Gun Control 5

[kg1982]

Yep.. See most Americans don't even think that the federal government should be nagging them about what they eat. Personal decisions.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

kg,

And?

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

One thing that needs to be examined in the wake of this shooting is access to mental healthcare.

[RWHamel]

I'm of the opinion that one of the motivations for these douche-bags is the notoriety that this generates. So forbid the press to report on these events.

[kg1982]

My theory is that this is not so much about gun control but about a larger philosophy concerning gov't. There is a huge overlap in the U.S. in terms of support for gun control and support for "nanny state" policies in other areas. Bloomberg and the Obamas definitely think that the gov't has the right to meddle in people's lives and "help" them make good choices. The most egregious are the soda ban in NYC and Michelle Obama's school lunch policies. If what seems to be the overwhelmingly non-U.S. posters agree with those sorts of policies, then that suggests that gun control is just part of a larger gap between how the U.S. and other areas of the world view the gov't.

[Robin Of House Hill]

Lorien,

I believe his point is that RPGs aren't available on the public market and you don't see criminals in the US toting RPGs because of that ban.

Ser Scot,

In the context of this topic, I'm not ruling anything out. :D

Surely though, if less people had guns, less people would need guns... no?

If you disarm the law-abiding, but not those who would use guns for criminal purposes, no.

I've got a feeling that if you face an armed intruder who's really willing to hurt you, no gun would be of any help whatsoever. And if this hypothetical intruder (even if armed) is not really willing to hurt you, he would probably ends up dead himself anyway, if you had a gun.

Not true. As I mentioned in another thread, the interior of my home is arranged to give me an advantage. Your second sentence brings an amusing sequence to mind.

Me: Are you going to harm me?

Intruder: No.

Me: Ok, then, wait a moment while I put my gun away.

I needed a good chuckle.

I'll try to explain:

If the average armed burglar knows that it's a remote possibility that the owners of the property he's intruding will respond with deatly fire, he is very likely to try to avoid at all costs to kill anyone. Obviously, the penalty for stealing is much lesser than the penalty for killing (even if the discount the moral discussion).

In other words: if I discover on armed intruder coming into my house, my chances of survival would be much higher if I don't offer resistence than they would be if I tried to shoot him.

ETA:

One thing that you should take into account is that this is an international board, with the majority of posters being from outside the US. And in many of the countries those posters come from, the need for gun control is a matter both left and right agrees with.

So, you think I should put a sign on my door saying, "Warning. Intruders will be met with deadly fire."?

The folks in some countries may find this aspect of US law strange, as I find some of their laws strange. I just don't post page after page after page, about them.

[James Arryn]

My theory is that this is not so much about gun control but about a larger philosophy concerning gov't. There is a huge overlap in the U.S. in terms of support for gun control and support for "nanny state" policies in other areas. Bloomberg and the Obamas definitely think that the gov't has the right to meddle in people's lives and "help" them make good choices. The most egregious are the soda ban in NYC and Michelle Obama's school lunch policies. If what seems to be the overwhelmingly non-U.S. posters agree with those sorts of policies, then that suggests that gun control is just part of a larger gap between how the U.S. and other areas of the world view the gov't.

Not really. The fact that you see gun control as indicative of a loss of personal liberty doesn't mean it translates that way for others. To most of the rest of the developed world, it is a concession along the lines of not being allowed to own a tank or build a bomb in your basement. It ranks much lower on the degree of 'egregious interference' in other people's choices than, say, banning gay marriage.

So, no...this is not about America being uniquely free...it is about America being unique in where and how it decides to exercise freedom.

[Galactus]

If you disarm the law-abiding, but not those who would use guns for criminal purposes, no.

Actually, yes. There's no magical distinction between "the law-abiding" and "the criminal" beyond the fact that the criminal has committed a, well, crime.

[sologdin]

likely that comprehensive federal gun control in the US is something on which only nixon may go to china. BHO should talk tough and then let it go. like tzanth notes upthread, it'd basically forefeit the presidency for the dems for a generation. let some GOP cowboy get elected on an NRA platform, and then suggest comprehensive regulation after a few more instances like this latest.

[Roose Seal]

If you disarm the law-abiding, but not those who would use guns for criminal purposes, no.

Adam Lanza was a perfectly law-abiding citizen. Until he went on and shot 26 people.

The folks in some countries may find this aspect of US law strange, as I find some of their laws strange. I just don't post page after page after page, about them.

I'd like to know what kind of laws you are referring to, but I'm willing to bet they don't lead to innocent people being murdered in cold blood.

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

Why don't you open a thread defending gun ownership, so that you will draw out all your fellow-supporters of gun ownership. There are plenty of them on this board. Perhaps you guys can come up with alternative ideas on how to reduce gun violence.

A group of neighbors and I are going to the next School Board meeting to push for a licensing/certification/training program permitting a teacher or school administrator to be armed. Right now, there is an armed security guy in the high school, but nobody in the other schools to protect the little ones from an intruder. Wonderful. And if we trust police officers/security officerts to carry them, why not properly screened/certified (and annually recertified)/trained teachers?

If someone were to tell me that there was going to be a shooter in my son's school tomorrow, and I could choose to have a armed teacher in that school or not, I'd choose the armed teacher every time. An armed, trained teacher has a much lower chance of hitting a student by accident than does the armed, unchallenged guy who is deliberately trying to kill them. At a minimum, a gunman receiving fire is going to be distracted from slaughtering the unarmed, and perhaps give more time for the police to arrive or kids to escape. There are always going to be bad people who will hurt the innocent. The way you stop them is to have good people willing and able to defend them. I'm personally unaware of any incidents where a lawfully armed security guard/off duty cop/teacher in a school went nuts, and engaged in a similar massacre, so I don't see practical evidence of a significant downside.

From the Atlantic -- hardly a hotbed of conservativism -- on the issue:

Other measures could be taken as well. Drum-style magazines like the kind James Holmes had that night in Aurora, which can hold up to 100 rounds of ammunition and which make continuous firing easy, have no reasonable civilian purpose, and their sale could be restricted without violating the Second Amendment rights of individual gun owners. But these gun-control efforts, while noble, would only have a modest impact on the rate of gun violence in America. Why? Because it’s too late.

There are an estimated 280 million to 300 million guns in private hands in America—many legally owned, many not. Each year, more than 4 million new guns enter the market. This level of gun saturation has occurred not because the anti-gun lobby has been consistently outflanked by its adversaries in the National Rifle Association, though it has been. The NRA is quite obviously a powerful organization, but like many effective pressure groups, it is powerful in good part because so many Americans are predisposed to agree with its basic message.

America’s level of gun ownership means that even if the Supreme Court—which ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment gives citizens the individual right to own firearms, as gun advocates have long insisted—suddenly reversed itself and ruled that the individual ownership of handguns was illegal, there would be no practical way for a democratic country to locate and seize those guns.

Many gun-control advocates, and particularly advocates of a total gun ban, would like to see the United States become more like Canada, where there are far fewer guns per capita and where most guns must be registered with the federal government. The Canadian approach to firearms ownership has many attractions—the country’s firearm homicide rate is one-sixth that of the U.S. But barring a decision by the American people and their legislators to remove the right to bear arms from the Constitution, arguing for applying the Canadian approach in the U.S. is useless....

....Which raises a question: When even anti-gun activists believe that the debate over private gun ownership is closed; when it is too late to reduce the number of guns in private hands—and since only the naive think that legislation will prevent more than a modest number of the criminally minded, and the mentally deranged, from acquiring a gun in a country absolutely inundated with weapons—could it be that an effective way to combat guns is with more guns?

Today, more than 8 million vetted and (depending on the state) trained law-abiding citizens possess state-issued “concealed carry” handgun permits, which allow them to carry a concealed handgun or other weapon in public. Anti-gun activists believe the expansion of concealed-carry permits represents a serious threat to public order. But what if, in fact, the reverse is true? Mightn’t allowing more law-abiding private citizens to carry concealed weapons—when combined with other forms of stringent gun regulation—actually reduce gun violence?

....Many of the worst American massacres end not in the capture of the gunman but in his suicide. In the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, for instance, the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, killed himself as the police were set to capture him. But in other cases, massacres were stopped early by the intervention of armed civilians, or off-duty or retired police officers who happened to be nearby.

In 1997, a disturbed high-school student named Luke Woodham stabbed his mother and then shot and killed two people at Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi. He then began driving toward a nearby junior high to continue his shooting spree, but the assistant principal of the high school, Joel Myrick, aimed a pistol he kept in his truck at Woodham, causing him to veer off the road. Myrick then put his pistol to Woodham’s neck and disarmed him.

On January 16, 2002, a disgruntled former student at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, had killed three people, including the school’s dean, when two students, both off-duty law-enforcement officers, retrieved their weapons and pointed them at the shooter, who ended his killing spree and surrendered.

In December 2007, a man armed with a semiautomatic rifle and two pistols entered the New Life Church in Colorado Springs and killed two teenage girls before a church member, Jeanne Assam—a former Minneapolis police officer and a volunteer church security guard—shot and wounded the gunman, who then killed himself....

[Editorial note -- this incident is particularly scary since this guy had already killed four people that same day, and was armed with over 1000 rounds. Such incidents rarely get the prominence of Columbine, the Aurora theater, or the Sandy Hook massacre precisely because more people weren't killed, so it was less newsworthy. On the broader point, the article is long, but cites research (not just factual anecdotes) that there are between 108,000 (low end) and 2.43 million (high end) instances where private citizens have used (usually brandishing rather than actually shooting) a gun to deter a crime each year in the U.S.]

It is an unexamined assumption on the part of gun-control activists that the possession of a firearm by a law-abiding person will almost axiomatically cause that person to fire it at another human being in a moment of stress. Dave Kopel, the research director of the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute, in Denver, posits that opposition to gun ownership is ideological, not rational. “I use gay marriage as an analogue,” he said. “Some people say they are against gay marriage because they think it leads to worse outcomes for kids. Now, let’s say in 2020 all the social-science evidence has it that the kids of gay families turn out fine. Some people will still say they’re against it, not for reasons of social science, but for reasons of faith. That’s what you have here in the gun issue.”

There is no proof to support the idea that concealed-carry permit holders create more violence in society than would otherwise occur; they may, in fact, reduce it. According to Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and the author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, permit holders in the U.S. commit crimes at a rate lower than that of the general population. “We don’t see much bloodshed from concealed-carry permit holders, because they are law-abiding people,” Winkler said. “That’s not to say that permit holders don’t commit crimes, but they do so at a lower rate than the general population. People who seek to obtain permits are likely to be people who respect the law.” According to John Lott, an economist and a gun-rights advocate who maintains that gun ownership by law-abiding citizens helps curtail crime, the crime rate among concealed-carry permit holders is lower than the crime rate among police officers....

....It is also illogical for campuses to advertise themselves as “gun-free.” Someone bent on murder is not usually dissuaded by posted anti-gun regulations. Quite the opposite—publicly describing your property as gun-free is analogous to posting a notice on your front door saying your home has no burglar alarm. As it happens, the company that owns the Century 16 Cineplex in Aurora had declared the property a gun-free zone....

http://www.theatlant...ingle_page=true

An article from the Cato Institute contains another study confirming the large number of crimes in which a gun was used successfully to protect the victim, using reported newspaper stories as the basis rather than self-reporting. It also contains studies regarding gun accidents, violent crime rates after passage of concealed carry laws, (including, for those in college, a nice comparison of the violent crime rate nosediving after Colorado State permitted concealed carry in 2003, versus a significant increase at gun-banning UC.), as well as a very long recitation of reported news stories (only a small fraction of the total) describing the circumstances where people used guns to defend themselves. Worth a read for anyone who doubts the worth of private weapons in protecting innocent citizens. It's a long read simply because there are so many incidents actually described as factual illustrations, which themselves are just a subset of the total number of incidents.. Just one example from the many, many pages of such incidents:

In March 2010 Stephen Pritchett attacked an 82-year-old woman in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Pritchett approached the woman and said, “This is your day. You are too old to be alive anyway.” He then “grabbed her cane and started beating her.” At that point, she drew a handgun and fired at Pritchett. She did not hit him, but unsurprisingly, the gunshot drew attention to her problem, bringing employees and then police.

http://www.cato.org/...ugh-Targets.pdf

I'm posting this not to engage in some extended debate with pendants, but simply to offer up a couple sources of information for people who may want to read these articles in their entirety so they can be informed as to both sides of the argument. My personal, direct concern is enhancing the security of my kids in their school, and to the extent others here may wish to consider similar points with respect to their kids, I'm offering this as an information resource. I personally think that having someone able to protect my kids from a gunmen is better than not having someone there, so I hope one result of this is a movement to get someone properly screened/trained/licensed in every school, because as a practical matter, it is impossible for cops to get there as quickly as someone who is already on the scene.

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

Adam Lanza was a law abiding citizen who was mentally ill and needed to be treated in a hospital setting, not on an outpatient basis. He was not treated in a hospital setting and the result is a tragedy.

[Galactus]

1. There actually is a right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, which is why Americans talk about it. There are also much wider and more absolute rights to freedom of speech and assembly in the U.S. than in Europe. There are no laws against hate speech in the U.S.

This is mainly irrelevant. It doesen't answer anythign either way. (I mean, it's not that the constitution cannot be amended) "It's in the constitution!" is the weakest argument for anything in the history of ever.

2. The gun violence argument is a correlation thing again. The state with some of the laxest gun regulations in the U.S. is the noted red state of Vermont (yes that is a joke..Vermont has a Socialist Senator). Vermont also doesn't have much gun violence. It is a fairly rural state and doesn't have alot of diversity. Sweden and Finland probably are alot like Vermont. Most of the gun violence in the U.S. takes place in poor urban areas and is gang violence.

The US murder-rate is just way out of whack with all other criminal indicators. The crime rate in the US and say, Sweden, isn't that different per capita really, except the US has about three times the murder (per capita) If gang violence was the cause you'd probably see a greater discrepancy in other gang-related violence (robbery, assault, racketeering, drug-dealing, whatever else gangs do) but it's not really there.

Also, while gang-related violence is responsible for some degree of the difference, the fact remains that even "normal" interpersonal violence is out of whack in the US: Your neighbour is more likely to kill you over a dispute, your husband is more likely to kill you, you're more likely to get shot after angering someone at a bar. And this is probably at least partially attributable to the fact that guns are easily availible and easy to use: There's very little gap between "I want to kill that guy." and "I've now killed that guy." than in Sweden where you have to use a bread-knife (or, if you live in the countryside, an axe, if you really want to shoot someone and own both a rifle and a licensce you're going to have to unlock your safe and assemble your rifle before you can shoot someone)

3. I think this is just a difference in governing philosophy. Lots of Americans just don't like having big government tell them what to do. There is a derisive term for it called the nanny state. Most of the biggest gun control advocates just like meddling in people's lives. For instance, Mayor Bloomberg's current crusade is against large sodas.

But if that was the case you'd see that kind of argument from liberals in Europe too. And by and large you don't.

[sologdin]

Why? Because it’s too late.

There are an estimated 280 million to 300 million guns in private hands in America—many legally owned, many not. Each year, more than 4 million new guns enter the market.

true enough. comprehensive regulation might include mechanisms to strip the market for replacement parts, maintenance materials, and so on. let the firearms out there fall into non-functional obsolescence.

[Larry of the Lawn]

I can't speak for all responsible gun owners, but I would not be surprised in the least to see many gun owners in the US completely willing to accept stricter regulations. I would have absolutely no issue with making handguns extremely difficult to obtain, ban semi-auto rifles, limit magazine capacity at 5 or 6, and require that all firearms be secured when not in use, even if there are no children in the home.

There is a very loud and vocal response from people who want to ban guns entirely and also from those gun owners unwilling to make any concessions towards tighter gun control. This is pure speculation but I think that there is also a very large number of reasonable people that simply want to reduce the incidence of gun violence but also understand that a blanket ban is not necessary to achieve this goal.

At the minimum, every gun sale needs to be recorded, and all owners licensed and registered. The way things are right now, too many irresponsible people have access to guns.

[Galactus]

And if we trust police officers/security officerts to carry them, why not properly screened/certified (and annually recertified)/trained teachers?

Because the more people involved the greater the chance of accidents or mishaps.

If someone were to tell me that there was going to be a shooter in my son's school tomorrow, and I could choose to have a armed teacher in that school or not, I'd choose the armed teacher every time.

But you can't do that. What you can choose is to have a loaded gun at the school every day, a loaded gun that might fall into the hands of one or the kids, or one of the teachers might snap and use it. Or it might get lost, or whatever.

[Robin Of House Hill]

Adam Lanza was a perfectly law-abiding citizen. Until he went on and shot 26 people.

Adam Lanza was 20 years old and could not legally purchase firearms. I'm waiting for more information before talking about his mental illness.

I'd like to know what kind of laws you are referring to, but I'm willing to bet they don't lead to innocent people being murdered in cold blood.

The laws I am referring to, have to do with peoples' freedom, rather than homicide. Mentioning examples in this thread would be a distraction.

[Roose Seal]

Adam Lanza was a law abiding citizen who was mentally ill and needed to ve treated in a hospital setting, not on an outpatient basis.

Which is why mental healthcare should be at the center of the debate as well.

But the fact remains that it's impossible to tell with absolutely certainty if someone will at some point in their lives commit a crime until they, well, commit one.

So until we live in a Minority Report state, drastic action needs to be taken.

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

true enough. comprehensive regulation might include mechanisms to strip the market for replacement parts, maintenance materials, and so on. let the firearms out there fall into non-functional obsolescence.

Well, that isn't pendantic, so....

The vast majority of guns will easily last for decades absent replacement parts. But the point of the article is that would be a bad idea anyway. That given the incredible prevalence of guns in the U.S. -- hundreds of millions of them -- people defending themselves and other innocents from those who commit gun crimes is likely to be a far more effective measure in limiting gun-related deaths of innocents then depriving the law-abiding of the ability to protect themselves. Because almost by definition, the last people to be deprived of guns are the ones willing to acquire/retain them illegally.

There are rational reasons, not simply emotion-based caricatures of stupid Americans irrationally wedded to their guns, in favor of permitting the law-abiding to retain guns. They may not be sufficiently convincing reasons for some, which is fine. But I think evidence and argument on both sides should be heard on an issue of this importance

[Robin Of House Hill]

So until we live in a Minority Report state, drastic action needs to be taken.

Funny that you mentioned this. I just purchased the movie with an eye to examining the possibilities, after stripping away the sci-fi BS.