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If you're trying to make a point, you've completely failed.

@TSG: Don't have a reply to really say, just wanted to thank you for being informative.

Here are my thoughts on this issue. I'll be addressing it from the point of view that a given form of gun regulation actually does reduce the amount of weaponry

With this sorta issue, there's a few sides to it. First of all, what kind of murder are you trying to curtail, and are you curtailing killers or deaths.

I feel with isolated murders, even by the same killer, you are not going to reduce the deaths much with regulation. The two reasons it might be reduced by it anyway is that the killer feels less safe to do the crime with a less effective weapon, and people killing in the moment out of rage is less likely with a less effective weapon. But if they are determined to kill, you can still kill someone easily with a knife to the neck, and there's not really a way to regulate sharpened metal.

In the specific case of mass murder though, deaths can be reduced directly by regulation, as people simply cannot kill as much with melee weapons than guns. If you compare mass murders, it is simply not a contest for what a single rogue can do. And again, guns provide some sense of safety for killers.

However, while this reduction of guns helps in most scenarios for this particular problem, it isn't addressing the root of the problem. Unhappiness with society, mental health issues, and poverty all have ties to murder. We most likely will have to accept some sort of collectivist policy if we want to keep people from entering the state that they get the urge to kill.

oh and I should add, people talk about the defense against the government idea of the amendment. I hate to say it, but when nukes were invented, and perhaps before then, the idea that the people alone could overthrow the government went out the window if the military still supports the government.

You might say, oh but the US would never use a nuke on its people, that's insane and would destroy the nation's future. But here's the question, who in their right mind is calling that bluff. They don't have to use it to establish fear across the nation. And even without all these UN regulated weaponry, I doubt there's any hope for an independent insurrection.

The only way the government would be overthrown now is if the military coups in favor of a mass protest outside government. The military is what actually decides who controls the country, and it's not at all unfounded for mass protests to result in the military removing a government who is viewed as destroying the nation. Western nations avoid it by not putting in policies that result in that kind of dissent, not because we're more civilized than other nations.

That's a very narrow interpretation of what it means to be in a Militia. You're using the text literally when one needs to look at the spirit of the amendment and what was intended when creating it. It wasn't just the threat of ones own government but the threat posed by other governments as well, since the United States was still a very small and very new power surrounded on two sides by a colony of the powerful French, and a colony of the powerful Spanish.

Additionally, the militia is designed to consist of every able bodied person whether they formally join an organized fighting force or just are on their own as a citizen and wish to defend their country and themselves from harm. The entire reason this law exist is because it is belief that Self Defense, is a right that people should have. What you are doing when you dismiss this argument is saying that the concept of Self Defense shouldn't exist, because there are people who possess the ability to command nuclear bombs. And frankly I'm not sure that's really a sound argument to make, though who knows, maybe it is.

With your other points, I actually agree with them and I find myself scratching my head at what exactly people wish to actually accomplish, aside from a mostly showy but pretty empty gesture.

If it's to stop these kinds of mass shooting incidents, well banning "Assault Rifles", which are simply semi-automatic rifles, that won't do much good. Handguns are and still are the preferred weapon of mass shootings. And it's not like rifle shootings weren't a thing before the AR-15 came to the market. The Texas Tower Sniper, The D.C. sniper attacks, Columbine, none of these would be prevented by this kind of ban.

If it's to reduce the amount of homicides by guns in general, again this won't do anything. Handguns are still the absolute number 1 contribute to gun crime, by a huge margin. Yet the majority of posters want to keep handguns but ban assault rifles, which would do little to curb crime.

If its to stop violent crime in general, well your actually a bit late to the party there. Violent Crime has been steadily declining over the past 2 decades, even during incidents of mass gun buying and selling, the rate of crime does not actually seem tied to the amount of guns currently in circulation within the United States. Gun Shows, where a lot of the iffy sales of guns occur, do not have a correlation with spikes in crime. Gun buy back programs do not seem to show an impact of violent crime either.

Frankly, at least to me, banning guns won't stop these tragedies from occurring nor will it make it harder for people to do them. So I have to wonder, what good will it actually do aside from being a political notch in one sides belt to claim victory over and get some good PR with?

Er black graphic T, i'm not arguing against self defense or owning guns or anything. I'm targeting the specific argument that the 2nd amendment is for protection against the government, it's just not realistic.

I'm not really taking a full position on it, I feel there's a lot of complexity to the issue that I don't understand. I'm just making a series of points I feel are important to note. The original purpose of the 2nd amendment has been lost to modern war technology, and most gun laws would mostly effect the confidence of killers and mass murder deaths more than anything.

Not really, as either has existed long before such weaponry existed. The oldest case of a mass murderers and mass killings, had nothing to do with semi-automatic rifles, and everything to do with people snapping and deciding to carry out acts of extreme violence. And I really doubt if them not having access to a 30 round clip was enough to deter them then, that it'd have any better a deterrence now.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-first-mass-murder-us-history-180956927/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Ysidro_McDonald%27s_massacre

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

I do apologize for jumping to conclusions about your stance however. I was unclear that that was indeed your intent. I merely wished to offer a counter point to the notion that a militia or armed populous has 0 place in the modern age, which seems the sentiment of most people.

BGT, are you going to bother explaining the point you were trying to make in your reply to me earlier?

Sadly, some people are sympathetic to the idea of removing free speech, free exercise of religion, and rights to peacefully protest the government.

Oh, and libertarians would hang you for taking away their property rights.

Why? It's literally your own point taken to it's logical conclusion. You equate the Constitution and Amendments as nothing but a piece of paper and then go on to say how changing it to save lives and better society is absolutely justified when it comes to guns. I merely applied that train of thought to remove the rights to privacy and right to freely associate, since those two are constantly sources of conflict when it comes to arresting and persecuting powerful criminals, that being needing a warrant to spy on them and needing just cause to break up an assembly.

The counterpoint of that is the same as the counterpoint you used, that there isn't really logic in using a type of argument that calls for making one of the major foundations of law irrelevant for the sake of supposedly increasing our safety, when in actuality it's just moving us in a direction that these laws were put in place to avoid

The fact you can't recognize your own point and modus operandi is kidna confusing to me to be honest. Like did you not read your own post before posting it up? I literally tore out that last part from your post.

I can see that you were doing that with what I said, what I can't see is the point you're trying to make by doing that, as in what's actually wrong with it.

If you have an issue with my point, just say it outright instead of trying to sound clever.

You’re not going to be able to stop a tyrannical government with access to jets, missles, tanks and drones with a rifle dude.

cough

If you ask me, most gun-owning Americans would be more likely to put down a revolution than participate in it, but to suggest that it would be impossible for an armed rebellion with firepower almost exclusively consisting of small arms to challenge a large military force is just ignorant of history. There are plenty of examples of a persistent guerrilla presence surmounting a well-funded, industrialized military.

I mean, we just need to look at the last 17 years of this war and ask yourself, "Why is this group without access to gun manufacturers, a navy, an army, or an airforce, not been wiped out yet?"

The reality of war is that no military ever goes all out. And it's very doubtful that they would go full out in their own domestic shore when you look at their actions on foreign soil against foreign combatants.

Not unless there was a change to the Geneva Conventions that says "by the way if you attack your own people you totes don't gotta follow these rules, no probs bro we got your back."

Black Graphic T, for one, you'd need a huge fucking alliance to enforce the geneva convention on the US, if they'd even need to violate it. The military numbers don't favor a total war with the US right now. Spending more on military than the next 8 nations combined does that.

Secondly, there's a difference between a war to advance foreign interests, where you need to reserve a military force for future combat and protection, versus a war for the survival of the state. I'd say they'd be quite willing to use a lot more of their military tech if they have a risk of not surviving the war.

That also goes for you too myconix

Okay, first off, If you think the US would come to a point where a civil war occurred, AND would still be the most powerful nation in the world, your sorely mistaken. One does not get to a point of complete and total warfare with itself without first suffering some major issues. A steep economic, sociological, or technological decline, would need to first occur for such a civil unrest to then evolve into civil war.

Second off, the world likes living, believe it or not. And it can't really live if the US needs to launch enough nukes to wipe out a quarter of the US. That's not how nukes work, they aren't normal bombs and they blast massive amounts of irradiated matter into the atmosphere which rains down all over the planet. The UN would sooner authorize Russia to put the US administration down then it would allow a nuclear bomb to be detonated in a civil war.

Third, this kind of act would completely collapse the military industrial complex. Without the workers to build the militaries weapons, ammunition, computers, and vehicles, there isn't going to be a military much longer. Call me crazy but if you have the president talking about genociding his own people in press conferences, I doubt Boeing, Lockheed Martin, or Remmington, would continue to do business with that administration at the risk of them blowing up their domestic manufacturing centers and workers. Unless we have devolved even further into the point the military presses people into manufacturing their hardware, Ie slavery, the private companies supporting the industrial complex are going to leave because this isn't profitable for them.

And if we are at that point, the US power would have declined far more rapidly, to the point, Canada and USAN would probably have a viable ability to take us out considering our power would be reduced to only the violence we can produce. And we just need to look at North Korea to see how far that actually gets you, except this time we won't have China to give us a life line.

I never said it would come to the point where the US would use a nuke. I just think they'll be willing to threaten it at that point. and I seriously doubt they would challenge that.

I'm probably not gonna reply further, since I've taken this chat way off course from gun control and I apologize for that, but I do believe we have the tech right now to both keep the rest of the world away and subdue a population, as dark of a reality that is. It's really hard to say how exactly politicians will react when faced with the current reality of weaponry, last time we got to check how that'd go was the cold war. But there's one thing I'm certain of, in the modern age of weaponry, international alliances are the only way the people would win a civil war against a nuclear armed state.

Give everyone a free gun then see whoever survives.

What purpose would this serve? (PS stop shitposting in serious debate)
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Could a U.K. Style gun ban work in the U.S? Given the fact that America has less of migrant problem it may just work, but I think a looser restriction on calibres would be necessary to get the population to agree peacefully.

It'd work if they could do it, but I'm expecting there;d be problems doing that with the Second Amendment in the way.

A UK style ban would not work. Guns are pretty ingrained in our culture, like it or not.

Not to mention, they went pretty far with it to the point of destroying historical relics simply because they're guns. As well as the fact that you have to be 18 years old to even buy a dining utensil set because it has a butter knife.

UK is probably the worst example to use for gun banning laws because it didn't do much to curb violence, just specifically gun violence.

The UK and not just its gun ban but it's "Zombie Knives" ban is pretty much a clear example of treating the symptoms without treating the cause. Just keep banning the weapons and then wonder why there are crimes still going on. Now crimes are starting to be done with Claw Hammers because guess what, anything can be used as a deadly weapon so long as it is durable and capable of inflicting pain on another person. But good luck using a claw hammer against 4 guys rushing you in self defense.

Expect sometime next year for the UK parliament to pass a ban on Claw Hammers, and next probably Screw drivers when someone discovers you can use one of them like a stiletto knife pretty easily.

This was kinda covered earlier with the whole "can't atop things entirely but can make them less bad", there's always going to be SOMETHING but these things are less deadly than guns and it makes sense to say that fewer people died than if those criminals had guns.

But what if everyone had a gun? That could work too. ( not really shitposting this time).

You're actually not the first. A lot of people tend to bring up ideas like "well, if the victims had guns and shot back it'd all be fine" with these shootings, some have taken stuff like the Las Vegas thing as a counterexample, saying that it shows you can't rely on that.

Maybe not rely, but might end up being more effecting than banning guns?

Just speculating really..

Fine, no solution is perfect. But when your solution has a net impact of 0 curbing of violent crime, you can't claim it was still a good solution. When crimes just stop being done with a gun and got be done with hammers, knives, and cars, you can't just go "Well look, no gun crime though. it worked."

Violent crime is violent crime, no matter the method used to perpetrated that crime. We should be looking to reduce violent crime as a whole, not just one type of violent crime while inflating other sources to higher rates the before.

Maybe not rely, but might end up being more effecting than banning guns?

That's more debatable but still runs into what people like to point to with the most recent incident, that in many situations the targets aren't necessarily going to be able to shoot back and put a stop to it effectively.

Fine, no solution is perfect. But when your solution has a net impact of 0 curbing of violent crime, you can’t claim it was still a good solution. When crimes just stop being done with a gun and got be done with hammers, knives, and cars, you can’t just go “Well look, no gun crime though. it worked.”

There's something you're overlooking here, which is the magnitude of the individual crimes, even if all it did was to make them "switch down" to lesser, more easily accessible weapons that could do a number to reduce the deaths/injuries from the incident. To once again use the Las Vegas shooting as an example, if he couldn't get a gun and ended up using a knife or hammer or something instead, he would've hurt/killed far fewer people that way, not to mention having to get up close as another obstacle. Even without stopping it from happening, that's saved a whole bunch of people anyway.

But this does go onto the next point:

Violent crime is violent crime, no matter the method used to perpetrated that crime. We should be looking to reduce violent crime as a whole, not just one type of violent crime while inflating other sources to higher rates the before.

Here's the thing, there's more than one thing that can be done. You can do something about the mental health stuff AND restrict guns more, just as an example.

One problem with gun control or the lack of thereof is that, how do we prove either one is effective? We might see the stats and compare, but we can't really tell why something is happening, is possible that gun violence was going to increase or decrease regardless and we only think it is because of the measures taken.

Not saying this is pointless, it is not, I just wonder how we will know when we have applied the right type of gun control? (or lack for that matter)

This was kinda covered earlier with the whole “can’t atop things entirely but can make them less bad”, there’s always going to be SOMETHING but these things are less deadly than guns and it makes sense to say that fewer people died than if those criminals had guns.

I don't think you can really argue it's been "less bad" in the UK. (For reference, the handgun ban went into effect in 1997.) The gun ban did very little for the homicide rate. It only started to drop in '05 when there was an overall plunge in crime.

What gun control advocates really need to do is figure out what caused that big downtick and work to replicate and perfect it in other countries.

To once again use the Las Vegas shooting as an example, if he couldn’t get a gun and ended up using a knife or hammer or something instead, he would’ve hurt/killed far fewer people that way…

Or he would have finished that tennerite/ammonium nitrate bomb he was building. A well placed car bomb can easily kill 50 people and we've already seen the power an ammonium nitrate bomb has. Good thing he never rented a Ryder truck.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/21/5-facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/

Here is the pew researches report on violent crime, and the fact that in the United States, it has had a very steady decrease after the 90's.

https://www.atf.gov/rules-and-regulations/national-firearms-act

There are too many graphs but this is basically a massive database tracking all aspects of guns, from sales to licensing to tax information. Gun sales have gone up post 90's, rising and rising to larger amounts then has really been recorded in the united states.

Now, here's what I won't do. I won't argue that Guns lower crime, because that is causation without causality. Instead, I'm arguing that guns actually have very little with the actual rates of crime themselves, to the point where banning guns would actually have a negligible impact, to an actually 0 impact, on violent crime.

These two statistics should be related, if one had to do with the other. If guns were really a massive enabler of violent crime, then violent crime should have skyrocketed post-90's and become absolutely worse then it was before. But it hasn't, instead crime has continued to fall, independent of whatever gun sales were occurring.

Similar to the statistics from the UK, banning guns didn't curb crime. Crime exploded and then receded, regardless of what was or was not banned. I'd say improvements to society, and improvements on how we treat young people and people who are first time offenders, would help to reduce the impact of violent crime many more times over then banning a weapon whose use in such crimes is statistically, the lowest out of all other gun categories, and even falls behind knives.

I would say this is very relevant to the topic as a whole.

If there's one thing you should take from the video, it's that poverty has a much bigger relation to violent crime than guns do.

The way I see it, I don't see why firearms shouldn't be regulated much the same way cars are. You have to register the product in question and pass a mandatory safety test. However, much like cars, I think you should be allowed to own a high-end gun (let's say, a 30 round capacity semi-auto rifle) if you so choose. After all, there's a lot of products people don't technically need, but exist for the purposes of luxury.

Now, you could worry that someone owning that gun is going to use it for nefarious purposes, but if you do that, you might as well worry the same thing about every semi-truck driver on the road deciding to pull an impromptu Death Race 2000, or every person that owns a custom audio system in their car using it to blow your ear drums out. Anyways, my point is, I don't think it's really fair to restrict a product based on what someone might do with it.

I see your point but I don't know to what extent this is a good analogy, vehicles are a vital mode of transport and we have no choice but to accept its risks, while guns are specifically created only to kill, self defense for good or for ill will involve killing most of the time because guns are extremely lethal, even hunting for sport involves killing. Not that makes guns BAD but it certainly makes them of more questionable worth to society, you can NOT say the same thing with cars.

Not too sure what to say to the rest (to be honest, I'll fully admit I could be wrong and I'm not really sure what to think regarding the statistics and such) but I can reinforce NO!'s most recent point, guns are specifically lethal weapons, so can't be 100% compared to other things that were made for something else (and achieve that purpose) but can be used to kill.

Fair enough point, but between self-defense and various other uses (hunting, target shooting, collecting, friggen revolver spinning) I think there's enough other uses for firearms to argue that there's enough reasons to own one that doesn't involve illegal activities.

Maybe yeah, but you gotta wonder why someone would need an assault rifle, everything else? sure sometimes you need something as strong as a shotgun for self defense, but assault rifles? (I know that "assault rifle" is a somewhat subjective and overused term, but still there is some serious firepower legal in USA) Then again I don't know for certain if you need a reason to be able to own something, I guess that can be debated too.

An assault rifle (as defined by the US Army) needs the following criteria:

It must be capable of selective fire.
It must have an intermediate-power cartridge: more power than a pistol but less than a standard rifle or battle rifle, such as the 7.92×33mm Kurz, the 7.62×39mm and the 5.56×45mm NATO.
Its ammunition must be supplied from a detachable box magazine.
It must have an effective range of at least 300 metres (330 yards).

(taken from Wikipedia)

No civilian model rifle is allowed to have selective fire, so basically "assault weapon" is just a term used to fear-monger.

Of course. it doesn't mean they're automatically evil and worthless but you need to just keep in mind that it's ultimately a lethal weapon and you need to keep that in mind when discussing valid uses and their merit.

WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG THAT IS WROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG

I'm SO TIRED of hearing this argument. To buy a car, you do NOT need to register it. You do NOT need to insure it. You do NOT need to put the sale of the vehicle in a database. You do NOT need to renew the registration. And most important of all you do NOT need to follow laws regulating modifications.

All of these laws are required to drive cars IN PUBLIC! However, if keep the car on private property you do not have to follow any laws whatsoever. Zilch. Nada. Null. None.

This aversion towards killing show just how detached the First World has become from reality.

Killing child rapists is good.
Killing serial killers is good.
Killing terrorists is good.
Killing dictators is good.

Killing is not, nor will it ever be, an inherently immoral act. Also, the argument "b-b-but it was MADE to kill!" is stupid. Nazis invented rockets to launch warheads and inflict mass death on Allied troops. These same rockets now sends satellites into space. Actually, a lot of technological advancements you enjoy today were invented by militaries to increase their overall lethality. Better pull out your trashcan and get to work on throwing some stuff away, if you really are steadfast in this view.

Sure and others in the topic have accepted that just being a lethal weapon doesn't mean it's worthless altogether and shouldn't exist, but that still means it's an important thing to keep in mind.

Particularly since you can't necessarily trust everyone to only use it on the right targets in the right situations, which I suppose is kind of the core of the whole issue. The clash of "there are reasons that people would need these, including civilians" versus "but if you just let anyone have them with no restrictions then it can go very wrong very fast and has already already done so before", there's a lot of disagreement on what the right balance is and how to practically enforce it, though, hence the debate.