As usual the best argument in favor of gun control is reading the postings of gun nuts.

Shouldn't we focus more on the volume of violent crime/murder that are committed and not how they are committed? If we got rid of guns and murders/violent crimes continued on the same path that it currently is on when more and more guns are owned in the US I would say we accomplished nothing by banning guns.

One side is posting facts and this is the other sides response? Who else would we listen to?

Not impossible but not very probable without changing a lot of minds first and for that to happen I think we’ll need to see a lot of societal changes first. It seems like support for gun control peaked back in the peaceful and tranquil happy days of the 50s. Then as social and political violence increased in the 60s that trend reversed and continued as crime, especially drug related violent crime, increased during the subsequent years. And I doubt the NRA is driving that scenario as much as responding to it. So while it’s obvious that if we eliminated guns, we’d get rid of a lot of societal violence and people would feel less societal unease, but that might be putting the cart before the horse in terms of how any substantive change will occur.

This is just not based in any sort of reality. The reality is that a large majority of Americans, including a majority of republicans, support stricter gun control laws. The reason not even the smallest piece of legislation can make any progress is because as soon as it's mentioned the NRA instantly leans on all of the politicians they fund and also starts spreading propaganda that the proposed change will force everyone to give up their guns.

Over the past few years there has been an increase in funding for gun control advocates but it's only just starting to have even the slightest effect on anything. The NRA has controlled the legislation on gun laws for decades and is still by far the most influential party in Washington and the #1 reason why no laws have been passed at the federal level.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx
Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?

1959 Jul 23-28 - Yes, should be: 60%
2018 Oct 1-10 - Yes, should be: 28%

That's the shift in public sentiment I was referring to. Short of that, I really doubt any of the other gun control policies some are advocating for and the NRA opposes will have a substantial impact on gun violence.

Sure, but that is one specific of a wider issue and has been made into a partisan issue that the right has won by sheer volume of messaging, to the point that it's now ingrained in the social conscience that anything that specifically talks about banning a type of gun is a breach of the constitution (which is absurd, but that's a slightly different argument).

In terms of stricter gun control in general, the attitude of the public is that the majority think we should have stricter laws and that has been the case for the entirety of those same 60 years. The fact that no stricter laws have been put in place is almost entirely down to the lobbying of the NRA and their propaganda of framing any sort of legislation as threatening constitutional rights.

No you're posting nonsense.

Here's a thought experiment. Why does the 2A only protect your 'right' to small arms? Why are things like c4 explosives, belt fed machine guns, artillery cannons, stealth fighters, and low yield tactical nuclear weapons impossible for the public to get their hands on?

Could it possibly be that it's because they're too dangerous?

I wasn't talking about myself. I was talking about the previous conversation (the 10 or so posts previous to mine) that I wasn't a part of.

I think it protects are right to small arms because they are used to protect oneself where c4, cannons, fighter jets, etc aren't used to defend oneself.

you have the right to defend yourself without a gun.

I think this is the most logical way to think about this issue, and this is not the stance most people make their argument from which is a big part of the problem. So many people say "We must do something" but then put forth no actual ideas that have any merit. Most people that are pro gun are also in favor of legislation that 1. Is achievable 2. Will make a significant difference 3. Is different from what is already law.



There's quite a wide variety of data about the defensive use of guns every year. There are sources that will show 2.5 million per year, all the way down to 100k a year or less. The problem with trying to narrow down to a smaller range is the likelihood that most defensive uses of guns are not every actually reported to the police and are therefore not really trackable. Several orgs have done surveys where people were asked in detail whether they have used a gun defensively in the past 12 months, but those numbers are always open to the counterargument that people will not be honest about it, thereby inflating the numbers. But almost every source I've seen, even the low end ones, show that defensive gun uses far outweigh the number of gun homicides every year.

A mandatory gun buyback program would never work in the U.S. for a multitude of reasons.

Those numbers are incredibly misleading.
In 2013, gun deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides, 505 deaths due to accidental or negligent discharge of a firearm, and 281 deaths due to firearms use with "undetermined intent".
So 2 out of every 3 gun deaths is a suicide, with a few more percent added in for accidents and justifiable homicide (self defense). Sources are listed here:

Suicides: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf
Homicides (not justified): https://web.archive.org/web/20150727...s/homicide.htm
Accidents and Justifiable homicides are cited in the same source.

There are certainly arguments to be made linking guns to more lethal suicide attempts but that falls much more in the mental health problem than a gun problem.

What is your definition for what an "Assault Rifle" is. Because mostly people use the term "Assault Rifle" to mean something that it doesn't. The military defines an assault rifle as an intermediate caliber rifle with a removable box magazine and select-fire capability (i.e. able to switch between semi-automatic and full-auto or burst-fire). So any weapon that can only fire semi auto (basically every handgun and most hunting rifles) are not assault rifles. Only weapons that are capable of firing fully automatic are assault rifles. And there are already extremely heavy restrictions on buying and owning automatic weapons in the US, and almost no crimes are committed with automatic weapons.

There is basically no evidence that shows that having magazine restrictions has any impact on the gun crime as a whole. The biggest problem would be the sheer number of magazines already in circulation, far higher than the number of firearms. It would be basically impossible to stop people from obtaining them if they really wanted to, or to collect them from people who didn't turn them in. It would also only matter in instances where the shooter fired more than 10 rounds, which by itself is an extremely rare event. The mass mass majority of shootings involve the suspect firing 3 times or less. And at the end of the day, shooters can just carry more magazines, the speed of a reload is pretty fast and it is very very rare that people attempt to disarm a shooter, even when he reloads or has a malfunction.

I think most pro gun people would have no problem with more safety requirements, and the are plenty of states that already have similar requirements to what you're suggesting. As far as gun safes go, they would be far to slow to use a firearm effectively for self defense, unless you are already in the room where the safe is, that's why they aren't mandatory. What kind of "better background check" would you prefer that isn't already being done?


This is basically victim blaming, if someone breaks into my house, or my car, and steals my firearm, the person at fault is the thief, not me. I'm not responsible for someone else's crime just because they decided to rob me, the same as I'm not responsible if I leave my car running with the keys in it and someone steals it and runs someone over.

Smart gun technology is an interesting concept to be sure but it's nowhere close to reliable enough yet. I believe the current numbers say it fails about 1 in 1,000 tries, and there are also issues with low battery problems, something that won't be ok when your life is on the line.


I just want people to lay out changes that they think would work and then give some evidence that shows it would work. The biggest problem I have in these kind of debates is the overwhelming amount of people who don't really know anything about what they are trying to legislate. They want laws for this and laws for that, but they don't even know what this and that are. That type of argument doesn't work for anything else and it shouldn't work in the discussion of firearms, regardless of how much people want to let their emotions control legislation.

Within the above sentence is the answer to the USA’s gun problem.

You socialist liberals are literally insane.

It is the 2nd amendment for a reason, number 2.

Answer me this, does the role does the individual prohibition of owning a gun in Iran, have anything to do with the authoritarian state they live in??

You fascist righties are absurd.

Because it doesn't matter, the entire notion of the noble group of ragtag militia dudes banding together to overthrow the corrupt government has already been tried, remember? Way back in 1861. Back then the rebels even had weapons parity with the government forces, including not just small arms but cannons, cavalry, generals, and even a navy. And they still lost.

Not to mention that that was a good thing because they were, if you recall, the bad guys. Fighting to preserve their 'right' to own other human beings wasn't really a good look.

Iran's authoritarian regime might have something to do with the US installing an even more authoritarian regime by force and then having that regime being overthrown.

Seems like if we're using guns to defend against tyranny we should have C4, fighter jets etc. Those could be useful to fight an authoritarian regime!

Actually I would think a well-placed claymore mine would be pretty much ideal for home defense. For some reason they're hard to buy though. Any thoughts on why?

And I believe the point of the right wing gun nuts is that the 2A isn't about just defending yourself from another individual, but also from the state. So if the state has things like c4, cannons, fighter jets and so forth then supposedly the 2A guarantees the right of the citizens to have weapons parity with that. But for some reason the only thing the NRA types fight to preserve is their ability to buy some pop guns that, if it ever came to a shooting war with government forces, would probably do more harm than good.

I mean, it's almost as though the right knows their entire argument pertaining to the 2A is bull****. But that can't be it, can it?

They dont have any interest in defending against tyranny. How many 2A hardliners are at the souther border demanding the release of those in the internment camps? How many were willing to stand up to the government holding their own Japanese american citizens in similar camps?

The 2A as a means to defend against tyranny was a short lived possibility in the later 1700s. Its a complete myth today.

This did make me chuckle. Well played if it's just a troll.

I don't think it's misleading, and you'll notice some of the followup conversation is about why I think suicides also matter, and why it's reasonable to expect that with fewer guns there would be fewer suicides, as also supported by the previous chart. However, if you just focus on civilian gun ownership vs homocide rates you do find a similar pattern, although it's a bit noisier, which I think is intuitive and not particularly problematic.


(from gunpolicy.org)


(from gunpolicy.org)


(I couldn't figure out how to attach the country as a label)

Maybe I should restate my original point. It's not so much even just the trendlines on the chart, it's the fact that the US is such an enormous outlier which suggests to me that we have a problem and that our gun policies are part of it.

Throw the US out of that graph and there doesn’t seem to be a strong trend in your graph.

Something can be an outlier compared to other locations and not be a problem. Also, to constantly compare the US to other countries is not as relevant as other people like to make it out to be. Different countries have different histories and different cultures and to say that just because something works somewhere else means it would work in the US is a stretch.

Also none of this comes to the heart of the "problem" if you even consider it a problem. You can't go back in time, so what policy changes can happen today that would have an impact in the US, given the number of firearms in civilian control? What laws can be passed, that aren't on the books already that could make a significant impact on the issue, and what proof is there that those measures would be effective and worth the cost? Just repeating there's a problem without offering possible solutions attached to some tangible evidence doesn't do anything.

Sure. I wouldn't be as concerned if the US is an outlier in ice cream consumed per capita. Perhaps an unstated premise in this thread is that I think people dying because of gun violence is bad. So having a lot of gun violence compared to other comparable countries seems bad.

I agree that all these other factors (culture, history, politics, etc.) matter, but that doesn't mean that cross-cultural comparisons are impossible, and the logic that connects gun-related deaths to the prevalence of guns is not particularly complicated. It's obviously true that efforts to curb these issues in the US will be different than efforts in other places, because of those cultural and political differences. It doesn't mean we can't identify a problem.

Some possibilities have been mentioned previously:

Although I'm also in favor of a constitutional convention and repeal (or reformulation) of the 2nd amendment, followed by a very large nationwide gun buyback program. But the above is certainly more realistic.

This is true. It's also true if you include a lot more countries. I was curious. This isn't every single country I could have added from the site but it's most of them: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

If you remove some of the most egregious outliers (including the US) then I think you can see a trend, but as I said it's pretty noisy, which doesn't surprise me. A better approach would include some other controls for relevant factors besides just the number of guns, but I don't have the time to turn this into a real research project right now. But the data is there if anyone wants to play with it.

The most obvious thing to want to control for is just economic development/prosperity, but I think that's what the original is doing, mostly.

Do fire extinguishers make gun combat safe with predictable outcomes?

"... a bit noisier... intuitive and not particularly problematic." Now there's an understatement. The data is not very noisy, and is quite intuitive. However, I believe from the pro gun control side, it is problematic.

Its quite clear that the more restrictive gun control laws as they currently exist in State and Local statutes occupy the counties/cities where the worst murder rates are -- to wit: Chicago, DC, NYC, LA, Baltimore and their metro areas.

Murders in US very concentrated: 54% of US counties in 2014 had zero murders, 2% of counties have 51% of the murders -- 25 Apr , 2017