Okay, so you just want to ban handguns. It’s not like it makes your proposals, where you target the least problematic groups that are as close to a perfect record as possible, a matter of good faith public policy.
They were heavily restricted by the 1934 National FIrearms Act which taxed ownership and placed a lot of requirements on people who wanted to own them. You might even be inclined to say that it was a big gun control success story - restrictions were placed, and no one who owned them legally ever caused harm with them in over half a century. And despite this apparent gun control success, what happened? Was it hailed as a workable model for gun control and acknowledged as a success story? No, of course, it was banned anyway.
It seems to me that there’s no reason that you could not advocate for gun control in good faith - it’s not like it’s impossible to craft an argument for gun control or rational gun control policy - but almost no gun control advocates actually do that. They want to ban guns and they don’t care what the actual rationale or effects of those policies would be. If they could ban all guns manufactured on a Tuesday, they would. If they could convince the congress that machine guns were a menace despite 52 years of perfect records for owners, they did.
Which seems to be exactly what you’re doing now with legal concealed carry holders. As a group, they are far more law abiding and less problematic than pretty much anyone would predict, and yet you still want to ban that.
I don’t want to ban legal concealed carry. I want to make it harder to carry concealed. Instead, states are moving to make it much, much easier to carry concealed. If you’re going to keep ascribing positions to me that I don’t have, I don’t this will be productive.
But, forget about what I want. How would you address the urban gun crime problem? That’s really the main gun violence issue in this country.
You can’t draw all the conclusions you want from that–most people don’t know the current state of gun regulations. Polling that asks “do you think there should be universal background checks for gun purchases, which currently there are not” that polls in the 80s percent, that is different from asking a more genericized “Do you want stricter gun laws?” The latter question is going to elicit a response based on the person’s awareness of current gun laws–which for the general public is often low.
A generalized question on gun control is also going to easily trigger someone’s partisan tribalism, a Republican hearing that question knows what the Republican answer is, and is going to answer in that way.
76% of people support banning people on Federal watchlists from possessing guns. [Which by the way I’d have a serious problem with–there is little to no due process at being put on one of those lists.]
73% support a three day waiting period between purchasing a gun and being allowed to take it home.
70% back the creation of a national database of gun sales.
According to a 2021 Rew report–only around 35% of all Republicans favor eliminating licensure for concealed carry (and yet something like 26 Red States have passed such a law–that has minority support within their own party.)
At the end of the day, the enthusiasm gap on gun control is fairly well understood. What is not well understood is the specious claims @Whack-a-Mole has made that appears to suggest that most gun owners are “nuts”, a slur he is leveling at some half of the nation’s population (and members of both political parties) sans any meaningful evidence aside from his “personal experience.”
How is it slur or specious when we have been down this road of gun violence in the US and yet almost no corrective action is taken? And this over decades.
The problem is apologists who pretend gun owners are mostly a swell bunch. If 95% of gun owners are normal and sane then why not normal and sane gun laws?
This is very silly and you should be able to easily recognize the logical error you’re making here.
Did you do a survey of everyone you know to see who owns guns? Do you ask people you meet whether they own guns? No, of course not. So how do you know when you meet a gun owner? You don’t. You only know when you meet someone who is so enthusiastic about guns that they bring it up with you, and you’re making the assumption that all gun owners are like that.
It’s like when religious people think all atheists are confrontational edgelords when most atheists don’t bring up the subject at all, and they’re far more likely to get into a fight with someone who is confrontational about it.
You’ve met plenty of gun owners that you have no idea were gun owners because it didn’t come up and it’s not a big part of their identity, but you’ve thrown away that data and chose only to focus on the people who do indeed make guns a very big part of your lives and assume they’re representative of all gun owners.
I’ve heard this called the toupee fallacy. If someone says “I can always spot a toupee”, they’re only including the ones they correctly identified (or that that incorrectly identify and assume they’re right), so they think their success rate is 100% because they’re not aware of the ones they missed.
Walk me through how you get from “there has been a lot of gun regulation that has failed” to “every gun owner is utterly obsessed with their guns”
Also, the proposals for legislation are almost always terrible law. Banning shit based on cosmetics, banning things to try to stop the most spectacular 0.03% of gun crime instead of the more common stuff, doing shit that’s basically a lie like “closing the gun show loophole” with laws that don’t actually do what they claim - I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen a good faith rational public policy seriously proposed over the last 20 years.
I’m not addressing “this thread’s” claim, I’m addressing the claim you made, which is that all gun owners are completely obsessed with their guns. You’re trying to start a different argument.
Well…if 95% of gun owners are “sane and normal” but they never manage to have their political will known in decades it is reasonable to assume they are ok with the 5% who are obsessed. Which, by definition, makes them ok with the obsessed too.
Feel free to explain to the board how the 95% of normal, rational gun owners have flexed their political muscle to work for rational gun laws.
Did you see the part of my post where I said I’m not arguing that point? I never said 95% of gun owners are sane and normal, never replied to a post with that argument, and have not endorsed that argument in any way.
What I did was attack your argument which relied on your own perceptional biases and made you make a ridiculous statement. You are trying to make me defend an argument that I have nothing to do with in order to weasel out of defending your own argument.
Your behavior is pathetic here. Why would I argue that view when I don’t believe it to be correct, haven’t endorsed it, never made that argument, and have absolutely nothing to do with that?
On the other hand, I addressed words that you wrote, an argument that you, yourself, made.
You seem to somehow think that I need to defend someone else’s argument that I don’t agree with or think is true, whereas you have no responsibility to defend your own words. And you claim what I’m doing is “wiggling and dancing”, this is beyond pathetic and I will no longer engage with you.
I think perhaps the more relevant fact that most people are very well aware of is the extent of gun violence in America. According to Pew Research again (same cite) approximately the same percentage (48%, or about half) of Americans see gun violence as a very big problem in the country today. I would suggest that here, if you want to claim that they’re unaware of a lot of facts, it works in the opposite direction: that if they were in fact aware of the statistics about gun violence in the rest of the developed world, and how incredibly high it is in the US in comparison with any other similarly developed country, they would feel even more strongly about the extent of the uniquely American gun problem.
I’m not @Whack-a-Mole but I do have a couple of observations. First of all, again quoting that same Pew report, it’s nowhere near “half of the nation’s population”. They report that some 30% of respondents said they own one more guns. That’s not “half”. I think it’s been well established that the enormous proliferation of guns in America is very unevenly distributed, and a relatively small minority who practically own personal arsenals are responsible for a disproportionate number of guns.
I see no useful purpose being served by a semantic argument over whether these people are “nuts”, but speaking from a Canadian perspective the American gun culture that these people represent just makes me shake my head in complete bafflement. I cannot get my head around the idea that there is an entire American subculture that considers assault rifles and semi-automatic handguns to be fun toys, fun to collect and show off to all your friends, to carry around with you everywhere you go, to have guns all over the house, and to shoot at things for the sheer joy of it. The culture that I inhabit and the legal framework that supports it – and that of virtually every other developed nation – considers guns to be dangerous lethal weapons that you only possess if there is an actual necessity, and even then rules about licensing, storage, and transportation are very strict.
The cultural and legal differences between the US and the rest of the developed world are just staggering, probably much more so than most Americans believe. But the result is that we don’t have school shootings and we don’t have rampant gun violence. As I mentioned before, the US per-capita rate of gun-related fatalities from all causes is more than six times higher than in Canada. The difference is even greater compared to most western European countries. That’s not just a little bit higher – it’s a goddam national emergency.
Most Americans that own guns (myself included) do not care how our statistics compare to other countries. I do care about lowering gun deaths in the United States, but I don’t find comparisons to other countries particularly salient because there are too many cross-variables that make such comparisons both uninteresting to me, typically useful only for scoring cheap political points, and totally useless in coming up with actual solutions.
44% of Americans live in a gun household–32% say they personally own a gun. I tend to think gun household is a more useful metric, as many people in a household will share use of firearms. It is the case that of the 330m or whatever guns we have (I think around 1 per person), there is a big concentration of guns in the hands of “multiple firearm owners”, with many people only owning 1-3 guns, but this is 44% of American households have a gun in it. Any attempt to paint gun ownership as some rare thing that no one does, when literally we’re talking 44% of American households, appears to be motivated by some desire other than having a frank and realistic conversation.
An important note–the vast majority of people who have “arsenals” never commit gun crimes, the vast majority of gun homicides are committed by young males who often have only one gun, and that gun is often possessed illegally in some manner or fashion.
I could remove all the references to guns in this section and replace it with “race cars”, and I think most people would say you’re silly if you have a real problem with race car enthusiasts. Driving race cars is fun, lots of people participate in drag racing, local tracks etc. It is also more dangerous than playing backgammon. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a dangerous hobby, particularly if you are not directly hurting anyone.
Everyone agrees illegal street racing is reprehensible, and everyone generally agrees murdering people with a gun is reprehensible. But no one tries to say we should ban the racing hobby because of illegal street racing. The fact that illegal street racing kills a lot less people than illegal use of firearms isn’t directly salient to most of us who own guns–I don’t believe if something is a right, and is something you should be allowed to do, it should be prohibited simply because lots of people abuse that right. Sorry, that is an intractable position for me and many gun owners.
What isn’t intractable is many of us would be fine with honest effort licensure schemes and other safety efforts. As @SenorBeef says though, many of us have also lived through a lot of dishonest efforts, like the 1994 AWB that removed basically no guns from the streets, made life annoying for enthusiasts who commit almost no gun crime, and focused on a number of cosmetic issues that have little to do with reducing gun deaths or making America safer.
Additionally–and I agree we should get over @Whack-a-Mole 's poor arguments and nonsense he was spewing about gun nuts, but your comments here about the “nuts” (and I don’t really mind the term–lots of gun enthusiasts use it tongue-in-cheek), show a big, big bias you have, and frankly an ignorance as well. I suspect you just don’t like these people. They are different from you, act different, talk different, they like different things, you don’t like them. Okay, that’s fine. Up in Canada you do a lot of things I don’t like, I don’t spend much time worrying about it. However, when you bring your bias into a discussion on public policy that is where I have a problem. The type of person you are “baffled” by, has virtually nothing to do with the gun homicide problem in the United States. That subculture of people who regularly shoot guns and have multiple guns, is a middle class hobby, that often is also a middle age hobby, or at least a hobby where most participants are age 25+ with a skew towards age 40+. Why? Mainly because it’s not cheap. Ammo is very expensive. Getting range time is time consuming and expensive in many parts of the country. Having multiple guns of the sort usually used for such recreational shooting is quite expensive. The vast majority of people committing gun homicides are young males who don’t have a lot of money, almost definitionally they are not part of the hobby.
Is there a reason you are spending time and energy talking about the hobbyists who are known to commit almost none of the gun homicides, and not the lower income young males who we know commit most murders, firearm related or otherwise? And “lower income young males” is not some code for “black”, the majority of murderers are white, although there is obviously some element of crime statistics that cross over into minority communities and various disadvantages they have. There was an important study done in 2013 that showed that 1% of the population is responsible for about 63% of violent crime. These are generally people who become violent at a young age, and commit much of their violence before the age of 25, although many of them continue to be dangerously violent into later adulthood. There isn’t a lot of overlap between this 1% and the middle class redneck who “baffles you”, that likes to spend time shooting a $2000 rifle and going through $200 in ammo on a range day.
That’s probably the worst possible approach, right there, FWIW. Like I said when I first posted in this thread, it was against my better judgement. The simple reality is the anti-gun crowd aren’t interested in a serious dialogue, they don’t like gun owners and they want you to know it. That’s fine. We don’t actually have to have a dialogue. My side won. There is nothing you or anyone else can do about it with your current approach. Maybe, and even I admit the odds aren’t great, maybe more constructive dialogue, in a hypothetical era of lower partisanship, could see some meaningful improvement, but it won’t happen when you start off with “America is different from Canada and Europe”, with the implication that this is a problem. Most Americans don’t want to be Canadian or European, and are fiercely proud of our differences. That may make you tut tut til your head spins, but it’s not going to change the situation here.
FWIW, when it comes to American gun deaths if you offered me a choice between continuing those deaths and banning all guns I would opt for the deaths. I think most gun owners would say the same. Life is risk, and lots of things have trade offs. I also think we throw around the word “crisis” or “emergency” pretty easily. I think gun violence is a problem, but there were 45,000 gun deaths in 2020. Around 19,300 were homicides. Around 23,000 were suicides. I do think it is worth distinguishing–suicide is primarily driven by depression and mental health issues, and I think the best approach to reducing suicides is in that field. I am fully aware that a suicide attempt with a gun is far more likely to succeed than other methods, but I am not persuaded that is a reason I should consider banning guns or placing unreasonable restrictions on ownership. Suicidal people have some level of responsibility for themselves, I am not in favor or restricting the rights and freedoms of the population at large simply because some people are suicidal. Now, I would absolutely support a more uniform process where if a physician and a mental health commission put a suicide risk hold on someone, that results in the confiscation of their guns and loss of gun purchase rights until that process is resolved through some sort of hearing.
The 19,000 gun homicides is awful and a big increase from the previous reporting year. I would be in favor of common sense gun regulations that might help bring that down, but I am also in favor of policing and enforcement changes that would likely help bring it down some too, and that frankly–many liberals spend a huge amount of effort fighting against.
While gun mortality is unfortunate, I don’t get nearly as concerned about it as many anti-gun people do because mortality is a 100% game on a long enough horizon, the real question is how does it compare to other things.
Would suggest that while a problem, we have several much bigger problems in the United States in terms of mortality. For example, a lot of cancer, heart disease and diabetes deaths could either be prevented, or that person could have been given longer life expectancy.
[A note on some data points–the FBI UCR for 2020 is my source for homicide offenders by age, but that dataset does have a problem in that around 6400 offenders are of unknown age. Of offenders with published ages between 10 and 59, there were 13,569 offenders, of which 8,084 were under the age of 30. It is unclear of course on the age of the 6400 uncategorized which could change the total breakdown significantly if that uncategorized data set is significantly different from the distribution of the known offender dataset.]
I don’t agree with this if I understand the sentence. I think media creates ever increasing emphasis on subject matter as a matter of practice. In the past there were actually standards as to how things were portrayed whether they were codified or not. Murders were depicted off camera. The viewer assumed a person shot or stabbed died but you didn’t see it visually depicted. NOW you see body parts shot away and blood spattered everywhere.
In my lifetime there has clearly been a shift in how violence is portrayed.
So you said this, about MOST gun owners - at least more than half, which is to say at least 50 million or so people:
He paraphrased this as “gun nuts”, which is a pretty reasonable shorthand for what you described. I would say that it’s far less extreme than your description. Certainly I would say that you could be a “gun nut” without literally caring about guns more than your family or wife, so your characterization is far more extreme.
And you think he’s the one that made the gross misrepresentation and that he owes you the apology?