Question for anti-gun:

[Mandalore_15]

... no one is killed by a gun anywhere, it's an inanimate object.

And with this one sentence, you have just lost all credibility.

That's right. Guns come to life and shoot people all on their own all the time. What is he taking about?

The whole "guns don't kill people, people kill people" statement is utterly meaningless. In that regard, pretty much any object is harmless unless used by a person to do other people harm. If you use that argument, the only way you can pull it off without being a complete hypocrite is to say that it's fine for people to own absolutely anything, from guns up to nuclear bombs. Are you OK with private citizens owning nuclear warheads?

 

[ElPatron]

The AK-47 one of the most common guns in the world is rare and expensive?

I posted a quote before. Go to wikipedia and find the article on the AK47.

Early production runs had issues and only a few stamped AK47s were made. They switched to milled receivers. However, the AK47 never got enough numbers produced until 1956.

In 1959 the AK47 was discontinued in favor of the AKM - which is MUCH more common than the AK47 which was only mass produced for 3 years, making the original AK47s a collector's item.

(cost i found in ten seconds from google was $649) So that fact that it's so wide spread being attributed to the fact it is cheap, reliable and easy to maintain is irrelevent.

Black market? Because for that price you're probably looking at a Saiga conversion by Arsenal. Not sure, though.

Those are semi-automatics. Perfectly legit to use in home defense if you use the 5.45x39 caliber, which fires a very light projectile less prone to penetrating walls if you miss and loses most of it's energy if it hits.

You also completely missed the point of my post. You may need a clean record to buy a gun, but every criminal before they get caught for the first time has a clean record. Plus you can still buy a grenade launcher I never said it wouldn't be expensive but you can still buy it. Why should anyone be allowed to buy an explosive device whose sole purpose is to turn people into mince meat.

If a criminal does not have a clean record, he will steal a gun, buy it from the black market or just buy it in a private sale.

Plus, why would a criminal spend money on a grenade launcher? Specially if ammunition is too expensive, and comes with a 200 buck tax on every shell.

People who buy them use training rounds. Those that only explode in a puff of powder instead of detonating high explosives.

(note: you can't buy a grenade launcher legally in britain).

You can build one illegally. You can buy a legal tank and fuck around with it's decommissioned gun to replace it illegally.

the rate of suicide deaths using firearms is more than 18 times higher than in England

Suicides are self-inflicted. Arguing about suicides with firearms is a moot point because people also have access to aspirin, knives, ropes and bridges.

See your salt shaker? If you swallow it's whole contents the sodium intake will kill you.

Also, London has 3,3 times the number of rapes commited in NYC in a similar time frame. Wanna discuss rates? Come at me.

So yes I may not know the nuances of buying a firearm in America (but you seem not to either)

Yes I know, despite your attempt to make me look like a fool.

, but I can still see the huge logical flaw in making lethal weapons that have no other use than to kill lots of people in a short space of time relatively easy to get ahold of.

Bombs are illegal, Breivik made one. Knives are lethal weapons and people have done killing sprees with them. Cars are supposed to make our lives easier but why do we need them to go faster than 120km/h?

Purposes are irrelevant. I use my firearms the way I want, I give them their purpose and I don't mess with nobody's life.

If someone wants a gun for home and self defence that fine, but you don't need something much more powerful than a hunting rifle at the absolute most for that, so why should a grenade launcher or an assault rifle be available at all.

Hunting rifles fire some of the largest calibers available and hunting ammunition was made to expand AND penetrate deeply, which gives it good penetration against barriers.

Using a large caliber rifle with hunting ammunition will cause the bullet to penetrate trough walls and possibly endanger the lives of innocent bystanders.

PRODUCTION OF ASSAULT RIFLES ARE PROHIBITED FOR CIVILIANS AFTER 1986 - THE ONLY WAY OF OBTAINING ONE IS TRANSFERRING ONE, WHICH IMPLIES A COST OF SEVERAL THOUSAND DOLLARS, PLUS A VERY EXTENSIVE BACKGROUND CHECK THAT WILL INCLUDE A VERY DETAILED INVESTIGATION ON YOUR LIFE.

There were only TWO cases of a Class III firearm being used in a crime. TWO cases.


Hunting rifle - semi-automatic, civilian legal and deemed "Sporting Purpose" weapon in many countries

WASR-10 - semi-automatic, same operating principle

Both are based on the same design. Tell me that the different furniture make the WASR-10 deadlier. Please.

 

[ElPatron]

The threads are getting ridiculous now, but yes, we can agree one thing.

Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people.

Anders Breivik is American. In fact, every gun homicide in the world is perpetrated by an American.

I assume you have proof of this?

EDIT: Assuming you weren't just being sarcastic, in which case forgive me.

Hey, he said it, burden of proof is on him.

If I am being sarcastic or not depends on his reply.

Umm... no they don't. There are many many (I don't know the actual numbers) car crashes every year, licenses and registrations be damned.
Besides can't a bullet be traced back to the gun that fired it? I assumed that part of CSI was based on real life forensics and not something the creators pulled out of their ass.

Thing is, car licenses aren't exactly hard to get. Unless you want to change the constitution, everyone must be able to get a license for firearms too. Problem not solved.

If you steal a car/buy it on the black market, the car is not going check if you are licensed.

Bullets cannot be automatically traced to firearms. The only thing you can do is to get a gun and compare rifling marks.

That is, if the bullet was recovered intact.

If I kill someone with a dirty barrel and then clean it, the rifling marks will be different if a lab investigates it. Heck, I could shoot someone, then use a tool to fuck up the rifling permanently.

Or just buy another barrel.

You have a poor understanding of forensics then. Gun registries are important and useful in tracking down criminals. You can often Identify what kind of gun has been used by shell casings and other methods. If you have a list of everyone who owns that model of gun, you have narrowed your suspects.

That works if there are 300 weapons in a country.

Casings? They are not a killing blow to the defense in court. They might help conclude the case in the best case scenario... Not to mention that if there is no GSR on the suspect or the victim, you can't be sure a casing was used during the crime unless you have some convenient way of proving it was there at the time of the murder like in TV shows.

Also, there are also the chances of the criminal picking up the casing (because the criminal watched CSI) or even planting a casing to incriminate another shooter.

You also underestimate the existence of illegal weapons

Writers make it convenient for a criminal to get caught in TV shows even if the case is complex. In real life not even DNA can be considered conclusive.

 

[LetalisK]

Oh for fuck's sake, can we have ONE stickied gun control thread forever? The entire time I've been on this site every single gun control thread retreads the exact same ground every time. Same arguments, same refutations, same links often times the same people.

 

[ElPatron]

We're nit-picking on AK47 since the modern "WASR10" is still effectively just the same as an original AK (and not difficult to make fully auto, if you know what you're doing).

It is effective. But more suitable for home defense than a 30.06 hunting rifle.

Easy to make it full auto? Have fun in the Club Fed and a heavy fine, if you're lucky.

If you're not so lucky, maybe you'll spend 10 years picking up soap in the shower.

If you're out of luck, that hammer will follow the carrier and strike the primer on a cartridge not fully chambered = instant KB! and the loss of a few fingers and facial features along that prison sentence.

Point is that some hunting rifles like the Norinco Hunter and Saigas, which are considered "sporting purpose" weapons in many counties (they are legal in France from what I have seen) are not very different from AK-replicas. The main difference is the magazine compatibility, which can be reverted easily.

Now, if hunting rifles are fair and good, why can't be semi-automatic rifles with the same operational principles be?

If I put flame decals in my car it doesn't make it any faster.

 

[Overusedname]

Every time there's a shooting like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, I see people casting blame at videogames, the doctors, the failure of the movie theater to put a security system on their exit door -- but somehow suggesting the fact that these people were sold devices capable of pointing at someone and ending their life is totally off-limits. That just seems so contrary to logic that I can't even wrap my head around it.

My little sister was watching news coverage of the Aurora shooting with me, and they talked about how he had a flack jacket, tear gas, handgun, shotgun, rifle -- she asked "How did he even GET all that stuff?" She was completely flabbergasted. I said, "He bought them at the store," like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Maybe we need to correlate gun-purchasing data better -- perhaps within the law enforcement database. Like maybe if you buy more than one gun, you go on a list somewhere. And if you buy another, you get points and go up on that list. And if you buy a few more, or a bullet-proof jacket, or if cops respond to a domestic situation at your home, you get even more points. Maybe past a certain number of points, you raise a red flag in a database somewhere. Maybe somebody who owns four hand-guns, has a history of spousal abuse, and was arrested for drunk and disorderly a year ago, maybe that guy goes on a watch-list. Maybe somebody who stockpiles guns and ammo over a short time-frame of six months, like James Holmes did, trips an alarm somewhere, and local police are asked to knock on his door and just see if everything is on the level.

I don't know.

But the idea that asking what role easy access to guns plays in a MASS SHOOTING is somehow off-limits? I can't understand that. It's the elephant in the room. If a 2-year-old stabbed some kid at his preschool with a steak knife over an argument concerning legos, your first question wouldn't be "what the fuck is wrong with this kid" or "do legos cause violence" -- it would be, "who the fuck gave this two year old a knife?"

Words cannot describe how much I agree with this post.

Getting a gun permit should be harder than getting into an ivy league school.

 

[algalon]

On average, 14 people are killed by a gun in the UK every year.
Over 9000 people are killed by a gun every year in the US.
*Shrugs sholder*
However, I am begining to doubt my source, mainly because it states that over 180% of the UKs population does drugs.
180 percent- out of 100 percent.

EDIT: It may also be because there really aren't too many countries with effictive gun control/police systems.

I mean, the only country I can name off the top of my head with gun control is the UK, and if you only take examples from control variable that small, you might get some bias.

We don't know enough about it to say for sure, is my point.

You're source is very wrong. Firstly, no one is killed by a gun anywhere, it's an inanimate object. Secondly, guns are used in murders alone fare more often in the US than this source indicates.

In hindsight I'd like to point out the stupidity of this post. So what, it's not the gun that kills people, it's the hand holding the gun? The gun enables a crazy person, say this guy

to kill multiple targets rather than just one (maybe) that he could have killed with any other object. Crazy is crazy but he could have done far less damage if guns were more restricted in sales over say, the internet and at gun shows.

 

[SpAc3man]

I've always supported strict gun control. I live in New Zealand which has pretty good rules in place. Gun related crime is pretty rare.

Spoiler: Here is a brief overview of how it's done in NZ, taken from Wikipedia

New Zealand's gun laws are notably more liberal than other countries in the Pacific, focusing mainly on vetting firearm owners, rather than registering firearms or banning certain types of firearms. Firearms legislation is provided for in the Arms Act and its associated regulations, though stricter unofficial police and government policies also apply[citation needed].
Firearms in New Zealand fall into one of four categories:
Pistols are firearms shorter than 762 mm (30 in).
Restricted Weapons include machine guns, selective-fire assault rifles, grenades and rocket launchers. This category also includes some non-firearm weapons such as pepper spray and Airsoft guns. The New Zealand Cabinet can declare things to be restricted weapons by regulation.
Military-Style Semi-Automatics (MSSAs) include semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that have one or more of the following components:
A folding or telescopic butt
A bayonet lug
A free-standing "military-style" pistol grip
A flash suppressor
A magazine that holds (or looks like it could hold) more than 15 rounds of .22 rimfire ammunition or 7 rounds of any other calibre.
A Category firearms are those that do not fall into any other category, and are the vast majority of legally owned firearms in New Zealand.
Registration is not required for "A Category" firearms, but firearms in any other category require both registration and a "permit to procure" before they are transferred.
Except under supervision of a licence holder, owning or using firearms requires a firearms licence from the police. The licence is normally issued, under the conditions that the applicant has secure storage for firearms, attends a safety lecture and passes a written test. The police will also interview the applicant and two references (one must be a close relative and the other not related) to determine whether the applicant is "fit and proper" to have a firearm. The applicants residence is also visited to check that they have appropriate storage for firearms and ammunition. Having criminal associations or a history of domestic violence almost always lead to a licence being declined.
A standard firearms licence allows the use of "A Category" firearms. To possess firearms of another category they are required to get an endorsement to their licence. There are different endorsements for different classes of firearm but they all require a higher level of storage security, stricter vetting requirements and the applicant must have a 'special reason' for wanting the endorsement.
Air guns can be purchased by anybody over 16 (with a license) and unlicensed and unrestricted to persons over 18.
Firearms are not allowed to be carried outside of private property unless one is a hunter, a farmer, or a member of the military or police. Even officers of the New Zealand Police force rarely carry a pistol on their person. Instead, firearms, usually one or two pistols and a shotgun, are carried in squad cars, and in a highly secure mount. When firearms are discharged in public, the police often come under intense scrutiny from both media and public but are seldom dealt with, whereas an ordinary citizen excising their right to use 'reasonable force' (see Crimes Act 1961) to stop a home invasion are usually prosecuted.

Owning a gun is not normal for people in the urban/suburban regions. It is very normal for rural areas. Farmers almost always have a .22 for rabbits, possums and the occasional animal that needs putting down. Anything of a higher calibre is generally for deer/pig hunting.

 

[spartan231490]

Stuff about pro-gun laws.

You're right. There are a lot of facts to support that guns reduce crime rates of things like theft. No one is stupid enough to try and steal from someone when there's the distinct possibility that they have a firearm, even if the thief has a firearm as well. The risk is too great for the reward.

The problem with your argument is within statistics that you posted yourself.

http://library.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUTORIAL/GUNS/GUNSTAT.html

When you have less gun control, you have more fatal encounters. Within the fifteen countries that had the most gun related deaths under the age of fifteen, the U.S. not only is the highest on the list but it almost tripled the second highest country. I might also note that Finland has pretty relaxed gun control laws as well, but they are much stricter than the United States.

The problem isn't so much in the fact that gun control doesn't stop crime, the problem is that it also creates an influx of much more violent crime. Murder might be down by a percentage, but the flat numbers are still grossly out of proportion from other countries. The U.S. still leads the first world in homicide. This isn't even going into the fact that the U.S. also has a very poor health care program which only exacerbates the issue or how many individuals are acquitted because of self defense. Guns promote violent solutions, unfortunately, which is the entire problem of a system with little to no gun control.

As a side note, I'm glad you posted something that was pro-gun control, if unknowingly, because it shows you use fair statistics. =)

Captach: know your rights. How appropriate.

I do try to avoid biased statistics, thank you for noticing. However, it's not really fair to use the US in these analysis. It leads to circular logic. The US has a phenomenally high murder rate, and suicide rate. Other have higher violent crime rates(Like the UK, but not many). By using the US in any analysis of gun control, the shear fact that the US has loose gun control laws and phenomenally high rates of crime and suicide will skew your results.

I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself well here, if you use the US in a gun control vs murder study, this will create results in favor of loose gun control leads to more murder, even though the US high murder rate is cultural. Like you pointed out, our murder rate is almost triple the next highest, this much of an outlier is bound to skew an analysis with a relatively small number of data sets.

I'm really curious to see a study that is just European countries. I will have to go try and dig one up.

That was fast: " The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population)."

http://theacru.org/acru/harvard_study_gun_control_is_counterproductive/

Wonder if I can find any more.

 

[spartan231490]

On average, 14 people are killed by a gun in the UK every year.
Over 9000 people are killed by a gun every year in the US.
*Shrugs sholder*
However, I am begining to doubt my source, mainly because it states that over 180% of the UKs population does drugs.
180 percent- out of 100 percent.

EDIT: It may also be because there really aren't too many countries with effictive gun control/police systems.

I mean, the only country I can name off the top of my head with gun control is the UK, and if you only take examples from control variable that small, you might get some bias.

We don't know enough about it to say for sure, is my point.

You're source is very wrong. Firstly, no one is killed by a gun anywhere, it's an inanimate object. Secondly, guns are used in murders alone fare more often in the US than this source indicates.

In hindsight I'd like to point out the stupidity of this post. So what, it's not the gun that kills people, it's the hand holding the gun? The gun enables a crazy person, say this guy

to kill multiple targets rather than just one (maybe) that he could have killed with any other object. Crazy is crazy but he could have done far less damage if guns were more restricted in sales over say, the internet and at gun shows.

He could have. Or he could have used bombs and explosives instead, and maybe killed many more people than he already did.

Don't bother. I said that several pages ago but nobody seems to care that he had an apartment full of grenades that would have done much more damage than his firearm.

 

[spartan231490]

Ack, OP too long. Anyway, all I'm going to say is I'm not against guns I just think that one should be required to have a license to own and use one and each firearm should have to be registered. After all you have to have a license to drive a vehicle and your vehicle has to be registered and vehicles aren't even classified as weapons. So how unreasonable is it to require that people have a license to use a gun and to register their guns?

Registration often leads to confiscation. California instituted a registration law for many semi-automatic weapons in the late 80's and within 2 or 3 years they passed another law and confiscated every one of those registered weapons.

Also, from what I've found, registration laws don't seem to reduce crime rate.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

The strict gun control in the UK seems to work. If I wanted to, I could get hold of drugs, but not a gun. They just aren't around. And I recall seeing a news bulletin about a shooting in the UK perhaps... twice in my life? We might occasionally get some nutjob bringing a knife to school with intent, but we never get this situation the US deals with where someone just brings a gun into school and unloads into half a dozen people. I'd quite like it if that continued to not ever happen.

 

[spartan231490]

The strict gun control in the UK seems to work. If I wanted to, I could get hold of drugs, but not a gun. They just aren't around. And I recall seeing a news bulletin about a shooting in the UK perhaps... twice in my life? We might occasionally get some nutjob bringing a knife to school with intent, but we never get this situation the US deals with where someone just brings a gun into school and unloads into half a dozen people. I'd quite like it if that continued to not ever happen.

Offences involving firearms have increased in all but four police areas in England and Wales since 1998, figures obtained by the Tories reveal

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6438601/Gun-crime-doubles-in-a-decade.html
"The latest Government figures show that the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year - a rise of 89 per cent.
In some parts of the country, the number of offences has increased more than five-fold.
In eighteen police areas, gun crime at least doubled.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223193/Culture-violence-Gun-crime-goes-89-decade.html#ixzz223skBn9w"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223193/Culture-violence-Gun-crime-goes-89-decade.html

sure about that?

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Besides can't a bullet be traced back to the gun that fired it? I assumed that part of CSI was based on real life forensics and not something the creators pulled out of their ass.

...and how exactly does that PREVENT shootings?

Does the CSI team have some sort of time machine, so all they have to do is figure out who fired the gun and go back to prevent it from happening?

Sure it's useful in reigning in those who used registered guns, but it doesn't PREVENT murders. Well, I suppose, it doesn't prevent murders that aren't pre-meditated - because more than likely someone who doesn't plan to get caught WON'T use a registered gun.

When did I say that it did? I never said anything about preventing shootings or anything remotely similar. All I did was compare it to vehicle licensing and registration which is commonly accepted by everybody. Stop confusing me with other posters.

Ack, OP too long. Anyway, all I'm going to say is I'm not against guns I just think that one should be required to have a license to own and use one and each firearm should have to be registered. After all you have to have a license to drive a vehicle and your vehicle has to be registered and vehicles aren't even classified as weapons. So how unreasonable is it to require that people have a license to use a gun and to register their guns?

Registration often leads to confiscation. California instituted a registration law for many semi-automatic weapons in the late 80's and within 2 or 3 years they passed another law and confiscated every one of those registered weapons.

Also, from what I've found, registration laws don't seem to reduce crime rate.

One time can hardly be considered "often." Besides that's not the part I'm advocating.

Umm... no they don't. There are many many (I don't know the actual numbers) car crashes every year, licenses and registrations be damned.
Besides can't a bullet be traced back to the gun that fired it? I assumed that part of CSI was based on real life forensics and not something the creators pulled out of their ass.

Thing is, car licenses aren't exactly hard to get. Unless you want to change the constitution, everyone must be able to get a license for firearms too. Problem not solved.

If you steal a car/buy it on the black market, the car is not going check if you are licensed.

Bullets cannot be automatically traced to firearms. The only thing you can do is to get a gun and compare rifling marks.

That is, if the bullet was recovered intact.

If I kill someone with a dirty barrel and then clean it, the rifling marks will be different if a lab investigates it. Heck, I could shoot someone, then use a tool to fuck up the rifling permanently.

Or just buy another barrel.

I don't really know what you're constitution says beyond the 2-3 amendments that everyone knows, but the only restiction to getting a license I was thinking of was an age restriction. Other than that well you'd probably want to make sure the person applying isn't the type whose going to go on a killing spree.

Writers make it convenient for a criminal to get caught in TV shows even if the case is complex. In real life not even DNA can be considered conclusive.

Are you serious??? That is why your justice system is such a colossal fail.