Lets say I wanted to buy a gun. Why would a person want a gun in the first place?
1. They want to go and kill someone. (yep that happens often)
2. Collecting. I cant tell you the number of people I know who just love guns, and love to own them, never once shot them, and probably have little to no ammo, just love the guns
3. Personal defense. A lot of people do feel safer when carrying a gun, They could probably feel just as safe with a tazer or mace.
4. Hunting/Target shooting. This is a sport, and it is a pretty big one where im from. We literally had a "deer day" where we got off of school for the first day of deer season. People like to hunt for sport, with guns.

Now the government has a goal, restrict people going for option 1, and let all the other people be free to own a weapon, so long as there is no chance for a #1 to get a hold on the weapon they own. What I think should be done is simply making everyone get permits for the gun, ensure that the gun after registry stays only with them, and in a safe, or on their person when not in use.

This would hopefully not let insane kids get their parents weapons and perform a school shooting, yet allow people who want to buy guns for perfectly reasonable measures to own them. Now there will be mistakes, there will always be black markets, a parents mistake of letting the kid figure out the safes key, and more. As long as the government ensures these people are responsible, hopefully these can be kept to a minimum.

Also what would having guns banned do to stop someone from killing like that. They can get weapons somehow whether guns are banned or not.

I'm not saying that guns should just be handed to whoever has the money, and i'm not saying that they should be banned from anyone owning them. They just need to be placed in the correct, and responsible hands.

How many gun nuts do you know that ACTUALLY Want to kill someone. (before the Apocalypse starts of course.)

Ill also tell you that I do not own any guns, nor do I really intend on owning any in the near future. I do not hunt, shoot targets, or participate in collecting firearms. I collect computers.

What about Switzerland? There every man who has trained in the Swiss militia can keep an army-issued rifle at home (assault rifle locked to semi-auto mode). So here's a society where there are guns everywhere yet there are fewer violent crimes involving guns than involving knives.

The big issue here is personal discipline. The Swiss, if I remember correctly, have a system of mandatory military service for young men. Military training is a lot more than teaching men to use weapons and kill people; it is about building discipline and teaching individuals to work as a group. This discipline is necessary for someone who will own an automatic weapon. A rational person who knows the power of a weapon will not use it to violent ends unless absolutely necessary. When irrational people get their hands on a firearm, they can cause havoc as recently demonstrated.


Isn't that what is already done in almost every country? And how would ensuring all of this be done without invading the privacy that people hold so dear?

I think that anyone who wishes to own an automatic or military weapon (including military-used handguns) must undergo military training and spend 2 years in active reserve. That way people without military training will not be able to get military-grade weapons. Hunting firearms, unless they are used by the military (SKS?), are not affected by this. This doesn't affect hunting much unless you want to use a battle rifle to hunt ducks.

"I think that anyone who wishes to own an automatic or military weapon (including military-used handguns) must undergo military training and spend 2 years in active reserve. That way people without military training will not be able to get military-grade weapons. Hunting firearms, unless they are used by the military (SKS?), are not affected by this. This doesn't affect hunting much unless you want to use a battle rifle to hunt ducks"

Something like this would make sense. Banning all firearms because "they are bad" does not.

That graph is pretty uninteresting. What's interesting is the total number of homicides or the total crime rate (per hundred thousands citizens).

Per capita is more interesting. Otherwise we could have a country of 10 citizens with one murder, and a country of 10 billion citizens and have 1 million murders.

That graph is per hundred thousand citizens...

It's on the left.

Edited my post for clarification.

Yes, hence why it's a per capita value.

Put a line of best fit into that graph. You'll see that USA doesn't behave like other countries - it has a lower gun density than Switzerland, but has a higher gun crime rate. Basically, if Switzerland grew to the size of the USA, it'd have more guns, but still be a safer place.

I find that very interesting.

I think the bigger issue is general cultural mentality. It's not about "keeping guns away from irrational people", because everyone (including you and me) can behave irrationally under the right (wrong) circumstances. Saying otherwise is just naive. The people in the world don't just separate into two categories (irrational or rational; good or bad or any other such categories). Everyone can snap under the right circumstances and start shooting people. The real question is: how often do these circumstances occur in a certain country and what are the consequences when someone snaps?

Apparently the US is just a really bad combination of the circumstances that make people snap (just something that might contribute, but I'm no expert: American news is filled with sensationalist crime reports which might make people paranoid) and the availability of guns that give people the ability to make a right mess when they do.

Also, despite the mandatory assault rifle, guns are much more regulated in switzerland. Its harder to get a permit to randomly carry guns around, you have to store the ammo seperately, etc.

BTW, for anyone skeptical of my assertion that everyone can do horrible things, I can recommend watching this video by the guy who came up with the Stanford prison experiment:

http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbard ... _evil.html

Zimbardo has pretty much spent his life trying to justify the idea that all people can be evil.
He might be right, but almost every single one of his studies has been biased, whether in the method or more often in his analysis of the results towards concluding that his way is actually right, more or less ignoring individual characteristics (E.g. he didn't even try to analyse why only one of the guards in the stanford prison experiment was a total douche).

Point taken. Still, he can't be the only one in the field who thinks that ordinary people can do irrational and evil things under the right circumstances, right? I'd actually love to hear that he has been demonstrated to be wrong, though.

One thing that's different about the US compared to the European countries is race.

Half the murders committed in the US annually are by blacks, which comprise 12% of the population. That's just the facts. As to why this is, there are plenty of theories... we've got our irrational drug laws, our underfunded inner-city police, our decaying educational infrastructure, our shipping manufacturing jobs overseas, white flight, etc. etc. All of these things contribute to a decayed urban core where the poor resort to criminal activity to get by.

Look at Switzerland - highly educated populace, basically the same GDP per capita as the US (and the US number is misleading because it's much more weighted towards the top 10% than in Europe), very low unemployment rate. And more guns per capita than the US. Big shocker - their murder rate is lower.

I've never heard that you need to store ammo separetely in Switzerland, I call BS on that one.

If you blame school shootings on the fact that guns are easily accesible in the U.S. you can't just run away from that assertion in the case of Switzerland by concluding that it's harder to get a permit to carry over there. Psycho teenagers don't have such a permit anyway, I doubt they even buy the gun themselves.

Just goes to show that you can't blame school shootings and high crime rates on gun laws, it's far more complex than that.

And before anyone says "well he's white and suburban" - that's why this is national news, not just another day in the ghetto.

Less than a week later, stabbing spree at a Chicago school.

Where's your indignation about that?

I get indignant about things as I know about them.
Also, I'm not claiming a lack of bias--No kid at my school has yet stabbed himself to death.

It was pretty funny when your mate shot himself though.

Besides, in many countries with restricted guns, knives/swords are also similarly restricted, if not more sometimes.

Fixed. You dont see any of the countries comparable to switzerland, that do ban guns, have such high murder rates, do you? You can use other factors to explain the difference between switzerland and the US, but that doesnt explain why murder rates in other EU countries are way lower.

If you dont see a clear correlation between possession of firearms and murder/crime on that chart, you may need to get your eyes checked..

Then I suggest you educate yourself. I posted an article about detroit self defense killings.

If guns were banned the only people who would be effected are the ones who are using their guns to defend themselves. The ghetto would still have guns and still have access to guns. Detroit will go further to hell.

Don't even bother mentioning how it's the cops job to take care of the streets. They get paid to do a job, if they don't get money they won't be "serving and protecting you"

Of course a white suburban kid with a mommy and a daddy, who lives in a neighborhood where people call the cops because someone was in their flower garden wouldn't understand what it means to be on your own.

What I want to know is, what's up with Belgium?! They seem to be a bit of an outlier.

Indeed, I don't think anyone over here would claim that it should be legal to carry around knives that are meant to be used as a weapon. Of course, banning all knives goes a bit too far, since they also have practical use. As far as I could find, in The Netherlands there are definite rules that prohibit certain knives (butterfly knives, double edged knives, knives over a certain length etc.). On top of that, if it can be demonstrated that someone is carrying a knife (no matter what kind of knife) with no other intention than to stab people with it, he can be charged as well.



To be quite fair, the chart shows a correlation between intentional firearm death and firearm abundance. It basically demonstrates that people prefer to use a gun to murder someone when it's a gun laying around. It doesn't directly demonstrate that people murder more often with guns laying around, because the other types of murder aren't shown. I wouldn't be surprised if the inclusion of that wouldn't change the picture dramatically, but still.