Thank you, I’ll be bowing out of this nonsense now.
Which then sends us into a different GD as to whether feeling safe even is an “individual liberty”, and then someone would bring up whether that stops at physical violence vs. verbal offense or extends to workplace policies etc. and down the rabbit hole we’d go
And yes, as to the American Exception, sure, it is annoying because to be entirely truthful sometimes “everyone else is doing it” is valid because there’s damn good reason they do and you should look into it. (OTOH let’s be careful about assuming that a real informed decision could only possibly lead to the policies we already consider “right”.)
I am certain that this viewpoint is a common one among 2A enthusiasts, even if it’s rarely expressed out loud. But it is nevertheless one of the most straightforwardly cold-blooded things I’ve ever read on these forums.
Yep. It’s also completely baffling to me. What is good about guns, in and of themselves? Not “what benefit do they provide society”, which we could discuss (both for private gun ownership and for guns existing in general). But if your point is “whether guns make life better for Americans or not is irrelevant to whether they should be allowed because they’reinherently Good” that’s completely baffling to me. If guns have all the societal costs they indisputably do, and you don’t even care to compare those costs to their benefits, that’s not something can be debated. That’s a near religious blind obediece that’s impossible to reason with.
Eh, it’s common, and easy to say, so long as it is other people who are dying for your cause.
Once it hits home, and the loved one of a gun advocate is harmed by gun violence, they do sometimes change their convictions.
Sort of like the people dying of COVID saying “oh my God, COVID wasn’t a liberal hoax you guys!”
If your argument is “due to cultural and societal trends, as well as the way policing works here, America is a more violent and criminal society than many other comparable countries”, that sounds like an argument FOR gun control to me. In other words, if Americans are more likely to commit crimes because of their society, then THEY SHOULD NOT BE TRUSTED WITH GUNS, and we should have MORE gun control than a low crime society where people can be trusted and the police know what they’re doing.
If you convinced me that we are inherently more criminal and violent, and our police is inherently more incompetent, then that wouldn’t make me shrug and say “I guess we can’t pass gun control laws”; it would make me say “I guess the populace is too immature to handle ‘common sense gun control’; better ban ALL firearms.” You don’t tell a three year old to drink responsibly, you take alcohol away.
Now, I don’t buy your argument that Americans will just always be more violent or whatever, so I don’t end up at that conclusion. But if I believed you, that’s where I’d head, not “oh I guess we can’t compare the US and Europe so we should give up”.
Which is why things will only change when large numbers of rural whites are gunned down. As long as the dead are mostly urban and/or minority, the gun people are more than willing to lay down those lives on the altar of the Second Half of The Second Amendment.
Did you read my earlier post? Is there X amount of mass shootings that would change gun supporters' minds, or is that the wrong way to think? - #67 by SenorBeef
You say “I’m willing to trade the right to have a drink with more deaths” every single day, or if you don’t like that analogy, take dozens of other things that you’re okay with being available despite causing deaths because it’s to your preference or it’s something you like.
Why is saying that I’m okay with accepting that people will die if guns are widely legal cold blooded and horrible, but saying I’m okay with accepting that people will die if alcohol is widely legal just fine?
The only difference is that he has the intellectual and moral strength to acknowledge that the choices he makes and the things he advocates have costs that he’s willing to accept.
No, completely wrong. You’re nitpicking my particular choice of words rather than what I thought I was pretty clearly saying: the liberty at issue here is not about the right to feel safe, it’s about the right to be safe. This is what is in stark opposition to someone else’s claimed right to free access to guns.
Since my comments were directed against the concept of unrestrained “individual liberties”, I was using the example of the Canadian ethos as an illustration of the fact that individual liberties are a two-way street, and that your purported right to free access to guns must, in a rational society, be balanced by my right and the right of my loved ones to be safe in our daily lives. This is in fact explicitly spelled out in the guarantee of “security of the person” in Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Its primary intent is to protect against state actions that violate such right, but like the right of free speech in both the US and Canadian constitutions, it enshrines a vitally important general principle.
That may warrant a dedicated topic.
~Max
That would be somewhat noble…if he were the one to pay those costs, and not the child who finds mommy’s Smith & Wesson in the glove compartment of the minivan.
Because the purpose of booze is not to end a life. When John Doe uses a gun to kill somebody, the firearm is acting according to its function.
As for your other litany of unsafe products, I’m more than fine with more regulation where appropriate. That’s why we have, over time, enacted more laws around the advertisement, sale, and consumption of products like alcohol and tobacco.
Acknowledging that some things are unsafe is not the same as being explicitly willing to trade innocent lives so that I can retain my ability to end hypothetical ones.
But we aren’t for unregulated alcohol consumption. We have laws about drinking and driving, and alcohol servers can get into trouble if they get someone drunk and let them go out and drive.
If we treated alcohol like guns, then we wouldn’t have DUI laws.
Even as someone who occasionally enjoys partaking in alcohol, I don’t get shitty about my right to drink, when, where, and how I want being restricted to some extent for public safety.
I don’t agree with this at all. The U.S. has very different policing, criminal sentencing standards, prison standards, and prosecutorial standards. While I am not disinterested in this line of discussion, I think it is sufficiently different from OP and thread topic that I don’t want to discuss it further here, if someone wants to hash out differences in crime and crime policy in the United States vs Peer Countries, feel free to make a thread and I will participate.
To try and circle back to the thread’s core topic–which I don’t think was intended to rehash intractable disputes about guns, in terms of “changing gun supporters minds”, on regulations–we are not going to accept the idea that we have our rights taken away because some people misuse those rights. That is a terrible line of thought that undermines the very concept of rights across the board.
Many responsible gun owners are fine with some regulations, regulations are not the same thing as bans. Things like shall issue licensure for example, often polls very well with a 70%+ majority in the country at large, which is a threshold sufficient for legislation in a “normal political environment.” It is important to understand the reason many gun owners oppose licensure is it has historically been implemented in a “may issue” form in blue states that essentially just served as a way to severely restrict gun ownership, based on the whims of local officials, who frequently withheld such licenses except for the politically connected.
I don’t disagree with the idea that they have to be balanced, but I don’t want Canadian social democracy here, period. I don’t want the balance you want, neither do other gun owners. We’re the ones voting in, and winning, elections. Not you. We get a say, not you. If gun control people want compromise it has to be on our terms. If they don’t want compromise most of us gun owners are content with the status quo.
I’ve said a few times in this thread (admittedly in long posts, so understandable if you’ve missed it), that I am in favor of licensure. Some form of licensure also typically polls well. Vox Conversations had a discussion recently with the guy who runs TheReload.com (I had never heard of it prior to the Vox interview–it appears to be a gun enthusiast website), even he mentioned that there’s a few things like prohibitions on high-capacity magazines, licensure, mandatory safety training etc that would probably have majority support in most states [he was not in favor of all of these proposals.]
I think I went into more detail here explaining that view, FWIW:
I lost a grandparent to cancer almost certainly caused by a lifetime of heavy smoking. Another grandparent to heart disease almost certainly caused by a lifetime of being obese, somewhat moderate but consistent consumption of alcohol, and many decades of tobacco use. I lost a grandmother in part to a serious struggle with diabetes almost certainly in part due to poor diet.
I have several close relatives struggling with health issues along these same lines right now with the unfortunate but predictable result probably coming in the next decade. That has not led me to want tobacco banned, sugary-drinks excise taxed, alcohol banned or etc. I just simply don’t have this philosophy that anything that causes death has to be banned, I think things have to be looked at in a broader concept of individual liberties.
Yes, but all those people died because of choices that they made.
People who die of gun violence die because of choices that others make.
Every health issue you described is something they did to themselves, via poor choices. None of that is remotely equivalent to being murdered.
Or maybe not. Your grandparent, presumably, came up in an era where the health risks of cigarettes were obfuscated. Maybe even the era where cigarette advertisements touted them as being healthy and had doctors (or actors playing doctors) shilling for them. They’re no longer allowed to do that, because people died.
Firstly, that isn’t entirely true. My grandparents did not choose to be inundated with (then-legal) heavy cigarette advertising in their youths. My grandparents did not choose to have big food companies engineer sweet and savory foods that are literally designed in a lab to tickle a part of our brain that makes us excessively crave them, and then push to have them on the shelves nationwide.
Secondly, there are many rights which sometimes cause other people to die, the specifics of those interactions are complex and become legal matters but are not in and of themselves usually reason for a cessation of the right. Drunk driving is not held up as a justification for banning either alcohol or cars, as an obvious example.
Right and we went ahead and made it very illegal to kill people with guns. Hell, it’s illegal just to shoot someone with a gun, better yet–it’s illegal just to shoot at someone with a gun, and is also illegal just to draw a gun on someone in a threatening way without shooting, excepting self-defense in these cases.
But no one pulled out a twinkie in the grocery store line and killed them with it. They may have succumbed to advertising, but they still made a choice.
But, if you want to blame advertising for people’s behaviors, I can point to lots of advertising for guns claiming that you aren’t safe without one on you at all times and places.
No, but it is a justification for regulating the use of both.