Individual or group A says some stupid shit.
Group B says group A is bad.
Therefore Group B must be good.
Supporting gun rights doesn’t mean you fully support the NRA.
The NRA is also not responsible for assholes shooting people
The science trotted out most frequently is mostly a 25 year old paper with methodological conerns (Kellermann 1993). Or complains that the CDC is not allowed to research gun violence (not true, bolding mine: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”).
Or how they actually did do the research, but it wasn’t publicisedpotentially because it didn’t fit the narrative (there are of course more mundane possibilities). Again, someone like Kleck does have his own bias, and his claims should be carefully evaluated. But any errors in his research shouldn’t discredit other research.
Not required. Only to drive on public roads, roughly analogous to requiring a CCW to carry loaded outside. I cannot say how this jibes with “constitutional carry,” though one de jure has constitutional protections while driving does not.
Not sure without a definition.
No, I would not be in favor of these laws, but do they exist anywhere? Obviously failure to supervise or take care of your kids should lead to penalties.
I think this exchange right here is demonstrative of part of the problem - the people who view guns as a useful and potentially life saving tool, are as strong in this conviction as the people who view guns as a device whose use needs to be restricted to save lives of shooting vitcims, are in their conviction. I think a lot of the people who advocate gun control really don’t get this - they think that the gun owners (more specifically, gun owners who are motivated by the idea of self-defense, not hunting) own their guns out of spite or something, like their sole purpose in buying those guns is to stick it to liberals. While there are undoubtedly a lot of obnoxiously spiteful conservatives among the ranks of gun owners, this is by no means the primary reason why they believe they should have a right to own those weapons.
The pro-gun-control people feel that pro-gun debaters are being petty and disingenuous by throwing terminology at them and acting like knowing the difference between .223 and .22 or “magazine” and “clip” is what separates people who are qualified to discuss guns from people who are unqualified.
The pro-gun people likewise feel that the pro-gun-control people are being petty and disingenuous by throwing statistics at them when they truly believe their right to protect their lives is at stake.
I think there can be substantial common ground reached between advocates of the 2nd Amendment and advocates of tighter restrictions on it, but the way that people discuss it often makes it really difficult for that common ground to be reached.
This makes me think of my own story of defensive gun use.
My extended family and I were vacationing in Bonnaire and had rented a house, I awoke to someone carefully opening the door. Fortunately I had my sidearm by my bed, reached for it and called out. He fled upstairs and in a fit of adrenaline I ran after him with my weapon drawn. He and several of his compatriots fled the house via the balcony while I woke the rest of my family. They had bent the bars on an upstairs window to get in. An obvious example of defensive gun use that probably saved the lives of my family including my 11 year old niece.
All of the above is absolutely true except for the fact that I didn’t actually have a gun, and only realized how stupid it was to run after him until after they had all fled. I suspect that a large number of those “defensive gun uses” would have had the same outcome whether or not the person had a gun. In particular I suspect that a number of them are of the form: “I heard a suspicious noise outside, went to the door with my gun and scared the intruder (or possibly racoon) off.”
I do believe that a substantial proportion of gun owners view guns as a life saving tool. I also believe that many anti-vaxers have a strong interest in their children’s health. That doesn’t mean they are accurate in their risk analysis.
Right on. And it should not be an all-or-nothing game, but while we are paralyzed by not yielding an inch, each clash just makes the argument more emotional.
I think that you are being more than a bit unfair to the ones who are looking for some level of gun control here. We are not looking to take the guns out of their hands, we are trying to make sure that they are in responsible hands. IF they say that that means that they will be taken from them, then that means that they do not consider themselves to be responsible.
We do get it, and I think it is perfectly fine that if you are in a situation where you fear for your safety, then you should be able to become a responsible gun owner.
The problem is, is that the gun advocates do not want to have any sort of interference whatsoever in their owning of any and every gun they could possibly want, and that ability to carry it anywhere they want. This means that irresponsible gun owners also get to buy any and every gun they want, and to take those guns anywhere they want.
I am sure that all the gun owner in this thread are responsible, that they keep their guns in a safe and away from the curious hands of children, as well as the hands of criminals. I am sure that when they carry in public, they maintain 100% situational awareness at all times. I am positive that when they practice their marksmanship, they make sure that the place that they are practicing is safe and that they are aware of what they are using as a backstop.
Unfortunately, not everyone is as diligent and responsible as the people in these threads, and as such, tragedies occur. Sometimes it is that an irresponsible gun owner has left their gun where a kid can get it, and in playing with it, they can hurt themselves or sometimes even another kid. Sometimes an irresponsible gun owner leaves their gun in a position to be easily stolen, and then it is in the hands of a criminal who may hurt someone with it. Sometimes, the irresponsible gun owner sells their gun to someone without the purchaser providing any sort of identification, which means that the seller very well could have sold the gun to someone who was prohibited form having a gun, while maintaining plausible deniability that they didn’t know that they sold the gun to someone who was not eligible to buy it. And sometimes, people are unaware of what it behind the target that they are shooting at, and so, instead, they kill someone who just happened to be unlucky enough to be used as your backstop.
I don’t want to take the guns from responsible gun owners, and I don’t even really want to take the guns from irresponsible gun owners. I just want guns to be in the hands of responsible gun owners, and out of the hands of the irresponsible or the criminal.
I’d love to work with the gun advocates on this, but they tend to find ready access to their toys more important to them than the fact that everyone has ready access to their toys.
I do not feel that the vast majority of gun owners own and buy guns out of spite of the gun control crowd, but I do have to express more than a bit of :dubious: when the best selling gun or accessory is the one that was used in the latest mass shooting.
More than even that. As they tend to also dismiss people who do know the difference between the two. You even have a pro-gun poster here who insists that a .223 and a .22 are basically the same round, and dismisses those who claim otherwise.
I get the same argument with pro vs anti seatbelt users. The anti seatbelt users are absolutely correct that there are a few circumstances where not being buckled in will be better than being buckled in. When you show them the statistics that show that those circumstances are far far rarer than people being saved by wearing a seatbelt, they respond with anecdotes of “some guy that was thrown clear”. They too, will claim that you are being petty and disingenuous when you try to override the gut feelings that they truly believe with solid facts.
Same as DGU’s. It’s all anecdotal. I’ve been involved in a few violent altercations in my life that were resolved without blood shed, and no gun was involved. fF I had had a gun, then I would call it a DGU. What is common to the two scenarios is not the gun, but a person who is able and willing to de-escalate a situation, rather than increase the threat.
I’ve read some of these self reported DGU’s and many of them are people describing how they broke the law and intimidated someone by brandishing their gun at someone that they only perceived as a threat. There was a poster on here a while back who described how he encountered a couple of people in broad daylight in a Home Depot parking lot, and how he felt that he show off his gun (by pointing it not at them, but at the entrance to the building), in order to stay safe. That’s a DGU?
There was the story a while back of the kid who got lost on the way to school and stopped at a house to ask directions. The owner of the house came at him with a shotgun, and had the owner not failed to disengage the safety, most likely would have killed him. (He did shoot, but was delayed long enough that the kid had a head start enough to be missed.) Were it not for the fact that his Nest video recorder picked it up, he could have called that a DGU as well.
If you start and argument that gets heated, and the other person starts looking like he may become violent over this argument, flashing your gun will intimidate them into not becoming violent, so would be considered a DGU.
Personally, the only DGUs that I consider to be valid is when someone of a weaker stature protects themselves against a person who does not have a gun themself. (A DGU against a gun is a wash, IMHO.)
I agree with that. Usually, the gun advocates insist that gun control advocates are arguing in bad faith, that we really just want to get rid of all guns (Why? why would we care about guns except for the effect that they have on society?), that because one person on a blog said that we should ban all guns, that all gun control advocates want to ban all guns.
And, it is the gun advocates, not the gun control advocates, who insist that the only way to make any decrease in gun violence is to ban all guns and make gun owners into criminals. They are very persuasive on this, and one day, thay may convince me to join in the “ban them all” crowd.
Or scared away the kid asking for directions, or the girl with a broken down car, or girl scouts trying to sell you cookies.
Yes, that’s obnoxious, you don’t need to be an expert. But you should have a minimum of knowledge. The places are where it legitimately makes sense is when someone says an AR-15 should be banned but a Mini-14 shouldn’t (functionally the same except one is wood) or impute magical thinking on the .223 round, but grandpa’s .30-06 is okay (2-3x more powerful than .223).
The “assault weapon” / “assault rifle” / semi-automatic / automatic distinctions can be important, because I do sometimes see people advocating for one or more of those things to be banned without really understanding what they are talking about. This applies all the way from regular people casually discussing the issue like we are, to politicians at the highest levels.
In this speech by Hillary Clinton, at 6:04 she says: “You’re walking to class…you’re driving your baby around in a car seat…you’re going to church…and somebody has an automatic weapon, or even worse, an assault weapon that is a military instrument of war?”
Anyone who is moderately knowledgeable about guns knows that what she said here doesn’t make any sense. But I think a lot of people who don’t know very much about guns - and I’m not saying this like it’s inherently a negative thing; a lot of people have no interest in knowing about guns and that’s fine - would hear those terms being discussed in the way that Clinton does in her speech, and they might have a clear, but inaccurate, mental picture in their mind: maybe they think that classes of weapons in America are something like “non-automatic”, which would be bolt-action rifles; “semi-automatic” which to them might mean handguns; “automatic” which to them might mean “repeatedly fires shots when you hold down the trigger” and then “assault” which means “repeatedly fires shots when you hold down the trigger, but at a greater rate of speed and with higher-caliber/more ‘powerful’ bullets.” This would be an inaccurate conception of what weapons are available and how they work, but I would actually not be surprised if there are a lot of people in this country who do think that, or something similar.
And so of course when people call for something to be banned but don’t have a clear idea of what it is, the other side isn’t going to take them seriously.
The proper response to people who are under misconceptions about how guns work isn’t to call them stupid and deride them for not understanding, and dismiss their concerns out of hand. They should be given the correct explanation of the terms in an objective way.
We have debated this in GD, and it was shown that the early studies done by the CDC were biased to start, and that they used a unusual and never before used metric .
Exactly. Most are not reported but just about every murder is. There is no reason to report a non-violent use of a handgun for defense. Not even required by law.
Possibly true, but we have no way of knowing. I have recounted my two stories her on this MB, and in the first case- homeless guys coming out and making angry demands for money, with makeshift weapons- and a woman being assaulted on the street-perhaps both could have been solved by me just faceing them donw. Or not. At the very least in the 2nd case, I stopped a felony in progress. Maybe if I had just yelled at him he would have stopped, but how do we tell?
First of all, I would like to thank everyone who has been participating, I know this topic has been done to death on the dope.
My views on guns have slowly changed over the past 20 years. When I was younger I hunted, mostly for the fun of camping and drinking with my friends, but I stopped after I got married. When I moved to Idaho I considered taking it up again, this is a hunting paradise after all, but never did. I bought a cheap 30-30 and sighted it in and fired it a few times. I bought a very cheap revolver from a co-worker who needed money. But never actually hunted.
Then I started working as an RN in an ER. Very busy ER but a safe area of the country. We didn’t have gang shootings. We had few truly random shootings. But what we did have was accidental shootings. People that shot themselves, their family members, or strangers. And every single person (that was able), told me how safe they are. “I always point it away from people”, I never leave it loaded", “I never drink around firearms”. Well bullshit, you certainly did this time.
We have also had several police officers killed by guns. I worked with those officers every day. Completely devastating. They weren’t accidental but they were even more unnecessary.
One morning my wife and I were woken by a deer snorting outside our bedroom. I went out to see what was up and a doe was snorting at her fawn, which was laying down. The fawn wasn’t moving and I assumed it had broken a leg. The doe wouldn’t let me get close enough to see exactly what was going on. It was early and I thought that I was going to have to shoot this fawn. I went to get my rifle and find the ammo, when I realized, “you are as likely to shoot yourself as that fawn”. I had just awoken, I hadn’t had any coffee and it was just getting light out. I haven’t done more than move those guns since and I gave away the ammo.
The point is, if you aren’t around a gun it is impossible to get shot. If YOU carry a gun, you might shoot me. The NRA’s solution to gun violence is more guns. If you buy that, then I’m surprised you can read.
With the explosion in mass shootings I am becoming more and more in favor of the Australian solution.
PS; The little fawn was already dead, I’m not sure why but it had a tiny little spot of blood on it’s head and, I think, a fractured skull.