I think you’re dodging the point. I already said I was in favor of stronger licensing, insurance, and training requirements in a failed attempt to avoid that rebuttal. If somebody steals something from me in the middle of the night while I’m asleep, something I was legally allowed to have, and they use it to commit a crime before I notice it’s gone, I should not be punished unless I was negligent in where I left it.
I also don’t understand the design argument. Cars are used to kill people efficiently all the time. Doesn’t matter if they were designed for it, they do it. If you want to go down that route, I would say the guns I own were designed to put holes in paper from a distance, because that’s all they’ve ever been used for. My guns, like my car, have a zero percent fatality rate. There are a lot of people in the world who can’t say that about cars they’ve owned. See how silly the argument gets?
Great, you’ve identified that there are going to be edge cases in what I said in a non-binding web forum. My point was that if your guns are stolen and you don’t notice or report it until the police show up weeks or months later you don’t fall under the “responsible gun owner” label that everyone loves to throw around.
Don’t play dumb dude, we all know what guns are designed for regardless of your own personal use. You can just as easily put holes in paper from a distance with BB or airsoft guns that are significantly less lethal.
You’re right, guns are designed to kill. I don’t own a gun to put holes in paper, I own it in case I’m ever attacked and I need it to defend myself. I was simply arguing that the design is irrelevant, and you disagree. Fair enough. But there are a lot of crazy motherfuckers out there. I live a 30 minute drive from three of the most infamous mass shootings ever perpetrated in the U.S., one of which was people being gunned down while shopping for groceries. So that’s why I carry one, not because I’m afraid (I’m not, the chances of that happening to me specifically are close to zero) but because it is happening, and if it does happen I want to give myself some small chance of saving myself and my loved ones. It’s still a tool of last resort because I know the most likely outcome of me shooting a criminal is me being killed by the police immediately afterward. I still want the chance to defend myself. But you won’t see me rushing into a situation to save strangers, because people have done that in my state and… been immediately killed by the police.
The real problem with making progress is that people who say they want more regulation usually don’t really want that, they want all guns removed from everywhere, period. And anyone who owns one is, by default, part of the problem. Gun control activists typically use the same strategies that anti-abortion activists use, to creep towards their eventual goal. I strongly suspect you fall into that camp. And I personally would love to live in that world, where guns don’t exist, but it’s a fairy tale. You’re welcome to hold those opinions but no meaningful change will come out of it. For a citation on that, I present to you: All of human history since the invention of the firearm.
I prefer to see solutions or regulations that work towards personal responsibility (recurring training requirements, with testing, at a bare fucking minimum), and other programs that remove the impetus behind most of these attacks, which is untreated mental illness. And that’s because there is no black and white fix to this problem. Excessive punishment, prison, or further empowering the police doesn’t accomplish it, any more than making homelessness illegal gets rid of the problem of homelessness. If that sort of thing worked, we wouldn’t have people sitting on death row. I believe that a much more effective place to spend money addressing this is on social programs that could help people from feeling like lashing out is their only remaining option.
Guns are designed to kill deer, ducks, and other animals that I want to kill. That they can kill humans is not intentional.
That argument isn’t much different from the argument that cars are for getting around and that they can kill is not intentional. If you care about death, then by every metric you need to ban cars first.
Humans are animals and some people seem to like killing them. By all means, let’s mandate licensing and insurance to own guns. No one seems to have a problem with those being requirements for cars.
Billions of dollars have been and are being spent to make cars less likely to kill people. But they have actual uses outside destroying things, unlike guns.
As a liberal gun owner who carries a concealed handgun, I say bullshit. You can’t say that as a blanket statement. Handguns are meant to kill people, first and foremost. Military rifles are designed to kill people, period, because the military is not in the business of hunting. The vast majority of guns ever created were created to allow for easier killing of human beings. To argue anything else is disingenuous. I facetiously argued against that point in another post in this thread, but only to illustrate that the design is irrelevant to the usage. Nobody buys a handgun to kill deer or ducks.
That would be a much stronger argument if cars were specifically designed to kill things efficiently.
There are also licensing and insurance requirements for cars that don’t exist for guns.
I think you’re dodging the point. I already said I was in favor of stronger licensing, insurance, and training requirements in a failed attempt to avoid that rebuttal. If somebody steals something from me in the middle of the night while I’m asleep, something I was legally allowed to have, and they use it to commit a crime before I notice it’s gone, I should not be punished unless I was negligent in where I left it.
I also don’t understand the design argument. Cars are used to kill people efficiently all the time. Doesn’t matter if they were designed for it, they do it. If you want to go down that route, I would say the guns I own were designed to put holes in paper from a distance, because that’s all they’ve ever been used for. My guns, like my car, have a zero percent fatality rate. There are a lot of people in the world who can’t say that about cars they’ve owned. See how silly the argument gets?
Great, you’ve identified that there are going to be edge cases in what I said in a non-binding web forum. My point was that if your guns are stolen and you don’t notice or report it until the police show up weeks or months later you don’t fall under the “responsible gun owner” label that everyone loves to throw around.
Don’t play dumb dude, we all know what guns are designed for regardless of your own personal use. You can just as easily put holes in paper from a distance with BB or airsoft guns that are significantly less lethal.
You’re right, guns are designed to kill. I don’t own a gun to put holes in paper, I own it in case I’m ever attacked and I need it to defend myself. I was simply arguing that the design is irrelevant, and you disagree. Fair enough. But there are a lot of crazy motherfuckers out there. I live a 30 minute drive from three of the most infamous mass shootings ever perpetrated in the U.S., one of which was people being gunned down while shopping for groceries. So that’s why I carry one, not because I’m afraid (I’m not, the chances of that happening to me specifically are close to zero) but because it is happening, and if it does happen I want to give myself some small chance of saving myself and my loved ones. It’s still a tool of last resort because I know the most likely outcome of me shooting a criminal is me being killed by the police immediately afterward. I still want the chance to defend myself. But you won’t see me rushing into a situation to save strangers, because people have done that in my state and… been immediately killed by the police.
The real problem with making progress is that people who say they want more regulation usually don’t really want that, they want all guns removed from everywhere, period. And anyone who owns one is, by default, part of the problem. Gun control activists typically use the same strategies that anti-abortion activists use, to creep towards their eventual goal. I strongly suspect you fall into that camp. And I personally would love to live in that world, where guns don’t exist, but it’s a fairy tale. You’re welcome to hold those opinions but no meaningful change will come out of it. For a citation on that, I present to you: All of human history since the invention of the firearm.
I prefer to see solutions or regulations that work towards personal responsibility (recurring training requirements, with testing, at a bare fucking minimum), and other programs that remove the impetus behind most of these attacks, which is untreated mental illness. And that’s because there is no black and white fix to this problem. Excessive punishment, prison, or further empowering the police doesn’t accomplish it, any more than making homelessness illegal gets rid of the problem of homelessness. If that sort of thing worked, we wouldn’t have people sitting on death row. I believe that a much more effective place to spend money addressing this is on social programs that could help people from feeling like lashing out is their only remaining option.
Guns are designed to kill deer, ducks, and other animals that I want to kill. That they can kill humans is not intentional.
That argument isn’t much different from the argument that cars are for getting around and that they can kill is not intentional. If you care about death, then by every metric you need to ban cars first.
Humans are animals and some people seem to like killing them. By all means, let’s mandate licensing and insurance to own guns. No one seems to have a problem with those being requirements for cars.
Billions of dollars have been and are being spent to make cars less likely to kill people. But they have actual uses outside destroying things, unlike guns.
As a liberal gun owner who carries a concealed handgun, I say bullshit. You can’t say that as a blanket statement. Handguns are meant to kill people, first and foremost. Military rifles are designed to kill people, period, because the military is not in the business of hunting. The vast majority of guns ever created were created to allow for easier killing of human beings. To argue anything else is disingenuous. I facetiously argued against that point in another post in this thread, but only to illustrate that the design is irrelevant to the usage. Nobody buys a handgun to kill deer or ducks.