Gun Violence and how to address it

If you break apart statistics enough you get to justify the guns...

Yep. Statistics have shown that everyone in the universe has three legs and owns a hyena.

To begin talking about the variations between states is always a bit iffy when you can just bring stuff across a border. Highlighting individual cities for elected officials is even more ridiculous unless you have airport style searches at city limits (not advocating this but that is what you would need to make the analysis effective)

Yes and no. If the cities are attempting to operate and pass laws on the presumption that they are going to have an effect similar to airport-style searches at city limits, yet such searches do not happen, then inherently the city governments and their policies need to be looked at. It's all very well for them to say "this is banned, that needs a license, whatever", but if it's effectively unenforceable, then they have to accept the realities pursuant to having their heads in the sand on the matter.

If similarly situated localities have differing results, the question is 'why'? Why can a city in a state with loose gun laws have a much lower violent crime rate than another city in a state with loose gun laws, if not even the same State? Or why can a city in a state with tight gun laws have a higher violent crime rate than a city in neighboring state with loose gun laws? Why do San Francisco and San Jose have much lower crime rates than Richmond and Oakland, all large cities within an hour's drive of each other? Blaming the ability to import guns from out of state doesn't address that question. There is something else at play here. Probably socio-economic, and probably cultural.

Finally, there's the question of 'deal with your own problems.' For example, the largest city in South Carolina is Charleston. (159k). The next largest city is Columbia (139k). Charleston isn't on the list of top 100 murders per capita. Columbia is #17. From the perspective of a Charlestonite, if Columbians can't sort out their city to be safe in the environment of South Carolina's gun laws, that's their problem. Why should someone in Charleston vote to restrict their guns?

It also covers the most useful class of weapons. Not to mention the minor detail of the impracticality of effectively banning a hundred million+ unregistered firearms. How would you do it? When I'm wearing a firearm, you've no way of knowing it unless I show it to you or are sharp enough to spot the extra clip on my belt if I'm wearing my shirt tucked in. And you certainly don't know if I have any banned firearms in my house which I can take out whenever I feel the desire.

Homicides by firearms were dropping in Australia prior to their buyback (and they estimate less than 30% of prohibited firearms were turned in, see previous sentence). To my knowledge, only University of Melbourne has looked for a causative relationship between the gun laws and the reduction in shooting (as opposed to simple correlation), and they were unable to find one.

The idea that bullets are not protected by 2a has been shot down by the courts already on the similar basis that the 1st Amendment protects ink. See Jackson v City of San Francisco. "The Second Amendment protects "arms," "weapons," and "firearms"; it does not explicitly protect ammunition. Nevertheless, without bullets, the right to bear arms would be meaningless. A regulation eliminating a person's ability to obtain or use ammunition could thereby make it impossible to use firearms for their core purpose".

If you have a right, you have a corresponding right to everything you need to exercise that right, including ammunition and magazines. There is even a right to have a shooting range in your town (Ezell v Chicago) under the theory that if you need to practice in order to exercise your right correctly, you have a right to have a place to practice.

The incremental approach is precisely why gun rights groups are no longer compromising on legislation. You make the point for them.

The "right to a certain calibre" currently falls under the "common use" test. .50 BMG is not commonly used anywhere, in the US or not so the bans on it have not been successfully challenged.. 5.56 on the other hand...

They have the right to set taxes, but they cannot be so as to have a chilling effect on the exercise of the right. The principle was first clearly stated with regards to taxes on newspapers (Grosjean v American Press in 1936), but was applied specifically to taxes on firearms in Murphy v Guererro 2016.

"The Court agrees with Murphy that the tax places an excessive burden on the exercise of the right of law-abiding citizens to purchase handguns for self-defense without a corresponding important government interest. Accordingly, the law cannot stand. The government need not arm the poor, but it cannot impose uncommon burdens on their ability to exercise their fundamental constitutional rights."

These solutions you propose are not new. There is a reason they are not in place.

[i]It suits the gun lobby to trot out the 'fact' that nothing can be done so to cut off debate before it has even begun. But an assault ban was brought in before and had some good effects. If enough politicians could actually take this seriously, then many lives could be saved.[/i]

What good effects? It had zero effect in studies, and for good reason: The 'ban' was entirely cosmetic (And rifles aren't an issue anyway). I bought a rifle in Kentucky during the ban. It was functionally identical to a pre-ban rifle with the exception of a flash suppressor. Actually, I also bought several rifles during my stay in California where the ban was (and is, as it's still in place) more strict than the federal ban. They are all fundamentally identical to rifles purchased in other states and now I've moved to another state, they are all in 'normal' configuration, because the ban's methodology is entirely superficial. Took between 30 seconds to two minutes to do it per rifle, just as the San Bernadino shooter did.

That's what you get when people who don't understand guns, probably because they don't like them, try to ban them. Useless idiocy. That's before you hit the minor question of how many are out there.

However, this thread isn't about rifles, it's about gun violence, and rifles are responsible for fewer deaths a year than fists. The violence, to include mass shootings, is predominantly being caused by pistols. Mainly pistols carried by criminals because they are easy to conceal, and thus the type likely to be carried by people more likely to cause violence, and that being mainly violence caused by criminals against other criminals. Even if you believe that focusing on guns will help solve the violence problem, focusing on rifles is not going to solve the violence problem. The problem with focusing on pistols is that we're not talking about a country like Ireland or New Zealand where gun owners are such a minority that they can get trampled. Some 45% of households in the US have one.

The answer lies not in focusing on the guns. Yes, the lack of funding for mental health is a perfectly valid complaint. I agree with this. Though I would also observe that when the folks who want to ban guns tended to be in the majority of government, they didn't fix the issue either. Even at the State level, it's not happening. DC, California or Maryland can fund all the healthcare that they want... but they're not doing it. It's disingenuous to point only at one side for being unwilling to address an issue that both sides claim will be beneficial.