Connecticut (et al)

[Wumbologist]

Very good! Because going on a killing spree in a school is very much like firing at a target at the range, they just move a little more right?

As I pointed out, Breivik killed many more people with the one that isn't an "assault weapon". Not to mention, he did so at greater range, with his victims fleeing in all directions.

[JimC]

Yes, Australia and the USA seem a good comparison.
Homicide rates in 2012 in killings per 100,000 people per year.
Australia 1.0
USA 4.1

And for further comparison
New Zealand 0.9.

In case Americans think their excuse is gangs, drugs, or ethnic minorities, note that New Zealand has criminal gangs, drug problems, and more ethnic minority as a percentage of the population than the USA.

And we also have drug issues, and ethnic gangs...

Some from NZ...

[FBM]

A skilled shooter can kill more people with a .22 Magnum than a unskilled person could kill with a fully-auto AK. Not saying the weapon is insignificant, only that the person behind it is more so.

[JimC]

A skilled shooter can kill more people with a .22 Magnum than a unskilled person could kill with a fully-auto AK. Not saying the weapon is insignificant, only that the person behind it is more so.

Well, Australia's worst massacre, was at Port Arthur: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthu ... Australia)

The Port Arthur massacre of 28 April 1996 was a killing spree in which 35 people were killed and 23 wounded, mainly at the historic[1] Port Arthur prison colony, a popular tourist site in south-eastern Tasmania, Australia.[2] Martin Bryant, a 28-year-old from New Town, a suburb of Hobart, eventually pleaded guilty to the crimes and was given 35 life sentences without possibility of parole.[3] He is now imprisoned in the Wilfred Lopes Centre near Risdon Prison.[4]
The Port Arthur massacre remains one of the deadliest shootings worldwide committed by a single person.[5] Gun control laws in Australia, which had been relatively lenient before the massacre, were reviewed and tightened significantly after the incident.

Bryant was not an expert shot, he was an intellectually disturbed loner, with access to a Colt AR-15. It was the availability of a machine perfectly designed for rapid killing of humans that let him kill so many.

After the massacre, a conservative Australian government, against a fair bit of opposition from some of its natural support base, significantly tightened gun control legislation.

[Blind groper]

Obviously the skill of the killer plays an important part. Just as important, if not more, is the lethality of the chosen weapon.

The nightmare would be if the USA did what Seth wants, and trained up everyone. Then the very next killer would go on a rampage to beat all previous ones. Selecting lethal weapons and using them with skill. The death toll would be horrendous.

[JimC]

Obviously the skill of the killer plays an important part. Just as important, if not more, is the lethality of the chosen weapon.

The nightmare would be if the USA did what Seth wants, and trained up everyone. Then the very next killer would go on a rampage to beat all previous ones. Selecting lethal weapons and using them with skill. The death toll would be horrendous.

The skill of the shooter is more important in a real military situation, with the opposition being fit adults, taking evasive action or firing back.

Not so important in a crowded mall full of bewildered shoppers, or in a classroom full of defenceless school children.

[FBM]

Bryant was not an expert shot, he was an intellectually disturbed loner, with access to a Colt AR-15. It was the availability of a machine perfectly designed for rapid killing of humans that let him kill so many.

After the massacre, a conservative Australian government, against a fair bit of opposition from some of its natural support base, significantly tightened gun control legislation.

Neighbours recalled he always carried an air gun and often fired it at tourists as they stopped to buy apples at a stall on the highway, and that late at night he would roam through the surrounding properties firing the gun at dogs when they barked at him.

...

He took out an Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and, firing from the hip, began shooting patrons and staff. Within 15 seconds, he had fired 17 shots killing 12 people and wounding 10. Bryant then walked to the other side of the shop and fired 12 more times killing another eight people while wounding five.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Bryant

Those numbers, at least, make me think that he was pretty skilled, self-taught or not. But again, I'm not saying that the type of weapon is completely irrelevant. That would be silly. Obviously it is important.

[JimC]

Bryant was not an expert shot, he was an intellectually disturbed loner, with access to a Colt AR-15. It was the availability of a machine perfectly designed for rapid killing of humans that let him kill so many.

After the massacre, a conservative Australian government, against a fair bit of opposition from some of its natural support base, significantly tightened gun control legislation.

Neighbours recalled he always carried an air gun and often fired it at tourists as they stopped to buy apples at a stall on the highway, and that late at night he would roam through the surrounding properties firing the gun at dogs when they barked at him.

...

He took out an Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and, firing from the hip, began shooting patrons and staff. Within 15 seconds, he had fired 17 shots killing 12 people and wounding 10. Bryant then walked to the other side of the shop and fired 12 more times killing another eight people while wounding five.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Bryant

Those numbers, at least, make me think that he was pretty skilled, self-taught or not. But again, I'm not saying that the type of weapon is completely irrelevant. That would be silly. Obviously it is.

Sure, he had done some shooting. In reality, probably about as much as me, in those days (I was pretty lethal on rabbits with a .22 ).

But he was nowhere near being a trained shooter, in military or law enforcement terms. But he didn't need to be, when the targets were a milling crowd of confused tourists, and he had a 30 shot semi-automatic weapon designed to kill humans...

[FBM]

Sure, he had done some shooting. In reality, probably about as much as me, in those days (I was pretty lethal on rabbits with a .22 ).

But he was nowhere near being a trained shooter, in military or law enforcement terms. But he didn't need to be, when the targets were a milling crowd of confused tourists,

Location, location, location!

... and he had a 30 shot

Aye, there's the rub.

semi-automatic weapon

Well, most hunting firearms are semi-auto, so...

designed to kill humans...

And anything designed to kill something as big as a deer would kill a human just as well.

The thing for me is hi-cap magazines. I used to hunt whitetail deer with an assault rifle with a hi-cap mag. It made me sloppy, knowing that I had 30 rounds. The only time I killed a deer with it took just one carefully aimed shot. The other times I sprayed and prayed. My hunting career came to an end before I could correct that error. But anyway, without hi-cap mags, the shooter has to stop to reload more often. Hi-cap mags are rarely needed for home defense, I think, so I don't think anything significant would be lost by banning them.

[orpheus]

Then gun owners are purposely skewing the data, making it impossible to determine if guns actually are a problem or not. This rather undermines your reliance on your "statistics".

Now why would they do that? It couldn't be because they care more about keeping their guns at all costs than they do about finding the truth - if that truth might mean that guns do harm society?

No, couldn't be that.

No, it couldn't be that. In fact, it's a matter of personal privacy and preservation of the Republic in the face of a long-standing attempt to ban and seize our firearms. As I elucidated in the New Jersey example of using gun registration lists which were never to be used for confiscations, but were only a few years later, gun owners no longer trust government to keep its word, and therefore we refuse to register our firearms knowing full well that it's the first step in the gun banner's agenda to confiscate arms.

So long as the government has no idea where the guns are or who has them, it's impotent to institute despotic tyranny because those arms will come out and be used to put down a tyrant should the need arise.

The very first thing that any tyrant does is to disarm the citizenry for precisely that reason.

That's why any sane gun owner would lie to a pollster about owning a gun. What they don't know can't hurt us.

Then you've no source of accurate statistics on which to base any of your arguments.

[JimC]

FBM wrote:

Well, most hunting firearms are semi-auto, so...

That's a significant difference to Oz, then. Most hunting rifles here are bolt action...

[FBM]

FBM wrote:

Well, most hunting firearms are semi-auto, so...

That's a significant difference to Oz, then. Most hunting rifles here are bolt action...

Ah. Well, that explains that. I'm pretty sure the most common choice among hunters in the US is semi-auto. I don't have any stats on that, though. It may be a misperception.

[Seth]

We just want to do it the only effective way that actually works and still protects our rights and liberties: permitting law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons for self defense, which has a demonstrable positive effect on suppressing crime and protecting some two million people every year from criminal predation.

How many times will you keep quoting the dubious findings of a discredited, and probably dishonest ex academic? John Lott has lost the respect of his fellow academics, and some of them think his "2 million per year" result came from figures he simply invented. I have shown you, Seth, reports from Yale and Harvard University in which both the concealed carry claim and the 2 million a year claim are utterly discredited. When you make those claims over and over again, despite the new evidence, you are being intellectually dishonest.

Sorry, but you're wrong and you're just repeating the hoplophobe propaganda in hopes it'll stick. It won't. The Yale and Harvard reports have been discredited as sloppy, biased and incorrect.

Firearms are used by private individuals every day to protect themselves. There are thousands of examples of news reports reporting such incidents at "The Armed Citizen" website. You have yet to refute a single such example, and all it takes is for ONE person to have been saved by a lawfully owned firearm and that's sufficient, because this is a debate about individual rights, not about collectivist ideology.

Sorry, that's not the government's job. The Supreme Court has said so quite explicitly a couple of times. No politician, government employee or police officer has ANY duty to protect ANY person against ANY particular crime...that's the duty of the individual.

Much hilarity here. Isn't it the NYPD who has the motto "To Serve and Protect"? However, I think if you asked any non corrupt police officer anywhere in the world whether the police had a duty to protect individual citizens, you would get a resounding Yesin reply.

Go ahead and ask them. Or better yet, let's ask the Supreme Court.

DeShaney v. Winnebago County

The court ruled 6-3 to uphold the appeals court's grant of summary judgment. The DSS's actions were found not to constitute a violation of Joshua DeShaney's due process rights.
Court opinion

The court opinion, by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, held that the Due Process Clause protects against state action only, and as it was Randy DeShaney who abused Joshua; a state actor (the Winnebago County Department of Social Services) was not responsible.

Furthermore, they ruled that the DSS could not be found liable, as a matter of constitutional law, for failure to protect Joshua DeShaney from a private actor. Although there exist conditions in which the state (or a subsidiary agency, like a county department of social services) is obligated to provide protection against private actors, and failure to do so is a violation of 14th Amendment rights, the court reasoned, "The affirmative duty to protect arises not from the State's knowledge of the individual's predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitation which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf... it is the State's affirmative act of restraining the individual's freedom to act on his own behalf - through incarceration, institutionalization, or other similar restraint of personal liberty - which is the "deprivation of liberty" triggering the protections of the Due Process Clause, not its failure to act to protect his liberty interests against harms inflicted by other means.".[4] Since Joshua DeShaney was not in the custody of the DSS, the DSS was not required to protect him from harm. In reaching this conclusion, the court opinion relied heavily on its precedents in Estelle v. Gamble and Youngberg v. Romeo.

Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled, 7–2, that a town and its police department could not be sued under 42 U.S.C. §1983 for failing to enforce a restraining order, which had led to the murder of a woman's three children by her estranged husband.

The Supreme Court reversed the Tenth Circuit's decision, reinstating the District Court's order of dismissal. The Court's majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia held that enforcement of the restraining order was not mandatory under Colorado law; were a mandate for enforcement to exist, it would not create an individual right to enforcement that could be considered a protected entitlement under the precedent of Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth; and even if there were a protected individual entitlement to enforcement of a restraining order, such entitlement would have no monetary value and hence would not count as property for the Due Process Clause.

Justice David Souter wrote a concurring opinion, using the reasoning that enforcement of a restraining order is a process, not the interest protected by the process, and that there is not due process protection for processes.

Here's a great article on the subject:

Killings within the law.

Yes, these can be evil. As I quoted before "The law is an ass!" Some laws are inhumane and evil, and any law that permits one person to shoot and kill another without ascertaining whether a real threat exists is evil. The act of so killing is also evil. Just because one person imagines another is a threat is no excuse to carry out a homicide.

That depends on what you mean by "ascertaining a real threat exists." Most self-defense laws permit an individual to act on appearances in the urgency of the moment, recognizing that if the law required proof absolute of a deadly threat before self-defense was used, the victim would likely be dead before being authorized to protect his life. The constraint on the individual is the "reasonable man test" that applies whenever the term "reasonably believes" appears in statutes like this. The reasonable man test is an examination by a jury or judge of the totality of the circumstances faced by the individual claiming a self defense justification for a killing to see if a "reasonable person of average intellect would be likely to respond in the same way if presented with the same circumstances." This means that your decision to shoot is going to be morning-after armchair quarterbacked by a jury, in the safety of the jury room, so you'd better make damned sure the attacker's actions justify lethal force before you exercise your self defense right to kill him.

When you say "imagines" it conjures up fantasies made up out of whole cloth, and that would never meet the legal standard for the use of deadly force. In Colorado, the law is very explicit. It says that the person using deadly force in defense of himself or another must reasonably believe that his life, or the life of another is in imminent (not probable or possible) danger of death or serious bodily injury, AND he must believe that a lesser degree of force would be inadequate to stop the threat.

It's really quite a high standard, and most civilians are eleven times LESS likely to use lethal force even when they are fully justified in doing so than police officers are. Who, by the way, have exactly the SAME restrictions on their use of lethal force with one major exception: a police officer may use deadly force to prevent the escape of someone whom he reasonably believes poses an imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm to the public at large if allowed to escape and if he is unable to prevent the escape any other way.

In Colorado, the intruder must make an "uninvited entry," AND he must do so with the intent to commit some crime OTHER THAN the uninvited entry inside the home, AND the homeowner must believe that the intruder is going to use ANY degree of physical force against ANY occupant of the dwelling.

Yes, and any homeowner who shoots dead an intruder will make whatever claims he feels he needs to make to justify the killing. Many of those claims will be lies. Though we can never know the exact numbers, you can guarantee that a lot of killings that are called self defense were judged that way based on lies.

Perhaps, but then again in a situation where someone has made a forcible entry into someone's home, the state legislature has said that the presumption must lie with the homeowner, not the criminal, and therefore absent evidence that the standard was NOT met by the homeowner, the law is going to side with him because it's HIS home and he is entitled to absolute safety inside it. Usually it's relatively easy for investigators to sort out what actually happened, and there have been a couple of cases where someone has been shot and the Castle Doctrine defense has been presented and the jury found the individual guilty of manslaughter or murder because, for example, the home's occupant actually enticed (invited) the deceased into the house precisely in order to set him up to be killed. The homeowner ended up going to prison for that murder.

I'll go with erring on the side of the homeowner and occupants and place the burden on the intruder not to make an uninvited entry with the intent to commit a crime and not to offer to use ANY degree of force against an occupant if he gets caught.

I spoke a couple years back with an American visiting NZ. He was a big time gun nutter. Not just an enthusiast. This guy was a nutter. He told me that if anyone entered his house uninvited, he would shoot the intruder dead, no questions asked. And then he would fire a bullet through the ceiling. He would tell the police the ceiling shot was a warning shot, fired at first. After which, his lie would be that the intruder kept advancing till he was forced to shoot him.

So, don't break into his house. I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who enters anyone's home uninvited and I too make the presumption from the get-go that anyone who forces an entry into my house (which they must do because I keep the house locked) is intending to do harm to me or my family. I'm not going to spend a second considering the "rights" of the intruder, I'm going to cover him and take whatever action is lawful and necessary based on his actions and not regret it for an instant if I have to shoot him.

Don't want to get shot? Don't enter my house uninvited or by force.

I suspect this tactic is well known among gun enthusiasts, and probably put into practice. Such a killing might be considered legal, but would be totally evil.

No, it would not be evil. It would be a reasonable reaction to a home invasion by a stranger who poses a threat to my family. Tampering with evidence or lying about it merely helps to protect the homeowner from unjust prosecution by bleeding-heart criminal-coddling District Attorneys.

The classic statement is "If you have to shoot him, drag him inside and put a butcher knife in his hand..."

I like the idea that criminals are made afraid that they are going to get whacked, even if it's not necessarily fully legal. Tends to dissuade them from invading people's homes, which is evil.

[Blind groper]

The Yale and Harvard reports have been discredited as sloppy, biased and incorrect.

The Yale and Harvard reports which say John Lott has presented flawed data, has been criticised by John Lott as sloppy, biased and incorrect. Only the most naive person would believe that.

all it takes is for ONE person to have been saved by a lawfully owned firearm and that's sufficient,

You are clearly not a fan of Mr. Spock who says that the needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few. However, it is simple maths. If an action results in saving one life at the cost of more than 1, it is wrong. Putting guns into homes will result in the odd rare, successful self defense, but will result in many more deaths from suicide or other homicide. 60% of all women who are murdered in the home are murdered by their male partner. That male partner carries out the murder with the gun, if one is kept at home, and the odds of such a murder are increased dramatically if there is a gun at home.

87% of all killings in the home by gun are suicides. That is a killing by the gun kept in the home.

The maths are simple. Those who keep guns at home are putting their whole family at risk, and the self defense they claim is a very low probability event. The chances of suicide or spousal murder are much, much higher.

You may call these bullshit statistics, but each statistic represents a human life. If you ignore the stats, then people die.

Your 'supreme court' examples are simply cases where the court let the police off the hook for not protecting someone where they were not in a position to do so. Of course I agree with the court. Policemen, like everyone else, are not supermen and cannot protect everyone all the time. However, when they can, they have the duty to do their damnedest to provide such protection.

Most self-defense laws permit an individual to act on appearances in the urgency of the moment, recognizing that if the law required proof absolute of a deadly threat before self-defense was used, the victim would likely be dead before being authorized to protect his life.

There is also the question of courage. If a person sees someone who might, but also might not, be a threat, and shoots to kill without taking the risk of checking to find out, that shooter is an arrant, yellow bellied coward. To kill another person to avoid a minor risk involved in checking is the most despicable and scum bag behaviour.

We give medals to people who take risks to save the lives of other humans. That is courage. The opposite is those who will kill rather than take a small risk. Those people are beneath contempt. They are the most low down, asshole cowards.

[MrJonno]

'Combat' knives are banned in the UK not because they are more dangerous than kitchen knives but because of the survivalist psycho's who buy them. You can't really lock someone up just for being one but you can make their lifestyle as hard as possible

It's an attack on the mindset more than the weapon and again nothing wrong with that