Isn't comparing gun crime rate of different states moot point? If the laws are like here, if I live in a state with very restrictive gun laws, I could just go to another state and get the license there, and I'd still be able to use the gun on my state. Isn't that how it works? So having restrictive laws in only certain states becomes useless, and those statistics that compare states are nor meaningful.

Why not comparing countries instead (it's less likely that people will travel to another country to get a gun license)? You'll then see how United States have much higher crime rates than countries with restrictive gun laws.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_gun_vio_hom_fir_hom_rat_per_100_pop-rate-per-100-000-pop

USA is the 8th country with the higher homicide with firearm rates. 3.6 per 100000 population. Look at western European countries where gun laws are very restrictive: the higher I see is Portugal with 0.84.

This graph is IMHO even more relevant. Murders per capita (for people who don't know the difference, an homicide is premeditated, while a murder isn't):

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-crime-murders-with-firearms

That graph is total murders, though. But it's easy to convert those numbers to rate for each 100000 population.
USA: 9,369 / 309,000,000 * 100,000 = 3.03
Spain: 97 / 47,000,000 * 100,000 = 0.20
Germany: 269 / 82,600,000 * 100,000 = 0.32

Murders are commonly started with small disputes, fights... It's visible how having a gun makes it easier to just kill the other people in such stressful situations.

Another thing that has been mentioned: people will get a gun even if it's illegal. Well, that's not really true. That's true for organized crime, they have their ways to get their weapons. But the majority of homicides come from "normal" people, people that would have no way of getting a gun illegally because they don't have the contacts. This specially true with murders. People don't go get a gun illegally to commit a murder because...well, then it wouldn't be a murder, it would be an homicide .

The big problem in the States is that the firearm industry has promulgated the feel that guns are needed for self defense and most citizens believe that by now.

http://azstarnet.com/news/opinion/article_fbdcca11-0e03-545a-9f90-8d15edf354ab.html

OH CANADA

Nicely derailed, guys. From "Angry Birds related to Powerful Cyberweapon" in less then 100 posts.

Anyway, my take on the discussion (minus the pointless arguing against strawmen and other invalid debating devices):

Situation A - someone has a gun, I don't. I now have one problem: not getting killed.

Situation B - someone has a gun, so do I. I now have three problems: not getting killed, not killing the other guy, and not accidentally killing myself.

I'll have situation A, please.

But really, it's a simple Prisoner's Dilemma (or rather, a Tragedy of the Commons, which is the more general case though less known). If you assume that your individual safety is higher if you carry, the best strategy for each individual is to carry. But the more people carry, the lower our overall safety gets. At the extremes: if nobody carries, nobody gets shot. If everybody carries, it's bound to go wrong a lot, even if only by accident. Hence, the best individual strategy is asymptotical toward a suboptimal overall equilibrium (that's about 15 dollars worth of words in just one sentence).

As to "outlawing guns doesn't help": Even if gun control is hard or impossible to enforce completely, it does send a signal, namely that we as a society do not consider carrying a gun normal behavior, unless a special case applies to you. Requiring a license for guns signals that a gun is something that requires proper training, and needs to be handled with extreme care; not something you can casually pick up at the superstore to kill an afternoon over a few sixpacks.

I'll shut up now. Maybe I should play some Angry Birds, see if the vicious Lua blows up my computer in a fierce fireball.

Nah, let the armed forces be armed, just don't give guns to the general public, because, they're a bunch of f*****g retards

And gives them fire-arms to use in the training camps and teh battlefield, and more importantly TRAINS THEM HOW TO HANDLE THEM. You crack my shell too.

Well, fry you man, I don't think people should have guns so suck it

Where's the news on that?

Yes, please. I'm all for that. Call me fucking Gandhi, I can take it.

I don't see any silliness in that. No guns, nobody gets shot. Simple.

The problem is the Tragedy of the Commons, or, if you prefer, the Prisoners' Dilemma (although the former I think describes the problem better). In short, if you have a gun, I need one, and then everyone needs one, and suddenly the world has become a more dangerous place overall, and nobody is any better than before they had guns.

Even if Angry Birds IS linked to nasty evil horridness it's still fun for 45 seconds.

Arthur, I skipped over some of that article you linked to earlier.

I find it a bit unsettling... It seems to be talking about how glorious and sobering it is to be able to make the choice of who lives and who dies whenever you hold a gun. -- Well, the thing is, I really don't think it's a good idea for people to be thinking about who should live and who should die on a daily basis, as they walk around with their guns.

From a programming point of view, it makes me think of why it's good to make class members private. (It's not at all the same thing, but I'm reminded of it. Just bear with me for a sec.)

In programming, making things private, or const, or whatever is just a way of reducing the probability of mistakes. Most of the time, programmers can trust themselves to just use variables and functions and pointers and so on in the way that they are meant to be used – and if they are used correctly, there is no problem. Making things const or private can just be a pest, because it sometimes means that you have to do a bunch of useless extra stuff just to get to the task you are actually trying to do. So it's tempting to just make everything mutable and public.

The reason we don't do that is because we know that mistakes will occur. We know that we might make a typo, or forget something; or that someone who doesn't properly understand how the code is mean to work might muck something up when they add their own contribution. So we structure our code carefully and strictly to make sure that the most delicate parts of the code can only be used in the correct way.

eg. If I pass a reference to some function, I don't want to have to worry about whether or not the function is going to the value of my variable; so I make sure it is a const reference.

Like I said, this isn't really the same as gun control, but I'm reminded of it. I'm reminded of it because I know that although guns can be used sensibly and safely, and that most people will in fact use them safely; the fact is that I don't want to have to worry about someone making a mistake by misusing their gun. I want the rules in place to make it harder to misuse the guns. Of course, the rules can still be broken, just like you can still use const_cast to get around the rules in programming if you are determined to do something evil; but never the less, the rules still make it significantly safer.

OH CANADA

Heh, true. Here is something to get our minds off guns. My son loves snowmen, and with our winter being terrible this year he didn't get to make one. Today he asked me to build him one, so I booted blender and made this (forgot to give them arms, but he didn't care).

{"name":"606128","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/e\/fe3783a73879d689000d95218004fe0c.png","w":960,"h":540,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/e\/fe3783a73879d689000d95218004fe0c"}