On 2012-12-21, at 7:12 PM, Jordan Hayes wrote:
> Marv writes:
>
>> The residents of black and hispanic ghettoes, as the communities
>> most affected by America's lax gun laws ...
>
> You have got to be kidding me. You think that there's a linkage between "gun owner" and the folks who are responsbile for 90% of the non-suicide gun homicide in the US? ... the vast majority of gun crime in the US is carried out with illegally acquired guns. Gun laws in the US do not -- and would not, given even the wackiest of proposals out there -- address this segment of reality.
No, I am not kidding you. The guns are only "illegally acquired" in the sense they are not purchased over the counter and registered. But they are still easily and inexpensively attainable in the secondary market, often by juveniles from friends, relatives and gang members.
That is what is at issue here - the widespread access to highly lethal weapons, not whether these were purchased "legally" from primary dealers, or bought or stolen second- or third- or fourth-hand. Prior to finding their way into the hands of assailants, the top 10 weapons used in gang murders, household homicides, and other gun crimes were all sourced legally, including the high-capacity rapid-firing assault weapons used in the more sensational recent killing sprees by Jared Loughner in Tucson, James Holmes in Aurora and Adam Lanza in Newtown.
More here:
http://www.ojjdp.gov/pubs/jvr/2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States#Violent_crime_related_to_guns
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,320383,00.html
http://www.vpc.org/studies/wgunint.htm
> You may think the current laws are lax; you may think they are already too strong ... but what isn't in dispute is that these laws one way or the other would have any bearing on the criminal enterprise that by its nature demands the support of violence to "succeed"...The epidemic of criminal activity that uses extreme violence as its support line is as impacted by gun laws as it is by alternate side of the street parking laws.
We keep going over the same ground, and you consistently have it backwards. The correlation between tighter gun laws and lower homicide rates has been supported in study after study, some of which have been cited on this thread. The US homicide rate is not 15 times the combined total of 23 other developed capitalist countries because its minority gang members, disturbed white youth, and reactionary patriots are somehow, as you and Wojtek insist, more prone to uncontrollable violence than their equivalents in these other countries; the sole variable is that they have significantly more opportunity to acquire the weapons needed to commit violent acts on a large scale. Countries such as Britain and Australia which imposed restrictions on the sale of assault weapons after homicidal outbursts witnessed significant decreases in gun crime. You've held up Canada as an as an example of a country where a relatively low homicide rate coexists with widespread gun ownership. But the procedures for obtaining and carrying a gun are stricter here than in the US. Lanza's mother, for example, might still have been able to obtain the Buckmaster AR-15 in Canada after more intensive screening, but her son would not have been able to fire hundreds of uninterrupted rounds as in Newtown since the gun can only be sold here with a five shot magazine which requires frequent reloading.
This may seem irrelevant to you, but by all accounts it would have allowed many of the victims to escape with their lives. It's only one of the modest but evidently effective restrictions on assault weapons that have been proposed by American progressives and the black and hispanic communities to bring US standards into line with the other countries. I can't be as certain as you are that their efforts are doomed to failure, which we'll only know in retrospect. Much less do I agree that this latest attempt at reform of the gun laws is unnecessary or, worse, a diversion from the economic protests in which many of them, unlike their critics on the left, are also engaged.