Connecticut (et al)

[aspire1670]

Sam Harris, "The Riddle of the Gun." http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the- ... of-the-gun

Shorter Sam Harris: I have a gun to protect myself against other people who have guns because cops cant be everywhere with their guns.

[FBM]

Let the witch-hunts begin! http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/02/us/ne ... ermit-map/

[Coito ergo sum]

Sam Harris, "The Riddle of the Gun." http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the- ... of-the-gun

Saw the bit

On the other, proponents of stricter gun laws often seem unable to understand why a good person would ever want ready access to a loaded firearm

and then switched off, good people/bad people is a meaningless division when trying to deal with fragile humans

He isn't calling one side good and the other side bad. He says there are good people on both sides of the equation.

[MrJonno]

He isn't calling one side good and the other side bad. He says there are good people on both sides of the equation.

Missing the point, good and bad don't exist as concepts much of the time for human beings. Is a person who comes up to find his wife in bed with another man and then proceeds to murder both a bad person?. It's a bad act but one that I think much of the population including 'law abiding citizens' are quite capable of.

People need to be protected from people (including themselves), it doesnt matter if they are good or bad. The whole concept that good people need to be protected from bad people is just flawed. A human people is not a rational player and laws should not be based on assuming he is

[Coito ergo sum]

He isn't calling one side good and the other side bad. He says there are good people on both sides of the equation.

Missing the point, good and bad don't exist as concepts much of the time for human beings. Is a person who comes up to find his wife in bed with another man and then proceeds to murder both a bad person?. It's a bad act but one that I think much of the population including 'law abiding citizens' are quite capable of.

People need to be protected from people (including themselves), it doesnt matter if they are good or bad. The whole concept that good people need to be protected from bad people is just flawed. A human people is not a rational player and laws should not be based on assuming he is

He's not using good/bad in that context. He's not saying "good people need to be protected from bad people." You're jumping to a wrong conclusion, and thereby misunderstanding him. Perhaps read the entire article -- but, that would possibly cause you to understand and, quite possibly, agree with some part of what he's talking about, which is what you want to avoid, obviously. So, by jumping on this good/bad point and then disregarding the thrust of what he's saying, is efficient in accomplishing that.

[MrJonno]

His article is riddles with the concept of good /bad, a good armed guard etc will protect a school from baddies. There is nothing else of consequence in that article apart fromt usual there are other ways to hurt people

When it comes down to it the person most likely to harm Sam Harris family is Sam Harris, the person most likely to hurt your family is you, the person most likely to hurt my family is me.
That is the starting point on any discussion,

[laklak]

After all, Ted Bundy, Dr. Shipman, John Wayne Gacy and their buddies weren't bad, they were just having an extended run of bad days.

[aspire1670]

After all, Ted Bundy, Dr. Shipman, John Wayne Gacy and their buddies weren't bad, they were just having an extended run of bad days.

Maybe. But none of them was stopped by a vigilante with a gun.

[MrJonno]

After all, Ted Bundy, Dr. Shipman, John Wayne Gacy and their buddies weren't bad, they were just having an extended run of bad days.

Generally insane but you can get premeditated evil but its very rare, most crime is not of this type. It's generally impuslive, irrational and not planned. When it is preplanned the courts tend to give far higher sentences

[Coito ergo sum]

After all, Ted Bundy, Dr. Shipman, John Wayne Gacy and their buddies weren't bad, they were just having an extended run of bad days.

Maybe. But none of them was stopped by a vigilante with a gun.

If some were, would it change your opinion?

[Coito ergo sum]

After all, Ted Bundy, Dr. Shipman, John Wayne Gacy and their buddies weren't bad, they were just having an extended run of bad days.

Generally insane but you can get premeditated evil but its very rare, most crime is not of this type. It's generally impuslive, irrational and not planned. When it is preplanned the courts tend to give far higher sentences

Most gun violence is preplanned or is at least rational and non-impulsive, as most of it involves the drug trade. Eliminate homicides from the drug trade, and we'd have a far different landscape to talk about.

[MrJonno]

Not convinced thats true, most murders are blokes killing their girlfriends/wives or people killing each other an argument down a bar (alcohol the main drug there)

[Coito ergo sum]

Not convinced thats true, most murders are blokes killing their girlfriends/wives or people killing each other an argument down a bar (alcohol the main drug there)

Not most gun homicides. Most gun homicides are in the urban areas involving the drug trade.

Most murders, incidentally, are NOT blokes killing girlfriends and wives. Most murders are committed by men against men.

As Harris writes --

Thirty percent of urban households have at least one firearm. This figure increases to 42 percent in the suburbs and 60 percent in the countryside. As one moves away from cities, therefore, the rate of gun ownership doubles. And yet gun violence is primarily a problem in cities. It is the people of Detroit, Oakland, Memphis, Little Rock, and Stockton who are at the greatest risk of being killed by guns.

[MrJonno]

The primary problem for violence and any crime is urban as you need a high density of people to have crime, thats the same everywhere. Can see that from a British map of murders (quite a weird website)

http://www.citizensreportuk.org/reports ... ce-uk.html

Laklak racial breakdown of crime can be found along with lots of other states on British crime, black people are over represented as victims and killers but are nowhere near being the majority of murders

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publicatio ... iew=Binary

[Seth]

Seth

I have shown you the references and the statistics. Telling me I am wrong is just the old ostrich again with his head in the sand, in case he sees some truth he finds unpalatable. In your case, learning that your guns do far more harm than good, which they do.

I'm not going to bother to dredge up the information that demonstrates your error because you will simply deny that the information is credible. We're at an impasse there it seems. But the fact remains that your primary claim, which is that more handguns in society will inevitably lead to more murders is demonstrably not true because the number of handguns in our society has been increasing for more than 20 years and yet all violent crime, including murder, continues to drop. No other evidence is needed to disprove your claim.

On domestic violence.
This is not uncommon in all western nations. I suspect it is more common in my country than in yours, since our very large Polynesian culture contains a sadly very large percentage of abusive husbands. The thing is, though, that with no gun in the house, the drunk and abusive husband beats his wife with his fists. In your country, the statistics show that a lot of the same kind of asshole will pick up a gun, and in his anger, shoot his wife. End result is that New Zealand has, per capita, a lot fewer murders of wives by husbands than the USA. Having more guns just puts women at risk.

Unless it's the woman that has the gun, which Samuel Colt referred to as "The Great Equalizer."

To laklak

The idea that drugs and blacks fuel murders does not stack up. My country has a fifth of the murder rate of the USA, and we have a massive drug culture, and more dark skinned ethnic minorities than the USA has. Certainly the drug culture fuels crimes, and violent crimes. But there is a big difference between a violent crime, like being beaten up, and a murder. In NZ we get a lot of beatings due to the drug industry, but few murders. The difference is that our criminals do not have hand guns. The reason they do not have hand guns is that we have made hand guns almost impossible to access, for everyone.

Nonsense. If your drug dealers wanted to kill people, they would kill people. Handguns are merely a convenient and effective method of doing so, but are hardly the only (or indeed the most common) weapon of murder.

But what handguns ARE is an effective tool of self-defense, used 100,000 to 2.5 million times per year in the US (well, firearms not just handguns) to defend innocent citizens against criminal predation of every kind, from burglary to robbery to murder.

And that's true whether you like it or not, and in spite of the long-debunked anti-gun propaganda that you continue to purvey.

You have yet to even try to refute any of the dozen or so instances of armed self defense I've posted so far, and I can post a hundred more if you try. It's not surprising you evade this fact because it utterly destroys your thesis.

You cannot permit law abiding people to have hand guns without indirectly supplying criminals also. To stop criminals getting hand guns, you have to stop everyone getting hand guns. We have done that in NZ, and Australia, and 23 of the richest 24 countries. Result is quarter or less murder rate.[/quote]