Another day, another shooting in the US

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Acid King
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Acid King »

O. Van Bruce wrote: Why does west Europe citizens have more rights and the same degree of liberty than an american citizen without the right of a normal person to use a firearm? we end up living more healthily, longer and with less preocupations and fears.
As far as I know, that's not necessarily true. European speech codes are more restrictive than in the US, for example, plus you have stuff like France's headscarf ban that would never pass muster in the states. The history of western Europe is much, much different than that of the United States and the formative experience of the United States is immensely different. It's not surprising the US and Europe have diverging values.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

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Just ban goths. They serve no purpose anyway.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Skykid »

RGC wrote:Just ban goths. They serve no purpose anyway.
lol
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Stormwatch »

mesh control wrote:http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compa ... 5,69,10,91

Guns clearly are not the problem.
Let me fix that link for you...

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compa ... 178,192,26

Regulating weapons, keeping them off the hands of incompetent people, is not a bad idea; but in the American context, such killing sprees are statistically minor. It's about poverty, gang violence, drug dealers, this sorta thing. I think you would do more to reduce violence by, for example, decriminalizing drugs and treating addiction as a matter of public health rather than crime.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Skykid »

Stormwatch wrote:
mesh control wrote:http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compa ... 5,69,10,91

Guns clearly are not the problem.
Let me fix that link for you...

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compa ... 178,192,26
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Skyknight »

Part of the quandary seems to be our less-than-ideal mental health system. We've yet to develop a dependable way to ensure that those with mental maladies get the care they need. And it doesn't help that there seems to be a belief that it's YOUR duty to contend with your family's mental issues; you may not call upon the state/populace for assistance if you want to remain respectable. Corollary: your family's fault.

As for where our tendency to valorize guns came from...I'd say one part 2nd Amendment (originalist cast), one hundred nineteen parts relatively recent frontier existence. Then again, I don't know what Australia's situation with firearms is...
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by O. Van Bruce »

Stormwatch wrote:
Let me fix that link for you...

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compa ... 178,192,26
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compa ... 178,192,26

Take that! And we only have 40 million people! (I'm Colombian)

Now seriously, you are getting things out of context, stormwatch. If I take in account my experience living in Colombia, which I think can be applied to most of the countries of latinamerica, your ussual low-mid class worker family or even low class family doesn't consider neccesary having a gun in their houses, maybe a machete or some kind of contundent weapon, but a gun?... nope.

In the U.S.A it seems like more and more people have paranoia and buy lots of weapons.

Gun related homicides in our homelands are basically due to poverty and desesperation, which is the lesser cause, and very large and organized Mafias, which are the majority. There are very few cases related to some crazy particular that have 3 or 4 firearms on his house.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by neorichieb1971 »

I know this is a bit extreme. But this is about collateral damage. In a situation where a country can sell guns openly (with little gun control) you can understand that at some point someone will die due to misuse of said guns.

But the people making the policies live in walled properties and the schools their kids go to have loads of cash. Only demented pupils who lost their way would ever attack someone with no regard for life in a school like that.

But move along 10 miles to the bad part of town and the culture is very different. You have drugs, thugs, bullies all striving to make a living out of peanuts. A gun in those areas is probably going to be used a lot more frequently in that area.

Going back to collateral damage.

If the USA sold nukes to other countries, how long would it be until someone fired one? A year, 2 years? The collateral damage isn't acceptable and therefore the nukes will never be sold.


So the policy in the USA is.. Its ok if a few people get shot, because freedoms are more important than lives. If a few people die as result of said freedoms, so be it.

If you keep the gun gates open, its only a matter of time. Some hick town boy or girl will just copy some movie, game or even a past shootout to make a statement of some kind. Ultimately, the people affected by this ordeal should vote, not politicians. They are not affected personally. Why do people in the USA need guns anyway? Just stay in safe places at night. Put cops in the bad areas.

Historically America makes its own problems, gets stuck down a policital dead end street and never changes policy for one reason or another.

It was only a few months ago some idiot shot up some people in a Batman movie FFS.

If the policy doesn't change, perhaps school kids should all buy bullet proof vests to go to school. A new uniform lol.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Drum »

Acid King wrote:
Drum wrote: So now look at the gun laws in those countries:

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compa ... 31,177,178

I guess you're right - guns aren't the problem.
It's a flawed comparison. America has 50 different states and 51 different sets of gun laws so doing 1:1 comparisons with other countries is borderline worthless.
Spare me, it was a simple rejoinder to a feeble and incomplete argument. If you have stats that break it down by state, go nuts. I'm entirely confident they'll back my point anyway (adjusting for stuff like population density and poverty levels).

It's also comical that you had the nerve to type that in the same post you typed this:
Acid King wrote:Violent crime has declined while gun ownership has stayed fairly consistent over the past 20 years, even though laws have been liberalized. Make of that what you will.
Look at the states with the biggest drops. Look at where the drops are. Look at New York, Illinois, California. Check out their laws and check out the numbers around, say, 1994 (for example!). They haven't been uniformly liberalised across the whole of the US, have they?
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by DragonInstall »

So many questions in this case.

Why did the mom buy so many firearms? Why would she not lock them up? Especially since she has a autistic child. Also why target the kids?

I'm so glad the guy shot himself. Save us tax payers money, since obviously he would be considered insane and will be living in a institute.

Banning guns may some what solve the rare cases of crazies, but doing so would create a lot more other problems.

US will never ban guns, so I have no idea why people keep bringing it up. It'll never happen.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by DEL »

There was a man called Bill Cooper who stated in the 1990s that the Govt wanted to remove guns from the hands of the American people, but it was not for the reasons you have been surmising here.

DragonInstall wrote;
US will never ban guns, so I have no idea why people keep bringing it up. It'll never happen.
Barry Soetoro has been trying to sign an Arms Treaty recently that would ban automatic firearms - remove them from the hands of the American Public.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by O. Van Bruce »

DragonInstall wrote:So many questions in this case.

Why did the mom buy so many firearms? Why would she not lock them up? Especially since she has a autistic child. Also why target the kids?

I'm so glad the guy shot himself. Save us tax payers money, since obviously he would be considered insane and will be living in a institute.

Banning guns may some what solve the rare cases of crazies, but doing so would create a lot more other problems.

US will never ban guns, so I have no idea why people keep bringing it up. It'll never happen.
Man, I keep repeating. I'ts not about banning guns, it's about making then harder to get in a legal way. Make people have some psichological and ethical test, and teach then how and when to use then legally before giving then any kind of firearm.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by DragonInstall »

I'm all down for making guns available only for the sane, but taking some psychological and ethical test probably wouldn't do anything.

In the case of this school shooting, it was the mother's fault for not locking the guns up. She is the owner of the guns....

I don't agree with the banning of automatics per say... I think there should be a law to prevent it from being made to shoot in rapid succession and the clip size should be reduced. California already has that law though.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by O. Van Bruce »

DragonInstall wrote:I'm all down for making guns available only for the sane, but taking some psychological and ethical test probably wouldn't do anything.
What would happen if no one takes the driving license exam?
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Super Laydock »

We can just copy/paste all arguments here next time shit like this happens (and it will).

"Over the counter" sale of guns, and still surprised that this happens more often than in strict gun-regulated countries. :roll:
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by O. Van Bruce »

Super Laydock wrote:We can just copy/paste all arguments here next time shit like this happens (and it will).

"Over the counter" sale of guns, and still surprised that this happens more often than in strict gun-regulated countries. :roll:
Yeah, they'll never change. It's almost a complete insensibility to the problem in most parts of the USA.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by neorichieb1971 »

Without deaths, just think about how many robberies happen everynight in the USA due to guns.

Think about how many people have handicaps due to guns.

Think about how many accidents have occurred due to guns.


Stupid analogy. But in the UK the ecstasy drug is illegal because 1% of the population are going to die if they take it. Guns only kill when they are used, its their purpose, and you bet your ass that 1% of guns sold kill people.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by BulletMagnet »

njiska wrote:First of all the NRA are a bunch of sensationalist nut jobs no better then the other side of the gun lobby.
I'm sure you're not the only "pro-gun" (for lack of a better term) person to feel that way, and am aware that a relatively small percentage of gun owners in the US are actually NRA members, but at least from where I'm standing there seems to be very little public pushback from "responsible" gun owners to the extreme policies the NRA advocates, let alone their borderline-psychopathic responses to crises like this latest one: every Muslim on the planet is expected to openly condemn every terrorist act that occurs anywhere at all or risk being accused of "closet sympathy" for the terrorists, but I'm not aware of the existence of any gun advocacy group that could begin to be called a "foil" for the NRA (maybe there is one; feel free to point me in their direction, as nobody else is). And yes, one could argue that "they don't speak for me, and it's not my responsibility to answer for them", but seriously, they're doing at least as much damage to the discourse, and gun owners' collective reputation worldwide, as the "ban everything" extremists on the other end, and pretty much never get called out for it, at least in the mainstream. If gun owners aren't the ones who should be speaking out against them, then whose prerogative is it, exactly?
Yeah, but there's more ways to kill someone then just a knife or gun.
Indeed there are, but as others have stated few of them (in this country, at least) hit the sweet spot of both effectiveness and easiness to obtain to the same extent that guns do. Sure, one could keep spouting the "don't blame the tool, blame the user" line until the cows come home, but in the meantime those tools and users keep combining to ever-more-horrifying effect. You're certainly right that there should be ample focus on the latter, but I wouldn't take that as a free pass to completely ignore the former either.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Octopod »

I wonder what would have happened to this 18 year old girl and her baby is she wouldn't have had a gun.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/okla-woman-sho ... MzQbW_LRME
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

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O. Van Bruce wrote:
DragonInstall wrote:I'm all down for making guns available only for the sane, but taking some psychological and ethical test probably wouldn't do anything.
What would happen if no one takes the driving license exam?

Aren't we talking about keeping guns from people with the intent to kill? Surely that wouldn't be hard for one to fake a test like that.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Bee Cool »

Sure guns save some people, but statistically they account for more unjustified deaths than they do for protection.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Octopod »

Bee Cool wrote:Sure guns save some people, but statistically they account for more unjustified deaths than they do for protection.

Maybe. I haven't seen any numbers to confirm or deny this. Either way though criminals will still get guns if they are banned but the people who want to protect themselves won't be able to.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by PC Engine Fan X! »

I have a feeling that what transpired yesterday with the 20-year old gunman and all those lives lost, he probably watched the news about last week's shooting rampage in Oregon and thought that he could try something like that. There are some crazy copycats out there just waiting for their 15 seconds of fame...so be it.

You might recall the 1989 Cleveland Elementary school shooting incident (in Stockton, CA) in which the gunman, Partrick Purdy, at one time attending the very same school during his childhood, used an AK-47 on his unfortunate victims at the school grounds. After the shooting spree, he fired the AK-47 on himself and died ("taking the easy way out" rather than facing law enforcement and being caught/dragged through the court system/etc).

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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Moniker »

neorichieb1971 wrote:Stupid analogy. But in the UK the ecstasy drug is illegal because 1% of the population are going to die if they take it. Guns only kill when they are used, its their purpose, and you bet your ass that 1% of guns sold kill people.
What gun ownership debate boils down to is how much power you want to take from the individual and give to the state. Taking guns away from citizens reduces their power several fold: not only do they lose the pure power of the weapon itself, but they also lose power relative to the police (and for that matter, the military). I am uncomfortable with a situation where the police in general are more powerful than the people in general, as I am a believer in the axiom that power corrupts. The more accountable the police and government are to the people, the better.

Suspicion of authority is hardwired into the America's beloved founding documents, and, I would say, American culture as well. This is a sort of idealism that in Western Europe and elsewhere, is outmatched by pragmatism. Individualism is perhaps the most enshrined of values, and sadly some individuals exercise the power they enjoy in the US to do horrible things. I would argue that individualism is worth preserving in spite of the fact that some people make bad, even horrible, decisions. If you think that the government should act as a parent who outlaws anything it deems harmful, then so be it. But that is not its proper role, in my opinion.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by DragonInstall »

I don't mean to start anything but I thought statistically, places that banned guns had an increase in crime.

Basically the law abiding citizens don't own guns, and the ones who break the law.... well get guns illegally. Knowing the innocent don't have a means to defend themselves, crime rate goes up because there is less to fear.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Acid King »

Drum wrote: Look at the states with the biggest drops. Look at where the drops are. Look at New York, Illinois, California. Check out their laws and check out the numbers around, say, 1994 (for example!).
And? If you took ten seconds to use the tool I linked to you'd see the drops are pretty much across the board. Florida had the third biggest drop, which was by more than half. Violent crime in Georgia, South Carolina, Arizona, Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Missouri, Wyoming, and Indiana all had drops between 47 and 34% despite their considerably lax gun laws. Two of the three states that received zeroes from the Brady campaign had their crime rates drop by 25% or more. Only 9 states had actual increases in violent crime.
They haven't been uniformly liberalised across the whole of the US, have they?
In general, yeah, they have. The states by and large have liberalized their gun laws over that time frame, not made them more stringent. With Illinois' law being struck down, all 50 states will have concealed carry laws, 39 of which are shall issue states or don't require a license at all. The vast bulk of that (something like four-fifths i think) happened in the past 20 years. Then you have the laws that have been struck down in the Supreme court and the expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, the proliferation of Castle doctrine states and Stand Your Ground laws.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Octopod »

Vermont has the most liberal gun laws in the country while also having one of the lowest violent crime rates.
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Skykid wrote:Country's got a serious problem. Called guns.
The problem is crazy people. Sure, I'll agree it's in the culture somehow, but you could blame the media just as much for getting the stories of murderers out there (not that I can see any realistic way of preventing this from happening - other than another ban on the media reporting, which we should all surely agree isn't something a civilized nation should do).

But if we had to ban something, we should ban crazy people. Duh.

There are a lot of unjustified beliefs on both sides, but here is one: All people and communities have exactly the same needs with regards to personal firearms protection.

This obviously isn't right. On the border with Mexico there is a very real possibility of confrontation with armed drugs smugglers or human traffickers. In the wilder parts of the country, it might be bears. America did its best to kill off all the indigenous wildlife for a few centuries but we haven't been quite as successful as inhabitants of the Isles or Europe, and in fact we pride ourselves on trying to reintroduce populations of wild wolves, bears and the like - but where there be bears there also are people with handguns for protection (wolves and coyotes aren't as problematic as coyotes, packs of dogs feral or otherwise, and other escaped household pests).

I am general agreement with njiska (there are a few wrinkles to the Switzerland case - my understanding is that by law you can't fire the sealed box of issue ammunition under penalty, but you could always go buy your own - the basic claim that it is a case where weapons are available but rarely used seems to be basically true) and some agreement with trap15, but firearms education only would help make conscientious firearms owners better citizen firearms owners, and unfortunately that would not be a quick fix here.

There are various reasons why mandating something that might have helped in this case - like having a gun safe - could also be counterproductive or ineffective, again in a case like this. The perp could still steal a key or combination or trick somebody; of course having your gun locked away might take precious seconds away from planning a response, which means not just less time to shoot an attacker if necessary, but less time making the important decision whether to shoot or even get the weapon.

What has been going on under the surface, invisible to most non-gun owners, is surge of awareness about firearms in recent years in the firearms community - YouTube has been an example where the mass media culture, free of "professional" editorial control and bias, has not only seen a lot of Tex Grebner-style incidents (and much worse - Tex was arguably just not careful enough and unlucky, rather than actually going out of his way to be a showoff), but it has also shed a lot of light on what a conscientious gun owner needs to think about. It's a free resource which lets people in any place where YouTube is available learn a lot for good or evil; on the whole, you should bet on good, but only if there are tireless advocates of what is right. You have people like these guys doing their best to get the word out there about what should be done. In fact there is a culture of haranguing people posting firearms videos on YouTube (and on TV, of course) for not being careful gun owners. What is different about gun ownership from many other communities is that we haven't gotten to a point where gun ownership is considered a "profession" - obviously it seems different from professions in many areas - but there are many ways in which a "professional" attitude towards firearms ownership and use would allow the community to better police itself (to some degree), in something somewhat like how professional organizations do a lot for professional responsibility when conduct may significantly impact public safety or good (like in engineering, law, research into infectious diseases, doctors - the latter two cases of course are areas where there have been some well-publicized cases of people with problems or criminal intent misusing their position even to kill people.)

Up until that point, the "professionalism" of firearms owners is generally clearly separate from simple criminal intent or insanity, which have been a problem since before there was law, and it is separate from how firearms play into insanity and crime. One firearms owner can be perfectly well acquainted with all the subtleties they can be expected to know and practice - they know their firearm's operation, they keep up on their training and don't say "okay, I took a 2 day course, done," they know about unique safety concerns for their firearm (i.e. cylinder-barrel gaps in revolvers, the danger of squib rounds), they have drilled how act in situations more realistic than firing at a stable target from behind a firing like, they know how to talk to a police officer at a traffic stop if they have been pulled over while concealed carrying, they remember to wear their plugs and they use a sound suppressor when possible, and so on - but these points alone don't ensure firearms won't get into the hands of crazy people.

The general argument against firearms and some responses:

I am not really sure how to best respond to the general argument - probably the strongest one - that acknowledges that banning firearms won't stop crazy people from being crazy, or criminals from being criminal; it just makes it more difficult to get a firearm that will let you shoot lots of people. If I did have a really good and simple response I'd be really famous, because the argument seems quite strong. Instead, traditionally the responses are piecemeal - that you would trade security for liberty (as Jefferson might say) and also trading personal responsibility for a feeling of comfort. I realize that many pro-ban people know that banning firearms won't resolve crime, and that's not what they are aiming for. That opens in turn an unconvincing discussion about probabilities and incidence, where either side might try to show that the world is significantly safer under their system. Yet I have pointed out that there is no evidence that a one-size-all action makes any sense here. One of the problems is inherently that you don't know what people are going to do. So we have a "right" to go vote, a right to drive a car, to go to the bank - rights to do lots of things which was intended for one purpose, which anybody might actually subvert. Many responses to the firearms debate talk about these rights, so I'll just assume we all realize what some of the typical responses could be.

"Modeling society" criticisms: People also think about is not just about rights but about the type of society we would have if we took seriously, in all cases, the utilitarian argument that we should do whatever makes everybody best off. Not only does such a system conventionally get criticized because of problems like the Nazi bad government example, and it also doesn't really do anything to prevent the cause of dangerously antisocial behavior (unless you can actually change people's natures, in which case the firearms ban is unnecessary since we could just mandate the crazy out of everyone, which again doesn't seem realistic as a goal), but it should also be looked on sceptically because utilitarianism doesn't provide hard and fast rules, but rather sliding goalposts.

"Strict liability" criticisms: There is a long-standing debate in legal scholarship about strict liability rules, mostly based on whether people should be convicted of crimes based entirely on the letter of the law (and although strict liability laws may be in place for utilitarian needs, their validity can easily be refuted if the utilitarian calculus changes). All but the most blinkered pro-strict liability advocate realize that part of what is important is that people should not be penalized for victimless, harmless incidents where a person just happened - even against their best intentions and in spite of having taken all the steps reasonable to prevent it - to violate the law's letter (one of the classic cases is a fine for a trucker who had his truck weighed, then went to another weigh station where he was weighed again and found to be just over the limit). Intention should be a reason we penalize people too, and recklessness plays some role too. (Firearms, and airplanes, and possibly cars, are almost unique in that people ascribe dangerously unpredictable natures to them which they do not to many other objects which in reality also have some degree of unreliability, like the ceiling over your head which could just come crashing down at any moment.)

But one reason to be very skeptical of the strict liability style project is that it would constrain people even according to facts they cannot have any knowledge of - like if I reasonably thought, absent insanity (and that is traditionally a defense), that I was putting a coin into a parking meter, but instead I was actually unfastening the peg which kept the piano suspended in air. And I think that if we can be skeptical of the argument that strict liability is a reasonable way of administering the law, we should also be skeptical of any argument that says that your person does not count - essentially that you have no dignity as a person (I don't mean to sound ultraconservative here, it's just the fact of seeing it) as regards making up your own mind about issues, but instead it should always be second-guessed, and even second-guessed before you found the situation.

Good firearms owners realize that the best tool they have available to prevent making a stupid decision is practice and education - and (if you grant firearms ownership as necessary for debate, i.e. in the case of police; substitute something for "firearms" if you want to see the general case for banning X, where X is alleged to be harmful, in spite of having many qualities which may in fact be necessary to life) education is no guarantee that we make the right decisions. Yet the idea of strictly banning weapons, regardless of the circumstances, seems to be akin to saying that education and experience don't matter and unique circumstances aren't ever found. This view of the world seems very nearly incoherent to me - it wants to say that they have already considered all the cases and can predict failure, in this one (obviously not), but they also want to say that you meet with success if you ban all these cases. I need to consider this further, but the problem is either that things are assumed to always fit a pattern, or there is a contradiction between the parts of that claim (I didn't lay one out here, but I have the feeling there is one).

I apologize for the poor structure of the above; I will try to revisit it later but this is just a draft for my own use - hopefully somebody will find it helpful in part.
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Ed Oscuro
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Re: Another day, another school shooting in the US

Post by Ed Oscuro »

BulletMagnet wrote:
njiska wrote:First of all the NRA are a bunch of sensationalist nut jobs no better then the other side of the gun lobby.
I'm sure you're not the only "pro-gun" (for lack of a better term) person to feel that way, and am aware that a relatively small percentage of gun owners in the US are actually NRA members, but at least from where I'm standing there seems to be very little public pushback from "responsible" gun owners
There is the NRA and there are the libertarians - they're interesting but I have never been on board with them (and despite my homages to rights or liberty, I don't think it is reasonable to see things as black and white as they do, just as I think the utilitarian or other arguments are misguided).

My big problem with your concern is that this is a matter of accident.

Take a look at Octopod's case. I think I know what it is about: A single mother shoots a home invader who wanted to rape and probably kill her. This IS the NORMAL in lethal firearms use (the normal in firearms use is somebody saying "that's a purdy wheelgun you got there Tex" or "hold my beer..." but I digress). Actually, that's not even the normal - the normal is probably that somebody brandishes a firearm and that stops the argument from escalating further.

Now consider what I have written before about the active part of gun owner culture which criticizes the "hold my beer" population of YouTubers and other idiots. There's a real attempt to educate people there. But they don't own the media, nor the NRA and libertarian think tanks (a libertarian think tank is also called a "keg" ...of acid) so that perspective doesn't get out there. The stories about people saving their lives with guns and then having their civil rights violated don't hit the news. Instead we get the news that pleases that tiny, tiny proportion of the population that thinks happy puppies, butterflies, and rainbows when you think of horror.

I know the police have a perspective, but it seems to me a cruel irony that a police spokesman in Detroit was misleading people about their rights when some unwanted pro guns types showed up to a gun buyback program and offered more, and this in the city that saw the first use of the "home as castle" defense, again with a black man against whites.
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