Defensive gun ownership is a farce

Don’t call people hillbillies and hicks, it’s offensive.

A huge number of those guns are not intended for war, killing humans or the commission of crime. A .22 caliber rifle is not a weapon of war. It’s simply not useful for killing humans effectively. It can do that, but so can a hammer. Huge numbers of rifles and shotguns are not of sort intended or useful for war, murder or crime. I have a pair of bolt action, single shot .22 rifles, two single shot break open shotguns, a muzzle loading rifle, and a .44 cap and ball pistol. Plus one I’m not listing.

That’s seven guns, a huge stockpile, but only one is remotely the sort of thing you would choose to defend yourself, or as a weapon if you were going to do something wrong. Sure the rest off them would be a better choice than a hammer. Lumping a 1932 .22 caliber rifle in the same category as an AK47, which is what these sort of statistics do, isn’t entirely useful or accurate. I don’t think most people do it to be deceptive though.

Amen, let’s pass a constitutional amendment which clarifies the right to keep and bear arms. I can see the argument that as currently stated it allows me to own what constitutes a modern infantry weapon, an assault rifle. I like to make the smart-assed argument it should entitle me to own a single shot flintlock pistol and a flintlock musket, as well a sword or tomahawk, but I don’t think that’s politically viable.

I’ll vote for one which makes sure people can own the guns they want and need for sporting uses. Allows for people to own guns to defend themselves and their property. (Though statistically a bad deal, as I said, not everyone is at the same risk of accident or of attack.)

We should ban handguns, they are real problem, it’s that simple.

Banning assault rifles is an emotional issue, it clearly only affects a tiny percentage of even gun crime, and none of the mass shootings would have been less tragic if the shooter had a nice spiffy 18 shot pistol. Those incidents are really a part of the suicide problem rather than the homicide problem. And we won’t reduce them until we look to help people who are in trouble and mentally ill, rather than hunting for monsters. Because they weren’t monsters, they were troubled and suicidal.
If you want you can say they became monsters when they went on those shooting sprees, sure. I view them as their own victims and another piece in the tragedy.

Foreign gun control really isn’t that relevant, Canada is more similar to America in real terms, has a lot more guns than those places, and a lot less crime. So it isn’tt just the guns.

Citing Great Britain in these arguments is always a bad idea, you’re less likely to die as a result of the violent crime you are far more likely to be a victim of there, which is not a selling point to a lot of people.

Also, KNIFE CONTROL, a crime against humanity, not the violation of human rights, but the violation of common sense, it’s an atrocity of stupidity. Never be seen in public on the side of this sort of idiocy. Sticks and stones are next on the list I’m sure, and once they come for the screwdrivers, then the island will collapse into darkness.

1 Like

I don’t think I disagree with a single thing you stated.

I was arguing from a position of… Shock and incredulity…

I was being very swift to comment, and wasn’t thinking too much about people’s feelings. So sue me, it’s an very charged debate, and it takes a lot of effort on everyone’s part to stay level headed, and I slipped up a little.

1 Like

SO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Stop whining. Start gathering petitions. Contact your lawmakers. If it is so important, and if you can get enough people to agree with you, then get the law changed.

And, until it is changed, it is STILL the law of the land.

2 Likes

We are. We are sharing new data/research, we are trying to find a point of consensus, and we are working together to debunk the argument that deadly force isn’t dangerous.

Hell, over-the-counter pill bottles come with safety caps.

So is this

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.

Pretty sure that every time a firearm is brandished it denies someone else at least one of these rights. Some of those justified (defense of self or property) some of those not. Guess it’s a good thing that the framers decided arms should be “well regulated,” and thus subordinate to those inalienable rights.

4 Likes

Are those truths really that self-evident, though?

Plenty of people are quite happy to deny rights to other people.

If human rights really were all that self-evident, countries wouldn’t have to codify them everywhere they think people should have them to protect them. And they wouldn’t vary from country to country. And the government wouldn’t deny them to their own citizens.

2 Likes

I’m a believer.

(for extra fun, open all of those links in tabs at once. auditory funtimes.)

1 Like

Everything I need to know, I learned from Rocky.

1 Like

To clarify; at the end of the scene, I’m meant to be rooting for Drago, no?

3 Likes

I know people who are convinced that the price of bullets has gone up because “Obama’s having parts of the government, like the POST OFFICE fer Chrissakes, buy them all up. He can’t take away our guns, so he’s trying to take away bullets instead.”

What I’ve gathered, though, is that the price has gone up because yes, supplies are limited, but that’s because so many paranoid gunowners are fearfully stocking up on bullets. :slight_smile:

6 Likes

that’s the heart of it.

2 Likes

pre-ten-tious!

I hate critiques which dwell upon whether or not they are “supposed to” like something.

What is “self-evident” does seem to vary from culture to culture and time period to time period, but some truths are simply unassailable. To wit:

  1. The Gun is good.
  2. The Penis is evil! The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was.
  3. But the Gun shoots Death and purifies the Earth of the filth of Brutals.

Go forth, and kill! Zardoz has spoken.

10 Likes

Yeah, who’s this asshole that tells me I’m “supposed to” like a hernia.

4 Likes

and it’s also not stored in ideal conditions, thus slowly degrading it.

Are you pretending I my intent is to say: “don’t make any ammunition”, Rather than “don’t make it available the way guns are”

First album I ever bought.

1 Like

That’s why I explicitly specified rotating the in-gun vs in-long-term-storage stock.

Let’s pull the numbers out of our somewhere for the sake of a simple argument and easy calculation. Say we have stock of 100 magazines worth of rounds. In-gun the round lifetime is 10 years, in-storage 100 years. Assume linear characteristics of degradation of the material. Say we are rotating the rounds every year, so they spend 1 year in-gun. Assume no losses on shooting on a range.

One year in gun is equal 10 years in storage. By rotation we therefore reduce the lifetime of post-rotation round to still fairly acceptable 90 years.

Specific lengths of allowable in-gun time, and the minimum amount of rounds for the desired total storage time, will depend on actual predicted-lifetime numbers. I feel too tired to derive the equations for you, maybe somebody else will be in the mood.

Using a revolver will be a prudent measure in case of longer storage times, when the reliability of individual rounds may be called into question; then instead of a jammed gun that requires many seconds of attention you get just one more trigger pull to do.

And we still have the parallel option of parylene-coating the bullets before storage whether in or out of the weapon. A friend when asked suggested it could actually work.
(Edit: Parylene is commonly used as a vapor-deposited biocompatible conformal coating for implants, and even a few of higher-end tattoo/piercing studios have their own coater. Not so out-of-reach tech. And there may be quite some better conformal coatings available for the ammo storage purposes; more research is needed. If all y’all will keep prodding me, you may even result in getting some done.)

Your nonideal-storage-conditions argument is valid but easy to work around.

4 Likes

Actually, Phillip is a Prince consort, not King. We won’t have a king again until Good queen Bess v. 2.0 kicks it and we then have King Charles the whatever number if it is (I’m sure nice Brit can tell me what number he’ll be).

2 Likes

No worries, I am in particular not offended, I have just grown tired of the impunity with which “my kind” is insulted in our culture. :smile:

If he calls himself Charlie III I’ll be amazed.

Georgie VII is my guess (note George VI was actually called Albert)