Blame the shooter, not the gun

reply to post by longlostbrother


Wrong. I suggest you look at the crime rate of Washington D.C. and Baltimore, both have had gun bans.

Really good modern stats here:

www.civitas.org.uk...

What you'll note is that the UK averages are frequently higher than most other European confides. Some crimes rates are higher than the US, like robbery, some like intentional homicide are MUCH lower.

The US has a much more punitive justice system than any other countries surveyed, and it seems to have no impact on crime rates.

reply to post by lambs to lions


A tired argument. People obviously just bring guns from outside the ban areas.

What it IS a good argument for is a NATIONAL ban.

Point well made.

reply to post by Wongbeedman


Drugs are illegal but people still get them. If guns were illegal people would still get them. People take drugs and bite faces off other people, people get guns and shoot people. The innocent are the ones that suffer. We need a way to protect ourselves.

Originally posted by MikeNice81
reply to post by longlostbrother

 

Less than 100,000 people are intentionally shot for violent reasons every year. In fact that number is more than 10% too high. According to the CDC in 2009 there were 30,561 violence related deaths and 59,344 firearms related non fatal injuries that were of violent intent in 2010. (The most recent years with figures available from the CDC web site.) That includes self defense shootings. So, with both numbers you are looking at roughly 89,905 intentional violent shootings per year. That includes self defense shootings, shootings by police, and other non criminal shootings.

Out of the 30,561 intentionally violent deaths by firearm only 11,493 were deemed murder in 2009. Suicide counted for 18,735 of those deaths. The remaining were listed as police intervention. It sounds to me like improved mental health care would do more to limit gun deaths than any law. Over 60% more people are killed by suicide with gun than by murder. So, to address the real problem maybe we should look at the root causes of mental illness that would lead to such decisions.

For non fatal injuries gunshots aren't even in the top ten. If you look strictly at violent non fatal injuries it is number eight. Again it is behind intentional harm to self. There are three forms of intentional forms of harm to self that rank much higher in yearly injury. Over 266,000 people a year intentionally poison their self. Again it looks like the key to preventing violent injury is increased mental health care.

It is much easier to blame a gun than to look at society and to look at the individual and ask, are we destroying are ourselves? Are we ignoring the most vulnerable in our society? Are we reaching out with love and care to lift up others? Instead we seek to limit the freedoms of 90 million Americans to make a minority of Americans feel warm and fuzzy.
CDC WISQARS
CDC Non Fatal Injuries

edit on 24-7-2012 by MikeNice81 because: (no reason given)

I never once claimed 100K were shot for violent reasons a year.

But, 100K ARE killed or injured every year with guns.
www.politifact.com...

I suppose you can argue that 86K are injured (subtracting suicides), but you can't honestly think 86K is an ok figure? Maybe you do?

reply to post by longlostbrother


The funny part is that Scotland was deemed the most violent "developed country" in the world in 2005. The UN did a study and found that Scotland was the most violent country in the world. Wales and England came up second.

The study, based on telephone interviews conducted between 1991 and 2000, said 3% of people in Scotland had suffered an assault, while the figure for England and Wales was second highest at 2.8%.

Both Australia and New Zealand had the next highest proportion of assaults among their population at 2.4%, exactly double the level reported for the United States.

BBC News Article

The UK has a violent attack rate of 2,034 per capita. America's is about 466 per 100,000 citizens. In other words you are more than 300% more likely to be attacked in the UK than suffer any form of attack in America.
Mail Online

Keep preaching to us about how violent we are. Even with our guns we are less violent than the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

Guns kill people eh? So when a gun kills a person why do I always see a human stand trial for the crime? Is there some kind of special law that allows guns to substitute their human host in for punishment? That's a pretty sly loophole right there.

reply to post by longlostbrother


Great way to miss the point. The cure isn't banning the gun it is looking at the reason people want to hurt themselves. That would actually save more lives than trying to ban guns to stop murder and violence. Over 18,000 people a year use a gun to take their own life. Do you think they wouldn't still take their own life in other ways? Suicide is rarely a rash decision. In most cases it is often thought out and well planned. Look at the causes of suicide and addressing that would potentially save the most lives.

Here is a second thing to think about. The non fatal injury numbers do not break down what was self defense (about 8,000 a year from other sources) what was a failed suicide attempt, or any other category.

If you take out suicides and self defense shootings you take out over 26,000 of the yearly shootings from their numbers. Suddenly the number is much smaller. That is nearly 25% of the number the CDC posts. 78,000 shootings with only 11,500 being intentional homicide isn't extremely high from a statistical standpoint.

It becomes even less disturbing to me when looked upon in the light that 63% of those being shot are criminals shooting each other. What that says to me is we need to start looking at fixing the social and economic conditions that encourage this type of behavior. It is an aberrant behavior that should be studied and addressed. To me it says we either have a lot of people feeling powerless and hopeless or we have a lot of psychopaths. Either way, we need to treat the root of the problem and not attack the 90 million people that behave in a responsible manner.

ETA:
78,000 injuries or deaths per year versus the 980,000+ defensive uses of guns. Let us adjust for the drop in the murder rate. 78,000 injuries or deaths per year versus about 660,000 defensive uses per year. I think I side with the at least 660,000 successful defensive uses. Now if we take out the 63% of "victims" that are known repeat offenders we have 28,860 "innocent" victims every year. That number sounds big, but is about 3.7% of the number of successful defensive gun uses. Again I side with protecting maximum lives and not punishing the responsible.

Originally posted by longlostbrother
reply to post by NavyDoc

 

???

Intentional murder rates are 3X higher in the US than the UK:
en.m.wikipedia.org...

The violent death rate in the US is SIX TIMES HIGHER than in the UK:
www.worldlifeexpectancy.com...

edit on 24-7-2012 by longlostbrother because: (no reason given)

Higher in rapes, burglaries, and armed robberies:
www.telegrap... h.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/7922755/England-has-worse-crime-rate-than-the-US-says-Civitas-study.html (Form the Telegraphin the UK so you can't claim bias of a US news source.)

he figures, compiled from reports released by the European Commission and United Nations, also show:

wheelgun.blogspot.com...

I noticed how you like to bring up data where defintions are twisted. From your own link:

onwards. The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary.[1] The legal definition of "intentional homicide" differs among countries. Intentional homicide may or may not include infanticide, assisted suicide or euthanasia.

If you dispense with playing with defintions, and go with simple criminal stats, you get lower rates, but not huge gaps. The murder rate in Mexico with, even stricter gun control in the UK (yes, actually, you can own several types of guns in the UK and even store them at home) is almost 15 times than that of the UK. So logically, gun control does not reduce crime. In fact, if you eliminate violence in the US centered around the illegal drug trade, you will find homocide rates less than that of the UK. You want to drop gun crime in the US? End the war on drugs.




The US murder rate continues to drop:www.dailymail.co.uk... 1393/Murder-rate-U-S-drops-lowest-levels-decades.html

While the UK murder rate continues to climb:[url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jan/19/murder-rate-rose-5-percent]http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jan/19/murder-rate-rose-5-percent[/ur l]

Murders in US drop but we actually have less gun control and more people buy and legally carry guns. Murders in the UK increase but they have more gun control and even now knife bans.

Logically, if bans work, the trends should be the opposite of what the fects demonstrate, but they are not therefore, logically, we can assert that bans of objects do not reduce violent crimes.

reply to post by NavyDoc


Sorry, but a rising murder rate is still not as high as a falling US one.

The point is that, the crime rates vary, and the millions of US guns don't seem to make much difference to crime, if at all (you keep pointing out how similar they are), but they DO make a difference in the number of people injured and killed by guns.

Obviously.

Originally posted by longlostbrother
reply to post by NavyDoc

 

Sorry, but a rising murder rate is still not as high as a falling US one.

The point is that, the crime rates vary, and the millions of US guns don't seem to make much difference to crime, if at all (you keep pointing out how similar they are), but they DO make a difference in the number of people injured and killed by guns.

Obviously.

Yet, also obviously, if we look at cause and effect, the rising and falling rates of murder do matter and do demonstrate that gun bans will not cause the elimination of murder or the saving of those lives that you mention.

Originally posted by CosmicCitizen
reply to post by hellbjorn012

 

If we didnt have the 2nd Amendment I am sure that many in government would actually try to confiscate the guns like they did in the UK and Australia.

And you still have that do you not.

Originally posted by AlonzoTyper

Originally posted by lambs to lions
To blame guns on gun-related violence is ridiculous. Why not just go ahead and talk about banning alcohol? After-all, drunken drivers kill far more people every year than domestic gun violence. Why don't we ban alcohol? We don't even mention it because parts of every class of America participates in the consumption of alcohol.
The truth is, and always has been that people kill people. It isn't the gun's fault, nor the alcohol. It is the irresponsible, selfish jacka$$ that disregards the lives of others.
So go ahead, blame the guns, and let them scare you into giving up another freedom.

As expected, now every anti gun person is getting on their soap box. What people dont realize is:

There have been people doing senseless harm to others since the dawn of mans existence. By the way, you dont need a gun to take out a group of people. War was much more brutal when men were bashing each others skulls in with mace's, clubs, and battle axes. Literally spilling your opponents blood on yourself.

Personally, I would rather be shot than stabbed, and I would rather be stabbed than have my head bashed in with a large piece of hardened steel with spikes.

Also, guns aren't ever going to NOT be manufactured, so there will always be ways to get them. Look at what happened during prohibition times with alcohol.....if you take away the law abiding citizens guns, than only the criminals will have them. That sounds great....

If I was in that theater, I would have been the only one NOT screaming and running. Even in my decrepit state and age, I would unload every last round I had on the shooter, and possibly saved lives. Had I been a younger man, I would have ran up behind him and slashed his throat.

Understand this, be it guns, bombs, or bows and arrows, people will always find ways to do harm to others. This is why people such as myself carry weapons at all times. Because not only do I not want to be a victim, but with psychopaths out there, I dont want to be standing idle whilst they do harm unto innocent people.

Oh please the theater was dark, he surprised them, used tear gas and had a vest on.


.. Oh but i forgot every gun owner is Rambo, can take on a army by themselves, immune to surprise attacks and tear gas and a man in the dark wearing body armor.... You likely would have got your chest blown wide open.

They even have a video out think i saw it posted here where people were unknowingly given guns with blanks and taken to class about guns and some guy popped in with a paint ball gun and all those claiming they were experienced with guns got shot before they even realized what was going down.

Now im not saying a person with a gun wouldn't stop a normal shooting but this guy had all the advantages!

A dark theater, tear gas, body armor. Sure John Rambo im sure you would have came out on top

In that situation even your trained LEO and serviceman would have been at a disadvantage.

Originally posted by hellbjorn012

Originally posted by AlonzoTyper

Originally posted by lambs to lions
To blame guns on gun-related violence is ridiculous. Why not just go ahead and talk about banning alcohol? After-all, drunken drivers kill far more people every year than domestic gun violence. Why don't we ban alcohol? We don't even mention it because parts of every class of America participates in the consumption of alcohol.
The truth is, and always has been that people kill people. It isn't the gun's fault, nor the alcohol. It is the irresponsible, selfish jacka$$ that disregards the lives of others.
So go ahead, blame the guns, and let them scare you into giving up another freedom.

As expected, now every anti gun person is getting on their soap box. What people dont realize is:

There have been people doing senseless harm to others since the dawn of mans existence. By the way, you dont need a gun to take out a group of people. War was much more brutal when men were bashing each others skulls in with mace's, clubs, and battle axes. Literally spilling your opponents blood on yourself.

Personally, I would rather be shot than stabbed, and I would rather be stabbed than have my head bashed in with a large piece of hardened steel with spikes.

Also, guns aren't ever going to NOT be manufactured, so there will always be ways to get them. Look at what happened during prohibition times with alcohol.....if you take away the law abiding citizens guns, than only the criminals will have them. That sounds great....

If I was in that theater, I would have been the only one NOT screaming and running. Even in my decrepit state and age, I would unload every last round I had on the shooter, and possibly saved lives. Had I been a younger man, I would have ran up behind him and slashed his throat.

Understand this, be it guns, bombs, or bows and arrows, people will always find ways to do harm to others. This is why people such as myself carry weapons at all times. Because not only do I not want to be a victim, but with psychopaths out there, I dont want to be standing idle whilst they do harm unto innocent people.

Oh please the theater was dark, he surprised them, used tear gas and had a vest on.


.. Oh but i forgot every gun owner is Rambo, can take on a army by themselves, immune to surprise attacks and tear gas and a man in the dark wearing body armor.... You likely would have got your chest blown wide open.

They even have a video out think i saw it posted here where people were unknowingly given guns with blanks and taken to class about guns and some guy popped in with a paint ball gun and all those claiming they were experienced with guns got shot before they even realized what was going down.

Now im not saying a person with a gun wouldn't stop a normal shooting but this guy had all the advantages!

A dark theater, tear gas, body armor. Sure John Rambo im sure you would have came out on top

In that situation even your trained LEO and serviceman would have been at a disadvantage.

edit on 24-7-2012 by hellbjorn012 because: (no reason given)

Of course a person was at a disadvantage in this situation. This is why Holmes picked the place, the time, and the equipment he did--to have the upper hand. HOwever, I humbly suggest that some chance of protecting yourself is better than no chance at all.

Of course a person was at a disadvantage in this situation. This is why Holmes picked the place, the time, and the equipment he did--to have the upper hand. However, I humbly suggest that some chance of protecting yourself is better than no chance at all.

Sure but the smugness of some coming here acting like they know for sure they would have gotten him under those extreme circumstances is laughable. They do not know what would have went down.

You know how to deal with guys like this? Lock him in a room with 3-4 of the victims male family members, preferably those who are bigger and stronger and let them beat him to death. Thats the way I see it. A bullet is way to fast a end for this guy he needs to feel the pain and helplessness his victims felt.

Im not really against guns but its certain that without the gun he would have not been able to kill all those people as easily.

Guns facilitate violent actions. Or they protect against other people with guns.

Either way they are violently destructive.

Like i said im not really against guns but the statement "Blame the shooter, not the gun" is just dumb.

Does the world need another apologist? They come out of the woodwork every time something like this happens. It's sickening. No one should be able to buy a hundred round drum magazine like he's downloading porn off the internet much less 6000 rounds. Do you think he was going rabbit hunting? Shame on you.

reply to post by kazanoom


I go through about that much ammunition in a months time between practice and competition.

I buy in bulk quantities to cut costs.

Most everyone I know buys thousands at a time unless they reload their own. Then they just buy thousands of bullets and primers at a time and keep using the same brass over and over.

People who dont participate in any actual shooting hobbies or arent privy to the lifestyle of those who do really cant and shouldnt have an opinion on the subject.

Educate yourself and form an opinion based on reality and fact. Not on ignorance and fear.

reply to post by thisguyrighthere


So you go through $1200+/month in ammo?
(and that's $.20/round, which is on the cheap side for most ammo)
I think that most people would find that you be an excessive amount of ammo for the average person to be using in a month.