Demand a Plan

[Kuya]

I don't know if this was posted before, but this movement seems promising to me in order to get Congress to move on gun legislation. Alls you gotta do is sign the petition and/or provide support in any other way.

http://www.demandaplan.org/

[Correction]

[Kuya]

Hollywood, both the greatest liberal conspiracy to sell boobs and gay marriage to our children, and the greatest conservative conspiracy to propagate gun violence and materialism across America.

[quannum]

what about entertaining propaganda like zero dark thirty?

[Kuya]

Or entertaining propaganda made by an obnoxious liberal fatass?

Hollywood has something for everyone.

[quannum]

hooray for hollywood

on topic:

The White House is reportedly weighing gun-control measures that are broader and more comprehensive than bans on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.

Measures under consideration by a working group led by Vice President Joe Biden include universal background checks for buyers, strengthened mental health examinations and stiffened penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors, sources told The Washington Post.

Carney said that in addition to assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips bans, the White House would push a law that required background checks on all gun purchases, even those conducted at gun shows or over the Internet.
...

I think they also need a dmv like system for written test, "driving" test and license renewals.

[Kuya]

niversal background checks for buyers, strengthened mental health examinations and stiffened penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors, sources told The Washington Post.

I like it!

[Marootsoobutsu]

This study from Harvard kind of craps on the idea that the problem is availability of guns or a lack of gun control. There is a ton to go through with this, and every paragraph leaves me wanting to comment here, which would lead to a rather magnificent wall of text no one wants to read. But, to sum: focusing on *gun* violence and not on *violence* in general is asinine, and misses general trends in society. Lower rates of gun ownership do not correlate positively to lower rates of violence; rather, there is a negative correlation, in both directions: higher rates of gun ownership *does* correlate to lower rates of violent crime. The study opens several ideas on the socio-economic causes behind this, and I think most conservatives and liberals would highly support addressing these (though they'll likely at least disagree on the method). Focusing on guns, though, is like focusing on the runny nose of the guy with AIDS. It's really not the problem, and while it might cause a temporary feel-good, it can't be controlled forever, and tends to come back worse (see England for the last 20 years).

I'd like to go on; I won't. I think you'll find the read most informative.

Edit: In most cases, the people who commit murders already cannot legally own fire-arms. The issue seems to be not enforcing already existing laws, not an insufficient law to address the problem.

[Kuya]

The study you just posted is talking about banning firearms? If so, i don't care, since i don't advocate banning firearms.

[Marootsoobutsu]

Not just banning them, but general restrictions: areas with fewer restrictions on owning them have lower rates of violence in general. In fact, more guns generally correlates to less violence. It's not just banning, but any kind of restrictive legislation, and notes that the majority of gun-related murders, in the US and abroad, are done by people who obtained the gun, or own the gun, illegally already. It addresses a lot of the surrounding issues that most people concerned with gun violence don't often address, but that I do think you would care about, especially socio-economic factors surrounding gun violence, and violence in general.

[Kuya]

So you're gonna go with the posting really long scientific studies angle? Fine, i can play that game.

[Odesseiron]

The DoJ flat out said that the 1994 ban accomplished nothing. So yeah. Keep going though, you might be onto something.

[Kuya]

Let's the academic article spam begin.

Employer Policies Toward Guns and the Risk of Homicide in the Workplace
Loomis, Dana; Marshall, Stephen W; Ta, Myduc L. American Journal of Public Health95. 5 (May 2005): 830-2.

This population-based case-control study of North Carolina workplaces evaluated the hypothesis that employers' policies allowing firearms in the workplace may increase workers' risk of homicide. Workplaces where guns were permitted were about 5 times as likely to experience a homicide as those where all weapons were prohibited (adjusted odds ratio=4.81; 95% confidence interval = 1.70, 13.65). The association remained after adjustment for other risk factors. The findings suggest that policies allowing guns in the workplace might increase workers' risk of homicide. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

How delinquent youths acquire guns: Initial versus most recent gun acquisitions
Webster, Daniel W, Dr; Freed, Lorraine H, Dr; Frattaroli, Shannon; Wilson, Modena H, Dr. Journal of Urban Health79. 1 (Mar 2002): 60-9.

Access to firearms among delinquent youths poses significant risks to community safety. The purpose of the study was to describe how a group of criminally involved youths obtained guns.

Youths were randomly selected from a juvenile justice facility to participate in a semistructured, anonymous interview. Transcripts were coded and analyzed with the aid of textual analysis software.

Of the 45 participants, 30 had acquired at least 1 gun prior to their most recent incarceration, and 22 had acquired multiple guns. About half of the first gun acquisitions were gifts or finds. The first guns youths acquired were usually obtained from friends or family. The most recent acquisitions were often new, high-caliber guns, and they came from acquaintances or drug addicts. New guns often came from high-volume traffickers. Gun acquisitions from strangers or through "straw purchases" were rare. Though few obtained guns directly through theft, some youths believed their supplier had stolen guns. Youths rarely left their community to obtain a gun.

Guns were readily available to this sample of criminally involved youths through their social networks. Efforts to curtail high-volume, illegal gun traffickers and to recover discarded guns from areas in which illicit drug sales take place could potentially reduce gun availability to high-risk youth.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Effects of a Gun Dealer's Change in Sales Practices on the Supply of Guns to Criminals
Webster, Daniel W; Vernick, Jon S; Bulzacchelli, Maria T. Journal of Urban Health83. 5 (Sep 2006): 778-87.

Licensed gun dealers are a major conduit for gun trafficking. Prior to May 1999, a single gun store sold more than half of the guns recovered from criminals in Milwaukee, WI, shortly following retail sale. On May 10, 1999, the store stopped selling small, inexpensive handguns popular with criminals, often called "Saturday night specials." The purpose of this study was to estimate the effect of this gun store's changed sales practices on criminals' acquisition of new guns. We used an interrupted time-series design with comparisons to test for changes in the number of guns that police recovered from criminals within a year of retail sale following the gun dealer's new sales policy. The dealer's changed sales policy was associated with a 96% decrease in recently sold, small, inexpensive handguns use in crime in Milwaukee, a 73% decrease in crime guns recently sold by this dealer, and a 44% decrease in the flow of all new, trafficked guns to criminals in Milwaukee. The findings demonstrate the substantial impact that a single gun store's sales practices can have on the supply of new guns to criminals. Proposed anti-gun-trafficking efforts in other cities could benefit from targeting problem retail outlets.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

[Marootsoobutsu]

So you're gonna go with the posting really long scientific studies angle? Fine, i can play that game.

Cool. I like most of the studies you post. This study, though, treated the subject of gun violence in a way I've rarely seen, and backed it up more thoroughly than most I've seen, with data. It didn't offer a lot in the way of solutions, but it at least dispelled some of the frequent citations of problems.

[Kuya]

What can you take from all that bullshit i just posted? Guns don't create crime, but gun availability does affect what kind of guns and how often guns are used by criminals (those already involved in illegal activities) and those who commit homicide but do not have a criminal record. Restricting guns isn't supposed to reduce violence or crime. Criminals and those who want to harm others will find ways to do that, guns or not. But the good argument that people are making is that guns are far more efficient at killing people than knives or barefists, so if we reduce the availability and the ease of access, we reduce the amount of violence that is committed with guns. The idea that we can't tackle gun availability and violence in general at the same time is a red herring. We can and we should.

[Correction]

The DoJ flat out said that the 1994 ban accomplished nothing. So yeah. Keep going though, you might be onto something.

It accomplished nothing because assault rifles as defined in the law are pretty rare; more violence happens with simple handguns and those went untouched.

[Kuya]

Notice that most of the issues people mention, Vtech, Colombine, and now the most recent shooting, don't involve people in drug gangs. It's average people, albeit with serious emotional issues, who often get their guns from other people who have bought them legally. Our problem, or at least mine, is that whenever a psycho is running loose (and there will always be some disgruntled jackass that wants to hurt other people), having a gun just makes things so much worse.

[Marootsoobutsu]

So, what you're saying is that people are already breaking laws in the acquisition of firearms, and the solution is... making it not just illegal, but super-serious-mega-illegal? Or are you saying you want more law enforcement, or at least heavier emphasis on fire-arms law enforcement? Or are you saying you think politicians are prepared to act on the deeper, more meaningful changes in our society, like lowering recidivism, treating poverty as a human issue and not a political one, acknowledging both the danger of drugs and the failures of the drug war, meaningfully identifying and assisting-- truly assisting-- those with mental health issues? The list of causes goes on, and on, and on, and on, but the underlying issue is that it's not a gun problem, it's a human problem and a socio-economic problem, and there is no quick fix to the issue. It's not something that can be fixed with a single law, it's not something that can be fixed in the duration of our nation's minute attention span. Moreover, it's a problem that is already diminishing as a whole: murder rates are down in the US, not up; murder rates in a lot of nations that have focused on blaming guns (18/25 of the European nations studied), are up, not down.

If your concern is people dying, don't focus on guns; focus on murder as a whole, and the social causes of violence. If your concern is just not hearing about the violence any more, because the spectacle is removed, then... well, I guess we have nothing to talk about.

[Kuya]

If you're so concerned about all of this:

like lowering recidivism, treating poverty as a human issue and not a political one, acknowledging both the danger of drugs and the failures of the drug war, meaningfully identifying and assisting-- truly assisting-- those with mental health issues?

Then go start your own campaign to address it (doubt you will, since i suspect you're not as committed to those things as you are committed to stopping gun restrictions). Meanwhile, i'm sure people who support greater gun restrictions won't mind supporting your campaign too, since all of those things are things liberals tend to care more about, just like gun control.

Either way, the crux of your argument is that rather than doing gun control, we should focus on other issues that are the true animus behind violence. I told you we can do both, we can both treat the cause, and diminish the damage done by the symptoms.

[Headspace]

Alex Jones' gonna deport all you mother fuckers