'@Isdaril' "Then only allow guns in those places, not everywhere."
Physical impossibility due to interconnected nature of United States, and such solution assumes that crime is immobile.
"Our society is not organized the same way, it has adapted to those fast means of transportations and if you prevent humans to use them a lot of them will simply die (here i'm talking about trucks) or deperish (here i'm talking about cars)"
With arrived to what, with a bit of rephrasing, is one of the common arguments in favor of gun ownership.
I'll put it this way: as "libertarian mugged by reality" I wouldn't really care about issue of cars and accept that certain number of incompetents, morons and psychos will cause death and injury with any tool (from angle grinder and up to and including 20-ton truck), but the sheer number of fatalities shouldn't be taken as easily as it is taken. And, unlike guns or freedom of speech, ability to drive a car was never framed as a right, from the start it was seen as privilege specifically granted by state. The fact that even utilitarian side of "car rights' is barely discussed at a time, when in UK is in moral panic about kitchen knives and drain cleaner, is an interesting aberration.
"There are currently 393 millions handguns in the hands of US citizens (according to wikipedia at least), 392 millions of those are posessed without a license. This doesn't seem like a small business to me..."
Smith & Wesson (on life support for over a decade now) had a revenue of less than 1 billion dollars in 2016. Ruger and Remington should have about the same, though they are also in a better financial shape.
Lockheed Martin's revenue for same year was about 50 billion. Ford Motor Company that still doesn't seem to recover from previous recession, in the same year got revenue of about 150 billion.
Colt Defense, even though it's supposed to supply rifles to US military once in a while, filed for bankruptcy few years ago. There is a joke in this, because Trump's election was actually bad for business, Obama's proposal to further limit gun rights led to gun sale spikes.
One of the major pro-gun arguments (law disarms honest people, lawbreakers will have guns anyway) holds up.
"No it does not, you only see what you want to see there, an other explanation is that Russia is more violent than the USA but because people can't get easily hold of a gun they don't manage to kill themselves that easily. "
You've missed that whole part where over 90% of gun crimes are committed with guns that are owned illegally. Handguns, which are usually the main tool of a homicide, cannot even be stolen from civilians. In an environment where (even absent the expenses for license and everything else) legal gun cost is considerable, almost a third of murders and attempted murders are committed with firearms. This can only mean that a) utility of gun is such that criminal will use it despite the risk of greater punishment and b) organized criminal structures gain an advantage in (or even exist for) distribution of illegal guns.
So, the death toll of organized crime is sort of baked into the total. Assume that instead of 6 million legal guns there are 60 million (i.e. every other person in Russia owns a gun) and "common violence" with guns scales proportionally, so it goes up tenfold. So instead of 100-300 people killed per year with legal guns there will be 1000-3000, while same or less than how many are killed with illegal guns already. That means that total number of people killed with guns will only double, and that's without accounting for displacement (i.e. people killed with a gun would be otherwise killed using something else) and unknown effect of defensive use.
That to me looks like a solid argument not in favor of limiting the guns, but in favor of paying more attention to organized crime, especially since it can operate across state borders.
"That is why I said it makes sense though it feels wrong (because we always want to see freedom as a good thing). "
Well, it's generally good, there's just a price tag of death and suffering attached to it.
I think that in last several decades people in general were so insulated from reality of violence that such price tag will (if it isn't already) will not be seen as acceptable.
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'@Isdaril' "Then only allow guns in those places, not everywhere."
Physical impossibility due to interconnected nature of United States, and such solution assumes that crime is immobile.
"Our society is not organized the same way, it has adapted to those fast means of transportations and if you prevent humans to use them a lot of them will simply die (here i'm talking about trucks) or deperish (here i'm talking about cars)"
With arrived to what, with a bit of rephrasing, is one of the common arguments in favor of gun ownership.
I'll put it this way: as "libertarian mugged by reality" I wouldn't really care about issue of cars and accept that certain number of incompetents, morons and psychos will cause death and injury with any tool (from angle grinder and up to and including 20-ton truck), but the sheer number of fatalities shouldn't be taken as easily as it is taken. And, unlike guns or freedom of speech, ability to drive a car was never framed as a right, from the start it was seen as privilege specifically granted by state. The fact that even utilitarian side of "car rights' is barely discussed at a time, when in UK is in moral panic about kitchen knives and drain cleaner, is an interesting aberration.
"There are currently 393 millions handguns in the hands of US citizens (according to wikipedia at least), 392 millions of those are posessed without a license. This doesn't seem like a small business to me..."
Smith & Wesson (on life support for over a decade now) had a revenue of less than 1 billion dollars in 2016. Ruger and Remington should have about the same, though they are also in a better financial shape.
Lockheed Martin's revenue for same year was about 50 billion. Ford Motor Company that still doesn't seem to recover from previous recession, in the same year got revenue of about 150 billion.
Colt Defense, even though it's supposed to supply rifles to US military once in a while, filed for bankruptcy few years ago. There is a joke in this, because Trump's election was actually bad for business, Obama's proposal to further limit gun rights led to gun sale spikes.
One of the major pro-gun arguments (law disarms honest people, lawbreakers will have guns anyway) holds up.
"No it does not, you only see what you want to see there, an other explanation is that Russia is more violent than the USA but because people can't get easily hold of a gun they don't manage to kill themselves that easily. "
You've missed that whole part where over 90% of gun crimes are committed with guns that are owned illegally. Handguns, which are usually the main tool of a homicide, cannot even be stolen from civilians. In an environment where (even absent the expenses for license and everything else) legal gun cost is considerable, almost a third of murders and attempted murders are committed with firearms. This can only mean that a) utility of gun is such that criminal will use it despite the risk of greater punishment and b) organized criminal structures gain an advantage in (or even exist for) distribution of illegal guns.
So, the death toll of organized crime is sort of baked into the total. Assume that instead of 6 million legal guns there are 60 million (i.e. every other person in Russia owns a gun) and "common violence" with guns scales proportionally, so it goes up tenfold. So instead of 100-300 people killed per year with legal guns there will be 1000-3000, while same or less than how many are killed with illegal guns already. That means that total number of people killed with guns will only double, and that's without accounting for displacement (i.e. people killed with a gun would be otherwise killed using something else) and unknown effect of defensive use.
That to me looks like a solid argument not in favor of limiting the guns, but in favor of paying more attention to organized crime, especially since it can operate across state borders.
"That is why I said it makes sense though it feels wrong (because we always want to see freedom as a good thing). "
Well, it's generally good, there's just a price tag of death and suffering attached to it.
I think that in last several decades people in general were so insulated from reality of violence that such price tag will (if it isn't already) will not be seen as acceptable.