The Inherent Stupidity of the Gun Argument

Famov

Famov

Secular Conservative
Guns are a divisive issue. Surprised? Well, what may be more surprising is the inherent lack of intelligence that envelopes the gun argument.

Stats are abound, and yet they are used with such a lack of responsibility that it is no wonder that you see stats that support restrictive gun laws and stats that support lax gun laws.

The anti gun group will bring up Australia and Canada (and compare them to the comparitively violent US), while the pro gun group will bring up Switzerland and the nations of Scandinavia (and compare them to everyone else). I've seen the UK used both ways, somehow.

What people are failing to understand about gun rights and violence is the same thing that Jack Thompson and Hilary Clinton fail to understand about videogames and violence, and that is that any selective use of statistics to derive the correlation that was looked for is nothing more than a correlation. There has been nothing to show that having more or less restrictive gun laws has any effect on the violent crime rates whatsoever.

So yes, every adult owning assault rifles in Switzerland has NOT been proven to lower crime rate. The UK practically banning handgun ownership has NOT been proven to lower crime rate.

And most importantly, the high violent crime rates in the United States has NOT been shown to be the result of easy access to firearms.

Any stats you attempt to show me proving any of the above will be entirely fruitless, for the reasons already explained.

Moving on to a similar issue, if handguns can effectively be banned in the UK, why not the US?

Well, the problem is obvious to anyone who has done their research. There are roughly 90 guns for every 100 American citizens. Each year we purchase 4.5 million of the 8 million guns produced. How do you disarm a population with that many guns?

No one can answer, because no one has tried. You see, the UK had registerred handguns in the absurdly low number of like .1 percent of their population.

Also, the UK has support from all of the major political parties. The US? The Democrats tend to support more restrictive laws, but none but the most left wing of the bunch would dare support an outright ban. In fact, most Democrats are very supportive of gun rights and those of us in the states can personally think of quite a few gun toting Democrats.

To say nothing of Republicans...

My last point of contention is the outright misunderstanding of the pro gun argument. It could be proven to me that banning guns in the United States, or any other country, would lower violent crime rates by a total of 50% and there would be no more suicides and we could see the second coming of Jesus throwing baskets of fishloaf at people. Would that change my mind that I have an unalienable right to own firearms for whatever (legal) design I wish? No, it would not. Because I am a law abiding citizen who has a right to do whatever I wish so long as I do not infringe on the rights of others. The act of gun ownership does not infringe on anyone's rights, and so I have all the justification I need.

Nice way to take all of the perceived complexity out of an issue, isn't it?

Oh, and for those people who love stats: the assault rifle ban that expired in the US has invoked lots of whining from the antigun lobby, but I'm not sure why, mostly because approximately zero people die from assault rifles each year. Completely scientific, I promise.
 
The only way you could tell whether or not gun bans actually work is to take one nation, copy it, ban guns in one version, and have them legal in the other, and compare them after a period of time. With anything else, there are always statistics that will run contrary. That's probably the biggest problem with sciences like economics - no other way to experiment with them than to try them out, and once you've done that, well, you have no control to compare with.
 
The bottom line is no one who supports gun control in the name of public safety can prove the public is made more safe by gun control laws. They can point to this or that correlation, but when the data is examined, the correlations are derived through unsupported assumptions and/or incorrect application of statistical analysis.

The are very simple refutations to the so-called correlations between gun ownership and gun violence. First is U.S. history: if you progress backward in U.S. history, the unfettered availability of firearms to the citizenry goes up, while gun violence goes down. That is the exact reverse of what the hypothesis of the gun control advocates claim. IF free availability of firearms is a factor in violence, why is it when one studies gun control vs. firearm availability in the 1950's, we find anybody could buy any non-full-auto firearm made, without registration, without even filling out any kind of generalized form - even by MAIL ORDER!!!! - yet gun violence was less than 1/10th what we see today. Proof positive that availability of firearms to the general public has nothing at all to do with the use of firearms in crime resides in our own history.

Second is, of course, the fact that regions in the U.S. with the most strict gun control laws have the highest per-capita levels of gun violence. This correlation is easily shown, and is often misused by some pro-2nd Amendment advocates to attempt the claim that higher gun ownership prevents violent crime. However, when correctly analyzed using all variables instead of simply focusing on who may buy a firearms compared to how often they are used in crime, the relationship between laws controlling firearms ownership and levels of violence (which again the exact opposite of what pro-gun-control idiots claim to be true) is easily explained. Crimes involving firearms started going up significantly in the 1960s, so a bunch of morons decided to punish law abiding citizens for the actions of criminals. When crime continued to go up, (because gun control was the ONLY thing these idiots did to address crime rates while simultaneously jumping on the prisoners' rights bandwagon) they decided that their laws were not strict enough, and passed more strict versions. Yet crime still continued to rise, and the brain dead, leading the mindless, made even more strict but useless laws. The cycle of passing more gun control laws, followed by zero effect on crime just keeps on keeping on, until we have cities today trying outright bans, yet crime rates are STILL unaffected by their brain dead measures.

Other countries have tried the gun control/gun ban approach to crime control. The only thing that can be said for those countries is they have lower crime rates than the U.S. BUT, again other factors are ignored, such as the fact that crime rates PRIOR to their gun control laws were already far lower than crime rates in the U.S. - thereby invalidating the comparison of crime rates with gun control laws in place. Also ignored is the fact that while their crime rates are lower, they are also on the rise, which is what led to the passage of gun control laws in the first place - just as rising crime led to passage of gun control in the U.S.) But when looking at all the data, instead of a head-to-head comparison of violent crime rates, it is easily shown that the increase of violent crimes in those countries touted by gun control advoactes has NOT BEEN AFFECTED by their gun control laws. Violent crime rates using firearms continue to rise in Britain, France, Australia, etc. Once again, when looking at the data by correct application of statistical analysis, the correlation between gun control and crime rates ends up being statistically insignificant when other factors affecting crime rates are included.

The bottom line is gun control does not work to curb the use of firearms in violent crimes. The supposed purpose of gun control laws is to provide ssociety with additional security against violent criminals. Well, first of all, Benjamin Franklin had something to say about those wishing to trade liberty for security. And second, when that trade does NOT result in the desired additional security the liberty-encroaching laws are supposed to provide, it just makes supporting reduction of personal liberty that much more shameful.
 
Watermark said:
The only way you could tell whether or not gun bans actually work is to take one nation, copy it, ban guns in one version, and have them legal in the other, and compare them after a period of time. With anything else, there are always statistics that will run contrary. That's probably the biggest problem with sciences like economics - no other way to experiment with them than to try them out, and once you've done that, well, you have no control to compare with.
Click to expand...
Actually, statistics do not "run contrary". Correct application of statistical analysis will always yield consistent results. What does not yield consistent results is when the analysis is incorrectly applied, such as ignoring (as opposed to isolating) other variables that affect the studied phenomenon. The act of using incorrect analysis to arrive at preconceptions is the hallmark of the pro-control advocacy. The pro-2nd advocacy also has a tendency to do so, but not nearly to the degree used by the pro-control advocates. It is the misuse of statistical analysis that has given statistics a bad reputation.
 
Good Luck said:
Actually, statistics do not "run contrary". Correct application of statistical analysis will always yield consistent results. What does not yield consistent results is when the analysis is incorrectly applied, such as ignoring (as opposed to isolating) other variables that affect the studied phenomenon. The act of using incorrect analysis to arrive at preconceptions is the hallmark of the pro-control advocacy. The pro-2nd advocacy also has a tendency to do so, but not nearly to the degree used by the pro-control advocates. It is the misuse of statistical analysis that has given statistics a bad reputation.
Click to expand...

I disagree. I think they both have a pretty bad tendency to do it, and there's really no way to completely isolate all of the confounding variables.
 
Just ban crime instead of guns...ohh wait we did that...
just stomp on people that commit crimes with Guns...Ohh we did that too.

I guess the only soloution is to ban people.
 
uscitizen said:
Just ban crime instead of guns...ohh wait we did that...
just stomp on people that commit crimes with Guns...Ohh we did that too.

I guess the only soloution is to ban people.
Click to expand...
Sure, you first. We'll get to the others soon following.
 
Good Luck said:
The bottom line is no one who supports gun control in the name of public safety can prove the public is made more safe by gun control laws. They can point to this or that correlation, but when the data is examined, the correlations are derived through unsupported assumptions and/or incorrect application of statistical analysis.
Click to expand...

You seem to have missed his point entirely as the opposite is also true.
 
Mottleydude said:
You seem to have missed his point entirely as the opposite is also true.
Click to expand...
No I did NOT miss his point entirely. I specifically addressed and criticized the misuse of stats by pro-2nd advocates.

Second is, of course, the fact that regions in the U.S. with the most strict gun control laws have the highest per-capita levels of gun violence. This correlation is easily shown, and is often misused by some pro-2nd Amendment advocates to attempt the claim that higher gun ownership prevents violent crime.
Click to expand...

Try reading - and responding to - the entirety of a post instead of a carefully selected phrase. Or was the rest beyond your limited comprehension?

And my post is not the only one, since the misuse of statistics by both sides was NOT his central point, but merely explained the confusion of opposing analyses. His POINT is the stats used by gun control advocates is completely, totally BOGUS, and is easliy refuted.

By and large, the vast majority of claims made by pro-2nd advocates are made in direct response to the lies told by the gun control factions. (ie: No, the statistical analysis on foreign country crime rates is invalid because their crime rates were lower before they enacted gun control, AND it leaves out several countries with high gun control and high crime rates, as well as several countries with low crime and low gun control.) While gun control advocates have misused statistical data, they do not do so with the proliferation of the gun control factions - primarily because they do not HAVE to resort to cooking the data. Valid analysis of crime data vs firearms ownership comes out on the side of the Constitution.
 
Last edited:
Watermark said:
And there's countries with high crime and low gun control. See United States.
Click to expand...
And there are countries with strict control, and low crime rates. Put it ALL into a statistical analysis and r is statistically insignificant. (<0.6)

The only VALID conclusion one can derive from a low correlation is there is no demonstrable relationship between firearms ownership and violent crime rates. Therefore, the justification of controlling legal ownership of firearms for the purpose of controlling violent crime is a bullshit excuse. It does not wash. It is a lie told by totalitarian Nazis (and believed by mindless, drooling drones) in order to limit an essential liberty.
 
Mnay countries do not have as violence oriented society as the USA does either.
Just watch US movies vs foreign films....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top