Originally Posted by
pbjosh
Gordon - you have no data to back up your opinion. I have data to back up my position. You seem to treat your opinion as fact. It is just a guess, and that is obvious. Like I mentioned several times also, while Australia saw a 20% decline in deaths after banning guns, the US saw a 50% decrease during the same time, while loosening gun control laws, and ownership of firearms went up.
Firearms do not make a nation more or less violent.
Ah, maybe I wasn't clear. Even though I said what I think the problem (and hence, the solution is) several times and I have been the most verbose on the subject in this forum, and I have not said, not once, that everybody needs to carry a gun, that seems to be inferred instead of understood.
To be clear:
The answer is you need to change the CULTURE. Not that you need to disarm everyone, nor give everybody a gun, but you need to affect a culture that respects firearms, trains people with firearm usage, and doesn't glorify them like we do in and with our gang/movie cultures.
Switzerland has that. Most of the US has that. But 5% do not. And that 5% causes the vast majority of the problem.
Sitting here and crowing about guns being the problem is totally missing the point. They are a symptom of the problem, not the cause. It should be so fucking obvious that everybody gets it but almost none of you do, and you guys are smart.
Here is the obvious part:
People have always killed other people. They have always found a way. But as culture moves forward, as we become more civilized we stop doing that. Guns, knives, swords, bows and arrows, clubs, sticks, bones. They always find a way. Gun are not unique, though they do it better.
As weapons become more lethal, the surprising fact is civilization has become more civil. Just a weird correlation, and no, not a causation.
But people will try and kill others. They always will. Hence the discussion in the beginning of Evil.
For the argument to move forward we need to discard if it is about guns or not about guns. Because it really isn't. That won't solve the problem of whither people kill each other.
My position is: It will come, in the US, from 1) radically changing gang/gun culture 2) better mental health care 3) proper paperwork systems that can properly block some people who have access to firearms who shouldn't.
That accounts for almost all homicides and gun related crime in the US. And it won't stop everything. Nothing will. It is Evil. But it will reduce it to levels seem in the rest of the developed world. Just eliminating gang gun usage will. Just that.
The argument is wrong though if you are arguing the tool, or the means. You need to look at changing the MOTIVE. If you can change the Motive, the means will have no use.