On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 9:31 PM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > On 20 December 2014 at 16:15, Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >> The criminals may or may not be armed. But the flaw in your reasoning is >> that the laws would serve only to disarm the law abiding good people, not >> the criminals for which possession is already out later. >> > > Reducing the number of guns in society reduces the chances of anyone > having weapons. >
Weapons are an equalizer. They make the 90 pound woman as formidable as the 200 pound man, and guns do this more effectively than knives or batons. Without such tools the weak and defenseless are at the complete mercy of the strong. Practically every genocide in history was committed against a disarmed populace, so I'm not sure that reducing the prevalence of weapons is something we should obviously strive for. > >> >> The total number of gun related injuries and deaths in the US is >> massively greater per person than anywhere else in the first world. >> >> >> That's largely a factor of gang on gang crime, which is a result of our >> drug laws, not gun laws. If you factor those out we have a remarkably low >> murder rate. >> > > You jest. > Multiple choice: The tens of thousands killed in Mexico are a result of ___ A) Drug cartels fighting each other over a piece of the highly profitable black market B) Gun laws in mexico aren't strict enough > >> A recent Harvard study found no correlation between number of guns in a >> country and gun murders: >> >> >> http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf >> >> Unlike all the other studies which do? You can find similar studies for > climate change too if you look hard enough. Here's a summary. > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate > > That page isn't useful unless you correlate it with the number of guns present in the country as well (which is what the study I provided above does). > >> You ought to be more afraid of the concentration of guns in the hands of >> the few, governments killed 100 million of their own people in the past >> century, far more than victims of gun crimes or accidents combined. >> Something the decentralization of arms might have limited. >> > > Yeah I'm scared of that too, but two wrongs don't make a right. > But democide isn't possible when the government doesn't have a monopoly on force. So it's not that two wrongs make a right, but that "one wrong" (widespread ownership of arms) can prevent a far worse wrong (mass murder and genocide against unarmed populations by governments that have all the guns). > >> Ending the world can hardly be argued defense, though the threat of >> ending the world arguably can be. That said, they're defensive for nations >> not individuals. >> > > Yes that's right it was the threat that was the defence. And the last time > I looked, nations are made of individuals. > Well I suppose you could rig something up like Raven in snow crash (who carried a nuke in his motorcycle side car wired to go off if his heart ever stopped), but let's debate private ownership of suitcase nukes after we come to some agreement on firearms. > > >> >> > Sadly, however, this isn't the case with guns, where there is an idea >> that having more lethal weapons around makes you safer. >> >> Like it or not, your life is protected daily by people with guns. When >> someone breaks into your house, will you not call on men with guns? >> >> No. I would call the police, not the army. (And the chances are fairly > good that whoever broke in wouldn't have a gun either.) > > I didn't realize police in NZ are unarmed. What would the police do if the assailant has a knife? Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
