Gun Control III

Hyroglyphx writes: Ah, so, if I implant a SINGLE murder story that could have been avoided if they were armed, I suddenly validate the whole premise of gun ownership based on that single example? We use examples to defend or a elucidate a deeper philosophical point... which is what Percy was trying to do and which is perfectly fine to do. But what you're suggesting is that I must now only discuss that particular case. I wonder if the same logic will apply if I give a real-world scenario of a murder case.

Statistics, facts, data make the case. The stories I post only make the point that the murder and mayhem continues while gun nuts stonewall.

That would be better but still poor. Percy’s point is these events are inevitable given widespread gun ownership and they don’t all happen to involve “idiots”. Yeah, and murder is inevitable too but we still pass legislation against it... I mean, seriously... what is your point?

The oft-described point is that normal average people (which is most people) will inevitably make mistakes, have accidents, or become angry, despondent or mentally ill. The widespread availability of guns makes the expression of these human foibles deadly.

You really did dismiss Percy’s point as a “hypothetical scenario” which could be countered by inventing your own. That is the “substance”. The story is real, the moral behind it is hypothetical and debatable.

You keep saying you accept the statistics, but you really don't. If you did then you would understand that gun possession increasing mortality risk is a reality, not a hypothetical.

quote: The underlying argument based on that story IS hypothetical. Because of this happening, that ought to happen in response. That doesn’t even make sense. The purpose of Percy sharing that story serves as an illustration of why people should not privately own weapons. A child can't shoot themselves without the gun, ergo if you introduce the gun you are responsible for the outcome... ergo guns should not be privately owned. How's that?

This is only partially accurate. Our culture of guns tells people that guns make them safer, therefore you can't really hold individuals responsible when they think of safety instead of danger when they think of guns. It tells them to think of shooting criminals when they hold their gun instead of pondering the risk of hurting or killing themselves or someone in their family or one of their friends or neighbors. When the luck of the draw says that today is the day that they'll be insufficiently careful or accident-free or sane, an unneeded death can be the result.

You seem to believe that guns have zero utility.... I'm asking how that would work for an unarmed military force.

You're raising the military yet again? I think you should save this canned response for someone advocating disarming the military. Good luck finding such a person.

Obviously guns do have a place in society, for however unfortunate that reality may be. As to your country, the one that has headlines about its "knife epidemic," only serves to prove that in the absence of guns people find other ways to kill people... which brings it all back to my central point that the true underlying issue is why people feel compelled to kill in the first place.

You keep bringing up the same points. This has been answered before. If is far easier to kill with a gun than a knife, plus guns can be used to cause death impulsively and instantly while knives usually cannot. The murder rate (all methods) in the US is 5.35, in the UK 1.20.

--Percy

Hyroglyphx writes: The reality is that I would like a world where fewer bad things happen. That is well within our power. I would like that too... I'm all ears as to suggestions.

Get rid of the guns.

You can't escape the fact that guns place one in more danger, not less. I don't deny that and have never denied that. But they exist and the genie is out of the bottle. It really, really sucks that nuclear weapons exist... I hate that fact. But as it stands now the only real deterrence is also possessing them. Its an unfortunate reality and I would never say that it isn't unfortunate.

And yet the world engages in significant efforts at nuclear arms control (like the treaty with Iran that Trump stupidly withdrew from and that has led to the current situation of increased risk of war with Iran). Why shouldn't the US make equally determined efforts at arms control for guns?

Just because we know how to make a nuclear bomb or a gun doesn't mean we have to actually make them and possess them and point them at populations and people.

"Because the loaded gun was placed under the seat of the jeep, a boy found it and critically wounded his mother. Therefore get rid of the gun under the seat so that the boy shooting his mother cannot happen." There is no "variable P." You're arguing two different things. Follow that conversation and then get back to me when you've addressed the actual premise.

He said as if he actually had a premise. What is your premise, pray tell?

Your point made no sense. Follow the argument and make an actual point. The reality is that if a gun had not been under the seat of the jeep the boy could not have shot his mother. There is no "variable P". You're saying things that have no apparent meaning, or possibly you severely lack clarity.

We agree that people are the real threat, and the better lethally armed the person the more mayhem. That's why we don't allow people to have tanks and bazookas, and why we shouldn't let them have guns, either. Fine, lets slow things down then.

What you mean is, "I'm going to ignore your comment and go off in a new direction." Do you understand that statistics tell us a gun is much more likely to be used against yourself, a family member, a friend, or someone nearby, than against a criminal? Do you understand that people are imperfect and that mistakes committed with deadly weapons can be, well, deadly?

Do you believe human beings have a fundamental right to protect themselves up to and including deadly force when deadly force is presented against them?

Addressing your change of topic, if they've got a gun and are threatening to kill you, and you've got a gun, too, then sure, go for it, defend yourself. But you still don't seem to understand how incredibly unlikely this scenario is compared to scenarios like the gun going off while cleaning your gun or showing someone your gun or loading your gun or demonstrating your gun or getting angry at someone or growing despondent or becoming mentally ill or just having an unfortunate accident.

How are you imagining that your scenario happens with any meaningful frequency? Let's say someone wants to kill you. You're fully armed, gun on your hip, ready to draw at an instant's notice. At a moment of their choosing someone approaches you from behind on the street, puts a gun to your head, pulls the trigger, then walks away and disappears into the crowd.

Or let's say you're at home watching television when someone suddenly breaks down your door and points a gun at you. Is your gun still on your hip or maybe in your lap? Then you draw and fire. Good for you. You were prepared for just this situation and you came through unscathed.

Or is your gun in a drawer? That's not very safe, is it, but let's say when you got home after your day of open carry you placed the gun in a drawer. Can you get to it in time?

Or when you got home did you place the gun in a lockbox in one room and the ammunition in another lockbox in another, which is what all gun safety classes insist you should do. I think you're screwed.

So someone's more likely to be killed if there's an accident with your gun? So that more people can be killed more quickly in a mass shooting? You must find it terribly ironic then that the killers themselves are killed with guns.

Why would I find that ironic? As you know, since I assume your memory isn't defective, I've advocated placing guns in the hands of specially trained units. It isn't a matter of whether gun violence is dealt with using guns, but whether we have specially trained and competent units to deal with gun violence (see the Police Shootings thread for many examples of the dire consequences of an armed police force).

Everything you say you've said before. Repetition doesn't render fallacies true. You've also already seen the answers before. You're like a chess player who doesn't even plan one move ahead, who just pushes pieces and in subsequent games keeps repeating the same mistakes. Maybe popping in occasionally isn't a good approach for you.

You're arguing against yourself. Many things in life are dangerous, but except for guns we try to increase their safety. That's not true,...

Of course it's true that we're not trying to make guns safer, which would have to be where it counts, through legislation. You really need to work on your consistency. First you argue for the legitimacy of existing efforts at gun lethality, then you claim the opposite that there are efforts to increase gun safety. Where are these efforts? Where's the legislation to require that guns be keyed to fingerprints or faces or retina patterns, that they must be made so they can't be adjusted to make them more "hair-trigger," and that they must be somehow keyed so they can't accept the more lethal forms of ammunition (at least not without a special license), and so forth, just for a few ideas for how government could make guns safer, in a manner similar to how they made cars safer.

Biofire makes a fingerprint-keyed gun. iGun Technology has a gun keyed to a ring with a chip in it. Armatix GmbH keys their gun to a watch. Are you in favor of government requiring that all guns have some sort of lockout feature like these?

When Armatix GmbH tried to sell their gun in the US they soon ceased their efforts due to an outcry from gun-rights advocates because of concerns about things like a New Jersey law that says that within three years of a smart gun being commercially available that all guns in the state must be smart guns.

Smart guns are expensive. For example, the Armatix GmbH gun cost $1300, and several hundred dollars more for the watch. What is a life worth? Is it worth less than making guns easily affordable?

Self defense advocates will always argue against smarts guns. "They cost too much, what if the battery runs out just as I need it, what if the 1 second it takes to recognize my fingerprint is the 1 second I need to save my life,..." And so on.

...because nobody wants a gun to go off when it isn't supposed to.

Of course no one wants a gun to go off unintentionally, yet many people ignore this desire and make their guns more "hair-trigger." People are often irrational and inconsistent. It's one of the reasons why people shouldn't have guns.

Manufacturers do add a lot of safety features to ensure that a gun only goes off when it is designed to. There's an incentive for that.

Really. So how come a boy was able to reach under the seat of a jeep, pull out a gun, and shoot his mother?

And except in certain circumstances (rare except for hunting), guns have no utility. Cars have high utility but are especially dangerous, but look one more time at what all the effort on car safety has accomplished. And cars will become even more safe when self-driving cars continue to improve. Maybe you'll be okay with guns when in the hands of Machine Learning.

The method of lockout isn't as important as the concept being accepted by gun nuts. As I described above, smart guns are viewed very suspiciously and skeptically by gun nuts.

I'm curious how you feel about less lethal devices, like Tasers.

Aren't Tasers wielded by the same insufficiently trained and imperfect people who wield guns? Of course the much reduced lethality of Tasers makes them much less a concern, but reports of misuse of Tasers abound, like the case of a visiting non-English speaking elderly mother getting tased while picking flowers but being unresponsive to police orders. Taser training and guidelines state that the mother was above the threshold age for tasing. That she was elderly was visually obvious. She survived but spent time in the hospital.

And the lawyer for murdered Pamela Turner is speaking out. See Message 224 for the latest developments. Not a pretty picture of our finest.

Not only does New Hampshire have lax gun laws, people aren't often held responsible for gun accidents. I've told the story before of the man cleaning his rifle at the kitchen table of his 2nd floor apartment when it went off, killing a man sleeping on his sofa in the apartment above. The New Hampshire Attorney General declined to press charges, deeming it an unfortunate accident. It is an unfortunate accident, but it also happens to be manslaughter... I disagree with the AG's decision.

There was no public outrage at the AG's decision.

Adjacent regions have much more lax gun laws, rendering the laws in Chicago and Illinois ineffectual. So gun laws don't stop criminals...

Strict nationwide gun control would make it more difficult for criminals to obtain weapons.

Even if tomorrow we tried turning the entire US into the UK it would be a monumental disaster and one where the homicide rate would increase exponentially.

You're merely repeating the same false scaremongering you've repeated many times before.

Along those lines I'm curious to hear how you would go about solving the gun problem.

Get rid of the guns.

--Percy

Source: ebay

--Percy

Hyroglyphx writes: Get rid of the guns. I'd love to hear how you propose disarming a nation of over 350 million gun-toting citizens...

Current US population is 328.9 million, not "over 350 million."

Many people own multiple guns, which of course you knew, so there cannot possibly be "350 million gun-toting citizens." Only about 1/3 of US households have a gun, so most people do not even have access to a gun. Of those who do a great many are not "toting" them around, not counting those who are hunting.

...deeply ingrained in the 2nd Amendment...

According to the Gallup poll from last year, about 60% of Americans support stricter gun control. About 20% of Americans want the 2nd Amendment repealed.

...that, statistically, own twice as many guns as there are people....

As of a year ago there were about 393 firearms in the United States, so there are about 1.2 guns/person.

...oh, and all with a police force that you disarmed.

And that's wrong, too. You managed to get through an entire paragraph without saying a single correct thing, as well as going around in circles asking the same questions that have been asked and answered before. Since you've forgotten the answer I'll repeat it: I don't know how we get from where we are to where we eventually have to be, but some places to start are registration of all firearms, licensing of all firearm users, training requirements, and home safety inspections (particularly of homes with children).

Maybe this concept is lost on you, but the very people that choose professions involving firearms (military, police, etc) where do you think they land on the socio-political spectrum when it comes to private ownership of guns?

Is there even a concept in there for someone to lose? Could you be more cryptic, perhaps?

You can write whatever laws you want, Percy, but without someone like me in the trenches enforcing those laws, they're useless in practical terms.

What is it you do in your trench? You've never told us, just that you're not a policeman.

Will try to get the rest of your premises when time permits.

Popping in with little time is killing your accuracy, and spending little time here is causing you to forget that most of what you're saying you've said before, and people have answered it before. I'm not saying you should spend more time here or that you should respond more promptly, just that your current approach isn't working for you.

--Percy

Taq writes: By that same logic, we should throw out every law since almost every law has been broken. We have laws against murder, but people still commit murder, so let's get rid of that law. People still steal stuff even though it is against the law, so let's get rid of it. Does this make much sense to you?

He's made this argument before, its idiocy has been pointed out before, but he keeps repeating it anyway.

--Percy

As Vimesey reports, there were two mass shootings in the past 24 hours.

Saturday morning at a crowed Walmart in El Paso, Texas, a gunmen opened fire, killing 20 and injuring 26, some with life threatening injuries. The shooter was taken into custody:

Mass Shooting in Texas

And early Sunday morning at a bar in Dayton, Ohio, 9 people were killed and 16 people injured. The shooter was also killed, details are sketchy at this time:

Mass Shooting in Ohio

It's time we instituted reasonable measures to end mass shootings:

• All citizens must be armed at all times, including children, especially children, because they are our future.
  Babies will be issued tiny Derringers.

• Schools and churches will be gun-required zones, right down to kindergarten and nursery school. In the interest of teacher safety homework and book reports will be outlawed.

• Citizens will be required to open carry their weapons, so that they are ready for instant response.

• All weapons will be required to be fully automatic with a minimum firing rate of 10 rounds/second.

• Any citizen discovered to have not fired their weapon at least ten times during a mass shooting will be deported to Mexico.

• All ammunition will be required to be highly deadly hollow points like this:

• It will be illegal for any non-pure American to own or carry a firearm or to remain in the country. DNA tests will establish who stays and who goes. Those failing the test will be deported to Mexico. Naturalized American citizens, green cards, visas, 10% Irish, doesn't matter. They all go. When they're all gone then Chief You-Can-Stick-Your-Reservation will turn out the lights.

• Police will perform house-to-house checks making sure that all occupants are armed and that no guns or ammunition are in lockboxes. Guns must be placed at strategic locations around the house best positioned for home defense.

• Any citizen caught unarmed will be deported to Mexico.

• A special court will be opened to handle all firearm cases. It will have one judge with a rubber stamp.

• All guns must be cocked and ready to fire. The phrase "locked and loaded" will be replaced with "cocked and loaded."

Finally we'll be safe in this country.

--Percy

Edited by Percy, : A couple more.

Edited by Percy, : Typo.

The Garlic Festival shooting has been a massive coverup by the liberal media. It was actually one of the most successful examples of what an armed citizenry can achieve in our country's history. The reality is that the gunman pulled out his gun but didn't get off a single shot before festival attendees dropped their garlic laden burdens, pulled out their guns, and unleashed a fusillade that stopped the gunman in his tracks. Yes, there was some collateral damage.

More seriously, I was tied up when Gilroy happened, was hoping someone else would mention it, thanks.

--Percy

Okay, gun nuts, here's a quandary for you. Yesterday an Armed Man was Arrested in a Walmart in Springfield, Missouri, for carrying a loaded rifle, a handgun, and a hundred rounds of ammunition while wearing body armor. Green County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Patterson said:

quote:

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“Missouri protects the right of people to open carry a firearm, but that does not allow an individual to act in a reckless and criminal manner endangering other citizens.”

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My question: What law did Dmitriy Andreychenko break? Missouri is an open carry state (it does have restrictions, like schools and polling places, and private businesses can also ban guns). Walmart sells guns and so of course it's fine to open carry inside Walmart in Missouri. This means that Andreychenko carrying a handgun on his hip was legal, carrying a rifle was legal, carrying ammunition was legal, and wearing body armor was legal. He wasn't behaving in a menacing or threatening way. He was just walking through Walmart while making a cellphone video of himself.

Andreychenko was arrested for making a terrorist threat. I think that as long as he has a lawyer who is one level of competence up from a public defender (I'm not attacking public defenders, it's just that they have too many cases and too little time to be effective in non-trivial cases) that he shouldn't have any trouble getting off. And if he doesn't then the ACLU should take up his case. It would be interesting to see this gun control case go to the Supreme Court.

It's nice to know that the good citizens of open-carry Missouri still have their wits about them and see armed men as dangerous. They might want to reconsider their open carry laws. Asserting your 2nd amendment rights in the abstract is one thing, but encountering an unknown armed man while just out and about on your daily errands is quite another. Allowing armed civilians assumes that they're responsible and sane and have good judgment, but we know this isn't true of everyone, and it is nonsense to think that people can make accurate on-the-spot decisions about everyone who is armed just by their superficial appearance.

What this Walmart incident shows is that even people in open-carry states know how dangerous guns are. They obviously feel strongly about the right to carry their firearms with them, but when it comes right down to it they also feel strongly about feeling safe, and this incident shows that they understand that guns do not make them more safe. No one in that Walmart felt reassured as Andreychenko patrolled the aisles. Missourians, and people in many other states, have to start making sane decisions about whether guns really make them safer.

--Percy

Yeah, I know all that, but I think the ACLU would like the case because it would force Missouri to defend the position that open carry doesn't really mean open carry. The end result could be stricter open carry laws in Missouri, which would be a good thing from the ACLU's perspective.

Missouri's gun laws are contradictory. This is a summary of Missouri's open carry law from the Giffords Law Center:

quote:

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No statutes in Missouri specifically prohibit the open carrying of firearms, and it specifically authorizes any person who has a valid concealed carry endorsement, and who is lawfully carrying a firearm in a concealed manner, to briefly and openly display the firearm to the ordinary sight of another person, unless the firearm is intentionally displayed in an angry or threatening manner, not in necessary self-defense. No person may exhibit any weapon readily capable of lethal use in an angry or threatening manner in the presence of one or more persons.

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More briefly, no statute prohibits open carry. Only people with a "valid concealed carry endorsement" who are "carrying a firearm in a concealed manner" are restricted in how openly they can display their firearms. Andreychenko was openly carrying and so didn't need to follow the concealed carry laws.

Because of this lack of any open carry laws that would provide some specificity of what's allowed and what isn't, Andreychenko was arrested on terrorism charges. But I've been searching the Missouri statutes and have found no law specifically addressing the commission of terrorism. The closest is the Forcible entry and detainer defined:

quote:

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   534.020. Forcible entry and detainer defined. — If any person shall enter upon or into any lands, tenements or other possessions, with force or strong hand, or with weapons, or by breaking open the doors or windows or other parts of a house, whether any person be in it or not, or by threatening to kill, maim or beat the party in possession, or by such words or actions as have a natural tendency to excite fear or apprehension of danger, or by putting out of doors or carrying away the goods of the party in possession, or by entering peaceably and then turning out by force, or frightening, by threats or other circumstances of terror, the party out of possession, and detain and hold the same in every such case, the person so offending shall be deemed guilty of a "forcible entry and detainer" within the meaning of this chapter.

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I don't think this is going to work well in court against someone who walked through the open doors of a Walmart in an open carry state.

--Percy

Sunday night a 35-year old Florida man shot and killed his 36-year old wife, his 61-year old mother in law, a 3-year old daughter, then himself. Left alive was the daughter's twin. Pablo Colon Jr., 35, had been living in the house with his family for the past six months. After reports a SWAT team stormed the house and found the bodies. A handgun was found in the house.

This is why having a gun in the house makes you less safe, because the odds of an accident or someone going crazy or becoming depressed or angry are much greater than the odds of a criminal invading the home and murdering people.

--Percy

Today on Meet the Press I watched a Republican (Rick Scott, FL) and a Democrat (Julián Castro, TX) offer useless solutions to the gun problem. Rick Scott deemed it a mental health problem while Julián Castro called for modestly tightening up gun registration laws. Scott's approach is no solution at all while Castro's is at least a move in the right direction, but neither will significantly reduce our high gun death rate because the real problem is too many guns and too lax gun regulations.

Here's a table of guns per capita and the gun homicide rate for North American and European countries. The United States is an extreme outlier. We have at least three times as many guns per capita as any other country, and our homicide rate is at least four times greater:

Country	Guns Per 100 Persons	Gun Homicides per 100,000
United States	120.5	4.46
Serbia	39.1	0.61
Canada	34.7	0.75
Finland	32.4	0.32
Iceland	31.7	0.00
Austria	30.0	0.12
North Macedonia	29.8	0.19
Norway	28.8	0.10
Switzerland	27.6	0.15
Sweden	23.1	0.32
Portugal	21.3	0.42
France	19.6	0.21
Germany	19.6	1.01
Luxembourg	18.9	0.00
Greece	17.6	0.53
Slovenia	15.6	0.20
Italy	14.4	0.35
Croatia	13.7	0.35
Belgium	12.7	0.14
Czech Republic	12.5	0.15
Hungary	10.5	0.11
Latvia	10.5	0.18
Denmark	9.9	0.11
Bulgaria	8.4	0.34
Spain	7.5	0.15
Ireland	7.2	0.21
Estonia	5.0	0.15
Moldova	3.0	0.45
Netherlands	2.6	0.29
Romania	2.6	0.04
Poland	2.5	0.04

--Percy

Tangle writes: Looking at those numbers I couldn't really see a strong correlation between guns and homicides but was surprised to find that it's r=0.87 - a very strong correlation. But if you remove the USA as a massive outlier, you get r=0.27 - a very weak correlation.

Before I posted I did a scatterplot on the data just to see if it looked like there was strong correlation, though I didn't expect one other than the one datapoint for the US. I figured it would take large differences in the number of guns per capita (like the one between the US and Europe) to reveal a strong correlation given other factors, such as gun regulations and culture.

What did you do to extract the numbers into your analysis tool?

--Percy

I also put the numbers in Excel, using Emacs, then just used the scatterplot function. I didn't know about the trendline or the "r2 function box", I'll check it out.

--Percy

Guns are moving into the classroom. Anyone who understands that guns increase rather than lessen danger knows this is a bad move. It's only a matter of time before a teacher or staff member carries out a shooting, perhaps a mass shooting, maybe an accidental shooting. Brief excerpt:

quote:

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Among the most extreme and divisive options, some school districts have chosen to arm staff members, putting guns in the hands of teachers to protect schools from guns in the hands of students.

A pistol in the waistband of a teacher, who will wear an outer shirt to hide the weapon at school.

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AbE: Does that look like a safe way to carry a gun? Does that gun look very effective against an assault weapon with a 50 round magazine?

--Percy

Edited by Percy, : AbE.

Edited by Percy, : Formatting.

It's been mostly quiet for a little while, there's no need to mention every single shooting, but yesterday saw another school shooting: 3 off-duty officers dropped off their children at a California school. Seconds later, gunfire erupted

Before classes had started, Nathaniel Berhow, a student at Saugus High School, walked into a quad area and removed a .45-caliber pistol from his backpack. He shot five students, killing two, then critically shot himself. He's in the hospital. It was his 16th birthday. It is not known where he got the gun at this time.

To quote a letter to the LA Times, "Until we control the madness of our gun fixation, we are doomed."

--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Grammar.