I don’t see the point of the manufacturing date ban.
This could go under the misunderstandings thread. If I advocate for a ban on semi-auto weapons and all handguns, leaving gun owners with nothing but bolt action rifles and shotguns, my “end goal” isn’t to take away stuff from gun owners. It really, truly, honestly, isn’t.
The end goal is to reduce unnecessary death. Banning weapons is a means to that end. I think that end is a very good thing to want, 30,000 people a year die because guns make it so damn easy to end a life. I think that’s beyond sad.
The folks who want to keep owning guns aren’t offering me a solution to those deaths. Sure, they’ll bring up the fact that people die from other things, as if nobody has attempted to reduce those deaths, as if those deaths make firearm deaths irrelevant. But a solution, a plan to reduce firearm deaths, that isn’t being offered.
Well, you won’t save 30k a year, first off. The majority of those are suicides, and personally I don’t think removing guns will affect that number substantially. Bringing up every gun death and saying that you want to save them all by this act sort of twitches the radar, especially when you say your ‘“end goal” isn’t to take away stuff from gun owners. It really, truly, honestly, isn’t’ right after saying you want to enact legislature that will take away something like 2/3rd or more (definitely more) of the guns currently on the street.
As to the last, what’s the solution to lower drunk driving deaths? We lose something like 40K people to alcohol related deaths (10k+ per year to drunk driving alone)? We already have gone through regulation, we have cops on the street looking for drunk drivers, hot lines to phone in if you see a drunk driver, laws about drinking, yet 10’s of thousands are killed a year. So…what’s the solution to this? Easy, right? Ban alcohol. Unfortunately, people don’t want to do that. Society is willing, over all, to accept the fact that by allowing it a large non-zero number of people WILL die.
Your solution is basically the Prohibition one, for all intents and purposes. Real solutions are more like those taken with alcohol and tobacco. Regulation, laws on the books, maybe a more intensive process. The issue though is folks like you, who while perhaps well meaning say things that at this point push the buttons of folks who are paranoid that ‘your’ side wants to simply grab all the guns. You probably don’t even see it, but it’s right there in your post.
I forgot the ‘why’ part, so here it is:
I’m hoping this one’s pretty obvious.
If it’s illegal to carry in public places, then it’ll be hard for people to shoot other people in public places. If you see a gun on someone, or see a gun-shaped bulge under their clothes, you can call the cops.
First of all, a lot of women get killed by their abusive husbands, boyfriends, and exes. Second, a lot of the shooters in the mass shootings we’ve been having, have previously been abusive to the women in their lives.
What you think about suicide is completely divorced from reality.
Britain reduced Tylenol based suicides by 43%, not by banning Tylenol, but by making it inconvenient to swallow a lot of Tylenol pills. Inconvenient. All they did was make suiciders push pills out of a blister pack instead of dumping it from a bottle and suicides by those pills dropped 43%.
Guns make killing people, including yourself, really easy. If you make it hard to kill yourself, even just inconvenient, a lot fewer people kill themselves.
Truly, honestly, I don’t give a rat fuck what you own. Truly. Honestly. I don’t care. Own whatever you want, for whatever purpose you want.
Every scrap of the problem I have with it has to do with the number of people killed by guns every year, the “cost of doing business” that comes with lightly-fettered gun ownership. The only reason 2/3+ of the guns on the street would be caught up in this is that 2/3+ of the guns on the street exist purely to give the wielder the power to kill a human being with the pull of a finger.
Nonsense. First off, nobody on your side of the argument has ever offered a more intensive anything related to guns. Second, what part of your proposal is actually going to take guns away from someone, or prevent them from buying a gun, given that your proposal isn’t even a complete sentence.
It should be but isn’t, given the number of weapons bought and owned even by actual Dopers that have that as their purpose.
The same people are ready to accuse you of something called “hoplophobia”.
Can you show in the data the the overall suicide rate declined in Britain during the same time? I’m looking at the stats on Wiki and it doesn’t look like there was a large decline.
Really? Japan has VERY strict gun laws, yet their per capita suicide rate is much higher than the US. Why? In fact, the US is in the middle of the pack wrt per capita suicides despite the very large prevalence of guns in the US. Why?
Sorry, but the facts seem to show that it’s your concept of suicide that is divorced from the reality of the statistics. If reality aligned with what you say then the US would have the highest suicide rate in the world, yet that’s not the case. In fact, the US has a lower per capita rate than many countries that have very strict gun control or out right bans on the things. I’ll ask again…why? How does this fit into your narrative?
Truly, honestly, that runs contrary to what you said. Here, let me quote you again: “If I advocate for a ban on semi-auto weapons and all handguns, leaving gun owners with nothing but bolt action rifles and shotguns, my “end goal” isn’t to take away stuff from gun owners.” So, you DO care what people own…you advocate that they don’t own ‘semi-auto weapons and all handguns, leaving gun owners with nothing but bolt action rifles and shotguns’. Your words. I can’t ‘Own whatever’ I ‘want’ ‘for whatever purpose you want’ if you got your wish wrt a ban. Seriously…you are saying two contradictory things here.
Again, you are contradicting yourself.
I seriously doubt ANYONE is on ‘my side’, so we can get that out first. I have offered up several, and since I’m the only one on ‘my side’ the failure is in you jerking your knee and not bothering to look at what I’ve written in the myriad threads I’ve participated in this stupid subject that I know you’ve been in, or failing that, simply asking me and assuming I’m on, presumably, the ‘pro gun’ side.
As to the last, that’s YOUR solution, to take guns away…ironic, considering your earlier assertion that ‘Truly, honestly, I don’t give a rat fuck what you own. Truly. Honestly. I don’t care. Own whatever you want, for whatever purpose you want.’. 
I don’t propose to take anything away. I propose to regulate it. Just like we regulate other things in our society that kills as many or more people annually and that we, as a society accept the cost of. Like alcohol. Or tobacco. Or driving over 55 mph. There are plenty of things that society does and accepts that kill more people than guns. We attempt to mitigate that to the extent it’s feasible, and I think there is some room to do that wrt guns as well, though it’s going to be a tough, uphill slog because of folks like you who advocate for unrealistic solutions that only accomplish getting the pro gun side riled up and on the defensive, unwilling to even think about compromise since it’s apparent that, in the end, what you and folks like you want is to ban most if not all of the guns. I mean, why would you stop at ‘nothing but bolt action rifles and shotguns’, in the end? If you could get those other things banned, as you say you want too (on one hand, then don’t on the other), why stop there? If there were no more semi-automatic or hand guns then like with suicides, people would find a way to use other tools to accomplish the same thing. I mean, what level of deaths would you accept? 5000 a year? 1000? 500? Where, to you, does it become acceptable, and why? Currently, it’s approximately 11,000, which is lower than a lot of other things we accept. Why is that figure not acceptable and where do you draw the line? Any why? If we cut that down too, say, 3000 deaths a few years down the line when you get your wish, but those deaths are from shotguns and bolt action rifles, because these are what is available, what then? Is 3000 acceptable to you or would you start agitating to get rid of the shot guns and bolt action rifles at that point (while saying you don’t give a fats ass about taking stuff from people…)?
It’s already generally illegal to shoot other people in public places.
And most of the people who are shooting other people in public places aren’t carrying legally.
I don’t care what you own, I care that people are dying. If you can stop these people from dying, I’m 100% OK with you owning whatever guns you want.
That’s a guarantee. Because it isn’t about you owning guns, it’s about people dying.
So, let’s see how you do.
That’s a great start.
Aaaaaand, not a single detail of what you would regulate. Nothing but complaining that I’m not curing cancer instead of wanting to take away your guns.
So, again, do you have a plan to reduce the number of people killed by guns? An actual plan, not “like we do with tobacco” or “let’s enforce the laws on the books” a plan of action that, as a result of implementing it, reduces the number of people killed by guns every year.
If you don’t have a plan, I’m sticking with my own. Despite the fact that it doesn’t have a chance in hell of being implemented, I’m at least being true to myself.
Kind of the point is that you can’t. You can NOT stop people from dying. You can try and mitigate their deaths to a degree, you could try and do an outright ban, but even if you get your wish and your ban you STILL won’t prevent people from dying. Prohibition is a perfect example. Yeah, it did in fact lower the number of people who died annually from alcohol. By a measurable amount. But it didn’t stop people from drinking or dying, and in fact shifted those deaths to others who wouldn’t have died if they hadn’t put Prohibition in place. Unintended consequences and all that. And what you propose would have the same sort of effect. It would, assuming you could actually do it (:dubious:) probably lower the number of gun murders by a noticeable amount. But it wouldn’t stop them, and it would almost certainly shift them to something else. You wouldn’t really change suicide rates, what you’d do is shift them to some other method. Maybe in the short term you’d lower them, but they would rebound back to their earlier levels as folks find alternatives. Gun murders…sure, you would probably lower those from 11k to something between 11k and maybe 5-6k. But they would still happen, and my WAG is that it would increase in other categories such as crime related or non-gun murders. One thing often overlooked in these discussions are that, while US gun murders are higher than most other countries, our non-gun murders are ALSO higher than most other countries. You aren’t actually solving the root problem, you are attempting to remove one tool from the tool chest. Yes, it’s an important tool, a tool that makes murder easier, but Americans find a way to murder 1000’s of our fellow citizens a year without guns too, and I think that can-do spirit would basically rebalance the numbers so that in a future where you get your wish, what will actually happen is non-gun murders will rise, and probably gun murders using shotguns and bolt action rifles will also rise.
You didn’t ask me. AND this thread isn’t about gun control, so it would be a hijack on my part. If you are really that interested, feel free to start your own thread which I’ll respond to, or search for my previous posts on this subject. Seriously…this is a goofy line of thought. Are you seriously thinking I have no answers to this, despite being in a ton of these threads in the past? This thread is about risk and risk assessment, so I’m posting along those lines.
No, and neither do you because it’s not possible. I have some ideas on how we might mitigate, to an extent, the number of people killed, but the reality is that if a society allows something, people will die. If a society bans something (say like illegal or regulated drug use), people will die. Anything a society does comes with a price tag in lives. Personally, I don’t think the price we pay for allowing citizens the right to keep and bare arms is unacceptable, and, more importantly, clearly the majority of my fellow citizens don’t feel it is either. What I think is more realistic is finding ways to mitigate it to the extent possible in the real world, such as how we mitigate alcohol and tobacco deaths. In all 3 cases we, in fact, have done quite a lot to try and mitigate them in fact, and, lo…in all of those categories the stats seem to show that the numbers of deaths per year have, in fact, gone down (with some brief spikes here and there).
You don’t have a plan, you have an idea. It’s not a plan because there is no way to impliment it unless someone makes you god emperor of the US and gives you absolute power. Even then, it’s STILL not a plan, because frankly you have zero idea how you’d even go about accomplishing it. Sort of like those plans that say ‘1) collect dirty underware’, ‘2) …’, ‘3) profit!!’.
I used to live in Virginia. I inherited my grandfather’s issued sidearm from World War II. (General grade officers were not discharged, merely moved to inactive reserves.) The weapon in question is an M1911a1, manufactured by Colt, in 1943. It is a semi-automatic handgun. (The quintessential cause of gun deaths in your analysis.) After owning it a few years, I decided that I dislike the absence of competence I suspected I might have, and joined a range, to practice to assure myself that I was able to use the weapon I owned.
Because Virginia has legal open carry as an option, I would put the weapon in the trunk, and the ammo in the glove compartment for the drive, and wear the weapon openly when I got there. (loaded, with an empty chamber, uncocked.) Using the magazines I had I was able to load 49 rounds, and keep the extra in my pocket. Tactically speaking, it was highly unlikely I would ever find myself in need of more ammunition as a limiting factor. Everything was fine, until winter came, and I put on my winter coat, and became a felon. I was carrying a concealed weapon, without a concealed carry permit.
So, I got one. Two forms, and a three week wait to get the permit in the mail. I could have gotten it sooner, by retaking the test required instead of listing my DD214 as proof of training. But, now I was a legally armed citizen. I could walk from the parking lot to the range with my coat on. I did so for the rest of that year, about once a week, at first, and then once or twice a month. Turns out, much to my surprise I was a pretty good shot, up to about 20 meters. (I read a study of gunshot wounds in the US over a thirty year period and found that most wounds received from farther than 20 meters were accidental.)
So, I cleaned and put away the pistol, with a lock on it. It would take me a bit under a minute to get up and get it, load a magazine, and be ready to shoot anyone. (Assuming I remembered the combination on the gunlock, likely, but not a sure thing.) Over time, my permit expired, and I did not renew it. Then I moved to North Carolina. Never bothered to get a permit here, and I don’t believe that open carry is legal in NC, but don’t much care. So, me, and armed intruders are the only folks I can shoot. (aside from close friends and relatives, of course.)
I have some reservations about how much safer I am with a pistol, and about the same amount about how dangerous I am to my community. I will probably leave the weapon to my nephew, when I die, as he has strong associations with my grandfather, and will probably spend some time in the military himself. My son has no interest it it, and my grandchildren are too young to have any expressed interest at this time.
The existence of a semi-automatic handgun is not what creates the risk. The concept of limiting gun ownership does have serious positive elements to be considered, and the “get all the guns” philosophy does nothing to encourage those elements.
The second amendment is an artifact of a bygone age. When it was written it was intended to keep the preeminent military weapon of the time in civilian hands, in control of local well regulated militias. A trained company of riflemen could win a battle against an invading army. In their own towns and villages they were capable of defending against the best that major governments of the time could field. None of that is true today.
The idea of allowing civilian ownership of stealth bombers and nuclear weapons, or even modern tanks is too ludicrous to even consider. Civilian weaponry is, and must be limited. All or nothing is a strategy that guarantees nothing.
Tris
Sadly, a shortage of people willing to pry things from my cold dead hands is insufficient.
You know, while it may not be within the lifetimes of many (any) of us reading this thread, I have a product proposal.
A police drone.
Hardware:
a. Manipulation: It’s some type of walking machine, similar to ones already demonstrated, but with the number of legs and manipulator types to be determined. It has non-lethal weapons only.
Computational : Embedded neural net system, similar to the hardware used to drive an autonomous car
Sensing : The usual suite of short range lidar, camera, ultrasonic, etc. Also special antennas and the ability to emulate a cell tower so that it can precisely locate the phone of someone that called it.
Power : Lithium-ion batteries.
Software capabilities : It has the ability to move, clearing obstacles and aggressively pushing through crowds, but avoiding impacts with humans above a threshold that would cause significant injury. It can navigate the environment, whether given a map or not. It can analyze the actions of humans in a 360 degree radius around the machine, and determine if a human is likely committing a forcible felony. (robbery, rape, assault and battery, etc)
Operating protocol :
Normally, the machine is unable to engage, either physically or using it’s weaponry suite (taser shells, gas, bean bag shells, foam shells) without approval from a human operator. In a specific scenario - the machine detects a firearm held by a human in an unsafe way (pointing anywhere but the ground), the machine would be permitted to engage the firearm itself immediately. (shoot it out of the wielder’s hand with a bean bag or tase the wielder)
Deployment : these machines would be mass-manufactured, by other robotic systems using the same technology base. The hardware would be cheap. The way I imagine it, they could be installed in residential and urban sidewalks, either in aboveground capsules or underground deployment capsules. The machines would wait for activation - they don’t need to “patrol” the streets, cameras do that *for *them in public areas. This also neatly fixes the battery life problem - they don’t need to be active for more than an hour or so, if a situation isn’t resolved by then they could trade positions with other such machines.
High value individuals could lease a robotic bodyguard to follow them around at all times. Middle class people could probably rent one provided by a private security company, installed for every cluster of houses or apartments.
Unlike low end rent-a-cops, these machines would have sophisticated, extensive testing in training in many real world scenarios and policies developed to maximize the chance of bringing each situation to a safe conclusion. They wouldn’t need lethal force as they don’t fear for their own life, and their nonlethal weapons could be dialed up to deal with even heavily armed and armored individuals. (technically making them lethal but with machine level accuracy, the software wouldn’t permit shots that are potentially lethal such as rubber bullet rounds to the head, neck, or torso)
So there would be no reason to have private firearms. When seconds count, robocop is seconds away. And he’s a lot better shot than you are but isn’t trigger-happy. And you aren’t going to be overthrowing the government once the government has systems like these - the government could deal with mass uprising by just mass arresting all the rebels, with few human deaths. (basically from rebels who accidentally hit each other with stray fire or explosives)
Yeah, I think you have no answers.
Here’s the trick, when a couple dozen companies have already collected dirty underwear and profited handsomely from it, a plan that starts with underwear and ends with profit is no longer inherently ridiculous. It’s just a business plan, and the “how to accomplish it” the 2)??? is a matter of copying those who have already done it successfully.
I used to live in a country where we made the impossible possible. We harnessed the power of the atom, we put a man on the Moon. Now we can’t even copy what other countries have done. Not only are we unable to copy it, we literally believe it is impossible to do what they have already accomplished. We have intelligent, thoughtful arguments as to WHY it’s impossible to do, why America is so utterly incapable of doing the things that other countries do as a matter of routine, why those of us who suggest it are just naive fools who are wishing for rainbow shitting unicorns, when we have friends who literally have pet unicorns and post on Instagram about cleaning up their rainbow colored poo.
I’ve given this a lot of thought, and believe the danger threshold is reached when hot lead comes out the end.
Robo Cop or the Terminator. :dubious:
But it wont reduce unnecessary death.
Look of those 30000, 20000 are suicides, and in Japan, they have no problem with committing more suicides than the US and with no guns.
Then read this legal decision: https://d3uwh8jpzww49g.cloudfront.net/sharedmedia/1510684/2064261_2019-03-29-order-granting-plaintiffs_-msj.pdf
*That is why mass shootings can seem to be a common problem, but in fact, are
exceedingly rare. At the same time robberies, rapes, and murders of individuals are
common, but draw little public notice. As in the year 2017, in 2016 there were numerous
robberies, rapes, and murders of individuals in California and no mass shootings.17
Nevertheless, a gubernatorial candidate was successful in sponsoring a statewide ballot
measure (Proposition 63). Californians approved the proposition and added
criminalization and dispossession elements to existing law prohibiting a citizen from
acquiring and keeping a firearm magazine that is able to hold more than 10 rounds. The
State now defends the prohibition on magazines, asserting that mass shootings are an
urgent problem and that restricting the size of magazines a citizen may possess is part of
the solution. Perhaps it is part of the solution.
Few would say that a 100 or 50-round rifle magazine in the hands of a murderer is
a good idea. Yet, the “solution” for preventing a mass shooting exacts a high toll on the
everyday freedom of ordinary law-abiding citizens. Many individual robberies, rapes,
and shootings are not prevented by the State. Unless a law-abiding individual has a
firearm for his or her own defense, the police typically arrive after it is too late. With
rigor mortis setting in, they mark and bag the evidence, interview bystanders, and draw a
chalk outline on the ground. But the victim, nevertheless, is dead, or raped, or robbed, or
traumatized.*
What you are doing is trying to reduce the number of *victims of mass shootings, *which are very rare, by banning half the guns in the USA. Crooks and killers will have no problem at all keeping up the 10000 a year death toll even with your gun limitations. Your gun limitations would have no significant effect at all on violent crime. Maybe, the next mass shooting MIGHT have 8 victims instead of 10. While saving those two lives is of course a Good Thing, you are willing to spend tens of billions of tax dollars and put quite a few OTHERWISE law abiding citizens in prison to save those two lives.
Pretty much in NY, CA, NJ, etc it is already illegal to carry a gun concealed. That has had no effect on murder rates. In other states, you have to have a CCW permit. Studies have shown that CCW permit holders have a very low murder rate.
And it is already illegal for anyone convicted of a spousal abuse crime to own a gun. Hasnt done much.
Shooting guns out of cops hands is not a Good idea.
And how do you spot guns inside buildings?
This also leaves out knives, blunt weapons etc, all of which murder a significant number of people.
You think I have no answers. Well, there is your problem.
Assuming those people who are in charge of the company agree with the methodology. Let’s give an example. Illegal drug cartels make billions of dollars a year. Should we copy their methodology? Why or why not? There were a lot of companies in the past, and even today who have made a ton of money because they ignore ecology laws and statutes. Should those be copied?
And this is really the key to the second paragraph. See, while you USED to live in a country that did all those things, you STILL live in a country where the majority of it’s citizens disagree with your master ‘plan’…and even disagree with your assessment of risk, by and large. And, sadly for you, you don’t live in North Korea or China and you aren’t either Kim the Fatter or Poo Bear, so you can’t simply say what you want and it is so, and the citizens have to suck it up. Yes, in other countries they do things differently, and if we only copied them we could be just like they are. But you seem to be missing two key things. In those countries, they are like they are because their citizens want it to be that way. And in this country that you live in, the citizens of your country don’t want it to be the way you want it to be. This is called ‘reality’ by the rest of us, and, sadly, you don’t seem to recognize it. You really have a number of choices though. You could move to one of those countries who you want us to copy. That’s really the easy one, since you actually could do that in the real world as it exists. You could wish you become god emperor if the US, and that you get all of the vast powers of Kim the Fatter and can decree by fiat the world as you want it. Good luck with that. You could try and convince a majority of your fellow citizens that your ‘plan’ is what they want and to vote for it through their local politicians. You could rant on a message board about how we could go to the moon but we can’t copy France or Japan and how that shows…something.
You are right…I don’t have solutions for you. My thoughts on this subject aren’t subject to unicorn farts and dragon wishes, and are more grounded in the real world as it actually exists. In that world, at this time, banning something that would in effect ban 3/4rds or more of all weapons while the 2nd Amendment still exists and hasn’t been overturned and relegating citizens to shotguns and bolt action rifles and nothing else isn’t realistic. Not only could you not do it legally and constitutionally, you couldn’t do it freaking logistically or realistically, as a very large number of people would ignore it or actively fight against it…and a lot of those people would be freaking LEO or military.