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Study Finds 3 Laws Could Reduce Firearm Deaths By 90% (meta.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The study, published in The Lancet, used a cross-sectional, state-level dataset relating to a host of topics associated with firearm mortality including gun ownership and even unemployment from across the U.S. to examine the relationship between recorded gun deaths and gun-control legislation. The study found that some laws, such as those that restrict gun access to children through locks and age restrictions, were simply ineffective while others, such as the stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly. According to the study's model, a federal law expanding background checks for all gun purchases could reduce the national gun death rate by 57%, lowering it from 10.35 to 4.46 per 100,000 people while background checks for all ammunition purchases could lower the rate by 81% to 1.99 per 100,000 and firearm identification could reduce it by 83% to 1.81 per 100,000. If the federal government implemented all three laws, the scholars predict that the overall national rate of firearm deaths would drop by over 90% to 0.16 per 100,000.
we don't need gun control, we need bullet-control. If a bullet cost five thousand dollars...
I doubt the market would bear $5k/bullet, but you might be on to something. Perhaps by swapping lotteries for a bullet tax we could kill two birds with one stone, pardon the pun. The religious zealots get their anti-gamblings measure and their bullets--crazy as it sounds--, and the schools still get the money.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
I guess I should correct myself. According to that link 79 people were killed in the 20 years before Port Arthur in Massacres in Australian. In the 20 years since 74 people were killed which is about 93% of 79.(So it's an improvement, just not much of one.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I noted above that most gun control laws completely fail to reduce crime, to reduce murders, etc, and they tend to INCREASE rape and sexual assault. There are a couple of things that work, though, in the right combination.
Texas had success with combining a mandatory sentence for make use of a deadly weapon in commission of a crime along with heavy promotion/ advertising of it. On city busses, billboards, etc you'd see ads like this:
Robbery: Two to five years in prison
Using a weapon in a robbery: Ten more years
After the ads were run, fewer robbers used weapons, resulting in fewer deaths. Interviews with convicts confirm that word got around the "thug" community: don't bring a gun if you're thinking of committing a crime.
Similar promotion of the concealed handgun law was also effective. Ads targeting high-crime communities reminded potential bad guys that the good guys now have guns, and may shoot back.
Talk to some gun owners sometime. You'll find many of them rather uneasy about the idea of selling to someone without a BG check. Thing is, there's nothing you can do other than to sell the gun to a dealer and have them resell it, which of course eats up money you might get. People do what they can to CYA, you can find forms online they'll print and have the other person fill out (none of which they are required to do). Some will just decide to do it through a shop anyways.
I'm one of those people. I'm not super in to firearms, but I like them, own 3 of them, and have a reasonably good working knowledge about them. Some time ago I decided to sell off one of my pistols. I had gotten a second one that I liked much better and didn't want the old one. It was a Glock 17, they sell pretty easy. However I was just uncomfortable selling it with no way of checking on the buyer, so I decided to eat the cost and sold it to a dealer. They offered me about half of what I'd get from an individual, no surprise since they were going to sell it for about what I would get (standard retail markup is about 100%).
I'd love the ability to have a good private BG check system, and you can be damn sure I'd use it.
How much would such a thing help? I'm not sure but I have trouble believing it would hurt.
After the Port Arthur massacre in Australia, tough gun controls were bought in requiring gun safety courses, safes, annual licensing, and restriction of semi automatic type weapons and most handguns. One interesting side effect of this, is I never hear about accidental shootings by children anymore. I live in a large Australian city and have never seen a firearm I public except for police and security guards. A handgun on the black market now costs over $5k.
This has been a big cultural change for Australia because when I was a kid in the 80s you could still buy guns from KMart.
To say it is too hard to do background checks is defeatism. Americas cultural violence/gun homocide problem will take generations to reform, but you should try to reform it. This doesn't mean a blanket ban, but sensible reforms like restricting military style weapons and licensing gun owners with appropriate background checks.
Yes the criminals will win for a while, but you will better off in the long term.
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My position on guns has me yelled at by both sides. I would like something like a driver's license to be required for buying guns and ammo. The license is earned (ideally at no cost or at a very nominal fee) by demonstrating that you can shoot what you are aiming at, clean a gun safely, and store it properly. You can lose this license by committing a violent crime with a firearm, being drunk or high with a firearm on you, or leaving your firearm unsecured where small children can get to it. Apparently this stance makes me a horrible monster to both sides of the debate.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Gun laws in general are racist. I had someone tell me that one day, and I asked myself, "This guy IS full of shit, isn't he? I have to obey the same gun laws that he does, don't I?" So, I googled, "Are gun laws racist?" Holy shit, my eyes were opened. Try it yourself. The very first "gun control" laws on this continent were unabashedly aimed at preventing black people from accessing weapons. Maybe the best link is this one: https://www.firearmsandliberty...
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
What gun control really means is "Centralized gun ownership"; in the hands of the government and small number of people approved by the government ---- thus gun control is diametrically opposite to the 2nd amendment which is intended to guarantee the states and people the rights to have militia as a defense against enemies both foreign and domestic, and a check against the power of the federal government and its military.
So where exactly are these militias? What training do they get? What is the chain of command (is the governor the CINC)? What are the rules of engagement? Do they have to follow the UCMJ while "on-duty"?
Because IMHO a bunch of folks running around with open-carry ARs don't seem "well regulated" to me.
I'm decidedly pro-gun, but I think we have to be careful with that line of argument. What happens if you cherry-pick the most violent regions of those other countries and shut them down? I don't actually know, but I suspect that the bulk of their violence (including gun violence) also happens in a few bad areas and that their statistics would drop, putting the US back toward the top of the list.
It should also be noted, though, that statistics measuring rates of firearms homicides are inherently biased from the outset. What we should be measuring is rates of homicides (and attempted homicides) with any weapon. Draconian gun control laws do actually reduce the number of guns in the hands of the populace, and therefore do reduce gun deaths... but that really doesn't matter at all to everyone who gets stabbed or beaten to death instead of shot. Now, there's an argument that the presence of guns increases the total homicide rate, and that's an argument worthy of discussion. (However, I haven't seen any compelling evidence that it's correct, and if you plot the nations of the world on a graph of gun ownership rates against homicide rates, you'll find no correlation.)
Jimminy Cricket, this is the 21st century. Do you see no other political solution to your grievance than buying a gun?
Don't you realise there's no other functioning democracy other than the USA? The existence of guns is the only thing that keeps the country in check! /sarcasm.
That is really funny! You have a great career as a comedian ahead of you (or as a politician, but I sincerely hope you will choose the former)
The one thing I'll grant you is that at the time of founding, the US did pretty well on the democratic front - although it was nowhere near as exceptional as a lot of people might think: the vast majority of the population had no voting rights (excluding in no particular order slaves, indians, women, and people without property), which makes the system less radically different from (proto-)parliaments such as the British Parliament, the French Estates-General, or the institutions of the 17th century Dutch republic. All of these systems ranged somewhere between monarchy, aristocracy, and "real" democracy. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Currently, there are plenty of "real" democracies, with political processes that are each flawed in their own way but that more or less succeed in translating popular preferences into policy and protecting the rights of its citizens. On the Economist's democracy index, the US has 20th place (after most of northwestern Europe) and is only just above the level of "flawed democracy", scoring especially bad on functioning of government and political participation. http://pages.eiu.com/rs/eiu2/i...
Freedom house similarly places the US on a downward trajectory and below almost all (north)Western European countries. (https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FH_FITW_Report_2016.pdf). From their report: "[American] elections and legislative process have suffered from an increasingly intricate system of gerrymandering and undue interference by wealthy individuals and special interests. Racial and ethnic divisions have seemingly widened, and the past year brought greater attention to police violence and impunity, de facto residential and school segregation, and economic inequality, adding to fears that class mobility, a linchpin of America’s self-image and global reputation, is in jeopardy."
A nation without a functioning political process, but where everybody has guns - I believe we call that a "failed state". See also Somalia, Iraq, or South Sudan.