Man shoots students at an Amish school.

[o_nezumi]

(Edit: At lithium Why? We're having fun.

I say a police force without guns is just silly (in this country. Maybe it works in countries with less crime) and letting police have guns but not the general public is dangerous.

That said I do think the presence of guns makes people take opportunities for violence more often (If you're really pissed and you can kill someone just by pulling the trigger...) and guns in the US should be WAY WAY more restricted.

I mean ideally people should just stop commiting crimes so we wouldn't need the police.
But realistically I think we should try to put the egg back in the chicken.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Originally Posted by puppychow

I disagree with that 100%. I think its the case where people make statistics work for THIER side, whichever that is.

(quoted study)

That's complete crap. Post one story where the lawful ownership of a firearm was turned around on it's owner. Post 5.... Post 10. As stated before, I can provide 1000's where the ownership saved lives.

As far as your "study" goes I would bet that you're not quoting from the study but from a website that is "quoting" from that study instead of reading the study yourself.

At it's simplest post a news story of an incident supporting what you're saying. You should be able to find 1000's of stories since the liberal media is as rabidly anti-gun as you are.

[o_theres *nothing* here]

But that doesn't matter, it only takes one instance to disprove a theory.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Originally Posted by theres *nothing* here

But that doesn't matter, it only takes one instance to disprove a theory.

Using that "rule" you could "prove" that women shoud not have the right to drive because one woman, Priscilla Ford, drove down a sidewalk and killed a large number of people. What you're saying is wrong.

[o_theres *nothing* here]

Well then, I could also prove that men shouldn't drive either, because there are no shortage of male drivers that do that.

Okay okay, maybe that was a bad point.. That crap works for physics only then.

Right now, I still say, if you can't fix people, take away their guns. But that ain't ever gonna happen. You'll never be able to take away every single gun from every single person. The honest people end up getting screwed over.

What I'm saying- or what anyone is saying, is just idealistic. They're there.

Well, guns still need ammo. So maybe if certain types of ammunition were banned and illegal for purchase by civilians, it would change things.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Originally Posted by theres *nothing* here

Well then, I could also prove that men shouldn't drive either, because there are no shortage of male drivers that do that.

Okay okay, maybe that was a bad point.. That crap works for physics only then.

Right now, I still say, if you can't fix people, take away their guns. But that ain't ever gonna happen. You'll never be able to take away every single gun from every single person. The honest people end up getting screwed over.

What I'm saying- or what anyone is saying, is just idealistic. They're there.

Well, guns still need ammo. So maybe if certain types of ammunition were banned and illegal for purchase by civilians, it would change things.

The only people you punish are the law abiding citizen with bans like that because the scumbags get whatever they want regardless of the law and there's always some foreign country willing to make ammo that the scumbags can get their hands on.

Look at the criminalization of alcohol and how "successful" that was. How do you address it? Make the penalties for misuse so steep that people actively avoid actions that would place them in jeopardy of being subject to those penalties. Then you have the problem with lenient Judges...but that's fodder for another pointless thread...

[mervaka]

Originally Posted by theres *nothing* here

Gun's aren't the problem. People are.

But you can't change people. So you'll probably have to take away the guns.

this man wins the thread. hit the nail on the head.

[o_theres *nothing* here]

:P

Making something illegal won't change anything. Like I mean, people are still going to drink. The stuff is still there.

But I'm saying, to take it all away, then solve the "problem". Bring it back later- if people are willing to play nice. When that happens, civilians who want guns will have to buy from the police department. Every single gun sold, documented and stamped with serials. Strictly enforce gun registry. Oh, and probably only to people that are farmers. You really don't need a gun in city. There are always bbguns, mace, and baseball bats.

I have to admit.. still idealistic at best. I don't think there really is a good way to stop people from killing each other. You wouldn't be able to get rid of every single gun.

I guess we could get Magneto to fly over america. But oh, I forgot he was a megalomaniacal power whore. He'd probably give them all to his army, or sell them in the black market.

[o_puppychow]

this was in the meat of what i posted before but i do not know how you can get around such a statistic:

a gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal, unintentional, or suicide-related shooting than to be used in a self-defense shooting.

how can you justify that away?

http://md1.csa.com/partners/viewreco...&setcookie=yes

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Originally Posted by puppychow

this was in the meat of what i posted before but i do not know how you can get around such a statistic:

a gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal, unintentional, or suicide-related shooting than to be used in a self-defense shooting.

how can you justify that away?

http://md1.csa.com/partners/viewreco...&setcookie=yes

You're reading someone elses take on 4 pages (pages 263-267) of a report that REFERENCES the study. Go find the actual study and link it here. The study itself was cited in the Journal of Trauma [J. Trauma]. Vol. 45, no. 2, August 1998. What your citing is COMPLETELY slanted to support your fallacious argument. Do your homework.

Honestly, I am not asking for that much. If lawfully owned firearms are so dangerous for their owners surely you can find a few news articles about such an incident?

[o_theres *nothing* here]

Well, I've said what I wanted to say. Now I'll let you guys do the talking.

Here's one account, where a man killed his family with a registered gun

Crime with Legally Owned Machine Guns

In 1995 there were over 240,000 machine guns registered with the BATF. (Zawitz, Marianne,Bureau of Justice Statistics, Guns Used in Crime [PDF].) About half are owned by civilians and the other half by police departments and other governmental agencies (Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York, 1997.)

Since 1934, there appear to have been at least two homicides committed with legally owned automatic weapons. One was a murder committed by a law enforcement officer (as opposed to a civilian). On September 15th, 1988, a 13-year veteran of the Dayton, Ohio police department, Patrolman Roger Waller, then 32, used his fully automatic MAC-11 .380 caliber submachine gun to kill a police informant, 52-year-old Lawrence Hileman. Patrolman Waller pleaded guilty in 1990, and he and an accomplice were sentenced to 18 years in prison. The 1986 'ban' on sales of new machine guns does not apply to purchases by law enforcement or government agencies.

From here.

Need to dig. But there's school to go to, so later.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Originally Posted by theres *nothing* here

Well, I've said what I wanted to say. Now I'll let you guys do the talking.

Here's one account, where a man killed his family with a registered gun

Did you actually read the article?

Neil Entwistle faces two counts of murder, one count of illegal possession of a firearm and one count of illegal possession of ammunition, said Melissa Sherman of the Middlesex County, Massachusetts, district attorney's office

Registered? Not according to that article. That article is not citing an example where a lawfully owned firearm did not act to deter a scumbag. Dig a little further and I'll bet you find that this scumbag was going to murder his wife and child regardless for money he stood to gain to pay off debts. Wife and infant. Strangle, stab, poison...he was going to do it anyway. So millions of law abiding citizens should be penalized for the actions of this bag of sh!t? More people are killed by people in cars. Shouldn't we outlaw them too? The Earth First nutjobs frequently think so.

[o_milk]

Nobody is forced to live in any one country. "zSilver_Fox", AFAIK the first NRA article you posted is pure propaganda due to the fact that the requirement of firearm registration began around 2000, maybe a tiny bit earlier. A little convenient for reports of weapons huh? Being a lawful texan, I think it would be mighty nice to buy a firearm and go bury it out back in case of emergency post apocalyptic events, other than that usage/availability = never/10 minutes of digging. Americans say no to no guns, but I think on the contrary. I believe that getting rid of guns would make fat kids feel like there is no hope for revenge and then they would result in suicide or excercise. You purely just couldn't protect yourself if you were fat and out of shape! Imagine the possibilities of this new approach to making Americans not fat. If you wanna pwn that robber, your gonna hafta do 50 pushups in the morning and 50 pushups at night. Beat that. I personally think barbaric slugfests are much more appealing than the detached ease of dismissal which guns can provide. Did somebody say milk?

[o_cruor]

I can certainly see the logic in that crimes would decrease in communities that has a lot of households carrying a weapon. This is a result of fear. Fear from the perpetrators that they might be killed during a burglary attempt, fear from the residents that without a gun they are more susceptible to burglaries.

It's the same principle which has kept us safe from nuclear holocaust for many a year.

But eventually the balance will get shifted again for the worse.

Criminals will get more sophisticated weaponry, use more advanced tactics when performing a burglary etc.

It's like an arm's race all over again.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Originally Posted by Milk

Nobody is forced to live in any one country. Innoc, AFAIK the first NRA article you posted is pure propaganda due to the fact that the requirement of firearm registration began around 2000, maybe a tiny bit earlier. A little convenient for reports of weapons huh? Being a lawful texan, I think it would be mighty nice to buy a firearm and go bury it out back in case of emergency post apocalyptic events, other than that usage/availability = never/10 minutes of digging. Americans say no to no guns, but I think on the contrary. I believe that getting rid of guns would make fat kids feel like there is no hope for revenge and then they would result in suicide or excercise. You purely just couldn't protect yourself if you were fat and out of shape! Imagine the possibilities of this new approach to making Americans not fat. If you wanna pwn that robber, your gonna hafta do 50 pushups in the morning and 50 pushups at night. Beat that. I personally think barbaric slugfests are much more appealing than the detached ease of dismissal which guns can provide. Did somebody say milk?

No, someone said Milk is an idiot...me. The only link I posted was to a database of articles where citizens defended themselves with firearms.

Why do you guys keep attributing the link SilverFox posted to me? Has reading comprehension been de-emphasized?

[o_the russian]

what that "liberal" media is trying to do is to make it so you can easily digest the research with numbers and figures every layman can understand... heres the research you were asking for:

http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/full/92/12/1988 by the Ameircan Public Health Association which authors the Ameircan Journal of Public Health, and the study in question to which I directly linked to was conducted by Harvard... in which case you can either believe in genuine statistics or your anti-liberal bias in regards to its methods in inquiry, which are outlined with every scientific means possible in their study.

and here's an excerpt

The association between household firearm ownership rates and homicide rates held for virtually all age groups and was particularly strong for adults aged 25 years and older. An example is the category of homicide victims aged 35 to 44 years. Table 2Go indicates that in a comparison of states that differed by 1 standard deviation in our firearm proxy (FS/S), the homicide rate was on average 35% higher in the states with the higher FS/S (i.e., multivariate IRR = 1.35). Given that FS/S was 4-fold higher in states with the lowest relative to those with the highest gun ownership rates, our multivariate model suggested that the homicide rate in the high-gun states would be 3.3 times that in the low-gun states (35% compounded 4-fold), and our bivariate model suggested a 3-fold difference (32% compounded 4-fold). Table 3Go presents the corresponding bivariate comparison of the actual number of homicide victims in the states with the 4 lowest and the 6 highest gun ownership rates: for victims aged 35 to 44 years, homicide rates were 3.4 times higher in the high-gun states.

In laymans terms... higher legal gun possession = higher gun-related homicide rate, both in-home and out.

The United States has higher rates of firearm ownership than do other developed nations, and higher rates of homicide.1,2 Of the 233 251 people who were homicide victims in the United States between 1988 and 1997, 68% were killed with guns,3 of which the large majority were handguns.4

Case–control studies suggest that the presence of a gun in the home is a risk factor for homicide in the home,5 that the purchase of a handgun from a licensed dealer is associated with becoming a homicide victim,6 and that gun ownership may be a risk factor for committing homicide7 (although other studies found no association with homicide perpetration. Most, but not all,9,10 cross-sectional studies have found a positive association between various measures of firearm availability and overall rates of homicide, a trend that holds across regions,11 states,12–14 cities,15,16 and counties.17

Nationally representative studies of the effect of firearm prevalence on rates of homicide have been hampered by the lack of direct measures of firearm ownership within areas smaller than the 9 US Census regions and by uncertainty regarding the validity of firearm ownership proxies. Our study extends previous work by using recent data, looking across both regions and all 50 states, disaggregating victims by age, and adjusting for potential confounders, including poverty, urbanization, unemployment, alcohol consumption, aggravated assault, forcible rape, and robbery. In addition, we used the 2 best currently available measures of rates of household firearm ownership—direct survey-based measures for regional analyses18 and a rigorously validated proxy of household gun ownership19 for region- and state-level analyses.

you should check out the data they collected

yet it should be noted that even after this, I do not expect you to believe the math... you will not believe what you dont want to believe as you have grown to believe in it religiously... and for all the articles and studies linked to in this forum, and your comments on how you can produce 1000 studies to contradict the articles posted, you have yet to produce 1.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Originally Posted by Cruor

I can certainly see the logic in that crimes would decrease in communities that has a lot of households carrying a weapon. This is a result of fear. Fear from the perpetrators that they might be killed during a burglary attempt, fear from the residents that without a gun they are more susceptible to burglaries.

It's the same principle which has kept us safe from nuclear holocaust for many a year.

But eventually the balance will get shifted again for the worse.

Criminals will get more sophisticated weaponry, use more advanced tactics when performing a burglary etc.

It's like an arm's race all over again.

Where would the arms race for criminals escalate to? What weapons would possibly negate the potential of an armed homeowner? Even in the US fully automatic weapons are highly regulated and VERY difficult to impossible to legally attain. If the criminal arms race was going to escalate don't you think it would have done so already?

While a very poor parallel look at Counterstrike. Give an experienced player a single pistol and a noob the choice of any weapon he can get his hands on. Place the pistol owner in a defensive posture and have the noob attack with his arsenal. My money is on the pistol owner every time....for many reasons. Granted not all lawful firearms owners practice but some do. So how does a criminal have anyway of knowing that their intended victim is well familiar with their weapon? Not sure what arms race escalation could counter that.

[o_milk]

Originally Posted by |404|Innoc-TPF-

No, someone said Milk is an idiot...me.

Dont get your panties in a bunch, I simply dont care because its pretty obvious name calling in my post bears no representative of the concept. In fact you could take the name out pretty easily and it wouldnt change my post at all. This is a simple difference between flaming and not flaming, I suggest you edit your post as will I.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Originally Posted by The Russian

yet it should be noted that even after this, I do not expect you to believe the math... you will not believe what you dont want to believe as you have grown to believe in it religiously... and for all the articles and studies linked to in this forum, and your comments on how you can produce 1000 studies to contradict the articles posted, you have yet to produce 1.

Right back at you. This issue is every bit as bad as religion, abortion or any other polarizing issue. You guys are C students at best. You don't read much and that which you do read you don't comprehend. So should I go into tearing down the methodology of this report?

We used cross-sectional time-series data (1988–1997) to estimate the association between rates of household firearm ownership and homicide.

Translation: We had the conclusion in mind when we collected the data to support what we believed to begin with.

Should I go further? Should I go further into that article and show you the other issues that are flawed? No, 3 pages into this thread and you guys STILL cannot get straight who quoted what here?!?!?!

I laid down the gauntlet before. Surely you can show me a list of newspaper articles supporting the danger that a lawfully owned firearm in the home poses to the occupants of that house. Keep it simple. Where are the articles? You guys whine about studies where you don't even read what you're posting nor do you understand it.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Originally Posted by Milk

Dont get your panties in a bunch, I simply dont care because its pretty obvious name calling in my post bears no representative of the concept. In fact you could take the name out pretty easily and it wouldnt change my post at all. This is a simple difference between flaming and not flaming, I suggest you edit your post as will I.

If you don't care then what you're doing is trolling. Take a hike troll.