Those Swiss fully automatic assault rifles are in the hands of people who have actually been trained by the government as a militia. . In the US, they're owned by nutters.
Like I said, those people effectively include all male population of a certain age, since Swiss militia are conscripts. Are you claiming that there are no nutters there? Or that army training somehow helps prevent killing sprees?
People love to speak about how in Switzerland it's all completely different because it's organized and there's training, but I'd really love to hear the exact mechanism of how it helps to prevent occasions like that. True, the people who have those weapons at their homes are not their legal owners, and cannot legally use them for anything other than their army service. But if some guy decides to go amok and shoot at people, he doesn't care about those legalities - he has a gun and ammo handy, and there's nothing precluding him from using them for that purpose.
And training? They teach people how to shoot those guns. I fail to see how it would help with anything when it comes to sprees, other than making them worse because they'd aim better.
The only logical explanation is that there's some other difference here that explains why young Swiss males don't take their SIGs and go shoot at kids at the nearest kindergarten. Something that, apparently, doesn't have much to do with laws that allow them to handle those guns in the first place.
Talk about misdirection. The argument has gone from seven hundred something down to one case. One.
I didn't say it is the only case, and it's trivial to find more. I said that it's the best known example.
I don't see the point in debating the rest of your claims, because they all hinge on the basic claim that taser does not carry a significant risk of injury or death, where it's demonstrably not the case.
Given the choice between the two, I'd rather live in a world where there a good chance of getting robbed than a good chance of getting shot.
When the probabilities are about equal, sure. What if they're not? Say, legalizing gun ownership would mean that you're twice as likely to get shot by a criminal, but ten times less likely to get raped (as a woman).
LESS GUNS = LESS GUN VIOLENCE
Compare the availability of guns to an average citizen in the USA and Switzerland with their corresponding gun violence rates. It's not as simple as that.
Europe also has rather porous borders, and widely varying gun laws. A citizen of the Czech Republic could go buy a handgun there and travel to any neighboring states pretty easily, for example.
A law against theft or murder restricts a particular unlawful activity.
A law that bans possession of firearms restricts a particular item on the grounds that it might be used for unlawful activity.
The more direct analogy is laws banning possession of lockpicks. On which opinions vary widely, from outright ban, to "can own with a license, need to show reasonable cause", to legal unless used in commission of a crime. If you want to argue the same spectrum for guns, by all means, let's do so.
The reason why the system to regulate class 3 weapons is "effective at keeping powerful weapons out of the hands of hooligans" has nothing to do with background checks, fingerprinting and registration. I had to be fingerprinted and registered and wait a background check when I got my concealed carry permit, too.
No, the reason why automatic weapons are used so rarely in crimes is because they're so rare in general. And the reason for that is because importation and manufacture of new automatic weapons is forbidden, so you have a very limited existing pool. As a result, the price on them is sky-high - you pretty much have to be a collector to even consider spending that much money on a weapon, because there's no other reason to justify it. Unless you're going for a bank robbery or something, there's pretty much no crime that would justify the expense of buying a full auto AK for $10-15k.
Is there any reason to think that mental health in this country is much worse than anywhere else? Not really.
Actually, I think that there is. People in other countries with accessible guns don't go on rampages nowhere near as often, even adjusting for population and number of guns available.
Is it as easy to kill someone with a tool designed specifically for that purpose or with something else?
You're asking the wrong question. Is it easy to construct a tool designed specifically for the purpose of killing many people at once, which is not a gun? The answer is yes, and they have seen widespread use by terrorists already.
I'll reconsider my viewpoint as soon as I get reliable evidence that banning guns would actually reduce the number of those rampages and the body count in any noticeable way (as opposed to, say, seeing more repeats of the Bath School massacre, which did not involve any guns).
The most logical standpoint would be doing exactly what GP has suggested - look at people who actually went on a rampage, and observe the commonalities. If you do indeed find out that they all had large collections of firearms, then what you say makes sense. Until then, it's baseless conjecture.
It actually varies from place to place. The problem is that there are too many other factors that are likely to be more heavily affecting this number - e.g. the poverty rate in a given state / area.
There are also some general trends - for example, violent crime was (and still is) steadily going down in most states for the last several decades, seemingly regardless of what policies they enact - so it seems to be a generic cultural thing.
As someone posted elsewhere: "I don't want to take your guns away, but if the price of freedom is 18 dead elementary school kids 3 times a year, I don't want to be free. "Gun control" doesn't have to mean "take away guns". Stop arguing against that straw man."
It would help if I knew what exactly I'm arguing against, then. Right now I see a bunch of articles like this that are basically demanding that all guns are surrendered and banned forevermore, so clearly it's not a strawman. But, of course, different people have different positions in this debate - it's not down two two sides that are "ban everything" vs "make everything legal".
But you have to be explicit then. Where do you draw the line?
If you're planning a suicide, you might as well just walk into the closest gun range, pay $20 for use of the facility and $10 to rent any handgun, go to the shooting line, and blow your brains out. Don't need to own a gun to use one. I was talking more about shooting other people...
It is always okay to discuss gun control, same as any other political topic. Just leave emotions at the door, please, and use reason and logic.
In this particular case, for example, the guy has used a legally acquired firearm for which he had permit, and to get said permit he went through a half-year process which, as I understand, included evaluation of his mental health and criminal background checks. So it's not the case of an untraceable gun getting into the hands of mentally imbalanced (at least at the time he acquired it), felon or terrorist.
The 2nd Amendment is not an unrestricted right to have any kinds of arms with no regulation or oversight. At the same time, even if you completely removed it from the Constitution and banned all guns, it wouldn't have prevented the occurrence of events like this. You might see illegal guns used then, or you might see something else (like e.g. Bath School disaster).
NRA propaganda is inane, but then so is the one coming from the Brady Campaign. Both sides are heavy on emotions and light on facts, and very much like to cherry-pick numbers and twist definitions to prove their preconceived points.
Guns don't have to kill, either. 99% of the time they're used to shoot paper. Furthermore, even when they're used to kill, it's not always murder or otherwise morally wrong - it's not wrong to kill a person who tries to physically harm you, and would be successful if you wouldn't have an option to resort to lethal force. So, yeah, guns kill - but not all deaths are evil.
look at homicide rates in countries that are our economic peers and have tighter gun control
They have many more differences other than tighter gun control. You'll have to convincingly prove that it's specifically gun control that makes a difference. Which is pretty tricky, since historical data (i.e. looking at the rates before and after stricter gun laws in UK, Canada, Australia etc) does not support it. For that matter, there are also European countries with lax gun laws (e.g. Czech Republic, where concealed handgun carry is permitted for civilians), or large number of guns available to civilians (Switzerland, Finland), which do not have a general violent crime problem not a shooting spree problem.
One of those is controlled and can easily cause many fatalities in a short period, and the othe is not controlled, and is used in many injury related cases, but is much more rarely fatal.
Which one of these is controlled, and how exactly said control would have prevented its use in this case?
I'm particularly interested about explosives, which are trivial to make from readily available materials. You won't be able to go full McVeigh without drawing attention, sure, but then the scale of what he did was much bigger, too. To get a body count similar to this guy, all that a perp would need is two-three pipe bombs filled with nails in a crowded place.
No burst fire of any rate. You have to pull the trigger for each bullet
Almost there already. Full auto is technically legal in US, but manufacture and importation of new guns is banned, and transferring any existing ones is expensive and very time consuming. To the best of my knowledge, no legally registered full auto firearm has ever been used in a shooting spree.
No high capacity clips. 5-10 rounds ought to take down any deer.
Are detachable mags okay? AR-15 (and any rifle with drop-free mags) can be reloaded pretty damn fast.
Even with fixed mags, like on SKS, stripper clips speed up the reloading process fast enough that it's still quite possible to shoot many people in a short amount of time. You might want to go to bolt-action. Except that can still be operated pretty fast with practice, as well, so you'd probably need go all the way down to double-barreled shotguns only.
Only long-barrel rifles should be allowed, since that's all you need for hunting
How does it help against shooting sprees? Rifles are actually more efficient for them (they are more efficient for pretty much anything except for self-defense, when you have to pull a gun fast enough to counter a threat).
In practice, nearly every able-bodied male of a certain (and fairly young) age has a fully automatic rifle in his possession. Sure, legally it's not his property, and he's not supposed to use it outside of his service, but he's required to carry it around and keep it in his house. So if he ever goes crazy like this guy, and decides to go shoot up some kids in school, he'll have it readily available - no need to go and buy one, even, just pick it up and go on your merry way.
So, in practice, Swiss society seems to be more conductive to these kinds of killing sprees, not less. But, guess what? They don't have that problem. IIRC, they had exactly one shooting spree, and that happened in the parliament of one of the cantons.The obvious question then becomes: what, exactly, are Swiss doing right? Or rather, what the Americans are doing wrong compared to the Swiss? Obviously, it's not about keeping guns out of the hands of civilians, since Swiss aren't, effectively, doing that.
(Also note that any reference to "firearm training" in this context is irrelevant. Lack of firearm training is not what causes people to go shoot up a school, and if you train them before they go nuts, they'll just be that much more efficient at it when they do go nuts. In fact, the shooter in this spree had to pass an NRA firearm course in order to get his pistol license.)
It depends. If I go unarmed (or even with a knife of my own) vs a guy with a knife, and armed with a gun vs a guy with a gun, then definitely the latter. When it comes to knives or bare hands, the physically stronger and bigger attacker will always have an immense advantage over me.
Also depends on the gun. I'd very much rather be shot with a.22 than stabbed with a knife.
There are plenty of people who want to own guns for whatever reason, and value this higher than a few dead kids every now and then.
The faulty logic here is the claim that if I give up my handgun, the kids won't die. There is no clearly established causative chain here. There are societies with lower gun ownership but more murders (including those of kids), and there are societies with similar gun ownership but much fewer murders. This would seem to imply that lax gun laws are not what causes those killing sprees.
You missed the obvious one: self-defense against physical assault.
From that perspective, a gun is rather a tool to efficiently and quickly incapacitate a man. It happens to have a very high coincidental lethality rate due to the way it works (which is an inevitable side effect of its efficiency), but that's not its intended goal. Which is why in self-defense you shoot center of mass, not head.
A hunter might need a hunting rifle. A police officer might need a hand gun. I'm not sure why anyone outside of deployed active duty military or on-duty swat team members need an assault rifle.
Very few assault rifles are civilian-owned in the USA. An assault rifle is a selective fire weapon firing an intermediate cartridge - i.e. it must be capable of fully automatic fire. Such weapons are heavily regulated - their production and importation is banned, and each transfer requires registration and a $200 tax. Needless to say, they cost a lot - generally speaking, starting from $10k. Also, several states ban their possession outright in their own laws.
No assault rifles were used in this shooting. The guy had a civilian (semi-auto) AR-15, but he left it in his car. He used two handguns for the actual shooting.
Also, if a police officer might need a handgun - presumably to defend himself if necessary - then why is the same ability denied to common citizens? Don't they have an occasional need to defend themselves efficiently, too?
Slashdot Mirror
Those Swiss fully automatic assault rifles are in the hands of people who have actually been trained by the government as a militia. . In the US, they're owned by nutters.
Like I said, those people effectively include all male population of a certain age, since Swiss militia are conscripts. Are you claiming that there are no nutters there? Or that army training somehow helps prevent killing sprees?
People love to speak about how in Switzerland it's all completely different because it's organized and there's training, but I'd really love to hear the exact mechanism of how it helps to prevent occasions like that. True, the people who have those weapons at their homes are not their legal owners, and cannot legally use them for anything other than their army service. But if some guy decides to go amok and shoot at people, he doesn't care about those legalities - he has a gun and ammo handy, and there's nothing precluding him from using them for that purpose.
And training? They teach people how to shoot those guns. I fail to see how it would help with anything when it comes to sprees, other than making them worse because they'd aim better.
The only logical explanation is that there's some other difference here that explains why young Swiss males don't take their SIGs and go shoot at kids at the nearest kindergarten. Something that, apparently, doesn't have much to do with laws that allow them to handle those guns in the first place.
In civilized countries, we don't let people starve to death. Do you think that I need to give a real argument to support that idea?
Talk about misdirection. The argument has gone from seven hundred something down to one case. One.
I didn't say it is the only case, and it's trivial to find more. I said that it's the best known example.
I don't see the point in debating the rest of your claims, because they all hinge on the basic claim that taser does not carry a significant risk of injury or death, where it's demonstrably not the case.
Given the choice between the two, I'd rather live in a world where there a good chance of getting robbed than a good chance of getting shot.
When the probabilities are about equal, sure. What if they're not? Say, legalizing gun ownership would mean that you're twice as likely to get shot by a criminal, but ten times less likely to get raped (as a woman).
LESS GUNS = LESS GUN VIOLENCE
Compare the availability of guns to an average citizen in the USA and Switzerland with their corresponding gun violence rates. It's not as simple as that.
Europe also has rather porous borders, and widely varying gun laws. A citizen of the Czech Republic could go buy a handgun there and travel to any neighboring states pretty easily, for example.
A law against theft or murder restricts a particular unlawful activity.
A law that bans possession of firearms restricts a particular item on the grounds that it might be used for unlawful activity.
The more direct analogy is laws banning possession of lockpicks. On which opinions vary widely, from outright ban, to "can own with a license, need to show reasonable cause", to legal unless used in commission of a crime. If you want to argue the same spectrum for guns, by all means, let's do so.
The reason why the system to regulate class 3 weapons is "effective at keeping powerful weapons out of the hands of hooligans" has nothing to do with background checks, fingerprinting and registration. I had to be fingerprinted and registered and wait a background check when I got my concealed carry permit, too.
No, the reason why automatic weapons are used so rarely in crimes is because they're so rare in general. And the reason for that is because importation and manufacture of new automatic weapons is forbidden, so you have a very limited existing pool. As a result, the price on them is sky-high - you pretty much have to be a collector to even consider spending that much money on a weapon, because there's no other reason to justify it. Unless you're going for a bank robbery or something, there's pretty much no crime that would justify the expense of buying a full auto AK for $10-15k.
Is there any reason to think that mental health in this country is much worse than anywhere else? Not really.
Actually, I think that there is. People in other countries with accessible guns don't go on rampages nowhere near as often, even adjusting for population and number of guns available.
Is it as easy to kill someone with a tool designed specifically for that purpose or with something else?
You're asking the wrong question. Is it easy to construct a tool designed specifically for the purpose of killing many people at once, which is not a gun? The answer is yes, and they have seen widespread use by terrorists already.
I'll reconsider my viewpoint as soon as I get reliable evidence that banning guns would actually reduce the number of those rampages and the body count in any noticeable way (as opposed to, say, seeing more repeats of the Bath School massacre, which did not involve any guns).
The most logical standpoint would be doing exactly what GP has suggested - look at people who actually went on a rampage, and observe the commonalities. If you do indeed find out that they all had large collections of firearms, then what you say makes sense. Until then, it's baseless conjecture.
It actually varies from place to place. The problem is that there are too many other factors that are likely to be more heavily affecting this number - e.g. the poverty rate in a given state / area.
There are also some general trends - for example, violent crime was (and still is) steadily going down in most states for the last several decades, seemingly regardless of what policies they enact - so it seems to be a generic cultural thing.
As someone posted elsewhere: "I don't want to take your guns away, but if the price of freedom is 18 dead elementary school kids 3 times a year, I don't want to be free. "Gun control" doesn't have to mean "take away guns". Stop arguing against that straw man."
It would help if I knew what exactly I'm arguing against, then. Right now I see a bunch of articles like this that are basically demanding that all guns are surrendered and banned forevermore, so clearly it's not a strawman. But, of course, different people have different positions in this debate - it's not down two two sides that are "ban everything" vs "make everything legal".
But you have to be explicit then. Where do you draw the line?
If you're planning a suicide, you might as well just walk into the closest gun range, pay $20 for use of the facility and $10 to rent any handgun, go to the shooting line, and blow your brains out. Don't need to own a gun to use one. I was talking more about shooting other people...
It is always okay to discuss gun control, same as any other political topic. Just leave emotions at the door, please, and use reason and logic.
In this particular case, for example, the guy has used a legally acquired firearm for which he had permit, and to get said permit he went through a half-year process which, as I understand, included evaluation of his mental health and criminal background checks. So it's not the case of an untraceable gun getting into the hands of mentally imbalanced (at least at the time he acquired it), felon or terrorist.
The 2nd Amendment is not an unrestricted right to have any kinds of arms with no regulation or oversight. At the same time, even if you completely removed it from the Constitution and banned all guns, it wouldn't have prevented the occurrence of events like this. You might see illegal guns used then, or you might see something else (like e.g. Bath School disaster).
NRA propaganda is inane, but then so is the one coming from the Brady Campaign. Both sides are heavy on emotions and light on facts, and very much like to cherry-pick numbers and twist definitions to prove their preconceived points.
marijuana doesn't kill. neither do cheeseburgers
I see that you have conveniently omitted cars.
Guns don't have to kill, either. 99% of the time they're used to shoot paper. Furthermore, even when they're used to kill, it's not always murder or otherwise morally wrong - it's not wrong to kill a person who tries to physically harm you, and would be successful if you wouldn't have an option to resort to lethal force. So, yeah, guns kill - but not all deaths are evil.
look at homicide rates in countries that are our economic peers and have tighter gun control
They have many more differences other than tighter gun control. You'll have to convincingly prove that it's specifically gun control that makes a difference. Which is pretty tricky, since historical data (i.e. looking at the rates before and after stricter gun laws in UK, Canada, Australia etc) does not support it. For that matter, there are also European countries with lax gun laws (e.g. Czech Republic, where concealed handgun carry is permitted for civilians), or large number of guns available to civilians (Switzerland, Finland), which do not have a general violent crime problem not a shooting spree problem.
One of those is controlled and can easily cause many fatalities in a short period, and the othe is not controlled, and is used in many injury related cases, but is much more rarely fatal.
Which one of these is controlled, and how exactly said control would have prevented its use in this case?
I'm particularly interested about explosives, which are trivial to make from readily available materials. You won't be able to go full McVeigh without drawing attention, sure, but then the scale of what he did was much bigger, too. To get a body count similar to this guy, all that a perp would need is two-three pipe bombs filled with nails in a crowded place.
No burst fire of any rate. You have to pull the trigger for each bullet
Almost there already. Full auto is technically legal in US, but manufacture and importation of new guns is banned, and transferring any existing ones is expensive and very time consuming. To the best of my knowledge, no legally registered full auto firearm has ever been used in a shooting spree.
No high capacity clips. 5-10 rounds ought to take down any deer.
Are detachable mags okay? AR-15 (and any rifle with drop-free mags) can be reloaded pretty damn fast.
Even with fixed mags, like on SKS, stripper clips speed up the reloading process fast enough that it's still quite possible to shoot many people in a short amount of time. You might want to go to bolt-action. Except that can still be operated pretty fast with practice, as well, so you'd probably need go all the way down to double-barreled shotguns only.
Only long-barrel rifles should be allowed, since that's all you need for hunting
How does it help against shooting sprees? Rifles are actually more efficient for them (they are more efficient for pretty much anything except for self-defense, when you have to pull a gun fast enough to counter a threat).
It is regulated, but in what way?
In practice, nearly every able-bodied male of a certain (and fairly young) age has a fully automatic rifle in his possession. Sure, legally it's not his property, and he's not supposed to use it outside of his service, but he's required to carry it around and keep it in his house. So if he ever goes crazy like this guy, and decides to go shoot up some kids in school, he'll have it readily available - no need to go and buy one, even, just pick it up and go on your merry way.
So, in practice, Swiss society seems to be more conductive to these kinds of killing sprees, not less. But, guess what? They don't have that problem. IIRC, they had exactly one shooting spree, and that happened in the parliament of one of the cantons.The obvious question then becomes: what, exactly, are Swiss doing right? Or rather, what the Americans are doing wrong compared to the Swiss? Obviously, it's not about keeping guns out of the hands of civilians, since Swiss aren't, effectively, doing that.
(Also note that any reference to "firearm training" in this context is irrelevant. Lack of firearm training is not what causes people to go shoot up a school, and if you train them before they go nuts, they'll just be that much more efficient at it when they do go nuts. In fact, the shooter in this spree had to pass an NRA firearm course in order to get his pistol license.)
You can't enforce the "well regulated militia part", because it's not prescriptive.
It depends. If I go unarmed (or even with a knife of my own) vs a guy with a knife, and armed with a gun vs a guy with a gun, then definitely the latter. When it comes to knives or bare hands, the physically stronger and bigger attacker will always have an immense advantage over me.
Also depends on the gun. I'd very much rather be shot with a .22 than stabbed with a knife.
There are plenty of people who want to own guns for whatever reason, and value this higher than a few dead kids every now and then.
The faulty logic here is the claim that if I give up my handgun, the kids won't die. There is no clearly established causative chain here. There are societies with lower gun ownership but more murders (including those of kids), and there are societies with similar gun ownership but much fewer murders. This would seem to imply that lax gun laws are not what causes those killing sprees.
Yes. They can also be involved in a potentially lethal use of force that does not qualify as murder.
You missed the obvious one: self-defense against physical assault.
From that perspective, a gun is rather a tool to efficiently and quickly incapacitate a man. It happens to have a very high coincidental lethality rate due to the way it works (which is an inevitable side effect of its efficiency), but that's not its intended goal. Which is why in self-defense you shoot center of mass, not head.
Bolt-action with stripper clips will work just fine, too. IIRC there was at least one successful shooting spree in UK involving a .22 bolt action...
A hunter might need a hunting rifle. A police officer might need a hand gun. I'm not sure why anyone outside of deployed active duty military or on-duty swat team members need an assault rifle.
Very few assault rifles are civilian-owned in the USA. An assault rifle is a selective fire weapon firing an intermediate cartridge - i.e. it must be capable of fully automatic fire. Such weapons are heavily regulated - their production and importation is banned, and each transfer requires registration and a $200 tax. Needless to say, they cost a lot - generally speaking, starting from $10k. Also, several states ban their possession outright in their own laws.
No assault rifles were used in this shooting. The guy had a civilian (semi-auto) AR-15, but he left it in his car. He used two handguns for the actual shooting.
Also, if a police officer might need a handgun - presumably to defend himself if necessary - then why is the same ability denied to common citizens? Don't they have an occasional need to defend themselves efficiently, too?