The Great ILX Gun Control Debate

"women must be armed to prevent rapes" is once again putting the onus on women to fight off rapes rather than, ya know, punishing and preventing rapists from committing rape

Yeah, I would like to drop that conversational byway. It's mostly an artifact of people coming around to acknowledging non-stranger rape is real, and rather than admitting it's been happening all along, they have to make some amazing claim that it suddenly came into existence in order to invalidate their past inaction.

On the other hand, most people who shoot others do shoot people they know.

xpost

true, but i guess the advocates would argue that it's on a continuum with the sort of women's self-defense training that's pretty common on campus and doesn't obviate the need to reduce rapes through prevention/prosecution.

multi-xps

I see that "epidemic" does not occur anywhere in the NYT article.

I will admit I have no especially well-developed ideas about rape on campus, but it doesn't take much thought to observe that campuses have high concentrations of 18-25 year old women, which is a fairly vulnerable cohort for rape, including both assault rape and acquaintance rape.

I expect that dealing with those two different categories would require two different strategies, but greatly multiplying the number of guns on campus seems like a policy that is particularly ill-suited to addressing acquaintance rapes, and a pretty damn poor way to reduce assault rapes, too.

nb: not having any grip on the preferred jargon for what I am calling acquaintance and assault rape, I simply used the terms that fell to hand. feel free to flay me for this indiscretion.

there's not a lot of agreement about what the "typical" campus rape looks like. there are some high-profile folks who advance the theory that most campus rapes come from serial offenders who are effectively sociopaths or worse, but many others have strongly challenged this idea. i think the alternative idea--that "good" men commit rape, because of their (likely alcohol-aided) disregard for boundaries--is particularly unsettling.

and yeah like you i really have no idea what the reality is. i think there's a big move afoot for better-funded and more carefully-designed research on this very subject, so maybe in a few years we'll have a better sense of what goes on and thus how it might best be prevented and dealt with.

but yeah i doubt the answer will be "guns"

I find that the questions best answered by "guns" are along the lines of "what do I need if I want to shoot somebody"

"What is the most fun way of making a hole in something from 20 feet away"

you guys should write a jeopardy category

but it doesn't take much thought to observe that campuses have high concentrations of 18-25 year old women, which is a fairly vulnerable cohort for rape, including both assault rape and acquaintance rape white men in an environment where they can feel reasonable certainty that their actions will go unpunished, which are all indicators for a high occurrence of sexual assault.

Also having said that iirc the incidence of rape is actually higher among women who don't go to college though, so....

I like to keep my personal career talk to 77, but you are very near the mark xp

orbit I'm curious if there's some statistical reason you call out white men specifically there

or is that just a "white = more likely to get away with it" type of thing

Specifically because it was the very first point at my source: "Sex offenders are overwhelmingly white males. Nearly 99% of sex offenders in single-victim incidents were male and 6 in 10 were white (Greenfeld, 1997)."

http://sapac.umich.edu/article/196

huh. weird.

"Sex offenders are overwhelmingly white males. Nearly 99% of sex offenders in single-victim incidents were male and 6 in 10 were white (Greenfeld, 1997)."

http://sapac.umich.edu/article/196

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Wednesday, 18 February 2015 21:18 (10 minutes ago)

this statistic would suggest a large cohort of white american men would contain fewer sex offenders than cohorts american men other races?

7 in 10 men are white, I believe, so... inconclusive

also, at least 9 in 10 white men are men.

eh shove off, I actually looked that up for north america

i wasn't making fun of you, just of statistics

:)

Specifically because it was the very first point at my source: "Sex offenders are overwhelmingly white males. Nearly 99% of sex offenders in single-victim incidents were male and 6 in 10 were white (Greenfeld, 1997)."

http://sapac.umich.edu/article/196

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Wednesday, February

considering 77% of americans are white, 60% is pretty good. tho as shakey points out part of that could be due to who actually gets charged for sexual assault

actually check that 62.6% of americans are non-hispanic white

"the best rape prevention program is armed women" has been a gun-nut jpg slogan for my whole adult life; i'm surprised it took this long for something quasi-real to come out of it

― goole, Wednesday, February 18, 2015 2:08 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

man the town listserv was all about this a few days ago re: http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/legislation/2015/SB0116.html

nh loves their guns man

People in the Midwest don't understand the redneckery of rural northeast, generally. My recent coworker acquaintance is from rural Maine and I have a knowing eyebrow-raise in our interactions.

Wow---Currington comes off like a wuss, but he's not nearly as successful as McGraw (who might still get Dixie Chicked, to some extent)(we'll see what the fading Duck Dynasty Daddy has to say; ditto Kid Rock, Hank Jr., Ted Nugent)
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/tim-mcgraws-sandy-hook-show-sparks-controversy-billy-currington-bails-20150417

I have to think at some point that shouting about your right to automatic rifles at the expense of a pile of dead children would create an image problem for you.

you would think so, and yet...

(we just enjoyed a 78,000+ strong NRA convention here last weekend)

"enjoyed"

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/charleston-and-the-next-time

A generally forgotten '90s episode recalled at the end of this piece by ILE fave Dennis Perrin:

Nothing proved this awesome power of gun cult batshittery more than the controversy in the mid-90s, when ex-President George H. W. Bush resigned from the NRA and published a letter attacking the NRA. The language in Bush Sr.’s letter may seem mild to us today, but back then, this is about as close to raw outrage as a blue-blooded elder statesman gets:... (text follows)

https://pando.com/2015/06/26/brief-history-american-gun-nuts/5b63d36f4248427552398e4d08fe314a0851f942/

http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/S-F-killing-sparks-national-outrage-likely-6366684.php

# of times the word 'immigration' appears: 10
# of times the word 'gun' appears: 0

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/us/a-culture-clash-over-guns-infiltrates-the-backcountry.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region®ion=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region

what a dumb fucking hobby

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/COpoYwQUkAAW_ZS.png

I think this is interesting:

A veteran who says he was carrying a concealed weapon on Oregon’s Umpqua Community College campus Thursday when 26-year-old Christopher Harper Mercer went on a murderous rampage, says he didn’t intervene because he knew police SWAT team members wouldn’t know him from the shooter.

In an interview with MSNBC, veteran John Parker said he knows lots of students who conceal carry at the school because, despite a school policy that discourages weapons on campus, Oregon state law does allow it.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/armed-vet-destroys-gun-nuts-argument-on-mass-shooters-by-explaining-why-he-didnt-attack-oregon-killer/

That exact scenario has gone through my head a lot of times when I hear the arguments for concealed carry -- how do the cops know who's the shooter and who's trying to stop him?

this is good too:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-byrd/are-guns-americas-biggest_b_8062870.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/14/people-are-getting-shot-by-toddlers-on-a-weekly-basis-this-year/

people seem to be shooting toddlers on a weekly basis too cf that horrible story in albuquerque.

Despite a spike in sales, Hawaii boasts persistently low rates of violence involving firearms, offering lessons for the rest of the United States.

https://www.facebook.com/janisianpage/photos/a.357587427661315.87486.357191544367570/913842435369142/?type=3

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpt1/v/t1.0-9/12074602_913842435369142_8702280429031007540_n.jpg?oh=88ea513ca6d9d8e0dc6fc0dc58affccc&oe=57178562

these days we just send a few big guns, ozzy.

which only fortifies ozzy's case, really

"Why do we send drones to perpetual war? Why not just send that guy from the movie Rocketeer?"

that photo captures the exact moment when Ozzy said that

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/12/11/mich-woman-who-shot-at-shoplifters-gets-18-months-probation-vows-to-never-help-anybody-again/

“I tried to help,” she told WJBK after her sentencing on Wednesday, before wryly adding: “And I learned my lesson that I will never help anybody again.”

She has learned NOTHING.