Do you accept that there will be another occurrence? Seems like a given to me, on the grounds that they’re averaging one every few months.
If so, whose loved ones do you think are best in the victim list? People who think it’s a fair price for easy access to guns, or people who don’t. The only group I can see who benefit at all would be the former, as it substantiates their position. So why do you think it’s malicious?
Besides being a bad attempt at a Swiftian sorta response, it was also an attempt at a thought experiment.
If you’re on the pro-gun side and such a regime was in place, would you be so cavalier about the number of innocents gunned down each year? Would you find such deaths a bit less acceptable? Would you start thinking about whether there might be some best-bang-for-the-buck restrictions on your ‘freedoms’ that might make a real dent on the carnage, at the least cost to your freedoms?
Obviously this will never happen, nor should it, but in the absence of a way of having the bill for gun rights be delivered to the houses of the gun-lovers, ISTM that the rest of us have every right to minimize the extent to which some sampling of the rest of us have to pay the damn bill.
Generally true, but it’s worth pointing out that many people who are knowledgeable about guns and interested in them – and many people who own guns and use them regularly – are also in favor of (modest) gun-control legislation.
The NRA’s absolute intransigence doesn’t reflect the views of all gun enthusiasts, or even a majority of them.
There is one major problem with your analogy, however. The NRA is a single, powerful, organization. It is quite meaningful to say “the goals or methods of the NRA are X”. Even if individual members of the NRA disagree with some of its aims, they open themselves up to being tarred with the NRA’s positions by virtue of being in the NRA.
The “gun-control lobby” has no such singular center. It’s not an organized group. It’s lots of different people holding lots of different positions.
Are there people who would like to “ban all guns”? People who literally think that guys living out in the wilderness who hunt for food should not be able to do so? Maybe a fractionally tiny amount. Are there people who would like to ban all private ownership of handguns? A few more. etc.
You do bring up an interesting point about the ban on automatic weapons. And honestly, I’d be interested in knowing more about the arguments put forth surrounding that ban when it was being enacted. It’s entirely possible that it was a foolish and wrong-headed ploy. Or that it was, as you seem to believe, an attempt to get the ball rolling on banning anything and everything. It’s also possible that it was purely a cynical desire for a short term political victory. It’s hard to say without knowing more about the situation surrounding it.
NRA = National Rifle Association, correct?
If so, then completely agreed. 
Whenever I skim a gun control thread there invariably comes a point when there’s a terminology argument over assault rifles and machine guns, and especially how they’re not really used in crimes that much. Which is true.
I suppose they’re just trying to be helpful to the other side. Pistols and shotguns are the ones that should be banned first. Biggest bang for the buck, so to speak. I’m sure that’s their point.
It’s funny, but in a way, the war on drugs has been more successful than the war on gun violence.
There aren’t many cases of people adulterating food or drink with heroin, cocaine, meth, PCP, etc. We don’t have to be afraid of dining at a restaurant; nobody is going to put street drugs in our Cobb Salad.
In contrast, there are cases nearly every day – certainly every week – of drive-by shootings. Where are the drive-by druggings?
I’m going out on a limb here, but I think showing symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia should be a very good indicator that the person/s in question shouldn’t be allowed to posses any guns.
Heroin WISHES it had the gun lobby’s influence.
To be fair to Crafter_Man and to the readers of this thread, here has been CM’s stance in the past:
Both pretty reprehensible in my opinion, and I own and enjoy guns.
Both quotes can be found in this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=675561
Who was the lead in Heller and McDonald? That’s rhetorical - it wasn’t the NRA. It was the SAF. It’s not quite right to say the NRA is the singular center of gun rights advocacy. They are the biggest player, but there are several others.
On the gun control side, it’s pretty much Bloomberg, Joyce, Soros, and Tides. They may have different positions on some things, but they all share the same position on wanting to ban guns. Here’s an illustration.
Well, Jeb Bush doesn’t disagree, apparently, so there’s that.
The Donald is calling for better mental health services as a means to prevent school shootings … tragic … he’s starting to get good at this “running for president” thingy.
Yah, it’s easy to call for better mental health care when you have no intention of paying for it.
My point is… this thread is entitled “Fuck the NRA”. SenorBeef then responded by saying “but the anti-gun-side did X”.
But since you and crafter_man, two posters who I’ve found to have interesting and consistent view about guns that differ quite a bit from mine, are both here, I’ll pose a question (hope I’m not repeating myself from several years back):
What would be your opinion of the following system:
-Any law-abiding citizen can legally purchase and own any firearm, up to and including fully automatic weapons. All types of bullets, magazines, etc, are also always legal (within reason… the bullet-that-release-a-cloud-of-weaponized-anthrax would still be illegal)
-Any law-abiding citizen can get a CCW
-Doing any of the above requires a firearm-owner license, which requires training about all sorts of gun safety issues, a background check both criminal and pscyhological, and yearly re-certification. There would be a few different levels of license, it requires more training and more safe-storage-knowledge to own 100 machine guns than to concealed carry a powerful pistol than to own a .22
-The above process is overseen by an independent panel whose mission is to absolutely ensure that it does what it claims, and does not just put obstacles in the way of legal gun ownership, and that registration records are not available to other parts of the government without a public hearing and court order
-An absolute guarantee that things won’t change. This is just how it is forever
Don’t view it as “would you support switching from the current US set of laws to this new set of laws…”, instead view it as “i might move to a foreign country in an alternate universe, how would I feel about the gun laws”.
So what would you think of such a system? Would you view that hypothetical place as “friendly” to gun rights advocates?
It is a bit of a tangent. The point I gathered from SenorBeef’s post #160 was that the NRA’s actions are a foil to efforts to ban guns. They act in what seems to be extreme ways (not enough for me) as a response to extreme actions from the opposition. That Brady, Bloomberg, Joyce, etc. push to continually ban, the NRA must act to continually resist everything, never giving an inch.
The analogy is that there is no compromising with someone who wants to kill you. Gun control folks want a ban. I don’t want any bans. There is no middle ground and no reason to compromise. Of course, no compromise is ever offered so that’s kind of moot.
Sounds fine to me, except for the yearly re-cert and psych exam. The psych part is open to abuse. In CA, to get a CCW, you need to show “good cause”. In most of the populated counties, “good cause” is never. If there is a psych exam that has arbitrary judgments, I suspect it’d be used in the same way. The yearly part would have to be low cost, and widely available. Current CCW renewal in CA is every 2 years I think, and the fee is around $300? last time I checked. That’s not a big deal, but I would want to see it more like driver’s license renewal - longer periods and cheaper. The retention of records also poses a challenge, but could probably be workable if controls were beefed up. Your hypo calls for licensing, but only mentions registration in passing. I wouldn’t support registration ever. I’d be fine with licensing without registry right now in theory, but in practice I’d oppose it unless some concessions were made.
Is it worth mentioning, if it hasn’t been done before, that tragic as these massacres are they are statistically insignificant (something like 0.05% of all gun deaths) and so that using them as the main reason for changing the constitution is not advisable.
It’s a bit like saying “I hope all anti-death-penalty people get their spouses murdered in front of them and give them the chance in the very moment they are crying on a pool of blood of their loved to decided whether the death penalty should be applied to the murderer”.
That’s the reason we don’t let judges preside over their family-members’ trials.
Erm, no it fucking isn’t.
A more logical comparison you could have made with your statement would have been “I hope Crafter Man has his spouse shot in front of them and give them the chance in the very moment they are crying on a pool of blood of their loved to decided whether the US needs stronger gun control” And I don’t hope that at all.
Personally I’d rather there weren’t any further massacres, occasional or otherwise (and let’s be honest here, this is now a regular event in the US) and I’d be thrilled to bits if Crafter Man and his loved ones had long, happy lives. No skin off my nose whatsoever.
But if you say, as Crafter Man did, “I would rather keep our gun laws exactly the way they are – and put up with the occasional massacre” you are explicitly saying you would rather people die if it means no increase in checks for gun ownership. If you say you are happy a cost should be paid, doesn’t that mean you are personally happy to pay it? Wouldn’t a fair person rather pay it themselves than let it fall on someone else?
Even though I’m much more on your side here than opposed to you, I think that it would be sufficient for Crafter Man to avoid a charge of hypocrisy if he accepted the same risk as everyone else of himself or his loved ones getting killed. He doesn’t have to go and stand at the head of the line; it’s enough that he’s in line with all the rest of us.
In some abstract ideal of karma, it might be nice if people paid a direct cost for their beliefs. If only anti-vaccinators’ kids got sick, or if only war-hawks got killed by the enemy. But the world doesn’t work that way.
A friend of mine opposes legal “loopholes” such as the exclusionary evidence rule; he wants it to be much, much easier for trials to result in criminal convictions. I said, “But what happens if you are wrongly accused, and convicted because of the rules you favor?” He said, “I’ll take my chance.”
In my opinion, that suffices to exonerate him of the charge of hypocrisy.
CM at least is honest with himself and others. Most gun rights advocates pretend the externalities of their position aren’t there or even make nonsensical claims like guns saving millions of lives a year, that the modern interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is how it has always been, or that the problem is just too hard to tackle so obviously nothing can be done. CM has the integrity to state openly that he likes his playtoys and is OK with the fact that people must die so he can have them.