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Taerkar posted:Ehh... I don't think I've seen people claim that open carry will stop mass shootings. Then you ought to praise God.
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Jul 10, 2015 23:19
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OwlFancier posted:I don't entirely remember saying that either? OwlFancier posted:While I would concur that if someone attempts to murder someone else, the defender's survival is preferable to the attacker's, all else being equal. I would also suggest that this is a deeply imperfect state of affairs, and that the difference is greatly outweighed by the fact that someone ended up dead. Your objective should not be to ensure the defender can always kill the attacker, your objective should be to ensure that there is no confrontation to begin with, or if there is, that both survive. What did you mean by this, if not that? This is expressly valuing an attacker's survival above a victim's ability to access effective self-defense.
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Jul 10, 2015 23:20
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SedanChair posted:Then you ought to praise God.
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Jul 10, 2015 23:21
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We should invest in mental healthcare, to keep these people from shooting up elementary schools, and colleges, and high schools, and churches. These targets are innocent, and have very little political impact. Through proper therapy, people would be prevented from hitting such inefficient targets.
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Jul 10, 2015 23:21
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Control Volume posted:We should invest in mental healthcare, to keep these people from shooting up elementary schools, and colleges, and high schools, and churches. These targets are innocent, and have very little political impact. Through proper therapy, people would be prevented from hitting such inefficient targets.
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Jul 10, 2015 23:23
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Nessus posted:Out of hypothetical curiosity: Well if your intent is to find negative impacts, you already failed.
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Jul 10, 2015 23:25
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LGD posted:What did you mean by this, if not that? This is expressly valuing an attacker's survival above a victim's ability to access effective self-defense. I accept, at the very least, that it is entirely impractical to expect people not to try to defend themselves. I have extreme respect for anyone capable of that level of pacifism and would consider that to be the pinnacle of morality in the circumstances, but I wouldn't expect it of people. What I meant by that was that focusing on the ability for a defender in a conflict to "win" the conflict suggests a lack of perspective, there are many alternatives available which can reduce the occurance of conflict so that you have little to no need for people to defend themselves. Enshrining gun ownership as a fundamental right will, at some point, become counterproductive to a progressing society. At some point, unrestricted access to guns causes more problems than it solves, because you end up with more people killing and injuring each other accidentally, or spontaneously, due to the proliferation of high-lethality weapons, than you do prevent assaults. I also argue that the death of an attacker is not a good outcome, merely marginally less bad than the death of the defender. A death is still a death and the validity of a person's life is not completely nullified at the point where they violate the rights of another. Much as we may fetishize the idea that it is.
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Jul 10, 2015 23:30
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LeJackal posted:Well if your intent is to find negative impacts, you already failed. This is exactly why noone should engage with you. You're the Hans Herman Hoppe of gun control.
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Jul 10, 2015 23:30
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LeJackal posted:Well if your intent is to find negative impacts, you already failed. A study comes out which shows something negative about gun ownership (other, I suppose, than the correlation with suicides, I'm not sure if that's disputed). What factors would this study need to have to not be immediately rejected by yourself? Do those factors exist?
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Jul 10, 2015 23:32
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LeJackal posted:Well if your intent is to find negative impacts, you already failed. By this, he means any study that sets out from the get-go to find a pre-determined outcome, likely isn't going to have very good methodology. If you want to run a study on "What effect does this have", the CDC has actually done studies like that, recently even. Their results were "Doesn't seem to have caused any effects positive or negative by itself".
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Jul 10, 2015 23:32
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Doccers posted:By this, he means any study that sets out from the get-go to find a pre-determined outcome, likely isn't going to have very good methodology. e: To be clear I am also not disputing the findings; however, I did have the impression that this research was being energetically worked against by various political forces.
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Jul 10, 2015 23:33
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Nessus posted:This is a hypothetical study, though. I'll restate it to be clear: for starters, how about not starting with 5 counties, then discounting 4 and keeping the one that's in the midst of the worst drug war violence? We could maybe follow that up with not listing rival 23 year old gang members as "children/family members". That'd be a good start.
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Jul 10, 2015 23:34
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Nessus posted:did they? I thought this research was explicitly, specifically banned and was not agitated for, because it had led to funding cuts for public health agencies in the past. That's very interesting to hear! Do you have a link somewhere? It was banned until after Newtown, but from my understanding they still aren't pursuing any large scale studies involving guns or gun control because it's such a polarizing topic. They were specifically defunded for it in the past, and I don't think the CDC wants to run that risk again, at least not in this political environment. Edit: Missed your edit - yes, politicians on both sides of the aisle want the studies to happen, but only if it comes out supporting their views. Which is why the CDC isn't pursuing it, you never who you'll piss off, even if you DO manage an unbiased & accurate study you don't know what impact it'll have come the next budget session. Shooting Blanks fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Jul 10, 2015 |
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Jul 10, 2015 23:37
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Nessus posted:did they? I thought this research was explicitly, specifically banned and was not agitated for, because it had led to funding cuts for public health agencies in the past. That's very interesting to hear! Do you have a link somewhere? The CDC was never banned from researching gun violence. They were banned from research that was specifically designed to advocate from either side. Largely due to what Kellerman did while he was there. Here's the most recent one ordered by Obama: http://iom.nationalacademies.org/Reports/2013/Priorities-for-Research-to-Reduce-the-Threat-of-Firearm-Related-Violence.aspx [edit] the ban on advocacy was in the 1996 Omnibus Appropriations bill, and the ammendment was Referred to as the Dickey amendment after its author, former U.S. House Representative Jay Dickey (R-AR)but this language did not explicitly ban research on gun violence. [edit] removed some stuff about the study I'm not sure was accurate until I can verify it. Doccers fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jul 10, 2015 23:37
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Giving regular people a right to own things that only exist to kill other people seems like an incredibly stupid idea. But then it makes sense when you realise that without guns the American government would subvert democracy and spy on its own people, possibly even becoming an aggressive global hegemony trading the safety of its citizens for more private economic power. Also keeps the red man at bay.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:21
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nopantsjack posted:Giving regular people a right to own things that only exist to kill other people seems like an incredibly stupid idea.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:22
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Okay, so we can pretty much sum up this thread as "most people can be trusted with guns, but some people have a psychological flaw where they can't own anything more dangerous than a wiffle bat, or else they get bizarre notions about how guns prevent crime, are the only way to have a just society, etc."
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Jul 11, 2015 01:24
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OwlFancier posted:I accept, at the very least, that it is entirely impractical to expect people not to try to defend themselves. I have extreme respect for anyone capable of that level of pacifism and would consider that to be the pinnacle of morality in the circumstances, but I wouldn't expect it of people. Nothing in here suggests my characterization of your views is inaccurate. You're essentially mandating that superhuman level of of "pacifism" for some people and not for others (and imply you would like to mandate it for everyone if not for reasons of practicality), because you're suggesting we remove a tool that enables people to resist assault that are otherwise physically incapable of it. This isn't to say there isn't a lot more we could be doing on a societal level to reduce violence- obviously there is! But since we haven't done those things, and we don't live in a utopia yet, why do you feel so comfortable advocating that we remove people's ability to defend themselves now? I get the arguments that the cost outweighs the benefits on a societal level, but you seem to be making an argument rooted in the right to life of people who are committing violent assaults (sexual and otherwise). This suggests that you do genuinely see successful rapes and near-death beatings as preferable to someone successfully defending themselves with lethal force. A dead attacker certainly isn't a good outcome, but it's one they've brought upon themselves through their own violent actions, and I find your suggestion that we should order our society to privilege the welfare of the strong and violent over other people's ability to adequately defend themselves from their depredations quite perverse for someone who seems to want to claim some sort of moral high ground.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:48
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Effectronica posted:Okay, so we can pretty much sum up this thread as "most people can be trusted with guns, but some people have a psychological flaw where they can't own anything more dangerous than a wiffle bat, or else they get bizarre notions about how guns prevent crime, are the only way to have a just society, etc." Addendum : Many other people are bugfuck terrified of the rest of society, so much so that they desire a vast authoritarian regime to insulate them from all possible harm.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:51
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Effectronica posted:Okay, so we can pretty much sum up this thread as "most people can be trusted with guns, but some people have a psychological flaw where they can't own anything more dangerous than a wiffle bat, or else they get bizarre notions about how guns prevent crime, are the only way to have a just society, etc." There are a lot of people with bizarre notions around here too, like "gun owners are inherently dangerous" and "gun owners will gun down a kindergarden at the drop of a hat" and "no one should defend themselves, ever, because a criminal's life is more important" and so on and so forth. Some of them are posting, in this very thread!
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Jul 11, 2015 01:57
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D&D always makes me want to set up a webcam on my gun safe and start a running timer to count off how long it's been since the last time my dirty communist rifles broke out of their imprisonment, loaded themselves, and marched off down the street to bayonet puppies and shoot children.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:25
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Liquid Communism posted:D&D always makes me want to set up a webcam on my gun safe and start a running timer to count off how long it's been since the last time my dirty communist rifles broke out of their imprisonment, loaded themselves, and marched off down the street to bayonet puppies and shoot children. I'm sorry that a webforum has driven you to a sneering insanity, but I really don't want to hear about the nauseating details of your personal life, and I would have been happy to keep pretending that this was a discussion rather than a pack of motherfuckers coming in to spar with the little Satan. Liquid Communism posted:Addendum : Many other people are bugfuck terrified of the rest of society, so much so that they desire a vast authoritarian regime to insulate them from all possible harm. Yes, the rentier class are sons of bitches, but that's off-topic.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:35
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Nah, pretty much on topic sadly. The rentier class pushing policy that creates a permanent underclass without hope of legitimate upward mobility as well as a drug prohibition enforcement scheme that makes dealing profitable for the higher ups while endorsing punishment that will permanently ruin petty criminals for any other profession has a lot to do with why the US has such a murder problem.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:43
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Going back to the original question, I don't know if guns are necessary in today's America, but regardless of which side you're on they're inevitable. A couple of thoughts on how to improve things Background checks need to be modernized. While there have been hurdles, the US managed to implement electronic medical record systems nationwide within a few years of a federal mandate, and we can do the same for background checks. No record needed since federal law prohibits it (although I'm sure the paranoid people and conspiracy theorists would disagree,) swipe a driver's license or provide legal identification for a quick computerized or called-in check for any gun or ammo purchase to make sure the purchaser is not prohibited from buying them. Mandate that private purchases go through a FFL and establish a standard fee that the FFL can charge (none of the $85 plus 10% of the purchase price bullshit like some local gun stores do) to minimize the impact on lower-income purchasers. Violent crime is strongly correlated with income inequality. In the long term, the establishment of a robust welfare state will empower the people who are most affected by and responsible for violent crime, diminishing crimes of desperation and disincentivizing people from resorting to criminal activity to make money. I believe that gun culture in the US is also related to the perception of a power imbalance between the average person and economic and political power structures. While I wouldn't expect the rhetorical nonsense about social services to go away anytime soon, over the course of a generation or two, I would expect to see this tension fade and for people who embrace guns for the sense of power gun ownership gives them to decline.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:58
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Liquid Communism posted:D&D always makes me want to set up a webcam on my gun safe and start a running timer to count off how long it's been since the last time my dirty communist rifles broke out of their imprisonment, loaded themselves, and marched off down the street to bayonet puppies and shoot children. If you're not afraid of them escaping why do you keep them locked up? 
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Jul 11, 2015 03:40
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GWBBQ posted:Background checks need to be modernized. While there have been hurdles, the US managed to implement electronic medical record systems nationwide within a few years of a federal mandate, and we can do the same for background checks. No record needed since federal law prohibits it (although I'm sure the paranoid people and conspiracy theorists would disagree,) swipe a driver's license or provide legal identification for a quick computerized or called-in check for any gun or ammo purchase to make sure the purchaser is not prohibited from buying them. Mandate that private purchases go through a FFL and establish a standard fee that the FFL can charge (none of the $85 plus 10% of the purchase price bullshit like some local gun stores do) to minimize the impact on lower-income purchasers. The first half of all this already happens, you need two forms of government ID for a background check, including one picture ID and of course it's an e-file system they're checking against the database nobody's sending your form via carrier pigeon. This doesn't, of course, make it a flawless system any more than the electronic medical databases are error-free. The second, from where I'm sitting, a few miles from a jurisdiction that permits exactly one FFL who's permanently on the verge of closing his business, has some pretty obvious problems. It could be a little more workable with a DMV-style system for guns instead of the rear end-backwards FFL unofficial government-official bullshit, and that'd also open up the door to lots of other nice things like standardizable, low-cost safety training, but then the bound books would go back to being a registry on paper as well as de facto and I'm pretty sure the democrats aren't gonna roll back FOPA seeing as they barely got it through in the first place, nor are gun owners gonna go for it because, y'know. FOPA. The well's kinda been poisoned. ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:There should be a additional codicil to Godwin's Law involving political cartoons. I approve of the cartoons as a step forward on replacing this thread with a pair of competing image macros, back to back, repeated indefinitely Now, which side gets the controversy puffin A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jul 11, 2015 03:47
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GWBBQ posted:swipe a driver's license or provide legal identification for a quick can't do that. identification costs too much and is an infringement in exercising one's rights. all you have to do is take someone's word for it that they are allowed to have a gun.
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Jul 11, 2015 04:10
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GWBBQ posted:Mandate that private purchases go through a FFL and establish a standard fee that the FFL can charge (none of the $85 plus 10% of the purchase price bullshit like some local gun stores do) to minimize the impact on lower-income purchasers.
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Jul 11, 2015 05:15
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Rent-A-Cop posted:The rest I get, but why this? Why should FFLs be involved in a private transaction? Take your pick: 1) To set up a chokepoint on which to later soft ban by restricting FFL licenses. (Already some communities are a an hour or two from an FFL, also the ATF has a history of FFL harrassment). 2) To add an additional price barrier. 3) To get serial numbers and information from these transactions into FFL bound books and build a registry. 4) To change the perception of firearm ownership towards a more negative view. 5) To make the ownership and transfer of firearms more laborious to deter ownership. LeJackal fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jul 11, 2015 05:22
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Rent-A-Cop posted:The rest I get, but why this? Why should FFLs be involved in a private transaction? I feel like as a citizen I am as capable of picking up a phone and navigating a prerecorded menu as some kid working for $8 an hour at Gander Mountain. There's probably something to be said for running everything through the relative handful of guys who're legally required to keep an inventory and subject to routine ATF investigation, and isolating the people who're knowingly supplying criminals so that their activity doesn't dissappear in a flurry of normal, legal undocumented transactions by random schmoes, although yeah the average person on Armslist would probably take advantage of the ability to make sure they're not selling to the local serial rapist if given it. It's not like law enforcement is helpless to identify or crack down on straw buyers even now though, they just don't treat it as a priority, so 
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Jul 11, 2015 05:38
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:It's not like law enforcement is helpless to identify or crack down on straw buyers even now though, they just don't treat it as a priority, so That timidity was kinda excusable before Abramski.
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Jul 11, 2015 06:38
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Liquid Communism posted:Addendum : Many other people are bugfuck terrified of the rest of society, so much so that they desire a vast authoritarian regime to insulate them from all possible harm. Thank you for providing a wonderful example of the sort of person Effectronica was talking about. The sort of person who sees their personal arsenal as a necessary tool for their self-actualization. I know that guns and holding guns and thinking about guns makes you feel wonderfully empowered but there are healthier ways to deal with self-esteem issues. Is there really no self-awareness here? Do you fail to understand that "my guns make me feel good" is not the sort of argument that's going to convince anyone whatsoever?
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Jul 11, 2015 06:49
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The Insect Court posted:Thank you for providing a wonderful example of the sort of person Effectronica was talking about. The sort of person who sees their personal arsenal as a necessary tool for their self-actualization. I know that guns and holding guns and thinking about guns makes you feel wonderfully empowered but there are healthier ways to deal with self-esteem issues. What argument would convince people? Do you understand that self defense is the only defense Americans can depend on?
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Jul 11, 2015 07:23
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LeJackal posted:Take your pick: This happened in my state of Queensland. You need a "Permit to Acquire" to get a new firearm, even though you may have already passed 2 lots of waiting periods (for your license and then for your first rifle) and already have a gun. By law the waiting period is 1 day. The government department in charge of such things decided doing the paperwork was too hard, and permits and licenses dragged out to 6 months or so. Gunshops were in real danger of going out of business. The government could not be compelled to hurry up as the law did not state a minimum processing time. Strangely, after the next government got elected, the times dropped to 3-4 days.
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Jul 11, 2015 07:37
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nopantsjack posted:Giving regular people a right to own things that only exist to kill other people seems like an incredibly stupid idea.  Instead it is the most popular cartridge by far. For every bullet used to kill someone a million times more are used to put a hole in paper. You could probably use those numbers to say the primary purpose of a car is to run someone over.
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Jul 11, 2015 07:41
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The Insect Court posted:Thank you for providing a wonderful example of the sort of person Effectronica was talking about. The sort of person who sees their personal arsenal as a necessary tool for their self-actualization. I know that guns and holding guns and thinking about guns makes you feel wonderfully empowered but there are healthier ways to deal with self-esteem issues. It's cool how like ten pages into the gun control threads all the memes cease to even form coherent responses to one another and just start getting spammed at random like a couple kids button-mashing their way through Mortal Kombat Maybe you'll chance on the combo for massive ownage, probably not!
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Jul 11, 2015 08:11
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Shooting Blanks posted:What argument would convince people? Do you understand that self defense is the only defense Americans can depend on? See, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. The whole life as a Deathwish fan-fic psychosis, where only your trusty *insert one of your dozen guns here*, steely unflinching gaze, and steady hand can keep you safe. It's not based on anything resembling a real cost-benefit analysis of gun policy, it's based on the fact that there's a certain sort of person who gets off on the idea of being able to own a highly lethal weapon. It's not about prudent self-defense measures, it's about indulging in an adolescent power fantasy of being able to carry around on your person throughout the day the ability to kill.
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Jul 11, 2015 10:00
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LGD posted:Nothing in here suggests my characterization of your views is inaccurate. You're essentially mandating that superhuman level of of "pacifism" for some people and not for others (and imply you would like to mandate it for everyone if not for reasons of practicality), because you're suggesting we remove a tool that enables people to resist assault that are otherwise physically incapable of it. This isn't to say there isn't a lot more we could be doing on a societal level to reduce violence- obviously there is! But since we haven't done those things, and we don't live in a utopia yet, why do you feel so comfortable advocating that we remove people's ability to defend themselves now? I get the arguments that the cost outweighs the benefits on a societal level, but you seem to be making an argument rooted in the right to life of people who are committing violent assaults (sexual and otherwise). This suggests that you do genuinely see successful rapes and near-death beatings as preferable to someone successfully defending themselves with lethal force. A dead attacker certainly isn't a good outcome, but it's one they've brought upon themselves through their own violent actions, and I find your suggestion that we should order our society to privilege the welfare of the strong and violent over other people's ability to adequately defend themselves from their depredations quite perverse for someone who seems to want to claim some sort of moral high ground. I'm certainly not going to claim that once someone deprives another human of any right, that they immediately forfeit all their rights including a right to live. Because that is very obviously disproportionate. As cathartic as it may be to take someone's life and feel justified about it, it does not seem very moral? If someone tries to steal from or injure someone else, how does that justify killing them? I can accept that they may be killed accidentally, but to set out with the intent to kill someone in that situation seems severely disproportionate. I won't try to draw an absolute, definitive line for what assaults justify intentional killing in self defence, because that would require me to declare absolutely what assaults are worse than death. But I would say that if someone is trying to kill you, it can justify trying to kill them in self defence, because those are at least commensurable, and that if someone is at worst, trying to steal from you, it certainly does not justify trying to kill them because money is not worth a life. The idea that any attack justifies killing in self defence is not at all morally sound.
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Jul 11, 2015 12:42
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OwlFancier posted:I'm certainly not going to claim that once someone deprives another human of any right, that they immediately forfeit all their rights including a right to live. Because that is very obviously disproportionate. As cathartic as it may be to take someone's life and feel justified about it, it does not seem very moral? If someone tries to steal from or injure someone else, how does that justify killing them? I can accept that they may be killed accidentally, but to set out with the intent to kill someone in that situation seems severely disproportionate. Equally rad is how you can develop this presumably amazing unstated predictive model for how this package of sumptuary laws might contribute to as much as a 10% impact on the overall crime numbers over the course of decades of implementation so acting on them now overrides all other moral concerns but as soon as a guy is pummelling someone else or shooting up their office it's all hold up hold up let's not leap to any conclusions here, let's see if he murders you first and figure out his intent from there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJlPr2KHSFo
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Jul 11, 2015 13:10
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As said, I accept that death may occur during self defence, it is hardly a controlled situation and I don't see much point in prosecuting people for it. However, to set out to kill someone who is not evidently trying to kill you is not moral. It should not be a desired state of affairs to have people shooting attackers dead to preserve material possessions. In that instance, non-lethal forms of defence are more appropriate.
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Jul 11, 2015 13:19
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