To gun, or not to gun?

Woo, guns!

Anyway, gun control vs not gun control vs maybe a little gun control.
http://jpfo.org/articles-assd03/18-good-gun-facts.htm
http://www.debate.org/opinions/is-gun-control-bad-yes-or-good-no
http://www.officer.com/article/10684591/the-great-gun-debate
http://americangunfacts.com/


Anyway, I could go on forever (well, for a really long time at least) on why I think guns are necessary, but I'll try to limit it to a few lines.

1. Guns provide safety. I know this may seem counter-intuitive, but where I live, laws or not you can drive 30 miles and illegally purchase an assault rifle (or a dozen) without anybody knowing. So if no law abiding citizens have guns, and criminals have guns, well, that's bad.

2. Guns are fun. Guns can be the center for activities that help bond family members. Spending a day at the range is enjoyable, and hunting is also a great way to hang out with friends. Just be safe.

3. I cannot stress this enough: Guns provide safety. I refer you to Kennesaw Georgia. The mere knowledge that people had guns prevented the crime, and nobody got hurt. That's great!

 

Gun control just won't work in America. There are places where it works and places where it doesn't work. The US is just not one of them... The only way we would have any luck is with a federal regulation on guns. (Note: regulation is not the same as ban). To have different states and cities with very different regulations defeats the entire purpose of gun control. Hell, most of the guns in Chicago gun violence are legally purchased in nearby suburbs.

When I grow older, I'll probably buy a gun for defense, since I'll have the right to. I just think there needs to be a very decent amount of regulations that don't have loop holes...


So to answer your question: For the United States, some gun control.

Although, Americans have a very different gun loving culture than the rest of the world. It's hard to compare us to other countries when it comes to gun control.

 

Theoretically, I'd be in full support for the idea of a strict gun control; however, in reality, I don't think that a strict gun control would actually work. Even though gun control has successfully worked in some places, such as Australia, guns are far too widespread and popular for gun control to work as effectively in the United States.

At this point, it would be next to impossible to completely get rid of all guns within the United States. So, if guns were to be prohibited, it would likely result in decent, law abiding citizens giving up their guns, while criminals continue to obtain and keep theirs (because, there's no way that they'd realistically be able to completely stop criminals from obtaining guns, at this point), making the society less safe than it already is. While the safest option would be for nobody to have gun, that's not realistically an option, and I'd rather everyone have access to guns than only criminals.

That being said, I'm not necessarily against strict gun control being enforced, because, like I said, it's theoretically a good idea and I dont't believe that it's completely and utterly impossible for it to work; however, I seriously doubt that it would.

 

When has a criminal ever cared about the law?

 

Guns do not provide safety. When gun ownership increases, gun crimes increase with them. For instance, every 1% increase in gun ownership leads to a 0.7% increase in the homicide rate: http://www.livescience.com/51446-guns-do-not-deter-crime.html

Also, unless they're willing to train for a couple hundred hours a year, a "good guy with a gun" is likely to fail to stop a criminal, and will probably be killed in the process, if not by the shooters, then by responding law enforcement who can't possibly know who they are. So say real experts: http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/its...own-nra-fantasy-world-of-good-guys-with-guns/

But let's put gun enthusiasts to the test. "In the end, only one of the 12 volunteer victims in the exercise survived. And it was because she ran away. No one was able to take out both mock shooters." http://kxan.com/2015/01/14/texas-gun-owners-re-enact-charlie-hebdo-massacre/

 

If I had a nickel for every pixel in that image, I could buy a gumball.

 

Literally everything you see on your computer is pixels.

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news...op-as-concealed-carry-permits-soar-/?page=all

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 17, 2015, Original Post Date: Dec 17, 2015 ---

Many people are willing to do that.

This is true. Of course, average response times range from 9-12 minutes, and most gunfights (where both parties are armed) are over in a matter of seconds (the general consensus seems to be 2-4 seconds, however the possibility of a drawn-out gunbattle still exists), so that's not exactly the biggest issue. And let me ask you, is the 'good guy with the gun' any more likely to die than if he/she didn't have a gun?

 

I hear talk about guns, but. What about flamethrowers?

 

Yes, that's true. But seeing as 7.3% of Americans have served in the armed forces, 7 in one hundred are trained to react. Now, of course, many will be progressing in years, so perhaps a more accurate statistic is 6-6.5%. So, in other words, 6 in one hundred (so let's say a church) x 3.5 units of 100 (number of people in church)= 21 people trained to react to the threat of violence. And that's just military servicemembers. It doesn't count police officers, or anyone else who might have prepared for this eventuality.

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 17, 2015, Original Post Date: Dec 17, 2015 ---

Lol. Too messy.

 

I'm serious about the flamethrowers.

They are actually legal. I actually bought one a couple days ago. I even made a post about it. It was as easy as ordering like you would off of amazon.

XM-42 Civilian Legal Flamethrower capable of up to and even further than 25 feet. More so if you modify the fuel. I am using it to revolutionize how people remove snow.

And if somebody should attempt to put my life in danger while doing so. I guess that said person is going to be getting an all over tan in the middle of winter.

 

Washington Times is a dumpster fire of factually-challenged conservative bias, and should never be a source in a reasoned debate. Your article is a case in point, as it makes the severe error of confusing correlation with causation, it uses stats badly (using overall national murder rates and concealed-carry rates, but these are not nationwide changes, they're regional), and it does nothing to counter the claims in the LiveScience article (an unbiased source, because science), because we can safely presume that people who apply for concealed carry permits were likely already gun owners before they applied.

My other sources were an opinion post from a number of subject-matter experts, and a news event from a group that is more inclined to your point of view. That's an example of sourcing your points well. By contrast, all of your source are heavily biased towards your perspective.

On the topic of trained military, you'll need to revise your numbers significantly downward, because a minority of military personnel receive training relevant to an active-shooter situation in a civilian environment. And even for those who do, the training hours are often inadequate, ongoing training after military separation is not a thing unless they pursue a career in law enforcement. That ongoing training, so say the experts, is essential.

 

Science doesn't normally involve itself in politics like this. This: "A high-profile shooting, like the June 17 crime that left dead nine members of a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, is typically followed by calls for greater gun control, along with counter arguments that the best way to stop gun crimes is with more guns."
Is not how scientific articles introduce themselves. Don't let a website fool you like this.

I don't think you're referring to combat training, because I'm pretty sure that everyone receives that. In terms of hostage rescue/combat around civilians, only special forces receive that kind of training.

But this seems to be what you're proposing: "It is better to allow an armed person with intentions to kill to enter an establishment unopposed by anything, kill whom he/she (usually he) wants, and then either engage in a gun battle with police, commit suicide, or attempt to flee."

 

I'm making a joke about the bad image quality.

 

Umm, what?

The article simply made a couple of statements about how people react. Some people call for gun control. Other people call for more guns. This is stating the obvious, and not taking a political position at all.

You're right, I'm not talking about combat, because it's pretty clear who the bad guys are in a conventional warfare scenario. But, uh, no, not everyone receives combat training. You've got three whole branches that are not expected to engage in small-arms combat: Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard. Except for special forces (and we're only talking SEALs here), base security, and ship boarding teams, those are three whole branches that never see combat training. Then there's all the in-the-rear-with-the-gear types in the Army, Marines, and National Guard who only see rudimentary training in boot camp and never revisit it. And even among those guys who do deploy to combat zones, they only get training that's relevant to a civilian shooting scenario when they're preparing to deploy to an Afghanistan/Iraq-type combat zone, with an active insurgency where the bad guys look just like everyone else.

So yeah, we're talking here only of:

- Special forces
- Soldiers, Marines, and Guardsmen who forward deploy to insurgency zones.
- Command security forces for Air Force/Navy in similar insurgency zones.

We're talking a very small minority of servicemembers now.

But the important thing is that these concealed-carry permits aren't currently going to military servicemembers and law enforcement only. They're going to anyone over 21 who doesn't have a criminal record. Most times you don't even have to take a weekend firearms safety course.

Your man is straw.

What I'm actually proposing is this: in countries that aren't saturated with guns, you don't have mass shootings, and this is not an accident or a coincidence. If it's absurdly easy to get your hands on an automatic weapon, then all that's stopping you from shooting up a mall is intent. So maybe if we at least got rid of the assault weapons, we wouldn't have mass assaults on the public.

 

You claimed that it was an unbiased, scientific source. While I haven't looked into whether it was biased or not, it is definitely not scientific.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recruit_training#United_States_of_America
All recruits of all branches receive basic weapon training.

Okay...?

SLURP!!!

Actually, it was a pretty fair representation of what your argument looks like to me.

Finally, you bring up your actual, and the most relevant, argument.

It's true, if you don't have guns, you can't shoot people. However, it is really, really difficult to control whether guns can or cannot enter the country. For island nations, such as Britain, it's simple. Countries such as Australia also have an easier time of it. We have a border with Mexico. Need I say more?

I would also make an argument based off of this site: http://www.mintpressnews.com/the-facts-that-neither-side-wants-to-admit-about-gun-control/207152/

That since, according to this website, gun control has no long-term effect on murder rates, we should not venture down that path, as it is an infringement on the freedoms we enjoy.

I, actually, have never seen this stance before. Intuitively, it seems that changing the availability of guns would change murder rates. But if we look at it from the standpoint of logic, we see that when guns are more rare, people might be more inclined to kill due to less danger to themselves, but less inclined to kill due to lack of means (knives/close quarters weapons are for a special type of sicko, and bows are impractical and difficult). Therefore a change either way nets 0, as it affects it both ways. Now, of course, it's possible that a change could affect the numbers more one way than the other, which is why we have to look at actual, statistical data.

 

Guns don't kill people. People kill people.

Don't ban certain guns, ban certain people.

 

Wat?lol

 

like, people on the no fly list and suspected terrorist watch list should not be able to buy a gun.