We take the guns out of the police’s hands as well. The robots can only see guns they have a line of sight to with their sensors and are close enough to see it on enough sensors for a very high confidence that it’s in fact a gun. One way to trick the robots would be to 3d print a gun with a shape that isn’t anything like a known firearm - that would definitely work, it would require a human operator’s authorization to engage a criminal armed with such a gun.
A knife or a blunt object is not as great of a threat - the only reason the machine would engage a gun immediately is that it’s an imminent threat to innocent victims a distance away. (multiple victims). If the machine catches a murderer in the process of stabbing someone to death, well, hopefully the human operators are quick to authorize force.
These machines would have no programming for self preservation, being shot is just fine, that’s a bullet that didn’t hit a human instead.
I believe removing all the semi automatics would lessen the damage from mass shootings. Revolvers are fine for home protection. I don’t think we would be able to remove all of them though, and the bad guys will certainly not turn theirs in.
At what point do efforts to prevent deaths give diminishing returns? Eventually the mantra “if it saves just one life” breaks down. We accept a cost/benefit ratio for things that cause human deaths all the time. I think the major difference between gun owners and gun control advocates is that the latter assign a zero, or near-zero benefit from gun ownership; and thus regard every last gun death as an unmitigated tragedy. Those who don’t own guns and have never needed to don’t really understand why everyone can’t be just like them in that regard.
Of those 30,000 deaths, how many would have occurred anyway if somehow it was magically impossible for guns to exist? How many suicides would have happened anyway by other means, how many non-gun deaths by violence or murder? And balanced against that, how many non-gun robberies, beatings, rapes and murders that were prevented by guns would be added to the toll? And that’s in the magic world where you can actually get rid of guns, including all hunting firearms.
The argument that the AMA makes is that adding a gun to a household is a net negative for the occupants. That the total sum of suicides, negligent discharges that cause a death, and homicides between the occupants following an argument exceeds the lives saved by the occupants defending themselves from attack.
I don’t know any credible data that disproves this.
A sensible firearms policy would then be one where in order to have a firearm, you would need to undergo training. Training in safe handling, prove you can shoot it accurately on test ranges. These tests need not be easy to pass - we don’t give driver’s licenses to everyone. The test would be objective, however - the criteria would be written down, and anyone that can meet them gets a license.
Then, you could have a sliding scale of increased cost of taxes and fees for each firearm, based on the killing potential of the weapon. Rifles would cost more than pistols, semiautomatic would cost more than bolt action, removable mags would cost more than fixed.
In addition to paying a fee at purchase, gun owners would need to contribute to a fund. Every mass shooting, every gun homicide, this fund would pay out to the victims. Thus all gun owners would be internalizing some of the externalities of mass gun ownership.
Failure to abide by the laws would result in incarceration, with a mandatory minimum sentence of some time in custody in a Federal prison.
There would of course be an amnesty and a buyback period.
Police would accept anonymous tips as to where illegal guns are hidden. They would not, however, conduct a door to door search.
That’s about what a sensible policy would look like. I know it will not happen, at least while the baby boomers are still alive, but it’s what needs to be done. It’s a similar policy to what they have in Europe.
Quite a bit. That’s the old CDC study, which was admitted by the head of the CDC to have as it goal showing that firearms are dangerous*. In order to do so, they came up with a unique method, never before used for sociology/criminology, but used for epidemiological. They also ignored data about reported non-lethal uses of defensive gun use, of which there are millions: https://d3uwh8jpzww49g.cloudfront.net/sharedmedia/1510684/2064261_2019-03-29-order-granting-plaintiffs_-msj.pdf Nationally, the first study to assess the prevalence of defensive gun use estimated that
there are 2.2 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses by civilians each year. Of those, 340,000
to 400,000 defensive gun uses were situations where defenders believed that they had
almost certainly saved a life by using the gun.7 Citizens often use a gun to defend against
criminal attack. A Special Report by the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice
Statistics published in 2013, reported that between 2007 and 2011 “there were 235,700
victimizations where the victim used a firearm to threaten or attack an offender.”8 How
many more instances are never reported to, or recorded by, authorities? A"
Why Congress Cut The CDC’s Gun Research BudgetIn the late ’80s and early ’90s, the CDC was openly biased in opposing gun rights. CDC official and research head Patrick O’Carroll stated in a 1989 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, “We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths.” …However, his successor and director of the CDC National Center of Injury Prevention branch Mark Rosenberg told Rolling Stone in 1993 that he “envisions a long term campaign, similar to tobacco use and auto safety, to convince Americans that guns are, first and foremost, a public health menace.” He went on to tell the Washington Post in 1994 “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol — cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly — and banned.”
*"However, the research was beyond flawed. For one, Kellermann used epidemiological methods in an attempt to investigate an issue dealing with criminology. In effect, this means he was treating gun violence the same as, say, the spread of West Nile, or bird flu.
It provided no proof or examples that the murder weapon used in these crimes belonged to the homeowner or had been kept in that home.
Furthermore, the gun victims he studied were anomalies. They were selected from homicide victims living in metropolitan areas with high gun-crime statistics, which completely discounted the statistical goliath of areas where gun owners engage in little to no crime.
Other factors that lent to the study’s unreliability were: It is based entirely on people murdered in their homes, with 50 percent admitting this was the result of a “quarrel or romantic triangle,” and 30 percent said it was during a drug deal or other felonies such as rape or burglary; it made no consideration for guns used in self-defense; it provided no proof or examples that the murder weapon used in these crimes belonged to the homeowner or had been kept in that home."*
There’s no clear relationship between the number of firearms and the death rate. The U.S. is high on this list, though below a number of countries that appear to be South American war zones, but there are tons of aberrations. For example, New Zealand apparently has a gun for every 3 people, but has 1/12 the gun violence.
Iceland has 4 times less guns as well (again, a gun for every 3rd person - would seem like plenty of guns, enough that anyone who wants to misuse a gun could get their hands on one) but has an incredible 171 times less gun violence.
With that said, there probably is a correlation. Look.
Let’s say 1% of your population are bad apples. They are murderous dudes. Which scenario is worse :
a. They can get their hands on guns
b. They can’t get their hands on guns
Now, sure, a good guy with a gun can sometimes shoot a bad guy with a gun first, but the advantage is going to usually be to the attacker.
It’s normally called an “anti-aircraft gun”, but that’s just newspaper talk. I don’t know the model. They believed that it had been imported from the USA in pieces, and assembled in Canada. I think they found the gun and the van a few days later, and established that it wasn’t in firing condition.
The word was that the guy they pointed it at was a vet, had seen what a gun like that could do with armor-piercing shells, and had no wish to put it to the test.
We are clear and in consensus on the nature of the benefits, and we work as hard as we can to minimize the human cost. In most cases, that is; since in most cases there isn’t a lobby strenuously trying to prevent any progress toward elimination of those costs.
The difference is not that we are not doing cost-benefit analysis appropriately. The difference is that, to us and to the rest of the civilized world, killing people is a cost. To you, however, it’s a benefit. That gap is not crossable by mere logic and fact.
Wait…are you saying there isn’t a tobacco lobby or an alcohol lobby?? Or are you saying that there are such lobbies, but that they don’t ‘lobby strenuously trying to prevent any progress toward elimination of those costs’? Because I have some news for you if you are saying any of those things…
Yet as a society we make these sorts of costs to benefit analysis all the time, and they certainly do cost lives. Often, a lot more lives than our decision to allow citizens to keep and bear arms do. And, in other countries, often their decisions and analysis cost more lives than ours do as well. I know many supposedly enlightened and ‘civilized world’ countries in Europe have smoking laws that make ours seem draconian. You can still smoke in bars and restaurants in many countries, for instance. And drinking can and is more prevalent in some countries. What do you suppose the cost in lives is for such decisions?
I actually don’t think this gap IS ‘crossable’, as folks tend to ignore some things that cost lives that society chooses to engage in while focusing strictly on others. I could point out the statistics of allowing folks to drink or smoke or even drive faster and compare and contrast that to gun murder deaths along with gun accidental deaths, and you and others will handwave that away, as you are doing and have done in the past. But deaths are deaths, and when a society chooses to allow something (or even to ban something in many cases) that will (not can) cause a non-zero number of people to die. Them’s the facts.
What is the benefit of tobacco? Alchohol? A great many unhealthy food items?
Guns scare you and you hate them as if they had evil will of their own. Maybe if you worked honestly from there, you’d be taken more seriously. As it is, your focus on guns as a health and safety issue when there is so much other low-hanging fruit that could be handled more expeditiously and with less political fallout is, at best, an unconvincing position.
Of course there are, but they do accept responsible controls on their products and limitations to their sales and use. They are businesspeople, not fetishists or ideologues or fantasists.
More accurately, it is not crossable because there is no fundamental basis of agreement on what is moral or ethical in a civilized society, not as long as one side insists on the right to kill.
It isn’t handwaving to point out fundamental fallacies. You just don’t like it.
The benefits to all those deaths need to be stated, then, don’t they? We do ban fast driving, we do strictly limit drinking and smoking, we do have public health education efforts that have been highly effective over the years. Even the people that say “Hey, back off, I just *like *those things” usually don’t go on to say “… so anybody else that gets hurt by 'em just doesn’t matter”. But guns are an exception, aren’t they? The fun of driving fast or getting drunk or getting a nicotine high aren’t really comparable to the fun of shooting somebody else, or even imagining yourself doing it, are they? And, please admit it, if you spend any amount time indulging those fantasies, then you *do *want to do it.
So, what do you consider ‘responsible controls’? Let’s take tobacco as an example. In the US, there are 34 million smokers. The estimated deaths from smoking annually are around half a million. Is that ‘responsible’? If so…on what basis? And, compare and contrast that to gun ownership verse death toll.
See, that’s the thing. You are defining what is or isn’t ‘responsible controls’ based on something other than statistics, and deciding what is or isn’t acceptable based on something other than statistics. Alcohol flat out kills more people annually than guns do in the US. It kills more people in other countries than it does in the US as well. Tobacco kills an order of magnitude more people, even counting ALL gun deaths from all causes in the US. It kills a hell of a lot more people in many other countries than it does in the US. So…what’s ‘responsible’? What ‘controls’ are in those that aren’t in guns, and why, despite that, do guns still managed to kill a lot less people? What’s ‘acceptable’ and what do you base that on?
Why is it more moral to allow an order of magnitude more people to die from tobacco than to own guns? How are you defining ‘moral’ in this? How is it more ethical to allow a larger number of people to die from alcohol than guns? Again, how are you defining ‘ethical’ here? I don’t see it as fundamentally different. Society decides to allow something and people die. Seems exactly the same to me, the only difference is that the cost in lives is actually less from the decision of society to allow people to keep and bear arms than it is from many other things we allow.
Basically, this line of logic doesn’t appeal to you because you know that you have no argument for it. Oh, you could say something along the lines of choice, and people choosing to drink or smoke as opposed to being shot with a gun, but then I could point out that drinking and smoking also take a significant toll on people who didn’t choose for an individual to drink or smoke.
It is a handwave on your part. You don’t like it because you have no real counter to this line of logic. You never have. So, instead, you go this route…as you always do. And you always will. Until and unless you can point out what the critical difference from a societal perspective is between guns, alcohol, tobacco and other things that society allows that WILL kill a non-zero number of people you basically are just waving your hands in the air and definitely don’t care.
And we put limits on gun ownership as well. So…BUZZZZ! Wrong again. Guns aren’t an exception, except in your own mind and only so you can handwave away the argument…as usual. You have nothing, you’ve never had anything on this subject and you have actually gone down hill wrt your argument. The ‘fun’? Really? So, because, to you, tobacco and alcohol are more ‘fun’, that justifies the higher body count? Seriously?
As to the last, well, assuming this sort of drive by insult passes muster with the mods I’ll just say that I don’t own a gun. Your own fantasies about what I might be fantasizing about are, as usually, as wrong as you are. I do drink and smoke, however.
So you’re saying that the problem isn’t guns in and of themselves, but how prevalent violence is in a country; and that we need to eliminate guns because too many people in the US just can’t be trusted with them?
By that logic, the single most effective gun control measure that could be passed would be to forbid African-Americans from owning guns, since they are vastly disproportinately both the perpetrators and victims of gun violence. (With apologies to all African-Americans who own guns to lawfully protect themselves).
You say I’m handwaving away deaths from tobacco or alcohol, as though I’m OK with those people dying.
I’m not.
I simply do not have a plan to make those deaths go away. I can’t look at another country’s fix to those problems and say “gee, those guys have cut their alcohol related deaths to 2% of ours, maybe we should do that!” A straightforward solution isn’t presenting itself.
You want to ban tobacco, I’m not going to stop you, I won’t type a single word to protect the rights of smokers, and what the hell, I’ll vote for the ban that you want.
You want to make cars illegal because they kill more people every year than guns? Well, I kind of like a functioning economy, so I’d prefer making a big push for self driving cars instead.
You want to make alcohol illegal, well, people can make gallons of it in their kitchen with rudimentary ingredients, so best of luck with that. We tried it once and failed miserably. However, if you know a place where they’ve cut alcohol deaths to extremely low numbers and think that emulating them makes sense, I’m listening. Seriously, I’ll listen.
If I know of a place that has cut firearm deaths to extremely low numbers, and I think emulating them makes sense, will YOU listen?
It isn’t about you or if you are ok with their deaths or not. I assume that you are a good human being, and that any deaths, especially ones you would consider needless, would not be ok. But, as a society, we accept that many of the things we allow will certainly kill some number of folks. Where the handwave comes in is thinking this is really any different. It’s not. By allowing citizens to drink, we accept that people will die. So, we put laws in to mitigate it to the extent possible. By allowing citizens to use tobacco, we accept that some number of people will die. So, we put in laws to mitigate it to the extent possible. By allowing people to keep and bear arms, we accept that some number of people will die. And so, just like in those other cases, we put things in place to try and mitigate it. Could we do more in all those cases? Absolutely. But ‘more’ is a relative term, and at a certain point it’s diminishing returns. In the US, I think we’ve basically hit a plateau wrt alcohol and tobacco mitigation, and really to ‘fix’ it you’d have to start actually banning it…which has been and is unacceptable. On the firearms front, honestly, I think more could be done, but it’s going to have very small effects. Waiting lists and things like that aren’t going to really make a huge difference (I still think we should do them). In order to have a real effect you’d need to ban things, as you proposed up thread. The problem is, like with alcohol and tobacco, the majority don’t want them banned.
That’s because you can’t fix everything and ‘make those deaths go away’. It’s not possible. Even if you made alcohol and tobacco illegal and threw the book at anyone who violated the law you wouldn’t. We didn’t during Prohibition and we haven’t during the War on Drugs™. I have no doubts that it would have an effect, and save lives…probably even thousands of lives. But it wouldn’t ‘make those deaths go away’, it would just lower them. And the same goes for guns. You could, perhaps, do what you planned, and ban all semi-automatic weapons and all hand guns. That would have an effect, to be sure. But it wouldn’t ‘make those deaths go away’ either…it would reduce the number of murders and accidents, but we are talking about something around 11k deaths a year in a country of over 300 million. Maybe you could reduce that by half with your measures? So…6k lives saved, maybe, a year. But at the cost of a hell of a lot of pain wrt anger, resentment and probably folks deliberately defying or flaunting the law, just like they would if you tried to ban alcohol and tobacco. Until and unless a society (OUR society) is willing to do something like that, simply putting up laws isn’t going to cut it. And, frankly, or society isn’t ready for bans on any of those things, even large category bans. And so, you’d get the War on Drugs, just War on Tobacco or War on Alcohol or War on Guns, and it would be the same effect as the War on Drugs has been…which is to say, we have maybe stopped 10% of the illegal drugs coming in and frankly spent a ton of money with little gain except to increase the prison population…which, of course, adds to the cost.
Sure, but then contrary to what most seem to think I don’t really have a dog in this fight, except from a purely constitutional and process perspective. I don’t own a gun, don’t plan to own a gun, and don’t really want to own a gun. The thing is, it’s not me that you need to get to listen to you, and really telling people that something works in some other country doesn’t cut it, IMHO. Showing them it works in another country doesn’t either, IMHO. If it did, we’d have universal healtcare or some sort of single payer system, instead of the legacy kludge we have. No, what you need to do is shift societies (again, OUR societies) view. Basically, what you need to do is make it so that the majority of Americans don’t want a gun (or to drink, or to use tobacco), don’t think they need one, and don’t think they ever will either want or need a gun in the future. Do that and then you can do what you want…once you use our system, as it was intended to change or get rid of the 2nd Amendment, since we are really just talking about guns though I used those other things. And if you do what I said, you CAN do that with the 2nd. You and everyone else in this thread knows that, today, right now, regardless of the NRA and Republicans blah blah blah, there isn’t a majority of Americans who will support that because that shift in public attitude hasn’t happened.
Just as a final though, consider…it IS happening with tobacco. Even though we haven’t banned it, the public perception of tobacco use has definitely changed over time, and isn’t where it was even 10 years ago. In fact, I think the US is ahead of the curve of most ‘civilized’ nations in this regard. And know what? The number of deaths due to smoking have gone down over time, though honestly, the carnage wrt tobacco use is pretty horrific when you put it in context (30 million smokers in the US and half a million deaths A YEAR, verse over 100 million gun owners and over 300 million guns and 11K murders/accidental deaths).
The problem is that I’m tired. The people whose view I need to change are the same people who ran to gun stores to stock up on weapons after a bunch of little kids got shot in their elementary school.
How are my words, as eloquent as they appear in my imagination, going to convince those people when Sandy Hook couldn’t?
I know that gun control is a dead issue in this country. I think it would save hundreds of thousands of lives over the years, but the people of this country would rather have the guns than the lives. That makes me sad.
Even you suggested that a ban could save 6,000 lives a year, that’s 2 9/11’s worth of deaths prevented every single year, but we won’t do it because gun owners would resent it. What is my pithy comeback supposed to be for that? You’re right, we won’t prevent 6,000 deaths per year because it would make gun owners unhappy.
That’s pretty much it. The problem isn’t with the people trying to make us a more decent society, a better and safer place to live. It’s with the people resisting it, with nothing more to offer than scorn.
Can anyone propose any useful way to engage those people (and no, capitulation isn’t one)?
