Las Vegas Terror Attack

[Rocky Mountain Shock]

What I believe is that a significant portion of the media and the left in general who are speaking out against "assault" weapons, in their heart-of-hearts, would rejoice at a repeal of the 2nd Amendment. Having that goal (ie. feeling or belief) is not 100% improbable. Actually attaining the goal may be.

Respectfully disagree. I know few people in the media, but as far as people who identify as liberals or Democrats, very few support an outright repeal of the 2nd amendment. I haven't (yet) been able to find poll numbers that directly speak of repeal of the 2nd amendment, the last I knew a few years ago it was somewhere around 85% of the general public who would oppose an outright repeal, and even the majority of democrats would oppose repeal. When the question is changed more broadly to gun control, the number gets significantly closer to 50%, with democrats in favor of greater restrictions by a significant majority.

So don't believe the gun lobby, who is on a highly effective fear mongering rampage trying to convince everyone that Democrats are going to take our guns. Democrats are not going to take our guns, and it's not even close.

[shockfan89_]

Wait, what? You think the 2nd amendment should allow us to purchase tanks, battleships, and F-16s?

This is why common sense must be used when interpreting and applying laws written 200 years ago.

What do you think the purpose of the 2nd amendment was/is?

[shockfan89_]

Respectfully disagree. I know few people in the media, but as far as people who identify as liberals or Democrats, very few support an outright repeal of the 2nd amendment. I haven't (yet) been able to find poll numbers that directly speak of repeal of the 2nd amendment, the last I knew a few years ago it was somewhere around 85% of the general public who would oppose an outright repeal, and even the majority of democrats would oppose repeal. When the question is changed more broadly to gun control, the number gets significantly closer to 50%, with democrats in favor of greater restrictions by a significant majority.

So don't believe the gun lobby, who is on a highly effective fear mongering rampage trying to convince everyone that Democrats are going to take our guns. Democrats are not going to take our guns, and it's not even close.

I generally agree with this, the problem is that anything short of taking our guns really won't be effective. Guns are illegal in Chicago yet there were 4,379 shootings in 2016 and 720 gun related homicides. That is the equivalent of a Las Vegas massacre every month in Chicago!!!

[Eric]

I am a gun owner. If I thought bans and confiscations would work I would be first in line to hand them in, but it won't work.

[Rocky Mountain Shock]

What do you think the purpose of the 2nd amendment was/is?

Well, that's the $20,000 question, right? We have some commentary from a few of the founding fathers on that, but consensus is hard to come by.

I'm sensing a logic trap, but I'll play along for awhile. Just personally, I believe the original primary intent was ensure continuity of state sponsored civilian militias (which would protect against tyranny and federal overreach), with the secondary intents of ensuring citizens had a means of self defense and for rural citizens to hunt for game. All those things seem perfectly reasonable and necessary 200 years ago, when guns were a common and necessary part of life especially in rural areas. I do not know--no one knows--if they would have written the amendment the same way with modern weapons technology in mind--my guess is probably not. But I think in that hypothetical situation, a form of the 2nd amendment would have still been written.

[Rocky Mountain Shock]

I generally agree with this, the problem is that anything short of taking our guns really won't be effective. Guns are illegal in Chicago yet there were 4,379 shootings in 2016 and 720 gun related homicides. That is the equivalent of a Las Vegas massacre every month in Chicago!!!

Guns are NOT illegal in Chicago. That's fake news. In fact, Illinois has a concealed carry law.

The idea that "anything short of taking our guns really won't be effective" is ludicrous. It's this kind of black and white, all or nothing thinking that probably leads to the ludicrous idea that the 2nd Amendment is going to be repealed any moment now. Can someone please tell me what happened to logic and reason? Some guy shot them probably--before Barack Obama himself confiscated his gun...

[Play Angry]

Guns aren't illegal in Chicago, good grief.

[shockfan89_]

It is ILLEGAL to have a gun or ammunition in Illinois unless you have a Firearm Owners Identification card which is issued by the Illinois State Police. How many of those 4,379 shootings do you think occurred by people who received a FOI card issued by the Illinois State Police?

Okay then name something that can be done, short of confiscation, to prevent gun related homicides.

[Play Angry]

It is ILLEGAL to have a gun or ammunition in Illinois unless you have a Firearm Owners Identification card which is issued by the Illinois State Police.

Not trying to be a jerk, but that is very different from what you said initially. There's no need to misrepresent the facts - it's a pain in the butt to buy a gun in Chicago, for sure, but it's also different now than immediately pre-McDonald.

Okay then name something that can be done, short of confiscation, to prevent gun related homicides.

This type of statement, coupled with:

I'm not suggesting we take all guns away but we really need to take a look at what we find important.

...are why everybody freaks out on both sides in these arguments.

The discussion should never be confiscate everything vs. total laissez-faire own-your-own-tank, but it seems like it always takes about ten seconds to devolve to that point. I know you believe in the latter because you have implied the word "all" into the Second Amendment prior to "Arms", but Scalia repeatedly acknowledged that the Second Amendment is not an unlimited right and the vast majority of conservatives do not take the activist approach you do with regard to the plain language in the Bill of Rights.

Mental health screenings, wait periods, restrictions based on criminal history and TROs, etc. are certainly concepts that can be debated, but none of those would have mitigated this incident, and they should be discussed on a standalone basis (I disagree with many similar proposals and certainly any elimination of due process). Here, however, a shooter legally obtained over a dozen functional equivalents of machine guns because manufacturers, lobbyists and consumers have found a legal workaround for restrictions designed to restrict access to exactly that type of firearm. The loopholes providing for legal sale, purchase and use of those modifications should be closed.

The fact that the killer either (1) could have tried to obtain those mods on the black market, illegally (he certainly may not have since everything he purchased seems to have been legal and there are other, illegal firearms which can inflict greater devastation which he opted not to purchase on the black market), or (2) could have used another mechanism to inflict equal or greater harm (bomb, car, etc.) is a very, very weak shield against the argument for closing those loopholes. It is not a condition to any restriction that the underlying incident be made impossible - mitigation has significant value and pretending otherwise promotes a false dichotomy.

Liberals will continue to overreach in the ensuing discussion, and many on the right will circle the wagons and reject any and all discussion of appropriate restrictions.

[wufan]

So you are going to ignore all the links I've posted in this thread? Yeah? Cool story bro.

I’m not ignoring. You posted four links in response to me and not one of them had anything to do with the correlation between gun ownership and homicide.

[wufan]

To clarify, the statistics most people have been talking about are gun homicides, which also do not include accidental deaths. I am not so certain that the data includes "preventing people from killing others." If I shoot someone to prevent them from killing me, that's not a homicide, so I don't know if it would count in the data. It all just depends on the specific data being collected.

I'm just saying, let's not say "gun deaths are inversely correlated with the number of guns owned in the US" unless that's what the data specifically shows since that's a pretty big difference (as you mentioned, the data cited so far excludes at least 2/3rds of gun deaths).

The original question was from me and in no way related to gun deaths or gun homicide. It was the correlation between gun ownership and all homocide. This was the supposition put forth which I disagreed with.

[wufan]

“Why is it that gun accessibility correlates fairly well with homicide rate in modern industrial countries?“

Gun ownership does not correlate to homicide even in developed countries.

[wufan]

The numbers are every where. Seriously. It's not a one to one. It's a correlation that is very strong. http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americ...ics/index.html https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...cs-maps-charts https://everytown.org/learn/ http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-...030-X/fulltext

None of these articles compare gun ownership and homicide.

[wufan]

Here’s a link with a negative correlation between gun ownership and homicide, although it’s not statistically correlated at all. The US is it’s own beast and a total outlier from the non-correlated supposition.

http://www.objectobot.com/?p=458

Also, if you look at US homicide rate vs civilized country homicide rate where no gun is involved, the US is still number 1 overall and over two times higher than the average. You ask if the people in the US are just more evil than in other countries...well we tend to mirder people at twice the rate even when no guns are involved. This information was per one of the articles you posted that didn’t talk about ownership vs homicide.

[boltforge]

I'm not going to argue with the rest of the post right now, but is your stance that suicide and accidents are analogous? You're arguing that if a person weren't committing suicide with a gun they'd be committing it with a knife, right? Which, I guess is a fine argument. I don't know the stats on it, but it at least seems somewhat logical.

But why would a car, stairs, tub, or whatever be mutually exclusive with gun accidents? Are you arguing that if we decrease gun accidents we would see an increase in car accidents? If yes, I would love to hear the logic behind it. If no, then it's totally relevant to the discussion.

On suicides. People are going to kill themselves. They will pick from available techniques. Increased availability of one technique means in statistics it will increase as well. So you should see more suicides by guns in places that have more guns. Similarly you see more suicides by jumping off bridges in places that have tall enough bridges to kill you. And more people jumping in front of trains in NYC than in Wichita.

On accidents. The number of accidents while doing 'whatever' are obviously related to how much 'whatever' you are doing. I'm not saying 'whatever #1' is in any way related to 'whatever #2'. I'm saying more people accidentally drown on the coasts than in the Sahara. More people cleaning their guns means more people accidentally shooting themselves. More people hunting means more people accidentally shooting their buddy. More people golfing means more people with golf tee injuries.

For gun stats it just means that suicides and accidents are always directly proportional to numbers of guns. But, crime is usually inversely proportional. So all three need to be separated and not dumped together into "Deaths by GUNS!!"