Conservatives in favor of gun control

According to the Australian Institute of Criminology -- "The public's perception is that violence is increasing, but trends in violent crime reported to police since the early 1990s reveal a mixed story. Homicide has decreased by nine percent since 1990 and armed robbery by one-third since 2001, but recorded assaults and sexual assaults have both increased steadily in the past 10 years by over 40 percent and 20 percent respectively."

This is the same trend observed in our neighbors to the north - you stand a less chance of being shot in Canada as compared to the United States, but a higher chance of being assaulted.

 

In contrast to the US, there certainly is less empirical analysis into gun effects and gun control. However, without surprise, we do find consistent results. Leigh and Neill (2010, Do Gun Buybacks Save Lives? Evidence from Panel Data, American Law & Economics Review, Vol. 12, pp 462-508 ) note:

In 1997, Australia implemented a gun buyback program that reduced the stock of firearms by around one-fifth (and nearly halved the number of gun-owning households). Using differences across states, we test whether the reduction in firearms availability affected homicide and suicide rates. We find that the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80%, with no significant effect on non-firearm death rates. The effect on firearm homicides is of similar magnitude but is less precise. The results are robust to a variety of specification checks and to instrumenting the state-level buyback rate

 

See earlier post where I said:

The US homicide rates were 6.9 times higher than rates in the other high-income countries, driven by firearm homicide rates that were 19.5 times higher. For 15-year olds to 24-year olds, firearm homicide rates in the United States were 42.7 times higher than in the other countries. For US males, firearm homicide rates were 22.0 times higher, and for US females, firearm homicide rates were 11.4 times higher. The US firearm suicide rates were 5.8 times higher than in the other countries, though overall suicide rates were 30% lower. The US unintentional firearm deaths were 5.2 times higher than in the other countries. Among these 23 countries, 80% of all firearm deaths occurred in the United States, 86% of women killed by firearms were US women, and 87% of all children aged 0 to 14 killed by firearms were US children.

 

LOL As if the Chinese fear a population armed with handguns when they are armed with the nuclear technology we are selling them. Give me a break!

 

Then I will define it. When it can be proven in a court of law, that there is a legitimate reason to protect one's safety with a gun, then the gun should be licensed allowed. Kind of like restraining orders now. If the general population is unarmed, those cases will be few and far between because the police and military will offer enough protection. Now, if you're suggesting that the police and military cannot be trsuted, I will end the debate there, becase I am absolutely not a conspiracy theorist.

 

Now, take your logic and apply it to the law abiding citizen versus the criminal.

You make this too easy.

 

I'm reading between the lines here but it appears that you have never owned your own house and had to deal with security issues of protecting your family. There are over 1.2 million violent crimes committed in the US each year. These happen because the police cannot get there in time to prevent the crime.

These crimes include rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and murder. Robbery includes home invasions where thugs with guns enter your house by force, torture, rob, and sometimes kill the homeowners. Read this story (or just google home invasion past 24 hours:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire,_Connecticut,_home_invasion_murders

Depending on where your house is located the best police response time on average is 8 minutes. If your house is in a rural area or the police are busy with another crime that response time can be 20 minutes or more. How do you plan to protect your family while you wait?

People are now being robbed on the street and taken to their ATM's to withdraw money. In some cases the criminals feel emboldened and then take the victims to a remote location for further "entertainment". Read this story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Channon_Christian_and_Christopher_Newsom

How do you plan to protect yourself and/or your family from that?

Time to get your head out of the sand and get a grasp of the world we live in.

 

Empirical evidence has found that guns are more likely to be used against family members than in their defence. Not a jolly finding!

 

If we do not arm the criminals to begin with, there is no need to arm the law-abiding.

 

I am not denying the world we live in. I have been jumped myself and luckily, they were unarmed. Had they been armed, I could very well have been killed. They came up behind me so even if they had been armed with a gun and I had been armed with a gun, they still could have shot me in the back or the head or whatever. Having a gun that situation would have made no difference or would have made things worse.

To answer your question: You take precautions and get a good security system. In the example above, if I had not been walking in the middle of the city alone at night, I would not have been jumped. It is not excuse for what the thugs did, but if I had been more careful, I would not have been jumped.

 

What about the rancher in Montana who uses a rifle to protect his livestock from predators?

What about the hunter in North Dakota who uses a shotgun to hunt pheasant?

Do they need demonstrate a "legitimate reason" to possess a firearm?

 

There are more Firearms in Private (Non-Military/non Law Enforcement) hands in Alaska than in ALL of China.

 

Not a valid finding,either...tell you what, you tend to your rights,and we'll tend to ours

 

Empirical evidence versus dogma? Hmm, difficult one. However, I think I'll stick with empirical evidence

 

I would bet that almost every good-American has a gun, most of which are unregistered. You can bet that 99.9% of criminals do have an unregistered gun. You'll never find them all so your stats are unreliable.

 

What did they do to you?

All true however, there are times when situations and events make it difficult or impossible to provide oneself with adequate security and in those cases, a firearm should be an available tool.

 

You are not a conservative---at all. You do not support individual freedom or individual accountability.

You have been so brainwashed by the Leftist media about the "evil" of guns, that you do not look at the "evil" people who pull the triggers. Guns are mearly tools, and fairly simple to make. Even the countries that alomost totally ban them like Japan and UK still have gun related deaths. Bad people will use whatever means they have available to commit their bad deeds. The technology will not go away, even with gun control (gun bans).

Just look at how effective South Africa's and Brazil's gun bans have been. They are multicultural countries with sorry liberal criminal justice systems. The result continues to been much higher crime than in the US. In South Africa, if one were to obey the gun laws there, it would be impossible to leagally obtain a weapon there for at least 2 years. As a rational person would expect, the criminals there easily obtain them from the black market, just as the gangs in Mexico obtain MOST of their weapons and drugs from the South, not from the US.

Your intolerance of private ownership of guns because of presidential assissinations is a poor excuse. The new fear should be of IED's, as they are now killing a majority of troops in the Mid East, as well as Christians in Nigeria, and so on. Terrorists, and other criminals could care less about the legality of the these devices. It would make much more sense to ban the entry of radical Islamics into our country than to ban guns.

Ask your gun control statisticians why they NEVER include countries in Africa and South America that we are much more culturally similar to in their gun control studies.

 

South Africa has a liberal criminal justice system? Where on earth did you get that idea?

 

Don't forget to mention that Aus, NZ and the UK DO NOT have the right of freedom of speech or a Constitution that protects individual freedoms. You guys also are governed by a queen. Free people in the US can only laugh.

 

You said earlier that you "do not support gun bans" which of course is what gun buyback programs like that in Canada and Austrialia's were. They were to buyback types of semi-auto weapons and others that the governments banned for private use. Now here you are defending them. Please show some integrity!

 

Buy backs aren't gun bans (indeed, they're attacked as its argued that folk will take advantage of the policy and then replace it with a legal weapon). Its not my fault that they have been found to be effective at impacting on crime rates. Its a shame that they aggressively attack your position though. Real proper shame!

 

According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime study from 1998-2000, South Africa is the "rape capital of the world." Also it was 2nd for assault and other murders out of 60 nations. The last time anyone was executed was 1998.

South Africa is not as bad as Zimbabwe is..yet. And America is not as bad as South Africa is... yet. As a country's government goes to the dogs, so does its laws and courts. Crime was vastly less under the former, more conservative rulers. The current crop of ANC leaders that hold power there---now under investigation, can be properly difined as "liberal."

 

This is just reference to the crime problems that its fighting again (problems which we'd expect, given the violent nature of apartheid and the long term cultural effects that it has engineered). So, let's conclude: you can't actually defend the ludicrous claim that South Africa has a liberal criminal justice system

 

Hmmm,I'm just wondering who died and made you arbiter of what constitutes 'dogma',and 'empirical evidence'?

 

I leave that to common sense and scholarly research. God bless the clever folk!