That’s because you’re focusing primarily (or solely?) upon the relatively tiny number of awful things that occur in life and yourself and your friends and are ignoring all the good and wonderful ones. Try becoming a conservative and you’ll find that you focus on and appreciate the good and wonderful things in life and yourself and your friends and that you’re better able to keep the awful things in their proper perspective.
I’m not kidding.
Sorry, I’m struggling with your arrogance. I don’t understand what made you think you were telling anyone anything they didn’t know.
While I am strongly anti-gun, I have to ask – what is your opinion on fried porkchops, urban car ownership, and private fireworks?
I don’t think that people who claim that products and services that cause a finite amount of harm per year should still be allowed solely on the basis that they’re cool as hell are crazy or stupid.
Granted, I am also against trans-fats, leaded gasoline, and of course personal firearms. But that’s because I think that the harm they cause is too large compared to the joy they bring.
U.S. gun laws are not really the issue here, to be frank. Like I said, in Norway or Germany you could easily legally acquire the weapons needed to do something like this. UK is a major outlier in its gun restrictions.
That being said, the “why” is “it depends.” There are probably a few major reasons, easy to understand:
If I had to guess, the first two, hunting and self defense encompass the vast majority of gun ownership. Sport shooting is also common but not as common as those two. True collectors are somewhat rare as guns are expensive thus gun collecting (serious gun collecting) is also expensive. “Survivalism” basically refers to a small political movement of people with varied beliefs. Some believe the U.S. government will collapse one day soon, and they will need guns to protect themselves in the apocalypse (this may seem silly, and it is, but these people genuinely exist and believe this.) There is some overlap with survivalists who are just “preparing” for that day, and survivalists who think the U.S. government is corrupt and needs “overthrown” by citizens (McVeigh of the Oklahoma City bombing was in the latter group.) These people form private militias and play at soldier in camouflage clothes and stuff and self-made obstacle courses where they practice firearms usage.
A more efficient way to say this is “I lied. I’m sorry.”
I can agree intellectually with this rational, well expressede viewpoint.
While not being religious, I do adhere to the Biblical wisdon that for everything, there is a time. And I have a soft spot for children that is analogous to a momma bear and her cubs. So I too have a very strong emotional reaction to today’s events, and open myself to examination of what my rights mean to others in terms of cost in blood, pain, suffering, and loss.
There is a time feel, to grieve, as well as a time to think. I have seen plenty here in this thread, but it’s not “balanced.” People are either all-out emotional, or full-out rational.
And I feel that, like olivemarch said earlier up thread, we are all reaching into our respective “wheelhouses” of responses and falling into our own prepositioned, well-worn camps.
And missing something bigger than any single issue.
It’s now being reported that the shooter was armed with two handguns (the Glock and Sig-Sauer)- that’s it. There was a third gun in his car, so perhaps he used that on someone else or was thinking about murdering more people later. But he apparently didn’t shoot up the school with any high powered rifle.
This entire thread makes me very, very sad to be a member.
I’m out. For awhile.
Stop trying to pad the reasons. All of those reasons boil down to “I think they’re cool as hell”. Which is fine. But I really don’t care if you want a gun to engage in your survivalist fantasies or if you just want to bury it in the back yard alongside your gold nugget; that still boils down to “guns give me a happy in the pants”.
The only exception to that list is self-defense – which is actually an argument against guns. Hell, guns are so deleterious to the concept of self-defense that I am completely baffled as to why gun ownership. But then again, Christians unironically use Pascal’s Wager as an argument to worship Yahweh (when actually it makes worshipping Yahweh a worse choice than flat-out atheism) so who knows.
Sure:
Maybe if I wanted to really dig, but I’m comfortable saying no I can’t cite anything good.
But that’s like me saying “cite something good that’s ever came from letting someone drink 20 shots of Jack Daniels in a night.” Not being able to cite that doesn’t mean I should agree with banning it. I don’t agree with banning anything just because we can’t show “something good” that’s come from it. It needs to be the opposite, that you can demonstrate that the thing being banned is inherently bad. I do not believe you can do that. After going back and forth with you it seems you came down on being opposed to all but single shot rifles and double-action revolver ownership, and the simple truth is there are hundreds of millions of guns currently in America that fall outside those definitions that have never been used in a crime or for any bad purpose. So I see no compelling reason to ban guns so restrictively. In fact I think it an unreasonable suggestion that here in America I should be unable to buy guns I’d be able to buy in Norway or Germany.
I’d be much more inclined to support things like per-gun licensing requirements where any citizen who receives an individual “gun owner” license must license each new firearm they buy, and to get the “individual gun owner” license the person must pass some educational courses and be certified to not be a threat to themselves or society. Certain things like any history of domestic violence, felony criminal convictions, mental institutionalization would be permanent bars to such a license. The “ban guns that Giraffe says are bad because they can fire too fast or hold too many bullets” is just not something I can support.
None of which has anything to do with my opinion of this asshole’s immorality.
Fair enough, thanks for the answer. I think reasonable people can be on opposite sides of this issue, even if half of them are wrong. 
I was answering a question in good faith from someone who lives in another country where almost no one owns guns. I felt that just answering him with “some people like guns” would be “rudely non-responsive.” I’m not trying to “pad the reasons”, and reject the premise of such a thing. I don’t think gun ownership is valid/invalid based on “number of reasons people own guns.” In fact I personally think at least two of the reasons on that list are not all that valid. The first I think is invalid is the survivalist one. I do not think survivalism is a valid political or rational ideology. I also don’t particularly buy into guns as a great self defense tool. Not because I don’t think they can be effectively used for self defense, but because I think statistically few people will ever need it for such and I think people who go around expecting to need it for self defense cause problems with brandishing firearms and escalating situations. Further, if you genuinely want to use a gun for self defense it needs to be at the ready. Here in my house all my guns are not really easily accessible, so if someone comes through my front door right now he’s getting tackled by a 6’5" 230 lb guy, possibly one with a fireplace poker or a whiskey decanter made ready as weapons, I won’t have time to go get my guns and he’s not going to wait while I do. So if you want firearms as home self defense they need to be on the ready at all times, which opens up a can of worms in regard to home safety.
The only reasons on my list I truly think are valid, personally, are hunting, collecting, and sport shooting.
Do you honestly think I just made this up? Do I have a history on this board of just making things up? I may be incorrect, as I’m going off memory of someone else’s description, but instead you attack my character immediately rather than assume error.
The story, as I remember it, was that gun control advocates felt that some of the DGU statistics were wildly inflated, and paid for their own study to be conducted to show that DGUs were vanishingly rare. That study still came up with a number of roughly 250k. I may be mistaken, or misremembering, but I’m not lying, asshole. It’s difficult to come up with the right google search to find the story.
I’m going to keep looking. This isn’t quite the same thing, but here’s part of a peer review by a respected criminologist about the methodology of the kleck survey. It sort of serves my point - basically “I didn’t think this would be true, I don’t want it to be true, but their methodology is solid”, but it’s not what I said, so I’ll keep looking.
In the meantime, let’s address your implicit argument. No one funded by, or sympathetic to, gun control advocates would come up with that number for DGUs. The reasons for this can either be that they’d be willing to lie not to come out with those numbers even if that’s what their data showed, or because the rest of the studies were shoddy research done by pro-gun advocates, and there aren’t really any significant number of defensive gun uses. Have I left out a possibility?
There’ve been about 2 dozen studies on the issue, and some of them were peer reviewed in major academic journals. They range from 108k (using a very flawed, unrealistic survey by the justice department) to a few million a year. It seems logical to assume that the real number is in that range somewhere. Do you contest this? Do you feel that there’s no way the number of defensive gun uses actually falls into this range? Or if you feel that it does, are you just being a pedantic asshole to make me dig up the cite that one of those studies was funded by anti-gun interests?
Tell us more about all the wonderful things in life and how much worse it used to be before the hippies and liberals fixed everything, Grampa!
It’s called the Constitution. A foreign concept for the other side of the pond, with its freedom of speech, and the second amendment.
While most gun advocates do nothing but earn my ire by advancing non-arguments like personal defense or fighting against tyrannical government, gun advocates who say that they want guns just because they’re cool I can respect. I think they’re wrong but I’m not going to curl my lip up at them like the furniture-chewers who think that they’re going to save the country Red Dawn style.
A lot of the things that I enjoy (such as fireworks) create social problems that I can’t really justify other than with a ‘yeah, I know that heart disease kills hundreds of thousands of Americans a year and we don’t need them to live, but saturated fats are delicious so fuck you’. And you know what? I’m okay with that. I think this:
“Giving a choice between a) keeping my guns and living with the current crime rate, and b) giving up my guns and a guarantee there will never be another murder in this country using a firearm, I would choose the former.”
Is worded in a rather brusque way, but I can totally respect the sentiment behind it. Consider: if the number of gun suicides/homicides per year were four people a year, would that be much less offensive? What about thirty? One hundred? A thousand?
No, typically, you fucked it up. It’s how much better things used to be before hippies and liberals “fixed” everything. To wit:
Ahem.
and
Ahem.
and
Note that the first post in the last link calls for guns as an answer to the problem. 
The point is, though, that people who want to harm large numbers of other people will always find a way to do so, wether by knife, bomb, fire, automobile or whatever. Most of the gun-related killings in this country are gang, ghetto, drug, or scuzzbug related anyway, and those can mostly be laid at the feet of those of your political persuasion, as you’ve spent that last fifty years manufacturing the perpetrators of them at the greatest rate possible. All this is the inevitable consequence of the breakdown of societal values which began in the sixties. It’s only gonna get worse kiddoes. In my midwestern flyover whitebread city murders are up over 50% from just a year ago and drugs and criminality infest every school and every neighborhood. Currently something like 39 states permit concealed carry of firearms and the likelihood is that the number will be much closer to 50 ten years from now as this society continues to throw off even more of these scuzzbugs and their associated criminality and as its citizens continue to feel less and less safe.
This is all an inevitable consequence of the breakdown of societal values that began in the sixties, and which has been exacerbated by liberal defense of gangsta, thug and illegal immigrant/drug cartel influences upon society, in which every attempt is made to thwart law enforcement and society in their efforts to criticize and discourage them, or to contain and suppress them.
Well, this is what you get, kids - an entire generation of uneducated ne’er-do-wells with all the wrong values who can’t hack it and who either look to guns and crime for their livelihood and amusement, or to guns and multiple killings as a way to strike back at society for creating their loserhood and to push them over the edge to their own suicide.
And it’s just gonna get worse because more and more of them are created every day, and that will continue to be the case until you wake up and realize that a society needs coherence, children properly raised by two parents and instilled with proper values, an education system that actually functions, and modes of behavior that include respect, politeness and consideration for others. You know - qualities that you pretty much find laughable.
But be that as it may, things are what they are and until people like you wake up and get a clue, BLD, it’s unquestionable that “steel phalluses” are simply going to flourish…and not as phalli, but as protection from the products of your wrongheaded, shortsighted and self-indulgent attempts at social engineering.
Yeah, nobody else has freedom of speech.
Also, the constitution says we have to have these debates about mass shootings, and can’t actually pass an amendment that would change gun laws.
The bottom line - the very bottom, once all the rage, fury, grief and promises have been expended - is that there is NO defense against a lone nut who does not care about his own survival.
None.