Gun Gontrol

[Buster]

Frankly, I don't think it makes any difference what you're killed with; getting killed is getting killed.

"The mortality rate for gunshot wounds was 22%.." (http://timlambert.org/1997/02/knives-00006/). 78% = 1 in a million?
And:
"The survival rate for patients ... was ... 0% (0 of 26) for those with blunt trauma."
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1575299&dopt=Abstract)

With this logic, baseball bats, knives, and even cars should be removed from society as countless people are accidentally and purposefully killed by them as well.

Also, here is a list of people that can't buy firearms:

-Convicted felons and people under indictment for a felony
-Fugitives from justice
-Unlawful drug users or drug addicts
-Individuals who have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution or determined to be mentally incompetent
-Illegal aliens and legal aliens admitted under a non-immigrant visa
-Individuals who have been dishonorably discharged from the military
-Persons who have renounced their American citizenship
-Persons subject to certain domestic violence restraining orders
-Persons convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence
(http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa010200a.htm)

It's not more laws that need to be made. What needs to happen is the laws that are already in place need to be enforced.

EDIT: :P It's not as if I have a reputation anywys

Oh, and I think that if someone tried to kill 33 people in a university with a baseball bat, they probably wouldn't succeed. They might kill maybe 3 people before getting owned with, say, another baseball bat. Guns, on the other hand, are a littler easier to kill with, and a little harder to take down. Just a little.

 

[Lackluster]

Can't we just leave it to it all depends where you get hit? -_-

 

[Rhazdel]

Every weapon has what is called a "danger area", which is an area that the weapon causes the most damage.

Baseball bats have a danger area of about 3 to 6 feet from the person swinging the bat. That means that if you are standing 3 to 6 feet from the person, you will sustain the most damage. If you stand outside 6 feet, the bat won't hit you, and if you stand inside the 3 feet (armspan = about 2 feet, plus first foot of bat), you won't sustain much damage.

It's simple physics. If something is moving in an arc (like a swung baseball bat), then the outside must move at a faster speed than the inside, because the outside must travel a farther distance in the same amount of time. So, if you can get inside or outside of the arc, you really won't be hurt very much.

Plus, baseball bats are easy to telegraph when and where the person will be swinging and are slow (maybe 5 full-powered swings per minute).

The point?

A gun's danger area is anywhere from contact (0 feet) to about 100 feet (for a pistol with moderate training).

Big difference.

Plus, guns are much harder to telegraph (tell when and where shots will go) and can fire at several hundred rounds per minute (the glock was an automatic).

I would MUCH rather be attacked with a baseball bat than a gun. At least I have a chance at avoiding the bat.

 

[djzalzer]

Buster: The VTech tragedy wouldn't have ever happened if the person that sold the guns was more responsible. Remember that firearms can't be sold to

"Individuals who have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution or determined to be mentally incompetent "

That guy had been deemed mentally incompetent: "CNN also learned Wednesday that in 2005 Cho was declared mentally ill by a Virginia special justice, who declared he was "an imminent danger" to himself, a court document states." (http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/index.html)
So the guns he used should never have been sold to them.

Rhazdel: If you keep moving, the chances are that you aren't even going to get hit. If I remember correctly, it's something like 4/100 to be hit in a vital organ (I can't find this on the Internet, though, so I may be wrong). I might rather be attacked with a baseball bat than, say, a car, but does that mean that we should ban everyone from using cars?

 

[Buster]

Buster: The VTech tragedy wouldn't have ever happened if the person that sold the guns was more responsible. Remember that firearms can't be sold to

"Individuals who have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution or determined to be mentally incompetent "

That guy had been deemed mentally incompetent: "CNN also learned Wednesday that in 2005 Cho was declared mentally ill by a Virginia special justice, who declared he was "an imminent danger" to himself, a court document states." (http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/index.html)
So the guns he used should never have been sold to them.

Exactly. As long as there are guns, there will be regulations on who can purchase them, but not everyone follows those regulations. My friend went to buy a gun, and all they asked for was driver's license to make sure he was old enough, and then he bought the gun. They didn't do any sort of background check, so my friend could have robbed a bank before and they wouldn't have even known.
The point is, the only real reason guns are aroundany more is for violence and hunting (And then pretty much only for sport, since very few people live completely off hunting any more), so why buy them?

 

[djzalzer]

Well, you can buy them for hunting (is it considered sport if you eat your catch?) or for self-defence. See, if the government banned guns, and a bank robber had a gun, do you think he'd go to the nearest police station and drop it off? No, he'd hide it away, and unless mass searches were conducted (which is invading unless they got a lot of search warrants) they wouldn't take guns away from criminals, just law-abiding citizens who liked to hunt, collected guns, or shot at targets for sport.

 

[Rhazdel]

Rhazdel: If you keep moving, the chances are that you aren't even going to get hit. If I remember correctly, it's something like 4/100 to be hit in a vital organ (I can't find this on the Internet, though, so I may be wrong). I might rather be attacked with a baseball bat than, say, a car, but does that mean that we should ban everyone from using cars?

???

I don't think you understood my point. Who said anything about banning cars/baseball bats??? My response was to your "statistics" that were terribly skewed. And it doesn't matter if you "keep moving" - they can just "keep firing". A person with a gun would have to be a horrible shot to miss a person running toward them from 15 feet. And even if you don't get hit in a vital organ, without immediate medical attention, a shot to the stomach can be fatal.

PLUS, your statistics for penetrating wounds vs. blunt force trauma don't mention what kind of penetrating wounds/blunt trauma they are for. The rescucitation rates for someone that has had their ribcage crushed in a car accident would be dramatically lower than a person attacked with a baseball bat.

You were trying to say that baseball bats were just as dangerous as guns.

Not even close.

 

[Andy6000]

???

I don't think you understood my point. Who said anything about banning cars/baseball bats??? My response was to your "statistics" that were terribly skewed. And it doesn't matter if you "keep moving" - they can just "keep firing". A person with a gun would have to be a horrible shot to miss a person running toward them from 15 feet. And even if you don't get hit in a vital organ, without immediate medical attention, a shot to the stomach can be fatal.

PLUS, your statistics for penetrating wounds vs. blunt force trauma don't mention what kind of penetrating wounds/blunt trauma they are for. The rescucitation rates for someone that has had their ribcage crushed in a car accident would be dramatically lower than a person attacked with a baseball bat.

You were trying to say that baseball bats were just as dangerous as guns.

Not even close.

I don't think he wants to listen to what might maybe be construed as plausible reasoning.

Okay... so, as to the question of 'if we ban guns, criminals will still have them': oh my yes, they would! But, think about this. How many criminals are caught daily? Quite a few I'd imagine. And say those guns were confiscated and kept from the criminal crowd once the criminal in question was caught? Now, this seems assininely pointless right now, since really, if you catch a guy robbing a bank, he goes to jail for a good number of years, he gets out, and then just goes and buys another gun from a less than credible source. If you cut off this 'source', then the gun level in the illegal crowd will stay the same, so every criminal you catch with a gun will decrease the overall guns in that crowd, winnowing down gun crime, so that the gun crime that still does show up is easier to track, and etc. Eventually you winnow the guns down to a very, very small minority of criminals. Now, the real problem with this logic is 'cutting off the source'. Which is the real question... How? Just cracking down harder, that sort of thing, a slow process, but nice.

Will people suffer? Will they be more defenseless than if they had slept with a gun under their pillow? For probably about a decade yeah, but if that real effort were made, in the long run, it would work out to be much, much better for society, now wouldn't it?

Also I'm giving up on convincing you gun shots are pretty dangerous. Especially gunshots from a gun shooting very fast, since 'keeping moving' doesn't help much if the guy puts 6 bullets in you before you can take 6 steps. You can bleed to death from non-organ wounds as well.

 

[djzalzer]

That's almost true Andy, except one thing. Sure, they'd maybe catch all the criminals that had guns in 10 years, but they wouldn't be able to stem the flow of guns coming in. Heck, we can't even stem the flow of illegal immigrants. Not only that but you'd put thousands of people out of jobs (ammunition and gun makers, small-town gunsmiths, craftsmen, etc., sport hunting, perhaps taxidermists) and in ten years, criminals can kill a lot of people.

Rhazdel: That's not what I meant; I meant that anything can be used as a weapon and guns would not stop murder.

 

[Rhazdel]

No, banning guns would not stop murder (actually, I think that guns should be legal, for the record), but banning assault/automatic weapons would sure slow them down.

Looking at crime reports, most violent crimes involving firearms are commited with automatic weapons (or pistols, due to their ability to be easily concealed). As it was stated earlier in this forum, there are many useful and reasonable uses for rifles, shotguns and even pistols.

There are no uses for automatic weapons other than to hurt people.

Some people say that automatics are more fun to shoot. That's fine. But that is why some firing ranges allow you to rent and fire automatics - and you have to give the guns back before you leave.