The only concerns they ever state are, essentially, that they might encounter a bad guy who needs killin’, or that the gummint might come grab their guns. Isn’t that pretty much it?
Who is the real source of those? A reread of this thread might answer that for you.
I do, and that’s how I know what those views really are.
See, that’s the thing you still aren’t getting, and obviously I am unable to convey the issue very well. The folks you are talking about here? They are the minority of gun owners. The fringe. Not the majority. The folks you would need to convince you are apparently completely unaware of. Hell, many of them probably don’t even own a gun at all. They are the ones who still think the RIGHT to keep and bear arms is important in concept, and would oppose you because you would be circumventing that right.
These are the folks you would need to shift, over time, to a different view point. You will never, ever shift the faithful. Trust me…can’t be done.
Because they view it differently, and, frankly, you don’t know who your target audience is for change. You THINK you know, but it’s clear by just what you’ve written here that you don’t know them at all. Many of them are Democrats. You won’t convince them with one event, no matter how horrific. And, frankly, they shouldn’t be convinced by one event, no matter how horrific. That would be like condemning all Saudi’s or all Muslims for 9/11. Sure, some folks did do that…but, do you think that this was right or fair? Consider how extreme that position is…then put that into the context of what we are discussing.
No, what you need to do is to shift the public’s view point. Basically, when enough of your fellow citizens don’t want or think they need a gun, then you will have achieved what all your bans wouldn’t…a sea change in attitudes that will affect real change. Look at tobacco. Consider where we were 50 years ago…then consider where we were 10 years ago…and where we are today. There has been a very real, gradual shift in our societies tolerance for it, and fewer and fewer people want it. At some point in the future, I think the shark will be jumped and you actually could ban it in the US without real serious blow back.
I think a similar dynamic is happening with firearms. Look at the stats some day for the number of households with guns over time. I think what you will see is that, while there are a lot more guns in the country than in the past, they are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Personally, I really believe that had the anti-gun folks (and I use that term deliberately) not tried to circumvent the 2nd Amendment and ban guns by fiat and thus riled up the gun folks we would be at a point by now where you could really be talking about changes to the 2nd Amendment. YMMV and I doubt many agree with me, but I think by the actions in the past we have put the backs up of both sides so that there is zero trust and thus…gridlock. I think we’ve done this on more than just gun control, but that’s just me.
See, again, I think you are wrong. Gun control isn’t dead. Your sort of gun control as you advocated above…that is pretty much dead on arrival. But you weren’t advocating gun control…you were advocating broad bans on the majority of guns. That is going to be resisted by a huge number of people who you are apparently unaware of. We aren’t talking about the radical pro-gun folks, we are talking about Joe Citizen (Democrat and Republican). Hell…I would oppose it if you tried to do it, and I’m not even a gun owner. And that’s because it, like all such proposals, undercuts the very foundation of this country, the Constitutional process. If you wanted to change or get rid of the 2nd Amendment through the process, I wouldn’t oppose you, but if you tried to ban all semi-automatic weapons and hand guns then I certainly would. And so would the majority of your fellow citizens.
But that doesn’t mean that less radical (and less illegal or un-Constitutional) gun control is impossible. What I wish is that the regulation side (as opposed to the anti-gun fringe) would take the time to learn the subject well enough to propose legislature that would actually have an effect and be Constitutional…or would bite the bullet and take on the 2nd directly.
It’s not because it would make gun owners unhappy or they would resent it, it’s because it would make a majority of your fellow citizens unhappy to the point that they wouldn’t support you in this. I wish I could make you understand that it’s more than some crazy fringe pro-gun folks who are in the way of your dream of bans on wide swaths of guns, because until you get that you won’t understand why what you suggested won’t work, even if you could push it through. It won’t work if a large percentage of the population opposes it…and until and unless you change their attitude that’s not going to happen. And until and unless you actually look into who that all is and why they feel that way, as opposed to just painting them all with a broad brush, you aren’t going to be able to even address them, let alone use your eloquence to sway them to a different path. Stop worrying about what France or Japan is doing or has done, and figure out why the majority of your fellow Americans feel like they do and would oppose you, and what would sway them in the direction you want them to go.
And you’d be doing it to save a relative handful of lives. More Americans die from falling a year than you’d save…in fact, more die each year from falling than from all the gun murders and accidents in 3 years. You have to get some perspective on the relative risks in all this, but as with Elvis I’m not sanguine that this will ever happen. Because it’s an emotional response, not one based on cold statistics and logic.
As I suggested to Cheesesteak, I’d start by actually figuring out who ‘those people’ are, and what they actually feel about this subject. It’s clear you and Cheesesteak don’t really know. What you THINK is that ‘those people’ are the fringe pro-gun folks. Thing is, as with you, those people are un-reachable…you will never, ever reach them. You will never, ever convince them. You can waste years even trying to get them to understand what you are saying. They won’t. Ever. Instead, try and figure out who the majority of the people are who still think that a personal right to keep and bear arms is important, and why. Many of them are Democrats…millions and millions of them in fact. Why do they want a gun? Why do they think they need one? What would convince them that they really don’t want one or need one? Proposing to take them away is probably not the right way to go. Like all humans, when someone tried to take something they think they want or need they are only going to hang on harder, fight more. If they are convinced, instead, that they really don’t care or don’t want or need something, it’s a lot easier to propose a change that takes that thing away.
But I’m really just talking to the wall here, right?
You’re right that the ideologues are only a part of the problem, but they do control the agenda politically, via means we all know too well. The less- or non-ideological numbers you refer to generally do support responsible gun control, as the polls show, but are perhaps just less sick of the problem, or maybe just feel defeated - if Sandy Hook and the 90% support for an assault weapons ban didn’t defeat the controlling ideologue faction, what else do you suggest we do? It doesn’t take the purchase, or intimidation, of very many Senators to do it, and they did it.
Of course, most of the ideologues would deny that characterization, but anyone who refers to a “militia”, for example, is thereby declaring himself to be one and beyond engageability.
You will never reach the ideologues. If that is what you are trying to do, it won’t ever happen. The majority can be swayed to a different path if you bother to try and actually know who they are and what it is they think and why they think it. This isn’t pie in the sky, we have plenty of historical examples. Slavery is one. Alcohol and the lead up to Prohibition is another. Tobacco use is probably the most relevant recent one. I think alcohol and the lead up to Prohibition and tobacco are the most relevant, since, as with guns, a large percentage of the American people used it in the past, yet in the case of tobacco today that has been diminishing. Why? Powerful lobbies have tried to stifle that diminishing, yet it’s happened. The small number of rabid advocates have opposed the march of constraints, from taking it out of the work place to taking it out of public buildings to taking it out of basically all buildings and restaurants and bars, to even constraints about where you can smoke outside. And the public has been good with this, by and large…it wasn’t done by fiat. Figure out how that dynamic has worked and I think you could use some of that in your crusade against guns, or at least in trying to get more regulation in place and put tighter constraints on firearms.
So it seems like the actual root cause is that we have people making the decisions (voters) who aren’t qualified to make them. They choose to believe wrongful information and nothing can change this. Some of them are old enough that neurological disease makes their decisionmaking questionable to begin with.
This is why we still have smoking, a constitutional guarantee to guns, cars are the only option, long prison sentences and more prisoners than anywhere else, no plan for climate change, a national debt, and arguably one of the least efficient healthcare systems in the world.
American voters are pretty stupid and easily fooled. Also our voting system restricts the amount of information voters can even express to literally a binary choice.
No I don’t have a fix for this. Though this might explain why China seems to be on the track to eating our lunch : isn’t China ruled by a council of professionals who are actually qualified in their fields?
Though to be fair, with China they engaged in screwup after screwup, their success is only a recent aberration.
Here’s one. The moment you start in, as above, that your side is decent and better, I not only stop listening, I start in to disdaining.
I need to convince people that saving thousands of lives a year is something we should do? I kind of resent that implication.
I’m not the one doing the cost benefit analysis and deciding that thousands of corpses are an acceptable price to pay for our right to keep and bear arms. I’m not the one deciding that 20 massacred first graders is just the way a free society works. I’m not shrugging my shoulders when 20,000 people a year blow their brains out and saying “they’d probably off themselves anyway so they don’t count.”
Your average guy, moderate Joe Citizen, has decided that. I’m not his conscience, or his soul, and if he really thinks that America would be so awful without guns, that it’s worth sacrificing so many lives to keep them around, it’s on him, not me.
Don’t you dare try to make this shit the fault of the people actually trying to end it.
This thread question is a bit like asking what is the threshold for saying someone is adult enough to consent to sex. There are various factors and no easy answers. Therefore, you have to lay down hard and fast rules that, although they don’t always make perfect sense, protect the majority of people. It isn’t science and it doesn’t always work, but we accept that for the greater good.
When it comes to guns there are pretty clear delimiters though for an answer – if you preface the question with “If you want to decrease the frequency of crazy people going on mass murder sprees” then [thread question]. Now the answer is self evident. But some people in America don’t care who gets fucked.
Seriously man…you need to grow up. When seatbelts were first invented, the public had to be convinced that they should be mandatory, not optional (that the user would have to pay extra for). Every thing you see around you that is safety related and saves thousand…10’s of thousands…100’s of thousands…even millions of lives…a year had to have someone convince the public that it was necessary. Good grief, that’s the stupidest objection I’ve ever heard. You take for granted so many things that people had to fight and sometimes die to make happen.
I see. So, you want to prevent suicides in the US. I assume you are going after alcohol then, yes? You have a campaign to get rid of it similar to the one you have against handguns and semi-automatic weapons, right? Because, you know, that alcohol is linked in a great number of suicides. Something like 30% of all suicides (with or without guns) is attributable to alcohol, and since you think it’s a problem that can be fixed (despite the fact that the US is actually in the middle of the pack wrt suicides per capita) then you’ll want to really focus on all the things that contribute to it. Oh, and you’ll need to ramp up the war on drugs too, both the abused prescription kind and the illegal types 'cause guess what? Yup…between alcohol and drugs they account for the majority of suicide deaths.
Sorry, but suicides are a sunk cost. I know most of you refuse to see it or understand the numbers, but as I said our suicide rate per capita is actually pretty small. Japan has nearly double our rate per capita, IIRC, and many European nations are higher than ours. And this, despite the fact that they either have gun bans or pretty steep restrictions. If you magically took all of the guns you want away I doubt the suicide rate would go down more than 20% in the short term…and in the medium and long term it would bounce back to the mean (it goes up or down over time). Taking away the tool used doesn’t take away the motivation or solve the issue, and people can obviously find ways to kill themselves without guns…ask the Japanese, they seem to be able to do it better than us and without guns by and large.
Oh I dare all right. The truth hurts, and it’s directly the fault of the gun banners in the past that we have the mess we have today. Sorry if you don’t like that, but they basically tried to ban guns by fiat, using the courts and the fact that the USSC was on the fence and didn’t want to take a landmark case on it one way or the other to essentially circumvent the 2nd Amendment. Again, by fiat. And they got caught doing it. And that riled up a LOT of people. And it destroyed any chance of trust in ANYTHING they do, because now the pro-gun types are suspicious and paranoid of any legislature because the think the motives are basically what you laid out here…the REAL goal is outright bans of broad categories of guns, hell, of all guns if your side can swing it. Notice that you didn’t talk about going through the process, about using the Constitution and the process to change or remove the 2nd before you started your snatch and grab. Your ‘plan’ didn’t have any of that in it. Note that I DID talk about that stuff, despite your earlier insistence that I didn’t have any plan. And finally, notice that you didn’t talk about any of that, instead you whined about having to do some work to convince people to do something and lashing out at me for pointing out how your side screwed the pooch over several decades to put us where we are today. I’m not saying the pro-gun side has been squeaky clean…they basically waited until the pendulum swung back their way after your side pushed it as high as they could, then ran with it to put in or protect everything they could, even when that, too, was stupid. So, here we are…just like in our regular politics, with both sides in gridlock, neither willing to budget and both with a fanatical fringe who wants the world.
And with that we are done. See, you don’t even want to try to understand the average citizen. You basically don’t give a flying fuck what they think, what or what their concerns are. What you want is a dictatorship where you can benevolently fix all their problems by fiat, regardless of how they feel about it. And you are pissed because it doesn’t work that way and you would have to get your hands dirty talking to the peasantry and hearing what they feel about something, instead of having them bow and look on you with adoration as you solve all their problems for them, because you know best.
Like Cheesesteak, your issue is that people get to have an opinion. At least you are a little bit more honest about it…you basically want a dictatorship like the CCP because you think they are doing a good job and that this is how things should be. An elite, unelected group that is able to dictate by fiat and their own whim what is best for their people, even when their actual history is one of one fuckup after another. Eating our lunch? Good grief, what people think of China is hilarious, and what people think of the CCPs accomplishments is astonishing sometimes.
And no, China isn’t ruled by a ‘council of professionals who are actually qualified in their fields’, they are ruled by the party elites. Again, the things people believe. This is perhaps the most hilarous thing I’ve seen in a while. 
Honestly, XT, something like that is the likely outcome for gun control. Except it won’t be a governmental body, it’ll be private corporations that set the controls.
At some point we’ll be in a space where there will be lawsuits about irresponsible gun ownership that lead to insurance payouts. Eventually that will raise insurance rates and disincentivize gun ownership…or make it more expensive. Government can’t forbid ownership of guns - on that you and I agree - but if suddenly one can’t get reasonably priced home or health insurance because of demonstrable risk it’ll change the equation in a hurry.
Oh, I agree with you in any case. It’s what I was trying to say about the parallel between guns and tobacco. There have been increasing restraints and restrictions on tobacco in our society, despite powerful lobbies and motivated and highly vocal users, and also despite the fact that a pretty large percentage of the population were and still are users. And the reason (well, one of them) is as you say…increased lawsuits and class action suits, as well as just increase awareness and a re-evaluation of the cost to benefit. I think that is a trajectory that could happen wrt guns and gun control.
Basically, along with that, I think a change in attitude is and has already been happening. A lot of people today are kind of in my boat. They don’t really want or see the need for a gun in their house or anywhere else in their lives. The percentage of US homes with a gun in it has been dropping over time, and I think that trend will continue. I think that the thing that has most held this trend back is folks who have tried to take the guns away by fiat. It’s like the Mythbusters episode where they were trying to take candy from the baby…the harder they tried to take it, the more the baby fought to keep it. In one scene, after they stopped trying to take it the kid lost interest and dropped it on the ground. I see that as a metaphor for this whole stupid, silly mess. YMMV.
Sure, saving lives is great. But you can’t prove that moderate gun restrictions will actually save any significant number of lives. That’s your idea but so far gun laws in America have never had a significant effect on violent crime. Even repealing the 2nd and forcing every state to ban all guns wouldnt affect much for quite some time as there are 300 million guns out there.
However, we give up safety all the time for freedom. We could save 30000 lives a year by reducing the speed limit to 25MPH. We could save 500000 lives a year by banning smoking. We could save 90000 lives a year by banning alcohol - and that was tried and didnt work. We are trying to save lives by banning drugs- and failing. We could save tens of thousands of lives a year by requiring vaccinations for the flu and childhood diseases. People die from skiing, from skydiving, and many other recreational sports- and they know they are risky- but they are free to do them anyway. Why do we allow cars that can go over 70MPH? Risky, but Freedom!
Ben Franklin: *“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
*
I don’t believe for an instant that moderate gun restrictions will save lives. Who believes that?
Absolutely. Want to do a cost benefit analysis of this? By my calculation, dropping the average travel speed from 30 to 25 would waste over 50,000 lifetimes worth of time every year by making people stay in their cars instead of living. It is an interesting idea, though.
I’m in. Are you in?
Yeah, banning alcohol doesn’t work so good, maybe we can attack this problem from a different direction, instead of assuming that what doesn’t work for one mode of death doesn’t work for all modes of death? Would that be ok?
I’m in. Are you in? I’m in, 100%, what kind of prison time are you thinking about for parents who don’t vaccinate?
Skydiving is hella dangerous, I mean, almost as many Americans die from skydiving each year as get killed by toddlers. Skiing is even worse, take all the toddler killings, and add in about 1 days worth of handgun murders, and that’s your annual death rate. It’s shocking, truly.
You aren’t selling me on this any more than E ever does. There’s a greasy slick of mendacity coating the “it’s about saving l1ves!!!” tactic. There are so many other, easier things you could take on and save a greater number of lives, but you don’t.
Then what sort of gun regs do you want? Repeal the 2nd?
Great. A noted sociologist has shown that this increase in School shootings is due to the media publicizing the killings.We could reduce school shooting by a lot if we just repeal that 1st Ad too. And crap like letting hate groups spread their lies, and books like the Anarchist cookbook be printed- lets get rid of that to save lives. Who needs freedoms if we can save lives? Besides, lots of crooks get off by the Bill of Rights, get rid of that and we increase public safety!:rolleyes:
No, a cost-benefit analysis is not allowed. You wont allow gun owners a cost-benefit analysis, you just want to save lives. All those millions of defensive gun uses? Those are benefits but since we can maybe save lives by banning guns, lets not consider those. Yep, speed limit to 25MPH it is.
What?!? “what doesn’t work for one mode of death doesn’t work for all modes of death”? What sort of crazy idea is that? I mean, alcohol prohibition didnt work, actually caused a huge increase in crime. Drug prohibition is clearly not working, it is a total failure. So *obviously *gun prohibition will work!:rolleyes:
Here’s the fun bit about this, if those millions of DGUs were actually saving lives, getting rid of guns would cost lives. That is your cost benefit analysis. Can you actually put together an argument that getting rid of guns would increase homicides year over year? You can try, I’m due for a good laugh in this thread.
BTW “you just want to save lives” isn’t an insult.
*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?*HON. ROGER T. BENITEZ
United States District Judge
It is when you want to take away peoples rights to do it, and perhaps cause mores deaths than you save.
If we outlaw swimming pools, it would have no economic impact to speak of (unlike restrictions on cars), and it would save 10 lives a day - many of those being children. The best thing is, it would not require any violation or repeal of constitutional rights. Also, if we do it quickly, it would significantly improve the quality of life of the neighbors of these people: Wealthy couple drive Manhattan neighbors crazy with $100M basement pool jackhammering | Daily Mail Online