5 year old shoots and kills 2 year old sister.

[Jason Webb]

First issue: Who the hell gives a 5 year old a damn gun.
Second: The President is an idiot, we've already established that.
Third: Statistically criminals get their guns LEGALLY.
Fourth: Even if there were harsher gun laws, criminals would still be able to get guns.
Fifth: Were those parents mental?

*breathes* That's all I had to say.

I agree with all but #3

Criminals most commonly get their guns through street deals or purchased legally by a friend or family member that can buy a weapon, and given to the other which is not allowed to purchase a weapon (aka straw sales).

@Lavish Yet both do kill people, yet you forgive Islam and not gun owners. EDIT: not you specifically, people in general.

@Green Ranger I said nothing about a necessary evil, criminals will obtain guns anyways, why should we not be allowed to defend ourselves. FBI statistics show that at least 60% of gun murders an illegally obtained weapon is used, whether that weapon was purchased legally through 'straw sales' (which is illegal though the method is not)

http://www.gunfacts.info/pdfs/gun-facts/6.2/gun-facts-6-2-screen.pdf

(these stats are older) http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/GUIC.PDF

The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. 114 million of these were handguns, 110 million were rifles, and 86 million were shotguns. In that same year, the Census bureau stated the population of people in America at 305,529,237.

EDIT: this is more effective:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/uc.../crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10shrtbl08.xls






Sorry if this seems jumbled or anything, I'm writing a paper while working on this.

 

[Jason Webb]

What scares me is the government wanting to forbid guns to those who know how to use them, specifically the retired Military. I have never met a single Veteran that served, who did not develop some degree of PTSD. For those who have it, here are methods to being snapped out of a flashback. And there is training for Vets to learn to identify that spiral and its triggers. Aside from the seclusive guy who runs the Army surplus store...I would rather arm the everyday Veteran and stand net to him when sh!t happens. Saves needed bullets that way.

Can you rephrase that? I am not sure of what your saying.

 

[Rom]

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

I'll just go ahead and leave that right here

 

[Mistress]

The US gov considers military vets a safety risk for owning fire arms, right up there with the mental unstable.

 

[Shiuzu]

God forbid the terrorists ever form a well regulated militia.

 

[Rom]

Also; if someone is mentally unstable, veteran or not, than they absolutely should not be allowed to have possession of a firearm.

I fail to see why that's a bad thing? We have multiple issues in this country, our mental health institutions is one of them. But we can't look at this as a "Well, criminals will still be able to get guns and crazy people will always be crazy, so let's just do nothing because 'Murica!" problem without being ****ing morons.

 

[Mistress]

All they gotta do is come in on the Walmart Barge and the trucking company will deliver them to every city in the US.

 

[Mistress]

Also; if someone is mentally unstable, veteran or not, than they absolutely should not be allowed to have possession of a firearm.

I fail to see why that's a bad thing? We have multiple issues in this country, our mental health institutions is one of them. But we can't look at this as a "Well, criminals will still be able to get guns and crazy people will always be crazy, so let's just do nothing because 'Murica!" problem without being ****ing morons.

I have not met one military vet who was deployed who did not develop some degree of PTSD. They are not crazy.

 

[Rom]

I was facetiously oversimplifying the issues of gun control and mental health in America in order to make a point.

 

[Jason Webb]

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

I'll just go ahead and leave that right here

Not sure where your going with this. We aren't well regulated? Or need to be more regulated?

The US gov considers military vets a safety risk for owning fire arms, right up there with the mental unstable.

Ah gottcha. Which is really a shame, as if they don't mistreat the soldiers enough already.

God forbid the terrorists ever form a well regulated militia.

:CAbove is that a joke?

Also; if someone is mentally unstable, veteran or not, than they absolutely should not be allowed to have possession of a firearm.

I fail to see why that's a bad thing? We have multiple issues in this country, our mental health institutions is one of them. But we can't look at this as a "Well, criminals will still be able to get guns and crazy people will always be crazy, so let's just do nothing because 'Murica!" problem without being ****ing morons.

PTSD doesn't make someone crazy. I agree that if someone is mentally unstable they should not be allowed a firearm, however the ever competent Dianne Feinstein stated this:

The Judiciary Committee is meeting today to mark-up the various civilian disarmament bills before the Senate. One of the bills in the frame: Senator Feinstein’s ”Assault Weapons Ban.” Readers watching the proceedings online tell TTAG that a proposed amendment would allow veterans to keep buying their “assault weapons” just like retired cops. Senator Feinstein opposed the amendment on the basis that veterans have PTSD and can’t be trusted with guns. Here’s her exact words:

THE PROBLEM WITH EXPANDING THIS IS THAT, YOU KNOW, WITH THE ADVENT OF PTSD, WHICH I THINK IS A NEW PHENOMENON AS A PRODUCT OF THE IRAQ WAR, IT’S NOT CLEAR HOW THE SELLER OR TRANSFER OF A FIREARM COVERED BY THIS BILL WOULD VERIFY THAT AN INDIVIDUAL WAS A MEMBER OR VETERAN AND THERE WAS NO IMPAIRMENT OF THAT INDIVIDUAL WITH RESPECT TO HAVING A WEAPON LIKE THIS.

[...]

I THINK WE HAVE TO — IF YOU’RE GOING TO DO THIS, FIND A WAY THAT VETERANS WHO ARE INCAPACITATED FOR ONE REASON OR ANOTHER MENTALLY, DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO THIS KIND OF WEAPON.

(http://www.thedailysheeple.com/fein...re-crazy-so-shouldnt-own-modern-rifles_032013)

 

[Green Ranger]

I agree with all but #3

Criminals most commonly get their guns through street deals or purchased legally by a friend or family member that can buy a weapon, and given to the other which is not allowed to purchase a weapon (aka straw sales).

@Lavish Yet both do kill people, yet you forgive Islam and not gun owners. EDIT: not you specifically, people in general.

@Green Ranger I said nothing about a necessary evil, criminals will obtain guns anyways, why should we not be allowed to defend ourselves. FBI statistics show that at least 60% of gun murders an illegally obtained weapon is used, whether that weapon was purchased legally through 'straw sales' (which is illegal though the method is not)

http://www.gunfacts.info/pdfs/gun-facts/6.2/gun-facts-6-2-screen.pdf

(these stats are older) http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/GUIC.PDF

The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. 114 million of these were handguns, 110 million were rifles, and 86 million were shotguns. In that same year, the Census bureau stated the population of people in America at 305,529,237.

EDIT: this is more effective:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/uc.../crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10shrtbl08.xls






Sorry if this seems jumbled or anything, I'm writing a paper while working on this.

Im on my phone so I cant look at the pdfs just yet, but gunfacts.info is not what I would consider an unbiased source - feel free to check out the main website for why I would think that.

the third, edited in link seems to lack information on legal/illegal firearms ratios, unless Im missing something, so yeah, not looking good.

 

[Rom]

Look, if we're going to bring the things that our legislators say to the table as legitimate responses to our concerns with national issues, we will be just as effective as they are; ie -- throwing shit at each other after pooping ourselves in confusion.

Here's the thing; I'm not saying that veterans with PTSD are crazy. PTSD is a terrible condition and, personally knowing many veterans who have returned from service with some degree of it, I can say that there are some that I would not want to have the ability to own a gun before they go through some serious mental health work and are given a relatively clean bill of health.

But until that time, I stand by my statement that people who are mentally unstable should not be allowed to obtain or carry firearms, despite prior military service.

Oh, and I was posting that part of the 2nd Amendment to high light the regulation part that all gun advocates seem to be afraid of. Because Obama is the second coming of Hitler and if we don't have our guns to fight back against the government controlled military and the illuminati than tyranny will rule these United States.

 

[BLADE]

Good God, it annoys me how much dishonesty and stupidity one side displays about the empirical data.

First of all, on gun ownership:

Spoiler: Gun Ownership Rate Calcs

Not quite. Mathematically, all that figure tells us is the total number of guns with respect to the total population.

It tells us nothing about the relative distribution of the guns. A weighted averaging of the figures I could find (Gallup, GSS, etc.) tells us that the percentage of American adults that own a firearm of some sort is around 25% +/- 3

Just using some very basic math, going back to that estimate (.88 firearms per 1 person)...

(AmPop X FirearmCapCoeff)

(315*.88)

>> 277 million firearms

Compared to

GunPop Coefficient X AmAdPopulation

.25 (239)

60 million gun owners in the US. Which means that each of those gun owners on average has 4.6 firearms.

There are some things to keep in mind even within that subset. The anecdotal and correlative data (like the rate of gun deaths) as well as what Gallup (1.2) the GSS (4) and other sources say suggests that relative to the rest of the country, a Southerner is about two times as likely to be a gun owner as an American hailing from another region of the country. We can use that likelihood coefficient as a relatively conservative way of estimating the average amount of guns n that a Southerner would have compared to the same non-Southern American since we can assume that distribution will more or less be smooth with respect to other potential differential variables (we don't want to get too fancy modeling things out here, and in any case, we risk overfitting the data or any other number of statistical follies, pecadillos and sins.)

Anyhow, the South, conventionally defined, makes up about 37% of the American population. That's not quite the same as the percentage of American adults (which we shall more or less define as the broad pool of potential gun owners) since the South has a relatively higher percentage of young people in it (given its higher population growth, in-migration, etc.) but also a burgeoning retiree population.

With all that being said, assuming that the under-18 cohort in the South is relatively larger than in the United States (24.2%), at around 25%...

That means that the American South contains ~35% of all potential gun-owners in the United States.

If we apply the likelihood coefficient, that means ~69% of all American owned firearms are in the South.

Let's go back to that original number. Gun purchasing rates have gone up, so let's assume that number has changed (particularly relative to the country's own growth, which has been sluggish) and now stands at ~95 firearm per capita. The original survey did not make the adult/child distinction but used a very inclusive headcount, so we will revert to that head count, simply for the sake of making these numbers mutually intelligible.

There are 315 million or so Americans. Assuming .88 firearms per each American, we get

~277 million firearms in circulation.

Of those, 69% or 194 million are in circulation in the American South. The remainder, 83 million are extant in the rest of the country. When compared to the rest of the country's population, that gives us...

(83/(.63*315)

.42

So .42 firearms per every 1 Non-Southern American, which is roughly comparable, as per this list to Switzerland and not that far off from countries like Germany and Canada. This number is actually probably overstating things as rural areas in the country skew culturally similar to what we think of as the South, and since Gallup (linked here) says that the Midwest has a comparable gun ownership rate to the South, so based off of that we could probably suggest a number around .32-.37 for suburban/urban America (which is still where the bulk of the population lives and relatively representative.)

In other words, if you dig down into the data, it's not so much that America writ large has a disproportionately greater concentration of guns. It's that one region does. Perhaps not coincidentally, the South also makes up a disproportionately larger share of the murder rate than the United States , by about a factor of two or three and even outpaces (as a region) some metropolises like New York City, not necessarily conclusively giving lie to factors like urbanization, etc. but certainly weakening those arguments as being necessarily determinative.

And of course, if you doubt those connections, you can always look at the long post I made a few pages back collating most of the relevant scholarship on the topic which did find a relatively strong correlation (sans other factors) between gun ownership rates and death rates.

tl;dr Gun ownership rates outside of the nutzos who think they need an arsenal to protect themselves from the brown hordes (because let's be honest, if you're a hunter like me, you need at most three different kinds of guns) or the brown hordes as represented by the multicultural New World Order have declined rapidly, and evenly outside of the South. Most of the US has gun ownership rates comparable to the rest of Europe.

As regards gun control and gun safety:

Spoiler: Educamate Everyone

Oh and some more information regarding some common arguments about gun control:

1. If only people were armed, we wouldn't have had all of these problems.

Bullshit. In fact, just the opposite seems to be true.

And in fact, gun ownership rates in the US are declining (from a very high point relative to other industrialized countries):

Even as death rates by firearm also decline (an intuitive fact if you are not some NRA hack or rube):

So in essence, there is a huge statistical, moral, political and intellectual onus on the people making this argument to provide even a smidgen of actual empirical evidence. And that's ignoring counter-evidence readily available like the fact that the army estimates (I would mention the Schrader Study, which is comprehensive but in my view fatally flawed) friendly fire rates (among all casualties) of around 10-14%, which means that even assuming that everyone is trained to the same degree that an American soldier is, the sheer presence of more firepower in a given situation would imply at least (under neutral circumstances) a 1-in-10 greater chance of fatal consequences for a bystander.

2. Other countries have lots of guns and not as much violence!

Also bullshit.

I didn't take Professor Rosenbaum's word for it, by the by.

Which does cast a very deep pall on the cultural argument. I've visited Israel. I have Zionist family. As I have mentioned there, the culture of violence across all races exacerbated by religious and resource tensions which we have no parallels in the United States makes this one of the most violence acculturated countries in the world. That is not to say that American culture does not unnecessarily fetishize and glorify violence to some negative impact, but that the onus probandi on those people making that argument (Saul, QD, etc.) has just increased substantially.

It also suggests to me tweaks to my license system, like having different licenses for different gun contexts. Perhaps a Class-1 License would allow one to have firearms at home, when hunting, and when in public spaces, and would have by far the most onerous and demanding process, with recertification every three months. A Class-2 License would allow one to possess firearms at home only. Class-3 for hunting only, with the weapon stored at a certified and regularly inspected depot of the firearm owner's choice. Or a combination/variation of the schemata suggested.

After all, states with tighter gun control laws are statistically speaking, less prone to gun deaths.

3. Okay, but that's not going to stop mass murderers in any meaningful way:

4. Blanket bans are dumb

I would still hold to that, and this is one of my areas of agreement (more or less) with the gun crowd, but with some caveats: not all bans are dumb, and while these bans do imput some burdens on guns which were not intended to be covered under the spirit of the regulations passed, it strikes me as a necessary and perhaps even virtuous trade-off, particularly when the evidence suggests that the assault weapons ban, to give one example was rather effective.

Stray observations:

Of the twenty deadliest spree shootings in the world, eleven have taken place in the United States, suggesting a twelve-fold disparity between what our share of the world population should suggest about our rate of spree shootings, and what has actually transpired.

Further recommendations:

Tax and legal incentives to keep guns out of the home/not on a person's body. No legitimate way (nor would I support any) to outright ban gun-carrying in the foreseeable future, but gun depots are a sensible and statistically proven way to reduce gun deaths, particularly (and which is now sadly more salient than ever) regarding children who die by the thousands due to gun violence, witting or unwitting.

A better handle on security/gun-free zones for impoverished areas and at-risk public places. As I noted, the poor, especially the minority poor are at danger of quotidian gun violence a fortiori. Better education programs, as well as better educational opportunities (now is the time for national jobs training programs, more robust small business loans, an infrastructure bank/sustained infrastructure investment, and free education and health care) would chip away at these factors (one of the sources I mentioned found one of the highest correlations of all, which are inductively full of implicature, between poverty and gun/sundry forms of violence.)

For schools, better layout and design. More police liaisons. Better designed classrooms with thicker doors and some sort of impromptu panic room layout, like a closet in which the children inter alia could hide (the heartbreaking anecdotal evidence from the Newton incident suggests that factors like this were marginally decisive.)

And smaller class sizes. Surprise, surprise, but the teacher union thugs have a good point here. Whereas it is impossible to conclusively proscribe lunacy like this from ever occurring, it is self-evidently a good idea to reduce classroom (and therefore target) densities for gunmen. Not only is this good safety policy, but it is also good education policy as well.

By the way, I read Mr. Webb's gundata site, and it is, in a word: bullshit. Much of the 'data' that it purports to rely on is from discredited hack and would-be-economist John Lott. As a math guy, his inability to do figures annoys me. But his dishonesty is troubling as well.

See these links.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2003/04/25/0426/

http://www.samefacts.com/2003/05/uncategorized/lott-donohue-and-levitt/

http://web.archive.org/web/20110606235648/http:/www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/guns/lindgren.html

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2003/02/09/lottethics/

And let's not forget the fact that the pro-gun side has spoofed various "academic" commentators (who turned out to be literally made-up identities) to shore up their research.

And that's the point. I do believe gun ownership is a right. It is a right that is constrained like all others, as I noted in my long-ass sections above. The data is all out there. It is very damning to the anti-gun control side. And there is no argument to be made empirically. You can, of course, stick to your philosophy that romanticizes machines that send out heated rounds of razor sharp steel whose only purpose is to create skeins of charred and melted flesh, to leave death and misery in its wake, and pretend that you are moral.

But you are not. That really is all there is to it. If you wish to argue about different gun control policies, fine. But the debate is more or less settled, as any honest person can admit.

The rest? Well I do hope your favorite boogaboos in society never form a well-regulated militia of their own.

 

[Kiro]

I'd say between the Fuzz-butt and Pros, all that's to be said for this argument has been said.

 

[Rom]

I would agree. Jiang and Pros reign supreme.

 

[Mistress]

I was facetiously oversimplifying the issues of gun control and mental health in America in order to make a point.

Good, cause I was going to say, let's take this to a RP and I would kick your butt there for it. :) I'm kidding. But I really did think it.

 

[Mistress]

You know, one of the biggest factors you see in these gunman stories, are shooters on mood stabilizers. I think great responcibility lies with the doctors not properly dosing their patients. They know what these drugs can do.

 

[Arisalin]

About the not leaving children alone for ANY reason - even if it's just for a couple minutes.

Bull shizzle. XD Your children can be an exception I guess since they want to beat eachother - which me and my older brothers did all the time and hey! I'm fine from it. I even learned how to handle myself from people and get a pain tolerance. It was all in jest anyways. It's kinda sad you can't deck your brother without getting in trouble nowdays...sad really.... I miss dropping them to the floor without having me mum and dad get looked up for abuse. :CCry1

About the children-that-age-no-gun? Well. I agree with that. Only reason you should be able to have a gun at that age is with your dad (or mom for poeple who would declare me sexist in assuming women wouldn't be shooting a gun with their child... *rolls eyes*) is with you showing you how to use said weapon. -.-

Note: Top part was a joke. Don't wig out. Not that I care what people think about me anyways.

 

[Lavi]

@Lavish Yet both do kill people, yet you forgive Islam and not gun owners. EDIT: not you specifically, people in general.

Are you implying that Islam is about killing people? I'm out before I explode. I have friends who are Muslim, including one who reads the Bible alongside the Quran. They look at the Islamic insurgents the same way Christians look at Westboro Baptist Church (granted one is a shouting hate mob and the other is a shooting hate mob). I really hate this stereotype, especially since we were the ones who armed and trained the insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq so that they can fight the Soviets.

 

[BLADE]

Well don't I feel prescient for having mentioned fear of teh browns as one of the driving issues behind gun stockpiling/defending a sick gun culture.

But please Mr. Webb. Proceed.