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Do Waiting Periods Work?

Why would it? It's not that hard to hang yourself.

Waiting periods are just another way to deter gun ownership.
I have yet to meet a gun banner who opposes waiting periods.
 
Why would it? It's not that hard to hang yourself.

Waiting periods are just another way to deter gun ownership.


Yes it is, it takes a bit of planning as well as determination - as opposed to simply pulling a trigger.
 
Yes it is, it takes a bit of planning as well as determination - as opposed to simply pulling a trigger.
It is hard to defend your family with a rope.
 
Yes it is, it takes a bit of planning

Doesn't take any more planning. People hang themselves when they're in jail, so how much planning could it take?
as well as determination - as opposed to simply pulling a trigger.

I'd say it takes just as much determination to pull the trigger. Some countries with very high suicide rates also have strict gun control laws. If you were right I should think we'd see a high correlation between the level of gun ownership and the suicide rate - but we don't.

Anyway, these arguments for waiting periods are extremely weak.

Why don't you just admit that the real purpose of waiting periods is to discourage gun ownership?

a right delayed.jpg
 
It's equally hard to commit suicide with it

Why would you resort to using a rope to defend your home anyway ?
Similarly, a 1994 survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] found that Americans use guns to frighten away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 498,000 times per year.
 
Doesn't take any more planning. People hang themselves when they're in jail, so how much planning could it take?

How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Where can you lash the rope to? Do you have anywhere you could use a dead-weight method or would you rely on strangulation?
Would you need to handcuff yourself like people who use a plastic bag do ?



I'd say it takes just as much determination to pull the trigger....

Then you're wrong and you have no idea of what you're saying
The act of dying isn't pleasant, hanging yourself and slowly strangling to death or putting a plastic bag over your head and slowly suffocating certainly isn't


Why don't you just admit that the real purpose of waiting periods is to discourage gun ownership?

In your mind, just WHO would be discouraged, from buying a gin, by a waiting period ?
 
Similarly, a 1994 survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] found that Americans use guns to frighten away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 498,000 times per year.

Might they not also be "frightened" away if you brandished a crowbar at them ?
 
Might they not also be "frightened" away if you brandished a crowbar at them ?
That is an experiment you should try. Go out on the street and aggressively wave a crowbar at some tough looking guy then do the same with a gun. Repeat 100 times and report your results. Then we can compare them to what common sense told us in the first place.
 
That is an experiment you should try. Go out on the street and aggressively wave a crowbar at some tough looking guy then do the same with a gun. Repeat 100 times and report your results. Then we can compare them to what common sense told us in the first place.

A certain lawyer couple in St Louis have learned the folly of brandishing weapons in public.
 
In your mind, just WHO would be discouraged, from buying a gin, by a waiting period ?

If there were a ten day waiting period to buy a bag of potatoes, potato sales would go down. If there were a ten day waiting period to post a comment on this forum, membership would plummet. If there were a ten day waiting period for a woman to have sex with a man after she made the decision to do so, the amount of sex in the world would drastically drop.

Reducing the amount of gun sales is the only reason people who are anti-gun support waiting periods.
 
I think the point of this is really to make people feel like they're doing something. You can just as easily buy a rifle wait three days and then go on a shooting rampage so if a shooting rampage can happen 3 days after you buy rifle it therefore doesn't work.

I never understood the waiting period myself, the arbitrary time spans don't really seem to make any kind of sense. So when you have a law that doesn't make sense it's probably based on emotion.

Yep, but if 3 days is not a 2A infringement then why not make it three weeks, months or years? Asserting that it is based on solid scientific studies, of course. ;)
 
A certain lawyer couple in St Louis have learned the folly of brandishing weapons in public.
I know so I think we need to use common sense.
 
That's a fair comment, people don't like all the shootings and mass shootings and want their politicians to take action

But Congress knows it's hands are tied by the 2nd Amendment so they pay lip service to people's demands

There can be no significant gun control until the 2nd Amendment is repealed.
No one likes mass shootings. What new laws would prevent them? There's already over 20,000 gun laws they haven't stopped them.

Isn't it the people's demands Congress is supposed to represent?

The 2nd. Amendment will not be repealed. Not in my lifetime, anyway...
 
No one likes mass shootings. What new laws would prevent them? There's already over 20,000 gun laws they haven't stopped them.

Isn't it the people's demands Congress is supposed to represent?

The 2nd. Amendment will not be repealed. Not in my lifetime, anyway...
Mass murder shootings are rare (defined as four or victims) compared to overall numbers of murders. Around 50 in last 20 years.
 
I'd say it takes just as much determination to pull the trigger. Some countries with very high suicide rates also have strict gun control laws. If you were right I should think we'd see a high correlation between the level of gun ownership and the suicide rate - but we don't.

Are you sure?

Guns and suicide: A fatal link
[ Spring 2008 ]

In the United States, suicides outnumber homicides almost two to one. Perhaps the real tragedy behind suicide deaths—about 30,000 a year, one for every 45 attempts—is that so many could be prevented. Research shows that whether attempters live or die depends in large part on the ready availability of highly lethal means, especially firearms.

A study by the Harvard School of Public Health of all 50 U.S. states reveals a powerful link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides. Based on a survey of American households conducted in 2002, HSPH Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management Matthew Miller, Research Associate Deborah Azrael, and colleagues at the School’s Injury Control Research Center (ICRC), found that in states where guns were prevalent—as in Wyoming, where 63 percent of households reported owning guns—rates of suicide were higher. The inverse was also true: where gun ownership was less common, suicide rates were also lower.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/
 
Are you sure?

I'm sure that guns don't cause people to commit suicide. If you are going to claim guns do cause suicide, then why doesn't it hold at the country level?

From your link:

For example, one study (Miller 2007) used survey-based measures of state household firearm ownership (from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System) while controlling for state-level measures of mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, and other factors associated with suicide. The study found that males and females and people of all age groups were at higher risk for suicide if they lived in a state with high firearm prevalence. This is perhaps most concrete when looking not at rates or regression results but at raw numbers. The authors compared the 40 million people who live in the states with the lowest firearm prevalence (HI, MA, RI, NJ, CT, NY) to about the same number living in the states with the highest firearm prevalence (WY, SD, AK, WV, MT, AR, MS, ID, ND, AL, KY, WI, LA, TN, UT). Overall suicides were almost twice as high in the high-gun states, even though non-firearm suicides were about equal.

You have rich urban states compared to many rural poor states. 30 seconds of google:

Adding to these findings, the aim of this study is to provide empirical evidence on potential associations of individual level indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) and social isolation (SI) with district suicide rates. While suicide itself is a complex phenomenon determined by genetic, cultural and behavioral factors (10, 11), such associations help to identify populations at risk.

Concerning suicide risks linked to SES, a meta-analysis by Li et al. (12) found the highest relative and population attributable risks of committing suicide for males in low ranked occupational classes and for persons with low educational achievement. Among women, relative risk ratios and population attributable risks were highest for unemployed individuals and individuals with low education. Regarding relations of education and suicide, suicides were also 2.12 times more often observed in the lowest educational group as compared to individuals with the highest educational levels across 35 countries in a study combining census and mortality register data (13). Unemployment turned out to be associated with suicide in a more recent meta-analysis (14). Relative risks of these associations were reduced after controlling for prior mental health. Financial strain, as captured by a family income to poverty threshold ratio has been found to be positively related to suicide attempts and ideations in a household survey among U.S. adults (15).

Look at the education levels between the two groups of states. Then there is the urban/rural component, going back to your link:

For example, suicide rates are higher in rural areas in the U.S. Firearm ownership is also higher in rural areas. Perhaps it is not the presence of firearms, per se, but something about rural life that leads to greater depression and suicidality, or, alternately, perhaps there is a character trait (such as self-reliance and an inclination to “go it alone”) that may be associated both with firearm ownership and suicide and it is this trait, not the presence of the gun, that leads to the association.

Causation can be extremely tricky. You guys are making dumb simple statements regarding firearms and suicide that do not hold up.

Moreover, people have the right to end their life if they choose to do so. Do any of you anti-gun leftists support laws criminalizing suicide? In other words, if someone attempts to kill themselves and fail, should they by imprisoned? If no, then you must agree that they have the right to end their life if they choose to do so.
 

That makes sense, because they were counting successful suicides (you can’t easily underreport those) rather than suicide failed attempts (very apt to go underreported). It‘s not hard to inflict a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound on the first attempt even if you are otherwise not a very good shot. As with any endeavor, using the best tool for the job helps to ensure success.
 
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