The Great ILX Gun Control Debate

fwiw my friends were heavily into fishing at one point and I thought it was a shitty way thing to do for recreation

i love to fish, personally. i learned it from my dad and have passed on to my kidsters. it gets me out into beautiful places, focuses the mind on interesting problems of hydrodynamics, entomology, etc... i have no reason to think that people who love hunting don't have similar reasons for loving it. i feel sadness every time i kill a fish, and couldn't handle it if a mammal was involved, but i'm not going to get self-righteous about it. much more disturbed by the whole animal food industry concentration camp situation...

i do think you have to be able to acknowledge the meaning of these things to many people. i don't think you have to agree with it, or subscribe to the social costs implicated, but to deny the genuine meaning of it, or reduce that meaning to crypto-fascism, racism, psychopathology, cowardice, or whatever, is to pretty much not even know what this phenomenon is that you're dealing with. acknowledge the genuine meaning, and then be as vehement as you want in opposing it nonetheless.

but your feelings about killing-animals-as-practice are irrelevant to a discussion of killing-people-as-horrible-reality, inasmuch as it alienates one segment of the gun owning population whose thoughts on curbing gun violence (and environmental conservation) could likely accord with yours

Well duh. I was musing on the fact that guns are so shitty that one shitty aspect of them needs to be more or less ignored to tackle the even more shitty aspects.

fwiw my impression of all the pro-gun people i've known is that they really really like firing and owning guns and latch onto any argument that rationalizes their continued ability to do so ie it's not much to do about anything larger (constitutional rights, ability to oppose tyranny etc) than them wanting to be able to do a favored hobby

― hope this helps (Granny Dainger), Sunday, January 9, 2011 3:54 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is old, but is germane i think (esp given yr xp): if you want to engage the people that want to be able to do a favored hobby (which is a whole lot of gun owners), it might be a good idea not to paint them as icky Bambi slayers, at least in the political arena (tho by all means continue to say so here)

'but you are killing animals' is only a moral argument that works with people who believe that killing animals is morally wrong

whereas 'your hobby allows more people to die' is a moral argument that can be used in any context

i have plenty of relatives who immediately started freaking out on 'don't ban guns' shit. of course they're all hunters. and I don't begrudge people their normal rifles. but seriously, how can we NOT put the assault weapons ban back in place? this mother legally purchased all this shit and took her boys target shooting. good going mom. no one should own these types of weapons.

gbx you can rest assured that in the political arena I do not intend to, er, shoot myself in the foot in that manner

right, which rules out anyone that eats meat, p much

xp

wait, did he have an assault rifle? I thought it was just a "normal" rifle with military styling? he def had handguns, I know that. also I think they found the rifle in the car, not at the scene.

animal being killed for meat is no different than animal being killed for recreation, p much?

"you eat meat, you have no room to criticize hunting/fishing" is v facile

an animal killed by an industrial farming apparatus for cheese burgers is arguably worse, morally, than an animal killed while it was minding its business in its natural habitat, but I'm not sure this is the place for going down this particular rabbit hole

criticizing hunting/fishing from a moral perspective is a crappy way to convince anybody because even americans who don't own/like/want guns mostly don't care about gun control for the poor bambi reason and the ones who do hunt almost by definition are not going to be convinced.

i KNOW

if america can flip-flop on "horsemeat--OK to eat" then it's not impossible to turn the country around on hunting/fishing, or at least bring back horsemeat.

how can we NOT put the assault weapons ban back in place?

Which goes, once again, to the irrelevance of this kind of minutiae. The assault weapon ban disallowed collapsible stocks, flash hiders, bayonet lugs, etc. - and magazines with capacities greater than 10. None of those things, magazines potentially aside, matter at all. An AR-15 is no more or less dangerous because it has a pistol grip than, say, a M-14/M1A (civilian version of the US military rifle that preceded the M-16). The latter actually fires a larger round.

wait, did he have an assault rifle? I thought it was just a "normal" rifle with military styling?

lotta ppl proudly ignorant of the difference imo

But my understanding is that the AR-15 wasn't used in the school anyway.

In the former U.S. law, the legal term assault weapon included certain specific semi-automatic firearm models by name (e.g., Colt AR-15, TEC-9, non-select-fire AK-47s produced by three manufacturers, and Uzis) and other semi-automatic firearms because they possess a minimum set of cosmetic features from the following list of features:

Semi-automatic rifles able to accept detachable magazines and two or more of the following:

Folding or telescoping stock
Pistol grip
Bayonet mount
Flash suppressor, or threaded barrel designed to accommodate one
Grenade launcher (more precisely, a muzzle device that enables launching or firing rifle grenades, though this applies only to muzzle mounted grenade launchers and not those mounted externally).

Semi-automatic pistols with detachable magazines and two or more of the following:

Magazine that attaches outside the pistol grip
Threaded barrel to attach barrel extender, flash suppressor, handgrip, or suppressor
Barrel shroud that can be used as a hand-hold
Unloaded weight of 50 oz (1.4 kg) or more
A semi-automatic version of a fully automatic firearm.

Semi-automatic shotguns with two or more of the following:

Folding or telescoping stock
Pistol grip
Fixed capacity of more than 5 rounds
Detachable magazine.

I don't get up in arms about "assault rifle" and "assault weapon" - I think it's pretty clear that people mean military-styled semi-autos. The point they need to understand is that styling is pretty irrelevant.

Anyway an assault rifle, by definition, is capable of automatic fire. These have been highly restricted since 1934 and civilian production stopped completely in 1986. They're also pretty much never used in crimes.

Is there an I Love Paramilitary Operations thread

Anyway an assault rifle, by definition, is capable of automatic fire.

well not by the definition of the old law....

Assault weapon is defined by the various AWBs, as CAD quoted.

re: grenade launcher, grenades are destructive devices subject to the same 1934-era restrictions as machine guns, etc..

Assault rifle and assault weapon are two different things. Assault weapon bans dealt with pistols, shotguns and other things as well.

ok yes i see yr distinction

was it the assault weapons ban that everyone agreed was a total failure? i feel like the political capital needed to persistently improve gun control laws to the point where they need to be would be better spent on health care.

the whole BAN ALL GUNS stance, aside from being practically impossible, might only serve to alienate liberal gun owners who would otherwise endorse very strict gun control measures.

thank you gbx... I mean, I'm all for taking the Bakunin "I will continue to be impossible as long as all others are possible" stance, but it is alienating to a degree when it's served up w/condescension (which is not what anybody is doing on this thread this time around afaict).

gbx, the 'banning and confiscating' left needs to exist to serve the purpose that the wacko bloc does to the right-wing. 'we need to be reasonable' ignores the fact that the left has been entirely too reasonable on this particular issue.

― iatee, Saturday, December 15, 2012 4:18 PM (2 hours ago)

don't know if anyone else has pointed this out but i just want to put this in my favorites tab or something to use the next time i or alfred or aero gets into it with iatee on the regular politics thread!

I think the existence of the far left on an issue strengthens the dems bargaining power it's just the far left simply doesnt exist w/ real voting power on many issues

and 'being really angry' doesn't make more people like you exist

unless you have angry sex

i'll post here what i posted in the Newtown thread:

Shouldn't this debate be a national referendum?

Today in Guthrie, OK a 3 year old got a hold of a gun and shot himself in the head. So after all the media bombardment regarding guns, someone didn't think to put their gun where a toddler couldn't get it.

Shouldn't this debate be a national referendum?

You want to make guns harder to get, work on it at the state level and in the courts.

state and local laws are kinda worthless when you can buy guns in a different state/district and bring them in

but Texas is so big

state and local laws are kinda worthless when you can buy guns in a different state/district and bring them in

I had to do a Ctrl-F to check to see if I still agree with what I've said in the past. Yup. I do.

me either

this is as good a time as any for people to read stevens' dissent in heller:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZD.html

so so so so so so so many people, including liberals, just credulously absorb as fact the conventional wisdom that the second amendment gives people the absolute right to privately own guns and that the history of jurisprudence on the issue supports that. it's a much bigger problem than people being mean to 'liberal gun owners' (lol)

I'm not talking about being "mean" to liberal gun owners, I'm talking about basic coalition building

http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/12613/large/TMW2012-12-19colorKOS.png?1355584910

more gun shops than grocery stores, McDonald's

http://www.businessinsider.com/more-gun-stores-in-america-than-grocery-stores-2012-12

it's not actually true, only more than supermarkets ie grocery stores w/ 2m+ in sales

assuming the figure includes big box chains that sell guns as well

If a big box sells guns, it is a gun store. (shrugs)

yeah i don't really disagree

bump