Bernie Sanders on Guns
- Thread starter What Would Jesus Do?
- Start date
Yeah, I disagree that an armed populace will do shit against this government if they wanted to come after you but whatever makes you sleep better at night. We also appear to disagree that regulations are part of the second amendment.
Finally, wanting regulations does not mean I want to ban guns. This is the hardest part of this debate to get through people's heads. Just because you want to do something doesn't automatically mean you want to ban all weapons. I am not even close to that. I actually support gun ownership. I don't want them banned at all. But that doesn't mean we can't make people more liable for their weapons or make sure that people with serious mental disorders don't have ready access to a firearm.
I've said my piece in this thread and asked you a few simple questions you refused to respond to. You got exposed and are now in full on desperation mode jumping to everything but the actual topic at hand.
We aren't other countries. if you like how they do it.....you're more than welcome to move there.
Why not give us specific examples of how you would make people more liable for their weapons?
Since there are so many laws already on the books for misusing a firearm, tell us what more you wound want done.
If I had that answer I'd run for public office. All I'm saying is provide people with an incentive to make sure their weapons stay out of the hands of criminals. I'm not familiar with every single gun law but I'm willing to bet that most of them deal with what to do after a crime takes place and very few of them deal with trying to prevent the crime from happening in the first place.
Iowa isn't other football teams. So why should they look to other teams for ideas on how to improve themselves?
If you say so. Sorry, I didn't see your posts. If that offends you, well, get over it.
Natural and I had guns and immigration all worked out on page 1 of this crap fest. WTF is going on?
Well since you were too lazy i will fill you in. Britain per cap has 8 times the violent crime rate as in the US. More rapes, robberies, etc etc.
I didn't need details to fill. I simply said we are not Britain. We're not Britain in so many ways. Thanks for providing a detail.
This didn't sound right so I googled. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime lists the homicide rate per 100k for the UK at 1 and the US as 4.7 in 2012.
https://www.unodc.org/gsh/
That had be a lot more robberies and rapes to make up for all the added dead we deal. So I was skeptical and kept looking. It turns out the whole idea is wrong. They get this stat by counting all crime in the UK vs only violate crime in the US taking advantage of definitional differences in crime reporting tracking. Deceitful from the start.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...-media-post-says-uk-has-far-higher-violent-c/
So you are more in the "I don't care what, just do something" crowd? Incentives are already there.
This goes to my earlier point about using statistics irresponsibly. Obviously people of all political stripes and interests do it. It does largely support the notion though that, despite the rhetoric we hear all the time, the US is actually not any more violent than other similar nations, and outside of small pockets of extreme activity, doesn't particularly have any more gun crime per capita either. So, the constant drum beat for more gun control is simply misguided.
Well we kill each other at near 5 times the rate, so I'm not sure it makes that point very clear.
No, we don't. Funny that you bend over backwards to demonstrate how one set of statistics is incomplete and misleading (correctly) but then in the next breath glom onto another statistic that fits with your political ideology that is equally misleading in the same way. Don't be such a partisan.
I said you were being partisan, although the UN certainly does not generally have the most glowing or fair opinions of the US either. I just thought that it was funny that you went out of your way to provide context for the contention that the UK has 8x the violent crime that the US does, and in your link when the best efforts at apples to apples comparison still showed that the UK had over double the violent crime rate, they just threw up their hands and said it was impossible to get the true answer (why do I think they wouldn't have had that devotion to context if the statistics showed that the US was awful?)...but then you throw out the overall homicide rate of the US with no such qualifications as if it is really meaningful. The truth is that the homicide rate in the US among people of European descent is right in line with that of Europe. Shocker. So, if the US looked more like Europe culturally and didn't have the racial issues to contend with, then there is essentially no difference, even though we have a lot more guns. It is only when you include the Hispanic and Black homicide rates that we start to deviate from the mean. You can attribute that to any number of things (racism, poverty, broken families, cultural issues, misguided government programs, not enough government programs, a combination of all of the above, etc), but the number of guns and/or controls on their purchase/ownership does not appear to be a correlation or it would effect the Caucasian population as well, and it just doesn't. Ironically, the areas that have the strictest and most comprehensive gun laws in the US also own most of the highest gun homicide rates in the country. If anything, the statistics show that increased gun regulation either has no effect, or a negative one. So, I don't know why, if you are so interested in honest discussion and not being deceitful, you would keep banging this gun control drum and throw out incomplete, largely meaningless numbers (while simultaneously chiding others for doing the same). Unless you are just married to being partisan on the issue.
Hold up fella, where am I banging the drum for gun control? This isn't my issue. I'm here shooting down fallacies. My only dog in the gun debate is tweaking the nose of those who like to misrepresent the 2nd amendment and that's just because I like to piss them off.
Talk about being partisan. My stat on the homicide rate clearly rebuts the notion that the U.S. Is a safer nation than the UK. Full stop. Don't assume I'm offering that as a reason for gun control because that fits your political assumptions. Frankly your racial excuse is in pretty poor taste and that's being polite. All lives matter, we don't need excuses for why an American is nearly five times more likely to be killed by another than a Brit. But we should recognize that's true and try to do better.
You can't talk about the real problem without bringing in race. It is not poor taste it is just facts. Black Americans have a homicide rate of nearly 20 per 100,000. White Americans have a homicide rate of 2.5 per 100,000. Over 90% of these black Americans are killed by other blacks. If you look at just males the numbers are much more staggering.
It's not that people don't think their life matters it's just that they won't stop killing each other.
Two points. First it is minimally in poor taste to make the argument that America's higher murder rate isn't dispositive because many of those victims are non white. That just sits wrong with me to make that point. If we ever get to talking about causes and solutions that point might have merit, but that wasn't the discussion.
Second, if the white homicide rate is 2.5/100k, that's twice what it is in the UK at 1/100k so once again the stat proves America is less safe. There was no reason to inject race into the argument, it doesn't ameliorate the point.
Last edited:
I agree you can't discount black lives, you also can't ignore the fact that it is black people taking these lives.
Americans Kill each other at a much higher rate than the British do. Have since the 1900's. We also kill each other a about half the rate of Russians that also have very strict gun laws. Now you will have to answer for yourself if you think that Americans would follow the UK example of if we would become more like the Russians if we were to enact strict gun control laws here.
I don't live in a land of unicorns and rainbows, I think it would get pretty damn ugly.
You say it isn't your issue, and I believe that as far as it goes (compared to other things, it really isn't my issue either), but based on your numerous comments, you obviously support more regulations and restrictions and weakening of current 2nd amendment rights. Maybe "banging the drum" isn't the right term, but you are certainly marching along with the beat. Also, shooting down fallacies just to replace them with your own is hardly impressive. Which brings me to your stat...you say it clearly rebuts the notion that the US is safer than the UK, but it does no such thing. When taken in the fuller context, it illustrates that the US has some localized areas within it that are exceedingly dangerous (especially for young Black and Hispanic men), but in actuality (and verified by your own link) overall you are more than twice as likely to be robbed, beaten, raped, or otherwise violently assaulted in the UK. So...not full stop. What you presented is overly simplistic, provided with no context whatsoever, and actually in opposition of a more robust and honest investigation. To reference something you said earlier, it is borderline "deceitful".
Also, I made no racial excuse whatsoever. I pointed out a set of facts that illustrate the fallacy of the "too many guns/to easy to get guns" line of argument. Those are the numbers. If the quantity of and ease of access to guns is what drives the violence, then you would expect to see the effect across the entire population. But, you do not...so obviously something else (or a combination of several something elses) is at play. What is poor taste is to insinuate racism and cloak yourself in feigned moral superiority to sidestep inconvenient data. All lives do matter, which is why I am not willing to pretend things are not as they are, or look at the issue with one eye closed, just to avoid exposing myself to vapid accusations of racism or bigotry...or the more passive/aggressive label of "poor taste". If you truly want us to do better, then we first need to take an honest look at the problem and the results (or lack thereof) of what has thus far been attempted.
This was the entirety of my point. Simply that America is about 5 times as dangerous as the UK. I dont really care about gun control. I just think the people have a right to have gun control if they want without it destroying the constitution.
Some parts of America are much more dangerous than UK. While others are as safe or safer.
As for the second part of course they do. All they have to do is amend it. Problem solved.
My point was simple. An American is nearly five times more likely to be murdered than a Brit. From there you launch into an attack based entirely on trying to discount that objective fact because the victims are not white. That is of zero consequence, you still have 5 dead Americans for every Brit.
That's the end of my argument, my only motivation was to reply to the meme. Therefore I don't care who the victim is or even how they were killed, all those murders weren't with guns, they were just murders. All these other gun control points don't interest me. I'll let you off the hook as this is out of character for you and I'll just assume you got off on a partisan tangent that came across wrong.
And that point is just not true. As I have said several times already, it is overly simplified, improperly applied, and based on wildly incomplete and misleading data. As someone who likes to "shoot down fallacies" you strangely insist on wallowing in this one. We keep talking about the US vs the UK (probably because the UK has an extremely low reported gun homicide rate, not just vs the US but compared to the rest of Europe as well)...but there is so much more to it. The UK number being used here only represents gun homicides that result in convictions. If we did that, our more apples-to-apples rate would be less than half what we report. They also do not include gun deaths that were the result of self-defense, police shootings, or justifiable homicide (but we do). Overall, they would still have a slightly lower gun homicide rate, but the difference is not even close to what you keep (inaccurately) portraying it as. See this link for more info.
With respect that doesn't make any sense at all. Some parts of the UK could say the same. We're looking at the national murder rates. Full stop. That's the only data set. No need to make excuses or try to dissect it with evidance not in play. The nation murder rate is all I need to win the argument that the UK is not more dangerous than America which I thought was a point you agreed with?
LOL...it is neither objective, nor a fact. If you think I am discounting anything because the victims are not white...I just don't know what to tell you. I don't usually like to make snarky comments about other peoples reading comprehension...but you are making it exceedingly difficult in this case. All the more frustrating because neither one of us is apparently really fired up about this issue in relation to others, but neither of us can resist deflating an overblown meme, and I find it all the more enticing because you are simply attacking one inaccurate meme with another one. Anyway, thanks for letting me off the hook.
Always enjoy the exchange.
The definition of homicide was the same in the study for each country. If you have other problems with their methodology, I'm not likely to be the one to speak to that. What is your best evidance for the homicide rate in each nation? The UK is being used because that's what the meme on page two used. All this gun talk is beside the point, that's not the point I was making.
No it was not, certainly not gun homicides...which is what this entire discussion has been about. For god's sake, do some reading. Now you are just making things up. There is a whole section in the UN report about the issues of comparing data across countries that do not count homicides the same way. Granted it is about a hundred pages in and doesn't make for titillating headlines, but it is there. Or, read the link that I provided. How about I let you off the hook on this one, you take some time and get your facts in order, and in the future we will pretend this never happened.
No it's not, as I've explained to you several times, I'm not talking about what you wish I was talking about. I'm responding to the idea that the UK is more dangerous than the U.S. Your partisan view point has blinded you to this simple point and sent you on a tangent. Give me the homicide rates of the two nations or accept that Americans murder each other more. Nothing else is germane.
Last edited:
Within reason, yes. More importantly, I would just like the far right and the NRA to acknowledge that there is a problem.
Whatever it is that you believe you are talking about, it is completely incoherent. In this thread, you have attacked the contention that there are more violent crimes in the UK than there are in the US (because the contention was that there are 8 times the amount, when in reality, with the best apples to apples comparison available there is only 2 times the violent crime in the UK vs the US). This was proper and the context that your link provided gave a better picture of reality and deeper understanding of the problems involved in comparing these statistics. But then, just like the poster you were so quick to correct and label deceitful, you trot out a very inaccurate and incorrectly conflated stat (and then further exaggerate it) to say that there is 5 times the homicide rate in the US as in the UK (the stat itself refers to gun homicides only, not overall homicides as you have alluded, and it is not even close to an apples to apples comparison, suffering from many of the exact same issues that your previous link illustrated to debunk the 8X violent crimes stat). You have been all over the place rhetorically, used statistics incorrectly (and hung with them long after it has been pointed out), and engaged in the very behavior that you found so boorish in others in this very thread. You are generally a better debater than this.
