The Gun Control Challenge

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So I'm debating gun control in 4 or 5 different threads right now, and as much as I enjoy this experience (less than you might imagine actually), I thought it would be more efficient to just say my piece here and save myself some repetitious typing.

My case goes something like this:

In the US, I currently enjoy fairly broad rights in owning and using firearms. There are people who think this is wrong or a bad idea for any number of reasons, and would like to curtail my rights in various ways in furtherance of their own beliefs. This situation is analogous to a court case in that the party wishing to impose sanctions, the "prosecution" if you will, has the onus to establish their case that the proposed restrictions would actually work, and thus the erosion of my rights is justified.

So, for those of you who favor gun control, the challenge is to present examples of successful gun control programs in action, showing why these measures are necessary and demonstrating that the purpose is really to save lives or prevent violence, not just some vague unease around or dislike of firearms. If you just don't like guns, this isn't the thread for you.

Now, the caveats. The US is awash in guns and has a wide range of socio-economic issues unrelated to guns that affect crime and violence, so in order for a valid comparison to be made, the policy in question has to have been:

• Imposed on a country where gun ownership was previously common.
• Imposed on a country where violence was an actual problem, preferably comparable to the US.
• Be shown to have acted independently of other socio-economic variables
• Shown to have reduced total violence, not just "gun violence" by significant levels

So, Japan, for example, which never had many guns nor much violent crime, would not count.

I'll briefly mention a few commonly proposed gun control schemes and some of my personal objections:

Registration: Only good at catching someone after a crime has been committed, and only in certain narrow circumstances. Has been expensive and ineffective where it has been implemented, e.g. Canada's long gun registration. Also, it has proven effective as a confiscation list for governments passing retroactive restrictions, such as England. Licensing creates similar problems.

Ballistic "fingerprinting": Expensive and ineffective; fails to account for the fact that metal parts erode with use and the "fingerprint" of the gun changes over time. Easily defeated with rudimentary tools as well.

Assault weapons bans: Restricts a class of weapon not commonly used in crime; primary distinction of "assault weapons" are cosmetic features.

Magazine capacity restrictions: Like "assault weapons", not commonly used in crime, a statistically insignificant number of high profile shootings notwithstanding.

Restrictions on concealed carry: Licensed carriers are much more law abiding than baseline citizens; record number of US citizens now carry while crime is at a 30 year low.

Restrictions on the number of guns one can own: US gun sales are at record highs while violent crime is at record lows.

Closing "gun show loophole": There is no such thing, the term was invented by the anti-gun lobby to describe informal sales at garage sales and such. An insignificant number of criminally employed guns come from gun shows.

Confiscation: Would lead to a larger bloodbath than what it was trying to prevent.

I'll add others as they occur to me.

Have at it!

Licensing: accomplishes the same thing as the form 4473 now in place for a background check.

Psychiatric testing: requires honesty, is easily defeated by acting, firearms are a right unless someone is proven to be dangerous, new mental health restrictions would result in endless litigation all levels of state and federal courts (including decades of technicalities in the supreme court), people would view mental health services much more negatively, stigma would be systematized and people would avoid seeking help regardless if they want to own a gun.

Random inspection: major 4th amendment violation

Ammo sales limits: cannot be made strict enough to prevent someone from committing a massacre, some recreational shootes go through 5-6,000 rounds in a weekend even without machine guns, it's easily defeated.

Ammo registration: tried and failed, logistically impossible.

Ban machine guns: for all practical purposes they are banned. There are very few in circulation and they require registration and a ton of paperwork and other restrictions. The guns the media refers to as machineguns are actually semi-automatic and only look similar to a machine gun on the outside. For example, all but a couple hundred legal, privately owned AK-type rifles are semi-automatic. A lot of mobsters may have found themselves on the wrong end of a machine gun before they were restricted in 1934, but they rarely used against the rest of the population- firearms normally weren't used for non-organized street crime (despite no background check at all back then!) and in the occasion they were, they tended to be much more mundane like pistols, lever guns, and various shotguns.

School zones: easily violated by those that don't know the area, law abiding people aren't going to shoot in the middle of town without damn good legal justification in the first place, it does nothing to stop criminals, prosecuting people carrying a gun/drugs for the intent of criminal activity would work better.

Ban hate group members from having guns: a endless series of seriously volatile 1st amendment fight would ensue and the law would likely be tossed out, impractical to enforce.

Unfortunately, no such statistics exist. If they did exist, it wouldn't be much of a debate.

It is my personal opinion, which is about all most people have at this point, that the US is only going to solve this problem when it manages to both:

1. Reduce the number of guns sitting around, starting preferably with the ones sitting in the hands of criminals, and...
2. Knuckle down on cultural issues facilitating the usage of guns without patronizing those that wish to own and use them.

Do those two things, and the end result is something similar to New Zealand I reckon: Low gun crime, practically non-existent mass killings, low homicide rate overall. Now, I know that comparing NZ and US isn't perfectly analogous, but both countries have a lot in common. Both are major cultural melting pots, and both are western cultures. By and large, there's way more that's similar than different. I've had 17 years in the US and 8 in NZ, ample enough time to take in all the minutia.

Please tell me more about:
1) How to take guns away from criminals first.
2) Why taking guns away from other people would matter if the criminals don't have them.
3) How to separate guns from culture (except maybe certain antisocial subcultures), based on your cultural experiences.
4) Why your solutions to violent crime are fixated solely on guns.

I think that the more law abiding people will be armed, the more will the criminals think before they will do something bad. Bandits will get the guns anyways.

Anywhere in the world, just dig deep in history. Well world is hundreds years ahead of US in this area, it is your turn to move your asses now.




Any you like. Or you want to say only americans are violent as*holes? No, we all are but we work upon it.



BS. Why independently? What silly request is this?



Any EU country. People don't die here so much and we don't have to spend so much for healthcare for wounded.



It counts. Do what Japan did years ago and live in peace. But no, you don't want, you want to carry. Well carry then, nothing to discuss about.




Right does not mean must have. You have right to live in healthy and save conditions, but do you? No, if you need guns to maintain them...

What is the basis for your analogy? Your entire structure of constitutional review is predicated on the view that legislation is presumed to be constitutional unless a court finds otherwise. Furthermore, legislation that infringes upon constitutional guarantees of rights is not ipso facto invalid, but subject to scrutiny, the depth of which depends upon the nature of the right being infringed, and the nature of the interest that the government seeks to protect.

I suggest that the onus of proof lies on you to demonstrate first that legislation to curtail firearms ownership and possession infringes on a right (an easy task), and further that the infringement fails to meet the appropriate standard of scrutiny.



Define a "successful gun control program in action." You have create an artificial standard because you know full well that you cannot prove causation linking government regulation of firearms with low firearms violence. All that anyone can demonstrate is correllation.

That being said, Canada has about 1/3 of the firearms ownership of the United States. Not surprisingly, our level of accidental death and injury in firearms related incidents is about 1/3 that of the United States. The mere existence of firearms creates the potential for accident.

But our rates of firearms death and injury arising from intentional use are about 10% of yours. We have fewer intentional firearms fatalities per weapon, as it were. Now is that a result of more robust firearms regulation? How can anyone demonstrate that?



So, in a nutshell, your argument is: "No country is comparable with the United States, and no legislative scheme can be examined in isolation, therefore I win the argument."

That is intellectually dishonest and I am calling you out on it.



Now this summary is a far more accurate and reasonable set of statements, and there are few that I will disagree with.

The long gun registry was, indeed, a fiasco up here--but it was a fiasco of administration, an example of politics leading without checking in with the bureaucrats first. Any public servant could have told the Minister, "you can't do this for the amount of money that you are claiming it will cost." As far as the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs was concerned, the registry was still a valuable tool for police agencies.

I also take exception to your somewhat cursory dismissal of licensing. The advantage of licensing is that it deals with the person, not the object. I don't care if you own 1 firearm or twenty. But I do care that you can demonstrate to me that you have a basic knowledge of firearms safety, that you can demonstrate an adequate control of a firearm to minimize the risk of acidental discharge, or injury to an unintended target.

As you, yourself, point out, "Licensed carriers are much more law abiding than baseline citizens; record number of US citizens now carry while crime is at a 30 year low." This suggests to me that licensing of firearms possessors, rather than the firearms themselves, is a strong first step.

Apart from the European Union, which should be abolished and have the entire bureaucracy tried for treason in respective countries, there is that little inconvenience called Estonia. Additionally, I'd like to know what exactly the homicide rates were before and after 'any EU country' introduced strict firearm legislation. What Americans pay for victims of shootings in health care costs is very little. It won't bankrupt the United States before Obamacare and a Cold War army will.

Did New Zealand ever have widespread gun ownership and/or a violent crime problem before they brought in the gun control? If no, then the current state of affairs there doesn't really mean anything vis a vis this debate, it's an entirely different scenario. My argument continues to be that it's the culture that is important, not the weapons, that I could arm Japan's population to the teeth and not see widespread violence or I could strip Americans of every gun and sharp instrument and we'd just invent new ones to use on each other.

That might be the view of my government, but it is not my personal view. I'm very much in favor of the Randy Barnett school of automatic judicial review of all proposed legislation for legality/constitutionality before it's even enacted, and of course favor very strict scrutiny. I'm not a lawyer, Visa, I respect some areas of the law and lawmaking, butI don't structure my opinions according to legalese. My analogy was more predicated on the idea of presumption of innocence when a punishment is being proposed, as I consider gun control to be a punishment of law abiding gun enthusiasts and firearms to often be unfairly blamed for social ills. I'm simply challenging the gun controllers to make their case that what they want is actually useful, and that their theories about guns and violence have any basis in fact.



I've been doing that for years, and every time we get a new crop of gun controllers I have to do it again; this time I thought I'd try putting them on the defensive for once. I've made my case over and over and over, as anyone who cares to browse my posting history can tell you, now I want the people who want to curtail my rights to make their case.



I would think a successful gun control program would be one that demonstrably saves lives. You're also almost correct, I'm pretty sure no one can prove anything beyond some correlations, but if someone thinks they can actually prove the causation end of things I'm giving them the chance here. If it was a right that was important to you, would you demand anything less than definitive proof from people seeking to dismantle it? (Thanks for the assist in the correlation not being causation thing, btw).



I would argue that it's a result of your culture, and demonstrate it by overlaying a graph of gun violence in Canada with data-points marked out for the introduction of various gun control schemes, showing their non-effect on the levels of violence. Unless of course the data shows otherwise, but I think we both know that it does not. I believe AoS has used this exact method of arguing this exact point in the past, though I don't have a link handy.



Not at all, I'm merely trying to keep my opponents honest by insisting that they compare apples to apples, so to speak. I'm frankly fed up with simpletons pointing out that America has lots of guns and lots of violence while country X has few guns and less violence and claiming to have won the argument, we both know it's not that simple. Culture matters. Economics matter. Social factors matter. All I'm asking for is a fair shake, for once, and if you think that's intellectually dishonest than I don't know what to tell you.



Valuable how? How many crimes did it solve? How much did it actually cost? Was it used for things it was promised not to be used for, e.g. retroactive confiscations? Law enforcers typically like to be the only armed parties around, I don't tend to take their word for anything when a gun law is being discussed.



Two points:

One, we don't license gun owners but gun carriers, much the same way that we don't license car owners but rather we license drivers, a subtle but important distinction.

Two, I'd have much less of a problem with licensing, maybe even no problem, if it wasn't for the existence and persistence of the anti-gun lobby. Licensing and registration databases have been used to enforce later prohibitions by governments, and frankly I'm not going to volunteer a list of what I own to people who may one day show up with a surrender order, there's just no percentage in that for me.

Of course it is. Ask the RCMP, they'll tell you all about how valuable it was as a tool to seize Type 97's from their owners and reclassify them without an order-in-council. Which proves Dox47's point.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/pol ... le1320685/

You know what drives me nuts? These are usually the same type of people who think they're so much more civilized and sophisticated than us primitive knuckle dragging savages. I guess simple-minded rhetoric is a hallmark of sophistication and resorting to vitriol is so classy .

1. The police would need to get really organized and systematically crack down on all the gangs, which would be getting two birds with one stone, really. After that was done, you'd want to start steadily removing the guns from the population, as plenty of gun crimes are committed with legally-owned and licensed guns.

2. This would greatly eliminate the mass killings that constantly occur in the US, as it's a lot harder to commit a mass murder without a gun. Things like arson, chemicals, bombs, etc generally require a lot more in the way of planning and execution, which is fortunate, really. All you need to do with a gun is get it in (usually easy), then whip it out and open fire.

3. Here in NZ, we have government-sponsored ads against things like drunk driving and such on TV. Something like that could help, there's many ways to sway the opinion of the public. Essentially, promote a view that is against the widespread proliferation of guns, without impeding on the rights of hunters and enthusiasts. It's possible, trust me. Nobody here hates hunters or guys who like to go out into the country and pop off some rounds, but we're also perfectly content to have it so that only those guys are running around with the guns. It works great.

4. Guns greatly facilitate violent crime. It's much easier to pop a few rounds into someone than it is to knife them. There's a reason why most criminals prefer guns over knives: A solid pistol is flat out better, and more dangerous in almost all circumstances. We've still got quite a lot of violent crime here in NZ, but our homicide rate is low. Basically, while we still have plenty of violent crime, it never tends to result in many deaths, and I think the lack of guns plays a big part of that.



http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/new-zealand

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politi ... ew_Zealand

There is some indication, as New Zealand started to have some major gun crime issues during the 60s through to the 80s, but I can't find any quick stats on them. After that, tighter gun controls came into place after a few mass shootings happened, and gun crime has been low since.

Get "rid" of all the guns and all our problems will suddenly be solved. Surely only goodness and prosperity will be the result.

That giant post you just quoted wasn't a bridge, so you don't need to put your troll comments under it.



Part of what facilitates gun crime are cultural issues leading people to want to do them. You'll need to handle that as well. The point was carefully designed to contain two problems at once: The culture that wants to use them for crime, and the rights of people who wish to use guns for legitimate reasons.

I certainly respect that as your personal view. But it's absolutely irrelevant as a question of law. And if you're going to have an intelligent conversation about the creation, application and execution of law, you cannot pretend to have that conversation in the absence of a legal framework.

As for your analogy to crime and punishment, I see the romanticism in it--but that does not make it a reasonably analogy on which to base a legal discourse.



As much as you might want to reverse the onus, that is not the way that your legal system works. The onus is upon you, and there it shall ever be, unless you can persuade enough of your fellow citizens to invite the chaos that would ensue from prescriptive review.



But again, you set an artificial standard. You've asked for definitive proof where no such proof can exist.



But where did our respective cultures come from? Our fundamental principle of constitutional law is that of "peace, order and good government." Our respective legal traditions have both arisen from the English Common Law tradition of parliamentary sovereignty, judicial oversight and individual liberty, but we have arrived in different places, and I believe that the divergence factor is our approach to and understanding of the role of law in well-ordering a society. Canadians--as a rule--embrace the idea that law and regulation can maintain a safe and fair environment in which the greatest number of people can enjoy the greatest amount of individual liberty. Americans--again, as a rule--embrace the idea that every law and every regulation is an infringement of individual liberty and that only the most demonstrably justifiable can be tolerated.

In that context, it stands to reason that Canadian firearms restrictions are part of the larger culture of respect for law that exists here, whereas in the United States, they are part of a larger disrespect for law. And in that sense, they can potentially be seen to meet part of your test of a "successful gun control program."



It think it's an unfair shake, because you are insisting on comparing apples to apples, when no other apples exist.

I quite agree that "America has lots of guns, America has lots of gun violence q.e.d." is utterly unreliable. I also agree that legislation is not the answer--the genie is already out of the bottle. But I do believe that legislation can be part of a larger answer, and that must begin by a reevaluation of citizens' relationship to government. So long as you demonize government, it will never be possible for you to develop a culture in which government can be seen as a constructive force in your society. And without that, I think you are doomed to labour under a continuing cycle of violence.



As for how many crimes it solved, I don't think anyone is likely to be able to come up with that number--particularly if you depend upon definitive proof of a causal link between registry information and laying an Information. As for cost, there are many sources for that, not least the Parliamentary Budget Officer. But there are certainly situations in which it could have saved lives

One thing, however, I can say definitively is that hte long gun registry could not have been used for retroactive confiscations, for two reasons. First, Canadian privacy law specifically prohibits government from using private information for purposes other than the purpose for which it was collected. While police can access data for the purposes of investigation of an allegation of crime, they do not have blanket authority to access data for other reasons. Second, no legislation authorizing confiscations has every accompanied the registry. While the Criminal Code permits judges to impose a firearms ban on a person convicted of an offence involving firearms, there is nothing in federal legislation that has ever permitted an indiscriminate confiscation of a non-restricted weapon.



I quite appreciate the distinction--I just think that you would be better served by upgrading licensing from carriers, to possessors. The broader the education and training that is available to firearms' owners, the more likely you are to create a culture of responsibility around firearms.

And you may have good reason for your fears about misuse of licensing data--but I prefer not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Start to reestablish the barriers around how government is permitted to collect, retain and use personal information, and then perhaps you can have greater confidence. Though I wonder whether that ship has already sailed.

Which is certainly fair comment. But just because people have an arrogant view about their own civilization or sophistication does not mean that the arguments that they make are incorrect--nor does does it mean that they are correct. This is a classic example of, "playing the man, not the ball."

The United States has a problem with firearms violence. No objective observer can conclude otherwise. And whether or not critics are arrogant or reasonable the arguments should be assessed on their substantive merits, not on the merits (or lack thereof) of the speakers.