Thread: Discimination against gun owners

I brought up the UK mainly because gwahir wondered whether there has ever been a country that is similar to the US and has consistently restricted gun ownership over a long period of time. As I said above, the UK certainly fits the latter criteria, but whether it's "similar to the US" in the pertinent areas is more questionable. It's probably more similar to the US than almost any other country except perhaps Canada, but I still doubt that it's similar enough to use the UK gun control experience to predict what US gun control might accomplish.

I do agree that Britain's high crime rate isn't caused by it's strict gun control, and that easing British gun control probably won't improve public safety in the UK (though on a personal level, if I had to walk through Glasgow or Edinburgh or Aberdeen at night, I'd damn well want to have a gun on me). I wasn't trying to suggest that the UK is so violent because it has restricted guns, or that the solution to the UK's violence problem is to lift it's gun restrictions. I think the lesson to be taken from the UK is that violent crime is the product of a complex stew of social and cultural and economic factors, and that the availability of guns is a fairly minor factor in comparison to many of the others. So it's possible to have societies that have high gun ownership rates and fairly high violent crime rates (the US), societies that have very low gun ownership rates and VERY high violent crime rates (the UK), societies that have high gun ownership rates and fairly low violent crime rates (Switzerland), and so forth. The influence of gun ownership on a society's violent crime rates is lost among the much more significant influence of things like education, economic opportunity, the healthiness of the youth culture, drugs, and so on.

Originally Posted by gwahir

No, it does mean I think gun owning is pretty horiffic. Owning a weapon used specifically for killing people is just pretty horiffic to me. (We're not really talking about hunting in this discussion, though, but the owning of firearms for defensive purposes.) And if I were to own one, it would be for defense. So you're wrong on almost all counts.

But "gun owning" and "owning a weapon used specifically for killing" aren't the same thing. You can't discount hunting, for instance, just because we haven't been talking much about it in this thread. A lot of people who own guns do own them for the purpose of hunting rather than killing people, no matter how little we've discussed hunting thus far. The same is true of sport shooting, historical collecting, and so on. I feel like it's disingenuous to say that gun ownership as a whole is horrific because one use for guns is horrific it happens to be the use we've talked about the most in this thread.

Originally Posted by crunker

I don't understand why some people seem to be concerned when some of us openly admit to liking the feeling of shooting a firearm. What's wrong with liking power? Because, when you come down to it, that's what a firearm is--power.

....this does not help the pro-gun case.