The Great ILX Gun Control Debate

Sorry to revive a touchy thread, but this story has my coworkers asking again why this kind of thing happens in America.
(I'm an American living abroad). What do I tell them?

Boy, 8, fatally shoots self with Uzi at gun show

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081028/ap_on_re_us/boy_shoots_himself

this is already being discussed in a rational and clear headed manner on the disgruntled shootings thread

you should probably reassure your coworkers that it was for the best that the child's accidental uzi suicide genes were removed from the genepool btw

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/08/gun.soccer.mom.dead/index.html

yeah... the irony

Skipping 1100 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

*chokes on sip of beer*

wow, at this point I doubt there;s anything one can say about guns that hasn't been covered.

True that, Android. In the US, it's really about location. Pragmatically speaking, widespread gun ownership in NYC is terrifying. In the rural West, it's no big deal and it's a given. It's a deep chasm that will never be universally applied in some proxy of federal law or under the cover of federal mandates in which both sides will be appeased. I suppose that the states and localities overall do a halfway decent job.

Gun fanatics are truly some of the biggest asswipes around. They really screw the pooch.

I took a bit more than a year off from shooting (primarily thanks to costs), have started up again recently.

This means reading gun forums for info (I'd like to start reloading on my own to save money). Which means pounding my head against the wall reading posts from people who are 10 times crazier than Roger Adultery. It's depressing, and pointless to even engage those people on any level.

But a sub-frustration is the uniformity of their political line. There's no reason for it! Even if you want to stockpile guns for self-defense, there's no intrinsic connection to thinking the President is a native-Kenyan communist. But they do. (Althought my in-person contact with other gun owners tells me there are a lot of them just avoiding the political talk completely.)

Is it the fault of the center/center-left that they've abdicated such a large issue and such a large group of people to the right?

Here's a gun control thread for people to use instead of doing it on the Giffords thread.

Also, most of the arguments anyone is going to make have already been made here, so it could save some bandwidth.

where is roger adultery when we need him

we do not need him

sorry i thought this was a debate thread

But a sub-frustration is the uniformity of their political line. There's no reason for it! Even if you want to stockpile guns for self-defense, there's no intrinsic connection to thinking the President is a native-Kenyan communist. But they do. (Althought my in-person contact with other gun owners tells me there are a lot of them just avoiding the political talk completely.)

Is it the fault of the center/center-left that they've abdicated such a large issue and such a large group of people to the right?

cmon you really can't see any correlation? 'if you want to stockpile guns for self-defense' is already suggesting a ton about someone's worldview, and in turn, political beliefs.

seriously, can we take this back over here?

topic relevance lawyers are like a horrible rash on ilx

would much rather live in that scary authoritarian world than the current one where innocent 9 year old girls get shot

― iatee, Sunday, January 9, 2011 1:56 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

I can't even comprehend this, dude.

idk try shooting at your screen, maybe it'll make sense

see that's not a very convincing approach to take when confronted with people who disagree with or don't understand you.

Hey do you want to have an actual conversation or just be dicks to each other?

haha wtf is hard to comprehend about my sentence?

are you in favor of the Patriot Act? cuz that seems to run on a lot of the same kind of justification.

In every totalitarian state that has ever existed the value of human life has decreased, not increased. If anything there would be more 9 year old girls getting shot, or gassed, or sterilized, or vivisected...

I can also not understand someone who actually pines for a police state but I think iatee was making a (hyberbolic) point not saying he actually wished to live in Stalinist Russia.

He's saying that the sentiment is hard to comprehend, not the sentence.

I personally would prefer to live in the authoritarian world where people's guns are taken away than the world where it's really easy to shoot a 9 year old girl. pretty straightforward!

That you think innocent people of any age are somehow safer under the boot of tyrant than everyday law-abiding people have access to guns because what they *could* do with them.

i think some of us are saying that there are a lot of hidden costs in that world as well.

xp

you see I don't think that the countries that currently ban guns are all tyrannies, is the thing, in fact they seem pretty nice

Bro, you said "scary authoritarian world," so sorry if you meant "Japan" or whatever.

i prefer to live in a world where i can coldly and calmly double-tap commie homos like you with my CCW

i think he meant ""scary authoritarian world""

hey look everyone cankles is back

hah you gun nuts are so fuckin sensitive

"the boot of tyranny"

theyre just guns yall

no one is putting you in leg shackles

Bro, you said "scary authoritarian world," so sorry if you meant "Japan" or whatever.

― Kerm, Sunday, January 9, 2011 1:17 PM

Kind of the point though, isn't it? Places where there are handgun bans are hardly scary and authoritarian. What makes America different that suddenly not being able to go grocery shopping with a glock at your side is basically the same thing as living in a police state?

thats how i feel when people start whining about phone tapping and shit - nooo my calls to grandma might be overheard ;_;

seriously, can we take this back over here?

― sleeve, Sunday, 9 January 2011 19:04 (20 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah come on y'all let's take our country BACK

I wrote an article about Tennessee gun owners a few months ago, just as a way to try to get more of a handle on their view of the world. I didn't come away from it wanting a gun, but I did come away more convinced than ever (and I was already pretty convinced) that in America we mostly just have to live with widespread gun ownership. And the good news is that, statistically, a very, very, very tiny percentage of legally-owned guns are ever used violently (or accidentally -- as horrible as kids shooting themselves or each other is, it actually happens incredibly rarely, we just tend to hear about it when it does).

Obviously widespread gun availability contributes to our relatively high homicide rate, and there's some evidence it makes our suicide rate higher, too. But those also are probably things we just have to live with. I'm not saying we shouldn't regulate it right up to wherever the Supreme Court will allow, and it's not like I think widespread gun ownership is a social good. But it's there, and starting fight after fight or fantasizing about banning guns outright is just not going to get anyone anywhere.

y do ppl want guns so bad if theyr not gonna use them idk it just seems like ppl are all "its my right!" but i mean u gave up yr right to a democracy p easily

from the other thread:

The whole point of having guns in America, according to the framers of the constitution, is so we don't end up with a scary totalitarian government. All other sidepoints are distractions because that is the point of the 2nd amendment. And, in this modern day, its bullshit to think a handgun is going to be helpful in an insurgency against a rogue regime. Handguns are bullshit.

If the time comes where citizens need to stand up and fight some oppressive fascist state we're gonna want machine guns and surface-to-surface rockets and grenades and heavy artillery... in any field of battle a fucking pistol is a weapon of last resort. A militia with just glocks is certainly not a well-armed one.

Ban handguns now and forever. That's my last contribution to this gun-control derail.

― no pop, no style -- all simply (Viceroy), Sunday, January 9, 2011 11:09 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

see, I really think this gets somewhere... lotta the pro-ban people on these threads aren't making any distinctions between weapon types (which is just making y'all look clueless and big-city elitist tbh), but if you wanna talk about handguns specifically I can totally get behind that. Just leave my mom the varmint rifles, the damn groundhog ate almost all the tomatoes this year before my brother-in-law got it with a .22.

Seriously, I can't imagine anybody except like an elk hunter needing more than a 22. I'm cool w/everything else getting legalized into oblivion.

I have no problem with hunting rifles as long as they are being used to hunt.

y do ppl want guns so bad if theyr not gonna use them

ever been to the range, it's really fun

people like doing fun things

tams do u own any guns

guns should be designed to blow up if they're pointed at anything other than a deer like motorbikes should be designed to blow up if they make more than a certain level of noise which is already too loud to be honest

yah but guns used for farming dont need to be "carried" if gun restrictions included clauses to do w/ using guns on yr own land for eg. i get that, my only experience of guns is like my uncle borrowing a gun to kill a fox that was getting the chickens (he didnt get the fox btw) and that seems like fine, but guns as a *weapon* is a diff thing and that is whats at issue yr just clouding it.

I dunno, a single handgun did a pretty damn good job of shooting a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats yesterday...