where I live, there’s a massive proliferation of grenades and grenade launchers. Angry men often get drunk and fire off grenade launchers at people. Kids bring grenades to school to show off to their friends. Small children often get a hold of grenades by accident and kill people. Last year, grenades killed more people than car accidents.
Obviously, the solution to this problem is smarter grenade pins.
I just don’t see “smart guns” doing much to reduce tragedy whether or not it’s made mandatory. We already have millions of unregulated/unencumbered firearms in the country.
Maybe it would help prevent the “little Johnny plays with his parents’ firearms and accidentally kills himself/parent/friend/bystander” scenarios but I’d think that any number of decades-old low tech solutions would work just as well here (including not keeping loaded firearms anywhere in your home).
Of course any proposed solutions invariably invokes the mythical “what am I gonna do when some home invading rapist kicks down my door in the middle of the night!” scenario.
You know, I was thinking on the way home how much this whole thing rubs me the wrong way.
Newsflash folk - some magical gadget isn’t going to fix the worlds problems. Yes it might help prevent some accidents, but the reality is the REASON people want to hurt others or themselves is still going to be there and a smart gun won’t help those issues.
What frustrates me more is the general attitude about this. That we need technology to save us. NO, we need to ENGAGE, help EACH OTHER, and give a fuck about someone more than ourselves.
This reminds me of the idea that technology will revolutionize education. That if we just gave all the kids iPads they will all go on to do great things. The problem is that kids don’t do poorly in school due to lack of resources at school, it is because of lack of resources at home. Resources like parents who are available - either by choice, or because they work too much, and/or one is out of the pictures or worse, abusive, in trouble the the law, etc. Parents who take an interest in their kids school work and help them with it and push them to do more. Properly fed and clothed, etc. Sure there are some parents who are doing their best, but there are also those who are failing their kids - for a variety of reasons.
Solutions for these hard problems are there. But they are hard solutions. Sure a smart phone can provide you with answers on how to live your life, but it does no good if it’s just full of cat videos and pop music.
I am not convinced that someone who is now careless enough to leave a loaded firearm where a child can get to it is not going to do something similarly stupid with whatever smart gun technology comes up. I was always taught keeping guns unloaded and locked up was the best way to keep them out of a child’s hands.
The mythical situation of an armed intruder is not as far fetched as one might think. In my area, we have had two home invasions involving people we know, one who lives next door to my Parents. In both cases, the targets were elderly people. In the case of the next door neighbor, the wife was home alone when they broke into her basement. She stood at the top of the stairs with a pistol pointed at the bottom of the stairs. one of the intruders came around the corner, looked up, saw her, and ran. They piled into their van and sped away. No shots were fired, nothing was stolen, the only damage was the window they broke to get in. The other case was an elderly gentleman. He put up no resistance, and was beaten pretty badly while they ransacked his house over a period of several hours. Of course, those are anecdotes, not statistics. But it does sometimes happen. Home invasions are a thing.
Where are you? I want to try out launching a grenade or three.
I agree technology cannot solve our problems for us. It can, however, empower us with tools to expand the possibilities for how to work on our problems.
Yes and no. You can give a man a fishing pole and bait and he could feed himself - IF he has the KNOWLEDGE of how to fish and cook, and IF he has the will to put in the work to catch the fish.
A large part of my point is that there are multiple issues, with no single solution. Simplistic “guns good” “guns bad” approaches, and hard line extremism on either end don’t lead to acceptable solutions. Part of the issue is that there’s a very serious divide between what gun violence looks like in rural areas and urban areas. Solutions for one area do not automatically transfer to others.
As to the rest of your response its pretty route nostalgia for a better time that never existed. I grew up in a pretty rural place. With a fairly large amount of guns. I can’t even really think of how many people I know, or know of who have been harmed by a gun. Many suicides, many shootings both accidental and “accidental”. I know lobstermen who have been shot for placing their pots on some one else’s fishing grounds. The catcher from my little league baseball team pulled a (unarmed) home invasion on what he and friends thought was a pot grow house. Turns out it was a dentist with a shotgun, 3 people died. (and which one was the outsider? The dentist who owned the house for 25 years? or the 5 home invaders who were all raised within a 50 mile radious). And I live in a state and area where this shit is less common. My family who were raised in Southern States, this shit seems like a daily occurance. Even out in the boonies. The fact of the matter is that these things did happen in the past. Just because noone (or you specifically) didn’t hear about them doesn’t mean they weren’t happening. Women still got beat, its just their husbands were more able to cover it up. The Catholic Molestation scandal wasn’t so shocking just because some priests were caught diddling kids. But because of how long it had been going on, how pervasive it was, and how well it was covered up. A fair lot of those cases dated to the 1970’s. And more than a few dated to the 1950’s. Like wise school shootings (and mass shootings in general) date back a hell of a lot farther than you remember:
You can’t extrapolate from your own experience, and your own awareness, to population wide effects. And basing policy proposals on “well when I was a kid things like this never happened” doesn’t work. We’ve got a much larger awareness of when these things these days. Even in the quite, small downs where things used to get hushed up ignored, or just flat out allowed depending on what was proper and polite, who the perpetrators were, and what connections they had. And a media apparatus that relies on them for ratings and profits.
Well that’s what I mean. Tools are instruments to enable. It’s still up to us to find the will and the way. With the right tools a fisherman can feed many people, but he still does the work. The tool amplifies his abilities, opening new possibilities.
Oh good. Some of them do have brains. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I like guns. But for a few different considerations, I’d own a few myself by now. But the utter batshit unwillingness to compromise on even the most basic measures that at most inconvenience gun owners has convinced me that perhaps I should be worried about these people owning guns. They’re not even rational enough for the most basic political savvy to see that it’s a bad idea to send people who make smart guns death threats and so is sending the NRA to throw a rally in the town where a mass shooting took place. When you are so far gone in your political opinions that there is no one who can suggest the mildest compromise for what amounts (let’s be fucking honest here) with a fucking hobby… I’m genuinely concerned that you may not actually be the kind of person I would trust to own a gun.
Jebus Christ, this is a reach through the aisles. Now how do we get everyone else to realize this?
I tried to be clear that my personal experiences are anecdotes instead of data. I also understand that school shootings have been a thing for a long time. However, they were not part of the list of things that my family worried about, for lack of a more elegant way to phrase it. I was really not claiming that my experiences are typical. But if you are talking about gun issues, you are going to end up eventually discussing the issues with someone who has similar experiences to mine, and are unlikely to be convinced that access to guns is the primary problem with the world today. I won’t even say that my perspective is more correct than anyone else’s. Just that it is one possible perspective.
It is also pretty objectively true that there were more shootings per capita, and more stranger abductions, and likely more fireworks related fatalities then than there are now. But we were not conscious of those things, and spent no time worrying about them. What my Mom worried about was the fact that at eleven years old, I was spending all day riding my motorcycle around in the San Juan National Forrest. And rattlesnakes.
I think most of the debates about guns and other dangers are more about perception than actual risk. And people with agendas are going to try to exaggerate or minimize those risks, depending on their goals.
Yes. And then happily inconvenience everybody else when they get their activities restricted by some collateral damage, while addressing some statistical non-risk totally overblown by the media.
Whether classifying spud guns as firearms, or - what PISSES me off because it got a bit too personal - mandating annoying hoops to get components for etchants, instead of just dropping by a shop, because suddenly they became “explosives precursors”.
And then restricting certain meds that do me good, because of a rare side effect that is more than compensated by increasing my focus/awareness and reducing the orders of magnitude higher risk that I walk under a car which already almost happened a couple times.
Perceptions and feelings. I hate people who are deciding primarily by feelings.
While we’re offering anecdotes in place of evidence: I was the subject of a “home invasion” once.
I stood up and told him to get the fuck out of my apartment, and he did. Burglar who was expecting an unoccupied flat, no weapons involved on either side.
I’m about 5’6", BTW. And, at the time, I was wearing nothing but boxer shorts (I was resting in bed, off work with a cold).
You were lucky. Home occupiers can get killed in such situations.
Chance of him getting to me before I reached the meat cleaver on the kitchen bench: very low. Chance of him having a weapon more effective than a small knife: virtually zero.
Sure, shit happens and it could have gone differently. Maybe he was an expert MMA fighter with lightning reflexes before he became a TV-stealing junkie. Not very likely, though.
I’m at vastly more risk from insects every day on the job (hospital visit last week, actually; it took the crews of two ambulances and two firetrucks to carry me up the near-vertical track out of the bush, strapped into a stretcher) than I am from the miniscule possibility of a lethal home invasion.
I think that was a poorly scouted burglary. A home invasion is when they are armed, and expect you to be home so that you can open the safe and tell them where the valuables are hidden.
Not quite that upscale, but for another personal anecdote:
When I was 19, I lived in a rotting slum in one of the dodgiest bits of Sydney. There were half a dozen of us living there; we were all heavy methamphetamine users, and half of the household were into heroin.
Amongst the many other failings of the house, the front door was impossible to properly secure. One day, as the household was gathered in the lounge room eating cheese and crackers, a random dude kicked his way through the front door, grabbed the cheese knife off the table and held it to the throat of one of the girls while he demanded we give him some heroin.
Being the house that it was, one of the girls had some stashed upstairs. However, being the girls that they were, they weren’t going to hand over their best drugs to some random arsehole for nothing.
So, instead, they talked to him until he calmed down, then gave him a couple of cones to smoke and sent him on his way. No blood spilt on any side.
Agree, I would be curious as to the specific studies as well. Always interested in reading the data, especially if it is going to tell me something other than crime happens mostly to the poor.
I agree that saying “mental health” is a bit of a red herring. But I think it gets trotted out because in the case of highly publicized shootings there are often medication and social issues at work that may be characterized as mental health. And “mental health” is a complex thing that no one can unwind. Especially when you consider suicide is a mental health issue and the use of firearms definitely increases the chance of completions.
Similarly, overall violence is a complex problem that can’t easily be unwound. I still think that in the US we are moving in the right direction, but I don’t think that more firearms regulation is the case.
Sounds like you are back east, in California we already have safe storage and transfers only through dealers with background checks, plus more, so we already have more the level of “common sense laws” that are referred to. But, we can attest that even those “common sense” laws do not stop the anti-2A crowd from pushing for more and more inane regulation that is overly restrictive and isn’t well received by most owners you talk to at the range.
When it comes to licensing and mandatory training for firearms ownership, I usually think of qualifications for voters (I do think that the right to self defense and firearms ownership is a right on par with electing our leaders, so take that in mind with my following argument). The problem with mandatory licensing and trainings are that they have a history of abuse for discriminatory purposes. I think there is general agreement that properly educated members of both classes is important or even essential for the rights to function properly. But should someone should not be able to vote or have the best means to defend themselves because they can’t afford the fee or because the people in power have decided to hamper the ability for everyone to obtain a license and favoring their friends?
These things have happened and continue to happen. Those are the concerns with increasing government regulation over a basic right.
We have a “common sense” safety card and additional background check fees in California. We were promised that the fees would only be used to maintain the program. Excess fees are now being taken for other uses and are now a revenue source.
