US House of Representatives passes bill loosening gun restrictions - Polidicks

I can get a lot of what Proboardslol is saying. 10,000 homicides a year from guns, 30,000 deaths a year from human-driven vehicles- that's a [B]lot[/B] of [I]real people[/I] with loved ones needlessly dying. I'd be outraged if someone close to me suffered an avoidable death made possible because other people wanted their freedom to drive or shoot merely recreationally, just the same as I'd probably be pissed off losing my guns because of something I had nothing to do with. Frankly as someone who loves guns and likes driving, I would be open to fairly restrictive regulations on each. The issue, I think- is where does it end? I think all life is precious and should be protected at all costs, but people will keep finding ways to die by accident or kill others until everyone is locked in small cubes for their entire lives. How do you keep prevent needless death without ruining life?

[QUOTE]Rep. Elizabeth Esty, D-Conn., called the bill an attempt to undermine states' rights, "hamstring law enforcement and [B]allow dangerous criminals to walk around with hidden guns anywhere and at any time[/B]. It's unspeakable that this is Congress' response to the worst gun tragedies in American history."[/QUOTE] Such bright senators we have that don't know what a CCW permit entails.

If I thought it'd end violence and senseless deaths I'd be behind a full gun and car ban today. All statistics point to it not doing shit, ergo it isn't the right solution.

[QUOTE=Grenadiac;52960461]If I thought it'd end violence and senseless deaths I'd be behind a full gun and car ban today. All statistics point to it not doing shit, ergo it isn't the right solution.[/QUOTE] I think the idea is less to end it and more to cut down on numbers and make violent acts and lethal mistakes harder to carry out. Either way, I'm not really for a full gun/car ban. I think the maximum of what I might want done is a severe limitation of where you're allowed to carry and use them. Especially in cities, I don't think handguns should be seen outside of the home or an indoor range there. It'd also only be part of the solution, working on poverty and healthcare (especially mental healthcare) would probably go a lot further in preventing gun death, but that's easier said than done. Car deaths would probably go significantly lower if you got rid of booze, but that didn't go so well the last time we tried it.

[QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;52960457]Such bright senators we have that don't know what a CCW permit entails.[/QUOTE] Democrats are to guns what the GOP is to basically everything that isn't guns.

[QUOTE=Kigen;52960243]What quite a few like to point out is there is almost no correlation between gun ownership percentages and crime rates. There are plenty of examples of this fact. [url]http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf[/url][/QUOTE] Snopes says that paper isn't reliable: [url]https://www.snopes.com/harvard-flaw-review/[/url] [QUOTE][b]The paper in question was not peer-reviewed, it didn't constitute a study, and it misrepresented separate research to draw shaky, unsupported conclusions.[/b][/QUOTE] [QUOTE]While identifying details were curiously absent on the five pages that followed, it was clear the “study” in question was an item titled “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?” originally published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (Volume 30, Number 2) [PDF]. [b]Of primary importance is the subsequent, widely misapplied label of the word “study” with reference to the 2007 item in question.[/b] The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy describes itself as “one of the most widely circulated student-edited law reviews and the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship.” Papers published in that journal are (while perhaps competitively sourced) [b]in no way equivalent to peer-reviewed research[/b] published in a credible science-related journals as “studies.” Use of the term “study” to refer that 2007 article dishonestly suggested that the assertions made by its authors were gathered and vetted under more rigorous study conditions, which didn’t appear to be the case.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]In short, [b]the purported 2007 Harvard “study” with “astonishing” findings was in fact a polemic paper penned by two well-known gun rights activists[/b]. Its findings were [b]neither peer-reviewed nor subject to academic scrutiny of any sort[/b] prior to its appearance, and the publication that carried it was a self-identified [b]ideology-based editorial outlet[/b] edited by Harvard students. The paper [b]disingenuously misrepresented extant research to draw its conclusions[/b], and researchers at Harvard (among which Kates and Mauser were not included) later [b]objected to the paper’s being framed as a “study” from Harvard[/b] (rather than a law review paper). The paper wasn’t “virtually unpublicized research” (as BeliefNet claimed); rather, it was simply not deemed noteworthy at the time it was published due to the fact it was neither a study nor much more than a jointly-written editorial piece representing its authors’ unsupported opinions.[/QUOTE] The authors appeared to have a political agenda, and it appears to be made up of cherrypicked/false statistics used to push forward that political agenda. From the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Public_Health_Association]American Public Health Association[/url]: [url]http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301409[/url] [QUOTE]In a bivariate analysis (a GEE negative binomial model with year fixed effects and accounting for clustering by state, but without any other predictor variables besides gun ownership), the gun ownership proxy was a significant predictor of firearm homicide rates (incidence rate ratio [IRR] = 1.011; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.005, 1.018). The final GEE negative binomial model revealed 6 significant predictors of firearm homicide rates: gun ownership proxy (IRR = 1.009; 95% CI = 1.004, 1.014), percentage Black, income inequality, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, and incarceration rate (Table 2). [b]This model indicates that for each 1 percentage point increase in the gun ownership proxy, the firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9%.[/b][/QUOTE] This means that, accounting for other variables, when we compare all of the states in the US there's an almost 1:1 relationship between the increase in gun ownership and the amount of gun violence (firearm homicide). Any other study/paper that suggests that there is no/inverse correlation between gun ownership and crime is probably similarly biased/incorrect. That said, they're definitely related/correlated, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there is a direct causal link between the two. As an example, here's a systematic map of the causes of obesity (which is another big social issue) based on research from many cross-disciplinary studies: [thumb]http://www.shiftn.com/obesity/images/Full-Map.jpg[/thumb] As you can see, big social issues like this have many causes which can all relate to one another in a complex network of relationships, so even accounting for other variables may not fully describe the relationships involved.

[QUOTE=thelurker1234;52960070]And what about New Hampshire? It's ranked pretty low for the US too in gun ownership, and has the highest median income of every state and the lowest poverty rate. And don't try to zing by saying that I'm neglecting those as factors, I acknowledge that they have an effect as well by decreasing the general crime rate.[/QUOTE] If we want to look at high levels of gun ownership, the top ten are Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, Mississippi, Idaho, Arkansas, Alabama, and North Dakota. If we order all 50 states from lowest homicide rate to highest, those states are #18, #40, #19, #16, #24, #46, #15, #41, #48, and #5 respectively. Six in the lower 25, four in the upper 25. New Hampshire has the lowest homicide rate in the country, but also some of the laxest gun regulation, and the highest number of registered [i]fully automatic machine guns[/i] of anywhere in the country. The stats do not paint any clear correlation between firearm laws, firearm prevalence, and homicide rates. [QUOTE=Simplemac3;52960448]How do you keep prevent needless death without ruining life?[/QUOTE] The simplest place to start is with restrictions that address significant factors so you can have the biggest impact, rather than blanket measures that disproportionately affect law-abiding people and at best will achieve the desired result through slow trickle-down effects.

[QUOTE=catbarf;52962175]If we want to look at high levels of gun ownership, the top ten are Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, Mississippi, Idaho, Arkansas, Alabama, and North Dakota. If we order all 50 states from lowest homicide rate to highest, those states are #18, #40, #19, #16, #24, #46, #15, #41, #48, and #5 respectively. Six in the lower 25, four in the upper 25. New Hampshire has the lowest homicide rate in the country, but also some of the laxest gun regulation, and the highest number of registered [I]fully automatic machine guns[/I] of anywhere in the country. The stats do not paint any clear correlation between firearm laws, firearm prevalence, and homicide rates.[/QUOTE] This is a pretty terrible way to do statistics since you just listed a bunch of very diverse states, found that there's a wide spread, and concluded that nothing regarding gun prevalence can be involved while ignoring a plethora of other variables that do matter. Like, there's a reason this is something that people trained in epidemiology, statistics, and criminology still find a challenge to examine. If you didn't even rank them in order, I would likely still have been able to straight-up guess which 6 were in the lower 25, and which 4 in the top 25. I can't even find reliable statistics that indicate whether NH has the highest amount of fully automatic machine guns, and they are still pretty low when it comes to ownership rates. There's also the factors I brought up before of it being a very small state with the highest median income in the country.

[QUOTE=proboardslol;52955372]Ok my hobby is collecting 90% enriched uranium[/QUOTE] I like how you accuse people of strawmanning and then post this lol

[QUOTE=Amber902;52964596]I like how you accuse people of strawmanning and then post this lol[/QUOTE] I dont even know what his point or logic is with that. Like i dont think you can make an intercontinental ballistic missile in your garage, and comparing the destructive nature of a nuclear weapon to really fast metal pebbles punching holes in things seems out of proportion.

[QUOTE=Amber902;52964596]I like how you accuse people of strawmanning and then post this lol[/QUOTE] Nah but you see it's not strawmanning when he does it you dishonest person!