Yes because if you take guns off the shelves in the stores, surely the criminals won't get them from the black market and now they'll be able to slaughter unarmed civilians because the government took away their ability to defend themselves. Good idea.
Maybe I wasn't very clear in my views about gun ownership and came across as a no-brained liberal thinker. I agree that banning guns overnight and all at once would not work in the US. What we need to do is phase out the legality of gun ownership after having tackled gang culture and organised crime, which no government in the US has ever been able to get its head around. In the very long term, I think that banning all firearms should be the goal, but this cannot be done now while the market for black market weapons still exists. Once gang culture is tackled then firearms should be phased gradually out as there would be no need for the members of the public to own them (of course, this would be so unpopular, not to mention unconstitutional, that it'll never happen any time soon).
Here are the most recent statistics for annual firearm-related murders in the US, where gun ownership is legal, compared to the UK, where it is very tightly controlled:
US - 9369
UK - 14
Now, the US has a population almost exactly 5 times bigger than the UK, but even when we adjust for this this the US has 134 times (yes, 134 times) more gun-related murders than the UK.
This proves that looser gun laws are not strictly related to lower gun violence. In the US, outlawing firearms would not reduce gun crime because there is a gun culture where organised criminals would and could purchase illegal weapons on the black market. However, if you were to claim that tighter gun laws don't reduce gun crime in any cases at all, this would be false, as proved by those statistics.
Here's my source for the gun-murder rates (population data is available easily with a Google search if you wanted to check that): <a href="http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-crime-murders-with-firearms" rel="nofollow">http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_f...</a>
If you want to have a constructive and sensible debate, I'm open to discussion with you.
Oh nice, you've really done your homework. :D I can definitely respect your stance on this. Kind of a dorky reference but I remember in this fantasy novel when this group of warriors saw a bomb for the first time. Obviously a much smaller explosion that what we're capable of today, but the reactions of the people were intense... it was as though they'd just blown up all of washington DC, they were so shocked. And it really got me thinking, manking would have been a hell of a lot better off if we had never invented gunpowder. We got too good at killing each other.
I do apologise for the tone of my previous comment, it did sort of come off as a flawed argument but Im glad to see I was mistaken :)
Should dueling be legal?
↑ View this comment's parent
← View full post
Yes because if you take guns off the shelves in the stores, surely the criminals won't get them from the black market and now they'll be able to slaughter unarmed civilians because the government took away their ability to defend themselves. Good idea.
--
dom180
11 years ago
|
pl
Comment Hidden (
show
)
Report
0
0
Maybe I wasn't very clear in my views about gun ownership and came across as a no-brained liberal thinker. I agree that banning guns overnight and all at once would not work in the US. What we need to do is phase out the legality of gun ownership after having tackled gang culture and organised crime, which no government in the US has ever been able to get its head around. In the very long term, I think that banning all firearms should be the goal, but this cannot be done now while the market for black market weapons still exists. Once gang culture is tackled then firearms should be phased gradually out as there would be no need for the members of the public to own them (of course, this would be so unpopular, not to mention unconstitutional, that it'll never happen any time soon).
Here are the most recent statistics for annual firearm-related murders in the US, where gun ownership is legal, compared to the UK, where it is very tightly controlled:
US - 9369
UK - 14
Now, the US has a population almost exactly 5 times bigger than the UK, but even when we adjust for this this the US has 134 times (yes, 134 times) more gun-related murders than the UK.
This proves that looser gun laws are not strictly related to lower gun violence. In the US, outlawing firearms would not reduce gun crime because there is a gun culture where organised criminals would and could purchase illegal weapons on the black market. However, if you were to claim that tighter gun laws don't reduce gun crime in any cases at all, this would be false, as proved by those statistics.
Here's my source for the gun-murder rates (population data is available easily with a Google search if you wanted to check that): <a href="http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-crime-murders-with-firearms" rel="nofollow">http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_f...</a>
If you want to have a constructive and sensible debate, I'm open to discussion with you.
--
shade_ilmaendu
11 years ago
|
pl
Comment Hidden (
show
)
Report
0
0
Oh nice, you've really done your homework. :D I can definitely respect your stance on this. Kind of a dorky reference but I remember in this fantasy novel when this group of warriors saw a bomb for the first time. Obviously a much smaller explosion that what we're capable of today, but the reactions of the people were intense... it was as though they'd just blown up all of washington DC, they were so shocked. And it really got me thinking, manking would have been a hell of a lot better off if we had never invented gunpowder. We got too good at killing each other.
I do apologise for the tone of my previous comment, it did sort of come off as a flawed argument but Im glad to see I was mistaken :)