Senate Gun Control

It took you this long to be embarrassed?

 

No.

I made an analogy earlier about a father making a fortune in a lifetime, and his fat, indolent son squanders it when he inherits it. It fits.

 

"develop people who would rather trust themselves with their own safety than rely on police or government protection,"

That is why we don't have police.

Oh, wait.

 

To me, the ultimate form of self reliance is relying on, you know, self... not guns. My individualism is not defined by any weapon... it's defined by my individualism.

 

I am? I'm saying that the current gun culture comes from the ideals of individualism and self reliance. If you want to get rid of the gun culture you have to remove those to pillars that are supporting it and replace it with something that won't lead to people believing they need guns.

And if the gun culture isn't based on those ideals... then what is it based on? What is it that drives the gun culture then? Because if you honestly want to end the gun culture you target the ideas that support it, you don't attack it head on.

You honestly don't know how many gun owners don't trust the police and view them as tools of an oppressive state? I'll tell you that's about 75% of the gunowners I know, they'd much rather handle their own affairs than call the police.

And a lot of gun owners would argue that their gun is an extension of them. Their home is a part of them, their property is a part of them.

 

Also, you are historically incorrect. The famously "self-reliant" American settlers of pretty much all eras complained pretty bitterly about the lack of government protection against Native Americans and other dangers. Guns were mostly kept because of their usefulness to rural subsistence farmers. Further, its worth noting that the modern American understanding of guns is only a few decades old, and is pretty distinct from what came before. As recently as the time of Clarence Thomas's appointment to the Supreme Court, the general legal and cultural consensus was that an individual right to gun ownership didn't even exist.

 

you know, heroin addiction comes from people wanting to feel good. i guess we'll just have to make it so people don't want to feel good anymore. do you see how ridiculous this sounds?

 

True, but how many of those settlers would've thrown away their guns if the government had provided protection? They keep their guns to survive on their own and only want government help when it's an issue the government needed to deal with.

But Americans have owned guns for a lot longer than just recently. Massive gun ownership didn't just happen since Clarence Thomas. It's always been there. It's just that it only recently has become a legal and constitutional issue.

Actually no, if you narrow it down to say not feeling good due to chemicals it would be fine. And it would also depend on what idea you were using to replace it with.

 

Not many. Because, again, most of them didn't see guns as primarily about "protection" in the first place. We just covered this.

 

Really? From what I understood 50 years ago it would be considered odd to not own a gun. Everyone from my grandparents generation that I know had a gun.

Very much for it. Also wouldn't mind seeing Kevlar and other type armor banned from civilian ownership.

 

Rogue is primed and ready to ridicule in the other thread while all the action is happening here.

 

We were settling the New World fifty years ago?

 

Oh you meant at that time period? From what I gathered near every household had at least one musket or rifle. They were used for defense and more often hunting. They were tools of survival. And when war came they were used by civilians in the militias.

 

I think in creationism because they only have 6000 years to work with, they have to speed up the timeline. Like in that Arrow show.

 

oh ok. i'm just going to stop having this conversation then. good luck in backwoods horror movie land. i hope you survive by shooting all of your many assailants in their faces. or maybe just... move?

 

Antilles, I think you could end the gun culture yourself. After all, you just need to explain to people how unnecessary it is for self-defense. As you've explained to us at some length over the past several days, they could just respond to threats by developing a massive cult around themselves over years and years, moving to Guyana, and then killing themselves as their utopian commune falls apart.

 

I'm not sure the gun crowd is the kind who would join cults or believe in an utopian dream.

 

Suriname >

 

Those Koresh people in Waco would beg to differ.

 

True but they would probably only make up less than .5% of most gun owners if that.

 

Yes, and defending your houses against breakins from British criminals.

 

A column by Fred Reed, a Marine veteran of Vietnam who worked as a crime reporter for the Washington Times for meany years:

Roll Over, Bark, and Beg

By Fred Reed
July 8, 2008


Oh god. There is no hope.

The other day I glanced at the web site of the Lake Chapala Society, a social club of sorts for expats around Mexico’s Lake Chapala, an hour south of Guadalajara (where I live). Clicking on “Safety,” I found a long list of reasons why you should never, ever use a firearm to protect your home and family. No. See, you might miss, or be scared, or the intruders might take it away and shoot you, and they might be all mad and hurt you when all they wanted was your television. No, the best thing is to let them do what they want, and then maybe they won’t do anything bad to you.

This supposedly was written by a retired cop but, if so, he (or quite possible she, judging by the tone) doesn’t sound like any cop I have known, which is whole lots. Anyway, his, her, or its advice, is “Leave the guns to people who are trained and prepared to use them.” Which he says he is.

Nuts. To begin with, cops usually know little about guns. They get a bit of training in the police academy, and then once or twice a year go to the range to fire a couple of magazines. Being actually good with a pistol requires putting tens of thousands of rounds downrange. Street shooting, which is what cops do in the unlikely event that they do any shooting at all, requires training of the sort offered by IPSC or, years back, Jeff Cooper and Chuck Taylor.

A few cops will learn on their own. When I went to shoot at the NRA range on Waples Mill Road in northern Virginia, I saw an occasional dedicated cop. But police departments don’t engage in real training because it costs a lot, takes a lot of time, and just isn’t worth it. The average cop never fires his weapon in line of duty. It serves chiefly as a badge of authority.

Smith (I’ll call him or her) implies further that no one who isn’t a cop knows how to use a pistol. He needs to get out more. In the small-town South of my boyhood, everybody had guns. We used them for hunting, for shooting varmints, and for plinking. My father gave me my first rifle when I was eleven in Athens, Alabama. In high school in Virginia, the first day of deer season was a school holiday because the teachers knew the boys would all be in the woods. When I was fifteen, friends and I often went to the dump in Colonial Beach at night to snap-shoot rats.

I later went to a federal fire-arms school at Parris Island in South Carolina. You may have heard of it. So did hundreds of thousands of other kids. The emphasis was on deadly force. At Camp Lejeune we did fire-and-maneuver with live ammo. (Also flamethrowers and 3.5" rocket launchers, though I do not recommend these for home defense.) If Smith were to check the number of men who have gone through the Army or Marines, he would find that very large numbers of people have had training in the use of firearms.

But what I dislike most about Smith’s advice is his advocacy of helpless passivity. It embodies a profound change in American attitudes, which once favored self-reliance. Now it’s reliance on the group. Don’t take primary responsibility for your defense. No, that would be violent, or scary, or macho, and all. No, let the criminals do whatever they want with you, rely on their merciful natures, and call 911 if you survive.

This is exactly what Smith advocates. If I were a criminal, I would love this guy.

His advice is bad. He says, correctly enough, that most intruders want chiefly to steal things. Think a little. At two a.m., you hear a noise and turn on the lights. You find two guys with knives. You can now identify them. They have knives. Focus on this point. Knives, and you can identify them. Do you see where this leads?

If they leave you alive, you will call the cops immediately after they leave. They know this. If they tie you up, well, you are tied up in the presence of two career criminals with knives. This may work for Smith, but I’ll pass. It just isn’t optimal. If they leave you conscious and tied, you will begin shrieking for the neighbors as soon as they leave. The neighbors will call the cops—and you can identify the intruders.

In the real world, criminals are not always interested only in your television. They will accept such side benefits as offer. This engenders fascinating situations. They discover your daughter of sixteen in her bedroom. “Hey, little girl, you’re real cute. Let’s get a better look. Take those pajamas off.” You get to watch. They may or may not choose to leave witnesses.

If you think these things don’t happen, regularly, you have never been a policeman in a big city. A friend of mine, a Chicago cop, tells of arriving at the scene of a break-in. The intruders had beaten the man unconscious and, among other things they did to her, bitten the woman’s nipples off. Literally.

I remember going one night to a hospital with a DC cop to interview a rape victim of fifteen. She was screaming, sobbing, choking, the doctors trying to sedate her. Messed up for life. Smith is right: Don’t have a firearm in the house. It might make them mad. They just want your TV, see.

In Virginia to get a concealed-carry permit, you attend a mandatory class on how to use a pistol. One of the instructors when I did it was a (very competent) female agent of the FBI. She talked to the class, some of whom were women, about rape. She made the obvious point that very few women have the slightest chance of fending off a two-hundred-pound deviate perhaps armed with a knife. A small concealed-hammer revolver, fired maybe through a coat pocket, can easily be handled by a woman of ninety pounds. Studies show that a rapist who has been shot several times loses ardor. We’re talking way beyond Viagra.

What is true of intruders is that they don’t want a firefight. When you rack a round into the chamber of a semi-auto, the sound is unmistakable and means only one thing: Someone is preparing to fire. You have to want a television very badly to go against someone who audibly is planning to kill you and audibly has the means.

You can do as Smith wants—let them do it, whatever it is, and then call a qualified professional. Or you can shoot the sons of bitches. Your choice. I don’t care.

 

I'd be careful not to over generalize. That might have been the case for some settlers, but my Mormon pioneer ancestors kept guns for self defense, largely because the government refused to protect them (and in some cases, actiely persecuted them). Go read up on the guns that Jonathan Browning produced in Nauvoo, Illinois. Each was marked with a plaque saying "Holiness to the Lord - Our Preservation".

And that "general legal and cultural consensus" wasn't that old either. It largely sprang out of the 1940s as a result of US vs. Miller (where Miller never actually presented his side to the Supreme Court because of financial problems he was killed before the decision was released). In the late 1860s, a large part of the debate over the 14th Amendment centered around states disarming freed slaves, and therefore violating their individual right to keep and bear arms.

And Ender_Sai, as the statistics I posted earlier show, the overwhelming majority of gun owners aren't going to use their guns irresponsibly. When better than 99.9% of handguns are not used to kill others (and some of those that are used to kill fall under justifiable homicide- the CDC's numbers don't differentiate), it's clear that the problem isn't gun owners in general. You don't penalize 99.9% of the people because of the irresponsibility of 0.024%.

In fact, if you break down the majority of gun-related homicides, a large percentage of them are drug-related and/or gang-related. While people with mental health issues tend to commit the larger spree killings or mass shootings, such attacks only make up a small percentage of the overall firearm homicide totals.

And V-2, running away isn't always an option. I have a good friend who is disabled and confined to a wheelchair. He carries a gun daily because he has been specifically targeted for attacks, because of his disability. His guns have saved his life on several occasions, even though he's never had to shoot anyone. (Twice he's held a person at gunpoint until the police arrived, and twice it's chased his attackers off).

 

Okay, but couldn't they just come up with something else? After all, a gun is only a tool. People who really want to defend themselves will find a way to do so regardless, so why are the guns important?