'This is not hyperbole': Rick Perry says Hillary Clinton jeopardizes gun rights

[branford]

6. Support for gun rights actually polls higher than support for abortion rights in many areas.

Last edited Mon May 23, 2016, 04:09 PM - Edit history (2)

More importantly, I would be far more comfortable with gun control as a matter of conviction if most of the demands had a reasonable chance of actually lowering violent crime.

For instance, universal background checks would not have stopped a single recent mass shooting, ALL rifles, no less purported "assault weapons," account for a tiny fraction of criminal or negligent misuse of guns and magazine size has no correlation at all to crime rates. Further, about a 60 percent of gun-related deaths are suicides, yet the USA still has a comparable suicide rate to most other developed nations, and demonstrably lower than gun control havens like Japan and South Korea.

Even in places that instituted strict gun control like the UK and Australia, any lowering of violent crime cannot be proven to be causally related to such legislation, particularly since these countries had much lower rates of violent crime (firearm and otherwise) that the USA to begin with. The USA has also seen its violent crime rate cut in half over the last few decades, all while gun laws have liberalized across the nation.

Virtually all gun control advocacy is now part of a culture war, largely pitting rural and exurban (and Midwestern and Southern) cultures against urban domains, and has absolutely nothing to do with actual safety.