Does owning weapons make one more likely to be a killer?

I was talking with some friends about the recent school shooting in Arizona and one of them blamed it (almost) entirely on gun ownership. This eventually became the main point of the debate. I personally think that him and similar shooters would have done something like that, i.e. kill a load of people regardless of whether they actually own a gun. I live in the UK, where gun laws are very strict but we do still get shooters (a recent example would be Raoul Moat- google him) that can be realistically compared to incidents like Columbine. While I accept that there are a host of factors that contribute to such incidents, this is a discussion of how much of a factor access to weapons is or if it even is one.

As the saying goes, 63 million gun owners killed absolutely nobody yesterday.

There might be something to be said that about a (very, very small) slight disproportion toward killers among people with guns, but it would be more readily explained by a man being driven to obtain a gun by the tendencies that lead a man to killing (in which case it's a good idea to make sure he's not the only one who gets one), rather than the gun hitting him with Kill Your Family Waves that make him go crazy.

edited 5th Apr '12 4:32:22 PM by Pykrete

OR you could strive to make it impossible for would-be shooters to get a gun...

As well as everyone else.

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That just flat out doesn't work. Even in nations where having handguns is illegal, and in some of which (like Britan) the regular police don't even need guns, people still get handguns and kill with them.

edited 5th Apr '12 4:48:18 PM by Vehudur

That would be nice, but then it would cause the non-psychos to feel like they'll have to defend themselves, which would ironically make them more likely to be a killer.

edited 5th Apr '12 4:48:50 PM by Ekuran

I know.

Banning Guns won't work. As has been said by others, the problem isn't those who follow the law, it's those who break it. If someone really wants a gun, they'll get it. If guns are restricted as they are now, it's a decent system. Those likely to commit crimes have a hard time getting them, and people legally getting them can get guns.

OP I'm just glade people haven't started mistrusting nursing students

edited 5th Apr '12 5:03:05 PM by joeyjojo

Well, there's also something to be said with people being distressingly lax with the usual background checking, but yeah. Allowing guns but documenting them is the best course.

People are psychos, having guns doesn't make them more likely to be a psycho, it just makes it take less time for them to get the tools they need to do psycho things.

In other words, no, it does not make someone more likely to be a killer. I am no more likely to go out and kill someone than I would be without owning guns. If I was the type of person who would go out and kill someone, but I didn't own guns, that just means if it was pre-meditated, I'd need to go out and buy a gun or a different implement of murder. It isn't about the device, it's about the person.

edited 5th Apr '12 5:19:54 PM by Barkey

@Thread: Not necessarily, but weapons can enable deadly violence.

Building on what Barkey said, like any other tool a gun can be used for good or bad. It doesn't have a morality or conscience, nor does it control that of others.

If the "psychopath" mindset is there, a gun or lack thereof doesn't matter. Should one not be available, they'll just find another tool to carry out any given desire to kill a person.

(I will admit to a somewhat juvenile amusement in seeing some of the reactions when I say I'm actually for gun control, when defined as "hitting what you aim at." That, however, is another topic, so let's not go any further down that particular road. )

"Likely" may be the wrong word.

"Convinient" would fit better.

It be easier to kill a person with a weapon than bare handed.

But if speaking of statistics, PROBABLY.

If nothing else, Lazy Killers wouldn't bother killing but its hard to quantify.

Plenty of people killed each other before guns were invented. I'll check if I have to but I believe murder rates were in general higher back then.

Not even counting the fact that much of Europe was in some form or another of constant war until relatively recently, yes, even the unlawful homicide rate was dramatically higher by our best estimations.

edited 5th Apr '12 6:52:23 PM by Pykrete

Exactly. My take: Owning guns makes you more likely to kill someone the same way owning Loli porn makes you more likely to rape little kids...that is, in the eyes of some people, but those people aren't generally worth listening to.

Erm.

/Takes notes for Unfortunate Comparison Notebook/

edited 5th Apr '12 9:11:30 PM by Muramasan13

Let's leave it at this: Correlation =/= causation. Even if people with weapons statistically kill more (though I don't know if they do or not), the weapon didn't force them to do it. Unless it was an accident, but that's less murder and more mishandling of a weapon/negligence.

While I don't think owning a gun makes you more likely to be a killer there is something to be said for people carrying guns around with them. Not because carrying a gun makes you a killer, but because in case a heated situation presents itself, you really lose your temper etc. you have the possibility of shooting someone, right there, in the heat of the moment, something you never would have done if you were thinking rationally. If you didn't have a deadly weapon on you, you couldn't make that choice in the heat of the moment and you would not have murdered someone. Taken to the extreme, if a majority of people are carrying guns there is a high chance of conflicts escalating beyond what they otherwise would have, simply because the option is there.

If someone wants to have a collection of guns at his house, uses guns to hunt or does target practice as a hobby etc. I don't think it's much of a problem, as long as he has a permit, which you'd ideally get by passing some kind of test, which would involve both a psychological profile and basic proficiency in how to use/knowledge of a gun. However I think guns should be restricted to those kind of uses, IE you should not be allowed to bring a gun with you for a walk downtown, because it generally leads to escalation and enables dangerous crime of passion.

Hm.

Well, it's definitely easier to kill someone if you have something you can kill readily with.

But if you're determined to kill someone, it's not like not having a gun is gonna stop you.

Yes, owning weapons makes one more likely to be a successful killer. But so does owning cars, or chainsaws, or so on.

After failing to get a gun illegally Breivik desided to obtain his weapons through legal channels

Wikipedia:

Just gotta let those ones slip through the cracks. There wasn't any reason to really deny a guy with a clean record and past gun ownership.

Yes, but our gun crime rates are still some of the lowest in the world. 0.07 murders with a firearm per 100,000 people in 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime - 40 times below that of the United States. I can say that I definitely feel safer that the majority of Joe Public is not permitted to own a firearm, and those that do have severe restrictions on them (for those interested, the Dunblane Massacre was pretty much the nail in the coffin for handgun ownership). I like having a police force that is for the most part not equipped with firearms (and most police feel that way too), and by and large gun laws are so strict because the majority of the population prefers it that way.

edited 6th Apr '12 5:14:39 AM by pagad