It’s very difficult to murder a roomful of gay clubgoers in Orlando with your fists.
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Boba Fett’s fate is kind of weirdly vague. Official canon is only the movies, TV shows, and new novels, and in those we know him to be in the Sarlacc. Disney killed all the expanded universe stuff where he climbed out & survived. But supposedly George Lucas has said that he’s alive, so he might pop up in some novel or future TV show or movie.
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Schrödinger’s Fett?
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while that is an effective ad, i don’t think it is the best ad. i humbly submit that this one is the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzjRwNUQDRU
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As usual when it comes to guns, you’re making a bunch of incredibly dishonest arguments to see what sticks.
False premise. The point of laws is not to stop illegal activity. It is extremely rare that laws stop any particular criminal activity. The question is, does a particular law decrease a particular criminal activity? If we were considering specific laws, we could say whether or not each particular law would have an impact on the likelihood of stealing or obtaining a gun through the black market. Relevant to this question is whether the law makes it more difficult for guns to get on the black market or make black market guns more expensive – everything else being equal, this would decrease the amount of guns getting to criminals.
Your “analysis” obviates all these very salient possibilities to simply say that we can’t 100% prevent black market sales or theft, so we should do absolutely nothing to try to prevent them (or alternatively that there is not a single other thing to do that could reduce these activities). This is obviously absurd, and not the kind of argument you would make on any other subject.
In terms of legality, you come to the conclusions you do by doing two things: making unwarranted assumptions and playing word games.
Case in point: black market and straw purchases.
How do guns end up on the “black market”? This might be a more complicated question than it looks, but after 5 minutes of googling, it looks like most black market guns come from straw purchases. So these “two ways” are really just one: straw purchases.
The thing about saying a straw purchase is: “Already illegal. An illicit activity.” is that by the very definition of straw purchase it cannot be true. A straw purchase itself is a totally legal purchase of a firearm. There is no way around this fact. You have to concede that a straw purchase at the time of purchase is a completely legal, licit transaction.
Where does it become illegal? When the firearm is passed or resold to someone else. But for this to be illegal:
- The recipient needs to disqualified from owning or purchasing a firearm
- The giver needs to know this about the recipient
You blithely assume this is always the case. But of course, there are any number of scenarios where this is not the case: - The straw purchaser is unaware that the ultimate recipient is disqualified from owning or purchasing a firearm. (Perhaps they’re honestly ignorant of this; perhaps they’ve carefully maintained plausible deniability to be able to make a sale. These are equivalent from the perspective of anyone but the straw purchaser.)
- The ultimate recipient is not actually disqualified from owning or purchasing a firearm, but intends to resell into this black market doohicky. Perhaps this person knows that the firearms will ultimately end up in the hands of criminals, but without specific knowledge of the buyer’s background (which is not required since face to face sales do not require background checks, allowing ample plausible deniability).
I would guess that one of these cases pertains in almost all actual instances. The black market dealer himself probably has a clean record, and he doesn’t ask any questions of the buyer – as far as he knows, this is a completely legal transaction which means in court he can always plead that he acted in good faith and that the buyer is at fault for violating gun laws by trying to purchase a firearm.
The upshot is that criminals can obtain firearms through a series of actions none of which is by itself illegal, but which are technically illegal once the whole chain is put together. Unfortunately, that’s useless from the perspective of preempting such purchases. You need a crime to be committed during the process to be able to interrupt, otherwise all you can do is charge people retroactively for obtaining a firearm illegally after they’re caught for something else.
The important point here is that to say “this is already illegal and is just not enforced” is just a distraction if the nature of the crime is such that it cannot actually be enforced until it is too late. And that is what you’re doing – creating a distraction.
Personally, I think you should just bite the bullet and say: “Yes, criminals can obtain guns through a series of events, none of which is a crime considered in isolation and which therefore cannot be legally prevented. That’s just too bad. Any attempts to decrease the number of guns criminals obtain through these ways would make it more onerous for non-criminals to obtain and own guns as well, and I don’t think that’s a reasonable tradeoff.” It’s certainly rhetorically weaker than the arguments you make, but it has the virtues of being actually honest and correct.
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Really now, background checks to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists?
Sorry, they have the money, they’ll get their guns anyway.
Realistically, the only thing background checks stop is straw purchases and that’s not a big means of criminals getting guns. How can a straw purchased gun compete with a stolen gun? The latter is a lot cheaper.
Besides, the true motives of the background check guys are apparent from a local situation. The legislature actually showed a bit of sanity, you can substitute a CCW license for the normal Brady check when buying from a dealer. There’s a background check measure on the ballot that among other things would get rid of this. From a safety standpoint, why? If you can get a CCW license you can pass a Brady check. It’s just it doesn’t yield a list of guns in private hands.
Missouri is such a weird state. We have this ad with Kander in the Senate race, and in the governor’s race, the NRA actually endorsed the Democrat, Chris Koster. That was actually a disqualifying endorsement for me. I also couldn’t vote for Greitens because he’s a Trump wannabe. I actually voted for a 3rd party candidate I know nothing about, an act I would normally rip someone apart for, but I was pretty disgusted by the major party candidates. The Missouri governor’s race is like a mini clone of the Presidential race.
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It’s actually 1/3 of households, not 1/3 of people - which works out to 22% of people or about 55 million people.
(shit, I can’t believe I was someone who said “actually…” in a reply, oh well.)
So the number of gun owners in the US is substantially less than the proportion that identify as Black and Latino/a, the proportion that is female, or the proportion that makes less than $20,000 a year (http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/model-estimates/income-breaks-2011). So I think the question should be why does this minority or less than 1/4 of Americans get to dictate so much policy?
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Can someone with video editing skillz splice in an exploding school bus at the end of the Greitens ad? At least that is what I imagined he was dumping all those bullets in.
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What is Greitens shooting at in that ad, a lake?
“Take that, stupid lake!”
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I’m not arguing about the effectiveness of any particular laws. You are attempting to make a general case that gun control laws cannot decrease gun crime. That’s harder to do than to make a case that a particular gun control law isn’t working. I’m rebutting the notion that no possible gun control law could reduce the number of firearms used in crimes.
It’s not what you know – it’s what you can prove. Are they “completely unaware” – no. Do they have enough plausible deniability to prevent a conviction? Almost certainly. What counts is what holds up in court. Yes, in some abstract Platonic sense they are “criminals”. But no one can prove it and they can’t be held accountable. So “criminal” in this case is just a word.
From what I can tell, this is the foundation of the black market for firearms in the US, so it seems like it probably happens very very often indeed.
LOL, way to prove my point. The War on Drugs made a huge difference in the drug market – again, you’re making arguments based on the notion that the only use of laws is to completely prevent a behavior when that’s not the least bit realistic. The War on Drugs creates huge increases in the price of drugs (you can see this as more and more drugs become scheduled – their prices shoot up). It’s hard to find the natural experiments you’d need to prove it, but I suspect that the War on Drugs greatly decreased drug use relative to what it would have been without the War on Drugs, just as prohibition really did decrease alcohol abuse. (The case against Prohibition is not that it was not effective, but that it was not worth the costs.)
But in terms of natural experiments to test this sort of thing, the relatively recent widespread prescriptions for Oxycontin provides a great one. Oxycontin scripts are basically exactly what you said there was none of – a straw purchase for heroin. With Oxycontin, you can purchase what is essentially heroin completely legally and then resell it – technically illegally, but no one will be able to hold anyone accountable and plausible deniability can be maintained at every step. And what happened with that? Widespread opiate abuse – first OCs specifically, and then a huge increase in heroin use as OC scripts become more rare and people start looking for substitutes.
The important point here is that the CHEAPER and EASIER to find drug was the symptom, not the cause. Wider availability of OC – you know, the legal part – was the cause.
When has anyone ever used guns to rebel against the US government? And yet you yourself are willing to use that as an argument:
Also it is dismaying how many people are against the use of government force, are wanting the government to be the only ones with that force.
If arguments that guns are allowed to prevent tyranny are allowed, then I really don’t understand why it’s fair to exclude arguments that guns can also be used to cause tyranny. Which is exactly what you’re trying to do here.
BTW, “when has this happened ever” – uh, it used to happen all the time, which is why we have the word “posse” to describe it in the first place.
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You know what? I’m getting sick of this merry-go-round.
Every time I post in a gun thread, you dismiss me as someone who doesn’t know anything about guns or have access to them. Then I post again, reminding you that I do have experience and ready access to guns. You post that most gun owners take proper care and lock up their weapons, so they’re not responsible for the one-in-a-million chance of someone going off the rails and shooting up a public place, and I remind you that the majority of gun injuries and deaths have nothing to do with that, and sometimes even bring up the fact that despite all the care taken in my family, guns have still been used for multiple suicides. So then you always counter by saying suicide has nothing to do with guns because they’re just the tool used. Often, you’ll specifically tell me that I should remember that knives can kill people too, and whenever that happens I’ll remind you that in the family I lived with as a teenager, I spent several years defending myself against a family member who tried to kill me on a near-daily basis, usually with knives but occasionally with other household items, and that if there had been access to a gun in that house I would not be here to disagree with you.
So have some balls and come out and say it: you would rather I had been killed by a knife, because that would prove your point, and I wouldn’t be here to present a differing opinion.
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Hah! That second ad is such a perfect example of republican ideology:
“Hi, I’m conservative! Watch me burn two-thousand dollars worth of fucking lead into this idyllic little pond for no reason.”
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This is not actually true. Most suicide survivors regret having made the attempt in the first place. A higher proportion of people who use means other then firearms survive their attempts. If you ensure that someone has to put more thought into a suicide attempt (e.g. they have to walk or take a taxi to a bridge instead of doing it in their apartment), then you will decrease the chances that the person follows through with it.
Firearms decrease the “activation energy” required to commit suicide. Access to more effective tools makes things easier, that’s the whole point of a tool. Firearms are very effective tools for suicide. Making suicide more difficult to commit will always prevent some number of suicides.
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UH. Generally such things are held to be unconstitutional and bad. As such tests, along with poll tests, have traditionally been used to exclude minority groups from participation in government.
Not neccisarily. That’s certainly a factor, and its deeply embedded in the NRA position on Guns. Though interestingly most of even their own membership disagrees with them on “common sense” gun control.
But as an example I have a family member who owns 15+ fire arms. He’s not paranoid, doesn’t think the government is coming for his guns. He’s a collector, avid target shooter, occasional hunter and fire arms instructor. The often weird and impractical shit locked up in his basement isn’t going to save him from raving hoards of Negros. He supports universal background checks, closing gun show loop holes. And would prefer a consistent federally administrated approach to fire arms regulation.
And so far as I’m aware most of those single gun house holds have that gun for “protection”. Implicitly or explicitly buying into the paranoid marketing that some one is going to go after your family. And only a good guy with a gun can stop them. These single guns are typically improperly stored (not locked up and loaded), and the owners are typically not too educated in their safe use. And a lot of our gun deaths come about from these single guns and their high association with suicide.
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My SO wants me to get a gun and a CC license because he’s working out of state and worries too much. I told him a gun couldn’t be in our house without it being properly stored in a locked safe, unloaded, with trigger lock and safety lock in place. Then reminded him how utterly useless it is in that state for “protection” and that I would still be grabbing one of the several stiff sticks/clubs we have scattered around the house if it ever became necessary.
So far, no gun! Yay!
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Is this the most effective political ad of 2016?
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I don’t know. I think so, or at least they plan to. Pre-Disney, yes the comics and the books I think had him survive.
Ok. But, again, extremely unlikely and rare occurrence. And you can do the same thing with hand guns.[quote=“wysinwyg, post:51, topic:88448”]
I’m not arguing about the effectiveness of any particular laws.
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I’ll have to address you after trick or treating.
Not compared to such occurrences in other Western countries, whether you’re talking about semi-automatic rifles or revolvers. Do you not think that the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet should have the same lack of nightclub and kindergarten massacres that other OECD countries enjoy?
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That’s a cool band name.
