>Restricting guns, ammo, attachments, magazine sizes etc are not effective forms of gun control imo
Why?
And the argument of "it's too hard because of the volume already sold" doesn't wash.
Why?
And the argument of "it's too hard because of the volume already sold" doesn't wash.
For example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00993-6
I’d expect people to deflect, minimise or argue that the trade off is worthwhile but blanket denial is pretty odd given the circumstances. There are after all plenty of articles interviewing parents and kids who have been affected as well as research.
I doubt they would. (If they make sense to have in a world with 20 round magazines, they make exactly as much sense in a world with 10 round magazines and a fantasy that no 20, 30, or 50 round magazines remain.)
And does the requirement to steal/import/manufacture/buy on the black market make it easier to buy on impulse, or harder?
Both are used in gang warfare and assassinations.
The point is to frustrate those efforts.
> I’d imagine it’s pretty easy to find some online from overseas.
Good! Now you've added new points of failure. It would just be terrible if that high-capacity magazine they bought from a sketchy vendor were to jam in the field.
> criminals can steal them from legitimate places.
...which increases the risk of getting caught before anything worse happens.
If you look at photos of confiscated guns in California, very few have 10 round magazines. Scrolling through SFPD's twitter, I can only find photos of illegal guns with illegal magazines.[1][2][3] The second photo is of a Polymer80, which is a pistol you can make at home using a dremel and a hand drill. They're compatible with Glock parts and quite reliable.
These laws do nothing to reduce violent crime. The main effect is to annoy law-abiding gun owners. When I moved out of California, it took me maybe 30 minutes to undo all the CA-specific modifications on my guns.
1. https://twitter.com/SFPD/status/1511846273644589058
A school-age kid very likely not.
Gun control isn't supposed to stop all criminals from getting guns, if there's a will, there's a way.
As Jim Jefferies puts pretty well: there's almost no reason to own a gun if you aren't a hunter except for that you like guns. That is ok on a personal freedom level but has pretty harsh consequences to a society when at scale...
There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year in the United States, and evidence to suggest this actually lowers the rates of various types of violent crimes (including "hot robberies", where the home owner is still in the house when it is being burglarized).
The right to self-defense is a foundational human right, and logically entailed from that is the right to effective means of self-defense.
Source?
> Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2013. Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/18319.
In all civilized countries, these are called murders. Someone entering your home does not give you the right to shoot them.
Worse than all of the above they will do it again and again with few opportunities to get busted because statistically few of these crimes actually solved.
Your families safety is the only thing that matters here. If playing Rambo will increase the risk to your family you shouldn't do it. If shooting the intruder will increase the safety of your family by even the smallest fraction of a percent at the cost of certainly killing a burglar you should absolutely do so.
Lets say the harsh truth. The only people prowling around invading other people's homes are awful people of negative value to humanity. From a purely utilitarian perspective you shooting them today would just mean that they stop hurting actual people of worth tomorrow.
For your own moral health you shouldn't hurt them if it is possible to avoid it and preserve your other goals but there is no situation in which you ought to prize any number of burglars over even 1% chance of your family members getting hurt.
Your outrage isn't moral its a plea for greater harm in service of a dysfunctional moral code where your children are less important than the meth addict who is terrorizing your neighborhood.
add gun control into the mix and this chance goes WAY down.
"If you startle them they could open fire sending a stray bullet into your kids room"
As could you by opening fire in an attempt to stop the attacker. Noting the majority of gun owners never use them, they are far more likely to cause harm them prevent it.
The "protection" argument is best served by reducing the number of weapons in circulation, not by arguing your ability to use one to protect yourself.
Here's the reality of things:
- 3 out of 4 burglaries happen with no-one home
- 7% of that remaining 25% show "a form of violence". It doesn't mean shooting. Even a fistfight counts in there. So, 1.75% of burglaries happen with violence. This is even lower in countries which have already regulated guns.
- There are approximately ZERO burglars that want a confrontation when stealing from you. It is infinitely more trouble than it is worth to be caught. Even if they know they will win a fight. A fight means noise, it means being potentially seen, caught, etc. Burglars will abandon ship the moment anyone is up. Once again, gun ownership makes the likelihood of things getting violent much higher. If you know you can easily run away, you don't come armed. If you know you can get shot, you come in armed and ready to shoot
- The meth addict is deserving of treatment and help, not being shot. Do you think people fall into meth for the lulz?
- Utilitarian perspective on human lives is absolute dogshit and a show of a rotten society and mindset.
Not to detract from the rest of your points, but this framing isn't helping. Even if we all were to agree that addicts deserve help, it does not fall to the victim of a burglary to extend that help, at that moment, at that time.
U.S. Department of Justice
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/ascii/vdhb.txt
39% of burglars were armed
28% of the time someone was home during the burglary
7% ended in violence. Not 7% of the 28% 7% of the total or 1 in 4 people who found someone home victimized them. Let me quote the report for clarity.
> A household member was present in roughly 1 million burglaries and became victims of violent crimes in 266,560 burglaries.
The most common crime is simple assault but rapes, shootings, and murders happen.
Lets rewind for a moment and re-center the discussion on what was said.
>> There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year in the United States
> In all civilized countries, these are called murders. Someone entering your home does not give you the right to shoot them.
We were never talking about what to do if someone burgled you while you were away. The entire sub discussion was whether shooting a burglar was a morally permissible response. The background facts are that you are going into the situation with a 1 in 4 not a 1.75% chance of being victimized.
Furthermore your burglar will keep doing what he is doing and he is going to crap out sooner rather than later and hurt someone else because he's going to keep putting himself in other people's houses with their kids.
At the population level helping addicts and shooting invading addicts aren't mutually exclusive. You offer all the help you can to people so you don't come into your house to steal your shit to sell for drugs. I'm absolutely on board with offering people help and I absolutely don't want to do harm to people.
While you are speculating I actually dealt with a fellow forcing his way into our home. He pushed his way in knocking my wife down in a position where she couldn't retreat. He didn't respond to a threat of imminent death in a rational way because he was on drugs. Nobody is dead nor even broke a bone because I opted for minimum violence and beat him him instead of trying to murder him. Furthermore we supported the prosecutors diverting him from prosecution into a drug treatment program because fucking his life after the fact wouldn't make us any safer.
Had it been the best choice to kill him I would have absolutely done it and I wouldn't have worried about his interests if they conflicted over much with me and mine. I certainly wouldn't render my family unsafe in order to preserve his life nor should I. Nor should you!
With that user's interactions with me hopefully in the rear view mirror. I'm looking at the drug dealers/users coming in and out of the building mostly en route to the schizophrenic chick who runs her apartment like a drug flophouse handing out electronic keys to the "secure" building like sticks of gum. Her druggies and dealers have started making trouble about getting in now that the door is keyed for one key per person so their "keys" don't work any longer.
Myself and my wife have both been threatened and they tried to burn our building twice in the last 6 months lighting a fire in the stairwell that threatened the life of everyone in all 56 units. Despite being obvious arson with the wall and floor of the stairwell lit by someone who lit then fled on camera twice in the same spot a month apart this was classified as a accidental warming fire set by homeless people and nothing was done.
I have already been told "snitches get stitches" by the druggies and I fully expect for someone to make an attempt at violence that ends in fatality one way or the other in the future.
Forgive me therefore if I don't have sympathy for bleeding hearts that want to extend the warmth of human sympathy and kindness to folks who are already inside their house robbing it while they are in it! My sympathy is so far past zero the counter has rolled over.
And while a home invasion does not necessarily give the right to shoot someone per se, it makes it quite a bit easier to satisfy the conditions for self-defense that I have laid out elsewhere in this thread.
I really wish people would stop repeating this falsehood. If you live in a state that allows private sales without a background check, and you sell a gun to a non-resident of that state, you have committed a felony. Non-resident sales must go through an FFL, which means background checks and whatnot.
Most criminals get their guns through theft, self-manufacture, or straw purchases (often via a spouse or close relative). They're not acquiring them through legal loopholes.
In the UK, guns are heavily restricted and we definitely have criminals but our gun crime is very low. There must be some reason these criminals are not using guns?
I'd wager that it's because most people do not have guns, so they're harder to access, less chance of criminals being able to access. Wouldn't that be the same in the US too?
But as far as I know, now it is also pretty much illegal to carry a knive around in the UK, as the crime with knives were and are very high (but still lower than the US).
But in general I do not agree to the idea to reduce the problem to the number of guns. Germany for example has a quite high number of guns per capita (higher than one would expect) and so has switzerland, but both have lower homicide rates than the UK.
I would rather focus on the reasons, why someone goes homicidal.
US already has a lot of weapons, and getting them illegaly is a lot easier, than in UK, where they literally have to smuggle them from abroad, and being an island makes it even harder.
I live in the balkans, and getting a gun here is very hard, almost impossible. People still get shot, and during the "wild 90s" here, there were a lot of shootings, even mass ones (not during the war, but after, or in in-war areas).
The only difference is, that we have "different criminals" here, so when someone gets shot, both the shooter and the shot person usually know why they're shooting and why they're being shot, and it's rarely without a good reason.
No, you don't.
The overwhelming majority of murders in the US follow the same pattern. Basically the drug industry DIYing the the kind of violent enforcement of business disputes that "real businesses" use courts and state violence for.
People going postal is a rounding error.
Gun control will not stop all gun crime tomorrow, but 10-15 years from now mass shootings will be far rarer than today.
Not to mention making these kind of things makes the criminals that are doing this stand out, and that is something they generally want to avoid.
Because we tried it for a decade and it did various shades of nothing.
IMO a lot of them just wants the "real thing" and not necessarily wanting a lethal instrument, so leading majority to non-firing/less lethal subgenres makes sense. They don't need a real working three-stamp Stormtrooper AR9 for 9mm Monday, but that's just my opinion.