This is a list of Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) about Guns, or the Gun Control debate. People that don't know these answers off the top of their heads aren't qualified to have an educated opinion, and we shouldn't run society by the tyranny of the ignorant. Each of the answers is a link that dives into the evidence that supports the answer.
Reasonable Control
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Ignorance + Fear = Gun Control
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Is there such a thing as reasonable gun control? - No. At least not with any of the suggestions the left has ever offered. We have 20,000+ examples of gun laws, are any of them "reasonable"? Certainly not the vast majority of the ones passed or being pushed so far. This is of course assuming your goal is to limit crime, suicide, or mass murder. If your goal is people control and empowering a totalitarian state, and abusing otherwise legal gun owners, they've been highly effective.
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What about magazine limits? - Magazine Capacity Limits aren't reasonable because:
- They do not significantly impact Reload Times, or rate of fire, and have never helped with mass shootings. No one has ever closed the gap during the fraction of a second it takes to reload a magazine. And most mass shootings have plenty of time for the shooter to reload, or just switch to a preloaded backup gun.
- You can buy or make high capacity magazines, revolvers take under a second to reload, and shooter could use a second gun (that's preloaded), and trucks/bombs/box cutters (9/11) are more effective than guns.
- Compliance on the laws is zero, New Jersey is a great example of that with 0 high capacity magazines ever turned in. California banned them in 2001, with no measurable positive impact on crime, shootings or mass shootings (in fact there were some increases) -- so in 2018 they made it harder to buy standard capacity (what the left calls high capacity), and still no impact (also with zero compliance).
- Since it can never be effective, it's just a way to harass legal shooters, and has zero impact on mass murders. So such laws can turn legal gun owners into criminals, but they can not deter criminals or determined mass shooters, and the laws in fact empower them through smuggling and the allure of something naughty.
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What about military style assault weapons bans? - If it's never worked before, what have we learned?
- First, it's a non-sensical term. Anyone that uses "military style assault weapons" is using a political term. The military uses assault "RIFLES", which have select fire (can go fully automatic) and have been illegal since the 1930's. Despite that ban mass shootings and their effectiveness has gone up, not down.
- What the politicians want to ban is assault "WEAPONS" - a made up term in the 1980's. Those are low powered semi-automatic (not select fire) civilian use hunting and sporting rifles that look like assault rifles. Their crime? Having their controls in the same place, looking like assault rifles, and a few cosmetic features like pistol grips or accessory rails.
- Assault weapons have lower firepower than most hunting rifles, most mass shootings are pistols, and places that outlawed them got near zero compliance, and they are far easier to smuggle or make than most drugs.
- They were banned from 1994-2004, and even the left admitted it had zero effect on gun crime or mass shootings, which is why the didn't fight the sunset clause when it ran out. But the gun controllers appeal to the you, left and ignorant, and there's always a fresh batch coming out of indoctrination camps (schools). So they waiting until enough didn't remember the failure of the first time, and they started pushing the failure again.
So if you ask the obvious question, "how does this help?" The gun controllers will dodge, attack, or give an emotion based answer (not a logic based one). So the ban must not be logical/reasonable.
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What about Microstamping? - This is engravings of serial numbers on the tip of every firing pin, so that ever expended shell tells you who the shooter is/was. The problems are:
- the technology doesn't actually exist (no one has been able to make it outside of SciFi)
- if it did exist, it's easy to defeat (a single dry fire against a center punch, or a quick hit with file/sandpaper, or replacing a $2 part)
- most guns used in crimes, aren't by the original owner (they're stolen, smuggled, or straw purchases) so can't be traced.
- Many guns don't eject casings (like revolvers), or you can buy make casing catchers
- and for generations would be made before this law.
So this can't do anything for crime or mass murder, but is a heavy cost/annoyance to gun owners for something that can't get positive results. California judges ruled that while it's not technically possible to comply, requiring it is not a hindrance to legally exercising your gun rights.
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What about No Fly Lists? -
What we know is there's thousands of people that shouldn't be on the no fly list that are on it. Theres's no known way for them to get off it. And no mass shooter has ever been on it. Sounds like a good enough reason to ignore the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 9th amendment and assume your guilt and take away your rights, to a gun-controller.
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What about Smart guns? -
The technology isn't there yet and probably won't be in my lifetime. A gun's prime value is instant reliability when you need it: a "Smart Gun" design undermines that and would let you die while waiting for your gun to "activate". They are advocated by those who don't understand guns, or to have another wedge issue that divides us between the gun controllers and the informed.
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Red Flag Laws - There's this idea that Red Flag laws might help -- that people could flag people who are at risk and get their guns taken away from them. It sounds good, as long as you don't think about it. However if you think it through: (a) most mass shooters most don't give warnings = all false positives (b) if you lower the bar enough that the red-flag laws apply, then everyone is guilty = all false negatives (c) it only forces shooters to wait (d) they just get/steal other guns or they can go to more deadly methods (e) it's already been abused where tried (f) Think SWATting someone (g) there's never been a study that shows that they help prevent gun violence (and they've tried to find justification in the past, many times). So while I'm not against the theory, there's no practical way to implement it, that wouldn't be a cluster-fuck and worse than doing nothing. On top of that, 75-80% of gun violence is gang related, so Democrats have blocked Republicans efforts to get Red Flag laws applied to Gangs: seriously. (They don't want to fix the problem, they want to punish the innocent).
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Gun Bans
What about an "all out gun ban? -
If gun control works, then it would be reasonable to take them all! If it doesn't work, then virtually all gun control is unreasonable! Pick one. The worst mass murders were done with box cutters, bombs, or in countries with the strictest gun-control, so we know it doesn't work. Thus, "nobody wants to take your guns, we just want a few "reasonable controls" is a lie. Gun-controllers are lying: either to us, themselves or both. I've never met the gun-controller that would be satisfied with X, when that means their neighbors will still have guns. X is always and only the beginning to Y (violence and a police state). So we know that "gun control" is a fraud, and the liars aren't being reasonable (honest). And we know that Prohibition failed miserably with Alcohol, Drugs, which are harder to make than guns... not to mention things like music/software piracy. Why does the illiteratti think this will be the one exception where prohibition will work?
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Do gun bans work? - The short answer is "not that we can tell", or not what we intend it for, or we wouldn't be having this debate. The controllers will throw out various logical fallacies to support their position, but each crumbles under the slightest scrutiny or information: which is why they try to shout it down or oppress those that know the facts and keep their low information supporters, their supporters. There are no high information gun controllers.
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How do we know that Gun Control doesn't help mass murder? Because the biggest mass murders have been in places with strict gun control, far stricter than in the U.S. and would never work here. And in fact, virtually all of the mass shootings in the U.S. were either done by government forces, or in gun-free zones because shooters are smart enough to pick places where people can't shoot back.
The media claims U.S. murder/crime rate is higher than other nations, but is it true? - Not so much. The U.S. ranks #121 safest out of 218 countries (middle of the pack), and #4 safest out of 49 counties in our hemisphere. And our crime and murders have been trending down whereas most of the AOCE countries have been trending up (despite gun control). If gun control worked (or guns caused crimes), we'd be the worst. And places like Sweden, Israel that also have lots of guns would have been crime ridden miseries (they aren't).
- Many will try to cherry pick either "gun crimes" instead of all crimes to lie. As if you'd rather be beaten to death with a club over being shot, or raped at knife point over gunpoint. The rational care about crime/murder, not the tools used. And your survivability rate over being stabbed isn't higher than being shot (the uninformed don't know better), and people will stab you quicker than shoot you, because it is quieter. And gun control wouldn't reduce availability in the U.S. for generations (at best) so is wasted effort assuming you want to help crime/murder in your lifetime.
- Many will cherry pick by country -- but a lot of that is flim-flam. They pick the U.K, Canada, Australia... and then if you show them how their numbers were faked, or show facts they don't like, are they reasonable? Or do they change the topic?
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Would murder or mass murder go down with gun control? - Not that we can tell. There's a cost/benefit to guns. While the left will lie and pretend there are no mass shootings that have been stopped by civilians, the facts disagree. Defensive Gun Uses (DGU) are common in the U.S. That's how many times guns are used for good (to stop a crime, or for "defense") as opposed to doing harm: best estimates are that guns are used in ≈5,000 murders per year (only about 1/2 of murders), but they're used about 2.2 million times a year to stop a crime. Do the logic on what happens if those crimes aren't stopped.
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What about all the gun controllers who disagree? -
A law is a reflection of the authors and advocates: if they aren't informed, then the laws they write aren't going to be reasonable. Virtually everyone that learns the facts switches sides: the vast majority of gun controllers (like the ones listed), are uninformed with no understanding of the tool, history of gun control laws, or the efficacy of what they propose -- thus what they propose isn't "reasonable". The question is should society be run as an idiocracy, where the will of the uninformed overrides the rights of everyone else? Because that's what this fight is fundamentally about: politically correct disinformation or ignorance winning out over gun owners individual rights and the constitution.
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Conclusion
Again, the reason that gun advocates argue with facts is that the facts support their arguments. The reason that gun controllers use appeal to emotion, word games, semantic tricks, math tricks, and so on, is because the facts and logic does not support their arguments. They're left with the choice of learn and grow to be better humans, or double down and play gotcha in order to win an argument, and lose on the causes they claim to care about.
Gun control is a losing battle in the U.S. You can't pass what they want, and even if you could get what the left really wants (door to door confiscation and complete bans), the best that would result in is civil war (insurrection) and violence for years. How is that a win? Their theory is that we would become safer, but when you look at the places they want to model us after, they aren't really safer, and what "safer" their is, is because of other reasons. So that's a hollow victory indeed. This is why most rank-and-file cops are not gun control advocates, but many politicians (their leaders and Police Chiefs) might me. Gun control is about people control, and is antithetical to living in a free society.