Lone Gunman Kills at Least 12 (38 wounded) at Midnight Batman Screening

[princedpw]

I'm having a hard time seeing good data on the stuff.  I tried to do a bit of reading on the subject and all of the "guns save lives" stuff seems to be a lot of anecdotal polls about people using guns to stop "attacks"...but attack doesn't actually automatically = threat.

It wouldn't surprise me if for every situation where someone else having a gun helped prevent an attack there are 5 situations where someone else having a gun made the situation much more dangerous/deadly.

Guns in the home are correlated with an increased likelihood of being shot.  If you want to increase your safety, you should get rid of your guns.  Here is one paper I found:

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full

 

[princedpw]

Just to reemphasize:  anyone who tells you need a gun for protection is either lying or deluded.

 

[Kin]

That's another thing, is there ever a situation where someone owning a gun has been used to stop something bad happening?

Oklahoma woman shoots, kills home invader

So, yeah, it happens. Not to the extent the NRA would like people to believe but a responsibly owned firearm can come in handy.

 

[Kin]

Just to reemphasize:  anyone who tells you need a gun for protection is either lying or deluded.

Or they just live in a different situation than you do. For instance, my family owns a couple hundred acres of land near the Kawarthas and the house we built on it is pretty deep in the brush. That means we get a lot of animals and some of them can be pretty dangerous, especially if they're sick or hungry. When I'm up there? It's important for me to have a gun. I can and have had bears near the house and reality is that a warning shot clears them off.

I've never needed an assault rifle but guns are important tools for a lot of people who live in rural areas.

 

[L K]

Just to reemphasize:  anyone who tells you need a gun for protection is either lying or deluded.

Or they just live in a different situation than you do. For instance, my family owns a couple hundred acres of land near the Kawarthas and the house we built on it is pretty deep in the brush. That means we get a lot of animals and some of them can be pretty dangerous, especially if they're sick or hungry. When I'm up there? It's important for me to have a gun. I can and have had bears near the house and reality is that a warning shot clears them off.

I've never needed an assault rifle but guns are important tools for a lot of people who live in rural areas.

Overgeneralized reaction to a statement.  I think the discussion has been strictly person on person. 

And for your story on having 200 acres, I could counter with my friend who is an endangered species biologist who works up in the remote areas of northern Ontario and works exclusively over night and arms herself entirely with bear spray.  She gets along just fine with the spray, but I completely understand having a family in that type of situation and wanting a gun for that kind of protection.

I also understand having a gun for hunting purposes. 

I also understand the appeal of getting to fire of high artillery weapon at a shooting range. 

I think we need to keep the distinction between those scenarios and guns to protect against people-on-people crimes.  There are certainly anecdotal stories where the gun was the deciding factor in a situation that could go very wrong.  But the problem is that stories like the one you posted get championed by the NRA/press (there was like a minute of video with the woman posing with her shotgun armed at the camera in that news story) and the ones where a family member has a negligent discharge and shoots a family member get quickly ignored with an iota of the press.

 

[Fanatic]

I modified the title a little bit. Not sure of the numbers but I think I recall that 12 have died (so far) and 38 are wounded.

 

[maplesyrup]

At it's roots though, the right to bare arms in the US isn't to protect oneself from burglars or bears (though it's a bonus I suppose.) The whole idea really is to arm yourself so that if the government gets out of line, militias can be formed to topple it. While that in itself is full of (pardon the pun) bullet holes, no politician in a "free" America will ever stand opposed. It would be political suicide. Again, I think the only thing that could be done is to make these things harder to get through tougher licensing. Maybe one would need to show they were responsible enough with a hunting rifle for a while before they were allowed to own an assault rifle.

 

[Kin]

And for your story on having 200 acres, I could counter with my friend who is an endangered species biologist who works up in the remote areas of northern Ontario and works exclusively over night and arms herself entirely with bear spray.  She gets along just fine with the spray, but I completely understand having a family in that type of situation and wanting a gun for that kind of protection.

Well, I can't comment specifically about your friend's situation because I don't know the practical realities of their research but I'd say from my experience, because we farm the land which means avoidance isn't always an option, bear spray would not be sufficient for my purposes.

You make a fair point about the distinction between person vs. person violence and what I'm referring to and I realize that probably wasn't the point being made but I just wanted to make a small point about how our own urban experiences don't hold true for everyone and that contributes to the mentality behind gun ownership.

I think we need to keep the distinction between those scenarios and guns to protect against people-on-people crimes.  There are certainly anecdotal stories where the gun was the deciding factor in a situation that could go very wrong.  But the problem is that stories like the one you posted get championed by the NRA/press (there was like a minute of video with the woman posing with her shotgun armed at the camera in that news story) and the ones where a family member has a negligent discharge and shoots a family member get quickly ignored with an iota of the press.

I agree in large part and the story I posted wasn't intended to try and present that as a common or likely outcome of owning a gun. I was just responding to the question that genuinely wondered if such a thing ever happened. But yeah, it can and that's one of the reasons I own a gun.

The thing is, owning a gun is a serious responsibility and it's one that's frequently ignored and it leads to things like you're talking about where guns are more likely to hurt you or a family member than they are an intruder. But I think that's more about the way a country handles it's gun ownership rather than gun ownership as a rule. If you look at a list of first world countries with the highest rates of gun ownership in the world you have America and Canada but you also have places like Switzerland and Finland where, at least in Switzerland, there's mandatory military service and those conscripted are required to keep their weapons at home. Despite this, there isn't a high rate of gun crime or accidents. Gun owners are properly trained and taught how to use a weapon.

So, yes, the lack of rules and regulations surrounding the ownership of guns in Canada and the US lets irresponsible people own guns and that leads to a lot of accidents and murder. I agree but that's a distinction that needs to be made when we talk about what a gun is "likely" to do. 

 

[L K]

I really wish negligent and accidental fire rates were a reported statistic.  Unfortunately they aren't, because I think that would probably be a very humbling statistic for the gun lobby to argue against.

Again though, I have no problem with gun ownership (particularly hunting rifles/shotguns), especially in farm-land (although I will never understand what the big deal was against having a gun registry).

 

[Kin]

At it's roots though, the right to bare arms in the US isn't to protect oneself from burglars or bears (though it's a bonus I suppose.) The whole idea really is to arm yourself so that if the government gets out of line, militias can be formed to topple it. While that in itself is full of (pardon the pun) bullet holes, no politician in a "free" America will ever stand opposed.

The thing to remember about the 2nd Amendment, or the entire Bill of Rights or the US Constitution or just about any bit of writing from the US's founding, is that it's often categorized as having a singular meaning or a universally agreed upon intent when the reality is that just about everything that came out of it was the result of an often fractious group of people who disagreed as much as people disagree today.

The opinion that the second amendment only exists within the context of a militia is A) something that's been before the Supreme Court and rejected and B) not evident in the way it's written. It would have been easy to write it to say that "The Government may not infringe on the rights of citizens to form a militia" but very consciously it's not written like that. It's written specifically to allow citizens to bear arms.

The problem with the Second Amendment isn't that it's been misinterpreted but rather it was written in a very different time. America was largely unsettled and chiefly agrarian and rural. The idea of banning guns would have been insane because nobody would ever have ventured westward if they weren't armed. As demographics have shifted and technology has changed the Second Amendment has largely become an anachronism and that's the issue. Reading it so as to allow for the armed toppling of a government is 100 times crazier because then you'd have to allow for civilian ownership of aircraft carriers and fighter jets. 

 

[maplesyrup]

Reading it so as to allow for the armed toppling of a government is 100 times crazier because then you'd have to allow for civilian ownership of aircraft carriers and fighter jets.

It's clearly more a matter of principle and while we both agree it's just not practical at all today, it's a principle that a lot of folks down there take very seriously. 

 

[Kin]

It's clearly more a matter of principle and while we both agree it's just not practical at all today, it's a principle that a lot of folks down there take very seriously.

I think that paints a far more cartoonish picture of gun owners than is accurate. I know a lot of  responsible people in the US who own guns and I've never once heard that one of their reasons for it is the potential need for the armed overthrow of their government. Tea Party nutjobs and NRA spokespeople represent the fringe.

 

[maplesyrup]

I know a lot of  responsible people in the US who own guns and I've never once heard that one of their reasons for it is the potential need for the armed overthrow of their government. Tea Party nutjobs and NRA spokespeople represent the fringe.

Well, take their guns away and I'm 100% sure they'd bring that up.

 

[Kin]

Well, take their guns away and I'm 100% sure they'd bring that up.

Well, alright, but you're talking about people you don't know so I'll take that salt with a grain of salt.

 

[GhostofPotvin29]

One somewhat jarring example of the differences between these two countries (which obviously extend culturally, etc):

Friday's horrific shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater has been a reminder that America's gun control laws are the loosest in the developed world and its rate of gun-related homicide is the highest. Of the world's 23 "rich" countries, the U.S. gun-related murder rate is almost 20 times that of the other 22. With almost one privately owned firearm per person, America's ownership rate is the highest in the world; tribal-conflict-torn Yemen is ranked second, with a rate about half of America's.

But what about the country at the other end of the spectrum? What is the role of guns in Japan, the developed world's least firearm-filled nation and perhaps its strictest controller? In 2008, the U.S. had over 12 thousand firearm-related homicides. All of Japan experienced only 11, fewer than were killed at the Aurora shooting alone. And that was a big year: 2006 saw an astounding two, and when that number jumped to 22 in 2007, it became a national scandal. By comparison, also in 2008, 587 Americans were killed just by guns that had discharged accidentally.

Almost no one in Japan owns a gun. Most kinds are illegal, with onerous restrictions on buying and maintaining the few that are allowed. Even the country's infamous, mafia-like Yakuza tend to forgo guns; the few exceptions tend to become big national news stories.

http://m.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-land-without-guns-how-japan-has-virtually-eliminated-shooting-deaths/260189/