I responded to this a few points up while talking to Bone
There’s a big difference between “the NYT is a corporation, and it is also a newspaper, and that newspaper has editorial opinions, and those opinions carry great public weight and have lots of influence” and “Exxon is a corporation, and it pays lobbyists to convince politicians to offer $300 billion in taxpayer subsidies for things that Exxon is already doing, which are in practical terms just cash payments”.
I think there’s an excluded middle here. I don’t mean to say that no liberal politician has any interest in gun control. But it’s also 100% clear to me that the level of rhetoric and paranoia with which the gun community greeted Obama’s election was staggeringly out of proportion to what actually transpired. And there’s no reason to think that Obama really WAS intending to take away all the guns, but the groundswell of people buying up tons of AR-15s and extra ammunition and stockpiling it convinced him that it was a bad idea. I’m not sure which of these I think is more likely:
(1) Obama maybe kinda sort would like gun control, but it’s way down on his list of priorities, so he talked about it a bit right after Sandy Hook, and then returned to working on things like health care that he really cares about
or
(2) Obama is strongly in favor of gun control, but is enough of a political realist to realize that it’s a third rail issue, so he reluctantly has let it slide, aside from a brief period after Sandy Hook when he thought there might be enough consensus
But what is certainly NOT true is:
(3) Obama is just ITCHING to release the STORM TROOPERS of the ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT and the UN who will TAKE AWAY ALL YOUR GUNS and make it ILLEGAL TO BUY AMMO so you’d better go out and BUY MANY MANY GUNS RIGHT NOW, and in NO WAY are the gun manufacturers who are actually making a profit off of selling those guns at all behind this level of hysteria no way no sir bob.
I think that is a rational decision. And you’ll note that in fact (barring a very unlikely late-second-term-twist) it has worked out quite well… the policies of Obama’s that you did support have been pushed by the president, and gun control has gone basically nowhere.
I don’t see what the relevance of that is. My point is, whatever the likelihood of there being a law passed at the federal level (I’m talking about the federal level because, frankly, I have zero idea what’s going on in the Idaho assembly and don’t hugely care, particularly given that it gets overridden by the supreme court anyhow) and then upheld which allows federal agents to confiscate guns that you currently legally own – and I believe that that likelihood is currently MINISCULE – the fact that one mayor legally overreached for some totally moronic reason during a time of unprecedented crisis does not really reflect on that likelihood one way or the other.
I suppose you could make an argument that including their commentary about guns will so offend gun-loving-folks that it will reduce the APA’s ability to give those people useful advice about other issues. But your response doesn’t seem to have been “huh, I believe that is a counterproductive paragraph, given the political climate in the USA today”, it seems more like “how outRAGEOUS that they should be so ANTI-GUN. Imagine it, a professional organization of DOCTORS!!! How dare they!?!?!?!?!”.
I feel like you’re reacting as if saying that someone should not own guns is an invasion of personal privacy tantamount to saying that someone shouldn’t be Christian, or shouldn’t be gay, or something. Telling someone you think they should not own guns isn’t a violation of their rights. Owning a gun is a constitutionally protected right. That doesn’t make gun owners a protected class the same way that a minority group with a history of suffering discrimination is.
In the first case, the corporate opinions that are protected and subsidized are ones that you like.
I agree.
But I think (2) is pretty much on the mark, and the reason there was not enough consensus was the unrelenting attention to the issue. If a couple election cycles had gone by without worrying about electing pro-gun politicans, there might well have been such a consensus after Sandy Hook.
There’s also the efficacy of voting in a block. Similar to organized labor recognizing that only through solidarity are they at their peak, as long as like minded people vote together even if the risk analysis may on balance come out the other way, will the effectiveness of the block hold strong.
If this weren’t the case, then opposition groups would and do attempt to divide the block and re-argue the issue every time, hoping to pick apart the block through a combination of attrition and this type of risk calculus. This is why so many gun control proposals isolate hunters or other groups of folks. It’s an attempt to divide the population saying something like, ‘oh we’re not targeting you, just those other guys! Or, we’re only targeting this type of weapon, not that other one!’
It’s unfortunate if this is the case. The solution to this is long term in nature. Politicians banning guns is happening now. One is of more immediate concern than the other.
If you simply deleted the beginning of #1 that says, “like today,” then a communist nation would satisfy that criteria. In general - my response would be similar to above. Any potential solution to these issues are long term in nature. The vast majority of proposals I’ve seen to address these things are worse than the problem they are trying to solve.
And, Bricker notwithstanding, the labor market for new lawyers right now is not very good. Law school in the past several years has not been a good investment.
Sort of to you, since you said those issues were more important to you, but mostly in general. Not to liberals or conservatives since I think support for gun control and gun rights crosses those labels, but just towards those who support gun control while simultaneously thinking those other issues are more important. If they are in fact more important - then those folks would have more allies if they supported gun rights. For example, I voted for Jerry Brown for governor. He was more pro-gun than Meg Whitman.
The timing was understandable, but the extent to which it was pushed and what specifically was pushed was not. Essentially it showed that given the right set of circumstances those that advocate for gun control would push as much as they could possibly do to ban guns. It will have renewed and invigorated the defense of gun rights for a generation, IMO. You take from that sequence of events that the gun control movement is not very effective or anything to worry about. I interpret it in the opposite, and only through vigilance will people who feel like me be able to defeat similar efforts in the future.
I think it’s #2. Which means continued vigilance else we’d wake up one day and find our rights have been legislated away.
During an unprecedented crisis is when the need for arms is most acute. Think about which businesses didn’t burn down during the LA riots. And while the likelihood of something draconian passing at the federal level is not as high as at the local level, that makes not a whit of difference for the residents of that particular locality.
Your neighboring city just banned standard capacity magazines. Do the residents of Sunnyvale care that it wasn’t passed at the federal level? What difference does it make to them? It may be worse, since there are more court challenges to file.
Saying someone shouldn’t own guns in the context of a doctor visit, to me, is borderline invasion of privacy. I’m not going to make a big stink about it, but I’d prefer they don’t ask.
What saying someone shouldn’t own guns is IMO, is saying that a person shouldn’t have available the most effective means of self defense, that they should rely on the goodwill of criminals to not target them, and that they should abdicate any responsibility for the defense of themselves or their family to either someone else, or random chance. It’s most certainly not a violation of their rights, but it is incredibly insulting and authoritarian.
Nonsense, unless you’re talking about the NYT having influence and ramming through bills that provide subsidies for the NYT. If, on the other hand, the NYT uses its influence to help shape the dialog about gay marriage or global warming or immigration, then that’s not at ALL comparable, because the NYT is using its influence to agitate for causes that it believes are in the country’s best interest, while Exxon is (in the example I proposed) using its influence to agitate for causes that are clearly and directly in Exxon’s best interest. There is no comparison between those two things.
Do you have a quick summary of what law(s) were seriously proposed after Sandy Hook and how close they realistically came to passing? I’m not talking about rhetoric, I’m talking about actual seriously proposed legislation.
Of course, there are also drawbacks to this. For instance, what if you’re someone who strongly agrees with 80% or so of the NRA’s positions, and that agreement is very important to you, but you disagree with them about 20%. The NRA, and groups of pro-gun people in general, tend to support candidates who agree with 100% of their positions (as you’d expect). So being part of a big block gives you a big voice, but it also gives you a big voice that is not necessarily saying what you want it to say.
Taking a step back, though, I guess I’m still puzzled as to WHY precisely gun control is SO important to you, seemingly out of proportion to plenty of other issues which, on the surface, seem like they ought to be at least in the same league of importance.
There’s a HUGE difference, though, and it’s a crucial one that is often elided over (intentionally or not) in discussions between the left and the right. I have absolutely zero problem with people being rich. In fact, it’s awesome. The fact that people who work hard can get rich drives enormous amounts of innovation and culture and all sorts of other things. So I’m not at all sad if we end up in a society where 1% are very poor, 9% are poor, 20% are lower middle class, 30% are middle class, 25% are upper middle class, 10% are rich, 4% are really really rich, and 1% are insanely rich, or something of that sort. In fact, that’s exactly how it should be. What’s important to me, though, is that when the children of one generation of people with that stratification grow up, this newer generation has a chance to be in a different bracket than their parents were. So someone works hard and busts her butt and invents a better mousetrap and grows her mousetrap corporation and eventually becomes so filthy rich that she bathes in pools of champagne? Hey, good for her. And there’s no way that her children aren’t going to start out at an advantage over the children of the janitors who clean out her factories. But the bigger that advantage is, the worse for society overall, as far as I’m concerned. (And there are plenty of filthy rich people such as Warren Buffet who agree with me entirely.)
Well, that’s an interesting he-saw she-saw kind of issue. How close did we actually come to having sweeping gun control bills passed and implemented? And how sweeping were they?
Sure, but there’s a difference between “continued vigilance” and “continued placing of this issue above all others at all times”. I’m not saying “hey, stop caring about gun control, you’re cool, chillax, go off on a 10-year-hunting-trip and when you come back I promise your guns will still be legal”, I’m saying “if you treat gun control as constantly in razor-edge-balance-crisis mode, you’re neglecting all the other issues that are facing the US”.
I’m not disagreeing, I’m just not sure what the relevance of the fact that the New Orleans mayor legally overreached, and then was later smacked down by the courts, is.
So you are about to take your newborn child home from the hospital. The doctor asks…
-have you childproofed the electrical outlets?
-do you have proper rear-facing child seats?
-do you own a pool?
-do you own guns?
Is that fourth question more of an invasion of privacy than any of the previous ones?
I think it’s hard to discuss that without a really precise definitely of what both “someone” and “shouldn’t” mean. I personally do not own guns. Since I have made that decision for myself, I guess that means that I think that a person like me living in my neighborhood “shouldn’t” own guns. One of my good friends who lives about 10 blocks away does own guns. He has two sons under the age of 5. He stores them in a super-heavy gun safe in his garage*. Do I think he “shouldn’t” own guns? Well, if he’d chosen to get rid of his guns when he had kids, I would have thought that was a reasonable thing to do. I know that he’s an INCREDIBLY responsible and careful person. At the same time, no matter how careful he is, there’s now some possibility of a perfect storm of events happening which results in one of his kids somehow gaining access to a gun in his home, which would be less likely if he didn’t own guns at all. What does that all add up to? Not sure, but I certainly don’t think it’s condescending or authoritarian for his pediatrician to have brought up the issue when he was first bringing his kids home.
*Obviously I mean he stores the guns, not the kids. Except when they’re on timeout.
Sure. OK. But at least part of the argument seems to be that a lot of our suicides are occurring because of guns. Suicides that would not occur if guns were not readily available. And I am just wondering why (if guns are effectively producing suicides that would not otherwise occur) a country like ours (even with the reduced number of households with firearms) which is relatively awash in guns would have a very average rate of suicide.
I mean doesn’t it undermine the notion that guns=suicide for you at all?
How do you explain the fact that your suicide rate is absolutely average for a wealthy developed western nation despite being awash in guns?
There was a similar study by a fellow named Kellerman years ago and his study found that having a gun in the house made you 2.7 times more likely to be murdered. It also found that living alone made you more likely to be murdered than having a gun. It also found that renting your home made you more likely to be murdered than either living alone or having a gun. It also found that engaging in illicit drug activity made you more likely to be murdered than someone who just had a gun or just rented their home or just lived alone. This should make you wonder how much of the increased risk of murder is caused by having the gun in the house versus how many gus are owned because the subject is likely to be murdered.
Sure, but pediatricians ask if you have a car seat and if you’re using it properly. They ask gun owners to get rid of their guns and if the gun is necessary THEN they ask questions about gun safety.
Errmm. You know you can’t just add up crude rates for different racial groups and arrive at a composite crude rate, right? At the very least you should average them, not add them up, if you were just looking for a rough estimate. According to Wisqars the crude rate in the 15-19 age range, the crude rate is .42 per 100,000.
If 1.37 black males, 0.0 black females, 0.43 white males and 0.03 white females (out of 100,000 of each) accidentally get shot to death the mixed crude rate has to be average and weighted.
The firearm homicide death rate for age range 10-14 is 0.66 for age range 15-19 the firearm homicide death rate is 7.76.
Just FYI, didn’t want you to get too shocked because you added instead of averaged the numbers.
This is the alpha and omega of your argument and it explains why you don’t survive long in great debates, before people shoo you away for being too stupid for adult conversations. You can safely be ignored.
And what if the choice was (1) Utah style gun laws across the country with greater equality of opportunity; or (2) Massachussetts style gun control with much less equality of opportunity?
As Bone said, if we took the issue off the table, he would be able to vote based on other priorities and pro-gun people are just as frequently equality of opportunity (in the sense that a janitor should have at close to the same opportunity as Bill Gates’ children as we can reasonably achieve) as anyone else.
The gun issue is a political loser for liberals. In swing districts and swing states, the gun issue hurts liberals more than it helps them. For example Virginia would not have gone for Obama if he campaigned on an Assault Weapons B
If we ever have tyranny in this country, I don’t think its going to come from ideologically driven elected officials, its going to be driven by the profit motive.
I don’t think that we are going to see any new federal laws that increase gun control.
Well it doesn’t matter now that other instances have been pointed out.
It occured at the state level in California. But I agree it won’t happen at the federal level (which BTW is also subject to being overturned by SCOTUS)
Like I said, I don’t think the law is a good idea but I also think that pediatricians are overemphasizing the risk associated with guns relative to other risks. Particularly as it relates to small children.