Newspaper runs gun show ad on front page below Parkland massacre story

[Quinquennial]

@Mister44

What is your best guess, your gut feeling, for the percentage of people going to a gun show or gun store where the MAIN purpose of said purchase is to:

Buy a gun with the intent of using it to a homicide.

Buy a gun with the HOPE of using it to kill someone in defense.

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” - Anton Chekhov

[Mister44]

Yeah, that’s fiction, though. Not real life. Hell that’s part of the problem IMO, one sees it in entertainment, its going to be used. And usually for murder, war, or to go after people who commit murder and war. Real life is less exciting.

@Brainspore

Irrelevant.

I don’t think it is. Either we have a bunch of dummies who don’t know the right way to use a firearm - buying them for the wrong purpose. Or do people really think that IS the reason most of them are buying them (I dunno, I’m asking.)

[Wanderfound]

@Mister44

Actually, they have made many engineering changes to make guns safer to handle. Unless something is mechanically broken, they don’t just “go off”. They don’t go off from most falls. They have things like loaded chamber indicators and magazine disconnects that won’t allow it to fire with out a magazine. Some have internal trigger locks. So, yes, there are safer designs.

There have been developments that marginally decrease accidental lethality, yes. They were contemporaneous with developments [1] that increased deliberate lethality. Overall, the balance is substantially in favour of “more lethal”.

@Mister44

What is your best guess, your gut feeling, for the percentage of people going to a gun show or gun store where the MAIN purpose of said purchase is to:

Buy a gun with the intent of using it to a homicide.

Buy a gun with the HOPE of using it to kill someone in defense.

Both of those groups of people are psychologically unfit to be trusted with firearm ownership.

I’d expect that most people at gun shows are spending money with the main purpose of acquiring another fun bang-bang toy to play with. The nasty mess of insecurity and racism that characterises US gun culture is more of a secondary motivation/justification.

.

[1] Primarily ergonomic; modern military and pseudo-military rifles are optimised for maximising aimed RoF from a minimally-skilled shooter.

[Mister44]

@Wanderfound

Both of those groups of people are psychologically unfit to be trusted with firearm ownership.

I agree.

But the NRA is a terrorist organization. People defending rights are the ones who are responsible for the murder of children. The blood is on the gun owners hands. For these and similar statements to make any sense to me, I need a gauge of percentages to those two camps. Or perhaps there is a third, nearly as bad category I am not thinking of, such as those who are insecure and/or racist. What percentage is that, does one think?

I’ve been going at this wrong, telling people what should be their perception, before even knowing what that perception truly is.

[JonS]

awww

@Mister44

I’ve been going at this wrong,

You were soooooo close to that epiphany, then you went and spoiled it

telling people what should be their perception, before even knowing what that perception truly is.

[AlexG55]

While it’s science fiction, I asked gun owners on another site a few years ago whether they would be willing to buy a (hypothetical) gun that was incapable of hurting humans but otherwise fully functional as a gun, including for hunting (perhaps it doesn’t fire if aimed at a human)- or whether they would be willing to have their existing gun collection modified in this way.

I got a wide range of answers, from “yes, completely fine” to “no, not at all”, via “yes, except the one gun I have for self-defense” and “no, but only because I want to leave my collection of historical weapons in their original condition”.

[m_a_t]

It’s a mess. It’s horrible," says Julie Anderson, the Sun Sentinel’s editor in chief. "We’re taking every step possible to make sure our editorial staff always see ads before publication so something like this doesn’t slip through.

So the editorial staff consciously let it slip through?

We deeply regret placement of a gun advertisement on our front page Wednesday morning. It has been against our policy to run gun and other types of controversial advertising on our front page.

So this was was an exception to the rule? Anybody wanted to make a statement here, maybe?

[Avery_Thorn]

Ok, so maybe I’m wrong about how newspaper ads work. I thought that ads were purchased months in advance. I would also figure that an ad would be priced based on location and size.

Such that the gun show would have purchased the front page ad and paid a lot of money for that size and placement months before anyone had any idea what else would be on that front page.

So should they not have run the news item?

Should we put editors in the position of “if I run this story and this ad on the same page, people will yell at me… so I shouldn’t run this story because this ad has been paid for for months and if I pull it the paper will loose money today!”?

[Mister44]

@AlexG55

I got a wide range of answers, from “yes, completely fine” to “no, not at all”, via “yes, except the one gun I have for self-defense” and “no, but only because I want to leave my collection of historical weapons in their original condition”.

This is an interesting hypothetical, and shows that gun owners aren’t monolithic in their views.

[roomwithaview]

@AlexG55

I got a wide range of answers, from “yes, completely fine” to “no, not at all”, via “yes, except the one gun I have for self-defense” and “no, but only because I want to leave my collection of historical weapons in their original condition”.

Would love to see the stats for that across a meaningful percentage of gun owners.

However, it makes no difference if that “one guy” is just mental.

[smulder]

@Mister44

I need a gauge of percentages to those two camps

“not zero”