You really need to make yourself available if they ever recast The Holy Grail. You've got the "Look, look, he's oppressing me!" down.

what guns? where are they getting these guns? this isnt the movies where everyone in the world knows a guy who sells handguns with the seriel number filed off.

i would imagine 95% of 18 year old highschool students are not be able to get a hold of a hand gun and bring it to their campus. if the law reduced the legal age to purchase a handgun down to 18, 100% of highschool 18 year olds would be able to bring one onto school grounds.

same goes for alcohol. 18 year olds should not be able to buy alcohol because if they could, every 14 year old in the country would know 200 people they can ask to buy it for them.

what magically makes 21 beneficial?

...nothing to do with magic or whether it is beneficial . There has to be a set age limit and 21 recognizes the process of normal maturation .

the same world where he is responsible enough to join the military... and carry firearms

Note that I already stated that both 18 and 21 are arbitrary.

By extension, what makes 18 so magical? Why not 17? That's right, it's an arbitrary number.

According to the study I posted earlier, it would actually be beneficial to raise the age to 25 because it would seem that incidence of harm from using a gun aren't as drastic post age 25.



And receive extensive training for those firearms.

I don't think I would have a problem with civilian 18 year olds owning handguns if they received the same amount of training and supervision as they do in the army.

Not in this country. Not the way you guys raised.

I can only read the abstract unless I want to pay $41.95. I'd like to see other things like the results by each age, not 0-14 and 15-24 which is dishonest to say the least, as well as who these people are, and how they obtained their firearms. The problem with these studies is there's basic flaws in them that they don't take into account, or at least put in the abstract, which is the peoples knowledge and understanding of firearms and firearm safety, for example. These studies tend to produce an image that we just need to look at the age numbers, then write laws against these people. This works for very young children, and sometimes ages in the grey area, 14 is a grey area, 20 isn't, for example.

Off topic, but a fair comparison, there's arguments going on in the US right now to raise the legal drinking age higher then 21 because there's so many drunk driving deaths and other incidences, worse than Canada, but in Canada you can drink alcohol at the age of 18 or 19 depending which province you live in. The argument in the US is "people are just not responsible enough at 21, etc." The issues that cause and solve these problems go beyond what your study provides, these studies can be deceitful and easy to accept if you're asking the wrong questions.

And to answer your question at the end, it is not up to me to decide for you, or you for me, benefit or no benefit, statistically speaking. Even if statistics were against firearm ownership I find this to be the wrong question to ask, how many 18-21 year olds require a handgun for self defense? The answer could be 0.01% or it could be 40%, the answer is irrelevant.

Probably not the answer you're looking for, but that's because we disagree on the methodology to solve our problems.

How about we require 18 and a GED or high school diploma?

This is the 'moving goal posts/impossible expectations' rebuttal. I'm sorry you can't see the entire article as I can, but I have access to gated documents, and you don't.

I can't reproduce the full article here because I'd be breaking copyright laws.

Your argument here is a non starter because while there may be methodological flaws, you're unable to point out which ones the author made (though I doubt you could, even if you could read the article). So your entire argument here is really null and void. You have to take what I'm saying at face value.

Here's what you can do: find a study that contradicts what I've posted. That's really your only move here.



How are statistics irrelevant?

I suppose you can, and are, making the emotional argument. And that's fine. But it doesn't really hold water in a debate. Nor is it a good way to decide policy...which is what we're discussing here.

Should the age be 18 or 21 because you feel that handguns provide more of a benefit (self defense) than harm (shooting other kids/themselves) or should the age be 18 or 21 because the data tells us that handguns are more harmful to younger people than they are beneficial.

The rational argument, which is based on statistics and deductive logic, is that handguns cause more harm than good for young people, therefore the age for handgun ownership should remain 21. You could work out a model that looks at the probability of harm caused of an 18 year old owning a handgun (P18) vs a 21 year old owning a handgun (P21). Based of the evidence that we do have, we know that P18 > P21. Unless you can prove that the probability of using a gun in self defense (Pd) exceeds P18, then the age for handgun ownership should not be lowered to age 18.



That's relevant to the school shooting issue, but irrelevant to the issue of younger people being more prone to harming themselves/others with guns, especially handguns.

This post was edited by Wakeskater77 on Jun 6 2013 09:16pm