Bear with me. The single biggest risk factor with guns is suicide.

[Recursion]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by SecularMotion (a host of the Gun Control Reform Activism group).

Look, I know I've been on "the other side" of a lot of you for a while here, but I do believe in gun control. The 1934 NFA was very effective gun control legislation. We should look to it for examples.

The single biggest risk factor with gun ownership is suicide. I know there are posters here who can back that up better than I can, so I'll leave that to them. A lot of people on "my side" (as I think Arafat once said, "A lot of people on 'our side', aren't&quot think that should just be ignored, but I don't. It's a legitimate and undeniable public health problem.

I don't know what to do about that. If we eliminated every single gun homicide in the country, we would still have a gun death rate several standard deviations above the world mean. 2/3s of all people who die from a gun in the US die by their own hand. This isn't some corner case or issue that should be ignored, this is the clear majority of gun deaths. These are deaths that would not happen (or at least would happen at a much, much lower rate) without the ease of access to handguns that we have (and they are essentially all handguns, along with nearly all murders).

I want actual gun control that addresses the real problems we face, and the real problem is suicide. What are the options?

[DanTex]

1. I wouldn't say "the real problem" is suicide.

I would say that suicide is one of the real problems. Homicide and suicide are both problems. 10,000 gun homicides a year is still more in a single year than the total number of Americans killed in 9-11, Iraq and Afghanistan combined since 2001.

It's also more than the average number of Americans killed per year during the Vietnam war (the worst year of Vietnam we lost 15,000 IIRC, so it's in the ballpark). The fact that more people die per year from gun suicides doesn't mean that gun homicides aren't a "real problem".

Also, ecological studies have found that, in the US, suicide rates are correlated with general gun ownership rates, even after controlling for other studies. So any law that has the effect of reducing gun ownership will also reduce suicide (and homicide) rates.

The Brady Bill was actually found not to have a significant effect on homicide rates, attributed most likely to interstate trafficking (the study compares states that already required background checks to those that didn't) and the private sales loophole. The one area where the study found a significant impact is suicide rates of older males. So, in general, gun control is an effective tool in reducing suicide.

[SecularMotion]

2. Locking

This member has been blocked and the thread is locked as violating the SOP..