To all, if someone wants to build a well constructed gun control thread that isn’t loaded with poison pills to start in GD, I will ride herd over it and keep it on subject.
If the OP is opening with the premise gun owners are irresponsible or evil, I will close it. That is not a debate, that is a rant.
Please mention that comparisons to laws regarding pools, cars, aircraft and space lasers will not be tolerated.
This poisons the well IMO.
Below is PURELY a “for example” and not an attempt to turn an ATMB thread into a debate:
If I want to propose a public safety policy, for example a national 45 mph maximum speed limit, why would the discussion be forbidden from mentioning other matters of public safety? To compare as a baseline exactly what level of “death mitigation” we have considered reasonable vs not-reasonable. This is one of the big things I think is fairly dishonest about how this forum talks about guns, the idea that you can talk about them as a public safety issue but they can’t be compared to any other public safety issue at all.
You’re objection is noted and even understood, but it is overruled. We can both do the research and find the dozens of examples of gun related threads hijacked beyond hope by these not gun control arguments.
You are not required to participate in such a thread.
Fair enough–I wasn’t expecting it to be heeded, just pointing out the bad debate parameters. That thread will be little different from the many such bad debates housed on these forums.
Like most GD threads that I’ve started, I’m more interested in hearing cogent arguments than in persuading folks of my view; while I have some opinions on the subject, GD is best for me when I can learn something from it. So I’ve tried to make the OP clear without taking a specific side.
We’ll see how this goes, I’ve added a staff notice.
Thanks! It may be that nobody else is interested, which, fair enough; or maybe I constructed the OP poorly.
Or maybe I’m just super impatient and folks are writing well-considered and amply-cited responses even now, and I need to slow my roll.
My guess is give it a little time and then it will pick up and be very busy for a few days.
I had to minorly mod 5 posts from last night in that thread. I think it is clear that it is nearly impossible for posters to not bring up 2nd Amendment or Cars. All of them could have been modnotes or worse.
This is the way of the gun thread.
Well, IMO that’s also because “discuss proposals you may support or reject” without alluding to some references as to why, feels oddly decontexted vs. the way we are used to doing things here.
Perhaps the mods can tell us what specific arguments are allowed in these debates to make their jobs even easier. Or they could make their jobs easier by simply allowing the discussion to run and only modding actual rule violations instead of controlling discussion to suit their personal sensibilities.
Right, it’s why I pointed out that this mindset is injurious to having any real discussion. But it triggers @What_Exit for people to talk about other public safety issues.
Human beings generally make arguments by comparison. Heart disease isn’t a problem because it kills x number of Americans in isolation, it’s because it actually ranks as one of the highest causes of death. Without that context it is incredibly hard to judge things. Like say someone is advocating more research dollars for X disease that kills X people, but we aren’t allowed to compare X to anything else. That leaves us unable to really judge the relative societal impact in context.
It simply isn’t logical to think of guns as having no comparative relationship with other causes of death–it goes against the entire way the CDC tracks mortality, for example.
One of those wasn’t even gun-related, just a straight-up personal attack, and should have been a warning, never mind a note.
Um, to be clear, most of the issues being mod-ified (sorry, I seem to believe I’m funny this morning) where explicitly disavowed in the OP. It’s been my understanding, heck, I even did a thread about it, that if the OP sets rules and conditions to the debate they should be honored - almost by definition, things that are excluded in the OP would have to be ‘off-topic’
Just saying that in a closely restricted thread, which this one is, @What_Exit is more enforcing the rules set out in the OP rather than his own preferences, although in this case, they do overlap closely.
I learned something from the current GD thread (about how background checks work), so that’s value-add for me. But I also read it after all the cleanup occured.
In general, I’m very pleased with the level of discussion in the new thread, but I agree that WE is erring a bit too much on the side of avoiding sidetracks. I don’t see how saying “Guns are tools with legitimate uses but also significant dangers, so let’s look at how we regulate other things that meet that description” is an illegitimate argument. Indeed, saying that it is seems to concede the gun nuts’ point that gun rights exist on some higher moral plane and can’t appropriately be compared to mundane things like cars or alcohol or whatever.
But I appreciate the difficulty of modding these threads. I was a bit miffed yesterday when WE shut down the Dickey Amendment discussion, but while composing my PM of protest, I realized that, although the topic seemed clearly appropriate based on the OP’s criteria, the practical effect of not shutting that down would have been that DrDeth would have turned the thread into a debate about the scientific merits of one particular study from 1996. So on second thought that was a good call.
Exactly, presenting it was a good addition to the thread, but letting 1 report overwhelm the thread would wreck the thread.
If someone wants they can debate the hell out of it as its own spinoff thread. I won’t close it and I won’t put extra effort into modding it.
I’ll admit to two things on @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness new thread:
Which doesn’t mean I don’t support these constraints. I’m just working harder than I would have expected to toe the line…
What I’m finding interesting in that thread is:
I’m really appreciating the way the thread is going, and thank everyone’s who engaging in it. There are some really thoughtful posts. And thanks, What Exit, for riding herd on it!
In my experience (avoiding the horror of “ack-shul-allee”) there is a lot more agreement in these threads on general issues and concerns but one or more persons in the threads starts down one of the tired ruts and drags the conversation down that way, at which point everyone else tends to drop out.
But, believe it or not the board is actually far closer to the center of the bell curve on this issue than many more specific groups are. Which may be a surprise to some, but trust me, if you ever lurk a firearms forum, you’ll see our most stringent Pro-gun voices would be considered commie liberals!