How To Argue For Gun Control.

We have slower speed limits. What my point was if we want to reduce fatal car accidents why not we put a 30 mph speed limit on I 10? Wouldn't that reduce car deaths?

 

If you scroll down in the link to the national gang center you'll see where I got my stats. They're under homicides.

First of all I'm black so if you're thinking about pulling the race card, don't. Secondly I'm just quoting facts. While I don't know exactly the reason why blacks make up most of the violence, my suspicion is growing up in fatherless homes.

I've been in the bad side of Chicago. It ain't pretty. For some reason when blacks (or anyone for that matter) are that concentrated such as Chicago crime increases.

 

Mac

LOL – My whole point is to try and get you to think about this and anyway my ‘solutions’ would take in a fair amount of what I’ve written here over the last 15 years.

You see I’m trying to get you see that this is a complex issue or rather set of complex issues that are not just about the problem of easy access to guns although that is part of the picture. I’ve always argued that a holistic approach is needed from reversing the adverse effects of neoliberal policies, then taking in drugs, education, campaign funding, penal reform, the power of lobbyists, the way welfare is viewed and so on.

This is what I’ve been trying to open your eyes to with this question to try and get you to think beyond what seems to me to be rather blinkered and ill thought through ideas. I mean your ideas often seem to designed to make a bad situation worse rather than better, tax cuts for the already wealthy, huge expansion of executions and imprisonment and hoping a god will step in at some point to ‘work’ it out

And fighting constantly to let the killing continue.

And your replies below reflect your desire for simplest answers based on a seeming inability to look deeper and ask the crucial question of - why.

 

Mac

here is the link you posted

https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/Survey-Analysis/Gang-Related-Offenses

I’m sorry but I still can’t see where it backs up your claim are you sure it is this link?

 

Mac

LOL hell man this whole car thing has never worked well for you, I mean it’s coming across not just as tedious but increasingly fatuous as well

But hey is your time you’re wasting.

OK here is something from the Telegraph a right leaning UK newspaper

[SIZE=11pt]It was a small incident, but it speaks volumes about life on American roads, where the chances of being killed in a crash are considerably greater than in the UK. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]One Florida motorist, who was apparently texting on the phone, drove into another car causing minor damage. The angry victim leapt out of his car, reached into the vehicle of the offending driver, grabbed his mobile and hurled it to the ground. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]The reaction on social media was surprising, with scant sympathy among many for the driver whose car had been hit. A handful felt the owner of the mobile phone would have been justified in defending his car – and his phone – with a gun. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Rightly or wrongly, this vignette suggests that in some parts of the USA, an individual’s rights to use a phone, or not wear a seatbelt or crash helmet, are given a higher priority than road safety. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]According to the latest figures more than 30,000 people are killed on America’s roads a year[/SIZE], compared with less than 2,000 in Britain. Federal statistics for 2012 showed a 3.1 per cent increase in road deaths compared with the previous year – the first rise since 2005.

[SIZE=11pt]Allowing for the difference in the population, it works out that the chances of a fatal accident in the USA are about three times higher. However, Americans tend to drive more and further and when this is taken into account the gap is significant, but less dramatic. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Other figures produced by the International Transport Forum show there were 3.9 people killed in Britain per billion vehicle kilometres in 2011, compared with 6.8 in the USA. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]“I think Americans tend to have a civil liberties view of things,” said Kara Macek, communications director at the Governors Highway Safety Association. “There are states where there are strong feelings against seatbelt and motorcycle helmet laws. There is the whole issue of what is seen as the nanny state. “Also there are 50 states, so you tend to have a patchwork of laws.” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Even though more than 3,000 people were killed in the USA as a result of what are known as “distracted driving” accidents, only 12 states have banned the use of a handheld mobile at the wheel. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Astonishingly, in seven states – Arizona, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas – texting at the wheel is allowed. It was only outlawed in Florida late last year. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]In New Hampshire , where the state motto is “Live free or die”, there is no legal requirement at all for drivers or adult front seat passengers to wear a seatbelt. Another 16 states are slightly more rigorous, only imposing on the spot fines for driving without a seatbelt if the motorist has been caught committing another offence as well. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]However Russ Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety believes speed and alcohol remain the biggest killers on American roads. “Rural states tend to have higher fatality rates rather than urban ones,” he said. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]This seems to be born out by the Institute’s own statistics, where the highest death rates per 100,000 people have been recorded by the sparsely populated states of North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Rader thinks this reflects the absence of speed cameras on American roads. “We have been much more lax in enforcing limits than in other industrialised countries. We are also seeing speeds increasing to a level we have never seen before, with one toll road in Texas setting an 85mph limit.” [/SIZE]
[SIZE=11pt]The consensus among road experts is that there needs to be a change in attitude among motorists and policymakers in the USA, even if death rates have plummeted since the mid-1970s. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]“In terms of safety culture we lag behind western Europe,” said Bruce Hamilton, research manager with the American Automobile Association Foundation for Transport Safety. He wants using a mobile phone or texting at the wheel to become as socially unacceptable as drink driving. This would also create the political will for a change in the law. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]But, according to Hamilton, there is also the issue of the country’s road infrastructure itself. Entering and leaving a highway can be a white-knuckle ride, especially on roads where a driver might join the highway from the right and then have to cut across four lanes of fast moving traffic to reach an exit on the left. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]“Many of our highways were built in the 1940s and 1950s when there was far less traffic, which was moving far slower than today,” he said. [/SIZE]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/road-safety/10882359/Why-US-roads-are-more-dangerous-than-in-Europe.html

 

Mac

To us they are called motorways and actually they are not the great problem in relation to fatalities it’s mostly country roads

The number of people killed on country roads is nearly 10 times higher than on motorways – RAC


And a lot of effort is being made to tackle that problem, with traffic calming techniques been used especially in villages. These where pioneered in urban areas and have done a lot to reduce accidents within towns and cities.

And that is the point regulators have done a lot to try and reduce the level of harm and are continuing to do so by gathering knowledge and bringing in prudent measures – in relation to guns you seem to want to block regulators from bring in prudent controls and I believe pro-gun politicians have done a lot to stop the gathering of information.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-13/gun-lobby-helps-block-data-collection-by-crimefighters
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-02/quietly-congress-extends-ban-cdc-research-gun-violence

 

Mac

LOL - Again you really need to do a bit of history research thing is that for most of its history smaoking was thought to be healthy and beneficial?

Here is a funny sketch form the Horrible Histories team
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rAMX4BTY-s

Advertisers promoted smoking as healthy using doctors to promote smoking (“More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!”)

http://www.healio.com/hematology-oncology/news/print/hemonc-today/%7B241d62a7-fe6e-4c5b-9fed-a33cc6e4bd7c%7D/cigarettes-were-once-physician-tested-approved

It wasn’t until the 1950 that large scale scientific studies began to get the message out about the adverse effects of smoking but the tobacco companies lobbied hard to suppress them.

It is argued that gun lobbyists leant a lot from the tobacco company’s fight and improved on the strategies.

Those tactics include suppressing information, blocking research, targeting individual scientists and pushing for state laws that prohibit cities and counties from passing their own gun measures,

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/31/nra-guns-tobacco-research/1859385/

 

Mac

Well one reason you put forward for the violence is that Americans are more violent and murderous than people in other developed countries.

But why not try looking into it and then thinking about it – I mean to me the fatherless homes argument seems a bit simplistic as I indicated last time we addressed it. It seems like the beginning of a journey rather than the end - the next question been – what are the reasons for fatherless homes and why does that have an impact – followed by the next question – what can be done to help?

In the previous discussion on this your main solution to the problem of fatherless homes was the hope people would turn to you version of god and turn ‘good’. My own suggestions were for a good well funded social services system, welfare, public housing, universal public healthcare, training programmes, a full employment economic model and cheap or free childcare to help people with children to work.

 

Mac

I believe the population density of Chicago is 11,864.4/sq mi

London is 11,760 /sq mi.

I live in London and it only had 175 homicides between Apr-2005 to Apr-2006. In fact in 2009 there were only 651 murders in the whole of England and Wales with a population of around 60 million.

I believe in 2005 the number of homicides in Chicago was 602

 

Mac

Yes you have already claimed you are black and since I can’t see why you would lie about such a thing, I take you at your word – and this was why your implication seemed so strange.

One of your arguments has been that ease of access to guns does not account for the US’s high levels of murder rate compared with other developed countries but that Americans are seemingly inherently far more murderous than people in the comparable countries that it is in Americans nature to be more violent.

My own argument has been that criminal activity is usually tied in to social and economic factors rather than be inherent but you seem to have fought against that.

In this discussion you seemed to have moved your position away from all Americans as a whole and moved toward the suggestion that it is black Americans that are the ones who are inherently more likely to be more murderous than people in the comparable countries.

You say keep race out of this but it seems to me that it is you that has now but it centre stage.

 

So just so we're on the same page can you list your top five things that's the root cause of violence?

 

My bad. Same site but different article. Here's the quote.

"Highly populated areas accounted for the vast majority of gang homicides: nearly 67 percent occurred in cities with populations over 100,000, and 17 percent occurred in suburban counties in 2012."

And here's the site.

https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/Survey-Analysis/Measuring-the-Extent-of-Gang-Problems#homicidesnumber

 

And this refutes my point how?

 

The NRA can't block anyone. They can only lobby congress to do so. And they aren't the big bad bullies as the media portray them as. They put less money toward lobbying than cellphone carriers. And besides that, the reason why the NRA urged congress to block the CDC from studying gun deaths is (1) guns are not medical conditions and (2) the CDC blantently said their main/sole purpose for the study was to prove that guns are dangerous. If you won't allow a creationist on a study on evolution when he blatantly said his sole purpose is to disprove evolution then why should the NRA allow the CDC do a study when their sole purpose is to prove that guns are dangerous?

 

Without derailing the thread can you provide evidence that such proposals actually work at the point of a gun?

 

Does London has a high single parent home rate?

 

Mac

I’m sorry but I still can’t see where it backs up your claim are you sure it is this link?

You said

Which implies that a third of gun related homicides in America are gang related (attributed to gangs) and that’s not what the site says.

Thing is that some argue that actually it seems to be that around 80 percent of gun homicides are non-gang related.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-defilippis/do-we-have-a-gang-problem_b_5071639.html

 

Mac

Oh we seem to have hit a nerve here didn’t we, you don’t happen to work for the NRA do you?

Guns are not medical conditions

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is charged with looking into public health and trying to find ways to improve it. So it looks at diseases yes but also at automobile deaths and injuries for example. As such they record the numbers of those injured and killed by guns but do not do any research, because the studies they had done strongly pointed to the need for prudent gun control and so the NRA accused it of bias and right wing politicians supported by the NRA threatened to defund the CDC if it didn’t stop doing such reseach.

The CDC blantently said their main/sole purpose for the study was to prove that guns are dangerous

They are dangerous I mean for fuck sake they are weapons sold on their ability to cause harm and death, and saying that guns are a public health problem that cause a huge number of injuries and deaths is just a fact

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-gun-research-funding-20160614-snap-story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2015/01/14/why-the-cdc-still-isnt-researching-gun-violence-despite-the-ban-being-lifted-two-years-ago/?utm_term=.18af7fb14061

 

Mac

Really not sure what you are going on about - what does ‘at the point of a gun’ mean?

Can you please clarify?

 

Mac



I believe the population density of Chicago is 11,864.4/sq mi

London is 11,760 /sq mi.

I live in London and it only had 175 homicides between Apr-2005 to Apr-2006. In fact in 2009 there were only 651 murders in the whole of England and Wales with a population of around 60 million.

I believe in 2005 the number of homicides in Chicago was 602

Not sure about London specifically but here is an over view.

Percentage of single parent

• The United States: 25%
• Ireland: 24%
• Canada: 22%
• The United Kingdom: 22%

Homicides by any method per 100.000

• US - 2011: 5.1
• England and Wales - 1.03
• Ireland – 1.1
• Canada 1.7

Firearm-related deaths rate per 100,000 population.

• US –2011 - 10.3
• England and Wales – 0.22
• Ireland – 0.8
• Canada – 2.0

Gun related homicides per 100,000

• US 2011: 3.6
• England and Wales: 0.06
• Ireland – 0.22
• Canada – 0.45