Stop using guns to kill things!

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That does it...I'm going out THIS WEEK to purchase a nice pocket knife. I've never owned one.

It's hard to weaponize pocket knives, too. They're too hard to open and snap shut after use. If you attack someone with a pocket knife, you have more of a risk of the thing closing on you and cutting your finger down to the bone than you would do actual damage to an attacker. But it does give you an slight advantage if you can wait out an attacker for an opening, or if you're taken captive it's a tool that can help facilitate escape. Not to mention they're just useful for all kinds of things.

They're also collectable and could be used as a bartering tool should the need arise.

Have you studied spring powered switch blade knives and stilettos?

There are also air and gas powered hand guns At close range they can be as fatal as hand held firearms.

ruveyn

More efficient tools usually lead to higher levels of productivity, whether or not the results of the productivity is judged as positive or negative.

What distinguished Holmes wasn't his offense. It was his defense. At Columbine, Harris and Klebold did their damage in T-shirts and cargo pants. Cho and Loughner wore sweatshirts. Hasan was gunned down in his Army uniform.

Holmes' outfit blew these jokers away. He wore a ballistic helmet, a ballistic vest, ballistic leggings, a throat protector, a groin protector, and tactical gloves. He was so well equipped that if anyone in that theater had tried what the National Rifle Association recommends -- drawing a firearm to stop the carnage -- that person would have been dead meat. Holmes didn't just kill a dozen people. He killed the NRA's answer to gun violence.

[...]

Essentially, Holmes has called the NRA's bluff. It may be true that the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. But the best way to stop a good guy with a gun is a bad guy with body armor. And judging from Holmes' vest receipt, he wasn't even buying the serious stuff.

The NRA bases its good-guy approach on a well-substantiated military doctrine: deterrence. By arming myself with a weapon that can hurt you, I discourage you from attacking me. For many years, this doctrine averted war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Each side feared mutually assured destruction. What broke the deadlock wasn't a weapon. It was a shield: strategic missile defense. The Soviets understood that a system capable of shooting down their nuclear missiles would, by removing their power to deter us, free us to attack. The best offense, it turns out, is a good defense.

That's what Holmes figured out. Defense, not offense, is the next stage of the gun-violence arms race. Equipping citizens with concealed weapons doesn't stop bad guys. It just pushes them to the next level. The next level is body armor. And unlike missile defense, which has proved to be complicated and disappointing, body armor is relatively simple.

That does it...I'm going out THIS WEEK to purchase a nice pocket knife. I've never owned one.

It's hard to weaponize pocket knives, too. They're too hard to open and snap shut after use. If you attack someone with a pocket knife, you have more of a risk of the thing closing on you and cutting your finger down to the bone than you would do actual damage to an attacker. But it does give you an slight advantage if you can wait out an attacker for an opening, or if you're taken captive it's a tool that can help facilitate escape. Not to mention they're just useful for all kinds of things.

^ Sounds eerily familiar to the plot of The Dark Knight.

Knives. Call me crazy, but I think that distance is quite a factor. Guns allow killing without proximity.

I guess that's the killer's whole point.

Knives. Call me crazy, but I think that distance is quite a factor. Guns allow killing without proximity.

I guess that's the killer's whole point.

Legal status and source of offenders' firearms in states with the least stringent criteria for gun ownership.
Vittes KA, Vernick JS, Webster DW.
SourceCenter for Gun Policy and Research, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Abstract
BackgroundGun possession by high-risk individuals presents a serious threat to public safety. U.S. federal law establishes minimum criteria for legal purchase and possession of firearms; many states have laws disqualifying additional categories for illegal possession.
Methods
We used data from a national survey of state prison inmates to calculate: 1) the proportion of offenders, incarcerated for crimes committed with firearms in 13 states with the least restrictive firearm purchase and possession laws, who would have been prohibited if their states had stricter gun laws; and 2) the source of gun acquisition for offenders who were and were not legally permitted to purchase and possess firearms.
Results
Nearly three of ten gun offenders (73 of 253 or 28.9%) were legal gun possessors but would have been prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms when committing their most recent offense if their states had stricter prohibitions. Offenders who were already prohibited under current law acquired their gun from a licensed dealer, where a background check is required, five times less often than offenders who were not prohibited (3.9% vs. 19.9%; χ(2)=13.31; p≤0.001). Nearly all (96.1%) offenders who were legally prohibited, acquired their gun from a supplier not required to conduct a background check.
Conclusions
Stricter gun ownership laws would have made firearm possession illegal for many state prison inmates who used a gun to commit a crime. Requiring all gun sales to be subject to a background check would make it more difficult for these offenders to obtain guns.

Number 1: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18670666

bolding mine.
If you get into a fight with your partner and are so mad that you want to kill him/her, a gun allows you to do so quickly and easily, before the heat of the moment passes.

Gun prohibitionists would have us believe that most murders involve ordinary people driven to kill in a sudden fit of rage only because a gun was present. This is based on HCI's distortion of the FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics. To the FBI, a murderer or rapist that lives in the victim's apartment building, or dueling drug dealers, are "acquaintances." These are the "friends and family" that HCI says kill each other -- DEFINITELY NOT LIKE THE FRIENDS AND FAMILY YOU AND I HAVE.

Almost all the "relatives" killed each year are the very same men, well-known to the police, that have been brutalizing their wives, girlfriends, and children for years -- those men are killed in self-defense. Would it be more "politically correct" if those women or children were killed by their abusers?

Law professor Don Kates has written, "Far from being ordinary, otherwise law-abiding citizens, those who commit murders, as every study of homicide shows, are real criminals with long histories of violence against the people around them...Indicative of this are FBI statistics showing that [b]74.7% of persons arrested for murder had been arrested previously for a violent felony or burglary..."

CAUSE AND EFFECT
Most statistical methods and studies are unable to prove that one thing is a cause of another. The methods are usually only able to demonstrate that one thing correlates with another or with absense of the other. That is, a properly done statistical study might show that one thing exists along with the other, but cannot prove that one of the things causes the other. So, a study showing that higher rates of gun ownership rates tend to exist alongside lower violent crime rates would not prove that higher gun ownership rates cause lower violent crime rates. Such a result would only suggest that higher gun ownership rates might cause reduced violent crime rates.

Given that a study showed a correlation between two things "a" and "b," it would be necessary to consider the possibility that: "a" might be the cause of "b"; "b" might be the cause of "a"; each might be partially the cause of the other; and that both might be partially or wholly caused by some other, maybe unknown, factor(s).

People are tempted to eliminate some of the competing alternative explanations based on logic. However, doing so demands a perfect understanding of the relationships between the factors being evaluated. In other words, the "logic" must be correct. Relying on logic to eliminate competing explanations typically results in erroneous interpretation of study results, especially if the process is being attempted by someone who knows little about the topic (like gun controllers who have never owned a gun deciding about gun matters impacting crime, violence, accidents, etc.). A study that finds that there is a high gun ownership rate in a time and place where there is a high murder rate, for example, might have such findings in part because a high murder rate causes people to acquire guns to protect themselves, their families and their neighbors. It is naive or dishonest to claim on the basis of such results that high gun ownership causes high murder rates.

There are some facts that can support the idea that one thing is the cause of another, as opposed to the reverse or both of them being caused by something else altogether. One thing that is essential is a logical explanation (of the cause-and-effect relationship) consistent with known facts and other observations, and that has withstood the scrutiny of numerous people knowledgable of the field. That is, one must ask how one thing could possibly cause the other.

Another fact that suggests that one factor is the cause of the other is that the second factor does not ever change until introduction or forced change of the first. If violent crime rates in a state start dropping faster after a right-to-carry law goes into effect in that state, after accounting for any other changes that went into effect at the same time, this would be very strong indication that the right-to-carry law causes crime reduction. On the other hand, a Washington, DC crime rate reduction trend that starts two years before a firearm ban in Washington, DC pretty much proves that the crime rate reduction was not caused by the ban.

Another fact that can suggest that one thing is a cause of others is that the thing was included in the analysis as a result of people suggesting for some theoretical reason that it might be the cause of factors that were found to be correlated in earlier analyses, and was found to have a higher correlation with the other factors than was observed between the other factors themselves. Higher correlations are found between causes and effects than between multiple things that share the same cause.

I can see why you need exceptions to the law. My maternal grandfather is the only person I know who owns a gun (though actually I'm not sure he owns it any more). He was a farmer and needed a gun to shoot any animals that got in accidents and were otherwise going to die slow, painful deaths. If you lived in a neighbourhood with a rabid dog problem, then you should be allowed to own a gun to shoot the dogs. A blanket ban seems almost as stupid as the near blanket allowance of guns that is currently in the US- sometimes a gun really is necessary. However, those should be exceptions, rather than the rule. Think of it like with knives- most people aren't allowed to carry a sharp knife even for protection or they'll go to prison, but we allow people to carry knives visibly if they need to cut ropes, or if they are high up in the Sikh faith.

Notice the part that says "a high murder rate causes people to acquire guns to protect themselves, their families and their neighbors. It is naive or dishonest to claim on the basis of such results that high gun ownership causes high murder rates.". That pretty much addresses #2. As for #3, since when was I against background checks?

number 3:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22729164

bolding mine.
stricter background checks in areas that have lax background checks could prevent some gun violence from happening.

More of them would just have their babymamma make the purchase for them. That's what a lot of them do already and registration doesn't slow it down.

Obviously, but many people don't have children, and not every mother or significant other, is free of a felony or misdemeanor domestic violence, so if stricter background checks were feasible, it could only result in less gun related violence, overall.