And yet we do it all the time. Your drunk driving example: we pass laws against having an open bottle of alcohol in a car. That’s just an object, not an action, which can’t be at a certain situation. We pass all sorts of laws involving the manufacture of cars (they have to have tail lights, safety belts, etc) in response to car accidents: those are restrictions on the tool (the car) that can cause harm.
Housebreaking is illegal, but we still have laws prohibiting the possession of lock-picking tools, Murder is illegal, and we have laws against mere possession of a (even small) thermo-nuclear devices (but I just wanted one to hunt rabbits!). USING heroin is illegal, but so is mere possession heroin.
We regulate automobiles, planes, elevators, doors in public buildings, and on and on and on. But any hint at any teeny tiny bit of gun regulation produces vast and idiotic outcry.
Enough, I’m off to hunt rabbits. If I can’t use nuclear weapons, maybe I can get a bazooka.
Do you have a cite for any of these interesting opinions?
Rather than go point by point I’ll simply address what seems to be the core premise you are basing your logic on: It’s not possible to push a magic button and have the hundreds of millions of gun in the country vanish. It’s simply not possible. Even if we had that magic button and we pushed it they would immediately start flowing in with a black market.
Two examples to prove my point:
Mexico has stronger gun law than the US and the criminals there have no problem getting any guns they want.
CT banned assault rifles recently and only a very small percentage turned them in. The rest of them are still in people’s hands, now illegally.
Are you serious with these analogies? Because they are really, really bad.
Having an open container in a car basically IS drinking and driving. Saying that is an example of a double law is like saying attempted murder should be illegal and putting a loaded gun to someone’s head should be legal, since that’s not at all the same thing.
The rest of your examples are more of the same.
If there were a well funded machine in this country dedicated to banning automobiles, you can bet that car lovers would resist any efforts of that machine to restrict or limit their cars. That’s what makes guns different than other things that are regulated. There’s absolutely not trust by people that the regulations suggested have any other end goal than eliminating gun rights. This is for good reason.
I’ve seen similar arguments used against drug laws. I’m in favor of legalization partly because despite our draconian law enforcement policies we have consistently failed to stymie the flow of drugs being imported into, produced, and distributed in the United States. But so far as gun laws go I think every time there’s a tragedy there’s a push for legislation, and, oddly enough, most of the suggested legislation wouldn’t have done a thing to prevent the latest tragedy in the first place. A 10 round magazine would not have prevented Sandy Hook.
There’s a catch-22 happening here. The gun lobby is so strong and has so much control over Congress that only the weakest measures are ever proposed because they’re the only ones with even a hope of passing, and having established this state of affairs, the gun lobby then criticizes the weak measures to be basically useless, which they more or less are.
The reality however is that there are measures that would very likely have prevented Sandy Hook, and for a whole host of reasons this kind of tragedy very very rarely occurs anywhere except in the US. Other countries have gun violence and even the rare mass shooting, but the rates of gun violence are very much lower and mass shootings are vanishingly rare. Guns like those used at Sandy Hook – specifically the Bushmaster and the two handguns – would typically be considered restricted weapons, restricted more tightly than already tightly regulated ordinary hunting rifles or unavailable at all; they wouldn’t be in the casual possession of an upscale suburban mother who I’m sure was your typical “law-abiding gun owner” that we hear so much about, and I’m sure imagined herself a very responsible person. Nor would you have a culture where a mother considered that taking her son out to a gun range was a beneficial form of parental bonding.
Changing the laws in a meaningful way and changing the gun culture would be a long and almost impossibly difficult road, but if it’s to be done you have to start somewhere. The tragedy is that every time the first small baby step is proposed, the NRA and assorted lunatics come out of the woodwork and quash it. This has been going on for at least 80 years, when they killed meaningful reforms in the 1934 NFA. And they are far more powerful and determined today than they were then.
Let’s say there WAS a well funded lobby dedicated to banning cars in the 1960s. Then requirements for burning unleaded gas and having seat belts were proposed. If car owners rebelled and said “HELL NO! THAT’S STEP ONE IN CONFISCATING ALL CARS!” then they would be just as batshit crazy as gun owners are today.
I think that’s wrong. Blacks are twice as likely to be shot to death as whites (age adjusted, whatever that means) but that doesn’t take income into account. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/feature/wp/2013/03/22/gun-deaths-shaped-by-race-in-america/ (but it look likes they are 5 times more likely to be murdered, are there are lot of non-gun murders in the black community or is it this “age adjusting” that does it?)
I think blacks have 3 times the poverty rate of whites. So maybe poverty rates have something to do with it.
So what? Would it be better if he used a hunting rifle with a wood stock instead of a black rifle?
The fact that going to the gun range is a fun family activity is a feature, not a bug. Do you want to close down gun ranges? Would that have stopped him?
There aren’t any guns that are the equivalent of a car without seatbelts. There’s no magic safety feature, that only if we implemented would make guns safer.
This is a great example of incrementalist thinking. Another reason why no compromise should ever be made on gun laws and every single additional restriction should be opposed. And so far it has been successful.
Well I happen to like a lot of what the NRA does so I guess that would make me a lunatic in your book. And while it’s tough to have a conversation with someone who is calling you a lunatic I will do my best.
What is gun culture? I ask because it seems to me that gun culture can be radically different depending on where you’re coming from. Gun culture in rural Arkansas is probably a bit different than gun culture in South Central Los Angeles, the south side of Chicago, or rural Alaska. What do you think needs to be changed?
You can blame the NRA but all they’re doing is protecting our Constitutional right to bear arms. Like it or not, per recent Supreme Court rulings, the right to own a firearm is an individual right. You can place some restrictions on those rights but they can’t be onerous. If you want to change that then we have a method by which you can amend the Constitution.
I forgot to address this is specific. My father started taking me to the gun range when I was 12 years old. Shortly after that I started hunting with him. I have some very fond memories of spending time with my father and then later with my father and my sister at the gun range and hunting. There is absolutely nothing wrong with teaching a child how to use a firearm.
Whoa! We can’t compare the effects of gun policy between the US and its immediate neighbors Mexico, but we can compare it to an island nation on the other side of the world?
Sure, john oliver from the Daily Show might think its a good comparison but the fact that John Oliver thinks its a good comparison does not make it so.
Here is a response I had to that notion in another thread. Some took exception to my description of the effect of the gun ban in Australian murders and suicides but judge for yourlsef and see if your Australia case is as slam dunk as you think it is.
If you eliminated the gun death rate in Ameica our murder rate would be among the lowest in the world. Do you really think that would be the result of banning guns or do you think there would be more knife murders, etc? If so then why focus only on gun deaths rather than on all deaths?
Mexico is a VERY valid comparison for the purposes of this thread. It’s the problem in the US writ large in that the average law-abiding Mexican doesn’t own guns, but the cartels and gangs, who don’t obey the law in the first place, are the ones with all the illegal guns, and not coincidentally, doing all the murdering.
Banning guns outright in Mexico wouldn’t stop that, just like more strict gun laws in the US wouldn’t put a dent in ours either for the same reasons. All you end up doing is beefing up the black market, hurting the legal market, and irritating a bunch of people who weren’t doing anything wrong or breaking the law in the first place. All the while, the criminal element goes on their merry murdering way.
That is a load of crap. Have you forgotten that the anti-gun morons didn’t just propose but also passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban? Their efforts aren’t just useless because they are weak, but because they are fundamentally misguided.
Setting aside the fact that Straya is not an island, it is really more culturally similar to the US than is Mexico. Most likely language plays a part in this, as that is a major cultural symbiont. Religion is probably another significant factor, Mexico being predominantly Catholic.
Guns are not a thing unto themself, they affect culture and are affected by culture. The underlying social issues that make guns a problem do need to be addressed, but guns themselves also play a part in those issues. We simply cannot look at them as if they are individually not a significant element of the larger view, and seems to be that the ammosexuals and the “gun-grabbers” want to constrain us from a broader look at things, in favor of their particular agenda.
What is wrong with us Americans in your view that makes this inevitable for our society, but simply does not happen in other western democracies that have strict gun control. Why have your dire predictions not come to pass in all of the other countries that already have these laws? Why aren’t Brits afraid to leave their homes because they aren’t allowed to carry guns with them everywhere? What do you think is different about Americans that we wouldn’t be able to handle this? Are we fundamentally flawed or something? Or are British people just way more brave than Americans? Do you view Americans as inferior to members of other cultures that are able to handle going about their daily lives without packing heat everywhere they go? Your views seem to strongly suggest it.
Then why didn’t banking guns in DC and Chicago make gun murders disappear? Coyld it have anything to do with the 300 million guns already in circulation.
But I am not an unreasonable man. If you can get the second repealed, I suppose I would be willing to try out your theory.
YOU may not be trying to confiscate guns but it is not true that no one is trying to take away guns. It is the ultimate goal of some of the most vocal gun control advocates
And yet our suicide rate is average for wealthy industrialized nations. Hmmm.
And if we ignored all gun deaths, our murder rate would be low relative to other wealthy developed nations. Are you saying that America’s resting state would be that low (I acknowledge that our murder rate is currently much higher than average).
IOW why are you only focusing on gun murders and not murders generally?
Or do you think there woudnt be a substitution effect.
Do you think there are any benefits to having legal owmeship of guns in society?
Would you change your mind if i showed you that guns are used defensively over 100, 000 times every year?
So depending on the stats you use, in anywhere between 90% to 96% of suicides in general the person survives. The attempted suicide death rate is somewhere between 4% to 10%. But from the same link: The use of firearms results in death 90% of the time. Hmmm.
Very, very few. A dangerous “solution” in search of a problem, indeed, as I said before. For example…
Would you change your mind if I showed you that (aside from those numbers being highly questionable) most of those incidents involved other people with guns (which argues for the long-term solution of having far fewer guns like in all other civilized countries) but, more importantly, how about if I showed you that…
Funny thing. It turns out that guns kill people, and they do it very effectively, and when you have a lot of guns, a lot of people get killed.
But maybe this is all some sort of statistical manipulation that the liberals have perpetrated. :rolleyes:
