Quote: Interesting, but that doesn't prove anything other than the fact that someone can steal a gun and murder someone.
It proves that if there were fewer guns, it would happen fewer times.
Quote: Shootings in hospitals don't occur regularly, and hospitals are well guarded (For the most part.).
The study found 154 shootings in hospitals over 11 years. That's not frequent, but an average of 14 times a year isn't meager either.
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Quote: You think a shooting that happens when someone unarmed takes a weapon off someone who is armed has to happen most of the time in order for that to be a serious consideration when arming people in the first place?
Sure, people are restricted from driving when they are drunk. Not all drunk people crash into or kill other people and they certainly for the most part don't intend to, but the law does indeed keep such people from cars while they are in that state of inebriation.
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Quote: That's baloney. Your point is that more guns make more people safer. I'm saying that even when taking into account when guns deter violence, when you take accidents, suicides, etc. into account, statistically overall the presence of guns make people less safe In other words, the likelihood of your own gun killing you or someone else in your family for ANY reason is much greater than the likelihood of you using that gun in self defense in a way that would have saved you or a family member.
The truth is, people commit suicide more often if the means are readily available to them and the vast majority of people don't go out of their way to commit suicide. Hence, if a gun is unavailable to them, they are far less likely to seek out an alternative means of suicide. Less gun ownership then would drastically decrease the number of suicides:
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/11/9126891/gun-suicide-rate
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Quote: You keep saying things that are just wrong. Since the mid-90s, the homicide rate has been dropping drastically in D.C.
You're getting cause and correlation confused. The gun ban was instituted because there was so much gun violence. It was already going up, and obviously the ban couldn't stop all the guns that were already out there so you shouldn't act like the gun ban was ever going to massively decrease gun violence.
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Quote: Bans aren't removed because they are ineffective but because Republicans are doing the bidding of the NRA. Again, I'm not calling for a ban on all guns, just much heavier regulation like the rest of the industrialized world.
Don't be obtuse. Pointing out that a few Democrats vote with the NRA does not discount that Republicans overwhelmingly do so to the point of being against even the most sensible gun regulations. Trump overturned an Obama rule to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill! Again, the assault weapons ban didn't destroy all of the thousands of assault weapons already out there, so it was never going to erase gun violence with them. It also had loopholes that let people get around it. But based on a Brady Center study, the ban nevertheless reduced the number of criminal usages of assault weapons from 4.82% to 1.61% That's a significant two-thirds decrease.
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Quote: You didn't answer my question. Right now, automatic weapons are banned. Are you in favor of overturning that ban? If not, why not?
So if you agree that at some level of potency, guns should be banned from civilian use, it's really only a discussion of what level that should be, not that guns shouldn't be banned because you just agreed that some should.
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Quote: Guns are minimally regulated and the NRA fights even the most sensible regulations. So tell me, why can every other industrialized country on average have one twentieth of the rate of gun deaths as the United States? What are they doing that we aren't?
I don't want a flat-out gun ban, but you still have answered my question. What's the biggest factor that makes gun deaths on average 20 times higher in the United States than in other industrialized countries? Do you deny that it's because the United States has nearly half of the civilian-owned guns in the world despite having less than 5% of the world's population?
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