Guns

[bralbovsky]

Not so long ago, The Colt company sat down with some legislators to work out a set of sensible regulations.
There was a draft of those regs published, but as a consequence, the NRA punished and basically destroyed the Colt company.
I'll see if I can't scare those up.

Meanwhile, context makes everything difficult.
Laws are not a panacea. In Chicago, for example, the legal penalty for having a gun is nowhere as severe as the gang penalty for losing one. so there's fundamentally a disincentive to surrender the gun, you have less to lose by using it. So bad or out of date laws are indeed pointless.

Do people kill with cars, yes, with knives, yes. There are more restrictions in the country about carrying swords than there are restricting guns. Texas, as a matter of fact, this year, made it legal again to open carry a sword.

Having said that, murder, for example, takes motive, means and opportunity. There's absolutely no reason not to reduce access to means. Let's not even involve the issue of accident.
And let's not involve that because someone thought it would be a good idea to stop keeping official statistics on whom gets shot, and how and when. This makes a secret of the actual impact, which...let's not talk about it.

I'll look for those regs.

[Bonefish]

Mimic car legislation. Done and done.

Granted, it won't have the impact that gun control advocates want, but then again, nothing else has worked either. Even Australia has mass shootings.

[Mike]

No one's suggesting that gun control will eliminate gun crime. Sure they have mass shootings, but their gun deaths per capita are less than one-tenth of the rate in the U.S.

We are the only nation in the world with more guns than people. Serbia is a distant second and no one else comes even close. And our gun death rate per capita is 10 to 20 times greater than all other developed nations. Makes me wonder if there's things we should do differently.

[Phoebe]

This is not a complete response to what you're saying, but one reason that it's high is just that it's so high. It becomes an accepted part of the fabric of our reality, and people who want to take a bunch of people down with them have a precedent set and associated desires. We are also an extremely angry and fearful culture, which I don't think is obvious to people who haven't spent a lot of time encountering other cultures around the globe. By the way my example of "people" is me, not anyone else here - I know some of you have much more experience of this than I do. I never really understood it until not that long ago.

[Iantha]

One of the commonalities that has emerged is that most of the shooters have histories of domestic assault. If our country does nothing about the guns, and it won't, do you think some of the violence and deaths could be mitigated by better addressing domestic violence? What would that look like to you?

I'd like to see stronger family safety nets to reduce stress at home. I'd like to see a child welfare system that wasn't quite so focused on reunification at all costs when a child is removed from the home. We need more support for women trying to leave abusive relationships and we need to minimize the stigma of being an abuse victim. We need more research on offender mentality and design programs to help rehabilitate offenders.

[Phoebe]

AMEN.

This is definitely one of the most meaningful common threads you find not only among mass shooters but among the many people who kill their partners or other loved ones.

One huge problem with this in my community, and unfortunately I'm not well educated enough about it to know whether it's a nationwide problem, is simply under reporting! People are willing to tolerate a certain level of violence against themselves or other women without doing anything about it, to say nothing of the domestic violence against men that is tolerated. Then when they try to do something about it, restraining orders seem pretty limited in enforcement and effect. That would also be the point where intervention to reduce violence and conflict would be helpful, but it seems like those interventions and anger management and rehabilitation programs happen only after somebody has done something horrible. Anytime there's a restraining order, maybe it's worth trying to find out why people are so angry, and get them access to some resources. Where I live the mental health system is just woefully underfunded and undersupported. So there's no way to meaningfully intervene even with a voluntary program for helping resolve anger.

By the above I don't mean to imply that domestic violence or other kinds of anger and violence are associated with mental illness. Most mentally ill people are completely non violent, or if anybody is going to be hurt it's themselves only. While anger can go along with mental illness - and in extreme cases can be by itself a kind of mental disorder - we shouldn't infer that the act of shooting things up is the act of a mentally ill person. Rather, it's more appropriately understood as the act of a person who cannot control anger. So somehow we've got to work on the problem of anger in our society and identify people who are having trouble getting a grip on it.

[Bonefish]

[Bonefish]

[Bonefish]

There's a reason why I am flippantly dismissive of "common sense" gun law proposals: They make no logical sense.

1) The majority of gun homicides(and probably suicides) in this country are committed with handguns. In 2014, 8,124 people were victims of firearms homicides, of those, 5,562 were killed with handguns, 248 with rifles, 262 with shotguns, 93 with "other guns", 1,959 with an unknown type of gun. More people were killed with fists and feet than with the non handguns, combined(excluding the unknown type of gun). Handguns already require you to be 21 and get a purchase permit from a sheriff. Even private sales theoretically require a purchase permit. Of course, it's damn near impossible to track the private sale of a firearm.

So make a registry, eh? Well, there's only 350 million plus guns in this country, and we don't know where they are or who has them, so at best we could just register the ones legally bought from FFLs, which is a drop in the bucket. Do you make owning an unregistered firearm a crime? Congratulations, you just made around a hundred million new criminals, over night. And if I know anything about how laws are enforced in this country, they will be disproportionately enforced against minorities and the poor. Hooray for progress, right?

2) Assault weapons bans. How do you intend to define this? Any semi-automatic fed from a detachable box magazine? Or just ones in rifle length? Which of course leaves things like Dragos and AR15 "pistols" available. Is a ruger 10/22 an assault weapon? It's a semi-automatic that fires from a detachable box magazine. It's also one of the most popular small game rifles and "plinking" rifles out there. And, in light of the small number of firearms deaths caused by these weapons, what's the measurable impact going to be? What's the point?

3) Limits on ammunition purchase. Sure, this one sounds reasonable, right? I mean, who buys 500 or a thousand rounds at a time? Well, a lot of people. Because bullets work like toilet paper: when you buy in bulk, you get a discount. If I wait for a sale of 5.56 ammo, I can get it for $.25 a round. If I buy it 20 rounds at a time? I'm paying more like $1.30-150 a round. So for those of use who like to go to the range to practice on a regular basis, we're expending hundreds if not thousands of rounds in a year. When I go trap shooting, I shoot around 150 rounds of shotgun ammo, in a day. Obviously, I can't afford to trap shoot very often. But if someone goes to the range and shoots 50 rounds a week it makes sense to buy in bulk for the discount.

Which leads to the problem of notifications: You create a vast cloud of noise of people engaging in normal recreational behavior, that now has to be flagged and investigated. Do we pull ATF agents who are investigating gun runners off to staff up the screening? Hire more agents? How much are you willing to spend for this?

4) No Fly, No Buy! This one makes great sense. If you can't fly on a plane because you're deemed a risk, why should you be able to buy a gun? But really, how do you get on this list? No one knows. Being muslim helps, apparently. But there's no judicial oversight, there's no appeals, you don't even know you're on the list until you are on the list. It's an unfair, arbitrary list that shouldn't exist in the first place, let alone be used to justify the removal of your civil rights.

The efficiency of these "common sense" proposals is questionable, at best, which means that even if these proposals became law, they likely wouldn't prevent a single death. Which means that the next time something tragic happens, the same people who pushed common sense gun laws, will be pushing for more gun laws. It's ridiculous. Either the people proposing the laws do not know what they are talking about(considering what some of them say about guns, that's plausible), or, they are pushing them in hopes of incrementally banning firearms. One of those is just ignorance, but the other is a level of malevolence that I can't abide.

[Tahlvin]

[mimekiller]

[Bonefish]

And shame on the republicans for protesting it when it wwas proposed as a firearms control thing, but otherwise not caring.

[bralbovsky]

The only way to administer something that's so entrenched is to approach it indirectly. That's part of what Colt was negotiating. Like cars, everyone needs gun insurance. We likely can't figure out who owns everything, and some folks will choose to be self-insured, but if people are held liable for the use of their guns, that will make them store them more securely, prevent negligent shootings (what TV calls accidents).
It then punishes only discharged firearms. Sellers will be more circumspect as well.

It won't fix everything. The power dynamic is so tangled in the culture that it's a gordian knot, but it's so tangled, it's one of the few places that adding lawyers and insurance companies might help.

[Bonefish]

[Bonefish]

Here's the thing: it seems like the best way to reduce gun violence isn't related to the number of guns in this country, but to poverty, youth, and male inhibitions regarding violences. Which suggests that we should work to reduce poverty, possibly providing a living wage, better social support networks, keeping abortion around so that young single women who can't support a child are not forced to have that child, and, finding some way to reach out to all young men who are at risk(but especially young black men) to prevent them from becoming violent criminals or the victims of violent crime. Now, I'm all for that. You give me a candidate who doesn't marry that to weird and arbitrary gun laws that will have no reasonable effect, and I'll vote for that person.

But if you give me someone who wants to make firearms manufactures liable for the crimes committed with their guns, that they can't reasonably be expected to prevent? Nah. You give me someone who wants to band all semi-autos, or just semi-autos made out of black plastic? Nah. Someone who wants to track every sale of ammunition? Nope. I'm not interested and I'm opposed to that sort of thinking.

So, the question is, do ya'll really want to reduce firearms homicides, and hell, even suicides(by providing better mental health care)? Or do ya'll wanna win points in the "Guns, yay or nay" argument? Because right now, ya'll ain't winning the policy war on this, and there's no indication that that will change. Balls in your court, what do ya wanna do?

[bralbovsky]

Nobody on this thread believes banning something is a solution.
Everyone on this thread is enlightened enough to understand poverty and racism as the root causes of many "insoluble" problems.

I believe the policy discussions on this thread also have a realism attached to them: There's no jurisdiction for intention. There's little chance of serious movement toward income equality or actually tackling the root weaknesses in the culture.

Things, cars, guns, are relatively susceptible to jurisdiction. They can be bar coded. They can be inspected.
Of course, lots of people drive drunk, steal cars, all the illegal things, despite long standing and often reasonable laws against those behaviors. Perhaps having no punitive restrictions about them might be better, but I don't think so.
We study traffic every day. We install rumble strips for the decreasing number of traffic fatalities, we install airbags, we change the way we engineer lights. How many of the innovations on vehicles are about safety - not because we want to be draconian about it, but because these are potentially preventable injuries and deaths.

If you ask me, gun violence, while horrible and sudden and all the bad things, is not even on my top list of things we have to deal with.
It just seems to me to potentially be low hanging fruit. Is it tangled with poverty? Is it tangled with mental illness? Duh.
Are we allowed to pass no restriction until we fix our poverty problem, and our mental illness problem, and our domestic violence problem, and every other problem that guns are tangled with?

This is not because I want to see people punished.
I'm actually all against privatization and profit in prisons. I'm actually no fan of municipalities that balance their budgets on aggressive speed enforcement. (Messing with this is one unintended consequence of self driving vehicles.)
Having said that, 300 million people need the rules written down.

I agree that we should aim for the level of restriction we have for vehicles. (Let's perhaps not conflate this with terrorist use of vehicles right away) I'm really just for reinserting the "well regulated militia" part of the amendment.

So, short answer, yes, making a law that it's illegal to steal bread disproportionately affects the poor. We should absolutely help that guy, and make sure the issue isn't some law and fascism smokescreen. That doesn't mean we shouldn't pass it to protect the baker in the meantime.

[bralbovsky]

I worry frequently, especially in this last year, about how easy it is to devolve to Syria.
I worry frequently about uniformed people who have stopped thinking about the illegality of orders, perpetrating violence on innocents.
This kind of cowardice is so easy.

I can't think of any other way to defend oneself effectively in 2017+ without firearms.
Trust me, I've explored most of the other options, come see.
Crossbows come close.

Having said that, two things:
--I'm going to be outgunned regardless. I don't have tanks, or planes. Or poison gas.

--I have to explain to my confed flag waving neighbor that the people he's likely to be shooting at, in such a circumstance, will either be the uniformed person whom he's been ostensibly worshiping for the last decade or his unarmed neighbor.

It's tough to keep things in their symbolic boxes. We often mistake the map, or the flag, for the territory. Cars are for transportation, except when they're for status. Guns are for hunting, or defense, or compensation, et al, except when they suddenly become an abstraction.
What makes regulating them so challenging is not their function, but their symbolism. What this says to me is that the obstacles, in that case, are either insurmountable, which would be tragic, or illusory and not entirely honest, also tragic.

[Phoebe]

That's a very interesting point. If the symbolism wasn't so powerful at this point, maybe reasonable people could sit down to work out a plan. But now it's like any touch against the gun represents a whole lot of other things, and anyone who likes guns as a tool is highly suspect in the eyes of those who don't understand that from their past or culture.

What I don't understand about the illegal gun arguments is that illegal guns often, though not always, used to be legal guns. Someone whose self-image is "safe gun owner" ended up donating a gun.

[Bonefish]

[bralbovsky]

More spinning our wheels or shooting blanks, choose your metaphor for this microcosm of pointlessness, but here goes:

There are places reclaimed from vehicle access. There are places it doesn't make sense to own a vehicle at all, partly because of the expense, partly because of the hassle of alternate side parking, partly because you don't need one; there's the train. I suggest the comparison holds.
Nobody except the personally, pointlessly, powerless bereaved - lord help them - is talking about an outright ban. It's foolish and solely for purposes of inflammation to bring it up at all. It's a trigger, and part of the whole symbolic entanglement.

I think you misread my intention. Helping the poor and protecting the baker are two separate goals, and two separate efforts. Protecting the baker might actually have a negative impact on the poor. Nothing's perfect.

Wrestling with poverty is another thread. While it is linked to crime, it's not inextricably linked to guns. Guns are a tool. Insanity is not linked to guns. Guns are a tool. Most poor people and most mentally ill people have nothing to do with guns other than worry about them. It's specious to conflate all these problems and pretend that guns are more than a means to make these issues worse.

Cars have unintended consequences. they separate families (disguised or perhaps encapsulated as opportunity). Cars create traffic and pollution and crashes and sprawl..... Nevertheless, they are a tool. The legislation surrounding them is meant to make them serve us rather than the other way around. And if the legislation was truly pointless or useless , there wouldn't be designated drivers, or lots of other adaptations, UBER, Hertz, Volvo, that responded to those laws.
Horses and buggies indeed.