Speed limits affect speed even when cops are not present, as anyone lucky enough to have been driving during the 55 mph speed limit period can attest. If speed laws were like gun laws, you’d only get a ticked if you actually crashed into something or someone. It is good to set limits before the damage is done.
Typically a child is not accused of theft when using a parent’s car. Especially when she didn’t tell him he couldn’t.
Good idea, that, actually.
Not sure what the clip includes but the car analogy was made by an anti-gun control person saying that due to auto accidents we should regulate cars. Stewart just pointed out that we do.
The Second Amendment is almost irrelevant in these discussions. You can’t cite the second amendment as evidence that the second amendment is still relevant in today’s society.
No one, seriously, is talking about a ban. The discussion is about regulation. In that case, cars and guns are not in the same league, constitutionally.
I like the car analogy. Lets see. We have cars that can go far faster than any legal speed limit in this country that I know of, even with factory limiters that limit the speeds to the absurdly low speeds of 130+mph. Lets call these cars assault cars. Some of these street legal cars can go 0-60 in 4 seconds or faster. We could say they have high capacity magazines, er, engines. Some people can legally even remove the speed limiter or tune their assault cars to go faster and be even more dangerous. There are also black ones. Those are the real fast ones.
In many respects, these cars are far too powerful for some, maybe most drivers. Really, no one needs a car that goes that fast. There are lots of bad drivers and none are required to take high speed defensive driving lessons to purchase an assault car. In fact, there are no limits or regulations – except financial ones – that prohibit anyone from owning what amounts to a speeding bullet weighing 2 tons. Given the amount of traffic deaths in this country one would think that there would be immense outrage and attempts to ban such fast cars. and to be fair, race cars, the machine guns of the automotive industry, have been banned from our streets. The ban on those has been so effective that no one has died from a race car accident on the regular streets of America. Amazingly effective the bans are.
Now, one could argue that there is no outrage against fast cars because the amount of accidents that involve high speed “assault cars” are rare and the real cause of most car accidents are the run of the mill, every day car. The handgun of cars, if you will. And we can’t ban those. There are too many and really a good old six cylinder four door is pretty darn useful.
Still, when drunk driving became a national issue, one would have thought we all would have jumped to the obvious and simple solution of making cars that just go slower. That and getting rid of the black ones, of course. The fast black ones are the really dangerous ones. Make them all wood paneled like in the good old days and so slow that it would be almost impossible for someone to injure another person. Heck, do you really need a car that can go faster than a Model T? No. When the founding fathers were, well, founding the country all they had were horses and carriages and who really needs a mode of transportation greater than one horsepower, anyway? Slower cars seems like the obvious choice instead of blaming the poor drunk like everyone ended up doing. Always blaming the drunk for the cars fault.
On way the analogy breaks down is that it is legal to drive without a license any kind of car you want on your own property.
However, the real way the analogy breaks down is that like driving cars owning firearms is already regulated. No one can legally buy a automatic weapon or the equipment to turn a semi automatic weapon into an automatic weapon. Most states require a license to carry a concealed weapon and minors and the mentally ill can not purchase a gun.
As far as I know there is no one trying to undo concealed weapons permits or restrictions on owning weapons by minors or the mentally ill.
As has been already pointed out there are a myriad of ways to restrict cars to make them less deadly but those laws have not been passed and are not likely to be passed because they restrict our liberty much more than it is worth. The same reason that additional gun laws should not be passed. They restrict liberty much more than they are worth. Banning assault rifles has already tried and did nothing to impact the crime rate, all it did was inconvenience some hobbyists. Likewise the city of Chicago shows the failure of handgun bans.
Everytime there is a high publicity shooting people demand action and since gun control is a form of action, some people start demanding gun control. However, there is very little evidence that gun control works and lots of evidence that it does not.
For example in Britain there was a mass shooting in 1989 in Dunblane that led to ban of handguns. However, in the next ten years crimes with handguns doubled. Contrast that with America where there was a shooting of the Long Island Railway in 1993 that led to calls for more gun control. One of the victim’s wife was even elected to congress on a gun control platform. However no gun control laws were passed and in the last twenty years gun crime has been cut almost in half.
In fact, yes. There were, for example, 517 private WARSHIPS that took part (under Letters of Marque from Congress, which authorized them to use their already existing cannon and ships to attack British-flagged ships) in the War of 1812. Many of these ships were 18-to-22 cannon brigs, and the average was something like 4-8 cannon.
Similarly, there were still private warships with cannon mounted at the time of the Civil War, although since privateering was outlawed by treaty in 1856, they tended to sail for the Confederacy–but they did exist and they were gutsy enough to win engagements with actual warships.
Exactly, Stewart was throwing a gun fetishist talking point back at them. There is a thread in the pit right now by a gun fetishist using this point.
Yes.
They were also allowed to own other people. It’s not relevant to today.
Just like the Dred Scott decision settled slavery once and for all?
A 5-4 decision that reversed over two centuries of interpretation is not exactly carved in granite.
Tell it to the person who brought it up, not to the person who corrected him.
I’ve got the solution! Let’s make guns unregulated, but make it illegal to shoot people! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Good suggestion (of OP’s thread-leader). Aviation has it that its laws are written in blood, arguably too with cars. Why not with guns?
My guess is the amount automobiles are needed (as in crux-ish to life functioning here) also supports all the interest, concern, and infrastructure for their safe operating. On a comparative scale, guns are very much a footnote (at least by some grim calculations). IOW the main problem “porting” analogous practices from the auto world to the gun world may be a lack of interest (read: funding, public persuasion, information campaigns, and so on).
It’s unfortunate because the whole infrastructure supporting guns could benefit from the auto-world’s practice of adaptability. For example, you could have RFID weapons that only recognized and fired for their owner. And guns could be made with a “planned obsolescence” (they stop working after, oh, say 5 or 10 years, to prevent stockpiling and such). Sadly, little seems to be incentivizing business, technology, and the public. Lots of pressure toward the status quo.
Well, since we are on track to have gun deaths pass auto deaths in the US, maybe it’s time to look at putting the same efforts towards gun safety that we do towards auto safety.
Lazy me. Thanks for the research. (And I promise I wasn’t being disingenuous.)
So, perhaps:
() fatalism–we’ve learned to give up; for example thinking gun safety measures (as in the IMO tainted term “gun control”) have failed in the past and so stop believing in new ones
() psychological remoteness–people don’t use guns much, as one poster above pointed out, certainly not as much as cars, so they aren’t perpetually reminded of danger (as with daily driving on some freeways: prospects of imminent death)
() vicious-circle-type effects–when faced with the prospect of auto accidents, we don’t think “drive more”; this is not the case with guns–when faced with the prospect of our own injury or death via guns, we DO tend to think “buy more guns” / I gotta get (another) gun (an understandable response) and this tends to counter safety talk and/or keep the marketplace and legal structures from adapting or offering new suggestions and innovations
In the spirit of the OP’s idea, one key element might be to look for ways to motivate industry and innovation–you have this wonderful progression in automobile safety (from seatbelts to airbags, better crumple zones, better consumer awareness on which models are safer), yet nothing is motivating an analogous process in the gun industry. (For instance, better non-lethals.)
FWIW guns are being made safer. Particularly handguns. Better safeties, low inertia firing pins, safer holsters, etc.
So continuing in the spirit of this thread, we propose that legislation works in conjunction with gun manufacturers just as it has with the auto industry (eg in late 1998, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 went into effect; it made airbags mandatory on all cars and trucks sold in the US). (Efficient markets can be very effective instruments, but sometimes they need a little push.) For example:
() the soft approach: legislation that by 2016 (say), no new weapons will be sold without RFID chip-owner safety locks; short-run equilibrium--status quo; long-run equilibrium (when laws go into effect), industry responds with (de jure) innovations to meet the new requirements, effective in reducing gun deaths
() the hard approach: legislation moves to start reducing America's gun supply (eg no more than a certain number of weapons per owner, cash for guns and other incentives in high-crime areas, and so on), mandating the gun industry innovate, to help reduce gun deaths; short-run equilibrium--some angry people, industry harrumphs and stews, etc.; long-run equilibrium--industry responds with (de facto) innovations in guns, effective in reducing gun deaths
(NB: on the RFID idea:
(1) before specific objections arise involving gruesome methods of getting the possibly implanted RFID chip away from the gun owner, consider the “counterfeiter’s cost”–you don’t need to outlaw paper currency counterfeiting as such, just raise the counterfeiter’s cost of making a $20 bill to some amount greater than $20
(2) it’s only one of many possible ideas, so before we decide killing it = killing the whole innovation-incentive proposal, realize it should NOT be up to me (or you dear reader) to make these innovations–it should be up to industry, with all its minds, technology, and all its concern for profits–they can do better than us and such top-of-the-head ideas
(3) from http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/design-architecture/new-gun-design-uses-rfid-to-boost-safety/4662: “We know it will work,” says McNamara of the RFID-controlled safety. But the next step — embedding the RFID reader and antenna into a shock-proof casing that can be sealed into a gun handle and put through rigorous testing with live rounds — is the most important one.; “Our idea, like putting seat belts in cars, is a safety thing. You need to prove the reliability,” he says.
)
With respect to RFID owner-locks: I’d probably buy one if they managed to demonstrate 100% reliability, and only so long as it was impossible for the gun to be disabled remotely – but I wouldn’t support them being mandatory. First thing I’d do, anyway, is make sure I can remove the lock from mine.