The Big Gun Control Thread

Yup. Even a near mint condition Mosin goes for around $80 at your local gun store. And it fires a 7.62x54R round that is almost guaranteed to kill you with a single shot. It is accurate to well over 500 meters and is far more capable of a single shot kill than just about any handgun currently manufactured. Nine out of ten dead Nazis would agree. And even after 70 years sitting in cosmolene, the quality of that firearm is many many times better than a comparably priced Lorcin or even a Hi-Point at double the price.

The issue isn't price. It's concealibility.

There are other factors in favor of handguns too. They are quicker on the draw. They are more convenient to carry and store. You are essentially talking a hand held device versus a backpack mounted device.

Also, one quick question: Are rifles still exceedingly more accurate and lethal if fired from the hip?

Sorry to nitpick this thread... I hope the above doesn't come across as snarky =)

I think I may have solved the gun control issue!!

The NRA and gun aficionados argue that the 2nd amendment gives them a right to bear arms. The true translation of this amendment has been the subject of much interpretation but I say for the sake of solving the problem we all just agree that everyone can have a gun, in fact as many as they'd like.

What the 2nd amendment didn't qualify was the type of gun soooooo in the interest of constitutionality, I believe every U.S. citizen should be allowed to own as many muskets as they'd like. In fact, I'm feeling so generous I'll even throw in the ability to conceal carry your musket.

There you have it gun fans, muskets for everyone! In fact, I believe I've found a picture of Paleo's closet!

IMAGE(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3206/3025467493_70eaf5bd45.jpg)

I believe the tapestry behind the guns is a replica of the classic General Washington's Landing in Incheon.

PFFFFTTT! Thats the Boston Massacre newb!

You do know he committed treason, right?

I'm sorry, I do not recall.

alexicacon wrote:

I'm sorry, I do not recall.

You might want to change your location to 'fantasyland'.

iaintgotnopants wrote:
alexicacon wrote:

I'm sorry, I do not recall.

You might want to change your location to 'fantasyland'.

I hear it's somewhere around Guatemala.

Whew, tough room.

I thought the "I'm sorry, I do not recall" line was wonderfully funny.

I watched the whole trial on national TV - that's all he said through the entire questioning when they had Ollie on the witness stand.

Col. North was never charged with, nor formally accused of treason that I've been made aware of. He was acquitted of any wrongdoing and all charges against him were dropped. I *believe* there was some group or another that tried to go to the supreme court to have his acquittal overturned, but the supreme court declined to accept the case.

Frankly, the man did what he was told to do, most likely by the same folks who later put him on trial for it - but such is government and politics in the clandestine ops. Those who make the decisions always leave it up to those who follow orders to take the heat. Ollie was a good marine, he did what he was told, and he later took the heat for it, just like he was told to do. He received an honorable discharge, as a commissioned officer in our military - which generally folks who commit treason are not eligible for.

Now, I don't particularly want to discuss 25 year old trials, that ultimately don't matter to anyone anymore, or especially to the gun control issues going on in 2011.

alexicacon wrote:

He was acquitted of any wrongdoing and all charges against him were dropped.

Erm, close, but not quite. He was granted immunity in exchange for testimonial about the affair before congress, otherwise today he would be known as Ollie the gun-running drug-trafficker instead of Ollie the pundit.

Fair enough ... I just re-read the wiki article on it.

(from Wiki)

While the defense could show no specific instance in which North's congressional testimony was used in his trial, the Court of Appeals ruled that the trial judge had made an insufficient examination of the issue. Consequently, North's convictions were reversed. The Supreme Court declined to review the case. After further hearings on the immunity issue, Judge Gesell dismissed all charges against North on September 16, 1991, on the motion of the independent counsel.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I guess I just labeled it as an acquittal vs. a reversal and then a dismissal of all charges.

6 of 1, half-dozen of other I guess. End result - a great movie starring Harrison Ford.

Ollie the gun running pundit.

I suppose I could just repost links to the dozen or so news stories that have happened over the last couple of days:
Shootings at Wal-mart, shootings at police stations, shootouts with deputies....on and on and on. What's the point when we're in the middle of a gun porn orgy.

Ok, hitting this one quickly too - since I couldn't earlier. (I had to pick one, I picked the other) ...

Crime is a horrible problem, and has been for centuries before guns were ever around. The problem is, all these laws on the books, and more and more laws, only impact those who follow the laws anyway.

The reports I read on the cases this weekend all had the central theme that the crimes were committed by people who were out of jail on parole, or who had existing rap-sheets. By law, those people already should not be allowed to own a gun.

But we see that that didn't help.

Guns save and protect as many lives each year in the hands of safety conscious, law-abiding citizens as they harm in the hands of criminals, those stories just don't garner as much news attention because they're not as sensational.

If more, qualified, individuals would exercise their right to protect themselves and their families, then the casualties and seriousness of incidents could be dramatically reduced, but people have decided to leave it up to undestaffed and overworked police forces for their entire safety, and the police simply cannot be everywhere, plus several courts have ruled that police do not have an individual responsibility to ensure an individual's personal safety - it would be an impossible task.

So, while I agree that such atrocities are awful, we, as a people need to be more vigilant, and take a stand for our own individual safety. But, when someone is willing to die for their cause, it's very difficult to protect against that.

The point here to me, is does anyone truly believe that banning and then confiscating firearms will cause violent crime to decrease? They did that in the UK and crime rates skyrocketed.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...

I'm not going to read this full thread.

I don't have time, and I want to get back to gaming. However, I feel these few photos sum up my opinion on the subject nicely.

My "babies"
EDIT: took it out, no sense wasting bandwidth - you got the idea.

My "closet"
EDIT: took it out, no sense wasting bandwidth - you got the idea.

Me and Ollie shaking hands

EDIT: took it out, no sense wasting bandwidth - you got the idea.

Any questions?

alexicacon wrote:

Guns save and protect as many lives each year in the hands of safety conscious, law-abiding citizens as they harm in the hands of criminals, those stories just don't garner as much news attention because they're not as sensational.

Except the research doesn't back up this myth. There was only one flawed study published in 1994, a telephone survey of less than 5,000 households, where 56 people claimed they used a gun to thwart a crime over the past year. (Actually, the survey question asked was if the person has simply brandished a gun because they felt threatened. There was absolutely no verification that the claim of danger was real, that a crime was in progress, or that the incident actually happened within the last year.) The researcher then extrapolated those unverified claims out to the country's population and, pretso, you got a report saying that guns to foil 2.5 million crimes a year.

Of course other surveys, such as the National Crime Victimization Survey, which has been collecting data since 1973, puts the number of incidences of defensive gun use much, much lower--at about 110,000 a year--which is several hundred thousand incidents short of the number of times guns are used to commit crimes.

So you can either believe that guns stop 20% of all reported crime--since 2.5 million is about 20% of the reported incidents of violent and property crimes--and that the one in three households that have guns are veritable super hero crime stoppers or you can believe that defensive gun use rarely stops crimes and certainly doesn't stop more crimes than 300,000+ times guns are used to commit crimes each year (Hell, more guns are stolen each year than the NCVS reported instances of defensive gun use).

alexicacon wrote:

The point here to me, is does anyone truly believe that banning and then confiscating firearms will cause violent crime to decrease? They did that in the UK and crime rates skyrocketed.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti......

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne......

Except, as the articles point out, no one really knows why UK crime rates increased and out of all the possible reasons mentioned the 1997 Firearms Act was not one of them. (And, just so you know, the banning of handguns affected less than 60,000 people in the UK so you can't really claim that it was firearms that kept crime low in the UK.)

You also might want to know that the UK reports crime differently than other EU countries and the US does. The rest of the EU doesn't log loud arguments as violent crimes. The UK does. In fact, half of all the 'violent crime' reported in the UK doesn't involve anyone who was actually hurt. It's just people screaming at each other and *saying* they'll hurt someone. But it get's logged in the stats as a violent crime..

And you also might want to look at the homicide rate mentioned in the first article's infographic. The UK has a homicide rate of 1.49 per 100,000, while the US rate is much, much higher: 4.3 per 100,000 (two thirds of that is from guns).

So the question is how in the hell does the "ultra-violent" UK have a homicide rate that's so much lower than ours? After all, the pro-gun side always says that if the government takes away their guns that people will just stab each other and yet that simply isn't the case in a country where handguns have been banned.

I agree with the scholars who link corrections to crime rates. We incentivise murder or other violence in many respects with capital punishment, 3 strikes, and sentences for non-violent or moderately violent crimes that are much longer than other nations. This means that our criminals have more to gain from intimidation, battery, or murder. This also serves to create desperation in criminals which results in our high incidence of police chases as well.

You will see a, interesting coincidence, correlation, between "law and order" countries and their violent crime, homicide.

I have addressed this elsewhere. But the US corrections system is a century or two behind the times in many respects. We criminalize addicts and the mentally ill with alarming consistency. People who could easily be rehabilitated through treatment, education, training are hardened and denied future opportunities with the label of felon.

Except, as the articles point out, no one really knows why UK crime rates increased and out of all the possible reasons mentioned the 1997 Firearms Act was not one of them.

It has been mentioned - but I think it's not something "correct" to continue mentioning as a public figure who wants to retain their job.

This article wasn't as recent as the other two, so I didn't include it earlier. My own opinion is anyone making a public statement over the last few years has been instructed to "refrain from speaking against any gun-control policy enacted by the state." But, it has been said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...

compiled by John Bryan, the former head of the firearms intelligence unit at New Scotland Yard.

Mr Bryan said that his report cast doubt on the wisdom of the ban. "The increase in the use of handguns by criminals since the implementation of the 1997 Act clearly raises important questions for policy-makers considering further controls on legally-held firearms."

David Bredin, the director of the Campaign for Shooting, said: "It is crystal clear from the research that the existing gun laws do not lead to crime reduction and a safer place.

"Policy-makers have targeted the legitimate sporting and farming communities with ever-tighter laws. The research clearly demonstrates that it is illegal guns which are the real threat to public safety."

The number of crimes involving handguns has increased, mostly due to a flood of illegally imported weapons and the use of those already in circulation before 1997

So the question is how in the hell does the "ultra-violent" UK have a homicide rate that's so much lower than ours? After all, the pro-gun side always says that if the government takes away their guns that people will just stab each other and yet that simply isn't the case in a country where handguns have been banned.

That's because we aren't just talking about homicides. Most violent crimes, in the US or the UK, are not murders. There's robberies, burglaries, rapes, kidnapping, and the like - all going on as well. And when people are stripped by the government of their right to equally defend and protect themselves and their families, then criminals become bolder - because their prey has no "teeth" ... and they know it.

In every instance within the US where concealed carry laws have been passed, and gun ownership regulation has been loosened in the form of the castle doctrine style laws across the country, crime rates have gone down. For the exact same reason as cited above, if criminals now have to wonder whether their intended victim may be able to defend themselves - and harm/kill the criminal, they're not as apt to commit a crime.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rep/gun-o...

I can't comment on the specifics of why crime rates have skyrocketed in the UK after their weapons ban, but I will say that it's oddly coincidental that that was (and still is) the observed and recorded trend.

Just like I cannot comment beyond the trends - including FBI trends and stats if you want to dig through them here: http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/ind... (the 2010 one isn't finished yet) - but the FBI also shows crime down over the last several years.

Of note however, is over the last several years, states across the nation have enacted castle doctrine laws protecting the right of people to defend themselves, and gun laws have been loosening across the board for concealed carry and good samaritan laws protecting those who choose to defend themselves.

My belief is there's an *inverse* correlation between gun ownership and crime rates. And the numbers tend to support that correlation - on both sides.

And finally: Even more specifically:

the pro-gun side always says that if the government takes away their guns that people will just stab each other and yet that simply isn't the case in a country where handguns have been banned.

Incorrect.

It most assuredly *IS* the case - as evidenced by years of trend analysis following the UK's 1997 gun ban.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/uk...

http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=1323

*

In or about 2006, there were about 60 million (actually closer to 58M, but we'll use the rounded-up number to be kind to hopolophobes) people in the UK as a whole, including Scotland.
*

In England and Wales alone — discounting Scotland — there were over 163 thousand knife crimes.
*

By the end of 2006, there were more than 300 million people in the US as a whole.
*

In the US as a whole, there were fewer than 400 thousand gun crimes.
*

In the UK, based on these numbers, there was one knife crime commited for every 374 people (rounded down).
*

In the US, based on these numbers, there was one gun crime committed for every 750 people — less than half a gun crime per 374 people (about 0.4987 gun crimes per 374 people, actually).
*

That means that, based on these statistics, you are more than twice as likely to be a victim of knife crime in the UK as you are to be a victim of gun crime in the US.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...

Attacks in which a knife was used in a successful mugging have soared, from 25,500 in 2005 to 64,000 in the year to April 2007. The figures mean that each day last year saw, on average, 175 robberies at knife-point in England and Wales – up from 110 the year before and from 69 in 2004-5.

......

The new report, which analyses figures in the British Crime Survey, concludes: “Since it’s extremely difficult if not impossible to limit the availability of knives, and knives are merely a tool used in violent crime, success in fighting knife crime will only come with success in dealing with the underlying causes of violence, fear and insecurity.”

There are reams of documentation detailing exactly the point that if guns are taken away, crime rates go up, dramatically.

And after guns, then does the country crack down on knives? But knives are needed to eat food, cut steak, do common utilities around the house - how does a country ban those?

And after knives, what's next? Crowbars? Baseball bats? Tree limbs? How far down the rabbit hole do we go trying to find some magic piece of legislation to stop crime? We have tens of thousands of gun laws already on the books - and do you know what, criminals ignore every one of them already, so what's a couple more - except a burden and a hindrance on an honest family's means of protecting themselves from the criminals.

If someone is going to commit a crime, and is intent to harm their fellow man, they will find a way to do so.

I do not see going after the tools someone uses as a viable way to remove or combat crime. I just don't. We need to have a comprehensive reform in the way we handle criminals who commit crime. It is the people who are the problem, not the tools.

alexicacon wrote:

Guns save and protect as many lives each year in the hands of safety conscious, law-abiding citizens as they harm in the hands of criminals, those stories just don't garner as much news attention because they're not as sensational.

If you are talking about law enforcement, than yeah, they save and protect lives. If you mean average joe shmoe on the street, no. Not even close. Gun ownership is more of a prophylactic than anything else, making the owner FEEL safer. They don't actually MAKE anyone safer. Most of the fatalities or injuries of homeowners during home invasions, for instance, are caused BY the homeowner's own weapons.

alexicacon wrote:

My belief is there's an *inverse* correlation between gun ownership and crime rates. And the numbers tend to support that correlation - on both sides.

If we're talking correlations, shortly after I moved to Omaha in 2006, the city passed a conceal/carry permit law within city limits. The following 6 months had most fatal shootings in decades, almost triple that of previous years.

EDIT: chart fail!

I'm trying to search for the homeowner invasion thing still, and I see a lot of instances where the homeowner thwarted and stopped/killed the invader, but have not found any where the homeowner was injured yet with their own weapon. I don't doubt it's happened, but I think the wording of that needs to be very careful - if you took it from an article, or depending on where the wording comes from.

Of home invasions - how many invasions was a homeowner injured vs. how many did the home owner successfully thwart the invasion.
2%, 5%, 10%, 40% ?? -- That would be an important number to know.

And of that percentage, how many of those did the homeowner injure themselves - is that the number being referred to by : "Most of the fatalities or injuries of homeowners during home invasions, for instance, are caused BY the homeowner's own weapons." -

because that number may still be a statistically insignificant portion of total home invasions where the homeowner was not injured at all - and would present a case for better training and better practice facilities for gun owners, but not a ban.

Sadly, I can't seem to find any data for that year that seperates gun crimes from "violent crimes" in general, and even then only a mention that there was a 24% percent increase in violent crimes that year. That's what I get for living in the flyover. I remember there being somewhere around 36 fatal shootings that summer, whereas we tend to average around 30 per YEAR, but feel free to discount my statements with inadequate sourcing. I'm just waiting in queu for Rift.

Gun ownership is more of a prophylactic than anything else, making the owner FEEL safer. They don't actually MAKE anyone safer. Most of the fatalities or injuries of homeowners during home invasions, for instance, are caused BY the homeowner's own weapons.

I haven't seen any information to support this - do you have an article or a study detailing it I could review?

If we're talking correlations, shortly after I moved to Omaha in 2006, the city passed a conceal/carry permit law within city limits. The following 6 months had most fatal shootings in decades, almost triple that of previous years.

EDIT: chart fail!

I haven't seen this either. All I'm going on is FBI data and trend statistics with the charts shown.

I don't undestand what you mean by "chart fail!" - could you expound on that somewhat?

No, I don't discount any of it - and I'm not trying to bring you down or call you out on it - so don't think that or take it that way please. That sort of thing is not what I'm about.

I'm just reading trying to find it as well - and I see a mall shooting in 2007, but not much of anything for 2006 mentioned at all.

I don't fault you your opinion at all. I would just like to read up on it because it would be a statistical anomaly and I would like to read more into it - to see if it was gang-related, drugs, what factors were determined to be involved and some of the reports from responding officers and news teams.

I don't have a problem with you citing it - it just piques my curiosity to go read up on it.

Nothing wrong with being part of the "flyover" - I think there's some real nice country out that way that the folks who put it down will never be able to appreciate.

alexicacon wrote:

In every instance within the US where concealed carry laws have been passed, and gun ownership regulation has been loosened in the form of the castle doctrine style laws across the country, crime rates have gone down. For the exact same reason as cited above, if criminals now have to wonder whether their intended victim may be able to defend themselves - and harm/kill the criminal, they're not as apt to commit a crime.

Simply untrue. Ayres & Donohue, in their 2003 paper debunking the oft-cited "More Guns, Less Crime" book by John Lott (and the academic paper it was based on):

No longer can any plausible case be made on statistical grounds that shall-issue laws are likely to reduce crime for all or even most states.

Duwe, Kovandzic, and Moody, in a 2002 study (abstract link only - couldn't find linkable full text) found basically the same thing.

Right-to-carry (RTC) laws mandate that concealed weapon permits be granted to qualified applicants. Such laws could reduce the number of mass public shootings as prospective shooters consider the possibility of encountering armed civilians. However, these laws might increase the number of shootings by making it easier for prospective shooters to acquire guns. We evaluate 25 RTC laws using state panel data for 1977 through 1999. We estimate numerous Poisson and negative binomial models and find virtually no support for the hypothesis that the laws increase or reduce the number of mass public shootings.

In fact, one of their models showed a correlation between passage of concealed carry laws and an increase in violent crime.

Donohue, Aneja, and Zhang published a study in 2010 which showed a stronger correlation:

Overall, the most consistent, albeit not uniform, finding to emerge from the array of models is that aggravated assault rises when RTC laws are adopted. For every other crime category, there is little or no indication of any consistent RTC impact on crime.
alexicacon wrote:

to see if it was gang-related

omaha does have a serious gang problem, and much racial tension to boot. I work in the downtown tourist/old market district, the most heavily policed area of town ironically (keeping tourism money incoming>quelling civil unrest, apparently), and even here there have been shootings and crime in general spilling over with increasing frequency from the surrounding low-income districts. Last fall I showed up at work to find bullet holes from an overnight drive-by. Yay!

alexicacon wrote:

Nothing wrong with being part of the "flyover"

This, my dear sir, is something we will never see eye to eye upon, I fear.

alexicacon wrote:
So the question is how in the hell does the "ultra-violent" UK have a homicide rate that's so much lower than ours? After all, the pro-gun side always says that if the government takes away their guns that people will just stab each other and yet that simply isn't the case in a country where handguns have been banned.

That's because we aren't just talking about homicides. Most violent crimes, in the US or the UK, are not murders. There's robberies, burglaries, rapes, kidnapping, and the like - all going on as well. And when people are stripped by the government of their right to equally defend and protect themselves and their families, then criminals become bolder - because their prey has no "teeth" ... and they know it.

In every instance within the US where concealed carry laws have been passed, and gun ownership regulation has been loosened in the form of the castle doctrine style laws across the country, crime rates have gone down. For the exact same reason as cited above, if criminals now have to wonder whether their intended victim may be able to defend themselves - and harm/kill the criminal, they're not as apt to commit a crime.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rep/gun-o...

I can't comment on the specifics of why crime rates have skyrocketed in the UK after their weapons ban, but I will say that it's oddly coincidental that that was (and still is) the observed and recorded trend.

Just like I cannot comment beyond the trends - including FBI trends and stats if you want to dig through them here: http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/ind... (the 2010 one isn't finished yet) - but the FBI also shows crime down over the last several years.

Of note however, is over the last several years, states across the nation have enacted castle doctrine laws protecting the right of people to defend themselves, and gun laws have been loosening across the board for concealed carry and good samaritan laws protecting those who choose to defend themselves.

My belief is there's an *inverse* correlation between gun ownership and crime rates. And the numbers tend to support that correlation - on both sides.

And your belief is simply wrong. If that was true, then the US would be the most crime free country on the planet considering the number of guns we have.

Your basic premise--and that of the NRA link you provided--overlooked something fundamental. A smaller and smaller percentage of Americans own guns. Only 30% or so of households actually own a firearm, down from 40% in the 1990s. So while the number of guns Americans own "have risen by 90 million" they aren't being bought by everyone. They're going to people like you who have an entire gun safe full of them. That's backed by national surveys, which point out that the top 20% of gun owners own 55% of all the guns in the country.

The entire idea that more guns equals less crime comes from some deeply flawed models and analysis the economist John Lott did back in the early 90s. His claims were based on studying crime from 1977 to 1992 in the ten states that had permissive concealed carry laws at the time. Other folks smarter than me have torn apart his research, including Ayres and Donohue, Webster, and Lambert.

When Ayres and Donohue reran Lott's model using data going up to 1997 and expanded it 13 additional states that had new permissive carry laws they found something Lott failed to mention: carry laws were associated with crime increases in more states than they were associated with decreases, meaning his original claim was bunk. They also found that states that didn't have concealed carry laws experienced a greater decrease in crime after 1992 than the states that had concealed carry laws.

Had Lott's original study been done a few years later, after the crack epidemic peaked and crime began to fall everywhere, we wouldn't have to put up with the myth that more guns equals less crimes. I mean it's incredibly simplistic to say that because a fraction of the population owns a gun and a minuscule portion of them actually carry it on them that guns are responsible for all the drop in crime since the 1990s. That ignores demographic trends, economics, everything.

alexicacon wrote:
Gun ownership is more of a prophylactic than anything else, making the owner FEEL safer. They don't actually MAKE anyone safer. Most of the fatalities or injuries of homeowners during home invasions, for instance, are caused BY the homeowner's own weapons.

I haven't seen any information to support this - do you have an article or a study detailing it I could review?

How about "Investigating the link between gun possession and gun assault" by Charles Branas? Seems when you pack heat you are 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to be killed as someone who is unarmed. If the people who were carrying actually have time to resist they become 5.45 times more likely to be killed.

Or Arthur Kellermann's research that found that just having a gun in your house increases your chance of being murdered 2.7 times (and your chance of it being a gun-related homicide by 4.7 times). He also found that "even after the exclusion of firearm-related suicides, guns kept at home were involved in the death of a member of the household eighteen times more often than in the death of an [intruder]."

As ruhk pointed out, guns don't actually make you safer. They make you and your family less safe and give you the false courage that typically ends up with you getting shot.