Las Vegas Shooting

[Lonestar]

Can you elaborate please? What disparity of force is at work? Between which two groups? How does 'everyone has guns' lessen this disparity more than the hypothetical scenario of 'no one has guns'? What is the evidence for this?

What terrible evil do you think is happening in all other countries than America that guns are preventing? Can you prove it? I imagine you are annoyed with me telling you how the Us should work, equally I'm annoyed that you are implying I don't know what the conditions in my country are and that we all have our heads in the sand about something.

I know you think you're being clever by having every sentence be a question, but the disparity of force comment should be self evident unless you really are that stupid/disingenuous.

An example of disparity of force would be two people jumping one at a gas station, or a much larger person attacking a much smaller person. The phrase "God created man, Colt made them equal" was a neat bit of marketing but it was fundamentally correct; it removed the advantages a physically more powerful individual has over a weaker one.

[ray245]

Guns should be seen as a privilege, not a right.

Self defense is absolutely a right, and firearms are an extension of that. "Haha well maybe the cops will arrive on time or maybe not" is a pretty shitty thing to say to someone.

That's a law enforcement problem. Before you consider owning guns as the automatic response to cops not being able to arrive on time, perhaps you can consider the possibility that law enforcement can be better improved and reaction times being much better?

[Lonestar]

That's a law enforcement problem. Before you consider owning guns as the automatic response to cops not being able to arrive on time, perhaps you can consider the possibility that law enforcement can be better improved and reaction times being much better?

Actually, if you are being attacked and it takes the cops 40 minutes to respond I submit it is also your problem, even if you are not at fault.

But yeah, this is just an extension of a really shitty "whelp tough tits, I live in a highly urbanized area with quick police response and I never have been in mortal harm so I don't know what the big deal is".

[ray245]

Can you actually explain coherently why "bearing arms" is a privilege granted for good behavior and not a right citizens default to having unless there's a specific reason they shouldn't have it?

Or is this just a default assumption on your part? Are Americans are just uniformly dumber and more childlike and ignorant than people in other countries, so that a large fraction of Americans automatically wrong about this? Because seriously, I've seen a lot of people argue for gun control who just assume this, and it's done more than anything else to turn me from pro-gun-control to anti-gun-control.

We have two groups of people. One believes they have an important right and wants to protect it. The other group believes that the right in question does not exist and wants to take it away. Normally, in cases like this we expect to see a damned good argument on the part of the group that wants to abolish the right. If someone tried to convince you that voting or free speech or moving to another town were "privileges" that you should have to earn by making special arguments and pleas to your government, they'd probably fail unless they had one hell of a good argument.

But most of the gun control advocacy I've seen in the past ten years doesn't even make an effort to justify this. It just says "lol no, this right you believe you have does not exist, the grownups should take it away from you."

Can't you do better than this? It's frustrating to watch.

Why is bearing arms a right? Is it a human right? Because if so, then it should be universal throughout the world. Is it a right for a democratic country to function? I don't think so considering many other democratic countries can function without necessitating guns.

You are opposed to the "right" being taken away, while never really showing why is it considered a "right" in the first place. To me, a right is something human beings or society cannot function without. It is a necessary part of your daily lives. Food, shelter are basic human rights. Freedom of expression are rights that are tied to a functional democratic society.

For something to be a right, it has to be universal in some form, that society as a whole cannot function without it. Freedom of speech, for instance, might not be exercised by everyone, but a democratic society cannot really function without it.

Just because you are brought up to believe it is a right doesn't mean it is a right. I await your argument why it is even a right in the first place.

Actually, if you are being attacked and it takes the cops 40 minutes to respond I submit it is also your problem, even if you are not at fault.

But yeah, this is just an extension of a really shitty "whelp tough tits, I live in a highly urbanized area with quick police response and I never have been in mortal harm so I don't know what the big deal is".

If you live in a rural area in which basic necessities cannot even function, then it means the town as a whole is quite dysfunctional, to begin with. People living in rural Japan, for example, do not have to worry about owning a gun just to protect themselves. Nor does it really apply to people living in rural parts of UK.

This feels like yet another case of American exceptionalism at work here, like with universal health care.

[Simon_Jester]

Heh.

Yes, it does if there is a disparity of force at work. The difference is that in those other countries the government(and you, apparently) have decided that disparity of force doesn't exist, despite that it manifestly does.

Can you elaborate please? What disparity of force is at work? Between which two groups? How does 'everyone has guns' lessen this disparity more than the hypothetical scenario of 'no one has guns'? What is the evidence for this?

Well, for example, there is the disparity of force between tall people (who have correspondingly bigger muscles) and short people. Between men and women. Between the able-bodied and the disabled. Between the young and the elderly.

Violent criminals tend to be male, able-bodied, and young; I can't comment as to whether they tend to be larger or smaller on average than the population as a whole. The victims of violent criminals may be male or female, able-bodied or disabled, young or old. Therefore, there is on average a disparity of force between a criminal and their intended victim, in a contest of physical strength. And since criminals are not literally dumber than animals, they will generally prefer to pick on targets that are among the weakest members of a population, further opening the statistical gap.

All of what I just said strikes me as fairly uncontroversial. If you can disprove it I will be surprised.

What terrible evil do you think is happening in all other countries than America that guns are preventing? Can you prove it?

America has a higher background level of violent crime than most other countries, for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons can definitely be fixed but haven't been by our fucked up political system. Others may actually be endemic to our culture, the way a lot of countries around the world seem to have specific anomalies about their societies.

Some of the extra violent crime may be caused by gun availability, but much of it is not. This is illustrated by, for instance, the fact that Canada manages to have a vastly lower rape rate than the US, despite there being no obvious reason rapes should be underreported harder in Canada than in the US, and despite the fact that gun availability should play little or no role in the incidence of rape.

Thus, citizens in America may reasonably argue that they are in greater danger than citizens of other developed countries.

---

The problem is as usual, cities and population density. Ban guns and ownership in all metropole areas. Leave the guns to people in the countryside and small towns and stop making city problems their problems too.

Sure people could smuggle them in, but so what it's not like an outright ban on everything wouldn't contend with basically similar issues anyway. Can always have trump build loads of walls.

Yeah, pay no attention to the fact that minorities are more likely to reside in cities. Do you want me to go into detail about the wall thing?

Interestingly, city populations tend to be more in favor of gun control than rural ones, minorities and all. If you have to live in a crowded, low-income, high-crime neighborhood, you may have a lot more worries about getting guns off the streets than does someone living in a sparse, low-income, low-crime small town in the middle of nowhere. Since on the whole it's minorities who live in the former and "poor white trash" who live in the latter, we see a situation where cities pass as much gun control as they can without getting slapped by the Supreme Court, while rural areas pass basically no gun control.

I don't really see the point. Living in a city comes with sacrifices, stop forcing them on the rest of the world outside the city bubble. That's all I care about.

Just as many small-town hicks get drunk and shoot their wives/the other guy/etc. as happens in the city. You just get less violent career criminals in smaller towns.

I strongly suspect you made that up, though I could be wrong, I suppose. Do you actually have proof of your claim?

Furthermore, would you not think that violent career criminals are the people most likely to go out of their way to procure guns they wouldn't otherwise want? Doesn't it make sense that the places with lots of violent career criminals would need more gun control, and that the same gun control laws that benefit the cities might be seen as much less necessary in other places that lack such career criminals?

I find that very unsurprising.

Then keep to the city where guns are banned.

Or apply the rules to everybody with rare exceptions.

I mean, I know you get your technocrat hard-ons from saying things like this, but this is the kind of thing a stupid technocrat says.

A smart technocrat would immediately spot the flaw in saying something like "Law A is necessary in Area B, so let's apply it to Areas B, C, D, and E indiscriminately unless people specifically apply for permits explaining why it shouldn't apply to them." By saying that, you've immediately declared your willingness to impose intrusive laws on Areas C, D, and E, without justification or basis in evidence. The fix is in; you decided you wanted to impose the law on them then you looked for a reason to do so.

And that's exactly how smart technocrats don't behave. Because technocrats who do behave that way, in the unlikely event they ever obtain power in the first place, are likely to wind up hung from lampposts as a warning to all the other incompetent bozos who think They Know Best (TM).

[Crazedwraith]

Can you elaborate please? What disparity of force is at work? Between which two groups? How does 'everyone has guns' lessen this disparity more than the hypothetical scenario of 'no one has guns'? What is the evidence for this?

What terrible evil do you think is happening in all other countries than America that guns are preventing? Can you prove it? I imagine you are annoyed with me telling you how the Us should work, equally I'm annoyed that you are implying I don't know what the conditions in my country are and that we all have our heads in the sand about something.

I know you think you're being clever by having every sentence be a question, but the disparity of force comment should be self evident unless you really are that stupid/disingenuous.

An example of disparity of force would be two people jumping one at a gas station, or a much larger person attacking a much smaller person. The phrase "God created man, Colt made them equal" was a neat bit of marketing but it was fundamentally correct; it removed the advantages a physically more powerful individual has over a weaker one.

Mostly I was trying to be crystal clear about my enquires. I was wondering if the parties you referred to were people vs criminals or people vs the government. (Apparently I am just that stupid? Or maybe things you think are obvious aren't, hence the request for elaboration)

I admit I've not been in a situation where self-defense is required, so i'd you have I'd defer to you there (I'd like to hear more about that incident if you are willing to share.) and yes I see what you mean about physical confrontation. But to my way of thinking a criminal on the attack is always going to have the advantage of the intiative/the element of surprise. If it's a physical confrontation even at a disadvantage one can struggle or run from a fight. If you start the scenario with a criminal pointing a gun at you, you are much worse off, even if own a gun yourself. You've got to draw and fire, and they've just got to fire.

[Lonestar]

If you live in a rural area in which basic necessities cannot even function, then it means the town as a whole is quite dysfunctional, to begin with. People living in rural Japan, for example, do not have to worry about owning a gun just to protect themselves. Nor does it really apply to people living in rural parts of UK.

Barring someplace like the Outer Hebrides rural UK or Japan isn't really applicable to some of rural America in terms of distance. But I should note that the average response time for the NYPD is something like 9 minutes. Anecdotally it's taken me(well, the wifey) longer to get a response from a urban police force here in the DC Area. Lotta things can happen in 10 minutes.

But, again, you're basically going "well sucks to be you, guess you'll just have to deal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ".

[Flagg]

I don't live in the US, so for this and other reasons my opinion isn't worth much. But I'll give it a shot.

There are two possible things here, right? There's a ban on future sales of weapons and a roundup of existing weapons in the category of "too dangerous", however that would be defined*. Let's say that there can be more or less universal agreement among legislators about what is and not "too dangerous", and that it does more than just duplicate the "ugly gun" laws of the past. The rank and file firearm enthusiast might not agree, but I'm completely discounting their opinions here for the sake of argument.

What, all the legislators agree? Your scenario has now diverged far enough from reality that it no longer addresses my question.

But you do start trending back towards reality further on, so I'll keep reading.

In the case of a ban, if there were sufficient political will to make it happen, then I would expect lots of grumbling and chest-thumping, not to mention stocking up in anticipation of such a ban, but ultimately not a lot of bad consequences. Not a lot of good consequences either, because of the enormity of the extant stockpile.

Okay, this is you at least starting to acknowledge the issue. I respect that.

If the government were to try to round up the extant stockpile, well, let's just say I don't know how that would be possible. Those who possess such items for the most part wouldn't want to give (or sell) them to the government. All the worst warnings from the firearm enthusiasts and militia types about the gun-grabbers would be coming to pass, and it would surprise me if the latter didn't try banding together in places like rural Montana, channeling Charlton Heston. The only thing for it would be to call up the military, and that wouldn't end well.

So, basically, in this way the US is fucked. The status quo is terrible, and there's really no way to fix it even if the political will existed to make the attempt. It can be made a little better, but not much.

This is, basically, why I answered to Jub as I did. The US started with a bigger gun culture than most developed nations, it has accordingly accumulated a very large number of guns that are overwhelmingly owned by law-abiding people... And many of those law-abiding people are firmly convinced that private gun ownership is a vital civil right, equal in status and significance with the freedom of speech or the right to vote. They're not going to change their mind on that subject.

So the most gun control can accomplish in the US is farcical nibbling around the edges. And this is done at ruinous political expense; it's one of the key "wedge issues" exploited by the far right to convince rural voters that the center-left Democratic Party is actually a bunch of sneering elitists out to take away their citizen-farmer freedoms. We'd be better off as a nation today if the Democrats had never brought up the idea of gun control at the national level in the first place, or at least never tried to ban and instead simply worked on things like waiting periods and background checks.

It's more about making sure more Americans stopped believing in that the American way of life is always the right way to go. The idea of gun owning as a free, natural and inevitable right of Americans is a little problematic. Guns should be seen as a privilege, not a right.

Until the vast majority of Americans can reconcile with that, i think there will never be any sufficient gun laws that will actually tackle the problem.

Can you actually explain coherently why "bearing arms" is a privilege granted for good behavior and not a right citizens default to having unless there's a specific reason they shouldn't have it?

Or is this just a default assumption on your part? Are Americans are just uniformly dumber and more childlike and ignorant than people in other countries, so that a large fraction of Americans automatically wrong about this? Because seriously, I've seen a lot of people argue for gun control who just assume this, and it's done more than anything else to turn me from pro-gun-control to anti-gun-control.

We have two groups of people. One believes they have an important right and wants to protect it. The other group believes that the right in question does not exist and wants to take it away. Normally, in cases like this we expect to see a damned good argument on the part of the group that wants to abolish the right. If someone tried to convince you that voting or free speech or moving to another town were "privileges" that you should have to earn by making special arguments and pleas to your government, they'd probably fail unless they had one hell of a good argument.

But most of the gun control advocacy I've seen in the past ten years doesn't even make an effort to justify this. It just says "lol no, this right you believe you have does not exist, the grownups should take it away from you."

Can't you do better than this? It's frustrating to watch.

How many other methods of preventable deaths per year in America where a cause and possible solution to prevent more of them are determined yet absolutely nothing is done to prevent them from reoccurring? Cars (which have far more utility than firearms) are heavily regulated and regularly subjected to recall. Plane crashes are investigated and entire systemic provisions are put in place to prevent another crash due to the same cause and far less people die globally per year in plane crashes than from gun violence in America alone.

Yet we have the same sad story of a heavily armed nut job killing dozens almost every year as well as “normal” gun violence and not only is zero done, but regulations are in the process of being rolled back.

So those are the preventable deaths, no matter the number, I want to prevent you smug cunt.

Well no, I'm actually serious. I mean, suppose it were established that the US has X surplus deaths per year caused by use of antidepressants whose side effect is a 50% increase in heart failure rates, when an alternative exists that would cause fewer deaths. Switching medications would save X lives a year. How big would X have to be, before the issue became as important to you as gun control is?

I'm not asking this to be smug or obnoxious, I am genuinely curious.

You are either being obtuse or outright dishonest here because even the pharmaceutical companies don’t have the governmental protections that the gun industry does. It’s very important to me that if a medication kills people it be pulled off the market. And that happens. And people have recompense. I have defective hernia mesh in my body causing me constant agony, that made my teeth rot out from the inside. I have recompense.

But the gun industry is legally protected and insulated. The way things work now, if someone who shouldn’t have a gun gets one and shoots me, I have no recompense. Period.

Also, medications and medical devices are not made to injure or kill, while firearms are. The same is the case with ammonium nitrate, vehicles, and any number of other things that can possibly be altered from their intended use to be used as a weapon. Guns are weapons by default. They have far less benefit to society, especially the way they are treated in the US, than other things that cause preventable death.

[Crazedwraith]

Heh.

Yes, it does if there is a disparity of force at work. The difference is that in those other countries the government(and you, apparently) have decided that disparity of force doesn't exist, despite that it manifestly does.

Can you elaborate please? What disparity of force is at work? Between which two groups? How does 'everyone has guns' lessen this disparity more than the hypothetical scenario of 'no one has guns'? What is the evidence for this?

Well, for example, there is the disparity of force between tall people (who have correspondingly bigger muscles) and short people. Between men and women. Between the able-bodied and the disabled. Between the young and the elderly.

Violent criminals tend to be male, able-bodied, and young; I can't comment as to whether they tend to be larger or smaller on average than the population as a whole. The victims of violent criminals may be male or female, able-bodied or disabled, young or old. Therefore, there is on average a disparity of force between a criminal and their intended victim, in a contest of physical strength. And since criminals are not literally dumber than animals, they will generally prefer to pick on targets that are among the weakest members of a population, further opening the statistical gap.

All of what I just said strikes me as fairly uncontroversial. If you can disprove it I will be surprised.

Hi Simon, since you've addressed me directly, I want to direct a few general comments your way. I'm surprised at that tack you are taking in this thread since I often agree with what you say. You seem to be taking the pragmatic approach that more gun control is just not possible in America at the moment? If it were viable politically would you want it? I saw you propose a hypothetical before that you could either have more gun control or more mental help, do you think this reflects the reality? Is either a possibility with the Republicans in charge? (Not trying to be harsh or confrontational here, just interested)

As to the points you've raised, see my response to Lonestar. I don't dispute the physical differences in criminals/victims. I do dispute that the gun levels the playing field as much as claim as criminals will always have the initiative.

Do you beleive firearms are a vital necessity for self defense in America? (again, asking for info not trying to win a 'debate' here.)

What terrible evil do you think is happening in all other countries than America that guns are preventing? Can you prove it?

America has a higher background level of violent crime than most other countries, for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons can definitely be fixed but haven't been by our fucked up political system. Others may actually be endemic to our culture, the way a lot of countries around the world seem to have specific anomalies about their societies.

Some of the extra violent crime may be caused by gun availability, but much of it is not. This is illustrated by, for instance, the fact that Canada manages to have a vastly lower rape rate than the US, despite there being no obvious reason rapes should be underreported harder in Canada than in the US, and despite the fact that gun availability should play little or no role in the incidence of rape.

Thus, citizens in America may reasonably argue that they are in greater danger than citizens of other developed countries.

Interesting and well reasoned. But my reading of Lonestar's post suggested not that he thought that Americans were in more danger than citizens of other developed countries but more that other developed countries were just ignoring the fundamental truth that only america had recognised in some way.

[ray245]

Barring someplace like the Outer Hebrides rural UK or Japan isn't really applicable to some of rural America in terms of distance. But I should note that the average response time for the NYPD is something like 9 minutes. Anecdotally it's taken me(well, the wifey) longer to get a response from a urban police force here in the DC Area. Lotta things can happen in 10 minutes.

But, again, you're basically going "well sucks to be you, guess you'll just have to deal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ".

The fundamental problem is still apparent. You have many rural places in which law enforcement is unable to reach in sufficient time. So either you invest more resources and money to ensure the police could respond in a quicker time, or you have to consider whether a rural community as it currently is in the US is even sustainable.

In addition, I think rural Australia doesn't seem to have too many problems in regards to requiring guns to survive in there. Same goes to Canada. Guns are still allowed, but they are far more restrictive than the ones in the US.

I've yet to hear arguments that law enforcement in the US cannot be better improve that do away with the extensive need for guns.

[Flagg]

The problem is as usual, cities and population density. Ban guns and ownership in all metropole areas. Leave the guns to people in the countryside and small towns and stop making city problems their problems too.

Sure people could smuggle them in, but so what it's not like an outright ban on everything wouldn't contend with basically similar issues anyway. Can always have trump build loads of walls.

Yeah, pay no attention to the fact that minorities are more likely to reside in cities. Do you want me to go into detail about the wall thing?

Interestingly, city populations tend to be more in favor of gun control than rural ones, minorities and all. If you have to live in a crowded, low-income, high-crime neighborhood, you may have a lot more worries about getting guns off the streets than does someone living in a sparse, low-income, low-crime small town in the middle of nowhere. Since on the whole it's minorities who live in the former and "poor white trash" who live in the latter, we see a situation where cities pass as much gun control as they can without getting slapped by the Supreme Court, while rural areas pass basically no gun control.

I’m aware. I was pointing out that he was being a fucking idiot oversimplicating things and suggesting that urban areas, with far more minorities, be walled off.


And frankly, I think out of the people in this thread on the side of “let’s figure out a way to prevent our American tradition of yearly gun massacres” I’ve been eminently reasonable. I’m not proposing “scary looking weapons” bans, or total confiscation. I’m trying to find practical solutions while at the same time pointing out that the gun industry is like no other industry in this country. They don’t risk being sued if they put out a faulty product. There are tons of loopholes that allow criminals to get their hands on guns and the gun industry is opposed to even talking about closing them. Any time some lunatic mows down a movie audience or a class of first graders they say “well clearly we need more guns with less regulation!”

If you want to pretend that isn’t a really fucked up problem to make your super logical emotionally and empathy detached points, then don’t respond because we have nothing to discuss.

[Crazedwraith]

The fundamental problem is still apparent. You have many rural places in which law enforcement is unable to reach in sufficient time. So either you invest more resources and money to ensure the police could respond in a quicker time, or you have to consider whether a rural community as it currently is in the US is even sustainable.

In addition, I think rural Australia doesn't seem to have too many problems in regards to requiring guns to survive in there. Same goes to Canada. Guns are still allowed, but they are far more restrictive than the ones in the US.

I've yet to hear arguments that law enforcement in the US cannot be better improve that do away with the extensive need for guns.

To be fair, given the current climate and seeing the contents of our own police corruption thread. Up gunning the police and making them more effective while taking away people's firearms is going to result in more problems not less.

At the very least you have to dramatically increase the police's effectiveness and public trust before implementing gun control in that scenario.

[ray245]

To be fair, given the current climate and seeing the contents of our own police corruption thread. Up gunning the police and making them more effective while taking away people's firearms is going to result in more problems not less.

At the very least you have to dramatically increase the police's effectiveness and public trust before implementing gun control in that scenario.

The point is to improve the police as a whole, not merely give them more guns. The problem I see you guys have in the US is that you find it hard to trust the police, either by their actions or their response time. The idea of wanting to take things into my own hands is appealing in such a situation, but it's not really healthy for society at large.

A police force that the public can trust to protect them and not abuse them, as well as a police that can arrive in sufficient time, should be something Americans should seek for, instead of being content with merely owning guns for self-protection. Gun ownership feels to be a stop-gap measure to avoid addressing the more fundamental problems in the US.

[Crazedwraith]

To be fair, given the current climate and seeing the contents of our own police corruption thread. Up gunning the police and making them more effective while taking away people's firearms is going to result in more problems not less.

At the very least you have to dramatically increase the police's effectiveness and public trust before implementing gun control in that scenario.

The point is to improve the police as a whole, not merely give them more guns. The problem I see you guys have in the US is that you find it hard to trust the police, either by their actions or their response time. The idea of wanting to take things into my own hands is appealing in such a situation, but it's not really healthy for society at large.

A police force that the public can trust to protect them and not abuse them, as well as a police that can arrive in sufficient time, should be something Americans should seek for, instead of being content with merely owning guns for self-protection. Gun ownership feels to be a stop-gap measure to avoid addressing the more fundamental problems in the US.

Okay, a) I'm not from the US and b) We're basically in agreement.

Like I said, you have to tackle the police before gun control in that case.

[TheFeniX]

Gun grab is a tough sell. I've had this talk with gun nuts afraid of "Hitlery." There's so many obstacles to make it work. This country is huge and spread out and you have to bank on local and state police being willing to disarm millions of gun owners as the ATF doesn't have near the manpower. Certain states WILL just ignore Federal mandates in this regard and the 2nd Ammendment makes it a hard sell either way.

You're also either taking valuable property with zero compensation or you pay out even more money buying the guns back. "You aren't coming in without a warrant" means more paperwork and expenses, not to mention the damage cops will do to homes while searching for guns because I alone could give them 10 guns and have more than that stashed away. I don't know how I would react to LEOs showing up at my house demanding tens of thousands of dollars of my property and I'm possibly the most level headed gun owner I know.

You're basically creating one big clusterfuck and also potentially feeding criminals guns as owners try and get some money back on their investment.

No, the only possible way is to do another "grandfathering." At some point, legislation will pass that says "any firearms manufactured after X date is now illegal for civilian ownership." And they'll just have to slowly bleed them out of the system. However, in the time this takes, it's more likely people will forget why guns are so bad and legislators with pro-gun sentiment will push for loosening of restrictions.

They don’t risk being sued if they put out a faulty product.

Firearms are subject to the same consumer protection laws as anything else. A (dumbass) friend of the family was going to sue a pistol manufacturer because he shot himself in the hand while the safety was engaged, but not functioning. The defect was noted and he settled out of court for medical/legal expenses, lost work, and few thousand dollars because, even though the gun was faulty, he was still dumb enough to shoot himself in the hand which is why he decided to settle (at the recommendation of his lawyer).

[Jub]

Generally speaking, Bubba with 20 ARs in his closet is a significantly smaller problem than someone who has one or two guns and shoots his wife. About 3% of the population owns half the guns in the country.

It isn't the guys with big ass collections that are the problem.

I never said it was a huge issue but it does make sense to send the occasional ATF agent over to ensure that Bubba 'Hundred-Guns' Ray hasn't gotten lax with his firearms storage and safety since the last visit. Getting to know him and making sure that things at home are still going well wouldn't hurt either. This goes for the more respectable Reginald 'Gun-Museum' types as well.

Does this level of frankly minimal government oversite violate current rights?

----------

I think the other factors may be playing a lot harder than the guns.

As an example of a class of violent crime in which guns very rarely make an appearance, consider the rape rates in Canada and the US. Guns are not commonly used in rapes, precisely because the stereotypical "armed stranger" rape scenario is so uncommon.

Now, Canada has a vastly lower gun crime rate than the US. But Canada also has a reported rape rate of somewhere between one and two cases per hundred thousand, whereas in the US it's more like 30 or 40.

Now, there are obvious confounders here. Rape rates are underreported in every country, because many or most victims don't go to the police. But at the same time, this is true in every country, and there's no obvious reason that rape victims in Canada should be, say, ten times less likely to go to the police than they are in the US. While we can't draw firm numerical conclusions, we can at least say that it sure looks as though Canada's rape rate is a lot lower than the US's, maybe as little as 1/10 the rate in the US. And this almost has to be caused by reasons other than guns.

This is not to say gun proliferation has literally zero effect on crime and murder rates. But clearly the picture is much, MUCH more complicated than "lol just ban guns."

I never said that guns were even the largest factor, however, one can't conduct a mass shooting without something to shoot. In Canada one guy managed 3 kills with a crossbow* but that was at a private residence and wouldn't even make the national news in the US unless race was involved.

According to gunviolencearchive.org there have been 273 mass shootings this year in the US. We can debate that number and the validity of their stats but unless someone can find better numbers they're what I'm going with. Using numbers pulled from wikipedia** there were 10 bombings attempted in the US since 2010 and 8 of those resulted in no casualties. I think this answers the idea that we'd rather have these idiots trying to pull off a bombing than a mass shooting. In fact just the Vegas attack is dealier and has caused more wounded than all other non-gun related attacks going back to the Oklahoma Bombing and ignoring that and the WTC Truck Bombing you can go back a very long way and see that guns are by far the most deadly tool a would-be mass murderer has at their disposal.

*http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/c ... -1.3736694
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism ... .93present

Let me answer your question with a hypothetical.

Suppose you could lower the murder rate by 10% by spending all your political capital on a draconian campaign of gun control that would have the far right literally up in arms including rural guerilla movements. Or you could lower the murder rate by 20% by spending it on social programs that will cause the far right to grumble a lot but eventually acquiesce because seriously, they can't even get their shit together enough to repeal Obamacare.

You do not have enough political capital to do both; even doing one will be a hard-fought battle. Which would you choose, from a utilitarian point of view?

The kind of gun control that rounds up existing guns in the US would be effectively impossible to implement. Too many owners would view it as unconstitutional and engage in civil disobedience (at best) or armed resistance (at worst). In the cases involving civil disobedience, some of the courts, maybe even the Supreme Court, would agree with them. And that's not just because of Republicans on the court, either.

This is not the first time you've been told this. Please stop opining on US gun control until you're prepared to address this reality squarely.

Your hypothetical is just as bullshit given that your 20% case has also yet to be seriously attempted. It could be argued that the ACA hasn't been around long enough for us to judge if it's had an effect on US crime rates (it also may not last long enough to ever be fairly judged) but can you name anything to that scale beyond that which could even come close to the desired effect? I can't think of anything but the current Opiod debacle may actually cause a spike if people stop ODing and start turning to crime to get a cleaner fix.

Has it happened? You don't know whether this is a case of a properly registered automatic weapon being bought or stolen in the US. How many such cases of legal machine guns being bought or stolen for crimes have actually occurred?

We don't know the details of this case yet. However, so long as the object is there to be stollen it has a non-zero chance of happening.

And I get that this makes you hard and all.

But seriously, you either have no concept of the differing level of resistance such gun control measures would encounter in the US compared to Canada, or you are an actively malicious troll promoting policies you know will lead to violent chaos.

I actually do understand the level of resistance, as much as any outsider can. I say this due to having seen the rhetoric that comes out here whenever this pops up and the opinions of the firearms channels I watch on a regular basis. I simply don't think that the issue outweighs the good that a multidecade slow tightening of the firearms noose would do. It starts by making gun lobbies illegal and then working to change young minds while slowly restricting weapons year over year. It's not particularly likely to happen unless you get an authoritarian anti-gun lefty the likes of which the right currently throws out as strawmen in office but it could happen.

Can you actually explain coherently why "bearing arms" is a privilege granted for good behavior and not a right citizens default to having unless there's a specific reason they shouldn't have it?

Or is this just a default assumption on your part? Are Americans are just uniformly dumber and more childlike and ignorant than people in other countries, so that a large fraction of Americans automatically wrong about this? Because seriously, I've seen a lot of people argue for gun control who just assume this, and it's done more than anything else to turn me from pro-gun-control to anti-gun-control.

We have two groups of people. One believes they have an important right and wants to protect it. The other group believes that the right in question does not exist and wants to take it away. Normally, in cases like this we expect to see a damned good argument on the part of the group that wants to abolish the right. If someone tried to convince you that voting or free speech or moving to another town were "privileges" that you should have to earn by making special arguments and pleas to your government, they'd probably fail unless they had one hell of a good argument.

But most of the gun control advocacy I've seen in the past ten years doesn't even make an effort to justify this. It just says "lol no, this right you believe you have does not exist, the grownups should take it away from you."

Can't you do better than this? It's frustrating to watch.

Given that the US is only one of 3 countries (the others being Mexico and Guatemala) that have this 'right' I don't think that anybody should have to argue against it being a right. To further make my case 6 other countries used to have such a 'right' and have since rescinded such rights.

Can you see why people from the other ~190 nations you share this planet with might question what makes the US special enough to have upgraded what we see as a privilege to the status of a right?

I strongly suspect you made that up, though I could be wrong, I suppose. Do you actually have proof of your claim?

Furthermore, would you not think that violent career criminals are the people most likely to go out of their way to procure guns they wouldn't otherwise want? Doesn't it make sense that the places with lots of violent career criminals would need more gun control, and that the same gun control laws that benefit the cities might be seen as much less necessary in other places that lack such career criminals?

I find that very unsurprising.

Of course, I have proof.

List of U.S. states by homicide rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U ... icide_rate
Louisiana - Rank 1 (10.3 per 100,000) (Pop Density 93.6/sq mi Ranked 24th)
New Jersey - Rank 27 (3.9 per 100,000) (Pop Density 1210.10/sq mi Ranked 1st)

Violent crime doesn't correlate with population density, at least not at the state level.

At the city level, we get similar results.

Crime rates per 100,000 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U ... crime_rate
St. Louis - Rank 1 (1817.1) (Pop Density 4,800/sq mi)
Memphis - Rank 3 (1740.1) (Pop Density 2,000/sq mi)
New York - Rank 52 (585.8) (Pop Density 28,210/sq mi)
San Jose - Rank 76 (329.6) (Pop Density 5,776.29/sq mi)

Density means little next to other factors. Thus, all areas need to be disarmed.

I mean, I know you get your technocrat hard-ons from saying things like this, but this is the kind of thing a stupid technocrat says.

A smart technocrat would immediately spot the flaw in saying something like "Law A is necessary in Area B, so let's apply it to Areas B, C, D, and E indiscriminately unless people specifically apply for permits explaining why it shouldn't apply to them." By saying that, you've immediately declared your willingness to impose intrusive laws on Areas C, D, and E, without justification or basis in evidence. The fix is in; you decided you wanted to impose the law on them then you looked for a reason to do so.

And that's exactly how smart technocrats don't behave. Because technocrats who do behave that way, in the unlikely event they ever obtain power in the first place, are likely to wind up hung from lampposts as a warning to all the other incompetent bozos who think They Know Best (TM).

Not like I haven't already proven that pop density =/= crime rates but if you fail to restrict problematic weapons in rural areas they will be far easier to smuggle into the cities that have banned them. Thus, you need to police all areas with equal fervor to ensure compliance.

-----

As for Americans being dumber and more childlike than other nations with equal wealth... May I point to your current PoTUS, your bottom of the class healthcare and education systems, your violent crime rates, lack of racial equality, the war on drugs, your current unemployment rates, and other issues that simply don't exist to the same degree in peer-level nations. In terms of hard numbers, let's directly compare the US to Canada as it's the basis for my view of the two nations. I also have some experience with Australia having spent half a year there but it doesn't inform my world views the same way and has many of the same issues, in terms of comparison to the US, as Canada has.

General

Happiness Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
Canada - Rank 7 - Canada Rates Higher in all categories
United States - Rank 14

2015 Inequality-adjusted HDI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... justed_HDI
Canada - Rank 11
United States - Rank 19

Legatum Prosperity Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legatum_P ... 6_rankings
Canada - Rank 5
United States - Rank 17

The Good Country Index: https://goodcountry.org/index/results?p=overall
Canada - Rank 10
United States - Rank 20

Satisfaction with Life Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfact ... Life_Index
Canada - Rank 10
United States - Rank 21

Where-to-be-born Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index
Canada - Rank 9
United States - Rank 16

As we can see looking at the general ratings Canada is a top ten nation to live in while the United States is in the low teens to the early twenties as a nation. As will be seen in the following section related to income, this is in spite of the average US citizen having more disposable income than the average Canadian citizen.

Economic

Household Income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income
United States - Rank 1 ($46,509)
Canada - Rank 11 ($31,086)

List of OECD countries by job security: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_O ... b_security
United States - Rank 24
Canada - Rank 30

List of OECD countries by long-term unemployment rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_O ... yment_rate
Canada - Rank 8 (0.89%)
United States - Rank 12 (1.42%)

List of countries by home ownership rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... rship_rate
Canada - Rank 35 (67.6)
United States - Rank 41 (63.5)

As can be seen here, the US is, homeownership and long-term unemployment aside, a more prosperous nation than Canada and yet rates lower in terms of general quality of life.

Environment

Environmental Performance Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environme ... ance_Index
Canada - Rank 25
United States - Rank 26

Environmental Vulnerability Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environme ... lity_Index
Canada - Rank 43
United States - Rank 115

List of countries by natural disaster risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... aster_risk
Canada - Rank 27
United States - Rank 45

Results for the last two seem at least somewhat out of the control of the nation, but Canada and the US could both seriously improve our environmental protections.

Health

OECD.stat: http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSe ... EALTH_STAT#

Female Life Expectancy at Birth:
Canada - Rank 14 (83.8)
United States - Rank 30 (81.2)

Female Life Expectancy at age 40:
Canada - Rank 14 (84.8)
United States - Rank 30(82.6)

Infant Mortality Rate:
Canada - Rank 29 (4.8)
United States - 32 (6.0)

Other Healthcare Indicators:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... healthcare

Colorectal cancer 5-year survival rate:
United States - Rank 5 (64.7%)
Canada - Rank 10 (63.5%)

Heart attack 30 day in-hospital mortality per 100 hospital discharges
United States - Rank 7 (5.5)
Canada - Rank 8 (5.7)

Hemorrhagic stroke 30 day in-hospital mortality per 100 hospital discharges
Canada - Rank 15 (22.2)
United States - 16 (22.3)

Ischemic stroke 30 day in-hospital mortality per 100 hospital discharges
United States - Rank 4 (4.3)
Canada - Rank 22 (9.7)

List of countries by health expenditure covered by government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... government
Canada - Rank 22 (70%)
United States - 34 (46%) Last on List

List of OECD countries by hospital beds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_O ... pital_beds
United States - Rank 23 (3.26)
Canada - Rank 30 (2.71)

List of countries by risk of death from non-communicable disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... le_disease
Canada - Rank 12 (12%)
United States - 30 (15%) Last on List

Teen Pregnancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalenc ... _pregnancy

There was no good list of recent data so I'll use a quotation for the United States and Canada instead to show the contrast.

Canada:

"The Canadian teenage birth rate in 2002 was 16 per 1000 [5] and the teenage pregnancy rate was 33.9. According to data from Statistics Canada, the Canadian teenage pregnancy rate has trended towards a steady decline for both younger (15-17) and older (18-19) teens in the period between 1992-2002.[17] Canada's highest teen pregnancy rates occur in small towns located in rural parts of peninsular Ontario. Alberta and Quebec have high teen pregnancy rates as well."

United States:

"In 2013, the teenage birth rate in the United States reached a historic low: 26.6 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19. More than three-quarters of these births are to adult women aged 18 or 19. In 2005 in the U.S., the majority (57%) of teen pregnancies resulted in a live birth, 27% ended in an induced abortion, and 16% in a fetal loss.

The U.S. teen birth rate was 53 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19 in 2002, the highest in the developed world. If all pregnancies, including those that end in abortion or miscarriage, are taken into account, the total rate in 2000 was 75.4 pregnancies per 1,000 girls. Nevada and the District of Columbia have the highest teen pregnancy rates in the U.S., while North Dakota has the lowest. Over 80% of teenage pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended; approximately one third end in abortion, one third end in spontaneous miscarriage, and one third will continue their pregnancy and keep their baby.

However, the trend is decreasing: in 1990, the birth rate was 61.8, and the pregnancy rate 116.9 per thousand. This decline has manifested across all races, although teenagers of African-American and Hispanic descent retain a higher rate, in comparison to that of European-Americans and Asian-Americans. The Guttmacher Institute attributed about 25% of the decline to abstinence and 75% to the effective use of contraceptives.

Within the United States teen pregnancy is often brought up in political discourse. The goal to limit teen pregnancy is shared by Republicans and Democrats, though avenues of reduction are usually different. Many Democrats cite teen pregnancy as proof of the continuing need for access to birth control and sexual education, while Republicans often cite a need for returning to conservative values, often including abstinence.

An inverse correlation has been noted between teen pregnancy rates and the quality of education in a state. A positive correlation, albeit weak, appears between a city's teen pregnancy rate and its average summer night temperature, especially in the Southern U.S. (Savageau, compiler, 1993–1995)."

Social/Political

List of countries by consultation on rule-making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... ule-making
Canada - Rank 5
United States - 13

Global Terrorism Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Terrorism_Index
Canada - Rank 66
United States - 36

In this case, rank indicates the level of risk faced by each nation and thus a higher rank is worse.

Global Competitiveness Report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Co ... ess_Report
United States - Rank 3
Canada - Rank 15

List of countries by Social Progress Index: http://www.socialprogressindex.com/
http://www.socialprogressindex.com/asse ... 1-2017.pdf

Canada - Rank 6 (Very High)
United States - 18 (High)

List of countries by time devoted to leisure and personal care: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... sonal_care
Canada - Rank 32
United States - 33

I'm going to give Canada the win here in spite of the US edge in economic competitiveness as I don't feel that relates in a strongly positive way to the average citizen's quality of life. This is born out in the general section of this data collection.

In short, the US ranks well below its peers in many areas and where it does beat them it does so mainly due to being the world's largest economy in a 1st world nation. If this doesn't show some deficiency in the social order and general population of the United States I don't know what will.

----------

*Drops the fucking mic*

[Flagg]

Gun grab is a tough sell. I've had this talk with gun nuts afraid of "Hitlery." There's so many obstacles to make it work. This country is huge and spread out and you have to bank on local and state police being willing to disarm millions of gun owners as the ATF doesn't have near the manpower. Certain states WILL just ignore Federal mandates in this regard and the 2nd Ammendment makes it a hard sell either way.

You're also either taking valuable property with zero compensation or you pay out even more money buying the guns back. "You aren't coming in without a warrant" means more paperwork and expenses, not to mention the damage cops will do to homes while searching for guns because I alone could give them 10 guns and have more than that stashed away. I don't know how I would react to LEOs showing up at my house demanding tens of thousands of dollars of my property and I'm possibly the most level headed gun owner I know.

You're basically creating one big clusterfuck and also potentially feeding criminals guns as owners try and get some money back on their investment.

No, the only possible way is to do another "grandfathering." At some point, legislation will pass that says "any firearms manufactured after X date is now illegal for civilian ownership." And they'll just have to slowly bleed them out of the system. However, in the time this takes, it's more likely people will forget why guns are so bad and legislators with pro-gun sentiment will push for loosening of restrictions.

They don’t risk being sued if they put out a faulty product.

Firearms are subject to the same consumer protection laws as anything else. A (dumbass) friend of the family was going to sue a pistol manufacturer because he shot himself in the hand while the safety was engaged, but not functioning. The defect was noted and he settled out of court for medical/legal expenses, lost work, and few thousand dollars because, even though the gun was faulty, he was still dumb enough to shoot himself in the hand which is why he decided to settle (at the recommendation of his lawyer).

Ok, so it’s the just victims of gun crime that cannot seek legal recompense if a criminal gets their hands on a gun. Thanks for the clarification everything I read on it was pretty murky.

[Lonestar]

I never said it was a huge issue but it does make sense to send the occasional ATF agent over to ensure that Bubba 'Hundred-Guns' Ray hasn't gotten lax with his firearms storage and safety since the last visit. Getting to know him and making sure that things at home are still going well wouldn't hurt either. This goes for the more respectable Reginald 'Gun-Museum' types as well.

Does this level of frankly minimal government oversite violate current rights?

It is generally interpreted as unconstitutional to have safe storage laws(well, enforced safe storage laws) in the US, so no, you can't just "Send the occasional ATF agent over". The exceptions are if you have a FFL of some kind or a NFA device, and the NFA device storage requirement usually comes from CLEOs who won't approve ownership if you can't describe to their satisfaction how you're storing them.

By the way, the RCMP fucked over a lotta people in Alberta during some floods by doing surprise inspections on known gun owners who had cleared out. Many had their safes stored on the first floor or basement so they moved everything to the attic/second floor when they left the flood area. The RCMP used this as a chance to do a mass confiscation. So, you know, good luck selling gun owners on a safe storage law that isn't a hilariously transparent attempt to make confiscation easier.

[Lonestar]

In addition, I think rural Australia doesn't seem to have too many problems in regards to requiring guns to survive in there. Same goes to Canada. Guns are still allowed, but they are far more restrictive than the ones in the US.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are also far more rural Americans as a percentage than Australia(where most are clustered in the Southeastern part) or Canada.

And you're really digging in on the "get fucked losers, you should have a better police system", huh?

I've yet to hear arguments that law enforcement in the US cannot be better improve that do away with the extensive need for guns.

Huh?

[Flagg]

Generally speaking, Bubba with 20 ARs in his closet is a significantly smaller problem than someone who has one or two guns and shoots his wife. About 3% of the population owns half the guns in the country.

It isn't the guys with big ass collections that are the problem.

I never said it was a huge issue but it does make sense to send the occasional ATF agent over to ensure that Bubba 'Hundred-Guns' Ray hasn't gotten lax with his firearms storage and safety since the last visit. Getting to know him and making sure that things at home are still going well wouldn't hurt either. This goes for the more respectable Reginald 'Gun-Museum' types as well.

Does this level of frankly minimal government oversite violate current rights?

----------

I think the other factors may be playing a lot harder than the guns.

As an example of a class of violent crime in which guns very rarely make an appearance, consider the rape rates in Canada and the US. Guns are not commonly used in rapes, precisely because the stereotypical "armed stranger" rape scenario is so uncommon.

Now, Canada has a vastly lower gun crime rate than the US. But Canada also has a reported rape rate of somewhere between one and two cases per hundred thousand, whereas in the US it's more like 30 or 40.

Now, there are obvious confounders here. Rape rates are underreported in every country, because many or most victims don't go to the police. But at the same time, this is true in every country, and there's no obvious reason that rape victims in Canada should be, say, ten times less likely to go to the police than they are in the US. While we can't draw firm numerical conclusions, we can at least say that it sure looks as though Canada's rape rate is a lot lower than the US's, maybe as little as 1/10 the rate in the US. And this almost has to be caused by reasons other than guns.

This is not to say gun proliferation has literally zero effect on crime and murder rates. But clearly the picture is much, MUCH more complicated than "lol just ban guns."

I never said that guns were even the largest factor, however, one can't conduct a mass shooting without something to shoot. In Canada one guy managed 3 kills with a crossbow* but that was at a private residence and wouldn't even make the national news in the US unless race was involved.

According to gunviolencearchive.org there have been 273 mass shootings this year in the US. We can debate that number and the validity of their stats but unless someone can find better numbers they're what I'm going with. Using numbers pulled from wikipedia** there were 10 bombings attempted in the US since 2010 and 8 of those resulted in no casualties. I think this answers the idea that we'd rather have these idiots trying to pull off a bombing than a mass shooting. In fact just the Vegas attack is dealier and has caused more wounded than all other non-gun related attacks going back to the Oklahoma Bombing and ignoring that and the WTC Truck Bombing you can go back a very long way and see that guns are by far the most deadly tool a would-be mass murderer has at their disposal.

*http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/c ... -1.3736694
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism ... .93present

Let me answer your question with a hypothetical.

Suppose you could lower the murder rate by 10% by spending all your political capital on a draconian campaign of gun control that would have the far right literally up in arms including rural guerilla movements. Or you could lower the murder rate by 20% by spending it on social programs that will cause the far right to grumble a lot but eventually acquiesce because seriously, they can't even get their shit together enough to repeal Obamacare.

You do not have enough political capital to do both; even doing one will be a hard-fought battle. Which would you choose, from a utilitarian point of view?

The kind of gun control that rounds up existing guns in the US would be effectively impossible to implement. Too many owners would view it as unconstitutional and engage in civil disobedience (at best) or armed resistance (at worst). In the cases involving civil disobedience, some of the courts, maybe even the Supreme Court, would agree with them. And that's not just because of Republicans on the court, either.

This is not the first time you've been told this. Please stop opining on US gun control until you're prepared to address this reality squarely.

Your hypothetical is just as bullshit given that your 20% case has also yet to be seriously attempted. It could be argued that the ACA hasn't been around long enough for us to judge if it's had an effect on US crime rates (it also may not last long enough to ever be fairly judged) but can you name anything to that scale beyond that which could even come close to the desired effect? I can't think of anything but the current Opiod debacle may actually cause a spike if people stop ODing and start turning to crime to get a cleaner fix.

Has it happened? You don't know whether this is a case of a properly registered automatic weapon being bought or stolen in the US. How many such cases of legal machine guns being bought or stolen for crimes have actually occurred?

We don't know the details of this case yet. However, so long as the object is there to be stollen it has a non-zero chance of happening.

And I get that this makes you hard and all.

But seriously, you either have no concept of the differing level of resistance such gun control measures would encounter in the US compared to Canada, or you are an actively malicious troll promoting policies you know will lead to violent chaos.

I actually do understand the level of resistance, as much as any outsider can. I say this due to having seen the rhetoric that comes out here whenever this pops up and the opinions of the firearms channels I watch on a regular basis. I simply don't think that the issue outweighs the good that a multidecade slow tightening of the firearms noose would do. It starts by making gun lobbies illegal and then working to change young minds while slowly restricting weapons year over year. It's not particularly likely to happen unless you get an authoritarian anti-gun lefty the likes of which the right currently throws out as strawmen in office but it could happen.

Can you actually explain coherently why "bearing arms" is a privilege granted for good behavior and not a right citizens default to having unless there's a specific reason they shouldn't have it?

Or is this just a default assumption on your part? Are Americans are just uniformly dumber and more childlike and ignorant than people in other countries, so that a large fraction of Americans automatically wrong about this? Because seriously, I've seen a lot of people argue for gun control who just assume this, and it's done more than anything else to turn me from pro-gun-control to anti-gun-control.

We have two groups of people. One believes they have an important right and wants to protect it. The other group believes that the right in question does not exist and wants to take it away. Normally, in cases like this we expect to see a damned good argument on the part of the group that wants to abolish the right. If someone tried to convince you that voting or free speech or moving to another town were "privileges" that you should have to earn by making special arguments and pleas to your government, they'd probably fail unless they had one hell of a good argument.

But most of the gun control advocacy I've seen in the past ten years doesn't even make an effort to justify this. It just says "lol no, this right you believe you have does not exist, the grownups should take it away from you."

Can't you do better than this? It's frustrating to watch.

Given that the US is only one of 3 countries (the others being Mexico and Guatemala) that have this 'right' I don't think that anybody should have to argue against it being a right. To further make my case 6 other countries used to have such a 'right' and have since rescinded such rights.

Can you see why people from the other ~190 nations you share this planet with might question what makes the US special enough to have upgraded what we see as a privilege to the status of a right?

I strongly suspect you made that up, though I could be wrong, I suppose. Do you actually have proof of your claim?

Furthermore, would you not think that violent career criminals are the people most likely to go out of their way to procure guns they wouldn't otherwise want? Doesn't it make sense that the places with lots of violent career criminals would need more gun control, and that the same gun control laws that benefit the cities might be seen as much less necessary in other places that lack such career criminals?

I find that very unsurprising.

Of course, I have proof.

List of U.S. states by homicide rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U ... icide_rate
Louisiana - Rank 1 (10.3 per 100,000) (Pop Density 93.6/sq mi Ranked 24th)
New Jersey - Rank 27 (3.9 per 100,000) (Pop Density 1210.10/sq mi Ranked 1st)

Violent crime doesn't correlate with population density, at least not at the state level.

At the city level, we get similar results.

Crime rates per 100,000 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U ... crime_rate
St. Louis - Rank 1 (1817.1) (Pop Density 4,800/sq mi)
Memphis - Rank 3 (1740.1) (Pop Density 2,000/sq mi)
New York - Rank 52 (585. (Pop Density 28,210/sq mi)
San Jose - Rank 76 (329.6) (Pop Density 5,776.29/sq mi)

Density means little next to other factors. Thus, all areas need to be disarmed.

I mean, I know you get your technocrat hard-ons from saying things like this, but this is the kind of thing a stupid technocrat says.

A smart technocrat would immediately spot the flaw in saying something like "Law A is necessary in Area B, so let's apply it to Areas B, C, D, and E indiscriminately unless people specifically apply for permits explaining why it shouldn't apply to them." By saying that, you've immediately declared your willingness to impose intrusive laws on Areas C, D, and E, without justification or basis in evidence. The fix is in; you decided you wanted to impose the law on them then you looked for a reason to do so.

And that's exactly how smart technocrats don't behave. Because technocrats who do behave that way, in the unlikely event they ever obtain power in the first place, are likely to wind up hung from lampposts as a warning to all the other incompetent bozos who think They Know Best (TM).

Not like I haven't already proven that pop density =/= crime rates but if you fail to restrict problematic weapons in rural areas they will be far easier to smuggle into the cities that have banned them. Thus, you need to police all areas with equal fervor to ensure compliance.

-----

As for Americans being dumber and more childlike than other nations with equal wealth... May I point to your current PoTUS, your bottom of the class healthcare and education systems, your violent crime rates, lack of racial equality, the war on drugs, your current unemployment rates, and other issues that simply don't exist to the same degree in peer-level nations. In terms of hard numbers, let's directly compare the US to Canada as it's the basis for my view of the two nations. I also have some experience with Australia having spent half a year there but it doesn't inform my world views the same way and has many of the same issues, in terms of comparison to the US, as Canada has.

General

Happiness Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
Canada - Rank 7 - Canada Rates Higher in all categories
United States - Rank 14

2015 Inequality-adjusted HDI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... justed_HDI
Canada - Rank 11
United States - Rank 19

Legatum Prosperity Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legatum_P ... 6_rankings
Canada - Rank 5
United States - Rank 17

The Good Country Index: https://goodcountry.org/index/results?p=overall
Canada - Rank 10
United States - Rank 20

Satisfaction with Life Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfact ... Life_Index
Canada - Rank 10
United States - Rank 21

Where-to-be-born Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index
Canada - Rank 9
United States - Rank 16

As we can see looking at the general ratings Canada is a top ten nation to live in while the United States is in the low teens to the early twenties as a nation. As will be seen in the following section related to income, this is in spite of the average US citizen having more disposable income than the average Canadian citizen.

Economic

Household Income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income
United States - Rank 1 ($46,509)
Canada - Rank 11 ($31,086)

List of OECD countries by job security: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_O ... b_security
United States - Rank 24
Canada - Rank 30

List of OECD countries by long-term unemployment rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_O ... yment_rate
Canada - Rank 8 (0.89%)
United States - Rank 12 (1.42%)

List of countries by home ownership rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... rship_rate
Canada - Rank 35 (67.6)
United States - Rank 41 (63.5)

As can be seen here, the US is, homeownership and long-term unemployment aside, a more prosperous nation than Canada and yet rates lower in terms of general quality of life.

Environment

Environmental Performance Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environme ... ance_Index
Canada - Rank 25
United States - Rank 26

Environmental Vulnerability Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environme ... lity_Index
Canada - Rank 43
United States - Rank 115

List of countries by natural disaster risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... aster_risk
Canada - Rank 27
United States - Rank 45

Results for the last two seem at least somewhat out of the control of the nation, but Canada and the US could both seriously improve our environmental protections.

Health

OECD.stat: http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSe ... EALTH_STAT#

Female Life Expectancy at Birth:
Canada - Rank 14 (83.
United States - Rank 30 (81.2)

Female Life Expectancy at age 40:
Canada - Rank 14 (84.
United States - Rank 30(82.6)

Infant Mortality Rate:
Canada - Rank 29 (4.
United States - 32 (6.0)

Other Healthcare Indicators:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... healthcare

Colorectal cancer 5-year survival rate:
United States - Rank 5 (64.7%)
Canada - Rank 10 (63.5%)

Heart attack 30 day in-hospital mortality per 100 hospital discharges
United States - Rank 7 (5.5)
Canada - Rank 8 (5.7)

Hemorrhagic stroke 30 day in-hospital mortality per 100 hospital discharges
Canada - Rank 15 (22.2)
United States - 16 (22.3)

Ischemic stroke 30 day in-hospital mortality per 100 hospital discharges
United States - Rank 4 (4.3)
Canada - Rank 22 (9.7)

List of countries by health expenditure covered by government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... government
Canada - Rank 22 (70%)
United States - 34 (46%) Last on List

List of OECD countries by hospital beds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_O ... pital_beds
United States - Rank 23 (3.26)
Canada - Rank 30 (2.71)

List of countries by risk of death from non-communicable disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... le_disease
Canada - Rank 12 (12%)
United States - 30 (15%) Last on List

Teen Pregnancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalenc ... _pregnancy

There was no good list of recent data so I'll use a quotation for the United States and Canada instead to show the contrast.

Canada:

"The Canadian teenage birth rate in 2002 was 16 per 1000 [5] and the teenage pregnancy rate was 33.9. According to data from Statistics Canada, the Canadian teenage pregnancy rate has trended towards a steady decline for both younger (15-17) and older (18-19) teens in the period between 1992-2002.[17] Canada's highest teen pregnancy rates occur in small towns located in rural parts of peninsular Ontario. Alberta and Quebec have high teen pregnancy rates as well."

United States:

"In 2013, the teenage birth rate in the United States reached a historic low: 26.6 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19. More than three-quarters of these births are to adult women aged 18 or 19. In 2005 in the U.S., the majority (57%) of teen pregnancies resulted in a live birth, 27% ended in an induced abortion, and 16% in a fetal loss.

The U.S. teen birth rate was 53 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19 in 2002, the highest in the developed world. If all pregnancies, including those that end in abortion or miscarriage, are taken into account, the total rate in 2000 was 75.4 pregnancies per 1,000 girls. Nevada and the District of Columbia have the highest teen pregnancy rates in the U.S., while North Dakota has the lowest. Over 80% of teenage pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended; approximately one third end in abortion, one third end in spontaneous miscarriage, and one third will continue their pregnancy and keep their baby.

However, the trend is decreasing: in 1990, the birth rate was 61.8, and the pregnancy rate 116.9 per thousand. This decline has manifested across all races, although teenagers of African-American and Hispanic descent retain a higher rate, in comparison to that of European-Americans and Asian-Americans. The Guttmacher Institute attributed about 25% of the decline to abstinence and 75% to the effective use of contraceptives.

Within the United States teen pregnancy is often brought up in political discourse. The goal to limit teen pregnancy is shared by Republicans and Democrats, though avenues of reduction are usually different. Many Democrats cite teen pregnancy as proof of the continuing need for access to birth control and sexual education, while Republicans often cite a need for returning to conservative values, often including abstinence.

An inverse correlation has been noted between teen pregnancy rates and the quality of education in a state. A positive correlation, albeit weak, appears between a city's teen pregnancy rate and its average summer night temperature, especially in the Southern U.S. (Savageau, compiler, 1993–1995)."

Social/Political

List of countries by consultation on rule-making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... ule-making
Canada - Rank 5
United States - 13

Global Terrorism Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Terrorism_Index
Canada - Rank 66
United States - 36

In this case, rank indicates the level of risk faced by each nation and thus a higher rank is worse.

Global Competitiveness Report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Co ... ess_Report
United States - Rank 3
Canada - Rank 15

List of countries by Social Progress Index: http://www.socialprogressindex.com/
http://www.socialprogressindex.com/asse ... 1-2017.pdf

Canada - Rank 6 (Very High)
United States - 18 (High)

List of countries by time devoted to leisure and personal care: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... sonal_care
Canada - Rank 32
United States - 33

I'm going to give Canada the win here in spite of the US edge in economic competitiveness as I don't feel that relates in a strongly positive way to the average citizen's quality of life. This is born out in the general section of this data collection.

In short, the US ranks well below its peers in many areas and where it does beat them it does so mainly due to being the world's largest economy in a 1st world nation. If this doesn't show some deficiency in the social order and general population of the United States I don't know what will.

----------

*Drops the fucking mic*

How dare you post facts!!??

<Insert smug, insulting, borderline psychopathic response here that also insinuates you only care about deaths caused by one product/industry despite the fact that this thread is concerning only deaths caused by that product/industry. Insist America is a special case that cannot be compared to other nations that once had, and at least mitigated if not solved, the problem at hand! Here>

Kind of reminds me of the single-payer debates we had in days of old on this same fucking board.

[Simon_Jester]

Okay, this debate has rapidly outpaced my capacity to keep up on sheer volume. I will respond to these things from earlier in the thread, try to respond to some other specific points, but I can only do so much.

That's a law enforcement problem. Before you consider owning guns as the automatic response to cops not being able to arrive on time, perhaps you can consider the possibility that law enforcement can be better improved and reaction times being much better?

Actually, if you are being attacked and it takes the cops 40 minutes to respond I submit it is also your problem, even if you are not at fault.

But yeah, this is just an extension of a really shitty "whelp tough tits, I live in a highly urbanized area with quick police response and I never have been in mortal harm so I don't know what the big deal is".

Everyone who advances the argument "well, the police can always protect you adequately against criminals, and I don't know what you're complaining about" should be made to read parables about dogs and geckos on the subject of what "privilege" means until their eyes bleed.

Why is bearing arms a right? Is it a human right? Because if so, then it should be universal throughout the world. Is it a right for a democratic country to function? I don't think so considering many other democratic countries can function without necessitating guns.

FOR THE RECORD: I am here going to put on the hat of a person who has a firm, unambiguous belief in the right to bear arms. I am going to exaggerate the strength of this belief, so that you are at least presented with a credible challenger in hopes that you will address the argument seriously. This involves me doing a debate-team-esque thing and making claims I personally do not fully believe, for the sake of playing the role of the "gun rights guy." Please, everyone, be aware that I am doing this, for the sake of us actually being able to have a meaningful debate on this issue.

I, Gun Rights Guy, would argue that bearing arms is a human right, at least for full citizens of the state they occupy, and should only be denied in specific cases where there is unusual reason to think a person incapable of exercising this right without unusual harm to bystanders.

And yes, even though I, Gun Rights Guy, believe that this is a universal human right, I acknowledge that democratic countries can function without gun ownership. That's not unusual. Democratic countries can function without a lot of human rights being fully in place.

I, Gun Rights Guy, would argue that democratic countries can function when the vote is restricted to certain fractions of the population, too. Many nineteenth-century republics were functional in that their governments did not collapse into dictatorship... even though women, racial minorities, and in some cases the poor, could not vote.

This does not mean that modern democracies should restrict the vote once again, as they used to do. Nor does it mean that I, Gun Rights Guy, would approve if they started doing it again. A universal right is not always a right that is respected by the government of your country. Even governments that pride themselves on how humane and enlightened they are may nonetheless disrespect important human rights that don't fit into their mental picture of what "humane and enlightened" means.

You are opposed to the "right" being taken away, while never really showing why is it considered a "right" in the first place. To me, a right is something human beings or society cannot function without. It is a necessary part of your daily lives. Food, shelter are basic human rights. Freedom of expression are rights that are tied to a functional democratic society.

For something to be a right, it has to be universal in some form, that society as a whole cannot function without it. Freedom of speech, for instance, might not be exercised by everyone, but a democratic society cannot really function without it.

Just because you are brought up to believe it is a right doesn't mean it is a right. I await your argument why it is even a right in the first place.

There are multiple approaches to justifying this, I, Gun Rights Guy, am going to take the opening steps to one of the approaches.

To summarize, I believe there is a flaw in your approach to identifying which things are "rights." The flaw can be rationalized around to preserve rights a person thinks is important... But can still be used easily to justify dropping rights you do not value. This creates inconsistency and intolerance of the rights and needs of others. And it all has its roots in how we decide which things are "rights."

Without first establishing my reason for using a different rule to identify "rights," our continued disagreement will be very hard to resolve.

...

In particular, I see a flaw in the way you regard things as being rights because they are 'essential,' and that nonessential rights are things to be withheld as privileges, presumably by the state. This definition is problematic, because you can live without a lot more things than you realize.

You use free speech as an example of something democratic society "cannot really function without." This invites two related questions. One is, what do you mean by "really?" How low-functioning does a society have to be before we say "this isn't really functional, people have a right not to experience this?" For example, one-party tyranny is a very stable form of government! Countries have lasted for decades without collapsing into anarchy under one-party rule. Is it really true to say that a society "is not really functioning" just because it's under single-party rule due to the lack of free speech?

Secondly, why "democratic" societies? Why is tyranny unacceptable in and of itself? What about tyranny makes it so bad? Your model doesn't have a good answer for this, so while you can use it to justify why people have a right to food and shelter, you can't use it to justify why they have a right to free speech or due process. A society that lacks due process and free speech can be quite functional, in that the average citizen leads a productive life, raises children and so on. In China, freedom of speech is severely curtailed, but society is 'functional.' Arguably more functional than it is in some nominally democratic countries, certainly more so than in some democracies of the past. Why do we have any preference for democracy over tyranny, if all that matters is that we are provided with the things we can't live without? Sure, there's an instrumental argument that democracy provides the necessities better on average... but that is not a good argument for opposing tyranny as such.

I don't feel you have satisfactory answers to these questions, so I propose an alternate definition of "rights" that DOES answer them.

Rights exist to ensure the security, dignity, and autonomy of the individual.

...

A right which is necessary to the basic security, dignity, and autonomy of the individual is a right, regardless of whether we can in some sense find a way to live without it.

We can live without free speech, but we cannot live autonomous lives without the freedom to speak, to raise grievances, to propose changes to our way of life.

We can live without the vote, but we cannot have dignified lives, free of subjugation, in such a society. It is a grave offense against human dignity to take fully functional adults and tell them "you are second-class citizens, you have no say in how this country operates."

We can live without guarantees of due process of law in our courts, but the security of accused prisoners is immediately in danger in such a society.

In general, all the 'intangible' rights work far better when viewed as necessary protection for the security, dignity, and autonomy of the individual, than they do when viewed as "things we can't live without." Freedom of speech, freedom from torture, freedom of religion, due process rights, the right to privacy, the right to travel... There are a huge number of such rights, many of them very well recognized by (for example) the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

To justify why we "cannot really live without" these rights requires tortured arguments full of epicycles. The sad reality is, all these are things we can live without. Most of humanity lived without them for most of history. Many of these rights are things we could theoretically make society "more functional" by selectively ignoring.

But we cannot ignore them and preserve security, dignity, and autonomy for everyone.

Thus, security, dignity, and autonomy of the individual are a much firmer grounding for whether or not something is a "right" than the standard you propose would be.

---

Actually, if you are being attacked and it takes the cops 40 minutes to respond I submit it is also your problem, even if you are not at fault.

But yeah, this is just an extension of a really shitty "whelp tough tits, I live in a highly urbanized area with quick police response and I never have been in mortal harm so I don't know what the big deal is".

If you live in a rural area in which basic necessities cannot even function, then it means the town as a whole is quite dysfunctional, to begin with. People living in rural Japan, for example, do not have to worry about owning a gun just to protect themselves. Nor does it really apply to people living in rural parts of UK.

This feels like yet another case of American exceptionalism at work here, like with universal health care.

Maybe rural Japan and the rural UK have lower violent crime rates than certain parts of the rural United States.

I mean, suppose a Canadian and a Guatemalan are arguing about building codes in Nigeria. The Canadian says that the Guatemalans need to enact stricter, more rigorous codes about insulation and heating to keep their buildings warm in the winter. The Guatemalan protests that winter in Guatemala is not very cold, and that Canadian building codes would result in dangerously overbuilt, stuffy, overheated, and uncomfortable buildings by Guatemalan standards.

Is this "Guatemalan exceptionalism?" No, it's basic common sense. If a problem does not exist in my country, I do not need to take special measures to protect against it. Conversely, it is not "Canadian exceptionalism" for the Canadians to feel the need for laws or rights that people in other countries do not desire so strongly, that address specific issues of Canadian climate and culture.

Is it that heretical to just listen to people who live in an area, or have close family that lives in an area, when they say "the needs of this area include XYZ, and do not include things that you, a city-dweller on the literal other side of the world, think are necessary?" Or when they say "your proposed changes to our society would be actively harmful to us, you don't know enough about our society?"

I mean, follow this pattern far enough and you wind up tearing down whole cities to rebuild them in accordance with your rectangular grid fetish, and that's such a passe, twentieth-century obsession.

[Jub]

It is generally interpreted as unconstitutional to have safe storage laws(well, enforced safe storage laws) in the US, so no, you can't just "Send the occasional ATF agent over". The exceptions are if you have a FFL of some kind or a NFA device, and the NFA device storage requirement usually comes from CLEOs who won't approve ownership if you can't describe to their satisfaction how you're storing them.

That sounds like something a Democrat-run Supreme Court could fix with a simple ruling. Especially as a requirement to store your weapons safely is no more onerous a law than not shouting fire in a crowded building is to free speech.

By the way, the RCMP fucked over a lotta people in Alberta during some floods by doing surprise inspections on known gun owners who had cleared out. Many had their safes stored on the first floor or basement so they moved everything to the attic/second floor when they left the flood area. The RCMP used this as a chance to do a mass confiscation. So, you know, good luck selling gun owners on a safe storage law that isn't a hilariously transparent attempt to make confiscation easier.

I, unsurprisingly, have no issues with them having done so. The people who left their weapons insufficiently secured broke the law, they should have left them on the first floor and made an insurance claim or stored their weapons on an upper floor in the first place. If they didn't have insurance, well, you get that shit when you live in a flood-prone area lest this happen.

----------

How dare you post facts!!??

<Insert smug, insulting, borderline psychopathic response here that also insinuates you only care about deaths caused by one product/industry despite the fact that this thread is concerning only deaths caused by that product/industry. Insist America is a special case that cannot be compared to other nations that once had, and at least mitigated if not solved, the problem at hand!>

Kind of reminds me of the single-payer debates we had in days of old on this same fucking board.

I'm just the fucking worst aren't I?

----------

Okay, this debate has rapidly outpaced my capacity to keep up on sheer volume. I will respond to these things from earlier in the thread, try to respond to some other specific points, but I can only do so much.

No Simon, you don't get to duck me after asking for citations and proof. Debate or concede on all points or I WILL get a moderator involved.

I mean, suppose a Canadian and a Guatemalan are arguing about building codes in Nigeria. The Canadian says that the Guatemalans need to enact stricter, more rigorous codes about insulation and heating to keep their buildings warm in the winter. The Guatemalan protests that winter in Guatemala is not very cold, and that Canadian building codes would result in dangerously overbuilt, stuffy, overheated, and uncomfortable buildings by Guatemalan standards.

Except that insulation is a two-way street and helps to keep homes cool in the summer and warm in cooler weather. This is a retarded argument and one that I wouldn't expect from you.

[Jub]

<delete me>

[Simon_Jester]

You are either being obtuse or outright dishonest here because even the pharmaceutical companies don’t have the governmental protections that the gun industry does. It’s very important to me that if a medication kills people it be pulled off the market. And that happens. And people have recompense. I have defective hernia mesh in my body causing me constant agony, that made my teeth rot out from the inside. I have recompense.

But the gun industry is legally protected and insulated. The way things work now, if someone who shouldn’t have a gun gets one and shoots me, I have no recompense. Period.

Also, medications and medical devices are not made to injure or kill, while firearms are. The same is the case with ammonium nitrate, vehicles, and any number of other things that can possibly be altered from their intended use to be used as a weapon. Guns are weapons by default. They have far less benefit to society, especially the way they are treated in the US, than other things that cause preventable death.

So the answer to my question is "fuck your attempt to put a number on this," then?

I mean, I'm a fairly numbers-oriented person, I often ask people for numbers in hopes of understanding why they believe what they believe. If you believe gun control is deeply important because of how many people guns kill, that says some things that help me understand and discuss. If, by contrast, you don't care how many people guns kill, or whether that number is more or less than other numbers, that also says things.

When I hear "fuck your attempt to put a number on this, you must be obtuse or dishonest to even ask the question," I hear "this issue is important to me in ways that I'm not comfortable applying numbers-based reasoning to."

On a side note, I was talking about an antidepressant with known side effects that got approved anyway because it only kills someone once every twenty thousand patient-years. They're already protected from lawsuits over this, et cetera, because it's legal to prescribe medication that has a known effect of slightly increasing patient death rates. The catch is that when you multiply "one patient per twenty thousand patient-years" by all the people on the medication, you get dozens if not hundreds of surplus deaths a year... and there are other products available.

Hi Simon, since you've addressed me directly, I want to direct a few general comments your way. I'm surprised at that tack you are taking in this thread since I often agree with what you say. You seem to be taking the pragmatic approach that more gun control is just not possible in America at the moment? If it were viable politically would you want it? I saw you propose a hypothetical before that you could either have more gun control or more mental help, do you think this reflects the reality? Is either a possibility with the Republicans in charge? (Not trying to be harsh or confrontational here, just interested)

I don't think gun control in America is practical OR particularly desirable. We might be slightly better off with it than without it, or not, but there are so many other issues that are causing so much more harm in America that I'd be much happier dropping the issue from the American political scene entirely than even trying to unravel it.

In addition to this, I have a prejudice in favor of respecting other people's rights, rather than just blithely waving away those rights because I don't believe they exist. I'm not comfortable going around establishing rights that fifty years ago most people just didn't believe in (i.e. right to practice your sexual orientation without harassment), while simultaneously trying to disestablish rights that large numbers of people still believe in even today (i.e. right to bear arms). Even if I personally don't feel a burning passion for the right to bear arms... well, I don't actually feel a burning passion for the right to not have to incriminate yourself in court, either. I still believe it IS a right.

So if gun control were politically viable, I'd basically still be opposed to focusing on it in the US until we had managed to fix many many other problems that would probably take my whole lifetime to fix anyway. It is way down my priority list, both because of how hard it would be to do anything about AND because I'm uncomfortable telling people that their rights are being taken away as 'time-expired' or whatever.

As to the points you've raised, see my response to Lonestar. I don't dispute the physical differences in criminals/victims. I do dispute that the gun levels the playing field as much as claim as criminals will always have the initiative.

Do you beleive firearms are a vital necessity for self defense in America? (again, asking for info not trying to win a 'debate' here.)

I think that you said that you have little physical experience of violent interpersonal conflict. If so, perhaps you should not be confidently contradicting other people who have more experience than you. This appears to include Lonestar, but does not include me.

My intuition is that guns level the playing field between weak and strong individuals a lot, which is a great help to self-defense against crime. Your intuition is that it doesn't level the playing field very much. The experience of someone who actually has encountered robberies, fights, and assaults in significant numbers? That experience is very different from either your intuition or mine.

Perhaps we should ask Raw Shark?

Interesting and well reasoned. But my reading of Lonestar's post suggested not that he thought that Americans were in more danger than citizens of other developed countries but more that other developed countries were just ignoring the fundamental truth that only america had recognised in some way.

Maybe Lonestar believes that the rest of the world really is just as dangerous, and is mistaken to believe that. Maybe some parts of the rest of the world as as high-violent-crime as America, and others aren't.

Maybe it's complicated and we shouldn't try to enforce a global law that happens to be functional in safe countries, just because we are ideologically committed to the idea that it will work equally well in unsafe countries.

Again, read this article. It's a good illustration of the problems that come from this super-top-down approach in other areas like urban planning. And I think it applies to gun rights just as well as it applies to urban planning. Some places need certain things, other places need other things. People in different places should have some reasonable measure of freedom, so far as possible, to work out what they need and try to meet those needs. If needs conflict, people can compromise among themselves.

But what should not happen is for people to come in from another planet and say "no no, you're doing it all wrong because your solution violates my preconceived notions developed while totally ignoring everything specific to the context of your situation."

[MKSheppard]

Image is real, taken by a cop's cell phone and *cough* leaked*