Yet another “constitutional scholar” who claims a legal right to own a firearm, but will not hesitate to ignore the law if it goes against him.
Back in post #201, I asked a question about where all these illegal firearms come from and didn’t receive any responses, so again I ask:
Are the majority of illegally possessed firearms manufactured illegally, or stolen?
If underground manufacturing is the problem, perhaps targetting those who create the weapons can stem the tide. If on the other hand they are being stolen, who exactly are they being stolen from-all those friends and neighbors who are armed to the teeth to protect “parasites” like me?
Ah, I love the smell of a false dichotomy in the morning. Another possibility is that the guns are manufactured in another country and are shipped illegally to the US.
Also, you seem to ignore the fact that a lot of guns exist and won’t just waste away if they are banned. So, banning guns, confiscating them from registered owners, stopping illegal manufacturing, and stopping illegal importing may well still leave lots and lots of guns in the hands of the bad guys.
In my area (Philadelphia) I’ve read that there is an enormous market for legally purchased guns in a different state, which are then transported and sold illegally in the more restrictive state for a huge profit (then reported as stolen, etc.). Don’t have a cite handy. But in this instance, it is indeed an illegal “underground” that feeds the pipeline.
They’ll be smuggled through Mexico and Canada, they’ll be manufactured for export in Europe and Asia (as many are today), they’ll be stolen from National Guard armories as they were back in the 60s & 70s, they’ll come from all over the place. It’s not hard to see where they’d come from. Create a lucrative market for illegal firearms and someone will be quite happy to make a pile of cash from it.
The counter argument, that you seem to subscribe to, is that the fact that there are so many guns in this country is the reason we need so many guns in this country. Talk about a self fulfilling prophecy.
The fact that the we can’t even keep track of the guns we have now (which end up killing people) is a result of the *want *of all these guns. This, I think is the culmination of the OP’s point. The NRA and Second Amendment Above All Else types, do shoulder some of the responsibility for all this “need” for guns.
Before you send them back, let me have them for a little while. I’ll show them the pedophiles at NAMBLA and the racist fucks at Stormfront and ask them if they would like to reconsider that little freedom of speech thing they so recklessly threw in there.
I haven’t had any coffee yet, so you all will have to forgive me. I just can’t remember that old saying about people who are willing to trade freedom for security. How does that go again?
I just wanted to add that you’re correct: if I decide I don’t want to cope with whatever new laws come down the hatch, I most certainly won’t. Just the same as ignoring a variety of moronic laws that are already on the books.
Yet I’m not a sociopathic killer; I just can’t figure it out.
buttonjockey is better equipped to answer this, but it is my understanding that most illegally possessed firearms are obtained through straw sales and then theft. Economy (read: gangster-gun) manufacturers like Bryco Arms, Lorcin and Raven have also been rumored to “lose” a great deal of stock from time to time.
Surprise, surprise, even economy guns are expensive to gangbangers. An individual I know that wasn’t ineligible to own a gun, yet lived in a ghetto neighborhood (by Spokane standards) purchased one of these pieces of garbage for $650!
Look, you’re already comparable to the vagina of a gang-banged elephant, do you really want to increase your status to the size of a whale’s cock receptacle?
Maybe people just want to own the things they enjoy and don’t want to see them banned? Why do you think this “assault weapon” and ammunition frenzy is going on in the firearms business world right now? My local gundealers won’t even order anything from Rock River Arms (makers of DEA AR15s) because some people have been waiting over a year to get their products! Demand right now is very, very high and it isn’t because of global terrorism, gangbanging or Mexico: it’s because people want to own these things before future legislature takes the ability to do so legally away.
I don’t see why my disapproval of you upsets you so, shitbag. You were the one who brought your criminal past to the table, not me. What do you expect me to think of you after you spout off about being a thief, assaulting people in a bar, and spending time in prison? All the while showing no evidence of contrition and blaming the victims, I might add. Do you think I should be pumping my fist in the air and shouting “You da man, ivan! You da man!”
You’re a fucking idiot as well as a shitbag.
While I ordinarily hate the call-and-response approach, I am at work and need an expedient of some sort…
No, not “in the wrong hands.” If you support private possession of guns, you have to admit that sometimes the wrong people are going to get them and that this will happen more often when guns are permitted than when they are not. This is not to say that were guns banned, they would magically vanish*, but if they were, they would be considerably less prevalent. Similarly, no one pretends narcotics, say, are not trafficked in this country, but the amount of the traffic is a good deal less than it would be if they were legalized.
The argument that a gun ban would not eliminate guns pretends that this is an all-or-nothing question and allows the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Passing laws against theft hasn’t eliminated stealing either, so repeal it? This really is a dopey argument and gun advocates who cherish their credibility should strive to avoid it.
What has Switzerland got to do with any of this? I am not arguing that private possession of guns and the non-existence of socially costly gun crimes cannot logically coexist. Evidently this obtains in Switzerland. It does not so obtain in the United States. I am not have an airy-fairy discussion about possible worlds. I am talking about what policy is good for the United States given our seeming propensity for multiple-fatality shootouts.
I think here you may be grasping my point above. The only other thing I’d point out is this: The question has never been “Can Object X be abused?” It is rather “Do the benefits of Object X outweigh its harms, including the harms of predictable abuse?” Hands, you will be surprised to learn, come in quite, well, handy.
Since Page 1 of this thread, all I’ve asked for is an explanation of how the benefits of gun possession (and I have been broadminded in what I have included as it benefits) outweigh its harms (the demonstrated excess mortality of gun crimes). Here we are on Page 8 and only one person has risen to the occasion. His argument was that guns allow either the possibility of armed revolution or at least the warm fuzzies that imagining yourself capable of resisting the government in armed insurrection engender, and that these political or psychological benefits outweigh the costs of gun crime. I find this argument a little unavailing.
Your points (1) and (2), if capable of proof, would go a long way toward making a redoubtable case for at least some private possession of firearms. I behoove you and your fellow-travelers to try to make the case.