Remind me who the “left” is in this scenario because fellow socialists and anarchists seem a bit thin on the ground when I look around. You mean the war between Center Right and Far Right?
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Yes, sorry, I mean the ostensible “left” and “right” that you see on TV that are in a perpetual war much like the perpetual war between the nations in 1984. Thanks for snapping me back to reality.
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So, basically, the War Between the Two Competing Political Parties.
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This is so wrong. “Guns” are not a cause of death, people shooting other people, is. E.g. the guns are not to blame, the criminals who use them in crimes, are. Furthermore, school shootings are not “gun culture” - that’s a pretty stupid thing to say. School shootings are simply crimes carried out by criminals who happened to use guns. Make sense?
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So a political party with large amounts of campaign donations coming from gun manufacturers is right to enforce a government ban on research on gun violence because it might be politicized…
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So the problem is - how do you keep the guns out of the hands of those criminals? Gun advocates don’t seem to have an answer to this question. Whatever you guys are doing now certainly isn’t working.
I (and probably most gun regulation advocates) am actually totally fine with responsible gun owners being able to buy and keep guns for whatever reason (collectors, target shooters, hunters, self protection)… But the issue is making sure that those owners actually ARE responsible with their guns, and STAY responsible with them. Right now, the American system seems to be failing in that regard.
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Who just happen to live in America, which just happens to have the most aggressive pro-gun culture. And gun killings just happen to happen more in states that have fewer gun restrictions. And murder rates just happen to go up when “Stand Your Ground” laws are enacted as a pre-emptive strike against restricting gun rights.
Sometimes things that “make sense” are just plain wrong. You can have whatever worldview you want. The question of whether more restrictions on gun access would reduce gun deaths (and school/mass shootings in particular) is an empirical question that doesn’t care what makes sense to you.
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Most of the time regulation is used to control the quality or safety of a thing. Regulation doesn’t tell me that I can’t have a banana, it just says that I can only have bananas that comply with certain production standards. In that kind of regulation, my desires and the regulations are mostly aligned, because the regulations help me get what I want. So I don’t have much motivation to try to evade those regulations and buy black market bananas.
But the point of gun regulation is not to help people get guns that are well-produced, it is to create a list of types of people who cannot have guns (e.g. felons, mentally ill, those who can’t pass a background check, etc) and types of guns that nobody can have (assault rifles, armor-piercing ammo, etc.).
So while regulation may not be the same as banning all guns for everyone, it still does come down to a question of: Can I get the gun I want, yes or no? If the answer is no, but there’s another similar gun that I want approximately as much and can get, then maybe it’s no big deal. That kind of regulation can be useful. But if not, then I’m effectively banned from getting the thing I want.
One could take a moral approach to that, and say that it’s wrong for me to want that, or it’s unreasonable for me to demand exactly this gun when another should suffice. But I don’t think that’s a useful approach, because pragmatically speaking, it’s going to be solely my decision whether I comply with regulation or turn to the black market to get what I want, and it’s quite possible I’ll choose the latter. This is why the regulation of guns (and other things like drugs) is fundamentally different from other regulation.
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I agree that banning guns, or even banning very popular guns, would be as futile as banning drugs unless there was overwhelming public support for it (in which case there were be very little gun ownership and very little point in doing so). But the NRA doesn’t just oppose banning guns. It opposed registering them, to waiting periods, to background checks. If you are legally blind you can’t drive a car but you can fire a gun. I hear that it’s all or nothing from those who are against gun control, but it seems to me that those who want gun control want anything not everything and the NRA wants absolutely nothing (well, they don’t seem to be angry about restrictions on selling firearms to children).
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Let us remember that the NRA speaks for fewer and fewer firearms owners every day.
I agree that they’re essentially a terrorist organization, and that they’re holding progress hostage. Lots of blood on lots of hands there.
I just don’t want to conflate the NRA’s harm with the harm of ordinary firearm owners. They’re vastly out of scale with one another.
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The problem is, there isn’t really anybody speaking for the sane gun owners.
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I’m happy to accept that. I mean, prominent voices in US politics are very often the voices of very wealthy interests that are completely disconnected with the vast majority of people. But NRA aside, my real point is that on this board I frequently see those who are against gun control present the gun control debate as if it were a debate between people who want to take away all the guns and people who just want to be left alone with their guns. There are lots of different policies between those two things, and I don’t think gun control advocates are universally radical any more than gun owners are.
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Very well said in both cases.
The Banners and the NRA want us to think that there is no middle ground. If the middle wins, they both lose!
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I’m guessing the answer isn’t so much preferring a particular religion, rather preferring that whatever religion a particular justice (or senator, or congressperson, or president, or …) has, they leave their religious prejudices out of it when they’re doing their elected or appointed job.
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It can be done. Although, it’s extremely rare to find a gun fetishist of either persuasion (pro- or anti-) that will respond positively to the kind of rhetoric that is stereotypical of their opposites. If you look at @anon75430791’s post above, for example, I could easily have a reasonable discussion with the local NRA president on those issues, and I would be treated with respect. But if you look at the responses to @Ryan_Gunn’s post, well, it should be obvious that you can’t have a reasonable discussion if your first impulse is mockery and derision. I can’t roll my eyes and say “Mr. Lindbergh, your ideas are all wrong and stupid” and expect him to keep listening.
Since both sides do it, there’s rarely any persuasive communication. Very people can be persuaded to change their minds by verbal abuse. The tired rhetoric that gets trotted out by both sides after every tragedy only seems reasonable to those already convinced.
Edit: Looking at the posts made since I started writing my own (got distracted a while back by other tasks) I see more than a few people here making an effort at real communication. Bravo!
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on the other hand, i’m a gun owner (1 30-30 rifle, 1 12 ga. shotgun, and 1 .44 magnum revolver) who thinks it’s truly crazy to have gun laws that are less stringent than they were in the so-called wild west where most localities large enough to have a sherriff or a federal marshal required folks to drop off their handguns at the local office before going any further in town. despite owning a handgun i think there is no reason for their possession in the civilian world. the problem is not having a conversation with people who own guns it’s having a conversation with people who worship guns.
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And we have a winner!
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