mass killings… why didn’t we see them when guns were even more readily available?
When were guns less prevalent in the US than today?
Interestingly, the murder rate has been going down for quite a while now. It raised a bit in recent years, but its nowhere near the rate it was in the 80s.
EDIT: That’s just the general murder rate, gun murders are, indeed, going up.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-murder-rate-is-up-but-still-far-below-its-1980-peak/
Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but it looks like the percentage of murders committed with firearms went up, not the absolute number. But yeah, crime is relatively low, though you’d think it was the purge based on media coverage.
I think Jay’s argument is that those arguing for anything approaching a ban on guns don’t account for the fact that so many of the killings will still happen. And I think that’s right.
We can’t stop all the killings, so let’s not try to stop any of the killings.
Sounds great.
How many of the killings will stop if we ban the scary guns? That’s an honest question. I’d like to know how many of the people who would die this year would not die if the scary guns were banned, because those are the only ones that stand a chance of being banned outright.
In 2014, 248 people were killed with rifles. That accounts for 3% of all gun deaths, 4% of all gun deaths excluding non-classified firearms. If we took that 4% figure and applied it to the 1,959 gun deaths caused by non-classified firearms, that would be an additional 78 people killed. So, 326. Assuming that “scary guns” just refers to assault weapons and not all rifles, then the number would be less than 326. The question is “how much less?”
Disclaimer: There’s a decent chance I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Thanks. This is the core of what I’m arguing. Even banning ALL rifles, including the non-scary ones, would have a minimal impact on overall gun deaths, and that’s assuming that at least some of those rifle users wouldn’t commit the same crime with a handgun. We’d have to be far more restrictive in our application of gun control to have a significant impact on gun deaths.
Yeah, I believe I’ve made a few in depth posts like this before with many facts and figures and statistics that show that gun crime is fractional (but over-reported) and that we see many hundreds more deaths from automobiles and cars every year, but generally they are glossed over and not talked about.
Cars are used every day by just about everyone to provide transportation for a variety of useful reasons.
Beyond the tiny minuscule fraction of times someone actually defends themselves or someone else with a gun (and probably overrun by times there’s an accident, though I admit I’m just guessing), what use is a gun? And I’m not counting entertainment, any more than I count entertainment with a car.
Let’s be honest here: your mind is made up on the issue (and mine for that matter), so nothing I say matters. I can say that entertainment is valid for both. I can say that hunting is a pastime for many people. I can say that defense of self and property is important. I can say the right is guaranteed. I can say that guns (and military-grade guns for that matter) in the hands of the everyman has been an incredibly crucial part of American history. But it’s kinda wasted breath because we just talk in circles every time.
I honestly don’t really know why I engage other than it gets my blood up when people say things like “guns are disgusting and I hate them and because some people use them for bad reasons, they should all be taken away and melted down” because it feels to me like a knee-jerk emotionally-driven reactionary statement that overlooks all the nuance and complexity of the issue.
I think what annoys me the most, and I’m super guilty of this as well, is how we just entrench in our sides harder and harder in response to any debate or discussion regarding the issue and every debate or discussion just devolves into screaming “you want people to be able to kill children” versus “you want to infringe my rights” at each other and no minds are ever changed and nobody is enlightened.