Replies to post #338541 on Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[stratocasterca]

i own several guns for different purposes, and good luck on anyone taking them away during my lifetime, although, i do not own handguns as i have no need for shooting people, which is about all they are good for.

I think the uneasy balance of guns and gangs is not really in a bad place now, but opening the floodgates of handguns to them will not have a positive outcome.

even in the old west, they checked handguns at the door to some towns. i don't think inner city kids need free access to handguns. if we want them to shoot, we should draft them and teach them how to kill more efficiently.

there just has to be some limits~~ does the ruling mean that people can bring handguns into court and on airlines now? that boundary could be pushed given the logic of today's ruling... who says you are any less a militiaman when you fly to Las Vegas for the weekend? i imagine the supreme court would be a tad nervous if all of the gallery were armed.

so now we will probably have a flood of new suits testing the limits of the ruling.. oh joy.

[stratocasterca]

i reread my first gun post and realize that satirical treatment of gun control could be misconstrued and cause me to be one of the people shot at from people with board rage. Don't forget, i can shoot back.

i do not advocate disarming the general population. i advocate keeping criminals from guns though vicious enforcement of gun violations in urban settings, which is discriminatory, but for good cause.

[stratocasterca]

your premise of Australia having an increase in gun deaths after gun control was invoked is not supported by the statistics.

Australia forced the surrender of nearly 650,000 personal firearms in 1997. A study published in 2001[104] shows a 47% decrease of firearms related deaths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics

however, in fairness, the same result was not achieved in the U.S. cities that tried it. The statistics do not support the premise i was taking about gangs. In the interest of fairness of debate, here is some stats from handgun control in the U.S.:

The National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank, reported the following statistics:[98]

New Jersey adopted what sponsors described as "the most stringent gun law" in the nation in 1966; two years later, the murder rate was up 46% and the reported robbery rate had nearly doubled.

In 1968, Hawaii imposed a series of increasingly harsh measures, and its murder rate tripled from a low of 2.4 per 100,000 in 1968 to 7.2 by 1977.

In 1976, Washington, D.C., enacted one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Since then, the city's murder rate has risen 134% while the national murder rate has dropped 2%.

However, if you run the data further out, those large gains in deaths dropped back down to the original levels within 20 years, so i am not sure that a conclusion of increased gun control decreases gun deaths is warranted in the U.S.