Totem wrote:
Yoss, believe me on this, I was all ears and prepared to listen to a reasoned opinion until I read this coming from you:
"The Constitution is an outdated document..."
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If that is from this thread, you might want to actually link it. You will find it was not from me.
My interpretation of the second amendment is a bit eccentric* and so I have not posted it here. I have, however, summarized studies of the peer reviewed literature on the issues at hand.
My offer still stands: if anyone Totem or gbaji or whomever wishes to post their actual data for any correlation between gun laws and crime I will examine the source of that data for you, including attempting to find papers which support or refute your conclusions. I know this is difficult for others since although you can google the articles, you may not be able to read them.
But why can we not just look at the statistics, as gbaji indicated he has done? (Without reference to any statistics. How quaint.) Because there is more then one factor at play. For example, the excellent research on suicide and gun waiting periods (it was in Austria, I believe). They pass a law requiring a waiting period. The suicide rate goes down - but is that the end of the story? No! They carefully compare the rate by method of suicide and conclude that suicide by gun becomes measurable smaller, while other methods stay about the same. And they have extensive references indicating other studies which found similar effects. So they conclude that gun suicides are not (at least measurably) switching to another method. Further, there could be other facts at play, such as economic. If the economy was in an upswing perhaps there would have been fewer gun suicides anyhow. And so they compare with other regions (nations, in this case, within the US it is often between states) to ensure not only was there a drop in Austria, but no drop elsewhere. Of course you have to be careful: perhaps other nation/states were also changing laws, or their inherent rates of suicide are way different or their economies are way different, etc.
*I have posted exactly how I think the second amendment could work to do its intended job: to protect the people against tyranny. Meaning fight off the US military in a straight up fight. This may have been months ago. You could have dug some quote like that up from that thread. It would not be a fair representation of what I said, which included explicit ways to make the current language work.