Why? A fetus is not a human, and the central purpose of abortion is not to kill it. Perhaps you thought you had a point of some kind there; sorry to disabuse you.
Now, how is the gun rights absolutist (or even the gun rights default case) position *not *accurately described as pro murder rights? :dubious:
Really? Suppose it becomes medically possible to transplant unwanted fetuses to volunteer surrogates; and as a consequence a Prenatal Adoption Act is passed making it a crime to kill a fetus by abortion. I think we’d then see that it isn’t about “a woman’s body”, it’s about vetoing a baby’s existence.
Simple: Shooting someone in legitimate self-defense isn’t murder. Yes, it might cause a human death. Causing a death != murder.
I’ll back you up on this. In fact, given how broad “accessory” laws on felonies are, I’m surprised straw buyers aren’t already charged as accomplices when the guns they pass on are used in murders.
However, in the particular case of the Columbine murders, the main straw buyer was given immunity in exchange for cooperation, and it couldn’t be proven that the gun dealer sold the firearm in question directly to the killers. Two other intermediates were convicted however.
Apropos of nothing, I suppose, I just wanted to note that I very much appreciate your position and perspective.
… really? Sober and armed 18-year-olds are more dangerous than drunk driving ones?
The ridiculous extremes to which you have to go to invent a situation in which you might have a point should be informative. Sadly, most of us are doomed to live in the real world - we don’t have the luxury of imagining a hypothetical one where our views can be justified.
Real-world examples (something you’ve just demonstrated a distaste, but that’s your problem) are hardly ever “simple”, are they?
Even when sober, they’re drunk on hormones.
I actually do appreciate hearing that. It’s too easy to get heated about it, for a lot of good reasons (people being dead, and a perception of fundamental moral rights on both sides).
That’s true of everything.
I’ll tell you what, I’ll even give you a freebie–the circumstances under which I’d accept a gun ban from a moral standpoint.
If you give me a world where the police have a positive duty to protect each citizen, personally and individually, at all times. And there are enough of them and effective enough that this is plausible. And each of us or our surviving kin can sue the local blue suits for dereliction of duty if we ARE physically harmed by a criminal.
Then I will consider the fundamental moral right I have (to effective self-defense) to be adequately discharged by the state such that I don’t need to have the most effective tools to exercise that right personally.
Right now I live in a world (as you say) where cops are generally middling, and are expressly NOT responsible for stopping or responding to any individual call. Being a particularly strong and large male, I suppose if you could offer me some sort of guarantee no criminal I encountered would be carrying, say, a bat or martial arts training…
You stated that the purpose of abortion is not expressly to kill the fetus. I proposed a thought experiment that would put that premise to the test.
Do you have any counter-arguments besides “Ha-ha, I pwn you.”?
So, the answer to “Do you have anything based on the real world to argue?” would be “No.” Got it.
Zeriel, show some credible data that guns save more lives than they cost, and you *might *have an argument.
And good luck getting past the percentage of gun deaths that are suicides.
Yeah, why don’t you try that sort of bullshit on the great debates thread. Hentor tried with decidedly mixed results.
[quote]
Extremely, extremely questionable, and that’s being generous. But you’ve already shown yourself eager to swallow any gun glurge that comes your way and repeat it as “fact”, haven’t you?
The “extremely extremely questionable” data is provided by the Department of Justice and cited by the violence policy center. Its the best information we have. Your complaint seems to be that you think the best estimates we have are still too high for your tastes.
Time to face reality chuckles. You’re losing and the people on your side of the argument are embarassed by you. You’re like the PETA of gun control. You might make sense if you dialed it back a LOT but as it is you are proposing something that is politically impossible as long as we have a bicameral legislation.
You and the gun nuts do have one thing in common, you both think that the government can confiscate our guns. You only seem to disagree on the effect of such a confiscation. Short of a constitutional amendment, you can’t do it legally and short of a restructuring of our bicameral legislature, you can’t get it done politically (and its the senate not the house that stands in the way, you’re just never going to get senators from 30 states to go along with confiscation).
Yeah, most of those boiled down to:
“NUH-UH! I have a countercite so your cite becomes useless” or
“your cite is from a pro gun site so your cite is useless” or
“your author isn’t an academic so anything they write is useless” or
“your cite isn’t a peer reviewed study so its useless” or some shit like that.
You have yet to provide any evidence to consider. Provide some and I’ll consider it.
It is the VPC’s decided slant towards gun grabbiness that makes any pro-gun evidence provided by them more credible. Thats not just appeals to authority, that is a statement against interest.
They ascribe credibility to the Department of Justice numbers.
Yeah, that’s odd because your cite seems to be using the 350,000 DGU number as the total number of DGU over a 5 year period and I had read the DoJ’s report of 350,000 as an annual number over those 5 years. Still, doesn’t 84,000 DGU/year provide SOME support for the notion that law abiding citizens are effectively using guns in self defense more frequently than they are flipping out and shooting every motha fucka they see?
Remember we aren’t debating the merits of guns in society. We are discussing the merits of private possession of firearms. If we compare the gun murders by who are allowed to possess a firearm versus the benefits of defensive gun use its not nearly as one sided an argument as you seem to believe. And that is ultimately the reason your side always loses. You fail to even consider the other side of the argument.
You mean something more neutral than the DoJ study? I think the problem is that neither side really wants the truth. They can’t even agree on the ground rules. The gun grabbers want to treat all gun murders as if they are fungible while the NRA wants to segregate gun murders by people who were permitted to possess a firearm versus people who were not. The NRA wants to treat every defensive gun use as if it protected a newborn baby from rape, while the gun grabbers want to break down the defensive gun use to granular levels so they can point out that a lot of the DGUs where the potential victim scared off a burglar might just as easily have scared off the burglar just by being at home when the thought they were out of town. If we can’t agree on a common set of principles against which to judge whatever data we may uncover then what use is the data. Having these ground rules would probably also go a long way towards gathering more useful pertinent data.
So its not just the lack of neutral data, its that we simply cannot collect data because the gun nuts will always lie about how often they use their guns in self defense.
From reading the article, it sounds like a reasonably valid point that restricting sales but not other transfers of handguns to people between 18 and 21 seems a bit silly.
Would you do the same for alcohol vendors and car dealers? What if the car dealer sells a corvette to a 16 year old kid who just got his license?
I’ve been offended by the NRA over the past decade or so mostly because they started getting politically partisan in areas beyond gun rights. After the Wayne LaPierre speech (in response to Newtown), the NRA seemed doomed to irrelevance until push for an AWB gave them new life. The gun grabbers had succeeded in outstupidding Wayne LaPierre.
As a proponent of licensing and registration, I don’t think I have been treated poorly by my fellow gun nuts because of my position on licensing and registration.
I think the thing some of us gun nuts are troubled by is your notion of strict criminal liability for any gun you ever owned (including guns that are stolen from you). That is a standard of culpability that we do not apply to ANYTHING else. I could lose a truck full of dynamite to a bunch of terrorists and I would not be criminally liable for whatever those terrorists did with the dynamite.
There are plenty of gun control advocates that aren’t as stupid and crazy as Elvis. During the gun control debate we recently had, there came a point when the realized that folks like Feinstein were counterproductive to the cause and put her in the back of the bus, and THIS is what is pissing off folks like Hentor. Gun grabbing is not a winning issue for Democrats in swing states and swing districts. After a tragedy like Newtown, we might have been able to get behind some sensible restrictions that would make a difference but it was the push for an AWB that made the gun grabbers look stupid.
Why is being in the army more dangerous than driving drunk and with a loaded firearm?
It makes you sound like an idiot when you go around saying that gun rights folks are pro-murder. It makes it very clear that you are not interested in debate, nothing can make you change your mind. You are the PETA of gun control.
Because self defense is not murder. Because hunting an animal is not murder unless you are PETA. Because shooting at paper targets ar a gun range is not murder. The fact that you think that someone who supports the right to bear arms is in favor of murder makes you sound like an idiot.
Would it make a difference to you if he did? And when you qualify that data as credible, aren’t you basically saying that you already know the answer so any data to the contrary is not going to be credible?
I have shown credible evidence that the number of gun murders committed by guns in the hands of law abiding citizens is relatively low (lets say 2000 for the sake of argument plus another 1000 in accidental gun deaths per year that could also be avoided if noone could legally own a gun). Hentor’s link above puts defensive gun use at somewhere between 50k and 85K per year. Its impossible to know how many of these defensive gun uses saved a life but its seems at least possible that the lives saved might be greater than the lives taken, doesn’t it?
The police don’t have guns to protect you, they have guns to protect themselves while they enforce the law.
I’ve seen society break down a few times and the cops can’t (and won’t) put themselves between every rioter and normal citizens. They are more likely to form a human wall around beverly hills than slow down as they drive through streets of looters ruining the livelihood of an entire community.
Yes, he provided cites that are convincing to those susceptible to factual reasoning, “mixed” with hysterical yammering from the binkie-toting ideologues like yourself.
One of the signs of your psychopathy is your separation of the individual from society, as if only one is real and the rest is a mere abstraction. It must be pretty damn lonely inside your skull.
Are you ever even going to try to provide some sort of evidence, by way of new reporting or even sober commentary, to show us that your story is anything other than a hysterical fantasy? Ever? Or do you just like being laughed at?
Guess not. 
Have you ever taken responsibility for any of your actions, ever in your life? Ever? Have you ever even heard of the concept? Gawdamm, boy.
They’re not mutually exclusive, fool.
Note that I said “absolutist”. The absolutist position you hold by your actions, your worthless words notwithstanding, is indeed support of the right to murder. It is the only right arguably derivable from the Constitution or in any code of social conduct you can offer that you hold to be absolute. Therefore calling it what it is is simply fighting ignorance. Not your own, of course, yours is impregnable behind your psychopathy, but there are others who read these things.
IOW, no, there is nothing you or he can offer. Might as well say so, that your position is not derived from fact but from paranoid fantasy.
Credible to you, because it’s what you want to believe. You’ve been shown otherwise in risible detail, however. 
Your psychopathy is your only excuse for not knowing better.
Now have some milk and a cookie and go back to bed. Dianne Feinstein isn’t *really *hiding under it waiting to grab your little binkie from under the blanket when you go to sleep.
This is basically laughable on every level. “You don’t have any real world data! And you have to provide some to counter MY lack of real-world data!”
Even then, sorry, it’s a moral issue for me through and through. All rights depend on the ability to be alive to enjoy them, which means I have a moral right to effectively defend myself. Until you either offer me a better tool for that than a gun, or demonstrate a plan to remove guns from the equation other than magic hand-waves, none of the statistics have any particular moral force for me.
I don’t find this relevant at all, having been in treatment for major depression after a suicide attempt.
Yeah, I would to a point. Let a guy get seriously blasted on your alcohol and get into his car with no plan, you should be partially on the hook for whatever he does. There’s a difference here because I’m specifically putting gun owners on the hook for ILLEGAL or NEGLIGENT transfers of firearms–and we already have laws (that aren’t really firm enough, if you ask me) preventing the (negligent) sale of alcohol to people who are “visibly intoxicated” in my neck of the woods.
Let a guy get drunk who is known to you to not be allowed or a good idea to be drunk, as is the case here (we’re discussing illegal or negligent transfers, mind you), yes, you share his crime.
I would in fact want to prosecute for murder a parent whose 16-yr-old raided their unlocked liquor cabinet and then ran someone down while driving drunk.
No, because the fact the kid has a license (legal proof of ability) is a proper test of due diligence on the suitability of the person to operate a motor vehicle.
I’m going to expand my previous statement a bit.
Without knowing the denominator (number of beneficial events due to firearms ownership), the numerator (number of maleficent events due to firearms ownership) alone cannot possibly tell you anything about the cost/benefit ratio, by definition!
I had this same stupid argument in the pit bull thread–number of fatalities alone tells you nothing about the risk involved.
That would be my point in its entirety.