Oh, okay. We only need convince gun owners to get rid of a couple hundred million guns, then. Piece of cake. Shouldn’t take long at all.
What? You mean they’re bad? Christ, we should put laws into place saying they’re illegal, and arrest people who make/distribute/use them! Why don’t we do that???
Perfectly coherent and reasonably stated. All of my gun-owning friends would agree with you 100%.
In the majority of handgun deaths, the victim is the guy with his finger on the trigger: suicide. Try again.
To the often-repeated claim, or rather the often-repeated emotional and ungrounded retort, about so-called “defensive gun uses”, they amount to only about 1600 incidents per year. Roughly an order of magnitude fewer than offensive uses, IOW.
But the need to be able to defend against the jackbooted thugs of a tyrannical government trumps all of that reality stuff, doesn’t it? :rolleyes:
I see no disagreement, even from the pro-gun side, that America's gun culture is morally empty (America's gun culture--that is, all the information, media memes, traditions in communities, word of mouth, etc., to do with guns; you're welcome to rebut that moral emptiness of course.)
So REBRAND America's gun culture. For example, address the moral vacuum, and give it more of a moral center. Right now the main value/"morality" seems to cluster around self-defense, with the usual corruptions of vengence, my-gun-makes-me-powerful, a go-to instrument whenever angry, threatened, etc.
I think this approach can be effective because
[ul]
[li]it can be done independent of changes in the legislation[/li][li]the more embedded and factious of the pro-gun groups seem to be operating as if the 2nd Amendment and the values around guns are sacred values, making them, in their faith-based mindset, very resilient to certain facts (a “faith” that is their right to practice, but not everyone else wants); but engagement over morals, values, etc., may be more effective[/li][/ul]
As far as execution, it probably has to be trial-and-error, community-by-community. For example contact houses of worship (who not only have the moral sensibility, but clout with the "right"/conservatives), and perhaps Everytown a/o the Brady Campaign (who have the money) in conjunction with a few Madison Ave ad execs (who have the sensibility wrt the overall culture, and could probably sell ice to Eskimos) could explore social media, TV and print, PSAs. You might also enjoin the CDC, the Surgeon General. If a message doesn't work, you redraft and try again.
I would like to materialize in the real world where I can defend myself from either. That’s my preference. It doesn’t matter if a crackpot uses a gun or a car to try to kill someone. What matters is the ability to defend against that. We don’t have a problem with legitimate licensed gun owners. We have a problem with unlicensed criminals who will never obey the law.
Yes, laws are in place and we do arrest people who make/distribute/use them…thanks largely to the people ideologically aligned with gun ownership. People aligned with gun control/elimination more typically have among their numbers those prone to act like drugs are cool, work to reduce or eliminate sentences for drug crimes, and make fun of/resist efforts to dissuade people from using drugs. The pain and suffering of gays and transexuals is a fly speck compared to the pain, suffering, criminality and death caused by drugs, and if the left were motivated to deal with it they would bring all their PC guns to bear to portray drug use as evil and socially unacceptable. Yet I think you would agree the very idea of using PC tactics on drugs is so incongruous as to be laughable.
Evidently you didn’t notice but I was talking about the use of guns to commit murder. There’s a difference. Clearly no one feels the need to arm themselves in order to protect their homes from people committing suicide.
Evidently we have different definitions of murder. Mine includes suicide. Did you know that if you own a gun, your chances of committing suicide are greater than your chances of using the gun to defend yourself?
The Brady bunch has repeatedly changed their name to distance themselves from all of the lies they’ve been caught telling. Bloomberg’s Everytown is another organization that uses every option, except telling the truth, to ban all firearms. But Bloomberg has 50 million to spend selling ice to the gun-ban zealots.
The current 2nd Amendment debate has been ongoing since at least 1968, and the bottom line is that the anti-gun zealots simply do not have the votes to change the U.S. Constitution. When they promote the anti-2nd issue, they can’t even keep a majority of either house in Congress.
Some people don’t impress me with their cognitive abilities either. As has been said, ban guns and the monster will find something else.
Don’t believe me? No handguns here.
A unique and self-serving definition of murder, I must say.
And yes, I’m aware that more people die from suicide than from murder. I have no idea what percentage of suicides die from gunshots however.
I also have no idea how many more people would be robbed, raped, burgled, strangled or shot were the fear they might have a gun at hand lessened or removed.
Are you really trying to argue for gun control so as to reduce suicide? I would think that by the time a person would become so despairing of life that they would kill themselves, they’d simply utilize one of the almost limitless other ways of doing so were a gun not at hand.
I’d like there to be fewer incidences of gun violence. I’d like there to be a lower body count. I don’t think more guns will help that, but I think fewer guns might, and that better education of people who don’t take them seriously might as well.
Cite that there are twice as many suicides as there are what everybody but me calls just plain murder:
