If you accept that the positive gun news thread is a safe space for gun enthusiasts where any contrarian view is verboten.
If you do not accept that premise there is nothing remotely disingenuous.
Really, what is positive gun news?
For me it would be: “Walmart stops selling ammunition for handguns, bans open carry in stores”.
For someone else:”Homeowner shoots intruder”.
There are arguments to be made for both these headlines being positive and there are arguments to see them as negative.
That thread clearly needs a better title.
And that seems to me to be the point of this thread. What is “Positive Gun News” is solely at the discretion of moderators who use their moderating powers to chastise people who fail the “What moderators think Positive Gun News Is” test.
Can I start a thread titled “Handsome Actor News” and then have moderators warn anyone who dares to post news about an Actor whom I don’t feel is Handsome?
Right now, there is a “Positive Abortion News Thread” in MPSIMS. It’s generally understood that it is a pro-choice thread.
For a pro-lifer to go into that thread and post, “Great news, it looks like the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe!” and then, when accosted by the mods, reply in feigned shock - “What? To me, that’s positive abortion news!” would be disingenuous.
Is it really so difficult to figure out the parameters of the thread? Really? OK. The thread is about incidents where a gun was used that led to a positive outcome. 99.9% of the time this will involve guns being used to stop a criminal threat. This may involve deterrence (best case) or violence, perhaps lethal. It is in the spirit of the thread to discuss individual incidents, but it is not in the spirit to discuss general gun policy.
“But wait!” you say “I need my internet outrage fix! How’m I supposed to get that sweet sweet dopamine rush?”
Have I got good news for you, my friend! You can get your fix in the numerous other gun threads on this board. If you don’t like what you find, start your own. Wanna “debate” gun policy? There’s GD. Wanna call gun owners poopyheads? The pit is right this way.
I have posted a time or two in that thread, challenging whether a particular news item is really “positive” and have not received a warning nor any pushback from other thread participants. Maybe that’s because I’m trying not to be a dick about it. But it does raise (well, continue) the question of what is threadshitting, and when is reasonable discussion allowed in a thread.
See, this is the fundamental disagreement on the premise. If a guy with a gun breaks into another person’s house, and the homeowner has a gun, and the homeowner shoots and kills the burglar, here is a situation where a burglary and a death occurred that may not have occurred without the guns. I don’t see how that’s positive.
If I am not allowed to post that opinion, then the thread has become an echo chamber. If the SDMB wants to support creating echo chambers for one side of controversial positions, then by all means state that as a policy so we know where you stand.
In any event, I’ve made my point. I think it’s pretty clear and I’m not going to get dragged into a morass of nit-picking and rules-lawyering. Post as you want, and I’ll leave it to the mods to sort things out.
The thread was started before Bone was a moderator, he hasn’t posted in it for over a year, he never once has tried to influence how the thread is moderated and as far back as 2016 he mentions not posting as much anymore. In his own words on a previous thread about this thread:
So no, the fact that Bone started the thread has nothing to do with it and he has not been involved in it even as a poster for quite some time.
I agree… and when the thread-starters are allowed to cast a specific opinion as “positive” and by extension define the alternate opinion as “negative”, it is basically taking a side and/or reframing the debate through a sort of structural change.
Right now, the presence of that thread strongly implies that “positive gun change” = gun control/confiscation is positive, and everything else is negative. Which is not how you run an ostensibly even-handed or neutral railroad, or get productive debate, IMO.
It seems to me sometimes that a lot of threads in ATMB come down to that.
I pretty much figured that.
As for the name I figure Bone can weigh in on that but if my memory is right a couple different firearms magazines ran a “positive gun news” column or a few stories now and then. Off the top of my head I am guessing they grew out of the NRAs “Armed Citizen” column. I actually like the name and feel its a good fit because it has covered more than just some citizen defending themselves against a bad guy.
And like others I just don’t see where someone is honestly confused about what the thread is for. But heck - I guess anything is possible on the internet. And it has made this thread a rather interesting read.
On consideration, I think it’s OK to post gun control stuff in the Positive Gun News of the Day thread. Similarly, it’s OK to post stories about people capping muggers and home invaders in the Positive Gun Control thread, because those gun owners exerted impeccable control over their weapons’ recoil when killing their assailants.
No. If someone kills an assailant with a gun, that means they’ve exercised good control over the gun. The story is thus a positive story about gun control.
