I realize that he's a comic so isn't necessarily out to make a logical argument, but I wish just once people who bring up Australia's restrictions (wasn't a ban) could explain why their homicide rate remained pretty much unchanged after 1996.
So being murdered only matters if you were killed along with a bunch of other people?
You brought up Australia's homicide rate which has nothing to do with the reason for their strict gun restrictions. Gun restrictions were put in place in Australia to halt the use of firearms in mass shootings, not to stop homicides. Homicide rates are rarely the target of gun reform because people will just find new ways to kill one another, gun reform is mostly put in place to stop tragedies such as these from occurring which under most circumstances it does a good job of.
Right, and I'm saying that even if that's true, that's a meaningless distinction. How well did France and Belgium's gun laws stop mass killings there? Know what the worse school massacre in U.S. history involved? Explosives.
How is it meaningless? If I'm going to compare the effectiveness of legislation I'm not going to use a statistic that is unaffected and not even the target of said legislation. Because a mass shooting happened in a state that has strict gun control does not mean the legislation was ineffective in doing what it was supposed to. Legislation rarely works absolutely. If we look at frequency of incidences many of the states have deflated numbers in comparison to the U.S. Are you saying that if guns are strictly regulated people will switch to explosives?
You're saying there's some qualitative difference between 10 people being killed all at once versus 10 separate incidents?
One person killing 10 people in one incident? And 10 people killing ten other people in separate incidents? The difference between them is that the mass killing is catalyzed in many cases by the same variable, a firearm, which can be regulated and thwarted (not in every case, nothing is perfect). Those 10 murder victims while it is tragic that lives were lost there is no variable that exists in every case that could help in thwarting future incidents. Now of course we could argue that the firearm is not the variable, but if we look at the frequency of events in other states with strict gun regulation we see that these massacre's are actually combatted pretty well by the legislation.
That's an awfully random reading of the evidence. How do we know that they were thwarted? Just because they don't happen as often (that we know about)?
I'm not sure what it is we are discussing anymore if I'm being completely honest. It may be because I've been sitting at the courthouse since very early this morning waiting for them to decide if I will serve on a jury which I don't think they are. I think the number of times a mass killing occurs is a good metric to work off of, is it perfect not really, but it's something.
Jury duty is a pain...for some reason ever since I became a lawyer I've never been called :) I guess to me it's just kind of arbitrary. It's like saying we should base policy on the number of killings that happen on Tuesdays.