RE: Come and Take It!
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Many deadly poisons are (or can be made by mixing) household chemicals. Fertilizer has been used to make bombs. Black powder can be made at home.
Guns are not "weapons of war" by default. The obstacle erected to prevent people from buying guns do not promote safety. Crime does not correlate with firearm ownership rates or types of firearms available.
Appeals to fear and popularity are irrational. Do you know what the real trend has been in violent crime over the past 35 years? It was dropping before the Clinton gun ban in the 90s. It continued to drop after Bush allowed that law to end per its sunset clause. It has dropped as states relaxed restrictions on carry. It remains high in two key areas: 1. impoverished neighborhoods with gangs and a black market in drugs, and 2. "gun-free zones."
No misdeeds by others can ever justify anyone infringing on peaceful people. Should crypto or cash be banned because they are "preferred by criminals"? No. Same for firearms, even machine guns. "But what about the children" is the exact same argument used by these book-banning Karens who prefer state violence as a solution to their fears.
What are the leading causes of death of children in the United States of America?
It's not poison. It's not bombs either.
At what point is the "cure" (guns) for "government violence" worse than the disease (children being killed by firearms)?
What would it take to change your mind on gun regulations in the US? What percentage of school children affected by gun violence will it honestly take to change your mind on this? 100%?
People who want common sense gun regulation and people who want to ban books are not making the same argument. The people who want regulations on guns are trying to solve the very real problem of children being shot in classrooms. Too many children are being murdered in their classrooms in the USA. That is a real problem that requires a solution.
Book banning is just religious people trying to enforce their views on others. They are very different arguments... the similarity is that children are involved in both scenarios.
How many "firearm-related deaths" are suicide or gang violence as opposed to school shootings? How does a ban address the root problem? How many instances of war, genocide, and police brutality will it take for you to change your mind about governmental legitimacy? We are facing a mental health crisis and a police state crisis. Blaming guns and demanding new laws is scapegoating, not taking serious responsibility. Your faith in political solutions is religious.
Honestly, I think there is a ton of work to be done in the USA to solve the violence affecting children.
I would absolutely love to see more resources devoted to mental health services, to housing, to solving rampart drug-use, etc. I absolutely want to see far more accountability for police in the United States. Police are absolutely a huge problem in this country, especially in their actions towards underserved communities.
If an increase in mental health services decreased gun violence in the United States, great, amazing, let's do it. If putting more resources into communities reduced violence, then awesome. I'm all for that.
To me, common sense gun regulations are part of the overall solution, and I might be wrong here, but they also seem like the easily place to start... the quickest win as it were, especially with buyback schemes that have been successful in other countries.
There is a problem with the amount of gun violence in the USA that I think needs to be solved.
Right, now you're starting to get it. The problem, however, is that the quick and easy solution is rarely the best.
First of all, judging by the rates of violent crime in your own country, I think it's safe to assume that the 1996 gun buyback didn't actually do anything. I sincerely doubt that gun buybacks in general are actually effective, even if the violent crime rate decreased afterwards. Correlation does not equal cause.
Second, the problems usually start in the public school system, which is why I mentioned the "public school to prison pipeline," in reference to the fact that the Prussian model (which American schools are based on) is an absolute failure, and @jacobtothe could explain why if you don't already know, because I can't be arsed to explain at the moment. I was spared from that experience, fortunately, otherwise I may very well have turned into a murderous psychopath... okay slight exaggeration there, but maybe you see my point.
Third, consider what I told you about the average school shooter, and bear in mind that not only are these (usually) boys abused at school, they are also neglected at home. Parents who don't want to raise their children stick them in public school and don't help them with their problems. Some people shouldn't be parents, simple as, but I don't think the government should be making the determination of who can or cannot be a parent; as before, Russia has this problem too, as @taliakerch routinely mentions.
Common sense gun regulations are part of the solution though.
Australia has 3 firearm murders per 1,000,000 people and the USA has 32.
I don't think that's correlation. That's because firearms are not easy to get in Australia which is part of those reforms. The buyback scheme got 650,000 firearms out of circulation, that has an effect on violent crime.
The murder rate in Australia is 1.3 per 100,000 people and in the US it's 5.
There are obviously a whole lot of factors that contribute to this. The Australian tax rate is really high, and a lot goes into services for mental health and low-income communities, but one of those factors is the inaccessibility of handguns and semi-automatic rifles.
The problem isn't with public schooling per se... it's with the resources that go into low-income areas. Lots of public schools have minimal violence, but when you have entire communities with very little opportunity, then violence increases.
Absolutely agree with your third point. The introduction of abortion laws and the outlawing of lead paint in the US had a significant impact on lowering crime 20 years later. The US is a great case study on this because the different states enacted different laws at different times so you can see the actual causation.
Hopefully reducing neglected children is something that countries and states get better at over time with family planning and health services... but if there are children that are neglected, you definitely don't want them to have easy access to high-powered weapons.
Judging by your reaction to my explanation of Russian gun laws, I'd say you call those "common sense," so what does the following data tell you?
From 1990 until 2022, the "intentional homicide rate" (which is different from "murder rate" for strictly legalistic reasons) in Russia spiked from 14 to 33 per 100,000 people in 1994, then dipped down to 23 in 1998 before going back up and spiking again at 31 in 2002, and it has declined every single year since then. According to the Russian government (NOT a reliable source of information), the murder rate in 2022 was 3.7 per 100,000 people. However, according to independent studies, it was 12 per 100,000 people back in 2014 (the most recent year I was able to get an independent study from), at a time when the Russian government reported only 8 per 100,000 people. In other words, despite Russia's gun restrictions and relatively low rate of firearm ownership (approximately 9%), the murder rate is either comparable to or roughly double that of the US. The only source of information in English that contradicts the trend and reports an increase in 2022 is a single article in The Moscow Times, which claimed that Kommersant reported 296 additional murder cases from 2021. That same article mentioned that this data conflicts with official reports from the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs). Feel free to read the report for yourself, but it's all in Russian.
The last time that the Russian government confiscated civilian-owned weapons en masse was in 1941, not to combat gun crime or put down a rebellion, but to supply the woefully under-equipped Red Army. In fact, to the best of my knowledge (and as before, @apnigrich can fact-check me), Russian gun laws, at least those with respect to what citizens are allowed to own, have remained virtually unchanged since 1924, the year that Iosif Stalin took over.
Granted, comparing data from only three countries isn't statistically significant, but the point is that I'm completely unconvinced that getting rid of guns would do anything for the US, even if people complied with a confiscation order (which is exactly what a mandatory buyback is). Curiously, when looking up this information, the same independent study reported that although the murder rate in Russia is more than double that of the US, the rate of rape is 17 times higher in the US than in Russia. I know that's not relevant, but I thought that was interesting.
17 times?!?!? That is... extreme.
I wonder if means rape happens less often, or if rape is less reported in Russia.
33 people murdered for every 100,000 people is absolutely huge. Very brutal.
This data tells me there are a number of factors at play; poverty, education, police response, resources, access to weapons, etc etc. Common sense gun regulations aren't the only piece of the puzzle... but I do think they are an important piece.
The US does have a precedent for this... in 1994 they passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that lasted for 10 years and only applied to the purchase of new semi-automatic rifles during that time (weapons already owned were not affected).
Source
You can see that when there were fewer mass shootings in the US between 1994 and 2004, and then a rise in mass shootings from 2005 to 2017.
I'm not an expert and I might be completely wrong, maybe common sense gun laws would not impact the USA in any way, but to me this problem seems big enough to try something to solve the problem. If the concern is that common sense gun regulations will do absolutely nothing, then do the same thing as in 1994 and have the act automatically expire... but at the moment the problem just seems to be getting continually worse, so the US needs to try something.
Oh bugger, here we go again.
The term "mass shooting" has been dishonestly re-defined to artificially inflate the rate and scare people, when the reality is that the overall violent crime rate has remained on a downward trend since 1981 in the US, as I believe @jacobtothe has already pointed out. What I mean is that, as violent crime (including gun crime) drops, the number of victims in a single event to categorise it as a "mass shooting" has also dropped. This is bog-standard statistical deception. As of 2013 per the FBI's criteria, the threshhold is 4 people being shot (not killed, simply shot; all four could survive and the event will still be called a "mass shooting" by the current definition), and the media reports on as many such events as possible in order to fearmonger with such headlines as "there have been more mass shootings than days in 2023". As much as I hate the idea of the government having a monopoly on the media, credit where credit is due, Russian state media such as RT doesn't do that... still, take everything they say with a
pinchfistful of salt.I wonder how many "mass shootings" were related to inner-city gang activity, which is usually committed with stolen guns by those who already have criminal records and are not allowed to own them under US law already (one of the demands I keep hearing is "universal background checks," which the US already does). Seriously, I have no idea, I'm left to wonder simply because of how many times "the shooter was known to law enforcement".
I think that's incorrect. Only 14 states have background checks on firearms (Source). As far as I understand, it's pretty easy to purchase guns at expos and gun shows is the some states without there being any record that you now own a firearm. Of course, the US has open borders between states, so there's nothing stopping someone from bringing a firearm into a state with background checks without anyone knowing.
I'm sure the majority of mass shootings occur between gangs... but to me the high number of school shootings, where kids are being murdered in their classrooms is the first problem to try and solve.
The media definitely tries to get as many clicks and views as possible, there's no denying that... but I think most Americans would not know how many mass shootings there have been in the US.
Apparently there has been 466 in 2023 (Source) but I've personally only heard about 10 of those.
Whenever you buy a firearm from a retailer, you are buying from a federal firearm license holder. You must fill out a federal form and pass a NICS background check in order for the sale to proceed. This is nationwide and has been in place for decades. It has a lot of false positives, too, in spite of technological progress.
Requirements for private sales have been added by some states, but this is not progress, it is overreach. A gun is just another object free people own freely.
In any emergency, the people there are the real first responders. The solution is simple. Instead of victim disarmament zones, allow teachers to carry a concealed weapon if they wish. Set a simple training standard. Defensive firearm courses abound. The risk/reward ration for violence dramatically shifts. When a citizen stops a shooting, the average casualties are a tiny fraction of when people must wait for the cops... if they even do their job in the first place.
Because my previous responses were so long, I never got to address the issue of economics, which I should, because @aussieninja does bring up a perfectly valid point, and that's the connection between crime and poverty. Economic downturn is the single largest correlating factor when looking at violent crime data. This is just as true for Russia as it is for the US. I don't have any data for violent crime in Russia prior to 1990, but I'm told it was relatively low until 1986... from civilians, anyway, whereas state-perpetrated violent crime was extremely high, just ask my maternal grandfather. Oh, wait, you can't, because he "fell off a train." Sure, comrade trashca- I mean commissar, was that before or after you shot him in the back of the head?
Anyway, the high murder rate in Russia in 1990 correlates to the economic situation, which was bad. Very bad. Between 1989 and 1990, the inflation rate was a whopping 2600%. The 1990s were no better, and the economic situation didn't begin to improve until Vladimir Putin implemented his own economic reforms and the country finally started to rebuild. The economic situation has continually improved, and the violent crime has continually dropped. I've seen it firsthand, because the last time I visited my hometown of St. Petersburg was in 2007, and other than the well-maintained tourist attractions such as Peterhof Palace, much of the city looked like it hadn't been touched since the siege was lifted in 1944. Okay, slight exaggeration, point being it was a wreck. However, @tatdt lives there, and she routinely shares pictures of the city. I recognise some of the locations, and they look nothing like when I was there. The city has changed a lot in the past 16 years, and everything I've seen so far looks like it's for the better.
Furthermore, where the crime is committed and who is committing it is the same in Russia as it is in the US: the inner cities. In Russia, this is gopnik territory, which most people avoid as much as possible. It's a fair assumption that drugs are also involved, and drug laws are just as ineffective there as they are almost everywhere else.
The bottom line is that the data shows a strong connection between economic prosperity and low violent crime. Since we know that free markets are more prosperous than command economies, I don't think it's much of a stretch to conclude that freeing the market would eliminate most violent crime.
Calling something "common sense" doesn't meant it's actually common sense. That is dishonest debate.
It's not my intention to have dishonest debate. I'm using that phrase because its widely used in the US media. If there's a better phrase to use I'm happy to adopt that.
My use of 'common sense gun regulations' is to differentiate from banning guns. "Banning guns" as a phrase is too confusing... which guns, which accessories, etc etc.
By 'common sense gun regulations' I'm talking about things like permits/licenses, tracking all gun sales, gun registries, requirements for gun lockers, no licenses for people convicted of violent crimes/domestic abuse, etc etc. Instead of writing that all out each time, I used that phrase, but again, it's not my intention to be dishonest, I'm trying to be more exact.
He's not going to listen. He's just going to keep brow-beating you until you make some kind of concession. I thought he was a useful idiot, but now, I'm starting to think that he's just another narcissistic moral busybody. Arguing with such people usually feels like this after a while:
I'm absolutely willing to listen.
I totally understand why people would want to own single shot rifles for hunting, but I don't understand why someone might need to own a firearm that can fire 60 rounds a minute.... especially now that we know so many innocent children have died in school shootings to those types of weapons.
If there is a real reason why citizens need those weapons that is more important than the lives of those school children I'd love to hear it.
Your failure to understand is irrelevant. Your are building a false choice when you present either owning modern firearms or protecting children. You are also deliberately ignoring the violence necessary to enforce these arbitrary edicts and the dearth of evidence that firearm freedom is the root cause of violence in society.
Why are your fears more important than my liberty? Why do you advocate government violence against peaceful people as a solution to your fear?
He completely missed the point of my arguments as well. When I informed him that countries which restrict access to firearms tend to have a lot of knife crime, he deflected to "gUnS dO mOrE dAmAgE tHaN kNiVeS."
When I informed him that his statistics are lies by omission, he said they weren't misleading.
When I informed him that the majority of gun crime in the US is committed with handguns, he expressed support for banning them as well, not just semi-automatic rifles. Apparently he really liked my brief explanation of Russian gun laws, and fully supports implementing them in the US. I don't. Russian gun laws are a wee bit restrictive IMO, but I could at least live with them, unlike British or German gun laws.
Are more children killed by knives in Japan or England than by firearms in the USA?
Obviously knife crime will rise in the USA if common sense gun regulations were introduced, but I imagine the overall numbers of school children affected by violence would be lower. Is that not a fair assumption?
That assumption is not remotely fair, and you basically admitted that your solution is bollocks anyway: "just keep banning implements until citizens have nothing left to kill each other with, and don't ever address why they want to kill each other in the first place... because that's hard, banning stuff is easy."
I'll put it this way: I hate football, and I hate football hooliganism even more. Should we ban football to stop football hooliganism, or should we figure out the underlying reason that football fans are so truculent?
Look, if pouring resources into mental health services, police reform, low-income communities, etc all reduce gun violence in America, without having to change any gun laws, then great. Let's get it done. Whatever it takes to prevent so many children dying needlessly.
The problem is that the solutions never seem to get implemented either. No one wants to pay higher taxes, or decrease military spending, to pay for those services.
So yes, I'd like to see:
to help decrease the violence in the United States.
The quickest win, to me, is the gun regulations. It would likely have an immediate positive effect, where the other solutions may take years, decades or generations to really improve. Very happy to be wrong on that.
I want to see the government get out of medicine and stop extorting the populace for the "public services" it offers as a facade for funding a military-industrial complex for war abroad and police abuse at home. You want the police to enforce arbitrary "regulations" which require threats of violence against peaceful people.
Again, first principles matter. I advocate for a society where people interact by mutual voluntary consent. Firearm ownership does not violate this concept. In each instance, you advocate for a nanny state imposing coercion instead. Why do you believe this to be a solution?
One of the stats often included in "gun death" statistics is suicide. Japan has a far higher suicide rate than the US despite the absence of guns. You can't legislate away the root problem.
That's not correct:
Source
In your original post you treated banning books, guns and weed as equally insane. I agree that banning books and weed doesn't solve many problems, and is more likely to cause more problems in society.
My objection to your statement is that guns are in a very different category, and that common sense gun regulations would reduce problems like school shootings. I'm not advocating for banning guns at all... but I do think something needs to change to solve the uniquely American problem of school shootings. I think the real solution is a number of things, including increased mental health services and resources for underserved communities, and I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but I haven't seen anything yet that leads me to believe that common sense gun regulations would not decrease school shootings in the USA.
My data may be outdated. Until recently, japan far outpaced the US. same source. However, the point that firearms ownership is not a demonstrable cause of suicide remains. Fixating on the guns misses the mark. You can't argue against my point that violent crime has plummeted from its peak in the late 1980s, with no demonstrable effect from the Clinton-era gun ban. Guns are not the root cause of suicide or violent crime.
Guns are inanimate objects. Drugs are merely substances people choose to injest. Books are filled with ideas. People may choose to use any of these to endanger themselves or others. Bans and restrictions are the wrong response in each instance.
I don't advocate for government violence against peaceful people.
Is a child in the United States of America more likely to be killed by a firearm wielded by a US citizen... or by government violence?
Aight, Ima post this again:
Also, have you ever heard of the "public school to prison pipeline"?
When Australia banned semi-automatic rifles and handguns in 1996... how many people were killed in that process? Was it more than the 35 dead and 18 injured massacre that prompted the regulations?
I have heard of the public school to prison pipeline. The USA needs to do a lot more to help its population avoid poverty. The USA is the world's richest country but for a huge slice of its population the opportunities are bleak. I would love the USA to put more resources into helping those communities. It would likely lift the economy of the entire country.