Yeah. Change "no one’ to “not everyone”. There’s always some who’re determined to be on the wrong side of history.
3 Likes
Again, my original point was relating to the original topic, which was about regulation guns like trucks. Again, nothing in those types of regulations would have triggered stopping a 64 year old white male with no record.
What has worked in other countries depends on what regulations you are talking about… Yes possibly other regulations in other countries might have prevented this, but that isn’t what the article nor what I was talking about.
Furthermore I have repeatedly stated regulations are not the only reason for less gun crime in other nations. Certainly it is a factor in some aspects, but regulation doesn’t seem to be the key correlation for gun murders.
Evidence:
-
Many many countries have much tighter restrictions and have high homicide rates and gun crime rates, i.e. Mexico, and Brazil.
-
Countries who have similar gun laws to the US (or used to) never had the same level of gun crime as in the US. i.e. the UK never had anywhere near the same crime rate back when we had similar gun laws. Candas was the same and is still pretty similar to the USs, but is much lower.
-
Of the huge gun reforms of the past, NONE of them correlate with a reduction in gun crime that wasn’t also matched by the overall reduction in crime (that is assaults, rapes, robbery etc also fell with the murder rate). Shouldn’t we see a clear reduction in gun homicides after say making it illegal to just mail order a gun, or set up the NICS system?
-
We have enjoyed a huge downward trend in homicides and gun violence just as they have in Europe since the late 90s. Why are we living in statistically the safest time crime wise since the early 60s with out any sweeping gun law reform?
-
Many cities and states that have the toughest gun laws don’t enjoy any lower crime stats, and indeed have some of the worst (ie Washington DC, Chicago, etc)
I contend, and I believe the evidence backs me up on this, that the causes for crime are more prevalent in parts of the US than in Europe and other countries with lower crime rates. Where those causes are higher, the homicide rate is also high, despite them having tighter gun laws. Our systemic racism and systemic assault on the poor is what breeds crime. Our War on Drugs has given them an appealing method to try to crawl out from that muck. I think decriminalization - even legalization, followed by real investment in our worst areas will reduce homicides more than any other regulation one can think of.
Why this again… Should all people with a penis also carry rape insurance to compensate any potential victims?
First off, the guy was a 64 year old white male and had money. So, you know, he could afford it. Not that he would tick ANY boxes for being an added liability.
The riskiest individuals would be poor black males (statistically, that’s what they go on, right?) So you know, you just fucked them out of their rights. Statistically, aside from these insane mass shootings, rifles account for like 1-2% of homicides per year. So statistically, they would have a lower premium than the average handgun.
Never mind the fact that statistically the average person who commits a homicide has a record, and that many if not most of them shouldn’t have guns in the first place - none of these people will buy insurance - they are already breaking the law.
Nearly ALL of us are physically capable. You could murder your family in their sleep with kitchen knives. So I suppose ALL of us should carry murder insurance, right? Just in case one has a bad day and snaps? More people kill others with fists and blunt objects per year than rifles (this year might throw that stat off), so since all of us (nearly) posses fists and blunt objects, I suppose we should have the same level of insurance, right?
2 Likes
Good to see someone’s been reading the script.
5 Likes
Personally, I see guns as dangerous machines, similar to cars in the sense that it’s appropriate to regulate them in the interest public safety. But I do find it revealing that in your response to my argument you immediately chose to compare it with that part of your anatomy.
10 Likes
Oh - yes - of course. I did totally fall into that trope, didn’t I?
But I think the analogy still stands.
Edited to remove what was supposed to be a joke.
oh goodness. you want to compare the us to mexico and brazil. the circumstances of poverty and crime – as you well admit – are intertwined. average yearly income in mexico: 12k usd; brazil: 8k usd.
we are supposed to be “leaders of the free world” and the best we can do is compare ourselves with gun deaths in poverty and drug stricken countries? wonderful.
answer. technology has made guns cheaper, more deadly killing machines. at this point our citizens own 50% of the worlds guns. it’s patently absurd.
maybe with fewer guns people also were less blase about committing serious crimes. huh. i wonder.
we can do better.
more people are dying by guns in the western united states at this point than by car accidents.
why not make things better? is anyone seriously satisfied with the number of homicides, suicides, and accidental gun deaths? i’m not. i hope you’re not.
define “tough.”
no state has the measures that i, or frankly anyone else, are talking about. you’ve drank the nra koolaid if you read what i wrote and think i’m talking about banning all guns and imprisoning all would be criminals
both, and.
the drug war and gun deaths aren’t fully separate issues.
for one, the easy access to guns means police get scared, and are willing to kill at the drop of a hat, and this readiness to kill disproportionately affects minority groups and other people in high crime areas.
and, i agree with you entirely that ending the drug war would reduce crime ( and gun crime. )
but, gun deaths aren’t solely about premediated crime, nor drugs crime, and i think you know that.
there’s no reason to be satisfied with the mass shootings, the homicides, the suicides, and the accidents we have.
none of it is normal. we can see from other countries with functioning bureaucracies and functioning civil societies that regulation works.
cherry pick all you want, but it doesn’t change the facts.
[edited for clarity ]
12 Likes
Can we not… PLEASE?
This discussion is already disturbing enough as it is without dragging Freudian psychosexual shit into it, thanks.
9 Likes
Aren’t you tired to defend this absurd position ?
No other developed country allow its citizens to own guns without some sort of licence or registration, and no other country allow people to walk around with machine-guns or automatic rifles let alone own them.
There is no legitimate reason to own a machine that can instantly kill dozens, even in a self-defence perspective, even in a sport perspective, and “culture” or “traditions” are even weaker arguments. This is utter nonsense.
To have as much (not the same, AS MUCH) legislation for guns in the US than for cars may not have prevent this massacre (but really, we can’t know) but it would be a step in the good, sane, and reasonable direction.
Your lack of will to change things and cynicism disgust me.
7 Likes
Since we’re already hypothetically going to be registering and licensing every gun sold, how about a mandatory, exponentially-increasing waiting period per gun purchased? Sure, you can still probably get 4 or 5 high-power semi-automatic rifles before the waiting period extends into the multiple-years-between-purchases territory, but also, realistically, what single individual requires the use of more than 4 or 5 high-power semi-automatic rifles for anything that isn’t slaughtering dozens of innocent human beings? Sure you could rope your family into the purchasing process, but every person you involve is one more who might also stop and ask “wait, why do you need me to buy a gun for you, anyway?”
I also don’t really understand why you think prohibiting the manufacture and import of high-power semi-automatic rifles would do nothing to reduce their supply and easy availability. If you can no longer just waltz into Walmart and pick up a handful of people-killing machines, but instead have to operate on the dark web using bitcoin or incredibly expensive cash-only transactions, the number of people who are going to invest themselves in going through all that is going to drop like a stone.
No, we may not be able to prevent every atrocity. The fact that someone shot 69 people in Norway in 2011 speaks to that. But how many mass shootings were there in Norway before or after that? Was it anywhere close to being on the order of one a day? And yes, to some extent there is a cultural difference in the US where “granny get yer gun” is the first solution to a problem (where “problem” is anything from home invasion to a waitress asking you to stop smoking) in a lot of people’s minds, rather than somewhere beyond the last possible resort. That’s something we have to counter in addition to the near-instant availability of firearms for many, many, many people. Here’s the thing though: part of countering “granny get yer gun” is making it harder for granny to get her god damned gun.
7 Likes
22 posts were split to a new topic: Punk politics!
bill o’reilly (whom i mostly detest) has at least had the self-awareness to go on record as saying that events like newtown (and presumably now las vegas) are the price we pay for having our freedom. is that your position as well?
if it is, then i know i really have nothing else to say to you on this topic and you really have nothing else to say to me on this topic and we can safely ignore each other on it.
if it is not, then would you please explain what it is you think we can do to stop this thing from happening in our country which, outside of times of war and terrorism, happens virtually nowhere else?
6 Likes
This is the clear demonstration that unrestricted freedom is not always a good thing.
2 Likes
Came here to post this.
I hope you don’t; I enjoy your posts, even when I don’t agree with you.
(I agree with you about avocados!)
Some people believe that when humans do evil things, the obvious solution is to take away everyone’s ability to do that thing; others believe that the obvious solution is to make sure nobody wants or needs to do that evil thing.
I no longer believe either of those two approaches is possible in our current culture. The USA is awash in gun fetish propaganda 24x7; we magnify, glorify and condemn guns constantly. Every child is carefully taught that the good guys need their guns to “protect” righteousness, and that the bad guys can be defeated by taking their guns. And since American media reach the whole world, we infect everyone everywhere with our madness… I have no solution.
It’s not only on the user end that trucks and their use is heavily regulated - the very design and manufacture of a truck is heavily regulated, to increase safety. The sale and resale of a truck is regulated. You can go to jail for simply operating a truck in an unsafe manner, even if no one is injured. One’s vehicle or the right to drive can be taken away for any number of reasons relating to mental and physical health, one’s finances, not mowing your property’s front lawn… Etc.
The inevitable attempt to compare vehicles to guns when there’s been a shooting really backfires if one is taking an anti-gun-control position. These people really don’t think these things through.
Yeah, we’ve had decades of government regulation as to the design, manufacture and operation of trucks, all to (successfully increase safety. Meanwhile guns have only gotten more dangerous. So even though the murder rate has gone down, vehicle fatalities have dropped even more, which means gun deaths are now surpassing vehicle deaths in more and more states…
First of all, yes, it would, because he wouldn’t have been able to convert his rifles into fully-auto (or the equivalent), for one (because the design and manufacture of trucks is regulated for safety issues, and if guns were treated the same way…). But even if that weren’t the case, such regulation would have prevented a much larger number of the daily incidents that happen in this country and with much higher collective death-tolls. So…
Yeah, well some people see anthrax as a fun treat that’s safe to eat.
6 Likes
Actually car/truck regulation is a great analogy. Plenty of people don’t have insurance, and have expired/no license and drive anyway and they only get in trouble if they do something stupid to get caught or if the police go on civil liberty-violating fishing trips and profiling. As far as registration, I doubt it happens as frequently, but people have stolen registration stickers/license plates, and the way they get busted? Surveillance-state enabling license scanners that the police use nowadays.
1 Like
Would they have prevented the other 350-odd shootings of four or more people that have happened this year?
Meanwhile, we don’t yet know what would have prevented this event.
1 Like
Yep. But I have to because half of the issue is rife misinformation.
Like this. The US already heavily restricts and registers machine guns. He didn’t use a legal machine gun.
It’s exhausting to try to interject perspective because fraction of a fraction of a percent use guns for crime. It is insulting to suggest I need to pay an insurance for this sliver of a population who use guns for evil. Then again, I am treated like a junkie or a potential criminal by the healthcare system and DEA for my opioid use so I guess I should I should just get used to it.
Yet my point stands. Mexico you cant even own a gun in a military caliber. They are extremely restrictive yet awash in gun violence. The point is their laws don’t stop the violence. Perhaps parts of the US are more like Mexico than we want to admit. Do you think if we had less poverty we would see a reduction in crime?
Oh well I see, its the victims fault they have rights they are abused by the police. If they were disarmed and compliant they wouldn’t get hurt. So we should forgo our rights so the government won’t hurt us. Great idea, I am sure they would love that. If we all kept quiet they wouldn’t need to push back either.
I’m sorry. That as an attempt to add levity that obviously failed. I deleted.
Final thoughts for the night:
I stayed quiet for two days as I didn’t think I could remain as calm as needed for some of the rather nasty comments. For a site that peddles drug paraphernalia for illegal drugs, and touts the benefits of some of them, it is rather shocking the nativity that this problem can be fixed by laws. It sees many people are proponents of skirting the law in certain areas - and that’s fine - but don’t act like making things illegal will make it go away.
My points I have made above stand. You can’t really show past gun control directly affecting crime. You cant explain to me why similar countries with similar laws have or had way less crime. The crime rate is dropping all over the US with out new legislation.
The truth is I could learn to live with a licensing scheme. I already have two licenses related to guns. I could live with registration - though when they use it against me later I get to do a big ol’ “told you so”. I could live with other hoops to jump through. But I do not see how this will make a serious dent in criminal use. They already do not go through the legal means or use a straw purchaser. I have said in the past I’d be ok with laws that targeted ways to keep them out of the hands of criminals but nearly every suggestion I see will mainly affect most of the normal people
More severe things like an outright ban of semi auto rifles would possibly work in the long term. But again, I find this idea as absurd as banning Muslims because some Muslims are terrorists to the percentage of owners vs abuseres. If you don’t have a turn in or confiscation scheme then you are still going to have tens of millions floating around. If you managed to get them turned in after a generation or so, you then have to deal with a country the lax security that has 13 million illegal immigrants and who imports literally tons of drugs will some how get its act together and keep illegal guns out. Oh and you have done nothing to help the 99% of the street crime that uses hand guns.
But for a place that advertises White Hat Hacking (which would mean one would have the tools to Black Hat Hack), warns of the surveillance state, and the importance of privacy and security of your computer and cell phones (Lets be honest, no one here is a Snowden. Our secrets are nude pics and browsing history) when these things deal BILLIONS of dollars in damage a year, ruins lives, and are used to set up crimes and even terror attacks. Hell they hack elections and our credit and our hospitals (grant some of these are out of the country but we have lots of native abusers) No one here would be willing to give the government a backdoor to their device to stop crime. No one is willing to concede any of their other rights in the effort to stem crime. Most seem to agree the TSA is a waste of time and money, and the NSA is overstepping its bounds. Every one seems worried about the rise of fascism.
But when crazy shit happens - fuck rights - fuck perspective - fuck the fact I was cursing you last week and fear you have too much power over our lives, I am scared now and something must be done!
Anyway - I guess I am failing at not taking some things personally, and my home keyboard is fuuuuuuuccccckkkkeeeed. So I will bow out for the rest of this thread. No one cares anyway so I am not sure why I bother. Hearing your own voice back to you is more pleasant anyway, amiright?
3 Likes
Sorry - just saw this - real quick.
What are you talking about? People MOD their cars all the time. They make them faster, destroy their EPA rating, etc etc
This place has tons of makers and maker related articles. You think LAWS stop people from modding something? Especially if it is for an evil intent?
OK- I’m done now. Night.
2 Likes
I fear that other means would be found to disarm these groups rather than make gun access more restricted.
1 Like
