Pit thread for Martin_Hyde {He has been BANNED}

The BBQ Pit
261

The vast, vast majority of gun owners never commit a crime or harm anyone with their guns. Somehow, they are responsible for the crimes committed by others - presumably because they advocate the continued legality of guns.

Most alcohol users don’t drive drunk, but collectively, using the same logic, by advocating for it to be legal, they are enabling drunk drivers.

It really is this simple:

  1. The legal availability of alcohol will increase innocent people dying, for many reasons, but specifically in this case due to DUI drivers hitting people

  2. If you continue to advocate for the legal availability of alcohol, you do so with an understanding that this will incur those extra deaths

  3. You will have decided that the tradeoff - that booze be available and people will die - is worth it

  4. Using the logic of the people in this thread, you are an inhuman monster that places your alcohol fetish over the lives of innocent children; you are worthy of nothing but derision and scorn; you lack any semblance of basic human decency.

Any attempt to sidetrack this by saying “but we try to keep people from committing DUIs!” - no shit, we try to stop people doing dangerous shit with their guns too - is purely rationalization as to why your own logic does not apply to you when it clearly does. Legally availability of alcohol = dead innocent children. There’s no way of escaping it. If you want alcohol to be legal, you are accepting dead kids (and others, but, you know, apples to apples) are paying the price.

This is not an apples to apples comparison. Those other countries were not awash in guns, with a whole culture built around being a frontier country during its formative years, with a long cultural and legal tradition based around gun ownership. It’s a lot easier to implement gun control in a place where guns were never that big a thing. As far as I can think, nothing like the modern US - with hundreds of millions of guns and hundreds of years of gun culture and history - has been disarmed.

Would gun control work? Sure, you could probably chip away at some things here and there. You probably wouldn’t cause a dramatic change over a period of less than decades. It certainly isn’t nearly as simple as “other countries ban guns and it works there, so it would work here too”

It’s funny, though, that alcohol prohibition was a miserable failure, and therefore not worth trying, but gun prohibition - on objects that are durable and can last centuries - would obviously be completely successful. Interesting that your prediction lines up exactly with what you want to be true.

262

Easy: you don’t give a single fuck about the lives of 13.5k people, but you give a lot of fucks about your shiny metal death dildo. There’s nothing else to it.

263

The experience of every other country on earth, you lying sack of shit

264

SenorBeef has said everything I would’ve said and more besides. The only thing I would add, just for the record, is that I’m not averse to sensible gun control measures such as more stringent background checks, longer waiting periods, or red flag laws. And I definitely think gun regulations are far too lax in some states. However, I don’t think an outright gun ban (or a collection of regulations so stringent that they form a de facto gun ban) is desirable or workable.

265

As SenorBeef mentioned, our relationship with guns is unique in the world. Not only do we have far more guns than any other country on Earth (120,000 guns per 100,000 citizens), but we have a gun culture that’s deeply ingrained into the history of the nation. The examples of other countries simply don’t map well enough onto ours to be instructive.

266

Maybe it’s just me, but I find casuistry to be deeply charming.

Except for the whole ‘dead kids’ thing.

267

This is toxic and unreasonable. In the very same post you read, I explained why there’s reason to believe that those experiences are not a simple comparison - no other country had the same situation that faces the US today, and so their prohibition was an entirely different animal.

There is absolutely no reason for you to accuse me of lying. I gave justification for what I said, and I certainly am not lying. I have not been toxic and insulting towards anyone, and I am genuinely working towards trying to get people to better understand the issue by giving what I hope is something to think about.

I don’t care that this is the pit and you can say those things. The fact that I’m trying to genuinely engage in making people think and understand and not personally attacking people and you respond this way is completely inappropriate and toxic. I can’t say that I’ll never respond to a post of yours again, but I will generally try to avoid it, since I don’t think you are operating in good faith or have anything worthwhile to say.

268

Ironically this post is pretty idiotic. It’s victim-blaming those who want more gun control. Sure, they don’t have a plurality, but they do have a magical pixie wand that they use to enact stricter control without having to have a debate.

269

Here’s the underlying problem with this observation… the differences between the US and other developed nations isn’t an immutable characteristic, it’s people’s opinions. When you say we can’t get rid of guns because of our gun culture and history, what you’re really saying is we can’t get rid of guns because millions of rabid gun owners won’t let us.

We all know that the gun toting asshole contingent of our country won’t let us fix this problem, the question is if you’re one of them or not. What I want is for them to be recognized as co-conspirators for future gun crimes, the people who make gun crimes possible in ridiculous numbers.

270

Right. No one else murders as many of their own children with guns as we do. That’s quite a “unique” relationship, in the same way that Ray Rice and his fiance had a “unique” relationship when he punched her out cold in an elevator and then dragged her unconsciously away. It’s time to rethink that relationship; it’s a toxic, abusive one.

Man, I really don’t care. I like you. You’re a cool guy to learn about Steam sales from, or to play some rounds of a game or two online with. But your view on guns is toxic and barbaric. It’s leading to thousands of deaths. The gun culture that you’re so keen to protect is evil. Stop protecting it.

Yes, the US is unique when it comes to guns - uniquely bad. We need to CHANGE our gun culture. Otherwise people will keep dying.

You keep bringing up alcohol, but that’s a bullshit example because guns are much, much more directly harmful to others than alcohol.

Yes, everything in life can cost lives. So you have to do a cost/benefit analysis. Cars, for example, are often brought up as an example, but they enable modern society to exist.

Alcohol doesn’t have a direct societal benefit, similarly to guns, so it SHOULD be scrutinized much more harshly. Most of the time, it’s a matter of personal choice, since you’re not actively harming anyone. When it comes to something like DUI, you ARE hurting people, and I think DUI is a great example. 70 years ago driving drunk was barely thought of at all. No one saw it as a problem. We had to have people shoving the problem in our face over and over and over, and finally we did. We made it culturally unacceptable to DUI and we put into place severe legal penalties for violating DUI laws. This is a great model for dealing with gun proliferation, by the way. If you’d gone back to the 70s, I’m sure we could find plenty of people making the same arguments you are about how drunk driving is too culturally entranched and there’s no point fighting it.

271

100% this. We need to hammer home the damage they cause, just like Mothers Against Drunk Driving hammered home the damage caused by drunk drivers. Make gun owners bear the externalities imposed by their gun proliferation through social costs (and a tax on guns used to pay the victims of gun violence wouldn’t be a bad idea either)

272

QFT. This, SenorBeef, is why I am not being polite towards you. I hope you can get over my rudeness; I will try to get over your callous disregard for human life.

273

At the risk of turning a pit thread into a gun thread…

First, if i could wave a wand and make all the guns in the US be as if they never were, I’d do it. Then we’d need to find solutions for farmers with vermin, and for a number of reasons, I’d like to support gun hunters, too. (There are plenty of existing alternatives to target shooting, IMHO.)

Second, if i could do the same with alcohol, i would. It goes beyond drunk driving. Alcohol contributes to broken homes, to children whose parents don’t buy groceries, or beat them, to partners who assault each other.

But i know i can’t do either of those things. We even tried outright prohibition of alcohol, and it was a massive failure.

But we’ve greatly reduced the toll alcohol takes on society. And 90% of that was about changing attitudes. It used to be, as recently as my childhood, a mitigating factor to be drunk if you were in an auto accident. Maybe not in the law (i honestly have no idea) but certainly in public perception. Now it’s considered an aggravating factor. We are getting close to accepting the same for rape and other social fallout of drinking. In public perception.

So, what can we DO to move the needle on the perception of guns?

Maybe some of the gun supporters in this thread can opine. It’s trickier, because the benign ways that people use alcohol aren’t all that closely related to the bad ways. What are the benign ways that people use guns? Killing vermin and game? The sensation (true or not) that you can fight back if someone aggresses against you? Feeling power under your fingers?

By the way, for anyone who gets a thrill out of that latter, try arc welding. I’ve shot a rifle at a range, and I’ve done some light welding. And welding, to me, was more exciting. I was literally melting pieces of steel to each other. STEEL! It moved under my fingertips. I have never felt so godlike. And you have the same feeling that this could REALLY hurt someone if you fuck up.

Anyway, i agree with the gun-lovers that just saying “guns are always bad” isn’t going to change hearts and minds. But i don’t know what will.

274

Oh man, I did a blacksmithing workshop (I made a knife!) and felt exactly the same. The part of the process where you’re pulling the red-hot metal out of the forge and then hammering it into a new shape? Unbelievably epic and, I agree, much more viscerally satisfying than shooting at a range.

275

You have a gun culture that has been foisted upon you in the past 50 years by the NRA. Prior to this organizations change of heart in the Reagan years (from promoting safe gun use, hunting and target shooting to “all guns all the time for everyone”), the US was on a sensible path about guns, like the rest of the world. It’s only been 50 years of politicizing guns by a powerful lobby group.

276

The double talk I always get from that is that the gun owners couldn’t possibly bear the cost of what their guns do to society.

So they acknowledge that their hobby costs society dearly, but they are willing to let society pay that price.

277

Very accurate. The NRA used to be a leading voice in firearm regulation.

Here’s a good article about the NRA’s early years.

This article goes into more detail about when and why they changed.

278

Some salient quotes for those who don’t want to click through:

In the 1920s, the National Revolver Association, the arm of the NRA responsible for handgun training, proposed regulations later adopted by nine states, requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon, five years additional prison time if the gun was used in a crime, a ban on gun sales to non-citizens, a one day waiting period between the purchase and receipt of a gun, and that records of gun sales be made available to police.

Karl T. Frederick, the president of the NRA, testified before Congress stating, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

279

Wrong. Guns are legal in all other developed nations that don’t have America’s horrendous gun problem. They’re just well regulated. Otherwise the statement is correct – militant gun owners who “never commit a crime” are culpable because they’re responsible for the proliferation of guns and the proliferation of a gun culture so toxic that it never ceases to shock and amaze the citizens of all other civilized countries.

This pathetic bit of whataboutism has been tried in just about every gun debate thread. It fails because alcohol has been a well-entrenched part of social customs for thousands of years and, to the extent it has downsides, they are mainly self-harm. Nice job, BTW, ignoring the statistic I cited: “In my country, the DUI rate has been reduced by 70% in the past 30 years. In the US, the rate of gun-related deaths has gone UP by 40% in just the past 20 years.” Interesting that the US is the only first-world country on earth where sensible people are desperately pleading for some form of gun control. No one, anywhere, is pleading for alcohol prohibition.

Bullshit. Canada was every bit as much a “frontier country” during its formative years. We just managed to evolve without killing each other, and without promulgating a toxic gun culture. In America guns are regarded as symbols of freedom, power, masculinity, and – with supreme irony – as icons of safety.

Interesting that my prediction lines up exactly with historical fact, and with
present reality in the rest of civilized world.

280

Besides the rebuttal arguments that other posters have already made to this claim, there’s also the fact that the US has other unique aspects of its cultural history that we don’t consider ourselves so helpless to do anything about.

For instance, the US is unique among modern developed countries in its deeply ingrained slavery culture. We have an entrenched and pervasive legal and cultural commitment to racially based chattel slavery that other modern democracies simply don’t, and it continues to affect US race relations and all other aspects of our culture to this day.

But we don’t just shrug our shoulders and say that we have to accept the devastating impacts of racism because of our history. Americans of today can change their slavery-influenced preconceptions about race, just as Americans of today can change their “Wild West”-influenced preconceptions about guns (which, as other posters have pointed out, are largely derived from recent cultural/political propaganda anyway).