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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RMF who wrote (928155)	3/29/2016 10:39:41 AM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Recommended By TideGlider Respond to of 1576858

Tim, it all comes down to whether you BELIEVE in unfettered gun rights for law abiding citizens or not. No it doesn't. 1 - We aren't talking about unfettered gun rights even indirectly. They aren't the issue at all. There are fetters that are accepted by just about everyone, and more accepted by most people broadly opposed to gun control. 2 - We aren't even talking about legal or constitutional rights to guns in direct terms but rather the facts about what happened after stronger gun control was put in place; the facts of the situation, not the legal, or constitutional, or political, or moral rights. The particular facts on the table show a reduction in murder after the gun control laws were added in Australia, but they also show a reduction before they where added, and a continued reduction after the effects from the addition should have sorted themselves out in the statistics. They also show the reduction was slow (but steady), while in the US when the number of guns increased at the same time as guns were more restricted and less numerous in Australia, the murder rate went down faster. That's far from enough information to conclude that the increase in guns in the US was the cause of the faster drop in murder rates, but its enough to support skepticism against laws like the one in Australia being greatly positive (or even clearly positive to a small extent) in reducing murders. All of which has nothing to do with the idea that everyone should be armed, and at best very little to do with the idea that everybody should be armed. In the US (the country with the higher murder rate of the two, but the greater/faster drop in the rate), it is far from the case that everyone is armed, or even that everyone is legally allowed to arm themselves with a gun. For example during the whole time period for the statistics in question felons have not been legally allowed to own or possess firearms in the US. Whether you think this is an important reason why we can have a large reduction in the murder rate despite having more guns, or whether you think its a restriction that felons can mostly get around, in either case it is a legal restriction (a "fetter") on gun ownership in the US, and nothing about the data, arguments, or comments in this conversation imply it should be removed.