@dr-pepper Sorry for taking so long to respond, I usually use the internet during downtime at work so weekends I’m pretty quiet online.
For the record, I did not concede to your argument. I simply gave up trying to argue whether a fantasy scenario that literally never happens fulfills my criteria of “civilian use of an automatic weapon”.
We seem to be in agreement that a huge overhaul of gun control is needed, like who can buy a gun, who can sell a gun. Similarly with mental health. Good.
It seems our main disagreement is on what guns people should be able to acquire. Even if I would agree with your arguments, that civilians need guns to protect against criminals who also have guns, I still fail to see why civilians would need anything more than a small pistol that can shoot a maximum of six bullets before reloading.
if there are X number of legal guns out there and Y number of illegal guns- how will reducing the number of X bring down the number of Y? It may stop Y from growing as fast as it’s been growing in the past but you haven’t explained how it’ll be reduced.
Stopping growth is also reduction. Guns decay and break down with age, and with illegal firearms they can’t exactly bring it to their local Walmart to get fixed. One you significantly stop the growth, it’s only a matter of time before the number in the hands of criminals goes down too.
Here’s a statistic for you: The total number of prisoners in the UK makes up 0.088% of the population. The average sentence for violence is 18.5 years. By contrast, 0.7% of the US population is in prison, and the average sentence for violence is 25 years. In the UK, there are about 40 violent crimes per 100,000 people compared to 300 in the US. So it clearly isn’t prison keeping violent crimes at a high.
I would love to quote you NRA funded studies, problem is that very few of their studies are relevant. They are all about how better armor leads to less death and nothing about how less guns lead to less death. In fact, just the opposite. The NRA has spent a ridiculous amount of time and energy both supressing gun control studies and making sure that studying gun control is illegal. I work in healthcare data. Until Trump changed the Dickey Amendment, we were not allowed to use healtcare data to research anything regarding gun violence. Because the NRA was clearly too scared to allow people to see how dangerous guns are. So to heck with your NRA studies. I’m looking at actual data and drawing my conclusions from that. If that’s too biased for you, then I guess reality has a bias.
I’ve pointed out several of your sentences and paragraphs that bear a striking similarity to NRA talking points. I’m not going to repeat myself on that, just re-read my old comments.