[supersloth]

AthenaDX, on 14 December 2012 - 03:41 PM, said:

Did you read any of the information I had posted or just had a knee-jerk reaction to that sentence I posted? I'm not doing it off my own head but the facts of the same thing people are posting about doing in the USA, did /not/ work in the UK. The UK, which we have a much closer culture to than that of Japan which is also being posted about.

i read the links, the first one is from 11 years ago, so i have problems with it based simply on age but also the fact that even if this was 2001 3 years would be such an incredibly short amount of time. these things don't happen overnight.

your second article backs up that crime went up over that same period but also that it went down in subsequent years (it also says a lot of things, since it's a wiki page it's kind of all over the place in what it says and how it's information is presented. i specifically read everything in the firearms crime section, and their homicide numbers are incredibly low compared to the united states, even if other gun crime numbers are up)

Marbelous, on 14 December 2012 - 03:56 PM, said:

jon.kiparsky, on 14 December 2012 - 04:35 PM, said:

What gets worse if you register weapons and require reasonable licensing?

Our Freedom, obviously. The question is whether the loss of that freedom is worth the potential gain in security.

YES. you can't buy a fucking four loko at a convenience store anymore. when was anyone up in arms about losing that freedom? why is the freedom to shoot people in the head so sacrosanct?

[creativecoding]

You can still buy Four Loko, they just don't contain caffeine anymore. Just saying.

I completely agree with you though. Freedom is nothing more than a buzzword that contains no meaning now. You can literally use it as a defense of anything and people will side with you. People need to face the facts, NOBODY is ready for absolute freedom.

[jon.kiparsky]

Curtis Rutland, on 14 December 2012 - 04:43 PM, said:

Quote

What gets worse if you register weapons and require reasonable licensing?

I didn't really want to get into this gun control discussion, but I do want to address this. I don't think anything gets worse, but I don't think it gets better either.

Fair enough. The claim was that it would get worse, and that's what I'd like to hear defended.

Quote

Most of the guns that are in the hands of criminals are already there illegally.

So perhaps a national database of stolen weapons would be useful. This would qualify as "sensible gun control" in my book - getting some control on the secondary and black markets. It's a lot easier of course if the weapons are registered to their owners and made identifiable.

Quote

I'm not suggesting our laws are perfect or that there's no solution, but I doubt registration is going to make it easier to do anything than track down who originally owned the stolen gun used in a crime.

Well, that's useful, since it establishes one end of a chain of dis-custody. How did the weapon get from there to here? Easier to trace if you know where "there" is. Now you can start figuring out how these stolen guns are moving.

Quote

I do believe that people should have to have mandatory safety training and pass a proficiency test before getting their first firearm (of each type, you should have to have a different test for shotgun/rifle/handgun). But I don't know how you're going to weed out crazies if they haven't already done something crazy.

So reasonable gun control is reasonable. Fine, we agree on that.

[creativecoding]

Found it.



New's is already having a field day. This is going to be talked about for weeks.

"every time we have intense saturation coverage of a mass murder, we expect to see one or two more in the following months."

EDIT: Also apparently the pictures you're seeing aren't of him. That or this guy's joking around:

This post has been edited by creativecoding: 14 December 2012 - 03:20 PM

[depricated]

supersloth, on 14 December 2012 - 01:47 PM, said:

depricated, on 14 December 2012 - 02:17 PM, said:

Hm. Nope, still not seeing it. What I said is that Gun control laws are about as effective as laws controlling explosives would be in Afghanistan. Idiots still get ahold of them illegally and blow themselves up on buses, in marketplaces, busy streets, and kill dozens. Frequently. This wouldn't change. People still steal licensed and registered guns and use them to kill people.

Criminals don't obey laws, so it's ridiculous to try to curb criminality explicitly by banning the object used by the criminal behavior. It's like banning boxing gloves - or better, banning the instruction of martial arts - because assault is a crime.

So again, do try to avoid the strawman.

first of all your analogy is retarded, so please stop with it already. second, gun control does actually work, there's evidence of this. during 2008 america had over 12,000 firearm related homicides, japan had 11, thanks to their firearm laws that are the most restrictive of any democratic nation in the world. your slipper slope argument is bullshit, essentially. you have no idea what you are talking about.

I can play the false correlation game too. Japan has literally infinitely more Seppuku-related deaths than Canada, the USA, and Mexico combined. At least in the past two decades. This, naturally, indicates that there should be much tighter restrictions on blades!

An old saying I picked up from a professor of mine was that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Japan's culture is significantly different than Euro-American or 'Western' culture. And I hate to burst your bubble, but all my guns required a background check and registration. Plus, without a license it must be carried openly - making it identifiable.


And do tell, how is the analogy "retarded"? I'm curious here. Guns kill people but bombs don't?Here's a source on the damage a person can do with explosives. I think it's an apt parallel. I understand that being so far removed from events elsewhere might desensitize you to the numbers, though. That's just one attack. These happen far more frequently than school shootings. Closer to home - this isn't a problem only in the Middle East.

I'll say for the third time now, I'm all for reasonable measures of control. Registration, licensing, culpability for failure to report theft within a certain timeframe, 12 hours training with written and performance tests. I'm opposed to outright restricting access - that won't solve the problem. People who want guns will get them, criminals will ignore the laws as they already do, and those who obey the law are left defenseless - bringing a knife to a gun fight - because some idiot thought that saying "you can't do that" was going to dissuade some bloodthirsty asshat who wasn't listening to begin with.

The reality of the situation is that to correct the problem the barbarism of American culture would need to be addressed and remedied - which is a far more daunting task than simply petitioning an anti-gun bill and patting each other on the back til someone shoots them in it. My answer to that would probably stir up all sorts of emotional whinging and get a bunch of people on the defensive pointlessly, though, so I won't even start on that topic.

[Sergio Tapia]

Why does the US have so many god damn school shootings? Is there a direct cause to it?
It seems every month somebody decides to go on a shooting spree over there. What's wrong?

[supersloth]

lots of dudes like depricated thinking guns are gonna save their lives when they go full john mcclane on a house invader when in reality they would just shit their pants. then some of them snap.

[depricated]

supersloth, on 14 December 2012 - 04:10 PM, said:

lots of dudes like depricated thinking guns are gonna save their lives when they go full john mcclane on a house invader when in reality they would just shit their pants. then some of them snap.

Got nothin else? Just personal attacks and conjecture? Sorry we don't agree, wish you didn't take it so hard.

[supersloth]

what else is there to say? you want a couple paragraphs on how explosives are banned in the united states and it works? about how afghanistan is a war zone and people are fighting what some of them to believe a holy war and how that's different from a 20 year old kid taking someone else's guns and shooting a bunch of 6 year olds in the head? nah, i'm good.

[j4v3d]

so the news people ended up naming a person that was not even involved in this horrific act?

Sue them for all they have got!

But away from that this is heart breaking - Questions raised again whether guns should be allowed so openly in the States.

[Curtis Rutland]

I love the comments like this that ignore pages upon pages of discussion about gun control and say things like "it raises questions."

[j4v3d]

well if it doesn't raise questions then what should it raise then? The death toll due to gun crime?

[CasiOo]

j4v3d, on 14 December 2012 - 11:37 PM, said:

well if it doesn't raise questions then what should it raise then? The death toll due to gun crime?

I don't think that was what he meant =x

[creativecoding]

j4v3d, on 14 December 2012 - 03:37 PM, said:

well if it doesn't raise questions then what should it raise then? The death toll due to gun crime?

That's what we've been discussing this whole thread.

[dorknexus]

I feel like sensible gat laws can prevent these sorts of events from occurring. However, I think sensible gat laws should focus on the "who" rather than the "what" which is what most gat control advocates are after.

I'd also like to point out (possibly pedantically) that the vast majority of gat-related crime in the US involves handgats and not assault gats. This is the reason why the Federal Assault [Gats] Ban of 1994 had almost zero impact on gat-related crime. It targeted a spectrum of firearms that wasn't related to the problem.

I'm all for "sensible gun laws," but people shouting to ban assault weapons when they aren't even a real problem doesn't seem very sensible to me. Not to mention that actual "assault weapons" are already illegal or very hard to obtain.

On a side tangent: Here is a recent (November 24th) research piece done by the Congressional Research Service concerning the efficacy of gun control in the US. This is (hopefully) what congresspeople will be reading when considering any new firearm legislation. I haven't read it myself so I couldn't say what its conclusions are. Going to go read it right now actually.

This post has been edited by dorknexus: 14 December 2012 - 05:31 PM