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Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo — Page 473

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yhwx said:

Tyrphanax said:

DominicCobb said:

The hope would be to get to a place down the line where people don’t really care about whether they have the right or not.

To go back for a second: I really don’t like this wording because it worryingly reflects the attitude of the world right now. Complacency is scary, and we’ve given up so many rights as it is because of it. Nobody would say this about freedom of press or any of our other rights, but because some people don’t like guns, it’s okay to give that one up. I’m not down with that.

Sometimes we have to give up things that were accepted as needed before. It’s part of life. It’s part of a country’s history.

Such as our rights as human beings? I’m not so sure about this.

dahmage said:

Tyrphanax said:

dahmage said:

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…

I mean… you can say they shouldn’t be a right, but you’d be wrong (tee hee). It serves a symbolic and practical purpose by saying that we as a people will not be ruled by tyrants, and giving us the means to defend ourselves against that eventuality. A huge part of American identity is the Revolution and throwing off the mantle of oppression, which wouldn’t have been possible without the average American citizen being able to pick up their rifle to fight for what’s right. I like the idea of that, and considering we’re not yet at the point that we don’t elect dangerously insane senile old white men into the highest office in the land, I’d kinda like to hold onto that kind of right, personally.

sure, lots of great reasons for it historically, but even if we still elect dangerously insane senile old white men, guns won’t help us against that.

I kinda addressed this with Dom earlier, and again I don’t like going into this realm very deep, but I really don’t like the idea of just throwing my hands up in this incredibly hypothetical situation and saying “Well, nothing I can do” as their gestapo or whatever does whatever it wants.

This is the problem with our modern politics: It’s based to much on feelings.

Kinda like jumping right to banning guns because people sometimes use them for bad things?

Your feeling that you’re showing right now will never materialize, at least in America. If we’re at the point where we have the Gestapo, there are much bigger structural problems in our society that we should have fixed earlier.

I honestly agree and that’s why I don’t like going into those discussions. However, it is nice to know that IF it happens, there is something I can do.

So can we solve the perceived need for guns in a way that you don’t need the damn gun, but can still feel safe / kill animals?

I don’t need the gun (I’m not even a hunter) like I don’t specifically need a car or a bottle of whiskey or a bag of chips or a can of coke… but as a free person, I have the right to have all or none of those things at my leisure (but I’d never mix the first three, haha).

I think you know FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech. In that speech, he described the freedom from want. I know you’ve said you’re not a big liberal, but I do think that you think that the government has the right to make certain programs that give people the right to an adequate standard of living.

I’m actually pretty close to a 50-50 split. Maybe 60-40, liberal.

Wouldn’t having a limited number of guns be a similar sort of freedom? Sure, it’s taking away you’re freedom to want a gun… but it also might give a freedom to life.

This is a good point, but saying that my right to effective, modern personal defense against bad people who may also be using effective and modern means is worth less than the possibility that another person may have their right to life infringed upon by a bad person sounds not so great to me. In a utopia, sure, but we aren’t there yet.

Keep Circulating the Tapes.

END OF LINE

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TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TV’s Frink said:

This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-gun-control-was-the-answer-my-research-told-me-otherwise/2017/10/03/d33edca6-a851-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html

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.

Yes that’s a longer version of what I said originally about the article: “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things”.

…or an intermediate length summary…

“America has a gun problem that other countries don’t have but I don’t understand why we have this unique problem (True we have a sh*t-ton of guns and little control unlike these other countries but that’s clearly nothing to do with it) so let’s ignore that particular problem and fix other things like mental health and violence against women that are problems not unique to America, or unique to the gun issue”

If the writer is proposing to fix mental health in human males (as if people haven’t thought of trying to do that across the globe already, for obvious reasons unrelated to guns… even if you could fix it!) and do nothing about guns, then good luck to him. He basically just said, let’s do nothing about the gun problem but buried it beneath a lot of words.

I disagree that the problem is a “gun problem.” We have laws protecting our intrinsic rights to defend ourselves from people who would cause us harm, and those rights “shall not be infringed.”

It’s not “ignore the supposed problem,” it is “focus on the actual problems.”

Keep Circulating the Tapes.

END OF LINE

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Jeebus said:

SilverWook said:

So what’s the pro silencer argument anyway? Unless you’re a hitman, or James Bond, I don’t understand the need for one.

That they still sound like this. They’re pretty darn loud. As for the ‘need’ for a suppressor; they make it so you don’t need ear protection to shoot, I guess. It’s not really a necessity, but it’s probably nice to have. That said, I’m not still sure how I feel about suppressors.

Suppressors are great, and also what Jeebus said. Guns are loud as hell suppressor or no, but one is a sonic boom and the other is heavy metal banging together, the latter of which is much quieter (and safer on the ears) for the shooters and the people around them.

It’s not like in the movies where it’s a pleasant little ASMR “fwip, fwip,” believe me.

Keep Circulating the Tapes.

END OF LINE

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 (Edited)

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TV’s Frink said:

This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-gun-control-was-the-answer-my-research-told-me-otherwise/2017/10/03/d33edca6-a851-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html

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.

Yes that’s a longer version of what I said originally about the article: “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things”.

…or an intermediate length summary…

“America has a gun problem that other countries don’t have but I don’t understand why we have this unique problem (True we have a sh*t-ton of guns and little control unlike these other countries but that’s clearly nothing to do with it) so let’s ignore that particular problem and fix other things like mental health and violence against women that are problems not unique to America, or unique to the gun issue”

If the writer is proposing to fix mental health in human males (as if people haven’t thought of trying to do that across the globe already, for obvious reasons unrelated to guns… even if you could fix it!) and do nothing about guns, then good luck to him. He basically just said, let’s do nothing about the gun problem but buried it beneath a lot of words.

I disagree that the problem is a “gun problem.” We have laws protecting our intrinsic rights to defend ourselves from people who would cause us harm, and those rights “shall not be infringed.”

It’s not “ignore the supposed problem,” it is “focus on the actual problems.”

The problems mentioned should be fixed regardless of the gun issue. Here’s some other things I pulled outta the air…

  • If the transport infrastructure was improved, that could make a small statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be sitting in less traffic jams and being less stressed?

  • If the government introduced a public information program to reduce sugar consumption, that could make a small statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be less hyper?

  • If companies paid people more, gave them more holidays, helped them with more benefits, better pensions, or gave them more flexible hours, that could make a small (or perhaps large?) statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be more happy?

We should be doing all this anyway and if it was easy we would have already. Now what about that gun issue? 😉

It’s like arguing that because “An apple a day keeps the Doctor away!” we should stop researching cures for cancer. Yes a healthy diet will have a measurable positive effect on fighting cancer but it does not fix the problem.

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.

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Tyrphanax said:

to defend ourselves from people who would cause us harm

There’s the main point of contention right there. Privately-owned guns simply don’t do that. When you buy a gun, in the overwhelming majority of cases it will never serve a single practical purpose (and there’s nothing wrong with that). Of the remaining extremely unlikely scenarios, it is MUCH more likely that the gun will be used, intentionally or unintentionally, to harm your family than to protect it.

The person who would cause us harm is the person bringing the gun into our homes because they mistakenly believe it makes us safer.

However, I do agree with your larger point that the second amendment forbids gun bans on any levels. I also believe it forbids bans on private ownership of chemical and biological weapons. “Arms” isn’t specific enough. It needs a repeal or at the very least a serious re-write.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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Tyrphanax said:

I obviously disagree with your main point, but it’s nice to have rational discussion about this issue with level-headed people. I love having my viewpoints challenged and having to really defend what I believe in - or change my views.

Respect your posts too. Good discussions are where people, for the most part, agree on the facts, but have different opinions based on that same set of facts. I like arguing like this because it’s those core value differences driving the opinions that make society interesting. I’d say a lot of things between us boil down to core value differences, and that’s actually good.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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 (Edited)

Tyrphanax said:

CatBus said:

Agreed, they thought their rate was too high even though it was lower than ours. In the US, we get a multiple shooting almost every day. If that was cut in half, or even a 75% reduction, I’d say it was still too high, so I’m with the Australians on this one.

“Almost every day” is a bit of a stretch, though. =P

The recent Vegas attack was the 273rd multiple shooting in the US this year (in 275 days). “Almost every day” is not a stretch at all. I’m not sure Newsweek’s “mass shooting” description is accurate, though, which is why I avoided the term. Shootings with four or more victims, to be precise.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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I’ll admit, coming from Canada, it’s hard for me to appreciate some of the minutiae of American gun culture. Part of it is from living in rural communities, but there’s not even the same feeling of being threatened that I hear Americans have, regardless of where they live. Hell, my family rarely locks the doors. While we have a rifle, we’d probably miss it more for the sentimental value my dad carries with it than because of feeling threatened. My dad prefers hunting via falconry nowadays.

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The idea that owning a deadly weapon is part of one’s “rights as a human being” is an idea that is so strange to me - there’s such a big, fundamental difference of belief here. We can debate this all day but I don’t think we can ever really get past that rift.

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I normally hate this argument, but in this case it works. Cars are extremely deadly, yet people deemed fit (low standards here) to operate them have a right to them.

The Person in Question

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flametitan said:

I’ll admit, coming from Canada, it’s hard for me to appreciate some of the minutiae of American gun culture. Part of it is from living in rural communities, but there’s not even the same feeling of being threatened that I hear Americans have, regardless of where they live. Hell, my family rarely locks the doors. While we have a rifle, we’d probably miss it more for the sentimental value my dad carries with it than because of feeling threatened. My dad prefers hunting via falconry nowadays.

Ironically, part of the feeling of being threatened comes from the fact that so many have guns.

The Person in Question

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TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TV’s Frink said:

This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-gun-control-was-the-answer-my-research-told-me-otherwise/2017/10/03/d33edca6-a851-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html

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.

Yes that’s a longer version of what I said originally about the article: “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things”.

…or an intermediate length summary…

“America has a gun problem that other countries don’t have but I don’t understand why we have this unique problem (True we have a sh*t-ton of guns and little control unlike these other countries but that’s clearly nothing to do with it) so let’s ignore that particular problem and fix other things like mental health and violence against women that are problems not unique to America, or unique to the gun issue”

If the writer is proposing to fix mental health in human males (as if people haven’t thought of trying to do that across the globe already, for obvious reasons unrelated to guns… even if you could fix it!) and do nothing about guns, then good luck to him. He basically just said, let’s do nothing about the gun problem but buried it beneath a lot of words.

I disagree that the problem is a “gun problem.” We have laws protecting our intrinsic rights to defend ourselves from people who would cause us harm, and those rights “shall not be infringed.”

It’s not “ignore the supposed problem,” it is “focus on the actual problems.”

The problems mentioned should be fixed regardless of the gun issue. Here’s some other things I pulled outta the air…

  • If the transport infrastructure was improved, that could make a small statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be sitting in less traffic jams and being less stressed?

  • If the government introduced a public information program to reduce sugar consumption, that could make a small statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be less hyper?

  • If companies paid people more, gave them more holidays, helped them with more benefits, better pensions, or gave them more flexible hours, that could make a small (or perhaps large?) statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be more happy?

We should be doing all this anyway and if it was easy we would have already. Now what about that gun issue? 😉

It’s like arguing that because “An apple a day keeps the Doctor away!” we should stop researching cures for cancer. Yes a healthy diet will have a measurable positive effect on fighting cancer but it does not fix the problem.

CatBus said:

Tyrphanax said:

to defend ourselves from people who would cause us harm

There’s the main point of contention right there. Privately-owned guns simply don’t do that. When you buy a gun, in the overwhelming majority of cases it will never serve a single practical purpose (and there’s nothing wrong with that). Of the remaining extremely unlikely scenarios, it is MUCH more likely that the gun will be used, intentionally or unintentionally, to harm your family than to protect it.

The person who would cause us harm is the person bringing the gun into our homes because they mistakenly believe it makes us safer.

However, I do agree with your larger point that the second amendment forbids gun bans on any levels. I also believe it forbids bans on private ownership of chemical and biological weapons. “Arms” isn’t specific enough. It needs a repeal or at the very least a serious re-write.

I’ll expect to see you guys throwing your weight behind a ban on alcohol consumption, drug use, and vehicle ownership too then. ;D

Keep Circulating the Tapes.

END OF LINE

(It hasn’t happened yet)

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 (Edited)

Ban bump stocks and anything else that can turn a semi-auto rifle into a full auto rifle. Totally ban full auto rifles. Ban all semi auto rifles that are too easy to convert to full auto.

One thing I will say that that we need to be more sensible with these bans. From what I’ve learned, the last time “assault rifles” were banned, we ended up banning rifles on look rather than on function. Lets not make that mistake this time. Lets make sure we understand what we are talking about when we past gun control laws.

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Could someone tell me what is so funny about a female sports reporter talking about routes?

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Well, I always find complete lack of context to be hilarious, but that’s just me 😉

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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moviefreakedmind said:

I normally hate this argument, but in this case it works. Cars are extremely deadly, yet people deemed fit (low standards here) to operate them have a right to them.

Few things… First, cars are not weapons. Second, cars are heavily regulated. Third, I’d gladly not have a car if I didn’t need one.

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Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TV’s Frink said:

This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-gun-control-was-the-answer-my-research-told-me-otherwise/2017/10/03/d33edca6-a851-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html

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.

Yes that’s a longer version of what I said originally about the article: “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things”.

…or an intermediate length summary…

“America has a gun problem that other countries don’t have but I don’t understand why we have this unique problem (True we have a sh*t-ton of guns and little control unlike these other countries but that’s clearly nothing to do with it) so let’s ignore that particular problem and fix other things like mental health and violence against women that are problems not unique to America, or unique to the gun issue”

If the writer is proposing to fix mental health in human males (as if people haven’t thought of trying to do that across the globe already, for obvious reasons unrelated to guns… even if you could fix it!) and do nothing about guns, then good luck to him. He basically just said, let’s do nothing about the gun problem but buried it beneath a lot of words.

I disagree that the problem is a “gun problem.” We have laws protecting our intrinsic rights to defend ourselves from people who would cause us harm, and those rights “shall not be infringed.”

It’s not “ignore the supposed problem,” it is “focus on the actual problems.”

The problems mentioned should be fixed regardless of the gun issue. Here’s some other things I pulled outta the air…

  • If the transport infrastructure was improved, that could make a small statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be sitting in less traffic jams and being less stressed?

  • If the government introduced a public information program to reduce sugar consumption, that could make a small statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be less hyper?

  • If companies paid people more, gave them more holidays, helped them with more benefits, better pensions, or gave them more flexible hours, that could make a small (or perhaps large?) statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be more happy?

We should be doing all this anyway and if it was easy we would have already. Now what about that gun issue? 😉

It’s like arguing that because “An apple a day keeps the Doctor away!” we should stop researching cures for cancer. Yes a healthy diet will have a measurable positive effect on fighting cancer but it does not fix the problem.

CatBus said:

Tyrphanax said:

to defend ourselves from people who would cause us harm

There’s the main point of contention right there. Privately-owned guns simply don’t do that. When you buy a gun, in the overwhelming majority of cases it will never serve a single practical purpose (and there’s nothing wrong with that). Of the remaining extremely unlikely scenarios, it is MUCH more likely that the gun will be used, intentionally or unintentionally, to harm your family than to protect it.

The person who would cause us harm is the person bringing the gun into our homes because they mistakenly believe it makes us safer.

However, I do agree with your larger point that the second amendment forbids gun bans on any levels. I also believe it forbids bans on private ownership of chemical and biological weapons. “Arms” isn’t specific enough. It needs a repeal or at the very least a serious re-write.

I’ll expect to see you guys throwing your weight behind a ban on alcohol consumption, drug use, and vehicle ownership too then. ;D

I thought we were discussing that article’s proposal to do nothing about the gun issue but if you instead want to switch to the old “total-ban” straw-man, then I guess that discussion is over (Not forgetting that I said guns didn’t need to be completely banned a couple of pages back).

Since you are making a compar-ison between guns and “alcohol consumption, drug use, and vehicle ownership” then you are conceding they are compar-able. So let’s explore that. e.g.

In the US (if I understand things correctly) Children are not allowed to drive because it’s too dangerous. Children are not allowed alcohol because it’s too dangerous. Children are not allowed drugs because they are too dangerous (adults aren’t either but it’s your example). Children are allowed guns because they aren’t dangerous?

A former(?) forum-member proudly claimed in this very thread that he shed a tear of joy at his little daughter’s gun use and collection of weapons. Some of us were horrified no doubt but I think it’d be fair to say ALL of us would be horrified if he’d proudly declared that his young kid was already a full-blown alcoholic after he’d started her on Absinthe at an early age (we’d probably hope he was arrested). Why is a relatively (I want to emphasise that word) harmless thing like alcohol treated as worse in the eyes of the law than weapons designed specifically for the mass slaughter of human beings?

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.

Author
Time
 (Edited)

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TM2YC said:

Tyrphanax said:

TV’s Frink said:

This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-gun-control-was-the-answer-my-research-told-me-otherwise/2017/10/03/d33edca6-a851-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html

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.

Yes that’s a longer version of what I said originally about the article: “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things”.

…or an intermediate length summary…

“America has a gun problem that other countries don’t have but I don’t understand why we have this unique problem (True we have a sh*t-ton of guns and little control unlike these other countries but that’s clearly nothing to do with it) so let’s ignore that particular problem and fix other things like mental health and violence against women that are problems not unique to America, or unique to the gun issue”

If the writer is proposing to fix mental health in human males (as if people haven’t thought of trying to do that across the globe already, for obvious reasons unrelated to guns… even if you could fix it!) and do nothing about guns, then good luck to him. He basically just said, let’s do nothing about the gun problem but buried it beneath a lot of words.

I disagree that the problem is a “gun problem.” We have laws protecting our intrinsic rights to defend ourselves from people who would cause us harm, and those rights “shall not be infringed.”

It’s not “ignore the supposed problem,” it is “focus on the actual problems.”

The problems mentioned should be fixed regardless of the gun issue. Here’s some other things I pulled outta the air…

  • If the transport infrastructure was improved, that could make a small statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be sitting in less traffic jams and being less stressed?

  • If the government introduced a public information program to reduce sugar consumption, that could make a small statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be less hyper?

  • If companies paid people more, gave them more holidays, helped them with more benefits, better pensions, or gave them more flexible hours, that could make a small (or perhaps large?) statistically measurable reduction in gun violence because people would be more happy?

We should be doing all this anyway and if it was easy we would have already. Now what about that gun issue? 😉

It’s like arguing that because “An apple a day keeps the Doctor away!” we should stop researching cures for cancer. Yes a healthy diet will have a measurable positive effect on fighting cancer but it does not fix the problem.

CatBus said:

Tyrphanax said:

to defend ourselves from people who would cause us harm

There’s the main point of contention right there. Privately-owned guns simply don’t do that. When you buy a gun, in the overwhelming majority of cases it will never serve a single practical purpose (and there’s nothing wrong with that). Of the remaining extremely unlikely scenarios, it is MUCH more likely that the gun will be used, intentionally or unintentionally, to harm your family than to protect it.

The person who would cause us harm is the person bringing the gun into our homes because they mistakenly believe it makes us safer.

However, I do agree with your larger point that the second amendment forbids gun bans on any levels. I also believe it forbids bans on private ownership of chemical and biological weapons. “Arms” isn’t specific enough. It needs a repeal or at the very least a serious re-write.

I’ll expect to see you guys throwing your weight behind a ban on alcohol consumption, drug use, and vehicle ownership too then. ;D

I thought we were discussing that article’s proposal to do nothing about the gun issue but if you instead want to switch to the old “total-ban” straw-man, then I guess that discussion is over (Not forgetting that I said guns didn’t need to be completely banned a couple of pages back).

Since you are making a compar-ison between guns and “alcohol consumption, drug use, and vehicle ownership” then you are conceding they are compar-able. So let’s explore that. e.g.

In the US (if I understand things correctly) Children are not allowed to drive because it’s too dangerous. Children are not allowed alcohol because it’s too dangerous. Children are not allowed drugs because they are too dangerous (adults aren’t either but it’s your example). Children are allowed guns because they aren’t dangerous?

A former(?) forum-member proudly claimed in this very thread that he shed a tear of joy at his little daughter’s gun use and collection of weapons. Some of us were horrified no doubt but I think it’d be fair to say ALL of us would be horrified if he’d proudly declared that his young kid was already a full-blown alcoholic after he’d started her on Absinthe at an early age (we’d probably hope he was arrested). Why is a relatively (I want to emphasise that word) harmless thing like alcohol treated as worse in the eyes of the law than weapons designed specifically for the mass slaughter of human beings?

I was hoping the little winking face there would denote the mostly-non-serious nature of that post.

That said, I don’t think I’ve ever argued against a federal minimum age requirement of 18 or so to purchase firearms (I’d also like to see other minimum ages baselined there as well), though I’m not sure how it would work in practice if I was going to go into a gun store here at 15 to try to buy a gun without an adult… I imagine I wouldn’t be sold to, though. But it’s not like adults ever buy kids booze or violent video games or anything, right? =P

And maybe you’re joking along with me, but I feel like teaching a child responsibility around guns and then allowing that child to own guns doesn’t really equate to the incredibly destructive disease of alcoholism. Honest question: do you think I have a disease because I learned about guns and gun safety and responsibility as a child?

Keep Circulating the Tapes.

END OF LINE

(It hasn’t happened yet)

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Jeebus said:

How would you guys feel about ranges where you can rent some of the more eccentric guns/attachments, shoot them for a bit, turn them in, and leave? I think this is a decent compromise between the “they’re just fun to shoot” side, and the “nobody should own fully automatic rifles (or whatever else)” side.

I think that sounds like a pretty good idea.

Do they not see the birds controlled in the atmosphere of the sky? none holds them up except Allah. Indeed in that are signs for a people who believe. – Quran (16:79)

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I’d be okay with that. Although I don’t know if I like the idea of the more dangerous sentient guns being all in one place where they can plot and scheme easier.

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TV’s Frink said:

I’d be okay with that. Although I don’t know if I like the idea of the more dangerous sentient guns being all in one place where they can plot and scheme easier.

Just because they’re sentient doesn’t mean they can pull their own trigger.

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flametitan said:

TV’s Frink said:

I’d be okay with that. Although I don’t know if I like the idea of the more dangerous sentient guns being all in one place where they can plot and scheme easier.

Just because they’re sentient doesn’t mean they can pull their own trigger.

Just because dogs don’t have fingers it doesn’t mean that can’t do all sorts of things you wouldn’t expect.

WAKE UP SHEEPLE