Why I don't really give a fuck about "assault rifles"... [View all]

Generally speaking, I really don't care about gun ownership unless there is a demonstrated risk to society at large. If, for example, gun ownership, and high rates of gun ownership, have been demonstrated to reduce crime rates, then great, show the evidence for that. If, however, there is no correlation or demonstrated link, then perhaps we should reexamine the utility of gun ownership of certain types of guns.

Now, a couple of things, one is I'm constantly annoyed by gun control advocates who demonstrate a myopia towards guns, they seem mostly interested in restricting the ownership of "assault" rifles, while not really demonstrating why we should do so for larger society. I will say that thankfully, crimes such as the mass shooting in Orlando are relatively rare, and in general, homicides committed from rifles(of any sort) only takes up a fraction of homicides in this country. Same for shotguns.

Now, this doesn't mean that rifles should be completely unregulated, instant background checks, national registries, magazine restrictions to about 10 rounds, further restricting semi-auto and fully-auto gun ownership all seem reasonable. However, hardly anyone really talks about handgun ownership restriction. I'm not likely to be robbed by someone who is carrying a 30.06, but 1911, sure. I may date myself with some of these references, lol.

Rifles and shotguns have many utilities, hunting, target shooting, etc. Even home defense(reference above) etc. I'm not really interested in restricting ownership of said guns from the general public. It seems unnecessarily restrictive.

Handguns, on the other hand, are another thing entirely. I would be hard pressed to find a way to justify why the general public should have access to handguns at all given current evidence. The issue is that we need to do a cost-benefit analysis on gun usage in this country, try to have as many controls as possible, but, unfortunately, it appears this is very difficult to do.

For example, on the Benefit side, a lot of people cite Kleck and others on Defensive Gun Use, but there are two problems with this, first, the estimates on the survey results vary drastically, from up to 2.5 million DGUs done annually to as few as 60 thousand or so. The high estimate means there are a lot more DGUs done than violent crime in that same year. Seems rather unrealistic. Even the low end of around 60 thousand DGUs a year relies on self reporting on surveys, which can be unreliable. Unfortunately, not a whole lot of resources are invested into this issue, when it should. It seems reasonable to conclude that, at best, the idea that DGUs are effective is inconclusive.

At this time, much of the evidence is pointing to gun accessibility appearing to be a leading risk factor in becoming a victim of gun crime or being able to complete a suicide. This is important, guns generally don't cause crimes, but they appear to increase the lethality of assaults by a large factor. This seems rather simple, it takes a lot more effort to kill someone without a gun than with one. Same goes for yourself as well, people are much more likely to succeed in taking their own life using a gun compared to other methods. Even worse, this isn't by a small factor, it can't simply disappear into statistical noise.

Given the evidence so far, I would say a reasonable response would be to reexamine handgun ownership, distribution and manufacturing to the general public entirely, increase and allow funding to aid in hopefully coming up with a medical and scientific consensus on the issue, one way or the other, etc. In the meantime, we should find ways to close loopholes on background checks, create a national registry for firearms, magazine restrictions, etc.