Thank you for the well thought out response. I wish everyone here would do that rather than just take the talking points from the NRA or the far left for that matter. We might actually be able to fix the problem that way. I was just giving you a hard time about the clip. If you were arguing for gun control the pro gunners would say you don't know anything about guns and blah blah blah.
I try and I am always looking for a good debate. Sometimes its hard to find here.
I figured about the clip. I don’t get angry about misstatements like many here seem to do. The use of the word ‘clip’ and ‘magazine’ is separate from the actual point even if it was inaccurate.
I don't dissagree about someone having two .45's for example. But why even appose a ban on high capacity magazines then? Wouldn't two .45's with say 16 round magazines be more deadly yet? Since there aren't any examples of the high capacity magazines being used for defense I think at worst it doesn't hurt anything. At best maybe some guy has to reload and drops his clip and gets tackled.
I guess I view every life as being very valuable. If you can save a few lives in a mass shooting then why not try? Will it drastically effect the overall homicide rate? Probably not, I still like to think the mass shooting are very rare, but again every life is valuable.
This is likely the largest are that we are goig to disagree on but I hope that I can show you the light
You ask why does it matter then? I hold life just as important as you and think that we should try our damndest to save every person we can BU*T (and this is a BIG but) there is a line that we need to acknowledge. The reality is the safest and BEST government to live under if safety and preservation of life is the metric you are measuring would be fascism or despotism. That is a simple truth.
Preservation of life is important but not at the expense of freedom. Where you want to air on the side of protection I am absolutely against that concept. I ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS air on the side of FREEDOM. Whenever you wish to take anything away, be it a big gulp, a large clip or smoking, I err on the side of freedom and fight it with every breath I take unless there are real and tangable benefits that can be proven AND those benefits outweigh the cost in freedom.
For example, the restriction on the right of free speech that makes yelling fire in a theater (or other crowded place) illegal is a sound restriction on freedom. The right to privacy that has been taken by the patriot act CLEARLY has saved lives and protects us but the COST is way too damn high. The patriot act is terrible law. Life is not the ONLY thing to consider here, our freedom is also an important consideration. The cost is low and the payoff high as related to that cost. The payoff with a restriction on magazine size is not only not proven but utter conjecture. It lacks enough reasoning for me as well as I can fabricate a large capacity magazine with ease, aquire one that is already in circulation or use more than one weapon (ie, the 2 guns example that I gave earlier). My beef here with your idea is essentially this: you want to limit freedom because YOU don’t see it as a large loss of said freedom. I also do not have a need for large cap mags, don’t own any and have no plans on purchasing the, but the idea that freedom is taken from people without what I consider due diligence in the reasoning goes against everything that I stand for.
The people that created the patriot act likely used your exact same logic. DO you think it was applied correctly there? Are you comfortable with how far this hole goes? If limiting 10 is allright, why not 5 or 1. That, BTW, is NOT a slippery slope argument. It is the same logic applied universally and it is the logic that can and WILL be used again and again...
Every life is valuable. EVERY FREEDOM IS ALSO VALABLE. Do not discount freedom.
I agree with much of what you say about viewing numbers from other countries. You would have to admit that Russia is often given as a pro gun argument when it is really not valid. So how do you counter that? Well pointing out the low homicide rates of countries with strict gun laws. For the sake of the US I hope that the number of guns is in fact not much of a factor in homicide rate. It could be other countries ban the violent video games, or violent movies, or some of the drugs we use to treat mental health, or do better policing.... But given that all the countries with much better homicide rates do have more strict gun laws, I think that would be a mistake to not look into it further.
And many that have worse homicide rates ALSO have stricter gun laws. As a matter of fact, ALMOST THE WHOLE WORLD has stricter gun laws. I do not aspire to be like the rest of the world.
That said, IF, and only if, the statistical analysis showed that gun laws in those countries was a factor in the lower homicide rates would such a comparison be valid. As the data does NOT support that claim, such data is meaningless. You might as well claim that every country that has a lower homicide rate is does not contain states, or a congress, or have a bill of rights, or does not sell hummus on Tuesday. All those would be just as meaningful. FIRST you need to establish that gun laws have a positive effect, AND THEN you compare the gun laws with our gun laws. That is the ONLY logical order to do it in.
How about we look at Canada?
In 1991, Bill C-17 tightened up restrictions and established controls on numerous firearms. Since about then the violent crime rate went down through 2007. They currently have a homicide rate of 1.6 which is drastically better than ours. Not a perfect comparison of course, but is there something to learn from this? There may very well be. Is it wise to completely write if off? I think that would be a mistake.
How about we look at Canada. First, we need to address your thumbnail. It is not cited. It does not explain itself at all. It does not even use the metric we are going by: homicide rate. It does not even mention the country that it applies to. I REALLY hope you did not pull this from a blog. Essentially, you should not even have posted it
Really, I KNOW you can do better than that
It took some digging but here we go:
Police-reported crime statistics in Canada, 2011
official Canadian source on this with some good data.
All violent crime (except sexual assault against children) have been on a gradual down trend since 1980 and the data in your thumbnail is outright false. There is simply no dicernable way for me to fit the increase in your cite with the actual numbers. It looks as though the gun law had little to no effect in canida as well with the homicide rate starting at 2.5 and decreasing to just under 2.0 after a decade
We can see that directly after the law was passed (I did not check the date but I am going off of your 1991 timeframe) a sharp increase in homicides tool place, leveled out the next year and then continues the same downward trend that had been going on the previous years. Note: I am NOT attributing the spike to gun laws – spikes happen and that is a given. That trend line dies not really change at all. As far as I can tell, this is not a good piece of evidence for gun control, the law does not look like it altered the trend at all.
Further, the piece that interests me quite a bit is the fact that attempted murders and actual murders have CONVERGED a lot after the law passed. That went from a full point in difference to just .1 difference. That is, 40% of attempted murders FAILED and now a pithy 2% fail. Possible that might be due to people lacking protection but the criminals not lacking the offensive means to kill? I believe that is likely but I would need to pull up more evidence to support so I will just leave that as an interesting thing to think about for the time being.
All said and done, I don't think Canada is the example you were looking for unless you can present this data in another way.
