Blind groper wrote:Seth finds the "more guns, less crime" argument convenient. This was a book written by John Lott. Sadly for Seth, that book and its conclusions have been shown by a number of highly qualified academics to be so much crap. However, as always, those who find the conclusions of crap books convenient will ignore any evidence to the contrary.
Wrong. It's been challenged by a number of highly-biased anti-gun academic shills (particularly a bunch at Harvard) who have yet to provide any credible refutation of Lott's work, much less the work of many other researchers, and legislative bodies, who have examined the evidence and concluded that Lott is indeed correct, which is why there are now 50 states which provide some avenue for law-abiding citizens to obtain permits to carry concealed weapons in public...although Illinois had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the bar to make it happen. Only 40 or so of the 50 states have "shall issue" regulations that make granting such permits non-discretionary, but that's changing every day too.
Seth quotes 'correlation does not mean causation'. That is a slogan which is used when the correlation is inconvenient. It is a slogan that is occasionally correct, but the correlation needs to be shown to be unrelated to causation. In this case, the correlation is clear, and is rational, and fits any reasonable model of causation.
No it doesn't.
Guns are tools for killing. More guns means more killing. This logic is sensible.
Let's suppose
arguendo that you're right. So what? Creatures need to be killed from time to time, and that happens to include human beings. That being the case it's only prudent to have the proper tool for the job. After all, it's difficult to drive nails with a herring.
More than that, it is backed up by empirical studies that show where there are more guns, the murder rate goes up. As I have shown with real world and statistically valid evidence.
Except you haven't. The number of guns in the US has soared in the last 30 years and yet the murder rate has been steadily dropping all that time.
Checkmate.
Seth likes to fall back on anecdotes, which I reject for the simple reason that anecdotes are not scientifically acceptable evidence.
What's not scientifically acceptable is refusing to accept validated observations in support of one theory because they happen to conflict with your theory.
My rejection of his anecdotes makes Seth think I am closed to logic and data.
No, it proves that you are closed to logic and data.
Not at all. It is just that Seth has not supplied anything other than cherry picked data, like anecdotes and a discredited book.
And yet you have been entirely unable, not to mention unwilling to try to rebut even a single one of those "cherries," much less provide any evidence whatsoever in support of your thesis other than the simplistic observation that murder rates are higher in the US than they are elsewhere.
To Seth, about suicide.
You keep falling back on the statement that a would-be suicide prevented from access to a gun will use another method. As I have repeatedly told you, researchers into suicide have found that most suicides are done on impulse, and tis is not repeated. So if you can stop a suicide, the impulse passes and the person lives a full life.
Feel free to stop all the suicides you like, but don't try to use suicide by gun as an excuse to deprive the enormous majority of non-suicidal gun owners of their property. It's a ridiculous and fallacious notion, as I've pointed out many times with the very simple example of the automobile. Ten times the number deaths caused by all forms of firearms are killed each and every year in automobiles, and yet you do not call for banning them, or bathtubs, or five-gallon buckets, or swimming pools or any of a very long list of things that kill people much more often than guns do...guns being down below the 100 most common causes of death according to the CDC.
You ignore this fact and attempt to argue that because cars are "necessary" and because they have utility, it's an inappropriate comparison, but this depends on your own fallacious assumption that guns are not necessary and have no legitimate utility, a narrow-minded utopianistic view of humanity that has no connection whatever to reality.
The easy way to stop the impulse is to make sure hand guns are not available. This simple measure would save thousands of lives each year. Those people would then have the opportunity to go on and have the same chance we all have of a happy and fulfilled life.
Except you completely ignore the much greater number of people who would die, be injured and be victimized because they did not have a gun when they needed it.
Given the choice between making it easier for suicides to achieve their desire for death and making it harder for criminals to victimize innocent people who don't want to be victimized, I'll take the rights of the innocent to be armed to secure to the maximum extent possible their right to be free of criminal attack over interfering with a suicide's sovereign and absolute individual right to end his or her life whenever it occurs to them to do so.
For you to tell me that I have to sacrifice my personal safety, and the safety of my loved ones in order to hypothetically make it more difficult for a suicide to exercise his right to commit suicide effectively and painlessly is beneath contempt.
"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
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