Morgenthaler wrote:I can't understand how YOU can't understand that there ARE societies with much less violence and homicides (per citizen),
than the United States. It's not utopia. It's just largely gun-free societies.
These all have one or two things in common:
1 They are largely gun-free.
2 They are secular to a certain degree.
If you want a more peaceful society, make it harder for people to kill each other.
Taking away guns from ordinary citizens is a proven method.
You are actually entirely incorrect on several counts.
Proven how? What study proves that?
Ordinary citizens aren't the ones committing violent crime. It's violent criminals who are, and they don't buy their guns in a store and fill out the paper work. Gun laws don't effect criminals. Most gun crimes are committed with illegal weapons, ironically which are mostly produced in Europe.
First and foremost you should research violent societies and make a graph. Then research societies with gun ownership and make a graph. When you put the two graphs next together, there is ZERO correlation between gun ownership and violent crime. (This is not a novel idea by the way).
In other words, there are incredibly violent countries (more violent then the US by far) with almost zero legal gun ownership, many of them. This simple fact destroys any correlation with violence and gun ownership.
Also what destroys the correlation is that the world was MORE violent BEFORE firearms. Guns are new. Violence and world war is not.
To infer that ridding the world of guns would rid the world of violence is absurd. There's a few thousand years of war and violence pre fire arm invention that proves this.
Here's a few real life, current "studies" you can call them, check it out:
Since Australia's 'Gun Ban' and 'Buy Back' programs, violent crime has gone up in the land down under. Be search to check out the rise in 'blade crimes', the use of swords by gangs is particularly interesting and goes to show - taking away guns doesn't take away violence.
In the United States, violent crime has gone down over the last several years, while gun laws have been loosened - not corollary, but notable
It comes down to this:
You can take the tools away. But you'll never take the violence away.
"If you want a more peaceful society, make it harder for people to kill each other."
And that statement gets into a VERY slippery slope of some serious Orwellian stuff....
Lucas Ives wrote:Here's the nutshell summary: the very act of carrying a gun sets up a different bias than if you had left the gun at home. You're still the same gun owner, you still believe he same things about gun rights/crime prevalence/etc. But having it in your pocket / in your hand makes you react differently to the same stimuli.
That is a VERY different thing then you said earlier. And again, is also stupid. Perhaps even more stupid.
Of course whatever tools are at your disposal changes your situational awareness. That's like saying, people wearing shoes will have a tendency to run more then people wearing sandals.
If there is a bear on my porch, and I don't have a gun near by, my mind knows this and automatically looks for other possibilities. If there is a bear on my porch and I have a shotgun in arms reach, mind knows this and I don't have to concern myself about seeking out other forms of protection/noise making.
It takes a university to discover that people's thinking is determined by the situation and tools at hand for a given problem? Hahaha
