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On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 06:02 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:47 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:00 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 04:57 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
Once again avoid everything I say. Your country is full of murder, and you're facilitating it. I have not shot anyone. No one has ever been shot with a gun I own. How am I facilitating it? 4.8 in 100,000 is hardly "Full". Especially when you consider that the majority of those are just criminals killing each other, fighting over drugs. Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime? I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue. I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Cite those sources then. Just claiming they exist means nothing. Banning the guns is one step, restricting/collecting them another, altering the culture one more. Gang violence is a difficult problem to address, particularly in the US where it has been allowed to spiral out of control (this is partly down to the availability of guns; other first world countries do not have the issue to the same extent). Gun crime still happens, including gang related shootings, in the UK. You can imagine why this is not as frequent, however. In a country where it is so easy to own a gun, you would feel obliged to own one yourself. They will then inevitably be used when gang clashes occur. Gang culture itself is really a separate issue, but the availability of guns facilitates the escalation of gang violence. Stop trying to redirect the argument. Alcohol is a dangerous substance, but this does not negate the fact that guns are also dangerous. Both should be addressed, this is a thread about guns. It's good that you haven't used guns to kill anything. It doesn't change the fact that guns are for killing. That is their design. Whether you use them for that or not is irrelevant. They are idolised for their power, and their potential. The National Academy of Sciences is one source: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/17/naspanel/http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htmRead number 5, they cite academic articles I can't get without paying some exorbinant fee. In fact, read all of them. Gang culture is not a separate issue because you, and others, conflate the high crime rates with guns when in fact its the gangs and War and Drugs that cause most of it. Legalize pot, or get better at fighting it, and gangs lose their biggest market, and thus all their funding. With no money left to fight over, gang violence will plummet, and so will gun violence. Restricting guns is only treating the symptoms, not the disease. Again, look at DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. All urban hellscapes, all with strict gun laws. On January 16 2013 05:55 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:00 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 04:57 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
Once again avoid everything I say. Your country is full of murder, and you're facilitating it. I have not shot anyone. No one has ever been shot with a gun I own. How am I facilitating it? 4.8 in 100,000 is hardly "Full". Especially when you consider that the majority of those are just criminals killing each other, fighting over drugs. Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime? I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue. I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Nuclear warheads are not killing instruments. The vast majority of nuclear warheads have never killed a person. Many of them have never killed any living thing. And that's why you seem a little bit blind. As for your argument for there being no correlation between gun control laws and gun crime, you forget that the majority of these statistics are made up by biased, bullshit-spewing fucks (on both sides of the argument). Very little comprehensive research has been done because it is easy enough to come up with a talking point statistic that favors either view. These fail to acknowledge mountains of confounding variables such as - The difference in gun control laws between states. DC may have strict gun laws, but its neighbors don't. - The current firearm saturation. Regardless of whether or not firearms have been outlawed, there will still be those who refuse to turn them in. This means that it would probably take several generations to reduce firearm saturation in any given area. - The amount of time that specific measures have been in place. - The amount of gun control measures actually in place, when compared to political theatre measures like the NY bill. Why do people always bring up nukes? That's such a ridiculous strawman. Besides, if you look at history, you will see that up until the invention of the nuclear bomb, wars were getting more destructive, and more widespread. Fear of the nuclear bomb, i.e. mutually assured destruction, prevented WW3. Further, it is in fact true that the vast majority of nukes have never killed anyone. Only two have ever been used in anger. I agree both sides statistics are biased, which is why I have never relied on them in this thread. I only posted them because the person I replied to seemed to not realize this. Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose. Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison. Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food. Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody. Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL
A poor argument. More people use alcohol with more frequency than people use guns. Hence more raw deaths per year. But you're right, alcohol is dangerous. That's why alcohol control laws have been put in place, similar to what needs to happen with guns. Thanks for agreeing with me.
P.S.
No takesies backsies
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I found this picture rather relevant
http://i.imgur.com/h3jBk.jpg
All this talk about "Why would anyone need a magazine with more than 10 rounds? You don't need an AR-15 to shoot deer!"
The 2nd Amendment isn't about sport shooting or hunting. There was no hunting or sport shooting clause in the Constitution, sorry!
I stood with Obama on nearly every issue, but his stance on this makes me no longer view him as a pragmatist. A pragmatist would look at the facts and hold up constitutional principles.
Edit: just for clarity, Obama did not support the uprising in Egypt, and the victory in Libya was mainly do to heaving bombing by NATO, not small arms. Inaccurate but the point remains. I think most people are in favor of the Syrian uprising.
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On January 16 2013 08:26 Jormundr wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 06:02 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:47 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:00 Millitron wrote:
[quote]
I have not shot anyone. No one has ever been shot with a gun I own. How am I facilitating it?
4.8 in 100,000 is hardly "Full". Especially when you consider that the majority of those are just criminals killing each other, fighting over drugs. Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime? I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue. I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Cite those sources then. Just claiming they exist means nothing. Banning the guns is one step, restricting/collecting them another, altering the culture one more. Gang violence is a difficult problem to address, particularly in the US where it has been allowed to spiral out of control (this is partly down to the availability of guns; other first world countries do not have the issue to the same extent). Gun crime still happens, including gang related shootings, in the UK. You can imagine why this is not as frequent, however. In a country where it is so easy to own a gun, you would feel obliged to own one yourself. They will then inevitably be used when gang clashes occur. Gang culture itself is really a separate issue, but the availability of guns facilitates the escalation of gang violence. Stop trying to redirect the argument. Alcohol is a dangerous substance, but this does not negate the fact that guns are also dangerous. Both should be addressed, this is a thread about guns. It's good that you haven't used guns to kill anything. It doesn't change the fact that guns are for killing. That is their design. Whether you use them for that or not is irrelevant. They are idolised for their power, and their potential. The National Academy of Sciences is one source: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/17/naspanel/http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htmRead number 5, they cite academic articles I can't get without paying some exorbinant fee. In fact, read all of them. Gang culture is not a separate issue because you, and others, conflate the high crime rates with guns when in fact its the gangs and War and Drugs that cause most of it. Legalize pot, or get better at fighting it, and gangs lose their biggest market, and thus all their funding. With no money left to fight over, gang violence will plummet, and so will gun violence. Restricting guns is only treating the symptoms, not the disease. Again, look at DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. All urban hellscapes, all with strict gun laws. On January 16 2013 05:55 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:00 Millitron wrote:
[quote]
I have not shot anyone. No one has ever been shot with a gun I own. How am I facilitating it?
4.8 in 100,000 is hardly "Full". Especially when you consider that the majority of those are just criminals killing each other, fighting over drugs. Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime? I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue. I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Nuclear warheads are not killing instruments. The vast majority of nuclear warheads have never killed a person. Many of them have never killed any living thing. And that's why you seem a little bit blind. As for your argument for there being no correlation between gun control laws and gun crime, you forget that the majority of these statistics are made up by biased, bullshit-spewing fucks (on both sides of the argument). Very little comprehensive research has been done because it is easy enough to come up with a talking point statistic that favors either view. These fail to acknowledge mountains of confounding variables such as - The difference in gun control laws between states. DC may have strict gun laws, but its neighbors don't. - The current firearm saturation. Regardless of whether or not firearms have been outlawed, there will still be those who refuse to turn them in. This means that it would probably take several generations to reduce firearm saturation in any given area. - The amount of time that specific measures have been in place. - The amount of gun control measures actually in place, when compared to political theatre measures like the NY bill. Why do people always bring up nukes? That's such a ridiculous strawman. Besides, if you look at history, you will see that up until the invention of the nuclear bomb, wars were getting more destructive, and more widespread. Fear of the nuclear bomb, i.e. mutually assured destruction, prevented WW3. Further, it is in fact true that the vast majority of nukes have never killed anyone. Only two have ever been used in anger. I agree both sides statistics are biased, which is why I have never relied on them in this thread. I only posted them because the person I replied to seemed to not realize this. Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose. Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison. Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food. Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody. Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL A poor argument. More people use alcohol with more frequency than people use guns. Hence more raw deaths per year. But you're right, alcohol is dangerous. That's why alcohol control laws have been put in place, similar to what needs to happen with guns. Thanks for agreeing with me. P.S. No takesies backsies
How does the frequency of alcohol use make it any less worthy of legislation? The victims are just as dead. If anything, it's frequency should make it more worthy of legislation, i.e. there's more chance for things to go wrong.
And what alcohol controls are in place? The drinking age, and open container laws are pretty much it, and they aren't even enforced that well.
On January 16 2013 08:29 Nagano wrote:I found this picture rather relevant http://i.imgur.com/h3jBk.jpgAll this talk about "Why would anyone need a magazine with more than 10 rounds? You don't need an AR-15 to shoot deer!" The 2nd Amendment isn't about sport shooting or hunting. There was no hunting or sport shooting clause in the Constitution, sorry! I stood with Obama on nearly every issue, but his stance on this makes me no longer view him as a pragmatist. A pragmatist would look at the facts and hold up constitutional principles.
I readily admit that what I'm about to say is anecdotal evidence, but I'm sure this is not the only anecdote like it.
I have a friend who was out hunting deer, when he was attacked by a bear. He would not be alive today if he did not have his WASR (AK47 ripoff, for those who are unaware). He shot it multiple times before it went down. If he had not had a semi-automatic rifle, he would be dead.
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On January 16 2013 08:31 Millitron wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 08:26 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 06:02 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:47 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime?
I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue.
I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Cite those sources then. Just claiming they exist means nothing. Banning the guns is one step, restricting/collecting them another, altering the culture one more. Gang violence is a difficult problem to address, particularly in the US where it has been allowed to spiral out of control (this is partly down to the availability of guns; other first world countries do not have the issue to the same extent). Gun crime still happens, including gang related shootings, in the UK. You can imagine why this is not as frequent, however. In a country where it is so easy to own a gun, you would feel obliged to own one yourself. They will then inevitably be used when gang clashes occur. Gang culture itself is really a separate issue, but the availability of guns facilitates the escalation of gang violence. Stop trying to redirect the argument. Alcohol is a dangerous substance, but this does not negate the fact that guns are also dangerous. Both should be addressed, this is a thread about guns. It's good that you haven't used guns to kill anything. It doesn't change the fact that guns are for killing. That is their design. Whether you use them for that or not is irrelevant. They are idolised for their power, and their potential. The National Academy of Sciences is one source: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/17/naspanel/http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htmRead number 5, they cite academic articles I can't get without paying some exorbinant fee. In fact, read all of them. Gang culture is not a separate issue because you, and others, conflate the high crime rates with guns when in fact its the gangs and War and Drugs that cause most of it. Legalize pot, or get better at fighting it, and gangs lose their biggest market, and thus all their funding. With no money left to fight over, gang violence will plummet, and so will gun violence. Restricting guns is only treating the symptoms, not the disease. Again, look at DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. All urban hellscapes, all with strict gun laws. On January 16 2013 05:55 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime?
I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue.
I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Nuclear warheads are not killing instruments. The vast majority of nuclear warheads have never killed a person. Many of them have never killed any living thing. And that's why you seem a little bit blind. As for your argument for there being no correlation between gun control laws and gun crime, you forget that the majority of these statistics are made up by biased, bullshit-spewing fucks (on both sides of the argument). Very little comprehensive research has been done because it is easy enough to come up with a talking point statistic that favors either view. These fail to acknowledge mountains of confounding variables such as - The difference in gun control laws between states. DC may have strict gun laws, but its neighbors don't. - The current firearm saturation. Regardless of whether or not firearms have been outlawed, there will still be those who refuse to turn them in. This means that it would probably take several generations to reduce firearm saturation in any given area. - The amount of time that specific measures have been in place. - The amount of gun control measures actually in place, when compared to political theatre measures like the NY bill. Why do people always bring up nukes? That's such a ridiculous strawman. Besides, if you look at history, you will see that up until the invention of the nuclear bomb, wars were getting more destructive, and more widespread. Fear of the nuclear bomb, i.e. mutually assured destruction, prevented WW3. Further, it is in fact true that the vast majority of nukes have never killed anyone. Only two have ever been used in anger. I agree both sides statistics are biased, which is why I have never relied on them in this thread. I only posted them because the person I replied to seemed to not realize this. Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose. Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison. Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food. Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody. Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL A poor argument. More people use alcohol with more frequency than people use guns. Hence more raw deaths per year. But you're right, alcohol is dangerous. That's why alcohol control laws have been put in place, similar to what needs to happen with guns. Thanks for agreeing with me. P.S. No takesies backsies How does the frequency of alcohol use make it any less worthy of legislation? The victims are just as dead. If anything, it's frequency should make it more worthy of legislation, i.e. there's more chance for things to go wrong. And what alcohol controls are in place? The drinking age, and open container laws are pretty much it, and they aren't even enforced that well.
It's hoplophobia, don't even try to reason with them. They're the type to go into utter panic if they see a guy in the street exercising his right to open carry.
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On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 06:02 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:47 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:00 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 04:57 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
Once again avoid everything I say. Your country is full of murder, and you're facilitating it. I have not shot anyone. No one has ever been shot with a gun I own. How am I facilitating it? 4.8 in 100,000 is hardly "Full". Especially when you consider that the majority of those are just criminals killing each other, fighting over drugs. Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime? I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue. I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Cite those sources then. Just claiming they exist means nothing. Banning the guns is one step, restricting/collecting them another, altering the culture one more. Gang violence is a difficult problem to address, particularly in the US where it has been allowed to spiral out of control (this is partly down to the availability of guns; other first world countries do not have the issue to the same extent). Gun crime still happens, including gang related shootings, in the UK. You can imagine why this is not as frequent, however. In a country where it is so easy to own a gun, you would feel obliged to own one yourself. They will then inevitably be used when gang clashes occur. Gang culture itself is really a separate issue, but the availability of guns facilitates the escalation of gang violence. Stop trying to redirect the argument. Alcohol is a dangerous substance, but this does not negate the fact that guns are also dangerous. Both should be addressed, this is a thread about guns. It's good that you haven't used guns to kill anything. It doesn't change the fact that guns are for killing. That is their design. Whether you use them for that or not is irrelevant. They are idolised for their power, and their potential. The National Academy of Sciences is one source: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/17/naspanel/http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htmRead number 5, they cite academic articles I can't get without paying some exorbinant fee. In fact, read all of them. Gang culture is not a separate issue because you, and others, conflate the high crime rates with guns when in fact its the gangs and War and Drugs that cause most of it. Legalize pot, or get better at fighting it, and gangs lose their biggest market, and thus all their funding. With no money left to fight over, gang violence will plummet, and so will gun violence. Restricting guns is only treating the symptoms, not the disease. Again, look at DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. All urban hellscapes, all with strict gun laws. On January 16 2013 05:55 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:00 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 04:57 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
Once again avoid everything I say. Your country is full of murder, and you're facilitating it. I have not shot anyone. No one has ever been shot with a gun I own. How am I facilitating it? 4.8 in 100,000 is hardly "Full". Especially when you consider that the majority of those are just criminals killing each other, fighting over drugs. Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime? I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue. I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Nuclear warheads are not killing instruments. The vast majority of nuclear warheads have never killed a person. Many of them have never killed any living thing. And that's why you seem a little bit blind. As for your argument for there being no correlation between gun control laws and gun crime, you forget that the majority of these statistics are made up by biased, bullshit-spewing fucks (on both sides of the argument). Very little comprehensive research has been done because it is easy enough to come up with a talking point statistic that favors either view. These fail to acknowledge mountains of confounding variables such as - The difference in gun control laws between states. DC may have strict gun laws, but its neighbors don't. - The current firearm saturation. Regardless of whether or not firearms have been outlawed, there will still be those who refuse to turn them in. This means that it would probably take several generations to reduce firearm saturation in any given area. - The amount of time that specific measures have been in place. - The amount of gun control measures actually in place, when compared to political theatre measures like the NY bill. Why do people always bring up nukes? That's such a ridiculous strawman. Besides, if you look at history, you will see that up until the invention of the nuclear bomb, wars were getting more destructive, and more widespread. Fear of the nuclear bomb, i.e. mutually assured destruction, prevented WW3. Further, it is in fact true that the vast majority of nukes have never killed anyone. Only two have ever been used in anger. I agree both sides statistics are biased, which is why I have never relied on them in this thread. I only posted them because the person I replied to seemed to not realize this. Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose. Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison. Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food. Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody. Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL
After I briefly address this, please stop using alcohol as a scapegoat to avoid arguing about the issue this thread is based around. Alcohol causes more deaths, alcohol is consumed by more people. Look at the fucking stats you're posting. 40,000 of those deaths are drink driving. That's illegal. We do everything in our power to prevent it. It's fucking despicable. This puts the death-toll as almost equal.
Secondly, the majority of the remainder of these deaths are self inflicted. People choosing to kill themselves through excesses is sad, but it's not the same as people choosing to kill other people. I'm much more willing for people to have complete freedom when it comes to their own person.
Thirdly, alcohol is not designed to kill, and is not dangerous in and of itself. Excessive use of anything will result in issues. By your logic, we should ban food in the US as it is ultimately the top killer.
Make a point that is valid, or stop talking.
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On January 16 2013 08:34 Nagano wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 08:31 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 08:26 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 06:02 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:47 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:
[quote]
Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing.
How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings.
As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Cite those sources then. Just claiming they exist means nothing. Banning the guns is one step, restricting/collecting them another, altering the culture one more. Gang violence is a difficult problem to address, particularly in the US where it has been allowed to spiral out of control (this is partly down to the availability of guns; other first world countries do not have the issue to the same extent). Gun crime still happens, including gang related shootings, in the UK. You can imagine why this is not as frequent, however. In a country where it is so easy to own a gun, you would feel obliged to own one yourself. They will then inevitably be used when gang clashes occur. Gang culture itself is really a separate issue, but the availability of guns facilitates the escalation of gang violence. Stop trying to redirect the argument. Alcohol is a dangerous substance, but this does not negate the fact that guns are also dangerous. Both should be addressed, this is a thread about guns. It's good that you haven't used guns to kill anything. It doesn't change the fact that guns are for killing. That is their design. Whether you use them for that or not is irrelevant. They are idolised for their power, and their potential. The National Academy of Sciences is one source: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/17/naspanel/http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htmRead number 5, they cite academic articles I can't get without paying some exorbinant fee. In fact, read all of them. Gang culture is not a separate issue because you, and others, conflate the high crime rates with guns when in fact its the gangs and War and Drugs that cause most of it. Legalize pot, or get better at fighting it, and gangs lose their biggest market, and thus all their funding. With no money left to fight over, gang violence will plummet, and so will gun violence. Restricting guns is only treating the symptoms, not the disease. Again, look at DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. All urban hellscapes, all with strict gun laws. On January 16 2013 05:55 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:
[quote]
Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing.
How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings.
As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Nuclear warheads are not killing instruments. The vast majority of nuclear warheads have never killed a person. Many of them have never killed any living thing. And that's why you seem a little bit blind. As for your argument for there being no correlation between gun control laws and gun crime, you forget that the majority of these statistics are made up by biased, bullshit-spewing fucks (on both sides of the argument). Very little comprehensive research has been done because it is easy enough to come up with a talking point statistic that favors either view. These fail to acknowledge mountains of confounding variables such as - The difference in gun control laws between states. DC may have strict gun laws, but its neighbors don't. - The current firearm saturation. Regardless of whether or not firearms have been outlawed, there will still be those who refuse to turn them in. This means that it would probably take several generations to reduce firearm saturation in any given area. - The amount of time that specific measures have been in place. - The amount of gun control measures actually in place, when compared to political theatre measures like the NY bill. Why do people always bring up nukes? That's such a ridiculous strawman. Besides, if you look at history, you will see that up until the invention of the nuclear bomb, wars were getting more destructive, and more widespread. Fear of the nuclear bomb, i.e. mutually assured destruction, prevented WW3. Further, it is in fact true that the vast majority of nukes have never killed anyone. Only two have ever been used in anger. I agree both sides statistics are biased, which is why I have never relied on them in this thread. I only posted them because the person I replied to seemed to not realize this. Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose. Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison. Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food. Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody. Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL A poor argument. More people use alcohol with more frequency than people use guns. Hence more raw deaths per year. But you're right, alcohol is dangerous. That's why alcohol control laws have been put in place, similar to what needs to happen with guns. Thanks for agreeing with me. P.S. No takesies backsies How does the frequency of alcohol use make it any less worthy of legislation? The victims are just as dead. If anything, it's frequency should make it more worthy of legislation, i.e. there's more chance for things to go wrong. And what alcohol controls are in place? The drinking age, and open container laws are pretty much it, and they aren't even enforced that well. It's hoplophobia, don't even try to reason with them. They're the type to go into utter panic if they see a guy in the street exercising his right to open carry.
Don't talk about reason and use a term that is completely unreasonable. It is not a phobia to fear people carrying lethal weapons.
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On January 16 2013 08:35 bardtown wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 06:02 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:47 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:00 Millitron wrote:
[quote]
I have not shot anyone. No one has ever been shot with a gun I own. How am I facilitating it?
4.8 in 100,000 is hardly "Full". Especially when you consider that the majority of those are just criminals killing each other, fighting over drugs. Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime? I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue. I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Cite those sources then. Just claiming they exist means nothing. Banning the guns is one step, restricting/collecting them another, altering the culture one more. Gang violence is a difficult problem to address, particularly in the US where it has been allowed to spiral out of control (this is partly down to the availability of guns; other first world countries do not have the issue to the same extent). Gun crime still happens, including gang related shootings, in the UK. You can imagine why this is not as frequent, however. In a country where it is so easy to own a gun, you would feel obliged to own one yourself. They will then inevitably be used when gang clashes occur. Gang culture itself is really a separate issue, but the availability of guns facilitates the escalation of gang violence. Stop trying to redirect the argument. Alcohol is a dangerous substance, but this does not negate the fact that guns are also dangerous. Both should be addressed, this is a thread about guns. It's good that you haven't used guns to kill anything. It doesn't change the fact that guns are for killing. That is their design. Whether you use them for that or not is irrelevant. They are idolised for their power, and their potential. The National Academy of Sciences is one source: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/17/naspanel/http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htmRead number 5, they cite academic articles I can't get without paying some exorbinant fee. In fact, read all of them. Gang culture is not a separate issue because you, and others, conflate the high crime rates with guns when in fact its the gangs and War and Drugs that cause most of it. Legalize pot, or get better at fighting it, and gangs lose their biggest market, and thus all their funding. With no money left to fight over, gang violence will plummet, and so will gun violence. Restricting guns is only treating the symptoms, not the disease. Again, look at DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. All urban hellscapes, all with strict gun laws. On January 16 2013 05:55 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:00 Millitron wrote:
[quote]
I have not shot anyone. No one has ever been shot with a gun I own. How am I facilitating it?
4.8 in 100,000 is hardly "Full". Especially when you consider that the majority of those are just criminals killing each other, fighting over drugs. Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime? I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue. I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Nuclear warheads are not killing instruments. The vast majority of nuclear warheads have never killed a person. Many of them have never killed any living thing. And that's why you seem a little bit blind. As for your argument for there being no correlation between gun control laws and gun crime, you forget that the majority of these statistics are made up by biased, bullshit-spewing fucks (on both sides of the argument). Very little comprehensive research has been done because it is easy enough to come up with a talking point statistic that favors either view. These fail to acknowledge mountains of confounding variables such as - The difference in gun control laws between states. DC may have strict gun laws, but its neighbors don't. - The current firearm saturation. Regardless of whether or not firearms have been outlawed, there will still be those who refuse to turn them in. This means that it would probably take several generations to reduce firearm saturation in any given area. - The amount of time that specific measures have been in place. - The amount of gun control measures actually in place, when compared to political theatre measures like the NY bill. Why do people always bring up nukes? That's such a ridiculous strawman. Besides, if you look at history, you will see that up until the invention of the nuclear bomb, wars were getting more destructive, and more widespread. Fear of the nuclear bomb, i.e. mutually assured destruction, prevented WW3. Further, it is in fact true that the vast majority of nukes have never killed anyone. Only two have ever been used in anger. I agree both sides statistics are biased, which is why I have never relied on them in this thread. I only posted them because the person I replied to seemed to not realize this. Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose. Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison. Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food. Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody. Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL After I briefly address this, please stop using alcohol as a scapegoat to avoid arguing about the issue this thread is based around. Alcohol causes more deaths, alcohol is consumed by more people. Look at the fucking stats you're posting. 40,000 of those deaths are drink driving. That's illegal. We do everything in our power to prevent it. It's fucking despicable. This puts the death-toll as almost equal. Secondly, the majority of the remainder of these deaths are self inflicted. People choosing to kill themselves through excesses is sad, but it's not the same as people choosing to kill other people. I'm much more willing for people to have complete freedom when it comes to their own person. Thirdly, alcohol is not designed to kill, and is not dangerous in and of itself. Excessive use of anything will result in issues. By your logic, we should ban food in the US as it is ultimately the top killer. Make a point that is valid, or stop talking.
"Assault weapon" related deaths make up 0.6% of all gun related deaths in the U.S.. "Assault weapons" and their high-cap mags however are the main target of gun prohibitionists such as yourself. Why is that?
I think it's more of an irrational fear of scary black guns than anything else, personally. If you get anything out of today's discussion, here's a website I found rather informative and well designed: http://www.assaultweapon.info
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On January 16 2013 08:39 bardtown wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 08:34 Nagano wrote:On January 16 2013 08:31 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 08:26 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 06:02 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:47 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
Cite those sources then. Just claiming they exist means nothing. Banning the guns is one step, restricting/collecting them another, altering the culture one more. Gang violence is a difficult problem to address, particularly in the US where it has been allowed to spiral out of control (this is partly down to the availability of guns; other first world countries do not have the issue to the same extent). Gun crime still happens, including gang related shootings, in the UK. You can imagine why this is not as frequent, however. In a country where it is so easy to own a gun, you would feel obliged to own one yourself. They will then inevitably be used when gang clashes occur.
Gang culture itself is really a separate issue, but the availability of guns facilitates the escalation of gang violence.
Stop trying to redirect the argument. Alcohol is a dangerous substance, but this does not negate the fact that guns are also dangerous. Both should be addressed, this is a thread about guns.
It's good that you haven't used guns to kill anything. It doesn't change the fact that guns are for killing. That is their design. Whether you use them for that or not is irrelevant. They are idolised for their power, and their potential. The National Academy of Sciences is one source: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/17/naspanel/http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htmRead number 5, they cite academic articles I can't get without paying some exorbinant fee. In fact, read all of them. Gang culture is not a separate issue because you, and others, conflate the high crime rates with guns when in fact its the gangs and War and Drugs that cause most of it. Legalize pot, or get better at fighting it, and gangs lose their biggest market, and thus all their funding. With no money left to fight over, gang violence will plummet, and so will gun violence. Restricting guns is only treating the symptoms, not the disease. Again, look at DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. All urban hellscapes, all with strict gun laws. On January 16 2013 05:55 Jormundr wrote:
[quote]
Nuclear warheads are not killing instruments. The vast majority of nuclear warheads have never killed a person. Many of them have never killed any living thing.
And that's why you seem a little bit blind.
As for your argument for there being no correlation between gun control laws and gun crime, you forget that the majority of these statistics are made up by biased, bullshit-spewing fucks (on both sides of the argument). Very little comprehensive research has been done because it is easy enough to come up with a talking point statistic that favors either view.
These fail to acknowledge mountains of confounding variables such as
- The difference in gun control laws between states. DC may have strict gun laws, but its neighbors don't.
- The current firearm saturation. Regardless of whether or not firearms have been outlawed, there will still be those who refuse to turn them in. This means that it would probably take several generations to reduce firearm saturation in any given area.
- The amount of time that specific measures have been in place.
- The amount of gun control measures actually in place, when compared to political theatre measures like the NY bill. Why do people always bring up nukes? That's such a ridiculous strawman. Besides, if you look at history, you will see that up until the invention of the nuclear bomb, wars were getting more destructive, and more widespread. Fear of the nuclear bomb, i.e. mutually assured destruction, prevented WW3. Further, it is in fact true that the vast majority of nukes have never killed anyone. Only two have ever been used in anger. I agree both sides statistics are biased, which is why I have never relied on them in this thread. I only posted them because the person I replied to seemed to not realize this. Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose. Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison. Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food. Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody. Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL A poor argument. More people use alcohol with more frequency than people use guns. Hence more raw deaths per year. But you're right, alcohol is dangerous. That's why alcohol control laws have been put in place, similar to what needs to happen with guns. Thanks for agreeing with me. P.S. No takesies backsies How does the frequency of alcohol use make it any less worthy of legislation? The victims are just as dead. If anything, it's frequency should make it more worthy of legislation, i.e. there's more chance for things to go wrong. And what alcohol controls are in place? The drinking age, and open container laws are pretty much it, and they aren't even enforced that well. It's hoplophobia, don't even try to reason with them. They're the type to go into utter panic if they see a guy in the street exercising his right to open carry. Don't talk about reason and use a term that is completely unreasonable. It is not a phobia to fear people carrying lethal weapons.
Coming from a country where they ban blades longer than 3 inches, I understand your fear. It's probably best you stay on that side of the Atlantic if you're so scared. Leave the preservation of constitutional principles to the Americans 
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United States24779 Posts
On January 16 2013 08:35 bardtown wrote:
Look at the fucking stats you're posting. 40,000 of those deaths are drink driving. That's illegal. We do everything in our power to prevent it. It's fucking despicable.
There are things we can do to help with that stat. For starters, we should see which types of alcohol are consumed the most by people who go on to drive while drunk and get into fatal accidents. We should ban the drinks of choice of murderous drunk drivers. Actually, to follow the example of recent gun legislation we should ban the types of alcohol that people are most bothered by, regardless of what percentage of drunk driving deaths it accounts for. For example, I heard that the guy who managed to kill 5 pedestrians with his hummer was drinking vodka that night so we should ban it. Killing 1 or 2 pedestrians is bad enough, but 5?
Anyone who wants to drink should be allowed to... we learned that the hard way during the US prohibition. However, all purchases of alcohol should require a background check. Any purchase of more than 3 ounces of alcohol needs to be logged into a database which goes on to public record. In fact, I encourage newspapers to publish everybody's alcohol purchases.
Shot glasses should no longer be bigger than 1 ounce... no doubles or triples!
If a mental health professional determines that you are likely to drive while drunk, you should be placed on the 'do not sell liquor to' list which will come up during the background check when you go to buy a drink.
You must be a registered drinker to by alcohol. You must recertify this permit every 5 years, without receiving a reminder in the mail, or else it is a class d felony.
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On January 16 2013 08:40 Nagano wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 08:35 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 06:02 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:47 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime?
I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue.
I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Cite those sources then. Just claiming they exist means nothing. Banning the guns is one step, restricting/collecting them another, altering the culture one more. Gang violence is a difficult problem to address, particularly in the US where it has been allowed to spiral out of control (this is partly down to the availability of guns; other first world countries do not have the issue to the same extent). Gun crime still happens, including gang related shootings, in the UK. You can imagine why this is not as frequent, however. In a country where it is so easy to own a gun, you would feel obliged to own one yourself. They will then inevitably be used when gang clashes occur. Gang culture itself is really a separate issue, but the availability of guns facilitates the escalation of gang violence. Stop trying to redirect the argument. Alcohol is a dangerous substance, but this does not negate the fact that guns are also dangerous. Both should be addressed, this is a thread about guns. It's good that you haven't used guns to kill anything. It doesn't change the fact that guns are for killing. That is their design. Whether you use them for that or not is irrelevant. They are idolised for their power, and their potential. The National Academy of Sciences is one source: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/17/naspanel/http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htmRead number 5, they cite academic articles I can't get without paying some exorbinant fee. In fact, read all of them. Gang culture is not a separate issue because you, and others, conflate the high crime rates with guns when in fact its the gangs and War and Drugs that cause most of it. Legalize pot, or get better at fighting it, and gangs lose their biggest market, and thus all their funding. With no money left to fight over, gang violence will plummet, and so will gun violence. Restricting guns is only treating the symptoms, not the disease. Again, look at DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. All urban hellscapes, all with strict gun laws. On January 16 2013 05:55 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime?
I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue.
I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Nuclear warheads are not killing instruments. The vast majority of nuclear warheads have never killed a person. Many of them have never killed any living thing. And that's why you seem a little bit blind. As for your argument for there being no correlation between gun control laws and gun crime, you forget that the majority of these statistics are made up by biased, bullshit-spewing fucks (on both sides of the argument). Very little comprehensive research has been done because it is easy enough to come up with a talking point statistic that favors either view. These fail to acknowledge mountains of confounding variables such as - The difference in gun control laws between states. DC may have strict gun laws, but its neighbors don't. - The current firearm saturation. Regardless of whether or not firearms have been outlawed, there will still be those who refuse to turn them in. This means that it would probably take several generations to reduce firearm saturation in any given area. - The amount of time that specific measures have been in place. - The amount of gun control measures actually in place, when compared to political theatre measures like the NY bill. Why do people always bring up nukes? That's such a ridiculous strawman. Besides, if you look at history, you will see that up until the invention of the nuclear bomb, wars were getting more destructive, and more widespread. Fear of the nuclear bomb, i.e. mutually assured destruction, prevented WW3. Further, it is in fact true that the vast majority of nukes have never killed anyone. Only two have ever been used in anger. I agree both sides statistics are biased, which is why I have never relied on them in this thread. I only posted them because the person I replied to seemed to not realize this. Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose. Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison. Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food. Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody. Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL After I briefly address this, please stop using alcohol as a scapegoat to avoid arguing about the issue this thread is based around. Alcohol causes more deaths, alcohol is consumed by more people. Look at the fucking stats you're posting. 40,000 of those deaths are drink driving. That's illegal. We do everything in our power to prevent it. It's fucking despicable. This puts the death-toll as almost equal. Secondly, the majority of the remainder of these deaths are self inflicted. People choosing to kill themselves through excesses is sad, but it's not the same as people choosing to kill other people. I'm much more willing for people to have complete freedom when it comes to their own person. Thirdly, alcohol is not designed to kill, and is not dangerous in and of itself. Excessive use of anything will result in issues. By your logic, we should ban food in the US as it is ultimately the top killer. Make a point that is valid, or stop talking. "Assault weapon" related deaths make up 0.6% of all gun related deaths in the U.S.. "Assault weapons" and their high-cap mags however are the main target of gun prohibitionists such as yourself. Why is that? I think it's more of an irrational fear of scary black guns than anything else, personally. If you get anything out of today's discussion, here's a website I found rather informative and well designed: http://www.assaultweapon.info
It's a fear of the potential of those guns, which as we've already noted have been used in a number of school massacres. They serve no purpose, are designed to kill and have the capacity to kill large numbers of people, and are idolised for their power potential to harm.
Flipside it; why do you need to own a big black scary gun? Is it cool? If you think it's cool or impressive, what do you think the fucked up kid who wants to make people notice him thinks?
Just because they don't account for a large proportion of gun crimes doesn't change the fact that they are particularly dangerous in terms of massacres (and not individual murders and gang killings), without having any beneficial traits. They should absolutely be prohibited, and gun nuts should not stand in the way of protecting human lives.
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On January 16 2013 08:43 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 08:35 bardtown wrote:
Look at the fucking stats you're posting. 40,000 of those deaths are drink driving. That's illegal. We do everything in our power to prevent it. It's fucking despicable. There are things we can do to help with that stat. For starters, we should see which types of alcohol are consumed the most by people who go on to drive while drunk and get into fatal accidents. We should ban the drinks of choice of murderous drunk drivers. Actually, to follow the example of recent gun legislation we should ban the types of alcohol that people are most bothered by, regardless of what percentage of drunk driving deaths it accounts for. For example, I heard that the guy who managed to kill 5 pedestrians with his hummer was drinking vodka that night so we should ban it. Killing 1 or 2 pedestrians is bad enough, but 5? Anyone who wants to drink should be allowed to... we learned that the hard way during the US prohibition. However, all purchases of alcohol should require a background check. Any purchase of more than 3 ounces of alcohol neesd to be logged into a database which goes on to public record. In fact, I encourage newspapers to publish everybody's alcohol purchases. Shot glasses should no longer be bigger than 1 ounce... no doubles or triples! If a mental health professional determines that you are likely to drive while drunk, you should be placed on the 'do not sell liquor to' list which will come up during the background check when you go to buy a drink. You must be a registered drinker to by alcohol. You must recertify this permit every 5 years, without receiving a reminder in the mail, or else it is a class d felony.
What? Who are you to bring reason into this discussion?! Black guns are scary, ban ban ban!!!!!
User was warned for this post
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On January 16 2013 08:43 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 08:35 bardtown wrote:
Look at the fucking stats you're posting. 40,000 of those deaths are drink driving. That's illegal. We do everything in our power to prevent it. It's fucking despicable. There are things we can do to help with that stat. For starters, we should see which types of alcohol are consumed the most by people who go on to drive while drunk and get into fatal accidents. We should ban the drinks of choice of murderous drunk drivers. Actually, to follow the example of recent gun legislation we should ban the types of alcohol that people are most bothered by, regardless of what percentage of drunk driving deaths it accounts for. For example, I heard that the guy who managed to kill 5 pedestrians with his hummer was drinking vodka that night so we should ban it. Killing 1 or 2 pedestrians is bad enough, but 5? Anyone who wants to drink should be allowed to... we learned that the hard way during the US prohibition. However, all purchases of alcohol should require a background check. Any purchase of more than 3 ounces of alcohol needs to be logged into a database which goes on to public record. In fact, I encourage newspapers to publish everybody's alcohol purchases. Shot glasses should no longer be bigger than 1 ounce... no doubles or triples! If a mental health professional determines that you are likely to drive while drunk, you should be placed on the 'do not sell liquor to' list which will come up during the background check when you go to buy a drink. You must be a registered drinker to by alcohol. You must recertify this permit every 5 years, without receiving a reminder in the mail, or else it is a class d felony.
How about we just take away the driver's licenses of bad offenders.
Any other stupid attempts at arguments you'd like to make?
User was warned for this post
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On January 16 2013 08:35 bardtown wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 06:02 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:47 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:00 Millitron wrote:
[quote]
I have not shot anyone. No one has ever been shot with a gun I own. How am I facilitating it?
4.8 in 100,000 is hardly "Full". Especially when you consider that the majority of those are just criminals killing each other, fighting over drugs. Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime? I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue. I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Cite those sources then. Just claiming they exist means nothing. Banning the guns is one step, restricting/collecting them another, altering the culture one more. Gang violence is a difficult problem to address, particularly in the US where it has been allowed to spiral out of control (this is partly down to the availability of guns; other first world countries do not have the issue to the same extent). Gun crime still happens, including gang related shootings, in the UK. You can imagine why this is not as frequent, however. In a country where it is so easy to own a gun, you would feel obliged to own one yourself. They will then inevitably be used when gang clashes occur. Gang culture itself is really a separate issue, but the availability of guns facilitates the escalation of gang violence. Stop trying to redirect the argument. Alcohol is a dangerous substance, but this does not negate the fact that guns are also dangerous. Both should be addressed, this is a thread about guns. It's good that you haven't used guns to kill anything. It doesn't change the fact that guns are for killing. That is their design. Whether you use them for that or not is irrelevant. They are idolised for their power, and their potential. The National Academy of Sciences is one source: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/17/naspanel/http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htmRead number 5, they cite academic articles I can't get without paying some exorbinant fee. In fact, read all of them. Gang culture is not a separate issue because you, and others, conflate the high crime rates with guns when in fact its the gangs and War and Drugs that cause most of it. Legalize pot, or get better at fighting it, and gangs lose their biggest market, and thus all their funding. With no money left to fight over, gang violence will plummet, and so will gun violence. Restricting guns is only treating the symptoms, not the disease. Again, look at DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. All urban hellscapes, all with strict gun laws. On January 16 2013 05:55 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:16 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:00 Millitron wrote:
[quote]
I have not shot anyone. No one has ever been shot with a gun I own. How am I facilitating it?
4.8 in 100,000 is hardly "Full". Especially when you consider that the majority of those are just criminals killing each other, fighting over drugs. Do you not understand that legalisation and availability is correlated with gun crime, and that support for this legalisation (which offers no benefit beyond satisfying ones 'preference' of owning guns) thus facilitates gun crime? I only said 'full of' because you made me angry. Have enough respect for your country that you want to lower gang and drug related killings, even if school shootings are the more pressing issue. I've said it a hundred times, the idolisation of killing instruments is, and can only be, a bad thing. If you want guns for self defence, do this: one model, designed specifically for self defense, brightly coloured, not easily concealable. Don't make guns cool, don't make them impressive, make them purely functional. Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing. How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings. As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Nuclear warheads are not killing instruments. The vast majority of nuclear warheads have never killed a person. Many of them have never killed any living thing. And that's why you seem a little bit blind. As for your argument for there being no correlation between gun control laws and gun crime, you forget that the majority of these statistics are made up by biased, bullshit-spewing fucks (on both sides of the argument). Very little comprehensive research has been done because it is easy enough to come up with a talking point statistic that favors either view. These fail to acknowledge mountains of confounding variables such as - The difference in gun control laws between states. DC may have strict gun laws, but its neighbors don't. - The current firearm saturation. Regardless of whether or not firearms have been outlawed, there will still be those who refuse to turn them in. This means that it would probably take several generations to reduce firearm saturation in any given area. - The amount of time that specific measures have been in place. - The amount of gun control measures actually in place, when compared to political theatre measures like the NY bill. Why do people always bring up nukes? That's such a ridiculous strawman. Besides, if you look at history, you will see that up until the invention of the nuclear bomb, wars were getting more destructive, and more widespread. Fear of the nuclear bomb, i.e. mutually assured destruction, prevented WW3. Further, it is in fact true that the vast majority of nukes have never killed anyone. Only two have ever been used in anger. I agree both sides statistics are biased, which is why I have never relied on them in this thread. I only posted them because the person I replied to seemed to not realize this. Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose. Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison. Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food. Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody. Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL After I briefly address this, please stop using alcohol as a scapegoat to avoid arguing about the issue this thread is based around. Alcohol causes more deaths, alcohol is consumed by more people. Look at the fucking stats you're posting. 40,000 of those deaths are drink driving. That's illegal. We do everything in our power to prevent it. It's fucking despicable. This puts the death-toll as almost equal. Secondly, the majority of the remainder of these deaths are self inflicted. People choosing to kill themselves through excesses is sad, but it's not the same as people choosing to kill other people. I'm much more willing for people to have complete freedom when it comes to their own person. Thirdly, alcohol is not designed to kill, and is not dangerous in and of itself. Excessive use of anything will result in issues. By your logic, we should ban food in the US as it is ultimately the top killer. Make a point that is valid, or stop talking.
11,000 of those firearms deaths are homicide. That's illegal. We do everything in our power to prevent it. 19,000 of the gun deaths are suicides. That's illegal. We do everything in our power to prevent it. Only around 600 are accidents.
http://smartgunlaws.org/gun-deaths-and-injuries-statistics/
I agree alcohol is not designed to kill, but it IS designed to impair mental functions. What you do with those impaired functions is what causes the problems, not the alcohol itself. Likewise, guns are designed to throw a tiny piece of metal at high speeds. What's in front of that metal isn't the gun's fault, its the user's.
Stop holding inanimate objects accountable when people are to blame.
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United States24779 Posts
On January 16 2013 08:46 WolfintheSheep wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 08:43 micronesia wrote:On January 16 2013 08:35 bardtown wrote:
Look at the fucking stats you're posting. 40,000 of those deaths are drink driving. That's illegal. We do everything in our power to prevent it. It's fucking despicable. There are things we can do to help with that stat. For starters, we should see which types of alcohol are consumed the most by people who go on to drive while drunk and get into fatal accidents. We should ban the drinks of choice of murderous drunk drivers. Actually, to follow the example of recent gun legislation we should ban the types of alcohol that people are most bothered by, regardless of what percentage of drunk driving deaths it accounts for. For example, I heard that the guy who managed to kill 5 pedestrians with his hummer was drinking vodka that night so we should ban it. Killing 1 or 2 pedestrians is bad enough, but 5? Anyone who wants to drink should be allowed to... we learned that the hard way during the US prohibition. However, all purchases of alcohol should require a background check. Any purchase of more than 3 ounces of alcohol needs to be logged into a database which goes on to public record. In fact, I encourage newspapers to publish everybody's alcohol purchases. Shot glasses should no longer be bigger than 1 ounce... no doubles or triples! If a mental health professional determines that you are likely to drive while drunk, you should be placed on the 'do not sell liquor to' list which will come up during the background check when you go to buy a drink. You must be a registered drinker to by alcohol. You must recertify this permit every 5 years, without receiving a reminder in the mail, or else it is a class d felony. How about we just take away the driver's licenses of bad offenders. Any other stupid attempts at arguments you'd like to make? User was warned for this post
I'm fine with that. Let's also take guns away from the people who go in and shoot up schools. Well I mean, we can pry it away from their cold, dead fingers, literally.
I'm not trying to make a big deal out of the alcohol link as others do, but it's not fair to say that we already take the necessary precautions to prevent alcohol deaths, but don't with guns.
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On January 16 2013 08:45 bardtown wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 08:40 Nagano wrote:On January 16 2013 08:35 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 06:02 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 05:47 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:
[quote]
Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing.
How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings.
As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Cite those sources then. Just claiming they exist means nothing. Banning the guns is one step, restricting/collecting them another, altering the culture one more. Gang violence is a difficult problem to address, particularly in the US where it has been allowed to spiral out of control (this is partly down to the availability of guns; other first world countries do not have the issue to the same extent). Gun crime still happens, including gang related shootings, in the UK. You can imagine why this is not as frequent, however. In a country where it is so easy to own a gun, you would feel obliged to own one yourself. They will then inevitably be used when gang clashes occur. Gang culture itself is really a separate issue, but the availability of guns facilitates the escalation of gang violence. Stop trying to redirect the argument. Alcohol is a dangerous substance, but this does not negate the fact that guns are also dangerous. Both should be addressed, this is a thread about guns. It's good that you haven't used guns to kill anything. It doesn't change the fact that guns are for killing. That is their design. Whether you use them for that or not is irrelevant. They are idolised for their power, and their potential. The National Academy of Sciences is one source: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/17/naspanel/http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htmRead number 5, they cite academic articles I can't get without paying some exorbinant fee. In fact, read all of them. Gang culture is not a separate issue because you, and others, conflate the high crime rates with guns when in fact its the gangs and War and Drugs that cause most of it. Legalize pot, or get better at fighting it, and gangs lose their biggest market, and thus all their funding. With no money left to fight over, gang violence will plummet, and so will gun violence. Restricting guns is only treating the symptoms, not the disease. Again, look at DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. All urban hellscapes, all with strict gun laws. On January 16 2013 05:55 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 05:28 Millitron wrote:
[quote]
Guns are not killing instruments. The vast majority of gun owners have never shot a person. Many of them (myself included) have never shot any living thing.
How are school shootings a more pressing issue? What makes those deaths worse than any other premature death? Far more children are killed due to alcohol than in school shootings.
As for gun control correlating with gun crime, it doesn't. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and its almost a warzone in some neighborhoods. You can't decrease gang violence by banning guns. Many gang members already have illegal guns, and many more will simply switch to knives or bats. Some statistics might say that gun control works, but just as many, from just as reputable of sources say it doesn't. Nuclear warheads are not killing instruments. The vast majority of nuclear warheads have never killed a person. Many of them have never killed any living thing. And that's why you seem a little bit blind. As for your argument for there being no correlation between gun control laws and gun crime, you forget that the majority of these statistics are made up by biased, bullshit-spewing fucks (on both sides of the argument). Very little comprehensive research has been done because it is easy enough to come up with a talking point statistic that favors either view. These fail to acknowledge mountains of confounding variables such as - The difference in gun control laws between states. DC may have strict gun laws, but its neighbors don't. - The current firearm saturation. Regardless of whether or not firearms have been outlawed, there will still be those who refuse to turn them in. This means that it would probably take several generations to reduce firearm saturation in any given area. - The amount of time that specific measures have been in place. - The amount of gun control measures actually in place, when compared to political theatre measures like the NY bill. Why do people always bring up nukes? That's such a ridiculous strawman. Besides, if you look at history, you will see that up until the invention of the nuclear bomb, wars were getting more destructive, and more widespread. Fear of the nuclear bomb, i.e. mutually assured destruction, prevented WW3. Further, it is in fact true that the vast majority of nukes have never killed anyone. Only two have ever been used in anger. I agree both sides statistics are biased, which is why I have never relied on them in this thread. I only posted them because the person I replied to seemed to not realize this. Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose. Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison. Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food. Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody. Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL After I briefly address this, please stop using alcohol as a scapegoat to avoid arguing about the issue this thread is based around. Alcohol causes more deaths, alcohol is consumed by more people. Look at the fucking stats you're posting. 40,000 of those deaths are drink driving. That's illegal. We do everything in our power to prevent it. It's fucking despicable. This puts the death-toll as almost equal. Secondly, the majority of the remainder of these deaths are self inflicted. People choosing to kill themselves through excesses is sad, but it's not the same as people choosing to kill other people. I'm much more willing for people to have complete freedom when it comes to their own person. Thirdly, alcohol is not designed to kill, and is not dangerous in and of itself. Excessive use of anything will result in issues. By your logic, we should ban food in the US as it is ultimately the top killer. Make a point that is valid, or stop talking. "Assault weapon" related deaths make up 0.6% of all gun related deaths in the U.S.. "Assault weapons" and their high-cap mags however are the main target of gun prohibitionists such as yourself. Why is that? I think it's more of an irrational fear of scary black guns than anything else, personally. If you get anything out of today's discussion, here's a website I found rather informative and well designed: http://www.assaultweapon.info It's a fear of the potential of those guns, which as we've already noted have been used in a number of school massacres. They serve no purpose, are designed to kill and have the capacity to kill large numbers of people, and are idolised for their power potential to harm. Flipside it; why do you need to own a big black scary gun? Is it cool? If you think it's cool or impressive, what do you think the fucked up kid who wants to make people notice him thinks? Just because they don't account for a large proportion of gun crimes doesn't change the fact that they are particularly dangerous in terms of massacres (and not individual murders and gang killings), without having any beneficial traits. They should absolutely be prohibited, and gun nuts should not stand in the way of protecting human lives.
Seung-Hui Cho used 2 pistols when he committed the largest mass shooting in 2007 at VA Tech--32 people. Pistols, bro. Pistols also typically have 7 round mags. Why didn't politicians go after pistols back in 2007? It's because it's easier to get the public to rally around removing big black scary rifles that look like military rifles.
Asking why someone needs to own a big black scary gun is irrelevant. It is a right protected by the 2nd amendment.
Do you not see the flaw in that question?
James Madison in Federalist No. 46 regarding 2A:
Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops.
Know your history and stop acting out of emotion and fear and irrationality.
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On January 16 2013 08:41 Nagano wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 08:39 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 08:34 Nagano wrote:On January 16 2013 08:31 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 08:26 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 06:02 Millitron wrote:[quote] The National Academy of Sciences is one source: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/17/naspanel/http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htmRead number 5, they cite academic articles I can't get without paying some exorbinant fee. In fact, read all of them. Gang culture is not a separate issue because you, and others, conflate the high crime rates with guns when in fact its the gangs and War and Drugs that cause most of it. Legalize pot, or get better at fighting it, and gangs lose their biggest market, and thus all their funding. With no money left to fight over, gang violence will plummet, and so will gun violence. Restricting guns is only treating the symptoms, not the disease. Again, look at DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. All urban hellscapes, all with strict gun laws. [quote] Why do people always bring up nukes? That's such a ridiculous strawman. Besides, if you look at history, you will see that up until the invention of the nuclear bomb, wars were getting more destructive, and more widespread. Fear of the nuclear bomb, i.e. mutually assured destruction, prevented WW3. Further, it is in fact true that the vast majority of nukes have never killed anyone. Only two have ever been used in anger. I agree both sides statistics are biased, which is why I have never relied on them in this thread. I only posted them because the person I replied to seemed to not realize this. Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose. Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison. Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food. Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody. Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL A poor argument. More people use alcohol with more frequency than people use guns. Hence more raw deaths per year. But you're right, alcohol is dangerous. That's why alcohol control laws have been put in place, similar to what needs to happen with guns. Thanks for agreeing with me. P.S. No takesies backsies How does the frequency of alcohol use make it any less worthy of legislation? The victims are just as dead. If anything, it's frequency should make it more worthy of legislation, i.e. there's more chance for things to go wrong. And what alcohol controls are in place? The drinking age, and open container laws are pretty much it, and they aren't even enforced that well. It's hoplophobia, don't even try to reason with them. They're the type to go into utter panic if they see a guy in the street exercising his right to open carry. Don't talk about reason and use a term that is completely unreasonable. It is not a phobia to fear people carrying lethal weapons. Coming from a country where they ban blades longer than 3 inches, I understand your fear. It's probably best you stay on that side of the Atlantic if you're so scared. Leave the preservation of constitutional principles to the Americans
You're going to warn me for country bashing, micronesia?
Nagano if you want to talk about fear, try living in my town without your gun.
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On January 16 2013 08:53 bardtown wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 08:41 Nagano wrote:On January 16 2013 08:39 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 08:34 Nagano wrote:On January 16 2013 08:31 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 08:26 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 06:28 Jormundr wrote:
[quote]
Just because nukes haven't killed anyone recently doesn't mean that it isn't their purpose.
Just because I use cyanide to paint my house doesn't mean that it isn't a poison.
Eating my own shit doesn't suddenly make it food.
Similarly, firing a gun at a target range doesn't mean that its primary purpose is for fun and games. Unless you've taken the Hippocratic oath or double pinky promised to never ever shoot somebody.
Guns are tools for killing people. If you cannot understand that, you are not mature enough to be near one. How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events. On January 16 2013 06:40 bardtown wrote:
One thing immediately picked up on (paraphrasing): New York had over 15x the homicide rate of London for over 200 years, before England's gun control laws could come into place. They then say later "America did not, after all, suddenly become a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been an important feature of American life throughout its history." What a completely null point, then. It is well known that England had limitations on gun ownership beyond what America has ever had from before America's foundation.
I don't really have the time or the qualifications to critique these papers, but I will say that their data seems to ignore a key point. They say it is difficult to assess whether violent crimes which happen with guns would have happened in some other form were guns unavailable. It should be clear that school shootings are facilitated by the availability of guns and would not happen to the same extent with other forms of weaponry. For me, school shootings alone are sufficient reason for a blanket ban on firearms. The availability of firearms has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line.
They also use only statistics from within the US. This is questionable, as guns are prevalent throughout the country (also the conclusion of the paper is basically that the data available is insufficient to draw a conclusion. This is not in favour of gun ownership).
The ten myths one is ridiculously selective in its use of facts and not at all credible. For example, whilst gun ownership is high in Switzerland, guns are acquired after national service. The training they receive there adds a whole new level to their restriction of firearms in comparison with the US. They are not freely traded, and they do not have guns engrained into their national psyche. Look at it this way. You own a gun, you're a stable individual with no intent of using it, like those in Switzerland. And yet America has numerous problems with social inequalities and mental health that Switzerland either does not have or would be screened for in the national service process. The availability of guns in the US is therefore a more significant risk.
You are ignoring the fact that the availability of guns enables this gang culture and the levels of violence related with it. Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are. The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do. As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours. As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery. Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL A poor argument. More people use alcohol with more frequency than people use guns. Hence more raw deaths per year. But you're right, alcohol is dangerous. That's why alcohol control laws have been put in place, similar to what needs to happen with guns. Thanks for agreeing with me. P.S. No takesies backsies How does the frequency of alcohol use make it any less worthy of legislation? The victims are just as dead. If anything, it's frequency should make it more worthy of legislation, i.e. there's more chance for things to go wrong. And what alcohol controls are in place? The drinking age, and open container laws are pretty much it, and they aren't even enforced that well. It's hoplophobia, don't even try to reason with them. They're the type to go into utter panic if they see a guy in the street exercising his right to open carry. Don't talk about reason and use a term that is completely unreasonable. It is not a phobia to fear people carrying lethal weapons. Coming from a country where they ban blades longer than 3 inches, I understand your fear. It's probably best you stay on that side of the Atlantic if you're so scared. Leave the preservation of constitutional principles to the Americans You're going to warn me for country bashing, micronesia? Nagano if you want to talk about fear, try living in my town without your gun.
So you're saying you'd prefer to have one? I just feel that cognitive dissonance radiating. Feels good.
Anyway, if you haven't already, and I don't think you have, http://www.assaultweapon.info
I could type it all out but I feel that website is really well produced and you should just visit it yourself.
User was warned for this post
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I own guns (including "assault rifles") because I can and want to, it's as simple as that. It's a right deeply ingrained in US culture. As a citizen of the USA, why would I care about what some UKer or Euro thought about guns? That's right, I don't.
If I'm pro gun ownership, does it rustle my jimmies that they are banned in the UK or Australia? Fuck no, not a single shit was given. LMAO at anyone trying to argue about gun ownership laws in a country they done even live in.
User was warned for this post
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On January 16 2013 08:54 Nagano wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2013 08:53 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 08:41 Nagano wrote:On January 16 2013 08:39 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 08:34 Nagano wrote:On January 16 2013 08:31 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 08:26 Jormundr wrote:On January 16 2013 07:52 Millitron wrote:On January 16 2013 07:24 bardtown wrote:On January 16 2013 07:07 Millitron wrote:
[quote]
How about javelins? They were invented to kill. Same with bows. But people still use them in sporting events.
[quote]
Did you see that the same day as the Newtown shooting, a man in China knifed around 20 schoolchildren? How about Timothy McVeigh? he just used fertilizer and a truck. Guns are not to blame, the individuals behind them are.
The availability of alcohol has no benefit, and endangers the lives of children. That's the bottom line. If you want to save children, get rid of alcohol first, it kills far more kids than guns do.
As for the statistics, I don't really care. Your statistics leave out just as many socioeconomic factors. There are no good, unbiased stats. I'm cool with not using the ones on my side if you're cool with not using yours.
As for Switzerland and the mental health stuff, I'm all for background checks for purchasing guns. Violent criminals or the mentally infirm should not have guns. But gun violence is only a symptom, not the disease. Until we treat the disease, i.e. shitty mental healthcare, we'll just bounce from one crisis to the next, putting bandaids on each one when we really need open-heart surgery.
Guns do not enable gang culture, the illegality of pot, and the porosity of the border does. If pot was legal, the market would fall out from under gangs, and they'd simply go out of business, per se. If the border was less porous, you could further shut down the illegal drug market. Take away the guns, and the gangs will just switch weapons, or even just get illegal guns. Take away their markets though, and that's game over. Make one valid point, please. Note that those children in China did not die. Had it been a gun attack, they would have. Bows and javelins are dangerous, but not to the extent that guns are. Want to provide an example of fertiliser as a weapon for each example I can cite for gun massacres? Again you try to divert the issue at hand. STOP BRINGING UP ALCOHOL AS A WAY TO AVOID THE ISSUE WE'RE DISCUSSING. Yes, gun crime is a symptom of deeper issues, but the restriction of guns can restrict the damage done by the symptom. America ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSING ITS HEALTHCARE, SOCIAL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ISSUES. NOBODY IS DENYING THIS. Cannabis is illegal in many countries. Those street dealers with the guns are selling crack, not weed. Maybe capslock will help your reading comprehension, but you want to ignore statistics anyway, because they're incomplete. You want an argument based on nothing but prejudice. You do not know that those children in china would have died had it been a gun. Being shot is not an automatic death sentence. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=0You also do not know that they would always live if he had not had a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre8 killed, 13 wounded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre7 killed, 10 injured. I'm not bringing up alcohol to avoid the issue. It's an analogy, and a fitting one at that. Alcohol has no legitimate uses beyond recreation. And alcohol causes thousands of deaths. Alcohol causes ~75,000 deaths a year: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6089353/ns/health-addictions/t/alcohol-linked-us-deaths-year/Even excluding cirrhosis, alcohol related accidents accounted for more deaths than ALL gun deaths in the US that year. Guns only cause ~31,000: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htmIf you want to save lives, why try to restrict the guns when alcohol kills over twice as many people, and is practically unrestricted? I'm going to guess it's because you have no experience with guns. They don't mean anything to you, while you do like alcohol. You're OK with legislating against things that have no importance to you, but you do enjoy a drink now and then. Well alcohol doesn't really mean anything to me, but I do enjoy shooting empty cans or cardboard boxes every now and then. I also appreciate the whole defense against tyranny thing, but I've covered that enough. I want an argument based on logic and reason. A Priori rationale means more to me than A Posteriori. Stats can be tweaked, poorly represented, or even forged outright, logic cannot. I never said legalizing cannabis would completely solve the gang issue. Remember the other half of my plan was to tighten border security to cut the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Edit: fixed a broken URL A poor argument. More people use alcohol with more frequency than people use guns. Hence more raw deaths per year. But you're right, alcohol is dangerous. That's why alcohol control laws have been put in place, similar to what needs to happen with guns. Thanks for agreeing with me. P.S. No takesies backsies How does the frequency of alcohol use make it any less worthy of legislation? The victims are just as dead. If anything, it's frequency should make it more worthy of legislation, i.e. there's more chance for things to go wrong. And what alcohol controls are in place? The drinking age, and open container laws are pretty much it, and they aren't even enforced that well. It's hoplophobia, don't even try to reason with them. They're the type to go into utter panic if they see a guy in the street exercising his right to open carry. Don't talk about reason and use a term that is completely unreasonable. It is not a phobia to fear people carrying lethal weapons. Coming from a country where they ban blades longer than 3 inches, I understand your fear. It's probably best you stay on that side of the Atlantic if you're so scared. Leave the preservation of constitutional principles to the Americans You're going to warn me for country bashing, micronesia? Nagano if you want to talk about fear, try living in my town without your gun. So you're saying you'd prefer to have one?
I'm saying I'd rather face every drunk, abusive thug in the country than have a gun at the expense of children's lives.
Just FYI, I don't care about your distinction between assault rifles and pistols. All guns should be restricted. Single shot rifles for hunters as a possible exception.
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On January 16 2013 08:56 CookieFactory wrote:
I own guns (including "assault rifles") because I can and want to, it's as simple as that. It's a right deeply ingrained in US culture. As a citizen of the USA, why would I care about what some UKer or Euro thought about guns? That's right, I don't.
If I'm pro gun ownership, does it rustle my jimmies that they are banned in the UK or Australia? Fuck no, not a single shit was given. LMAO at anyone trying to argue about gun ownership laws in a country they done even live in.
Until one of theirs is one of the most vocal proponents of gun prohibition in the media today (I'm looking at you, Piers Morgan).
You do make a good point though, it makes me question why I advocate against gun prohibition. But then I realize that we all have to take a stand against those who wish to take your rights away. I fight for racial, gender, and orientation equality under the 14th Amendment, I fight for due process, freedom of speech, and whenever those are under attack I try to put effort defending those as well. It's only fitting that you too should try and invoke reason and responsibility when the 2A is under attack from politicians and the media.
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EPT
