Topic: What's your opinion of gun control? - page 184. (Read 450482 times)

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.

Generally the way these laws work is that there are federal statutes that are then set into state law (same with illegal drugs, more about this later) but the states can have more restrictive laws or in some cases, more lenient ones.

For example, in Texas it is NOT illegal for felons to own guns.  This is a curious historical thing, dates back to where there were legitimate needs for guns to protect against Indians. 

Then when the state makes more restrictive law, they can be fought as against the second amendment.

Different than drug laws - Federal government is selectively taking a back seat to state decisions in the direction of more lenient.

Basically, looks pretty lawless to me.  Now who exactly was saying we were going to fix a problem with more laws?

ROFL...

I am taking my response to this thread, as the poster is off topic where originally posted because he knows better than to post it in a related thread where his arguments will be decimated.

-Gun suicides:

So is this a gun problem, or a mental health problem? Do you really think if some one wants to die they need a gun to do it? Say we disarm everyone but the police and military... ever heard of suicide by cop? There are still plenty of buildings to jump off of, buses to jump in front of, and drugs to OD on without guns in the picture.

-Over-availability:

Do you really think making laws restricting the legal ownership of guns will make criminals stop using them? Illegal weapons are available all over the planet, ESPECIALLY in countries where guns are banned. Banning drugs worked so well, I am sure it will work just as well for guns! Illegal drugs certainly aren't available everywhere are they?

-Decreased availability causes decreased mortality:

Decreased mortality for whom? Criminals and crazy people? Even if your little utopian idea of banning guns some how magically making them less available worked, literally the only people you have disarmed are those that obey the law. Then you can watch the crime rate go up again along with the mortality and the over all violent crime rates.

-Historical reasons for guns as laid out in the US' constitution, such as defending yourself against government tyranny, lost Conquistadores, or POHMs setting out to bring the US back under British rule, are laughable today:

I don't know what country you are from, but I am fairly confident it is not the USA. I am not sure where you get off making those choices for a country you do not even live in, and pretending you understand our culture intimately from the outside.
Defending ourselves from government tyranny is the NUMBER ONE REASON people are buying guns over the past 10 years. Just watch any time Obama makes some comment about gun control everyone buys a shitload of guns in preparation for the tyranny which is very clearly rooted in the US government. This is the furthest thing from a joke as it has been since the civil war. Of course if you are safely within the borders of another nation, it is still a joke to you.

-The consumer fire-arms industry (which is what you're really talking about, and has nothing to do with weapons that could realistically hold off the government), is selling a fantasy so that "big boys" can also have their Barbie Doll accessories:

Hmm, I dunno about that. They seem to be doing a pretty good job holding off our modern military with small arms in Afghanistan. This argument is just a fallacy. Modern technology doesn't make you bullet proof. Additionally it is extremely difficult to occupy an armed nation for an extended period of time regardless of how many nukes, jets, tanks, drones, or bomb robots you have. Additionally the guns aren't just for the government, they are also to protect individuals from the insane mobs of hungry people that result from any economic collapse.

Classic. 
If i ever decide to let others do my thinking for me I'll get an iPhone.

IIRC that's already been part of the federal check for 20 years...

Activists Are Trying To Remove the Gun Emoji





Does the right to bear arms apply to emoji arms? It’s actually a somewhat serious question; activist nonprofit New Yorkers Against Gun Violence aims (excuse the pun) to disarm the iPhone by pressuring Apple’s CEO to remove the gun icon from its emoji catalog.

“The iPhone is ubiquitous. [Guns are] on the iPhone as an option,” the executive director of NYAGV, Leah Barrett, told Fast Company. “We thought this was a way to bring attention to the issue [of gun violence].”

The activists encourage people to tweet at Apple’s CEO and ask for the gun emoji to be removed, using the hashtag #DisarmTheiPhone. However, Fast Company cautions, “If a company like Apple removes words from that language, even if they’re technically pictures, isn’t it censorship? How far does this linguistic adjustment go? If we type the letters G-U-N should they be autocorrected to S-U-N, P-U-N, or F-U-N?” Well?


http://theweek.com/speedreads/569544/activists-are-trying-disarm-iphone-gun-emoji

I do think that there are some who should not have the right to weapons and should be filtered from the licensing process. I don't believe that the right to own weapons should be a afforded to people who have been guilty of a violent crime and I don't think that the mentally handicapped or emotionally disturbed