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 Ouze wrote:
No, no, yes.

Thanks. I thought so, but it was helpful to have it confirmed.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Not really. Nothing at all could have stopped what happened in Vegas, at least as far as gun laws are concerned. The perpetrator had the means to bypass everything.

Why are replying to my post when you didn't read it? Here's a larger block of what you replied to;

"If an effective control could be developed that stopped these kinds of mass shootings had been in place it might have stopped some events like Las Vegas but it wouldn't make a dent in the overall death toll from the proliferation of guns in the US. That's doesn't mean it is okay to do nothing, a law like that would have made a huge difference to 59 people in Las Vegas"

"If". "Might". It's right there, plain as day that I am not saying such a control exists. But then you take the next sentence, which was making an assumption that such a law might merely comment on making the effort, and you reply to that as if I had said there were laws ready to go to stop this or something.

Don't do that. It misrepresents my point, and leaves you debating with an argument of your own creation.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 cuda1179 wrote:
As for the numbers that you call "correct and verified", the devil is in the details. If lower gun ownership rates lower shootings by 10 deaths, but raise stabbing deaths by 10, is there really an improvement? That's the issue. The only real metric is if overall murders go down. Which is why their charts are flawed.

You said the numbers were "wrong on so many levels", and you "went back and double checked using actual crime statistics". That sounds like you were saying the numbers were false. I was saying the numbers are correct. If you're making an argument that the numbers are right but lack context, that's something different. You're still wrong, because the 'guns get replaced by knives' argument is just horrible in all the ways, but it is a different argument.

So, whats going to come of this is Vegas is going to not allow guns and youll get bag searched at your hotels?

I feel bad for the security guys who have to search though peoples bags in vegas...

 Grey Templar wrote:
At the very least, the level of planning he put into this attack shows that he was motivated and a setback like not having easy access to guns wouldn't have stopped him.

You've confusing 'we can't stop everyone from ever getting access to a means to do this' with 'it is futile to ever put any roadblocks in front of anyone trying something like this'.

Those are massively different things. I mean, you lock your door at night, yeah? That lock isn't certain to stop anyone getting in the house, it is still possible to force it open. But it does make it harder.

It's the same for putting restrictions on some firearms. It won't stop everyone buying guns for nefarious purposes, but it makes it harder, and it gives the cops a much greater chance of intercepting this stuff before it happens.

And I know this guy was rich so money wasn't an issue, but just because you have money it doesn't mean you know what the hell you are doing when it comes to dealing in the black market. Rich kids getting busted buying weed is a cliche for a reason.

 cuda1179 wrote:
I've hesitated to post in this section. I'm a pro-gun gun nut that owns dozens of weapons created over the course of 130 years.

I hold my right to bear arms very closely, yet I am open to some forms of weapons laws. What I find to be silly is the "Common Sense" laws many get behind. Honestly, after every major incident these "common sense" laws are brought up, and in reality they wouldn't do jack to prevent the tragedy that just happened. They are simply feel-good laws for non gun owners and total pains in the butt for those of us that do own guns.

Banning pistol grip rifles, pistols with magazines outside the grip, barrel shrouds, bayonet lugs, .50 rifles, etc. are NOT doing anything. Literally nothing at all. Stop asking for this, it simply makes you look stupid. The only thing that might work (notice the might part) are magazine size restrictions and background checks. The magazine capacity is seriously debatable.

I keep saying it over and over and over again. If you want people to do more background checks, make it free and easily accessible. Do you know how many gun owners would willingly get on board with background checks if they could simply whip out their smart phone and do it for free in 2 minutes? The only reason to limit it to FFL dealers is so that the process for transferring a weapon is too big of a hassle and makes it cost prohibitive. I honestly think that this was intentional to make owning a gun as unattractive as possible. All this does is promote hidden sales.

I don't think common sense gun laws would have stopped this shooter. By all accounts, he had the money to buy and smuggle in machine guns and mortars

American dakka members can correct me if I'm wrong, but some old machine guns still exist in the USA? You just can't buy or make them anymore?


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 sebster wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
The question I've always asked myself is why is this happening now? What is it about modern American society that makes this tragic events occur with greater frequency?

America has had guns since the 1600s. And yeah, you can't compare a musket to a machine gun, and yeah, there has always been gun muders since the 1600s, but it feels different, more vicious and nacisstic these days.

It feels different because time provides distance, it reduces the horror that we feel when these things happen today, it makes us forget the horror people felt at the time. But reality is that murder used to be more common than it is today.

Switzerland is a prime example of an armed nation that doesn't have half the gun crime of the USA.

What guns are owned and how they are used is a big part of the issue. Swiss people have access to guns but their use and access to ammo is strictly controlled.

To cut a long story short, this is not an American problem. I think it's a problem of human nature that needs to be solved.

Except the rest of the developed world has more or less 'solved'* it in their own countries. Through many different means, but they've all gotten to the point where murder, and murder with a gun is a fraction of the rate it is in the US.


*Really, controlled or significantly reduced is better. Solve implies getting to zero murders, which is an impossible standard.

I disagree Seb

As I said earlier, I used the example of the UK in the early 1900s for a reason. Here was a heavily armed society, a militarised society that celebrated British victories in the Boer War and the Sudan, trained school kids to use machine guns, and obviously took pride in being more powerful than anybody else with the British Empire, and yet, gun crime was never as bad compared to the modern USA. The modern USA is obviously what Britain was in the 1900s: heavily armed society, and the most powerful nation in the world right now. It's a valid comparison IMO.

And also, your average British policeman was never armed with anything more than a sturdy club, a whistle, and a notebook and pencil.

If one heavily armed society had low gun crime, and another heavily armed society has higher gun crime, then yeah, it's a human nature problem IMO. Or maybe it's American society? I don't know.

 whembly wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 amanita wrote:
The 2nd Amendment is about the populace having the capability to resist a tyrannical government, not about dangerous 4-legged animals. A gun isn't evil, it's a tool used for good or ill by its wielder. Just like a hammer or a knife. Hypothetically, if you went camping with your wife and 4 men showed up and said they were going to have fun with the two of you would you say the pistol you have is evil then?

I wonder how many people are saved by having a gun in such situations, vs how many people are killed in altercations which they would have otherwise survived if guns weren't readily available?

I don't know, I haven't checked the numbers, but I'd guess at the former being much smaller than the latter.

It is an area where I think muricans tend to differ from much of the rest of the world, even if the latter number is much larger I'd guess many (most?) Americans would still want to have their guns for their protecting themselves whereas many other societies would rather have them removed for protecting the community as a whole.

Like, take the number of people killed by cops in the US, surely that number would be tiny if it weren't for the quarter of the population that is armed.

But it'd be interesting to see a poll about what the average murican does think, because obviously we only hear for the vocal ones when in reality roughly 3 quarters of you don't own guns in the first place so mustn't think they are a tremendously necessary part of life.

The CDC report that Obama commissioned stated that between 800,000 to 1.8 million successful defensive gun uses over their study (I think it was 12 to 18 mo review).

That doesn't answer my question though. My question was how many people were "saved" by it.... I highly doubt 800,000 to 1.8 million people would have died if they weren't defending themselves with guns, you'd have to break it down better than that.

Average murrican vote overwhelming for candidates that protects the 2nd amendment.

Well candidates tend to stand on more than one thing.

A random googling tells me just over half of Americans think there should be stricter gun laws, that it's currently too easy to get guns and think that the country would be less safe if more people carried guns. About a quarter to a third think handguns should be outright banned and a third to a half reckon semi-automatic rifles should be banned.

The poll of "prevent all americans from owning guns" was pretty overwhelming, about only about 9% were in favour of that one.... but then even in countries with gun bans the laws don't stop ALL people owning guns (bolt action rifles for hunting, security peoples, etc) so that question is a bit loaded in that not even other countries with strict gun laws go so far as to ban ALL guns from EVERYONE.

It'd be interesting to see the response to a question like "do you think american gun laws should be more like Swiss gun laws?"









Personally I'm neither for nor against gun regulations. I just think a lot of the arguments are ill informed and ill considered. I think guns do cause more deaths, but to quantify how many is difficult because any comparisons can't be separated from socio-economic factors and many comparisons are statistically insignificant. The biggest negative effect of guns is probably suicide and things like domestic violence and more minor crimes turning deadly, with things like mass murders getting the attention but actually only being a tiny fraction of the picture.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
If one heavily armed society had low gun crime, and another heavily armed society has higher gun crime, then yeah, it's a human nature problem IMO. Or maybe it's American society? I don't know.

I'd like to see a source for your claim that there was a huge number of guns in private hands in England in 1900. There were few laws, and no restrictions until 1920, I agree, but I've seen nothing to suggest Englishmen took up that opportunity to get their hands on loads of guns. And no, the story of a gun battle between a crime gang and police/the army doesn't count as proof. What's needed is some kind of figure on the number of people who owned a gun, or at least a raw figure of the number of private guns in the country at that time. I haven't seen that figure, and given I just trawled through about a half dozen really dodgy pro-gun pages looking for this, if there was some figure to show England once had loads of guns and it didn't impact their rate of gun murder, I'd love to see it.

My own suspicion is that while gun laws were lax, few people in England took advantage of that to buy a gun. The desire wasn't there, culturally. It would explain how those gun laws were able to be put in place without great disturbance - they were restricting something few people had or wanted. But I'm guessing, and if you've got some real numbers I'd love to see them and be proven incorrect.

I don't think guns are the problem. Americans are the problem.
See, in Switzerland or Finnland or even Canada there are plenty of guns. But there are no masacers. Mass shootings are (in what we call the civilised part of the world) a purely american problem.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
That doesn't answer my question though. My question was how many people were "saved" by it.... I highly doubt 800,000 to 1.8 million people would have died if they weren't defending themselves with guns, you'd have to break it down better than that.

You're right to doubt that number. For starters, the figure doesn't come from the CDC, it comes from a CDC study that says gun control and particularly defensive gun control is terribly misunderstood. It quotes the 1.8m figure as part of a range, saying studies have found 108k, and up to 1.8m, saying not only is there a wide range of surveys, but they're all unreliable for lots of different reasons. From there the usual liars in the rightwing media ran with it, claiming the CDC report said 1.8m defensive gun uses, that's now gospel and Obama and the media were suppressing the story. And then it ends up here as a CDC report.

Anyhow, as to the actual source of that 1.8m figure, it's hilariously terrible. What they did was cold call a bunch of people and ask them if they'd used a gun in the last year to stop a crime, if they said yes they asked them how many times and what type of crime they stopped. Then they took that response rate, multiplied it by the population to come up with their mega-figure of amazing crime prevention.

The problems with the method should be clear. It's an obviously political question, and the person hearing the call would know its political relevance and be tempted to lie. Not everyone is going to lie, but there's going to be a clear false positive rate. A false positive is always an issue, but it becomes a crippling issue when the rate of instance is extremely small in the first place. Let's say the 108,000 figure is accurate, that means that 0.04% of people use a gun defensively each year. If just 6 people in every 1,000 chose to lie in the survey, it would overstate the survey by 15 times, and increase the instances from 108,000 to 1.8m per year. And is anyone out there going to claim that there's no way that 6 people in every 1,000 wouldn't dare tell a lie about this?

And for what it's worth, the CBO report was actually picking a smaller range. There's similar phone studies that have given numbers up to 4.5 million defensive gun uses a year. But there's also sensible methods giving numbers down around 55,000 and some even lower than that. Exactly what the real answer is is unknown. What is known is that the phone survey method is amazingly bad, but it will always come up in these conversations because it suits a certain political narrative.

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
To cut a long story short, this is not an American problem. I think it's a problem of human nature that needs to be solved.

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:If one heavily armed society had low gun crime, and another heavily armed society has higher gun crime, then yeah, it's a human nature problem IMO. Or maybe it's American society? I don't know.

Your posts on this topic are very confused. I'm glad you're starting to click that one heavily armed society with a long-term extreme problem alongside a bunch of other well armed societies without it suggests that there is something specific about the society with the problem that causes it. Your previous position that it meant the opposite was very strange.

A couple people have said that US citizens overwhelmingly vote for candidates that support the 2nd Ammendment. Is this as straightforward as it suggests? Are there many cases where candidates policies are pretty much the same except on gun control where such a claim could be tested? Are their other lines across which pro-gun/pro-control politicians are also split that would make such a correlation unreliable? I'm thinking the pro-control side are likely to be more liberal socially, for example? Or am imagining a consistency that's not reality? Genuine curioisty - ike most people out the US I guess, I'm pretty up to date on general US politics and up to date on the elections that recieve considerable press overseas but I'm not very au fait with general Senatorial and Representative voting patterns.

 von Hohenstein wrote:
I don't think guns are the problem. Americans are the problem.
See, in Switzerland or Finnland or even Canada there are plenty of guns. But there are no masacers. Mass shootings are (in what we call the civilised part of the world) a purely american problem.

Rates of crimes in America are very close to elsewhere. They don't have higher assaults or other forms of violence. There is no evidence at all for this idea that Americans are just somehow more barbaric. It's actualyl a pretty damn incredible claim, and one with no support in the evidence.

So we have to look elsewhere for why Americans might commit more murder more often.

As to Canada Switzerland and Finland having guns but nowhere near the rate of murder, you're right that their murder rate is nothing like the US. But they still very high among developed nations. In fact, would you like a list of developed nations by gun deaths?

1) USA
2) Canada
3) Finland
4) Switzerland
5) France

So the exact four countries you picked out for having lots of guns also happen to be the four countries with the highest rates of gun deaths.

Though I will note that is gun deaths, so it includes suicides.

nfe wrote:

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
To cut a long story short, this is not an American problem. I think it's a problem of human nature that needs to be solved.

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:If one heavily armed society had low gun crime, and another heavily armed society has higher gun crime, then yeah, it's a human nature problem IMO. Or maybe it's American society? I don't know.

Your posts on this topic are very confused. I'm glad you're starting to click that one heavily armed society with a long-term extreme problem alongside a bunch of other well armed societies without it suggests that there is something specific about the society with the problem that causes it. Your previous position that it meant the opposite was very strange.

A couple people have said that US citizens overwhelmingly vote for candidates that support the 2nd Ammendment. Is this as straightforward as it suggests? Are there many cases where candidates policies are pretty much the same except on gun control where such a claim could be tested? Are their other lines across which pro-gun/pro-control politicians are also split that would make such a correlation unreliable? I'm thinking the pro-control side are likely to be more liberal socially, for example? Or am imagining a consistency that's not reality? Genuine curioisty - ike most people out the US I guess, I'm pretty up to date on general US politics and up to date on the elections that recieve considerable press overseas but I'm not very au fait with general Senatorial and Representative voting patterns.

It's a complicated subject, and it's easy to get confused sometimes.

 sebster wrote:
The problems with the method should be clear. It's an obviously political question, and the person hearing the call would know its political relevance and be tempted to lie. Not everyone is going to lie, but there's going to be a clear false positive rate. A false positive is always an issue, but it becomes a crippling issue when the rate of instance is extremely small in the first place. Let's say the 108,000 figure is accurate, that means that 0.04% of people use a gun defensively each year. If just 6 people in every 1,000 chose to lie in the survey, it would overstate the survey by 15 times, and increase the instances from 108,000 to 1.8m per year. And is anyone out there going to claim that there's no way that 6 people in every 1,000 wouldn't dare tell a lie about this?

And for what it's worth, the CBO report was actually picking a smaller range. There's similar phone studies that have given numbers up to 4.5 million defensive gun uses a year. But there's also sensible methods giving numbers down around 55,000 and some even lower than that. Exactly what the real answer is is unknown. What is known is that the phone survey method is amazingly bad, but it will always come up in these conversations because it suits a certain political narrative.

Yeah, it goes back to what I was saying about things being statistically significant. Polling on things that have a very low occurrence are naturally on statistically shaky ground because as you say it only takes a few people lying or misrepresenting the facts to blow things wildly out of proportion.

If we take the 1.8 million number to be true, the US only has a population of 323M, so that's 1 crime prevented for every 180 people. The total number of violent crimes (murder, aggravated assault, rape and robbery) is only estimated to be 385 per 100,000.... which comes out to 1 in every 260. So we're saying crimes are prevented at a higher rate than they are committed? If that were true and you removed guns from Americans the crime rate would reach 3rd world country levels. The number is even more silly if you consider that only a quarter of Americans own guns, so for every 45 gun owners one reckons they stopped a crime with their gun?

I just find those numbers quite difficult to believe. As you say the true answer is probably a tiny fraction of that.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:


It's a complicated subject, and it's easy to get confused sometimes.

The topic is very complex - but if A, B, C, D's firearms statistics are the same except for D's massively higher rate of violence, it's pretty weird to conclude, without recourse to any other data, that the reason for the higher rate must be something common to all four.


I'm not sure I buy that A, B, C and D are the same, though. I don't accept that, for instance, the UK was ever armed on anything like the scale that the US is, and I think the type of arms - and the reasons for owning them - are pretty starkly different in highly-armed nations today. Switzerland is often cited, for example, and certainly has lots of guns - but guns are required for state-organised militia and everyone is formally trained. In the US, for the most part, regardless of how many people think they might need to fight off the government or stop someone murdering their kids, people have lots of guns because they like guns. That's not a bad reason - but it's definitely a different one.

 Albino Squirrel wrote:
Doesn't much matter. The notion that we would repeal any part of the Bill of Rights is unrealistic to say the least.

You would bring in an amendment to the constitution.

Alternatively, the Supreme Court ruling that basically allowed everyone to bear arms could be modified by the Supreme Court.

Another way forwards would be to tackle things on a state by state level.

Where there is a will there is a way. The question is how much will there might be, and whether it is swinging one way or the other. My worry is that it is swinging both ways; I mean, that pro-gun rights people and anti-gun rights people are perhaps both becoming more polarised as the issue comes up again and again.

The Constituton was written and ratified without a Bill of Rights.
The Constitution includes a process explaining how it can be amended.
That process was used to amend the Constitution to include the Bill of Rights.
That Process can be used to amend the Constitution to repeal any part of the Bill of Rights.

Well, as we know, only one amendment has ever been repealed. And a quick look at Wikipedia tells me that even then, there wasn't overwhelming support for it to be repealed.

I think there's more chance of me being made King of France than the 2nd amendment ever getting the boot.

Like I've said before, only Americans can solve American issues.

Well, it was more of a “can it be done” vs a “will it be done” kind of answer.

I still think the Bill of Rights was a mistake because it changed how the Constitution approached the role of government. The old arguments against it still make very good points.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:


American dakka members can correct me if I'm wrong, but some old machine guns still exist in the USA? You just can't buy or make them anymore?

Not American, but my understanding is that the law changed in about 1986 but was not applied retroactively, so guns sold before then are still completely legal. Was reading earlier, apparently there are something like a dozen completely legal M134 miniguns in civilian hands in the US. And no, they don't know who owns them - but they'd have to be rich. Um, like this shooter was. Anyone thinking Vegas got off lightly???

Crispy78 wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:


American dakka members can correct me if I'm wrong, but some old machine guns still exist in the USA? You just can't buy or make them anymore?

Not American, but my understanding is that the law changed in about 1986 but was not applied retroactively, so guns sold before then are still completely legal. Was reading earlier, apparently there are something like a dozen completely legal M134 miniguns in civilian hands in the US. And no, they don't know who owns them - but they'd have to be rich. Um, like this shooter was. Anyone thinking Vegas got off lightly???

I think the vast amounts of ammo needed, and the cost of that ammo, would probably stop 99% of Americans from buying a machine-gun, even if they were legal.

Yeah the article I read suggested a minigun would set you back the best part of half a million dollars, and would cost about 3000 bucks per minute of fire in ammo.

Not to mention the fact that it's a tad harder to sneak a minigun into a hotel than ten rifles.

 d-usa wrote:
The Constituton was written and ratified without a Bill of Rights.
The Constitution includes a process explaining how it can be amended.
That process was used to amend the Constitution to include the Bill of Rights.
That Process can be used to amend the Constitution to repeal any part of the Bill of Rights.

Hissssssss, heresy! Not the holy text!

Anti gunners are always terrified at the prospect of following the established procedures to amend the Constitution.

 Frazzled wrote:
Anti gunners are always terrified at the prospect of following the established procedures to amend the Constitution.

Why do that when they can take nibbles here and there, slowly erode the rights over time so people never really notice.

 Frazzled wrote:
Anti gunners are always terrified at the prospect of following the established procedures to amend the Constitution.

I am all for going this route. Have been the whole time. I believe I have made myself clear on the subject quite a bit. The problem is that it requires a good deal of work to accomplish and we all know congress avoids work like cockroaches avoid light.

Crispy78 wrote:
Yeah the article I read suggested a minigun would set you back the best part of half a million dollars, and would cost about 3000 bucks per minute of fire in ammo.

You could however buy a Gatling gun reproduction for about $16,000. That isn't even classified as a automatic, technically it's a bolt action per ATF regulations, so no class 3 permit required.

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Anti gunners are always terrified at the prospect of following the established procedures to amend the Constitution.

I am all for going this route. Have been the whole time. I believe I have made myself clear on the subject quite a bit. The problem is that it requires a good deal of work to accomplish and we all know congress avoids work like cockroaches avoid light.

We also know there is one side of the aisle that is bought and paid for in large part thanks to the NRA--so it wouldn't happen.

Pretending that "anti-gunners are terrified" of trying to use established procedures is ridiculous. You can't have established procedures function properly when half of a two-party system has been hijacked with obstructionists that work so hard to keep the other party(when they're the minority or the majority) from being able to use those procedures in good faith.

 djones520 wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Anti gunners are always terrified at the prospect of following the established procedures to amend the Constitution.

Why do that when they can take nibbles here and there, slowly erode the rights over time so people never really notice.

Because that way the legality can challenged and be heard before SCOTUS, and SCOTUS can make a range of decisions, including the possibility that militia doesn’t mean “everybody”.

Basically the same thing that happens with abortion every single year.

Well, the difference is that there isn't an explicitly stated right to an abortion. Heck, it's covered under a right to privacy, which itself is only implied by the 4th, 5th, and 14th amendments. In my opinion that ruling was a bit of a stretch.

 sebster wrote:


As to what can be done, I don't know. No-one does. The debate on gun control is horrible on all sides. The left focuses on scary sounding weapons and challenges opponents with moral arguments 'how can you justify this awful, black gun with a bayonet stock'. The right trades in dismissive arguments based on irrelevant technical details,

I'm going to take some issue with this part of your statement, mainly for the fact that those technical details often are not necessarily irrelevant. Having the wrong kind of grip or a pinhole drilled in the wrong place or a sear that slips too easily or a barrel that's a half inch too short is the difference between being perfectly legal and a 10 year stint in club fed. You get the technical detail arguments because they matter. The technical details are a legal minefield, putting a vertical foregrip on a large pistol makes it an NFA controlled item, but an angled foregrip does not and is perfectly fine, the ATF has, in the past, issued official letters declaring pieces of string to constitute a machinegun as a result of technical details. Want to know if a rifle is legal in California? Better start learning your technical details. If the arguments sound like they're getting into weird technical details, it's because they have very real effects in law that people have to be aware of and deal with constantly.