What we need are some sensible regulations about weapons. Like these:
Virginia State Legislature Bans American Flags On Sticks, But Lets Guns In
When tiny sticks with flags on them are outlawed, only outlaws will have tiny sticks with flags on them!
You can have my tiny stick when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers … so to speak.
Other than meaning ‘it’s easier to obtain handguns in the US than in many other countries’, “our gun culture” isn’t a fair term imho. It would seem to imply that people who believe in gun ownership for sporting, defense, or ideological reasons are somehow fellow travelers with the criminal subclass who are the primary abusers of firearms. There are actually two gun cultures in the US, and they have almost nothing in common except guns.
Virginia State Legislature confirmed to be made entirely of vampires.
There were over 17,000 accidental gun injuries in the US in 2012, according to the CDC’s WISQARS data base.
How does that compare with accidental injuries from other causes?
I don’t give a fuck.
And how meaningful is that? Out of how many total incidents of gun use? Are gun accident injuries occurring 1% of the time guns are used, or .00001% of the time, or what?
17,000 accidental gun injuries in a year doesn’t say anything by itself to support your claim that simple gun safety rules “routinely fail”.
It means that in a given year, enough Americans will be accidentally injured by firearms to fill a large concert venue or a Chicago Blackhawks game.
I don’t know. How many?
It means that about 48 people a day will be injured accidentally by firearms, largely in service to a hobby.
I’m comfortable saying that the simple rules routinely fail.
Bear in mind that this does not include gun accidents that do not result in injuries. For instance, each installment of the GunFail blog on Daily Kos includes incidents of “home invasion shootings,” where gun fucks invade people’s homes with their Freedom Ingots.
If you want to talk prevalence rates, odds ratios or relative risk and other means of describing and comparing phenomena statistically, I’ll be happy to join. If you actually understand such things, it would make a nice change from the conversations I usually have with gun morons on these boards.
So? Do you have a suggestion to rectify this? This is essentially a truism that can be applied liberally to many inherently dangerous inanimate objects.
Can you define how you are using the term “sufficiently”? What would you consider sufficiently reducing the butcher’s bill?
I apologize if you think that’s an overly loaded term, I was trying to avoid that, and if you want to suggest an acceptable alternative term I’d be fine with that.
It might even be simplistic to limit it to two cultures, obviously there are a lot of factors. Most of the incidents in current news involve the members of the first class, not the second. That does not mean the ‘sporting/defense/etc’ people create the preponderance of “abuse”, but they are certainly not exempt, either. Two hoodlums shooting each other is generally less newsworthy, I’d guess. Many gun users apparently belong to the first class, until they climb a fence after someone suspicious (or get out of the truck to stalk Treyvon), and then they frequently become members of the second. Or their children get hold of an unsecured weapon, or… Certainly our death by gunshot numbers are very high compared to other first-world nations.
I shoot, BTW, although I quit being a gun owner when my first child was born.
Sure, there is a middle ground. But many of the anti-gun folks in this thread are not searching for a middle ground. They want to ban guns.
They have no interest in a cost benefit analysis of guns, they focus entirely on the costs and refuse to accept any evidence of the benefits.
I wasn’t familiar with the Canadian system but based on the wikipedia entry, I think I could live with almost all of it if the various licenses and permits (including carry permits) were on a shall issue basis rather than a discretionary basis (there is a lot of minutiae about particular types of firearms being subject to different rules, which I haven’t really taken a good look at).
I don’t understand the rationale behind some of the rules but I don’t see anything retarded like restricting rifles because they have bayonet lugs and pistol grips.
The hell was I remembering then. The last time I looked up murder rules, and I could have sworn I was looking at PA code but I apparently wasn’t, it didn’t use numeric degrees. Eh, fair cop.
What an idiotic argument. There’s nothing about my proposal that violates either.
Damuri, circa 1770. “Can you point me to a single jurisdiction that has adopted anti-slavery laws?”
As for your whinging about harsher than murder and forgetting to lock your safe, I’ve made myself abundantly clear. To recap:
If you leave your loaded gun deliberately unsecured, that IS tantamount to an intent to murder, in my book. Anyone who owns a firearm SHOULD know that they are deadly, and that leaving one loaded and unattended around people, especially children, is a vastly increased risk.
If your hypothetical bad luck Chuck doesn’t lock his gun safe, that’s ordinary negligence. He’s not shown a criminal degree of intent to allow his gun cause random havoc.
Which is where he and I disagree strongly. Despite your idiotic attempts to brand me as some sort of hoplophobe.
Everything I’ve seen suggests that the average cop is required to fire around an order of magnitude fewer rounds per year than the average recreational shooter of my experience. I also do not see a lot of training for cops on when to draw, trigger discipline, etc, the published materials I see are mostly how to put rounds in the center ring of a stationary target. “Qualifying” tends to mean at most four dozen shots at a stationary target per year.
I’d expect it to be the same as the DMV. Reasonable rates, in other words, with higher rates for specialist stuff like handgun training/licensing (I analogize that to motorcycle licensing).
And a licence and testing will fix early childhood experiences how? Maybe a questionnaire where if you answer yes you can’t have a gun?
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I’m not denying we have a gun culture problem in this country. I don’t know that there is a magic solution.
And…so what? By itself, that is fairly meaningless, and is a likely insignificant fraction compared to the number of people who use/handle/interact with firearms without incident on an annual basis. And it is absurdly insignificant number compared to the top 20 causes of accidental non-fatal injuries.
I don’t know. You’re the one trying to use the 17,000 number as some kind of significant point to back up your argument without providing anything to compare it to in order to demonstrate that simple gun safety rules “routinely fail”, so why don’t you tell us.
Again, go ahead and demonstrate the significance. Over 100,000 kids under 18 are sent to the emergency room each year for accidental skateboarding injuries. So over 273 kids will go to the emergency room every day, largely in service of recreational activity. And that’s just kids, not the whole skateboarding population.
So, why do you single accidental gun injuries for such scrutiny and claims about the simple safety rules when they’re an insignificant number of injuries in comparison to the rest of real life, and are also at rates/probabilities that are likely less (I’m comfortable saying this!) than at least some of the most common causes of accidental injuries?
For which you have yet to demonstrate any actual basis for saying such.
So, can you demonstrate that including these would amount to an actually meaningful number of incidents that would actually help support your argument? Or are you also going to handwave that too based on how arbitrarily comfortable you feel with it?
Given your response to Lumpy, you don’t seem to give a fuck how the number of accidental gun injuries actually stacks up to the rest of the real world in regards to relative risk and prevalence rates, you think 17,000 by itself is enough for your claim that simple gun safety rules routinely fail - even though you’ve haven’t actually demonstrated as much.
IIRC these sort of draconian punishments violate cruel and unusual punishment as well as due process. The punishment is not only grossly disproportionate to the crime, the punishment is unfair when compared to more severe crimes that have lighter sentences (see mandatory sentencing for crack versus cocaine). Its not just my opinion that rape is worse than accidentally shooting someone while cleaning your gun in terms of criminal liability, is it? Crimes usually have at least one of two requirements intent and action. When you say that we will convict someone of second degree murder for failure to notify police that their gun stolen (and the gun was later used by someone else to commit murder), then you are eliminating both elements. They did not actually commit the crime and they did not have intent. The closest you can get is felony murder and there we have the notion of transferred intent between co-conspirators to a crime. Its been a long time since law school but what you are proposing is so far outside the ballpark that you really need to think about this more before you keep insisting that this is a reasonable solution to anything.
There were plenty of anti-slavery laws in 1770 and philosophical objections to slavery have existed as long as slavery has existed. Not so with your idea, its a bad idea, we all get them from time to time.
And do you really want to compare the criminal liability laws of our time with slavery?
And your book is ignorant of legal theory and history.
And we already have crimes that can result in 50 year sentences for that sort of thing. Isn’t 50 years enough for you (20 years in many jurisdictions)?
You haven’t got intent in EITHER case. You may have gross negligence in the first case but I always understood your standard to be strict liability, not “if they’re really really reckless and irresponsible” IIRC, you wanted to throw the book at the guy that was carrying his gun Mexican style.
I don’t think you and Hentor have the same position. Hentor isn’t searching for the right answer, he is searching for HIS answer. My problem with you is that you have decided that this drastic change in our legal system and how we determine criminal liability is the answer to something. Your idea will have consequences for the entire legal system, a reasonably well balanced system that we have developed over centuries.
You keep trying to convince yourself of this, yet it is completely wrong. Negligent homicide is a crime, and has no element of intent at all.
This is really all you need to say, because it is the crux of the issue. Gun douchebags are so fixated on their amulets that they readily consign any victims of their anti-anxiety placebo object to meaningless status.
The reason why I don’t give a fuck about Lumpy’s interjection is that I’ve been down the “pools/cars/skateboards” argument dozens of times. In terms of straight comparisons like relative risk, the issue is - in part - the denominator. You seem, so far anyway, to understand that much at least. Our problem will be that the denominator isn’t known, and I assume that it’s rather low.
The second issue is going to be what that denominator represents. I say that it largely consists of hobby activities and, as I said above, a placebo that people use to self-medicate problems with anxiety. In other words, most of the gun douchebags in our country are just pissing themselves with fear and have guns so that they can shoot kids who are just turning around in their driveway, are coming to their door for help, or who are their own kids sneaking back into their house.
This second issue is a matter of the relative value of the activities that feed into the denominator. I’m going to estimate their value as low; I anticipate that you’re going to estimate the value as high. I anticipate this because you’re ready to dismiss the butcher’s bill as insignificant.
Finally, comparisons to pools, skateboards and other similar sources of potential injury or death are fraught with limitations as analogies because firearms pose markedly distinct differences. Most prominently, people are far less likely to end up injuring bystanders with pools or skateboards. A person isn’t going to drop their skateboard in church in such a fashion that it sends a projectile into someone else’s leg. Additionally, the approximately 17,000 figure represents accidental injuries associated with firearms. It doesn’t include intentional injuries and it doesn’t include deaths. There were over 80,000 non-fatal firearm injuries of any intent in 2012. And of course, that doesn’t include the approximately 30,000 fatal incidents involving firearms.
Gunfucks dismiss this figure as insignificant because they need it to be. It would be nice to see just a touch of humanity in their consideration of the issue, but they cannot even voice a desire to see that be lower because it’s a threat. The power of fear is great, and people respond with desperation when one suggests they face a fear without the rituals they have come to develop to fend them off. This is true even when the person recognizes that the ritual is itself maladaptive.
In other words, your position in this debate is based on a derogatory caricature of the other side. 'Nuff said.:rolleyes: