Perchance, are you both not a gun owner or user and also someone who enjoys either boats, pools, cigarettes, trains or skiing?
Also, boms, missiles and speech were not mentioned prior in this thread.
Bombs and missiles are already banned, and speech is something I enjoy. Did you add these to somehow improve your argument? I don’t think that’s nice.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned banning hotdogs yet. They are the #1 cause of choking death in children. Furthermore, they often contain disgusting byproducts, like pigs’ knuckles and worse yet saturated fat that can cause heart disease in adulthood, if you don’t choke to death on them as a child.
That is a good point. This list grows longer and more ominous. What are the numbers on hotdog deaths? I need to know where to rank it on the action list.
Yeah, a few of them had already been mentioned in this thread, but they’re all some of the more usual inane comparisons to guns. I wasn’t trying to single anybody here out. I’m just tired of all of these arguments:
Each of them is more full of holes than the guys from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. And you all should know it by now. Since they’ve been repeated ad infinitum as long as gun policy has been a thing.
Honorable mentions for “Arguments I would like to see die in a fire”:
H1. Look at this creative reading of the Constitution that happens to agree with what I already felt about this.
H2. The Founders wrote it. I believe it. That settles it!
H3. Open carry? What is this, 1880s Dodge, KS?
H4. [I only read NRA newsletters and WorldNetDaily.]
H5. Your love of guns is actually {alienation from society / latent racism / latent homosexuality}. [I got my PhD in Armchair Psychology from Full Sail University].
H6. You can’t know anything about guns unless your stockpile is bigger than mine.
There seems to be no corner of the Internet that is safe from these. Even here on SDMB we see literate and respectable posters reduced to dolts endlessly babbling out minor variations on these cliches.
inb4 “The important thing is you found a way to feel superior to both sides.” Another braindead verbal diarrhea. Leave it in your quiver, Robin Hood.
Well that’s a simple question with a very complex answer. According to this article “10,000 children under 14 go to the emergency room each year after choking on food, and up to 77 die… About 17% of food-related asphyxiations are caused by hot dogs. If you were to take the best engineers in the world and try to design the perfect plug for a child’s airway, it would be a hot dog,” says statement author Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “I’m a pediatric emergency doctor, and to try to get them out once they’re wedged in, it’s almost impossible.”
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, since the real danger lies down the road, when the hotdog’s saturated fat accumulates on arterial walls causing the choking survivor to die of heart disease. Every 33 seconds someone in the United States dies from cardiovascular disease which is roughly the equivalent of a September 11th-like tragedy repeating itself every 24 hours, 365 days a year.
I don’t think it is lame or inane. It is perfectly legitimate to try to get clarification on what problem you are trying to solve before you start proposing solutions. People skip that essential step in all kinds of arguments or even for technical problems like troubleshooting a failure.
If the question is how to reduce preventable deaths through additional laws and regulations, then there is no reason to focus on guns in particular even if you still include them in the overall strategy. That is where the swimming pool comparison is relevant. You could make all swimming pool owners build high fences with secure locks around their pools, make them take life-guard classes before they can have one, and have a certified life-guard on duty anytime there is anyone under 18 swimming. That would reduce deaths through accidental drownings but it only addresses one problem of many. People in general are terrible at evaluating the statistics on these types of issues so you would need a ranked list with hard numbers to show you where you could save the most lives the fastest way.
Of course, that only applies if the real question is how to reduce preventable deaths and I don’t necessarily think that is true for many people. We are making the point that they can be honest about the real question or that proponents of some of the stricter gun control measures should clarify their true intent. There is nothing irrelevant or stupid about that.
The question was why do you think it is “inane” to compare guns to other things that kill folks, especially when you included bombs and missiles?
deleted: double post
It’s inane because it confuses the relation between the death statistic and the policy prescription. The statistic justifies the action people already want to take about one particular object. But the statistic all by itself does not imply a particular policy position. Gun ownership is controversial and for whatever reason, a lot of people hate it. More so than hot dogs and backyard pools. So if you want to point out the hypocrisy of gun control, you need to find a highly controversial object with a similar fatality rate/potential to inflict harm that people do not get animated about. Any other everyday object consumed in large quantities that might cause death doesn’t do the trick.
Yes, those naughty naughty Supreme Court Justices- how dare they do a “creative reading” on the 2nd Ad of the Bill of Rights! :eek: What gives them the right to do this? :rolleyes:
I mean- what is your argument? I can see three:
Guns are evil, they deserve special consideration.
Guns have no use I like/want/understand as opposed to car/smoking/bathtub so of course guns have to be banned.
Yes, all these things are dangerous and yes we have to regulate them all.
The part I bolded is, I think, the crux of the issue. The anti-gun group already wants guns banned, so the statistics on accidental deaths caused by guns are used to justify that action. Sandy Hook just adds emotion to the argument.
But what the pro-gun side is suggesting is: What is your objective? If your true objective is to prevent accidental deaths of children, then the solution is to look at the causes of accidental death in children (drowning is #1) and put your resources there first. If your objective is to prevent any premature death from any cause, then you put your resources into preventing heart disease, as that kills more Americans prematurely than anything else.
But if your objective is to ban guns because you hate that people can own them, then that’s fine. Just don’t justify it by saying your objective is to save lives.
The objective is not to solve some specific social problem but to create a just world. It’s the same rationale as wanting to ban all forms of abortion. In the anti-gun vision of the world, people just don’t have guns. Preventing childhood fatalities is an additional rationale that further supports the justice of the policy. The difference between guns and abortion is that anyone who voluntarily disarms while other people have guns is a sucker. So everyone has to disarm to achieve this just world, not just the people who don’t want to own guns themselves. This makes it somewhat different than, say, banning alcohol, hot dogs, or private pools.
ETA: Just to avoid ambiguity, this is not my position. I am just giving the argument the way I think it goes.
In other words, you are saying that these folks think this way because they believe that their view of what a “just world” would be is the only right one? So anyone who wants to have a gun must be what? Crazy? Criminal?
And somehow they also ignore the fact that if all law abiding folks gave up guns, there would still be plenty of guns out there for crazies and criminals to get a hold of?
Yes. Personally, I would rather live in a world without an armed civilian populace, too. I have no opinion on what kind of person would want to own a gun, and my own moral reaction to someone else’s gun ownership is uninteresting. What matters is that no one have guns. I also neither want nor own a car, but this is an issue where some pluralism is ok. My lack of car ownership doesn’t leave me vulnerable to people who do have cars. Not owning a weapon does leave you vulnerable to people who do. So if anyone is going to disarm, everyone has to disarm.
So personally, I think that an outright gun ban and statewide repossession will never and should never happen because we are too far gone for universal disarmament to ever work. It must be absolutely voluntary and not compulsory. There are a lot of people to persuade. The best we can hope for at the moment is a consistent and sensible regulation scheme in which we treat guns like any other important object that people own. This of course won’t happen until the second amendment is repealed, so that is where the real action ought to be. Not in these nonsensical, cosmetic end-run assault weapons bans or whatever. Guns are never going away because there is no clear path to voluntary disarmament, but at least we can try to stop being insane about it.
The problem, of course, being that this does not in fact create a just world. It merely creates a world where larger, stronger, aggressive people can dominate smaller, weaker, less aggressive people, which is hardly just.
I’d be fine with getting rid of all guns if humans were as pacifistic as bonobos. Of course, if that was the case, there’s be no need to get rid of guns, as no one would ever even dream of using one to shoot another person.
Nonsense. No one is suggesting that we return to the state of nature along with disarming. The gun might have been the great equalizer in a world without strong political and legal institutions. But in the US, for the most part, that’s no longer true. Perhaps our institutions need to be even stronger before people would consent to disarming. This is a goal to strive for as well.
The problem with that is there will always be some people who are armed, even if all guns disappeared from the face of the earth today. Guns aren’t the only way to protect oneself/oppress others - humans are not a peaceful bunch and they will always find ways to to cause trouble for each other.
Why? That doesn’t bar regulation of anything.
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I’m thinking you’ve never had any involvement with criminal sorts - doesn’t matter how many laws we have, they are going to continue to ignore them and continue to try to be more equal than everyone else.
Of course. Disarmament doesn’t make every problem go away, it just solves problems that an armed populace causes or exacerbates. It doesn’t magically change human nature and no one expects it will. I do not live in fear of other human beings. I would prefer to rely on the strength of our institutions rather than on whatever meager force I can muster up. This is the world more consistent with my values, so that’s what I am going to try to create. I’m just a regular person with no extraordinary political power, so I just try to persuade and join organizations that want to bring about the changes I want to see. Garden variety stuff.
Yes, in practice, it does.
I’m thinking you’d be wrong. There are probably more people in a ten block radius of me than in your town. I’ve lived in very mixed neighborhoods for a long time and have bumped into all sorts of shit incidentally over the years. When I was 18 I worked for a real estate company that owned a lot of property in some of the worst slums in the city. I ended up going with the federal marshal to do evictions.
I think there’s a greater likelihood of a child dying by drowning than being shot in the US. However, there is no comparison in promulgating the total number of guns and pools (we can’t compare deaths in terms of exposure - presumably many more hours are spent swimming without drowning than being shot at without dying by children), which is why I referred to the base rate: the chance a child will die doing their average activity other than swimming.
I’m not seeing any problems that it would solve. People who wish to go about killing people will simply come up with another way to do so.
I have no fear but I also am realistic about how much the police can do to protect me as an individual. If nothing else, I feel it is my responsibility to take care of myself as much as I can, and not rely on anyone else to do so.
What does it bar?
Well, there 330,000 people in my town… :D. But, with that experience, how in the world could you believe that more laws/police are going to change the issues with people who feel they can or must rob/attack/kill others? No matter what, there are always going to be people like that out there.
I was also talking about actually living with seriously poor people whose attitude is the world owes them and/or there is no reason they should work for anything. Hell, I live in a “mixed neighborhood” now and bump into shit every time I hit the road, but living with it creates a whole new awareness of how some people think.