ScrewyWabbit wrote:
We've just this very day seen firearms used to massacre little children. Its not hysteria, its reality. Yes, of course gun advocates would prefer not to have this debate, or at least put it off until there are no fresh memories of dead children to contend with, but this is the reality of what has happened, the reality of what will likely continue to happen unless we do something to prevent it from recurring in the future, and the reality of what every sane normal person should want to try and prevent.
If not having gun control laws is such a great idea, that is what should stand up in the face of the "hysteria" that we may be going through right now. If we can't all get together and do the right thing when we're all reeling from the frest impact of a tragedy that is a direct result of our lack of tough gun restrictions, then when will we? When we aren't thinking about the victims of gun violence and gun advocates can make us forget what harm guns can really cause?
Plus, when we have half the gun nuts proclaiming "Obama will take our guns!" and the other half proclaiming they need their guns to resist some inevitable government takeover or power grab, I'd say very few gun advocates have any basis for accusing anyone else of engaging in hysteria.
And speaking of underhanded tricks, your statement "Why do you think they need tragedies to sell gun control anyway?" is exactly that. Its exactly this type of tragedy that we need gun control to prevent, and yet every time there's a tragedy, the right wing tries to convince us that reacting to the tragedy is not allowed or hysteria. Bollocks. We shouldn't need tragedies to "sell" gun control because we ought to have gun control to prevent the tragedies to begin with. But as long as we don't have real gun control, we need to pause every time there's an unnecessary tragedy and remind ourselves that the price of not having gun control is the unnecessary deaths of our husbands, wives, sons and daughters. Its not a debate to have in the quiet times between these tragedies when the tragedies themselves are far off in our minds and only abstract instead of real and in our face. We need to have these debates in the face of these tragedies that we could be preventing, so that we are fully and vividly aware of what we're doing every time we decide someone's 2nd amendment rights are more important than the life of a child.
I'm going to quote the OP from my long running thread on this subject, to save time.
Dox47 wrote:
In the US, I currently enjoy fairly broad rights in owning and using firearms. There are people who think this is wrong or a bad idea for any number of reasons, and would like to curtail my rights in various ways in furtherance of their own beliefs. This situation is analogous to a court case in that the party wishing to impose sanctions, the "prosecution" if you will, has the onus to establish their case that the proposed restrictions would actually work, and thus the erosion of my rights is justified.
So, for those of you who favor gun control, the challenge is to present examples of successful gun control programs in action, showing why these measures are necessary and demonstrating that the purpose is really to save lives or prevent violence, not just some vague unease around or dislike of firearms. If you just don't like guns, this isn't for you.
Now, the caveats. The US is awash in guns and has a wide range of socio-economic issues unrelated to guns that affect crime and violence, so in order for a valid comparison to be made, the policy in question has to have been:
- Imposed on a country where gun ownership was previously common.
- Imposed on a country where violence was an actual problem, preferably comparable to the US.
- Be shown to have acted independently of other socio-economic variables
- Shown to have reduced total violence, not just "gun violence" by significant levels
So, Japan, for example, which never had many guns nor much violent crime, would not count.
I'll briefly mention a few commonly proposed gun control schemes and some of my personal objections:
Registration: Only good at catching someone after a crime has been committed, and only in certain narrow circumstances. Has been expensive and ineffective where it has been implemented, e.g. Canada's long gun registration. Also, it
has proven effective as a confiscation list for governments passing retroactive restrictions, such as England. Licensing creates similar problems.
Ballistic "fingerprinting": Expensive and ineffective; fails to account for the fact that metal parts erode with use and the "fingerprint" of the gun changes over time. Easily defeated with rudimentary tools as well.
Assault weapons bans: Restricts a class of weapon not commonly used in crime; primary distinction of "assault weapons" are cosmetic features.
Magazine capacity restrictions: Like "assault weapons", not commonly used in crime, a statistically insignificant number of high profile shootings notwithstanding.
Restrictions on concealed carry: Licensed carriers are much more law abiding than baseline citizens; record number of US citizens now carry while crime is at a 30 year low.
Restrictions on the number of guns one can own: US gun sales are at record highs while violent crime is at record lows.
Closing "gun show loophole": There is no such thing, the term was invented by the anti-gun lobby to describe informal sales at garage sales and such. An insignificant number of criminally employed guns come from gun shows.
Confiscation: Would lead to a larger bloodbath than what it was trying to prevent.
I'll add others as they occur to me.
Have at it!
If you like, I'll also dig up the exact number of people in the US who've died in mass shootings in the last 30 years and demonstrate what an insignificant number it is, compare shootings to other more likely tragic events and their relative chances of happening to a given person, and otherwise rip up any further emotional appeals. That thread went 25 pages without anyone coming close to meeting the challenge, so think
carefully, as I do believe I may have heard it all on this topic.
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Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer.
- Rick Sanchez
14 Dec 2012, 1:18 pm
