But in many of them, they accept higher levels of tobacco deaths or alcohol deaths than we do. Context is still important, regardless. Basically, it comes down to what a society is willing to accept wrt risk in contrast to what they want.
The middle position to this is that we regulate tobacco and alcohol use and access (more than many other countries ‘of the industrialized world’), and we COULD do the same with guns if we could all just agree and compromise. That is actually what this thread was supposed to be about. Sadly, it’s not.
I think your idea is probably the wisest one however, I still don’t see how that will stop criminals from getting guns nor some crazy from doing a Las Vegas style mass murder.
My thing is I want people to be able to protect themselves and their homes from the bad guys. Every day in the US guns are used to stop criminals and prevent crime. Quite a few people I know keep one around for just that reason.
I didn’t click the link. I assume your point is
*“Ha ha! Gun grabber is not up-to-date on gun-lover lingo! Only gun lovers should have a voice on gun legislation.”
*
I don’t know if “satisfied” is the right word, but I understand that people use guns to kill themselves and others sometimes, and that fact hasn’t persuaded me that they should be banned. I also accept roughly 110 deaths a day so I can own and operate a motor vehicle. And roughly 3,200 Americans die each day from heart / cardiovascular disease, but I feel no pressing urgency to ban Big Macs.
“we don’t believe bans have ever worked on anything” comes across as a pretty self-serving idiotic statement, exposed as such after mere nanoseconds of consideration.
The NRA apparently heard from their members, who were not at all happy with the idea that the first piece of gun-related legislation Republicans might pass after winning unified control of the federal government would be a ban of some sort.
Bans (or heavy regulations) on lots of things have worked - full auto weapons are actually quite rarely used in crime. Civilian nuclear weapons are pretty rare. The idea that bans can’t work is just obviously untrue. Not that bans always work, but sometimes they do.
We banned booze. How’d that work out? So badly we brought it back. We banned drugs. How’d that work out?
We banned kiddie porn. How’d that work out? We banned drunk driving. How’d that work out? We banned explosives. How’d that work out?
I can keep on going.
If someone is determined to kill a bunch of people, it is very hard to stop. Banning particular things isn’t going to work if the person is really determined.
If guns were banned in the U.S. I suspect it might have an effect on events that had short planning stages. Think guy gets pissed, grabs his gun and drives to the local <whatever> and starts shooting. For things like the Las Vegas shooting, well, he’d either find guns somehow or actually use the explosives he worked on. Or take flying lessons then rent a plane. Or make mustard gas. Or buy some ball bearings, a pressure cooker or thirty and some explosives.
As far as banning bump stocks goes, go for it. I suspect that building one is easy in the big scheme of things and won’t do a damned thing if another jackass wants to kill a bunch of strangers because the jackass is mad at the world.
Can you name a few things that have been banned and worked? I mean, full auto weapons are not banned, and, frankly, were heavily regulated because people THOUGHT they should be and because there were a few sensational crimes where they were used. Looking at the pre-heavy regulation crime done with full auto weapons it was minuscule. Post heavy regulation it’s…minuscule. Obviously, these bump fire mods are available, yet you don’t usually see them used in shootings. So, I’m not seeing this as a good example. We tried to ban alcohol and various drugs, yet I’m not seeing any success there. There have been attempts to ban porn, especially child pornography, but it still happens. I can’t think of much that’s been banned in the US that has worked very well.
That’s the thing, IMHO. Trying to ban something that a large number of people want is going to be a fool’s errand. They will just do it anyway, judging that the authorities can’t catch everyone. That’s basically why people still buy illegal drugs, after all. What you really need to do is get people to stop wanting whatever it is you are trying to get rid of voluntarily. It’s working, slowly, with the tobacco…the percentage of Americans who smoke has slowly gone down over time and is much lower than in many other countries as a percentage of the population. If you actually tried to ban guns, flat out, what I predict is it would be Prohibition all over again…the fervent would rejoice for a while in their victory, but the average gun owner would just figure out ways around the laws, and you might get a situation where there are more guns per household than there were before the ban. Some people would turn in guns, but many wouldn’t, and the backlash would be incredible and would probably cause people to be even more stubborn about this.
Conversely, we had been on a trajectory where the guns per household were actually dropping as a percentage until fairly recently. Voluntarily, fewer people were choosing to have guns in their homes. Crime rates have also been on the decline in the US until the last year or so, and even though they are increasing today from what I recall they aren’t anywhere near what they were in the 70’s or 80’s (or even the early 90’s).
Bans on alcohol and drugs haven’t worked because they’re reasonably easy to manufacture in the privacy of your own home. The bans and restrictions on everything else we’ve banned or restricted have worked GREAT.
No, the bans haven’t completely eliminated the thing in question, but the idea that a solution must be perfect to be worth doing at all is standard conservative bullshit. It is not impossible to make things better.
What’s an example? It’s not easy to manufacture, say, cocaine in the US unless you have the base materials. Same goes for other drugs (all of the poppy-based ones AFAIK you have to import the base material). What are some examples that they worked ‘great’.
WRT guns, I suppose it depends on what you mean. It’s going to be no harder to smuggle in guns than it is to smuggle in cocaine or other drugs. Making ammo is pretty simple, and regardless of how effectively you think it will be to get folks to voluntarily turn the things in, there are currently more guns in the US than people…so, existing guns are going to be pretty much everywhere…which means there will be a thriving trade on the black market if you tried to ban them (this is all assuming you could get a full and complete ban, of course). As for making them, I’d guess it’s as easy for someone with the right tools and stock to make a gun as it is for a cartel to make drugs in quantity or the old bootleggers to make booze in after Prohibition…it’s all about what you know and what access you have.
I didn’t say the solution has to be perfect to do it, I asked for examples of bans that have actually worked. I still haven’t heard any and, frankly, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. In most cases, post-ban you actually have people doing whatever you are banning MORE than they were pre-ban. But if you have some solid examples I’m all ears.
Nukes, rocket launchers, tanks, kiddie porn, robbery, battery, slavery, pooping in the streets…
‘But we haven’t eradicated kiddie porn, robbery, battery, or slavery at all!’
No, but we have reduced the incidence of it happening and given ourselves avenues for punishing perpetrators that we catch. Do we create ‘underground movements’? Sure. But the underground movements leave society better off than if the movements in question were still overground.
Please tell me you didn’t just compare bump stops to nuclear bombs.
I’m with those who think trying to legislate away these spree killers is a lost cause. The focus should be on the day-to-day street killings that make up the vast majority of gun deaths in the US.
Well, you go from things that even if they weren’t ‘banned’ most people couldn’t afford anyway to things I’m not seeing any evidence that being banned has done, well, anything wrt the numbers. Do you have evidence that banning kiddie porn, say, has actually reduced the amount out there or the amount looked at? Maybe it has, though the fact that we still see people arrested for it fairly often makes me wonder. Robbery is certainly ‘banned’ I guess…do you have evidence that over time since robbery was ‘banned’ that this has caused it to go down in rate? I mean, it’s been ‘banned’ since, well, forever…doesn’t seem to have had the amount of robbery dry up over time. Slavery was certainly banned in the US, but I’m unsure whether it’s less worldwide today than it has been in the past. The North Koreans get a large percentage of their hard currency from slavery, and from what I’ve read slavery affected a hell of a lot of people even today. You seem all outraged, yet, again, you STILL haven’t actually shown how banning something has really done much. You’d have been better off talking about gun bans in Japan or Australia instead of nukes and robbery. Seems a better case could be made there. Those get back to my actual point, which is to REALLY get rid of something in a society what you have to do is have people voluntarily give it up.
Have we? That’s what I’m asking you, yet you still haven’t shown it. I think that drugs and alcohol are the prime examples of how your proposed ban on guns would actually play out.
Also, do underground movements leave society better off? Have the drug cartels or the mob during Prohibition left society better off? That doesn’t seem intuitive to me, to be honest.
Let me ask you a question…has ‘banning’ murder stopped people from being murdered? This is kind of the equivalent in silliness, so you should give your answer as much thought as I did, which is to say you should saying something about how stupid a question it is in some diplomatic or perhaps funny way.
Now, would you like to go back to the quoted parts and give me your real answer or ask me a relevant question?
Yeah, probably overplayed that as a percentage of the world’s population. That said, the estimates of the number of slaves today in the world are between 30-40 million, so it’s not like it’s disappeared. It’s just mainly disappeared from the US and Europe. But yeah, I admit that while 30-40 million is still a hell of a lot of people there are over 7 billion humans on the planet today, verse the 1 billion or so during the latest industrialized and official slavery period. Slavery just seems to be the gift that keeps on giving wrt humans throughout history with periods where it’s accepted and periods where it isn’t but still exists regardless.
Slavery was certainly banned in the US, but I’m unsure whether it’s less worldwide today than it has been in the past. The North Koreans get a large percentage of their hard currency from slavery, and from what I’ve read slavery affected a hell of a lot of people even today. You seem all outraged, yet, again, you STILL haven’t actually shown how banning something has really done much. You’d have been better off talking about gun bans in Japan or Australia instead of nukes and robbery. Seems a better case could be made there. Those get back to my actual point, which is to REALLY get rid of something in a society what you have to do is have people voluntarily give it up.