Funny, how no one I know is complaining that they can’t use a SAW to go squirrel hunting. Guess not making those available is a sensibile law as well. The law abiding stay safer and criminals have it harder.
If you don’t see the difference between “generally available, with more red tape/paperwork/fees” and “can’t get it at all or supply is so limited as to artificially inflate the price beyond all reason”, then you’re beyond any help I can offer.
So that’s two gun supporters who’ve dodged the question, and none who’ve answered it. Way to engage in honest debate, here, guys.
It’s not the only use a gun can be put to, but it’s the only use a gun is designed for.* (Just as a chainsaw is only designed for cutting down trees, but one could be used to dismember a body.) Please feel free to point out to me the gun that’s designed for teaching you Spanish, though.
*Actually, another statement of mine was more accurate: causing grievous bodily harm to living things. It’s not just about killing people; it’s also about killing animals. Please note that I have assigned no moral value to this purpose; I’m just stating it.
[QUOTE=Shot From Guns]
A crazy person has you cornered. She offers you a choice. You can be either:
a.) Punched in the head once; or
b.) Shot in the head once.
Which one would you prefer?
[quote]
To fight the hypothetical, of course. 
In that situation, I’d of course pick a punch in the head. On the other hand, I’d much rather be shot in the head than stabbed with a kitchen knife in the head, so I can’t say I see the relevance.
Actually, both of the firearms I currently owned are designed primarily for shooting at specific kinds of targets and would be hard-pressed to do more than seriously annoy/lightly wound a human-sized target without some exceptional accuracy and/or close range. (my only rifle is a .17 target rifle, and my shotgun would need a different choke and a few other (admittedly easy and convenient) adjustments to do anything other than bother someone with birdshot.) That they COULD under the right conditions be adjusted or reconfigured to do grievous bodily harm doesn’t say anything about their design purpose.
Unless you’re arguing that firearms in general are by default designed to hurt living things badly, and weapons of the type I own are exceptions/special cases.
The point is that fists, while potentially damaging, at least offer you a decent chance of survival. A gun, not so much. (Which isn’t to say you can’t survive being shot in the head–just that it’s highly unlikely.) That’s why some people believe that guns should be more regulated than, say, tire irons.
Ignorance fought, then. But I’m guessing those were both modified from earlier models of guns to make them, for lack of a better term, “toy” models. To analogize, the existence of Hot Wheels doesn’t mean that cars aren’t designed for transportation.
Depends who is doing the beating and who is getting beaten. A “fair fight” between evenly matched opponents is different from a situation where there is a disparity in size, strength, age, skill, or numbers. I’m in decent shape for a man in late middle age and I’ve had training in unarmed combat; but the three young men in the car I mentioned upthread would have been able_in all likelyhood_to beat me to death.
Have you ever been in a real fight or been attacked by someone who is making a serious effort to hurt you?
I’m one of those people, so fair enough–I just don’t think they should be regulated out of reach of Joe Safe-Gun-Owner. Your thoughts on my counter-hypothetical of knife-vs.-gun instead of punch-vs.-gun.
Upon further research, I think I’d have to ponder it for a while as to whether I’d rather be shot in the head with .17HMR than punched in the head by a professional boxer.
To make it a bit more clear:
My target rifle was built from the ground up to engage cardboard targets at a range of 50+yards. .17HMR rounds will deliver about 245 ft-lbs of energy at optimal range, to compare that there are boxers on record who can deliver 950+ ft-lbs of energy with a punch–obviously these are not directly comparable by any means, but you can see how the mere fact of getting shot with .17HMR isn’t going to kill you unless it hits you someplace especially vital–I’m not sure it’d even penetrate the skull. For comparison a typical pistol round (9mm or .45) delivers about 400ft-lb, and a typical deer rifle delivers something on the order of 2600 ft-lb.
My shotgun is set up/choked for trap shooting, and the only ammo I have on hand is No.8 Birdshot. Configured in this manner, if a human-sized target is within ten feet and not wearing a jacket, I might lacerate his skin/first layer of muscle but I’m not going to damage his ribs let alone do him serious injury. In point of fact, I don’t keep heavier rounds around because I don’t need 'em.
Doesn’t matter. I’d still rather have them unarmed or armed with a knife or a tire iron because (a) those things aren’t designed to efficiently kill and (b) if I can keep out of their reach, I’m safe.
Not sure exactly where you were going with that–were you saying that it would be less painful to be shot to death than stabbed?
You have, for all intents and purposes, a “toy gun.” It’s a weapon that was deliberately made less lethal than its precursors so that it could be used for pleasure shooting. This is not the same gun that someone would be carrying with them “for protection.”
I’m sure you would rather have them unarmed. I would also rather have them unarmed. Pretty much anybody would rather that criminals who are trying to do them harm be unarmed. The only problem is, the criminals get guns even though they’re not supposed to have them. Felons aren’t supposed to have guns - but they do. Hell, people aren’t supposed to commit armed robbery - but they do.
The question here is whether or not you or I - non-criminals - should be able to be armed. In light of the above, I believe the correct answer should be “yes.” The bad guys are going to find guns no matter what, so handgun restrictions only hurt law-abiding people who want to defend themselves.
The question is not “should law-abiding people be allowed to own and carry guns,” but rather, “how do we determine who is mentally stable and well-trained enough to be able to use guns in a responsible manner.”
If you’d bother to look upthread, you’d see that I don’t have a problem with guns per se–I have a problem with American gun culture.
Cool. Presuming, of course, that you *can *stay out of their reach. I guess the handicapped, the elderly, the less-athletic-than-their-attackers, et. al. should just take their chances on surviving a beating or stabbing?
See, criminals don’t play fair. They specifically target people whom they believe they can successfully victimize. So, yes, if you are a big, strapping young man who carries himself with authority, you are less likely to be chosen as a target than a small person, old person, handicapped person, and so on. If the shitbags happen to be running in a pack, they’ll even go after that strapping young man if they believe their numbers and weapons will allow them to prevail.
This is why I don’t believe in playing fair. I’m not a strapping young man. I’m a middle aged guy who has arthritis. Your average late teens-early 20’s shitbag is faster than me and possibly stronger. He also is fueled with a desire to victimize others. I don’t owe him anything, least of all a fair fight. Neither do any of the other people he might choose as his prey on any given day.
Yup. Also, puppies and children. In fact, if we could work out some kind of a rig to make them **less **mobile and **more **defenseless, that would be optimal.
I’ll take that as an admission you have no legitimate reply but can’t bear to simply say so.
What sort of significance are we talking about here? We can talk chi-squared, or changes in probability of this or that theoretical event… but I don’t know how many theoretical lives have to be saved before folks will become willing to give up their actual rights.
I ascribe these numbers to a failed (and failing) prohibition policy. Undercut the illegal drug market and there aren’t enough profits left to kill over, to buy police, or to keep the multitude of satellite criminal organizations running.
Mexico has fairly strict (similar to early-1990s UK) gun control, in theory. In practice, well funded criminals don’t have to obey (or enforce) the law in Mexico.
Why do you assume the yoots *didn’t]/i] have their own guns? Maybe they took a moment to think very carefully about what they were doing and why and realized that it wasn’t worth it.
Have you heard the term “regulars” used in reference to military personnel? “Well regulated” means “gun control” in the sense of hitting your target. The Militia Act of 1792 had requirements for minimum armament and periodic drilling that were unpopular. (There’s a newspaper editorial from the time noting the requirements of 20-24 prepared shots for a musket, firelock, or rifle was excessive and that no one should need more than 10. I don’t have a good reference, unfortunately, it’s just stuck with me as particularly humorous 180 in light of the 1994 AWB restrictions on normal capacity magazines.) The States’ reaction made it pretty clear that, while they agreed the second amendment explicitly denied the Federal government any authority to infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms, it did not grant the Feds any particular power or authority to force the militia to be “well regulated” if they didn’t want to be.
It certainly appears to be the intent of the Framers that the civilian militia be armed and trained to have parity with an average paid army of the day. You can see in the Milita Act of 1792 talk about forming companies of artillery, et al. from volunteers within the battalion with a notable absence of discussion about how the Federal government will be providing the heavy metal or where it’s to be kept when exercises aren’t being conducted. Many of the cannon for the US Navy were initially supplied by private citizens… which was about as heavily armed as you could get in those days.
Whether they’d keep this point of view as technology progressed is open for discussion. They’d be down with anything we use to kit infantry, almost certainly. Whether the talk about a home-sourced artillery company would get translated forward into mechanized armor, I couldn’t tell you.
You thought your question was “honest debate”? I would not be happy to take my lump and then let her go about her crazed merry way to attack someone else. I would be willing to risk getting shot in the head if it meant the crazy person would be stopped.
In the spirit of “honest debate”, though. You’re in a heated argument with someone who is categorically unwillling to use unjustified lethal force. Would you prefer your opponent had a gun or would you rather they had their fists?
Well, if someone is currently in prison for something that demonstrates a lack of mental stability, training, or responsibility, that might be a good way to tell. Otherwise, I’m not too keen on the idea of restricting people’s rights before they’ve done anything that would warrant it.
Mostly, I’m saying a knife is equally lethal to a gun in a “one free shot to the head” level, only more liable to permanently main/cripple instead of kill outright. Roughly, my point was “there are things other than guns that would more than fill the place you made for them in your hypothetical”.
This is very true–while my shotgun has the capability to be easily modified as a home defense weapon (by purchasing an 18" smoothbore open choke barrel), I do not currently choose to exercise that capability because I have no need of more potent weaponry at this time–99.99% of home invaders around here I could stop with a broom because they’re dumbass college kids, we don’t even have a meth problem like any other self-respecting central PA town.
So we’re in agreement then–the problem is how to properly regulate and license firearms to maintain their availability as much as possible to Joe Safe-Gun-Owner while denying them as much as possible to Murray Mugger, Colleen the Closet Basket Case, and Will Wifebeater.
I’d say we’d need to move this thread to great debates, but it has never stopped pro-gun fanatics from saying the kind of shit that provokes this response before.
THIS would be an interesting topic for a great debate–I think that there’s a lot of problematic interpretations centering on the various definitions of the term “militia” in that era, but I prefer to think from a sanity and historical local militia composition standpoint that civilian ownership should be limited to light infantry weapons–11B stuff in Army terminology unless they changed the MOS on me. I was under the impression that the Militia Act of 1792 was more properly dealing with the kinds of formations that would eventually become the State and National Guard type units.
Just about every country pursues largely similar drug control policies to our own. Did you think countries with low gun crime are the ones who bit the bullet (no pun intended) and said, “okay, we’re going to legalize cocaine”?
Suppose you lay out for me exactly what I said that you think is “shit” and provocative?
In fact, she quoted it in the post I was responding to. I know it’s hard to keep track of who’s a rabid anti-gun nut and who’s actually trying to have a debate in good faith, but so far my experience has been that Shot From Guns is the latter–hell, she even says:
And if you don’t think much of the more visible parts of American gun culture can be dumb as shit, then I don’t know what to tell you.