IC Forum Archive

GcDiaz · Posts: 1057

Takashi wrote:

GcDiaz wrote:

Remember, they prey on the weak.

Sorry, but sayings like that are hilarious to me.

Especially with the italics (nice touch!). But hey, it wouldn't be a cliche if people hadn't been repeating it for ages.

aderack · Posts: 5018

GcDiaz wrote:

Defense against... people with weapons. Ones predominantly bought with hostile intent.

We're still talking about the criminal underclass, right? Just making sure.

I mean, who else would buy a weapon with hostile intent?

Sawtooth · Posts: 2350

GcDiaz wrote:

Sawtooth wrote:

if weapons are a deterrent why not even bother with a surprise and openly display a gun to not get messed with in the first place?

Because they're still guns. Strangers with visible firepower make some people nervous. Those people then feel the need to escalate. It becomes one big stupid dick contest until someone wakes up in a bad mood and gets shot for appearing threatening. Then we're back to square 1.

a strange game. the only winning move is not to play -_________-

GcDiaz · Posts: 1057

Sawtooth wrote:

GcDiaz wrote:

Sawtooth wrote:

if weapons are a deterrent why not even bother with a surprise and openly display a gun to not get messed with in the first place?

Because they're still guns. Strangers with visible firepower make some people nervous. Those people then feel the need to escalate. It becomes one big stupid dick contest until someone wakes up in a bad mood and gets shot for appearing threatening. Then we're back to square 1.

a strange game. the only winning move is not to play -_________-

If only we could confiscate all the game pieces. That's one move I'm definitely for, just as soon as it can be done with 100% accuracy and in the blink of an eye. Wouldn't want that guy at the end of the line to change his mind. Nor would I trust the ones handing out the toys for tots. Until then, leave well enough alone.

duckzero · Posts: 244

GcDiaz wrote:

duckzero wrote:

Now, when you apply gun control to the criminal element (I'm including militias), yeah, you can immediately see a need for gun control. I don't want to drive around in N. Dakota, only to have my whole body explode because some nut in a camp believes i'm a federal agent and shoots me with a .65 caliber sniper rifle. Yeah, that dude does not need to have a gun. Anywhere where the local population feels the need to pack heat at all times, could use a bit of gun control. But, there's no way to universally apply that, it would have to be at a state level.

Please shut up. You have heard of innocent till proven guilty? Militias are dumb, but they're not automatically criminal. Wacko takes a shot at you because he thinks you're a fed? Fine, throw him in jail. Deny him the right to bear arms because you THINK he'll be a threat? I'll have to go with Moses on that one. It IS paranoia when they're not really after you.

I love guns. They're great stress relievers, and fantastic equalizers. I also think every child in America should be taught how to use one; not so that they will, but so that they'll know how to handle them. Let them see the damage they can cause (no need to be graphic either; water jugs work perfectly), and teach them how to arm/disarm them. It's all about exposure; the less they see of it in real life, the more they'll believe the bullshit they see on TV and movies. I happen to know a 15-yr old who's a great shot with an Uzi (he was 11 at the time). He went to the range with his grandpa, his uncle, a friend of the family (he brought the Uzi and other toys), and myself. That kid learned more about weapons and gun safety in that one day of shooting than probably all of you combined. You think his mom will ever have to worry about having loaded guns in the house? His school bully?

See, what I said is not completely untrue. Militia's, Gangs, Police, your neighbor, EVERYONE needs a bit of restraint when it comes down the weapons available. Listen, the media criminalized the Black Panther Party when they decided to bear arms, now, I agree that they were completely right in what they were doing, and they were within their rights. But, when you give an already marginalized group of people (the BPP, random militia in N. Dakota, tamil tigers, etc...) a bad rep, and they have guns on hand, by default everyone affiliated with them becomes Guilty until proven innocent.

The only reason I brought up some of the wacko militias was that before 9/11 there were over 200 domestic terrorist plots thwarted by the same guys up in the general area.

Now, that really was'nt so bad was it?

GcDiaz · Posts: 1057

aderack wrote:

GcDiaz wrote:

Defense against... people with weapons. Ones predominantly bought with hostile intent.

We're still talking about the criminal underclass, right? Just making sure.

I mean, who else would buy a weapon with hostile intent?

I don't understand, are you turning this into a debate on the class system? Criminals come from all strata, so there goes that. Out with it.

GcDiaz · Posts: 1057

duckzero wrote:

But, when you give an already marginalized group of people (the BPP, random militia in N. Dakota, tamil tigers, etc...) a bad rep, and they have guns on hand, by default everyone affiliated with them becomes Guilty until proven innocent.

That's public perception. God help us if it ever becomes the standard of law. I personally don't care what they look like until they actually do something. Comes from associating with brigands and undesirables.

You'll have to pry this top post FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS! Heh.

shnozlak · Posts: 704

I find the best deterrent is an idling chainsaw.

There has recently been an increase in the use of machetes in gas station hold ups, jewelry store robberies and the like. Discuss.

Clash! · Posts: 631

shnozlak wrote:

I find the best deterrent is an idling chainsaw.

There has recently been an increase in the use of machetes in gas station hold ups, jewelry store robberies and the like. Discuss.

That would seem to increase the "Hero Effect".

Sure they are frightening blades, but if I throw a glass jar of lighters at his face from a distace I have a good chance of not getting harmed.

GcDiaz · Posts: 1057

shnozlak wrote:

I find the best deterrent is an idling chainsaw.

There has recently been an increase in the use of machetes in gas station hold ups, jewelry store robberies and the like. Discuss.

Wonder if that doesn't have to do with the harsher penalties for gun crimes? Being threatened with a large machete is just as effective. No one wants to get sliced open, after all.

I know some who'd rather die than survive disfigured or disabled.

Mr. Business · Posts: 1530

Aw christ, another one of these goddamn threads? Fuck it.

antitype · Posts: 1148

One of the drivers at the pizza shop where I work made a delivery the other day, and when he rang the customers' doorbell one of them handed him money for payment right before another one jumped out and punched him in the face before grabbing the pizza and running back inside. So my co-worker went back to his car and the guy who punched him apparently realized his partner had fucked up their attempt to steal the pizza, so he came running out demanding that the cash be returned. Yeah, this is total low-class stoner comedy material, right? My co-worker pulled a cane out of his car (he'd apparently needed it for a while after a leg injury, or something), and waved it in the air while telling the pizza-grabbing moron to back the fuck off. It worked pretty well as a deterrent, 'cause the guy gave up and went back inside!

So my co-worker got punched in the face, but at least he got the money and avoided further incident without the involvement of any guns! Wow!

On the other hand, if you're into hunting for sport or for food, well, there's that. I don't care for it, myself — I think hunting for sport in particular is a selfish waste of life — but I wouldn't say it's a crime. I guess some people would say it's murder, though. Hostile intent? That might be stretching it a bit, but whatever.

vision · Posts: 472

antitype wrote:

...punched him in the face before grabbing the pizza and running back inside.

Isn't that a bit foolish, since they have clearly identified as living at that address?

Anyway, when I think gun control I think House of the Dead.

antitype · Posts: 1148

vision wrote:

antitype wrote:

...punched him in the face before grabbing the pizza and running back inside.

Isn't that a bit foolish, since they have clearly identified as living at that address?

Well, yeah! One phone call and police report later, they're hauled downtown in cuffs. They may not end up facing charges or anything (unless, like, they happen to be carrying drugs or something) because it comes down to his word against theirs and who knows, but at least they'll have to deal with that whole process of being treated like a criminal.

GUNS GUNS GUNS GUNS

Captain EO · Posts: 371

Most people can't fire guns to save their life nor do they realize just how hard it is to hit something. So combined with all the average joes with guns that feel that it is their duty to protect their families with force, that makes us either safer or....

Guns are pretty stupid. Were it up to me, I'd ban everything that wasn't a hunting rifle of some sort. There's no reason to have a handgun but to shoot another person. Blah blah people have to protect themselves, okay, whatever but this suburban brinksmanship where people have handcannons to shoot some boogeyman murderer that will never be anything more than a hypothetical is stupid. And the distinctly American sentiment that guns are some divine right, is a ridiculous sentiment that leads to the disturbing firearm worship we have now. See NRA. Handguns aren't a necessary evil, they're just evil. And people into guns/knives are usually douchebags.

Adilegian · Posts: 124

Gun control is fine and necessary.

The important thing, I think, is to understand the implications of the word "control." We control something by restraining its tendency toward extremes, yet without eradicating it altogether. (After all, no one seriously thinks that "self-control" means a total abnegation of the self.)

America's gun problems are symptomatic of a larger inability to manage excess. Excessive firearm ownership results in street thugs possessing more potent arms than the police, kind of like excessive eating results in a variety of serious health problems. Our societal corpus does not like to be told what not to eat.

One of the main problems is the lag between (1) changes in the nature of American gun ownership and (2) public perceptions of the nature of American gun ownership. The Second Amendment was drafted as a clause that empowered citizens to insurrect, should just cause arise. This is no longer a serious justification for the amendment. Saying that we defend the right to bear arms for the reasons the right was conceived is as insensible as saying that the American character of the 21st century is the same as it was in 1776.

I've found that, in most cases, I'm lucky if the other person even understands the reasons why select members of the Philadelphia Convention considered the Second Amendment necessary. The American character, as exhibited in public discourse and as indoctrinated in the federal education system, has become a host of traits opposite those that fueled the American Revolution. Both the Federalists and the anti-Federalists saw government (and our Constitition) as something that should derive a posteriori from human experience. Most of our public schools raise us to view the various elements of our government as a priori structures.

End result: The very context of the argument over the Second Amendment is usually flawed because many of us view the letter of our foundational law as a sacred totem. Rational propositions can't penetrate an unquestioning, spiritual commitment to a perceived fact--and that's just as true in politics as it is in religion.

I'm unsure whether or not I'm in favor of firearms education. American culture used to foster somewhat amiable relationships between men of different generations who belong in the same family. I guess you say that we don't raise our children anymore; we'd prefer to legislate a program for their cultivation via the public schools.

I learned to shoot from my father and my grandfather. My Dad was a Green Beret, and I lived on various American military bases around Germany until I was ten. I grew up around guns when I was very young, and, when we moved to America, I transiently experienced suburban and rural environments.

My father taught me how to shoot while lying in the dirt of the pig yard around my grandfather's farm. (The pigs had been corralled into their pens.) As per his military training, my Dad could fire a high-caliber rifle with a penny balanced on the end of the nuzzle, hit the target, and have suppressed the kick so that the penny didn't even sing.

My grandfather had been firing a pistol that day when he and my father taught my sister and me how to shoot. The sun had started to descend, so we quit firing for the day. He brought one of the pigs out of the pen, let it walk a bit into the field, put the gun's muzzle against its head, and blew its brains into the dirt. We ate that pig for breakfast the next morning.

I was twelve, and I had never seen that sort of matter-of-fact killing before. I cried a lot as soon as I got away from everyone else. That's the kind of thing that gives a boy a man's perspective on guns. I know what they do, and I know that they are built only for that purpose. A mature perspective on actual gun use balances sorrow and a sense of necessity, and the current debate on gun control hardly recognizes either. A respect for the simultaneous cruelty and necessity of death is apparently "out there."

All of my exposure to guns has come from men who knew how to use them correctly and who knew how to use them well. And also from women! My mother grew up on a couple of farms, and she was actually a better shot than my Dad. Theoretical knowledge is (I think) among the least mature kinds of knowledge, and I think that you develop a more mature relationship with firearms when you grow up around them as innocuous facts that form a daily part of your life (as in the military and on a farm). Hunting works as a socializing element, too, but only insofar as the hunt is part of the relationship between the child and his emotional world.

This has been a more or less personal approach to the issue, but I think it's the most honest way I have to address it. I don't hold implicit reverence for the Bill of Rights, because a posteriori conclusions need to relate to their contexts. The public discourse could safely dispense with its ideologues; actual experience serves us better.

km · Posts: 171

So, Adilegian, just because people are sheep (or however you want to word that), why should we be dropping out bits of the constitution?

Saying we should get rid of the 2nd amendment because people don't understand what is its intention (which is something that is hotly debated and up to interpretation anyway) seems like a downright awful idea to me.

Yes, yes, I know, what I just said plays into your a priori thing. But I hold these opinions because of everything I see happening in countries without these things, and how America doesn't have these kinds of problems because of the enumerated rights that we have. And if you want to put on the tinfoil hat a bit, there are people who see the second amendment growing importance every time a new anti-terror law gets passed.

I think that the constitution is more important than individual laws, and it should be held higher than them. The constitution acted as a contract between these new states of America, and it specifically forms the foundation for everything else. It's the most basic guarantee on how the government can be expected to act. I would be very, very, very angry if someone decided to just change that, because... people held it in reverence too much...?

Also, what's this about extreme unquestioning reverence for the law in America? Where the hell did you get that idea? Sure, some people see it that way, but, *gasp*, you'll hear from ordinary people with a public education that... that... a law is unjust! That's right! I know. It's insane. It just seems to me like a lot of people take the easy way out in these kinds of discussions, and just label everyone as stupid. Is it because it's the popular thing to do around the internet? Do we all have a chip on our shoulder because we aren't always considered 'normal' people by 'normal people' standards? It doesn't matter. Humans are most absurdly clever animals, and it's pretty callous to just dismiss everyone out of hand.

I do, however, agree with what you said guns should be to people. And I agree that it is sad that it seems that most fathers don't teach their sons this kind of thing (or at least you never hear about it). But the former point I made clear in my first post (I hope), and the latter, is well, another discussion entirely.

LW Joestar · Posts: 1358

For better gun control, use both hands.

GcDiaz · Posts: 1057

Also, tuck in your elbows.

And fer God's sake, maintain cheek-to-stock weld!

dhex · Posts: 2963

Captain EO · Posts: 371

km wrote:

Saying we should get rid of the 2nd amendment because people don't understand what is its intention (which is something that is hotly debated and up to interpretation anyway) seems like a downright awful idea to me.

I thought the second amendment was more about the right to arm a militia and less the average citizenry. You could argue that citizens that are armed can make a defacto militia but eh. You say tomato I say tomato. My point is, that you can interpret the 2nd amendment so that the individual citizen does not have the right to own a gun, you know, just because, and not betray the intent of the amendment.

dhex · Posts: 2963

GcDiaz · Posts: 1057

dhex wrote:

Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

keep in mind that at this time, millita = armed citizens. more specifically, armed male citizens and freemen (depending on the relative bigotries of the area, of course) to organize and fight off outsiders. and if you're james madison, prevent the federal army from getting out of hand while the constitution is hammered out.

it is impossible to interpret either historically or at face value the above clause without reading very explicity "the right of the People to keep and bear arms" as meaning exactly that. well, not impossible, but rather difficult.

It's that damn second comma that does it. Remove it and it couldn't be more clear.

dhex · Posts: 2963

well, not quite. the commas thing aside (commas show up in some copies, not in other copies, and seem to have been a grammatical whim of the copier) "bear arms" in that context clearly means "military/miliita service" (by the standards of the day; no one would refer to "bear arms" to describe hunters of the day) however, the use of People in caps, compared with the first and fourth amendments specifically, is rather unambigious. it does not refer to a state organ, for example, in terms of the rights of the People to petition government for redress, etc.

also, it's hard to ignore that at that time, most households would have had a rifle of some kind, which is where i think "keep" comes in; a wording against seizure by outside forces.

this question very is difficult from a persuasion angle because, especially in large urban areas and among liberals in particular, it is very hard to counter the attitude towards the notion of "self-defense" (as a rhetorical bugaboo) exhibited by aderack on page one. i think the statistics bear me out, in terms of there being not much of an effect either way, but that's not the core of this kind of public policy - it's countering "what sort of animal wants a weapon?" and the like. which isn't really the point; if nyc liberalized its gun laws tomorrow, would hundreds of people run out to get permits? i don't think so. canada has a lot of guns, and yet their culture is quite different. so does colombia, for that matter, with quite different results.

abortion is probably far more difficult in a lot of ways, in terms of convincing people on the other side, but the gun thing always gets the blood pumping. both sides exhibit a great deal of contempt for one another, and even in casual conversation there is a lot of ugliness towards the notion of self-defense, which i don't quite understand.

Adilegian · Posts: 124

I'm sitting in the tutoring center on the day, and most of my students' papers are already turned in. It's been very, very slow, so I've had a lot of time to compose a response.

It's long.

--------------

km wrote:

So, Adilegian, just because people are sheep (or however you want to word that), why should we be dropping out bits of the constitution?

Saying we should get rid of the 2nd amendment because people don't understand what is its intention (which is something that is hotly debated and up to interpretation anyway) seems like a downright awful idea to me.

There seems to have been a misunderstanding. I didn't argue either for or against the Second Amendment in my post above. I only outlined what I think are some of the problems underlying the conversations on the issue that take place on national and regional levels.

I try to be simultaneously idealistic and unprincipled. I think that legislation pursued on principles is pursued for wrong reasons. Ideals adapt; principles ram into walls and break both the structure and the rammers.

km wrote:

I think that the constitution is more important than individual laws, and it should be held higher than them. The constitution acted as a contract between these new states of America, and it specifically forms the foundation for everything else. It's the most basic guarantee on how the government can be expected to act. I would be very, very, very angry if someone decided to just change that, because... people held it in reverence too much...?

In accord with what I wrote above, I wouldn't support legislation enacted on an uncontextual principle. However, I also think about American law and our Constitution in accord with the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, rather than Hamilton and the other Federalists. Jefferson's idea (which was obviously not adopted) was that the nation should revise and redraft its constitution every generation or so. He thought that a governmental constitution, in order truly to serve the needs of the people subject to its governance, needed to accord to the way that they wanted to live their lives.

By extension--my own extension, not Jefferson's, as far as I am aware--this would require the evaluation of the needs of the times. I don't wholly buy into the idea of historical interpretations of the intentions behind the Second Amendment, because the Founders were proper Enlightenment men. They elaborated their reasons for their decisions at length in spoken and written conversations. The motivations for the amendment aren't as nebulous as those of Biblical proverbs.

The problem we've encountered is that the letter of the law has remained the same while the spirit of the times has changed. (This is the political discord that Jefferson had wanted to pre-empt.) This discord mixes with my previously-mentioned a priori reverence for Constitutional law, and it creates a whole lot of problems in our national and regional conversations.

I'm going to pursue a brief tangent, but it's relevant to my point. One of the problems posed by the Bush Administration isn't that millions of Americans are oppressed by a flat, dull, nationalist rhetoric that flatters the American people as "a freedom-loving people;" the problem is that the retardedly simple rhetoric reflects what many millions of Americans have wanted to hear. I think that, in historical hindsight, our self-conscious "love of freedom" will appear as oppressive to our cultural growth as most mediocre political tyrants are. We tend to idolize freedom to the point that we prefer to think about how to get more freedom, rather than think about what to do with the freedom that we have.

I think that our popular consciousness (not our national consciousness, mind you, but our popular consciousness) symbolically correlates an idolized "love of freedom" with the actual letter of the Constitution. We've enshrined our founding documents in Washington, D.C., and our public education has selected "freedom" as the aspect of our foundational history to elaborate into a national creation myth. Other options exist, of course, and they're evident to any serious student of the personalities and events of the American Revolutionary War. We could have emphasized rational self-governance, economic prosperity, or the devotion many of the Founders had to conscientious, deliberate affiliation with the organizations of our world. The fact that self-governance and economic prosperity are present strains in American culture is beside my point; my point is that "freedom" is the spirit that gives life to our national myth.

"Freedom" is a cat-call that drowns out the fire alarm. We've so magnified it as the fundamental characteristic of our nation's beginning that well-educated people can take interpretive liberty with the facts of our history. They can claim that "we have always been a Christian nation" and that America exists as an expression of Christianity in the world, and people of a like belief system find it less offensive than they might otherwise because the claim only violates the facts of our history. It doesn't violate the perceived spirit of our foundation myth.

Culturally, we've put ourselves in a bind. If we talk about revising the Constitution, we're perceived as against freedom. We spend so much goddamn time and money talking about freedom with such a small fraction of that time talking about what to do with that freedom. This is where I think our national and regional conversations on the Second Amendment tend to become parodies of democratic discourse.

The heaviest responsibility of a free person is the decision regarding where he will lay the limits on his freedom. In the all-or-nothing atmosphere of American politics over the last eight years, we've been unable to talk about limited freedom without being perceived as heretics against the American soul. However, this is a lesser problem compared to the fact that many people willfully polarize themselves on given issues (often in accordance with principles). Regarding gun control, many of us forego the complex thought required for meaningful legislation by being Anti-Gun-Control (on the grounds of freedom) or by being Pro-Gun-Control (on various grounds, anti-violence being among them).

Of course, the term "Pro-Gun-Control" itself is stupidly loaded. It has the same kind of rhetorical implication as "Pro-Choice." According to the literal meaning of the phrase, I'm in favor of gun control, and I think we should have the right to own them!

I agree with dhex, and I think that fear provides a strong motivation for both extremes of the debate. However, I also think that an unreflecting reverence for freedom fuels much of the sentiment supporting unregulated gun ownership. In order to talk about the issue with
the intention to draft meaningful legislation, we'll need to drop these principles and look at the reasons why we think we need guns. This means we need to look at the situations in which we foresee ourselves needing to shoot someone or something, to consider the likelihood of those situations' occurring, and to decide which types of firearm best fit the circumstances.

km wrote:

Also, what's this about extreme unquestioning reverence for the law in America? Where the hell did you get that idea? Sure, some people see it that way, but, *gasp*, you'll hear from ordinary people with a public education that... that... a law is unjust! That's right! I know. It's insane. It just seems to me like a lot of people take the easy way out in these kinds of discussions, and just label everyone as stupid. Is it because it's the popular thing to do around the internet? Do we all have a chip on our shoulder because we aren't always considered 'normal' people by 'normal people' standards? It doesn't matter. Humans are most absurdly clever animals, and it's pretty callous to just dismiss everyone out of hand.

I'm sorry to have given the impression that I dismiss people out of hand. I sincerely do not. I want to understand everything to the best of my abilities, and I know this means reducing the external world (and the people in it) to my own epistemology. However, I'm broad-minded enough to accept the mysterious, and I try not to disregard anyone as stupid, idiotic, or fanatical simply because they're not exactly in line with my way of thinking. I speak generally when I speak about broader social patterns, yet I know that individuals veer from the path conceived for them in my understanding.

I also don't have a chip on my shoulder. I have not been regarded as normal, generally, and I like that. For me, it has meant uncommon acceptance among a great variety of people in whom I delight endlessly (carpenters, actors, engineers, opera singers, poets, and so on). I would be ungrateful to resent the characteristics that have granted me such pleasure, just because they have attracted occasional social discomfort.

Back on the subject of the thread: I didn't mean to suggest that the public education system makes people incapable of having opinions about our American civic life. I only mean to say that it tends to give us bad tools for seriously considering what it means to be American. "Being American" means more than "being free." I don't think that our public education system encourages students to think about what more it means to be American. Because of the symbolic closeness between the Articles of the Constitution and the idea that "Americans are Americans because they are free, and they are free because of the Constitution," we tend to have serious problems discussing laws whose letter is close to those revered documents. Extremism is the result of immature, uncritical thinking, and most people's opinions tend to become more extreme when the issues move closer to spiritual priority. "Freedom" has become an American spiritual priority, often at the expense of rational self-governance--the ideal that made American freedom from England worthwhile in the first place.

On a lighter note: I think rifles are wonderful. I'm piecemeal building a Mosin Nagant for open-field target shooting. I'm in love with the gun's mechanisms.

TOLLMASTER · Posts: 1977

I live in Massachusetts, so blue state stuff here, but everyone I've ever known who has owned a gun? Total alcoholic who abused either his girlfriend or wife, whether physically or just with the threat of violence. So when people start talking about gun control, I'm usually (emotionally) in support of it immediately. I don't really bring into account any kind of constitutional amendments or what not; I just know that the type of people I know own guns are the kind of people I wouldn't trust with them, and that the two groups that are the most associated with guns, criminals and police, are two groups which I distrust.

Would I outlaw gun ownership? Probably not. The government sets laws that restrict you from doing things, not sets laws that inform you what you're allowed to do, and everytime you take away a right, you have to have a very good, very clear reason to do so. Outlawing guns would do what, exactly? The kind of people who I don't want to have access to guns would probably find other ways while starting a very dangerous criminal infrastructure, while denying the law abiding citizens their right to enjoy something they like. But I do kind of wish that guns didn't exist--for whatever reason, I've had more run-ins with the more violent members of my local society than many, and from my point of view, even the idea of guns existing somewhere has done much harm (you can't really do anything about the gangs racing down the street and breaking in headlights, because the police won't do anything and then the gang might retaliate, for instance) without doing much good (which seems to mostly be "nebulous enjoyment from a decreasing number of people").

GcDiaz · Posts: 1057

Dude, Springfield sucks. I keep telling you to move East.

dhex · Posts: 2963

i think the work of gary kleck can be recommended to anyone with an interest in the current status of research on gun control laws and their efficacy, as well as the contentious debate regarding defensive use. if kleck is right, a little more than 1% of all guns are used defensively each year, and most of them in a "brandishment" - that is showing the weapon rather than firing it.

he strikes a nice line between the hardcore on either side, and neither the nra nor cdc/brady foundation are big fans of his because he supports reasonable restrictions but not bans. and he makes some reasonable points about the media treatment of weapons and their relative ignorance.

armed was his latest work, though some of his earlier books are now coming back into print.

i am somewhat dismayed, though less surprised, at some of the public health atttitudes about self-defense (i.e. it is immoral to fight back against someone who is attacking you), though the cdc has backed down somewhat after admitting its studies cannot find a link between gun control laws and lessened levels of gun violence. makes sense, as four major american cities with high levels of gun violence (they account for 20% of murders with about 7% of the nation's population residing there) and high levels of restriction on the access to weapons.

Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review (2004) is a review of the available literature, and goes very in-depth into some of the problems with measuring firearm law efficacy, problems with reporting on surveys, and the research methodologies involved. it's free as an html version, but extremely long.

James · Posts: 1735

Here's a question: hasn't America already exceeded the maximum saturation point for effective gun control? We never had firearms ingrained in our national culture - after Dunblaine, there wasn't really much of an outcry over dropping the banhammer because they were already limited to armed services, hobbyists and paranoid farmers.

Firearm offenses vs weapons used in self-defense also strikes me as somewhat deceitful - a guy called Tony Martin over here fatally blasted a kid in the back with a pump shotgun while he was fleeing a robbery at the guy's farm - the kid was probably an amoral little shit, but I'm not sure settling his hash like Dirty Harry was an ideal outcome. Actually I'm completely sure it wasn't ideal - you don't deal with society's problems by peppering the symptoms in the spine with buckshot, and I'm not sure that an armed society doesn't cheapen the cost of life though it's culture.

As for guns as a liberty issue? Uh uh. Seatbelts aren't liberty issues - you're handling a complex and unnatural machine with the capacity to fuck someone up through your negligence, so you gotta agree to the licensing rules society sets out for them. If we all grew handcanons out of our crotches, then it would be a rights issue.

(NB. If my government started enacting genocidal policies, I'd do everything in my power to arm the targeted groups)

James · Posts: 1735

Also - that bit in Dazed and Confused with the mother brandishing a shotgun at the hazers would count as a "crime in which victims used guns for self-protection", right? Does this guy assess the anatomy of each incident, assessing how things would have played out sans firearms?

TOLLMASTER · Posts: 1977

dhex wrote:

i am somewhat dismayed, though less surprised, at some of the public health atttitudes about self-defense (i.e. it is immoral to fight back against someone who is attacking you)

Can you explain that a bit? I had previously been under the assumption that the idea was to prevent people from escalating situations that might become violent, but I've never really heard the attitude above in your post explicitly expressed.

I think it's fair to say that many, perhaps most, arguments start when one or both parties are extremely emotional and are acting somewhat irrationally, and bringing the factor of firearms into that equation can lead to some pretty messy results. Not that they couldn't, or don't, kill each other with knives or lamps or whatever, but I think firearms are both psychologically easier to use (wonder if there has been a study on this, I wonder?) while potentially more destructive (a very agitated person with a gun can take down many people, while a guy with a knife is far more limited in the number he can hurt, because he can more easily be overpowered/takes a longer time, and police can arrive to stop him).

~~That html site is horrible, by the way. No one is going to buy their book if previewing it makes them go blind.~~ I'm an idiot.

James · Posts: 1735

Lick Meth · Posts: 154

I mean not to offend or skate issues with my rather polarised phrasing but, as I grow older, I still find it rather odd and scary that with the founding of the most powerful nation on Earth, the second most important ideal gave insight to the idea that its people would (want to?) live out their days in constant fear of others around them - friends, neighbours, but especially outsiders.

Unless I'm reading it incorrectly.

Broco · Posts: 546

Lick Meth wrote:

Unless I'm reading it incorrectly.

You are. For one, the numbering of the amendments does not indicate their importance. For two, note the use of the phrase "a well regulated militia" in the text of the amendment; the emphasis on personal self-defense came much later.

dhex · Posts: 2963

Binjuice · Posts: 118

No way I'm reading all of this shit, but shooting a person's face with a gun is never justified.

James · Posts: 1735

dhex · Posts: 2963