Mark Steel on NRA reaction to Boston bomb. Genius

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Ahh yes the old a conservative is a liberal who's just been mugged scenario; I've seen that one in action before too. My only problem with it is that it's too close to the liberal "you''d feel differently you'd lost someone to gun violence" line of emotional reasoning, and not common enough to rely upon as a method of persuasion. That, and so many of the people at the top of the gun control movement either carry themselves or employ armed bodyguards to do it for them, which you'd think would undermine their whole argument...

I do think the undecided can be reached through less extreme means, verbally beating the hell out of the committed anti gunners without resorting to their level of non-argument is one way of going about it. Standing up as an example of an educated, reasonable gun owner who doesn't conform to the stereotypes peddled by the antis is another way. I try and do a bit of both myself.

BTW, I've got a new spin on the old saw: a libertarian is someone who's just been mugged by the police. I think it works.

Yes, but the best part is I don't have to be involved in the persuasion part. A drivers ed instructor can lecture all he wants about seat belts but it's when someone with a thick head gets banged up in an accidend because they werent wearing their belt that they learn from the school of hard knocks.

The Rosie O'Donnell type.


The school of hard knocks way might be extreme but it seems to be more permanently effective since there is some personal memory of terror and/or pain to always reflect back on.
With the good example and tact method it seems more likely they might run back to their protectionist default setting at the first gun related mishap they hear about or if they go long enough without an incident where being armed would have helped.


Makes sense after i thought about it for a sec.

^
Perhaps the new NRA tactic should be to spread the word that anti gun types carry a lot of cash and are easy marks. I can see the add now: "Are you tired of crime not paying? Armed victims cramping your style? Not to worry, there's a foolproof new way to pick victims that you know can't fight back! Just look for the handy Brady Campaign stickers, you know anyone with one is reasonably affluent and completely unprepared!"

A good tactic on the part of the NRA would be to start representing gun owners and not gun manufacturers. Sadly the same can be said for most lobby groups around the world regardless of their chosen subject

I don't know. For me there would be that temptation to bait an attack by putting Brady Campaign and other ant-gun/protectionist stickers on the back of my SUV just so I might get the opportunity to try out some tactics and test the terminal ballistics of some ammo.

Didn't I debunk this particular falsehood earlier? The NRA doesn't get it's power from gun manufacturers, it gets it from the tens of millions of gun owners who, NRA members or not, look to the group for information on who stands with them and who stands against them. What benefit, for example, do gun manufacturers receive by blocking the recent Senate bills? Those bills were aimed at non professionals selling used guns, sales that the industry doesn't profit from. A group that was truly an industry owned group and not an owners group would have let that one sail on by, as making it more difficult to buy a used gun very well might have benefited the industry. Same with modern rifles and handguns, the NRA is fighting to keep them legal because we, the American gun owners, want to purchase and use them. Does the industry benefit from keeping it's products legal? Duh, but that's hardly a strong case that the NRA is about manufacturers more than owners.
Do I wish the NRA would tone down it's rhetoric and diversify it's image a little bit? Hell yeah, as I think that would make it more effective, but I also still want to the group to fight every crappy feel good measure that the Democratic Party and it's ilk keep trying to foist upon us.

lol leftists always have to tie to 'Big-something'. Gun manufacturers? Really? You know who is benefiting the most out all this gun control talk, gun manufacturers and gun shops. More demand more scarcity. DHS buying up tons of guns and ammunition(wonder what they're doing with it) has been real nice for their pocket book. Why would gun manufactures support "expanded background checks" and ending the fake "gun show loophole" which in reality means the outlawing of private sales?

Reminds me of all the idiots that whined about how insurance companies were preventing healthcare "reform" then passed the corporatist monstrosity that is Obamacare that the insurance companies wrote to their benefit.

Your standards for debunking are different than mine. You're saying that the NRA does not get its power from wealthy backers or corporations but less than half (last I read) of its funding comes from membership fees. In some cases companies even have deals with the NRA where portions of profit are given to them on rifle sales. In any case, what you are saying is actually not precisely my point. The NRA and gun manufacturers have a symbiotic relationship.

I think you misunderstand me, though. I really, really don't think the NRA cares at all about the legal aspects of this issue. I don't even think they believe what they repeat ad nauseaum. The NRA's rhetoric is keeping people nervous and more likely to buy firearms in the fear that they will be severely controlled in the near future. They have been doing this for the past few years since Obama came into office and its working out well for their corporate backers. The NRA cultivates the market so the manufacturers can keep reaping massive profits through people's paranoia. Nobody is coming to take your guns. Its all just an extremely well played marketing strategy..

That's... pretty much exactly what I'm saying. So...?

Some of the anti-gun arguments are so asinine I suspect they are actually on the NRA's payroll to help them keep up sales by giving them a bogey man to point at,

If Mike Bloomberg didn't exist, the NRA would have had to invent him.

Again; so? Money isn't everything, if people don't support your position in the first place, no amount of advertising is going to sway them. Sure, the NRA gets money from manufacturers, but that's not where it's power lies. Do you think any amount of anti-gun advertising is going to change my opinion, or vise versa for someone with opposite beliefs? The NRA is powerful because a lot of people support it's position, not because it gets industry contributions. I also should have said "addressed this point" rather than "debunked", but I was in a hurry.



Actually, as I own semi automatic rifles and pistols and their standard capacity magazines, people do want to take my guns. Obama is on the record wanting to ban all handguns http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_ob ... aire2.html , ban concealed carry http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-4jqZSEo0Q%E2%80%9D, and referring to the most restrictive (and unconstitutional) gun laws in the country as "model legislation" http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government ... Nationally . Are you really going to argue that it's "paranoia" to take Obama at his word? He's not the only one either, Feinstein and co have been trying to incrementally ban everything for years, as she says in her own words: ”If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them – ‘Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in!’ – I would have done it. I could not do that.”.
I don't need the NRA to tell me these things, I just have to look at what the anti gun people are saying with their own mouths.

I don't own guns out of fear, I own guns because I like them, and the failure to grasp that concept is what's driving this latest round of demonization of the NRA and gun owners generally.

Okay, phrased very badly. It is never or extremely rarely the sole or even main factor, but definitely, you have to have a bad relationship with guns in order to use them for crime. People with healthy relationships with guns don't do that, they either don't have guns, or like Dox, they know when to not use them.


Are you even aware of what position I am arguing?
There is presumably a certain amount of overlap between "crimes facilitated by guns" and "crimes prevented by guns"
Take 10 crimes. If 5 are facilitated by guns and 4 are prevented by guns, with 3 of the crimes prevented by guns being ones that were also facilitated by guns, then removing guns could potentially have a net impact of reducing the number of crimes by 1.

I mean the aspect that responds to gun crime by advocating guns for teachers or nurses, and the part that gives guns to children. I hate this analogy because it seems to be used as an unjustified attack of sorts, but I was referring to the Alex Jones subset who almost have a "fetish" for guns. I am sure there are a great deal of responsible gun owners who share something like a culture, but I was not referring to them.

FWIW, my grandfather owns a gun (or at least owned, he might have got rid of it when they moved house a few years ago) and I have seen him use it, so whilst I'm not immersed with guns as you are, they aren't alien objects to me.
Because the gangsters have probably not got the same respect for guns that you have.

Well everyone in the Western world outside of America would agree, so yeah, if common sense exists I'd say this is an area where it is pretty well defined. I am generally against appealing to "everyone else thinks it so it most be true" though, otherwise I would have done so already.

Seriously can't believe you'd be against fostering the idea of responsibility that you and many others so clearly have within the entirety of the community.

Okay, I shall move from "guns are more deadly than other weapons" to "if criminals replaced guns with other weapons, then less harm would be done to the victims of crime".

Armed robbery actually being more deadly than non-armed robbery... I mean, I would have thought that often the weapon was just to scare people, I know fake guns are often used to commit armed robbery in this country, and I was even told by a police official of a case where a man robbed a shop by convincing an attendant that the crisp he'd just shoved into his back was a gun.

I think you've reacted badly to a study which goes against your worldview here and not thought about it rationally.

If you would read the study, it is dealing primarily with drug violence. It recognises the problem as much as you or I do. Try giving it a read, it is much more robust than most anti-gun studies.

I think, and you seem to agree from your response above, that guns make people more likely to become murderers than simple violent offenders.

I would argue that it would be best to combine tackling the causes of crime (the drug war, inequality, poverty, general lack of respect, etc.) as well as making it harder to commit serious crime (by making it harder to access deadly weapons, increasing surveillance of crime hotspots, increasing policing numbers and efficiency, etc.), as well as not glorifying crime (see the portrayal of mass shooters in the media, marketing realistic and even fully functioning guns for children, etc.).

Maybe the way you suggest that mass shootings, shown to be reduced by the Australian case, don't matter because they're statistically insignificant? I'm having a hard time squaring that with anything other than being hardened to atrocities because they're routine for you, or not wanting to see action taken because you are afraid of it somehow affecting you badly.

Well, quite. I think you've misinterpreted by "nonsensical" counter argument.

"A lack of guns does not lead to more suicides, therefore removing guns will not reduce suicides."
"A surplus of guns leads to more murders, therefore removing guns will reduce murders."

Once again, I would suggest that both cultural changes (making anti-depressants more widely available, not associating worth of a person to financial worth or physical features...) could go hand in hand with making it harder to commit suicide by removing the easiest, most effective way of doing it. This seems to have had an effect in Australia.

Am I railing for gun control?

If you re-read my contributions to this thread, you'd find me pointing out that the NRA response to gun crime is funny, regardless of whether it is right; that the burden of proof you demand is too high; that cultural changes need to happen; and that gun control might or might not work, but in any case is probably totally impractical. You just put me in a convenient box because I disagreed with some of your points.

And yes, I would like better support services.

You don't live here, you only read about it on the internet.

Your view of what this country is like is simply not rooted in reality, but in science fiction and scare stories. Whenever I am in private, I have privacy. When I am in my house, at the park, in the countryside, on my street or any of the roads my friends live on, in a classroom, in the staff rooms at work, in the toilets at work or school or anywhere else, in the common room at school, in fact anywhere that could remotely be described as a "private" place and several places that couldn't, I have privacy, and there are no cameras. If I were to go for a drive and break the speed limit, I would be photographed by speed cameras... or I would if they hadn't all been taken out due to budget cuts!

Additionally, as explained above, this is not some kind of grand system. I work in a shopping mall, in one of the largest shops in the mall. We have about 15 cameras in the shop, focused on areas where shop lifting happens most regularly and on the tills. If we think a crime has been committed, we have to trawl through the CCTV footage after the fact. If the manager of another shop thinks a crime has been committed in his store and wants to see our footage in case we have better shots of the criminal than he does, then he has to ask us, he can't access it remotely. See also: the police. Even if there is someone sitting behind a load of screens trying to track someone on the small number of public cameras in the pedestrianised area (there isn't), once that person goes into a shop, Big Brother cannot see them.

I think, and the statistics back me up here, that gun and knife control has worked in this country and has saved lives. I also think that CCTV cameras in shops and speed cameras are pretty undeniably a good thing, and that other cameras in extremely public places like high streets and train stations are also good things. I have not been spoon fed this from birth, the British hate CCTV- given your paranoia regarding security cameras I'd guess you've read 1984. On gun and knife crime, as said before, I often get attacked as a "right wing bigot" when I tell people that America is quite different to Australia, that there is considerable literature that says guns deter an awful lot of crimes, and so forth. Just because I don't buy your "guns are a right" schtick doesn't mean I buy the "guns are unequivocally bad" schtick.

If you're as well versed in defence as you claim, you'll know that it isn't simple. A single bullet will sometimes fail to stop someone pumped up on adrenaline who is determined to kill, in that situation I'd argue you're in big trouble not matter what.

Often, I would suggest that the best option is to give them a chance to run away, particularly with burglars. Don't get between them and their exit, give them the chance to bolt now that they've been discovered. In other situations, trying to disarm an attacker can be effective. I've also got considerable martial arts training and I know how to disarm someone holding a handgun, though it probably a lot harder when they can kill you with it first. I also wouldn't know what to do with a rifle, probably would just try and stop them pointing it at me. If you are close enough and they are unaware of you, then blunt weapons and fists can be effective- there's that "knife beats gun within 20 feet" factoid. If the attack is not armed, then running away becomes a serious option (and indeed even if they are armed). Otherwise, sheer force is an option, as is martial arts skill and improvisation. Of course, there is always the risk of one-punch death, but that is considerably less likely than death from one shot.

"removing guns"
Just for a moment let's forget all about the constitution and all that other backward non-progressive American hogwash and get down to the execution phase of removing guns.
How does that actually take place?
Explain how guns can be removed.
Will it be the same way illegal drugs have been "removed" by the endless war on drugs?

I suppose the pros would simply argue that in the hands of the 'bad guy', a knife will magically become as good as a gun...



See above. Again you are conflating possibility with feasibility. By your logic, since people routinely enter the US illegally, the border control is totally useless and there is no point to set up any checkpoint.



You would make a great field commander for the Imperial Japanese Army in the second half of WW2.



What is the difference? You need the same control system to put your craft exactly in front of the AF1, and the AF1 is loaded with state art electronic counter measure. Moreover what is your supposed intercept height? How much time does it take for your model to reach the position? There are radars scanning the airspace near the airport and I suppose there is extra measure if the AF1 is coming.



Does Hollywood story-writers get social calls all the time?



Neither do you. Moreover, simply quoting the view of a few slave owners 200 years ago is just appeal to authority.



Supporting plans for better social service is not a reason for not supporting gun control in order to reduce suicide -- there is no reason why one can support _both_ courses of action. You are the one who needs to read because your arguments are full of those fallacies.



They did practically remove private ownership of 'destructive devices'.

Don't count on illegal production. Criminals in the developed world aren't desperate enough to bet their own lives on firearms with no quality standard whatsoever.

The number of destructive devices was never anywhere at the same level as non-destructive device firearms.
They didn't "remove" them they passed laws regulating them and there are still plenty that are un-registered out there in the past 79 years since the NFA was enacted..
When I asked your boy Walrus how they would be removed I meant that in a literal sense.


Don't count on criminals being technologically inept in all cases.
Don't count on others not supplying them at a profitable cost.

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