I haven’t even glanced at that awful Instahack’s blog in years, and now I am reminded why. Here’s what he has to say about the recent murders at a Sikh temple:
The 6 Sikh temple shooting victims identified; Satwant Singh Kaleka died trying to fight off shooter. Heroic. But it’s too bad he didn’t have a gun.
What? So it’s Kaleka’s fault because he wasn’t carrying a gun? In a temple?
In Instahack’s world, are we supposed to be armed everywhere?
Has there ever been a single incident where an armed bystander stopped a killing spree or hostage taking?
I do not know. But I would guess if such a case existed the gun nuts would be clamoring to have statues of the person put in every town square and dept. store window in the country. We would all know that person’s name because the 2nd Amendment crowd would scream it at us every *%$#ing day, and every time the question of gun control came up. We’d never hear the end of it. They’d name airports of schools after him.
There are, of course, instances of someone shooting another in self-defense. But if neither party were armed would the use of lethal force have been necessary in the first place?
@steve84:
So far I’ve found three stories:
2 involved either a security guard or police officer
1 involves armed students whose weapons were outside of the campus with the shooting, who distracted the shooter long enough for someone else to tackle him
So far the answer seems to be ‘not really but kind of at the same time.’
We should all be wearing suits where guns are duct-taped over every square inch, and they should constantly be shooting. That way we’ll get all the bad guys!
Sikhs are actually supposed to be armed everywhere, with knives.
Well, Sikhs carry ceremonial daggers/swords, and the last place they would expect to have to use said weapons is in a temple. Funny how gun nuts think an offensive weapon can be used as defense like a shield. It can’t…
That “Imagine if somebody else their had a gun” is so stupid and tiresome, in a “Hey motherfucker, imagine if NOBODY there had a gun” sort of way.
Whenever I enter I Sikh temple I expect to be shot at, so I always carry my Scalia-approved rocket launcher. Kids, don’t leave home without it! :-þ
I’d point out that this “guns don’t kill people – people kill people” argument magically doesn’t seem to apply to efforts against nuclear arms proliferation.
I mean, nuclear weapons don’t kill people – people kill people – so let’s not do anything to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
In the wet dreams of every NRA member.
Yes, but many Sikhs these days don’t carry real weapons anymore. All of the Sikhs I used to know (kinda lost contact with them these past few years, sadly) just carried a dagger or sword shaped pendant or even key-chain with them.
They worship at the throne of Heinlein: “An armed society is a polite society.” But unlike Heinlein, who could have done the math, the gun advocates can’t compute the expected value of the death count with tons of guns everywhere (watch out for the crossfire, innocent bystanders!). Lots of lesser gun incidents everywhere (I question the “lesser” part) versus a very small number of greater (I mean “worse”) incidents? Too difficult to take into account. Let’s not think of it and get some more 100-round cartridges for our bang-bangs before Obama hides them all!
Somehow I didn’t feel a lot safer when an armed student told me he was one of the good guys.
Every goddamn time there is a shooting some fucking asshole comes up with the “well, if everyone was armed…” argument.
It’s not original or clever or even fucking correct. I’m so sick of the victim blaming that goes on when everyone should be focused on actually helping the victims and their families.
Wait a minute. After Aurora, I read that it wasn’t the guns that were the problem–you could take away the guns and you’d still have a “ticking time bomb”, after all. People can kill each other perfectly adequately with a knife, I read, so the gun isn’t the problem.
Satwant Singh Kaleka had a knife. A butter knife from the kitchen. The gun advocates keep telling me a butter knife is enough to kill with. So how come it wasn’t enough to magically protect Satwant Singh Kaleka from a man with… what was it again? A gun?
But guns don’t kill; people kill.
Either guns and butter knives are equivalent, or they are not.
I think we know the reality.
If the victim was carrying a kirpan, in this case it didn’t help much.
Satwant Singh Kaleka was trying to fought off the shooter with a knife that’s been described as a butter knife by some sources and his kirpan in others. My wager is he did carry a kirpan, but it was a small, dulled blade.
As amusing as the idea is of a white supremacist being taken down by a temple full of men armed with swords, life is not an action movie. Kaleka’s death is exactly what I’d expect of someone trying to fight off an armed attacker. It was a brave thing to do, but a more lethal weapon is no guarantee anything would have turned out differently. It may have just injured more people.
Indeed, what good for protection would a gun be unless I carried it around with me absolutely all the time, fully loaded, of course, just like a character in a John Wayne movie. And what kind of gun would be best for a little old lady like me? A sawed off shotgun, I believe, would be easiest for me to handle. Now just picture all us little old ladies walking around everywhere with sawed off shotguns. Maybe the boys would have to start behaving!
Unless a kirpan is a light saber, and Sikhs are trained in the ways of the force, wtf?
*googles*
WTF?
Why You’re Wrong just did a podcast about gun control. Surprise, tighter laws mean less crime with guns, not criminals running rampant in the streets with uzis.
You can always count on instaputz for this sort of brilliant commentary. Of course, we Americans live in a country where the people who actually know things and get things right on a consistent basis are blacklisted by the media, and people who know nothing and always get things wrong get featured spots on all the news shows and opinion pages.
You can always go to YouTube and watch “funny” videos of cops shooting themselves while drawing their weapons, and amateur quick-draw idiots doing the same, or that video of people (including a police officer) trying and failing to draw from concealment and engage a gunman. And not to be too macabre here, but the Aurora shooter was the only one armed and wearing a gas mask in a room full of I guess a couple of hundred people, he had a couple of hundred rounds of ammo, and he “only” managed to kill 12 people. This idea that someone with little or no formal training and no real world combat experience can magically become John McClane when the need arises because they can afford a few hundred dollars for a handgun and another $50 for a concealed carry permit… it is really really a ridiculous notion, and disqualifies that person from ever being taken seriously on the subject ever again.
Answer: Yes, and we’re also supposed to wear a cowboy hat, boots, and be named John Wayne.
Have to agree with many of the comments above. Regardless of your pro/anti-gun opinions: The planned element of surprise + crowd (i.e. limited line of sight and safe backstop) = a suboptimal pistol defense scenario. In my experience, gun “nuts” who actively train and plan—vice spout canned rhetoric—tend to agree as well.
I mean, nuclear weapons don’t kill people – people kill people – so let’s not do anything to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear non-proliferation has absolutely nothing to do with trying to avoid killing people and everything to do with trying to maintain the nuclear monopoly of a few countries – most of which are the world’s largest sellers of conventional weapons and the most frequent practitioners of area-attacks directed at civilians. If you want a more peaceful world forget about the nukes and start trying to figure out how to rein in the US!
And any proper “laugh at the gun nuts” thread must make reference to The Mall Ninja
http://tinyurl.com/228925
I guess nowadays we’d call it a “poe” …
Maybe.
There is the scary possibility that it’s not and that The Mall Ninja lurks out there, guarding some shopping mall near you.
some fucking asshole comes up with the “well, if everyone was armed…” argument.
If everyone had a nuclear weapon then nobody’d dare attack anyone else, right? It’s rational!
The response on Facebook by some was this:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=378939625509002&set=a.199201850149448.49600.194105303992436
Original page cited is gone. The google cached page is accessible from http://goo.gl/WOUGt
After so many needless deaths in such a short span of time, you might think that some in the NRA are starting to feel just the least bit of shame. But you’d be wrong. They’re still pushing the meme that these deaths, while tragic, are blood sacrifices demanded by and made to the altar of the 2nd amendment.
They’re waiting on a significant death toll.
I’ve never read Instapundit, though I’ve never heard anything good about him. This little flippant remark of his doesn’t give me any urge to go read his site.
On the other hand, I know for a fact that having a gun can sometimes save lives because I’ve lived through such an incident. To be clear, this occurred at my own home, and the gun was locked and unloaded when things began, but thankfully I had plenty of time to get it out quietly before the situation escalated.
My wife and I used to live with my mother-in-law and brother-in-law. The brother-in-law had some rather questionable friends, and one night one of them showed up drunk ranting about having no place to go, so we decided to let him sleep it off on the porch for a while. Unfortunately, his roomate who he’d just been arguing with came over too. They started yelling, and knowing their reputations I got worried and quietly fetched the pistol.
As I feared, the yelling turned to fighting, but stayed at the drunks flailing impotently in the driveway stage at first. Then the first guy (the really drunk one) broke off and started coming back up to the porch. I don’t know what he said, but whatever it was it really angered the second guy, who picked up a 3 foot steel pipe from a broken chain link fence and went forward to hit the drunk in the back of the head.
That’s when I raised the pistol, yes cocked and loaded, and told him to put the pipe down and leave. My mother-in-law had already called the cops when the fist-fight began and they arrived shortly thereafter.
That night I did, in fact, save someone’s life by having a gun available. I did not even have to shoot, for which I am very grateful!
The point of this, I suppose, is that yes, guns can be used to stop violent attacks and prevent harm to people. Not in the “heroic sovereign citizen with his Second Amendment Tool” fantasy way that some people like to talk about it, of course. But it does happen and usually no one hears about it precisely because no one gets hurt. “If it bleeds, it leads” has always been a handy rule of thumb of the news, but the converse is also true – if no one gets hurt, it’s not news at all.
By the way – for those who were talking about the old “you can use a knife to kill” line, this new item might be of interest:
http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-teen-kills-eight-knife-attack-reports-102629246.html
A guy in China killed 9 people in a knife attack this week. It’s very uncommon, but I guess it really can be done. I was quite surprised by that story.
I’ve hated gun culture for a long time, and I actually own guns. (Necessity: Don’t want wild animals eating my pets. And nothing impressive either.) Hating gun culture is the only sane response to it.
I consider it a religion full of hardcore zealots who consider mass shootings to be god’s punishment against those insufficiently worshipful of firearms. (If only one person in the crowd had been the right religion…)
The NRA is little different from Westboro Baptist. Both are vile ghouls that capitalize on every tragedy to remind us that if we’d just prayed to their deity in time, this never would have happened.
Appalachian School of Law Shooting
And if you notice, the current incident was stopped by someone with a gun.
You’d think the Sikhs would get with the times and swap their kirpans for 1911s. Fulfill the spirit of the commandment with modern technology…
Because guns are so hard to make…
I mean it’s not like someone can build a .50BMG sniper rifle with a file
Guns are such old technology that it is impossible to ban them completely. All you can do is limit their access to the population of people who are unconcerned with breaking the law.
A teenager killed eight people with a knife and wounded five more in northeast China after falling out with his girlfriend, state media said Thursday.
Crazy people do crazy shit.
The best we can hope for is to minimize the collateral damage of people’s craziness.
I don’t see how restricting firearm ownership to the state and lawbreakers helps.
Christopher, imagine if he had an AK.
And really, that is such a lame fucking attempt at an argument.
Christopher@31,
According to that article you linked to, several witnesses say the gunmen put down his gun and was subdued by an unarmed “former Marine and police officer” before either of the other two students could retrieve their personal guns from their cars and get back.
What is your point? Because no ban will ever work perfectly one should not have a ban?
1: the Kirpan is not meant to be used as a weapon, but a symbol of a willingness to fight to protect the innocent. It doesn’t need updating any more than christians should swap out the crucifix for a more modern symbol of execution.
2: the law school shooting was noted upthread. Where the guys with guns were off duty LEOs, and their guns only got his attention so others could subdue him, assuming their guns actually did anything, since other reports were that he simply ran out of bullets and a marine tackled him. Oh, and his gun was already empty when they got him. Good job on all that.
3: both of your homemade gun examples are noted as just as likely to blow up in your hand and take months of work by professionals. Yes, gunsmiths are capable of making guns by hand. I defy you to find a bank robber who is going to spend years learning the skills involved, then weeks hand crafting a gun for himself just so he can shoot up a place and make off with a few hundred dollars.
I don’t know if you’re always awful, or just choosing to be today. But yeah, way to let your fixation on ownership of a proxy-penis allow you to insult and trivialize murdered people.
steve84:
You just tossed yourself into the NRA’s favorite briar patch.
In fact, guns are used all the time to stop home invasions, robberies, car jackings, and similar crimes. Spreading the latest story of this is one of the favorite tropes on gun nut blogs and other outlets. Such stories get particular attention if the individual defending themselves is especially young or old, or if the criminals are particularly scary in various ways.
And they use the fact that this kind of thing happens all the time to justify the alleged necessity to go about armed.
Now, someone who thinks a bit about risk management knows that in a nation of 300 million, rare events are still frequent. The issue isn’t how frequent, but what rate? And how does that compare to other risks?
Despite the recent mass shootings, murder rates still are declining. Most Americans, if they’re not involved in criminal activity, and don’t live with a violent family member, are at very low risk of violent attack.
Christopher, you and txpiper should hang out.
And that having a gun in the home increases the likelihood you or someone else ine the home will be killed,injured or commit suicide with it.
For your consideration,
Two men forced their way into a home early one afternoon and began to assault the resident. During the scuffle, the resident managed to pull a handgun from his pocket and fire it multiple times. Both men fled the scene on foot. The body of Jacob Clark was found a short distance from the residence; he had suffered a single gunshot to the chest. The second alleged intruder, Joey Pugh, 18, was not injured. He was caught soon after the incident, arrested and charged with aggravated burglary. (Knoxville News Sentinel, Crossville, Tenn., 5/23/12)
Raymond Hiles, 25, was arrested after being treated for a gunshot wound to the neck. He was shot after breaking into the home of Fred Ricciutti, an 84-year-old Korean War veteran. Ricciutti had been asleep with his wife, who was ill at the time, and heard a noise at about 4:30 a.m. He then saw someone come into the room. Ricciutti quickly drew a gun from a nearby drawer and shouted a warning at Hiles before firing once. (York Daily Record, Elizabeth, Pa., 5/10/12)
Willie White, 75, was watching a basketball game at about 1:15 a.m. when he heard a steady banging at his door. White armed himself with a rifle before an 18-year-old intruder was able to kick in the door. White said, “I was nervous—I figured if someone’s hostile enough to break your door down, he’s capable of anything. So once he came inside my house, I shot him.” The intruder sustained a single gunshot wound that proved fatal. His two accomplices fled the scene. (The Detroit News, Detroit, MI, 3/29/12)
People fled in terror when a gunman entered a medical building and took several people hostage. A doctor at the practice, Jeff Ferguson, retrieved his gun and guarded an exit, allowing an estimated 50 people to escape down a stairwell, warning them, “If this guy opens this door, I’m going to have to shoot him.” Ferguson said after the ordeal, “I was absolutely prepared to shoot him, yes.” Despite negotiators’ best efforts to get 28-year-old Dominic Oliver to surrender peacefully, he was later shot during a confrontation with police. He died at a local hospital hours later. (FOX News, Colorado Springs, Colo., 2/28/12)
The list could go on and on, Q.E.D.
Remember, the freedoms that you have are protected by rough men who stand ready in the night to do the unthinkable on your behalf.
The problem is deeper than the superficial ban all the guns that many who comment here make. We are a part of nature, and nature is red of tooth and claw (ask PZ). There are many gun control laws already on the books that if properly implemented would decrease the amount of “gunplay” in our society. Unfourtunatly, too many people put profit ahead of compliance to the law.
This from a country boy in good ole South Carolina.
P.S. I do not own a gun, I have had enough chemistry in college to synthesize explosives (gotta love the sciences). However, I am really jelouse of all the nifty poisions that the cellular biologist get to play with….. Did I mention we need to really fear PZ… it is always the quite ones….
Nope, you ignore the man who heard some noise while in bed, grabbed the handgun out of the nightstand and shot his wife dead coming back from the bathroom, etc. Or even better, shot himself in the foot. QED. Guns are deadly, and hurt those you love…
It’s funny because Keresthanatos’s post was literally described not 3 posts prior by rturpin, wherein he explained exactly what was wrong with that reasoning, and why that is far from “QED.”
I live within a few miles of the shooting and find the whole incident to be very sad. This area is obsessively wrapped up in the gun culture and I suspect that the fully tricked out AK-47’s they buy are not for shooting squirrels in the back yard. I acknowledge that the majority of these people don’t do violence on their neighbors but they are not the kind of people I invite over to the house to meet the wife and kids. How do they not see that their shoot’m-up fantasies are worse than kinky?
rturpin has an excellent point, and the points brought up about personal injury and the tradgies of not being sure of your target are very real. I am curious as to how many of the posters have a LEO or military backround ?
Maybe we should require a plethysmograph test for gun ownership.
Funny how the gun knuts always give anecdotes, but shy away from real evidence…Which aren’t anecdotes, but the statistics that look at everything, good and bad. Then they aren’t so good…
I am actually in favor of a full suite of psycological testing and observation before purchase, an intense corse of training comparable to Army AIT, and yearly physical and psycological evaluations for continued owenership.
To quote Ice-T
Yes, you are vastly more likely to die from suicide or an accident while owning a gun than to use it to protect anyone. Yes, people who think concealed carry makes them a superhero do more harm than good. And yes, more legal guns means more criminals with guns. That doesn’t change the need for citizens to be able to own guns.
Really, Quinn?
because here’s the thing: the last couple of years have seen an explosion of protests around the world.
Occupy isn’t shooting at anyone.
the Revolution in Egypt wasn’t a shooting war. Though there are a few of those, like in Libya and Syria.
It isn’t guns that defend against tyranny. It’s the people being willing to fight. Guns will make that easier, because, as established, it makes idiots feel like superheroes. But having a nutter with a compound who owns 3000 guns on your side doesn’t mean you’ll succeed, or else the Branch Davidians would have gone down very differently.
Guns don’t fight tyranny. People do.
On the subject of fighting tyranny, just what is supposed to be used if the populance is disarmed ? Sticks ?
sticks, stones, human bodies, willpower.
Unless you’re claiming Gandhi’s movement won independence for the Subcontinent by a series of military victories where British troops were routed by gun-toting Hindi.
@keresthanatos: I’m in favor of not being able to drag the damned things around in public at all. Mainly because of all the people I’ve met that are gung ho about concealed carry are the absolute last people I want hauling a loaded firearm around. If you have to take them somewhere for a legitimate legal reason (e.g. hunting) they make carrying cases they can be locked in. I’m also in favor of an outright ban on certain weapons and ammunition that has no real purpose to civilians other than feeling badass. (.50 BMG, any handgun bigger than a .45ACP, etc)
It would make stopping many massacres easier, since seeing a dude dragging around a rifle or carrying a pistol means he’s automatically breaking the law and it’s time for people to either run or try to tackle him. He may not even make it to the massacre site, since even a minor traffic violation will get him arrested.
And this is from a guy that owns guns. I just don’t bring them out of the house. I don’t think it’s fair to risk the safety of others so I can indulge a macho hero fantasy. Of course my ammo is more likely to rust(corrode?) into uselessness than ever be fired, so I make a shitty gun nut.
Branch Davidians semi auto vs Fed full auto……and tanks…..only one was used, and it did not even have to fire. Another question for the commenters, how many of you have come under fire from full auto weapons.
Call me crazy, but I’m getting the feeling that this is strikingly similar to the whole sexual harassment thing, where the blame is placed on the victim rather than the perpetrator.
What kind of culture do we live in where the message is “Don’t get shot” as opposed to “Don’t shoot people”?
@jthompson amen brother, I too am a lousy gun knutter, because I don’t own a weapon other than a knife.
I just expect a little better from the commenters on PZ’s blog than the standard knee jerk reactions that are so typical of hot button issues.
Well…, this whole do unto others thing just doesn’t seem to work out too well where ever it is tried.
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
Well, yes, I long ago decided that if I ever suffer a health decline where the end of my independence is imminent, I will commit suicide. I have no desire to end my days in a nursing home. And for anyone who knows a little brain anatomy and still retains their capacity to shoot, a pistol is effective, painless, and doesn’t involve other people in the preparations.
Do you have a problem with that?
I’m not yet old, my health is good, and I hope I don’t face such issue for decades yet. But… the clock ticks. Those over 65 have a higher suicide rate than any other age group, and men over 85 have a suicide rate over four times the nation average:
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-us-statistics-and-prevention/index.shtml
Of course, the authors of that had to write with the tacit assumption that every suicide is a tragedy that should be stopped. Which is bullshit. When one’s body is falling apart, and before one’s mind does so completely, it can be quite rational to decide how much more decline to suffer. Someone who has lived seven decades is a very different case from a 19 year-old upset over the loss of their first love. If the NIMH wants to lower the suicide rate among the elderly, instead of worrying about who owns guns, they should worry about alleviating the chronic diseases of age.
I’m suddenly more thankful than ever that the jackasses in the campsite next to the one I shared with my daughter this weekend were only playing carelessly with airsoft guns and a bow and arrow. >.>
That actually sounds pretty reasonable to me. I don’t think there’s any need to try to ban guns, merely to
1) restrict the ability to acquire them readily to responsible, law-abiding citizens, which will not stop people involved in crime from obtaining them on the black market but will seriously reduce careless accidents and will make it much harder for people who don’t otherwise have a criminal background but “snap” for whatever reason to obtain weapons, and
2) reduce the allure and mythicism that surrounds gun culture.
I wonder if the Arms Dealers can somehow get a sustainable conflict going between the US government and its residents? You know, and sell to both sides, like in every other conflict on earth. There must be some slick way to do it and not lose ALL of your customers in the bargain.
a stick bow even with field tips is a deadly weapon out to about 50 yards, a recurve, to about 150, and a compound bow easily to between 300-500, let’s ban sticks from idiots, hell let’s just ban idiots, it’s our only hope.
posted by Me, Chief Amongst all the Idiots.
Sure, there are events that were stopped by guns. That’s why we give them to police.
No one keeps track of the number of events where a civilian failed to stop the guy.
There are far fewer events than guns, though. Home invasions and spree shooters are so rare we lose more people to lightning than those two things combined.
But guns kill.
I’m sorry, I can only post gibberish. This stuff pisses me off so. Because I know I’ll fight back because I have, and got beat for doing so. Because my father was shot and killed by mistaken police officer. Because there have been shootings stopped by just some unarmed people.
All this talk just pisses me off.
Not at all, but removing access to an easy method seems to reduce the suicide rate (e.g. a 1/3 reduction in suicides in Great Britain when they phased out coal gas ovens). Since many people who attempt suicide are glad they did not succeed, reducing your chance of suicide seems desirable.
Which is why our military favors the stick and sharp in leu of fire arms!
Oh wait, no they actually prefer the deadlier weapon.
If you think any civilian force could actually stand against the standing US armed forces in instance of hypothetical tyranny even with guns you’re hilariously delusional.
That’s part of why I oppose most futher restrictions on gun ownership. People react emotionally to events like the shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin, but the reality is that gun deaths have been fairly steady even as gun ownership has increased.
There are still too many deaths, of course, and I think it would be quite reasonable to revise conceal carry laws. Given that most homoicides using guns are committed with handguns by young men, I honestly think that restricting the ownership of handguns by young men might be a very sensible thing to do. Leave those guns to older people and women.
But I cannot see any reason to restrict the possession of semi-automatic rifles, “large” capacity magazines (aka I-don’t-have-to-reload-every-ten-seconds-at-the-range magazines), or high caliber weapons. Despite the high profile incidents that happen, the number of deaths from these weapons is simply not that high. More people drown in the US each year than are killed with rifles.
FBI homicide info
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10shrtbl11.xls
CDC drowning info
http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Water-Safety/waterinjuries-factsheet.html
I wish we really could have rational gun laws in the US, but as long as the only sides debating are “OMG Guns Are Evil” and “OMG Guns Are Awesome” then nothign good is going to happen.
Building on what Ing said, the modern US military could probably take multiple developed countries and win, at the very least with a draft and careless ROE (in other words, total war along with including civilians as targets). What the fuck makes gun nuts think that their little militia are going to do against a force like that?
Seriously, it’s like the Rebellion from Star Wars trying to overthrow the Emperor without any ships or vehicles. Not gonna happen.
karpad:
No, I don’t think that an armed language obtained Indian independence. Nonviolent resistance was certainly critical in India, but the 1857 rebellion by armed soldiers succeeded in ending the East India Company’s control of the subcontinent. And nonviolent protest has ended horribly as well. Remember the Czar’s treatment of peaceful protest.
@Ing #67 past delusional, actually. However I agree, but you must admit that basically our present adversary is doing a fine job, using little more than improvised weaponry and a desire to accept a 10 to 1 causality rate.
Not many cultures can sustain the damage of total warfare which is why only the most genocidal of cultures even try.
But we digress from the core of the argument which I believe to be, what is it that makes our culture so disfunctunal as to be prone to random acts of violence across all social strata. What can we do to protect ourselves, and our society. What can we do to make sure we do not continue down this continuing path that we seem to be evolutionary designed for. Sorry, can’t put it any clearer.
@Ing and Rip,
First, gun ownership could prevent officially unsanctioned oppression rather than an all out war. The small town sheriff, the crooked cop, etc. People do occasionally succeed in arguing self-defense after they’ve protected themselves from police.
Second, in the unlikely event of an all-out rebellion, there would obviously need to be army defections for any such effort to have a chance. There are, however, countless recent examples of the military refusing to fight or defecting to rebels.
Is this likely? Of course not. I don’t own a gun, and I don’t think it’s a great idea to keep one in one’s home. But the right to keep and bear arms is an important safeguard of liberty in the US.
@62: You know how you make someone a killing machine with a bow? Start with their grandparents. You know how you make someone a killing machine with a gun? Give them a gun.
Violent attacks are easier to resist with effective tools. To say the person fighting off the Sikh Temple shooter might have had more success if he’d had an appropriate tool for the job is not “victim blaming.” It is a somewhat distasteful attempt at political point scoring, but proponents of civilian disarmament are guilty of the same kind of point scoring in the wake of such tragedies.
Mass shooters and spree killers have a long and well documented history of staging their attacks places where victims are likely to be unarmed.
Firearms can be used responsibly, and are used to resist violent attack quite frequently.
WRT crossfire: the danger posed to bystanders and innocents from “friendly fire” is real, but the risk of getting shot accidentally by a defender pales in comparison to the risk posed by unimpeded, deliberate fire from an attacker. In the Gabby Giffords shooting, several armed citizens elected not to shoot because of the lack of a clear shot. Their concealed firearms weren’t especially useful in that situation, but they did act responsibly and choose not to fire when they lacked a clear shot, rather than cause the bloodbath of crossfire so many firearms opponents seem to think is inevitable whenever a gun is used in defense.
An interesting blog post comparing the body count of spree shootings where civilians acted to stop the shooter, versus those that were ultimately stopped by police.
http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/07/31/auditing-shooting-rampage-statistics/
Ugh. I hate to double post, but this is one of my pet peaves?
So you think that a disorganized group of people armed with only small arms and improvised munitions would pose no threat to the US military? That’s really ignorant and shows that you have not been paying attention to the news. Let me give you a couple of recent examples of such groups that successfully fought the mighty US armed forces:
A) The Taliban in Afghanistan. Yeah, they got beat up initially and pushed south almost out of the country. And then they stopped trying to fight like an army and started fighting like a guerilla force. Now they operate with impunity throughout the country, even in Kabul, and we’ve been unable to to anything to dislodge them. When we leave, they’ll take over again and it will be just like when the Soviets left. (That’s right. They will have defeated 2 “superpowers”.)
B) The Iraqi insurgency. What’s that I hear you say? We won? Like Hell. We never defeated them, we simply paid them to stop fighting us. We bribed the enemy to look the other way while we turned tail and ran. (We should never have been there in the first place, so I’m glad we left, but we still ultimately lost because all they wanted was for us to leave, while we wanted to dictate the form of their government. They won. We lost.)
Yes, Virginia, the US Army can be beat by a small, disorganized and untrained force.
But having said all of that, I don’t think it would even be needed – not by the right wing nutters, at least. They’ve infiltrated the US military extensively as it is and there’s a lot of sympathy for them in the armed forces. As a lesbian, atheist, environmentalist, thinks-Obama-is-too-conservative liberal, I’m more afraid of the military and police siding with the right-wing than anything else. I live in Texas (ugh) and don’t have enough money to leave. So I have guns in case any of my neighbors decide that they need to send a message to people like me. If that happens I’m ready to give them an instant reply.
Dear Eris,
I love you.
Please don’t shoot.
Yours respectfully,
H.M.Gray
yes, It is amazing how many people do not know about The School of The Americas, once located at Ft. Benning Ga. where some of the best terrorist and gurellia fighters recieved the best training in the world.
@christophernicholas very good work, but small sample size. would be intresting to see what could be gleaned from the FBI databases relevant to this question.
Usual furfies turn up in threads like this. One further up is that gun restrictions ‘deprive only law abiding citizens of guns’. This is one of those specious notions that a mere glance around the world can disprove.
Yeah, if you banned a vast swathe of gun types tomorrow, only nice folks would hand theirs in (and probably only a subset of them). -Then- you can go to work on the illegal ones. And yes it will take a while. But it works, ultimately, even though I readily acknowledge the US situation is peculiar.
So that sort of talk is mostly irrelevant to what the right course of action is or isn’t. More interesting, to me at least, is the consistent talk as though there is a clear dichotomy between law abiding citizens and ‘criminals’. It’s a particular language about these matters, almost as though guns are a force field against what is virtually a separate species that lurks in the dark waiting for its chance. Haven’t seen that sort of language here yet so much, but it’s alluded to I suspect.
It’s kinda of a mythical, poisonous black and white view of things that warps the debate. But that’s conservatism for you I guess.
It’s also amazing to me that people purporting to see the world in the realist way as peace officers and service men & women do, wouldn’t support heavy gun control. The job of a police officer is much improved by the lack of the things in the community in any number of ways.
Quinn Martindale wrote:
But the right to keep and bear arms is an important safeguard of liberty in the US.
Why? What liberty are you safeguarding with the right to keep arms? The freedom to shoot someone, the way George Zimmerman did in Florida, for instance? That seems to be the kind of liberty that gun advocates seem to think is vital. I don’t see it.
Guns, I don’t think would be the same problem if the people who argued for less gun control didn’t include a whole lot of fear.
At a point I was very into swords (I ended up selling mine off when I moved on to photography, lenses are expensive) and the culture there isn’t all about self defense. It is about swords being kind of pretty, with the whole self-defense angle being a bit of a wink and a nudge.
The argument is made, but not in all seriousness. Learning to use a sword is mostly down to improving your physical fitness and improving the way you move, and having the discipline to not go crazy with it. Sure, you can use it for self-defense in theory, but the skills are worth having regardless.
With guns it all seems to be “X horrible, yet somewhat unlikely, situation could happen to YOU!”
It is not simply the guns, but why people are buying them that seems to be the problem. It is a fear based market.
*sigh*
First, my gun bona fides
I own guns. I am an NRA certified firearms instructor. I have spent a lot of time and money learning practical shooting. I even have a concealed carry permit and a *shudder* ugly black plastic Assault Weapon.
Guns are used in tens of thousands of cases every year to prevent crimes. In almost all of those not a single shot is fired.
OK, got that? Certified Gun Person.
Here’s my honest opinion on the matter.
The gun culture True Believers are chiroptera scat insane. A lot of them are just itching to assume a Weaver stance and “Mozambique” half a dozen criminals. They rush to “The Armed Citizen” column as soon as their copy of American Rifleman arrives in the mail and shout “Wolverines!” when they don’t think anyone is watching.
They’ve turned a sporting good or piece of highly specialized safety equipment into a full-blown fetish. And the fantasies are as disturbing as they are predictable.
I think it is worth noticing that many of us are not from the US, so guns are not a hot button issue for us. It is actually not really an issue for us at all.
On the other hand, many of us think that the US gun laws are batshit insane.
@75 – you’re joking, right? Who do you think funded, supported, and (most importantly) armed the Mujahadin?
On the subject of fighting tyranny, just what is supposed to be used if the populance is disarmed ? Sticks ?
The internet. No, I’m not kidding, at least not entirely. The Polish resistance to Soviet domination was fueled largely by technology brought in from the west. And I’m not talking about the latest and greatest in guns, but rather computers, communication equipment, etc. There are numerous examples of a tyranny being overthrown more by organization than by arms. And the society that results from such an overthrow is full of people that know how to cooperate rather than people who only know how to shoot.
An appropriate tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmFUf2eU5U8
While a lot of the pro-gun arguments are superficially plausible, they always run into one major problem: there are a large number of countries around the world that are generally comparable to the USA apart from having much tighter gun controls. In the vast bulk of those countries, per-capita homicide rates are drastically lower than those seen in the USA (e.g. 2010 intentional homicide rates per 100,000 population: Australia 1.16, USA 4.8).
At least one of two things is true: either lax gun regulation does indeed lead to a greatly increased homicide rate, or the USA is populated with an unusually high density of murderous arseholes. Having met a fair few Americans, I’m leaning towards the first explanation.
Here’s an argument for the Republicans out there: Lax gun control raises taxes as higher gun ownership leads to more shootings (accident, murder, suicide) and more injuries causing higher utilization of medical services, legal services, and emergency personnel. Maybe that will convince them where the humanitarian argument won’t: The NRA wants you to pay for cleaning up their mistakes!
Also, counter anecdote to the “you need a gun to take out a gunman” argument: A crazy guy wandered into a bar near where I used to live with a gun AND a bomb. One person in the bar did have a gun with him, but wasn’t able to get it out muchless use it without provoking the guy to set off the bomb. The assailant was ultimately taken out by a couple of unarmed women. One distracted him and the other tackled him. No deaths, although the first woman was shot in the thigh. Unarmed and brave saves the day.
A nuclear arsenal for every citizen! Mutually Assured Destruction!
Only then will we all be safe.
Not if the Republicans get their will and privatize everything. So I guess that argument won’t sway them.
As wanderfound@86 points out, the US gun lobby are very good at ignoring the most obvious source of evidence: international comparisons. Homicide rates in rich countries correlate with income inequality, but even taking that into account, the US rate is way higher than expected. There’s also a nice example at the other end of the gun law distribution: Singapore, which is highly unequal, but with extremely strict gun laws, has a homicide rate much lower than expected from the correlation with income inequality; and another with higher homicide rate despite being unusually equal, but with high gun ownership: Finland.
As for the decline in US homicides over recent decades, that tendency is common to a large number of rich countries, and currently unexplained. My guess is that it’s to do with the declining percentage of young people: most violence, worldwide, is carried out by young men (obviously, a lot of state-sponsored and non-state political violence is organised by middle-aged to elderly ones).
KG
What are your feelings on the idea that higher violent crime rates may be tied to childhood lead poisoning? I read a few stories on that a while back, and was wondering if it might be a contributing factor in some cases.
A woman recently told me online she was voting for Romney because he supported gun laws. She went on to say that if everyone was allowed to carry concealed guns at all times, the recent ‘Batman theatre’ shooting would have worked out differently. I envisaged a situation where whenever you were watching a film you were aware that half the audience might have been packing, and it just took one person to get suspicious of another person for the shooting to start, whereupon everyone would join in and it wouldn’t stop till the majority were dead.
@93
I could imagine surround sound becoming an issue.
Last Sunday, courtesy of my non-observant Sikh brother-in-law, I visited a gurdwara for the first time in my life. It was in a suburb of a large Australian city.
My sister and I were the only ghoories in the place, and it evidently made no difference to anyone there – I was offered a place to sit and a meal from the communal kitchen, and my questions about the pictures adorning the walls were politely and intelligently answered. The kiddies played, old folks basked in the sun and the young folk made eyes at each other. In other words, what any community does in common if they want to keep themselves together.
I have no truck with theology, but the thought of that peaceful community being torn to pieces by a murderous gunman is disgusting.
After Jorge Saavedra killed Dylan Nuno in self-defense with a knife, Nuno’s fathead father also made the same idiotic statement: “If my son had a gun, he would be alive today.”
http://www.hlntv.com/article/2012/01/04/florida-bullying-teen-killed-not-charged
Of course, in that case Saavedra was the victim and Nuno was the aggressor, so it’s not the same situation as the Wisconsin shooting. But it is the same stupidity, the idiotic belief that guns will make you safer.
Nuno and Page are similar in that they were both violent thugs whose behaviour went unchecked before they caused their own deaths.
brucegorton,
I’ve no idea. I guess that could also be a contributory factor to the recent reduction in violence, as a lot of countries have taken action to reduce lead pollution.
As others have pointed out, the continual spat going on in the US about whether everyone and his/her dog should be allowed to carry tools whose only purpose is killing seems a bit odd to those of us in the civilised world.
The argument about “if you make guns illegal then only criminals will carry guns” is particularly egregious, and looking at UK gun crimes might tell you why. Plenty of criminals here do carry guns, and they are not that hard to acquire illegally. The criminals with guns are largely those involved in gangs or organised crime. They are used in robberies (where the criminals generally don’t actually want to shoot anyone and the advice from law enforcers even in the US is to give the criminals what they want) or to shoot other armed criminals. Neither of these situations would be alleviated by having law abiding people carrying firearms. For the former situation, I’d be interested to see how many US citizens with concelaed weapons manage to get themselves shot by reaching for a gun rather than a wallet when confronted by an armed robber.
Our murder rate is far below that in the US. Most murders tend to be crimes of passion (which is also why the death penalty isn’t a deterrent to murder). If you have a tool that makes it much easier to kill someone quickly, you’re much more likely to actually succeed. Killing someone with a knife or hammer is physically and psychologically much more difficult than shooting them.
Argue all you like about other factors, but the argument that having very strict gun control laws makes for fewer deaths at the hands of criminals is a total non-starter.
More deaths. Obviously.
This was a Sikh temple. Aren’t they obligated to have knives on themselves at all times? one of those holy rules that includes a bracelet, a comb, etc?
the only reason that I bring this up is that you (PZ) seem incredulous that a weapon would be brought into a temple, but Sikhs also have armed conflict at the forfront of their thoughts every day.
I forget the exact reason ( and don’t have time to look right now) but each object is to remind them about a facet of things to do on a daily basis.
The Sikh comunity fights hard to allow their children to bring knives to school for “religious” purposes…
You sure you have that phrased correctly for rhetorical purposes?
Because you can replace the word “gun” with “screwdriver” or “hammer” or “bottle of Tylenol” and it would still be true.
Guns are dangerous in the wrong hands, we get that. So is Tylenol.
Because you can replace the word “gun” with “screwdriver” or “hammer” or “bottle of Tylenol” and it would still be true.
Citation, please. The correlation between having a gun in the house and higher rates of murder, suicide, and accidental death is extremely well established in the literature. Excess mortality due to screwdrivers, hammers, and tylenol, not so much.
Well, that is the rationale for international nuclear arsenals for the past 75 years, after all.
But scaling that idea down to individual people armed with hand arms, though,… that can’t work though, right?
It’s not like immediate stern negative feedback – like having a gun barrel pointed in your face – has ever been shown to be effective in changing unwanted antisocial behavior, right? Scandinavia has very low rates of drunken driving compared to the U.S. One of the reasons is that their penalties for the crime are a lot more immediate and stern than ours.
Gingerbaker:
You do realize how ridiculously hard it is to accidentally kill yourself with Tylenol ot a hammer, don’t you?
Also, PZ, are you really only starting to hate gun culture? I’ve hated it for decades. Then again, I’m from Texas. It was right there in front of me my whole childhood.
Much as I hate to contradict you, Audley, it’s easier than you might think to kill yourself with a bottle of Tylenol if you have the right chronic illness. Liver damage and tylenol can be a deadly combination.
But a bottle of Tylenol can also save the life of a person with a dangerously high fever or make life much more comfortalbe for someone with a moderate fever. Unlike guns, the only purpose of which is to kill.
There really is no limit to the stupidity of gun nuts, is there? Have you never heard of something called the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? The rationale for that is that the more states have nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that one of them will use them – and that that will set off a full-scale nuclear war.
Another reason is that alcohol is much less readily available (because more expensive), and drinking much less socially approved.
Besides which, gingerbaker, I missed your explanation of why international comparisons are valid with respect to drink driving, but not with respect to homicide rates.
Dianne,
Oh, I’m sure that it’s possible to kill yourself with Tylenol (look at all of the warning labels!) But my point is you have to have the right set of circumstances for it to happen.
Also, if you’re annoyed at your neighbor and you’re waving around a bottle of Tylenol (instead of a gun) at him, it’s not going to go off in his/your face.
Odd thing is that if there were to be a tyranny in the US, and the population had to defend itself from that tyranny, I reckon it would be a right wing tyranny, and most of the gun nuts wouldn’t exactly be opposed to it…
Don’t be silly, dianne. People die every day – well, every week, anyway – from Tylenol they have in unlocked, unregistered bottles in their own home. Every one of them is an excess mortality. Every screwdriver you have in your home is a statistical time bomb waiting to go off compared to a screwdriver you don’t have in your home.
Apparently you don’t have the time to read the thread you’re commenting on.
@111: Would that be an admission that you can’t back your claim up with data I’m seeing? Because that’s what it looks like. Medline and google scholar are your friends, you know. Except, of course, when they don’t support your claims.
Well, I agree with the hammer, but accidental death from Tylenol is surprisingly and sadly pretty common.
My cousin, who is now a board-certified internist, did her residency at Bellevue in NYC. She said she saw a *lot* of young Hispanic women come in with Tylenol overdoses – done as a half-serious suicide attempt due to a cheating spouse or boyfriend – and most of them died from resulting liver damage. If only they had used aspirin or aleve….
But my point is you have to have the right set of circumstances for it to happen.
Unlike a gun, which can and often does go off more or less at random or because you made some fairly minor mistake in the handling of it. It takes real work to kill yourself with tylenol-virutally no one can do so with just one 325 mg tablet. One bullet, on the other hand…
Defending your home is something completely different. I’m not really against people keeping guns in their homes.
But it’s something else *entirely* when people carry guns everywhere in the public in the feverish paranoia that they may be attacked by a madman.
Gingerbaker:
Nice to know you ignored the “accidentally” bit in my post.
I’m not saying that accidental ODs on Tylenol don’t happen. I’m just stating that it’s more difficult for the average Tylenol owning person to accidentally kill themselves with it is than it is for your average gun owner to accidentally kill themselves by gunshot.
I’m talking about the risk involved with owning the two items. One is waaaaaaay lower than the other.
The far Right’s obsession with the myth of a risk-free existence I can understand, to a point. Like most of their ideology, it’s based on blind, primal fear. What I don’t understand, is that their reaction is to actually make things more dangerous for everyone. A herd mentality doesn’t make for good decision making.
Turning this nation into an armed camp isn’t even close to a solution, and certainly not the act of a civilized people.
half-serious suicide attempt you have an odd definition for “accidental”. or you don’t know shit about suicide
Dianne,
Thanks, that’s exactly what I was trying to get at!
borkquote
you have an odd definition for “accidental”. or you don’t know shit about suicide
And what the hell is up with gingerbaker mentioning that the women in the “suicide anecdote” were Hispanic? What the fuck does it matter?
Puts a bad taste in my mouth.
those Latinas, they’re so overemotional/passionate/hysteric, doncha know.
bad taste, indeed. microaggressions FTL
Ah, yes, Jadehawk. “Fiery Latinas” and all of that.
*barf!*
Incidentally, I’ve seen a number of people attempt suicide with tylenol, male and female, Hispanic and non-Hispanic. Even heard of one attempted murder involving ativan, alcohol, liquid tylenol, and an NG tube. But it’s a lot of work to kill a person with tylenol, especially a person with a previously healthy liver. It’s harder to accidentally take a whole bottle of tylenol accidentally or in an impulsive suicide attempt than to pull one trigger. Also, most people who get to medical care after a tylenol OD will live if they haven’t delayed too long. It takes time for the tylenol to destroy the liver and if you get to it before the damage is done, it can be largely stopped with the right treatment. Even if the liver is destroyed, an emergent transplant can sometimes save the patient.
I am one among many free-thinking, reasonable, rational, responsible gun owners. I enjoy target shooting at my local range and in competition. I am extremely safety conscious, practice with my weapons regularly including knowing how to handle them under stress and in the dark. I am licensed to carry a concealed pistol in my state but normally do not do so. I dislike extremes on either end of the argument. Do you really want only the government, local law enforcement and the criminals to have access to weapons? The police have some deterrent power but mainly investigate crimes after the fact. They are rarely able to respond immediately when a criminal breaks into your home to rob you or worse. I assure you that anyone entering my home with bad intent will wish they had made other plans. While I would prefer not to kill, I will defend my home and family against evil people. We have very strict gun ownership laws here in Massachusetts that include no mail order guns or ammo, lengthy background checks prior to issuance of a permit (usually takes 5-6 weeks), purchases must be made in-person through a licensed dealer, a follow-up background check with the State Police is conducted at time of purchase and mandatory safety training is necessary prior to even applying for a permit. The bottom line is the criminals don’t care about laws and you simply cannot legislate the insane. Are you aware of any type of prohibition that is or has ever been successful? Prohibition, be it guns, alcohol, gambling, prostitution or drugs simply creates an even more robust black market. Rather than prohibit, I support a more realistic approach. Since you clearly cannot control a market punitively without creating a highly lucrative black market, I support legalization and taxation of such activities, products and services. With respect to weapons, I support legal gun ownership with appropriately restrictive limits, background checks, fees and taxes as the only sensible answer in a free society.
I was a city kid but many of my family and friends are country folk. The attitude towards guns I have seen is a gun is a tool or a fetish.
Rifles are pretty common in the Australian countryside, they are used to quickly and cleanly end the life of pests and livestock. I have yet to meet an Australian farmer that keeps a firearm for self defence reasons.
I can’t imagine a life where I would feel the need to own a firearm in case something bad happens to me – I just can’t imagine living in fear like that. I feel sorry for those that do.
Really? “Hispanic” was a necessary and relevant detail. Fuck-a-doodle-do. I guess I’m lucky that I’m a man, or else that inherent Puerto Rican instability combined with being a hysterical woman would have pushed my depression over the top and driven me to a completely successful suicide attempt by now. And since I own a gun, no Tylenol would be harmed in the attempt, which I guess is a good thing?
based on what I have read in this thread and others, I have determined that guns are a necessary evil in the United States because it does not actually have a police force
mmmm, drinkable charcoal. *gag*
are you aware that there are countries out there where guns are so rare, bank robberies are comitted with plastic toys?
(IOW: yes; prohibition works, when what’s prohibited is extremely hard to manufacture by yourself)
and for that matter: are you aware that there are countries where not even the cops carry guns?
We have very strict gun ownership laws here in Massachusetts
And one of the lower murder rates in the US.
Disagree, The rationale for NNPT is to keep nuclear arms out of the hands of terrorist/irrational players. But the rationale of MAD – mutually assured distruction – seems to have been succesful or valid.
Keeping nukes out of the wrong hands is like trying to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, not out of the hands of responsible gun owners.
mmmm, drinkable charcoal. *gag*
Mucomyst. Large amounts of it. By mouth. I’m not saying the aftermath of a tylenol overdose is fun…
they’re not so much a necessary evil because of not enough police, they’re unbannable because of it. Trying to clean up the vast swaths of USAmerican countryside where there’s one cop per square mile is simply impossible. That is the one reason why banning or even controlling guns in the US is not feasible. This place really is the Wild West, still.
The rationale for NNPT is to keep nuclear arms out of the hands of terrorist/irrational players.
You mean like that one country of crazies that actually went and used a nuke on some poor city full of civilians? Twice.
But if you don’t oppose the NNPT, then why oppose laws that make it harder for “terrorist/irrational players” to get guns? For example, background checks.
you are frighteningly ignorant of the history of the Cold War
for one example: http://geoffolson.com/page5/page8/page24/page24.html
meaning, Western Civilization hasn’t ended in Nuclear Winter by sheer dumb luck. Hence, NNPT.
your cousin is a racist. shocking.
Gun ownership doesn’t bother me as much as not following range safety rules with guns. Like the ammunition and gun are kept separate until one is in position to actually load and fire the gun safely. That does put a minor crimp in concealed carry, but following range safety rules makes sure no innocent people are accidently shot. If you shoot yourself in the ass by a misfired weapon it is a learning experience.
Yet I live in Vermont. We have what is probably the most lax gun laws in the nation. We don’t need a permit to carry a concealed weapon here.
And we have, I believe, one of the lowest murder and gun violence rates – if not the lowest – in the country.
dianne (et al) – The use of nuclear bombs on Japan, while horrific, can only be understood if you keep it in historical context including Japan’s first strike, suicide attacks (the Kamikaze), Japan’s stated goal of world domination and their blind religious devotion to their godhead, the Emperor. To attempt to rationalize the use of nuclear bombs in the light of what we know today is disingenuous. We were desperate in the extreme, facing a relentless, murderous enemy of proven inhuman brutality. While in hindsight we see victory over Japan to have been nearly inevitable at that point, Truman felt he had no choice as he was unwilling to accept the high casualties and high likelihood of failure of an invasion of the home islands. Keep it real by keeping it in proper historical context.
and this “excuse” works for excusing Hiroshima, but not for bombing something in the Middle East tomorrow because…
That is a moronic thing to say. Fuck you, Jadehawk. She was there on the front lines doing that work, and she still does that sort of thing in NYC. Board-certified, working for the VA, can’t afford a decent apartment, and definitely not a racist.
And fuck your implication that I am a racist as well. Next to the last refuge of a scoundrel?
Not exactly useful from a self-defense standpoint, is it? On the other hand, it is certainly true that range safety rules keep you safer, and knowing/understanding them can keep you safer even if you don’t follow them to the letter.
Really? Which nuclear strike did I miss? Or do you just want to move the discussion away from a point you fumbled?
Oops. I forgot. Nothing invokes a hysterical reaction like implying that the US’s destruction of two civilian cities-including destroying one at the very moment that Japanese officials were touring the destuction of the first bomb and deciding to give up- wasn’t perfectly justified in every detail.
completely irrelevant as an argument for anything.
they you’re misrepresenting your cousin here, because what you’re claiming your cousin said was in fact racist.
no, just a fact. you’re promoting harmful stereotypes and relying on hearsay unsupported by data, and you’re blaming the purported results of it on “culture”. you’re being just as racist as Romney was when he blamed Palestinian poverty on their culture.
you’re subliterate. pay attention to what I said, and learn some fucking history. I fumbled nothing, cupcake.
None of those elements are unique to Japan. If you start holding that they make nuclear first strikes “understandable”, you’re well on the way to making good on all the “sleeping giant” rhetoric that gets thrown at certain Middle Eastern countries.
The Emperor had almost dick to do with Japanese actions in WWII. They had a military junta calling the shots and two wings of out of control military forces starting offensive wars that they were necessary for (the Army attacking China to show the need for infantry, the Navy attacking the Pacific to require naval support) to justify further funding.
The Japanese had severe structural problems that made their behavior possible. Pointing out that it’s due to blind religious fervor is no better than what the Islamophobes do now.
You clowns just don’t get it, do you.
She was there on the front lines doing that work, and she still does that sort of thing in NYC. Board-certified, working for the VA, can’t afford a decent apartment, and definitely not a racist.
Ahem. I’m a board certified internist. I have worked for Bellevue and the NY HHS VA. I had a quite nice apartment, even during fellowship. Doctors at Bellevue don’t actually live on starvation wages. I strongly suspect that the friend in question has an odd idea of what a “decent apartment” is.
And probably an odd idea of what does and does not constitute racism. For example, if you respond to an OD in a Hispanic woman with “She’s just trying to get attention” whereas you respond to an OD in a non-Hispanic woman with “she’s deeply depressed”, that’s racism.
I don’t own guns because I live in fear. Most guns owners use them for hunting or recreational shooting sports, many of which require a high degree of concentration, coordination and patience (indoor shooting on a controlled, professional range, skeet and trap also under controlled conditions). That I can also use them for protection is a bonus. Despite some (relatively few and extremely low on a per capita basis) terrible mass killings perpetrated by the mentally unstable or criminal elements, we live in a free society that handles private gun ownership rather well. This would, I believe, be improved if more states adopted licensing and sales regulations similar to those in Massachusetts. I also lived in Vermont for five years and concur with gingerbaker regarding the extremely low crime rate with gun violence being very near to a non-issue. The more populated states with larger cities would likely benefit from improved gun control legislation, but not on a ban or prohibition on legal, responsible gun ownership.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
parochialism is both funny and sad.
Hysterical culture??
That’s it, I’m done. I have better things to do with my time than to argue with racists.
rorschach – Yes, believe I do get it. The heinous actions of a few should not negate the truth. The vast majority of US gun owners are responsible, productive, law-abiding citizens. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to these complex legal and sociological issues if we are to maintain a free and open society. I welcome opposing viewpoints and enjoy the discussion.
the answers are actually very easy, since the causes of violence in the US are well-known. It’s their implementation in what you erroneously consider your “free and open” society that is so difficult as to not actually ever going to happen.
The vast majority of US gun owners are responsible, productive, law-abiding citizens.
And they and their families are at higher risk of death because they have a gun in their house. There’s really no way around that: the data is very consistent.
Which is better at stopping a bullet? Your offensive weapon, or kevlar vest? Guns don’t protect, as they are offensive, not defensive.
Paul – excellent points all, as Japan did have extreme internal problems including (no surprise) a lack of natural resources, perhaps most significantly, energy. Tough to delve so deep in this short format. Yet, but did not their military use the extreme devotion to the Emperor as their carrot to stimulate the masses? Is this not very similar to what the Bush administration did to justify their aggression in the Middle East – lies and deception to frame it as a fight for “god and country”. Same thing, different times. Those in power use that power and whatever leverage they can to move the citizens. Free-thought is necessary to oppose group-think. Well challenged.
For values of “free and open society” meaning “I can carry a gun into the shopping centre since I am such a responsible citizen”. Blinds, you are wearing them.
Oh, but they don’t. As a matter of fact, they show the truth quite clearly. Guns kill people. The free availability of guns makes it easy for people to kill people. If every gun in the US was to be replaced with a pocket knife tomorrow, emergency services could send their staff to take their overdue annual leave.
Well I’m sold.
Where can I one of these diplomas in Content-Free Waffling?
If you have friends or family at the time, please put some thought into who will find your body, what state it will be in, and what that will do to them. And remember that while you may not need any help making preparations, somebody will have to clean up the mess. Most people don’t think of these things, and they cause a lot more pain than was needed.
Look, I’m a gun guy and even I see the ridiculousness of putting “concealed carry handguns” next to “free and open society” without the words “means that we really don’t live in a” stuck between them. I made the conscious decision to buy a handgun because I don’t feel particularly “free and open” in my neighborhood after dark. I’d be happy to live someplace where I could feel really “free and open” and leave my gun locked up for weeks/months at a time instead of loaded on my desk during the day and loaded on my nightstand when I sleep. If I felt like going to buy groceries or running to Home Dept for some machine screws required going armed as well, I think I’d probably lose my shit entirely… and I sure as hell wouldn’t describe society as free and fucking open.
that’s not a pro-gun argument, that’s an argument for better elderly care and broader assisted suicide acceptance.
Also, since we mentioned Tylenol earlier: it’s just as painless but a lot less messy and traumatic to the poor fuckers who’ll find you if you killed yourself with over-the-counter painkillers.
yep, anyone who uses terms like “hysterical culture” is racist and probably misogynistic too.
And that crap about Japan, well, glad Paul already refuted it.
dianne – I am aware of no verifiable study showing the risk increase you describe. I’d be interested in your source for the claim. While commonly held, such claims appear anecdotal.
Nerd of R – Interesting point. Would you prefer a vest and no weapon in the face of intruders intent on doing you or your loved ones harm? With the understanding that I hope never to do harm to any other person, I am prepared mentally and physically to fight viciously and to the death if required to protect my beautiful wife and child. You would otherwise not know that of me because I’m as mellow and laid back as they come. A vest offers a limited temporary shield to give you a chance to respond to an attack. In lieu of a shield, I’ll take the weapon and hope it is never needed.
Mental exercise – you awaken to the sound of breaking glass, intruders are entering you home in the night. Your wife and young children are asleep. You call 911 but the police are tied up on another emergency and are at least 15 minutes away. The criminals are two large, dirty, vicious men that can easily overpower you. They announce their intent to rob you, rape your wife and daughter while you watch and then kill you all to prevent any possibility of your ever identifying them. Which would you prefer to have at the ready, a ballistic vest, or a 12 gauge shotgun that you handle with condidence. Think very quickly my friend – here they come…
meant “confidence” (obviously)
Offline, I’ve known — shit, you’d think I’m exaggerating, because the number really is frightfully large — people who’ve attempted suicide by taking a bunch of pills.
I had no idea they were all secretly Latinas.
a back door and/or a large dog, since I’m a hell of a lot less likely to die that way than trying to be John Fucking Wayne
also, possibly medicine for whatever brought on such an unrealistic nightmare/hallucination.
and incidentally, the implicit sexism in your scenario has also been noted. did you really only want men and lesbians to respond?
FIFM
You know, a little “be glad we let you have freedoms, bitch” mixed in with a lot of cherry-picked ancedotes doesn’t impress me at all. And I own a gun.
that’s ok. I had no idea I was secretly Latina, either. (or maybe the lack of liver damage means I’m not?)
Kokobean said: “I don’t own guns because I live in fear. Most guns owners use them for hunting or recreational shooting sports, many of which require a high degree of concentration, coordination and patience (indoor shooting on a controlled, professional range, skeet and trap also under controlled conditions). ”
Great! So we can ignore all the hand waving about how nessesary guns are for self defence etc, because the main reason people own guns is that it is fun to shoot things.
Also I am glad you are against the ownership of military style weapons because, you know, they are not really designed for skeet and trap shooting.
That was what you meant? No?
Oh look, I’m writing off kokobean, too, for being a misogynistic ass!
(What would happen if your wife wasn’t beautiful, koko?)
Irrelevant. You used the term “protection”, which is defensive. Armor/kevlar vests are defensive protection. There is nothing defensive about a firearm, it is all offensive. So, quit using the defensive “protection” bullshit when talking about firearms, as how much true “protection” does a firearm supply? All you can do is try to kill somebody else with one, if they don’t have the drop on you, and that offensive, not defensive.
I think it means you must be, because you’ve evolved a super-liver through generations of hysterical pill-popping.
How long would it take you to remove it from the safe? You do keep it locked up so your kids cannot harm themselves accidentally, right? There’s no such thing as “at the ready” in such a scenario, unless you risk your kids’ safety regularly day after day. If you can quickly grab the gun (or grab a key and use it to grab the gun), so can your kids.
@kokobean
One source for the claim that having a gun in one’s home increases the risk of accidental death or suicide.
Oh, and if guns are only for target shooting then you won’t mind leaving them locked up at the range?
FFS, I wish gun owners could at least be HONEST. How the fuck can we have an honest conversation about guns when people are lying about their relationship with deadly weapons? Guns are for killing things, with the exception of . Handguns and semi-automatic military-style rifles are for killing people, and large capacity magazines are for killing a lot of people. Maybe someone can defend unrestricted ownership of things designed to kill people, but they need to base that defense on the reality of the situation and not a bunch of lies about sporting and hunting.
And despite that lack of living in fear, kokobean thinks this is a compelling ‘though experiment’:
Imagine how more quickly the police could respond to crimes if they weren’t so busy determining who shot whom in houses like kokobean’s.
Oh, but they are. Haven’t you heard them wax on and on about how responsible and knowledgeable they are and how gun deaths are all the fault of Other™ people?
Is that a racist dogwhistle, Brownian? Used by the True Believer Gun Worshippers, that is.
not always. Other People also includes “those careless people, unlike me”, “those untrained people, unlike me”, “those triggerhappy people, unlike me”, etc.
I’m no misogynist, far from it. My wife happens to be a very good shot but I’m not sending her out first. And, it’s pretty hard to run with a kid or two in your arms, assuming you have the opportunity to escape and aren’t trapped at the end of the hall with the bad guys blocking your best exit. But, go ahead and let the video roll on your “backdoor escape” scene. I’m thinking they shoot the dog and run you and your family down in the backyard… frustrated that they now have no time to rape and pillage, they just kill you all on the spot in retaliation for their troubles. By the way, the cops are still 10 minutes out. Is that really your best possible plan? It may well be for you and that’s fine. It is not an acceptable scenario for me. They might get me but I’m going to hurt them as much as possible first.
Also, I in no way, implied or otherwise, restricted such preparation for self-defense and self-reservation based on gender or sexual orientation. What I did do is posit how I might approach this dangerous situation based on my own gender and life experience – that of a loving husband and father absolutely intent on protecting his family. I’m definitely no misogynist, but I will always stand up in front of my wife and child in the face of danger and hope I can do the job.
With the opposition’s descent into name calling and unfounded implications of sexism (such an easy card to play isn’t it) I’ll take this time to exit the thread… thanks for playing along.
Brave Sir kokobean ran away
Bravely ran away, away.
When questions rears their ugly heads
He bravely turns his tail and fled.
Yes Brave Sir kokobean turned about
He gallantly chickened out.
Too bad you can’t take a gun to an internet debate, huh. THEN you’re be really brave.
“Thought exercise”
“self-preservation”
My bads…….cheers all!
Jesus Christ, it’s about time you shut the fuck up, koko.
Masturbating in public like that is just so uncouth.
Not necessarily racist, but the fundamental attribution error is strong in kokobean’s supposed rationality. Everyone is either a Loved One™ or a Criminal (e.g. “large, dirty, vicious men”.)
Another vivid terror scenario by koko “I don’t own guns because I live in fear” bean.
@kokobean,
How many home invasions happen with the goal of “rape and pillage” each year?
Oh, jolly well played, Illuminata!!
This new learning amazes me. Tell us again how sheep bladders may be used to construct kevlar vests.
cupcake, benevolent sexism is still sexism.
if I have the opportunity to retrieve the gun that’s safely stored away so none of my kids can accidentally shoot themselves with it, I have the time to fucking get out of a house that’s being broken into.
yeah, that totally happens, regularly, all over the US. stop watching so many movies, it’s scrambling your brain
no dear, my plan is not to be so paranoidally afraid of thinbgs that just aren’t bloody likely. I can’t even be arsed to lock my door.
do straight women and gay men have wives a lot in your universe?
if you’re intent on protecting your family, you’d keep your guns where your kids couldn’t accidentally get at them, rendering them useless in your scenario anyway.
One person calls him a misogynist and that means that “the opposition” has descended into name calling and unfounded implications (even though that person did note exactly what text she considered to demonstrate misogyny). Sounds legit, and not at all like a copout. Special kudos to Brownian’s post at 183.
Hopefully koko is better at flouncing than I am.
Even if this improbable doomsday example happened, Guntroll didn’t explain:
1. Whether you know with absolute certainty that the men aren’t armed and wouldn’t shoot you if you tried to scramble for your gun.
2. Why you are incapable of using an improvised weapon or a kitchen knife against them, which would be less likely to set off alarm bells if you were reaching for it (aren’t knives sticks supposedly dangerous as a gun?).
3. Why you can’t just intimidate them (by bluffing) or negotiate with them.
4. How you managed to have a readily available shotgun that could be easily be used in this dangerous, high pressure situation and yet not so available that it is a danger to the wife, daughter, or yourself during Non-Doomsdays.
I mean, from the sounds of it, you’ve got inexplicably strong and unarmed robber-rapists who magically know that the police are nowhere nearby, are incapable of being tricked, fooled, or frightened because they are so focused on robbery and rape, and your only option is to either use a flak vest or a shotgun against them, with no possibility for using any weapon short of a firearm on them. And that’s the incredibly unrealistic scenario used to prove that guns are good and necessary. Riiiight.
A fine contribution by, LZD, ever the clever debater. “Shut the fuck up” is so often the most effective strategy. I shall oblige.
Do you want to take the chance that your Home™ and Loved Ones™ might be the first?
Fill your womenfolk with dynamite, and razorwire all of your doors. It’s the only way to ensure your safety against dirty home invaders.
in koko’s universe, not only do straight women commonly have wives, but the Capital One Vikings are jobless and their unemployment run out, so they were forced to return to a life of raping and pillaging.
no wonder he needs a gun.
How clean are you? Should we be pulling out our 12-gauges instead?
Who the hell is LZD?
specifically, one of those magical guns that exist only in his universe, which can only be accessed(and then instantly so) during home-invasions.
Cause that would never happen… They gave him a sophisticated homemade shotgun, which looked like an oddly shaped cane, and told him to use it if he found trouble at the bank.
But just run of the mill nutjob murders wouldn’t go through the trouble to make a gun?
Except
sometimes
they
do.
You are also forgetting the class of people skilled enough to make a machine-gun out of scrap who don’t mind breaking the law to use that skill so that they can sell their product for black-market prices.
False dichotomy.
Don’t shoot people. If you are ever in a situation when someone is breaking that rule, don’t get shot.
It’s not the US armed forces vs someone else, it’s the US armed forces vs their source of funding, food, fuel, and people. Small arms would do just fine in disrupting supply lines and laying siege on the military backed government. The US has ~3 million active and reserve military members and ~700,000 police. In 2010, there were 14 million background checks conducted for a civilian to buy a firearm in the US. In a full out (un)civil war, it is not guaranteed that the group controlling the US armed forces would prevail.
You gotta look at the murder rates by race and by location. If you aren’t white or black, your chances of being murdered are less than pretty much all of europe. Looking at the county level map (best I could find on a short google search, the FBI crime stats show the trend still remains), you’ll notice that old Dixie and the places that southerners migrated to are hotbeds of homicide. Blacks migrated to the northern and western industrial cities during reconstruction, WWI and WWII. Whites primarily migrated to the western agricultural regions during the dust bowl. It seems like the institutional violence of slave culture cannot be eliminated by time alone.
@168:
Be very careful with that: lethal overdoses with many common painkillers (Tylenol in particular) provide for a spectacularly messy and painful death. If you do have to find a pharmaceutical suicide method, look for Nembutal (AKA sodium pentobarbital). Even that isn’t a sure bet if taken orally without accompanying anti-nausea drugs, because it’s possible to vomit up the dose and survive (albeit with possible hypoxia-induced brain injury).
OTOH, the original poster’s advocacy of pistols as a suicide technique is nowhere as sure-fire as they think either. Bullet trajectories are unpredictable, particularly after the slug has smashed through a skull, and humans can sometimes survive truly astonishing degrees of brain damage. Speaking as someone who has worked in brain injury rehab: if you’re lucky, a major brain injury will just fuck up your life. If you’re not lucky, then phrases such “living hell” come to mind, along with the likelihood that you may not retain sufficient capacity for a second attempt at bailing out.
And, of course, there are the aftermath issues that are mentioned in the above quote. The thing that pissed me off about my grandfather’s suicide wasn’t the fact that he did it; it was that he left my grandmother to deal with the resulting mess. The suicide was an act of understandable despair (he was not a healthy man), but the manner in which it was done was an act of selfishness.
kokobean #170:
Another mental exercise – you’re staying in a motel room, on a trip with your adult son and some of your friends. You get woken by someone slipping into your room late at night. You slip out your Glock handgun you keep in the bedside cabinet’s drawer. You raise your gun to point at the shadowy figure and, fearing for your own safety, open fire. Congratulations, you’ve just shot your own son. If you think that could never happen, tell that to Michael Leach, an ex police officer, who did exactly that:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/york-police-captain-mistakenly-shoots-son/story?id=16837822
The idea of firearms being a ‘defensive weapon’ is only true in some perfect world, where every owner of said defensive weapon is a crack shot and never makes mistakes, even in the midst of chaotic situations like the one referred to in the OP. This is not that perfect world.
And what if the bad guys had terrahertz radar sights and rail guns like in that Arnie movie? What then? WHAT THEN?!!!1!!!
… Just a mental exercise…
That’s you.
Don’t worry; kokobean would never make such a careless mistake identifying his Loved Ones™ at 3:45 in the AM.
What if the big, dirty men shout FORCED LAUGHTER in your face in front of your wife and kids? The magic 12 gauge might not be enough.
*snickers* +1 internets for you.
So, it is unlikely to outrun two home invaders when you actually know the geography of your own home infinitely better than they do (and you also have a convenient escape hatch in the shape of a motor vehicle in the driveway, which you conveniently ignore)? But it is likely that you can either keep a loaded gun near your bedside without harming anyone OR keep a gun stored away using sane safety precautions, and thus find the time to unlock the gun, retrieve the ammo kept in a separate location, and load it up? And somehow running will piss them off enough that they will kill you (via unspecified means) but if they walk into your room while you’re in the middle of your loading your shotgun, what? Will they just enter into a pleasant conversation about the second amendment? No matter how you slice it, you are privileging the amount of time it takes to get the gun in order to mock the idea of having enough time to get away from the Home Invaders.
Your imagination is paranoid, distorted, and ridiculously gun-centric.
Jadehawk:
Does that mean straight men could have husbands? No, of course not. That would be icky. And I’m pretty sure, if I’m profiling koko correctly, that koko’s universe would not have unemployment benefits. But there would also be no shortage of positions for Vikings, so at least there’s that.
I’m sorry, I just don’t get it. I live in a high crime neighborhood in a high crime city and I’ve never felt the need to only purchase a gun and I’ve never had the urge to pleasure myself by thinking up ridiculous home invasion scenarios (so I can feel like a big
manwoman by fantasizing about protecting my beautifulwifehusband). Maybe I’m an anomaly.Koko, do you realize that home invasions are down– way down? It has nothing to do with gun ownership (IIRC, that has remained mostly steady over the past couple of decades), but because nothing has any sort of resale value anymore. Why bother stealing a tv when you could just buy a new one at WalMart for a few hundred dollars?
LIES!!! Guns are always enough!
Brownian @183
it’s not fear, it’s bloodthirsty anticipation
i don’t know. husbands don’t seem to figure in koko’s scenario, unless you yourself are one. only beautiful wives and children. Don’t know about homely or ugly wives, childless couples, single people, or people with husbands.
What a dumb rule.
Every range I’ve been to and every class I’ve attended stress a variation on the 4 rules to firearm safety.
1. Always treat all guns as loaded.
2. Never point a gun at something you are not willing to see shot.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your target is sighted in.
4. You are responsible for everything that happens along the bullet’s trajectory: make sure that there isn’t something behind your target that you don’t want to see shot.
Follow any of the four rules 100% of the time, and you will have 0 negligent discharges. Consciously try to follow every one all the time and you will hopefully be following at least one of them 100% of the time.
Brownian:
*studies tiny tiny keyboard*
But… the A and the L keys are nowhere near each other. Kokopuffs can’t see well enough to type three simple letters and someone has trusted him with a gun??
nope. see the chart at 5:00 in this video, for example.
I happen to think my wife is beautiful, but that’s surely just my opinion.
The wholly absurd and dystopian scenario (special thanks to the large, dirty intruders) serves to illustrate the wide divergence of opinions on the topic that is unlikely to be solved in our lifetimes. Still, neither disarmament nor total deregulation (of guns) provides workable answers.
As for me, I’m selling the guns, disposing of the ammo, divorcing the wife, trading in the kids, bringing the dog to the shelter, moving to Vermont, putting in a spare back door and leaving everything unlocked.
@Audley I live in gun-wing-nutopia and I’ve never heard the scenario koko proposes. Maybe I’m assuming too much in thinking koko lives in the USA. Maybe they live in drug cartel controlled state somewhere. And I can’t imagine what planet koko lives on that would allow the bad guys that are intent on killing koko and family to *wait for koko to get his gun out*. If they plan on wreaking havoc, they are damn sure not going to wait on you to shoot back. And if I’m being raped, my partner damn well better be getting the fucking kids out of the house and running away, not trying to make our kids orphans.
Gun nuts ought to just join the national guard. Then they can be part of a well-regulated militia, perhaps do some good in a disaster, and play with military gear (they’ll even get a uniform!) at taxpayers’ expense. When I was in the reserves (83-89) I even got my very own M-60 machinegun to lug around! W00t!
Seriously, though, if the argument is that guns are necessary to prevent tyranny, it was from a time before when tyrants could deploy area bombing and WMD. The revolutionary war period soldiers did not have to cope with MLRS, satellites, or air strikes. Revolutions are won (or lost) when the standing army picks sides or begins to fight among itself – so if tyranny is what we’re really worried about, we’d be talking about how to increase the separation between the national guard and standing army, downsize the standing army and remove single points of control (take back the requirement that the president and congress must agree to field the army!) If there’s a constitutional protection that’s crucial to preventing tyranny, that is it right there. What’s odd is that a lot of the same people who “support the 2nd” don’t seem to mind that the war powers act is being ignored, that the standing army keeps getting bigger, and that the guard gets deployed outside of the country’s borders. Helllooooo??? Is everyone watching the side-show?
The “founding fathers” appear to me to have been influenced at least somewhat by reading their Gibbon; the transition of Rome from republic to empire was a side-effect of the growth of power of the military and the extreme individual power of charismatic generals. So they put a few protections in place against some future Caesar marching his legions across the Rubicon. But they didn’t know Fox News was going to happen and they didn’t know that the nation would become a mass of sheep who had been propagandized into insensibility. Indeed, a big piece of that propaganda is “your liberteez, u can haz them, if u haz a gun!” – which is bullshit. Convenient bullshit for the potential tyrant.
More to the point, the congressional/military/industrial complex has already more or less succeeded with a putsch. They don’t actually need to have a jackboot on every face; they merged with Wall St and accomplished a leveraged buy-out. Who needs guns when you have all the money and power and control the dialog? And, if your enemy has all the money and power and controls the dialog, who are you going to shoot with your piddly little gun, anyway?
Technology to the rescue yet again
It would take about the same time to turn on a light as it would to get a loaded pistol out of one of those safes.
Imagine shooting someone in your own home with a 12 gauge – ick! Just think of the mess!
If you are going to imagine a fantasy break-in at least have it ending with the bad guys being tasered. That way at least they just soil themselves and not your carpet – and if you are the sadistic type you can get a few kicks in before the police arrive…
Aaah, fantasy scenarios… They make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Jadehawk:
Which video? My phone isn’t playing nice and when I click your link, I get a list to choose from.
“It’s a joke! Whenever you look at me like that, it’s a joke!”
Citation: Your fantasy situation that you just admitted was absurd.
And you still haven’t acknowledged that you were wrong and that someone gave you an article showing that there is increased risk of gun death and injury by simple merits of having a gun in the household.
What a fucking scholar.
I’m curious. do you think the word “opinion” is some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card that means you cannot be pointed to how your opinion is based on non-reality and therefore wrong?
besides, just because something isn’t likely to happen anytime soon doesn’t actually mean that there’s no wrong sides in this “divergence of opinions”. one would think that as an atheist, you’d know that.
you’ll note that the people talking to you have suggested neither. I’m not at all convinced that much can be done to prevent the US from sliding into Mad Max territory anyway, considering the amount of pathological fear in too large a segment of the populace, and the wholly disfunctional civic and political system.
That doesn’t mean I’m not going to point out when someone is making dumbass arguments.
Imagine shooting someone in your own home with a 12 gauge – ick! Just think of the mess!
I used to imagine a break-in scenario. I come home from a trip and there is a pair of empty shoes on my porch and the dogs are looking particularly pleased with themselves.
They disassembled a deer all over the front yard, one time, and I came home when they were still half-finished. For a minute I thought they’d gotten the mailman.
grrr.
it’s the first segment of the Rachel Maddow show from July 23rd. Ezra Klein is guest-hosting, so there’s charts galore.
Thanks, J. I’ll give it another shot!
A great point. But armed resistance can buy time for dissension to rise in the military. Look at Syria right now, the continued survival of the rebels has bought time for an increasing number of defections. Such an uprising would only be possible with massive popular support and would only be necessary in the face of an obvious power grab such as the suspension of elections or a military coup. I think there is very little chance that such an even will occur, so I’m fine with lots of restrictions on gun ownership (e.g. training, waiting periods, etc.), but I think it’s important to retain the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
Interesting 2004 study here:
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full
excerpt –
“Much of the debate in the literature has focused on the risks and benefits of gun ownership in terms of lives saved versus lives harmed. Studies of defensive gun use suggest that millions of defensive gun use incidents occur each year by people to protect themselves or their property against assaults, theft, or break-ins (30, 31). However, guns are also involved in unintentional firearm shootings and domestic altercations in the home and are the primary method used in suicides in the United States (1, 32). The body of research to date, including the findings of this study, shows a strong association between guns in the home and risk of suicide. The findings for homicide, while showing an elevated risk, have consistently been more modest. They suggest a need for more research to better distinguish the risk and protective factors associated with guns in the home, including an examination of the risk posed by forces both internal and external to the home.
Footnotes
↵Reprint requests to Dr. Linda L. Dahlberg, NCIPC, Division of Violence Prevention, Mailstop K-68, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4770 Buford Highway, NE, Atlanta, GA 30341 (e-mail: ldahlberg@cdc.gov).
You have a seriously inflated sense of how useful fingerprint recognition is. It tends to be either too difficult to get a good read (increasing the time to get the gun out), or too easy to fool. More’s the pity when your kid watches a Discovery channel show that shows how to fool fingerprint scanners. Now they have a loaded gun! Fun for the whole family.
If we’re going to be dealing in outrageous fantasy scenarios, then I’m sure everyone across the wide divergence of opinion can agree that the correct procedure for dealing with home invaders is to seal yourself in the engine room and blow out all the airlocks.
Another recent incident where civilian gun ownership kept a bad situation from getting worse.
Can you imagine the guy in the picture tackling someone or otherwise physically overpowering a person bent on violence?
Another recent incident in which civilian gun ownership lead to two people and some dogs being shot and killed.
Final thought: Concur with Quinn – stronger regulation is appropriate and necessary while protecting ownership rights.
how many licks does it take to get to the center of a flounce that actually sticks?
Damn… airlocks. If only…
The more popular safes are ones without bio-recognition: there are simply a set of four buttons where your fingertips would be and you choose a code sequence. Switches and solid state components are pretty damn reliable.
Brownian,
I’m one of those there “thems” that owns a gun, and I’m responsible and safe(by a definition that suits my situation) and all that stuff. I also don’t lie about my motivations: I own a gun out of fear, based on research on my neighborhood’s crime rate. As soon as I move someplace safer, the need for a gun goes away the same way it didn’t exist for me for the previous 36-ish years of my life. I don’t fetishize the gun, I don’t think it magically makes me Rambo, and I’m all for extremely strict regulations/laws and the punishments to go along with them.
This flounce is an all day sucker…
So, in the pro gun column, we’ve got a study calling for more research and one story of a dude in a cowboy hat shooting some people.
Wow, I am soooooooooo convinced, *eyeroll*
(Sorry, Jadehawk. I can’t find the video because MSNBC’s mobile site won’t let me switch to the full site and their internal search (Bing) sucks ass.)
And for whatever reason, comment 204 is still awaiting moderation.
For those who say civilian gun ownership can’t do squat against the military:
14 million: number of background checks conducted in 2010 by the FBI so that a civilian could buy a firearm.
Woah, tag failure.
That should be:
less than 4 million: number of active and reserve military plus police in America.
greater than 14 million: number of background checks conducted in 2010 by the FBI so that a civilian could buy a firearm.
interesting indeed, especially the part where they note that more studies need to be done.
also the part where it says “or their property”, basically admitting that gun-ownership leads to making theft a capital crime.
and lastly, the part where it says (obviously) that the defense was against non-lethal, non-sexual crimes, once again confirming the absurdity of the rape-pillage-kill scenario.
yes. very interesting indeed.
also interesting:
what was that about your precious wife and kids?
BTW, there’s something seriously wrong when it is more difficult to get plates on your car than it is to buy a handgun.
Certainly not joking. The US funded and armed the mujahedin … in the 80’s. We stopped after the Soviets left and they we’re on their own for the next decade.
Also, when was the last time the Taliban forces used tanks, helicopters, and bombers? (Hint: they don’t have those.)
My point was and still is valid. A force armed with small arms and improvised munitions can conduct successful operations against the US military, and is doing so on a daily basis. They can’t defeat us, but they can certainly prevent us from defeating them. And that’s all it really takes, since eventually we’ll just get up an leave and they will have their country back again.
Oh, I know. All guns are manufactured by Smith & Wobegon.
Christopher:
Feel free to shoot at those unmanned drones. I’m sure that’ll do a hell of a lot of good.
Speaking of guns “protecting people”: wasn’t Gabby Gifford’s shooter taken down by an unarmed aid? And the shooter at the Unitarian church a while back? And wasn’t the Fort Hood shooter brought down by a cop, not a civilian?
Your anecdote doesn’t mean squat, Christopher.
No, it’s far worse than that. The article was one Quinn already cited, that showed a higher risk for gun homicide and suicide for people who had guns in their household. The part that he cited was a part that was simply stating something that was said earlier, in a way that was less easy for a pro-gunner to spin: That the elevated relative risk for suicide was even higher than the elevated relative risk for homicide. That’s what it is a referring to when it says “have consistently been more modest” but, out of context, it sounds like it is saying that there is little to no effect.
He took probably the one paragraph that sort of sounds like it supports the gunners. And it doesn’t. It only sounds like it does when you take it out of context.
Again, what a fucking scholar.
Audley,
Don’t leave out the fact that at the Gabby Giffords shooting, a guy with a concealed handgun almost gunned down the person who took the gun from the shooter.
that was 20% cooler than anything anyone else has said so far.
that study isn’t even in the pro-gun column. it clearly notes a correlation between guns in the house and your chance of getting killed, especially if you’re not living alone and over 35. They’re just being honest and admitting that correlation isn’t causation, and that all those folks could be Improbable Joe clones who lived in dangerous neighborhoods and thought the gun would protect them.
Brownian… ummmm… mine’s a Springfield. :P
Improbable Joe – funny how THAT little tidbit didn’t make it into the How Awesomely Brave and Responsible Gun Owners Are narrative.
Oh yeah? Mental exercise for you: it’s late at night. You’re at home, sleeping, with your Loved Ones™ around you, when deranged serial raping Huns loudly break into your home before marching up the stairs to evilly describe their plans for raping you, then raping your children, then raping you with your children, then having you take a turn raping them for awhile, then stealing your Property™ and writing on the walls with permanent marker and then shooting you so you can’t identify them because these are the only Huns who’ve never seen CSI and don’t know about DNA.
Are you going to throw your ‘studies’ at them? Hurry now, no time to think, the cops have all moved to Burkina Faso.
Don’t forget trespassing? They cite “Guns in America: national survey on private ownership and use of firearms” for said factiod, which very well could include people saying their guns prevented trespassing. In fact, I would assume this to be the most common self-reported “protection of themselves or their property”.
Is this controlled for situations like Improbable Joe, where guns are owned because the crime rate (including risk of dying from a firearm, one assumes) are already higher? I don’t raise this in argument, but it would be useful to know.
Depends on where you are at.
In California, I can make an appointment with the DMV go in and get my plates. If I need replacement plates or need to move plates to a new vehicle I can do it by mail.
To get a handgun, I need to pass a state and federal background check, pay and pass a state mandated safety test, demonstrate safe handling to the gun dealer, provide proof of residency (power bill, car registration, etc with a physical address), provide proof of owning an approved locking device, then wait ten days before coming back to the store to pick up the handgun.
Getting a handgun is far more difficult than getting plates, even though murderous assholes use cars to kill people too. (I was one block away from that incident when it happened)
it isn’t, which is why they’re saying more studies need to be done.
you left a lot of shit out of that — you know, the whole pay for insurance, learn how to drive a car, get training license, get license while having proof of residence of some sort, birth certificate…. To get plates on a car takes a hell of a lot more than a fucking appt at the DMV. Get your head out of your gun case please.
C’mon people, let’s be constructive here. We need a Govt program to make sure every American is armed and has loads of ammo. It’ll thin the herd after all.
I would like to know when all of these Judge Dredds decided that theft and trespasssing were death penalty worthy offenses.
http://www.abc.net.au/health/features/stories/2005/05/19/1836000.htm
Article about depression in rural Australia – see the bit about higher gun ownership leading to more successful suicides. This is a tragic situation because here we have a segment of the population where gun ownership is actually necessary.
I also don’t believe that hacking or tools for hacking should be banned.
And yours does?
Uh, he didn’t have a clear shot, was unsure of the target and thus withheld fire. Isn’t that what you are supposed to do? Isn’t that what all the anti-gun folks say won’t happen, instead substituting a fantasy of everyone shooting willy nilly?
Well, and it gets even more complicated. I was in the Marines, I even did a little marksmanship coaching, and so I know my way around guns and whatnot. Even with the training I’ve had, and the regular trips to the range, I feel like I’m just a little ahead of the game and not suddenly able to single-handedly take down a mythological pack of multi-ethnic thugs with guns and switchblades and funny haircuts and denim jackets with the sleeves cut off. And when I do carry, I carry openly as a deterrent. It announces that I’m a gun nut, and maybe that anyone with bad things on their mind will move along to an easier target, but who knows?
Many of the people I was in the Marines with, even with all that training and no one actually shooting back, were barely able to hit a target much better than half the time. That’s with the gun out and loaded and someone giving them a “ready-set-go” on the range, not trying to draw a concealed handgun from underneath clothing while someone is pointing a weapon at them. And then if everyone is armed, who do you shoot? It is so, so, so, SO dumb!
Christopher:
That is a false equivalence.
That was my point Christopher– why anecdotes are completely unreliable. For every good ol’ boy you come up with, someone else can come up with an unarmed civilian who took a shooter down without killing anyone.
But nice try though.
In Florida you walk into a gun store on Monday, fill out a form and sign it, how your driver’s licence and pay the fee, and come back on Friday and pick up your handgun.
Oh, and I don’t give a damn about my property enough to risk my life for it and didn’t magically become a cop because I own a gun. If I’m upstairs sleeping and the alarm goes off and I hear someone downstairs stealing my shit I lock my bedroom door and wait for the cops. If someone busts down a locked upstairs door, then I assume they mean to do more than take my TV, but otherwise I have insurance.
Duplicate plates
New plates
You said get plates on a car. That is different from your new goal post of legally driving said plated car. You still have to physically demonstrate safe operation of the device (gun or car) supply identifying documents (more are required for a gun) and come in person to the office (twice for a gun). The only difference is the insurance requirement.
Interestingly, it looks like someone might’ve been trying to copycat the Aurora murderer, right near where I live.
A friend was at the theater at that time.
So I was right, thanks for verifying that. It’s not easier to get plates than it is to get a gun. You do ~ the same amount of identifying and proving, then you get plates or a gun.
This is of course, complete crap, and only demonstrates your complete ignorance of WWII. That the USA would defeat Japan was obvious (even to some Japanese) from the moment of Pearl Harbor: the disparity in human and material resources, and technical sophistication, was overwhelming. By the time the decision to drop the atomic bombs was made, Germany – a far more formidable enemy – had already surrendered, and Japan’s cities were already being incinerated by conventional bombing – Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared this to facilitate assessment of the effects of atomic bombs. No invasion would have been necessary, and this was known at the time. Japan had lost the Dutch East Indies, its only significant source of oil, tin and rubber – each of which, independently, was absolutely necessary to its remaining an industrial economy, let alone keeping the war going for more than another 2 or 3 months. The only possible excuse for the atomic bombs is the risk of a massacre of POWs. This could have been averted by making clear that the survival of the Japanese monarchy depended on that of the POWs.
You missed at least
threefive* occasions – there may have been more we don’t know about – when our survival was a matter of luck. One is well known: the Cuban missile crisis. The other two both occurred in 1983, when that shithead Reagan had persuaded the Soviet gerontocrats that a first strike was likely. Google “Stanislav Petrov” and “Able Archer” for details.Even after the Cold War, there was another near miss in 1995: that time, we were saved by Boris Yeltsin’s refusal to believe that the US was attacking Russia. For that one, google “Norwegian rocket incident”.
*I’ve just found another two, from 1979 and 1980 – both false alarms generated by US early warning systems.
In the spirit of compromise I now propose the following solution to this gun control mess:
Amend the Second Ammendment to make gun ownership MANDATORY. A requirement for citizenship. Your certificate of gun ownership will henceforth replace your SIN card, passport, birth certificate, and driver’s license and will become your sole piece of government ID. You will use it for everything you currently use your SIN/passport/birth certificate/driver’s license for. You must present it in order to vote. The age of maturity will no longer be a fixed number like 18, but the day in which the young person passes a gun safety course and earns to right to obtain his or her gun ownership certificate. And those who cannot successfully pass this course and prove that they can handle the firearm, the SYMBOL OF CITIZENSHIP IN THIS GREAT UNION, safely and responsibly, of course, will be deported as illegal aliens.
This way, all the gun owning nuts will be happy and need not fear the government taking away their guns, while the government and police will be able to regulate and monitor firearms use in the country through all regular channels by which it monitors and regulates citizen activity, since the gun ownership certificate is now used for everything.
And for those of you pansy liberals who are afraid to have a gun in your home, remember, as sole and rightful owner of your firearm, you have the right to do whatever you want with it, including keeping it in a safe deposit box on the other side of the country, or in a bulletproof display case with no ammo (which you do not need to buy), or rent it to the army or police (which again can be on the other side of the country if you wish).
Cool story bro.
Apparently , in 2009, there were 11,493 murderous assholes who just happened to choose to use a gun to kill people. And only 5,306 murderous assholes used any other possible method. Oh yeah, only 60 were motor vehicle homicides.
Oh yeah, but there is a fucking epidemic of people using cars as weapons! Cars are Just As Bad!
re #271;
By 1945 it was obvious to absolutely everyone that the US was going to win the Pacific War. Japan’s entire final defence strategy was predicated on making victory costly enough for the Americans that they would be able to surrender with negotiated terms. In absolutely none of those plans was the possibility of actually stopping the American advance (ie, not losing the war) ever even entertained.
But the US wanted unconditional surrender. The atomic bombs were dropped to compel unconditional surrender. If the Allies would have been satisfied with a negotiated surrender, they would not have had to drop the bombs.
(Incidentally, the US invasion plans for Japan, in the event the Japanese did not surrender, entailed dropping atomic bombs on the beaches, and marching their amphibious invasion force right into the fallout, which kind of suggests that the US at the time really had no clear idea precisely how terrible a weapon their new atomic bombs actually were, and were still thinking of them as just really big conventional explosives)
if I were an asshole, I’d start using all this “but cars kill people, too” whining from gunnuts as argument for better public transportation to replace cars. Two birds with one stone. :-p
Jadehawk,
You could go for one of those gun buy-back programs, and get people to trade guns for bus passes.
Those are only the cases where other drivers weren’t able to run down the Criminal™ before he could squeeze off a bumper.
To be fair, the number is so low because car ownership is so ubiquitous that Criminals™ are much less likely to try to run you down if they suspect you might be a driver too.
You mean a bus pass like this little paper thing—[pulls bus pass out of his wallet, gets a paper cut]—ow! I could totally kill someone with?
How is that going to solve the problem of Criminals™ raping and pillaging your Loved Ones™?
Cars kill people! Fund personal helicopters
Unfortunately, as we all know, cars don’t actually kill people. People kill people. Therefore, it should perfectly legal for me to have a car with a lance-like protrusions, bulletproof glass, a flamethrower and a jet engine, as long as I pinky-swear that I’m not a Criminal or Irresponsible Person. I swear, it’s only for hunting deer, self-defense, and regular target practice.
simple. the criminals would keep their guns and therefore not have the bus pass to drive to your neighborhood to pillage and rape. problem solved.
keresthanatos:
I loathe that Orwell (mis)quote. No, actually, my freedoms are protected by the activists who fight for them: the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and other liberal organizations. The U.S. military hasn’t fought for the “freedom” of anybody except big corporations in decades, and cops are state-employed thugs who “protect and serve” people with social privilege and keep the rest of us in check.
Illuminata:
Precisely.
anteprepro:
You’ve never driven a Pinto, have you?
I live in the city. I see buses everywhere. Even kids are using buses these days (where are their parents? but that’s another story.) They aren’t hard to get.
Criminals™ don’t care about the law. They’re evil to the core and will stop at nothing to get one just so they can drive to your house, rape you in the night and set your Loved Ones™’ PVR to record reruns of Two Broke Girls.
Anecdotes are great when rebutting absolutes: “no one was ever saved by a civilian owned firearm” can be falsified with one example.
Did someone actually claim that guns have never been useful, ever?
I’d support that.
Even with all the fancy safety gear (thanks Ralph), cars still kill ~30k people a year. One of the more likely ways to “die before your time” (ie not cancer or heart disease).
But even with better public transportation, I wouldn’t support making privately owned vehicles illegal.
Err, post #1 implied it
What “absolute” do you think you were rebutting? This seems to be a very common tactic of the pro-gunners: Assuming that “absolute” statements that were never actually said by anyone are currently on the table to “rebut”.
Christopher:
Hey! That’s about the same as the number of gun deaths in the US per year. It’s a coincidence on par with the moon being the same apparent diameter as the sun.
Oh good, you didn’t just pull that one out of your ass. You just replied to something that was said over 100 comments ago without explanation. Good on you.
Or number 1 was a question, since it seems that so few shooting sprees have been stopped by armed civilians.
You keep reaching, though.
Because if they didn’t have access to guns, murders wouldn’t murder…..
I don’t think this is a fair criticism. I thought it was pretty clear what point Christopher was trying to make with the anecdote.
Audley:
What’s funny is, the example he linked to didn’t rebut #1 at all. The shooter was subdued by an unarmed person.
Now that is an argument that no-one is making.
But now that we’re here, since cars and everything can be used to kill people, they can presumably also be used to murder murderers before they murder, right? Just like guns?
So why don’t we just get rid of the guns then? After all, as you point out, we don’t actually need them.
Hey everyone! Apparently there’s nothing we can do to lower the murder rate! Good to know that the US is just a murderous place with no hope of redemption!
(Tell me, how would the Aurora, CO murders have happened without guns?)
Concealed Chevy Impala.
Christopher:
I believe cars have another use, other than turning living things into ex-living things.
I forget what it is, though.
And if it were at a drive-in, James Holmes would have been run down by responsible car owners before he touched his horn.
Nigel:
*facepalm!* I went back to reread the article (I only skimmed it the first time), but now it’s demanding payment. *sigh* So are you saying that the Texas good ol’ boy didn’t actually stop anything?
Brownian #295:
In addition to that, if guns have no impact on how often murderers murder, then they obviously don’t make killing people easier, and are thus a bit pointless as defensive weapons, and those other things, like cars and knives, do have other uses.
Brownian:
Is that an Impala in your pants or are you just happy to see me?
Audley:
I haven’t completely caught up on this thread yet, but in #31 Christopher linked to a shooting as a rebuttal to #1.
In the Wikipedia link, an unarmed bystander subdued the shooter before two others with weapons arrived on the scene.
There may be other rebuttals I haven’t seen yet. Still reading.
Not that it matters — it’s dangerous to have a drawn weapon at any shooting. You are likely to get mistaken for the shooter, and end up collateral damage yourself.
A little too obvious, huh?
Well, that’s why I keep a Tercel in an ankle holster for back-up.
Sure it is. The theory is that if guns were somehow magically eliminated from the US (good luck with that), our murder rate would drop significantly enough to offset the decrease in liberty. Aside from the fact that neither liberty nor safety are or should be fungible quantities to be traded around, there is little evidence that having no civilian access to guns will change the murder rate. Other items will simply be substituted. It is the culture of violence that should be attacked, not the tools that are used by violent and non-violent alike.
Oh Nigel, no there’s an article at 234. It appears to be behind a paywall. >:(
Christopher:
This is what I don’t understand: what is the reduction in liberty to have highly regulated arms? What freedom do you gain from owning a firearm, other than the owning of the firearm?
Answer the rest of the comment, then.
If guns do not facilitate murder, how do they facilitate the defence from murder?
A non-paywalled version.
Seems legit.
Yeah, we know, from your cold, dead hands.
Or were you talking about the Criminals™? Why do the Criminals™ want the guns. Don’t they know how easy it is to get their hands on murderous cars?
FYI: you and all the other gun defenders need to stop doing that. You can tell me that you’re the very height of responsibility until you’re blue in the face, but I have absolutely no reason to believe you’re either violent nor non-violent but your say-so.
You’re the ones with the Manichean thinking, not me. I understand gradiations, and I do not divide the world into White Hats and Black Hats.
Contributing to climate change?
Thanks, Nigel!
But armed resistance can buy time for dissension to rise in the military. Look at Syria right now
Do you really think that dissention isn’t rising because of CIA/Saudi provocateurs?
The successful revolution trope generally includes a massacre (like the Boston massacre, the initial but amazingly undocumented atrocities in Libya, Tienamen Sq, etc) to get the people to run to the barricades. So, yeah, if the armed resistance is crucial as a sacrifice, I might buy that argument.
(BTW, the Chinese were very smart and moved units from Northern China into Beijing. They knew it’s harder to get people to fire up their own neighborhoods. That’s another reason why the US national guard absolutely should be prohibited from being deployed outside their state.)
So… According to Nigel’s link, the Texas good ol’ boy didn’t actually put a stop to anything: people had already been murdered and a cop had already opened fire on the gunman.
So, it proves exactly squat.
Maybe you have a better memory than myself? Or we’re talking about different anecdotes? The comment with the link to the cowboy hat guy had no indication that it was talking about comment 1.
As for Chris’s response to me: Way to address the argument, assclown.
Aren’t guns violent by their very nature? They are tools of violence, and any use of them is by definition violent to one degree or another.
I wonder if they are contributing to the culture of violence?
there may have been more we don’t know about – when our survival was a matter of luck
US Navy fired on USSR sub during the peak of the cuban missile crisis.
US U2 spyplane got lost over the pole during the peak of the cuban missile crisis and flew deep within USSR air-space. (That was one a doozy – “radar tracks coming in over the pole! launch!”)
Stanislaw Petrov is a name everyone who survived the 80s should know.
PERIMETR is still operational, so we shouldn’t pat ourselves on the back. The sun could still rise in the west some day. :(
I never said that they don’t facilitate murder, merely that even if murdering became slightly harder, the murder rate wouldn’t change.
As for the second half, unlike most weapons, guns can be utilized equally well by the weak as they can by the strong. Without guns, you can have a group of punkass teens with machetes chop up your village while you hide in the bathroom hoping not to be found. The strong can prey on the weak with impunity.
With firearms, you don’t have to put up with that shit.
Risk-assessment scienticians in the US forecast that in the event of a national ban on firearms, yearly smotherings will increase by eight million percent.
What are you hysterical anti-freedom militants going to do then, ban pillows?!?!
That could well be it, in this case. I’d read Christopher’s comment #31, and I might have simply assumed he was still arguing along that line.
Christopher:
That happened to my neighbor once.
So, let me get this straight: your entire argument is predicated on the US degenerating into a third-world country?
I dunno, other than the obvious “fewer guns” thing. Solves road rage almost entirely though.
One of the things that always bothers me about the gun nuts is the almost complete resistance to having less guns in circulation and making it harder for people to get them, which is vaguely reminiscent of the anti-abortion crowd being generally against effective sex ed and birth control as well. Clearly their position has some serious flaws in it.
So, guns are only slightly better at killing than regular, household items? Then why are they more than twice as likely to be used in homicides?
What a dumb fucking anecdote and argument.
Think of the many tragedies that could have been averted if only people in politically unstable African nations had easier access to firearms.
Strange thing is, folks like Christopher have been forcing me to re-evaluate my position on gun control.
I grew up in an area where hunting was not only acceptable, but almost necessary, due to the remoteness of the area, the seasonal nature of the work, and so on. I’ve been very gun-conscious my entire life. I have owned guns constantly since I was 13 years old.
I am seriously considering giving them away to trustworthy family members. The more I hear folks defending gun rights, the more I realize guns should be heavily regulated.
At the very least, it ought to be as difficult to get ammo as it is to get Sudafed.
Degenerating?
It’s not like firearms haven’t been used
that way in America
in recent memory
It’s because of their idiotic thinking that leads them to believe that criminals are simultaneously so smart and determined that no reduction in supply could possibly thwart their nefarious perfidy, and yet so indescribably stupid that their only goal is to break into your house to gloat before befouling your virgin daughter with their savage seed.
… have never seen an argument about making guns more easily available that explains how you make them less easily available to everyone else. Having a local home-grown arms race sounds like the exact opposite of a good idea. “They have machetes, so I’ll get a shotgun! They got shotguns, so I’ll get an assault rifle! They have assault rifles, I’ll put landmines in the yard! They have mortars, so I’ll need some unmanned drones! Nukes for everyone!”
nms wins.
So, that’s a “yes” on the racist dogwhistles, then.
Also, guns don’t kill people, punk-ass teens kill people.
Fortunately they don’t really have a lobby group so I bet it would be pretty easy for the government to implement a registry.
[Emphasis mine.]
Do you really think that some asshole who walks into a movie theater wielding hand-held weapons is going to be able to kill 12 people and injure 58?
Especially if there are a bunch of off-duty military personnel in the audience?
Look, I’ve studied martial arts for 15 years – including training in a variety of hand-held weapons – and I seriously doubt I could pull off that level of body count unless everyone was willing to come at me one at a time (because that really does make things much easier).
My I humbly suggest you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about here?
[Emphasis mine.]
Ah, yes; middle America is exactly like Rwanda, right down to the “punkass teens” getting support from the local police, government, and military.
You’re really making some incredibly dumb-ass ignorant arguments, dude.
What have I said that would make you want to give up and admittedly useful tool? What else would you legally hunt with? Bows are just as deadly and persistence hunting is not for the faint of heart. I guess you could just raise chickens and snap their necks by hand. Or use a knife on other livestock, but that is rarely as humane of a death as a .22lr in the ear.
If you don’t want to use a gun to defend yourself from another human (if you are ever in such a rare situation), don’t. It’s not like I advocating that everyone be required to shoot people for trespassing or jaywalking.
Don’t like abortions, don’t get one. Don’t like the defensive use of firearms, don’t use one.
Illuminata:
Are we surprised, though? Every time I hear about some gun nut who wants to protect their suburban McMansion from “intruders”, I can clearly see who they mean, and it ain’t white people.
I’m so sad koko stuck the flounce– after his “hysterical culture” comment, I would have loved to hear what he had to say about African Americans.
Nope. If anything it is an ageist dogwhistle. In my neck of the woods, the punkass teens will be white.
Some parts are closer than you think. We haven’t changed as much as we should have since the Deacons of Defense days.
This is, quite simply, a lie. The evidence is there in international comparisons, which I pointed to @91.
You don’t explain why homicide rates are “multifactorial and complicated”, but drink driving isn’t. Because you can’t.
I blame Charles Bronson’s Death Wish movies. People apparently think those are documentaries.
Seriously, if you think the arguments are bad HERE, you should hang out on some gun owner forums for a couple of minutes. I’ve got a Springfield XDM .40, which holds 16 rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, and comes with three magazines. I think you can get three more rounds in the 9mm, which in either case brings you somewhere close to a 6-shot revolver’s capacity plus 2 reloads. And then, AND THEN!… once a year you can send off a rebate form and get two more magazines and a second magazine pouch for free. FOR FREE!!! (yeah, and I got them, I can’t pass up free things.)
So, if I load and carry all five magazines that’s 80 rounds. The gun nuts will tell you that it is unjust to ban or even restrict the sale of high-capacity magazines… because 16 rounds before reloading isn’t enough, you need to be able to fire 30 or more before reloading. For self-defense. Because in self-defense situations, you generally engage in extended firefights like in the movies.
Oh, right. That’s why firearms never caught on among the military.
Citation needed.
Desperately.
Koko? Or was it gingerbaker? I get them all sorts of confused.
Remember the Rule of Pro-Gun Ownership arguments: everything can be used to kill everyone therefore ease of weapon does not increase murder rates, but only a fool brings a knife to a gun fight.
Isn’t the violent crime rate down? And dropping?
Then why did handgun crime go up in the U.K. after the ban?
Your comment @91 just compared overall homicide rates. As I pointed out in 204, the homicide rate in the US is highly race and location dependent. This indicates that something other than just being an American is behind the culture of violence.
If you want to support your point that reducing the amount of guns present will reduce the violent crime rate, you need to do a comparison of rates within a single country before and after a ban then compare the trend with similar countries that have not changed their regulations.
If you look at a single shot, from people with equal levels of skill, in a space with sufficient maneuvering room, within the effective range of the bow, then yes, bows are just as deadly as guns.
Remind me again, how many arrows are you sending at your target per minute?
How far away is that target?
What’s the pull on your bow?
Oh, and we sort of breezed over the fact that no one is actually born a criminal, and every criminal was a law-abiding citizen right up to the point that they broke the law. The idea that NRA members and the other “right kind” of gun owners are magically law-abiding citizens forever, and it is the “other kind” of people who are born criminals… it is yet another delusional idea.
Of course, if you buy the whole “we need guns to overthrow the
Democratsgovernment” idea, I’m not sure how law-abiding the gun nuts really are.Wikipedia to the rescue! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_over_time
That was gingerbaker.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about when I mention Manichean thinking.
Just so we’re all clear, I am a criminal. I have in the past broken the law and committed crimes, and I will do so again.
and you imagine nutcakes like koko, and idiots like yu who imagine that gun-ownership = Teh Liberty aren’t part of the so-called “culture of violence”? lol.
the more Americans wank over their precious guns and how much they need them, the more the worship of violence in the USA remains intractable.
also, what universe do you live in, that people can be so neatly divided into violent and non-violent people? (also, few guns double as tools, and those are legal in those Ebil supposedly non-free European countries, too.)
if cars ever became as useless as guns (one can dream, eh?) I’d absolutely make is a massive pain in the ass to own and operate one.
that’s incoherent, as it assumes all murders are 1st degree murders.
or, you can have proper civilization. you know, unlike the US.
amazingly enough, I don’t have to put up with that shit even without a firearm, since civilization hasn’t crumbled entirely yet.
Also, really, claims that the Rwandan genocide wouldn’t have happened if there were more guns?
yeah, no. pure, unadulterated bullshit.
well, as a basis of argumentation it’s less unrealistic than delusions of being a survivor if that happens in a country full of guns. you know, like the USA.
Didn’t some racist asshole just shoot up a Sikh Temple because he thought they were part of a group he hated enough to kill?
America has a long history of terrorism being committed against minority and marginalized groups. It is not uncommon for local police to back the oppressors.
Didn’t the feds and state have to step in and fire all the police in Colorado City because they were fully subservient to the FLDS and supported violent actions against those who went against the church?
Do you even read this blog?
Paul:
Dammit! Mixin’ them all up.
My bad, koko.
Christopher:
Because I don’t use it for subsistence hunting anymore.
Guns have one purpose: to kill things. If you are not in a position that requires killing things, it is no longer a tool, but a dangerous piece of equipment with no other purpose.
The poster I was replying to was considering getting rid of his hunting rifle because he was somehow convinced that guns are scary. How is a bow significantly less deadly than your average hunting rifle? If a hunting rifle is so scary that it shouldn’t be kept in the house, how is a hunting bow any less scary?
Err…because the ban was in 1997, and there was a big change in how violent crime was recorded in 1998 and another change in 2002/3?
Here.
And that is with ~14 million civilian firearm transactions a year. Doesn’t seem like there is much correlation between the quantity of guns in civilian hands and the levels of violent crimes….
Perfectly reasonable.
Personally, I have had need of the tool in the past and can foresee rare situations where I might need it in the future, so I’d rather keep the tool around even if it is never used again for its intended purpose.
Obviously you don’t, nor do you read the posts refuting your tired and wrong, and inane justifications for you idiocy. I don’t give a shit how many guns you own. But I do care about you practicing safe range rules when dealing with those guns, as that can effect me and other innocent people, including your family and friends. Range safety rules include not leaving loaded weapons anywhere. In fact, the ammo and the guns should be separate until you are prepared to actually fire the weapon in short period of time, say less than 5 minutes. I don’t want to take away your weapons, but rather your unsafe handling of said weapons.
*sigh*
stupid people should not be on the internet. it wastes my time.
http://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/opus713/ccjs_gun_crime_report.pdf
Okay, let me see if I’ve got this part of your argument straight:
We need to protect gun ownership in the US because parts of America are almost as dangerous as Rwanda during the genocide (where gangs of “punkass teens” with support from significant parts of the local police forces, government, and military ran around massacring people with machetes), and as evidence of this claim you offer a case where a “lone wolf” asshole used guns (not machetes) to massacre a group of people all by himself (thanks to the guns, natch!) and a case where the federal authorities stopped a group of local police for abusing their position (I don’t recall any murders there…I guess everyone was hiding in their bathrooms?).
Do I have that about right?
‘Cause if so, I must reiterate my previous point:
You’re making some dumb-ass ignorant arguments, dude.
Apparently not.
That’s because even if you don’t personally own a firearm to defend your sovereign individuality, unthinking men stand awake all night ready to rough people up.
Or something like that.
No they don’t.
Loaded weapons should be under your control at all times (holstered, in your hand, in a safe, or on safe and slung over your shoulder), but other than that, if you are intending on using a gun it should be loaded, otherwise it is an expensive club. Do you think hunters only load a round when they see a deer?
I spelled out the four rules of firearm safety and none of those rules talk about being unloaded until you are ready to fire.
What range do you shoot at that requires such silliness?
Christopher,
You don’t even read the articles you link to, do you? The answer is right there:
In other words it was absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the change in the law – which, BTW, was not a “ban”, but a tightening of laws that were already far tighter than in the USA. What we haven’t had since the change in the law is a mass shooting of the kind the change in the law followed, and was intended to prevent.
Yep, when international comparisons are brought out, the resort of the American gun nut is usually either to pretend they haven’t been made, or “It’s all the fault of the blacks/rednecks”, expressed more or less openly according to personal preference. This fails to take account of the other, non-American examples, in both directions, which I also pointed out in #91. The culture of widespread gun ownership, on the absurd pretense that this either protects the owner and family (when statistics show the opposite) or somehow prevents the establishment of a tyranny (when this is so obviously daft it’s difficult to believe it’s intended seriously) is a large part of the culture of violence.
Seriously?
Have you ever fired a compound bow?
How many children have accidentally shot someone with a bow?
It is in no way comparable to a rifle.
In before a link of a news article where a kid accidentally shot another kid with a bow, provided as if some profound point is being made.
Fair enough.
As I noted above: rate of fire, range, and the strength required to use the former as opposed to the later.
How many people keep hunting rifles around for “home defense”? Or is that not what you’re arguing with regards to gun ownership? ‘Cause I’ve got no beef with people owning licensed hunting rifles; it’s the assault rifles and handguns that are the real problem.
Hunting rifles actually have a primary purpose other than killing people.
But assault rifles and handguns? Yeah, not so much….
Compared to the UK and Canada, the murder rate is falling far more dramatically in the US.
And that is with Americans making ~14 million gun transactions a year. We are literally swimming in civilian owned firearms, yet our murder rate is dropping faster than countries with moderate to severe firearm restrictions. It doesn’t seem to support the more guns = more murder position.
Have we walked into a time-warp back to 1650 when this question still actually made a little bit of sense?
That’s because it is actually an irrelevant red herring to that position.
so is gun ownership.
It seems like there’s a constant shift between hunting and target rifles, versus handguns and assault rifles. We’re not really talking about a bolt-action rifle or double-barreled shotgun, so comparing them to machetes or bows sort of completely misses the point.
So banning guns doesn’t get them out of the hands of people who would use them illegally. You don’t say…
If this isn’t a mass shooting, what is?
And if we went back another 200 years, a good longbow wielded by a well-trained archer was considerably more effective than any gun on the planet by almost any measure.
Wrong.
Ironically, Christopher, NOTHING in your rant preceding this actually contradicts anything at all about what NoR said regarding the rules of that gun range.
If the father had kept a handgun in the house, perhaps he could have prevented the armed assailant from escaping into the woods.
Those charts aren’t for gun ownership, they ask if there is a gun in the house. Gallup makes no effort to determine if the actual number of people owning guns has changed. I suppose I can’t blame you, since they put in a misleading title…but you could at least read the actual content at the link.
Oh Christopher,
I also note that you have omitted a rule of gun safety.
5. Store firearms and ammunition separately and securely.
It has already been stated upthread that if you are being a responsible gun owner, guns are worthless as self-defense.
The prerecorded sound of a shotgun shell being chambered could have some utility, although twice I have scared off thieves simply by saying hi to them.
Those numbers are what a statistical sampling of people felt comfortable telling a phone survey person and indicates access to a firearm. Since America doesn’t have a universal list of legal gun owners, statistics like this are as good as we’re going to get.
Or you could look at sales, but yearly increasing gun sales doesn’t quite fit with the “gun ownership is going down” theory.
Equally high levels of skill only. If the people taking the shots are of lower skill levels then it is a different story entirely.
Bows are 1. harder to aim effectively, and 2. the arrows impact with less force and do less peripheral damage to the tissue that they strike. This doesn’t matter if you are skilled and hit a lethal area, since both are powerful enough to kill on a single strike. But if you are less skilled than that, and aren’t guaranteed to hit a lethal area, the greater damage done by the bullet means that you have a greater chance of getting a kill-shot with your aim slightly off than with a bow. All other things being equal, a gun is an easier weapon to use effectively than a bow.
Take two experts with their respective weapons of equal skill and the two weapons may be equally deadly (but only in a very narrow range of circumstances – the gun is the more versatile weapon and will be superior in a wider range of circumstances). Take two amateurs of equal skill (or lack thereof) and the one with the gun is superior virtually every time.
This was in fact the main reason firearms displaced longbows and crossbows on the late medieval battlefields, even though at that time the bows were still superior weapons in range, rate of fire, accuracy, and deadliness. Bows were harder to use. Archers took more time and resources to train. If you lost an archer to battle attrition it costs your side more and is harder to replace than if you lost a musketman.
not wrong
Why would you do that? What is the point of an unloaded gun? What extra safety does locking up ammo and the fire separately provide. If someone is going to jack your gun safe, they’ll also jack your ammo safe.
The terminal ballistics of a broadhead is far worse than any handgun round and most rifle rounds. Bullets aren’t magic. If they don’t hit something important (CNS, major circulatory component, or hard organ) you’ll probably survive if you can get to the hospital before sepsis sets in. Same with a bow, only a broadhead is many times the diameter of the largest bullet you can reasonably fire from a small arm.
Wat? The question was “Do you have a gun in your home?”. Later on, it’s noted that
So no, it does not indicate that. If you truly believe it does indicate that, you’re saying that your kids have “access to a firearm” (as do anyone that breaks into the house), and you’re a terrible gun owner.
Yes, because it’s not as if even the right wing media was covering that existing gun owners were scrambling to buy more guns because they thought Obama was going to take them away. Best to assume that gun sales imply “a new gun owner” in every case. Oh, and from your link on gun sales:
Let’s also ignore how many of those requests were either duplicated or denied. Yeah, that definitely seems to be the sensical approach. Just ignore that requests don’t map one-to-one with gun sales, let alone to gun owners. No need to deal with what one can support with facts, there’s an agenda at stake! FOURTEEN MILLIOOOOOOOON!!!!
*reads christopher’s latest bilge*
Le sigh, I must get to the store before it closes. I am certain that you will not lack for answers to your questions.
Even as late as the 1800s, until the advent of reliable breech-loading repeating rifles, the longbow remained superior to the gun in rate of fire, accuracy, and range, when wielded by a master bowman.
The problem with longbowmen in battle was that these master bowmen had to train for decades to attain that level of skill, and so they could not be easily replaced. And they had to fire and aim their bows standing up, which made them defenceless sitting ducks for enemy snipers armed with guns.
@Christopher in #373:
So are you claiming that the rate of gun ownership is responsible for the decline in violent crime rates between 1991 and 2010?
Because the chart you linked to indicates that self-reported gun ownership has fluctuated significantly in that same span of time.
Now admittedly, I don’t have a yearly breakdown on violent crime rates for the same period, but the statistics Audley posted in #346 indicated an overall decrease in the homicide rate of 51% over the last 21 years. The chart you linked to indicates an overall decrease in the rate of self-reported gun ownership of 3% over that same period of time.
Audley‘s statistics also indicated that the homicide rate stagnated between 2000 and 2008. According to your chart, the rate of gun ownership fluctuated by 5% over the same time period, with a generous assumption of an overall increase of 1% in gun ownership across it.
Audley‘s statistics further indicated that the homicide rate dropped by 0.5% in 2009, while your chart indicates a continually declining gun ownership rate from about late 2007 to late 2010 (down 3% over that period).
To bastardize Inigo Montoya: “I do not think those statistics mean what you think they mean.”
lol. from the link:
Not jusdt storage, but on your person two. As to the safety factor, your weapon can’t accidently discharge while carrying it in a crowded area. Better know as DUH, Gads, are you stupid. And it shows.
Maybe, except that I can burn through the whole magazine in the time it takes you to nock your second arrow. And good luck shooting an arrow one-handed if you get hit in the arm.
Look, when you’re reduced to defending a “bow versus gun” argument to avoid admitting that you’ve made a weak point, don’t you think you should stop? You brought a knife to a gunfight with that one, chum. :)
Any bullet that fragments and tumbles on impact does far more damage from fragmentation and cavitation than any arrowhead of any reasonably imaginable design or proportion. The massive difference in impact velocity alone more than makes up for any difference in projectile mass. The cavitation bubble easily exceeds area of affect diameter than any imaginable arrow, and while arrows damage by cutting and maybe crushing, cavitation pulps tissue.
The wounds of any arrow strike that is not instantly lethal are MUCH easier to treat medically than equivalently non-immediately lethal bullet wounds.
The point, for people who aren’t selfish assholes, is that nobody can accidentally shoot somebody else.
Like the father who was recently shot and killed by his 3 year old in Indiana.
But you are still whining about bows being as deadly as rifles.
Never mind that it takes a great deal of strength to cock a bow, and even more to shoot with any accuracy.
What is your point in posting here in any case?
Oh, and Christopher, can you tell us how often you have used your weapoon in public? If zero, why do you still carry it? Another DUH.
Note the blatant dishonesty here of the false equivocation. MOST rifle rounds. The broadhead is ONE type of arrow. All it takes is ONE type of rifle round to be more deadly, and the argument is dead.
As for the handgun comparison, come back when you can fire a broadhead arrow with a bow that you can hold, draw and aim with a single hand, is shorter than 6 inches and can be stored in a pocket.
Ooo! Ooo! But what if the arrowhead was dipped in Poison Arrow Frog toxin?
Bullets are WAY less lethal than arrows!
Inigo Montoya @386
I’m pretty sure Chris is just bullshitting at this point.
Both gallop and GSS surveyed ~1000 people. Both report numbers in the same ~40% region. I don’t think either can be totally relied on, especially when year to year changes are just a few percentage points. Neither show a dramatic drop or rise in self reported gun ownership over time. The only thing they really show is that gun ownership is fairly consistent over time. With a rising population, that would translate into more total guns available (population rise would also help explain the rise in sales).
I don’t see how any of the three data points (two small surveys and the record of every transaction through an FFL) show gun ownership is decreasing. They definitely don’t show as dramatic of a change as the homicide rate over that time period.
Christopher,
I admit I’d forgotten the mass killing you link to @371 – but I’d point out this, like the previous two in the UK (Dunblane and Hungerford) was carried out with legally owned guns, suggesting that the law needs to be tightened further.
It doesn’t if guns are allowed in through lax border controls, no. The solution to that would seem to be better enforcement, not making still more guns available for criminals to acquire. Presumably, you think that if the UK weakened its gun controls, gun crime would fall – at least, that’s the logic of your position.
Actually, the trends for the US and Canada look pretty similar, while your source has clearly doctored the last part of that for the UK (the footnote states that the statistics since 1997-8 have been adjusted to take account of a change in the way crimes are recorded, but does not explain how). here are the real England and Wales homicide statistics for the last 10 years, showing a considerable decline – mostly due to a reduction in domestic violence, which in the UK, rarely involves gun use (the reduction is thought to be due to better enforcement). I note also that at all times the US rates are massively above those for Canada and the UK, and that your source attributes the rise in homicides in the 60s onwards to liberalism. Is that your own view?
I’m pretty sure in fact that a good bow will out-range a handgun, and have superior accuracy. But the mere comparison of the two is another blatantly dishonesty apples-oranges type comparison. Bows are hunting weapons (or sporting, but the bow sports are basically simulated hunting when it comes right down to it). Only an idiot (or someone starving and desperate) hunts with a handgun.
Handguns are weapons designed to be used AGAINST PEOPLE IN COMPARATIVELY CONFINED SPACES. Like assault rifles and machine guns, handguns are designed specifically to kill people.
[Emphasis original.]
Absolutely true; I suppose I should have been more precise.
Speaking from experience (and inexperience), it’s a lot easier for a novice to hit something smaller than, say, a car with a gun than with a bow, and that just gets more true the farther away the target is.
If anything, NICS checks underestimate things.
Many people buy more than one firearm in a single transaction in order to ameliorate the background check over multiple firearms.
In many states, sales of used guns don’t have to go through the system and thus aren’t recorded. But since those guns are already in circulation, those transactions won’t alter the totals much.
I don’t currently live in a location where getting a concealed and carry permit is viable, so I never carry in public. I have used a firearm on my property to get a thief to leave empty handed. My wife used a firearm on our property to get a peeping tom (or possibly worse if the situation was allowed to unfold) to leave promptly. In neither case was a round fired.
that’s not even true. you can look at the chart I showed you and see the drop in gun ownership and then a small spike in some guns likely due to “ZOMG Obama is coming for our guns” BS. however, each of the three graphs shows gun ownership lower than in 1970
You can also dip the bullet into poison arrow frog poison! (And it’s only valid to compare the two).
But, it depends on the poison, but some of them are still easier to treat medically than your average high velocity rifle bullet wound with fragmentation and cavitation effects. Some of them are neurotoxins that paralyze the diaphragm, and if you get to the victim fast enough, intubate him and mechanically ventilate him, some of those poisons can be cleared from the system and have their effects wear-off in time (or you can find an antivenom) and the victim will recover. Indeed, some of the muscle relaxants used in modern anesthesia were originally derived from hunting poisons of this sort, and they work in the same manner – the muscle relaxant paralyzes the patients muscles, the patient is supported by intubation and mechanical ventilation for the duration of the anesthesia, and then the effect wears off, the medication is cleared from the system, and the patient wakes up fine.
Nope, it was just the best graph I could find on short notice.
I’m a proud gun owning liberal atheist humanist myself. I’m quite disturbed by the theocratic, fascist right wing that has grown like a cancer in American society.
Then in each case, an unloaded but real weapon could have done the samme job in a safer manner as a scare tactic. And you know it…This is why we don’t take your word at face value. There are safer ways for everybody to do the same thing, and you have a obvious agenda and trouble with the truth..
Curses! Foiled again!
I didn’t know that.
That’s very cool; thanks for sharing it.
but do they underestimate them more now than in the past? the other way round?
point is, you can’t use that at all to determine whether gun sales are on the rise, because you don’t know how the correlation between total gun sales and NICS checks has changed over time.
You don’t point a gun at someone if you aren’t willing or able to shoot them. That is a bluff you never want called.
I am thrilled that both situations ended with no one hurt. If either situation escalated, I would much rather have a real gun in hand than an airsoft pistol or novelty lighter.
Just because a dimondback can get most threats to move along with a quick rattle, doesn’t mean that fangs and venom is useless.
lol. parochialism strikes again. the “liberalism” in KG’s comment is not what you think it is. It means neo-conservatism/libertarianism.
Same with a bow, only a broadhead is many times the diameter of the largest bullet you can reasonably fire from a small arm.
Arrows don’t cause the kind of hydrostatic shock that a supersonic bullet does. FYI. They’re mighty lethal, no doubt, but there’s a reason why bullets are preferred. And let’s not talk about the terminal ballistics of a .50 bmg round…
do you know what mimicry is?
And even further, if you establish correlation to gun sales that doesn’t tell you squat about gun ownership. Christopher kept using ~14 million checks to imply a well-armed populace (implying 14 million more people with guns; one guy with 14 million guns isn’t much of a protection from tyranny). But unless you can further tie sales to people, you can’t say anything knowledgeable about the preponderance (or lack thereof) of gun owners.
The terminal ballistics of a broadhead is far worse than any handgun round
BTW, my .308 t/c encore would like to politely disagree with that. As would my .50 desert eagle.
And this sort of thing, interestingly, may have in fact already been done. The infamous ricin-pellet umbrella-gun assassinations the KGB reputedly carried out during the cold war. The firing mechanism is hypothesized to be either a gunpowder charge or a compressed air cylinder, making the thing a true gun/air gun.
(Of course, if it was spring-loaded instead, it would technically be a bow, I think).
I know the difference between classical liberalism, libertarianism, neoconservatism, neoliberals, and what right-wingers mean when they say “liberal”. The link in question was using the last definition.
I support many of the positions of classical liberalism and respect some of the personal freedom stances of libertarians, but I also fully support a socialized infrastructure (including health and elderly care). I find the neocons and neolibs to be two heads of the same hydra that is devouring our world.
Right wingers definitely call me “liberal”.
Wouldn’t you know, an armed society truly is a polite society!
The infamous ricin-pellet umbrella-gun assassinations the KGB reputedly carried out during the cold war.
That was not a quick kill; it took several days for the victim to die.
Are we still talking “home defense” here? Because if you can get your attacker to sit down to a home-cooked meal of “eggs litvinenko”* you can be sure they won’t bother you again.
(*The literal opposite of “eggs benedict” I suppose)
plus, you’d have to determine how many of the total sales are additional gun sales. gun shows for example often involve people selling guns to each other, and a gun that’s changing ownership from one well-armed gunnut to another is not a gun that increases ownership
It stops your heart quickly instead of slowly?
.308 maybe, but the barrel is so short you’d probably not get any fragmentation or even much hydrostatic shock (which is highly overrated as a wounding mechanism). Plus most .308 rounds aren’t known for their fragmentation abilities, unlike M193.
The .50DE is just another handgun round: barely over the speed of sound with no deep fragmentation or hydrostatic shock. Even using a hollow point, there won’t be enough expansion to make a larger wound path than a broadhead.
Biology analogy fail.
For rattlesnakes (or any venomous snake), fangs and venom are NOT DEFENSIVE WEAPONS. They are OFFENSIVE, for hunting and killing. Their defence is bluff and deterrence. When snakes bite in self-defence they will often dry-bite, to conserve their venom for hunting. In fact one can quite easily say that every defensive envenomation by a snake is a MISTAKE by the snake, a costly waste of venom, which is very expensive metabolically to make.
Because the snake’s venom, no matter how potent, does not immediately incapacitate a large predator like a big cat or a human with a shovel, or something like that, using venom in its defence bite does the snake NO GOOD WHATSOEVER. If the implied threat of venom and a dry bite was not enough to deter the predator, then an envenomated bite adds nothing to the equation, as by the time the venom takes effect, the snake will have already been killed by the determined predator that was not deterred by either the threat display or the pain of the bite (dry or otherwise).
Indeed, all venomous snakes would in fact enormously benefit if snakes could get together, pass and enforce venom-control laws that mandate the exclusive use of venom for hunting, and allow only dry bites and displays for self-defence.
Of course, snakes don’t have the necessary neural capacity to do this.
Do humans?
Right wingers call lots of things by labels that are not accurate.
And if they did, would any other animals care about the rattle any more if it was no longer associated with possible death (regardless of whether or not the snake lived)? Or would the rattle become useless and therefore unused with the snakes biting without warning as a last ditch effort? The latter seems to be actually happening due to human pressure.
apparently I misread what KG’s comment referred to. Mostly because I wouldn’t have expected anyone, not eve you, to source their information from such bugfuck sites as that one. O.o
In Christopher’s world, it appears that policemen arm themselves with handguns, and militaries equip their infantry with rifles, purely from aesthetic choice, seeing as crossbows with broadheads and exactly and equally effective as lethal weapons.
True dat, but I still uphold many of the classical liberal ideals, so I wear the label with pride. Plus I am very happy to be classified in another group from those mouth breathers. As the old joke goes, if heaven is full of christians, send me to hell.
That would depend on the specific wording of the snake-collective’s venom-control laws. But the snakes would first have to evolve hands and invent writing.
Another biology analogy fail. The rattles are disappearing not because they have become useless (they are still useful for deterring other predators), but because they have become a liability when dealing with humans. The humans don’t respond by backing down from the sound of the rattle, but instead respond by homing in on the sound and killing the snake. So the snakes have changed their behavior.
But crucially, this changed behavior is not an improvement on their condition as it might have been before they had a rattle or if they had never had a rattle. The snakes are simply worse off all-around and are trying to make the best of it.
I have used a firearm on my property to get a thief to leave empty handed.
so you’re saying you’re willing to commit murder to protect your stuff?
this is “culture of violence” right there. O.o
Christopher may in fact be generally politically liberal. He may be correct on some of the details of what he’s talking about (to an extent, I see his point about the uselessness of an unloaded gun). It doesn’t mean that he’s not largely wrong on this issue, but it also doesn’t mean that you can draw too many larger conclusions about him.
Does anyone else note how the cases of, “Talking people down from shooting/stabbing/etc. with a gun”, would have worked just as well if the person getting them to stop had something that **looked** exactly like a real gun? And, yet, there seems to be no obvious awareness that they might have been the other person, under the right stresses, or that if that other person hadn’t had one either…
Think pretty much everything else I could have said was in this thread, including the, “How the hell do you expect to defend against tyranny by the people that own more guns than you, or control the military?” Because, the reality is, either they split, or they choose sides, and since we are talking about the US military, not some place buying surplus crap from other countries, if they side with the tyrants, your screwed anyway.
blockquote fail.
so you’re saying you’re willing to commit murder to protect your stuff?
this is “culture of violence” right there. O.o
Which is exactly what would happen if people only used prop guns to get intruders to leave….
Uh, those rattles aren’t props.
Remember, “Just because a dimondback can get most threats to move along with a quick rattle, doesn’t mean that fangs and venom is useless.”
What the hell is wrong with you?
Christopher,
So, you didn’t bother to enquire whether your source was likely to be honest, e.g. not likely to be cherry-picking, or distorting data – it seemed to support your position, so you used it.
Evidently it doesn’t bother you that you are aligning yourself with that theocratic, fascist right wing.
No I am willing to commit murder if my life or the life of those around me is threatened by another. I didn’t feel threatened in that incident. I am also willing to risk my life to stand up and maintain the peace: whether that means confronting a thief in the night or someone abusing another in public. I would prefer it if the trouble makers in question back down with a simple threat, but acknowledge that when people are confronted while committing a crime, they could very well attack the interloper.
so that’s a “yes”, effectively.
What the hell is wrong with you?
The analogy is thus:
rattle :: brandishing a firearm like object
venom & fangs :: a loaded firearm
The display (rattle or brandishing) only works to get someone to back off if they honestly believe that the display is backed up by something more profound.
If snakes only rattled and didn’t have fangs and venom, no one would respond to a rattle with caution. If people only displayed fake firearms, no one would respond to a brandished firearm like object with caution.
Is the analogy really that obtuse?
Jadehawk and Christopher:
Do you actually believe the shit that you type, or are you perfectly comfortable lying?
Yes, because as has been pointed out, rattlesnakes are not being killed by humans because the humans believe that rattlesnake won’t back up the threat.
For fuck’s fucking sake.
Yes, because the post you were responding to was discussing a creature (humans) that don’t really care about the venom. The point being made was that the rattle (brandishing a firearm like object) was actually counterproductive when it comes to this creature. For the analogy to work, your point would have to be that brandishing a firearm like object is a bad idea no matter what, because as soon as the human hears it they will hunt you down and murder you, whether or not you have venom and fangs.
In short, the analogy was a non-starter because you didn’t seem to process what the person you were responding to was saying in the first place.
No, that is a “no” effectively. If it were “yes” effectively, I would have shot them, not just yelled at them in the nude from behind a loaded gun.
I am willing to confront someone who is breaking the peace.
I am willing to kill someone if they threaten the life of myself or someone in my presence.
Not all breaches of the peace are by someone who is threatening the life of another. And even in those cases, they can often be subdued without killing them.
But if everything goes wrong and you have to make a choice between dying and killing, I’ll kill. I don’t want to kill, and hope to die of old age in my bed without killing, but I would if necessary.
That does not mean I would kill over stuff, only over life.
I’ll make the comparison explicit, since you have trouble following your own trains of thought:
That’s the this part: “The display (rattle or brandishing) only works to get someone to back off if they honestly believe that the display is backed up by something more profound.”
So, is it working on humans? Are they killing the snakes because they’re not actually scared?
No.
Yeah? Because the rattlesnake’s fangs are now like an unloaded gun?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Where the fuck did I lie, asshole?
Oh god, not that fucking “Rough men ready to due violence on your behalf” shit! I was a SIGINT analyst in the military, and I can’t remember how many guys had that dumb quote posted somewhere in the barracks, like they were going to crypt-analyze “the enemy” to death or some shit. Always sounded like a marketing slogan for a gay escort agency specializing in BDSM.
I wasn’t the one that brought up human/snake interactions. The initial analogy was in reference to the pre-columbian environment that the snakes evolved in. Most bigger animals give rattlers a wide berth when they rattle because the threat is valid.
Since you seem to be ignoring it, what Jadehawk was initially pointing out is that you were ostensibly breaking one of the basic rules about firearms:
Perhaps what you mean to say is that you didn’t actually point the gun at him, and you just flashed it? Otherwise, it is “yes” effectively, or you were breaking the most basic rule of gun ownership. I’m only pointing this out because you don’t seem to realize why Jadehawk is reading “yes”, and has not been given any reason not to (you waffling about it doesn’t change the initial conflict presented).
Where the fuck did you get that?
fangs & venom :: a loaded firearm
ie the viable action that backs up the display
The person was a thief. You chased them off with a weapon you admit you would have used, had they not run away.
If you’re unwilling to kill someone over property, you do not wave a loaded weapon you intend to use at them.
And I didn’t say you lied. There are two options in that comment, the first being that you don’t actually understand what words mean.
Frankly, I’m leaning toward that estimation of you.
and you’re willing to escalate the former into the latter. hence, effectively “yes”.
I was willing to see them shot if the situation progressed to a point where I felt my life was threatened.
My finger was off the trigger, I was aware of my backstop, and I treated the gun as loaded. I didn’t negligently discharge my weapon. I was as safe as the situation would allow.
From this, stupid:
.308 maybe, but the barrel is so short you’d probably not get any fragmentation or even much hydrostatic shock (which is highly overrated as a wounding mechanism). Plus most .308 rounds aren’t known for their fragmentation abilities, unlike M193.
I’ve used it to crush cinderblocks. Try that with your broadhead and get back to me. The Encore’s barrel is 12″ and the round is supersonic at the muzzle. You get plenty of hydrostatic shock, believe me. I’ve greatly enjoyed shooting watermelons with the thing; they stretch out on the axis of the bullet’s passage most impressively. Why? Energy transfer. LOTS of energy transfer. I use .308 military surplus ball, so even without expansion, it’s hitting the target extremely hard.
Perhaps you’ve convinced a few of the less firearms-experienced readers of this blog that you know what you’re talking about, but anyone who has a lot of range-time is probably laughing at your right now.
Keep shovelling.
The .50DE is just another handgun round: barely over the speed of sound with no deep fragmentation or hydrostatic shock. Even using a hollow point, there won’t be enough expansion to make a larger wound path than a broadhead.
Well, if you knew anything about guns you’d have known that the Desert Eagle only feeds JHPs, so, yeah, it’s a hollow-point. 1600 ft/lbs of energy at the muzzle; it’s fine for crushing cinderblocks and liquifying watermelons. So is a .44 magnum, which actually has about the same muzzle energy.
Yes, it’s “just another handgun round” and an elephant is “just another really large mouse-like creature”
You’re mincing words very finely, here. As if the amount of hydrostatic shock you get from any of those rounds is not greater than the big fat zero you get with an arrow. An arrow does not hit its target hard enough to knock bone-chips out through the back of it, which a .44 mag, .50 ae, or .308 will. And let’s not talk about the .220 swift. I have a 12″ barrel for the Encore in that calibre too; sure the rounds aren’t coming out at 4000+fps but 3000’ll do ya.
This isn’t mine but check at 2:48 and tell me if your broadhead’ll do that to a watermelon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2tHAw-_DBM
I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t instantly raise their hand if given a choice between taking a .44 mag round or a .308 compared to a broadhead. Seriously.
(BTW, for those who wonder: I only shoot paper, cinderblocks, watermelons, and hard drives; my guns are simply for entertainment and live securely locked up when not in use. I have no illusions about the usefulness of guns for defending one’s home or shooting down black helicopters.)
If they hadn’t run away and instead chose to escalate things, then I wouldn’t be protecting property, I would be protecting my life.
If a cop shoots someone because they pulled a gun when confronted while thieving, did the cop kill them over property or because they felt that their life was in danger?
DO violence I should say! Bottom ten percent people, bottom ten percent.
Give Christopher some credit, he wasn’t going to shoot some would-be thieves over stuff. That would be barbaric.
He was going to escalate the situation by threatening them over stuff and putting himself in danger over stuff, then he was going to shoot them to protect himself. It’s completely different.
Also, please help support my “Guns for Snakes” intiative, which you can find on Kickstarter. If we reach $100,000 we’re going to return them to Ireland.
FFS.
YOU escalated the situation by pulling out a fucking loaded gun.
Jesus Christ.
DID THIS THIEF PULL A GUN ON YOU?
dude. you’re the one escalating things when you point a deadly weapon at someone; especially considering that you believe one shouldn’t point a weapon at someone unless willing to kill.
both. because wtf? why is the cop pulling a gun on a thief?
Which is a secondary analogy brought up by another that none the less supports my point. What happens when the threat isn’t backed up by a viable action? Those you threaten will ignore the threat and kill you. Hence, pointing a prop gun at someone is totally not the same as pointing a loaded gun at someone.
I don’t feel like nor do I have the time right now to relink them all again but there are a number of studies here in the comments showing that owning a gun or living in a home where guns are present significantly increase your chance of being killed, injured or committing suicide by firearm.
No, it doesn’t, fuckhead, because the rattlesnake has a viable attack to back up the threat. If the rattles were known bluffs, humans wouldn’t attack the rattlesnakes out of fear.
Christopher:
I’ve agreed with at least one of your points, but this one leaves me cold. Why in the hell are you “confronting” people with a loaded gun for “breaking the peace”? Are you a police officer? What I see is someone escalating a situation from theft to potential homicide, and for what? Why are you brandishing a weapon at a thief?
It hardly matters. This dumbfuck doesn’t even comprehend his own goddamn analogies.
oh and since we’re on this lovely topic. do you know that when deciding whether someone is pulling a gun or not, people are often making racist split-second decisions, and that’s why unarmed black men end up getting murdered because of the fucked up, violent logic you’re using?
your logic is part of what you’ve called the culture of violence. the reasoning that it’s ok to escalate a physically harmless encounter by introducing a deadly weapon into it.
If a cop shoots someone because they pulled a gun when confronted while thieving, did the cop kill them over property or because they felt that their life was in danger?
The cop killed them over property. Because it depends on how they were confronted.
There are these things called radios and loudspeakers. A cop can call for backup and wait, then they can get on the horn and yell, “excuse us? this is the police and we’d like to talk to you…”
Your presupposition is that the cop placed themself in a situation where violence was necessary and that the criminal chose to commit suicide by cop. That’s not a valid supposition.
I live on a farm in rural PA and I periodically have to deal with trespassers, hunters, ATVers, etc. I don’t go out and confront them; I call the state police and the state police go out and yell on the megaphone and tell them, “This is the state police. Please come over here a minute.” It just works.
Wound track for handgun rounds.
Wound track for a broadhead
Energy (ft/lbs) is a rather poor metric for terminal ballistic performance. Wound track data through ballistic gel is a far better indicator.
Some ATVers on the back 40 is not the same thing as someone in your fenced yard, in the middle of the night, committing a felony. I also live in a rural county, 2000 square miles and only two cops on duty at night. Moreover, I initially thought that it was cats making noise, but if I’m going to investigate bumps in the night I’m going to take the flashlight with a gun attached in case it isn’t cats.
Wound track for handgun rounds.
Wound track for a broadhead
You’re moving the goalposts. And I bet you had to search around to find some ballistic gel pictures that didn’t include wound tracks for a .357 mag or a .44 mag.
And I noticed that you “missed” the point I made about the .200 swift or the .308. You’re really wriggling, aren’t you?
.44 mag in ballistic gel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXhCHhFFIFc
Fuck your stupid broadhead you intellectually dishonest creep.
Wound track for a .308 round, which can be fired from a handgun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-Zip_b-5RQ
Fuck your silly broadhead. The entire block disintegrates.
CHristopher,
I’m still waiting for an explanation of why, if a bow is as lethal as a gun, the military, and all but a tiny handful of criminals and hunters, use firearms. Also an explanation of how you would kill multiple people within a few seconds with a bow, and how you would carry it into a shopping mall or temple without it being detected.
Some ATVers on the back 40 is not the same thing as someone in your fenced yard, in the middle of the night, committing a felony.
You’re wriggling again. I notice how you left out the “hunters” from my comment. And who said anything about my back 40? I’ve had idiots with deer rifles camping out close enough to my house that I’ve opened the bedroom window and yelled at them to go away. After the first time one of them lifted a rifle in my general direction I switched to calling the state police.
It is a better deterrent than inviting them in for tea.
Christopher care to refute any of the links about firearm ownership and increase risk in the thread I linked to above in #460?
Let’s not forget Mexicans. One was shot in the back of the head not far from the house I grew up in a few weeks ago. He “looked to be grabbing something from his waistband, where many gang members carry guns”.
(note: I also wonder if Christopher is being knowingly intellectually dishonest by referring to those “track” pictures in ballistic gel using static jpegs instead of motion captures. Because once the gel has snapped back together it doesn’t look quite as bad. When you actually see the size of the cavity produced by the impact, you can see that there’s a gigantic difference between what a broadhead does and what a bullet does. It’s why people use guns instead of arrows. Duh.)
Firearms have qualities other than projectile effectiveness that make them better choices for most tasks. I never claimed a bow was better than a gun, merely that a bow could be just as deadly as a gun.
You can easily kill unarmed people with a machete. Being detected didn’t seem to be a hindrance in any of those incidents.
(Warning, don’t click on that link. It is disgusting. No one should see it. On the upside, google answered my question. The internet is fucking great and fucking depressing at the same time.)
once again we’re back at willing to kill for stuff. why do you think it’s ok to escalate a situation by pulling a gun on a thief?
So you admit that you’ve been arguing in bad faith this entire time?
the “tasks” a gun performs are killing tasks. a gun is better at different kinds of killings, but it’s still not more deadly?
nonsense.
Well, it is his stuff. It’s nice stuff. It’s not his fault if they don’t shrivel and run off when he shows his piece. They’re choosing suicide by homeowner.
You can easily kill unarmed people with a machete.
Yes, so why didn’t you confront your thied with a machete?
Checkmate.
Or a bow? Or a car?
So you admit that you’ve been arguing in bad faith this entire time?
He won’t do that. But he’s very carefully selecting what he says; he’s more interested in “winning” a silly argument on a blog than in getting at any kind of truth.
Christopher:
A foolishly flippant answer to the only person who has been remotely sympathetic to your position proves pretty strongly that you’ve been arguing not from ignorance, but in bad faith. I wash my hand of you.
Hydrostatic shock isn’t totally accepted as a valid wounding mechanism until you get over 600 ft/lbs distributed over 1ft, equivalent to ~1000psi internal pressure wave. Most handgun rounds are incapable of that, thus the crush path is the only useful wounding mechanism.
Hydrostatic shock isn’t totally accepted
Look! The goalposts! Now they’re over here! OOoooooO!
Because I have no way of knowing that they are “only” a thief. If someone is rooting around in my personal space at midnight, they could have any number of intentions, many of which could necessitate using a gun in self defense. Thus having a gun handy is prudent. If the situation doesn’t qualify as one where I would need to protect my life or those of my household, the gun doesn’t get used as anything more than a snake’s rattle.
I have always maintained that hydrostatic shock isn’t a factor in handgun wounding potential, no matter how dramatic shooting watermelons is. That opinion is backed up by current science.
Where did the goal posts move from and to?
Because I don’t have a flashlight attached to my machete.
Specifically, what did you count as your “personal space” in this specific case. Because if there was a single lockable door between you and the thief, behind which you could have called the cops, you’re simply wrong.
So you are admitting that the entire schtick about bows was just a distraction tactic.
And now you’re starting a new one about machetes. If the reason for the much greater level of homicides in the US is a generalised “culture of violence” rather than the availability and valorisation of guns, why are there vastly more homicides – and other crimes – carried out with guns rather than bows or machetes?
So we as a society should invite thieves to take whatever they want with no resistance? I don’t think that’s right. I think we should resist, but that doesn’t mean I think thieves should be shot on site.
I thought I’ve made it quite clear that I believe that deadly force should only be used when your or anothers life is in danger. If a thief thinks my stuff is worth more than my life, then I will resist with deadly force, otherwise I’m perfectly fine with posturing. I’m pretty sure the thief I escorted off my property won’t try that shit again on someone else. Everyone walked home alive and there is one less person thieving. Sounds like a win-win to me.
Christopher, you’re using the words “resisting” and “posturing” but what you mean is “escalating a situation as an excuse to use deadly force… and it that case, I say it makes you a murderer.
If you don’t treat the culture of violence, then a ban guns will result in a slightly more clunky, but equally deadly item taking its place and thus no change in the overall murder rate.
Is my premise still unclear?
dumbest thing I’ve heard today.
Not in my state:
Homicide is also justifiable when committed by any person in any of the following cases:
1.When resisting any attempt to murder any person, or to commit a felony, or to do some great bodily injury upon any person; or,
2.When committed in defense of habitation, property, or person, against one who manifestly intends or endeavors, by violence or surprise, to commit a felony, or against one who manifestly intends and endeavors, in a violent, riotous or tumultuous manner, to enter the habitation of another for the purpose of offering violence to any person therein; or,
3.When committed in the lawful defense of such person, or of a wife or husband, parent, child, master, mistress, or servant of such person, when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony or to do some great bodily injury, and imminent danger of such design being accomplished; but such person, or the person in whose behalf the defense was made, if he was the assailant or engaged in mutual combat, must really and in good faith have endeavored to decline any further struggle before the homicide was committed; or,
4.When necessarily committed in attempting, by lawful ways and means, to apprehend any person for any felony committed, or in lawfully suppressing any riot, or in lawfully keeping and preserving the peace.
So your state sanctions murder. Fucking lovely.
Furthermore, I was unwilling to shoot just to apprehend. I let him go off into the night to live another day with lessons learned rather than to violently apprehend him. Just leaving us alone was all I desired.
yeah. dead thieves are a much better potential result than stolen stuff.
this? this is your precious culture of violence.
if guns are better at some things than other items, then those other items are not equally deadly.
Should they be shot off-site?