Gun control in the USA

obplayer wrote: »

A modern military rifle has a tremendous muzzle velocity. This creates a cavity as it goes through the body. While temporary this cavity can and does create a large exit wound, and the cavity created as the round passes through the body does damage as it is created.

http://emergency.unboundmedicine.com/emergency/ub/view/5-Minute_Emergency_Consult/307519/all/Wound_Ballistics

'Bullet crushes tissue it directly passes through, forming a permanent cavity.'

You must also understand that modern hunting rifles and handguns have hugely greater muzzle velocity than when the second amendment was passed. They are simply not comparable.

For handguns check the following

http://www.angelfire.com/mi2/jamesyoungergang/hanska.html

'Cole had suffered an amazing total of eleven wounds; five in Northfield and six at Hanska Slough'

With modern handguns he would have died.

obplayer wrote: »

This is my last post. If you are saying that modern weapons are less dangerous, or even remotely comparable to those available in the days of the second amendment then you are seriously deluded. I've been a shooter too.

50 Cent was shot nine times and is still making records, Joseph Guzman survived 19 gunshot wounds in 2006.

And you are 95% likely to survive a gun shot wound assuming you don't bleed out according to this doctor. And 80% of potential sites on the body that a bullet hits are non-fatal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0

robindch wrote: »

And do gun advocates think that a five-year old is capable of distinguishing between a toy gun and a real one?

Some children are introduced to shootong at a very young age, and in that case never given unsupervised access.

No doubt the family of Tmorej Smith (dead from gunshot wounds) would have wished so.

They bought a pink gun into the home and left it unsecured. The is no legislating for that kind of idiocy, a search of the home would probably reveal bleach under theb sink within reach and pain meds in a drawer accessible to toddlers.

And do gun advocates believe it's fine for kids to threaten, without consequences, to shoot each other?

You didn't run around as a kid pointing a stick going Pew! Pew!? Seriously? Tell me how damaging it was to you and society?
Perhaps you can tell me what consequences a five year old who shouts "bang, bang" at another child in the playground should be? Call Homeland Security perhaps?


Robin, you persist in trotting out these single incidents as if they prove something, when in fact as I have pointed out all you are doing is throwing petrol on the flames of hysteria. Why don't you try engaging in proper debate instead?

obplayer wrote: »

This is my last post.

Why is this such a common phrase in disagreements between people who have opinions on gun control policy and legislation but no experience using firearms; and people who have differing opinions on the topic and experience using firearms?

I had no idea murder was an actual physical device, a piece of engineering whose proper function and use required some technical knowledge to understand and practical experience to fully grasp. I'm shocked. I always thought it referred to a generic abstract action whose means were irrelevant.

robindch wrote: »

Well, if guns were outlawed, then perhaps they wouldn't have been able to buy one.

Are you seriously suggesting all guns be banned? Because that is not even the law in Ireland.

An argument that runs "a child was killed by X, therefore X should be outlawed" even you can see is logically flawed.

Perhaps you didn't have time to read the story I quoted? In it, two kids were playing with what they thought was a nice pink toy, when one accidentally shot himself in the head. If parents had drilled the kids with the idea that you should never go near a gun, never play with it, never point it at anybody,

You just:
A. Agreed with me that the parents were at fault.
B. Made the case for children receiving proper gun instruction in homes that own guns, and
C. Made the case that parents rather than governments should ensure that those safety concepts are drilled into a child.

never play any games that involve fake or real guns, well, perhaps that child might still be alive?

Are you serious? Do you advocate the banning of toy guns? Or paintball? Airsoft?

Well, in all fairness, I was replying to a post by FISMA's in which trotted out a series of single examples.

Robin, you have trotted out single examples all through this thread.

I just refuted the first one. The others are equally trivially wrong.

I suspect because arguing with gun advocates is about as rewarding as arguing with creationists.

Well, at least you avoided "gun nuts", whilst still managing to be insulting.

Tell me, do you have any intention of debating the issue? Or are snide posts and one off examples the sum total of your contribution.

magicbastarder wrote: »

hang on; you're claiming that regulation does not work, but your solution is regulation?

My "claim" (and by that I presume you mean the findings of the US Department of Justice, the CDC, the National Academy of Sciences, and a lot of other such groups) is that legislation does not work when trying to address gun violence in a country as a whole; my "solution" (and by that I presume you mean my comment on this one single specific case) is that individuals taking on personal responsibility for gun safety does work.

One is legislation for an entire population; the other is a personal undertaking. The two are not really directly comparable.

robindch wrote: »

A related discussion concerns whether or not releasing more guns into the community increases safety (as gun advocates maintain), or reduces is (as gun control advocates maintain).

I would dispute the idea that you can say "gun advocates" there as though there was agreement on this point; there isn't, the entire topic is orthogonal to the question of private firearms ownership, and frankly the science that's been done on this was evaluated by the National Academy of Sciences some years ago, who found that there simply wasn't any reliable evidence one way or the other. There's interesting anecdotal accounts from both sides, but no actual proven data or analysis that survives peer review.

Gun advocates maintain that it allows people to do pretty much whatever they want with guns.

That's not even close to their position, in fact it's a damn near defamatory way to describe their position. The actual position gun advocates have on this is the far simpler point that the amendment guarantees a legal right in the US for an individual to possess firearms; while gun control advocates claim it has been misinterpreted by the US Supreme Court and that it should not provide that right.

magicbastarder wrote: »

but THAT'S THE POINT. you are *not* able to depend on every single gun user to be responsible with their weapons.

Firearms. And yes, that's true. I also cannot depend on every single car user to be responsible with their vehicles, which is why I drove past yet another car crash on the way to work this morning and which is why we see people dying on the roads every year.

We don't ban cars though, we just make it a crime to drive recklessly, have licencing and testing and age limits before you can drive on public roads, and require insurance.

And before you say it, there's a specific criminal offence in Ireland for discharging a firearm recklessly, we do have licencing, we have competency requirements for licences (and testing in certain cases like shooting deer on Coillte land), we have age limits and we have insurance (though it's more strongly recommended than legally mandatory). And we also have a shedload of other legal requirements.

None of these are technically incompatible with US law as far as I know (though I'm not an expert on US firearms law by a wide margin).

However, they're not the regulation you're thinking of, and none of them would have prevented Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech or any of the other high-profile rare mass shootings in the US; because in each of those cases, the law was completely bypassed with malice aforethought - and in Sandy Hook's case, the law was bypassed by someone willing to kill their own mother in order to break the law regarding possession of firearms. Frankly, when someone is that strongly motivated to do wrong to others, as much as it galls and sounds like a child's logic, no written law in the world will stop them and you really will need some person to stop them.

And that brings you right round in a circle to looking at the idea of armed guards in schools - an unpleasant thought, but one shared by both gun advocates like the NRA and gun control advocates like Bill Clinton (under whose aegis the federal assault weapons ban was enacted). If two groups from such ideological endpoints actually agree on a measure and call for it (albeit not at the same time), I'd say that meant the measure might not be as daft as it might initially sound.