MASSIVE Elementary School Shooting in CT *12-24 Maybe be dead

[JarodRussell]

teacake wrote:

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Interesting how all those guns don't leak up into Canada.. and by that I mean that presumably Canadians could get them if they wanted them. But maybe their are other issues which make them less prone to shoot each other?

Canada has much stricter gun control laws.

[Brolan]

I'm watching the memorial service. It's an amazing coming together of all faiths.

[Locutus of Bored]

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

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That quote purporting to be from Morgan Freeman is not, in fact, from Morgan Freeman. It's fake. Linky

Not cool. You don't piggyback off of the Supreme Narrator's golden voice to give yourself greater authority and notoriety. It just isn't done.

[gturner]

RAMA wrote:

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Gun Deaths - 2011: Japan 48, Great Britain 8, Switzerland 34, Canada 52, Israel 58, Sweden 21, Germany 42, UNITED STATES 10,728

Which is culturally interesting. The Swiss own almost 4 million guns (a bit more than half the US per capita guns), which is about 120,000 guns per annual gun death. Canadians own about 10 million guns, which is about 200,000 guns per annual gun death (roughly the same gun ownership rate as Sweden, France, Germany, etc, about 35% of the US guns per capita). The US has 260 or so million guns, or just 25,000 per annual gun death. Why is the US five to eight times as efficient at killing people with guns? Is it that we have better targets, escalate disputes better, or have more drug wars?

[Squiggy]

Deaths per gun is a totally useless, made up statistic.

[cooleddie74]

gturner wrote:

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The US has 260 or so million guns, or just 25,000 per annual gun death. Why is the US five to eight times as efficient at killing people with guns? Is it that we have better targets, escalate disputes better, or have more drug wars?

It's the total number of lives - the actual human beings - that's important, not the completely meaningless and artificial metric you just came up with.

We still had almost 11,000 deaths from gun murders during that particular year, more than all the American servicemen and women who have died in both Afghanistan and Iraq combined since 9/11. How many guns exist in the total population per gun murder means absolutely nothing. You might as well have mentioned invisible elephants or Mogwai and it would have been just as valid.

[gturner]

The deaths per gun is relevant to the claim that murder rates are correlated, if not driven, by guns. If Canadians had the same prevelance of guns as the US, and the murder rate was a function of the number of guns, then the US would still have 11,000 gun deaths and Canada would have about 152. Conversely, we could reduce the number of US guns by a factor of eight for the same gun ownership rate as Venezuela, which is less than a fourth that of Switzerland and a third that of Sweden, yet Venezuela has 53 murders a day, which for the US would be 220,000 a year. An eighth as many guns per capita, 20 times as many murders per capita.

[RJDiogenes]

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

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^ I had a pet ideology once. It ran away. I fed it talking points and everything.

I had a pet rock once that ran away. I was surprised, because it was sedimentary.

[MacLeod]

A better comparrison is homicides using a gun per capita.

And whilst it is true that the US doesn't have the highest homicide (using a gun) rate per capitia in the world, it has the highest rate per capitia amongest the develeoped world.

So if we use one of the stats posted above about gun deaths. UK 8, US 10 728 now as the UK population is roughly a fifth of the US comparring them directly is meaningless you have to muliple or divide one by 5 to get a more accurate comparrison accounting for population. So that would be around 40 vs 10 728 when population is factored in.

The UK has very tight guns laws, the US doesn't. Conclusion tight gun laws lead to few homicides by guns.

As for other factors, the same video games/ movies etc.. are available in the UK as the US. Yet the homicide rate is no where near a fifth of the US homicide rate. So the effects of these would appear to be minimal.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

HoHoHocutus wrote:

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Not cool. You don't piggyback off of the Supreme Narrator's golden voice to give yourself greater authority and notoriety. It just isn't done.

Huh? What did I do?

[cooleddie74]

People such as myself get a bit tired of hearing weak statistical excuses made for roughly 10,000 gun murders happening in this country each and every year. ”Well if the U.S. had the population of Britain or Belgium and there were just [insert random number] guns per person in the country and the Moon was in its Gibbous phase with the Comet Kohoutek traveling through the Constellation Lyra....”

Just stop it. By almost any metric the U.S. has one of the highest gun murder rates in the world and the worst in the advanced industrialized world. Every year we lose more people to pointless gun violence than we have in Afghanistan and Iraq *combined* since 9/11. Every year. All the numbers cooking and deft twisting of them to try to make them sound nowhere near as bad isn't going to change reality and we can't base our national gun crime policies on manipulating the numbers to protect the gun lobby's interests.

10,000 people a year is a statistic that's far more important than what the gun lobby wants and thinks and we as a society need to grow up and face what our culture has become over the years.

[cooleddie74]

For the record that reply wasn't directed against posters like MacLeod but the gturners and others from other threads who've taken similar positions.

[JarodRussell]

HoHoHocutus wrote:

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Not cool. You don't piggyback off of the Supreme Narrator's golden voice to give yourself greater authority and notoriety. It just isn't done.

Hopefully he can even sue whoever made it up in his name to make people believe it was his quote.

[Squiggy]

Here's a metric that I just made up that I think is relevant

Gun deaths per person who think that guns are a right bestowed by God.

[siskokid888]

Here's my argument for gun control - 20 children dead.

Go ahead, NRA slaves, make your argument.