Gun = Violence??

[Admiral Donutz]

Originally Posted by Who_Flung_Poo?

A bit late on this but I just can't let this one go.

What if we look at another nation with very strict gun laws? How about the UK? Right now they have all but abolished all individuals rights to fire arms, and yet the crime rate there just keeps escalating.

UK is violent crime capital of Europe - Telegraph

It's not as simple as having tight gun laws or not, what to me would seem far more influentual would be the history of the spread (accesabilty) of firearms. If firearms have been hard to get by for quite a while I'd expect less firearms incidents compared to a situation were untill recently laws were more liberal.

That's why strict gun laws as found in some European nations wouldn't work quite well in the US (or other euro countries). Not in the short term atleast, in the long term perhaps, when all the current stocks of legal (now illegal...) weapons and ammo have been become out dated and expired. Say, a hundred years from now perhaps?

Is this going to stop someone who really wants to get a gun from getting one? No, we Dutch say "where there is a will there is a way". If you want to achief something badly enough you probably will succeed. Wether it's trying to get your hands on your gun or assasinating a person. It will just take more effort/preperation/risk.

Will it lessen the chanches of your avarage criminal (burglar, pickpocketer, robber) having a gun? I'd guess so. If these items aren't very wide spread in the legal and illegal cirquit it will mean you;ll have to do more effort to get one. More risk, time. Effort that's probably not worth it if the task at hand probably ain't that risky. Why get a gun if you chanches of a succesful burglary aren't much smaller? Just enter an empty house, get your stuff and get the hell out.

[MrFancypants]

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

You don't need to be highly trained, you need to be familiar with your weapon and comfortable with it. You don't need corrective eye surgery, they're called glasses, or spectacles, they're quite common. An old guy who wears glasses and does what he considers fun in his spare time sounds pretty representative to me.

I disagree, if you want to compete with a young criminal you need constatn training and probably also surgery.

True, they don't stop being criminals, but they try to figure out a different racket. Petty thieves aren't known for their smarts, and the learning curve for certain extralegal jobs is kinda high. If we're going to claim that muggers will join drug cartels, then it suggests that the drug cartels just had a bunch of new dumb guys join up. That's a whole lot more opportunities for a member to become an informer, or just plain a screw-up. I'm blaming my East Asian History class for this reference, but was Mao's army stronger or weaker after the Long March?

I agree that criminals usually aren't very smart, but that is part of the problem. If you present a stupid person with a problem that person will not come up with an innovative solution, they'll just try harder with the solutions they are used to, which could easily translate to "get a bigger gun".

I would if there weren't simple ways to address the concerns. Negative stereotypes held about themselves causes people to fulfill the stereotype. Read in the spoilers for more, but they make this long post even longer

Spoiler:

If I recall correctly, this was tested by testing two groups with X color hair/eyes/something, then telling one group that people with X color hair/eyes/something were smarter and the other group that people with X color hair/eyes/something were dumber, and then re-testing them. The group that was told they were smarter than average started performing better. The group that was told they were dumber performed worse.

A similar phenomena has been reported in a study on AFROTC students. They were asked to conduct an eye exam, and were given a score. One group, in casual attire, was then given a flight simulator exercise and asked to read the tail numbers off a plane. They had the same success they had in the normal eye exam. Then the others were given orders to dress in their flight suits, gear, etc. and put in the same flight simulator exercise and ordered to read the tail numbers off the same plane at the same range. They performed better than their previous test.

That's interesting, but I wouldn't call the aging process a stereotype. Maybe it is self-reinforcing, but that doesn't seem to help your argument either.

The American counterpart to the 9x19mm Parabellum is the 9x19mm Parabellum. There are many alternative rounds because there are many different pistols and many different people. Is the 7.92x57mm Mauser round inferior to or better than the 7.62x51mm NATO round? Is the .50 BMG round inferior to or better than the .22LR?
People have different preferences. Some like going to a bigger round, because they feel more secure using something heavier. Some like using smaller cartridges, so they can fit more ammunition in.

With American counterpart I meant the various .38 caliber rounds, but my actual point was that we are not talking about a few complaints or individual preference but rather about a real trend towards more powerful ammunition.
If you are talking about people who want a gun to feel more secure I don't think it is logical at all to assume that they will use the least powerful weapons available.

God bless national stereotypes. They bring so much to the conversation! I mean, going off of national stereotypes, you'd be a huge fan of some sort of cloth badge, maybe in the shape of a triangle, that people could wear so people could easily tell if they're a pacifist or belong to a certain political party

To shoot more than once seems like a good idea if a single bullet has less muzzle energy and if you have a higher magazine capacity. That is not a stereotype.

Not sure what you are alluding to with your cloth triangles as those were never used by Germans to identify any particular political group, please explain.

Can you tell armed old people from unarmed old people? Can you tell an armed woman from an unarmed woman? The point about guns is that you don't have to be a strong young man to be effective with them.

Already answered in the part you quoted: "Guessing which groups is least likely to have a weapon and/or to use it effectively isn't very difficult either".

Armed Robbery and Homicide are far worse crimes in the USA than robbery or assault, which result in far harsher sentences.

And your overflowing prisons demonstrate just how effective harsh punishment is as deterrence for violent crime. So I guess my point that more guns will not decrease crime but just increase violent crime still stands unchallenged.

Robbing kids is seen as shitty behavior, even among thieves and muggers. An iPod or Cell Phone (unless you're on crack or meth) isn't worth the trouble unless you're able to pickpocket it or just snatch and grab. Hopefully an armed adult would see this attempt to snatch and grab (pickpocketing's harder to pick up on, of course) and do something about it.

So you're not willing to trust a criminal not to kill you when you are unarmed, but you are willing to trust them to rely on some code of honour when it comes to the possibility of others being robbed?

OK, so the only experts on immigration in Germany are foreigners, right? Only a Mexican can talk about Immigration in the United Kingdom (very few Mexicans immigrate to the UK, so they're pretty unbiased, by this reasoning)

Not sure where you made that connection, I just said that I don't trust American sources when it comes to guns, not that every source is unreliable.
Generally I would agree that someone who isn't directly involved in an issue is more likely to come to an unbiased conclusion, but that doesn't really seem to apply to your examples of immigrants talking about immigration.

Colossal error in judgement? Our ancestors wanted us to be able to effectively fight against oppression and defend ourselves. If George Washington had 50,000 M-16s and the resources to keep them running, then the war would have been over much faster. There's no difference in lethality between an M-16 and Kentucky Long Rifle, except that the Long Rifle punches a larger hole(arguably more lethal, assuming that hitting a vital organ or blood loss makes a weapon more lethal) and takes longer to reload. The difference is efficiency.

Efficiency is a measure for how good something is at a given task. Weapons are often used to kill, a more efficient weapon is therefore better at killing. Something that is better at killing could also be called more lethal. But whether you want to use "efficient" or "lethal" doesn't really matter to me as it changes little about my point.
And yeah, I'd call it a colossal error in judgement. Especially if their intent was to fight effectively against oppression because the instances of averted tyrannies are rather small in comparison to the number of people who have killed each other so efficiently with guns in the last 200 years.

But the whole endless defense-against-tyrants discussion aside, I don't think you could argue that giving a person a weapon if that person is not reasonable enough to handle a weapon is in fact an error in judgement. Now if you repeat that error for all those people who are not responsible enough (which, even if you assume a low percentage of your total population, still ends up as a number in the hundreds of thousands) and that over several hundred years we do indeed talk about a colossal error in judgement.

There is the question about whether the Founding Fathers wanted us to have guns so we could be an effective military force without a standing army, and whether having a standing army negates that reason for having firearms, but that is not the only reason the Founding Fathers allowed us guns, going off of their writings.

Maybe. I don't know the constitution well enough to judge the Founding Father's actual intentions (although I doubt that an "enlightened" person would be very happy about the attitudes towards gun-violence that are common in the US today), but I do think that it would be fundamentalistic to apply everything written in the different context of the more or less distant past to the present.

[Junk angel]

Maybe. I don't know the constitution well enough to judge the Founding Father's actual intentions (although I doubt that an "enlightened" person would be very happy about the attitudes towards gun-violence that are common in the US today), but I do think that it would be fundamentalistic to apply everything written in the different context of the more or less distant past to the present.

Not to forget that many legal texts are written vague to an extent out of a reason. If a text is somewhat vague (not to a to large point) it can be interpreted on the current situation. And due to this flexibility be more actual.

[MrFancypants]

Originally Posted by Who_Flung_Poo?

A bit late on this but I just can't let this one go.

What if we look at another nation with very strict gun laws? How about the UK? Right now they have all but abolished all individuals rights to fire arms, and yet the crime rate there just keeps escalating.

I was wondering when that would come up. I have only looked at those claims in detail once and that was several years ago. Then I found out that the increase in crime rates in the UK was a long-term trend that existed long before that weapons-ban. There were also some funny things about the change of laws not actually having any noticeable effect as people were allowed to keep the guns they already had while not so many people were buying new guns. Then there was something about attacks with air rifles being included in some of their gun-crime statistics after the ban of weapons which is of course great for anyone who wants to show how things went downhill after the ban but not really very meaning ful is you ask me.

But in general I'd like to point out that I never suggested that banning weapons is a good idea or that I am in favor of such laws. I think that the availability of weapons has an impact on violent crime but banning weapons isn't going to change much about the availability, at least not immediately and not without additional measures (like reducing imports of illegal weapons). If you imagine a graph of gun-related crimes over time after a weapons ban then I'd guess (and I can only guess since there are no such studies to my knowledge) that the function would first increase, reach a maximum after a couple of years and then slowly decrease and approximate to a constant value after 100 years or so.

Sooner or later they'll have to move on to banning rocks and sticks.

I'd rather take my chances with an attacker armed with rocks or sticks than with an attacker armed with an AR-15. For all I care you can ban sticks and stones as well though, I don't find them to be particularly useful items to carry around anyway.

[Crazy Wolf]

Originally Posted by Admiral Donutz

It's not as simple as having tight gun laws or not, what to me would seem far more influentual would be the history of the spread (accesabilty) of firearms. If firearms have been hard to get by for quite a while I'd expect less firearms incidents compared to a situation were untill recently laws were more liberal.

That's why strict gun laws as found in some European nations wouldn't work quite well in the US (or other euro countries). Not in the short term atleast, in the long term perhaps, when all the current stocks of legal (now illegal...) weapons and ammo have been become out dated and expired. Say, a hundred years from now perhaps?...more cool things written

I'm not trying to raise any sort of argument with you, Donutz, but just some things I find interesting: nitrocelluose is made of nitric acid and cellulose (also known as plant fiber). Nitrocellulose is a very good explosive, and is quite suitable for gunpowder, especially when mixed with alcohol and ether to stabilize it. Nitric acid can be easily derived from pee, and cellulose is everywhere, from the trees to your shirt to your textbook. A primer is some sort of shock-sensitive flammable or explosive material, like tannerite or certain phosphorous compounds found in match heads.
Sten guns are little more than bedsprings and pipes.


Fancypants: You really can't think of any time in German history that certain people were required to wear triangles denoting their stance in German society? Aren't stereotypes fun?

[MrFancypants]

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

Fancypants: You really can't think of any time in German history that certain people were required to wear triangles denoting their stance in German society? Aren't stereotypes fun?

Nope, not in the form you described. I'd rather see you explain what kind of triangular patches you are referring to before I answer to that part of your post.

[Admiral Donutz]

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

I'm not trying to raise any sort of argument with you, Donutz, but just some things I find interesting: nitrocelluose is made of nitric acid and cellulose (also known as plant fiber). Nitrocellulose is a very good explosive, and is quite suitable for gunpowder, especially when mixed with alcohol and ether to stabilize it. Nitric acid can be easily derived from pee, and cellulose is everywhere, from the trees to your shirt to your textbook. A primer is some sort of shock-sensitive flammable or explosive material, like tannerite or certain phosphorous compounds found in match heads.
Sten guns are little more than bedsprings and pipes?

You can make your own bomb with "household items", doesn't mean it's a good argument to legalize ownership/selling/owning/using bombs.

[Nemmerle]

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

The actuality of it is beside the point?

Yeah. Even if they are following you if you turn around and draw on them that’s not how it’s going to get written up. You’ve got to make what’s actually happening and what you can prove go along together, so that when it gets written up you can come up with stuff that justifies what you've done more quickly than the other guy can come up with stuff that makes it look bad. Justice doesn’t care what happened, it cares about what people can prove; and if you're the one holding the gun and the other guy has a hole in him the onus for that is going to be very much on you.

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

It's going to look bad if you confront one, it is best if in a public place to try to lose someone who is following you, but if they continue to follow you into a secluded place, then that's suspicious behavior. They might not be intending to robbing you, but you have established reason to believe that they are following you with purpose.

If you suspect someone is following you go towards safety, do not head off into the secluded areas where there’s only his word and yours as to what went down.

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

That is exactly the question you want everyone to be asking.

Indeed, and you still haven’t answered it

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

Few people are express targets for an assassination. If they had some skill with a rifle, or ability with disguises and poison, they could dispose of you relatively discreetly. The handgun is not there to defend against some international cartel of thugs you've pissed off. It's there for the crime that makes up 99.9% percent of cases. Having a gun changes a criminal's risk-reward equation. It's greatly increasing the criminal's risk while barely affecting the reward. This is enough to dissuade the vast majority of cases.

If a criminal was purely interested in maximising his risk-reward equation in terms of money he’d be trading drugs or indulging in one of the more profitable long term criminal activities. The people robbing you on the street are already the less intelligent ones, the ones that continue to close after they realise you’ve realised that they’ve thought about you as prey are way out on the fringes. Their equation is going to be about anger, pride, and fear things like that – as much as it is about getting money for the smallest risk.

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

Decent security on doors and windows should cost about the same as a decent handgun($400-600, if you do the work yourself). A crowbar costs maybe $20. Crowbars work quite well against door frames.

Decent security on doors at the minimum means you’ve secured the doorframe properly – that means a reasonable chunk of metal screwed a way back into the wall, you’re not getting that open with a crowbar in any kind of a hurry.

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

What weapons? He doesn't have a gun in this situation, right? Those sort of laws usually end up applying to swords, spears, and other obvious weapons. A crowbar does pretty good against a lot of household objects that would otherwise be good improvised weapons.

Hello Mr Crowbar meet Mr Chair; he’s like you, only less whack and more tangle. You only need it for a moment so you can sweep the weapon aside and get in close where it’s not going to be of any use to him.

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

Improvised weapons are useful to those who think creatively, have some sort of martial inclination, and have the ability to move from one improvised weapon to another (not confined to a wheelchair or requiring a walker). Intentionally-made weapons are useful to everyone. I don't want this to get into a dick-measuring contest, but how tall are you, what's your weight, and what's your martial arts background?

Couldn’t say how tall I am, haven’t measured myself. I weigh somewhere around 12 stone. My martial arts background is largely irrelevant since you’ve no way of knowing whether it’s the 90% out there that wouldn’t harm a fly or the 2% that’s extremely useful but I’ve been doing various things for around fifteen years now the longest running of which would be a style of Wadu Ryo karate.

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

What household objects would work well against me, a 195cm, 110kg guy with little training armed with a crowbar?

Pots, pans, chairs; deflection to get in close where your weapon isn’t going to be much good. Liquids, solvents etc; to throw at you from a distance. Knives, pinhammers; to use once you’ve managed to close.

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

How well do you think you would fare, and how well do you think the octogenarian a few blocks down would fare?

I’d almost certainly win. I don't think the octogenarian a few blocks down would fair very well. Then again I agree with fancypants that they probably wouldn't fair too well regardless.

[Crazy Wolf]

Oh, no, USING bombs without the proper permits is very much illegal, and possessing explosives without the proper storage is a no-no, but the base components of compounds like tannerite and thermite are either minimally restricted or not restricted, due to their simplicity and ease of manufacture. Plus, fertilizer can be explained away if you have a lawn or garden.

[MrFancypants]

Originally Posted by Crazy Wolf

Oh, no, USING bombs without the proper permits is very much illegal, and possessing explosives without the proper storage is a no-no, but the base components of compounds like tannerite and thermite are either minimally restricted or not restricted, due to their simplicity and ease of manufacture. Plus, fertilizer can be explained away if you have a lawn or garden.

Well, since you're not explaining your position I'll just post what I can assume using your last posts as reference. Seems to me as if you are referring to the nazis and their practice of forcing Jews to wear certain signs. Obviously Judaism is a religion, so your description of signs used to describe the political background is wrong. Furthermore, the symbol that Jews were required to wear was a David's Star, not a triangle. You are probably confusing this with triangles that were used in concentration camps to identify the type of prisoner.

Your post is not only flawed but also a rather tasteless and inappropriate accusation. It is also in no way a stereotype to say that all Germans are nazis (or, if you use your symbology, concentration camp guards)- it is rather an insult. Which you are of course fully aware of since you refused to explain your post in more detail.

So even if I did use stereotypes this would be in no way an appropriate answer. As it happens I didn't use any stereotypes though as I explained earlier.

That aside your behavior in general only proves my point. If you can't be trusted not to use insults in an internet discussion then it would probably not be a bright idea to trust you with a weapon when you might end up in a much more heated real life debate.