Why does anyone NEED an assault rifle?

coachdb18 said:

Why? There seem to be a bunch on here that insist the UK is crime free! Are you now saying there's a problem in the UK with violent attacks?

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oggbashan said:

The UK does not have the significant problem with gun deaths that the US has. The US is almost unique among Western nations for number of deaths by gun for comparable population statistics.

Recently the UK has had an increase in deaths from the use of knives and acid used as part of gang warfare and street thefts.

The level of violent crime worries communities and UK politicians so both are trying to work out solutions. Too many incidents are 'revenge' for previous attacks so are self-perpetuating. Bystanders are getting hurt or killed too.

The number of arrests for use of knives is significant. But that isn't the answer. We need to stop the casual use of knives for minor irritations or 'disrespect'. That needs more than police work.

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coachdb18 said:

I guess you haven't noticed that if someone pulls a knife, and you pulla gun, they pull a fast exit? Shame you haven't noticed...

But you're on the road to banning EVERYTHING that can hurt you as YOUR solution (good luck with that approach LOL)

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oggbashan said:

The UK does not have the significant problem with gun deaths that the US has. The US is almost unique among Western nations for number of deaths by gun for comparable population statistics.

Recently the UK has had an increase in deaths from the use of knives and acid used as part of gang warfare and street thefts.

The level of violent crime worries communities and UK politicians so both are trying to work out solutions. Too many incidents are 'revenge' for previous attacks so are self-perpetuating. Bystanders are getting hurt or killed too.

The number of arrests for use of knives is significant. But that isn't the answer. We need to stop the casual use of knives for minor irritations or 'disrespect'. That needs more than police work.

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oggbashan said:

The UK does not have the significant problem with gun deaths that the US has. The US is almost unique among Western nations for number of deaths by gun for comparable population statistics.

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KimGordon67 said:

... but if guns are freely available, everyone pulls a gun. It's ajdapjw easier to kill someone with a gun. This is part of the reason US homicide rates are so high in the US compared to other OECD states.
No one said there is 'no crime' in the UK - that would be ridiculous. But homicide rates are demonstrably lower.

Gun ownership and homicide correlations are here.

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Hypoxia said:

"... but if guns are freely available, everyone pulls a gun."

That's the conundrum. If firearms are omnipresent, you MUST assume that all around you are armed, and MAY be hostile. Thus you'd better shoot first, shoot at any seemingly-threatening gesture. Otherwise, you're dead. That's the logic of survival.

Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon depicts a society where "dueling and the carrying of arms is a socially accepted way of maintaining civility in public; a man can wear distinctive clothing to show his unwillingness to duel, but this results in an inferior social status." Donning the "brassard of peace" means never ever arguing or contesting in public. Does this sound like a good way for society to operate?

Alas, Heinlein's "an armed society is a polite society" mantra doesn't work in this universe. People carrying firearms shoot each other and those not carrying, don't, duh. They'll find other, less efficient ways to inflict damage. Let's keep that efficiency rate down, hey?

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coachdb18 said:

Our gun death problem is almost completely confined to our 10 largest cities (90%), which have TERRIBLE inner city problems that extend to liberal control and do-gooder policies of the last 50 years.

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The Washington Post compared 2012 homicide rates for each state to Brady Scores (the Brady campaign scores states on how strong they are on 'gun control'). There was no connection between “stronger” gun laws and lower homicide rates.
Everyone finds gun murders abhorrent and wants there to be fewer victims. But in order to find the solution on how to reduce such murders in the United States, a balanced perspective at the national and international levels is needed.
When taking into account all available international data, there is no relationship between firearms ownership and gun homicide rates. The findings from a comparative perspective show that the U.S. has relatively high homicide rate among “developed” nations, but is lower than one would expect given its very high firearms ownership.
There are numerous cities with unacceptably high gun murder rates, but those tend to have stronger gun control laws.
A state-level breakdown shows no connection between gun control laws and lower homicide rates. New Hampshire and Vermont, for example, have “permissive” laws and the lowest homicide rates in the nation.

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coachdb18 said:

FACTS:

Zero Correlation Between State Gun Laws and Firearms Homicides

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Wolchover: You wrote a paper last year giving examples where distance correlation improves on Pearson’s method. Talk about the case of homicide rates and state guns laws.

Richards: This was prompted by an opinion piece in The Washington Post in 2015, by Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at UCLA. The title of the article is “Zero Correlation Between State Homicide Rate and State Gun Laws.” What he did was—you know, my eyes bugged out; I couldn’t believe it—he found some data on the states’ Brady scores, which are ratings based on the toughness of their gun laws, and he plotted the Brady scores on an x-y plot against the homicide rates in each of these states. And if you look at the plot, it looks like there’s no pattern. He used Excel or something to fit a straight line to this data set, and he calculated the Pearson correlation coefficient for this data set, and it came out to be nearly zero. And he said, “Aha, zero correlation between state homicide rate and state gun laws.”

Wolchover: That’s not kosher?

Richards: I was horrified. There are so many things wrong with this analysis. The first thing you notice in the scatterplot is that there’s one dot which is way, way out from the others, with both a high Brady score and high homicide rate. That turns out to be the District of Columbia, which is not a state; it’s really a city, so if you include it in the analysis, because it’s so far away from everybody else, it’s going to have a major effect on the slope of the regression line. That’s the first complaint; he should have removed that data point—you learn that in Stat 100. If you remove it and refit the linear regression line, the Pearson correlation is not zero, actually.

But should you even fit a linear regression line to this data set? If you look at the rest of the data, you don’t see any linearity to the relationship, and it’s easy to understand why: There are bunches of points that correspond to geographic and culturally similar regions. If you break up the states by region, then you see reasonably linear relationships starting to show up in the scatter plots. And then in each case, you find that the higher the Brady score, the lower the homicide rate.

Wolchover: Distance correlation does an even better job without having to split things up, right?

Richards: Exactly. My [astrophysicist] wife and I did these calculations in the fall of ’15, when we saw the opinion piece. She was a whiz at computer programming—I miss her just for that! It’s a silly reason to miss her, don’t you think? She calculated the distance correlation coefficient. And even with the District of Columbia included, it signaled that there was a statistically significant relationship between Brady scores and homicide rates.

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Hypoxia said:

You're still loose, traitor? Time is short. Surrender now or take exile.

Shitty statistics. A Powerful New Weapon in the Fight Against Shoddy Statistics This statistician's work is why your cellphone doesn't drop more calls. Pay him royalties, hey? And quit pulling numbers out of your traitorous ass.

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KimGordon67 said:

You know he's not going to understand any of this.

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LeatherChaps said:

Im not sure if this has been bought up yet, but one essential use of a semi-auto rifle (aka "assualt rifle) is to eradicate feral hogs.

Feral hogs are a huge problem for farmers and ranchers in the south and they are rapidly spreading north. They are an invasive species that root up crops and destroy fields. You cannot just bait them with poison as that would also kill native wildlife.

You can hunt them with bolt action rifles but it is far more effective to have multiple rapid shot capacity as they run in pacts and are very hearty beasts that often take more than one round (thats what you libs call bullets ) to kill.

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LeatherChaps said:

Im not sure if this has been bought up yet, but one essential use of a semi-auto rifle (aka "assualt rifle) is to eradicate feral hogs.

Feral hogs are a huge problem for farmers and ranchers in the south and they are rapidly spreading north. They are an invasive species that root up crops and destroy fields. You cannot just bait them with poison as that would also kill native wildlife.

You can hunt them with bolt action rifles but it is far more effective to have multiple rapid shot capacity as they run in pacts and are very hearty beasts that often take more than one round (thats what you libs call bullets ) to kill.

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phrodeau said:

Build a wall. Do I have to think of everything?

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LeatherChaps said:

Im not sure if this has been bought up yet, but one essential use of a semi-auto rifle (aka "assualt rifle) is to eradicate feral hogs.

Feral hogs are a huge problem for farmers and ranchers in the south and they are rapidly spreading north. They are an invasive species that root up crops and destroy fields. You cannot just bait them with poison as that would also kill native wildlife.

You can hunt them with bolt action rifles but it is far more effective to have multiple rapid shot capacity as they run in pacts and are very hearty beasts that often take more than one round (thats what you libs call bullets ) to kill.

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Cuckolded_BlK_Male said:

Home invasion.

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