This post is likely to be unforgivably long. I've also got a couple shots of Vodka in my system, so I might be in a bit of a ramble and rude. You have my apologies in advance, but here is my full, blunt opinion. If you want it summarized, here it is: Gun Control is factually proven to work. Australia has made that point clear. The low number of gun-related fatalities in countries with gun control makes that clear.
Here's an amusing look at said gun laws by John Oliver, who is far more charismatic than I. I'm often dismayed by the black and white view of this issue. So, let me get a few bullet-points out of the way.
- Assault rifles should be legal to own. It's irrational to ban these when they make up a tiny fraction of fatalities in comparison to hand guns. Yes, that does happen to go against what Canada and Australia thinks, despite my using John Oliver's piece about Australia as an example in favour of gun control. You can either take that as hypocrisy, or critical honesty.
- Emphasis on control: Set up a licensing system so that those who want access to progressively deadlier or more exotic firearms need greater (but still reasonably acquirable) permissions in order to do so. Again, the likelihood that someone will go on a killing spree with a .50 calibre sniper versus a hand gun is miniscule.
- Set up tracers in firearms so that if one is reported missing or stolen, it can be found. "What if the government spies on me with it?!" To be blunt, the government is already spying on your Internet usage, phone calls, the phone itself, text messages, payroll, medical records, et cetera. If you sincerely draw the line at tracking your firearm in terms of privacy, you've got issues. Resolve those prior things first and then we can talk about removing tracers in your firearms.
- No, I don't believe gun control alone stops crime. Criminals will commit crime with or without firearms. However, just because a system doesn't completely prevent a crime, doesn't mean it has no impact on that crime. Just because we prosecute people for committing murder, doesn't mean people will stop committing murder. Just because we require people to have driver's licenses for motor vehicles, doesn't mean people won't drive drunk or break the law with them. If you argue against gun control for this reason, realize you can apply the exact same argument to driver's licenses. Except cars aren't instant death flingers.
- Maintain a national database (firearms registry) that details who owns what firearms. That way, if for some reason a person loses their certificate of ownership or similar document, they can simply bring 1-2 pieces of photo ID to a government office to reacquire it. Also useful in case the police impound a firearm off the street in cases of firearms reported missing or stolen.
So, just to reiterate:
I don't think any gun should be illegal, so long as it's still classified as a firearm (sorry artillery enthusiasts), but I do believe there needs to be licenses and control measures in place for them. Why? Because when a couple of teenagers can go into a Target and buy hundreds of rounds of ammunition without so much as an ID to go shoot up Columbine,
you've got a fucking problem. Now, to go over a few of the points in this thread I found especially confusing or irrational.
Please note: If I think a point of yours is irrational, that doesn't then imply that I think
you are irrational. Most of the people I'm going to call out here are people I've already spoken with and know, like Nydanna and her lovely ferret, or Dervish and his CHARMANDER! Everyone is entitled to having irrational opinions or statements from time to time. Including me. Just consider this someone who is questioning you, not someone who hates you or thinks you're dumb.
I was against gun control, under the reasoning that more guns reduce crime and the incentive to commit crime, but I agree with this.
More access to instant death flingers does not then reduce the rate of instant death flinger-related fatalities. This is like saying that increased populations of wild bears in cities somehow
reduces bear-related fatalities. No. No it doesn't. Now, what
causes people to use firearms to murder
other people obviously isn't the mere presence of firearms: A gun is just a tool, just like any other tool. However, to believe that more firearms reduces gun crime is irrational, because the US has a shitmetricfucksillyton of guns, and it has
tons of gun crime.
Gun control is fine and dandy, but people are missing out on one major factor. Most criminals are not getting their guns legally! Do you really think they care if more rules and regulations are put on owning/buying a gun? Hell no! They can rob a bank, get a few grand, and buy one from the guy down the street who doesn't care who he's selling it to.
If we can't stop
all gun crime with gun control, we obviously shouldn't have gun control. If we can't stop
all drug crime, we obviously shouldn't have drug laws.
Please stop using this argument, there are much better arguments to use than this in support of firearms.
Gun Laws do not stop Gun Crime from happening.
Source.
Guns aren't the problem, tolerance for people with mental illnesses is.
Mate, I have a mental disorder. By sheer statistical odds, someone you know and call a friend
probably has a disorder. I don't wear it on my chest, I don't ask for pity, but I'm making it known to you here and now because by your logic,
my existence shouldn't be tolerated. I don't know about you, but I think we've had some pretty good conversations before. I'll chalk this one up to generalizing a group of people, and not malicious intent. I really hope you don't look at me in a poorer light after this merely because of a circumstance of my birth.
Australia, for instance, still has pretty high homicide numbers for a country that has an almost total ban on firearms,
Dammit Dervish. I agree with the statement that banning all firearms doesn't solve the problem, because the underlying problem is people
being motivated to murder in the first place, but
gun control works... As part of an overlying system of measures that should be used to reduce violence. Yes, I agree with you, Canada's weapon laws in general are fucking stupid.
Skallagrim talks about knife laws in Canada, and he makes several good points about how fucking idiotic our laws can be about these things. I agree it needs to be overhauled and a lot of these straight ban measures should be abolished, they're illogical.
However, one doesn't need to keep pulling the same circlejerked claim by the pro-guns folks of the US that gun control only has other forms of violence skyrocket. Because
statistics says otherwise.
This is great! It means that
our laws to protect citizens are fucking working. While that doesn't mean they're perfect (they never will be), that typically means to adjust the systems we have in place. Not go about deleting them. Gun Control is one measure of many: It's part of a bigger system of laws that maintain order.
Just because things are better now, doesn't mean we should go abolishing a measure meant to maintain order. You don't leave your door unlocked just because there's a low rate of theft in your neighbourhood.
If you ban guns, knives, pencils, rope... anything that can be turned into a weapon might as well be banned/controlled as well.
Guns can fling instant death from several hundred feet away with little training. Knives at least require melee range, but most governments actually do have knife laws too. (They can also be equally daft in what gets banned and what gets kept, because legislators are fucking Hollywood dumb.) Pencils and rope are not reasonable weapons in the same sense as guns and knives: Pencils are used to draw things, rope is used to tie things. Knives are used to cut and gut, and bullets are made to pierce. Knives and guns are tools, but they're intrinsically
violent tools by nature, so comparing them to non-violent tools by nature is a bit naive.
However, you are absolutely right that screening is a measure that should be in place, and that banning all firearms doesn't magically make crime go away. So there's good points.
To be fair, the US is massive-- Canada has a lot of space geographically, but population wise, they've got nothing on the over 300 million that the States have. Comparing anything relating to murder/suicide when both countries have such differences is ridiculous.
Actually, there's things like murder rate per capita that are easily comparable: Because it measures the number of people skullfucking each other like cavemen at a rate of # per 100,000.
So if you have 50 murders in a town of 500,000 people, that's a per capita rate of 10:100,000. If you have a rate of 40 murders in a town of 200,000 people, that's a rate of 20:100,000. Ergo, the town with 200,000 people has twice the murder rate of the town of 500,000 people: 10 to 100,000 versus 20 to 100,000.
Perfectly rational way to go about it, addresses population disparity. Because even addressing population disparity, the US has much higher rates of violent crime in general than Canada. However, that's not exclusively because of a lack of gun control: You've also got significant presences of gangs (especially gangs as a result of lingering racial divide era) and the ever so infamous drug war. Those both contribute, and probably more than a lack of gun control if I'm going to be honest. However, I don't have the sheer data on that on hand right now. So take that with a grain of salt.
I could be wrong, but I don't think any legitimate arguments for gun control even exist.
I don't want to be murdered by a lunatic with a firearm.
Regardless, Canada makes an interesting comparison to the US because despite popular opinion, firearm ownership is very widespread in Canada and we have the highest US cultural intake of any country in the world, yet we still manage to have respectable numbers compared to other developed nations in regards to homicide and violent crime. Switzerland, for instance, has one of the highest rates of firearm ownership in the world and has very low violent crime rates. It suggests that the ability to obtain and own firearms is less important than cultural cues and government oversight, or the lack-there-of.
I don't really disagree. However, it should be noted that Switzerland only has about half as many guns per household as the US does, and
even they still have some form of gun control. Plus, their own people are starting to push for more gun control.
If we need to ban guns because they are dangerous and allow an individual to cause large scale damage, doesn't that mean we need to ban fire?
#1: Fire is not an instant death flinger that can cause pinpoint murder, instantly, from several hundred feet away.
#2: Actually yes, lighting things on fire willy nilly is illegal. It's called
arson. Whether you're lighting trees on fire, or buildings on fire, or anything that we could feasible use on fire--that
is illegal. If you're in the middle of a drought, you can't even start campfires in your back yard.
So... Yes. Fire
is illegal, except in certain,
legally regulated circumstances. Like owning a box of matches to light your candle, or owning a hunting rifle to kill some deer.
Also, to some of the above posters. Looking at the US as a whole is terribly misleading at the effectiveness of gun control because the laws concerning it aren't uniform. A state by state breakdown would make a more sound argument.
This is a fair point. It should probably be a federal law, except the US doesn't work on common sense like that.
Hm, those are some interesting points ya'll are making.
Yes. Yes they are. Now I'm going to take a third shot of vodka. Y'all have been warned.
But that's a good point I kind of touched on but didn't really delve into, but I honestly think that if the US government had federal firearms laws and legislation instead of leaving it up to each of the States there'd be a noticeable downturn in firearms crime. Like I said, a big problem is the legal loopholes and how easy it is to obtain the firearms in some States verses others with virtually no oversight.
I love you. In a not gay way...
Charmander.
Well I mean, I could still use the parking lot as a minefield... It doesn't take a ton of creativity... Crazy people are a problem.
Btw, forgive me if I'm being naive, but for Austrlia's murderer rate, does that assume a murderer committed with a firearm? If it does, I'm not sure it is a fair comparison.
Yes, crazy people do crazy fucking things. That is explicitly why horrible horrible land mines are generally not for sale. In fact, most first world countries don't even use them anymore, because it turns out leaving a whole field full of unkaboomed mines leaves many
scattered children giblets several years running.
I'm not sure it does, because I've got the statistics up above...
Personally, I prefer to stay away from guns entirely, but if someone else wants to own one for protection or something, I really don't care that much. It's when people start collecting loads of guns for no other reason than just to have them, that's when it starts to bother me; you really only need the one, anymore and I get the impression that you're planning something devious. Unless you like to go hunting, then I guess owning multiple guns is acceptable in that case.
Generally most people who have large collections of guns have them because they like guns. Like collecting computers, or coins. Vast majority of such collections never get used against people. Mainly because most people who go murdering with firearms are generally the sorts that only recently got their hands on said firearms anyway, rather than collecting them over several years. The deer won't know what hit them though.
So idk, it's complicated.
Leave it to insanity wolf's girlfriend to come up with the mellow, reasonable statement.
THAT SAID, I recognize that this is an extreme example. But I have always been of the opinion that you have to go too far before you truly know where to draw the line.
You know I've been a rampaging cynical auto-correcting dick up until now, but I figured I'd highlight this just to be the person to tell you that critical self-evaluation like this, and being willing to argue from the shoes of the opposing view, is good. Like, really good. Like, that is a mark of immense strength of character and intelligence on your part.
You keep doing this, upstanding citizen. Regardless of the fact that we have opposing views.
That a person can collect rifles and whatnot and just keep fully functional automatic weapons in their home is, frankly, scary.
The majority of gun crimes are committed with hand guns, not automatic weaponry. This is like banning katana when the majority of blade-related murders are the result of people carrying knives around 4-6 inches in length, y'know?
Anyone and everyone should take the time for gun education.
That and everyone capable of doing so should own a gun, be properly trained with it and have a conceal and carry permit. Imagine if everyone were doing so, gun control by the populace. Some jackass runs into a mall with the intent to shoot people for fun will be stopped dead in their tracks, no pun intended.
Because you know what resolves mass murder? Arming a population with instant death flingers and putting it into their head that they can stop murder by
murdering. This will end well.
Because both sides seem to argue that it's a complete ban. Like an overnight desicion that every gun in the country should be brought in and destroyed.
Because the NRA and other gun advocacy groups tend to go absolutely fucking batshit every time gun control gets brought up. It's like being in a room full of creationists and saying "evolution": The overreactions are real. The insane gibberish and nonsense and fearmongering is real. It's why I'm writing this post: Because in my buzzed stupour, I am hoping that, by targeting every single logical flaw I can find and offering a rational middle-ground opinion, with suggestions that can be tweaked and changed, that some small, insignificant measure of progress can be made.
Huh. I ran out of things. The other points made afterwards are reasonable.
I guess that's it then. Hope this is useful information with a maybe useful opinion by a drunk ferret.