Do ( D )s sell more guns than ( R )s?

[The Grand Nudger]

It's pretty well known that criminals do, in fact, follow the law and even plan their crimes according to it.  More broadly, they function in whatever environment (with whatever restrictions) that the law has created.   

Criminals are people like the rest of us, not raging anarchists for whom the law is a non-entity who don't take the potential consequences of their own actions, to themselves, into account. They've simply decided to do this one thing, this time, that breaks a specific law. While a law that says "don't shoot people" is certainly being broken when a person shoots someone, the shooter has no power or ability to change the sum of the environment which they committed their crime in. What this suggests is as far from "criminals don't follow the law" rhetoric as can be imagined. It suggests that the best laws, as in most effective regardless of the motivations of an individual, are the ones that criminals have no choice -but- to follow.

This is why we don't see a rash of hand grenade crimes in the US, even though a grenade would be a must-have item on every criminals wishlist if the law were wholly ineffective in the face of their anarcho-criminality. They have to climb mount improbable to get one, and then using it brings consequences they don't want on their heads.

We know for a fact that gun control works, and a more sober assessment than "criminals don't follow the law" is that some of the things we might do and call gun control might not be effective, or work as intended. The thing to do isn't throw our hands in the air and suppose that there's nothing that the law can do, but find which sets of legislation are most effective for a specific goal and replace those ineffective control measures with items in the effective set. For criminals-and-guns that can sometimes mean cracking down on a second party. Most guns in the trace data were purchased illegally. Even if we imagined the ridiculous, that the end user had no regard for law whatsoever, someone in the chain of procurement did and does care. Enforcing straw purchase regs and other transfer related minutia will effect the end user in a manner beyond his ability to control. His decision to use a gun will necessarily play out in an environment where it is harder to procure one, and the procurement incurs a greater cost (both financial and legal).

[Yonadav]

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That's a very popular meme. But it is almost certainly not true. In most situations where an aggressor was stopped by a gun, the incident was never reported. An aggressor almost always retreats when confronted with a gun, and that's the end of the incident. No one bothers to report it.  I had 8 young men attempt to assault me in Portland OR while I was waiting for a bus at 1 AM. They were gay bashers. They were like, "You're going to die, faggot". I am not a gay man, but they thought that I was. They surrounded me and I pulled out my gun. They mouthed off for awhile, and then went away. I didn't fire a shot. They never landed a blow. There wasn't much to report. If I did report it, the cops might look for a reason to hassle me. But I probably would have had the crap stomped out of me that night if I hadn't had a gun. I might have been killed. Guns resolve situations frequently, and those situations don't get reported.

Um... Brian did say "in the home".  Your incident was not in the home.

If someone defended themselves with a gun against a stranger in their home, I'll wager that it's going to be reported most times, even if they didn't fire a shot -- because WTF was a stranger doing in their home ?   How did he get in?  What did he want?  Is he going to come back with friends or a gun of his own?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that incidents involving break-ins or home invasion are going to get reported, regardless.

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For starters, it's pretty silly to restrict the statistics to 'in the home'. If we are going to talk stats about whether gun owners have saved or hurt by owning guns, then you have to look at the whole picture.

And I don't agree that people call the police every time that their gun caused an aggressor to retreat from their homes. Prospective assailants aren't always burglars who break in. Lot's of people have been told to leave at gunpoint, without the police ever becoming involved. That stuff never makes it into the stats.

[The Grand Nudger]

In polk county florida, 2016..a man named Orville Lee Wollard III fired a warning shot into a wall in his home, allegedly.  He says it was to scare off his daughters abusive live-in boyfriend.   Under floridas 10/20/life laws prosecutors offered him a deal.  Plead guilty to a felony and get 5 years probation with no jailtime.  He refused, now he's serving a 20 year sentence for aggravated assault with a firearm.

It's a crime to try to "scare" a criminal with a gun.  I wouldn't call the cops if I shot at somebody, either...but suggesting that people don't call the cops when they do this doesn't paint the picture one might hope. It merely states that people do not call the cops on themselves when they commit crimes. If that stuff "made it into the stats" it could only increase the numbers of reported gun crimes.

[Yonadav]

In polk county florida, 2016..a man named Orville Lee Wollard III fired a warning shot into a wall in his home, allegedly.  He says it was to scare off his daughters abusive live-in boyfriend.   Under floridas 10/20/life laws prosecutors offered him a deal.  Plead guilty to a felony and get 5 years probation with no jailtime.  He refused, now he's serving a 20 year sentence for aggravated assault with a firearm.

It's a crime to try to "scare" a criminal with a gun.  I wouldn't call the cops if I shot at somebody, either...but suggesting that people don't call the cops when they do this doesn't paint the picture one might hope.  It merely states that people do not call the cops on themselves when they commit crimes.  If that stuff "made it into the stats" it could only increase the numbers of reported gun crimes.

Yeah, you aren't this dumb. You know that you are blowing smoke. Some guy brandished a gun at someone that he didn't like and fired an intimidation shot? Yep, that's illegal. 

Someone told a would be assailant to leave at gun point?  That's self defense.

[The Grand Nudger]

The guy actually was abusive.  Court documents from prior charges and convictions and witness testimony leave no room for doubt.  Things is, it's actually illegal for people to start popping off at criminals.  Alot of people who do so and do get reported find themselves surprised by this fact.  The man in question probably didn't think he was doing anything illegal, just as a more recent case involving a "good guy with a gun" in a walmart parking lot did.

In florida, just pulling the gun gets you ten. Wollard fired it, so he got 20. Mandatory minimums..pretty much everyone involved thinks it's a shit ruling, including the judge.

Again, if people self reported the instances that they pulled a gun on someone, it would -add- to the numbers of gun crimes...because it's a crime, even when the other guy is a bad, bad man.

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-and that's before we get into the actual stats on what good guys with guns accomplish, no amount of invoking non-existent statistics will change that or even makes a lick of sense. All you're doing is imagining that a bunch of unknown events would have a great enough statistical weight to argue some point contradicted by weight of known events. An unknown property of provolone cheese on the planets surface might counteract gravitational forces, as well.

[Yonadav]

The guy actually was abusive.  Court documents from prior charges and convictions cleave no room for doubt.  Things is, it's actually illegal for people to start popping off at criminals.  Alot of people who do so and do get reported find themselves suprised by this fact.  The man in question probably didn;t think he was doing anything illegal, just as a more recent case involving a "good guy with a gun" in a walmart parking lot did.

Again, you aren't this dumb. Who cares if the guy really was abusive. That's not relevant. "He's abusive and I really don't like him" isn't cause to threaten him with a gun. "He made me fear for myself" is reason to draw a gun. This is the difference between brandishing and self defense. 

You aren't this dumb. You know the difference between brandishing and self defense. You are just muddying up the waters to be a libtard because you simply can't help yourself. You are an intentionally dishonest person.

[The Grand Nudger]

This was exactly the defense that Wollard fielded and why he rejected the felony plea.  He was in his own home, and he and members of his family were being threatened by a violent offender.  He fired a warning shot into the wall with no intention of hitting anyone, and he didn't hit anyone.  None of that matters, because what he did, even accepting his story as factual, was against the law.

Your appeal to a local hidden variable is pointless in any appraisal of the above reality.  Let's tackle it head-on, though.

Gun ownership, all by itself, increases rather than decreases the risk of homocide and suicide.  A gun in the home massibvely increases the chances that females in the home will be shot.  Guns intended for self defense are the leading category of guns involved in unintentional firearm deaths.  Even if we accepted the most inflated numbers that advocates put forward for "good guys with a gun" stopping crimes, the instances in which guns are used successfully for self defense is orders of magnitude lower than those same guns being turned against their own owners and other residents of the home.  The fbi ran a 13year study which found that in the course of the study they could only identify a single instance of a good guy with a gun stopping an active shooting, while in theat same time period 21 active shooting incidents were stopped by unarmed civvies.  Additionally, during that time, armed citizens qualitatively worsened mass shootings by either misidentifying the shooter and taking action, or being misidentified as the shooter, themselves (and we just had another one of these recently).  Carry states are shown to have a 10-15% higher rate of violent crimes involving guns, and employing a firearm in a robbery defense has not shown to have any noticeable benefits.  The likelihood of sustaining an injury during a robbery is precisely equal between people who pull a gun and people who take no defensive action.  

Running through all of that, is that a gun is more likely to be stolen and then used in a crime than it is to be employed in self defense - and this probably has alot to do with those guns for such being out and accessible to a thief by virtue of their intended use, as well as the number of unintentional firearm deaths.

So...climb mount improbable for me, tell me how large of an invisible statistic would be required to balance out all of the abve, Yon? Feel free to refer to your NRA talking points for alternative statistics, lol. I don;t see how you could make the case otherwise, since the fabric of reality itself has joined in on the great libtard conspiracy to do...whatever.

All that a good guy with a gun adds to a situation with a gun, is another gun. That's not candyland funtimes where justice is served and we the people are safe, it's a crossfire.

[Yonadav]

This was exactly the defense that Wollard fielded and why he rejected the felony plea.  He was in his own home, and he and members of his family were being threatened by a violent offender.  He fired a warning shot into the wall with no intention of hitting anyone, and he didn't hit anyone.  None of that matters, because what he did, even accepting his story as factual, was against the law.

Your appeal to a local hidden variable is pointless in any appraisal of the above reality.  Let's tackle it head-on, though.

Gun ownership, all by itself, increases rather than decreases the risk of homocide and suicide.  A gun in the home massibvely increases the chances that females in the home will be shot.  Guns intended for self defense are the leading category of guns involved in unintentional firearm deaths.  Even if we accepted the most inflated numbers that advocates put forward for "good guys with a gun" stopping crimes, the instances in which guns are used successfully for self defense is orders of magnitude lower than those same guns being turned against their own owners and other residents of the home.  The fbi ran a 13year study which found that in the course of the study they could only identify a single instance of a good guy with a gun stopping an active shooting, while in theat same time period 21 active shooting incidents were stopped by unarmed civvies.  Additionally, during that time, armed citizens qualitatively worsened mass shootings by either misidentifying the shooter and taking action, or being misidentified as the shooter, themselves (and we just had another one of these recently).  Carry states are shown to have a 10-15% higher rate of violent crimes involving guns, and employing a firearm in a robbery defense has not shown to have any noticeable benefits.  The likelihood of sustaining an injury during a robbery is precisely equal between people who pull a gun and people who take no defensive action.  

Running through all of that, is that a gun is more likely to be stolen and then used in a crime than it is to be employed in self defense - and this probably has alot to do with those guns for such being out and accessible to a thief by virtue of their intended use, as well as the number of unintentional firearm deaths.  

So...climb mount improbable for me, tell me how large of an invisible statistic would be required to balance out all of the abve, Yon?  Feel free to refer to your NRA talking points for alternative statistics, lol.  I don;t see how you could make the case otherwise, since the fabric of reality itself has joined in on the great libtard conspiracy to do...whatever.

Yeah, as usual you are trying to force me into the position of being a big gun rights advocate. I objected to bogus information that is being spewed out by gun control zealots. It would be nice to have an honest discussion, but gun control freaks are disingenuous. We've already discounted suicides in this discussion, because the rate of suicide in the US doesn't stand out when compared to the rate of suicide in other nations. So it seems that guns are the preferred method when available, but other methods are used when guns aren't.

You guys are obsessed with an issue that you are unlikely to ever prevail on. That's just a fact. The thing that pisses me off about that, is that it is so hard to turn you guys to more effective approaches to saving lives. You just aren't very interested in other stuff, because guns are your moral hobby.

[The Grand Nudger]

It doesn't matter if you're a gun rights activist or not.  The statements you made run the gamut of being factually wrong to fundamentally dodgy.  

The good guy with a gun theory is factually wrong.  The underlying appeal to hidden variables is misguided, at best.

[Yonadav]

It doesn't matter if you're a gun rights activist or not.  The statements you made run the gamut of being factually wrong to fundamentally dodgy.  

The good guy with a gun theory is factually wrong.  The underlying appeal to hidden variables is misguided, at best.

No, you say things that are factually wrong. You deliberately conflated an incident of a guy brandishing with self defense, to argue that people aren't allowed to use guns for self defense. And I haven't advocated a 'good guy with a gun theory'. You're far more libtard with a hobbyhorse issue than a guy who is actually interested in saving lives.

This discussion started with some points about how stupid it is to be talking about the NRA all the time and greatly exaggerating their power over congress. If you guys were serious about the NRA, you would want the NRA to be mentioned as little as possible in news media. But the NRA is a comic book villain to you, and your narrative just isn't any fun without them.