Gun Control and the Second Amendment

Bruce Willis said the other day that if you start messing with the Bill of Rights the whole thing will shortly be erased. He said to leave it. I'm with him.
 
Before we begin disarming citizens for mental deficiency I think we need to focus in house 1st. I propose mandatory bi-monthly drug tests for all Police officers as well as annual mental exams. If they're going to be murdering innocent people in the streets (the cops) they should be more prepared to give up their individual rights to privacy. While we are at it, all police officers family members should also be tested. I fully agree we need gun control. Police do not need guns for traffic stops.
 
Bruce Willis said the other day that if you start messing with the Bill of Rights the whole thing will shortly be erased. He said to leave it. I'm with him.

Bruce is a huge moron, but he is right in this case.
 
Why would a well-armed military and police fear law-abiding citizens with ARs, AKs, high capacity magazines, and the likes? We, the people, are the government I thought. I want to know what they are planning NEXT and using this as a stepping stone for. This is all bull. They cannot enforce a law forbidding criminals the firearms, and the guns can be bought on the street. Not giving up any of my rights willingly, but they can try to figure how to deal with the problem they created when they started allowing murderers to live ten and fifteen years before going to trial. Gun owners know to keep guns away from crazy cousin Eddie.

Criminals using guns don't illegally buy illegal guns, they illegally buy legal guns. Other people legally buy legal guns to use them for illegal purposes. It's the legal guns that people claim as having the right to own that are being used to rob liquor stores and kill massive numbers of people in public places.

The problem is solved by making guns illegal across the board. If they can't be manufactured, they can't be sold and they can't be used. It's a simple math problem of 1 - 1 = 0. You can't argue it since there's nothing to argue.

Bruce Willis said the other day that if you start messing with the Bill of Rights the whole thing will shortly be erased. He said to leave it. I'm with him.

In that case, show me your membership card to your nearest WELL REGULATED MILITIA. Or have you and most gun-nuts forgotten the first part of the 2nd amendment that you never seem to quote?
 
Criminals using guns don't illegally buy illegal guns, they illegally buy legal guns. Other people legally buy legal guns to use them for illegal purposes. It's the legal guns that people claim as having the right to own that are being used to rob liquor stores and kill massive numbers of people in public places.

The problem is solved by making guns illegal across the board. If they can't be manufactured, they can't be sold and they can't be used. It's a simple math problem of 1 - 1 = 0. You can't argue it since there's nothing to argue.

Totally, I mean they made certain drugs illegal too, and we never see those! Did you know the gang members in Hells Kitchen in the 1930's and 1940s used to make their own guns?


In that case, show me your membership card to your nearest WELL REGULATED MILITIA. Or have you and most gun-nuts forgotten the first part of the 2nd amendment that you never seem to quote?

No problem, its my birth certificate. Anything else I can show you?
 
Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?
The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.
Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, DC, is a classic example, but just one among many.
When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, handgun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.
The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.
But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries – and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.
In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.
Neither guns nor gun control was not the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference.
Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.
In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms. In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s – after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions – there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.
Gun control zealots' choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.
You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.
Guns are not the problem. People are the problem – including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.
There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/18/great-gun-control-fallacy-thomas-sowell
 
It's cliche, but...

Guns don't kill people. People kill people.

Why are people killing people? Let's go after that. Taking away guns, although will probably prevent some gun-related incidents, but it still won't solve the underlying problem. Without doing that, people will find other means. If a troubled teenager can't get his hands on a gun, he might use a knife instead, or make home-made pipe bombs, etc. If someone wants to cause public harm and anarchy and you remove one mean of doing so, they will just find other means.
 
It's cliche, but...

Guns don't kill people. People kill people.

Why are people killing people? Let's go after that. Taking away guns, although will probably prevent some gun-related incidents, but it still won't solve the underlying problem. Without doing that, people will find other means. If a troubled teenager can't get his hands on a gun, he might use a knife instead, or make home-made pipe bombs, etc. If someone wants to cause public harm and anarchy and you remove one mean of doing so, they will just find other means.

My favorite thing is when the Britiskis come in and start yammering in about how Utopian England is now that guns are banned. Despite record breaking crime statistics. The best though is how they butt-hurtedly insist that while yes crime may be exploding as populations grow, that the number of gun related deaths are less than the US. As though someone murdered with a knife or being strangled to death is less dead. Or that less guns means less death... not true. Some of the toughest laws on guns in the books belong to Brazil, Mexico and Russia and yet those places are murder central. You couldnt even pay me enough to go to Brazil unless I had a serious glorious tan, they kidnap white 1st worlders down there for Ransom for christs sake. OH wait, also... some of the toughest gun laws in the US are in.... DING DING DING my home state Connecticut. We are finally on the Map with our newtown massacre.
 
While there may be some sort of truth to the idea that less guns = less murders, this idea taken out of context is flawed.

If we had no doctors there would be less malpractice. If we had no surgeons there would be less surgical mistakes. If we had no medications there would be less overdoses. No chemicals means less accidental poisonings of children.

These are no less true but taken out of context they tell a different story from what we expect. Doctors injure or kill almost 200 thousand people a year in this country due to mistakes. Shall we get rid of them?
 
While there may be some sort of truth to the idea that less guns = less murders, this idea taken out of context is flawed.

If we had no doctors there would be less malpractice. If we had no surgeons there would be less surgical mistakes. If we had no medications there would be less overdoses. No chemicals means less accidental poisonings of children.

These are no less true but taken out of context they tell a different story from what we expect. Doctors injure or kill almost 200 thousand people a year in this country due to mistakes. Shall we get rid of them?


So in other words, you are something like 20 times more likely to die from a Doctor error vs a handgun? BAN DOCTORS!!!! DOCTOR CONTROL!!!!
 
what are you saying? fewer guns= fewer murders. how can you take that out of context?

another thing, gun owners have rights, guns don't.

There seems to be a presumption of causality; that more guns causes more deaths. It is correlational, not causal. There is a confounding third variable. Most likely cultural or social, in my opinion.
 
what are you saying? fewer guns= fewer murders. how can you take that out of context?

another thing, gun owners have rights, guns don't.

Because even though it is true, it isn't valuable information unless we also examine the other effects of having guns in tandem with this. I thought my illustration made it quite clear.

Less doctors = less malpractice deaths. It even means less psychotic doctors that carve their names into people like they are some kind of art piece after a successful procedure like that one was doing some years ago. Unless we also include a determination of the value of having doctors vs. the risk, then it doesn't mean anything.

There seems to be a presumption of causality; that more guns causes more deaths. It is correlational, not causal. There is a confounding third variable. Most likely cultural or social, in my opinion.
Yes, there's that as well.
 
Last edited:
There seems to be a presumption of causality; that more guns causes more deaths. It is correlational, not causal. There is a confounding third variable. Most likely cultural or social, in my opinion.

It's blacks and Mexicans. There I said it.

[video=youtube;RmZdvVnMXCc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmZdvVnMXCc&list=AL94UKMTqg-9AotIdpqD1XWS74l0bEey-u[/video]
 
the context is not whether humans kill humans, the context is whether there a greater propensity toward murder as gun availability increases.

your example about doctors and malpractice is out of context.

I agree the word 'propensity' changes the concept but that word was not used. So now it is different from what I read it to be.
 
the context is not whether humans kill humans, the context is whether there a greater propensity toward murder as gun availability increases.

your example about doctors and malpractice is out of context.

You are trying to make a logical argument that more gun availability = more death. Logically speaking, yes thats the case. You introduce an element into the equation and the element changes the equation to include it. However you are stopping prematurely. Do guns also save lives? Yes they do, there is plenty of evidence of this. So you are trying to say that if adding guns to an equation = more death, therefore guns shouldn't be around because they are a bad idea. This isn't a good argument, because guns probably save more lives per capita than take lives per capita. So they have a net positive effect and their existence is justified and useful.

There are approximately two million defensive gun uses (DGU's) per year by law abiding citizens. That was one of the findings in a national survey conducted by Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist in 1993. Prior to Dr. Kleck's survey, thirteen other surveys indicated a range of between 800,000 to 2.5 million DGU's annually. However these surveys each had their flaws which prompted Dr. Kleck to conduct his own study specifically tailored to estimate the number of DGU's annually.
Subsequent to Kleck's study, the Department of Justice sponsored a survey in 1994 titled, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms (text, PDF). Using a smaller sample size than Kleck's, this survey estimated 1.5 million DGU's annually.
There is one study, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which in 1993, estimated 108,000 DGU's annually. Why the huge discrepancy between this survey and fourteen others?

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

And we know the number of gun "homicides" each year is usually around 10,000. (bear in mind many suicides which are self inflicted are written up as homicides because suicide is technically illegal.) So 1-5 million DGU each year. Again, having guns around us saves more lives than it takes.

The Doctor vs Malpractice thing isnt out of context either, you're piggybacking on the same logic. Its like if I say how many children drown in Pools every year. The only difference of course being is there is no moral outrage, pundits, or mass movements to ban swimming pools which introduce even more death into our lives than guns do annually.

There is no logic behind the gun control lobby. We have common sense laws on the books now. We don't need more bureaucracy meddling with our native born rights. When does it end? Guns are not scary, death is real. people need to fucking come to grips.

This whole bullshit over the Newtown massacre turning into a national gun debate is pathetic! Nobody gave 2 shits about those kids deaths, it was just the shock of reality hitting all you people tucked away in ignorance of the darwinian nature of life getting a hot dose of reality. Now everyone is scared and wants the big bad boogie man (guns) to go away. What they arent realizing in the heat of their panic is they are making irrational emotional decisions that degrade their quality of life in the long run. A 1000 people die on 9/11 Because we meddled with some stinky bearded 3rd world shit stains and suddenly my government is talking about using fucking Recon drones to kill American citizens... on American soil? are you fucking joking? We see a little blood and we sacrifice all our freedom to a fucking government thats strangling the prosperity out of us! What the hell people! Thats why I think its pathetic... I truly think per capita Americans are some of the dumbest 1st worlders in history. Fucking self obsessed cry babies. Sacrificing our rights and liberties because they are scared... Christ I cant wait for the Apocalypse. We need a good flushing on the earth, get rid of the non-hackers... I know how evil this sounds, I dont care.
 
[MENTION=1451]Billy[/MENTION]

I think what he is saying is that guns increase murderous tendencies.

There's a difference between guns giving more opportunities for murderous people to murder, and guns increasing murderous tendencies.

I'm not certain if this is true but it is a different concept from what I initially took it to be.

Edit: I will say that even if we take the conservative estimate of 100,000 DGU's that still puts guns as doing more good than harm, so I still don't think that the above changes things very much.
 
Last edited:
no. I am saying that murder rates are higher when gun availability is higher. and it is not me saying it, its Harvard Injury Control Research Center

Why are they higher? That's an important question.

Is it because it allows people who already want to kill to do it more easily, or is it because it causes more people to want to kill?

For example, maybe I really want to murder somebody but all I have is a knife, so I decide against it, but if I get a gun I would kill them.
Or I'm not typically murderous but when I get a gun I decide that killing this person is worthwhile.

Which is it? This is important to realize.
 
I hate to say it but it doesn't matter to me why people want to kill each other, I just want to limit the damage they do when they are compelled to do it.
Again, you are not taking the conclusion of the actions you want to take into full consideration. If you removed guns from the equation crime would spike and there could be MORE deaths. Just because theyre done with poison, knives and bats, doesnt make them less dead. You have to admit to your aversion to guns and accept that you may be a hoplophobe. Once you do that you can be well on your way to conquering it and not having to worry so much about it. I mean... 10,000 gun deaths per year is what .0003% chance of it being you... you would have a better chance of being struck by lightning.
 
Yes, there may be more deaths were there are more guns, but there is also more freedom.

As Benjamin Franklin put it "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
 
Back
Top