Machine gun fire into Las Vegas crowd at Route 91 music Festival

[LeafByNiggle]

LeafByNiggle:

Typical anti-regulation rant.

Not a rant. Its an opinion.

Then to Jig_Saw you said:

Well yes we should accept that evil happens. That doesn’t mean we like it. We should try to stop it if we can. But I’ve read of no ideas to stop evil that work. I’ve seen lots of ideas that will increase the success of evil.

Now that is an opinion.

 

[pnewton]

millions of abortions have resulted in millions of dead children in the US.

millions of guns have not resulted in millions of dead people in the US.

Great so you would be all for it, right? Get rid of something morally neutral for the greatest of moral goods. Sounds like a plan.

I like the idea because it would reveal if the Democrats really are the party of death, and if the Republicans will ever give more than lip service to opposing abortion.

 

[Jig_Saw]

Since a single event like Las Vegas or Sandy Hook could bankrupt an insurance company, I don’t see how they can profitably sell the insurance, which I’m sure you know. Personally I think it is a back door ban of firearms, and personally, I think you know that, and personally, I don’t think gun control advocates are willing to be honest about what they really want, which is a ban on the private ownership of firearms, because they know the public would never go for it, so they talk about “common sense regulation”, which focus groups well, but don’t talk about what they, and you, really want.

I am for my right to life and property. I don’t see any reason why I need to give up my rights for someone else. I am fine with firearm ownership except I don’t want it for myself, nor do I want to pay the costs of it. Why do so many on your side seem to want the right but not accept the responsibility?

 

[Jig_Saw]

Well yes we should accept that evil happens. That doesn’t mean we like it. We should try to stop it if we can. But I’ve read of no ideas to stop evil that work. I’ve seen lots of ideas that will increase the success of evil.

So evil happens and I and the rest of society just have to pay the cost and sacrifice our rights so you can have yours? Is that right?

 

[exnihilo]

So evil happens and I and the rest of society just have to pay the cost and sacrifice our rights so you can have yours? Is that right?

You aren’t sacrificing your rights. But yes, society does pay a price for freedom. That is the trade off. I mean I could pay the price for people being allowed to drink if a drunk driver kills me. I know that. But that doesn’t make me want to get rid of alcohol.

 

[josie_L]

I believe much crime has been prevented by those who own guns, thereby saving lives and benefiting Americans in general:

University Study Confirms
Private Firearms
Stop Crime 2.5 Million Times Each Year
By J. Neil Schulman
4-20-7

Gary Kleck, Ph.D. is a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author of “Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America” (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), a book widely cited in the national gun-control debate. In an exclusive interview, Dr. Kleck revealed some preliminary results of the National Self- Defense Survey which he and his colleague Dr. Marc Gertz conducted in Spring, 1993. Though he stresses that the results of the survey are preliminary and subject to future revision, Kleck is satisfied that the survey’s results confirm his analysis of previous surveys which show that American civilians commonly use their privately-owned firearms to defend themselves against criminal attacks, and that such defensive uses significantly outnumber the criminal uses of firearms in America. The new survey, conducted by random telephone sampling of 4,978 households in all the states except Alaska and Hawaii, yield results indicating that American civilians use their firearms as often as 2.5 million times every year defending against a confrontation with a criminal, and that handguns alone account for up to 1.9 million defenses per year. Previous surveys, in Kleck’s analysis, had underrepresented the extent of private firearms defenses because the questions asked failed to account for the possibility that a particular respondent might have had to use his or her firearm more than once.

Dr. Kleck will first present his survey results at an upcoming meeting of the American Society of Criminology, but he agreed to discuss his preliminary analysis, even though it is uncustomary to do so in advance of complete peer review, because of the great extent which his earlier work is being quoted in public debates on firearms public policy.

The interview was conducted September 14-17, 1993 by J. Neil Schulman, a novelist, screenwriter, and journalist who has written extensively on firearms public policy for several years.

Readers may be interested to know that Kleck is a member of the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations. He is also a lifelong registered Democrat. He is not and has never been a member of or contributor to the NRA, Handgun Control Inc., or any other advocacy group on either side of the gun-control issue, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.

http://rense.com/general76/univ.htm

 

[Ridgerunner]

I guess we’re lucky he had all those guns, then, and was able to modify them to achieve a rapid rate of fire. I guess that kept him from doing a lot worse, right?

No. We (and probably a lot of others) are lucky the security guard and others prevented the escape and further destruction he evidently had planned.

 

[josie_L]

Although the survey was done some years ago, current statistics bear out that greater gun ownership does not correlate with more gun crime, actually there has been less.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

I believe much crime has been prevented by those who own guns, thereby saving lives and benefiting Americans in general:

University Study Confirms
Private Firearms
Stop Crime 2.5 Million Times Each Year
By J. Neil Schulman
4-20-7

This was the result of a survey that asked people if they had used their guns to prevent a crime. Notice that the respondents can only surmise whether any particular use of a gun really did prevent a crime. For example, they might have shown their weapon in what they thought was going to turn into a deadly fight, and maybe the fight did not materialize. But all we have to go on is the impression the gun owner had. On the other hand, gun death statistics are hard numbers, not subject to one’s memory of the personal interactions in the event.

Statistics show that if you have a gun, you are more likely to be shot by your own gun than you are to use that gun to defend yourself from a criminal.

 

[Jig_Saw]

You aren’t sacrificing your rights. But yes, society does pay a price for freedom. That is the trade off. I mean I could pay the price for people being allowed to drink if a drunk driver kills me. I know that. But that doesn’t make me want to get rid of alcohol.

Sure, I am giving up my right to property. It seems like my right to life and property does not quite equal your right to arm yourself.

Alcohol is taxed at a higher rate than other substances, so the state does attempt to offset some of the costs with alcohol by having those that consume it pay more to keep from robbing the property of the rest of society.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

Although the survey was done some years ago, current statistics bear out that greater gun ownership does not correlate with more gun crime, actually there has been less.

Do those statistics take the trouble to hold all other variables constant that might affect the crime rate?

 

[Inisfallen]

It seems like my right to life and property does not quite equal your right to arm yourself.

This is the heart of the matter. For some, their right to own an arsenal is absolute. And if the cost of that right (usually paid by others) is thousands upon thousands of deaths, that’s just the price to be paid.

 

[josie_L]

You could not have possibly read the article for you to have written this in the time you did.

P.s. The methodology used is specified in the article.

 

[Jig_Saw]

I can’t think of a more useless survey than asking gun owners if they THINK they prevented a crime with their gun. Maybe we can ask young Axe-wearing men if wearing Axe makes himself more attractive to women.

 

[josie_L]

Read the article.

 

[Inisfallen]

You aren’t sacrificing your rights. But yes, society does pay a price for freedom. That is the trade off. I mean I could pay the price for people being allowed to drink if a drunk driver kills me. I know that. But that doesn’t make me want to get rid of alcohol.

And yet you have no problem with regulating the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. Go figure.

 

[Jig_Saw]

This is the heart of the matter. For some, their right to own an arsenal is absolute. And if the cost of that right (usually paid by others) is thousands upon thousands of deaths, that’s just the price to be paid.

Exactly. They have their right to arm themselves, whatever the cost to everyone else is irrelevant. I have no rights equal to those who have the right to arm themselves. If I get killed by a gun owner, that’s the cost of freedom.

 

[Ridgerunner]

911 was an act of war. Oklahoma City seems to have been a one-off incident in the United States. If it weren’t, we would be talking about how to make sure it doesn’t happen again and would be having serious conversations about adding substances to Ammonium Nitrate to suppress explosions. But we are talking about the murder of 59 people via guns. So, it seems appropriate to talk about why gun owners expect all of society to take on the financial costs of them exercising their rights. They can have their guns, but they can’t have my life and my property as well. I have the right to that.

The point was that guns are not a necessary ingredient to a murderous rampage. One could also say, by the way, that the Tsarnaevs’ murders and maimings were “acts of war” or “one-off incidents”. So, we could say, were the Bastille Day murders, which were done with a truck. All such acts are “one off” acts of murderousness and evil. Possibly modern societies that have any semblance of freedom at all are going to be subject to such things for some time, since it’s difficult to know who the jihadis, sociopaths and otherwise deranged people are and to stop them pre-emptively. We do know who most criminals are, but don’t seem able to effectively stop them from killing, even when law enforcement is reasonably convinced they are likely to do so sometime in the future.

But of all the remedies imaginable, it seems to me depriving law-abiding citizens of their right to have firearms is not going to deter jihadis, sociopaths and the deranged. Most definitely it won’t stop criminals from murdering.

 

[josie_L]

I posted two articles previous to this one, one was from the Washington Post and the other from the National Journal, neither of which can be accused of conservative bias.

 

[Ridgerunner]

This was the result of a survey that asked people if they had used their guns to prevent a crime. Notice that the respondents can only surmise whether any particular use of a gun really did prevent a crime. For example, they might have shown their weapon in what they thought was going to turn into a deadly fight, and maybe the fight did not materialize.

Perhaps you surmise correctly about what the participants surmised. But they were there at the scene, and there is no particular reason to doubt their impression of the situation.