Mass shootings are not America's main gun problem

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The biggest problem about gun laws or any laws that prohibit behavior is, the criminals do not obey the law. Laws work best with honest and law abiding citizens. The net affect is any behavior that is made taboo by a law, such as guns, will still be practiced by the unlawful.

In Chicago, which has some of the toughest gun laws, in America, there are more shootings than in any other city in the USA. These shootings are done mostly by the unlawful, who ignore the gun law. Many innocent people, who obey the gun laws get mugged and shot and have no way to defend themselves. Why do Democrats see this as the example to follow?

Cook and colleagues Susan Parker and Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago interviewed 99 inmates of the Cook County Jail in Chicago. They were looking for criminals who were likely to have used a gun or had ready access to one. The authors described the group of participants as "a convenience sample of gun-involved, criminally active men living in greater Chicago."

"It is difficult to say how representative they are of the larger population with that description," they wrote. "For that reason, we do not place much emphasis on the statistical results, as opposed to the qualitative patterns that emerged from these data."

That said, of the 70 inmates who had possessed a firearm, only 2, or 2.9 percent, had bought it at a gun store. The report found that percentage was in line with the findings of the Chicago Police Department when it traced weapons seized from suspected gang members

The Democrats don't seem to not be very good at math. If we follow Obama and Hillary, we might be able to save 3% of the lives lost by gun crimes in Chicago, if we take away guns from everyone; legally. But they do not have the common sense to address the 97% of illegal guns, which will still be there.

One reason may be that most felons register as Democrats; 70%. If you addressed only illegal guns and saved 97% of the lost lives due to gun violence, the Democrats will lose votes, since felons can't vote. Maybe to the Democrats, lives saved mean less than votes lost. On the other hand, if you make guns illegal, since more conservative now own legal ones, you may be able to arrest the defiant ones; felons, and remove Republicans from voting.

The young liberal needs to think, fact check, and learn basic math skills.

 

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Uh, no, that's you going spla again. I'm a gun control advocate, consistently and continuously for years now on this forum.

When someone points to Australian gun control as an example of what the US should do, they should not be surprised when people interpret that as advocating the US do what the Australians did. Which is a threat.

Your utter lack of self-awareness in this is comedy gold.

But you forgot the part about the fact that nothing I have posted conflicts in the slightest with my continuing advocacy of more and better gun control in the US. I am a gun control advocate, always have been. You did notice that, right, after I pointed it out to you - again?

Some people in the US don't trust the CDC in the matter of gun control, specifically. That's where the funding was cut off. Doctors studying gun injuries, law enforcement studying gun violence, scientists doing their sciency thing, all funded no problem.

By now the reasons for the US deadlock, the cutoff of CDC funding, etc, should be obvious to the reasonable public whether in agreement or not. There is a strain of crazy here on both sides, and deadlock with mistrust is hardly a surprise.

I don't happen to agree with them, btw (I favor research funding via any agency, in particular because with better funding we might get some better research than we've seen so far), but it's hard to argue to somebody that people with that attitude and level of obliviousness can be trusted with political power. They can't. Nannystaters are dangerous.

btw, sidelight: Somebody mentioned car seats. When the infant car seat laws were first passed in Minnesota, they were pretty inconvenient - the kid had to go in the back seat where they were out of care reach (remember when there was a flurry of tragedies in which kids were forgotten in hot cars? They were all in back seats - air bags, kid seats, safety), the carseat had to be replaced three or four times at hundreds of dollars a pop as the kid grew, if you had more than three kids to schlep a normal car for a low income family would no longer carry them, the common practice of tucking a fretful kid in on the front passenger side floor where they would fall asleep in a pretty safe place was no longer legal even in the car seat, it took a long time to load the car even for short trips when one could not leave the kid home for ten minutes, there were strain and back injuries from dealing with the seat and the kid and so forth in cramped circumstances, etc etc. But these concerns were dismissed in the interests 0f safety. Ok.

But then came the beautiful event: one of the chief promoters of the law had to drive a few blocks of residential side street back to her church on Sunday morning to retrieve some stuff she had forgotten, and could not leave her toddler at home unattended. She had food in the oven, needed the stuff before dinner. The car seat took time and hassle in her model of car, the kid hated it and cried. So she tucked the kid in on the front floor, happy and safe, took off for the quick trip - and got pulled over by a cop who had seen the kid's foot in the air over the front seat.

She had to sit for a long time, while the ticket was written. Had to appear in court with lowlifes. She was fined many dollars. Had to walk a toddler home barefoot for suburban blocks without sidewalks and without a spare diaper. Had to arrange to pick up the car. Burned dinner. Missed what she needed the stuff for. Was interrogated by government social workers regarding her fitness as a mother. And boy oh boy was she mad - she wrote a column for the newspaper about the imposition, about the unfairness, about the lack of common sense displayed by police who enforce the letter of laws obviously not intended to be this kind of burden on people, and so forth (that's where I got the background).

Ha.

 

It's bad but in the current rankings America is ranked a bit lower and lower than several Western nations. My suspicion is that economic factors against economic expectations is responsible for most of it. Gun suicides then correspond to that deviant fraction of the remaining death rate unexplained by the former: the 'easy option'. But ultimately, you're right to say that the US needs better monitoring. The problem in part is devolution of responsibilities to the states: then again, some of the deregulated ones have low gun suicide rates.

 

Suicides, specifically. I didn't make this clear.

 

The ugly reality is the United States will do nothing about it for the foreseeable future. A huge portion of the population believe they need guns, and are very very VERY loud when it comes to preaching it and even more stubborn. Right now, to some people, the idea of taking away guns is viewed along the same lines as taking away alcohol, or tobacco. To do so would en site such a bitch fit from such a large portion of the population, and in many cases would absolutely lead to violence.

Some people believe they need it for protection from criminals, some believe they need it for protection from the government (which is about the stupidest argument as of yet) and others believe they simply SHOULD have them, for no other reason than they want them.

I tend not to have strong feelings either way. I see valid points on both sides. On on hand, it would definitely help to have a gun were I to find myself in a situation where I needed it to survive or to even not get hurt. "better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it".

There are also a lot of gun related deaths/injuries that occurred which simply wouldn't have occurred were guns not so available. Arguments and fist fights that would have resulted in minor bruising at most, in many cases are now shootings.

The way I see it is there is a balancing act that happens regardless of what many believe. The more guns we have out there, the more protected you may feel, and perhaps its true in some situations. But the more deaths that will occur.

The bigger issue I think is not a gun issue, its a people issue. If people were more reasonable, less extreme, and not so quick to violence there would be less problems all together.

 

My idea to gun violence is to counter it by instilling pacifism in faith.
Pacifisim to wisdom to perfection to safety
God would and can be absolutely passive.

 

You are not seeing it because you are mentally screwed up in this matter. You are a perfect illustration of how - the mechanism by which - gun control has come to be deadlocked in the US, despite a vast majority of Americans favoring a wide variety of gun control measures (several of which I have listed in my posts over the years) - the public face of gun control advocacy has been taken over by your brand of discourse, and people in general are refusing to trust that kind of ranting bs with political power even in a good cause.

I mean, look at this in regard to the repeated posting of Australian gun confiscation (ok: call it coerced surrender if you want to - it isn't going to make any difference in the US) as a model for the US:

Oblivious. Completely oblivious. And this is the voice of a loud, ubiquitous, faction in the US - it's not just foreigners who talk like that.

No, I haven't. Your brand of crippled mental functioning is not universal, here or anywhere, and I have been moderate in tone throughout - certainly more so than you.

No such post from me exists. No anti-science or anti-CDC research post from me exists on this forum. Again.

We need an acronym for this: maybe atlats? (are they lying or are they stupid?).

I have several time repeated my support for CDC research into gun violence, including in this thread. I have explicitly favored expanding, improving, and better funding, the sorry state of such research in the US, by any number of agencies. My sole complaint about research into gun violence in the US has been its poor quality and frequently misleading presentation.

I anticipated you missing the point
(that the characteristic obliviousness of nannystaters to obvious and inevitable consequences of their proposals, including the fact that they will not be enforced according to their ostensibly benign intentions)
completely, as you did.

Why do you think you are unable to read my posts with comprehension?

Do you suppose this inability has anything to do with such matters as your - and others - invariable and apparently perfectly sincere denial of the threat of gun confiscation inherent in the posts of so many gun control advocates - latest example being post #29 in this thread?

 

It was much worse than that. The US government sold missiles and other high end military gear to Iran, and used the profits (Iran paid top dollar, the US bought wholesale) to finance Contra operations that Congress had refused to fund - including logistical gear and weapons purchases from US manufacturers, massive drugrunning into US territory (including the launch of the crack cocaine epidemic, in southern California http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/ ), and terrorism in the Nicaraguan countryside (blowing up buses and schools and medical clinics, murder and torture and rape of trade union activists, teachers, journalists, and medical personnel, etc).

The ostensible goal was the overthrow of the new government of Nicaragua, and the restoration of rightwing strongman rule allied with the US.

The real life consequences have included quite a bit of gun violence in the US, especially in ghettos gutted by crack and subjected to what amounts to low grade civil war between gangs of one kind and another - far more death and destruction by gunfire than has been inflicted by the occasional mass shootings of suburban white people.