Yep - that is pretty much the case.
Thatâs easy. Over the last 20 years, every rifle range and gun shop within 50 miles of me has had to shut down and/or move their business out of state due to harassment and protests.
The end result is probably the opposite of what was intended. Legal gun owners now have a very hard time getting rid of their guns, those that kept their guns can no longer practice leading to increased risk, and illegal sales have gone up. According to my time on the grand jury, while people can no longer legally buy or sell a gun at a legal dealership, they can just hop on down to the parking lot behind my local 24-hour shopping area at 2am and pick one up while buying drugs. This is better how?
This is why I said that there is a severe misunderstanding of the problem; every âsolutionâ has incrementally exacerbated the problem.
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Nobody threatens to throw gun-control activists in jail?
I try hard to stay out of gun control discussions online. Theyâre seldom productive and seldom change peopleâs minds, and most of the participants are either gun control advocates (who are wrong), or gun nuts who are crazy scary people I donât want to be associated with, and about the only way to keep them from being offensive is to say âHey, did you hear about the new Model ### from This Manufacturer? How is it?â and let them geek about stuff I donât actually care about.
Iâve always felt survivors of sexual assault should be given favored status over anyone elseâs right to own a gun.
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ââ˘Even if you were to commit a pool-based murder, youâd be hard-pressed to kill a large number of people at once.â
Am I the only one here who immediately realized a way to kill everyone in a pool quickly that would be much, much easier than chasing them all around a building and shooting them individually? Obviously Iâll leave the details as an exercise for the reader as I wouldnât want to give some unimaginative crazy person ideas.
ââ˘Relatively few people are murdered with pools.â
Maybe⌠maybe it is just easer to make pool murders look like accidents. Dead is dead anyway, regardless of whether it was murder or accident, I fail to see how narrowing the argument to motive reduces the danger of pools.
ââ˘Pools arenât mobile or concealable, thus I can keep myself and my family away from pools if I donât want to assume that risk.â
Tell that to the wicked witch of the west.
The basic numbers also donât add up.
In the US, there are about 3,500 unintentional drowning deaths (excluding boating) annually. 1
Meanwhile, for the past 50 years in the US there have been about 8,000 homicides each year via handguns alone, with another 3,000 or so perpetrated with other firearms. 2
Now, granted, the United States is not âthe Western Worldâ. But when one talks about extremist gun culture in the Western World, the focus is most certainly on the most gun crazy portion - the good olâ US of A.
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I assume you mean electrocution. That would actually be pretty tricky for the average Joe because a fair amount of electrical wiring knowledge would be involved. You couldnât just throw a toaster in a pool and end up with a body count on par with Sandy Hook or Columbine; the circuit breaker would short out immediately. Most cases of pool electrocutions to date have involved wiring problems that only effected a localized part of a poolâbad news for a child swimming nearby that light fixture but not likely to mean certain death for people swimming on the opposite side.
Maybe thatâs why no one has ever committed mass murder that way.
Harassment, huh? Were the owners visited at their homes by someone carrying a real-seeming weapon and then threatened with it?
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Iâve always felt that people have no need to privately own firearms with the possible exception of those who subsist on hunting (and even then, the weapons could be owned and managed publically and rented or loaned out as needed).
Given how few people actually hunt for subsistance rather than purely for âsportâ, I believe my position explains itself.
Iâm not comfortable with giving the average person such sweeping power over life and death. We register our motor vehicles and license our drivers out of fear of accidents, but we give people tools designed specifically to end life quickly and easily after the barest of formalities.
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No, they were simply forced out of their homes, their children were forced out of their schools, they lost their livelihoods and they were driven from the communities they grew up in. Nothing as severe as a face to face confrontation with an idiot.
Should I be able to apply my beliefs to your behavior as well? Or is this a one-way operation?
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When my behavior endangers others, yes.
Which is exactly is why we have a system of laws.
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No laws are being broken by legal gun owners, the 99% of gun owners in the US.
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I assume the original statement about pools vs guns stems from the book Freakonomics.
In it they point out that you were much more likely to have an accidental death in your home if you owned a pool vs a household owning a gun.
This goes against conventional wisdom, as a gun is seen as a dangerous thing, while a pool is much more benevolent. And while people want to enact laws limiting the harm guns cause, the passion to regulate pools is virtually non-existent.
âForcedâ? What did they use, torches and pitchforks? Youâre going to have to provide some concrete specifics to make this seem worse than what the article claims happened to Longdon. Some vague proof that it actually happened would be a good starter. Also, proof that the methods used involved threats of bodily harm would be nice as well.
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In my state, hell yes. You go to Walmart, where you present a special ID, a purchasing permit, giving you the right to buy and own a gun. A clerk calls the state police. If your application is acceptedâand itâs not a givenâyou have to wait 24 hours to get a long gun, rifle, or shotgun, and 72 hours to get a handgun.
If itâs found out that you have minors under the age of 14 running around the house and youâve left that handgun on the coffee table without a trigger lock, depending on what part of the state youâre in, youâre criminally liable (the Googles are failing me on what the penalty is, but if anyone figured out there were firearms in my house and me without a FOID card, itâs pretty steep, and if I further allowed a felon to stay here, itâd be even worse.)
But yeah, you could bring that gun home, load it, and leave it on the coffee table. You could also leave the gate to your swimming pool unlocked with a sign that says âFREE CANDY AT BOTTOM OF POOL!â Nobodyâs really preventing you from doing that. But you would be criminally liable.
The pool analogy falls apart when you consider all gun deaths, as the number of drownings are outnumbered by shootings. Drownings definitely dwarf, say, murder with rifle, though. And theyâre all dwarfed by motor vehicle accidents.
Excellent question. And what is a the heart of some of this discussion.
I have noticed a desire to create an equivalence between different kinds of response.
There is a huge qualitative difference between what people mean by âforcedâ
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I have a friend who likes guns and he is very bipolar and he sends the usual deranged wingnut emails. And I have bipolar friends who just donât want a gun because they are bipolar. I donât know anyone who is extremely anti-gun, but the online community seems to the mirror image of my bipolar friend. How that relates to the real world, i donât know. But online discussions on guns seem to follow the mold of online Israeli-Palestinian debates - endlessly fascinating to (pretend?) activists and nobody else. Bystanders are left wondering maybe they should get a motel room for a violent grudge fuck and maybe they will discover they are secret soul mates.
Some people are larger, in better health, and better trained than average. Iâm actually one of them. Itâs not fair that, all things being equal, smaller people, people who are untrained, or in ill health are vulnerable to larger thugs. Self-defense classes are great, and I used to teach one. For some people, in some situations, a gun is a reasonable option. If youâve never been in that position of being the vulnerable individual, please consider it. I am not against stringent licensing.
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Youâre right - private ownership of both guns and pools should be more regulated (in the case of pools, not least because theyâre such a waste of water). I donât deny that there are good reasons for some people to have them (hence regulated rather than banned) but I really feel the world would be a better place if the average home had neither.
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