Baron Von PWN wrote:Ray Rider wrote:An excerpt from the end of a good article about gun laws and the Tucson shooting:
"There have been dozens and dozens of people killed in school shootings in the U.S. since the Gun Free School Zones Act was passed in 1995, including, of course, the notorious massacre at Columbine. It’s been said countless times before, but it seems to bear constant repeating since it seems never to sink into the minds of those who think that laws can solve everything: criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law, no matter what it says about carrying guns to public events, while disarming the law-abiding public can only embolden them. If government can’t manage with the sensible laws it already has against letting volatile individuals own guns, it seems pointless to give it less sensible ones to enforce. After all, if the answer to stopping a lunatic assassin like Jared Lee Loughner were as easy as that, the U.S. could simply outlaw murdering people. Except it already has. That hasn’t worked, either."
Or maybe its because you can just cross a state border and get yourself an AK. A more reasonable comparison would be to look at countries where gun ownership is banned or severely restricted and compare them to the US. If in those countries Gun violence actually increased (or stayed the same) after the ban, the article's assertion (Gun bans only serve to embolden criminals and deny citizens protection) would be correct.
This is a logical fallacy. Because the absence of a firearm may inspire a murderer to use a different weapon, a more accurate measure would be to look at overall homicide rate relative to gun laws. The U.S. has the least restrictive gun laws and the highest homicide rate (0.005%) among the 34 OECD nations. However, the U.S. also has less restrictive gun laws - but a substantially lower homicide rate - than many non-OECD nations such as Costa Rica, Russia, Venezuela. But, in all of those countries - outside the 10 or 15 worst - the crime of murder is a statistical anomaly.
In common victim-crime categories, however, the U.S. generally has a lower crime rate than peer nations with restrictive gun laws.
- RAPE (over the whole of the Earth you're 150 x more likely to get raped than murdered)
- you're twice as likely to get raped in Canada or Australia than the U.S. - Canada and Australia have more restrictive gun laws than the U.S.
SERIOUS ASSAULT (over the whole of the Earth you're 30 x more likely to be seriously assaulted than murdered)
- you're as likely to get assaulted in Canada or the UK than the U.S. - Canada and the UK have more restrictive gun laws than the U.S.
BURGLARY(over the whole of the Earth you're 30 x more likely to be burglarized than murdered)
- you're three-times more likely to be burglarized in Australia than the U.S., twice as likely in the UK than the U.S., roughly as likely in Canada as the U.S. - all of those nations have more restrictive gun laws than the U.S.
Do restrictive firearms laws lead to national crime pandemics? It's impossible to tell definitively with this data set. If so, though, the question is: if Americans had the option of decreasing their 5-in-100,000 homicide rate to, say, Canada's 2-in-100,000 - but, along with that, would come Canadian-level rapes/looting/pillaging/assaults, would they?
Does one feel safer with a low chance of being murdered in Denver and - also - a low chance of being raped, or, an even lower chance of being murdered in Van-City but a high chance of being anally raped and then stabbed in the shoulder with a butcher knife?
I think those are personal judgment calls and can really depend on one's tolerance/interest in having things inserted in one's rectum against one's will. I think many people in Sydney, for instance, have come to tolerate - and in some cases enjoy - getting pinned down in an alley and having a bottle of Dr Pepper shoved in their anus while their wallet gets nicked. In fact, I've come to greet Australian friends recently by stabbing them in the eye with a pencil, then sodomizing them with my bare fist. But I respect different cultural norms and traditions. This is just a difference in experience and value-sets and why a nation's residents are best-equipped to legislate themselves rather than sit in judgment on others from a cracker jack throne.
