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Originally Posted by Resolute 14
My god, you are just wonderful with the rhetoric, aren't you?
Your stats don't tell the story you want it to. They show that fewer guns in circulation means drastically reduced odds that they will be used. You've really only succeeded at reinforcing my point.
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The Stats Canada reports show that guns are used in a tiny portion of intimate partner crimes. Assuming that all the guns used in these offenses are in the hands of law-abiding citizens, you reduce the incidence of intimate partner crime by 576 out of 97,500 cases. Keep in mind, these are cases where the most serious weapon found was a firearm. The 2011 StatsCan report measuring violence against women shows an even lower number. Out of 77,943 cases of a violent crime committed against a woman by an intimate partner, only 57 cases involved the pointing, use of or discharge of a firearm. That is 0.073% of all cases.
Your assertion that getting rid of guns will cause a drastic reduction in gun related offenses is mostly correct. Without guns, you can't have gun crime. This assumes that all these offenses were committed by people who would follow a confiscation order if it was implemented. The problem with this is that you have focused primarily on GUNS and not reducing violent crime as a whole.
You'll never hear someone say "we got rid of guns and reduced the amount violent crime against women by an intimate partner from 77,943 cases to maybe only 77,886 cases!". What you'll actually hear is "we banned guns and the majority of gun crimes against women by an intimate partner dropped to almost nothing!". This also assumes that all 57 of those people who used a gun illegally against an intimate partner ONLY want to use their gun and would not use other means of abusing them.
For every other offense, we blame the person who committed the act since you can't assign blame to an amoral object like a car, a bottle of alcohol or a baseball bat. But when it comes to gun crimes, where a similarly amoral object was used, the response is to blame the gun and to call for a ban. Imagine how fast people would have been shouted down if they called for knife control after Matthew de Grood stabbed five people to death in Calgary's worst mass murder. Or how fast people would stop listening after people called for a ban on alcohol after each drunk driving incident. The attitude is that "since it doesn't affect me, I don't care if 2 million people are affected".
@DuffMan; The US has no real gun licensing system, Iraq and Somalia have no laws period and are both in a state of war. I have no idea about Yemen. Gun homicide rates are not available for all three.
The following list is all the countries that have more guns per capita than Canada does, but have a lower amount of homicides by firearm. France, Norway, Sweden, Uruguay, Cyprus, Serbia, Finland and Switzerland. For the rest of the top 13 countries, there is no data available for 3 of them and the US is in the number 1 spot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chill Cosby
Forgive me for the most basic and uneducated of questions, but for those "gun people," what does a gun provide that is a requirement to your happiness, which could not easily be replaced by something less controversial?
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How are the shooting sports different than every other sport? The only reason guns are "controversial" is years of people being told that guns are evil, only a criminal would NEED a gun and there is no legitimate use for a gun.