Bhoy wrote While I don't entirely disagree that a ban on guns would be ineffective within the US, I have never really understood why people feel the need to protect their rights to guns so badly even to an extent of promoting and encouraging ownership.

I'm not entirely sure on your source for gun related homicides last year (I don't disagree with it) but the BBC reported that it was 13,286.

What I don't understand is that the major argument of owning guns is self defence. Are you aware of how many homicides and justified as self defence? It's 259 (2012 figure).

So in reality, that's about 2% of homicides with guns are made in self defence.

I seriously struggle to comprehend how that number is a reasonable and justified reason for gun ownership.

Would the homicide rate go up if you started to ban guns? Probably due to less fear in criminals and a retaliation against the government.

However over a 50 year gap, would the rate of homicides still be above what it is now? In my opinion, no and I think it would drop significantly.

Without a doubt, if you had no guns then you'd have significantly less homicides and less mass killings. I don't think anyone can disagree with that. Your only obstacle is the amount of guns in circulation and a black market that would be incredibly difficult to track and break down.

However that is not my decision to make. I live where guns are illegal and I have never felt the need for one because we don't need to protect our self against other guns. Your situation is different however I still whole hardheartedly disagree with guns, even in the US.

I could be wrong here, but I found the study you cited for the statistic, "Are you aware of how many homicides and justified as self defence? It's 259 (2012 figure)."
[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

I'm not disputing its accuracy, but I want to have a closer look at a chart a bit further on in the study, page 8.


I only want to focus on the property crime aspect of the chart because I'm not entirely convinced that people should be able to conceal carry, perhaps that's a conversation for another time.

This chart - at face value - shows that of the 84 million property crimes committed between 2007 and 2011, 103 thousand people defended themselves with a firearm.
The chart shows this as 0.1 percent.

The problem with this chart is that it includes the following categories:
- 'Property crime, victim not present' Absence is not a reaction. That number should not be included.
- Considering that we are discussing what kinds of weapons people should protect themselves with and the efficacy of those weapons, the category 'Offered no resistance' should not be included.
- 'Nonconfrontational tactics include yelling, running, or arguing' should not be included for the same reason.
- 'Unknown reaction' should not be included because we don't know what they used to defend themselves which is unhelpful when talking about what weapons should be used.
- 'Other reaction' is also very unhelpful in this conversation for the same reason as 'Unknown reaction'

That reduces the number of instances we are interested in to around 562 thousand and bumps the percentage of people who repelled an intruder with a firearm up to just above 18%.
It leaves us with 6% of people defending themselves with a weapon, and 74% defending themselves without a weapon.

According to the DoJ, 61% of offenders were unarmed when violence occurred during a home invasion, while 12% were armed with a firearm.
This data was collected over a 4 year period, so over a 5 year period, like 2007 - 2011, these statistics would increase slightly, you can tell me if my math is correct later on.
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The chart states underneath that:

"Of this number [our 18%], it is not known whether the use of a gun would even be a legal response to the property crime."

Therefore, we now have 18% of people defending themselves with a firearm, and with the increase in 1 year of crimes for the DoJ statistics, 15% of intruders being armed with firearms.
74% of people defending themselves without a weapon, and with the DoJ statistics and a 1 year increase in crime, 76% of people facing an intruder who was unarmed.

These statistics - at face value - now paint a picture more in favor with the view that gun ownership is necessary to fight off the armed intruders.
But that is only at face value.

The point of this is simply to show that statistics - as they exist at the moment - are almost useless.
They are always limited in what they show and because this is such a complex issue we need complex statistics to discuss it.

We don't know how many of the people who used firearms to repel an intruder didn't use reasonable force.
It isn't logical to suggest that a correlation between the numbers of armed intruders and armed defenders means that armed intruders were therefore all repelled by armed defenders.
We don't know how many of the people who fought an intruder with a weapon used reasonable force.

According to the CPS, the reaction to disproportionate force is explained as:

... it might seem reasonable to you at the time but, with hindsight, your actions may seem disproportionate. The law will give you the benefit of the doubt in these circumstances.
This only applies if you were acting in self-defence or to protect others in your home and the force you used was disproportionate disproportionate force to protect property is still unlawful.

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We don't know how many of the people in our percentages were defending their property with disproportionate force.
We don't know how many of them were alone and not in immediate danger but still decided to attack disproportionately.
We don't know how many of them were protecting their families and attacked using reasonable force.

18%, to me, seems to be a figure far too large to simply dismiss, and given the lenient view of reasonable force in US law, it wouldn't be much less than 18% who did use reasonable force to defend themselves which, again, would only support the face value statistic of correlation between the DoJ's 15% of intruders armed with a firearm and our 18%

With that being said, as I feel I have adequately shown, statistics don't do us much good here.
Unfortunately they are the only things which matter in this discussion and the only things which can actually make or break a point.
I think that the people collecting these statistics need to catch up with this issue, and that the people using statistics need to be more tentative about their proposed helpfulness.

Feel free to point out any flaws in my reasoning here. You have already managed to shift my view on the issue of it being a 'small chance' to encounter an aggressor with a firearm.
I did think it would be a much larger percentage than it is now reasonable to suggest it would be, but still not small enough for me to agree that it would be a good reason to ban guns.

002 wrote Here is why I believe a gun ban will never work. Let's all look in our wallet, in my wallet I have a dollar bill from 1996. This is a piece of paper that made it 20 years being handed to one person after another, folded, crinkled, stuffed away, etc. How does this have to do with guns? I mean there was no ban on the dollar bill, but this one was only made for one year, and yet it is still around 20 years later. You try to out right ban guns, or even what you deem I shouldn't have, and it's the same thing as the dollar bill. Some guns will get turned in, found, etc. just like some dollar bills will be burnt, lost, ripped, destroyed, etc.

According to the Congressional Research Service, there are roughly twice as many guns per capita in the United States as there were in 1968: more than 300 million guns in all.

Gun sales have increased in recent years. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, U.S. gun-makers produced nearly 11 million guns in 2013, the year after the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre. That's twice as many as they made in 2010.

300 million guns? That's a lot to take away. It will take a while to phase them out.

I do however believe that if things continue the way they are, guns will phase out in the next 50 years. Guns are where they're at now because of previous generations. What did they do for fun when they where kids? Some played sports, others went out hunting and became a firearm addict. Fewer and fewer of that generation still exists and few people of our generation go out hunting or use guns. I know that if I never went hunting, I'd never have a need for a gun and probably wouldn't own what I do. I only have what I have because I was trained with firearms since I was a small child, and I generally love firearms like some people love automobiles. With less of this generation being like me, less of the next generation will get the training and addiction and it keeps going less and less and less until eventually very few of the population has them. I may be completely wrong, this is just what I see in my community and I always hear my grandpa talk about when he was a kid in high school everyone brought their shotgun and went hunting after school.




Here is just another one of my opinions. You want to cut down on the number of massacres / deaths in these massacres? Let's start with school shootings. Let's train all the teachers with firearms and make sure they bring one every day. Honestly, do you think the death / injury count would've been as high as it was for Sandy hook and Columbine if all teachers had firearms? What's next, theaters? Give the ticket cops guns and training with those guns. Would the Aurora shooting have killed / injured so many people if the ticket cops had guns? This could go down the line for cooks, for cashiers, for bartenders (they're not supposed to drink), for the manager at the repair shop, etc. Don't feel safe with the cashier having a firearm? You'd best get yourself one too and know how to use it.

I have no disagreements that it would be near impossible to get guns under a reasonable number if they were outlawed. The black market would always be bigger than any other nation on Earth.

I saw a video on Facebook the other week, you might have seen it. A 14 year old attempts to buy cigarettes and alcohol which both get denied because he has no ID. He then goes into a private gun shop and buys a gun in 10 mins with next to no checks.

As long as your guns are legal and the access to guns is stupidly easy for anyone without any training or mental health checks, you're going to continue having massacres wether you think people are protected by guns or not.

And I'm sorry but I completley despise that argument you've brought up. Giving teachers guns is not going to stop massacres, it's going to create massacres. If you gave every teacher in America a gun, I will put everything I own on it that a teacher will have already shot a student within a month. Teachers get depressed and students will piss them off constantly all day, you only need 1 of them to snap and you will have dead children.

A ban is a long term solution and a short term problems, more guns is a short term solution and a long term problem.

The thing is its too late for the US its finished there is no going back from the mess it has got itself into over the last 60 years or so whether it be guns or something else.

I am not going to lie mate, I'm kind of a bit confused by all of these statistics you've just handed me haha.

From what I can understand, there isn't much I disagree with. I'm not sure if you considered the point about how many attacks defended with a gun were actually necessary. I know 18% were protected but that number must be substantially lower when we've already considered that only 259 cases of homicide with a firearm were justified.

Should we say like half of those homicides were related to protecting a property?

130 / (103,000 / 4) x 100 = 0.5%

So in reality, only about 0.5% of the time where people need to protect themselves with guns against an intruder, they actually need to use it (it's probably around 1/2% when you consider people who don't die from being shot).

It's just nothing more than my opinion that I don't consider them a justified reason for security and I think it's just a growing problem by adding more guns for 'protection' which you can never recover from. If you had banned your weapons when the UK and Australia had done so, you might not be in the mess you find yourself in now.

Bhoy wrote

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Obscurum wrote "]

Bhoy wrote While I don't entirely disagree that a ban on guns would be ineffective within the US, I have never really understood why people feel the need to protect their rights to guns so badly even to an extent of promoting and encouraging ownership.

I'm not entirely sure on your source for gun related homicides last year (I don't disagree with it) but the BBC reported that it was 13,286.

What I don't understand is that the major argument of owning guns is self defence. Are you aware of how many homicides and justified as self defence? It's 259 (2012 figure).

So in reality, that's about 2% of homicides with guns are made in self defence.

I seriously struggle to comprehend how that number is a reasonable and justified reason for gun ownership.

Would the homicide rate go up if you started to ban guns? Probably due to less fear in criminals and a retaliation against the government.

However over a 50 year gap, would the rate of homicides still be above what it is now? In my opinion, no and I think it would drop significantly.

Without a doubt, if you had no guns then you'd have significantly less homicides and less mass killings. I don't think anyone can disagree with that. Your only obstacle is the amount of guns in circulation and a black market that would be incredibly difficult to track and break down.

However that is not my decision to make. I live where guns are illegal and I have never felt the need for one because we don't need to protect our self against other guns. Your situation is different however I still whole hardheartedly disagree with guns, even in the US.

I could be wrong here, but I found the study you cited for the statistic, "Are you aware of how many homicides and justified as self defence? It's 259 (2012 figure)."
[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

I'm not disputing its accuracy, but I want to have a closer look at a chart a bit further on in the study, page 8.

Click to View Content

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

I only want to focus on the property crime aspect of the chart because I'm not entirely convinced that people should be able to conceal carry, perhaps that's a conversation for another time.

This chart - at face value - shows that of the 84 million property crimes committed between 2007 and 2011, 103 thousand people defended themselves with a firearm.
The chart shows this as 0.1 percent.

The problem with this chart is that it includes the following categories:
- 'Property crime, victim not present' Absence is not a reaction. That number should not be included.
- Considering that we are discussing what kinds of weapons people should protect themselves with and the efficacy of those weapons, the category 'Offered no resistance' should not be included.
- 'Nonconfrontational tactics include yelling, running, or arguing' should not be included for the same reason.
- 'Unknown reaction' should not be included because we don't know what they used to defend themselves which is unhelpful when talking about what weapons should be used.
- 'Other reaction' is also very unhelpful in this conversation for the same reason as 'Unknown reaction'

That reduces the number of instances we are interested in to around 562 thousand and bumps the percentage of people who repelled an intruder with a firearm up to just above 18%.
It leaves us with 6% of people defending themselves with a weapon, and 74% defending themselves without a weapon.

According to the DoJ, 61% of offenders were unarmed when violence occurred during a home invasion, while 12% were armed with a firearm.
This data was collected over a 4 year period, so over a 5 year period, like 2007 - 2011, these statistics would increase slightly, you can tell me if my math is correct later on.
[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

The chart states underneath that:

"Of this number [our 18%], it is not known whether the use of a gun would even be a legal response to the property crime."

Therefore, we now have 18% of people defending themselves with a firearm, and with the increase in 1 year of crimes for the DoJ statistics, 15% of intruders being armed with firearms.
74% of people defending themselves without a weapon, and with the DoJ statistics and a 1 year increase in crime, 76% of people facing an intruder who was unarmed.

These statistics - at face value - now paint a picture more in favor with the view that gun ownership is necessary to fight off the armed intruders.
But that is only at face value.

The point of this is simply to show that statistics - as they exist at the moment - are almost useless.
They are always limited in what they show and because this is such a complex issue we need complex statistics to discuss it.

We don't know how many of the people who used firearms to repel an intruder didn't use reasonable force.
It isn't logical to suggest that a correlation between the numbers of armed intruders and armed defenders means that armed intruders were therefore all repelled by armed defenders.
We don't know how many of the people who fought an intruder with a weapon used reasonable force.

According to the CPS, the reaction to disproportionate force is explained as:

... it might seem reasonable to you at the time but, with hindsight, your actions may seem disproportionate. The law will give you the benefit of the doubt in these circumstances.
This only applies if you were acting in self-defence or to protect others in your home and the force you used was disproportionate disproportionate force to protect property is still unlawful.

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

We don't know how many of the people in our percentages were defending their property with disproportionate force.
We don't know how many of them were alone and not in immediate danger but still decided to attack disproportionately.
We don't know how many of them were protecting their families and attacked using reasonable force.

18%, to me, seems to be a figure far too large to simply dismiss, and given the lenient view of reasonable force in US law, it wouldn't be much less than 18% who did use reasonable force to defend themselves which, again, would only support the face value statistic of correlation between the DoJ's 15% of intruders armed with a firearm and our 18%

With that being said, as I feel I have adequately shown, statistics don't do us much good here.
Unfortunately they are the only things which matter in this discussion and the only things which can actually make or break a point.
I think that the people collecting these statistics need to catch up with this issue, and that the people using statistics need to be more tentative about their proposed helpfulness.

Feel free to point out any flaws in my reasoning here. You have already managed to shift my view on the issue of it being a 'small chance' to encounter an aggressor with a firearm.
I did think it would be a much larger percentage than it is now reasonable to suggest it would be, but still not small enough for me to agree that it would be a good reason to ban guns.

I am not going to lie mate, I'm kind of a bit confused by all of these statistics you've just handed me haha.

From what I can understand, there isn't much I disagree with. I'm not sure if you considered the point about how many attacks defended with a gun were actually necessary. I know 18% were protected but that number must be substantially lower when we've already considered that only 259 cases of homicide with a firearm were justified.

Should we say like half of those homicides were related to protecting a property?

130 / (103,000 / 4) x 100 = 0.5%

So in reality, only about 0.5% of the time where people need to protect themselves with guns against an intruder, they actually need to use it (it's probably around 1/2% when you consider people who don't die from being shot).

It's just nothing more than my opinion that I don't consider them a justified reason for security and I think it's just a growing problem by adding more guns for 'protection' which you can never recover from. If you had banned your weapons when the UK and Australia had done so, you might not be in the mess you find yourself in now.

This is once again where the statistics fail us.

From what I can understand, there isn't much I disagree with. I'm not sure if you considered the point about how many attacks defended with a gun were actually necessary. I know 18% were protected but that number must be substantially lower when we've already considered that only 259 cases of homicide with a firearm were justified.

I don't think that we can say it is substantially lower than 18% because we don't know the numbers for how many intruders weren't killed. It could have been that only a smaller amount than the 259 were killed at all, which would leave the 18% number as a more accurate estimate.

I did consider this though, although reading back over it was quite difficult to understand.

given the lenient view of reasonable force in US law, it wouldn't be much less than 18% who did use reasonable force to defend themselves which, again, would only support the face value statistic of correlation between the DoJ's 15% of intruders armed with a firearm and our 18%

Basically what I was saying here is that if these statistics are being misused, they can support the view that even if we remove 3% from the 18% as unreasonable force, they still match the amount of armed intruders.

My point was simply that statistics are easy to manipulate and are quite hollow when they are so broad and unspecific on an issue where specifics are desperately needed.

Bhoy wrote

002 wrote Here is why I believe a gun ban will never work. Let's all look in our wallet, in my wallet I have a dollar bill from 1996. This is a piece of paper that made it 20 years being handed to one person after another, folded, crinkled, stuffed away, etc. How does this have to do with guns? I mean there was no ban on the dollar bill, but this one was only made for one year, and yet it is still around 20 years later. You try to out right ban guns, or even what you deem I shouldn't have, and it's the same thing as the dollar bill. Some guns will get turned in, found, etc. just like some dollar bills will be burnt, lost, ripped, destroyed, etc.

According to the Congressional Research Service, there are roughly twice as many guns per capita in the United States as there were in 1968: more than 300 million guns in all.

Gun sales have increased in recent years. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, U.S. gun-makers produced nearly 11 million guns in 2013, the year after the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre. That's twice as many as they made in 2010.

300 million guns? That's a lot to take away. It will take a while to phase them out.

I do however believe that if things continue the way they are, guns will phase out in the next 50 years. Guns are where they're at now because of previous generations. What did they do for fun when they where kids? Some played sports, others went out hunting and became a firearm addict. Fewer and fewer of that generation still exists and few people of our generation go out hunting or use guns. I know that if I never went hunting, I'd never have a need for a gun and probably wouldn't own what I do. I only have what I have because I was trained with firearms since I was a small child, and I generally love firearms like some people love automobiles. With less of this generation being like me, less of the next generation will get the training and addiction and it keeps going less and less and less until eventually very few of the population has them. I may be completely wrong, this is just what I see in my community and I always hear my grandpa talk about when he was a kid in high school everyone brought their shotgun and went hunting after school.




Here is just another one of my opinions. You want to cut down on the number of massacres / deaths in these massacres? Let's start with school shootings. Let's train all the teachers with firearms and make sure they bring one every day. Honestly, do you think the death / injury count would've been as high as it was for Sandy hook and Columbine if all teachers had firearms? What's next, theaters? Give the ticket cops guns and training with those guns. Would the Aurora shooting have killed / injured so many people if the ticket cops had guns? This could go down the line for cooks, for cashiers, for bartenders (they're not supposed to drink), for the manager at the repair shop, etc. Don't feel safe with the cashier having a firearm? You'd best get yourself one too and know how to use it.

I have no disagreements that it would be near impossible to get guns under a reasonable number if they were outlawed. The black market would always be bigger than any other nation on Earth.

I saw a video on Facebook the other week, you might have seen it. A 14 year old attempts to buy cigarettes and alcohol which both get denied because he has no ID. He then goes into a private gun shop and buys a gun in 10 mins with next to no checks.

As long as your guns are legal and the access to guns is stupidly easy for anyone without any training or mental health checks, you're going to continue having massacres wether you think people are protected by guns or not.

And I'm sorry but I completley despise that argument you've brought up. Giving teachers guns is not going to stop massacres, it's going to create massacres. If you gave every teacher in America a gun, I will put everything I own on it that a teacher will have already shot a student within a month. Teachers get depressed and students will piss them off constantly all day, you only need 1 of them to snap and you will have dead children.

A ban is a long term solution and a short term problems, more guns is a short term solution and a long term problem.

As far as the kid with the alcohol and guns is concerned, he should've never gotten a gun. I don't know if you know how it works, but one of the first things they do is ask for your ID and start a background check. That kid getting a gun was the seller being lazy, just like how some minors can get alcohol and cigarettes. I haven't seen that video, but I guarantee you, there was a lot of cherry picking there.

As far as teachers and guns, look at cops. They deal with A LOT worse than what a teacher deals with on a day to day basis, yet cops don't just snap and shoot. There is some police brutality and "accidentally" grabbing the gun instead of the taser, but if you're that worried about a teacher snapping, you need to take a look at your school system and see what can be changed.

A ban is just a band-aid. As others have brought up, look how well bans have kept drugs off the streets.

Bhoy wrote

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Obscurum wrote "]

Bhoy wrote While I don't entirely disagree that a ban on guns would be ineffective within the US, I have never really understood why people feel the need to protect their rights to guns so badly even to an extent of promoting and encouraging ownership.

I'm not entirely sure on your source for gun related homicides last year (I don't disagree with it) but the BBC reported that it was 13,286.

What I don't understand is that the major argument of owning guns is self defence. Are you aware of how many homicides and justified as self defence? It's 259 (2012 figure).

So in reality, that's about 2% of homicides with guns are made in self defence.

I seriously struggle to comprehend how that number is a reasonable and justified reason for gun ownership.

Would the homicide rate go up if you started to ban guns? Probably due to less fear in criminals and a retaliation against the government.

However over a 50 year gap, would the rate of homicides still be above what it is now? In my opinion, no and I think it would drop significantly.

Without a doubt, if you had no guns then you'd have significantly less homicides and less mass killings. I don't think anyone can disagree with that. Your only obstacle is the amount of guns in circulation and a black market that would be incredibly difficult to track and break down.

However that is not my decision to make. I live where guns are illegal and I have never felt the need for one because we don't need to protect our self against other guns. Your situation is different however I still whole hardheartedly disagree with guns, even in the US.

I could be wrong here, but I found the study you cited for the statistic, "Are you aware of how many homicides and justified as self defence? It's 259 (2012 figure)."
[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

I'm not disputing its accuracy, but I want to have a closer look at a chart a bit further on in the study, page 8.

Click to View Content

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

I only want to focus on the property crime aspect of the chart because I'm not entirely convinced that people should be able to conceal carry, perhaps that's a conversation for another time.

This chart - at face value - shows that of the 84 million property crimes committed between 2007 and 2011, 103 thousand people defended themselves with a firearm.
The chart shows this as 0.1 percent.

The problem with this chart is that it includes the following categories:
- 'Property crime, victim not present' Absence is not a reaction. That number should not be included.
- Considering that we are discussing what kinds of weapons people should protect themselves with and the efficacy of those weapons, the category 'Offered no resistance' should not be included.
- 'Nonconfrontational tactics include yelling, running, or arguing' should not be included for the same reason.
- 'Unknown reaction' should not be included because we don't know what they used to defend themselves which is unhelpful when talking about what weapons should be used.
- 'Other reaction' is also very unhelpful in this conversation for the same reason as 'Unknown reaction'

That reduces the number of instances we are interested in to around 562 thousand and bumps the percentage of people who repelled an intruder with a firearm up to just above 18%.
It leaves us with 6% of people defending themselves with a weapon, and 74% defending themselves without a weapon.

According to the DoJ, 61% of offenders were unarmed when violence occurred during a home invasion, while 12% were armed with a firearm.
This data was collected over a 4 year period, so over a 5 year period, like 2007 - 2011, these statistics would increase slightly, you can tell me if my math is correct later on.
[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

The chart states underneath that:

"Of this number [our 18%], it is not known whether the use of a gun would even be a legal response to the property crime."

Therefore, we now have 18% of people defending themselves with a firearm, and with the increase in 1 year of crimes for the DoJ statistics, 15% of intruders being armed with firearms.
74% of people defending themselves without a weapon, and with the DoJ statistics and a 1 year increase in crime, 76% of people facing an intruder who was unarmed.

These statistics - at face value - now paint a picture more in favor with the view that gun ownership is necessary to fight off the armed intruders.
But that is only at face value.

The point of this is simply to show that statistics - as they exist at the moment - are almost useless.
They are always limited in what they show and because this is such a complex issue we need complex statistics to discuss it.

We don't know how many of the people who used firearms to repel an intruder didn't use reasonable force.
It isn't logical to suggest that a correlation between the numbers of armed intruders and armed defenders means that armed intruders were therefore all repelled by armed defenders.
We don't know how many of the people who fought an intruder with a weapon used reasonable force.

According to the CPS, the reaction to disproportionate force is explained as:

... it might seem reasonable to you at the time but, with hindsight, your actions may seem disproportionate. The law will give you the benefit of the doubt in these circumstances.
This only applies if you were acting in self-defence or to protect others in your home and the force you used was disproportionate disproportionate force to protect property is still unlawful.

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

We don't know how many of the people in our percentages were defending their property with disproportionate force.
We don't know how many of them were alone and not in immediate danger but still decided to attack disproportionately.
We don't know how many of them were protecting their families and attacked using reasonable force.

18%, to me, seems to be a figure far too large to simply dismiss, and given the lenient view of reasonable force in US law, it wouldn't be much less than 18% who did use reasonable force to defend themselves which, again, would only support the face value statistic of correlation between the DoJ's 15% of intruders armed with a firearm and our 18%

With that being said, as I feel I have adequately shown, statistics don't do us much good here.
Unfortunately they are the only things which matter in this discussion and the only things which can actually make or break a point.
I think that the people collecting these statistics need to catch up with this issue, and that the people using statistics need to be more tentative about their proposed helpfulness.

Feel free to point out any flaws in my reasoning here. You have already managed to shift my view on the issue of it being a 'small chance' to encounter an aggressor with a firearm.
I did think it would be a much larger percentage than it is now reasonable to suggest it would be, but still not small enough for me to agree that it would be a good reason to ban guns.

I am not going to lie mate, I'm kind of a bit confused by all of these statistics you've just handed me haha.

From what I can understand, there isn't much I disagree with. I'm not sure if you considered the point about how many attacks defended with a gun were actually necessary. I know 18% were protected but that number must be substantially lower when we've already considered that only 259 cases of homicide with a firearm were justified.

Should we say like half of those homicides were related to protecting a property?

130 / (103,000 / 4) x 100 = 0.5%

So in reality, only about 0.5% of the time where people need to protect themselves with guns against an intruder, they actually need to use it (it's probably around 1/2% when you consider people who don't die from being shot).

It's just nothing more than my opinion that I don't consider them a justified reason for security and I think it's just a growing problem by adding more guns for 'protection' which you can never recover from. If you had banned your weapons when the UK and Australia had done so, you might not be in the mess you find yourself in now.

I'm sorry, I couldn't step out of this one. So 0.5% is enough to say that guns aren't needed for protection, yet 0.0003% (the percent of the population who are murdered by guns) is such a horrible number we need to ban guns because of it? Logic is failing me on that one...

I don't disagree that there is not regulations in place like taking ID to prevent the minors from purchasing guns. However, this is not the same as buying cigarettes or alcohol. What are cigarettes going to do? And I and many other other have been drinking long before it was legal to do so. They are both just small time problems which has no real consequences.

However for anyone to just go in to a shop and buy a gun without submitting to mental tests and having to wait a long time to stop any immediate use of the guns is more than unacceptable.

Even with ID, it's still stupid to be able to walk in and buy a gun. The ID wasn't even the point really, I was just showing how easy they are to buy and how untraceable these guns are in the long term.

Cops is not a subtitle comparison and you even admitted the problem yourself, cops do commit murder quite often actually, how many do you actually think happen that aren't caught on someone's phone? Teaches will shoot children and being on a neutral standpoint, I think it is utter stupidity to even consider giving people guns inside of a school.

And do you think if an attacker decided to shoot up a school, they're not going to shoot the teacher first and then the class? Do we need to start arming kids now?

The only way to stop the massacres is to stop giving them access to guns. Giving away more guns for 'protection' has never worked and if you keep doing it, it's never going to work and it will only cause more easy access and more massacres.



That percentage is not taken from for same value and have no correlation.

I said guns are only used 0.5% of the time when someone is confronted in a home invasion.

You said 0.0003% (0.0004% is the actual number) are murdered by guns last year.

The reason I think guns should not be legal for protection is that only 2% of that murder rate is actually used in protection.

The other 98% is just straight murder not within the law.

What logic are you failing to understand? I'm assuming you read that wrong.