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That sounds like you're buying into propaganda. Defensive gun usage is extremely common, and there have been an incredible number of mass shootings that never occurred, or were ended early by people carrying concealed. I do agree that people who are open carrying or brandishing needlessly could present those issues.

According to politico, defensive gun usage is not that common, with an estimated 3,200 occurences a year in the US, to compare with the 33,636 deaths due to "Injury by firearms" for 2013.

I would also question how you know there has been an "incredible number of mass shootings that never occurred", since they never occurred...

I didn't say you did.

So why are we here?

Controls are bans.

Ok if we're not even speaking the same language no point continuing. Is English your first language?

I said fewer guns would mean fewer shootings, that is obvious.

That wasn't so hard was it...

I also said, and this is important, that fewer guns means more crime and murder.

Yet I posted a link to research that shows this is not true, and you clearly choose not to accept this.

I did a study on this for a statistics class.

Cool story. Citation or shut up.

There was a book written on this correlation between guns and crime which is widely regarded for its scientific rigor. Crap. John Lott is a gun lobbyist with good credentials but poor methods. His book is commonly used by gun nuts but already extensively debunked:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.armedwithreason.com...

I think this is bad because you cherry pick the nations by limiting yourself to comparing the USA to "developed" nations. Mexico is a developed nation

Really? Really? This is scraping at the bottom of the barrel. I compare the US to developed nation because the US is supposed to be a developed nation. The richest country on the planet with a crime record similar to that of a war-zone and you think this is ok because Mexico is equally terrible?

People like the VPC overlook Mexico and claim it is not "developed", why is that? The answer is simple...

It's simple because it not a developed country (seems obvious, but here we are). And don't take my word for it: http://hdr.undp.org/en/countri...
Ranked 74th. The OECD which is generally considered the bulk of "the developed world" is the top 35 nations. So Mexico is not even close. Everyone with a brain knows this except gun nuts that like to trot out Mexico because their numbers make the America's look not so shocking.

The only one with a gun inside was the shooter until the police entered the building a couple of hours later.

Wrongo! Check your facts.

Now I'm not saying that having a bunch of drinking folks carrying guns is a good idea, but I am saying that a couple of armed individuals inside the club would have a good chance of disrupting the carnage and lowering the death toll. However, we will never know the answer to all these "what if" questions.

Well, let's see, we have examples of armed peoople shooting up bars and restaurants when gathered, so we can know that there are problems with that solution. We can also see that this club had security, armed security.

Maybe instead of guns, a solution would be to control the entrances better, or to have more exits.

But we DO know that putting guns into law abiding hands LOWERS violent crime rates (such as shootings) not the other way around. The statistics don't lie, and they tell a totally different story than what you think, especially if you tend to be on the left side politically.

What? Statistics lie all the time. So do claims about them. Even assuming your allegations are valid (and with the Kleck numbers, no we can't), it is entirely possible to come to the wrong conclusion, or for outcomes to change.

Stop thinking you know anything. All that arrogant "We know" from people gets annoying. No, you do not have superior reasoning or intelligence, and believing you do causes more problems.

We also know that mass shooters seek out gun free zones to ply their trade.

They seek out places where people are gathered, they want to kill a lot of people at once, we don't want people with guns in those places because of the risk of what they would do.

This applies even more with drinking.

According to his diary, Adam Landza passed up shooting up the Denver airport and instead decided on a movie theatre which explicitly prohibited guns because he understood it was unlikely he'd encounter armed resistance and could kill more people.

Ahem? Adam Lanza was in Connecticut, you may be thinking about James Holmes.

You really should be a bit more careful to check your facts.

So, let's be honest, you need to disarm the bad guys, not the good guys. Suggest laws that do that for a change and I'll bet you find there is a lot of support for your suggestions...

No, you won't. Even attempts to find out how bad guys get guns, which had inconsequential impact on the total firearms said bad guys had, are treated as if it was a deliberate attempt to illegally arm them by the Obama administration. In reality, of course, the program, was legal and began under the prior administration. Instead it became a political football.

Just like any number of proposals.

However, this "assault weapon" ban garbage or the attack on the AR-15 in particular is a non-starter as is most of the "gun control" legislation coming from the lefties.

Actually, everything is a non-starter, can't even have a conversation thanks to sneering and condescending attitudes like this.

But I'm beginning to think that this is really about political posturing and not really about doing anything, it's about blaming the other side for saying "no" to them on a topic that garners them emotional support from the sob stories, and not anything else...

Beginning to think? You're late to the party. One side s

This is your big citation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Note found right at the top of that Wikipedia pate

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: Seems to be copy/pasted from another site and is not in Wikipedia's style Please help improve this article if you can. (July 2015)

It happens that the site the Wikipedia entry was copy/pasted from, is John Lott's website. John Lott is a discredited "gun researcher and advocate".

http://www.armedwithreason.com...

Fact is, if you own a gun (and I do), you're about 15 times more likely to hurt yourself or a family member than you are to defend yourself or stop a crime. If you live in Florida, Texas or Georgia, that goes up to about 40 times more likely.

They function differently, but to most folks, they appear exactly the same. This is how gun-control types inject fear, uncertainty and doubt into the debate.

He's talking about gun FUD.

Calling an AR-15 an "assault weapon" isn't FUD. AR-15s are marketed as weapons used to assault people. They're designed for assault. As opposed to pepper spray or a taser which, while unpleasant and possibly deadly, they're marketed for defensive use and not optimized for maximum death.

Also cite your sources and explain yourself. What do you mean by firearm related crime goes up? Are more people getting busted with owning an illegal firearm AND committing crime when they'd otherwise just be charged with just the crime? How are you defining these terms? Do more people get guns because they're banned?

Cites sources showing that defensive gun ownership is a myth.

And did you seriously just reference John Lott, and then use the phrase "well researched" in the same sentence? You dumbass: That's like citing Senator Inhofe as your source for global warming data.

If you would reference Lott, you should a bit about him first:

From ( http://www.armedwithreason.com... ):

Lott’s work is filled with bizarre results that are inconsistent with established facts in criminology.

According to Lott’s data, for example, rural areas are more dangerous than cities. FBI data clearly shows this is not the case. Lott’s model finds that both increasing unemployment and decreasing the number of middle-aged and elderly black women would produce substantial decreases in the homicide rate, conclusions that are so bizarre that they should cast doubt on the entire study.

From ( http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~la... , basically 47 pages of why "correlation is not causation"):

Only 20% of permits were issued to women, but the male and female homi-
cides rate went down by the same amount and the reduction in the rape rate
was similar to the decrease in assaults. Lott speculates that guns are four
times as effective for females. While this is not impossible it seems more
likely that the decreases were caused by some other factor that applied to
males and females equally.

Or from my favorite:

The empirical studies of right-to-carry laws preceding Lott and Mustard’s study may be flawed,2" but if these studies have any value, they suggest that right-to-carry laws and high gun ownership levels either have no significant effect on crime or else increase it Both Ludwig and Black and Nagin conclude that no credible empirical evidence supports the judgment that right-to-carry laws deter crime. At this point, there is essentially no reason for an intelligent consumer of social science research to accept the Lott and Mustard findings.

Of course the right-to-carry cure for violence worked for the Hatfields and McCoys. It worked for Bernhard Goetz. It worked on the American frontier. It is being copied in Rwanda today. According to John Lott and David Mustard, right-to-carry can work for us too.

http://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/v...

Although let's be honest, you didn't look into shit, and you never actually read Lott's research either. (Helpful link: http://www.johnlott.org/ )

You just picked up the name from the NRA or some other group of idiots.

If you're discounting what you claim the major cause of American gun deaths (illegally owned guns used by criminals) to be, you've got to do the same in Canada. In nearly every category Canada is better off, per capita, than the US in terms of crime.

Also, citation needed for the not counting gangland violence showing low murder rate. The closest thing I can find is a mis-cited report about Chicago that a US conservative site trotted out, sourcing a CDC report that shows nothing of the sort, via Reddit. Here's a well cited refutation of the idea that 80% of gun deaths are caused by gangs, not even after ruling out suicide is it close to true..