Gun/antigun thread

[stanmog]

The NRA isn't pushing to allow terrorists to buy guns. It opposes giving the attorney general the sole power to prevent gun purchases by anyone he merely says he suspects of being a terrorist. Surely you can understand opposition to this after all the carping about the attorney general's misuse of power recently. Furthermore, it is naive in the extreme to think that a determined terrorist (or any other criminal) is not going to be able to get any weapon he wants, just because the A.G. says no. As with all other gun laws, the only people who are kept from buying guns are the law abiding citizens.

regards,
Stan

[Tye]

The NRA isn't pushing to allow terrorists to buy guns. It opposes giving the attorney general the sole power to prevent gun purchases by anyone he merely says he suspects of being a terrorist. Surely you can understand opposition to this after all the carping about the attorney general's misuse of power recently. Furthermore, it is naive in the extreme to think that a determined terrorist (or any other criminal) is not going to be able to get any weapon he wants, just because the A.G. says no. As with all other gun laws, the only people who are kept from buying guns are the law abiding citizens.

regards,
Stan

I agree with Stan. If I were to commit a murder or 4 and maybe commit an armed robbery and I needed guns and read the paper and saw that the AG had put the kibosh on my gun buying plans, I doubt I'd refold the paper and pull out the want ads. Bad guys are going to get guns if they want guns. It's naive to think that just because it may be illegal to get said guns that they are going to only use harsh language in their crimes.

~Tye

[Leisureguy]

I certainly understand the principle that, under due process, a suspect has a presumption of innocence and that it is the prosecutor's job to prove him/her guilty of the charges beyond a reasonable doubt. But recently, as I'm sure you've noticed, the rules have been changed for suspects who are suspected of being terrorists: they are routinely imprisoned (for years), kidnapped and taken to other countries to be tortured, denied habeus corpus, etc. To allow all that without speaking up, and then protest that they aren't allowed to buy guns, seems to be swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat. You recall, for example, the German guy in Macedonia who was grabbed, flown to Afghanistan, tortured, and then, when it turned out he was guilty of nothing, just dumped out in the Macedonia country side. Or the Canadian who was a suspect, grabbed when he came through the US, flown to Egypt, imprisoned for months and tortured, and finally released. Canada had the grace to apologize, at least.

So it just struck me as odd that all the most outrageous behavior is taken as okay, but not being able to buy a gun is a real transgression of rights. Aren't the other things as well?

But I do understand that this is not on topic. Still, it struck me as weird.

[tidemand]

Tye wrote.

Bad guys are going to get guns if they want guns. It's naive to think that just because it may be illegal to get said guns that they are going to only use harsh language in their crimes.

I have been following this debate for a while and have seen several post like Tye´s that the criminal is going to get guns anyway. My question is then, where do the criminals get these illegal guns from ? I found a report that stated :

According to Americans for Gun Safety (December 2002), gun theft is most likely in states without laws requiring safe storage of firearms in the home and where there are large numbers of gun owners and relatively high crime rates. Based on FBI data, nearly 1.7 million guns have been reported stolen in the past ten years, and only 40% of those were recovered. The missing guns, over 80% of which are taken from homes or cars, most likely fuel the black market for criminals. NEA, AGS and the National Rifle Association advocate for safe storage. To access "Stolen Guns: Arming the Enemy" visit www.agsfoundation.com.

If i read this correct about 80.000 guns are stolen from private homes and cars every year. Maybee you should consider laws requiring safe storage to at least make it more difficult to steal them.

Henrik [/quote]

[JohnP]

.... But recently, as I'm sure you've noticed, the rules have been changed for suspects who are suspected of being terrorists: they are routinely imprisoned (for years), kidnapped and taken to other countries to be tortured, denied habeus corpus, etc. To allow all that without speaking up, and then protest that they aren't allowed to buy guns, seems to be swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat.

Hi Michael,
While I've heard similar stories, I've not seen where any of these apply to U.S. citizens-those routinely imprisoned (for years) were generally captured in armed conflict with the U.S...nevertheless I'm not sure how a non-U.S. citizen would be allowed to purchase a firearm here anyway. The allegations of torture, etc. have never been substantiated to my knowledge, so I'm keeping a somewhat open mind about that until more proof comes through. Where it stands now however if someone has an open hatred of this country (or any other for that matter) I'm taking things said with a grain of salt, same as, for instance, something claimed about the Israelis by a Hezbollah militant or vice verse..

You recall, for example, the German guy in Macedonia who was grabbed, flown to Afghanistan, tortured, and then, when it turned out he was guilty of nothing, just dumped out in the Macedonia country side. Or the Canadian who was a suspect, grabbed when he came through the US, flown to Egypt, imprisoned for months and tortured, and finally released. Canada had the grace to apologize, at least.

These are classic examples IMHO of he said, she said. If these people were being wrongly tortured or some such, that is a terrible thing. In the mean time, I see a huge difference in common exploitive techniques used to gain information and "torture". I also have a hard time with giving enemies the same rights as citizens...next they'll be offering social security to them, as well. Regardless, an apology is the same as an admission of guilt of whatever the alledged victim claims, and so far, I'm not convinced.

So it just struck me as odd that all the most outrageous behavior is taken as okay, but not being able to buy a gun is a real transgression of rights. Aren't the other things as well?

IF as before, the other things truly are happening to innocent people, that is tragic, however, the gun issue is a concern specifically of citizens. Enemies captured on the battlefield or in open contact with Al Qaeda operatives, are just that, enemies. To be honest I have less concern about such people than I do about the same happening to citizens or people here legally.

But I do understand that this is not on topic. Still, it struck me as weird.

Strange...why is it so surprising? to me it makes perfect sense. Suppose such things really are happening to non-citizens at the hands of the U.S. government, what makes us think if they could find a reason, that they would not do the same to us? I'm giving the government a benefit of a doubt, as much of the stuff is hearsay put out by supposed former prisoners, who have a predisposed bias and a lot of media attention. That does not mean to me that I trust our government. There's an old saying, trust but verify. Same here; I'm sure in numerous countries that when the government first started taking their arms, the citizenry for the most part thought it would always have their best interests in mind...
Fun discussion so far.

John P.

[JohnP]

Henrik,
Excellent point. Most states here do have safe storage laws, however just like the other ones, people break said laws...
John P.

[Leisureguy]

From The Week magazine:

One Gun for Every Citizen
The Virginia Tech massacre has put America’s gun culture under harsh scrutiny once again. Is more gun control the answer?
5/4/2007

How much gun violence is there in the U.S?
About 1,000 crimes involving firearms are committed every day, and some 29,000 Americans are killed by firearms every year. Of those victims, about 11,000 are murdered, 17,000 use a gun to commit suicide, and nearly 1,000 die in accidents. (By comparison, the annual toll of gun deaths in Britain is about 100, and in Canada, 168.) Every day in the U.S., eight children alone die from a gun wound. “As far as young people are concerned,” says Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, “we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech every four days.”

How easy is it to get a gun?
It’s a breeze. The federal Brady Law, passed in 1993, requires a background computer check and a three-day waiting period for a gun purchased from a store. Unless the check turns up evidence of a criminal conviction or mental incapacitation, the sale can go forward. But the law exempts gun sales at flea markets and gun shows, and thousands of guns are sold at such venues each year with no oversight. There’s also a robust underground market in illegal guns. By most counts, there are about as many guns in the U.S. as people—approximately 300 million. A third are handguns, and most of the rest are rifles and shotguns.

What about state laws?
They vary widely. A handful of states prevents anyone under 18 from buying guns and requires that firearms be registered. Colorado closed its “gun-show loophole” after the Columbine school massacre in 1999. Seven states ban assault weapons. In New York City and some other municipalities, only permit holders may carry guns. But in much of the country, a strong tradition of hunting, coupled with a belief in the unfettered right to bear arms under the U.S. Constitution, has made tightening gun laws politically untenable. Many people believe strongly that guns make them safe.

Are they right about that?
There is some evidence backing them up—although advocates on both sides challenge the validity of every study concerning guns. The pro-gun side often cites a Florida State University study that concluded that Americans use guns 2.5 million times a year to defend against crime, often by merely displaying a weapon. Critics, though, say that figure is wildly exaggerated and is based on unsubstantiated self-reports from gun owners, rather than on police reports. Still, in recent years, most categories of major crime have declined, while gun sales have been soaring—evidence, gun proponents say, that an armed populace is a safer populace. A controversial study by criminologist John Lott found that violent crime often goes up when local citizens are barred from owning handguns. And then there are the anecdotes.

What kind of anecdotes?
The kind in which citizens thwart rapists, robbers, and homicidal maniacs by whipping out a gun. In 2002, a shooting at Appalachian Law School in Virginia was reportedly stopped when a student grabbed his gun from his car and confronted the shooter. In Pearl, Miss., another school shooter was stopped when a vice principal took his .45 from his truck and ran to the scene. In Oakland, Calif., last month, a pizzeria owner thwarted an armed robbery attempt when he shot—and killed—the suspect. “Criminals hate it when citizens are allowed to carry guns,” said Nashville gun owner George Reynolds. “They don’t feel safe to rob, pillage, and kill.”

So more guns equal less crime?
It’s not quite that simple. Even when guns are purchased by law-abiding citizens with the best intentions, they can be used to kill innocent people. A 1997 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that a gun kept at home is 22 times more likely to be used to kill a friend or family member than to stop an intruder. A study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that children in states with the highest rates of gun ownership were 16 times as likely to die from an accidental gunshot wound, nearly seven times as likely to commit suicide with a gun, and more than three times as likely to be murdered with a firearm. “Where there are more guns, there’s more gun homicide,” said David Hemenway, director of Harvard’s Injury Control Research Center.

Would more gun control mean less crime?
Not necessarily. With 300 million guns in private hands, it would be nearly impossible to disarm the entire country. So even if all weapons were banned tomorrow, the National Rifle Association argues, criminals would be sure to keep theirs. Critics of gun-control law point to Washington, D.C.’s experience after banning all handguns: Murder rates there are higher than in cities where private handgun ownership is not banned.

Is any compromise on guns possible?
One possible area of consensus involves efforts to keep guns out of criminal hands. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is leading a mayors’ campaign to get Congress to allow the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to create a database of guns used in crimes, to be made available to local police officials. That idea has a chance, says Jim Kessler of Third Way, a policy group that supports the campaign, because it’s viewed as anti-crime, not anti-gun. In a country in which firearms are so woven into the legal and cultural fabric, Kessler says, gun-control efforts are doomed if they appear to be hostile to the very concept of gun ownership. “It can’t be seen as a jihad against guns.”


How Other Countries Do It
In several Western nations, massacres by gun-wielding nuts have led to strict gun-control laws without much political controversy. In 1996, a drifter gunned down 16 children at an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland. Within a year, Great Britain made it illegal to buy or possess a handgun. In Israel, gun-license regulations were stiffened after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, in 1993. In Port Arthur, Australia, a deranged gunman massacred 35 people in 1996. Prime Minister John Howard immediately launched a campaign that culminated in laws banning 60 percent of all firearms then available, and restrictions and licensing of the rest. Gun-control advocates consider Australia one of their greatest success stories. Since 1996, the rate of gun deaths in Australia has fallen by half. Australia today has a per-capita gun-crime rate less than one-tenth of that in the United States.

[Leisureguy]

And another article, this one from the NY Times today:

In March, for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable.

There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

In those two decades, breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law, they have helped to reshape the debate over gun rights in the United States. Their work culminated in the March decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, and it will doubtless play a major role should the case reach the United States Supreme Court.

Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.

“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Professor Tribe said. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

The first two editions of Professor Tribe’s influential treatise on constitutional law, in 1978 and 1988, endorsed the collective rights view. The latest, published in 2000, sets out his current interpretation.

Several other leading liberal constitutional scholars, notably Akhil Reed Amar at Yale and Sanford Levinson at the University of Texas, are in broad agreement favoring an individual rights interpretation. Their work has in a remarkably short time upended the conventional understanding of the Second Amendment, and it set the stage for the Parker decision.

The earlier consensus, the law professors said in interviews, reflected received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution. “The standard liberal position,” Professor Levinson said, “is that the Second Amendment is basically just read out of the Constitution.”

The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” (Some transcriptions of the amendment omit the last comma.)

If only as a matter of consistency, Professor Levinson continued, liberals who favor expansive interpretations of other amendments in the Bill of Rights, like those protecting free speech and the rights of criminal defendants, should also embrace a broad reading of the Second Amendment. And just as the First Amendment’s protection of the right to free speech is not absolute, the professors say, the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms may be limited by the government, though only for good reason.

The individual rights view is far from universally accepted. “The overwhelming weight of scholarly opinion supports the near-unanimous view of the federal courts that the constitutional right to be armed is linked to an organized militia,” said Dennis A. Henigan, director of the legal action project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “The exceptions attract attention precisely because they are so rare and unexpected.”

More at the link above.

[stanmog]

The "eight children" said to be killed by guns every day is boosted by considering as children anyone under 21, and including those killed by police, or during the commission of a crime, or gang activity.

The so-called gun show loophole is somewhat exaggerated as well. Any gun dealer who has a Federal Firearms License (FFL) is bound by the same laws, rules and regs regardless of where the transactions take place. Private sellers, however, can sell to anyone without the checks the FFL dealers are required to perform, but are limited to a small number of sales per year. When the anti-gun groups report that as many as half of the sellers at gun shows do not have FFL's, that is true, but only because they are not selling guns: they sell books and other paraphenalia.

While it is true that gun crimes may be less in Australia and England after gun banning, other violent crimes have soared. You are 6 times more likely to be mugged in London than New York. So overall violent crime has risen, the weapons used have changed.

To cite Israel as a case for gun control is disengenuous: every teacher in Israeli schools is armed, after a terrorist attack resulted in the deaths of students; since arming teachers, there have been no more attacks on Israeli schools.

I am away from my home computer where I have stored appropriate citations (just for Michael), and will try to post them in a few days when I'm home.


Regards,
Stan

Edited to add: http://www.gunfacts.info/

[sysiphus]

GUNS ARE NOT INHERENTLY EVIL!
They have no soul. They have no will of their own. They do not seek out victims to maim, frighten or kill.
With the exception of the accidental shooting of someone (the 'kid found dad's pistol' cases), guns have been used to do one of two things: Assist in the commission of a crime (crimes of passion included), or assist in the thwarting of the commission of a crime. That's it. No mas.

If guns ceased to exist tomorrow, there would still be crime. Violent crime. Murders, robberies, rapes, muggings, crimes of passion. Would the numbers go up or down? Anyone who says that the answer is anything other than a speculative guess is selling something, or forwarding an agenda.

Countless man-hours have been spent over the last few decades doing nothing other than "spinning" "facts" about guns, gun use, and gun crime by both the pro- and anti- crowds.
What is interesting is that we have stopped concerning ourselves with "evil" people, and transposed our fears onto the "evil" firearm.
Yes, in fact, guns don't kill people, people kill people. The only provable fact in the entire gun debate is that people killed each other before the gun was invented. The only hypothesis that can be extracted from the preceding fact is that people would most likely still kill one another if all guns were taken away.

[drmoss_ca]

Yes, in fact, guns don't kill people, people kill people. The only provable fact in the entire gun debate is that people killed each other before the gun was invented. The only hypothesis that can be extracted from the preceding fact is that people would most likely still kill one another if all guns were taken away.

No one on either side of this tedious thread would argue with you. The only question is by what factor do guns increase the body count by making the process more efficient? The NRA would like to say 'hardly at all' and the gun-controllers think it is 'a lot'. That it is increased isn't really open to debate any more.

Chris

[notthesharpest]

GUNS ARE NOT INHERENTLY EVIL!

Neither are bombs. Neither are land mines. Neither are crystal meth, pot, or anthrax. The question of whether the object is evil is irrelevant and silly. What can be done with the object is what matters, and is why we are having this discussion.

[sysiphus]

Perhaps I have come across as itchin' fer a fight here. If so, I offer my most humble apologies.
The gun control debate is one that apparently will be with us for quite some time. Like the other "biggies", I doubt that anyone who wanders in with an opinion will be swayed to the 'other' opinion, regardless of the passion put forth in the argument.

I think the good Doctor is correct in his description of the thread.

[notthesharpest]

Perhaps I have come across as itchin' fer a fight here.

No, not really (not any more than anyone else, I suppose). You just made a statement (guns are not evil) that is part of a straw-man argument.

Of course guns are not evil. Everybody knows that. Nobody (nobody in this thread, and nobody reasonable) ever said they were. Whether guns are evil is not the point, not even a little bit. The point is if it's a good idea for everybody (or lots of people, or whatever) to have them.

[sysiphus]

Withdrawn

[MOSES]

Now I don't believe the US public is ready to do this as yet - if after all a series of 'high profile' campus killings of young people isn't enough, then it will probably take something along the lines of the same scale of slaughter, but this time of 'famous' (& therefore important?) citizens before big changes get talked about.

So do you have a campus of Kennedy's & Lennons etc?

John,

With all due respect, I'm not sure that is the point. I feel very personally about the VT shooting. As I said, I went to school there, and, whether justifiable or not, I feel a pretty close kinship to the current students, including those who died. And, in fact, it took a few days to be sure that I did not know of them personally. So, I seriously doubt that I, for one, would be more swayed by a campus of Kennedy's and Lennons getting shot up.

On a constitutional level, interesting to see that Prof. Tribe has come around to the viewpoint he has. Maybe a few other liberals are seeing the point that a broad interpretation of some rights suggests the same for others...

-Mo

[GollyMrScience]

If laws strict enough to stop people from doing bad things were to start taking into account any person's capability to cause mischief and mayhem we would all be under house arrest.

[notthesharpest]

If laws strict enough to stop people from doing bad things were to start taking into account any person's capability to cause mischief and mayhem we would all be under house arrest.

All I can take from this is that you would like to abolish the concept of crime. I don't expect that was what you meant, but that's what it sounds like.

[Leisureguy]

A friend once had a brilliant idea of how to do away with crime: make it illegal.

[GollyMrScience]

Michael's friend got it. If we start banning stuff because a bad person might put it to bad use our lives would be severely restricted.
If only we could make guns illegal. If only we could make knives illegal. Then murders would stop.
Well why don't we just cut to the chase and make murder illegal.
Oh wait.....