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>hope that someday they will be banned in the U.S How would something like that possibly be carried out?
by x14 9y ago
>hope that someday they will be banned in the U.S
How would something like that possibly be carried out?
- yequalsx 9y agoSimilar to how other bans get carried out. Make it illegal and send those who violate the law to jail.
- SlowRobotAhead 9y agoWorked for drugs, and tax evasion, and human trafficking, and alcohol for awhile. Simply make it illegal and it goes away!
- Larrikin 9y agoThe logical conclusion from that train of thought is that laws have no meaning if people break the laws. So why have any laws?
- nbdev 9y agoWhy have a society if you cannot trust the people in it to defend themselves?
- themacguffinman 9y agoBecause when we organize a society, we can specialize into roles like policing and become more effective at defense as a whole?
- jakeogh 9y agoSo ask the threat to wait a 5+ minutes while you call the cops? Should we DRM 3D printers (DMLS@home is coming) to a walled garden of things? The 2nd Amendment is not separable from general purpose computing. Who needs "assult crypto" anyway?
- deno 9y agoPolice in United States do not have to protect you: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-pol... Average national response time is 10 minutes, even in cities the median is 5min, but can be as high as 30min for some remote areas. In certain situations there may be no police response at all, as was the case in 1992 Los Angeles riots or practically any major natural disaster. The ‘let the police do it’ argument would only logically work with incredibly pervasive and invasive surveillance technology and/or police robots (https://goo.gl/wpMV8 https://goo.gl/wpMV8). Even so, 2nd amendment would be even more relevant to balance the killer robots.
- humanrebar 9y ago> In certain situations there may be no police response at all... This more or less describes the Parkland shooting.
- foghagernows 9y agoThis isn't like organizing roles at a startup company. We're talking about an individual's right to defend themselves against someone bigger and stronger, someone with a weapon who wants to take your shit or fuck you or just fuck you up. You put much faith in the Government, and I put it in the individual. What happens when your police force is turned against you, becomes incompetent, gets lazy, or just doesn't show up? It's idealistic. Life is a struggle for the individual, no matter how much we'd like to forget it or offload our worries.
- wincy 9y agoGuns also equalizes the power disparity between a man and a woman. I see gun ownership as female empowerment, but the left never seems to mention that.
- makomk 9y agoThat might be a good argument in theory, if it wasn't for the part where US police don't have to protect citizens and all the population that are outside of effective police coverage. It's not the argument gun control campaigners seem to be making right now. They mainly seem to have gone for the approach of supporting police officers standing by and doing nothing as kids are murdered one by one. Given that, I suspect you're going to have a hard time convincing people who don't already agree with you that they should give up their guns and let the police take care of everything.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pasquinelli 9y agowhy not defend yourself with something less likly to accidentally kill some random people?
- prepend 9y agoWhy not defend yourself with a towel??
- pasquinelli 9y agoa towel isn't a good defensive weapon. a firearm isn't so good either. it's a great offensive weapon though.
- flounders 9y agoIt's a valid question. If we had something like phasers instead of firearms, I'd be more than happy to use those exclusively. The problem is we don't really have a good alternative. Tasers that shoot tend to be one shot solutions, and even then they don't always bring down targets, or they might prove as lethal. Rubber bullets you can fire multiple of, but they could cause serious damage too, especially if shot in succession, and there is no guarantee of taking the target down. There just isn't a solid alternative right now.
- CompuHacker 9y agoNot to offer a complete solution: Lasers, and pervasive societal warnings about the danger of lasers.
- zkomp 9y agoThat is too simple. The conclusion is the laws only work as long it is percieved better to follow than not, either by force, violence or social coercion or their actual concequences. Drug laws for example does not really work, since some people self medicate no matter if there is a death sentence. Others don't care since they probably wont get caught. While other laws kind of does work, people can rationally choose to follow them because the concequences of doing so are the "best" available option.
- int_19h 9y agoLaws have no meaning if [most] people can break the laws without consequences. The ability to enforce is important.
- SlowRobotAhead 9y agoDo you understand that outside of obvious moral ethics - that a law against murder doesn't stop someone from murdering. It only gives lawyers a way to punish it. It's the punishment that is the deterrent. Why should law abiding gun owners be punished again? Adding punitive laws is not a deterrent. Enforcing those laws is. We don't enforce many guns laws, then you come in yelling about adding more laws. The logical conclusion isn't that laws have no meaning if they're broken, it's that they have no meaning if they aren't enforced, and we're not. Parkland could have been avoided in at least 6 different ways. So tell me how your new-laws that make illegal things illegal-er would stop people with no criminal record from being bad.
- yequalsx 9y agoA person is law abiding until they aren’t. It’s about keeping people from having ready access to so much lethality when that person decides to become a bad actor. Banning guns would lower the likelihood of a bad actor having as much lethality as they currently are easily able to acquire. Parkland could have been avoided in a 7th way too. Without access to guns it wouldn’t have been as lethal.
- foghagernows 9y agoSo what if the person had used a bomb? Or 3D printed a gun?
- yequalsx 9y agoPeople do illegal things. This isn’t surprising nor an argument against making something illegal. If it could be shown that banning guns and making it illegal to sell guns didn’t decrease the frequency of their usage to commit crimes then I would no longer be advocate for banning guns.
- SlowRobotAhead 9y agoExcept that there is no correlation to gun ownership and crime. We know the places that have more guns don’t have more crime, we can’t call correlation to that, but we do know adding guns doesn’t increase crime - because that’s been true since the high crime peak of the early 1990s where crime has been falling with guns skyrocketing. It’s painfully childish to claim that it’s some surprise that where guns are that there is more gun-crime. Something can’t be abused where it doesn’t exist - the joke is that people look at gun-crime compared to overall crime. Rape rates in Australia are 40-45% higher than the USA. If you’re a rapist, it’s much safer to “work” in Oz, does the rapist getting shot in the USA contribute to “gun-crime”? On paper, yes.
- yequalsx 9y agoAdding guns probably doesn’t increase crime rate. It does the mass murder rate. It is precisely gun crime that I abhor. Thus I'm opposed to their availability.
- SlowRobotAhead 9y agoCan't wait for the citation from an actual study (try the CDC, they've put out at least 3 since 2013)! You should be able to easily show that rural USA with it's murder rate on part with Europe is definitely not the place where all our guns are... oh wait...
- yequalsx 9y agoI don’t understand your sarcasm. I agreed with you that the crime rate has not gone up due to an increase in gun ownership. But guns in their current form certainly increase the lethality of those with bad intent. This isn’t deniable. My claim is that the mass murder rate, the rate at which we have mass killings in the U.S. would go down if buying/selling guns were illegal.
- eloisius 9y agoJust like drugs. It’s easy.
- some_random 9y agoExactly! No one would break the law, that would be illegal! And while we're at it, we can use it as an opportunity to crack down on minorities we don't like, and maybe do some good old selective enforcement, genius.
- _frog 9y agoIn the same way other countries who've banned firearms have carried it out? It's not like there's no precedent for this if you look outside of America.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoAmerica isn't other countries. Guns are as ingrained in rural America's culture as lifted trucks and beer. There would literally be armed revolts if the government tried taking peoples' guns away en masse.
- yequalsx 9y agoWhat's interesting is that rural America was in favor of increased gun control in the 1960s when blacks started to assert their right to own guns. Ultimately peoples' attitudes can be swayed and changed and it isn't really hard to do it. Witness our embracing of torture, taking shoes off to board an airplane, fear of sharia law, etc.
- TaylorAlexander 9y agoYes, and blacks were taking up arms because they were literally being bombed. The whites wanted to control their rights to have guns so they could continue controlling the black populations with violent force. So you highlight how gun control has been used as an oppressive tool in the past. What are we do to when only our corrupt government is allowed to have guns?
- jjjensen90 9y agoOur "corrupt government" would crush us with jets, tanks, nukes, laser weapons, missiles, helicopters, drones, ships, chemical weapons, smallpox, and probably many more things regardless of whether we had AR-15s or not.
- nbdev 9y ago
- matt_s 9y agoAt one point (1920 I think) there was an amendment which made alcohol illegal. It went on for 13 years and then was removed. So there is a legal framework to add/remove amendments from the US Constitution, they are amendments after all, they were not there originally (I think 3 years after).
- apazzolini 9y agoI think he was alluding to the fact that although there is a legal way to make guns illegal, it won't actually get rid of guns, in much the same way making alcohol illegal didn't prevent people from drinking.
- deadmetheny 9y agoYeah, and look at how well that whole experiment turned out.
- latencyloser 9y agoIt was removed, but also (and maybe because) it was nearly impossible to effectively enforce. Gun restrictions would very much experience the same problems. There are millions of guns and gun owners in the US and many of those people are firm believers in their right to own a gun. They'd likely bury them in the yard or, as the old joke goes, "lose" them in a boating accident, before turning them over to authorities. I personally would _never_ willingly turn mine in--they're for my and my family's protection and have saved my life before. I am certain many gun owners feels this way as well. Trying to enforce such a rule would be difficult, if not impossible.
- matt_s 9y agoI didn't really comment on if it was enforceable, just that in a logical manner there is a path for amendments to be removed, added or changed. Doing minimal research on prohibition since I had no context into what triggered it: "Prohibition also united progressives and revivalists. The temperance movement had popularized the belief that alcohol was the major cause of most personal and social problems and prohibition was seen as the solution to the nation's poverty, crime, violence, and other ills." [0] You could replace alcohol with firearms and the part about removing them being "solution to the nation's poverty, crime, violence, and other ills". I bet there are a lot of people that would believe that prohibiting firearms would help solve those issues. Just because laws are not easy to enforce doesn't mean they can't happen. There are still counties in some states that are 'dry'. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...