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Do you own a firearm ?

?

  • Total voters
    33
I'm sixty-eight year old liberal Southern California Democrat who was born and raised in the DC suburbs of Maryland and I've owned at least one gun since age nineteen.
I dropped my NRA membership over fifteen years ago.
 
I used to own an AR-15, 2 12 gauge shotguns, a 20 gauge and a 22 pistol. Most inherited from my Dad when he passed.

Went about 5 years of never shooting them, opening the gun case, etc. so I sold the AR-15 (I personally bought) and gave my Dad's guns to extended family, who own probably 50+ guns in one family alone.

Won't lie - shooting tannerite is fun. Expensive hobby though.
 
Tender Branson said:
No, I don't own firearms and also have no firearm license and also don't intend to get one.

Here in Austria, there are 400.000 firearm license owners, with about 1.5 million legally registered firearms.

But estimates suggest that there are much more illegal owners, with about 2-3 million firearms in total in circulation.

The country has 9 million people.

So, while not as heavily armed as US citizens (more guns than people), 30% of Austrians have a legal or illegal firearm statistically-speaking.

Which is one of the highest rates in Western countries, together with Switzerland, Finland, Serbia etc.
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Hi Tender,

I do not own a gun. I hope I never feel that I 'need' to own a gun.

Now about what you are saying. Your math is off. Let me explain to you.

You are saying that 400,000 people have registered about 1,500,000 firearms.

- This equates to 1,500,000 Registered Guns/400,000 Registered Fire Arm Owners = 3.75 Registered Guns per Registered Fire Arm Owner.

You also say that Austria has about 9,000,000 People.

- 1% of 9,000,000 People = 90,000 People. Than we know that 400,000 / 90,000 = 4.4%. So all you know now is that 4.4% of the population owns all the registered firearms with an average of 3.75 Registered Guns per Registered Owner.

Now you go on to say that there are an estimated 2-3 million firearms in circulation in Austria in total and 30% of Austrians are in the possession of a legal or illegal firearm. From the 2-3 million guns total 1.5 million guns are registered. That leaves you 0.5 million to 1.5 million guns that are not accounted for. The worst case scenario is that there are 1.5 million additional guns and nobody owns more than 1 of those guns. That leaves you with 1.5 million people owning an illegal gun in Austria. That equates to 16.7% of the population owning an unregistered gun. In the worst case scenario these guns are not own by people that own a legally obtained firearm, so we can add that 4.4% to the tally as well we end up with 16.7% + 4.4% = 21.1% of the population owning a gun.

That was a worst case scenario and the math to show you.

The reality is of course the following.
- Some people who legally own firearms also own illegal firearms.
- Since we see an average of 3.75 legal firearm per person it would be silly to assume differently for illegal firearms.
- Most people are less inclined to own an illegal firearm if there are means to do it legally, This does not apply to criminals. But not all illegal firearms are owned by criminals. Many are collector items hanging on the wall in grandfathers living room and bedroom.

I think the reality is that no more than 12% of the people in Austria own a firearm and it is probably nearer 9-11% if you ask me.

I based everything on your numbers and did not do any fact checking. When I was finished and asked ChatGPT to check it for me for stupid mistakes. He found a typo in one of the numbers, so that was important. But than he also said, and I quote: 'Many independent studies and estimates align with a 10–12% gun ownership rate in Austria, so yes — your conclusion is sound and well-argued.'. I see I also pasted the style. lol.

Joey
 
The reason why Austria has a very high per capita rate of firearms around are more on the "illegal" side, not the legal ones.

The 400k legal owners are quite small and from the 1.5 million legally owned, about a million are hunting rifles, not handguns.

The Small Arms Survey estimates an additional 1 million illegal firearms, but these are just estimates and nobody knows if true or not.

So, why so many estimated illegal weapons in circulation ?

# militia: after WW2, Austria like Switzerland and Finland armed its population to counter future invasions. Here in Austria, this became obsolete after the Soviet Union collapsed and EU membership, but in Switzerland and Finland, armed militia are still a common school of thought today (Switzerland because it's completely neutral unlike Austria and Finland because it borders Russia and is under constant threat of being invaded by them).

# Balkan Wars: many illegal weapons were smuggled to Austria from there in the 90s, or brought along with immigrants from there.
 
ScrambledEggs said:
I used to own an AR-15, 2 12 gauge shotguns, a 20 gauge and a 22 pistol. Most inherited from my Dad when he passed.

Went about 5 years of never shooting them, opening the gun case, etc. so I sold the AR-15 (I personally bought) and gave my Dad's guns to extended family, who own probably 50+ guns in one family alone.

Won't lie - shooting tannerite is fun. Expensive hobby though.
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Hi ScrambledEggs,

I am strongly against legalizing guns, but yeah, that sounds like great fun! And I really mean that. This is actually why I took a quite a few years before I took a stance against it. Because I can see that it is actually really a lot of fun, and that applies much broader than just shooting tannerite.


Joey
 
Peter said:
Or it could be that strict gun laws work.
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Not the case in the US. The regions with the strictest gun laws are the regions with the most gun crime. The problem in the US is our revolving door criminal justice system. Too many offenders just get a slap on the wrists and are back on the streets before the ink on the arrest paperwork is dry. And there is that the vast majority of gun crime is in the inner cities, due to rampant gangland drug trade.
 
MAGAnificent said:
Not the case in the US. The regions with the strictest gun laws are the regions with the most gun crime. The problem in the US is our revolving door criminal justice system. Too many offenders just get a slap on the wrists and are back on the streets before the ink on the arrest paperwork is dry. And there is that the vast majority of gun crime is in the inner cities, due to rampant gangland drug trade.
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That's because firearm laws need to be enacted on a nationwide basis.
 
I live in a big city, so no. I've never really felt the need to own a firearm. And statistically, if I owned a firearm it's more likely to hurt me or someone in my house than it is to hurt a bad guy.
 
Gatsby said:
I live in a big city, so no. I've never really felt the need to own a firearm. And statistically, if I owned a firearm it's more likely to hurt me or someone in my house than it is to hurt a bad guy.
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Yes that is true..a gun owner is more likely to shoot someone he/she knows and less likely to shoot someone who he/she doesn't know.
 
Peter said:
I wonder why the UK has such low figures for gun crime given that gun control never works and criminals will just get guns regardless of the law?
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In my opinion, it is two things.
1. Gun ownership was never widespread among the UK citizenry, no sense of it as a political right, and so on, so the UK doesn't have millions of unregistered guns floating around.
2. Cultural. Brit roughnecks may beat the stuffing out of you but are more reluctant to kill out of cultural norms.

Japan somewhat the same.

It doesn't work so well in America where there are more guns than people, and a very violent recent history. (recent=250y)
 
MAGAnificent said:
It could be that the UK does not have the revolving door criminal justice system the US does.
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America has by far more prisoners than any other country. By far. And nearly the highest incarceration rate per 100,000.
And some rightists still parrot the same bullshit.
 
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