Right to bear arms.

[Reboot]

14 minutes ago, Snowy79 said:

It would be interesting if there was statistics to show how many people were saved by their own gun. 

Quote

 Guns save more lives than they take; prevent more injuries than they inflict

* Guns used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year -- or about 6,850 times a day. [1] This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives. [2]

* Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8% of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.[3]

* As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.[4]

* Even anti-gun Clinton researchers concede that guns are used 1.5 million times annually for self-defense. According to the Clinton Justice Department, there are as many as 1.5 million cases of self-defense every year. The National Institute of Justice published this figure in 1997 as part of "Guns in America" -- a study which was authored by noted anti-gun criminologists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig.[5]

* Armed citizens kill more crooks than do the police. Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606).[6] And readers of Newsweek learned that "only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The 'error rate' for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high."[7]

* Handguns are the weapon of choice for self-defense. Citizens use handguns to protect themselves over 1.9 million times a year. [8] Many of these self-defense handguns could be labeled as "Saturday Night Specials."

https://www.gunowners.org/sk0802htm.htm

 

 

[Reboot]

17 minutes ago, stevewool said:

Can I ask any of our members here.

If you own a gun have you ever had to use it , maybe not to fire it but to use it to protect yourself from being killed.

I own guns, and fortunately have never had to use them to protect myself. I hope I never have to.

Edited October 4, 2017 by Reboot

[Reboot]

A British acquaintance who is an avid hunter just reported they are tightening the gun laws in the UK...news came out the day after Vegas. He is going to have to turn several of his firearms in.

[Reboot]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-gun-control-was-the-answer-my-research-told-me-otherwise/2017/10/03/d33edca6-a851-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html?nid&utm_term=.e9f43c4e9dfd
 

Quote

 

I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.

Leah Libresco is a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site. She is the author of “Arriving at Amen.”

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.

When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.

As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.

As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. I couldn't even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?

However, the next-largest set of gun deaths — 1 in 5 — were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.

By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.

Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.

Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.

Even the most data-driven practices, such as New Orleans’ plan to identify gang members for intervention based on previous arrests and weapons seizures, wind up more personal than most policies floated. The young men at risk can be identified by an algorithm, but they have to be disarmed one by one, personally — not en masse as though they were all interchangeable. A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.

 

 

[Dave Hounddriver]

1 hour ago, Reboot said:

Let's apply that logic to the First Amendment:

You could'a been a lawyer.  The points are logical but the results are more dead people from civilian gunshots than anywhere else in the world.

1 hour ago, stevewool said:

If you own a gun have you ever had to use it , maybe not to fire it but to use it to protect yourself from being killed.

Yes, I owned unregistered rifles in Canada and I rebelled and refused to follow the law that was brought in to register them because I believed it was my right to keep them on my property for my own protection and use. (The law was later repealed so I was glad I never registered them).  I used them to put down animals (I lived on a farm)  I used them to hunt the occasional deer that wandered onto my property.  I used them to kill or scare off coyotes who would kill my animals and in one case I used one to kill a wounded bear who had been hit by a car and was still alive and on my property and a danger to the life of anyone she came near.  I was told later that I made a mistake by NOT killing her cub, who was not a danger to me but who ran off when I shot its mother.  I was told the poor cub would starve to death without its mother and it would have been more humane to put down the cub.

Guns can be useful tools and should not have to be registered ON YOUR OWN PROPERTY.  But that's as far as i would go to agree with the NRA activists. AND I could see no use for a gun in the city.  Perhaps a ban on guns in urban areas would be helpful.  Keep them out on the farm or on the shooting range or out hunting.

What guns did I have?  An old .303 and a .22 were all I ever needed.

[Dave Hounddriver]

52 minutes ago, Reboot said:

Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress.

What a crock!  Here are facts:

Quote

Australia had 13 mass shootings in the 18-year period from 1979 to 1996 but none in the succeeding 19 years after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, in which a gunman killed 35 individuals using semiautomatic weapons and the government instituted gun control.

 

[Lou49]

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Perhaps it is a mental health issue :

 

According to records from the Nevada Prescription Monitoring Program obtained by the paper on Tuesday, Paddock was prescribed 50 10-milligram diazepam tablets on June 21 by Henderson, Nevada physician Dr. Steven Winkler. Diazepam – better known by its brand name, Valium – is a sedative and muscle relaxer in the class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, which studies have shown can cause aggressive behavior in some patients. Chronic use has also been linked to psychotic episodes.  

[Reboot]

18 minutes ago, Dave Hounddriver said:

What a crock!  Here are facts:

Australia had 13 mass shootings in the 18-year period from 1979 to 1996 but none in the succeeding 19 years after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, in which a gunman killed 35 individuals using semiautomatic weapons and the government instituted gun control.

Statistical significance is the result of a multitude of data points Dave. Mass shootings were rare in Australia even prior to the ban. What you show is a dearth of data, from which no statistically significant conclusions can be drawn, especially since there are many confounding factors involved in a phenomenon like this.

Here is homicide data from the UK:

Edited October 4, 2017 by Reboot

[Reboot]

Homicide are more common, therefore, more data. So let's look at that.

This chart shows AU homicide rates over a period of time that includes the country's ban. 

This merely appears to be the continuation of an existing trend:

Here is total number of homicides in AU, again, not an impressive reduction:

Here is the US over a similar period. The declines in homicides are much more impressive, despite the fact that no such measures were taken, and despite the fact that tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of firearms were sold to citizens over the period:

 

Edited October 4, 2017 by Reboot

[Jollygoodfellow]

2 hours ago, Lou49 said:

Guns don't kill people, people kill people.

How many times have we heard that? Sure it's the weapon so let's say cyanide dont kill people, its the administration of it that kills people. ?????????? 

Lets face the facts. If this continues to be a do as you want, own as many guns as you want then it might be your turn for a police officer knocking on your door at 4 in the morning with bad news about your daughter or son.

So easy for many just to push it off on to some other blame until you or your family are a victim. 

My point is that the US citizens have grown to be scared of venturing outdoors without protection so it's a dog eat dog situation. Will never change and good luck to all.

Who really needs 30 guns and for what purpose?  Surely a bit of regulations might just save one or two lives?