Swimming pools are just for recreation. Thousands of children drown in them every year. People die skiing. People die using toothpicks. Smoking and drinking kill. Eating sugar kills. There are all kinds of recreational activities that are dangerous to those doing them and those around them.
Do you know that at least 90 people die and over 3200 annually are seriously injured due to underinflated tires?
What’s wrong with recreation?
Since nobody was killed by a gun in the Las Vegas massacre your problem isn’t solved.
What killed all those people was a suicidal maniac who could have driven his plane full of gasoline into the crowd. Or an 18 wheeler. Both would have killed many more people.
You make it harder, not impossible.
Oklahoma City, 9/11, etc. were all done without any firearms and had a cumulative death toll 50 times greater than Vegas.
Ok. So did God, in his holy write, decide that we have the right to semi-automatic weapons but not machine guns and antitank missiles?
What is it that you can derive from nature or god that says in order to defend yourself, you must have a device with a kilometer of range that can fire as fast as you can pull the trigger? And carry as many bullets as can practically be fit into the ammunition feeding device the weapon uses?
Why don’t your self defense rights stop at multi-shot tasers? That would stop most attackers. Or why don’t they continue to anti-aircraft missiles? That would stop even those nasty drones that government now has.
What the heck is a holy write?
This is true for all regulation of any kind, of anything. It’s all that any law can ever accomplish. That turns out to be a lot, especially when it starts to change how people think about dangerous things, whether it’s smoking, drunk driving, or guns.
Is that a riff on that other comical digression, “you’re all gonna die eventually”? The focus of firearms laws is the indisputably very large number of preventable tragedies that involve firearms. This is not a difficult concept to understand unless one is very intent on not understanding it.
Guns should be legal because their positive utility outweighs the negative utility of making them illegal. This is evidenced and affirmed by the system of laws that we have in this country. The moment that calculus changes the laws of the country can be changed to reflect the new calculus.
Good luck.
I agree with the general principle here. But the problem seems to be that the debate is being driven by the extremes. We have a crowd on one side arguing that guns have no positive utility and a crowd on the other side arguing that guns have no negative utility. Which makes if difficult to compare the two.
OK, let us say you have two semi auto rifles, both in the same caliber. Same magazine.
One has a nice walnut stock.
The other a black plastic stock, in a military style. It even has a bayonet lug.
why would rifle A be legal and Rifle B illegal? They have the exact same potential for lethality.
The only reason why semi-auto rifles are used often in spree mass killings is the large capacity magazine.
This argument makes no sense. A shovel can be used for a single purpose, as can an axe, but a gun can only be used for a single purpose. Oh, but an axe can be used to pick your teeth and a shovel can be used to change the channel on your TV when the remote’s out of batteries; but the gun butt can be used to crack walnuts or to hammer a nail into the wall.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with my post. I mistakenly said no one hunts with “semi autos” when I meant “semi autos with detachable magazines.” Is there some point to continuing down this unrelated tangent?
Great point, SamuelA. My read on this has always been that the majority of gun people are, fundamentally, pussies. They live in constant, crippling fear of criminals, liberals, and large black men storming into their house, smacking them around, and making themselves sandwiches as they roundly abuse their family members, which they would be absolutely cringeingly powerless to stop.
Ah, but if they had a GUN! Then they would be Arnie and Sly combined! They’d be twelve feet tall and ripped like a greek god, and they’d be able to boom out in an authoritative god-like voice "Hold it right there, punk! ", whip out their 45 caliber hand-cannon, and righteously prevail over the evildoers in a puissant frenzy of action-movie tropes!
So ignoring all evidence that large-black-men sandwich-and-outrage house invasions are essentially nonexistent, that guns wouldn’t protect you then unless you literally had it in your hand 24/7, and that guns in your house are vastly more likely to kill or injure one of your family members instead of “protecting” you, they indulge in these teenage-boy fantasies of them being the action hero to assuage the nigh-constant cringeing state of fear they live in. Fear which is constantly stoked by a whole industry built around it - news media concentrating the .01% of bad stuff into a never-ending stream of disaster, arbitrary violence, and black-sandwich-invasions.
Simlarly, if the GUBMINT got all uppity, and tyrannical, they would put it back in it’s place toute suite! After all, that’s what the second amendment is ABOUT! And I promise you, buddy, nobody - but NOBODY - is quartering troops in THIS house, nosirree! That damn king of england went off with his tail between his legs and has never been back, thanks to me and my gun buddies!
They all talk a game orders of magnitude bigger than they walk. I used to be on their side re the argument that a well-armed populace is a defense against tyranny. That’s not a bad thought to have. But then what happened when the government decided to take away huge chunks of our rights, essentially in perpetuity, with the Patriot Act? They’re at the front of the line cheering and calling anyone who doesn’t like it commies. What about when we found out that our own government is spying on literally everything any of us ever does, and storing it in perpetuity? Not a peep. Not a problem! That’s not tyranny, that’s necessary! The terrists, you see! They’ll get me if we don’t do that! And I know they’re a problem because the Gubmint and the Teevee tell me so!
What about the fact that police steal more than burglars now? We literally live in a country where everything we do is spied upon, and the police steal more than burglars with absolute impunity. But is that a problem? Hell no! They’re stealing from those damn sandwich-invaders! What do I care??
Any credibility around gun people ever reacting against tyranny is well out the window by this point, completely aside of it being laughably antiquated in an age of stealth fighters, drones, and advanced military technology.
In the aggregate, all they want to do is lovingly caress their guns because they make them feel big and important, and indulge in masturbatory action-movie fantasies to assuage their constant state of cringeing fear. The actual, empirical, side-effects of that? The highest gun violence rate of any industrialized nation, the most mass-shooting events, the most gun suicides, the most gun-related domestic violence, the most kids and family members killed by guns in the industrialized world. Pussies, the vast majority of them, who indirectly kill women, children, and others just to assuage their own never-ending fear the tiniest amount.
Now there’s a stat with some mental heft behind it. When you say “cumulative” you kind of leave real life behind.
I haven’t gone through all three pages so forgive me if this has been brought up already.
The second amendment’s right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution not, as the NRA contends, so you can have a hobby of shooting paper or putting meat on the table, or even so you can shoot uppity criminals. The purpose is so you can shoot uppity bureaucrats. Wiki’s article on Federalist No.46:
And lest you think “militia” refers to the National Guard, that is not so. The Militia Act_of 1903 defines the Guard is the “organized militia.” Every able-bodied male citizen from age 17 to 45 in this country is liable to be called up as part of the reserve (or “unorganized”) militia. Every veteran (male or female) is in the unorganized militia to age 64.
Now, times have changed since 1789 or even 1903. Perhaps all is lollipops and roses and our governments would never, ever change the way they are now. But I think the the number of people who will think making Donny Two-scoops President for Life is a great idea is far, far greater than the fans of Obama ever would have. Since those without guns only enjoy as much freedom those with the guns are willing to grant them, I’d like to keep mine.
The guns were bought legally. He got the room legally. There was nothing illegal about bringing them to his room. In fact, he did not break the law until he broke the window and started shooting.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it should have been harder than that.
Neither of the other incidents were as easy as you mention. Of note, is that apparently Paddock had a plane, apparently he had some bomb precursors. Ultimately, he went the gun route. Maybe just because it was easier.
Great way to stereotype. To get back to reality, none of that is true. We have some hard-core liberals on this board that are gun owners. Some are even women and minorities. They all have them for their own reason and I would bet good money that none of them are going to kill anyone with them.
I have two chain saws. Are you also going to claim that I am a threat to Texas?
This is a warning for sexualizing posters and their arguments. Really it was a grab bag in this post but this one was pretty clear. If you feel you must, the BBQ Pit is right around the corner.
[/moderating]
Sorry for my absence – not trying to post and ditch, just been busy. I’ll try to respond to everyone who hasn’t been responded to already by someone else making the same point I was making…
That was certainly the Enlightenment-era line of thought when they wrote the Bill of Rights, but it doesn’t MEAN anything. You have no rights, beyond what society guarantees for you. And even if society says that you have a right, if that right isn’t enforced, you lack it (see: Jim Crow era. Blacks may have equal protection by law, but that doesn’t do jack squat for them. Maybe they should have had more guns? :smack:)
If 90% of guns in the US went away, that’s 270 MILLION guns. If we reduced mass shootings in the US by 90 percent, that’s 315 fewer mass shootings a year. 27,000 fewer gun deaths. That sounds PRETTY FUCKING GOOD to me. Let’s DO IT!
I disagree. When a drug company comes up with a new drug, we make them prove that it’s safe and does what it promises before we allow them to sell it. Does that make us a police state?
Besides, guns are an extreme case. You are saying, “I want the right to possess the ability to kill you, or anyone else, at a whim, from a distance, with a minuscule twitch of my finger”. I think “Absolutely not! Are you batshit CRAZY?!” is a valid response to that request, thank you very much.
I don’t care that you don’t have the right to ACTUALLY DO IT. You have the right to posses the means to do it. The fact that you’ll end up in jail afterwards doesn’t really help me very much, does it?
30,000 dead Americans a year isn’t “minuscule”.
Get a taser. Get your own dog. Get a BB gun to scare away another person’s pet rather than brutally gunning it down. These are all valid alternatives that don’t require me to agree that you, a guy I don’t know from Adam, deserves the ability to kill me dead at a thousand feet.
Exactly. Either you are a “responsible gun owner” who keeps his gun unloaded at all times and in a safe, in which case when someone breaks into your house, you’re fucked anyways; or you sleep with a loaded pistol under your pillow, in which case you still have pretty good odds of getting shot, but you also run the risk of blowing your own stupid head off.
Again, this. We all agree that vigilante justice is a bad idea, yes? Batman is a comic book character, not a role model. It’s not your job to “defend yourself” by gunning down trespassers. That’s what law enforcement is for.
In most civilized countries, it is NOT legal to shoot someone just because they barged into your house. Frankly, the fact that it’s not only legal in America, but that so many Americans think it’s the right thing to do, really troubles me.
They can also use tasers or pepper spray, or call for help, or take self defense classes. I don’t know what fantasy world you live in, but if a mugger grabs a woman from behind in a dark alley, she isn’t going to be able to whip out her pistol and shoot him if he’s so much stronger than her anyways. Knowing that your targets are carrying deadly weapons would make muggers much more likely to carry their own weapons, or just use deadly force.
Muslims, blacks, gays, and other minorities aren’t by their very nature deadly threats to human life. They don’t have the magic power to spew hot lead in your general direction from a distance.
That’s their intended purpose, yes.
You could shoot a target without using a tool capable of stripping a human of his life at a hundred yards.
Last time I checked, hunting involved killing. So this isn’t a counterexample.
Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize that sport hunting involved gently tickling the target. Oh wait, the purpose of guns is still killing.
Sounds like fun. Could you do it with a weapon that’s not capable of killing a human?
Great, you can get any kind of gun you want – from a pistol to an m249 machine gun – if it’s not functional. If you aren’t gonna shoot it anyways, what’s the difference?
And how much more often do American criminals shoot their targets than criminals in other countries, both because they know their target could have a gun and because they themselves can easily get their hands on one?
People always say this. “But the gun was legal! So gun control wouldn’t help!” It would if the gun was ILLEGAL and so the shooter couldn’t buy it in the first place!
Sounds good. I think a 1886 Winchester Repeater would look great on my wall. But if I ever bought one, it would be a non-functional replica. Why can’t your father’s collection of guns be similarly disabled?
Bullshit. You think cavemen had rights? You think people in ancient Rome had rights? Your rights come from the society you live in and its willingness to defend your rights. If your society is shitty enough, your rights come from your own ability to defend said rights. In other words, in a place like Somalia, your rights come from the barrel of a gun. Why are so many Americans eager to make America the same?
I’ll jump on the pro-gun bandwagon. I own a few firearms, all for the same reason, because they’re fun. Generally speaking the larger the caliber, the louder, and the more powerful the gun is, the more fun it is to shoot. That’s where it ends for me; I have never, and will never shoot anything living.
Much the same as drinking alcohol, I don’t do it for any productive reason, I do it because it’s fun. Alcohol has it’s uses as a chemical, sure, just like guns have their usage (military and police), but for the every-man their sole purpose is recreation. If we went back to prohibition, far fewer people would die from drunk drivers; the trade-off there is analogous.
I understand that because I have the right to drink alcohol recreationally, some number of people may die each year because of other people are abusing that right. Same goes for firearms, I understand that by having the right to own and operate firearms, some number of people are going to die from abusing that right. In my mind, these are comparable in that their both needless recreation with negative externalities, but I accept them because I don’t personally want to lose my rights just because of some bad people.
I concede it’s a bit self-centered, but that’s my reasoning.
There is little reason why guns should be legal.
I live in Bucharest, Romania. My brother has lived in the United States for 20 years, where he graduated high school and university. He’s a great gun ownership supporter, which comes as a shock to me.
Romania and Cyprus have the strictest gun control laws in Europe. Where do you think you can find the lowest murder and violent robbery rates in Europe? Exactly - in Romania and Cyprus.