Liquid Communism posted:

This is why you should not post on the subject. Your obnoxious attempts to couch your hate for a group as reasonable and expected and good policy are just noise, and provide nothing of value to discussion.

MaxxBot posted:

Yeah, it's funny to see people who would generally consider themselves liberal admit that they want to ban guns out of disdain for gun owners. That's a fundamentally illiberal concept and if the topic were anything other than guns this sort of argument wouldn't be accepted.

MaxxBot posted:

Yeah, it's funny to see people who would generally consider themselves liberal admit that they want to ban guns out of disdain for gun owners. That's a fundamentally illiberal concept and if the topic were anything other than guns this sort of argument wouldn't be accepted.

semper wifi posted:

The years have made me jaded when it comes to studies about guns, and I think that's true of most people interested in it because as I'm sure you know, there's a study for every position. No matter what position you're taking someone has massaged the numbers to support it.

Dead Reckoning posted:

The safety of someone's partner and family is their business. If your partner feels that she doesn't want to live with a person who owns guns, she can either ask you to get rid of them, or she can break up with you. Either way, it's none of the state's business.

quote:

I don't see barring the sale or transfer of a thing to be meaningfully different than prohibiting it, even without confiscation, because the intent and long term effect is the same.

quote:

What adjudication criteria, precisely, would you have used to disqualify the San Bernadino shooter?

VitalSigns posted:

So by "people" you mean "one poster", who will be used as proof that any and all gun regulation no matter how reasonable or effective, even when proposed by gun owners like myself who still want guns legal for hobbyists and hunters, is a devious trick which once signed into law will reveal in invisible ink the abrogation of the constitution and the authorization to start busting down doors and grabbing every gun in the country while Obama licks up the tears of law-abiding gun-enthusiasts and becomes drunk with glee at their despair.

VitalSigns posted:

So by "people" you mean "one poster", who will be used as proof that any and all gun regulation no matter how reasonable or effective, even when proposed by gun owners like myself who still want guns legal for hobbyists and hunters, is a devious trick which once signed into law will reveal in invisible ink the abrogation of the constitution and the authorization to start busting down doors and grabbing every gun in the country while Obama licks up the tears of law-abiding gun-enthusiasts and becomes drunk with glee at their despair.

stinkles1112 posted:

My point is that I frankly don't care if some legal grey area is meandered into in service of the noble cause of breaking America's awful gun culture.

Geoff Peterson posted:

I'm all for loving up Gun Culture.

MaxxBot posted:

I'm perfectly fine with gun control, I like the approach of regulating guns more like we regulate cars, I agree that in some cases the regulations are too lax.There are tons of people on this forum however, not just Tezzor, who want to end all civilian firearm ownership.

MaxxBot posted:

Yeah, it's funny to see people who would generally consider themselves liberal admit that they want to ban guns out of disdain for gun owners. That's a fundamentally illiberal concept and if the topic were anything other than guns this sort of argument wouldn't be accepted.

archangelwar posted:

This is an interesting avenue of attack given that:

* Liberal is used as a pejorative against Democrats (and by association misc. leftists) in US political parlance
* In general leftism subordinates individual liberties against strength of social contract, and believes in strong collectivist solutions
* Individual firearm rights are not settled dogma among classic liberal thought, nor was it among America's founding elite

So whether you meant it as a descriptor of the left, or in the broader political "classic liberal sense," this seems to be an incredibly weak avenue of attack.

Panzeh posted:

A USA without guns would be something other than the USA, honestly, and i'm willing to accept additional gun deaths for that.

As long as capitalism rules the country, the proletariat should always be able to arm themselves. Yes, Tezzor, I know we kill each other with them, but class war inevitably involves the proletariat killing one another. It's just how the game has to be played. We had to kill Germans to liberate Germany, after all.

MaxxBot posted:

It's not the banning guns part that I was describing as illiberal, it's the concept of wanting to ban a thing because you personally dislike the people who use that thing. I wouldn't use that criticism against something who wanted to ban guns purely out of public safety concerns.

MaxxBot posted:

It's not the banning guns part that I was describing as illiberal, it's the concept of wanting to ban a thing because you personally dislike the people who use that thing. I wouldn't use that criticism against something who wanted to ban guns purely out of public safety concerns.

MaxxBot posted:

It's not the banning guns part that I was describing as illiberal, it's the concept of wanting to ban a thing because you personally dislike the people who use that thing. I wouldn't use that criticism against something who wanted to ban guns purely out of public safety concerns.

Tezzor posted:

I don't care if you think I'm illiberal. The character of gun fanboys speaks to the background and sincerity of their arguments and the consequences of them; for example, a person believes we should deregulate automatic weapons. His arguments make no sense and are easily rebutted, but he persists in them to the point of absurdity despite the fact that critical thought reveals them to be asinine almost immediately. He could be an anomaly, but there are millions just like him. Why is this? It makes sense only in the light of the theory that he is a toy-obsessed narcissist and his access to whatever firearm he wants on the merest whim is far more important to him than other peoples' suffering, let alone intellectual honesty.

Kilroy posted:

Actually it's based on the fact that putting automatic weapons on the NFA registry worked amazing well at totally eliminating their contribution to gun violence, even before the registry was closed. Opening that registry back up, and requiring handguns be on it as well, would do more to curb gun violence than all the mealymouthed demagoguery you could vomit up in a thousand gun control threads.

quote:

what benefit is there to increasing the number and production of and decreasing the cost of automatic weapons?

Effectronica posted:

Consider: if there is a correlation between gun ownership and being a total schmuck, then "[banning] a thing because you personally dislike the people who use that thing" suddenly metamorphosizes into an evidence-based policy entirely in keeping with liberal political philosophy.

SedanChair posted:

If the evidence in question is in support of "effective wedge-issue politicking," I agree.

Tezzor posted:

That's not the argument they give and you know it. Why not just put handguns on there if that's so effective? Without reference to increasing your accessibility to useless toys, what benefit is there to increasing the number and production of and decreasing the cost of automatic weapons?

Tezzor posted:

That's not the argument they give and you know it. Why not just put handguns on there if that's so effective? Without reference to increasing your accessibility to useless toys, what benefit is there to increasing the number and production of and decreasing the cost of automatic weapons?

Kilroy posted:

It was effective before the registry was closed, to the maximum extent theoretically possible. As such, there is no reason to think reopening it would lead to a significant increase in violence, and in fact good reason to think it would have no effect at all. It is therefore a good bargaining chip for putting handguns under the same legal regime, which if our experience with automatic weapons is anything to go by would put a solid dent in gun violence and overall violence. Not to mention, without opening that registry no one would go along with putting handguns on it, since that would mean handguns could no longer be manufactured or imported for civilian use at all.

You want a reason for reopening the registry that doesn't include lifting the ban on manufacture and importation, but there basically isn't one. It is the whole point of reopening that registry: to make adding handguns to it more palatable. You're worried about access but apparently haven't considered that you might be able to organize the fee structure such that access to automatic weapons doesn't change much. I suppose if I was the sort that thought access to firearms was some sort of check on government tyranny, I could also offer the argument that access to automatic weapons provides for a more effective check, but I'm not that sort so I won't. It is just a compromise to improve the law and the gun control regime in the US. But you seem to take any compromise at all as a personal offense, because you view it as a capitulation to a group of people that you loathe on a personal level - this description should sound familiar to you. This makes you lovely at politics and totally unconvincing to anyone that doesn't already agree with you, which is unfortunately most of the gun-control crowd (see quotes above). So, again, you and people like you are the reason gun control in the US is such a moronic poo poo show.

Kilroy posted:

Actually it's based on the fact that putting automatic weapons on the NFA registry worked amazing well at totally eliminating their contribution to gun violence, even before the registry was closed. Opening that registry back up, and requiring handguns be on it as well, would do more to curb gun violence than all the mealymouthed demagoguery you could vomit up in a thousand gun control threads.

VitalSigns posted:

Agreed. The registry worked, there seems to be no benefit to a backdoor ban.

Reopening the registry would also be a good faith move that would blunt the criticism that adding more guns to the registry is just a prelude to another backdoor ban on sales. Theoretically anyway, in the 90s that could have worked, probably not now with a black president that gun-nuts are so convinced is a Muslim Manchurian Candidate from the beating heart of Kenya that Brezhnev smuggled into the womb of a white woman to one day destroy all our freedoms that they're cashing in their retirement accounts to stock up on more and more guns.

meristem posted:

But it - is - the state's business, because women who want to leave their partners are often killed, and the partner having a gun is the number one predictor of a murder attempt. So, it's a vicious circle: you don't want to stay, you can't really leave. This is where state intervention is required.

Obviously - that would be the intent, to decrease the number of guns in circulation. But how this would affect you, your guns and your rights? With the number of guns currently in the US, and their general sturdiness and durability, any visible effect would take years, if not generations, to materialise.

Presumably, the result of a periodical psychological exam could show him unfit to possess one. It might not work in this particular case. But there's a chance this would have worked for Elliot Rodgers, Vester Flanagan, James Holmes and the Planned Parenthood shooter.

Dead Reckoning posted:

Then there' the issue that the NFA theoretically exists to regulate dangerous and unusual weapons that fall outside the scope of "arms," and pistols have been held to be "arms."

Dead Reckoning posted:

A psychologist's opinion is not an objective standard for adjudication. Especially if the state gets to pick the psychologist. Unless someone has been formally diagnosed as mentally incompetent or a danger to others, their rights shouldn't be restricted.

Dead Reckoning posted:

Huuuuge [citation needed] for that first claim. You're seriously alleging that the number one predictor of an attempt to kill an intimitate partner is firearms ownership?.

quote:

Retrospective and case control studies have associated the use of guns and substance abuse
(both drugs and alcohol) with intimate partner homicide (Browne, Williams & Dutton, 1998;
Campbell, 1995). Access to and availability of firearms in the US greatly increases the risk of
homicide in general, as well as the risk of intimate partner homicide (Kellerman et al., 1993).
Bailey and associates (1997) reanalyzed the results of two population-based case-control studies
and found that prior intimate partner violence and gun ownership were strongly associated with
femicide in the home. In a study of 134 homicides of American Indian, Hispanic, and Non-Hispanic
white women in New Mexico, researchers also found that firearms were nearly two times more
likely to be used in “domestic” (intimate partner) femicides than other femicides (Arbuckle et al.,
1996). In most cities, handguns are the weapon of choice for intimate partner homicides (Wilt,
Illman & Field, 1995), although in Chicago (Block et al., 1995), knives (37%) were the most
commonly used weapon from 1993-96, with firearms a close second (37%). Male perpetrators
were more likely than female perpetrators to beat an intimate partner to death and slightly more
likely to use a handgun. In the 11-city femicide study, perpetrator access to a gun increased the
risk of femicide by OR = 5.38 and then use of a gun drastically increased the risk of the worst
incident of abuse being fatal (incident level risk factor) by OR = 41.38.

Dead Reckoning posted:

Also, the NFA being the primary factor in preventing machine gun crimes is a fallacy. Sawed-off shotguns are regulated by the same act, but remained quite popular for crimes.

quote:

Huuuuge [citation needed] for that first claim. You're seriously alleging that the number one predictor of an attempt to kill an intimitate partner is firearms ownership?

quote:

Statistically, the United States is not a particularly violent society. Although gun proponents like to compare this country with hot spots like Colombia, Mexico, and Estonia (making America appear a truly peaceable kingdom), a more relevant comparison is against other high-income, industrialized nations. The percentage of the U.S. population victimized in 2000 by crimes like assault, car theft, burglary, robbery, and sexual incidents is about average for 17 industrialized countries, and lower on many indices than Canada, Australia, or New Zealand.

"The only thing that jumps out is lethal violence," Hemenway says. Violence, pace H. Rap Brown, is not "as American as cherry pie," but American violence does tend to end in death. The reason, plain and simple, is guns.

...

"It's not as if a 19-year-old in the United States is more evil than a 19-year-old in Australia—, there's no evidence for that," Hemenway explains. "But a 19-year-old in America can very easily get a pistol. That's very hard to do in Australia. So when there's a bar fight in Australia, somebody gets punched out or hit with a beer bottle. Here, they get shot."

In general, guns don't induce people to commit crimes. "What guns do is make crimes lethal," says Hemenway. They also make suicide attempts lethal: about 60 percent of suicides in America involve guns. "If you try to kill yourself with drugs, there's a 2 to 3 percent chance of dying," he explains. "With guns, the chance is 90 percent."

...

The ways in which people die by guns would not make a good television cop show. Rarely does a suburban homeowner beat a burglar to the draw in his living room at 3 a.m. Few urban pedestrians thwart a mugger by brandishing a pistol. "We have done four surveys on self-defense gun use," Hemenway says. "And one thing we know for sure is that there's a lot more criminal gun use than self-defense gun use. And even when people say they pulled their gun in 'self-defense,' it usually turns out that there was just an escalating argument— & at some point, people feel afraid and draw guns."

Hemenway has collected stories of self-defense gun use by simply asking those who pulled guns what happened. A typical story might be: "We were in the park drinking. Drinking led to arguing. We ran to our cars and got our guns." Or: "I was sitting on my porch. A neighbor came up and we got into a fight. He threw a beer at me. I went inside and got my gun." Hemenway has sent verbatim accounts of such incidents to criminal-court judges, asking if the "self-defense" gun use described was legal. "Most of the time," he says, "the answer was no."

Tezzor posted:

Your proposed benefit is that if we increase accessibility to automatic weapons we can therefore restrict access to pistols. This would certainly be an acceptable tradeoff to me, but I don't accept the premise of your argument that it would be something that average gun owners let alone gun otaku would accept or that it would make much if any difference at all in making passing it easier.

Kilroy posted:

Bedshaped posted:

They should bring in a law that says for every gun sold in the US an equal gun is given to a random American Muslim.

LeoMarr posted:

Hi guys, I don't know poo poo about firearms other than what I google on the spot, Who's my first opponent