AgedGrunt said:
Lightknight said:
So here's what I would propose if someone actually wanted to impact actual crime and not legal consumers:
I genuinely appreciate your proposals (pretty much nobody calling for more gun control actually does this) but not only will criminals work to successfully dodge the measures you would make, many currently law-abiding gun owners would as well. There is a hugely negative response to draconian solutions such as trackers, key chips or a mechanism in a gun that would stamp every round with a number that could be traced to the gun.
I accidentally posted that early. After significant editing I thought I was posting it for the first time this morning but I was only editing it. I did some more specific research so I think I'll post it again here at the bottom if that's ok. You didn't quote mine from yesterday but it is a drastically different post.
Specifically your first item, which is something many believe is the issue, actually isn't the problem. Looking at mass shootings in the US there are no shortage of cases where the psychopaths didn't raise any red flags because they weren't criminals, and didn't raise any alarm bells to anyone because they were not suspicious. So how can we a fight the problem with "common sense safety laws", as Obama put it, when not even friends and family members of mass shooters are aware that anything is wrong with the person?
Mass shooting aren't common enough to direct how the entire nation operates. Less than 100 people from 1982 to now have decided to go on a shooting spree. You're telling me that this warrants restricting the rights of 300 million people? You do realize that in nearly every instance these sprees are stopped by trained individuals with guns, right? Cops aren't walking in and hugging them until they stop. Also, these public sprees are incredibly rare. People try to talk about the overall mass killing numbers as though they're all Newtowns but those incidents account for around 15% of the overall numbers. So statistically 15 people since 1982? Again, more people are murdered by knives than rifles each year. In 2013 twice as many people were killed by knives than rifles. Would you advocate a banning of sharp objects to maintain consistent philosophy here?
CandideWolf said:
Zhukov said:
Yes, your government gets up to some shady shit. All governments seem to at some point, yours just has the greatest potential capacity for it.
USAUSAUSAUSA
My thoughts on people thinking they need guns to protect itself from the government is that there is some deep-seated desire for the government to attack them just so they can justify it. Not necessarily overt or concious, but it may be hanging around the back of their head.
It is not, however, unreasonable to justify having a gun to protect oneself from home invaders or other sorts of criminals who may themselves have guns or any kind of weapon. If we could magically also remove guns from criminals' hands then I would be a lot more in favor of this but instead it comes across more as taking guns away from legal law abiding customers without doing shit to criminals who obtain theirs illegally. Also, I own a six acre piece of property just outside of town and there are fairly dangerous wild animals from bears to wolves to coyotes in my area. I know something like an AK sounds unreasonable to hunt deer with but a bear in close proximity endangering my family or animals? You need something reliable, high caliber, and hopefully rapid firing. All that in addition to a clean backup pair of pants and underwear would be nice.
Please also remember that the majority of gun related crimes committed in the US are done with illegally obtained firearms. In fact, the current statistic is that 93% of the guns used in crimes aren't obtained legally. 93% is a lot. The vast majority in fact. Also, only 10-15% of gun crimes are committed with stolen guns, so the common belief that criminals most commonly steal guns just doesn't match up with the actual numbers. [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/guns.html] Instead, the vast majority use straw purchase sales.
Straw purchases are already illegal yet gun stores still allow them to happen and many guns reported stolen that are used in crimes can also be the result of straw sales rather than legitimate theft to crime events. The second largest source is from legal but corrupt gun vendors. Also illegal and a HUGE source of gun crime at like 30%.
Likewise, in countries where guns are banned we still see regular rises in gun related crimes and even sometimes a spike in gun-related fatalities in the years following the bans. America does have a bigger problem than others but we also have dynamically different regional difficulties to overcome than smaller countries (land and population sizes) do. Our environment even allows for lucrative crime organizations that can afford higher quality weapons than gangs in other nations may be able to. Even so, look at the impact of gun bans in places like England that are praised right now for having gun control laws in place:
http://www.justfacts.com/images/guncontrol/england-full.PNG
If that chart is correct, the bans did what?
The most reasonably minded individuals could make the argument that stricter rules on legal acquisition of guns isn't going to do shit to the problem of criminals acquiring guns illegally. It's better policing of illegal sale of guns that would impact the vast majority of gun related crimes. Stopping
legal owners from obtaining them is just needless domineering by enforcement of political belief on others. Little different from a religious nut demanding that you adhere to the tenets of their faith just because something you're doing or own makes them feel icky. In other countries, the criminals still obtain weapons. Do you really believe a country with as massive a drug problem as ours can somehow also keep out guns? You're just talking about making the already illegal dark market for guns even more lucrative for large criminal organizations. Yet another revenue stream. Hell, it may even encourage gun manufacturing plants which take up a lot less space than drug fields. All we need is creating a market that encourages criminals to start making armor piercing rounds and high powered guns.
What's also silly is that the vast majority of these calls to ban guns is only on the scary looking assault rifles. What these naive people don't realize is that assault rifles are big and easy to detect and so are responsible for far less deaths each year than knives are. There is legitimately more rationale to ban knives than rifles of almost any kind. Instead, handguns are significantly more likely to be the culprit. Out of 10,000 homicides caused by guns, 75% are likely to be handguns.
If people really wanted to make a difference in crime, then they wouldn't give a shit about rifles and would focus on handguns. Instead we see people reacting with terrified imaginations that just don't coalesce in reality like they think they do. That is not the way to legislate. Public outrage over the rarest events of gun violence isn't a sound reason to make nation-wide laws. Public outrage over a clear and pervasive existence of gun violence in general is.
So what do I propose given this knowledge?
1. Stricter enforcement of existing laws that are not being honored by licensed arms dealers. The laws being on the books don't mean crap if they aren't being followed.
2. A greater attempt to sniff out the bad arms dealers.
3. A greater attempt to find and prosecute the buyer of guns in a straw sale. These people frequently walk into a gun store with the criminal who points to a gun that they then buy under their own license. Gun vendors are supposed to reject these kinds of customers.
These things would impact actual gun violence trends rather than less than 5% of gun violence like current lines of thought are trying to attack just because assault rifles look scary. But assault rifles are not only hard to conceal but are often only obtainable by the affluent (aka the people who aren't likely to commit crimes) unlike handguns which are easily concealable and relatively cheap.
If stricter laws are put in place regarding guns, they should be regarding handguns to at least be consistent with the stated intention of such laws. I would be in favor of handgun storage requirements but those would be very difficult to enforce and would likely only end up affecting families where a tragedy has just occurred and the storage failure has come to light. Many states have trigger lock laws in place though. Again though, stolen guns are used in a very small amount of crimes because it takes too long for a stolen gun to make its way to a criminal.