Setting 2nd Amt. talk aside, does gun control work?

[closeupready]

Has it been tried outside the US? And has it been tried where guns were previously unregulated, and there was an associated drop in violent crime/deaths?

[Recursion]

1. The practical side is my concern more than "mah rahts"

I guess I look at our history of prohibiting alcohol and now drugs and have a hard time believing something easily manufactured, transported, and concealed, and widely desired, is going to be practically prohibitable.

Almost no society in history, AFAIK, has been as widely armed as the US (and this has been true for centuries), so I don't know that there's a precedent there.

[Lizzie Poppet]

14. As you say, there are few if any relevant precedents.

Strict gun controls may or may not work in other cultures, but none of them are sufficiently similar to our own to state unequivocally (or even with anything resembling confidence) that their experiences would translate.

Moreover, because we are indeed so heavily armed, it's very much in question that a level of regulation of firearms that would achieve these other cultures' rate of civilian gun ownership is even possible. I'm inclined to think it is not, so questions of whether that's actually a desirable goal are a bit moot.

[closeupready]

15. I believe Israel and Switzerland and Yemen are all

examples of societies that are actually more heavily armed today than the US, though I'll concede I'm just going by recollection.

[Bake]

2. We already HAVE gun control laws on the books.

Plenty of 'em. What exactly do you want to do? Ban all private gun ownership?

How do you plan to implement that? Because frankly, that's never happening in this country.

Bake

[closeupready]

4. That's not my argument, anymore than I would argue

that since most if not all shooters are men, we should execute all men at birth.

Conversely, see the study I linked to when you and Recursion were simultaneously posting, about Australia, that actually saw a violent crime increase in the years after they enacted a gun ban in 1997.

[Zoeisright]

29. That the NRA fought tooth and nail.

And that are not enforced, with plenty of loopholes. Christ. Wake up.

[Bake]

33. So enforce them.

Geez. Wake up yourself.

Bake

[closeupready]

3. Here is a study about Australia which adopted a ban on guns in 1997:

>>In 2002 — five years after enacting its gun ban — the Australian Bureau of Criminology acknowledged there is no correlation between gun control and the use of firearms in violent crime. In fact, the percent of murders committed with a firearm was the highest it had ever been in 2006 (16.3 percent), says the D.C. Examiner.

Even Australia’s Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research acknowledges that the gun ban had no significant impact on the amount of gun-involved crime:

In 2006, assault rose 49.2 percent and robbery 6.2 percent.
Sexual assault — Australia’s equivalent term for rape — increased 29.9 percent.
Overall, Australia’s violent crime rate rose 42.2 percent.

Moreover, Australia and the United States — where no gun-ban exists — both experienced similar decreases in murder rates:<<

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=17847

Thoughts?

[DanTex]

9. Here's an article about Australia form the Harvard School of Public Health.

It notes that, at the very least, there has not been a gun massacre in Australia since the law passed. Of course, that can't automatically be attributed to the ban.

It does not appear that the Australian experience with gun buybacks is fully replicable in the United States. Levitt provides three reasons why gun buybacks in the United States have apparently been ineffective: (a) the buybacks are relatively small in scale (b) guns are surrendered voluntarily, and so are not like the ones used in crime; and (c) replacement guns are easy to obtain.

These factors did not apply to the Australian buyback, which was large, compulsory, and the guns on this island nation could not easily be replaced. For example, compared to the buyback of 650,000 firearms, annual imports after the law averaged only 30,000 per year, with many of these bought by law enforcement agencies.

For Australia, a difficulty with determining the effect of the law was that gun deaths were falling in the early 1990s. No study has explained why gun deaths were falling, or why they might be expected to continue to fall. Yet most studies generally assumed that they would have continued to drop without the NFA. Many studies still found strong evidence for a beneficial effect of the law. From the perspective of 1996, it would have been difficult to imagine more compelling future evidence of a beneficial effect of the law. Whether or not one wants to attribute the effects as being due to the law, everyone should be pleased with what happened in Australia after the NFA—the elimination of firearm massacres (at least up to the present) and an immediate, and continuing, reduction in firearm suicide and firearm homicide.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/files/bulletins_australia_spring_2011.pdf

[joeybee12]

12. Nice source...unrec

[closeupready]

13. Wow, that's really uncalled-for.

Shame on you for that. Should be ashamed of yourself.

[SomethingFishy]

25. Really? Because your source also says:

Increases in Education Spending Do Not Result in Higher Academic Performance
Federal spending has increased for elementary and secondary education programs; however, two-thirds of students still can't read or solve mathematical problems at grade level...

The Underworked Public Employee
If public-sector employees just worked as many hours as their private counterparts, governments at all levels could save more than $100 billion in annual labor costs...

Exchanging Medicaid for Private Insurance
Converting Medicaid into block grants would allow states the flexibility in designing programs that fit their individual needs, says Devon M. Herrick, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis...

Raising Medicare Eligibility a First Step toward Deficit Reduction
Over the next 20 years, spending on the major entitlement programs is projected to continue to rise very rapidly, reaching 15.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2030...

I bet if I spent more than 5 minutes over there I could find hundreds more lies.

[closeupready]

27. Whatever. Give in to your hysteria, because

I'm done "talking" with you. Click.

[Zoeisright]

30. You need to back off and shut up.

This is not a day for being snarky.

[dballance]

26. I learned all I needed to know about a report from the NCPA

when I read this "The NCPA joined with scholars at The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the American Action Network to identify what most needs to be repealed and replaced in the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ObamaCare)" on their website.

So my "thoughts?" My thoughts are the NCPA is a right-wing shill institute and I don't trust anything they publish any more than I trust anything Limbaugh says.

[bluestate10]

5. I doubt that it would work much for this incident and the one in Oregon.

The Oregon shooter would not have been netted by background checks or even gun registration, given that the gun was stolen immediately before the shooting. Not enough information is known about the current shooter yet.

What background checks and registration, along with tough control of import of guns would dramatically impact are the shootings by criminals and people that have a history of mental illness. Those shootings don't get much publicity, but the account for almost 100% of the people killed by guns each year.

[DanTex]

6. Well, there's never been a society as heavily armed as the US right now,

so you aren't going to find a perfect example. However, it is worth noting that the US has by far the highest homicide rate in the developed world, in large part due to gun violence. Of course, we aren't going to transition to a low-gun-violence society overnight, but in the long run I don't see why we have to have four times as many homicides per capita as the UK.

Here's a study that looks at gun control in Hawaii. One of the big problems with gun control in the US is that it is really easy to carry guns from one state to another, so the effect tight gun laws in one state is undercut by lax laws in adjacent states. Since Hawaii is an island, it is better to look at as an experiment.
http://home.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/UCLF-HawaiianExperience-2005

[rrneck]

7. Yes. It works.

But not perfectly. There is a point of diminishing returns with any regulation. That's where the controversy lies. How much regulation exceeds the point of diminishing returns in the form of waste of resources, diminished civil rights, and loss of life because of the regulation.

[Stinky The Clown]

8. A complete gun ban will start to get some results.

Guns have no place in civilian hands in a civilized society.

Other guns should be locked in armories.

Overturn the second amendment.

I am speaking out because of this incident.

I have held this view for decades. I bite my tongue about it a lot.

[Motown_Johnny]

10. 9000+ Murders in US: 39 in UK

http://www.juancole.com/2011/01/over-9000-murders-by-gun-in-us-39-in-uk.html


^snip^



Number of Murders, United States, 2009: 15,241

Number of Murders by Firearms, US, 2009: 9,146

Number of Murders, Britain, 2008*: 648
(Since Britain’s population is 1/5 that of US, this is equivalent to 3,240 US murders)

Number of Murders by[pdf] firearms, Britain, 2008* 39
(equivalent to 195 US murders)

*The Home office reported murder statistics in the UK for the 12 months to March 2009, but these are 12-month figures).

[Spider Jerusalem]

11. Guns have been largely regulated in most other places

and most other countries don't have the sort of gun culture the US does--most of Europe for instance is more urban than rural and anyone who had a gun was likely to be a farmer who had a shotgun for killing vermin, or wealthy and able to hunt game for sport. The UK despite previously having much less strict gun control laws than today has never had any kind of comparable rates of gun violence or murder to the USA. (The murder rate is around one per 100K people.) And with the absence of the sort of gun culture the USA has, stricter regulations on guns when they came in were much easier to implement.

[Warren Stupidity]

16. lets put it this way: we've tried the gun-nut policy.

[closeupready]

17. I don't understand; what are you saying?

?

[Warren Stupidity]

21. we've tried it their way for the last 20 years.

it ain't working.

More guns, less regulation, and mass slaughter is now routine.

The AWB expired and wasn't replaced. Carry regulations have been loosened. Stand Your Ground has spread. The USSC overturned decades of existing gun regulation.

We've tried "everyone armed everywhere" and predictably, a nation awash in guns suffers chronic gun violence.

[Aristus]

18. A common argument is "Well, a criminal is going to get a gun any way he can".

And while I don't quibble about the persistence of murderous fanatics, I do have to ask: Why the hell are we making it so easy for them? Minimal waiting time, little or no criminal background check, little or no mental health history check, military-grade weaponry on sale at every gun show in the country, no tracking of ammunition sales, etc.

The NRA types are forever babbling about "sensible gun laws" while doing everything in their power to prevent the passage of just those kinds of laws...

[Recursion]

19. We're talking about how criminals buy guns

Why the hell are we making it so easy for them? Minimal waiting time, little or no criminal background check, little or no mental health history check

Criminals buy their guns from the same people from whom they buy their cocaine. With no waiting time or background check.

Military-grade weaponry on sale at every gun show in the country

There is no gun show that sells military grade weaponry.

[nadinbrzezinski]

20. The problem is that we haven't seen these bans long enough

We did not get here in ten years...it will take over a generation for the effects to start to be felt.

That is my view.

But Canada, which has a similar numbers of guns as we do, but a much lower death rate, is a good model. Background checks are significant, and so are licensing requirements.

We can start by closing the gun show loophole and reinstating the AWB. And we also need to understand, results will take a decade or more to start to show.

[morningfog]

22. Yes, it works, even in the US. States with more gun control have less gun related deaths.

[xchrom]

23. It can. Design, implantation and end user with the

Designated institution are what's important.

I'd like to see public health officials begin to get involved in designing legislation, etc.

[closeupready]

24. Yes, public health and mental health professionals, I agree.

Particularly since mental health as a recognized profession has only been in existence for a relatively short time.

Point being, if a mental health professional is considered by society as especially capable at recognizing mental illness or tendency towards violence, then they should have input in drafting measures designed to address and reduce gun violence.

[xchrom]

31. It exemplifies the problem of our age.

How to design simple, but effective legislation.

How to administer that legislation with the end user in mind.

Public health people are often over looked experts in both arenas.

[Zoeisright]

28. Of course it does. Just look at every other first world country in the world.

Christ.

[closeupready]

32. I did. Duh. Clearly, Australia is 3rd World.

[mmonk]

34. I'm not sure. You'll probably have to compare statistics from the US and Somalia

with statistics from civilized countries to make a determination.