Ban Teh Buttar Knive!!

[beet1e]

Well Toad, it's like this. When Nanny Blair bans foxhunting, there's uproar. Big countryside alliance protest signs going up in fields which border main roads.

But if they want to ban guns, it's a bit like banning Citroen car dealerships in Dixon where Lazs lives. It might reduce Lazs's car choices, but I don't think he'd lose any sleep over it.

It has been said that 10,000 lives lost annually is a price worth paying for the right to bear arms. Your concern for those lives lost is, in your own words, touching.

I think of it the other way round - not having guns is a price worth paying to avoid the bloodbath which I am sure we would have if guns were to be made freely available.

I regret to say I'm not feeling very well tonight, so will have an early night.

Toodle-Pip

[Toad]

Having talked with many Countryside Alliance members (have you? do you know any at all?), they had their reasons for not openly fighting the Dunblane/Hungerford knee-jerk laws. Primarily, I think that, given the political situation, they felt the situation was hopeless and fighting it would have been damaging to their overall effort.

Lately, however, I think they realize they should have fought. Why? Because there is no end to it. The antis NEVER stop. I believe that's why you see the activism over the fox hunting and you're going to see much more activism from them overall.

It has been said that 10,000 lives lost annually is a price worth paying for the right to bear arms.

Your problem here is that there is absolutely nothing to support the idea that if we had more restrictive gun laws that the total would decrease.

To the contrary, there is evidence that the opposite is the case. The cities with our strictest gun laws, including bans, have the highest gun homicide rates.

There is evidence that stricter punishment of "gun criminals" has much more of an effect on gun homicide than any restrictions on the inanimate objects themselves.

Further, we continue to see gun homicide totals decrease without passing confiscation/ban laws. As I pointed out, murder is down nearly 6% compared to the first six months of 2003.

All without denying the Constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.

[beet1e]

Ah, Mr. Toad.

Having talked with many Countryside Alliance members (have you? do you know any at all?),

No, not really. I don't hang out with master beaters!  

Your problem here is that there is absolutely nothing to support the idea that if we had more restrictive gun laws that the total would decrease.

No problem here - I never said that it would. In the US, it's much too late for that - LOL. Your society is awash with guns. You've made your 2nd amendment bed, and now you must lie in it. What I will say is that you will go on paying for it with 10,000 deaths annually. And while some of those are criminals, many of them aren't, and include children from both genders.

And there is plenty to support the fact that by keeping guns out of our society, we can contain homicide to a much smaller level than if our streets were awash with guns. It never fails to surprise me that some people cannot see this.

There is evidence that stricter punishment of "gun criminals" has much more of an effect on gun homicide than any restrictions on the inanimate objects themselves.

And in Britain, there is evidence that restrictions on said inanimate objects is working quite well, with only 68 gun homicides in 2003.

Further, we continue to see gun homicide totals decrease without passing confiscation/ban laws. As I pointed out, murder is down nearly 6% compared to the first six months of 2003.

Can you quote a source for that? According to the FBI website, the report for 2004 is only a preliminary report. The FBI stats for the years 1999-2003 show that homicide by guns has risen every year since 1999. Source: http://www.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/ucr/cius_03/xl/03tbl2-9.xls

[Toad]

Originally posted by beet1e
Ah, Mr. Toad.  No, not really. I don't hang out with master beaters!

Exccedingly strange as you seem to be THE Master Beater of them all.

You've made your 2nd amendment bed, and now you must lie in it.

And so we shall; it's a mighty comfortable bed. Wouldn't trade it for anything.

And there is plenty to support the fact that by keeping guns out of our society, we can contain homicide to a much smaller level than if our streets were awash with guns.

Actually, there isn't. Your historical firearm homicide data merely says that in your English society there has always been a relatively few firearms (in comparison with say Canada, Switzerland or the US) and you've had a relatively few firearms homicides. You are merely guessing about what would happen if Englishmen had in the past (or in the future) a similar amount of firearms ownership as Canada. There's no data whatsoever.

Even Mr. Moore in BFC was unable to link the number of firearms available directly to the the firearms homicide rate. Gosh, if HE can't do it, I don't think you can either.

And in Britain, there is evidence that restrictions on said inanimate objects is working quite well, with only 68 gun homicides in 2003.

I suggest that the evidence merely supports the hypothesis that English society is not as violent as US society. Care to post a link to Britain's homicide rates over the last 80 years? I'm betting that the firearms homicides/100,000 hasn't been significantly altered despite the ever more restrictive bans/confiscations you've passed over there. I suggest that historical rates will show the laws didn't really change anything, as your society is not and never was as violent as ours.


 

Can you quote a source for that? According to the FBI website, the report for 2004 is only a preliminary report.

Yes, it SAYS it's a preliminary report that covers the FIRST SIX MONTHS of 2004. If you click on the link I provided, it will take you to the FBI site where said preliminary report is posted.

I think you're going to have to wait a bit for the report on the entire year, as the year isn't over yet and they'll have to crunch data a while.

The salient factor is this:

January-June 2004

Collectively, law enforcement agencies throughout the United States reported a decrease of 2.0 percent in the number of violent crimes brought to their attention in the first 6 months of 2004 when compared to figures reported for the first half of 2003.

So, 2003 Preliminary (Six Month) Report compared to 2004 Preliminary (Six Month) Report shows a clear decrease in murder.

It's apples to apples; It's the first half of the year report in both cases.

The Full Report probably won't be out till June 2005.

[lazs2]

beet... you are wrong about me not caring about a ban of citroen dealerships in dixon...  I hate the stupid cars... never owned one and most likely never will... but.   it is not my right to ban em nor is it my govenrnments.... I would do all I could to stop it.

I also realize that some day they may make one that a big block will fall into with great suspension and whatever or good looking...

I would think that you would have figured this all out given the thread you started about how you now are thinking of getting a gun to protect yourself...  Can things get worse where you will yearn for a gun?  certainly...  only a blind man could not see the possibility...  what blinds you is the fact that you think you can control people and yet still live without personal controls... this is the fault that all advocates of big government have.   They feel that their fellow citizens are not to be trusted but that they can opperate with little or no control because they are.... well.... better.

I don't really feel that way.

White homicides are shrinking... gun ownership is about at a saturation point yet the gun crimes are going down... in the minority communities it will just take longer to come down... it is better to let nature take it's course and for stricter penalties to work than to punish the law abiding for the acts of a few.... no... not just punish... strip them of their human right to self defense.

lazs

[beet1e]

Mr. Toad

Earlier I said "You have to understand that for the vast majority of Brits, guns are not an issue." - and your response was

So, is the rest of this sentence "so we have no problem with totally ignoring the wishes of the minority"?

Later, when I pointed out that you were going to have to live in the 2nd amendment bed you'd made, you said

And so we shall; it's a mighty comfortable bed. Wouldn't trade it for anything.

So, is the rest of this sentence "so we have no problem with totally ignoring the wishes of the minority? In this case, the minority is the ~10,000 people annually who find themselves at the wrong end of a gun. And before someone chirps up and says those people are all criminals/blacks, so it doesn't matter, I would point out that the victims in 2003 included 66 children under the age of nine.

You chide me for not having a problem with a relative minority of people not being able to shoot certain types of guns if they wanted to, but you have no qualms with your 2nd amendment utopia whose lax attitude towards gun ownership results in the deaths of hundreds of children each year.

You are merely guessing about what would happen if Englishmen had in the past (or in the future) a similar amount of firearms ownership as Canada. There's no data whatsoever.

I've never stuck my hand into a pan of boiling fat, but I've got a pretty good idea that it would not be pleasant. But I can't prove it. There's no data whatsoever.




Lazs, the thought of you parading past Dixon City Hall carrying a banner which reads "Save Our Citroens" is too funny to contemplate!

White homicides by guns down 2%? Why, 2004 might turn out to see only 9445 gun homicides instead of 9638. WTG!

[Nash]

I just had me a thought.

Would it be possible for you to bold anything that hasn't been said before to make things easier for the casual lurkers to this thread?

[Toad]

Originally posted by beet1e
In this case, the minority is the ~10,000 people annually who find themselves at the wrong end of a gun.

Which is a "minority" that has no direct relation to gun ownership/non-ownership, the issue under discussion. Ownership/non-ownership isn't directly linked to "finding themselves etc."

You can more correctly group your "~10,000 people annually who find themselves at the wrong end of a gun" with the "~50,000 people annually who find themselves on the wrong (dead) end of an automobile accident".




 

attitude towards gun ownership results in the deaths of hundreds of children each year.

There are many lax attitudes towards many things that result in the deaths of hundreds of children each year. I'll look for your posts on those.



 

I've never stuck my hand into a pan of boiling fat, but I've got a pretty good idea that it would not be pleasant. But I can't prove it. There's no data whatsoever.

Ah, but there is. There is ample empircal and statistical data on the results of frying human bodily appendages.

Try again.

[Torque]

Originally posted by lazs2
Our per capita gun homicide rate for whites is about the same as canadas.  

lazs

I've never seen you post any data to back it up. Gang warfare isn't indigenous to the states.  

Can you post the links to your source, or should we start calling you michelle?

[lazs2]

torque... the white homicide rate in the U.S. is the same as the total homicide rate in canada.   I have no idea what the breakdown in canada is.   If you could find it for me we could compare but...  as it is..  if only whites in America are counted then we would have about the same homicide or slightly less than canadas.

lazs

[Nashwan]

I've never seen you post any data to back it up. Gang warfare isn't indigenous to the states.

Can you post the links to your source, or should we start calling you michelle?

Lazs follows the Goebbels school of propoganda. Tell a big lie, repeat it often enough, and people will believe it.

The homicide rate for Canada is 1.73 per 100,000 people.

The homicide rate for the US is 5.7 per 100,000 people.

There were 16,503 murders in the US in 2003, a rate of 5.7 per 100,000. Those figures are straight from the FBI uniform crime reports.

The first thing Lazs does is discard several thousand murders that the FBI doesn't have Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHRs) for. The FBI has SHRs for 14,408 murders. So Lazs reduces the number of murders to 14,408 as a first step.

The next step is to refine the murders by race.

According to the SHRs the FBI has, there were 5,132 white murderers, 5,729 black murderers, 308 "other" race murderers, and 4,874 where the race of the murderer wasn't known or wasn't specified.

So, having already removed the murders where an SHR wasn't supplied, Lazs now throws out all murders committed by black and "other" race murderers, and also throws out nearly 5000 murders where the race is unkown.

That takes you down to 5,132 white murderers, a rate of 2.27 per 100,000 population.

That's still substantially above the Canadian or British rate for all murderers, but having ignored almost half of all murders where the race of the offender isn't known or specified, another fudge of 35% or so is hardly noticeable.


What Lazs also ignores, of course, is that by throwing out all the murders committed by blacks, he is effectively removing most of the urban poor, who in most of the world commit most of the murders.

Here, for example, are the figures for Scotland, which has a very small ethnic minority population, yet still has a murder rate much higher amongst the urban poor:



The dark area, with a murder rate several times the rest of Scotland, is Glasgow. It's overwhelmingly white, yet like all large cities has a disproportionate murder rate.

What Lazs is trying to do, is self select a richer, more law abiding segment of the population, and compare it to the average in other countries.

Even then, he has to distort the statistics to do it, and even after all the distortions, the figures still come out higher than other country's averages.

[Toad]

Hey, Nashwan, my curiosity has been piqued.

Is there any UK source for homicides/100,000 that start in the early years of your gun controls and give rates by year to the present?

In short, how far back do the stats go? It'd be interesting to me to see a graph of rates with years of major gun laws delineated so I could see if they've actually changed much.

[Nashwan]

I haven't seen stats going back very far.

You'd have to go back to the late 19th cetury to get a clear picture of the effects of changes in the law on homicide (laws changed radically in the early 20s, and I should think WW1 had a major effect on the homicide rate, removing a very large proportion of the young men during the war, many of whom never came back.)

I don't know how accurate figures going back that far would be either.

[Toad]

Well, how far do they go back and where might I start looking? Any online links?

Seems to me this should be an interesting area to researchers.

I think we all agree that England is and always has been a far less violent society than the US.

Given that, it'd be mighty interesting to chart the firearms homicide rate/100,000 over the years and see it the gun laws actually DID anything other giving the populace a knee-jerk sense of "doing something".

For example, if the homicide rate has been between say 1.5 and 2.0 since before the laws were enacted, the initial conclusion would be that the laws were needless and pointless.

Much as the laws post-Dunblane/Hungerford were needless and pointless.

[Torque]

Indeed Nashwan, it would seem laz indulges in the same dodge and burn tactics of which he incessantly whines about.

The whiter shade of southerness is not lost, michelle it is.

Using Toronto as a benchmark, with a population of 2.7 million it recorded 63 homicides during '03. Over 50% are non-white and are gang or drug related.  

The figures drop slightly if you include all of the GTA comprising some 5.6 million people.

If the Canadian govn't painted statistics by numbers like the states, i'm quite sure the white homicide rate here would reside around .09/100 000.

The national homicide rate dropped 7% in 2003, 1.73/100 000 is the lowest in over three decades.