Philandro Castile verdict

[Sparko]

We see a lot of mass shootings occurring in the US. And the gun murder rate is sky-high compared to gun-controlled countries.

I am sorry but westerns and mobster movies on Netlix are not real. And if you want to compare gun murder rates, you have to separate all of the criminal gun ownership from legal gun ownership in the stats. And remember how large the US is compared to most other countries.

And when you say "disarming the citizens only makes it easier for the criminals to have power, or the government." I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make about the entire rest of the gun-controlled Western world. Are you trying to suggest Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Denmark are dictatorships? Or that we are run by criminals??? Your comments seem divorced from reality. And in a democratic society why is it bad for it to be "easier" for "the government" "to have power"? And do you seriously think any guns you own would stop the American government bashing down your door and locking you in a tiny cell in Guantanamo if they decided they wanted to?

No, me owning a gun would not stop the US government from locking me up. It is only when all citizens can own guns that the government will take pause. I am not saying that Australia or New Zealand ARE dictatorships, but disarming their citizens is a good way to make it easier if they want to be. As far as criminals, yeah, if only criminals have guns, the citizens are at a disadvantage, unless you want to have armed police at every corner. People have a right to defend themselves. You can bet a criminal is going to think twice before robbing someone if they think that person is armed.

[Sparko]

In Germany 'Swedish Chef' is 'Dänischer Koch'

what the heck? The Swedish Chef actually makes sense?

[Mountain Man]

You can bet a criminal is going to think twice before robbing someone if they think that person is armed.

There is, in fact, a well-documented correlation between an increase in legal gun ownership and a decrease in violent crime.

[Leonhard]

If you have to deliberately misunderstand Sparko to prove him wrong, you've lost.

What was his point then, I'm just going by what he said. "ordinary citizens in the USA can and do own and carry firearms, in public. Yet you don't see mass shootouts and murders going on because of it." That's what he said. But there are mass shootings, ranging from white supremacists walking into a church and shooting black people, to Ed Harris and Klebold of Columbine fame shooting their fellow students, to a pro lifer walking into an abortion clinic and shooting those people, to disgruntled workers bringing a weapon to a job meeting and killing his colleagues, to ...

I'm not being facetious, I'm seriously just trying to understand what he meant then.

[Starlight]

There is, in fact, a well-documented correlation between an increase in legal gun ownership and a decrease in violent crime.

2015: New Study Is Latest to Find That Higher Rates of Gun Ownership Lead to Higher Rates of Violent Crime:

the most reliable academic analysis consistently shows that gun ownership is more often a catalyst than a deterrent to crime.

Last week, amid heightened scrutiny of gun violence in the wake of the Charleston church shootings, a group of researchers released the latest study on the correlation between firearm prevalence and crime rates. Their findings only add to the growing evidence against the “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis.

2016: The Relationship between Firearm Ownership and Violent Crime:

Examining violent crime, homicide, rape, robbery, and assault for 1,997 counties in the United States, the findings indicate that increased prevalence of firearms was associated with increased violent crime, homicide, rape, robbery, and assault. The results of this study suggest that a decrease in prevalence of firearms has the potential to decrease violent crime in the United States.

[Starlight]

What was his point then, I'm just going by what he said. "ordinary citizens in the USA can and do own and carry firearms, in public. Yet you don't see mass shootouts and murders going on because of it." That's what he said. But there are mass shootings, ranging from white supremacists walking into a church and shooting black people, to Ed Harris and Klebold of Columbine fame shooting their fellow students, to a pro lifer walking into an abortion clinic and shooting those people, to disgruntled workers bringing a weapon to a job meeting and killing his colleagues, to ...

I'm not being facetious, I'm seriously just trying to understand what he meant then.

He phrased it very carefully as "mass shootouts" referring to a Wild West movie-like free-for-all with multiple groups of people all shooting at each other at once - rather than as "mass shootings" which is not a topic he wants to talk about since it utterly destroys his case, as you've noted.

[Mountain Man]

"Disarming Realities: As Gun Sales Soar, Gun Crimes Plummet"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybe.../#3575d55e3f7c

"Statistics Prove: More Guns, Less Crime"
https://www.infowars.com/statistics-...ns-less-crime/

[Sparko]

What was his point then, I'm just going by what he said. "ordinary citizens in the USA can and do own and carry firearms, in public. Yet you don't see mass shootouts and murders going on because of it." That's what he said. But there are mass shootings, ranging from white supremacists walking into a church and shooting black people, to Ed Harris and Klebold of Columbine fame shooting their fellow students, to a pro lifer walking into an abortion clinic and shooting those people, to disgruntled workers bringing a weapon to a job meeting and killing his colleagues, to ...

I'm not being facetious, I'm seriously just trying to understand what he meant then.

I meant that you don't see legal owners of guns misusing them and going around shooting people left and right. It isn't a problem. Yes you have a few crazy people here and there, but do you really think stricter gun control laws would stop them? "Oh no! I can't get a gun! However will I kill all those people? I guess I will just go home instead of building a bomb"

I mean, did having strict gun laws stop Anders Behring Breivik from killing 77 people in Norway?

[Littlejoe]

I meant that you don't see legal owners of guns misusing them and going around shooting people left and right. It isn't a problem. Yes you have a few crazy people here and there, but do you really think stricter gun control laws would stop them? "Oh no! I can't get a gun! However will I kill all those people? I guess I will just go home instead of building a bomb"

I mean, did having strict gun laws stop Anders Behring Breivik from killing 77 people in Norway?

And HOW many dead from being run over in vans the last few weeks in England? As you are (I think) correctly pointing out, guns aren't necessary for mass killings to occur.

[Bill the Cat]

2015: New Study Is Latest to Find That Higher Rates of Gun Ownership Lead to Higher Rates of Violent Crime:

the most reliable academic analysis consistently shows that gun ownership is more often a catalyst than a deterrent to crime.

Last week, amid heightened scrutiny of gun violence in the wake of the Charleston church shootings, a group of researchers released the latest study on the correlation between firearm prevalence and crime rates. Their findings only add to the growing evidence against the “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis.

2016: The Relationship between Firearm Ownership and Violent Crime:

Examining violent crime, homicide, rape, robbery, and assault for 1,997 counties in the United States, the findings indicate that increased prevalence of firearms was associated with increased violent crime, homicide, rape, robbery, and assault. The results of this study suggest that a decrease in prevalence of firearms has the potential to decrease violent crime in the United States.

- The Trace is an American non-profit journalism outlet devoted to gun-related news in the United States. It was established in 2015 with seed money from the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, which was founded by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg,[2] and went live on June 19 of that year.[3] The site's editorial director is James Burnett.

- The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice is a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the United States' reliance on incarceration






Many countries with much stricter gun laws have nearly identical suicide rates as the US.

http://gamapserver.who.int/gho/inter...tes/atlas.html


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...wed-reasoning/
In asking the Supreme Court to let the District of Columbia ban handguns, the city has a simple argument: Whatever one thinks of the Second Amendment, banning handguns is a “reasonable regulation” to protect public safety. The problem for the city is that anyone who can look up the crime numbers will see that D.C.’s violent crime rate went up, not down, after the ban.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2...n-violence-ban
In the years following its ban, Washington did not generate a decline in gun murders. In fact, the number of killings rose by 156 percent — at a time when murders nationally increased by just 32 percent. For a while, the city vied regularly for the title of murder capital of America.

Chicago followed a similar course. In the decade after it outlawed handguns, murders jumped by 41 percent, compared with an 18 percent rise in the entire United States.

[Mountain Man]

2015: New Study Is Latest to Find That Higher Rates of Gun Ownership Lead to Higher Rates of Violent Crime:

the most reliable academic analysis consistently shows that gun ownership is more often a catalyst than a deterrent to crime.

Last week, amid heightened scrutiny of gun violence in the wake of the Charleston church shootings, a group of researchers released the latest study on the correlation between firearm prevalence and crime rates. Their findings only add to the growing evidence against the “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis.

2016: The Relationship between Firearm Ownership and Violent Crime:

Examining violent crime, homicide, rape, robbery, and assault for 1,997 counties in the United States, the findings indicate that increased prevalence of firearms was associated with increased violent crime, homicide, rape, robbery, and assault. The results of this study suggest that a decrease in prevalence of firearms has the potential to decrease violent crime in the United States.

More bait-and-switch "studies" that conflate homicide and suicide with violent crime.

[Starlight]

"Disarming Realities: As Gun Sales Soar, Gun Crimes Plummet"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybe.../#3575d55e3f7c

"Statistics Prove: More Guns, Less Crime"
https://www.infowars.com/statistics-...ns-less-crime/

Those are not actual studies, they're just idiots writing opinion pieces. They could never successfully get published in any sort of journal because they have a very basic issue:

The thing is, MM, crime has been going down across the Western world over the past few decades (experts can't totally agree on precisely why this is). And not just a little bit, it's been going down heaps. This is what in data analysis is called a "main effect". It's the factor that outweighs everything else. Over that time, Americans could have halved their number of guns or doubled their number of guns, and crime would still have gone down because the effect on crime that guns have simply isn't as big of an effect as the across-the-board drop in crime rates.

So observing that gun sales have gone up in America over that period doesn't really tell us anything about what effect the guns were having on crime, other than that it wasn't so huge as to block the main effect. Would crime have dropped even further if the number of guns hadn't gone up? Or would crime have dropped less if the number of guns hadn't gone up? That's something that it's impossible to know from the data in the articles you linked to. What you have to do is a much more comprehensive analysis such as was done in the studies I linked to and look at how much gun ownership has gone up or down in every county and cross-compare that with changes in crime-rates in the counties (e.g. as the 2016 study I linked to did), and from that you can tell what effect the gun prevalence is having.

[Teallaura]

Santa lives in Finland. A fictional residence for a fictional person.

But his workshop is at the North Pole - everyone knows that.

And who you calling 'fictional'?

[seer]

So while the ownership rate was going up, deaths by gun homicide has gone down.

[JonathanL]

But his workshop is at the North Pole - everyone knows that.

And who you calling 'fictional'?

Santa's workshop is at the North Pole? That's just anti-Finland propaganda.

Santa lives and operates from Finland. Having a workshop in the North Pole would be stupid.