Psyral Infection said   
Can someone explain this gun control thing to me?   

nope. 

I am not a fan of guns    

i am.  big fan. 

but I would never vote to restrict guns and or restrict the right to bear arms.   

i might. 

there gotta be limits, and the current limits seem to be a bit too unlimiting, lately. 

If you threw a rock at my head, I would not go and fist fight the rock. That seems silly.    

yeah, thats silly. 

almost as silly as the idea that anybody is fist fighting firearms. 

DrFreshness said

Is that a serious question?  Because I can explain it to you.  The way I heard it put best recently is that it's a public health issue.  The bottom line is that making guns easy to get means that thousands more people are going to die every year than if guns weren't easy to get.  If you doubt that, just look around at all the countries where living standards are similar to the US but guns aren't easy to get.  None of them have anywhere near the same murder rates- it's easier to squeeze a trigger than to kill someone a different way, and so more guns means way more people making snap judgements to kill people and more deaths.  If you disagree with any of this, frankly I think you're either an idiot, or you've made up your mnd and will not hear anything that contradicts that.

Where I don't think someone who is anti-gun control is being an idiot at all is if they recognize what I said above, but they still feel a need to protect themselves that overrides that.  It's very true that you can't rely on law enforcement and if it comes down to do it owning a gun may be the only thing that saves your life.  Your right to own a gun is a public health hazard that leads to a lot of deaths, but if I for one was in a situation where I thought it was keeping my family safe I'd fight like hell not to give it up, thousands of people gettng killed by guns notwithstanding

It's tricky issue, with reasonable arguments on both sides.  If you don't see that, you're missing the point.  

Yes, it was a serious question.

To make a point, I will present a non gun-control viewpoint. This is not my belief but it will make my point if you follow the entire argument (which is ultimately not for or against gun control)

This is from the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and these were all pulled from actual statistics. They did not make up the numbers and was their best interpretation of the data:

• There is a negative correlation between gun ownership and violent crime in countries internationally (more guns = less crime).
• Nations with strict gun control laws have substantially higher murder rates than those who do not in general. In fact, the 9 European nations with the lowest gun ownership rate have a combined murder rate 3x that of the 9 European nations with the highest gun ownership rate.
• In the decade following Britain's Labor party's election and banning of handguns in 1997, the number of recorded violent attacks soared by 77% to 1.2 million. They report 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 people in UK. and only 466 violent crimes per 100,000 people in USA.
• In 1982, Kennesaw, Georgia passed a law requiring heads of households to keep at least one firearm in the house. The residential burglary rate subsequently dropped 89%. The violent crime rate in Kennesaw is still 85% lower the national average.

Caution: no single number can tell the whole story. And statistics can be read many different ways.

Those who are looking to increase gun control choose to look at the statistics that will point to that and disregard the other just as those who want to prevent increases in gun control are choosing to look at the statistics in the way to "prove" their own points (Just as I have done above.)

Truth is, if you actually look at the raw data which surprisingly is held by the CDC, you will see that it is completely inconclusive. True academia can not find any correlation for or against gun control based on the statistics. Even computer algorithmic analysis shows no correlation between gun control and less gun violence. What it does show is something completely different but that both sides will never use since it does not help either in their proposed causes. Computer analysis shows income and education to be the top factors that correlate to gun deaths, not level of gun control in a particular area (whether it be states or in different countries of the world). These analysis are done via product-moment correlation coefficient, polychoric correlation, and coefficient of determination methods. This prevents interpretational bias and gives a coefficient of relation between statistical data showing whether or not there is a cause and effect scenario or even causeS and effect.

The analysis done by unbiased mathematical computation is very different than the "facts" presented from both sides of the gun control argument. It shows that there is no statistical correlation between gun control and gun deaths. Only when you pick and choose which parts of the data you want to use instead of looking at it all can you make a case for or against gun control that "seems" to make sense and "seems" to be based on factual statistics.

Gun control is just that. Gun control. It does not show and has never shown historically to lower gun related deaths unless you choose to isolate small subsections of the data for a political purpose. Analysis should always be done via true mathematical correlation algorithms to prevent intentional or unintentional bias. Mathematical analysis shows no correlation - or to be more accurate, shows such a low correlation coefficient which falls below the computed variance allowance for the input dataset.

The analysis shows just this: Income and education level (which consistently show correlation with each other so it is not surprising that both factors had high correlation coefficients from the raw data) have the biggest impact on number of gun deaths not whether there were gun control laws in effect in an area or not.