(June 13, 2016 at 7:20 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: I've mentioned here before how my own country (New Zealand) is awash in privately owned firearms, but has a miniscule incidence of gun violence.  I don't think the problem in the US is so much guns as it is gun culture - the notion that nearly anyone who wants a gun should not be obstructed from getting one, and that this is somehow a 'right'.  NZ views gun ownership as a privilege, one that can be taken away for various infractions of the rules.

Boru

I don't even think it's that sort of culture. I think it's a subculture that has been steeped in Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, which views a sidearm as a solution -- which it is only very rarely.

I'm not sure how your media reports this issue to you, but here on the ground in Texas, I can say this: I know many gun-owners. The overwhelming majority have no intention to use their weapon against anything other than paper. The overwhelming majority are not "they can pry my gun from my cold dead hands" types.

I know that even here in America the media distorts the picture on the ground. I can't speak to the accuracy of the reportage you watch, but if it's as accurate as ours is, it's still far off base.

(June 13, 2016 at 7:48 pm)Esquilax Wrote: The Japanese, it should be noted, also seem to have a healthy respect for guns and what they represent, too. They don't treat them as toys, or rhetorical chest-thumping devices, like Americans do.

My uncle took me out to teach me shooting at age nine. He taught me respect for the weapon, taught me to never point it at someone I didn't intend on killing. Taught me that every gun is loaded, taught me that I held the power of life and death in my hands -- "Boy, this will kill anyone on that end. Is that what you want to do?"

I'm not unusual in that regard. I know there are dipshits who use guns for compensation and swagger, but there's a hell of a lot of media bullshit in your verbiage, it seems to me.

Even here, advocating for gun rights, I don't own one myself, so it's not about chest-thumping or anything, your overbroad generalization aside. Poison the well all you want, but there's water down there too, your stereotypes notwithstanding.

(June 13, 2016 at 4:59 pm)Huggy74 Wrote:

(June 13, 2016 at 4:03 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: You quoted murder statistics when discussing homicide even as you mention that the one is a subset of the other. You are equivocating the two terms.

End of argument.

*Sigh*

All murders ARE homicides but all homicides AREN'T murder why don't you understand that?

Huggy, I see your point. But you were quoting the statistics to demonstrate that there are four times more vehicle related 'homicides' than gun-related 'homicides'. You didn't quote 'homicide' figures for gun-related deaths: you quoted 'murder' statistics. While it is true that murders are homicides, you agree that murders are a subset of the total gun-related homicides, therefore the 1:4 ratio you initially quoted isn't true. The imbalance of the two figures was the sole reason for quoting them, to prove your point. The fact that it's not accurate undermines your point.

Having said that, yes, you do have a simplistic point that 'deaths are deaths', so we should be doing something about road safety.

The point is that we DO do things to improve road safety, but given the number of people and vehicles involved, the cost and scale of the infrastructure, the size and complexity of the industries involved, and the sheer number of of influencing factors, makes it a time-consuming and expensive enterprise to make a noticeable difference. Banning cars would be one solution, but it would have a massive social and economic impact and result in the collapse of the country.

On the other hand, given the obvious correlation between the number of guns and the homicide rates, with one relatively cheap law change you could most likely make a substantial impact on death rates, without having any noticeable effect on the economy. It won't solve the whole problem, but it seems like a 'quick win' to me, after which you could re-assess the influence of other aspects of the social problems that lead to gun deaths.

(June 13, 2016 at 8:52 pm)Homeless Nutter Wrote: But whatever, fine - I wasn't arguing, that guns make people want to kill themselves - not in any statistically significant numbers, anyway. They only facilitate a speedy solution. Which at the end of the day - influences statistics, like suicide rates.

I don't think anyone here doubts the efficiency of guns in killing. But I'm pretty sure anyone here who has been there knows that ideation precedes the act ... and those set on their course aren't going to be put out for lack of a one-second solution. People close their garage doors and sit in their cars for twenty minutes, people go out of their ways to save enough from their prescription to combine that with a little vodka for the end-run.

The inclusion of suicides in gun statistics is fallacious for this reason: suicides are voluntary. Just as Huggy included irrelevant data to "support"his argument, so is anyone including suicides in gun deaths doing the same.

Hell, if I wanted to, I could drive off a cliff, and validate a gun-nut's comparison to automobiles ... but would you accept my suicide as statistically valid?

(June 13, 2016 at 9:16 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: I don't even think it's that sort of culture.  I think it's a subculture that has been steeped in Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, which views a sidearm as a solution -- which it is only very rarely.

And, of course, the public failed to understand that, in those films, those were meant to be fairly extreme situations and even then, in quite a few cases, they're actually called out on being too extreme.

Just watch this scene from The Searchers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzu68c2GJSc


and maybe this one for good measure, where he may not be condemned by the characters, but it's clear he's not meant to be the good guy he's cracked up to be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5hT5FLMUBg

TL;DR. People take ideas from things they like and disregard the rest, even if it's crucial to understanding it.

The West was built on guns. I like to think we have evolved past that, considering how long ago the West was civilized.

(June 13, 2016 at 11:06 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote:

(June 13, 2016 at 9:16 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: I don't even think it's that sort of culture.  I think it's a subculture that has been steeped in Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, which views a sidearm as a solution -- which it is only very rarely.

And, of course, the public failed to understand that, in those films, those were meant to be fairly extreme situations and even then, in quite a few cases, they're actually called out on being too extreme.

Just watch this scene from The Searchers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzu68c2GJSc


and maybe this one for good measure, where he may not be condemned by the characters, but it's clear he's not meant to be the good guy he's cracked up to be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5hT5FLMUBg

TL;DR. People take ideas from things they like and disregard the rest, even if it's crucial to understanding it.

Or watch The Shootist. The overarching theme of the movie is the futility of violence as a solution ... and yet how the social admiration that comes to tough guys gets handed down, only to complete the circle.

(June 13, 2016 at 9:36 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:

(June 13, 2016 at 7:48 pm)Esquilax Wrote: The Japanese, it should be noted, also seem to have a healthy respect for guns and what they represent, too. They don't treat them as toys, or rhetorical chest-thumping devices, like Americans do.

My uncle took me out to teach me shooting at age nine. He taught me respect for the weapon, taught me to never point it at someone I didn't intend on killing. Taught me that every gun is loaded, taught me that I held the power of life and death in my hands -- "Boy, this will kill anyone on that end. Is that what you want to do?"

I'm not unusual in that regard. I know there are dipshits who use guns for compensation and swagger, but there's a hell of a lot of media bullshit in your verbiage, it seems to me.

Even here, advocating for gun rights, I don't own one myself, so it's not about chest-thumping or anything, your overbroad generalization aside. Poison the well all you want, but there's water down there too, your stereotypes notwithstanding.

Perhaps I was being too broad, when what I meant to do is point out the very different culture surrounding guns in the US as opposed to elsewhere. I didn't realize I still needed the caveat that I'm not trying to speak sweepingly about an entire group of people- I thought I'd been here long enough that it's clear I try to account for nuance in my positions- but I guess sometimes I do. Some Americans, not all.

That's sort of the problem with trying to politicize an object, I suppose: the act of doing so warps the culture around it so that a certain stripe of citizen, say, takes walking into a supermarket with an assault rifle strapped to them to be patriotic, rather than just sad. I've seen people walking around in shirts that joke about shooting advocates for gun control for being "pussies," I have this kind of right-wing person as an uncle now that I've married Luckie, I'm really not just plucking this stuff out of nowhere.

(June 13, 2016 at 11:28 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Or watch The Shootist. The overarching theme of the movie is the futility of violence as a solution ... and yet how the social admiration that comes to tough guys gets handed down, only to complete the circle.

Fair enough, The Shootist does explicitly deal with those themes. Come to think of it, most of Clint Eastwood's best films deal with it to some extent, particularly his westerns (the ones he and Sergio Leone directed especially, and Unforgiven most of all.) That said, I linked to those two videos from The Searchers to underscore that, no, even in his best films, John Wayne is not always heroic, and anyone looking closely at his films should notice this. It's impressive to see how people can latch so heavily onto those films as a guide for life and miss something so blatant as that. If only the Western didn't more or less die out just as the genre as a whole really started to embrace the moral ambiguity inherent in the whole enterprise.

(June 13, 2016 at 5:26 pm)Brian37 Wrote:

(June 13, 2016 at 5:22 pm)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: The good news is that if you are shot dead you won't suffer from cancer and then die. 

You will never get out of life alive.  Death is a relentless hunter and it always wins.

No shit Sherlock, yes death gets everyone at some point. I don't see how stating that fact has a fucking thing to do with the need to reduce gun deaths. So your answer to gun death is "Shit happens?" Why have any fucking laws at all then?

People who love laws are suffering from the Moses complex.  They think if they have 100 million laws that everything will be perfect.  That's why they keep writing new laws everyday.  It didn't work for Moses and it won't work for you.