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[Sinbad the Diver]

Then there's the "other" gun culture. The culture of fear and paranoia. The culture of looking for a means to "feel" safe, a way to feel in control. The culture that confuses self defense with the right to murder someone who scares you ....

Do you not find it strange that the other almost 6 billion people on this planet have found other ways to deal with one another than by arming themselves?



R..

This other gun culture you speak of is a less a gun culture and more a disafected moron culture. The fact that they include guns in their paranoia is secondary to the fact that they are in most cases nutjobs. And while they make great news fodder, they are a tiny little nothing in the scheme of things. You have them too, anarchists, skin-heads, neo-****s, etc.

As a general rule the US is a more violent culture than most of the civilized world. Fodder for a completely different thread. Gun ownership didn't create that culture, they have become tools of that culture.

 

[Diver0001]

As a general rule the US is a more violent culture than most of the civilized world. Fodder for a completely different thread. Gun ownership didn't create that culture, they have become tools of that culture.

Yes. We're totally in agreement on this. I don't think gun ownership in and of itself is the problem either as I said earlier in this thread.

R..

 

[herman]

...............................
One of those I can perfectly follow. The other is completely.... well ... (for lack of a beter word) nutzoid, to my way of thinking. What makes it seem nutzoid to me is that only in America do people somehow manage to twist the "safety" argument to the point where they're in fact arguing that they have the right to kill. Do you (general you, I"m not sure *you* really think this) really think that Americans are the only people in the world who aren't safe on the streets? Do you really think that burglary doesn't happen anywhere else? Do you not find it strange that the other almost 6 billion people on this planet have found other ways to deal with one another than by arming themselves?

hmmm

R..

I am quite sure others do not feel safe, the difference is we have an option. You speak of "other ways" to deal with the problems. Other than simply accepting to be victoms, can you describe to me one of the EFFECTIVE methods.
Let say 3 thugs, twice your size kick the door of your home down armed with ball bats and intend to rape your wife and kill both of you afterwards- it does happen, here and elsewhere, please describe one of the ways in which others prevent this from happening. The outcome must be that the bad guys leave, no one is hurt and other than frayed nerves and a broken door, all is well. Oh and they will never do it again to anyone else.

And to be clear I absolutely do believe I (and everyone else) have the right to kill when myself or my loved ones are threatened with grave harm. In the above case, I may be hurt but the intruders will no longer terrorizes anyone and no court will release them to victomize anyone else.

 

[FredT]

not quite true...there are several cities that ban ownership of firmarms either through outright bans or through permitting requirements that equate to virtual bans because no one can get an ownership permit. Now, I guess you could say that anyone that lives in those places or most big cities IMO is mentally insane....so I guess you are right.

The idea that the US north of Virginia and East of the Appalachian mountain chain, and to a lesser extent west of the Pacific coastal ranges is generally uninhabitable by "sane" folks as defined out here in flyover country is well established. The best that can be said for those poor souls who choose to live in those urban wastelands is that they at least generally share their insanity with their neighbors, or they would change their politicians.

 

[Diver0001]

Let say 3 thugs, twice your size kick the door of your home down armed with ball bats and intend to rape your wife and kill both of you afterwards- it does happen, here and elsewhere, please describe one of the ways in which others prevent this from happening.

In that situation I would envy your "option".

The question is how many of the 20,000 murders per year are baseball bat wielding, wife raping, blind-rage murdering thugs twice your size who suddenly break into your house for no reason?

How do you think the other 19,990-odd of those deaths should be justified?

I know you're afraid of this. It could theoretically happen. An asteroid could also crash through your roof and smash your skull while you're responding to this post .... There is always a "chance" that something terrible will happen. The problem here is that many people are getting hurt or killed so a few (probably a very few) people have the "option" we're talking about.

In most countries the needs of the few do not outweigh the needs of the many. Coincidentally most countries also have less violent cultures than the US. I'm not an expert in anything like sociology but I do think that justifying or even advocating killing in the name "personal safety" comes at a high price.

R..

 

[Diver0001]

And just to make one thing clear, I'm not advocating taking away all the guns because of what I wrote above. I don't think that's the solution. But obviously there's a cultural issue to be addressed and I would like to see the pro-gun organisations like the NRA step up to the plate and do their part.

That's what I started out saying in the first post I made. I'm not anti-gun. I'm not anti-NRA but I do see a need to address the social effects the seem to be at work. I think the NRA would agree with the sentiment that guns are just tools and they don't make the world inherently dangerous. I would turn that around too and say to them that guns don't make the world inherently safer either, especially not in a culture where "the good of the individual" is a central value, as Sinbad pointed out.

That's where I seem to part ways with their message, and that's where their message gets, in my opinion, off the tracks.

R..

p.s. incidentally, you guys deserve a compliment. This is one of the most level-headed debates about guns I've ever seen.

 

[gsk3]

Speaking of commenting on places in which you have never lived, it is curious that those who support gun ownership without any restriction at all seem to be those who live in the suburbs, which generally don't have problems with gun violence. I have no problem with that except when the NRA spends its time attacking cities (like DC) which do have a problem and try to do something about it. And yes, in the farther reaches of some cities, it really can get that bad. Not all of West Philadelphia is like this, but it's worth reading the late John Pryor's article. Do you really think you could live there and not support reasonable, commonsense precautions (penalties for unregistered gun ownership, better tracing of firearms, shutting down the handful of bad apple dealers whose guns disproportionately wind up being used in crime). None of these things affect your sport or home defense usage in any way, but the NRA screams bloody murder (forgive the pun) just the same for reasonable precautions as they would for an outright ban.

Again, on the theme of commenting where you (collectively) have no experience, Sinbad's description of a "third world hole" airport is pretty far from my experiences in airports in countries which he would lump into that category. Quite the contrary, airports in low-income nations tend to be quite lax in security--also a problem, but certainly not the same one as here.

The comments about firearm deaths being not that big a deal are shockingly ignorant. There were 25,650 men who died from influenza and pneumonia in 2006. How much press is there for the flu? There were 26,712 men who died from injury by firearms in 2006. Nearly half were by homicide (as a side note, there are reams of data in a variety of contexts to show that reducing access to the means of suicide dramatically decreases suicide rates, so the comment to the contrary was also misguided). How much press coverage is there for firearm deaths?
Sources:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/deaths.htm
ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/Publications/NVSR/57_14/Table12.xls
ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/Publications/NVSR/57_14/Table19.xls
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr57/nvsr57_14.pdf

And yes, I do own and practice with a gun at a club.

 

[Thalassamania]

So, basically you get your info from the European media and the internet and have no idea what life in the US is actually like or what the NRA actually does.

Looks to me like his information and analysis is pretty much right on. Likely way more accurate than your idea of what life outside the US (or for that matter life outside of the "flyover" US) is like.

Let's put some facts to this. According to the US Dept of Justice Statistics in 2001, the last year that seems to be published, there were 29,500 firearm related deaths in the US. That is out of a population of 285 Mil. 58% were suicides. The idea that people are not going to commit suicide if they don't have a gun is rather amusing to say the least. Less than 1,000 were accidents. The remainder were homicides, which means that these are people that are willing to break about the most serious law there is, so you think a law that says they can't have a gun is going to stop them? One of the cities with the highest murder rates every year are Washington DC where guns were completely outlawed until last year.

If you remove the unwarranted and unsupported assumptions inherent in your analysis it falls apart.

As for the NRA promoting vigilantism, that's a stretch of the facts. They support gun ownership and the idea that people have a right to defend themselves, especialy in their homes. In addition, the NRA is the largest proponent of gun safety training and sponsors major efforts and training programs to teach people how to safely handle guns, including programs to teach children what to do if they find a gun.

What horse crap. Fortunately the NRA is in decline along with it's fear mongering fellow travelers.

The biggest reason the NRA does not support gun ownership for sport only is that our constitution protects our rights to own guns period. Not for sport, not for protection from criminals, but for protection from the abuses of govt. The US was founded and grew as a place for people to escape the tyrany of govt. And as such, we defend our individual freedoms above all. The result of that is a society that many in the world do not understand, but we don't understand how people in europe can give so many off their personal freedoms away and place so much faith in their future in their govt.

So ... you and the Black Panthers are going to go and protect our freedoms from the cops and the army, eh? That's scares me more than my government does.

What I find interesting in all this -- and this is, in fact, something about American culture that I don't understand -- is why people in the US confuse having a gun with being safe.

Sinple, it's not safety, that's crap, it's a control and fear of impotence thing.

In about 200 other countries in the world people find a way to deal with their apprehension and fear of each other in other ways. I live in one of the (if not THE) most densely populated countries in the western world and believe me there is more than enough fear and more than enough burglary to go around here as well but the rate of homicide and fire-arms induced death is very low. The Dutch might be a bad example, because they don't actually have a right to defend themselves against criminals (at least not meaningfully) but everywhere you look, all over the world, people find ways to defend themselves without intent to inflict grievous bodily injury or death. It's a matter of scale.

To me, there are in fact two kinds of "gun culture". There's the kind that like their guns, they shine them, they clean them, they take pictures of themselves shooting them for their blogs, they keep track of their best scores at the range and they compare notes with their friends. Basically they have a lot of fun with them. These are the people you're talking about, I think.

Then there's the "other" gun culture. The culture of fear and paranoia. The culture of looking for a means to "feel" safe, a way to feel in control. The culture that confuses self defense with the right to murder someone who scares you ....

One of those I can perfectly follow. The other is completely.... well ... (for lack of a beter word) nutzoid, to my way of thinking. What makes it seem nutzoid to me is that only in America do people somehow manage to twist the "safety" argument to the point where they're in fact arguing that they have the right to kill. Do you (general you, I"m not sure *you* really think this) really think that Americans are the only people in the world who aren't safe on the streets? Do you really think that burglary doesn't happen anywhere else? Do you not find it strange that the other almost 6 billion people on this planet have found other ways to deal with one another than by arming themselves?

hmmm

R..

Yup.​

 

[jagfish]

One issue that has not been addressed here is the issue "passive deterrent" of states that have relatively open ownership laws. Valid or not, I remember reading statistics of crime in states that went from stricter gun laws to relatively permissive laws. The information I read strongly suggested that such a situation was a passive deterrent, presumably since those who are prone to commit crimes were more careful/selective/hesitant when gun ownership is wide and "unpredictable" in a state.

I really don't recall the sources, but I'm really curious about this aspect. As Routurner pointed out, the actual incidents of self defense gun intervention will always be statistically small, but I think that the overall passive effect has the potential to have a greater effect.

 

[Diver0001]

One issue that has not been addressed here is the issue "passive deterrent" of states that have relatively open ownership laws. Valid or not, I remember reading statistics of crime in states that went from stricter gun laws to relatively permissive laws. The information I read strongly suggested that such a situation was a passive deterrent, presumably since those who are prone to commit crimes were more careful/selective/hesitant when gun ownership is wide and "unpredictable" in a state.

I really don't recall the sources, but I'm really curious about this aspect. As Routurner pointed out, the actual incidents of self defense gun intervention will always be statistically small, but I think that the overall passive effect has the potential to have a greater effect.

Well... I found something about that earlier today but I don't remember which site I was looking at. It was one of the pro-gun sites. It suggested a marked decline in some kind of incident in Florida after changes to the laws in .... 1986? (I think). I don't know how it's measured and you'd need to see if they changed how they keep records etc etc. but if you just look at the numbers it looks like there might be something to it. That said, it's really hard to know what the real deterrent effect is without having a good base-line to compare with. You don't know what else changed in the period of time they measured and if the result is directly related to changes in the law or not.

If you want a general idea of how much "deterrent" there really is, I suppose you might be able to draw some conclusions by comparing Canada (that has relatively strict gun control) with the US since the population culturally is fairly similar... If you do that, then you'd conclude immediately that any deterrent effect is hugely outweighed by the general increase in rates of gun related deaths. I don't know if that's a fair comparison either but it's another way of looking at data about deterrents.

R..