Please, please tell me the first 90 banana myths. Seriously, this sounds interesting. 
6 Likes
It sounds like it would make life “better” but the Tutsi Rwanda would probably disagree.
This is all awful.
2 Likes
We’ve already been down that road with the CDC and they produce gibberish. It isn’t like the CDC hasn’t ever done it. They got their hand slapped and now have to sit in time out for choosing to fund heavily biased researchers.
Citation?
5 Likes
And yet they will try try try and try again, for preventing even a single death is worth it all…
1 Like
lol - you think the republicans just voted against the CDC on the issue because the NRA said so to from some paranoid fantasy? I guess I will have to fire the dagooglemobile and see what I can turn up. It isn’t that interesting to me as it is all partisan one-upsmanship bullshit. At some point the CDC timeout will end and hopefully they will fund some more interesting work at that time.
ETA: I don’t know where I am going to find sources or anaylsis on short notice that don’t come from stiltingly biased sources, so don’t hold your breathe. If you have examples of the wonderful science they were conducting, please post.
Today I heard the AR-15 called a long gun, on NPR.
I mean, fucking A people. FUCKING A you are not helping if you call the AR-15 anything but an assault rifle. Because that is what an AR-15 is FOR. ASSAULT
6 Likes
Vanfire of the Bon Mot’s.
2 Likes
No, I think I’ll ignore you instead.
Some of the focus needs to be there. Sorry bro, maybe you will be less frustrated if you want possible things?
I don’t buy the theory that “3D printing makes it pointless to restrict ownership of certain kinds of guns.” If that was the case then we’d have seen significant numbers of people using 3D printed assault weapons to commit crimes in other first-world countries by now. We haven’t.
If I spent enough time working on my chemistry skills I could learn to make my own dynamite. It does not follow that the government should therefore stop any attempts to regulate high explosives.
10 Likes
This is not reality based. It’s also not relevant to the very troubling limitation in COLLECTING data.
Preventing data collection does not improve data quality or decision making.
7 Likes
Agree that the chill which prevents even the collection of data isn’t good. Data is good. CDC was prohibited from promoting or advocating for gun control. To the extent people have used that to say you can’t collect data at all is sad.
To be technical, the CDC isn’t allowed to use funds (including man-hours) in the process of officially (and therefore usefully) collecting, collating, processing, and analyzing said statistics (despite it being a cause of death). This means they are unable to officially collect the data, and nobody there is allowed to formally work with it. No working papers. Nothing. And it’s not like it’s delivered to their door, there’s a cost in collecting it from law enforcement agencies that cannot be paid.
This is unlike every other statistic they do capture. And, it just so happens, the CDC is a respected source and delivers very high quality data (I’ve used their work in my own quite frequently, and they’re respected internationally as well)
So basically what we have here is a severe limitation being imposed by political ideologues upon individuals who (other than political appointees) are the ones who should be making these judgement calls. Congress never should’ve put their fingers in there and it’s the ONLY similar limitation placed upon them. Politicians are unqualified to make these decisions and there is nothing justifiable about that move.
And yes NRA, Sales, and Politics were the key factors. Nobody involved was trying to help public service (unless they were very, very stupid)
Public Health lost. Politics won.
16 Likes
Ok- sorry about that.
1 Like
I think the 3D printer argument isn’t really strong either, what I would say is that guns are really rudimentary mechanical objects. You don’t need a 3d printer to make one.
The way we’ve regulated them in America makes most of the harder to manufacture pieces legal to own while the regulated part that is the legal/technical “gun” is often not very complex at all. So a lot of the hullablloo around banning certain things/processes or tools isn’t going to lead to very effectual change.
A lathe and a mill are nice, but even those are overkill. People have done it with hacksaws, hammers, and drills.
1 Like
I suspect that the error-contigent likelihood of being engulfed in flames in attempting to produce certain controlled products (e.g. dynamite, meth) is probably sufficient deterrence by itself.
2 Likes
There’s going to be a lot of stumbling over verbiage, I think.
“Terrorism,” sure, but that implies a connection to an organized network with a coordinated plan and this guy just seems to be a lone shitbag.
“Mental illness,” almost definitely, but most crimes are probably this to one degree or another and no one mentions it until the NRA wants to deflect appeals for gun legislation.
“Hate Crime,” definitely.
“Religious extremist,” maybe. That can go hand-in-hand with mental illness, and it’s hard to disentangle the two.
“Something where fewer people would have died if the US had better gun laws” yeah, I think so, but you can say that about almost any shooting and that doesn’t make it better for the folks who wound up dead or their loved ones.
Media being what it is, I imagine this gets put in the “Terrorism” slot and shunted down the “OMG Mulsims!” memory-hole. I hope not, but I expect once that term comes out and finds a Muslim to perch on, we stop looking any deeper for causes.
Which, of course, means that this won’t be the last one.
Bluh.
3 Likes
In France thye have total bans on assault weapons and most private ownership of weapons. Yet Islamic radicals were able to enter the Bataclan night club and kill 89 people. They even used fully automatic AK’s. Even those are illegal in the US.
Yeah, I think you nailed it. In general, people are going to take what they want to from this one because it has a little bit of everything.
And we’ll continue to live in a world where nobody’s properly shocked that somebody thought it was okay to kill somebody else based upon some personal belief system.
Part of having a civilization is the expectation that we’ll act like civilized adults when lives are on the line. The bar is set way, way too low.
1 Like
