I don't bloody understand mass shootings

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > I don't bloody understand mass shootings

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Khizan posted:

You see, we need guns because the solution to mass shootings is a bunch of untrained people with minimal range time and dreams of heroism engaging in unaimed panic fire.

The police usually get their man heyooooooo

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 10:14

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 05:32

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

OP I've never been spree killed and I don't know anybody who has, for largely the same reason I don't know anyone who's been eaten by a shark even though shark week is demonstrably a thing on TV, but when an angry guy broke into my house at the crack of dawn and proceeded to start strangling my roommate in his bed a shotgun was really helpful in persuading him to sit down and discuss his problems civilly and wait for the police to arrive, which they did after a delay that I'm pretty sure was longer than two humans in sequence can last without air. In Australia I guess my roommate and possibly I would be dead, sucks to be us, but at least the TV wouldn't be so upsetting for you and after a couple seconds of showing pictures of my house they could get back to rerunning the best missing white women of the 2010s or whatever.

Violent crime has been dropping steadily at about the same rate everywhere in the developed world since about the same time in the early 90s, its statistical likelihood from place to place is almost perfectly lockstep a function of poverty and density and nothing else, and in the US the number of incidents that end in the (typically nonlethal) defensive use of a firearm by the victim is many times the number of homicides total, let alone by guns, let alone by spree killers. None of this makes for interesting news or matters to the kinds of people who want to start a moral panic, so hope remains that maybe gun violence will get to be this decade's Satanic ritual abuse.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Dec 3, 2015

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 11:00

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Hazzard posted:

I've heard an American Conservative (Originally French Canadain oddly enough) who cited the Puckle Gun as George Washington knowing where firearm technology was going. The Puckle Gun, for those who don't know, is more or less a gigantic revolver.

that guy is dumb, afaik the US never even used Puckle guns during the revolutionary era, they tried out Belton flintlocks and, shortly afterwards, Girandoni and Nock rifles

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 17:04

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

What kind of mental screening do you envision that would filter for road rage

like we can ID paranoid schizophrenics with a passable degree of accuracy but it seems pretty unfair to put random assholes' damage on them

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 18:27

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

charliebravo77 posted:

"Generic anger management issues" is pretty goddamn broad. I scream and yell at drivers from the confines of my own vehicle all the time, but never once has it crossed my mind to draw my legally owned and carried handgun and open fire on them.

you should probably chill out a bit dude, smoke a blunt or something

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 20:13

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Stinky_Pete posted:

I open fire on them all the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlzoL-wQwio

lol if someone would rather have guns than weed

"oh man i'm gonna have so much fun sober at the firing range! I can't wait to spend 5 minutes reloading this clip! that's almost two whole minutes of firing if i take time to aim! POW!"

if it takes you five minutes to reload you need to smoke a little less first. Time and place for everything, dude, seek the middle path

antiga posted:

I suppose I'm pro guns, but really I'm anti dumb gun control politics. This is mostly because I find gun control advocates and politicians to be shamefully intellectually dishonest. Every time I hear someone with a talking point about 'gun deaths' who knows full well how that two thirds of gun deaths are suicides, I think they're full of poo poo. Every time I hear about 'assault weapons' which is meaningless or how high capacity magazines are some kind of newfangled thing that hasn't been around for forty years, full of poo poo. Every time I hear about 'common sense gun control' without describing one example of what that would be, full of poo poo. Every time I hear about gun buybacks or other horrible policy, full of poo poo. I'm anti gun control because I've yet to see solid evidence (or even solid logic really) that economically viable gun control policy would be effective in preventing non law abiding persons from carrying out gun crimes. (The closest I've heard of is dramatically increased penalties for having a gun merely present during any felony, which again would be primarily effective in locking up lots of people, not preventing mass murders.)

In my experience, when traditional taking points are challenged your average armchair expert says 'surely we should not let people who are mentally ill own guns, who could disagree with that'. Forgetting about the adverse consequences for getting people treated, there's zero thought about how you'd even begin to implement such a policy. No one seemed to know that Adam Lanza or Dylan Klebold or Va Tech guy were as dangerous as they were.

All of that being said, Republicans are always going to look like assholes after something like San Bernardino happens. Most of them are assholes. I think Democrats look just as bad by using tragedy to get retweets but that's surely up for debate.

american gun politics have had everything to do with signaling to the base and nothing to do with actual crime since the 1934 NFA banned people chopping down rifles to make them into semi-concealable ghetto pistols, but not actual pistols being used by criminals to sneak around with firearms and bushwhack each other in populated areas.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 23:35

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Keldoclock posted:

Fortunately there are many ways to kill people, for example, the worst school mass murder was done without firearms. You could also steal a tank, fly an airplane into a skyscraper, build a car bomb, gas Tokyo's subway system with homemade sarin gas, mail anthrax in envelopes, etc etc. Basically you've got options, is what I'm saying.

Actually, I find this fairly unfortunate most of the time

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 00:02

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

green chicken feet posted:

I think the fear about 2nd amendment rights being taken away amounts to this: if a violent person breaks into your home, and it's legal for you to have a firearm, at least you have the chance of defending yourself or discouraging the invader, regardless of how physically-inferior you may be to that person. Many people would be unequipped to stop an attacker, or multiple attackers, based on physical prowess alone.

At the same time, I can see few logical reasons why the average person should have access to anything more "automatic" than a rifle or perhaps a revolver. I'm no gun expert, but I can't see a reasonable self-defense or hunting-based (i.e. not mass killing) application for semi-automatic or automatic weapons.

revolvers actually kinda suck, there's a reason people started making other kinds of guns like 70 years ago and it wasn't for the benefit of Adam Lanza. it's a lot of the same reason only amish guys and those guys in central park still go riding horsecarts around, even though they are objectively slower and more awkward.

the current discourse revolves around self-defense but that's not really the core function of the right or a particularly strong argument for it, it's just a positive day-to-day benefit that can be directly appreciated by the same kind of people who don't routinely engage in significant political speech, practice weird and unorthodox religions, or risk anything should government agents start randomly tossing their house looking for crimes without cause, but appreciate those rights being enumerated anyway.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Dec 4, 2015

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 00:31

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Keldoclock posted:

For an argument that this would be ineffective, please see the fine array of cheap pistols poor people worldwide have manufactured themselves with the express intent of shooting each other with them, linked earlier in this very thread.

I don't know, but I can guess.
1. being ethnically and culturally homogeneous
2. suppressing media
3. distributing wealth
4. not already having a trend of mass murder(although they are not unheard of in europe)
5. being smaller in population and geographic size, with more borders.

Do you know the answer to this question? I don't know the answer to this question.

i feel like it would also be pretty hard to get a good death rage going when you've just eaten a whole bunch of frogs and snails and poo poo and had your rear end in a top hat hosed out

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 01:33

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Keldoclock posted:

Speak for yourself buddy, I get my best death rages going in the bathroom.

see, you definitely want like a Baconator or something for that

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 01:38

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Weldon Pemberton posted:

As someone also born abroad in a country that restricted gun access after a mass shooting, I don't fully understand it either. The value of guns and the importance of the 2nd Amendment is something that most Americans grow up with and take for granted. I would argue that all the things the second poster in this thread mentioned- freedom of speech, assembly, etc.- are "needed" for a healthy society, but that access to weaponry isn't that important. Most Americans would disagree. There are various arguments for this point of view, from "it's a god given right to own whatever property I want" to appeals to the revolution and the necessity of an armed populace in keeping the government from exercising tyranny. All of these I can understand to some degree. I'll just never understand the added emotion about it that Americans have, because of where I was raised.

I would question the idea of mass shootings being solely the result of access to guns. There are lots of countries with a very strong gun and hunting culture that don't experience these tragedies constantly. As weird as I feel recommending a Michael Moore documentary, Bowling for Columbineis actually the opposite of what a lot of people expect because he explicitly contrasts the USA to Canada. Canada has a high rate of gun ownership but low incidence of mass shootings. The closest Moore comes to a conclusion is hypothesizing that there is something in American culture that is responsible. Whether it's the idea he puts forward that there is a "culture of fear" stoked by the media and distrust of one's neighbours, or something else, it does at least seem to be part of the equation. Do Americans perhaps think of guns as being more for defending yourself from human beings than hunting for some reason, such as the collective memory of the revolution? Maybe it's something to do with the American Dream: people are raised to believe they can achieve anything, and when that turns out to be false they want revenge against society. I don't know.

In the end, this is one of those issues that I just have to throw up my hands and go "oh well, this is something for born American citizens to decide for themselves." I don't have a problem with being semi-evangelical about my other political views and might vote on them if I stay here long enough to get in a position to do so, but I'm taking a backseat on this. It would be like moving to India and trying to interfere with the caste system- a thing that has many downsides, but is part of cultural and religious history there and has seen many attempts at reinterpretation by figures like Gandhi. It's too far outside my experience to understand in quite the same way.

Consider that the possibility of a tyrannical military dictatorship is a bit more immediate and real in parts of the world that actually have a military beyond like seven dudes and a US airbase, and right up until they got colonized and disarmed by America 70 years ago the basic state activity of all those peaceful democratic countries that obviously maintain stability through pure enlightenment was exterminating as many of their own and each others' people as they could lay hands on. The original point of the second amendment, which got a bit lost along the way much like the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth, was that democratizing hard power in a country where that's a necessity is key to making it structurally impossible for the central government to slip back into militarized autocracy.

It's been defanged and eroded to the point of near meaninglessness in practice (much like the rest of the bill of rights), and the specific implementation the founders had in mind probably wouldn't have worked anyway, but people still want what little they got left, and the principle still shows its value in the, uh, majority of attempts at democracy worldwide where simple petitioning by the people fails to be enough to stop them reverting to military dictatorships once some general realizes he's the boss of all the guys with actual guns and poo poo and doesn't have to listen to anybody.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 10:03 on Dec 4, 2015

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 09:12

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

AA is for Quitters posted:

People wonder why so many mass killers are younger white males, generally on the lower end of the economic spectrum.

When you get told your entire childhood that you can do anything if you just work hard enough, when you reach adulthood, and start working as hard as you can and still end up going nowhere, it becomes really easy to start looking for someone to blame.

Some people like Harris and Klebold realized the fact that the American dream is just a pipe dream and we really aren't so far removed from the caste system as angry teenagers, and it caused them to do what they did.

Some people blame minorities for why all their hard work isn't giving them anything to show for it, and do things like shoot up churches.

It's not the culture of fear, it's that there is the consistent lie of the opportunity to advance past how you grew up, when these days that opportunity doesn't exist. It's probably a large part of why (I'm not a sociologist) mass killings are on the rise. As more and more people that came of age during the recession go out into the work force and realize that even if you're the hardest working employee there it doesn't get you much outside of an a for effort, I don't think that the number of mass killings is going to decrease.

Gun control is a moot point until the issues behind their motivations are addressed. Canada doesn't have the same stigma against welfare, doesn't have some of the massive inequality issues, doesn't give people the same reasons to go out and seek revenge on a cold cruel world

virtually all of these guys are embittered comfortably middle-class losers who never worked hard at anything in their lives and want for nothing save celebrity status, spree killing is as white and bougie as Whole Foods. Poor folks kill each other at a much, much higher rate, but in ways that don't tend to make the news, targeting specific people, no street kid's going all Isla Vista because he can't get laid. That's a big part of why they scare people.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Dec 4, 2015

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 20:53

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Sockmuppet posted:

Well, yeah, my point remains that it's simpler (in terms of practicality) to remove the easy availability of guns than to make the massive changes everyone seems to claim must be made first.

(There have been 355 more mass shootings in the US this year than in Norway, and you don't have 355 times more people living there, so the statistics aren't in your favour. We're a radically different society, I just added my background to show how completely alien your countrys whole mentality about making guns more available than healthcare is)

Edit: �Yes, it does happen in other places. But boy, does it happen a lot in the U.S., and boy, does it happen really frequently�

lmao yes well you see if you pick exactly the right definitions of "mass", "shooting", "ever", "other countries", whether 3 or 4 victims makes a killing count as worthy of consideration, and well you have one study but I've got another unpublished unreviewed study that Teaches the Controversy, then the US is unique in the exact way I say it is and my favored policies are the only ones that will impact the kind of violence I've decided counts as real.

this is the kind of rhetorical contortion I'm used to seeing in evangelical literature where they try to pin the headlining disaster of the week on gay marriage. Saudi Arabia locks up its queers and it never gets earthquakes above a 5.0 magnitude, except for the Gulf of Aqaba.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Dec 4, 2015

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 22:18

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Omne posted:

One thing I don't understand is why the thought of any regulation on guns at all is seen as an attack on gun rights.

For example, those on one side argue for mandatory waiting periods, while those on the other argue that doing so infringes on their constitutional rights. Yet the first amendment grants the right to peaceably assemble in protest, but most local governments require permits to be filed and approved before the protest is allowed. I know this isn't a perfect comparison, but I hope you get my point.

Another common statement is that "[insert proposed gun legislation] won't stop all violent crime so we shouldn't do it." That is certainly true; even removing from existence all guns wouldn't stop violent crime. But why not make it just a little bit harder for a lone wolf/domestic terrorist/international terrorist/etc. to get a gun? Is the need for immediacy in a gun purchase so great that any background check is too much of a burden? The Senate voted down a measure yesterday to require anyone on the terrorist watchlist or no-fly list to be prevented from purchasing a weapon. Why is that a bad thing?

The first amendment has caveats associated with it (you can't say whatever you want, you can't use religion to do whatever you want, the press can't write whatever they want), why not put some caveats on the second amendment that would make it maybe just a little bit more difficult for bad people to get guns?

mainly because the main force pushing for gun restrictions at the state and national level is a bunch of pseudo-religious fringers who openly despise 'gun people', who they characterize as basically the hillbillies from Deliverance and seek to punish for everything from the drug war to Planned Parenthood getting defunded, and in the past when the exact same incremental increases in restriction they propose now were adopted they have only ever lead to them to demand more arbitrary laws as the crime rate (and mass shootings) held on unaffected. When someone like that comes up to you smarming about their 'reasonable', 'compromise' policies that didn't do poo poo before and ain't even about what's happening, you kinda assume bad faith and tune them out.

Very, very few of the spree killers in particular would have been affected by any gun legislation that's actually been proposed - the standard spree killer is a white or asian dude in college or working a middle-class-ish job, with no significant criminal record or documented mental health history that'd DQ them and not like half of the rest of the population, using whatever poo poo comes to hand. Our last big one out here was a cranky loner college student who used a 9mm pistol, a .22, and a goddamn mountain of 10rd mags that he left trailing behind him wherever he went like murder Hansel, and he wandered around town killing 32 people before anyone stopped him. Like, the only gunpundit talking point that even comes close to relevant here is he mostly killed people in a university gun-free zone, although I guess I can't say for certainty that LaPierre wasn't right and he wasn't driven to murder by Newgrounds flash games.

The no-fly list thing specifically is a bad idea because the no-fly list is a secret government shitlist with no known consistent selection method and a track record of red-flagging everyone from dissident journalists to Senators, and once you're on it unless you're a celebrity you have no recourse to ever get off or find out why. It's bullshit when applied to travel and it's intolerable when used to strip away peoples' actual rights as citizens. Anyone pushing for this is a fascist trying to spook you into unthinking obendience with the T-word, plain and simple.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Dec 4, 2015

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 23:29

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Liquid Communism posted:

One of the big things that both sides of the Argent can probably agree on is that it is a travesty that the BATFE and DoJ refuse to prosecute straw purchasers despite having legal grounds to do so.

christ yes

ashgromnies posted:

Elliot Rodgers wasn't a Muslim though

as far as we know

# ¿ Dec 5, 2015 23:29

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

if you're really into gun control you should probably be advocating for all spree shooters to be retroactively declared Muslim, because if there's one thing the last decade and a half has taught us it's that angry Mohammedans are the one thing that'll bring the parties together to start going at civil liberties with a fucken chainsaw.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2015 23:34

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

JohnGalt posted:

There totally were 355 mass shootings this year

* pellet gun shootings

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Dec 6, 2015

# ¿ Dec 6, 2015 00:44

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

LogisticEarth posted:

Yeah this is a good read. I was going through the shootingtracker site (or whatever the Reddit map is), and was really skeptical about how they were reporting the events. A lot of them were murder-suicides or crime-related. That still sucks, but doesn't really fall under the crazed gunman/political terrorist umbrella that most people think of when they hear "mass shooting". I was looking at Philly, and I saw they had a 10-victim shooting listed back in July. Seeing as how I live in the area and heard jack-all about that, I was intrigued. Turns out someone took pot shots at block party with a shotgun loaded with birdshot. People got peppered with pellets from some distance, nobody killed or seriously injured. But if you just go by the numbers, it looks like a rampage. That's not exactly useful data when trying to figure out roots causes for events like San Bernadino, Newtown, or Aurora.

that's still pretty hosed up, mind

Omne posted:

I get his point on the Patriot Act and it's definitely a slippery slope. I actually hadn't thought of gun control that way before, but I see where it comes from. My point is that rights aren't always "all or nothing, any infringement is wrong" because certain rights do have those caveats or restrictions. Gun ownership seems to be "any single restriction whatsoever is a massive infringement on my rights." Would, say, waiting three days be an unspeakable infringement?

A Wizard of Goatse, I hear you on the no-fly-list thing. What would you say if the same legislation that made those on the list restricted from owning a firearm also include more transparency on the list. It would be something like "you are on this list for X reason. To get off this list, do Y." That way people would know why they are on it (i.e. my name is close to someone else's name and I can prove I'm not them) but also be given recourse on getting off of it. I think the total lack of transparency on those lists is a huge violation.

One point that I tend to agree with is a lot of mass shootings are caused by unstable people (i.e. Adam Lanza, James Holmes). To help prevent those, mental health screening or other methods could be used to limit the occurrence of that, no?

skipped over this before but while this'd be an improvement I'm really not cool with people being arbitrarily declared guilty until they prove themselves innocent. I'd probably be okay with adding some more criteria to the NICS check/4473 if you could find something that's missing from there that'd trip up jihadists and incel warriors, but I don't think there really is such a thing that'd pass muster. Are you addicted to or an unlawful user of wahabbism?

while guys who snap and try to kamikaze as many random people as possible are sort of definitionally unstable I'm not sure what you're seeing in this that'd make it into any kind of system to DQ Holmes and not every other vaguely goony dude. Like, if you want to use shootings as an excuse to improve our mental health programs and actually do some good for some people then that's fine by me and I won't question it too much, but there's pretty scant evidence that increased funding will lead to someone finding the hidden red flag that differentiates a latent mass murderer from any other unhappy introvert, or come with a pill for being bitter and alienated.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Dec 6, 2015

# ¿ Dec 6, 2015 01:12

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

i believe that every law-abiding citizen the world over should have the right to their very own The Rook�, not just police and military

# ¿ Dec 6, 2015 14:24

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

JohnGalt posted:

Wait. I have a bulldozer at home. What do I need to make it a tactical bulldozer?

Branding, for one

# ¿ Dec 6, 2015 17:39

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

should I smugly bring up the scraped knees instead

Reddit guy's an rear end in a top hat and so are you.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2015 22:08

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Panzeh posted:

I don't think you'll get a lot of people with this but focusing on poo poo like hi-points and these .32 pocket pistols that actually end up being used for most gun crime as opposed to things like AR-15s which are almost never used for this would be a start.

I remember about 10 to 15 years ago the thing to do for cheap handguns in West Virginia was to buy a $100 Mosin-Nagant rifle from ww2, and then chop the thing down to a bare minimum size to make a 'handgun' out of it. I imagine that it's just a recipe for wrist destruction, though.

Just hearing people go on about how every bubba with an AR or AK has modified it to be full auto makes me want to tune you out. Also, by the way, the reason you see people buy ammunition in lots of 1000 is because it's cheaper that way. It's not because everyone's stocking up for the apocalypse.

this is one firearm restriction that might have a meaningful impact on the crime rate, since it's pretty hard to go undetected wandering around town looking to bushwhack someone with an AR stuffed down the front of your pants, but given that basically every federal gun law stems directly from dancing around this issue way back in the 30s and concealable arms have largely been pushed out of contention by the battle over spooky looking Rambo guns that give yuppies the vapors when they see em on TV don't expect it to ever reenter serious discourse in your lifetime

# ¿ Dec 7, 2015 19:42

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Subyng posted:

The 2nd amendment isn't carved into stone, people. Wasn't the 18th amendment the prohibition of alcohol?

yeah, and it was a loving disaster the country's still suffering from the effects of, so people are kinda leery about a squad of moral panic vanguardists carving new sumptuary laws into the Constitution 'for your own good'

It'd be completely possible to amend the constitution in whatever manner, as has been done right up to the 90s, if strong popular and political-class support were behind it. It's not, gun control advocates can't even get support for currently-constitutional bills at the Federal level and current signs point to even more of them being voted out of office next election.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2015 20:27

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

yeah, it is, which is why there's a bunch of amendments to it. It's just very, very hard to pass an amendment to the Constitution by design, so it's not really on the table for political point-scoring on wedge issues. Nobody's going to remove the Second Amendment for the same reason nobody's going to amend the constitution to outlaw abortion.

The Bill of Rights is sort of commonly held sacrosanct because that's a list of, basically, most of the freedoms the American people have the legal standing to defend against a hostile government. Taking peoples rights away because after 200 years you've decided they're inconvenient to your political objectives generally doesn't go over well, though over the decades and especially in the last few the Feds have managed to quietly chip away the 2nd and 4th through 9th amendments to near meaninglessness without provoking much more than some intense grumbling.

On the plus side, the first amendment's made a big comeback since the days the Supreme Court ruled it didn't apply to war protestors

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Dec 7, 2015

# ¿ Dec 7, 2015 20:59

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

wiffle ball bat posted:

equally as worthy of discussion in the mass shooting thread as the second amendment and comparing "shooting" stats between countries in wildly different socioeconomic situations using wildly different methods of crime analysis.

all you traumatized white girls look the same to me

Jeza posted:

So if I understand you, you really don't care too much about guns or gun control, but care instead about the sanctity of the constitution? Don't you think that the original intention behind the amendment has been completely lost? The "right to bear arms" is just an addendum to the importance of having a Militia, back when something like that could feasibly have overthrown a corrupt government. Not to mention the sheer technological constraints of single shot, muzzle loaded weapons means that they were legislating effectively for a completely different thing.

I just fail to see the upside of the 2nd Amendment. Thousands die directly because of it. I don't see finding that problematic as 'flimsy' logic. What good is the 2nd Amendment doing the US? How does it help? How has it helped in the last century?

Is 'lol your rights have been thoroughly undermined so we might as well just take them away' supposed to persuade anyone of anything except that you're kind of a cock?

if the rights of the people have been corrupted or vitiated, that's an imperative to restore them to a point where they're able to serve some good.

ashgromnies posted:

I don't really get this argument. Why would we exclude that? Do gangbangers killing each other not count, and we don't think it's a bad thing that society should work to alleviate?

The causes of spree killings are not well understood; the sample sizes are tiny, they're spread pretty evenly across the country, and there's no detectable trends between killers that they don't equally share with huge numbers of non-killers, so this is one problem where 'keep all men with less than three good friends away from anything potentially dangerous' is about as viable a solution as any.

The causes of gang slayings are incredibly well understood and have a pretty much 1:1 correlation with endemic poverty and density within the country, with no other variables significantly affecting regional rates. Those just aren't problems that "society" cares to alleviate, so you change the subject.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Dec 8, 2015

# ¿ Dec 8, 2015 05:12

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Jeza posted:

The right has become outmoded. I fail to see how it has been undermined in anyway, on the contrary it has and is being fulfilled beyond the wildest dreams of its creators. More arms than people, and each one probably several times more deadly than a flintlock pistol. But the right was designed to allow citizenry to overthrow government, not for the citizenry to arm themselves to the teeth. Guns are part of the clause to stop a tyrannical government legislating against arms, then monopolising the use of force. The entire clause is probably derived from a 17th piece of English legislation where the Protestant majority were given permission to be armed, while Catholics were disbarred. By establishing a right to arms, nobody can be disenfranchised in this way. People are blind to associate this Amendment with self-defense, because guns in the 18th century were not shot without planning. A gun in your house was not loaded or primed with powder at all times, let alone the concealed carry laws that now come part and parcel with America and guns.

If you wanted to restore the right to a point where it serves some good, you could just as well give every of-age citizen an unloaded weapon then establish citizen run ammo stores, where they can go to become armed Militia when the US government needs overthrowing. Obviously possessing ammo for unlicensed purposes, i.e. hunting or sport purposes would then be a crime.

The purpose wasn't to let militias overthrow the government. The purpose was to eliminate the distinction between a discrete military caste, who rules as they please, and the subjugated people, who are ruled, because when those two are separate votes only matter as much as the former feels like letting them matter. If you don't see how that's been systematically eroded away regardless of whether grandma has a derringer to ventilate bandits with I don't know what to tell you

Use of arms in self-defense is a natural and acceptable consequence of democratizing force, and was very definitely a thing that went on in the 18th century, but it isn't the point, no. Nor was hunting.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Dec 9, 2015

# ¿ Dec 9, 2015 00:29

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Jeza posted:

I did refer to this here: "Guns are part of the clause to stop a tyrannical government legislating against arms, then monopolising the use of force." And militias overthrowing a corrupt gov't is part of it.

If the right has been eroded away, the reason it has been eroded is unrelated to America's level of civilian armament, which is massive, or its theoretical ability to form militia. It's just that what constitutes the use of force and power in a modern society is so far beyond being contained in a few rifles and pistols that they have been rendered irrelevant. I don't see it as having been eroded, simply superseded. You could tell me a few ways the Second Amendment has been meaningfully eroded though? I googled for some examples and I just get crackpots talking about how bureaucracy slowing down their concealed carry permits is a liberal, leftist agenda.

You might want to ask the Panthers, if you can find surviving ones.

The official alternatives the founders attempted to a professional military class started coming apart almost immediately, and were soon replaced by a fulltime standing army (plus the draft). This doesn't make them any less correct about the latter's corrosive effect on democracy, though, and we've known it all along. That's that military-industrial complex peacenik hippies like Eisenhower keep bitching about, say.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Dec 9, 2015

# ¿ Dec 9, 2015 18:32

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Jeza posted:

Pretty much this. Being afraid of the possibility that somebody will be breaking into my house with the intention to kill me/harm me is something has never occurred to me, and I do not live in a particularly safe neighbourhood or anything. Something like that would be a pretty extraordinary event. Why would anybody want to break into a house to kill you? It's like some kind of weird delusion. If somebody broke into my house planning only to kill me, then the chances are I'd just die. I also think the same outcome is most likely for anybody in the US, even if they own 100 guns. Hell, owning 100 guns would probably be why they broke in in the first place. Does every American sleep with a loaded gun under their pillow? What if they have a gun? What if you don't hear them break in?

Owning a gun makes you more likely to die. Accidentally, by suicide, by somebody else. It literally puts you more at risk of dying. The incidences of a gun being used in necessary self-defense that avert your own injury are also vanishingly small.

It is extraordinary, but happens, dumb/psycho criminals breaking into your house and doing all kinds of dangerous unpredictable poo poo when they find you at home much less so; unless you've got your guns on display in which case you're a moron it's not why; some of the morons do; sometimes you don't; it's not vanishingly small at all, it's many times more frequent than those other things you list.

I live in a "safe neighborhood" with one of the lowest crime rates in the area, home invasions were never a concern to me and I never seriously thought about them; about a year ago a guy broke into my house and started strangling a boarder in his bed because, as it turned out, guy was dating his daughter and he didn't approve. He sorta had a point, but I lucked out and had a busted up old clays shotgun in the workshop downstairs to sit him down with for the roughly ~20 minutes it took for the police to roll by and pick him up. My sister lives in Baltimore and gets her house burgled on an annual basis; year before last guy smashed through her window and found her in there, she lucked out and managed to run him off all by her 150lbs-soaking-wet self. poo poo happens; it doesn't happen all the time (except to Baltimoreans), but it only needs to go badly once in your life.

If you're concerned about your own suicidal impulses, don't buy a gun, you know that's a risk factor for you and one you can control. If you're scared that owning a gun will somehow make you a murder magnet through their insubstantial death vapors, don't buy a gun; you're kinda loopy and hysterical and don't want one anyway. These are the sorts of decisions and risk calculations a competent adult should be able to judge for themselves and their own unique circumstances, without some bureaucracy that barely knows their names or a keyboard warrior who doesn't even know that making all their decisions for them and everyone else's too in loco parentis.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Dec 10, 2015

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 03:31

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Rudager posted:

That's not the same as some person breaking into random house just to hurt someone like the original quote is saying.

Sure, so? The point was (aside from that this poo poo happens, as much as liberals want to concoct a vast false-rape-accusation conspiracy where everyone's lying and it doesn't) that a 'safe neighborhood', aside from not being an option for tons of people, is no guarantee that nobody'll gently caress with you for non-random reasons you didn't see coming. I guess we could sit around all night and quibble about whether the burglar who finds a little old lady in the house and bashes her skull in had the 'immediate intent' to do so while breaking in or just intended to rob the place and panicked when he found her inside, or what truly defines random for a person unexpectedly being attacked out of nowhere, but that seems extremely pointless and stupid to me. There is a fair chance depending on who and where you are that at some point in your life you're going to get into a violent, life-threatening confrontation, whether with someone you know or someone you don't, for reasons that will probably appear random and unexpected to you at the time even if on a cosmic scale they follow a perfectly reasonable causal chain, and the police are unlikely to swoop in and rescue you Superman-style in the moment. That's not their job, and they are not equipped for it.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Dec 10, 2015

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 04:35

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Rudager posted:

So how does carrying, or having a gun in your house, help prevent any of that?

it doesn't prevent it from happening but it sure helped prevent my roommate, and maybe me IDK, from dying from it. It'd be nice if we could pass a law to eliminate hate from the heart of man but until someone works that out this is a stopgap measure I can, uh, live with.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 05:02

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

I for one can't wait for Obama to pass his executive order that the police can't have guns

# ¿ Dec 11, 2015 03:32

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

thrakkorzog posted:

In the Antebullum south they were all about making sure that people wanting a gun had to get permission from the local sheriff to get a gun. Want to make bets over who was allowed to have a gun and who was denied?

The great-grandparents of the same people that may-issue states allow/deny now you mean

# ¿ Dec 11, 2015 14:31

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Jeza posted:

I've spent some time digesting all the thoughts and information in this thread, and have come to the conclusion that America's gun violence crisis could be averted by enforcing all weapons sold in America be designed as horrifyingly realistic penis simulacra. They can still serve the purpose of self-defense, but no longer are fetishised by whackjobs, and the desire to concealed carry falls through the floor.

It would be even better if every male gun owner was forced to take a plaster cast of their own junk upon which his own guns would be modelled, but of course, I'm a reasonable guy and that might be practically a little difficult to implement.

This method solves almost every gun related ill in America, while preserving the second Amendment. God bless.

I support the Cronenberg Amendment

# ¿ Dec 11, 2015 16:18

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

There is no ban and never was; the CDC published one methodologically sloppy study by a researcher who'd previously expressed strong anti-gun sentiments that the NRA and conservative politicians interpreted as the CDC using public funding to stump for Clinton's pet policies, and in 96 Congress earmarked the exact portion of their budget that went to that particular study to research brain injury instead. The CDC at the time stopped making definitive gun-related policy recommendations (they continued to track firearm-related fatalities), Democrats started spinning it into some elaborate conspiracy by the gun Elders of Zion to suppress the terrible secret that the Democrats were right all along, the CDC resumed research into gun violence but the results weren't OMG BAN ASSAULT RIFLES NOW so nobody paid attention and Democrats kept on truckin' with the exact same talking point as though nothing had happened.

You will, notably, have a pretty hard time finding the specific text or any details about these studies for how high-profile they are, and none of the articles pushing this narrative will either name, link, or clearly describe them, because their actual findings are far less interesting or useful than the myth that the facts aren't on the author's side because of a shadowy plot to suppress The Truth. So here they are

Here's the 1993 Kellerman study that pissed everyone off http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506
Here's a 2003 report specifically on the effects of gun laws http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5214a2.htm
Here's the one Obama commissioned and then abruptly stopped talking about in 2013 http://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1
Here's a CDC study investigating a particular community in detail, from this year http://dhss.delaware.gov/dhss/dms/files/cdcgunviolencereport10315.pdf

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Dec 12, 2015

# ¿ Dec 12, 2015 03:50

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

raven4267 posted:

I have to say I am impressed on how polite this gun discussion is, compared to the poo poo shows that go on in the so called debate and discussion forum. I have only read a couple of condescending comments from people who hate guns as well as hate the people who own them.

why'd you edit out your post

ashgromnies posted:

How sure are you of that?

It seems like society failed him here, anyways. The story of James Holmes supports my case: he was telling therapists he wanted to kill people and was obsessed with the idea, yet no one helped him overcome those feelings, notified the police, or at least got his name on a list of people that shouldn't own guns.

Edit: looking into the extant gun control laws as they relate to mental illness I do see a couple issues: the majority of states either require a court order (which wouldn't be completely unreasonable if there was also an adequate structure for reporting and investigating people that mental health professionals could access) or they require the person to have been committed to a mental health institution.

I don't think that's a terribly hard sale to republicans, most of the pro-gun people agree that access by the homicidally unwell should be restricted.

eliminating checks on mental health disqualifications is gonna be a hard sell to anyone actually interested in maintaining the pretense of civil liberties for much the same reasons as uncitizening anyone on a secret TSA blacklist; diagnosing people as crazy has been a favored means of arbitrarily stripping undesirables and Kennedys of their rights with no recourse for longer than it's been a means of helping them, and there's still not a huge amount of uniformity or clear, non-subjective standards in the field. If you've been adjudicated mentally incompetent, you know it, and you know why, and you crossed a pretty clear line to get there, you didn't just say something in passing to some headshrinker who chose to interpret it poorly.

you might wanna ask yourself why you're going straight to Stalin's Greatest Hits in order to catch, like, one or two actual badguys ever

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Dec 12, 2015

# ¿ Dec 12, 2015 16:44

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Keldoclock posted:

Here is an original sound byte I have used for something like 8 years now, applicable to basically any situation involving violence.

If people are trying to kill you, perhaps you should reconsider your actions. Doubly so if they are willing to die in order to get the chance to kill you.

Unfortunately, you know, thinking is hard so it isn't often that people actually apply this either to their own personal lives or to organizations.

yeah man if those first graders had thought through their actions a little harder they woulda known better than to gently caress with Adam Lanza

# ¿ Dec 13, 2015 05:41

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Dude's victims had never even heard of the guy, which is as common as not, their major role in the leadup to the shooting was simply to exist in the nearest large concentration of people that the shooter had any relation whatever to. Cherry-picked nothing, that's standard; neither the students Seng-Hui Cho shot nor Virginia Tech as a whole did anything particularly awful to him to merit a blood vendetta, they housed him and gave him a community and a decent education and a shot at a nice life which is a better deal than most folks ever get from anyone; they were simply around when he got it in his head to do what he did. You could maybe argue that universities have some kind of moral obligation to ensure their male students get laid by Freshman year but beyond that we're already talking drastic "root and branch changes the entire nation would have to undergo" that individuals have literally no power to effect so all your response does is reframe the exact same lack of an answer as somehow the victims' faults for being born in an imperio-capitalist patriarchy or something

# ¿ Dec 13, 2015 06:13

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

And again, nobody's been particularly unkind to most of the spree killers out there, the average school shooter's had an easier life than the average normal person. Maybe the true solution...is to start bullying nerds again...

# ¿ Dec 13, 2015 15:33

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Guys who grew up with their parents beating the living poo poo out of them every day are more likely to become hockey stars than spree killers, the notion that the Eliot Rodgers of the world are driven to kill by the pain society has inflicted upon them is actually kinda disgusting. These are guys who who place no value on others' lives and go straight to the most nihilistic and extreme acts of cruelty they can think of because they don't have any definable external problems in their own lives, and if you're handed the world on a silver platter and still miserable there ain't poo poo you're gonna do to fix it except stare at your navel and grow malevolent.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2015 15:51

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 05:32

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Jeza posted:

You don't have to directly be unkind to socially exclude somebody. Not many (or none?) of these spree killers had lots of friends. Aside from the few who are truly delusional, most school shootings seem to be a kind of lashing out due to loneliness and bitterness. I guess Keldoclock is saying you should be inviting that weird fidgety kid with no friends to your MtG game if you don't want to get riddled with bullets.

It is never a question of how easy your life is, but how happy your life is. Social and physical isolation completely distorts a person's view of the world and other people. There is probably no doubt that both Adam Lanza and Seung Hui-Cho would have lived normal unremarkable lives if those around them had made a special effort to include them in lots of activities. It is an unreasonable and unrealistic demand, imo, but it doesn't make it untrue.

I briefly scrolled through the list of wiki list of school shootings (so many) and most of the ones I cared to click on showed the perpetrator as bullied or majorly isolated.

Or you woulda been convenient to get murdered when they decide to make the lives of a bunch of random people all about them with a nine-mil, there's a reason we're not friends with misanthropic, self-absorbed loners.

If you wanna do more to make sure those assholes are never manufactured in the first place fine cool but that poo poo gotta start in pre-K.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Dec 13, 2015

# ¿ Dec 13, 2015 15:56

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > I don't bloody understand mass shootings

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