[Politics]The Right to Arm Bears in a Crowded Theater

[RobbyPants]

So, the two most common things I hear on the radio from conservatives about gun control is:

1) Now is not the time to talk about it, and

2) Let's talk about better psych evaluations instead (of gun control).

It seems like both of these are ways of paraphrasing "I don't want to talk about gun control" (although at least one offers an alternative as a distraction as opposed to plugging their ears). Is this because they're afraid they're going to lose the debate? I mean, the numbers haven't really ever been in their favor, and it seems like they've endured mostly because of tradition and appeals to emotion, but currently, they might even lose the argument on emotional appeals alone.

Are they just trying to avoid a losing battle, hoping it will blow over?

[erik]

Indeed. Trying to conflate a naturally occurring simple chemical with an engineered murder weapon... seems a bit cheeky. Try again Fuchs with something that makes sense?

[RobbyPants]

Alcohol kills people. A lot of people. It makes them lsoe control too, and is probably the main cause between a lot of violence.

Why is it ok to sacrifice so many people for alcohol, but not for firearms? What makes enjoying guns so much worse than enjoying drinks?

Alcohol directly kills people when they slowly poison themselves. While stupid, it's akin to simply eating unhealthily, or making any other personal choice that is short sighted. No reason to ban it.

Other than that, alcohol doesn't kill people. The actions people take after the fact are what kill the people. The biggest difference is guns enable people with an intent to cause harm to cause lots of harm. Alcohol isn't enabling people to do that. They may make worse judgments, but you criminalize things like driving while drunk. Murder is already a crime. There is no reason to make it easier for people to murder.

The primary difference is intent. Guns make it easier for a person who intends to kill people to kill people. Alcohol makes people who's intent is to drive home more likely to kill people. It's not like people get liquored up and jump on the freeway seeing if they can kill 27 people before they ultimately die.

[RobbyPants]

Courts already use transdermal alcohol detectors in some cases which are worn. So, seriously, want to ban alcohol? Make every citizen wear one, and jail whoever drinks alcohol, and whoever removes the checker. You totally can, these days, wipe out drinking, as long as you wipe out a few of those pesky liberties and rights on the way. So... are you for or against making all people wear alcohol detectors just so no one can abuse it anymore?

Also, simply being drunk is very unlikely to hurt anyone else. Getting behind the wheel drunk is likely. You could have your cake and eat it too by installing these on cars instead. Sure, you could get around that by having a sober person blow into the thing, but why not have them drive instead? I suppose you could have a sober child blow into it, or something, but that's akin to basically sabotaging the trandsermal detector you want anyway.

[K]

Third, alcohol doesn't give individuals the power to kill lots of people in mere minutes, so equating the harm of alcohol and the harm of guns is just insane.

Alcohol kills people. A lot of people. It makes them lsoe control too, and is probably the main cause between a lot of violence.

Why is it ok to sacrifice so many people for alcohol, but not for firearms? What makes enjoying guns so much worse than enjoying drinks?

1. Rates of accidental death and intentional murder are vastly different.

2. People willingly assume the risk when they drink, so if they get liver disease or die of alcohol poisoning it was their fault because they knew the risks and did it anyway. Guns, on the other hand, give power to assholes and harm people who had no choice in whether they wanted to take part in the risk.

So yeh, until keeping a six-pack in your house means that I might accidentally die while you are handling a beer or that six pack gives you the power to kill everyone in the neighborhood, the two things are not even close in magnitude.

[Dr_Noface]

oops

[Username17]

Third, alcohol doesn't give individuals the power to kill lots of people in mere minutes, so equating the harm of alcohol and the harm of guns is just insane.

Alcohol kills people. A lot of people. It makes them lsoe control too, and is probably the main cause between a lot of violence.

Why is it ok to sacrifice so many people for alcohol, but not for firearms? What makes enjoying guns so much worse than enjoying drinks?

First off: there are heavy restrictions on alcohol. "Alcohol Control" is already a thing.

Secondly: as has been pointed out repeatedly to you: Prohibition of Alcohol has been tried and does not work. Prohibition of guns has been tried and does work. Regardless of whether you consider the two to be morally equivalent or not, one of them is a pragmatic success and the other is a pragmatic failure.

Thirdly: Alcohol is fucking food. It's a fundamental decay product of all sugars and is basic substrate of your liver that is literally always present in your body no matter what you eat. A total ban doesn't even make sense and is literally impossible to enforce. All you could possibly hope to achieve would be to regulate how much alcohol can be in various foods and drinks of varying sizes. And... we do in fact already do that.

---

Bottom line: your alcohol/guns comparison is a bad comparison and doesn't make sense on any level. You should stop hammering on it because it makes you look like an idiot and is therefore bad rhetorical strategy.

-Username17

[Shrapnel]

Fuchs, have you ever heard of the 18th amendment? In the early twentieth century, a large group of people (comprised mostly of woman) clamored around and petitioned the goverment to ban alchol because they thought that it was stuff straight from hell and that it was going to send America down the road to oblivion. This movement becomes known as Prohibition.

So, the goverment caves and passes the 18th amendment, which made it unconstitutional to drink, own, or distribute alchohol.

Now, people love to drink. And people don't like to be told to stop drinking. I should know, I've tried.

So, what happens is that hundreds of people begin making their own homemade alchohol. And this in turn leads to the crime of bootlegging, which then in turn leads to hundreds of successful criminals and criminal empires during the Prohibition era. Al Capone is an excellent example of this. The Bush and Kennedy families made their family fortunes through bootlegging.

Eventually, it gets so bad that the goverment removes the 18th amendment, making it legal to get shitfaced again.

Point: The banning of alchohol was tried, and it failed.

Further, your yammering about banning alchohol seems to me like trying to divert attention away the real issue.

[Darth Rabbitt]

The Bush and Kennedy families made their family fortunes through bootlegging.

The Kennedy family did, but the Bush family made their fortune off selling engine parts to the Nazis well after the US declared war on Nazi Germany (as late as 1944.)

[Shrapnel]

Oops. Well, all I remembered was that the Bush family's money came from crime.

[tussock]

The biggest difference is guns enable people with an intent to cause harm to cause lots of harm.

I tried proving that years ago when someone challenged me to. I couldn't do it. The rate of suicide by gun is proportional to the number of people who have ready access to guns, not any higher. The rate of murder by gun is the same. They're just not especially dangerous. People who carry screwdrivers are somewhat more dangerous than people who carry guns, statistically. Gun-locks reduce gun-murders, but not murders, because wanting to kill someone right now is all you need, the lock just changes what you pick up to do it with, not your success rate, statistically speaking.

Mass murders and other killing sprees now involve guns or explosives (it's really hard to buy a good suit of armour and quality sword these days, and highjacking aircraft got really hard once someone told the passengers about that trick). So gun access does make these more common as a matter of practicality.

However, mass killings are a tiny subset of all murders. So you'd keep this sort of thing out of the news, but it's only news because it's still so rare. It wouldn't substantially change the number of kids who get murdered each year, most commonly by their own parents or other people in their place of residence, killed with fists and feet and lack of medical attention.

But if he'd just waited 'till school got out and ploughed his two-tonne vehicle through a big bunch of them at any speed he could've got scores more. At some point you have to deal with the real issue here, why so many current and former attendees like to commit mass murder in their school, in the US.

Which is a really hard question that no one's even allowed to ask, seeing as it challenges all the great national myths at once.

But you might consider not publicising these events quite so hard, seeing as that's totally a motivating factor for a lot of them. Consider a permanent national campaign of anti-bullying in schools, seeing as almost all of them were perpetual victims of group bullying (as popularised on kids TV, note the Glee kids still get bullied all the time). Consider dropping all the casual glorification of violence from your media and replacing it with sex (as if). Or, follow the liberal talking points and ban some guns, and pretend like that'll help.

[Essence]

Casual glorification of violence has already been demonstrated to be unrelated to crime rates or the tendency of a watcher to be violent.

Seeing bullying on TV, on the other hand, has actually totally been proven to increase bullying in schools.

[sabs]

Except this guy has never attended that school. EVER.
So, it has nothing to do with wanting to blow away kids at a school you used to go to. It's also not like Columbine, which was clearly a result of bullying and fame seeking. The Columbine kids had a hit list, as they walked by more than 1 person and did not shoot them. They even said, "not you" to one young lady. So this wasn't like that at all.

The Newtown shooting had more in common with the Aurora shooting, than it did with the Columbine shooting.

[Whatever]

So, the goverment caves and passes the 18th amendment, which made it unconstitutional to drink, own, or distribute alchohol.

Not quite.

Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Owning alcohol, and drinking alcohol, were still legal. If you were a rich person with a wine cellar, you could keep drinking to your heart's content.

[nockermensch]

The biggest difference is guns enable people with an intent to cause harm to cause lots of harm.

I tried proving that years ago when someone challenged me to. I couldn't do it. The rate of suicide by gun is proportional to the number of people who have ready access to guns, not any higher. The rate of murder by gun is the same. They're just not especially dangerous. People who carry screwdrivers are somewhat more dangerous than people who carry guns, statistically. Gun-locks reduce gun-murders, but not murders, because wanting to kill someone right now is all you need, the lock just changes what you pick up to do it with, not your success rate, statistically speaking.

Mass murders and other killing sprees now involve guns or explosives (it's really hard to buy a good suit of armour and quality sword these days, and highjacking aircraft got really hard once someone told the passengers about that trick). So gun access does make these more common as a matter of practicality.

However, mass killings are a tiny subset of all murders. So you'd keep this sort of thing out of the news, but it's only news because it's still so rare. It wouldn't substantially change the number of kids who get murdered each year, most commonly by their own parents or other people in their place of residence, killed with fists and feet and lack of medical attention.

But if he'd just waited 'till school got out and ploughed his two-tonne vehicle through a big bunch of them at any speed he could've got scores more. At some point you have to deal with the real issue here, why so many current and former attendees like to commit mass murder in their school, in the US.

Which is a really hard question that no one's even allowed to ask, seeing as it challenges all the great national myths at once.

But you might consider not publicising these events quite so hard, seeing as that's totally a motivating factor for a lot of them. Consider a permanent national campaign of anti-bullying in schools, seeing as almost all of them were perpetual victims of group bullying (as popularised on kids TV, note the Glee kids still get bullied all the time). Consider dropping all the casual glorification of violence from your media and replacing it with sex (as if). Or, follow the liberal talking points and ban some guns, and pretend like that'll help.

Devil's Advocate: "If you ban guns, you'll make bullying worse! Right now, jocks should be living with the nagging fear that if they push the 90lb weird kid too hard, he'll return to school in with guns and cause a massacre. But without guns, feeble nerds have no easy way to vent out their frustration, so the bullies can act with impunity!"

Is the Right hiring writers right now? I've been reading too many The Onion opinion articles.

[Shrapnel]

So, the goverment caves and passes the 18th amendment, which made it unconstitutional to drink, own, or distribute alchohol.

Not quite.

Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Owning alcohol, and drinking alcohol, were still legal. If you were a rich person with a wine cellar, you could keep drinking to your heart's content.

Ah, well, the Constitution is poorly written.

Also, keep in mind, I learned about Prohibition in middle school, so the fact that I remembered as much as I did is quite frankly amazing. And either way, the 18th amendment caused more harm than good, I think we can all agree.

[Username17]

The rate of suicide by gun is proportional to the number of people who have ready access to guns, not any higher.

This is totally wrong and I have no idea why you believe that. The rate of suicide attempts is proportional to the number of people who have ready access to firearms. The rate of successful suicides isn't proportional at all. Lots of people attempt suicide at some point, but also the vast majority of them don't actually die and go on to live normal lives afterwards. Except the people who attempt suicide with guns, where a majority of them do in fact die.

There are lots of things that go into how often people attempt suicide. There are cultural factors (Looking at you, Japan), there are genetic factors (which is why suicides are so prevalent in Finland and Hungary, those people simply lack the will to live), economic factors (suicide attempts increase whenever the unemployment rate does), social factors (ditto for divorce rates), and so on. But the plain ugly truth of the matter is that the majority of people who slit their wrists or eat a bunch of pills or some other emo drama horseshit don't actually die, while the majority of people who shoot themselves in the head totally do.

The United States has a high overall suicide rate even though it has a low overall suicide attempt rate. Firearms represent less than 2% of the suicide attempts and 51% of the suicide successes in the US. Homes with a firearm in them are five times as likely to experience the death of a family member by successful suicide than those without. If we had less firearms, we'd be counted as a low suicide country.

I cannot believe that you looked at the firearm statistics for even half a second if you came to the conclusion that firearms were not increasing our suicide deaths. Because it's obviously and trivially true that they do.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

Yeah, it's anecdotal, for sure, but I know at least four people who attempted suicide (once or more) without a firearm, and they're all still alive. The two people I know who did use a firearm... aren't.

[PhoneLobster]

Bottom line: your alcohol/guns comparison is a bad comparison and doesn't make sense on any level. You should stop hammering on it because it makes you look like an idiot and is therefore bad rhetorical strategy.

I would also like to briefly focus on his representing it as an offer "you give up alcohol I'll give up my guns".

I accepted that offer. That should be all it requires, a one for one exchange of individuals giving up stuff he is pretending to be equal. Yet he has been eerily silent on that point and NOT immediately agreed to give up his guns in return.

It was clearly a deceptive offer and he does NOT believe that an individual giving up alcohol is equal to him giving up his bullet firing dildos.

I think it's very unfair as I've already melted down all my alcohol in a furnace just like the implications of his offer for what he is supposed to be doing with his guns right now if he were remotely honest on his whole "you give up X I'll give up Y" offer.

[Koumei]

Indeed. Much as I like the occasional drink, I have $30 worth of stuff in the fridge and will gladly pour it down the drain when the people of Switzerland melt their guns down. Hell, I'll make it easy: you can do what we did, where the government buys your guns back at very favourable rates, so you get more money than you spent on them, and then they melt them down, and I will just pour my booze down the drain without expecting a refund.

Deal?

[Fuchs]

I don't give a damn about suicides. Want to kill yourself? Go ahead. My uncle didn't feel like dieing in pain from cancer. Should I'll be in the same situation I'll do the same, but I'd probably opt for a gun, not poison. For the mentally ill there should be enough help around in a civilized state. And honestly, I'd rather have people shoot themselves than jump from bridges or in front of trains and traumatize or even injure others.

As far as alcohol goes: Are you really telling me that drunks only hurt themselves? Are you really so out of it, or such liars, that you try to claim that alcohol doesn't cause a ton of violence, mostly through making people lose control of themselves? Are you so pathetic that you try to lie about the effects alcoholism has on the drunk's family and enviroment?

Why do you think alcohol is getting banned in football stadions around here (edit: here=Switzerland), even in the areas around sports stadions? Because people found out that drinking causes violence.

If you were not allowed to drink to excess we'd have a ton less violence. Yes, prohibition didn't work back then - but that doesn't mean we should not do anything against alcohol abuse. Are you really telling me that just because you can't keep everyone from drinking we shouldn't even try to prevent anyone from drinking? Doesn't that sound a lot like "some criminals will always have guns, so don't try to outlaw them"?

Point is: You lot want to drink, and don't care how many people die as a result of anyone able to buy and drink alcohol. That makes you hypocrites when you rant against guns.

As long as you enjoy a drink you don't have the moral right to complain about guns. It's like a christian extremist trying to get other religions banned while claiming their own "holy book" is special and should not be touched.

With regards to my offer: I didn't mean "you" as in "one of you". But cute way to try to avoid facing your hypocrism.

[Username17]

I don't give a damn about suicides. Want to kill yourself? Go ahead.

That's terrible. The vast majority of suicide attempts, and by vast I mean more than 95% are performed by people who feel very sad in an extremely transient fashion. Suicide is a public health problem. People get urges to kill themselves all the time, and if they have the opportunity to act on those urges at the moment they have them we have an entirely senselessly wasted life.

Genuine reasoned euthanasia is a real thing, but it's very small compared to the number of total suicides. We can compare Holland, where Euthanasia is in fact totally legal and used by many people (about 1600 per year), and conclude that for a country the size of the United States (about 310 million instead of about 16 million people) there should be something on the order of thirty thousand people who genuinely want to and have reason to die in any given year. The actual number of suicide attempts in the United States is something north of 380,000 per year - an order of magnitude more than the people who legitimately and rationally want to die.

Easy access to extremely deadly ways to kill one's self on extremely short term notice would very likely kill hundreds of thousands of people who do not actually want to be dead every single year.

Your opinion here is simply factually wrong. You should consider having a different one.

-Username17

[virgil]

If you were not allowed to drink to excess we'd have a ton less violence. Yes, prohibition didn't work back then - but that doesn't mean we should not do anything against alcohol abuse. Are you really telling me that just because you can't keep everyone from drinking we shouldn't even try to prevent anyone from drinking? Doesn't that sound a lot like "some criminals will always have guns, so don't try to outlaw them"?

I know a fair number of places in the states that do try to inhibit some drinking; dry counties, not before or at work, not while driving or adjacent to driving, etc.

[PhoneLobster]

but that doesn't mean we should not do anything against alcohol abuse. Are you really telling me that just because you can't keep everyone from drinking we shouldn't even try to prevent anyone from drinking? ... hypocrism.

At this point you are flat out ignoring what people have already told you.

It has been mentioned that alcohol IS restricted and limited successfully in various ways. People would ALSO like to restrict GUNS in various ways and those countries that do benefit.

You are flat out arguing the case against yourself despite the fact that someone already pointed that out to you. Why? Typing with one hand while wanking off your metal bullet dildo with the other. That's my theory.

[Tumbling Down]