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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
x4 In my experience even knowing about guns causes people to look at you like you're a potential spree shooter.
@Devil Take Me: You know, as long as you keep strawmanning the arguments as "Dey're Gon' Take Our Guns 'Way!", we can't have a productive debate. Calls for restrictions on certain types of purchases, stronger background checks, stricter licensing requirements, national research into violence and its prevention, comprehensive tracking of inventories and serial numbers to identify criminal dealers and purchasers... all of these rational measures turn into, "You'll take our guns from our cold, dead hands, you dirty Feds."
We cannot make gun ownership illegal under the Second Amendment. I think that is wrong and I would support its repeal. But as long as we have it, there will not be an army of jackbooted thugs marching across the land to take away your guns.
Stigmatizing gun ownership is an excellent method, however; it's been working wonders on smoking. Make it socially unacceptable to have a gun and people will naturally stop wanting them. To that end, making a big deal in the news of people getting killed by guns is part of the overall message.
Edit: Certainly, people will go to rather extreme efforts to buy things more cheaply, even if it means evading the law to do so, or risking getting unsafe products, or funding criminals who murder kids in other countries. You can't stop that entirely. What you can do is address the demand side, while making the drugs safer for the majority of buyers. Also, I see no reason, other than taxation, why the retail price of legalized marijuana (for example) needs to be massively higher than the street price when sold illegally.
edited 31st Jan '13 7:33:57 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Have you been playing Happy Wheels?
Anyway, the Supreme Court has more or less confirmed the interpretation of the Second Amendment as "citizens have the right to own guns".
edited 31st Jan '13 9:06:19 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I think I linked before some facts about the amount of deaths caused by cars compared to guns in the States. far higher number of vehicular fatalities, including deliberate vehicular homicides, natch. which I obtained from the website for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Yet I don't see anyone going round saying "Ban all cars because they are EVUL."
And let's not go through the tired arguments already hashed out in this thread and others about want versus need. You don't get to run a coach and horses through the Constitution because you feel uncomfortable with it, particularly when you are advocating prohibition of something that has been in the Constitution since the second time it was amended. All you will achieve is throwing napalm on the woodshed of criminality. Forget selling drugs, selling guns is going to be the next big growth industry after any form of prohibition.
For proof, look at the Volstead Act. People who would never have touched alcohol in their lives became alcoholics because the very act of prohibiting it made it cool.
Stigmatizing gun ownership in America will NOT work in the way that it has been hoped for by its proponents, and credited with when it comes to smoking (which is, sadly, undermined by the amounts of people who die every year through smoking related lung cancers and other diseases), or drinking and driving (which is itself undermined by the amounts of drivers, pedestrians and passengers killed every year by drunk drivers).
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Actually I was just thinking of the Dawn Of The Dead remake.
If you want to make the argument from "original intent", then the Right to Bear Arms would only cover the type of guns that were generally available at the time, like single-shot muskets. Or perhaps the modern equivalent of the frontiersman's musket, such as shotguns and hunting rifles.
Either way, you draw an arbitrary line, saying, "These weapons are covered by your right to bear arms, but these others are not."
The government can have my Brown Bess when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Probably with a Predator Drone strike.
edited 31st Jan '13 9:20:31 AM by Lawyerdude
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.@Tam: Cars are for transporting people. Guns are for killing things. They are not comparable. And the Constitution has been amended many times since its creation, including the removal of the infamous "three fifths" clause regarding slaves. So I see no value in any of your arguments.
The notion that stigmatizing guns won't work in the same way as stigmatizing tobacco or drunk driving also seems to be just something you and other people made up, without any evidence.
And we aren't engaging in any form of prohibition. Hell, we have more regulations on alcohol and tobacco use today than we do on firearms. We have more regulations on cars, even! I've said that I support repealing the Second Amendment, but until that happens, we are not banning guns. We want to make gun ownership safer and more responsible.
Look, I'm not arguing in favor of gun ownership, merely noting that SCOTUS has ruled on point. If we amend the Constitution, that problem goes away.
edited 31st Jan '13 9:27:52 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Another fun fact about cars: They're already regulated more than we regulate firearms. As you can see, Tam, our current regulations for automobiles are grossly insufficient. From this it's a very intuitive leap to seeing how much more insufficient our firearm regulation is.
I don't think there's anything to gain from making firearm usage in general illegal or in stigmatizing gun ownership as a whole, but the main stalling factor in intelligent gun control debate is the insistence by pro-gun advocates to see any increase in regulations, no matter how obvious or thought out, as being tantamount to 'banning all guns.'
(Whoops, was typing that while Fighteer was typing his reply, apologizes for the repetition.)
edited 31st Jan '13 9:53:53 AM by Karkadinn
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.![]()
Sorry, Fighteer but I totally disagree with you. For one thing, you are accusing people on the other side of the argument from you as strawmanning. I thought ad hominem attacks were banned on this site?
Stigmatizing gun owners for owning guns? What's next? Do you go along with those idiotic bastards calling themselves "journalists" who published gun owners details on the internet, and ended up getting themselves hoisted on their own petard when their details were similarly plastered for all to see? Because that worked really well, didn't it? No, no it really didn't. Unless the intention was to make it easier for criminals to know where guns were and to encourage them to try and steal them for use in further criminal activity.
The endpoint of what you and others who think like you is to criminalize people who have had their rights protected for hundreds of years. What happens when the next moral panic comes along and demands something you and they like or see as protected behaviour under the Constitution is curtailed, stigmatized, and eventually banned?
Don't kid yourself that it will not happen. Human history would delight in proving you wrong.
Right, the slippery slope argument. You going to go down the whole list of fallacies? Slave ownership was legal for hundreds, if not thousands of years. We took it away in the 1860's. We survived as a nation.
We stigmatize lots of things to discourage them. Drugs. Tobacco. Unprotected sex. Drunk driving. One would imagine that creating social pressures against these things would be seen as less intrusive than attempting to outright ban them.
You're coming from a premise that, "We've been allowed to own guns, therefore we must always be allowed to own guns." This is a false premise; it has no moral weight. It's Appeal to Tradition.
edited 31st Jan '13 10:03:16 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The slippery slope fallacy is only a fallacy when it is a fallacy. When it is not, it is not. Remind me which was the party of the slave states during the civil war? Wasn't the Democrats was it? Oh oops, it was. The same party that is going hell for leather for gun control now. Funny, that.
And us Brits banned slavery first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_of_1807
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
Long before Lincoln brought in the Emancipation Proclamation, and his successors brought in the Thirteenth Amendment.
If you don't like people pointing out the logical endpoints in your arguments, you shouldn't make them.
It amazes me that anyone needs to say this, but if you cannot conclusively prove that X usually leads to Y, yes, it IS a slippery slope fallacy.
I'm not sure what your slavery rambling has to do with anything, other than a poor attempt at mudslinging.
In reference to an earlier post, I'd also like to note that there is value in distinguishing between media-driven 'moral panics' without any basis in logic and genuine statistically-verified problems that happen to produce concern as a side effect. If anything, the United States as a whole has UNDERREACTED to gun violence, given the high rates of fire-related homicide in this country compared to other first-world nations.
edited 31st Jan '13 10:32:51 AM by Karkadinn
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.Eh, I don't really see the need to stigmatize guns. They just need to stop being glorified so much. There's no way there's ever going to be any reasonable national discourse about this, otherwise. I don't have anything against responsible gun owners, though, and I don't see why I should.
And what does who banned slavery first/which party supported it have anything to do with the topic? Seems like a strange thing to bring up in the first place, considering how strict Britian's gun laws are relative to ours.
edited 31st Jan '13 10:36:41 AM by HilarityEnsues
He brought it up as one of many possible examples of why appealing to the longevity of a cultural facet in history is not a valid tactic. If he'd brought up gender roles instead, or long-held but antiquated medical practices, or centuries-aged misunderstandings on how human reproduction works, what would you have said then?
The US isn't even that old as a nation, compared to most countries, in the first place.
Like Hilarity, I don't see what all those other things you said have to do with the point he was making.
edited 31st Jan '13 10:58:46 AM by Karkadinn
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.Tam, you brought up the immutability of gun ownership as if it were a natural law, not something in the Constitution that can be changed like anything else. We've changed the Constitution 27 times already; what's one more?
You have as yet not made any cogent arguments in favor of unrestricted gun ownership. You've appealed to tradition; you've built a slippery slope from banning guns to banning anything anyone doesn't like; you've constructed a false equivalence between guns and cars; you've declared without evidence that social stigmatization won't work. You've conflated any attempts to regulate or control guns with outright banning them. You've stated that gun deaths are not a serious problem then accused us of fomenting hysteria when we bring up actual gun deaths.
In short, you've been applying the bog standard defensive tactics of the right to this conversation. Then you accuse us of ad hominem for not sitting down and taking it like most of the people in the media. I'm terribly sorry if we aren't going to shut up and play along.
"If we ban guns they'll be banned everywhere." — That's actually rather funny given that we have the least restrictive gun laws of any First World nation.
edited 31st Jan '13 11:36:30 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Tam: You do know that the Democratic Party of the Civil War era was nothing like the modern party, right? The exact opposite, in many ways, actually. And I'm confused as to your point of slavery and endpoints. Britain banned slavery first, leading to the rest of the world banning it, so if America bans guns, they'll be banned everywhere?
boopI'd state that gun deaths are not a serious problem, at least to me given the chances of being involved in one. That most gun laws are directed at things that won't help is part of the problem, but hey.
There's an equivalency you can make between cars and guns: both can be dangerous and we should base laws around how dangerous they've proven they can be as opposed to how dangerous they are designed to be in various situations. As such, unless you hold the argument that cars should be completely unregulated since they're not designed to kill people, you should base your reasoning on how likely they are to kill people instead of what they're designed to do.
Rifles and shotguns, together, kill about as many people as bare fists, and half as many people as knives
. The most common reasoning is that those are terrible guns to commit crimes with due to size. As such, I'd say they're safe enough to not regulate any kind of seriously.
As for social stigmatization, I'd say it's unlikely to work purely because it doesn't seem to actually prevent smokers, drunk driving, or most of the other things it's working against for the most part. It might work if targets are a sufficiently small group, but I don't think it would actually prevent it entirely.
Fight smart, not fair.If we need to regulate anything, it's getting a license to call Slippery slope Fallacy. The fallacy is in assuming Y is the only possible conclusion of X without recognizing even the possibility of middle ground. Slippery slopes happen all the time throughout history (usually stopping at several of those middle grounds along the way, each time justifying that they won't go further!), and legislature and court rulings are built on it. Being wary of a slippery slope is not remotely fallacious, and flippantly disregarding an argument because it's wary of one is, if anything, irresponsible.
That. And
that.
edited 31st Jan '13 12:59:26 PM by Pykrete
And you think stigmatization is going to mean anything to those people in the lease? Stigmatization doesn't really work very well across groups because it simply settles into us vs them. If it were within the group it would help because your friends are doing it, but if they form a comrade-re around it, and tell their opposition to fuck off, how do you plan to implement any sort of stigmatization that's effective without legal backing?
Fight smart, not fair.Fine, call it de-glorifying them. Whatever it is in our culture that makes it seem cool to pack heat and gun down people who cross you, let's target that and work on eliminating it. The militia mentality is separate but related: the notion that gun owners are noble defenders of freedom; the last bulwark against The Enemy Taking Over (whatever that enemy might be).
Frankly, it doesn't bother me if gun owners feel the need to withdraw into iconoclastic little groups to nurse their grievances. Smokers already do that. As long as they aren't shooting kids in schools (or blowing smoke in my face), I'm happy.
In fact, there are many cultures that have banned guns that have not descended into tyranny, so calling Stalin, Hitler, or Mao on attempts to regulate guns is absolutely a slippery slope fallacy. Also, the fallacy implies that regulating additional things is bad, when that might not be the case.
edited 31st Jan '13 2:04:59 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion. If examples re: firearm regulation are so ubiquitous, then it's not going to be hard to bring them up to demonstrate the point, is it?
Of course, if you do that, then it's no longer a fallacy because you have PROOF - not because you assert that it's not a fallacy.
edited 31st Jan '13 2:15:40 PM by Karkadinn
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.

Indeed.