What a very nice, thoughtful post, Marley. Thank you. (But what about ETOH? ;))
I appreciate what you said about “tipping points” not needing to be entirely rational.
I guess I have 2 questions. First, do we really “need” to do anything about guns? My personal thoughts are that the extent to which Americans “cling to” gun ownership seems at least a bit at odds with what I would hope for in an enlightened, modern, developed society governed by laws. And I personally do not feel considerably safer knowing that more guns are in the hands of mor people. But when I draw up a list of public safety issues, and consider the costs of addressing each and the likelihood of success, I suspect gun control is certainly not #1 on my list.
Second, are there any meaningful gun control laws that can be enacted without at least correcting the punctuation in the 2d amendment?
Dinsdale, your position reminds me of learned helplessness. The classic experiment involved pairs of dogs receiving shocks, one of whom was given the power to end the shock, whereas the other had to endure the shocks of seemingly random duration.
As described on Wikipedia:
Whereas it seemed we as a nation were destined to endure seemingly random shocks, this event has pricked our conscience such that there is now a low partition. The question is whether we simply lay down passively and whine, or whether we decide to do something about it.
How high is the partition preventing one from escaping to a country with a different attitude towards guns and a lower rate of shooting deaths?
Perhaps my views are skewed by the fact that I am a recent convert to supporting private gun ownership. The motivation for my conversion was the Patriot Act, expanded search and seizure, and other related recent steps towards a more intrusive government.
Maybe the wall has been lowered as you suggest. But I doubt it. I suspect this incident will quickly fade in the public’s collective memory the next time a natural disaster hits, or should Brad and Angelina break up. I think incidents such as this fits into the category of things people like to periodically wring their hands over without actually doing anything about it. Hell, let’s be especially dark and say shootings like this are a good thing, because it brings some excitement into the average person’s life, and allows them to be grateful for nothing more than the fact that they were not the victim of this senseless act. :eek:
And from a utilitarian standpoint, the American public and our government seem to be able to concentrate on only a very short list of things at any one time. And as I assess what I consider to be the problems of American society today, meaningful reform of gun laws is pretty low on my list.
Hell, I’d support one simple step towards a solution. If someone is convicted of a violent crime committed while carrying a gun, they get prison for life, no parole. Let out all the drug users and other non-violent criminals to make space for them.
But instead we’re going to hear about what is and what isn’t an assault weapon, waiting periods, and other BS which really isn’t going to change anything - and certainly not to an extent worth the effort.
No offense, but that’s a crazy reason. What are you going to do, shoot the warrantless wiretap off your phone? Or are we talking a Red Dawn against the One World Government type scenario?
Wouldn’t that suggest that change never happens? I suppose you could point to the problem that African American women are having when they want to marry a white man as evidence for your position. I just don’t know how I would counter that.
That’s more than dark, and I think it’s a severe misread of the matter. People don’t find the realization of their deepest fears to be a positive experience. The President doesn’t break up during a speech over recreational outrage or morbid curiosity.
The public attention may be brief, especially when trying to cope with something so devastating. The government, though, does many things all at once, since it isn’t a monolithic entity. However, the two are not independent and big change in the latter often requires the former.
I would suggest, though, that in attention to having a short attention span, people collectively also have movable set-points. Isn’t people’s reaction to a lot of stuff “Didn’t we already do that?” Otherwise, again, we would never see collective attitudinal change on anything. Your thinking seems really defeatist here.
I like it. Presently, majorities of people support bans on semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazines. Let’s roll with majority opinion on those things too.
Thanks for the responses, Hentor. I assume you will appreciate if I approach this, not as a debate, or an attempt to convince anyone of anything, but instead, as a clarifying of my thoughts.
Pretty busy day here, but I wanted to briefly respond to this:
No need to get terribly into my personal thoughts here, but way at the top of the short list of things I value are free speech and privacy. I was shocked at the extent to which our society gleefully abandoned those post 9/11, in the hopes of some incremental increased safety. Such steps caused me - for the first time in my life - to think of my government as something other than generally benevolent. And when values I consider extremely important became threatened, other peoples’ fears of jackbooted thugs at the doorstep impressed me as slightly less wacko. And I thought it might not be a bad idea if the “government thugs” were uncertain as to exactly what lay behind each door. Whether anyone else agrees, I truly feared the country we were becoming post 9/11, in terms of government intrusions and wealth inequity.
I’m not going to argue this, just attempting to explain.
A switch also flipped in my brain around that time. As I said, I highly value privacy. But there clearly is a firmer Constitutional basis for a right to gun ownership than most privacy rights I hold dear. I knew how offended I was that so many people (and my government) did not appear to value my right to privacy (and association, speech, etc.) as highly as I did. Which gave me a little insight into how strongly someone might feel if a constitutional right THEY vlued highly was threatened or chipped away at.
This is just silly. Alcohol consumption directly leads to people killing other people in drunk driving accidents. Negligent homicide is still homicide…
It is, but many of the anti-gun folks in these threads have convinced themselves that the analogy doesn’t work (and by repeating that amongst themselves over and over they ‘prove’ it doesn’t), so there is no point trying to use logic on them.
While the pro-gun people continue to ignore the fact that eventually alcohol homicides will be zero and they will have to come up with a new false equivalence, and in the meantime there are steps we can take to reduce fatalities, so there is no point trying to use logic on them.
sigh You keep bringing this up, so I guess I will address it…though if you really want to discuss it you should start a new thread. Ok, so you posit that someday, in the future, we’ll have automated traffic systems such that cars will drive automatically and thus freeing us from the ‘slaughter’ of 10’s of thousands of Americans (and millions world wide) in drunk driving accidents each year. Ok. Maybe that will happen in the future. It’s not going to happen today, however…or tomorrow or next year, or 10 years from now. In the mean time, before we have that magic technology, the reality is that quite a few people will continue to die in drunk driving accidents, and there isn’t a lot that could be done to mitigate this fact that isn’t already being done. We won’t be putting in a magical automatic driving system anytime soon, because for one thing the technology doesn’t exist yet on any sort of scale. The costs would be astronomical as well…and again, like in the gun control debates it comes down to a cost to benefits analysis. The costs to save those 10’s of thousands of lives a year simply aren’t worth the potentially hundreds of billions or even trillions it would cost to implement such a system…and they aren’t worth the political costs that would be incurred either, considering how people would react if they were told they had to buy the stuff necessary, as well as the other things folks would complain about.
So, hopefully this has addressed your issue enough so you can stop bringing it up in these threads. As I said, if you REALLY want to discuss it, start a thread on it and see what other 'dopers think of the idea. My guess is most will bring up the same things…that it’s unrealistic at this time, but maybe 20 or 50 years from now it could happen. Hell, maybe 10 years from now there will be sufficient breakthroughs in material science to make the costs cheap enough to actually start doing it on some scale.
I read one suggestion that sounds useful. They referred to the newtown shooter and similar wackadoodles as “malignant narcissists”. They crave attention and the more attention they get the more satisfaction they get. The best way to curtail their satisfaction is to make it illegal to publish their names of anything about them. We would convert them into instant non-persons.
What makes you think its magic tech? Google’s self-driving car has already logged hundreds of thousands miles without an accident. A buddy of mine who works at google says the head of the dev team on it thinks it is about 3 years away from production scale. He may be optimistic, but 10 years is certainly reasonable. Think of it in the context of seatbelts. The belt was patented in 1955, wasn’t mandatory in the US until 1984. Looked at in that context, driverless cars seem pretty comparable. And the point is, once this happens, there will no longer be any alcohol fatalities, so your entire argument will be moot.
So I ask again, once this happens (lets say, 20 years from now), THEN can we ban guns? Or are you going to just switch to a new false equivalence?
XT, arguing that we shouldn’t worry about regulating X because we don’t regulate Y is a good way to get people to agree that Y should be regulated. Which leaves you in a bit of a pickle since you probably don’t want to regulate everything, otherwise you’d just agree with the original premise.
Ah, so the point of all of this is to take away the analogy between guns and alcohol? Well, ok…if in 20 years we have an automated driving system that substantially drops the alcohol related death and injury rate, then I totally agree…the analogy will no longer be valid. I SHOULD still be alive by then, so if you would like to re-address this at that point I’d certainly be willing.
You’re (maybe inadvertently) laying out reasons for regulating alcohol more heavily with the assumption that no one wants to do so. You’re trying to say there’s some sort of hypocritical discrepancy between how the other side views the danger of one or the other. Presumably there’s a deeper kernel of anti-regulation, nanny statism logic etc., because someone who wants to regulate both would just agree with you.
Well, the larger point is demonstrating that the lethalness of alcohol for non-consumers is a very narrow, specific, preventable case, while the lethalness of guns is much wider gate for which there doesn’t seem to be any hope of locking. If someone came up with tech that disabled the firing of guns if they were pointed at an innocent person, I would let you guys have all the guns you wanted. But as it stands now, once a gun is in someone’s hands there doesn’t seem to be any failsafe for when that person decides to do evil with it.
That’s a tough question because it’s hard to define “need.” These shootings, horrible as they are and as often as it feels like they’ve been in the news in the last year or two, are incredibly rare to the point that it’s difficult to believe they could be eliminated (or that the cost of eliminating them would be worthwhile). But I think it’s past time to make some changes to the mental health system and to institute some sensible restrictions on high powered guns while still respecting the fact that people have the right to own guns. Ironically whatever changes are made will probably not be the most effective ones - the changes that would make the most difference are probably impossible for political and logistical reasons. But if there are some sensible changes we can make to help sick people and reduce the likelihood of these kinds of things to some extent, those should get a fair hearing.
This fails for just about every possible reason. To name a couple: these people usually end up dead, so you can’t curtail their satisfaction; in addition to its Stalinist overtones this idea is about the most clear-cut violation of the First Amendment anyone could dream up; and you have to be kidding if you think there is any realistic way to erase the name of a mass murderer from social media. Giving away the First Amendment isn’t a better idea than giving away the Second.
No, again, that’s not my argument. I think that more could be done, regulation wise, especially with people have multiple violations of the current drunk driving laws, but that’s neither here nor there. MY point is that even with regulation (hell, even with banning during Prohibition), society basically has to accept that some non-zero number of people are going to be hurt and killed every year. That’s reality. Yeah, if we get magic automatic driving systems as HoboStew theorizes, that would almost certainly make a difference…but you are talking about a huge cost for basically marginal gains. Something like 40k people are killed (this is from memory) each year in the US from alcohol related accidents. That SOUNDS like a huge number, but now when you put it into the perspective of the entire country (a country of over 300 MILLION). Yes, each death is a tragedy…but realistically you simply can’t regulate tragedy out of existence. So, we create laws and regulations to try and mitigate it to the best extent that is rationally possible…and then we accept the consequences. To me, that’s why the analogy works between alcohol and guns…they are both things we don’t, specifically ‘need’…but both things that a large percentage of the population ‘want’. They are both things that we attempt to regulate and have laws against abuse…but in the end, by allowing them at all we, as a society, accept that there will be a non-zero amount of harm they will cause.
Realistically, you have a slightly better chance of banning guns than alcohol today…but that’s because the attempt to ban alcohol was such a spectacular failure in the past. My guess is that a similar ban of guns at this stage in our history and with the current mindset would be a similar spectacular failure. Regulation…well, we are already doing that, but I’m sure some tweaks could be made. But they are going to have a pretty minimal effect, IMHO. So, to me, we as a society have to get some perspective, to look at the actual numbers of deaths being caused in both cases, then look at what it would REALLY take to substantially change those numbers in terms of both political and monetary cost, and decide if it’s worth it.
Drunk driving wouldn’t be possible with a car to drive. In fact, combine alcohol with just about anything – including those precious guns – and you’ve got a recipe for disaster, but no one has ever been murdered with alcohol. Alcohol on its own only kills those who drink it.
