[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