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PT6A posted:On the other hand, we had five people killed in a mass stabbing in Calgary, and some people (idiots) are already starting to say that guns would've been the answer. Unless you address the root causes of violent crime, it's just going to go back and forth between "guns are causing crime" to "guns would prevent crime," depending on how restricted guns are at that specific point. Personally I'm waiting for the moment of clarity when everyone finally realizes that what causes mass killing incidents is mental illness, specifically suicidality, and the answer that would actually address the problem is better public mental health care.
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Apr 22, 2014 13:17
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sean10mm posted:But aren't you saying that all mentally ill people are mass killers in the making, which is wrong and bad and you should feel bad for saying it? I don't even think it's "probably", I think it's provably -- by definition, if you're suicidal you are mentally ill, and almost every single mass shooting incident I'm aware of involved either apparent suicidality or other history of mental illness or both. There's a stigma issue that has to be addressed too but that needs to be done anyway because being mentally ill shouldn't be any more stigmatized than having a cold is; everyone is going to have some degree of mental illness at some point in their life, even if it's just short-term depression. It drives me up the wall. Yesterday morning on NPR they had a woman on from Bloomberg's new anti-gun group and she talked for over an hour and the only time she even mentioned mental health and suicide prevention was in passing, as a "oh and we're working on that too." She spent three times as much time talking about how the group was going to punish pro-gun Democrats. It's like the entire political debate has become captured by a giant red herring, a giant poisoned red herring that will only harm the left's ability to effect real change. Every dollar spent on gun control drives more Republican gun owners to the polls and thus directly harms the legislatures' ability to enact positive health care reforms. Drives me batty.
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Apr 22, 2014 15:42
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rakovsky maybe posted:This seems like a gross oversimplification and an attempt to pathologize all aberrant behavior. Some spree killers are suicidal but not all - Chris Dorner for example. Was every British/German soldier who went over the top mentally ill? Or every samurai who committed seppuku? Chris Dorner literally committed suicide so I'm not sure where you're getting that he wasn't suicidal. Two points: 1) Suicidal Behavior is its own disorder in the DSM-V. Going on an armed rampage is pretty much by definition suicidal behavior. Admittedly, it isn't always, but in almost every case where it isn't, there's some other major mental illness such as schizophrenia or paranoia or delusional behavior. Going on an armed rampage is not something mentally healthy people do. 2) That may seem an overly technical argument; ok. There's substantive support for this too. Mark Ames has written a novel-length analysis of the past twenty-five or so years of mass killings in America. What he found is that the vast majority of multiple-homicide killings, workplace shootings, spree killings, etc., are committed by frustrated, angry, depressed people who have lost their jobs or their place in society and are lashing out. They're murder-suicide revenge killings. As you point out, that's largely a result of the capitalist system, but it's hardly a shock that the capitalist system makes a lot of people really depressed! That doesn't mean the mentally ill are all homicidal maniacs. Hell, it doesn't even mean spree killers are "homicidal maniacs." It just means that the most common cause of mass shootings is depression and suicidality. When I say the cause here is mental illness, I mean no stigma by that. Having mental illness should be no more stigmatized than having a cold. But it does mean that the proper response to spree killings and mass shootings is to dramatically increase our public mental health care system. natetimm posted:I mean, you essentially have both sides saying the same thing. If the left conceded to stop seeking further gun control measure against the right in exchange for bipartisan support and funding for the treatment of the mentally ill wouldn't that probably produce a much greater net benfit to society? There's an opportunity right there in front of everyone's face to reach out and grab but people are so polarized that it isn't even seen as a possibility. The right wouldn't go for that deal because it uses the gun rights crowd to drum up votes. It would be a very smart strategic move for the left to start pushing that angle but it would take uniformity and there will always be Bloomberg types going off-reservation in order to build up their status. GlennFinito posted:I find it amazing that both sides in this thread went "yeah, it's totally mental health" and then continued to attack each other's strawmen without batting an eye. America, gently caress Yeah! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 23, 2014 14:23
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Fat Ogre posted:
Do you really want people convicted of domestic violence or with a history of recent mental health commitment as a danger to themselves or others to be able to freely purchase firearms? If not, do you want lifetime imprisonment for domestic violence? Do you want to dramatically lengthen mental health commitment times? There should probably be a way to "clear your record" and restore your right to purchase firearms once lost, short of a presidential pardon. If nothing else, it's an issue with vets who often refuse to seek mental health treatment for fear of losing their gun rights.
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Apr 23, 2014 14:57
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Fat Ogre posted:Are they currently incarcerated? Have they paid their debt to society? Do we trust them with other deadly instruments like cars, bats, gasoline, chainsaws, axes, etc? I just think this seems a little too simplistic. What about people on probation? What about individuals with outpatient treatment orders? "Ready for discharge" and "Safe for society" aren't binary on/off states; they're spectrums and it often takes a long time for someone who is not safe for society to transition to a place where they're ready to live completely independently. If we have to wait till people are 100% ready for full safe discharge before they can leave the psychiatric hospital, a lot of people will be staying a lot longer than if they could move to halfway houses, supervised independent living programs, or the like. And once we have people living with some degree of freedom, you have to worry about them going over their set boundaries and buying things they shouldn't. Shageletic posted:Restoring gun purchasing rights is a relatively easy task. Wow, I wasn't aware things had moved that fast in that area -- just a few years ago that was a brand new idea.
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Apr 23, 2014 15:17
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Fat Ogre posted:
This seems like a reasonable position though "active supervision" can mean a lot of different things (i.e., checking in with a probation officer once a week?). I think we can probably all agree that someone on probation after an armed robbery conviction probably shouldn't be owning a gun. Once we have really anybody wandering around outside by themselves, who shouldn't be allowed to have a gun, some kind of background check system makes some degree of sense, so long as it's minimally cumbersome. The current instant system is actually pretty good on that front. We might need to change or reword some of the questions or alter precisely how people get their purchase rights back, etc., but that's just fiddling with details.
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Apr 23, 2014 15:42
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Fat Ogre posted:Just make it against the law for that person to own the gun. If they are caught with the gun it is on them. Yeah, ok, I think this is the agree to disagree point for me. It's not "on them"; it's on whoever is the victim of the crime they perpetrate with the firearm they're illegally holding. At some point, the government has to step in and actively prevent harm. If a ten year old walks into a liquor store and asks to buy a handle of Smirnoff, then drinks it, stumbles back out to a car, gets in, drives off, and strikes and kills some poor schlub because ten year olds shouldn't be driving drunk, I think it's perfectly justified to say "what the gently caress was the store clerk thinking" and to even have a law saying "store clerks should not sell alcohol to ten year olds." It's not enough to just say "well we'll just punish the ten year old!" because ten year olds are minors and not responsible and because someone's already died and sending the ten year old to jail won't bring them back. Similarly, people on probation for armed robbery probably shouldn't be allowed to buy or own firearms, and it makes sense to me to have a background check system in place to prevent that. Call me crazy I guess? The current system may need some reforms but it does not need to be abolished.
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Apr 23, 2014 15:54
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Nessus posted:Well that's the point of the loving thing, it IS a deflection. (IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: For the political class, I imagine.) It's like how the draft plan for health care in 1994, many elements of which went into the PPACA, wasn't really meant to pass, it was a rhetorical instrument only. That's why it's so annoying. They're using the real issue to deflect away from the relative non-issue that everyone already knows how to talk about. It's political kabuki theater. Everyone knows the gun debate already and it's a good way to signal what team you're on and how bad the other team is, so everyone settles into it and ignores the actual substantive solution. And this isn't just true on internet forums, it's even true when someone like Bloomberg is trying to decide where to spend $50 million.
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Apr 23, 2014 17:32
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Fog Tripper posted:Oh please, if it didn't have all the poo poo attached to it and was pushed by someone other than Feinstein and Biden, it could have been done with strong support across party lines. It's awfully convenient for antis to push out a fantastic smelly turd with little bits of corn (the actual meaningful parts) and then act aghast when the majority of thinking humans reject it. Pointing at "well, because THANKS OBAMA!" is disingenuous bullshit. All major political actors in the gun debate do this though. The right has no incentive to compromise because gun bills drive up their voter rolls, and the establishment left has a track record of backing such stupid gun bills that for the most part they can't back down and back smart legislation without looking weak. The nation as a whole would be much better off if everyone just said "well, we've all been talking about the wrong issue, let's pass comprehensive mental health care and mental health commitment reform," but the political class has no interest in that happening. SedanChair posted:Bloomberg perceives us as squabbling bands of people intent on hurting ourselves and each other. So he proposes to control us through stop and frisk, soda bans and gun laws. For these virtuous crusades, he's purchased his seat at the right hand of the lord. Yeah, I was thinking of precisely that quote but didn't want to go to the trouble of looking it up. To be clear though the right wing figures say equally stupid poo poo. At least for them though it makes political sense, they're actually winning voters. Bloomberg is just massaging his ego. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 23, 2014 17:40
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Fog Tripper posted:Dude is just going to bypass saint Peter. He doesn't need no stupid interview. The . . . VIP lane, as it were.
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Apr 23, 2014 17:44
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Talmonis posted:It's odd to me. Why would anyone actually need a sound suppressor? Earplugs are dirt cheap, and over the ear protection has been used for decades. I'd heard that this was a big thing in gun advocate circles, but it never made sense to me to make an assassination tool more common and easy to aquire. All else being equal I'd rather everyone at the range were using suppressors than not, just because it's easier on the ears that way even with plugs. It's not an issue I'm exactly going to climb onto a soapbox about though. It is a dangerous hobby after all, the government gets to regulate it.
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Apr 23, 2014 17:48
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Fat Ogre posted:
That's all true. The upside is that overall violent crime has been declining significantly for decades now (arguably because of the EPA more than anything else). Really "crime" as an issue isn't nearly as important as it was when the gun control movement got rolling back in the 90's, because we just have a lot less crime now. Which is another reason this issue is mostly totemic now.
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Apr 23, 2014 17:53
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Nessus posted:I can certainly see why it isn't fun to hear, but I suppose y'all can reassure yourselves that you control all branches of government and most state legislatures on this topic, so pretty much nothing's going to come of it. It's frustrating to me just because I want Democrats to win elections, and this stuff makes that harder.
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Apr 23, 2014 18:20
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Powercrazy posted:The blind are disabled because of physical inability. What about those that are hobbled by the state? If they have a job that they need to get to, what do you think they do? Beg rides from family members or buy a motorized scooter / moped, usually.
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Apr 23, 2014 20:55
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Both guns and cars are very heavily regulated depending on what you count as regulation (i.e., state or federal, does a driver's license requirement count, what about air quality regulations, etc.) I think any comparison saying one is more or less regulated than the other is probably facile unless it includes a thousand pages or so of state and federal law analysis.
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Apr 23, 2014 22:06
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Fat Ogre posted:Yes but I don't think most people would be happy with this and I'll explain. These are essentially all semantic arguments. In nearly every case you list there is in fact a regulation that accomplishes the same goal, just in a slightly different fashion -- i.e., regulating driving age rather than ownership age, limits on use in public areas that don't exist for fireams, etc. The rules may be different but they still exist in a nearly one for one corollary. The net total number of laws and regulations for guns and for cars are thus both "very high" and it would be very difficult to intelligently or conclusively say either was more or less regulated than the other.
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Apr 23, 2014 22:19
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Fat Ogre posted:Not quite. I go by the punishments for the regulations involved. Try making and selling a car that doesn't comply with federal safety or clean air act regulations, though; you could end up on the hook for millions. It's just a pointless comparison. There's a massive amount of regulation of both industries. It's just that most people don't think about the regulations they don't directly experience (auto manufacturing rules) and also don't think about the regulations they're used to (driver's licenses).
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Apr 23, 2014 22:26
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I think there's also a doomsday prepper element; buying up .22lr is a big thing in those circles too.
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Apr 24, 2014 03:13
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:My problem with gun ownership is that it inexorably leads to poo poo like this. There's a definite element to a culture of fun ownership of paranoia and distrust that They could get you at any second and you should be prepared to give Them what's coming. That's kinda like arguing that the problem with motorcycle ownership is that it "inexorably leads to poo poo like this" (or, for that matter, making the same argument about rock music). Owning a gun doesn't mean you're participating in "gun culture," no more than owning a motorcycle means you're a Hell's Angel, or owning a Rolling Stones album means you're shooting up. You're looking at a Venn diagram and thinking it's a flowchart. More importantly though "gun culture" based arguments don't achieve anything positive. All they do is ramp up the culture war, and that drives up Republican votes, because people who are going to identify with the 'gun culture" will get defensive and go out and vote, whereas people who don't so identify generally don't care and won't go vote because of their fear of rednecks or whatever.
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Apr 24, 2014 14:28
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SedanChair posted:Nobody here or nobody period? Because tons of people on Free Republic are defending him. Tons more have specifically said that you should have the right to capture and kill intruders in any manner you see fit. Their main beef with this murderer is that he was too dumb to clam up when talking to the cops. That's kinda like drawing your examples from Stormfront.
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Apr 24, 2014 18:54
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I have a hard time imagining how anyone who has ever been in a bar can believe it's a good idea to allow members of the public to carry firearms in said bar.
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Apr 24, 2014 21:21
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Fat Ogre posted:That isn't what is being said. I'm not saying you should sue them for not letting you carry. That is your strawman argument being made. I think the problem with that is that any time a shooting happens anywhere near that bar the bar's gonna get sued into oblivion, and just the cost of defending against those lawsuits is probably going to shut the bar down, even if they had armed guards on staff 24/7. You're creating a potential liability where none existed before, and if anyone gets shot, the lawyers are going to home in on that potential source of cash. One way or another the bar in question will then get sold, either to pay the legal bills or to pay the medical bills.
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Apr 24, 2014 21:48
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Fat Ogre posted:Did the bar take reasonable steps to prevent armed people from being there? Yeah, and you're piling up costs on a business and that's going to have the net effect of shutting down businesses, either because 1) They say "concealed carry allowed" and a guy gets shot there and they get sued because what sort of idiot allows guns in a bar? (Serious question: what sort of idiot allows guns in a bar?) 2) They say "no concealed carry allowed" and they get sued because you didn't allow me to carry to defend myself and now I got shot here so you're responsible. Whether or not[i] they did all the above things they're [i]still going to get sued because "did you do enough to prevent the harm" is a fact question and thus will go to a jury, and most cases settle before actually going to trial because trials are expensive. Basically what you're doing here is letting anyone who gets shot within a hundred yards of any bar ding the business for a few thousand & maybe medical bills, because 1) any bar owner with any goddam sense at all will ban guns from his bar, and 2) under your proposed law, any place where guns are forbidden the owner's taking responsibility on himself and is therefore liable. How about the law just says "Don't take guns into bars because that's a really loving stupid thing to do. If you're going into a bar, you assume the risk of being in a no-gun area. Don't like it? Dont' drink in bars, it's a waste of your money anyway." We can call it the "Don't take your guns to town" law.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:02
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Fat Ogre posted:That is already the law in a lot of places. I don't have a problem with it. Unfortunately, it's not the law everywhere.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:10
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Fat Ogre posted:You missed this part chief. Yeah I don't think that part is going to actually work in practice. People are going to take their guns inside then change their mind, etc. It's just got BAD IDEA written all over it. Weapons and bars don't mix.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:18
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Fat Ogre posted:Never said it did. You're projecting or making up a straw man here. But saying no to guns actually might increase safety, because drunk people with guns are a bad idea? You're creating a legal catch-22. Either the bar owner says "no guns" and he gets sued when someone brings a gun in anyway and shoots someone, or the bar owner says "yes guns" and he gets sued when someone brings a gun in and shoots someone.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:29
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Fat Ogre posted:How exactly is get getting sued for negligence in the second option? "You encouraged people to bring guns here then you didn't do enough to prevent their misuse." The part you're missing is that the lawsuits don't have to have actual winnable merit to bring the bar down. They just have to create enough factual dispute that it could go to a jury. Jury trials are prohibitively expensive.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:34
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Fat Ogre posted:In no case am I saying we change the law to make it extra easy to sue people. I'm just saying it shouldn't be illegal to sue them for doing that, and that it shouldn't be surprising when it happens. I don't think you're drawing a distinction with a difference there. You can either sue someone for something or you can't. If you can, people will. The specific situation you've described would make such suits profitable because they would necessarily involve a fact question ("did the owner do enough to protect") and thus could be forced to trial rather than dismissed on summary judgment. Because trial costs are high, this means such suits would be an easy way for predatory attorneys and desperate plaintiffs to ding bar owners for cash any time a shooting happened nearby. It's just a BAD IDEA in capital letters. It's one of those concepts that sounds all Principled and Libertarian-Logical in the abstract but that would cause all sorts of real problems in the real world.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:53
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Fog Tripper posted:Again, do you have evidence that licensed concealed carriers are doing such things, at a rate that is even measurable? I didn't specify licensed.
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Apr 24, 2014 23:46
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meristem posted:Chomskyan (or someone else with university access), do you have access to (Siegel et al., 2014)? Here's the abstract - it sounds interesting and pertinent to the discussion, and the publication is from this year (actually, from 10 days ago): Every time I've done a serious dive into gun statistics the end result has been a wash. 95% of the studies are hogwash with huge glaring errors, like making straight-up comparisons between England and America without controlling for outside factors, or have huge correlation-causation problems, etc. The remaining few studies (I'm mostly thinking of the work by Ayers and Donahue, and a couple other studies I can't remember the names of off-hand) generally don't show much of any significant increase in homicide rates as a result of liberalization of gun restrictions; they don't show much of any significant decrease either, and what significant effects they do find are pretty minimal (from what I remember, on the order of a percentage point or two either way). In other words, it's not really clear from the actual evidence that, when you control for other factors, any of the changes to gun control laws made over the past couple decades in America made any sort of actual significant difference in violent crime or homicide rates. This makes a lot of sense because there are a lot of more important societal factors causing crime . Gun laws aren't a cause either way; those are things like poverty and lack of education and lack of opportunity and environmental pollution (see link). At best guns are a controlling or aggravating factor for someone who's already decided to commit a crime, and gun laws are just a controlling or aggravating factor on that. Trying to control crime rates via gun laws is like trying to steer a truck by pulling on the trailer hitch.
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Apr 25, 2014 14:36
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meristem posted:Do you think it may be possible that these laws didn't have a good effect because, as has been mentioned many times in this thread, they didn't really focus on the correct things (e.g. handguns)? I don't think I said anything that could be remotely construed as being in any way against further research. I was just pointing out that in gun debate threads on the internet the statistical arguments generally wash out into irrelevancy because the current state of the statistical research is not sufficiently complete to allow for intelligent conclusions to be drawn, especially as regards to any particular legislative proposal under debate (i.e., waiting periods, AWB, handgun ban, whatever). It's certainly possible that some sort of theoretical law could be drafted that would have a significant impact on crime rates of one kind or another, but the statistical evidence doesn't seem to be there yet supporting any particular such proposal.
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Apr 25, 2014 16:55
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mcmagic posted:Are you really going to argue that gun owners aren't vastly more anti government paranoid and racist than the average population? Come on. Considering how many guns are in circulation in America, gun owners are the population. Not all gun owners are Free Republic members, even if all Free Republic members are gun owners.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:47
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SedanChair posted:Use a FOIA request to compile a list of burglary targets? I must say that would be some Robert De Niro master thief type poo poo. Not really. There have been a few instances where local papers made broad FOIA requests and announced their intent to publish lists of all concealed carry permit holders with their names and addresses. Once it's in the local paper it wouldn't be exactly hard for thieves to scout around for homes where the owners are away, break in with a set of safe tools or a dolly to move a safe with, and walk off with a gun collection. Around where I live some gun shops had to close down because thieves kept doing things like demolishing a whole wall of their building with a huge truck just so they could break in and smash-and-grab a lot of guns. Big gun collections are a big target for thieves for a lot of obvious reasons.
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Apr 27, 2014 15:00
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SedanChair posted:Yes, really. Because that has never happened. Dude, do you really think I'd just make this stuff up? quote:The battle over the privacy of gun owners continues in New York. Last week, the Lower Hudson Valley Journal News secured the names and addresses of gun owners in two New York counties, publishing the information as an interactive map and framing the "story" as a public service -- information people would "want" to have following the Connecticut school shooting. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...-requests.shtml And for gun store robberies: http://www.firstcoastnews.com/story/news/2014/01/26/gun-shop-rams-car-burglary/4916347/ Guns are a big target for thieves and it's not unreasonable to fear that people might break in during the day and steal your guns if they know you have them. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Apr 27, 2014 |
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Apr 27, 2014 15:06
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SedanChair posted:I know that happened. What hasn't happened is the targeted burglary part. I'm not sure we need a concrete proven case of such for it to be a reasonable fear on the part of gun owners.
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Apr 27, 2014 15:11
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The Carbon Tax posted:
I actually made this point a few pages ago :P Like I've said before in this thread, ultimately the statistical arguments wash out; none of the available evidence is strong enough to convince anyone either way because none of it is provable, and guns in America have become primarily an identity-politics issue, as we can see over the last few posts ("gun owners aren't reasonable" vs. "mah freedom"). Which is yet another reason the whole debate is better abandoned. It's just an intractable morass and we're better off spending all that time and energy reforming mental health care.
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Apr 27, 2014 15:55
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meristem posted:This is not statistics, though? You are equivocating the meaning of the word. As I went over before, all mass shooters are by definition engaged in suicidal behavior which is a disorder under the DSM V. You're absolutely correct that most mentally ill people are nonviolent but mass shootings are almost always some variant of suicide attempt and therefore classifiable as mental illness.
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Apr 27, 2014 16:53
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Job Truniht posted:Instead of making sweeping generalizations, would you actually like to point out, from a statistical perspective, why these are statistically unreliable? Questionable statistics are one thing, people outright refusing to read sources and argue on some serious misconceptions on how statistics work is entirely different, which is why I told falcon that this is misplaced controversy. Eh, like I said, I'm not really interested in that debate, but I did explain why up-thread. Basically the studies fall into two groups. One's medical studies (i.e., guns in the home correlates with increased risk of x, type thing) and those are correlational and thus won't convince anyone because there's always some unaccounted for potential confounding factor such as socioeconomic background, etc. (i.e., maybe people who carry guns are in high-risk professions where they're more likely to get shot anyway). The other group of studies is done by professional economists and they tend to be a LOT more rigorous and do things like compare rates of different types of violent crime before and after various laws were passed. That line of studies starts with John Lott, goes through Ayers and Donahue, and I think a few other people too now. That line of work is hotly debated on both sides but last I saw the effects they were arguing over were very small, on the order of a percentage point or two up or down for specific subtypes of crime over specific ranges of years, and depending on how the data got sliced the results wandered around considerably. Either way it's all somewhat moot because even where there is evidence there's not strong enough evidence to convince anyone we need major social policy changes. It's not even so much that the statistics are questionable as that they're not relevant; most of the people engaged in the gun debate are doing so as a matter of identity signalling and culture war. Gun debate statistics aren't drivers of policy, they're just weapons in the culture war. (This is true even at the macro level: look at Bloomberg's massive donation to gun control this year, which apparently he sees as his get-out-of-hell-free card for the Pearly Gates). Nessus posted:So are there any prospects for improving mental health care that a. could pass the Republican House and b. aren't basically 'lock up the mentally ill; better they be imprisoned than anyone even talk about looking about thinking about requiring me to lock up my guns or something'? We're closer than you might think. I mean, nothing's going to pass the Republican House; they couldn't pass a bill to officially name a puppy as the Capitol Building's most adorable animal of the week right now. But there's hope at the state level, and that's where most of the reform needs to happen anyway. After Virginia Tech the Virginia legislature passed a number of positive mental health law reforms that other states are starting to adopt as a model. . Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Apr 27, 2014 |
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Apr 27, 2014 19:55
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Job Truniht posted:
Like I said above, I'm not trying to handwave away statistics as a field, I'm saying that most of the statistical work being done is bad, or more precisely, insufficient. If you're talking about gun statistics and you haven't even heard of the Lott / Ayers & Donahue debate, I have to wonder how much reading you've actually done. I didn't think a link was necessary because usually they're the first things brought up & shot down  in any online gun debate. You can catch up on the debate here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns,_Less_Crime http://econjwatch.org/articles/the-debate-on-shall-issue-laws Note that I'm not endorsing either particular side in that debate, I'm just saying the approach they're using is better by far than "welp, these two things have a correlation, therefore one causes the other," which is what most of the "guns in the home make X more likely" type studies are usually used to argue. To say anything worthwhile you have to make before and after comparisons and attempt to control for confounding factors. Not really but sortof. I think if there were really rock-solid, bulletproof data on guns either way it would make a difference. I don't think gun control is on the level of something like global warming where the consensus and evidence are so rock solid that you have to be willfully blind to ignore it. I think it's more that almost all of the gun "science" is either 1) debatable and suspect or 2) shows such minimal impact either way that it isn't sufficient to convince anyone, even people who might be persuaded by better evidence, to actually change their minds. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Apr 27, 2014 |
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Apr 27, 2014 20:40
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mugrim posted:Civil and potentially criminal liability for lost/stolen guns A lot of the stuff you're saying makes sense on some level but this is nuts, sorry. All you'd do is turn every gun crime into an opportunity to bankrupt some prior owner with legal fees. I mean, come on. You know the legal system isn't fair. Creating more causes of action that hurt private individuals with shallow pockets isn't the way to fix anything. In practice such a proposal would effectively just be a backdoor gun ban. Personally, I actually think the current system is -- well if not ideal, at least workably decent. The major change I'd make is that expanding the instant background check system would probably be a good idea depending on how it was implemented. I also see the argument for liberalization of silencer purchase requirements. A gun safe requirement for those who own more than X number of guns might be a good idea but I'd implement it as a purchase requirement, i.e., a checkbox on the form certifying that you have locked storage available for any gun you purchase. Trying to enforce it any other way is just a recipe for adding further pain to burglary victims and (relative) innocents. Responsibility is one thing but there's a proximate cause issue here. Did your thread on cars impose civil or criminal liability on owners of stolen cars if the cars were misused? Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Apr 28, 2014 |
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Apr 28, 2014 04:34
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