Honestly, a bunch of us do exactly that. Also healthcare. Generally it’s people who loudly proclaim that America is the bestest country ever.
You missed the point. What people are outraged about in this context is assertions by gun rights supporters that they would not give up their guns even if doing so would somehow magically guarantee that there would be no gun murders ever again.
There are no alcohol users in this discussion asserting that they would refuse to give up alcohol even if doing so would somehow magically guarantee that there would be no alcohol-abuse-related deaths ever again. So your accusations of hypocrisy are beside the point.
The larger and more realistic point—namely, that in real life all engagement with any potentially dangerous objects involves trade-offs between risks and benefits—is valid, and I don’t see anybody disputing it. It’s just that there’s strong disagreement about what types and extents of trade-offs we as a society should be willing to accept.
Ah, American Exceptionalism. I don’t know of any other two words in the English language that excuse as many failings.
True, but not by openly appealing to the influence of history and culture. Not among those who are willing to agree that racism is bad, at least.
Sure, there are plenty of mostly-non-racist people who are completely uninterested in doing anything to remedy the pernicious persistent impacts of our white-supremacist history, and are happy to just go on pretending the racial playing field is already level. But they’re not saying “Eh, it’s unfortunate but we just can’t help being persistently destructively racist, because racial discrimination is so baked into our history and culture.”
The people who are openly admitting that racial discrimination is baked into our history and culture are the ones who don’t object to persistent destructive racism and white supremacism. They’re all for it, in fact.
That’s different from the gun-rights advocates who are engaging in this weird combination of denouncing the bad outcomes (e.g., school shootings) while simultaneously explicitly declaring that the influence of our history and culture makes it impossible to fix them.
And this “history and culture” excuse is bullshit anyway, as pointed out earlier.
It’s impossible to fix because a powerful industry lobby group has effective total control over a major political party, and that party is refusing to do the will of the people and establish reasonable and effective measures (used by the rest of the civilized world) to reduce mass killings of children.
Like many things in life - follow the money trail. It’s all about the cash in corporate pockets, used to purchase politicians to enable those same corporations to make more cash. The children are just meaningless collateral damage to them.
And these corporations and politicians who are all about the cash are also enjoying the help and cooperation of the useful idiots who buy into their bullshit propaganda about how it’s all about the USA’s holy history and culture, and there is nothing we can do about it.
Which leads us to a situation where the claim is made that if a party adopts a position that is wanted by about 80% of the population, it will lose them votes. I don’t know whether that claim is true or not, but if it is, America is just too stupid to justify existing any longer.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
This is a country where we have to make sure we politely engage with the pro murder children camp.
It’s not about what a position is anymore;
It’s about how you sell it.
A majority of people wanted all the things in the Affordable Care Act.
But when it was given the label of “Obamacare”, most were against it.
A majority of people want a system that provides assistance to those people who need it, in order to lift them out of poverty and make them productive citizens.
But when it is given the label of “socialism”, most are against it.
TLDR People are easily manipulated.
+1.
I hate to say it, but several posters I generally agree with are acting like asses in this thread. Sometimes the guy being accused of “sealioning” really is acting polite and rational while others put words in their mouth and scream invective at them.
I’m not going to try to have a real discussion of the underlying issue on post 300 of a Pit thread, but I agree with those who have said that cigarettes and alcohol are good analogies. Public education about the dangers of gun ownership, and social pressure toward making guns unfashionable and “gun culture” an object of ridicule, are going to work better than pushing for sweeping legislative bans.
Could you please point out where this happened, specifically, with evidence?
No one forced him to say that he was willing to trade other people’s lives in exchange for gun rights. Those were words that came straight from his mouth (or fingers for the pedantic).
And yes, sometimes people are just polite, and sometimes people using polite language to advocate for terrible things. The argument that has been made in this thread is that he is of the latter. You can disagree with that argument, but to simply assert as you have is to do exactly as you have just complained, putting words in other people’s mouths.
Except that in those cases, we actually do have laws that get passed to decrease their cost to society. If they were good analogies, then we would have laws passed about guns to decrease their cost to society.
Once again, you are guilty of what you just cried foul on. We are not talking about “sweeping legislative bans”, but things like mandatory background checks for all (with very limited exceptions) gun transfers. Something that is supported by a strong majority of the population, including most gun owners.
Saying it was worth trading thousands of children’s lives to maintain current gun rights wasn’t put in anybody’s mouth. That’s a literal quote. And that’s monstrous to most people, no matter how polite or ‘rational’ the presentation.
And the industry gun lobby re-frames these reasonable measures as “gun grabbing”, or “destroying our proud history and culture” and credulous folks just go along with this line of bullshit and repeat it.
I’d just like to point out that this is the Pit. The whole reason this thread is here is so that invective could and can be hurled.
People are following a playbook though. If they can’t argue against the horrifying things that have been said, then they pivot to the lack of civility. Fuck you assholes.
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Not gonna search through the thread for instances. Yes, he is willing to trade a certain amount of innocent deaths for gun rights. I am willing to trade a certain amount of innocent deaths for my right to drink alcohol and drive cars. Does that make me a horrible, inhuman baby killer? I agree that alcohol and cars both have more socially redeeming aspects than guns do, but thinking in terms of those tradeoffs and being aware of the consequences of your choices are what rational people are supposed to do.
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We DO have laws that decrease the cost of guns to society. We should have stricter ones, but we certainly do have them. My point is that saying “This is a stupid choice to make, and here’s why” is likely to lead to a more productive discussion than “We are going to take away your right to make that choice”. And as more people come to agree that gun ownership and use are undesirable, it will be easier to pass more stringent laws.
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Yes, SOME people are talking about moderate and popular positions like universal background checks. Again, not going to look for cites, but I recall at least one person has advocated repealing the Second Amendment, at least one has expressed a wish that no guns exist at all, and several have used rhetoric strongly suggesting that they hate gun owners so much they are prepared to pass whatever laws they possibly can to fuck with them.
I’m kind of worried that so many people are channeling their outrage at mass shootings into calling for people to vote Democratic (which of course we should all be doing anyway). Because even if they could get their act together to pass that package of overwhelmingly popular reforms, those reforms aren’t going to produce anything more than a very gradual decline in the level of gun violence over a long period of time.
Which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t bother to do it, just that to the extent that we communicate the message that there is some simple legislation that will completely fix this problem, we’re setting people up for disappointment when we get our reforms passed and there’s no immediately obvious improvement. (I know nobody has explicitly claimed that, but I find it implicit in the tone of many here who appear focused on winning elections and passing legislation to the exclusion of addressing wider cultural factors)
Just want to specifically say that this is fucked up and wrong. Sunny Daze is a valued member of the community who is always worth listening to.
Oh, yeah, I also hate it when the quote button does that. 
Simple truth–we have several posters in this thread that gleefully jumped on the idea of people I personally know being the victims of gun violence. You could say you find that behavior immoral, or you could accept it, and you showed an acceptance of it. That reflects poorly on you.
What I start with is an actual recognition of where we are. SDMB posters, and frankly it appeals like Democrats at large, believe we are starting from a base where, if a school shooting is terrible enough, emotion-laden appeals focused around the time this tragedy occurs, will “finally move the needle.” Here is what I see–within 24 hours I see Ted Cruz saying “we can’t politicize this tragedy.” I seem Tom Cotton saying “I really hope Democrats don’t try to politicize this tragedy, which they have invariably done my entire time in the Senate.” We see Kellyanne Conway saying “I really hope Democrats don’t pound on the tragedy of these kids dying for political purposes.”
Isn’t it weird all of those Republican talking heads are saying basically the same thing? That’s an organized political opposition, it isn’t spur of the moment. This is something they have strategized. And it has worked well for them. As best I can see, the Democrats have no answer at all. My suggestion is that frankly, because the battle lines are so entrenched, using these dramatic, emotion-laden events as the “attachment point” to try and talk about gun control is a net loser for the Democrats. Maybe someone can point to meaningful political wins the Democrats have advanced from this tactic and I’d change my mind, but right now, I don’t see that.
My idea was that Democrats need a more comprehensive, systemic approach that links to issues of concern that are ever-present in voter’s minds, which I think for example our generally high rate of gun crimes is such a thing. One reason I favor this strategy is right now Republicans win a lot of votes and PR off of the crime issue. Meanwhile, society at large is almost oblivious to the fact that gun crime is at its highest in several deep red states, that several Republican lead major cities (Jacksonville being an example) have much higher crime rates than “war torn hell holes” like San Francisco which are frequent targets of conservative propagandizing. With school shootings, Republicans are offering voters the option to mourn, but refuse to talk about the politics. I think it is harder for them to do that on an issue like general crime because Republicans can’t stop talking about general crime and politics, so they are at least present on that field of battle, best case scenario this line of attack seriously undermines a political strategy and political topic that right now primarily favors Republicans. Another scenario maybe it doesn’t do that, but it makes Republican attacks about crime less effective? Or maybe it does nothing. It may genuinely be Democrats just can’t win on this topic at all, but I’m saying they should at least try a different tactic before concluding that. If Democrats truly can’t win on this topic at all then the options for going forward are a lot less appealing.
Except that isn’t how it works at all. Acknowledging that a liberty has a conflict with a pure interest of public safety is simply recognizing the cause and effect of living in a free society. Further, I have never presented it as black and white–that is the hypothetical you guys want. I’m fine responding to it, but it’s a hypothetical. In that hypothetical I am not willing to trade the negatives of full bans of firearm ownership, with the liberty hit. But I am willing to impose fairly serious regulations and controls on legal gun ownership, many policies of which are used throughout Europe and some are even shared with organizations like Everytown for Gun Safety.
Incorrect, see my above response to @Cheesesteak.
Incorrect, see previous comments.
This is a false narrative, see above commentary.
Right, let’s be clear as to what drives this pit thread. Despite a thread being started in P&E, despite it clearly being labeled and intended as a thread to discuss politics, the people foaming at the mouth in this thread wanted no such thing. They wanted a venue to attack gun owners, gun rights, call them all “Freedummies”, blast Republicans, compare America to other countries to advance a narrative that America is terrible and we need to evolve into Glowing Balls of European Light. I can frankly get on board with blasting Republicans and critiquing the United States, but a lot of the rest of it is just frankly recreational outrage. I don’t like recreational outrage, period. I chose to stake out a position more firmly rooted in what I feel are the realities of the politics of the issue–again, in a P&E thread about politics. Specifically in part because I like to advance the general argument that, as you say, you need to win elections to set policy, something that Democrats seem almost hostile to hearing. The response that came (which included death wishes directed at innocent people who committed the sin of being known by me), is because someone interrupted the kabuki theater / performance art. Someone shared a political opinion the histrionic mob disliked, and then they got to do something many of them (like @MrDibble ) love even more–they get to start rambling on about how the offender is racist, spew ad hominems at them for dozens of posts et cetera. This is performative trolling from people that have no interest in real discussion, and showing how they circle the wagons around actual death wishes being made, shows the meager nature of their morality and character.
I don’t really know much about @octopus but it is hilarious to see you post this while ignoring the behavior of the crowd of “usual suspects” in this thread who are literally doing the exact thing you are alleging here: @MrDibble , @crowmanyclouds , @Joey_P , @k9bfriender, @Czarcasm – and yourself, this is what you are.
I didn’t know this term existed until the other day, and when I heard it and the context in which it was mentioned, it made sense to me. But now it’s starting to look like the SDMB just uses it to mean “someone posting things I disagree with, in a way where I look stupid because my response is to just spew profanity and insults while they make actual arguments.”
I wouldn’t advocate pandering to Repubilcans–people who are still committed Republicans are likely not meaningfully persuadable. But we have a Senate, we have an electoral college, and we have a House that is malapportioned. This means that a political coalition that is primarily made up of minorities and college educated whites, is going to have a tremendously difficult time winning elections at any level in about 30 States, if you think that conceding 30 states to the red team isn’t going to have a serious negative impact for the party and country, I don’t really know what to say.
Are the “polite people” the ones wishing death on innocent people because someone disagrees with their political tactdics?
Further ad hominems and lies.
Intelligent and refined posting style.
This guy is building up quite the record of quality posts.
As I said, a serious discussion about gun rights has no place in this thread. But to keep it very brief–I believe that all liberty create public safety risks which create some level of deaths. The simple answer is I don’t think we can live in the sort of society I want to live in if we get rid of all our liberties in the name of safety. To people that simply don’t care about gun rights, they aren’t a “liberty” they are a “fetish”, but our constitution and our history as a people enshrine the right to own and possess firearms–subject to reasonable regulation. For what it is worth, in countries like China, there is a belief that partisan politics is socially toxic, leads to corruption, misrule et cetera. I have some friends in Hong Kong who are very big supporters of the PRC government (and were very against HK’s democracy protests.) They literally just don’t believe that a political system where voters get a “say” when choosing between partisan political parties is worth what they view as the “societal costs.” I think you’d probably feel very differently, because being able to express your preferences through voting is very important to you, but not all liberties are universally shared. I fully recognize gun rights are such a liberty, but it’s silly to act like, in a world with many possible liberties, me deciding one liberty (that our Constitution and history also supports) is important enough that I am unwilling to completely erase it on public safety concerns makes me some monster.
Ah, “Godwin’s Law” in effect. Pity you concede that your argument is so manifestly weak.
You’ll be waiting for a long time before I engage with you in any way other than to point out–you have wished death on innocent people because you were mad at someone on a message board. You are a monster.
Incorrect, I’ve said I do in fact care about the 13.5k deaths.
That’s actually your side in this debate, as per previous posts noting that you were on board with wishing death on people.
Not even close.
Why would I give a fuck what a baby killer has to say?
Also, what the fuck is up with you racist morons and verboseness? Both you and Max_S do it. Do you fancy yourself an intellectual? You’re not, you’re a moron.
Fuck you, yes it is. Millions of people could wish death upon gun owners every day, and not a single death will result. Not one.
But when miserable shit sacks like you accept thousands of deaths a year as the cost to own your pew pew toy, thousands of people will die every year, and continue to die, specifically because you, personally, are preventing change. You helped kill those kids, not by pulling a trigger, but by making damn sure that sick 18 year old had his choice of triggers to pull.
“A baby killer.” Another lie–and again, from a person who is fine with wishing death on innocent people
This is the moral ground on which the hoi polloi in this thread stand.