Unknown Soldier

If there were no or too few guns, you don't think people would switch to other weapons like knives to commit murder? The UK has a high knife crime rate and it seems pretty easy to murder someone with a knife here, but it's commonly known that they only use knives because guns aren't just readily available.

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John Wilkes Booth

It's not that people won't use the other weapons like knives. It's that guns are more efficient tools of death and lead to higher murder rates. Violence won't stop, but murder rates will drop. If you don't believe me take a look at the murder rates of any big American city and compare it to London.

edit - I mean to be honest NYC is a relatively tame example since they actually got their crime somewhat under control by American standards. Take a look at what is happening in Chicago. Do you really think this type of thing would be possible without guns?

Lord Larehip

If someone kills you, you're dead and a gun won't do you any good. If someone pokes a gun in your face and demands your money, I'm sure you're going to pull out your 44 and blow him away. Don't make me laugh.

Lord Larehip

We live in a country where everybody thinks they are Dirty f-ucking Harry and damned few of them have ever needed a gun for anything other than target practice (and probably suck at that). What kind of society are we when everybody has to walk around packing a gatt because they are so afraid of being shot by someone else? And who in their RIGHT mind could possibly conclude that such a state affairs is not only attributable to but inevitable because of the proliferation of guns into every nook and cranny of this country? And bringing up the ridiculously low gun crime rates of England and Japan won't help your case because we rough tough Americans know that they are just a bunch of pussies who wouldn't last a day on the gritty streets of the US--GRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!! We're SO bad!!!!!

Dr_Rez

Way to completely avoid everything I posted and not answer any of the questions I asked. What is your background with guns, are you speaking from a place of fear or knowledge?

I have put a seat belt on for 23 years and never needed it. One day I got in a car accident and it saved my life.....Same idea. Im glad you feel comfortable enough to not have a gun, but I don't. Seriously dude your above comment contains the logic and intelligence of a child.

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Lord Larehip

You haven't read one link I've posted, have you? Stop accusing me of bad logic because you're not educating yourself despite the fact that I've given you plenty of sources by which to do that. Having a gun is NOT like a seat belt. Read the links I gave you! Seat belts do not INCREASE your chances of dying in a car accident. Having a gun in your house QUITE OBVIOUSLY DOES increase your chances of blowing your own damn head off. Is this going too fast for you??

Buying a gun to protect yourself from criminals generally doesn't work because most people murdered by guns in this country are not killed by complete strangers, they are killed by people they knew and usually people they loved. The stories below are typical. I haven't bothered to check husband-shooting-wife or ex-boyfriend-shoots-girlfriend because I'd be here all day cutting and pasting links. But the ones below are all the result of guns in the home. They don't keep you safe. I'm not against people owning guns as long as they understand the risks. But do the research before you buy one and understand the possible consequences. You are more likely to be shot or to shoot someone you love and care about if you have a gun in your house than you are to shoot an intruder. If more people truly understood that, we wouldn't have so many of these needless deaths.

Ohio 12-year-old boy fatally shoots 9-year-old brother, himself in horrific slayings* - NY Daily News

4-Year-Old Kentucky Boy Fatally Shoots 6-Year-Old Sister

5-year-old Kentucky boy fatally shoots 2-year-old sister - CNN.com
Different incident than the previous link

Boy, 13, shoots sister, 6, at Oakland Park home, Broward Sheriff's Office says - Sun Sentinel

New Jersey boy, 4, shoots neighbor in the head with .22-caliber rifle from 15 yards away | Mail Online

Police arrest neighbor in shooting of 3-year-old boy in Flatbush, Brooklyn | 7online.com

Boy Killed Mom Over Firewood Chore - ABC News

boy shoots mother over chores | AT2W
Different story than previous link

Freebase Dali

I feel like sometimes we're advocating for the continued irresponsibility of gun owners by blaming the guns. What about children that die of unintentional poisoning by common household chemicals? Do we blame the chemical, or the dumb ass parent that leaves that sort of thing in easy access of unsupervised children?

Personally, I think any parent whose kid kills someone else with their gun, accidentally or not, should be charged with negligent homicide. I also think that if someone owns a gun and has children, it should be a felony to simply have the weapon accessible to them, and their gun should be taken away.
I do not, however, think that banning guns across the board is going to be effective in the U.S. Not only are there far too many of them, it simply creates a black(er) market for them and shifts the availability to criminals who simply don't follow laws, and disarms those that do.
If the statistics are such that you're more likely to die at the hands of a friend or loved one versus a violent criminal, then it's rather naive to think it wouldn't swing the other way when the only people with the guns are the criminals.

Personally, I've had guns all my life. I've had them during my 6 years in the military, and I know how to handle them. I have a pistol in my bedroom, and I've never accidentally blown off a toe or killed a family member. And maybe my chances of having to defend my own life against a violent criminal are slim in comparison to the alternatives, but that's not the only measuring stick. I'm pretty sure you can find PLENTY of examples of someone defending themselves against violent criminals. It's not nonexistent. The fact that it isn't is enough reason for me to have the chance at even odds, because frankly, I do give a damn about my life. Misguided idealists are not going to rob me of the ability to protect it, no matter how irrelevant they think the danger is.

Just because your life was never threatened does not mean that no one's is. For every single incident where someone's is, that's a real person that is affected by whether they can protect themselves or not. Even if it's not on your own radar. It's still people.

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Lord Larehip

Just wow:

Federal funding for gun research, however, is rare, outside of federal grants that are available to study other injuries. That's deliberate. Since 1996, federal law has prohibited all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health from using funds, "in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control."

The National Rifle Association pushed for the legislation, maintaining that government research into gun violence is unnecessary.

Kids and guns: 'These are not isolated tragedies' - CNN.com

Lord Larehip

Children don't accidentally poison their siblings or a neighborhood kid. I don't think there is any particular epidemic of kids ingesting poison. Kids killing other kids or themselves is incredibly frequent. After everything that has happened, people still leave their guns around for kids to get hold of.

Yoou can't even get the NRA to go for that much. You see, if we charge stupid parents, then more of them won't buy guns and then the gun manufacturers won't haul in as many billions as they currently do every year. In 2012, it was almost $12 billion in sales and nearly a billion in profit:

How the U.S. gun industry became so lucrative

??? The number of guns deaths will QUITE OBVIOUSLY go down since you're removing the major source of them. If only a criminal could shoot you, you have far less chance of being shot because right now ANYBODY can shoot you. This fact is lost on Rez or he pretends it is.

I had a marksman's ribbon--the first ribbon I earned. Don't own a gun now. Never will.

Nobody is saying that aren't any examples of a gun saving someone's life. There must be thousands of such examples and I smile anytime I read of a stupid wretch being shot to death for messing with the wrong person. All I am saying is that the ODDS are that this will not happen to you in your lifetime. The odds are greater that you will, in fact, blow a toe off or kill a neighbor or loved one by accident. It may not happen but the ODDS are GREATER then the odds that you will justifiably shoot someone. Before someone buys a gun, they need to know that and, as long as they do and have weighed the risks and practice rigid gun safety then I have no problem with them. But the truth is, most people buy guns stupidly, wantonly and then they pay a terrible price or a neighbor does or family member. No one should EVER buy a particular firearm because they think it would be cool to own it. You must have a need for it and have a place to stow it safely.

My life HAS been threatened and so was my brother's in another incident. Neither of us own a gun nor required one to neutralize said threats and resorting to guns would have been disastrous. In my case, I would have gotten innocent people killed and I'm thankful none of them had a gun and tried to use or they might have gotten me killed.

If you try to play Dirty Harry and get a family member of mine killed, you're going to need that gun for real when I come looking for you.

John Wilkes Booth

I don't really disagree, though I think that it is really impossible to say for sure exactly what would happen. The interesting thing about it all is that most of the guns on the black market are manufactured in the US and introduced into the population through the legal gun market. The saturation of guns in the US and the apparent ease of access to them is so prevalent that cartels have been smuggling US manufactured guns across the boarder into Mexico and South America in bulk for years. I can imagine that were these guns to be made illegal, you could easily expect to see these stockpiles of weapons come back to haunt us by returning home to fuel the new black gun market.

But to me, while this might make the prospect of eliminating guns not feasible, this dilemma more than anything else demonstrates that we need to be more cautious. I don't think we should ban guns across the board, but we need to regulate the market better so that it's not as easy for the weapons to slip from the legal market into the black market. I can't think of any reason why the govt couldn't do a better job at tracking gun ownership other than the fact that the NRA furiously lobbies against any prospect of such a system.