Dense_Electric said:
She had me up until she started on gun laws. Games can provide inspiration for a crime as readily as guns can provide a means. Most of us would agree that that doesn't mean we should blame games when someone goes and shoots someone after playing GTA IV, so why would you blame the gun? Both are merely scapegoats to excuse a violent individual.
Furthermore, an assault weapons ban would be especially ludicrous. The VAST majority of gun crime (by which I mean between 99%-100%) is committed with non-assault weapons. Most of them are committed with semi-automatic pistols, most of the remainder with shotguns or bolt-action or semi-automatic rifles that don't qualify as assault weapons. Yet I don't hear anyone advocating that those should be banned. I believe I read a statistic somewhere that said something like fewer than 50 murders in which a firearm was used involved an assault weapon since the 1970's. This is the equivalent of advocating that Lamborghinis should be banned because people die in car accidents.
While I agree that statistically removing assault weapons is not going to change much considering how most killings are done with pistols, I do not agree that blaming guns is the same as blaming games, not
entirely anyway.
Blaming games is saying that experiencing fantasy violence is akin to wanting to commit it in reality. Anybody with a brain can point out that millions of violent games are enjoyed worldwide and the percentage of those people who go onto kill is so small it's insignificant.
The same cannot be said for guns. Banning guns (which wouldn't work for countless reasons anyway) hypothetically has a more logical argument. Let's say for example, as impossible as it is, that all guns were completely wiped from the planet as well as all knowledge of how to create them. The death toll from murder
would drop significantly. Not because guns
cause violence, but because they make it so much
easier to.
If one of those psycho's went into a school with a knife they'd still cause damage, and almost certainly some death's, but it's a lot easier for a group of people to tackle a single man with a knife than somebody with the ability to kill an entire room of people without moving from the spot.
People often reply to that argument with something along the lines of "They'd make a bomb instead", but the difference with that is that if they wanted to, they could do that anyway. Removing guns does not make creating explosives any easier, it just means less people getting shot.
Although like I said, banning guns would never work for some very obvious reasons. The most obvious one being that you'd simply be removing guns from the kind of person not likely to use them as a tool to murder. The kind of person who is willing to murder is not the kind of person who is going to hand over their gun to obey the law. So really a ban would just mean more criminals with guns, while law abider's do not have them.
People may respond to that in regards to other countries where they are illegal, but bear in mind that those countries don't have millions of them in homes through-out the country already. It's not a case of them being taken away, it's a case of them not having been there in the first place.
