@stormy178@mastodon.stormy178.com @MelodyCooper

And when someone staps someone or beats them with a bat do we cry about how bats are legal... Yes there is a problem, but absurd solutions like making guns illegal is obviously not the answer.

@freemo @MelodyCooper I don't know if they're the answer, but taking guns away from people results in fewer gun deaths. Yes, there will still be bat deaths and hammer deaths and what have you, and we can generalise that as blunt force objects. You can't get rid of blunt force objects. Getting rid of 99% of guns is trivial in comparison.

@pies @freemo @MelodyCooper Fewer gun deaths isn’t the same as lower deaths. Most gun deaths aren’t related to legal owners anyways.

@zack

**Exactly** now your getting it. Fewer gun deaths doesnt mean fewer deaths overall (and in fact can mean **more** dewths). And thus thr problem with using gun deaths as a metric or goal.

@MelodyCooper @pies

@freemo @zack @MelodyCooper Fewer gun deaths usually also means fewer deaths in general. It doesn't have to, but it does.

Obviously higher birth rate also causes more deaths :) But having a gun allows for more opportunities to intimidate and hurt people with it, opportunities that are often not available to people who's best available weapon is a kitchen knife.

It also allows for some opportunities that aren't really possible with blunt force objects and blades, such as deadly accidents and mass killings. There's very few multiple death stabbings and almost no baseball bat suicides.

And I have yet to hear a good argument for risks related to harder access to guns that isn't based on there being very easy access to guns.

Poland has 40 million people and the number of mass shootings that can be counted on one hand within the living history. The same is true for the great majority of countries. US is a special case for many reasons - lack of social safety net is a big factor in violence in general, so is the mass incarceration - but you could only makes things better if you make sure a crazy person can't easily purchase an automatic rifle.

@pies @zack @MelodyCooper

The data suggests otherwise from what ive seen. But if ghats the case you want to make then make it. Dont provid unrelated data that doesnt say that.

@freemo @zack @MelodyCooper US has an incredibly high murder rate for its level of income. Source is mentioned.

@pies @freemo @MelodyCooper Switzerland has a very lower murder rate when compared to the UK for example, despite the UK going much further with general weapons bans that include kitchen knives. Maybe this is more complicated than you want it to be.

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo I know Switzerland is a favourite example, the second one being Canada, but maybe actually read up on Switzerland before you do it. Certainly not a "get an AR at the grocery store" kind of country.

@freemo @pies @MelodyCooper huh, if only I used a point of comparison to make my example actually communicate something specific. I just compared a relatively lax country to a tightly buttoned down one. Try addressing the point, please.

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo What you gave is the only example you can think of. There are no other countries like that. There are a few where hunting is popular and that makes of a significant number of guns that don't generally cause the murder rate to skyrocket. The rest has restrictive gun laws and high murder rates or a lot of guns and murders.

Why did you choose Switzerland in particular? Is it its similarity to the US? Do you think US should be required to have a purchase licence for any modern firearm!? Should there be a puchase licence requirement for ammo? What are you trying to say, exactly?

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo ok, too many typos and no edit functionality on my app or server :) But I think you get my point. I give a list of twenty countries where restrictive gun laws work. You only look at the one where there relatively lax - still much stricter than in the US, mind you. You're not looking for evidence.

@freemo @MelodyCooper @pies I bet residual lead levels in the water gives a stronger correlation with murder rate than the gun regulations.

@zack @MelodyCooper @pies

Again you dont use corelation if your doing honest science on this or any topic like it...

@freemo @zack @MelodyCooper None of us here are doing any science. And lack of control over sales and ownership of firearms is certainly not the only problem that contributes an abnormally high murder rate in the US.

But your insistence that the fact that anyone can buy an automatic weapon in your country has no bearing on murder rate being extremely high indicates to me that you don't really want to learn. You just want to preach.

And that's fine.

@pies @freemo @MelodyCooper You clearly aren’t familiar with gun laws in the US if you think anyone can get full auto here. What a shock, another anti gun person who doesn’t even know what they’re arguing against.

@zack @MelodyCooper @pies

Obviously what zack said. The sale of new auto weapons have been illegal in the usa for a very long time. You can only get access to very old antique autoweapons and there are very few of them at all.

It does discredit you when you say stuff like that.

@freemo @zack @MelodyCooper Yes, it must be impossible. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/4/16412910/automatic-guns-las-vegas-shooting

@MelodyCooper @pies @freemo I could easily point to the shooting in France at that eagles of death metal concert, where lots of weapons got through in a stricter setting than the US. There will always be ways around the issue including home made weapons which are getting more robust every year that completely dodge the question of regulation to begin with.

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo And yet, US has hundreds of mass shootings a year, and France decidedly does not, go figure.

@freemo @pies @MelodyCooper If we’re shifting goalposts now to mass shootings, the US doesn’t have the worst per capita death rate related to that. Also, most of those mass shootings in that statistic are gang related, which also confounds your clearly well formed opinion even if you wanted to say that study was outdated. You clearly just want to preach, which is fine I guess.

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo I'm not, @freemo had mentioned it.

Anyway, what about tha murder rate? Is it the lack of old architecture? Maybe it's the freedom? I'm sure there must be reasons other than very easy and uncontrolled access to something that's specifically designed to kill people.

@freemo @MelodyCooper @pies The point was that there will always be a way to get past regulations. That it can happen in tightly regulated places too, so picking out one of the rare instances where a shooter could actually afford a full auto is disingenuous at best. Not to mention you ignored the most common form of mass shooting: gang conflicts - often perpetrated with guns that weren’t legally acquired in the first place. And it’s all meaningless anyways since everyone is at most a $2500 mini-cnc machine away from having basically any gun they want these days. Bullets might be the harder part of that equation actually, but they’re also pretty easy to make, I’m pretty sure I know someone who’s made both.

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo And you go on and on about things that aren't US-specific. What is different about the US that causes you guys to murder each other much more frequently than in, say, Spain or UK?

@MelodyCooper @freemo @pies Our gang violence is pretty substantial here, probably more so than most developed countries. Just because you want to ignore this doesn’t make it untrue. Please stop changing topics.

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo CDC estimates that gang violence was responsible for 10% of overall homicides in 2020. So I think you need another excuse.

@freemo @pies @MelodyCooper I think you need to consider that even if you took away all gun violence the murder rate in the US would still be high, many times higher than most developed countries - guns are clearly very far from the main problem here. I’m trying really hard to be good faith and polite here, but I haven’t seen any sign of that from you whatsoever. I could point to any number of stats, but because any single one of them doesn’t account for the entire discrepancy it won’t matter to you, you’ll just jump to an entirely different subject or ignore it.

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo Where are those stats then? You claim the reasons are different, and you keep moving the goalpost on that (so it's not gang violence after all?)

I'm curious to know what particular piece of data makes you so sure it's not the easy access to guns that's causing all those extra murders to happen.

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo And no, I'm not skipping around, or moving the goalpost. I'm talking about the reasons for US having so many more murders than any other rich country.

I do appreciate that US has many structural problems that may cause people to turn to violence, from prolific lack of access to basic necessities of life like health care and housing, to an incredibly harmful mass incarceration system you've built, to a lack of support for getting out of poverty that plagues vast swaths of US. I get that. And that's quite unusual for a rich country and I'm sure contributes to the problem. And if you had like 50% or even 100% more murders, I could buy that argument. But the disparity is much, much larger.

@freemo @pies @MelodyCooper Again, even without guns it’s over that line.

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo And what is the source for this assertion?