JWeinCom said:
HappySqurriel said:
JWeinCom said:
HappySqurriel said:
A question I would want answered with gun control is "What do you want to achieve?" and follow that up with "How does eliminating guns achieve that?" ...
If someone has the intent to do harm and is ready to break the law to accomplish that banning guns won't prevent them from doing harm; because they will probably be able to get an illegal gun, and even if they can't they could find some other way (bomb, kinfe, car, etc.) to do the harm they want. |
In Israel they had a problem with soldiers commiting suicide via gunshot. They changed military policy so that guns were not kept at home with the soldiers, but on base. The rate of suicide via gunshot fell significantly. The rate of suicide by strangulation rose slightly. Overall suicide among soldiers fell significantly.
Of course, the suicidal soldiers could have easily found other methods to off themselves, and some did. But, the lack of easy access to guns brought down the suicide rate. Putting an extra step between the thought and the action had a meaningful impact.
Making it more difficult to get the gun adds several steps between thought and deed, adds more points at which suspicion can arise and the would be killer would be caught, and could conceivably alter the type of weapon that is used, possibly decreasing overall impact.
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Are you implying that Israel realized they had a problem with suicide, they didn't do anything to address the underlying mental health problems, and the reason suicide rates fell was lack of access to guns?
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The article I read was specifically in regards to access to weapons. It doesn't mention any other actions they took in particular.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/mythbusting-israel-and-switzerland-are-not-gun-toting-utopias/
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I suspect there were probably substantial efforts to reduce suicide rates but the article ignored those because pointing out that reducing access to guns was one small part of a large strategy to prevent suicides is less sensational, and would be down right honest; something you don't see from the mainstream media.
