Only in some situations. it’s a lot easier to run away from a shotgun than an M-16. The shotgun has a MUCH shorter effective range, and has to be reloaded constantly.
But let’s face it, gun control laws wouldn’t have prevented this massacre. Lanza used a regular .223 hunting rifle, which would be probably the last type of gun to ever be made illegal.
No, he didn’t. He left the rifle in the car and used two semi-automatic handguns…which hopefully will not be the last type of guns to ever be made illegal.
Oh. never mind then.
So yeah, I’m against handguns, for the record. They are murder weapons, pure and simple, designed to be hidden. Nobody needs them. I accept the reality of long guns for hunting and home defense, but handguns are murder weapons, pure and simple.
To be fair (not that I support his/her view), some of us live in a society/country that constantly tries to scare the bejesus out of us. We have entire organizations worth billions of dollars whose primary purpose is to make us live in pant-shitting-fear 24/7.
If you give in completely to their worldview, you should be low crawling in PPE to your armored car just to make it to the mailbox. That’s pretty much how they make the world outside your front door appear.
Politics is involved in this, as is marketing and commerce. My point being that Crafter Man is a product of the 24hr death/mayhem/terra’ists lurking around every corner media, and it shows.
It makes it difficult for him/her/it to believe that he/she/the aren’t about to be taken hostage the very next time they visit a convenience store.
Sometimes, ignorance is not only bliss, it’s sanity.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
Actually, I should have said the root cause of whatever causes someone to shoot someone(s) else. Common ones would be robbery, hate, mental illness. If guns suddenly all disappeared from the earth, people would find other ways to kill each other.
Because their “harmless fun” tends to entail robbing people to get money to pay for their fun, and/or becoming useless/a burden to society due to dependence and overdosing, and/or violence if something goes wrong with their dosage. Except pot - that appears to be pretty safe, and it is also becoming legalized.
I carried a handgun in my car during my travels until I moved to California where the laws were much more restrictive. I think of that as a legit reason to have one.
Would I give up the right to own guns to save 0.0006 lives (a single gun-owning household’s share of the annual gun deaths)? No.
Just as I wouldn’t give up my right to own a car to save .00035 lives (a car-owning household’s share of the 40,000+ car deaths in the US). (I assumed that all 114 million households own cars, which is certainly untrue, so that number should be somewhat higher. I couldn’t find a quick number for car-owning households.)
The only argument I can see against guns that have been cosmetically designed to look like military rifles is that wackos certainly seem to like them. Your average gun owner doesn’t seem to care for them much. The projections snag on things and they take up a lot of room.
The real problem is that for every ten sane, responsible pro-gun people, there’s a psychopathic dummy like Crafter_Man wearing dorky jean-shorts while inspecting the length of the grass in his yard and waiting for some poor mutt to wander near his McMansion so he can take out his six-shooter and put a bullet in it before adding the carcass to his burn pile.
And for every ten sane, reasonable anti-gun people, there’s a socially-awkward, scared-of-the-world dork like Boyo Jim wearing a Hot-Pocket-stained polo shirt and glasses with a cracked bridge(because he hyperventilates at the mall and can’t get the fucking thing fixed) posting anti-gun screeds because he needs to feel like he’s moving the needle on life.
Nuts like these two dingbats are the chief source of the angry, uncompromising attitudes we see in the gun “debate”.
This was your first objection which I responded to:
“…if nobody every drinks again, nobody is going to die in a drunk driving accident, genie or not.”
Implying that you object because if people stopped drinking alcohol then the problem goes away even if there is no genie involved.
And the same is true of guns, if people stop firing guns then people will not get killed with bullets shot from guns, even if there is no genie involved.
Your point number “one” makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Yes, that neatly skewers the hypothetical assertion that there have never been any mass shootings in Britain. Indeed, the article also brackets it with a couple of other notorious incidents in the Eighties and Nineties. So, three in 23 years as opposed to…?
(We had less gun control before the earlier shootings, too, though we never have had a gun culture like the US - then again, few countries have.)
Maybe his choice examples should be part of a psych exam anyone needs to take to acquire a gun license. If you answer like CM, you can only buy a slingshot made of toilet paper.
Ah, I see. So if a thing can be the tangential motive for a crime, it’s OK to restrict it even though the thing itself isn’t infringing on any rights. But if a thing can be the *enabler *of a crime, whoaaaa, slow down, rights man, rights !
I see you’ve thought this through and are consistent in your beliefs.
Not to mention that there probably wouldn’t be so much drug-related robberies in the first place if drugs were legal and readily available - as that’d also make them cheap. Precious few people have been robbed for beer or cigarette money that I’m aware, and those are just as addictive as any drug you might care to name. Hell, half of the restricted psychoactives aren’t even physically addictive at all - LSD, 'shrooms, pot are all good on that front as far as I know for example.
Opium dens used to be a thing, heroin was sold over the frickin’ counter at one time. Was there also just a ridiculous amount of drug-related robberies back then ? I don’t know, but I don’t believe so.
Irrelevant. Alcoholism makes people just as useless and dangerous ; lung cancer is quite the financial burden on the system, as are cirrhosis and pancreatitis. Or gun-related wounds (accidental or not-so-accidental) for that matter.
I can be a very mean drunk, you know. But that’s OK - I’m allowed to be, as long as I don’t kill or maim people. Also, I’d kinda like to see someone get in a fight while on a heroin or LSD trip. It’s bound to be hilarious in a slapstick fashion. I’m not even sure you can stand up on heroin.
Plus, if potentially leading to violence is a legit reason to ban something, guns should be pretty high up the list, don’t you think ?
I know this is a lost cause. I know that this post was from a while back. It’s just so stupid and reliable in gun threads that I am compelled to try again.
Gun fucks don’t understand the denominator. (That’s the number on the bottom of a fraction, or a ratio.). Except that they appear to understand it somewhat when it comes to comparing the raw number of handgun homicides in the UK to the US!
So, I have a new thing I’m trying. You are equating the number of firearms deaths in the US to the number of automobile related deaths. You are comparing the numerators.
How many cars did you see in use yesterday? I saw thousands. On my way in to work,looking out the window, at lunch, on my way home. Hell, I even used one myself running errands later in the day
How many firearms did you see in use yesterday? Me, I saw 0. Just like the day before and the day before that.
That’s the denominator. How risky something is depends on you degree of exposure to the risk..
The latter is correct.
Neither is non-psychopathic.
I must again ask this question; if in fact the removal of guns would not reduce the number of people killed, then why do guns exist? If guns don’t make a person’s efforts to kill more likely to succeed, why do people buy them? Why do armies continue to spend millions of dollars outfitting soldiers with expensive, hig-quality firearms, rather than with cheaper spears or swords? Why do people carry guns for protection instead of, say, a switchblade or a baseball bat? Why did you have a gun in your car, and not a knife? Knives are cheaper. You must clearly have felt a gun made it likelier you could defend yourself. I have to admit that when I joined the army, I was pleased they gave me a rifle. I would have been more than a little concerned if I had been issued an axe and told “Hey, just find a way to kill 'em with this, soldier.”
Clearly, people would not always “find another way to kill each other.” Guns make it likelier you can kill someone. That’s why we invented them.
If I knew logisticians were going to subject my comments to microanalysis I would have chosen my words more carefully. So to clarify: would I (and only me) be willing to give up my guns in exchange for zero murders in this country? Of course I would. But that’s a hypothetical circumstance. What I am *not *willing to trade is more gun control (for everyone) in exchange for less citizen-on-citizen crime. And this assumes more gun control would reduce crime, which is highly debatable.
Logisticians, as in experts in logistics?
So, heavily armed and stupid? Great combination.
If we are going to focus on mental functioning in re: gun ownership, how about we include cognitive function too. How about you have to be of at least average IQ?
Seriously. While it’s true that the reasons for the high rate of gun violence in this country is a little more complex than more guns = more violence. To pretend that easier access to guns isn’t a contributing factor, and probably a significant one, is pretty stupid.
I travel fairly regularly, yet never feel the need for a gun.