Gun-toting mom shot in the back by her 4-year-old may go to jail for 180 days

boing
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Restrict the manufacture and sale of guns to the general populace except in well-regulated scenarios such as single shot hunting rifles.

So it sounds like you support making sure the guns aren’t out there then. Glad you’re on board!

How many drug possessors are shooting other people up with their drugs? If you could guarantee that guns would only be used for intentional suicide by the gun owner, I’d be fine with that compared to the situation we currently have.

Presenting it as a percentage is deceptive because we have far too many gun owners as it is. 20k a year or even just 600 to 800 a year is too much in my opinion. And yes, insurance is still warranted.

Yes, because guns are more dangerous than cars by nature, regardless of the statistics. Cars aren’t manufactured for the purpose of killing people. Cars are even designed to prevent injury in the event of an accident. Guns aren’t. Guns are killing machines. You keep acting like they’re as benign as blenders. You don’t keep a guillotine or an electric chair in your backyard for the neighborhood kids to randomly play with. The obligatory answer seems to be: “I’ve never accidentally discharged my firearm.” And that’s true of every “responsible gun owner” until an accident happens, exactly as it “happened” to the mother in this story.

So again, you seem all too comfortable writing off “a tiny fraction of the population” in favor of guns.

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Both the UK and Oz have only experienced one or two spree shootings each since enhanced gun controls were introduced after the 1996 Dunblane and [Port Arthur] (Port Arthur massacre (Australia) - Wikipedia) Massacres respectively.

There have been well in excess of 100 school shootings in the US in the same timeframe. That’s just school shootings, not people just going postal in society at large, that’s people shooting kids at school.

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Ah - again this fallacy that guns are only used to kill people. They aren’t. They are a hunk of metal made to shoot things. Most people use them to shoot targets or maybe hunt. Even those who buy them for defense rarely use them for that. Somehow my dad has spent 70 years on this planet, even joined the armed forces, and has yet to shoot anybody. Guess I’ll tell him he’s doing it wrong.

Seriously, I am tired of this ignorant statement as fact. It isn’t. From shooting sports to informal plinking, guns are used every day and hurt NO ONE. See below.

No, I am defending the OVERWHELMING majority of gun owners who don’t hurt ANYONE with their guns against people who, even when the stark numbers show how rare it is, can’t at least admit this. You sound just like people who want to ban Muslims because some are terrorists, or are racists against blacks because some of them commit crimes, or claim that Mexico is full of rapists. You can keep dredging up scary examples and reasons to be afraid - but they hold no more validity than the 3 examples I gave. Discrimination is wrong. Stereotyping a whole group on the behaviors of a few is wrong.

The US has a problem. I don’t know exactly what is causing it, but we are more violent than Oz or the UK. This isn’t from guns, but from culture. Even before those guns laws, neither country had the murder rate or gun crime rate the US had. ETA - also mass shootings have gotten worse, but the TOOLS they want to blame have been around since 1959. Gun laws are only more restrictive in the past 75 years. Something else is causing more mass shootings - not our laws, not availability.

And again - as I asked - look at the chart. LOOK AT IT. Where did the handgun ban and confiscation reduce the murder rate? WHERE? It didn’t. With out looking it up can you at least tell me, looking at the chart, your best guess when the ban took place?

The UK is a gun free utopia with very tight restrictions on everything and hand gun law so bad their Olympic team has to practice in another country. Yet after the ban homicides actually went up for awhile before coming back down. Partly because UK gun crime was never that bad, and partly because the REASONS for people killing others have nothing to do with the tool they used. They moved on to the next best thing which why you now have “save a life - surrender your knife” campaigns.

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Nobody said that. I said they are designed and purchased for their ability to kill people. They are advertised with their ability to kill as their selling point. They are used to kill people, but they aren’t only used to kill people. Their primary purpose for existence is their ability to kill. If you weren’t interested in having a gun for its ability to kill, you’d buy a BB gun or a replica gun. If you want to purchase guns that aren’t capable of killing people, I’m all for that. I’ll throw in a few bucks for a non-functional replica gun for you as a Xmas present.

If you’re interested in sport shooting, you don’t need to keep a firearm at home. If you’re interested in hunting, you don’t need a handgun or anything more than a single shot rifle. If you’re interested in self-defense, you’re statistically better off not owning a gun.

That is writing off a significant number of people for an entirely unnecessary, optional interest. Rarity is only at play when you’re talking about percentages, not gross amounts.

You want to say I’m just like the Nazis too? You seem to be pulling out every example of a bigot and saying I’m like them. I don’t want to ban Muslims, I’m not racist against blacks (any more than a privileged white male might be latently by someone’s definition), and I wouldn’t claim that Mexico is full of rapists. Comparing the stereotyping of people based on their inherent nature to an opposition to the ownership of guns is a highly unfair comparison. People don’t choose to be black or Mexican. People choose to be gun owners. But I’m not even attacking gun owners. I’m attacking gun ownership. I understand that people think guns are cool. Guns are also unnecessary and pose an unnecessary risk compared to their benefits. A bigot is a person with an irrational hatred of a group. I have a very rational distaste for guns and the terrible power they have by nature and I distrust other people to wield that power responsibly.

I’m also not saying that all gun owners are irresponsible. I’m saying that their enthusiasm for guns is perfectly understandable, but, in my opinion, not justified compared to the loss of life that gun culture in America leads to, regardless of whether it’s accidental or intentional use of guns.

If someone could legitimately prove that some action I perform for my own entertainment, like juggling for instance, was a part of a culture that leads to hundreds and thousands of preventable deaths, I’d strongly consider giving up juggling or at least accepting that some form of regulation of juggling was necessary to prevent unnecessary deaths, even if I myself know that I would likely never juggle in such a way that would lead to someone’s severe injury or death. And juggling balls aren’t designed with the purpose of being able to injure or kill something. But I’d be rational and accept that regulation because human lives are more important than an unnecessary, albeit very enjoyable activity like juggling or shooting targets.

Sometimes you have to make sacrifices even if you personally have done nothing wrong because others ruin it for everyone. I believe we have exceeded that point. We exceeded it in the 1930s and should have banned guns back then. The gun violence rate has gone down since Prohibition, but we’ve still had decades of unnecessary deaths that could have been prevented by reducing gun ownership in the country. Less demand means less supply. Tighter restrictions on manufacturing would mean less supply. The cost of a black market gun could get so high that a gun would be more valuable to sell than to commit a crime with. If gun enthusiasts would self-regulate by supporting the permanent revocation of gun ownership rights for anyone who is shown to be at all irresponsible with them, I think that would go a long way to show that they aren’t willing to write off innocent lives for the sake of an unnecessary interest.

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Does a four year old ever recover from the trauma of nearly violently killing its mother?

Will the mother continue teaching the child how to shoot repeatedly resurrecting the trauma until the child becomes a full blown psychopath?

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OK, here it is again.

The UK passed a series of increasingly restrictive Firearms (Amendments) Acts in 1988, 1992, 1993, 1994 and two more in 1997 (the amendments were to the 1968 Firearms Act, which itself superseded the 1965 Firearms Act). There would appear to be a plateauing out of a previous increase and then a fall in Firearm Homicide rate in the UK over that period, would there not?

You will, of course, now say that correlation does’t mean causation, despite having asked for it … :smirk: :laughing:

But surely it would seem perfectly logical that if you make lethal toys less available, that less people will die from their effects? :neutral_face:

[Edit: I copied the wrong graph, so the apparent effect I pointed out isn’t there. The dates of UK legislation are correct. Feel free to pull the Likes].

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As always, there is the elephant in the room: if America’s laissez-faire gun laws aren’t responsible for the exceptionally high US murder rate, what is?

I’ve yet to see an answer from a pro-gun advocate that doesn’t ultimately reduce to “it’s because we have too many black people”.

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What about addressing rape by a mandatory schlong insurance? How well would that work? Think about the victims!

…and even the non-industrial domesticated ones can be pretty good as a potentially lethal blunt object.

Likely yes, until he will be fed with how bad thing happened over and over and over and over.

The do-gooders keep doing that to me. Feels like every day I wake up there is something else to give up, to be restricted, taxed, limited, licensed, or worse. And, to add insult to injury, I am then a bad guy, a criminal, if I don’t intend to just meekly roll over and obey.

I bet somebody like you will be happy to ban ownership or require registration of metal cutting grade ytterbium fiber lasers once they get cheap enough to own just for fun, just because a couple inevitable incidents happen. Hell, it already happened to stupid laser pointers in some countries.

Do-gooders and their War on Fun.

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Sorry - you got turned around. That is the US chart, not the UK chart. I hardly doubt UK laws has any affect on the US.

As for WHY the US crime rate when down, the honest answer is no one is for sure why. The RISE was at least party due to the crack epidemic, which is also why the black murder rate had a disproportionate spike compared to everyone else. Freakonmics makes a fairly strong case that Roe v Wade and the legalization of abortions was at least partly responsible (less hopeless poor turning to crime). ETA - another theory is removing lead from gasoline and thus the effects of lead in the environment.

Here is the UK chart again. You can see your laws in the 80s and 90s kept the murder rate about the same, with slight upward slant. Ironically after the hand gun act in 97 murder went UP. It is back down, nearly to 1980s levels though. I could say something about causation/correlation with the increase in murders after the bans, but honestly I can’t say for certain that the ban lead to the spike or if there were other forces.

Yes and no. I mean it SEEMS logical. But how you THINK things should work and how they work in the real world are often two different things. Thats why I love books like Freakonimcs and You are Not So Smart, because it takes what seems like a reasonable conclusion and then turns it on its ear.

IF you had a complete gun band and confiscation in the US, yes it would reduce gun crime, and suicides. It would not get rid of it because the black market would still exist. 3rd world hell holes with high murder rates, and even nice ones like Mexico, have VERY restrictive gun laws. Read Mexicos gun law wiki. Yet some how they are awash in gun violence. So if we did that in the US we would punish the 80 million honest folk and a small percentage could still get them through illicit means and do what ever they want.

But odds are you aren’t going to have a complete ban. So no matter what scheme you set up in place, you are going to get criminals getting their hands on guns. Look at drugs. Look at teen drinking and smoking. I was a teen. I didn’t drink, smoke, or use drugs. But if I WANTED to - pre internet - it would have not been a problem. How can you logically think that some how we can create a fool proof barrier? Its like Trump supporters for the wall - it’s folly.

Question - how do we prevent more illegal drugs from coming into the US? We already have the laws, do we need more? Or do we just come to the realization that you can’t stop all of them.

So aside from it not working - and we already have several checks and balances in place, don’t pretend we don’t. But beyond that I have the philosophical problem with making “lethal toys less available” so less people die. Smoking and drinking are legal and are causes of some the top killers of American, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and lung disease are 4 of the top 5 killers, and LEGAL substances are the cause for a lot of it. Diabetes is #7 and obesity is a leading factor in many of these conditions too. Maybe we should ban refined sugar, soda pop, and Twinkies. And with alcohol you also have the added issues of alcoholism and it playing a role in assaults, rapes, drunk driving accidents, and other horrible things.

But wait, Mister.44, many people enjoy a drink and occasional cigar or joint, and hurt no one. In fact MOST of them do. We tried banning alcohol and it didn’t work. It made things worse. The drug war is a complete failure. Banning those other things in the hopes we get less people to die form their effects is folly.

Exactly!

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One of the hypotheses points to phasing out tetraethyl lead in gasoline.

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Insurance for cars really is a protection for the OWNER.

Wrong. The majority of people who own cars don’t even have collision coverage unless mandated by the auto loan company. But EVERY CAR has liability insurance to protect everyone else from mayhem you cause from negligent actions

Because, like it or not, in the US gun ownership is a right.

Every right in this country, including free speech and free exercise of religion is subject to regulations where the concern is public safety. If you have the money to buy a gun, you have the money to be responsible for its use to the general public.

Next - how you going to enforce such a law?

The market will do that for you. Homeowner’s policies can have exclusions for gun thefts or gun related negligence unless it is separately insured. Proof of insurance necessary for places where guns are used in public. Gun owners will seek it out to protect themselves from personal liability for misuse of their guns.

Finally - such a scheme would do JACK SHIT to lower gun violence

A strawman point. The need for insurance will lower ACCIDENTAL OR NEGLIGENT gun death and injuries. Something which is largely ignored by the gun lobby.

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What about addressing rape by a mandatory schlong insurance? How well would that work? Think about the victims!

Your schlong is personal property? Its not attached?

…and even the non-industrial domesticated ones can be pretty good as a potentially lethal blunt object.

But they aren’t designed to be them.

Likely yes, until he will be fed with how bad thing happened over and over and over and over.

Because his mom was too stupid to take responsibility for herself.

The do-gooders keep doing that to me

The people who make stupid excuses for negligent gun use make me ashamed to admit I own one. If you don’t want to be treated like a nut, show some sense of responsibility.

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Homeowners policies already have requirements for extra valuables. If you had a couple guns/gold rings stolen they will replace them. If you had a safe of guns/jewelry stolen you would need extra insurance for replacement.

Well it started there, but people migrated the topic. And no, laws or insurance will not lower accidents. Education will. You think people are safer drivers because they have insurance? Or less likely to get sick or injured because they have health insurance? Ridiculous. Accidents don’t happen out of ignorance, they happen from complacency and negligence.

I can’t tell if the last part is a lie, or you just don’t know. The NRA is the ONLY large private entity I see trying to educate the public on guns safety. Other than maybe the Boy Scouts (who use NRA certified instructors). They have kids programs for schools. They have a huge network of instructors for lesson and training programs. They have free gun lock programs and reduced pricing on safes programs. So if you think the NRA isn’t pro safety you are mistaken. The only government entities in the game are Wildlife and Conservation departments in various states who run ranges and do hunter safety courses.

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Unless there are natural consequences to an act of driving stupidity, the odds of being caught are pretty small. Society relies on licensed drivers to do the right thing on the whole. It’s possible to go a month in rural NZ without seeing a police highway patrol vehicle. And yet, somehow, most of us don’t play ‘Death Race 2000’ on the way to work …

You also don’t have people marketing cars as the latest in pedestrian killing technology nor lobby groups making excuses for drunk drivers and drag racing. If people insured guns like they did cars, there would be a market incentive to store them more safely and avoid careless dangerous actions. Plus it would take the government out of the business of recording gun ownership stats and put it into private industry.

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And that’s how we are losing the rights, one salami slice after another.

As somebody often operating on quite low budget, this is not necessarily true. Scraping out money for A doesn’t mean automatically you can afford A+B.

An insurance can as well cause a moral hazard, when people will become less careful because they are insured.

The world works in perverse ways.

My body is my personal property, and all its parts. If I get a RFID chip implant, it is my property too, even if it is attached. Doesn’t matter if the part is added later or if it came as part of the standard package, it is still a part and a property.

Guns are designed to accelerate projectiles. Nothing more, nothing less. The effect then depends on where you aim them. Most projectiles are accelerated towards paper or other inert targets.

Because other do-gooders will want to repeat it to him over and over.

Won’t work. You have X, object X is associated with Y, so you are Y whether you do Z or don’t.

People and their silly emotion-driven perceptions…

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You fail to understand what liability insurance is for. Its not to protect your stuff directly. Its to make whole the people damaged by your careless actions. It only protects your stuff in the way that your assets don’t get seized in a lawsuit.

Insurance enforces more careful behavior. People avoid careless actions with their cars because accidents will raise their insurance premiums. Seatbelts are worn because failing to wear them may void injury provisions of a policy. People have a financial incentive to act responsibly. As with the analogy of cars, people take defensive driving courses to lower their premiums.

Making excuses for negligent behavior does gun owners no service whatsoever. It gives the public the impression they are sociopaths more concerned with justifying activities behavior than being responsible.

The NRA is the ONLY large private entity I see trying to educate the public on guns safety.

And yet here you are advocating that gun owners owe no responsibility to the public for lapses in gun safety. Yet it is common as hell for people to make excuses for unsafe storage and handling of firearms. Yet not once do they seriously address the issue of preventable accidental gun deaths. The NRA doesn’t really give a shit about gun safety beyond a token gesture.

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And that’s how we are losing the rights, one salami slice after another.

Bullshit. Its how our system always works. The government has the onus to justify its restrictions. Its why you can’t use religious freedom as an excuse for human sacrifice or free speech to excuse mail fraud.

So what do you have against responsibility to the public or even the privatization of gun regulation to take it out of the hands of Big Brother Govmint? It is more libertarian than making silly arguments and inviting government one size fits all regulation.

An insurance can as well cause a moral hazard, when people will become less careful because they are insured.

Bullshit. Insurance premiums go up when you are less careful. It costs you to be an idiot.

My body is my personal property, and all its parts.

Try selling your shlong. Its not property. Its you.

Honestly the bad faith nonsense arguments people are using here to avoid responsibility of gun ownership only make it easier to paint gun owners as dangerous, sociopathic morons whose interests can be easily ignored. It does no favors to those who take their right to bear arms seriously.

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Yes, these are some of the most contentious threads here… Even people who normally get along well tend to become shouty by the end of them…

A cup of tea will help with reading them and still feeling sane at the end of them.

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Isn’t it enough that she got shot in the back?

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Giving you GENEROUS rounded up numbers, 20K people out of 350Million people and 80 million gun owners, are killed or injured by guns per year. That is .025% of gun owners. Health insurance already covers damages in most cases.

I have NEVER made excuses for negligent gun handling. But insurance for accidents is simply not needed. If it happened often enough the insurance companies would demand an extra rider, but they don’t.

Where have I advocated that gun owners have no responsibility for lapses in safety. Please show me. I said this women doesn’t need JAIL TIME, but public service would be an appropriate punishment. If a gun owner hurts someone or damages something they should make it whole. This doesn’t mean separate insurance is needed. If I throw a base ball through a window I have to pay for that too. Nor have I made a an argument for anything other than responsible storage.

The NRA, again, stresses safety in everything they do. Every event they sponsor. They are the ONLY private organization I see actually producing materials. Most gun manufactures put in a safety pamphlet with new guns - from - THE NRA! They have the largest network of instructors and safety range officers in the world. But they don’t care about safety? Please.

You need stop drinking the kool-aid on what you think the NRA is about.

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