Not all of them, just most of them. And I’d like to have every gun registered, and sold in a regulated way, no more of this “gun show” shit. And I’d like to have serious restrictions on who can own guns — like, if you’ve been convicted of domestic violence, you don’t get to fondle guns anymore. Let’s ban all those assault rifles and any weapon that can be fired fast enough that you can murder 50 people in short order. We should also criminalize the NRA, because they’re already destructive enough to society.
I’m looking at this list of NRA contributions in the last election, and it’s kind of eye-opening. The only Democrat who received any donations from the NRA was Hillary Clinton, and it was more of a pathetic token tip.
Over $11 million to elect Trump, almost $20 million to oppose Clinton? Yeah, that $265 she got from the NRA is more of an insult than a donation. Then there’s this list of all the NRA blood money recipients who also sent fucking thoughts & prayers
to the Las Vegas massacre victims.
By the way, that murderous asshole hauled 23 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition to his hotel room. Shouldn’t owning that many weapons be indicative of a pathology that makes the person a danger to their community? This was a sick man — not sick in the sense of mentally ill, but sick in the sense of possessing a vicious, deadly criminality.
Oh, one more thing I want: repeal the second amendment. It’s been twisted far beyond its original intent, for those who have a religious devotion to the intent of the Founding Fathers, and its original intent was selfish, elitist, and racist, for those who don’t.
I suspect I won’t get any of my wishes met in my lifetime, though, because this country is run by plutocrats with millions of yahoos in their pockets.
I just read that 3% of people in the US own 60% of the guns. Something like that. I, too, think it’s time to shut down the NRA (a terrorist group), ban automatic rifles, ban huge munitions magazines (as California has done), and other common sense measures. And, last but not least, repeal the Second Amendment. The militias referenced there, as well as modern police, are basically descendants of slave patrols, which were designed to keep African American slaves in line. Is there any doubt that if the Las Vegas shooter had been African American, he’d’ve been shot before he even got to that hotel with all of his guns? Additionally, if he were Muslim, or looked like he was Muslim, he’d’ve been called a terrorist? It’s time to call these mass shooting by white men what they are–terrorism–and to make gun laws accordingly.
In addition, at least what the Swiss do, in order to buy ammunition, you must:
Also, for the Swiss military-issued guns kept at home, the ammunition is not kept at home (with a few exceptions), but at military facilities.
I think that people who own guns should have gun insurance, as well as a license to own them. We license people to own cars and then require them to have insurance to drive them. Well, yes, people in cars kill more people than people with guns—so far—, but that could easily change.
anxionnat@1, “3% of people in the US own 60% of the guns.”
Yes, America’s passion for guns: ownership and violence by the numbers (some editing for formatting reasons (unmarked)):
@1 anxionnat
I can believe that. Just look at this Washington Post article on it – gun ownership is at historic lows in the US, with only slightly more than 1/3 of Americans either owning a gun or living with someone who owns one. But those who do own guns own a lot of them, and that Top 3% of gun owners own on average 25 guns.
This is probably not going to get any better, either. We’re almost at the point where prospective gun owners can make their own guns and ammo without being professional gunsmiths. That will make them virtually impossible to track and register.
That’s weird! Even though I own guns, I actually agree with everything PZ said in this post.
It’s almost as though reasonable people can come to a common understanding and agreement on an issue and together formulate a plan for improvement.
Oh wait, we’re talking about Congress. So, nope, we’re all doomed.
I still own some guns (used to work in law enforcement, BTW), and I agree as well. Stating that for the record, because there’s a caveat coming…
At the same time I think it’s vital to restrict government use of firearms. I say that broadly and vaguely because I don’t necessarily mean “disarm (almost) all police,” although that’s probably what I mean. Regulating guns and regulating the police are theoretically orthogonal issues — we could, hypothetically, do one without the other — but there’s a great deal of feedback between the two. Police brutality is partially justified by the fact that anyone might be armed. If we magically passed a full and complete gun ban tomorrow, this would be used as an excuse to ESCALATE police brutality: now they have the added, “hideously dangerous” task of confiscating weapons, on top of everything else. Especially from those dangerous “urban” types, who will be assumed non-compliant with the new laws (because what else is new?).
It’s false that the 2A works as the right-wingers speculate: restraining government overreach through fear of armed insurrection. But it’s also true that banning guns without demilitarizing the police will exacerbate existing perverse incentives, simultaneously increasing the motivation to violence and diminishing the actual risk.
So it worries me when discussion of gun control focuses exclusively on the private sector and dismisses militarized police as at best a separate and unrelated problem. Enjoying the war on drugs so far? Because when the war on guns breaks out, buckle up baby!
Masked Avenger, don’t the police already confiscate guns when they arrest? How would a confiscation law be different?
Here’s a blue-sky proposal that leaves the 2nd in place: Tax guns. Yes, you can own them, but each one has a tax associated with it. The second and subsequent ones incur a higher tax. A tenth gun would require quite a stiff penalty, indeed. All levied gun taxes fund a non-profit gun control lobbying group.
Here’s another: The president (the next Democratic one,) calls up the militia. All of them. The 2nd makes gun owners a militia. Have the president call them up and send them to war. They can refuse such duty, but only by surrendering every last gun they own.
“Have the president call them up and send them to war. ”
Errrr…. there will be people on the other end of that war. And people with no interest in it, but just happen to be there.
I reset my password and logged in for the first time in at least a year to say that I find PZ’s suggestion reasonable and a good starting point.
Yes, I am a firearms owner (I think about a dozen) but there are plenty of my fellow firearms owners that I find a bit on the scary side. The easy sales at gun shows and the lack of a national database are a huge issue for law enforcement when things like Las Vegas happen.
Personally I haven’t fired any of them in years since I live in the city and you can’t just go out the back door and shoot across the pond like when I was growing up. I also don’t like most of the current crop who show up at firing ranges these days. I do keep them for sentimental reasons, I used to save up my allowance from my grandfather to purchase most of them. We would take a trip to the local WalMart when I had saved up enough to afford them. I don’t have many things left from him but I do have good memories of us spending time together doing target practice.
Hell, if somebody showed up at a hotel in Vegas with 23 pairs of shoes in their luggage, you’d think they were a bit weird.
The reason that will never happen is because such a law would strip at least half of working cops of their weapons. Not that I’d mind, but, y’know.
These are all great ideas! And I speak as a gun owner. I live on a ranch and raise livestock. Every now and then an animal needs to be dispatched humanely… and once, I used a rifle to defend my life. Yes, I really did.
Against a pack of pet dogs. (They were all wearing collars.) If I had not had my rifle with me that day, I would not be here posting this. My Partner would have come home, wondered where I was, noticed all the buzzards in the field…
And I would STILL fully support ANY or even all of these ideas – HAPPY to have a tax. HAPPY to do anything necessary… to end this pointless violence. I would be HAPPY to give up EVERY LAST FIREARM WE OWN. (They were inherited.) More than happy, if it will end the senseless violence or even HELP. This has got to stop.
What we have here in the USA is just plain stupid. No other word for it. Christ of the Andes. Why can’t politicians see this, are the dollars really that blinding? THEY could be next. Don’t they see that?
Some guns, gun components, and accessories are already subject to a transfer tax under US law. This includes automatic weapons and things like silencers that are covered under the National Firearms Act. The tax in most cases is 200 bucks, which hasn’t changed since the NFA was introduced in 1934. The act came about due to the use of automatic weapons by gangs during the Prohibition Era, which were previously unregulated.
jacksprocket @ 9: Yes, war is another problem. To the point where I just assume there’ll always be a war to send our militia off to.
Of course, if we aren’t at war, and gun owners know what will happen when one starts… one won’t start.
As long as the Second Amendment remains on the books, more attention should be focused on the “well regulated” clause. My read on that is that gun control is constitutionally required.
I thought that the Second Amendment was in case of attack by the perfidious Brits.
In case it’s gone unnoticed, we actually left some time ago.
@kestrel #13:
Now, you see, that’s what I call responsible firearm ownership. A similar thing happened in my family, where we went from my granddad teaching his sons to shoot and my dad teaching me to shoot. I’m grateful to them for it (especially since it was my granddad who taught me how to skin and gut a rabbit), and for putting everything into perspective. We’ve gone from several guns to no guns.
But then I’m English, and no longer see much point in owning firearms without having to jump thorough hoops to demonstrate that I absolutely must have one. I can still skin a rabbit; I can still catch one with a snare. What I don’t believe is that my government is going to turn on me in any situation which can be resolved only by violence — that may have been true of powerful lords in the high medieval era but not so much now. The threats you and I face right now, politically speaking, are much much more dangerous. Guns won’t fix that, or at least not as reliably as long-term political argument might.
On the other hand, I suppose, handguns and long guns might fix the problem of overt governmental oppression, if those guns can be used to stop main battle tanks and attack helicopters. Yeah, right…
davidnangle,
They take your gun(s) when they arrest you, sure. But cops actually don’t arrest people all that often. The majority of their encounters are things like traffic stops — temporary detention. In those cases they may decide to do a “Terry search,” which is allowed “for their safety,” in which they check for weapons within your easy access and temporarily take them away. Or they may not. You’d be surprised how many encounters police actually know you have a weapon and just let you keep it. (In those cases it helps to be white, naturally, and it depends on the circumstances as well as the individual cop.)
Under a full and complete gun ban, though, they would always want to confiscate your guns, permanently, and depending how the law was written would also then have to arrest you specifically for possession of a gun. That’s a broad new class of crimes, where every traffic stop just became more likely to end in an arrest and permanent confiscation — and every detainee might have a gun and be determined to make the cops pry it from his cold dead fingers. Cops need probable cause to search for a gun, but the new law will create new edge cases where courts would either restrain cops or further undermine the 4th and 5th amendment protections. For example, knowing that you ever had a gun permit (or hunting license) might be deemed probable cause to search you and your car every time you’re stopped for any reason. As might your gadsden or confederate flag sticker. Etc.
The actual danger to cops would decrease along with the volume of guns in the wild, which would look like exponential decay. But the specter of the rabid gun owner who decides that this speeding ticket is his chance to return his gun “bullets first” and go out in a blaze of glory will be cemented in our culture for a long time to come, and cops will act accordingly.
Yep, that could work. The NFA did exactly that, to limit machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, suppressors (i.e., silencers), etc. When it was passed in 1934, the $200 tax was equivalent to roughly $3,500 today. Nowadays the gun itself cost 2-3x the tax, so people do pay it (especially to get suppressors). A tax indexed to inflation would have teeth.
That would be funny to see, but it wouldn’t work of course. Too many laws have changed over the years; the machinery to do such a thing has atrophied. Kind of like letters of marque and reprisal: technically legal, but logistically impossible.
From Sleeper (1973):
Trickster Goddess @ 17:
“Well-regulated” is a very specific term of art in 18th-Century military parlance. To be “well-regulated”, a military organization must have a rigid and unbreakable rank hierarchy, with rank being assigned by civilian authority. That means no election of officers by the troops. (IOW, most State Militias were not well-regulated at least up to the Civil War era.)
It must also possess a system of discipline so savage that the rank-and-file are much more afraid of their officers than they are of the enemy, and would never dream of running away.
All of this is “essential to the security of a Free State”–the Second Amendment says absolutely nothing about “self-defense” or private gun ownership, now that “The People” (collectively) keep and bear arms six ways from Sunday.
Just another statistic:
Number of Americans killed on battlefields in all wars in history:
1,396,733
Killed by firearms in the US since 1968:
1,516,863
(NYT)
And the good old GOP, of course, insists that the Vegas shooter’s gun arsenal is “a right,” but medical treatment for his 500+ survivors is merely “a privilege.”
Wacko House has apparently received its instructions from the NRA, which were presumably approved by Putin (23:13 mark):
i’ll just leave this here…
“Evidence from 130 studies in 10 countries suggests that in certain nations the simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths.”
https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article/38/1/140/2754868/What-Do-We-Know-About-the-Association-Between
gun control.
it works.
I disagree with your opinion, but I do love the constitution and subsequently your right to express it. Feel free to express it as loudly and as many times as you’d like. But, I also love my constitutional right to own as many guns as I please.
Now, with that being said, if you’d like to come take my guns, please try to come and take them :)
Oooh, a tough guy with guns. Scaaary.
#23- tomh:
So an uninsured victim gets shot by a guntoter exercising their founder-given right. They wind up in hospital for several weeks recovering after extensive surgical intervention to save their life for being in the line of a crazy killer’s gunfire. Does that uninsured victim get billed by the hospital for anything?
OTOH does the victim’s insurer foot the bill for the consequences of NRA propaganda that curtails thoughtful gun regulation?
Who pays?
No, it all is on the shooter, and the first that should happen is confiscation of their penis enhancements, then their actual organ if they can’t/won’t pay. It they won’t pay, they obviously aren’t responsible persons, and don’t need their organs.
I can see reasons for limited gun ownership. Hog hunters are high on the list as protectors of ecosystems. One shotgun. Personal protection requires one pistol with a limited capacity clip.
A pistol possessed by a crowd member wouldn’t have helped given the high ground of the shooter in the Vegas case. There are arguments that armed potential victims could overcome an assailant. Refuted.
Excessive possession of firearms especially automatics or convertibles should be prevented.
And given societal callousness for people whose health is foreseeably going south or terminal, since euthanasia is mostly illegal in the US, it would be humane to provide someone with that personal option without explicitly knowing the outcome, though when their health goes too far they might not be capable of relieving themselves of pain and suffering. We should reform our legal scruples on end of life options to make firearm possession not fit into that picture.
Here is a demonstration of the surest, most effective way to use your gun to prevent yourself from being victimized:
[steps momentarily out of Pharyngula retirement]
I’ve recounted this before, sometime back in the mists of Pharyngula around, oh, 2007 or so. I think. Maybe.
Anyway.
I own a firearm. It’s a .45 caliber carbine with a pinhole sight and a hair trigger. It was handmade by my grandfather (including hand-rifling of the barrel) who gave it to me when I was 12 years old.
Here’s what I have to do in order to fire it:
First, I pour a measure of powder down the muzzle of the barrel.
Second, I place a square(ish) (typically cotton) cloth patch (the tighter the weave the better) over the muzzle of the barrel. The patch should be cut roughly 2 cm on a side.
Third, I place the .45 caliber lead ball on the center of the patch over the muzzle.
Fourth, I use a starter (if I’m out of practice), or a regular ramrod (if I’m not) to set the ball inside the muzzle, with the patch helping form a tighter seal. Then, with the ramrod, I push the patch-and-ball all the way to the base of the barrel interior against the powder already there (“seating” the ball).
Fifth, having withdrawn the ramrod, I lift the rifle in my left hand, resting along the crook of my left elbow with the muzzle pointing down-range (and I would have started exactly NONE of this process without checking to see that down-range was clear of humans, pets, automobiles, rubbish bins, livestock, fuel refineries, Impressionist art, and well, just about everything except space, the target, and a heavy berm of soft earth or sand behind it to absorb the through-path). With the rifle so arranged, I reach into the trigger guard and pull back the rear trigger which activates a catch within the firing mechanism that allows the hammer to be cocked.
Sixth, I draw the hammer back with my right thumb, having removed my forefinger from within the trigger guard. The hammer moves back to the half-cocked position (snicker). With the hammer in that position, a pull on the trigger should NOT cause the hammer to fall, but I don’t even risk testing that and keep my hands away from the fore-trigger and the trigger guard.
Seventh, I fumble with less-than-elvish-dexterity fingers for a percussion cap, which I then fumble to place upon the nipple underneath the hammer. (You think using those little screwdrivers to fix your glasses is tough? Try this sometime. It’s an object lesson in how bad the human nervous system can be at precision small-scale work.)
Eighth, I check down-range again, then return to the hammer and draw it back to the full cock (har har) position.
Ninth, I set the butt (he said, “butt”) of the rifle against my right shoulder, with left hand supporting the stock under the barrel, and right hand on the grip near the trigger. My forefinger does NOT rest on the trigger yet, but alongside the stock above the tigger guard and below the hammer (or lock).
Tenth, I sight the weapon, meaning I check ONCE AGAIN that down-range is clear, and then examine through the pinhole sight to establish my target, consider the distance, wind direction and velocity.
Eleventh, I gently place my forefinger on the trigger, draw a long, slow breath, exhale partially and hold it.
Twelfth, I squeeeeeeeeeeze the trigger. Not a pull. Not a jerk. Not a yank. A squeeze.
Thirteenth, I feel the kick, hear the BANG, smell the smoke, see the plume, and exhale.
Fourteenth, I look up from the sight, wait a few seconds, slowly return the rifle to rest position, and start the process all over again if I’m shooting another round.
200 years ago, the most elite soldiers in the world could go through that process and fire 3 rounds a minute in any weather . . . maybe 4 if they were really good.
The point of all that is that it is still a Killing Machine, and that was what it was designed to do. If I hunt for food, I need to kill something. If I wield it in defense of my person against an assailant, I have a fair possibility of killing (or at least maiming) something (and in the case of my carbine, it’s probably more useful as a club than an actual firearm, especially at close range). It’s one of the late-older forms of the firearm, and it’s still profoundly deadly.
Which brings me to this: Number me among those who want better gun control laws, regulation, oversight, systems of legal recourse and accountability, counseling, public healthcare consideration, education, administration, and areas of exclusion (like all school campuses, from pre-kindergarten through post-secondary, for fuck’s sake, and I’m looking at you, University of Texas system, you dumbshits).
And on my carbine, I can’t even get through 2 rounds in a minute, because I’m just that slow. I have become so appalled and mortified by the horrors of gun violence in our nation that I don’t even really want to fire the gun ever again, and am wrestling with looking for a suitable museum to which it could be donated. I loved my grandfather, and he made a gift of artisan quality, but it now weighs heavily in my heart, linked as it is to a national sentiment fetishizing the firearm above the lives of people.
The U.S. has a gun culture problem. And it’s killing us.
Hi.
Still learning,
Robert
[strolls slowly back into the fog of Pharyngula retirement, fucking long-winded like always]
hemidactylus@#30:
We should reform our legal scruples on end of life options to make firearm possession not fit into that picture.
Guns are a terrible way to end one’s own life. It’s either painful and unreliable or messy and unreliable. Given that opiates or barbituates are a pretty pleasant way to go, it’s pretty silly to consider guns as an alternative. Also, the people who have to clean up really appreciate some consideration.
no more of this “gun show” shit
Gun shows have nothing to do with it. All sales by a licensed dealer, no matter the location of the transaction, require a background check. Private parties don’t have access to NICS. Thus federal law doesn’t require background checks for private sales, whether at a gun show or not.
Let’s ban all those assault rifles
Assault rifles are heavily restricted and none manufactured after 1986 can be owned by private citizens.
and any weapon that can be fired fast enough that you can murder 50 people in short order
Please, define “in short order”.
I’m looking at this list of NRA contributions in the last election, and it’s kind of eye-opening. The only Democrat who received any donations from the NRA was Hillary Clinton, and it was more of a pathetic token tip.
Considering that the 2016 Democratic Platform advocated repealing the PLCAA, lied about assault weapons being weapons of war, and advocated banning standard capacity magazines for firearms it’s hardly a surprise.
We should also criminalize the NRA, because they’re already destructive enough to society.
How statist of you.
Shouldn’t owning that many weapons be indicative of a pathology that makes the person a danger to their community?
Don’t know much about guns, do you? The number of guns isn’t indicative of anything. Different shooting activities require different guns and it’s not uncommon to have a backup gun for many of them.
This was a sick man — not sick in the sense of mentally ill, but sick in the sense of possessing a vicious, deadly criminality.
And apparently nobody had a clue. What do you propose to identify this type of person?
Oh, one more thing I want: repeal the second amendment.
Article 5 of the Constitution awaits. All you have to do is get 2/3 of both Houses of Congress and 3/4 of the states to go along with you. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.
And that Thom Hartmann article you link to is really weak. The changes to the wording of the 2nd Amendment don’t affect what was already laid out in Article 1. It’s a bogus argument.
It’s been twisted far beyond its original intent
Please enlighten us. Try basing your analysis of the actual text of the 2nd Amendment and not some imagined “intent”.
I suspect I won’t get any of my wishes met in my lifetime
Finally something we agree on.
Incidentally, over on one of the threads on Salon, there was somebody claiming that the NRA’s true purpose is to serve as a lightning rod for public indignation, so that weapons manufacturers — who are of course the major backers and funders of the organization — don’t attract public opprobrium.
That’s actually an interesting idea — it makes me wonder what the table in the OP would look like if contributions from manufacturers were included, because those manufacturers are also very much pro-war, which is definitely a bipartisan consensus issue.
logicusprime:
I’m not USAnian, nor am I remotely interested in guns. But I’m not an ignoramus.
A quick Googling shows this is a false claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole
So? They’re not banned, are they?
(Technically, your retort constitutes a non sequitur)
Is it not obvious? Semi or auto, large capacity magazines.
(duh)
Way to miss the point. There’s no need to identify them and give them special denial; you should consider the concept of the difference between a whitelist and a blacklist. Neither is perfect, but each is most appropriate in particular situations — and in regards to gun control, it’s pretty fucking obvious which is the better overall, whether or not it accounts for every edge case.
Cripes, you really don’t like addressing the actual points being made, do you?
That it’s possible in principle but extremely-difficult in practice (“gun culture”) is irrelevant to whether it would yield a better outcome in terms of needless injuries and fatalities.
And yet another weak and irrelevant objection; you would have been better off disputing the actual claim rather than attempting to suggest that the original intent is being upheld.
Yeah, but you apparently think that’s a good thing, unlike PZ.
(The way things are is the way they should be, right?)
—
I suspect I shall never venture into the USA, and this is one major reason. I really wouldn’t feel comfortable being around an armed populace, and having any given person easily being able to kill me at a distance for whatever reason enters their mind. :|
A quick Googling shows this is a false claim
Pay closer attention. The laws are no different for gun shows than they are anywhere else. Your Wikipedia link even refers to it as a “perceived loophole”.
So? They’re not banned, are they?
No, and they’re also a non-factor in gun violence. What’s the point?
(Technically, your retort constitutes a non sequitur)
Only a bit. I wasn’t as clear or thorough as I could have been.
Is it not obvious? Semi or auto, large capacity magazines.
Magazine capacity doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with “in short order”. A bolt action rifle can have a high capacity magazine. And a lower bound on ‘in short order” would help determine what else might be covered.
Way to miss the point.
Hardly. He made a statement of a problem without proposing a solution. No point to miss.
Cripes, you really don’t like addressing the actual points being made, do you?
Yeah, right. He said he wanted to repeal the 2nd Amendment. I explained what was required to do that.
That it’s possible in principle but extremely-difficult in practice (“gun culture”) is irrelevant to whether it would yield a better outcome in terms of needless injuries and fatalities.
Try reading what he wrote. He didn’t say it would yield a better outcome. He only said that it had been twisted beyond its original intent. But intent isn’t relevant, especially not that weak article by Hartmann. The words of the 2nd Amendment are what matter.
And yet another weak and irrelevant objection; you would have been better off disputing the actual claim rather than attempting to suggest that the original intent is being upheld.
To the extent that he relies on Hartmann’s argument I did, beyond that there’s no claim to dispute. Hence the request for explanation.
Yeah, but you apparently think that’s a good thing, unlike PZ.
Yep.
(The way things are is the way they should be, right?)
No. There’s a lot of work to do to recover lost ground.
I suspect I shall never venture into the USA, and this is one major reason. I really wouldn’t feel comfortable being around an armed populace, and having any given person easily being able to kill me at a distance for whatever reason enters their mind. :|
Not any given person. And you’re not free from that risk no matter where you are.
Expat here. I emigrated to New Zealand, which has gun laws which are both far more lenient and far more restrictive than the US. I can own a machine gun here. No problem. Seriously: https://www.guncity.com/3006-browning-1919a4-243727
I just have to:
1. Provide the Government with a good reason for owning it.
2. Demonstrate to a policeman with appropriate experience that I can correctly maintain and safely and properly operate it.
3. Physically show the Police the appropriate gun safe I keep it in. Annually.
4. At time of purchase, present the license for the gun the Police issued me after 2 and 3 above.
Still, with this freedom to own truly outrageous weaponry: Our cops don’t carry. Our population doesn’t carry. When I see a cop? I feel SAFER.
America’s problem isn’t guns, or lack of gun laws, or the NRA. America’s problem is that as a culture it is addicted to violence. Hopelessly and terminally addicted. It is the mother’s milk you feed your children. It is the yardstick by which you measure your Nationalism.
You (’cause I voted with my bloody feet) LOVE violence. Your sports, your entertainment, your music is all filled with violent imagery. Violence is required for you to be entertained.
Make all the laws you like. Until Americans learn to change WHO you are you’re all just going to keep killing each other.
logicusprime, I do appreciate your response, since it invites due response.
Ahem. You focus on form rather than content, eh?
My emphasis in this quote from my citation, to which you refer:
“Under federal law, private-party sellers are not required to perform background checks on buyers, whether at a gun show or other venue. They also are not required to record the sale, or ask for identification. This requirement is in contrast to sales by gun stores and other Federal Firearms License (FFL) holders who are required to record all sales and perform background checks on almost all buyers, regardless of whether the venue is their business location or a gun show. Access to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) is limited to FFL holders and FFLs are not issued to persons that only sell firearms at gun shows.
Since the mid-1990s, gun control advocates have voiced concern over the perceived loophole in legislation, and campaigned to require background checks and record-keeping for all gun sales. Contrarily, gun rights advocates have stated that there is no loophole, that current laws provide a single, uniform set of rules for commercial gun sellers regardless of the place of sale, and that no part of the United States Constitution empowers the federal government to regulate non-commercial, intrastate transfers of legal firearms types between private citizens.”
Point being that PZ thinks they should be banned, and your objection was that they are heavily restricted — now you concede they’re not banned, but make the additional claim that they’re a non-factor. Which is interesting, given the actual events and evidence at hand in this most recent case of a mass-shooting.
(You really imagine single-shot, small magazine weapons would have produced similar carnage under otherwise the same circumstances?)
Nothing to say about the difference between single-shot, semi and auto firearms, eh?
And yes, magazine capacity only comes into it when the number of victims exceeds the magazine capacity and reloading is in order. Your trivial objection is duly noted and dismissed for what it is, given the example at hand is tens of deaths and hundreds of casualties from a single shooter.
You don’t think the post title (“Actually, I do want to take your guns away”) is a proposed solution?
(And this time I’m damn sure you didn’t actually miss the point, since you’re actively avoiding it)
<snicker>
So, if intent isn’t relevant, whence your original question about the validity of PZ’s understanding of the intent? ;)
Anyway, if the words are the only thing that matters, then every gun owner should be part of a “well-regulated militia”, not merely just a citizen, right?
!
Fair enough; you’re a regressive person rather than a progressive person, yearning for the wild, wild west.
(At least you admit it)
Care to see some actuarial tables comparing different advanced economies and the danger of violent attack or accident via firearms?
<clickety-click>
Ooh, look, there’s an article just up from CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/index.html
I see you persist with the feeblest of objections; that no place is safe doesn’t mean that some places are not safer than others. Facts show that, basically, anywhere but failed states and undeveloped states are safer than the USA. As with health care, it is an outlier — and not in a good way.
(The USA truly is exceptional!)
I suppose it’s because I’m an historian by training and temperament, but it always baffles me how people can look at a 300 year old law with late 18th century wording and say that the original thinking and intent behind that law are irrelevant, the only important thing being how their modern interpretation of the language itself might play out. That’s treating laws as some kind of magic formulas, incanted in a language that is above, beyond and exempt from the essential condition of language itself. It’s blatant ahistorical nonsense.
Well, okay, it doesn’t baffle me completely. I suspect they don’t really think that way, they just pretend to because it advances their sick, anti-human hoplophile agenda. It’s amazing how much of the world makes sense when you realise that most people don’t actually believe their own nonsense, they just pretend to for personal gain.
The world of the eighteenth century was a very different one from ours, both in its technology and in its outlook and concerns. Its laws reflect those outlooks and concerns. Which means that they ought to be changed and modified with later laws when that becomes necessary. Perhaps it is because American laws don’t go back much further than that that this culture of ignoring historical conditions has developed? After all, some of English law goes back to the eleventh century and is written in Latin or Medieval French. You simply can’t ignore the vast gulf of time and change that attends on that.
Is it a form of American exceptionalism to believe that the measures that seem to be working in all other industrialised countries are really some completely new and untested thing that needs thorough debate and does not have any data one way or the other?
Look, people, I’m pretty sure there’s no copyright on laws. Feel free to look at Germany, the UK, Australia, Japan, Portugal…
We’re happy to help out, really, because we’Re just as sick and tired to hear about the latest mass shooting and domestic violence case turned mass murder as you are.
I know the laws are not perfect. There’s still gun violence*, but they seem to help a lot. And yes, we even still have hunters and collectors of historical weaponry.
*I actually used to be a member of a “shooting society” because they operate the range where you can practise archery. There were two types of un shooters: The actual sports people and those who kept up their membership to the minimal degree required by the law to keep their license. The latter were the exact type of guys you don’t want to have a weapon.
just read through the thread and two things stand out.
At 10 bowd-boring old white dood says; “Yes I am a firearms owner (I think about a dozen)…” How the hell can one not know exactly how many firearms one owns and where they are?
And.
At 26 scumcontrol threatens violence at just the thought of some sort of gun control.
We are suffering our own problems here in Spain at the moment but the USA scares the shit out of me.
28:
Maybe this is the solution. Use that other American habit; that of suing each other. If the people who sold weapons to others were financially liable for any deaths resulting from their use, maybe they might be more carefull to whom they sell. Have an audit trail back to the manufacturer, who will ultimately pay, if the dealers down the line go bust.
Alternatively, enforce closure of a gun dealership if any of the guns they sell end up killing people. Drastic, but effective. No insurance, and the gun-fondlers can keep their 2nd amendment.
28:
Seconded.
The fundamental reason why America is a developing backwards society is that they think guns need to be discussed in the same breath as free speech, free press, trial by jury, etc. That’s actually a point of serious discussion and debate.
Americans see a fucking absurd laughable list list like:
– free speech
– free press
– trial by jury
– guns
and don’t think there’s an odd one out.
Before the guns themselves, it’s the idea of guns being a right that’s the actual problem. It can’t go away in the current existing generations. Basically, American society needs to make a drastic change in raising their kids.
In fact, they think this list is fine:
– free speech
– free press
– trial by jury
– guns
But this one isn’t:
– free speech
– free press
– trial by jury
– healthcare
LOL.
If you think that “my joy at duck hunting” is more important than human lives I cannot help you.
John Morales,
Ahem. You focus on form rather than content, eh?
You’re using a Wikipedia footnote without a supporting cite as authoritative? Really?
now you concede they’re not banned, but make the additional claim that they’re a non-factor. Which is interesting, given the actual events and evidence at hand in this most recent case of a mass-shooting.
I never said they were banned. Don’t make stuff up. It’s a cheap tactic.
Since the Las Vegas shooter didn’t have any automatic weapons it is a non-factor.
Nothing to say about the difference between single-shot, semi and auto firearms, eh?
What would you like to know?
And what’s your objection to stating a bound on “in short order”?
You don’t think the post title (“Actually, I do want to take your guns away”) is a proposed solution?
No. And I don’t think Myers is telling the truth. He doesn’t want to take away my guns. I’ll bet he’s willing to pay some thuggish guys with guns to do it, though.
So, if intent isn’t relevant, whence your original question about the validity of PZ’s understanding of the intent?
He’s using it as a rationale. He needs a better one.
Fair enough; you’re a regressive person rather than a progressive person, yearning for the wild, wild west.
Oooh. An insult. So much for rational discussion. Piss off.
Care to see some actuarial tables comparing different advanced economies and the danger of violent attack or accident via firearms?
Not particularly. My point being that although your risk might be lower, it does exist. I don’t need any actuarial tables to verify it and neither do you.
Ooh, look, there’s an article just up from CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/index.html
Interesting. 48% of the guns but only 31% of the mass shooters. What countries are making up for that?
I see you persist with the feeblest of objections; that no place is safe doesn’t mean that some places are not safer than others. Facts show that, basically, anywhere but failed states and undeveloped states are safer than the USA. As with health care, it is an outlier — and not in a good way.
Where did I say that some places aren’t safer than others? I simply said that you’re not free from risk anywhere. Please try not to inject your own biases into my words. That’s at least the second time you’ve misrepresented what I’ve said.
I heard an interview on NPR with a guy who did security for Las Vegas hotels. He was going on and on about how great the security is vs. guns — they’ve got metal detectors, they’ve got gunpowder-sniffing dogs, they’ve got cameras, yadda yadda.
Host: “What about the elevators? Could someone go through the front door without carrying any guns, check in, and then go down to their car in the garage and take all their guns straight up to their room?”
Security Expert: (long pause) “Yes.”
The interview ended immediately thereafter.
cartomancer,
a 300 year old law
What law would that be? That predates the founding of the country.
but it always baffles me how people can look at a 300 year old law with late 18th century wording and say that the original thinking and intent behind that law are irrelevant, the only important thing being how their modern interpretation of the language itself might play out.
First off, a 300 year old law would have early 18th century wording. But your general complaint baffles me, too. It’s important to understand what the meaning of the text was at the time it was written. It’s also important to examine specific text in the context of the entire document.
Well, okay, it doesn’t baffle me completely. I suspect they don’t really think that way, they just pretend to because it advances their sick, anti-human hoplophile agenda.
Interesting, I find it to be far more prevalent among hoplophobes.
Its laws reflect those outlooks and concerns. Which means that they ought to be changed and modified with later laws when that becomes necessary.
There’s a process for that. Perhaps it’s not as big a concern for others as it apparently is for you.
I love it when gun fondlers go on about the minutae of what is semi or fully automatic yadda yadda, trying to simply outdrown people who are not gun fondlers with jargon and trivia while completely ignoring the point that there’s something very wrong in a country where around 13.000 people a year die from guns.
logicusprime @47:
Not countries. People like Paddock. He didn’t use all of his dozens of guns, did he? Seek in the bleedin’ link and ye shall find:
Love the “only 31% of the mass shooters” by the way. For less than 5% of the world’s population, you’re real overachievers.
I love it when gun fondlers go on about the minutae of what is semi or fully automatic yadda yadda, trying to simply outdrown people who are not gun fondlers with jargon and trivia
I’m always amused when hoplophobes make themselves look like idiots by making proposals that show they have absolutely no clue what they’re talking about and that won’t do anything to cut down on the 13,000 or so homicides involving firearms.
while completely ignoring the point that there’s something very wrong in a country where around 13.000 people a year die from guns
We do have a serious problem in this country that no one is addressing. Almost 60% of firearms-related homicide victims are black and that percentage is increasing. The great majority of that violence is intraracial. Changing gun laws won’t make a significant difference because it’s primarily due to criminal activity. What are doing to figure out why it’s happening and how to change it? Very little from what I can see. Most of the time when I bring up these facts and my concerns about them I get accused of victim-blaming or racism by liberals, so I don’t mention it very much. Just don’t accuse me of not caring.
Love the “only 31% of the mass shooters” by the way. For less than 5% of the world’s population, you’re real overachievers.
Yeah, just I found it interesting that, given all the complains about the number of guns in the US, that we’re below average in the number of mass shootings relative to the number of guns in this country. I would have expected us to be higher. Other countries are apparently the overachievers in that regard.
Somebody really doesn’t know how statistics work, even after they’ve been given a pretty sensible explanation.
Citation needed.
But given that you already changed gun deaths to homicides, I’m not going to hold my breath.
The use of firearms for violence in US is limited by the number of hands people have.
logicusprime, #49
I’m talking about the second amendment to the US constitution, obviously. The one about maintaining a well regulated militia. That one. The one that gun-fondling hoplophile scum in America keep bringing up in order to justify amassing the arsenals of deadly weaponry that any right-thinking country would have denied them outright. The one that leads, directly and inexorably, to the astounding and unacceptable gun violence that horrible benighted country is forced to endure.
I am glad you agree with me that this problematic little piece of legislation ought to be understood in its proper 18th century context. A context that relates to the musket-wielding ad-hoc citizen armies of a recently founded ex-colonial country afraid of the kinds of political instability that threatened such a society at that time. A context that has precisely nothing to do with bloodthirsty hoplophile scum stockpiling 21st century machineries of death and murdering dozens of innocents from the balcony of a Las Vegas hotel room.
And yes, I am aware that there is a procedure for amending the US constitution. The very existence of “amendments” such as the one under discussion is fair evidence of that. I think they should be used to strike the second amendment away entirely and replace it with something that bans firearms outright in the US. And if the political will is not there – which, given how corrupt and in the pockets of the Mechanised Death Lobby the politicians of the US are, it clearly is not – the political system needs to be reformed such that it is there. Because it is there among the general population, that’s for certain.
Also, it’s a bit strange to define those with a perfectly natural and healthy dislike of deadly weaponry as “hoplophobes”. The ones who don’t have an antipathy toward such instruments of intentional murder and suffering are the maladjusted and pathological ones, particularly given the abundant evidence of how destructive the abundance of such things is to human society. Now, it is true that mainstream American society is deeply dysfunctional in this regard, and encourages such dangerous pathologies as hoplophilia, so it’s a cultural problem as much as it’s an individual one.
logicusprime @53:
You actually think that the number of mass shootings per gun owned in the US is below the world average? Where on Earth did you pull that from?
The percentage of mass shootings is lower than the percentage of guns owned because most American gun-owners own multiple guns.
During the First World War, 100 years ago, the standard of proficiency for a trained British soldier, and infantryman, was 15 aimed rounds per minute. When I was in the US Army, I could attain 30 aimed rounds in about 45 seconds using an M16A1 automatic rifle when firing in semi-automatic mode. The reason I could not attain a higher rate of fire is because I had to stop, eject the empty magazine, and insert the next one. — which took about 15 seconds (I was in Intelligence (98GL), not infantry). Using a civilian AR15, I could achieve exactly the same rate of fire. With a larger magazine (there are 100 round magazines on the market), I could achieve a higher rate of fire with a civilian version than I could with a military M16 firing in semi-automatic mode. Hell, I could do better with an AR15 and a 100 round magazine than I could with an M16 firing in 3 round burst mode.
Compare that to the (also military) Lee-Enfield .303 infantry rifle. Five or ten round box magazines and bolt action. Or a Winchester repeater with an internal magazine and lever action. No matter how well trained, a shooter can not even come close to the rate of fire of an AR15 with a 100 round magazine.
So I call bullshit on anyone claiming that magazine size does not matter.
One hundred round magazines for semi-automatic ‘sporting’ rifles (which are civilianized military assault rifles). How the fuck are they legal?
DaveM @43:
Into the early 2000s, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) tracked fire arms used in crime and which FFL dealer sold them. An FFL dealer who had too many sales which ended up being used for crimes could lose their license. The Bush administration stopped the collection of that data in order to protect the poor, put-upon FFL dealers and also to protect fire arm manufacturers who sold them to the questionable dealers from lawsuits. They also tried (I think unsuccessfully) to give fire arm manufacturers immunity from lawsuits
Blaming the 2nd amendment does nothing. You can regulate guns just like drugs but that just reminds me of a Bill Maher interview on his show about legalizing drugs and his argument was that he could get you anything you wanted and that regulation does nothing. The point being as related to guns or rather when it comes to killing people is that there are options. If this guy couldn’t just walk into a store and buy an AR15 then he simply would have met a guy under a bridge somewhere and bought one because why would he have a moral dilemma about buying illegal goods if he is about to mass murder people? Anyway, some other stats and reports show that you are more likely to get stabbed or beaten to death than shot. So, should we outlaw knives, baseball bats, pipe wrenches, and candlesticks? I guess pretty much every weapon in Clue along with pressure cookers. I’m not sure how liberals can be for d-regulation of drugs but for regulation of firearms. In fact, some of the top killers in the country are regulated… cars, alcohol, tobacco, and doctors.
The problem is that there are no good regulation proposals, but the internet and hollywood is full of more liberal nonsense that falsely blames the wrong people and proposes actions that fixes nothing. It is probably hard for modern day hippies to understand that sometimes there are just senseless acts and the person committing those acts are solely to blame. The Vegas shooter is to blame (and whoever helped him). Not NRA or Republicans or Remington or your ex. You don’t have to turn everything into politics and activism like you have a solution and the world is going to be a better place if everyone would just listen to you. This guy was a quack. He planned it. He did it. He is to blame. A gun control bill was not going to prevent him from killing. You can’t argue that it would have limited his destruction because an argument could also be made that his destruction could have been greater. You can’t speculate to his weapon of choice had he not had access to an assault rifle. Maybe he uses a pistol or maybe he goes with a bomb.
This comment by Lynna over on the Political Madness thread is enlightening.
Man, I really must have missed the reports about 13k knife and club deaths a year in the USA.
Also, what did I say about American exceptionalism.
Person A: We need gun control. For starters, we should ban all those scary mass murder rifles.
Person B: Your lack of correct technical terminology shows that you don’t understand anything gun related. For starters, most gun violence is done with common handguns.
A: Then make those handguns uncommon, whatever. Regulate all guns to the same degree they do in other countries.
B: We should discuss what kind of solutions are most effective in reducing gun violence. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand anything about guns.
A: Maybe just copy gun regulations from other countries?
B: No, we must find the best solutions to avoid any unnecessary regulation of firearms. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand guns.
A: Nobody really needs those mass murder rifles.
B: Ah, see what I mean?
@62 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-:
Sorry, shot with an assault rifle. Most firearm deaths are by handguns. So, you are more likely to get stabbed or beaten than shot with about any other firearm combined besides handgun.
Observe, if you will, the distant nation of Venenia. You probably don’t know it. It lies somewhere in the vast Western Ocean of its world, spanning hundreds of miles from sea to shining sea. A large country, this, recently sprung to influence on the international stage. The colonial offshoot of a once-great imperial power. Let us discover more of what its people are like.
The Venenian character is a strange one to those outside its borders. Venenians celebrate the art of poisoning more than any other people. Venenian children grow up playing cheerful games of Poisoners and Victims, re-enacting the mass poisonings that their ancestors inflicted on the natives who used to live there. They are given toy stillettos, plastic agaric slices and elaborate replica toxin stills to while away the hours with. When they are a little older they spend their leisure time brewing nerve agents for mass dispersion in popular video games like the smash hit “Hemlock Hill” series. Venenian cinema tends to feature heroic, determined toxicology experts, using their knowledge of deadly chemicals to poison the enemies of Venenia in myriad ingenious ways. Historical pictures about How the West was Envenomated used to be the biggest draw, but in the 80s these gave way to rip-roaring action flicks that glamorised the chemical warfare of the day. At the moment fantasy superhero films are popular – Henbane Man, The League of Fantastical Myotoxicologists, Bacillus Master and the Bone Melter, that sort of thing.
Adult Venenians tend to keep vast stocks of deadly poison in their homes, which they see as their patriotic right and duty. It is a rare household that doesn’t have at least a few drums of Agent Orange in the garage, a syringe or two of anthrax under the bed and ten sachets of potassium cyanide at the back of the bread bin. They cite the Third Alteration to the Constitution of Venenia as justification for all this, which was passed in the early days of their nation after Venenian assassins had poisoned the king of their former colonial power. They need all this poison, so the story goes, in case the Venenian establishment tries to oppress them – for how will they poison their rulers again and win their freedom back if control of all deadly substances is held by the government? That the government owns apocalyptic quantities of incredibly sophisticated toxins, industrial plague sprayers and fleets high-tech poison drones tends to pass them by.
The National Poison Association of Venenia is a powerful lobbying group, funded by the obscenely wealthy Toxin Barons who own the nation’s poison industry. The manufacture and sale of deadly poisons, both at home and abroad, is big business in Venenia. So to keep the poison flowing the NPA funnels its vast wealth into political campaigns. Nearly every politician in Venenia is afraid of Big Poison, or wants some of its sweet venom money, so it is next to impossible to pass any kind of meaningful industrial safety or hazardous substance control legislation in the country. Thus, through manipulation of the capitalist system – an appropriately poisonous economic structure for a country like Venenia – opposition is effectively stifled. The current High Toxocrat of the Venenian commonwealth is perhaps the most poisonous leader the country has ever had, relying more than any of his predecessors on the support of the rabid toxophile lobby to hold on to power. Change looks unlikely in the foreseeable future.
In recent decades, however, there has been a growing concern among Venenians that something might not be quite right in their society. Mass poisonings seem to be an epidemic in modern times. Eighteen years ago a pair of schoolboy poisoners from Dovetown killed fifteen of their classmates by lacing the school dinners with Beladonna. Five years ago a class of children were murdered at Uncus Harenaceus by a man throwing vials of arsenic. Eighteen months ago the Vibration night club in Furioso was hosed down with black-market cytotoxins.
On Sunday a man in the entertainment resort of Fields stockpiled canisters of pesticides in his hotel room, then poured gallons of DDT onto crowds outside, injuring hundreds. By the time police rapid-response poisoners arrived he had drowned himself in his own poison vats. The position of the NPA continues to be that the answer to a bad man with a bottle of poison is a good man with a bottle of poison.
Some Venenians grow weary of the constant toxicity of their homeland. Checking for deadly mushrooms in your dinner and living in fear of random contaminations of the water supply is no way to live. So they pack up their things, jump in their Mithridatic Arks and fly to our world to start afresh. A family of recent Venenian immigrants contacted me the other day, excited by the prospect of settling down to a peaceful life on Earth.
They’ve gone to this swell place called America, you see. Where things are completely different.
cartomancer,
I’m talking about the second amendment to the US constitution, obviously.
No kidding.
The one about maintaining a well regulated militia. That one.
There’s your first mistake. It’s about the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Maintaining a militia is covered in Article 1 Section 8.
The one that gun-fondling hoplophile scum in America keep bringing up in order to justify amassing the arsenals of deadly weaponry that any right-thinking country would have denied them outright.
I can see having a reasoned discussion with you is going to be difficult, but I’ll give it a shot. Do try to keep your emotions out of it.
I am glad you agree with me that this problematic little piece of legislation ought to be understood in its proper 18th century context.
Try paying closer attention to what I wrote: “It’s also important to examine specific text in the context of the entire document.” If you won’t accurately represent what I wrote then you can’t be reasoned with.
I think they should be used to strike the second amendment away entirely and replace it with something that bans firearms outright in the US.
Yeah, you’re not the first person here to mention that. Good luck with it. /s
in the pockets of the Mechanised Death Lobby
Hyperbole much?
Also, it’s a bit strange to define those with a perfectly natural and healthy dislike of deadly weaponry as “hoplophobes”.
Just following your lead of “hoplophiles”. And dislike of an inanimate object is natural and healthy? Since when?
The ones who don’t have an antipathy toward such instruments of intentional murder and suffering are the maladjusted and pathological ones, particularly given the abundant evidence of how destructive the abundance of such things is to human society.
I had hoped that, given your proclaimed training and temperament as a historian, we could actually discuss the 2nd Amendment calmly. Unfortunately, there appears to be no reasoning with you. Your emotions are overwhelming your intellect. Too bad. And some people think it’s hard to argue with those on my side of the argument.
Stupid me @57: Of course the number of mass shootings per gun owned is lower in the US than the rest of the world. But this is a meaningless statistic since most American gun owners own multiple guns. Paddock doesn’t count as 1/50th of a mass shooting because he owned 50 (or whatever absurd number of) guns.
Rob Grigjanis,
Somebody really doesn’t know how statistics work, even after they’ve been given a pretty sensible explanation.
I wasn’t trying to make an argument based on statistics, I just noted a correlation that seemed a bit odd. Don’t be so touchy.
That’s fucking reassuring, isn’t it?
I got an idea: regulate the fuck out of those as well.
That same someone seems to be unable to even find out who actually said what.
Rob Grigjanis,
You actually think that the number of mass shootings per gun owned in the US is below the world average? Where on Earth did you pull that from?
From the link provided by John Morales. Try reading it. I’m not endorsing it and I didn’t use it as the basis for an argument. I just found it interesting and unexpected.
US: 31% of mass shootings, 48% of the guns.
Other countries: 69% of mass shootings, 52% of the guns.
Rob Grigjanis,
You posted #67 while I was composing. Like I said, I wasn’t basing any argument on it.
logicusprime, #66
If you think that there is any moral high ground to be gained from adopting the persona of an emotionless robot when thousands of people have been needlessly killed – and continue to be needlessly killed – just so a bunch of arseholes can collect instruments of death, then you are sorely mistaken. This is not an issue for argument – the issue was settled centuries ago in the civilized parts of the world. We might as well sit down and calmly discuss whether slavery is okay, or whether witches ought to be burned at the stake. That’s the level of issue we have here – it is only in blighted America that anyone could think otherwise.
We don’t want to argue with those on your side. You don’t have an argument. We want you to admit that, give up your childish posturing and either fuck off out of the way or do something positive to change your godawful country’s regressive laws and culture for the better.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-,
But given that you already changed gun deaths to homicides, I’m not going to hold my breath.
Well, if you had a clue what you were talking about you’d know that 13,000 is roughly the number of homicides. The total number of firearms related deaths is about triple that amount, with almost all of the others being suicides. Bone up on the topic before criticizing someone else.
cartomancer,
We don’t want to argue with those on your side. You don’t have an argument. We want you to admit that, give up your childish posturing and either fuck off out of the way or do something positive to change your godawful country’s regressive laws and culture for the better.
You wouldn’t know if I have an argument because you refuse to listen. You’re hopeless. Making decisions based raw emotion rarely turns out well. That’s why I fight idiots like you so vigorously.
Rob Grigjanis,
Just realized I attributed to you a comment by Giliell. My apologies.
#75
The decision was not made on raw emotion. The raw emotion comes afterwards, in the face of smug morons like you who persist in flogging a dead horse the rest of us got over centuries ago.
I get angry at those who advocate for slavery.
I get angry at those who advocate for misogyny.
I get angry at those who advocate for theocracy.
And I get angry at those like you who advocate for mass murder and the endangerment of civil society.
Would you please get on with the fucking off now?
The point is that gun control or messing with the 2nd amendment is not going to stop crazy people from being crazy.
What is there not to understand that most ideas on how to regulate does not fix anything?
cartomancer,
Would you please get on with the fucking off now?
No ;^)
cartomancer,
And I get angry at those like you who advocate for mass murder and the endangerment of civil society.
You have a real reading comprehension problem.
#79
Bad smells never do.
Yep, gun control will have no effect on the number of mass shootings. Which is why Canada, with lots of privately owned firearms(something like 10 million is the high estimate), and the culture most similar to the US, has lots of mass shootings.
Except it doesn’t. We should have dozens a year if we had the same per capita number of mass shootings as the US does. We don’t.
cartomancer,
Don’t be a dick. I know it’s probably impossible for you, but give it a try.
timgueguen,
Except it doesn’t. We should have dozens a year if we had the same per capita number of mass shootings as the US does. We don’t.
I’m not familiar with Canadian gun crime stats. Has Canada ever had levels similar to the US? If so, at what point did Canada start diverging and what legislation was passed that might be responsible for it?
#83
Perhaps I might be more kindly disposed to you if you stopped trying to defend the hoplophile scum who are responsible for this uniquely American awfulness. I have this peculiar antipathy towards advocates of mass murder and those who seek to distract from the issue with meaningless witterings.
cartomancer,
Perhaps I might be more kindly disposed to you if you stopped trying to defend the hoplophile scum who are responsible for this uniquely American awfulness.
As I said, you have a real reading comprehension problem. Who have I defended? Specifically? Which comment? Quote it or shut up.
#86
All you have done on this thread is tried to manufacture meaningless quibbles with PZ’s blatantly obvious set of minimal gun control measures, then tried to argue with flawed minutiae and irrelevant statistics at every turn. You have taken the side of the NRA, the hoplophiles, the people who don’t want to do anything because it would hurt their bottom line or threaten their pathetic view of masculinity. You have persisted in pretending that there is actually any debate to have on these issues, and failed to suggest anything at all that might help to make things better. You have tried to dismiss and belittle the important emotional component to dealing with such horrors as these.
By refusing to acknowledge that America needs the same gun control measures that so demonstrably keep the rest of the developed world safe, you have advocated for mass murder and taken the side of its proponents.
@73 cartomancer:
None of those issues are related. The fact of the matter is that for a lot of gun owners the first priority is home protection, self protection, wildlife protection and for me it is not that i live in a bad area, it is because I live so far away from help. If a rabid bobcat comes in my yard then I need to be able to put it down and there are crazies out there too. Next, gun owners would be hunters and wildlife control. Then, would be sport, clays/targets. Lastly, would be collectors and they typically aren’t even firing their guns.
So, why would I want to give up gun which I consider a necessity because a few crazies go crazy. Even in my area, I could find a place and take my handgun and kill over 100 people before help arrived. Or I could go house to house and strangle everyone with a phone cord. It would be tiresome but I could probably get to 50 in a day before investigators started looking into the matter. In fact, if I went the phone cord route I probably wouldn’t get far because one of the houses I hit I will probably get shot. But, the reason I don’t is because I am not crazy.
Obviously, different parts of the world has different dangers and it is best to be prepared. If you live somewhere that you don’t feel the need to have a gun then I am happy for you but don’t link senseless killing by a crazy person with the ability to own, shoot, or collect a gun. I think in other places the crazies will trade the guns for knives, bats, bombs, and lately I’ve been hearing about strong acid.
cartomancer,
All you have done on this thread is tried to manufacture meaningless quibbles with PZ’s blatantly obvious set of minimal gun control measures, then tried to argue with flawed minutiae and irrelevant statistics at every turn…
In other words, you have nothing.
ctech, #88
I did not say they were related issues. I said they were issues which had been resolved with the same level of certainty and moral clarity as the issue of whether gun control is necessary to reduce the incidence of gun death and foster a culture that does not glorify firearms.
I speak as a resident of England, where there is literally nothing you might need a gun for. The most dangerous wild animal here is a badger. But I do recognise that other places are not so fortunate. I can see some utility to having a weapon to chase off dangerous wildlife in very rural areas where it is a danger. I can also see that there is no real moral harm in sporting contests of ballistics. For wildlife control… I do not know enough about that to say whether it is necessary to use firearms or not, but I can imagine it might be.
My objection is to the culture in America. The culture that glorifies guns, machismo, killing, violence and revenge. That is the root of this problem. That is why these mass killings happen. And that culture is sustained, promoted and spread by a determined lobby of gun obsessives funded by the firearms industry. Their aegis, crux, shibboleth and keystone is the Second Amendment of the US constitution. Their whole mythology centres on it. It is the focus of their legislative efforts. That’s why it needs to be torn down. America needs to become a grown-up country where firearms are feared by the majority and treated with respect by the few who need them – not fetishized and worshipped as is currently the case.
See Venenia, above. That’s really what your country looks like to outsiders. That’s what we’re worried about. Of course a few rural people can have something to keep the bears away. Of course an olympic pistol shooter can have a training gun, safely stored at her training centre under lock and key. Those are so far from a retired accountant stockpiling thirty machine guns in a hotel room that they’re not really the same issue at all.
Why won’t the gun fondlers of the US ever grow up and accept that their plumbum projecting fantasies are directly responsible for thousands of needless deaths?
#89
No, you have nothing and I’m sick and tired of you bloviating about it at great length all over the thread. Your smug, supercilious fatuousness really infuriates me. This is an important issue. We don’t need arseholes like you trying to distract from what needs to be done.
Now fuck off and be done with it. I have no more desire to waste my time on your stupidity. If Giliell or Rob Grigjanis have more patience than me for such things then so be it.
The cold emotionless argument of the psychopath.
cartomancer @92: Nah, I’m done (I think). More a question of stamina than patience. Thomist hair-splitting obtuseness followed by Americans talking about guns makes for a long week. I was going to bring up Dunblane and Port Arthur, but what’s the point?
Of course, the truly stupid thing about this statement is? Anyone? Oh, then: If any part of the government, no matter which side did it, ever when as bug nuts about taking away guns and gun nuts are about defending them, the ‘taking’ would probably be done using and escalation of tactics, starting with asking, then tear gas, then tanks, then snipers, probably, finally remote drone strikes. Because, seriously, your basement full of pop shooters would mean jack all if/when the “government” decided to stop being nice about it. Only…. That it is far more likely that atheists, gays, liberals, or some other “enemy” will be targeted by “the government” using these sorts of tactics, if we see more, and crazier, sorts of right wing wackos elected, while the left’s worst offense would probably amount to sending you a harsh letter, and wring their hands when you gave them the finger. This is a far more honest assessment of how likely it is to *ever* happen the way all the gun nuts are scared to death it will. The left would, frankly, never stand for another “accident” like Wacko, or others. The right on the other hand… would probably issue the regulation changes to the agencies that made the next one possible, by disregarding *everything* about rules of engagement and reasonable actions, just to make it “easier” to put down what ever threat, or imaginary rebellion, they saw this week. Just look at the crap they are pulling with who is in charge of, and the rules to be followed, in *every other agency*, as we post and read here.
BTW… on a side note, why the F are there now 3 “notify me of followup” things on the silly page, of which the one that actually used to work (the one just before the “post comment” button, now seems to do exactly nothing? What clown keeps messing this up in the IT for the site? I just don’t get it.
To PZ
Look. I’m sympathetic with what you say, and even agree with some of it. I wouldn’t even be posting this if you didn’t post factually incorrect information. I’m just asking that you don’t post claims that are clearly factually-false.
This Las Vegas mass shooting was an outlier, even among mass shootings which are outliers. 99.9% of gun deaths are not mass shootings. 50% of mass shootings happen with handguns only, and they also account for about 50% of the deaths of mass shootings – at least according to the available data from Mother Jones.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/In other words, even in mass shootings, handguns are about as dangerous as rifles of any kind. And in the typical shooting, aka a non-mass shooting, aka 99.9% of gun deaths, handguns are a far bigger concern because they’re smaller and therefore more concealable.
The colloquial term “assault weapon” does not map onto reality. It’s a fiction, invented by anti-gun advocates, in order to purposefully confuse the audience and create confusion between “automatic guns” and “guns that look scary”. There isn’t a category of modern guns that is substantially more dangerous than “semi-automatic guns” in the civilian context that lies between “automatic guns” and “semi-automatic guns”.
Do you want to ban all semi-auto guns (and revolvers), leaving only stuff like bolt-action rifles and lever-action rifles? Then just say that. It’s short, clear, precise, and everyone will understand, and you won’t look foolish for using nonsense terms like “assault weapon”.
The only one twisting its original intent and clear language are the Democrats. The clear author’s intent, ratifier’s intent, and original plain text public meaning is all the same: Individual persons should be allowed to own, possess, and reasonably store, carry, and use military-grade weaponary. See my own collection of citations and argument here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ak6bx8jyDxIlsLuFHHevw-4RQ7R5vJb15RtTNG5d79w/editEnlightenmentLiberal #96
I found your comment on the origin of the term “assault weapons” interesting, but after some quick searching it doesn’t seem to be accurate. Apparently the term was coined by the gun industry itself as a “catchy” name to stimulate sales of certain weapons less familiar to firearm enthusiasts of the 80s. See below link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/us/even-defining-assault-weapons-is-complicated.html
Of all the pro-gun arguments, the one I have the most questions about is the one that “we need guns to overthrow the government if it becomes tyrannical.”
Let’s leave aside the question of whether it would even be possible for the gun-owners of America to overthrow a tyrannical government supported by the military.The question I want to ask is: Did you support Micah Johnson when he shot five police officers in Dallas because he thought the government was supporting the massacre of his people?
No? What about when Jared Loughner shot Gabby Giffords, or James Hodgkinson shot the GOP baseball game?
You didn’t support that either?
Well, if you don’t think people unhappy with the government should shoot police, and they shouldn’t shoot politicians, then whom exactly were you planning to shoot in your little fantasy?
And how is it that you get to decide when is the right time to rise against tyranny, but Micah and Jared and James don’t?
cartomancer,
Now fuck off and be done with it.
Not a chance. I’ll keep pointing out your ignorance and irrationality whenever I feel like it.
corvus1005 @97
Because “people killing style gun that makes you feel like a Real Man” was too obvious.
EL @96
Would this not include machine guns, bazookas, rocket propelled grenades and shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles etc?
logicusprime
Unlike you, I’m happy to learn something new. Now would you please keep up with it and provide some evidence for your claims?
Besides, “actually the number of gun deaths is three times as high” does not seem like a good argument against doing something.
No, you didn’t realise. It was pointed out to you.
ctech
Oh, I got this one.
I’m not even going to bother you with the raw facts that mental illness and mass shootings aren’t correlated or anything. I’m going to talk about actual “crazy” people.
I got a cousin who is legally insane, meaning he cannot be convicted in criminal court because he cannot be held responsible. He generally spends time in and out of the psychiatric ward and when he’s out the whole family is wondering what he’ll do next, hoping that no innocent bystander will get hurt.
One thing we can be pretty sure of is that he won’t get his hands on a gun because we live in a country where you cannot buy them just from some other guy at a gun show or private sale. Tell me again how tough gun legislation does nothing about crazy people being crazy?
Oh, right, you deal with “crazies” by killing them.
You’re showing aptly why you personally shouldn’t have firearms.
I’m pretty sure that there are other countries that deal with wildlife and have sensible measures in place that allow for hunting but that miraculously don’t have your level of gun deaths.
Yeah, that is totally likely and reasonable. Nobody in any house will be able to stop you (except with a gun!) or alert the police. That’s why Germany and Britain and France regularly have mass phone cord stranglers.
Yeah, just dismissing the problem as “crazies” is totally an argument. Not only has it been shown to be completely false time after time again, it’S also useless as two shits.
Of course it’s also complete nonsense because you simply don’t have the number of death and suffering in other places with better gun laws.
Giliell,
No, you didn’t realise. It was pointed out to you.
Yes, I did. I didn’t see your comment until after I’d apologized to Rob.
And this is on Pharyngula! Imagine how many people like these two are found among the general American voting population.
This is why there’s no hope.
The Second Amendment is unnecessary and bad. The country will be a million times better off if it was to be replaced with an amendment guaranteeing healthcare for everyone.
It’s really simple stuff. Americans just don’t want to do it. There’s no need for studying percentages, technical definition of guns, etc.
Guns are just a dangerous bad thing.
It’s also funny how you didn’t apologise to me after mistaking me for Rob, logicusprime. BTW I’m still waiting for you to provide some evidence.
logicusprime
I’ve learned to distrust people with “logic” in their nickname.
There’s little logic in what you say, unless logic is very different in the US than in the rest of the world. Which it isn’t.
EL @96:
Not directly responding to your comment, just my own thoughts on the matter: I’d ban semi-automatic rifles, handguns, lever-action rifles and pump-action shotguns, at least, with no “grandfathering”. You don’t need any of those for hunting. As for the “protecting your home” chestnut, doesn’t toddlers accidentally shooting each other outnumber successful “home defense” incidents? Personally, I keep a baseball bat handy. More reliable at close range.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of curious children and concert goers!
@90 cartomancer: The American culture has nothing to do with the mass shootings. So, you think the Vegas shooter wanted to be John Wayne? The guy was obviously disturbed. Aside from mental health individuals getting their hands on guns the other mass shootings have been foreign attacks or radicalized religious nuts. Your last sentence you hit on exactly what I am talking about…. It is illegal to stockpile machine guns in a hotel room. So, do you think this nut case gave a shit about any gun control legistlation?
@102 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
You are talking about legally buying guns. Okay, stop these maniacs from buying guns the current “legal” way… do you think that stops them from searching for them to buy it illegally? Or do you think that stops the guy who already has a stockpile of weapons from selling? Have you ever met some of these folks at these gun shows? I’m sorry, but they just don’t give a shit. So, are you saying the only reason your crazy cousin does not mass murder a bunch of people is because he can’t get his hands on an assault rifle?
Yes, when a crazy person goes super crazy and starts shooting people from a hotel balcony then you put them down like a rabid bobcat.
Yes, quaint little English towns have their fair share of crime and killings and phone cord stranglers. Also, perhaps they are able to deal with wildlife with their low area and population quite effectively where the residents don’t have to deal with it themselves. The houses where I live would never “alert the police” because it is worthless. It would take forever for the police to arrive and some people have hundreds and hundreds of rural acres that does not have a government wildlife control program. So, your nonsense is that you think other places with better gun laws have less death and suffering. I would just call bullshit on that.
@105 Saad:
yes, when there is no more crime and no more wild or rabid animals I will happily surrender my weapon. Cars are just a dangerous bad thing. Some people are able to not have a car. That’s great, but don’t tell everyone they can’t have a car.
@108 Rob Grigjanis:
You are just wrong. Semi/Pump shotguns are used for about all game especially bird. Semi rifles are not allowed for about anything except pest and nuisance animals such as wild hogs, squirrels, etc. You can shoot hogs without about anything, spot light them, bait them, whatever. People have a lot of fun and sport clearing their land of wild hogs and so many like to use assault rifles. Recently, people have realized that you can cultivate them to eat but I’m still not sure about that. Anyway, lever action and bolt action are the top rifles for hunting. I use a 30-30 lever action which is a very common hunting rifle.
As for more toddlers shooting each other outweigh successful home defense, I would have to see exact numbers because I generally hear of news of both incidents, but toddler gun control should start with the parent/guardian. There is no reason why law makers need to bring in gun control for toddlers getting guns. Most are accidents. Perhaps have some stiffer penalties for parents of children who screw up with guns. However, I also hear of children stabbing other kids, beating other kids, and in fact several stories of kids doing wrestling moves and killing their little brother. That is a parenting issue and has nothing to do with having a gun for home protection. As for accidents, how many kids get hit in the face with bats playing baseball? It is an accident and with better parental/coach supervision you can limit those.
I guess a baseball is good, but I am not sure how it is more reliable than a shotgun at close range which is really recommended for home defense and can be used as a bat as well.
ctech @110:
There’s a difference between “are used for” and “are needed for”.
There will always be bad parents. I don’t favour death sentences for children who had the misfortune to be born to them. And yes, kids find other ways to harm and even kill each other. But if you’re arguing that Suzie would have found some other way to kill Johnny if she hadn’t blown his head off, you’re an idiot. And if toddlers don’t need guns to kill each other, neither do adults.
OK, so keep a break-action double-barrelled shotgun handy.
ctech @109:
Most guns that end up in the hands of Canadian criminals were bought legally at gun shows in the States, then smuggled into Canada. Do you think American criminals make their own guns, or rob gun manufacturers? I’d be surprised if the process didn’t start with legal purchases.
ctech
Probably yes. It’s not impossible to get them via illegal ways, but very, very hard. Also gives authorities plenty of opportunities to figure out that somebody’s trying to get their hands on that stuff. Once in a while weapon caches are discovered and police can then actually remove that shit.
Gun control. As I said, it’s damn hard to get illegal weapons in places with strict gun control. Their problem usually is places with less gun control being nearby.
Dude, the Midsummer Murders are a TV series. England and Wales had a whomping 571 homicides in 2016. Germany has somewhat different categories, but the number of murders in 2016 was 373. That’S what the USA manages on a good weekend.
Sweden. Norway. Damn, even Russia is better in those matters.
So, you think that 571 people in England and Wales (you can now multiply by a generous 6 to make up for the population difference, which would make 3.426) are the same and not less than 11.000. So what is it? Are you simply dishonest or too stupid to know the difference?
So, because occasionally kids hurt each other non fatally and in extremely rare freak accidents kill each other means that there is no difference between this, the frequency and severity with which it happens and the fact that in the USA you’re twice as likely to be killed by a toddler than by a terrorist.
@111 Rob Grigjanis:
Yes, bird shot is actually quite needed for hunting small game. Most other weapons would be nearly impossible to hit a small moving target.
As for the kids, I am saying accidents happen and that falls on the parents to work harder even though they are not all preventable. However, your kid accidentally shooting you or someone else with your gun is 100% preventable.
@112. I am not sure of the influx of guns but if all guns started with legal sales then there is crime or illegal activity somewhere along the lines. If there are regulations to make legal sales harder the legal sales will still happen. The people who clean your house will still steal your legally purchased pistol and then it enters the illegal arena. So, it sounds like legally bought guns is irrelevant when you talk about crime.
@113 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
You take a few stats and you find your own interpretation and relation with the numbers. You clearly are the one too stupid to realize that there are a ton of other factors. Also, drugs are regulated and you can still get those quite easily. It is not hard to get illegal guns and why with all of (where ever you are from) with its great gun control still has gun deaths. The same would be over here. The crazy person will still illegally obtain an assault rifle and kill people or kill with a legally obtained gun.
As for the pain and suffering, it seems there is a car bomb or train bomb or someone getting sprayed with acid every day in europe which if you didn’t miss my point entirely you would understand that even with your gun control there is not less death and suffering. Maybe you have less gun deaths but there are other factors than just access to guns. Gun control is not the reason people mass murder people. We have our mass murders you have yours. I’m pretty sure Robert Black caused plenty of fear for years and years and without a gun.
The point is that the pro gun side believes stopping crime before it happens is essentially futile. You know, the movie Minority Report was not real.
ctech, #109
Those are just standard Republican gun fondling talking points that have been put to rest over and over already.
It is also American exceptionalist garbage. there are plenty of countries that have crime and animals and cars and a fraction of the gun murders as America. So you’re just talking utter bullshit here.
You guys are like creationists. In the face of clear concrete evidence, you cling to your baseless conclusion like it’s an established truth.
You’re a complete idiot, aren’t you?
The numbers I quoted for Germany and the UK are all murders/homicides. The numbers for the USA are just gun homicides. So yes, there’s considerably less death and suffering here.
And that doesn’t even get into the accidents and suicides.
@115 Saad:
I think you are mistaking me for someone who gives a shit about the exact gun murders. How about this for exceptionalism!? When those countries have 0 gun murders then I will listen. If anything, the US numbers actually indicate that there is not a correlation between number of firearms per inhabitant and the number of murders. There are simply other factors that you are not taking into consideration that likely influence violent crimes. You say it is like creationists but you are the ignorant one that read the preface and think you know it all. It is you who are clinging to a baseless conclusion by only looking at the Cliff Notes. You are talking bullshit when you think there is a cookie cutter solution but you are stuck on one simple stat.
@116 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-:
What does knowing your bullshit stats for some bullshit country have anything to do with being an idiot? And I am saying your stats are just counts and they don’t indicate causes. You are just dumb enough to think hey people are shooting each other. If we take away the guns then they will stop hurting one another. Yes, they will stop shooting each other (mostly, as there are still gun murders so these people are finding ways). But they won’t stop hurting people. The point is that you got a few crime stats and think that is shows less pain and suffering. There are more factors. You are an idiot.
And I can’t keep up where the fuck you are from. Stick to one country. If it is Germany and you are German then you should stop worrying about American gun laws and go check why Germany’s violent crime cases have sky rocketed.
That’S complete bullshit.
1. Yes, there’s a very clear correlation.
2. That’s not how statistics work. Are you by any chance also an anti vaxxer because a very small number of measles cases still appears in vaccinated populations?
Yes, my stats clearly show that there is less pain and suffering. Less homicides, less accidents. Less dead people.
But let’s reverse the table: What is your evidence that without readily available guns people would still hurt others at similar levels to where they are now in the USA?
And which evidence would be enough for you to believe that there’s a correlation between gun ownership and lax gun laws on the one hand and death / injury by firearms on the other?
ctech,
You might want to play around with the data here. Look at the rates of various crimes and see how the US compares to other rich industrialized countries (Canada, Japan, S. Korea, European countries). I find it easier to compare using the map view. For most of the crimes they report on–burglary, car theft, robbery, assault, rape–the US is comparable to other rich countries. In some cases we’re toward the high end, in some cases toward the low end. (For some reason they don’t have US data for kidnapping.) Overall, we seem like a fairly normal rich country.
The one exception is the homicide rate. For some reason, the US is off the charts on homicide compared to other rich countries. Any thoughts on why that might be?
Probably the same level of evidence it would take to change the mind of a hard core anti-vax whackaloon. I wonder how many of ctech’s neighbors have been killed by wild animals lately. Being killed by a wild animal is probably the second most likely way I could get killed at work, but I have never felt the need to be armed and if the risk was high enough, bear spray would be adequate.
So apparently my comment got lost in moderation limbo. Short version: go here and play around with the crime rate statistics. Compare the US to other rich countries (easier to do in map mode). What you’ll find is that the US is a fairly normal rich country (slightly higher rates for some crimes, slightly lower for others), with one exception: homicide.
There’s also this.
If you include all firearm-related deaths, the US comes out even worse.
But I guess such is the price of .
Hmm, now that’s two posts lost in moderation it seems. So here’s the story without links: the US is a normal rich country in terms of most crimes, with the exception of homicide, where it’s the outlier (by a lot). And if you include all gun-related deaths, we’re even worse off.
But I guess that’s the price we pay for our .
Link # 1, including an interactive table of rates of gun deaths and gun ownership by country.
Link # 2: comparing homicide rates in rich countries.
Link # 3: crime statistics by country. I find the map view to be the most revealing; basically it shows that the US is a normal rich country in all crime rates except homicide.
Apparently it’s the third link that’s not getting through. The site is knoema dot com (with an s after the http). It shows crime rates by country; map view is the most convenient. What you’ll see is that the US is fairly normal among rich countries in terms of crime rate except for homicide.
OK, I guess you’ll just have to trust me (or google it yourself) when I say that, in terms of other crimes against people, the US is a fairly normal rich country. It’s just homicide that stands out.
@Rob Grigjanis
I didn’t plan to defend the second amendment, and my personal opinion on whether it’s a good law is more muddied nowadays. I came here primarily to correct simple and obvious factual errors.
If I tried to defend the second amendment, I would do it on other grounds. I think that the mere possession can affect culture to prevent a culture of servility to the government and preserve the spirit of resistence, which will most often manifest in voting, not shooting. This to me is the more sensible argument. I also think that perhaps an argument can be made for the crime deterrence effect, although I have personally never seen satisfactory numbers that make me conclude either way.
Regardless, I feel quite strongly that police should be subject to the same firearms laws as everyone else, and whatever training and licensing that they receive should be made available to everyone else. In other words, cops should just be mere civilians with a uniform and a badge, and not with special legal powers, as far as is reasonably possible. In other words, cops should not be military, and we should not live in a police state, in martial law. We should not use a standing army for law enforcement during times of peace.
…
To corvus1005
It seems to be both. The anti-gun lobby has definitely latched on the word in a completely dishonest and disingenuous way. The leaders of this movement really ought to know better, or they are unbelievably big ignorant fools, i.e. Senator Feinstein. As to who first invented the term? Dunno. Not terribly important.
…
To militantagnostic
Yes.
Is it a good idea to allow anyone to own and possess such things in city limits with no training, and no licensing? No.
Does the federal second amendment permit licensing that is conditional on completing certain training? IMO yes, esp. based on modern precedent (driver’s licenses) and based on the second federal militia act of 1792.
Does the federal second amendment permit reasonable bans on certain kinds of weapons in city limits? IMO clearly yes, based on several bits of historical regulation that were cited in the Heller decision.
Does the federal second amendment permit bans of weapons in sporting events and other large gatherings? IMO yes.
Should we also carve out an exception for nuclear, chemical, biological, and explosives (with context), regardless of what the second amendment means? IMO yes. This is one of those times that I think that we should sacrifice the rule of law, because the specific alternative is much much worse. Explosives is the really hard one, because modern fertilizer is basically explosives, and our society really needs lots of modern fertilizer.
EL,
Do you really think that Europeans are “more servile ” to their governments than USAians? How would you even measure that?
I don’t. If anything, I think the American right are more servile, which means my argument is quite flaky.
Fair enough, though I would say, rather than servility, we’ve evolved a system, partly by design and partly through historical accident, that is built to maximize apathy.
ctech, #109
American culture has EVERYTHING to do with the massive numbers of mass shootings that America sees over and above the rest of the developed world. That and the criminally lax gun control laws – which are a result of the rampant gun culture and the institutions founded to promote it. How else could we account for the discrepancy? What other differences are there between America and the rest of the developed world that would explain it?
Perhaps if it was one or two Americans stockpiling guns and trying to take half a town with them on their suicide attempts there might be some doubt about the link with American gun culture. Sure, it happens very occasionally elsewhere too. Dunblane in Scotland or the Brevik massacre in Norway for instance. But it happens all the fucking time in America. Pretty much once a day in fact. The Las Vegas horror was something like the 270th mass shooting (more than four people) recorded this year in the US. You can’t just pin results like that on “one-off madness”. It’s not one-off for a start, and madness takes different forms in different cultures. This is a peculiarly American madness. Suicidal people in most of the world don’t think that taking dozens of innocent bystanders with them will add lustre to their bid for oblivion. It’s a pattern of behaviour that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere to any great degree. But it’s endemic to the US.
You say America’s mass gun murderers are either “mental health cases” or “foreign individuals” or “radicalised religious nuts”. I don’t think there’s any evidence at all for the first two instances. The mentally ill are statistically far less likely to be violent than to be victims of violence in America. It’s a lazy cop-out to explain the pathological elements of one’s culture away as madness, and even if there are some mentally ill people among them, mental illness is heavily culturally conditioned. African schizophrenics, for instance, tend to find that the voices in their heads are soothing and wise, whereas American schizophrenics tend to find theirs are harsh and violent. As for many of them being foreigners… were the Columbine shooters foreigners? Was the Sandy Hook shooter a foreigner? Was the Pulse shooter a foreigner? Was this Las Vegas shooter a foreigner? Nope, all US citizens. What evidence is there that a substantially greater number of non-Americans are committing these crimes than Americans? I would go and look it up, but since the American anti-immigrant right would be having a field day with such statistics if they existed I am fairly confident they do not. At any rate, if vast numbers of American mass murderers were foreign nationals visiting the US then you would have to explain what it is about American culture that makes so many visitors so murderous after living there for a bit.
I doubt there are more highly religious fanatics among the shooters’ numbers either. But if there are then one has to ask where they got into fanatical and violent religion in the first place. A country like America with a culture of violence and fanatical religion perhaps?
But I understand that it is difficult for most people to step outside their own culture and see themselves and their flaws as others see them. “What should they know of England who only England know?”, as Kipling put it. That’s why I wrote about Venenia – to try to get across how ridiculous the rest of us find your gun culture and how ridiculous it is to claim that there can’t possibly be a link between the cultural fetishizing of a weapon and its abundant use in mass murders.
As has been noted, “mass murders” is just the most headline-provoking facet; domestic violence and household “accidents” (many involving children) take a lower-level but more constant toll. And, as with motor vehicle statistics, the number of people who get hurt greatly exceeds those who are killed.
Guns are tools for killing, pure and simple — that they are also used for recreation is incidental.
ctech@109:
So… I’m gonna have to call you on this claim. I’d like to give me evidence of the purported English phone cord strangler who killed 50 persons. Or you might just be full of shit?
ctech@114:
So Americans, unlike others, are too incompetent at using firearms to be able to hit birds with two shots or less. Not really the tack I’d go for, were I trying to argue for… Anything, really.
ctech@117:
I’d say your public masturbation about this leaves people with no illusions about what you care for.
When Americans stop smuggling weapons (and I feel I must tell you that it’s illegal, since you seem a bit confused) to other nations, you can start thinking about demanding anything of us. As it stands, I don’t give a flying fuck whether the smuggled firearm was bought legally or not, it’s so fucking illegal to smuggle arms that you idiot fucks don’t even get it. And that’s why foreigners hate gunwanking Americans. Keep your masturbation to yourselves, you gaggle of assholes.
Go get yourself well fucked, you hideous monster.
What Feline said.
@118
Because people can’t care about mass shootings and shitty gun regulation in countries other than the one they’re from?
Also lol while the german migrant crime rate has indeed gone up a whopping 50%, said crimes are concentrated in around 1% of the migrant population, and the overall crime rate has fallen.
Try getting info from sites that aren’t like, right wing propaganda mags lmfao
Also humans managed to hunt small game long before the advent of gunpowder, so the idea that birdshot is some sort of necessity probably has a lot of peasants rolling in their graves.
Oh, good lord, I never did get around to the rest of his dumb-ass shit. Sorry about that. So, for a quickie:
ctech@118:
Shows how you’re a fucking idiot. “Bullshit stats”? What even? “Bullshit countries”? You, child, is nowhere near deserving of being treated like an adult. Fuck off, sugarpuff, and go whine elsewhere
“hey people are shooting each other”
I mean, yeah, That’s what we are saying. People are shooting each other. We’d rather they didn’t. You’d rather they did. That’s why you’re a hideous monster, and we are loving humanists. You are the actual baddie here, no matter of your view of of how fine skulls look on your cap.
Howsabout you shut your idiot face if you’re unable to consider the possibility of more then one nation being present in this world. You’ve previously been told why the rest of the world might care about the perennial criminality of the American. Might be that American criminality, which we keep being told is culturally endemic, unavoidable they say, is a thing we do not want.
Ye gods, I missed that gem
Cupcake, outside of the USA it is not considered a character flaw to know about more than one country. Of course I cannot remember to ever have claimed citizenship of any other country, so maybe you simply let your assumptions and imagination run wild.
1. Why do I worry about US gun laws?
a) I worry about my friends getting killed in mass shootings and gun accidents, a risk that is much higher for them than it is for me.
b) I also care about people getting needlessly killed who are not my friends. I want less suffering
2. Violent crime in Germany
So, where did you get that information from? It cannot be bulls hit statistics, can it?
Yeah, right, we had an increase in violent crime (though, really, look up the term “sky rocket”) and yes, refugees were to blame for part of it. Funny about this is how people care a lot about the perpetrators (those horrible refugees!) but not about the overwhelming majority of victims (also refugees).
They also seem to care little about the increase in violent crimes against refugees and people with a migrant background. Like the several hundred attacks against refugee housing and refugees or the mass murder in Munich where several studies come to the conclusion that it was right wing terrorism but the police still refuse to acknowledge that.
Which, btw, shows that yes, you can still get your hands on illegal guns in Germany. Nobody here said our laws were perfect, just better.
The reason it’s so easy to reject all the arguments from pro-gun Americans is because they aren’t even doing the bare minimum:
They first have to show that American Homo sapiens have a unique need to own a bunch of guns. Alternatively, they can show that those other countries where citizens don’t own much guns or own some guns but with much stricter regulations are suffering because of their gun control.
Until you demonstrate one or both of those, all your arguments are going into the American exceptionalism garbage bag, which is bursting at the seams.
To be honest, America is exceptional, in the way they stubbornly refuse to regulate something so obviously deadly dangerous as guns.
Just as, on any thread advocating feminism, the responses from anti-feminists amply demonstrate why feminism is needed, so this thread illustrates that on any thread advocating gun control, the responses from gun-fetishists amply demonstrate the need for gun control. The threat of violence from scumcontrol, the psychopathic lack of emotional response to mass murder from logicusprime (and what an unintentionally revealing nym that is!), the blithering about “crazies” from ctech, who is apparently unaware that a world outside the USA exists… Kudos to Giliell, Rob Grigjanis, cartomancer.
@130 cartomancer:
You should check your facts on the number of mass shootings. It all depends on what shootings your source decides to include in that number. Shootings like Vegas are uncommon, not rare especially when you take into account radical religious groups like the San Bernardino attack but every country has to deal with those attacks whether it is a gun or bomb or someone driving a truck through a crowd. You remain ridiculous because you keep believing all the liberal nut jobs and their stats and I didn’t know you had a phd in mental health. Someone who kills fifty people, whether they are clinically diagnosed or not, HAS A FUCKING PROBLEM. The Vegas shooter seems to have been a normal enough individual as more information trickles out of the investigation but something was seriously disturbing him. I think that is clear from his actions. Also, the pulse shooter was born in the US but there is reason to believe he was radicalized.
@Feline 132: You’ve obviously never been bird hunting. I guess since you are on your countries anti-gun smuggling task force that leaves little time to actually hunt.
@Vivec 134: I’ve been telling you guys to check your sources. All of sudden you get stats that you don’t like and then there are other factors. So, stfu. @135 – Yes, they trapped small game. A trap was probably preferred to catch a rabbit and I’m quite sure they were not killing many birds with a bow and arrow.
@136 Feline: Yeah, you guys seem real loving.
@138 Saad: Yes, you need to look at the country list of firearms owned per inhabitant and gun crimes. US is high but not alone and we have a bunch more guns than the countries that beat us.
@140 KG: I fully understand a world outside the USA exists. My answers indicate that even when I’m told there is less death and suffering in Europe. Maybe I don’t like to wake up and hear about an American getting ran over by a crazed maniac driving a truck through a crowd, but I don’t start blasting that country’s culture, laws, leaders, etc.
I don’t really care that much about other countries. I hope they are all doing well, but I get world news and it ain’t all peaches and cream over there even though the people on this post keep talking about American gun control like they are geniuses with all the answers.
ctech @141:
And he made it a fucking problem for dozens dead, hundreds wounded and thousands bereft. All so you can keep your lethal toys. This is one of those times I wish there were a hell.
There’s nothing more to say. You’re a fool of the worst kind: One whose blinkered obtuseness means more innocents will die for nothing. Their blood is on your hands.
@142 Rob Grigjanis: This goes back to one of my first points. You make statements like “Their blood is on your hands” and that is a lot of the problem. You keep looking for someone to blame and the only person to blame is the asshole that decided to open fire on a crowd. I know in your weird sense and view of the world that someone if you can make sense of it then it can help you cope or even feel better about your yourself for being a loving humanist and you can keep telling yourself, “it’s not my fault. It is everyone else.” Maybe there is a not a hell but your sure as heck keep acting like their is a heaven and the line goes out the back door of people who is not at fault.
The Vegas shooting is a senseless act of cold blooded murder. There is no explaining it even with the guy’s motive known which at this time could be anything. Let’s just say, he did because Ben and Jerry discontinued his favorite flavor. The act is still senseless and he is to blame. Don’t lessen his callous actions by placing an an ounce of his blame on anything or anyone else.
Oh, the irony!
@144 rietpluim: How is that irony?.. Irony would be if somehow the Vegas shooting was my fault because I own a few guns. Are you seriously now trying to blame some guy on an internet message board because he is against some of the crazy gun control measures the liberal nutjobs want to take!?
I am for some gun legislation that actually helps if they can figure out weakness in the vector from going from a normal citizen to a crazed individual. I heard this guy bought 30 guns or more in a year. Well, that is something to look at to add waiting periods and investigations to bulk gun purchases. Most gun people would get right with that. I think they are already looking at the bump stock which makes sense. Fully auto weapons are illegal so why should an accessory that mimics it be legal. There is nothing wrong with making those illegal, but when this happens again all the activist will strike up and pass more worthless legislation. So, after a gun control measure is in place and we still continue to deal with mass murders then what?
@141
Weird, I figured people somehow managed to hunt birds before guns were invented.
(They did)
There are crazies with guns (but not ctech). Gun control is also crazy. Apparently, “crazy” translates to “I don’t get it and don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”
ctech, I do hold you responsible. Laws apply to everyone, and in a democratic system we are responsible for those laws. They are how we maintain a society which is peaceful, fair, stable, etc., and you can fail at that task. If in fact (not in your skewed self-congratulatory opinion) you are resisting effective laws that reduce gun violence, you are responsible. I realize there’s no need to to tell you this, much less to do it so politely, since by now it’s entirely obvious that you are a transparent and habitual bullshitter. So fuck you and your ilk, whether or not you count yourselves as “normal” or “responsible gun owners.” Those words mean nothing. People die while you hide behind nothing. It’s only slightly reassuring that you do it so ineptly.
@147 consciousness razor: Yes, because the laws the liberals want to pass is to just strip people of their guns. Gun violence is already a criminal act. A very serious offense. If that by itself is not stopping these “crazies” from doing violence then taking my gun away will have no bearing. Somehow that is hard for these gun control activists to understand. Why is it hard to believe that there are other underlying factors other than just gun ownership?
Well, you are just a fucked up individual if you are holding other people responsible for 1 man’s mass murder. I sure hope you are not in charge of anything day to day.
The reasoning is very simple: If we ban gun possession for everyone, then less “crazies” will not have guns, because everyone will not have guns, and the general global ban will make smuggling guns into the country extremely difficult.
However, as for obnoxious mainstream gun control measures that don’t do anything, such as so-called “assault weapon bans”, I agree. I believe the ultimate purpose of the gun control lobby is to weaken the constitution and rule of law, and ease into even more restrictions in the future, and the goal is a total gun ban, and they’re more than willing to be dishonest dipshits in order to achieve this, IMO laudable, goal of less violence and death. Further, part of this tactic must be to change the culture to make people think that they need guns less, and to change the gun culture, and they believe, perhaps rightly or wrongly, that fighting this war over relatively do-nothing legislation with gross dishonesty will help them win this culture war. I’m highly dubious, to say the least, but maybe I’m just irrationally principled in my stance against dishonesty in politics.
Related read, for everyone:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-poverty-of-data-journalism-and-the-irony-of-gun-control
Typo:
then less “crazies” will not have guns
Sorry, I have a double-negative there. I just want a single negative. Ex:
“… then dangerous people will not have guns either …”.
Ctech, the classic example of the Gunnus Nuttus, “how dare you try to take mah toys away from me” who enjoys murdering small birds with massive hails of hot lead and calls it “sport”. Fucking psycho.
Boy, that is a relief! I am sure the 34,000 deceased will be pleased to hear.
EL @149:
What is/who are the gun control lobby? Is it some sort of secret antiNRA funded by Soros and the other Illuminati? Sounds like the climate denier view of climate scientists; they hate our freedoms, want
all our basesthe power to promote dastardly liberal agendas, and so forth. And they’re all in it together, conspiring in coded emails or summat. And see how successful they’ve been!I wonder whether you think there’s anyone on the pro-gun-control side in this thread who substantially disagrees with Josh Marshall, or who doesn’t already understand the points he makes.
To Rob
Senator Feinstein is a rube and being used by someone else, or she’s taking the rest of us to be rubes. Specific example relevant to this specific case: Her proposed assault weapon ban both explicitly allows and explicitly bans the same gun, the Ruger Mini 14. It explicitly bans the version that looks scary because it’s painted black, has a collapsible stock, etc., and it explicitly allows the “normal looking” version that has a wood finish, no collapsible stock, etc. It’s the same f’ing gun. Again, either she is a fool, or she’s taking the American public to be fools, in proposing this regulation. I don’t know which. Take your pick.
I am just observing that there seems to be a concerted effort at passing nonsense gun regulation. Maybe it’s a “conspiracy” among gun control lobbies and groups. Maybe it’s just that they’re all as willfully ignorant as PZ concerning guns, and they take it as a point of pride that they don’t understand what they seek to regulate – an extremely foolish position. Maybe some other explanation exists for this phenomenon. I don’t know.
Rob Grigjanis @#149:
Whoever they are, they’re probably in cahoots with the wicked environmentalist cabal who denies the superiority of nuclear energy.
ctech@141:
Haven’t been, actually. Not for the reasons you’d imagine, though. What you missed is what you were told, though.
You were told that pump action shotguns are not needed for bird hunting, you responded with a complete non sequitur about bird shot, and I responded to the answer implicit in your non-response, i.e. that Americans, unlike others, need pump action shotguns to hunt birds. Using bird shot.
Still waiting for sources on the alleged English phone cord strangler, by the way.
Now, as to how loving I am? That is a relative measure. And somebody has to be the least lovable of the cohort.
To Kreator
Deny reality all you want. The so-called environmentalists are IMO the primary reason why we haven’t fixed global warming and ocean acidification yet.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-09/las-vegas-nra-opposes-ban-on-bump-stock-gun-device/9030888
(same gun exactly!)
@156 Feline:
What modern bird hunter do you know that is not using a shotgun with small game shot?
The phone cord strangler was an example that a gun is not needed as I am sure there have been plenty of home invasions that killed people without the murder weapon being a gun and the fact that most serial killers do not use guns. I didn’t think I needed to explain that because I thought you understood my point that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. It is a stupid saying you hear over and over but it is right, but I can’t help it that you don’t get it.
@151 Lofty: Well, how dare the nitwits on here keep blaming everyone but the actual Vegas shooter!? I didn’t kill anyone. I haven’t killed anyone. Nor did the majority of gun owners. You can call it “sport” but most people “hunt” birds. We also train dogs to fetch the birds because we try to collect every one we kill which we then clean and eat after giving thanks. To idiots it can seem like murdering a poor helpless bird. You are confusing bird hunting with sporting clays. Typically, sporting clays or some people call skeet shooting is a low death rate activity. Yes, I am not going to give up my guns. I enjoy hunting and eating what I kill. I also enjoy shooting clays and targets. I also have a conceal carry permit and carry a revolver sometimes especially when I travel.
There is probably legislation that could help reduce gun crimes but gun owners are not going to be receptive to it especially when the democrats come right out and say that they want it to be a slippery slope to getting rid of all guns. An inch turns into a mile so I am not going to give the inch even though it may make me sound like I am unreasonable.
Actually it’s the bullets that kill.
And I notice that you’re totally ignoring the data and argument I provided in 122-125. If you want your unfettered access to guns, the price you pay is an unusually high murder (and suicide and unintentional killing) rate. That’s what people mean when they say you have blood on your hands.
This discussion does have me wondering: why do we arm our military with guns when telephone cords are just as deadly and more reusable?
ctech @159:
Reference please. Are you sure you don’t mean “the democrats come right out and say that they want gun control and paranoid pants-pissing pistol-fondlers claim it’s a slippery slope”?
@162 Rob Grigjanis
http://freebeacon.com/issues/pelosi-certainly-bump-stocks-further-gun-restrictions/
@161 What a Maroon, living up to the ‘nym
You’re missing the point, but yeah sometimes phone cord is more accessible and has been a murder weapon in place of a gun. Also, I saw your data from 122-125 but it is skewed and spun to tell the story you want to tell. For example, when you sort the list of countries and firearm related deaths you get US not even in the top 10 but what is important is that no other country is even close to the US in the amount of guns per 100 inhabitants. Then, because that doesn’t really help your argument you then have to cherry pick which countries to really compare it to. Based on that data it is hard to make the statement that more guns equal more gun deaths because if you sort by “Guns per 100 inhabitants” you should see a strong relationship with the total firearm related death column, but that is not what you see.
Now, if you want to start adding other factors to the reason for gun violence in the US then I am all ears. I like some of the American culture discussion because yeah we have some culture problems here but I think it is far-fetched to label the culture as gun-loving or cowboy-loving as the reason for the gun violence. I think the culture in terms of desensitizing America’s youths but still babying them and not teaching them how to take responsibility and we start applying words like affluenza with bullshit social networking for kids. All of that along with a growing economic disparity in a melting pot that is boiling over is going to continue to breed these events.
The US is 11th in firearm deaths per 100k people. Yay! The ten countries ahead of the US are:
1. Honduras
2. Venezuela
3. El Salvador
4. Swaziland
5. Guatemala
6. Jamaica
7. Colombia
8. Brazil
9. Panama
10. Uruguay
Filling out the top 20:
12. Montenegro
13. Philippines
14. South Africa
15. Paraguay
16. Mexico
17. Costa Rica
18. Argentina
19. Peru
20. Nicaragua
No one’s saying that rates of gun ownership is the only relevant variable. I’d say that political are pretty important as well. Which is why what countries you compare us to matters: do y ou really think these countries are apples to our oranges? Wouldn’t you expect the US to be more similar to countries that are similar to us politically and economically, i.e., rich, industrialized countries. Yet here we are, the lone apple among oranges. And as you point out, the main difference is that we have a lot more guns.
The other point I was making is that, homicide aside, the US isn’t a particularly crime-ridden country. I can’t link to the data because whenever I do my post goes into the moderation black hole, but the data can be easily found–just google “international crime rates”; the data I was looking at comes up 6th. There you’ll see that the US isn’t an outlier in terms of other types of crime; we’re comparable to the other apples. So vague cultural explanations aren’t terribly convincing.
Wouldn’t you expect the US to be more similar to countries that are similar to us politically and economically, i.e., rich, industrialized countries?
Yes, I would but I think people bring up vague cultural explanations because we are obviously missing some apples or oranges. So, you really aren’t comparing apples to apples when you think you are even though we may be similar to other “apples” in other categories of crime. Are we similar to any oranges? If so, then perhaps some of those crime levels having nothing to do with being just an equivalent industrialized country. I will check out the other crime rates that you mention but I think it will show that it is not indicative of a less convincing explanation but reinforces the idea that there are other factors than just amount of guns or having an industrialized society.
The fact is that the gun control narrative is exactly that of more guns equal more gun deaths and the numbers from your data do not show that.
Quoting Rob:
WTF Rob.
There’s the title of this thread which is indicative. Maybe you would say that PZ doesn’t speak for all Democrats on this issue. Maybe. IMAO PZ does speak for most pro-gun-control Democrats on this issue.
But that’s not what made me go “WTF Rob”. This is what made me go “WTF Rob”: Quoting you from up-thread:
Quoting from the linked-article:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-poverty-of-data-journalism-and-the-irony-of-gun-control
Bolding added by me:
Come on good sir. This is just extremely silly now.
It’s stuff like this that let’s the gun-nuts know that they’re right – that the Democrats cannot be negotiated with in good faith on this issue, which means that they support the NRA because the NRA fights more or less every measure of gun control, because again the general gun-nut population believes – and rightly so – that no good-faith negotiations can be had with Democrats, and that every compromise is simply a small surrender that will accrue over time.
Fucking English, how does it work?
ctech @163:
(My emphasis). You actually read “further gun restrictions” as “getting rid of all guns”?
EL @166: What the fuck is “bad faith” about saying plainly and publicly that one wants more gun restrictions than just a bump stock ban? Christ, gun nuts are infants.
To Rob
I cited another person, who also said that they want to take all of their guns away (with the caveat “maybe only most of your guns”). You responded to me posting that link, and said that most posters here are in agreement with the broad points of that post, and the broad points of that post is how to achieve a total gun ban, as indicated by the quotes that I gave.
We’re in a thread that is titled “Actually, I do want to take your guns away”.
And yet you still have the gumption to lie and pretend that the goal of the gun-control movement is not to ban all guns. This dishonesty is just going to increase NRA support, and make compromise less. Then again, maybe you believe that there can be no compromise, because the goal should be a total gun ban. Still, I don’t think that morally excuses the dishonesty.
Typo:
>and make compromise less likely.
EnlightenmentLiberal, I’ve been heroically holding back in responding to you due to an incident at Marcus’ blog, but…
Zero guns, zero gun deaths — that is inarguable.
The possible number of deaths = (number of guns) x (guns’ capacity) — that is inarguable.
The easier guns are available, the easier those who shouldn’t have access will have access — this is inarguable.
Regulatory regimes (and their associated enforcement) affect gun availability — this is inarguable.
(And there you have the crux of the argument which you so blithely ignore as lacking evidence)
PS
But the NRA is an NGO — it’s a club, not a statutory body.
(I don’t suppose you’d care to quantify the likelihood of the NRA compromising on any further regulation with or without such purported dishonesty)
EL @168: You’d make a crappy lawyer, mate. They have minimum standards of comprehension, I’ve heard.
That, old boy, is a total comprehension fail. One might say a lie. You and ctech keep seeing “all guns” where there is no “all”. Grow the fuck up.
AFAIC, you can have whatever bolt action rifle or double-barreled shotgun you want, if you have a good reason for it. And yeah, that almost certainly means banning most guns. Clear enough?
@167 Rob Grigjanis: That sounds like the definition of a slippery slope. You want to talk about other’s comprehension when you are not even on topic.
@172 Rob Grigjanis: Yeah, because when the mass murderers go in a gun shop to buy a gun they always mark the box for “shoot groups of people” as the answer to what is your primary reason for purchasing a gun today. Individually, each restriction does not talk about “ALL” guns. No shit sherlock. That is what a slippery slope means. We understand that. Do you? Actually, EL is making a great point which I’ve only scratch the surface and that is how do you begin discussing with, as you would call them, paranoid pissy pant gun lovers about how to regulate their guns. What EL is saying is that the democrats have to be reasonable and careful without going nuclear, otherwise, any bill will just get killed on the floor if it even makes it that far. I’ve seen the same scenario play out for bills concerning animal rights where it is impossible to make farmers or animal meat processors believe the limits of the bill because their whole life they’ve dealt with all the infant PETA nitwits. So, they won’t listen to any animal control regulations measures.
Ah, so it’s only if an American gets killed in Europe that you don’t like it. Can’t say I’m surprised, given the fuckwitted nationalist drivelling of your “How dare a foreigner criticize mah country” response. Which of course simply ignores the very simple point that abundant examples from outside America show quite clearly that restrictions on gun ownership reduce gun deaths, including but not limited to mass shootings. Moreover, total homicides are also considerably higher in the USA than in economically and culturally similar countries, so the “Oh, people will just use trucks/bombs/knives/fists/…” argument is clearly crap.
Or maybe it’s because they think any such measures would cut into their profits, and they care more about that than about animal welfare.
Well, the only way to stop a bad infant with a gun, is a good infant with a gun!
As ought to be obvious even to you, it’s not the “general gun-nut population” that those supporting serious gun control should aim their arguments at – because as gun-nuts – your own phrase – they are not open to rational argument, and value their guns over human lives. The target should be those who are neither gun-nuts, nor sufficiently opposed to the gun-nuts to pressure legislators to pass serious measures of gun control.
@174 KG: KG, read at your own risk. I’d hate for you to add to the gun violence when you find out that you are the one who is extremely bigoted in your view of the world.
https://mises.org/blog/mistake-only-comparing-us-murder-rates-developed-countries
@175 KG: Yes, that is probably the main reason. It is possible to regulate an industry straight into bankruptcy. Then, we can start importing all of our pork and steak from Mexico.
ctech @178: Yes, let’s see what racist libertarians (aka Mises Institute) have to say about gun violence in the US. Who could guess?
@180 Rob Grigjanis: You continue to only listen to news telling you what you want to hear so you just stay dumb. I read news and reports from all over conservative, liberal, libertarian, etc. There is nothing inherently racist about the article I linked. You may not choose to get all your news from sources you don’t like but I doubt 100% of news from sources you don’t like are all incorrect. So, here you go again being unable to even listen because you are already screaming that something is racists that you don’t agree with.
The excellent point the article does make is that there are bigoted views involved in cherry-picking countries, labeling what is considered developed, and how to interpret their crime rates. Also, your attitude reinforces the ideas in that article that people like you only want to hear what you want to hear.
ctech @181:
Ah, yes. We should be comparing the US to Mexico because their histories share some similarities. That’s not cherry-picking at all! Never mind the high crime rates in Mexico largely due to extreme economic polarization (worse than US). And it’s funny that the author thinks it unfair to compare US to Europe or Japan, but makes not one mention of Canada! Oh wait, there may be an explanation for that:
Nothing remotely like a racist dog whistle, that!
Bonus: A bit about the chairman of the Mises Institute. Rockwell says he didn’t write the vile racist and homophobic sewage. He only helped promote it!
I do actually read and listen to conservative voices. But I draw the line at that sort of crap.
Seriously, the Ludwig Von Mises Institute is not a credible source in any possible sense; it’s like listening to an Alex Jones rant. I mean come on, it publishes stuff like “Defending the Blackmailer” and “In Defense of Bribery“; it argues against child labor laws and for legalizing drunk driving, and has writers that complain about something as petty as traffic lights. And then there’s the more mainstream conservative stuff like climate change denialism.
Please, no “it’s satire” defenses, because even if it is, it’s quite poorly done. Not even Poe’s Law can save the institute.
@183 Kreator: Quoting a single lucid article covering the topic does not promote the entire Mises Institute. All media outlets have shit in their closet. Your censorship simply is biased and stricter when it comes to information that you either disagree with or actually makes you wrong. Well, think you’re wrong. It is important to tell a story that a while back a big conservative friend of mine pointed out to me that there is no real difference most times in the end result between liberals and conservatives, only the path to get there. It was a pretty good thought experiment and I immediately started thinking about all the school debate topics and realized some are pretty stupid. For example, when asked to debate abortion it almost pits one side as being “for killing babies” and the other side as “against killing babies”. It is BS. Everyone is against killing babies. Neither side is technically wrong. On the topic of gun control, everyone is for more safety. I think you will find that gun safety is a top priority for many gun owners and I think you will find more pro-gun people to be more moderate towards sensible regulation as I have already seen with many of my acquaintances which isn’t very indicative but hopeful that if “these” acquaintances of mine can start listening to gun control then some very hardened pro-gun people can tune in. The only hate appears to be coming from left when they find out someone is simply pro-gun.
To John Morales in 170
Pretty sure you’re confusing me for someone else. Pretty sure you just quoted a bit from one of ctech’s posts, and wrongly said that you’re replying to me.
PS:
And yet again, you have a fundamental reading comprehension fail when dealing with me. You have some serious problems.
PPS:
Sorry for multi-posting. Hell, I made more or less exactly the same argument that you already did, back in post 149 (with a typo that I corrected immediately in post 150).
So, you replied to someone else, thinking it was me, not sure why.
You attacked me for holding a position that I also expressly refuted just a few dozen posts up too.
You really need to slow down, and read carefully, e.g. read for comprehension, esp. when dealing with me. When dealing with me, almost without fail you will misrepresent my clear positions. It’s really quite frustrating. I don’t know what your problem is, but you should fix it.
@149 EL: Hey, I do want to reply back to this post now that you bring it up again.
The reasoning is very simple: If we ban gun possession for everyone, then less “crazies” will not have guns, because everyone will not have guns, and the general global ban will make smuggling guns into the country extremely difficult.
The logic seems to be sound, but it really doesn’t make any sense. Banned gun possession for everyone… a ban would make having, owning, carrying a gun against the law, right? Why would making those characteristics (owning/carrying etc) of a gun against the law do anything to stop crime when the things people are using them for are already against the law. Smuggling contraband is already difficult. Maybe, there are degrees of difficulty of smuggling contraband, I guess, based on size and shape, but smuggling contraband is already against the law so I don’t see why the smugglers would suddenly say, “Hey, I can’t supply guns anymore because of this ban they got going on, but can I interest you in some crack?” Obviously, the law-abiding, gun toting citizen would no longer have a gun and probably won’t get one illegally either because they won’t take the risk meeting shady people in shady areas, but at the time they want to do something illegal and need a gun then that law restriction/ban goes out the window.
I think if you want to see how well bans work in the US just look at our war against drugs.
Again, a nation-wide general gun ban would decrease supply, and thereby decrease opportunities for gun violence, and thereby decrease gun violence.
The second great American drug Prohibition is different in at least one substantial way: People really really like their drugs, whether it’s tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, etc. This seems to be a universal human constant.
Whereas, if we look at the western European countries, people don’t have that same sort of innate need to possess a gun. Some of these countries show that it’s really not all that hard to enforce a general gun ban, and the facts there also reinforce the manifestly obvious conclusion: If you have a well-enforced nation-wide gun ban, then gun violence goes down.
ctech@159:
Dear me, you…
You are not aware that not all shotguns are pump action.
The person who said
is entirely unfamiliar with the concept of double barreled shotguns. Me, I’m familiar with them. The very least of reasons is that that’s what my grandfather used for bird hunting. We sold it after he died. Legally, I might add. That the draconian strictures of gun control for you.
But one feels a need to ask whether you’ve ever been bird hunting, since… Well, see above.
Well, most of us would say that an example needs to be real, and not imagined. But since you’re sure of it, I’ll treat it as an assertion surely full of shit.
EnlightenmentLiberal @185, you’re perfectly right there.
Be assured I am duly embarrassed.
[later]
Probably because I’ve been holding back so long, and your name was immediately below the comment I quoted.
Anyway.
ctech @188:
Fascinating that you choose, for comparison, a policy that was idiotic and doomed to failure from day one. You might as well ban scratching your arse when it itches. There’s no question that alcohol and other drugs cause a lot of damage, but making them illegal causes much more. The puritanical culture which forbids drug use creates victims. If you’re arguing that more restrictive gun laws would create more gun victims, you don’t have a leg to stand on.
A more appropriate comparison: There are “bans” against sexual assault. As Cosby, Weinstein, Saville, etc (aka the tip of the iceberg) demonstrate, those bans haven’t helped a multitude of abused folk, mostly women and children. That’s down to the culture which gives a free pass to the powerful, at the expense of the powerless. So, because they haven’t worked very well, should we repeal laws against sexual assault? Or should we maybe try and bring our culture in line with the aspirations of our laws, which are supposed to protect the powerless?
To John.
Thanks.
@190 Feline: Something is wrong with you for keep arguing this. What makes you think I am only talking about pump action shotguns. In fact, now most serious bird hunters use a semi auto shotgun. The type of shotgun has no bearing on the round except for the size like 10ga, 12ga, 20, or 410. Just because you say your grand daddy had a double barrel shotgun does not mean it was not pump. There are pump double barrels. I think you are wanting to discuss the difference between a pump action and a crack barrel. Yes, a lot of hunters use crack barrels to hunt as well. My statement was that they are using a shotgun with bird shot to hunt small game. Everything else you have just added additional meaning.
As for the phone cord strangler all you have to do is look up any serial killer in the UK such as Robert Black. Again phone cord strangler is a metaphor for these types of crimes.
@192 Rob Grigjanis: Yep, and there are bans against shooting mass numbers of people. It is called murder and no we don’t repeal laws against murder just like we don’t repeal laws against sexual assault. So, the ban for the thing that you want fixed is already in place and continual failures with war on drugs and sexual assault laws should tell you something and that it does not keep bad shit from happening. A better comparison for the gun ban would be to say that Weinstein is not allowed women. It is a ridiculous slipper slope because you would say “Ok, all men must stay away from all women. Wait, we still have sexual assualt. Okay all women stay away from women. Ok, wait I see reports of a dog humping a woman’s leg. Ok, no pets for anybody and everyone stay away from each other. Whew, we are all safe. That was a close one.”
@189 EnlightenmentLiberal: That is the idea isn’t it? The problem is getting voters and the lawmakers to believe in that notion because they don’t believe enough evidence exists to show that is what will occur in the US with a nation-wide ban and they think there is just too much contrary evidence against the “this worked in Sweden approach”, for example. Much less those discussions can’t even take place for the reasons you have already been posting such as the dialogue that is coming from the democrats which scare of any reasonable discussion on making stricter gun control measures.
And now the gun fondler is jerking off about the intimate details of all the penis substitutes he’s fiddled with. No wonder the US is fucked.
To ctech
No idea what you’re talking about. Again, it’s quite obvious that nation-wide gun bans are entirely practicable to a high degree of effectiveness, and at reasonable cost, as opposed to nation-wide drug bans (IMAO). It’s also manifestly obvious that an effective nation-wide gun ban will drastically lower the number of guns in the country, and it’s also manifestly obvious that at this extremely lower level of guns per person, there will be a drastic decrease in gun violence. It’s manifestly absurd to disagree.
Will it stop all gun violence? No. There will still be smuggling. However, as evidenced from other countries, it will drastically lower the amount of gun violence.
Are there other ways to achieve comparable levels of reductions in gun violence without a nation-wide gun ban? Perhaps.
Is a nation-wide gun ban a good idea? I remain slightly in favor of the second amendment, but I have mixed feelings. However, people like you are not doing the pro-gun-rights side any good in the culture war with your ridiculous arguments i.e. “a nation-wide gun ban cannot be effectively enforced” and “an effective nation-wide gun ban would not significantly decrease gun violence”.
@197 EnlightenmentLiberal: I have mixed feelings as well, but I know without question a complete, nation-wide gun ban is never going to happen so the far left needs to shut up about that. Where I am from it is fully agreed that the reason for more burglaries than robberies is because there are a lot of guns. So, first there needs to be a solution to make people feel safe if you want to go after gun ownership for home defense. It does not good to tell people we are taking your guns but we will do our best to make sure there are no more gun crimes because some people (law-breakers as I’ve said) will still have guns. It is as simple as hearing a story about a gun crime and the ban will start getting broken more and more by people illegally buying a pistol and hiding in their house. Another category would be hunters. I am just not sure what type of claim the far left can make to take a hunter’s gun as there would be economic and ecological impacts. In my state, hunting is licensed which helps cover all types of wildlife costs for the state. If the left takes all the guns then no more hunting licenses, bird tags, etc then no more wildlife revenue for the state. Also, my state monitors wild game ecosystems and understand quite well the pressures human hunting puts on animals and effectively setting game limits and hunting dates you can keep ecosystems in balance. A real example are wild hogs which are awful pests, reproduce like crazy and cause tons of damage as do deer. Wild hogs literally have no limit, can be killed at night, and can be shot with anything you got. A gun is viewed as a tool by many gun owners either on the farm or in the woods. So, in some cases a gun ban for some people is comparable to telling a mechanic he can’t use his wrench.
So, actually the pro-gun-rights side can sound as ridiculous as they want but the mountain to climb will be done by the anti gun people and it is their ridiculous rhetoric that does no good in the culture war. I am simply stating the factual sentiment from the gun toting side.