Guns Don't Kill People, Toddlers Do

The whole toddler thing seems like a good justification for mandatory birth control, if you ask me. Whether devilspawn kids or dumb parents, I don’t want to be caught in the crossfire.

Wow. You jumped to the hyperbolic strawman pretty quickly. Feel free to read through my previous posts on this thread if you want more of the nuance of my position.

Who would rationally think that all non-natural death is even possible to prevent? Natural is even a suspect term here because animals (humans) killing other animals seems pretty natural to me if you look at human history or even just animal planet. Agreeing to what “natural” actually means would likely take a long time, so that’s not even worth addressing in my opinion.

Which rights of gun owners are you referring to? Gun rights? The 2nd amendment? I think the 2nd amendment is outdated and I disagree with the Supreme Court’s very recent interpretation that the right to bear arms is separate from the concept of maintaining a well regulated militia. Since militias are outdated and unnecessary in modern times, the whole 2nd amendment seems useless to me, or rather, more dangerous to the citizenry than the government.

And what about the 5th amendment rights of individuals not to be deprived of life…without the due process of law? By not enacting reasonable limitations on the possession of life-depriving weapons, the government is, in my opinion, complicit in the violation of every innocent gun victim’s 5th amendment rights, which I consider more important than, and indeed a sine qua non for, anyone’s 2nd amendment rights.

The irony is that accidental deaths and injuries among hunters have gone down precisely because of sportsman groups like the NRA holding safety classes. This was their sole mission, promotion of safety and marksmanship, until the Gun Control Act of 1969 took them by surprise.

But I agree, their current generation of spokespeople are just not helping.

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Yeah - and how long were cops resistant to switching to semi-autos from revolvers?

When the technology is reliable enough, cops will probably switch willingly.

I was going to read this entire thread but I figured it would be full of the same “gun defenders” as the last four of these threads on Boing Boing saying that guns aren’t a problem. A quick skim says I’m right so I’m giving up.

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Nah, there’s some new ones, and a few centrists added to the mix.

If you think these comment threads are bad, you should try an outdoor sports forum. You will quickly appreciate everyone’s comparative tact, nuance and spelling ability.

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I was just trying to figure out why gun deaths were special compared to other deaths and I got my answer.

So you figured out that gun deaths occur because a bunch of post-apocalyptic fantasists can have their cowboy daydreams of fighting off the “gubbermint” and being “good guys with guns” while the corporate interests that provide their drug of choice make money off of selling death machines for the (predominantly white, male) masses?

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Haha. See the MBTI thread for my response to this. YAI.

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chants loudly “Centrists! Centrists! Centrists!”
I’ll give you my middle man position when you pry it from my cold dead hands!

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I invite you to read what you just wrote.

Cough cough.

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I checked again. There’s an article about straw purchases at gun stores, but that’s not the same thing as underage sales.

And if you’re pointing to something in the audible story, please point to it. You can’t expect that I’ll invest 42 minutes listening to the story so I can make your point for you.

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One a week. But hey, more small children get shot than do police officers in this country, so I guess someone’s taking to heart the saying that the only thing that stops a bad toddler with a gun is someone shooting a toddler. That’s how it goes, right?

Yeah, the entire gun violence problem in this country is entirely restricted to people being shot by toddlers, rather than shootings by toddlers being symptomatic of a larger problem with guns.

Twice as many than are shot by toddlers armed with firearms. We have about 10,000 children shot each year in this country. That’s not even getting to the bulk of shootings involving adults, whereas children are disproportionately the victims of bathtub drownings.

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No way… you created a .gif bank for those kind of gifs specifically!!! Are there that many of them? Oh my god, my world is breaking down around me…

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I would suggest that one of the reason that online efforts to promote gun control fall short precisely because it appeals to what is often the very same people involved in some combination of anti-gun, anti-gmo, anti-vaccine, anti-factory farms, anti-animal research (did I miss anything?). They don’t accomplish anything because they are splitting their time between various issues without doing anything, and while their numbers seem large (because the same people get counted over and over again on different issues) this obviously does not translate into votes. This sense of having overwhelming numbers yet being thwarted is common to political movements, which must resort to a conspiracy theory to explain how “We surround them” (Glenn Beck) without being in charge.

Also, there is more than one bank?!!?! How many banks are there?

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Obviously, we need laws that bathtubs be no more than two inches deep and a 25 mph national speed limit.

Damned slippery slope!

I can’t wait until we finally hit the “gun control/video games/feminism/trilbys-as-fedoras/circumcision/Steve Jobs” megathread. It’s going to happen, and I for one have my .gifs at the ready.

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Lessee, there’s the main gif bank thread, and the misandry gif thread, you know those.

There’s a newer one just for jpgs and pngs and whatnot, and of course the Count to 10k thread gets a lot of neat images.

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