@oritteropo
"[Norway's] stats of 20% recidivism after 2 years compares fairly favourably with the United States statistics of 80% after 3, wouldn't you agree?"

You are controlling for ethnicity, right? Or not?

Scandinavians in the US do just as well as they do in Scandinavia, in the same way that East Asians in the US have just as low crime rates as they have in East Asia.

(Actually, Scandinavians do even better in the US than in Scandinavia, but not by a huge amount.)


So no, Scandinavians' crime rates in Scandinavia don't compare favorably with Scandinavians' crime rates in the US. They do great in both systems.

Whatever stats they have for Norwegians reforming after a stint in prison are temporary.

Scandinavia's gang-rape and street crime rates have already skyrocketed.

It's only a matter of time before they realize the people they've been importing who have low academic scores and high crime rates have a different ideology and much worse prison reform stats.

http://news.yahoo.com/ohio-police-chief-takes-criminals-task-online-062947818.html

This has me more concerned than the NSA mess. Too easy for this to tip into community shunning and violating the rights of the accused. Innocent until proven guilty.

If he never used names, I'd be fine with it. But he uses names apparently.

Community shunning did work in the old days -- maybe this will indeed make a difference in the crime rate.

I don't like it when one person wearing a badge of authority does it.

All those statistics were following the same trends pre gun ban. So at worst , the gun ban merely failed to slow the crime rate increase, but it still stopped mass shootings.

So no gun control: same crime rate plus mass shootings
Gun control: same crime rate, no mass shootings.

Call me crazy but I'd say one is better than the other.

Maybe you should read that again. I'll summarize it for you in case you didn't understand or even bother to read all of it. After Australia's gun ban:

* The violent crime rate has increased 55 percent.
* Sexual assault has increased 51%.
* The homicide rate increased peaking in 2002 until it began to decline at the same rate it was declining pre gun ban.

And those are not my own words, those are the statistics provided by the Australian Institute of Criminology.

The people behind the study may be biased, however it doesn't matter who published it as long as their sources check out, which the article I linked does cite the Australian Institute of Criminology. Your link is just as biased cherry picking out only gun related crime, ignoring the overall crime rate. Obviously if you ban guns then shootings will decrease, but if you look at the whole picture something will take its place. Here is the summary notes from the Australian Institute of Criminology on violent crime:

* Assaults continue to represent the majority of recorded violent crimes. The overall trend since 1996 has been upward, with an increase of 55 percent between 1996 and 2007.
* The trend in sexual assault has also followed a general increase. The highest numbers of victims of sexual assault and of assault were recorded in 2007.
* There were 282 victims of homicide in 2007: a 12 percent decrease from 2006 and the lowest number recorded in the past 12 years.
* Continuing the trend since 2004, robbery offences increased again in 2007, to 17,988.
* The number of recorded kidnappings fluctuates from year to year. From 1996 to 2004, kidnappings registered a general increase, but the number of victims of kidnapping has remained relatively steady following a decline in 2005.

Here is the summary of statistics on homicide by weapon type: "There has been a pronounced change in the type of weapons used in homicide since monitoring began. Firearm use has declined by more than half since 1989-90 as a proportion of homicide methods, and there has been an upward trend in the use of knives and sharp instruments, which in 2006-07 accounted for nearly half of all homicide victims."

There you go, straight from the source. Post NFA, violent crime is higher. While homicide initially went up, it fell back to a steady decline which was already in decline before the NFA.

It is a common fantasy that gun bans make society safer. In 2002 -- five years after enacting its gun ban -- the Australian Bureau of Criminology acknowledged there is no correlation between gun control and the use of firearms in violent crime. In fact, the percent of murders committed with a firearm was the highest it had ever been in 2006 (16.3 percent), says the D.C. Examiner.

Even Australia's Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research acknowledges that the gun ban had no significant impact on the amount of gun-involved crime...

Moreover, Australia and the United States -- where no gun-ban exists -- both experienced similar decreases in murder rates:

* Between 1995 and 2007, Australia saw a 31.9 percent decrease; without a gun ban, America's rate dropped 31.7 percent.
* During the same time period, all other violent crime indices increased in Australia: assault rose 49.2 percent and robbery 6.2 percent.
* Sexual assault -- Australia's equivalent term for rape -- increased 29.9 percent.
* Overall, Australia's violent crime rate rose 42.2 percent.
* At the same time, U.S. violent crime decreased 31.8 percent: rape dropped 19.2 percent; robbery decreased 33.2 percent; aggravated assault dropped 32.2 percent.
* Australian women are now raped over three times as often as American women.
More...

When I said "just about any" kind of firearm should be legally obtainable, I should clarify that I mean guns. Explosive ordinance, anti-vehicle weapons, fully-auto vehicle mounted machine guns, etc. is where I see the line between reasonable and unreasonable.

My problem with getting into regulating "assault weapons" is that I see it as a very real slippery-slope hazard -- unlike restrictions like waiting periods, registration, legal obligations to keep guns locked in cabinets when not in use, etc. etc.

Here's an example: my gun-nut friends had in their extensive arsenal 2 rifles, an AR-15 and a Ruger Mini-14. The AR-15 is basically equivalent to a military M-16, except the one they had didn't have selectors for 3-shot burst or full-auto (semi-auto only). The Mini-14 was designed around the M-14, which was the military standard-issue rifle until being replaced by the M-16.

Trying to get the government to regulate those firearms seems like a nightmare to me. Is just the AR-15 (M-16) an "assault weapon"? Are they both? I've fired both and I don't think that there is any reasonable way to say that the AR-15 is "over the line" of what a civilian owner should have with the Mini-14 being "ok". The Mini-14 is a fantastic farm/hunter rifle; safe, reliable, and easy to handle -- but in the event of somebody going off the deep end and shooting people up, it is going to be just as deadly/tragic as if they had an M-16.

Basically I think that the right-wing types have a pretty legitimate beef when they say that gun crimes are committed with illegally obtained weapons, and that therefore most heavy restrictions just affect legitimate, responsible gun owners while doing very little to keep guns out of the hands that you really want them out of. I should look for data about gun crime rates comparing legally purchased guns versus black market sources, and gun-related injury and death rates between gun-nut havens like Texas and my neck of the woods in Kansas compared to more liberal urban areas.

Finally, I guess that I should make it clear that I'm OK with restrictions that require you to prove that you are a responsible owner to have any firearm. Waiting periods, background checks, loss of privileges to anyone with a criminal record, having to register and periodically present your firearms to prove that you aren't re-selling them, etc. I consider all that kind of stuff reasonable limitations on our right/privilege to own firearms. But getting into trying to figure out what does or does not classify as an "assault weapon" goes the wrong direction in my opinion.

Ha, is anybody in this thread self-aware enough to observe that liberals are unable to debate intellectually, rather than using constant insults?

Let's list them:
1. Somebody who dares to express different opinions must have a small penis.
2. He/she is also a troll.
3. He/she is also an asshole.

That's a lot of ire just for diversity of opinion.


This is what you're not realizing:

1. If you completely remove rural gun-owners from the society, the average crime rates don't go down.

2. So if you want to reduce crime rates, instead of making false accusations of rural gun-owners (untruths are bad), focus on the communities that cause the crime rates (urban youth and gang culture).

@EMPIRE said: "As opposed to conservatives who see sex and gays everywhere?"

Responding to criticism with "but conservatives are just as bad as liberals" doesn't seem like enlightened liberalism.

I haven't advocated conservativism. I'm simply someone who was a liberal until I grew up and realized there's an entire intellectual world that liberals don't know they're not aware of. And they'll fight to keep that way.



@Fletch @Deano:

It sounds like intellectual dishonesties don't bother you guys, as long as you're entertained.

"Let's just lie and say people with different opinions than ourselves are the source of our high violent crime rates."

Again, genocide and religious/political persecution are not comparable to the system I describe. Nobody in my system would be arrested or executed because of their ethnicity, political alignment or religious beliefs. They would only be arrested and executed if they broke rational and fair laws, such as requiring aspiring parents to be healthy, responsible, educated and financially secure.

And yes, there is a huge disparity in crime rates around the world. What is consistent is that areas with the most surveillance and law enforcement (which are generally the more prosperous and advanced areas) have the lowest crime rates. Washington D.C. currently has the highest violent crime and murder rates in the country. There are shootings on a daily basis (despite the stringent gun laws) in the poorer areas of the city. If the police decided to focus their efforts in these areas and lethally enforced a zero tolerance policy, crime would be significantly reduced. However, they don't because politicians don't care about the ghettos and slums. Instead of trying to either improve them or purge them, they simply let them sit and fester as lousy and irresponsible parents continue to breed future criminals.

Thankfully, there are no contemporary examples where ALL of what you describe has been attempted. That would be because it was done away with centuries ago as a discredited idea.

The closest attempt to what you describe would be in certain european countries around 1939-1946 (I will not invoke godwin! ). Is that really the model you want to follow?

And your technology argument is patently false. If technology was the primary factor in creating a safe community, then there wouldn't be such a huge disparity between crime rates in different parts of the world. Even allowing that poorer areas have less technology doesn't account for the vast difference.

Right, well thankfully we no longer live in the dark ages.

And you're actually wrong about fear. We live in the safest time in history (statistical fact) and we don't use torture as a deterrent, yet when state sanctioned torture was considered a deterrent (which was much of human history) violent crime rates were much higher.

I suggest you read "The better angels of our nature" by Stephen Pinker.

You can recover from being raped. You can't recover from being murdered. While rape is certainly traumatic and can cause physical harm, it's still nowhere close to being dead.

As for rehabilitation's efficacy, how many criminals are repeat offenders? If rehabilitation worked, there would be no such thing as a repeat offender.

You are correct, though, in regards to our current implementation of the death penalty being ineffective. For one, the death penalty is very rarely handed out. You stand a much better chance of getting a life sentence. Even if you do get the death penalty, you'll likely sit on death row for years before being executed. In fact, this is often a benefit to prisoners, as they are separated from the rest and don't have to worry about being raped or beaten. Free food, free room, no threats from other prisoners and you don't have to worry about anything because you already know you're going to die. And when you are finally executed, it is done in the most humane (and unnecessarily elaborate and expensive) way possible. If you're a sociopath who has accepted or even embraced your own death, this is hardly the worse way to go.

The death penalty isn't the ultimate penalty, either. There are some people who don't care about living and therefore don't care about dying. To them, death means nothing. However, being forced to live a life of pain and suffering isn't appealing to anyone, no matter how apathetic they may be. If the penalty for any crime was to have your arms, legs and eyes removed, be hooked up to the necessary IVs to survive and then forced to endure daily torture for the rest of your life, I guarantee crime rates would drop substantially. Fear is an incredibly effective tool at keeping people in check. It's when people stop being scared of punishment that rules start being broken.

Ok, i'll bite your troll bain:
You do the same thing every other law abiding citizen does in every country that has much stricter gun control or outright guns bans and yet has lower crime rate no matter which way you slice it.