Would it be okay if we got Congress to settle things that way? Especially the poo-flinging? C-SPAN would be so much better with that.
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The phrasing implies one lives deep inside a human hive, where that’s true. If you live on the prairie three hours from the nearest police presence, it’s irrelevant.
And there’s many points in between. If you call the police from my suburban house and say you heard shots fired, they might say “Why is that a problem? Are you aware of any crime being committed?” or even “Do you realize it is a crime to tie up emergency services phone lines with non-emergency calls?”. That’s because I live within earshot of plenty of areas where hunting is legal, including my own property (my attic has 14 gauge shells laying all over the place from where the former owner used to take pot-shots at rabbits in the garden).
It’s reasonable for people in very densely populated areas to want to control who can use guns and other tools that can easily penetrate into other people’s spaces, especially since law enforcement and butcher shops are readily available in cities.
It’s reasonable for people in sparsely populated areas to want uncontrolled access to guns and other tools, since they don’t have ubiquitous law enforcement or convenient shopping centers everywhere in the country.
In either case, as @jnala said it’s really just not reasonable to insist that guns must be dangerously harmfully loud instead of merely extremely annoyingly loud.
But of course, what any one person may quite reasonably want is not necessary what that person should, can or will get. This is definitely not an Age of Reason.
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Not a gun story but that sentence reminded me of the futility of calling something in.
Me and my wife some years ago had tried to call the police on a group of young guys setting a fire in the middle of the road, along with setting off fireworks into traffic where my parents lived. This was in the middle of the 4th of July, so i understand that their lines were crazy busy but we got such a run around. No one cared. Fire department referred us to the PD, the PD referred us to another precinct, and so forth until we gave up.
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this reminds me of the concept of “hollywood homely” where you have an undeniably attractive actress like drew barrymore playing a character who is so geeky and unattractive she has made it into her early 20s and “never been kissed” when in actuality someone who looked like she did would be the object of constant attention and would be more likely to be oversupplied with offers for dates than ignored. in other words something that is easy to find in movies but ridiculously hard to find in reality.
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Are people normally in the habit of firing guns around places of residence and business in a non-criminal/non-threatening/non-dangerous fashion? Absolutely not.
If you live next to an open air firing range, the sound of gunfire is merely a known risk for the property. Hunting grounds are typically not close to residential neighborhoods for safety reasons.
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You’d be surprised. I grew up in the far western Chicago suburbs (the last town before the cornfields start, basically, and from there on in, it’s solid city).
Sugar Grove had a big problem with a firing range. Basically, decades ago the firing range was in the middle of nowhere. Then the suburbs themselves creeped out slowly closer to the firing range, which had the weird effect of putting more houses within earshot of the range and also saw the range getting a lot more usage. I don’t recall who ended up winning that dispute over noise.
Google maps suggests no more firing range in sugar grove, soo…
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[quote=“Mangochin, post:129, topic:102731”]Are people normally in the habit of firing guns around places of residence and business in a non-criminal/non-threatening/non-dangerous fashion? Absolutely not.
[/quote]
You’re mapping a local variable into a global space. In high poverty or urban areas, well sure, hearing gunfire in those places probably does signify a crime, threat, or danger.
In the rest of North America, or perhaps I should say in most of North America, the sound of a gunshot is no more interesting than the sound of a loud motorcycle. I have to be pretty bored before I’ll spend any effort investigating the sound of guns on property I don’t personally own. If my neighbor spends an entire Saturday shooting tin cans on his back porch with a revolver, why should I care? And why shouldn’t he have a silencer? I wish he did!
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Around here, many people have ranges set up. It is not unusual to hear shooting. I don’t complain when they do a bunch of shooting, and they don’t complain when we do the same. To the best of my knowledge, everyone fires with a dirt berm or hill as a backstop, and not in the direction of any neighbors.
I am unaware of any criminal or negligent firing anywhere near us. There is some hunting, but we don’t allow it on our property, except for prairie dogs.
My dad can hear the skeet range that is 5 miles away or so from his house with the wind in the right direction.
People in the country can shoot in on their own property, some times to the chagrin of their neighbors. Of course there is little recourse for the neighbors in that case unless the user is unsafe.
Ranges get push back because of noise from people who moved out to the country, only to find out they can hear shots of a range miles away. This isn’t just ranges, but other loud things. A local small race track that had been there for decades got closed down because a rich, heavily connected person moved out near it.
Again, the reason “you don’t really really need to have them” isn’t a good reason to keep them on the NFA list. There isn’t a good reason to not own them. I haven’t even really heard a good suggestion on why in this thread.
You know, I noticed in the UK that women and men in TV and Movies tend to be much further from a “10” on the scale. I am guessing it is because just shear numbers they have less very attractive people that can also act. But at the same time, its a bit more refreshing to see regular looking people on TV.
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Airports as well. No matter how remote you locate an airport, people are determined to build houses near it and start complaining. We actually have a first class gun range in our county. It is about all we have. But it is in the middle of nowhere.
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I live in an incorporated city, discharging firearms within city limits is prohibited. Pretty sure there aren’t sheriff’s departments in the hinterlands bothering with Community or Broken Windows. They’re reactive because they mostly don’t need to be proactive.
However, it turns out that a pretty big percentage of Americans live in cities or suburbs. Your special case could merit legislation that allows for strict licensing of suppressors/silencers to allow your neighbors to live more harmoniously with the nimbys. It doesn’t merit legislation that removes a total ban.
I’m pretty sure that the people who are frustrated about this have tried to no avail. That’s been my experience, doesn’t stop my state from allowing open carry on campuses and continuing to whittle away at access to birth control and abortion. When people compare what I can do with my body to making shooting ranges more “pleasant” it does get my dander up, especially with the way things have been going.
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This seems contradictory…
You saw the dodge in my argument 
. I thought you would.
And our urban culture is fairly homogeneous, at least above the Mason-Dixon line. It’s probably possible to legislate a lot of things pretty much identically for that majority of Americans who live in densely populated neighborhoods.
But I don’t particularly want to have laws that prioritize the unwarranted fears of 80% of the population above any concern, no matter how minor, of another 20%. Minority viewpoints matter to me.
I don’t really understand why otherwise intelligent people seem to think a single set of gun laws could sensibly be applied to an area the size of the USA. (The same comment applies to water laws.)
Most acquired hearing loss involves a reduction in the ability to discriminate sounds rather than an inability to perceive them.
E.g I can tell that people are talking, I just can’t make out what they’re saying.
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Fair enough.
Why can’t this be solved by legislating reasonable restrictions and by requiring licensing and registration through the ATF? This is how we deal with people who feel the urge to own a retired Sherman or a Gatling gun.
But I’m very not interested in the Tyranny of the Minority. That’s how you end up with attacks on female bodily autonomy. [Hey, I guess it kinda does tie in!] You’re also ignoring cities below the Mason-Dixon line. Is it more legal to discharge a firearm within Atlanta city limits than it is within Boston city limits?
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Never met someone with partial hearing loss? It usually is for certain frequencies. He has trouble hearing lower ranges, and often time he hears sound, but its muffled and not clear, as with voices.
At any rate, he isn’t deaf and when I visit I have heard it some times.
Yes, that’s what he has.
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Yes, that’s already been explained to me by someone else.
I’m sure I’ve met someone with partial hearing loss, but not known it.
But I’ve not known someone intimately enough to discuss the finer points.
As a semi-relevant tangent, a bit of the neuroscience of hearing…
Your inner ear looks like this:
The three canals are your vestibular system; fluid moving through those, deflecting tiny hairs in the process, allows you to detect head movement and provides a large part of your sense of balance.
The snail-shell bit at the bottom is the sound detector. It’s also full of fluid and tiny hairs, which are connected to nerves that respond to movement of the hairs.
Any sound that hits the tympanic membranes (the “eardrum”) creates a wave in that fluid, which moves down the cochlea deflecting hairs as it goes. High frequency sound creates short rapid waves, low frequency sound creates long slow waves.
The system measures sound in two ways, described as “time” and “place”. Neither system is perfect; they each have a margin of error, so they only tell your brain that the sound is somewhere between frequencies x and y. However, by using two independent methods, you get much greater precision, as you can narrow the range of possibilities to just that area where the two ranges intersect.
|---------| System 1
|---------| System 2
|--| Combined precision
The “time” system works by using the entire membrane. It measures the time delay between pulses, and computes the frequency of the signal from that.
The “place” system makes use of the fact that the hair cells on the cochlear membrane are laid out in a “tonotopic” pattern. All that means is that the hairs at the start of the membrane are a bit stiffer, and the flexibility increases as you move further along. The stiffness of the hair affects the frequency at which it resonates most strongly, which allows the brain to determine frequency by looking at which spot on the membrane is generating the strongest response.
Acquired hearing loss is normally caused by excess sound pressure destroying some of the detector hair cells. It just physically breaks them. The stiffer, tuned-for-high-frequency hairs at the start of the membrane are more brittle and closer to the outside, so they’re the first to go.
This damage leaves the “time” system largely unaffected, but trashes the “place” system, particularly in the higher frequencies. The result is a person who can still detect sound, but has trouble discriminating between similar frequencies, particularly in the higher register.
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