You've assumed that the vast majority of gun homicides in the US are caused by criminals. Neatly ignoring the many deaths caused by terrified home defenders, kids who get access to guns, etc.
It's really not like the war on drugs at all. The war on drugs failed because many millions of folks in every country routinely take drugs and circumvent controls to get hold of them. That is patently not the case for gun restrictions, which vanishingly few people try to circumvent in the UK and other Western European countries.
Of course there's no correlation between countries in Western Europe. That's because Western European countries have strict gun control laws which mean that the vast majority of households don't possess a gun. You're expecting to see correlation when you'll only see statistical noise around a zero point. I have no idea how those figures you quote are compiled, but the great majority of guns in Western European countries will be held by the police, the army, gamekeepers, criminals who've obtained them through smuggling and a few other groups. In daily life, civilians have a close-to-zero chance of ever encountering someone with a gun. Which is the gun death rate in Western Europe is so much lower than in the US, where that is decidedly not the case.
I think the tickle in your throat is your brain or your conscience. Because the links you provide are *not* to "stories from the UK or France or Germany or Sweden of crazed killers who've cooked up some clever death dealing machine in their kitchen and then wreaked mayhem on the streets". In fact: - your first story is about a Californian criminal making a gun that wouldn't have worked if he had fired it, but he didn't fire it. In Fresno. So not the UK or another Western European state, not a clever death dealing machine, and no mayhem. Apart from that, great choice of article! - your second story is at least in the right country, but is not about clever death dealing machines -- it's about replica guns -- and is not about mayhem on the streets (because none has been implicated in a mass killing). Another great choice of article!
The OP argued that tighter gun control would lead to attacks using *different methods* eg Sarin gas, bombs, etc. I will now spell this out for you, as you are either too stupid or too obtuse to realise what this is about: there are no examples of people carrying out mass attacks using Sarin gas, bombs or other non-gun methods that they cooked up at home in Western Europe, despite gun control. Gun control does not therefore lead to attacks using different methods.
That first graph is probably one of the most stupid fucking graphs I've ever seen. Have you never heard of "keep all other factors constant"? There is no point whatsoever in including conflict countries like Afghanistan or drug-supplier countries like El Salvador on the same graph as Western Europe, the US, Canada etc (ie, countries corresponding to what used to be called "the first world"). Too many confounding variables.
If you do what I actually said, which is look at gun death rates in the US vs Western European countries, you'll find exactly the pattern I said: gun death rates in the US are 2.97 per hundred thousand, while rates for Western European countries vary between 0.12 (UK, strict gun control) and 0.84 (Portugal, less strict gun control).
Where's the cite for your uk vs us stats? Show us you're comparing like with like.
Where's the cite for the run on small baseball bats? In a country where people don't even play baseball!
And where's the cite for the long knives thing? This is the only vaguely plausible thing, and the doctors are not the government, and no ban took place. And gun death rates are vastly lower than in the US.
Gun death rates are vastly higher in the US than in Western European countries. Because guns aren't common in Western European countries. Swiss gun death rates are higher than other Western European countries (but lower than the US). Swiss men have guns at home, but are also trained. I think there's a pretty clear pattern...
But it Does Not Happen. There are no stories from the UK or France or Germany or Sweden of crazed killers who've cooked up some clever death dealing machine in their kitchen and then wreaked mayhem on the streets, are there? Mass killings in these countries are dramatically rarer than in the US, and still involve guns for the most part.
What in earth makes you say that about the UK? D you live for the anecdote? Stats don't support you, and as someone actually living here, rather than pontificating about the country from elsewhere, I'm pleased to say that me, my family and my friends do not spend our lives in abject terror of being assaulted by criminals.
I reckon you must be a troll. No one could seriously regurgitate Fox talking points so precisely, and actually believe them, surely?
You know you would not have panicked, do you? Unless you're a veteran, or have actually been in such a situation, you have no idea if you would panic or not. You may like to believe you wouldn't, but you can't be sure you would cope with the immediate fear of violent death. It is something you can only partly train for, and most firearms training course are sure to stress that very point.
And obviously in a crowded cinema, your chance of seeing the shooter as distinct form the panicking crowd is going to be minuscule.
Would it not be a little more honest to say that the dead children and babies are the price you're willing to pay in order to adhere to your right to bear arms? Ie at least acknowledge the cost benefit trade off?
Erm, the first opportunity for Scottish people aged 16 or 17 to vote in elections is coming up but hasn't happened yet....and Scottish 16 year olds who commit a crime are not imprisoned in adult jails.
How this kind of crap gets marked insightful, I do not know. Age of consent is not the same as age of adulthood. Legally, you become an adult at 18 in the UK but the age of consent is 16. In the US, you become an adult at 18 as well, but the age of consent varies from state to state.
None of this has anything to do with totalitarianism.
It's a lovely idea, in theory. In practice, it's more likely that the rapist will have a gun than the victim. If they both have a gun, then she's likely to die, rather than be raped. Knowing that the rapist is also going to die is pretty cold comfort.
I have not implied that a woman's sexual organs are something to be ashamed of. I have highlighted that an insult based on a woman being a woman is misogynist. That is a very different thing. It's got nothing to do with the use of the word "vagina". If he'd said "calm down, dear", as David Cameron did to one of his own MPs recently here in the UK, that would be just as sexist without referring to sexual organs.
In a world where hundreds of millions of women are raped, cut, beaten, abused in other ways and killed simply for being women, I will continue to call out misogyny when I see it. And encourage you to not waste energy defending this particular insult by trying to convince yourself, me or others that it is not sexist, but instead put some energy into making the world around you a safer space for the women you know and care for.
The poster assumed the gender of the OP was female and created an insult based on their sex alone. That is misogynist behaviour. You may be desensitised to it, because we all, sadly, hear so much of it, but it is indeed misogynist.
No, true misogyny is hating women, and defending woman-hatred. It's almost entirely done by men. So while I admit it's possible you're a woman, I kind of doubt it, because defending what is obviously intended as a sexist insult by pretending that it's not is a pretty classically misogynist piece of behaviour.
I think it's highly indicative that you chose a misogynist insult in relation to a gun violence discussion. Women-hatred and violence have been vile bedfellows forever
I love the idea that you think that it would have been just as easy for the killer to have used: - a bomb - poison gas - a car To do this.
Are you completely mad or just very very stupid?
It might have been possible to have used those weapons but it certainly wouldn't have been just as easy. Not even close. More difficult to obtain, transport, and deploy gas or bombs effectively. And you obviously can't drive a car around inside a school killing people, only in the grounds, which would have killed far fewer.
Slashdot Mirror
You've assumed that the vast majority of gun homicides in the US are caused by criminals. Neatly ignoring the many deaths caused by terrified home defenders, kids who get access to guns, etc.
It's really not like the war on drugs at all. The war on drugs failed because many millions of folks in every country routinely take drugs and circumvent controls to get hold of them. That is patently not the case for gun restrictions, which vanishingly few people try to circumvent in the UK and other Western European countries.
Of course there's no correlation between countries in Western Europe. That's because Western European countries have strict gun control laws which mean that the vast majority of households don't possess a gun. You're expecting to see correlation when you'll only see statistical noise around a zero point. I have no idea how those figures you quote are compiled, but the great majority of guns in Western European countries will be held by the police, the army, gamekeepers, criminals who've obtained them through smuggling and a few other groups. In daily life, civilians have a close-to-zero chance of ever encountering someone with a gun. Which is the gun death rate in Western Europe is so much lower than in the US, where that is decidedly not the case.
I think the tickle in your throat is your brain or your conscience. Because the links you provide are *not* to "stories from the UK or France or Germany or Sweden of crazed killers who've cooked up some clever death dealing machine in their kitchen and then wreaked mayhem on the streets". In fact:
- your first story is about a Californian criminal making a gun that wouldn't have worked if he had fired it, but he didn't fire it. In Fresno. So not the UK or another Western European state, not a clever death dealing machine, and no mayhem. Apart from that, great choice of article!
- your second story is at least in the right country, but is not about clever death dealing machines -- it's about replica guns -- and is not about mayhem on the streets (because none has been implicated in a mass killing). Another great choice of article!
The OP argued that tighter gun control would lead to attacks using *different methods* eg Sarin gas, bombs, etc. I will now spell this out for you, as you are either too stupid or too obtuse to realise what this is about: there are no examples of people carrying out mass attacks using Sarin gas, bombs or other non-gun methods that they cooked up at home in Western Europe, despite gun control. Gun control does not therefore lead to attacks using different methods.
Back in your box
That first graph is probably one of the most stupid fucking graphs I've ever seen. Have you never heard of "keep all other factors constant"? There is no point whatsoever in including conflict countries like Afghanistan or drug-supplier countries like El Salvador on the same graph as Western Europe, the US, Canada etc (ie, countries corresponding to what used to be called "the first world"). Too many confounding variables.
If you do what I actually said, which is look at gun death rates in the US vs Western European countries, you'll find exactly the pattern I said: gun death rates in the US are 2.97 per hundred thousand, while rates for Western European countries vary between 0.12 (UK, strict gun control) and 0.84 (Portugal, less strict gun control).
What a pile of horseshit.
Where's the cite for your uk vs us stats? Show us you're comparing like with like.
Where's the cite for the run on small baseball bats? In a country where people don't even play baseball!
And where's the cite for the long knives thing? This is the only vaguely plausible thing, and the doctors are not the government, and no ban took place. And gun death rates are vastly lower than in the US.
Gun death rates are vastly higher in the US than in Western European countries. Because guns aren't common in Western European countries. Swiss gun death rates are higher than other Western European countries (but lower than the US). Swiss men have guns at home, but are also trained. I think there's a pretty clear pattern...
But it Does Not Happen. There are no stories from the UK or France or Germany or Sweden of crazed killers who've cooked up some clever death dealing machine in their kitchen and then wreaked mayhem on the streets, are there? Mass killings in these countries are dramatically rarer than in the US, and still involve guns for the most part.
What in earth makes you say that about the UK? D you live for the anecdote? Stats don't support you, and as someone actually living here, rather than pontificating about the country from elsewhere, I'm pleased to say that me, my family and my friends do not spend our lives in abject terror of being assaulted by criminals.
I reckon you must be a troll. No one could seriously regurgitate Fox talking points so precisely, and actually believe them, surely?
You know you would not have panicked, do you? Unless you're a veteran, or have actually been in such a situation, you have no idea if you would panic or not. You may like to believe you wouldn't, but you can't be sure you would cope with the immediate fear of violent death. It is something you can only partly train for, and most firearms training course are sure to stress that very point.
And obviously in a crowded cinema, your chance of seeing the shooter as distinct form the panicking crowd is going to be minuscule.
Would it not be a little more honest to say that the dead children and babies are the price you're willing to pay in order to adhere to your right to bear arms? Ie at least acknowledge the cost benefit trade off?
Mod parent up, insightful
Subtle code. Why not talk about "cosmopolitan"? Pin your colours to the mast, so to speak.
Or you could just fuck off back to antisemitic twat land, where you can play happily with all your vile friends, and leave the rest of us in peace
Erm, the first opportunity for Scottish people aged 16 or 17 to vote in elections is coming up but hasn't happened yet....and Scottish 16 year olds who commit a crime are not imprisoned in adult jails.
No, he's right. Age of purchase moved to 18, age of possession is still 16.
This is a truly dipshitted comment. Cameron wrote the fucking article in the fucking Mail announcing the policy change. He's a twat.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2250809/Victory-Mail-Children-WILL-protected-online-porn-Cameron-orders-sites-blocked-automatically.html
How this kind of crap gets marked insightful, I do not know.
Age of consent is not the same as age of adulthood. Legally, you become an adult at 18 in the UK but the age of consent is 16. In the US, you become an adult at 18 as well, but the age of consent varies from state to state.
None of this has anything to do with totalitarianism.
It's a lovely idea, in theory. In practice, it's more likely that the rapist will have a gun than the victim. If they both have a gun, then she's likely to die, rather than be raped. Knowing that the rapist is also going to die is pretty cold comfort.
I have not implied that a woman's sexual organs are something to be ashamed of. I have highlighted that an insult based on a woman being a woman is misogynist. That is a very different thing. It's got nothing to do with the use of the word "vagina". If he'd said "calm down, dear", as David Cameron did to one of his own MPs recently here in the UK, that would be just as sexist without referring to sexual organs.
In a world where hundreds of millions of women are raped, cut, beaten, abused in other ways and killed simply for being women, I will continue to call out misogyny when I see it. And encourage you to not waste energy defending this particular insult by trying to convince yourself, me or others that it is not sexist, but instead put some energy into making the world around you a safer space for the women you know and care for.
The poster assumed the gender of the OP was female and created an insult based on their sex alone. That is misogynist behaviour. You may be desensitised to it, because we all, sadly, hear so much of it, but it is indeed misogynist.
No, true misogyny is hating women, and defending woman-hatred. It's almost entirely done by men. So while I admit it's possible you're a woman, I kind of doubt it, because defending what is obviously intended as a sexist insult by pretending that it's not is a pretty classically misogynist piece of behaviour.
I think it's highly indicative that you chose a misogynist insult in relation to a gun violence discussion. Women-hatred and violence have been vile bedfellows forever
I love the idea that you think that it would have been just as easy for the killer to have used:
- a bomb
- poison gas
- a car
To do this.
Are you completely mad or just very very stupid?
It might have been possible to have used those weapons but it certainly wouldn't have been just as easy. Not even close. More difficult to obtain, transport, and deploy gas or bombs effectively. And you obviously can't drive a car around inside a school killing people, only in the grounds, which would have killed far fewer.
Stupid stupid stupid
No no no. It is not either-or. The issue is, amazingly, multifactorial and guns are most definitely part of the issue.
The Swiss have the highest rate of gun deaths of any European nation, precisely because guns are readily available
The closest European country is Switzerland. Where guns are common due to conscription.
Nobber