What makes an expert?

It’s not a problem exclusive to one party. ObamaCare had typos and mistakes too.

Yeah, but those so-called “doctors” can’t even tell if the bullet that splattered a child’s guts on the playground was fired by a cool AR-15 or a lame Mini 14. Ergo, their “facts” and “knowledge” are irrelevant.

But ALL rifles are high-velocity compared to handguns.

So which ones are you going to ban? The scary-looking ones, or the ones that were actually used in major wars?

That really sounds like an argument from the cat lady here:

Guns Explained With Cats

Mind you , I’m one of the liberals that do get convinced by research, most of the evidence I saw convinced me that most guns should not be banned, but that licensing and more checks are needed.

And I do think that the guns that do harm people, as the medic in the article linked described, should be partially banned; one should be able to get them by qualifying for their use by the needs of the gun owner, or IMHO by imposing limits like passing checks and training to get a special licence for weapons that do that kind of harm.

I’m retired, in my working life I learned there are two definitions of an expert. The management definition of an expert is “The farther away they have to come and the more you have to pay them the bigger expert they are”
The real world definition is “Anyone who knows their job inside and out is an expert.”
I learned this back in the 70’s. I worked for the Park District and I was in charge of setting up the yearly Christmas tree. Management hired a Christmas Tree decorating expert from two hundred miles away to decorate the tree. My fellow workers and I chuckled to ourselves. Any 10 year old kid who had decorated their family tree is an expert.
Just go with the flow I guess. lol

What research is that? Because I am also one of those liberals and have not come to that same conclusion.

I think one of the problems when it comes to gun regulation is it is never airtight (e.g. handguns are banned as opposed to handguns are ok but maybe ban magazines over 15 shots?). In order to appease the NRA and their ilk to pass anything resembling gun regulation the legislation gets nerfed and compromised six ways from Sunday such that the resulting regulation is so riddled with holes as to be effectively useless. Then gun advocates point to that seriously deficient legislation and tell you that clearly gun regulation does not work.

appearing on the show Pawn Stars :slight_smile:

Begging the question. You assume the rights of individuals should be left to the opinions of experts to begin with. I don’t care about some hick gun enthusiast or someone who’s parents bought a master’s in public policy.

That’s not true. Some guns, like the Remington Model 700 were designed for hunting.
https://www.remington.com/rifles/bolt-action/model-700

Of course, they can easily be repurposed to hunt humans.

Which, of course, is the problem when attempting to make policy on restricting firearms. The specifics of what makes one gun more or less deadly than another can be very technical. And restrictions based on technical requirements can be subject to loopholes and “hacks” (like the buttstock).

Some of the specifics that make guns appear more “tactical” or scary are often cosmetic or ergonomic (like Picatinny rails used to for attachments).

Considering how many NRA supporters take exception to the term “assault weapon” in the first place, probably isn’t going to happen.

For some reason you’ve chosen to characterize gun control as taking the form of “banning guns”. It may surprise you to know that in most countries that have a very low rate of gun violence, there are either no gun bans or they are a very limited minuscule part of the solution. The big parts are the control of access and availability of guns, requirements for legal ownership, restrictions on use and transportation, and arguably the biggest of all, a major difference in the gun culture and public attitudes to all guns in general. Most of those require little or no knowledge about the technical characteristics of specific guns.

No, but what the kid in Florida has is first-hand unvarnished knowledge of the impact of gun proliferation in a society that promotes gun culture, and the motivation to do something about it, things that are sadly lacking in a great many so-called adults who seem to be in denial.

No, but what the oppressed minority can contribute is how those racial problems manifest, how they’re perceived and experienced, and how they affect the lives of said minorities. You may need the expertise of sociologists and experts on race relations to formulate specific policies, but it would be foolish indeed to advance policy proposals without input from those whose problems you’re trying to solve.

True enough, but observe how these elements are handled in the gun debate. Those with personal experience like the Florida kids and parents or the Sandy Hook parents are dismissed as merely basing their conclusions on anecdotal experience, lacking objectivity, or (in the case of the kids) lacking “maturity”. Academics who analyze the sources of gun violence with careful and corroborated studies get their studies picked apart nitpick by nitpick, as if it was somehow controversial or even crazy to conclude that guns are dangerous and they kill people more or less in proportion to their unrestricted availability. And the group that simply points out that the US is the only advanced country on earth where this sort of gun violence occurs to this extent are dismissed as ignorant of American exceptionalism.

In the gun debate – and ISTM in the gun debate alone – neither personal experience nor subject matter expertise seems to matter in the slightest if the argument is for gun control. If the argument is for gun control, the speaker is deemed to be wrong, end of story. And this has been the story – and its sad end – again and again since at least 1934, while other countries forged ahead with stronger gun control at least half a century ago.

The comparison by the surgeon was between a handgun wound an an assault rifle wound, based on his experience. Read about the damage these things do, then tell me if the kind of rifles I shot in Boy Scouts do the same thing.
For a military weapon tearing apart the guts of your enemy and making surgery difficult and time consuming is a good thing. I’m not quite sure why you think this is so great in the civilian world.

True. But the Times today had a long article on how there were major flaws in the tax legislation, and lots of things that are undefined. Some are typos, some are errors from rushing it through in secret.
The point is, do you judge the authors of these flawed bills as harshly when they don’t involve guns.

Yes, Congress (and this goes for both parties) isn’t particularly competent at writing legislation. I believe I’ve posted my thoughts along those lines in the past, motivated by glitches / mistakes / problems in non-gun-related legislation.

Perhaps you should run for congress and show them how it’s done.

Especially when hand-written in the margins.

The ‘NRA’ stands for National Rifle Association. So why are they concerned about revolvers and pistols? Don’t they know the difference between rifles and revolvers and pistols? It seems they don’t understand the difference.

At the moment, their chief concern almost certainly is rifles like the AR-15. Very little is changing on the handgun front: bump stocks don’t apply, you already have to be 21, and for some reason nobody seems to think they’re evil.

People comparing “the shoulder thing that goes up” and other illustrations of extreme ignorance as “making a typo about a particular bullet caliber” are being disingenuous.

Politicians who support gun control very often sound like Todd Akin. Remember, the “legitimate rape” guy? And how he supposedly spoke to doctors who told him “the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down”? Is that the guy you want writing legislation about abortion?

That’s the sort of ignorance gun owners see regularly from national politicians. Nobody expects their representatives to be experts. We expect them not to be colossally ignorant.

Everyone knows that rifles are more damaging than handguns. The AR-15 is not particularly high powered for a rifle. The average deer rifle bullet will have about 1,000 more ft/lbs of energy than the average one fired from an Ar-15. If what we care about is power it would be better to ban hunting rifles and shotguns. However if what we care about is total people killed it would be better to ban the much less powerful handguns which are used in 88% of murders where the gun type was reported.

You’re ruining their emotion-driven talking point.