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I wonder about the tragedy that can be caused with easy access to deadly force. If/When the proverbial shit hits the fan, if many people around you have guns, a

• shawndumas 16y ago
  "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." — Jefferson "You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence." — Charles A. Beard
  • mturmon 16y ago
    Why these quotes? Is anything Thomas Jefferson, Walter Mondale, or the Dalai Lama said automatically true?
    • jrockway 16y ago
      Because they were famous and their quotes were pithy. My question is, how come nobody ever gets shot in Japan? Guns are banned, there are criminals, but most murders are stabbings (or arson, etc.) If you listen to Jefferson, Japan would be a haven for dangerous gun-toting criminals shooting up anything and everything just to get some pocket change. But that is apparently not the case.
      • shawndumas 16y ago
        Shootings in Japan [1] . [1] http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Shootings+in+Japan http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Shootings+in+Japan
        • jrockway 16y ago
          And the first result says, "The number of shootings in Japan fell to a record low of 53 in 2006." From the wikipedia page "Gun Violence in the United States", "In 2005 [there were] 10,100 homicides committed using firearms". The US is bigger than Japan, but not 190x bigger. So if you are trying to disprove my argument, you did a bad job.
          • shawndumas 16y ago
            The point was that a gun ban does not equal no guns. Also you need to understand that the demographics vary widely.
            • ericd 16y ago
              Obviously, but 190x less gun violence is a very large difference in the right direction. With 53 in a year across a country that populous, it's fair to say noone.
              • shawndumas 16y ago
                Japan has less crime period. Now, before you start saying that that's because of strict gun control, know that they have less knife crime, less fraud, less divorce (though it has dbl since 1990), you get the point. There is no ban on knifes in Japan and yet there are far less crimes commited with them. Your correlation is not causation. Japan has a completely different demographic and social makeup. Shame plays a huge part of their culture. Traditional family values were the norm until recently. I would argue that your thinking that gun control is the cause of low crime in Japan as misguided. "Shootings [in Japan] rose to 66 compared with a record low of 53 in 2006, the National Police Agency said in a report. The figure was up for the first time since 2001. [...] The number of those who died from shootings rose to 22 from 2 in 2006, the report said. Those wounded numbered 18. Gun-related crime had been rare in a country with strict gun control laws, but last year's string of shootings shocked the public and prompted the government to further strengthen its firearms law." [1] Make a wager; will stricter gun laws help? Have strict laws banning drugs helped? (Heck, how did prohibition go?) You say that Japan has less crime overall because of gun control; I say it’s a culture / demographic thing. Maybe we are both wrong. I think it is the traditional values of Japan, and I am not alone in supposing this. “But [Ichita Yamamoto] also fears the increase in gun violence could be a symptom of something more worrying. ‘There are few people who do this kind of thing in Japanese society,’ he says. ‘There is no culture in Japan that we shoot other people.’ What concerns him though is that perhaps Japanese society is changing. ‘Japanese traditional values have changed, the concept of family is changing, relations between people are changing,’ he says. ‘A lot of people feel lonely or isolated, so this kind of incident could be something to do with changes of this kind.’ Shootings do, as the gun-owners complain, get blanket coverage in the media. But while newspaper columnists and pundits are good at wringing their hands about the fact that gun crime is increasing, they are not so successful when it comes to agreeing what it reveals about the state of Japanese society. And more importantly, perhaps, they cannot agree on what to do about it.” [2] . [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST252568 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST252568 [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7257072.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7257072.stm
      • TeHCrAzY 16y ago
        I would argue that their culture is significantly different to that of the USA.
      • nandemo 16y ago
        For starters, there was never a lot of guns in the hands of civilians in Japan so it shouldn't be that hard to keep them banned. It's also risky to bring guns illegally into the country; to take that kind of risky one would probably have to be into other illegal, profitable stuff like drug trade. But there isn't a lot of drug trade in Japan (compared to US). Anyway, I think it's very hard to use Japan on one hand, or Switzerland and Israel on the other, to argue about gun laws in US.
    • shawndumas 16y ago
      "[A]rguments from authority are an important part of informal logic. Since we cannot have expert knowledge of many subjects, we often rely on the judgments of those who do. There is no fallacy involved in simply arguing that the assertion made by an authority is true. The fallacy only arises when it is claimed or implied that the authority is infallible in principle and can hence be exempted from criticism." -- An Authority [1] . [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority