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sc94597 on 22 December 2012
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hsrob said:
sc94597 said:
A_C_E said:
sc94597 said:

Providing Mental Health Care IMO is the best answer as you stated above for the reason that you also stated above.

I like your wording in your first sentence where you state, "Death by guns will decrease but violent crime will increase". I myself would subtitute death for crime in my country if I were President.

Then certainly you'd love to live in China! They have a much higher crime rate than the U.S, but a lower homicide rate than half of Europe - with the people lacking freedoms, might I add. It's bad enough when the criminals are commiting crimes, but when the government does too, it's worse! In China they have no laws protecting children from teacher abuse, for example.  Yet their children are relatively safe from death, I suppose.  Is that a better society?

Also, we have no idea what the effects could be. Yes, death by guns would decrease, but who's not to say that death by other means won't increase with a gun ban? 

Higher crime rate in China than the US?  I'd be curious to see a citation for that.

China may have plenty of corruption and theft but I'd be very surprised if the total crime rate there wasn't much lower than the US.

The difference is that China doesn't have a good system for reporting crime and a corrupt judicial system, so we have no idea, but the consensus does seem to be that there is quite significant crime in the country. As an anecdote, from what I hear from my roommate (he's chinese) there is more crime overall in China than the U.S, especially by the government. Also, there are some things that are not illegal in China that would be illegal here: such as child abuse by teachers (which has only just been changed because of a high incidence of cases in October.) Another example is piracy.

An example of an altered statistic would be: if somebody was hit by a car, the driver would kill that person so they wouldn't get in trouble, because it would have been labeled as an accident, and hence not a crime. They have plenty of video footage of this happening. 

Another example:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576349181022278452.html

So we have no way of quantitatively knowing, I suppose. 

Note, I didn't say violent crime, which means I did acknowledge that the U.S likely has a higher incidence of it.