Gun control in the USA

aloyisious wrote: »

I saw this photo today in a redtop in a local cafe. It expresses (for me anyway) why fire-arm owners and the so-called gun lobby in the US should lash out at the media for promoting the myth that all gun-owners are "it's all about me" when it comes to gun control.

Having said that, I wish those gun-owners who go on about the "right to keep and bear arms" would wake up to the fact that for a lot of people, it's all about these kids and the trauma they went through. There's not enough being said by gun-owners to "kill-off" the negative impression that they don't give a fiddlers curse about anyone but themselves, when it comes to owning Semi-Auto weapons designed for battlefield use and ancillary items like extended weapon magazines. They don't seem to realize that they are their own worst enemy, nor caring about how the worst sections of the US citizenry are getting hold of lethal fire-arm weaponry so easily due to what I see as a complacant attitude towards the public good.

Personally I don't think the media are being at responsible in the way they cover such events. But to call gun-owners out as being 'selfish' is like suggesting people who have a glass of wine when out for dinner and then drive home don't give a 'fiddlers-curse' about the impact of DUI.

Sparks wrote: »

Speaking as a gun-owner and the father of a young child, would you ever <bleep> off with this notion that gun-owners don't love their children and that they don't look on the events in Sandy Hook with horror or want to have their children and themselves safe from such incidents?

They just don't think that you have the right solution.

It's called a disagreement and we're supposedly able to handle those as adults, but over issues like this it appears that's not the case (and before anyone gets on a soapbox, we have equally good examples of not being able to handle disagreements when it comes to gay marriage, abortion, animal welfare-v-animal rights, and so on).

I was making the point that NOT all gun owners were of the mindset that the right to keep and bear arms was the most important thing. I was referring to those who are opposing changes in gun ownership law to stop un-necessary availability and ownership of semi-auto, or fully auto, battlefield-use weapons and ancillary items like extended magazines amongst the US population.

Seeing as how the mother of the killer in the case concerned was a registered gun-owner who's own weaponry was used to make her his first victim, I think this underscores my point. I never wrote anything about gun-owning parents not loving their children

I believe that if gun-owners want to gain use of those items, they can join the US Military and use them in a controlled environment.

We both know that the federal laws on gun control in the US do not apply stateswide and that states, counties, municipalities etc there have their own gun laws, the strictness of which varies.

Speaking as a former (30 year) Irish PDF member, I know that the control of weapons will not stop stupid people from using them to unlawfully kill other people, but it can help reduce stupid people gaining access to weaponry with a high kill rate capability. Cheer's.

Ah, the hysterically ironic Jim Carrey, who also uses armed bodyguards.

Hollywood, the natural habitat of the hypocritical.

I thought the background checks would have gotten through. No skin off the nose of the government there, they're playng the long game. They'll keep pressing and with some more shootings they'll get what they want, only a matter of time.

MadsL wrote: »

And you persist in trolling this debate; I have no idea why.

Just in case you really expect us to take an article from cracked.com seriously, let's examine those claiims.

I'd have to disagree.
I thought the article made some good points but being anti-gun, I probably would.
Doing my best to put that aside temporarily I thought the following paragraph was interesting

article wrote:

"What's wrong with somebody wanting to protect his family?" Nothing. And people do use guns to fight off bad guys (although nobody has any idea how often that happens, because the subject is so politicized, it's impossible to find statistics that agree). But how many of those same people who are willing to shell out used-car money on "home defense" firearms don't, for instance, bother spending 20 bucks to keep a working fire extinguisher or carbon monoxide detector in the house? That Bushmaster AR-15 that mass shooters keep using? It costs a thousand bucks, and bullets are a dollar each (and you need to fire a few thousand of those to get proficient with the weapon). So why not spend those thousands on an alarm system and better locks so the bad guy never gets into the house in the first place?
In other words, are they obsessed with security, or are they obsessed with the idea of getting to shoot some mother****ers? Are gun manufacturers selling guns they think people will actually use, or are they selling a fantasy? Are they, in fact, filling an emotional need?


Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_20396_5-mind-blowing-facts-nobody-told-you-about-guns.html#ixzz2QqlzJQjB

I laughed at the "Is Pat Kenny a lizard person?" thread. :pac:

robindch wrote: »

In all fairness, it has been demonstrated, over and over and I'm inclined to agree with your implication that there's little point in rehashing it -- you don't accept the evidence and that's that really.

Robin, it's not my opinion. It's the professional opinion of the national academy of sciences. You're not one of these people who thinks that because something in General Relativity doesn't fit with your idea of common sense that you're right and Einstein was wrong, are you? Because that's pretty much what you're doing here. The NAS's report wasn't based on opinion; they found that the statistics - the actual mathematics - wasn't dependable in the existing studies (in other words, they hadn't done their maths correctly).

If it was them saying "well, we think that X is wrong based on our worldview", then yes, I could see valid criticism - but when they say "actually lads, 2+2 is not equal to 4.27", then it's pretty cut and dried.

And it's not just the US - look at Australia, as we've already done - they introduce their bans after Port Arthur, say that they've prevented any further mass shootings (except that one that happened that one time, but that only killed two people so it doesn't count)... but then a few years later, when the dust has settled, the laws were found to be ineffectual. The head of the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research said "I would need to see more convincing evidence than there is to be able to say that gun laws have had any effect" in 2005; and research in 2006, 2008, 2009, and a consensus paper in 2010 showed that the laws did not reduce firearms violence, did not prevent suicide by firearm, did not prevent mass shootings and were ineffectual in preventing crime. An utter waste of time and a case of confiscating innocent people's property, banning innocent people's sports and pastimes, and demonising a large number of innocent people -- all for nothing.

Yes, I agree. However, the reason it's not been done is because the Republican Party, in line with the wishes of the NRA, made it illegal for the CDC to research one of the largest killers in the USA.

If that's true, then how come there is CDC research on the topic after that supposed ban came in? Like this or this? I asked you that before, but you got all quiet.

And even when they're produced, it's virtually certain they'll be ignored just as the current, overwhelming evidence is ignored too.

Did your irony meter not just explode typing that while ignoring all the previously presented evidence listed in this thread?

Do you really reckon the vote -- which, by default, also blessed the sale and purchase of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines --

Horse hockey. Three things:
1) Connecticut had a ban on assualt weapons - their version of the federal ban never sunset and was more extensive than the federal ban - at the time of the Sandy Hook shootings. It didn't stop those shootings. And as one of the studies I linked to above shows, when you compare similar jurisdictions - Australia and New Zealand - who both have mass shootings, one of whom bans the firearm used and one of whom does not, the ban has no effect on prevention of subsequent mass shootings (in the Aus/NZ case, neither side had mass shootings but NZ never brought in the bans Australia did). So if it's been proven to be ineffectual, why would you push it as a solution?

2) The sale and purchase of assault weapons (and let's not forget that that's a legal term, not a technical one) is already banned or strictly controlled in many US states. So not voting on a bill which would only have affected background check requirements has no impact on that.

3) The items that were in the bill relating to high capacity magazines were removed long before the vote, so the vote had nothing to do with that; several states brought in laws banning them anyway, most of which are now being contested because they were so badly written they broke existing firearms law; and the worst lone shooting in US history, Virginia Tech, didn't use high capacity magazines, the shooter just bought a lot of standard size magazines, stuck them in his backpack and reloaded. What use is a law that says the shooter has to stop every ten shots for less than two seconds to reload - two seconds where he'd still have a round in the chamber?

An ineffectual law is worse than no law at all - because if there's no law at all, at least you don't think you've fixed the problem when you patently haven't. All an ineffectual law does - as shown in Ireland of late by Dermot Aherne and Michael McDowell before him - is give a politician a fig leaf to hide behind in the Dail or in front of the media.

really the result of something other than the "political and financial purchasing power of the NRA and the wider pro-gun lobby"?

Yes. Because I don't think the NRA run everything. Everyone likes to say they do, but that doesn't make it so.

There is, arguably, a silver lining to this mess though. Opinion polls have consistently shown that background checks are massively supported by the general population

That's not new.
Seriously, you need to drop this idea that the debate is on gun control -v- no gun control. There's been gun control in the US since the founding of the state - that's what the second amendment is (it doesn't confer a right, it's the foundation of the law that limits that right - remove the second amendment today and Walmart could be selling machine guns with armour-piercing and incendiary rounds tomorrow).
And every SCOTUS ruling on the second amendment has always stated explicitly - go read Scalia's judgement in Heller - that the second amendment is completely compatible with licencing and registration and regulation in general; it's blanket bans that they don't allow.

This entire debate is (a) being focussed on gun control because that's more soundbite-friendly, easier to be seen to be doing something about, and not as messy as the real problem, which is cultural, societal, and which isn't unrelated to the near-victorian standards of mental healthcare in the US; and (b) when it does focus on gun control it ignores the nuance and portrays it as NRA-v-sanity, it ignores the awkward point that gun owners and the NRA have been lobbying for effective gun control for decades, and it completely skips the point that this is a complex and nuanced argument about what kind of gun control works, where the lines can be drawn in the legal system the US operates under, how to integrate that into the culture and social norms they have and so on. Because it's a lot easier to parade photos of dead children on the screen when all you care about is advertising revenue.