ANSWERS: 5
  • No, if anything it increases it.
  • No. Statistics show that some of the places with the most violence have the tightest gun control.
  • Nope, gun control only restricts the possession or use of guns.
  • No, it just changes the weapon, here in the UK knife crime is a problem.
    • bostjan the adequate 🥉
      "Does gun control prevent gun violence?" "No, it just changes the weapon" I think you misread the question.
  • So, this is a trick question for a lot of people, because the word "prevent" can be taken in two ways. Either you take it to mean "completely eliminate" or you take it to mean "to hinder or hold back." Both are acceptable definitions from the Merriam-Webster English Dictionary. In the first sense, one can look at the places with the strictest gun control in place and see that there is still extant gun violence, therefore, gun control does not completely eliminate gun violence. However, in the second sense, gun violence is significantly reduced by putting certain gun control measures in place. Obviously, common sense tells us that if you make it more difficult for violent criminals to obtain firearms, it will be more difficult for them to commit gun violence, and there have been hundreds of data studies in peer-reviewed journals to indicate that gun control, as a whole, reduces the amount of gun violence. Even studies funded by the NRA have strongly suggested such, in spite of the fact that the NRA lobbies very strongly to reduce the amount of gun control passed by congress. For example: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1661390 . Anyone who suggests that more gun control means more gun violence (Thinker, feel free to debate me on this, but I warn you that I have many facts on my side to support this) is clearly well off base with reality. But, if you take a nuanced approach to the way the world works, and how value is balanced between safety and liberty, acknowledging that gun control, generally, reduces gun violence does not make a person anti-gun or anti-second amendment or whatever. In the USA, we have it written directly in the Constitution that the right to self-defense is not to be infringed by the government. So, by law, congress must pass gun control measured without taking away the individual's right to self-defense. And, if congress is allowed to make exceptions to any of the ten laws which are hold the most authority, then our system of government is fundamentally broken. Also, "gun violence" in the broadest term, is not necessarily bad in all cases. A person who shoots a convicted felon in order to prevent that convicted felon from, say, stabbing a child with a knife - has not committed any moral transgression of decency. If anything, the shooter in that case is a hero, yet, by definition, the act of doing so increases the amount of gun violence. While I would not argue that most gun violence follows a similar moral justification, the fact that such cases do exist makes the metric of "gun violence" perhaps not the best metric to make any argument for or against gun control.

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