Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo — Page 472

TV’s Frink said:

I don’t know how you expect to win the war if you give up bump stocks. You won’t be able to fire fast enough to stop the government from taking the rest of your rifle!

To be fair, knowing the NRA they may just get lumped in with other NFA items like suppressors and Short Barreled Rifles.

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

Sorry, meant to reply to this one and forgot:

NeverarGreat said:

The frontier was in the DNA of our country for a long time, and to a certain extent still is judging by the number of TV shows about Alaska. The problem is that the rest of the country is well and truly domesticated, so guns are not necessary for the vast majority of the populace to remain safe - gun ownership is now technically a hobby for most of the US population.

Definitely true, but I don’t think that complacency means we should forget about it as a right. The press can mostly write whatever it wants, but that doesn’t mean we should let the First Amendment slip.

And I would disagree that rights can only be won through violence - see Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the women’s suffrage movement, etc. Anything won through violence can be lost through violence. And there are rights other than the right to bear arms - the right to life among them. If one right infringes on another, which one should be honored? Do we accept the deaths of thousands of people each year as fair sacrifice for our right to own weapons?

There was certainly some violence in those movements, just usually against the people within the movement itself. It certainly was not an easy path for them to get the rights they wanted.

Tyrphanax said:

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.

I find this extremely convenient reasoning, seeing as how the right wing was responsible for electing this ‘dangerously insane senile’ old white man.

They sure did, and I would think that a lot more of my fellow “more-liberal-than-not” colleagues would be more interested in their Second Amendment rights after we got slapped with this insane loser who is making moves against minorities all the time. I know I would.

Tyrphanax said:

CatBus 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.

Symbolic, yes. Practical, no. Gun ownership would be equally effective against the rule of tyrants in modern America if the guns in questions were made out of cardboard and depended on the owner to make banging sounds with their mouths to signal that the other people should fall down.

Again, I disagree with this. See Afghanistan in the 1980s and Vietnam in the 1960s.

That’s just a case for increasing the costs of a foreign invader such that their balance sheets no longer work out and they withdraw (i.e. asymmetrical warfare). Not really quite the same thing as your own local tyrannical government, but actually a pretty decent analogue to the US Revolution in that respect. The primary lessons of those wars in my book is not about the importance of private gun ownership, but of the importance of finding the backing of a large foreign power to turn your local unwinnable conflict into a winnable proxy war.

Guns and gun ownership are parts of an issue, sure, but a much much smaller part than the overall issue in my mind (we have more guns in the country than people, but we’ve not all been murdered yet). Tackling that issue is going to be difficult and hard, like you said, but I’d rather go after that than ban guns… and then ban knives… and then ban sticks and rocks… and then ban karate lessons… and then tackle the root cause. Let’s get the hard part done first and I think we’ll find that the smaller problems solve themselves to an extent.

Once the world rids itself of crime, hatred, and violence – sure, that’ll solve the problem. But in the meantime Australia banned and destroyed guns and their homicides have dropped significantly without having to wait nearly that long. Australia still has violence, mental illness, hatred, domestic violence, and even terrorism. It’s quite possible not a single crime was stopped by their gun ban. But the crimes that did happen had fewer victims, which is the entire point of gun bans. Frankly I’d have been much happier if all of our recent mass shooters were just as deranged and criminal as before, but were using one of those cardboard cutout guns instead of real ones. Failing to tackle the root cause never seemed so good.

Australia had almost no mass shootings until the one that prompted their ban. Australia already had much less crime/homicide than the US, even before the ban.

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.

Australia had no Second Amendment or much of a gun culture as compared to the US. Australia has fewer people and far far fewer guns than the US and the main impact was on suicide rates.

The first couple points indicate how they managed, politically, to pass the ban when we have a much bigger problem and we can’t. As for suicide rates, I agree with your assessment. Mass shootings are not the primary downside of private gun ownership. Suicides, “simple” homicides and accidental deaths are a much worse problem, but they are so common they’re just background noise. It takes a mass shooting for people to consider that there may be a better way.

Australia is a continent surrounded by water, whereas America has two massive mostly-open borders to the north and south (and if you think the central/south American cartels are making a [literal] killing on drugs right now, just imagine if you just took all the guns from a country with a gun culture like the US has).

Mostly agree again. Most state-by-state regulations don’t work for exactly this reason, and Australia does benefit from geography. But we are the country flooding our neighbors with guns, not the other way around.

The black market on drugs simply increased the price of drugs. If the ban doesn’t work out, maybe an 800% sales tax would do the same thing. I’m fine with that.

In the end, like Scandinavia, Australia is a totally different country/culture/environment than the US, and what is good for the goose is not always good for the gander (though much like in Australia, homicides and gun crime in the US is the lowest in 50 years as well).

I didn’t actually buy into the Scandinavia metaphor to begin with–I think how well socialism works isn’t geographically defined–socialism is nothing more than democracy applied to economics, and democracies can make good and bad choices. And wrapping back to the beginning, America’s homicide rate is still higher than Australia’s, which Australians considered to be a problem worth solving, so they did.

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).

Wrong.

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.

It was necessary back then. It’s not now.

Our pitiful little guns would never be able to hold a fight against any modern military.

Guns and gun ownership are parts of an issue, sure, but a much much smaller part than the overall issue in my mind (we have more guns in the country than people, but we’ve not all been murdered yet). Tackling that issue is going to be difficult and hard, like you said, but I’d rather go after that than ban guns… and then ban knives… and then ban sticks and rocks… and then ban karate lessons… and then tackle the root cause. Let’s get the hard part done first and I think we’ll find that the smaller problems solve themselves to an extent.

Bad arguments.

First, you say that we haven’t all been murdered yet because of guns. Well, of course we haven’t! Whoever said that’d happen?

Secondly, you make a tired slippery slope argument. Nobody is going to ban knives. What is the purpose of a gun other than to kill (whether that be a human or an animal) in this modern age? Knives have more usage than to kill.

dahmage said:

“you can get a nice Julienne using a semi-automatic rifle”

I’ve seen guys fry bacon on machine gun barrels before.

Instead of calling it Chopped, they might have to call it Ricochetted.

yhwx 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).

Wrong.

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.

It was necessary back then. It’s not now.

Our pitiful little guns would never be able to hold a fight against any modern military.

Guns and gun ownership are parts of an issue, sure, but a much much smaller part than the overall issue in my mind (we have more guns in the country than people, but we’ve not all been murdered yet). Tackling that issue is going to be difficult and hard, like you said, but I’d rather go after that than ban guns… and then ban knives… and then ban sticks and rocks… and then ban karate lessons… and then tackle the root cause. Let’s get the hard part done first and I think we’ll find that the smaller problems solve themselves to an extent.

Bad arguments.

First, you say that we haven’t all been murdered yet because of guns. Well, of course we haven’t! Whoever said that’d happen?

Secondly, you make a tired slippery slope argument. Nobody is going to ban knives. What is the purpose of a gun other than to kill (whether that be a human or an animal) in this modern age? Knives have more usage than to kill.

All of this has been addressed in subsequent posts.

TV’s Frink said:

Tyrphanax said:

dahmage said:

“you can get a nice Julienne using a semi-automatic rifle”

I’ve seen guys fry bacon on machine gun barrels before.

See, if the guns were made of bacon like I recommended earlier, this wouldn’t be a problem!

Cholesterol bullets of pure love.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tyrphanax said:

yhwx 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).

Wrong.

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.

It was necessary back then. It’s not now.

Our pitiful little guns would never be able to hold a fight against any modern military.

Guns and gun ownership are parts of an issue, sure, but a much much smaller part than the overall issue in my mind (we have more guns in the country than people, but we’ve not all been murdered yet). Tackling that issue is going to be difficult and hard, like you said, but I’d rather go after that than ban guns… and then ban knives… and then ban sticks and rocks… and then ban karate lessons… and then tackle the root cause. Let’s get the hard part done first and I think we’ll find that the smaller problems solve themselves to an extent.

Bad arguments.

First, you say that we haven’t all been murdered yet because of guns. Well, of course we haven’t! Whoever said that’d happen?

Secondly, you make a tired slippery slope argument. Nobody is going to ban knives. What is the purpose of a gun other than to kill (whether that be a human or an animal) in this modern age? Knives have more usage than to kill.

All of this has been addressed in subsequent posts.

Sorry, I was just catching up.

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.

TM2YC said:

"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)…

Upton Sinclair said:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

CatBus said:

Tyrphanax said:

CatBus 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.

Symbolic, yes. Practical, no. Gun ownership would be equally effective against the rule of tyrants in modern America if the guns in questions were made out of cardboard and depended on the owner to make banging sounds with their mouths to signal that the other people should fall down.

Again, I disagree with this. See Afghanistan in the 1980s and Vietnam in the 1960s.

That’s just a case for increasing the costs of a foreign invader such that their balance sheets no longer work out and they withdraw (i.e. asymmetrical warfare). Not really quite the same thing as your own local tyrannical government, but actually a pretty decent analogue to the US Revolution in that respect.

Guns and gun ownership are parts of an issue, sure, but a much much smaller part than the overall issue in my mind (we have more guns in the country than people, but we’ve not all been murdered yet). Tackling that issue is going to be difficult and hard, like you said, but I’d rather go after that than ban guns… and then ban knives… and then ban sticks and rocks… and then ban karate lessons… and then tackle the root cause. Let’s get the hard part done first and I think we’ll find that the smaller problems solve themselves to an extent.

Once the world rids itself of crime, hatred, and violence – sure, that’ll solve the problem. But in the meantime Australia banned and destroyed guns and their homicides have dropped significantly without having to wait nearly that long. Australia still has violence, mental illness, hatred, domestic violence, and even terrorism. It’s quite possible not a single crime was stopped by their gun ban. But the crimes that did happen had fewer victims, which is the entire point of gun bans. Frankly I’d have been much happier if all of our recent mass shooters were just as deranged and criminal as before, but were using one of those cardboard cutout guns instead of real ones. Failing to tackle the root cause never seemed so good.

Australia had almost no mass shootings until the one that prompted their ban. Australia already had much less crime/homicide than the US, even before the ban.

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.

I’d argue that the way the media idolizes mass shooters has a profound effect on the amount of mass shooters we see. The fact that I can name and picture most of these guys the day after they do the deed and I can’t think of even one victim is indicative of this. “Almost every day” is a bit of a stretch, though. =P

I’m all for lowering murder and crime rates. 100%. The issue is when we get into writing off rights, or valuing one more than another.

Australia had no Second Amendment or much of a gun culture as compared to the US. Australia has fewer people and far far fewer guns than the US and the main impact was on suicide rates.

The first couple points indicate how they managed, politically, to pass the ban when we have a much bigger problem and we can’t. As for suicide rates, I agree with your assessment. Mass shootings are not the primary downside of private gun ownership. Suicides, “simple” homicides and accidental deaths are a much worse problem, but they are so common they’re just background noise. It takes a mass shooting for people to consider that there may be a better way.

But, again, banning guns doesn’t deal with the fact that people who want to do these things will find a way to do them. We should really be addressing the fact that there are almost no readily available support systems in the country for people with health and mental health issues, and that these issues if left untreated can cause profound changes in people, not to mention their financial situations. And not even getting into poverty and racism and gangs and the demographics those issues affect. This is all stuff that will not be solved by blanket bans of guns. Not to mention that gang violence rarely involves long guns like we saw in Las Vegas anyway.

Australia is a continent surrounded by water, whereas America has two massive mostly-open borders to the north and south (and if you think the central/south American cartels are making a [literal] killing on drugs right now, just imagine if you just took all the guns from a country with a gun culture like the US has).

Mostly agree again. Most state-by-state regulations don’t work for exactly this reason, and Australia does benefit from geography. But we are the country flooding our neighbors with guns, not the other way around.

The black market on drugs simply increased the price of drugs. If the ban doesn’t work out, maybe an 800% sales tax would do the same thing. I’m fine with that.

I feel like if there were suddenly a deficit of guns in the US, we’d see a lot more people moving guns here from out of country along the same lines drugs are now. Maybe the issue is lessened, but it’s not stopped by a longshot. Canada has this issue right now, even with the laws they have. So does Chicago and other American cities with tight laws (granted, other states have looser laws and that contributes, but the point is that those who want will get).

In the end, like Scandinavia, Australia is a totally different country/culture/environment than the US, and what is good for the goose is not always good for the gander (though much like in Australia, homicides and gun crime in the US is the lowest in 50 years as well).

I didn’t actually buy into the Scandinavia metaphor to begin with–I think how well socialism works isn’t geographically defined–socialism is nothing more than democracy applied to economics, and democracies can make good and bad choices. And wrapping back to the beginning, America’s homicide rate is still higher than Australia’s, which Australians considered to be a problem worth solving, so they did.

You make a lot of fantastic points here, and I enjoyed reading your post.

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.

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.

There are a lot of these places around. Ironically, Las Vegas has several of the largest.

I’d still rather own my own, however. I can go rent a Ferrari, but man I’d rather have one in my garage.