Intresting substitution of gun violence, which is what we were discussing, with crime rate.
However other tools may be far less effective. That’s why spree killings like this are far more common in the US than in the rest of the developed world.
Or put it another way: if “bad guys be killin” no matter what, they why not let people buy nerve agents or RPGs at their local corner store?
Bombs seem to be very effective. Gas/chemical attacks seem to be very effective.
Gun violence only addresses the use of a gun. Since firearms are used for self-defense, a Democrat Party ban on firearms would leave their constituents less able to defend themselves from rapists, robbers, thugs, muggers, car-jackers, etc. You know, criminals. If criminals know that their intended victims are not armed, or can not possibly be armed and law-abiding at the same time, why not pick up a few extra bucks, grab a new car, and date the car’s driver for a few hours. The crime rate would go up, but gun violence would go down. That would be a good thing, right???
Wearing seat belts doesn’t reduce car accidents. It only reduces deaths in car accidents.
Yes but I wasn’t saying effectiveness is the only factor, just heading off the obvious “They’ll just use knives!” or whatever.
With explosives, there already are restrictions on the purchase of explosives, and even legal materials will draw the attention of law enforcement when bought in suspicious circumstances.
Also, they are used by people planning for some time to carry out a terrorist action. Not already in someone’s closet ready for them to snap.
Why does this logic not work across the rest of the developed world? Somehow the knowledge that a person does not have a firearm doesn’t turn societies into Hobbesian nightmares versus ones where perps only think you *probably *don’t have a firearm.
And of course, we have to at least mention that the number of times guns are used successfully for self-defence is tiny compared to their involvement in crime or accidental deaths. Let alone if we throw in the difference it makes to the successful suicide rate.
FPS gamers?
Do we have any idea if that’s actually true or just something people say?
Besides, even if it curbed gun violence, that would still be huge. I don’t know where you live, but plenty of cities have a lot of gun violence. I know mine does.
I heard it said that Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country but still averages 58 gun deaths a month – so that’s equivalent to a Vegas incident every 30 days.
True, or no?
Thanks for reminding us that everything is about our partisan divide. I’m sure many unwilling to dig into the arcana of gun control details will appreciate this stream-lined path to proper “thinking.”
Bring it? I am not the one bringing it. It is people with unfettered access to guns and a desire to kill people that are bringing it. I’m on the side that would rather that not be brought.
The goal of the anti-gun folks has been to find reasonable steps to reduce the amount of gun violence. That reasonable steps to reduce gun violence has been blocked by those who hold 2A as a reason that nothing can be done, then you are going to lose public support.
Do you think that the public is going to accept no longer going to concerts, to sports games, to anywhere that could present a good target, or do you think that they public is going to say, “enough, we need to do something about this”?
And, if you still steadfastly cling to the second, proclaiming to all and sundry that nothing can be done to reduce gun violence as long as 2A is enshrined, you are going to be losing support for it. Amendments have been changed before. It’s not impossible, it just takes quite a bit of public support. And every time this happens, that there is a mass shooting and you all hide behind 2A, laughing at our futile attempts to save lives, you lose more and more support for your position, and more and more of the public scratching their heads, and wondering why we have this 200 year old relic that is getting people killed.
After the oklahoma city bombing, did farmers say “Bring it! Try to take away our fertilizer!”, or did they follow along with sensible regulations that has prevented such an event from occurring again?
That you ascribe evil motive to those who do not want to see mass shootings like this again, while trying to take the high ground in insisting that there is nothing we can do to prevent tragedies like this makes no sense whatsoever, and is not an argument that will stand even the slightest challenge in the court of public opinion. Please continue making this argument, as it erodes even more support for your precious amendment. Your fellow friends of the gun will give you kudos for repeating it ad nauseum, but anyone who isn’t a part of your gun culture is turned off by such nasty rhetoric.
A very quick glance at the wiki page shows that Chicago has a ban on “assault weapons”, lost or stolen guns must be reported, only one gun can be purchased every 30 days, all sales are videotaped, purchases are reported to law enforcement agencies, if anyone under 21 is present in the house, guns must be secured. On top of that, there’s Illinois laws: 72 hour waiting period, permit required, no open carry (which is technically more restrictive, I believe than allowing it) and background checks required for purchases.
So I don’t see anything that really jumps out at me, but even if they were super restrictive. Guns could be 100% illegal in every single way inside the Chicago border, that’s not enough to do anything because all you’d have to do is go outside the city limits to pick one up.
You could make the illegal in the state and gun violence may go down on a scale that size, but gun shops would pop up right on the border*. This will have to be a country wide thing to make a large impact. Certainly having restrictive laws inside one city or county isn’t going to make that big of a difference, but it’s probably all the law makers there had the power to do.
*I was surprised when I went to Canada at the amount of Cuban cigars that were sold right over the border. They were being advertised on the signs outside of Walgreens. Similarly, I’d be willing to guess as soon as you cross the border into WA/CO/OR there’s plenty of dispensaries. It’s illegal to travel back home with what you buy, but I’ll bet there still there.
Why were you surprised ? If Americans refuse to buy their cigars, naturally Cubans sell to those who will.
Well, to be fair, Americans don’t refuse to buy them, it’s illegal to buy them in the states and they’re so unavailable you’d never see them here unless you’re looking for someone to bring them in illegally. Also, as someone that’s only smoked a small handful of cigars in my life, they’re not really on my radar.
But my point wasn’t that they’re available in Canada, it was how, as soon as I cleared the border, they were right there, everywhere, right in my face.
What I was saying is that if you simply make guns illegal in Chicago, it’s not all that hard to get them outside the city. Even making them illegal in the state and gun shops will pop up just over the border (like cigar shops in Canada and dispensaries in CO/OR/WA).
It’s not fair to say that Chicago has strict gun laws and still has shootings. It would be like wondering why a city still has an overweight population after banning high fat foods or a drunk driving problem when they’ve required bars inside the city to close at noon.
IOW, making something illegal, when it’s still legal 3 miles away isn’t going to do much good. It’s a start, but it’s not like someone has to smuggle the contraband in from another country.
First, just because some people on the left/anti-gun side constantly repeat ‘reasonable measures’, and/or inject ‘folks’ into their missives doesn’t change the broad perception of gun owners that the anti-gun lobby wants to take their guns. 
Way too many anti-gun people on the internet say so. Maybe that’s all troll/bots, who knows? But it’s one aspect IMO of ‘in internet veritas’ which has tended to further polarize various issues in recent times. It’s not credible IME to most pro-gun people to say anti-gun people don’t want radical measures.
And that’s a big aspect of why your missive here is so detached from political reality IMO. I don’t think we even see much of the underlying opposition to significant federal gun control now, because it’s so far from political reality. Any perception the pro-gun people are playing with the ‘life’ of the 2A in the face of an outraged public nearing a tipping point against it…hard to imagine where you get that from.
Again, if you ask Americans in polls ‘should there be more gun control’ ‘yes’ is at least competitive, sometimes a plurality or even majority. But a lot of it is the typical left-leaning answers on policy questions by people who don’t pay attention and/or get their politics from pop culture. The hard core of pro-gun control is far smaller than it would need to be to overcome the hardcore of anti gun control on a national basis.
There could always be tinkering. For example I doubt most people had heard of ‘bump stocks’ before this incident. They are only a marginally practical way to convert semi-auto to ersatz auto weapons, but one of the marginal cases is firing from above into a huge crowd (where extra movement of the gun in elevation wouldn’t spray a lot of the rounds into the ground short of, or over, the target). Will even they be banned now right away? I doubt it. But I’d go along with ‘not impossible’, ‘takes more public support’ for such a minor change. But the 2A going away? Nothing is impossible but that’s a reasonable facsimile for ‘politically impossible’ IMO. In the very long run? We’re all dead in the long run.
And tinkering is tinkering. ‘Reasonable’ changes such as banning bump stocks won’t really change much. So naturally the anti-gun people will be frustrated by that assuming they get that far. IOW a more radical anti-gun agenda only makes sense based on the huge number of guns, and the anti-gunners’ beliefs and perceptions (about which way causality runs between guns and societal problems etc), so back to the non-credibility of “it’s only ‘folks’ who want a few ‘reasonable’ changes”. No, it’s a gaping cultural divide, with the prospect of the anti-gun side bulldozing the pro-gun side on a national level light years from political reality.
Speaking for myself, absolutely there is. The problem is enforceability. What if we said, starting tomorrow, all person-to-person firearms sales had to go through a licensed firearms dealer and be subject to background checks. I think that’s a good idea, but who is going to have the manpower to enforce that? It’s black marketguns that account for a large percentage of gun related violence. When I say “black market” I include stolen, straw purchased and corrupt dealers. We can’t enforce the restrictions we have now, adding more doesn’t make sense.
make it so only rich people can afford legal ammunition? I’m afraid that, like alcohol and tobacco, a “hefty” tax will probably just help fuel a larger black market.
People are not turning their guns back in, guns stores are not libraries. The percentage of households with guns peaked in 1994 at 53%. It has since fallen one third to 36%. The total number of guns has gone up but this is because there gun enthusiasts who like to collect different guns.
And that’s pretty much my whole point. You can either deal with people like myself, who don’t want to see al guns confiscated, but wants to see reasonable measures to see events like this and other instances of gun violence reduced, or you can refuse to deal with people like myself, and instead deal with the people who actually want to take all the guns.
If you keep blowing off reasonable gun controls, then unreasonable is all that will be left.
So, you think that if we have more shootings like this, and increased gun violence overall, public perception will shift in favor or looser regulations on guns?
A few more shootings like this, along with the cries of, “You can’t do anything about it, second amendment, neener neener.” is not going to give more public support to your already tenuous position. That many people don’t study the ins and outs of gun culture doesn’t make their opinion on wishing for less gun violence any less.
So, you doubt that even a minor change like getting rid of a technicality that allows people to make their weapons indistinguishable from illegal or illegally modified automatic weapons, from the perspective of those being shot, would get rolled through? I don’t doubt you are right that it would be problematic to try to ban them on a federal level, esp given the current makeup, and that even if some states or municipalities tried to ban them, then they’d get overturned by the 2A in the courts, making public’s opinion about the 2nd amendment that much weaker.
Keep saying that. The public is not as tolerant of these mass shootings as you think it is. You say that these mass shootings is just the price we pay for having guns in our society. Well, there are plenty of people who do not want to pay the price so that you can have your toy.
Essentially, you are saying that we have two choices. We can stop going to concerts, sporting event, or anywhere else where people are gathered, we can always be on the lookout for snipers. We need to determine whether we are supposed to run or to duck and cover in the case of having an active sniper (as there are those who are emphatic on both sides), and remember to perform those actions while our lives are in danger. We, the public, can just accept the danger that the unreasoning compromise and worship of 2A gets us.
Or, we can not do all of that, and simply repeal it. I think that, rather than living like we are in a war zone, people will opt for not being shot at. For not having to cower indoors.
I’m offering a third choice, we can work together, now, to find reasonable accommodations that are somewhere in the middle. You get to keep your guns, we get to keep our lives. If you refuse to work with those who are willing to work with you, if you tell the public that they just need to get used to being targets, then that third choice will go away, along with your precious guns.
Seriously, the best argument against the second amendment is the arguments that are being pushed forward by second amendment enthusiasts themselves. I don’t need to do anything, you keep it up, you are turning the public against you just fine all on your own.
Good cop bad cop huh? I don’t have a very strong opinion about the gun issue (some people actually don’t). I just realize we, in the US, are nowhere remotely near any kind of tipping point, in politically effective terms, v the 2nd Amendment broadly. IOW to the people you could actually address accurately personally as ‘you keep it up’, your threat is entirely hollow in my estimation. Obviously we just fundamentally perceive that differently, but past political evidence is on my side (even current: none the Democrats running for Senate re-election in Trump states
said anything about gun control in response to this incident) and I don’t see what reason there is to believe that’s changing.
Definitely not on the broad issue of guns as per 2A. The violent crime rate in the US has ticked up slightly recently after a long decline since the 1990’s. The gun ownership rate is harder to nail down but not greatly different (a recent poll said all time high, other data suggest a slight decline). And gun control laws are looser in more states now than tighter it’s probably fair to say. So if violent crime in general goes back up significantly, the US public (again where rubber hits road in Congress, not polls of people who don’t vote) is going to turn to gun control as the answer? I don’t see why.
On the narrower issue of mass shootings, the problem is that the ‘reasonable measures’ wouldn’t change it. That’s again not to speak against them, I’m really pretty neutral. Just gaming through, a few things are banned, everything else grand fathered, etc. How could that really change the mass shooting dynamic much? It won’t. Then very naturally the ‘good cops’ (real or posing as) would want more, and it’s back to the huge cultural divide and your fantasy, sorry to say but it is, of ‘the public’ aroused in anger at the pro-gun minority. The pro-gun minority is big. Most of the rest of ‘the public’ doesn’t care that much beyond ‘give me a quick easy solution’, which doesn’t exist. So 2A nowhere remotely near in danger no matter how stubborn the pro gun side is.
I think you need a new spiel to convince anybody. Again noting my position is mainly bemusement about the wasted energy on this issue when nothing major is going to happen on the gun side, not that I personally oppose small symbolic changes to gun laws. I live in one of the tightest gun control states, and it doesn’t really bother me.
If there is not enough consensus to push thru what you think is reasonable, how will there be consensus to push thru what even you agree isn’t reasonable?
Which is even more easily blown off.
I think people will lose interest pretty soon - that’s what usually happens. Maybe a ban on bump stocks, but that won’t affect the statistics on gun violence noticeably, so nothing further.
Well, no, that’s kind of silly. Mass shootings like this are extremely rare, and nobody is going be on the lookout for snipers for more than a couple of weeks.
But your false dichotomy is why we don’t have to accept your “reasonable” gun control suggestions - the idea that we can either live our lives in fear, or repeal the Second Amendment, is not reasonable.
Regards,
Shodan
You didn’t take it far enough.
People who would like to go on mass shootings are crazy to start out with. How do we identify them and keep them from getting their hands on guns?
