I'm completely with Lawyerdude (for once). The constant chorus of "Well, if you really mean to kill, you'll do it with anything" is really besides the point. The point is that guns give an unparalleled power to people and doesn't require any training, strength, or permission to wield.
Hey, my right-wing leanings say that I don't want anyone depriving Americans of their right to bear arms. Fact is 68 million firearms in the country and one of the lowest instances of gun-related homicide, no need to ban them.
There absolutely needs to be more in the way of making it so that people understand the destructive power of these small metal pieces.
In short, it shouldn't be easier for me to get a driver's license than a gun license; I can kill way more people with the gun that the car.
It was an honorActually its the 4th highest % of gun homicides and the 14th highest murder rate in the world
edited 9th Apr '12 1:41:27 PM by whaleofyournightmare
Dutch LesbianWow. Switzerland really is a World of Badass.
Mache dich, mein Herze, rein...@setnakhte - It certainly can be banning gun ownership in general. It's not a lie at all, and I don't appreciate the insinuation. As far as the OP question is concerned, gun control would mean banning gun ownership. "Does owning weapons make one more likely to be a killer?" If the answer is yes, the solution would be to ban gun ownership.
"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.![]()
Was that not an example of an ad hominem argument? Attacking the man rather than the idea, or using an attack on the man to attack the idea?
I am going to commit one myself by pointing out that the logical extension to what you are saying is that possession of anything that could be found in the average room and can be used to kill would be banned.
My inner Rational!Harry and inner Rational!Quirrell are having an argument as to the validity of what I have just said, and Harry has pointed out that I have at least ten things that I could use to kill within plain sight of my current seated location.
edited 9th Apr '12 2:36:15 PM by TamH70
To be clear - I obviously don't condone gun control. I was just making the point that gun control can indeed include banning all gun ownership. Kind of like the Australians did, or very nearly.
Tam, I'm with you on the "anything can be used to kill" thing. For me, two coffee mugs, water glass, beer glass, bread knife, chair, laptop when closed. Uh, and .22 caliber derringer in my pocket. It's unloaded, but even such a small pistol can be used to pistol-whip if need be.
edited 9th Apr '12 2:46:58 PM by Martello
"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.True story. There was a case not too long ago where a middle school kid got punched in the back of the head by a classmate being a dick — it burst a blood vessel near the brain and he died. The human body is very fragile in very unexpected ways.
My biggest issue is with where guns are stored. I know of some countries where you can own a gun, but you don't have free access to it. It has to be stored at a range or armory somewhere with a range, and you check it out to go and use it in that same building.
No. My guns stay in my home, stored with me, within arms reach in case I need them. No dice.
On the bright side, if they did start slowly banning more and more things, I know it'd take ages for them to decide to ban shotguns, so I'll always have my 870.
I spent four years at a college where a whole lot of loud hippies were proposing exactly that, among other very shortsighted things. So I'm gonna go ahead and call BS on that.
Furthermore, the whole point of why gun possession is baked into our culture in the first place is because people who just got done throwing off one corrupt government wanted to be in a position to throw off the next one if it turned bad again. So technically even "reasonable" things like only banning higher-powered weapons will still be seen as an intrusion on that by the very institution that has the most to gain from it.
edited 9th Apr '12 7:36:13 PM by Pykrete
I think possessing murderous tendencies makes one more likely to be a killer than possessing a gun.
I may be biased, though. I have relatives who own guns, but they just use them for hunting deer and birds (for food).
But I do think maybe there should be some sort of test or filter to make sure the guns don't fall into the wrong hands.
I'm an elephant. Rurr.![]()
Note the "radical pacifists" bit. Loud, college-age hippies are the lifeblood of them. Colleges are not a good place to understand the political environment of the country. It's the first time that people are unrestrained by their parents' beliefs and tend to become very radicalized. After a few years they generally calm down. But when the second amendment was written guns were slow, inaccurate weapons. I'm sure that that law would have been written with much different wording had the founders been prescient to modern weapons tech. Also, the second ammendment does use the phrase "well-regulated militia".
It wasn't just that they were slow and inaccurate — it was that everything was at a level that small organizations could be expected to obtain, and the military didn't really have anything that utterly eclipsed it. A cannon wasn't exactly the sort of thing the average Joe had, but it wasn't particularly hard to make, and private ships got hired out and refitted. There wasn't really any concept of nigh-indestructible multibillion dollar battleships shelling the shit out of things from miles away, or supersonic jets leveling an entire field before you could hear them.
edited 9th Apr '12 7:53:42 PM by Pykrete
On guns. It takes more then just picking up a gun to use it effectively. Both Police and Military go through a fair bit of training to learn to use them effectively. Any idiot can get point blank and shoot you. If they can get that close and shoot you they can get that close and use other weapons on you as well.
Any idiot can also use a knife, club, bit of hefty chain, sharp stick, or any other improvised or purpose made weapon. Not only are they easy to obtain they are easy to use and they are silent. They are also easily as lethal as a gun and are used to intimidate as well as cause physical harm.
Literally nearly any object around you can become a weapon and used to kill. You don't need training to do this. People have been killed with a wide array of non-weapon objects. It doesn't take special training or even purpose designed weapons to kill someone.
Better yet it doesn't take any training to kill someone with your bare hands. Every single one of us in this thread is capable of killing someone without any trianing. It is a fallacy to assume any object wielded as a weapon is any less lethal then another. You only have to be hit once to die, you can be lucky and receive a light flesh wound, or escape unscathed.
Having any weapon of any type doesn't make you a killer. Inflicting fatal lethal force on someone makes you a killer. You can use your car to kill someone, you could use a pen on your desk, a rolling pin, a kitchen knife, etc. It is all about intent and action of the indvidual not the objects.
You can't always run or run fast enough. You can't always act fast enough or avoid every dangerous situation. What do you do if you get jumped by two or three guys working together? What happens if you unintentionally get cornered etc.
There are too many x factors to consider when trying to determine how effective any one item or weapon is going to be in any given situation.
Pykrete:Canons were not easy or cheap to make or get. Transporting and supplying them with materials is even more expensive. If you don't know how to load it correctly you could have the fresh powder charge your loading go off and destroy or damage the gun or injure the crew. There was such a thing as ships shelling the shit out of cities. They used both cannons, ship board mortars and later early rockets to do so. Before guns ships would have things like ballstas, onagers, and other siege equipment that could hurl projectiles at a city. Incendiary projectiles were frequently used despite the hazard.
As for guns being innacurate that is not true. Smoothbores could hit a man sized target at 100yds reliably. The early rifles could hit a man sized target at 200yds. There was a well known push for a constant improvement in weapons the fore fathers would have been more then familiar with.
edited 9th Apr '12 8:19:45 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?So here's a question.
How do you prevent a deranged man from simply pulling out a concealed handgun in a crowded mall and just going wild? That college shooting shows that if someone really wanted to, they could easily kill a couple people in a class room.
There may be many factors but a gun makes most of those factors irrelevant. To kill someone with your bare hands, you need to probably surprise them, be alone, be stronger than them, and win in a struggle.
A gun you can pull out of a jacket and open fire and kill probably 3 more people in seconds. And thats someone with little to no training.
edited 9th Apr '12 8:27:40 PM by Thorn14
There's no real way to stop something like that, aside from making psychological standards for purchasing guns. Or rather higher standards for what puts you on a list of people who cannot own firearms.
At the end of the day though, murder happens. We can't stop every single thing bad from happening. Even the most extreme forms of gun control wouldn't stop it, and in my opinion it isn't worth the cost, giving up our right to bear arms to make the homicide rate take a small dip.
Yeah, I said it. I don't think it's worth it. Sometimes rights take precedent over lives.
You can pull a knife out of your jacket and stab someone just as easily 3-4 times as you could shoot them. There is no gurantee every shot or blow is a killing shot. I can make a molotov cocktail and kill dozens in seconds with items from a hardware store.
edited 9th Apr '12 8:41:29 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?Look, the discussion of how easy it is to kill someone with various tools ignores what we can use. Statistics.
What statistics? Well crime ones aren't going to work well because America simply has way more crime than everyone else due to some poor social policies. It's difficult to also judge the effect of gun control, since once you have it, all factors OTHER than gun control is what affects your gun related homicide rate. So what is there left to do?
Well the argument is that guns help protect you or guns don't help protect you.
- Statistics showing that similar crimes with a gun are more likely to result in a death of participants
- Statistics showing gun accidents kill many per year, injuring others (we can ignore hunting accidents)
- Statistics showing what number of crimes were prevented by guns (extremely low)
The problem is, so many die just from poor gun handling it really doesn't justify stopping a crime unless that crime was attempted murder, which in most cases, it was not.
Meh, not a lot of sympathy for people who shoot themselves in the face for being idiots. I'm a firm supporter of mandatory classes on gun safety being a requirement for purchase.
And not just like "Ok look, I demonstrated that I can turn the safety on and off, load the gun, unload it, and lock the slide back. Gimme my gun."
Like an actual class. It doesn't take long to do, just make people take the damn class to buy a gun. Make it last two years, and then if they buy another gun after that 2 year period, they have to take the class again. Problem solved.
If you can still shoot yourself or somebody else by accident with a gun, it means you're a fucking fool. If you shot yourself, you deserved it, if you shot someone else, you're a murderer via incompetence.
edited 9th Apr '12 8:46:27 PM by Barkey
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I'm 20 feet away from you. I pull out a gun and shoot you.
I'm 20 feet away from you, I pull out a knife and try to stab you. Which is easier for me?
I agree on the classes. As much as I'd love firearm restrictions I think its only possible in a country where firearms are not a firm part of the culture.
Kind of scares me at times really when I hear my college classmates talking about what guns they own.

Gun Control does not mean banning the ownership of guns, this is disingenuous exaggeration to the point of being an outright lie.
"Roll for whores."