Mega-Thread: Gun Control Thread

[Grinning Serpent]

People do get their licenses taken away

Doesn't stop people from driving without licenses/with revoked licenses. There's also a *major* issue with people driving uninsured (why in the *fuck* isn't auto insurance just provided by the state, if it's a requirement to have it? Or at least for the "mandatory state minimums"?), and those things also tend to combine in the somewhat high rate of hit-and-run incidents. Which is then compounded by cops often not giving a shit about a hit-and-run unless it happens to a cop, the wealthy that use the cops to oppress the poor, or someone is killed by the hit-and-run.

Of all the things you can point to in the US, as an example of "how we could be doing guns better," pointing to our driver's licenses and traffic laws and stuff and acting like that's an example of an actually functional system that makes people safer is so fucking ignorant it sounds like parody.

Literally the only reason we don't have tons and tons of deaths from cars is because federal regulations have forced auto manufacturers to repeatedly install and update safety standards in vehicles, together with regulations on how roadways are to be constructed (particularly in regards to distance between lanes, visibility, etc.) There's nothing really analogous to that with respect to guns, not with our current level of technology. Maybe a couple hundred years from now we can Westworld guns that can't fire deadly rounds except in specific conditions, but something like that is a LONG way off.

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dunno how you can look at 3 nine year olds getting blasted to bits and not want to destroy every gun in the world.

some people have the same empathy as an isis fighter in this thread

That's pretty fucking easy - there's several folks I know that wouldn't be here today if they didn't have a gun on them, or would not be here in a good state of body and mind.

I'm pretty sure that the number of lives saved by "person defending themselves or others with a legally owned gun" quite dramatically outweighs the number of dead in mass shootings, by probably at least a couple orders of magnitude. If you figure the lowball estimates of around 70-90k "legitimate" DGU incidences annually is accurate, if you said that even five percent of those were "they would have died if they didn't have a gun to defend themselves with" cases, you're still at least a full order of magnitude above a typical year's mass shooting deaths and quite a lot higher than that if we're only talking about school shootings.

Emotionally, what's happening is deplorable and it needs to stop. The very, very first step of that is voting Republicans out of power (or finding other means of removing Republicans from office but I get banned when I start muttering about those other options.) But I would really love it if people would stop standing on the still-warm corpses of children to try and bludgeon people with morality. You aren't a single fucking bit better than the shitheel Republicans that have enabled these murderers through legal and political obstructionism.

It's fucking ghoulish. Be a better person.

[Endus]

The question is, what else can be done besides MORE gun regulations which already exist. There is NO evidence thus far in my view that gun regulations in and of themselves is causing he problem we are seeing and I have argued why.

No. You haven't. You've just declared without basis that you don't like gun regulations. Every time you're called on this, you resort to your baseless "opinions" or "feelings", and refuse to even look at and honestly consider actual evidence. You do this openly, brazenly.

You don't have an argument. Just a blind, unreasoning declaration.

Plenty of other ways to end these mass shootings. My idea address the individuals who already demonstrated through their actions they need mental help.

Like this; you're factually wrong about the mental health factor, it's already been demonstrated to you repeatedly, and you just refuse to actually consider the evidence, because it violates what you baselessly feel.

[Grinning Serpent]

Clearly you just homeschool them, or have your kids at a private school. /thinkaboutit

But no really, that's how these people think. Or just, "It'll never happen here! Why should I be worried?"

FWIW, most security is just what you'd call "security theater." It's the presentation and illusion of safety, but it's not *actual* safety. My sister got snookered by an ADT salesman and pays $65 a month for her "monitoring service," but you think it would do a good goddamn bit of good if some dude was kicking in her door? Ain't changed the lag bolts in exterior doors' striker plates to be more resilient (the default bolts included in handset kits tend to be rather short and small, making it easy to shear them off with a solid kick or two), ain't done anything to make the windows harder to break through, still has a majority-glass door going out to the sunroom, which itself has no meaningful security features. But turning the alarm on at night makes her *feel* safe. It's a teddy bear. Makes you feel better but it ain't gonna do a single fucking thing for you if dreams/nightmares turn into reality.

Having a gun gives you an option you did not have previously, but it will not matter if you aren't with the gun if someone starts breaking in. It will not matter if you have not trained in the proper use of that gun and have not done drills and practice to help control fear and adrenaline if you are thrust into a dangerous situation. Seeing to the actual, physical security of your residence is the best thing you can do. Thicker, longer bolts will hold out much longer, giving you time to react, barricade yourself in a safe location, and contact emergency services. You can get windows that are harder to break, or who have frames designed to limit access. And so on.


Related to today's events, the only practical way to avoid them is to prevent them from getting a gun. But that is not an option in this country, for a lot of reasons. So you have to learn to accept that and seek out what your next options are. I'm pretty sure we've gone over them many times here. But I feel like before you can even bother with that, you have to get our government actually functioning again first. And that seems to invariably mean, get Republicans out of the way. One thing's for sure - if Sandy Hook didn't spur Republicans to actually start working with Democrats on trying to find and implement solutions (regardless of what those solutions may be), probably nothing will. So, to me, step one is "remove the obstructions."

[jonnysensible]

You aren't a single fucking bit better than the shitheel Republicans that have enabled these murderers through legal and political obstructionism.

It's fucking ghoulish. Be a better person.

you are a massive pussy who loves watching kids die again and again so you can have a toy

go on write some more fan fiction about doors

[Grinning Serpent]

No. You haven't. You've just declared without basis that you don't like gun regulations. Every time you're called on this, you resort to your baseless "opinions" or "feelings", and refuse to even look at and honestly consider actual evidence. You do this openly, brazenly.

You don't have an argument. Just a blind, unreasoning declaration.



Like this; you're factually wrong about the mental health factor, it's already been demonstrated to you repeatedly, and you just refuse to actually consider the evidence, because it violates what you baselessly feel.

I dunno, I think mental health and wellness is almost invariably tied into mass shootings. These people are generally not in an emotionally, mentally healthy place. But if you're talking about something that would appear in the DSM? Yeah, they're "healthy" in that sense. As far as I'm aware, being redpilled/blackpilled is not something that is a diagnosable mental illness.

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you are a massive pussy who loves watching kids die again and again so you can have a toy

go on write some more fan fiction about doors

I don't even own any guns, dude. Try again.

[Endus]

I'm pretty sure that the number of lives saved by "person defending themselves or others with a legally owned gun" quite dramatically outweighs the number of dead in mass shootings, by probably at least a couple orders of magnitude.

By excluding all the other gun violence, sure. You shouldn't do that, though.

Also, scrap the "pretty sure". Get actual facts. Like, I'm pretty sure you're pulling info from a CDC study, but ignoring that the study was pulled by the CDC because of gross methodological flaws that rendered its data essentially biased beyond usefulness.

If you figure the lowball estimates of around 70-90k "legitimate" DGU incidences annually is accurate, if you said that even five percent of those were "they would have died if they didn't have a gun to defend themselves with" cases, you're still at least a full order of magnitude above a typical year's mass shooting deaths and quite a lot higher than that if we're only talking about school shootings.

Or I'll take a more-developed consideration of the supposed figures;

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/f...nse-gun-use-2/
https://www.politifact.com/factcheck...sive-gun-use-/
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/13/60214...n-self-defense

There's little evidence that "defensive gun use" saves many lives, at all. Especially since many of these studies involve self-reporting, and many descriptions of what respondents felt were "defensive gun uses" were just violent criminal threats in and of themselves, like threatening a couple guys by firing into the ground just because they were standing in front of your store one night. Most of these supposed studies put the number of "defensive gun uses" at twice or more the number of actual shootings, and if we're gonna be honest, we'd have to assess all the offensive threatening with guns that doesn't end in a shooting, too, then. Which would jack gun violence figures up proportionally, too.

It's a bad argument and there's really no solid evidence backing you on this.

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I dunno, I think mental health and wellness is almost invariably tied into mass shootings. These people are generally not in an emotionally, mentally healthy place. But if you're talking about something that would appear in the DSM? Yeah, they're "healthy" in that sense. As far as I'm aware, being redpilled/blackpilled is not something that is a diagnosable mental illness.

Being a hateful shithead/angry as hell/sad enough to want everyone you know to die/etc are all just "emotions", they're not mental illness. They may not be emotionally healthy, but that's not "mental health". A dude who got left at the altar isn't "emotionally healthy", but he's not sick. Back when I was going through my divorce, I was seeing a psychiatrist for issues related to ADHD (eventually getting diagnosed properly for it), and doing tests I flagged as possibly depressed, but as my psychiatrist pointed out, with my marriage failing and my academic struggles that had pushed me to get diagnosed, I had tons of reasons to be sad, and being sad isn't the same as being depressed. One's an emotion reasonable based on circumstances, the other's a chemical imbalance that has nothing at all to do with your circumstances.

I don't consider "emotionally healthy" to be a useful descriptor here.

I don't want to argue the DSM is the be-all and end-all of mental health, since it's regularly updated and improved, but if we're not talking about something that should be in the DSM, we're not talking about mental illness. And "being super angry that black people live nearby so I'm gonna shoot up their church and kill as many as I can" isn't mental illness; it's "just" hate and anger and lack of moral character.

I loathe this argument, because it A> stigmatizes mental illness unfairly, B> doesn't actually explain shit, and especially C> gives these attackers a fuckin' excuse. Which they largely don't deserve. They're not sick. They're morally impaired violent assholes. There's a big fuckin' difference.

[jonnysensible]

we havent tried anything but nothing can be done

what about cars?!?!

what about a fantasy situation where i have to defend myself from Michael Myers trying to steal my tv?

[Grinning Serpent]

By excluding all the other gun violence, sure. You shouldn't do that, though.

I agree, but that is exactly what they're doing, so I don't think it's unfair to use that same bullshit mentality against them.

It's a bad argument and there's really no solid evidence backing you on this.

Those sources are all over the place. Notably, they don't seem to be talking about the same thing, necessarily. They often talk about number of criminals shot "defensively" (as in, the victim halts the attack by shooting their assailant), but other things they're pulling information from specifically include "intimidation" as part of defensive use in the statistics being referenced.

It also seems like most of them are decrying Kleck's bullshit study, which I'm not at all defending. Everyone knows that one's a bunch of horseshit. I said "I think" because I'm pretty sure Giffords at one point had an article or blurb on their site that listed somewhere between 60-80k DGU instances annually, but I can't find it so it's possible it's from elsewhere. I do know it wouldn't be from a pro-gun outlet, as they all love that Kleck report.

Like, even if you used a very low number of 60k instances of DGU annually and assumed that only 1% of them saved the victim's/a victim's life, that would still be easily more the lives lost in mass shootings in a typical year and likely 5-6 times as many lost in school shootings annually. Even if we're using Gun Violence Archive's bullshit definition of "mass shooting" and "school shooting," let alone one that's a bit more strict.

If you're defining defensive gun use as *only* "I shot my attacker to make them stop," then yeah I think incidences would be extremely low. As your own sources say, the vast majority of time the victim doesn't have to fire a shot. You could probably use a realistic looking airsoft gun instead of a real gun in those cases, because most people aren't going to be willing to risk it to call that bluff. I would still consider those to be "defensive gun use," however, because the implication is that the threat of being shot made the intruder or assailant stop.

I loathe this argument, because it A> stigmatizes mental illness unfairly, B> doesn't actually explain shit, and especially C> gives these attackers a fuckin' excuse. Which they largely don't deserve. They're not sick. They're morally impaired violent assholes. There's a big fuckin' difference.

I agree. I wasn't defending it.

[Doctor Amadeus]

we havent tried anything but nothing can be done

what about cars?!?!

what about a fantasy situation where i have to defend myself from Michael Myers trying to steal my tv?

We could try dealing with the mental health Crisis leading individuals into schools to kill innocent people. We could try that.

Or we can child proof the fucking country because of what a fraction of the population does that we don’t want to do anything about. Because we could hurt their feelings.

[Nastard]

Because in the face of the fact people don't NEED cars in big cities that waste tax payers dollars and cost people lives those Traffic laws aren't enough, if the idea is that Gun Laws need to do more because of the same reasons.

"We're fucking up with this one area so let's fuck up in another" isn't the argument you believe it to be. We need to do better with many avenues and using incompetency as an excuse to not try harder is a terrible mindset. It'd be like you saying you don't need to brush your teeth to prevent tooth rot because you're already fat. Hypothetically speaking of course. I'm not insinuating you're obese and toothless.

The house isn't burning, not anymore than if the same can be said about automobiles.

Sorry, no. Fucking no. You don't get to be the "this is fine" dog on a day when children were gunned down by an assault rifle at school. That's absolutely sickening. I'd ask you to try again tomorrow but we might be waiting a while for a day with no mass shootings. Besides, you're dodging the entire point of preventative measures even after admitting they can be beneficial.

If everyone isn't willing to give anything up for this cause they preach, then nobody should be expected to feel otherwise by the same folks.

As I mentioned before, I'm a gun owner. I feel like I'm one of the few in this thread that both owns a firearm and is also for better regulation of them. I hunt for my own food and enjoy shooting targets at the firing range. I don't believe regulations would impact me much, if at all, but even if they did I'm always open to discussion about ways to prevent shootings. They won't take all of our guns; that's an alarmist trap people keep falling into, but there needs to be a middle ground between "take away all guns" and "take away none" and no one seems to want to budge. This shit ain't working, and it hasn't been working for a while. If I have to lose something for things to get better, fine. So be it. Anything I lose is incomparable to what people will gain.

[Grinning Serpent]

A good video regarding it and the nonsense talking points bought up by people that can't even be hired in shopping centres.

It's not a good video, though. It's the same dumb nonsense that gets vomited out time and time again, it's literally the opposite number to "thoughts and prayers" or what I guess, now, will be "the gay/trans made em do it" if MGT's latest nuttery is anything to go by.

The guns are part of the problem but they are not part of the solution. If we reduce it down to "you need two things for a mass shooting," yes the gun is one of them... and the other is the shooter. Politically, logistically, and legally it is not plausible to try and solve this by focusing on the guns. So instead, we need to focus on the shooters. What combination of factors results in someone choosing to commit such an act? What options do we have to address these factors?

Though, step one is removing Republicans from office, because even if we could get Democrats to agree to stop fellating Bloomberg, we would still be able to make no progress as long as Republicans are obstructing them at every turn.

[Doctor Amadeus]

Don't bitch about hurting people's feelings, you've done nothing but whinge, moan and cry about yours.

I’m never suggested my feelings are paramount. But I’m not going to support more gun restrictions when I don’t think it has anything to do with mass shootings.

[Doctor Amadeus]

"We're fucking up with this one area so let's fuck up in another" isn't the argument you believe it to be. We need to do better with many avenues and using incompetency as an excuse to not try harder is a terrible mindset. It'd be like you saying you don't need to brush your teeth to prevent tooth rot because you're already fat. Hypothetically speaking of course. I'm not insinuating you're obese and toothless.



Sorry, no. Fucking no. You don't get to be the "this is fine" dog on a day when children were gunned down by an assault rifle at school. That's absolutely sickening. I'd ask you to try again tomorrow but we might be waiting a while for a day with no mass shootings. Besides, you're dodging the entire point of preventative measures even after admitting they can be beneficial.



As I mentioned before, I'm a gun owner. I feel like I'm one of the few in this thread that both owns a firearm and is also for better regulation of them. I hunt for my own food and enjoy shooting targets at the firing range. I don't believe regulations would impact me much, if at all, but even if they did I'm always open to discussion about ways to prevent shootings. They won't take all of our guns; that's an alarmist trap people keep falling into, but there needs to be a middle ground between "take away all guns" and "take away none" and no one seems to want to budge. This shit ain't working, and it hasn't been working for a while. If I have to lose something for things to get better, fine. So be it. Anything I lose is incomparable to what people will gain.

I used to be for more regulations also. But I started looking outside of just my own perspective. I’m talking here about gun control. Not specifically about the shooting because it just happened so I’d rather more information about what happened.

So far it hasn’t compelled me to change my mind on gun laws. This person committed murder then committed suicide. I’m going to wait for facts about this person’s background.

[Grinning Serpent]

As I mentioned before, I'm a gun owner. I feel like I'm one of the few in this thread that both owns a firearm and is also for better regulation of them. I hunt for my own food and enjoy shooting targets at the firing range. I don't believe regulations would impact me much, if at all, but even if they did I'm always open to discussion about ways to prevent shootings. They won't take all of our guns; that's an alarmist trap people keep falling into, but there needs to be a middle ground between "take away all guns" and "take away none" and no one seems to want to budge. This shit ain't working, and it hasn't been working for a while. If I have to lose something for things to get better, fine. So be it. Anything I lose is incomparable to what people will gain.

Makes no difference to me, either. Only reason I don't own any guns is because I don't want to spend the money. Even just for hobby shooting, that's still a lot of money dedicated to something, especially factoring in various fees and fuel costs on top of just ammo and parts (nearest outdoor range that's not a fascist watering hole is a good 45 min drive from me.) If it was also intended for defense, add in even more costs for training and practice and everything that comes with it (as well as a more expensive gun, since I wouldn't buy a 10/22 or whatever if I was specifically wanting a gun for defense.)

I think there's things we can do to improve our gun laws. Our gun laws are pretty shit, not just from a health and safety standpoint, either. The fucking *Brits* practically hand out suppressors like candy because they like having functional hearing, but we have to invite the ATF to crawl up our ass and pay $200 to obtain one here. There's a *lot* of room for improvement, and if the political cost of doing *anything* with gun laws wasn't so absurdly high, there's some mild restrictions or limitations I'd be perfectly fine with, like mandatory waiting periods and such.

But I also think that feature bans won't do a fucking thing to make us meaningfully safer and just rile up voters, and Democrats just won't fucking drop that subject and move on to other things. It's been so many years and I still don't understand why Bloomberg has such a bug up his ass about guns. If he was focused on saving/improving the lives of children, there's a lot better places to invest that money.

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You didn't watch the fucking video at all, since Brian makes it distinctly clear that the distinction is the US has overwhelming firearm numbers, and voting out the mongrels is the biggest thing we can do, and spreading TO vote out the gun-lobbied nutjobs from office. At least take a moment out to engage with what is posted before posting yourself, jesus christ.

Oh, I didn't see it was a reaction video. I thought it was the original news footage. I don't generally waste my time on reaction videos because they're low hanging fruit shat out by morons without the skills necessary to make a proper living anywhere else.

[Doctor Amadeus]

It's not a good video, though. It's the same dumb nonsense that gets vomited out time and time again, it's literally the opposite number to "thoughts and prayers" or what I guess, now, will be "the gay/trans made em do it" if MGT's latest nuttery is anything to go by.

The guns are part of the problem but they are not part of the solution. If we reduce it down to "you need two things for a mass shooting," yes the gun is one of them... and the other is the shooter. Politically, logistically, and legally it is not plausible to try and solve this by focusing on the guns. So instead, we need to focus on the shooters. What combination of factors results in someone choosing to commit such an act? What options do we have to address these factors?

Though, step one is removing Republicans from office, because even if we could get Democrats to agree to stop fellating Bloomberg, we would still be able to make no progress as long as Republicans are obstructing them at every turn.

Yeah I saw that BS on Twitter too and I’m simply not going to entertain the suspects pronouns nonsense or whatever the hell else has to do with their sexuality.

I don’t find that has anything to do with fucking murdering innocent people.

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Stop talking about waiting for "facts", you've no interest in them at all in this thread. You're waiting for any information that can reinforce your already formed biases, nothing more. Your posts add nothing of value -at all- to this thread, and to the greater discussion at large, Endus pegged your posts correctly earlier:

I do care about facts. I don’t care about everyone who’s got an agendas interpretation of facts.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

Yet one of the highest rates of death is car accident from excessive speed. Lamborghini's are as much needed as AR-15s

A Lambo costs between $250k and $500k
An AR-15 costs between $500 and $2000

And can be regulated as a commercial vehicle. Still no NEED for most cars in big cities. All the money and lies wasted that could go for so much else.

People don't NEED guns either. All the money and lives wasted that could go for so much else.

Yes my rights are more important than your feelings about them.

It's not my feelings that are being sacrificed...it's children.

[Doctor Amadeus]

Fair, my response was a bit harsh to you and that's on me but it is a good response from Brian, and reinforces that we can, even if exhaustedly, do more by voting out the worst of the worst doing whatever they can to push the worst of this forward with a, "it's all fine".

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So you don't care about your own then, because it's an agenda interpretation of facts, to the point you are waiting for more information that can exonerate your own agenda. Fuck me if that's not an own goal that'd get you laughed out of dunkin' I don't know what is.

I care about mine but. Don’t know everything that happened recently. I don’t think it has anything to do with gun control.

Whatever gets discovered will be just that.

[Grinning Serpent]

A Lambo costs between $250k and $500k
An AR-15 costs between $500 and $2000




People don't NEED guns either. All the money and lives wasted that could go for so much else.



It's not my feelings that are being sacrificed...it's children.

Arguments over "needing" something are so goddamn pointless. You need to choose a better tack.

[Doctor Amadeus]

A Lambo costs between $250k and $500k
An AR-15 costs between $500 and $2000

People don't NEED guns either. All the money and lives wasted that could go for so much else.

It's not my feelings that are being sacrificed...it's children.

I don’t agree. People have the right to their guns it isn’t up to you to decide if they need them and shouldn’t be.

If they haven’t broken any of the laws on the books then they should be allowed to have a firearm ANYBODY.

[Nastard]

Arguments over "needing" something are so goddamn pointless. You need to choose a better tack.

I think he only brought it up because DA said people don't need cars. His tone was a mocking one.

I care about mine but. Don’t know everything that happened recently. I don’t think it has anything to do with gun control.

Whatever gets discovered will be just that.

Whatever findings happen, I think it's safe to say that this person shouldn't have had access to that kind of weaponry. I personally believe there could have been ways to prevent it and an attempt should have been made even if it was in vain. I can't sanction the mindset of anyone who thinks it was inevitable and no attempts should've been made. Maybe that's just the hopeless optimist in me, but I know shit can be better than this: