TOM THE DANCING BUG: How to Tell the Difference Between an Open-Carry Patriot and a Deranged Killer

boing
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[quote=“ghostly1, post:193, topic:34180”]
The stats you posted say otherwise, considering “illegal sources” is at 40%. Granted “from family/friends” doesn’t give exact stats for “stolen,” presumably they fit in to the “Other” category, 8.5-11%.[/quote]

I guess I should have been a bit more descriptive. I meant a legal source where one would have to go through a background check. Most people selling at those 4 venues listed are licensed FFLs that will do the NICS check. A small percentage of sales at flea markets and gun shows will be private sales that would require no check. And of course there are a small number of crooked FFLs. (I recently read about one in the Seattle area and it was amazing how slow the ATF was to act on it and shut them down.).

That’s exactly my point. I would be willing to consider new gun laws that I felt actually did something. Most ideas proposed would go after the avenues where < 12% of the guns are coming from. I don’t feel that is an effective means to combat gun crime.

The problem with the ~37% that comes from friends for family is - how do you combat that? I am sure some items might be stolen. I’ve known people whose black sheep family member stole their gun (not sure if that stat would show up under friends/family, or below under illegal sources of theft). But also consider that for a criminals friends and family, they aren’t “bad people”. Friends and family are often willing to buy a gun as a straw purchase. So you have someone who hasn’t gotten in trouble, passes a NICS check, and then sells/gives the gun to someone else. We can’t read minds. I know some gun shops are vigilant about it. If they see the boy friend point in the case and say, “I want that one.” they will refuse to sell for suspicion of a straw purchase. But not every FFL will catch this, nor is there anything to catch if she just goes in alone. How can you possibly read people’s minds?

The black market is a mix of stolen guns, imported guns through illegal channels, and people who can legally buy them reselling them to criminals. All of those things are already illegal. What additional laws do you propose to combat this? Pretty much every thing I have seen suggest is just going to further limit law abiding people, and at best, minorly inconvenience criminals. A person doing straw purchases now is probably still going to be able to jump through any additional hoop.

One last note, if you read through that PDF I linked to above, you can see how gun violence has dropped significantly since the mid 90s. This was done with out sweeping gun reform laws. I think we should look at why the violence dropped, identify the causes of the violence, and go after that. I think we need to look hard at the number and ask ourselves why certain communities have a rather high homicide rate, while many other places enjoy one closer to our Canadian and Australian friends. Even in those places, the rate has fallen by about half, so something must be improving there as well.

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So it turns out this is a thing.

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Yeah - lots of knife laws are BS too. The 50s hysteria over juvenile delinquency helped along by their use in movies and magazines, etc, lead to the demonizing and crack down of weed, comic books, and switch blades.

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Don’t worry, I conceal carry. We walk among you!!!

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I’ve been surprised at the number of people in this thread who have suggested this, and now you’re saying it again. I live in an area where open carry is not rare, and concealed carry is probably so common that it would scare a lot of folks on this BBS. That said, nobody would give a double-take to a minority group open carrying, just the same as how no one cares when white guys do. I know that that’s just my area, but damn.

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Another thing that a lot of gun control proponents forget is that statistics show that most accidental shootings are non-fatal.

But that’s only because the media focuses on deaths to boost sales - since people are shot and killed accidentally every week it’s easy to sell newspapers. We don’t ban cars, and they kill people. So why not let people be killed by guns? 1 + 1 = 1.

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Oh sure, it’s all fun and games until you start having the drive-by fencing…

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Apart from the fact that most people don’t spend an hour every day in a public place with a loaded weapon ready and aimed at everyone else on the street. Instead it’s a small minority of gun fondlers causing nearly as many fatalities with their toy dildos as a much larger number of people do while spending much more time “cocked and locked” in their cars. False equivalence is false.

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I was curious after reading this thread about what the statistics actually show, since they are used by people on both sides of the argument to say different things.

If you look at charts of general murder rate in the UK, the US, and Australia, after strict gun control was enacted the murder rate increased in the UK but did indeed decrease in Australia. But the decrease in Australia coincides with a very similar decrease in the US. If anything, the decrease in the US - coinciding with no meaningful change in law or policy - is actually greater.

This suggests that looking at these statistics is essentially meaningless. There are clearly myriad other factors (social, economic, political) affecting the murder rate, and as Maggie’s recent article on the research surrounding gun control points out, nobody is really doing the complicated analyses that would be required to suss out anything meaningful.

It’s obviously very alluring to people on all sides of the issue to use these statistics, since everybody does it and because depending on how you construct your graph you can make it say basically anything you want (try a google image search for “uk murder rate” or “australia murder rate” to see what I mean).

Ultimately I do think most people end up realizing that (perhaps subconsciously), and so the debate isn’t really about murder rates unless your intention in the debate is to distract (since the data can most easily be used to suggest that restricting guns has little to no effect on murder rate), as some in this thread seem to be doing (I’m not referring to you, Mister44, despite the fact that I’m replying to you - you’ve always been a voice of reason on the pro-gun side in these debates on boingboing).

So, those in favor of stricter gun control frame the debate around the idea that guns enable crime, and enable psychopaths (and whoever) to kill or harm more people than they otherwise would be able to. This makes intuitive sense, but is not something you can easily look at from statistics.

The murder rate in the UK went up post-gun-control, but the #1 murder tool by a huge margin is knives (and predictably, there has been increased regulation on carrying knives as a result). In the US, murder rate by knife has actually dropped significantly in the same period but is basically irrelevant since it is utterly dwarfed by the gun murder rate.

So the question is, without easy access to guns in the US, would the knife murder rate be anywhere near as high as the gun rate? For most people killing someone with a gun is going to be vastly easier than killing someone with a knife. You can debate that, but actually this is something used by gun advocates in the US - the “leveling the playing field” argument admits flat out that it’s easier to kill with a gun than with anything else.

So does easy access to guns (no matter where they come from, legal or otherwise) enable gun violence? Guns are obviously an enabler of violence - basic history bears this out inarguably. But is that relevant to this point?Places with both easy access to guns and lacking strict regulation of them and/or their use have more gun violence - the places with the most gun violence are countries in the MIddle East and Africa and countries with drug trafficking issues (e.g. Mexico and some South American countries, and SE Asia). Then there’s the US right up there.

And then there’s Switzerland, a place gun advocates like to use in their favor. Gun ownership is very high, because the government gives them to everyone (and trains them). The overall murder rate is extremely low (which gun advocates point out), but that’s clearly due to other factors - like high wealth, relatively evenly distributed, and strong social safety nets etc. I can say “clearly” because the rate of gun murders in Switzerland as a percentage of overall murders is higher than in any other developed countries besides Canada and the US.

In other words, regardless of the overall murder rate, the easy availability of guns and relatively lax regulation translates directly to more gun violence. And as is fairly inarguable, even by gun advocates as I noted, guns are easier to make violence with than anything else. Murders and violence will always exist, because there are lots of reasons for it stemming from human/animal nature. Easy access to guns means making murder easier.

So:

Pretty much every thing I have seen suggest is just going to further limit law abiding people, and at best, minorly inconvenience criminals. A person doing straw purchases now is probably still going to be able to jump through any additional hoop.

True. So part of the problem, then, is the law-abiding people. They care more about being able to easily own guns than what the effect of the laws that make that easy for them have on the rest of society, because to truly reduce gun violence means taking away guns. Criminals will still have them but it will be much more expensive and harder to get them, so there will be less of them.

We’re not going to become a Switzerland-like utopia anytime soon (because of many of the same people who oppose gun control, of course), where this isn’t a big issue because the murder rate is 1/10 what it is in the US to begin with. Poverty isn’t going away, and the obviously-stupid war on drugs isn’t even going away. Most of the social and other factors that lead to murder in the first place aren’t going away anytime soon in the US.

So why are we enabling the violence that stems from those factors by allowing such easy access to guns?

Because law-abiding citizens don’t want to give them up.

It’s not that I can’t sympathise, or that I trust the government. I get it. And I get the rugged individualist thing, and the romance of the wild west. But the world has moved on and I would like to move on with it. This applies not only to guns, but to socialized health care and all the other things that every other developed country has that the US doesn’t.

I realize that my comment basically reads as “take away all the guns”. Well, you know… that is the only easy solution to gun violence!

If gun rights advocates would like to help us build a more utopian/egalitarian society instead, that would be great, but socialism is evil to them so we’re stuck. I’m certainly unfairly grouping people together here, but open-carry assholes and many, many other gun rights advocates and sympathetic conservatives are the ones who are making “take away all the guns” look more and more like the only solution.

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I seriously doubt the veracity of that claim though I welcome you to cite some reputable sources to support it. However, for the sake of argument let’s assume it’s true.

Automobiles are highly regulated and require training, licenses, registration and background checks to operate. For example, you won’t be issued a license to drive if you have a history of DUIs or can’t pass a drivers’ test. The more dangerous the automobile, the more rigorous the licensing requirements. That’s why the average Joe can’t get behind the wheel of a big rig hauling gasoline. There are also a number of Federal, state and local agencies whose sole purpose is to reduce the harm caused by cars. These measures are all in place because we recognize that automobiles are dangerous objects which need to be carefully regulated.

Explosives are even more heavily restricted than automobiles, and usually require very specialized permits and training to buy or use. The Federal government also carefully tracks sales of explosives and explosive precursors like chemical fertilizers to minimize the likelihood of a would-be terrorist stockpiling them. This is one reason why the Boston Marathon bombings only killed three people—a really deadly bomb is relatively hard to build. These measures are all in place because we recognize that explosives are dangerous substances which need to be carefully regulated.

Building Codes are strictly enforced to minimize the likelihood of people dying in fires, whether set intentionally or otherwise. Americans demanded better protection against fires after a few well-publicized tragedies such as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911. Now we have fire escapes, fire alarms, flame-retardant building materials and countless other measures in place to minimize the likelihood of building occupants dying in a fire. These measures are all in place because we recognize that fires are a serious danger which needs to be carefully addressed through regulation.

If you look carefully through my previous posts you’ll note that I never called for a ban on guns. I merely support measures which recognize that guns are highly dangerous objects which warrant careful regulation.

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Who said anything about banning anything?

I live in a city where I’m likely to encounter thousands of people actively using automobiles before I finish my morning coffee. The only place where I’d be likely to encounter that many people simultaneously using firearms is in a war zone. Even so, I’m statistically almost as likely to be killed by a gun as I am by a car. How can that possibly be?

Because of the thousands of people operating motor vehicles I will encounter, almost all of them will have had training and licensing to operate them. The production and use of those cars are also subject to countless state, local and federal laws. If any of the people I encounter can’t meet those standards then I want them off my public roads, pronto.

That’s all I want for guns. Not to ban them, just make sure that we have some decent standards in place to minimize the harm they cause and keep them away from people who shouldn’t have them. Plenty of countries already do this.

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Thanks. You pretty well summed up my opinions.

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Like The Daily Show said-- that’s because a Black trying to do open carry would be in jail or dead (or both) in minutes.

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There was one Amazon offering that had a three pack of adapters…

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That is why I can’t believe that any responsible gun owner would defend these yahoos. They are irresponsible trollies and somebody is going to get hurt because of them.
Pure trolley… Purposely standing in the Baby Products aisle at Target – as soon as they go home, they are probably logging into 4chan.

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I disagree with you and everyone else who said that open carry is a white thing, based on my personal experiences. See my post (post 208) above, for my personal perspective.

Yes, I have seen black people open carry, and still, no one cares. Where I’m from, no one gives a crap if you’re carrying a gun openly or concealed (or if they do care, they don’t act like it or say anything), and being a white male or a minority isn’t relevant. I know that there are still racists in America, but I honestly believe that in most of this country, folks wouldn’t look at a black person open carrying any differently than a white person open carrying.

Edited to correct grammar.

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Nobody would, or you have personally seen this happen and nobody has?

Because they’re very different propositions, and one’s taken pretty much on faith. I hope your area’s good enough that it’s the latter case.

Edit: I see you posted the answer to my question while I was writing. Well, good for your area then.

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I specifically said that it was my area that I was talking about in the post that you quoted.

I know that my area is not necessarily representative of the entire US, but when you start talking about how black people and white people are treated differently, you’re not taking about guns anymore; you’re taking about racism, which is a separate issue. Gun owners and racists are not mutually exclusive, I know, but they are not mutually inclusive either.

Maybe my part of the country should be a model.

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Anyone happen to know the particulars of the law?

Is it illegal to carry multiple rifles? (The above link doesn’t seem to be helpful in this respect.)

I keep expecting to see a picture of one some zealous open-carry guy with 2 rifles on his back, one slung diagonally on each shoulder, and a third held in front. Caption: “What? It’s my constitutional right to own and carry 3+ rifles! Stop oppressing me with your sour looks!”

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The cartoon makes no sense because an intelligent and aware individual would get away from the situation immediately if a person showed up with a rifle in an “out-of-context” situation. I would check that my properly concealed weapon was reachable and get out of the area. There is simply no reason to have a rifle out in a place where it should not be. I would have left the chipotle immediately when those two idiots showed up with their rifles. I would not wait to find out WHY he had it. Of course the Texas law is stupid that you can concealed carry a pistol, but not open carry one, but you can open carry a rifle. They just need to raise awareness in a more appropriate manner.

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