The Great ILX Gun Control Debate

yeah guys. gun leg is gonna be hard. so let's not try.

besides, there's powerful lobbying behind that shit.

I really dont see how the upside of owning guns privately outweighs all of the death and stuff that happens that involves guns. t0dd on the mark to this point.


now, excepting for legitimate reasons (say viable and verified threats against family, self – but not raw property, fuck property – and for the procurement of food, hunting, etc.,) why [/i]can't[/i] we have a significant lockdown on guns? seriously, let's quit hiding behind the second amendment as gospel; use it for the philosophy intended. the philosophy is intended toward the protection of the people from universal threat. so let's read it in the spirit of mitigating a universal threat: gun violence. logos, not inflexible literality.

anyway, we're reading an evolutionary article; or at least i try to consider it that way when i'm reminded of the 3/5ths representation it entitles me.

also bullshit on the 80 million guns claim

xpost galore

Manalishi: That is really the worst stat i have ever seen... and possibly the most transparent. I am pretty sure you realize this.

While accidental gun deaths do matter to me and are definitely a problem, they are not the real problem. The problem is non-accidental gun deaths... where people are meaning to harm others. are drive-by shooting accidental? are school shootings? are cases of passion?

sure, doctors are people and they make mistakes. the human body is fragile and when doctors accidentally prescribe a wrong drug or make a mistake in surgery, it is not with intent to harm. how many doctors are out there who harm intentionally?

lol guns

http://images.dmusic.com/v7/emoticons/shoot.gifhttp://forums.seriouszone.com/images/smilies/sconf.gifhttp://images.dmusic.com/v7/emoticons/uzi.gifhttp://forums.seriouszone.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

i think that 80 million might be right - the best estimates are something like 30% of households, but that # doesn't differentiate between an old hunting rifle in the garage and a loaded 357 in the dresser.

http://www.renegadechickens.com/chickens/Toons/foghorn.jpg

pictured l-r: ilx, roger

Nonviolent protest only works against opponents who have qualms about slaughtering you, yeah?

No, it works against people who have qualms about being seen to slaughter you. It's all PR

Kerm: in a democratic society such as ours, mowing opponents down rarely results in positive gains for your side. remember what happened in Harlan County after an anti-union bully killed a miner? the company gave in and let the miners unionize because there was national attention and scrutiny.

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e105/con7/gungirl1.jpg

^^ properly educated amirite????

I've been following this debate with interest, during my lunch break of vegetable pasty and orange juice, but sadly Manalishi has just lost all credible debating points with his fucking rubbish statistics.

This article is about the Australian gun buyback. It might be of some interest to the gunny people on this thread.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/buyback-has-no-effect-on-murder-rate/2006/10/23/1161455665717.html

Dr Baker and her co-author, Samara McPhedran, declared their membership of gun groups in the article, something Dr Baker said they had done deliberately to make clear "who we are" and head off any possible criticism that they had hidden relevant details.


hmm.

The stats were just for fun, folks. Get over yourselves.

That said - the statistics are correct. But clearly supposed to be funny.

SO you are just trolling then.

Boy, you fellas just LOVE that word, huh?

you proved you are no jimmy kimmel.

lock thread

lol @ 'great ilx gun control debate' = milo and dan perry more or less agreeing and everyone pretending to take manalishi seriously

guns: cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems

So the next time I go to the docs, do I need to pack heat or something?

The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is 0.0000187.
The number of accidental deaths per car owner is 0.000055.

almost three times as high!

clearly, we should outlaw cars before we outlaw guns.

number of airplane deaths per airplane rider is 0.000002 ... this is about 1/10th the odds of dying in a car accident!

so ... why is it harder to get an airplane pilots license than a driver's license? LIBERAL CONSPIRACY?!?!?!

"The younger the better. I like shooting them. I like how they look and smell."

-manalishi

seems pretty clear to me.

It is very tempting to put the manga girl on this thread.

do it. i havent seen it yet thank god but anyone whos clicked on this monstrosity deserves it.

Gershy, I remember when I first saw that footage (thanks youtube), it really upset me. But now it doesn't really fuck with me(thanks, desensitisation).

if guns were allowed in the state capital, i bet somebody totally would have shot dwyer in the hand before he shot himself, thus saving the day.

One guy with a conceal-carry could have ended that in an instant.

Aw man, I just got back from the ER (where, last week, we had a guy shoot his eye out in a botched suicide, in case anyone's wondering), and am too tired to wade in here properly, but: milo's been pretty otm throughout here, guys. And Manalishi, dude, you're making decent points with bad stats, and clearly know how to wind up the masses, but you realize that the whole feel-smell-taste admission just gives dweebs like kenan an excuse to make ad hominem attacks that confuse the issue. And kenan: cut it out. Your smarmy, preening bullshit is full of gross assumptions about guns, gun owners, and gun violence.

That being said: taking the Constitution as gospel is silly, and weirdly dogmatic--it's just some shit some dudes wrote a couple hundred years ago. Good stuff? Sure! I like it, including the Second Amendment. But even if I didn't, and even if, like kenan, I thought that the Second Amendment ought to be repealed or seriously undermined, there's nothing really to do about it: the right to bear arms really IS a part of "being American." Not because you're obliged to like or endorse firearms, but because you're obliged to live with them, even if only because they've been grandfathered in. Let's assume that those 80 million gun owners only own one gun. And let's also assume there's a small percentage of illegal, unregistered or accounted for guns (how about 2 million). That's still a shitload of guns. Getting rid of them would be impossible, and would also require the American gov't to go and arrest or harass perfectly law abiding citizens like milo and Roger and my dad and, like, most of the state that I live in and all of my parents' neighbors. That is, people who have never used a gun against another person and hope that they'll never have to. Moreover, guns have been retained by the American people since day one--this is NOT the case in Europe, so to apply the British model of gun control is specious. Y'all never had guns (thanks, repressive monarchies!) so to say that you're cool without them, so why aren't we? is disingenuous. (a very similar line of reasoning could be applied to socialized healthcare but that is an entirely different issue...)

And another thing: slaughters like today's tragedy will always be outliers. Tacky as it may seem to say this, 30some deaths by handgun-wielding-psychopath every few years is lost in the heaving sea of your "average" gun deaths: some accidents, some criminal v. innocent, lots of criminal v. criminal, some innocent v. criminal, crimes of passion, and so on. Accidents are the fault of irresponsible gun owners. Crime is crime, and if, say, drug dealers are willing to shoot each other over whatever, getting rid of guns will (a) just make them stab instead, and (b) oh wait, do nothing since they'll still probably get their hands on guns anyway (note: this can really not be exaggerated enough--any attempts by the gov't to, say, srsly stop the flow of handguns into the country would just be a huge misallocation of resources, much like the War on Drugs).

Crimes of passion are really where guns make the difference (though, note, I have zero stats to back this up): while ppl will never stop killing each other out of rage, getting rid of guns would probably seriously curb the number of people who are successful. Guns are alarmingly convenient, both in the ease and the distance with which one can kill someone else. If everyone always had to stab or beat everyone else to death, you'd probably see a lot of would-be killers stand down--"actual" violence is a lot harder than making someone dead before the ringing in yr ears has stopped.

oh, and the concealed carry argument is totally retarded: college students are not really likely to be the type of ppl that are gonna have concealed carry licenses, nor are campuses likely to be the type of place that would allow ppl to walk around strapped. thus: the only people that will have guns will be criminals or gun nuts (who, in this case, would also be criminals). So, criminals and criminals.

(also: no stats for any of my arguments, just hunches. so, yeah, if you know something i don't, please share, but try to be civil about it. something about gun control brings out the smug moralist in people/kenan, where even CONSIDERING gun ownership is basically the same as wanting to have underwear like the sex machine)

(also: RA sent me a CD-R wrapped in gun paper, and I secretly thought that was totally awesome, especially because it smelled good. then again, so does phil wood bike grease. the lesson here: grease smells good to some people, i guess?)

(also also: this is a good read, though it's really supposed to be mapped to nuclear proliferation, not American gun control)

to piggy back a bit here (and then i swear i'll go to bed, holy shit i'm tired): curbing gun violence would really best be solved by addressing the social issues that give rise to violence, period. legalizing most drugs might be a good start. many gun deaths (certainly the most tragic) are the result of strays loosed in the heat of some kind of on the fly shooting, often crime/gang related. Only a crass dick would suggest that "better gun education" would prevent that sort of reckless tragedy--wouldn't we be better off trying to pull the rug out from that sort of conflict in the first place? The time and money and manpower that would have to go into dismantling an entire American industry would be far better spent doing likewise to the social/institutional/whatever structures that are in place to engender widespread violent behavior.

(HOWEVER: i have spent very little time where accidental/malicious gun death is a real concern--which is why i'd probably defer to someone like vahid)

i fully expect to have most of this thrown back in my face, btw, i'm not really thinking clearly right now.

dude go to sleep lol

this is a very very important paper which addresses the issue: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/314/7089/1271

basically the point is that risk-taking behaviors (being involved in gang+drug violence) is strongly correlated with life expectancy.

this chart pretty much summarizes the important findings - it's a scatter plot of the life expectancy in 77 neighborhoods EXCLUDING HOMICIDE DEATH vs the homicide rate (per 10000? 100000?)

daly + wilson did a follow-up in 2001 which correlated homicide and income inequality but the correlation was much weaker.

the usual conclusion drawn from the 1st study is that if people don't *feel* like they have a future ahead of them, they certainly won't act as if there is one. in that sense, the common interpretation of what happens when people go postal isn't a whole lot different from the violence of homicide in urban neighborhoods.

i'm not a psychologist so i can't speak to any of these issues but i do believe this is the current state of clinical thinking on the issue - the public health problem which follows (how to get people to believe there is a worthwhile future ahead of them) is a much tougher issue.

lolololol i forgot what a menk roger adultery is.

ok that is exactly the sort of thing i wanted to read....tomorrow morning. thanks, v. i'm very interested in the epidemiology of issues like this, and am a little embarrassed i came to the table with so few numbers

np

The time and money and manpower that would have to go into dismantling an entire American industry would be far better spent doing likewise to the social/institutional/whatever structures that are in place to engender widespread violent behavior

so one thing people have been arguing lately is that civic engagement in america is quite low compared to countries where gun violence / homicide rates are much lower (you could do a similar comparison across neighborhoods in america). what constitutes civic engagment would be things like involvement in church, home ownership, higher education, employment, membership in civic groups, etc etc ... i have a strong intuitive feeling that these things are even stronger dis-incentives to gun violence than draconian gun laws or a well-armed populace.

Yeah, but whilst waiting for hearts to change, changing the laws which the society has plainly shown itself to not be able to deal with would be a sound start. Dealing with the symptoms is essential, but tackling the problem in the first instance is part and parcel of that.

What are criminals afraid of? Burglar alarms? Dogs? Nope. They're afraid of some housewife in a bathrobe with a loaded and cocked .357.

This may very well be the case, the point is that statistically the housewife has a lot more chance of shooting down a family member (mistaking it for a criminal or in a domestic fight). Guns are mostly used on family members and/or friends. Not criminals. Secondly you'll have to be a god damn good fucking shooter if you come across a burglar cause he is has the advantage of knowing he's doing something wrong and shooting is a lot of easier with that pre-knowledge. And hey did you learn shooting in the dark with adrenaline pumping through your body?

I'm not in favour of guns specifically for that reason. And, I know, one has knives in the house so in a domestic fight you could use that (or any other object) but it's not the primary use (so people think less of it as a knife to kill people) and it's less deadly (unless you of course chuck the knife right in the heart or whatever).

That said, it's not easy to reason with a culture that has incorporated guns to such a degree. I realize that it's impossible to erase that part. But one can try. Shootings like the one that happened yesterday is much rarer here. It happens but when (and this is very rarely) it is a smaller scale. I wonder why...

But I'm repeating what has been said.

i'm never understood why pistols have been so obsessively focused upon; what about the other stuff the police have? i'm thinking specifically here of NIGHT VISION. why should they get to have it and we don't? if an intruder breaks into my house in the middle of the night i'd be a lot better off with NIGHT VISION and a baseball bat than my normal eyes and a gun! or, imagine that the police are pursuing me across a field for a crime i didn't commit. at night, they can basically grab me at will because they can see me and i can't see them. with night vision, i would know exactly where to run to escape them! a gun's not going to do me any good, because killing cops is not exactly a recommended course of action, no matter how innocent or guilty you are. yet the home safety boosters insist on GUNS all the time, rather than the other hardware that would make a much bigger difference to their safety, and which is monopolized by the police!

Fact is I like guns. I like owning them. I like shooting them. I like how they look and smell. And it's my right to stockpile them if I want to. I have a CCW permit and can legally carry a gun in 39 states.

haha dude. without even getting into the gun control thing, just from a style point of view, taking that much pleasure from deices that are designed to kill people (in the case of handguns) is just straight-up creepy. it's like having a big collection of guillotines in your back yard or something. *shiver*

i'm never understood why pistols have been so obsessively focused upo

We've trief to focus on bricks as killer objects but it was laughed at.

Statistically, doctors are 9,144 times more dangerous than gun owners.
NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONE DOCTOR.

Joke/gag/trollage/laff riot/whatever, this is actually the single most stupid thing I have ever seen posted on ilx/possibly the internet.

I was curious about where this thread would go (didn't have high hopes, of course). As someone who has (a) handled a variety of guns before, over several visits to a variety of shooting ranges, (b) been violently attacked - at gunpoint - and had loved ones violently attacked, and (c) come to the personal conclusion that I wouldn't actually feel safer with a gun around at all, I'm always curious to see if there are convincing arguments out there.

Come to find Roger A./Manalishi sounding genuinely frightening at several points, spouting nonsense statistics and kneejerk constitution citations, and offering nothing of any real substance.

i.e. Show me someone who can attempt to speak reasonably and intelligently about why liberals "have it wrong" about gun control without sounding like a SCARY FUCKING MANIAC.