“Basically”?
I am sure many gun owners agree with you, @crenquis, but it was the more vocal subscribers to Guns And Ammo that demanded the head of the editor for wanting guns to be sensibly regulated and open discourse.
Now that I think of it, there isn’t much proof that those that wanted his scalp were subscribers. I feel forcing him to resign might hurt that publication in the long run.
They shot themselves in the foot?
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I’m also not sure how ‘pistols have very poor accuracy’ means it’s not an offensive weapon, but rather a defensive weapon.
I mean, if you’re an offender, and you fire a weapon with poor accuracy, and it misses… you’re still going to be acting offensively. You might damage property instead of the person you’re aiming at, or you might damage somebody else, or you might not hurt anybody and scare the bejeesus out of the target, but either way, as somebody on the offensive, you’re still causing damage and mayhem and probably don’t care about what got damaged. You might lose if your only goal is killing the person and you failed, but… as an offender, there’s at least a chance you’re the only one in the area who’s got their gun out, and so you can get closer and take another shot.
Now, let’s say you’re a defender. Who are you defending against? Probably not overwhelming force (if so, you’re screwed anyway, most likely), but probably against one guy or a small group of armed offenders. And so, chances are, if you aim at somebody threatening you with a weapon (or threatening everybody, in a hostage situation) and miss, your bullet hurts… your property, or somebody else you care about who’s in the area, or an innocent bystander, either way… your defending didn’t just FAIL, it did more damage, except in the slight case if it scares the person into leaving with no further damage. If that DIDN’T happen, you’ve just attacked somebody who’s got a weapon and willing to use it, and missed, so they’re still armed, so not only did you harm something other than your target that you probably don’t want harmed, but you also made yourself a target.
Seems to me the handgun’s more effective as an offensive weapon than a defensive one.
And better yet, 13 handguns are more effective as offensive weapons than just one little tiddler.
Re: defense against what?
Whomever decided that marketing guns as an antidote to a creeping sense of paranoia would work… Is probably a very wealthy person.
Couldn’t disagree more.
You say a gun magazine editor saying “some” regulation is OK is the same as a LGBT publication editor saying “some” gay bashing is OK.
So, you’re saying any gun regulation at all is unfair and abhorrent?
Nah.
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Your reasoning is fine. Here’s my reasoning:
Back in 2001 some legislation was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Republican president. This legislation represented a real abridgement of civil liberties. It was as clear a step towards tyranny as I’ve seen in my lifetime.
And it seemed to me that at the time that the “gun owning demographic”, if I may generalize a little, responded to this legislation with enthusiastic choruses of “love it or leave it”.
If a Democrat signs the Tyranny Act of 2018 into law then sure – there might be a little bit of armed resistance though I rather doubt there would be much because as we’ve already gone over not many gun owners are actually organized into the sorts of militias that would allow for sustained and organized resistance to a superior fighting force.
If a Republican signs it, though, I’m just going to invest in textiles because I suspect brown shirts will be flying off the shelves.
There won’t be any armed resistance to tyranny in the US because there’s never going to be a single unambiguous transition from freedom into tyranny. We’re already on the way. The frog is already boiling; it hasn’t caught on and doesn’t seem like it’s going to catch on.
I suspect that a lot of what has kept the Syrian resistance going isn’t applicable in the US but I’d have to study that situation some more to really know. But that’s mostly irrelevant because the politics of revolt in Syria are so different than they are or would be in the USA.
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[quote=“wysinwyg, post:366, topic:13824, full:true”]
There won’t be any armed resistance to tyranny in the US because there’s never going to be a single unambiguous transition from freedom into tyranny. We’re already on the way. The frog is already boiling; it hasn’t caught on and doesn’t seem like it’s going to catch on. [/quote]
I agree with you on that. I think the drug war has picked away and picked away on our civil rights. In some states I believe the police can come into your home because they claimed to smell drugs. How do you prove a smell? The UK has slowly fulfilled the prophecy of 1984 with their massive surveillance system.
This is also why many people in the US are unwilling to accept a registration system. People in the UK felt that a registration system, for the most part, was fair and reasonable. Then they have a few high profile events, knee jerk legislation, and now it’s so bad that their Olympic shooters have to practice abroad.
Every time an insurgent force is dismissed (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc), they end up providing much more resistance than thought possible. It wouldn’t play out like some Red Dawn fantasy, but given how well armed the citizens are, there would be formable interference.
But like we said - the likelihood of that ever happening is slim to none.
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I suspect it’s more like “every time an insurgent force provides much more resistance than thought possible people actually remember that they were dismissed.” Presumably insurgent forces that just get rolled over don’t get as much positive press as ones that don’t. It seems plausible to me that some insurgent forces are dismissed, provide about as much resistance as predicted, and are then pretty much forgotten. Had the Iraq and Afghanistan insurgencies happened in a world without a 24 hour news cycle and the internet they would probably have been regarded as unremarkable and perhaps have gone completely unremarked – compare US casualties from those occupations with, say, Vietnam.
We could get into specifics of why some insurgencies are more effective than others. But as soon as we try to do that we get stuck in a spot where we try to guess whether the circumstances of some hypothetical US insurgency would lend themselves to effective and sustained guerrilla warfare. Since neither of us see that as a plausible outcome in the first place that would just be a trip through Imagination Land without an itinerary.
You want me to start naming names? People who have testified before congress maybe? Or a phone directory from K Street?
Unless your children are hungry, and they can’t eat rocks.
No, it’s still negative. The alternative is perhaps even more negative, but something still died because you couldn’t bring yourself to eat a handful of nuts.
Absolutely. That’s why I advocate for universal gun education in the schools. Disarmament is a fairy tale; it could only happen as part of a bloody civil war. If anyone actually wanted to decrease unnecessary gun deaths, education is currently the best achievable answer.
And you know, if gun competency was taught in schools and everybody had to pass the test, it would eliminate nearly all the right-wing arguments against competency requirements, because passing the test would not single out and label gun owners only.
Do you really think so? That’s astounding to me. I think the circle of life is a wonderful thing. I am OK with the fact that everything I eat (including handfuls of nuts) involves me being part of the creation/destruction mandala.
Personally, I hope my death will nourish other living things in the future. I see this as a positive thing.
I gotta go feed the kids (literally, but just a coincidence) so I must sign off now.
Try not to get shot (not always easy when feeding children).
I imagine gun manufacturers would complain loudly if the courses implied too strongly that guns were “dangerous”. On the other hand, they would probably be thrilled at the idea of every child being encouraged to shoot guns. Given how the NRA responded to the CDC doing gun violence research, I would not be surprised if they pushed for a “Guns are awesome!” approach to safety classes.
In general, do gun safety classes for children actually work? One study: Teaching firearm safety to children: failure of a program - PubMed
The present study investigated the effectiveness of a skills-based firearm safety program on reducing children’s play with firearms. In a randomized control study, 34 children aged 4 to 7 years participated in a week-long firearm safety program; the Control Group was composed of 36 children. After the program, pairs of children were observed playing in a structured setting in which they had access to a semiautomatic pistol. A total of 53% of the pairs played with the gun, and there was no difference in gun-play behavior between those children who did and did not receive the intervention. Interview data revealed significant discrepancies in parent and child reports of parental gun ownership and inaccurate parental predictions of their children’s interest in guns. The results of the current study cast doubt on the potential effectiveness of skills-based gun safety programs for children.
Well that makes no damned sense. Kids aren’t going to listen so we should stop teaching them? At 4-7 their impulse control is going to be very weak. They are barely old enough to really understand the concept and permanence of death. I highly doubt these numbers would be much different if you were talking about pills that look like candy, approaching a strange dog, climbing trees, playing with a lighter, or 101 other dangerous situations we teach our kids to avoid. One small study of one age group hardly condemns the idea of a skills-based gun safety program.
4-7 is too young to leave alone with a gun. I wouldn’t let my seven year old, who swims better than me, alone in a pool or rider her bike to school - I sure as heck wouldn’t let her handle a gun by herself.
However exposing kids to guns at a young age, removing their taboo, teaching them basics of safety and marksmanship - all of those things will add up to the point when they are older they can reliable handle a firearm safely. My grandpa was like 9 or something when he would be given 5 bullets and be expected to come back to the house with 4 squirrels.
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I don’t often agree with you, but in this I do. Responsible gun usage can be taught to children – and probably should, considering how often they have occasion to be around guns, whether for hunting or in human violence situations – but that doesn’t mean you can then leave 4-7 year olds alone with a gun sitting on a table.
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The study you’ve linked does not directly address the issue I was talking about - actual achievable methods of decreasing unnecessary gun deaths - it only studies “the effectiveness of a skills-based firearm safety program on reducing children’s play with firearms”.
A good thing to study, yet without further research, you are left guessing that maybe the children who received gun safety training would be less likely to harm anyone in their play, or you can guess that the amount of harm would remain unchanged. But I don’t think uninformed guesswork really advances us towards any useful consensus.
Note I don’t have access to the full text of the study nor to the training materials and records, so I’m really not qualified to judge the quality of the work anyway. Thank you for linking it, though - it’s nice to know that such research hasn’t been completely suppressed.
