Certainly. We ban bridges all the time!
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The only thing that can stop a bad 9 year old with a gun is a good guy with a gun. If only the instructor had had a gun everything would have been fine, right?
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-cops-tv-show-crew-member-dies-20140827-story.html
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a fake gun is a good guy with a real gun and a bad aim.
So you think that even though guns are a very rarely used, rarely wielded tool specifically designed to cause explosive deathâwhich compares very well with other forms of violent/accidental death in the gross numbers of violent/accidental death occurring for devices⌠especially given that these other devices are used daily, if not hourly for manifestly useful purposes not to do with killing someoneâthat means guns are âas safeâ as more mundane equipment?
That is completely disingenuous. To take that argument seriously would require extreme stupidity. Putting it forward is really just a cloak for the fanatical view that the value of life is nil when it comes to radical, fanatical interpretations of the right to self-defense. Gun ârightsâ has gotten to the point where it fetishizes murder-fantasy over any other political consideration.
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Since you seem to have missed it:
Higher end estimates by Kleck and Gertz show between 1 to 2.5 million DGUs in the United States each year.[1]:64â65[2][3] Low end estimates cited by Hemenway show approximately 55,000-80,000 such uses each year.[4][5] Middle estimates have estimated approximately 1 million DGU incidents in the United States.
So, approximately one million people in the US every year use them to great effect⌠Next argument, please!
So the possibility of a future without dominance by mindless, fanatical gun-rights absolutism (and comorbid disingenuous arguments) has what to do with âDGUâ now?
Can you show me ANY proof that civilian full auto ownership is a problem? Iâve been actively involved in the NFA community for over two decades, I am a certified Trainer/Range Officer, and I read OSHA, NTSB, and all firearms accident reports for fun. I can count the accidents with full auto firearms like this on one hand with a decade or so worth of room left to go at the rate they are occurring. If this accident horrifies you to the point of demanding legislation because a child died, you must be livid about the presence of swimming pools and buckets full of which are leading a daily genocidal pogram on children by comparison.
Why do citizens need to own them? Do you know where the vast majority of the incremental upgrades that have occurred to the M16/M4 weapons system have come from? Civilians. You know how they developed them? Because they were avid shooters who spent enough time shooting a single rifle (soldiers rarely use the same rifle for long periods of time) that they noticed issues and created products to solve those problems. The only incentive they had to do so is that there is a civilian market to sell to and make it worth investing inâŚthen, maybe a decade or so later, the military might actually adopt the change, but the change would never have come about without the civilian market and would not have been refined and tested by consumer feedback. The M16/M4 was notoriously famed for functional issues decades ago before civilians made observations and came up with modifications to the system from dedicated range and competition shooting, it is now as reliable as anything else out there due to civilian input.
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Well, a lot, if you are the one who is allowed to define âfanatical gun-rights absolutismâ any way you want. Anybody who actually believes the Constitution is âfanatical,â right? I was just pointing out that you stated that guns are ârarely usedâ and yet they are used defensively by approximately a million people a year. That is not ârarely.â I am sorry that you do not understand why this is relevant. Think about it long and hard, and you might just begin to understand.
Like Iâve said, I donât quite know how to draw a parallel because there are many legitimate uses for firearms (hunting, recreation, self-defense, collecting, government sanctioned law enforcement and government sanctioned battle) but at its essence, a firearm is a tool that is designed to kill or injure. So itâs not a completely faulty product like a cigarette (when used as intended, it is harmful) but in some types of legitimate uses, it is a harmful product. And yes, swimming pools are harmful but at their essence, they are not designed to kill or injure.
My firearm background is hunting (firearm utilized as an animal killing tool) and I guess that I just donât understand the draw of privately owning/using fully automatic military weapons (firearm utilized as a human killing tool).
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Where it serves as a marketing tool for arms dealers that has nothing to do with a well-regulated militia, yeah.
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Wait⌠what?
Let me remind you that it was YOU that took a story about a firearm mishap and turned it into a political issue with your statement
I was just opposing the stupid.
⌠ok Iâm tired of copying things. You win.
I thought we had a rule about victim blaming here?
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The 9-year-old is the victim in this situation. The instructor is just dead.
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Then you need to work on your reading.
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Really?
Between Miller in 1939 and Hiller in 2008, it was pretty clear that it was perfectly constitutional to regulate firearms. That is what the âfoundationalâ second amendment meant, for all intents and purposes, but for some reason I imagine you still felt there was a fundamental right to bear arms outside of the militia context even before 2008. For you, the militia restriction probably was just a pesky detail when it came to the second amendment, and you likely based your arguments on what you thought the second amendment should mean. Thatâs fine, and itâs not much different from what youâre complaining about here.
Also, note that while voting is not a foundational aspect of our nationâand certainly not voting by women, children, or minoritiesâslavery, on the other hand, is a foundational aspect of our nation⌠and despite the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments it wasnât until 1967 that the right to black-white marriages was recognized. Things change, and just because something is in the Constitution (or not) doesnât mean itâs right.
Maybe a more accurate articulation of why there is a âgood reasonâ to allow widespread gun ownership is that âthe Supreme Court has recently overturned long-established precedent and found that the Constitutionâwhich was written in the context of a war of independence by oppressed citizens against a strong central government, and includes the word âmilitiaâ when discussing the right to bear armsâas establishing the right to own a broad array of modern firearms even in the non-militia context.â Itâs still open to debate whether that is a âgood reasonâ or not, but at least itâs the law.
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I think Iâd be a lot more convinced by the claim that âyou canât legislate away technologyâ if it wasnât already being done (effective gun control) by pretty much every other civilized country.
Compare gun deaths in the US to pretty much every other country with a similar per-capita GDP and the concept that it just isnât possible is clearly absurd.
The only thing stopping the US from adopting similar legislation with similar results is our 2nd amendment.
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He was not a victim. The girl is a victim because she wasnât old enough to make an informed decision. I think most people here feel terrible for her. The instructor put her, himself and those around him in danger through lack of respect for a dangerous weapon. The company is also responsible for letting small kids use high powered weapons without ensuring safety. In some ways I feel sorry for the guy because heâs also a product of his culture and I donât want him to die of his stupidity, but this is a million miles away from blaming a rape victim for her choice of clothing.
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Heâs not a victim? He gets shot in the head, and hes not a victim? There can only be one victim, and that victim is the girl? The convention against victim blaming only applies to rapes?
A lot of this really is victim blaming, except rationalized by saying the dead man isnât a victim. (I would also note that in other contexts people here might call this sort of death a murder. homicide, or execution.) He is a victim. Instead of blaming him, we could instead blame the USâs gun culture, which has also victimized him.
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Let me preface this by repeating that Iâm upset that he died and wish it hadnât turned out this way. I may think someone is doing something idiotic and dangerous, but it doesnât mean that I feel smug or anything if they suffer the consequences. He is a victim to the extent that he was subject to cultural influences, but he was also a very active part of that culture and was influencing others both through his job and on Facebook:
This is not the same as someone who couldnât find a job and felt forced to take anything going - his online persona fully matched up with his actions in his work. The events leading up to his death were also within his control. While we could say that he was a victim purely because he died, I would prefer to reserve the charge of victim blaming for cases where the personâs actions arenât the main cause of their misfortune. Blaming US gun culture without including him would seem odd, considering that he and the company he worked for represented a particularly egregious example of it.
What are these other contexts? Iâm struggling to think of one.
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Would he have been killed if he grew up in any other industrialized country other than the USA? Isnât it US gun culture that inculcated his beliefs about firearms? His mentality is a product of the culture in which he was raised.
He chose to buy the girl her gun-shooting package? He decided that she should shoot an Uzi? Iâm pretty sure those are decisions that the girlâs parents, and not the dead victim, made. Now, maybe he was bad at his job, but he was doing his job and providing services to a paying customer in accordance with the businessâs policy of allowing children to fire these weapons, and the penalty for being bad at your job usually isnât death.
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