the prevailing discourse in the political arena and the news is different.
The prevailing argument of gun advocates, at least in the US, is that "it's not our guns. it's those other, bad people's guns". It would probably help their case if they stopped arguing that owning a potentially deadly piece of gear is some universal human right not subject to regulation like, say, owning a car.
Most car owners cause approximately no deaths. All drivers need a license and insurance.
The compromise is there to be had - own whatever gun you want, but take a few steps to convince the rest of us that you can do so safely.
Your whole premise is false: keeping and bearing arms is much safer than driving cars. I can go into details as to why I believe that's the case, but to start with, whenever I walk outside the door I put my carry gun into a holster, and then never take it out until I return home. So it's just sitting there on my hip under my shirt or vest, not much of a danger to anyone as long as I keep it away from an MRI machine's strong magnet.
But the raw facts speak for themselves; off the top of my head, the latest available numbers are 33,000 or so vehicle accident fatalities per year, 600 with guns.
Lots more car owners accidently kill than gun owners, and as I've mentioned elsewhere, the proper analogy to a drivers license is a concealed carry licence, and I'd add for hunting a hunting licence, which nowadays requires proof of taking a hunter's safety course (unless you're an old guy like me and are grandfathered).
As far as "convincing" "the rest of us", we simply don't have to do that any more than I have to convince you that I can use a printing press without prior restraint, its an enumerated Constitutional right. Want to change that? The Constitution has a mechanism.
Quoting the number of gun accidents is misleading. The point of a license is to keep dangerous equipment out of the hands of people who are a danger to others or themselves. Thus you should really count murder/suicide too, and as wikipedia says, "In 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicide deaths, and 11,078 firearm-related homicide deaths in the United States". So guns really are at least as dangerous as cars, probably moreso since only 1/3 of households own guns.
Since of course we know that gun ownership/access and suicide are closely correlated, and nearly gun free societies like Japan and China don't have suicide rates nearly twice ours....
And what about considering the opposite end of the stick, e.g. that firearms are used 2.25 million times per year in self-defense (which I figured some time ago was about twice as many times as they are used in criminal offense).
Above the united states in that rank (and by a LOT) is most of Europe. France, Belgium, Austria, most of Eastern Europe (and the Netherlands if you were to add "self" chosen euthanasia to suicide figures, bringing it up to over 20. Self between brackets since it's often not a choice, as medical treatments are stopped for elderly people in Holland, making euthanasia the only treatment that can offer hope to alleviate pain)
There's also Japan, just in the top10, which was claimed to have a lower suicide rate than the US because of lack of guns, in fact has a suicide rate just short of twice that of the US.
Incidentally, all muslim nations are reporting suicide rates that I just can't believe are accurate, or they're just not present at all. I know multiple stories about suicide from people in Kuwait, and I've never been (just work with consultants that have been there). Presumably they only report suicides amongst Kuwaiti, not the 80% immigrant population, and even then it seems on the low side.
There's reasons for suicide, but merely having an easy means to do it (guns) doesn't factor in at all. Looking at that list, clearly the cold is the main factor, with a close second bad economic conditions, and then we move on to lack of freedom. I wonder if you were to check suicide rates in parts of the US if this pattern would hold. Most in the poor northern states ?
Alaska comes out on top, with only New Mexico as a southern state in the top-5.
So here's the theory from those statistics.
1) cold (maybe lack of sunlight ?) is a big cause of suicide
2) barring that, bad economic conditions
3) after that, bad government will do it
> but merely having an easy means to do it (guns) doesn't factor in at all.
The research on this is very good and very clear. Access to effective means of suicide increases rates of completed suicide. Guns are very effective means of suicide, thus access to guns increases rates of completed suicide.
You're making a mistake to compare rates of suicide among different nations. That's tricky because of the different ways suicide is reported (or not reported), but it's also not relevant.
What we really want to know is what the rate of completed suicide would be in the US with guns available and with guns not available.
Once you have that information you then decide whether it's significant enough to warrant restricting guns.
I'm trying to ignore my own strong anti-gun sentiment. My kneejerk reaction is to say "ban all guns!". My considered response is something like "increase availability of mental health treatment! Provide rapid access to crisis and home treatment options! destigmatize mental illness! Persuade men to get treatment for illness, especially mental illness! Start a discussion in the gun owning community about locking guns up, and about getting treatment for mental illness".
Your comments about treatment of elderly people in the Netherlands feels odd. Please, do you have a cite for that?
Being from The Netherlands myself, this is simply not true. Euthanasia is something that both the patient (and if the patient is no longer capable of deciding for himself, his family) and the doctor have to agree on.
Stopping treatment or prescribing drugs that will shorten the patient's life is also being done in the US, so if you want to inflate the suicide numbers, you have to do it for all.
How can a patient -aside from a coma- EVER be incapable of deciding for himself ? Yet most often family decides ... For family, what you neglect to mention is that say "no, don't euthanize" often has a very high (monthly) cost (for the home + treatment), whereas euthanasia is free. And what happens when they say no, but don't pay ? All treatment, including very basic treatment like dialysis is stopped, leading to painful deaths.
Don't they have health insurance ? Well, yes, but the Dutch government unilaterally changed the terms of national health insurance to no longer cover any treatment that isn't likely to "significantly" extend life, on average, and measured in percentage (and not for a particular patient). Of course significantly extending life is measured as a percentage, and if you're 80 ... Basic cheap treatment like dialysis is stopped at ~69 years old. And while it is true that it's unlikely to extend a patient's life by 10% from that point, stopping that treatment will be fatal in ~48 hours in some cases, and it'll be a painful death.
A "hunting license" gives you the ability to take an animal, not to own a firearm.
And in most states (outside of the most infringing states -- my home state of NY is a great example), a Conceal Carry license is "how" you can carry a handgun on your person - and not the ability to own one.
A hunting license also gives you the ability to carry a loaded long gun in a variety of places it is otherwise illegal, due mostly to anti-poaching laws.
You seem to have not noticed how printing presses, and newfangled movie projectors and radio transmitters, were instrumental in arranging the deaths of a quarter billion disarmed people by their own governments in the 20th century. You simply can't achieve that level of mass murder if you're limited to getting up on a soap box, word of mouth, etc.
The An Lushan Rebellion, for example, is thought to have possibly killed 15% of the human population of the entire planet. Hitler and Stalin couldn't dream of such levels of mass murder.
Do you need a license or insurance to own a vehicle? Likewise do you need those to operate a vehicle on private property for private i.e. non-commercial purposes?
One wonders, why? At least in the case of licenses and insurance, we see folks all the time (anecdotally illegal aliens doing work, though I'm curious how well statistics actually back that supposition up) drive with neither, usually to no ill effect.
Insurance usually doesn't seem to help very much in the case of a totaled car, and mostly just seems to be a captive market for insurance providers. Drivers licenses are more for glorified identification than a seal of approval of your driving prowess--look at the highways near any major city.
And yet, here we are, with millions of firearms owned and honestly not that much death and dismemberment because of it, all without licensing and insurance.
We don't need a compromise--it's a solution in search of a problem.
The point about insurance isn't so that the driver gets a new car if they wreck it -- it's so that if they kill or injure, or damage the property of, someone else then that someone else is covered.
Driving licenses are "a seal of approval of your driving prowess" in many countries other than the United States; American drivers frequently can't drive for shit. (Sorry, but I live in the UK, with approximately half the per-capita adjusted road death/injury rate to the US, and a driving test that's notoriously hard.)
As for "not that much death and dismemberment" because of the easy availability of firearms in the US, it's noteworthy that the level in question is a couple of orders of magnitude higher than in the UK, where firearms ownership is rare and tightly licensed. I wouldn't argue for a total ban -- if nothing else, North America is full of interesting and exciting wildlife, to which many people live in close proximity -- but there's no obvious need for city dwellers to own semi-auto rifles and handguns, and requiring those who do to carry third-party insurance in case an accidental discharge ends up injuring someone is an absolute minimum.
"...and requiring those who do to carry third-party insurance in case an accidental discharge ends up injuring someone is an absolute minimum."
The thing here is that accidental discharges don't happen if you properly maintain your weapons and ammunition, and if you handle them properly.
As an example, I wouldn't store any weapons with a round chambered, wouldn't store weapons loaded, and wouldn't use any rifle or pistol rounds in an apartment for self-defense because of over-penetration concerns. The case where you have an accidental discharge and it hurts someone or something is entirely preventable using common sense, and so I don't believe that we should require insurance against what is honestly improper and unsafe tool usage--that burden should rest on the person who caused the accident.
As over 90% of road traffic accidents are the result of human error, I strongly disagree with your conclusion -- otherwise we wouldn't need third-party insurance for cars, either.
(On the other hand, if you're as sensible as you say, I have three words for you: no claims discount.)
Quick searching is not instructive as to pricing, but I guess some homeowners policies cover gun accidents, and such insurance is not particularly expensive.
Indeed, and you can tell from the costs what the insurance companies think are the serious risks (hint, not liability).
I'll just mention ratios, that I'm a USAA customer who's father was in the military (eyesight kept me out, but they have a special category for us because we're better risks), that I don't have very many guns, have a monitored alarm, and no longer get the no claims discount (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado).
All that said, I pay 4 times as much for the extra protection needed to cover loss of my guns as I do for the liability insurance that's an enumerated part of my renter's policy, and the single instance liability they're on the hook for is 35 times greater than a total loss of my listed guns and scopes.
Well, we don't see that all the time - we see it sometimes. The only reason some people can drive with neither is because most people don't.
I don't think it's merely a solution in search of a problem because we seem to spend an enourmous amount of political energy on the topic in the way we don't on 'who gets to own a Ferrari'. Ferrari owners pay the exorbitant insurance fees for the privilege. You're a firearms enthusiast who would like to own a .303 British? More power to you. Pay up.
Actually, the higher-energy cartridges like .303 Brit and .30-06 are used even more rarely in crime than other rifle cartridges. Intermediate cartridges, which came into military favor following the second world war, allow the user to carry more ammunition per unit of weight, and to manage the recoil of the rifle more easily. It's also easier to manufacture an autoloading rifle to reliably fire a cartridge like 5.56 or 7.62x39 than one like .303 British.
Ferraris aren't very common as bank robbery getaway vehicles either. My point was that it should be possible to come up with some sort of regulatory regime that reasonably covers the entire range of uses - from personal safety to collection of exotica.
This isn't possible if one side's position is 'I get to have whatever I want, because'. You can't buy a thing that plugs into your wall socket that isn't UL certified, what exactly, is so uniquely special about firearms, of all things.
The great thing about mandatory liability insurance is that the government doesn't need to make any determination at all about how dangerous various kinds of weapons are. You think the threat of Gun Type X is overblown? Great. If that's true, market forces will ensure that the liability insurance for it is cheap.
Some of us believe that we shouldn't need to convince you of anything. There is no such thing as "pre-crime". I have the liberty to do as I please as a human being on this planet so long as it doesn't hurt you. Simply claiming that I might hurt you or someone else might hurt you with a rifle is dubious logic at best.
I have the liberty to do as I please as a human being on this planet so long as it doesn't hurt you.
No, you don't. There is such a thing as exposure to risk. Otherwise anyone would have the liberty to build a toxic waste processing plant by your back yard because, hey, that's not hurting you. Yet.
Strangely, this is not the established way of things in any actually functional society.
The beauty of liberty is I don't care what you think about me exercising it. That's kind of the point I was trying to make. That whole "give me liberty or give me death" thing really means something to some of us and we really don't care what others think. They have a name for us actually - Americans.
No, those are caricature Americans. No thinking Americans, starting with the founders, made it a point of pride of ignoring what other people think. They may have arrived at different conclusions but the notion they did so because liberty is some function of willful ignorance is idiotic.
I'd recommend testing your theory by taking a loaded gun out in public and pointing it at random strangers while telling them, "You're going to die!" As long as you don't actually shoot them, you've done them no harm, right?
The prevailing argument of gun advocates, at least in the US, is that "it's not our guns. it's those other, bad people's guns". It would probably help their case if they stopped arguing that owning a potentially deadly piece of gear is some universal human right not subject to regulation like, say, owning a car.
Most car owners cause approximately no deaths. All drivers need a license and insurance.
The compromise is there to be had - own whatever gun you want, but take a few steps to convince the rest of us that you can do so safely.