It's not really an argument. Other comment said "the only thing" contributing to the supply is manufacturers, like if manufacturers weren't around guns would go away. I don't think they would.
I wasn't making an argument, I was making a joke. I was imagining a fictional character believing that illegal things magically can't happen, and murder does happen so it must be legal, so the obvious solution would be to make it illegal so it would stop happening.
I do live in the US, and there's never been a mass shooting where I live, either. The US is a very large place. Things vary quite a bit from place to place. A shooting totally could happen near me, I'm just saying the size of the US and its large population does make them look like a more common thing than they actually are sometimes.
I agree that public indiscriminate mass shooters probably are not deterred by the thought of someone else having a gun and shooting them to stop them. In fact that may be what they want a lot of times. Public mass shootings are a very small portion of gun deaths, though, even in the US. There are some lists of shootings that include things that don't really belong. Gang violence is the one most often cited, if 3 people from one gang and 2 from another shoot at each other over a dispute, that's technically a mass shooting by many definitions, even though its not really contributing to anyone else's safety.
It doesn't seem like the FEE article citing CPRC and the NPR article disagree very much. But it's true that some people will trust the NPR one much more, so that's valuable.
Edit: I mean, the numbers in the articles aren't necessarily the same, but the idea that the US could be better and could be worse is present in both.
I appreciate your detailed response, but can you explain why per capita is hiding rather than revealing? To me it only makes sense to look at per capita. If you didn't, and said the US had way more shootings than Norway, I'd say, "yeah, duh, the US has a lot more people so of course it will have more." You have to compare to the population or else it's all meaningless. Maybe you mean something else and I'm misunderstanding.
I was familiar with the one Norway shooting and how that's an outlier, but I don't think the article's argument rests that strongly on that one data point.
That might be one reason why some warned against using it, but I definitely had teachers in middle school and high school that explicitly said not to use it because it could be changed by anyone including people who could be wrong or lying.
In a sense it is a monopoly, just a very narrow one. The first step to identifying a monopoly is identifying the relevant market, and that is quite hard to do, actually.
Yeah. I think what these people mean usually is that the phrase "separation of church and state" isn't in the Constitution, which is true. They heard that somewhere and repeat it. Maybe that West Wing episode where Charlie does a bit about it.
The US is unique both in gun laws and in gun deaths.
Gun laws, yes. Gun deaths, not as much The US does have a lot, I won't argue with that, but I would not say it's unique.
Gun crimes are committed by a very small portion of gun owners, so the statistics aren't so simple. It's like minnows and whales in sales. The issue is that if someone wanting to commit a crime is choosing not to because they worry their victim might turn out to have a gun and shoot them in defense, and then you remove that deterrent you end up with more crime. The number of guns randomly distributed would seem to correlate with increased violence and crime, but the distribution matters a lot. If you double the number of guns but somehow limited them only to the least criminal and most responsible, you'd probably actually decrease crime despite the number of guns going up. So whether a 90% decrease amongst good gun owners with 10% decrease amongst bad gun owners is actually a net positive, I'm honestly not sure.
London does have homemade guns. I wouldn't say it's full of them, of course, but they are there and they are a problem sometimes.
Availability of guns is obviously increased by the laws being such that large scale manufacturers can make and sell, as in the US. But it's hard to disentangle America's gun culture, gun availability, and its laws. America has so many more guns than the UK in large part because the gun played such a bigger role in US culture historically, you know, violent revolution for independence and settling the Western frontier and all that. Then once there are lots of guns more people need guns to defend themselves, and so on. That was all allowed by the laws. The culture perpetuates the laws, the laws perpetuate the culture, etc.
Only to drive on public roads. You can own one and drive it around on your own property with no registration or a license at age 13 if you want. It's not a perfect analogy.
And that's the other edge of the double edged sword. If you say, "people with known mental health problems lose certain rights, even temporarily," some portion of people with those problems will just fight harder to keep them unknown, foregoing help in the process. It's just like how when certain places pass laws prohibiting having sex when you know you have an STD, some people just stop getting checked so they don't "know" they have an STD.
It would almost certainly reduce the number of guns out there, I don't think anyone would dispute that. Alcohol prohibition reduced the amount of alcohol and the number of consumers by a huge amount. What people would argue, however, is that Prohibition made the alcohol that was out there much more dangerous. They'd also argue that gun prohibition would reduce formerly legal owners by (made up numbers) 90% while only reducing already prohibited owners by 10%. Is that a net gain or a net loss?
It's not really an argument. Other comment said "the only thing" contributing to the supply is manufacturers, like if manufacturers weren't around guns would go away. I don't think they would.