The Glade 4.0

I was reading in the paper about the third fatal shooting (all unrelated supposedly) in our small town in one week.

Remind me again what's so bad about taking guns away? I mean, wouldn't that eliminate a lot of murders (not all obviously, where there is a will there is a way) due to a gun being the quickest and most efficient way to kill someone without having to have any time to stop and think about it?
Wouldn't taking guns away eliminate a large number of "crimes of passion" or impulse killing just because a gun was so readily available?

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Well this is interesting.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Because the people who are doing the shootings like this aren't going to be stopped by preventing guns from being purchased at reputable dealers. I can't be sure, but its highly unlikely that the people involved in your shooting got their guns though legal means. So eliminating a legal method of buying guns hurts more honest folk than dishonest folk.

Crimes of passion are certainly made easier to follow though with a firearm, but the lack of them certain doesn't stop them. If I'm off my rocker enough to murder someone (or myself) in a fit of rage, a kitchen knife, my shoelaces, any sufficiently large blunt object, or even my bare hands will take life just as dead. Yeah the reason I don't have a firearm has everything to do with fits of rage, but I think societally the pros outweigh the cons.

There is the alternate possibility of destroying every gun we get our hands on. This has problems too. Now in a relatively small, geographically isolated country like the UK, you can do a reasonable job of accomplishing this, and they have. The problem, as the UK recently find out, is when people armed with hand/improvised explosive weapons seek to do harm to honest citizens, honest citizens are left less defended. If you look at Lex's stats and run down the recent list of high profile shootings nationwide, you'll see many of them take place where lawful citizens are separated from their guns. Again, it's the honest, law abiding person who is getting the short end most of the time.

You're a smart lady, LK. Don't buy into the hype that guns are the problem. Sinful people are the problem, you should know better.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Here's the thing about guns... criminals don't care how they get them. Sure, all of us would take the time to get a permit, but someone fiending for crack rocks doesn't really care about legalities.

There are 3 reasons.

1) We already do take guns away - from criminals. It is not ok to take guns away from people who are not criminals just because they might someday become one, any more than it is to take away cars from people just because they might drive drunk someday. This is a free society; we do not simply attempt to figure out what course of action will result in the fewest deaths and take it, especially since we generally don't pick the right one anyhow.

2) There is little reason to think taking guns away would reduce murders; in fact it would most likely result in a modest increase. At one point in the past we had a thread where there were several studies shown that revealed somewhere between 800,000 and 2.5 million crimes a year. I calculated that, based on the lowest number (800,000 preventions) that, if we eliminated all gun murders but at the same time did not prevent any murders with guns, then we would have an annual nationwide increase in murders; I don't recall how much, but enough that there was no doubt it would not be an improvement.

3) The power of handguns is frequently overestimated. Other types of guns are rarely used for crimes, so handguns are what matter, and in reality, a large knife is equally deadly (although for different reasons). This does not mean you can substitute one for the other for all applications, but rather that, overall, it is not significantly harder to kill someone with a large, or even moderate-sized knife than a gun. Similarly, taking away guns generally does not help with suicides. Males, for example, denied guns will simply resort to jumping instead.

In other words, the gun does not go nearly as far to making crimes easier as people are often lead to think.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

What's the point of your #2? Lex already established that taking away guns does not decrease murder rates.

If people are for teaching sex ed, we should be teaching gun safety as well. All the same arguments could apply.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

That's why I asked for the reminder.

It's just frustrating that there are no easy solutions (or maybe any solutions) to stop this sort of thing....I was talking with one of my friends who is staying with another women in the projects downtown and she was telling me about some 8 year old kids trying to blow up the compound by lighting the gas lines with matches.....the parent's beat the **** out of them, but they will be back there doing it tomorrow. She said most of the kids in the projects are literally throw-away kids. They get a beating every now and then, but no one reads to them or plays with them, the kids raise each other. There is no food in the house because the parents sell the foodstamps for drugs, cellphones, etc. The only meals these kids eat are the ones they get at school, IF they go to school...many kids don't even go to school and no one shows up to find them. They learn to beg, borrow, steal, or beat the hell out of someone else to get what they need. She and her roommate are having problems with a 200lb lady with a baby and 5 kids who keep strong arming their way into their apt for their shower and their air-conditioning because they haven't had power or water in quite some time....can't/won't pay the bill so they literally shove neighbors out of their doorways to get in. No one calls the police for stuff like this, it's just the way it is there....and these kids will grow up uneducated with this survival of the fittest mentality and wind up shooting each other as teens or adults.
We talked about that situation last year when I called the police about that woman beating her child and my friend told me that it really is just a cultural difference and that the only thing I would accomplish by trying to prevent one of these beatings for these kids would be that I would wind up getting a beating myself, and the parents would beat the child even harder for "causing them problems"...basically if I tried to intervene, they would just take it out on the kid worse later.
Her solution? Make abortions more readily available in lower economic areas like ghettos and projects because if they were, these women wouldn't be having these kids in the first place.
When I expressed how apalling the whole situation was and surely there are other alternatives, she told me that I live in "wonderbreadland" where I enjoy all of the privileges of being white and living in suburbia...she calls me her "little forest fairy" because I'm so naive.

Is this really the way life is?

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

It is where they're concerned.

Ain't nothin you can do but move the hell out of there.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Think of all the repercussions with prohibition but worse.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Because all the anti-gun control people like to pretend guns used in crimes come from some where else. They don't want to admit most of them were made here and bought legally at one point or another.

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Well yeah Hop they do. That doesn't invalidate my British example or any of the other data/reasoning in this thread. We can't put the black powder genie back in the bottle if we wanted to. Even if we could there is evidence that it would be net detriment.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

So it's just Mississippi?

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

No, just the inner city

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Holy shitsnacks!

No it is not.

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Memento Vivere

I have local knowledge.
That sandbar was not there yesterday!

No, plenty of states have problem areas like that. Mississippi (and probably Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas, and a few others) just have a larger share of that sort of thing due to a combination of factors of history, economics, and race relations.

Don't be taken in by band-aid solutions to social problems. Social problems are hugely complex and almost any attempt to solve them creates other problems elsewhere that may be less, equally, or more severe, because social problems are interconnected with lots of factors whereas the solutions generally try to address one tiny part of that whole. That causes unintended consequences elsewhere.

A good example was an Australian law mandating bike helmets. This caused a major drop in youth bicycle riding, because the helmets were unfashionable. Later on, people started pointing out that in the aggregate, the loss o fitness benefits probably outweighed the gain in safety from mandating bike helmets.

Social guardians usually try to address this by ever more ham-handed measures, such as then mandating that people ride bikes. A similar situation with guns would be that once we disallowed guns, knifings and clubings would rise. Then someone would want to start regulating or banning knives and baseball bats.

Basically, gun control is a solution looking for a problem. It offers temptation in the form of appearing to solve a social ill of violent crime, or at least reduce it, but in reality it just shifts the crime to other means and may make it worse in the process. The problem is that a lot of people are simply married to the idea of gun control for its own sake, and so they would far more happily require baseball bat licenses in order to avoid giving up on gun control as a failure. Their goal is to control guns in order to control guns, and the supposed benefits in terms of violent crime control are just an afterthought justification.

This ties nicely into our discussions lately of utilitarian ethics. The usual more sophisticated argument is that the right of private citizens to own guns is not as of great a benefit as preventing gun deaths. This shows exactly why utilitarianism is designed to assign utility to what's emotionally appealing, not to any supposed "mathematical" greatest good.

1) The rights of 308 million people ARE in fact, more important, than a few thousand deaths a year; we would need literally hundreds of times more deaths per year to make banning guns acceptable. If this is not the case, then it is a moral travesty both to have fought the Revolutionary War in the first place, or for anyone ever to fight for freedom or rights of any sort, since wars clearly cause more death than gun crime. The claim that preventing deaths is the greater good is based entirely on Monty-style arguments of "Are you going to tell that to someone who's son was gunned down?" No, I'm not, but I don't need to. Society does not need her approval.
2) Banning guns WOULD largely stop large-scale shooting massacres, but again, this is in reality unimportant. If we want to go simply by a tally of deaths, any reduction in massacres would most likely be more than offset by an increase in killings of people who lacked he means to defend themselves (most likely because guns allow a physically inferior person to confront a stronger opponent successfully). People claiming to be utilitarians love to point to incidents like Virginia Tech, but they are basing that on he emotional impact of 30 people getting shot in one place, as oppoed to, say, 40 people getting stabbed in different places around the country on different days and times which does not grab our attention.
3) Almost all such arguments focus on urban/suburban areas and ignore rural areas where police protection is far more sparse and many people use guns to procure food. The needs of people who have to hunt for part of their food are usually poo-poohed, with those in favor of gun restrictions usually wanting to allow them hunting rifles and shotguns but with all sorts of absurd restrictions that accomplish no purpose except to make anti-gun people feel better, and which are imposed with their ideas of what is needed for hunting or self-defense in rural areas, usually when they have no experience whatsoever with such matters.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Your snarky comment might be worth something if we hadn't already tried gun bans in various areas only to find the murder rate increased.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Well put, DE. Food for thought.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

I know, its the same principle as mutually assured destruction. Sad stuff.

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This is how humanity works. You can either adjust your sugarplum idea to reality or you can continue to ignore reality and offer solutions that make the real world worse.

What is your end goal - if it's more people dying and suffering then go for gun control. If your end goal is to feel better about yourself while ignoring consequences then go for gun control. If your goal is to make the real world a better one then focus your efforts on education, parental training and daycare programs, food and housing assistance.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

There's nothing sad at all about mutually assured destruction. Nuclear deterrence kept NATO and the Soviet Union from having it out in central Germany for fear it would go nuclear. If there had been no such risk, there almost certainly WOULD have been a conventional WWIII at some point and in fact with our over-reduction in strategic arms, we risk that eventually happening somewhere.

As it happened, a lot fewer people died than otherwise would have.

Insofar a guns go, who cares whether they were bought legally or not? People can do all kinds of things with stuff they acquired legally. I'm quite certain Timothy McVeigh and the guys that bombed the WTC in 1993 rented their trucks legally.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah, ironic, isn't it? The Nuclear Arms Race saved countless millions of lives.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Indeed. The only real problem with MAD is that if, for some reason, it DOES fail, you're completely ****. You can retaliate, but that's it. The whole point of the ABM treaty was to preserve this situation out of fear that one side or the other might manage to neutralize the other's ability to retaliate and thereby provoke a first strike before the deterrent was lost.

The problem with this thinking is that, as a practical matter, A) you can simply build more weapons if you're technologically behind and saturate any affordable defense and B) any resources going to defensive systems are NOT going into offensive systems that can actually attack you.

Had we not had the idiotic ABM treaty, the limitations of guided missiles as a ground-based defense system would have been realized much sooner, and we might possibly be at a point today where ICBMs were obsolete, SLBMs were a secondary system and manned bombers were still the primary means of delivery. Sadly, we're now a good 50 years behind on that. Manned bombers have, regardless of their other merits tactically, have 2 important political advantages: they take hours to reach their targets, and can be called back.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Only to see them replaced with firebombs and other explosive attacks like you see in Europe and the Middle East.

The Maj. Hassans and VT shooters of the world will be simply content to blow people up rather than shoot them and the rest of us will simply be deprived of our means of stopping them.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"