JimC wrote:Hermit wrote:
One caveat is in order: Except for police, defence forces, private security firms some criminals, and a handful of sporting shooters concealable guns have never been available. You might discount anecdotal evidence of road ragers, and customers having fatal shootouts with shop assistants at fast food retail outlets, toddlers accidentally killing their mums, and stand your ground aficionados murdering unarmed sources of perceived danger, but eventually this question becomes unavoidable: How many anecdotes are necessary before the number of them can be regarded as statistically significant?
Your thesis about the ineffectiveness of gun control is stated too broadly. It totally revolves around the gun buy back scheme of John Howard's, which had a very narrow focus; achieving a major reduction in the number of semi-automatic rifles available, and preventing Port Arthur style massacres, which you agree it has done.
I don't agree that's what the gun buyback has done. There may be a correlation at the surface but there are so many other factors that confound the simple conclusion that one cannot realistically say that banning and melting down rifles has "prevented" anything at all, except perhaps for making it impossible to use those particular weapons. But as we've seen with the recent seizures of military grade fully automatic rifles from persons in Australia, it is far from impossible for someone who is determined to obtain an automatic, or semi-automatic rifle to use in a massacre, and it's most likely dead easy for criminals to get handguns, just as it is virtually everywhere on earth.
One of the principle differences pointed out in the past by experts is the difference in social custom and psychological base beliefs between Americans and most everybody else when it comes to the issue of guns. It may well be true that more multiple killings happen here because of a psychological link between the RKBA and the sort of evil that is required to perpetrate such massacres. It may also be true that the "national conscience" of Australia was so badly shocked by the Port Arthur event that it simply has not occurred to anyone to try to replicate it or exceed it. Yet.
It may be that the average nut case who kills multiple people is not determined enough to acquire a semi-auto rifle because their motivations are more passionate than nefariously planned. But that's just an assumption based on the fact that there haven't been any killings similar to Port Arthur since then. This cannot however be said to be an indication that the gun ban "worked" because that assumes information not in evidence and ignores many confounding factors that may also have affected the probabilities of another massacre.
I'm pretty confident in saying that this is a "not yet" situation, and that it's pretty much certain that Australia will suffer a mass killing at some point in the future perpetrated with semi or full-auto rifles and other military equipment merely because the threat of Islamic terrorism and copycats make this a worldwide threat none of us can afford to ignore.
What BG is trying to say is that it is certain that gun bans will prevent murders. In one respect this is true: if you seize some particular guns, those guns won't be used to commit murder, but they will (as we see in the discussion) be replaced with other mechanisms of injury or the perpetrators will simply find a way to acquire new replacement equipment. Guns exist, and it's pretty ignorant and childish to even think that they are going to disappear. Even if every civilized nation on earth immediately banned all firearms, there would still be billions of them out there and it's simply not possible to collect them all, partly because many people won't allow the government to do so, and will either resist or grease them up, put them in a length of plastic sewer pipe and bury them in the back yard for the day when the worm turns again. Is that not what just happened somewhere in the UK, where a kid with a metal detector found a stash of "illegal" weapons buried on his family property?
I mean really, just ask the IRA about hiding weapons. Nobody in their right mind thinks the IRA actually turned in anything but inferior spares do they?
So, as has been pointed out repeatedly, all banning guns does is take them away from the people who need them and who are the least likely to misuse them without substantially affecting the ability of criminals and crazy people from getting their hands on deadly weapons of all types.
The issue evaded by BG very consistently is the factual data about defensive gun uses, which exists in abundance, but which he chooses to ignore.
The only people who turn in guns in response to gun bans are law-abiding citizens. Criminals don't.
The real issue of gun control in Australia, as you allude to in the part of your post that I quoted, is the continuing absence of hand guns in the general population. Granted, professional criminals can obtain them at considerable cost (and mainly use them as either threats, or to murder rival criminals), but they are rare other than that. A defensible thesis is that it this continuing gun control which explains much of the difference in homicide rates between us and the US
The historical differences are indeed quite important in assessing the viability of trying to reduce gun deaths by banning guns. It's simply beyond any possibility that even a majority of the 300+ million guns in the US would be turned in were such a law passed, which would require amending the Constitution to begin with.
So even if BG is entirely mathematically correct, it's a pointless argument because it cannot happen here in the US. Civil war would likely result from a serious attempt to seize guns here.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
