Your assumptions of my intentions are pretty flawed.
Apart from restricting gun ownership in ways that are only conceived of in other countries.
Anyway, every one of your points relies on an acceptance of some or all of the conventional wisdom of idiots. As I’ve noted, having someone like you trot them out over and over as if they mean something doesn’t actually mean anything.
Personally, I think there is a continuum of response to this entire complex of nonsense. At some point the stupidity of pumping more guns into the ecosystem has to be viewed as a bug, not a feature, and then we can begin a non-stupid conversation about the future. Then a system of incentives and regulations can be put into place to encourage more responsible ownership and to impose more restriction. Eventually, a new equilibrium will be reached where more responsibilities and more restrictions against gun ownership will match the new value placed on the risk of having these toys laying around.
When you’ve excreted the Kool-Aid from your system, you might have something to add, but until that point is reached, you’re just tagging walls with “I lurve pewp!”
Compare the murder rates of the U.S. and Japan and… well, never mind. Or consider how many sprees per capita use knives versus guns, or don’t. Data really doesn’t matter for you in this conversation, does it? If it does, you have to start paying attention to the fact that you have a real problem with your talking points.
I am not comparing per capita incident rates. (And these do not have much to do with guns but rather with the local culture - which is what I talk about. Change the culture and the weapon issues change with it.) I am comparing the result of guns vs knives in a single incident. The difference is not that much dramatic. Hope it is clearer now.
Like I said, data doesn’t seem to mean anything to you. If sprees are noted as a problem, you call them anecdotes. If murder rates are compared in response to your citation of an anecdote, you say that you intended to talk only about anecdotes. It’s weasels all the way down so I’m leaving you to your own devices with that squirming stack. I respect myself to much too wrestle with it.
It’s not me who insists on comparing apples and cobblestones. (It’s not much of an art to win an argument when you counter something that was not actually said. This technique even has a name, which I cannot remember now.)
And yes, the sprees are merely anecdotes. Look at the statistics of death causes. Getting killed in a shooting or stabbing spree is somewhere way way down. Lump it in your threat perception with other random events you don’t worry about and you’ll be happier. I for one will start worrying about such incidents only when they migrate from the front page of the figurative newspapers to their fifth page, when worldwide screaming over a single event turns into quarterly statistics that nobody pays care to.
Why so much worry and emotions about what’s essentially a non-threat?
When you get a bit older you’ll probably realize people can have a different opinion than you and not be an idiot.
While I guess I don’t know exactly what restrictions or incentives you are proposing (perhaps they offer a fresh idea), but I find the general ideas proposed will not work in the real world in this current environment. Simply put, people who own guns in the interest of committing crime do not care about “a system of incentives and regulations can be put into place to encourage more responsible ownership”. We do not have a big problem of irresponsible owners, we have a problem of criminals committing crime. Criminals generally do not get their guns through legal means, so no new set of laws or licensing is going to do anything.
I find it interesting you are interested in the data. Like the raw data showing the millions of safe, non-violent gun owners, vs the very small percentage of those who abuse them/use them in crime. I think a lot of people look at the TSA and find that the cost and regulations to prevent something as unlikely as a shoe bomber to not be prudent.
Rolling a triple gun-homicide and a gun-suicide into the general statistics of gun mayhem doesn’t make it look like anything other than a non-non-threat. The fact that it doesn’t add much more to the pile of death than any other Friday is not a point for you. In all of your comments you haven’t made a single point that isn’t a bunch of stupid weaseling. You are not debating. That was my point and you continue to make my point for me.
This guy did, though. Maybe (maybe) if he couldn’t have done the results of the weekend might have been different.
I did read the comments from people who know more about this talking about how easy it is for people to pass mental health assessments, but if you have a health history like this guy did perhaps you should be ruled out of legal gun ownership unless you can 100% prove your suitability - I.e. switch the burden of proof. Cf getting a pilot’s licence with any kind of blacking out incident in your past, ever.
Don’t begin a war of personal assumptions. I know what it means to point out that you are simply repeating the talking points of idiots. It’s up to you to continue to do that. It’s also up to you to plead fake outrage and misread what I wrote, and to condescend when you have no basis to do so.
What does this have to do with anything? If I were to use your talking-point-based standard of bullshit, I could point out that we haven’t had more than one or two light-plane suicide-crashes since 2001. That would be a point against you in that argument, so I’m fairly certain you would not want to argue against yourself on that issue. I would not make that point because it’s not really a data-based argument, (tiny sample sizes), nor does it pass the plausible-causation sniff test because, among other issues, hijacking planes is a giant pain in the ass, and targeted precautions—even outside the institution of the TSA—are very effective.
However, when any jerkoff on the ground can have “a little moment” and escalate from hidden hostile fantasies into a dead spouse, a drive-by, or worse with little effective brake except their likelihood of having a gun in the first place, the plausible causation element comes to the fore, as do the data. The data show that a large number of jerkoffs in the U.S. do, in fact, use their easy access to guns to escalate “a moment” into a very effective incident of wounding and murder, and if they already have a gun lying around there is very little effective outside brake on that action at all until after damage is done. And if they restrain themselves from a spree, they might even get away with it without being smeared out across a city as a cloud of ash.
The data certainly show that in the aggregate, having a gun easily at hand doesn’t prevent shootings. Accidental oopsings are also not trivial, especially given how little gun owners actually handle their guns compared to the other dangerous equipment they use daily.
The numbers are pretty stark, but political motivations that verge on the theological can overcome anything with enough belief. As you prove. Repeatedly.
[quote=“daneel, post:281, topic:32359”]
This guy did, though. Maybe (maybe) if he couldn’t have done the results of the weekend might have been different.[/quote]
Yeah - but the guy WASN’T a criminal when he bought them. There was no reason to deny him. Criminals also uses straw purchases via a friend or relative who can legally buy a gun. You can’t read minds to determine if these people have evil planned.
I think his mental issues is a failing of our mental health system, not our gun laws. Already the NICS system checks for a mental competency flag. The problem is it is pretty easy to avoid that flag if you don’t seek help and no one commits you. If we had a better mental health care system, I would be open to the idea of meshing it with the NICS checks already in place. I imagine though there are some huge hurdles for that, HIPPA laws and the like. I don’t think it’s prudent to be forced to prove mental competency first. It would be like requiring proof you are not a terrorist every time you fly.
And let’s remember, while sensational, crazy people going off and killing people is only a small portion of the overall gun crime, most of which stems from gangs, drugs, and traditional assault and robbery. A system to combat one probably won’t have much effect on the other.
The TSA is supposed to keep us safe from the highly unlikely event of a terrorist attack in the skies. I don’t think they have done much of anything to make us safer, and have become nothing more than a giant time and money suck machine. But I guess the security theater makes people feel safer.
I feel the same way about most proposed gun laws. Added, often arbitrary restrictions do little to nothing to reduce actual gun crime, which is the goal. Like the TSA, many of these laws might make some people FEEL safer because they are doing SOMETHING, but not actually effect anything.
Gun crime has been dropping since the peak in the 90s. This isn’t due to gun laws.
[quote=“andy_hilmer, post:282, topic:32359”]
The data show that a large number of jerkoffs in the U.S. do, in fact, use their easy access to guns to escalate “a moment” into a very effective incident of wounding and murder, and if they already have a gun lying around there is very little effective outside brake on that action at all until after damage is done… The numbers are pretty stark, but political motivations that verge on the theological can overcome anything with enough belief. [/quote]
The numbers are very stark, and I have to question one’s political motivations to condemn the millions of users hurting no one because of a small percentage of abusers. It seems to me one has to be very set in ones beliefs to continue to ignore this. I guess it’s a complete confirmation bias thing, as I bet you have never read an article about a gun that didn’t involve violence. The rather mundane reality is that most guns and gun owners will never hurt a living thing in their lives.
The sense that I used it (“gerrymandering of the facts”) implied no before or after. That’s an interpretation you perceived from it. Gerrymandering of the facts, the way I used it, could mean that the mechanisms by which a fact is reported were either fixed beforehand, or were fiddled with afterwards…either way… but the net results are the same - the facts have been tampered with.
So why didn’t I just say, “tampering with the facts”? Because gerrymandering implies so much more. It implies politicians doing bad things, people looking out for their own wicked self interest, governments getting directly involved in shenanigans. It implies arbitrary boundaries into which facts get placed… conveniently to favor one’s own position. Like playing Risk with your brother and all the little pieces start conveniently migrating into his positions when you get up to take a pee. Gerrymandering is a GREAT word. A LOADED word. I love that word.
If I had just said gerrymandering, standing all alone, I could see how someone would go, hey, he used that word wrong. But I didn’t use it that way. I gave a contextual clue to how I was using it: “gerrymandering of the facts.” Most people got it, without further prompting, and didn’t seem to have a problem with it.
If you don’t like tropes, that’s your business. But this whole argument is stupid. What’s a language if you can’t gerrymangle the living fuck out of all of its words?
When you set a trap for someone and they avoid it, safe it, and hand it back to you, don’t jump up and down on it with bloody legs and say “See!? This is where you were supposed to go!” I get that this is how you feel about most proposed gun laws. Despite your feelings, though, comparisons with other countries show that there is a great deal of room for improvement to be gained from adapting existing, functional gun restrictions from other democratic English common law systems. My proposition is that we are not a particularly unique snowflake with respect to this particular issue. Unless you have a special snowflake of an argument, I think I’ll just drop back and lurk some more.
Yawn. Question away. I’ll let you know if a question is particularly special or not. I’ve always been fascinated by guns, I’ve handled them to some degree, but I find the reasons people use to justify actually having these toys to be a little cracked. On the plus side, they’re a tech toy that doesn’t become obsolete and they are vital for the performance of certain very interesting, exciting, dangerous jobs. On the negative side, they don’t become obsolete because the companies are all shoveling out tiny variations on decades- and centuries-old designs through massive marketing machines designed to capture America’s big-boy toy-fondling market. The marketing of these toys relies on disgustingly manipulative, simplistic appeals to fantasies of fear and domination and power. So my “feelings” (political motivations) are to avoid being taken in by a bunch of cynical corporate PR. Making life safer in a statistically significant way is a bonus, even though it’s become fashionable to dump on people for wanting to improve our lives.
Ummm… you realize that the arguments of tiny variations on old designs, massive marketing machines, fantasies of maybe fear but certainly domination, and even the making life safer, can be applied to SUVs as well?
Re gun designs, it is difficult to beat the good ol’ Russian AK47. In terms of resilience and reliability that thing beats more or less anything else. You can forge the lower receiver from a garden shovel. And the pop-pop sound is a classic.
Re saving lives, consider overhauling health care; start with repealing the McCarran-Ferguson Act and force the insurance companies to behave. Then move on to reducing the oh-so-common staff errors, which kill a lot of people. A lot. While there, try to increase success rate with cancer and strokes; a meager success here can compensate for all the gun-related incidents. Unintentional poisonings are another big category. Chronic respiratory issues. Obesity. Name it, it will be more important, numbers-wise.
If we take only the mass-shooting deaths, which is the main topic here, they average at about 18 per year, between 1983 and 2012. Deaths by a lightning average at about 54 per year. Make a conclusion yourself about the real magnitude of this danger.
Why does everybody and their cat want to address the supply side? Why not asking WHY people want to own these toys, and improve the society so the demand goes down? And why the “life savers” and “life improvers” spend so much effort on so statistically insignificant area when there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit elsewhere?
My mother was not allowed to have a driver’s license because she has epilepsy. Which only occurs in her sleep, and has been kept under control her entire life with medication. It wasn’t that she had an accident and lost her license; she was never allowed to have one because there was the possibility that she could seize while driving and hurt herself or others. Ergo, no right to drive. But she can own as many guns as she wants. 'Murrica!
