The only gun control solution

C

cdoc42

New member
I offered this suggestion on a physician discussion forum, but surprisingly, the thread expired from absolute non-participation. So I'll turn to gun owners to see what opinions might develop.

As I see it, there are only two possibilities that will result in a reduction in deaths caused by guns.

1) Total confiscation and the abolition of ownership of any gun.

2) The use of the death penalty in cases of any type of criminal use of a gun.
This includes brandishing a gun in the course of a crime, so injury or death of another human being is not the ultimate criterion.

Suggestion #1: It is not likely that the total removal of guns of any kind from our society is immediately, and not even remotely, possible. It would take YEARS to change the Constitution of the United States, and the piecemeal appearance of multiple laws, as we have seen, will not provide a sufficient resolution.

That leaves us with suggestion #2. Neither would it be an immediate solution, but a piecemeal application would ultimately leave us with a marked reduction in repeated offenders, and eventually, a significant reduction over time.

It has been stated that the prior application of the death penalty did not provide for any reduction in associated crime. But I have never seen any information that discussed, let alone proved, the mere presence of possible death changed an offender's mind. How can we measure crime that never happened?

What we will know is the offender will never repeat the offense.

Details obviously will have to be developed. How do we deal with brandishing a weapon in self-defense? The first consideration is self-defense is not a criminal act. But difficulty is presented in a case of a routinely beaten wife who brandishes, then kills her husband before he repeats another beating.

But these legal complexities are not absent in our current system now, and a thorough analysis of the consequences of the death penalty application would be a necessary developmental consideration.

So-does anyone want to opine?
 
While I agree that there are entirely too many rogues unhanged, I see a couple of problems.

First is the certainty of the verdict. People do get unjustly convicted. Some get off by a stool pigeon recanting, or by DNA or other scientific forensic test. Some don't. I'd hate to see the wrong man die for a crime he did not commit.

Second is the timeliness of the punishment. There was a psychological study of criminals that found the deterrent effect was not the severity of the sentence but its promptness. Supporting somebody on death row for long appeals before executing him is not very effective except in eliminating one likely recidivist. There was a killer here whose last round of appeals was that he had grown too senile in decades of prison to remember what he was convicted of. Absurd.
 
Not likely to happen any time soon.
Look at the relatively impotent step Joe just proffered. No major ban, and background checks are not confiscations. Braces?
Kind of a dumb idea in the first place, along with bump stocks.

So to paraphrase Bill Clinton :D “it depends on what the word “Total” means.

Are you going to execute everyone who has a gun and doesn’t turn it in?
What about 90 year old Gramps who forget he had the Vietnam era pistol up in the attic (much less his home address)?
What about those who will keep guns no matter what after hearing about family members gassed in WW2?

I expect we’ll have 1939 Germany-style gun control in this country right after term limits and politicians quit lying.
 
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cdoc42 said:
As I see it, there are only two possibilities that will result in a reduction in deaths caused by guns.

1) Total confiscation and the abolition of ownership of any gun.

2) The use of the death penalty in cases of any type of criminal use of a gun.
This includes brandishing a gun in the course of a crime, so injury or death of another human being is not the ultimate criterion.

...

So-does anyone want to opine?
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IMHO, both #1 and #2 suffer from the logical error of viewing the tool (a gun) as somehow instrumental in causing the crime. Looking at #1, if you remove ALL guns (assuming, hypothetically, that this might be possible), people will still kill other people. There have been any number of well-publicized, as well as unpublicized, murders by plenty of other instruments and modalities: knives, axes, clubs, arrows, poisons, arson, strangulation, asphyxiation, motor vehicle assault, drowning, bombs, and even the old stand-by of just shoving the victim off a cliff.

Cases in point:

1. The Petit murders in Cheshire, Connecticut. Dr. Petit was bludgeoned with a baseball bat. (He survived -- barely.) Mrs. Petit was strangled. The two daughters wre killed by the fire.

2. In October 2017 a would-be terrorist killed eight people by driving a rented truck down a bikeway in NYC. Ignoring Europe, you can find numerous cases of murder by vehicle right here in the U.S.

3. People forget that the guns used in the Columbine HS massacre were the back-up plan. The primary plan was propane bombs. The bombs failed to detonate, so the two losers resorted to Plan B. If the bombs had exploded, the death toll would have been MUCH greater.

4. People also forget that the worst school massacre in the United States was not Sandy Hook, and did not involve firearms. 1927, Bath Township, MI. IIRC, the toll was 48 killed and 50-something injured. The weapon was dynamite. Again, the perp was a poor bomb maker. He mined both wings of the school, but only one side went off. If the other wing had blown up, the casualty count would have been at least double. As it was, this still stands as the worst school massacre in our hstory -- and it didn't involve guns.

5. The Boston Marathon killers used pressure cookers.

The problem is that too many people are afraid to tackle the real issue, which is trying to stop people from killing other people. If you just restrict access to or take away one class of tool, those who choose to commit murder will just choose another tool. Is it easy to diagnose potential murderers and to prevent future murders? No, it's not. It's very difficult, and too many people don't do difficult -- so they focus instead on the tool, because they can comprehend that. But that just distracts attention from addressing the underlying issue: Why do people kill other people, and can we do anything to reduce such actions?

Note that I didn't write, "How can we prevent such actions." I didn't write that because it's impossible. People have been killing other people since Cain slew Abel. Anyone who thinks we can absolutely eliminate murders belongs in a padded room. The best we can hope for is to reduce the numbers, and trying to do that by banning the instrument rather than addressing the cause is a futile approach.
 
As I see it, there are only two possibilities that will result in a reduction in deaths caused by guns.
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You are making the same fallacy as most people: that the political actions around guns are intended to reduce deaths by guns. They are not.

Why would I say this:

Basic fact is that the current law is fully capable of handling the problem, but law enforcement does not follow the system as is.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-18-440.pdf
In 2017 there were 112,090 NICS denials. Of those on 12.7k were investigated and only 12 ever were prosecuted.

That was the entire purpose of the system! And the FBI simply does nothing.

Further:
At the state level, officials from 10 of 13 selected states said they did not
investigate or prosecute firearm denials, some citing competing resource
demands and the lack of statutes with which states prosecute as reasons. The
remaining 3 states investigated a high proportion of firearms denials. One of the
3 states reported about 1,900 referrals for prosecution in 2017 and about 470
convictions.
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So 1 out of 13 states actually is serious about violent crime. No, it doesn't identify the state.

In Cincinnati this week it was revealed that a 1/3 of all shootings this year were committed by a 5 group gang. It took the CPD 4 months to find them?

Don't even get me started on the revolving door for violent criminals in so many cities.

There are no laws that can be passed to reduce violent crime if law enforcement and prosecutors don't do their jobs.
 
1) Total confiscation and the abolition of ownership of any gun.

2) The use of the death penalty in cases of any type of criminal use of a gun.
This includes brandishing a gun in the course of a crime, so injury or death of another human being is not the ultimate criterion.
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Both of those seem pretty extreme to me. Lets look at some of the downsides..

1) total removal of legal gun ownership....
Aside from the actual difficulty in doing this, where does that leave us? It leaves us in the law of the jungle where the strong prey on the weak and at their whim.

We do still have that today, but at least with firearms, there is the possibility that the weak may triumph. The old saying that God made man but Colt made them equal is not without merit.

Next part, better be taking the guns away from the cops and private security as well. otherwise, you're making them targets. Some decades ago I read some fiction (no longer remember title or author) but in it, there was total gun confiscation. End result was 1) criminals became overwhelmingly armed with submachine guns (produced for them by organized crime, as the SMG is the simplest and cheapest repeating firearm to make) and 2) cops and armed security became primary targets in order to get their weapons and ammunition.

And, of course a disarmed populace was totally at the mercy of armed criminals...

now to your second point, using the death penalty for any/every crime involving a gun. Simply won't fly in today's society.

Turn back the clock a century and some, and you find a society that generally felt that while hanging an innocent man was regrettable, it was the price of doing business in order to remove murders from society, permanently.

Somewhere along the way, that changed into "better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be sent to prison". That is a noble ideal, but unfortunately, leaves us with 10 violent men free to commit mayhem.

Even bad people were more reluctant to commit murder back then, I think primarily because of society's "conditioning". Generally, there was believe that if caught, punishment was a sure thing. And a fairly rapid thing, and that there was a general belief that not only would you be hung, you would go to Hell, as well.

people just don't believe that anymore. We have been taught otherwise, capital punishment is not a sure thing, and even life in prison isn't a sure thing either.

As you noted, fear of the punishment is not a deterrent that can be measured or quantified. No one can count the crimes that didn't happen.

And, as you noted capital punishment (we are told) is not a deterrent, but it is unquestionably something that prevents repeat offenders...:rolleyes:

I think a lot of crimes never happened because people believed that they would be hung, get the gas chamber or the electric chair, etc if they got caught. Today, that's not the case. Maybe it never was, but I think people believed it was and that was a factor, perhaps the most important one.

I don't think it would be right to put someone to death, for having a gun during the commission of a crime. Just brandishing it to frighten doesn't deserve the death penalty to me. Shooting and killing people is a much, much different matter.

You cannot put the genie back in the bottle. If you can figure out a way to trick the genie into putting himself back in the bottle, go ahead. Outside of fables, no one has been able to do that, yet, and I doubt we ever will.
 
Our rights, all of them, are not absolute. There are limits and always have been on all of our rights. I believe that there can, and should be certain limits on firearms. The real debate is where do we draw the line.

For many reasons it is really impossible to put toothpaste back in the tube. By that I mean it is near impossible to make something illegal that has been commonly used in the past. Handguns with 15-17 rounds have been commonplace for a very long time. Thirty round magazines for modern sporting rifles are standard. That should not change.

And with rights come responsibilities. If someone proves they aren't responsible they can, and always have had certain rights removed. As it should be.

I believe a better approach is to deal with keeping guns away from those who should not have them. I think this has been a mistake made by gun owners in the past. By opposing every single proposed law we have often defended people who we should have thrown under the bus. I'd rather distance myself from some of these people.

But if someone does prove to be a responsible gun owner what they own, how many they own, and how much ammo they possess is no ones business.
 
Thanks to everyone for a mature, unemotional response to this issue. I certainly don’t expect to get this quality of thought from the internet at large. With continued discussion we might just come up with an answer worthy of consideration.

Jim Watson: “First is the certainty of the verdict. People do get unjustly convicted.”
If a crime is committed with a gun and it is shown to be the weapon used, there is no uncertainty. The difficulty, of course, is revealed when the gloved perp robs a bank and throws the gun on the floor, making it untraceable to him. These are the details that must be worked out.
“Second is the timeliness of the punishment.” It is not an issue IF you robbed the bank or IF you committed ANY crime. The issue is IF you did it with a gun. That sets the penalty.

TXAZ: “Are you going to execute everyone who has a gun and doesn’t turn it in?
What about 90 year old Gramps who forget he had the Vietnam era pistol up in the attic (much less his home address)?
What about those who will keep guns no matter what after hearing about family members gassed in WW2?”
Which –or are all- of those, CRIMES? I did not propose that simply HAVING a gun is punishable by the death penalty.

Anguila Blanca: The proposal is not about preventing killing people by all means possible. We are dealing with those who wish to remove guns from our society, regardless of the paucity of use for killing other human beings by the majority of gun owners. So GUNS are the focal point. If you use a GUN in a criminal act, and you are found guilty of the act, the death penalty applies. If you use a knife, that’s a different issue.

Ghbucky and Mainah: Enforcement of current laws is inviting. Start with Hunter Biden and his 4473 felony. Enforce ALL the crimes effectively. How does that reduce crime with guns? It puts more offenders in prison. Period. They DO get out, and off we go again. The death penalty would totally prevent that.

44AMP: I offered the possibility of total gun confiscation as an obvious absolute, but improbable solution, and most certainly not one I would advocate.
You said: “I think a lot of crimes never happened because people believed that they would be hung, get the gas chamber or the electric chair, etc if they got caught. Today, that's not the case. Maybe it never was, but I think people believed it was and that was a factor, perhaps the most important one.

I don't think it would be right to put someone to death, for having a gun during the commission of a crime. Just brandishing it to frighten doesn't deserve the death penalty to me. Shooting and killing people is a much, much different matter.”
The fear of consequence today is absent, I agree. But if it becomes a reality, that will change the culture of those fearless offenders. It appears you agree with that. With respect to the extent of punishment just for using a gun in the commission of a crime, THAT is the price to be paid for not taking the guns away from law-abiding citizens. Brandishing it to frighten leaves the option of killing for failure to comply, which is enough of a threat to justify the death penalty.
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Jmr40: “I believe a better approach is to deal with keeping guns away from those who should not have them.”
Until someone comes up with a way to make that prediction without alienating the legitimate rights of the majority, absolute punishment for failure to conform to the rules and laws that perpetuate a safe society seems to me to be a necessary intermediate step to change the criminal culture. A kick in the ass or a slap on the hand has not been working, yet we see the progressive left moving even further in that direction by releasing various incarcerated lawbreakers into society. It’s time to make a stand. There is no reason for a law-abiding gun owner to face quasi-punishment to pay for recreational enjoyment.
 
cdoc42 said:
Anguila Blanca: The proposal is not about preventing killing people by all means possible. We are dealing with those who wish to remove guns from our society, regardless of the paucity of use for killing other human beings by the majority of gun owners. So GUNS are the focal point. If you use a GUN in a criminal act, and you are found guilty of the act, the death penalty applies. If you use a knife, that’s a different issue.
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I understand this perfectly. The problem is (as you may have heard or read before), "he who controls the language controls the narrative." People who claim they want to ban guns to prevent killing people are engaging in a logical fallacy: that you can prevent evil people from committing evil acts by removing just ONE of the many tools they have at their disposal for killing. IMHO it's not useful to try to engage them on the battlefield of their choosing. I think it's more productive -- in terms of swaying the fence-sitters, since you'll never convert a hard-core gun grabber -- to point out the flaws in the approach of "Let's just take away all the guns and then nobody will ever be killed, ever again."

I think we need to advance the truth: guns are only an instrument, a tool. Let's say the issue isn't "gun" violence. Let's say we want to eliminate graffiti. To accomplish that, we'll just ban aerosol paint cans. Simple solution, right? Except that graffiti artists can use brushes and paint in cans; they can use crayons; they can use charcoal; they can use whitewash. Eliminating ONE of the many tools available won't eliminate the problem. A better approach (to complete my analog) would be to figure out why people engage in graffiti, and they try to convince them why they should stop doing that. But -- that would be difficult. Most graffiti (today) is done with aerosol cans, so let's just ban aerosol paints. All that will do is create more sales for brushes, and paint in cans.

Back to people killing people. People who want to kill people will find ways to do it. There was a school massacre several years ago in (IIRC) Germany in which the assailant attacked the school with a home-made flame thrower.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem. Don't allow the other side to contro the narrative by allowing the focus to be on guns.
 
so let's just ban aerosol paints. All that will do is create more sales for brushes, and paint in cans.
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You're forgetting something.

and its the same thing with guns....

Banning aerosol paint cans would be a major pain in the butt for the MILLIONS of people who use them for painting that isn't graffitti.

Same thing with the guns, ban X to prevent its use in crimes ALSO punishes the millions of us who don't use our guns in crimes.

But they don't care about our feelings, or our monetary investments, or even our ability to defend ourselves. All they care about is banning a gun (or something else) beacuse somebody MISUSED it and commited a crime.

This is, unfrotunately the mindset in all together too many places these days.

A few years ago, some high school students went to a Frat party at a college.
They drank a (then new on the market) energy drink in way over proper amounts and then drank quantities of alcohol on top of that. Several got seriously ill, one, perhaps two died.

Govt response was not about underage drinking, it was to BAN the energy drink from being sold in the state.

Neat simple solution, WRONG in my opinion but it "solved" the problem, at least as far as the govt was concerned....:rolleyes:
 
I totally agree with both of you. The focus should NOT be on the tool. But it is. My suggestion is not to present for approval two options. They are presented as the only options available to resolve the issue of gun-related crime, which is the focus of the opposition to guns.

Total removal of guns is one option. But it is not likely to happen simply because it is a Constiutional right. I put it there because the gun opposition would love to see it happen but it is simply not likely in these United States.

That leaves option two as the only viable avenue to reduce, then eventually stop, killing BY GUNS. It will not stop the killing of human beings. Evidence of this is apparent in the United Kingdom, where guns were replaced by knives.

The effort to eliminate guns by the left has nothing to do with concern over the death of one's fellow man. It is a historic effort by those in pursuit of political power to disarm the populace to prevent their eventual overthrow by insurrection.

The"Woke"phenomenon cannot survive in the face of an armed private population.

Those of you who argue we should not focus on the tool - well, the death penalty does not focus on the tool. We should go to the conference table with the attitude that we, the law-abiding gun-owning community, are willing to put ourselves at risk of death if we violate the law with our guns, and we're secure in our position because we know WE are not the problem. But we DO insist that those in our society who violate our safety with a gun should be removed from our existence. Let's see what the "progressives" do with that.
 
cdoc42 said:
I totally agree with both of you. The focus should NOT be on the tool. But it is. My suggestion is not to present for approval two options. They are presented as the only options available to resolve the issue of gun-related crime, which is the focus of the opposition to guns.

Total removal of guns is one option. But it is not likely to happen simply because it is a Constiutional right. I put it there because the gun opposition would love to see it happen but it is simply not likely in these United States.
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I'm not counting on the Constitutional right argument to win the day. If you missed it, the Ninth Circuit court of appeals just ruled that the Second Amendment does not protect a right to carry a firearm outside the home. And someone commented that they had previously ruled that it also doesn't protect a right to carry within the home. (I'm not sure how that can be, in the face of Heller, and whoever wrote that didn't mention the case). Biden has just appointed a commission (a completely unilateral commission) to study the possibility of stacking the Supreme Court. And there's also the possibility of a Constitutional amendment to repeal the Second Amendment.

I think we have to square off and combat the anti-gun narrative as often and as publicly as possible. What we need to do is to show the undecided segment of the populace that the anti-gun argument is a lie, that it can't accomplish what it claims, and that we need to re-focus the national effort away from "gun violence" to "violence."

The effort to eliminate guns by the left has nothing to do with concern over the death of one's fellow man. It is a historic effort by those in pursuit of political power to disarm the populace to prevent their eventual overthrow by insurrection.
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We are in agreement on this.
 
Before mentioning potential solutions to a problem, the root of the problem must first be considered.
Why has gun crime escalated so dramatically in the last few decades? Who are the majority of culprits, and how and where are guns getting into their hands?
IMO social breakdown, criminal pandering, as well as demonizing LEOs and forging anti-law sentiment among certain groups are major contributors. The root of all of this, again in my opinion, stems from political propaganda in order to create a hostile citizenry to create an excuse to disarm everyone, render us helpless and under their control.
 
The LAW is not the problem. LAW ENFORCEMENT, or the lack of it, is the issue.

Any discussion of new laws is useless as long as we have our current culture of non-enforcement of existing laws.

I also reject, absolutely, ANY discussion of 'gun crime'. The issue to discuss is 'violent crime'. Any discussion of 'gun crime' is dishonest at the outset.
 
Violence is the result of someone’s bad choices, always.

In Europe and California they are now regulating knives, as their efforts at gun control haven’t reduced violence, people just turn to other weapons.

Get rid of guns and mass murderers will just start building bombs from stuff at the hardware store, or driving trucks into crowds of people.

The real issue is you can take people out of the slums but you can’t take the slums out of the people. In other words, people are a product of their choosing. We are presently choosing a more morally bankrupt society. We watch violent movies, listen to violent music, watch violent pornography and play violent video games. Is it any wonder, then, that violence goes up? And guns are just a convenient and easy way to be violent.

As our society degrades, as high moral standards deteriorate, as nuclear families become less common, we are going to see more violence. More rape, more murder, more child abuse, more violence (including gun violence).

We can choose to raise good families, have high moral standards, and be better as a people and our society will undergo a change and gun violence will become less and less of an issue, and those pushing gun control will have a smaller and smaller voice.

Or we can choose moral decay, and reap the consequences, including more gun violence.
And then our politicians will keep trying to come up with crappy treatments for the symptoms of moral decay (like gun control) rather than addressing the actual problem, which is the slow degradation of our society.

I fear we are on the path of Ancient Rome, and when we have gone too far, we will fall into chaos, just like they did.

Liberals just want control. They want our society to be less violent and they want to control everyone to get there. But they aren’t willing to tell people to choose a clean and good lifestyle. Instead they think taking away guns will fix the problem. They are fools.


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1) Name a place where this has worked successfully. It will never work because police, military and the protection teams of the wealthy will always demand these weapons. This demand creates the opportunity for intentional or unintentional loss of these weapons to criminal organizations on a regular basis.

Additionally, the useful life of a weapon is at times 100 years, 100000 rounds. There is no way to eliminate the previously legally help weapons.

2) While punishiment, even death penalty, sounds great, but we are losing sight of the real issue. The real issue is the bait and switch where we get baited with the idea of eliminating crime through elimination of firearms or increasing punishment. There are no suspects identified in the majority of Chicago homicides. Who will get this punishment? The switch is creating a system of laws to selectively enforce against your political enemies. This is what the ATF was created to do.
 
Radny97 said:
Violence is the result of someone’s bad choices, always.

In Europe and California they are now regulating knives, as their efforts at gun control haven’t reduced violence, people just turn to other weapons.

Get rid of guns and mass murderers will just start building bombs from stuff at the hardware store, or driving trucks into crowds of people.

The real issue is you can take people out of the slums but you can’t take the slums out of the people. In other words, people are a product of their choosing. We are presently choosing a more morally bankrupt society. We watch violent movies, listen to violent music, watch violent pornography and play violent video games. Is it any wonder, then, that violence goes up? And guns are just a convenient and easy way to be violent.

As our society degrades, as high moral standards deteriorate, as nuclear families become less common, we are going to see more violence. More rape, more murder, more child abuse, more violence (including gun violence).

We can choose to raise good families, have high moral standards, and be better as a people and our society will undergo a change and gun violence will become less and less of an issue, and those pushing gun control will have a smaller and smaller voice.

Or we can choose moral decay, and reap the consequences, including more gun violence.
And then our politicians will keep trying to come up with crappy treatments for the symptoms of moral decay (like gun control) rather than addressing the actual problem, which is the slow degradation of our society.

I fear we are on the path of Ancient Rome, and when we have gone too far, we will fall into chaos, just like they did.

Liberals just want control. They want our society to be less violent and they want to control everyone to get there. But they aren’t willing to tell people to choose a clean and good lifestyle. Instead they think taking away guns will fix the problem. They are fools.


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Well said. America seems to be going the course of the Great Roman Empire. Watching our Enemies grow stronger and our Military grow weaker is a hard thing to witness. Gun Control is not the major worry that we face.
 
Aguila Blanca said:
Originally Posted by ghbucky
I also reject, absolutely, ANY discussion of 'gun crime'. The issue to discuss is 'violent crime'. Any discussion of 'gun crime' is dishonest at the outset.

Correct.
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+2 on this.


I said it in another threat. The greatest mass murder in US history, exactly 2,977 killed on 9/11, was perpetrated with box opening razors.
 
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