Gun control wouldn't have stopped what happened in Vegas...should we do it anyway?

Great Debates
181

Esquire made a nice point in an email they sent out to subscribers yesterday. Responsible gun owners need to do something. On the one side you have you have crazed anti-gun nuts who want to ban everything and haven’t and aren’t going to get anywhere because of their all-encompassing “guns are Evilllllll!” Rhetoric.

On the other side you have the gun nuts who want to be Rambo, and the NRA and manufacturers who cater to them.

The excluded middle is the responsible gun owner who has his grandfather’s deer rifle, a shotgun, a varmint gun, maybe a trap gun, a plinker, and maybe something for home defense who has been raised around guns and for whom they are a fact a daily life. That guy has equal disdain for the Rambo wannabes as he does for alarmists. That excluded middle which is the proper place for responsible gun use and ownership needs to propose legislation to solve these issues. The anti- gun nuts need to rethink their position and tone down their rhetoric and realize that they are wrong to the degree that their is a worthy tradition of responsible gun use in this country that should continue. Get those two sides together and I think you can produce legislation that keeps miltary grade equipment out of the hands of lunatics. It doesn’t solve the drunken guy shooting his wife, or an impulsive suicide but it solves the big problem of the guy using a piece of military hardware to take out dozens or hundreds of people at once.

Solve that problem and that is an excellent start, and a worthy one. It will never happen as long as the anti gun crowd wants to take away grandpas hunting rifle or the handgun that a man own’s for self-defense. Concede that right to responsible gun owners and you’ll get somewhere. That’s my opinion

182

The louder a gun is the easier it is for a large group of people to know they’re in a “situation.” This is exactly what happened in Vegas if you have been watching. The gunman was completely invisible to the victims. And it was a festival concert situation. (REMEMBER ALL THE LOUD MUSIC AND CROWD NOISES?)

Now given that gun enthusiasts thoughts often run towards self defense with a firearm, especially in times of crisis, it is really shocking to me that they don’t seem to be able to put themselves in that situation in Vegas, in their minds. It seems like that’s all they do for the rest of their day. Is it because their handguns would have been useless and possibly dangerous for them to have in their hands? Does this event make their whole world fall down? Isn’t it a little bit of a snowflake attitude that you can’t do anything?

"As the Onion headline laid waste to America’s gun politics:

No Way To Stop This…Says The Only Country Where ‘This’ Regularly Happens"
(Stole this from a comments board)

Everyone who is a victim has that moment when it’s life or death. You’re just telling us that you haven’t had it. It doesn’t make a difference… to you. At this time. Congratulations.

183

Society has accepted the risk of car deaths because cars have a significant utility besides killing motorists and pedestrians.
“Lethality” is a bit of a fuzzy metric. I mean all guns are lethal if you’re the only one in the room who has one. But too your point, I suspect one of the problems we have is the labyrinth of gun laws based on this feature being banned or that caliber being restricted because certain things look more “tactical” than others.

The of course, you have the “arms race” people mentioned to engineer “legal” workarounds like the “bump stock”.

Or the way driving a motorcycle 200mph at night with no head lights is nice.:smiley:
The standard “pro gun” line WRT silencers is that they “aren’t actually silent”. While this is true. everything I’ve read about them indicates that they do provide the following benefits:

  • Reduce the sound signature or disguise it enough to make it less identifiable as a gunshot
  • Reduce muzzle flash (making the shooter more difficult to locate)
  • Make the gun more stable, so as to quickly allow quicker follow up shots
  • Reduce the noise within an enclosed space (such as a hotel room)
    To your point, the fundamental problem is that making a gun “less obnoxious to fire” and more ergonomic for the shooter tends to improve the tactical utility of the weapon as well.
    But the whole problem IMHO is that pro-gun people believe guns should be treated as this sacred objects. I can’t remember the last time I could bring shampoo or nail clippers on an airplane. You need to pass a test to drive a car and there are strict rules to follow with respect to where and how you drive it. Even more so for heavier and more complex machinery. And yet, in many states, nearly anyone can purchase nearly any firearm.
184

Yes, they are.
Especially when they think they are being smart

So can knives and matches and drugs and poisons etc to which many children die each year.
Perhaps anything that could harm a child should be illegal, and anyone even possessing one of the banned items should be publicly executed.

How? is not your home security system, freely available to to every man woman and child protecting it?
Perhaps for every time a home security system fails, one of the companies employees should be executed?
That should impress upon them the importance that their system protect VS all threats all times.

So can your own knife, bat, hammer, axe, garden tool, extension cord, flammable liquid, etc.
So these things are bad for you to have also, you may not have them

You are an expert on suicide?
Cyanide or a 4lb explosive device is less definitive?
I would prefer you just shoot yourself rather than deciding to take your car into oncoming traffic at 92mph which seems a somewhat popular idea of late.

I think your cites may fail you

Nice you copied it word for word of their website, but you misspelled You’re

You don’t have to worry about it doing anything, including saving your life.
If i want to kill you, unless you can kill me you have 0 hope.
You wont save your wife, you wont save your child who is screaming for you to save them and you wont save yourself, nor will the police, it will be too late and it is not their job to save you it is to investigate after the fact.

See you do not simply get to decide that. It is not how things work here.
You do not simply get to decide you or your thoughts or your ideas are superior, we decided that was BS and tossed out that nonsense over 200 years ago.

185

Meanwhile outside the thread these are not even questions for actual adults anymore.

186

I’m seeing a consensus emerge on the right about the need to ban bump stocks.

187

‘Assault rifle’ in the political realm is all about features, and only secondarily lethality. The ‘assault gun’ ban in my state NJ might be one of the more inane but not totally atypical. Focusing on ‘military style features’ it allows versions of the AR-15 family as long as they don’t have stuff like bayonet lugs or folding stocks. But the WWII M1 carbine (which fires a glorified pistol round) is an ‘assault gun’ in NJ.

You could have a lethality based law, but it would drop the ‘assault’ political marketing term and ban semi auto long arms (esp. which fire true rifle rounds) which can accept large box magazines (or less meaningfully ban just the larger magazines). Some state laws are close to that*. Then you’d have an arguably rational lethality based law…which would have no chance politically except in the bluest states, and no a big change in that is not about to happen. And that’s assuming the law is a ban on new sales. Laws retroactively outlawing large categories of gun are beyond politically infeasible, hasn’t happened on a large scale even in blue states.

So, let’s ban ‘bump stocks’, and be back to where we were a few days ago as far as the vast majority of voters who’d never heard of them**. But realistically that debate IMO belongs in ‘elections’, ie will GOP Congressional candidates opposing it give the Democrats an improved prospect in a few swing districts/states in 2018, or will even that much gun control actually still hurt the Democrats?

*but again say which magazine you can put in the gun, they don’t ban guns which can easily accept illegal magazines.
** in fairness I believe Diane Feinstein proposed a bill banning them. I’ve heard they’ve sold out everywhere in the last few days.

188

I don’t capitulate to the premise. All the evidence we have shows that gun control would actually stop these sorts of things. Countries that have gun control do not have these problems. Gun control can limit access to guns in the first place. Psychological testing being required can stop people from legally acquiring guns. And removing people’s ability to buy guns if they at any point give a gun away illegally can help. Throw in paying people for the guns they don’t need, and you can get a ton of guns off the streets. If owning an unregistered gun is a crime, you can take those guns away, too.

Everyone who wants or needs a gun for legitimate purposes can be allowed to have them, while taking them away from others. The main issue is this utter distrust of government that has been baked in. We need this, but the people who will have to be okay with this can’t fathom the idea that we are doing this for the good of society, and not to eventually use the law to come in and take their guns. Despite that not being a problem in other countries.

Decreasing the availability of guns will in fact make mass shootings less likely to happen. The more effort you have to go through to do these psychotic acts, the better. Having required mental health screenings where we can check a person’s ability to empathize and realize that killing people is wrong can help us keep track of these sick people.

None of these mass shooters have been healthy individuals, and there are always plenty of signs of their problems. It’s just that we have no system in place to check these people and keep them from owning guns.

189

Depends on what you mean by gun control. If you mean banning certain types of guns or making them extremely hard to get, then sure, you can sharply reduce gun deaths. That’s not on the table and never will be.

190

People keep saying this, but thus far it’s only emotion I’m seeing to back that up. He fired more shots into the crowd that he would have without this bump stock? Show me. He had 9 minutes to fire…how many shots could he have shot with a conventional semi-automatic verse the bump stock? And, more importantly, how accurate was he with the bump stock verse a regular semi-auto. By my calculations, he should have been able to shoot about 1000 rounds through a regular semi-automatic in 9 minutes. How many did he actually shoot?

As for the silencer, how did that actually affect his attack? He didn’t have it after all, so it obviously didn’t do anything to prevent this attack.

Feel free to go into details and walk me through this. It’s getting a bit tiring people coming into the thread and saying I’m wrong and then doing dick all to show that except for their outrage. This goes for the other posters who are saddened by my OP or outraged by it or just have some other bug up your ass about it.

191

This article is perhaps relevant:

192

It does seem as though we’ve been through this a few times, but watch this video, I advanced it to where she is about to fire on “full auto”. Tell me that you can fire a semi-auto that quickly.

You calculated about 1000 rounds in 9 minutes, that’s 1.85 rounds per second, without stopping. That seems a bit high. Not that you can’t squeeze off 2 shots a second, but not if you are switching between windows, reloading and stuff like that. I’d put it closer to 200-300 rounds if he pulled the same plan, but did not have auto-fire capability.

Why do you keep going on about accuracy? He wasn’t aiming at a person. He wasn’t aiming at a small group. He was aiming at a crowd of 22,000 in an area more than half the size of a football field. All he had to do was hit anywhere in that target, and he was hitting someone. He also had semi-auto’s in his room set up for sniper type of fire. If he had those, then why did he start with the autos, if they were just as good, or even better.

I haven’t heard an estimate of how many shots were fired, but given that there were 100s of people who were shot, 1000 rounds sounds like a pretty low number. Judging by the damage done, and the sounds from the video, I’m gonna WAG that the number of rounds fired ends up being much greater than 1000.

193

Okay, so he says that the policies that he was working on would not have had the effect that he was looking for. It did not change his stance that guns are a public danger, just that it is difficult to come up with legislation that will have a positive impact.

What policies do you recommend in order to reduce the number of gun deaths?

Or are you insisting that the only way to do anything about it is to repeal the 2nd amendment?

194

If you want to significantly reduce gun deaths, that is the only path forward. Not that i support it. Personally, I think mass shootings are a fad that will fade away. Crazy people who seek notoriety seek out different outlets for their crazy and it changes with the times. In the 60s, it was assassinations of famous people. In the 70s it was hijackings(the famous ones were terrorism, but a lot of crazy individuals tried to hijack planes because reasons). Columbine seems to have begun a trend towards mass shootings as the primary outlet for loser rage. But I suspect we’re about to enter the age of vehicle slaughter. It’s just much easier and probably more deadly.

195

This is from that article: “Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them”

Is that what he was researching? What policies would keep people that already have guns from using them?

196

I don’t know if DragonAsh is an expert on suicide, but she does know what the science on the subject says.

70% of people who survive a suicide attempt never make another one.
Cite

Levels of gun ownership in a given region are correlated with higher suicide rates, although gun owners are no more likely to have suicidal thoughts or be mentally ill. The relationship holds after adjusting for poverty, unemployment and urbanization.

There is no relationship between gun ownership and non-gun suicide; in states with lower gun ownership, the overall suicide rate is lower. It is not the case, as is often asserted, that suicidal people would simply kill themselves by other means if guns were not available; rather, for the most part, they would simply not kill themselves. This is likely because the “success” rate for gun suicide attempts is over 90%, while the rate for the next two most popular methods (poisoning and cutting) are both under 5%.

Cite for the above two paragraphs.

It is an established fact that more guns = more suicide. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we should or could get rid of all guns, but we don’t need to lie to ourselves about the correlation.

197

It was the deadliest single-shooter attack in history. Are you really that skeptical that a high rate of fire didn’t make it worse than it would have been otherwise?

Here’s what I think – by far the deadliest few moments were the first few seconds. After that, people were running for cover, and are hard to hit from a distance from any distance, and after another minute or two most who haven’t been wounded will have found some sort of cover. But in the first few seconds, they’re a stationary crowd, unsure of what’s going on, and all that matters in terms of killing as many as possible is “how many bullets can you pour into that crowd?”. For those moments, automatic rate of fire will result in the most bullets into that crowd, with many times more bullets than would be possible with semi-auto fire. And thus it’s logical to assume that the very high rate of fire resulted in more deaths in those most dangerous moments than semi-auto fire would have caused.

198

Yep. Also stronger background checks, required safety courses, and outlawing of high lethality assault weapons, but overall this stuff is likely to decrease gun violence much more than any gun control measures that are politically feasible in the foreseeable future.

Sadly, it appears we are destined to be arguing between the alternatives of doing nothing and doing stuff that’s unlikely to help much for a while.

199

I posted it a few pages ago. Not one reaction. But there are vehement posts about research needed.

200

Psychiatrists are not mind readers. There’s no feasible “screening” procedure that is going to identify a sociopath who is lying about his intentions. You could identify a handful of floridly psychotic or manic people, at tremendous cost per case identified, but most gun killers don’t fall into those categories.

I am very ambivalent about the idea of preventing people with a history of diagnosed mental illness from owning guns. My fear is that this could cause more deaths than it prevents, by discouraging people from seeking treatment. I am not aware of any good data addressing this topic.