No, it’s not the topic is Gun control proposals for which the burden falls on criminals and not the law-abiding.
I mean, you can say it’s about all gun control since if you make a law that makes otherwise law abiding citizens criminals overnite, then they are criminals in a way. **But that is certainly not the intent of the OP. **
As the Op stated "It’s a common sentiment among gun owners, or at least activists for the right of the people to keep and bear arms, that many gun control proposals are intentionally crafted to harass / inconvenience / make life harder for law-abiding gun owners. In this thread, I’d like to discuss gun control proposals that do NOT harass / inconvenience / make life harder for law-abiding gun owners. I suspect adhering to that guideline in an absolute sense would be difficult, so let’s focus on proposals that maximize effectively reducing gun crime while minimizing the harm / imposition on law-abiding gun owners." and as Miller stated
…* the point of gun control is to reduce the amount of gun violence in society, not to just be a dick to people who like guns.*
Oddly, you tend to go ballistic whenever posters wont keep one of* your* Ops on what *you *consider the true topic as stated by *you. *
Hope the tipster spends his money fast, before getting shot by the felon’s buddies. Who have guns because any kind of check to show that they shouldn’t be able to buy a gun would be gun grabbing in your book. And it would of course inconvenience the law abiding. Like the law abiding guy who bought many assault rifles before shooting up the country music concert - when he suddenly turned non-law abiding.
And such a move wasn’t even hinted at in that proposal, so I have no idea why you have artificially inserted it. As far as what “I can say” goes, why don’t we just stick to what I(and others) do say. Now, what are your objections to the proposal Damuri Ajashiactually made?
(emphasis mine)
Where did I say anything of the sort ? I simply said that making the guns go poof could only have a strictly positive effect on suicide rates by removing a method that is fairly common (and VERY effective) when you look at people who suddenly decide to kill themselves. At which point would-be suicides have to look into methods that require more effort, more time, more travel, more planning, which might fail hilariously (like my ex-brother in law, who tried to hang himself from a tree, broke the branch which then hit him on the head and KOd him for 40 minutes at which point he drove himself to hospital and counseling. Which is a tragic story really but come on, you gotta laugh)… all of which is time than can be used, by them to think about other options besides suicide or simply have their untenable emotions disappear, and by others to hopefully notice, help, talk, be there.
“But if they want to kill themselves they’ll just do it anyway”, to my mind, has just as much validity as “but if they want to murder people they’ll do it with knives and hammers and cars !”, that is to say not overly much at all.
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Didn’t say that either, because that’s not really something that can be empirically quantified.
You can reconceptualize the 2nd Amendment to understand that “the people” refers to the individual members of the preceding-mentioned “militias”, then buy-back all the guns owned by Americans currently not in any militias.
So you support making things more difficult for law abiding gun owners? Cool.
If we knew who bought what weapons, we might be able to pay a visit on someone with a suspicious pattern. Data analytics would be good for this. That wouldn’t prevent all shootings, but it could help.
How would they know someone tipped the cops off? The tipster’s extra cash. Plus, it is hard enough to get people to speak up after real crimes. I don’t think you’re going to have a lot of success in getting to people to rat on members of their community who have lots of guns. It’s an impractical solution. After all, they could rat for free with less risk of being suspected. Are they? Not that I’ve heard.
I don’t think you would ever get a conviction for a violation that arose out of a sheriff running out of the legally necessary forms. I think it would also violate the constitution.
Sorry, missed this earlier. Not sure what you said or didn’t say as I’ve lost track of the original conversation, but I agree with you…if you could magically make guns go away, it would have a short term effect…possibly even a medium term effect…on suicide deaths using guns. No doubt about it, IMHO. I doubt it would save all, but there would be a non-zero number of folks who, not having a gun, would not commit suicide when they wanted too, and a percentage of those folks could and almost certainly would talk to someone or maybe just move past the darker period and decide, in the end, not to commit suicide after all.
Having done that, however, I think that in a fairly short time the numbers would start to rebalance, as you haven’t really addressed anything but magically taking away a method. I know you are saying we should magic away the guns AND enhance suicide prevention programs and all the rest, and that’s all great and would certainly help, but just taking away guns would only have a small, short term effect IMHO. Eventually, people would simply switch to other means readily available to commit suicide. Clearly, in countries with heavy gun bans or restrictions they find ways that are superior to the US wrt deaths from suicide per 100K. And even in the gun laden US, the majority of suicides are from other methods than guns.
The thing is, in reality, you can’t magic away the guns, so you get into whether it would be practical, feasible or even meaningful wrt suicides as well as just general gun deaths (murders, accidents, etc) for any specific and actually do-able sort of regulation that stays within the confines of the 2nd Amendment. In the end, by allowing guns and having a protected right, Americans basically accept that people WILL die due to this. It’s up to the citizens to decide if the cost in lives is worth the right and ability of common citizens to keep and bear firearms. Just like we make that calculation with other things that WILL kill a non-zero number of citizens. To me, the cost is similar to many things our society allows. That said, as with those other things we allow that will kill citizens, mitigation is always a good thing, if it can be done within the confines of the law and Constitution. IF that mitigation is actually useful and helpful and would make any sort of difference, I think it’s worth looking into.
So if there were suicide booths on every corner, there would be no change in the suicide rate. Everyone who thinks about committing suicide already have all the tools they need.
How is that a strawman? You are literally saying the ease of use and accessibility of suicide tools doesn’t matter. Or for long, I assume you think suicide rates would bump up but then settle into pre-suicide booth levels.
Because that’s not what you said, which was about suicide booths and other bullshit that had nothing to do with my own post. In addition, I specifically said that it WOULD have an effect, especially in the short and medium term. Thus, it’s a strawman. In fact, it’s the definition of strawman.
Suicide, and specifically suicide rate has a lot of factors. Method is only one of them, and, pretty obviously, varies from country to country, region to region, and over time in the same country or region. Methods go out of favor, or come into favor, or are used more or less. But the method isn’t what makes the base rate.
So, in this case, magically taking away all guns will have an impact…as I acknowledged, despite your strawman. But over time, people will just use other methods…as they do in other countries that ban or heavily restrict guns. Eventually, if nothing else changes, the rate will pretty much go back to, or close to, the original baseline for a country, which itself varies over time. Funded programs that target people who are potential suicides are going to have a way bigger impact, especially in the long term than targeting a method of suicide and taking that out of use.
In any case, we’ve seriously strayed away from the topic of the thread, but I didn’t see Kobal2’s reply until the thread popped back up earlier so figured I’d reply to say that I generally agree it would have an effect.
