Gun sales up since the electionFollow

How about you show me some facts stating otherwise? Should we compare murder rates in cities with tough versus loose gun control laws?

Sure, Mogadishu has the least restrictive gun laws, Vatican City the most.

Let's compare the violent crime rates.

Do you see how picking random out of context statistics is meaningless? Do you see how it's the ONLY way your position can be defended? There are mountains and mountains and mountains of data on this. More weapons don't make people safer. The safest places are police states. the least safe places are anarchies. The argument's over. Stricter gun control laws will save lives if they actually lower the number of guns in a given population. Period. Permissive carry laws do not, and can only be construed to have done so via the silliest of statistical hoop jumping. Granted, there are a lot of NRA funded studies that do just that, but frequency in media doesn't equate to scientific merit.

Pick another argument, because yours is not only wrong, it's ignorant and stupid. There are valid arguments for gun ownership, just as there are valid arguments against seat belt or motorcycle helmet laws. What there isn't is the argument you're making, just as there's no argument that one is safer not wearing a helmet or seat belt even though, on occasion, I'm sure someone is killed or injured by a safety device. Can you see why on balance a person would look like an idiot making the argument against motorcycle helmets by claiming a person was *safer* without one? How much of a gullible sucker he'd seem if he cited a study where a small sample of accidents showed people wearing helmets were injured more, without controlling for any other variable? THAT'S YOU, ACE.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-toystoreshooting29-2008nov29,0,2830895.story

Game over.

for those that argue that the number of guns doesn't effect deaths because of firearms.

I work in a gun shop on Saturdays. We've been picked quite clean, especially of semiauto rifles.


If I may interject a little example into this debate: The police kill a certain number of people every year as well. It would not be sound to claim that disarming the police would be a good idea because any reduction in the overall gun death rate is a benefit, as you do with citizen firearms ownership. There are other considerations.

Let's create a hypothetical American city. We'll call it Guntown USA. Guntown has a high rate of gun ownership and the following crime statistic sample per year:

100 Firearm Murders, suicides, and fatal accidents.
500 Rapes
1000 Burglaries

Gun control legislation is passed banning all guns in the city. The statistic sample for the next year looks like this:

50 Firearm Murders, suicides, and fatal accidents.
1000 Rapes
2500 Burglaries

In your argument, you would declare that the gun control law had a positive impact because it cut the number of firearms deaths in half. Yet I think most would argue that a decrease of 50 deaths is not "worth" subjecting the people to 500 more rapes and 1500 more burglaries every year.

Now let's pass a right-to-carry law in Guntown, and protections for people who use guns in self defense. A "make my day" law. Gun ownership and public transportation increase.

125 Firearm Murders, suicides, and fatal accidents.
250 Rapes
500 Burglaries

In this case, the public suffers an additional 25 gun deaths per year. A damning increase that would brand the law a failure in the eyes of gun restriction activists. Yet it does so in return for cutting the number of total rapes and burglaries in the city by half. Hardly a failure in the bigger picture.

Most people who own guns and support an armed society do so because the odds of being killed by a gun compared to being protected by one favor protection. I would rather embrace guns and suffer a 1/1000 lifetime chance of being killed by a gun than a 50/50 chance of being robbed in my home because a gun was unavailable to me. I would rather my wife be mixed up in one shootout than five rapes. This is borne out statistically in some studies. In the UK, where guns are banned entirely they have a much lower gun death rate than the US. But their rate of home robbery is five times the US rate. When hundreds of felons in the US prison system were polled about why they avoided committing home robberies, the answer was that it was because they were afraid of running into an armed homeowner. In the same study, some 58% also claimed they were more afraid of accidentally attacking an armed victim than of confronting the police.

Criminals are human beings, and generally think rationally. They will attack the victim which the criminal believes poses the least danger to him. He wants maximum reward for minimum risk. Raising the risk to the criminal reduces crime.

Imagine another very brief scenario. The Federal government passes a law that requires ALL women in the US to obtain a carry license and training, and to carry a pistol with them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in any and every location. What would rape statistics in the US look like after that?

Deterrence and defensive force make you safer. Disarmament does not.

Also the famous statistic of being XXX times more likely to kill a family member or friend in your home than an intruder is true. But please recalled than 98% of all the intruders confronted in your home will not be killed, or ever fired at. The odds of harming a friend or family member with a gun versus repelling an intruder favor gun ownership by a wide margin.

Edited, Dec 12th 2008 4:36pm by DarkswordDX

So you're saying that no statistic matters since we can't "prove" that the change in the law actually affected the change in the crime rate? Isn't that ludicrous?

If gun control laws have no impact on crime, then your argument is equally fallacious. The entire assumption of this argument is that by changing the gun control laws, we'll have some kind of effect on the resulting rates of different types of violent crime statistics. It is perfectly reasonable, therefore, to examine changes in violent crime statistics during a period of time after a change in the gun control laws in order to assess the result of the change in the law.


Tossing the results out when they don't support your argument is kinda childish, don't you agree?

Edited, Dec 12th 2008 5:08pm by gbaji

Please note that I am not saying gun proliferation doesn't affect firearm death rates.

Thats exactly my opinion about the laws concerning 'illegal' drugs.

Its pretty obvious to anyone with a brain, that if all drugs were de-criminalised, then at a stroke, drug related crime would become a non-issue. Think of all the law-enforcement resources that could be diverted to doing something usefull rather than harrassing hippies with a bag of weed for example.

Its odd tho, that in the US, it would appear that the most vocal group when it comes to protecting society from the evils of drugs (and indeed, extra-marital sex), are the same group who are most vocal about retaining the right to carry firearms.

If you believe that the carrying of a weapon reduces the incidence of violent crime against the individual (with said reduction being your reason for maintaining the right to be armed), then surely you must agree that decriminilising (currently illegal) drugs would be a good thing for society as a whole because of the reduction in drug related cruimes?

Or is the right to bear arms really nothing to do with the 'good' of society as a whole, and more to do with being selfishly paranoid (everyones out to hurt me) and in possessiion of a very small *****, wrapped up in some sort of bollicks about the Bill of Rights and the Constitution?

I wasn't looking for an arguement, believe it or not, the weather here is just too damned nice .

I was just making an observation. Honest.

Really. Can you prove this accusation? Because I think, you think, they think so. But I don't really think they think so even though you may think so.

Sure. And I pointed out that the exact same statistics are used whether you're measuring the effect on violent crime as a result of tighter or looser gun control laws. The statistics are just statistics and should be no more or less valid in either direction. You seem to want to toss out crime statistics on the basis of the assumption that we can't prove that they were caused by changes in gun control, but *only* when the changes are ones you don't agree with.



Please! Not this again! We're talking about all violent crime. Not just gun crime. I already explained why this is a circular and irrelevant argument. Waiting a week and then repeating an argument I've already thoroughly thrashed is kinda weak, don't you think?




Huh? I'm not sure what you meant to say, but that's not what the link I posted said. It showed that rates of "violent crime" (not just "gun crime) went down dramatically after the passage of a concealed carry law. Not "gun crime". All violent crime.


Look. I know you guys love to parrot the whole "correlation != causation" argument when it's convenient for you, but at the end of the day, if someone predicts that by making X change, we'll get Y result, and then they make X change and Y result occurs, you can whine about how they didn't prove that X caused Y, but you're just making yourselves look dumb when you do it. This is why I question the burden of proof you seem to be placing on my side of the issue.


Just because you can't believe that criminals are less likely to attempt to victimize people they think might be armed doesn't mean that it isn't true. That's really the root of this whole thing. You assume that can't be true, so no amount of evidence is ever going to be good enough to prove to you otherwise. You'll always assume that any corresponding change in violent crime rates must have been caused by something else. Afterall, you *know* that it can't be because (in this case) more people were carrying concealed weapons...


Horse... Cart. Look it up.

Edited, Dec 19th 2008 2:16pm by gbaji

I own an M-4 and shot a deer to feed me and some friends after having no power for a week in the aftermath of Ike. Now, I know well and good that 5.56 is a poor hunting round and look forward to upgrading to a KelTec RFB sometime in the next month or so.

Why do I bring this up? It's simple. Even a high powered pellet spraying man-killing mondo black rifle can still be used for peaceful and good purposes. What is the point in controlling them? There are enough retired firearms in circulation on the black market to keep ill-intentioned people well armed for decades. These people have no regard for the law be it stealing, murdering, or assault weapon bans. It's all the same.

I know, for a fact, a lot of people buy these types of weapons out of abject fear and ***** extension.. But it doesn't matter, because at the end of the day, just as I have a right to own an M-4 so do they. Under bad circumstances, these things can be used as a tool for getting food as well as protecting oneself. A killer will kill with any tool they can happen to get their hands on. Anyone with the internet can download the Anarchist Cookbook and do tons more damage than someone with an assault rifle.

Should we ban or regulate the internet because of this? Of course not, because then we're talking about the First Amendment, aren't we? It makes zero sense to be selective about these things.

It's irrelevant, because no regulation is really needed on both accounts.

Edited, Dec 28th 2008 2:53am by Lefein

Sure, why not? We let people buy Excursions and Escalades without any regulation.. Hell, let's compare vehicular manslaughters to assault weapons murders while we're at it. Four wheels is just entirely too dangerous, so everyone should be ordered by the guv'ment to drive motorcycles... Oh wait.

Edited, Dec 28th 2008 3:03am by Lefein