Gun Control

[Bob Jane T-Mart]

Recently there's been a number of mass shootings lately in the United States such as in Las Vegas where 58 people were killed and hundreds more were injured. Sadly these are a relatively common occurrence, with at least several occurring per year. Many of the shooters bought their guns legally; of the 271 guns used in mass shootings, it is known that at least 164 were bought legally.

Perhaps it is time to enact gun control laws to prevent these deaths.

Where I live, in Australia, we do not have 2nd Amendment rights. To own a gun, one must obtain a license. Because there are fewer guns in my country, there are fewer gun deaths and there have been no mass-shootings in the last 3 years here. I am going to take the position that only citizens with a valid license should be allowed to own guns. I don't see the problem with this and I don't understand why one would need the right own guns unless they're a farmer, hunter or sport-shooter, in which case they can apply for a license.

 

[Sucumbio]

https://www.outdoorlife.com/blogs/g...oes-it-cost-own-firearm-state-state-breakdown



This extensive article breaks down state by state the actual requirements for gun purchase and ownership. Many states have no license requirements for purchasing a rifle. Handguns are more likely to be regulated with the necessity of a concealed carry permit. A few states require a permit to make any gun purchases including private sale.

To be safer I agree that all 50 states and local jurisdictions within should follow Hawaii's example or another like it. Require a permit to purchase any firearm. And to get one means to have to pass a strict background check including mental health workup, criminal past, and other red flag issues. This would not violate the 2nd amendment. It would simply ensure that people aren't able to just randomly go and get armed without any authority figure noticing. I think it's sad that in this day and age it's still totally easy to get a gun.

We could even look at gun limits themselves. Why does 1 person need 10 assault rifles and 10 thousand rounds of ammunition? Short answer, they don't lol. If anything were to happen that required that kind of armed response, well suffice it to say that individual would be better off allowing the authorities to handle the situation.

But, well, some folks just can't sleep at night unless they know if an army came after them they could hole up in their compound and fend them off like they the Terminator or something.

I'd also suggest that citizens be required to justify their need for a permit. Hunting. Sure. Target or gun club sure. But defense against home invasion? Ehhhhh we'll see. Maybe if you live in an area that has a crime rate above a certain percentage.

I know people would argue that to go defenseless would be too risky. That such laws would encourage break ins because there's no deterrent. But that's horse dung. Breaking the law should be deterrent enough. If it's not, then the law itself is inadequate, not the fact that Joe Plumber wasn't armed enough. (Not to mention the numerous accounts of accidental deaths and or injuries occurring due to mishandled firearms.)

 

[Bob Jane T-Mart]

https://www.outdoorlife.com/blogs/g...oes-it-cost-own-firearm-state-state-breakdown

This extensive article breaks down state by state the actual requirements for gun purchase and ownership. Many states have no license requirements for purchasing a rifle. Handguns are more likely to be regulated with the necessity of a concealed carry permit. A few states require a permit to make any gun purchases including private sale.

To be safer I agree that all 50 states and local jurisdictions within should follow Hawaii's example or another like it. Require a permit to purchase any firearm. And to get one means to have to pass a strict background check including mental health workup, criminal past, and other red flag issues. This would not violate the 2nd amendment. It would simply ensure that people aren't able to just randomly go and get armed without any authority figure noticing. I think it's sad that in this day and age it's still totally easy to get a gun.

These seem like fairly common sense issues here. Someone who has a history of violence, perhaps gang-related should not be able to legally purchase a firearm, for example. The fact that this is in not in place throughout the whole of the US is utterly ridiculous to me.

I'd also suggest that citizens be required to justify their need for a permit. Hunting. Sure. Target or gun club sure. But defense against home invasion? Ehhhhh we'll see. Maybe if you live in an area that has a crime rate above a certain percentage.

I know people would argue that to go defenseless would be too risky. That such laws would encourage break ins because there's no deterrent. But that's horse dung. Breaking the law should be deterrent enough. If it's not, then the law itself is inadequate, not the fact that Joe Plumber wasn't armed enough. (Not to mention the numerous accounts of accidental deaths and or injuries occurring due to mishandled firearms.)

It's actually rather dangerous to have a gun in your home. Someone you live with may easily use it against you; it's more likely that you'll be killed by someone you know well than someone you don't. By owning a gun, you're actually increasing your chances of getting killed. In addition, guns being present in one's home increases the likelihood of successful suicides, for obvious reasons.

If your house is being broken into, just call the police. Pulling a gun on someone with a gun could easily result in a shootout, where you might get killed. Sure, you might kill the other guy, but there's an excellent chance you might die. If you live in the middle of absolutely nowhere, a gun might be useful for self-defence reasons, but most of us don't live in the middle of nowhere.

 

[Buddhahobo]

Disclaimer: I don't own a gun.

To be safer I agree that all 50 states and local jurisdictions within should follow Hawaii's example or another like it. Require a permit to purchase any firearm. And to get one means to have to pass a strict background check including mental health workup, criminal past, and other red flag issues.

What's the point of the permit then?

The "strict background check" is already done before any legal firearm purchase. That's what NICS checks are.

The typical argument I see against a federal permit system is that it's a registry. Turns out people, including current and retired cops and military, don't like having their names, addresses, and what they own published out in newspapers for anyone looking to do some midnight shopping. Which happened in my hometown due to a reporter with an axe to grind. We, uh, no longer require permits.

This would not violate the 2nd amendment. It would simply ensure that people aren't able to just randomly go and get armed without any authority figure noticing.

Assuming you're doing so legally, that's already true, though. The NICS check is ran by the FBI, they know the name of every person looking to buy a gun when it's checked against their database.

*shrugs*

Don't get me wrong, a discussion of "How can the NICS be improved" is one worth having, but it helps knowing what's already there so one isn't just recommending things that have already been in place for several decades.

We could even look at gun limits themselves. Why does 1 person need 10 assault rifles and 10 thousand rounds of ammunition? Short answer, they don't lol.

The current legal response to that, I believe, is "So what?". Similarly, one probably doesn't need 15 crates of Heinz ketchup nor 10 thousand beanie babies, but that's independent of whether or not you can legally have them.

The Courts have historically held a particularly dim view on attempts to circumvent constitutional rights via backhanded methods like, say, ammunition taxes or voting permits. Like, if you can think of an argument on that train of thought that won't involve you fleeing out of the Supreme Court with a 0-9 vote against you by all means, but people have been trying stuff like that for quite awhile. The Justices haven't been amused.

These seem like fairly common sense issues here. Someone who has a history of violence, perhaps gang-related should not be able to legally purchase a firearm, for example.

They can't. So I suppose that's a weight off you mind?

It's actually rather dangerous to have a gun in your home. Someone you live with may easily use it against you; it's more likely that you'll be killed by someone you know well than someone you don't. By owning a gun, you're actually increasing your chances of getting killed.

Not really? You're assuming here someone is trying to kill you. Much like your own country shows, if someone is actively trying to kill you, you'll die. Australia's gun laws led to an immediate increase in knife-related murders IIRC. The actual rate of murder wasn't effected, just gun-related murder.

If we talk about accidental shootings, I mean, that's just basic gun safety not being followed, same as very simple-non-Darwin-Award concepts like "Don't thrust pointy bit of knife to someone you're handing it to", "Silverware does not belong in electrical outlet", and "Don't text/drink and drive".

And lastly, suicide, much like mass shootings continually show to be, is mental health related. The ever increasing group of mass shooters with a history of actively seeking mental health help (or physical health services, neurologists and the like) and being denied is also distressing. But that opens up a whole different can of worms, both legal and historical, on how one goes about dealing with that. But that's also definitely a conversation worth having, and is in many ways an identical conversation to the one above about how one could even go about improving the NICS.

If your house is being broken into, just call the police. Pulling a gun on someone with a gun could easily result in a shootout, where you might get killed. Sure, you might kill the other guy, but there's an excellent chance you might die. If you live in the middle of absolutely nowhere, a gun might be useful for self-defence reasons, but most of us don't live in the middle of nowhere.

I mean, that might be true in Australia, but that's...not really true here? Get out of the cities in the US and for huge parts of the countries you're looking at response times on the order of hours, not minutes if we're talking about break-ins or people truly out to murder you in your sleep. And if we switch to burglary, the concept there isn't to get in a firefight, it's to scare them off.

Far more in terms of safety would be animals, though; coyotes, boars, deer, bears, moose, alligators, etc, depending on where in the country your from. US wildlife is basically as bad as meme-Australia's wildlife, basically. And in terms of food, too...then everything else, really. Never really understood the insistence by some people that the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th reason someone may own a gun is because of some crazy paranoia.

The middle of nowhere thing is kind of another big problem with the whole framing of the debate in the US; rural and urban divide, which basically went from not very important to hugely inflamed in the last few years ago. Most gun-related deaths happen in cities, with illegally obtained firearms. Most gun owners are progressively more rural places from a city, with legally obtained firearms. Guns are viewed as magical murder sticks in cities, and why the family isn't going hungry that winter in rural places. Laws are passed on a state (or federal) level, and Capitols are all cities. Stuff like NYC being granted enough autonomy such that they have the capacity to enact their own harsher gun-related laws within the city itself is more the exception than the rule.

Perhaps it is time to enact gun control laws to prevent these deaths.

And that's basically where the devil in the details comes into play. Everyone wants to prevent those deaths, but "Let's pass laws!" is not an actual solution, it's a recommended path one must then travel down. The actual questions that needs to be answered is "Will this law actually prevent these deaths?", with a subquestion to just make sure you haven't been wasting your time to pass a duplicate gun control law because for some reason politicians don't actually bother reading pre-existing legislature before pushing their own.

The answer to this question in the US has generally been a spectrum between "No, not really" to "Are you sure just making things harder for legal gun owners isn't your actual aim?" and "Did you really just classify shoelaces as machine guns?"

 

[Sucumbio]

What's the point of the permit then?

The "strict background check" is already done before any legal firearm purchase. That's what NICS checks are.

Well, that's the problem. Not ALL points of sale require a background check. And the NICS check is not strict enough, but I think you touch on that later down. It basically matches Name and DOB to a list of ineligible people using three specific databases, the NCIC, the III, and the NICS index. Though that may seem "good enough" it does nothing to touch on mental health, misdemeanor arrests, etc. It also doesn't allow for a gun shop owner to probe as to why the gun is being bought.

The typical argument I see against a federal permit system is that it's a registry. Turns out people, including current and retired cops and military, don't like having their names, addresses, and what they own published out in newspapers for anyone looking to do some midnight shopping. Which happened in my hometown due to a reporter with an axe to grind. We, uh, no longer require permits.

It doesn't need to necessarily be open to the public. All it really needs to do is standardize the process without leaving loopholes like gun shows, and including more information.

Assuming you're doing so legally, that's already true, though. The NICS check is ran by the FBI, they know the name of every person looking to buy a gun when it's checked against their database.

Right now if you run my name through NICS it'd come back empty. But... that's not to say I should therefore be able to -just buy a gun-. No... there should at least be a pause. Every purchase should be delayed by at least 24 hours. This could help reduce crimes of passion where the person literally got it in their head to go to the pawn shop, buy a gun, and go kill someone. During that 24 hour period, you can do more than a criminal background check. You can access mental health records for one. I don't pretend to know how extensive that check should be, or if it's even constitutional. But I can't help think that the system we have now, fails too often. Look at the Sutherland Springs Shooting. The system absolutely failed here. Had it not, he'd had a much harder time finding weapons. That's not to say he'd have given up. Probably not... I think he was gonna kill no matter what. But at least enough red flags could have gone off as to perhaps create a chance for intervention before so many deaths.

Don't get me wrong, a discussion of "How can the NICS be improved" is one worth having, but it helps knowing what's already there so one isn't just recommending things that have already been in place for several decades

I agree, here. But to put a finer point on it, the NICS is a great tool. It just needs to be treated as part of a larger spectrum of tools that lead to an ultimate "yes" or "no" in terms of whether or not you can legally own a firearm. To keep within the 2nd amendment, one should assume that the right to bear arms, is more, a right to not be denied firearm ownership based on loose criteria. Or civil rights. I remember they tried to outlaw blacks from owning guns. In reality, the 2nd amendment isn't the problem. It's the fact that so many states differ on their rules, which creates pathways for would-be criminals to obtain their weapons. There's just too many instances where spree killing or mass murder or just straight up homicide, is being committed with weapons which were purchased "legally."

 

[Bob Jane T-Mart]

Succumbio has responded to the points regarding the background checks and so forth, so I'll discuss the other stuff.

Not really? You're assuming here someone is trying to kill you. Much like your own country shows, if someone is actively trying to kill you, you'll die. Australia's gun laws led to an immediate increase in knife-related murders IIRC. The actual rate of murder wasn't effected, just gun-related murder.

It just seems as if "no weapon murders" have increased somewhat over that period rather than knife-related murders. Overall murders since then have been down. So I guess you could argue it either way?

If we talk about accidental shootings, I mean, that's just basic gun safety not being followed, same as very simple-non-Darwin-Award concepts like "Don't thrust pointy bit of knife to someone you're handing it to", "Silverware does not belong in electrical outlet", and "Don't text/drink and drive".

People make mistakes. There's a reason we have safety procedures and features in place in most cases and it's not always the person responsible for making the mistake that gets hurt either. We insist on having licenses for driving to try to prevent people doing stupid things with cars, so why is a license for owning something ostensibly designed to kill such a bizarre concept?

And lastly, suicide, much like mass shootings continually show to be, is mental health related. The ever increasing group of mass shooters with a history of actively seeking mental health help (or physical health services, neurologists and the like) and being denied is also distressing. But that opens up a whole different can of worms, both legal and historical, on how one goes about dealing with that. But that's also definitely a conversation worth having, and is in many ways an identical conversation to the one above about how one could even go about improving the NICS.

Mental health is a key aspect, but guns certainly make suicide easier. If you don't have access to a gun, a drug overdose is probably the next easiest thing. Drug overdoses are far less effective however and so people can actually be saved. If you use a gun, it's a different story. In fact, gun ownership and successful suicides are strongly correlated even controlling for other factors. Maybe in addition to treating mental health, we should maybe stop people owning things that are very dangerous because people will use them to kill themselves.

I mean, that might be true in Australia, but that's...not really true here? Get out of the cities in the US and for huge parts of the countries you're looking at response times on the order of hours, not minutes if we're talking about break-ins or people truly out to murder you in your sleep. And if we switch to burglary, the concept there isn't to get in a firefight, it's to scare them off.

It's not as if Australian crime rates are absolutely rampant. Australia as of 2013 had a robbery rate of about half that of the US. So it does not seem as if the right to bear arms is particularly effective in reducing robbery rates. In 2014 the burglary statistics seem to show that Australia has a higher burglary rate of 879.4 per 100,000 vs America's 610.5 per 100,000. I think it's worth mentioning I would imagine most criminals would prefer to break into a house that is not occupied than one which is occupied. Even if you do own a firearm, if you're not at home, you can't protect your property. So I actually don't think that "defending your property" from break-ins with a firearm is actually going to stop anyone unless you're at home all the time. What I'm getting at is that you don't need a firearm to have your house or premises remain safe.

Far more in terms of safety would be animals, though; coyotes, boars, deer, bears, moose, alligators, etc, depending on where in the country your from. US wildlife is basically as bad as meme-Australia's wildlife, basically. And in terms of food, too...then everything else, really. Never really understood the insistence by some people that the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th reason someone may own a gun is because of some crazy paranoia.

I think we're actually in agreement on this one. If you live in a place with dangerous wildlife, I think owning a gun is useful. However, that should be a very valid reason to own a permit, rather than give everyone the right to own guns.

The middle of nowhere thing is kind of another big problem with the whole framing of the debate in the US; rural and urban divide, which basically went from not very important to hugely inflamed in the last few years ago. Most gun-related deaths happen in cities, with illegally obtained firearms. Most gun owners are progressively more rural places from a city, with legally obtained firearms. Guns are viewed as magical murder sticks in cities, and why the family isn't going hungry that winter in rural places. Laws are passed on a state (or federal) level, and Capitols are all cities. Stuff like NYC being granted enough autonomy such that they have the capacity to enact their own harsher gun-related laws within the city itself is more the exception than the rule.

Maybe I'm going out on a limb here but I would think that those illegally owned guns were probably bought legally at some stage and stolen/resold illegally. By decreasing the number of guns in general we would, therefore, decrease the number of illegal guns.

And that's basically where the devil in the details comes into play. Everyone wants to prevent those deaths, but "Let's pass laws!" is not an actual solution, it's a recommended path one must then travel down. The actual questions that needs to be answered is "Will this law actually prevent these deaths?", with a subquestion to just make sure you haven't been wasting your time to pass a duplicate gun control law because for some reason politicians don't actually bother reading pre-existing legislature before pushing their own.

Australia has not had a significant mass in about 3 years. So I'd say that we're doing something right with our gun control laws.

The answer to this question in the US has generally been a spectrum between "No, not really" to "Are you sure just making things harder for legal gun owners isn't your actual aim?" and "Did you really just classify shoelaces as machine guns?"

The problem is that legal gun owners are the ones often doing the mass shootings. So maybe we should actually make it harder for them?

Anyway thanks for replying mate.