StrangeSox

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 03:44 PM) The excuse that "The assault weapons ban was full of holes" is not a good reason to not have an assault weapons ban...it's a great reason to actually implement a well-designed assault weapons ban. The NRA pokes that law through with so many loopholes that it isn't as effective as it could be. It's allowed to lapse. Weapons that should have been banned under an effective assault weapons ban get used in mass shootings. People say "but the AWB woudln't have banned those guns". Great, give me one that would. The gun he used is a killing machine, and nothing else. It is built to fend off a battalion. Yeah, the '94 AWB was pretty crappy but did include magazine size limits. So that means we should have a good AWB, not no AWB.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 03:43 PM) The issue comes from how it's currently handled by the "law". These restrictions are often argued because they're not on a level playing field. For example, Chicago has far more restrictions than a neighboring suburb when it comes to purchasing, registering and owning. This type of enforcement doesn't work well...and it leaves too much room for argument. This has to be handled federally, across the board, across all 50 states or the argument will never end. I'm not a fan of guns...never have been. But the idea that people a few blocks away from me are able to have weapons I'm not allowed to have seems unfair...even for a person that has no use for such weapons. This is one of the HUGE problem areas that needs to be addressed. It absolutely needs to be a federal-level policy and you stated why very well. It's also why pointing to Chicago and saying "see! gun control doesn't work!" isn't exactly a strong argument.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 03:42 PM) I didn't mean to infer ALL guns in my prior post, but there's a new push now for gun bans in the wake of Newton. Look at this thread. People are talking about bans on guns left and right. Here's two senators wanting to reinstate the assault weapons ban even though the weapons used would have been legal to have under that law: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...eapons-ban.html oh so you were building a strawman there, cool. Because without the "ALL" part, your response to soxbadger doesn't really make any sense. Yes, after yet another mass gun murder, people are finally starting to think "hey! maybe we have a gun problem!" and would like to do something about it. That is not an absurd or dumb position to take.

The NRA and other gun-advocate groups have been feeding rhetoric that any attempt at regulating guns is just the first step on the inevitable confiscation of all guns for decades.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 03:35 PM) Are you not reading the headlines right now? It's not just dumb people responding. It's smart people who truly believe that proper response to these tragedies is to take away guns entirely. who is saying this? I want links.

QUOTE (CanOfCorn @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 03:31 PM) Cars don't dole out deadly force as their PRIMARY function. Guns do. Even if you are shooting at a range or at tin cans. That is the lone job of a gun. Cars are definitely dangerous...but as was said before, their PRIMARY function is to get someone from point A to point B. They are also specifically designed to ensure the safety of their occupants and to minimize the damage done to other vehicles and pedestrians that are hit. Comparing guns to any other thing that is not primarily designed to kill something is a s*** argument.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 03:27 PM) Oh bulls***. At some point we just choose not to care because of the importance of the object at issue. Obviously you could give two s***s so of course it's a bad analogy for you. I do care, so it's a good one. If you're taking a pragmatic approach to it, yes, you decide at which point it's not worth it. I've decided that the tens of thousands of gun deaths we have every year, and in particular this latest massacre with 20 dead children, is not worth it. I don't believe you can justify your need to own a handgun or an assault* rifle in the face of that reality. That doesn't mean I'm advocating for a ban on all guns, but it does mean I'm advocating for strict restrictions on many guns. There simply is not a net benefit to having 300+M guns floating around our society. You can't make the pragmatic case against cars. Our economy would cease to function. The same isn't anywhere close to true if we started strong restrictions on certain types of guns. *I note again that this category is problematic but for the sake of argument etc.

That's because vehicles and guns are not the same thing with the same sort of benefits to society. We don't talk about that because that argument is infantile.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 03:18 PM) No, like everything else in life, when something goes wrong, we don't blame the product, we blame the person making the mistake. If you own a gun and someone accidentally gets shot, it's because you f***ed up and made a mistake, just like running a red light and hitting something with your car. It's not the cars fault, it's your fault for operating the car the wrong way. If your seven year old gets ahold of the gun, you made a mistake. If you have a teenager with a problem, and he gets your gun, you made a mistake. That doesn't make guns anymore dangerous because some asshole somewhere shoots up a school or some negligent gun owner allowed his kids to get his guns. No, what makes guns more dangerous is that they are specifically designed to kill things whereas cars are designed to transport you and are designed, by law, to limit their ability to kill other things.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 02:32 PM) I was going to edit that after that was when I got my handguns and rifle, realizing that my shotgun wasn't going to do much until they got closer. I have had that gun since I was 10. I still got shot at, and a few more steps I was opening fire. Yet you never had to use your gun, and you relied on the police.

We can't get rid of [tools of violent crime] until violent crime is stopped.

that's exactly why the thread started off asking if its time to revisit the 2nd. If it's modified via amendment (or changed via overruling Heller), then you don't need to talk about what is unconstitutional or not.

Yet you never had to use your gun or even threaten to use it and instead actually did rely on the police. And as you said, it was a shotgun, not a handgun or an 'assault' rifle*. You didn't need a personal arsenal, 10,000 rounds of ammunition and a 30-round magazine with more strapped to your chest. You were in fear because other people had guns. That's the same reason we'd like to restrict them--far too many guns are out there already, and it's trivially easy for anyone to get their hands on one, legally or not. By the way, I fully agree with your push-back against the naive "just move!" argument.

Some commentary on the 7C/Posner decision mandating concealed carry in Illinois last week: On one level, I think this is a little unfair to Posner. Whatever motivated his (tasteless) joke, it’s not that he’s a gun nut indifferent to the consequences of striking down gun control legislation. Posner has been openly contemptuous of the the Supreme Court’s holding in Heller. Having said that, Posner’s opinion is a little odd. Had the Supreme Court in Heller merely declared an individual right to bear arms in self-defense without detailing the potential limitations, it would be hard to object to Posner’s application of the precedent. On its face, Posner’s argument isn’t illogical: if the 2nd Amendment creates an individual right to self-defense, this would seem to apply outside the home even if the facts of Heller were about maintaining a weapon in one’s residence. The problem is, Scalia’s opinion did address this question directly, and at a minimum strongly implied that the 2nd Amendment did not proscribe concealed carry laws: Given that to Scalia originalism provided the justification for finding an individual right to bear arms, this settles the question for me. My reading of Posner’s opinion — since we know his application of Heller isn’t the product of a personal belief that the Second Amendment should confer an individual right to bear arms — is that it’s another round in his ongoing battle with Scalia. Scalia might disown the implications of his opinion, Posner seems to be saying, but lower courts are now obligated to follow his holding to its radical conclusions. If you don’t like it, overrule Heller. I can sort of understand the impulse, but I think Epps is right that it’s the wrong course to take. Reductio ad absurdum is fine for a law review article, but less so for an circuit court. If the Supreme Court wants to hold that concealed carry laws are unconstitutional, it should go first. Especially since the Supreme Court can just refuse to hear appeals, lower courts shouldn’t apply Heller more broadly than necessary, it in particular shouldn’t cite it to strike down laws that the Court specifically implied are constitutional.

It's ridiculous to equate cars and guns in their threat and their utility. If that's really the best pro-gun argument out there, you have a very weak case. Guns are a "boogeyman" because, unlike cars or knives, they're designed to kill things. They're used much more frequently in this country to kill other people, and there's several hundred million of them in circulation. The benefits of our current liberalized gun policies are questionable at best. It isn't going overboard to recognize the very real harm that guns cause in our country and want to stop that.

Yet we live in some strange fear where we rationalize easy and widespread access to dangerous weapons and fight against any sort of laws to restrict or regulate them, arguing instead that we need more guns in more places and more people should be carrying loaded weapons on them at all times. If guns weren't a much more effective means of killing things than cars or knives, they wouldn't exist. It's silly to argue that they are not extremely good at what they are designed to do.

His fear of being a victim of gun violence is no less ridiculous than the argument that we need quick and easy access to loaded weapons for self-defense.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 11:44 AM) I agree with something like this more than I'd agree with someone who took every precaution and it happens anyway, and them being thrown in jail for a murder they didn't commit. Some of these suggestions are on the verge of going way too far, which is exactly what I said would happen when people suggest laws or legislation when in a state of emotional response. Soxbadger is proposing hypotheticals that are intentionally out on the edge to illustrate a point, I think.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 11:37 AM) Um, no. That's not about taking responsibility. You can be 100% responsible and have your weapon stolen somehow. I don't agree with blaming that person if they took every precaution against it, but it happened anyway. like requiring that it be stored in a locked safe however, you could possibly restrict straw purchases this way if you had a national registry.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 11:29 AM) What I believe isn't really relevant to the conversation. If we're in a thread discussing what reasonable gun policy in this country should be, it seems relevant.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 11:29 AM) And I'm asking how. Presumably gang members use friends or family to get legally acquired guns. What restriction on those family members could be put into a law to stop that gun from getting to a gang member and being used? Gonna do a background check to make sure that the person doesn't have any gang member relatives? You're missing my point. I'm not in favor of continuing the status quo when it comes to the availability to get guns for everyone. Families of gang members or the middle-aged dude in the suburbs should be equally restricted. The wide-spread easy access to guns is part of the problem itself.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 11:25 AM) So if the rest come from legal purchases, what gun restrictions would curb that problem? Criminals and felons can't legally purchase guns, so you're still getting them from law-abiding people with no records. Looks like the solution is to restrict the ability of law-abiding citizens. Technically, they are not actually law-abiding, but since we have no way to screen that, we need to reconsider the ease with which any non-criminal can obtain a gun.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 11:23 AM) I think he meant if guns get banned or are made illegal. But no one is proposing that this actually happens.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 11:20 AM) It IS an economic certainty that even if you banned and removed all gun the US today, that someone would go into business replacing them, and making s***loads of money doing it. It goes to one of the top arguments for legalization of drugs and pro-abortion... Do you want to have the process controlled and monitored by the government, or do you want it driven completely underground? Yet there would not be 300 million guns circulating on the black market, and it'd be highly unlikely that most Law Abiding Citizens, like Nancy Lanza, would have several of them laying about their house unsecured.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Dec 17, 2012 -> 11:15 AM) That's the point exactly. It isn't the law that changes behavior. People are going to do what they are going to do. The only real deterrent to that is a real threat of punishment. If this woman wasn't locking her guns up with a mentally unstable kid around, what's the real rationale that she would have done it because her government told her to do so? She was already more lax in a more extreme situation than most would be. I don't see another law as having changed this situation. The existence of the law itself can have persuasive force even without threat of stringent enforcement. It provides a standard or a code that you are aware of and are expected to follow. Here is one study of safe-storage laws that found considerable reduction of accidental death of minors. What do you see as possibly changing this situation? Is there any form of additional gun control you'd support?