Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure school-kids can't legally buy guns anyway, so by restricting adults even more you aren't making it more illegal for Timmy to acquire the gun.

I repeat
"How illegal it is (punishment for owning/using a gun), isn't what matters. What matters is how easy it is to acquire that illegal thing."
I at no point talked about making it less, or more illegal.

Why do people have an obsession with "how legal is thing x". The conversation should be "how can we prevent people, especially children, from shooting each other". This conversation always gets twisted to weird philosophical, statistical and technicality debates, instead of real world discussion, about real world problems.

Why do you, of all people lash on to meaningless technicalities/semantics?

Because I don't really have an opinion on the matter anymore. I pick up on this stuff so more annoying people don't do it first and piss everyone off. I assumed that you felt it was an important point because of the combination of your use of bold caps, the saturation of your post with swearwords, as well as you concluding with; "that's the whole motherfucking point". However, I did misinterpret your point, my bad.

However, I'm not exactly sure that you can just logically assume the increased difficulty of acquiring an illegal gun would stop little Jimmy. I mean, if he's already willing to buy a firearm illegally then he is probably pretty obsessed obsessed his plan. We don't know exactly how much the illegal gun market would be damaged by attacking the legal one. I'm not convinced.

In terms of the two graphs pig posted, I can't help but feel like all we have proven about them is that such statistics are unhelpful af when almost all interpretations will be biased and when any number of other factors could have been at work.

Are you saying it's hard? I mean, you can google it and get an infinite supply of articles saying how easy it is to illegally acquire guns, I even saw one on the first page with a title like "how to get an illegal gun on facebook in 15 minutes".


Banning guns isn't going to stop people doing illegal things, if they are already planning to break the law then they clearly don't care if the guns are legal or not.

It's such a pointless argument to even make...

Closing this thread because it's just retarded how hard Pig was baiting and how eagerly everyone was to bite.

In the future, just ignore whatever Pig writes. He only writes it to get you all mad.

@Pig, there's a difference between playing the devil's advocate and just flat-out trolling. Engage less in the latter from now on.

Reopening thread, because I believe there are still things to be discussed.

I heard this argument the other day "having a gun makes you more likely to be injured in a crime", um, maybe that's because people in bad neighbourhoods buy guns to defend themselves? What a loaded use of statistics!


Here's some actual statistics on injury:

As you can see, it goes exactly as you would expect.