My goodness this thread is all over the place. I did spy uniformed trying to actually discuss the topic at one point and Roger threw out the gun violence per capita talking point that has been making the rounds in response.
Here is my view on the gun debate. The proposals put forth by Obama and Biden are not serious efforts to curb violence in general or gun violence specifically. They are knee jerk responses to an inflamed base that needs the President to say or do something. I feel this way for the following reasons:
1) As uninformed hinted at, the true scope and nature of gun violence in the United States dwarfs the type of senseless mass killing we saw in Newtown and elsewhere. All of the dead in mass shootings going back to Columbine make up a fraction of 1% of Americans that have died at the hands of guns.
2) The suggestions put forth by Obama and Biden do not address the core issues in how guns get to our streets and why they are being used and instead seem to target mass shootings. I feel this way for the following reasons:
a) background checks have been a toothless measure for decades now because the vast majority of guns used in crimes are procured through theft or by resale from straw buyers that pass background checks. In the Newtown case the weapons were purchased by the perpetrators mother so if we went back in time and these measures were in place he still would have access to these types of guns. I suppose you could argue that the Aurora shooting would have been
b) the focus on Assault Rifles is a pointless distraction both because the majority of "assault rifles" as characterized by the Clinton Era Assault Weapons ban are mechanically and functionally no different than routine hunting rifles, with the only difference being cosmetic features that mimic military weaponry, but also because assault rifles play an extremely small role in our historic gun crime and gun deaths. Banning these makes no difference.
c) Trigger Locks and chamber locks are all based on a trust system and not enforceable unless we resort to Washington DC like civil liberty intrusions from the 90s, which were all deemed by courts unconstitutional.
d) The focus on magazine size is also a distraction as most gun deaths do not result from hundreds of shots being fired. Even in the case of mass shootings, the seconds gained from a shooter having to change our six round cartridges rather than 12 round cartridges could have saved a few lives in theory but do not represent some real solution to preventing these types of killings.
3) While there seems to be a portrayal of gun ownership = gun violence, the larger academic literature on this subject shows and almost inverse relationship between stricter gun control and violent crime. Most developed nations are experiencing increases of violence in concert with increasing government restrictions on guns.
So that is the real discussion here. Would you rather have our decades long trend of lower and lower violent crime statistics be interrupted by a flurry of knee-jerk Washington policy making that is viewed by most folks as counter-productive? The only real argument I have heard is that we need gun deaths to be a smaller percentage of overall deaths and these measures will imply more stabbings and clubbings and fewer shootings.
Lets focus on that discussion if we want to be honest with each other. All the “Gun Nut” talk is just uninformed and shrill political babbling.