> | Z, drug cartels are running submarines, do you think arms manufacture would be beyond their capability?
1. That happens, for the most part, OUTSIDE of the U.S.. As soon as there were a spike in your milling machines (which I posit is ridiculous anyway), the FBI would be right on that. If they actually cared about the spread of guns, they'd be tracking those machines within a week. Oh, but they could build factories which make professional milling machines, and then they'd make guns from the bootleg milling machines! So you'd have to ban factories! WHERE DOES IT STOP??? Um, probably at the guns.
2. It seems that the entire underground world has managed to build, at the most, 120 submarines. That's a far cry from the probably hundreds of thousands of guns they'd probably need to manufacture. And there's no way those guns would be anywhere near as lethal than those professionally made. Not that I don't think a lot of NRA members wouldn't sell guns to drug cartels if that's all they could sell to...
3. Submarines have useful purposes outside of smuggling drugs. In fact, 99+% of them are not used to smuggle drugs. So if the Coast Guard sees a submarine, it's not going to assume it's smuggling drugs. If nearly 100% of submarine use were for smuggling drugs, I'd certainly think that every submarine be registered and tracked, and would want to restrict most people and institutions from gaining access to submarines. Almost all gun use is to kill something, to learn how to kill something or how not to kill the wrong things because you have a gun, or to simulate killing something.
4. A large percentage of homicides that occur in this country do so because the killer is under the influence of drugs. Another large chunk of them occur because the killer is trying to obtain drugs. What percentage do you think are committed by scary ol' drug cartels?
>Have you ever compared how many lives have been ruined through the availability of alcohol? Where's the outrage?
The primary use of alcohol is not to kill. You get no utility out of a six-pack every now and then that has nothing to do with trying to kill yourself or someone else? But the fact is that it can kill. So we regulate it accordingly. Perhaps we could do a better job, but your NRA buddies essentially argue that one of the only products only built to kill should have no regulation at all. Once again, not a good analogy.
>
All of the liberal bastions of gun control have the highest murder rates, I don't think gun control is the answer.
Actually, we can agree that for the most part, the most liberal areas are the most population-dense ones, for whatever reason you want to attribute that. Well, accounting for population density, there probably isn't much difference in PER CAPITA murder rates from a city of 50,000 to a city of 5,000,000. And even on an absolute basis, I just crunched the numbers:
-Average murder/manslaughter rate for a 40,000-60,000 person city in the US: 4.6 per 100,000
-Average rate for 60K-100K: 4.53
-Average rate for 100K-250K: 6.74
-250K+: 11.2
It gets higher, but not that much higher, as a city gets bigger.
But let's compare a couple of cities in the 250K+ range. New York City, your bête noir, has a murder rate of 6.3. Wichita, which is certainly much more conservative than New York, has a nearly identical murder rate of 6.5. And how about Tulsa, which might be more conservative than Wichita, has a 12.4 murder rate, which is twice that of New York's! In the meantime, Ted's liberal bastion of Seattle that you're always bashing has a murder rate of just 3.2, lower than the average for cities of 50,000.
So there have to be other factors involved. Now, this isn't by city, it's by country, but:
static3.businessinsider.com
There is a tremendous correlation between gun ownership and gun violence on a national level. MUCH higher than the correlation between liberal and conservative areas. And if you believe that the countries with the fewest guns are also the most liberal, well, huh... looks like there's less violence where there's the most liberalism!
At the risk of sounding like Tench: C WUT 3Y3 DID DERZORZ? :)
Seriously, there very well might be valid, rational reasons to believe that more guns doesn't equal more gun violence or that guns should only be banned after other things have been banned. But the ones you're using ain't those.
And I can't believe I just spent that much time on an SI post... don't expect that again anytime soon.
-Z
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