This will be entertaining.
Australia: Low-cost machines capable of making parts for deadly rifle will be shipped in from the US
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/new...-1227259181348
New chapter in the saga: Guns don't kill people
Florida man riding bike is killed when handgun in jacket pocket discharges ... itself ... all alone ... without anyone pulling the trigger.
I know I cannot always be right but you gotta give me this one. GUNS KILL PEOPLE! That's the only fucking thing they actually do. I tried petting a dog with a gun and I killed it. I fucking fed my sick grandma with a gun and I blew her brains off.
I tried to do a bunch of shit with a gun and I ended up killing a lot of living things. I must be doing something wrong ..
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/26/us/flo...ghtVODTopLink/
Goddamn. A 13 year old shoots and wounds his 16 year old brother, shoots and kills his 6 year old brother, and then commits suicide.
Over food.
dumb people do dumb shit. Some kid launched another into the pavement because they were "car surfing." Another drove through a crowd of people.
She patrols for poachers in Africa.
Last edited by Deepvoid; 03-27-2015 at 10:10 PM.
Guy starts shooting up a barbershop filled with people (including children). A concealed carry holder who was walking by shot him. Nobody but the initial shooter was injured.
http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/...297176271.html
That's pretty cool. Gotta admit it.
Just unfortunate the same day a law abiding citizen saves some lives ... a teenager accidentally shoots himself in the head while playing with a cat.
So at the end of the day, I'm just not impressed.
If one positive event cancels out one negative event (though I'd argue the metric should be in lives saved vs lost). Well, then the positive events win.
This can only be polled based on "what makes the news" but just for yesterday:
Woman shoots here ex-boyfriend in self defense http://www.click2houston.com/news/po...ation/32130258
Another crazy ex-boyfriend is shot in self defense: http://www.click2houston.com/news/br...-beau/32125294
A "warning shot" fends off a home invasion: http://www.clickorlando.com/news/sho...nford/32124874
:P
Then maybe you should look it up instead of relying on rhetoric to come to the conclusion. Especially when that rhetoric focuses on the most statistically small instances of a problem. The answer is pretty obvious when you dig into it.
And really? A comedy bit is your support? It's designed to be funny, not accurate. Every few seconds he mentions something that is factually incorrect.
just for fun....
045: - "australia had a massacre in 96, banned guns, hasn't seen a massacre since." False, there have been at least 7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...s_in_Australia. OH BUT HE MEANT GUN MASSACRES! Ah, you have to help the comedian make a point? you don't say! Well, you might as well look at the statistical incidence of "gun crime" (because crime only matters if it involves a gun) before and after the ban... you'll quickly notice that things like gun homicides and other gun related crime were in a steady decline since, at least, the 80's and continued to decline without change from the gun ban.
2:15 - "there is one argument alone for having a gun, and that argument is 'fuck off' " .... False. There are many reasons for allowing people to have guns. Also, "fuck off" is actually a legitimate reason in a free country. It is the responsibility of the government to justify why a citizen cannot do something, it's not the responsibility of the citizen to justify why they should be allowed to do something.
2:35 - he makes the case that guns aren't for protection because they are called assault rifles. Holy derp. An assault rifle is a very very specific weapon, he is probably mixing it up with "assault weapon". However, anti-gun groups have decided to invent the "assault weapon" term as psychological propaganda to help push banning guns. Good job buying into it! The definition of an assault weapon is based on cosmetic features, which further discredits the notion that the name implies the functional use.
3:00 - but people commit suicide with guns!!! Uh, and? It's not like guns are a magic object that makes people commit suicide. Suicide rates didn't go down in Australia after the 96 gun ban. In fact, I believe they went up. But, since I understand how these things work, I wouldn't blame the gun ban for that... I would recognize that there are many factors that cause people to do things. edit: yup
aaaand you get the idea. I don't think I need to spend more than 3min on that stupidity
Last edited by DigitalChaos; 04-02-2015 at 04:39 PM.
I'd say it's impossible to quantify people "saved" as a metric in this debate. How can you tell if the victims would've been killed vs victims being robbed, injured ect..?
On the other hand you have the actual deaths at the hand of guns. Accidents, murder, suicides... These events will give you hard numbers that aren't questionable.
Maybe if the CDC could actually get funding to conduct the necessary research we could have all the data to really have an accurate discussion on the matter... But it seems the NRA would rather not have that discussion, I wonder why? $$$
You are correct. It's impossible to get extremely accurate numbers on things like defensive gun use. There are just too many situations where it won't get reported. However, an entity like the CDC could establish some educated statistics here, just as you say.
But what is interesting is that the CDC recently did just this. In 2013, Obama ordered the CDC to do a study, for $10mil. There was very little coverage on the results of that report from the gun control proponents, which is really interesting considering 2013 was prime time for the post-Sandy Hook gun control push. The gun-rights side certainly covered it though. Guess why! Oh, and fuck the NRA.
To sum it up, the CDC estimates that for every instance of offensive gun use, there is 1 to 3 instances of defensive gun use. So that's just one instance that addresses the original question.
are we talking about the Center for Disease Control, or a different CDC? If not, why would they be primed to offer gun statistics?
I'm pretty sure that the study that was released wasn't the CDC's itself. That $10 million dollars Obama proposed for the study was never approved so as far as I know, the CDC has never received dedicated funding for the study. I could be wrong here but I'm pretty sure I'm correct.
and to be clear, I like guns and I'm pro 2A... Not coming from a anti gun angle on this..
The CDC subcontracted the study to the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, which is normal. The CDC "owns" the study in that sense. Obama mandated the study. I wasn't able to quickly pull up the funding source or cost, but the study was certainly conducted.
Other findings of the report (I'm quickly running through this):
- Crime, including gun violence, is going down, not up.
- More people are buying firearms.
- Handguns, especially concealable, are the major source of crime.
- Focusing on "assault weapons" and high cap magazines is pointless.
- Mass shootings are statistically insignificant. Cities like Chicago are the issue.
- Firearm suicide outnumbers firearm homicide.
- In the context of 300k violent crimes per year, they estimate 500k-3mil defensive gun uses per year. (shit, I under-represented this)
- Denying guns to those under restraining orders will reduce homicide by 7%
- Gun turn-in/buy-back programs are ineffective
- They were unable to determine if right-to-carry laws impact violent crime or if gun restrictions reduce firearm violence.
- self-defense is an important crime deterrent
- they found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared to victims who used other self-protection strategies.
I should also state that when people talk about "gun <insert something here>" it almost always misses the point. gun crime, gun violence, gun deaths, gun homicide, gun suicide, etc. Either crime, violence, deaths, etc are all bad, or they aren't. Either guns alter the pattern of those things, or they don't. Like it fucking matters if 1% of people choose to jump off a bridge while another 1% shoot themselves if taking the guns away results in 2% jumping off bridges. Solve suicide if that is your goal. Don't pretend to solve suicide by being afraid of objects. Choosing to only look at a specific type of crime, death, etc is asinine and only serves to let people say misleading shit like "there are 3000000% more GUN deaths in the US than in antarctica." If guns actually cause the rate of something to go up/down per capita, then let's discuss it.
Well, I'd say gun crimes aren't replaced by knife/axe/poison crimes.
A gun is an user-friendly, very effective tool. It's quick, powerful, and has a great range compared to every other mean to hurt or kill someone.
So, even if the amount of attempted murders were equal in parts of the world allowing citizen to be armed vs those forbidding it, the amount of successful homicides/suicides would be radically lower in the latter.
But the thing is, you don't don't kill someone with a knife as easily, and hanging yourself requires you to go through a long process.
Your question amounts to "In countries without Photoshop, aren't there as many shitty collages as there are in countries where that program isn't available for everyone ?", to me.
No, in one part you have an available, efficient and easy to use tool, in the other the obstacles you encounter to obtain the same result require a stronger drive and motivation.
I agree with you on this : everyone always focuses on the means, and never on the reasons. And I understand that gun laws are so ingrained in US' history and culture that trying to ban them now would probably be disastrous. But the fact of the matter remains that the US citizen are allowed to own as many slick death machines as they fancy, and just like in the rest of the world, a sizable proportion are assholes, madmen or just plain idiots. And when those have a problem, they have an easy fix handy, contrary to the bellends who can't have guns.
And other statistics comparing crime rates between states and nations, that don't look like a D&d chart.
Which was, you know, fundamentally my point, but feel free to nitpick.
Nice list.... except you forgot probably one of the most important points made, and a reason why outsiders just can't seem to get their head around the US's gun-culture.
• U.S. has highest rate of firearm-related deaths among industrializedcountries, despite violent crime rate decline
http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2013/Prio...-Violence.aspx
But hey, I can't expect you to spend more than 5 minutes looking for the report you so adamantly championed...
Also, this Slate article does a pretty good job of digesting the main points of the study without throwing in too much rhetoric.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health...gs_from_a.html
Last edited by Canuckle; 04-10-2015 at 12:48 PM. Reason: Added Slate article
Another horrible story.
3-year-old shot a 1-year-old in the head.
The only good thing about this story if there is one, is that hopefully this 3-year-old won't remember this.
Question is, is that the kind of thing you hid from you son as he grow older? Would you eventually tell him?
Ok I had to double post. This has got to be the craziest thing I've read in a while.
Man accidentally shot his mother-in-law.
"Larry McElroy was outside when he fired his 9 mm pistol at the armadillo. The bullet killed the animal, but also ricocheted off of it, hit a fence, went through the back door of his mother-in-law's mobile home, through a recliner she was sitting in, and into her back."
holy christ. That's like some Final Destination freak accident stuff. Luckily she didn't die. This is the first "gun accident" story I have seen in a very long time that I can't really blame on stupidity. I mean, I never understood the point of shooting small animals, but from a safety perspective, it doesn't sound like he didn't anything dumb. If i were a cop, I'd be so paranoid about this kind of thing happening when having to use a gun. All the hard surfaces in urban areas make this type of thing even more possible (yet still pretty rare).
Here is a ricochet from a 50cal (huge) gun that hits the shooter. (not gory or anything, he is uninjured... barely)
They were shooting at steel plate targets. You can hear how long it takes to hit the plate, come back, hit the ground, then bounce into his ear protection. The whistle noise starts after it hits the plate and starts to tumble.