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You are completely misunderstanding my point.

People are acting like gun ownership is a national disaster. In the grand scheme of things, not very many people are dying to guns. While more than virtually every other advanced country out there, it is still an extremely small number. 5 per 100,000 is the number I saw while looking it up earlier.

That being said, these events occurring at all is still a horrifying thing to deal with. But rather than doing something drastic like completely banning guns, maybe we need to have an eye more on how to just prevent these mass killings that are occurring with any choice of weapon. Because they are absolutely occurring with weapons besides just guns. Groups of people are getting stabbed, run over, shot at. There are many methods to the madness.

One really need only look at gun homicide rates in general in the US to see that it isn't much more of a problem now then it was say 20 years ago. The homicide rate in 1999 was 0.00394% of the population. In 2017 it was 0.00428% of the population. Does that mean we should completely ignore it? No, but I also don't think it means we need to limit gun ownership to 1-2 per person.



Money can't buy happiness. Just video games, which make me happy.

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To add to the argument, gun restriction, while it absolutely appears to reduce HOMICIDE with a gun, doesn't appear to reduce violent crime at all.

Britain and Wales, for instance have more than double the rate of violent crime as the US.

So I've got to ask (even though this trade-off isn't necessarily inevitable), would you be more comfortable with a higher gun homicide rate but substantially lower violent crime, or vice versa?

I've personally lived in a city (where I went to college) where people frequently got beat up and robbed if they walked around at night. It wasn't at all enjoyable. Ironically, this was also the 1st time I ever kept a gun in my house as my neighbor's were being robbed in the middle of the night etc and I didn't want to feel completely defenseless to this.



Money can't buy happiness. Just video games, which make me happy.

Baalzamon said:
4 dead in southern California after a stabbing rampage.

Those 4 might beg to differ regarding the lethality argument used earlier when discussing guns vs knives.

We have a lot larger problem than guns that is leading to all of this. I'm not even close to knowledgeable enough about it all to know what specifically is the issue, but it certainly seems to be more prevalent in the US than elsewhere. And it absolutely is not limited to just shootings.

If you tell me that bombs are more lethal than crossbows, but I find a case where someone killed 6 people with a crossbow and that's more than some bombs take out, that's not a good argument. 

Do you disagree that as a general statement it is easier to kill multiple people with a gun than it is with a knife?



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Baalzamon said:
4 dead in southern California after a stabbing rampage.

Those 4 might beg to differ regarding the lethality argument used earlier when discussing guns vs knives.

We have a lot larger problem than guns that is leading to all of this. I'm not even close to knowledgeable enough about it all to know what specifically is the issue, but it certainly seems to be more prevalent in the US than elsewhere. And it absolutely is not limited to just shootings.

Hmmm, this guy spent what 4 days killing 4 people with a knife while the Dayton Ohio guy spent 30 seconds and killed 9 people and injured 16.  Yep, no difference here I see.  I highly doubt anyone has ever claimed that people do not get killed in the US by all types of ways.  Some ways of killing are just more efficient then others.  This just doesn't go for the US but for any country.  I guess if people can claim you can still be killed by a knife so why you blaming guns then nothing will ever be done.



Torillian said:
Baalzamon said:
4 dead in southern California after a stabbing rampage.

Those 4 might beg to differ regarding the lethality argument used earlier when discussing guns vs knives.

We have a lot larger problem than guns that is leading to all of this. I'm not even close to knowledgeable enough about it all to know what specifically is the issue, but it certainly seems to be more prevalent in the US than elsewhere. And it absolutely is not limited to just shootings.

If you tell me that bombs are more lethal than crossbows, but I find a case where someone killed 6 people with a crossbow and that's more than some bombs take out, that's not a good argument. 

Do you disagree that as a general statement it is easier to kill multiple people with a gun than it is with a knife?

I wouldn't completely disagree. But are we ONLY looking at the lethality of something to determine if it should be legal?

Because there are many many things more lethal than a gun that are perfectly legal.



Money can't buy happiness. Just video games, which make me happy.

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Baalzamon said:
Torillian said:

If you tell me that bombs are more lethal than crossbows, but I find a case where someone killed 6 people with a crossbow and that's more than some bombs take out, that's not a good argument. 

Do you disagree that as a general statement it is easier to kill multiple people with a gun than it is with a knife?

I wouldn't completely disagree. But are we ONLY looking at the lethality of something to determine if it should be legal?

Because there are many many things more lethal than a gun that are perfectly legal.

I'm not talking about legal or not, I'm talking about regulation. I would be curious to hear what things are more lethal than guns but less regulated. 



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RolStoppable said:

Resentment of women happens to be an ingredient because the killers tend to hate lots of groups and at times really everyone. But using that ingredient to portray a massacre as being caused by misogyny is almost as bad as blaming violent video games when violent video games were among the interests of a killer. Your initial post complained about news reporting to fit a certain narrative, but you are trying to pursue a certain narrative yourself.

Wow. Just wow. I don't even know how to respond to this. I mean by this logic, SURELY half of all mass shooters should be female.

I'm not trying to create a narrative, I'm trying to point out demographic and attitudal patterns among mass shooters that to me seem very obvious and worthy of some scrutiny.

I also said precisely nothing about video games and did not definitively conclude as to what the main motives of the Dayton shooter were, but rather highlighted that women seem to have been especially high on his proverbial list of hates.



Baalzamon said:
To add to the argument, gun restriction, while it absolutely appears to reduce HOMICIDE with a gun, doesn't appear to reduce violent crime at all.

Britain and Wales, for instance have more than double the rate of violent crime as the US.

So I've got to ask (even though this trade-off isn't necessarily inevitable), would you be more comfortable with a higher gun homicide rate but substantially lower violent crime, or vice versa?

I've personally lived in a city (where I went to college) where people frequently got beat up and robbed if they walked around at night. It wasn't at all enjoyable. Ironically, this was also the 1st time I ever kept a gun in my house as my neighbor's were being robbed in the middle of the night etc and I didn't want to feel completely defenseless to this.

This is an argument I've seen several times before and every time it seems to be the result of someone not really looking very deeply into the question before shooting out an answer. If you actually compare violent crime by narrow categories between the USA and the UK, you will find that the US far exceeds the UK in almost every category.

So where does this falsehood originate from? It is a question of definitions. Lets compare the UK's definition of "violent crime" to America's:

United Kingdom:

“Violent crime contains a wide range of offences, from minor assaults such as pushing and shoving that result in no physical harm through to serious incidents of wounding and murder. Around a half of violent incidents identified by both BCS and police statistics involve no injury to the victim.” (THOSB – CEW, page 17, paragraph 1.)

United States:

“In the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses which involve force or threat of force.”   (FBI – CUS – Violent Crime)

As you can see, the definition is far more broad in the UK. If you push someone with no physical harm being done, this is classified as a violent crime in the UK, while it wouldn't be in the US. The US does not include simple assault in its definition of violent crime, which suppresses the statistic.

Lets compare a few numbers with definitions that are more comparable (numbers are per 100,000 individuals using 2011 crime stats):

Robbery (UK:US) = 135:113 = 1.1x more likely in UK
Burglary (UK:US) = 460:702 = 1.5x more likely in US
Rape (UK:US) = 26:26.7 = 1.02x more likely in US
Homicide (UK:US) = 1.14:4.6 = 4.0x more likely in US
Agg. Assault (UK:US) = 35:241 = 6.9x more likely in US

You're argument is fundamentally flawed because you are not comparing like to like. USA has more violent crime if you are looking at comparable definitions.



the-pi-guy said:

>is the belief that women should be the public property of all men (e.g. prostitution, pornography, surrogacy, beauty pageants, etc

Supporting the legalization of prostitution, or supporting those other things doesn't promote the belief that women should be public property.  

I've never heard of the idea that women should be public property.  

I think it's very obvious that treating women as say wombs for hire by the general public or as commercial receptacles for penises are definitely specifically gendered forms of dehumanization that functionally treat women as the property of the male public at large. As much seems self-evident to me. I don't know how one can miss that. I mean when the consumer is a man and the product for sale is a woman's body, I just think it's very clear. 

Last edited by Jaicee - on 08 August 2019

Jaicee said:
the-pi-guy said:

>is the belief that women should be the public property of all men (e.g. prostitution, pornography, surrogacy, beauty pageants, etc

Supporting the legalization of prostitution, or supporting those other things doesn't promote the belief that women should be public property.  

I've never heard of the idea that women should be public property.  

I think it's very obvious that treating women as say wombs for hire by the general public or as commercial receptacles for penises are definitely a specifically gendered forms of dehumanization that functionally treat women as the property of the male public at large. As much seems self-evident to me. I don't know how one can miss that. I mean when the consumer is a man and the product is a woman's body, I just think it's very clear. 

On the second point "commercial receptacles for penises" I'm curious how your viewpoint takes into account the existence of male prostitutes. 



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