Your logic is flawed because...


The VAST majority of shootings involve handguns. Drive-by shootings, robberies, muggings, domestic incidents, suicides, it's handguns.

In second place would be random and various guns like hunting rifles, shotguns, et cetera. Because these are what most people own, they also are responsible for the most deaths accidental or not.

Large picture? Very few deaths are actually caused by so-called assault weapons. They just tend to be high-profile when it happens.


They have used hunting weapons in some instances. Charles Whitman used a shotgun and a hunting rifle to kill 16 people and wound 32 others.






Anyways technology progresses: sporting guns have always followed the military advancements and vice-versa. It is unreasonable to expect all advancements and ingenuity to suddenly stop and for people to only use designs which date back to the 19th century. People want the latest things.

Compare the military to the sporting guns from each period, you notice a trend:

So glad I live in the UK right now tbh. What do y'all even need guns for, with the exception of sport?

Who in their right mind would be happy receiving a gun as a gift

Who in their right mind wouldn't? I mean maybe not in your country since you couldn't use it and would risk going to jail, but if you lived in a place with more rights why not?

I got a shotgun when I was like 2 years old.

And handguns are banned in a lot of countries with almost zero gun deaths each year, like Japan. Banning handguns would drastically decrease the number of gun deaths in the U.S., but instead this law is permitting even more of these handguns to be in existence. That's ridiculous.

Asdfghjkl when I was 2 years old I got toy cars

I didn't say banning assault rifles would COMPLETELY eliminate shooting murders, just that it would decrease the number of gun deaths. And it would, for reasons I already explained.

Not advocating for this bill or even for having gun laws as ridiculously lax as they are currently, but you have to recognize that Japan is an island. It doesn't have ANY bordering countries, let alone unstable ones like Mexico. You can't compare results in Japan to results in the US.

You can't do that because it's unconstitutional. The 2nd Amendment says you have a right to bear arms and the Supreme Court takes that to mean for self-defence, as well as for national defence.

The Supreme Court already tossed out Washington, D.C.'s ban on handguns and also Chicago's handgun ban. Both cities were forced to allow them.

The fact that you can't ban handguns is a really bad thing. The U.S. should alter the constitution; it would save thousands of lives each year if they did ban handguns. It's already working in many other countries.

Well then, you can RESTRICT handguns, as I'm sure they're doing in DC and Chicago; that would accomplish the same goal (decreasing # of handguns and therefore deaths). That should be done nationwide.

How does it even matter what countries the U.S. or Japan borders? Mexico's stability should not affect the gun laws in the U.S.

Japan is a well-developed and industrialized nation, like the U.S., and is a large nation at 126 million people. Just because the U.S. has 2.5x the population doesn't entirely rule out the adoption of their policies. Why should it? It'll just be harder to implement, that's all.

Let's not insult people and have a healthy debate, please.

I could point out that that was a deduction and not an insult.

But okay, I'll delete that comment.

Just try to keep things nice. Thanks

But it does in very obvious ways. The large-scale cartel operations in Mexico that make a business out of drugs and weaponry often find a prime market in the US. When one house catches fire, so do its neighbors. Japan doesn't need to worry about weapons being illegally brought into its borders as much due to the fact that it has no countries that border it. The US cannot expect banning guns of any sort to work as well as in Japan, so long as there is cartel action to amplify the black market mechanisms that pop up with the prohibition of any good. And yes, Japan does have domestic gangs that could theoretically traffic weapons, but the US has much worse domestic gangs on top of those outside its borders.

Mexico has a very small influence on the amount of guns in the United States, because the vast, vast majority of guns used in the U.S. are bought in the U.S.

Do you really believe that the main reason 12,000 people are killed by guns each year is because of another country? I think you're trying to shift the blame away from the U.S., which is the wrong thing to do. It's the U.S.'s problem, and it can be fixed domestically.

Yes, currently the vast majority of guns are bought in the US. And large amounts are smuggled into Mexico. In 2012 the ATF traced 68,000 guns back to the US, and numbers have surely increased since then. Do you really think, if banned, guns won't be smuggled back into the US? Do you think there is no cartel activity occurring in the States?

And no, of course I'm not blaming Mexico for the deaths caused by guns. That's an obtuse mischaracterization of what I said. I'm not shifting the blame away from the US, either; that's also a mischaracterization of what I said. I'm pretty sure I started off saying that I'm not advocating for the ridiculously lax gun laws in the US. All I'm saying is Japan is notorious for being fairly isolated compared to other countries, even for an island; it is ridiculous to compare them to the US, which is highly influenced by activity on its borders. I'm not sure why you think the US is immune to simple supply/demand rules that give rise to the black market activity after most prohibitions, but I assure you, they exist and would not be mitigated by the presence of an incredibly unstable country with cartels that are already domestically active right next door.

If you don't want me to use Japan as an example, I'll use some European countries.

Homicide rate per 100,000

USA: 3.6
Italy: 0.36 (10 times better than US)
Denmark: 0.3 (12)
Belgium: 0.29 (12.4)
France: 0.22 (16.4)
Germany: 0.2 (18)
Spain: 0.15 (24)
Hungary: 0.13 (27.7)
Slovenia: 0.05 (72)
UK: 0.04 (90)
(Japan 0.00)

SOURCE

Some of these European countries are (or are bordering) countries that are politically unstable, just like Mexico. However, a lot of these countries have stricter gun laws that have caused them to have a lot less gun deaths.