rdmcandie wrote:
Let me put this in a way your brain might comprehend it. In Canada it is illegal to own small firearms. But every year regardless of the laws against guns, we still have gun related murders. This means people still buy guns and people still use them. Laws mean sh*t @#%^ all to people that mean to break them. I live 10 minutes from lack Erie a quick boat ride later I am in Cleveland. A few years back police found a car in a parking lot with Toronto plates that had a trunk full of guns.
They still come in even though Laws say they can't.
They still come in even though Laws say they can't.
Do you have no concept of numbers at all? It's not all or nothing. Laws don't have to prevent every single offense to be effective, they need only reduce. You don't need to--and can't--make it impossible to kill someone with a gun. You can make it more unlikely or more difficult.
Murders are rarely brilliant masterwork plans carefully pondered on for months, trained for, and then executed with the utmost precision. Often they are spontaneous or heat of the moment occurrences. A wife assaulting her lecherous husband isn't necessarily hellbent--stopping at absolutely nothing--on murdering him, though she may try. She's angry and irrational. It's fully possible she just wants to make him suffer. If she has a gun, she will shoot at him. If all she has is a knife, she will attempt to stab him. If she has nothing else, she may try to punch and kick him. This is how many murders occur, not because she carefully premeditated the event, but because she had a more lethal tool available to her.
That's why gun suicides have the highest success rate, because often people aren't entirely gung-ho about killing themselves or others. Because when they try a slower and complicated method like overdosing on pills or cutting themselves they can easily fail or give up. The differences with guns is that it is hard to fail or give up.
This is why the "sure, blame the gun," argument fails. The presence of lethal weapons like guns doesn't increase the number of assaults, but it can upgrade a battery to a murder.
Edited, Jan 11th 2011 8:56pm by Allegory