I was wondering, if banning guns, and various gun controll laws are being done to stop crime in our streets (and elsewhere), why not take the next step and just make Crime illegal? Wouldn’t that be more helpful than banning guns alone?
[QUOTE=RD’S Alias - 1A;835163]I was wondering, if banning guns, and various gun controll laws are being done to stop crime in our streets (and elsewhere), why not take the next step and just make Crime illegal? Wouldn’t that be more helpful than banning guns alone?[/QUOTE]
lol
these are not the words you are looking for.
[QUOTE=RD’S Alias - 1A;835163]I was wondering, if banning guns, and various gun controll laws are being done to stop crime in our streets (and elsewhere), why not take the next step and just make Crime illegal? Wouldn’t that be more helpful than banning guns alone?[/QUOTE]
There are far too many guns in America. They’re literally all over the place, in the hands of anyone who wants them, illegal or not. They don’t disappear or get recycled; they just get redistributed to those who “have need” of guns–i.e. those who intend to use them. Who supports gun rights? The Right. Who funds gun rights activists? The Right. Who gets monetary support from gun manufacturers? The Right. Who wants to stop crime? The Right.
They’re clueless redneck *******s. Not that the left is much better these days. Politicians will take money from anyone, support from any lobbyist. Corporations run our country. We’re pawns of an aristocracy, and some warped minds buy into these illusions and but into guns and churches, and we slaughter each other at alarming rates.
You can call illegal immigration illegal, but unless you’re willing to implement policies that keep illegal immigrants out, or deport them when they’re caught, it’ll never reduce the influx of illegal immigrants.
That is why I think instead of banning guns, we just make illegal activities illegal.
I say that baning guns is thinking too small to solve the problem. We need to Ban illegal activities!!
[QUOTE=RD’S Alias - 1A;835253]That is why I think instead of banning guns, we just make illegal activities illegal.
I say that baning guns is thinking too small to solve the problem. We need to Ban illegal activities!![/QUOTE]
Hmmm…I thought that the illegal possession of guns was illegal, and constituted an illegal activity. You have to ban guns in order to enforce the law. Let’s say three cops have a criminal penned up in a warehouse, and run in with standard issue pistols and the criminal has an assault rifle with grenade launcher attachment–Halo style. What do you think the odds are that all three cops are going to make it back out, alive, or fully intact?
Hmmm…I thought that the illegal possession of guns was illegal, and constituted an illegal activity. You have to ban guns in order to enforce the law. Let’s say three cops have a criminal penned up in a warehouse, and run in with standard issue pistols and the criminal has an assault rifle with grenade launcher attachment–Halo style. What do you think the odds are that all three cops are going to make it back out, alive, or fully intact?
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If you ban criminals and illegal activities, you won’t have this scenario in the first place! The cops would all be at Dunk’n Doughnuts relaxing!
You can ban guns all you want, but untill we ban the actual CRIMES that are being commited, we will never get rid of crime and our streets will never be safe!
You have to ban guns in order to enforce the law
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No you don’t, guns are just a tool of crime, not crime itself. If you banned all the guns, criminals would still commit crimes with other tools. You have to ban crime itself, completely all together. Only then there won’t be anymore crime.
In short,
gun crimes are higher in Washington D.C. where guns are banned, while gun crimes are lower in Texas which has more constitutional own and carry laws!
[QUOTE=RD’S Alias - 1A;835260]Hmmm…I thought that the illegal possession of guns was illegal, and constituted an illegal activity. You have to ban guns in order to enforce the law. Let’s say three cops have a criminal penned up in a warehouse, and run in with standard issue pistols and the criminal has an assault rifle with grenade launcher attachment–Halo style. What do you think the odds are that all three cops are going to make it back out, alive, or fully intact?
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If you ban criminals and illegal activities, you won’t have this scenario in the first place! The cops would all be at Dunk’n Doughnuts relaxing!
You can ban guns all you want, but untill we ban the actual CRIMES that are being commited, we will never get rid of crime and our streets will never be safe![/QUOTE]
You’re a real rube.
[QUOTE=RD’S Alias - 1A;835261]You have to ban guns in order to enforce the law
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No you don’t, guns are just a tool of crime, not crime itself. If you banned all the guns, criminals would still commit crimes with other tools. You have to ban crime itself, completely all together. Only then there won’t be anymore crime.[/QUOTE]
Actually, studies have shown that if we put a ban on procreation, we could see the end of crime altogether in something like 90-100 years’ time…tops.
[QUOTE=Scott R. Brown;835264]In short,
gun crimes are higher in Washington D.C. where guns are banned, while gun crimes are lower in Texas which has more constitutional own and carry laws![/QUOTE]
Consider the socioeconomic environment, local history, population density…nope, let’s just count the guns and make a blanket statement.
“Men are smarter than women. That’s not just me speaking. It’s science.”
I have provided statistical evidence on the other thread and you decline to consider it as well. You hold your opinion based upon your emotions and not based upon any empirical evidence.
[QUOTE=Scott R. Brown;835315]I have provided statistical evidence on the other thread and you decline to consider it as well. You hold your opinion based upon your emotions and not based upon any empirical evidence.[/QUOTE]
You have provided statistical evidence on the other thread, and I consider it BS as it’s a fact and figure thrown out by the NRA. It seems rational to you to consider these figures as “facts”. Reason tells me that in a politicized issue like this, with such an interested party like the NRA, their facts and figures will match to whichever opnion they choose.
Reason tells me that in the many statistics I’ve seen here at my job, your facts and figures are worth about, I don’t know…1, maybe 2 ****s?
[QUOTE=Scott R. Brown;835264]In short,
gun crimes are higher in Washington D.C. where guns are banned, while gun crimes are lower in Texas which has more constitutional own and carry laws![/QUOTE]
and crime is far lower in the uk where guns are banned than in all of your country
where they arent
so ?
[QUOTE=golden arhat;835472]and crime is far lower in the uk where guns are banned than in all of your country
where they arent
so ?[/QUOTE]
So This!
The following is an analysis of this paper:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
“We were able to put together figures for nine European nations that had more than 15,000 firearms owned per 100,000 households, and we also had nine European nations that had less than 5,000 firearms owned per 100,000 households,” Kates said.
“What we found was that the first group, with triple the rate of gun ownership, had one-third the homicide rate of the second group.”
On the other hand, in Russia–where firearms had been under police-state control for decades–Kates and Mauser found an exceedingly violent society.
Although the Soviet communist regime tried to hide the problem from the rest of the world, the collapse of the Soviet Union exposed the truth: Despite those iron-fisted government controls on firearm ownership–almost no Russian civilians owned firearms–Russia had, and continues to have, by far the highest murder rate in the developed world.
Kates and Mauser write: “In the 1960s and early ’70s, the gunless Soviet Union’s murder rates paralleled or generally exceeded those of gun-ridden America. While American rates stabilized and then steeply declined, however, Russian murder increased so drastically that by the early 1990s the Russian rate was three times higher than that of the United States. Between 1998-2004 … Russian murder rates were nearly four times higher than American rates.”
We see much the same thing in Luxembourg, where handguns are completely banned and firearm ownership of any kind is rare. Even though its (lawful) citizens are effectively disarmed, in 2002 Luxembourg had a murder rate nine times higher than in neighboring Germany–where firearms are legal and widely owned.
“Individuals who commit violent crimes will either find guns despite severe controls or will find other weapons to use.”
Kates and Mauser point to comparison after comparison that shows no link between gun availability and suicide rates. For example, Spain has 12 times the gun-ownership rate of Poland, yet Poland’s suicide rate is more than double that of Spain. Greece has triple the gun-ownership rate of the Czech Republic–and admittedly more gun-related suicide–yet the overall Czech suicide rate is nearly triple that of Greece. Similarly, Finland has over 14 times the gun-ownership rate of its southern neighbor Estonia, yet Estonia nonetheless has a much higher suicide rate than Finland.
In the absence of firearms, suicidal people simply substitute other means. As evidence, Kates and Mauser point to two powerful examples.
In the 1980s, suicide among teenagers and young adults spiked in the U.S., and many blamed firearm availability for the increase. What they failed to mention was that suicide among young adults was rising throughout the developed world–regardless of gun availability–and in many places was rising far faster than in the U.S.
Among English youth, for example, suicide increased 10 times as fast as among American youth, yet the preferred method of suicide there was car exhaust asphyxiation.
Another tragic illustration involves suicide among young Indian women living on the island of Fiji. When these women marry, often to non-Indian men, they commonly go to live with their husbands’ extended families in less-than-friendly, if not openly antagonistic, circumstances. Perhaps as a result, they have a suicide rate many times higher than that of non-Indian Fijian women.
Guns are unavailable to these women, Kates and Mauser report, but that evidently makes no difference: Many still commit suicide–about 75 percent of them through hanging, and nearly all the rest by poisoning themselves with the herbicide Paraquat.
Giving Guns Magical Powers and Malevolence Toward Man
Another favorite fantasy of the gun haters is that firearms have some mystical power to transform otherwise lawful, peaceable people into murderers and maniacs.
To hear the gun-ban lobby tell the tale, it’s as if firearms were some sort of evil magic charm just waiting for humans to let down their guard so that they, the firearms, could turn the tables on us once and for all.
Firearms, they tell us, will turn family disagreements into shooting wars.
A gun kept in a closet as a defense against intruders, they say, will instead be used against a spouse in a moment of rage.
According to the Violence Policy Center, “the majority of homicide[s] [occur] … not as a result of criminal activity, but because of arguments between people who know each other.”
But as Kates and Mauser point out in their study, “These comments … contradict facts that have so uniformly been established by homicide studies dating back to the 1890s that they have become ‘criminological axioms.’ … [N]either a majority, nor many, nor virtually any murderers are ordinary ‘law-abiding citizens.’ Rather, almost all murderers are extremely aberrant individuals with life histories of violence, psychopathology, substance abuse and other dangerous behaviors.”
What’s more, as Kates and Mauser note, a major national, yearlong study on gun murders in U.S. homes between acquaintances found that the most common situation was one in which the victim and the perpetrator “knew one another because of prior illegal transactions.”
Read between the lines and you’ll realize what that refers to: Drug pushers murdered by rivals or robbers. Gang members murdered by fellow gang members. Women murdered by stalkers or domestic abusers.
In any of these cases, as Kates and Mauser explain, the perpetrators are “all individuals for whom federal and state laws already prohibit gun possession.”
Do Guns Reduce Crime? Or Does Crime Reduce Guns?
Although their data would support such a claim, Kates and Mauser don’t argue in their paper that firearm ownership is the cause of low crime rates in many European nations.
As they write in their paper, “It would be simplistic to assume that at all times and in all places widespread gun ownership depresses violence by deterring many criminals into nonconfrontation crime, [although] there is evidence that it does so in the United States …”
Instead, they maintain, with refreshing candor, that some European countries simply have low crime rates, and because of that, those countries never imposed anti-gun laws. So gun ownership is high, and crime is low–it’s just not necessarily low as a result.
As an illustration, Kates cites Norway: “The reason Norwegians have guns is for hunting. They don’t keep them for self-defense and they don’t need them–they have a low-crime country.”
On the other hand, some European nations experiencing high levels of crime subsequently passed anti-gun laws–but those laws failed to have any effect on crime.
“The people you need to control are not going to obey the gun control laws,” Kates explained. “And the people you don’t need to control, those are the ones who obey. So what you get is, you get either nothing, or you get worse results, with gun control.”
In the final analysis, this paper places the burden of proof squarely on the shoulders of the proponents of anti-gun laws.
For, although higher rates of gun ownership may not necessarily reduce crime in all societies, in no case can it be demonstrated that higher gun ownership rates cause higher crime.
The relationship between firearms and crime may be one of correlation more than causation, but the correlation is a good one: More guns may not always dictate less crime. . . but more guns definitely go hand-in-hand with less crime.
And the advocates of gun bans bear the burden of proving otherwise before imposing more onerous laws.
As Kates and Mauser conclude in their study:
"Whether gun availability is viewed as a cause or as a mere coincidence, the long term macrocosmic evidence is that gun ownership spread widely throughout societies consistently correlates with stable or declining murder rates. Whether causative or not, the consistent international pattern is that more guns equal less murder and other violent crime.
There you go, Ban CRIME, not guns!!
In fact it seems guns HELP in the banning of crime, so they should be encouraged!!
[QUOTE=Shaolin Wookie;835233]There are far too many guns in America. They’re literally all over the place, in the hands of anyone who wants them, illegal or not. They don’t disappear or get recycled; they just get redistributed to those who “have need” of guns–i.e. those who intend to use them. Who supports gun rights? The Right. Who funds gun rights activists? The Right. Who gets monetary support from gun manufacturers? The Right. Who wants to stop crime? The Right.
They’re clueless redneck *******s. Not that the left is much better these days. Politicians will take money from anyone, support from any lobbyist. Corporations run our country. We’re pawns of an aristocracy, and some warped minds buy into these illusions and but into guns and churches, and we slaughter each other at alarming rates.
You can call illegal immigration illegal, but unless you’re willing to implement policies that keep illegal immigrants out, or deport them when they’re caught, it’ll never reduce the influx of illegal immigrants.[/QUOTE]
Yes they are all over the place in the US. Why I just picked up an UZI lying on the street this morning. Unfired and still New In Box. Oh what a country!!!
“Clueless Redneck” I see you buy into the media’s propaganda.
Let me clue you in on something. Up until 3yrs ago I competed in various shooting competitions in CA, TX and AZ. I would say a good 30-40 of the competitors are minorities including myself (Filipino). A good number of them are professional earning I would assume $50K and above. I have met Doctors, Dentist, Lawyers, etc. Shooting is a very expensive hobby. In one competition, you could fire off 500+rds. Totaling about $$200. That not including the gun used and various upgrades made to it to make more accurate. A lot of long range competition shooter uses rifles that are in the $1500 range.
So here’s my profile: Filipino raised in the US. Consider myself a Moderate Republican. Grew with firearms in the house. Father was an avid hunter. So is my brother. I am a gun collector therefore I own “a few” firearms. The first, I bought at age 18 and still have it to this day. Prior military, now working in the financial service industry. Income would be considered upper middle class. Concealed Handgun Licensee. NRA Life member and GOA member. Never once have I used my firearm to harm another human being. Never once Have I drawn my firearm and pointed it at someone in anger, that’s my last resort. Martial Arts is my first. I am your typical gun owner based on my experience. Yet the media will profile me as a toothless redneck from the backwood of Kentucky. I also have friends that are avid gun collectors. One is black, 2 Mexicans, and one Vietnamese.
Violence can be attributed to the mindset of the person. Not tools. If that’s the case, then fat people can blame their spoons and forks for being overweight. Violent crimes can also be commited other ways. Most serial killer kill by other means other than a firearm. Child molesters do far more irrepairable harm throughout time than firearms would. Without firearms violence will still occur, deaths will still happen.
It is humans nature that makes us prone to violence some personalities more so than others.
We have far too many gun laws in the books already. The problem is they are not being enforced. Politicians just keeps putting more on the books as a feel good measure and to get votes. The media helps them by distorting the facts and sensasionalizing tragedies. They never report the good things that come of it. Here in TX there have been reports of CHL holders saving lives. Yet they are not reported nationally, only in local papers. However, you have one school or mall shooting by a deranged individual and its on CNN before the cops even get there.
[QUOTE=Shaolin Wookie;835307]Consider the socioeconomic environment, local history, population density…nope, let’s just count the guns and make a blanket statement.
“Men are smarter than women. That’s not just me speaking. It’s science.”[/QUOTE]
Okay, instead of comparing 2 different places with different circumstances, let`s look at a case where the environment remained the same and the only change was the gun laws. Years ago the city of Kenesaw Georgia passed a law stating that all homeowners in the city limits had to have a firearm. The rate of all violent crimes fell to almost zero. Crimminals are like any other preditor…they look for the easiest available prey. Like people in a so-called gun free zone.
When Florida enacted concealed carry laws violent crime dropped, except for attacks on the one group the crimminal knew would not be armed; foreign tourists. When the media interviewed juvenal gangs in lock up to see why they were attacking all of these European tourists they assumed there was some prejudice involved. It turns out it was nothing but practicality. The gang members said that the tourists were carrying cash and cameras and had just come through security so they were unarmed. Most of the gang members had gone so far as to memorized flight schedules from Europe so they knew they would be carjacking unarmed tourists and not Florida residents who might be armed.
That`s why so many of the big shooting rampages that make the news are in schools and Universities. When th Columbine shooting occured the first thing one of my friends in Isreal said was “Where were the (Armed) guards?” because every school there has them. On field trips most of the teachers are also armed.
And just for your information, according to the FBI the largest single group of gun owners in the US isnt rednecks, its senior citizens, especially women. Imagine that, people who realize that they arent a physical match for a younger aggresive attacker are actually arming themselves rather than saying "Oh well...". Whats the world coming to?
I think xcakid nailed this one. Guns do not commit crimes. Guns do not murder people. People with criminal and murderous intent do this.
Crime was terrible before guns were even invented.
Finally… robbing a population of its ability to defend itself is the first step towards tyranny. That is a fundamental tenet of the United States of America.
Crime was terrible before guns were even invented.
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Exactly!! That is why crime should be banned and made illegal!!