The Gun Control Challenge

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You fail to mention that overall crime has been on the decline since the early/mid 90's which means you failed to meet two of the criteria:

The whole purpose of the criteria is to look beyond the tunnel vision of gun laws and crime and try to take as many different variables into account as possible. Correlation and causation is really tricky, especially for a topic as grossly oversimplified and agenda driven as crime. Even crime and poverty has a real shaky correlation; experts expected a rise in crime since the recession and yet crime has been dropping which even left their heads spinning.

The really funny part is he doesn't fail to mention it - it's right there in the graphs.

The other interesting point is that, according to those graphs, the unintentional death by firearm actually grows post-ban. This is interesting because it suggests an increase in inexperienced gun owners making deadly mistakes, presumably due in large part to a lack of training.

Some other homicide rates which seem to go up after gun confiscation is genocide and the killing of heretics. Hitler, Stalin, Mao...

The state doesn't seem in a hurry to give up THEIR guns. Quite the opposite.

I'm of the opinion that the anti-gun position is largely due to ignorance of the tool itself. Maybe if you take a gun safety course you will be stripped of your mysticism regarding guns and how only the state can be qualified to use them properly.

In general I agree - most people I encounter on a daily basis are anti-gun simply because they're afraid of guns - which is absurd, and seriously detrimental to society at large.

Having said that, there are at least people on this thread who are able to form an opinion based on facts and reason - as opposed to FUD. Unlike most that I talk to - I at least respect their opinion, even if I disagree with it.

AceOfSpades - I told you something juicy about that criteria before. Do I have to repeat it?

sliqua-jcooter - that's all?

Amnesties only applied to Nazi party members--the only group in Europe besides the Swiss that could have guns--when the gun laws changed. For occupied countries, the amnesty was the Nazis strolled into town and ordered everyone to turn in their guns or be summarily shot. Many countries had gun registry records that greatly helped the Nazis with their "amnesty" program.

With the exceptions of England and Switzerland, and Finland, European countries never had very high gun ownership rates-especially compared to the US when compared at any same time period.


California is a favorite testing ground for the Brady's, and the laws are dysfunctional because the legislators and attorney general are a bunch of ret*ds! All the new gun laws since republican governor Pete Wilson termed out do not make any real world attempt to address how criminals tend to use guns.

All that shows is that the statistics continued to follow the same trend before and after gun confiscation. Congratulations! You just proved that Australian gun control was a solution seeking to find a problem to solve.

Yep - that's the only thing really interesting about those statistics. Like the poster above me said - everything else just shows that gun violence, and non-gun violence, continued to decline at more or less the same pace as it did pre-ban.

Mass murder rates fell immediately afterward, which is something of note, but taking away guns from good people who want to defend themselves - or go hunting - or just go out to the range and have some fun, just because someone might snap one day and start shooting up his neighborhood is rather alarmist and unnecessary. There are far better ways of dealing with that.

That is a problem pro gun advocates face.
No one wants to take into account the fact that the US has 6 times as many people as England, it's the 3rd most populated country and has 14 times as many guns, again by far the most in the world.
Yet still on a global scale has a medium amount of gun deaths.



Indeed
It also shows that the non gun homicides have been 2 or 3 times as high throughout.
That stricter gun laws did not effect the number of mass shootings. Edit: Misread, that's why you read things more then once.
Correction: It did reduce the number of mass shootings, however not the amount of gun deaths otherwise.
It also shows that while gun suicides dropped approximately 0.5 per 100,000 the non gun suicides jumped a whopping 2 or 3 per 100,000
Further the amount of accidental gun deaths showed a significant increase meaning the people who are considered "safe" gun owners are not being properly trained to safely handle the gun.

Last edited by Mike_Garrick on 03 Sep 2012, 4:53 am, edited 1 time in total.

John_Browning - I was not talking about denazification. I was talking about thousands of exwar arms laying literally all around Europe. People did collect and destroy them (bury&blow up). Many of them remained in private hands for years. Gun amnesties happen guite often and people hand over these relicts up to this day.

The research paper that picture is from is called "Australia’s 1996 gun law reforms: faster falls in firearm deaths, firearm suicides, and a decade without mass shootings" - so sure the crime rates were dropping. But gun law helped it. Especially in mass shootings which is something we were discussing before (like I am psycho because I am not afraid of local picpocket but I fear an ordinary madman with semiauto

BS, there is a lot of people who can defend themselves with guns in Australia, and hunters too. Stop this foolish propaganda. Just like there are hunters and shooting ranges all over the Europe. Cheap propaganda...
PS - someones right to "have some fun" is higher then societies right for security? Jeez...



Sure there are... Like, like...




Yeah right : "Results: In the 18 years before the gun law reforms, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and none in the 10.5 years afterwards. "

Garrick - everyone pays attention to this. That's why you find numbers of deaths/guns per capita or 100 000 people. That's why people make this calculations Number of Murders, United States, 2009: 15,241

Number of Murders by Firearms, US, 2009: 9,146

Number of Murders, Britain, 2008*: 648
(Since Britain’s population is 1/5 that of US, this is equivalent to 3,240 US murders)

Number of Murders by[pdf] firearms, Britain, 2008* 39
(equivalent to 195 US murders)

But sorry, saying that "US has 14 times as many guns, again by far the most in the world" as some sort of excuse for high gun violence rate is nonsense. It is not an extenuating circumstance, it is one of the causes...!

You're trying to support your own point. I'm not going to do your research for you.

I'll do research to support my own points or to find things out that I want to know. I won't do research to support someone who wants to make a point, but is not willing to do the research himself.


This is misleading, since only 4.14 of the 10.27 are homicides and 5.71 are suicides.


This is not useful by itself. By itself, all it shows is that removal of most guns removes most of the possibility of death by gunshot. Well, duh. Getting rid of all personally owned cars would prevent many deaths from car accidents.

That Japan has a rate of 0.07 for firearm deaths doesn't tell me how much violence they have in Japan. Is that rate because of the gun control, or do the Japanese kill each other with baseball bats, or do the Japanese just not kill each other at all?

Earlier in the thread, Dox47 said he could air-drop AK-47s on Japan and essentially nothing would happen. Those numbers don't tell me whether or not he's right about that.


Comparing Alaska to Louisiana shows that a 25% reduction in guns causes a 2.25 increase in deaths per 100K. Comparing Alaska to Nevada shows that a 50% reduction in guns causes a 1.41 decrease in deaths per 100K.

The data here shows that the states with the high gun ownership are not closely correlated with an equally high gun death rate.

What I would be more interested in would be a comparison of gun violence vs. other violence and how this changes with the introduction (or repeal) of gun control laws.

Think about what he said. The states with the "absolute least gun control fail to show up" in the top 5 list of highest gun death rates.

That doesn't point to a strong correlation between high gun death rates and low gun control.

Pstt!

Total violence, not just gun violence. Ask for THOSE numbers...

Also, I am going to respond to the handfull of posts worthy of the effort, my life has just taken an *interesting* turn and it might be a while before I get to it.

The real gun control challenge is this:

Prosecutors: 'Anarchist' group of U.S. soldiers aimed to overthrow government

I have seen some of these same ideas, periodically, on this forum.

Except for the graph marked "firearms homicide death rate omitting mass killings" was completely unchanged before/after. Only until you factor in mass shootings do you see a drop at all.

The simple fact is that, while mass shootings get an inordinate amount of press coverage, they are significantly less common than other kinds of shootings. Statistically speaking, you're far more likely to be killed in a mugging-gone-wrong than a mass shooting. Not to say that nothing should be done to prevent mass shootings, but I'll come back to that in a second.




Fundamentally, individual liberties are very much more important than the State's ability to suppress those liberties in the name of anything, be it security, terrorism, etc.



Gee - thanks for assuming that I wouldn't be able to back my own statements up with examples. I appreciate the vote of confidence. I have a suggestion - don't treat me like an imbecile and I won't treat you like one. Deal?

Anyway - a better way to avoid mass shooting incidents is to examine what causes these shooters to go on a shooting rampage, figure out a way to identify people who fit that profile, and come up with ways to get them help or otherwise prevent them from acting on their impulses.

Of course, a lot of time has been spent examining these incidents and determining what motivated the shooters to commit these crimes, and what (if any) warning signs were present before the shootings. In the vast majority of cases, warning signs were there - and even more disturbing is that most of the time those warning signs were actually noticed. The problem then, in my view, is two-fold. First, the people close to these shooters in a position to take action to either get the shooter help, or prevent the shooter from being able to carry out their plans, were hesitant to take action because they were overly cautious.

For example, the Virginia Tech shooter was known to have mental health issues, and was known to be prone to violent outbursts. In fact, he was essentially (the reality of the situation is so stupid it made my lawyer cry) voluntarily committed. But because the court system (and his therapist) went out of their way to avoid involuntarily committing him to a mental health institution - despite the fact that everyone knew and freely admitted that he was a danger to himself and others.

There are similar situations in nearly every case I've looked at where the system didn't work as intended because people went out of their way to avoid certain outcomes - usually in a misguided attempt to "help" the person in question.

So the way forward seems pretty simple to me:

1) make sure that people who have been deemed by some form of process of law to be a danger to themselves or others are not allowed to legally purchase firearms. In most cases this requires no change to current law.

2) Make sure that adequate funding for mental health institutions and private therapists is available to make sure that no person is ever denied therapy if they have, or may have, a mental health disorder - or may be a danger to themselves or others.

3) Work to eliminate the social stigma that is associated with mental illness. More people would be open to therapy if they weren't stigmatized for it.




Statistics aside, do you actually believe that someone who wanted to go on a mass shooting rampage couldn't get their hands on a gun (or several)? Mass shooters are just as likely to procure their weapons illegally as they are to buy them legally - so I have a hard time believing that gun control made it significantly harder for these people to get guns - even if there's very clearly a correlation. Especially when you consider that, excluding mass shootings, gun homicides didn't change at all. If normal criminals didn't have any harder time finding weapons - why did mass shooters?