Topic: What's your opinion of gun control? - page 183. (Read 450551 times)

Yes, you are right, there is no such thing as insane people. All of those mass shooters were perfectly sane, and they certainly weren't 9 times out of 10 on psychoactive pharmaceutical drugs known to cause suicidal tendencies. People losing their mind and becoming homicidal is nothing but a modern invention. A collapsing economy, world wars, and corrupt government certainly isn't causing people so much stress they are just snapping. Also it certainly has nothing to do with the fact that the majority of Americans are on at least 1 prescription medication. Funny how in Sweden guns are in every household by law, yet they don't have those same problems. I guess it must be the guns and not the psychological state of the people pulling the trigger.

BTW, when you reduce an argument to a cliche, then argue against the cliche that is a fallacy known as a straw man.




Why are they two completely different issues? Because you declare them as such? I find them VERY closely related, because without guns in the hands of law abiding citizens, we are nothing but potential targets for criminals waiting to become victims. BTW, by definition, criminals do not follow regulation. It is not a difficult concept. If you can afford to pay for it, you can get it. The same goes for ANY contraband from drugs to uranium. Pretending regulations will some how prevent criminals from acquiring guns is a fairy tale. The war on drugs worked so well reducing the availability of drugs, I guess we should try regulating guns too!

BTW the idea that the sale of firearms are not regulated in the US is a complete myth.


Gun sales in the USA are already regulated. You are arguing for more regulation and reduction of availability of firearms. By default you are arguing for the restriction of supply of firearms by law. Considering that there is a tremendous actual supply of firearms globally, and that won't change any time soon, so what you are arguing for then is the removal of guns from the hands of law abiding citizens. Criminals will always find ways around laws and regulations, that's why they are called criminals.

Of course the stats say that law abiding citizens cause the most gun deaths. You know why? Those stats include self defense, police shootings, and suicides, and you parrot it as if they are all murders. After that the most murders using guns are from gang activity, and gangs will always find a way to kill with or without guns.

The criminal side is far from a red herring, because it is real fucking easy to sit outside the country and let us be the victims of violence while you poo poo us about gun ownership. BTW WTF does Lockheed Martin have to do with any of this? Last time I checked they don't make small arms (guns and rifles) for consumer use, only military (like miniguns and rocket launchers). If you have a gripe with the way our military works that is completely another subject.

Also I never said "Regulations don't work", that is all you. BTW that is a nice straw man again attributing a statement to me and then arguing against it. The USA already has plenty of gun regulations, making more is not going to improve the situation as I explained criminals just seem to not care about laws, furthermore most regulations punish people AFTER THE FACT, so it is not preventing anything anyway. Funny how that works.



Is this even an argument? It looks to me like another fallacy, this time an ad hominem attack. You can believe whatever you like and call us names, it doesn't change the facts or provide substance to your argument. Also, how the fuck would you know anything about our internal politics as an outsider? Do you think they talk about this shit on TV? You are claiming more knowledge than you could possibly have.


WHAT IN THE FUCK are you talking about? What does this have to do with the availability of firearms in the US? As I said before if you have a gripe with our military that is completely another topic. BTW, not every soldier is issued a tank on arrival to Afganistan, sorry to burst your bubble. Maybe actually talk to ANY SOLDIER ever deployed to Afganistan and ask them if they were afraid of getting shot with rifles. Modern technology does not make people invincible to bullets.

I've no interest in immortality of either the Abrahmaic or red-dot Indian type or whatever, or of the technobabble trans-human type.  To me they are equally ludicrous sales pitches and put forward for very similar goals.  I'm personally planning on a future most of which is spent as worm-dirt.  Might as well burn off my extra ammo in the time period while my biological mechanisms are relatively active.  The reason why the Utopian's escape to the great beyond would be cause for celebration to is simply because there would be fewer of them around to bother me.

If everyone is immortal why waste rounds into the air for celebration?

 

Once immortality is available through trans-humanism (or whatever-the-fuck it's called) it should be quite possible to convince a lot of Utopian greenies to drink the cool-aid and thus save Mother Gaia for the whole.  I can't wait.  I'd crack a beer, BBQ a steak, and watch the entertainment.  I may even fire off a few rounds into the air in celebration.

Too bad it is completely utopian like most of his arguments. He has plenty of good ideas, the problem is almost none of them are actually viable in reality.

Beliathon, you have actually, if only for once, said something that makes sense.

We can't pretend that more stringent gun laws are going to prevent 100% of tragedies 100% of the time. No matter what laws are put in place, some criminals are still going to be able to obtain a weapon.

The problem is that technology so heavily favors offensive potential over defensive. Nation-states prioritize offensive tech for reasons that should be obvious to any student of history. Gun control wouldn't be such a huge problem if we all had personal force-fields and/or tissue-regenerating nanobots in our bloodstream.

This is why Hawking and others theorize that few, if any, civilizations survive the transition from type I to type II. If/when a civilization's weapons tech approaches type II destructive potential before that civ's social evolution reaches type II creative potential, it's game over for that planet.

This is the reason I believe we must rid ourselves of the nation state ASAP.

I feel we already have reasonable gun control. It's just that there is no way to keep people from killing each other. It is normal human behavior and has always been a part of societies. No law is going to change that, some people do not obey laws.  So a new rule is only going to be honored by the people you don't have to worry about and makes the work of criminals easier. People who carry to protect themselves are not the problem. The increasingly violent society we live in and those who act out and hurt others are. I see no logic in disarming victims to control the behavior of perpetrators.

If you really want to do something of value then consider what YOU are willing to pay.  It is hollow to think up rules for others to obey and pay for. Easy to take away someone eases rights, but what are YOU willing to do?
Will you pay for mental health services? Pay for drug treatment? Share the wealth of our country with the urban poor? That is where the killing is happening. It is NOT happening in places where/by people who legally carry guns.
If only it was as easy as banning a product.

Why should the world be so simple that a universal standard must apply equally and everywhere? Oh, because extremism requires that it's either one extremist position, or another extremist position.

If it's not Anarcho-Capitalism, then it must be Communism instead.

Well, no. Improved gun control doesn't automatically mean they must be banned, or that a robotic banning mindset must also be applied equally and everywhere else where might be safety concerns. If you can't see that, then you're being unreasonable.

+1
By that standard we should not have free speech rights. Free speech and protesting is dangerous and should not be allowed. Look at what happened with the Arab spring. It would be a far safer place if we were placed in cages and monitored. It would also eliminate the much, much greater problem of auto accidents. Which kill way more people than guns. Everyone please return to the safety of your cages!

Some people keep projecting their utopian fantasies of the perfect society onto the real world, and believe that freeing and promoting guns will lean things in that direction.

"Death? Destruction? Mayhem? Who gives a fuck. My emotional attachment to my man-dolls is more important than any real-world issues that anyone could ever bring up. What denial? Lalalalalalalala!"

The 2nd Amendment, like it or not, does not say that ownership of firearms may be permitted in such a manner as to yield the lowest possible number of gun deaths. 

Any reasonable person understands the reality that protection against everyday crime as well as the more dramatic mass killings that each get 1 minute of news coverage requires a percentage of the population to be armed.

Some people keep projecting their utopian fantasies of the perfect society onto the real world, and believe that restricting guns will lean things in that direction.

That's the "gun control issue" in a nutshell.

"Mental health" is a modern phenomenon, possibly a huge fad, and there's no solid proof that it even exists outside of a society's need to self-correct by correcting individual people's behaviour. There's a lot of good material that could be discussed on mental health: the failure to change minds with involuntary therapy, "you versus the outside world" philosophical issues, commercial incentives leading to iatrogenics, over-prescribing, profiteering from hypochondria and the creation of entirely new mental illnesses that didn't exist before. And, controversially, whether or not suicide constitutes a mental health problem at all -- is enlightened euthanasia a legitimate thing? Is the question even answerable, given that death is an unknown unknown? At least for the living.

Rephrasing: "so is this a gun problem, or a people problem?
"Guns don't kill people, people kill people" has been covered.


2 completely different issues.
The US is the world's biggest manufacturer and exporter of guns. There's only so much (little) onlookers can do if the US chooses to keep flooding the market. I can see how guns have become a Libertarian 'darling' because without scratching the surface it looks like regulation fails to work. And it's so convenient that criminals don't respond well to being shouted at. But who's shouting at the likes of Lockheed Martin to reduce production? No-one! When it comes to petty consumer-level criminals, the availability is completely unregulated.

As long as gun manufacturers keep making record profits with zero regulation, it's all just pissing in the wind.


Where did I say banning?
Did you read the link? It's the law-abiding citizens that cause the most gun deaths. The criminal side is just a red herring. Change regulations at the consumer level, and suddenly there's less criminals, or more criminals. So what? Did it force Lockheed to supply less guns onto the market?

"Regulations don't work" is complete fallacy. You're not even trying to reduce supply. The main similarity with that and the drug war is that regulators have achieved the same ends by different means. They've castrated themselves by making drugs outright illegal, and therefore also unregulated.



Yeah, keep telling yourself that... Who am I to say that your culture is paranoiac and delusional? You guys are smoking the "gun dope", but only you have the power to tell yourself to cut down. I can't fix your denial.


Because your troops don't want to get killed just because civilians back home are too lazy to make real changes like regulating the weapons manufacturers. It's all US versus Russia proxy fighting, and dragging it out for years is probably the best they can do to avoid massacring the civilians caught in between. But yeah, it's totally those anti-tank pistols that are defeating the troops.