Guns used for lawful self defense

[Sean Hayden]

I was surprised to read ownership had declined too, just going on what must be an increase in gun sales here in Houston. But that's what it said, I'll see if I can find it.

[Sean Hayden]

Keep in mind I'm not going deep into any of this. Apparently gun ownership has declined -fewer people own guns- but the people that do own them have more and more.

http://leanforward.msnbc.com/_news/2012 ... -ever?lite

[Wumbologist]

Keep in mind I'm not going deep into any of this. Apparently gun ownership has declined -fewer people own guns- but the people that do own them have more and more.

http://leanforward.msnbc.com/_news/2012 ... -ever?lite

2011 Gallup poll had self-reported gun ownership at the highest rate since 1993:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/150353/self- ... -1993.aspx

In '09 I had to take a firearms safety course as a licensing requirement, and was put on a waiting list because the demand for the classes from new gun owners was so high.

[laklak]

No one has any idea how many guns there are in the U.S., or how many people own them. The only data they have is from self-reporting, which isn't a particularly rigorous methodology. I've seen estimates from 200 million to 400 million guns, 30 to 70% ownership rates.

There are a lot of people I know who would lie to a survey taker. Me? Guns? No, no guns around here, nope.

[Wumbologist]

Me? Guns? No, no guns around here, nope.

Boating accident?

[laklak]

Boats? No, haven't seen any boats around here, nope.

[FBM]

"If you don't have pictures, I wasn't there."

[Sean Hayden]

Yeah I wondered how badly self-reporting might have screwed up the results.

Here is some more information based on the same report:

KEY FINDINGS

According to decades of GSS data analyzed in the VPC report--

Household gun ownership peaked in 1977, when more than half (54 percent) of American households reported having any guns. By 2010, this number had dropped more than 20 percentage points to 32.3 percent of American households reporting having any guns in the home--the lowest level ever recorded by the GSS. In 2010, fewer than a third of American households reported having a gun in the home.

Personal gun ownership peaked in 1985, when 30.7 percent of Americans reported personally owning a gun. By 2010, this number had dropped nearly 10 percentage points to 20.8 percent--the lowest level ever recorded by the GSS. In 2010, slightly more than one out of five Americans reported personally owning a gun.

Male gun ownership peaked in 1990, when 52.4 percent of males reported personally owning a gun. By 2010, this number had dropped more than 19 percentage points to 33.2 percent--the lowest level ever recorded by the GSS. In 2010, only one out of three American males reported personally owning a gun.

Female gun ownership has fluctuated within a narrow range with no recent signs of increase. Relatively rare, female gun ownership peaked in 1982 at 14.3 percent. In 2010 the female personal gun ownership rate was 9.9 percent. Only one out of 10 American females reported personally owning a gun in 2010.

Found here: http://www.vpc.org/press/1104norc.htm

[Seth]

Whatever.
The end result is that anyone in the USA who wants a hand gun, can get one. I have been told by an American I know, that even if the legal authorities turn you down, it is not hard. Just a little more expensive.

In western Europe, though, it is almost impossible to get a hand gun, and very, very few possess one. Since half of all murders in the USA are done with hand guns, this goes a long way to explaining why murder rates are so much lower in western Europe.

This is quite obviously not true. It's as easy for a criminal to get a handgun in Europe as it is anywhere because those who walk in criminal circles don't give a damn about the law. It might be difficult for a law-abiding citizen to get a gun because such a person would not be connected to the network of criminals that makes it easy to get a gun. But criminals have no problem whatsoever getting guns, and if it's not a hand gun, there are plenty of shotguns to be sawed off and made at least as concealable and dangerous as a handgun.

So, once again, you demonstrate abysmal ignorance of facts.

[Seth]

There is no easy answer, of course, and any solution would take decades to fully implement. However, that is not an excuse to fail to act.

No excuse is needed for the refusal to do as you suggest because the right to keep and bear arms (specifically including handguns) for personal defense is a fundamental constitutional right, thus sayeth the Supreme Court of the United States in interpreting the 2nd Amendment.

The need is for a federal law - not local or state - to restrict hand guns to police and military.

No there isn't because even if you do so, all you do is disarm law-abiding citizens, not criminals.

Obviously, that will not stop those murders and suicides overnight.

Or ever.

But if you can, in the short term, drop hand gun murders from 8,000 per year to (say) 4,000, and drop hand gun suicides from 12,000 per year to (say) 6,000, then you are saving 10,000 human lives each year. That is well worth doing.

No, it's not, because you simply refuse to acknowledge the up to two million times per year that firearms (including handguns) are lawfully used to thwart crimes and prevent victimization. So, rather than 8000 "handgun murders" each year, you'll have tens of thousands of murders and other violent crimes because only the military, police and criminals have handguns, and the criminal's prey are rendered helpless. This is precisely what the differences in crime rates in DC and Sarasota demonstrate, a fact which is repeated everywhere in the nation. Where law-abiding citizens are barred from having or carrying handguns for self defense, violent crime rates, and murders, are always much higher than in locales where concealed carry is lawful.

That you refuse to acknowledge these facts only points to your clear bias and inability to accept facts which rebut your false claims.

This does not prevent people from having a defense for their homes, since such a law is limited to hand guns - not to the much more effective sporting rifles.

I guess you have yet to figure out that violent crime doesn't just happen in one's home. How stupid is that?

Slowly, over years or decades, with no hand guns for sale in gun shops, the supply will dry up, and the guns will become much more expensive.

Only for law-abiding citizens, and with the number of handguns currently in circulation, it'll be centuries or millennia before any reduction in handgun crime will be apparent. Sorry, but I decline to allow anyone to disarm me and make me into a helpless victim, even if doing so would save the lives of 8000 other people. My life is not a statistic, it's mine, and I'll defend it even against the government attempting to reduce me to a cypher in the calculus of tyranny and gun control.

This will cut the numbers in the hands of even criminals. Not to mention the actions of police to remove hand guns from criminals. Over time, hand gun murders and suicides will drop to something close to zero, which has already happened in every other western civilised nation.

Horseshit.

[Seth]

Wumbo

I have already admitted that the cure will take time. In the short term, you will be correct, and the law abiding citizens will no longer have hand guns, while many criminals will retain them. However, the number of murdered people will drop, in relation to a reduction in number of hand guns in circulation. For home defense, paranoid citizens can use rifles, which are actually better, since they are more accurate. The truth is, of course, that the number of ordinary citizens murdered in their homes by invading criminals is a very tiny number. Most murders are criminal killing criminal, or ordinary citizen killing someone he/she knows. The latter group will drop in number substantially, and very quickly, as ordinary citizens no longer have hand guns.

The simple fact that both Chicago and NYC have had, effectively, complete bans on private ownership of handguns, even in the home, and they are at the top of the list for domestic murders, including murders with "illegal" handguns proves that you're once again mendaciously distorting the truth.

My life, safety and rights are not subject to infringement on the specious argument that someone else might use their legal or illegal handgun to murder their spouse. Using your metric, we have to ban steak knives for everyone because of Elzbieta Plackowska of Naperville, Ill. (a suburb of Chicago, where guns are banned) used a knife on Wednesday to stab her seven year old son more than 100 times and her 5 year old daughter to death because she was mad that her truck driver husband was often away.

Sorry, but that's idiocy. Crazy people and murderers will kill people no matter how many or few guns there are in a society, and since the police cannot be everywhere (even in police-state NYC) disarming everyone (all 300 million of us) to try to prevent a very tiny number of murders committed by spouses will cause MORE harm than allowing law abiding citizens to carry defensive handguns. The facts prove this. All you have is your silly notion that infringing on the rights of 300 million people will save 8000, which it won't. You know this, but you utterly refuse to acknowledge the millions of times each year that people use their firearms lawfully to prevent or thwart violent crime, documenting which is the purpose of this thread. You have not once been able to refute any of the tiny number of the millions of examples of this lawful use of firearms by demonstrating with absolute scientific certainty that the absence of a firearm in the hands of the victim would have resulted in their not being hurt or killed or otherwise victimized by the violent criminals who attacked them.

This makes your arguments worthless ideological bilge and a poor attempt at propaganda, nothing more.

These numbers are not insignificant. In the USA, between 1500 and 2000 people are murdered by their spouse each year, and the dominant murder weapon is hand gun.

Yes, they are insignificant when compared to the rights and safety of the other 300 million people in this country.

In the longer term, though, hand guns will become few and far between. There may be a few (but only a few) home made weapons around, but they are usually not as good, and prone to problems. Professionally made hand guns are more reliable, more accurate, and take more lives.

You really don't have a fucking clue, do you. If the government bans handguns, I'm going into the business of manufacturing high-quality "illegal" handguns for the "criminal element" that will readily buy them outside the "legal" market for firearms, if for no other reason than to use them to kill the bureaucrats and politicians who voted to ban handguns in the first place. Manufacturing a quality handgun is abysmally simple for someone with a lathe, a milling machine and some other basic tooling. I can do it in my basement, or some other clandestine location (like a semi-trailer that moves about the country) without the least bit of trouble.

So can anyone else with a modicum of skill with machine tools.

In time, even criminals will no longer have access to hand guns, and the murder rate will drop dramatically. But only if the government has the courage to do the right thing, which I seriously doubt. Politicians are known cowards, who will never do anything that may cost them votes.

Nope. Never work. For one thing, aside from the black market and home manufacture, handguns will be smuggled in through the borders from other countries, and they will be stolen from and indeed sold by the police and military to "criminals." I know where my National Guard armory is, and it's child's play for me and my Unorganized Militia tactical team to take over the armory and steal the guns before anyone can even respond to an alarm. And there would be no alarm because among the "like minded individuals" I know are large numbers of National Guardsmen who understand the Constitution and would willingly participate in putting down the tyrants who attempted disarm this nation...including the ones with the combinations to the alarms and vaults.

[Gallstones]

If someone is shagging your wife, are you more likely to kill him, if you have a gun at home, or not?

If he's shagging her without her consent then I'm highly likely to kill him. Almost a certainty, actually, if I can get to a gun. If it's consensual sex then there are plenty of divorce attorneys for that sort of thing, murder is a bit OTT for infidelity.

If bullets were as easy to dodge as questions, there wouldn't be much of a problem.

What I don't like about high levels of gun ownership is the knowledge that the pathetic wanker in the next car or sitting at the next table could be carrying a gun.
Americans are used to living with that shit. If you live in shit all your life, you don't even realise there's a smell.
Guns just reduce the quality of life, simply by being there. But if you've never known anything else, you can't know that.

I've lived long periods of time with no guns, and then periods of time of many guns. Right now I have many guns.
Right now is better.

[Blind groper]

Suggesting that we get rid of legal ownership first is not only political suicide, it's the equivalent of conspiracy to commit murder. The gun-owning criminals will have a field day.

This opinion is not backed up by facts.
First : It has already been done, by many nations, and the dreaded outcome you fear did not happen.
Second : Hand guns are used in murder by criminals mainly to kill other criminals. They are also used by more ordinary people in domestic type murders and in suicides. The number of murders by criminals of the householder, while it happens, are very small.

[Blind groper]

I think you underestimate how long it would take for existing illegal arms to dry up.

As i pointed out to FBM, this is not new. In the UK, for example, 100 years ago, hand guns were readily available. The average citizen could buy one easily. Restrictions have been very effective, and did not take terribly long to have an impact. Murder rates in the UK have been steadily dropping for a long time.

Arguments about home made guns and such things as sawn off shotguns are also answered the same way. Outside the USA, in other western civilised nations, home made guns and sawn off shotguns etc are a part of the crime scene, but a very small part. They exist, but not in large numbers. We can expect the same result in the USA, if the police are assiduous in carrying out their duty, as they are in the UK and elsewhere.

Violent crime, including gun crime in the USA, has also been dropping in recent years. While the police are quick to claim credit, it is much more likely to be a function of an aging population. As I pointed out earlier, most violent crime is committed by males of 16 to 30 years old. That demographic is becoming a smaller percentage of the total, and the rate of violent crime per capita is dropping as well.

[Blind groper]

This is quite obviously not true. It's as easy for a criminal to get a handgun in Europe as it is anywhere because those who walk in criminal circles don't give a damn about the law..

Bullshit.

It is not about giving a damn about the law. it is about making it hard to get hold of such weapons, and having a police force that arrests anyone who has possession.

The truth of that is shown by the very small number of hand guns, even in criminal hands, in western civilised nations outside the USA.