Cost of Gun Reform

I thought I would throw this out to the other members in the Australian forum because it shocked me.

An Aussie member of the board, who I will not name, was posting in the ;gun forum and stated they would accept 700 deaths per year IF we could have less firearm regulation

So, does anyone agree that this is an acceptable number of deaths in exchange for a "right" to carry a gun?

 

Ask him if it would be acceptable if his children, parents and friends were the only ones killed and none of the other 650 plus people. Would he still be happy he has the right to carry a gun?

 

I did wonder that myself but did not get back to reply to the post. Sadly you find this a subtext of the "gun control" debate where many diminish the deaths in America as "only gang" related and/or suicides

 

Considering the population, where a proportion of gun users will have accidents or incidents which are otherwise impossible to stamp out with access to guns, it's not so bad compared to the large population, and I'm sure he means as a maximum, not a mandated sacrifice lol. I guess it's just his threshold. It would be ludicrious for Australia to endure numbers like that - its why the Police need to crack down on organized crime like CMG/OMG's. If that many people were dying due to criminal ownership, then we'd all need to arm ourselves just try to reach that deterrent effect gun ownership might have in the US in which case we'd incur a rise in accidents. Ideally there wouldn't be any gun access outside of restricted ranges, but I'm not sure how practical that will be when desktop manufacturing arrives in force.

 

There is no correlation between gun laws and violent crime, illegal deaths, suicides or even firearm accidents. Gun laws achieve nothing.

 

Would you accept 700 deaths by gunshot per year if they prevented 725 deaths by some other means (knives, blunt objects, etc)? Would you accept 1 death of a rapist by gunshot to prevent 10 violent rapes? Would you accept one death of a child molester by gunshot to prevent dozens of children molested?

There is a current example of this in my state. A violent rapist,working as a taxi driver in a college town, raped and killed (by strangulation) several women over the period of a few years. If the first girl he attacked had SHOT him, there would be several good people alive today that died at his hand. The result: Our 'gun death' rate would have gone up, and our violent crime rate down (as it has been doing for the last decade).

It's not a 1:1 calculation. If those 700 deaths are mostly bad guys, then you may be doing society a favor. You can't just say "there were 700 gunshot deaths, so if there were no guns, that would be 700 saved" because most of those deaths would have been committed anyway, just by some other means.

 

That would be me

It's true, I would much rather 700 innocents die (or any amount, really - 700 was just the US's gun death rate scaled to our population) than interfere with the private affairs of my fellow men without a demonstration of their individual initiation of force, or imminent threat to that effect.

I'll wait here while you get the tar and feathers.

 

Absolutely. My parents are smokers, yet I absolutely support their ability to put whatever they want in their bodies, even knowing this will most likely kill them.

What do I mean to say by this? That the two are to be equated? No, not here - that's an argument for another day. I'm merely pointing out that consequences are not the only rubric people evaluate their values and actions on, and any supposition that they are is wholly devoid of any understanding of ethics and how people form ethical, and thus political views.

My , of course.

 

A number of people in this thread have put various claims such as gun control and murders are not related. Does anyone have any evidence of any of these claims?

 

Freedom is a funny word, it is subjective, like love.

If we by giving one person or group a freedom deny another person or group their freedom in anyway, do we have freedom? Sure the person or group get their freedoms, but society as a whole has less freedom.

Some people put more emphasis on some freedoms than do others. It is their right to have this choice.

Often, not always I find that those that oppose gun control, remember guns and who uses them are only restricted, not banned. They usually are the ones who want other freedoms denied. Some of them want the government to deny certain freedoms that they enjoy to others based purely on race, skin colour, religion, political beliefs, attire or even how they wear their hair.

 

I want the freedom to drink alcohol, I don't drink a lot but I want the right to.
I want the freedom to drive on public roads where and when I choose.
I want the right to know that I can do so without having to worry about those that drive drunk.
To give me all freedoms, we have to restrict some, usually to protect ourselves from ourselves, but that is not my concern. It is to protect others that I am concerned.

 

What a load of rubbish! How does less gun control mean less freedom for some people? How does more gun control mean more freedom for some people?

That statement is an outrages example of blind, ignorant, unthinking, baseless stereotyping and ignorant social vilification.

 

The police have turned into the Governments tax collectors, and don't do much to help and protect the community anymore. Then how is everyone suppose to protect themselves against "real" danger?

Disarm the citizens, and you turn them into submissive sheep.

 

Why live at all? Why bother having a pulse. This is truly some dark depressive junk.

 

Yes, because there are no real studies that can prove correlation. Just look at gun ownership across the world, the gun death rates/gun ownership are all over the place. In some cases, more guns with lower crime and visa versa.

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Usually eh? That of course is just your opinion. I usually find that those that want more gun control, generally want more government control.

 

If we look at all the current facts, evidence, and statistics presented by by groups who want & don't want gun control, there is sufficient reason to believe that gun control within a population does not reduce crime rate. Reducing crime rate was the main reasons politicians campaigned for gun control, and there is simply "NO" evidence then or now to support them disarming the citizens based on crime reduction.

Looking at this from another perspective, it would be much easier for politicians to control the general public through their command over the military, if the citizens had NO guns to fight back with - if politicians enacted Marshal Law over a country, or wanted the military to intervene in a public gathering or demonstration against the government or politicians.

 

Why? I am a gun owner.

 

I use to be a gun owner myself, and a member of our local shooting club for over two decades, but all the time consuming red-tape just took all the general fun out of it. They have all these rules for owning a gun that can kill, and basic rules that allow some 18 year old behind the wheel of a high powered car that can do 240ks per hour that can kill not only him/herself, but anyone else unlucky enough to be in the way. Doesn't make any sense from a safety point of view, unless you're looking at it from a politicians perspective, which means gun ownership doesn't equal tax revenue, but vehicle revenue does. Who cares if an 18 year can drive a high powered car and kill themselves or others, so long as the vehicle revenue keeps rolling in.

I will always maintain, that politicians disarming the citizens of their guns had absolutely NOTHING to do with preventing crime or for safety reasons...that's why they cannot offer any independent statistics to back their decision up. I think it has more to do with them being confident in knowing the citizens have nothing to fight them back with.

 

http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html

You will note that the number of homicides in Australia began declining long before Howards gun laws. Homocide by firearm started declining in 1969. There is no change in the graphs due to the gun laws, in fact the year with the highest number of firearm homicides came several years after the gun laws were introduced. This demonstrates that the stupid gun laws had no effect whatsoever on the rate of murder in Australia.

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/EBA9606492CEFC61CA25788400127CEB?opendocument

Suicide using a firearm accounts for just 7% of all suicides. Again the gun laws had no effect.

 

I wish I could go somewhere and shoot off a belt from an MG42. I think gun clubs should be allowed to stock prohibited weapons.

 

Absolutely. If they're held at the range under lock and key - what possible objection could there be?

There is ALWAYS a more reasonable option than prohibition. Maybe that's ensuring anyone who uses the prohibited weapon has achieved at least training equivalent to that police/soldiers receive, and requiring a guard be with the weapon at all times, at cost to the range.

However insane you want to go with the regulations- there's always an option less insane than complete prohibition.

 

Talk about insane. Insane amount of money.

P-51 Collector Installs Authentic Machine Guns

 

Gun control laws were tightened after the Port Arthur massacre to try and prevent such events in the future. Firearms are very dangerous, and it's perfectly reasonable for there to be strict regulations on them, just like there is on a huge range of other very dangerous machinery.

There's always going to be a line in the sand somewhere, and the weapons either side of it will seem arbitrarily positioned, that's simply inevitable.

 

That is not a problem - the reduction in gun related accidents and homicides seems to have been more influenced by the securing of firearms than the availability

On the other hand - why would you WANT to do something like that? (On second thoughts - male, big gun, lots of noise, = think I just answered my own question)

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But would you accept a rise of gun related deaths to 700 per year as a cost of relaxing the current gun legislation?

 

John Stuart Mill once proposed that execution for murder was preferable to life imprisonment. I don't know if he ever asked someone about to be executed what their view of that was.

I think you bravely set yourself up for a flogging by mentioning a number.

So, generally speaking - and this is to anyone interested - how many deaths would be acceptable to have unregulated firearms?

I suspect that many of us would say, none. I would. But then I'm in favour of regulation. But I'm in favour of regulation that's reasonable and effective and it's not a position based purely on principle. If your statement had been a little more pragmatic we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.

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I think I could mount some sort of argument to support that point but - buggerit! - I have to get to work!