Please explain how the existence of a 36-page-long thread devoted to a discussion of gun violence and titled "Fucking Guns" constitutes "avoiding this" issue.
We need to understand the consequences of our decisions. Avoiding addressing them doesn't change them.
Indeed we do.
Do you understand the consequences of accusing, with no discernible basis, shipmates of culpability for mass murder might possibly offend some of those shipmates?
Do you understand that your avoidance of acknowledging and apologizing for what you've said might exacerbate the original offense?
Do you grasp how simply repeating information we are all agonizingly familiar with suggests that you believe us to be stupid or ignorant or both?
Do you comprehend that your obstinate refusal to examine, accept responsibility for, or attempt to change the character of your interactions here only add to the real distress you cause others as well as yourself?
One could put it a little less personal: Allowing gun ownership means innocent children will die.*
Indeed, that is less personal. It's also blindingly obvious and trite. The problem here is that's not what you said. What you DID say is the problem: you basically accused a shipmate of culpability for child deaths because she once cocked a gun to scare off an intruder. You followed this up by claiming she should have been prepared to suffer rape, injury, and/or death to save others from violence.
Perhaps you can lay out a clear row of dots we could all follow showing how Ross's putative self-sacrifice would have saved even one child from death or injury. Perhaps you can show how her self-defense led to someone else's harm. I can't quite pull this off. Can you?
Then there's the whole voting responsibility. As you're not a US citizen, and (AFAIK) living in a country with its own political upheavals to cope with, you may be unaware that representatives many USers voted for actually passed a House gun control measure on February 27, 2019. It is sitting (along with a staggering pile of other worthwhile legislation) on the desk of the Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell. He refuses to bring it up for a vote.
This man is not subject to federal votes. He's from Kentucky. Only voters from Kentucky get to weigh in on his election, and that won't happen until November. I won't burden you with a request for solutions to this problem, as it may lead to my being accused of something reprehensible.
The problem is, the less personal the statement, the more it allows us to wiggle free.
Life sucks and sometimes there are no, easy win-win decisions. But we should make decisions understanding the outcomes of those decisions.
*This isn't even a new thing, it is part of the gun control groups' statements. This is not even a new thing on this thread. Go back for yourself and read the laments for innocent children shot by legally purchased guns.
Yeah. Meanwhile, how's that apology coming along? Or that change in posting style?
You're not here to have dialogue yourself. You're here to lecture and find fault. And yes, it matters who says a thing - when you have behaved so badly for so long it affects how people receive what you've said.
Last comment on this tangent.
Something is correct or incorrect regardless of who says it.
"for so long" is rubbish.
And most dances require partners.
No one, absolutely no one, has lined up to defend you. You have behaved badly for a long time, and we all know it.
This being the case, it no longer matters whether what you say is correct or incorrect, because you have engendered so much bad feeling. You don't seem to care about that, but if you want people to pay attention to what you say and give it any kind of credence, you should. Facts matter, but we are not logic machines capable of ignoring your longstanding disregard for your interlocutors. I don't give a shit about whether anything you post is true or persuasive, because you demonstrably don't give a shit about anyone here as a human being.
You care about other posters? Great. Show it: apologize to Ross (to say nothing of the rest of those you've offended). Show it by changing your attitude and posting style.
The availability of guns is going to force that equation. It is unavoidable.
Here are the words which appeared to me to suggest that you think the vast majority of Americans somehow feel compelled to buy into the whole gun-ownership phenomenon. As noted, not even a third (as of 2017, anyway) of Americans have fallen prey to this delusion.
[Edited to fix coding - Rossweisse]
That was part of a longer chain of interaction. The context of that statement leads to its actual meaning.*
Maybe you should say what you mean instead of relying on people to work it out for you.
This, children, is called the tu quoque fallacy. The basic idea of the fallacy is that the person making it is saying that what they do wrong doesn't matter, because somebody else has also done wrong.
Rubbish. Some interactions leading to hell calls require dual participation to get to that point. Even in a zero-sum world, that allows for fault on both sides.
If we didn't respond to you, you couldn't talk trash. Yes, that's true. Shame on us for giving you any audience at all. How foolish of us.
Statistics for 1/10/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 26
Total injuries: 51
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
You're digging yourself in deeper. Stop, take a breath, walk around the block.
You've come across as not caring at all about the horrible situation Rossweisse was in. Absolutely, protecting kids from guns is very important. I think we all get that. But there weren't kids, in *this* situation.
As a matter of public policy...at this point in history, there's no way America is going to outlaw guns. It's just not. If it did, average people would keep buying them illegally; current conspiracy theories would be proved true; and many people who believe those theories have guns. And some of them are in private militias. that actually train and prepare for things. Banning guns would set a lot of bad things into motion, and likely increase the death count.
As horrible as guns often/usually are, there *are* some circumstances where having and (regrettably) using them is the best option of those available. Alan's post, earlier on this page, sets that out well.
Rossweisse was in one of those situations. Bad things had already happened in her building. She wisely chose to be ready to protect herself, and IIRC she'd grown up around guns and been taught how to use them. If she hadn't had that gun available, and been able to scare off the creep who managed to get it, mostly likely she would've been raped or murdered, or both.
There are complexities that you don't seem to be realizing or acknowledging--and that causes your posts to come across as relentlessly driving a moral steamroller over anything in your path...or anyone. And not just on this topic.
I think you believe very much what you're saying; and you believe there are various truths that must be forcefully stated anytime and anywhere they come up.
But that approach pushes people away. And it hurts them, and angers them.
That approach makes you sound like you care more about those truths and moral principles than about human beings that those truths and principles are supposed to help.
As a matter of public policy...at this point in history, there's no way America is going to outlaw guns. It's just not. If it did, average people would keep buying them illegally; current conspiracy theories would be proved true; and many people who believe those theories have guns. And some of them are in private militias. that actually train and prepare for things. Banning guns would set a lot of bad things into motion, and likely increase the death count.
As horrible as guns often/usually are, there *are* some circumstances where having and (regrettably) using them is the best option of those available. Alan's post, earlier on this page, sets that out well.
As you point out, the current situation in the US will make it impossible to introduce laws which significantly reduce legal gun ownership - much less introduce laws similar to, say, the UK or an outright ban. The number of people who currently consider they have legitimate reasons to own a gun and the number of guns in circulation both make that impossible - even without the added complications of various conspiracy theories and private militias.
As I said, it's not an ideal world. Progress will need to follow several fronts, and will need political will to address all of these over an extended period of time. There's probably political capital for a gradual process of banning particular types of gun for which the vast majority of the US population can't see any reason why any private individuals need one - military style weapons being on that list. I don't know what polling has been done, but I can see significant (even if not a majority) acceptance that some people need guns to hunt, control pests in agricultural settings, and self defence etc. But, is there anywhere near the same support that people need assault rifles for that?
Long term what's needed is action to address the reasons people feel they need a gun for self defence. Which means making people feel that they'd be safe without a gun, which is not just the people who have a gun for that purpose - it's the wider community who themselves feel safe but would say "if I lived there, I'd need a gun to be safe" and therefore are supportive of others having guns in different circumstances. That means actually making people safer - ensuring that tenants have rights to control access to their homes (as in the example cited by @Rossweisse) as an example. But, probably more to reduce unfounded fears people have - people are concerned, for example, about a significant part of the population with untreated mental health problems, these almost certainly do not make them more dangerous than anyone else (except to themselves) but people think they're dangerous, having a decent health care system such that people receive treatment has a lot of benefits besides reducing the perceived risk of violence but that is one benefit. Similarly, improvements in treatment for people with drug problems would benefit everyone. From a distance there also appears to be a significant racist element in play, and rooting racism out of our societies is something else that's not going to happen in the short term but will have a massive range of benefits to everyone.
AIUI, there've been federal bans on assault rifles in the past. But they run out (or are overturned), and there hasn't been enough political will to renew them at that time.
It would be great to secure another assault weapons ban, but assault weapons are far from the only problem we face.
The bills passed last February offered no such ban. The Bipartisan Background Checks Act did, however, close existing loopholes in internet and gun show sales and expanded from 3 days to 10 days the time within which the FBI must conduct background checks or let pending transactions go through. A companion bill, HR1112, closed the loophole which made it possible for Dylan Roof to obtain the weapon he used in his 2015 attack on members of a Charleston church.
Sorry; it's late here, and I've inadvertently given a false impression about those bills. Both passed the US House in late February of 2019. They have not passed the Senate (have not even been brought up for vote), have not been signed into law, and therefore have had zero effect on our current gun situation.
Day late, dollar short:
US SHOOTINGS REPORT 1/12/20
Statistics for 1/11/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): One: 5 injured in Colorado
Total deaths: 52
Total injuries: 96
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Statistics for 1/12/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 30
Total injuries: 69
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
OK, I did look up the bible verse out of curiosity. The degree to which one needs to want to see wisdom is a little too acute here. The bible is shit for contemporary reference outside of its shadow of zealotry, and you are a fucking idiot for foisting it.
Statistics for 1/13/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 33
Total injuries: 43
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Statistics for 1/14/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 19
Total injuries: 38
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Statistics for 1/15/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 36
Total injuries: 55
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
The FBI arrested three members of a neo-Nazi group called “The Base” on Thursday morning, days ahead of a pro-gun rally in Richmond that is attracting fringe figures and has already prompted a state of emergency declaration.
The three suspects — Brian Mark Lemley, William Garfield Bilbrough, and Canadian fugitive Patrik Mathews — face a variety of gun charges. Lemley and Bilbrough are also accused of illegally harboring Mathews, a former Canadian military reservist who fled his home country after being accused of being a recruiter for The Base. The trio is expected to face a federal judge in Maryland on Thursday afternoon.
The suspects had discussed traveling to Richmond, Virginia, for a Jan. 20 rally in front of the state Capitol to protest new gun control legislation, The New York Timesreported. The rally has become a flashpoint for the fringe right, prompting Gov. Ralph Northam to declare a four-day state of emergency and ban guns from the Capitol complex.
Lemley and Mathews had allegedly built an assault rifle and amassed hundreds of rounds of ammunition before their arrest, according to the FBI. On a recording, Lemley said he had made the gun into an illegal machine gun and made plans to hide it from federal agents, according to the FBI.
Mathews was already a fugitive, leading to speculation that the only reason he'd show up at a prominent public rally would be to go out in a blaze of glory as a martyr to the cause.
Statistics for 1/16/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): One: 5 injured in Chicago IL
Total deaths: 23
Total injuries: 51
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Statistics for 1/17/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): One: 4 killed, 1 injured in Utah
Total deaths: 21
Total injuries: 42
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
If guns are available, there will be innocent deaths from accidents. And in choosing to support laws allowing private ownership of guns, one is accepting those deaths.
The same logic applies to:
Cars
Ladders
Fireplaces
Swimming pools
Toasters
Your argument is hopeless because you're attacking the question from completely the wrong angle, citing the qualitative risks. Nearly EVERYTHING has risks. The issue is the extent of the risks versus the extent of the benefits.
The reason that gun ownership only makes sense in a limited range of circumstances is not just that risks exist. It's that the risks are relatively high while, in most circumstances, the benefits are rather low.
The reason that gun ownership for self-defence is a dumb idea is that the statistics indicate only about 1 usage out of 23 actually achieves the intended aim of self-defence. You have to get lucky. Any other appliance with that failure rate would be gotten rid of. The statistics also show that having a gun in the house tends to increase your chances of getting shot.
And the reason that your argument is getting everyone offside is because you fail to tip your hat to any of this, and then throw in the ridiculous notion of "accepting those deaths".
Do you accept deaths from cars? Do you accept drowning in swimming pools? What kind of monster are you? Oh sure, NOW you're going to tell me about seatbelts and pool fences, as if that absolves you from supporting the deaths of innocent children.
If guns are available, there will be innocent deaths from accidents. And in choosing to support laws allowing private ownership of guns, one is accepting those deaths.
The same logic applies to:
Cars
Ladders
Fireplaces
Swimming pools
Toasters
Your argument is hopeless because you're attacking the question from completely the wrong angle, citing the qualitative risks. Nearly EVERYTHING has risks. The issue is the extent of the risks versus the extent of the benefits.
The reason that gun ownership only makes sense in a limited range of circumstances is not just that risks exist. It's that the risks are relatively high while, in most circumstances, the benefits are rather low.
The reason that gun ownership for self-defence is a dumb idea is that the statistics indicate only about 1 usage out of 23 actually achieves the intended aim of self-defence. You have to get lucky. Any other appliance with that failure rate would be gotten rid of. The statistics also show that having a gun in the house tends to increase your chances of getting shot.
And the reason that your argument is getting everyone offside is because you fail to tip your hat to any of this, and then throw in the ridiculous notion of "accepting those deaths".
Do you accept deaths from cars? Do you accept drowning in swimming pools? What kind of monster are you? Oh sure, NOW you're going to tell me about seatbelts and pool fences, as if that absolves you from supporting the deaths of innocent children.
Fucking stupid. Those other things are not designed to kill.
Though, we do accept a certain amount of death as acceptable when determining speed limits and road design and maintenance. We accept a certain amount of death in health care as well. Almost anything used improperly or to a lesser safety standard can cause injury or death.
The difference is they are not designed to kill people. A gun, properly used, kills. That is what it is designed to do.
Fucking stupid. Those other things are not designed to kill.
What's fucking stupid is that this was not part of your argument.
Because it would have been part of mine. Any time you say that something is fucking stupid right now, it's not ME you're critiquing, it's yourself.
I'm well aware that guns are designed to cause injury and would point that out while discussing how high the risks are. You didn't. You just made a statement about innocent deaths from accidents. Nothing about intended use. Invoking intended use now seems pretty fucking stupid after constructing an argument about accidents.
Besides, every single person you tell that guns are designed to kill will tell you they have no intention of killing someone, except in self-defence.
Your argument was that supporting gun ownership was supporting innocent deaths from accidents.
If you want to argue that supporting gun ownership means supporting a tool designed to kill, that's an entirely different approach. You'll probably just piss people off for a slightly different set of reasons. *buys popcorn*
This is not a new thread and the participants aren't new to it either. If they do not understand guns are meant to kill by now, pointing it out is a waste of time. In fact, its deadly potential was the point of the anecdote that triggered all this.
The argument isn't hopeless, at least one person saw beyond the emotional response to the heart of the problem. The others were reacting to the perceived slight, not the real point itself. That is what made it problematic, not the logic used.
And that is part of the problem with gun control in the US; logic is not the factor considered in many cases.
In some ways, the personal safety argument is like the anti-seat belt argument. If one combs through every vehicular fatality, one will find a few cases where wearing a seatbelt caused a death rather than prevented it. But it remains that those incidents are incredibly rare and are not justifications for avoiding safety belt use.
This is not a new thread and the participants aren't new to it either. If they do not understand guns are meant to kill by now, pointing it out is a waste of time.
1) Do you find evidence that thread participants fail to grasp the lethal nature of guns? If so, kindly point this evidence out.
2) If it's a waste of time to note the lethality of guns, then why waste your own by doing so here:
. . . at least one person saw beyond the emotional response to the heart of the problem. The others were reacting to the perceived slight, not the real point itself. That is what made it problematic, not the logic used.
If I understand this post, you're suggesting here that the emotive material in others' responses to your remarks is irrelevant, and that only discussions of your post's central "logic" (to use your label, though I'm not persuaded it applies to the thought process you display here) matters.
Doesn't the nature of the responses you've received suggest that the emotive content (or lack thereof) is in large part what taxes people's patience here? Are you really prepared to ignore or dismiss this irritation as not mattering when it clearly does matter to many of us? As do the relationships which develop among Shipmates?
We "listen" more attentively to some posters here than to others. Fair? Valid? As I'm not necessarily among those most "listened to," I won't comment. It's very, very human, though; people have their personal "sorting hats" and divide their fellows into Slytherins, Hufflepuffs, and Gryffindors. Your posting history suggests that you'd like to be listened to; you repeat your painfully obvious points over and over; you're a fairly frequent flier; you make the same tedious (and sometimes illogical) arguments again and again, and so on. That's what many people do when they don't feel listened to (I don't presume to suggest it's necessarily true for you; as already noted, I can't imagine what you get out of coming here, as Ruth suggests, to lecture us).
May I suggest that respecting others' feelings rather than dismissing them might get you more "listened to" (if indeed that's something you desire)?
On these threads, we deal simultaneously with at least two major factors. One factor consists of topics of discussion; another is the living, breathing population which turns up here to comment on these topics, drawing on a wide range of opinions, insights, facts, personal experiences, analysis, convictions, knowledge, moral codes, values systems, etc. to do so. Indeed, the Ship, in acknowledgement of the fact that topics can involve material that's quite sensitive for many of us, has recently created a more-closely-moderated board, Epiphanies, as a kind of "safe haven" for topics likely to raise close-to-the-bone feelings. My (possibly incorrect) impression is that you were somehow instrumental in that board's creation.
Yet here you seem to deny the importance, relevance, and applicability of the complex human emotions and interactions which make up the bulk of Ship discussions.
My son and I have been watching Ken Burns's 16 hour documentary, "The West," (it's excellent). We just finished a section about the cowboys and how disruptive they were when they came into town after weeks on the trail. By 1870's most of the towns in the west had passed laws not allowing them to bring their guns into town. They knew guns didn't belong in town in the 1870's. In the old West.
This is not a new thread and the participants aren't new to it either. If they do not understand guns are meant to kill by now, pointing it out is a waste of time.
And yet, when I pointed out the logical problem in the argument you DID present, you decided the response was to say "fucking stupid" and point out that guns are meant to kill. As if this had to be explained to me.
Make up your fucking mind, would you?
If your only defence of the logical fallacy in your argument about "capable to kill in accidents" is to invoke a difference between guns and cars/swimming pools that you think is so obvious as to not be mentioned, then the smart conclusion would be to acknowledge that your actually presented argument is fucking stupid and doesn't present any kind of additional grounds for gun control.
All you were fucking saying is that accidents can kill people. Any kind of accident. Which is so obvious as to not worth mentioning, is in no way specific to guns, and is nothing more than you being an emotive prick with a version of "won't somebody please think of the children".
My son and I have been watching Ken Burns's 16 hour documentary, "The West," (it's excellent). We just finished a section about the cowboys and how disruptive they were when they came into town after weeks on the trail. By 1870's most of the towns in the west had passed laws not allowing them to bring their guns into town. They knew guns didn't belong in town in the 1870's. In the old West.
Interesting, Twilight. I'm old enough to have watched boatloads of B&W TV shows featuring gunslingers, the obligatory Hero Sheriff, the saloon-with-obligatory-floozy-with the-heart-of-gold, the one-room schoolhouse plus schoolmarm, etc. One would never have guessed at the existence of these laws from the TV shows. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and on and on. And in the street outside, us kids all playing (shudder) at cowboys and Indians with our toy pistols.
Statistics for 1/18/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 22
Total injuries: 46
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
@orfeo
I'm not bothering going through your post piece by piece.
My point is that laws which allow for the possession of guns result in innocent deaths. They are not all by accident, btw.
If one wishes for the law to allow them to posses a gun for self-defence, then they are accepting those deaths. WHat is the logical flaw in that?
If I understand this post, you're suggesting here that the emotive material in others' responses to your remarks is irrelevant, and that only discussions of your post's central "logic" (to use your label, though I'm not persuaded it applies to the thought process you display here) matters.
I'm not saying that emotional response is irrelevant to everything. It doesn't change the logic of the argument, but one can still reasonably criticise the form in which the argument is presented.
...If I understand this post, you're suggesting here that the emotive material in others' responses to your remarks is irrelevant, and that only discussions of your post's central "logic" (to use your label, though I'm not persuaded it applies to the thought process you display here) matters.
Doesn't the nature of the responses you've received suggest that the emotive content (or lack thereof) is in large part what taxes people's patience here? Are you really prepared to ignore or dismiss this irritation as not mattering when it clearly does matter to many of us? As do the relationships which develop among Shipmates? ...
If experience is any guide, nothing appears to matter to lilbuddha except lilbuddha, and her black-and-white opinions. No matter what drivel she posts, all are to take it seriously and treat it reverently. And yes, she is prepared to ignore or dismiss anything anything posted - which is almost anything at all - that does not coincide entirely with her, shall we say, idiosyncratic worldview. Logic does not enter into it.
I'm still waiting for her to post links supporting some of her more excessive opinions, as well as apologies for some of her more egregious personal insults. I will, of course, wait until the Second Coming, because lilbuddha doesn't do apologies or proof. Both are beneath her.
@orfeo
I'm not bothering going through your post piece by piece.
My point is that laws which allow for the possession of guns result in innocent deaths. They are not all by accident, btw.
If one wishes for the law to allow them to posses a gun for self-defence, then they are accepting those deaths. WHat is the logical flaw in that?
The logical flaw, you twerp, is that the word "guns" is completely irrelevant to the argument and can be replaced by a swathe of other consumer products.
If you're trying to mount an argument for gun control, as opposed to an argument forbidding the ownership of private property, THIS MATTERS.
If you actually bothered to go through my posts, maybe you would understand.
Your proposition is nothing more than "accidents can result in death".
The fact that you've chosen a particular object to insert into your proposition is nothing more than a distraction as to the nature of the proposition. It fails to actually influence the truth or falsity of the proposition.
I mean, this is as frustrating as hell to me because I'm thoroughly in favour of rigorous gun control. What I'm not in favour of is trying to support rigorous gun control with incomplete and shoddy arguments. You've done nothing at all to explain if/why gun accidents are more frequent and/or more likely to result in death as a means of distinguishing guns from other products, and when I tried to do this your response was "fucking stupid".
You literally think the crux of the argument, the part that actually pertains specifically to gun accidents and distinguishes them from other accidents, is the part not worth mentioning.
My son and I have been watching Ken Burns's 16 hour documentary, "The West," (it's excellent). We just finished a section about the cowboys and how disruptive they were when they came into town after weeks on the trail. By 1870's most of the towns in the west had passed laws not allowing them to bring their guns into town. They knew guns didn't belong in town in the 1870's. In the old West.
Interesting, Twilight. I'm old enough to have watched boatloads of B&W TV shows featuring gunslingers, the obligatory Hero Sheriff, the saloon-with-obligatory-floozy-with the-heart-of-gold, the one-room schoolhouse plus schoolmarm, etc. One would never have guessed at the existence of these laws from the TV shows. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and on and on. And in the street outside, us kids all playing (shudder) at cowboys and Indians with our toy pistols.
Maybe just a few years difference, or a difference in the shows/movies that got shown in the UK, but there were no lack of examples of that sort of law on what I watched when much younger. A common type of storyline would be:
1. Lawless town where the bad guys (rancher who wants to run everything and his cowboys, criminal gang, unscrupulous railroad or mining company etc) run riot, obligatory fight in the saloon spilling out to quick-draw gun fight in the street
2. Town appoints new Sheriff/calls in a Marshall to restore order. First act of the new lawman is to ban guns within the town
3. Bad guys ride into town and ignore law going into saloon with their guns. Leads to showdown with the lawman who either arrests them, shoots one or two of them, or the bad guys hand over their guns or ride out of town
4. This "things getting better" moment leads to the bad guys changing tactics, obey the law in town for a while handing their guns in, but being even worse outside of town. Often the point where they hire a professional gunslinger to take on the lawman
5. Things build up to final showdown. Bad guys ride into town in large numbers (and/or with their new gunslinger) ignoring the law to hand over their guns. Confrontation with the lawman and his deputies. Townsfolk support the law or bad guys gunslinger switches sides or quits. Big gunfight, good guys win.
Thing is, though, it all feeds the "redemptive violence" myth and Might Makes Right.
They did, and anytime a Quaker or other pacifist is encountered he's a silly little wimp who needs protection. Movies like, "Friendly Persuasion" always ended with the anti-gun person seeing the light. It's even worse now with the same violent movies are redone and now starring women.
Mel Gibson and Liam Neesom have made entire careers out of turning to violence after the death of a wife or daughter gives them what's seen as the proper moral motivation to seek revenge. Ugh to them all. I'm glad I'm not married to a man with a cabinet full of guns just waiting for someone to kill me so he'll have an excuse to use them. It sure seems to be a popular fantasy.
Comments
Please explain how the existence of a 36-page-long thread devoted to a discussion of gun violence and titled "Fucking Guns" constitutes "avoiding this" issue.
Indeed we do.
Do you understand the consequences of accusing, with no discernible basis, shipmates of culpability for mass murder might possibly offend some of those shipmates?
Do you understand that your avoidance of acknowledging and apologizing for what you've said might exacerbate the original offense?
Do you grasp how simply repeating information we are all agonizingly familiar with suggests that you believe us to be stupid or ignorant or both?
Do you comprehend that your obstinate refusal to examine, accept responsibility for, or attempt to change the character of your interactions here only add to the real distress you cause others as well as yourself?
Indeed, that is less personal. It's also blindingly obvious and trite. The problem here is that's not what you said. What you DID say is the problem: you basically accused a shipmate of culpability for child deaths because she once cocked a gun to scare off an intruder. You followed this up by claiming she should have been prepared to suffer rape, injury, and/or death to save others from violence.
Perhaps you can lay out a clear row of dots we could all follow showing how Ross's putative self-sacrifice would have saved even one child from death or injury. Perhaps you can show how her self-defense led to someone else's harm. I can't quite pull this off. Can you?
Then there's the whole voting responsibility. As you're not a US citizen, and (AFAIK) living in a country with its own political upheavals to cope with, you may be unaware that representatives many USers voted for actually passed a House gun control measure on February 27, 2019. It is sitting (along with a staggering pile of other worthwhile legislation) on the desk of the Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell. He refuses to bring it up for a vote.
This man is not subject to federal votes. He's from Kentucky. Only voters from Kentucky get to weigh in on his election, and that won't happen until November. I won't burden you with a request for solutions to this problem, as it may lead to my being accused of something reprehensible.
Yeah. Meanwhile, how's that apology coming along? Or that change in posting style?
No one, absolutely no one, has lined up to defend you. You have behaved badly for a long time, and we all know it.
This being the case, it no longer matters whether what you say is correct or incorrect, because you have engendered so much bad feeling. You don't seem to care about that, but if you want people to pay attention to what you say and give it any kind of credence, you should. Facts matter, but we are not logic machines capable of ignoring your longstanding disregard for your interlocutors. I don't give a shit about whether anything you post is true or persuasive, because you demonstrably don't give a shit about anyone here as a human being.
Maybe you should say what you mean instead of relying on people to work it out for you.
If we didn't respond to you, you couldn't talk trash. Yes, that's true. Shame on us for giving you any audience at all. How foolish of us.
Let's see some evidence of it then. Your move.
Statistics for 1/10/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 26
Total injuries: 51
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.
You're digging yourself in deeper. Stop, take a breath, walk around the block.
You've come across as not caring at all about the horrible situation Rossweisse was in. Absolutely, protecting kids from guns is very important. I think we all get that. But there weren't kids, in *this* situation.
As a matter of public policy...at this point in history, there's no way America is going to outlaw guns. It's just not. If it did, average people would keep buying them illegally; current conspiracy theories would be proved true; and many people who believe those theories have guns. And some of them are in private militias. that actually train and prepare for things. Banning guns would set a lot of bad things into motion, and likely increase the death count.
As horrible as guns often/usually are, there *are* some circumstances where having and (regrettably) using them is the best option of those available. Alan's post, earlier on this page, sets that out well.
Rossweisse was in one of those situations. Bad things had already happened in her building. She wisely chose to be ready to protect herself, and IIRC she'd grown up around guns and been taught how to use them. If she hadn't had that gun available, and been able to scare off the creep who managed to get it, mostly likely she would've been raped or murdered, or both.
There are complexities that you don't seem to be realizing or acknowledging--and that causes your posts to come across as relentlessly driving a moral steamroller over anything in your path...or anyone. And not just on this topic.
I think you believe very much what you're saying; and you believe there are various truths that must be forcefully stated anytime and anywhere they come up.
But that approach pushes people away. And it hurts them, and angers them.
That approach makes you sound like you care more about those truths and moral principles than about human beings that those truths and principles are supposed to help.
Please let things go, once in a while.
As I said, it's not an ideal world. Progress will need to follow several fronts, and will need political will to address all of these over an extended period of time. There's probably political capital for a gradual process of banning particular types of gun for which the vast majority of the US population can't see any reason why any private individuals need one - military style weapons being on that list. I don't know what polling has been done, but I can see significant (even if not a majority) acceptance that some people need guns to hunt, control pests in agricultural settings, and self defence etc. But, is there anywhere near the same support that people need assault rifles for that?
Long term what's needed is action to address the reasons people feel they need a gun for self defence. Which means making people feel that they'd be safe without a gun, which is not just the people who have a gun for that purpose - it's the wider community who themselves feel safe but would say "if I lived there, I'd need a gun to be safe" and therefore are supportive of others having guns in different circumstances. That means actually making people safer - ensuring that tenants have rights to control access to their homes (as in the example cited by @Rossweisse) as an example. But, probably more to reduce unfounded fears people have - people are concerned, for example, about a significant part of the population with untreated mental health problems, these almost certainly do not make them more dangerous than anyone else (except to themselves) but people think they're dangerous, having a decent health care system such that people receive treatment has a lot of benefits besides reducing the perceived risk of violence but that is one benefit. Similarly, improvements in treatment for people with drug problems would benefit everyone. From a distance there also appears to be a significant racist element in play, and rooting racism out of our societies is something else that's not going to happen in the short term but will have a massive range of benefits to everyone.
The bills passed last February offered no such ban. The Bipartisan Background Checks Act did, however, close existing loopholes in internet and gun show sales and expanded from 3 days to 10 days the time within which the FBI must conduct background checks or let pending transactions go through. A companion bill, HR1112, closed the loophole which made it possible for Dylan Roof to obtain the weapon he used in his 2015 attack on members of a Charleston church.
US SHOOTINGS REPORT 1/12/20
Statistics for 1/11/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): One: 5 injured in Colorado
Total deaths: 52
Total injuries: 96
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.
Statistics for 1/12/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 30
Total injuries: 69
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.
Sardis?
OK, I did look up the bible verse out of curiosity. The degree to which one needs to want to see wisdom is a little too acute here. The bible is shit for contemporary reference outside of its shadow of zealotry, and you are a fucking idiot for foisting it.
However, I prefer ye olde "Jesus is coming--look busy!"
"The True Aim of the Gun Sanctuary Movement" (Bloomberg via Yahoo).
Focuses mostly on the state of Virginia as an example. Folks there, including the governor, are fighting the good fight for gun regulation, but...
Statistics for 1/13/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 33
Total injuries: 43
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.
Statistics for 1/14/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 19
Total injuries: 38
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.
Statistics for 1/15/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 36
Total injuries: 55
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.
Speaking of Virginia:
Mathews was already a fugitive, leading to speculation that the only reason he'd show up at a prominent public rally would be to go out in a blaze of glory as a martyr to the cause.
Statistics for 1/16/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): One: 5 injured in Chicago IL
Total deaths: 23
Total injuries: 51
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.
Yes, I heard a little about that. Can't we get those folks some Nerf bazookas? (They shoot sponge balls.)
Warning: some will find it disturbing.
Statistics for 1/17/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): One: 4 killed, 1 injured in Utah
Total deaths: 21
Total injuries: 42
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.
The same logic applies to:
Cars
Ladders
Fireplaces
Swimming pools
Toasters
Your argument is hopeless because you're attacking the question from completely the wrong angle, citing the qualitative risks. Nearly EVERYTHING has risks. The issue is the extent of the risks versus the extent of the benefits.
The reason that gun ownership only makes sense in a limited range of circumstances is not just that risks exist. It's that the risks are relatively high while, in most circumstances, the benefits are rather low.
The reason that gun ownership for self-defence is a dumb idea is that the statistics indicate only about 1 usage out of 23 actually achieves the intended aim of self-defence. You have to get lucky. Any other appliance with that failure rate would be gotten rid of. The statistics also show that having a gun in the house tends to increase your chances of getting shot.
And the reason that your argument is getting everyone offside is because you fail to tip your hat to any of this, and then throw in the ridiculous notion of "accepting those deaths".
Do you accept deaths from cars? Do you accept drowning in swimming pools? What kind of monster are you? Oh sure, NOW you're going to tell me about seatbelts and pool fences, as if that absolves you from supporting the deaths of innocent children.
Though, we do accept a certain amount of death as acceptable when determining speed limits and road design and maintenance. We accept a certain amount of death in health care as well. Almost anything used improperly or to a lesser safety standard can cause injury or death.
The difference is they are not designed to kill people. A gun, properly used, kills. That is what it is designed to do.
What's fucking stupid is that this was not part of your argument.
Because it would have been part of mine. Any time you say that something is fucking stupid right now, it's not ME you're critiquing, it's yourself.
I'm well aware that guns are designed to cause injury and would point that out while discussing how high the risks are. You didn't. You just made a statement about innocent deaths from accidents. Nothing about intended use. Invoking intended use now seems pretty fucking stupid after constructing an argument about accidents.
Besides, every single person you tell that guns are designed to kill will tell you they have no intention of killing someone, except in self-defence.
If you want to argue that supporting gun ownership means supporting a tool designed to kill, that's an entirely different approach. You'll probably just piss people off for a slightly different set of reasons. *buys popcorn*
The argument isn't hopeless, at least one person saw beyond the emotional response to the heart of the problem. The others were reacting to the perceived slight, not the real point itself. That is what made it problematic, not the logic used.
And that is part of the problem with gun control in the US; logic is not the factor considered in many cases.
In some ways, the personal safety argument is like the anti-seat belt argument. If one combs through every vehicular fatality, one will find a few cases where wearing a seatbelt caused a death rather than prevented it. But it remains that those incidents are incredibly rare and are not justifications for avoiding safety belt use.
Nobody has used anything as justification for avoiding gun safety laws of any kind. You will intentionally miss the point, won't you?
1) Do you find evidence that thread participants fail to grasp the lethal nature of guns? If so, kindly point this evidence out.
2) If it's a waste of time to note the lethality of guns, then why waste your own by doing so here:
Then there's this:
If I understand this post, you're suggesting here that the emotive material in others' responses to your remarks is irrelevant, and that only discussions of your post's central "logic" (to use your label, though I'm not persuaded it applies to the thought process you display here) matters.
Doesn't the nature of the responses you've received suggest that the emotive content (or lack thereof) is in large part what taxes people's patience here? Are you really prepared to ignore or dismiss this irritation as not mattering when it clearly does matter to many of us? As do the relationships which develop among Shipmates?
We "listen" more attentively to some posters here than to others. Fair? Valid? As I'm not necessarily among those most "listened to," I won't comment. It's very, very human, though; people have their personal "sorting hats" and divide their fellows into Slytherins, Hufflepuffs, and Gryffindors. Your posting history suggests that you'd like to be listened to; you repeat your painfully obvious points over and over; you're a fairly frequent flier; you make the same tedious (and sometimes illogical) arguments again and again, and so on. That's what many people do when they don't feel listened to (I don't presume to suggest it's necessarily true for you; as already noted, I can't imagine what you get out of coming here, as Ruth suggests, to lecture us).
May I suggest that respecting others' feelings rather than dismissing them might get you more "listened to" (if indeed that's something you desire)?
On these threads, we deal simultaneously with at least two major factors. One factor consists of topics of discussion; another is the living, breathing population which turns up here to comment on these topics, drawing on a wide range of opinions, insights, facts, personal experiences, analysis, convictions, knowledge, moral codes, values systems, etc. to do so. Indeed, the Ship, in acknowledgement of the fact that topics can involve material that's quite sensitive for many of us, has recently created a more-closely-moderated board, Epiphanies, as a kind of "safe haven" for topics likely to raise close-to-the-bone feelings. My (possibly incorrect) impression is that you were somehow instrumental in that board's creation.
Yet here you seem to deny the importance, relevance, and applicability of the complex human emotions and interactions which make up the bulk of Ship discussions.
I don't get it.
My son and I have been watching Ken Burns's 16 hour documentary, "The West," (it's excellent). We just finished a section about the cowboys and how disruptive they were when they came into town after weeks on the trail. By 1870's most of the towns in the west had passed laws not allowing them to bring their guns into town. They knew guns didn't belong in town in the 1870's. In the old West.
And yet, when I pointed out the logical problem in the argument you DID present, you decided the response was to say "fucking stupid" and point out that guns are meant to kill. As if this had to be explained to me.
Make up your fucking mind, would you?
If your only defence of the logical fallacy in your argument about "capable to kill in accidents" is to invoke a difference between guns and cars/swimming pools that you think is so obvious as to not be mentioned, then the smart conclusion would be to acknowledge that your actually presented argument is fucking stupid and doesn't present any kind of additional grounds for gun control.
All you were fucking saying is that accidents can kill people. Any kind of accident. Which is so obvious as to not worth mentioning, is in no way specific to guns, and is nothing more than you being an emotive prick with a version of "won't somebody please think of the children".
Interesting, Twilight. I'm old enough to have watched boatloads of B&W TV shows featuring gunslingers, the obligatory Hero Sheriff, the saloon-with-obligatory-floozy-with the-heart-of-gold, the one-room schoolhouse plus schoolmarm, etc. One would never have guessed at the existence of these laws from the TV shows. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and on and on. And in the street outside, us kids all playing (shudder) at cowboys and Indians with our toy pistols.
US SHOOTINGS REPORT 1/19/20
Statistics for 1/18/2020
Total mass shootings (4 or more casualties): 0
Total deaths: 22
Total injuries: 46
Children under 12 killed: 0
Info courtesy of Gun Violence Archive.org.
Any errors mine.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.
I'm not bothering going through your post piece by piece.
My point is that laws which allow for the possession of guns result in innocent deaths. They are not all by accident, btw.
If one wishes for the law to allow them to posses a gun for self-defence, then they are accepting those deaths. WHat is the logical flaw in that?
Yes, that was Roy's. And when Trigger died, Roy had him taxidermied.
(:shudder:)
I'm still waiting for her to post links supporting some of her more excessive opinions, as well as apologies for some of her more egregious personal insults. I will, of course, wait until the Second Coming, because lilbuddha doesn't do apologies or proof. Both are beneath her.
The logical flaw, you twerp, is that the word "guns" is completely irrelevant to the argument and can be replaced by a swathe of other consumer products.
If you're trying to mount an argument for gun control, as opposed to an argument forbidding the ownership of private property, THIS MATTERS.
If you actually bothered to go through my posts, maybe you would understand.
Your proposition is nothing more than "accidents can result in death".
The fact that you've chosen a particular object to insert into your proposition is nothing more than a distraction as to the nature of the proposition. It fails to actually influence the truth or falsity of the proposition.
I mean, this is as frustrating as hell to me because I'm thoroughly in favour of rigorous gun control. What I'm not in favour of is trying to support rigorous gun control with incomplete and shoddy arguments. You've done nothing at all to explain if/why gun accidents are more frequent and/or more likely to result in death as a means of distinguishing guns from other products, and when I tried to do this your response was "fucking stupid".
You literally think the crux of the argument, the part that actually pertains specifically to gun accidents and distinguishes them from other accidents, is the part not worth mentioning.
1. Lawless town where the bad guys (rancher who wants to run everything and his cowboys, criminal gang, unscrupulous railroad or mining company etc) run riot, obligatory fight in the saloon spilling out to quick-draw gun fight in the street
2. Town appoints new Sheriff/calls in a Marshall to restore order. First act of the new lawman is to ban guns within the town
3. Bad guys ride into town and ignore law going into saloon with their guns. Leads to showdown with the lawman who either arrests them, shoots one or two of them, or the bad guys hand over their guns or ride out of town
4. This "things getting better" moment leads to the bad guys changing tactics, obey the law in town for a while handing their guns in, but being even worse outside of town. Often the point where they hire a professional gunslinger to take on the lawman
5. Things build up to final showdown. Bad guys ride into town in large numbers (and/or with their new gunslinger) ignoring the law to hand over their guns. Confrontation with the lawman and his deputies. Townsfolk support the law or bad guys gunslinger switches sides or quits. Big gunfight, good guys win.
They did, and anytime a Quaker or other pacifist is encountered he's a silly little wimp who needs protection. Movies like, "Friendly Persuasion" always ended with the anti-gun person seeing the light. It's even worse now with the same violent movies are redone and now starring women.
Mel Gibson and Liam Neesom have made entire careers out of turning to violence after the death of a wife or daughter gives them what's seen as the proper moral motivation to seek revenge. Ugh to them all. I'm glad I'm not married to a man with a cabinet full of guns just waiting for someone to kill me so he'll have an excuse to use them. It sure seems to be a popular fantasy.