They can see the big picture. They can see, for example, that it won’t work, but that nobody cares that it won’t work, because politicians just want to look like they’re doing something and scared people just want to see something done. Actually fixing the problem doesn’t even enter into it. And after years of being made the scapegoat, they can see it coming from a ways off and are sick of it.

I mean, look beyond the surface for thirty seconds, would you? Every year in the US, you have 30,000 gun deaths. Yes, but now look at the next level of detail down. Are all those gun deaths the same? No, of course not, so how many were of what type?

20,000 were suicides. Canada and Australia both proved by doing it, that if you ban guns to prevent suicide by gun, you can succeed. Unfortunately, Canada and Australia both also proved by doing it, that if you deny suicidal people one means, they just choose another. Suicides by self-inflicted gunshot drop off to nearly zero; and then suicide by drowning, jumping, poison, self-inflicted knife wounds, car exhaust and every other method goes up and the final suicide rate remains unchanged.

So by implementing a gun ban as a solution instead of looking to the actual causes of the problem and addressing them, you’re ignoring 20,000 deaths as acceptable losses.

Look now at the remaining ten thousand or so. According to the US DoJ, two thirds of those are gang violence. Thing about gangs is, take away legally held firearms and you don’t generally disarm them. But lets say you have Harry Potter’s wand and you wave it and all the guns in the world vanish instantly. Now the gangs are reduced to beating and stabbing each other to death and, oh yeah, IEDs. You know, like the pipe bombs Dublin gangs have been using on each other for the last few years, including the one they found in a school this week. But let’s be generous and say you eliminate all their gun deaths (around six thousand) and they only manange to beat, stab and blow up four thousand. So that’s two thousand people you’ve saved so far.

What about the remaining three thousand gun deaths? Well, let’s give you the gun accidents right off the bat. That’s another four to five hundred in a bad year. So you’re up to 2500 lives saved now.

And the remaining 2500? Well, the thing is, some of those are going to be genuine cases of self-defence; and some are going to be premeditated murder; and some will be some form of manslaughter in between those two poles. But if it’s a genuine case of self-defence, then it was a him-or-you situation, only the innocent parties now didn’t have a gun to defend themselves so they’re dead (and the criminals involved lived). And if it was pre-meditated murder, well, if you’re evil enough to plan it, you’re evil enough to use another means if one is denied you, so you probably won’t save any of them. But lets be generous and say you save all the manslaughter cases. At a guess, that’s another thousand, maybe another fifteen hundred people right there.

So you saved maybe four thousand people, swapped between five and fifteen hundred lives (ie, you saved that many criminals and killed that many innocent people), and you made no difference at all to 26,000 deaths.

That’s back-of-an-envelope, but consider this too: according to the pro-gun-ban side of the debate in the US, firearms are used every year in 80,000 genuine self-defence situations (the 80,000 don’t show up in the gun death figures because not every situation required the firearm to be discharged or the criminal killed). The anti-gun-ban side has a much higher figure, in the six-to-seven-figure range, but let’s say they’re utterly biased and wrong and use the pro-gun-ban side’s figure.

If it’s a genuine self-defence situation and those innocent parties can’t defend themselves then the outcome is going to be a beating, or a rape or a murder or some other violent crime. So, implementing a complete gun ban (something you’d have to employ Harry Potter or Sooty to successfully do), you save about four thousand lives, you trade hundreds of innocent lives for hundreds of criminal lives, you have no effect on twenty-six thousand deaths, and you create eighty thousand beatings, rapes and murders.

Even at the most basic level of assessment, that plan is not a good one.

But when you say that the problem is not guns, but the people using them, you start doing things like funding mental health programs properly (that’s 20,000 lives you could save per year), like funding anti-gang policing and social programs properly (that’s at least six thousand lives you could save per year, along with tackling 80% of the crime in cities like Chicago. Now you’re looking at four thousand deaths per year, primarily made up from self-defence cases and premeditated murder; tackling the former would be helped by the increased funding you’re sending towards the police already, and the latter… well, that’s rather a hard nut to crack, but if you could reduce the deaths down to the point where the largest component was non-gang premeditated murder, you’re saving the equivalent of the entire population of a largish town every single year.

Me, I think that’s the better way to do it. But it’s kindof a big picture for a soundbite, isn’t it? Shame we can’t talk about the big picture…

@ Mark Dennehy, you forgot to bank the table. At least the views of Bruce Willis have encouraged you out of your shell.

So let’s hear of your recommendations for Ireland.

Since gun licensing laws were brought in in Australia in 1996 there has only been 1 mass shooting with 2 deaths. Overall gun deaths have also dropped by two thirds. You can’t legislate against insanity but you can sure as hell legislate against an insane person getting their murderous hands on a semi-automatic weapon.

Jessica, firstly Australia had firearms licencing since its foundation (in most states; some parts like Tazmania had no licencing until the early 90s) and a completely different approach to owning firearms; what could be enacted there is not necessarily possible to enact elsewhere, for reasons both legal and psychological.

Secondly, the incidents which caused the change in law there began with gang violence, and psychologists now think the subsequent incidents were spurred on by sensationalist mass media coverage causing copycat incidents (something you also see in the US and elsewhere – for example, listen to this psychologist speaking after a mass shooting in Germany: http://youtu.be/PezlFNTGWv4?t=1m39s )

Thirdly, the ban Australia brought in was in response to Port Arthur, where a man who would never have been granted a firearms licence because of a violent history broke the law by buying firearms without licences and went on a shooting spree. So in response to a law being broken… they wrote another law. And since then, researchers studying the law and its effects have found that:
- Gun suicides fell… and hanging suicides increased at the same rate that gun suicides fell, but continued to rise (the overall suicide rate actually increased; later efforts in mental healthcare brought the rate back down again)
- Legal gun ownership increased from the levels before Port Arthur.
- Firearms violence had been declining for a decade before Port Arthur, despite the perception caused by high levels of publicity given to what were at the time highly unusual tragedies.
- If you just take correlation as causation, there is the rather uncomfortable point that, to quote the WSJ “In 2008, the Australian Institute of Criminology reported a decrease of 9% in homicides and a one-third decrease in armed robbery since the 1990s, but an increase of over 40% in assaults and 20% in sexual assaults.” That’s a correlation, not a causative relationship — but then again, so is what you alluded to, and what’s sauce for the goose has to be sauce for the gander. (Otherwise, we’d have to admit that this is not a simple problem and requires further careful study, and if we did that we’d just be agreeing with the CDC and the National Academy of Sciences, two well-known opponents of the pro-gun side of the debate in the US)

Lastly, as to the the idea that the bans prevented mass shootings, I offer two points:
- Everyone thought that after Hungerford, and again after Dunblane and again after Cumbria. In Australia they thought so after Port Arthur and again after Monash (myself, I would have thought that if a law stopped mass shootings, you wouldn’t have any more mass shootings, rather than your interpretation, that we’d have more mass shootings but we could talk about them as though they were merely minor inconveniences to be ignored). It would seem we learn very slowly and that the lives lost in these tragedies truly are wasted because we never fix the actual problem, which is that we never enforce the laws we have (Hungerford, Dunblane, Port Arthur and Monash were all cases where the existing laws would have stopped the shootings had they just been enforced)

- The head of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Don Weatherburn, who arguably knows more about this than you or me, stated in 2005 in a letter to a Sydney newspaper (http://www.smh.com.au/news/letters/the-terrorism-debate-balance-v-the-bogyman/2005/10/31/1130720479201.html) that “It may come as a surprise to Simon Chapman (Letters, October 31) but, like him, I too strongly supported the introduction of tougher gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre.

It is always unpleasant to acknowledge facts that are inconsistent with your own point of view. But I thought that was what distinguished science from popular prejudice.“

@mark in considering the big picture you forgot to argue for the rights of cartels in surrounding countries that need all the legally purchased semi-auto assault rifles,.50 calibre machine guns and armour peircing long range rifles. If they are going to kill anyway, they might as well have something instead of a bat for self defence, but it may be at the expense of batting statistics.

Barney, I don’t think anyone needs to argue for those cartels.
I mean, for a start, they’re being sold arms by the ATF anyway!

He has definitely gone down in my estimation. Staline has gone up after his comments in support if the ban on assault weapons.

I am almost positive that he has never shot or blown anybody up. He is also correct to day that there is no evidence linking films and gun-violence. Sad to hear his thoughts though, how anybody can consider it a right written 220 years ago to have assault-weapons remains a mystery to me. I like his films, but he is wrong in this.

Ummm… He’s never blown anyone up… All special effects don’t ya know. Disagree with him on gun control thouhh

Theres been a few amendments to the US bill of rights. The orginal bill only protected white men.

Yes of course as all men were created equal…..as long as they were protestant, white males who were able bodied, straight and land and slave owning…seems a perfectably reasonable basis for forming a constitution

Why was he up in your opinion initially ? because he is a hollywood actor ??
Thats what gets someone up in your opinion ?
but an opinion that differs from yours, thats just unforgivable.

The US constitution does not specify particular race or religion.

Are you sure there is no evidence linking violent movies to actual violence being acted out?

About that Hitler-took-away-the-guns meme?
He didn’t. The Weimar Republic brought in the strict firearms legislation, in an effort to disarm Hitler and the Nazi party. Turns out that a group of disaffected thugs in the grip of the same psychological effect identified by the Stanford Prison experiment, and armed with coshs and knives and other such weapons aren’t stopped by firearms legislation.

Personally, I think that that’s an even stronger, if more nuanced statement about firearms legislation – namely that it never tends to do what the legislators intend it to do, and that the problems those legislators are trying to address with it can usually be addressed more effectively in other ways (and that tragic loss of life is often the end result of not doing so).