louisg wrote:Ed Oscuro wrote:However I would leave it up to the discretion of the individual to say (within reason; it does seem reasonable that fully automatic weapons are highly controlled, after all!) what is useful to them. All the politicians blathering on about how people "don't need" feature X, Y, or Z have obviously never realized that these "features" can save lives, help civilian familiarization with service weapons (useful in peacetime as well as the runup to war) and most importantly have never realized the "points system" some hack dreamed up for counting up how many "bad" points a weapon had before it could be denied import was a clever farce with no real significance other than to frustrate users.
Well, if anyone wanted to make a difference ban-wise, they'd ban handguns, not rifles.
Rifle and shotgun attacks are far more lethal than most handguns. We should carefully note that aside from the rare cases where somebody has brazenly gone out with a rifle for criminal activity - like a gang (Tubbs would like to remind us all that "I hate machine guns!") or one of the recent massacres - most criminals would use handguns, which are generally far less deadly, because they are convenient and concealable. But oh goodness! Such are the reasons why police use them as well, and law-abiding owners too. Since society is unlikely to tolerate citizens walking around armed with rifles (as you might see in a place where the argument for going so armed is implicitly understood - like Israel or certain parts of the southern US border, perhaps) this means that we are going to limit homeowners, people in private security, and others to an inconvenient solution which will lead many to stop going armed or greatly inconvenience them, while criminals may go armed as before.
Now, the sheer number of deaths and wounds attributed to handguns, as well as the statistics presented earlier about how they seem to help facilitate suicides that might have been avoided otherwise -
Anyway, lots of weapons have features that can "save lives" because they're powerful/easier to hit shit with, and would help "familiarize" people with military-grade weaponry. Not all of them are legal, for generally good reasons. So, I don't know where you're going there.
Any specifics or are you just going to throw up your hands and give up? Very little I can respond to in here, except to say that I could not say that familiarization is
alone a sufficient condition for allowing freedom to arm. It is a supporting reason, at least as far as I've developed it here. But I think we should be careful before we throw away one of the advantages the nation's soldiers have traditionally enjoyed, simply because various populations (other populations - I don't mean this as any kind of a class war opener but it should be noted that the nation's military service members are more highly representative of some parts of the country, and less in others) within the country have determined that they know what is best for everyone. I think we should allow every area the chance to make some determination on this kind of issue, since locality really does matter in this kind of debate. And this seems to follow logically from my discussion earlier about situations where the individual or government is advantaged - I think there is a better reason to be less friendly towards the idea of carrying weapons in densely populated areas with heavy police coverage, as opposed to carrying weapons in sparsely settled areas with gaps in government services.
But as far as I can tell, the only reason people buy a lot of the more powerful guns, scopes, etc, isn't that they're worried about home defense, it's because they think the guns kick ass. But they don't want to say that, because that sounds less than completely serious. I'd personally respect people more if they were honest about being enthusiasts and hobbyists instead of coming up with bullshit reasons why every home needs an AR-15. Serious business
That is an interesting dimension to it, too, but are you going to start requiring Hummer owners and soccer moms to prove that they shouldn't just be driving around in a plastic smart car? Or the guy who owns a two-ton ex-military truck because he's a collector - obviously, we could say that if such a truck were to lose its brakes or be driven recklessly, it could do a lot more damage! The problem with this "what's needed" view is that it assumes some outsider should (or can) determine what a person needs, and it also denigrates the ability of the owner to exercise their own caution in potentially dangerous situations. In the case of the driver I am thinking of (I have no idea where he would come down on the firearms debate), I recall that it was an SUV turning on red that totaled one of his Jaguars. Quite often you can only count on enthusiasts (amongst all the world's population) to know what they are doing. And also, what would your example tell us about video games? Surely it has occurred to you that some people not only like the "experience" of being a soldier or being in charge of deadly vehicles and weaponry, but they like the violence as well. And some would even admit this but they could also strenuously argue that they know the boundaries of conduct and reality - just as the driver of a heavy vehicle should have his license and watch all the signals, because he likes the heavy vehicle and not necessarily a particular use, and just as the owner of a firearm might enjoy "plinking" and target practice or hunting or have a demonstrable need for personal protection.
Yeah, obviously a lot of gun nuts like guns because they're supposed to be neat (I think they're rather boring in many ways actually). I don't see what that's supposed to tell us other than it is supposed to call into question the "seriousness" of gun owners, but that would be an ad hominem we wouldn't want to fall for, wouldn't you agree? If this "seriousness" of the hobby could tell us something profound about the seriousness exercised towards safety (it does not), or would tell us something about the intent of the weapon, then we might have something interesting to talk about.
Talking about the purpose of firearms gives us fewer obvious opportunities for reform than you might think because people with criminal intent don't reveal that intent ahead of time - unless somebody can be tricked into revealing their bad intent, it remains a secret (if it is a secret good intention, then obviously it is no problem). When you hear about the latest bomb plot bust, does the phrase "entrapment" ever enter your consciousness? This happens in much more mundane and less serious classes of offense, too, of course, of which firearms would be and is a chief example because the courts only need to be reminded of the "deadly nature" of a firearms to be convinced to throw the book at someone. It seems that we can use intent to validate cases of gun ownership (because the person is obviously good), or in cases as a misnomer because other judgements (psychological or criminal history) are really doing the work (where it's not undiscoverable "intent" but rather the observation of other people who are preventing a crime), or in some kind of "needs-based" test. If somebody misuses a firearm by accident, that has nothing at all to do with intent, of course. I realize that all probably sounds somewhat suspect, but I believe it is actually true. When we use "intent" in the law I think we're really asking people to try to do some armchair quarterbacking without having thrown the ball from the defendant's perspective.
I think the strongest case that can be made for limited gun ownership is simply the utilitarian "by the numbers" argument. But this is also an argument that cries out for a better thought-out solution than one that is merely ideologically satisfying. Banning slavery is a good example of something that is applicable everywhere and emotionally satisfying to think of, because any "stakeholders" who lose out in a slavery ban are profiting from a wrongdoing. But banning an entire class of handguns that are known to be useful (I won't comment on bans of "nuisance" firearms, except to say that it seems like some bans were directed against manufacturers and price points, i.e. trying to force guns out of the market without going through the trouble of a full ban, rather than quality concerns; banning the sale of new firearms that are dangerous to operate seems uncontroversial) sets us up to have to consider how heavy the bad consequences must be that we should accept in order to achieve the good ones. And tragically too many people are too short-sighted to see that calling for the nationally organized example will ensure that all relevant local distinctions are lost - so that either one camp is severely underserved by any resulting legislation, or the compromise ensures that no adequate legislative solutions are reached for any populations.
