🔫 Firearms: Why own them? Why ban them?

[Mister44]

@crenquis

Isn’t it time for responsible gun owners to back laws requiring liability insurance and jail time for irresponsible storage and handling?

Ugh. As @medievalist noted, the insurance scheme is just ridiculous.

1. First off you are focusing on the smallest segments of gun deaths - accidents.

2. Let’s be clear, accidents are horrible and they suck. However only a fraction of them are kids getting into unsecured firearms. Most of them are people who know better. A portion of them are suicides listed as accidents (if you read about a retired Sheriff who shot himself in the chest while cleaning a gun, someone ticked “accident” so his widow could collect a pension still.)

3. Again gun accidents are horrible, but they are no more or less horrible than the other preventable household accidents such as falls, drownings, backing over their kids in the drive way, and poisonings. You pointed out pool laws which are fine but do we also need say locked safety cabinets for our Tide Pods and cleaning chemicals?

4. Accidents are usually already covered under home owners and health insurances. So the insurance scheme isn’t necessary.

5. The people least likely to afford or obtain insurance are the poor and especially poor minorities. Congrats, you just put in more or less a Jim Crow law.

6. It will do NOTHING to deter gun crime. Most of these people shouldn’t have guns anyway and they did not go through the CURRENT checks and balances in the first place.

@crenquis

Pool owners have all sorts of laws and regulations that govern accessibility to pools and homeowner’s insurance gets adjusted for the additional risk.

Depending on the state, there are already these laws in place. I am not opposed necessarily to a proper storage law - but let’s be honest, if your not one to properly store them now, will you do that just because there is a law now? Awareness of what the right thing to do and what people actually do are two different things. Everyone knows what the speed limit is (or at least there abouts), not everyone obeys it.

And again, among 80 MILLION gun owners, 100 people a year who don’t properly store their firearms is 0.000125% of gun owners. 0.000125%! I mean do we really need more LAWS to fix this?

@Melizmatic

Anyhoos… hopefully going forward, the existence of two separate posts on essentially the same topic will deter firearms enthusiasts from derailing posts about police shootings, civilian shootings and the BLM movement.

It isn’t the same topic at all. Which is why there are two threads, because of the sensitivity of getting peanut butter in chocolate and vice versa.

@lolipop_jones

Did you assume that the majority of people who are caught on the street with a gun and no carry permit would necessarily be black?

Minorities, especially blacks, are over policed. So yes I imagine a majority of people caught illegally carrying would be black. My shooting buddy is more likely to get searched for his CC than I would, which is also why he isn’t going to volunteer information that he is carrying. Something I have done even though I don’t need to. Though I honestly don’t blame him.

[lolipop_jones]

@Mister44

Minorities, especially blacks, are over policed. So yes I imagine a majority of people caught illegally carrying would be black.

I agree. But the laws against assault and murder are a good idea, and no one that I know of has suggested that those actions should be legalized for the reason that we as a society do not yet enforce them equally.