Blind groper wrote:No Seth
The University of Chicago Social Survey shows clearly that the number of people owning guns has been falling for decades.
Again, even if true, which it's not, there are 11 million more people carrying guns in public than there used to be. That's a fact. And blood is not running in the gutters as a result, as your ilk insisted would happen.
This is where I was on the wrong track. It really does not matter how many guns are out there. If a nut case has just one gun or 100 makes little difference. He is still just one gun criminal.
Exactly. You finally got it. It's not the number of guns out there, it's
who is in possession of them and what they use them for.
Gun ownership has been falling.
You go right on thinking that.
The fact that gun nutters have been stocking up with more than one gun is irrelevant, since most gun murderers kill just one person at a time. So it matters not if they have one gun or many. It is the number of gun wielders that counts.
No, it's the number of criminal gun wielders that counts.
And the University of Chicago shows that there has been a steady decrease in the number of gun wielders, which ties in nicely with the fact that the murder rate is dropping. Fewer gun wielders means fewer gun crimes.
So what? More guns, less crime.
Changing your argument doesn't help you at all, even if your sources are correct, which they aren't, as has been explained to you. I own many guns and carry one every day in public, but if your pet researchers called me and asked me if I owned any guns I'd not only tell them no, I'd insist I'm the most anti-gun person on the planet, which of course would be a complete lie. But denying them any information that might lead back to me and my guns is more important than answering their stupid questions about something that is none of their business.
Now multiply me by 200 million and we see that your citations aren't worth the paper they are written on because something else has changed in the last 35 years that affects the accuracy of those surveys: Major attacks on gun owner's rights have become the norm, so gun owners have become aware and protective of their privacy, particularly after things like a New Jersey newspaper publishing a map of every licensed gun owner in one county, a map that resulted in licensed individuals being targeted by thieves.
As you rachet up the hysteria, we are smart enough to know that feeding you false information about the number of guns and gun owners is an important defense against eventual government confiscation, which has occurred every time a gun registry has been set up.
Your pet hoplophobes have absolutely no way to know whether a "no" answer to a gun-owning question is the truth or a lie, which makes the results you tout unreliable and irrelevant.
What we do know is that hundreds of millions of NEW guns have been purchased in the US in the last 35 years, and if you are stupid enough to think that all of that buying is existing gun owners buying more guns, that's your business and I'm happy for you to think that. The obvious truth is that more people own guns and the verifiable truth is that 11 million or more people are now carrying them in public, which was not true at all 35 years ago, when having a CCW was quite rare. And we have not seen any increase in crime rates caused by this proliferation of guns in public, in fact we see exactly the opposite: dropping crime rates nationwide.
Therefore, more guns, less crime.
You lose.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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