HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I'm sorry, but if you truly believe that then you are an idiot. If the police barely have enough firepower now to protect themselves and citizens from criminals, what makes you think taking away their only truly effective weapon will help anything?

Gun control is a joke anyways. Criminals rarely use guns that they legally obtained to perform crimes anyways. If you are in America and want a gun, its very easy to illegally get one. Stricter gun control laws wont stop that. All they will do is stop a normal citizen from getting a gun to protect themselves, which in today's day and age is almost a necessity.

Now I haven't read the whole thread yet, so I'll be replying to all of that soon. I just felt the need to reply to this post first since it popped out as the most ill-informed.

Edit: Ok, read the whole thread now. I agree with most of the points presented in this thread that are against stricter gun control. Its simple, you ban guns and criminals will still get them. Banning alcohol didn't stop people from drinking during prohibition. Try disarming everyone who already has guns in America and you'll end up dead yourself too.

Btw, if anyone is curious, I'm not speaking out of my ass here. Most of what I've posted above comes straight from police officers I've worked with and talked to. I've actually asked them about this and most guns that criminals use are either stolen from people who legally own them or are illegally obtained in other ways.

So, for example, you would be OK with private ownership of nuclear weapons? Because it's fine to have them if you are moral enough not to use them?

There is no legitimate reason for a civilian to own a weapon, other than hunting.

There are plenty of other self-defense solutions (for example living in a safe country) that are viable alternatives. Back to the Japan example, their crime rates are less than 1% of that of USA. Why would you need to own a self defense tool at all in a safe country? I would say that 99% of people go through life without ever needing to defend themselves, and of the 1% that do need to, 99% of them (if not more) do not need to kill their attacker.

In fact the stats back me up on that first assertion there, violent crime rates in Australia (a generally safe country) are around 2 per 100,000 population. So 0.002% of the population are involved every year (approximately). The homicide rate is around 1.5 overall. Sadly I couldn't find any statistics to decide as to how many people would have survived by owning a gun, but I can't imagine that it would be high.

Are you an American or something? If so it will be difficult for you to understand the world outside of your own country (not a judgement on you, it's just that is the way your education and culture works)

In Australia most cops don't have guns any more, and neither do most criminals.

Violent crime in USA is more than 100x more prevalent than in Australia (in fact I think it is around 400x).

Non-lethal weapons are superior, because Australia believes in justice not assassination. A quick example of this is that Americans rejoiced when Osama was assassination, where as the rest of the world was disappointed (if not disgusted) that justice was not served.

America has one of the easiest ways to get guns, and still a ton of illegal guns are acquired too. Perhaps this should be taken as a judgement on American society that they all want to have the ability to kill people.

As you pointed out, America is the most fucked up and bloodthirsty country in the world. Special precautions should be taken when dealing with their violent population. I don't have a "magic bullet" solution to fix America - but giving them less sharp objects to stab each other with, so to speak, can only help.


So anyway ass-speaker, please tell me about these Australian cops you talked to. inb4 really was speaking out of ass.

Im going to assume that you're an idiot and you don't know where the shooting that caused this whole discussion was.

Just to inform you, it was in the US. You know, not Australia. So no, I haven't spoken to Australian cops because they wouldn't know how crime works in THE UNITED STATES.

It doesn't make sense to talk about gun control in places where this didn't happen.

I'm willing to go a LONG ways back to explain the reasons why the US Constitution has the Second Amendment, and why it's seriously out of date. I'm also willing to explain the reasoning why having a gun for self-defense is a pretty stupid claim. I'm ALSO willing to explain the reasons why gun crimes in America are higher from a purely cultural perspective.

So ya. Long post coming...

History of the Second Amendment and Why it's Outdated

The Second Amendment is a fairly well cited part of the Bill of Rights, however people are taking it out of the context from which it was written: 200 years in the past. The origins of the Second Amendment don't actually originate in America, but rather in rural areas of Britain. These sparsely populated areas rarely, if at all, had a public police force. This made crime a fairly hard thing to combat in these areas. Therefore, the British government gave their citizens the right to carry and bear arms for the purpose of maintaining the peace in the area. They were also allowed to train and maintain a militia for this very purpose. Notice the context. This is not to protect themselves from a tyrannical government, but to protect themselves from outlaws when public authority was NOT available.

But how does that relate to the Second Amendment? Literally, the Founding Fathers copied that very law for the very same reason. America was to be a very new country, so an established system of law could very well take time to reach some of the parts of the country. For this very reason, they copied the law to give their citizens the rights to defend themselves, since law enforcement could literally be days away from even hearing about a crime, let alone reaching it.

This also requires a bit of prefacing about the Constitution. The Constitution was not written in stone. The Founding Fathers made it clear that Amendments were crucial to the preservation of the State. They outline the process of proposing an Amendment to the Constitution because they knew that times change, and with it so should the laws. When a law becomes obsolete, it's only common sense to remove it. No doubt, the Founding Fathers would have wanted many more revisions to the Constitution by now, considering we've been following pretty much the same document over the past 200 years.

So now, we come to today. There is virtually no part in America where law enforcement is not readily available. The need for citizens to take the law into their own hands, which is what the Second Amendment was proposed for, is virtually non-existent. The law is clearly obsolete by the standards by which it was implemented. However, there's an interpretation that it's for the sake of defending oneself against one's government. If anybody sits down and thinks about that, if you really needed to defend yourself against your own government, would you REALLY GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THEIR LAWS!? Fuck, the reasoning that it's in place to justify defense against the government is the stupidest bit of logic I hear.

That's, in a nutshell, the history of the Second Amendment.


Why That Gun is More Likely to Kill You Rather Than Protect You

People always have this stupid notion that having a gun will protect you from being the victim of violent crime. Let's get some facts very, VERY, clear. One, having a gun to protect yourself only works if you're aware of the threat before the threat incapacitates you. Two, it's only useful if you can react to the threat before it incapacitates you. Now lets look at basic criminal logic. One, I'm not going to run at you from 100 m with a knife drawn. I'm going to attack from behind, or ambush you, or attack from a much closer distance. Two, if I have a gun, and you have a gun, and my gun is drawn and jammed against your forehead, you're either an idiot or have a death wish if you try to draw your gun at this point. Three, once I have my gun jammed against your forehead, I'm going to make sure you don't shoot me in the back when I run. And a gun on the black market can easily fetch a couple hundred bucks. So I have all the incentive in the world to steal your gun and use it against you. Four, if I'm robbing you when you're sleeping, I've probably already stolen your gun. So even if you do wake up, you can wake up to the barrel of your gun in your face. Five, if I'm robbing you when you're not asleep, calling the cops will stop me just as effectively as pulling a gun on me.

Now let's look also at the definition of self-defense. If the crime is over, and the perpetrator is running away, will shooting him in the back be self-defense? Is shooting somebody because I'm afraid of the possibility of harm considered self-defense? The answer to both of these is, without a doubt, no. But then how does one decide if an act was in self-defense? Are you just going to take the word of the last person standing that it was in self-defense? Where is the line drawn? This has never been formally established.

Lastly, with guns more readily available, guns are most readily available for criminals. In fact, most crimes committed with guns are committed using guns that were either purchased legally, or were stolen from a person who had purchased it legally. So rather, one of the best options against gun violence is to remove guns from the equation. More guns in circulation results in more opportunities for criminals to receive guns.


Why America is a Gun Happy Culture, Historically

This is fairly evident if anybody looks back the past 100 years. Name some of the most idealized points in American History. I will almost guarantee you that you named at least one war. Name some of the most romanticized jobs in America, past and present. I will guarantee you that cowboy is one of them. Basically, America's gun culture isn't just something that exists just recently, but is the culmination of several decades of glorification of gun ownership.

Shortest paragraph, yea \o/

But ye, long post is long. And no tl;dr. This is discussion, so you read it.

Congratulations on agreeing with one of the worst post in the thread then, surpassing it!


Are you trolling right now? My post that you replied to initially was specifically and explicitly in the context of Australia.

Looks like you talked shit then tried to cover it up with "Oh not in this specific context".



Firstly, no one said banning guns was a magic bullet. I actually explicitly stated it...

However banning commercial ownership of guns in the biggest gun-exporter country in the world can be nothing but a good thing.

I don't think you would argue that removing gun ownership restrictions in any country can only be a good thing - so what you are arguing is that banning gun ownership makes little or positive change - which is what we said in the first place.

Also comparing USA to any of the countries covered in the study is laughable. For example Finland is by far an outlier, at 411.2 guns per 100,000 population. USA however is at 88,800 per 100,000 population. That is 200 times more than the greatest outlier. Can you really even make a comparison based on that?

Also if you compare any country on that list you will see that the murder with gun / murder percent is less than 25% for any country. In USA it is greater than 50%. Obviously judging USA by a dataset that it is WAY outside of is not valid at all.

We don't have any data even close to USA.