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Sword and Sceptre posted:Whatever metric you're using mass shootings account for an insignificant statistical anomaly of deaths each year in the US. I too would like to live in a world where no one had guns and murdered each other but lets be realistic here that will never happen. Is gun control a hill worth dying on, is using you're limited political capital on this issue a smart choice? We have old people freezing to death and infants going hungry but lets take away bubbas AR. Meanwhile, in reality, gun deaths are neck-and-neck with traffic fatalities this year.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:02
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Sword and Sceptre posted:Is gun control a hill worth dying on, is using you're limited political capital on this issue a smart choice? No, it is not, America has a core of dedicated paranoid voters who think expanded background checks with a majority of support among Americans is a lizardman plot to exterminate the white man, and as long as congress is beholden to the gun lobby there's no point in frightening those people to the polls with pie-in-the-sky ideas like "let's not sell guns to violent criminals or kids with a documented history of psychological problems and a grudge against some scapegoat group"
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Dec 8, 2015 07:02
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The truth is that nobody cares about when gangsters and drug dealers kill each other. As long as they aren't robbing people and gunning them down like Batman's parents, they can kill each other all they want. Which is convenient, because they are probably the only people who will go out of their way to get illegal guns if guns were banned. Everyone else with guns has them for normal reasons like hunting or  home defense , and gets them legally, but end up using them to murder people anyway. The lesson is that normal people also have the potential to get pissed off and alienated enough to murder each other. It's not some scary outside group who need to be disarmed, it's loving us, we're the ones who can't be trusted with guns. We can be good for 99.99999% of our lives, but it just takes a couple of minutes of losing it in a lifetime to ruin things. With a few hundred million people, that 0.00001% of the time apparently ends up being thousands of people murdered per year.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:04
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Your Dunkle Sans posted:Not trying to derail the topic further, but I was thinking of a scenario like, let's say you're abducted by ISIS abroad with a few other journalists. Blindfolds come off a few hours later, you're with the other journalists and ISIS guys point guns at your heads. They say, convert and kill the guy next to you to prove your faith. If you don't, you die. You comply and kill the guy next to you, but you are rescued mid-scenario by US Special Forces and flown back home. The situation is described back home, now what? Dead Reckoning posted:You're a loving murderer is what. Yeah murder (or attempted murder) is one of the few acts to which duress isn't a defense. E: Oh wait I got one, that scene at the end of Spartacus where the Romans make Spartacus fight his bestie, and they're each planning to take a dive so the other lives but the Romans go "oh and the winner gets crucified" so suddenly it turns into a real death match where each tries his best to murder the other cleanly in order to spare him from the winner's gruesome and horrible torturous death. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 07:04
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah murder (or attempted murder) is one of the few acts to which duress isn't a defense. Really? So the correct option is to just... accept death? I imagine that would be a really hard choice to make, especially if you had a wife and kids back home you'd be willing to do anything to see again.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:10
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah murder (or attempted murder) is one of the few acts to which duress isn't a defense. Also, I think the burden of proof is on the state in any contention between the state and a citizen, whereas you think the citizen also must justify their actions. Also, you're retarded. Your Dunkle Sans posted:Really? So the correct option is to just... accept death? I imagine that would be a really hard choice to make, especially if you had a wife and kids back home you'd be willing to do anything to see again.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:24
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Why are you all of a sudden discussing trolly problems.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:25
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For those who have served in the military, a lot of confirmed kills are justified by a "it was you or me" reasoning, especially when it comes down to having to shoot kids they suspect might be rushing their convoy with a grenade. They may have saved lives, or they may have killed an innocent kid who was at the wrong place at the wrong time. You could argue said person was involuntarily involved, it's a morally gray area IMO. But, I'm more or less done with this derail. I appreciate your entertaining my hypothetical. Teriyaki Koinku fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 07:28
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Your Dunkle Sans posted:For those who have served in the military, a lot of confirmed kills are justified by a "it was you or me" reasoning, especially when it comes down to having to shoot kids they suspect might be rushing their convoy with a grenade. In the mil, it's understood that the "you or me" logic sometimes works both ways. Even though maybe neither of you particularly wanted it to come to that. You both might be in the right to kill each other, but you always had a choice.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:37
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If anyone wants an argument against certain people stockpiling lethal weapons (or a few laughs) look no further than the TFR rules thread.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:50
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Arglebargle III posted:Meanwhile, in reality, gun deaths are neck-and-neck with traffic fatalities this year. Lmao you're right, ill edit my post to be less abrasive. What the gently caress is wrong with America.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:54
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Meanwhile, our Glorious Leader is insisting that anyone on the no fly list (which contains babies, dogs, Marines, journalists, and serving members of Congress) should be barred from owning a firearm. 
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Dec 8, 2015 08:55
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-Troika- posted:Meanwhile, our Glorious Leader is insisting that anyone on the no fly list (which contains babies, dogs, Marines, journalists, and serving members of Congress) should be barred from owning a firearm. Those sound like a few good groups to start with.
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Dec 8, 2015 09:04
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I move we put Ted Kennedy back on the no-fly list, I don't think zombies should be allowed to own guns or have access to the brains of 200 or so captive air travellers.
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Dec 8, 2015 09:16
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-Troika- posted:Meanwhile, our Glorious Leader is insisting that anyone on the no fly list (which contains babies, dogs, Marines, journalists, and serving members of Congress) should be barred from owning a firearm. Hey, if you're gonna try to rear end-gently caress people's constitutionally protected rights without due process, you might as well go balls deep and add the list of people who you're already preventing from freedom of travel and freedom of association! I mean, it's not like the last three administrations haven't wiped their asses with the fourth through ninth amendments pretty much continuously in the name of the War on Terror.
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Dec 8, 2015 09:36
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muike posted:"mental health" gets cited as absolutely, positively, the number 1 reason gun violence happens Broadly speaking, it is. "Mental health" is a lot broader than simply acute medical conditions such as depression or schizophrenia, a person's mental health and state of mind is determined largely by environmental factors and social conditioning.
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Dec 8, 2015 09:40
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Tezzor posted:You seem to have difficulty answering the question. Why does almost nobody do this before committing crimes? I understand that you were determined to do it because you are a gun fanboy who wanted a neat toy (thanks for admitting to breaking federal law without being asked btw, when ancient demon "Obama" bursts from his skinsuit this will be very handy) but why do other people not do this? I'll save you the smugness. Because the vast majority of the 300+ million firearms in circulation in the US have never, and will never be used to commit a crime.
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Dec 8, 2015 09:51
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Liquid Communism posted:I'll save you the smugness. Because the vast majority of the 300+ million firearms in circulation in the US have never, and will never be used to commit a crime. Until they're made illegal, then they'll all have been used in committing a crime.
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Dec 8, 2015 09:52
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Bip Roberts posted:Until they're made illegal, then they'll all have been used in committing a crime. Well yes, that's how ex post facto laws work, although they're also explicitly prohibited by the Constitutuion (Art. 1 Sec. 9 & 10). But don't let that stop butthurt internet people from whining that they're so terrified of the populace that legal process is clearly unnecessary. I mean, what else have we learned from the post-9/11 world. If people are scared enough, statistics and laws don't matter nearly as much as the urge to have Done Something.
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Dec 8, 2015 10:06
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Tezzor posted:If it's so trivial and effective to machine a gun to make it fully automatic how come almost nobody seems to do it before committing a crime, even premeditated crimes like mass shootings or major robberies where it might prove useful Because generally machine guns (fully automatic) are useless for anything but spray and pray. Even the military just uses them to get the bad guys to hunker down while a team flank them. Machine guns are had to control, hungry machines. You either need to find a way to lock them down through some means like a tripod meaning your ability to move is gone, spray and hope to hit something, and ammo is fuckin' heavy. Seriously, go pick up a box of rifle ammo, then imagine having to haul 10 times that at the least. Now also add to that that making some guns full auto is dangerous, more dangerous to the shooter than they'd like because the modifications cause the gun to "run away" or simply put keep firing till all the ammo is gone whether you're pulling the trigger or not. Some guns would even destroy themselves in the process. Machine guns being some awesome murder machine is mostly hype from movies where everyone has access to one, unlimited ammo, and no recoil. Hell, might as well be asking why no one uses the bayonets some rifles use or the grenade launchers that are attached to the gun. It just isn't worth the effort SocketWrench fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 10:22
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There are over 250,000 or so legally owned and registered machine guns in the US. Since 1934, there have been (when last I checked) a total of two homicides committed with any of them in the US. One was a cop murdering an informant in 1988 with a department-owned MAC-11. The other was a doctor in Ohio who shot a colleague to death with a similar silenced MAC-11 in 1992. They simply aren't practical weapons outside of the battlefield conditions they were designed for. The available ones are hideously expensive thanks to the registry being closed in '86, and frankly they're mostly good for collecting and taking out to the range to hit the giggle switch and spend a lot of money very quickly. Crimes in general, and homicides in particular, primarily involve inexpensive concealable handguns. You'd do better to worry about Hi-Point cranking out $150 MSRP .380 subcompacts than every machine gun ever made by man.
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Dec 8, 2015 10:40
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There have only been two machine gun murders in a century after we used gun control to take them out of the hands of gangsters who were massacring people with them during prohibition. This is all the proof we need that gun control doesn't work. Also, for shame on the Bataclan and Mumbai shooters for bringing inferior automatic weapons when everyone knows they are useless.
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Dec 8, 2015 10:44
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GulMadred posted:Actually, the "poisoning" category includes deaths due to drug overdose and chronic alcohol abuse. It's also important to note that the chart covers a very specific demographic. Paul Krugman commented on it a few weeks ago, painting it as a symptom of despair among middle-aged white guys facing economic marginalization. You can find the original paper here (PDF) (abstract). That is not an accurate summary of what has actually happened (see Andrew Gelman's discussion of the PNAS paper here: http://andrewgelman.com/2015/11/10/death-rates-have-been-increasing-for-middle-aged-white-women-decreasing-for-men/). e: I just checked that Krugman never actually referred to men in particular in his opinion piece (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/opinion/despair-american-style.html), so I guess you just made that part up. In fact, the Gelman analysis shows that the increased rate of mortality is almost completely attributable to white women in a relatively narrow band of ages. blah_blah fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 10:47
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Liquid Communism posted:There are over 250,000 or so legally owned and registered machine guns in the US. Since 1934, there have been (when last I checked) a total of two homicides committed with any of them in the US. One was a cop murdering an informant in 1988 with a department-owned MAC-11. The other was a doctor in Ohio who shot a colleague to death with a similar silenced MAC-11 in 1992. Oh wow the regulation of the NFA has done a great job keeping automatic weapons in the hands of law-abiding gun owners instead of gangsters, let's expand it to more weapons so hunters and enthusiasts can have their hobbies while would-be criminals have a tough time getting their hands on them legally. Good point about the handguns, they were originally part of the NFA let's put that provision back in.
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Dec 8, 2015 10:52
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FuriousxGeorge posted:There have only been two machine gun murders in a century after we used gun control to take them out of the hands of gangsters who were massacring people with them during prohibition. This is all the proof we need that gun control doesn't work. All it did was mean machine guns had to be registered and there was a tax stamp. And it came out after prohibition was repealed. The boom for gangsters was over and done already.
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Dec 8, 2015 11:03
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VitalSigns posted:Oh wow the regulation of the NFA has done a great job keeping automatic weapons in the hands of law-abiding gun owners instead of gangsters, let's expand it to more weapons so hunters and enthusiasts can have their hobbies while would-be criminals have a tough time getting their hands on them legally. Good point about the handguns, they were originally part of the NFA let's put that provision back in.
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Dec 8, 2015 11:57
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Quick reminder that that stupid homemade gun derail started because LeoMarr wants to pretend guns are no different than knives.
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Dec 8, 2015 13:27
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Your Dunkle Sans posted:In some ways, gun control in the U.S. feels like trying to close Pandora's Box. It might've been possible before so many guns were stockpiled and in the supply of the general population as well as the development of the arms-industrial complex and major special interest groups such as the NRA, but the cat is out of the bag and almost impossible to get back in now. This is a huge red herring that gets brought up all the time. No realistic gun control plan involves going and trying to get them all back, and I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting it.
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Dec 8, 2015 13:29
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Nevvy Z posted:Quick reminder that that stupid homemade gun derail started because LeoMarr wants to pretend guns are no different than knives. Maybe it was stupid, but the underlying information was interesting. In places where especially stringent supply side gun control is in place, criminals do manufacture them.
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Dec 8, 2015 13:35
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Kilroy posted:That would mainly keep guns out of the hands of poor people, so yeah it would probably go a long way to reducing gun violence. Not sure about the impact on mass shootings which is all anyone seems to care about, though. Lots of regulation makes things harder for poor people. It's more expensive to be a homeowner because the jackbooted stormtroopers on the city council makes me buy indoor plumbing within the city limits instead of making GBS threads in a hole in my yard. If regulation makes guns too expensive for poor but law-abiding people to obtain and we can't abide this abridgment of human rights, then so does charging money for guns in the first place. The answer is socialism. Gun Socialism. Do you buy a handgun and 60 rounds every few months with your Gun Stamps, or do you save them up and splurge on a tommygun and a barrel of ammunition? The choice, and the right, is yours.
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Dec 8, 2015 13:35
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Infinite Karma posted:Everyone else with guns has them for normal reasons like hunting or It's easy to generalize hunters, however there are rural areas in the US where people either hunt or srarve.
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Dec 8, 2015 13:35
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Nevvy Z posted:Quick reminder that that stupid homemade gun derail started because LeoMarr wants to pretend guns are no different than knives. I love that people are sincerely arguing with someone who's response to criticism was to unironically post a giant confederate flag and a gun image macro.
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Dec 8, 2015 13:35
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SocketWrench posted:Hell, might as well be asking why no one uses the bayonets some rifles use or the grenade launchers that are attached to the gun. It just isn't worth the effort But SocketWrench, don't you know that bad guys are unstoppable criminal masterminds who will never be deterred by even the highest barriers to violence? It's not as if violent criminals could be deterred by something like for example the weather. That would be ridiculous.
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Dec 8, 2015 14:40
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Liquid Communism posted:I mean, what else have we learned from the post-9/11 world. If people are scared enough, statistics and laws don't matter nearly as much as the urge to have Done Something. Meanwhile, in reality, gun deaths are neck-and-neck with traffic fatalities this year.
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Dec 8, 2015 14:41
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LeJackal posted:Maybe it was stupid, but the underlying information was interesting. In places where especially stringent supply side gun control is in place, criminals do manufacture them. You just can't help yourself from making up bullshit can you?
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Dec 8, 2015 14:48
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VitalSigns posted:Lots of regulation makes things harder for poor people. It's more expensive to be a homeowner because the jackbooted stormtroopers on the city council makes me buy indoor plumbing within the city limits instead of making GBS threads in a hole in my yard.
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Dec 8, 2015 14:58
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Nevvy Z posted:Quick reminder that that stupid homemade gun derail started because LeoMarr wants to pretend guns are no different than knives. Which is another one of those arguments that gun advocates don't think through (they don't think any of them through, but you know what I mean) because if guns are no different or at least comparable to knives then why do you need a gun over a knife? And the answer is obviously that guns are more effective, but good luck getting any of them to admit that, because then their argument falls apart. Edit It's not unlike when people like Dead Reckoning say things like "gun control laws are based on emotion so they're not valid" when their own arguments for owning guns boil down to "because I want them". Emotions are for me and not for thee, apparently. Who What Now fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 15:02
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I think I've read that within 10 ft or something and assuming that the person with the gun hasn't raised their weapon to fire, a gun at that point is a liability compared to having a knife. That could have been bullshit though, I dunno. I do like guns, but considering that I happen to live in a country where they are really illegal, obviously they aren't terribly important to me. But I also don't think it's a very important issue either way - I'm not convinced that a ban would lower violence a great deal in America, because a lot of Americans are pretty violent and banning guns won't change that (and will probably make many of them a good deal more violent). I don't think it would have stopped Robert Dear from attacking a Planned Parenthood and killing some people, for example, although it may have stopped him from using a gun to do it. I also don't think that just because "only" 20% of the population feels passionately about a thing, that's a good reason to discount their opinion entirely. 20% is a lot of people. And finally, more than anything I strongly believe whatever positive impact very strict gun control could have would be more than overshadowed by all the other poo poo that would happen afterwards. America doesn't need another "Reagan Era," fellas - thanks. There. There is an argument from a gun advocate that, I believe, is reasonably thought through.
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Dec 8, 2015 15:23
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Liquid Communism posted:I'll save you the smugness. Because the vast majority of the 300+ million firearms in circulation in the US have never, and will never be used to commit a crime. What does the total number of firearms have to do with anything? We're talking about that subset of firearms that are used in crimes, even premeditated major crimes. Why are they not modified in such a way, other than that the thesis is accurate and minor inconveniences can have a counter intuitive degree of effect in mitigating crime?
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Dec 8, 2015 15:45
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Liquid Communism posted:There are over 250,000 or so legally owned and registered machine guns in the US. Since 1934, there have been (when last I checked) a total of two homicides committed with any of them in the US. One was a cop murdering an informant in 1988 with a department-owned MAC-11. The other was a doctor in Ohio who shot a colleague to death with a similar silenced MAC-11 in 1992. Hey guys did you ever notice that the most regulated and therefore most expensive and rarest type of firearm is used in very few crimes? What a weird coincidence. Welp the law works time to repeal it
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Dec 8, 2015 15:51
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