Guns

[Bonefish]

[Bonefish]

[Phoebe]

I see you making a few different main points here:
- Handguns and things like drug-trade related violence are a much bigger problem than other kinds of gun violence, so if we aren't going to solve those first, forget it.
- People want to take guns away / make them much harder to obtain than is warranted, so gun owners should be worried about losing rights. Subpoint: domestic violence restrictions would sweep more people into the net than should be swept.
- There is really nothing we can do to solve the problem of kids being shot in school anyway, or the solution lies totally elsewhere.
- Guns that people might want to ban because they are, for whatever reasons, a weapon of choice for mass shooters, are nevertheless super useful normal weapons anyone might want and should be able to have.

I hope I'm not stating these uncharitably because that's not the intent. I can rehearse why I disagree but at the end of the day, the question is whose view should prevail in this disagreement, just like in any other dispute in our democracy. The gun manufacturers' view is the only one prevailing right now, and it brooks no compromise, no limitation, no nothing even though most people want those things. We are very good at accepting shitty compromises in so many other areas of rights violations, from speech to equal opportunity to privacy to religion... you name it! But in this one area, the almighty gun maker reigns supreme despite being out on a limb with little public support. That's messed up on its face, and you'd expect really good reasons to account for it. But there are not really good reasons! I think Bonefish is doing a better job than most paid NRA spokespeople (like that horrid woman, omg) to present reasonable points, but these just aren't imo good enough to explain why we can't even compromise a bit on guns here.

We are now so far from compromise that, instead of doing anything meaningful to limit the totally unimpeded access to guns in FLA, the legislators there instead think - with straight faces - that it's a good idea to arm the teachers! That is one of the most psychotically bad ideas I have ever heard, and no serious person supports it, but in our democracy it's a serious policy proposal these days, and it lets you know just how far we have come unhinged from reason and good norms.

This is how far we are from having to worry about gun owners losing guns or easy access to them! We are more prepared to arm teachers than to chip away any piece of total convenience and total access to the guns. That is... so fucked up the mind boggles. In the few years since Sandy Hook, have we passed meaningful gun reform? Have we invested in our schools and public health systems? No! Mostly we have passed NRA-supported measures that make it easier to get access to guns! The CDC cannot even study the problem, much less recommend public health solutions! We are not closer to the scary place of taking guns away from people - if anything we have gone the opposite direction, so why the paranoia?

Think of it: on one side of the Paranoia Balance Beam you have a fairy-tale about gun loss that never happened even after Sandy Hook and thus probably never will, and on the other side you have worries about innocent kids being slaughtered in their classrooms, which is definitely a thing that happens. One side has to do with death and the other with inconvenience and fewer choices. One side is real and the other is make-believe. But yeah, we should probably go with make-believe inconvenience? Is it make-believe, likewise, that gun restrictions actually produce lives saved? I don't need significant numbers to convince me these measures are worthwhile, unlike the NRA which apparently needs a lot more blood before anything is compelling. Will some compromises that limit the kinds of weapons and ammo available or the ease of getting access to it help to save lives? I'm betting yes and I have yet to hear a convincing argument that it's wrong. Nor have I heard any argument to explain why anyone with whatever background has a constitutional right to the maximal amount of choices of gun/ammo combos stored privately however they choose, so I feel pretty content to place restrictions on all portions of that arrangement. Compromises. Something we are so far from right now that we want to arm teachers. That is the compromise. Raising the age from 18 to 21 is the compromise.

[Bonefish]

Listen: "assault weapons" are not the "weapon of choice" for mass shootings. I'm trying to keep calm here, but the FBI published a report on Active Shooters. I highly suggest you go read it, because it contains a lot of relevant and pertinent information. out of 160 active shooter incidents between 2000-2013, around 36 involved a "rifle"(the FBI doesn't track "assault weapons", probably because one of the major gunfights that made the FBI rethink their weapons policy was committed with a ruger mini-14 that the 1994 AWB and the current proposed AWB wouldn't effect), the majority of those 160 cases read pretty much the same: "[subject] armed with a handgun...". Now, granted, this is leaving out some of the more recent shootings. I go with the FBI because they have pretty robust information gathering, unlike, say, non profit "school shooting" trackers that tell us we had 18 school shootings this year, but don't tell us only three or four involved actual homicides or attempted homicides, the rest covering law enforcement officers accidentally discharging their firearms, a suicide, etc.

The 1994 Federal Assault Weapons ban is not a fairy tale. It did happen, and I personally experienced the impact of it. Interestingly, one of my favorite firearms was used during that time period at Columbine high school. Remember Columbine? Well, one of the firearms used was the Hi Point 995, a firearm that was directly designed to be compliant with the federal assault weapons ban! And an even more wide sweeping ban is currently being proposed as an answer.

Back to reality: in the 13 years the Active Shooter Report covers, there were 486 deaths from Active Shooters. Over a 13 year period. By comparison, in the next 5 days, something like around 450 people will die from firearms violence, including suicides. Getting rid of suicides, it will take about two weeks for gun homicides, not counting any active shooter incident that may happen, to equal that amount. I am going to say this, very slowly, but very loudly: MASS SHOOTING/ACTIVE SHOOTING EVENTS ARE A MINUSCULE PORTION OF GUN DEATHS IN AMERICA. I wanna repeat this: YOU ARE MORE LIKELY TO WIN A MILLION OR MORE DOLLARS PLAYING THE LOTTERY THAN YOU ARE TO BE INVOLVED IN A MASS SHOOTING. This is a problem that has been blown out of goddamn proportion by a lobby that wants to sell you fear. Fear that "YOU COULD BE NEXT! OR IF NOT YOU, YOUR KIDS!"

Also, the "arming teachers is crazy and dangerous". I don't know how to tell y'all this, but plenty of states already allow this. 10% of states allow Concealed Carry permit holders to carry in schools, 3 more allow it with some restrictions, and a whopping 17 states(including some of those with the concealed carry permits) allow adults to carry with the permission of the school or district. It's not that fucking crazy.

Quoting the FBI:
"
Resolutions
The majority of the 160 incidents (90 [56.3%]) ended on the shooter’s initiative—sometimes when the shooter committed suicide or stopped shooting, and other times when the shooter fled the scene.
There were at least 25 incidents where the shooter fled the scene before police arrived. In 4 additional incidents, at least 5 shooters fled the scene and were still at large at the time the study results were released.
In other incidents, it was a combination of actions by citizens and/or law enforcement that ended the shootings. In at least 65 (40.6%) of the 160 incidents, citizen engagement or the shooter committing suicide ended the shooting at the scene before law enforcement arrived. Of those:
■■
In 37 incidents (23.1%), the shooter committed suicide at the scene before police arrived.
■■
In 21 incidents (13.1%), the situation ended after unarmed citizens safely and successfully restrained the shooter. In 2 of those incidents,24 3 off-duty law enforcement officers were present and assisted.
■■
Of note, 11 of the incidents involved unarmed principals, teachers, other school staff and students who confronted shooters to end the threat (9 of those shooters were students).
■■
In 5 incidents (3.1%), the shooting ended after armed individuals who were not law enforcement personnel exchanged gunfire with the shooters. In these incidents, 3 shooters were killed, 1 was wounded, and 1 committed suicide.
■■
The individuals involved in these shootings included a citizen with a valid firearms permit and armed security guards at a church, an airline counter, a federally managed museum, and a school board meeting.25
■■
In 2 incidents (1.3%), 2 armed, off-duty police officers engaged the shooters, resulting in the death of the shooters. In 1 of those incidents, the off-duty officer assisted a responding officer to end the threat.26
Even when law enforcement arrived quickly, many times the shooter still chose to end his life. In 17 (10.6%) of the 160 incidents, the shooter committed suicide at the scene after law enforcement arrived but before officers could act.
In 45 (28.1%) of the 160 incidents, law enforcement and the shooter exchanged gunfire. Of those 45 incidents, the shooter was killed at the scene in 21, killed at another location in 4, wounded in 9, committed suicide in 9, and surrendered in 2."

And I'm tired of hearing "the right won't compromise". I've offered compromise after compromise including but not limited to, national licensing requirements, national registration, insurance requirements, expanded background checks. And I can't get you to budge off the "ban the scary black guns" bit, not one iota. I'm sorry, but we already TRIED IT YOUR WAY AND IT DIDN'T WORK. And when the only position you won't give up, the only one you keep belaboring being "we need to band those scary guns", then saying "we don't want to take away your guns" starts looking more like a lie. Like "just let me put the tip in" is a lie.

This is why "we" refuse to compromise. You don't compromise with someone who is negotiating dishonestly or coercively. You want to deprive me and millions of others of their rights, because you "feel" that the black guns are "scary". I'm sorry, but that's not good enough for me. And so long as the left continues to behave dishonestly about gun control and what their aims are, I will not compromise. I won't support politicians who compromise my right to self defense to a state that has NO LEGAL OBLIGATION TO DEFEND ME.

[Phoebe]

At times I'm not clear who you are arguing with. The points where you and I actually seem to disagree, since I am not saying anything about banning the scary black guns, have to do with whether school shootings are a big deal, whether we're moving in the direction of compromise that would mean unacceptable losses to gun owners, and whether we should arm teachers.

You may not think the school shootings are a big enough deal, and the lives lost are not large enough numbers, to prompt a public policy response. I think it's enough to be a big deal. We just aren't going to agree on that, but red herrings about greater gun violence/more deaths elsewhere don't have much effect when I already agree with you about the other gun violence being a big problem. People care about school shootings, and movie theaters and concerts and all the others, even if the numbers are small compared to all the suicides and drug trade shootings. We have a capacity to care about all of those things. This caring is not a problem or fault in people. By contrast, that woman who is the NRA spokesperson right now? She comes across like a complete moral monster.

I'm not sure how things were when I was a kid, but during my adult life, "compromise" on this issue has meant making it easier to buy a much broader variety of guns and carry them around concealed. Compromise has meant capitulation to the NRA, along with an unnecessary polarisation of politics on other grounds because the NRA s*** infects everything and Republicans are the main beneficiaries of NRA support. This is why I don't feel like compromise is moving to some place where gun owners have to give up something major, since I barely see any evidence of any compromise in another direction. There are so many other things that we can't even do right now, before we get to taking away guns!

And that brings me to the teacher arming. It really is totally f****** crazy. The fact that some people are already getting away with a ridiculously bad idea does not change the quality of the idea. What kind of training do you suppose is necessary to make that a good idea, under the circumstances that are normal in a classroom, and what do you suppose the odds are of getting that to happen? And then suppose we have a well-trained person. What are the odds that they successfully deal with the situations and encounters that we are supposedly training them to deal with, without causing further collateral damage without causing further collateral damage? These situations are difficult even for seasoned professionals. The idea of attaching extra pay, or funding the actual weapons provided, in a world where teachers can't get a damn pack of markers and Kleenex paid for and have to beg for parents to bring them in or pay for them out of pocket, is truly nauseating. And if arming teachers is a solution to take seriously, well, keep in mind that it undermines all those other arguments about school shootings being too rare to take this type of public policy response on.

[mimekiller]

looks like the best firearm for home defense is a medium length barrel double-action revolver

[Phoebe]

The way a particular school replies to the whole "walk out" thing is a pretty good litmus test of whether its administration or school board is functional or a disaster. They should publish a list and it might be a lot better than test scores for indicating where parents should try to send their kids. Why does educational administration attract people who want to be such petty tyrants? Do they perhaps realize that their petty tyranny just drives teenagers the other direction? Maybe it's a secret long game?

[buckett]

[mimekiller]

[DMDarcs]

[mimekiller]

[DMDarcs]

[mimekiller]

[Phoebe]

Dear God: sorry to bother you again so soon, but...

[DMDarcs]

[Eliahad]

[Phoebe]

We need a way to bottle what Darcs just said and dispense it as medicine across the country.

[mimekiller]

[bralbovsky]

Kudos and reference to Darcs, and to others, personally known to me, who give the lie to DeVos and others who apparently, unthinkingly agree with her.

[bralbovsky]

So this thread really isn't or shouldn't be, about percentages, which feeds right into Twain's, "Lies, damn lies, and statistics".

It is, or should/could be about numbers of preventable, individual traumas and tragedies.

Often, these are perpetrated by desperate men on other desperate men, and innocence and guilt are gray.

Thousands of these are suicides, which, don't get me started on the fundamentally minuscule and superficial differences between the treatment of the mentally limited and troubled in the 18th century and today. he chemicals are different; the warehouses are prettier (except when they're not, and many, many folks who need it never get help) - although that's part of several larger questions.

We pretend that these are largely unpreventable, perhaps inevitable, given the prevalence of thoughtful, but cowardly practitioners of this carnage. That somehow, this is part of what 'normal' looks like. Bullshit.

This is subsidiary to a larger lie, that government and laws don't work, so maybe we shouldn't pay so much for them. It's not government that doesn't work, it's dishonest and corrupt government that doesn't work. Government gathers resources to collect a million arrows to fight the French, or send guys to the moon (which showers the rest of the society with technological developments). Laws have demonstrably reduced traffic fatalities and cleaned up drinking water, except when overtaken by corruption. Corrupt and therefore weak governments can't get their shit together to fix the roads, or study health problems, or provide care for their ill and elderly, or fight the Russians.

So, schools. Wholesale education is an impossible task that folks have somehow been managing successfully for at least five thousand years. It produced, for good or ill, the British Empire. It produced NASA. It is, however, the last big pile of public money that folks like Blackwater, and their grafty ilk, eye with rapacious glee. But, but, in order to defund, destroy, privatize the system, we have to convince folks it's broken. That it doesn't work, that, despite its evolution from an army of schoolmarms (who persevered in the face of poverty wages and all manner of insult and abuse) to a refuge for the GIs discovering college, to a fundamentally top level civil service job, it fails kids wholesale.

Our schools are a reflection of who we are, filtered by what we think we might be. They have weathered and emerged from Jim Crow, and corporal punishment, and two-income families. They have managed to make the pitiful folks on late night television who don't know what we commemorate on Columbus Day, still funny and strange to the rest of us. (To decode , in case one needs it: if most people didn't know what the real answers were, we wouldn't find it amusing, just odd.) All this, in most places, for a per kid hourly that's a bargain compared to your local teenage babysitter.

Education and educators are under fire, mostly from people who would like them to go away, so they can make a profit. And this profit thing, which gets in the way of so much good public policy, coincidentally, is part of our gun debate too. Weird.