So, let’s say that you’re advocating a re-implementation of the Assault Weapons Ban. As you are proposing a change, it is incumbent upon you to demonstrate why the change should be made. You have 10 years of previous implementation of the law to prove its effectiveness. Use that information to make your case.
That’s why I dismiss their caveats. It’s like the “I’m not saying it’s aliens, but it’s aliens” guy. They’re not saying it didn’t make any difference, but there is no evidence that it did. To my mind, that means that it didn’t make any difference.
What it means to your mind is immaterial, if your mind is objectively wrong. In this case, it is.
You could make a similar claim that’s thoroughly defensible, however. Instead of saying, “The law did bupkis,” you could say, “There’s no evidence that the law had any measurable effect.” These two similar statements have a key difference in their claims, and that key difference is important enough for the statisticians studying the issue to emphasize it. Why not make the defensible claim yourself?
This is a great analogy, for the exact opposite reason: it’s the opposite of what they’re saying. They’re not saying the equivalent of “I’m not saying it’s aliens, but it’s aliens.” They’re saying, “We’ve seen no evidence of alien life yet, but that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as aliens.” They’re that guy, whereas you’re the guy saying, “We’ve not seen evidence of aliens? WE’RE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE!!!”
As yet, I have not seen any measurable effect, only the claims that there might possibly have been some, though it cannot be substantiated. My later statement, the one that you’re keying on, came later, and was rhetorical in nature.
And so… prove that there are aliens. I’ll not dismiss the idea that there are aliens if you can do so, just as I’ll not dismiss the claims of gun-control advocates who assert the AWB did something if they can prove that it did.
Fair point, although now that I read the Wikipedia article, it’s still not “zero measurable effect,” it’s “insufficient evidence.” Even your original claim was too strong.
And then, if we leave Wikipedia and Follow the source, we find that these studies caution against considering them to be definitive:
The more I think about this, the more it smacks of dishonesty.
Here’s the timeline:
-A ban on assault weapons is contemplated.
-People buy them like they’re going out of business.
-These guns last for how long? Decades?
-The ban is enacted.
-A few years after people have bought them like crazy, some scientists study the effects of the ban, and say, “Yeah, right before the ban their sales went through the roof, so there are a ton of them around still, and we’re not seeing an effect from the ban yet.”
-People say, “SEE! THE BAN HAD NO EFFECT! REPEAL IT!”
It’s bleedin’ obvious that if such a ban is going to have an effect, its effect will start to be felt after the assault weapons already out there start breaking down, corroding, and otherwise becoming useless.
It’d be like requiring all new cars to have seat belts, and then saying that, since the number of traffic fatalities hasn’t changed within a few weeks of the new requirement, seat belts make no difference in traffic fatalities. Ya gotta give it time.
I’ll start with this. It gives me an opportunity to sound like a heartless prick.
Spree shootings really aren’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. We hashed it out in another thread - over the last few decades, on average about 12-15 people per year are killed in spree shootings. As a cause of death, it’s probably not even in the top 1000.
People are horrible at evaluating relative risk. Very few people truly understand that it’s a big world out there, lots of bad shit happens. They are of a mindset that does not allow them to see the big picture, to consider the rates of incidents of certain events, to realize how big the world is and how many people are in it. They can only relate to the world through narratives, through something that approximates personal experience.
This is why the media can essentially create perceptions of risk out of thin air. Before 9/11, 2001 was “the summer of the shark” - not sure if anyone remembers that one. Big shark attack epidemic, right? Well, no, actually. 2001 was a below-average year for shark attacks. The media just didn’t have much else to do, so they blew a few incidents way out of proportion and created the “summer of the shark” out of thin air, and yet suddenly people were avoiding going into the ocean for no reason.
Similarly, a big dramatic plane crash will keep certain people from flying for years, even if they come to realize it was the only major crash they’ve heard of in the last decade and there must’ve been tens of millions of flights or more in this time with no problems at all.
To care so deeply about a few incidents the media spoonfeeds you while being blissfully unaware of everything else is irrational. All over the world horrible shit happens to people, and kids, all the time. In the months since Newton, probably over a million kids starved to death, were raped to death, were tortured, and underwent all sorts of horrible fates. The world is an awful place, with untold amounts of suffering. And yet if you get all weepy for months over some kids you don’t have a personal connection to because they got shot, why aren’t you getting all weepy about these other million kids with horrible fates that you also have no personal connection to? Because you lack perspective. You only see the world through the narratives that the media decides to tell you.
Your risk, and your children’s risk, for being a victim of a spree shooter is so infinitesimal that the idea of changing societal policy substantially, affecting millions of people and restricting human rights, is a ridiculous overreaction.
We have roughly 10,000 gun homicides each year in the country, only a tiny fraction of which are spree shootings. That’s roughly 27 per day. Coincidentally, that’s roughly the same amount who died at Newton. So those deaths represent an average day of gun homicides. And yet people are not freaking out on a daily basis. It takes a story that gets an extreme emotional reaction from them, rather than any analysis of facts and statistics.
I will go even further, to demonstrate why this is not rational. Gun deaths have been on the steady decline for decades. Are people happy about this? No, they’re probably not even aware of this. However, the amount of time our media spends in feeding frenzies over shootings is going up. The actual number of people dying are going down, but the feeling of danger spoonfed to you by the media is going up.
I would posit that if this situation were reversed - if the actual gun homicide rate was climbing for years, but no one ever shot up a bunch of kids or a movie theater or committed any other big dramatic spree shootings, people would actually feel better about guns in society and perceive less danger, even when the actual level of danger is greater.
So to me, spree shootings are no big deal. Tragic, sure. But insignificant from both a risk assessment perspective and a societal control perspective. So any laws that get pushed during the We Must Do Something phase after such a shooting are either ill-thought out (if you want to actually reduce gun deaths, an assault weapons ban is such a ridiculous waste of political capital that you cannot be taken seriously as someone interested in that as a goal) or capitalizing on public hysteria, pushing the agenda they’ve been waiting for all along onto the public at a time that We Must Do Something, even if those laws are bad. Hence my comparison to the Patriot act.
Do you not understand that the Assault Weapons Ban was a cosmetic ban? It could never have made any difference for the simple reason that an AR-15 shorn of bayonet lug, flash hider, barrel shroud, or rifle grenade launcher, even under the terms of the AWB, was perfectly legal. In fact, AWB-compliant AR-15s were sold by the millions over those 10 years.
It’s as if they banned cars that had spoilers and side skirts and then claimed that the accident rate was reduced as a result. It didn’t have any measurable effect because it simply could not have. That’s honesty for you.
Even as someone who is not much impressed by Second Amendment arguments–and who furthermore feels that the Second Amendment is deeply flawed in its original meaning and modern interpretations and probably should be revised in the very least–to me the AWB is clearly useless for the purpose of reducing gun-related violence.
I was going to dig up a bunch of quotes from the threads after Newton to show how mocking and gloaty the tone was, but I’m too lazy, you can look it up if you’re interested.
As to the rest - as I said, how many spree shootings do you need to make societal-wide changes, especially if all you want to pass are dipshit meaningless laws like assault weapons ban that don’t actually meaningfully address the problem and only inconvenience decent people? A whole lot more than we see.
In general, we should not change societal policy for such a low incident and risk, unless the corresponding change is so cheap, easy, and causes little disruption to things that isn’t targeting.
Why is it that occasional massacres deserve so much more attention than other crimes or deaths? Should we dictate all our laws based on how dramatic and sensational the thing they’re targeting is?
Well, gun homicides are down about 41% since the early 90s.
Enforcement. No one seems to be interested in punishing people who own guns but shouldn’t, or who commit crimes with guns. The NRA constantly hammers that people who misuse guns should be punished, and yet as a society we seem to be very little interested in bothering to do so, instead thinking that throwing even more laws at the problem is somehow the solution.
I can’t speak to her mental state, but I can speculate. By now, she’s been fighting this battle for decades. She views gun nuts as pure evil, and her cause as holy. In a way, this is probably a holy war for her, and it’s important that she wins, that she punishes the other side, than any concern with the effectiveness of any particular policy or law.
I don’t doubt she takes some sort of satisfaction every time she gets some ammunition to rub it in their faces, to attack them again.
If she were truly concerned for public safety and creating good policy, how can you explain her almost juvenile obsession with assault weapons bans? By now she’s been debating the things for decades, and she has to know that they’re pointless and bad policy. But by God she’s going to show those gun nuts who’s boss and get one passed one of these days.
For her, I think banning guns may very well be an end unto itself.
If I were being generous, I could make an alternate case as to why you think a shooting like Newton might be a net good. As I said, people don’t give a shit about the 10,000 random homicides, but they care deeply about a heart-wrenching narrative. If you took a purely logical view, and you assumed that such a shocking incident may strike up enough hysteria for you to be able to take action to reduce gun violence in a way that hundreds of times that many deaths in non-dramatic incidents would not, then you could think that the changes it drove would eventually result in fewer deaths than the instigating incident, possibly by orders of magnitude. Of course I don’t actually think this is motivating her, but I would actually accept it as an intellectually honest position, so long as the person had an informed opinion that whatever laws came out of this would substantially reduce gun violence. Here’s another one where stupid shit like the AWB makes a mockery of such assumptions, though.
First, the only real expansion of gun rights has come through concealed carry policies, policies which have been quite successful, or at the very least, not significantly harmful. What other new expansions of gun rights are you seeing?
Secondly, it’s interesting that you brought up MADD. It used to be that drunk driving wasn’t considered such a big deal, wasn’t enforced greatly, etc. So what happened? We dramatically ramped up enforcement and punishment. Once you thought there was a decent chance you’d get caught, and that the punishments were severe - even draconian - people wised up quickly.
The gun lobby actually advocates something similar for guns. They want enforcement and punishments for people actually using guns in crimes (or before crimes are committed, if felons are caught with guns and such) to be much harsher, and much more widely enforced. If you scare criminals away from using guns in the same way you scare people away from driving drunk, we might actually see some real changes. At least it has far greater chance, with less inconvenience to good people, than farces like the assault weapons ban.
Without a jedi mind meld, I can’t tell if that’s something she actively hopes for. It wouldn’t surprise me. But yes, the relevant thing is that when these sorts of things happen, people like her pounce into action to exploit it to the fullest. Trying to pass a law in the middle of a hysteria strongly suggests you know the law won’t pass when cooler heads prevail. And from that you have to question the wisdom of the policy.
The assault weapons bans do not ban weapons based on their functionality. It does not ban weapons more suited to crime or murder, but rather, guns that look scary. There’s a deliberate misinformation campaign to confuse the public as to what an “assault weapon” is - the very team is meant to mimic “assault rifle” without actually using the term, since no assault rifles would actually be covered under assault weapons bans.
You could take two functionally identical weapons and add some features to one that made it look “more military”, and one becomes banned and the other not. Conversely, if you remove those features, you still have the same rifle, but now it passes the ban.
I’ve heard people say “well, let’s not allow so many loopholes this time around so that people can just remove these features and have a ban-compliant weapon” which misses the point entirely. Since the only thing that classifies something as an “assault weapon” are these cosmetic features, they aren’t loopholes. The laws try to ban weapons that look scary - so you remove a few of the things that make it look scary, and you’re legal. The things that actually affect functionality are already governed by other laws.
The harm in trying is that we should not impose laws on people that simply do not make sense. People could become criminals one day for owning a gun they’ve had for years and have done nothing wrong with. Costs are added to guns that have to take extra work to remove standard parts to comply with bans. In general, it shouldn’t be the place of the person who’d be affected by the law to make the case that it shouldn’t exist, it should be on the person proposing the law to show that the public good would outweigh the public harm. Such laws only serve to inconvenience gun owners with no actual benefit.
The reality is that many gun control advocates will ban any guns they could. Banning scary looking guns is a low hanging fruit. You can lie to people and convince them that “weapons of war” are all over our streets, that it’s a real problem that has to be solved. If these same gun control advocates could somehow convince the public that banning guns that were manufactured on a Tuesday, or whose name started with the letter C, or whose serial number has a 5 in it needed to be banned, they would do so. They are looking to ban any and all guns they can, to cause any inconvenience to gun owners they can, to chip any anywhere they can. It’s just a matter of what they can try to sell to the public. Assault weapons bans are such low hanging fruit, easy to lie to the public about. They should be fought because they’re absurd and ineffective, the problem they’re attempting to solve doesn’t actually exist, that they inconvenience law abiding people for no reason, and that they’re part of an overall agenda to gain any ground they can against gun rights.
If gun control advocates were sincerely interested in public safety, they might exploit this hysteria in a way that passes a law that might actually do some good. However, their repeated focus on bullshit assault weapons bans shows their true agenda - not of public safety, but of banning any gun they think is politically viable to ban.
I’m heartened to see that some of the people in this thread who aren’t gun rights advocates nevertheless recognize what bullshit assault weapons bans are. They instantly discredit the intentions of anyone professing to be interested in public safety, and the political capital wasted on such a worthless goal is incredibly counterproductive.
Today, 199, 999,964 guns in America were not used by one person against another to cause a death, nor were they involved in an accidental death.
36 were.
Ban 'em all, I say.
Today, 74,999,966 American gun owners did not use any of their guns to kill another person, nor were their guns involved in an accidental death.
34 did.
Punish 'em all, I say.
Today, 93 people were killed by cars.
Where’s the compassion or outrage for those 93? Some of them were children. We could save far, far more lives in this country if we got rid of automobiles, and there’s not even a Constitutional hurdle to leap over.
But no.
That’s what’s so laughable about these debates. To support car usage, you must accept that there will be deaths. 93 of them per day, as of 2009, in an age of crumple zones and side-curtain airbags. Fundamentally, you are saying “the benefits of automobile usage justify the unfortunate risk to life inherent in automobile ownership and use.” To you, those 93 lives are less valuable than the 36 lives lost due to firearms today. You don’t advocate for them. You don’t mourn them. You don’t start pit threads over them. Yeah, they’re dead, and that’s sad…but hey…gotta have my car, right?
We’re not in GD discussing “reasonable” measures that would prevent car deaths, like, say, reducing the speed limit to 35 MPH nationwide. Or limiting car operation to adults between 45 and 55 years old.
Instead, we’re beating the dead horse of trying to ban “high capacity magazines,” which means that my handgun now has 11 rounds in it instead of 13 (well, not really, since I’d still have my “high capacity” magazines after the ban…but the hapless son of a bitch who buys a Walther P99 next year…HE would only carry 11 rounds.) Or, we’re discussing how dangerous the AR-15 is–not because of its functionality, which is identical to my grandfather’s deer rifle–but because it’s scary and black and made of polymer!
I’d seriously like you to ask yourself this question: how many mass murderers do you know, personally? Zero, right?
1 in 4 of every single person you see on a daily basis is a gun owner. Your friends. Your co-workers. That dude who picks his nose in the car when he’s next to you at the red light.
You legitimately want to take away the rights of 25% of your fellow Americans for the actions of Klebold and Harris, James Holmes, and Adam Lanza?
I take no position on whether it’s a cosmetic ban. I take a position on your claim that absence of evidence of effectiveness equals evidence of absence of effectiveness. That’s a fallacy.
As for whether it could have had any effect, well, of course it couldn’t have any effect in the very short term, after folks who opposed it spent the months leading up to it saturating the private market with the guns it banned. And in the long term it was repealed. So your theory–that it is impossible for it to have any effect–was not tested.
There are opposing theories out there. The gun lobby ensured that the opposing theories could not be tested either.
I was thinking of replying to this one, but good lord, talk about your low-hanging fruit.
So instead, I’ll lob it out as a softball to Debaser. You insist that it’s the gun-control side that’s irrational. How about you address the innumeracy and hysteria in this post, as a bit of bona fides showing that you can view the issue with at least a modicum of objectivity instead of approaching it from an entirely partisan standpoint?
While the effectiveness of a law may be a crucial element in the law’s value, it is not the sole element. In my estimation, there isn’t much law can do for our situation. There are simply too many guns to be controlled.
But there’s more to it. Laws are expression of cultural change as much as they are an instrument to forbid and punish bad behavior. They reflect our changes as a people. Did passing a law that makes forbidding black people to ride the bus illegal, did that suddenly equalize black access to the city buses? No, not if they couldn’t afford to ride anyway.
Suppose that were so, should we not pass such a law regardless, even under the dire threat that it would not be effective? Even if the law does not have bigotry quivering in its boots, it serves notice of our disapproval, it announces that we are changing, and we have changed.
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if statistics show a minimal effect from a ban on assault weapons. That’s a point, but its not the whole point. It can be as simple a point as the bleeding obvious, that a military weapon has no place in civilian hands. That is a point worth making,what kind of country are we, that we encourage our citizens to arm themselves in fear of each other? And even if the end result is nothing more than a pubic statement of our disapproval, of our commitment to change, then that is worth doing until something better can be done.
We remove the law forbidding some people from riding the bus, but they still can’t ride because they can’t afford it. Still worth doing. Even the smallest step matters.
Of course I don’t, because the rest of the post is an explanation for your hypothesis, and I don’t actually have enough information to evaluate your hypothesis. That’s why I’m more interested in data–but in this area, data is carefully minimized.
For less than the effective life of an assault weapon. The ban wouldn’t begin to show any sort of effect until the number of useful assault weapons out there began to decline significantly.
The effective life of well cared for guns is measured in centuries, so your theory is that this can’t be tested in your lifetime? So you don’t really want a ban but confiscation?