Anyone like to shoot?

[Peter123456789]

I genuinely believe that guns kill people. Just look at our poor inner city neighborhoods, for example. In addition, studies have shown that one is less safe[I][/I] by owning a gun.

However, sport shooting, where one does not take a gun home, should be legal.

[SteveFoerster]

I genuinely believe that guns kill people.

I suppose they do, in exactly the way that pencils make spelling mistakes.

[sanantone]

I genuinely believe that guns kill people. Just look at our poor inner city neighborhoods, for example. In addition, studies have shown that one is less safe[I][/I] by owning a gun.

However, sport shooting, where one does not take a gun home, should be legal.

:eek: :leaving:

[rebel100]

I never leave home without my SIG P290...

ive been considering an ultra concealable single stack 9, Sig 290 is a definite contender. Also considering the Kimber Solo, though I may save a few bucks and pick up the ruger or a beretta nano. I need something for those occasions when it's fully legal yet frowned upon. A sunday go to meeting gun if you will. 

[ironheadjack]

I genuinely believe that guns kill people. Just look at our poor inner city neighborhoods, for example. In addition, studies have shown that one is less safe by owning a gun.

However, sport shooting, where one does not take a gun home, should be legal.

The poor inner city neighborhoods aren't hellholes because guns exist they are hellholes because gang bangers use guns to kill each other over drug territory. In fact, gang violence accounts for nearly 50% of the violent crime stats in the U.S., according to a 2011 FBI UCR on violent crime. I have a safe full of guns...they have no effect on inner city neighborhoods.

Studies that show you are "less safe" by having a gun in your home, are often flawed and misrepresented to suit the ideology and end-goal of the group presenting the flawed study. Those studies don't take into account suicides, or protective firearm uses by residents.


Research by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, has shown that firearms are used for protection as many as 2.5 million times annually.

If you feel less safe with a firearm in your home by all means do not own one. But do not tell me I cannot keep and bear firearms in my own home because you do not trust your self with the responsibility.

The leading causes of death in the US are cancer and obesity related diseases. By your logic we should ban cigarettes, and unhealthy foods.

....gun related murder is extremely rare, accounting for about .005% of all deaths in the country last year. Even rarer are murders committed with so called “assault rifles,” which pans out to about .0002% of all murders in 2011. (Note: these numbers are based on mathematical analysis of FBI Uniform Crime statistics, and statistics from the U.S. Center for Disease Control.)

9 Leading Causes of Death in the United States - Mic

[EI2HCB]

I genuinely believe that guns kill people. Just look at our poor inner city neighborhoods, for example. In addition, studies have shown that one is less safe[I][/I] by owning a gun.

However, sport shooting, where one does not take a gun home, should be legal.

I sure hope sport shooting people take their guns home, otherwise they better make sure that the police look after your guns otherwise they could get into the hands of criminals. I come from Ireland were the citizenry have been disarmed a long time, we have gun crime there were people are murdered all the time yet guns are illegal which means that criminals find ways to attain firearms regardless of the law. With the limited supply of ammunition every time a firearm is discharged it kills someone with the exception of police and military target practice. Statistically speaking a study could show that for every round fired in Ireland the kill rate per round is higher than any other nation in the world. Irish criminals believe in gun control, not only do they use both hands and control their rate of fire they also benefit from government policies because the citizen has no access to firearms and so are compliant when confronted by criminals. What a controversial subject I'm sure it has application in the criminal justice tests

[Peter123456789]

" 2espressos_in_separateCupsOct 1st 2013, 12:32
The whole "guns kill people" vs. "people kill people" debate is just a case of a really bad framing of a debate, probably at least partly courtesy of NRA spin doctors. It should be clear to everyone that people kill people with guns, and if you take away the guns, people will still kill people, but because it will be that much more difficult, they will kill less people. " - the comment section of The Economist piece below.


Thank you for pointing out the number of deaths in America, and thanks for letting us know how many people in the US use guns for protection. But let us not stray from the topic, which is the fact that owning a gun makes one less safe. If this is not the case, then please find me 1 study suggesting otherwise. There is a big difference between feeling secure and safe than actually being safe. I'm afraid some of us have seen too many movies.

I ask you to read the following two pieces. Maybe I can sway you away from the majority, to the side of research and facts.

The Economist (2013) PREPPING for an appearance on Dutch TV this week to talk about the new gun-control measures that take effect in Maryland starting October 1st has afforded me a priceless opportunity to watch lots of gun-rights videos. My favourite, I think, is Ice-T's appearance on CNN, where he seems not to grasp the concept of laws. ("I'll give up my gun when everybody else does," he says, with a wry, superior glare. Well, ah, yes. That's how laws work; they impose the same rules on everyone, all at once, to overcome prisoners' dilemmas like this one.) Another good one is this savvy, funny rabble-rousing speech by Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, at a rally in Idaho. Mr Rhodes opens up by scolding the crowd for being too lightly armed: "Where's your rifles? You know what your handgun is for, right? (Scattered crowd response.) To fight your way to your rifle!"

On a more serious note, conservative millennial pundit Ben Shapiro of Breitbart News had an interesting conversation after the Newtown shootings with liberal DIY news-show producer David Pakman. Mr Shapiro argued that it's hard to determine whether gun laws work, since less restrictive areas such as New Hampshire have low gun-violence rates while highly restrictive areas such as Chicago have high gun-violence rates. "It comes down to culture, and how do we inculcate a culture that really takes violence seriously and takes gun ownership seriously," Mr Shapiro says. "The truth is this: Britain has a lot of gun laws on the books, they have five times our violent crime rate."

That isn't the least accurate crime-stat quote I've ever heard, but it's not accurate, and more importantly it's very misleading. The total prevalence of violent crime in America in 2010, according to the National Crime Victimisation Survey, was 10.8 per 1,000 people; that is, you had about a 1.1% chance of being a victim of a violent crime. In England and Wales, according to the British Crime Survey, it was 3.1%. This makes England's violent crime rate three times as high as America's, not five times. That's still a striking difference. But counterintuitively, "violent crime", in both America and Britain does not include homicide. (Violent-crime stats are usually based on survey data rather than police reports, since many crimes are never reported to the police; but homicide victims tend not to respond to surveys.) Homicide is a separate category, and here the difference is startling: as we reported this summer, the homicide rate in America is four times as high as that in England and Wales. There were 622 homicides in England and Wales in 2011. In America, with a population 5.5 times as large, there were 14,022.

How much of that difference should be chalked up to the presence of guns? Well, gun-rights advocates often argue that there's no point taking away people's guns, because you can kill someone with a knife. This is true, but in practice people are nowhere near as likely to get killed with a knife. In America, of those 14,022 homicides in 2011, 11,101 were committed with firearms. In England and Wales, where guns are far harder to come by, criminals didn't simply go out and equip themselves with other tools and commit just as many murders; there were 32,714 offences involving a knife or other sharp instrument (whether used or just threatened), but they led to only 214 homicides, a rate of 1 homicide per 150 incidents. Meanwhile, in America, there were 478,400 incidents of firearm-related violence (whether used or just threatened) and 11,101 homicides, for a rate of 1 homicide per 43 incidents. That nearly four-times-higher rate of fatality when the criminal uses a gun rather than a knife closely matches the overall difference in homicide rates between America and England.

Then there's the related argument that people have a right to defend themselves against aggressors carrying firearms, and that if you criminalise gun ownership, only criminals will have guns (which is perhaps what Ice-T was getting at). That may be valid in the abstract. In practice, 0.8% of victims of gun violence say they responded to their attackers by either using or threatening to use a gun. Not much of a risk for the criminal, it seems. Perhaps that was because too few Americans own guns or carry them on their persons to have a substantial effect, but it's hard to imagine driving those numbers up much higher; Americans already own twice as many guns per person as any other nation. How many more Americans would need to carry weapons in public in order to create a serious criminal deterrent? Five times as many? Ten? Is this even possible, let alone desirable?

None of this should be particularly surprising. We know that overall, firearm deaths are lower in states with stricter gun-control laws. More recently, we've learned that the expiration of America's assault-weapons ban was responsible for a substantial portion of the subsequent increase in gun deaths in northern Mexico. It's really not terribly shocking that making it harder to get your hands on machines designed to kill people results in fewer people being killed. But we've worked very hard over the past few decades to convince ourselves otherwise.

Gun control: Data suggest guns do in fact kill people | The Economist


In conclusion, please read the following, written by a gun enthusiast:
Do Guns Make Us More Safe or Less Safe? The NRA Seems to Be Winning the Argument*|*Mike Weisser

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-weiss...87996.html

[SteveFoerster]

My favourite, I think, is Ice-T's appearance on CNN, where he seems not to grasp the concept of laws. ("I'll give up my gun when everybody else does," he says, with a wry, superior glare. Well, ah, yes. That's how laws work; they impose the same rules on everyone, all at once, to overcome prisoners' dilemmas like this one.)

Perhaps the more important concept that Ice-T grasps is that just because there is legislation against private gun ownership doesn't mean that everyone obeys that legislation, and that for those who live in high crime areas, slavishly obeying such legislation literally means bringing a knife to a gunfight.

In practice, 0.8% of victims of gun violence say they responded to their attackers by either using or threatening to use a gun. Not much of a risk for the criminal, it seems.

The assumption here is that those victims believe they're safe to answer this question honestly.

[ironheadjack]

Thank you quoting another persons words and making no attempt to form your own opinion.

No where in what you quoted does it prove how having a gun in your home makes it less safe. In fact what you quoted completely strayed from your original point and went into another arena of the gun control debate. Guns are simply pieces of metal that require human interaction to do anything. There is a loaded handgun within two feet of me right now as I write this, tell me how I am less safe. My fact about using guns for protection doesn't stray from your point of homes with guns are less safe, it directly correlates with it.

None of this should be particularly surprising. We know that overall, firearm deaths are lower in states with stricter gun-control laws. More recently, we've learned that the expiration of America's assault-weapons ban was responsible for a substantial portion of the subsequent increase in gun deaths in northern Mexico. It's really not terribly shocking that making it harder to get your hands on machines designed to kill people results in fewer people being killed. But we've worked very hard over the past few decades to convince ourselves otherwise.

That is completely and utterly false. If you follow the link on that site to the research and data, you will understand what I said previously about studies that "are often flawed and misrepresented to suit the ideology and end-goal of the group presenting the flawed study." The number one state with the most oppressive gun control is California, but somehow with all that gun control they still lead the way with the highest murder rate and murder by firearm. With 1,879 deaths in 2012, California has the highest number of murders anywhere in the US - and perhaps unsurprisingly, the highest number of murders by firearm too (1,304). The lowest numbers were recorded in Alabama (1 firearm murder), Vermont (2) and Guam where there were none in 2012.

If you do a tiny bit of research you will discover that Vermont has almost no gun laws, they even have a thing called Constitutional Carry, which says residents of Vermont have a Constitutional right to carry firearms on them. Again this is Vermont, a state known for it's hippie population and the only state to have a socialist senator.

The states with the highest murder rates always have the most gun control. California, Chicago, NYC, New Jersey, DC

I don't even know what to make of "we've learned that the expiration of America's assault-weapons ban was responsible for a substantial portion of the subsequent increase in gun deaths in northern Mexico". The federal "assault-weapon" ban expired in 2004 after 10 years on the books when the FBI concluded that the draconian law had no effect on crime rates. Operation Fast and Furious was another failure at the hands of the federal government specifically the BATFE, in which they allowed straw purchasers to sell guns to Mexican cartel members in hopes of following these guns to high ranking cartel members.

The problem with gun control laws is that laws only effect the law abiding. Criminals by their very definition are not law abiding. Yet, big government types believe that they can legislate away evil; which is obviously impossible.

[UptonSinclair]

I am one of the odd americans who would gladly move to a country where private ownership of guns in prohibited. Unfortunately, emigration is pretty tough for the working class.

Since the constitution protects private gun ownership, I just want to ban ammunition.