Author Topic: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days  (Read 244047 times)

GuitarStv

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1550 on: February 19, 2019, 10:57:26 AM »
OK, so my solution that pisses everyone off equally.  It's really just focusing on where changes could do the most good without expecting human nature to change.  TLDR version, 3 main steps:  1. Make handguns illegal  2. Allow rifle ownership (as many as you want) but not in cities  3. Legalize pot, cocaine and hallucinogenics. 

See, it's going to make everyone mad!  It's not enough for the GC people and it's way too much for the GRA people.  But, I've put a lot of thought behind these specific ideas and I'll expand on them a bit if you don't mind.

1.  Make Handguns Illegal - purely based on statistics, handguns cause the most death.  So just eliminate them.  And they aren't really needed. 

2.  Allow rifle ownership in rural areas (and small towns) but make it illegal in cities.  Mostly because I've lived on a farm in BFE (that's bum-fuck-egypt for you non country folk) and when you're in the middle of nowhere, being isolated is a real problem.  If someone comes there to do you harm, you'd better have a weapon or you're screwed.  Rifles fill this function fine, and I find shotguns work particularly well with intruders. 

3. Legalize most illicit drugs.  As has been pointed out, a large percentage of the gun violence in this country is driven by the drug trade, ie gang related violence.  Don't try to fix it by removing the weapons (which will never work).  Fix it by removing the true cause, the black market and profit created by making drugs illegal in the first place.  Legalize it and watch the violence disappear overnight.  Actually, #3 works synergistically with #1.  When you combine them, we won't be throwing people in jail for having or dealing drugs.  We WILL be throwing them in jail for possessing firearms. 

There, I think those 3 points will manage to piss off just about everybody, LOL!

1.  Sure.

2.  This seems overly restrictive and unfair.  I don't see why rifle or shotgun ownership can't own a long gun.  Many people who live in cities leave the city occasionally to go hunting, or for target shooting.

3.  I'm mostly on board with this . . . but have some reservations.  Bath salts and crystal meth (probably other drugs too) are extremely addictive, to the point that I'm not sure there exists a safe use threshold.  One or two uses can cause physical withdrawal symptoms.  To me, it makes sense regulating these drugs.  If it's never safe to use, I'm OK with it being an illegal drug.  Caffeine, marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, alcohol, ecstasy, steroids, human growth hormone, etc. aren't particularly addictive so I tend to feel that the decision about taking them should be left up to the individual.  Some of the drugs between are questionable to me.

Cities are (by far) where most of the gun violence occurs.  So they should be gun-free zones.  Your desire to hunt should not impinge on my right to not get shot.

I'd be interested to see what the stats on that start to look like after a handgun ban.  Here in Canada there's no ban on owning rifles/shotguns in cities and gun violence with those guns in cities is not particularly rampant.

Logistically though, it seems like there would be a lot of challenging questions here.  What are you going to define as a city?  What if a small town gains population and becomes a city, do you go door to door and confiscate the guns?  What if a city loses enough population that it becomes a town?  What proximity from a city is considered OK to own a firearm (like if I have a farm on the outskirts of New York, can I get a long gun)?

Tyson

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1551 on: February 19, 2019, 11:36:07 AM »
OK, so my solution that pisses everyone off equally.  It's really just focusing on where changes could do the most good without expecting human nature to change.  TLDR version, 3 main steps:  1. Make handguns illegal  2. Allow rifle ownership (as many as you want) but not in cities  3. Legalize pot, cocaine and hallucinogenics. 

See, it's going to make everyone mad!  It's not enough for the GC people and it's way too much for the GRA people.  But, I've put a lot of thought behind these specific ideas and I'll expand on them a bit if you don't mind.

1.  Make Handguns Illegal - purely based on statistics, handguns cause the most death.  So just eliminate them.  And they aren't really needed. 

2.  Allow rifle ownership in rural areas (and small towns) but make it illegal in cities.  Mostly because I've lived on a farm in BFE (that's bum-fuck-egypt for you non country folk) and when you're in the middle of nowhere, being isolated is a real problem.  If someone comes there to do you harm, you'd better have a weapon or you're screwed.  Rifles fill this function fine, and I find shotguns work particularly well with intruders. 

3. Legalize most illicit drugs.  As has been pointed out, a large percentage of the gun violence in this country is driven by the drug trade, ie gang related violence.  Don't try to fix it by removing the weapons (which will never work).  Fix it by removing the true cause, the black market and profit created by making drugs illegal in the first place.  Legalize it and watch the violence disappear overnight.  Actually, #3 works synergistically with #1.  When you combine them, we won't be throwing people in jail for having or dealing drugs.  We WILL be throwing them in jail for possessing firearms. 

There, I think those 3 points will manage to piss off just about everybody, LOL!

1.  Sure.

2.  This seems overly restrictive and unfair.  I don't see why rifle or shotgun ownership can't own a long gun.  Many people who live in cities leave the city occasionally to go hunting, or for target shooting.

3.  I'm mostly on board with this . . . but have some reservations.  Bath salts and crystal meth (probably other drugs too) are extremely addictive, to the point that I'm not sure there exists a safe use threshold.  One or two uses can cause physical withdrawal symptoms.  To me, it makes sense regulating these drugs.  If it's never safe to use, I'm OK with it being an illegal drug.  Caffeine, marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, alcohol, ecstasy, steroids, human growth hormone, etc. aren't particularly addictive so I tend to feel that the decision about taking them should be left up to the individual.  Some of the drugs between are questionable to me.

Cities are (by far) where most of the gun violence occurs.  So they should be gun-free zones.  Your desire to hunt should not impinge on my right to not get shot.

I'd be interested to see what the stats on that start to look like after a handgun ban.  Here in Canada there's no ban on owning rifles/shotguns in cities and gun violence with those guns in cities is not particularly rampant.

Logistically though, it seems like there would be a lot of challenging questions here.  What are you going to define as a city?  What if a small town gains population and becomes a city, do you go door to door and confiscate the guns?  What if a city loses enough population that it becomes a town?  What proximity from a city is considered OK to own a firearm (like if I have a farm on the outskirts of New York, can I get a long gun)?

I might actually soften my stance on the point to be something along the lines of:  Anyone can own a rifle/shotgun if they obtain a hunting license. 

This type of change (get rid of handguns, let rifles/shotguns be used for hunting and home defense) would also reduce the number of suicides, since it's physically much more difficult to kill yourself with a long barrel rifle than it is a short barrel handgun.  It won't eliminate it because some people will be clever and rig a way, but it'll make a big dent in the largest cause of gun deaths - suicide. 

SharkStomper

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1552 on: February 19, 2019, 02:37:39 PM »

I might actually soften my stance on the point to be something along the lines of:  Anyone can own a rifle/shotgun if they obtain a hunting license. 

This type of change (get rid of handguns, let rifles/shotguns be used for hunting and home defense) would also reduce the number of suicides, since it's physically much more difficult to kill yourself with a long barrel rifle than it is a short barrel handgun.  It won't eliminate it because some people will be clever and rig a way, but it'll make a big dent in the largest cause of gun deaths - suicide.

My uncle had no difficulty killing himself with a rifle.  No rigging or cleverness was apparent at the scene.

iris lily

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1553 on: February 19, 2019, 03:57:08 PM »
OK, so my solution that pisses everyone off equally.  It's really just focusing on where changes could do the most good without expecting human nature to change.  TLDR version, 3 main steps:  1. Make handguns illegal  2. Allow rifle ownership (as many as you want) but not in cities  3. Legalize pot, cocaine and hallucinogenics. 

See, it's going to make everyone mad!  It's not enough for the GC people and it's way too much for the GRA people.  But, I've put a lot of thought behind these specific ideas and I'll expand on them a bit if you don't mind.

1.  Make Handguns Illegal - purely based on statistics, handguns cause the most death.  So just eliminate them.  And they aren't really needed. 

2.  Allow rifle ownership in rural areas (and small towns) but make it illegal in cities.  Mostly because I've lived on a farm in BFE (that's bum-fuck-egypt for you non country folk) and when you're in the middle of nowhere, being isolated is a real problem.  If someone comes there to do you harm, you'd better have a weapon or you're screwed.  Rifles fill this function fine, and I find shotguns work particularly well with intruders. 

3. Legalize most illicit drugs.  As has been pointed out, a large percentage of the gun violence in this country is driven by the drug trade, ie gang related violence.  Don't try to fix it by removing the weapons (which will never work).  Fix it by removing the true cause, the black market and profit created by making drugs illegal in the first place.  Legalize it and watch the violence disappear overnight.  Actually, #3 works synergistically with #1.  When you combine them, we won't be throwing people in jail for having or dealing drugs.  We WILL be throwing them in jail for possessing firearms. 

There, I think those 3 points will manage to piss off just about everybody, LOL!

1.  Sure.

2.  This seems overly restrictive and unfair.  I don't see why rifle or shotgun ownership can't own a long gun.  Many people who live in cities leave the city occasionally to go hunting, or for target shooting.

3.  I'm mostly on board with this . . . but have some reservations.  Bath salts and crystal meth (probably other drugs too) are extremely addictive, to the point that I'm not sure there exists a safe use threshold.  One or two uses can cause physical withdrawal symptoms.  To me, it makes sense regulating these drugs.  If it's never safe to use, I'm OK with it being an illegal drug.  Caffeine, marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, alcohol, ecstasy, steroids, human growth hormone, etc. aren't particularly addictive so I tend to feel that the decision about taking them should be left up to the individual.  Some of the drugs between are questionable to me.

Cities are (by far) where most of the gun violence occurs.  So they should be gun-free zones.  Your desire to hunt should not impinge on my right to not get shot.

People. Really, get a grip on reality.

There are already all kinds of laws (“bans” if you will) on handguns and ammo and equipment. While we are at it, same for many kinds of drugs.

Does that remove them from the urban population? No it does not.

DH spent 3 months on the grand jury here in murder city and the great majority of his cases were guns and drugs.

Iris, St Louis urban core

Indexer

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1554 on: February 19, 2019, 06:24:00 PM »
I find it interesting that the same people proposing we legalize drugs are suggesting we ban guns. I'm a responsible citizen. If I can be responsible with one, why not the other?

On the subject of drugs, people will drive under the influence of these substances and will probably result in more deaths than gun deaths each year. I'm in full support of legalizing marijuana, shrooms, ect. but I am also a realist and recognize some people will still drive.

I do think we have a problem and we need solutions. I just don't see banning weapons as being the solution. Legal gun owners are very rarely the problem, and there are enough weapons in circulation that collecting them would be extremely difficult. Plus a lot of citizens, law enforcement, and politicians would likely be killed in the process of mass confiscation.

I think we should mandate universal background checks, and the waiting period should be increased to a week since background checks are often taking longer than 3 days*. I also think there should be more training and education, especially if someone is going to carry a pistol on their person.

*I saw an article in the WSJ today about how several of the recent mass shootings were committed by people who would have failed a background check, but the background checks weren't complete until after the weapons were purchased.

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1555 on: February 19, 2019, 08:01:54 PM »

Were you able to find a single instance where alchohol caused the deaths you're referring to, rather than simply was present?  Every gun related death is caused by the gun.  Yes, sometimes when people are drunk they kill other people . . . but people drink all the time.  Just because alchohol was present doesn't mean it caused the death which is what you're assuming here.  You can certainly argue that alcohol causes societal problems.  I'm not sure that you can argue it causes deaths though, at least not at all in the same way that a gun causes death (by design).  There are some parallels, but they're fundamentally different.


I'm sorry, but this is quite hilarious, because you're arguing the pro-gun people's arguments for alcohol while trying to differentiate between the two at multiple points in your argument, and that's great, because it only further illustrates how similar the two points are!

First, you're being pedantic by saying the alcohol "caused" it. You're anthropomorphizing the alcohol and the guns. Neither causes it. The people using them cause it in both cases (until we have Terminator coming into town), but the alcohol and guns have an impact on the situation beyond just what the person does. That's why we have to argue what happens because the alcohol or gun is present versus them actual things doing something, because short of AI, they aren't doing anything on their own.

Now, you say "Yes, sometimes when people are drunk they kill other people . . . but people drink all the time.  Just because alchohol was present doesn't mean it caused the death which is what you're assuming here." This is the best example of what I said above. Gun people say (rightly so) all the time that, people own guns all the time and yet people don't get hurt almost all of the time with gun owners (just like alcohol). Just because guns are present doesn't mean they cause deaths, just like alcohol. We can't know what would have happened with a gun, without a gun, could the same person have been killed by other means, would they have been able to defend themselves with a gun but weren't because they didn't have it with them? We know they affect the scope of things (i.e. making it easier to kill someone when they might not have been able or making it possible to kill more). We just don't know, whether alcohol made it worse or not (except drunk driving deaths, which are pretty clear cut that the alcohol made it worse). We do know both affect the scope of things because of alcohol related deaths and gun deaths.


As far as alchohol being "a clearer public health crisis because it's ingesting something that slowly deteriorates the body's functions" . . . there's a large body of research indicating that people who drink occasionally are healthier in several measures (and live longer) than those who abstain (http://time.com/5166514/moderate-drinking-live-longer-study/).  While excess alcohol consumption is deleterious to health, those who drink in moderation actually live longer.  Owning a gun however, increases your risk of dying early (https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/160/10/929/140858, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gun-suicide/gun-access-tied-to-greater-suicide-murder-risk-study-idUSBREA0J1G920140120).


Again, a great pro-gun like argument here! Alcohol certainly has benefits in moderation. Guns certainly have benefits too, which pro-gun people like myself are glad to highlight. You can hunt with them. They're fun to shoot - hobby, entertainment. They can and do protect people in situations where they are in danger quite a bit, so why all the focus on the negatives of guns *cough* alcohol *cough*, right, right? Also, while there are good statistics on people drinking in moderation versus people who don't, that's a pretty clear cut thing. All of the studies for guns look at things differently. They look at (as best as I've been able to tell), was a gun in the home, discounting important parts such as were the gun owners responsible - did they keep them locked up from kids? Would they/did they remove them if someone in their family showed signs of mental illness, etc? Did the alcohol studies look at it as "was alcohol in the home (abusers and moderate drinkers alike), and if so, did the chances of something bad happening increase because it was there" because that would change things tremendously by including people that abuse alcohol like people that commit suicide or accidentally hurt themselves. The fact that no or at least fewer studies (anecdotal, admittedly, but I've never heard of any) take the tact of alcohol in every home (good and bad) where guns are always as far as I've seen look at guns in every home ask what happens (good and bad) is actually kind of evidence in and of itself of a slant in the way the studies are performed because they're not looked at it "holistically" as pro-gun control people might say :). 


Why are we discounting suicide deaths by gun?  Presence of guns unequivocally increases suicide risk (https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/supplementary/firearm-availability-suicide.html).  Study after study has shown that people who feel suicidal tend to only feel suicidal for short periods of time.  Having a gun present makes it much more likely that they will kill themselves http://pnhp.org/news/guns-and-suicide/ at least party because so much less planning is required with a ready lethal device sitting aroundhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223849/.  Most suicidal feelings are an impulse that will pass given time https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/.  Stricter gun laws reduce the number of suicides https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-firearms-suicides/strict-state-gun-laws-linked-to-fewer-suicides-and-murders-idUSKBN1GH39W.  Although the suicides are a problem that is only suffered by gun owners (and their family members), I think that their lives are worth saving and their deaths are as meaningful in the discussion of gun control as a murder is.

I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time taking you seriously here. Why are we discounting suicide deaths by guns? Because you stated "Can you please provide some news articles that show what you're talking about where alcohol itself caused the deaths of people (other than the person consuming the alcohol)?" This is the premise of your argument. If you ask me to discount people hurting themselves with alcohol in your discussion, of course I'm going to discount people hurting themselves with guns in mine....I don't know much of what else to say here, except aren't, as you stated "their lives are worth saving and their deaths are as meaningful in the discussion of gun control *cough* alcohol? If you want to include people hurting themselves, that's fine, just brings alcohol back up to 88,000 deaths and more than twice the gun deaths.

So we're back to the main and in actuality the only point you have that differentiates alcohol and guns (at least if the ones you just gave me are all you have) - intent of design. The reason I proposed this question was to see if that was it, and apparently it is.

Intent is great for a court of law where someone's level of crime is being determined, not so much for public policy issues. Those are hopefully more about what's actually happening. And you don't even have intent. You have a nebulous "intent of design." Not good enough, not nearly good enough.

If this is the best anyone can come up with, for gun control proponents with this perspective on alcohol (which is apparently almost all of them given, again, the lack of people flooding the streets for changes in alcohol, for restricting people's ability to get alcohol even before they do anything wrong, etc., the lack of the topic of restricting alcohol on a public party platform, etc.), I declare them hypocrites willing to not even just passively say, OK, I guess we might need to do this but to rabidly say, take away their rights without doing the same for an equally and actually greater threat to the public health right now. Why? I can't help to keep coming back to this, even though it's admittedly speculation...because it's easier to take away someone's right to do something when it's something you don't are about. So they're all hypocrites, but hey, I'm a hypocrite on my own things to, so we're in the same boat :).

Wolfpack Mustachian

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1556 on: February 19, 2019, 08:42:59 PM »

You're right, changing opinions via dialogue is pretty rare so kudos for that.  Then maybe we keep talking :) 

OK, so my solution that pisses everyone off equally.  It's really just focusing on where changes could do the most good without expecting human nature to change.  TLDR version, 3 main steps:  1. Make handguns illegal  2. Allow rifle ownership (as many as you want) but not in cities  3. Legalize pot, cocaine and hallucinogenics. 

See, it's going to make everyone mad!  It's not enough for the GC people and it's way too much for the GRA people.  But, I've put a lot of thought behind these specific ideas and I'll expand on them a bit if you don't mind.

1.  Make Handguns Illegal - purely based on statistics, handguns cause the most death.  So just eliminate them.  And they aren't really needed. 

2.  Allow rifle ownership in rural areas (and small towns) but make it illegal in cities.  Mostly because I've lived on a farm in BFE (that's bum-fuck-egypt for you non country folk) and when you're in the middle of nowhere, being isolated is a real problem.  If someone comes there to do you harm, you'd better have a weapon or you're screwed.  Rifles fill this function fine, and I find shotguns work particularly well with intruders. 

3. Legalize most illicit drugs.  As has been pointed out, a large percentage of the gun violence in this country is driven by the drug trade, ie gang related violence.  Don't try to fix it by removing the weapons (which will never work).  Fix it by removing the true cause, the black market and profit created by making drugs illegal in the first place.  Legalize it and watch the violence disappear overnight.  Actually, #3 works synergistically with #1.  When you combine them, we won't be throwing people in jail for having or dealing drugs.  We WILL be throwing them in jail for possessing firearms. 

There, I think those 3 points will manage to piss off just about everybody, LOL!

Interesting points. There have been multiple people address them, so I think I will only have one comment. Your distinction between city and not city, despite the issues it would cause is one of the biggest divides I see in the gun control debate. I grew up around guns as many/most rural people do. I hear a gun go off at my house on a Saturday afternoon and literally think nothing of it. I almost always don't even notice it. I know it's just someone target practicing or hunting. Someone in a city hears a gun go off, someone is much more likely to be hurt, and they might be at risk. It's a huge perspective shift and is the one I don't see changing anytime soon. It also reflects the city/rural divide in politics in general. So while I wouldn't be happy with it :), as you say, it's definitely interesting (and believe it or not, you're not the first person I've heard suggest it, so maybe it's picking up steam, lol).

Tyson

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1557 on: February 19, 2019, 09:31:49 PM »

You're right, changing opinions via dialogue is pretty rare so kudos for that.  Then maybe we keep talking :) 

OK, so my solution that pisses everyone off equally.  It's really just focusing on where changes could do the most good without expecting human nature to change.  TLDR version, 3 main steps:  1. Make handguns illegal  2. Allow rifle ownership (as many as you want) but not in cities  3. Legalize pot, cocaine and hallucinogenics. 

See, it's going to make everyone mad!  It's not enough for the GC people and it's way too much for the GRA people.  But, I've put a lot of thought behind these specific ideas and I'll expand on them a bit if you don't mind.

1.  Make Handguns Illegal - purely based on statistics, handguns cause the most death.  So just eliminate them.  And they aren't really needed. 

2.  Allow rifle ownership in rural areas (and small towns) but make it illegal in cities.  Mostly because I've lived on a farm in BFE (that's bum-fuck-egypt for you non country folk) and when you're in the middle of nowhere, being isolated is a real problem.  If someone comes there to do you harm, you'd better have a weapon or you're screwed.  Rifles fill this function fine, and I find shotguns work particularly well with intruders. 

3. Legalize most illicit drugs.  As has been pointed out, a large percentage of the gun violence in this country is driven by the drug trade, ie gang related violence.  Don't try to fix it by removing the weapons (which will never work).  Fix it by removing the true cause, the black market and profit created by making drugs illegal in the first place.  Legalize it and watch the violence disappear overnight.  Actually, #3 works synergistically with #1.  When you combine them, we won't be throwing people in jail for having or dealing drugs.  We WILL be throwing them in jail for possessing firearms. 

There, I think those 3 points will manage to piss off just about everybody, LOL!

Interesting points. There have been multiple people address them, so I think I will only have one comment. Your distinction between city and not city, despite the issues it would cause is one of the biggest divides I see in the gun control debate. I grew up around guns as many/most rural people do. I hear a gun go off at my house on a Saturday afternoon and literally think nothing of it. I almost always don't even notice it. I know it's just someone target practicing or hunting. Someone in a city hears a gun go off, someone is much more likely to be hurt, and they might be at risk. It's a huge perspective shift and is the one I don't see changing anytime soon. It also reflects the city/rural divide in politics in general. So while I wouldn't be happy with it :), as you say, it's definitely interesting (and believe it or not, you're not the first person I've heard suggest it, so maybe it's picking up steam, lol).

Yes, the city/rural divide, you put your finger on it.  It goes way beyond guns and really does explain a lot of our division in politics.  You know, I'm glad I posted in this thread, it's helped me to realize something:  I've changed.  The gun control thing is something I used to be pretty passionate about and I'm discovering that I just don't care all that much any more.  I think I'm slowly starting to learn to let political issues just not bother me like they used to. 

Anyway, it was nice conversing with you :)

GuitarStv

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1558 on: February 20, 2019, 11:30:36 AM »

Were you able to find a single instance where alchohol caused the deaths you're referring to, rather than simply was present?  Every gun related death is caused by the gun.  Yes, sometimes when people are drunk they kill other people . . . but people drink all the time.  Just because alchohol was present doesn't mean it caused the death which is what you're assuming here.  You can certainly argue that alcohol causes societal problems.  I'm not sure that you can argue it causes deaths though, at least not at all in the same way that a gun causes death (by design).  There are some parallels, but they're fundamentally different.


I'm sorry, but this is quite hilarious, because you're arguing the pro-gun people's arguments for alcohol while trying to differentiate between the two at multiple points in your argument, and that's great, because it only further illustrates how similar the two points are!

First, you're being pedantic by saying the alcohol "caused" it. You're anthropomorphizing the alcohol and the guns. Neither causes it. The people using them cause it in both cases (until we have Terminator coming into town), but the alcohol and guns have an impact on the situation beyond just what the person does. That's why we have to argue what happens because the alcohol or gun is present versus them actual things doing something, because short of AI, they aren't doing anything on their own.

The purpose of a gun is to make it easier to kill.  When used as designed, a gun is lethal.

The purpose of alcohol is to inebriate.  When used as designed it's not lethal.

I think that what's happening here, is that you interpret both as being equal.  I don't.  I'm not sure that we'll meet eye to eye on this.

Putting landmines around your house would increase defense (particularly from burglars and would be rapists) significantly more than owning a gun.  If a child runs into your yard and kills him or herself, the landmine didn't kill the child.  Given that landmines aren't evil, and it's only the actions of people that cause death . . . why then are landmines illegal?

In your mind, guns are just like a an alcoholic drink because both might be involved in death.  In my mind guns are just like a dangerous weapon because they're designed to kill.  I can see and understand where the argument that you're making, but just fundamentally disagree with your classification.




As far as alchohol being "a clearer public health crisis because it's ingesting something that slowly deteriorates the body's functions" . . . there's a large body of research indicating that people who drink occasionally are healthier in several measures (and live longer) than those who abstain (http://time.com/5166514/moderate-drinking-live-longer-study/).  While excess alcohol consumption is deleterious to health, those who drink in moderation actually live longer.  Owning a gun however, increases your risk of dying early (https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/160/10/929/140858, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gun-suicide/gun-access-tied-to-greater-suicide-murder-risk-study-idUSBREA0J1G920140120).


Again, a great pro-gun like argument here! Alcohol certainly has benefits in moderation. Guns certainly have benefits too, which pro-gun people like myself are glad to highlight. You can hunt with them. They're fun to shoot - hobby, entertainment. They can and do protect people in situations where they are in danger quite a bit, so why all the focus on the negatives of guns *cough* alcohol *cough*, right, right? Also, while there are good statistics on people drinking in moderation versus people who don't, that's a pretty clear cut thing. All of the studies for guns look at things differently. They look at (as best as I've been able to tell), was a gun in the home, discounting important parts such as were the gun owners responsible - did they keep them locked up from kids? Would they/did they remove them if someone in their family showed signs of mental illness, etc? Did the alcohol studies look at it as "was alcohol in the home (abusers and moderate drinkers alike), and if so, did the chances of something bad happening increase because it was there" because that would change things tremendously by including people that abuse alcohol like people that commit suicide or accidentally hurt themselves. The fact that no or at least fewer studies (anecdotal, admittedly, but I've never heard of any) take the tact of alcohol in every home (good and bad) where guns are always as far as I've seen look at guns in every home ask what happens (good and bad) is actually kind of evidence in and of itself of a slant in the way the studies are performed because they're not looked at it "holistically" as pro-gun control people might say :). 


The difference is that the 'certainty of benefit' is quite different between guns ownership and alcohol use in moderation.  The actual beneficial impact of moderate alcohol use is well studied and not controversial.  There are a great many conflicting studies regarding the beneficial impact of gun ownership.

As was already pointed out and referenced, at it's simplest . . . people who occasionally drink live will longer than average.  People who choose to own a gun in America will live shorter lives than average.




Why are we discounting suicide deaths by gun?  Presence of guns unequivocally increases suicide risk (https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/supplementary/firearm-availability-suicide.html).  Study after study has shown that people who feel suicidal tend to only feel suicidal for short periods of time.  Having a gun present makes it much more likely that they will kill themselves http://pnhp.org/news/guns-and-suicide/ at least party because so much less planning is required with a ready lethal device sitting aroundhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223849/.  Most suicidal feelings are an impulse that will pass given time https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/.  Stricter gun laws reduce the number of suicides https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-firearms-suicides/strict-state-gun-laws-linked-to-fewer-suicides-and-murders-idUSKBN1GH39W.  Although the suicides are a problem that is only suffered by gun owners (and their family members), I think that their lives are worth saving and their deaths are as meaningful in the discussion of gun control as a murder is.

I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time taking you seriously here. Why are we discounting suicide deaths by guns? Because you stated "Can you please provide some news articles that show what you're talking about where alcohol itself caused the deaths of people (other than the person consuming the alcohol)?" This is the premise of your argument. If you ask me to discount people hurting themselves with alcohol in your discussion, of course I'm going to discount people hurting themselves with guns in mine....I don't know much of what else to say here, except aren't, as you stated "their lives are worth saving and their deaths are as meaningful in the discussion of gun control *cough* alcohol? If you want to include people hurting themselves, that's fine, just brings alcohol back up to 88,000 deaths and more than twice the gun deaths.

I'm sorry that I wasn't clear in my reasons.

Gun ownership increase suicide deaths for a variety of reasons.  Removing guns from the picture quite clearly reduces this number.  Even very right wing pro gun groups have admitted this.  The person committing the suicide though is often not the gun owner, but a family member, lover, or friend.  When you discount suicides you're discounting these deaths where gun ownership has directly caused the death of another.



So we're back to the main and in actuality the only point you have that differentiates alcohol and guns (at least if the ones you just gave me are all you have) - intent of design. The reason I proposed this question was to see if that was it, and apparently it is.

Intent is great for a court of law where someone's level of crime is being determined, not so much for public policy issues. Those are hopefully more about what's actually happening. And you don't even have intent. You have a nebulous "intent of design." Not good enough, not nearly good enough.

If this is the best anyone can come up with, for gun control proponents with this perspective on alcohol (which is apparently almost all of them given, again, the lack of people flooding the streets for changes in alcohol, for restricting people's ability to get alcohol even before they do anything wrong, etc., the lack of the topic of restricting alcohol on a public party platform, etc.), I declare them hypocrites willing to not even just passively say, OK, I guess we might need to do this but to rabidly say, take away their rights without doing the same for an equally and actually greater threat to the public health right now. Why? I can't help to keep coming back to this, even though it's admittedly speculation...because it's easier to take away someone's right to do something when it's something you don't are about. So they're all hypocrites, but hey, I'm a hypocrite on my own things to, so we're in the same boat :).

Intent of design is used all the time to prevent people from owning dangerous things.  I'm not allowed to buy landmines to ring my property . . . because they're dangerous.  I tend to see guns (specifically handguns) as similar.  Landmines are arguably more defensive than a gun (which can be used offensively, whereas a landmine just sits there waiting for a trespasser) but they're designed to kill or maim, so the right to own a landmine is severely restricted.  This isn't based on studies of the effect of legal landmines in the US.  They've been banned entirely because of intent of design.  Same thing goes for nukes.  Nukes have never been legal, so we really have no idea of their deterrent effect.  We've just taken away people's rights to own them because they are designed to kill large numbers of people . . . we should legalize them for a few decades for study were your reasoning here sound.

(FWIW, I am a teetotaler.  If we lost the right to drink tomorrow, it would mean that I don't have a beer or a gin and tonic every couple months.  No real appreciable difference to my life either way.  I don't currently own a gun, but spent an awful lot of my young life hunting with a rifle in the woods.  I've spent an awful lot more time shooting guns than drinking alcohol.  While it's true that I don't fetishize them to the extent that seems to be common in the US, I'm not sure that it's fair to say that I don't care about guns.)

nnls

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1559 on: February 21, 2019, 01:59:53 AM »
OK, so my solution that pisses everyone off equally.  It's really just focusing on where changes could do the most good without expecting human nature to change.  TLDR version, 3 main steps:  1. Make handguns illegal  2. Allow rifle ownership (as many as you want) but not in cities  3. Legalize pot, cocaine and hallucinogenics. 

See, it's going to make everyone mad!  It's not enough for the GC people and it's way too much for the GRA people.  But, I've put a lot of thought behind these specific ideas and I'll expand on them a bit if you don't mind.

1.  Make Handguns Illegal - purely based on statistics, handguns cause the most death.  So just eliminate them.  And they aren't really needed. 

2.  Allow rifle ownership in rural areas (and small towns) but make it illegal in cities.  Mostly because I've lived on a farm in BFE (that's bum-fuck-egypt for you non country folk) and when you're in the middle of nowhere, being isolated is a real problem.  If someone comes there to do you harm, you'd better have a weapon or you're screwed.  Rifles fill this function fine, and I find shotguns work particularly well with intruders. 

3. Legalize most illicit drugs.  As has been pointed out, a large percentage of the gun violence in this country is driven by the drug trade, ie gang related violence.  Don't try to fix it by removing the weapons (which will never work).  Fix it by removing the true cause, the black market and profit created by making drugs illegal in the first place.  Legalize it and watch the violence disappear overnight.  Actually, #3 works synergistically with #1.  When you combine them, we won't be throwing people in jail for having or dealing drugs.  We WILL be throwing them in jail for possessing firearms. 

There, I think those 3 points will manage to piss off just about everybody, LOL!

1.  Sure.

2.  This seems overly restrictive and unfair.  I don't see why rifle or shotgun ownership can't own a long gun.  Many people who live in cities leave the city occasionally to go hunting, or for target shooting.

3.  I'm mostly on board with this . . . but have some reservations.  Bath salts and crystal meth (probably other drugs too) are extremely addictive, to the point that I'm not sure there exists a safe use threshold.  One or two uses can cause physical withdrawal symptoms.  To me, it makes sense regulating these drugs.  If it's never safe to use, I'm OK with it being an illegal drug.  Caffeine, marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, alcohol, ecstasy, steroids, human growth hormone, etc. aren't particularly addictive so I tend to feel that the decision about taking them should be left up to the individual.  Some of the drugs between are questionable to me.

Cities are (by far) where most of the gun violence occurs.  So they should be gun-free zones.  Your desire to hunt should not impinge on my right to not get shot.

I'd be interested to see what the stats on that start to look like after a handgun ban.  Here in Canada there's no ban on owning rifles/shotguns in cities and gun violence with those guns in cities is not particularly rampant.

Logistically though, it seems like there would be a lot of challenging questions here.  What are you going to define as a city?  What if a small town gains population and becomes a city, do you go door to door and confiscate the guns?  What if a city loses enough population that it becomes a town?  What proximity from a city is considered OK to own a firearm (like if I have a farm on the outskirts of New York, can I get a long gun)?

I might actually soften my stance on the point to be something along the lines of:  Anyone can own a rifle/shotgun if they obtain a hunting license. 

This type of change (get rid of handguns, let rifles/shotguns be used for hunting and home defense) would also reduce the number of suicides, since it's physically much more difficult to kill yourself with a long barrel rifle than it is a short barrel handgun.  It won't eliminate it because some people will be clever and rig a way, but it'll make a big dent in the largest cause of gun deaths - suicide.

In Australia (well at least in Western Australia) you can get a gun licence if you live in a city and are a member of a hunting club. My uncle had a membership, the gun had to be stored at the hunting club, he was able to get it whenver he went hunting or to target practice.

SharkStomper

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1560 on: February 21, 2019, 02:46:24 AM »

I might actually soften my stance on the point to be something along the lines of:  Anyone can own a rifle/shotgun if they obtain a hunting license. 

This type of change (get rid of handguns, let rifles/shotguns be used for hunting and home defense) would also reduce the number of suicides, since it's physically much more difficult to kill yourself with a long barrel rifle than it is a short barrel handgun.  It won't eliminate it because some people will be clever and rig a way, but it'll make a big dent in the largest cause of gun deaths - suicide.

@tyort1 Maybe you missed this

My uncle had no difficulty killing himself with a rifle.  No rigging or cleverness was apparent at the scene.

Tyson

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1561 on: February 21, 2019, 09:04:50 AM »

I might actually soften my stance on the point to be something along the lines of:  Anyone can own a rifle/shotgun if they obtain a hunting license. 

This type of change (get rid of handguns, let rifles/shotguns be used for hunting and home defense) would also reduce the number of suicides, since it's physically much more difficult to kill yourself with a long barrel rifle than it is a short barrel handgun.  It won't eliminate it because some people will be clever and rig a way, but it'll make a big dent in the largest cause of gun deaths - suicide.

@tyort1 Maybe you missed this

My uncle had no difficulty killing himself with a rifle.  No rigging or cleverness was apparent at the scene.

You're right, we should probably ban rifles too ;)

middo

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1562 on: February 21, 2019, 02:54:30 PM »
OK, so my solution that pisses everyone off equally.  It's really just focusing on where changes could do the most good without expecting human nature to change.  TLDR version, 3 main steps:  1. Make handguns illegal  2. Allow rifle ownership (as many as you want) but not in cities  3. Legalize pot, cocaine and hallucinogenics. 

See, it's going to make everyone mad!  It's not enough for the GC people and it's way too much for the GRA people.  But, I've put a lot of thought behind these specific ideas and I'll expand on them a bit if you don't mind.

1.  Make Handguns Illegal - purely based on statistics, handguns cause the most death.  So just eliminate them.  And they aren't really needed. 

2.  Allow rifle ownership in rural areas (and small towns) but make it illegal in cities.  Mostly because I've lived on a farm in BFE (that's bum-fuck-egypt for you non country folk) and when you're in the middle of nowhere, being isolated is a real problem.  If someone comes there to do you harm, you'd better have a weapon or you're screwed.  Rifles fill this function fine, and I find shotguns work particularly well with intruders. 

3. Legalize most illicit drugs.  As has been pointed out, a large percentage of the gun violence in this country is driven by the drug trade, ie gang related violence.  Don't try to fix it by removing the weapons (which will never work).  Fix it by removing the true cause, the black market and profit created by making drugs illegal in the first place.  Legalize it and watch the violence disappear overnight.  Actually, #3 works synergistically with #1.  When you combine them, we won't be throwing people in jail for having or dealing drugs.  We WILL be throwing them in jail for possessing firearms. 

There, I think those 3 points will manage to piss off just about everybody, LOL!

1.  Sure.

2.  This seems overly restrictive and unfair.  I don't see why rifle or shotgun ownership can't own a long gun.  Many people who live in cities leave the city occasionally to go hunting, or for target shooting.

3.  I'm mostly on board with this . . . but have some reservations.  Bath salts and crystal meth (probably other drugs too) are extremely addictive, to the point that I'm not sure there exists a safe use threshold.  One or two uses can cause physical withdrawal symptoms.  To me, it makes sense regulating these drugs.  If it's never safe to use, I'm OK with it being an illegal drug.  Caffeine, marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, alcohol, ecstasy, steroids, human growth hormone, etc. aren't particularly addictive so I tend to feel that the decision about taking them should be left up to the individual.  Some of the drugs between are questionable to me.

Cities are (by far) where most of the gun violence occurs.  So they should be gun-free zones.  Your desire to hunt should not impinge on my right to not get shot.

I'd be interested to see what the stats on that start to look like after a handgun ban.  Here in Canada there's no ban on owning rifles/shotguns in cities and gun violence with those guns in cities is not particularly rampant.

Logistically though, it seems like there would be a lot of challenging questions here.  What are you going to define as a city?  What if a small town gains population and becomes a city, do you go door to door and confiscate the guns?  What if a city loses enough population that it becomes a town?  What proximity from a city is considered OK to own a firearm (like if I have a farm on the outskirts of New York, can I get a long gun)?

I might actually soften my stance on the point to be something along the lines of:  Anyone can own a rifle/shotgun if they obtain a hunting license. 

This type of change (get rid of handguns, let rifles/shotguns be used for hunting and home defense) would also reduce the number of suicides, since it's physically much more difficult to kill yourself with a long barrel rifle than it is a short barrel handgun.  It won't eliminate it because some people will be clever and rig a way, but it'll make a big dent in the largest cause of gun deaths - suicide.

In Australia (well at least in Western Australia) you can get a gun licence if you live in a city and are a member of a hunting club. My uncle had a membership, the gun had to be stored at the hunting club, he was able to get it whenver he went hunting or to target practice.

The rules in Western Australia also require the hunter to have their paper licence on them when carrying the gun, and also a letter from the owner of the land they are hunting on, giving them permission to hunt on the land if the owner is not present.  As a land owner, I do not have this issue, but technically my son needed a letter from me to allow him to shoot rabbits and foxes on our land when I was not home.  He also needed a letter from me before he could purchase a gun himself, and he needed a gun safe installed in the home (which is allowed in rural areas) and have it inspected by police.  Ammunition must be kept locked separately from the gun.

These rules make it very clear that guns are not expected to be used for self defence in Western Australia, as the time required to unlock the gun safe, unlock the ammunition, load the gun and then point the gun at anyone would be too long to stop a home invasion.  Guns are available for the farming community as a tool for their intended use, destroying vermin, and livestock as necessary.

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1563 on: February 21, 2019, 08:13:29 PM »

The purpose of a gun is to make it easier to kill.  When used as designed, a gun is lethal.

The purpose of alcohol is to inebriate.  When used as designed it's not lethal.

I think that what's happening here, is that you interpret both as being equal.  I don't.  I'm not sure that we'll meet eye to eye on this.

Putting landmines around your house would increase defense (particularly from burglars and would be rapists) significantly more than owning a gun.  If a child runs into your yard and kills him or herself, the landmine didn't kill the child.  Given that landmines aren't evil, and it's only the actions of people that cause death . . . why then are landmines illegal?

In your mind, guns are just like a an alcoholic drink because both might be involved in death.  In my mind guns are just like a dangerous weapon because they're designed to kill.  I can see and understand where the argument that you're making, but just fundamentally disagree with your classification.


Landmines are not illegal because of intent. They're illegal because there's no safe way to use them without collateral damage. This is the same as nukes that you mention at the bottom. We don't need studies to determine that you can't put a landmine somewhere without severe risks. We don't need studies to know a nuke would damage a huge area. We don't need studies to know that you can shoot a deer with a gun and it's a good thing if you eat the meat. We don't need a study to know that good people can and do use guns to stop bad things (we would need a study to know how many).

I certainly agree we have a fundamental difference (which I'll address at the end).


The difference is that the 'certainty of benefit' is quite different between guns ownership and alcohol use in moderation.  The actual beneficial impact of moderate alcohol use is well studied and not controversial.  There are a great many conflicting studies regarding the beneficial impact of gun ownership.

As was already pointed out and referenced, at it's simplest . . . people who occasionally drink live will longer than average.  People who choose to own a gun in America will live shorter lives than average.


The difference is explicit in your own statement. You say, "The difference is that the 'certainty of benefit' is quite different between guns ownership and alcohol use in moderation." Of course that's the case - you're defining the situation to benefit your point of view. You're comparing gun ownership as a whole with using alcohol in moderation. You're literally comparing a general statement of having guns with a specific statement of someone using alcohol correctly. That's the only reason you can declare "certainty of benefit," because you're literally defining it that way. I could say the same thing - let's compare the certainty of benefits of alcohol ownership with responsible gun usage as defined by (always assuming it's loaded, keeping it away from kids and mentally ill people, or shoot, let's cut to the chase, define it as only shooting animals to hunt or people committing criminal actions). Then, yea, responsible gun usage has an incredible certainty of benefit while alcohol ownership has much risk. Because, again, you're defining the situation. No study looks at alcohol ownership in households as a survey to see risk/benefit (please show me one if you can find it). Studies automatically define moderate drinking as the test to see if it's good or not. Studies automatically define ALL gun ownership and then say, oh, what could someone do bad with it. It's implicit that they're biased in different ways. You have to see this.




I'm sorry that I wasn't clear in my reasons.

Gun ownership increase suicide deaths for a variety of reasons.  Removing guns from the picture quite clearly reduces this number.  Even very right wing pro gun groups have admitted this.  The person committing the suicide though is often not the gun owner, but a family member, lover, or friend.  When you discount suicides you're discounting these deaths where gun ownership has directly caused the death of another.


I'm totally fine with this, if we keep our reasoning consistent for the comparison between alcohol and guns, which I believe is all we have left that we're discussing. You define self-harm as tied to guns. Then self-harm has to be tied to alcohol in the same way, in which case, literally 10's of thousands of more deaths per year are at the feet of alcohol.


Intent of design is used all the time to prevent people from owning dangerous things.  I'm not allowed to buy landmines to ring my property . . . because they're dangerous.  I tend to see guns (specifically handguns) as similar.  Landmines are arguably more defensive than a gun (which can be used offensively, whereas a landmine just sits there waiting for a trespasser) but they're designed to kill or maim, so the right to own a landmine is severely restricted.  This isn't based on studies of the effect of legal landmines in the US.  They've been banned entirely because of intent of design.  Same thing goes for nukes.  Nukes have never been legal, so we really have no idea of their deterrent effect.  We've just taken away people's rights to own them because they are designed to kill large numbers of people . . . we should legalize them for a few decades for study were your reasoning here sound.

(FWIW, I am a teetotaler.  If we lost the right to drink tomorrow, it would mean that I don't have a beer or a gin and tonic every couple months.  No real appreciable difference to my life either way.  I don't currently own a gun, but spent an awful lot of my young life hunting with a rifle in the woods.  I've spent an awful lot more time shooting guns than drinking alcohol.  While it's true that I don't fetishize them to the extent that seems to be common in the US, I'm not sure that it's fair to say that I don't care about guns.)

Intent of design is not used to ban things that I'm aware of. As I mentioned above, landmines and nuclear weapons are banned because they're frickin' dangerous and dangerous to tons of people at large and could not be used in a defensive application where there wasn't a huge risk of collateral damage. These are extreme differences from guns. You're comment "we should legalize them for a few decades for study were your reasoning here sound" is really silly, and I know that you know that. We don't have to legalize a nuclear weapon to know that it has a blast radius of however many miles, it's implicit in the science behind it. My reasoning would in no way require that we study nukes to ban them.

Look, I can't speculate on your motives. You say you're a teetotaler and you've used guns before, fine. I don't know you or your background. Here's what I do know:

I've admitted more than once when I was wrong or when I was being pedantic. You haven't admitted that you have very explicitly used pro-gun arguments to try to say the comparison to alcohol is poor. This is important not to say "na-na na-na boo boo I'm right and you're wrong" but to show you that the fact that this is a very effective comparison has been made multiple times in the argument. They're not these radically different things. There are tons of similarities. You are, for whatever reason, too entrenched to admit it though, it seems.

I will circle back again to your point. We do have a fundamental disagreement. You are biased against guns, plain and simple. I am biased for guns, of course. I'm not going to deny it. But that difference is keeping you from seeing that alcohol is statistically more dangerous than guns, which I don't believe you've once admitted even though it's true. Something can be dangerous even if it's not designed to be. In this case, alcohol is that thing. There's no getting around this. If something is statistically more dangerous than something else, you tackle it more not less and certainly do not ignore it completely, if you're not being hypocritical. It boils down to these points:

Alcohol kills more people than guns. I didn't make this up, the CDC says it's so. Argue with them if you disagree.

Alcohol and guns are both "optional" items. You don't need them to live. They're not necessary to support your family (unless you're in one of those industries). If both were banned and were able to be made to magically disappear, people could continue to go to work, have relationships with each other, etc. So in that very important sense they're very similar.

People are up in arms to restrict and often times ban guns. It's in the news. People are passionate enough about it to campaign on social media. To protest in the streets. To call people bad names if they don't fall in line. To declare that gun deaths are on their heads. To put it as one of the highlights of the platform of an entire political party.

These same people (by and large) are not addressing alcohol in the same way, even though it's tied to more deaths. They are literally willing to ignore something that puts more people in jeopardy, for what reason? Because guns are scary? Because you don't like them? Because you like to drink? Because you don't want to go against something a much higher percentage of society says is fine? Because it's easy to jump on a bandwagon against guns? Whatever...

I have a very legitimate right to be pissed off that people are willing to take away one right while ignoring another when there's no good statistical reason why to do it that way. These are very comparable situations. Yet, people ignore alcohol and are willing to remove rights from tens of millions of Americans who have done nothing wrong. I doubt many gun owners have thought of this argument. I doubt many would totally agree with everything I have to say. But if you want to know the sentiment behind gun proponents getting pissed off, it's this sentiment.

People are willing to take away someone else's rights because they just don't care about the right. It's not important to them, so they not only relinquish it freely to a government they would otherwise fight against for taking away rights they do care about. They don't just relinquish it; they crusade against it, and it's all because they just don't care about that right. How do I know that it's because they just don't care about it? Because they ignore another similar but more dangerous thing. But if the right that could get taken away is something these other people prefer/don't want to take away/think isn't as bad even though statistically it is/whatever they can't even be bothered to go after that other right and be consistent.

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1564 on: February 21, 2019, 08:14:47 PM »

Yes, the city/rural divide, you put your finger on it.  It goes way beyond guns and really does explain a lot of our division in politics.  You know, I'm glad I posted in this thread, it's helped me to realize something:  I've changed.  The gun control thing is something I used to be pretty passionate about and I'm discovering that I just don't care all that much any more.  I think I'm slowly starting to learn to let political issues just not bother me like they used to. 

Anyway, it was nice conversing with you :)

Thanks, tyort, it was nice conversing with you as well! I'm improving on not letting political issues bother me like they used to, but I still have a long way to go :).

zolotiyeruki

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1565 on: February 21, 2019, 08:22:47 PM »
I find it interesting that the same people proposing we legalize drugs are suggesting we ban guns. I'm a responsible citizen. If I can be responsible with one, why not the other?

...

I think we should mandate universal background checks, and the waiting period should be increased to a week since background checks are often taking longer than 3 days*. I also think there should be more training and education, especially if someone is going to carry a pistol on their person.

*I saw an article in the WSJ today about how several of the recent mass shootings were committed by people who would have failed a background check, but the background checks weren't complete until after the weapons were purchased.
In my opinion, the concern with drugs is that they alter a person's state of mind, degrade that person's decision-making skills, and can be addictive, which leads to very poor decision.  Guns don't have that same effect.  Certainly they enable more poor decisions by people who are already inclined to play stupid games.

As for background checks, I think it's important that we make establish some basic facts about them.  You may already be familiar with them, but just to make sure
1) any gun purchase from a gun dealer (i.e. FFL) requires a background check
2) any gun purchase across state lines, even a private transaction, has to (legally) pass through an FFL and background check
3) the "gun show loophole" is a myth
4) in general, private sales between two people who are residents of the same state are *not* subject to background checks, although some states have instituted them

As for people who got the gun before the background check completed, I'll have to see a source for that.  Usually, background checks are done over the phone or via the internet--the FFL enters the buyer's info, the NICS runs it through their system, and you get a yea or nay either immediately or within a few minutes, and the sale cannot happen until the background check is finished.  If someone bought a gun before a background check completed, I'm guessing either A) the FFL did something very wrong (which new laws wouldn't prevent) or B) it's some other sort of state-level background check.

I know some states have a 1-week waiting period, and some states don't have any waiting period at all.  Are there any good statistics that show the impact (if any) of such "cooling off periods"?  I'm not saying that there's no effect, but so many gun laws are written to address scenarios that are dreamed up rather than real.  (For example, Illinois' concealed carry law that says you can't carry in 23 different types of locations, including hospitals, nursing homes, any educational institution at any level, etc.  Seriously, people who go through the effort and expense to get a CCW permit are NOT the ones you need to be worried about!)  Or other laws or policies that are pure fantasy, like sticking a "no guns" sign at the entrance to your business.  The people who will heed the sign are the law-abiding citizens who aren't going to cause trouble in the first place, and the Bad People coming to do harm aren't gonna care about  that little 4"x6" placard.

GuitarStv

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1566 on: February 22, 2019, 07:56:29 AM »

The purpose of a gun is to make it easier to kill.  When used as designed, a gun is lethal.

The purpose of alcohol is to inebriate.  When used as designed it's not lethal.

I think that what's happening here, is that you interpret both as being equal.  I don't.  I'm not sure that we'll meet eye to eye on this.

Putting landmines around your house would increase defense (particularly from burglars and would be rapists) significantly more than owning a gun.  If a child runs into your yard and kills him or herself, the landmine didn't kill the child.  Given that landmines aren't evil, and it's only the actions of people that cause death . . . why then are landmines illegal?

In your mind, guns are just like a an alcoholic drink because both might be involved in death.  In my mind guns are just like a dangerous weapon because they're designed to kill.  I can see and understand where the argument that you're making, but just fundamentally disagree with your classification.


Landmines are not illegal because of intent. They're illegal because there's no safe way to use them without collateral damage. This is the same as nukes that you mention at the bottom. We don't need studies to determine that you can't put a landmine somewhere without severe risks. We don't need studies to know a nuke would damage a huge area. We don't need studies to know that you can shoot a deer with a gun and it's a good thing if you eat the meat. We don't need a study to know that good people can and do use guns to stop bad things (we would need a study to know how many).

I certainly agree we have a fundamental difference (which I'll address at the end).

It's certainly possible to use landmines without collateral damage.  If it wasn't, they would never have been used by the military.  But you can replace landmines with artillery if that makes you happier.  You say that you don't need studies to know that there are severe risks associated with placing landmines, OK, sure I can buy that.  You say that you don't need studies to know that you can shoot a deer with a gun for meat, OK, sure, I can buy that too.

We don't need a study to know that good people can and do use guns to stop bad things (we would need a study to know how many).  Sure, I can agree with this too.

By the same token we also don't need a study to know that easy access to hand guns is extremely dangerous, and that it leads to a great many bad things (we would need a study to determine how many).

Our fundamental difference is that you believe that the good outweighs the bad.  I disagree.  There are several studies available that demonstrate that the bad outweighs the good, and several studies that demonstrate that the good outweighs the bad.  I'm not sure where that leaves us.




The difference is that the 'certainty of benefit' is quite different between guns ownership and alcohol use in moderation.  The actual beneficial impact of moderate alcohol use is well studied and not controversial.  There are a great many conflicting studies regarding the beneficial impact of gun ownership.

As was already pointed out and referenced, at it's simplest . . . people who occasionally drink live will longer than average.  People who choose to own a gun in America will live shorter lives than average.


The difference is explicit in your own statement. You say, "The difference is that the 'certainty of benefit' is quite different between guns ownership and alcohol use in moderation." Of course that's the case - you're defining the situation to benefit your point of view. You're comparing gun ownership as a whole with using alcohol in moderation. You're literally comparing a general statement of having guns with a specific statement of someone using alcohol correctly. That's the only reason you can declare "certainty of benefit," because you're literally defining it that way. I could say the same thing - let's compare the certainty of benefits of alcohol ownership with responsible gun usage as defined by (always assuming it's loaded, keeping it away from kids and mentally ill people, or shoot, let's cut to the chase, define it as only shooting animals to hunt or people committing criminal actions). Then, yea, responsible gun usage has an incredible certainty of benefit while alcohol ownership has much risk. Because, again, you're defining the situation. No study looks at alcohol ownership in households as a survey to see risk/benefit (please show me one if you can find it). Studies automatically define moderate drinking as the test to see if it's good or not. Studies automatically define ALL gun ownership and then say, oh, what could someone do bad with it. It's implicit that they're biased in different ways. You have to see this.

I see your point, and agree somewhat.  The thing is, there's some difficulty in comparing apples to apples here.

I can define moderate alcohol use pretty easily, by setting a blood alchohol level or number of drinks in an hour for a particular body weight, etc. 

It's a bit more difficult to define an equivalent 'responsible gun usage' category.  More than half of gun owners in the US admit to failing to secure their gun safely (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180225184123.htm).  Are most gun owners irresponsible?  Or is securing a gun not considered a responsible action to take?  How do we compare apples to apples?




I'm sorry that I wasn't clear in my reasons.

Gun ownership increase suicide deaths for a variety of reasons.  Removing guns from the picture quite clearly reduces this number.  Even very right wing pro gun groups have admitted this.  The person committing the suicide though is often not the gun owner, but a family member, lover, or friend.  When you discount suicides you're discounting these deaths where gun ownership has directly caused the death of another.


I'm totally fine with this, if we keep our reasoning consistent for the comparison between alcohol and guns, which I believe is all we have left that we're discussing. You define self-harm as tied to guns. Then self-harm has to be tied to alcohol in the same way, in which case, literally 10's of thousands of more deaths per year are at the feet of alcohol.


Intent of design is used all the time to prevent people from owning dangerous things.  I'm not allowed to buy landmines to ring my property . . . because they're dangerous.  I tend to see guns (specifically handguns) as similar.  Landmines are arguably more defensive than a gun (which can be used offensively, whereas a landmine just sits there waiting for a trespasser) but they're designed to kill or maim, so the right to own a landmine is severely restricted.  This isn't based on studies of the effect of legal landmines in the US.  They've been banned entirely because of intent of design.  Same thing goes for nukes.  Nukes have never been legal, so we really have no idea of their deterrent effect.  We've just taken away people's rights to own them because they are designed to kill large numbers of people . . . we should legalize them for a few decades for study were your reasoning here sound.

(FWIW, I am a teetotaler.  If we lost the right to drink tomorrow, it would mean that I don't have a beer or a gin and tonic every couple months.  No real appreciable difference to my life either way.  I don't currently own a gun, but spent an awful lot of my young life hunting with a rifle in the woods.  I've spent an awful lot more time shooting guns than drinking alcohol.  While it's true that I don't fetishize them to the extent that seems to be common in the US, I'm not sure that it's fair to say that I don't care about guns.)

Intent of design is not used to ban things that I'm aware of. As I mentioned above, landmines and nuclear weapons are banned because they're frickin' dangerous and dangerous to tons of people at large and could not be used in a defensive application where there wasn't a huge risk of collateral damage. These are extreme differences from guns. You're comment "we should legalize them for a few decades for study were your reasoning here sound" is really silly, and I know that you know that. We don't have to legalize a nuclear weapon to know that it has a blast radius of however many miles, it's implicit in the science behind it. My reasoning would in no way require that we study nukes to ban them.

Agreed, the point of mentioning it was to show how silly the whole argument that it is necessary to perform studies to prove that obviously dangerous things are dangerous.

Handguns of course, are also frickin' dangerous and dangerous to tons of people at large, and carry with them a huge risk of collateral damage.

The argument about defense makes no sense at all.  As mentioned, it's difficult to use a landmine in an offensive manner, they were designed as an (admittedly indiscriminate) defensive weapon.  It's very easy to use a gun in an offensive manner, they are designed as an (admittedly more discriminate) offensive weapon.  Now, if you want to say that the ability to discriminate between targets is most important, then I'd argue that there exists greater reason to restrict automatic and semi-automatic guns as they enable less discriminate firing.



I will circle back again to your point. We do have a fundamental disagreement. You are biased against guns, plain and simple. I am biased for guns, of course. I'm not going to deny it. But that difference is keeping you from seeing that alcohol is statistically more dangerous than guns, which I don't believe you've once admitted even though it's true. Something can be dangerous even if it's not designed to be. In this case, alcohol is that thing. There's no getting around this. If something is statistically more dangerous than something else, you tackle it more not less and certainly do not ignore it completely, if you're not being hypocritical. It boils down to these points:

Alcohol kills more people than guns. I didn't make this up, the CDC says it's so. Argue with them if you disagree.

So, you just complained that I was not comparing like for like . . . but deaths involving alcohol vs deaths caused by guns is not exactly apples to apples either, is it?  If I have a beer and an hour later walk outside, slip on some ice, crack my head and die, I have increased the number of alcohol related deaths.  Would you say that alcohol caused my death?  Is this the alcohol equivalent of being shot to death in your mind?

That's why the CDC does not say that alcohol kills more people than guns (as you keep repeating).  It does list a great number of deaths involving alcohol though.



Alcohol and guns are both "optional" items. You don't need them to live. They're not necessary to support your family (unless you're in one of those industries). If both were banned and were able to be made to magically disappear, people could continue to go to work, have relationships with each other, etc. So in that very important sense they're very similar.

People are up in arms to restrict and often times ban guns. It's in the news. People are passionate enough about it to campaign on social media. To protest in the streets. To call people bad names if they don't fall in line. To declare that gun deaths are on their heads. To put it as one of the highlights of the platform of an entire political party.

These same people (by and large) are not addressing alcohol in the same way, even though it's tied to more deaths. They are literally willing to ignore something that puts more people in jeopardy, for what reason? Because guns are scary? Because you don't like them? Because you like to drink? Because you don't want to go against something a much higher percentage of society says is fine? Because it's easy to jump on a bandwagon against guns? Whatever...

I have a very legitimate right to be pissed off that people are willing to take away one right while ignoring another when there's no good statistical reason why to do it that way. These are very comparable situations. Yet, people ignore alcohol and are willing to remove rights from tens of millions of Americans who have done nothing wrong. I doubt many gun owners have thought of this argument. I doubt many would totally agree with everything I have to say. But if you want to know the sentiment behind gun proponents getting pissed off, it's this sentiment.

People are willing to take away someone else's rights because they just don't care about the right. It's not important to them, so they not only relinquish it freely to a government they would otherwise fight against for taking away rights they do care about. They don't just relinquish it; they crusade against it, and it's all because they just don't care about that right. How do I know that it's because they just don't care about it? Because they ignore another similar but more dangerous thing. But if the right that could get taken away is something these other people prefer/don't want to take away/think isn't as bad even though statistically it is/whatever they can't even be bothered to go after that other right and be consistent.

OK, you've convinced me.  They're both dangerous.  Let's ban both.

caracarn

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1567 on: February 22, 2019, 08:47:43 AM »
The rules in Western Australia also require the hunter to have their paper licence on them when carrying the gun, and also a letter from the owner of the land they are hunting on, giving them permission to hunt on the land if the owner is not present.  As a land owner, I do not have this issue, but technically my son needed a letter from me to allow him to shoot rabbits and foxes on our land when I was not home.  He also needed a letter from me before he could purchase a gun himself, and he needed a gun safe installed in the home (which is allowed in rural areas) and have it inspected by police.  Ammunition must be kept locked separately from the gun.

These rules make it very clear that guns are not expected to be used for self defence in Western Australia, as the time required to unlock the gun safe, unlock the ammunition, load the gun and then point the gun at anyone would be too long to stop a home invasion.  Guns are available for the farming community as a tool for their intended use, destroying vermin, and livestock as necessary.
I think this is very interesting.  I think this type of expectation would go a long way to satisfying the GC folks since the GRA folks many times are saying their purpose is not to kill/harm anyone.  It would be a way to make it clear to all that as a society we have decided that this purpose is not what the gun owner has the gun for, as you have done there in Western Australia.  It would also seem to be something that would be difficult to argue with from the rural/remote area gun owners we have here who indicate part of why they need one for defence is that response time would be too long.  I assume you would have the same issues of response duration, yet your society acknowledges that and determines that still does not change the fact that you are not to use the gun for defence.  I would assume that is based on the belief that the threat of attack is more overblown in the mind that in the reality.

caracarn

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1568 on: February 22, 2019, 09:01:57 AM »
They don't just relinquish it; they crusade against it, and it's all because they just don't care about that right. How do I know that it's because they just don't care about it? Because they ignore another similar but more dangerous thing. But if the right that could get taken away is something these other people prefer/don't want to take away/think isn't as bad even though statistically it is/whatever they can't even be bothered to go after that other right and be consistent.
I've been watching this discussion for a bit, but would like you to read the bolded parts as the one train of thought they are. 

I find it does occur often, if at all, that if someone does not care about something that they take the effort to crusade against it.  Crusading is not easy.  The Crusades took people hundreds of miles away from their homes and killed many of them.  Seems an unlikely action to take for something one does not care about, doesn't it?  Is it possible what you may not be seeing is that they do not care about the alcohol issue (which I would say they do not because they take no action, exactly what you would expect when someone does not care) because is it not possible that while alcohol cause more deaths that may be because more people use it more often, so the death rate per use is smaller?  I'd say about 95-98% of the people I have every met have used alcohol at least once.  The number of people that have ever used a gun is a much smaller percentage.  I know a lot of people who use alcohol daily, sometimes multiple times per day.  I do not know a single gun owner that I could say that of.  I have never seen a per use study, only a per capita statistic (I'd venture to guess because getting accurate numbers of how many times a person used alcohol would be prohibitively difficult and subject to gross error) of alcohol and deaths.  Just because something is not studied does not mean it could not in fact be accurate. 

So the crusader GC individual certainly cannot be legitimately accused of not caring about the status of that right.  It is too much effort to put forth for something one cares little or nothing about.

Johnez

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1569 on: February 22, 2019, 09:55:41 AM »
^Wolfpack's point is that GC advocates *disregard* the right to bear arms. It's not that they don't care about guns (obviously they do), it's that they treat the second amendment as if it doesn't matter.

Alcohol is a funny thing. We *DID* try to ban it. Didn't work out. However there are very heavy regulations levied on it's consumption. There ARE people crusading for tighter restrictions and harsher punishments. Ever heard of MADD? I don't think there is a requirement that once you join a cause or movement you have to join every other cause and movement. Should people who donate after a hurricane some place be expected to donate to *every* natural disasters fund? We pick and choose what we fight for. Sometimes it's out of closer proximity to the problem, sometimes there's a passion behind the choice, sometimes we are attracted to an issue because of the news portrayals. Alcohol related deaths are tragic, and it's use is completely optional and unnecessary I agree, in fact I'd agree to BAN the crap as I've written in an essay once in school. I think the reasons for choosing which cause to fight or the fact that one chooses to fight for one but not the other is not a basis for disregarding the actual arguments of their cause.

Kris

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1570 on: February 22, 2019, 10:18:45 AM »
^Wolfpack's point is that GC advocates *disregard* the right to bear arms. It's not that they don't care about guns (obviously they do), it's that they treat the second amendment as if it doesn't matter.


Which is kind of BS. We have rights, but most people are able to acknowledge that there are limits to those rights. We have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But there are certainly limits to all of those things. We as a society have decided that the limit to our liberty is if we commit a crime and therefore go to jail for it. Many states have decided there's a limit to the right to life: if a person has murdered someone else, the state reserves the right to execute them. The limit of the pursuit of happiness is if that pursuit contravenes a law or harms someone else.

The right to bear arms is not absolute. And just because there is an amendment in the constitution (an amendment which is written in a fairly ambiguous manner) does not mean that it is. And saying that the right isn't absolute doesn't mean that one disregards the right.
« Last Edit: February 22, 2019, 10:20:18 AM by Kris »

GuitarStv

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1571 on: February 22, 2019, 10:26:40 AM »
Any mention of the right of men to bear small arms as part of a militia to defend a country from the dastardly English, written in the time of sail-ships, legally owned slaves, and muskets has no place in the discussion of modern firearms in a country in 2019.  Logically, the 2nd amendment shouldn't matter at all to this discussion.

Johnez

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1572 on: February 22, 2019, 10:42:59 AM »
I prefer the first 10 amendments remain untouched. If we go about changing things just because they were written in the time of sail boats and muskets, what's to stop them from effing with the first  amendment? And sadly, it appears one of our  justices is already working on that..

GuitarStv

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1573 on: February 22, 2019, 10:52:37 AM »
I prefer the first 10 amendments remain untouched. If we go about changing things just because they were written in the time of sail boats and muskets, what's to stop them from effing with the first  amendment? And sadly, it appears one of our  justices is already working on that..

Fortunately, the amendment doesn't have to be touched at all.  It only applies to land owning men within fighting age who are part of a well regulated militia, after all.

I'd say there's a lot of wiggle room for interpretation there . . . given that the currently legally accepted interpretation is already radically different than the amendment as written.

Tyson

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1574 on: February 22, 2019, 11:25:12 AM »
I think the main issue is one side feels the world has it's fair share of nasty, dangerous people that you need a gun to defend against and the other side feels like guns in and of themselves are a public safety hazard and we'd ALL be better off if guns were removed from the equation. 

The problem is, both sides have a point.  There are nasty people in the world that commit violent crime.  Guns are a useful deterrent in those instances.  On the flip side, guns do raise the threat level for everyone.  Because often what you get is simply better armed and emboldened bad people. 

I'm glad you all are hashing out some good solutions ;)

Kris

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1575 on: February 22, 2019, 11:47:10 AM »
I think the main issue is one side feels the world has it's fair share of nasty, dangerous people that you need a gun to defend against and the other side feels like guns in and of themselves are a public safety hazard and we'd ALL be better off if guns were removed from the equation. 

The problem is, both sides have a point.  There are nasty people in the world that commit violent crime.  Guns are a useful deterrent in those instances.  On the flip side, guns do raise the threat level for everyone.  Because often what you get is simply better armed and emboldened bad people. 

I'm glad you all are hashing out some good solutions ;)

Sure. So, let's make sure that people can get a gun if they want to, as long as they follow some rules and show they have learned how to use one and how to safely store it, etc. And that people who have shown a history of violent dumbassery don't have legal access to them.

That seems very, very logical.

Tyson

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1576 on: February 22, 2019, 12:48:26 PM »
I think the main issue is one side feels the world has it's fair share of nasty, dangerous people that you need a gun to defend against and the other side feels like guns in and of themselves are a public safety hazard and we'd ALL be better off if guns were removed from the equation. 

The problem is, both sides have a point.  There are nasty people in the world that commit violent crime.  Guns are a useful deterrent in those instances.  On the flip side, guns do raise the threat level for everyone.  Because often what you get is simply better armed and emboldened bad people. 

I'm glad you all are hashing out some good solutions ;)

Sure. So, let's make sure that people can get a gun if they want to, as long as they follow some rules and show they have learned how to use one and how to safely store it, etc. And that people who have shown a history of violent dumbassery don't have legal access to them.

That seems very, very logical.

You're being too reasonable! 

Kris

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1577 on: February 22, 2019, 12:56:48 PM »
I think the main issue is one side feels the world has it's fair share of nasty, dangerous people that you need a gun to defend against and the other side feels like guns in and of themselves are a public safety hazard and we'd ALL be better off if guns were removed from the equation. 

The problem is, both sides have a point.  There are nasty people in the world that commit violent crime.  Guns are a useful deterrent in those instances.  On the flip side, guns do raise the threat level for everyone.  Because often what you get is simply better armed and emboldened bad people. 

I'm glad you all are hashing out some good solutions ;)

Sure. So, let's make sure that people can get a gun if they want to, as long as they follow some rules and show they have learned how to use one and how to safely store it, etc. And that people who have shown a history of violent dumbassery don't have legal access to them.

That seems very, very logical.

You're being too reasonable!

Sorry. I guess I just Hate Freedom(tm) and have complete disregard for the Second Amendment.

golden1

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1578 on: February 22, 2019, 01:15:12 PM »
Quote
^Wolfpack's point is that GC advocates *disregard* the right to bear arms. It's not that they don't care about guns (obviously they do), it's that they treat the second amendment as if it doesn't matter.

Such bullshit.  Thanks for willfully misunderstanding and disregarding the motives of people who want restrictions on gun use.

These two sentences are true to many people:
1) The second amendment matters and should be respected.
2) We need to find solutions to the many problems our society related to guns.
(This is not a paradox.  People have different interpretations of many of the amendments, and "well regulated" is part of that amendment that you love.)

You saying that is like me saying that you obviously care more about guns than dead kids because otherwise you would work to find solutions for mass shootings instead of shooting down every option (pun intended).  Obviously not true, deliberately inflammatory, shuts down all reasonable debate.

Johnez

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1579 on: February 22, 2019, 04:26:17 PM »
^You're welcome. Just for the record, I'm reiterating what I *think* WP's point is, I don't actually subscribe to it.

For point 1, I really wish GC advocates would make that a priority in their actions. Placing onerous restrictions such that owning a gun is completely pointless betrays their "respect" of the second amendment.

For point 2, I wish things like "mental health" could be seen as a national issue separate from GC. Along with building opportunity in the form of economic and education initiatives, some of gun violence will decrease. Does a CPA need a gun to sell drugs safely? No. Give every child the proper opportunity to not "need" a gun is the best gun control. When every child growing up has the greater opportunity to become a doctor, teacher, CPA, mechanic or software developer and NOT a gun toting gangbanger, we'll see a drop in more than gun crime.

And by the way some posters have written, there are actual proponents of entirely removing the second amendment. Not the entire or a large number of the GC advocates, but a noticeable enough amount.

Can we discuss this without getting....up in arms about it? ;+)
« Last Edit: February 22, 2019, 06:26:10 PM by Johnez »

GuitarStv

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1580 on: February 22, 2019, 05:01:56 PM »
And by the way some posters have written, there are actual proponents of entirely removing the second amendment. Not the entire or a large number of the GC advocates, but a noticeable enough amount.

As written, the 2nd  amendment only applies to the land owning white men within fighting age who are part of a well regulated militia.  Modern interpretation of this has changed an awful lot from what was actually written.  There's no reason that it needs to be entirely removed, just change the interpretation from what it currently is (as it has already changed from what it originally was).

Wolfpack Mustachian

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1581 on: February 22, 2019, 07:06:00 PM »
They don't just relinquish it; they crusade against it, and it's all because they just don't care about that right. How do I know that it's because they just don't care about it? Because they ignore another similar but more dangerous thing. But if the right that could get taken away is something these other people prefer/don't want to take away/think isn't as bad even though statistically it is/whatever they can't even be bothered to go after that other right and be consistent.
I've been watching this discussion for a bit, but would like you to read the bolded parts as the one train of thought they are. 

I find it does occur often, if at all, that if someone does not care about something that they take the effort to crusade against it.  Crusading is not easy.  The Crusades took people hundreds of miles away from their homes and killed many of them.  Seems an unlikely action to take for something one does not care about, doesn't it?  Is it possible what you may not be seeing is that they do not care about the alcohol issue (which I would say they do not because they take no action, exactly what you would expect when someone does not care) because is it not possible that while alcohol cause more deaths that may be because more people use it more often, so the death rate per use is smaller?  I'd say about 95-98% of the people I have every met have used alcohol at least once.  The number of people that have ever used a gun is a much smaller percentage.  I know a lot of people who use alcohol daily, sometimes multiple times per day.  I do not know a single gun owner that I could say that of.  I have never seen a per use study, only a per capita statistic (I'd venture to guess because getting accurate numbers of how many times a person used alcohol would be prohibitively difficult and subject to gross error) of alcohol and deaths.  Just because something is not studied does not mean it could not in fact be accurate. 

So the crusader GC individual certainly cannot be legitimately accused of not caring about the status of that right.  It is too much effort to put forth for something one cares little or nothing about.

Fair enough. My wording could have been a bit clearer. These people don't care about defending someone else's rights. I guarantee they have rights of their own, though, that they'd desire to protect.

Also, a study of sorts could be easily performed for guns. You don't have to pick people out who use their guns daily to match alcohol or anything like that. Just do a study with houses with alcohol in them (or that have had them it in them in the past week or whatever, since it's a consumable), and compare it to houses that don't have any alcohol in them to compare different risks and danger factors that occur. It could easily be done, but people don't put the effort in to do studies with a similar bias against alcohol like they do against guns.

Wolfpack Mustachian

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1582 on: February 22, 2019, 07:25:30 PM »

It's certainly possible to use landmines without collateral damage.  If it wasn't, they would never have been used by the military.  But you can replace landmines with artillery if that makes you happier.  You say that you don't need studies to know that there are severe risks associated with placing landmines, OK, sure I can buy that.  You say that you don't need studies to know that you can shoot a deer with a gun for meat, OK, sure, I can buy that too.

We don't need a study to know that good people can and do use guns to stop bad things (we would need a study to know how many).  Sure, I can agree with this too.

By the same token we also don't need a study to know that easy access to hand guns is extremely dangerous, and that it leads to a great many bad things (we would need a study to determine how many).

Our fundamental difference is that you believe that the good outweighs the bad.  I disagree.  There are several studies available that demonstrate that the bad outweighs the good, and several studies that demonstrate that the good outweighs the bad.  I'm not sure where that leaves us.


Landmines and artillery both have collateral damage. Landmines aren't used in our military anymore because of the risks of collateral damage, etc., so if the military bans them, they agree they're worse than guns and not an apples to apples comparison. Artillery has collateral damage that is not just allowed but encouraged because you're trying to kill a bunch of people at a time. Guns, again, can be used properly to hit one person and therefore can be used as self defense.

I agree at our impasse for feeling which bad or good is outweighed and that statistics support both sides.
 




I see your point, and agree somewhat.  The thing is, there's some difficulty in comparing apples to apples here.

I can define moderate alcohol use pretty easily, by setting a blood alchohol level or number of drinks in an hour for a particular body weight, etc. 

It's a bit more difficult to define an equivalent 'responsible gun usage' category.  More than half of gun owners in the US admit to failing to secure their gun safely (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180225184123.htm).  Are most gun owners irresponsible?  Or is securing a gun not considered a responsible action to take?  How do we compare apples to apples?


Again, I agree that apples to apples here is nearly impossible, but I just wanted to make sure the point that they weren't apples to apples when you defined drinking in moderation was understood.


Agreed, the point of mentioning it was to show how silly the whole argument that it is necessary to perform studies to prove that obviously dangerous things are dangerous.

Handguns of course, are also frickin' dangerous and dangerous to tons of people at large, and carry with them a huge risk of collateral damage.

The argument about defense makes no sense at all.  As mentioned, it's difficult to use a landmine in an offensive manner, they were designed as an (admittedly indiscriminate) defensive weapon.  It's very easy to use a gun in an offensive manner, they are designed as an (admittedly more discriminate) offensive weapon.  Now, if you want to say that the ability to discriminate between targets is most important, then I'd argue that there exists greater reason to restrict automatic and semi-automatic guns as they enable less discriminate firing.


As discussed above, landmines are not a suitable comparison even though the claim could be made that they're defensive. I do think the ability to discriminate between targets is most important. That's the defining point to me (along with the greater risk for less reward) between automatic (which I don't think many gun owners want to bring back to being more loosely restricted) and semi-automatic. Semi-automatic can just as easily discriminate in firing as a bolt action. It can be misused worse, but you can still target and aim very specifically with it.


So, you just complained that I was not comparing like for like . . . but deaths involving alcohol vs deaths caused by guns is not exactly apples to apples either, is it?  If I have a beer and an hour later walk outside, slip on some ice, crack my head and die, I have increased the number of alcohol related deaths.  Would you say that alcohol caused my death?  Is this the alcohol equivalent of being shot to death in your mind?

That's why the CDC does not say that alcohol kills more people than guns (as you keep repeating).  It does list a great number of deaths involving alcohol though.


I still think this is being pedantic. There are tens of thousands of deaths, call them alcohol related or otherwise, where you drink too much at once or over time and the alcohol literally kills you. If the ~10,000 people who kill in drunk driving accidents were eliminated because they weren't drunk, that alone would take care of almost all of the homicide deaths from guns. Alcohol causes deaths and in great quantities. More than guns, even if you eliminate ones that are a little less directly related. There's no reason to shy away from saying alcohol causes more deaths than guns.


OK, you've convinced me.  They're both dangerous.  Let's ban both.

Great! I'm glad you're finally consistent :).

Indexer

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1583 on: February 22, 2019, 09:53:48 PM »
As for people who got the gun before the background check completed, I'll have to see a source for that.

Here you go:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/thousands-of-guns-are-mistakenly-sold-to-banned-buyers-its-the-atfs-job-to-get-them-back-11550591324

Dylann Roof, the kid who shot up the church in Charlestown, is the prime example in the story.

"It happened with Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who in 2015 fatally shot nine African-Americans during a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, S.C. Roof was armed with a .45 caliber Glock 41. A past drug arrest should have kept him from buying the weapon, but his background check stretched past three days, allowing him to take it home."


That shouldn't happen, and it wasn't an isolated case.

"in 2017, 310,000 purchases were allowed to proceed after the three-day limit and before the checks were complete"

Luckily the overwhelming majority of those 310k cases ended up being legitimate.  In only about 6,000 cases did the background check fail, and in most of those cases the ATF was able to peacefully retrieve the weapon.



As written, the 2nd  amendment only applies to the land owning white men within fighting age who are part of a well regulated militia. 

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

1. No where does it say anything about land owning men. I get that is who was in charge back then, but using the 'white land owning men' argument would also imply that only white land owning men have a freedom of speech and religion. You can't have it both ways.
2. Age is never mentioned.
3. No where in there does it say that the guns are only for the militia. The "people" have to the right to keep and bear arms. A well regulated militia is a preposition in this sentence.

GuitarStv

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1584 on: February 23, 2019, 12:53:26 PM »

As written, the 2nd  amendment only applies to the land owning white men within fighting age who are part of a well regulated militia. 

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

1. No where does it say anything about land owning men. I get that is who was in charge back then, but using the 'white land owning men' argument would also imply that only white land owning men have a freedom of speech and religion. You can't have it both ways.
2. Age is never mentioned.
3. No where in there does it say that the guns are only for the militia. The "people" have to the right to keep and bear arms. A well regulated militia is a preposition in this sentence.

White land owning men were the folks who would have made up a well regulated militia at the time that the constitution was being written.

There have always been clear age limits for men serving in a militia.  In 1903 for example, the militia was legally defined as being an able bodied man from 17  - 45 (https://definitions.uslegal.com/m/militia/, https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/03/20/a-short-history-of-the-militia-in-the-united-states/).  As the elderly cannot be part of a militia, I think that a reasonable person could argue that the second amendment wouldn't have applied to them at the time it was written.

At the time the constitution was written, black folks weren't really considered 'people'.  They were bought and sold as slaves, and were given 3/4 the vote of a white person (mostly to placate their owners who wanted more political power).  The founders obviously didn't intend black people to have the right to own a weapon when they created the amendment, otherwise they would have been arming the very slaves that southerners were busy exploiting.  Sure, the 13th and 14th amendments were designed to reverse the founders intent to oppress black people, but if we're reading the 2nd amendment in context you can't argue that it was supposed to allow black people to own a gun.

Women were generally considered people, but again very much second class people.  Women were effectively property of a man for their whole life.  They didn't have freedom to own land, or to go against the wishes of the man who controlled them (be it their father or husband).  They were not a part of a militia, and therefore there would be no original intent to allow them to bear arms.  While they were given the right to vote by the 19th amendment, the constitution still doesn't define women as having equal rights to men (that's why there's a push for the ERA).

'The people' as written in the constitution would have meant white men between a certain age.  If you're talking about arming black folks, women, or elderly people, that's well beyond the scope of what was written in the second amendment.

GuitarStv

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1585 on: February 23, 2019, 01:02:41 PM »
So, you just complained that I was not comparing like for like . . . but deaths involving alcohol vs deaths caused by guns is not exactly apples to apples either, is it?  If I have a beer and an hour later walk outside, slip on some ice, crack my head and die, I have increased the number of alcohol related deaths.  Would you say that alcohol caused my death?  Is this the alcohol equivalent of being shot to death in your mind?

That's why the CDC does not say that alcohol kills more people than guns (as you keep repeating).  It does list a great number of deaths involving alcohol though.


I still think this is being pedantic. There are tens of thousands of deaths, call them alcohol related or otherwise, where you drink too much at once or over time and the alcohol literally kills you. If the ~10,000 people who kill in drunk driving accidents were eliminated because they weren't drunk, that alone would take care of almost all of the homicide deaths from guns. Alcohol causes deaths and in great quantities. More than guns, even if you eliminate ones that are a little less directly related. There's no reason to shy away from saying alcohol causes more deaths than guns.

I know you think that this is being pedantic . . . but it's also true.

Alcohol related deaths do not mean caused by alcohol.  I even provided an example to illustrate when an alcohol related death.  I agree that a (large) percentage of the deaths are likely caused by alcohol, but not the full number you're using.  You're comparing apples with oranges, much the same that you accused me of doing earlier.

Unless you have different information than currently provided, saying that alcohol causes more death than guns is not supported by the data you have . . . so I'll object every time you say it.  There are more alcohol related deaths than gun deaths though.

zolotiyeruki

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1586 on: February 23, 2019, 06:30:45 PM »
Sure. So, let's make sure that people can get a gun if they want to, as long as they follow some rules and show they have learned how to use one and how to safely store it, etc. And that people who have shown a history of violent dumbassery don't have legal access to them.
It sounds great!  Except that a very high percentage of guns used in crimes are obtained in ways that wouldn't be touched by such regulations--either straw purchasers, stolen, etc.  For example, last week a guy who recently lost his job went to his old workplace and killed five people and injured several others.  He had a prior felony conviction, which disqualifies him from gun ownership.  There are plenty of gang members running around Chicago who are either underage or have previous convictions, and they don't seem to have any issues obtaining guns, despite the multiple laws put in place to prevent exactly that.

Quote
It's a bit more difficult to define an equivalent 'responsible gun usage' category.  More than half of gun owners in the US admit to failing to secure their gun safely (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180225184123.htm).  Are most gun owners irresponsible?  Or is securing a gun not considered a responsible action to take?  How do we compare apples to apples?
From that link, "The survey defined safe storage as all guns stored in a locked gun safe, cabinet or case, locked into a gun rack or stored with a trigger lock or other lock. This definition is based on research showing these practices reduce the risk of unauthorized access or use."

I take issue strongly with multiple things in your post:
1) If the gun owner is the only resident, how is it unsafe?  If everyone in the home is trained on how to properly handle firearms, how is it unsafe?
2) If a primary use of firearms is self-defense or defense of the home, locking them up sorta defeats the purpose.
3) You're setting up a false choice:  either your gun is locked up, or you're being irresponsible/unsafe/dangerous.  I'll take door 3, thankyouverymuch! :)

Any mention of the right of men to bear small arms as part of a militia to defend a country from the dastardly English, written in the time of sail-ships, legally owned slaves, and muskets has no place in the discussion of modern firearms in a country in 2019.  Logically, the 2nd amendment shouldn't matter at all to this discussion.
I'm not sure you want to make that argument, because if we apply the same logic to the 1st amendment, it means that Freedom of Speech is irrelevant when it comes to radio, TV, telephone, and the internet, and the government should be free to stifle any speech they want to as long as you're not on a soapbox or publishing a newspaper.

You're right that the constitution was written in a time of sailing ships and legal slave ownership.  That's why it has a mechanism for getting updated as the need arises.  That's why slave ownership is illegal today, women and people of all colors have the right to vote, and the President's cabinet can remove him from office if they find him unfit to serve.

Kris

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1587 on: February 23, 2019, 06:46:35 PM »
Sure. So, let's make sure that people can get a gun if they want to, as long as they follow some rules and show they have learned how to use one and how to safely store it, etc. And that people who have shown a history of violent dumbassery don't have legal access to them.
It sounds great!  Except that a very high percentage of guns used in crimes are obtained in ways that wouldn't be touched by such regulations--either straw purchasers, stolen, etc.  For example, last week a guy who recently lost his job went to his old workplace and killed five people and injured several others.  He had a prior felony conviction, which disqualifies him from gun ownership.  There are plenty of gang members running around Chicago who are either underage or have previous convictions, and they don't seem to have any issues obtaining guns, despite the multiple laws put in place to prevent exactly that.

Quote
It's a bit more difficult to define an equivalent 'responsible gun usage' category.  More than half of gun owners in the US admit to failing to secure their gun safely (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180225184123.htm).  Are most gun owners irresponsible?  Or is securing a gun not considered a responsible action to take?  How do we compare apples to apples?
From that link, "The survey defined safe storage as all guns stored in a locked gun safe, cabinet or case, locked into a gun rack or stored with a trigger lock or other lock. This definition is based on research showing these practices reduce the risk of unauthorized access or use."

I take issue strongly with multiple things in your post:
1) If the gun owner is the only resident, how is it unsafe?  If everyone in the home is trained on how to properly handle firearms, how is it unsafe?
2) If a primary use of firearms is self-defense or defense of the home, locking them up sorta defeats the purpose.
3) You're setting up a false choice:  either your gun is locked up, or you're being irresponsible/unsafe/dangerous.  I'll take door 3, thankyouverymuch! :)

Any mention of the right of men to bear small arms as part of a militia to defend a country from the dastardly English, written in the time of sail-ships, legally owned slaves, and muskets has no place in the discussion of modern firearms in a country in 2019.  Logically, the 2nd amendment shouldn't matter at all to this discussion.
I'm not sure you want to make that argument, because if we apply the same logic to the 1st amendment, it means that Freedom of Speech is irrelevant when it comes to radio, TV, telephone, and the internet, and the government should be free to stifle any speech they want to as long as you're not on a soapbox or publishing a newspaper.

You're right that the constitution was written in a time of sailing ships and legal slave ownership.  That's why it has a mechanism for getting updated as the need arises.  That's why slave ownership is illegal today, women and people of all colors have the right to vote, and the President's cabinet can remove him from office if they find him unfit to serve.

Right.

So the solution is to do nothing.

Or am I misunderstanding?

Perhaps we could just start here, knowing that it will probably prevent just a very, very small number of unnecessary gun deaths?

What do you say?
« Last Edit: February 23, 2019, 07:19:18 PM by Kris »

Wolfpack Mustachian

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1588 on: February 23, 2019, 09:02:12 PM »

I know you think that this is being pedantic . . . but it's also true.

Alcohol related deaths do not mean caused by alcohol.  I even provided an example to illustrate when an alcohol related death.  I agree that a (large) percentage of the deaths are likely caused by alcohol, but not the full number you're using.  You're comparing apples with oranges, much the same that you accused me of doing earlier.

Unless you have different information than currently provided, saying that alcohol causes more death than guns is not supported by the data you have . . . so I'll object every time you say it.  There are more alcohol related deaths than gun deaths though.

OK, so you've brought up a great point peripherally. I am using the word pedantic way too much :) and in this case, it's not applicable because it's more than that.

Let me rephrase.

By saying what you're saying, you are twisting the truth. Especially from a policy standpoint, I'll just go ahead and say it, your point is wrong.

Not to be too snarky, but dictionary definition of cause: make (something, especially something bad) happen.

You can take this in two ways. The first way, since you are being so particular is to literally be the one to make it happen. There is only one way you can make something happen. You have to be the active force behind it happening. A gun doesn't shoot itself. The person is the one pulling the trigger. The person is the one taking the drink and doing something very bad afterwards or simply killing themselves with the alcohol. So, if you're talking about it from this perspective, both are in the same boat, and you are not correct.

The second way is to realize they both facilitate deaths. Guns don't kill people. Alcohol doesn't kill people. However, when they are involved, people's deaths are facilitated. For drunk driving, just because it's alcohol and a car that both facilitate it doesn't mean everything is still just facilitating it. Try to go further than that in your logic about either "actually causing" the death, and you're back to the first point, neither actually kills anyone.

Furthermore, we're talking a bit abstract and philosophically, but we're obviously talking about public policy here as well. From a public policy standpoint, if you take something out that eliminates the bad thing that happens, that's pretty solidly equivalent and desired. I.e. if you take the alcohol out of the drunk driving fatalities, the fatalities disappear (unless you can find me some massive amount of people who drank so they could kill someone in a car so they could claim drunk driving instead of homicide). So, from that standpoint, you are not correct.

You act like your statement was some kind of proof for your point. You made up a random story about someone who fell. I have already linked you to statistics about alcohol. These deaths are attributable by the CDC to alcohol. Their methodology isn't the easiest to find, but they are linking the 88,000 deaths per year to alcohol. It doesn't have to mean that all 88,000 would immediately go away if alcohol disappeared, but they're the ones that linked them together. I trust their linkages better than your or my hypothesizing, so yes, alcohol causes (see above if you're still confused about cause) more deaths than guns because 88,000 is greater than 40,000.

You can continue to object every time I say it. You can continue to be wrong.

Wolfpack Mustachian

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1589 on: February 23, 2019, 09:58:32 PM »
I just want to say one thing outside of my responses to GuitarStv. I think it's very important that when arguing against guns in this subject that everyone remembers that this is talking about taking away someone's rights. We as a society take away rights all the time, but we do it for reason, with cause. The ultimate taking away of rights is putting people who commit crimes in jail, taking away their freedom. We take away privacy for wire taps when there's a reason to suspect that particular person did something wrong.

The difference in this and guns is, many/most of the gun control ideas are taking away rights before anyone does anything wrong. These people haven't committed a crime and are having their rights restricted for what they can use in defense.

Now this argument doesn't preclude background checks, and I am not against any reasonable background check (i.e. not doing what some areas do to restrict people from getting guns at all, indefinitely, using background checks as the reason). Background checks don't apply to this because they are there to make sure people who have done something wrong don't get the guns, going back to what we've all agreed upon in society is a reason to restrict rights - actually doing something wrong.

The biggest reason I argued about the alcohol thing is this. We can't even say that guns are this unicorn thing where, oh wow, well, it's so bad and things are so bad that we have to treat them differently than any other right. I've given an example, alcohol, that is extremely similar to guns and has as much or more of a negative impact than guns. Guns aren't this magical, singular issue.

Beyond that, it's preemptively restricting rights. I am not saying we shouldn't do this at all. I'm just saying, we should do it with deliberation, thoughtfully, balancing rights with safety. For example - should high capacity magazines be banned because they don't help defense that much vs. allow more people to get hurt? It's a worthwhile discussion. So, I'll go ahead and counter any arguments to the effect - this is not saying do nothing. It's just saying, we should take restricting rights before people do anything wrong seriously. People shouldn't be berated for not wanting to have their rights restricted, getting called names or declared being responsible for deaths they had nothing to do with. They aren't the bad guys causing problems. The bad guys are. They haven't committed a crime. That's kind of the point. So yes, have reasonable discussions. Do some things to help improve safety that don't restrict others' rights too much. But do it with serious deliberation, and do it realizing, everyone has their own rights that they like. Someday, someone may argue that your preferred right should be preemptively restricted because "safety." Maybe you won't agree then...

Kris

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1590 on: February 24, 2019, 07:15:42 AM »
I just want to say one thing outside of my responses to GuitarStv. I think it's very important that when arguing against guns in this subject that everyone remembers that this is talking about taking away someone's rights. We as a society take away rights all the time, but we do it for reason, with cause. The ultimate taking away of rights is putting people who commit crimes in jail, taking away their freedom. We take away privacy for wire taps when there's a reason to suspect that particular person did something wrong.

The difference in this and guns is, many/most of the gun control ideas are taking away rights before anyone does anything wrong. These people haven't committed a crime and are having their rights restricted for what they can use in defense.

Now this argument doesn't preclude background checks, and I am not against any reasonable background check (i.e. not doing what some areas do to restrict people from getting guns at all, indefinitely, using background checks as the reason). Background checks don't apply to this because they are there to make sure people who have done something wrong don't get the guns, going back to what we've all agreed upon in society is a reason to restrict rights - actually doing something wrong.

The biggest reason I argued about the alcohol thing is this. We can't even say that guns are this unicorn thing where, oh wow, well, it's so bad and things are so bad that we have to treat them differently than any other right. I've given an example, alcohol, that is extremely similar to guns and has as much or more of a negative impact than guns. Guns aren't this magical, singular issue.

Beyond that, it's preemptively restricting rights. I am not saying we shouldn't do this at all. I'm just saying, we should do it with deliberation, thoughtfully, balancing rights with safety. For example - should high capacity magazines be banned because they don't help defense that much vs. allow more people to get hurt? It's a worthwhile discussion. So, I'll go ahead and counter any arguments to the effect - this is not saying do nothing. It's just saying, we should take restricting rights before people do anything wrong seriously. People shouldn't be berated for not wanting to have their rights restricted, getting called names or declared being responsible for deaths they had nothing to do with. They aren't the bad guys causing problems. The bad guys are. They haven't committed a crime. That's kind of the point. So yes, have reasonable discussions. Do some things to help improve safety that don't restrict others' rights too much. But do it with serious deliberation, and do it realizing, everyone has their own rights that they like. Someday, someone may argue that your preferred right should be preemptively restricted because "safety." Maybe you won't agree then...

WPM:

What about having people demonstrate that they know how to own and store a gun safely? Like a driving test before getting a license?

Wolfpack Mustachian

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1591 on: February 24, 2019, 03:31:58 PM »

WPM:

What about having people demonstrate that they know how to own and store a gun safely? Like a driving test before getting a license?

I'm not opposed to this (of course if it's handled fairly), especially if it worked into a concealed carry license or that was kind of an extension of the basic training. Even if that wasn't the case, it still is not unreasonable. The CC license works fairly similarly although maybe not as much on gun storage safety. The person could get it with a background check like a CC and then be vetted for a smooth buying process with just the license.

Kris

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1592 on: February 24, 2019, 04:06:08 PM »

WPM:

What about having people demonstrate that they know how to own and store a gun safely? Like a driving test before getting a license?

I'm not opposed to this (of course if it's handled fairly), especially if it worked into a concealed carry license or that was kind of an extension of the basic training. Even if that wasn't the case, it still is not unreasonable. The CC license works fairly similarly although maybe not as much on gun storage safety. The person could get it with a background check like a CC and then be vetted for a smooth buying process with just the license.

Well. I think you and I are more or less on the same page. For me, background checks and a basic "field" test plus written test about storage, e.g., would be enough for me.

zolotiyeruki

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1593 on: February 24, 2019, 07:43:48 PM »
Right.

So the solution is to do nothing.

Or am I misunderstanding?

Perhaps we could just start here, knowing that it will probably prevent just a very, very small number of unnecessary gun deaths?

What do you say?
Great questions!

Yes, you are misunderstanding.
No, we should not start with those three proposals, for the reasons I outlined earlier, plus the fact that you'd be depriving an enormous number of people of their right to self-defense.

I have seen gun rights vs gun control discussions this precise pattern a lot of times.  It's something like this:
Anti-gun person: Here's a proposal (or a series of proposals) for reducing gun deaths.
Pro-gun person: Here's why your proposals won't work, will have nasty side effects, or are impractical.
Anti-gun person: Then you don't care about fixing the problem.

Do I have proposals?  Well, sort of.  This problem is a really difficult one, because it is driven in large part by culture, and culture is difficult if not impossible to change by enacting laws.  I view the problem more as a gang problem in the case of murders, and as a mental health problem in the case of suicide.  To some extent, I see gangs as a problem of economics and marketing.  In areas with lots of gang activity, teens are often faced with two options: either work hard in school, get a job, work for a living, or join a gang, sell drugs, and make easy money.  The gang side has some pretty effective marketing--a lot of peers are doing it, their success is immediately visible, there's a real brotherhood of sorts.  Staying in school and getting a job are not glamorous, require lots of work, and don't come with a built-in social life.  Some of these kids come from families and homes where working a legitimate job to earn a living is either A) not enough (low wages, single mom can only work part time, etc), or B) not a priority or possible.  I realize I'm painting in very broad strokes here, and I don't wish to imply that such is the case for the majority, or even a large percentage of the people involved.  But it's a far more visible choice than, say, out in middle-class suburbs.

In some areas, the marketing problem, the culture problem, and public policy create a vicious circle.  For example, in some Chicago neighborhoods, the gangs are so brazen and powerful that candidates for city council will meet with them to try and get their support.  This has historically extended as far as ignoring gang activity or tipping them off to police activity.  Lack of enforcement leads to more gang activity, which further depresses the area, making gang involvement appear as the only choice, etc. Corruption in Chicago is rather widespread, even though it doesn't get much press.

So, from the perspective of economics, the goal is to make gang activity less attractive by removing incentives or adding penalties, and make legitimate work more attractive.  At this point, you'll have to forgive me if I slip a little into brainstorming mode, and not all of this might make sense let alone be a good idea. First of all, we need to recognize reality:  under the status quo, a lot of these kids aren't going to graduate high school, let alone go to college.  So teaching them skills and habits that will help them earn a living should be a priority.  As much as our country's culture prizes higher math and science and language skills, those things aren't going to benefit all students.  Vocational classes?  Bring 'em back.  Give kids the opportunity (or perhaps even assignment?) to work around the school and get paid for it.  Crack down on any and all gang activity in school.  Crack down on the drug trade to reduce the incentive to get involved.

On the mental health side, that's an even more difficult one.  I can understand the motivation behind various "red flag" laws that are currently en vogue, but such programs are vulnerable to mistakes abuse by both politicians and private citizens.  They also provide a strong disincentive for people to seek help, i.e. call suicide hotline -> police show up and confiscate your guns.  This one isn't hypothetical, either.  New York's "SAFE" Act has led to plenty of stories of people being deprived of their rights because, for example, they briefly had a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication.

There's a third type of gun death that gets a lot of press, and is used far more often as a reason to pass stricter gun laws, despite its statistically small contribution: mass shootings.  The thing is, you're not going to stop this type of thing by, say, stricter background checks.  The Vegas shooting was performed by a guy who would have passed any background check you can imagine.  Sandy Hook?  The guy murdered his mom and stole her guns.  The Parkland shooter should have been diagnosed as mentally ill and barred from owning a gun.  I could go on and on and on.

How would I approach such situations?  Well, first of all, by not giving them press.  Don't name the guy who did it.  Name the brave people who fought back.  Second, abandon the entire idea of "gun free zones."  The whole concept is so incredibly brain-dead that it boggles the mind.  As I stated this earlier in the thread, the people who pay attention to such rules aren't the people you're worried about, and the people you're worried about won't obey such rules.  In fact, a very high percentage of mass shootings happen in gun free zones.  The people who commit such crimes are often mentally ill, but not necessarily stupid.  They're not going to try to shoot up a police station or a gun store.  They choose soft targets, i.e. where they can inflict maximum casualties with minimum chance for resistance.  The guy who shot up the theater in Aurora, CO drove by three other movie theaters to the one that was "gun free."

Instead, I believe we should allow teachers and school staff to be armed, and be trained in how to respond to an attack.  Such programs are already officially in place in various states without incident, and I've heard that in states that don't allow it, some teachers do it anyway.  Is there a risk of an accident?  Absolutely.  Does it outweigh the risk of a school shooting? Well, we're comparing two very tiny risks, but my instinct says "yes," because if armed teachers were leading to injuries or deaths in schools, we would see it plastered across the news.

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Re: 11 School Shootings in 26 Days
« Reply #1594 on: March 02, 2019, 02:49:16 PM »

WPM:

What about having people demonstrate that they know how to own and store a gun safely? Like a driving test before getting a license?

I'm not opposed to this (of course if it's handled fairly), especially if it worked into a concealed carry license or that was kind of an extension of the basic training. Even if that wasn't the case, it still is not unreasonable. The CC license works fairly similarly although maybe not as much on gun storage safety. The person could get it with a background check like a CC and then be vetted for a smooth buying process with just the license.

Well. I think you and I are more or less on the same page. For me, background checks and a basic "field" test plus written test about storage, e.g., would be enough for me.


As a gun owner with a CC license, I am on the same page as the two of you. I'm not worried about my fellow gun owners who have their CC license. They tend to be very by the book, care about safety, and law abiding citizens. It's the people who obtained their weapons illegally or without a background check/training that are concerning.