hands11 wrote:The obvious answer to this problem is that there are to many gun in America. The reason there are to many is because of the NRA. The solution is to make it harder to get some models and hold those with them more responsible. We need to limit what kinds of weapon people can legally own. We also need a social network that help mentally ill people. We used to have that but because of cost decision, those things have been closed.
Here is the simple equation of what is going on. There is lots of money to be made in selling guns. The more they sell, the more people get shot. The more they get shot, the more people feel they need one to protect themselves the more money the gun sellers make. They even passes laws that protect them against law suits. Its a perfect profit making model for gun manufactures. They max profits and have no downside risk for their product. They would love the solution to be buy more guns to protect yourself against all the guns they already sold. What a dream marketing approach. They sell more, you need more.
Maybe the solution is using common sense to realize this is there model. Max profits at any cost.
I don't think it's that simple, hands11.
If we could wave a magic want and make all guns disappear, that would be one thing. But we can't. Practically speaking, the European no-gun model isn't applicable in the U.S. because of our lower population density. It's easy, coming from suburbia, to talk about gun control when the police are just 3 minutes away. The police therefore serve as a reasonable deterrent for most crime. It's not the same in a rural area. In the boonies, the police are 10-20 minutes away... long enough for an armed intruder to do whatever he wants. You need a gun to defend yourself.
With guns necessary in rural areas, guns will therefore be reasonable available in rural areas. With guns available in rural areas, guns will therefore be relatively easy to access for criminals in suburban and urban areas. With criminals having access to guns, gun control only takes guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens.
Read this
Harvard study on gun control. The bottom line is that when you make an effort to compare apples to apples (comparing European gun control nations to European no gun control nations for instance) the data clearly shows that having armed citizens reduces the incidence of violent crime. Likewise, the liberalization of gun ownership in portions of the U.S. has led to a greater reduction in crime than in areas were gun control persists.
I repeat again, emotional reactions generally lead to bad laws. We are all horrified at what happened at Sandy Hook, and we all want to
do something to prevent it from happening again. But we have to make sure that our response would actually be appropriate and effective (not to mention Constitutional). We can't just do something to make us feel better about ourselves. Sometimes, bad stuff just happens and there's nothing anybody can do about it.