Sure, I don’t deny that speech can harm people. But there is a difference between me yelling obscenities at a bar and me walking into a bar with a gun in my hand.
So it is a false equivalency.
Er, why not? People aren’t islands, they acquire and internalize information from their surroundings. Tobacco ads resulted in more smokers, certainly. Do you suppose otherwise, that anyone who smokes would have done so in the absence of ads?
Blame isn’t relevant here, it’s a matter of costs and benefits. Allowing anyone to put out almost any information means bad information gets out, and does harm.
Again, allowing people the option to tweet about hurricanes means allowing others the option to make bad decisions based on those tweets. This anecdote illustrates my point.
Sure, I will leave it at that.
… just like making a movie on bank robbery gives people the idea to go and rob a bank.
More generally, the protections we have for various rights in this country have costs. The fact that we make it so hard to convict people of crimes undoubtedly lets criminals go free to harm more people. Our protections against search and seizure, weakened as they may be, definitely prevent law enforcement from preventing certain crimes that could’ve been caught if they were allowed the freedom to search in any way they wanted.
These legal protections in very real ways cost lives. If a criminal is released due to police misconduct during the investigation and goes on to murder some little kid, and her father makes an emotional plea - what do you tell the guy? “Ok, let’s reform our entire justice code to make sure this doesn’t happen again”, or “I’m sorry, shit happens, that sucks, but your dead kid doesn’t trump the protections of our legal system”?
Similarly, what about the people who die in a way that could’ve prevented if only the police could thoroughly search anyone they wanted at any time? “Your dead kid doesn’t trump my right not to be treated like a suspect and routinely abused by the police”?
Most of you don’t feel gun ownership is a right, and this colors your view of the issue, but understand that a lot of people do view gun ownership this way, and so it isn’t any different in terms of acknowledging that protection of rights can have a very real cost, and on some level, the vast majority of people accept this.
Not a tactful thing for joe the plumber to say but absolutely correct none the less.
Yes, that happens too. See the case of the 1997 North Hollywood shootout and the movie Heat, for instance.
Not exactly. All, or almost all, of us do acknowledge the current legal reality in the US. Many of us don’t think it *should *be a right, though.
Certainly, but the problem is our difficulty in seeing the *value *that this purported right to gun ownership has, compared to our ease in seeing the very real cost in lives it entails. We also have great difficulty in seeing how so many on the Second Commandment side do not see that. We also experience great sorrow not only in the death toll itself but in the ability of so many of the gun-rights absolutists to see the dead dismissed as abstractions, while often at the same time presenting to us some vision of a militia defending against tyranny as a real possibility that must be prepared for. The “cost” to us of having the legal situation reversed, and of eliminating the view of gun ownership as a “right”, is not at all evident.
Your assertion that the “vast majority accept this” is, to be blunt, not well-grounded in reality.
Yes, I agree with you. There were a few copy cat underground fighting groups after the movie Fight Club.
But that’s not the point I was trying to make.
Slavery? What’s interesting is that there are now some third amendment cases working through the system. Maybe a new area of jurisprudence.
Have you heard of the DUI exception to the fourth amendment?
Nobody was supposed to talk about that!
I have to keep reminding myself that the Second Amendment isn’t the only ridiculously obsolete amendment in the Bill of Rights – so is the third, which was passed in direct response to the British Quartering Acts. Like the third, the Second Amendment was a direct outgrowth from the times and concerns of the American Revolution and – as early drafts of the wording make very clear – was intended to protect the security of the nascent new country against foreign attack.
Today it’s not only ridiculously obsolete, but in retrospect the most damaging, short-sighted, and ill-conceived provision in probably all of constitutional history. So while more modern constitutions in other nations guarantee their citizens peace and security, Americans are guaranteed their guns. And every once in a while, generally after yet another mass killing, there is a certain amount of fretting about why Americans are constantly shooting each other in such large numbers, with occasional suggestions from the lunatic fringe that it’s because there aren’t enough “good guys with guns”.
What it’s meant to do is prevent discussion of gun laws after a shooting spree. That’s the only context this is used in, and it’s not an accident its use would prevent all discussion of gun laws. That’s a feature, not a bug. In spite of a million people yelling “CRISIS!” there was very widespread support for some changes in gun laws after the Newtown shooting, so it didn’t even work. What did happen was that lobbyists were able to get a message together and pressure legislators to make sure nothing happened. This did not improve the quality of the debate. If it were really about rationality, people who make this claim would be happy to have the discussion at a time when emotions weren’t running high. But they’re not. They’re saying “we shouldn’t discuss this right now” when what they mean is “I will not discuss this ever.” That’s disingenuous, isn’t it?
No, and they would’ve actually been willing to debate those issues. But they weren’t a heavily funded industry lobby with top-notch access to Congress, and that’s why nobody listened. Funny how that works.
This is pretty telling because you failed to notice the difference between discussing something and making a law. We can and should discuss things at any time. There are no rules for when and how the public can get interested in an issue and debate it, thought obviously there are lobbyists in at least one industry that would very much like to convince us otherwise. Societal debates can be messy and time consuming. Laws have to be carefully considered and shouldn’t be rushed into.
Why are we already restricting this to mass shootings?
Granting that you can find people who are irrational on any issue, I think you’re doing people who disagree with you a disservice here by assuming they’re unable to consider it rationally. You’re correct that, for example, we’re all much more likely to die in a car crash than in a mass shooting (or even a non-mass shooting). But one might take the viewpoint that our society needs cars, that it couldn’t really function without them, and that cars have a lot of benefits, and that the benefits outweigh the costs. And of course our society actually tries to reduce automobile deaths. And one might also believe that even considering mass shootings in context, the benefits of mass gun ownership don’t outweigh the costs. Or one might believe that some aspects of gun violence or mass gun violence could be curtailed without significantly reducing firearm liberties.
You can go ahead and tell me that’s not rational if you like, but I think you’ll have a hard time.
It certainly communicates the contempt that permeates every aspect of this discussion.
Except of course that nobody said that because it would’ve been disgusting.
[QUOTE=SenorBeef]
“Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights” is tactless, but
[/QUOTE]
Why “but”? Why is tact a secondary issue? This isn’t “why are you getting so huffy? I’m just speaking the truth”, is it?
These automobile examples are going to come back to haunt people because within the next few decades it will be illegal in America to drive a car. We’ll be riding in cars, but all the driving will be automated.
I actually think that helps my point. Like I said, safety is a huge point of emphasis with cars.
There are people who sit with an agenda who know that it won’t pass in normal circumstances. The Patriot Act wouldn’t have passed in 2000, for example. So they wait for their moment, something emotional that will disrupt the status quo and change the public’s mind enough, at least temporarily, for them to push their agenda through. You attempt to portray this is “oh, now is a good time to have an honest open discussion of gun laws”, but that’s not how it actually manifests. It’s more like “quick, exploit this and try to push through anything we can before the emotional impact runs out”, which makes it almost exactly analogous to the post-9/11 laws. Someone with an agenda lying in wait for the right moment for hysteria to allow them to hammer it through.
I think people would be more receptive to discussion of gun laws if they were actual discussions and not attempts to capitalize on a tragedy. Furthermore, if they were actual good-faith attempts to do some public good, rather than push an agenda through fear mongering. For example, what was the big push after Newtown? Assault weapons ban proposals that everyone knew were bullshit.
I don’t know, who are these people who are unwilling to have the discussion? I’m certainly willing to have it, but I’m just some random dude from the internet.
From the perspective of gun rights advocates, we’re fighting a battle against a group who is either ignorant or deceptive. They don’t focus their advocacy efforts on the most efficient way to serve the public good, but rather, they’re willing to create any infringement against gun rights that they feel they can get to pass. This is why so much effort is spent lying about, and then trying to push through bullshit that has no real public good purpose like assault weapons bans. They look scary, it’s easy to lie to the public about the nature of them, and they’re often the focus of these sorts of crisis. So if your goal is to push any sort of infringement you can on gun rights, with the ultimate goal of nickel and diming gun rights out of existence, they seem like a good wedge issue. But focusing on them also proves that you’re not really interested in promoting the public good - you’re just interested in eliminating gun rights regardless of the merits of any particular proposal.
And so when you’re working against a group who, as a whole, does not seem to have a good faith interest in promoting public good, who are willing to lie and appeal to emotion and use any crisis to pass their agenda, you’re pretty much always on the defensive, and having a good-faith discussion of public policy is almost never on the agenda.
When was the last time there was an attempt to genuinely have such a dialogue? I’m not sure that it’s reflexively rejected so much that it’s never seriously proposed.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Obviously the “discussion” in this is focused around public policy advocacy. The first sentence of the post I’m replying to is about having a discussion in order to create laws.
If one particular crisis or issue gets the discussion going on a subject strictly because of the emotional reactions people have, it’s unlikely to lead to good policy. It’s more likely to empower advocates of policy positions which are generally untenable to exploit the public to push through their agenda. Good faith policy discussions could hypothetically happen during a crisis, but in practice, that’s not what actually happens - what actually happens is slipping in whatever you can before the hysteria window closes.
That’s what we’re discussing, isn’t it? The public doesn’t seem to be interested in the random murders here and there that just become background noise. It takes something sensational and dramatic to get their attention. And then we get solutions proposed to disproportionately affect these rare, sensational cases rather than targeted at the more mundane but far more common issues.
These are two entirely separate issues. In one, you respond to my point about people evaluating relative risk. In the other, you essentially outline what a good-faith discussion of gun policy would be. I’m entirely open to having a discussion about the merits of gun ownership, the effect on society, and proposing specific policies that might curtail the negative affects to some degree. This is essentially what I’m advocating for - that’s the opposite of We Must Do Something response to hysteria.
People said this sort of stuff all the time, just not as bluntly. Opposition to the government moves post 9/11 government moves were decried as anti-patriotic or pro-terrorist by right wing retards. If you were against sweeping new government spying and policing powers and various foreign policy adventures, you were disrespecting those who died on 9/11 or some nonsense like that. And in fact, people were willing to say “I’m willing to accept the possibility that terrorist attacks may kill people, I’m not willing to give up our fundamental rights in a futile attempt to prevent that”, which basically mirrors the sentiment expressed in the title of this thread.
As already noted, that doesn’t disprove anything. Whether or not such a thing ever happens, it only underscores the fact that the purpose of cars is transportation, not killing people in accidents. The purpose of guns is killing. How do you make killing “safer”?
The only thing that you could do is at least have strict regulations governing who may buy a gun and how they may be used and transported. The NRA vehemently opposes all such regulations and uses its Congressional muscle to make sure they don’t happen. Or you might design a “smart gun” that could only be fired by its rightful owner. When a dealer in Maryland carried such a gun, gun nuts threatened to kill him. The entire gun debate has deteriorated into utter insanity. Gun advocacy has become something like a fundamentalist religion. Which is why the legacy of the Second Amendment is such a tragic one.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. " - Rahm Emanuel
I’m having a little trouble believing you’re unaware of this, but there was a big push for expanded background checks, and about 90% of the public supported it. So I don’t think everybody knew that was bullshit. The bill died, of course. Here’s a story on the subject from April 2013, which is about four months after the shooting spree. There’s still widespread support for that provision and plenty of time had passed by then, but it didn’t happen anyway.
By the way, the “you’re exploiting a crisis” crowd does not mind using a crisis to expand access to guns. This is at least as cynical as what you’re suggesting the other side is doing.
I am sure this sort of black and white thinking makes it easier for you.
I think you’re blurring the lines between public debate and the crafting of laws by the legislature. Arguments by the citizenry can happen however they happen. Laws have to be carefully considered, but it really doesn’t matter how they come into being.
Do you think perhaps that has something to do with the well-funded gun industry lobby that kills proposed changes in gun regulations? I think there’s probably some kind of connection there.
When? And why do you think so many people who share your views are utterly uninterested in having that discussion?
It mirrors it without the being an asshole part. And like I said, we lost that argument. Maybe that was a tactical error.
1.3 million people a year die in motor vehicle accidents on this planet.
It may take more than a few decades, but there is going to be a cure for the mass death occurring on the streets and roads, as described here:
My own state of Pennsylvania is one of relatively few places on earth where motorcycle helmets aren’t mandatory. So maybe we’ll follow this precedent and continue to die on the roads while the rest of the world lives.