In the last month, 57 people have died in American shootings - all committed with guns legally purchased and registered by the shooters...
Read about them here.
Without any preconceptions, pre-judgments or assumptions, I'd like to address this simple question:
If handguns were illegal, how many of those people would be alive today?
Does it outnumber the people who wouldn't be?
Coffee Bean, as always, keeps this argument grounded in humanity, rather than statistics. I know it's not about how many people are alive or dead, or anything as flat and unemotional as that. I believe in the American constitution and believe that we liberals can't go around asking to change it if we're using that same document to defend constitutional liberties like same-sex marriage...
But 57 people have died this month because of the 2nd Amendment.
9 comments:
I'll point out that at least one of the persons on your list was not able to possess guns legally. I don't know about the rest.
Roland, I do believe that you KNOW you cannot blame the Second Amendment for anyone's death. The Left has a very hard time with understanding that people MUST be and ultimately ARE responsible for their own actions.
Today alone, nine people died in plane crashes. No telling how many died in car crashes. No idea how many were electrocuted or died in accidents either.
By your same logic, ALL of those inanimate objects should be BANNED.
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
gives an estimate of how many defensive gun uses there are a year.
Gun control, when you root through the real data (and when in doubt, one should always retreat to the data) has always seemed a profoundly mercurial topic, and it always for me revolves around a chart from an old FBI report I read comparing gun crime and gun ownership in developed countries around the world. All the countries in Europe map to a nice, shallowing curve, with more guns correlating to more crime, but each gun "adding" less crime than the one before-a logistic curve. Switzerland, with more gun ownership, and with army issued automatic weapons in most homes, fits nicely on the curve-more gun violence than the rest of Europe per capita, but not much.
The US blows the top off the curve. With less guns than Switzerland, we kill way more people-and more people than Spain with somewhat fewer guns, kinda shredding a self-defense argument.
Clearly, the fit of the curve suggests that having more guns around, legitimate and sanctioned or otherwise, presents more opportunities for them to be used in the act of killing people with greater ease and less discomfort than other means. Guns, do in fact kill people.
However, the curve also suggests that an equal contributing factor is that Americans kill people more than their international peers. Between those two facts, the idealistic arguments of both of the most thoroughly entrenched camps are pretty well put to the flame.
Hey Tom - I think you're right, but the majority clearly did have permits.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090407/ap_on_re_us/legal_gunmen
And thanks for the stats on defensive gun use. I was wondering about those. It appears they're pretty vague, though - between 100,000 and 2 million 'defensive gun uses' a year? That's a pretty big margin.
I really liked Z's comments.
Roland, you do realize that Z did not say anything, right? He supposedly quoted a data set that clearly places causation with the number of guns in a particular place.
Using the very same logic that Z quotes, my gun room has an infinitely greater number of guns in it than the rest of my house. No shooting deaths have occurred in my house in any room.
And on your comment regarding permits, those that do get concealed carry permits are generally much better shooters than those that do not. By the very same logic, the better of a shooter that you are, the more crime you thwart.
Silly.
Still, the Leftist ignores the FACT that for a gun to perform any function at all, there must be a person to operate the inanimate object. Sorry, to say guns kill people is the height of stupidity.
This problem in this whole debate is that Leftists want to make moves that appear to be correct, those on the right DO the correct thing.
Check stats on where gun deaths occur, they are highly concentrated in areas with higher gun control. And check specifically government subsidized housing. And check ONE particular race, too.
I've also seen stats indicating that Americans use their guns for violence at a much higher percentage rate than comparable countries.
I think it is because our society as a whole as become so focused on self, i.e., having the most, being the best, surpassing the Jones'.
Two Dogs, your example fails both a sampling test and a granularity test and thus reveals itself as a straw man.
My point is not in direct opposition to yours- yes, guns are fired by people. Places with more guns sitting around have more people at any given moment who, wisely or otherwise, can fire it. But Americans tend to fire them more than most, for whatever sociological reason- it could be the result of our rather unfavorable income distribution curve and correlated national average happiness and satisfaction, or any of a thousand other well demonstrated correlates.
Reality has no respect for the "Leftists" or "Rightists." It is filled with positive and negative feedback loops, and perverse unintended consequences, and sorting effects, chaotic attractors, and a thousand other elements that all sit and cackle at capitalized partisan shouting matches. We just have to do what works- and the whole point of good governance should be to use all the empirical resources at its disposal to uncover those pragmatic solutions. Otherwise its just a waste of breath.
Z, let's just get to your gist, HUMAN BEINGS should be against the law, that is where this argument leads ultimately. Someone who ignores the VERY BASIC fact that without human action, a gun performs no function, cannot be debated. They lack the most basic skill of logical thought.
"Strawman." That is hilarious.
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