This discussion further enforces the thought behind the lyric in a Tool song: “The only way to fix it is to flush it all away”
People’s attitudes are too far gone to be helped, and they are too far gone to justify any effort spent helping them to see the error of their thinking.
Guns are used to kill things. Exclusively. “Target shooting” is just the way you become more efficient at it. Guns will never be outlawed, and the discussion is pointless, because there are too many people who are too far gone in their thinking.
Stop trying to engage them in rational discussion and just move on with your life. Get out of their way. You cannot fight them but with the same weapons they use, and in so doing you would reduce yourself to their level.
Aren’t you the piece of shit who bragged about switching places with your friend and fucking his girlfriend when she thought it was him? Not sure rapist is much better than necrophiliac. Then again, I suspect the probability of you actually getting laid IRL is slim, so I’m more inclined to take the story as a juvenile fantasy.
It seems pretty clear that some people are willing to sacrifice other people’s children so that they can enjoy the right of owning a piece of technology designed to kill living things.
Heck, why not; a good sociopath would be willing to sacrifice other people’s children for a nice cup of hot coffee.
As long as the price of freedom is merely other people’s children getting gunned down at their school, then what the heck, ami right?
Let’s say a genie proposes to you: I can promise you that no one will ever die from a drunk driving accident again, if only you and everyone else give up drinking alcohol forever.
If someone were to answer - no, I enjoy it, lots of people enjoy it responsibly, and shit happens in life. Let’s keep it. Would you be utterly horrified at their abject depravity? Would they be THE WORST PERSON EVER!!!111?
Myself, as a person who occasionally consumes alcohol but never drives drunk - should I feel enourmously guilty for all the idiots that kill people on the road? Is it my fault they’re dead?
Yet - when it comes to guns, if someone is willing to accept the costs for what they perceive as the benefits, that’s abjectly horrible? That all gun owners should feel guilt for this tragedy even if we’ve never done anything but behaved completely responsibly?
You probably do something, or believe in some policy, or own something that, if it were magically wiped from the face of the earth, would prevent at least 1 death. Would you be willing to give up all those things? Would you be a monster if you didn’t?
In a later post, he came up with “freedom is not free.” Which actually applies to our military–thereby implying that he had served. Most of the radical gun nuts have not. Perhaps that’s part of their problem.
I’m a Texan. Have never owned a gun & have no desire to do so. But I know guys who hunt or collect fine shotguns or whatever. They don’t obsess about their hobbies–which are not endangered & should not be.
I do wonder why some hobbyists think they must own sophisticated automatic weapons. (Well, I don’t. They are, as you said, sick fucks.) It’s time to discuss this matter, legally.
I think it’s pretty clear from the hypothetical that we’re not talking about one single person giving up something in order to prevent these things, but everyone having to give them up, otherwise it doesn’t make sense. It’s not as if we’re discussing a gun control law to disarm one scapegoat. It wouldn’t be a very useful hypothetical in that case.
If I’ve misinterpreted, and crafter man is saying that he personally, and only him, would not give up his guns to prevent thousands of deaths, then yeah, he’s a huge dick. But I think he’s saying he doesn’t think the policy should change for everyone, even in the hypothetical crazy world, it prevented all firearm deaths.
I also wonder why dipshits that don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about are so confident about declaring policies to be common sense. None of these scary looking guns that you think your after (and did anyone not notice the guy today committed his kills with common-as-fuck-totally-normal handguns?) are actually “sophisticated automatic weapons”.
This is a sophisticated military-grade automatic weapon, right? It’s crazy for civilians to own them. Wait, no, that’s actually exactly the same gun as this one, which would be totally normal for someone to own, right? It has an aftermarket stock that makes it look scary. The sort of laws people like you make would make the first one illegal and the second one legal EVEN THOUGH THEIR FUNCTION AND CAPABILITIES ARE IDENTICAL. That’s essentially what the assault weapons ban did. It didn’t regulate stuff that actually made a functional difference (like whether or not the gun could fire on full auto), but whether it had stuff like a pistol grip or bayonette lug. Cosmetic differences.
The idea that there are these disproportionately effect scary high power military rifles floating around on the streets is retarded and baseless. Rifles like that are used in a vanishly small amount of crimes, and the most effective massacre weapon would be a 12ga shotgun.
Give me a fucking break, look at the thread about the incident. People are rushing in to say NYAH NYAH TOLD YOU SO GUN OWNERS, YOU’VE GOT MORE BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS. FFS. There are like 15 of these posts before any gun rights advocates come in to defend themselves.
When it comes to rational discussion on this board, your side isn’t winning. Nor d othey intend an “honest and frank discussion” on these matters in the middle of gloating over straw men they created out of gun rights advocates in those threads.
For you to pretend to have the high ground, and the rational high ground no less, means you either haven’t read the threads, or you’re blinded.
Do you think you would get just one, or would they keep giving you one every year for the same thing?
Its like Lionel Messi winning world player of the year. Even though he is fantastic every year, at some point they will say, “He has five of these, lets give it to somebody else this year.”
I think you would only get one, with an honorary award every decade or something.
I lurked for a very long time before finally joining.
I can’t figure out how to link to CM’s post, so look at post 37.
The one where he was bragging about trapping feral cats, then driving them out to somewhere and then drowning them. He also brags about shooting dogs in that post.
It doesn’t surprise me that CM thinks that kids are expendable as long as his gun rights are safe.
Personally…if I knew for a fact that giving my guns up would mean that there would never be another murder by gun…I’d be so busy calling for someone to take them away that I couldn’t type here.
Not a good analogy. Two things. One is that if nobody every drinks again, nobody is going to die in a drunk driving accident, genie or not.
The other is that Crafter Man didn’t say “me and everyone else” or even "me and everyone else who owns guns legally. He said “me.” And while he might have meant “me and other legal gun owners” (if you stretch what he said into what you want him to have meant), he clearly didn’t mean “everyone”. His first post referred to restrictive gun laws, which in themselves would not prevent criminals who already have guns from using them in crimes. So he must have meant some kind of magical deal from a devil or genie as you supposed, and if you throw in magic, it makes just as much sense for it to be a personal one-on-one-deal as it does a deal for “everyone”.
Oh, forgot to mention. If a genie offered me the deal that if I and I alone stop drinking altogether, there would be no more drunk driving deaths, I would take that deal in a second.
These things.
I think the people that make such inflammatory remarks would change their tune if a) they were actually given the choice (this is an imaginary hypothetical) to either keep their guns, or have 15,000 people die every year due to gun violence, b) some sick fuck shot people they cared about, or c) someone could tell them definitively that they would not ever need their gun to either kill anything or anyone or defend themselves against someone trying to hurt them or their loved ones.
That said, I think guns are awesome, I really do. I love shooting at targets and cans and anything that can be destroyed by a gun except living things. It’s really fun. I had a gun for self protection when I lived in a neighborhood that did have robberies and some violent crime. I sold it after I moved, because as a tool, it lost much of its usefulness and became more of a liability.
Guns aren’t inherently bad, but having an arsenal is overkill, and in the hands of a mentally unstable person can facilitate mass murder. As much as people think it to be true, you can’t buy bravery at the gun show, and the chances are if you can afford a ton of guns you can afford to not need a single one since you can live far away from high crime areas and don’t have to kill what you eat.
Oh, and massacres don’t happen to the loved ones of gun fanatics, they’re “prepared” and will stop any such attempt immediately and without fail, even if they aren’t at the scene. Crackpot gun enthusiasts really do give a bad name to responsible gun owners. What a shame.
Actually, it could be very funny, watching people plastered to the gills driving around a big city miraculously avoiding death. That genie would be damn busy. OTOH, there was no promise of drunk driving maiming.
