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> Regulating guns ... ameliorates the problem of how much damage a mentally disturbed person can do. No, it makes it much worse. We want the violent lunatics t
by Daniel_Newby 14y ago
> Regulating guns ... ameliorates the problem of how much damage a mentally disturbed person can do.
No, it makes it much worse. We want the violent lunatics to have guns, because guns are not particularly fast or efficient at killing people. A lone gunman can kill at most a few hundred people before he is stopped.
You know those nightclub fires that kill hundreds of people in ten minutes? We want our nutjobs to have guns so they will not be forced to recreate a nightclub fire on a stadium scale, followed by decades of copycats.
- Joeri 14y agoSo, i'm sure any minute now you'll post the statistics on how countries with tighter gun laws have huge numbers of stadium fires... We don't need to talk hypotheticals here. There are many countries with tighter gun laws. Any "but regulation will make it worse" argument can be vetted based on real world observations.
- Daniel_Newby 14y agoIt is not a matter of statistics. You can smugly measure water for 10 years and learn nothing about ice. No amount of data on Swiss shootings has any bearing on whether Joe Gun-Controlled will back a gasoline tanker up to a high school basketball stadium. To predict unknown unknowns, you have to do RAND Corporation-style operations research and hypothetical projections. This has been done, and it turns out that mass killing is easy. Really easy. As in, the 9-11 attackers were a bunch of pikers. That's why after 9-11 security for prominent targets shifted to a strange combination of bollards and guard patrols. Metal detectors and gun screening do not affect safety much. Intercepting truck size weapons does. I'm flabbergasted that my comment was voted down and justified by "what matters is the past, not your ridiculous hypotheticals". It reads like the Microsoft buffer overflow manual circa 1998.
- Joeri 14y agoWhat matters is what is likely, and what is likely is largely what is observed. People don't blow up schools with tanker trucks. They could, and if they had the intent to kill they should, but they don't. But that's not my point. My point is that the best source for wise decisions is hands-on experience. Many countries have a better handle on the gun situation than the U.S. What's wrong with learning from their experience?
- MaysonL 14y agoOklahoma City bombings: how many copycats?
- ArnoVanLumig 14y agoThese "more efficient" methods are also available without gun regulation, so why doesn't this happen already? Apparently there's something about guns that makes them an attractive weapon for these people. Another thing here is that gun regulation alone is not sufficient. In the Netherlands guns are heavily regulated, but we still had the incident in Alphen a/d Rijn [1] last year. The shooter was a member of a shooting association and was known to have mental problems. That's just not a good combination. If guns could be regulated in such a way that they never end up in the hands of violent lunatics that would probably be okay, but I just don't see how you could do that without banning them altogether. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphen_aan_den_Rijn_shopping_mall_shooting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphen_aan_den_Rijn_shopping_ma...
- Daniel_Newby 14y ago> Apparently there's something about guns that makes them an attractive weapon for these people. Thousands of exciting movies and TV shows about guns as a tool for "justice".
- mpweiher 14y agoWell, let's take an example. Breivik built a bomb, which killed 8. Awful. Because he was dissatisfied with the result, he went on a shooting spree that killed 69. I think I see your point...