Hadn’t thought of it that way.
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Seconded. This is something that really, really, really disturbs me in discussions.
This narrative of “bad” people only serves to justify committing atrocious acts to others (like, e.g., the American prison system industry): “Ah, this only affects bad people, they deserve it!”
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I have the impression that one or two are self-identifying on this thread.
But what do I know? I’m just a Euro-weenie (as P J O’Rourke calls us) for whom it is front page news when anybody gets shot. Our road traffic deaths per 1000 are several times lower than those in the US, too.
The question I ask is whether the NRA is a cause or a symptom. Looking at the history of the Weimar Republic, it’s tempting to suggest that the NRA is the result of the strength of the far right and its desire to create armed conflict when the time is right. Which also could suggest that the rest of the population of the US is potentially sleepwalking to disaster, just as Germany did in the 1920s-30s. Hitler arose because of the Wall Street Crash. Think what an economic crash in China could do to the US economy, think about the similarity between the Republicans currently in charge and the Prussians who ran Germany behind the scenes. (In some cases the ones are the descendants of the others).
It is not just about gun control; ultimately it’s about what happens to the US. And that perhaps is why anybody who voluntarily disarms is seen as a threat.
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I read that half of all guns in America are owned by just 3% of the population. It seems like if you own a large cache of weapons - more than N number of guns where maybe N is 5 or N is 9? That’t the 3%?
So probably someone who owns 20+ guns is in that 3%? What legitimate purpose does 20+ guns serve?
The answers I keep hearing amount to two things. The first is that the person is a collector. I don’t understand why, if you are merely a collector, you need working firearms. Also, I would expect that the guns have some historical significance if you are collecting them. An antique gun from the civil war is interesting and is not the root of our gun problem. But having 30 AR-15s probably is the root of the problem.
The second use that I hear people claim is that they are amassing a cache of weapons with which to hold government officials at bay. These are people imagining themselves to be recreating the Ruby Ridge incident casting themselves in the role of Randy Weaver. That kind of thinking probably has a lot of overlap with mass shooters and is probably not something we want happening.
I can’t see why we couldn’t have some hard limit on the number of guns you own unless you are declaring yourself to be a museum in which case you should have to show the guns to have historical significance and the guns should not be in a fireable state.
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.380 ACP is certainly used in crimes plenty. That’s a pocket-gun caliber. There’s oodles of cheap and easily concealed firearms in .380, some for under $200 if you don’t really care about quality, and that’s buying them legally.
Either way, point number two is spot fucking on. What the fuck business is it of anyone else if this person decides they don’t want to have guns anymore and gives them over to the police? I mean, the only objection I can come up with is that the police already have well too many guns and funding for guns as it is, so they really don’t need any more, but that’s really more of a personal opinion than an actionable argument.
I’ve updated The List. It’s finally reached recursion and peak absurdity.
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The gun ownership concentration thing sounds really scary, and the two arguments that you’ve been given certainly have some validity, but there are two things that I think need to be addressed to give you a more complete and accurate answer as to why things are they way they are.
First point: you probably don’t think about guns like a gun collector thinks about guns. You likely think of guns as weapons and imagine people who buy them as people who intend to use them as weapons. I view them mainly as tools, but that’s because I grew up on a farm where we had to use them to run predators/pests off, and for sustenance hunting. When I look at my old shotgun I don’t see a weapon so much as a tool for getting rid of the groundhogs that would undermine the ancient brick foundation of our house, or for putting rabid raccoons out of their misery while protecting the chickens. I don’t think about guns like a collector either. They don’t see them as weapons that have a specific purpose, nor do they see them as necessary tools, they just like them. They might have 30 AR-15s because each one has some specific subtle difference, or they’re from different companies, or maybe there’s not a lot of difference at all and they just collect AR-15s. I know guys that have ten or fifteen of the same kind of gun, they’re just slight and different variations, a lot of times they’re still packed in grease and have not (and have no intention) of ever being fired.
In a sense, they view firearms much the way I view video games. I’ve got hundreds of games, and over 30 home consoles spanning from the 70’s to present, including some weird and obscure stuff. Some of those consoles play the same games as other consoles, and I’ve got copies of the same game for multiple systems, but it’s not because I intend to play both the PSX and Saturn version of a game and do a rigorous comparison, or because I even intend to play every one of the games to completion–I own some of them because they’re bad–either way, I have them because it brings me pleasure to do so.
Understand, I’m not saying that video games are functionally equivalent guns, what I’m saying is that you have to consider the collection from the perspective of the collector. A lot of the people who collect firearms are basically just giant nerds who would be MORTIFIED if someone shot most of the stuff in their collection because they own those guns because it pleases them to own them, not because they have any intention of actually shooting them.
Don’t get me wrong, there are people with very large private collections, and not all of them are as I’ve described, but the point of that was to demonstrate how the average person’s view of what a firearm represents is a lot different than how a collector sees them. Another quick analogy that might get the point across, lots of people have some little cache of pornography somewhere, hidden in a folder on their computer, a box of old playboys, whatever. To that person, that is pretty mundane stuff, pleasurable to look at, but not meaningful. To a deeply religious Christian or Muslim person, that is absolute filth, the product of a world gone wrong, and proof that the devil has tangible influence over the world. Same thing, vastly different perspective.
Anyway, collectors aren’t the reason why the ownership is concentrated like that. The reason why is because in the 1960’s when the US first passed some gun control laws (which, ironically, were racially motivated and meant to prevent predominantly African American people from arming themselves to protect themselves from a DEEPLY racist society) triggered a shift in the NRA leadership which ultimately resulted in them going from a legitimate sportsman’s organization to basically a lobby firm for the firearms industry. They’ve been squawking about how the big bad gub’ment is going to take all your guns away for over half a century now and it has become all but the NRA’s sole purpose for existing.
The government probably won’t try to take your guns away. They might limit what you can buy and how you can buy it, and they might introduce moratoriums on the production of certain things for domestic civilian sale, but there is almost zero chance of the government trying to mass-disarm the US because it would spell political death to everyone involved, and it would be an expensive logistical nightmare that would fall far short of actually working because we honestly have no idea where most of those guns are.
Despite the odds of the government trying to mass-disarm the US being infinitesimally small, that hasn’t deterred capitalism from doing what capitalism does in the least. In other words, the vast majority of those guns that are being held by just 3% of the population? They’re not owned by crazy militia types, nor unbelievably nerdy (trust me, it’s an area of nerd-dom) but by gun speculators. People who buy up guns when they are cheap and then wait for people to get really scared that they won’t be able to buy guns in the future which leads them to… want to buy guns and these people are there waiting to sell one or two or however many to them. Ironically, this market was created by, and has been sustained by the national conversation on gun control. Whenever there’s even talk about the possibility of tighter laws, the cost of guns and ammunition skyrocket, and these people make money off of those fears hand-over-fist.
The people holding these collections of course fan the flames of those fears and they ratchet prices up every chance they get, sometimes turning profits of 2x-10x depending on the gun/ammunition and when it was originally purchased. Thanks to the panic that the NRA created and has helped keep alive for over half a century, this is an incredibly profitable side business because there have been very few occasions in which the price of guns and ammunition in general haven’t at least kept their value in-pace with inflation, and usually they beat it by a fairly significant margin.
Case in point: in 2002, .22LR cost about $10 for 1000 rounds. If you grew up bored on a farm, you would know that 1000 rounds of .22LR is enough for about a year worth of “I’ve got nothing better to do” target shooting, depending on how often you do it. Two years ago $100 was a “good deal” on 1000 rounds of completely unremarkable sub-sonic .22LR. The same is true for most firearms, though not always with such drastic differences in price.
So there you go, that “half the guns belong to 3%” thing sounds really foreboding, like there’s some secret army out there, but it’s really just capitalists being capitalists. If you wanted to collapse that market, all you’d have to do is convince people that the government is never going to try to take guns away completely, just make them a little more complicated to buy and sell, and that bubble would pop pretty fast.
That might not be what you want though, because that means that firearms would likely be more evenly distributed and that might carry some unintended consequences. In a sense, the fact that so few people hold so many of the guns in the US might actually be lowering gun violence, it’s hard to say.
Then there’s the whole thing about how there are lots of other countries where people can own guns fairly easily and they don’t have crazy mass-shootings. While I’m definitely in favor of saner gun control laws (like strictly regulating private party sales and requiring FFL transfers for them and the like) I think that the violence is the symptom rather than the disease. People quite intentionally tugging at the strings of racial and class fears have much more to do with the violence than the number of firearms available. Guns might make acts of violence slightly more accessible, but humans are fragile and crazy people can come up with all kinds of far less conspicuous and far more scary ways of killing people than mass shootings. (Remember that time in the 80’s when someone put cyanide in bottles of Tylenol and scared the piss out of everyone? Yeah, stuff like that can still readily happen at any time, all the tamper-evident stuff is security theater.)
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As one of those unicorn gun-friendly progressives, I’d like to weigh in that this is the kind of bullshit that makes me very, very, very angry in terms of gun culture, and the 180 the NRA has done in my lifetime. You internet buffoons are not only disproving any rational point you could have made, you’re shitting on other things you likely also claim to believe like capitalism (this guy owns the fucking guns you idiots – he can do whatever he wants), freedom of expression (internet pictures are a type of expression), superiority of the police in keeping order (if this guy doesn’t think he should be trusted with guns, don’t you think the cops are the safest place to hand them in?), etc.
No, you fucking assholes on the internet are mad about one thing, and one thing in particular – this guy who looks like you and what you want the country to be is doing isn’t falling in lock step with your bullshit. You are mad that there’s one less (presumably straight) white guy with guns out there. Even if you don’t consciously believe that and are truly just mad that someone is opposing your argument, if you’re really that angry about it to give a death threat, I’m thinking you have a way deeper cause.
I say this because I grew up around plenty of responsible gun owners who are fairly conservative types, and are just as unhappy when some asshole shoots up a gathering, because it makes them look bad. If someone does something like this move, they may roll their eyes a bit, but it’s his property, and they’ll move on with their day. I disagree with a lot of their worldview, but on this one we both agree. No, the people threatening this guy are a very special breed of asshole, and some of them likely don’t even own or give a rip about guns in general. If this guy was of a different demographic, I assure you this would have been a very different set of comments (although some of them would still involve death threats for different reasons).
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I want to thank you for your response because I feel like I learned something I didn’t know by reading it. I really appreciate that.
Question about the .22LR ammunition anecdote: Are you saying the price has gone from $10 per thousand rounds (at some point in the past but I’m not sure when exact you mean?) to $100 per thousand rounds now? If so, why did this happen? Did the government do something to make ammunition more expensive?
Second, the people who are speculating on guns by owning lots of guns. Hmm. That sounds like Beanie Babies to me for some reason. What if we could somehow make them think a new law might make their cache of weapons illegal to sell? Would that not make them want to exit the speculating on guns business? Could we (should we?) crack down on who can be be a gun dealer?
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They spend less than $200k/year (compared to over $2.5M in 1996 prior to the Dickey Amendment). That’s less than they spend on studying CJD, with a US death toll of under 1000/yr.
It’s not the CDC’s fault that some people can’t tell the difference between how science is reported and propaganda. Every abstract has a conclusion. If the data says that gun control decreases risk of death by firearm by a factor of three, should the authors sugar-coat it to account for the hurt feelings of Ruger executives?
Also, the full name of that government agency is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Once they determine the prevalence and risk factors of a disease, their mandate is to work to prevent it. Note also that the term “Disease” is broadly defined to include population risk factors. That’s why you see CDC campaigns for healthy diet and exercise.
ETA: As an even better example, the CDC website is currently running a campaign on their front page to encourage people to be tropical storm ready. That’s not a disease, it’s a public health risk.
Maybe that’s because the particular government we’re talking about is actively encouraging firearm proliferation. Maybe we also have a chance to learn from previous fascists, who successfully used armed civilian groups to help gain and hold power against a non-fascist majority. Maybe it’s just not that funny when lives are in the balance.
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The speculation isn’t so much “guns are going to be illegal and I’m going to make a ton of money on it” so much as “I can’t buy guns anymore so I better get all the ones I want now.”, in my experience.
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Question about the .22LR ammunition anecdote: Are you saying the price has gone from $10 per thousand rounds (at some point in the past but I’m not sure when exact you mean?) to $100 per thousand rounds now? If so, why did this happen? Did the government do something to make ammunition more expensive?
It was about $10/1000 rounds in 2002 or so and the price has increased tenfold in the intervening years. There has been very little to drive that increase apart from scare mongering from the NRA and the like. Even if there is absolutely zero “threat” to gun rights the NRA continues to churn out “they’re coming for your guns” propaganda at full steam, it’s part of what has made them so effective–no matter what is going on, no matter how far from the national spotlight gun rights are at the time, the NRA keeps as many people as they can afraid that the ATF will kick their door down and take their lawfully acquired guns at any moment.
With regards to ammunition, they keep people afraid that the government is going to significantly raise taxes, place limits on the amount of ammunition that can be purchased, or just plain manufacture a shortage in order to run prices up. There was one such “shortage” during the Obama administration–there was no risk to the availability of most ammunition, but there were lots of rumors that there was, which drove people to buy up all they could, then when other people went to the store to buy ammunition, they saw barren shelves and thought, “oh no! there really is a shortage!” which motivated yet more people to buy up all the ammunition they could. I knew personally of people who had “moles” at big-box stores like Wal-Mart who knew when shipments of ammunition were coming in so that they and all their friends could show up promptly at 5AM (or whenever the shelves were stocked) and buy all of it in one go. Stores started putting per-customer limits on ammunition purchases, so people just enlisted their friends and family to help them buy more. With the exception of a brief shortage in a particular kind of percussion cap (the part of the cartridge that the hammer strikes to ignite the powder) there wasn’t a “real” shortage, it was all just fear mongering built largely around fear of a democratic president. (I’m sure race was rolled in there too, but there were plenty of African American recreational shooters standing in those lines as as well, so it wasn’t all that.)
As for why .22LR specifically? Because that is the most common recreational caliber. Where and when I came from, it was perfectly normal for a kid (of either sex) to get a Remington 10/22 carbine for their 12th or 13th birthday. The purpose was primarily to teach responsibility and gun safety, and most of them were only ever used for target practice which is a heck of a lot of fun. (I went on to shoot competitively and still do on occasion) Most of the guns bought by people who just want to go out to the range, or to a relative’s remote country property to shoot at some paper targets or cans or something are chambered in .22LR because it’s a cheap (in theory) cartridge that–while certainly dangerous as all cartridges are dangerous–is generally less dangerous than something bigger. Don’t get me wrong .22LR is still very dangerous, but the perception is that it’s safer which contributes to its popularity, as well as both its relative cheapness and the fact that guns chambered in .22LR tend to be less expensive.
With that said, it affected everything. 9mm is probably the next most popular cartridge, followed by .223/5.56mm (what an AR-15 shoots). Both of those were almost impossible to find at that time and when you did find them, it was always at artificially inflated prices. Large rifle calibers are much less popular because they’re already expensive, the places where you can shoot them is pretty limited, and they’re pretty punishing to shoot very much of, and the prices on those didn’t really change much. It really was all just because people were panicking over nothing.
Incidentally, you tend to hear “a thousand rounds of ammunition” thrown around a lot in the media as though that is some kind of benchmark for madness. A thousand rounds is generally a case of ammunition, which is usually the most cost-effective way to buy it, and a thousand rounds isn’t nearly as much as you’d think. It’s not at all uncommon to shoot through a hundred rounds of ammunition in an hour or two at the firing range. I’m confused because the media in general likes to throw that around and I don’t know if it’s because they just don’t know, if it’s meant to scare people who don’t know much about guns, or if it’s a number that has been fed to them by the gun lobby. I mention the latter because it could very well be the case that they got that number pushed into the zeitgeist as “an unreasonable amount of ammunition” which puts a big divide between gun owners and non-gun owners and the gun lobby needs those kinds of divisions in order to keep their “flock” in line. In other words, the regular media can say, “and at the shooter’s home they found two thousand rounds of ammunition” implying that only a bad or dangerous person would have that much. A perfectly normal person who happens to enjoy shooting hears that and thinks, “god, they act like I’m some kind of maniac” and the NRA or some other Wormtongue is waiting to whisper in their ear, “they do! they do! they are nothing like you, they can’t be reasoned with!”
I want to stress again that you have to think about the guns from the perspective of the people in question. To them they are collectors’ items, or tools, or sporting equipment, or just something they think is neat. I’ve shot competitively and I have met a lot of shooters that would be loathed to take a shot at a living thing, even if they had a decent reason to–the point is, in their minds, there’s no automatic association between guns and violence even if people outside of their “world” do. On top of that most of these people have time, a lot of money, and probably part of their identity wrapped up in guns and shooting. The NRA knows that, and the NRA knows they can manipulate those people into acting like fools and monsters by instilling and then preying upon the fear that someone is going to take that away from them. Most of them are often pretty normal folks before they drink (or are spoon-fed) the NRA kool-aid, after that all bets are off. I’ve watched that propaganda get to people in my own family and saw it gradually transform otherwise bright, thoughtful, well-spoken people into Fox News robots over the course of a decade or so.
As for your second point, most of the people with huge speculation collections are licensed dealers. It makes sense, they can usually buy the guns at much cheaper prices (selling a gun to a dealer is like selling jewelry to a pawn shop, you might get 300 dollars for a thing they’re going to turn around and sell for 900 dollars which is part of why people panic when there is any talk of regulating private sales) A licensed dealer can also purchase things like ammunition at wholesale prices and then mark it up to their heart’s content. They stockpile the guns for times when the market is high where they sell them for huge profits, and then buy lots of guns up when the market is low. They also buy them when the market is high, too. Gun shops don’t tend to have refund policies, as you might imagine, so the favored customers during high times are generally married men who have always kind of wanted a gun. The salesman talks them into something over-priced and menacing looking, the hapless customer goes home, his spouse finds out, and demands that the gun “go back.” The shop owner, hat in hand, will tell you that they can’t return your money and that they can’t buy it back at full price, so they offer to either buy it back at a substantially lower price than the customer paid for it, or offer to sell it on consignment from which they will take a huge commission. I’ve done professional work for some gun shops and I’ve seen some of those consignment deals–the value stated to the customer will be something like $300, and the shop gets the customer to agree to let the shop take 25% or 50% of that value when the gun sells. What the customer doesn’t realize is that the shop owner is going to sell the gun to another schmuck for 900 dollars and pocket the extra 600 on top of the 150 they already got the customer to agree to. Folks who work in gun stores are, at least within my experience, pretty candid about this behind closed doors. I’ve personally witnessed a person working in the back office notice what we may as well just call a “mark” and call the sales desk phone to get someone over to start the hard sell pitch. Dealers may sell, buy back, and resell the same gun three or four times before someone buys it and keeps it, and the dealer makes oodles of cash every time this happens.
On top of that, dealers can do things like process FFL transfers, which is necessary if you’re buying a gun from someone out of state or through some kind of mail-order. With the exception of the US government’s civilian marksmanship program (which has lots of strings attached and can elaborate on it more if you’d like but this is already turning into a novel) it is illegal to simply mail order a gun and have it show up at your door. Instead, you have to process the transfer through a dealer who will take delivery of the firearm and then transfer it to you. The price of this service varies from dealer to dealer, if you’re friends with a dealer then you might be able to get them to do it for fairly cheap, but generally speaking the price is whatever the hell they think you’ll pay. You’re also entirely at their mercy as far as time frames go, so if you haggle them down a lot on the transfer fee, they’re pretty likely to make sure the transfer takes a good long time (think months) just to spite you.
Sorry this has kind of ballooned into more than intended, and it touches on a lot of subjects, but I suspect that I’m one of the few people around here who is both staunchly leftist, but who grew up around firearms, and who participates/ed in shooting sports. I’m not trying to change anybody’s opinions, I just figure that I can help give people an idea of how many “gun people” think, how those people are being manipulated, and what the laws concerning firearms are actually like. The media (left, center, right, all of it, really) tends to completely whiff when it comes to reporting on and explaining firearms laws, and while I’m not an expert, I’m happy to explain one I know.
I certainly have opinions on what I think sensible gun control laws would look like, but that’s a matter for a different post.
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Yup. Pretty much.
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And in a sane world, every single person who threatened him would have their gun privileges permanently revoked. Perhaps even seeing jail time for the threats against this man.
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It’s been a while, so I forget my sources, but a few stats: Louisiana tops murder rate again, new FBI data shows . St. Louis had a murder rate more than three times Chicago’s in 2015. Heck, in terms of murder rates in large cities, Chicago barely made the top ten. (Plenty of smaller towns exceeded their ranking, too, even if that page only mentions the ones in Louisiana.)
I said guns escalate violence - an argument turns into murder. (There’s plenty of evidence for that - one obvious bit being a comparison of non-gun murders in the US to other first world countries. The US rates are comparable to total murder rates in other first world countries, with US gun murders being a big stack of numbers on top of that.) But studies also show that owning a gun makes one more likely to be the victim of violent crime, even when adjusting for a whole slew of factors (socio-economic, reason for owning a firearm, etc.). That and other studies more specifically indicate that gun owners generally respond more aggressively to (a fairly wide variety of) situations, escalating them.
It does if you aren’t statistically stupid about it - comparing similar sized areas/over sufficiently long periods of time. A town might anomalously have a murder rate twice that of Chicago’s in a single year - but when that’s consistently true, year after year, which is absolutely the case for a number of towns in the US…
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To reiterate in song form.
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thanks for digging that up. I honestly never would have guessed that given the way people talk.
kind of off topic, but that article led me down a strange web of links and i found this source which concludes:
Blacks in the United States are disproportionately affected by homicide. For the year 2013, blacks represented 13 percent of the nation’s population, yet accounted for 50 percent of all homicide victims.
For homicides in which the weapon used could be identified, 84 percent of black victims (4,960 out of 5,891) were shot and killed with guns.
but, i’m definitely sure regulating guns and gun sales will have no effect on this at all whatsoever. yup. completely convinced. i’m going to stick my fingers in my ears, and go back to reading feel good anecdotes on nra sponsored websites.
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Maybe it is like Muslims and the Koran; Americans cannot destroy the holy objects of their devout veneration? 
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