I've mostly disengaged from this head vs brick wall debate, but I jsut wanted to interject something regarding those who compare prohibition of drugs/alcohol with prohibition of guns.
Quite frankly, the comparison is retarded.
The success of criminalization needs to be assessed as a net change in harm to society. Number of deaths is a good place to start.
Prohibition of drugs in general doesn't work very well. We know that for a fact - 20+ years of the War on Drugs and all we have to show for it is overcrowded prisons and what appears to be a never-ending cycle of violence and addiction, with a rather unhealthy dose of ODs for good measure.
The reasons for this are simple: ease of manufacture, and lack of regulation.
Prohibition is nearly impossible for most drugs, simply because they're trivially easy to make. Marijuana just
grows. Meth is made in kitchens. You quite simply cannot control supply, no matter what you do.
But so long as there is no government-regulated and legal recourse, you also have no way to control the content of the prohibited substances. The result? Coke cut with Comet, and an unexpectedly pure dose of heroin that turns a pleasant evening into a lethal overdose.
Driving the drug market underground also creates, obviously, a black market - with all of the social cost that implies. Supply cannot be controlled, so there's always territory to fight about, money to steal...and you can't call the cops when you've just been robbed. It's a libertarian "private security" nightmare come to life, where organizations protect their investments themselves. In more direct terms, we have drug cartels fighting each other and the police, well-financed and well-equipped, killing each other and innocent bystanders.
Clearly prohibition of drugs doesn;t work very well.
But the comparison with guns doesn't make a lot of sense, for just a few reasons:
You
can influence the supply of guns. You can't just manufacture an assault rifle in your living room from off-the-shelf parts. You can't grow handguns with hydroponics. Oh, sure, you can make some homemade firearms, but they aren't nearly as effective as what we commonly use today - and they still aren't as easily available.
This means that while you certainly cannot completely eliminate the presence of guns, you
can restrict their availability with an effectiveness simply impossible for drugs.
Restricted availability for guns translates directly to reduced gun violence, which means fewer deaths.
A recent
UC Davis study shows that
gun shows are the leading source of guns used in crimes. Many of the transactions are illegal, but take place in an environment where undocumented sales will not be noticed, right out in the open.
Criminalizing non-sporting guns (ie, only allowing shotguns and hunting rifles, possibly tightly controlled handguns at certified sporting ranges only kept under lock and key and unavailable to take home) would eliminate the source of most of the guns used to commit crimes in the US. When your gun breaks, you won't be able to have it repaired. You won't be able to go to a gun show and buy an assault rifle, or even a handgun. Weapons will need to be imported...and while you most definitely cannot stop the supply of guns, you
can very effectively reduce their numbers.
So those who compare drug prohibition to gun control are simply verbalizing from the orifice typically utilized for the expulsion of feces.
Meanwhile, the effectiveness of guns as a deterrent has been brought up repeatedly in this thread. What of the time-old adage, "when guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns?"
Well, it's certainly true, by definition even. Law-abiding citizens will give up their guns, but we can hardly expect criminals to - they already have their guns illegally anyway. So what happens when a gun-armed crackhead invades your home, and you now have no way to protect yourself?
Statistically, you're both more likely to escape with your lives.
Let's be honest in this debate: this is an argument driven completely by
fear. Irrational fear. Fear blown far out of proportion to actual risk. You are
significantly more likely to die in a car accident than to be murdered - and not even necessarily in a home invasion (in 2007, there were 41,059 automotive deaths in the US; in the same year, there were 16,929 total murders). The per-capita murder rate in the US is 0.042802 per 1,000 people - the chances of being murdered are insanely small. It's not a 1% chance;
one in every 23,363 people will be murdered in the US. I don't know about you, but I don't even
know 23,000 people. To visualize it, picture a football stadium that seats 20,000 people.
One of those people in a packed game
might get killed (and that's all murders, not restricted to firearms).
And yet we're terrified, to the point that we're debating what to do when this oh-so-certain event takes place. "Home defense" is not a defensible position - statistically, you're not likely to be burglarized, and you're far less likely to be killed in a home invasion.
Why is this? Simple, really - we see murders and home invasions on TV cop dramas and in the news all the time. Familiarity gives us a false sense of likelihood - because we hear about it all the time, we literally consider home invasions and murders to be far more common (and specifically more likely to happen to us) than they actually are. This is exacerbated by the emotional impact of home invasions and murders (we assess a higher expectation of risk when there is an emotional attachment, particularly heartfelt, tearful personal stories on 60 Minutes). Our instincts tell us to "defend ourselves!"
But those instincts evolved at a time when "home invasion" meant a rival tribe trying to steal our food, or a mountain lion in the camp. A weapon and a strong defense were good ideas, and would save the lives of tribe members.
We don't live in those circumstances any more (well, certain rural areas may need defense against a coyote or mountain lion - but those are easily handled with hunting rifles, and not very effectively defended against with handguns; assault rifles are just a bit of overkill). In a home invasion, rather than facing a rival tribe who's trying to steal all of your food, kill the men and rape the women, a home invasion is
almost always just a simple thief. Even if he's armed, he doesn't want to kill you - he'd rather you weren't home, and may not even realize you're there. Your best bet is to hide and avoid a confrontation - you're both more likely to walk away from the situation alive.
And let's be honest: scary as it is, a home invasion is
not justification for taking a life. That's why we don't execute thieves. Fear breeds an irrational, exaggerated response.
That irrational, exaggerated response is yet another reason "home defense" just translates to more death: you'll invariably shoot a person who was just trying to take your TV. Did he deserve punishment? Sure. Should he have taken your TV? Certainly not. Did he scare the bejezus out of you? Probably.
But he didn't deserve to die for taking your TV and making you shit your pants.
Guns for "self-defense" just mean more people dead at the end of the day, not less.
Guns for "self-defense" don;t deter anything, as crime rates between the US and other countries show, where gun bans don;t change burglary rates. The thief doesn't know you're armed until you shoot him, anyway - you can't classify something as a "deterrent" if it cannot act to
deter a thief from committing a crime, and a thief can hardly be deterred by something he's unaware of.
"But without guns," you'll say, "people will just commit murder with other things, like knives, and you'll have no way to defend yourself."
"Your argument is retarded," I'll respond.
The murder rates for the US and the UK:
quote:
# 24 United States: 0.042802 per 1,000 people
# 46 United Kingdom: 0.0140633 per 1,000 people
Obviously, some people switch to knives (or whatever) to commit murder. But the murder rate is
significantly lower in the UK, where you cannot own a gun.
This may have something do do with the fact that, as someone eariler noted, drive-by
stabbings are rather difficult.
This imbecilic argument also relies on the assumption that
firearms are the only means available to protect oneself. This is so massively false that anyone using this argument should immediately be mocked within an inch of their lives.
Nonlethal methods of defense exist by the score.
Burglary alarms actually
do function as a deterrent, because they have nice little signs out in your yard and on the window saying your house is protected (in fact, I recall reading a study once where homes without security systems were statistically more likely to avoid a breakin if the simply had a security company's sticker posted). Tasers and stunguns are great fun - they rarely kill, and you get the added benefit of being able to gloat over your would-be-assailants twitching, screaming, helpless body as you wait for the police to arrive and take him away - a satisfying and
appropriate response. Pepper spray has similar effects.
"What if you miss? What if you don't keep your pepper spray/taser/stungun/whatever close to your bed?"
The exact same things can be asked of guns - more so in fact, because guns are legally required to be kept in a gun safe in many states, as opposed to beneath your pillow. In a home invasion scenario, do you
really think you'll have time to wake up, get out of bed, get your gun, and find the intruder before he finds you?
And if he sees you going for a gun, what do you think he'll do with his? Guns
escalate violence; once a gun is pointed at someone, very few options are left. If an intruder thinks
his life is now in danger, do you really think he won't just shoot you? If you were unarmed, there's still a chance the intruder would back away and escape, using the gun as a threat instead of just killing you.
Guns as a defense are obviously not a reason to possess guns.
But gun deaths are still deaths. And not all gun deaths are murders.
From
here:
quote:
In 1999 there were 1776 gun deaths in the 0 through 17 age group and 3385 gun deaths in the 0 through 19 age group. By subtraction we find that there were a whopping 1609 gun deaths in just the 18 through 19 age group.
How many kids would die in gun accidents if their parents couldn't legally obtain handguns?
In the UK, between '06 and '07, there were a whopping 59 gun-related homicides. With a population of 60,943,912, that makes ther per-capita rate 0.000000968.
In the US, the per-capita rate is 0.0001424.
That's over three orders of magnitude.
The data is absolutely indisputable: banning guns
does reduce the number of deaths from guns. Illegal weapons obviously still exist, but reduced availability directly corresponds to reduced deaths.
Reduced deaths means reduced harm to society.
The only remaining rationale?
"The evil guv'ment is going to oppress us all!"
The absurdity of standing up against a professional military force funded at the national level and equipped with weapons and capabilities that make handguns and hunting rifles seem like airsoft and paintball guns by comparison.
The "militia" concept became irrelevant and obsolete after WW1, with the inception of machine guns, air power, and tanks.
Let's consider a little scenario, shall we? Since the Nazis are so frequently brought up (in total disregard of Godwin's Law), we'll use them for a thought experiment.
Imagine that every Jewish man, woman and child had been armed with handguns when the Nazis began rounding them up. What would have been the result?
I imagine the Nazis would have needed to step up ammunition production for the war from all of teh bullets expended on Jews...but no amount of "armed resistance" on the militia level would have prevented an absolute slaughter. In fact, the Germans would have found it easier to step up their propaganda: "the Jews are clearly enemies of the State, fighting our good servicemen and shooting them as we try to relocate them humanely!"
The end result would certainly not have been a viable Jewish resistance. It simply would have meant a more obvious killing ground, using bullets instead of ovens and gas. Less efficient to be sure, but in the end not very different. A bunch of people with handguns cannot stand up to a tank column, or SS soldiers armed with sub machine guns and Uzis.
"But what about Iraq? The insurgency is effectively fighting the US military!"
What planet do you live on? They aren't "effectively" doing anything more than giving us a political headache. They've caused a few thousand deaths, sure, but they can't possibly stop the military from conquest. If the US decided to round up every (insert Shia or Sunni here), there is absolutely nothing the insurgency could do to stop us.
Further, the weapon of choice for the insurgents is
not the handgun: it's an AK-47, already illegal in the US, and an Improvised Explosive Device, which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with guns.
This entire debate is spawned not from well-reasoned arguments, but from gut reactions of fear and a desire for retribution; a "fight or flight" response that eschews sanity and seeks violent reprisal in situations where it is unwarranted. This thread demonstrates clearly the sway our animalistic instincts still have over us, as we ignore objectivity, statistics, ethics, and
reality in favor of the solution that makes us
feel better.
We aren't cave men. We have the luxury of being able to analyze data and statistics, to observe
real trends rather than simply what we perceive as individuals. We have the luxury of being able to make choices based on ethics and objective effectiveness rather than testosterone and adrenaline.
Those abilities clearly show that gun ownership provides no benefit to society, and provides real net harm. In countries where handguns are illegal, there are fewer gun deaths and fewer overall murders. How can a
rational human being argue with those numbers?
- I thought I felt something.
™ Version 4.2
