Angry rebuttals to follow. Iām getting outta here.
I gotta admit, I can see why Obamaās somber reaction speech to the last mass shooting* basically boiled down to āfuck it, I give up.ā
*Or was it two mass shootings ago now? I forget.
A sadly somber masterpiece.
Not the first person to think of it:
But I like this one better:
http://thismodernworld.com/archives/7617
Though it does earnestly repeat the tiresome talking points of one āsideā of the gun ādebateā, I appreciate the implication that when it comes to responding to violence in American society, almost everyone is just going through the motions.
We have to, really. Because even though theyāre hollow and meaningless, if we stop repeating the same tired discussions about gun control and media censorship, we might be forced to actually reflect deeply on the society we have built. And while a dozen murders is a bummer to hear about, itās nothing compared to confronting the profound perversity of the culture, the economy, and the government (all of which we ourselves created on purpose) which gave rise to the shooting.
A more reasonable response to these sort of things would be to ignore the media sensationalistic approach, to wit - āHigh-powered assault weapon of immeasurable killing capacity murders a bunch of innocent, helpless, kind people at elementary school! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!! GAWD HELP US ALL!! More on this story at 11:00!ā, and focus on the simple reality - āIndividual person kills many.ā
Besides, does this sort of ājournalismā do anything more than spread the lock-your-door-and-live-in-a-cave-because-the-terrorists-are-everywhere mentality? No, it doesnāt. Learn the difference and keep yourself free from the fear-mongering of others.
Also, you never hear the other āsideā to the gun debate : āMillions of gun owners remain calm, cool, and collected, and go about their lives as normal people.ā Iād love to see more of this side of the story. Itās closer to reality than any of that crap on CNN or your local news station and way more important.
Well, I for one think we need strict national gun laws. I trust the government completely to get this right, because theyāve proven themselves to be worthy of our trust. And even though where I live guarantees that law enforcement wonāt get here for 20 minutes, I totally trust them to not shoot me. Because we all know it never happens.
I donāt know if you can call it a ādebateā when two groups of fanatics wearing blinders and earplugs scream at each other.
The irony is that this is probably the third or fourth time Mr. Bolling has done a strip along these lines in the wake of a mass shooting. Scouring the archives for the appropriate examples is left as an exercise to the reader.
[quote=āeFarther, post:7, topic:10635ā]
Also, you never hear the other āsideā to the gun debate : āMillions of gun owners remain calm, cool, and collected, and go about their lives as normal people.ā
[/quote]Actually I hear that āsideā of the debate EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. a psycho who was able to easily acquire dangerous weapons murders a bunch of innocent people, which is to say, quite often.
FUN FACT: Did you know that the vast majority of people who buy high explosives use them for non-violent purposes such as building demolition, mining or putting urban legends to the test on the Discovery Channel? Logically we should get rid of those pesky laws regulating the sale and use of dynamite, because it wouldnāt be fair punish the vast majority of law-abiding explosive users just because of a handful of neāer-do-wells.
Here, hereā¦ It is time to stop these discussions and rise up in arms against the NRA!
Basic Risk management and Security Theatrics finds an excellent demonstration case in āMass Shootingsā. If they were as common as people would like to convince us, they wouldnāt make the news. The hundreds of people murdered /every week/ in low income neighborhoods? a statistic. but murder a weekās worth of people in under an hour? time to rewrite the constitution!
The stats already came in to demonstrate that you are more likely to be killed by the police than a terrorist bombing. I would imagine the same rings true for mass shootings. Weāve now demonstrated that the TSA lockdown post 9/11 has caused a fairly significant upswing in traffic deaths because of a new found preference for road travel.
(I would care a lot more for the gun control advocates if their message was about reducing the overall level of violence for people without white privilege), instead of hand-wringing about having to have their evening dinner upset by another hysterical shooting story on the evening news.)
Risk management, folks, look at the numbers, and expect unintended consequences from applying risk mitigation to edge cases.
Stop trying to rationally parse a complicated issue!
Weāve GOT to give up even more Rights to achieve a little more safety and save JUST. ONE. LIFE. Weāre supposed to pass poorly rationalized laws immediately in the wake of any tragedy. We passed a ton of hasty, awful laws after 9/11 and itās not like our Govt servants have ever abused those powers, right?
All we need is just one final perfect law. It can be enforced by the same public officials who missed the repeated, obvious signals that the Navy Yard shooter should have been under arrest and unable to buy firearms. Not automatic assault weapons, mind you; weāre talking about a pistol and a shotgun. Not the assault rifle boogeyman that everyone wants to legislate out of being, but the same basic firearms that people use for hunting and protection.
Then, after we get done disarming the entire nation, a different group of zealots can get to passing a law to protect all those unborn āinnocent livesā that are lost every day.
Hi-ho. Less freedom will make everyone happy and content.
I would be fine with people having the right to carry pistols and shotguns, but not assault rifles. Ecstatic even.
Look up the mortality rates at Columbine vs. Newtown and compare the types of weapons the shooters used. The physics are undeniable. Science.
I suppose that there might be some gun control advocates who think that the public should be disarmed while the police remain armed to the teeth. I, however, have never met one.
first, define an 'assault rifle"ā¦ then watch me demonstrate how something that doesnāt match your definition of āassault rifleā is functionally identical to another weapon you did designate as one.
next, Posit proof that enacting law that affects millions of people, to possibly extend the lives of a handful of people in extremely rare events, until they die from one of the 1000 other more life-threatening events we face every day. Extra Credit for postulating how this is āResponsible Civic Actionā.
Wait a second, you said Right to Carry, not āownā, alright then, well, millions of us already have the legal right to carry a pistol (and the paperwork that goes with it), but we canāt carry around semiautomatic magazine-fed rifles (*) legally in a lot of states. Cool, you got your wish, itās already reality.
(* - I believe this is the phrase youāre looking for, āassault rifleā is a term from video games that isnāt used by anyone with any weapons handling experience in the real world)
Iād welcome a debate where gun enthusiasts actually took this approach. An honest argument for gun rights might sound like āThe right to arm ourselves is so critical for our collective well-being that it outweighs the relatively small number of people who die in mass shootings.ā
But thatās not what I hear from the gun rights supporters. What I hear is almost exclusively along the lines of āThe fact that Americans can easily acquire high-capacity/assault-style firearms has NOTHING TO DO WITH the fact that our country regularly experiences mass shootings.ā This is unsupported by evidence at best and entirely disingenuous at worst, because access to these kinds of firearms is the most dramatic difference between the United States and culturally similar nations which do not regularly experience mass shootings.
Addendum: Squee!!! Iām debating firearms ownership risk and law with Jeff!
Unabashed CH fanboy
absolutely! thatās pretty much my argument, with a little extra of my ownership of firearms also has no bearing on the relatively small number of people who die in mass shootings.
Likewise, taking the personal end of the risk management scale, banning certain classes of weapon will also have no negligible effect on the already negligible probability of my being killed in a mass shooting. So if weāre going to swing the āneeds of the many outweigh the needs of the fewā needle to the opposite end, overreaching and kneejerk gun laws do nothing to make me safer, but do plenty to take options away from me. I donāt benefit at either end of the scale, socially or personally.
All it does is appease people who are reactive and risk-incompetent (which unfortunately describes a wide swath of the populace and governance)
