The Trouble with Killing Life

[cannon_fodder]

Actually, there is no empirical evidence this will be the case if high cap semi-auto weapons are better regulated but it is the meme that politicians keep repeating.  As if the existing guns out there aren't already in the hands of the criminally insane or in the possession of careless owners who leave them under their bed to be stolen and end up in the wrong hands.

Since we value personal privacy so highly, it is nearly impossible to get a hit on mental illness on a background check if the person has not previously been on the radar screen of law enforcement.  You also cannot prevent straw purchases from taking place, you can make the penalty very high, but there are still people willing to take that risk.  So even if you can't buy them at gun shows or you must pass a stricter background check or pay $200 for the license to own one, there are still huge cracks for bad ownership of these to slip through.

Of course there is no empirical evidence, the NRA and the GOP have worked really hard to make sure we can't study the issue. I covered this clearly above. Saying "there is no evidence" when the gun lobby works as hard as possible from stopping anyone from looking for evidence is a farce.  "We can't do it anyway, it's just a meme." But all evidence is to the contrary.

It worked with machine guns. It worked with ammonium nitrate. It worked in every other country that has tried it. All of those institutions still have "huge cracks" but it has cut way, way back on crimes committed with the regulated items.

Right now there are 250,000 automatic weapons in private hands all over in the USA. How often are they stolen and used in crimes (the answer: in the last 80 years there have been 2 murders with machine guns)? How often are they bought by straw men and used in crimes? How often does a farmer buy 1500 pounds of ammonium nitrate and give it to a right wing nationalist?

There certainly will be cracks. In the short term it will do almost nothing. In the long term, nothing indicates it wouldn't work. Other than the fact we won't bother trying.

So sure, other than the fact it usually works when we try, there is no evidence saying it will work.

[heironymouspasparagus]

BINGO!

How all these people can equate assault rifles with these much more deadly items is beyond me too. ;-)

Rifles (all rifles) account for several hundred deaths a year. Heck, 100 kids a year die from accidental bathtub drownings. I keep hearing that assault rifles are made for one thing, but the evidence doesn't seem to be bearing it out. More people die by the bare hands or blunt object of another person every year than by long guns. The false equivilence occurs when most people see Marteen shooting up a club and assume that the weapon is somehow more dangerous than others. That's the problem.

Exactly!  That's why I posted this earlier....it's "the light is better" syndrome.  Seems like it bears repeating....




   A police officer sees a drunken man intently searching the ground near a lamppost and asks him the goal of his quest. The inebriate replies that he is looking for his car keys, and the officer helps for a few minutes without success then he asks whether the man is certain that he dropped the keys near the lamppost.

   "No," is the reply, "I lost the keys somewhere across the street." "Why look here?" asks the surprised and irritated officer. "The light is much better here," the intoxicated man responds with aplomb.

[heironymouspasparagus]

Lot's of talk about the 30's and machine guns and how 'outlawing' them made such a huge difference in quality of life.  What the outlawing of machine guns and cut off shotguns did was to make law abiding owners of those guns criminals, and had zero effect on criminals who used the weapons in crime.  What finally put a dead stop to the carnage was the end of prohibition in 1933. 

The scale of these events was very different but they also dealt with terror as the main goal - get people scared so they will respond to the message of those with great power and wealth.  For example, the St Valentine's Massacre - held up as the 'poster child' of hand wringing to get rid of machine guns - killed 7 people.  6 of them were known criminals killed by other known criminals.  One was a mechanic who happened to have a really bad day by choosing to be in the wrong place at the right time.

The massive crime wave of the time has an exact parallel to today - the prohibition of alcohol - where today's is the war on drugs.  There is an absolute cause and effect relationship that we have known about and understood since the 1920's.  And yet, some with great power and wealth continue to make this a political football

Again....IF we are concerned about death and destruction, we should quit "looking" for solutions where "the light is better".  Let's do something real, meaningful, and effective.




Little background information;

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/a-centennial-history/fbi_and_the_american_gangster_1924-1938

[cannon_fodder]

I call shenanigans.

Your argument is: the reason we no longer see machine guns used to commit crimes is because we made alcohol legal.

While cute, that argument utterly fails. People still use firearms to commit crimes (actually, at higher rates) but they don't use automatic weapons. Terrorists. Drug dealers. Gangs.  But since alcohol is legal, they choose not use machine guns... that's a non sequitur. Totally illogical conclusion.

Shenanigans.

(I agree with your minor premise, that prohibition was a disaster and we can learn from it)

[MyDogHunts]

A peasant revolt and the end of the world would seem to need assault weapons for killing bad guys.  The underlying psychology of so many (see GB votes to leave EU) is that we are afraid and want to protect our own.  Guns protecting us is why assault weapons sell, not hog hunting.

If you can't change the mindset legislating guns are for naught.

[heironymouspasparagus]

I call shenanigans.

Your argument is: the reason we no longer see machine guns used to commit crimes is because we made alcohol legal.

While cute, that argument utterly fails. People still use firearms to commit crimes (actually, at higher rates) but they don't use automatic weapons. Terrorists. Drug dealers. Gangs.  But since alcohol is legal, they choose not use machine guns... that's a non sequitur. Totally illogical conclusion.

Shenanigans.

(I agree with your minor premise, that prohibition was a disaster and we can learn from it)

What I was getting at was that the machine guns were the weapon of choice of the prohibition criminals and instilled terror vastly disproportionate to the real threat.   In much the same way as mass shootings are instilling a terror vastly disproportionate to the real threat.


Today, the very real threat to a much larger number is the violence directly resulting from our prohibition approach to drugs.   And the one we should be focused on to try to stop mass murder of many thousands a year.  Let's get over "the light is better syndrome".


Our approach is to focus on the "mote" in one's eye, while ignoring the "beam" in another's.

[Conan71]

Of course there is no empirical evidence, the NRA and the GOP have worked really hard to make sure we can't study the issue. I covered this clearly above. Saying "there is no evidence" when the gun lobby works as hard as possible from stopping anyone from looking for evidence is a farce.  "We can't do it anyway, it's just a meme." But all evidence is to the contrary.

It worked with machine guns. It worked with ammonium nitrate. It worked in every other country that has tried it. All of those institutions still have "huge cracks" but it has cut way, way back on crimes committed with the regulated items.

Right now there are 250,000 automatic weapons in private hands all over in the USA. How often are they stolen and used in crimes (the answer: in the last 80 years there have been 2 murders with machine guns)? How often are they bought by straw men and used in crimes? How often does a farmer buy 1500 pounds of ammonium nitrate and give it to a right wing nationalist?

There certainly will be cracks. In the short term it will do almost nothing. In the long term, nothing indicates it wouldn't work. Other than the fact we won't bother trying.

So sure, other than the fact it usually works when we try, there is no evidence saying it will work.

Regulation of semi-auto long guns might sound like a good idea but it is a false sense of security.  If one tool is eliminated, terrorists will find another way to do it.  Out of the 25 worst acts of terrorism in human history, 80 percent involved or exclusively used explosives, at least according to this list:

http://list25.com/25-worst-acts-terrorism-committed/1/

Another was carried out with daggers, yet another reign of terror was committed with the guillotine.

It's on the internet, so it has to be true.

The guns are merely the tool of a sick or angry mind.  If someone wanted to kill 30 school kids they can bomb a school bus or drive a semi-truck into the playground of a school.  There is no shortage of places in large US cities where a car bomb could take out 50 to 100 people during peak rush hour in the city center or detonate one as thousands of people are leaving a major sporting event or concert.  

Look how easy it was for the bombers to set off a bomb at the Boston Marathon.  We can assume what has kept that from happening again or at another large marathon is a heightened awareness of security and a stepped-up security presence, not a ban on pressure cookers or back packs.  Again, terrorists are usually not looking for resistance.  They look for a target-rich environment with minimal to no security where people would least expect an attack to occur.  Who would have ever thought a gay nightclub would be the stage for a savage attack like that?

Perhaps an investment in more police or military presence in major cities is what we need to prevent terrorist attacks, which are still quite rare in the United States.  Perhaps school districts take the threat serious enough, they have more armed guards at every school.  Perhaps nightclubs will employ armed guards.  Are we really frightened enough to say we'd rather invest money earmarked for roads on more cops and more security?  Whoops, no can't have more police or military on US streets, that's tyranny!

We are Americans, we suffer from a short attention span.  If more police presence or better security sounds like a better idea today, we will assume everything is okay in a few weeks and won't vote to spent the money on more cops or security when the time comes.

Estimates range from 4 million to 30 million semi auto rifles in the U.S.  Crime statistics would tend to indicate over 99% of those weapons are owned by responsible people who have no intention of carrying out a mass shooting.  So we stop the manufacture and sale of any of these types of guns now.  What happens next?  Do we institute a government hand-over (will never happen as that would be seen as tyranny and the dis-arming of citizens) or buy back?

Let's be honest, if semi-auto long guns did not exist, terrorism would not cease to exist.

Perhaps time would be better spent analyzing and implementing better counter-terrorism measures instead of taking the simplistic approach of banning
a weapon which is used in a very small percentage of terrorist attacks.  This is a very complex problem which goes far beyond semi-auto rifles simply existing.

[erfalf]

What I was getting at was that the machine guns were the weapon of choice of the prohibition criminals and instilled terror vastly disproportionate to the real threat.   In much the same way as mass shootings are instilling a terror vastly disproportionate to the real threat.


Today, the very real threat to a much larger number is the violence directly resulting from our prohibition approach to drugs.   And the one we should be focused on to try to stop mass murder of many thousands a year.  Let's get over "the light is better syndrome".


Our approach is to focus on the "mote" in one's eye, while ignoring the "beam" in another's.

Gun grabbing logic:

If we ban assault rifles there won't be any on the street and therefore no associated crimes will occur.

at the same time...

You can't ban drugs because you can never really get them off the street so we should legalize them.

[heironymouspasparagus]

Gun grabbing logic:

If we ban assault rifles there won't be any on the street and therefore no associated crimes will occur.

at the same time...

You can't ban drugs because you can never really get them off the street so we should legalize them.

Yeah.


On drugs, the phrase I use is decriminalize.  I recommend a more nuanced approach - not all drugs are the same magnitude problem for society - possession for any 'unprocessed' drug, as in found naturally and used directly off the plant/fungus should be legalized.  Growing/distribution of the naturals - I am specifically thinking marijuana, psilocybin, cane toad, etc - legalized.  Others??


Use and possession of processed drugs, including but not limited to hash, cocaine, heroin, PCP, meth, etc should be a traffic citation type event.  With treatment options available in lieu of incarceration.


Manufacture/distribution of the processed drugs - mandatory 10 year no parole event for 1st time offender.  2nd event - mandatory life with no parole prison event.

We can use the laws to 'steer' people into more productive, less destructive modes of behaviour.  And if they won't be steered, at least won't be out on the streets.  This eliminates the profit from the largest group of the most benign (comparatively) drugs.  Saving us many tens of billions a year in wasted enforcement efforts.  And as we have seen, thousands of lives due to drug related - gang - violence.   Depending on who is trying to make the case, we spend from $30 to 90 billion a year on the war on drugs that could be cut to a fraction.  

THEN, and this is extremely critical - take that fraction of the money that we are saving, since that is all that would be required, and set up help/counseling/cleanup programs for those that want them.  And even one step further - for the processed drugs addicts, provide the drug at low or better yet, no cost, in a clinical setting where doses can be reduced over time in what ever the appropriate medical method is to eliminate the addiction.

Save massive amounts of money.