Sure, but I've lived in the US all my life and the ability to own and use a gun is considered a basic human right. It's right up there along with free speech. These things are in the constitution, which can't really be removed by legal means and instead only supplemented/added upon. So yes the idea of removing a basic statement from the constitution is appalling.
Perhaps when you say "Basic Human Right", you mean "American Constitutional Right". Here's the list of our 30 basic human rights, as outlined by the
UDHR, stolen from
here:
Basic Human Rights
1. We are all free and equal. We are all born free. We all have our own thoughts and ideas. We should all be treated in the same way.
2. Don’t discriminate. These rights belong to everybody, whatever our differences.
3. The right to life. We all have the right to life, and to live in freedom and safety.
4. No slavery – past and present. Nobody has any right to make us a slave. We cannot make anyone our slave.
5. No Torture. Nobody has any right to hurt us or to torture us.
6. We all have the same right to use the law. I am a person just like you!
7. We are all protected by the law. The law is the same for everyone. It must treat us all fairly.
8. Fair treatment by fair courts. We can all ask for the law to help us when we are not treated fairly.
9. No unfair detainment. Nobody has the right to put us in prison without a good reason and keep us there, or to send us away from our country.
10. The right to trial. If we are put on trial this should be in public. The people who try us should not let anyone tell them what to do.
11. Innocent until proven guilty. Nobody should be blamed for doing something until it is proven. When people say we did a bad thing we have the right to show it is not true.
12. The right to privacy. Nobody should try to harm our good name. Nobody has the right to come into our home, open our letters or bother us or our family without a good reason.
13. Freedom to move. We all have the right to go where we want in our own country and to travel as we wish.
14. The right to asylum. If we are frightened of being badly treated in our own country, we all have the right to run away to another country to be safe.
15. The right to a nationality. We all have the right to belong to a country.
16. Marriage and family. Every grown-up has the right to marry and have a family if they want to. Men and women have the same rights when they are married, and when they are separated.
17. Your own things. Everyone has the right to own things or share them. Nobody should take our things from us without a good reason.
18. Freedom of thought. We all have the right to believe in what we want to believe, to have a religion, or to change it if we want.
19. Free to say what you want. We all have the right to make up our own minds, to think what we like, to say what we think, and to share our ideas with other people.
20. Meet where you like. We all have the right to meet our friends and to work together in peace to defend our rights. Nobody can make us join a group if we don’t want to.
21. The right to democracy. We all have the right to take part in the government of our country. Every grown-up should be allowed to choose their own leaders.
22. The right to social security. We all have the right to affordable housing, medicine, education, and child care, enough money to live on and medical help if we are ill or old.
23. Workers’ rights. Every grown-up has the right to do a job, to a fair wage for their work, and to join a trade union.
24. The right to play. We all have the right to rest from work and to relax.
25. A bed and some food. We all have the right to a good life. Mothers and children, people who are old, unemployed or disabled, and all people have the right to be cared for.
26. The right to education. Education is a right. Primary school should be free. We should learn about the United Nations and how to get on with others. Our parents can choose what we learn.
27. Culture and copyright. Copyright is a special law that protects one’s own artistic creations and writings; others cannot make copies without permission. We all have the right to our own way of life and to enjoy the good things that “art,” science and learning bring.
28. A free and fair world. There must be proper order so we can all enjoy rights and freedoms in our own country and all over the world.
29. Our responsibilities. We have a duty to other people, and we should protect their rights and freedoms.
30. Nobody can take away these rights and freedoms from us.
You could say this is just semantics, but these semantics are why some people in the thread found it appalling.
Gun violence has actually gone down,
according to the FBI, in the last 20 or so years quite significantly. Simultaneously the number of guns in the US has been rising (
source). This does not prove a causation, but it does prove that a rise in number of guns does not cause a rise in gun violence.
This last sentence is in conflict with itself. Correlation does not mean causation, as you say, and lack of correlation does not mean lack of causation.
It's really simple: if it's likely that a criminal will be shot committing a crime, they will be less likely to commit the crime. Even criminals can be trusted to abide by their own self-interests.
This is why we have laws. If a criminal will be executed or imprisoned indefinitely for committing a crime, they will be less likely to commit the crime.
We still have murder and rape despite these laws, and we still have murder and rape despite these guns. These are unsatisfactory, or at the very least, incomplete solutions. Fear alone won't prevent all crime, and those that don't fear the legal risks of a crime aren't going to fear a gun owner (if anything, they'll just be more mentally prepared to resort to violence, because it will be kill or be killed at that point).
At this point often times the concern of the mentally unstable having access to guns comes up; "Well what about the mentally unstable who will violently commit mass shootings without concern for retaliation?" Again, I refer you to the charts from the FBI. Statistically these kinds of people are not relevant to the current discussion. There just aren't enough of them to warrant concern relevant to general gun control. However, like I've said before, they probably deserve their own special attention and their own separate discussion.
I'm looking at the charts, and I don't see how half a million incidents every year is not enough to warrant discussion on how we can better prevent guns from falling into the hands of those that want to bring harm to the innocent. I don't see how 8% of all violent crimes is so insignificant that we can't bring to the table some sane regulations that may potentially save lives in the future.
You're right that people overreact when an event such as this comes up, but I feel that obstinate rejection of
any suggestion to improve things is an equal overreaction to protect the right to bear arms.
Guns can sound scary if one is ignorant to how guns work in a society. Sure. But if we start looking up stats and making basic arguments based on human psychology, shooters don't like to be shot back at. For example
92% of all mass shootings since 2009 have occurred in gun free zones. It's simple: the best place to kill a lot of people is where they all gather and have no defense.
That statistic is ignoring armed security. In fact, it was a report to counter-point the alternate claim that
86% of mass shootings allowed guns on the premises. So it's really up to how you want to frame that data. My guess? Mass shooters pick large public events or areas, which are also generally events/areas where citizens are forbidden from bringing weaponry. Or are you honestly suggesting that allowing firearms into the Super Bowl is going to make it a safer event?
Violence control only really affects non-violent citizens. It does not stop criminals or the mentally unstable from acting out in violence. It stands to argue that a very effective and empirically verifiable method for lowering violence is to arm the just citizens with self-defense. Chicago is a good example. I've heard that Chicago is regularly rated as one of the
top 3 cities in the US for murder rates. Then Chicago started issuing concealed carry permits and immediately experienced its lowest murder rate
since 1958.
Since 1958? Are you kidding me? You just linked an article that showed gun violence was at its worst during that time, so
of course it's lower now, but that doesn't mean it's because Chicago started issuing concealed carry permits. Like you said earlier: correlation is not causation. In the same vein I could link gun ownership to
higher risk of suicide,
increased risk of homicide, and
increased risk of violent death in the home.
So really there's two options that we see in this discussion:
- Arm citizens for self defense
- Bolster government power over the citizens to defend the citizens
To me it seems clear that the first option is very effective. I also know, anecdotally, from personal experience that the police take a long time to show up to a violent act. Where I used to live in Oregon the police response time was 30 minutes to 1 hour. In a city it could take anywhere from 2-15 minutes, or maybe longer.
Unless properly trained, a citizen returning fire in a crowd is going to do more harm than good. It's also going to add to confusion. Hypothetically, if you hear multiple gunshots and see someone shooting into a crowd, do you draw your gun and kill them? What if they're firing back at the original shooter? What if you get shot for trying to shoot them? I don't see any scenario outside of fantasy where this would work, especially when you consider even self-defense within your own home has way too many cases of accidentally shooting a family member thought to be an intruder.
If a mass shooter is shooting people, the best way to stop this act is for someone in the immediate vicinity to fight back and neutralize the offender. Actually this applies to any violent scenario, not just with guns. Beatings, fist fights, knife attacks, or anything else violent will be most effectively shut down if someone in the physical proximity at the time of the crime is able to stop it. And criminals know this. Criminals will be less likely to commit crimes of violence if they anticipate immediate retaliation.
Training, certifications, permits. If that's what you're advocating, I can support that. But that training, those certifications, and those permits would all serve as the oversight on gun ownership that we are sorely lacking today.
So if the first option can be shown, empirically and logically to be effective, why do the second one? Because it makes you *feel* safer? This is a serious question -- why would granting power to people you don't know, who have a blatant history of corruption (I'm talking about US government entities), without any proper methods for relinquishing that power, be a better option?
I don't know everyone on the street or in the mall. Government employees are at the very least interviewed, most have background checks performed on them, and many are elected as representatives by the People: you know, you and me. I'm all for decentralizing, but your hard sell on the Big Bad Government just discredits your position as having an ulterior agenda from my perspective.
Any confrontation has no other possibility besides one party dying.
Actually a lot of confrontations involve nobody dying. It's pretty easy to shoot someone in the leg, or to simply show a gun and not fire at all. Here's a recent one in Oregon, guns involved, no deaths and no firing (
source). Here's another from Oregon involving a shooting, but no death (
source).
Why kill the other person if they don't
also have a gun? Sand Wraith's point is that if the shopowner presented a gun to the armed robber, suddenly it's not just a robbery but a fight for survival. There's no sense harming the victim when they don't have a gun, but when they do and you don't want to die, maybe pulling the trigger isn't such a bad idea.
What makes the situation even more stupid is that the constitutional right was written when guns could shoot only once before needing to reload.
Well actually I've never heard of anyone having access to anything other than guns that could only shoot once before "reloading". It's called semi-automatic. Unless you mean long manual reload times, sort of like a bolt action rifle or muskets that take a ball and powder reloading.
You know, at that same time there were lots of other "arms" besides just muskets. There were mines, morters, cannons, and the list of crazy shit goes on. Yet the original authors still chose the umbrella term "arms". They didn't write "muskets".
I'm pretty sure he is referencing oldschool muskets. The law was written when guns were very primitive, and you could argue that the level of sophistication makes them almost entirely new inventions. However I find it to be a weak argument, because the purpose of the Second Amendment is to form a well-regulated militia to prevent a centralized government from growing too powerful. It's barbaric and ineffective with further innovations in warfare, but that was the original intent. Honestly, interpreting the Second Amendment as "private, individual ownership of arms" is quite loose, but that
is the modern interpretation.
If guns are so terrifying I imagine that cars would be much more terrifying. A gun can be owned and pose no threat to anyone; guns cannot be fired unless the trigger is pulled. However, no matter what the situation is, anytime someone enters a car they put others around them at risk. In 2011 there were around 11k homicides involving guns (from above FBI source). That same year there were 32k motor vehicle deaths (
source). If we factor in vehicle related
injuries and gun related injuries (not just deaths) I bet you the disparage would be even more dramatic.
Cars are just way more dangerous than guns. So, shouldn't there be even stronger emotional responses to all the cars being driven? Why isn't this talked about nearly as much?
Funny you should mention it, but we have far more regulation on the ownership of cars. And there is a
huge movement to deal with the issue that is the human driver. But this is off-topic, because you're conflating accidental injury with intent to harm others. If you want to be genuine in the comparison, try to find a source for vehicular homicide / vehicular manslaughter and compare the numbers. The best I can find at the moment is
300, which is 37 times
less than firearm homicide.
Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Jul 6 2016, 6:19 pm by Roy.