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Is the phrase “pull the trigger” (as in, to do something) offensive?
No
The Person in Question
This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.
Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:
A very flaky article. Basically “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things” 😉
VIZ TOP TIPS! - PARENTS. Impress your children by showing them a floppy disk and telling them it’s a 3D model of a save icon.
This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.
Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:
A very flaky article. Basically “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things” 😉
Er… I don’t think that was the throughline at all.
I think it was more along the lines of “There is a problem but people are trying to put a band-aid on it instead of addressing the root cause.”
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This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.
Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:
A very flaky article. Basically “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things” 😉
Er… I don’t think that was the throughline at all.
I think it was more along the lines of “There is a problem but people are trying to put a band-aid on it instead of addressing the root cause.”
I missed the part where it diagnosed the “root cause” and came up with a solution.
VIZ TOP TIPS! - PARENTS. Impress your children by showing them a floppy disk and telling them it’s a 3D model of a save icon.
This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.
Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:
A very flaky article. Basically “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things” 😉
Er… I don’t think that was the throughline at all.
I think it was more along the lines of “There is a problem but people are trying to put a band-aid on it instead of addressing the root cause.”
I missed the part where it diagnosed the “root cause” and came up with a solution.
I’m extrapolating from what’s in the article:
As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. I couldn’t even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?
However, the next-largest set of gun deaths — 1 in 5 — were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.
By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.
Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.
Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.
Even the most data-driven practices, such as New Orleans’ plan to identify gang members for intervention based on previous arrests and weapons seizures, wind up more personal than most policies floated. The young men at risk can be identified by an algorithm, but they have to be disarmed one by one, personally — not en masse as though they were all interchangeable. A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.
(Emphasis mine)
The root causes I identified here are: access to and stigma against mental healthcare, especially among older males (as we may be seeing in the Las Vegas incident); poverty, systemic racism, and other aspects of society that lead to gang violence; and low priority and intervention with regards to domestic violence among LE.
The solutions proposed in the article are, as written:
Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.
[…]
A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.
“We should just ban guns” is a really easy thing to say, but let’s face it, if all guns disappeared tomorrow, would suicide numbers go down substantially? Would gang violence be impacted in a meaningful way? Would domestic be curtailed in a major way? I sadly doubt it. You can say “well it would be less deadly” but to step away from my pro-gun bias for a moment, is “less deadly” really the goal here? You might slow down or even stop mass shootings with a ban, sure, but when we look overseas at methods used in mass killings, a cursory search shows more man-portable IEDs than guns. I feel like a bomb going off in the middle of the crowd in Vegas would have been a lot worse than what we saw.
The more important use of time and resources in my opinion is to find out what makes people want to kill a lot of other people and work on a solution to that before they get to the point where they’re choosing a weapon to carry out their plan. By that time, it’s already too late.
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There are two things that make me think that less access to guns would be a good thing:
There are two things that make me think that less access to guns would be a good thing:
- look at information from other countries, see how they have less guns, and less suicide/homicide
- consider what percentage of suicide and homicide is related to heat of the moment decisions. If you slow down that persons access to a gun by even 10 minutes, how many of those decisions would not be made?
Is that correlational or causational? Is it because of cultural differences? Population differences? Is it just because they have fewer guns? Better access to healthcare or mental healthcare? Better laws regarding domestic violence? Less gang violence? Less racism? Less poverty? More? There’s a lot to consider when comparing two countries that feed into suicide and homicide rates than just “they have fewer guns and therefore fewer deaths.” I also want to point out that I’m not arguing that less guns here wouldn’t equal less deaths because that’d be stupid. If we could completely ban driving and alcohol and drugs, we’d see less deaths there, too (and there’d be a much bigger impact than banning guns as well!).
You definitely would see fewer crimes of passion and spur-of-the-moment suicides, I won’t deny that at all. But when someone really wants to kill another person, or when someone is really sure they don’t want to live anymore… that’s not something that can be stopped by less access to a given implement. That’s the real problem I’m looking at here: how do we keep it from getting to the point where a certain tool is the issue?
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There are two things that make me think that less access to guns would be a good thing:
- look at information from other countries, see how they have less guns, and less suicide/homicide
- consider what percentage of suicide and homicide is related to heat of the moment decisions. If you slow down that persons access to a gun by even 10 minutes, how many of those decisions would not be made?
Is that correlational or causational? Is it because of cultural differences? Population differences? Is it just because they have fewer guns? Better access to healthcare or mental healthcare? Better laws regarding domestic violence? Less gang violence? Less racism? Less poverty? More? There’s a lot to consider when comparing two countries that feed into suicide and homicide rates than just “they have fewer guns and therefore fewer deaths.” I also want to point out that I’m not arguing that less guns here wouldn’t equal less deaths because that’d be stupid. If we could completely ban driving and alcohol and drugs, we’d see less deaths there, too (and there’d be a much bigger impact than banning guns as well!).
You definitely would see fewer crimes of passion and spur-of-the-moment suicides, I won’t deny that at all. But when someone really wants to kill another person, or when someone is really sure they don’t want to live anymore… that’s not something that can be stopped by less access to a given implement. That’s the real problem I’m looking at here: how do we keep it from getting to the point where a certain tool is the issue?
you raise excellent points. but isn’t it worth trying out the premise that less guns means less violence? That is the part that i never understand. there is such a strong desire to keep guns in america… that it seems to make it impossible to try solutions.
I think we should just make guns taste like bacon and then everyone would eat their guns and problem solved.
My work here is done.
There are two things that make me think that less access to guns would be a good thing:
- look at information from other countries, see how they have less guns, and less suicide/homicide
- consider what percentage of suicide and homicide is related to heat of the moment decisions. If you slow down that persons access to a gun by even 10 minutes, how many of those decisions would not be made?
Is that correlational or causational? Is it because of cultural differences? Population differences? Is it just because they have fewer guns? Better access to healthcare or mental healthcare? Better laws regarding domestic violence? Less gang violence? Less racism? Less poverty? More? There’s a lot to consider when comparing two countries that feed into suicide and homicide rates than just “they have fewer guns and therefore fewer deaths.” I also want to point out that I’m not arguing that less guns here wouldn’t equal less deaths because that’d be stupid. If we could completely ban driving and alcohol and drugs, we’d see less deaths there, too (and there’d be a much bigger impact than banning guns as well!).
You definitely would see fewer crimes of passion and spur-of-the-moment suicides, I won’t deny that at all. But when someone really wants to kill another person, or when someone is really sure they don’t want to live anymore… that’s not something that can be stopped by less access to a given implement. That’s the real problem I’m looking at here: how do we keep it from getting to the point where a certain tool is the issue?
you raise excellent points. but isn’t it worth trying out the premise that less guns means less violence?
Honestly, I don’t think so. Some people are so insanely protective of their guns/paranoid of the government that it’d be easier to drain the ocean with a single spoon. Why waste that effort on the impossible task of trying to get rid of [specific types of?] guns, when that effort can instead by used on solutions that are plausible?
Just to flog this old, dead horse for some background to my point: in my interpretation, America and guns are inseparable. Rights “endowed by our creator” (whatever “creator” means to you) concerning keeping and bearing arms are acknowledged in the Constitution (not granted by it, but acknowledged by it as being intrinsic), and the gun culture here is more than in most other countries. They’re part of the DNA of the country, whether we all like or agree with it or not.
This adds a huge layer of difficulty to any legislation against firearms, and in my opinion, rightfully so: it’s very very easy to give up a right, but very very difficult (pretty much impossible without violence) to get a right back. It’s not really something you can “try out;” once they’re gone, I doubt we’ll get them back. In my opinion, that’s not acceptable.
That said, I am personally not against actually reasonable, common-sense gun laws, many of which are already in place: actual fully-automatic machine guns are prohibitive to acquire, we have ID requirements, license requirements (in many places), background checks (I’ve done them!), waiting periods (in many cases), and the gut feeling of the person behind the counter selling to you (if you look shady, you probably won’t be sold to; gun store owners have a livelihood to maintain after all). The issue is that in many many cases, the laws we have aren’t enforced properly and a lot of people slip through the cracks.
Pretty much anyone who’s used a legally-purchased gun in these crimes has slipped through a crack somewhere, especially in the background checks department, either because government bureaucracy is not exactly as communicative as it should be between departments, or efficient in any way even on a good day, and a lot of red flags are ignored, lost, or just not even reported (especially potentially dangerous mental health issues), or because a friend or family member trusts someone who shouldn’t be trusted too much.
We really need to focus on enforcing the laws we do have right now than just piling more on.
Uh… let me know if I actually addressed your question there. Haha.
JEDIT: Jeebus kinda said similar to what I was getting at. Thanks man.
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I think we should just make guns taste like bacon and then everyone would eat their guns and problem solved.
My work here is done.
I find this hard to argue with…
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It’s a cultural problem, and there isn’t one big solution, there’s a bunch of little ones. I say we need to try them all.
Is the phrase “pull the trigger” (as in, to do something) offensive?
No
This exchange didn’t go very far.
The Person in Question
Slavery is in the DNA of the country. We got rid of that eventually.
Slavery is in the DNA of the country. We got rid of that eventually.
Slavery is intrinsically wrong. You are infringing on another person’s rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Owning a gun is not intrinsically wrong. Owning a knife or sword or machine gun or rocket launcher or nuclear bomb is not intrinsically wrong, for that matter. You can commit an action with them that is intrinsically wrong (or intrinsically right!), but ownership in and of itself does not register on that scale.
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I’m very opposed to needlessly limiting freedom, even if it isn’t a very objectively important freedom, like gun collecting. We need to heavily regulate who can own a gun and put in place harsh penalties and strict oversight when it comes to where those guns end up once someone buys them, meaning that all guns (or at least the more dangerous ones) need to be bought and sold through licensed dealers with background checks and the like. Also, illegal and excess guns need to be confiscated and destroyed to decrease the massive number of guns floating around this country. Banning all guns for everyone is a pointless and stupid exercise of authoritarian government. I’m in favor of heavy gun regulations, but I’m also in favor of keeping this country as free as possible, within reason, and the fact is, most gun-owners aren’t endangering anyone.
EDIT: Also, I agree with everything that the preceding post says.
The Person in Question
It’s a cultural problem, and there isn’t one big solution, there’s a bunch of little ones. I say we need to try them all.
I’m with you as long as you don’t alienate my rights! ;D
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Slavery is in the DNA of the country. We got rid of that eventually.
Slavery is intrinsically wrong. You are infringing on another person’s rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Owning a gun is not intrinsically wrong. Owning a knife or sword or machine gun or rocket launcher or nuclear bomb is not intrinsically wrong, for that matter. You can commit an action with them that is intrinsically wrong (or intrinsically right!), but ownership in and of itself does not register on that scale.
Guns are people too, Tyr.
Slavery is in the DNA of the country. We got rid of that eventually.
Slavery is intrinsically wrong. You are infringing on another person’s rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Owning a gun is not intrinsically wrong. Owning a knife or sword or machine gun or rocket launcher or nuclear bomb is not intrinsically wrong, for that matter. You can commit an action with them that is intrinsically wrong (or intrinsically right!), but ownership in and of itself does not register on that scale.
Guns are people too, Tyr.
Jesus I hope they never rebel then because we’re fucked. How do you fight an army of guns with no guns?
I think this might be a potential movie idea, Frink. PM sent.
Keep Circulating the Tapes.
END OF LINE
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Slavery is in the DNA of the country. We got rid of that eventually.
Slavery is intrinsically wrong. You are infringing on another person’s rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Owning a gun is not intrinsically wrong. Owning a knife or sword or machine gun or rocket launcher or nuclear bomb is not intrinsically wrong, for that matter. You can commit an action with them that is intrinsically wrong (or intrinsically right!), but ownership in and of itself does not register on that scale.
Guns are people too, Tyr.
Jesus I hope they never rebel then because we’re fucked. How do you fight an army of guns with no guns?
I think this might be a potential movie idea, Frink. PM sent.
Thanks for the PM. To answer the question you asked in that PM, I think the best way to end our movie is to have humans turn to robots in order to defeat the guns. But then the robots turn on the humans, and the humans turn to…SEQUEL!!!
I’m very opposed to needlessly limiting freedom, even if it isn’t a very objectively important freedom, like gun collecting. We need to heavily regulate who can own a gun and put in place harsh penalties and strict oversight when it comes to where those guns end up once someone buys them, meaning that all guns (or at least the more dangerous ones) need to be bought and sold through licensed dealers with background checks and the like. Also, illegal and excess guns need to be confiscated and destroyed to decrease the massive number of guns floating around this country. Banning all guns for everyone is a pointless and stupid exercise of authoritarian government. I’m in favor of heavy gun regulations, but I’m also in favor of keeping this country as free as possible, within reason, and the fact is, most gun-owners aren’t endangering anyone.
EDIT: Also, I agree with everything that the preceding post says.
I pretty much agree with this.
Slavery is in the DNA of the country. We got rid of that eventually.
Slavery is intrinsically wrong. You are infringing on another person’s rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Owning a gun is not intrinsically wrong. Owning a knife or sword or machine gun or rocket launcher or nuclear bomb is not intrinsically wrong, for that matter. You can commit an action with them that is intrinsically wrong (or intrinsically right!), but ownership in and of itself does not register on that scale.
Guns are people too, Tyr.
Jesus I hope they never rebel then because we’re fucked. How do you fight an army of guns with no guns?
I think this might be a potential movie idea, Frink. PM sent.
Thanks for the PM. To answer the question you asked in that PM, I think the best way to end our movie is to have humans turn to robots in order to defeat the guns. But then the robots turn on the humans, and the humans turn to…SEQUEL!!!
I love it. Thanks for the PM detailing the sequel where the robots overpower both and the humans and guns have to form an uneasy alliance in order to take down the real threat, which leads to the next sequel.
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Guns shouldn’t be a right.
but part of what Tyr and Jeebus seem to be advocating is that it is just to hard to force a fix that too many people fundamentally diagree with (but guns are my American RIGHT). It is true in a very pragmatic sense, but it is also very frustrating to me.
Part of what i do is software development, so i certainly tend to think in terms of ‘that old software is fundamentally wrong, lets replace it!’, and so part of me just screams against the idea of accepting something is guaranteed to yield bad outcomes. it is like keeping on using that buggy product, even though every now and then it corrupts the data. (deleted a way too long and drug out analogy that doesn’t even make sense)
All i can say is, i really do think that guns are the problem, but sure, we can also try some other solutions. But solving peoples desire to murder is even harder than just getting rid of some of the murder weapons…