Sendraks wrote:

Teague wrote:You can't own a fully automatic one in the US I think but I wasn't arguing that. I was pointing out you can own an AR-15 and a .22 can be lethal.

The point is that its little more than a single shot rifle in an AR-15 body or a semi-automatic .22 in an AR-15 body. Its cute, but for the purposes of having a single shot rifle, there are far better options and also for the .22 semi version as well.

And yes, .22's can be lethal. Being fired from the housing of an AR-15 doesn't magically make them more so.

So basically saying you can own an AR-15 is different to what it means in the US, where you can own a semi-automatic variant chambered to fire nato rounds.

Teague wrote:You need a section 1 firearms licence to own one of those long barreled pistols in the UK.

3.8 Any long-barreled pistols with dimensions greater than those stipulated in section 5(1)(aba)
of the 1968 Act (such as the long barreled Uberti Cattleman revolver) are not caught by
this section of the Act and may legally be held on a firearm certificate.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... aw_v13.pdf

Good chap on finally linking to the firearms licensing guidance. I wasn't sure if the pistol in the picture had the dimensions exceeding those covered in the section 5 material I already listed. If it does, then yes it isn't covered by the prohibition for pistols. Its also an unlikely weapon for anyone going on a rampage with given its bulk and lack of rapid fire/self loading capability.

Spearthrower wrote:

Byron wrote:Spearthrower, yes, of course it might be decided that, on balance, more lives will be saved by banning guns. My point is simply that this isn't a open-and-shut case.

The point I made was actually that the possession of guns in a defensive context could also lead to death that would otherwise not have occurred.

Another facet of this is that if you are a burglar in the UK, you don't need to take a gun with you. Whereas in the US, presumably you have to work under the assumption that the person whose house you're burgling possesses a gun, so you would need a gun as a tool of the trade. Also, if a criminal encounters a person while burgling in the US, wouldn't it be 'rational' (in quotes) for them to assume that their intended victim could actually harm them and engage in a little pre-emptive aggression?

Much like with nuclear weapons, it's as much the proliferation of them that's a problem because their mere existence ensures more potential for them needing to be used.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program defines burglary as the unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or theft. To classify an offense as a burglary, the use of force to gain entry need not have occurred. The UCR Program has three subclassifications for burglary: forcible entry, unlawful entry where no force is used, and attempted forcible entry. The UCR definition of “structure” includes an apartment, barn, house trailer or houseboat when used as a permanent dwelling, office, railroad car (but not automobile), stable, and vessel (i.e., ship).
Overview

In 2012, there were an estimated 2,103,787 burglaries, a decrease of 3.7 percent when compared with 2011 data.
The number of burglaries decreased 5.6 percent when compared with 2008 and was down 2.4 percent when compared with the 2003 estimate. (See Tables 1 and 1A.)
The estimated number of burglaries accounted for 23.4 percent of the estimated number of property crimes. (Based on Table 1.)
By subcategory, 59.7 percent of burglaries involved forcible entry, 33.9 percent were unlawful entries, and 6.3 percent were attempted forcible entry. (See Table 19.)
Victims of burglary offenses suffered an estimated $4.7 billion in property losses in 2012; overall the average dollar loss per burglary offense was $2,230. (Based on Tables 1 and 23.)
Burglaries of residential properties accounted for 74.5 percent of all burglary offenses. (See Table 23.)

Expanded burglary data

Expanded offense data are the details of the various offenses that the UCR Program collects beyond the count of how many crimes law enforcement agencies report. These details may include the type of weapon used in a crime, the type or value of items stolen, and so forth. In addition, expanded data include trends (for example, 2-year comparisons) and rates per 100,000 inhabitants.

Expanded information regarding burglary is available in the following tables:

Trends (2-year): Tables 12, 13, 14, and 15

Rates (per 100,000 inhabitants): Tables 16, 17, 18, and 19

Offense Analysis: Tables 7 and 23

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/c ... e/burglary

Security Statistics
Here are some home security statistics that may shock you… And hopefully motivate you to take action

2,000,000 home burglaries are reported each year in the United States.
About 30 percent of all burglaries are through an open or unlocked window or door.
Nearly 66 percent of all burglaries are residential (home) break-ins.
Renters are just as likely to be the victims of property crime as homeowners.
The highest percentage of burglaries occur during the summer months.
Homes without security systems are up to 300% more likely to be broken into.


Burglary Facts

Every 13 seconds a home intrusion is committed.
2.5 million+ home intrusions are committed each year.
Only 17% of the homes in U.S. have a security system.
2,500+ cars stolen per day… almost 2 cars a minute.
Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the U.S.
1 out of 3 residential assaults are a result of a burglary.
85% of break-ins are from non-professionals that are usually more desperate and dangerous.
People want security and need peace of mind.
Insurance agencies can offer discounts up to 20% for auto insurance when a home security system is installed.
Home security statistics tell us that 95% of break-ins needed some amount of force to break-in.
Thieves prefer easy access, through an unlocked doors or windows.
Home security statistics tell us that the type of tools used to break in are usually simple; a screwdriver, pliers, pries bars, and small hammers are most common.
Police usually only clear 13% of all reported burglaries due to lack of witnesses or physical evidence.


and read the rest here....

http://www.safeguardtheworld.com/statistics.html

Teague wrote:Except the pistol pictured above will fire 6 bullets as fast as you can pull the trigger.

Teague wrote: I'm assuming something like a glock would be legal too as long as it meets the requirements as the ruling stats any pistol?

ii) any self-loading or pump-action rifled gun other than one which is chambered for .22 rimfire cartridges (section 5(1)(ab));

Oldskeptic wrote:

ED209 wrote:

Briton wrote:

Briton wrote:

Here's an article that argues that statistics disagree with that.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc ... ths/69354/

Interestingly they claim statistical analysis debunks your theory that mental health is a significant issue.

Oldskeptic wrote:Yes, creative statistical analysis can debunk just about anything. It's good that the author acknowledges that correlation does not imply causation.

Okay...we know that and that's why it was acknowledged. What stats/evidence did you use to come to the conclusion that gun control 'haven't done a damn bit of good'?

It's funny because he keeps mentioning dunblane, but is incapable of accepting that the resulting handgun ban has led to zero repetitions in the 20 years since, making it just about most unarguable good done by gun control laws anywhere.

New gun control laws were passed 1989 after the Hungerford massacre. That didn't prevent the Dunblane massacre in '96. And as for zero repetitions in the 20 years since even stricter gun control laws were passed after Dunblane. It's not true, those new restrictions didn't prevent the Cumbria shootings in 2010.

ED209 wrote:Was it in a few dollars more, lee van cleef had a comically oversized pistol like that with a rifle stock that screwed to the grip.

Oldskeptic wrote:The lesson learned by the UK and the US should be that stricter gun control laws do nothing towards reducing the number of these kinds of incidents.

Pass a law against semi-automatic rifles and someone intent on killing will use semi-automatic hands. Pass a law against semi-automatic handguns and someone intent on killing will use 22. rifles and shotguns. Pass laws against 22. rifles and shotguns and someone intent on killing will find some other weapon like a sharp machete, someone hacking away at a gymnasium full of children and a couple of teachers could kill and maim bucket loads of them.

Oldskeptic wrote:When I say these kinds of massacres I'm not linking by where they happened or who they happened to or by weapons used. The common denominator is disaffected, disgruntled people that feel they have been unfairly treated and or harmed by a certain group or society as a whole. These people once they decided to seek revenge by killing are not going to be stopped by what weapons are not available.

Sendraks wrote:

Teague wrote:Except the pistol pictured above will fire 6 bullets as fast as you can pull the trigger.

It depends. If it is a double action revolver or not. If it is not, then you need cock the hammer before releasing the trigger.
If it is double action that's another matter.

Teague wrote: I'm assuming something like a glock would be legal too as long as it meets the requirements as the ruling stats any pistol?

A glock is a self loading pistol. Which would be covered by the following in the list of prohibitions. I suspect this would also be true for the revolver you listed if it was double action, as it would be considered to be self loading.

ii) any self-loading or pump-action rifled gun other than one which is chambered for .22 rimfire cartridges (section 5(1)(ab));

Teague wrote:As long as the bullet is a .22 you can have a self loading pistol like a glock or this 1911....

Teague wrote:Incidentally, My friend has a 17hmr long rifle which is bolt action. However, the bolt action is fast and he could fire the 24 round magazine in around 20 seconds.

Warren Dew wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:How can anyone from America really get into this with a Brit, when the United States has a gun death rate over forty times higher per capita than they do in the United Kingdom? From what position of authority or evidence can you even enjoin that argument?

Some of us ignore any singling out of "gun deaths", because we think dying from a knife is just as bad as dying from a gun; basically the term is just an excuse for using exaggerated statistics.

Now, the murder rate is higher in the U.S. than in the UK by a factor of 4, but the overall crime rate is higher in the UK than in the US by a factor of 3, and accounts for a thousand times more crime. Both may be affected by gun control.

Lots more interesting statistics here:

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-inf ... ates/Crime

Sendraks wrote:

Teague wrote:As long as the bullet is a .22 you can have a self loading pistol like a glock or this 1911....

Yes, I believe that was clear in the prohibitions I provided. The weapons must be chambered to fire .22rimfire cartridges, which are a lower velocity round than centre fire cartridges. Yes, you can kill with these, but you are far less likely to do so than you would if you were using an actual Glock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glock

To be clear, when you say "you can own a Glock" what you mean is "you can own a Glock that's been modified to only fire .22 rimfire rounds" as opposed to an actual Glock, which fires vastly more powerful ammo.

Teague wrote:Incidentally, My friend has a 17hmr long rifle which is bolt action. However, the bolt action is fast and he could fire the 24 round magazine in around 20 seconds.

That must be nice for him.
If you're making the point that yes, he could probably kill a number of people with that weapon, I'd simply refer you to the comments I made to Oldskeptic as to why such weapons were not banned in light of the Cumbria shootings in 2010.

GT2211 wrote:I read the study, that is how I made it past the page you noted, to to table 3 and got that figure. The authors do acknowledge that it is likely that people are overstating the rate at which they wound or kill the offender, but they downplay it saying its 'probably too high'.

Their figures show that more people report injuring or killing people with firearms in self defense, than there were firearm injuries/wounding of any kind in the entire year. These figures aren't just a little off, they aren't even remotely accurate. The authors attempt to explain it by suggesting that maybe people are overestimating their marksmanship by 'remembering with favor' and giving inaccurate information on that question. But since the answers are so far off on that question, it should raise serious red flags to researchers about the reliability of these peoples answers to other survey questions related to DGU.

And its issue with extrapolating from a small sample pool applies to the whole study. Surveying a couple thousand people for an event that happens to somewhere between 1 out of every couple hundred people to 1 out of every few thousand. Politico had a piece on these studies this year

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... yth-114262

On Sept. 21, 2014, Eusebio Christian was awakened by a noise. Assuming a break-in, he rushed to the kitchen with his gun and began firing. All his shots missed but one, which struck his wife in the face.

What do these and so many other cases have in common? They are the byproduct of a tragic myth: that millions of gun owners successfully use their firearms to defend themselves and their families from criminals. Despite having nearly no academic support in public health literature, this myth is the single largest motivation behind gun ownership. It traces its origin to a two-decade-old series of surveys that, despite being thoroughly repudiated at the time, persists in influencing personal safety decisions and public policy throughout the United States.

In 1992, Gary Kleck and Marc Getz, criminologists at Florida State University, conducted a random digit-dial survey to establish the annual number of defensive gun uses in the United States. They surveyed 5,000 individuals, asking them if they had used a firearm in self-defense in the past year and, if so, for what reason and to what effect. Sixty-six incidences of defensive gun use were reported from the sample. The researchers then extrapolated their findings to the entire U.S. population, resulting in an estimate of between 1 million and 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... z3nj9Gg7yc

Teague wrote:When I said "Like" a glock, I meant to use it as an example that you can have any pistol. The round it fires isn't really that important.

Teague wrote: As for the bolt action, I was more pointing out, as I was with the pistols, that these weapons are still available in the UK but we don't have the same issue as the US.

Teague wrote: I'm trying to make a case that legislation is effective over here but that isn't the only issue of course that stops gun violence as we don't have the same culture when it comes to firearms.

Oldskeptic wrote:

It's hardly rocket science. The only real sticking point is a simple refusal to accept a simple truth rather than any kind of creative clash of ideas. The narcissism and sheer depravity of those who refuse to give up guns no matter how many people get killed will not yield to debate. All you can do is call it out for what it is.

calling people that disagree with your simple solution narcissistic and depraved isn't helping your case other than with people that are already just as short sighted as you are being.

Sendraks wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:So, why isn't the government learning the same lesson from Cumbria? Is there some cut off point between 12 and 17 where the number of deaths are acceptable?

If you weren't so horribly biased, you'd have already thought this through.

1 - Shotguns and Bolt action rifles are most commonly used for hunting and pest control.
2 - Amongst the UKs hunters and farmers are many rich landowning types.
3 - Rich, lobbying types, who are part of influential groups.
4 - Also, rich landowning types tend to be Tories. 2010 we had a Tory Government.

It doesn't take much brainpower to figure out why the Government did press for a ban on those firearm types following Cumbria.

Pistols and semi-automatics didn't have widespread use...

Oldskeptic wrote:So, the difference as you see it is that a man with one 22. rifle and one shotgun can't quite kill as many people as a man with two semi-automatic handguns and two revolvers? That's the difference that stricter laws made?

The lesson learned by the UK and the US should be that stricter gun control laws do nothing towards reducing the number of these kinds of incidents.

You've slipped wholly into the world of the irrational at this point.

Lets see.
Were the types of weapons used at Hungerford used at Dunblane? – No.
Were the types of weapons used at Dunblane used in Cumbria ? – No.
Was the expected result of banning those firearms types achieved? – Yes.

And also - YOU DON'T KNOW HOW MANY INCIDENTS WERE PREVENTED BY THESE CHANGES IN LAW.
Maybe its a failing of the UK systems, but we're not very good at collecting data on incidents that didn't occur.

Oldskeptic wrote:When I say these kinds of massacres I'm not linking by where they happened or who they happened to or by weapons used. The common denominator is disaffected, disgruntled people that feel they have been unfairly treated and or harmed by a certain group or society as a whole. These people once they decided to seek revenge by killing are not going to be stopped by what weapons are not available.

I agree that limiting the availability of weapons doesn't magically stop people from going on erratic, bloody thirsty, rampages, but it does potentially decrease the amount of harm they can do.

In addition, limiting access to weapons with which it is relatively easy to kill people, means that individuals will have to be very highly motivated to go out and do harm with a melee based weapon. Be it kitchen knife, or baseball bat or whatever.

And you're right in that the only way to meaningfully tackle the problem of such incidents, is to look at the underlying social factors and address those. I absolutely agree that you can't just ban firearms in the US, because it won't achieve the results that it has in the UK. Its a larger nation, the attitude to firearms use is different. Tighter regulation would probably go someway to achieving the change the US needs, mainly through dint that tighter regulation tends to produce useful data which can be used to then drive further meaningful actions.

Fallible wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:

Fallible wrote:Oldskeptic - The laws were passed in 1988. And the laws after Hungerford didn't deal with pistols, so no, they wouldn't have stopped that. The restrictions passed after Dunblane were to do with pistols. The Cumbria shooting was carried out by a man with a shotgun. So no, it wouldn't have stopped that. There have been no mass killings with assorted firearms since Hungerford, and no mass killings involving pistols since Dunblane. In other words, the legislation worked.

In the Cumbria shootings Derrick Bird used a 22. rifle and a shot gun, how is that not assorted firearms? Thomas Hamilton at Dunblane used two 9mm Browning HP pistols and two Smith & Wesson M19 .357s, how is that not assorted firearms. Michael Robert at Hungerford used a handgun and two semi-automatic rifles, how is that assorted firearms and the 4 pistols at Dunblane is not.

OldSkeptic, you'll have to excuse my ignorance of firearms and the terminology related to firearms. Having never seen a real gun, let alone owned one or felt the need to do so, I am pretty ill-equipped to talk as you have about them. My point was that in each case that you referred to, the same guns were not used in a subsequent attack. A, singular. Remember that part. So for you to say that the subsequent legislation made absolutely no difference is a bit disingenuous.

Oldskeptic wrote:
Maybe not in the UK, but that's not the case in the US. Many people enjoy going out to gun ranges and shooting at targets with friends. Showing off their pistols [snip other stuff]

Oldskeptic wrote:If all you're looking for is different weapons being used to the same effect then you do have a point.

Oldskeptic wrote:When I say these kinds of massacres I'm not linking by where they happened or who they happened to or by weapons used. The common denominator is disaffected, disgruntled people that feel they have been unfairly treated and or harmed by a certain group or society as a whole. These people once they decided to seek revenge by killing are not going to be stopped by what weapons are not available.

tolman wrote:What makes you conclude that every such person is necessarily on a downward slope which will inevitably result in their attempting mass murder?

tolman wrote:Surely, some subset of people act impulsively at a peak of frustration which would pass given time?

tolman wrote:What makes you think that even in someone with compromised rationality the decision to seek revenge by killing is entirely independent of the possible means available to them, and their expectations of success?

tolman wrote:What if someone is well below average build - are they really going to be (and expect to be) as successful with a blade as with a gun?

tolman wrote:Though to be fair, having said that, if they picked their target location correctly, most people of any build would have a good chance of killing at least as many people with a vehicle as they could with a gun, even if targeting specific individuals might be difficult.

tolman wrote:But maybe that just wouldn't seem as romantic or impressive, even to an irrational mind.

Oldskeptic wrote:[...] And it is worth noting that not always, and not even often, are the people attacked the actual people that have caused the perceived wrongs and or humiliations. The people attacked are representative of those people, and in cases like Dunblane the targets are people that the perceived wrong doers care about. [...]