Of course libertarians are not much interested in evidence anyway, they just have an ideological agenda to run; but it seems pretty obvious to normal folk that an armed society is not primarily a more polite society (if it is more polite at all) - it's primarily a more dangerous society for getting shot.
And the thing that really strikes me about the last year or two of shooting tragedies in the US is how readily it's glossed over that it was legally purchased weapons that were involved the killing. I mean, doesn't that make it obvious that it doesn't matter that the buyer appears to be a "good guy" at the time of purchase: what matters is how the gun eventually comes to be used. In other words, the problem is the guns being everywhere.
A good article in The Guardian puts this all in perspective. Here are the crucial paragraphs:
The National Rifle Association likes to argue that criminals, or people intent on committing a crime, will obtain guns no matter what the law says. Among the 5,417 gun homicides in 2012 that the FBI assigns a circumstance to (3,438 are "unknown circumstances"), a mere 1,324 were committed in conjunction with another felony. Three times that (3,980) were committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Of that, over half (1,968) were the result of an argument that escalated fatally out of control.Stunning figures that for any sane person means we are very glad to live under Australian gun laws rather than American. Here's the final paragraph from the article:
To put it another way: otherwise unpremeditated murders, where people kill out of momentary rage, are the single most common type of gun homicide in America. More than gangland killings (822); more than murders committed during robberies (505) and drug deals (311) combined.
You keep a gun out of the argument, you will save lives. This is not hypothetical. A person may be intent on killing someone else, but it is simply harder to do with anything else. That's why forms of homicide other than guns account for only about a third of all homicides. Someone gets angry at someone else, they may reach for a weapon. If we make guns harder to get, by requiring a test for the license, or by banning handguns more broadly, the one at hand might be far less deadly. Like, say, popcorn.
What do you think about the recent proliferation of illegal handguns in Australia? Could it be that while the tight restrictions on guns in Australia had an effect for a while, people are finding ways around these laws now (and, unsurprisingly, the people who are doing so are the people you would least want to have guns - violent criminal types)?
ReplyDeleteIf there is no way to effectively control the obtaining of illegal weaponry then in the long run, it would seem to render the gun laws moot.
Funny, I don't hear that much about handguns being used in crime in Australia. But even if they were, a sure way to make more of them available for criminals would be to have a thriving legal market for them.
ReplyDeleteThe pro gun lobby in the US (and fools at Catallaxy) get thrilled every time that a shop or home owner is in the media having successfully chased away a crim with a legal gun.
What they do not want to talk about is the number of times a legally purchased gun has been used to kill, and how the very presence of the legal gun is the effective cause of death (that is, those cases in which an argument escalates to death because one of the parties just happened to have a gun handy.)
And that doesn't even include talking about suicide. But if you do, it makes the danger of owning in the US even more stark:
"The evidence suggests that on average, having a gun actually increases the likelihood that a person will be injured or killed, rather than that it will be used to protect that individual from harm. If you own a gun, the most likely person you are to shoot is yourself. The next most likely person you are to shoot is a close family member. Homes with guns are a dozen times more likely to have household members or guests killed or injured by the weapon than by an intruder.The odds are much greater that the gun will be used against you or a loved one than that it will be used against an armed assailant or an intruder. Firearms are more often discharged in a homicide, suicide or an accident, than in self-defense."
Link:
http://www.examiner.com/article/possessing-a-gun-makes-you-less-safe-not-more-safe
It's a very simple proposition.
ReplyDeleteThere is a clear correlation between gun prevalence and gun deaths in any given community.
This very basic understanding seems lost in the fog of discussion about the issue.