[jacquesm]

If you combine average people with lots of guns and then say 'people are the problem, not guns', you're missing out on an important fact.

People are not a constant. They're not #defines, they may be sane today, insane tomorrow and sane the day after that.

They are impulsive, prone to error and there are a thousand circumstances in life where otherwise perfectly normal people do things that we later label insane.

Temporary insanity is a plea that is heard sometimes in the courts. The basic idea is that during the act the person was insane but is now sane.

This is usually to either get a reduced sentence or none at all. The concept hinges on the fact that we are prone to mood swings, sometimes extreme ones. And that in a fit of anger or worse than that someone can do things that they would normally not do.

And that's the sane people, claiming that. Imagine those that are not 100%. So if you mix a large number of guns with a large number of people without much training, oversight, discipline or checks you're asking for trouble. Some of them are bound to be unstable, and even they don't know about it, yet. But you'll read about it in the paper when they do find out.

The 'right to carry arms' is a card played by people that are afraid they will no longer be a allowed to play with their toys, and cynically used by politicians to get them to vote against their own best interests.

There is no way that an armed revolution will be initiated by them, or if it were initiated would be won by those with their guns. Even a large number of them vs the military is a foregone conclusion. If that were the case it should have happened when that was still possible. Now it's just a relic, a symbol of a nation born from violence unable to let go of its past. The only way to win a conflict like that is to get the military to side with you, or to fracture it to an extent that the outcome is no longer a certainty.

And every year a hundred or so (or even a few thousand if you count the injured) people will die because of this stupidity.

In incidents of 1 or 2, or 28.

In a civilized country individuals do not need guns, should not need guns and should not have guns. If you do insist on that then you should also take responsibility for every time an insane person managed to get hold of one (note that the kid that did this didn't use his own guns but the guns legally owned by his mother, now murdered with her own weapon).

edit: this thread has already been flagged off the homepage.

[InclinedPlane]

Are we going to play this game? How dare you call guns toys. Do you have any idea of how many crimes guns stop every year? How many rapes, how many robberies, how many homicides? This is not a small thing, some estimates put the number of rapes per day stopped due to the potential victim being armed or thought to be armed at more than a thousand. Per day.

The naive math of no guns = no gun crime is so easy, and so mentally satisfying to people who have no experience with guns. People who live in safe neighborhoods where crime is uncommon. People who have never been faced with life or death situations where having a gun could save someone's life, or save them from being raped, or robbed. But when the math becomes a more complex question of potentially trading off rape, or even homicide vs. potentially reducing one kind of mass homicide then the answers aren't quite so pat and easy are they?

[leoedin]

Is it really naive math if it's informed by statistics from other countries? (Incidentally, statistics are something completely missing from your comment).

The article linked has the right conclusion. Banning guns works. The US saw something like 12,000 gun related homicides in 2008. The UK, with a 6th of the population, saw 39. Adjusting for population, that's over 50 times fewer deaths.

The grim truth is that banning guns in the US probably wouldn't do much. The UKs low gun crime is a result of a hundred years of high levels of control. It would take decades for any gun ban to impact on gun levels. However, statistics does show that if there's very few guns available, there is very little gun crime.

Rather than call something naive because you don't like it, why don't you provide statistics that support your argument? Do you have any idea how many crimes guns stop every year?

[jacquesm]

> This is not a small thing, some estimates put the number of rapes per day stopped due to the potential victim being armed or thought to be armed at more than a thousand. Per day.

How does that work in the rest of the world then? I don't see thousands of people being raped here per day, so clearly something else must be stopping those rapes.

Really, guns are toys. Get over it.

The chances of you facing a life-or-death situation where a gun will help you are ridiculously overblown.

We're not trading off homicide vs one kind of mass homicide, that just brings things to the attention of a larger audience. The real trade off is citizens murdering other citizens with guns versus them not being able to do so or to do so easily. Sure there will be criminals with guns, they're not going to magically disappear. But there will be far less of them.

[pingbear]

>I don't see thousands of people being raped here per day

Because no one reports on it. No one reports on the impoverished of India killing each other when someone cuts in line at the water pump in the morning. No one reports on the gang murders in Eastern Europe that happen everyday. Rape goes on all the time. Just because the West has NGOs and charities dedicated to women's issues and run campaigns and just because they have statistics (such as they are) showing that rape incidence might go down, that doesn't mean that rape doesn't happen on a massive scale on a daily basis.

Seriously, how ignorant can a person be?

[jacquesm]

America is in the West. Last I checked at least.

What you are describing is a country with a disfunctional police force.

[wildranter]

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe. —Albert Einstein

[abrown28]

The mere presence of my shotgun in my 5' tall female friends hands prevented her from being raped. A knife wouldn't have worked... need a bit of skill and strength. Kung Fu wouldn't have saved her... she's 5' tall and not strong. A gun is a force equalizer.

People like you bemoan the fact that anyone can pick up a gun and use it to deadly effect without any training. I can say without reservation that that makes me very happy.

[jacquesm]

For this to make sense you have to look at statistics, not individuals. Statistically speaking your argument holds no water, but I'm happy for your friend. In her case it worked out well. But that's the exception, unfortunately.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20121216092406AA...

"People like me" like to judge things on a wider basis than the exceptions confirming the rule.

[glenra]

The anti-gun studies tend to be pretty terrible as a rule. Including that one. Have you looked into any of the studies on the other side?

Suppose a woman in an isolated place avoids a rape via one of these methods: - credibly yelling "go away - I've got a gun!" - brandishing a gun - aiming a gun at the attacker - firing a "warning shot" - firing at the attacker, but missing

...and the attacker runs away.

She's not likely to report this to the authorities. The attacker certainly isn't going to report it. So a study of "shooting incidents" won't include it. A study that starts by looking at cases where somebody was actually shot is counting most of the social costs but only some of the social benefits of gun ownership.

[jacquesm]

You can fantasize situations until the cows come home, but until you get some hard numbers involved it doesn't amount to anything. Are we going to count cases where people were wounded? Where guns were used but no shots were fired?

How many dead people is worth how many raped women? And so on.

And when you've done all that you're going to have to compare with countries that have gun control in place, look at the rape incidence before and after the change (if there was one) and do a plain comparison of rape incidence in countries with and without.

Those studies have been done, but since you're going to dismiss those with 'anti gun studies tend to be pretty terrible as a rule' it probably won't matter much.

Keep at it. How many dead will it take? Until one of your family is murdered? Or will you still stand by your claim even then?

[glenra]

In other words, you didn't even look at the details of your own study and whether it related to the post you were responding to, you just did a keyword match to see that it reached "the right conclusion". Got it.

If you never look at anything the other side is saying about your side, you're doomed to talk nonsense. Like Kellerman's "43-to-1" claim.

Pro-gun people consider it a win if a gun deters a murder, deters a rape, deters a theft or other nastiness. But anti-gun researcher often run studies that assume the only benefit of guns is if they actually kill a bad guy. (They also have been known to occasionally interpret "the victim knew the attacker" as "the person shot was a family member or loved one".) Given those sort of assumptions, it's trivial to generate "some hard numbers" that are useless, like a 4-to-1 or 12-to-1 or 43-to-1 ratio between "bad" things happening and "good" ones happening to those who own a gun.

The study you gave also assumed a dubious direction of causality - if people who know they are in danger of being attacked tend to go buy a gun, that alone could adequately explain the discovered correlation between being shot and carrying a gun.

(A nice orthogonal issue is that most murderers and most murder victims have multiple prior violent felony convictions, so this Philly study is probably telling us mainly what happens within and among the criminal class. If you aren't a violent felon and don't know any violent felons, the chance of you being killed goes waaaay down.)

[jacquesm]

In a dysfunctional society, one where there is no law and where you have to take matters into your own hands to get a modicum of safety guns have their place. That was America a few centuries ago. If you still feel that unsafe than you have another problem than the one you're trying to solve with your guns.

Try living in a country with gun control laws for a bit and see where you feel safer. And be sure to ask the women there too if they feel safe or not.

Fear is an incredibly powerful motor behind a lot of stupidity, if you're so afraid that you can't walk around for fear of being robbed or raped if you're not 'packing heat' then why don't you do something about that problem, rather than to go around and compound it by escalation?

And yes, I read those studies, and quite few besides. The consensus is very clear (outside the NRA and their stooges, that is): guns in large numbers in society make that society a more dangerous place. Period.

So you can talk until the cows come home, the facts simply don't support your conclusions.

[abrown28]

Here is a non fantasy... You want to want to make the vulnerable defenseless. You are a despicable person.

[jacquesm]

What a ridiculous thing to say. Let's arm all the kids, they're defenceless. Let's arm all the old people too, they're defenceless. In fact, let's arm everybody because after all, when kids and old people have arms everybody else is defenceless.

And then we'll both sit back and watch the world burn while the defenceless people try to come to terms with their new-found power and slaughter each other.

What's despicable is that there is a country full of people that are so insecure and that have such little faith in their law enforcement that they feel the need to stockpile ammo and weapons as if there is going to be a shoot-out any moment. And guess what, they're all surprised when there is going to be the occasional shoot-out and when people that shouldn't have access to guns find it all too easy to get their hands on them.

The power to kill is bad enough when we pass it on to the state but that's a necessary evil. It isn't called the state monopoly on force for nothing.

If you're so insecure that you can't live without a chunk of iron under your pillow then you should look at how you can improve your society to the point where it is safe enough to live a normal life without having metal detectors at grade schools and armed shopkeepers.

Keep the poor as poor as they are, keep the insane living on the streets, give everybody access to as much hardware as they want and you will reap exactly what you sow.

[subsystem]

If you havn't already read it, "From Dictatorship to Democracy" supports some of your points.

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/FDTD.pdf