Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?

Status
Not open for further replies.
Gun control by itself does little good. It's all about (1) mentality /culture, (2) availability (3) quality of law enforcement and only then gun control laws. What works for one country or culture doesn't work for another.
 
Cain committed the first murder when he smote his brother Abel. Judas committed suicide. No firearms were involved.

Human nature does not change. Tools do.
 
Only in a case where someone got some terriblly tragic news, and didn't have time to process it. If a firearm was available it might and I say might have an immediate effect on if he did himself in. In that period of minutes and no one was around to talk him down, like the death of a child. Otherwise no. The death of a loved one might trigger that, a sudden death of a child, or spouse. But the body has defenses against this sort of thing. Maybe one in a million would do such a thing.
Many people fail at this process. I had a very wealty client who I saw every month for 15 or more years, and he tried "out of the clear blue sky" 3 times. His wife caught him 3 of the 3, he was looked down upon by the family whose daughter he married, they were one of the wealthiest familys in the country. That wore on him for years.
I sat with him and told him if he wanted to kill himself , he was too smart to screw it up 3 times, he agreed, I never saw him after thet, I think he was embarrased he told me.
 
The garrote and the dagger are much quieter than a firearm for murder. The garrote suffocates the brain, and the dagger kills the heart.

And carbon monoxide poisoning from the tailpipe of a car though a shop vacuum hose you can buy at any hardware store works pretty well for suicide.

If somebody is going to off someone else or themselves, you probably could not stop them, no matter what feeble laws were passed.
 
Say there were no guns, they never were invented, never existed. How did Cain kill Able? IIRC with a rock or a sharp stick.

If someone really wanted to commit suicide there is always rat poison, rope, cars, alcohol to overdose on, you could overdose on narcotics, probably even a couple grams of pure caffeine, you could ingest a whole container of drain cleaner, I heard the Arabs do it by eating a pound of salt. So would the logical choice be to ban salt?

Guns only make it easier to do, if someone completely lost the will to live and wanted to end their own life there are a million other ways to do it than with a firearm. Yes, a firearm makes it easy and painless. If you had a bullet going 1400 FPS go through your brain you probably won't feel it. But if a person is determined enough then they will find a way to get it done, no use in making all of us suffer. Banning guns would make murder rates go up, think of all the home invasions where the good guys wouldn't have guns to stop the violence.

Just my two cents...

Levi
 
Sure it will! Just look at NYC and Washington, DC. There ain't ever any murders in NYC, and DC only started getting murders after Heller screwed things all up.
 
thump_rrr said:
Banning guns will not reduce either murder or suicides.
Stricter storage laws will however reduce accidental deaths in which children are involved.
Click to expand...
So would banning swimming pools, buckets, and household cleaners.

Oh, and for what its worth, any of the three above acount for more accidental deaths of kids than firearms.....................just something to think about...
 
It's the only control we have over tyranny of government, murder would increase in the battle for control.
 
newfalguy101 said:
So would banning swimming pools, buckets, and household cleaners.

Oh, and for what its worth, any of the three above acount for more accidental deaths of kids than firearms.....................just something to think about...
Click to expand...
Swimming pools do have storage laws in some localities in the form of mandatory fencing. Mandating safe storage for firearms would be consistent with the similar regulation for pools.
 
Florida passed a law to prosecute parents if a child causes injury or death with a gun improperly secured, to date no-one has ever been prosecuted by this law. The law has been on the books for over 7 years and many children have died, but no-one wants to punish greiving parents!!!
 
DammitBoy said:
I checked the Bill of Rights this afternoon... coud not find any mention of the right to own swimming pools not being infringed.
Click to expand...
Which isn't relevant to discussion of safe storage requirements, any more than it is relevant to laws regarding brandishing.
 
Thats actually a pretty complicated question. First, are you BANNING them or ELIMINATING them. If you are Banning them then mureders and suicides would undoubtedly increase. The old 'the only people to turn in their guns were ther honest ones' argument which holds very true.

Eliminating them is where it gets complicated. I think a logical conclusion would be that yes, mureder and suicide rates would fall. Suicide was discussed earlier in this thread with some posts about taking the 'means'. That is a common argument that most experts see some validity, although I think it would be veyr nominal. Murder is a little easier. I think it would drop a little bit because of basic effenciency questions. We can talk about people killing themselves for thousands of years and Cain and Able and on and on, but let me know when you find an axe or a knife that is as efficient as a Glock. You would have less multiple murders, like a guy walking into a sandwich shop to rob it and offing four people. It would be pretty tough to kill four people in a Subway with a knife, not to mention completely unnecesary. THose kinds of things would decrease some. I would not include pre meditaded mass killings in that example. Those guys would find other means.

The kicker though is the action of government and how many people they would kill. It is very easy to argue that number would far outweigh any gains made by reductions in the general public.


And on a side note, anyone that wants to compare murder rates in other countries ie England, Sweden, etc to the murder rates in the US always want to blame the guns. ZTHey pay no attention to the actual forces behind the killings. The society we live in.
 
"when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns"

truest statement ever imo.

Handguns are pretty tough to get a licence for over here, and even then they are competition range use only. But theres been 10 shootings in the past 2 weeks or so.

i cant find the data, but i think only something like 1-2% of homicides are with a registered firearm.

While bans didnt change much in the way of homicides, since they were already declining from the past 20 years, suicides did go up slightly.
 
Quote:
Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?

No one committed murder nor suicide before the advent of firearms?
Questions like this are both silly and somewhat pointless.
Click to expand...

Well said pockets.
 
Ban guns? I made my first gun on the metal lathe/milling machine in my high school metal shop class using a donor barrel from an old Ted Williams .22 rifle; in fact, there was enough left over for my buddies as well. I carried it as a paperboy in Newark, New Jersey. Yes, the gun was banned, but it is the reason I am here today, half a century later. (In retrospect, I'm mad as hell that the law couldn't protect a 16-year old just trying to earn a few bucks to buy a car someday.)
 
Assuming an effective ban, which would be fairly easy over time, the assault rate would probably remain about the same. The murder rate would decrease.

The anti's, at least the smart ones, never say the crime rate would decrease, only the number of dead.

They are correct. Guns are better for killing than any weapon an assaultor might use instead. That's why they were developed and why police, soldiers, criminals, and armed citizens have them.

Same for suicide. Attempts no change, resulting deaths lower.
 
The stats are meaningless without controlling for demographics, poverty, and all sorts of other factors.

Controlling for demographics, the U.S. has a murder rate much more in line with some European countries.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

D
  • Locked
Murder Rate Hits 40-Year Low
Replies
6
Views
455
Vern Humphrey
V
D
  • Locked
European Murder Rates Compared to the United States: Demographics vs Guns
2
Replies
27
Views
2K
Dean Weingarten
D
R
  • Locked
Murder, Suicide Rates Up in Parts of U.S. -Study
2
Replies
27
Views
1K
jefnvk
J
G
  • Locked
Don B. Kates: WOULD BANNING FIREARMS REDUCE MURDER AND SUICIDE?
Replies
5
Views
508
Ol' Badger
O
D
  • Locked
Article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy
Replies
15
Views
1K
westcoast362
W
Back
Top