Or cause littering.
No, I’m saying you’re closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten loose.
Pools and ladders. Dumbest analogy ever. Look, if you get rid of pools and ladders there are still going to be bodies of water to drown in and high things to fall off of. Getting rid of the tools that make those activities safe would - by definition - make them more dangerous. Ergo: more people would die swimming and climbing if we got rid of all pools and ladders.
You cannot say the same thing about guns. Guns are made for fucking shit up. If there aren’t any guns, it’s harder to fuck shit up. Nobody is going to die because it’s harder to knock a Coke can off a fence post from 30 feet. But fewer people are going to die if you have to take out your favorite movie theater with nothing but your fists.
And I’m talking in the theoretical here. I know it would be impossible to make all guns dissappear, but then the same is true of pools and ladders, no?
No, we’re talking about relative risk here, and that means comparison with other kinds of risk is obviously a part of the analysis. The gun grabbers must first establish that firearms are somehow so much more hazardous than the other risks of ordinary life as to require draconian restrictions on firearm ownership and use.
And frankly, I’m immensely skeptical that you’re not on the side of the gun grabbers.
If you have something to offer besides loutish sarcasm, please present it. Otherwise I have no time for you.
In that case, you might want to skip comparing possessing guns to possessing drugs from now on.
Just sayin’.
Naw. Drugs are an excellent example of the federal government’s inability to control contraband, as is alcohol prohibition in the early part of the 20th century. Whenever someone talks about the federal government removing firearms from society as if it was perfectly obvious that it could be easily and effectively done, they should be reminded of the government’s previous failures at contraband control.
Yep, addiction is a strong force to overcome.
I think maybe some of the people here are talking past one another. I don’t think you can round up every gun in the US without a bunch of nuts trying to kill whoever knocks on their door. That said, there are plenty of common sense laws and rules that would serve everyone well. For example:
-
Limit the number of guns a person can own, with exiting guns being grandfathered in. In Switzerland, the limit is apparently 3.
-
Require fairly comprehensive licensing for gun ownership which must be renewed every x number of years. The actual firearm should be registered to the owner as well.
-
Restrict private sales to licensed brokers/dealers. Ownership should be non-transferable, except when a gun is sold/turned in to a dealer of law-enforcement authority.
-
Ban the sale of body armor, suppressors, and large-capacity magazines to anyone but law-enforcement personnel, and those with a legitimate reason to need such things.
-
Require all stolen or lost guns to be reported to the police, with penalties for those suspected of reselling or guns w/o authorization. All thefts must be reported within 14 days.
-
Make willful non-compliance with any of the above laws a felony with mandatory jail time.
I know we have some of those things in some places, but just those things would be a good way to ensure that people who own guns demonstrate a little more responsibility with their guns, and that the appropriate parties are accountable when they get into the wrong hands. I don’t think you can do much at this point to prevent some of the spree killers out there, but you can do a great deal of good prevent straw buyers from sending guns over the border, or into urban areas where they will be used in crimes. To me, that is where we can make the biggest impact. The widespread availability of guns, the lack of accountability of those who own them, and the large black market for guns is what is most dangerous.
Either way, why is it that we only talk about gun laws when some fuckface shoots up a bunch of innocent people? There is only so much you can do about that. The areas where we can really affect change are not with these rare events, but with the all too common shootings that happen with greater frequency and regularity. Laws that don’t address the growing black market are doomed to fail.
To determine if swimming is dangerous, you don’t count swimming pools. You count how many people swim and compare that to the number of drownings. Similarly, to determine if guns are dangerous, you don’t count the number of guns, you count how many people are shot at. Because people not shot at aren’t at risk of being killed by a gun, just like people who don’t swim are not at risk of drowning while swimming. It seems to me these are the factors to consider in determining how dangerous guns are. I’m pretty ambivalent about what the results of the analysis would be, but I think that’s the analysis people who claim guns are less dangerous than pools or ladders should make.
If someone were to ask me “Tooth, we’re fresh out of ideas. How can we curb gun deaths in America?” I would suggest a complete halt to selling new firearms of all sorts. If you have one, great. Use it properly and it’s yours for life. If it’s used in a crime (and recovered), it is destroyed and removed from the national pool of guns. And not replaced. Want another gun? No problem! There’s Craigslist, there are classified ads, maybe your neighbour Zeke is selling his. But no new guns. Eventually, after a couple of decades of this, I believe it would be a lot more difficult for criminals to get guns. It wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but I think it would work.
But I’m fine with the status quo. As I said, Americans killing Americans is not my concern. I’m fine with Canadian gun laws as they stand, what you do is not my problem.
As for your skepticism, I like shooting. I don’t do it often, but I like it well enough. I wasn’t raised in a Gun Culture, but I was raised around guns; they’re no big deal. I think the weeping and wailing and the way some Americans treat their guns like they’re little flags is silly, but that doesn’t mean I want to confiscate their guns. I believe the AWB is a good idea, but was so vague and watered down as to be rendered worthless. And if I lived in a state where I could carry a weapon, I probably would. A vocal liberal atheist living in one of the southern states? Absolutely I’d arm myself.
You mean like if he was a Phd student in Neuroscience from a State university nobody in the media would make a point to mention it in the first paragraph every time they cover him?
I have never read an article about Holmes that didn’t mention he was a Phd in Neuroscience. You don’t even have to go back a month to find a counter-example to your supposition.
Not even close to a counter-example. Holmes was in the process or pursuing a PhD in neuroscience. That’s not a footnote in his biography, it’s who he is/was.
Just like, if this guy was currently enlisted or recently discharged, it could be more relevant…but he wasn’t and it’s not.
First of all, it’s an *incredibly *close counter-example to your supposition that they wouldn’t mention somebody’s educational background. You said BA in theater from a State University, Holmes was a Phd student in Neuroscience from a State University. That’s unbelievable close, in spite of the meaningless distinction you brought up.
With that said, they also constantly mention that he earned a BS in Neuroscience from UC Riverside, which is a footnote in his biography. If you want a counter-example more on point than that we’ll have to wait for an actual BS in Theater grad to go on a killing spree.
Incredibly? Hardly. Page’s military service (or hypotherical BA) was 15 years ago.
Holmes had, until the recent weeks, been a student, and I’m assuming that his PhD program was a direct continuation of his BS, which means that in this example they could practically be considered a single event.
May I take a moment to express my sympathies with the noble Sikhs?
We also know where Holmes went to elementary school, and we know about his high school extracurriculars and church activities in addition to his college information. He’s much younger than Wade Page was, so that seems pretty comparable to me. We’ll know more about Page soon, including more recent activities and his job status. At this point we only know a few details, one of which is that he was in the military from 1992 to 1998 and that he was active in the white power music scene for a decade or so. I understand your opinion that his prior military service isn’t relevant to what he just did and it makes sense to me, but we don’t know that yet and the public can make its own determinations about relevance. It should be presented appropriate but there’s no reason to ignore it or treat it as a footnote when not much else is known. Eventually it may be treated that way.
It always amuses me when Switzerland is mentioned re: guns laws. I’m Swiss and in the many years I lived there I’ve never seen a gun in public except for at one of the few firing ranges.
The low crime rate has absolutely nothing to do with guns but everything to do with a very high standard of living and literally a culture of lack of guns. You would never refrain from doing something (legal or illegal) out of fear that someone else *might *be armed. There just isn’t the same confrontational culture as in the US, whether it be at bars or on the road.
Being robbed at gunpoint was practically unheard of until the past few years when the borders have opened up and armed criminals have had an easier time entering the country.
Oh and does my father have a military-issued rifle and handgun? Absolutely.
Would it take about half an hour to find the box they are in, buried somewhere in the basement, and then to reassemble and load them? Absolutely.
A fairly major aspect the “pools and ladders” = guns brigade seems to be ignoring here, is that when you swim in a pool or climb a ladder, you are, by your own actions, endangering yourself. When you take a gun and shoot other people with it, you endanger multiple other people who have no choice in the matter.
As such, five deaths by drowning in a pool are not equivalent to five people being murdered using a gun. There is a far stronger case for public intervention in the latter situation than in the former. In fact, it is the very sort of thing that public intervention exists for.
I’d say it has more to do with the fact that you have a mostly homogenous population of a bit below 8 million, which is roughly double the population of…Los Angeles. 
You are right…our cultures, demographics and histories are totally different, and there really is no comparison. That goes for most European countries, when folks attempt to trot out something along the lines of ‘well, gun controls works in Europe, so it should work exactly the same in the US too!’.
The UK has a diverse population, and gun control works there.