Since you own a gun...

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by warch

Adding to the statistic that correlates multiple gun ownership with probability of involvement in gun crime.

"Statistic" isn't the plural of "anecdote".

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

You see, saying she has decided to obey the law doesn't answer some questions.

Did you read the law yet?

I didn't think so.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

At least three threads and hundreds of posts, and not one pro-gunner willing to acknowledge that more people with guns in our country leads to more deaths. Wow.

Because it's not true.

And even if it were, not all deaths are bad. If I blow away someone who's trying to rape me (you really should read that law, you know), I'd consider that a good thing.

Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you think the rapist is a victim of society, and should be given a chance to reform...or try again.

Please note that the second paragraph of this post is a hypothentical...I don't even agree that more guns implies more deaths. Millions of guns in this country--the vast majority of them--never killed anyone and never will.

[warch]

Damn my colloquialism!

[warch]

Do people shooting guns cause gun shot wounds? If not, what causes gun shot wounds?

[xoxoxoBruce]

People getting in the line of fire.

There is no acceptable or unacceptable ratio.
Parents being stupid is somehow an imperative for me to divest myself of guns? I don't think so.
Some parents have been being stupid forever, I don't see than changing.
Nor do I see that as a particular problem I can do anything about.
I'd be much more worried about the damage the stupid parents allow their whelps to do with automobiles.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by warch

Do people shooting guns cause gun shot wounds?

Not always. Or there'd be hell to pay every third Saturday in Southampton PA.
However, gunshot wounds are always preceded by gunfire.

For some reason, this discussion always seems to have problems with logical fallacies (especially affirming the consequent and errors of composition and decomposition) and causation.

Since the gungrabbers here are so fond of hypotheticals, here's one for Spexxvet:

Consider a sealed room with two people in it. Obviously if the room contains no guns, no shootings will occur. If the room contains two guns, each in the posession of one of the people, I maintain that shootings are less likely to occur than if there was only one gun.

Of course, if most of what you know about firearms has been gleaned from watching television and movie drama, and you believe that guns are implicitly eeeevil, tend to go off at random on their own, and cause agressive insanity in people touching them, you won't accept that assertion.

On the other hand, if you've actually been around guns and noticed that none of those three propositions is true, you'll probablyfind the assertion more plausible.

But I say the idea that there's an implicit positive correlation between the mere number of weapons in existance and their criminal use is mistaken.

Interesting post at NRO:

Originally Posted by Davel Kopel

Our nation has too many people who are not only unwilling to learn how to protect themselves, but who are also determined to prevent innocent third persons from practicing active defense. A person has the right to choose to be a pacifist, but it is wrong to force everyone else to act like a pacifist. It is the policies of the pacifist-aggressives which have turned American schools into safe zones for mass murderers.

[Flint]

My family are from the country, where guns are just another tool (IE, a mechanical device with no implicit psychological characteristics). These "urban" associations with guns don't jibe with their "rural" function. Ironically, the function of those guns might be altered dramatically if some fancy law-makin' city-slicker were trying to take them away.

The "taking-your-guns-away-boogeyman" is the ideological flip-side to the "replacing-the-Constitution-with-the-Bible-boogeyman" . . .

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by MaggieL

...Since the gungrabbers here are so fond of hypotheticals, here's one for Spexxvet:

Consider a sealed room with two people in it. Obviously if the room contains no guns, no shootings will occur. If the room contains two guns, each in the posession of one of the people, I maintain that shootings are less likely to occur than if there was only one gun. ...

Utter foolishness. Unlike UG, I'll explain why.

Ok, not utter. If there were no gun at all, there would absolutely be no shooting.

If there was one gun, and you had it, then I would surrend, lay face down on the floor, do whatever you told me to do, and you would only shoot me if you were a nasty, heartless, sadistic bitch. So that's one shot, probably. If I got had the gun, I would only shoot if you didn't surrender, after trying less lethal solutions.

If there were two guns, I would shoot you right away, so that you couldn't shoot me, knowing that you would do the same. If I didn't kill you, or you got a shot off at the same time I shot, you would still get a shot off. That's two virtually guaranteed shots.

Ha!

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by Flint

My family are from the country, where guns are just another tool (IE, a mechanical device with no implicit psychological characteristics). These "urban" associations with guns don't jibe with their "rural" function. Ironically, the function of those guns might be altered dramatically if some fancy law-makin' city-slicker were trying to take them away.

The "taking-your-guns-away-boogeyman" is the ideological flip-side to the "replacing-the-Constitution-with-the-Bible-boogeyman" . . .

Pistols or rifles/shotguns?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

At least three threads and hundreds of posts, and not one pro-gunner willing to acknowledge that more people with guns in our country leads to more deaths. Wow.

There is of course more here to think on.

It's not about bloodthirstiness and it's not about playing at cops-and-robbers. It is about resisting evil; somebody robbing and murdering you is breaking a couple of Commandments, no question. There is also the fundamental concept that humans may resist evil -- without even being duly constituted or paid by other humans to do so. Evil and resistance to evil is a thing of every human heart and every human mind. When the practitioners of evil, as they do, kill either righteous or unrighteous people in pursuit -- sometimes how trivial that pursuit! -- of their aims, there is absolutely no wrongness in resisting their endeavors and no genuine reason -- though some specious ones have been offered -- to stop short of lethal force if that's all that's going to succeed.

No pro-gunner with a lick of sense -- in my experience, about 99% of them -- fails to recognize that this comes at a considerable personal, and emotional cost; uneasy lies the head that shot the guy. This is inescapable to anyone mentally normal. Even the immediate prospect is jarring, as I know from personal experience: I had a roommate who was going quietly crazy, and once I thought I would have to pull a gun on him -- in my own bedroom. It felt terrible. It requires mental conditioning to function under such a stress: it starts with deciding beforehand if you're going to take on the responsibility for ending a man's life, or if you're going to submit to him wrongfully killing you.

Far too many antigunners demand -- though they will deny it, and demonstrate a passive murderousness in the denial -- that one do precisely that. Thus is these people's sense of the allegedly rightful satisfied. None of these bozos will consider that it could as easily happen to them, rather than to the gun people. This is the huge moral chasm between the righteous progunner and the murder-loving anti.

In reading John Lott (see p.5 this thread), you will discover a pretty well-founded estimate that the lawful and righteous use of such killing tools about two and a half million times annually prevents a loss to the American economy of upwards of three billion dollars each year, totting up property loss, worktime loss, medical costs, lawyer fees, and so forth. Even in a trillion-dollar economy, that's still a good shot in the arm preserving wealth.

Spexx, you are a man who is visibly reluctant to go around killing. That in itself is a recommendation that you should own three or four guns yourself, as you would not use them wrongly and take measures to guarantee no one else would use your arms wrongly either. You've also had the grace not to accuse progunners of lacking that reluctance, which is commendable. You've not yet taken an effectual antigenocide stance, which in my view (and that of most humans) is not commendable, but you show no signs of having educated yourself on that matter yet.

Approximately every second household in the United States has at least one firearm in it. Yet crime and bloodshed do not come to every second household. There are things guns do and things guns do not do -- the man educated on the subject knows well which these are.

What do we see in men who murder schoolgirls or shoot up the neighborhood in a suicide-by-cop? A great degree of aberrancy, a viciousness that lacks sanity. The anti-self-defense lobby prevents immediate and effectual response to these monsters through its hysterical fear of killing tools, and does all humanity a terrible injustice: it is so terrible that these people ought to be locked up for lengthy prison terms for mass and chronic incitement to murder.

Do not, Spexxvet, ask moral persons to stop resisting evil, even unto death.

The plural of "anecdote" may not be "statistics" but I've long held that an analysis of all those The Armed Citizen columns that have figured in NRA magazines for decades ought to help the statistical study somehow. At the least, it is a very considerable weight of testimony in support of the moral use of arms.

[mrnoodle]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

Utter foolishness. Unlike UG, I'll explain why.

Ok, not utter. If there were no gun at all, there would absolutely be no shooting.

If there was one gun, and you had it, then I would surrend, lay face down on the floor, do whatever you told me to do, and you would only shoot me if you were a nasty, heartless, sadistic bitch. So that's one shot, probably. If I got had the gun, I would only shoot if you didn't surrender, after trying less lethal solutions.

If there were two guns, I would shoot you right away, so that you couldn't shoot me, knowing that you would do the same. If I didn't kill you, or you got a shot off at the same time I shot, you would still get a shot off. That's two virtually guaranteed shots.

Ha!

The assumption that if guns are present, they WILL be used to kill someone, is one of many failings all antis share. Why do you think that just because you're both armed, you have to try to kill or overpower each other? No wonder you guys don't like guns.

And why aren't you fighting the nasty, heartless, sadistic bitch? With or without a gun, you're just going to lay there and let her kill you?

[warch]

What does the room look like? Is there food? How long are they in there? What is the room sealed with?

by the way I love venison. Hunt your game, just dont use an AK-47. Give 'em a chance and dont spoil the meat.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Mrnoodle, well said. But we must remember Spexx is unlikely to be completely rational on this -- he clearly rages against self defense, and that is his besetting sin.

He will pretend rationality, and keep up the pretense pretty well, but hoplophobia has got its claws well sunk in his id and his ego. The cure is difficult, and I do not greatly anticipate imminent success. A BBS is not quite the right medium.

I'm going to go see if the JPFO website still has its article on "Raging Against Self Defense."

Bingo. This is one of the best summaries I know of what the guns-and-freedom people are up against, and of why the antis won't be made to see reason: they do not have eyes to see.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Warch, there's no such thing as "an evil gun," which is the theory you're subscribing to. It's a gun-ignorant point of view, which ignorance redounds to the favor of the crime- and genocide-lovers. NOT a view I take, for sure.

A semiauto civilian AK chambered in 7.62x39mm is actually about as good a deer gun in close country as a .30-30, delivering about the same punch. Use an expanding, hunters' bullet. An AK-74 type semiauto, in 5.45x39mm, wouldn't be quite as good a bet -- and you'd probably be hunting deer in Siberia with that cartridge anyway.