900 people and leave the other 100 out of it. The way the law is supposed to work, is that it is better to let one guilty man go free than it is to send an innocent man to jail. The ratio of gun owners doing bad things, vs. th eratio of gun owners overall, is not sufficient to engage in a collective ban. I see it in the same light that I see provisions in the PATRIOT Act: everyone's phones are tapped, because of the slim possibility that one or two people are talking to terrorists overseas.

And no, don't start with "but phones don't kill people", it's not the phone I'm talking about, it's the principle of collective punishment. And anyway, if a phone is being used to coordinate terrorism, then in a roundabout way it is being used to kill people. That's why in military situations, we typically want to take out the enemy radioman first-- disrupt their communications and isolate them from reinforcements. The people who push unauthorized wiretapping are operating under the mentality that if 1% is doing something wrong, 100% must submit to disruption.

About 57 million US adults own at least one firearm, and about 400,000 crimes were committed with guns in 2006. Someone earlier in this thread suggested that it would be equally valid to lock up all men's penises due to rape. The rape rate in the US is about 0.5 per thousand. This is more than a factor of ten lower than the rate of firearm crime. Note that I have not taken into account repeat murders, nor repeat rapists. Don't have the data, unfortunately, since a lot of reported crimes are never solved.

I think it's vitally important that people be conscious of the rate of crime compared to the total ownership (of guns, penises or something else) before making asinine off-the-cuff analogies.

120 million guns is the current given estimate in circulation. At 300 million people, that is almost one gun for half the population. Those guns are concentrated in the hands of anywhere from 40-80 million gun owners. If "half" of these people were actually engaging in gun violence, there would be no law and order in this country at all; it would be anarchy. So the ratio of gun owners engaging in crime is nowhere near the amount that would justify collective punishment.

Out of 400,000 crimes involving guns, bear in mind those are not all murders, those are crimes where a gun was involved in some way. Some of them are murders, but some will also be such things as displaying a gun as a threat, or violating a probation rule by having possession of a gun when they're not supposed to, or having possession of a stolen gun. So many of those gun crimes actually involve other things that are already illegal: robbery is illegal, using a gun does not make it "more illegal"; murder is illegal, using a gun does not make the victim "more dead"; having a stolen gun is illegal because having stolen property of any sort is illegal, the gun does not make it "more illegal".

Many of these crimes can be prosecuted sufficiently under existing laws & penalties, without wasting police, court, and prison resources by going after 40-80 million people who have not done anything wrong.

Remember, the USA has one of the highest incarceration rate sin th eworld already, and some of those crime sare for what many consider "victimless" or "bogus" crimes. Minor drug offenses, for example. The cops are already so tied down they can barely get the 4-5 million criminals take care of, the courts are already jammed with actual dangerous people, th eprisons are already bursting at the seams... so people want to "deter crime" by devoting resources to tens of millions of people who haven't actually done anything?

Priorities, please.

[Coyote]

This website offers comparison statistics between Canada and the US for gun related crimes and suggests that availability of firearms does influence their use in crimes.

Guns per capita: Canada .25 US .82 US/CAN 3.3x
Murders with Firearms: Canada 0.5 US 4.4 US/CAN 7.9x
Murders with Handguns: Canada 0.23 US 3.3 US/CAN 14.5x
Overall Homicide rate per 100,000 Canada 1.83 US 6.62 US/CAN 3.6x
% of homicides with firearms: Canada 27.3% US 66% US/CAN 2.4x

I really don't care how much you want to satisfy your kill boner at the range or shooting up things in your backyard. Guns simply don't prevent crime, they don't deter criminals, and they don't protect you.

Bear in mind that when the economy bottoms out in the USA, and you hit the bottom of poverty, you are well and truly fucked and desperate. Desperate, hungry people, or desperate addicts, will turn to crime to feed their needs.

On the other hand, places like in Europe or Canada have social safety nets that keep people from falling into such deep despair. They don't have the need to turn to desperate crime.*

There are many other factors in this than "satisfying the kill boner" . So unless you have something else besides ad-hominem attacks...?





*That leaves only the amoral thrill-seekers, such as yobs in Britain (BTW, I'd be more terrified to walk in "gun-free" London than in any city in the USA, because of the yobs I've heard of. They are unarmed. But being armed isn't the problem, it;s the violence that is the problem, to me).

[Coyote]

So how does that disprove my assertion that less guns equals less gun violence?

England has seen something of a crime wave since banning guns, has it not? And most of the Western states in the USA, such as where I live in Boise, Idaho, are practically a sea of guns, yet the crime rate is very low. By your reasoning, Boise should be a bloodbath of mayhem. The most violent places in the USA are... inner-city poverty areas, many of them where guns are illegal.

Even if you say "they import those guns from places like Idaho, where guns are plentiful" that still doesn't address how, in those places where guns are being "sourced" from, they still aren't war zones.

Think about it-- if 40 million armed people were truly as violent and bloodthirsty as you imply, the USA would be a non-functioning entity. It would be Somalia on a grand scale. You're arguing hyperbole.

[Coyote]

Further, seven is very nearly an order of magnitude more than one.

Is seven your cutoff point for when it becomes permissible to punish all 1000 people of a social group for the misdeeds of those seven?

Even further... did you even read the post? The point is that we can't all freak the hell out about some kind of arbitrary "punishing many for the misdeeds of the few" alarmism. We all accept that some things are used almost exclusively for nefarious deeds...

Actually, no, that is a mischaracterization of my point. I do not think that guns are "almost always" used for nefarious deeds. I am pointing out the number of guns in the population, the crimes, the legal defensive uses of guns, and other factors to say that, actually, guns among the general population are not as big of a problem.

I can assume you are arguing from the standpoint of "if it saves one single life, a gun ban is good", and looking at the 400,000 gun crimes to base that on. I am arguing from the standpoint of, "if it saves one single life, allowing guns is good," and looking at the lack of criminal activity among 40 million people and the 2.5 million estimated crimes that are stopped by armed citizens defending themselves legally. It is a glass half-empty/half-full situation.

...even if there are some non-harmful uses for them (the aforementioned high explosive grenades would be fun as hell but it seems unanimous that their effective ban is not a bad thing). The point is that we have to discuss the fraction at which global punishment is reasonable for local screw-ups, not throw out the whole idea.

With the number of guns and gun owners in the USA, it would seem that the majority of the uses are, in fact, non-harmful. Non-harmful gun use is actually the norm, and gun crime is the aberration. And I cannot think of any point where "global punishment" is reasonable in an instance where there is no victim. A citizen that buys a gun, and uses it for hobbyist purposes, while having it available for protection in the (unlikely) event he needs it, is victimless.

[Coyote]

I did think. I have come to the reasoned conclusion that handguns, probably being the vast majority of those weapons used in crimes and having minimal hunting utility, should be banned or should at least be controlled to the extreme that fully automatic weapons are.

Actually, handguns are one of the ideal personal defense weapons due to it's weight, ease of carry, and short range. That would be why a lot of police tend to have them.

[Coyote]

Wouldn't the proper comparison be between either licensed drivers and licensed gun owners, or between number of cars and number of guns, but not between drivers and number of guns or licensed gun owners and number of cars?

It really gets complex, because whether people like it or not, gun ownership is considered a right rather than a priviledge, and the reverse is true of cars... there's also what the different machines are designed to do; one is a mode of transport rarely used (purposefully) as a weapon, so it is fair to say most deaths are accidental. You can also be a safe driver but kill because someone else wasn't.

A gun, on the other hand, is a tool intended to inflict damage on targets (paper or people) and so it is, in fact, being used for its intended purpose (legally or criminally). So there can be tap-dancing about "intent" and the like.

[erik_t]

Is it okay to "collectively punish" the owners of some hypothetical item in which 50% of the owners do something wrong? How about 999/1000? There is presumably a point at which it is sensible and legitimate, right?

Collective punishment is, in my opinion and according to the law, wrong under any circumstances. If you have 1000 people, and 900 of them are doing something wrong, you jail 900 people and leave the other 100 out of it. The way the law is supposed to work, is that it is better to let one guilty man go free than it is to send an innocent man to jail. The ratio of gun owners doing bad things, vs. th eratio of gun owners overall, is not sufficient to engage in a collective ban. I see it in the same light that I see provisions in the PATRIOT Act: everyone's phones are tapped, because of the slim possibility that one or two people are talking to terrorists overseas.

One is never 100% sure that a person accused of a crime is in fact guilty. Pod people could have been impersonating him. 100% is an unreasonable standard, which is why the law uses the term reasonable doubt.

The idea that for an arbitrarily large group of people N, that N-1 guilty people should be free instead of the one being unfairly locked up, is unsupported in law or in common sense. Overall restrictions are imposed on the people because of the misdeeds (or even potential misdeeds) of a few. A civil engineer needs to get a building permit on his house, just like all the unwashed masses. Sarbanes-Oxley requires many companies to spend money on compliance measures, even though only a few broke any law.

It is not an exaggeration to say that if you truly hold this notion that the many cannot be restricted because of the few, that you end up with a society with zero proactive regulation whatsoever.

And no, don't start with "but phones don't kill people", it's not the phone I'm talking about, it's the principle of collective punishment. And anyway, if a phone is being used to coordinate terrorism, then in a roundabout way it is being used to kill people. That's why in military situations, we typically want to take out the enemy radioman first-- disrupt their communications and isolate them from reinforcements. The people who push unauthorized wiretapping are operating under the mentality that if 1% is doing something wrong, 100% must submit to disruption.

Well I'm glad you can so nonchalantly drop your MESSness as if it's relevant, but this example is not valid. You can't link any deaths to the use of phones. It's this fear-mongering rights-restriction, I think, that bothers people, not as much the very idea of monitoring. If you could call someone and, in the very act of making that call, send a powerful shock through the headset and kill them, and if tens of thousands of people were killed this way each year, I think people might have a different view of the situation.

About 57 million US adults own at least one firearm, and about 400,000 crimes were committed with guns in 2006. Someone earlier in this thread suggested that it would be equally valid to lock up all men's penises due to rape. The rape rate in the US is about 0.5 per thousand. This is more than a factor of ten lower than the rate of firearm crime. Note that I have not taken into account repeat murders, nor repeat rapists. Don't have the data, unfortunately, since a lot of reported crimes are never solved.

I think it's vitally important that people be conscious of the rate of crime compared to the total ownership (of guns, penises or something else) before making asinine off-the-cuff analogies.

120 million guns is the current given estimate in circulation. At 300 million people, that is almost one gun for half the population. Those guns are concentrated in the hands of anywhere from 40-80 million gun owners. If "half" of these people were actually engaging in gun violence, there would be no law and order in this country at all; it would be anarchy. So the ratio of gun owners engaging in crime is nowhere near the amount that would justify collective punishment.

No, it's not 40-80 million. It's about 57 million.

Anyway, you're no better than the newbie. You're stating a priori that some particular ratio is necessary to justify collective punishment (never mind that you just said that the only allowable ratio is 1.0000), and that this number falls below it. You make no attempt to justify this particular choice of ratio. You merely state it as fact.

Out of 400,000 crimes involving guns, bear in mind those are not all murders, those are crimes where a gun was involved in some way. Some of them are murders, but some will also be such things as displaying a gun as a threat, or violating a probation rule by having possession of a gun when they're not supposed to, or having possession of a stolen gun. So many of those gun crimes actually involve other things that are already illegal: robbery is illegal, using a gun does not make it "more illegal"; murder is illegal, using a gun does not make the victim "more dead"; having a stolen gun is illegal because having stolen property of any sort is illegal, the gun does not make it "more illegal".

Yeah, I probably knew that those weren't all murders, since I went ahead and cited a different number for murders.

Many of these crimes can be prosecuted sufficiently under existing laws & penalties, without wasting police, court, and prison resources by going after 40-80 million people who have not done anything wrong.

Again you state your opinion as fact. I don't find the current level of prosecution to be sufficient. Neither do the ten thousand or so people who are unlawfully killed by a gun each year. However I correctly claim that this is my opinion, not that it is some self-evident truth declared from on high.

Remember, the USA has one of the highest incarceration rate sin th eworld already, and some of those crime sare for what many consider "victimless" or "bogus" crimes. Minor drug offenses, for example. The cops are already so tied down they can barely get the 4-5 million criminals take care of, the courts are already jammed with actual dangerous people, th eprisons are already bursting at the seams... so people want to "deter crime" by devoting resources to tens of millions of people who haven't actually done anything?

About 41 million speeding tickets are written per year. This doesn't count the huge number of hours that police are spending watching for, but not catching, speeders. The vast majority of law-abiding citizens would probably give up their guns if so mandated by law, and we would probably not put 57 million people in jail. No such thing has happened in any other country that removed guns from public circulation.

Is seven your cutoff point for when it becomes permissible to punish all 1000 people of a social group for the misdeeds of those seven?

It would depend on the level of necessity of the activity. If we're talking about doing away with private automobiles, then no. Automobiles are critical to the functioning of our society. If the ownership of tacky-ass collector's plates killed a person per thousand per year, then yes, I'd ban them (sighs wistfully... I'd probably ban them anyway...). Something like gun ownership would fall somewhere in between.

Actually, no, that is a mischaracterization of my point. I do not think that guns are "almost always" used for nefarious deeds. I am pointing out the number of guns in the population, the crimes, the legal defensive uses of guns, and other factors to say that, actually, guns among the general population are not as big of a problem.

It's not a mischaracterization of your point, because I wasn't replying to you. You are "pointing out" nothing. I have pointed our the number of deaths per gun owner per year. You have brought nothing to the table but your own opinions, like that this aforementioned number is "not as big a problem." Not as big a problem as what? Why not?

I can assume you are arguing from the standpoint of "if it saves one single life, a gun ban is good", and looking at the 400,000 gun crimes to base that on. I am arguing from the standpoint of, "if it saves one single life, allowing guns is good," and looking at the lack of criminal activity among 40 million people and the 2.5 million estimated crimes that are stopped by armed citizens defending themselves legally. It is a glass half-empty/half-full situation.

No, you can't assume that. If you'd read my posts in this thread before posting yourself, you'd see that I already posted the number of deaths per year from guns.

As for your crimes-stopped-per-year with guns, I actually went and dug up the source, since apparently you couldn't be bothered to do so. Of note are the points that the vast majority of the crimes stopped were not of the nature of violence against one's person, but were preventing petty robbery and the like. Somewhere in the hundreds of thousands (note that the author claims depending on which figures you prefer to use, anywhere from 800,000 on up to 2.4, 2.5 million defensive uses of guns against human beings -- not against animals -- by civilians each year). Is that worth ten thousand deaths a year? Maybe, it's something I'll be pondering. That's a worthwhile conversation to be having, not this ZOMG DON'T PUNISH ME CAUSE OF HIM!!!1

With the number of guns and gun owners in the USA, it would seem that the majority of the uses are, in fact, non-harmful. Non-harmful gun use is actually the norm, and gun crime is the aberration. And I cannot think of any point where "global punishment" is reasonable in an instance where there is no victim. A citizen that buys a gun, and uses it for hobbyist purposes, while having it available for protection in the (unlikely) event he needs it, is victimless.

Of course not, punishment of any victimless crime is arguably unnecessary. But gun ownership does not solely result in victimless crime - it results in 400,000 victims a year. Were you paying attention?

Actually, handguns are one of the ideal personal defense weapons due to it's weight, ease of carry, and short range. That would be why a lot of police tend to have them.

No shit. They're also one of the ideal crime-committing weapons for exactly the same reasons.

[Broomstick]

Well I'm glad you can so nonchalantly drop your MESSness as if it's relevant, but this example is not valid. You can't link any deaths to the use of phones.It's this fear-mongering rights-restriction, I think, that bothers people, not as much the very idea of monitoring. If you could call someone and, in the very act of making that call, send a powerful shock through the headset and kill them, and if tens of thousands of people were killed this way each year, I think people might have a different view of the situation.

Actually, the use of cellphones to remotely detonate bombs is well documented and has been used for years. I don't know what the rate of deaths per year via phone use actually is, but you assertion that phones haven't been used to kill people is false. Please note that for future reference.

[erik_t]

That's only true in the same sense that the USPS has killed people by delivering bombs to them, or a piece of brightly-colored paper has killed someone by flapping in the wind and causing the horse they were riding to flip out. I'd say the bomb killed the people, and the phone was just a trigger mechanism. I mean, hell, we could step back even further and say that fingerprints have killed people because it was the ridges of the fingers that pressed the buttons of the phone that detonated the bomb that killed people.

If you want to be as pedantic and anal-retentive as that, I won't stop you.

[Coyote]

It is not an exaggeration to say that if you truly hold this notion that the many cannot be restricted because of the few, that you end up with a society with zero proactive regulation whatsoever.

That is a very extreme interpretation and not what I am aiming at. Law is supposed to restrict socially damaging behavior by dealing with individuals who cause that damage. A society always has to seek the comfortable balance point between safety and freedom. A society that will be as safe as humans can realistically make it will not be so free, whereas a society that is completely free will most likely end up with very little safety.

The rub here is that I see 57 million gun owners and 400,000 gun crimes (and not all 400,000 gun-involve dcrimes are even violent or deadly) I feel that the safety to freedom ratio is fine. Before you come back at me with some emotional argument about "how the victims feel" please also remember that not everyone who is a victim of gun crime automatically becomes an anti-gun advocate. Some, in fact, go out and buy guns themselves. I also won't buy the idea that those 400,000 crimes crimes would never have happened without guns because, quite frankly, in the abscence of guns, crime will continue just as well but with knives, clubs, chains and bare hands-- all melee weapons that tilt the balance of power substantially in favor of the younger, stronger street thugs and takes a means of defense away from the older, weaker, and less capable.

Well I'm glad you can so nonchalantly drop your MESSness as if it's relevant, but this example is not valid. You can't link any deaths to the use of phones. It's this fear-mongering rights-restriction, I think, that bothers people, not as much the very idea of monitoring.

Well, actually, cell phones have been used to organize street riots ("Battle for Seattle") so it could be aregued that phones can be tools of crime. EDIT: I hadn't thought about the bomb detonation, though. That, too.

But on the subject of fear-mongering, what of your own fear-mongering about "citizens with guns are all ticking criminal time-bombs that can't be trusted". Gun crime tends to come from criminals, and the police themselves remind us that many violent criminals are in fact repeat offenders. So 400,000 gun crimes may actually just reflect the actions of, say, 100,000 people or less-- and then we have to ask if they got ahold of guns legally, or were they stolen goods. Sorry, but 400,000 gun crimes isn't enough.

About 57 million US adults own at least one firearm, and about 400,000 crimes were committed with guns in 2006. Someone earlier in this thread suggested that it would be equally valid to lock up all men's penises due to rape. The rape rate in the US is about 0.5 per thousand. This is more than a factor of ten lower than the rate of firearm crime. Note that I have not taken into account repeat murders, nor repeat rapists. Don't have the data, unfortunately, since a lot of reported crimes are never solved.

I think it's vitally important that people be conscious of the rate of crime compared to the total ownership (of guns, penises or something else) before making asinine off-the-cuff analogies.

It wasn't so much the rates of crime as it was the notion that punishing everyone that shared X characteristics because of the handful of a few that also shared X characterisitc is illogical.

Let's be generous and say that 400,000 gun crimes are parsed out in such a way that there are two crimes per criminal. That's 200,000 criminals doing two crimes each. Out of 57 million gun owners, what's the safe-owner-to-criminal-owner percentage?

Before you say it, no, I don't think crime is "good" or "acceptable" nor will I coldly write them off as "collateral damage". No crime is good. But given the rate of criminal activity to non-criminal ownership, I'd say the police and courts are better spent expending their resources on the smaller group of people that are actually doing harm, rather than targeting a huge number of people that aren't.

Anyway, you're no better than the newbie. You're stating a priori that some particular ratio is necessary to justify collective punishment (never mind that you just said that the only allowable ratio is 1.0000), and that this number falls below it. You make no attempt to justify this particular choice of ratio. You merely state it as fact.

Actually, no, I was asked what would be acceptable as a ratio and I said that I didn't want to see anyone punished because of the actions of a few; and the "collective punishment" part of the discussion gained acceleration because of a comment from an earlier poster that found that line of reasoning to be "mad".

The rate of gun crime to gun owners is such that I would find restricting all gun owners because of the actions of the criminals to be unfair, because it would amount to collective punishment. You can argue about what constitutes threshholds of acceptability before it is logical to use collective punishment all you want, but from my viewpoint things remain the same:
There is a much higher level of legal gun ownership than criminal gun ownership.

Those that are engaging in criminal use of guns is smaller than then the number of gun crimes, because it is logical to assume that the ratio is not "1 criminal = 1 crime", but more likely, 1 criminal = multiple crimes".

It is also likely that criminals can, and would engage in crime regardless of the existance of guns, so the existance of guns is not germane to the existance of crime. If it could be proven that the existence of guns turns people into criminals (who would otherwise be peaceful) I'd change my tune.

Many other factors are responsible for causing crime, such as poverty, lack of education, and economic factors. Resourses spent harassing 57 million gun owners could achieve far more crime prevention by diverting those resources to alleviating the desperation that sparks crime. It could pay for social safety nets so that people don't fall to such financial depths that crime becomes a worthwhile option.

Many of these crimes can be prosecuted sufficiently under existing laws & penalties, without wasting police, court, and prison resources by going after 40-80 million people who have not done anything wrong.

Again you state your opinion as fact. I don't find the current level of prosecution to be sufficient. Neither do the ten thousand or so people who are unlawfully killed by a gun each year.

You don't find the current level of prosecution to be sufficient-- that, sir, is your opinion, stated as fact. And as for the gun victims, how do you know this for sure? Did you interview them? Are you seriously trying to tell me that you know how 10,000 dead people feel about anything? I say once again: you do know that there are people who are survivors of gun crime that do not become anti-gun advocates, right? Sometimes they even go out and buy guns themselves. Don't you find it a bit much for you to assume that you know for a fact that all 10,000 people who died because of guns have posthumously become gun-control advocates? That would seem to be stating another opinion as fact, yourself.

However I correctly claim that this is my opinion, not that it is some self-evident truth declared from on high.

I've known for much of this argument that this is going to be as much about opinions as it is about facts. I stated pages ago that some people only feel safe if they have a gun, while others only feel safe if there are no guns, and there won't be much room to reconcile these two positions. So you can set aside your accusations about my "proclomations from up on high" and keep this real.

About 41 million speeding tickets are written per year. This doesn't count the huge number of hours that police are spending watching for, but not catching, speeders.

But catching speeders is a minor inconvenience to resources compared ot tracking down and investigating and confiscating property from 57 million people. You write a ticket and the guy-- who deep inside realizes he did something wrong-- goes on his way and mails in his check to the court.

In contrast, you'll have 57 million people who have not done anything wrong and broken no laws, suddenly being told they are criminals and the cops are going to come to take property from them that they bought with their own money.

The vast majority of law-abiding citizens would probably give up their guns if so mandated by law, and we would probably not put 57 million people in jail. No such thing has happened in any other country that removed guns from public circulation.

But no other country in the world that I know of offhand has gun ownership as a right, so the cross-cultural comparison won't necessarily be valid. I also wonder if the "vast majority" would give up their guns, really. Most gun owners in America are suspicious of a government that would try to do that, and most gun owners I know have stated an intent to hide, bury, or disassemble their weapons, or turn in a couple old "clunkers" while hiding the rest, because they feel that a government that wants to disarm the populace has some no good planned.

I'm sure you'll find this line of reasoning paranoid and so on, and maybe it is, but right now you have millions of "law abiding" gun owners who aren't causing trouble, and you're going to essentially attack them for no good reason. You will create an enemy from thin air. Even if 1 million of them resist violently, and the "vast majority" (the other 56 million) go quietly, you have just created 1 million violent new criminals that didn't exist a day before. Wasn't your plan to reduce crime? Instead, you've increased it, caused social unrest, and may even have made a police state necessary.

It's not a mischaracterization of your point, because I wasn't replying to you. You are "pointing out" nothing. I have pointed our the number of deaths per gun owner per year. You have brought nothing to the table but your own opinions, like that this aforementioned number is "not as big a problem." Not as big a problem as what? Why not?

You are insinuating that I don't care about the deaths from guns. I do care. Actually, I care that anybody dies of crime at all, I don't just fetishize the gun deaths. I would like to lower overall crime rates and deaths due to crime, and I don't believe that gun bans are the way to do it. Guns are also used to stop crimes, yes even theft and "minor" infractions as well.

...depending on which figures you prefer to use, anywhere from 800,000 on up to 2.4, 2.5 million defensive uses of guns against human beings ... by civilians each year. Is that worth ten thousand deaths a year?

You are making the claim that those crimes or deaths would not have happened if guns had not been available. You seem to be of the opinion that those 10,000 deaths occurred only because of guns being present, and that had there been no guns, there would have been no deaths. You need to prove to me beyond a reasonable doubt that such is the case. You appear to be fetishizing guns as the "cause" of crime, and implying that if there were no guns, crime would disappear. You seem smarter than that. Crime happens for a variety of reasons, and guns no more "cause" crime that your aforementioned vanity liscence plates "cause" crime. You also neglect to mention that while the 2.5 million legal gun defenses doe sinclude "petty crimes" it also includes instances where people's lives might have been saved as well. Are those deaths worth it to you?

Of course not, punishment of any victimless crime is arguably unnecessary. But gun ownership does not solely result in victimless crime - it results in 400,000 victims a year. Were you paying attention?

I've owned guns for 20 years, yet I have never caused a crime. Am I doing something wrong? In fact, I know several people who own guns and have never caused crimes-- we must be all messed up. Where are my victims?

By your own numbers, 57 million people own guns, and there are 10,000 gun deaths. Do the math. There are 2.5 million legal defensive gun uses in America. How many were not for petty crimes, but to prevent deaths? Out of 2.5 million legal defensive uses, what if there were-- 10,000 lives saved in all that? What would that ratio be? Would those lives be unworthy?

Your argument is based on a lot of emotional bluster and assumption: you imply that you are compassionate, and I am callous, and that those 10,000 deaths would not have occurred if there had been strict gun control in effect over the 57 million gun owners. Burden of proof is on you.

Actually, handguns are one of the ideal personal defense weapons due to it's weight, ease of carry, and short range. That would be why a lot of police tend to have them.

No shit. They're also one of the ideal crime-committing weapons for exactly the same reasons.

[/quote]

Could it be it is not the tool but the user that is decides?

[Broomstick]

That's only true in the same sense that the USPS has killed people by delivering bombs to them, or a piece of brightly-colored paper has killed someone by flapping in the wind and causing the horse they were riding to flip out. I'd say the bomb killed the people, and the phone was just a trigger mechanism. I mean, hell, we could step back even further and say that fingerprints have killed people because it was the ridges of the fingers that pressed the buttons of the phone that detonated the bomb that killed people.

If you want to be as pedantic and anal-retentive as that, I won't stop you.

You're full of shit and don't want to admit your example was piss-poor. Cellphone triggers, where calling the trigger cellphone detonates the bomb, is quite different than how USPS has been utilized to deliver bombs. The USPS, UPS, Federal Express, et al may have been used to transport a bomb but not to TRIGGER it. I specifically refer to instances where the cellphone becomes an integrated and essential part of the bomb.

Your example of the horse spooking due to an environmental influence is equally bullshit and not equivalent to a cellphone bomb trigger. In the case of the horse there is no malice intended, it's a fucking accident as the horse has no intention of killing its rider. On the other hand, it takes active forethought and malice to wire a cellphone into the trigger mechanism of a bomb and it is no accident when the results explode and kill people. In other words, it's an even worse example than any prior ones you've given.

Your refusal to admit you're wrong is pathetic and intellectually dishonest. I merely pointed out your example was flawed, you are the one too stupid to find a different example that better suits your argument.

[erik_t]

That is a very extreme interpretation and not what I am aiming at. Law is supposed to restrict socially damaging behavior by dealing with individuals who cause that damage. A society always has to seek the comfortable balance point between safety and freedom. A society that will be as safe as humans can realistically make it will not be so free, whereas a society that is completely free will most likely end up with very little safety.

Okay, we're on the same page then.

The rub here is that I see 57 million gun owners and 400,000 gun crimes (and not all 400,000 gun-involve dcrimes are even violent or deadly) I feel that the safety to freedom ratio is fine. Before you come back at me with some emotional argument about "how the victims feel" please also remember that not everyone who is a victim of gun crime automatically becomes an anti-gun advocate. Some, in fact, go out and buy guns themselves. I also won't buy the idea that those 400,000 crimes crimes would never have happened without guns because, quite frankly, in the abscence of guns, crime will continue just as well but with knives, clubs, chains and bare hands-- all melee weapons that tilt the balance of power substantially in favor of the younger, stronger street thugs and takes a means of defense away from the older, weaker, and less capable.

Okay, I am in complete agreement with all of this. As I've maintained throughout my involvement in this thread, at least I think I've tried to maintain, what we need is a discussion about what is an acceptable ratio of damage by a few vs. punishment (I'd prefer a different term, but we can go with that) of the many. What isn't sensible is some kind of freakout about some kind of nonsense black and white world where you can't force one guy to wipe his feet even if it would save a quadrillion lives.

But again, we're clearly on the same page. It's just a question of where we should draw the line.

Well I'm glad you can so nonchalantly drop your MESSness as if it's relevant, but this example is not valid. You can't link any deaths to the use of phones. It's this fear-mongering rights-restriction, I think, that bothers people, not as much the very idea of monitoring.

Well, actually, cell phones have been used to organize street riots ("Battle for Seattle") so it could be aregued that phones can be tools of crime. EDIT: I hadn't thought about the bomb detonation, though. That, too.

But on the subject of fear-mongering, what of your own fear-mongering about "citizens with guns are all ticking criminal time-bombs that can't be trusted". Gun crime tends to come from criminals, and the police themselves remind us that many violent criminals are in fact repeat offenders. So 400,000 gun crimes may actually just reflect the actions of, say, 100,000 people or less-- and then we have to ask if they got ahold of guns legally, or were they stolen goods. Sorry, but 400,000 gun crimes isn't enough.

Nowhere have I said that all of those people are "ticking time bombs", as you phrase it. My frustration is that people were tossing about claims that there were a tiny number of crimes vs a huge number of guns, and nobody bothered to actually find any numbers. I wished to rectify that, and give us some idea of the number of people that would be "punished" vs the damage done. If you have a metric you'd prefer instead of this one, I'm all ears.

It wasn't so much the rates of crime as it was the notion that punishing everyone that shared X characteristics because of the handful of a few that also shared X characterisitc is illogical.

Let's be generous and say that 400,000 gun crimes are parsed out in such a way that there are two crimes per criminal. That's 200,000 criminals doing two crimes each. Out of 57 million gun owners, what's the safe-owner-to-criminal-owner percentage?

Before you say it, no, I don't think crime is "good" or "acceptable" nor will I coldly write them off as "collateral damage". No crime is good. But given the rate of criminal activity to non-criminal ownership, I'd say the police and courts are better spent expending their resources on the smaller group of people that are actually doing harm, rather than targeting a huge number of people that aren't.

Again, we're now talking numbers. I accept that you believe that 200,000 / 57,000,000 isn't a high enough fraction. I don't necessarily disagree with that. I did not march into this thread with some preconceived notion of the numbers that would be necessary to make such a restriction worthwhile.

I took a stab at it, saying that I think handguns are disproportionately likely to be used in crime (in 1993, 57% of murders were committed with a handgun, compared to 3% rifle, 5% shotgun, and 5% unknown firearm PDF WARNING). The number of each available is about 77 million handguns, 79 million rifles, and 66 million shotguns PDF WARNING (I'm aware I was earlier using number of owners and am now using number of guns; this is just the info I was able to find easily). This indicates that the number of guns per murder in any given year are:

Handgun 7,196
Rifle 140,319
Shotgun 70,314

It is my belief that the reasonable line is somewhere between 7200 and 70,000, trending towards the lower end. Note that this only holds for an item that has considerable utility, but does not make our society possible by its very existence (eg the automobile at 5500 cars per death per year, although of course most of those are accidental).

Actually, no, I was asked what would be acceptable as a ratio and I said that I didn't want to see anyone punished because of the actions of a few; and the "collective punishment" part of the discussion gained acceleration because of a comment from an earlier poster that found that line of reasoning to be "mad".

The rate of gun crime to gun owners is such that I would find restricting all gun owners because of the actions of the criminals to be unfair, because it would amount to collective punishment. You can argue about what constitutes threshholds of acceptability before it is logical to use collective punishment all you want, but from my viewpoint things remain the same:
There is a much higher level of legal gun ownership than criminal gun ownership.

That's perfectly fair.

Those that are engaging in criminal use of guns is smaller than then the number of gun crimes, because it is logical to assume that the ratio is not "1 criminal = 1 crime", but more likely, 1 criminal = multiple crimes".

It is also likely that criminals can, and would engage in crime regardless of the existance of guns, so the existance of guns is not germane to the existance of crime. If it could be proven that the existence of guns turns people into criminals (who would otherwise be peaceful) I'd change my tune.

Many other factors are responsible for causing crime, such as poverty, lack of education, and economic factors. Resourses spent harassing 57 million gun owners could achieve far more crime prevention by diverting those resources to alleviating the desperation that sparks crime. It could pay for social safety nets so that people don't fall to such financial depths that crime becomes a worthwhile option.

I am highly sympathetic to that viewpoint. I'd include some kind of crimes-per-criminal statistic if I could, but I don't have that information. And I agree that the resources would be better spent elsewhere - that's why I'm not advocating taking them away, and I never have. I think if we were waving our magic wand and remaking the world, we'd be better off without handguns. But I wouldn't take them away in any foreseeable future.

Again you state your opinion as fact. I don't find the current level of prosecution to be sufficient. Neither do the ten thousand or so people who are unlawfully killed by a gun each year.

You don't find the current level of prosecution to be sufficient-- that, sir, is your opinion, stated as fact.

This cracks me the fuck up. How more obvious can I make it that it's my opinion? "I don't find ___" is very much different from "____ isn't". I'll make a huge bold OPINION tag for you in the future if this nonsense is perpetuated.

And as for the gun victims, how do you know this for sure? Did you interview them? Are you seriously trying to tell me that you know how 10,000 dead people feel about anything? I say once again: you do know that there are people who are survivors of gun crime that do not become anti-gun advocates, right? Sometimes they even go out and buy guns themselves. Don't you find it a bit much for you to assume that you know for a fact that all 10,000 people who died because of guns have posthumously become gun-control advocates? That would seem to be stating another opinion as fact, yourself.

That was silly and off-the-cuff, yes. It doesn't change the fact that either of our thoughts on this are opinions, and there is no factual line-in-the-sand on one side of which it's okay to restrict rights, and on the other side of which it is not. That was the point I was trying to make.

I've known for much of this argument that this is going to be as much about opinions as it is about facts. I stated pages ago that some people only feel safe if they have a gun, while others only feel safe if there are no guns, and there won't be much room to reconcile these two positions. So you can set aside your accusations about my "proclomations from up on high" and keep this real.

I'd have it no other way, and I expect the same from you. I expect you to be a little sympathetic that I'm addressing the same post to multiple people, not all of whom have said this.

But catching speeders is a minor inconvenience to resources compared ot tracking down and investigating and confiscating property from 57 million people. You write a ticket and the guy-- who deep inside realizes he did something wrong-- goes on his way and mails in his check to the court.

I don't know the time spent by the cop watching the radar gun or whatever per speeder caught. Do you? Honest question.

In contrast, you'll have 57 million people who have not done anything wrong and broken no laws, suddenly being told they are criminals and the cops are going to come to take property from them that they bought with their own money.

They would emphatically not be told they are criminals, and this is a silly canard often raised by the NRA and the like. Something being against the law does not make someone a criminal for having/doing it. I am not proposing this, but a buyback + fines for the noncompliant would negate much of this.

The vast majority of law-abiding citizens would probably give up their guns if so mandated by law, and we would probably not put 57 million people in jail. No such thing has happened in any other country that removed guns from public circulation.

But no other country in the world that I know of offhand has gun ownership as a right, so the cross-cultural comparison won't necessarily be valid. I also wonder if the "vast majority" would give up their guns, really. Most gun owners in America are suspicious of a government that would try to do that, and most gun owners I know have stated an intent to hide, bury, or disassemble their weapons, or turn in a couple old "clunkers" while hiding the rest, because they feel that a government that wants to disarm the populace has some no good planned.

If you've got a more applicable example, I'm all ears.

I'm sure you'll find this line of reasoning paranoid and so on, and maybe it is, but right now you have millions of "law abiding" gun owners who aren't causing trouble, and you're going to essentially attack them for no good reason. You will create an enemy from thin air. Even if 1 million of them resist violently, and the "vast majority" (the other 56 million) go quietly, you have just created 1 million violent new criminals that didn't exist a day before. Wasn't your plan to reduce crime? Instead, you've increased it, caused social unrest, and may even have made a police state necessary.

Oh, please. Weren't you the same guy who was complaining about PATRIOT act and maybe FISA? I didn't see riots in the streets, though I wish I had. A police state wasn't even passed after the Sedition Act of 1918, for crying out loud. People would be pissed off, but you're going to need to support any claim that it would amount to any more than that, if the discussion continues down this path.

It's not a mischaracterization of your point, because I wasn't replying to you. You are "pointing out" nothing. I have pointed our the number of deaths per gun owner per year. You have brought nothing to the table but your own opinions, like that this aforementioned number is "not as big a problem." Not as big a problem as what? Why not?

You are insinuating that I don't care about the deaths from guns. I do care. Actually, I care that anybody dies of crime at all, I don't just fetishize the gun deaths. I would like to lower overall crime rates and deaths due to crime, and I don't believe that gun bans are the way to do it. Guns are also used to stop crimes, yes even theft and "minor" infractions as well.

It's not my intent to make any such implication. I'm just asking you to be clear about what you think, not drop phrases like "not as big a problem" as something, without saying what "something" is.

...depending on which figures you prefer to use, anywhere from 800,000 on up to 2.4, 2.5 million defensive uses of guns against human beings ... by civilians each year. Is that worth ten thousand deaths a year?

You are making the claim that those crimes or deaths would not have happened if guns had not been available. You seem to be of the opinion that those 10,000 deaths occurred only because of guns being present, and that had there been no guns, there would have been no deaths. You need to prove to me beyond a reasonable doubt that such is the case. You appear to be fetishizing guns as the "cause" of crime, and implying that if there were no guns, crime would disappear. You seem smarter than that. Crime happens for a variety of reasons, and guns no more "cause" crime that your aforementioned vanity liscence plates "cause" crime. You also neglect to mention that while the 2.5 million legal gun defenses doe sinclude "petty crimes" it also includes instances where people's lives might have been saved as well. Are those deaths worth it to you?

On one side, we've got deaths that were directly caused by guns. On the other side, we've got situations in which the presence of a gun might have saved a life. Some of those deaths would have happened without a gun, yes. Some of those lives were saved by the presence of a gun, yes. But to my knowledge, we have no way of knowing how many of each.

I would argue that the user-friendly point-and-click interface of a firearm makes murder much more accessible to people who would otherwise not want to get their hands dirty, but I do not claim that is a fact. I would further argue that, again because people don't want to get their hands dirty, most of those violent crimes would not have ended in murder (since about 1.2% of violent crimes are murders).

Again, I'm open to suggestions on this. There just isn't enough data.

Of course not, punishment of any victimless crime is arguably unnecessary. But gun ownership does not solely result in victimless crime - it results in 400,000 victims a year. Were you paying attention?

I've owned guns for 20 years, yet I have never caused a crime. Am I doing something wrong? In fact, I know several people who own guns and have never caused crimes-- we must be all messed up. Where are my victims?

Do not strawman me, please.

By your own numbers, 57 million people own guns, and there are 10,000 gun deaths. Do the math. There are 2.5 million legal defensive gun uses in America. How many were not for petty crimes, but to prevent deaths? Out of 2.5 million legal defensive uses, what if there were-- 10,000 lives saved in all that? What would that ratio be? Would those lives be unworthy?

Hell if I know. Based on 1.2% of violent crimes being murders, and 37% of gun defense uses being against violent crimes, and there being 800,000-2.5 million uses per year, between 3,500 and 11,000.

Your argument is based on a lot of emotional bluster and assumption: you imply that you are compassionate, and I am callous, and that those 10,000 deaths would not have occurred if there had been strict gun control in effect over the 57 million gun owners. Burden of proof is on you.

The hell I do. Don't put words in my mouth, thanks.

Actually, handguns are one of the ideal personal defense weapons due to it's weight, ease of carry, and short range. That would be why a lot of police tend to have them.

No shit. They're also one of the ideal crime-committing weapons for exactly the same reasons.

[/quote]
Could it be it is not the tool but the user that is decides?[/quote]Once again, no shit. There's no need to bleat platitudes.

[erik_t]

That's only true in the same sense that the USPS has killed people by delivering bombs to them, or a piece of brightly-colored paper has killed someone by flapping in the wind and causing the horse they were riding to flip out. I'd say the bomb killed the people, and the phone was just a trigger mechanism. I mean, hell, we could step back even further and say that fingerprints have killed people because it was the ridges of the fingers that pressed the buttons of the phone that detonated the bomb that killed people.

If you want to be as pedantic and anal-retentive as that, I won't stop you.

You're full of shit and don't want to admit your example was piss-poor. Cellphone triggers, where calling the trigger cellphone detonates the bomb, is quite different than how USPS has been utilized to deliver bombs. The USPS, UPS, Federal Express, et al may have been used to transport a bomb but not to TRIGGER it. I specifically refer to instances where the cellphone becomes an integrated and essential part of the bomb.

Your example of the horse spooking due to an environmental influence is equally bullshit and not equivalent to a cellphone bomb trigger. In the case of the horse there is no malice intended, it's a fucking accident as the horse has no intention of killing its rider. On the other hand, it takes active forethought and malice to wire a cellphone into the trigger mechanism of a bomb and it is no accident when the results explode and kill people. In other words, it's an even worse example than any prior ones you've given.

Your refusal to admit you're wrong is pathetic and intellectually dishonest. I merely pointed out your example was flawed, you are the one too stupid to find a different example that better suits your argument.

Go play in traffic.

a. I wouldn't be forced to think up several different analogies if you weren't so thickheaded that I couldn't just give numbers.
b. Never mind I wasn't the one who started this asinine phone tangent in the first place.
c. You ignored the logical next step in your asinine "ZOMG PHONES KILL" sequence. Perhaps your feeble mind couldn't process so many steps at once.

Seriously, actually contribute something or quit wasting my time.

[Broomstick]

Phones have been used to kill people. That is a fact. Your refusal to acknowledge facts does not alter reality, but it does make you a dishonest piece of shit.