Isn't the proper question "how many deaths happened in other countries of the same population density" ?
Because I assure you, it's lower in the UK, Japan, etc.
You cannot just say "oh well what can you do, it's the price we pay to have our toys".
Because I assure you, it's lower in the UK, Japan, etc.
You cannot just say "oh well what can you do, it's the price we pay to have our toys".
I looked into the stats briefly on murders per 100k by country, and the US was somewhere in the middle of the pack. If you assume that removing guns would eliminate those deaths (I doubt this), we were actually quite safe. If on the other hand you assume that those deaths would have been caused in other ways - we are still in the middle of the pack.
That implies that suicide is a rational act committed by rational actors. The fact that suicide prevention fences on bridges absolutely have been proven to work refutes that.
Regardless, it is misleading to include suicides when talking about gun violence, just how it's misleading to only talk about rifles when talking about gun violence.
Have they been proven to prevent suicide, or to prevent suicide by jumping from a bridge?
I always thought those were to stop people from throwing crap at cars/trains anyway; I have never seen them on bridges that just go over water. I've also noticed that you can often judge the niceness of an area by what they put along the sides of bridges: if nothing then it is probably a nice area, if a fence then it is not notably nice but kind of average, if a corrugated steel then it is probably a fairly shitty area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bridge#Prevention
Suicide is not a rational act, common sense does not apply here.
Heck, why restrict fully automatic M16s and bazookas - why dare impose limits at all. People are rational and intelligent their freedom should not stop where others begin. In fact you should be able to drunk drive and carry around your loaded M16 out the window down the highway.
We should be like the middle east with people firing fully automatics in the air anytime they want and gangs roaming around in pickups fully armed.
The gun bans they are trying now are the only place they can start. Because anything more sane would insanely be ignored. At least they are trying and it's a start.
Guns are not toys and that's the whole problem, people want to play with them because they think it's a game.
The thing about legislative efforts, is that on an issue where there are parties who want to take certain laws to one extreme or the other (Ex: Banning all guns.) and the sliding scale is freedom vs regulation, there will inevitably always be push from both of the extreme sides. So even if you enact "reasonable" gun laws, there will always be parties trying to push them forwards or backwards. This means that the sensible thing for guns rights organizations to do is turn even a minor gun regulation into a shitstorm so that the opposing forces on the other side have to spend all their energy maintaining reasonable gun laws.
Internet activists may want to take notes.
What they are trying to restrict is the use of guns as toys and I have zero problem with that. I think hunting is ridiculous and horrible in this day and age but I guess that's part of the compromise I have to do. I am not accepting anything further than that though, guns are not toys.
This doesn't describe any gun owner I've ever met. Like most people who want to ban guns, you're arguing out of complete ignorance.
Our death rate due to firearms has reduced by half since our automatic/semi automatic buyback program initiated in 1996 and yet, the number of guns sold last year was the same[1] as pre-1996 levels.
[1] http://www.theage.com.au/national/australians-restock-the-gu...
But why are we talking about guns? This isn't a gun conversation, this is a mental health conversation. Give people a free and easy way to seek help for mental conditions and this problem just... goes away.