None of which is in any way analogous to the restrictions placed on the manufacture, advertisement, and sale of those products.
Which takes me back to several suggestions I’ve made that are regulations I think many gun owners could be convinced to support, or who support now. Converting that ideological position into a vote and legislation, in today’s political climate, is a different matter, but that’s where we are.
I don’t see even one person in this thread arguing there should be no regulations of firearms at all. What those of us who support gun rights are saying, is we won’t stand for bans. There ought to be recognized an implicit right to possess a firearm that can’t be outright ceased without good legal cause, like a prior criminal conviction or some other adjudicated process relating to competency or etc.
You must mistake me for someone who does not want regulation, on the contrary I welcome more regulation.
However I was pointing out that at least in the US legal culture the “right to be safe” is not considered as undisputable as you seem to assume and we’d end up in the usual circular argument.
The kid in the car that the drunk driver slams into is also paying the price for alcohol. There are innocent victims in both cases.
Why does that matter? It does, all the time. Is it supposed to be a comfort to all the people who were killed by alcohol that the product wasn’t specifically designed to kill them?
I don’t even think you win the purpose argument. Guns can be used for good - a lot of people owe their lives to guns they were able to use in self defense too. In comparison, alcohol isn’t really that important to anyone. At best, it’s purely recreational.
In fact, I would say that denying the ability to defend themselves to battered women, little old ladies, families in high risk areas, people with unusually high risk jobs, and other people who have difficulty defending themselves without a gun is much more morally problematic than keeping people from getting their drunk on.
No, you’re trading innocent lives so that you can retain your ability to drink alcohol.
I’m willing to admit it. Martin Hyde is willing to admit it. It would appear that you are not, only willing to offer weak rationalizations to avoid the truth.
There are no regulations on guns? You can just carry and shoot them whenever, however, and at whoever you want?
We have laws against doing dangerous things with alcohol, like drinking and driving. We have laws against doing dangerous things with guns, like randomly shooting them in a crowded area, for instance. We have laws that restrict gun purchases to people who are of the approrpriate age, who can pass background checks, etc. The assertion that there are no regulations on the ownership and usage of guns is absurd.
The core point is that almost everyone is willing to trade innocent lives for something they want. Acting like this is somehow unique to gun owners is delusional, lacks self awareness, and to some degree is performative righteous outrage.
I lost a cousin to a tragic mentos and soda attack. He was standing on a balcony when a group of hooligans set off fifteen diet coke two liter bottles by dropping five mentos into each one. The blast threw him clear off the balcony.
It is illegal to drink and drive. In how many states is it illegal to drink and carry? In other words, the amount of regulation when it comes to operating a motor vehicle FAR exceeds those needed to carry a weapon…as has been pointed out too many fucking times to count over the years.
Agreed, and I say that as someone who likes his drink. Alcohol is enjoyable and fun, but it definitely does not serve any particularly virtuous higher purpose.
States where it is illegal to consume while carrying:
Alaska
Arizona
California
D.C.
States where it is illegal to carry while intoxicated:
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Idaho
Illinois
Iowa
Kansas
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Missouri
Montana
Nevada
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Rhode Island
Texas
States where it is both illegal to consume AND illegal to carry while intoxicated:
Nebraska
New Mexico
North Carolina
South Carolina
Tennessee
Utah
Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
While I tend to believe that guns are sui generis, I do think there’s an analogy to be drawn here.
Anybody else old enough to remember M-80’s (big firecrackers):
They are – according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms – illegal to possess.
As are any number of enumerated and unenumerated explosives.
You simply cannot own them, legally.
But some people like to go off into the middle of the desert and blow shit up. Why should they have to suffer draconian restrictions of ownership and use ?
This isn’t raising the subject of legal/illegal ownership of Howitzers or tactical nuclear weapons.
An M-80 contains three grams (3g) of explosives. The legal limit of explosive material in a consumer firework is 50 mg, so … sixty firecrackers has the same amount of explosives as a single M-80.
So why do we prohibit ‘consumer’ ownership of something as relatively benign as M-80’s ?
And how potentially safe or potentially dangerous to human life and limb is an M-80 compared to most handguns and most long guns.
How about firearms with high-capacity magazines ?
There isn’t a lot of rational consistency in our public policies here. Of course, that’s true for no end of things in the US, but this one isn’t academic. It’s existential.
One of the main differences is constitutional jurisprudence has not found there to be any sort of right to possess explosives, and it differentiates explosives from firearms. We have an actual right to bear arms. That’s a thing many gun control advocates don’t want to believe is true, but it certainly is.
Also, you aren’t quite right–the link you linked to actually says M-80s are legal if you have a license, it is just most people don’t have explosives licenses.
a) My comment about ownership is actually correct. Your comment about licensing is also (partially) correct. There are state-by-state specific regulations that vary, and you cannot just walk into a store and buy M-80’s as a US citizen;
b) “Because it says so” is only an argument offered by staunch gun rights advocates as it pertains to the 2ndA. They’re ready, willing, and able to toss out the other Amendments that they’re less fond of.
In terms of the Constitution, I guess you can put me in the camp with Thomas Jefferson:
The idea of amending constitutions at regular intervals dates back to Thomas Jefferson. In a famous letter, he wrote that we should “provide in our constitution for its revision at stated periods.” “[E]ach generation” should have the “solemn opportunity” to update the constitution “every nineteen or twenty years,” thus allowing it to “be handed on, with periodical repairs, from generation to generation, to the end of time.”
To me, the very notion of ‘originalism’ is about as naïve and obtuse as actively ignoring best practices from around the world.
At some point, this would be a better nation if we cared as much about responsibilities as we do about ‘rights,’ and as much about what we should do as about what we can do.
Most americans, including gun owners, support a number of regulations that will never come into effect because of a smaller number of very vocal advocates who claim any form of regulation is the first step towards door to door confiscation.
Anything that doesn’t get in the way of the current wide open funnel of guns into the hands of the criminal and irresponsible is useless for the purposes of public safety.
Rather than common sense restrictions on guns, I see gun advocates complaining about any current restrictions, and a desire to remove any regulations that do exist. I don’t think that anyone has said no regulations, but there have been plenty who would like to see less.
Difference is, is that we can see that guy weaving on the road, pull him over, and arrest him for DUI before he slams into the kid in the car. We cannot say diddly squat about a parent who leaves their gun freely accessible to their children until after a tragedy has occurred.
Carry, just about, yes, and the few places that they are not allowed to be carried, gun advocates complain and complain about. Actually shooting them is often not allowed in many circumstances, but up until the moment the trigger is pulled, the person is a law abiding gun owner.
This is different from DUI, where the moment that an impaired person gets behind the wheel, they are breaking the law. We don’t have to wait until they get in an accident.
But not against carrying them in a crowded area. No laws about how they are to be carried and secured.
Well, no we don’t. In many states, if you have a gun that I think is cool, I can buy it from you, and you don’t have to even know my name, much less a background check.
The notion that anyone said there are no is an absurd strawman of your own creation. What is being said is that there are not effective regulations to keep the guns out of the hands of the criminal and irresponsible.
But one group recognizes the dangers, and works to mitigate them as much as possible. The other is 100% willing to see more deaths rather than restrict their ability to have easy access to guns.
Okay, I hope you enjoy that line of attack against people who do those things, I’m not one of them. I strongly believe in the general right to bear arms as both a specifically enumerated right, and as an intrinsic right that we obviously possessed going back to before we had a constitution (akin to the right to property, travel etc.) For this reason, I don’t actually believe the 2nd Amendment is the only reason we have the right to arm ourselves, although I think it is a good thing it is enumerated. I also think the 2nd Amendment was largely intended to prevent the Federal government from disarming the various States and people, and thus had no real relevance to most State level gun laws historically speaking (that arguably changed with Heller, which I think was an “okay” decision but don’t fully agree with.)
Sure, and I think that applies to things like freedom of association, speech etc. All of our rights carry with them duties and responsibilities. However not every responsibility / duty is appropriate venue for government regulation.
For the first amendment, I think we have a responsibility to our other Americans not to do things like spread misinformation, hurtful lies, medical myths, knowingly bad advice et cetera, we also have a general ethical responsibility not to harass or belittle people etc. However, most of these are simply not appropriate areas for government regulation–that doesn’t mean we have no responsibilities there, just not government enforceable ones. Now, things like incitement to riot, or yelling fire in a crowded theater, that is where it crosses into an area where government prohibition is valid.
Guns are the same–regulations are appropriate in some respects but not in others, and I’ve laid out where I think those lines should be drawn, roughly speaking.
McDonald, I think. Heller was about a D.C. act which carried the force of an act of Congress.
~Max
Kind of sad that the answer requires a list instead of just “All of the USA”.
If there was a serious prohibitionist (of alcohol) movement in the US, they would be saying the exact same thing to you. Every regulation would be some half-measure by their standards, and you’d be a monster for supporting anything short of total prohibition.
So are you there’s a level of regulation, short of banning guns for all practical purposes, that you’d be satisfied with? If we tried to minimize gun deaths in the same sort of ways we try to minimize alcohol deaths?
It’s obvious that in whatever level of regulation you envision, innocent people would still die to guns. Are you okay with that? Since we’re doing more to try to regulate away the problem - even though there’s no way that we could ever fully regulate away the problem and anything short of prohibition accepts that you’re not making your full legal effort to make it stop - is that enough to feel like gun owners are not responsible for those innocent deaths? There is almost certainly no regulation that is going to prohibit all innocent gun deaths, just as any level of DUI enforcement is very unlikely to prevent all DUIs.
The alcohol death analogy is rock solid, but if you want, feel free to take another one. You use more energy than you need to if you were willing to live a more modest life. That energy generated kills people through things like lowered air quality, industrial accidents, climate change, etc. Without a doubt, you will have been at least partially responsible for the death of many people through your modern western lifestyle and your energy consumption. Are you willing to accept that your energy usage and your lifestyle shortens and ends lives?
You buy products from factories in China where they install suicide nets to catch the people who commit suicide on the job. It’s apparently that much of a routine occurrence.
I could come up with a hundred of these examples given enough time. There are things in your life that you enjoy, things that are not essential to your survival, the availability of which kills innocent people. Acting as though only gun owners do that, and they’re sick, heartless bastards for being willing to accept that is just a story you tell yourself so you can have righteous outrage and be in denial about your own impacts in the world. Saying “well we try to stop those things” really doesn’t matter. The reality is: the availability of alcohol is going to kill people, no matter how we attempt to regulate or enforce it. If you think that alcohol should remain legal, you are making the decision that people will die so that you can have that.
The only difference is perceptual. You think something is wrong with gun owners and you don’t like guns, so it seems so obvious to you to ban them. Whereas you (I’m assuming) like alcohol and think there’s nothing wrong with people who drink as a whole, so it doesn’t seem obvious to ban them. If we covered drunk driving deaths like we covered mass shootings, it might even change your mind because it would change your perception even though it would make no difference as to the actual innocent people dying from alcohol-related fatalities every day, only your awareness of them.
Here’s the difference between how alcohol use affects me and how guns affect me.
I go to places where people drink alcohol on occasion. Someone has one drink, I have one drink, no impact on me. Someone has many drinks, if you get behind the wheel of a car, yeah that needs to be stopped. If you stagger home to your house next door, get a cab, get a ride from a friend, basically don’t care. You might be an alcoholic, maybe you shouldn’t drink, should be in AA, but that’s a long term issue. If you pick a fight with me, that’s also a problem. I would likely stay away from an establishment where the odds of that increased.
A loaded gun? I’m noping out of any place where I suspect people might be carrying a loaded gun. A loaded gun is very difficult to use safely and very easy to use in a way that might hurt people. I do not want to be in the vicinity of people with loaded guns. Same reason I don’t go hiking in the woods during deer hunting season. You carrying a loaded gun is incompatible with my presence. I want to be places where people don’t do that.
Do you find yourself near loaded guns as casually as you find yourself around alcohol? I don’t really think that analogy holds. That almost never happens.
We were talking about innocent deaths - the availability of each causes innocent deaths and that’s indisputable. You have no choice about it when the drunk driver slams into your car, just like you don’t have much of a choice about it in the extremely unlikely chance you are in an area with some sort of mass shooter.
Really, all of these objections are just obscuring the analogy between those two things.
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Do you think we’d have fewer innocent deaths if we prohibited alcohol usage? To keep it simple, I used DUI non-driver victims. But you could find a lot of other ways alcohol harms people. But just to keep everything clear and easy, let’s talk about DUI victims.
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If you do not think that alcohol should be prohibited, are you accepting that your advocating for the continued availability of alcohol will, in a small part, lead to more of those innocent deaths?
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Can you admit, then, that you’re willing to pay (or tolerate) a certain amount of innocent deaths so that you can have alcohol available?
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As the question is posed by the OP, is there a certain number of drunk driving victims that need to die before you changed your mind?
I get that this is uncomfortable to answer, but it’s actually really simple and should be easy.
If concealed carry becomes common, a badge of honor among gun owners, then I guess I will.
Prohibition did actually save lives. It was actually a success in that regard. The negatives outweighed the positives though, and we are better off using intolerance of DWI and AA in the attempt to limit negative consequences of alcohol.
The positive uses of loaded guns are so limited that I again default to zero tolerance in my proximity, except for use by licensed professionals. Even with them, the more I need them around, the less safe I am, so it doesn’t really help that much to have them around. If I need to live next door to the fire department so my house doesn’t burn down, I should probably figure out how to make my house safer.
I don’t care if you hunt with guns or do whatever with them on your own property, far away from me.
I mean, all 50 states allow concealed carry of handguns. Some require permits, and they usually aren’t allowed around schools/courthouses/jails/etc, but all 50 allow it.
~Max
And there we have it–“the positive uses of loaded guns”, is nothing more than an opinion based on what you choose to value. There is a no less valid argument to be made against alcohol and in favor of alcohol prohibition (not by me, I love booze–but I would concede the argument essentially makes itself–alcohol is bad for you, causes innocent people to get hurt, causes severe behavioral issues, and a large percentage of all crime–not just DWI, involve people intoxicated on alcohol.)
In a free society we don’t eliminate people’s rights simply because you may not value that specific right, sorry.