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0 pointslucozade4y ago0 comments

> Restricting guns, ammo, attachments, magazine sizes etc are not effective forms of gun control imo.

Of course restricting magazines and accessories is not effective. They're only brought into the argument by people who don't want effective gun control.

But restricting guns and ammo is absolutely effective. The UK has a sixtieth of the rate of gun deaths compared to the US. And the UK is no paragon. Its rate is much higher than it should be, in my view, because a lot of gun crime is gang related so does not get the attention it deserves. A more reasonable rate would be closer to Japan's which is about a quarter of the UK's. Much lower and you likely start requiring genuinely authoritarian regimes such as Singapore or HK.

The US could absolutely get to saner gun crime and homicide levels if there was any real will to do so but there isn't. Of course it wouldn't happen overnight but it doesn't have to.

The real problem, in my opinion, is that the US is so de-sensitised to extreme violence that they can never have the equivalent of the collective traumatisation that the UK had after Dunblane. That was the spur we needed to put rational gun laws in place. The balance in the US is so far out of kilter that the seesaw is buried in concrete. Even biblical massacres of innocents can't shift it. So very very sad.

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kodah4y ago· 2 in thread

> Of course restricting magazines and accessories is not effective. They're only brought into the argument by people who don't want effective gun control.

Citation needed. https://news.yahoo.com/news/senator-introduces-legislation-g... That's a Democrat.

If you're not very well educated on guns or the laws around them and you're contributing to a topic on guns, then you are not here in good faith. I would say that you and several other commenters on this thread are exactly the embodiment of that.

For the shining example of knife-crime that is the UK, there are also examples like Germany and Switzerland that have very low gun violence. I'd rather focus on what underpins gun crime in the US and get at the source rather than allowing it to be certain peoples pet topic that they vapidly spew misinformation on.

lucozadeOP4y ago

Knife crime in the UK unacceptably high. So high in fact that it's something 60% of the benchmark for unacceptable crime rates. The US's.

Being anywhere near as bad as the US in any violence categories is a genuine cause for shame and is the reason why knife crime is a big topic in the UK.

Obviously, it's not a big topic in the US because it pales into insignificance compared to gun crime. Not because the US has low knife crime; it doesn't it's terrible.

And I genuinely don't know why you'd bring up Germany and Switzerland. Their gun crime stats are bad. Switzerland particularly. Obviously they're not as bad as the US because no country outside central America, the Balkans or South Africa comes even vaguely close to the US. That doesn't make them good though.

And I lived in Switzerland long enough to understand pretty well why the gun crime is low compared to the volume of arms in circulation. I lived in Kandersteg for a bit so I saw the training first hand. But you can't reasonably argue that the US mess isn't because of gun ownership because Switzerland isn't as bad.

And as to your point re the senator from Arizona. I could have worded that better. They're not trying to pass a law for effective gun control. They're trying to make baby steps on the road to effective gun control that are sufficiently small to have a vague chance of succeeding. The intention is laudable. And it is likely that they do want effective gun control eventually. So I accept the rebuke.

kodah4y ago

On one hand you decry the actions of meaningless gun control by those acting in bad faith but then as soon as it's democrats doing the exact same thing it's "baby steps" and laudable. Can you explain why you're doing this?

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