I want to focus on a single aspect of the gun debate, represented by this post:
I’ll respond the same way I did in that thread, though the poster thought it was a hijack, so I started a new one.
This is a childish argument, IMO, and a repeated one. Guns aren’t the only issue, but they are part of it. Guns are more lethal than knives (and some kinds of guns are more lethal than other kinds of guns); knives are more lethal than bare hands; etc. Adults can recognize this while also recognizing that this is a complex issue that isn’t nearly as simple as “let’s ban guns” (which is both politically and, considering the amount of guns already here, probably physically impossible). If he had had access to a rocket launcher, C4, or nukes/chemical/biological weapons, he could have killed even more people – thankfully, government regulation has successfully made such weapons very difficult to acquire. If he’d had a fully automatic weapon, he might have killed more people – thankfully, government regulation has made full auto weapons difficult to acquire. It’s just silly and beneath reasonable adults to pretend that the fact that he could easily acquire very lethal firearms has nothing to do with the body count of this event.
If this argument were true, then a Roman legion would have a chance to defeat a modern Marine battalion. It’s just silly and childish and this entire line of argument should be dispensed with. Guns aren’t the only issue here, but they are part of the issue. Guns are more effective at killing people than knives, and more effective at killing people in schools than cars or trucks. There shouldn’t be a debate about this.
I’ll re-post this from that thread so as to stop the hijack over there:
The available evidence suggests that this notion is incorrect; availability of the tool has a lot to do with how often the tool is used. Cite and cite.
Well, of course having guns enables a killer to kill more victims, and kill more of them more quickly. That’s what a gun is designed to do.
That being said, if someone is truly determined to be a large-scale killer, then he or she may put a lot more homework and effort into researching how to build bombs, how to poison people on a large scale, etc. Eliminating all guns might reduce overall death tolls, but at a certain point, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
I posted this a week or two ago but it bears repeating. Study after study after study shows the same thing. There are ever fewer “but that doesn’t tell the whole story” excuses left for gun advocates to hide behind when faced with evidence that guns are at the root of the very high violence in the US. Of course there will still be violence and murder and mayhem even if every gun magically disappears but there will be a helluva lot less of it if guns were gone.
If you do not want to read the whole thing the bottom line is the easy availability of guns in America increases violence and the death toll substantially.
I’ve lost a battleship to a galley in Civilization back in the day but I digress. Yes, guns make it easier. However, they aren’t the root cause. The root cause is a defective brain.
Now, let’s say you get rid of all civilian owned guns. What’s the next step to further reduce homicide from the mentally ill? Remove vehicles, knives, and things that can be transformed into explosives or poisons?
Anyways, you are correct. A gun is more efficient at killing when compared to a knife, a halberd, or a hammer.
The argument is so idiotic I really don’t know why you’d bother making a dedicated thread to discuss it. “Hey there was wars before guns and bombs, so what difference do guns and bombs make? Absolutely nothing!”
If a person with a defective brain can only get ahold of items that kill or harm a few people, rather than dozens, that’s an improvement already.
The idea that somehow or other, we are looking for a answer to all violence, and that we believe that we can get rid of all the guns, and never have any violence anymore is a strawman.
If you have 100 people a day dying through something that you have influence over, and you use your influence to decrease that to 50, that’s good. It seems that you are insisting that unless we can prove that it saves all 100 forever from anything then it’s not worth doing anything.
This seems a common refrain among gun advocates. If a law cannot be 100% effective then why have the law? Banning guns will not stop murders so why ban guns?
Because I see it so often. Hopefully we can at least clearly demolish it on this board so we don’t have to waste time refuting it again. Of course, that’s probably a faint hope.
Well every time you see the argument you can just clearly demolish it with my above quote. Very little time wasted. No more time than linking to this thread instead.
I sense you don’t really appreciate it. Are you really under the impression that once we demolish the argument in this thread, we won’t see it here again? That linking to this thread the next time someone brings it up will save you time?
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it silly and childish, but I will say the logic is pretty sketchy: People are violent, so any laws to try to mitigate the effects of that violence won’t work. The slippery slope fallacy of “If they ban one gun, they’ll ban all guns” is also weak. There are limitations to every right. Freedom of religion doesn’t give me the right to sacrifice virgins on my front lawn (or anywhere else).
But the fear of many gun-owners is very real. I once tried to reassure a group of alt-right gun advocates that the Second Amendment was in no danger of repeal, and they practically instantly on me. According to them, anyone who doesn’t see the Second Amendment is in daily danger of repeal is a goddam lib’ral.
The argument that someone who wants to take out a lot of people will find a way is a little misguided. Those ways–poison, bombs, etc.–exist now. Shooters want the satisfaction and power of being there to deliver death in person. Dump poison into the school ventilation system, and you’re not going to be around to see people die. Furthermore, they won’t know it’s YOU. If you’re going to become death, the destroyer of worlds, you want people to recognize your status.
Actually, yeah…I disagree to a point. If your point is that gun violence happens in the US more than in countries without guns because of the availability of guns, well duh…of course that’s true. Just like the availability of alcohol or tobacco are going to increase the number of deaths due to those compared to societies that ban those things. However, if we look at non-gun related murders in the US, they are still far, far higher than in most of the countries used to compare with the US. If you took away all of the guns by some magic tomorrow then the US murder rate in raw numbers as well as per capita are going to be far higher than the UK, France, the Scandinavian countries, Japan and most of the rest. So, while guns bump our numbers up, it doesn’t account for the fact that the US is still higher in per capita murders than just about every other western nation. Which points to something other than guns as being the root issue that we have and they don’t…guns simply enable more murders than non-guns, but at a guess if you took away the guns you’d simply have more murders using non-guns. Perhaps you’d save some lives…say, going from 11k murders by guns and 5k by non-guns to 8-9k in the new reality.