If we’re going to have guns, then I support mandatory training. If you can’t pass a safety test, you shouldn’t have a gun.
I think there’s an ideological gap that’s maybe insurmountable on this issue. I don’t want other people around me to be lethally armed. Have you met people? What’s the line? “People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”. I don’t want the guy who’s parking spot got taken from him to pull out his gun. I don’t want someone to shoot the kid who rang their doorbell unexpectedly. A guy I used to work with would say “An armed society is a polite society” and I’m like, no. If you’re pulling out guns to settle traffic disputes, you have a failed society. I don’t want to live in a world where people think it’s okay to pull out a lethal weapon over minor problems. I don’t want to always have my speech chilled because at any moment the other guy can just shoot me dead, so I better make nice. That’s the world I imagine where everyone’s carrying a gun.
I also live in a city. Most of the time there’s stuff you don’t want to destroy behind anything you might be shooting at. Maybe it’s different out in the sticks where you have wide opens spaces. I don’t want to have to think about stray bullets because some macho idiot got mad that someone took his seat on the bus. I don’t want to live in fear that the guy sitting next to me on the train is going to switch from fondling his gun to firing his gun.
And I know people can do violence without guns. Fists and knives and trucks and bombs exist. But those are less efficient, useful for other things, or difficult to get. A fist fight over a bus seat probably everyone walks away from. A gun fight, probably not. And yes, knives exist, but they don’t seem to have the mystique that makes people stupid, and are less likely to kill a bunch of people real fast.
Probably the best compromise would be to have gun laws be at the state or city level. Nebraska is very different than new york city. I don’t know how you’d handle people traveling though.
Watching from outside, imho the American gun control issues are hampering cooperation in more important areas.
I know you consider it a very emotional issue but compared to tax reform, lgbtq rights, racism, employee rights, homelessness etc, it’s not worth getting stuck on.
Saying this as someone who lived in countries with both high (although not US level) and low gun ownership.
Yeah I’m not a single issue voter on guns. If the guy in this thread was a serious candidate they’d have a good shot (no pun intended) at my vote, depending on the alternatives and other details.
You’re probably the most reasonable pro gun person I’ve talked to in a while.
Do you think the right to own a gun is more real than the right to drive a car? Because we require a driver’s test (and insurance and other stuff) for a car, and if you took cars away a lot of people would be fucked. Way more than if you took guns away. (Which is also a bunch of separate issues. We should be less car centered)
I don’t really accept that the right to have a gun is a fundamental right. I know it’s in the Constitution. That provides legal backing for it but not like moral or ethical backing, to me.
You’re right that poverty other issues cause a lot of problems. And our policing system is utter garbage. That’s why if you were a serious candidate, I’d consider voting for you even with the disagreements on this.
You could make an argument that travel is a fundamental right, and if you accept that the most effective tool comes with the right then access to a car becomes a right.
I don’t know if I accept that having a right also means you have the right to the most effective tools to execute it. You have the right to speech but airwaves are restricted. Many places have laws limiting noise made in the early morning.
Some of that probably comes from recognizing that you may have the right to talk about how great Widgets are, I have the right to sleep at night.
You might have the right to defend yourself, but I want the right to not live in mortal fear because that guy carries a fully automatic gun on the bus I need to take.
So in the US when we want to make something illegal, and that thing happens to be a constitutional right, we levy a tax against it. Then we only issue tax stamps to very select few people, or simply refuse to issue them at all. NFA 1934 is one of those weird tax scheme that makes you obtain a $200 tax stamp to have certain types of weapons. They are heavily controlled and non-transferable without going through a similar process.
You know, Im obviously one person so my input matters very little, but Id much rather vote for a candidate with your ideals than any of the present options. Hopefully one day there will be a candidate with these ideals and the recognition needed to win the election
In scare quotes, because the people that commit random acts of violence in schools—versus targeted violence–are so uncommon that it’s hard to draw definite conclusions about risk factors.
That is not relevant. Targeted violence in school isn’t tolerable either.
Almost all of them ‘leak’ information in the days or weeks prior to murders; I do think that there needs to be a way to seriously investigate things like that, but I don’t know how you could do that in a way that doesn’t infringe on other, equally fundamental rights.
Indeed, so we’re going to have to solve this problem in whichever way minimizes harmful side effects. Unfortunately, that may involve inconveniencing gun owners, but it’s better than depriving everyone of privacy and going full Minority Report.
When you get right down to it, a lot of it is an issue of culture, where people feel like violence is a reasonable way to express feelings.
Mass shootings in particular are usually committed by someone who has no intention of still being alive afterward, and they do indeed almost always end in the shooter’s death. That’s not merely a “way to express feelings”.
the UK and Australia both have combined rates of violent crime–battery, forcible rape, robbery, murder–comparable to the US, and, in the case of rape in Australia, likely rather higher.
You’re contradicting yourself. How can American culture be uniquely violent if those other countries have similar rates of violence?
The US does have a sharply higher murder rate though; our violence is more lethal.
Because we have guns.
The unfortunate truth is that you can’t have rights without someone misusing those rights to hurt other people.
Yes, and we preserve those rights despite that because the alternative is worse.
The alternative we’re discussing right now is gun control. Is that worse than the status quo? If so, why?
If people can drive, sooner or later someone is going to drive a rental van into a crowd, just because they want to kill people and that’s the way they can do it.
This equivalence is questionable for two reasons:
Unless I’m mistaken, that doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as shootings do.
Cars have a purpose other than killing. Guns don’t.
First, despite there being multiple school shootings this year, school shootings are a tiny fraction of the overall homicides in the US
Which are also often committed with guns…
which are, in turn, dwarfed by the number of suicides committed with firearms.
I’m not talking about suicide.
Second, looking at your link you provided, you see a lot of things like, “A gun was fired during a fight near a basketball game at Appoquinimink High School. No injuries were reported”, and “Bullets struck two windows of classrooms at PS 78 in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island. One classroom was occupied by ten adults, but no bullets entered the classrooms” being counted as "school shootings:, which you then compare to Columbine. You are intentionally, and in bad faith, conflating entirely different things, and placing them all under the heading of, “firearms near schools”.
It is relevant, because it has different causes, and is thus addressed differently.
That’s not a meaningful answer. Let’s have some details.
Are you willing to engage in good faith, or have you already decided that the only solution is banning firearms?
Are you willing to engage in good faith? So far, you’ve argued based on false premises (namely that school shootings are rare, and that there are no bona fide school shootings in the previously linked Wikipedia list) and evasive non-answers (namely that targeted violence at school is to be “addressed differently”, with no explanation of how). Doesn’t seem like good faith to me.
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I would vote for you. Especially cause Satanist, but I support your entire platform.
Depending on how your gun policies are, I might be able to swallow that in exchange for everything else
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If we’re going to have guns, then I support mandatory training. If you can’t pass a safety test, you shouldn’t have a gun.
I think there’s an ideological gap that’s maybe insurmountable on this issue. I don’t want other people around me to be lethally armed. Have you met people? What’s the line? “People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”. I don’t want the guy who’s parking spot got taken from him to pull out his gun. I don’t want someone to shoot the kid who rang their doorbell unexpectedly. A guy I used to work with would say “An armed society is a polite society” and I’m like, no. If you’re pulling out guns to settle traffic disputes, you have a failed society. I don’t want to live in a world where people think it’s okay to pull out a lethal weapon over minor problems. I don’t want to always have my speech chilled because at any moment the other guy can just shoot me dead, so I better make nice. That’s the world I imagine where everyone’s carrying a gun.
I also live in a city. Most of the time there’s stuff you don’t want to destroy behind anything you might be shooting at. Maybe it’s different out in the sticks where you have wide opens spaces. I don’t want to have to think about stray bullets because some macho idiot got mad that someone took his seat on the bus. I don’t want to live in fear that the guy sitting next to me on the train is going to switch from fondling his gun to firing his gun.
And I know people can do violence without guns. Fists and knives and trucks and bombs exist. But those are less efficient, useful for other things, or difficult to get. A fist fight over a bus seat probably everyone walks away from. A gun fight, probably not. And yes, knives exist, but they don’t seem to have the mystique that makes people stupid, and are less likely to kill a bunch of people real fast.
Probably the best compromise would be to have gun laws be at the state or city level. Nebraska is very different than new york city. I don’t know how you’d handle people traveling though.
Watching from outside, imho the American gun control issues are hampering cooperation in more important areas.
I know you consider it a very emotional issue but compared to tax reform, lgbtq rights, racism, employee rights, homelessness etc, it’s not worth getting stuck on.
Saying this as someone who lived in countries with both high (although not US level) and low gun ownership.
Yeah I’m not a single issue voter on guns. If the guy in this thread was a serious candidate they’d have a good shot (no pun intended) at my vote, depending on the alternatives and other details.
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You’re probably the most reasonable pro gun person I’ve talked to in a while.
Do you think the right to own a gun is more real than the right to drive a car? Because we require a driver’s test (and insurance and other stuff) for a car, and if you took cars away a lot of people would be fucked. Way more than if you took guns away. (Which is also a bunch of separate issues. We should be less car centered)
I don’t really accept that the right to have a gun is a fundamental right. I know it’s in the Constitution. That provides legal backing for it but not like moral or ethical backing, to me.
You’re right that poverty other issues cause a lot of problems. And our policing system is utter garbage. That’s why if you were a serious candidate, I’d consider voting for you even with the disagreements on this.
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You could make an argument that travel is a fundamental right, and if you accept that the most effective tool comes with the right then access to a car becomes a right.
I don’t know if I accept that having a right also means you have the right to the most effective tools to execute it. You have the right to speech but airwaves are restricted. Many places have laws limiting noise made in the early morning.
Some of that probably comes from recognizing that you may have the right to talk about how great Widgets are, I have the right to sleep at night.
You might have the right to defend yourself, but I want the right to not live in mortal fear because that guy carries a fully automatic gun on the bus I need to take.
Hello doppelganger. Except, I’m ex-JW, just a garden variety humanist, and have no clue what the nfa of 1934 is.
So in the US when we want to make something illegal, and that thing happens to be a constitutional right, we levy a tax against it. Then we only issue tax stamps to very select few people, or simply refuse to issue them at all. NFA 1934 is one of those weird tax scheme that makes you obtain a $200 tax stamp to have certain types of weapons. They are heavily controlled and non-transferable without going through a similar process.
Here’s more info about it if you care to look into it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act
We also did this with Marijuana during that same time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marihuana_Tax_Act_of_1937
You have my vote already!
You know, Im obviously one person so my input matters very little, but Id much rather vote for a candidate with your ideals than any of the present options. Hopefully one day there will be a candidate with these ideals and the recognition needed to win the election
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Consumerism is the third leading cause of why we’re boiling ourselves out of a planet
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Corporate culture of prioritizing quarterly growth and profits above all other factors
Excessive reliance on meat based meals
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Would you happen to have some idea what to do about all the school shootings?
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There have been multiple school shootings this year alone. Your statement would have been reasonable had you made it in the wake of the Columbine shooting, but to say it today is frankly absurd.
That is not relevant. Targeted violence in school isn’t tolerable either.
Indeed, so we’re going to have to solve this problem in whichever way minimizes harmful side effects. Unfortunately, that may involve inconveniencing gun owners, but it’s better than depriving everyone of privacy and going full Minority Report.
Mass shootings in particular are usually committed by someone who has no intention of still being alive afterward, and they do indeed almost always end in the shooter’s death. That’s not merely a “way to express feelings”.
You’re contradicting yourself. How can American culture be uniquely violent if those other countries have similar rates of violence?
Because we have guns.
Yes, and we preserve those rights despite that because the alternative is worse.
The alternative we’re discussing right now is gun control. Is that worse than the status quo? If so, why?
This equivalence is questionable for two reasons:
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Which are also often committed with guns…
I’m not talking about suicide.
I did nothing of the sort. There are multiple bona fide school shootings in that list, such as the Michigan State shooting and the Covenant shooting.
That’s not a meaningful answer. Let’s have some details.
Are you willing to engage in good faith? So far, you’ve argued based on false premises (namely that school shootings are rare, and that there are no bona fide school shootings in the previously linked Wikipedia list) and evasive non-answers (namely that targeted violence at school is to be “addressed differently”, with no explanation of how). Doesn’t seem like good faith to me.
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