Gun Control & RKBA
In reply to the discussion: Questions the left won't discuss about gun control, but should - and soon. [View all]gejohnston
(17,502 posts)One made fun of the absurd idea that guns can disappear if you ban it, like heroin. The other simply pointed out the logical fallacy you were using, circular logic. If fact, you used it again along with appeal to authority. Do you know what a logical fallacy is? It is something people skilled in critical thinking avoid. Certainly should be avoided when it comes to public policy. The problem with gun control activists, or any kind of prohibitionists, they can't make argument without them. Of course there are the standard propaganda techniques. The most common logical fallacies activists use are
appeal to emotion
ad hoc
bandwagon
ad hominem
genetic fallacy
The most common propaganda techniques are demonetization and card stacking.
I noticed at no time did you address the points I made. Instead you ignore use as facts articles that may or may not be relevant and, quite frankly, meaningless. Some police official blows his own horn about a lower lower murder rate. Is there any actual evidence that he wasn't just bullshitting? BTW, is the article using statistics from the Home Office? If so, they are pretty meaningless. It could simply be that the number of murders are the same, but fewer convictions for the crime. If ten people were murdered and the crime went unsolved or nobody is convicted for the crime, those homicides are simply not counted by the Home Office. That has been their policy since 1967. An apples to apples comparison, meaning if they counted their murders the same way the FBI does, the numbers would be two to three times what the HO reports.
It also said that a crack down on criminal gangs who had illegal guns, meaning they didn't just take the guns, they took the gangbangers too. Not proof, just more circular logic.
Since the UK has had gun licensing systems before our lifetimes, criminals didn't buy them in guns stores.
Your argument fails.
Australia's murder fell the past ten years. And? Every Australian state had some type of licencing system and some had registration. The National Firearms Agreement was in 1996. What the article forgets to mention that gun ownership and the number of privately owned guns in Australia have increased during that ten year period, now passing pre NFA levels. A fact that has gun prohibition activists clutching their pearls and screaming for even stricter laws. Meanwhile in the US, guns and gun ownership increase over the past 20 years, while murder and violent crime is half of what it was then. Oh, and heroin deaths have doubled in the US over the past ten years. There is no evidence that NFA had anything to do with the drop. There could be an infinite reasons for the drop including
biker gangs stopped killing each other
improved policing
aging population
improvements in the social safety net
finally getting rid of leaded gasoline
In case you were wondering
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline
Holding up the UK Parliament as some kind of paragon of wisdom ignores the problem of knee jerk laws they pass from the pointless handgun ban which only affected the few licensed target shooters to the despicable and, biologically at least, racist mass killing of harmless dogs based on stupidity and ignorance.