Here’s the way I look at the whole “guns don’t kill people” argument. They are right in that a gun doesn’t whisper sweet nothings into people’s ears and force them to use it. They are right that a gun sitting on a shelf doesn’t kill anyone. Where I have issues though is what I’ll call the flood analogy. Let’s say you live in a flood plain and a flood hits. You know that the root cause of the flood is rain, so you can sit there and say ‘What we need to do is stop the rain.’ and that would indeed stop the flooding, but simply yelling that there’s too much rain doesn’t really help anyone. What you do is build a dike or a dam that controls the amount of damage that the rain can do. The gun lobby argument seems to be, “Most of the time we don’t need those dams or dikes and I personally enjoy the view without them. Why should a person like me be forced to suffer because of the rain? It’s the rain’s fault, so let’s stop the rain.” Well, I hate to break it to them, but the “rain” ie mental illness isn’t something that you can just stop. There is no magic wand that eliminates the dark triad. The reasonable solution then is to build those dikes and dams. Control the flow of guns and cut off access to the worst of them. You’re not going to stop the rain, but you’ll at least mitigate the damage it can do.
nuclear weapons don’t kill people
Why is someone not able to purchase an automatic weapon? Why is someone not able to easily purchase two tons of ammonium nitrate?
Good so far, for a flawed analogy. Rain is a natural phenomena, it happens, it’s going to happen, whether we want it to or not. Human violence is also, to a certain extent, a natural phenomena; we’re not nice people. Difference being, we can identify and control, take preemptive or corrective action, on anomalous human behaviors, be they criminal behaviors or psychoses.
Epic fail. The “gun lobby” (we’ll go with your terminology here; I don’t feel like a whole separate argument) is: “We’ve built dikes and dams and levees and locks on the rivers aplenty, and pay good money to have them staffed with professionals to operate them. But we still have floods. Not because the dams/dikes/levees/locks don’t work, but because the people manning them are asleep at the switch.”
I hate to break it to you, but law enforcement, schools, and such have the tools necessary to at least begin to identify the nutters and, if they’d get off their ass and do something, prevent them from escalating to mass shooters.
Nicholas Cruz was known to school administrators, and law enforcement at local, county and federal level to be a know threat; he publicly made terroristic threats, expressing a desire to be a mass killer.
Devin Patrick Kelley, of the Sutherland Springs Church Shooting, was court-martialed and Bad Conduct Discharged from the U.S. Air Force for felony domestic violence. If the Air Force Personnel Office at Holloman A.F.B could’ve been bothered to forward that info to the NICS system as directed by the U.S. Dept. of Defense to do so, he wouldn’t have been able to legally purchase a firearm.
We say, “Use the tools we have given you, the dams and dikes and levees and locks, to a reasonable approximation of their useful potential, before proposing more of the same. Maybe fire some of the people who are supposed to be operating them in time of need, but fail spectacularly. Maybe identify criminal organizations, like narcotics gangs and cartels and such, as Terrorists, and crack down on them with the full weight of all the billions, trillions, we spend on our Military and Law Enforcement.”
Insightful analogies here. Thanks for sharing this.
You can
Isn’t that fertilizer?
How would they have identified Stephen Paddock and what would they have done once they identified him?
No, they don’t. Hindsight is 20/20; for every person with a particular set of characteristics who goes on to kill people, there’s a slew of apparently identical people who don’t.
There is exactly one way to put a dent in the shootings; serious national gun control. There* isn’t* going to be serious national gun control. Therefore, the killings *will *continue indefinitely.
Have you tried buying large quantities of it lately?
Lets not forget the worse mass murder in US history was done be bad guys using box cutters.
France has way higher gun control than the US and they still have had mass shootings such as theNovember 2015 attacks. France has also had terrorists who simply drove their vehicles into crowds of people.
As for the AR-15 it has been out for 40 years. They partially banned it back in the 90’s.
You don’t win any points in favor of arsenic by pointing out how much worse cyanide is. That argument only works for stupid people.
***I don’t think banning AR-15s would make a dent in mass shootings. ***
It would, however, make less of a dent in the people shot.
Wounds From Military-Style Rifles? ‘A Ghastly Thing to See.’
*Trauma surgeons tell what it is really like to try to repair such devastating injuries. “Bones are exploded, soft tissue is absolutely destroyed,” one said.
*
I’m not convinced that there are more shootings, more murders or even more mass murders. But if there are, it isn’t because gun control laws have loosened up. You need to look at the behavior, not the hardware. And look at how these events are sensationalized by the media. You can’t tell me that these nutjobs aren’t looking to become infamous and notorious at the hands of the 24 hour news channels.
And while I agree that you can’t always predict what is going to happen, it WAS predicted with the Parkland murderer. Several people called and warned that he was planning a mass murder, and at least two mentioned it taking place at a school.
I am absolutely dumbfounded that all of the heat is on the NRA and guns, with seemingly little on the FIB and local police.
The reason we have more violence than places like Japan and the UK is that we don’t have the same people as those places. They are largely stable homogeneous populations with shared monocultures. Coincidently those two examples are islands which makes controlling what comes in easier. The closest international analogue to the United States would be Brazil which has a similar heterogeneous population and cultures. Its constitution is largely based on the US constitution as well. They have far stricter gun control than the US yet have 5 times the murder rate per capita.
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I think it’s worth repeating though that while to you ‘AR-15’ may be a relevant category and ‘military style rifle’ a meaningful term it’s not a relevant category nor the latter a meaningful term in fact. Moreover legislators not only voters often don’t know what they mean by such terms, and laws are actually passed classing guns by basically irrelevant characteristics, most often in the sense that other guns without those characteristics are about as deadly, not that the ones they target are not.
Banning the AR-15 (even in the broadest sense of clones etc) would be stupid. Lots of other guns fire 5.56mm/.223. Lots of guns in other calibers are just as lethal or more, whether or not those calibers or particular ammo are used (anymore) by armies. The round most civilians use in 5.56mm guns isn’t actually 5.56mm NATO though it can be; there are different rounds in that caliber. And the convenience value or ‘brand loyalty’ to AR-15 types is a quite shallow factor in the demonstrated preference for them; lots of other choices are quite close.
And if ‘AR-15’ is supposed to be shorthand for what ‘everyone knows’ means ‘all box magazine fed centerfire (ie non .22 rimfire) semi-automatic rifles and/or box magazines of large capacity’, everybody clearly doesn’t know that, because there are real state laws banning guns by name or appearance allowing ones functionally equivalent: pointless feel good.
Whether or not one agrees with more or what more gun control, focusing on one general design of gun, or using vague non technical or made up political terms like ‘military style’ or ‘assault weapon’ is counterproductive. It’s not that hard to learn a little about guns, then propose laws based on capabilities of guns, the only rational basis for distinguishing among them.
The problem presented to a potential mass shooter is that most people don’t want to get shot. They are going to run away and hide and otherwise make themselves harder to kill, it seems to be a natural reaction for most rational people.
To combat this, the potential mass shooter needs to have a weapon that can kill and injure as many as possible before people are able to react. The first few seconds are vital to get a high kill count. Sure, you may be able to pick off some victim here or there who wasn’t able to find good cover, but the juicy targets, the easy “spray and pray” targets of groups of people are all dispersed.
Fortunately for him, the mass shooter has easy and legal access to just the weapons that are designed specifically for the task of killing many people in a short amount of time, so he is able to get a higher kill count before it gets into the tedium of hunting people down and shooting them individually, along with the increased risk of his spree being cut short by responses from authorities or armed staff.
AR-15s and similar rifles are semi-automatic; in spite of slanted news coverage calling them “military-style-weaponry,” they do not “spray.”
I just now watched the CNN town hall where Rubio was confronted by the students. As much as I hate to fucking say this, because Rubio is so pathetic, the fact of the matter is that most of what he said is correct. The “assault weapons” category is problematic from a standpoint of banning certain weapons and not others, and while the material details don’t matter to many people (especially those who are grieving for their family who were killed), they are still relevant to the many other people who don’t want to see such rifles restricted.
Also, while the NRA undoubtedly is a powerful lobby, the fact is that there are many, many people who simply don’t agree with gun control and will vote accordingly. Casting this drama as the NRA against the people fits a convenient narrative of a powerful villain against the will of the people, but the reality is not so simple.
As I’ve said many times before, I don’t believe the Democrats at the present time should campaign too hard on gun control, and I believe any proposals involving the language “ban” qualify as “too hard.” The election is theirs to lose, again.
I’m surprised the anti-gun control folks on this board aren’t deeply offended by what this church did. I mean, the church forced these lawful AR-15 owning couples to unload their guns, leave all ammunition outside the church, and even zip-tie those now-useless-for-their-true-purpose-to-protect guns. What if a crazed killer ran in with a gun (or knife, or whatever, it doesn’t apparently matter because killer is crazy)? How would these folks have been able to defend themselves? Why didn’t the church TRUST these couples to handle their guns as they should, i.e. always loaded and ready for defensive shooting? :rolleyes:
Maybe the church consistory, elected from or otherwise supported by the church laity, got together and decided what they would do wrt the issue in their particular church?
And that their decision, in their church, is largely irrelevant to the broader national debate?
Or do you have another strawman point to make? :dubious: