Why you have no right to bear arms

[2SKATES1STICK]

having a gun just gives 'people' a chance to shoot you first without repercussion in 'self defense'.

and by 'people' i obviously mean police and black people. oh and monarch-mind-controlled patsys.

[Gurn]

The real question is do you have the right to arm bears? Seems only fair given hunters are armed and some hunt bears. Add a little balance to the world.

[patrickd73]

Anybody who has a steak knife can easily do the damage that a gun could, and worse. So anybody who goes into Ikea or Costco and walks out with a knife set is asking the general public to trust them, and showing "callous disregard" for anybody who has a fear of knives. What about people who own snakes, spiders, scorpions, and other creepy crawlers and wild beasts as pets? The same must apply. Maybe for those of us that are afraid of heights, they should take our fear into account when constructing buildings and bridges. Silly, right?

I own guns, not because I bought them, but because I inherited them from my father who was in law enforcement. I'm licensed to own and use them. I don't care what anybody else thinks, because it isn't my job to care. If I have a friend who doesn't like weapons, obviously I won't parade them around when they visit. But further than that, people can mind their own business.

[Guest]

Anybody who has a steak knife can easily do the damage that a gun could, and worse. So anybody who goes into Ikea or Costco and walks out with a knife set is asking the general public to trust them, and showing "callous disregard" for anybody who has a fear of knives. What about people who own snakes, spiders, scorpions, and other creepy crawlers and wild beasts as pets? The same must apply. Maybe for those of us that are afraid of heights, they should take our fear into account when constructing buildings and bridges. Silly, right?

I own guns, not because I bought them, but because I inherited them from my father who was in law enforcement. I'm licensed to own and use them. I don't care what anybody else thinks, because it isn't my job to care. If I have a friend who doesn't like weapons, obviously I won't parade them around when they visit. But further than that, people can mind their own business.

This is nonsense.

1. Name the uses for a knife; name the uses for a firearm. Here's a hint: one has many uses, the other kills.

2. People can die from stray fire, it happens all the time. On the hand hand, I don't need to worry about whether you know how to cut a steak. You'll hurt yourself and yourself only.

3. All the "examples" you cited have a reference to harming another as an unintended consequence. Compare that with firearms and think about it for a moment. Does it make sense to you why your "parallels" are silly?

People should mind their own business so long as your actions don't have an adverse affect on them. Once that line is crossed, then your business becomes a matter of public consideration.

[Grapefruits]

Anybody who has a steak knife can easily do the damage that a gun could, and worse. So anybody who goes into Ikea or Costco and walks out with a knife set is asking the general public to trust them, and showing "callous disregard" for anybody who has a fear of knives. What about people who own snakes, spiders, scorpions, and other creepy crawlers and wild beasts as pets? The same must apply. Maybe for those of us that are afraid of heights, they should take our fear into account when constructing buildings and bridges. Silly, right?

I own guns, not because I bought them, but because I inherited them from my father who was in law enforcement. I'm licensed to own and use them. I don't care what anybody else thinks, because it isn't my job to care. If I have a friend who doesn't like weapons, obviously I won't parade them around when they visit. But further than that, people can mind their own business.

Yep. More people were killed in Canada last year by being stabbed. Death by firearm is at it's lowest since the 60's and ownership is increasing by the week.

[Guest]

Yep. More people were killed in Canada last year by being stabbed. Death by firearm is at it's lowest since the 60's and ownership is increasing by the week.

Even if this is true - so what? If one wants to murder someone, they will.

[Buddhas Hand]

I stopped reading the article after the part about stats and all that to prove gun ownership increases your possibility of getting hurt and your neighbours owning guns hurts you, where pot and gay marriage doesn't. Increased amounts of growing pot, an illegal drug, would also increase competition to sell that (assuming it's not all personal use). More openly gay people won't stop the intolerant idiots from being, well, idiots. Maybe you get caught in the middle of violence between drug dealers, or maybe someone attacks a gay couple near you and you also get hurt - and they don't even have to use guns to do it.

The proper way to think of anything is to consider reasonable levels of anything. Gay marriage doesn't have too much in the way of limits as far as what rights tradition married couples get. Legalized pot and regulated sales/production are good things. Neither of those would harm you any more than reasonable levels of gun ownership. Anything can have a negative side, and much of it is fear-based, but that doesn't mean one person's fear should get in the way of a reasonable solution

I cannot find any information on the dangers of living next door to a gay couple.

I believe that living next door to a pot grower /dealer would be more dangerous than not .

Every bit of reliable information i can find backs up the fact that owning/posessing a gun is more dangerous to you and your loved ones than not owning/posessing a gun.

I could post up many articles and studies but i chose this one as it describes the effect posessing/carrying a gun changes your veiw about others , their supposed danger to you and if they are carrying a weapon/gun.

Guns don't offer protection – whatever the National Rifle Association says

David Robert Grimes

Tuesday 26 March 2013 01.17 AEST

The insistence that guns protect people from rape and violence is not rooted in scientific reality

An American family compare handguns at a National Rifle Association meeting. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

"The one thing a violent rapist deserves is to face is a good woman with a gun!" That was Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the National Rifle Association, the standard bearers for America's gun lobby, making the case that personal firearms prevent rape.

The assertion that guns offer protection is a mantra the NRA has repeated often. In the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, LaPierre opined: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun", insisting that schools should have armed guards.

Academics such as John Lott and Gary Kleck have long claimed that more firearms reduce crime. But is this really the case? Stripped of machismo bluster, this is at heart a testable claim that merely requires sturdy epidemiological analysis. And this was precisely what Prof Charles Branas and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania examined in their 2009 paper investigating the link between gun possession and gun assault. They compared 677 cases in which people were injured in a shooting incident with 684 people living in the same area that had not suffered a gun injury. The researchers matched these "controls" for age, race and gender. They found that those with firearms were about 4.5 times more likely to be shot than those who did not carry, utterly belying this oft repeated mantra.

The reasons for this, the authors suggest, are manifold. "A gun may falsely empower its possessor to overreact, instigating and losing otherwise tractable conflicts with similarly armed persons. Along the same lines, individuals who are in possession of a gun may increase their risk of gun assault by entering dangerous environments that they would have normally avoided. Alternatively, an individual may bring a gun to an otherwise gun-free conflict only to have that gun wrested away and turned on them."

This result is not particularly unexpected. Prof David Hemenway of Harvard school of public health has published numerous academic investigations in this area and found that such claims are rooted far more in myth than fact. While defensive gun use may occasionally occur successfully, it is rare and very much the exception – it doesn't change the fact that actually owning and using a firearm hugely increases the risk of being shot. This is a finding supported by numerous other studies in health policy, including several articles in the New England Journal of Medicine. Arguments to the contrary are not rooted in reality; the Branas study also found that for individuals who had time to resist and counter in a gun assault, the odds of actually being shot actually increased to 5.45 fold relative to an individual not carrying.

The problem goes deeper than this, however. There's good evidence that the very act of being in possession of a weapon has an unfortunate effect of making us suspect others have one too. This was shown in a 2012 paper by psychologists Prof Jessica Witt and Dr James Brockmole, where subjects were given either a replica gun or a neutral object and asked to identify the objects other people were holding.

Subjects in possession of a replica firearm were much more likely to identify a neutral object as a firearm. The erroneous assumption that someone else is armed can and does often end in tragedy.

Indeed, the evidence suggests the very act of being armed changes one's perception of others to a decidedly more paranoid one. Other studies have shown an element of racial priming too, where a black subject is more likely to be assumed to be carrying a weapon. Guns have a curious psychological effect beyond this: a 2006 study by Dr Jennifer Klinesmith and colleagues showed men exposed to firearms before an experiment had much higher testosterone levels and were three times more likely to engage in aggressive behaviour relative to the subjects not primed with a weapon.

LaPierre's proclamation bears the hallmarks of a litany of misconceptions. Gun aficionados often frame the debate in terms of protection, but it is vital to realise that the vast majority of rape and murder victims are not harmed by nefarious strangers, but by people they know, and often love – friends, family members, lovers. Far from protecting people and keeping families safe, the sad truth is that firearms are often used in episodes of domestic violence. The John Hopkins centre for gun policy research has some sobering facts on this; women living in a home with one or more guns were three times more likely to be murdered; for women who had been abused by their partner, their risk of being murdered rose fivefold if the partner owned a gun.

Nor did guns make the women safer; women who purchased guns were 50% more likely to be killed by an intimate partner. So LaPierre's "good woman with a gun" is actually, it seems, putting herself in danger.

Viewed in this light, the NRA's insistence that rapes can be prevented with firearms or that teachers should be armed appear even more stupid than they already seemed. It is worth remembering that just as America leads the world in gun ownership, so too does it lead the world in gun homicide, with 11,000 to 12,000 murders committed by firearms each year. The tired old rationalisation that guns protect people is frankly contradicted by the evidence. The inescapable conclusion is that gun ownership makes everyone less safe. The logic the NRA espouses is perverse and transparently self-serving – the solution to gun crimes is not more guns, and no amount of rhetorical dexterity can surmount this fact. If the US is to have a truly honest discussion about its gun culture, it needs to be rooted in fact rather than fantasy, and the sound and fury from the NRA should be dismissed with the contempt it deserves.

You state that any thing can have a negative side and in theory this is true but i see no real advantage to owning a gun , especially when all the reliable information states otherwise.

For you Hunters out there man was hunting for tens of thousands of years before guns came along , if you want a rush hunt with dogs and knives , we used to hunt feral pigs over here in aus this way.

Up in the gulf country razorbacks would get up to 300-400 pounds with big long tusks.

[William_Clarkson]

People inclined will get guns regardless of the law and people who want to murder, but don't own a gun will use another weapon. People are less likely to harm someone who has a gun.

UK often brags about its low gun violence, but the gun ban led to more overall murders and the spike is too high to simply dismiss is at population growth. Not to mention, this doesn't count things such as rape & assault.

Yes, you won't see as many mass shootings in Britain, but regardless, more people are dying now.

http://usconservatives.about.com/od/capitalpunishment/a/Putting-Gun-Death-Statistics-In-Perspective.htm

^Just read this article. Talks about how many gun deaths a result of gang violence and suicide. Gangsters will still get guns regardless of gun laws (e.g. Chicago) and suicide can happen with a knife you'd find in a kitchen to.

[Lockout Casualty]

I stopped reading the article after the part about stats and all that to prove gun ownership increases your possibility of getting hurt and your neighbours owning guns hurts you, where pot and gay marriage doesn't. Increased amounts of growing pot, an illegal drug, would also increase competition to sell that (assuming it's not all personal use). More openly gay people won't stop the intolerant idiots from being, well, idiots. Maybe you get caught in the middle of violence between drug dealers, or maybe someone attacks a gay couple near you and you also get hurt - and they don't even have to use guns to do it.

The proper way to think of anything is to consider reasonable levels of anything. Gay marriage doesn't have too much in the way of limits as far as what rights tradition married couples get. Legalized pot and regulated sales/production are good things. Neither of those would harm you any more than reasonable levels of gun ownership. Anything can have a negative side, and much of it is fear-based, but that doesn't mean one person's fear should get in the way of a reasonable solution.

So you missed this part:

That doesn’t mean you can’t have one, it just means that the terms under which you own one are going to have to be negotiated, and you’re going to have to expect to make some compromises.

Yep. More people were killed in Canada last year by being stabbed. Death by firearm is at it's lowest since the 60's and ownership is increasing by the week.

Maybe that's because our handguns are in a safe, with a trigger lock, separated from rounds, and can only be transferred between the home and the gun range. Compare that to the US, where scaredy cats sleep with 30 round rifles by their nightstand (there, guns are 67.7% of total homicides).

[Buddhas Hand]

People inclined will get guns regardless of the law and people who want to murder, but don't own a gun will use another weapon. People are less likely to harm someone who has a gun.

UK often brags about its low gun violence, but the gun ban led to more overall murders and the spike is too high to simply dismiss is at population growth. Not to mention, this doesn't count things such as rape & assault.

Yes, you won't see as many mass shootings in Britain, but regardless, more people are dying now.

No more people where dying then 1999- 2009 and the graph finishes at 2011 where it is back to the very low level of the 90's.

Going by this graph/ information it is impossible to ascertain how many people are dying now.

[CanadianLoonie]

What's next, you have no right to self-defense?

[Lockout Casualty]

People inclined will get guns regardless of the law and people who want to murder, but don't own a gun will use another weapon. People are less likely to harm someone who has a gun.

UK often brags about its low gun violence, but the gun ban led to more overall murders and the spike is too high to simply dismiss is at population growth. Not to mention, this doesn't count things such as rape & assault.

Yes, you won't see as many mass shootings in Britain, but regardless, more people are dying now.

http://usconservatives.about.com/od/capitalpunishment/a/Putting-Gun-Death-Statistics-In-Perspective.htm

^Just read this article. Talks about how many gun deaths a result of gang violence and suicide. Gangsters will still get guns regardless of gun laws (e.g. Chicago) and suicide can happen with a knife you'd find in a kitchen to.

A few things wrong with your assertions:

1. The return of the crime rate to pre-ban rates shows this could be an outlier in the long term, an immediate aftereffect of banning guns. Also, the rate per capita even at the height of the spike compared to the US is tiny. There's no mental gymnastics one can do to avoid the god honest truth: more guns lead to more gun deaths.

2. Explain to me where black market guns from if criminals can't buy guns from the store. Right, hundreds of thousands of guns are stolen each year. As well, how many criminals do gangsters shoot compared to non-criminals? Gangsters will get guns now, but what if they're not available in every third household?

3. Suicide can be impulsive, and it's much different to think about instantaneously dying from a gunshot wound or butchering yourself like a pig to bleed, or going through the trouble of setting up a noose (I bet most people wouldn't even know how to). People will still commit suicide, but at least the impulsive ones may have a change to rethink it.

Try not to give too much credibility to sources like USConservatives.

[Lockout Casualty]

What's next, you have no right to self-defense?

This may sound outrageous, but how about presenting some food for thought? Just a little something is all I ask.

[William_Clarkson]

No more people where dying then 1999- 2009 and the graph finishes at 2011 where it is back to the very low level of the 90's.

Going by this graph/ information it is impossible to ascertain how many people are dying now.

We can still though that there was a spike initially which often happens (I can find other examples). Still, once it balanced the murder rate was pretty much the same, so people are still finding ways to murder. Didn't really solve much by the looks if it, except see a lot more people die after the gun ban for about a decade. Violent crime's gone up though in that period and is a long ways from dropping down to pre-gun ban levels:

[CanadianLoonie]

This may sound outrageous, but how about presenting some food for thought? Just a little something is all I ask.

How about...gun laws are obsolete.

[Lockout Casualty]

We can still though that there was a spike initially which often happens (I can find other examples). Still, once it balanced the murder rate was pretty much the same, so people are still finding ways to murder. Didn't really solve much by the looks if it, except see a lot more people die after the gun ban for about a decade. Violent crime's gone up though in that period and is a long ways from dropping down to pre-gun ban levels:

This can be attributed to the changes in the way these statistics were collected.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/crime-stats/crime-statistics/period-ending-june-2014/stb-crime-stats--year-ending-june-2014.html#tab-Violent-crime

As you can see, violent crime peaked in 1995.

Latest CSEW estimates show there were 1.3 million violent incidents in England and Wales, which is the lowest number recorded since the survey began in 1981

Gunfacts.info is probably not the best source, even if it claims to "drive a long, rusty nail into the coffin lid of gun control industry". (Industry?)

Edit: The gun crime statistic is also off for likely the same reason, from the same government source as above:

Figure 7 shows the trend from 2002/03 and demonstrates that since 2005/06 there has been a substantial decrease in the number of offences involving firearms recorded by the police. The volume of such offences has fallen by 41% since 2008/09 (Table 10b). This reduction in offences involving firearms is, in percentage terms, a larger reduction than that seen in overall violent crime.

So gun crime is actually reducing at a faster pace than other violent crime. Maybe there is something to gun control, mm?

[Buddhas Hand]

We can still though that there was a spike initially which often happens (I can find other examples). Still, once it balanced the murder rate was pretty much the same, so people are still finding ways to murder. Didn't really solve much by the looks if it, except see a lot more people die after the gun ban for about a decade. Violent crime's gone up though in that period and is a long ways from dropping down to pre-gun ban levels:

Is this an attempt to link violent acts that do not involve guns with the ownership/ non ownership of guns ?

Nearly all the reliable available information points to the fact that posession of a gun in the home endangers you and your loved ones.

Why would any rational intelligent person ignore this and posess a gun in the home ?

[William_Clarkson]

A few things wrong with your assertions:

1. The return of the crime rate to pre-ban rates shows this could be an outlier in the long term, an immediate aftereffect of banning guns. Also, the rate per capita even at the height of the spike compared to the US is tiny. There's no mental gymnastics one can do to avoid the god honest truth: more guns lead to more gun deaths.

2. Explain to me where black market guns from if criminals can't buy guns from the store. Right, hundreds of thousands of guns are stolen each year. As well, how many criminals do gangsters shoot compared to non-criminals? Gangsters will get guns now, but what if they're not available in every third household?

3. Suicide can be impulsive, and it's much different to think about instantaneously dying from a gunshot wound or butchering yourself like a pig to bleed, or going through the trouble of setting up a noose (I bet most people wouldn't even know how to). People will still commit suicide, but at least the impulsive ones may have a change to rethink it.

Try not to give too much credibility to sources like USConservatives.

1) The chart didn't account for overall crime just homicide rates which shows people incilined to murder will do so anyways.

2) The main point regarding the gangsters is that it inflates the gun homicide rate, while other countries don't have to deal with the gang violence the US does.

3) Like the article mentions Japan still sees a lot of suicides by other things (e.g. jumping in front of a train another impulsive way to commit suicide).

[Lockout Casualty]

Is this an attempt to link violent acts that do not involve guns with the ownership/ non ownership of guns ?

Nearly all the reliable available information points to the fact that posession of a gun in the home endangers you and your loved ones.

Why would any rational intelligent person ignore this and posess a gun in the home ?

Are we talking about the same people here?

[patrickd73]

This is nonsense.

1. Name the uses for a knife; name the uses for a firearm. Here's a hint: one has many uses, the other kills.

2. People can die from stray fire, it happens all the time. On the hand hand, I don't need to worry about whether you know how to cut a steak. You'll hurt yourself and yourself only.

3. All the "examples" you cited have a reference to harming another as an unintended consequence. Compare that with firearms and think about it for a moment. Does it make sense to you why your "parallels" are silly?

People should mind their own business so long as your actions don't have an adverse affect on them. Once that line is crossed, then your business becomes a matter of public consideration.

Who, in Canada to be specific, has died from stray fire? This isn't the Detroit slums. No matter where in the country you are. Unintended consequences, you say? As you also said, if you're going to harm someone, you're going to do it no matter what type of weapon you have access to.

Stray fire from a hunter in the woods? How often does that happen? And how many registered firearms do you truly believe are involved in fatal accidents? Perhaps we should go back to regulating the purchase of alcohol, which directly causes more deaths than anything else in this country. What this article states is that people who own firearms in this country have callous disregard for the fraction of the population who apparently live in fear of random of gun violence. Gimme a break.

On the "hand hand", someone could walk up to you and stab you with a knife they purchased 5 minutes prior. With a gun, aside from a paintball or air gun, takes weeks and weeks to acquire. Which do you think is safer now? Do you even know what's required to own a firearm?