Is the damage to society from guns worth the freedom to have guns?

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I can't imagine how people blame inanimate objects. An AR15 can't get up from the table, walk to a school, and just start killing people. You should be blaming people, not the object itself. Crime, especially murder, has been around since the beginning of man, and it will always exist. To get rid of crime is to get rid of humans. As I recall, the people who do that end up in terrible situations.
 
Look at the DOJ numbers their 1994 study where they determined the number of times a firearm was used to stop a violent crime. http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/165476.txt

That study showed that firearms were used to stop a violent crime 1.5 MILLION times a year.

Private estimates are higher. Kleck's study indicated over 2,500,000 defensive gun uses a year.

Using the DoJ numbers and extending them over a 10 year period, defensive gun uses stopped 15,000,000 vs the order of magnitude smaller number of violent crimes where a gun was used. That's a factor of 10 benefit from firearms.

You have to look at rates and not raw numbers and compare the rates. In a population of 400 million the rates of gun use in violent crimes are not large enough to call for more laws. Compared against the 10X higher rate of defensive gun use it certainly doesn't make any sense to come up with new and more baroque ways to address an emotional instead of statistical problem.

If you're really concerned about society look at the root cause of violence instead and look for ways to reduce those. That will give the greatest benefit to society because it will help reduce the reasons violence takes place.
 
I question your premise. I think that guns do more good than "damage."

Research shows vast numbers of crimes are prevented by guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Perhaps far more than the number of deaths and injuries resulting from criminal misuse of guns.

If you are willing to surrender your right to own guns, how about bicycles and swimming pools? These things kill more people than do guns. So do cars. Medical malpractice kills more people than do guns. Should we ban medical doctors? How much are you willing to give up in the interest of saving lives?
 
Looking at the various responses in this thread, and the very different interpretations of what the OP was trying to say in the article

a) folks just skimmed the article and made some "assumptions" about its contents

and

b) the writing itself was an attempt to be a bit too nuanced, and the point of the article is getting lost on folks.

It seems you were trying to back into a pro-2A argument from an anti-2A premise. The result might have been too complicated for a cursory read.
 
I'm not going to look up the numbers again, but it is estimated by almost all sources that guns stop much more crime than they facilitate. Yes, guns are worth it. If you give up a small degree of freedom to gain a small amount of security, then you will have neither and lose both.
 
I won't read the essay, but I'll answer the question by stating that Dr. John Lott's studies showed that (at the time) guns were successfully used over a million times annually to PREVENT violence and/or injury to their owners.
He started out as an anti-gunner, but had enough integrity to conduct an honest research project and to change his opinion based on his findings.

Those findings & figures are always ignored by those who present an anti-gun agenda by starting out with something along the lines of "How can we justify gun ownership when ALL guns do is cause harm?"
That flawed premise is invariably wrong.
Denis
 
Okay... over the past ten years how many crime incidents with guns do you think have happened here in America?
Click to expand...

And...

The same question would have to be applied to things like alcohol and automobiles
Click to expand...

Jack...

Gun-related deaths and injuries...all of them combined...pale in comparison to the highway carnage...even with alcohol removed from the equation. What do we do about that?

Any whackjob can take a quart of gasoline, an empty glass bottle, and a piece of rag and construct a fire bomb. Do we ban the sale of gasoline and phase out glass bottles and regulate rags and require registration of Bic lighters...because of what someone might do? Can you imagine the outrage?

You seem to be on board with further restrictions imposed on tens of millions of gun owners and shooters who have never killed anyone, nor ever will...on the very small possibility that it will somehow keep another nut job from going postal.

Criminals and sociopaths pay scant attention to rules and regulations. Once a man has decided to commit the ultimate crime against God and humanity, no law...no rule...and no posted sign will stop that.

It's far more likely that further restrictions would remove the one tool that actually could stop an attack in progress. There were a few handguns locked in cars at Luby's that fateful morning...left there by law-abiding citizens who complied with the law. On the other hand, the killer wasn't deterred in the least by that law, nor by the law against murder.

If only one had been armed and willing to shoot him down at the outset that morning, the body count would very likely have been much lower.

There also seems to be a prevailing belief that anything that is restricted or banned will henceforth become unavailable. If history has taught us nothing else, it's shown that a man who is determined to have something will eventually have it. All it takes is desire and money. If he decides that he wants a live hand grenade, he can arrange it. If he decides that he wants to have sexual relations with a 10 year-old virgin, he can arrange it. No law or restriction will stop him.
 
There will always be damage to a society weather there are gun or no guns..or weather there are more laws or not...as a tax paying law abiding citizen im tired of having to pay the price because of a criminal who's gonna do something bad no matter how strict the laws are
 
woj... you pretty much nailed it. I certainly don't recognize the article based upon many of the comments here. :)
 
If my math is correct, law-abiding Americans use firearms to deter crime ~25,000,000 times in ten years - 2,500,000 annually.

You may want to study who are the victims and perpetrators in most of the gun-related crimes.
 
I refuse to read another opinion on guns. Guns are part of society, they aren't going any place. So this back and forth nonsense has to stop. When you have 24% of the people out of work and the stock market hitting new highs, there is much more to worry about than guns.
We need to get this economy straightened out and everything will return to normal. When you have depression type economic circumstances going on, it's easy to try and single out specific incidents and lay blame there.
That is not the problem. Next week it will be something else. When the Seals killed Ben Ladin, a short time ago, you didn't hear about guns being bad then Guns were just the instrument he used to fulfill his objective, it could have been anything from fire to poison gas.
When folks can't make enough money to eat and keep a roof over their heads, they resort to some crazy stuff. I don't think this generation had the mental toughness that our parents and we had, they never saw this kind of preassure before. This was the generation that got awards for just playing, not winning.
They were handed everything that we busted our chops to make, new cars, college degrees, high paying jobs, the promise of an easy life. Now you take that away, and you just don't have some folks with the ability to accept the fact that someone pulled out the rug. They are angry and don't have the ability to tough it out. Instead they break, and these violent incidents are the result. IMO, Guns have "little to nothing", to do with the underlying causation.
 
So you were writing for readers... or mind readers?
Click to expand...

Actually, for a different crowd than here. I am going for the softcore anti-gun crowd who is that way because they never really thought about the underlying assumptions of their feelings. They are willing to parrot what they've heard because they haven't heard any counter arguments.

Sometimes you tear away the peel of an orange slowly and delicately, and at other times you smash that sucker with a sledgehammer. This is the more delicate peeling away of what they think they know.

The crowd here is just as full of assumptions as the gun control crowd, with the caveat that most of the assumptions here are correct. However, thought patterns can sometimes get in the way of understanding, even when the thought patterns are generally good ones.
 
In Rawanda countless people were murdered with machettes. I'd rather take a bullet.

While these discussions are healthy for philosophical reasons the fact is that guns are here and we should be focusing on getting back the rights we've lost not compromising further. Stand strong and united, that's what's always made us Americans to begin with.
 
Damage to society? What damage? As others have pointed out this is a flawed premise. To me and I suspect everyone on this forum it's one of the enumerated freedoms that set us apart from the rest of the world. It's so wonderful for the entire law abiding civilian population the opportunity to assume and exercise the responsibility for ones own life and liberty with firearms if they so wish, as we know millions do daily. Too bad some one wasn't doing that in Aurora. It's so very sad when a lunatic does his evil, yet I'm always encouraged that we have to deal with such madmen only on occasion.

So I guess in a nutshell I just don't see damage as part of the equation.
 
Ok, so starting with the terms and perspective of your opponent is much like the "and the bicycle riders" approach to illuminating the fallacies of their assumptions.
 
Read my new signature line below.

Is keeping guns out of the "wrong hands" worth the collective criminilization of MILLIONS of people simply for having a thing that the vast majority would never use to harm anyone?
 
hso... I am not familiar with your bicycles comment. Could you explain it. I always enjoy learning new phrases.
 
I was doing some carpentry work years ago with an individual that was green as the grass. Wasted enough lumber to build another shed. I thought real hard about hitting him with a hammer.......reckon it was the hammers fault?

I just cant see how banning guns would fix.......anything. Crimes are illegal.....right?
 
The fact of the matter is that this issue cannot be solved on any assumption of the data or any misinterpretation of the laws. The bigger picture is this: It is not the primary part of our government to burden us with laws (even though they do). The laws that we can function under as a society have already been established in our bill of rights that are in the constitution of the United States of America. These laws are now being looked at and being analyzed as to how to alter them to suit our current situations. This document, aka constitution, is nowadays looked at as an archaic document with no value in our modern society. These folks fail to remember that it is this same "archaic" document that gives each and every American the freedom of speech, and more importantly to me, the freedom of religion. I'm not even going to bring up the right to keep and bear arms because that was put in place to make certain that the constituion of the United States of America stays a permanent contract with the citizens of the united states. A governmental contract with all citizens, gun owners or not, of the United States of America.
Do not give up a bit of our contractual rights, because what little comfort we gain will be very short lived. Support the constitution and those that seek to preserve it.
 
Jack,

Do you believe that gun control will prevent criminals from using guns in crimes? last I checked criminals don't follow laws. There for, a strict gun control would essentially hurt the victims who would be without the firearm that could have saved their life.

It is my belief that firearms are a tool, a tool that saves more lives the they are used to take said lives.
 
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