Other nations' restrictive gun laws cut down on shooting deaths

http://azstarnet.com/news/opinion/article_fbdcca11-0e03-545a-9f90-8d15edf354ab.html

The politicians of Arizona decided that Jared Lee Loughner was a decent law-abiding citizen. As such, they determined that he deserved to be able to legally purchase virtually any type of firearm he desired and to legally carry that firearm in a wide variety of public and private spaces.

So Loughner legally bought a gun designed to kill many people extremely rapidly and he carried the gun legally. He was carrying his gun early Jan. 8 when he was stopped by police.

It was only after he started shooting at innocent people that he stopped being a decent law-abiding citizen.

In all other high-income democracies, it would have been very difficult for Loughner legally to have obtained his weapon. Some of these countries have very few private guns (e.g., Japan, United Kingdom), while others have fairly many (e.g., Canada, Australia, Israel, Switzerland, Finland), but have more restrictive gun laws than the United States.

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yup

it's what's for lunch.

Is it now a peaceful utopia?

On edit: Yes, I see that firearm deaths are down dramatically. It's not an oasis, yet...but maybe that's because they haven't seized all those evil guns from people who already legally own them.

And their firearm death rate is much, much higher than in the U.S.

I am not going to let the actions of criminals be used as an excuse restrict my right to keep and bear arms.

I do not care what the effect is on shooting deaths. You are not going to punish me for the criminal actions of others.

I'm going to stea...er borrow, that for my future use. :yourock:

I have long said that it was and is a mistake to allow the gun control crowd to frame the debate on firearms in terms of crime.

There will always be crimes committed with firearms. Thus there will always be a hue and cry to restrict firearm ownership in the name of criminals.

We should not rise to that bait.

We should not allow the actions of criminals to be an excuse to restrict the rights of law-abiding people to keep and bear arms.

yup

I win

figure that out all by yourself?

If there are fewer guns, there will be less GUN violence.

Show causality between the rate of firearms ownership and violent crime. When you figure that one out we all win.

Logic fail.

Common courtesy fail.

Bumper sticker fail.

Typing fail.

Language fail.

Fail. Fail. Fail.

I currently have the freedom to own firearms.

You are advocating restrictions on that freedom. Ergo, in regards to firearm freedoms at least, they are less free.

But I don't really care how free I am compared to someone else. They are free to seek out the governance that suits them.

The bottom line is that I will not allow people like you to use the actions of criminals as an excuse to restrict my rights.

Is my side winning that fight? Is my side currently on the offensive while yours is on the defensive?

Yup.

That is what laws do. They are restrictions on what you can do. The restriction may be a good one, or a stupid one, but it is still a restriction upon the citizen's freedoms.

For example:






It's obvious that Loughner had severe mental issues and also that people in a position to help failed to respond. I would submit that it wasn't the gun laws in Arizona but the staff of his college that failed to act responsibly and helped to cause the tragic shooting.

Don't forget his parents. I would argue primary responsibility rested with them, since he was their dependent. (Over 21, but utterly dependent upon them for money and shelter)

anyone who needs them without the prospect of going broke paying for it...I haven't heard a single politician suggest we should overhaul our mental health and addiction services infrastructure.

Other countries with strong gun control are Russia, Mexico, Nigeria and Jamaica all of which are very violent

I have a thread somewhere where I used the 2007 small arms survey and found that low gun ownership rate by civians correlated to a 5 times higher average murder rate when comparing nations.

It's pretty simple. More people get shot in countries with more guns. The gun lobby argues that doesn't matter because people in England get mugged and people in Africa have guns anyway, but that's pretty much obfuscation.

What's the problem with discussing the issue honestly? Why does the gun lobby invest so much energy in disingenous arguments? Why do we have this irrational position that more people carrying more guns in more places at more times is just fine, and anyone that happens to get shot is just some kind random phenomena, like weather, that we all simply must accept?

Fewer guns means fewer shooting deaths, period. We have a lot of shooting deaths, and a lot of guns. We also have a Constitutional right for people to own "arms."

We can balance these things, but we get nowhere with ridiculous statistical voodoo pretending that there is no relationship between gun violence in America and gun ownership in America.

"Overall accident rate unchanged after ban."

Quick question, what is the overall violent crime rate in the UK in comparison to the US?

Edit: We're all familiar with the liturgy of NRA statistical gymnastics. None of which change the fact that more guns = more gun deaths.

US Consumers have added 125,000,000 new guns since 1998, and the number of gun deaths have gone down.

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/total-nics-background-checks

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr

This is exactly the kind of illogic the gun lobby pushes. Countries with the most guns have the most gun deaths. It's not a 1:1, mathematically perfect formula, but it's hardly a random coincidence.

There's no way around this, so we get these stock logical dodges, like, "violent crime in the U.K." Very nice, except, a) the U.K. appears to have a very low threshold for what it books as a "violent crime," and b) pretty much no one is getting shot. And no, as gun homicides go down, "knifings" do not keep up.

It's nonsense. An honest argument would be like the poster above, who doesn't care how many people are shot, so long as we keep all our guns. Maybe hard to support in terms of civic responsibility, but that's the truth of the extreme end of the pro-gun position.

We have a problem in this country with too many people being shot. It's not unrelated to the fact we have the most guns per capita in the world. It's unlikely a ban would solve the problem, but the idea that's there no connection is ludicrous. And the worst of the gun lobby arguments, which is that the solution is for even more guns, carried by more people, in more places, is beyond ludicrous.

That's what I don't understand. Guns are just a tool. If you restrict them, people intent on doing harm will simply use other weapons.

If you aren't actually lowering the overall murder rate by reducing the number of guns available in a given society, what's the point (besides pissing lawful gun owners off, who show it at the polls)?

Edit: But they're not all the same, are they? Guns are the American way to kill people, and they kill better, faster, and easier.

There's a few elements at play here. Just as people note that the Brits have never had a big problem with people getting shot, we always have. Our culture loves guns. Worships them. In the worst case, fetishizes them. We have more guns, and more gun freedoms, than anyone else. And more people getting shot. There's no way to slice that where's there's no connection between the two.

A ban? No. But the opposite argument -- that we need more guns BECAUSE more people are getting shot -- is pretty close to insane.

I mean, if you are being attacked or robbed, regardless of the assailant's weapon, its a lot easier to defend yourself with a gun (even if just brandishing it is all it takes to make your attacker back down). And the collective threat of civilian force against abusive government intrusion makes the government think twice about really passing abusive laws. There's a reason Switzerland wasn't invaded by the Nazis during WWII, for instance.

If you were really concerned about the proliferation of guns, you'd quit advocating for more gun controls. Nothing makes people want to buy more guns faster and in greater quantity than the threat of government restrictions on the right to keep and bear.

The American non-gun homicide rate is higher than the overall homicide rate of most OECD member states. Our problem is people getting murdered; the means is largely irrelevant. Murderers in the U.S. opt for guns because they can, but there's no guarantee that they wouldn't murder absent firearms. Or have them smuggled in; there isn't a country in the world where a criminal can't acquire a firearm if he wants one. Even in China, organized crime can get their hands on firearms, generally directly from the back door of the factory, courtesy of a corrupt Norinco employee.

No, all weapons aren't the same, but the differences lie to a large extent in the nature of the application.

If you intend to assault, rob and/or murder an unarmed victim, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference what kind of weapon you use. Bludgeon, blade or firearm, the weapon grants you an advantage. We've had quite a few stories from East Asia over the past few years (for those willing to pay attention to them) of mass murders where the assailant used a knife, and the victims were unarmed.

If you intend to defend yourself from someone intent on assaulting, robbing and/or murdering you, a firearm gives you a significant advantage over the assailant if he's using "personal force," a bludgeon or blade, and puts you on a par if he's using a firearm.

According to the statistics listed on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate_to_1999 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate), the highest ever recorded homicide rates in the United Kingdom occurred in 2001-2004, well after the imposition of the post-Dunblane handgun ban. As a result, you can't credit the restrictions imposed in the wake of Hungerford and Dunblane with reducing violent crime in general and homicide in particular. Sure, they may be in decline now, but that's from a historic peak that occurred after the imposition of the latest restrictions.

Another couple of stats: from 1997 to 2007 (the ten years after the imposition of post-Dunblane restrictions), firearm crimes in the United Kingdom doubled (which is admittedly a bit hazy as the Home Office counts crimes committed with air guns and replicas as "firearm crimes," but it says something about how effective your gun control measures are perceived to be when people aren't willing to take the risk that the gun being pointed at them might turn out to not be a replica).
But more significantly, from 2000 to 2008, the number of nonfatal shootings in the UK almost tripled.

Firearm restrictions in the UK have been the equivalent of a janitor spraying a fire extinguisher at a smoldering cigarette butt in a trash can, somehow thinking it'll put out the blaze in the filing cabinet six feet away.

Edit: 1) Homicides and shootings are two different things and 2) There's no basis to assume a restriction would work instantaneously.


There's no getting around the main point, which is that in places with fewer guns, fewer people are shot. Practically no one gets shot in the U.K. Hardly a surprise, but you'd think it was with all the zig-zagging pro-gun arguments you hear. The gerrymandering of statistics is truly bizarre. The big point always so carefully avoided is that more guns generally means more shootings.

Culture plays a big role, but these arguments that more and more and more guns in the U.S. with fewer and fewer restrictions has no relationship to our rather embarrassing problem of a lot of people getting shot has become silly.

I mean, you're dead either way. Does it really matter how?

I think you're arguing honestly, but I don't think that's an honest argument. An American kid's not going to bring a knife to school and mow down 20 classmates. You're not going to get knifed by an angry driver you cut off.

We're a violent country compared to other industrialized nations. But we shoot people. Our kids shoot people. We are swimming in a soup of guns that goes way beyond hunting, or sportsmanship, or self-defense. Do you really think Columbine and VT and road rage and just basic, day-to-day American mayhem would be exactly the same with knives and sticks?

As is food poisoning.

The point is, you need to address why people would want to resort to killing others in the first place. The tool they happen to use is really irrelevant.

Assuming we could magically get rid of all the guns that are already out there, people would still be dying in roughly the same number.

And I'm sorry, but it's simply nonsense to contend that Americans would find a way to stab or bludgeon each other as effectively as they shoot each other. A knife or a stick just can't keep up with a gun, which we already know, which is why guns exist in the first place. They kill better, faster, and more reliably, and allow one person to do more damge, more quickly, to more people, with less thought.

If that wasn't the case, there'd be no resistance to gun restrictions in the first place. People don't want guns out of some aethetic choice. They want them because they kill better, and because everyone else has one, which means someone without one is at an enormous disadvantage in a violent encounter. So the pro-gun argument becomes this tail-chasing arrangement, where the slaughter of a dozen people with a gun is used to support a demand for more guns, which makes more guns available, which ensures more people will be shot, which supposedly supports the argument for even more guns. In the office. At the park. On federal property. No one is safe without a gun, because everyone has a gun, so the argument goes. And when the shooting starts, it's not the guns' fault, of course.

Edit:
We're becoming a country of people eyeing other with our fingers on the trigger, ready to deal death with the flick of a finger, and somehow, despite the notion that good people can carry guns all the time, with no problem, things go wrong and people get shot. Not stabbled, not poked with a stick. Shot. In larger numbers than in places where there are fewer guns.

It's not a coincidence.

Knife flashed at driver near Ladysmith



Road rage leaves one man injured



Corpus Christi police: Reckless driver threatens mother, son with knife


Need I go on?

You can't have it both ways. Again, this is a ridiculous line of argument from the gun lobby.

And your anecdotes don't even help. Someone waved a knife and ran away? The gun version of that story ends how?

I was merely pointing out that that is a false assumption, as we see such attacks even now, with so many guns still out there.

Guns aren't the same as knives in that it is a lot easier to use a gun in defense than it is a knife. Offensive uses have more in common (you can do a lot of damage with either weapon, especially against unarmed victims).

Again, there is a small point, but vastly overblown. If guns and other weapons are truly the same, let's ban guns now. The Second Amendment says nothing about firearms. "Here's your 'knife' permit, have a nice day."

We have a violence problem, but we have separate problem with people getting shot. That is a unique problem directly related to America's fascination with guns and their prevalence here.

I think it was pretty clear from the Founding Fathers' writings that when they said "well-regulated militia" they were speaking of all able-bodied civilians being regulated (equipped) with the same level of armaments as a regular soldier. Which in today's case would mean: sidearm and assault-rifle, at the bare minimum.

There was no national guard, when amendment 2 was penned.

Beyond that, the bill of rights is not a "the people can" document, its a "the gov shall not" document:

THE Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution

http://billofrights.org

The bill of rights protects the rights of we the people, through restrictions on government exercise of power.

That being the case, the government shall not infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, BECAUSE a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state.

Due to the nature of the document itself, the only restriction in amendment 2, is one that restricts government.

The pro-gun view of strict construction is conveniently selective. Assume "firearms" where the document says "arms." Assume the militia clause is a meaningless anachronism to be discarded. Keep the bits about "keep and bear."

And no Constitutional right is as absolute as the gun lobby suggests. ,

"There also weren't huge populations or weapons that kill dozens in seconds."

Privately owned cannons couldn't kill dozens in seconds? Uh...ok... :eyes:


"The pro-gun view of strict construction is conveniently selective. Assume "firearms" where the document says "arms.""

No. But then this IS the guns (firearms) forum, not the knives or nunchucks forums, isn't it?

"Assume the militia clause is a meaningless anachronism to be discarded."

Nope. I demonstrated what it means in the previous post. You're simply saying that not ascribing to it the meaning YOU believe is valid, is discarding it.

I suppose from your point of view, that seems true.

"And no Constitutional right is as absolute as the gun lobby suggests."

I haven't claimed that its absolute, and I'd LOVE to see you cite to evidence, anything of substance that supports that ridiculous claim about the "gun lobby".


Will you?

They helped draft the 1968 GCA and endorsed the Brady Bill in '93.

In the 19th and early 20th century, New York had a murder rate five times that of London- even when both countries had little, if any, gun control.

http://www.amazon.com/Murder-York-City-Eric-Monkkonen/dp/0520221885

Europe's not as in love with shooting people as America is, nor as in love with guns. The big fallacy is that we can love guns, embrace them, stack piles of them on every corner, fetishize them, and commend them to every able-bodied citizen as the responsible way to uphold law and order ... and then shrug when the bullets fly.

Europeans don't obsess over firearms the way we do. They don't have this core of people insisting that we all arm ourselves and prepare to shoot our way out of trouble. They CAN restrict guns more, because the population is not convinced that they are somehow naked and incomplete without a pistol on their collective hips.

Both shootings and homicides were higher in most of the US as compared to the UK before gun control. Hell, our non-gun homicide rate is higher than the UK.

assault. That's probably part and parcel of gun culture as well. Angry Americans don't beat people up, slice them, or bludgeon them. They shoot, and they aim for the center mass. All or nothing.

And I notice you conveniently ignored my following sentence, which was:

Your claim that "angry Americans don't beat people up, slice them, or bludgeon them" is false. Fully one third of American homicides are committed by means other than firearms, and those non-gun homicides alone account for more homicides (in terms of rate per 100,000) than the overall homicide rates of most European countries (at least, non-former Soviet bloc ones).

Moreover, your use of the term "angry Americans" seems to imply that you not only buy into the notion of the "virgin killer"--someone committing a homicide in a fit of sudden and uncontrollable rage--but that you also believe such individuals constitute a sizable percentage of murderers. I strongly suggest you read "The Myth of the Virgin Killer" by Kates & Polsby http://www.hoffmang.com/firearms/kates/Myth_of_the_Virgin_Killer-Kates-Polsby.pdf

You're right in one aspect, which is that the British have never had a big propensity to shoot each other. But that goes before back before they had any gun control. Which makes it rather difficult to credit restrictive gun laws with the low level of gun violence.


What you're conveniently overlooking is that the UK has seen increases in gun crime, including shootings both fatal and non-fatal, after the implementation of the Firearms (Amendment) Acts of 1997 (by which I mean the completion of confiscation of firearms that up to that point had been held legally). To argue that it can take a while for a measure to show positive effect is plausible; to argue that a measure is effective because it was followed by a decrease in gun crime when, between the measure being implemented and the decrease in gun crime, there was an increase in gun crime and the aggregate result is that gun crime, even after the decrease, is at higher levels than it was prior to the measure being introduced... well, that just stretches credulity beyond the breaking point.

Just to reinforce this point, let me quote a passage from this article in the Torygraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6438601/Gun-crime-doubles-in-a-decade.html

The lady makes a fair point, but does implicitly acknowledge that from 2002 to 2005, levels of gun crime were at best static, and at worst increasing. Is five to eight years enough to expect a gun control measure to show some effect? If not, then what basis is there to assume that any subsequent decreases in gun crime were the effect of the measure, as opposed to other, coincidental factors?


I'm increasingly inclined to think that you claim your interlocutors are practicing evasion when what they are in fact doing is refusing to unquestioningly accept your premises, in particular the ones you don't bother to state explicitly (see Audiatur et altera pars, http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html#alterapars).

Yes, more guns does generally mean more shootings. It does not, however, necessarily mean more violence. At some point in the late 1980s (and at other times as well, for all I know), Switzerland had the highest percentage of homicides committed using firearms in Europe. At the same time, it had one of the lowest homicide rates--possibly the lowest--in Europe. In other words, the availability of firearms influenced the method of homicide, but it did not demonstrably affect the frequency. We see a similar effect in American suicide statistics: firearms are the predominant means of suicide in the U.S., but American suicide rates are unremarkable compared to other developed countries (especially non-Catholic ones, a point I will touch on again later).

Nor does the number of legally possessed firearms necessarily correlate to gun violence. To cite one example, Brazil has lots of guns, and lots of gun crime. However, by the best available estimates, over half the guns in the country (9 million out of 17 million) are illegally possessed, and regional/local levels of gun crime correlate negatively with levels of legal gun ownership. As another example, Jamaica has extremely stringent gun laws (making it possible to sentence a minor to life imprisonment merely for possessing spent cartridge cases, and requiring an annual registration fee of $6,000 to keep a licensed firearm), but there lots of illegal guns and the homicide rate has been the highest in the world for several years of the past decade.

(Aside: Jamaica, frankly, has lot to fucking answer for. Fostering criminal gangs as the enforcers of rival political parties, and then exporting them both to North America and the UK. Much of the more violent tendencies among black drug gang members in both the US and UK can be traced to the Jamaican "posses" that came onto the scene in the 1970s and 1980s.)

To return to a point I touched on earlier, suicide rates in South American countries like Brazil appear unaffected by the number of guns in circulation, which is explicable to at least some extent by the fact Catholicism holds suicide to be a grave sin. You can get absolution for murdering people, no sweat, but suicide...


Well, there you've gone beyond confusing correlation for causation and into claiming correlation where none exists. Over the past twenty years in the United States, levels of gun ownership have risen, and regulations have been loosened, but violent crime rates, including homicide, have dropped by half.

Speaking as an immigrant, I have to say that American society doesn't seem to be remarkably violent, but it does seem to be remarkably homicidal. There seems to be something in the collective subconscious (to borrow Jung's term) that holds that if it's worth inflicting violence on somebody, it's worth killing him (or her). If so, I think that may explain to some extent the American love of guns, but not vice-versa, given that the American non-gun homicide rate is higher than the overall homicide rate of most other OECD member states.

In a country as flooded with firearms as America, it's again silly to insist on a 1:1 correlation. The fact is we have a lot of guns and a lot of shootings. That big picture never changes, and it's valid across all countries. Arguing that we had a few more guns one year and a few less shootings the next deliberately misses the forest for the trees, as does the similar pro-gun fallacy that if one area increases restrictions, and crime goes up or down, that means something.

Nothing works that way, and the correlation / causation fallacy is used for pro-gun arguments more than the other way 'round. Look, guns went up and crime went down. Or went down and then went up. Either way, guns win! It's calculated intellectual dishonesty.

None of it affects the core fact that we have a problem with people getting shot, and that problem relates directly to the number of firearms. All the pro-gun arguments are designed to distract from this basic fact.

Legal / illegal guns is a similar intellectual contortion. Where do all the illegal guns come from? Why don't they attract more attention than they do? Why is it so easy to buy them legally or illegally, regardless of your status. How is it that Mexico ends up with 60,000 American long guns to use in its drug wars? Their gun laws don't work? WE are a big reason why.

Pro-gun forces contend that we simply need to enforce our existing laws better, but that's a similar dodge. There's simply no way to keep up with the sheer volume of firearms. They're practically laying in the streets. If you want to reduce illegal arms, you can't come from the position that legal arms can't be registered, tracked, or regulated in any meaningful way.

We've come to a place where the pro-gun argument is that everyone will be armed, all the time, and a lot of people will be shot, but that's simply the price we all have to pay. A few mass shootings. A few dead kids. A few more store clerks and cops and ex-spouses killed in the second or two it takes to decide to shoot a gun.

We've become not an emblem of firearm freedoms, but a caricature of it. It's become a fundamentalist religion. Irrational, immutable, and immune to discussion.

like we did with alcohol? How much are you going to pay owners for the 260million firearms in circulation? How are you going to pay for this?

Do you honestly think there is political support for anymore gun restrictions here?

Do you want to see a republican run government?

Do you want to fix the root cause issues that actually contribute to violent crime?

The rest of what you said are straw arguments I didn't make, but I'll bite:

1. A ban? No. Won't work here with attitudes the way they are. We need to modify our views of guns and agree on reasonable restrictions so that we don't have so many, so readily available.

2. Support for more restrictions? Yes. Contrary to the gun lobby's slippery slope arguments, every restriction isn't an eyelash away from a ban. Let's start with an electronic registration, and letting the ATF do its job busting dirty gun dealers. The NRA won't even "permit" that anymore.

3. Republicans? Republicans thrive in the sea of guns

4. Of course. Our culture of violence is the root cause, and part of that is our obsession with guns, and part of that is the notion that guns are a sacred, blessed hallmark of freedom and democracy, that cannot be limited, lest King George come back and oppress us.

1) How do we need to change our views , legal owners that is?

2) It the the ATF a few hours to trace the Glock 19 involved in the giffords shooting. Because they DO in fact have access to the info on the (ATF Yellow form) that is filled out in all dealer based sales.

3) Republicans ignore the social problems caused by guns. Because they dont care. We should pick up voters who currently vote counter interest because of a stupid outdated gun position. We dont do jim crow anymore, gun control will go the same way.

4) Gun violence is made up of neat bundles of deaths. Suicide and homicide by mentally ill people. We destroyed our national system of treating the mentally ill. Sure it was not good, but there is probably a better solution than dumping people on the street and in prison systems.

b. Drug violence (mexico, DC, S Chicago, pretty much any urban area), caused by Drug Money. People arent out killing for fun, they are acting for economic reasons.
Remove that incentive. It impacts minorities and impoverished communities more anyway.

c. Random crime, not preventable. Still carried out with knives, bats, and other body creating methods in places like Japan.

5) Culture will clean up, no one will be writing music about buying their crack at walgreens..

"How is it that Mexico ends up with 60,000 American long guns to use in its drug wars?"

First, as you've been repeatedly been told, firearms ownership is at record highs, without a corresponding rise in gun deaths to go along with it.

So the myth that "more guns = more deaths" is BUSTED. Completely, totally, and utterly BUSTED.


Second, , I'd love for you to cite the source of that 60 thousand.

Third, that 60 thousand number in proper context - that of guns coming from american gun stores - is almost certainly wrong.


Pentagon Fingered as a Source of Narco-Firepower in Mexico

Posted by Bill Conroy - February 12, 2011 at 8:44 pm

Another series of leaked State Department cables made public this week by WikiLeaks lend credence to investigative reports on gun trafficking and the drug war published by Narco News as far back as 2009.

The big battles in the drug war in Mexico are “not being fought with Saturday night specials, hobby rifles and hunting shotguns,” Narco News reported in March 2009, against the grain, at a time when the mainstream media was pushing a narrative that assigned the blame for the rising tide of weapons flowing into Mexico to U.S. gun stores and gun shows.

Rather, we reported at the time, “the drug trafficking organizations are now in possession of high-powered munitions in vast quantities that can’t be explained by the gun-show loophole.”

Those weapons, found in stashes seized by Mexican law enforcers and military over the past several years, include U.S.-military issued rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers and explosives.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2011/02/pentagon-fingered-source-narco-firepower-mexico

River of Guns Winds Through Some Interesting Spots
Friday, February 18, 2011
The idea that we'd ever find WikiLeaks information relevant to the protection of United States citizens' gun rights wasn't anywhere on our radar when the NSSF's Larry Keane tipped us off to some disturbing information gleaned from leaked State Department documents.

According to State Department cables, the Mexican drug cartels are getting their weaponry from an international operation, with the cartels getting military weapons through various government channels. Some of those weapons did, in fact, come from the United States, but they weren't the result of the "gun show loophole" straw-man purchases or any of the other individual criminal acts anti-gun groups would have you believe.

Large quantities of those US weapons -everything from rifles to machine guns, grenade launchers, explosives and ammunition, came from purchases by the government of Mexico from the United States. As the underpaid, undermanned and undermined soldiers of the Mexican army skipped out on the military to put their training to work for the cartels, they took their issued-arms with them.

No specific numbers on how many of those guns "recovered in Mexico and traced back to the United States" were, in fact, military purchases, but the State Department cables indicate a portion of the fewer than 12 percent of the traceable weapons actually came from the United States in gun shop/individual type purchases. Remember, that's not 12 percent of the tens of thousands of weapons recovered - it's only 12 percent of the weapons recovered that were traceable. It's nowhere near the 12 percent figure that has been misquoted and used as evidence of the United State's "horrific" problem of illegal gun sales.

http://www.theoutdoorwire.com/features/224028


And then theres the 2500 guns walked in a single case alone, by ATF - unless one chooses to say ATF whistleblowers are not credible.


It isn't quite as you make it out to be.

That is logical voodoo from the gun lobby, and nothing more. In a country saturated with firearms, why on Earth when anyone expect for a moment that an X% change in firearms would lead -- instantly, no less-- to an X% change in shootings?

Still doesn't change the fact that more guns overall = more shootings overall. Which is hardly a shock.

As for the other:



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/12/AR2010121202663.html

Why wouldn't that be the case, when the NRA has successfully fought to brand the ATF as (and I quote) "jack-booted thugs!!!" to prevent electronic registration, and to otherwise hamstring and smother law enforcement's ability to even investigate gun dealers?

"Still doesn't change the fact that more guns overall = more shootings overall."

Thats the falacy. More guns overall, HAVEN'T led to more shootings.

"Why wouldn't that be the case, when the NRA has successfully fought to brand the ATF as (and I quote) "jack-booted thugs!!!"

Thats going to happen, when you shoot women holding babys, barbecue people alive after they defend themselves against you, and stomp kittens t0o death, as well as sending people to federal prison for a malfunctioning semi-automatic rifle in retribution.

"to prevent electronic registration"

Its not needed.

"and to otherwise hamstring and smother law enforcement's ability to even investigate gun dealers?"

Thats a bullshit claim. Law enforcement is NOT hamstrung, including ATF.

Here, let me help you out there..

http://www.notangsushi.com/?p=58

For someone who likes to accuse others of having to dodge and contort to sustain an argument, you're doing a pretty good job of it yourself. There seems to be no evidence that you don't feel justified in hand-waving away when it doesn't suit your argument, while happily ignoring the fact that the excuses to justify that behavior also work against you.

If it's fallacious to expect that the imposition of restrictions should yield some kind of measurable effect, then where does that leave the claim made in the OP, namely that the lower numbers of shooting deaths in (selected) other countries are the result of more restrictive gun laws? You're peeing on your own feet.

And why is it unreasonable to expect gun control measures to produce a measurable effect? That is, after all, how they're marketed. Time and time again, we're assured that if we adopt this restriction or that restriction, it will result in a reduction in violent crime--note: not just gun crime, but violent crime overall--just as we're told that loosening gun laws will result in blood flowing in the streets/on the hiking trails/on the campuses. If there is no measurable effect, why would it be unreasonable to conclude, at least provisionally, that the gun control measure didn't work?


If you subscribe to the notion that restricting the supply of legal weapons is going to prevent the acquisition of illegal weapons, you need to look outside North America. In China, it's illegal to own anything more powerful than a .177-cal air rifle, and even that requires a permit; nevertheless, a combination of corruption and sloppy inventory control means organized criminals can buy guns straight from crooked employees at arms manufacturing plants. Organized crime in south-eastern Europe (Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria) get their guns in similar fashion, and then sell them on to their associates in western Europe.

The important thing to understand is that the "diversion" (to borrow the ATF's term) of firearms into criminal hands is primarily a demand-driven phenomenon. This is obscured in the United States because there's a large private market from which guns can be, and are, diverted, but criminals in other countries--even comparative amateurs--can acquire firearms if they want them, though the supply chain might be rather longer.


That paragraph illustrates the fundamental problem with your argument. You start off with a premise that's hard to argue with--"more guns generally means more shootings"--but then you pull a bait-and-switch and implicitly replace "shootings" with "homicides." Say, didn't you say earlier that shootings and homicides were two different things? Why, yes you did, right here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=382418&mesg_id=382950 Again, that distinction evaporates when it suits your own argument. And contrary to your claim that it's "silly to insist <the ratio of increase of firearms to increase in shootings> would be 1:1" (which I never claimed, incidentally) that seems to be precisely the (unstated) assumption you're basing your argument on. And for good measure, you throw in the "arm everyone" canard.


Your assumption--that those kind of murders are undertaken on the spur of the moment and made possible by the perpetrator "just happening" to have a firearm on him--is not supported by the evidence. In particular, the notion that intimate partner homicides are generally "crimes of passion" is a myth, a lie concocted by the killers themselves (and their defense attorneys)for the purpose of wangling a lighter sentence. Over 50% of intimate partner homicides are known to have occurred after the killer has stalked the (former) partner ((source: Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear); moreover, it should be noted that this doesn't mean none of the remainder did, but just that it couldn't be established that they had. In short, intimate partner homicides are not spur-of-the-moment occurrences; they are almost invariably the culmination of an often quite lengthy and escalating process.

It should be superfluous to point out that undertaking an armed robbery is not a spur-of-the-moment thing either, nor is the perpetrator's decision to bring a firearm to commit one. The decision to do so has been taken beforehand, with conscious acceptance of the possibility of inflicting death. That is precisely the reason why the law treats any death that occurs in the course of an armed robbery as first-degree (i.e. premeditated) murder, any protestations of the defendant that he didn't intend to kill anyone notwithstanding.

And then there's killing a cop. You have to have been living under a rock since adolescence to not know that that's aggravated first-degree murder; anyone with such defective impulse control as to decide on the spur of the moment to shoot a cop isn't going to be someone who would have remained law-abiding if only it weren't for the presence of a firearm.

To sum up: the killings you describe are not the result of decisions taken on the spur of the moment by people with no prior history of violent behavior.

So all other violence is OK with you as long as it isn't gun violence? I carry my guns to defend myself against violent crime. I don't want some mugger slicing on me or beating me up so I am prepared to shoot him if need be to protect myself. Why are you so against self-defense?

or there simply a Law of Substitution effect, resulting in no net improvements?

North Korea, Rwanda, Darfur, China, Cambodia, Lybia, California, New York City............

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but the suicide and crime rates stayed just the same.

same number of bodies. Right?

Data backing my claim. This data is important as it points out that trading rights away does NOTING to help root cause..

http://www.abcdiamond.com/australia/murder-crime-in-australia/

Misleading statistics again. Homicides in Australia are low, so percentages don't mean much -- you're talking about 306 murders in 1990 vs. 293 in 2006? That's a drop, anyway (1% -ish) but the numbers are too tiny to mean anything -- one crime either way would change the result.

On the other hand, practically zero mass shootings and a drop armed robberies is meaningful even in a small sample. Gun crime dropped.

This is the same cherry picking problem we see over and over again. Fewer guns mean less gun crime, and that result is consistent. But gun proponents insist on a huge, instant drop in overall crime rates, or the gun reduction is meaningless, they say.

I'd agree gun restrictions raise the incidence of attacks with other weapons, but it doesn't even out. And in America the whole argument fails to address the fact that these other places simply don't embrace either guns OR murder the way the U.S. does.



http://www.abs.gov.au/

how those bodies got made is irrelevant. They are still dead. The fact the numbers DID NOT CHANGE is the point. All that money and effort to accomplish nothing. Same number of bidies in the freezer.

It is a 10 year data set.

There is no more argument about this in America. The pro groups have no data to back them, only emotions generated by events. Every data and study over time shows no causation between gun ownership and crime.

And you can't pull statistics from a country with 300 total homicides per year to argue that every gun homicide avoided becomes a knife homicide. That is ridiculous on its face.

that show assaults with what the idiots classified as "assault weapons" trending down before, during, and AFTER the ban.

The only thing that changed was their access to firearms. They gave it up for no reason.

Hey guess what the rate of solved homicides in Japan is.... wait for it.. 96%

See they classify murders they can not solve as abandoned bodies.

And our homicide rate has experience a sharp drop without any reduction in guns-per-capita or restrictions on the types of operating system the gun uses.




Australia also does a much better job of taking care of income inequality than we do.





I think this map does a better job of describing violence in society than gun laws.

... so how are the gun laws working in:

Colombia
South Africa
Jamaica
Venezuela
Russia
Mexico
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Belarus
Ukraine
Papua New Guinea
Kyrgyzstan
Thailand
Moldova
Zimbabwe
Seychelles
Zambia
Costa Rica
Poland
Georgia
Uruguay
Bulgaria

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita

Knightly nobleness has arisen among the armed people.
America became the powerful country by means of the Great Equalizer of Chances.
There where there is no free sale of the weapon, there is an unpunished insult of people.

And if we, as a nation, cut down on cars, we'd have fewer car-related deaths, all things being equal.

Doesn't mean we'd have fewer transportation-related deaths, just few car-related deaths.



I'll post this again:




The blue line is the UK's total homicide rate. People can rightly trumpet "Britain's firearms-related homicide rate is at the lowest ever!"

And they would be right.

They would be ignoring the fact that the total homicide rate is up 40% from when I was born. DESPITE banning and confiscating "assault weapons" in 1989 and handguns in 1997.