What did this girl have that she needed?

[Thumpalumpacus]

Get rid of the guns, and the gun crimes will drop.

How do you propose to do so?

[piscator]

Get rid of the guns, and the gun crimes will drop.

How do you propose to do so?

"We'll run up the 'Jack. That will show them we mean business."

[Blind groper]

No country got rid of all of the guns, all in one moment.

Getting rid of the guns would be a long term process, and the benefits would be spread over a long period.

This is the way laws reducing the death toll from the roads operated. One law, which helped reduce car accidents. Then another. Later, another. Each time, with proper policing, the number of deaths on the roads got less. When the wearing of seat belts in my country became compulsory, it did not, by itself, stop all road deaths. But from one year to the next, they dropped by 10%.

The same thing would apply to guns. I do not know where this approach will start. Knowing Americans and their idiocy regarding guns, it will not start, but get worse.

The big thing, to reduce the crazy death toll in the USA, and drop the number of people receiving a bullet from 100,000 per year to a much lower number, is to make a start.

[Seth]

No country got rid of all of the guns, all in one moment.

No country has ever gotten rid of all guns, ever, and that will never, ever happen. The Pandora's box was opened up when the Chinese invented gunpowder and stuffed it in a tube with a rock on top.

Getting rid of the guns would be a long term process, and the benefits would be spread over a long period.

Utopian nonsense. You're even more of a fool than I thought if you think that the world can ever be gun-free. It can't. For one thing, the military needs guns, and if the military has them, they can and will be stolen and used by criminals, as they always have been.

So, all you do is arm the criminals and disarm their victims.

This is the way laws reducing the death toll from the roads operated.

Idiocy. Cars aren't banned you dunce.

One law, which helped reduce car accidents. Then another. Later, another. Each time, with proper policing, the number of deaths on the roads got less. When the wearing of seat belts in my country became compulsory, it did not, by itself, stop all road deaths. But from one year to the next, they dropped by 10%.

Well, interestingly, the gun crime and overall crime rates in the US continue to fall as more and more people buy guns, so your objective is being achieved. So what are you complaining about?

The same thing would apply to guns. I do not know where this approach will start. Knowing Americans and their idiocy regarding guns, it will not start, but get worse.

Except that the facts show that it's not getting worse, it's getting better as more guns are added to the society. The obverse is true in places where guns are heavily restricted, including right here in the US. Viz: Chicago. And then there's central Africa, where the civilian population is almost completely disarmed and Boko Haram walks in to a village unopposed, rounds everybody up and kills them without losing a single terrorist.

The big thing, to reduce the crazy death toll in the USA, and drop the number of people receiving a bullet from 100,000 per year to a much lower number, is to make a start.

We made our start 30 years ago with the liberalization of concealed carry law, and our successful experiment shows that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry guns ends up with reduced crime rates wherever it is authorized.

[Seth]

Correlation doesn't equal causation, Professor Seth. Crime could have reduced in the US for other reasons.

You are absolutely correct. It probably has many causes. But the point is that BG's thesis that more guns means more "gun murders" is specious and false as proven by the fact that with more guns in the hands of law abiding citizens in the US, the "gun murder" rate, along with almost all other rates of violent crime, has gone down, and continues to go down, which utterly refutes his thesis.

[Blind groper]

Actually, if you were to plot on a graph, rate of reduction in murder rate, and rate of increase in gun ownership, you would get a negative correlation, which is used to demonstrate the two factors are antagonistic.

Murder rates in the USA dropped substantially in the USA in the first half of the 1990's, but has been dropping at an ever reducing rate ever since. The same thing happened right across te western world, where no change in gun ownership could have been a factor.

Murder rate has fallen from 5.0 per 200,000 people to 4.7 over the time that gun ownership has increased greatest. A similar period in the early 1990's saw a drop from 10 to 5.5. A very big drop during a time when gun ownership changed very little.

But, I know that using data and facts to argue against Seth's religion will have no effect.

[Seth]

Actually, if you were to plot on a graph, rate of reduction in murder rate, and rate of increase in gun ownership, you would get a negative correlation, which is used to demonstrate the two factors are antagonistic.

Murder rates in the USA dropped substantially in the USA in the first half of the 1990's, but has been dropping at an ever reducing rate ever since. The same thing happened right across te western world, where no change in gun ownership could have been a factor.

Murder rate has fallen from 5.0 per 200,000 people to 4.7 over the time that gun ownership has increased greatest. A similar period in the early 1990's saw a drop from 10 to 5.5. A very big drop during a time when gun ownership changed very little.

But, I know that using data and facts to argue against Seth's religion will have no effect.

Once again, you're posting a classic strawman argument, but in doing so you prove my claim. More guns, less crime.

[pErvinalia]

...

[Blind groper]

There is still, outside of Lotts lies, not one shred of credible evidence that more guns equals less crime. There is, however, a mass of evidence that more guns equals more gun crime. Researchers at Americas top universities agree on that, and I have posted the references to show that.

[Seth]

There is still, outside of Lotts lies, not one shred of credible evidence that more guns equals less crime. There is, however, a mass of evidence that more guns equals more gun crime. Researchers at Americas top universities agree on that, and I have posted the references to show that.

And yet there are more and more guns in the US, and less and less crime, as shown by the DOJ, FBI and national crime statistics. Inconvenient truth, innit?

You lose.

[Blind groper]

And as I pointed out on the other thread, there are fewer and fewer people owning those guns. A person who is out to commit murder just needs one gun. But each household in the USA with guns, now has, as an overall average, more than 3 guns.

Since 1980, there has been a gradual reduction in the number of people owning guns. The percentage of households with at least one gun has dropped about 20%.

So your claim that more guns means less murders is so much bullshit. There may be more guns, but only because the obsessive gun nut cases are becoming even more obsessive and buying more guns. However, most Americans are smarter than that, and the percentage with guns is falling. That alone is probably part of why the murder rate in the USA is falling, due to the simple principle that fewer people with guns means fewer gun murders.

The other reason why the murder rate is falling, of course, is that there are fewer young men in the 18 to 32 year age group, which is responsible for most murders than any other age group.

So, Seth, you can stop telling everyone that more guns means fewer murders, since I just poked a hole a semi truck could drive through, in that argument.

[Seth]

And as I pointed out on the other thread, there are fewer and fewer people owning those guns. A person who is out to commit murder just needs one gun. But each household in the USA with guns, now has, as an overall average, more than 3 guns.

Since 1980, there has been a gradual reduction in the number of people owning guns. The percentage of households with at least one gun has dropped about 20%.

Complete crap. You are making up numbers again. There is no reliable data on how many households (much less individuals) have a gun in them, and you know it. There is no such data because we, the People, explicitly deny our government the authority to collect such data. What we do know is that the number of NICS background checks has gone up a lot:

Executive Summary

The FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) Section has processed firearm background checks since November 30, 1998. Since that time, the experience gained enhances national security and public safety by identifying, developing, and implementing improvements in support of the NICS Section’s mission. Striving to provide effective and efficient service to its customers, highlights of the NICS operations in 2013 include the following:

From the inception of the NICS on November 30, 1998, to December 31, 2013, a total of 181,567,975 transactions have been processed. Of these, 85,196,840 transactions were processed by the NICS Section and 96,371,135 transactions were processed by state users. Of the 21,093,273 background checks processed through the NICS in 2013, a total of 9,315,963 transactions were processed by the NICS Section and 11,777,310 were processed by state users.

Denials issued by the NICS Section totaled 88,203. Since inception of the NICS on November 30, 1998, the NICS Section has denied a total of 1,075,781 transactions.

The NICS Section achieved a 91.82 percent Immediate Determination Rate, surpassing the U.S. Attorney General-mandated goal of 90 percent or better.

The NICS Section processed 98,688 explosives transactions. Denials issued by the NICS Section totaled 2,403.

The NICS Section processed 2,596,745 of the total 7,360,400 firearms and explosives transactions conducted via the Internet-based NICS E-Check. The amount of transactions processed in 2013 is a 66.25 percent increase over those processed in 2012.

The NICS Index expanded in 2012 to include state-prohibiting records. The expansion was a contributing factor in the number of records maintained in the NICS Index. As of December 31, 2013, the NICS Index records totaled 11,166,690, which is an increase of 2,842,759 records over December 31, 2012.

The NICS Section staff obtained approximately 29,328 final dispositions which were posted to criminal history records and disseminated over 26,680 dispositions to state agencies to assist in updating state records. As of December 31, 2013, the NICS Section staff had obtained approximately 859,000 record-completing dispositions.

The Voluntary Appeal File (VAF) permits the NICS Section to maintain information about persons to document their eligibility to receive firearms. As of December 31, 2013, the VAF maintained approximately 28,000 entries with an active Unique Personal Identification Number (UPIN). From July 2004 through December 31, 2013, over 76,000 background checks have been processed using a UPIN.

The NICS availability averaged 99.89 percent.

There were 3,375 firearm retrieval referrals forwarded to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives by the NICS Section.

As we see, since its inception the NICS system has rejected only 0.6 percent of all gun purchase transactions by licensed dealers. That's six-tenths of one percent. Hardly a shining success in getting guns out of the hands of criminals...who don't usually try to buy guns commercially. The vast majority of those denials are because the applicant was convicted of a crime punishable by a sentence of one year or more, or a misdemeanor punishable by a sentence of two or more years.

Note that this particular regulation does not take into account the actual sentence, whether the defendant was given a deferred sentence or was given a conditional sentence with probation. If the individual is either convicted, pleads guilty or offers an Alford plea to a crime with the applicable maximum penalty, even if he never serves a day in jail and never commits another crime in his life, his 2nd Amendment rights are forever denied by the feds. This includes entirely non-violent crimes such as check fraud or a conviction for manslaughter due to a traffic accident that has nothing to do with the violent tendencies of the individual.

As well, many of the initial denials are overturned either by FBI research or on appeal: "In 2013, approximately 0.95 percent of the firearm background checks processed by the NICS Section received a final transaction status of deny." Again, hardly a shining example of keeping guns away from criminals. Many of those final determinations result because the person attempting to buy a gun didn't even remember a conviction that disqualified them forever, and of all the NICS checks where a denial was finalized, there were fewer than 5 cases referred to the DOJ for prosecution for lying on the form. That's a pretty miserable record actually.

So your claim that more guns means less murders is so much bullshit. There may be more guns, but only because the obsessive gun nut cases are becoming even more obsessive and buying more guns.

You have provided zero credible evidence that this is occurring.

However, most Americans are smarter than that, and the percentage with guns is falling.

Liar.

That alone is probably part of why the murder rate in the USA is falling, due to the simple principle that fewer people with guns means fewer gun murders.

And yet, more guns, less crime.

The other reason why the murder rate is falling, of course, is that there are fewer young men in the 18 to 32 year age group, which is responsible for most murders than any other age group.

Irrelevant. More guns, less crime. Not more guns, more crime as you claim. You just can't get around that simple fact. It doesn't matter if one person is buying all those tens of millions of guns every year (which is a ludicrous implication), more guns, less crime. Guns up, crime down.

Your thesis is utterly destroyed.

So, Seth, you can stop telling everyone that more guns means fewer murders, since I just poked a hole a semi truck could drive through, in that argument.

Nah, you're just spouting strawmen and red herrings.

The facts are simple: More guns in the US, less crime in the US.

You're done, bucko. You've failed and you will continue to fail no matter how much you flail about trying to shoehorn your lying propaganda into your argument of "more guns, more crime."

The facts have defeated you.

[pErvinalia]

There is still, outside of Lotts lies, not one shred of credible evidence that more guns equals less crime. There is, however, a mass of evidence that more guns equals more gun crime. Researchers at Americas top universities agree on that, and I have posted the references to show that.

And yet there are more and more guns in the US, and less and less crime, as shown by the DOJ, FBI and national crime statistics. Inconvenient truth, innit?

You lose.

I thought you agreed that correlation doesn't equal causation? You are absolutely the worst debater I have ever seen.

[Hermit]

There is still, outside of Lotts lies, not one shred of credible evidence that more guns equals less crime. There is, however, a mass of evidence that more guns equals more gun crime. Researchers at Americas top universities agree on that, and I have posted the references to show that.

And yet there are more and more guns in the US, and less and less crime, as shown by the DOJ, FBI and national crime statistics. Inconvenient truth, innit?

You lose.

I thought you agreed that correlation doesn't equal causation? You are absolutely the worst debater I have ever seen.

So you're not only slow on the uptake. You are also weak in the memory department, rEv. Reminder: http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 5#p1597635

[Seth]

There is still, outside of Lotts lies, not one shred of credible evidence that more guns equals less crime. There is, however, a mass of evidence that more guns equals more gun crime. Researchers at Americas top universities agree on that, and I have posted the references to show that.

And yet there are more and more guns in the US, and less and less crime, as shown by the DOJ, FBI and national crime statistics. Inconvenient truth, innit?

You lose.

I thought you agreed that correlation doesn't equal causation? You are absolutely the worst debater I have ever seen.

I didn't say there was causation. I said that the correlation disproves BGs thesis of "more guns, more crime." Causation is irrelevant, only the correlation is important. If BG were correct, then more guns in the US would result in more crime. It does not. Therefore QED he's wrong and it remains true that here, more guns, less crime.