Except the problem is, as you state below, that if enough people start thinking like him, we’ll eventually change the laws.
So yeah, you do have to give some weight to his paranoia, because if you walk around showing off your gun thinking that it makes gun control LESS likely, you’re probably wrong. It makes it more likely, because–as you say–it is not normal behavior in urban America to walk around carrying a gun.
I grew up in Alaska. If I was out in the woods and a guy walked by carrying a rifle, I’d think nothing of it. If I was at the fucking library and a guy walked by carrying a rifle, I’d start looking for the fucking exits, because he’s almost certainly one kind of asshole or another, and I don’t want to be around him when his goddam gun goes off.
You’re not going to normalize open carry by showing off your guns at restaurants and hardware stores. Yeah, in many states this behavior is legal. Too many yahoos open carry and people will start wanting to change the law to stop it from being legal.
I grew up in the country around hunters and farmers. Guns were insanely commonplace. I would still call the police if I saw someone carrying one around.
Once again you are trying to make hyperbolic statements about fears that arise from people carrying guns in public
I, for one, am not afraid of someone randomly going mad while eating their cheeseburger and starting to shoot. I have three fears
The gun holder shooting by accident
That if guns are unremarkable, then the person carrying the gun while on the way to do “bad things” becomes unremarkable - which is not something I want to happen
That something will happen while in the restaurant to trigger an argument that escalates to a shooting. I once had a McDonalds staff member chase after me with an iron rod - if he had a gun on him, what might have happened?
and just to add a fourth -
I am also scared of genuine misunderstandings ending in shootings - one person does something innocuous that is perceived as a threat, which is then acted upon by the gun holder to the detriment of all parties.
As you increase the incidence of gun carrying, you increase the chances of ALL of the above.
How do you reconcile this belief with the fact that most pro-second-amendment legislation and advocacy is perfectly fine with the restriction of air-pistols, combat batons, pepper sprays, and other implements of self-defense? (see, for example, the 2012 RNC in Tampa)
Doesn’t it also hold that the majority of people have an IQ of 100 or above? I actually don’t know if that’s true. I think if the median IQ was 100 that would be true, but reality could skew it so even though the average was 100, it doesn’t tell us enough about the population to conclude on which side of the 100 marker holds more people. In any event, it’s poor public policy that is crafted on the basis that people are stupid.
The more you will also increase the instances where people will have the ability to defend themselves if they so choose. I concede there is plenty of bad behavior to point at - it’s in the news quite a bit. I think this is a choice that people should be able to make for themselves.
The people that started this thread, open carrying long arms - they are stupid and hurt the cause. It’s a feature that freedom sometimes means freedom to act badly.
Here’s another link with more details. Republican protesters and politicians opposed attempts to disarm guests and protesters of their firearms, even though they raised no objection to disarming them of a variety of other weapons including (but not limited to) legitimate tools of self-defense.
I don’t have a cite that these Republicans were explicitly invoking the party’s platform on the 2nd amendment, or that this gun-centric attitude is extremely common in “right to bear “arms”” advocacy and other arms are rarely if ever mentioned. Do I really need one, though? Do you actually dispute either of these claims, or are you just asking for data about things you already know to deflect the question?
So, to hear the “a right is a right, regardless of context or effects, and should be protected absolutely by exercising it” people say it, there should be a whole lot more open brandishing going on just to desensitize us all of us to the sight of it, but those who actually *do *it are idiots/assholes who actually hurt the cause. Seems inconsistent somehow, doesn’t it?
In the incident you refer to, the Tampa City Council passed a temporary ordinance banning such things as water guns, poles and pieces of wood from the convention. The governor of Florida has no authority to stop them from doing that, so the ban was enacted.
The Tampa City Council also attempted to ban guns. However, Florida law prevents local governments from crafting gun ordinances that exceed state law’s boundaries unless the governor approves, and he did not.
So I can’t suss out exactly what you’re asking. Here are some possibilities I glean from your post:
[ul]
[li]Why, legally, were water guns, poles, and pieces of wood banned by Tampa and actual guns not banned?[/li][li]Why is the banning of water guns, poles, and pieces of wood by Tampa a good idea when actual guns were not banned?[/li][li]Why did Florida’s legislature remove gun ordinances from the ambit of local governments, but permit local governments to control water guns, poles, and pieces of wood?[/li][li]Something else?[/li][/ul]
Actually, that is one compromise I could get behind: let carry laws be set at the county level, so that urban and rural counties could have separate carry standards.
To keep it from being chaotic, you’d need a limited menu of options to choose from, e.g. open carry everywhere would be the most liberal option, while no open carry, and concealed carry only on a demonstrated need basis would be the most restrictive. You might have one or two options in between, e.g. no open carry, but concealed carry on a shall-issue basis. Signs on the major roads would alert you when you were moving between areas with different carry laws.
Mostly, as you suggest, you’d have cities having the most restrictive carry policies, and rural areas having the most lenient. The more conservative suburban counties of a city would have less restrictive laws than the more liberal 'burbs.
It would certainly make a lot more sense than having carry laws being set at the state level, given that most states have both major cities and quite rural areas as well.
We craft public policy around the limits of general human functioning ALL the time. Where the risks for poor consequences are even within spitting distance of the benefits, we restrict, prohibit, and make illegal in just about any context you can think of.
That’s why you can’t, just on a whim, go down to the helicopter store and just buy one with no experience or training, and choose to just fly it around from your backyard. That’s why the Autobahn is atypical. That’s why you can’t do an appendectomy on your neighbor. That’s why you can’t order anthrax for your basement research lab. I’m sure you could go on and on.
Do you think that recognizing people’s functional limitations in these other examples is poor public policy?
Right. Like the woman in Walmart got to choose for herself not to be shot by the moron dropping his gun. Like the woman in the church got to make the same decision for herself. Like the parents of the kid in the school where the photographer lost his handgun got to decide for themselves. Like the people who regularly have their homes invaded by neighbors bullets in the GunFAIL blog get to choose for themselves.
If gun nuts were the only ones at risk, there would not be any debate whatsoever.
Do you think that people have a right to choose not to be shot due to the EXCEEDINGLY predictable intersection between human limitations and firearms?
And it’s a feature of a free society that we routinely and commonly restrict people’s freedoms because we don’t want the predictable idiots to hurt other people.
How do support your claim that 2nd amendment advocacy is a recognition of a “natural right to self-defense” when the behavior of 2nd-amendment legal decisions, legislation, and advocacy, focuses exclusively on lethal firearms and provides no support for less-than-lethal tools of self defense (including, but not limited to, defensive sticks and airguns in the specific example of the RNC)
Recognizing the limits of individuals is fine. Certain activities require specialized skills. I’m not sure I would agree with limits on practicing medicine as a small L libertarian, but the concept holds true. What is poor public policy is to assume everyone is stupid and then craft laws based on that.
Even still, none of those activities are enumerated fundamental rights protected under the constitution. A better example would be … literacy tests to vote. We don’t require a level of intelligence to vote, or to exercise any of the other fundamental enumerated rights.
No choice made by society will eliminate the risk of being harmed by bad actors. My neighbor could very easily drive his car into my house and kill everyone around. That being said, we have decided that risk is worth the benefit. Just as we have done for many other inherently dangerous activities.
I think the actions of the folks in the OP will lead to or contribute to the restriction of open carry, just as it did in CA with the Mulford Act. You would support that I assume. If that’s true, then you should celebrate these useful idiots (people in the article in the OP).
The difference is, there are clear tangible, practical benefits accruing to the vast majority of us from cars. And even with that, we are steadily working to reduce the consequences of driving. As a result, there are 35% fewer automobile deaths each year, in absolute terms, than there were when I was growing up 50 years ago.
The benefits of gun ownership to society at large seem to be abstractions like Freedumb. Your gun, if brought into my presence, is much more of a risk to my safety than a protection from other risks. And on top of that, the pro-gun folks seem to be dedicated to opposing any efforts to reduce the consequences of guns.
There used to be a lot more automobile deaths than gun deaths. There are still more automobile deaths, but the margin’s getting pretty small. Those lines will probably cross in a few years. Freedumb!
“Second, there is a movement among some gun owners to try to normalize guns in society through exposure therapy, maybe that’s what they are trying to do. I’m not sure that things will work out the way they imagine.”
Where do I:
(1) claim to represent that movement;
(2) say that gun murders (or any murders) are acceptable;
(3) claim that anyone that suggests that guns are a problem require therapy.
I dunno. I think the point is or should be to make it casual. Making a big show of it seems more like shock therapy than exposure therapy.
We trust 16 year old kids to drive a ton of metal at 65 miles per hour. It seems to me that if training and licensing is good enough to teach a 16 year old to drive, on the freeway, then it might work for guns too.
Depending on what you mean by insured, I suppose so, if that means that we get some uniformity of gun rules.
I’m also in favor of licensing and registration of all handguns.
And for the record, there are plenty of places in this country where open carry barely warrants a second glance. And those places seem to get along just fine without very many restrictions at all.
Its only the extreme elements of both sides of this debate that resort to this sort of name calling.
Daily? That’s not what what the article seems to say. Mass shootings (defined as 4 or more deaths) comprise something like 1% of all gun deaths.
It’s implicit in your approving description of it.
Every fucking time you dismiss the killings rate “insignificant” or with words to that effect, or discuss your claimed right to carry as being more important, which is in virtually every one of your filthy posts.
Example from this very same post:
Do you need a dictionary link for “therapy”?
:rolleyes:
You are in some small disagreement with them over tactics - but not over objectives.
You’re a sick, sick fuck, not just a dishonest and cowardly one.
[Quote=Direct Quote From the Fucking Article]
Including Monday’s mass shooting, the Reddit list for 2013 is nearing 250 incidents. That’s an average of one mass shooting almost every day.
[/QUOTE]