America..why won't you just ban the fucking gun?

[TheDapperGent]

yea.

cuz 5 yr olds should have anything closely resembling a gun.

I grew up with play guns/rifles that looked the part running the neighborhood with the other kids. We'd pretend to shoot each other. I turned out pretty passive.

[elliseamos]

yea.

cuz 5 yr olds should have anything closely resembling a gun.

I grew up with play guns/rifles that looked the part running the neighborhood with the other kids. We'd pretend to shoot each other. I turned out pretty passive.

but what we're talking about is a "toy" gun that shoots actual bullets and is only a "toy" because it's marketed as such. is that what you ran around the neighborhood with?

[broken iris]

Well, that didn't take long:

[TheDapperGent]

yea.

cuz 5 yr olds should have anything closely resembling a gun.

I grew up with play guns/rifles that looked the part running the neighborhood with the other kids. We'd pretend to shoot each other. I turned out pretty passive.

but what we're talking about is a "toy" gun that shoots actual bullets and is only a "toy" because it's marketed as such. is that what you ran around the neighborhood with?

I must have missed that part. I'm often guilty of skim reading. The toy guns I grew up with looked real but didn't fire anything at all.

[elliseamos]

yea.

cuz 5 yr olds should have anything closely resembling a gun.

I grew up with play guns/rifles that looked the part running the neighborhood with the other kids. We'd pretend to shoot each other. I turned out pretty passive.

but what we're talking about is a "toy" gun that shoots actual bullets and is only a "toy" because it's marketed as such. is that what you ran around the neighborhood with?

I must have missed that part. I'm often guilty of skim reading. The toy guns I grew up with looked real but didn't fire anything at all.

i think you should try actually reading posts before you join in.

[@SkitchP]

Have we banned Limos yet?

[elliseamos]

Have we banned Limos yet?

first things first here skitch.

[broken iris]

[urlhttp://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_GUN_VIOLENCE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-05-07-19-27-18[/url]

Reports show gun homicides down since 1990s

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Gun homicides have dropped steeply in the United States since their 1993 peak, a pair of reports released Tuesday showed, adding fuel to Congress' battle over whether to tighten restrictions on firearms.

A study released Tuesday by the government's Bureau of Justice Statistics found that gun-related homicides dropped from 18,253 in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011. That's a 39 percent reduction.

Another report by the private Pew Research Center found a similar decline by looking at the rate of gun homicides, which compares the number of killings to the size of the country's growing population. It found that the number of gun homicides per 100,000 people fell from 7 in 1993 to 3.6 in 2010, a drop of 49 percent.

Both reports also found that non-fatal crimes involving guns were down by roughly 70 percent over that period. The Justice report said the number of such crimes diminished from 1.5 million in 1993 to 467,300 in 2011.

But perhaps because of the intense publicity generated by recent mass shootings such as the December massacre of 20 school children and six educators in Newtown, Conn., the public seems to have barely noticed the reductions in gun violence, the Pew study shows.

The non-partisan group said a poll it conducted in March showed that 56 percent of people believe the number of gun crimes is higher than it was two decades ago. Only 12 percent said they think the number of gun crimes is lower, while the rest said they think it remained the same or didn't know.

The data was released three weeks after the Senate rejected an effort by gun control supporters to broaden the requirement for federal background checks for more firearms purchases. Senate Democratic leaders have pledged to hold that vote again, perhaps by early summer, and gun control advocates have been raising public pressure on senators who voted "no" in hopes they will change their minds.

Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, a member of the Senate Republican leadership, said the figures show that gun control groups have emphasized the wrong approach to controlling firearms violence.

"That's what many of us have argued all along, is that focusing just exclusively on the guns is not the correct approach to this," he said. Thune said lawmakers should aim instead at preventing future mass killings by improving mental health programs and increasing the records that state governments send the federal background check system so the checks can do a better job of keeping guns from people who shouldn't have them.

Gun control supporters said the numbers have declined but remain too high, with U.S. rates of gun killings remaining far greater than most other nations.

"None of these studies change the impact of Newtown and other recent mass slayings, showing the need for common sense measures" restricting guns, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said.

The Justice study said that in 2011, about 70 percent of all homicides were committed with firearms, mainly handguns.

The trend in firearm-related homicides is part of a broad nationwide decline in violent crime over past two decades, including incidents not involving firearms.

Both studies concluded that most of the decline in gun homicide rates occurred in the 1990s. The Justice report found that since 1999, the number of firearm homicides increased from 10,828 to 12,791 in 2006 before declining to 11,101 in 2011.

Though researchers differ over all the reasons why gun violence has declined, many attribute it to the aging of the baby boomers. The crime rate was higher in the 1960s and 1970s when many in that large generation were teenagers, an age when higher proportions of people commit crimes.

Crime rates dropped in the early 1980s as that generation aged, rose in the latter part of that decade as the use of crack cocaine grew, then dropped again in the 1990s as the nation's economy improved, analysts say.

The Pew report also said:

-The gun suicide rate is 6.3 per 100,000 people, and there were 19,392 suicides by firearms in 2010. That rate has declined more slowly than the firearms homicide rate, with 6 in 10 gun deaths now suicides, the highest proportion since at least 1981.

-More than 8 in 10 victims of gun homicides are men and boys.

-Fifty-five percent of gun homicide victims in 2010 were black, far beyond their 13 percent share of the population.

The Pew study chiefly used federal data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey, a household survey conducted by the Census Bureau.

I was definitely under the impression that there was more gun violence now than in 1990s. This does not change my opinion about the need for federal level background checks, but interesting info nonetheless.

[simple schoolboy]

I was definitely under the impression that there was more gun violence now than in 1990s. This does not change my opinion about the need for federal level background checks, but interesting info nonetheless.

Listening to congressional Democrats would tend to give that sort of impression.

[elliseamos]

I was definitely under the impression that there was more gun violence now than in 1990s. This does not change my opinion about the need for federal level background checks, but interesting info nonetheless.

Listening to congressional Democrats would tend to give that sort of impression.

i would say the impression is warranted when you consider things haven't changed much since '99.




unlike when congress passed the Crime Control Act in the 90s (as i've posted about previously) and you see the very prominent drop everywhere.

[red calzolaio]

a couple second graders were recently suspended for pretending their pencils were guns.

good. get 'em when there young little bastards.

[simple schoolboy]

The impression that there is more gun violence now than in the 90s is supported by your graph?

Should we anticipate a massive increase in firearm related crimes because of the sunsetting of the Federal assault weapons ban? I'm presuming you are the most excited about that provision of the Crime Control Act, despite all indications that 'assault weapons' contribute a negligible amount to gun crime. Your previous post with more local law enactment dates highlighted in the graph of crime rates show a mixed if not alltogether lacking relationship between gun control laws and crime rates. Similarly, its not clear that liberalization of carry laws have had much of an impact on crime rates but just like the above, if you want to ignore other factors you can try to claim that sort of relationship.

[TheDapperGent]

yea.

cuz 5 yr olds should have anything closely resembling a gun.

I grew up with play guns/rifles that looked the part running the neighborhood with the other kids. We'd pretend to shoot each other. I turned out pretty passive.

but what we're talking about is a "toy" gun that shoots actual bullets and is only a "toy" because it's marketed as such. is that what you ran around the neighborhood with?

I must have missed that part. I'm often guilty of skim reading. The toy guns I grew up with looked real but didn't fire anything at all.

i think you should try actually reading posts before you join in.

Read this asswipe. My original response that you quoted wasn't even directed at you. But keep being snarky. People here eat that shit up. As if there isn't enough of it around the internet as is.

[elliseamos]

i think you should try actually reading posts before you join in.

Read this asswipe. My original response that you quoted wasn't even directed at you. But keep being snarky. People here eat that shit up. As if there isn't enough of it around the internet as is.

no need for name calling and whining, dapper. i was just offering advice since you'd posted something that really had nothing to do with what we were discussing.

The impression that there is more gun violence now than in the 90s is supported by your graph?

my graph? those charts are from the study that broken iris referenced about gun homicides going down since the 90s, for which i was making the case that direct federal (i.e. congressional) intervention had a noticeable impact immediately. Therefore, i felt like looking back all the way to the 90s demonstrates that congress can get things right and since things are still not to everyone's liking, we could expect another Crime Act to help solve things again.

Should we anticipate a massive increase in firearm related crimes because of the sunsetting of the Federal assault weapons ban? I'm presuming you are the most excited about that provision of the Crime Control Act, despite all indications that 'assault weapons' contribute a negligible amount to gun crime.

no i liked these parts the most actually:

• Title I: International Money Laundering
  Title XI: Short-Barreled Shotguns
  Title XIX: Anabolic Steroids Control Act of 1990
  Title XXI: Perkins Grant Expansion
  Title XXII: Firearms Provisions
  Title XXIII: Chemical Diversion and Trafficking
  Title XXXVII - National Child Search Assistance Act of 1990

Your previous post with more local law enactment dates highlighted in the graph of crime rates show a mixed if not all together lacking relationship between gun control laws and crime rates.

really? it seems pretty clear that the Crime Act lowered gun related incidents around the country. the charts show state & city level interventions are ineffective and wasteful, federal regulation seems to be incredibly effective.

Similarly, its not clear that liberalization of carry laws have had much of an impact on crime rates but just like the above, if you want to ignore other factors you can try to claim that sort of relationship.

right, the carry laws don't seem to be the answer either, i think it has to be bigger than any one city or state. which again, i feel like all these charts show the impact a functional congress can actually have on crime (gun related incidents included).

[broken iris]

State Department Demands Takedown Of 3D-Printable Gun Files For Possible Export Control Violations





The battle for control of dangerous digital shapes may have just begun.

On Thursday, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson received a letter from the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanding that he take down the online blueprints for the 3D-printable “Liberator” handgun that his group released Monday, along with nine other 3D-printable firearms components hosted on the group’s website Defcad.org. The government says it wants to review the files for compliance with arms export control laws known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.

“Until the Department provides Defense Distributed with final [commodity jurisdiction] determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled,” reads the letter, referring to a list of ten CAD files hosted on Defcad that include the 3D-printable gun, silencers, sights and other pieces. “This means that all data should be removed from public acces immediately. Defense Distributed should review the remainder of the data made public on its website to determine whether any other data may be similarly controlled and proceed according to ITAR requirements.”

Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas in Austin, says that Defense Distributed will in fact take down its files until the State Department has completed its review. “We have to comply,” he says. “All such data should be removed from public access, the letter says. That might be an impossible standard. But we’ll do our part to remove it from our servers.”

As Wilson hints, that doesn’t mean the government has successfully censored the 3D-printable gun. While Defense Distributed says it will take down the gun’s printable file from Defcad.org, its downloads–100,000 in just the first two days the file was online–were actually being served by Mega, the New Zealand-based storage service created by ex-hacker entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, an outspoken U.S. government critic. It’s not clear whether the file will be taken off Mega’s servers, where it may remain available for download. The blueprint for the gun and other Defense Distributed firearm components have also been uploaded several times to the Pirate Bay, the censorship-resistant filesharing site.

Wilson argues that he’s also legally protected. He says Defense Distributed is excluded from the ITAR regulations under an exemption for non-profit public domain releases of technical files designed to create a safe harbor for research and other public interest activities. That exemption, he says, would require Defense Distributed’s files to be stored in a library or sold in a bookstore. Wilson argues that Internet access at a library should qualify under ITAR’s statutes, and says that Defcad’s files have also been made available for sale in an Austin, Texas bookstore that he declined to name in order to protect the bookstore’s owner from scrutiny.

Despite taking down his files, Wilson doesn’t see the government’s attempts to censor the Liberator’s blueprints as a defeat. On the contrary, Defense Distributed’s radical libertarian and anarchist founder says he’s been seeking to highlight exactly this issue, that a 3D-printable gun can’t be stopped from spreading around the global Internet no matter what legal measures governments take. “This is the conversation I want,” Wilson says. “Is this a workable regulatory regime? Can there be defense trade control in the era of the Internet and 3D printing?”

Wilson compares his new legal troubles to the widely-followed case in the mid-1990s of Philip Zimmermann, the inventor of the cryptographic software PGP, who was threatened with indictment under ITAR for putting his military-grade encryption software online. “It’s PGP all over again,” says Wilson.

In Zimmermann’s case, much of the technology community was outraged that PGP’s inventor was being treated as if he were selling bombs or missiles to a foreign regime when he had simply put a powerful piece of privacy software on the Internet. That public support is widely thought to have influenced the State Department decision in 1996 to drop its case against him.

In this case, by contrast, Cody Wilson is literally an arms manufacturer. But whether the government will have any more luck in controlling the spread of his invention remains to be seen.

So much for gun control.

[broken iris]

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2013/05/ ... un-buyers/

D.C. Considers Mandatory $250K Insurance Policy for Gun Buyer

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) — The D.C. Council is considering requiring people to purchase liability insurance before they can get a license to own a gun.

The bill would mandate that prospective gun owners maintain at least a $250,000 policy. The policy would cover damages from negligent acts or intentional acts that aren’t undertaken in self-defense.

A handful of states are considering similar measures, but none has passed such a law.

The District of Columbia has some of the nation’s strictest gun-control laws. Handguns were banned in the city before a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling.

A council committee will hold a hearing Thursday on the insurance requirement.

The bill was introduced by Democratic Councilmember Mary Cheh who was first elected in 2006.

I hate these computer written online articles, but this is not a horrible idea. Could be considered discriminatory based on class, like a poll tax.

[broken iris]

unlike when congress passed the Crime Control Act in the 90s (as i've posted about previously) and you see the very prominent drop everywhere.

An alternative hypothesis for this time period based on neurocriminology:

As for environmental factors that affect the young brain, lead is neurotoxic and particularly damages the prefrontal region, which regulates behavior. Measured lead levels in our bodies tend to peak at 21 months—an age when toddlers are apt to put their fingers into their mouths. Children generally pick up lead in soil that has been contaminated by air pollution and dumping.

Rising lead levels in the U.S. from 1950 through the 1970s neatly track increases in violence 20 years later, from the '70s through the '90s. (Violence peaks when individuals are in their late teens and early 20s.) As lead in the environment fell in the '70s and '80s—thanks in large part to the regulation of gasoline—violence fell correspondingly. No other single factor can account for both the inexplicable rise in violence in the U.S. until 1993 and the precipitous drop since then.

[elliseamos]

As for environmental factors that affect the young brain... No other single factor can account for both the inexplicable rise in violence in the U.S. until 1993 and the precipitous drop since then.

if we're only talking about environmental factors (neuroscience) then sure, great insight. if we consider nurture over nature, then deterrence (both natural and legal consequences) might need to be considered.

i don't think it's the end-all-be-all b/c i think our country is horribly over incarcerated, but deterrence is a factor:

Nonetheless," he concludes, "to the extent that deterrence is a factor that can be readily influenced by public policy through changes in the criminal justice system, it may represent the quickest and most efficient way for government to influence criminal activity in the short run.

[Peeps]

did england ban the meat cleaver yet?

[Man in Black]

Do those of you in favor of more gun control have a better understanding of the gun-rights crowd, now?

I don't expect that many of you will agree with them, but do you at least understand where they are coming from?

I've no doubt that there are (many) good people working in government. I've no doubt that many operate with the best of intentions.

Unfortunately, it is the natural tendency of government to overreach, to over-legislate, to take away individual rights in the name of the "greater good".

Get steamrolled if you want, just don't expect it of everyone.