So some of the political cartoons in Otterloop 's political cartoon thread referenced Bob Costas talking about the recent shooting in KC, and I found this clip of him discussing our gun culture on MSNBC: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/201...availability-of-guns-makes-mayhem-easier?lite For my part, I'm rather impressed with his thoughtfulness and willingness to answer the questions he knows everybody will ask (e.g. "Are you in favor of gun control?") even though such questions are, at heart, peripheral to his point. Hopefully this won't turn into yet another thread on gun control, but given the subject matter I fear it probably will.
Out of curiosity, do other countries have a gun culture that - for the lack of a better term - fetishizes firearms the way the US gun culture often seems to?
Fetishizes is a perfectly cromulent word. And um, probably some of the middle east / Indian subcontinent countries?
I was about to post something to the same effect; I think over on the other boards either you, Lizard_King or jeffd linked to some study that showed we're just a very violent nation even when you control for gun use and/or ownership.
No clue; it's why I'm asking. Certainly there are some areas of the world where guns are extremely prevalent (I'd add Africa to the list), but I don't know if they have the cultural cachet that they have in the United States.
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0277953698000975?via=sd&cc=y Is a study that gets tossed around a lot, along with a few others linking various economic and social measures to homicides, to explain why individual countries and specific states within the US have such high murder rates.
I think probably the only irrational fear that I still hold over from my conservative days is the fear of gun control. I think history demonstrates unquestionably that even the most democratic societies can turn into dictatorships or other repressive states. I guess for some reason I am still convinced that a general right to keep and bear arms has a possibly imperceptible but non-trivial effect on governance: the existence of a large number of armed citizens has a deterrent effect on tyrannical impulses among leaders. I guess I feel like lots of institutions in our society mitigate against a descent into tyranny: fair courts, separation of powers, freedom loving citizens, a tradition of democracy, etc. I would tend to add "armed citizenry" to that list (though very far down it to be sure) and I have such a fundamental and massive distrust of politicians that I want that list to be as long as possible. I think as a point of cost/benefit it's probably very likely that the costs of having this really small mitigating factor vastly outweigh the benefit and I'm sure everybody will hate this post and think I'm a jerk and I understand that impulse. I think the problem is that I've never been a victim of gun crime and I don't know anybody that has been and so I tend to value this very abstract and flimsy hypothetical out of proportion to the real and immediate cost of the crimes committed with guns. :(
I'm not aware that there's any evidence that firearm ownership rates influence transitions from democracy to dictatorship (or vice versa). Acemoglu and Robinson's model - which is about the state of the art as I'm aware of it - doesn't include gun ownership that I know of. edit: Acemoglu and Robinson do mention guns early on in a brief discussion of what they call "de-facto power," which is your ability to make others do what you want by shooting them. An imbalance of de-facto power has obvious implications (dudes with the guns get what they want), but I don't think that extends to their model of democratic/non-democratic transitions.
I think probably my main irrational (or not) liberal fear is of private ownership of guns. I see no need for it, I'm not worried about the mythical totalitarian regime, and I believe an armed citizenry only puts us all in a constant state of danger.
Guns are fun and I generally like shooting them, but I don't want people bringing them out into society. They belong on display at home or in use at a range or in the woods, not on your person in a crowded bar.
I guess the initial presence of arms might have a small deterrent effect in a country where the armed citizenry is anything like a match for the machinery of the state but that country is not the US. However, even if we do posit a theoretical 'people's rebellion' that for some reason requires small arms to overthrow it's tyrannical leadership they will likely have no problem in acquiring aforementioned arms over a fairly short period. For a real world example see what is going on in Syria right now. Pre-war, as far as I can tell Syria ranked 112 out of 179 countries for the rate of private gun ownership (with the US at number 1, Germany at 15 and England at 88) and yet there seems to be a functional armed rebellion against the state. For reference see this handy site (I have no clue as to it's general accuracy but there it is) : http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compare/179/rate_of_privately_owned_firearms_-_world_ranking/ Anyway, gun control is, at least as far as the statistics seem to indicate, a distraction if you care about reducing homicides and general societal violence. What you actually need is more socialism, which is why I would expect that policies like Obamacare, once they become embedded and extended, will have more influence on reducing homicide rates long term than any half-arsed gun control measure. Pulling things out of my own arse for a minute, I think that the problem with individualism that causes increased murder rates is that it makes each individual in society have to bear more personal risk. Once you raise each persons individual risk you also raise the stakes and the fear that the dice could roll and it could all go the wrong way. Then, once you have more individuals running around with a constant background, and burden, of personal fear they are in that fearful mindset a much higher proportion of the time and that fear easily leads into extremism, anger and eventually violence,
The "armed citizens as a check on slides into authoritarianism" argument isn't compelling. Either in terms of counterfactual speculation about how certain slides to authoritarianism might have gone differently with more privately owned weapons or in terms of historical examples of gun-rich populations that nevertheless had authoritarian regimes imposed over them. EDIT: From the amusingly titled "A Stinger for Antonin" from a few months back. Like the author I think that, indeed, a rational "libertarian" gun nut should demand MPADS and ATGMs, which is basically a reductio ad absurdum for the concept.
I thought he was eloquent in expressing what most of us in the "isn't having guns proliferated and extremely accessible a bit of a problem?" camp feel. There is something very implausible about thinking a culture which venerates firearms and supports their ubiquitous ownership will not suffer significant harms distinct from a culture lacking those aspects. We don't think that way about, say, vehicle laws, or as Costas said fast food.
There are some harms but they are mostly not the harms that most people think of. As jeff said it is more around things like making suicide attempts ever so slightly easier and more likely to succeed and adding another source of accidents around the home. People doing violence to other people largely don't seem to be that bothered or driven by the difference in efficacy of the tool with which they use to do it. I suspect that is because most murders that happen are driven by rage and happen at home and it's just as easy to beat/knife/hammer your wife/neighbour/partners lover to death in rage as it is to shoot them in one. The murders that don't fall into that rage and opportunity driven bracket are far, far smaller in number and likely overlap strongly with the group that can & will still obtain guns whatever the rate of ownership in the society they happen to inhabit (see lone madmen, hitmen, professional criminals etc)
Unless there are some studies I haven't seen, it also seems to have a significant effect for the lethality of domestic violence: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447915/ http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/12/03/1270841/bob-costas-jovan-belcher-gun-control/
Well that's the sort of thing I have in mind. I don't think it's easy to trivialise such events though, as even small percentages probably translate thousands or tens of thousands of cases in a country the size of the US. So I don't think it's superficial to think that's a problem that needs addressing. Taking cultural analysis as a starting point, which Costas does, is useful because it gives a reason for the massive disparity of firearms deaths between, say, the US and UK even before the latter's strict laws. Or practically any Western country you care to mention. It also avoids the black hole of throwing hotly-contested data about regulation around, though I'm sure there's a black hole for culture too.
The problem with intra-US studies like that, and especially studies that only look at gun ownership in the absence of other factors is that they can't establish why violence can be high in countries where private gun ownership is low and low in countries where private gun ownership is high and they can't identify whether owning a gun is just a symptom of an underlying problem. Are they just discovering that the more extremely angry & violent people in society are also those more likely to be the kind of people that go out and buy guns? Because I suspect that is true, but it doesn't mean that those violent people would go away if the guns went away they would likely just use knives, hammers or be the types that find a way whatever the state of the law. I don't doubt that there is some small effect caused by the increase in weapon efficacy but I suspect that, especially in the political climate of the US, you would be wasting time an political capital burning up potential allies when you could be spending it on more significant risk factors for homicide/violence (that can explain the difference in rates between somewhere like the UK; low gun ownership, higher homicide and Germany; high gun ownership, lower homicide) and that also affect a wider range of problems.
Not only is there nothing wrong with that stance, the American legal profession as of the 1930s (a time when the Second Amendment's stance on private ownership of firearms was not controversial) would've agreed with you. I went hunting for legal opinions for a previous argument on this topic and found a court decision--from Texas, no less--upholding a law forbidding firearms to be brought into schools and churches and citing several cases as precedent for the constitutionality of restricting carriage of firearms in public places.
I'm mostly focusing on domestic violence here, because that's what Costas' comments were about. Here's an international comparison of homicide-suicides (which are mostly cases of domestic violence) between the Netherlands, the US, and Switzerland: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2010.09.003 From the discussion: An interesting chart from the study: A pretty interesting article. What it suggests to me is that for people to whom suicide is the main goal, not having access to guns will probably save some of their partners, but not children (children being easier to kill without a firearm), but for people to whom violence against their partner is the main goal, not having access to guns will have less of an effect. The rates in general (ugly but readable):
Great, let's talk about epidemiology and guns. There's a much larger study of European violence stats available, and the long view makes things a great deal more complicated. I would submit if you want to study violence rates in the US, doing it across states provides ample fodder while reducing (but not eliminating) cultural variables and allowing for the inclusion of relatively (relatively!) smaller differences in societal infrastructure, economic situation, etc. Vermont vs Louisiana gun crime tells you a lot about both states, but only a limited amount about what laws targeted at guns really do. If you want to reduce domestic violence or its severity in the US, there are plenty of avenues available that will attack the problem directly. If you want to use domestic violence as a roundabout way of attacking gun ownership, you're going to necessarily run into a lot of methodology problems on the way to making a point that isn't going to be very persuasive in the big picture. One Texas case would not tell you what the "legal profession" thought of guns in the 1930s, and whatever it did tell you about its specific legal context would be contingent on the language, not to mention the place in the legal hierarchy of the particular court. There's a reason that when talking about the broad arc of US legal history people stick with Supreme Court cases when they aren't referencing broad studies of legal trends, and even then there's a lot of room for error and misinformation (ie look at how people misread SC cases today that happened right in front of us). Incidentally, I don't think the 2nd amendment is controversial now in the US (I have no idea about the 1930s), as evidenced by the fact that it takes an international and heavily left-leaning crowd like this one to even muster a half-assed argument against guns in the wake of tragedies that involve guns. If you want to reduce violence and social harm, there are other levers that will not cost tremendous political capital to even attempt to mention.
If you're going to tease apart gun culture and gun ownership, "gun ownership doesn't appear to impact overall murder rates" would kind of be a relevant point. As pointed out, there's some association internationally on guns and domestic dispute murder rates, but it's mild, with other follow on complications.
You may be right about it not being controversial, but strictly, fatalism about the political unsaleability of gun control feels more like the contemporary sense of priorities and possibilities in the political discourse rather than an awareness that a pro-second-amendment consensus has entrenched itself sociologically vs. the way it was in the 80s or 90s. As for mass shootings not leading to gun control pushes these days, I'd put that down to two main factors. First, people've been inured to them; second, the "does gun control bear closely on mass shootings" discussion has been rehashed to the point where even pro-gun-control people recognize that mass shootings aren't a great advertisement for gun control. The grounds for gun control would be better regulation reducing quotidian gun violence, and it's hard to imagine how that policy gap suddenly brings political pressure to bear when so many other quotidian nightmares like the prison system/war on drugs don't. Perhaps that's partly why American liberals have given up on gun control; they've realized that assassinations and mass shootings - things that make people think about guns - make for a poor policy argument, while things that make for a better policy argument just don't factor politically. Perhaps that wasn't clear before the 1990s-2000s.
I recognize that one case doesn't demonstrate the opinion of the legal profession, but a body of cases can. This article wasn't the opinion from the bench but a review article in the wake of that judgement discussing the body of cases on the topic which cited precedent back to the 1880s. I don't have a perfect memory and I went to find that citation for an entirely different reason (relating to your second paragraph here, since I think that interpretations hinging upon the phrase "well-regulated militia" are simply the product of wishful thinking) but I don't believe in a single one of the cases in question did the court decide to strike down a law against the carriage of weapons in public places on the basis of the Second Amendment. And, keep in mind that the latest Supreme Court case regarding Second Amendment protections of individual ownership of firearms is from 2008, making it ipso facto controversial at that time. I doubt that people who disagreed with the way the Second Amendment was interpreted before were persuaded by the decision, so it would seem to me that its controversy status hasn't changed much since then.
Very little of what you wrote there makes sense to me in and of itself, and even less so with reference to your original "one Texas case" with reference to "1930s legal attitudes" post. Why would you post that when you were talking about what you describe in this post? In any case, forbidding firearms in schools and churches can come from a number of reasons that are not inherently similar to public carry as a general rule, and then only sometimes connected to broader issues of second amendment interpretation; there's a broad spread of ideas about how limiting, for instance, the asshole behavior in the thread I linked should be relative to practical realities of normal gun ownership. Being controversial isn't a binary status, of course, but compared to just a couple of election cycles ago where gun control was actually a position mooted at the national stage, it is much less controversial now in any practical sense. If you think the controversy status hasn't changed, you must be operating on a geologic timescale or something.
This is why the second amendment is crap, he says with deliberate provocation and with a worrying penchant for talking in the third person. It undermines even the most minimally common sense approaches to firearms legislation. For example, I might say something along the lines of: "Owning firearms is fine, but it should be predicated on meeting certain requirements as to the safe use, handling, and possession of said firearms. Every individual who wishes to own a gun should have to demonstrate their ability to safely operate it by passing a basic course, as with driving. Moreover they must be able to store their firearm and ammunition in a secure place when it is not in use, with failure to comply an offence. They must also pass a psychological evaluation including an interview as to their intended use of the firearms they wish to possess. Finally every firearm purchased must be registered." I'm sure some of these requirements already exist in some form, but from what I can tell they mostly don't or are very limited. You get the gist. But the second amendment casts a shadow over what I would consider incredibly reserved proposals as to basic public safety. I can already hear objections that at least some of these proposals undermine people's right to guns, because it precludes certain individuals from owning them just because they aren't competent or don't want to leave them lying around. To have a political environment where even discussing this sort of thing can be counter-productive is incredibly toxic. At least that's the way it seems from outside the land of the free.
People that aren't crazy would object to some of those on the basis of them representing an expansion of government into a manner that requires a strong burden of proof, and it wouldn't have to be attached to blind reverence for the constitutional articles per se so much as (if you believe as I do) that the constitutional limits in the US represents the boundaries of state and federal government power relative to the individual and not the other way around. You can get momentum to get some of these things at the state level (for instance, Maryland's gun registry), but the main reason they don't happen in the US at the national level is because there is much more strong opposition than support for those measures. That is, not because it's constitutionally impossible but because for a variety of reasons it won't sell in politics (and unlike healthcare, for instance, the record on misinformation is much more mixed). In addition, again, it would be difficult to make compelling, data-based cases for them even if there were popular support simply because it's uncharted territory for a country with a mixture of relatively strong institutions and widespread pre-existing gun ownership prior to the law being passed. Finally, I would repeat that if you are interested in reducing violence in the US, there are many routes to that which don't involve confronting the gun culture directly. The second amendment doesn't prevent addressing the actual problems, and in many cases will permit many reasonable restraints on how guns are owned and used given popular support. Many of the more flagrant "Oh America you so crazy" cases in recent memory are the product of ALEC and other organizations (IMO) deliberately baiting controversy while they have a friendly Supreme Court, so they write things into conservative-dominated state law that seem to adhere to the letter of precedent (ie Stand Your Ground) while being obviously problematic and likely distasteful to many Americans. But so long as that distaste can be reframed by conservatives into people going after the second amendment per se, then it's going to lose and moreover it's going to serve as a relatively low stakes litmus test that will rally conservative momentum generally. I support what I think are reasonable restrictions on gun ownership, such as the waiting period and police check. I will look at other proposals, but really I'm much more interested in targeting things that I believe are real problems versus legal gun ownership and access as it stands today. Guns aren't a litmus test issue for me generally, but when they've taken the national stage in the past it's been through measures nearly as dishonest and ignorant as stand your ground, such as assault weapons laws, magazine caps, and the like, all of which fundamentally misrepresent real problems as well as being a reversal of that "default" position of individual rights that I put forth in my first paragraph.
Related: Ta-Nahesi Coates has a really good post up today regarding stand your ground laws. This isn't policy stuff so much as just some really honest writing.
Well sure, even though I think that's a rather grandiose way of putting it, given that nobody who isn't "I shouldn't have to wear a seatbelt" level of unbalanced thinks vehicle laws are constitutionally problematic sans cast-iron empirical justification. I would have thought the burden of proof would lie more with those who think that: leaving firearms and ammunition unsecured does not represent a serious safety risk; that persons unable to safely handle firearms do not represent a serious danger if they are allowed to own firearms; that psychologically unbalanced people can be trusted with lethal weapons; and that registering weapons does not allow for more effective law enforcement. My argument wasn't that the second amendment makes these things impossible. It's that it frames any debate in terms of fundamental rights which undermines even the most tentative moves towards common sense safety legislation. I'd argue it's a significant factor in why the opposition is so widespread and effective: the lens through which people see the issue is one of individual rights contrasted with government imposition. There's a sense in which literally any legislation can be framed as such, but I think the vehicle example (if I'm not beating the analogy to death, as with political cartoonists and the financial "cliff") shows it's not a universal attitude. Guns = rights in the US, which is alien to mainstream discourse in many other countries. I think that's regrettable, whether it's irreversible or not. Well I'm not interested in reducing violence in the US. Couldn't care less. Would like more of it, frankly. In all seriousness I agree with this, with the possible exception of "real problems" which is a bit question-begging. I would characterise firearms accidents, which I'm assuming could be reduced through the sort of proposals I outlined, as a real problem. It's not as sexy as a significant reduction in overall levels of violence, but my small-country socialistic heart likes that sort of thing.
All of those are separate questions with separate levels of burdens of proof for why the government should do more than it does in those capacities. You want to talk about how to make legal gun ownership safer, great, that's one kind of conversation with its statistics. You want to talk about making law enforcement more effective, that's another. You want to talk about "psychologically unbalanced people", which at the moment is right up there with GOP "fraudulent voters" in terms of the threat it represents beyond existing firearms laws, that's another kind of conversation right there. By not separating them, you run the risk of presenting what looks like "we'll see what sticks in order to inhibit gun ownership per se" case, which is the sort of attritional approach that has cost the anti-gun movement whatever credibility it has. Don't tell me it's about firearms safety when it's actually legal gun ownership when done safely that bothers you in and of itself. You can call it grandiose, but it's actually the crux of the argument, and why attrition-based whittling of the right to own guns has been responded to with a counter-strategy of recentering the argument around farcical and occasionally lethal propositions such as stand your ground. You will get response in kind from the gun lobby, and they will win in the US. And yet it doesn't. Plenty of gun restrictions do get passed, and plenty of improvements to gun safety do occur. I'm perfectly ok with the current state of US government legislation generally on this, and I like that I can live in a state or county with more restrictions or less if I choose. I don't see why it's necessary for popular attitudes across countries to be identical if your end goal is for the countries themselves to be materially better off. If you want to propose specific ideas with specific evidence supporting their utility and why they would be a good idea for a specific problem, that's great. Yes, you assume. I assume that it might, instead, and I would prefer not to have unnecessary laws (thou shalt lock thine guns, which makes sense for some situations and not for others) for what I believe can best be handled through education-based initiatives. The NRA, for instance, shouldn't be the one teaching kids how to handle guns safely in terms of theory; to borrow Flowers' suggestion from elsewhere, it could be like driver's ed in high school and then up to the parents if they want practical demonstrations. I shouldn't have to lock my guns if there are no children with access to them. I shouldn't have to adopt a mandatory means of protecting myself from a non-problem; there's really not much that's analogous to a seat belt in its universal utility because guns themselves are such a solved problem in terms of their basic functionality working as designed. Regardless, because the issue is polarized around the symbol of the gun being revered on one side and loathed on the other, then it's just going to be marking territory towards a broader pro or anti gun agenda. I mean, I just can't believe that you're primarily concerned about gun safety issues in a totally different country. And your motivation (and thus desired end goal) needs to be on the table unless you want this to be an endlessly circling series of tactical moves around a legal mentality you've already acknowledged is wholly alien to you.
I think I'm simply defining controversy differently, as an issue that is unsettled. Attention to controversies waxes and wanes, but I don't think that controversial issues become less controversial unless the wane in attention is permanent. Gun control has been through more than one attention cycle already--it's hardly gone for good. My point with what I've written is that the Second Amendment was not historically interpreted to preclude reasonable gun control measures (including restrictions on public carry) and that the argument over the interpretation of such is a recent (as in post-1960s) red herring, which is a position I believe you basically agree with.
In case you hadn't noticed I'm not a politician or legislator. I'm not presenting this as some comprehensive plan for gun regulation in the USA. I quite explicitly listed them as the sort of perfectly reasonable approaches to gun regulation which run up against a cultural prejudice in favour of extreme liberty when it comes to firearms, and pointed to the second amendment as being a significant factor in why this sort of response carries so much weight. If I was pushing this as a platform I would certainly want hard data to back up each claim. My point is that even putting very restrained proposals on the table runs up against immediate claims of constitutional rights violations. I check in the mirror every day to see if I've become a convenient straw man. So far nothing, but don't give up hope. This would seem to support my point, which is that even timid regulation is politically toxic, to the point where the other side can capitalise off it in insane ways. Because even the most measured, evidence-based approach to regulation is going to be treated as whittling away at gun rights. (In a sense it is - that's what regulation entails.) And no matter what it is, even if it doesn't exist (see the response to Obama's election among reactionary gun owners), it is considered a wholesale attack on gun ownership. "Plenty" is a relative term that I doubt we'd find much agreement on. Perusing state law on wikipedia shows the balance overwhelmingly towards extremely limited regulation. Regulations do not get written in crayon on an A4 sheet of paper based off one line of a forum post. Quite obviously a "keep your guns secure" law would be nuanced enough to encompass different circumstances, though if kids are the only reason you can think to lock your guns then that's the sort of cavalier attitude which does so-called gun safety enthusiasts no favours. I can't tell if you're being disingenuous or not but I never compared guns to seatbelts. I compared them generally to vehicle ownership, which is the possession of a potentially dangerous tool which carries significant prerequisites and restrictions, largely absent for firearms. And firearms are designed to kill people. What are you even talking about with my primary concern? My point, and I really can't be bothered repeating it more than this, was a critique of the political and culture discourse which in my view undermines even the most reasonable regulation arguments. I wish that wasn't the case because I'm of the bizarre opinion that gun law in the US might not be perfect in terms of welfare outcomes. If that's such an affront to you that you think I'm secretly harbouring a wish that Americans be banned from owning guns then there's little more to say.
Yeah, I should have just taken into account the bullshit tone you adopted from the outset, and been affronted and disingenuous all on my own before volunteering to be lectured yet again on how you've cracked this whole seatbelt thing and have guns figured out. What is problematic is not that you are suggesting ideas about gun limitations. It's that you think simply suggesting them is the issue rather than their relative quality. Basically, you're just picking fights on first principles via a series of Trojan horses.
If I tried to care less about what you think of my tone I might break some physical law. What's problematic is that you're wilfully interpreting this: "To have a political environment where even discussing this sort of thing can be counter-productive is incredibly toxic" as "suggesting [ideas about gun limitations] is the issue rather than their relative quality". That manages to be both patronising and stupid. Patronising because it assumes I don't care about the quality of proposals, which I even bothered to deny for you. Stupid because it fails to recognise how a debate with any real political traction, as in not this one, over the relative quality of proposals is predicated on a political environment willing to seriously consider such proposals in the first place. As for Trojan horses I'm afraid I meant what I said, as inconvenient as that may be. I'm just happy that you, LK, of the sweeping analytical broadside, just tried to castigate me for 'lecturing'. That's just delightful.
I'm sorry, LK, if I understand what Lhowon is saying, I agree with him that the political atmosphere in the U.S. is toxic to any attempts to regulate guns. Any. Hell, here in Philly, the city has twice passed assault gun bans that were then struck down by the state legislature. The D.A. has tried to crack down on straw purchases for felons, which ought to be uncontroversial, and the state has made threats and taken actions to stop enforcement. When the most liberal of politicians are no longer willing to touch the subject, it's not because they've come to realize that there are no good arguments for gun control. It's because they are aware of the political consequences. I won't hide the ball you think Lhowon is hiding -- I am personally utterly opposed to private ownership of firearms. My opinion is irrelevant because the regrettable 2d Amendment exists and the interpretation of that amendment is pretty well established. However, there is a fairly large gap between the right to do something and the wisdom of doing so and our culture, in this as in many other things, is not wise.
I'm not disagreeing that it's difficult to pass any form of law on guns without the NRA's support or at least their halfassed acceptance, as has happened in the past with measures like background checks and waiting periods depending on their context (and if you look at the current NRA stance, it has shifted significantly to the right as its opposition gives ground and the broader conservative wackiness grabs hold of guns as a signifier). However, what I am getting at is that not all of the failures of gun control are created equal or equally tragic, and my point was that the differences matter. For instance, there has not yet been a situation where an assault weapon ban or magazine capacity ban is addressing a systemic problem that actually exists relative to how gun violence actually happens outside of movies and exceptional crimes. This matters, because if you're going to go with a red meat issue that is evidence-free, then you better have the political momentum to win it, and you can ask the GOP how solving non-problems of voter fraud turned out for them despite having far greater ignorant momentum than any assault weapon ban. The fact is the federal government has plenty of restrictions on automatic weapons and the like which are not premised on how much waving an AK-47 onscreen terrifies people who don't know anything about guns. This is a solved problem from the pro-gun side in terms of making the case against it, and it substantially weakens the credibility of anyone who goes with such ignorance-baiting and then tries to claim, for instance, they want to make good faith compromises around gun safety or the criminal expressions of gun ownership. Straw purchases by felons are a different thing altogether, but again, I would have to see the data on the problem that is being solved here because I generally disagree with turning felons into second-class citizens (voting especially). I think they make a great target for anything controversial because *surely* no one would agree with protecting their rights over something that seems on its face legitimate, and in a different political climate you might be right. But gun advocates have no reason to concede ground just because something sounds right, and that's going to keep happening. It's not irrelevant, it's actually really important, and I'm glad you're being direct about it. I would say if you're interested in wisdom-oriented arguments, then make the case for them. I would submit that by parsing out red meat issues and re-framing around data-based issues, ideally with candidates who have credibility with the mainstream in their states on guns, you have at least a chance. But the kindest thing you can do for the NRA is utterly dismiss the intellectual underpinning of individual liberties and follow that up by premising your arguments around what scares the dwindling numbers of people who treat supporting gun control per se as a litmus test. Moreover, I suggest that if you're interested in tackling violence per se rather than guns, you would have a much better chance (chance, I said, Philly is still going to be Philly + Pittsburgh and Alabama in between, as Carville famously said) of compromising with moderates. I think if you're worried about things that generate crime in Philly, and things that generate a self-perpetuating criminal class in urban areas, you will likely find that relatively few of the problems are addressed by targeting straw purchases by felons generically. It would be one thing if attacking that angle came at reasonable political costs, but it doesn't, and the electorate doesn't broadly support attrition-based tactics against private gun ownership that you might favor in a country or state that catered more to your tastes. And so what I am suggesting is that it's important, if you support reasonable restrictions of guns, and would like to see the situation where we as a nation aren't having arguments where Stand Your Ground is a starting point rather than an argument ad absurdum made to ridicule gun advocates, then you need to reconsider what you mean by "wise" gun laws. Twenty years ago, mere belief in climate change was a laughable political position and gun control wasn't. The former has adhered rigidly to data-based arguments, and paid dearly when it has even slightly diverged. It's not what I would call a success, but compared to the unmitigated disaster of the tragedy and fear-mongering of the gun control movement, I think you have a clear example of what's preferable for a liberal-moderate target audience.
My comments were not intended to promote gun control, but to add domestic violence as somewhere where the presence of guns seem to matter, and also to add some weight to Bob Costas' original point that people got so outraged about. Guns in domestic violence situations seem to exacerbate that violence. Dan Lawrence then seemed to indicate that an intra-US study was lacking in some ways, so I posted an international study that fit especially well with the Belcher case. The idea that absent guns, everything would be the same because perpetrator motivation overcomes all difficulty in killing with a different tool is just something that does not seem to hold up in suicide, domestic violence and accidents. Which, again, doesn't mean that I'll go tilting at American fetishization of the 2nd amendment (deleterious though it may be, but that goes for fetishizing most of the constitution), because, as pointed out, the effect of gun control on the grand scale doesn't seem to have that great an effect on the macro level.
