Man, I’m going to have to check back and see what the boneheaded OPer wrote that lead to this mess… :rolleyes:
Well, there are more cars in the US than there are people. So, rhetrofitting them all with either breathalyzers OR self driving systems (which haven’t even been developed yet) means…well, one hell of a lot of money. A quick look up shows that currently a breathalyzer fitted into a car costs approximately $1500 per device…multiplied by over 300 million cars would be…well, lots. That good enough for you, or would you like something more indepth?
Note: I think that built-in breathalyzers are probably a pretty lousy idea.
That said, you could pretty easily mandate their inclusion in new cars as a required safety feature - no retrofitting involved. Within 10-15 years, voila, almost every car on the road has it. At a per-car cost of significantly less than $1500 I’m sure.
Mostly I have questions:
I’ve been thinking about alcohol/drugs in regards to this tragedy as well. Not as an analogy but as a possible related problem. Speculating why I haven’t heard any questioning yet about whether the shooter had been using either. Most gun crime involves the use of a mood-altering chemical. Or were either of his parents heavy users of drugs or alcohol?
What exactly is producing these children who have difficulty handling feelings, behavior? One in ten Americans is diagnosable as alcoholic/chemically dependent. If they drink or use during pregnancy it can cause Foetal Alcohol Syndrome or Effect. And these are children who have difficulty making a connection between behavior and consequences. Our jails, prisons and mental institutions are full of them. (Actually, after having recently viewed our newspaper’s Baby Bragger column, it appears we are raising quite a generous new batch. They tend to have distinct facial characteristics.)
And how about why you can’t get help when you notice that your child is a bit scary. You can’t institutionalize him unless he has demonstrated that he’s a danger to himself or others.
Why aren’t we talking more about all of these things in our culture? Guess my focus is there is because when I seen strange behavior that’s the most simple explanation.
The other would be mental illness. One in four households deals with it whether it be full-blown psychosis or moderate depression. The majority of mentally ill people self-medicate creating an even more unstable state of mind.
Knowing these things it’s a bit of a miracle that we don’t have more frequent mass attacks.
ETA: And most of the people in our prisons were under the influence at the time of the crime. I don’t see drug/alcohol use as unrelated to gun violence at all.
Since you still seem to be completely unable to comprehend the original point, I can’t see how your scorn and derision is anything but unfortunate and sad for you at this point.
By the way, I have only been using small words so far, so the fact that you still haven’t gotten it really just embarrasses yourself at this point. Your sarcasm fell a bit far from the mark on this one I’m afraid.
You could roll them out like we did with seatbelts. Nobody retrofitted, we just made them standard going forward. And I notice you are studiously avoiding the fact that this will eventually be handled by the fact we won’t be driving our cars at all. I wonder why.
Well, you seem to be going back and forth between drink, or perhaps sell drinks (you don’t need a liquor license to buy a drink), so I’m unsure what you are getting at. There are many more restrictions on LEGALLY carrying a gun into than drinking, however. For instance, you can’t legally carry a gun into an establishment that sells alcohol (ironically considering this tangential discussion), though that is changing in some places (Virginia I seem to recall). Obviously, you could illegally carry a gun anywhere you want, as long as you don’t get caught, but if you go by the strict letter of the law there are a lot of restrictions…heck, some states you can’t legally carry a gun in without restricted permits, and many where if you have a conceal permit in one state it’s no good in another.
I don’t have an issue with regulation OR restrictions of fire arms. Hell, I don’t have an issue with registration or even licensing, though I know a lot of gun folks do.
Well, what would be great is if you didn’t ascribe things to me that I didn’t say. I commented on the problem of households. I think the entire alcohol, tigers, and elevators OH MY conversation is stupid.
So, I’ll take that as a ‘no’…you aren’t going to illuminate the ‘blindingly obvious point’. Ah well.
My apologies. I didn’t mean to misquote or mis-characterize your point. I’m in the middle of a small SDMB feeding frenzy, with many people piling on me atm…and I’m attempting to read and reply the best I can, while doing so on an iPad, which isn’t the easiest thing for me to do at my advanced age.
Good lord. Seriously? I, and several others, already did, to great lengths.
Ok here goes, one more time:
Saying that X number of people died last year from situation A as well as from situation B, therefore we can equate A and B, is meaningless when the number of occurrences of situations A and B are not the same.
Is that too abstract?
Should I give more concrete examples? I know that didn’t work last time so I didn’t want to just try that tactic again.
I don’t think I’ve been inconsistent, but I see that in the end we’re pretty much on the same page here. Both are dangerous, both are restricted, and we need to be smart about making sure our regulations both make sense (i.e. address the real problem) and don’t have unintended consequences (see: prohibition leading to organized crime).
Then I guess I don’t understand the point of the analogy after all - I thought it was to highlight that guns are over-regulated when compared to the more-dangerous alcohol. Because I promise that if a politician pitched the idea of a national handgun registration scheme (for example) they would be eaten alive by the NRA.
Ah, yes…glad I already addressed that then. I acknowledged long ago that it’s not a 1 for 1 comparison. Did I need to explain that to you, or is that simple enough to understand? And MY use of the analogy, as I also explained, wasn’t about a simple comparison of the number of deaths by gun verse the number of deaths by alcohol…which was another reason I was so dismissive of Hentor’s post which sparked this cluster fuck.
However, by all means…give me some examples of why gun ownership is so far out of whack wrt alcohol consumption that it’s a totally unworkable analogy. Obviously anyone under the legal age can’t, legally, buy or drink alcohol, yet people under those limits can and do own and shoot guns. There are more guns in the US than people, and over 5 million new guns are sold per year in the US. By the same token, on average something between 1-2 gallons of alcohol are consumed for every person in the US, so that’s a hell of a lot. But you are saying that we can’t even make a rough analogy here, so please…use small words and feel free to make your case. I promise to listen and do my best to follow along.
[QUOTE=Jas09]
Then I guess I don’t understand the point of the analogy after all - I thought it was to highlight that guns are over-regulated when compared to the more-dangerous alcohol. Because I promise that if a politician pitched the idea of a national handgun registration scheme (for example) they would be eaten alive by the NRA.
[/QUOTE]
No, not at all. I don’t think guns OR alcohol are over regulated, though there could be some tweaks either up or down. I have no real problem with regulation, however. I agree, however, that it’s politically unfeasible for politicians to seriously pitch a national handgun registration scheme, mainly because that well has been poisoned in the past, and a lot of pro-gun folks are rabid now on the subject. After all, serious attempts were made in the past to basically reinterpret their rights out of existence through endless attempts to change the interpretation of the 2nd, as well as by draconian gun control laws in a few key states or cities. Personally, I’m in favor of regulation, as well as enforcing existing laws…just like with alcohol.
Yes…exactly. And, both are things that a large percentage of the population wants and would be reluctant, to put it mildly, in having taken away from them. I suppose you could also say that both have fervent but small groups of folks opposed to them who are constantly trying to ban or further restrict their access, but I don’t think the folks who pushed through Prohibition are still a large force in the US today, while the anti-gun movement has a small but fierce group of folks who are quite active and quite politically powerful, for all their relatively small numbers.
You are really going to duck this one, aren’t you? Eventually, deaths to drunk driving will be zero because nobody will be driving themselves. Once that happens, THEN can we get on with the gun control?
XT - So if you did understand his original point, then why all the claims to be completely baffled by it or why he would post it? Why the scorn and derision for a fellow poster when really you simply disagreed with what he was saying. Was that necessary then? You acted like he was insane and you were totally unable to understand what was being said. Now you’re acting like I’m crazy because I tried to explain something to you that you claimed was beyond your comprehension. You’re all over the place here.
Also, why do you keep implying that my posts are too hard for you to comprehend. I don’t use obscure words, or unnecessarily long ones either. I don’t think the reading level of my writing should be too above your level. Maybe we drop that one at this point, ok? Its not clever or helpful for the conversation. Its just petty.
I can understand you disagreeing with his post, buy you’ve acted is if you couldn’t begin to even understand why it would even be posted. That’s why you’ve been piled up on.
You said it was blindingly obvious. Since I had already addressed that, I was figuring that I was missing something. I wasn’t directing scorn or derision at YOU…I was asking what I was missing. You kept basically saying I was being dense, without laying out what I was missing. Since, as I said, I had addressed that much, much earlier, what did you want me to say?
At any rate, my apologies to the thread for this ridiculous hijack. Hell, I even apologize to Hentor…his was probably just a throwaway post and didn’t really mean anything (HE was going for the whole scorn and sarcasm thingy as well).
We have become??!
Romans - gladiatorial combat, public executions
Dark Ages - nomadic raids on established populations, Blood Eagle, public executions
Middle Ages - bear baiting, public executions
Renaissance - more bear baiting, auto da fe, public executions
Age of Enlightenment - bear baiting, terrior vs rat fights, public executions
Victorian/1800s - animal baiting, bare knuckle boxing, public executions
early 1900s - still animal baiting, boxing still very popular, public executions waning
mid-late 1900s - animal fights finally dwindling and outlawed, boxing still popular, no more public executions generally however we then got Vietnam for the 6 o’clock news and CNN covering every public place shooting, major traffic incedent[remember that 110 car pile up in northern California?]
2000s - yay, now we get to see footage of radical muslims chopping heads off, and bodies scattered everywhere. But no more animal baiting …
Dude, humans are bloodthirsty. Deal with it. It is not going away.
Hm, interestingly your list seems to indicate that humans are in fact becoming less bloodthirsty. Clearly there is far less in the way of public execution than there used to be, or things like gladiatorial combat or animal baiting. Is it possible that culture has in fact reduced our “bloodthirsty” tendencies?
A shooting spree at an elementary school isn’t objectively any more outrageous than a shooting spree at a high school or a movie theater or a church or a corner outside a supermarket or any of the other places where these kinds of murders have happened. They’re all horrible and in that sense perhaps this shouldn’t change anything. But that’s not how people really work. Sometimes they change their minds or wake up to an issue for reasons that might not be objectively rational. The question is whether our current gun laws are reasonable and if the risks and benefits associated with those laws are acceptable and whether different laws would be better. The laws need to be sensible and well thought out regardless of the specific reasons people change their minds. Is there any realistic way, particularly given the cultural background of the U.S., to prevent things like this from ever happening again? No. They’re already very, very rare. Could there be ways to reduce events like this and also address other problems? Yes, there could be.