Well, thank you for sharing!
I hope I don’t come across in this exchange as condescending, that’s certainly not intended… BUT, it seems to me that even if we assume your basic premise is correct, there are still going to be SOME elections where the level of pro-gun-ness of a particular candidate is far less likely to actually end up having a real world impact than others. If you’re voting for mayor of your town, and one guy says he wants to ban all guns, and that’s a power that the mayor has (at least until a lengthy series of court battles are resolved), then hey, by all means, be a single issue voter for that election. But that’s very different from electing one member of a state or federal legislature, etc.
As for whether guns are the most important issue facing our country, here are a few ideas I’ll toss out of things that have the potential to hurt our country’s future FAR more than at least some levels of national gun control laws:
-increased income inequality, more difficult for poor kids to achieve the American dream
-increasing influence of corporations in politics, Citizens United, superPACs
-global warming
-dependence on foreign oil keeping us entangled the clusterfuck that is the Middle East
-declining quality of public education
-increasing trade imbalance with China (and others), decline of US manufacturing
Those are the types of issues that I think REALLY threaten the future of the USA. A thousand years from now when historians try to pinpoint the exact moment that the USA failed as a nation, it’s going to involve some large and systemic issue like the above, not “well, congress passed a poorly worded assault weapons ban, and it was a direct line from that to the entire once-great nation dissolving”… at least, that’s how I see it.
Those issues are mostly important. (I do not see the criticality of “income inequality,” myself, and do not regard the “increasing influence” of corporations as an issue, because corporations like the New York Times and NBC Universal already hold so much sway that I suspect the concern is actually dilution of their influence by other corporations that do not hold appropriately leftist views).
But it’s not true that any candidate has emerged as a shining answer is resolving our dependence on foreign oil or a realistic way for one country to make effective strides in reducing global warming.
Bone has the right of it: I’m actually kind of amazed that I’m seeing this return to a refrain of, “It’s a fantasy that anyone wants to make sweeping gun control laws – why are you voting as though this is a danger?”
After Sandy Hook, the reality was laid bare: there were plenty of people in power who were waiting and alert for a chance to do just that.
Let’s take a trip back through time and see the mood:
And of course actual legislative proposals.
And from the horse’s mouth:
Why weren’t the votes there? Because of an attention to voting for pro-gun rights politicians.
I honestly feel like you’re simply reviving the tactic of claiming the worry is a silly one until such time as another attempt might succeed, and then you’ll shrug and echo RNATB: hey, the will of the country is there, what can you do?
I’m sorry for your loss.
I’ve known enough Texans in my life to know that wit is not really the dominant trait there.
Ask Kellerman. He’s the one that wrote the paper.
And if you can use a study that says that a person who lives alone or a person who rents their home is more likely to be murdered than someone who has a gun in the home, then doesn’t that tell you that the cause effect relationship for at least some (if not a lot )of that increase might be going the other way?
Maybe you haven’t been paying attention but we were talking about the risk of owning a gun versus the risk of owning a pool. Pools are more dangerous than guns and if you didn’t have to rely on lies, insults and logical fallacy, you’d be over at great debates trying to defend your silly anti-gun position within the constraints of actual debate instead of name-calling.
Instead you sit in the pit displaying your irrational fear of guns for all to see.
As a professional medical organization? I don’t think they should be doing it. I don’t know if they shouldn’t be allowed to do it but it undermines their credibility in other areas. It might lend credence to anti-vaccers who think that pediatricians are driven by an agenda.
Who went to jail for that again?
And while not federal (after all the law under discussion is not federal), there are several cases of confiscation at the state level.
I voted for Obama any time I saw his name on a ballot despite knowing his position on guns. I would say that the vast majority of the people I vote for are anti-gun but I vote for them anyway because I don’t think guns are the ONLY issue. But I recognize a lot of people do and the Democrats need to get around to realizing that or they are going to lose swing states like Virginia and even Pennsylvania.
And the paranoia surrounding newtown was not entirely unwarranted.
That sounds mostly right.
What do you make of the fact that our suicide rate is dead fucking average compared with the rest of the wealthy industrialized world despite the fact that we are awash in guns and these other countries tend to have almost no guns at all.
So how the fuck do we handle laws today that make abortions illegal except where the life or health of the mother are at risk? You do realize taht tehre are laws like that on the books, right? And you do realize that we perform those abortions on a daily basis, right? So why aren’t these guys being tried for breaking the law in what are generally pretty anti-abortion states? Or is it possible that doctors have a pretty good idea when the life and health of the mother are at stake?
Same can be said of any law ever but we deal with laws in the current context and the law you are talking about does not say what you think it said. You are taking the law a few steps down the interpretive road to get to your conclusion. You’re pointing to a slippery slope or something like and I don’t think you would read a law that MIGHT one day lead to an inerpretation that might emperil gun rights the same way. YOu’d probably say the gun rights folks were being paranoid.
While the number of guns in the US is high and increasing, the number of households with firearms is in the decline. What share of households have gun enthusiasts as opposed to a gun somewhere that they’ve forgotten about?
More deeply suicide, like homicide, has a large number of cofactors. Empirical research is necessary to tease them out and measure them across countries. Your question does little to shed light on the role of gun culture on self inflicted injury as well as potential mitigating factors: only research can do that.
Most physicians would disagree. As a physician, I disagree. Regardless of politics, guns are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality, particularly in the US, and not just for pediatric patients.
Gun deaths -all comers - are about 10.2 per 100,000. Gun homicide is 3.5 per 100,000. (1)
Accidents are the 5th leading cause of death in the US, suicide is 10th. (1). Firearms contribute to both. About half of American suicides are with guns, 6.3 out of 12.3 per 100,000. In fact, having a gun in the house makes dying by homicide and (if male) suicide more likely (2).
Gun suicides as a separate category would rank at #15th most common causes of death, just below Parkinson’s disease (7.4 per 100,00) and edging out aspiration (5.8 per 100,000). (1)
Gun deaths are set to exceed traffic fatalities for the first time next year (3) so if a physician can reasonably ask about seat belts and car seats, then it would seem guns safety would be an equally legitimate concern.
Getting back to pediatrics, gun accidental deaths run at 1.82 per 100,000 teenagers (15-19) (4), while homicide is the second leading cause of death among teens (10.4 per 100,000, ages 12-19), and 82% involve firearms. (5)
By contrast, the death rate of pediatric cancer is 2.3 per 100,000 pediatric patients (6). If cancer is a reasonable concern for physicians, then firearms certainly are, leaving aside political agendas and just going by the numbers, especially since firearm deaths are very preventable, which is the name of the game in medicine.
1 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf
2 http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full
3 American Gun Deaths to Exceed Traffic Fatalities by 2015 - Bloomberg - sorry, didn’t track down the primary source yet.
4 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2012/10/15/peds.2012-2481.full.pdf
5 Johns Hopkins Center for Adolescent Health | Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
6 Cancer in Children and Adolescents - NCI
Yup.
Even comparisons within one country need to be made with some caution.
Wait, what? You’re saying that because living alone and having a gun in the house are both significant predictors in a multivariate regression model, that living alone could explain why having a gun in the house is significantly predictive of death by homicide?
Bwahaha! You absolute moron! Jesus Christ are you a dummy. If two variables are significantly predictive in a regression model, it means that they cannot fully account for one another. What did you think that smart people meant when they would say such and such is still significantly predictive of so and so after “controlling for” some other factor? It expressly means that even after accounting for the significant effect of living alone, guns still raise the risk of death by homicide by a factor of 2.7.
See, this is a perfect example of the echo chamber of gun nuts. Our moron, Damuri Ajashi tells us that he cannot access the Kellermann article, but he also asserts that the Kellermann article says x and y about gun deaths. That means that some other moron told our moron something completely wrong and fundamentally stupid, and our moron came here to share that stupidity with us. Thanks so much, other unknown gun nut moron!
And, our moron still doesn’t understand what I’ve been trying to explain about comparisons between two predictors in a regression model, but now I understand that that concept is so far above his level of comprehension, I needn’t bother.
(Also, note that all one needs to do to read the Kellermann article is google Kellermann 1993. The article is freely available. Damuri Ajashi is lying when he says that he cannot access it. He probably just means that he cannot understand it, which is why he parrots what other morons are telling him.
Oh, this is such bullshit.
The opposite is true, of course. Liberals are the thought police. Not agreeing with them is something that not only can they for the most part not comprehend, but is something that they make every effort to not allow.
Does that mean you think you have a reasoned, fact-based argument to present?
It would be high time.
Not condescending at all. I agree that there are some more important elections than others - that’s hardly controversial.
The principal is the same. What if Olympia Snow was your rep (senator)? Wasn’t she the swing vote in few large pieces of legislation? The thing is - sometimes you don’t know when the votes will really matter and when they won’t. One member of the legislature can’t really pass new legislation on their own, but sometimes they can derail bad ones.
A lot of these would be topics for threads unto themselves, but since you raised some potential issues I’ll comment briefly:
[ul]
[li]I actually don’t care a single bit about income inequality. Not one bit.[/li][li]I accept corporate influence in politics. It’s part of the deal living in a free(ish) society. Money is speech. Corporations are gatherings of people together to execute a common interest.[/li][li]I’d prefer energy independence, but nukes seem like a non-starter and nothing right now is currently viable. I do support renewable sources and have paid a premium to utilize them for a cause I believe in, even though it’s not cost effective. Unfortunately the intersection of environmentalists and gun rights advocates doesn’t seem to be large. One has a more immediate impact than the other.[/li][li]I’m not in favor of federally funded education at all. A well educated population is a critical component of a successful society - our current scheme of attempting to achieve it is failing.[/li][li]I don’t really care about trade imbalance. Freer markets combined with each country taking advantage of their comparative advantages is better overall.[/li][/ul]
But if you think about this another way - you see many issues as more important than gun rights. Then why push gun control? If you really believe those other things are more important, then if you give in on guns, people like me would be free to support and advocate for other issues. If I believed Hillary Clinton was a gun rights advocate - I’d vote for her in a heartbeat. I almost voted for Obama in 2008 actually simply because I thought the Republican party could not be rewarded for condoning torture (just couldn’t do it - went third party). But until the time where the issue of gun rights are settled, I’ll vote single issue. It’s the most effective way to achieve the goal.
I think it’s a question of risk analysis… the negative weight you should assign to voting for a less-pro-gun candidate isn’t the worst case that could happen, it’s the worst case that could happen multiplied by the likelihood of that worst case. So to be a rational single-issue voter, you have to not only think that gun control is more important than any other issue (and in fact, arguably more important than all other issues put together), you also have to think that it’s constantly hanging in the balance.
(Also directing this response at Bricker, who expressed a similar sentiment.)
This is obviously a tangent, but… let me rephrase that slightly. Income inequality in and of itself is not a particularly important issue to me. What is an important issue, and probably one of the top 2 or 3 issues facing the USA right now imho, is inequality of opportunity. You have Bill Gates and you have the guy who cleans Bill Gates’s toilets. Both of them have kids who are the same age. The American Dream, to me, the thing that has the potential to be the most amazingly wonderfully USA-USA-We’re-Number-1-American-Exceptionalism, is the idea that both of those two kids have a chance to grow up, get a great education, go to college, and go out into the world and be successful and get good jobs and own homes and so forth. Now, obviously, their opportunity has never been remotely EQUAL. But I’ve read studies which indicate that it’s getting LESS equal. It’s getting HARDER for kids who grow up poor to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and work hard and become doctors or lawyer or small business owners or what have you.
If I could choose one of two possible futures for the USA in 100 years:
(1) Like today, but the trend has reversed itself, and children of janitors are becoming lawyers and doctors at a higher rate than they ever have before. Also, private ownership of guns is WAY more restricted than it is now
(2) Guns are super-duper legal and unrestricted, but social mobility is vastly further reduced. Children of the rich almost always end up rich. Children of the poor almost always end up poor.
It’s not even close. (1) is so much better it’s not even debatable. And it’s FAR more “American” in all the ways that really matter.
Was that addressed to me specifically, or to liberals in general? If it was addressed to me specifically, I am NOT pushing gun control. I respect the constitution, and the constitution says you have the right to own guns, so you have the right to own guns. I’d probably end up somewhere different than you on issues such as registration, background checks, mandatory training and responsibility, etc., but I am NOT trying to take away your guns, or your large magazines, or your “assault rifles”. And as issues goes, it’s just not very important to me.
If you’re addressing it to liberals in general, well, I just don’t think it’s very high on most people’s radar. How much of that is “we just don’t care all that much” vs “the problem is so fucked that there’s no point in even trying” vs “going up against the NRA is political suicide” is unclear, but really, on the list of things Obama and the current Democratic congressional leadership have actually put significant time and effort into, gun control is just not very high on the list. Sure there was one flurry of interest, entirely understandably, right after an incident in which a guy with a gun KILLED A BUNCH OF ELEMENTARY STUDENTS, but then it died down again.
Like I said, I’m not particularly pro-gun-control, but if I was, I would find the bitterest irony of all the extent to which so many people on the other side were deathly afraid that my side was constantly ABOUT TO WIN, when in fact my side could barely get congress to answer our calls.
That is ridiculous nonsense, unless you are unable to tell the difference between conduct codes on super-liberal college campuses and actual laws proposed by liberal legislators.
Here’s a telling fact: there is an organization that is a strong and unrelenting defender of free speech. They have defended free speakers from all sides, including the rights of the KKK to protest in public, and various rights of religious people to show that religion in public schools. That organization is the ACLU. And they are viewed as incredibly liberal. That is not a coincidence.
The most prominent national-scale issue that directly involved potentially outlawing speech or expression in the past decade or so is the proposal to outlaw flag-burning. And it’s sure as heck not the liberals who are proposing it.