And what point do you think you’re making by pointing that out?
Consumption of alcohol is non-essential, but alcohols are a significant component of monogastric digestion.
Moreover there are substantial health benefits in drinking alcohol rather than water when water supplies are contaminated and unsanitary.
In Tudor times most of the people were mostly drunk most of the time on low alcohol ales.
That you are making as good a strawman argument that has ever been posted on SDBM.
… and that age old merkins and irony meme.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a strawman is a good guy with a strawman.
Predominantly, alcohol is intended to be used on yourself; firearms are intended to be used on others. Firearms give you the power to end another’s life, at a distance, in an instant; alcohol doesn’t. Even legitimate usages of firearms carry the danger of harm to others; for alcohol, danger to others comes predominantly from engaging in further activities, such as drunk driving—which is, therefore, already banned. Firearms can be easily used with intent to harm—in fact, that’s their intended usage; alcohol can be used mainly for self-harm (which of course can have secondary, disastrous effect on others, like an alcoholic parent neglecting their children), and its intended use is entirely recreational.
So the difference is, with firearms, harming others is what they’re made for, and they give their owners a unique power to do so, at a distance, and instantly. While with alcohol, harm to others is an effect of its abuse, already subject to legal restrictions, and in fact, its use impairs your ability to inflict it, by generally impairing motor functioning—if you were to intentionally harm somebody, your chances are much greater sober than drunk. Yet as far as I know, in many places in the US, I can’t walk around with a bottle of beer, but I can carry a gun without issue.
Mind you, a good guy with a good argument is also rather effective.
This is a false distinction that has no bearing on the reality of the harm that either produces. “Abuse” of firearms is illegal in the same way as “abuse” of alcohol is illegal. Harming others with a firearm is illegal. Threatening others with a firearm is illegal. Reckless handling of a firearm is illegal. Just like drunk driving is illegal. I’m not buying the distinction you’re trying to make here.
You also imply that all legitimate uses of firearms carry danger of harm to others. That is certainly not true, except in the most pedantic “bad things could always happen” sense, in which case it’s certainly equally true for alcohol as well, and thus a meaningless distinction. Imagine I live in your neighborhood - what do you think of the danger to yourself from these two scenarios:
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Once a month I have dinner at a friend’s house, drink half a bottle of wine in 2 hours, and drive home legally with a 0.079% BAC.
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I have a collection of rifles in a safe in the basement which I periodically take to the county shooting range for target practice.
By any objective standard you’re in far more danger from scenario 1 than scenario 2.
Your answer really just boils down to “I think firearms are bad and I think alcohol is fine, therefore, I’m going to get upset about firearms deaths but just shrug and accept deaths caused by alcohol.”
Are the people killed by drunk drivers any less dead than those killed by mass shooters?
Incidentally, I’m not trying to change your mind - it’s totally fine with me if you think firearms are inherently bad and of no redeeming value whatsoever, and thus no number of deaths from firearms are acceptable. I mean, I get it, it’s a valid opinion.
However, there are people who do think firearms have redeeming value. For self-defense, for fun, for hunting, or (yes) for culture, heritage, tradition, etc. And those people are willing to accept some number of deaths from firearms as an acceptable price to pay for the privilege we have as American citizens to own them.
And before you dismiss that out of hand, the point I’m trying to make is that this is exactly the same argument and thought process you go through when you justify acceptance of the current situation in the US around alcohol deaths. The only difference is your background, values, and priorities - the actual numbers and magnitude of the harm caused are not very different at all. You think alcohol is fun, and it helps you relax, or makes social gatherings more enjoyable, or whatever, and you know plenty of respectable and responsible people that drink alcohol, so it’s pretty easy for you to say “Oh, drunk driving deaths suck, but drunk driving is illegal and the police try to catch them, and it’s not as if we can just ban alcohol entirely, so what can you do?”
And part of living in a free society is understanding that some other people, with different values and priorities than you, will say “Oh, mass shootings suck, but they don’t happen that often and police try to stop them, and it’s not as if we can just ban guns entirely, so what can you do?”
And ideally we’d find a way to just live in mutual tolerance and understanding here. But when the dominant position from the anti-gun side is “Fuck you fucking ignorant hicks, we don’t give a fuck about you or what you value and we’re going to take all your fucking guns and melt them down as soon as we can figure out how the fuck to do it” - well, that doesn’t seem very tolerant to me.
The distinction is the following: I can aim a gun at your head and splatter your brains across the wall from dozens of meters away, and you can do virtually nothing about it (I mean, I personally can’t, but in general, it’s possible); I can’t do that with a bottle of beer. There really isn’t anything to get about that, it’s just how guns work. Yet, bottles of beer are often illegal to carry in public.
With a gun, to inflict harm on others, all you need is the intent—that’s why, if you want to murder someone, you’re more likely to buy a gun than a case of beer.
Alcohol, on the other hand, chiefly harms others by increasing the risk involved in certain activities. These are simply different categories across which any comparison is facile: a gun is an instrument intended to cause harm, while any harm caused due to alcohol consumption is a secondary, knock-on effect. That doesn’t mean that there are no circumstances where guns are inappropriate, nor that alcohol consumption always is, but it does mean that they’re very different regarding their potential to inflict harm.
Or, take pools: lots of people drown in them. But you can’t aim a pool at someone and murder them; that’s why pools and firearms ought to be legislated differently.
People don’t always properly consider the sheer power having a firearm gives you. You essentially carry a button around with you that you can push to end the life of anybody near you. Alcohol, by comparison, has the immediate power to get you, and nobody else, slightly woozy in the head.
These are radically different things.
Frankly, I wouldn’t bother to make a distinction at all.
Alcohol, mass shootings, and pool deaths are three completely separate issues. They each have different causes, solutions, and/or amelioration. Presumably, a society can work on all three, more or less simultaneously, or prioritize as the lawmakers see fit.
Mass shootings, and the overall death rate from firearms, is a problem that exists in the US, and pretty much nowhere else (to anything like the same degree) of a similar cultural and governmental structure*. Adopting the methods used by similar countries would go a long way to bring those deaths down.
*I tend to shorthand this as “First World countries”.
That’s an argument for why you think firearms are bad. It’s not an argument for why a free and tolerant society should give preference to your opinion over that of those who see more value in firearms, when the same society readily and uncontroversially accepts a similar cost-benefit tradeoff (albeit without such a clear division along political and cultural lines) with regard to the harm caused by alcohol.
I don’t think firearms are bad; I think they give individuals a unique power over the life and well-being of others, in a way that hardly anything else does (and hence, can’t be validly compared to alcohol), and thus, they should be regulated accordingly. We know that this is possible: as @galen_ubal above points out, many other nations effectively do so.
They are already regulated accordingly. You do not need a background check to purchase a beer.
No one is suggesting that stricter regulation is impossible. That is an actual strawman. The question is whether stricter regulation (such as, a complete ban) should be enacted, given that US society has a very different mix of cultures, values and priorities than other countries.
Well, the point is that you set up an equivalence between alcohol and firearms that’s simply false; now having gotten that out of the way, it seems, with you recognizing the need for both being regulated accordingly, maybe we can leave that distraction behind.
That’s an interesting strategy to lead the discussion, though. As best as I can tell, nobody actually made the argument you’re characterizing as a strawman, nobody having claimed that anybody says stricter regulation was impossible, so that’s a strawman accusation that is itself a strawman…
You kind of do. It’s just limited to verification of age.
Oooh, who had “American exceptionalism” on their bingo card?
OP here.
When you start a thread at the Dope, you never know what direction it’s going to take. Scratch that. When you start a thread at the Dope, depending on the topic, you can almost ALWAYS predict the direction it’s going to take. 
Often it will wander off behind the bleachers and become the center of a circle jerk.
I guess it’s a bug.
And a feature.
What struck me about the headline was the fact that this isn’t even news any more. One more instance of someone shooting into a group (as opposed to shooting specifically at one other person alone-- I don’t give a crap what you want to call it), and we’re all "Ho-hum 
What’s for dinner?"
Compassion fatigue? Disaster fatigue? Political fatigue? Migrant kid fatigue? Loneliness fatigue? Too-much-togetherness fatigue? Pandemic fatigue – that might be the biggest one, not sure. All of the above – and more.
One thing I’m not seeing much of is “thoughts and prayers” being directed at the victims (the surviving ones) and the families of the deceased. Now it’s mostly “there are no words” – it’s true. There aren’t.
And as others have noted, all those adults who complain that “kids today” have it easier than they did are now faced with a generation of kids who literally have to worry about being murdered in their classrooms. Because a large number of Americans define “freedom” as “I get to do whatever I want without regard for the consequences to others”.
I really don’t understand how this distinction is difficult for anyone. When a bottle of beer gives you the ability to instantly kill people hundreds of feet away, we can discuss this analogy; until then, it’s completely asinine.
By the way, if your problem is drunk driving, I’d say your problem really is cars more than guns (and while alcohol can’t really be used to hurt anyone else, except indirectly, cars are huge chunks of metal weighing many tons that can be accelerated to high speeds - often much faster than our monkey brains can deal with - and can certainly be used to harm others. So don’t compare guns and alcohol; compare guns and cars.
Well, cars have a very important legitimate use, unlike guns: they get you from point A to point B quickly, and our entire economy and society is built around people being able to do this. You can’t run a modern first world nation over a land area as massive and sprawling as the USA without cars.
So there’s your cost/benefit analysis for guns, alcohol, and cars. Alcohol is pretty valueless on a societal level, doesn’t contribute much and does lead to harm; but really, it can only be used to hurt yourself (though it might make you more likely to use a gun or a car to hurt others - but that’s a separate issue).
Cars are of enormous value, enabling our society to function. They move millions of people and billions of dollars worth of goods every day. So the benefits are huge. They also kill tons of people, and are contributing to global warming. Right now, we don’t have any alternatives that will enable us to run our society without these harms, but as technology improves, we will get the means to solve these problems. Electric cars must fully replace fossil fuel burners; and absolutely, once electric cars are easily available enough, all new gas powered cars should be illegal (and we really should have been there by now). Same goes for driving. It is one of the most dangerous activities we regularly engage in, and once self driving cars exist and are safer (which may take another decade or two but is the path we are headed down), manually driving SHOULD be banned, at least on public streets, because at that point the benefits of driving (you get to feel like a big man, pressing down the accelerator and hearing the engine roar?) will not outweigh the costs.
Now we come to guns. Some people think they’re good for self defense - they are wrong, a gun in your house greatly increases your odds of a violent death. Some people think they’re fun to shoot, and that’s great for them, but not at the cost of thousands of Americans a year.
We also have a very long list of mitigations in place to reduce the risks posed to others (and ourselves) by cars. You must be at least 16 years old to operate one, and you must pass theory and practical tests to ensure that you meet an appropriate standard for use. Certain physical conditions (most notably poor eyesight) can result in restrictions or a ban on operation. Your vehicle must be inspected regularly and must be registered in your name with the state. In most jurisdictions you may also be required to at least carry some form of third-party liability insurance for any damage caused. And misuse of your car can result in loss of operator privileges even if no harm has occurred.
Furthermore, cars face other locale-specific restrictions regarding where they can be used and the way in which they can be used (e.g. speed limits), restrictions also designed to mitigate the risk posed to others.
So whenever someone trots out the “what about cars?” argument, my response remains “If you want to compare guns and cars, sure - let’s regulate guns the way we regulate cars.” But they never seem to want to.
Any time I hear someone defending or standing up for so called gun ‘rights’ I find it sadly comical. Actually a lot more sad than comical. The rest of the world just shakes their heads at Americans killing one another day after day and then actually proposing, as many do, that the way to solve this is with even more guns.
It has nothing to do with ‘rights’, or even the sacred 2nd amendment. It has everything to do with money. The gun lobby. The pay offs. Those that make vast fortunes from weaponry. Those in control. These people don’t give a rats ass for the 2nd amendment, or lives for that matter. All they care about is lining their pockets. If hundreds/thousands of people have to die each year as a result, well, life goes on (for them). These people rely on the simplistic, uneducated among us just as (for example) D. Trump and his grifter friends do. People are nothing but pawns used to suit other peoples greedy purposes. Until people wake up and realize they’re being played, the carnage will continue. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. There’s too many people who are willful blind followers out there.
It is trivially easy to purchase a gun without a background check, or even a check of an ID to make sure you are old enough in my state. It is harder to buy beer here than buy a handgun or AR15.