What’s your ultimate point in all this? That when media spotlighted gun related stuff happens, no one calls for gun control measures? That I’m just making it up until I dig through some random public comments to establish that position?
I am unsurprised, seeing as neither of those are political issues.
This has been debated ad nauseum tho, you aren’t going to change my mind & I’m not going to change yours, so we should probably just restrict this to the OP’s original debate RE was this the correct use of Costas’ platform.
Well, the point is, if gun control advocates’ arguments on the issue are so weak that they can only make progress on it by exploiting people’s emotions whenever a tragedy appears in the news, as opposed to making a rational case in the normal news cycle, “politicizing the tragedy” is just a waste of time, because once the story fades and the emotional impact recedes, people will go back to (rationally) ignoring the issue.
If there is an issue that most people do not know about, and some kind of tragic story brings more attention and publicity to it, then that’s different. That has an actual chance of changing some people’s minds, or at least making them better informed. But gun control has been done to death (heh), and at this point no one is going to change their opinions on it because of some attention-whoring talking head on TV.
Did a national TV host mention it during a half-time show?
I would not expect something to be considered “policitizing” unless it was a call for Congress to institute mandatory steroid testing or force the NFL to convert to flag football rules. Costas apparently called for political changes, since handgun bans are inherently political because of the Second Amendment. It’s not the same thing, therefore.
Regards,
Shodan
I thought my point was perfectly clear. I disapprove of buzz-words and buzz-phrases designed to justify not discussing an issue, words and phrases you seem to use for just that purpose.
“Shrieking”-gee, that person is acting extremely irrationality, so there’s no way to rationally respond.
“Anti-Gun Nut”-They want to ban all guns!
“Secret Agenda”-They want to ban all guns, but are lying about their true purpose.
“Slippery Slope”-No matter what they are suggesting, they will just keep going on and on until all guns are banned.
I’ve been pretty clear across a lot of different threads that I regard anyone who is driven purely by media narratives and visceral reactions rather than any reasoned analysis of the situation as shrieking. Tell people to stay out of the water during Summer of the Shark? Shrieking idiot. Tell people they should never let their kids be unsupervised due to whatever the fuck those famous kidnappings were? Same deal. Demanding broad new gun control laws because the media has a nice juicy gun control story? Same deal.
This is actually pretty incidental to the actual gun control debate - people’s inability to view things with reason perspective and evaluate relative risk is a problem against all sorts of public policy debates.
As to your point, fine, take away shrieking. I don’t care. Suddenly if I change my language a little bit, your whole line of argumentation goes away, yet my point doesn’t change. Which makes it pedantic and nitpicky.
Your point is that gun rights advocates rush out and say out of the blue “hey, this is no reason to change gun policy!”, but that’s not true. It’s only in response to proposals to change gun policy. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. Why would someone proactively come out and advocate the status quo in the absense of change?
My apologies. I assumed from your post that you were simply unaware of the statistics, and would not in fact consider an event occurring approximately 0.00000001 times per person per year “insanely frequent”.
Did you mean something like claiming the President has a secret plan to take away people’s guns because he hasn’t done anything to take away their guns?
No, that’s not analogous, nor a serious policy position (what does it even advocate?), but just some lame tu quoque sniping.
Um, that wasn’t my point. I thought I had explained my point thoroughly, but perhaps you’d rather discuss this other point that I didn’t bring up.
Fine. Remove the word shrieking from my previous statements and reread them. The meaning doesn’t change. I’m still talking about people who either deliberately use a visceral emotional reaction to capitalize on support for their cause, or the people who react that way. The magic word is gone, now apparently my argument isn’t fatally flawed.
Just so long as you are willing to admit that, at the very least, both sides react in pretty much the same way when they support one side and/or decry the other. I’m in opposition to buzz-words on both sides, btw, and would have reacted just the same if a poster on the other side had popped up with conversation stoppers.
It was a silly, stupid comment by someone who thinks far too much of himself. Wrong place and the wrong time. He didn’t know the full facts, we may never know the full facts but it was premature to discuss gun control. If he had to pontificate then he should have focused his ire on the sport itself that rewards and encourages aggression. That allows athletes to get away with all sorts of transgressions in the name of the program and that appeas to turn a blind eye to steroid abuse. I would have had more respect for him had he done that.
I agree with this analysis. I’ll add: nothing Costas said is untrue.
Yeah, I’m sure you would’ve equally policed someone who used the word “shrieking” once to talk about who intiated emotional appeals and cries to action or the equivelants on the side you consider yourself on. No doubt you would fight to the death over such irrelevant minutia to correct an ideological compatriot.
I wasn’t issuing a thought-terminating cliche, or poisoning the well, I was just using an embellishment when referring to behavior that I’d previously just laid out.
So we can move on then? Thank you ever so very much.
Just one time I’d love to see one of these threads without someone hijacking it. Especially you, since you seem to have taken on the role of hall monitor in these threads of late.
Nothing? He flat-out declared that she would still be alive had he not had a gun. Because we all know that all muscle-bound, Type A, hyper-aggressive men need guns to kill their families.
“If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.” is not precisely “untrue”, but he certainly does not have the knowledge to make such a judgement. The idea that a roid raging elite athlete who’s in the top 99.9% of physical power for a human being would be totally shut down without access to guns is implausible.
It’s always strange to me in the gun control threads how often gun control advocates only seem to be concerned with gun deaths, assuming that all gun deaths would otherwise be turned into nothing in the absense of guns. The reality is that only the delta between murdering with a gun and being unable/unwilling to murder in the absense of guns is relevant. No one feels better about being stabbed to death.
His statement is also sort of ironic, when the gist of it is that people who only react viscerally to these incidents and forget have no true perspective, when he himself is trying to stir up that same visceral reaction.
I’ll be sure to raise my hand before speaking next time, teach.
Pot, kettle, yadda.