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Originally Posted by longbough
Thanks for making that point for me. I was going to follow up with the same statement, but I didn't feel like carrying on the discussion. It was enough for me to get the other fella to concede that a ban might not work at all - and may even be irreversably harmful.
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Irreversably harmful? A gun ban? This should be interesting.
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Originally Posted by longbough
I'll make an analogy with car seatbelts in Hondas. If I were to argue that seatbelts don't save lives - one would point to the statistics (just as we have done with examples like D.C., Florida and other places). It'd be easy for me to say those cases aren't relevant to Honda drivers because they're completely different cars (e.g. SF Bay Area is a different city).
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All I've seen is Washington, and that has [I]always[/]I had a much higher crime rate than SF. I have not seen any evidence that this is not a case of apples and oranges. Is it not possible that this could work, simply because it has not worked once in the past?
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Originally Posted by longbough
Can I say that we can "test it out" by MANDATING Hondas to be sold without seatbelts? What if you're wrong and lives are lost? Can you give those lives back? In the face of evidence of seatbelts with other "vehicles" is that a chance you can take?
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I think it's obvious that as far as safety, these comparisons are not apt. We all know seatbelts save lives and there is irriputalbe evidence supporting that. Guns do not save lives. They are weapons intended to do harm or cause destruction. There is no way to test the no-gun scenerio in SF without putting the laws into effect.
I'm arguing this wrong. Let's start at the beginning. I say that guns are too big a liability to have at all, and even if they are available elsewhere, we should restrict the ownership of guns as much as possible. The people of S.F. agree with me. One the flip side, you say that because the gun ban might have given rise to a higher murder rate in places like Washington D.C., it might not only not help people, it could actually hurt people. You argue that those who legally own hand guns are now safer because of those hand guns and taking them would put them at a greater risk.
Here's why I think you're wrong. In the past 26 years, America has only seen an average of no more than 300 justifiable homicides a year by civilians. This stands in stark contrast the the NRA's quote that there are "as many as 2.5 million protective uses of guns each year..." Does this mean that the bad guy never dies? Searching online, I've found a great deal of research coming from websites that feature picutres of guns in their logo, but very little coming from reputable sources besides 2 big cases: Washington D.C., and Australia.
Let's break the Washington D.C. situation down. The big problem here is that Washington DC is right next door to Virginia, with very leanient gun laws. Because you have a gun ban right next door to lenient gun laws, of course you have a problem. The same is not true of San Francisco. California on the whole has pretty serious gun control. San Francisco is surrounded by either the rest of California, or the pacific ocean. It is not mear miles from an area with lax gun control. This is an of itself makes the SF/DC comparison that of apples and oranges.
Australia: Two years after the Austalian ban, there have been further increases in crime: armed robberies by 73 percent; unarmed robberies by 28 percent; kidnappings by 38 percent; assaults by 17 percent; manslaughter by 29 percent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.Of course, those statistics weren't specific enough to let you know that almost all of those crimes were committed with guns that were STILL LEGAL. The Aussi gun ban banned 60% of all guns, leaving the market with 40% of guns still legal to purchase and own.