The American school of firearms instruction

boing
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If that isn’t how you feel, then I urge you to reread and re-evaluate your original statement: “since the poorest in society are most negatively affected by firearms, it is seems that their inability to readily purchase weapons would actually be better for poor people as a group.”

Because that statement explicitly says that if we limit the poor’s access to firearms (which are mostly all law abiding citizens) it would help them as a group. Limiting a law abiding poor person’s access does nothing positive for the law abiding people. THEY are not the ones committing crimes and hurting people. But my encouraging the restriction to the entire group, you just lumped in that 99% of honest folk with the 1% of criminals. Which is exactly what Trump and others are doing with the Muslim ban and BS with immigrants.

I am glad you see that applying your logic here (restricting freedoms in the effort to “help” people) is obviously abhorrent when you apply it to other freedoms, and I hope one can connect that this too applies to all rights.

What is your thoughts on the matter? I am pretty sure it has little to do with their laws, and more to do with their more homogeneous culture, lack or at least much less severe systemic racism that has worked to keep certain segments poor and hopeless for decades, having a 7.7% poverty rate compared to America’s 14.5%, the fact that America has 5.6x more people living in poverty than the WHOLE NATION of Switzerland has people, and better social programs and safety-nets.

I am not ok with doing something that either does nothing to help the goal, or negatively affects people as a side effect. The numbers show that of the 80 million gun owners in the US 0.001% manage to accidentally kill someone. Sure, I would like to see that number lower, but that percentage is extremely low. There are MANY MANY more dangerous household items. So don’t take my rational risk assessment as just being some cold hearted libertarian. I also don’t think we need a Muslim travel ban, nor majority of TSA screening, because those are two other examples of low risks being made to seem like they are much more dangerous than reality.

If your goal is reduction of accidents, I would be 110% for more PSAs, public awareness, promote more education and training, etc. If you want to get the government involved, why not offer shooting lessons in schools like they used to as an extracurricular activity? Some colleges still do. I took 2 semesters of Rifle shooting at the ROTC building at K-State. I know people whose kids are on college shooting and trap or skeet teams.

At any rate, I have explicitly shows how your insurance scheme is bunk, and you haven’t been able to counter that point. My point of how it would be used to hurt poor Americans is extremely valid.

Except you haven’t. You make the claim that this scheme would “promote better practises for firearms owners.” but where is your evidence for that? Every. Single. Day. I see people on the road who pay for insurance. Many of them extra high end insurance for their new Camero or Mustang. And Every. Single. Day. I see them using unsafe practices. And these are people presumably with licenses. Registering your car and buying insurance doesn’t make you a safer driver. You can be competent enough to get a license, and still drive like a jackass. The whole reason insurance is required is, as I stated above, auto accidents are EXTREMELY COMMON. If the car accident rate was as low as the gun accident rate, car insurance would either be not mandatory, or exceptionally low, as the risk factor would be much, much lower that it currently is.

Deliberate or not, if it directly disproportionately affects the poor and minorities, then how is it anything other than classist and racist? The drug laws on the surface aren’t racists, but their USE and ENFORCEMENT certainly are. And you’re ok with giving the government more tools to continue this?

Great. I am here. Listen to me.

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I explained them above to someone else here. They’re not thoughts but facts. Someone else pointed out that the ammo is controlled as well, another good workaround solution if we can make a meaningful distinction betweens arms and ammo here (which I doubt).

I find it interesting that the go-to explanations for both of you were about sociology and culture and economics rather than gun control laws (it is a European country, after all). Also, why do you have such a problem with per-capita comparisons? They’re pretty standard.

I’d much prefer that the government offered them with no military strings attached and instead of a right-wing industry lobbying group that markets with bigotry and fear and whose primary mission is not firearms safety but PR and boosting its membership rolls.

All you’ve shown is that this would be a regressive mandate on poor gun owners as an externality, which I acknowledge to be true. So is mandatory auto insurance. ACA would have been another example, if the government hadn’t offered subsidies.

Now that I think about it, I’d be all for the government offering subsidies to poor gun owners to reduce their annual premiums if they can demonstrate they’re keeping the weapon for a non-criminal purchase. Some liberals and progressives might complain, but overall the good would outweigh the bad and you’d see poor people being able to own a firearm or two without the burden of the mandate.

I hear you. It’s a reason I hate driving. But our anecdotal observations aside, auto insurance has been shown to have salubrious effects on reduced accident rates from a statistical viewpoint. I don’t have access to the paywalled and dead-tree journal articles, but Zador and Lund (1986), McEwin (1989), Devlin (1992) and Cummins and Weiss (1999) seem to be the frequently cited sources on the topic of insurance’s effects on accidents. Some of them come at the issue from studies of the effects of no-fault auto insurance, which they conclude sometimes raise accident rates or keep them the same level due to moral hazard. Obviously no-fault is not a workable situation for mandatory gun owner’s insurance since in non-criminal situations one party is usually obviously liable. Unless Wild West gun duels on main street come back to America, that is (we’re waiting, Florida!).

Of course, in the case of autos this effect is helped along by laws regarding who’s allowed to drive, what kind of vehicles they can drive, etc. That’s a non-starter for the Second Amendment fundies, of course.

Enacting classist or racist measures implies a deliberate intent to hurt a particular class or race. The drug laws are a great example of a law designed to be applied to all citizens being deliberately targetted at a particular race.

In the case of mandatory insurance of any kind or VATs, poorer people will always be affected because they are by their nature regressive fees. We make decisions as a society as to whether a regressive tax’s or mandate’s beneficial effects offset the economic effects on the poor, and sometimes dampen those bad effects via subsidies.

In regard to race and gun control, America has an interesting history. People like Reagan were all gung-ho on Second Amendment rights until the Black Panthers joined into the game.

Please let us know what you are a recognised expert on in regard to this discussion. Credentials would be helpful if you’e comfortable sharing. I don’t claim to be an expert in any of these things, by the way, but I’m not looking to rule the comment thread.

Anyhow, this all goes by the wayside if you’re for mandatory gun locks, mandatory training, etc. for gun-owners etc. as @waetherman interprets your position. I’d also prefer the legal route for making these things a mandatory aspect of firearms ownership.

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I learned this with a Glock. Also figured out I’d never buy a Glock for myself.

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Then, once again, you are loudly and proudly asserting that nothing should ever change, because there is always someone who would prefer the status quo.

Setting aside cars, which have numerous rigorous standards and laws surrounding them, and which have shown sustained improvements in safety outcomes over the past 5 decades), could you enumerate these MANY MANY items? Because I’m going to call bullshit on this spurious claim.

And, of course, you’re only looking at the cost. Yet everything is a cost benefit tradeoff - please also show the benefits that accrue from the wholesale ready access to and possession of firearms.

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I have a question.

How is it, whenever this comes up, that you get to arbitrarily decide that the only numbers that matter, the only numbers amenable to change, are the accidental deaths and injuries?

When you restrict access to dangerous yet easily available items, ALL deaths and injuries are reduced, not just the ‘accidental’ ones. So the number you’re looking for reduction in is ~30,000 deaths per annum, not 800, and hundreds of thousands of injuries, not 15,000.

And yes, some of those intentional deaths and injuries (suicide, murder, police killings, etc.) will migrate to other tools, but very far fewer than 100%. Like, orders of magnitude fewer.

You have repeatedly been told this. Yet you continue to repeat it. Why is that - trolley? Hard of learning? Shill? What?

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A gun thread?

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I’ve been avoiding this thread, but it seems like a good place for this:

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For the most part, I’m down with @gracchus on this one. I’d still rather get back to the actual words in the Constitution and have rational regulation of firearm ownership, but in lieu of that, a mandatory insurance scheme could work if structured well.

Really? Please point to the part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that is addressed by firearm ownership.

Hint: It’s not Safety, as one is far more likely to be harmed by one’s own firearm than protected by it.

I’ll just leave this right here…

This is a corollary to the “No True Scotsman” logical fallacy that the NRA likes to trot out so often. “Only criminals harm others with a gun, because the act of harming others with a gun makes you a criminal!” Basically, you’re a law-abiding gun owner until you use that gun in a crime, then you’re a criminal.

I would typically classify a friend of mine as a responsible gun owner, and he even owns a gun safe. However, just leaving his handgun (hidden, in a box) out of the safe for a couple of days led to a theft that wouldn’t have been possible if it had been properly secured. It was taken by a subcontractor working on his house, who stumbled upon it on the top of a cabinet while accessing a duct. My friend, BTW, feels absolutely sick that his gun is out there and could be used to hurt or kill someone. If he’d had mandatory insurance, it might have been that one thing that triggered him to secure his gun instead of leaving it out, knowing his premiums would have gone up or his insurance dropped once he reported the theft.

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The poor are much more likely to be the victims of gun violence rather than the perpetrators. I’ve never heard anyone in poor urban neighborhoods saying they wanted more guns in the neighborhood to feel safe. The thought that they might even be compensated for being injured or having property damage would be amazing.

No need to speak for them in any case, but especially not when they’re not even against the idea of gun registration and insurance.

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I don’t think that you personally feel this way, and I do not intend this as any sort of accusation, but…

Are you aware that, from outside the US gun culture, the constant use of “diversity” as an explanation for the astronomically high US homicide rate comes across as a thinly-veiled version of “it’s because we’ve got too many black people”?

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Well now you have:

No one wants under aged kids and criminals running around with guns. But the vast majority of people poor areas are not criminals and have a right to defense and ownership. A common thread I have noticed of every black 2nd Amendment advocate is they grew up thinking guns weren’t for them. Only thugs and criminals and the cops had guns. They later came to the realization that they had the right to defense as much as anyone.

I agree with that. I am not saying there aren’t minorities and other cultures in Europe, but the US isn’t called the melting pot for nothing. AND the NUMBERS in the US are just massive in comparison.

Though thanks for bringing this up because I had another point I wanted to bring up based on some information I learned. European cities are much older than the ones in the US, and for the longest time they were kept small enough you could WALK from the end to the center in a half our or less. Granted with new transportation, they cities are larger now, but still the DENSITY in European cities are way more than US cities in general.

In the US, with the ample room and the love of the car, people would move out to the edges as prosperity allowed. This left the poor in the old areas, and those areas tended to go to shit. The public works in the poor areas are fewer and run down. Conversely, in the wealthier areas, the public works are new, more plentiful, and well kept. I think this too is one of the reason there is less crime in Europe in general, as their cities, are denser, their public assets are closer together, and so the poor and rich are going to both be using a lot of the same things. Thus the library is going to be up kept and get new books because they have the money for it. I think it is dozens of small differences that add up for our cultural differences.

And let us not forget that little over 50 years ago many cities had SEPARATE services for whites and blacks. So even before the expansion into suburbia, we had unbalanced resources.

Yes, and problems SCALE. If poverty is the cause of crime, the more people in poverty will lead to more crime at an exponential rate.

At any rate, my whole point with this is the US and Switzerland are very different. There isn’t just one thing making our crime rate higher.

Page 44:
Gun accidents for 2014 - 586
You said to forget cards, but thats over 35,0000
Falls - 31,959
drowning - 3406
smoke and fire - 2701
poisoning - 42032

Now granted it doesn’t really show what is at home and what is out in the world but your <16 stats shouldn’t be from jobs. Falls and poisoning and drowning are waaayy more common. I hear on the radio warning to keep your Tide Laundry pods out of reach of kids. So just look around your house and think of all the things could poison themselves or fall off of.

Also note - the accidental gun deaths of 14 and under is 50 a year, showing nearly everyone seems to be properly storing their fire arms.

I’ve repeatedly said there are three major classes of gun deaths, and each requires different solutions. The other poster said the insurance scheme would help with education and proper gun handling, which would reduce accidents. If that is their justification for this scheme, then that is what I am going to look at. Though I also addressed why it would do NOTHING to help gun crime nor suicides.

Yes, yes, I agree if you had say a million gun owners, and then you only had say 10,000 gun owners, then all things being equal, if the accident and crime rates are less, then of course you will have less deaths.

But again:
Limiting access to legal users primarily only affects legal users. I concede that if you magically made guns disappear from legal owners, then the supply for criminals to steal from would be less. But since that won’t happen, any new road blocks is primarily ONLY going to affect legal, law abiding people. Not criminals. Look at Mexico, Columbia, Brazil and a host of others - all have much stricter gun laws and all have high gun crime.

WHY is this concept so hard to grasp? Alcohol consumption went UP during prohibition. Drug use is so prevalent than several states are like, “Ah fuck it, make weed legal.” Do you HONESTLY think we are just a few more laws away from really licking the gun violence problem?

And before one brings up the UK and Australia as successes - they NEVER had the gun crime rate even when their laws were similar. Something else is going on beside just access. Their murder rates are on a steady decline - JUST LIKE in the US!

And again, why should everyone else’s rights be stripped because a very small minority use them for crime, suicides, or mishandle them? I am sure you use something every day that is misused by others to cause death, fraud, and a whole host of bad thing. Would you agree to have your access to these items restricted and/or monitored in the interest of greater security and safety? Why or why not?

Er - you can’t shot a Glock on Single action. The don’t use a hammer like a revolver or a 1911. So you can’t cock it then fire it. It uses a striker that cocks as the trigger is pulled.

If you think regulations and education are the only reason they have less gun crime, then I really don’t know what to tell you. I guess start with my short list of differences in my other post.

I just asked it to another poster, but if regulation was the only thing keeping us from a much safer nation, why is it nations like Mexico are awash in blood, even though private gun ownership is extremely restricted? How can you look at all the other illegal things people buy and sell every day in American, and honestly think we are a few laws from licking this thing?

Who said anything about military strings? And boy, I can tell you hate the NRA, but they really are the largest network of safety instructors and training programs.

Aw, I was going to suggest this for you, but you got there eventually. Sounds about right. Your last sentence again - wow. You and that other guy don’t like poor people. Sounds just like the people wanting to mandate piss test for people on welfare. I mean, how would you even demonstrate you keep a gun for non-criminal purposes. Jesus H Christ, and I got accused of crocodile tears.

Mmmmhmmm - so tell me which part of the Gun Control act of 1968 do you find targeted at Black Panthers and should be repealed? Odds are I will agree with you. (pretty much all of that bill most people would find “common sense”). But you’re right gun control has its roots mainly in keeping them out of the hands of blacks. No one ever suggested the idea before they started trying to protect themselvs. Fortunately your suggestions explicitly racist.

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Fair point. But that isn’t what I meant by that statement. I have never blamed diveristy on the crime rate. Like, ever. I have factored in the fact that we have a lot of racism, which is applied on the systemic level, and used to disenfranchise minorities as a factor in crime. But I will stress again, minorities aren’t the problem. It is the poverty too many of them face.

So in the example of Switzerland, they don’t have large dense urban areas where they systemicly keep the people down there, where they end up with no hope and little opportunity.

Wait, I take that back. If you have been reading about some of the immigrant/refugee violence cropping in up in Europe that is EXACTLY what they are doing.

This isn’t to say there isn’t racism in Europe or other places, but America has it’s own brand that has been shaped by hundreds of years of it’s unique history. So say “Why can’t American’s be cool like Switzerland.” is as ignorant of all the culutral differences that lead to, “Hey, if we just go to the Middle East and bring Coke and blue jeans, they will be just like us!”

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Thinly, huh?

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Yup, when there’s an underclass being shat upon, crime and violence will inevitably follow. It’s an intrinsic part of the system of oppression.

And yet, the Swiss and French are not being slaughtered at anything like the rate of Americans. Even if you scale for the relatively larger proportion of the US population in the underclass, the US homicide rate is still orders of magnitude larger.

I suppose you could argue for a power-law statistical relationship between oppression and violence, but that strikes me as a hypothesis in need of supporting evidence before being taken seriously.

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Right there in purple, my favorite color, under safety.

Oops should have read down. I need to head to bed, but those papers tell only part of the story.

If you’re an armed criminal you are more likely to be killed by another armed criminal.

Sure, if you are more likely to have an accident or suicide with something in your home, than if you didn’t own it.

But again, the risks are exceedingly low. A chapter in Freakonomics showed one is more likely to have an accidental death in your home from owning a pool, than from owning a gun, but no one is worried about a pool in a home.

And that second paper shows how we really need better data. The fact is MOST people who defend themselves with a gun, never fire a shot. When presented with an armed victim, the criminal usually runs away. How often does this happen? Anecdotally, a lot, but I concede that isn’t’ good data.

Also, in general, I don’t beat the “defense drum”. Nearly everyone in America who owns a gun will never hurt another person with their gun.

Ah yes, trying to be funny, but not… Because everyone in the NRA is OBVIOUSLY racists…

I will just leave this rebuttal. Though to be fair, his insults are a bit flat, but he isn’t a professional comedian.

If you look at some of the large city crime stats who break things down better, you will You will notice that nearly 100% of the people who commit homicides have prior arrest records. About 80-85% of those who are homicide victims also have prior records. Places with the worst violence aren’t people targeting just random victims (though that happens too), they are targeting other people involved in illicit, illegal activity.

So yes, there are people who flip out and kill their wife in a domestic dispute, or shoot their cousin over taking the last slice of pizza, or some twisted sick person shoots up their work place, but the majority of gun crime happens in large cities, and most of those people are involved in criminal activities that lead up to the act of murder.

I really need to get off my ass and make a list of links, but here is Milwaukee to get started.

http://city.milwaukee.gov/ImageLibrary/Groups/cityHRC/reports/2015AnnualReportFINAL.pdf

Isn’t that how it should be? I am a penis owner, but not a rapist. I own a fishing pole, but never a poacher.

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Hey, they just got there. Give them 150+ years of being told they are free and can be what ever they want, yet no, not really.

I imagine most people there still have hope they can work for a better life for their family.

Too many places in America, dealing drugs or stealing or what ever looks to be the only viable way to get out.

Street level drug dealers make LESS money than if they worked at McDonalds. And working at McDonalds won’t kill you - well - maybe if you ate their food all the time, but not for 40 years or so. Yet for many people that life is seen as the most viable opportunity.

I don’t think I look at it from oppression to violence. More lack of hope and opportunity makes one more willing to risk more.

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I think we’ve gone 'round this one before, but I will repeat it: the numbers don’t back your assertion. On a per capital basis, there is no difference between firearm violence in urban and rural areas in the US.

You keep downplaying the scope of the problem. The numbers seem small. Four firearm homicides per 100,000 is low relative to heart disease and cancer. Then again, all causes of death in the US are low compared to the big 2, which represent 50% of the total (ok, I threw stroke in there to make it an even 50%). Suicide is in the top 10, and over half of all suicides are firearm suicides.

You’ve used the comparison to vehicle insurance, asserting that the reason that mandatory vehicle insurance is required is because of the scope of the problem. But in 2015, the death rate due to vehicles (accident, homicide, and suicide) was the same as firearm deaths (again, accident, homicide, and suicide) at 10.3 per 100,000. A key difference is that the vehicle death rate is trending down, while the firearm death rate is trending up, with mild decreases in firearm homicide overwhelmed by increases in firearm suicide.

Throwing our hands up and saying, “not much we can do about that” would be pretty callous. The number of firearm deaths in the US exceeds that of hypertension or Parkinson’s’s disease, and those are worth fighting, right? It’s not supposition - if more (preferably all) gun owners locked up their guns, it would dramatically decrease the firearm death rate.

That really wasn’t the point of the FoD skit, and I think you know it. It was that the NRA acts racist, by playing on the (overblown) fears of its members that they needs guns to protect themselves from violence - which the numbers don’t support. To me, CN completely missed the point of the FoD skit, which was specifically to call out the hipocrisy of the NRA’s stated goal of advocating for gun rights for everyone, while using marketing tactics that prey on fears of young black men, who in turn are the disproportionate victims of gun violence. If he’d called them out for concern driving trollies, he would have had more of a valid point.

Which the NRA has quashed by getting their employees in Congress to pass legislation preventing the entire DHHS & NIH from doing any such reasearch.

Which is my point. You aren’t, until you are. The NRA tries to make the point that gun violence is committed by criminals, not responsible gun owners, but their statistics automatically push people from one category to the other by definition. It’s the same person, but by NRA statistics, on Friday they are “responsible” and on Sunday they become “criminal.”

BTW, I appreciate the dialog, @Mister44. You make cogent arguments, I come away more informed, and I have to up my own game to keep up.

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US population: 325,000,000 (popn density: 34/km^2)
EU population: 510,000,000 (popn density: 116/km^2)

What were you saying about scale again?

This is simply not the case, as the example of Australia linked up thread shows. The truth is out there mate. You are just being willfully, aggressively ignorant.

[quote=“DukeTrout, post:109, topic:97085”]
My friend, BTW, feels absolutely sick that his gun is out there and could be used to hurt or kill someone. If he’d had mandatory insurance, it might have been that one thing that triggered him to secure his gun instead of leaving it out, knowing his premiums would have gone up or his insurance dropped once he reported the theft.[/quote]
The way that is dealt with here is that you must to have an approved gun safe, it will be regularly inspected by the police (and your licence will be revoked if you fail), you must keep the ammn, bolt (if applicable), and weapon in separate places, this is all repeatedly emphasised to firearms owners, and you will charged if you fail, especially if your weapons get stolen.

The option of treating firearms safety as just a cost of doing business does not exist.

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As I’ve stated before, I don’t understand why gun control doesn’t fall on the opposite end of the political spectrum that it does, since the argument can easily be reduced to the question of who is allowed X- Everyone, or just the few privileged elites?

I support widespread gun ownership for the same reason I support economic justice and free speech- Because they are all about the democratization of power.

Or, just give a lot more guns to women and minorities. Remember why the original gun control laws were passed in the first place*.

*linking to MTV not because of their stellar history of journalism, but because they’re probably marginally more objective than say americafuckyeah.biz.co or something.

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Honestly, I’m kind of surprised, and more than slightly worried, that our current situation isn’t enough to convince liberals of the importance of this.

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