Guns bad...case closed

[Tero]

Here's my proposal. I would propose The Irresponsible Gun Owners Act. It boils down to this: If you buy a gun, and that gun is subsequently used by another person to shoot or hurt someone, because you had carelessly left it lying around and loaded, or where ammo could be had, YOU GO TO JAIL FOR A LONG TIME. I recall a man who had his son with him, he had taken a gun to a gun store to try to sell it. Getting in the truck, the gun went off and killed his son. Now, they called that a terrible tragedy and said he'd been punished enough by the death of his son.

Nope. That don't hack it. He needs to be in jail. We need to make gun owners understand that there is a cost for their carelessness. It is a fact that a gun in a household is FAR more likely to be used in the death of a household member than it is to defend the household from an intruder.

And I don't see, as a decent people, how we can let this go on. I don't like the idea of banning guns, and this seems like an alternative that is worth considering. Gun owners should take personal responsibility for the deadly weapons they own. You do this a few times in some high-profile cases, then I think that gun owners would think twice about leaving loaded guns setting around the house.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/2 ... Owners-Act

And the statistics do show that the "responsible gun owner" is mostly a myth. every single gun owner has moments where the gun is not under their control. I worked in a plant that was across the freeway from a slum. Some people worked a night shift and thought they needed guns. It was a fenced parking lot but quite easy to get into. A number of the cars had guns, as the plant did not allow guns on site except for guards.

[Seth]

Here's my proposal. I would propose The Irresponsible Gun Owners Act. It boils down to this: If you buy a gun, and that gun is subsequently used by another person to shoot or hurt someone, because you had carelessly left it lying around and loaded, or where ammo could be had, YOU GO TO JAIL FOR A LONG TIME. I recall a man who had his son with him, he had taken a gun to a gun store to try to sell it. Getting in the truck, the gun went off and killed his son. Now, they called that a terrible tragedy and said he'd been punished enough by the death of his son.

Nope. That don't hack it. He needs to be in jail. We need to make gun owners understand that there is a cost for their carelessness. It is a fact that a gun in a household is FAR more likely to be used in the death of a household member than it is to defend the household from an intruder.

And I don't see, as a decent people, how we can let this go on. I don't like the idea of banning guns, and this seems like an alternative that is worth considering. Gun owners should take personal responsibility for the deadly weapons they own. You do this a few times in some high-profile cases, then I think that gun owners would think twice about leaving loaded guns setting around the house.

As it happens, we have plenty of laws that deal with exactly this sort of thing, and a justice system that adjudicates such incidents. People go to jail all the time for negligent use of firearms. That one or another didn't is an artifact of how the justice system works, which takes things like "what is the effect of jailing the breadwinner of the family on the rest of the family after a tragic accident where there is no evidence of deliberate negligence?"

I think we'd be better off concentrating on putting actual criminals who deliberately use guns to commit crimes in jail for a "LONG TIME", something the liberal cocksuckers in the federal government refuse to do, even though the US Attorney has the power to put EVERY criminal who is in possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime of ANY KIND in prison for a mandatory minimum of five years. Wanna guess how many times the feds actually even file a companion case in a case of criminal gun possession? Almost never.

And the statistics do show that the "responsible gun owner" is mostly a myth. every single gun owner has moments where the gun is not under their control.

This is a pure, unadulterated lie.

I worked in a plant that was across the freeway from a slum. Some people worked a night shift and thought they needed guns. It was a fenced parking lot but quite easy to get into. A number of the cars had guns, as the plant did not allow guns on site except for guards.

And many states have passed laws making it lawful for people to have guns in their cars while at work precisely because they DO need guns going to and from work. And if any gun was stolen from a car in that lot, that's the responsibility of the criminal stealing the gun, and the responsibility of the company for not properly securing its employees vehicles and allowing the theft to happen.

[Blind groper]

To Seth

About gun owners being irresponsible.

Any gun owner who keeps a gun at home under insecure conditions is irresponsible. You have argued in the past that guns need to be kept easily accessible, not in a safe, in case they are needed in the home to defend against an intruder. But I have pointed out that, out of 16,000 murders each year, only 100 come from an intruder into the home. A hell of a lot more than 100 murders each year happen BECAUSE a gun is kept without full security (not in a safe) in the home.

Any gun owner keeping the gun out of a safe is irresponsible. That adds up to a hell of a lot of irresponsible gun owners in the USA.

[Seth]

To Seth

About gun owners being irresponsible.

Any gun owner who keeps a gun at home under insecure conditions is irresponsible.

That depends on exactly what you mean by "insecure conditions." It's not a one-size-fits-all proposition. What is adequately secure in one household might not be in another.

You have argued in the past that guns need to be kept easily accessible, not in a safe, in case they are needed in the home to defend against an intruder.

Yes, that is true. A home-defense firearm is of no use at all if it is not loaded and cannot be accessed in a matter of seconds by the homeowner at need.

But I have pointed out that, out of 16,000 murders each year, only 100 come from an intruder into the home.

You haven't pointed it out, you've made it up, out of whole cloth, and in doing so you also mendaciously and deliberately ignore the millions of times per year that homeowners use their quickly-accessible firearms to PREVENT murders, and other crimes short of murder. You're lying, it's just that simple. Moreover, your argument disrespects the rights of those purported 100 people who ARE (according to you) murdered in their homes who had a right not to be murdered and a right to keep and bear arms for effective self defense, particularly and explicitly in their own homes.

A hell of a lot more than 100 murders each year happen BECAUSE a gun is kept without full security (not in a safe) in the home.

And millions of potential murders are prevented by having an easily-accessible loaded firearm in the home.

Any gun owner keeping the gun out of a safe is irresponsible. That adds up to a hell of a lot of irresponsible gun owners in the USA.

The problem is that "not in a safe" is a vague term which makes your statement incomprehensible and largely a biased bit of deliberately mendacious propaganda, which is quite typical of lying anti-gun propagandists.

I strongly suspect that by "a safe" you mean some giant steel box with a complex locking system that takes time to open. But that defeats the whole purpose of having a firearm readily available for home defense, as you well know. But there are plenty of alternative "safes" available that both allow immediate access while securing the firearm from unauthorized access, particularly by children. From button-combination locks to biometric safes that respond only to authorized fingerprints there are devices that solve the problem of kids and guns, and yes, any parent with young children or children of any age who have not received thorough gun safety training who keeps a firearm in the house that is not secured against a child playing with it is indeed being irresponsible. But "secured" means different things under different circumstances.

Then again, someone who lives in a home where there are no children has a different situation to deal with and so different, and lesser degrees of securing their guns are appropriate and reasonable. This is not to say that it is acceptable to leave loaded firearms lying about if one ever has guests, especially ones who might have children with them, but demanding that every gun owner unload, disassemble and lock firearms up in slow-to-access combination safes and store the ammunition separately is simply not called for and is not, of course, legally permissible now that the Supreme Court has ruled that effective armed home defense is covered by the 2nd Amendment and that handguns are explicitly protected by the 2nd Amendment as suitable and appropriate for home defense.

The rational conclusion is, of course, that the law merely imposes a duty upon gun owners not to allow their firearms to be accessed by anyone in any way that results in a crime being committed or someone being unlawfully injured or killed. It is left up to the individual to decide how best to meet that standard of conduct and if an individual gun owner fails in this duty, then as in the case of any crime, the culpable individual is punished according to the statute after due process.

On the other hand, I strongly advocate that all firearms be kept locked up when not being used, except for those used for personal defense when they are in the possession of the individual. All my guns are so secured, not only in a gun safe but behind locked doors as well, except for my home and personal defense weapons, which are secured in quick-access devices.

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This sort of care is taken by the vast, overwhelming majority of law-abiding, responsible gun owners.

Those who don't use due care would not use due care even if the law required them to do so because the law already requires them to handle and store their firearms responsibly or be held liable for their failure to do so. Therefore, no further laws are required.

[Blind groper]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc ... on/266613/

You have a short memory, Seth!

The reference above is where I got the 100 homicides each year from an intruder in the home. Across the whole USA!!!

This is not a major problem. You do not need a gun in the home to defend against an intruder, since only 1 person in 3,200,000 in any one year will be murdered by an intruder.

The extra killings that come from having a gun in the home are much worse. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, your chances of being murdered double simply by keeping a gun at home.

This means that keeping a gun at home changes the odds of getting murdered from 1 in 20,000 in any one year, to 1 in 10,000. Compare that to 1 in 3,200,000 of being murdered by an intruder. Makes keeping a gun at home to protect against intruders look pretty damn stupid!

[JimC]

Blind groper wrote:

The extra killings that come from having a gun in the home are much worse. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, your chances of being murdered double simply by keeping a gun at home.

While being in general agreement with your position on guns, the above statistic could be somewhat skewed. People who live in bad neighbourhoods may tend to buy and keep guns at home more frequently than those in safe neighbourhoods. They may well be at more risk of home invasions because of where they live, but this is not necessarily a direct consequence of having a gun at home.

[Blind groper]

http://www.humanosphere.org/science/201 ... est-world/

The reference above shows international statistics on murder rates, and especially murders committed with guns. It shows that, of 23 westernised and developed nations, the USA in 2013 had a murder rate of over 5 killings per 100,000 people per year. The second worst was Finland with less than 2. Finland is also the nation out of that group with the second highest gun ownership.

The only group of nations with significantly higher gun murders than the USA are Central to South American nations, who have major crime and drug problems.

If we look at the 48 OECD nations, and exclude Mexico (one of the Central American nations with big crime), there is a correlation coefficient of 0.8 between gun ownership and murder rate. That is an enormously high correlation, and one that cannot be laughed away.

Joe Biden made the interesting comment that most people shot dead with guns were killed with their own gun. This is, of course, true only if you include suicide. The New England Journal Of Medicine published a study which concluded tat simply having a gun in the house increased the likelihood of a member of te family killing him/herself by 2 to 10 times (depends on how securely the gun is stored). While Seth will predictably reject this by saying suicides do not matter, it wold be different if it was his son or daughter who used his gun to suicide!

[Blind groper]

the above statistic could be somewhat skewed. People who live in bad neighbourhoods may tend to buy and keep guns at home more frequently than those in safe neighbourhoods. They may well be at more risk of home invasions because of where they live, but this is not necessarily a direct consequence of having a gun at home.

Jim

100 million American own guns. If 100 million people, on average, have double the risk of being murdered, this is not to any great extent the result of a few people living in bad areas.

[Seth]

Here's a guy in the UK who definitely needed a defensive handgun...or any other effective self defense weapon. This is exactly the kind of person that BG and the rest of the anti-gun dopes don't give a flying fuck about. It's fine with BG if someone beats the shit out of someone else because they are helpless to defend themselves.

[Blind groper]

Seth

Two points relating to your anecdote.

1. There is no guarantee that if he had a gun it would have made things better. It might have ended with him being killed instead of being beaten up.

2. The plural of anecdote is NOT data.

[Seth]

Seth

Two points relating to your anecdote.

1. There is no guarantee that if he had a gun it would have made things better. It might have ended with him being killed instead of being beaten up.

There are no guarantees of anything, but it also might have completely averted the entire crime if he'd produced a pistol and started shooting at the intrudes immediately, the moment they invaded his home with force and violence. In any event it's not up to YOU, or any government, to predict outcomes and limit self defense options before or after the fact. Only the victim gets to decide what tools he or she might need to prevent such injuries.

2. The plural of anecdote is NOT data.

Yes, in fact it is when the data being collected involves persons victimized, injured or killed by violent criminals because their governments deliberately disarmed them and left them helpless to defend themselves. Each one of those anecdotes, and there are tens of millions of them, is a nail in the coffin of the idiotic argument you trot out regularly. You don't like the fact that people do actually defend themselves successfully with their guns, and you don't like the fact that people who are unarmed are more likely to be injured or killed by their assailants, so you just ignore them entirely, which is about as morally bankrupt as it can possibly get.

[Seth]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc ... on/266613/

You have a short memory, Seth!

The reference above is where I got the 100 homicides each year from an intruder in the home. Across the whole USA!!!

Yes, I tend to forget bullshit factoids you pull out of your ass quickly.

This is not a major problem. You do not need a gun in the home to defend against an intruder, since only 1 person in 3,200,000 in any one year will be murdered by an intruder.

It's a major fucking problem for every one of those 100 people who are murdered, not to mention the tens of thousands who are not murdered but who may be beaten up like this guy:

You don't give a fuck about him or anybody like him. You're fine with what happened to him. You're fine with all the women that are raped by intruders, in fact you favor people being beaten up and raped rather than allowing them effective means for defending themselves. If I didn't know better I'd say you were a rapist and violent thug, given the way you defend their ability to pummel and rape people with impunity.

The extra killings that come from having a gun in the home are much worse.

Much worse than what? What "extra killings," specifically. Produce a complete list of these alleged "extra killings."

In any event YOU don't get to make that analysis or that rule, so fuck off.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, your chances of being murdered double simply by keeping a gun at home.

And the NEJM article is a blatant falsehood that has been debunked many times because of it's (deliberately) flawed procedures for data collection.

This means that keeping a gun at home changes the odds of getting murdered from 1 in 20,000 in any one year, to 1 in 10,000. Compare that to 1 in 3,200,000 of being murdered by an intruder. Makes keeping a gun at home to protect against intruders look pretty damn stupid!

Unless you're like this guy:

In which case it looks pretty damned stupid not to have a gun.

The individual, personal right to effective tools of self defense is not a statistical argument and never has been. It's a personal choice that no one, and I mean NO ONE has any right to interfere with.

[Seth]

Blind groper wrote:

The extra killings that come from having a gun in the home are much worse. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, your chances of being murdered double simply by keeping a gun at home.

While being in general agreement with your position on guns, the above statistic could be somewhat skewed. People who live in bad neighbourhoods may tend to buy and keep guns at home more frequently than those in safe neighbourhoods. They may well be at more risk of home invasions because of where they live, but this is not necessarily a direct consequence of having a gun at home.

And that is why the NEJM article is false. It's authors used a deliberately biased method of data collection from a very limited inner-city area with precisely the characteristics you mention, and then it failed to account for whether the gun involved was owned by the homeowners and whether the gun was legally owned by the homeowners, and whether the homeowners were themselves criminals and members of criminal gangs subject to threats from other rival criminal gang members.

This particular study has been dissected and debunked long, long ago.

[Seth]

It shows that, of 23 westernised and developed nations, the USA in 2013 had a murder rate of over 5 killings per 100,000 people per year.

I'm going to stop right there because you are spouting the same old cherry-picking "westernized and developed nations" bullshit you always spew, which is intentionally and mendaciously biased language specifically intended to make the US look bad when in fact the US falls far down the list of all nations and their gun death statistics, which includes nations which are not "westernized and developed" to your satisfaction but who still have rigid and draconian gun control schemes.

The reason that you and every anti-gun fuckwit use this cherry-picking crap is because when the truth is told it proves unequivocally that neither gun bans nor harsh gun control measures have any effect whatsoever on the criminal use of guns, which utterly destroys your entire argument, not that you haven't done so many times all on your own by admitting that the number of guns in a society is not related to the amount of gun violence.

So shut the fuck up.

[Seth]

Jim

100 million American own guns.

Liar. Neither you nor anyone else knows how many Americans own guns.

If 100 million people, on average, have double the risk of being murdered, this is not to any great extent the result of a few people living in bad areas.

But they don't have that doubled risk because your factoid is simply a lie.

Besides, two times zero is still zero. Two times 0.00004 is 0.00008. Big fucking deal. Your factoid is bullshit because an individual's risk of being murdered is not the same for every person, it varies wildly and depends on many factors, not just whether they own a gun. The risk of a black male between 15 and 25 living in any large metropolitan area being murdered is thousands of times greater than the risk of a 45 year old white male living in a rural area.

Your pet study is bullshit because it used only a very carefully selected specific and deliberately biased pool of homes, which of course fatally skewed the results.