Failing to Answer "WHY"

[Celtic159]

Another thing to keep in mind are the realities of MD's murders. In 2011, 398 total murders for the state. 197 of them were in Baltimore City, 97 of them were in PG County. Nearly 3/4 of the state's murders happened in two areas. There were another 30 murders in Baltimore County, and it's a safe bet that some of them were spillover from the city.

Seems to me that the antis are focusing on the tool rather than the problem.

 

[MDFF2008]

....

 

[fabsroman]

Another thing to keep in mind are the realities of MD's murders. In 2011, 398 total murders for the state. 197 of them were in Baltimore City, 97 of them were in PG County. Nearly 3/4 of the state's murders happened in two areas. There were another 30 murders in Baltimore County, and it's a safe bet that some of them were spillover from the city.

Seems to me that the antis are focusing on the tool rather than the problem.

Yep, just because Baltimore City and PG County cannot take care of their citizens, everybody in the entire state has to suffer. Think they should be looking at a lot more than "guns". They should be looking at the totality of things (e.g., education, opportunity, drugs and why so many are driven to them, gangs, and the list goes on). Same thing goes for Washington, DC. When none of the Presidents want to send their kids to public school, it tells you right away that something is broken in DC, the education system.

 

[MDFF2008]

I was hoping for some things I could put on a web page, like nice statistics with sources and things like that.

 

[Lagmeister1950]

Yep, just because Baltimore City and PG County cannot take care of their citizens, everybody in the entire state has to suffer. Think they should be looking at a lot more than "guns". They should be looking at the totality of things (e.g., education, opportunity, drugs and why so many are driven to them, gangs, and the list goes on). Same thing goes for Washington, DC. When none of the Presidents want to send their kids to public school, it tells you right away that something is broken in DC, the education system.

You have a huge number of folks in those districts who are criminally involved in the judicial system in some way. And they are friends and relatives to the people who vote. Disarming shop keepers and the law abiding home owners basically protects the delegates constituency.

So, none of this about the rights of law abiding citizens of Maryland. It is about disarming the public so the democratic constituency is not shot robbing a store or is not sent to jail for a very long time for shooting someone with a handgun.

 

[fabsroman]

I was hoping for some things I could put on a web page, like nice statistics with sources and things like that.

Why isn't an assault weapon ban useful, is because the FBI statistics show that less than 20 homicides a year are committed with long guns, and assault weapons per the Maryland definition are a subset of long guns. Hence, even less than the reported number of homicides in the State of Maryland via long guns are committed with assault weapons. I can drag up the actual statistics for you if you need them.

Homicides Committed in Maryland by year and type of long gun
Year Rifle Shotgun
2011 2 5
2010 3 12
2009 2 6
2008 4 13
2007 9 11

As you can see, assault rifles aren't as much trouble as shotguns in general. However, shotguns aren't a big deal either. Biden is a MORON.

 

[fabsroman]

One thing I have been thinking, why the heck do we have to answer "why". They want to reduce our 2nd Amendment rights, they should be answering "why" their proposals will work.

Simple reason "why" gun control will never work is because the criminals will get them from somewhere or make them themselves. The government has not been able to control anything. Drug control sucks, immigration control sucks. Immigration control is so bad that as soon as there is a slight reduction in available funding (e.g., sequestration), the POTUS has to release 2,000 illegal immigrants back into the mainstream population. Jails are already full too.

 

[TheRussianNightmare]

I see no benefit in associating decriminalization of illicit drugs with the effort to protect the 2nd Amendment and restoration of any gun rights lost. That strategy will surely lead to dissent among us. I for one am an advocate for the 2nd Amendment but have equal disdain for cds and the effects of drug abuse on any society. This is not the venue to debate success or failures of the war on drugs. I want my Constitutional firearm rights free and clear of any debate on decriminalizing illegal drugs. In my opinion the two topics are unrelated and any attempt to discuss or compare both at the same time is a diservice to the Second Amendment and progress made in that direction.

Drugs and gun crimes go hand in hand. Decriminalizing drugs leaves more room for violent offenders in prison. Marijuana is a schedule one drug even though it is not nearly as dangerous as a huge percentage of prescription drugs. No one has ever overdosed on marijuana. There is no lethal dose.

Prison lobbies, Oil and Chemical Lobbies, Police lobbies, Big Pharma lobbies, Alcohol lobbies all work to keep marijuana/hemp illegal because they would lose out on BILLIONS of dollars.

By the way, I don't use marijuana. It's only illegal because the above groups want it to be illegal. It is not dangerous when used responsibly.

It's a shame that the people on this forum aren't our leaders. This is a great community of well thought out, logical, critical thinkers who I believe could really change things for the better. More of us should run for office. Our "leaders" are slaves to donors and their parties' agendas, constituents be damned.

 

[Celtic159]

Drugs and gun crimes go hand in hand. Decriminalizing drugs leaves more room for violent offenders in prison. Marijuana is a schedule one drug even though it is not nearly as dangerous as a huge percentage of prescription drugs. No one has ever overdosed on marijuana. There is no lethal dose.

Prison lobbies, Oil and Chemical Lobbies, Police lobbies, Big Pharma lobbies, Alcohol lobbies all work to keep marijuana/hemp illegal because they would lose out on BILLIONS of dollars.

By the way, I don't use marijuana. It's only illegal because the above groups want it to be illegal. It is not dangerous when used responsibly.

I agree with every last word of this.

Bravo!

 

[fabsroman]

Drugs and gun crimes go hand in hand. Decriminalizing drugs leaves more room for violent offenders in prison. Marijuana is a schedule one drug even though it is not nearly as dangerous as a huge percentage of prescription drugs. No one has ever overdosed on marijuana. There is no lethal dose.

Prison lobbies, Oil and Chemical Lobbies, Police lobbies, Big Pharma lobbies, Alcohol lobbies all work to keep marijuana/hemp illegal because they would lose out on BILLIONS of dollars.

By the way, I don't use marijuana. It's only illegal because the above groups want it to be illegal. It is not dangerous when used responsibly.

It's a shame that the people on this forum aren't our leaders. This is a great community of well thought out, logical, critical thinkers who I believe could really change things for the better. More of us should run for office. Our "leaders" are slaves to donors and their parties' agendas, constituents be damned.

Exactly. When I spend a couple hours in District Court for criminal matters, it seems as though more problems are caused by alcohol as is caused by drugs. I see no reason why the softer drugs should not be legalized. If there is not a physical addiction issue, I am fine with it. I have seen way too many good people involved with legal troubles over pot and pot paraphernalia charges, which had they just been drinking alcohol they would have been fine.

See, dealing with things in a vacuum is a pile of crap. Trying to solve the 2nd Amendment issue is bigger than just guns. One needs to delve deeper to understand what the real problem is in these inner cities. Get rid of the inner city murders, and murders with guns becomes rather insignificant. Question is, why the heck is this stuff happening in the inner cities and not the rural farms. It isn't because guns are more available in the inner cities than in rural farming communities. It goes beyond the gun, but that would require some serious effort of our legislators to solve the big problem. Passing gun control is the easy way out for them. No, cleaning up the inner cities so they don't look like bombed Nazi Germany is the key to solving a lot of problems in our nation, not just this alleged 2nd Amendment problem.

Think big picture and long term, because it has taken us a long while to get to this low point.

 

[Hopalong]

Sorry, misinterpreted your request.

http://www.nraila.org/media/10883516/nij-gun-policy-memo.pdf - DoJ memo spelling out why gun bans and magazine restrictions won't work.

http://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2013RS/fnotes/bil_0001/sb0281.pdf - Maryland's Department of Legislative Services report on the fiscal impacts of the original SB0281 bill. At the top of page 18, they very clearly spell out that they are understaffed by 30+ people and spending $10,000 a week on overtime for even the current workload. With the new proposed licensing provision, wait times will increase even further. A right delayed....

 

[oathkeeper]

Educating people on the concept of personal responsibility is how we win. The liberties we value all came from the basic idea that YOU are responsible for YOUR safety, the safety of your family, providing food, a roof over their heads & their health care.

 

[rh92]

Drugs and gun crimes go hand in hand. Decriminalizing drugs leaves more room for violent offenders in prison. Marijuana is a schedule one drug even though it is not nearly as dangerous as a huge percentage of prescription drugs. No one has ever overdosed on marijuana. There is no lethal dose.

Prison lobbies, Oil and Chemical Lobbies, Police lobbies, Big Pharma lobbies, Alcohol lobbies all work to keep marijuana/hemp illegal because they would lose out on BILLIONS of dollars.

By the way, I don't use marijuana. It's only illegal because the above groups want it to be illegal. It is not dangerous when used responsibly.

It's a shame that the people on this forum aren't our leaders. This is a great community of well thought out, logical, critical thinkers who I believe could really change things for the better. More of us should run for office. Our "leaders" are slaves to donors and their parties' agendas, constituents be damned.

Educating people on the concept of personal responsibility is how we win. The liberties we value all came from the basic idea that YOU are responsible for YOUR safety, the safety of your family, providing food, a roof over their heads & their health care.

All this.


It seems like these days people forget the concept of personal responsibility and have the government take care of them. How pathetic.

 

[Elliotte]

One thing I've been thinking, we need to answer "WHY" more.

It's a great idea. Another important thing is to explain things in terms the people asking these questions will understand. Yes, there is a difference between a "round" and a "bullet", but most of the uniformed general public don't know or care about the difference (and many legislators are uninformed or less informed as well, even ones on our side). In some cases it's necessary to explain what the difference is, but again, we must work to make it understandable to as many people as possible.

For each of these I'll try to give a detailed answer and a short answer, cause some situations require a one sentence or 10 second response.

Why don't magazine limits work?

In theory magazine limits work great. The idea is that by limiting how many bullets a person can carry in a gun you can limit how fast they can shoot/kill people. Some people on the gun-confiscation/anti-gun side go so far as to suggest that the time it takes to reload a gun will allow a bystander or LEO time to stop the attacker.

What prevents a magazine limit from working comes in many forms.
1) Criminals by their nature and definition are people that don't follow the law. Any law limiting the size of a mag/clip is just one more law that they've broken, and in most circumstances, the penalties for breaking a mag/clip limit law are less than the other laws they're breaking.
2) There are already lots of "high" capacity mags/clips in the area. To ensure the new law works, you would have to go door-to-door and confiscate all illegal ones. Even if you do that, there will be some people that hide theirs from the police.
3) There aren't the same laws in surrounding areas, so it's easy to get the illegal mags/clips out of the area and bring them back. (this one doesn't work as well at the national level, but smuggling still exists for drugs, if there's enough profit for mags/clips it'll happen too).
4) By their design, most magazines/clips are just a tube or box with a spring, something that is simple enough to make that someone could build or jury-rig a homemade version of the illegal size.

Short answer: Criminals don't follow the law, there's too many to get them all, you can bring them in from where they aren't illegal, and they're easy enough to make at home if you can't buy them anymore.

Why doesn't licensing work?

Here the idea is that by making each person have a license to buy a gun and/or licensing each gun, the police can take each gun found at a crime and trace it back to the last person who legally owned it. Once again, there's lots of problems:
1) Not only do criminals (still) not follow the law, there is Supreme Court precedent that they are not required to register themselves or their guns because they would be implicating themselves as criminals and violating their 5th Amendment rights.
2a) Some criminals steal stuff. So even if a person follows all the laws, licenses themselves, registers their guns, stores them in a locked safe, a criminal can still come in and steal the guns. At this point the only thing all this licensing has done is identify the victim of a crime.
2b) Expanding on 2a) but still a separate problem, a person willing to transfer guns to a criminal could legally buy a bunch of guns, license them all, and then set up things for the criminal to steal all of the guns. Then when the police get involved, the bad person who bought the guns will just lie to the police or not tell the police that they helped the criminal. The bad person will pretend to be like the good person in 2a) and say that the guns were stolen.
3) Licensing only works if the gun is found. You can't trace a serial number (or shell casing) for a gun that you don't have. All the criminal has to do is hold on to the gun (and the spent brass by using a revolver or brass catcher).
4) There is a black market for guns where the buyer never has to get licensed/registered.

Short answer: Criminals legally don't have to register/license, criminals steal things (like guns), criminals can pretend to be good guys who were robbed, and there's already a black market that doesn't follow the law.

Why isn't an AWB useful/needed?

The idea here is to ban the guns that are the most deadly or used by criminals to commit crimes. There are all kinds of problems here

1a) The biggest problem is that the 1994 AWB and all other state-level AWBs don't target the guns & features used the most by criminals. What these AWBs do target are the guns & features that look like ones used by the military, they target ones that are used in a relatively miniscule number of crimes which happen to get the most media attention, and they target guns & features that some have seen used in TV & movies.
1b) While 1a) mentions that the AWBs target the wrong guns & features, the correct guns & features that help out criminals are the same guns & features that help police and good guys defend themselves from the criminals.
2) In order to have the AWB affect criminals, the police would have to confiscate the banned guns from every person, which would not work since criminals wouldn't follow the law and some people would hide their banned guns.

Short answer: AWBs don't target the guns criminals use most, but even if they did, those are the same guns good guys and police use the most, and no matter what guns you ban you'll never get rid of them all.

I'm hoping some people here can provide some useful information to answer these questions.

Think about it from the perspective of someone who doesn't know.

If someone said "Stop SB281, and I said "why" we can tell them all the bad things in the bill, but we don't have a great resource as to "WHY" it's bad.

So I'm asking everyone here if they can help provide some information/links to facts that can answer the "WHY"

And please don't post things like "It's a constitutional right" We are addressing people who are concerned about violence, so we need to show them "It's not dangerous AND it's a constitutional right"

Now some of my arguments are based on the fact that criminals don't follow the law. If you use this in an argument the other person might respond with, "well are you saying we shouldn't have laws against murder? Or that we should legalize all drugs?" For me, I am for allowing people to do things as long as it doesn't directly affect someone else negatively (unless they are affecting you, in which case you can respond/retaliate in equal measure). Murder directly impacts another person. Legalizing drugs is an issue that I am against, but I admit I don't have a good argument against it right now. But, here's where the 2A argument comes in, there isn't a specific Constitutionally protected right to eat, smoke, inhale, or inject whatever you want. There is a Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms.

Hope this long-winded post helps

 

[P-12 Norm]

One thing I've been thinking, we need to answer "WHY" more.

Why don't magazine limits work?

Why doesn't licensing work?

Why isn't an AWB useful/needed?

I'm hoping some people here can provide some useful information to answer these questions.

Think about it from the perspective of someone who doesn't know.

If someone said "Stop SB281, and I said "why" we can tell them all the bad things in the bill, but we don't have a great resource as to "WHY" it's bad.

So I'm asking everyone here if they can help provide some information/links to facts that can answer the "WHY"

And please don't post things like "It's a constitutional right" We are addressing people who are concerned about violence, so we need to show them "It's not dangerous AND it's a constitutional right"

Problem is you are asking us to justify a Constitutional right, which is easy to negate with a Yes, but...! I Know you said you don't want any "Because it is my right" responses, however, I believe that when it comes to abridging a right that is a birth-right like that, the burden of proof needs to be on those attempting to infringe upon us, and they need to have it put in that context. The proof that abridgement will have a positive impact needs to be incontrovertible, and of such a nature as to prove there is no other way than said abridgement.

I do think we need to show them that guns by themselves are not the cause of the danger so we can divert their attention away from the idea of gun control as an option to stop senseless violence, but we also need to educate the public about the historical dangers of large government and gun control too.

 

[hdatontodo]

Their proposed solutions don't address the root cause of the problem.

Everyone needs money. If you have few marketable skills or are unemployable due to alcohol addiction and live in an area with no matching employment, you'll make money by stealing or dealing.

At the hotel at which I had been held up 3 times, we used to tighten up security before Christmas to make it harder for people to get spending money.

People will use tools available to them for stealing or dealing. The mistake the anti's make is thinking that changing the legal channels for obtaining these tools will reduce the opportunity for crime. If criminals can smuggle in drugs, which are banned, what is to prevent them from smuggling in guns and drugs?

A friend of mine was sprayed with a machine pistol (MAC10) at the instruction of one of our soon-to-be ex-death-row inmates. No law prevented that. Anyone who can get his hands on kilos of drugs can get firearms too.

 

[Kilroy]

I've been working on a paper of "talking points" that we can use. Simple, one sentence arguments for the twitter and facebook crowd. They're very easy to work into quick conversations where you don't have time for long reasoned arguments. Here's two:

Gun registration gets you a list of legally owned guns.
Bam, immediately shoves into their face the stupidity of trying to reduce crime by targeting the law-abiding. Along the same lines:

Criminals buy their guns out of car trunks in dark alleys, not at gun stores.
This throws water on any call for waiting periods, more background checks, fingerprints, etc. More to come later.

 

[davsco]

you know what is funny, well maybe not that funny?

we say mag limits are pointless because everyone can reload quickly, yet we all want 30 round mags in our AR's and 17 rounders in our glocks.

we say AR-15's and benelli m-4's are just cosmetically different than other, more pedestrian, autoloading rifles and shotties, yet we don't want our AR's banned and they're primarily what is in insanely high demand.

we are totally contradicting ourselves. We want these exact guns and mags because they work very, very well in personal and home defense. and we should have and keep them for that very reason (on top of being a ton of fun to shoot and compete with), of course with support of our constitution.

we're dealing with folks who for the most part don't shoot and just have no concept of using a gun for self defense. since to them, they won't be using a gun for protection, any gun anywhere (other than in the hands of mil and police) is just a potential to harm them, whether a bad guy has it or a bad guy steals it from a good guy that has it.

just some thoughts, unfortunately no answers other than the 2A is there for a reason, and other than that, it just makes sense that folks ought to be able to protect themselves, and revolvers and pea shooters aren't the best tools for the job.

 

[SomeGuy]

You can not put the ink of the 2nd Amendment back in the bottle. Any attempt to do this is simply a show of ignorance by the General Assembly.

If you do not like it, amend the Constitution, the process is well established.

Do not spend millions of our tax $, and years in courts to defend laws that are written so poorly they are found to violate the

Rights of The People, Endowed by our Creator, and enumerated in the Constitution of the United States of America.

This is Common Sense.