Okay but is the standard then that just because people choose to use the flag system we should treat a topic that is not really dissimilar from many other topics, in a special way? Maybe there should just be consequences for repeated use of the flag system when the flagged post clearly is not a moddable action.
I guess for me at the end of the day–I mostly like to see a message board have as many discussions as possible within the remit of that board (and this board is basically a broad spectrum general topic board), I support the concept of not letting really hateful topics be discussed because there’s a flipside of open discussion where you end up like 4chan/8chan/Stormfront etc which isn’t what almost anyone wants.
I doubt I will participate in any future gun threads unless the topic is very interestingly crafted–which is my norm, in the 2000s and such I used to debate guns on here a ton, but I’ve largely decided these threads aren’t worth participating in for many years. But I wouldn’t want my personal disinterest in them to mean people who are interested in hashing it out lose that privilege. And along those lines I thought @puzzlegal’s point was a salient one–just because I’ve mostly said all I have to say on this topic, shouldn’t mean the topic is closed for any future members or current members who have not done so.
I’m already somewhat investing a lot of typing into a topic I’m not super invested in, but my high-level philosophy on things like this would be:
- Is a gun thread a genuine debate or premise for debate?
- Is it distinct from other gun debates within a reasonably recent timeframe?
- Have the posters in the thread avoided devolving into deliberate trolling, rules violations (i.e. personal attacks etc)?
If those three things are met, I don’t personally see a problem with it being in GD.
What I could maybe see being a good idea is saying if a post is just a complaint about guns, it should just be a post in the already extant complain about gun omnibus thread in the Pit (Stupid Gun news of the day (Part 2) - #211 by Mundane_Super_Hero), I would argue Velocity’s thread that kicked all this off would actually fall pretty obviously in that category–taking his OP in a textually strict way, I don’t think it was really a vehicle for debate, just a vehicle for being angry and upset about mass shootings–and we basically already have a place for things like that, a one sided thread that anti-gun people post anti-gun things in, and largely avoid spamming the rest of the forum with it.