Gun sales rise in past year, especially among women and African Americans
npr.org
npr.org
* crimes in general go down as more people carry firearms legally, but by far less than most firearm advocates claim.
* though, the most dramatic of that decrease is related to violent crime as some arguments might claim.
* when firearms become more lawfully common police are slightly more likely to be victims of violent crime.
* the numbers related to crime change as a result of change to gun laws tend to be tiny even for high population density large cities indicating many arguments on the subject are exaggerated to fit a narrative.
In the list you can easily see that the U.S. has the highest firearm related death rate of any OECD country. In fact it is almost 100 times higher than Germany for homicides.
People have this schizophrenic notion that the US should have the demographics of Brazil but the homicide rate of Sweden, and that aint gonna happen no matter what kind of gun control laws you pass. Same thing for measures of corruption, etc.
So you have nations with very low homicide rates, like Bangladesh, versus nations with high homicide rates, like Nigeria or Brazil or Jamaica. And the gun control laws don't seem to make much of a difference in comparison to ethnicity. Looking at Europe, you have wide variations in gun ownership rates but a fairly low homicide rate across the board. Looking at US states, again wide variations of gun ownership rates not well correlated to homicide rates. So stop pretending that the high homicide rates in the US, which are accounted for in urban centers are because of loose gun control laws in DC or Chicago. The US has exactly the homicide rate you'd expect just by using WHO intentional homicide rates per continent and comparing that to US demographics.
Yes. Everyone knows African Americans have more in common with Africans than Americans. Asian Americans are a monolith, and so is Asia. And Latin Americans speak Latin. Sigh.
Why wouldn't we compare the US to other places with similar GDP per capita?
> The US is roughly 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa and 5% Asia.
I'm not sure if you're trying to claim that people commit violent crimes at different rates based on their genetic makeup, or if you're you trying to claim that multicultural societies lead to more violent crime, but both claims are preposterous.
London and Singapore are giant multicultural melting pots, and tremendously safe. Even New York City is safer than many major European cities. (Really, look it up.)
Violent crime in city is the result of poor drug policy more than anything, not the city's ethnic demographics, nor gun laws.
The test here would be to compare the violent crime rate in cities with high ethnic diversity and high economic inequality, with cities with high diversity but low inequality. Or low diversity but high inequality.
Because we want to compare the US to places that people find comparable and desirable and, gosh, maybe even slightly superior, rather than places that people find to be totally undesirable.
We also would like to compare the US to places that might have statisitical similarity. A good example of this is Canada: lots of people claim cause/effect in the US for laws about underage drinking, yet Canada had a similar decrease in underage drinking without changing any of their laws. This contradicts those who claim that public policy changes were responsible.
In addition, European countries help show that sometimes there are other solutions than just "more guns". And, what some of the fallout from BLM changes is showing is that disarming initial responders rather than always just sending in armed police seems to result in positive results to the system.
We look to Europe because sometimes they are exemplars and that while maybe we shouldn't blindly just do what they do, perhaps we might want to think about and emulate what they do right.
Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips firearm-related homicide or accidents).
I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between milli- and micro-.
I'm still waiting for doctors to have to wait ten days for multiparty approval on their decision to proceed with a procedure predicated on an obvious misread of the patient's chart.
Until that day, gun control advocates have the blood of 590 Americans on their hands, every day, for choosing their Cause Célèbre to be something that kills far, far fewer people than a much, much bigger problem.
Reminder that any policy advocacy position that comes from any standpoint other than holistic harm prevention has one goal, and one goal only: power and control.
edit: HN hivemind apparently believes I am factually incorrect. Approximately 24k Americans die annually via firearms[1], whereas approximately 250k Americans die annually via preventable medical errors[2].
> many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-
> gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips
> firearm-related homicide or accidents).
This is quite a jump from guns to medical errors and I think this is comparing apples and oranges. It seems absurd to me only fix "burning" issues because then only mediocrity can be reached. It's better to fix root causes. That said, I wonder how many of these errors happen because both medical personal and patients are under extreme stress due to a bad financial situation, a dangerous neighborhood etc.
Imagine you live in a neighborhood where people have guns and actually use them. Wouldn't you be a bit stressed out and thus being more prone to make errors, communicate incorrectly, both as patient but also as nurse/doctor?
No, have you never lived in a rural area?
Nursing licensing standards already cover that skill (and a lot more.) Congress has also worked to promote things that deal with actual problems that exist, rather than things that are long solved, and which have been demonstrated to reduce preventable medical errors like meaningful use of EMRs; knowing how to multiply and divide correctly doesn't help when poor, unstructured records give you inaccurate or incomplete information to start with.
My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle, and you are indirectly responsible for allowing more people to die than if you had made a more factually-aligned choice. Gun control advocates are, therefore, obviously driven by a desire to control others, and not by any serious intention to save lives.
A decision to advocate for gun control is a conscious decision to NOT advocate ( per limited hours/resources tradeoffs ) for cancer treatment research, dietary policy improvements, medical error prevention, traffic safety research funding, environmental policy, Alzheimer's research, or any number of things that will save more lives.
It's rational to assume that the motivation is something other than actually saving human life. Control and power, being common and time-tested motivations of humans, seems to be a reasonable first assumption.
But the cause of that problem isn't even arguably “there is no required testing to verify they nurses can do the task appropriately”, since there is, in fact, required testing that includes that within it's scope.
So the idea that Congress enacting a new requirement on that would be parallel to it's initial adoption of a background check requirement for guns but for a more pressing problem is not defensible.
The fact that Congress has also repeatedly recently adopted (not merely discussed) new rules designed to address things that are actually empirically contributors to avoidable medical errors also demonstrates that the implication that that is being neglected while gun control is being discussed is also false.
> My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle
If you assume that every advocate is equally effective in all issues, and that the targets of that advocacy are equally easily moved on all issues, and that the effect of policy change that would be acheived by the same movement of decision-makers is proportional to the scale of the problem being addressed, then this is a defensible position. But none of those are reasonable assumptions.
Each state has different firearm availability and laws.
Some states have very liberal gun laws, including automatic or semi-automatic weapons and concealed carry. Others have very strict laws, and with limited types of guns available and a loaded gun in a car or concealing a handgun would involve jail time.
People become criminals when there's few other options
Once you start getting enough gun ownership, you start getting the "Who's the bad guy?" problem when there are conflicts. And the cops won't be terribly restrained if the gun owners aren't white.
1) There are something like 300-600 million firearms in the US. Attempts to disarm only get the guns from those who are law abiding, you disarm the defenders without doing much to the criminals.
2) You probably increase the death rate as you have made people less able to defend themselves, but done basically nothing to most murders because you didn't succeed in disarming the criminals.
By increasing the supply their availability for criminals also goes up proportionally.
This isn't common today, but considering ongoing the efforts to make 3d-printing Glock and Hi-Point frames easier I can't imagine it will remain uncommon forever. These aren't exactly hard to find, see [0].
And for those who think you can just ban all other gun parts and fix the problem, I present to you the FGC-9 - a pistol-caliber carbine manufacturable in your basement with a 3d printer, metal bar stock, and some high-pressure pipe. Semi-auto, rifled barrel - the works. [1] Is it a trivial process? No. Is it going to get easier and produce higher quality results with time? Yes.
0: https://www.defcad.com/library/60d6a735-4a8c-4b42-8dd7-33b13...
1: https://www.defcad.com/library/ac26b242-720f-4608-a202-0ecea...
Out of approx 400,000,000 guns, only very roughly 12,000 are used in crime. There is less than 0.01% overlap.
Again, I don't see how an argument that "crime change as a result of change to gun laws tend to be tiny" can be anything but laughable given data points like "Japan" or "Belgium".
The argument is that legal guns increase gun deaths but reduce other types of crime, either by substitution (e.g. reducing knife crime) or by deterrence (e.g. reducing home burglaries).
That claim has its own burden of proof that it needs to meet before it can be accepted, but looking at other countries and saying "More guns means more shootings" isn't addressing the actual argument.
Suicides don't count? For the record: I'm 100% in favor of public policy that results in large decreases in the suicide rate.
They also don’t count 1 for 1.
It’s much easier to substitute something else for a gun when committing suicide than when murdering someone.
That idea seems to be belied by the upthread assertion that gun deaths disproportionately represent suicides.
The point is that perspective matters. You want to treat "crime" as a single thing because it seems like "the actual argument" to you, and when I see that same argument it looks like senseless spin because it's trying to dilute the US's outrageous homicide rate in an analysis by comparing it to burglaries in Amsterdam or whatever.
Yes, and I'm not advocating for that.
My only point is that "less gun deaths in countries without legal guns" isn't addressing the original claim that other crimes have decreased as a consequence of legal guns. I'm not taking a position on whether that claim is true, or what exactly they mean by that, which are both questions I also would like to be answered.
Once you include multiple countries, isn't your data skewed by "countries at war import a lot of guns"?
> or spun to include things other than gun violence in "crimes", perhaps?
That's not spin. You want to minimize total deaths, not "gun violence". If banning guns meant instead of getting shot, the same number of people got stabbed instead, the ban would be pointless.
It's almost like, as I said above, the clearly obvious determining factor in gun violence is the simple number of weapons. That this obvious hypothesis is simply disbelieved by large numbers of HN posters (many of whom like to call themselves "rationalists") continues to astound me.
Except that this simply is not true.
Gun violence in the us is not correlated with gun ownership.
It is correlated with poverty. It’s as simple as that.
This is because ‘gun violence’ is just violence.
Calling it ‘gun violence’ makes it seem like it’s about guns, but it really isn’t.
The prevalence of guns changes the nature of crime, on the whole, from largely survivable violence to presumptively lethal injury. And that's bad, thus the game-playing with "crime" statistics instead of shootings to try to obscure the clear truth.
And the proper answer here is gun. You're much less likely to be hurt by a mugger with a gun--the mugger is far more likely to rely purely on deterrence rather than actually use his weapon.
Would you prefer to be mugged or a mugger to be shot?
That’s a fine perspective to have, but it completely contradicts the people here who are saying no one is demanding prohibition.
If your prior is "gun rights are super important and any attempt to regulate guns must be resisted", then it leads you inevitably to ridiculous arguments like "AKTUALLY guns reduce crime (for some variant definition of crime that includes non-violent stuff)" or (and you fell right into this one) "[gun regulation] leads inevitably to large scale gun confiscation or prohibition"[1].
At what point will the gun folks come back to rational compromise? You know how you end up with inevitable prohibition? When it's the only option left to the majority.
[1] Which is just clearly false, look at the diversity of gun laws across the globe! CLEARLY it's true that you can regulate them better than the US without "inevitably" confiscating them. Look at Canada, for goodness sake.
Has this been established through natural experiment?
In regards to the motives of their inception, it seems like a bit of leap to go from "armed black militias patrolling streets" and "an organized band of men armed with loaded firearms [...] entered the Capitol on May 2, 1967" to then saying that the resulting anti-gun legislation was necessarily inherently racist. Every time a white kid shoots up a school and it leads to further gun restrictions, do you assume that this is because of legislator's anti-whiteness? Almost every school shooter/mass shooter is white, and there have been all sorts of gun restrictions imposed as a consequence of these events. In fact, wasn't there JUST a band of mostly white men who entered the Capitol, which has also led to suggestions for increased legislation against firearms? Is the resulting legislation that comes from that going to be anti-white?
This is therefore irrelevant to any distinction between “arguing for” and “demanding”.
This is such a toxic, false statement. It denies reality: people are getting jailed for their actions. Due process is still in effect, you understand; and if anything, far fewer people are jailed than probably should be due to overcrowding, high costs, etc. Recidivism rates are very high.
Pretending that people are being jailed because of the color of their skin is ridiculous, especially considering that in many cities the jury, lawyers, judge, clerks, etc. are also of the same skin color. People are being jailed for committing crimes; and yes, these crimes are being disproportionately committed by some groups - as statistics have consistently shown for decades.
Statements like yours throw the entire justice system under the bus. You essentially call into question the entire appartatus that remains to protect normal folks in the burnt out husks of cities like Baltimore and Detroit.
> Karens' across the country feel that they need to control everyone and everything
Karen is an anti-white slur. "Karen" expects people to follow the rules and to be pro-social, and gets mad when they do not; this used to simply be good, mutual enforcement behaviour that everyone engaged in to keep people honest and to fight corruption. Stereotyping middleaged white women who simply want the process to be observed as written is offensive, and as sexist/racist as any other single term you could use these days.
Police need to enforce the laws in economically depressed neighborhoods where crime, gangs, and drugs are much more common. However, police are also abusive in that environment, and the criminal justice system perpetuates economic and social hardship in those neighborhoods by disrupting good home/family environments.
Both forces — neighborhood criminality and an overly harsh criminal justice system — work against true social justice. One of the worst consequences is poor psychosocial development in children growing up in that environment (constant stress and fear, broken families, etc). For a somewhat anecdotal view of this sociological phenomenon, see Alice Goffman's book _On the Run_ (she's the daughter of Erving Goffman).
That is not the point. People should not have to sit in a cage and then be "judged" by a system that is no longer blind and is stacked against anyone who goes through it. How long do you want to sit in a cage for "something you did not do"? It's no longer about "justice" or "reform", it's about revenge and benefiting those who make it up.
> Statements like yours throw the entire justice system under the bus. You essentially call into question the entire [apparatus] that remains to protect normal folks in the burnt out husks of cities like Baltimore and Detroit.
The system needs to be thrown out because of how it was created and what it has become. Instead of only being used to "reform" the most reprehensible individuals in society (violent crimes, theft, fraud), it has become a weapon for use against anyone the two parties did not like. First it was the racist Democrats who used it against those who did not look like them and then the fundie Republicans pushed it even further to use it as a tool for the things the church did not like. Many people sitting in jail right now should not be in jail because their "crimes" never affected anyone else or society at large.
> Karen is an anti-white slur. "Karen" expects people to follow the rules and to be pro-social
Being a cunt is not limited to any one group or ethnicity. "Karen" is applicable to any busybody who should mind their own business and leave people alone.
If there was a meme name for an angry woman would you have an issue if it was a predominantly black woman name? There is a sterotype of the angry black woman, so even if you would be fine it would immediately be called racist.
I'm not that bent out of shape over 'Karen' as a slur, but the hypocrisy is annoying. It's like calling a geeky black guy an Urkel.
This is a pretty ridiculous way of talking about this. Let's be concrete about it: if the name was "Shaniqua", we'd all know that it was intended to be insulting toward Black women, right? Are you implying I'd be okay with that one? I'm not.
"Karen" has evolved into being an anti-white slur, and I'm not okay with either option, nor any other slur of this sort. It degrades the conversation and makes it impossible to discuss actual problems that have highly predictable demographic correlations.
Reads like the words of someone who has never experienced life in a high-crime area. Likely, your sentiment about this is entirely created by false premises, an illusion from Hollywood about the nobility of gangsters. Life is not like that. Scary, sociopathic or even psychopathic people abound; violence is a daily fact of life; everyone has a mugging story.
The vast majority of these people sitting in cages have broken the law. Do you remember the law? The list of things you may not do, the list of things you will be punished for doing. A 2-year-old can understand this: do bad thing, sit in the corner as punishment. I'm not sure what happens in the brain of a mature adult to make them forget these basic mechanics; it really feels like you must have been sold sob stories that make your mushy heart over-empathize with a media construct. In reality, there are people out there who will stab you for $20.
> Many people sitting in jail right now should not be in jail because their "crimes" never affected anyone else or society at large.
There are certainly some such people, but have you looked at the 'revolving door' phenomenon where police arrest people who are punted back out onto the street hours or days later? They learn that there is no real lasting consequence for their actions besides an uncomfortable few nights (albeit, out of the rain and cold, and with free food). There are not that many people who end up in prison for crimes that don't affect others - and when they are in jail for a minimal offense, oftentimes that's the only thing that police and prosecutors could concretely nail them on, despite knowing or believing that they're involved in far worse actions that they haven't been caught for.
The other thing is, many actions do affect society at large. Drug use does; advocates for Legalizing Everything pretend otherwise, but opiates have a massive effect that cannot be mitigated just by making them legal. The addiction doesn't go away; the cost of the drugs doesn't disappear; and the actual impact of being a junkie doesn't stop. You don't end up all-of-a-sudden being able to hold down a job reliably just because your risk of arrest goes away. You don't remove chances for fentanyl to kill people by turning a blind eye to the problem.
> it has become a weapon for use against anyone the two parties did not like.
Guess what, Yank; these problems exist outside of your country and your two-party bubble bullshit too. Every major city in the world faces these problems, in predictably direct proportions to demographic factors that may not be politely discussed. The problem is endemic, it's not a function of the system except to the extent that the system finds ways to profit off of corruption and drug money.
The extremely abbreviated way to make this point is to say "racism is over because Obama, and Kamala, and black faces in high places".
The conclusion here is actually "these things are not caused by racism, because you can completely remove white people from the equation and yet the situation only ever gets worse".
Social policies combined with demographic realities are the proximate causes here. Continuing to paper over the latter with the former just entrenches the issue generationally.
"see what happens when white people are completely removed from the equation" is not an experiment that is possible to run.
So, no, you can't empirically do what you're saying you can do.
If you have a thought experiment or an approximation in mind, do share.
Here's a thought experiment: every judge, lawyer, jury member, and police officer is now black. If you think that is akin to white people disappearing, then we disagree. e.g. who wrote the laws? who stands to profit the most from incarceration?
It's called "systemic" racism for a reason.
In the bay area "there are no homes" is a real problem, but the systematic reasons for homelessness are even more important to solve.
As that process occurred, the value of the weapons would spike as scarcity took hold, and tactically-useful firearms (e.g. semi-auto) would become expensive on the black market. This would mean that criminals would need to be far more judicious with how they carried and used them.
It is very plausible that this scarcity effect would lead to a meaningful reduction in the possession and use of firearms by low-level street criminals, which would also by extension lead to a reduction in levels of firearms-related homicide, assault, and intimidation.
A low-level narcotics broker is less likely to carry around a Glock that costs $10,000 (which they have to dump off of a bridge or in a storm drain every time it's used in a homicide), than they are to carry around a black-market stolen Glock that cost $600.
This seems implausible. The number of guns used in crime is in the tens of thousands each year.
The number of guns sold this year was more than 20,000,000.
The number in circulation is greater than 400,000,000.
Even in Australia compliance with gun buybacks wasn’t much more than 50%, and they didn’t have a second amendment.
The idea that Guns will become scarce in the US any time soon is simply unrealistic.
As for the 10,000 glock, that situation is also just a fantasy.
In London criminals can simply rent guns, fairy cheaply but with a high deposit. They only discard them if they fire them in a crime, otherwise they return them and get their deposit back.
This way, even just one gun can be used by hundreds of criminals at minimal expense, and with little risk of being caught possessing an illegal weapon.
The guns wouldn't instantaneously disappear overnight in this scenario. It would take 10-20 years to see a sizeable impact.
I have an interesting quote related to the UK and gun laws:
Gun deaths remain extremely rare in Britain, and very few people, even police officers, carry firearms. But the growing presence of American weapons on the streets, which has not previously been widely reported, comes as serious violent crime, like murders and stabbings, has risen sharply.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/world/europe/handguns-smu...
So, hey, U.S. firearms restrictions might have some very positive outcomes for the U.K. (and Mexico as well).
I'd love if you could share an article about that firearms rental operation, how prevalent those weapons actually are, and if they're coming in from the United States.
That's with current tech, and I don't think the tech of 20 years from now is going to be worse. If anything, 3d printing will be even better.
Now, that FGC-9 isn't nearly as concealable as a standard Glock. But I'm sure there's ongoing efforts to make a home-manufacturable semiauto pistol, too.
The more interesting thing to manufacture yourself is ammunition - smokeless powders are rather flammable, primers take that and scale it to 11 with a side of toxicity, and case manufacture has a lot lower tolerances than you'd think. (Bullets are comparatively easy, if you have a source of lead stock and can make a mold) But the number of guns in circulation in the US pales in comparison to the amount of ammunition stockpiled - estimates generally put annual sales at 8 to 10 BILLION rounds of ammunition. A lot of that is fired each year, but that's still a hell of a stockpile to go through first.
So, yes you can make an FGC-9 in your garage. Fair enough.
But are the barriers to manufacturing one in the garage sufficient to significantly reduce proliferation?
So, my example is the widespread absence of fully-automatic weapons in U.S. crime. Any schmuck with a lathe and a milling machine in the garage can crank out fully-automatic sub guns like it's Christmas in Sarajevo in 1993. But nobody does. You only very rarely hear about full-auto being used in the commission of crimes. Why? Perhaps the illegality, expense, and manufacturing hurdles (however small they might be) are just good enough to prevent meaningful proliferation in the way we see with semi-autos today.
The ammo thing is an interesting point too. I would think one of the biggest hurdles would be to homebrew ammo that was clean-burning enough not to immediately jam something like an FGC-9 in small calibers. I looked into cartridge case manufacturing and I guess there's a brass drawing process or something. I wonder how difficult it would be to base a design around CNC machined cartridge cases instead?
Compare with any European country and you will see that gun control works.
Of course, there will always be criminals who will acquire illegal guns, but overall it’s much harder to get a gun.
If your standard is 100% efficiency, you could make everything legal including murder, because making murder illegal doesn’t avoid it by 100%.
But looking at the numbers to add more context: Switzerland is very different from USA.
First of all gun ownership in Switzerland is around 25%, it's over 40% in USA.
Secondly, 25% of Swiss own a firearm, not a gun, in USA gun ownership (meaning a gun) is at 22℅
In Italy gun ownership is at 12% and gun deaths are almost zero, as in Switzerland most of the legally owned firearms are rifles for hunting purpose, kept locked in a cabinet.
Nobody in Switzerland sleeps with their gun under the pillow and nobody thinks it's a solution to crime, that's the biggest difference.
Secondly: Americans own too many guns and that's stupid.
third: USA is the richest country in the Worlsd and the largest owner of guns on the planet, so please don't make it a class issue, because it's really not.
Finally: Swiss are rich, they have an higher education on average so they don't end up shooting each other on the street like in the USA, were they think that owning firearms is a solution to poor education.
The only 2 places in Europe where there have been domestic mass shootings that were not terroristic attacks are Switzerland and Norway, not surprisingly the two countries that own more firearms.
Guns are bad. It's a fact.
And you know this how?
You really thought that an African boy couldn't possibly know? Seriously?
World War 2 happened less than a century ago. During Weimar and the 1930s, pretty strict gun laws were put in place.
Hint: Hitler was legally voted into power. It's not that the Nazis had guns and the rest of the country was in fear to oppose them.
During the Weimar era and the Nazi era, gun control laws were put into place. That is a historical fact.
Also, hint: saying that Hitler was voted into power as if it were an average democratic vote deeply misunderstands the situation. I suggest reading more about the era, specifically Ian Kershaw's book.
This is correct.
Richard Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich is excellent too.
> I always find it odd how Europe is used as an example of gun control success. Especially when it comes to the issue of oppressive governments.
> World War 2 happened less than a century ago. During Weimar and the 1930s, pretty strict gun laws were put in place.
Yet they’re prolific.
The old Improvised Munitions handbook has instructions for how to make a "zip gun" with little more than pipe and a nail. Guns are easy. Safe, reliable, long-lasting guns require a bit more work.
Stopping people from killing others with guns is a cultural and social issue. Trying to fix it by blocking access to guns is an ever-more losing strategy.
Easy enough if you have access to the necessary power tools (usually a drill press or a router). There are a number of companies creating unfinished lower receivers and providing kits for one to finish it themselves. It's also legal in the US.
https://www.5dtactical.com/80-lowers-s/101.htm
https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/are-%E2%80%9C80%E2%80%9D-or-...
Is it your contention that any old fool like myself can produce useful guns (ones that don’t explode when I shoot it) and ammunition? Does this ability scale the same way that growing marijuana does?
As for whether it's easy to produce a working gun: well, generally you can purchase the component parts of a gun on some continuum between raw materials and final product. The exact point on the continuum that you make your purchase depending on your risk level and how restrictive gun component laws are where you live. After that it's a case of following schematics and a little machining skill.
However, it seems unlikely that individual criminals would manufacture their own guns, in the same way that drug users don't typically manufacture their own drugs. It would require investment into machinery and minor expertise, but the barrier to entry is low enough that suppliers shouldn't have much problem stepping in to meet demand. I would assume that the US has the highest prevalence of gunsmithing expertise of almost any nation at this point. Those skills won't vanish overnight.
If you're really interested in making a home made gun, without involving a supplier, there are already ways to do that [2]. It seems unlikely a ban on 3D printing or other machinery and raw materials would work out.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-flow-of-guns-from-...
There are lots of examples of countries with effective illegal drug operations and effective gun control. Therefore the belief that banning guns will necessarily be as effective as banning drugs is provably false. As such it’s a poor argument. There are lots of valid reasons to believe that banning guns in the U.S. won’t work.
I.E. Columbia accounts for 43%[1] of the global coca supply. Taking your argument at face value, Colombians would consume 43% of the worlds coca supply having no impact on your ability to purchase cocaine in, say, Miami.
Comparing other countries success on one form of prohibition doesn’t give much insight. Compare it to America’s success on current and historical prohibition. American’s don’t honor prohibition.
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/13/colombia-calls-a-draw-i...
I’m not ignoring the nature of the drug trade. I’m claiming that the drug trade and drug smuggling are not apt comparisons to illegal gun manufacturing and smuggling. I don’t have any other claims. The argument that making guns illegal can’t work because it didn’t work for drugs is a dumb one.
> Comparing across generations is not valid as times and perceptions and social values change.
No need to look across generations. There are plenty of prohibitions to choose from today. Like automatic rifles and opium.
> I’m claiming that the drug trade and drug smuggling are not apt comparisons the illegal gun manufacturing and smuggling.
I’m going to hazard a guess that you don’t come from a gun culture.
Otherwise law abiding citizens smoke weed. Likewise they source fully automatic mods for their rifles and hoard bump stocks.
And these are just hobbyists.
Add in the game theory incentives of organized crime and their already established distribution channels (the same distribution channels they’re using to move drugs). I don’t understand how it isn’t close to apples-apples.
Making guns illegal won’t be effective because making drugs illegal hasn’t been effective.
As such this argument is not valid. A person who wants to intelligently argue why banning gun ownership in the U.S. won’t work must use a different argument.
All criminal laws have as their aim to make prohibitions of certain behaviors. All fail at 100% efficiency but most do well in terms of regulating acceptable behavior over time. The prohibition on slavery was quite effective in the U.S. If you want to argue that banning guns in the U.S. won’t work go ahead and argue that. Just don’t use the foolish argument that since banning drugs didn’t work in the U.S. then banning guns won’t work. It is sloppy thinking.
I can think of a lot of reasons why banning guns in the U.S. won’t work. You alluded to one of the reasons why I think this. None of my arguments on why this won’t be effective in the U.S. have anything to do with the ineffectiveness of the war on drugs.
I suggest reading a bit about countries like Mexico where the reality is totally opposite to what you claim.
Of course, culture also plays a role: the UK never had many handguns or shootings before stricter regulations came in, and when they did gun owners generally complied.
Even Hip Hop in the UK glorifies stabbings instead of shootings.
Immediately after the ban, there would still be gazillions of guns floating around the US. It would take multiple decades after the ban until the positive effects can be felt. During this time, the criminals would absolutely still have guns while the law abiding citizens would not.
Furthermore, there are huge smuggling activities at the US's southern border, making it possible for guns to enter on that route. Maybe if a strong border wall is built, it can be pulled off somehow.
Also don't forget that there are wild animals in many parts of the US, like say in Alaska. Sometimes you need to have a gun.
It feels like many who advocate banning guns severely underestimate the importance of the issue to the other side.
The overwhelming majority of Americans, I'd guess over 90%, do not live in places where they need firearms to protect them from wild animals. Why should hundreds die from gun violence in cities every year because of the off chance that someone in Alaska will encounter a bear?
The government there has reduced the civilian owned guns by over half in the preceding decade. [1]
Is Myanmar and example of well functioning?
All I said was that it is possible to enforce gun laws if the government is well-functioning, which was probably an overstatement.
All I'm trying to say is that if the government is serious about gun control and has control of it's law enforcement (which was a proxy for 'well-functioning', outlaws will not have them)
There are a number of countries that have laws on the books, but does a terrible job of enforcing those rules.
All of this is irrelevant to the discussion of whether the laws should exist or not.
For my needs, Myanmar isn't a country worth discussing in terms of gun control because it's not like the citizenry has a voice in drafting policy and owning small arms has been a way of life there for decades, and does it seem to have resolved their issues with "representation"?
There were many stories during the "firey but mostly peaceful" demonstrations last year of people who were ordinarily liberals trying to buy guns for personal and home defence and discovering to their horror that that actually there is a background check and a waiting period, you can't just buy one on a whim. Nor can a friend legally just lend you one.
I can't blame them, this past year we've all witnessed that our society can quickly change into something that is unrecognizable.
2 blocks down, there's still a TRUMP 2020 flag with a nazi flag right under it so I'm keeping my AR-15 nearby.
Meanwhile, I train regularly and I've found target shooting to be a really relaxing and meditative pursuit.
Yeah, I think you are just making this all up in your head.
I don’t know. I know we can’t get by on feelings that are stirred by others who wish to do our thinking for us.
Asian Americans have been targets of racial attacks for long before the start of coronavirus.
http://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_b23f80fae7a40a9358c39377e47...
This is bad thinking IMO.
If we expand upon this logic:
- 50% wants to rush the capital
- 50% want to riot in the streets and burn down businesses
Then we essentially live in a war zone and that AR-15 is nowhere near enough firepower to protect you.
The far better solution is to have a firearms safety and target practice course as part of compulsory schooling. Use laser-dry-fire equipped, color-coded handguns and you can avoid any live fire/ammo anywhere.
Live ammo and live fire aren't necessary to learn safe handling. The instructors would still be correcting any students who handle their laser guns unsafely. And the lasers in those laser guns or snap caps aren't powerful enough to be a huge safety risk. The laserlyte snap cap ones appear to be 5 mW. Not perfectly safe, but unlikely to do significant damage without intentionally staring up the beam.
It is of limited use to practice shooting with guns that don't shoot real bullets. The student doesn't learn safety properly and picks up bad habits b/c he thinks the guns are safe. That learning transfers over to real life and how you practice is how you will react under stress.
I agree. A course like that would have to have a module where the students would have to fire real guns, but I'd say you could still use dummy guns to teach the basics (and fail anyone who's blase with those) before they advance.
Written as if she had some malevolent intent, which is absurd.
But this is what makes handguns so useful: even a hardened criminal begins to look for the exit when he sees even the most naieve person pointing a handgun randomly. Guns are indeed a great equalizer.
I wonder how many people get killed/injured due to lack of training?
I would argue that not having training is just as bad as not having a gun at all. If life is in danger, why would I reach for this thing (a gun) that I don't know how to use properly?
Thanks largely to movies you very likely can a gun. For example a double action revolver requires merely pointing and pulling the trigger. Even a blind man can shoot a gun: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=blind+man+shoots+assailant&
Often the mere appearance of a firearm in the hands of a victim is enough to convice an attacker(s) to leave. And shooting a firearm, whether anyone is hit or not, attracts all kinds of attention from neighbors and police.
These are the four basic rules of firearm safety, this is how you wear PPE, this is how you remove ammo from a gun, this is how you load a gun, and this is how you shoot, then shoot a few rounds so people can experience the noise and kick. Shouldn't be more than a 2 hour class and cost more than $50 ammo included.
(I'm an American gun owner and enjoy using the range every now and then.)
Beyond that, my extended family is almost entirely based in the Deep South of the US, one of my cousins is a professional firearm dealer, and another works for one of the largest sellers of hunting apparel. One of my best friends owns about 50 guns. The number of irresponsible uses of guns in my family and friends group are zero. Guns are a tool like anything else - if it’s legal to own a chainsaw, a hunting knife, or a sledgehammer then it is not ridiculous to have licensed responsible adults to own guns.
I applaud the sale of firearms and the continuing spread of the culture to all people, races, and genders. The more people learn responsible use of guns and own them, the safer they will be, the safer society will be, and the less likely some idiot group of politicians will ban them.
The Soviets had no qualms whatsoever, even booby-trapping childrens toys. But they couldn't hold Afghanistan.
Yes I'll concede that fighting a guerrilla war without external support is difficult but it was always thus. Another example would be the Cuban revolution. However civil wars are often fought without any external backing being the decisive factor.
I have family that lost everything to communism and had to restart in America. If you have never had to live under authoritarian rule, as a huge portion of civilization had to in the past and still currently do, it’s easy to think a reversion to the mean will never happen. But it can and does!
> I'm from a former communist country. We had anti-communist gorilla fighters to the mid fifties. Guess what, the gorillas were hunted down and neutralized one by one.
What proportion of the population were those fighters? It's obvious that a small poorly-supplied force can't stand up to a brutal state, on the other hand "a huge number" of armed people might be able to, or at least put up a respectable fight. Furthermore, there's a deterrent effect from having an armed population that has to be taken into account.
Of course, it's not realistic that the civilian populace will be capable of engaging in open-field combat with the military.
With these advantages and coordinating securely being generally available, I think an insurrection could create a lot of troubles for an occupying force. Lots of opportunities to document and share atrocities the occupying forces would commit as well which would at the very least ensure sympathetic governments and organizations would help continue the smuggling in of supplies and weapons.
The Chinese government in a few steps:
1. Cut off the internet, jam the radio signals and the satellite signals to blackout the entire island. Impose a sea blockade.
2. Stop the drinking water.
3. Wait 72 hours and gather the bodies. Blame local terrorists for destroying the water pipes.
And this is only the simplest way to smash the resistance. Without mobile communications and GPS, all groups will be cut off from each other, exposed from the air to drone attacks, and totally unable to retreat, because there is nowhere to go.
A better counterfactual case study would be North Korea, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or present-day Myanmar; where the regime largely lives amongst (albeit in a stratified/segregated way) and selects from the populace that it controls.
I'd be especially interested in the early days of the regime, before its power is fully solidified and when it's the most unstable.
So yeah, there’s certainly Internet tough guys who just need an outlet to express their frustration. But there’s a large community of people that do in fact know which direction to point their rifle.
Unless anti-tank munitions are also available, armed HKers would've just led to armoured fighting vehicles on the streets. The State will always have more firepower than you.
On a different note, how do you justify having 50 guns for personal protection?
The point is exactly that the gun debate shouldn't be just about everyday personal protection. In case of a massive conflict it's great to have enough supplies to last years and to hand out to those who need them. You may not be able to just go to a store and get more.
Case in point: the people arguing that drug prohibition is ineffective are often the same ones arguing for gun prohibition. If prohibition doesn't work for drugs, why will it work for guns?
It isn't a left or right thing, just a people thing. The same phenomenon exists in the opposite direction; guns good but drugs bad.
But even before we get there, no one in the US is even talking about gun prohibition.
This entire comment thread is filled with straw men arguing against prohibition when at most people are demanding more regulation, the majority of which is supported by the majority of gun owners.
Also, gun regulation works in the majority of countries with functional governance. Heck, even drug prohibition “works” wherever they really want to prohibit it (such as many Muslim countries). The problem with drug prohibition in the US is not an issue with whether it works or not, but that the cost of enforcement is too high.
Seems pretty clear that this is just a political concession, in the same way that pro-life people are for more regulations on abortion. They’d really like to ban it entirely, but that is an unrealistic political non-starter, so the talking points are more compromising.
> countries with functional governance
Yes, well that is kind of a rare thing historically, hence the need for citizens to be able to defend themselves. Even many so called functional governments weren’t a few decades or half a century ago.
This is just not true.
A couple days ago Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative David Cicilline announced what they are calling an "Assault Weapons Ban" [1]
DC attempted to ban handguns not too long ago and courts shot it down. [2]
We have people trying to ban both handguns and rifles. If that is not a gun prohibition I don't know what is.
[1] https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-rele...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Hell...
There’s plenty of talk about restricting specific types, basically based on appearance, of weapons but haven’t seen much suggesting they’d like to ban them or make them completely unavailable as is often suggested by the right.
Libertarians are not leftists and this might surprise you but sometimes political parties do things different from what many of their voters might want. Consider that very large numbers on the left voted for Bernie Sanders and support his policies, but the party had largely avoided taking them up wholeheartedly or at all.
> this might surprise you
The snark is not necessary. If you can't comment about politics without being dismissive and arrogant, don't comment at all.
Bernie Sanders is for restrictions on guns. AOC is for restrictions on guns. I don't know what mainstream leftist is for widespread gun ownership. Can you suggest any?
As I said in my comment, I think it's primarily a cultural thing. Left-leaning urbanites don't interact with guns, whereas right-leaning rural residents often use them for sports and hunting. While some leftist groups are for it, this is again a fringe thing that doesn't exist in real life all that much.
The slippery slope argument has been used many times to avoid making any changes at all. Maybe your read is based on propaganda? Maybe mine is? I don’t believe Democrats would ban all guns in the same way that I don’t believe fuel economy standards were intended to ban trucks as was argued by some on the right. Though there is a constitutional right to own guns where the right to drive an F150 sadly does not yet exist.
Restrictions of guns does not equal banning guns and Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and many other prominent politicians on the right also favor restrictions on guns.
The entire situation would be better if reasonable discussion could be had.
Personally, I don't think banning guns or having restrictions will do anything at all. The sources of gun violence are cultural and social. Figure out why mass shootings or gang warfare are so common, then address the root of the problem.
Having a fundamental distrust of your fellow man is a tough way to go through life.
I keep a fire extinguisher in my kitchen but I don't think that means I feel "mortally threatened" every time I cook dinner. OTOH I do wear a helmet when I ride my bike due to a fundamental distrust of my fellow man, so I suppose it's not cut and dry
I can think of at least another kind: someone who likes to be prepared, who doesn't think they'll ever need it, and hopes to never use it. - me
Do you pay for insurance that you aren't legally-required to have? A gun is not the same, but there are parallels.
As you said, carrying a gun comes with huge responsibility. The chances that I would have to carry a gun to protect my life would have to be much higher than they are today before it overcame my concerns about carrying a gun.
Becoming oblivious to wearing a weapon is in itself a liability. So it comes with significant mental overhead.
With a good "holster" (for me, CCW Breakaways), I pretty much don't have to worry about it at all, even when doing something physical.
I'm sure I'm an outlier, but I think it goes to show that generalizing is bad.
You're assuming you know what I think or feel, and you're wrong.
If 40% of the population think they need to be prepared, there is probably something broken in that community.
The only way to fix the situation, in my opinion, is gun control. People are worried, admitting that's the main motive, because there are too many armed people around.
I agree, risk zero does not exists, but there is a lot that can be done before platoeing
To put things in perspective, these are some stats about Firearm-related death rate per 100,000 population per year
Country United States
Year 2017
Total 12.21
Homicide 4.46
Suicide 7.32
Unintentional 0.15
Undetermined 0.10
Guns per 100 inhabitants 120.5
---
Country Italy
Year 2015
Total 1.13
Homicide 0.29
Suicide 0.72
Unintentional 0.12
Undetermined 0.00
Guns per 100 inhabitants 11.9
---
Country Japan
Year 2015
Total 0.02
Homicide 0.00
Suicide 0.01
Unintentional 0.00
Undetermined 0.00
Guns per 100 inhabitants 0.60
On an unrelated note, the person being interviewed really expresses a binary world view of left vs right with no in between, which is discouraging.
Out of the top ten highest weeks for background checks, nine were in 2020/2021, the other was in 2012 [2]. A month after Obama was reelected? Not sure what else was going on in December 2012.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/07/13/three-mil...
[1] https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/nics
[2] https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/nics_firearm_checks_top_...
The hypocrisy is totally lost on the interviewee.
(First lesson: real-world gun violence is never anything like in movies)
There is a big difference in lethality between a cop who practices in the shooting range regularly and the average criminal.
But you're wrong in this way: shot-for-shot the cop is no more likely to hit a target than is a bad guy(BG). Difference is the cop won't quit shooting until he's out of ammo (likely multiple 20-round magazines) b/c he's required to stay at the scene, whereas the BG will (sensibly) leave ASAP.
But what if, say, having guns increase the risk of being attack from bad guy instead, because now they feel that you're a threat to them?
And no evidence of that (increased risk). The 'bad guys' avoid getting shot at. Folks who are armed are at greater risk from themselves than from an intruder.
In America, you aren't forced to have a gun. Freedom is our core ethos. You choose to have a gun. You are more than welcome to take it on faith you will never be in a situation where you need it, and thankfully most aren't.
Those groups fear the government roughly as much as she does now, and that's by-and-large why they own guns.
She doesn't seem to reach a second-order level of thinking and realize that common fear — she just sticks to "my marginalization makes me fear the government and own guns" without thinking of why they own guns. It's sad because there could be much more common ground, which leads to more considerate dialogue.
The reaction of conservatives to the BLM movement has confirmed for many that conservatives don’t fear government overreach but that they fear any disruption to the social (ie including racial) status quo. I think many would object to that characterization, but it’s hard to argue that there has been pretty strong resistance from conservatives to stick their neck out to oppose police brutality. (There are exceptions to this, by Romney and some more libertarian types, but they’re much too rare).
So the question is, is an ideology like conservativism what it claims to outsiders or to what its adherents actually do and say to one another? Professed vs revealed preferences.
We could say the same about "liberalism" when we look at deadly riots, fires started at police stations with people inside, people executed on the street, ideas like "f** x" based largely on x's race or profession.
It's clear that the majority on both sides are relatively moderate. They aren't the loud minority you hear the most of. Why do both sides use this defense, but neither side believes it about the other?
It is, I fully admit, vindication of distrust of the government. It is not, however, vindication of /conservatives/, for all the reasons given here. And that is what the question was asking.
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/18000520/gun-risk-death
"Alarming" spike in deadly unintentional shootings by kids as gun sales soar during lockdowns
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unintentional-shootings-guns-ki...
There are very few activities which require a firearm to be owned as opposed to rented. Hunters can hunt and marksman can shoot, as long as the weapons are returned as part of a standard rental.
Guns won't stop the (American) government from asserting its will. Many people have tried that, believe me it doesn't work out. Merely owning a gun won't stop a determined adversary or provide you with a modicum of additional safety unless you've been trained in how to quickly acquire and shoot it. An assault rifle is of almost 0 value in a non-war urban setting, unless you plan to be firing at many targets at a range of 200m+
Statistically, the overwhelming majority of guns end up harming their owner or their owner's family. Actual self-defense is near the bottom of real uses for fired personal weapons.
Don't buy a gun. Buy a dog. You'll be safer
Which is why if you're serious about using a gun for self defense, you need to carry it on your person or have it at the ready.
> Anything else is horribly unfair to people who pay taxes but can't reliably use guns to protect themselves (ie the elderly or disabled)
A small subset of the population can't do something so no one should be able to?
> There are very few activities which require a firearm to be owned as opposed to rented. Hunters can hunt and marksman can shoot, as long as the weapons are returned as part of a standard rental.
Self defense.
> Guns won't stop the (American) government from asserting its will.
Tell that to Amon Bundy. Tell it to Mexico. In fact, tell it to most of the countries the US has gone to war with over the last 50 years.
> Merely owning a gun won't stop a determined adversary or provide you with a modicum of additional safety unless you've been trained in how to quickly acquire and shoot it.
Which is why you should get training and practice.
> An assault rifle is of almost 0 value in a non-war urban setting, unless you plan to be firing at many targets at a range of 200m+
This is total nonsense that you just made up.
> Statistically, the overwhelming majority of guns end up harming their owner or their owner's family.
That's data from the entire country and largely results from suicides. The need to own varies wildly by location, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.
I’m not saying that I think guns are effective or not, but when I see arguments like this that cherry pick statistics or make up stories to appeal to emotion it makes me suspicious about the validity of the argument.