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I was trying to sleep, but something got me riled up, so I thought I'd share this thought and see how it bounces back on me.

See, I was thinking about how the government chooses to limit my particular freedoms pertaining to gun laws, and how I think that's bullshit. Naturally, you're all thinking, as a libertarian, he thinks any slight limit of freedom is bullshit. Fair enough.

But I got to thinking more about it. And about how if you are perfectly careful with a gun, ain't no accidents going to happen. You keep it locked in a case with the key around your neck. You don't keep it loaded. You don't point at something you don't fully intend to shoot and you don't take that safety off until you intend to pull.

Not that there can't be freak accidents. For instance, slight amounts of gunpowder buildup in the barrel that eventually blows up, or some crazy science shit that happens one every million years. But I would compare those to manufacturing errors in the automobile industry; sometimes, your car is going to blow up. You just know it ain't going to happen to you cause it's so damn rare.

So, that said, I thought about other tools (Sometimes, people forget that a good firearm is as much a tool as it is a pleasure to fire; whether it be for legitimate hunting or even for rebellion against bullshit governments ((Independence))) that have similar consequences. I thought what about knives. I thought about recycling factories. And then I thought about cars.

Cars cause a number of motherfucking deaths. And no matter how fucking careful you are with a car, you can still get into an accident. Not just some freak one in a million shit either, but some legitimate, breakfast ruining dead shit because even though you were super careful, one other guy wasn't. Or any of the other billion drivers on the road.

So, my thought is, are guns safer than cars? And if the answer to that first question is yes, then is it sheerly the benefit of cars that keeps them around? Do we undervalue the use of a firearm?

Discuss.

I think guns are much safer than cars. It strikes me as obvious enough that it's probably not even debatable. It's just that guns have a bad rep because this nation is composed primarily of ignorant cowards.

People have their priorities completely fucking backwards. It's because they tend to make decisions about things without thinking things through, and believing that the scant amount of information they have gives them enough perspective to make an informed and fair conclusion.
For example, trigger locks only exist because people are concerned about firearm-related accidents involving their children. However, swimming pools have shown to be far more dangerous to children. But somehow, trigger locks are mandatory while pool covers are not. If the focus was really on the children, rather than grasping at any straws they can to argue for gun prohibition, you'd think pool covers would be a bigger deal than guns. Go figure.
(And there are also the facts that trigger locks are counter-productive in that they cause more frequent misfires due to the need to circumvent the gun's own safety mechanisms, and that having a lock that takes 30 seconds to remove in an emergency defeats the purpose of keeping a gun in the house in the first place.)

It's odd to me that people can think of guns as out of place because they have this cold and violent association, but that piloting highly explosive, two-ton, metal deathtraps at 90 feet per second as part of their day-to-day is totally okay, and is in fact fine to expose your children to. The average family is probably totally fine with an unnecessary 12-hour drive to Disneyland, but you'd have to be psychotic to consider bringing your kid to a firing range.
Car accidents are far more messy, expensive, brutal, and frequent than any damage a handgun could cause, and yet it's guns that are too dangerous to abide.
Fuckin' weird.

SlappyMcGee wrote:Naturally, you're all thinking, as a libertarian, he thinks any slight limit of freedom is bullshit. Fair enough.

*sigh* I'm pretty sure I've seen you refer to yourself as a libertarian before, so I'm going to go on a side- rant about that. Because I can.

People shouldn't define themselves and their opinions in terms of an ideology.

Labels are only helpful in that they help understand what something is likely to contain. So labels like "libertarian" or "cosmopolitan" or "neoliberal" or "Marxist" or whatever are helpful because they let people know, in a very vague sense, what sort of arguments/ perspectives a book or article or person is going to make. It's not helpful for knowing how good the arguments contained in said book or article are going to be.

Of course, if you view yourself as something, you cut off any chance of being able to change your opinion or learn from any other perspective, and it creates a complete rigidity in what you think. So if you define yourself as a libertarian you're limiting yourself to believing x, y, z, and you're not really going to take into account anything anybody else says. After all, as a libertarian/ fundamentalist christian/ feminist/ anarchist or whatever, the only way you can respond to things is through your already existing beliefs. Intelligent discussion isn't possible between two people who believe that they "ARE" something- libertarian, marxist, whatever- because they'll still "BE" that at the end of the discussion, and their beliefs are immutable.

So, say, the distinctive Marxist thing is a belief that class is at the route of everything, especially civil war and revolutions. Let's say some really convincing evidence comes up that, say, the Shah's Iranian revolution came about because of religious identity issues, with class and economics playing only a secondary role. If you're A MARXIST, you believe that it was all to do with class, because EVERYTHING is to do with class, and IT'S IMPOSSIBLE for anything to happen without class being at the bottom of it. Which is an incredibly stupid and blinkered way of looking at the world.

And basically I figure that if you keep defining yourself as a libertarian, nothing anybody says- not even hard evidence that guns are incapable of improving anybody's lives- is going to sway you from your view that liberty is the most valuable thing in the world and the ONLY approach to ANY issue is to increase the liberty of everybody involved, no matter what the actual effects are.

If you've been doing a bunch of reading and you realise that you generally hold views of a libertarian nature, sure, it can be helpful to think of yourself as having a libertarian perspective. If you do a bunch more reading and realise that there are a bunch of flaws in what you previously believe, you adjust your opinions accordingly. And that doesn't mean going from being a libertarian to being a fundamentalist christian/ feminist/ anarchist or whatever. It means you start holding nuanced views, and you can start having interesting, original things to say rather than just spewing out the party line.

/end irrelevant rant.

Anyway.

SlappyMcGee wrote: So, my thought is, are guns safer than cars? And if the answer to that first question is yes, then is it sheerly the benefit of cars that keeps them around? Do we undervalue the use of a firearm?

Discuss.

You've got it with the 'benefit' part. It's what things are used for that lets you pick and choose between them.

Cars are used to help people get from point A to point B. The developed world has been built up with cars in mind, and pretty much it's impossible to hold a job without one. I know, because I'd arrive at work late all the time due to public transport fuckups. Even when I was catching busses a full hour earlier than I would need to if they ran on time. Cars do a lot of good, and are needed to exist in the world as it is at the moment.

Same thing for knives. Knives cut things up- fruit, vegetables, meat, craft stuff, wood, metals, whatever, depending on the knife. So they're not regulated. Of course, some types of knives are designed for killing people- say, I own a knife in the same style as the one Buffy kills Faith with in Season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's a beautiful thing with huge ridges on the outside to tear everything up when you pull the knife out and two prongs to mess up people's insides if you twist it while it's in their body. For knives like these, there are a bunch of forms you have to fill out and regulations and stuff, because there's not much you can do with one besides display it (like I do) or try to kill people with it. And that seems pretty fair to me.

Guns, on the other hand, are used almost exclusively to kill people. Of course, there's an exception for a few subsets of society- say, farmers may need guns to put down hurt livestock, that kind of thing. Of course, every developed nation with strict gun laws has already taken this into account, and people who need guns for business purposes are already allowed to.

You could argue that because guns can be used for pleasure (shooting shit up or hunting), outlawing them stops people from being happy, and so they should be allowed. Even if you ignore the whole issue of how ethical it is to hurt and kill things for pleasure, then you still have to weigh up the amount of happiness hunting gives people against how often guns are used in domestic disputes when one partner gets really fucking mad and thinks for a few moments that it might be a good idea to blow their spouse to bits. And then the issue of crime rates and gun laws, and that kind of thing.

Either way, you're going to have a hard time justifying allowing guns on utilitarian grounds, especially if you compare the shit that goes down in the US with countries with stricter gun laws. If you weigh up the stuff and find that, yeah, guns are necessary enough/ give people enough pleasure to outweigh the deaths that wouldn't occur without gun laws, then cool, you've got a strong case.

If, on the other hand, your argument is simply "Cars are dangerous. We allow cars, THEREFORE we should allow guns", you're missing a step or two in your reasoning:
1. The fact that we allow something more dangerous than guns does not mean we SHOULD allow something more dangerous than guns- you could just as easily make the case, in reverse, that "cars are more dangerous than guns, therefore we shout outlaw cars."
2. Do cars give some other benefit that justifies allowing them in spite of their danger? Can you argue the same for something which is designed to kill people?

If your argument is "firearms are necessary to rebel against bullshit governments", that's a better argument. My only problem is that revolutions have pretty much only ever worked when the rebels got the army on- side first, and that when there are enough people rebelling against a bullshit government it's easy enough to bypass said government's gun laws and import them anyway. In any case, how effective would a handful of small firearms be against a full- blown army with full army gear, tanks, and state- of- the- art weaponry? Unless you want to argue the government should allocate artillery and tanks and aircraft to enough neighbourhoods to balance its own power, I don't see how allowing a couple of measly pistols is going to make very much of a difference.

And if your argument is "I am a libertarian. I believe the government should not interfere in anything, because liberty is more valuable than anything else- including safety, life, and happiness", then you're arguing something I find fairly ridiculous and I don't know what to say to that. I mean, sure, liberty is valuable, but unless you can demonstrate that it's the most valuable thing in the world you don't have that much of a case here, either.

Fuck you and your fucking sweet ass Buffy references, Formica.


First and foremost, I don't know if you go around making the first half of your post any time anybody identifies themselves with something like that; do you do it to Christians? Do you do it to Republicans? What I meant by being a libertarian is that I do -in fact- value freedom above anything else, and that was a quicker way to say it. I disagree with other libertarians on issues some times, but I still feel comfortable calling both they and I libertarians. And in spite of believing in the very values our country was funded on, I can also entertain ideas outside of that. I can, in fact, embrace them.

And more to the point, I don't know how you can be so fucking bold and imply that I do not have nuanced views on issues that may differ from whatever the libertarian M.O. The line you quoted was obviously an exaggeration and a joke. Try and read the nuances of what I said before you accuse me of not having any God-damn nuance.

I supported the war in Iraq. And do!

Now that we're done with your so-called "irrelevant rant" (and I would be inclined to agree), let's get to the meat of your rebuttal.

Guns, on the other hand, are used almost exclusively to kill people.

That's interesting. But I think it's a little irrelevant. Don't you think any danger the gun actually presents to you is your fear of other citizens? Removing guns doesn't actually stop people from wanting to kill another person. If somebody is mad enough to get a gun and shoot their wife, (Or wives in Utah! Which I'm cool with, as a libertarian) why is it you believe that they would not stab their wife? Or run her over? Is it because guns are such an effective tool that you believe they should be banned? Perhaps anything that could poison your spouse, with that 100% guarantee of death, should also be banned from homes.

My point being simply that as far as any domestic abuse problems go, the guns are genuinely not the problem. The fact that somebody insane uses a gun to kill his wife is not actually an argument against guns; it's an argument that crazy people shouldn't have guns and that the world would be better if there weren't so many crazies. Sure, I can get behind that.

Furthermore, you assess my argument of the enjoyability of guns as one of their utilities as a danger vs. pleasure comparison. I disagree with this sentiment being posted here, because it was never my intention to try and argue that something dangerous should be allowed simply based on the pleasures it presents. My main argument, if I have to be more direct, is simply that something necessary should be allowed regardless of the dangers it presents. Moreover, I question these so called dangers that you offer in both my previous paragraph and my initial post.

Finally, sheerly based on your final paragraph, I would like to point out that it is simply my belief that liberty is, in fact, necessary to life and happiness, albeit with safety sacrificed in the process. As we probably both know what Ben Franklin said, They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. And it happens to be a quote I believe in very strongly, although we can get into that in another argument, I believe.

So, that said, let me highlight the three arguments I am making with this thread:

1) Guns do not make people crazy or violent. In fact, according to Wikipedia, in a sourced statement: Criminologist Gary Kleck compared various survey and proxy measures and found no correlation between overall firearm ownership and gun violence.
2) Guns are a necessity, for both their utility purposes for farmers, hunters, and potential military, whether it be internal or external, but also simply because people are promised the right to them in the constitution.
3) Guns are safer than automobiles. Or, as Tsukatu points out, Pools. And yet, a large part of the focus of the media towards making our country (which we will assume is the USA) safer is focused on making guns harder to come by. Whereas I demonstrated situations where guns could be perfectly safe as long as handled with care, you said, well, yeah, but a crazy person who hates his wife is likelier to kill her if he has a gun. Which I believe is false, as does Gary Kleck and his -research-. Moreover, simply because we have a society enshrined around cars should not mean that we must always be. We were once a society enshrined around trains and yet, we've moved on from that. We continue to use machines that, however useful, are more deadly than guns. So, if you want to make the use vs. danger comparison, make it here:

1) Guns have high use, have always had high use, and despite the fact that you marginalized certain tasks that have been achieved by guns, such as the founding of the USA, will continue to have high use, and -relatively- lower danger.
2) Cars have high use but have a much higher danger.

The idea being that with a gun, one can control nearly all of the variables. If the person controlling the variables shoots somebody, that's on him, that isn't on the gun. Whereas in a car, there are too many variables, and instead of being on person's shoulders, the blame falls on tons of shoulders, and as the 6 million car accidents each year in the USA show, there's always a weak link in a car.

I dunno. I can't ride a Shotgun to work.

Incorrect:

1. man sees hammer
2. man thinks to himself, "hmm, I could probably kill my wife with that hammer, if I desired"
3. man picks up hammer out of curiosity
4. holding the hammer compels the man to murder his wife
5. man murders his wife with the hammer

Correct:

1. man wants to kill his wife
2. man grabs the first deadly object he sees, which just so happens to be a hammer
3. man murders his wife with the hammer

Furthermore, the following reasoning was used above, but is clearly retarded. I just wanted to restate it to do its simplistic stupidity justice.

Killing Is Bad.
Guns Go Pow And Kill.
Guns Are Bad.
Make Them Go Away.

HORRIBLE UNFORMED POST FOLLOWING:

SlappyMcGee wrote:First and foremost, I don't know if you go around making the first half of your post any time anybody identifies themselves with something like that; do you do it to Christians? Do you do it to Republicans? What I meant by being a libertarian is that I do -in fact- value freedom above anything else, and that was a quicker way to say it. I disagree with other libertarians on issues some times, but I still feel comfortable calling both they and I libertarians. And in spite of believing in the very values our country was funded on, I can also entertain ideas outside of that. I can, in fact, embrace them.

Nah, I don't generally go around forums ranting about that, but it's something that's been pissing me off today after being accosted by some self- defined Marxists I used to hang out with at uni. It might not apply to you that much/ at all, it's just something that bugs me. And yeah, it pisses me off way more when people are all "I am a Christian, THEREFORE I believe evolution should not be taught in schools, and I refuse to listen to any other arguments" or "I am a Republican, THEREFORE I believe the Iraq war is justified, and you can't sway me on that".

Anyway, sorry, that part of my post was probably just misplaced frustration.

slappymcgee wrote:Removing guns doesn't actually stop people from wanting to kill another person. If somebody is mad enough to get a gun and shoot their wife, (Or wives in Utah! Which I'm cool with, as a libertarian) why is it you believe that they would not stab their wife? Or run her over? Is it because guns are such an effective tool that you believe they should be banned? Perhaps anything that could poison your spouse, with that 100% guarantee of death, should also be banned from homes.

Two things here:

a) Guns are MUCH more deadly than general- purpose kitchen knives. Lacerations are often superficial, and even worse knife wounds are generally easier to treat than GSW's. But yeah, knives (and poisons and cars for running people over) can and do kill people a lot. There's all of this media attention about knife violence in Melbourne at the moment, actually, which kinda does suggest that people who can't get guns DO use knives. But still- it's more difficult to knife somebody than shoot them, both physically and (for most people) psychologically.

b) Yeah, you can stab your wife, or run her over, or poison her. The thing is, though, that almost everybody who kills their partners in domestic disputes do so in the heat of moment- and regret it right afterwards. The extra time it would take to tie up your partner and run them over, and even the extra time it takes to grab a knife, struggle with your partner, and then stab her is time in which people stop feeling murderous. Seriously, murder in domestic disputes is barely ever pre- meditated. Heaps of people shoot their partner, and not many poison them, for that exact reason.
Outlawing guns doesn't mean that people will therefore choke their partner to death instead, even if this is true in a few cases. For the most part, it means that people won't go around killing other people.

slappymcgee wrote:Finally, sheerly based on your final paragraph, I would like to point out that it is simply my belief that liberty is, in fact, necessary to life and happiness, albeit with safety sacrificed in the process. As we probably both know what Ben Franklin said, They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. And it happens to be a quote I believe in very strongly, although we can get into that in another argument, I believe.

Personally, I believe that liberty and freedom have intrinsic value. But I don't see it overriding every other value, and I think society is only possible when you restrict certain liberties- the most dramatic example being the liberty to kill or hurt other people. If everybody has complete liberty to do anything, there's no longer any advantage in being in a society, and it would probably dissolve.

I think it's fine to limit liberty IF there's a good reason to. Say, if somebody's liberty to do something affronts somebody's rights (liberty to steal vs right not to have something stolen from you.) Or if increasing liberty for one section of society would make another section worse off. (The liberty to set whatever wages you like). Or to put it another way, I think liberty is good, because having more options and feeling like you have a degree of control over your own life generally makes people happier. And that's about the extent of the value I see in liberty. If increasing liberty harms more people than it benefits, I don't see any reason to do so.

Also, random badass quote from the French Revolution- Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.

slappymcgee wrote:Perhaps anything that could poison your spouse, with that 100% guarantee of death, should also be banned from homes.

Sounds good to me! I'm all for safety standards in household cleaners.

The fact that somebody insane uses a gun to kill his wife is not actually an argument against guns; it's an argument that crazy people shouldn't have guns and that the world would be better if there weren't so many crazies. Sure, I can get behind that.

Agreed, the world would be better if there weren't so many crazies. It would ALSO be better if the crazies there were in the world didn't have guns. Since every method of controlling gun ownership has proven fairly unreliable in filtering out crazies, it makes a lot of sense to me to limit guns to people who actually need them- thus limiting the number of crazies who get guns.

On that note,

slappymcgee wrote:My main argument, if I have to be more direct, is simply that something necessary should be allowed regardless of the dangers it presents.

Totally. So the real question is if guns are necessary.

slappymcgee wrote:1)Guns do not make people crazy or violent. In fact, according to Wikipedia, in a sourced statement: Criminologist Gary Kleck compared various survey and proxy measures and found no correlation between overall firearm ownership and gun violence.

Interesting. I can't comment, because I haven't read it, but the stuff I've read before and stuff I heard sitting in on some of the more interesting criminology lectures at uni suggests otherwise.

If you want, I can go ahead and find some evidence to the contrary, and we can go for a “MY EXPERT IS BETTER THAN YOURS!” sort of an approach.

slappymcgee wrote:2) Guns are a necessity, for both their utility purposes for farmers, hunters, and potential military, whether it be internal or external, but also simply because people are promised the right to them in the constitution.

Sure, farmers should be allowed to have guns. I'm opposed to hunting on a bunch of other grounds (for one, it's not necessary for anything, and for another, I'm a crazy animal- loving hippie) but whatever, I can see your point there. The military obviously doesn't function without guns, not does the police force, but that doesn't mean they should keep their guns after leaving the military/ police force. The only argument you're making here is that people WHOSE JOBS REQUIRE GUNS should be allowed them.

As for the constitution, there's a lot in there that's good. Free speech and all that jazz is stuff that Australia doesn't have enshrined anywhere, and as a result the government is trying to firewall “offensive” sites online like wikileaks, meatspin, unencyclopedia, lemonparty, and that kind of thing.

And then there's a lot that was relevant when the constitution was written, and isn't anymore. I can't remember the wording, but property rights used to extend indefinitely UPWARDS, not just outwards. Then commercial airlines opened up, and a bunch of people started charging the airlines for flying through “their property”. So the US government, pressured by these airlines, did the sensible thing to do- ammended the constitution to get rid of a right that no longer made any sense. Just 'cos it's in the constitution doesn't mean it makes perfect sense.

America was a piss- weak agrarian power when it was formed. More or less everybody was a farmer, the police force was presumably more or less non-existent. In this context, the right to bear arms made perfect sense. America ISN'T a piss- weak agrarian power any more, so I don't see how the right to bear arms is still relevant.

slappymcgee wrote:3) Guns are safer than automobiles. Or, as Tsukatu points out, Pools. And yet, a large part of the focus of the media towards making our country (which we will assume is the USA) safer is focused on making guns harder to come by. Whereas I demonstrated situations where guns could be perfectly safe as long as handled with care, you said, well, yeah, but a crazy person who hates his wife is likelier to kill her if he has a gun. Which I believe is false, as does Gary Kleck and his -research-. Moreover, simply because we have a society enshrined around cars should not mean that we must always be. We were once a society enshrined around trains and yet, we've moved on from that. We continue to use machines that, however useful, are more deadly than guns. So, if you want to make the use vs. danger comparison, make it here:

I already talked about this a bit earlier, but a few more points:

Cars are dangerous. THEREFORE, it would be desirable not to have cars, right? It's just the practicality, at this point in time and with society structured as it is, which makes getting rid of cars impossible. At the very least, it's desirable to make driving as safe as possible, yeah? Hence speed limits and traffic light cameras and maximum blood alcohol levels and other things which restrict your liberty to drive however dangerously you like.

Pools ALSO have safety regulations. In Australia, you CAN'T have a pool unless you have a child- proof fence around it, and it's illegal to have a child in the area without supervising it. It's an imperfect system, obviously, and it would be good if you could improve it, but nobody's arguing that you should dismantle the meagre safety regulations surrounding pools we have.

Guns... Well. You can't make them any less dangerous without getting rid of what makes it a gun- the fact that it can shoot lethal bullets into things, so the best you can do is regulate who gets to use guns. Guns are deadly and risky. They're also probably necessary/ have high use for some people, say fathers, who should be allowed to have them. For other people, eh. Why tear down the child- proof fences around pools if you don't have to?

slappymcgee wrote:Guns have high use, have always had high use, and despite the fact that you marginalized certain tasks that have been achieved by guns, such as the founding of the USA, will continue to have high use, and -relatively- lower danger.

[/quote]

What high use? What tasks have I marginalised? Sorry, I'm genuinely curious. I can't imagine why guns are still high use in America today.

Furthermore, the following reasoning was used above, but is clearly retarded. I just wanted to restate it to do its simplistic stupidity justice.

Killing Is Bad.
Guns Go Pow And Kill.
Guns Are Bad.
Make Them Go Away.

[/quote]

Killing is bad.
Except for in a few highly specific contexts, guns don't do anything BUT go pow and kill.
Guns are bad in the hands of people who would use them against other people. (And what else is average office- working Joe able to use it for?)
There would be fewer deaths if they went away. So why not do that?

At what point, specifically, does the reasoning become retarded?

Okay, I'm probably going to regret ever getting into this thread at all, but:

formica wrote:"I am a Christian, THEREFORE I believe evolution should not be taught in schools,

From my experience, the majority of Christians (including me) are pissed off at that line of thinking too. There's a difference between "freedom of religion" and "imposing one's beliefs on a public education system".

Sorry, just had to say it; my apologies if it was just an example off the top of your head >_>

formica wrote:
Anyway, sorry, that part of my post was probably just misplaced frustration.

No bigs.

Two things here:

a) Guns are MUCH more deadly than general- purpose kitchen knives. Lacerations are often superficial, and even worse knife wounds are generally easier to treat than GSW's. But yeah, knives (and poisons and cars for running people over) can and do kill people a lot. There's all of this media attention about knife violence in Melbourne at the moment, actually, which kinda does suggest that people who can't get guns DO use knives. But still- it's more difficult to knife somebody than shoot them, both physically and (for most people) psychologically.

b) Yeah, you can stab your wife, or run her over, or poison her. The thing is, though, that almost everybody who kills their partners in domestic disputes do so in the heat of moment- and regret it right afterwards. The extra time it would take to tie up your partner and run them over, and even the extra time it takes to grab a knife, struggle with your partner, and then stab her is time in which people stop feeling murderous. Seriously, murder in domestic disputes is barely ever pre- meditated. Heaps of people shoot their partner, and not many poison them, for that exact reason.
Outlawing guns doesn't mean that people will therefore choke their partner to death instead, even if this is true in a few cases. For the most part, it means that people won't go around killing other people.

I find this to be an interesting argument. I think that, once again, there's a couple of holes in this line of thinking. As Tsukatu pointed out, the chain of events means, yeah, you're going to look for the quickest way to kill a spouse. We've been talking knives, but what about regular tools? Chainsaw, nailgun, hammer, just about anything with enough utility to warrant staying around can be a deadly weapon. The biggest problem with trying to lower gun violence by getting rid of the gun is because what you're left with is just violence. (That's a hell of a quote. I'm running for governor.) The problem here is dem' crazyfolk. We need to address that before we address guns. Eliminating a quick way to kill means what; people are going to kill their spouses slowly and experience prolonged psychological damage? I'm not saying that killing somebody with a gun is a good thing. But the way you make it sound when you kill somebody by strangling them or stabbing them sounds a whole lot worse for every party involved.

Personally, I believe that liberty and freedom have intrinsic value. But I don't see it overriding every other value, and I think society is only possible when you restrict certain liberties- the most dramatic example being the liberty to kill or hurt other people. If everybody has complete liberty to do anything, there's no longer any advantage in being in a society, and it would probably dissolve.

I think it's fine to limit liberty IF there's a good reason to. Say, if somebody's liberty to do something affronts somebody's rights (liberty to steal vs right not to have something stolen from you.) Or if increasing liberty for one section of society would make another section worse off. (The liberty to set whatever wages you like). Or to put it another way, I think liberty is good, because having more options and feeling like you have a degree of control over your own life generally makes people happier. And that's about the extent of the value I see in liberty. If increasing liberty harms more people than it benefits, I don't see any reason to do so.

Also, random badass quote from the French Revolution- Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.

I agree with some of what you're saying here. But my idea of society working is that you are free to do whatever does not impede the liberty of others. I realize this would require at least a basic court system, so at the very least, I would, in my ideal society, pay the absolute minimum tax to man the borders of my country as well as have a system in check to solve major disputes, such as murder.

Agreed, the world would be better if there weren't so many crazies. It would ALSO be better if the crazies there were in the world didn't have guns. Since every method of controlling gun ownership has proven fairly unreliable in filtering out crazies, it makes a lot of sense to me to limit guns to people who actually need them- thus limiting the number of crazies who get guns.

Since every method seems to be unreliable, we have not found the correct method yet. I could agree with that. Some people are acquiring firearms who have no business acquiring firearms, whether it be through illegal and legal gun trade. I am definitely against illegal gun trade. As far as legal gun selling goes, a proper psychological exam done yearly plus a gun safety course specialized to the particular type of firearms you wish to obtain done once every five years would seem to be enough in my mind. Do you have to pass any sort of legitimate psychiatric exam to get a gun right now? I'm not sure that you do.

More to the point, do you know what aren't illegal in the slightest. Homemade weapons. Flamethrowers. Napalm. (I've read a Cracked.com list! It must be true.) These things are just as deadly as guns. And do you know who has these things? Nobody. Flamethrowers and homemade firearms literally would only serve the purpose of entertainment for the people who own them. But nobody owns them, because there is no necessity to these items. I would argue that most guns are purchased for a legal necessity rather than the intention to kill somebody.

Interesting. I can't comment, because I haven't read it, but the stuff I've read before and stuff I heard sitting in on some of the more interesting criminology lectures at uni suggests otherwise.

If you want, I can go ahead and find some evidence to the contrary, and we can go for a “MY EXPERT IS BETTER THAN YOURS!” sort of an approach.

I don't necessarily disagree that there is some evidence to the contrary, I went and looked up the issue on Wikipedia and that was simply the only evidence for either side present. That said, I feel like that citation may have been cheap. Both sides have a tendency to spin the facts in their favor on this issue, so it is probably better to stay at this from a hypothetical standpoint. That said, I would love to know the numbers if you happen across them.

As for the constitution, there's a lot in there that's good. Free speech and all that jazz is stuff that Australia doesn't have enshrined anywhere, and as a result the government is trying to firewall “offensive” sites online like wikileaks, meatspin, unencyclopedia, lemonparty, and that kind of thing.

And then there's a lot that was relevant when the constitution was written, and isn't anymore. I can't remember the wording, but property rights used to extend indefinitely UPWARDS, not just outwards. Then commercial airlines opened up, and a bunch of people started charging the airlines for flying through “their property”. So the US government, pressured by these airlines, did the sensible thing to do- ammended the constitution to get rid of a right that no longer made any sense. Just 'cos it's in the constitution doesn't mean it makes perfect sense.

America was a piss- weak agrarian power when it was formed. More or less everybody was a farmer, the police force was presumably more or less non-existent. In this context, the right to bear arms made perfect sense. America ISN'T a piss- weak agrarian power any more, so I don't see how the right to bear arms is still relevant.

It is a good point that the constitution might lack some relevance in today's day and age. All I'm saying is that from a legal standpoint, since there are no amendments over that business, it's legally sound to not restrict Americans the rights to firearms.

And personally, I think the forefathers kind of hit the mark with that one. But that's just a microcosm of this debate as a whole.

As far as people with jobs only requiring guns should get guns, let me get into that in a bit:

I already talked about this a bit earlier, but a few more points:

Cars are dangerous. THEREFORE, it would be desirable not to have cars, right? It's just the practicality, at this point in time and with society structured as it is, which makes getting rid of cars impossible. At the very least, it's desirable to make driving as safe as possible, yeah? Hence speed limits and traffic light cameras and maximum blood alcohol levels and other things which restrict your liberty to drive however dangerously you like.

Pools ALSO have safety regulations. In Australia, you CAN'T have a pool unless you have a child- proof fence around it, and it's illegal to have a child in the area without supervising it. It's an imperfect system, obviously, and it would be good if you could improve it, but nobody's arguing that you should dismantle the meagre safety regulations surrounding pools we have.

Guns... Well. You can't make them any less dangerous without getting rid of what makes it a gun- the fact that it can shoot lethal bullets into things, so the best you can do is regulate who gets to use guns. Guns are deadly and risky. They're also probably necessary/ have high use for some people, say fathers, who should be allowed to have them. For other people, eh. Why tear down the child- proof fences around pools if you don't have to?

People have to drive around for twenty minutes and parallel park a car to get a license. Since we nearly agree that cars are more dangerous than guns, should people not be given stress tests? Regular psychological exams? Wouldn't this also feasibly lower insurance rates? It seems like if we were pressing the issue of the dangerousness of driving a car, A) Insurance could be lower but it would be a task to get a license and drive and B) more funding could go into public transport as a response.

What high use? What tasks have I marginalised? Sorry, I'm genuinely curious. I can't imagine why guns are still high use in America today.

Now, this is one that hasn't come up in the debate yet but is a pretty solid trump card if there ever was one. Making it harder for legitimate hard working Amurricans to get guns doesn't mean that there stops being guns in America. Sadly, if you ban every gun in America, then the guns don't disappear, but only the bad guys have them now. When you make it illegal to own something, you get a whole lot of lawbreakers, not a whole lot of people moved to stop having guns. Look at prohibition. Now imagine if the illegal gun trade started to be a regular encounter with every day people. Where guns go to anybody without control or serial numbers or nothing. That sounds worse to me.

But that's all systemic of the system. What is the real need that people have for guns? It's a deterrent. When crime is at the high it's at in some cities, sometimes having a gun is all you can do to protect yourself. Gun accidents and crimes of passion suck, but serial killers, rapists, and fucking pricks who don't give a fuck about you and your kind will learn how to give a fuck when you have the same as them, maybe better. God forbid you have to shoot somebody, but as long as you got a gun, you're going to find criminal scum, the pussy shit-cowards of our sad world, are going to be a lot more scared than you are. And in the pursuit of happiness, not being scared of the fuckers is a must.

The fuckers aren't going to go away. And neither should the antifuckers.

*Hhhokay, ssso, here is my rant you might say*
Several things to address, not enough memory to type them all

First, I'd like to point out that I find it amusing that an Australian and a Canadian (not to shaft Tsukatu, but you've only had one towerpost) are arguing with some context to American law.

formica wrote:*PARAPHRASING* Outside of law enforcement, guns are only used to kill people and those bastard hunters *ENDPARA*

1) You brought up hunters, but I'm not sure you are away how big hunting is in some areas, no matter your hate of those meat eaters. As for not being required, sure, you could go to the super market and buy some beef instead, but well cooked deer is god-damn-delicious
2) Are you aware there are places called shooting ranges? Where people go to shoot guns at various targets? Sometimes to prove that they can shoot said guns more accurately than other target-shooters, but more often just because they find it fun? Have you yourself ever fired anything bigger than a BB gun? Because it is a pretty awesome feeling.
3) Collectors. Some guys just like having a lot of cool looking shit. A friend of mine is a knife collector. He has about 20 in all shapes and sizes, including some I'm pretty sure it isn't legal for him to own. He also brought his knife collection to our dorm at KU, which is hellishly against their rules. Did he do it because he intended to go around stabbing people, or even use them in a more domestic manor? No, he just liked his knives and wanted them with him. Some dudes just like having guns to gawk over.
4) This last one is going to seem contrived, because it is a second hand story, but deal with it. One of the guys I'm living with next year at KU lives in St. Louis. He has a friend who also goes to KU and lives in St. Louis; this guy is from an Iraqi family that just moved to the US a few years ago, they didn't exactly have large amounts of cash sitting around when they moved, so they ended up in one of the worst parts of St. Louis. On one occasion the friend of mine went to the Iraqi dude's house. Upon arriving, the entire Iraqi family (which I believe he said somewhere around 6-8 people live in that house) swarmed out, surrounded his car, and escorted him in with guns, including I was told a couple AK-47s and others similar in size. Why? Because they found that the only way that you stay safe and that your shit is protected is to show that you mean business and if you fuck with them, you'll get fucked back. I'm sure these seems a little ridiculous to those of us living in safe neighborhoods, but there are places where people need the protection. To add a random quote that is nearly as cool as the others being thrown around, 'The best defense is a good offense'.

Would you also be a proponent of outlawing bow and arrow? They are around for the exact same reasons, hunting, shooting, collecting, and some crazy bastard has probably killed a few people with one.

As I said at the beginning, I have forgot what else I wanted to rant about, I need to start taking notes :/

A few very quick things before I go to bed- properly arranged!

The problem here is dem' crazyfolk. We need to address that before we address guns. Eliminating a quick way to kill means what; people are going to kill their spouses slowly and experience prolonged psychological damage? I'm not saying that killing somebody with a gun is a good thing. But the way you make it sound when you kill somebody by strangling them or stabbing them sounds a whole lot worse for every party involved.

I think you've misinterpreted me a bit here: I was saying that, when guns aren't available, less people kill other people in domestic disputes. It is, I think, something to do with emotional distance- standing a little while away and squeezing the trigger of a gun is much easier to do than getting up close and personal and slowly strangling to death. I'm saying that a lot of the people who WOULD use guns in a fight against somebody else, while it's on their person, WOULDN'T go to the kitchen, grab a knife/ hammer, and bludgeon their spouse to death.

The amount of murder in domestic disputes in America outstrips that of Australia and Europe, I think. (Evidence possibly forthcoming if/ when I can be bothered.) Sure that might be because Americans see violence and murder in a completely different way to Europeans and Australians, but since the bulk of said deaths are gunshot wounds, it doesn't seem likely.

Now, this is one that hasn't come up in the debate yet but is a pretty solid trump card if there ever was one. Making it harder for legitimate hard working Amurricans to get guns doesn't mean that there stops being guns in America. Sadly, if you ban every gun in America, then the guns don't disappear, but only the bad guys have them now. When you make it illegal to own something, you get a whole lot of lawbreakers, not a whole lot of people moved to stop having guns. Look at prohibition. Now imagine if the illegal gun trade started to be a regular encounter with every day people. Where guns go to anybody without control or serial numbers or nothing. That sounds worse to me.

Prohibition =/= firearms.

In Australia, guns are for the most part illegal, and barely any criminals find a way through to the black market to buy a gun. Sure, the cream of the scum do- the Underbelly lords and all that wank- but the meat- and- potatos of the crime world try to hold people up with knives or with brawn. And less people die.

Getting a gun on the black market is, if it's regulated and watched properly, going to be a very hard thing to do. The mafia might get them, and they'll still trickle around a little bit, but I really doubt that the amount of guns on a black market would be equivalent to the amount on the legal market if it's halfway competently regulated.

Plus, regular law- abiding Larry isn't, when he snaps, going to have a gun to slaughter friends and family with.

Win/ win, right?

People have to drive around for twenty minutes and parallel park a car to get a license. Since we nearly agree that cars are more dangerous than guns, should people not be given stress tests? Regular psychological exams? Wouldn't this also feasibly lower insurance rates? It seems like if we were pressing the issue of the dangerousness of driving a car, A) Insurance could be lower but it would be a task to get a license and drive and B) more funding could go into public transport as a response.

Yeah, I'm not seeing any real drawbacks to making it harder to be a driver, provided there are other realistic options- say, public transport that's not shit!

Likewise, I'm not seeing any real drawbacks on making it pretty damn hard to own a gun, provided other realistic options exist- say, a well- funded well-trained police force to take care of motherfckers and a state with strong social support measures to limit the amount of people that become motherfckers in the first place!

But that's all systemic of the system. What is the real need that people have for guns? It's a deterrent. When crime is at the high it's at in some cities, sometimes having a gun is all you can do to protect yourself. Gun accidents and crimes of passion suck, but serial killers, rapists, and fucking pricks who don't give a fuck about you and your kind will learn how to give a fuck when you have the same as them, maybe better. God forbid you have to shoot somebody, but as long as you got a gun, you're going to find criminal scum, the pussy shit-cowards of our sad world, are going to be a lot more scared than you are. And in the pursuit of happiness, not being scared of the fuckers is a must.

The fuckers aren't going to go away. And neither should the antifuckers.

It's a decent trump card. I've got a few problems with it, though-
1. No statistics, but how often do you think people shoot people they mistake for motherf*ckers? Say, that person you SWEAR was stalking you home, or your daughter climbing in the window sneaking back home after a party when you're SURE she's a burglar. Humans make mistakes, especially when they're jumpy and full of adrenaline- which is the sort of situation in which you'd be using the gun in the first place.

2. And also, at want point of motherf*ckerage does somebody deserve to die? Somebody raping your wife? Somebody stealing a car? Somebody stealing some jewellery? Some creep who's infatuated with you and keeps bordering the line between a crush and stalking? Somebody who grabs your wallet? A drunk who threatens to hurt you, or wanders into your home after dark, or urinates against your shed? Somebody who keeps looking at you the wrong way?
There's a related point, which is that, no matter who morally justified you may have been shooting that motherf*cker doing something for which he actually DOES deserve to die, the law might not see it that way. Shooting motherf*ckers willy- nilly might just land you with at least a few years of imprisonment, which doesn't even leave the gun owner any better off.

A related, weak point: I really like Kurt Vonnegut's approach to people. He mentions in Slaughterhouse 5 how his Dad realised that, "Kurt, you know, you've never written a story with a villain in it." He wrote a full book where every incidental character has a full backstory and future and wrote about how one of the crimes of fiction is that it leads people to believe that, in their lives and in the world, there are main characters and supporting characters, when really there are just people. Okay, there are nasty pieces of work out there, but this whole approach of "I am a good guy, THESE GUYS ARE BAD GUYS" justifies doing shitty things to "bad" people way too easily.

People commit crimes for a tonne of reasons, and being a bad person isn't necessarily at the top of the list. I've been robbed on the train before, and they seemed decent enough and even gave me back my SIM card back for my phone, and I'd feel pretty damn messed up if I'd shot them instead of handing over what I had.

But that's more of a comment on me than on the ethics of killing people who are robbing you.

Anyway, with both these points it seems like you're arguing for putting the law into the hands of regular citizen Joe, when, I think, a trained police officer would do a much better job. Maybe it's worth campaigning for an increased police presence?



Once more point, and it's a complete stretch:

Jeremy Seabrook wrote this interesting basic little book on World Poverty, and he includes this as a throwaway point:

Jeremy Seabrook wrote:Crime has another social role - it represents the privatization of social justice. Collective action for self-improvement has been delegitimized, done away with by official declarations over the death of socialism. Crime is the response of individuals to socially created wrongs: it is both a caricature of mainstream values (criminals, too, show great enterprise and ingenuity in their operations), and a celebration of heroic individualism at the heart of capitalism-made-global.

It's interesting, because libertarian values underpin justifications for unfettered markets, national and global. The ideals of liberty and autonomy and individuality are behind getting rid of social security and public medical care and all that stuff: People should be free to make their own choices, and nowhere are these choices more meaningful than on the market. Government interference (in the form of social security) undermines all that wonderful choice and gets rid of a bunch of lovely options by providing a floor people theoretically can't fall beneath- we should leave it up to the market. This also seems to be the logical conclusion of your statement here:

I would, in my ideal society, pay the absolute minimum tax to man the borders of my country as well as have a system in check to solve major disputes, such as murder.

Which, in turn, creates the "bad guys" you want to protect yourself against.

Anyway, it's a complete stretch and a bit off topic and iunno how much I even believe it, but hopefully it's at least an interesting stretch.




And

The biggest problem with trying to lower gun violence by getting rid of the gun is because what you're left with is just violence. (That's a hell of a quote. I'm running for governor.)

*is* an awesome soundbite.

smartalco wrote:1) You brought up hunters, but I'm not sure you are away how big hunting is in some areas, no matter your hate of those meat eaters. As for not being required, sure, you could go to the super market and buy some beef instead, but well cooked deer is god-damn-delicious
2) Are you aware there are places called shooting ranges? Where people go to shoot guns at various targets? Sometimes to prove that they can shoot said guns more accurately than other target-shooters, but more often just because they find it fun? Have you yourself ever fired anything bigger than a BB gun? Because it is a pretty awesome feeling.
3) Collectors. Some guys just like having a lot of cool looking shit. A friend of mine is a knife collector. He has about 20 in all shapes and sizes, including some I'm pretty sure it isn't legal for him to own. He also brought his knife collection to our dorm at KU, which is hellishly against their rules. Did he do it because he intended to go around stabbing people, or even use them in a more domestic manor? No, he just liked his knives and wanted them with him. Some dudes just like having guns to gawk over.
4) This last one is going to seem contrived, because it is a second hand story, but deal with it. One of the guys I'm living with next year at KU lives in St. Louis. He has a friend who also goes to KU and lives in St. Louis; this guy is from an Iraqi family that just moved to the US a few years ago, they didn't exactly have large amounts of cash sitting around when they moved, so they ended up in one of the worst parts of St. Louis. On one occasion the friend of mine went to the Iraqi dude's house. Upon arriving, the entire Iraqi family (which I believe he said somewhere around 6-8 people live in that house) swarmed out, surrounded his car, and escorted him in with guns, including I was told a couple AK-47s and others similar in size. Why? Because they found that the only way that you stay safe and that your shit is protected is to show that you mean business and if you fuck with them, you'll get fucked back. I'm sure these seems a little ridiculous to those of us living in safe neighborhoods, but there are places where people need the protection. To add a random quote that is nearly as cool as the others being thrown around, 'The best defense is a good offense'.

1. Different issue completely. But I've got no problem with hunting for food. I'm also very obviously for it in places where people NEED food and animals provide that. Just not so much when people like going around shooting random creatures for no point except a laugh. Basically, needless pain bothers me. Still, it's not anything I'd necessarily want to impose on other people.

2. Alright, shooting things on shooting ranges is fun. Fair point. Still, you could do that without gun ownership and with rentals from shooting ranges. And anyway, you still need to prove that the enjoyment people get on shooting ranges is worth the negative consequences of allowing widespread gun ownership.

3. I've got a small knife collection. It's shiny and I like it a lot. Still, I'm glad there are at least some regulations on owning non- domestic use knives. And anyway, you're talking to a guy living in MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, where knife violence is the latest hot issue in the papers and the source of a bunch of new government initiatives. You'd find a LOT of people here who would be completely for banning the sale of kill knives, and barely any who would find the idea as ridiculous as you do. And I'm pretty sure that if there was a sudden spate of deaths by bow- and- arrow the exact same debate would pop up.

4. Fair point. I'm renting in a fairly low socio- economic area of Australia at the moment (and my neighbour was robbed a few months back), but Australia's way behind America when it comes to crime.

So there are areas where crime is bad enough that people NEED guns for security. Sure, I can see that, and anybody who owns a gun in this area is completely justified in doing so. Sure. It might even help things if guns were legal, or if the government handed out a gun to everybody when they turn 18 or 21 or whatever. Okay. I can kinda see the logic here. These parts of the world are screwed up, and people need guns, THEREFORE they should be legally entitled to them.

Still, since the problem seems to be unique to America, I think the more powerful argument is that the government should stop being so shit and redress whatever it is it's doing wrong to create the crime in the first place. Create a decent police presence, create proper social security and give people realistic options other than crime, and all that jazz. There's probably a more pressing need to do that than to give out free guns.

Okay, there has been a frickin' explosion of stuff to respond to here, but rather than address each bit individually, I'll summarize my views and let you extrapolate my response from that. Afterward, if you had a point you think I glossed over, feel free to mention it specifically.

I was raised in a very liberal environment, so naturally my default when I was younger was that "my team" was for gun prohibition, and that the only people who wanted guns were angry and racist. I didn't see that there was a point to gun ownership whatsoever other than to feel like a badass, and that they were much more harm than good.
One of my closest friends in high school was a bit of a gun nut, and it surprised me that he was sensible. That gave me an academic interest in the subject. So I did research for myself, for a paper in high school, and for another in an argumentative writing class in college. Through my research, it became clear to me that the gun rights lobby had the most powerful and sensible arguments, and I was forced to change my position in the interests of intellectual honesty.

There are many small reasons to permit gun ownership, including hunting, collecting, principle (if you're a libertarian), what have you, but I don't find any of them particularly compelling. My immediate focus when it comes to gun rights is crime.
It shouldn't be surprising that criminals prefer unarmed victims. They prefer it so strongly, in fact, that the majority of violent confrontations are diffused instantly when a gun enters the scene. The victims usually don't even have an opportunity to fire, and in fact don't need to; if you simply show a gun, or in many situations simply state that you have one, you are five times more likely to leave that encounter completely unharmed. This is why I've said in the past that even advocates of gun control should carry an unloaded gun or a non-functioning replica with them.

More importantly, research shows that the deterrent effect is serious business. Whereas the gun control lobby dominates the media and political scene, the tables are completely turned around in the world of academic research. I've had a very difficult time trying to find a decent paper in support of gun control, and those in favor of gun rights cheerfully tear the existing argumentation apart. I really haven't seen that gun control has any motivating influence other than emotional appeal.
The following statistical trends are very well-established, and for some reason proponents of gun control seem to refuse to address them:

• There is zero correlation between increased gun prevalence in a society and increased violence.
• Introducing shall-issue concealed weapon permits into a society dramatically reduces its rate of violent crimes.
• The lower rates of violent crime "bleed in" to neighboring US states, even if those neighbors have unreasonably stringent gun control regulations.

These studies take all kinds of differences between states into account, including income, crowding, and even the heat and humidity, and rarely find these to be statistically significant factors.

The two states that epitomize polarized views on gun control are Vermont and Washington DC.
In Vermont, the only "license" you need to carry and conceal a handgun on your person is 18 years of age, and it is one of the safest states in the US. Its rates of violent crimes and theft are, if memory serves, the second-lowest in the nation. Gun prevalence is high, people apparently know to use their words to solve their disputes, and crime doesn't pay.
Washington DC, on the other hand, has only recently allowed its residents to keep guns in the home, but of course only while trigger-locked and physically stowed in a locked box kept a great distance away from the locked box containing the ammo. And DC shows all the symptoms you'd expect from a society that restricted gun ownership exclusively to criminals: it's the murder capital of the US, and leads every other category of violent crime by a wide margin as well, with property crime not far behind. Civil unrest has been higher in Washington DC in the last decade or two than countries whose unrest provoked NATO intervention.
Point is, when you outlaw gun ownership, only criminals will have guns. And as gun proponents like to say, "in the event of an emergency, the police will show up in time to draw the chalk around your body."

Existing regulation addresses two points: who can own a gun, and where they can carry it. In their present state, firearms regulations are extremely unbalanced: just about anyone can own a gun, but nobody can legally do very much with one. This, to me, is the primary problem, and balancing these regulations should be the highest priority.
We need much stronger regulations on who can own a gun, because current regulations are a combination of ineffective and unenforced. To get a car, you need to pass a written test and a field test, and your license can be taken away if you prove to be mentally unstable. We don't have any of these as requirements for gun ownership for some reason, and that needs to be fixed. It's also my personal opinion that the public high school curriculum should include a mandatory civics course which should cover proper handling of a firearm, among many other things.
On the other hand, the crime-reducing influence of high gun prevalence is stunted dramatically by regulations that don't address the right problem. Gun locks, trigger locks, storage and transportation requirements, and gun-free zones only restrict the demographic that consistently shows to reduce the crime rate around them. It is mind-boggling to me that legislators could possibly expect gun-related crime to be reduced due to these measures. These regulations serve only to address the imaginary "problem" of normal, everyday people being motivated to do criminal things simply because they have a gun on them.
(Yes, the establishment of Gun-Free Zones is one of the most idiotic initiatives ever conceived by a governing body. People do not wander into convenience stores and, realizing that they're short on cash but have a weapon on them, decide to rob the place. The intent is established long before the fact, and the criminal sure as hell isn't going to have a change of heart if he sees the Gun-Free Zone sign. Instead, he is going to be drawn to an area that guarantees that he will be the only one armed. Consequently, Gun-Free Zones are some of the most dangerous areas of any city, and you would do well to avoid these areas.)

So when you make an argument like...

formica wrote:Killing is bad.
Except for in a few highly specific contexts, guns don't do anything BUT go pow and kill.
Guns are bad in the hands of people who would use them against other people. (And what else is average office- working Joe able to use it for?)
There would be fewer deaths if they went away. So why not do that?

...you are fixated only on the immediate consequences of using a gun, and completely ignoring motivations to brandish or use one, not to mention the change in social context that the high lethality of guns imposes.
Yes, killing is bad, but that's beside the point. The point is that humans are fucking terrified to die, and if they see that the consequences for harassing you or burgling your home include death, they will back off immediately. Pulling a gun introduces a very sudden and powerful change in circumstances. (See, for example, this hysterical video.) The point has been beaten to death in academics that increased gun prevalence does not correlate to increased violence or violent crimes; guns do not introduce any violent crime that wouldn't be happening already.
"Taking away all the guns" is quite powerfully counter-productive, as such an initiative only hinders the influence of the demographic that reduces crime by owning guns; vis. Washington DC. "There would be fewer deaths if they went away" is flat-out fucking wrong.

You ask what Joe Office-Worker is going to do with a gun, and that's a very good question. I am sincerely happy that you asked it.
In an ideal world, people would not have evil inclinations in the first place, and so guns, police, and even government would be totally unnecessary. But in a world where people do have nefarious intentions, the ideal is to have an extremely high prevalence of guns in the hands of responsible citizens, which they never, ever have to use because it's clear that committing a violent crime results in an immediate death sentence. So the best thing that Joe Office-Worker can do with a gun is simply to have it, and to carry it with him. In doing so, he contributes to maintaining a safer society.
Provided we fix the two legal issues I mentioned earlier (making it much more difficult to earn the license for a gun, but allowing people who prove themselves responsible to carry concealed weapons with them as they please), I can't imagine a safer society than one in which concealed carry is practically universal. How many muggings do you think are going to go down when the mugger knows that 3 out of 4 people are carrying concealed weapons? And because they are concealed, he can't exactly pick out victims he knows are unarmed. As I've said multiple times before, increased gun prevalence does not correlate to increased violence, so more people with more guns isn't going to increase the crime rate. Accidents may become more frequent, but that will be grossly overshadowed by the plummeting murder rate.

Some time ago, I read an excellent blog post which remains my very most favorite blog post to date. I don't remember enough about it to find it again, but here's a paraphrasing of it:
Generally speaking, you have two ways of getting me to do something for you: reason and force. For example, if you wanted me to give you money, you could ask nicely or offer future compensation, or you could also threaten to beat or kill me if I don't give it to you.
Obviously, in a civilized society, all negotiation is through reason; force should never enter the scene.
Guns have two properties that make them particularly well-suited for maintaining a safe society (the explanation as to why is coming): they are extremely lethal, and they are very easy to use. Size and strength do not matter; a gun is just as lethal in the hands of an 80-pound woman as it is in the hands of a 200-pound, steroid-abusing gangster. Disparity in size, strength, age, gender, and even number go right out the window, and are no longer applicable as advantages or disadvantages in a physical conflict.
So when you want something from me and are considering how you could get it from me (reason or force), seeing a gun at my side removes force from the table outright. You must thereafter deal with me through reason. It would be no different if I were a different combination of size, gender, and age: force is simply not an option available to you.
If successful use of a gun depended at all on physical strength or skill, this would not hold. If we carried knives or hatchets or baseball bats, the young and the strong, which are incidentally the vast majority of violent criminals, could still consistently use force to get their way. Because a gun is so lethal and so easy to use, it is the Almighty Equalizer.

So, look, I don't think of myself as some kind of vigilante or superhero. Having excuses to kill people is not why I intend to carry a firearm, because I am not a maniac. And this is also an accurate description of the body of lawful gun owners. Through my friends and friends of friends, and all of my outings at firing ranges, I have never come across an irresponsible gun owner. In fact, practically all of them handled their weapons with grim sincerity. The stereotype of a careless redneck is not at all representative of the gun-owning population.

So that's the side I've seen of the gun rights lobby. But "they are cold and metal and make loud noises and I'm scared of loud noises" is basically what the gun control lobby's argument boils down to.

Tsukatu wrote:(See, for example, this hysterical video.)

I think this is seriously all the argument we need against gun control.

I think Tsukatu also touched on something that should be pointed out; you mentioned how difficult it is for criminals to obtain illegal guns in Australia; shouldn't that be a good thing if people can legitimately be certified to own guns? That means only the good guys have this powerful weapon, and that's something in itself.

Slappy wrote:Guns are a necessity because people are promised the right to them in the constitution.

Woah. You /flaming/ liberal.

Comparing cars to guns is ridiculous, and you know it. If guns are "necessary," cars are fucking vital. We can put up with the danger of a crash or malfunction easily -- as long as we can move more 700 miles in one day. Guns, on the other hand, are very rarely used in helpful situations (fucking up someone who's entered your house illegally, hunting, etc ... how often do those things happen these days) -- compared to cars, their helpfulness is utterly minuscule.


EDIT: Little clarification. I hate cars. I think the downside of cars is greater than the downside of guns nowadays, and not because of the drunk drivers and shit, because of the environment. I'm a hippie; I'm usually on you guys' side in these sorts of things. Fuck cars; we should bike everywhere.

But still, you're comparing apples and oranges.

Tsukatu, you are on a roll or something lately.

xVxCrushloaderusSupremusxVx wrote:Tsukatu, you are on a roll or something lately.

Yeah, I should say, Tsukatu, that post of yours is particularly well written and embodies the issue for me perfectly.

Sorry if I repeat something from above but some of the above posts were just a little to long for my present mood.

But I got to thinking more about it. And about how if you are perfectly careful with a gun, ain't no accidents going to happen. You keep it locked in a case with the key around your neck. You don't keep it loaded. You don't point at something you don't fully intend to shoot and you don't take that safety off until you intend to pull.

Cars cause a number of motherfucking deaths. And no matter how fucking careful you are with a car, you can still get into an accident. Not just some freak one in a million shit either, but some legitimate, breakfast ruining dead shit because even though you were super careful, one other guy wasn't. Or any of the other billion drivers on the road.

You're not really comparing them on a level footing here. The car can still kill you even if your perfectly careful with it because of the other people on the roads but in this case it isn't really your car that kills you it's the other persons car. True it may be your car with which the impact takes place or which crushes or burns you but it's the other car and the person driving it which causes your death. Similarly you can keep your gun unloaded and locked in a box with the key round your neck and it is unlikely to kill you however it doesn't stop someone else's gun from killing you if they walk up behind you and shoot you in the back of the head or fire irresponsibly while hunting and hit you on a walk through the woods. I think this comparison is closer to fair.

Deaths basically fall in to two categories accidental and purposeful. Cars usually kill in accidents, people do occasionally run each other down on purpose but it's a rare form of attack because your not close to the person an interaction which results in this kind of rage is unlikely and if the attack is preplanned its just a bizarre weapon to pick also requiring you to meet the person on the road. Disparately people killed by guns are usually killed on purpose as to shoot someone by accident is unlucky and will usually be from far enough away or in a non-fatal body part or with a low enough calibre bullet not to be fatal and guns are the weapon of choice for wars, murders and many executions. This opposing types of fatal danger (I assume we're talking about danger of death and not injury here, if we're talking injury cars clearly have the upper hand) means it is hard to classify exactly which one is more dangerous in itself. In most places more people die in car accidents than gun related crimes but guns there are less guns than cars in circulation and they're less often used.

I would say I'm tipping slightly towards guns. To use an analogy, which animal is more dangerous a crocodile or a dog? Though in most place you are more likely to be killed by dogs and a crocodile is not a threat if well contained in a zoo cage, I'd still say the croc is more dangerous because the question of a things danger usually implies it is present and the croc is better designed to kill me and more efficient a doing so. However I'm not sure.

xVxCrushloaderusSupremusxVx wrote:Tsukatu, you are on a roll or something lately.

SlappyMcGee wrote:Yeah, I should say, Tsukatu, that post of yours is particularly well written and embodies the issue for me perfectly.

Heh, thanks. I think I owe it to age, really. More time spent thinking about stuff gives you more perspective.

ghoulash wrote:Guns, on the other hand, are very rarely used in helpful situations (fucking up someone who's entered your house illegally, hunting, etc ... how often do those things happen these days)

Airplane crashes make the news, but successful takeoffs and landings do not. A popular media is a sensationalist media, which naturally capitalizes on the public's fear. A good percentage of successful defensive uses of firearms are never reported to the police, either, so it's not surprising that the news doesn't mention them often.
I tried to dig up that paper I mentioned, but I failed. I do remember finding an estimate of the number of defensive uses of handguns somewhere, and I remember it being surprisingly large, but I'm sorry that I don't have the number and the source. Point is, I'm confident that this issue has been adequately addressed, and you should be confident in my confidence because I'm much smarter and prettier than you, and probably make more money.

Allow me to end with two quotes:

The overwhelming majority of encounters between armed citizens and violent criminals end just that way, whether in the depths of the inner city or in the wilderness.
Perpetrator begins to attack.
Perpetrator sees gun pointing at him.
Perpetrator suddenly decides that he has made a terrible mistake, and is about to die from what I’ve come to call “sudden and acute failure of the victim selection process.”
Perpetrator either flees or surrenders.
End of story.
Most of the time.
Sometimes, the predator is so obsessed or enraged, so drugged out or drunk, or just so unbelievably stupid that he continues the attack. When this happens, the citizen/victim has no choice but to steady the gun and pull the trigger. This is the moment at which you will need not only the wherewithal to do what needs to be done, but the skill and familiarity with the firearm to allow you to do so.
- Captain Massad Ayoob

"Confucius say, do not break into house of man who run to gunsafe smiling and say, 'finally!'"
- Anonymous

Tsukatu wrote:

ghoulash wrote:Guns, on the other hand, are very rarely used in helpful situations (fucking up someone who's entered your house illegally, hunting, etc ... how often do those things happen these days)

Airplane crashes make the news, but successful takeoffs and landings do not. A popular media is a sensationalist media, which naturally capitalizes on the public's fear. A good percentage of successful defensive uses of firearms are never reported to the police, either, so it's not surprising that the news doesn't mention them often.

Are ... are you seriously going to argue that because the media doesn't pick up on most "vigilante defenses" (which may or may not be true: there's nothing the heavily sensationalist morning news likes more than a story about a private citizen pulling a Superman), we should assume that guns are incredibly useful? More useful than cars? Even if you are, the same logic about what gets reported and what doesn't applies to cars -- the number of accidents is large in total, but small percentage-wise.

I won't argue with the make more money part, much as I wish I could.

To steal Tsukatu's approach and summarise Tsukatu's reasoning:

Tsukatu's stupidly simplistic view wrote:Crime is bad.
Guns lower crime.
Guns are good.
Everybody (save the crazies) should carry a gun.

There's a pretty huge gap in the reasoning. Guns are also accidentally discharged and used in domestic disputes, not just to defend yourself. (And it'd be interesting to know the relative rates of accidental gun- related death in Washington and Vermont. In any case, even IF the crime- reducing benefits outweigh the drawbacks of accidental shootings and disproportionate responses to petty crime (say, the handful of people who get blown up for not noticing the "trespassers will be shot" signs on country properties), these are still unavoidable drawbacks of using guns to control crime.

There's a huge amount of literature coming from many perspectives on why people commit crime, and your view- people naturally try to take things away from other people, and are only restrained by the risk of retaliation- is at best incomplete. People commit crime for a bunch of reasons, including the values held by society, a state of deprivation with no or few other ways out, desperation, how anonymous they feel, how much they have to lose and- yeah- how likely they are to lose it. And sure, widespread gun ownership might lower crime by drastically raising the stakes involved for those who would otherwise commit it (as Vermont seems to suggest, though, you know, correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation. Are there any other major differences between Vermont and Washington? Poverty, police presence, communal structures?) It DOESN'T mean that gun ownership is the best, most effective, least- harmful way of reducing crime.

Neighbourhoods where crime is so bad that people NEED guns to protect themselves aren't fucked up because there's a concentration of mentally fucked up people living in these areas. They're fucked up for a bunch of other reasons. Fixing the main causes of crime would probably have the added benefit of making these areas less fucked up to begin with, rather than scaring people away from a life of crime with the threat of violence.




The whole argument reminds me a bit of that argument about the moral virtue and necessity of war: War drives technological advances and changes that occasionally trickle down into other areas and enrich the general population's lives. That argument is fairly ridiculous, because there are other ways to achieve the same things, more efficiently and without all of the human costs inherent in warfare- say, investing a bunch of research into agricultural production or industrial innovation, rather than hoping that some of this shiny new research into helping make napalm EVEN MORE deadly will somehow trickle down into soldering industries. Basically, since there are better ways of doing it, campaigning for war loses its moral force.

Likewise, saying that widespread gun ownership is good because it reduces crime glosses over the negative effects of widespread gun ownership- the direct ones to do with accidental shootings and disproportionate responses, and the more vague, longer- term ones about how encouraging people to rely on privatised security, like guns or the security hired out by gated communities, might compromise some of the more valuable ideals of a community/ society. If there's a better way of reducing crime- say, one that incidentally also reduces poverty, rather than one which results in accidental gun deaths- then there's no real argument for giving out guns to anybody who wants one.

So the relevant question isn't exactly "would guns reduce crime?" (debatable- I'll dig up some articles eventually, but at least the pro- gun lobby has some strong arguments here), but "would guns be the best way of reducing crime?" And this question is a lot harder to answer.

Edit: Two interesting articles
A fairly famous study was: Kellermann, Arthur L., Frederick P. Rivara, Norman B. Rushforth, Joyce G. Banton, Donald T. Reay, Jerry T. Francisco, Ana B. Locci, Janice Prodzinski, Bela B. Hackman, and Grant Somes- 1993- "Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home." New England Journal of
Medicine 329:1084-1091. It found that persons living in households with guns are 2.7 times more likely to be the victim of homocide than those living in households without guns, which seems to imply that people who shoot their spouses would NOT generally just grab a hammer and kill their spouses using that instead.

It has, of course, been criticised, but even the harshest critics I read granted a increased risk of 1.4

Kwon, Scott, Safranski and Bae wrote an article called "The Effectiveness of Gun Control Laws: Multivariate Statistical Analysis" (American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 41-50) which found that gun control laws have a very mild positive effect on gun- related deaths, with the big determining factors being a state's poverty level, unemployment rate, and alcohol consumption. So basically gun markets don't make people any safer and have only a very slight impact on the number of gun- related deaths. On the other hand, social programs and promotion of employment (and maybe some good free community health programs for alcohol addiction) are probably doing to do a lot of good in reducing crime. Assuming this is true, Tsukatu's case falls apart.

ghoulash wrote:Are ... are you seriously going to argue that because the media doesn't pick up on most "vigilante defenses"... we should assume that guns are incredibly useful?

Absolutely. Whenever I mention that you are mistaken to believe a certain event doesn't happen, that carries with it the fullest implication that the event is of ultimate, insuperable use and importance, that it is necessarily an embodiment (and evidence of) an absolute moral good, and that successfully preventing even a minor portion of these events would so critically undermine the foundation of a civilized society that armageddon would soon follow.

In other words, no, you're putting words in my mouth. The only point I made was that defensive handgun use occurs with meaningful frequency; to see that as an attempt to argue that guns should be considered useful by default or, hysterically enough, to associate defensive handgun use with vigilantism, is simply absurd.
What is it that pops into your head when I say "defensive handgun use"? Do you picture a woman being mugged, and then a group of armed men swarming around the mugger like a SWAT team? Do you think I'm talking about the Punisher swooping down off a rooftop, or the Friendly Neighborhood Sniperman decapitating the mugger with a .50 BMG? Because for a typical self-defense scenario with a gun, your phrase "vigilante defense" is nowhere remotely close to accurate.

formica wrote:Guns are also accidentally discharged and used in domestic disputes, not just to defend yourself.

Firearm-related accidents are extremely few and far between. It seems to me that you think of them as highly-volatile and unpredictable, and that guns are simply going off randomly and unintentionally all the time in the homes of gun owners.
You're fixated again on the direct consequences of a gun going off, and forgetting how the severity of those consequences changes people's behavior. First off, it shouldn't be surprising to hear that people with extremely little experience with guns appear to be the most accident-prone with them. When it comes to owners who are practiced in the use of their weapons, they appear to treat safety as a priority as well: you are about an order of magnitude more likely to be hospitalized in a game of tennis, or especially football, than in an outing of target shooting or hunting. And as has been mentioned previously, your kids are in greater danger from your dog or pool than your gun, and you can stack the odds further against an accident by bringing them to the range with you every now and again to satisfy their curiosity.
Either way, education and training requirements for licenses would dramatically reduce the already insignificant number of firearm-related accidents.

formica wrote:even IF the crime- reducing benefits outweigh the drawbacks of accidental shootings and disproportionate responses to petty crime

You say this as though there was any question of it. Deaths and injuries from firearm accidents are less than the reduction in violent crime rates they introduce by several orders of magnitude. Selling guns that frequently kill the buyers and their families is not exactly a successful business strategy for gun manufacturers.

formica wrote:There's a huge amount of literature coming from many perspectives on why people commit crime, and your view- people naturally try to take things away from other people, and are only restrained by the risk of retaliation- is at best incomplete.

It's funny for me to hear you say that, because I never once mentioned the reasons people would have criminal intentions, but only that they have them.

formica wrote:widespread gun ownership might lower crime by drastically raising the stakes involved for those who would otherwise commit it (as Vermont seems to suggest, though, you know, correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation. Are there any other major differences between Vermont and Washington? Poverty, police presence, communal structures?)

So, like, when I said that academia has done this subject to death, I wasn't lying. I've read countless long and intensely boring papers that focused on the statistical influence of other factors on crime, and their justifications for why it was the change in gun laws that was most responsible for the change they were talking about. I'm not referring to high school papers or opinion blogs here, bro, but hundreds of well-funded studies conducted by highly respected economists and statisticians at internationally renowned universities. The war over gun regulations is pretty much fought by politically-motivated academics on the gun rights side and clueless, fear-mongering politicians on the other. This is the prevailing stereotype.

formica wrote:It DOESN'T mean that gun ownership is the best, most effective, least- harmful way of reducing crime.

Many factors influence crime, with arrest and conviction rates being the most important. However, nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws are also important, and they are the most cost-effective means of reducing crime. The cost of hiring more police in order to change arrest and conviction rates is much higher, and the net benefits per dollar spent are only at most a quarter as large as the benefits from concealed-handgun laws. Even private, medium-security prisons cost state governments about $34 a day per prisoner ($12,267 per year). For concealed handguns, the permit fees are usually the largest costs borne by private citizens. The durability of guns allows owners to recoup their investments over many years. Using my yearly cost estimate of $43 per concealed handgun for Pennsylvanians, concealed handguns pay for themselves if they have only 1/285 of the deterrent impact of an additional year in prison. This calculation even ignores the other costs of the legal system, such as prosecution and defense costs --- criminals will expend greater effort to fight longer prison sentences in court. No other government policy appears to have anywhere near the same cost-benefit ratio as concealed-handgun laws.
(emphasis added)
-- p.140, More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott, Jr.

formica wrote:If there's a better way of reducing crime- say, one that incidentally also reduces poverty, rather than one which results in accidental gun deaths- then there's no real argument for giving out guns to anybody who wants one.

You're saying this in the face of figures like "US states without shall-issue permits for concealed handguns have, on average, violent crime rates that are 127% higher than states that offer such permits."
If there's a better deterrent to violent crime, we haven't found it yet.

formica wrote:saying that widespread gun ownership is good because it reduces crime glosses over the negative effects of widespread gun ownership- the direct ones to do with accidental shootings and disproportionate responses, and the more vague, longer- term ones about how encouraging people to rely on privatised security, like guns or the security hired out by gated communities, might compromise some of the more valuable ideals of a community/ society.

Hm, that latter bit is admittedly something I had never considered. (I am, however, completely unconcerned about the problem of firearm-related accidents.)
Whenever I hear people talk about privatized security in a bad light, I think of two things: the state of public security in England, which appears to have treated Orwell's 1984 as an instruction manual, and the following quote by Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security, deserve neither."
I have, however, no opinion one way or another about security as a private institution. It's not an issue I've looked into very much, so I don't feel qualified to talk intelligibly about it. Arming individual citizens, however, has absolutely nothing to do with private security firms.

formica wrote:basically gun markets don't make people any safer- they put them at slightly higher risk of gun- related death. On the other hand, social programs and promotion of employment (and maybe some good free community health programs for alcohol addiction) are probably doing to do a lot of good in reducing crime. Assuming this is true, Tsukatu's case falls apart.

I actually laughed at that last sentence. If those facts are verifiably true, then you of course have a good point in there somewhere, but a single 9-page paper you dug up by some nobodies does not, in my mind, stand well against the torrents of information I've seen that concludes the opposite. The trend I've seen most everywhere I've looked is that an introduction of firearms into a society makes violent crime take a sudden and severe turn. If you like, I could go through some of the literature I have and take pictures of all the pretty little graphs that show this.

Many factors influence crime, with arrest and conviction rates being the most important. However, nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws are also important, and they are the most cost-effective means of reducing crime. The cost of hiring more police in order to change arrest and conviction rates is much higher, and the net benefits per dollar spent are only at most a quarter as large as the benefits from concealed-handgun laws. Even private, medium-security prisons cost state governments about $34 a day per prisoner ($12,267 per year). For concealed handguns, the permit fees are usually the largest costs borne by private citizens. The durability of guns allows owners to recoup their investments over many years. Using my yearly cost estimate of $43 per concealed handgun for Pennsylvanians, concealed handguns pay for themselves if they have only 1/285 of the deterrent impact of an additional year in prison. This calculation even ignores the other costs of the legal system, such as prosecution and defense costs --- criminals will expend greater effort to fight longer prison sentences in court. No other government policy appears to have anywhere near the same cost-benefit ratio as concealed-handgun laws.
(emphasis added)
-- p.140, More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott, Jr.

That something is the most cost- effective method of achieving something does NOT make it the most effective overall, just the cheapest. Obviously. And I can't see much in that quote suggesting anything other than "Wow! Concealed handguns COST BARELY ANYTHING- it's totally the best approach."

tsukatu wrote:I actually laughed at that last sentence. If those facts are verifiably true, then you of course have a good point in there somewhere, but a single 9-page paper you dug up by some nobodies does not, in my mind, stand well against the torrents of information I've seen that concludes the opposite. The trend I've seen most everywhere I've looked is that an introduction of firearms into a society makes violent crime take a sudden and severe turn. If you like, I could go through some of the literature I have and take pictures of all the pretty little graphs that show this.

The New England Journal of Medicine and the American Journal of Economics and Sociology aren't exactly fringe publications, especially not the former. In any case, the bigger point is that there are better, more effective ways of solving crime through social programs, etc, that have a bunch of other positive effects and no real negative ones.

I also came across a bunch of other stuff referring back to a more or less complete consensus that the bulk of sociological evidence, at least, shows strong correlation between the availability of dangerous firearms, particularly handguns and assault weapons, and the proliferation of violent crime- even though the cause is still contested.

Anyway, sure, throw some links my way, I'm up for a bit of reading.