America has vast and currently unimpeachable rights to weaponry. There is a huge swath of policy space between that and banning gun ownership. We can reduce gun ownership, trafficking and weapon deadliness a thousand different ways while not adversely impacting legitimate usage. Universal background checks, limiting purchase frequency, banning 100-round barrels, increasing liability for dealers.
Not sure if you're joking there -- maybe you meant magazines?
Like so many other gun regulation ideas, it seems superficially reasonable based on "danger" but it's almost never the case that items like that contributed measurably to gun deaths. They don't need to be banned -- they are niche items. Mass shooters who have access to them rarely use them. They rarely use 40 or 50 round magazines. Indeed, people rarely purchase magazines larger than the standard 30 rounds.
We can reduce gun ownership...
That is not a legitimate policy goal. The earlier poster points out that gun ownership is not correlated with crime at all. We shouldn't set policy goals that are merely about partisanship -- trying to cut down on gun owners because we don't like them -- rather than a clear public benefit.
...increasing liability for dealers.
I would like to better understand what you have in mind here. In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?
> That is not a legitimate policy goal. The earlier poster points out that gun ownership is not correlated with crime at all. We shouldn't set policy goals that are merely about partisanship -- trying to cut down on gun owners because we don't like them -- rather than a clear public benefit.
A 2014 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded having a firearm in the home, even when it’s properly stored, doubles your risk of becoming a victim of homicide and triples the risk of suicide. [0]
Guns are intrinsically dangerous, in much the same way as certain aggressive dog breeds and industrial explosives. While many/most people can safely raise rottweilers, store dynamite, and keep guns, some will not. Is there a marginal benefit associated with the removal of each marginal gun? Obviously. Is gun ownership reduction a legitimate policy goal? Obviously. It's strange that you think otherwise.
> In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?
Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.
A 2014 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded having a firearm in the home, even when it’s properly stored, doubles your risk of becoming a victim of homicide and triples the risk of suicide.
It doesn't say that, exactly, since it doesn't distinguish between properly stored and not properly stored cases. It is a meta-analysis; they took a bunch of papers and did the best they could. We can't say that if they're properly stored it's about the same, or worse, or better.
It also acknowledged some methodological limitations, including studying overall death rates, and not specifically deaths due to guns:
...we considered studies of suicide and homicide victimization by any means, and firearm-specific outcomes may differ.
Another issue the study encountered, was that gun ownership rates were not directly available to many of the aggregated studies, which therefore relied on various proxies.
What makes relying on a study like this to initiate a policy of reducing gun ownership not premature?
Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.
We do have laws like this already -- FFLs do background checks for every purchase and if they fail to do so, they can lose their license. What are the expansions that you'd like to see?
Guns are supposed to be dangerous. That’s the whole point of their existence.
We already have background checks. Licensed dealers who fail to follow the law lose their license and are prosecuted. The atf has no difficulty in enforcing that.
And as already posted, there’s really no useful information in that “review”.
Liability like car ownership. Failure to secure your weapons imparts liability. Guns stolen or sold without a background check that are used in a crime carry a punishment for the last registered owner. Punishment ramps up rapidly with multiple offenses. This will punish traffickers but also encourage safety.
Correct. For one, it should be mandatory that care be taken that guns not be stolen. Locked up in safes when possible or otherwise attended to and not left lying around. Secondly, a missing gun should be reported immediately. Like I said, punishment ramps up after multiple offense. If it happens once, call it a fluke and fine $100 or whatever. If it happens twice you're being careless. If it happens more, you are probably a trafficker and should be prosecuted and lose your right to own guns. This kind of rule will affect very, very few people and hopefully zero responsible owners.
Presumably only if you fail to alert the authorities to the theft.
Of course authorities don’t always pay attention to registration changes — one UK police force sent me a speeding ticket for a car I had sold nine months previously, even though the DVLA had actually registered the sale and transfer of ownership.
It isn’t compatible with basic principles of liberal government to offer “What’s the harm?” as the basis for a restriction or policy. There needs to be a clear and just basis for government action, and a commitment to repealing or abolishing policies that do not prove to be worthwhile.
The same thing goes for asking “Why do you need that?” and if people don’t have a reason you like, taking that as a basis for restriction. In a free society, the people don’t need a reason — we can do what we like. It’s the government that needs a reason. We should be questioning proposed policies, with an eye to the public benefit, not because of any love of guns, but merely out of a basic requirement for government accountability.
A ban on "large capacity" (greater than 10 rounds) magazines was implemented 25 years ago [0]. In actuality, it did very little except to drive demand (and increase prices) for such magazines.
The trouble with those policies (aside from 100-round barrels... I have no idea what that means, and I don’t think you do either) is that they’re often-mentioned, but people forget to ask the question, “Have these policies actually improved anything where they’ve been implemented?” Many of the recently-publicized shootings in the US have occurred in California, which has some of the most strict firearms laws in the nation.
> We can reduce gun ownership
Do we actually want that, though? There are murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually, whilst there are around 7k non-suicide-related deaths by firearm annually (1) (significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture).
Compare firearms deaths with other causes:
* 70,000+ die from a drug overdose (2)
* 49,000 people die per year from the flu (3)
* 37,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities (4)
* 250,000+ people die each year from preventable medical errors. (5)
* 610,000 people die per year from heart disease (6)
There are a lot of things that might sound reasonable on the surface that the media likes to tout in the firearms debate, but many of them don’t hold muster. Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I think somebody has an agenda.
>Many of the recently-publicized shootings in the US have occurred in California
Many everything occurs in California. It has 12% of the US population. To be representative, one in eight US things should occur here.
>Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7?
If someone went out one saturday and gave 20 random people (or immigrants) a heart attack, it would be too. A huge amount of resources are already spent on things like preventing flu deaths. We just all agree it's the smart thing to do, for reasons you cited.
It's not evidence to not ignore gun violence, it's evidence to put as much effort into prevention as we do for e.g. flu and disease.
I think the point still stands: the three states with the most mass shootings are the three most populous, in order [0]. Texas and Florida have some of the loosest gun laws; California the strongest.
There's also the problem about gun violence vs. mass shootings, and how regularly the two are conflated. D.C has the highest percentage of gun violence deaths, but only one mass shooting [0] [1].
Of course, two-thirds of gun violence deaths are suicide [2] and about 80% of the one-third that are homicides are gang-related [3].
The war on drugs didn't work; we couldn't keep gangs from smuggling in drugs. What makes any one think we'll do any better with guns?
Next, arguments about high-capacity magazines. It takes three seconds to change an AK magazine [4]; you don't really need high-capacity. Yes, it takes some practice, but not a ton and many of these people start planning a month in advance (see El Paso guy's manifesto). Add to this that you can 3-d print your own [5], and likely manufacture one of reasonable quality. They're really not that complicated.
Finally, remember it really is the "tactical" or "scary" guns after which they go [6]. I'm convinced it's so they can win the white suburban mom demographic with pictures of black plastic pistol grips. Remember that most AR-15s are .223 cal. They would ban those, but let you keep your 30-aut-6. Lord knows how many M1s and Garands are out there, and I've never once heard them mentioned. At this point, I wonder if mass shooters go for an AR-15 because that's what all the others used and every one is just terrified of that one particular gun.
Now let's take President Trump's solution, "red flag" laws. Alan Dershowitz wrote an excellent editorial against these in the WSJ [7]. Such laws are wrong for the same reason "stop-and-frisk" is wrong and for the same reason I object to today's airport "security"; Americans are not to be treated like common criminals without comitting a crime. And if you don't think it will have a disparate impact on blacks and browns, then I've got a bridge to sell you. This also sounds like another brick in the road to a technocratic dystopia, a la China's "social credit score".
As mentioned by others, the opioid crisis is a much bigger deal, as are suicides. This is terrorism, which is designed to cause maximum fear and discord with minimum action. We could be discussing how to allocate resources to the problems which kill the most, rather than being driven by rampant alarmism. I wish we didn't have a twenty-four-hour news cycle going on about it, or politicians trying to make it a number-one issue. Fly the flag at half-staff, say a prayer, do what we can for the families of the dead, and move on. Some time, the cost of the "solution" is greater than that of the problem. Tragedies happen; there is not always something politicians can do. Good policy rarely comes from a place of fear.
> If someone went out one saturday and gave 20 random people (or immigrants) a heart attack, it would be too.
I'd love to see where people have proposed banning gas cans or truck rentals. (I wish I could also say 'knives', but Britain actually seems to be that retarded)
I can't tell whether you're being ironic or not. If you're suggesting hypocrisy for not proposing to ban those, consider their legitimate use. In restricting use of a potential weapon, you have to weigh the cost of the restriction. Restricting or banning truck rentals has a different effect on society than restricting or banning assault weapons, for example, so you approach them differently.
> Restricting or banning truck rentals has a different effect on society than restricting or banning assault weapons, for example, so you approach them differently.
Yep! You can ban truck rentals with little to no side effects, while banning gun ownership has a history of leading to genocide. Or is that not the comparison you'd make?
> Or for the really facetious answer, here's a nice post detailing not quite the truck ban you asked about
I'm not quite sure what comparison you're trying to make here. Yes, most vehicle rentals require you to show a driver's license, but that's a technical competency requirement, not a intentions requirement.
>banning gun ownership has a history of leading to genocide
Basically every other developed country has stricter laws than the US (which is what we're talking about, not full bans). It's ridiculous to suggest those lead to genocides.
> Many of the recently-publicized shootings in the US have occurred in California, which has some of the most strict firearms laws in the nation
If California's laws prevented some but not all of the shootings then it still should be considered a success.
> Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I
I don't think this is honest. If your mother and father died in a mass shooting you would not feel the same as if they had died of heart disease. To treat the trauma of violent deaths differently from illness/disease is very natural.
Rationally, if heart disease suddenly killed tens of people in a single event you had better believe it would make headlines.
> Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7?
Heart disease does get public attention -- check your breakfast cereal, as a banal example: odds are it touts its "heart healthiness" -- and gun control isn't 24/7 either.
But there are a few components to consider. One is that gun deaths are traumatic beyond the impact of just the death. The murder of someone you love, where another human being willfully ended their life, is a whole different thing to process psychologically than their death after an illness or even in an accident. Can we reduce those ripples of harm by preventing these murders?
That "willful" bit is important too: a gun enables a person to kill a bunch of other people. Should our society make that enabling easy? Heart disease isn't perpetrated by one person on another. And, yes, you can kill a lot of people at once with a car, too. But a gun's entire purpose is killing; aside from that and sport shooting it's useless. A car is actually better for just visiting grandma or picking up groceries than being a murder weapon.
And the most important point is to rebut the relative privation that you've presented: of course the other causes of death are a problem. That doesn't preclude dealing with this one. Gun control advocates believe that there are obvious, straightforward measures that we're not taking advantage of that can reduce gun violence. Are there such measures for the flu?
It can be also out of country purchases: go to Canada, buy the gun, come back. The situation is not different in any way, especially because if you buy the gun in Vermont or Canada you are still not allowed to get it in California. Do you want to regulate guns in Canada?
And that's assuming that people don't just manufacture the guns themselves - automatic rifles with box magazines are literally 1940s tech, and while making a good one takes a ton of expertise, something able to kill a bunch of unarmed civilians is a lot easier. For that matter, how long will it be before home CNC mills will be able to make modern(ish) weapons?
Soooort of, but not really - at least for the ones I've seen. There's a difference between "finish an 80% lower" and "make a gun from blocks of metal", and I think we'll hit the latter relatively soon.
Barrel should have been drum. Like what the Dayton shooter used to hit 14 people in 30 seconds.
100% irrelevant. Just because there's a lot of heart disease doesn't mean we don't care about gun deaths. If we passed all this legislation and the net result is that the next mass shooters only kills 5 people instead of 10, then it's still worth it. You don't need 100 round clip to defend your home. You don't need a flash suppressors or 1000 yards of range and you don't need an arsenal.
The trouble with these kinds of disingenuous replies is that nobody can take them seriously.
* You know what a 100 round drum barrel is.
* You know as well as anyone that automobiles exist, and that local laws can easily be circumvented, and hence has little bearing on how well a similar national regulation might work.
* "Significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture". I'm sorry, but this is utterly irrelevant. Why would their regulations or lack thereof matter one bit in deciding whether the people killed by firearms in those areas "count"?
* "Murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually" doesn't even attempt to sound evidence-based.
Pretending like you don't understand basic facts does not help your credibility. Although I suspect these talking-point replies are not meant so much to be taken seriously or responded to, but to merely decrease the signal to noise ratio in any discussion so as to drown out legitimate debate.
To take the remainder of your comment seriously:
For both good and bad reasons, people tend to take acts of violence, particularly indiscriminate ones, more seriously than, say, drug overdoses, where people, rightly or wrongly, blame the victim. Of course not all gun deaths are blameless, but neither do we want to pretend like suicides are unimportant.
Finally, we do try to take many of those other causes of death seriously. I get the argument of proportionality (we should spend 10x the effort on drug overdoses as we do on non-suicide gun deaths, I guess?), but unfortunately these stats are usually used in an attempt to say "nothing can be done".
No, something CAN be done. We can and should do better to prevent easily-preventable deaths -- whether or not the victim shares some blame in the death.
If we can save a few hundred or a few thousand lives, is that not a worthy goal? We are on a perennial march to make automobiles incrementally safer, but we haven't insisted that everyone climb into bubble-wrapped cocoons. Our regulators walk a line that sometimes errs to far this way or that way, we fight about it online, we argue with our representatives about it, but overall, progress is being made and lives are being saved.
And given that drum and barrel (when referring to containers) are usually synonyms in English, it's not unreasonable to imagine a non-english speaker confusing the two, remembering that 'barrel' is a term related to guns, and saying '100 round barrel'.
>A barrel is not a unit of measure for rounds. Learn something about what you want to discuss if you want to have any valid point, being clueless and talking is not a good idea.
Actually my whole point is that people should not care about, and not be allowed to own those things...
That said, I've been in the army myself back in the day, I just don't care for guns to keep reading about them 20 years afterwards, or to go read about the different variations on the market.
Nor is english my first language, I read that the shooter used a 100 round barrel, I guessed they mean an attached mechanism (round), or some magazine or something. I know that revolvers have barrels, and those bizarro mob guns in the 20s (tommy guns?).
Still, apparently there's a 20-bullet barrel, how about it?
They were joking, and you're being needlessly hostile. Plus you're wrong on multiple counts. Most of the counter examples are historic, but still.
Yes, barrel is not a unit of rounds, but there are situations where it would be appropriate. Superimposed loading is where multiple rounds are loaded in the same barrel and are fired sequentially. This is a very old idea, but for a modern take on it look up (the now defunct) Metal Storm. Terrifying stuff.
There have been guns with many more barrels than 7 or 8. Volley guns have been made with anywhere from just a few to nearly a hundred barrels. They weren't always big platform mounted monstrosities either. A famous example would be the nock gun: a 7 barrel, shoulder-fired flintlock.
Why do you care so much about reducing gun ownership in the US, when the US gov ships thousands of containers with weapons to KSA that uses them in Yemen?
