Can we please just admit that maybe gun control is a good idea finally?

I haven't read every post here yet as the thread is moving pretty quickly, but wanted to toss in an article I stumbled across this morning from July 2012 (after Aurora, CO). It provides a little insight into the Japanese gun control model.

A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths
http://www.theatlantic.com/internat...-virtually-eliminated-shooting-deaths/260189/

But what about the country at the other end of the spectrum? What is the role of guns in Japan, the developed world's least firearm-filled nation and perhaps its strictest controller? In 2008, the U.S. had over 12 thousand firearm-related homicides. All of Japan experienced only 11, fewer than were killed at the Aurora shooting alone. And that was a big year: 2006 saw an astounding two, and when that number jumped to 22 in 2007, it became a national scandal. By comparison, also in 2008, 587 Americans were killed just by guns that had discharged accidentally.

Almost no one in Japan owns a gun. Most kinds are illegal, with onerous restrictions on buying and maintaining the few that are allowed. Even the country's infamous, mafia-like Yakuza tend to forgo guns; the few exceptions tend to become big national news stories.
[...]

Even the most basic framework of Japan's approach to gun ownership is almost the polar opposite of America's. U.S. gun law begins with the second amendment's affirmation of the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" and narrows it down from there. Japanese law, however, starts with the 1958 act stating that "No person shall possess a firearm or firearms or a sword or swords," later adding a few exceptions. In other words, American law is designed to enshrine access to guns, while Japan starts with the premise of forbidding it. The history of that is complicated, but it's worth noting that U.S. gun law has its roots in resistance to British gun restrictions, whereas some academic literature links the Japanese law to the national campaign to forcibly disarm the samurai, which may partially explain why the 1958 mentions firearms and swords side-by-side.

Of course, Japan and the U.S. are separated by a number of cultural and historical difference much wider than their gun policies. Kopel explains that, for whatever reason, Japanese tend to be more tolerant of the broad search and seizure police powers necessary to enforce the ban. "Japanese, both criminals and ordinary citizens, are much more willing than their American counterparts to consent to searches and to answer questions from the police," he writes. But even the police did not carry firearms themselves until, in 1946, the American occupation authority ordered them to. Now, Japanese police receive more hours of training than their American counterparts, are forbidden from carrying off-duty, and invest hours in studying martial arts in part because they "are expected to use [firearms] in only the rarest of circumstances," according to Kopel.

The Japanese and American ways of thinking about crime, privacy, and police powers are so different -- and Japan is such a generally peaceful country -- that it's functionally impossible to fully isolate and compare the two gun control regiments. It's not much easier to balance the costs and benefits of Japan's unusual approach, which helps keep its murder rate at the second-lowest in the world, though at the cost of restrictions that Kopel calls a "police state," a worrying suggestion that it hands the government too much power over its citizens. After all, the U.S. constitution's second amendment is intended in part to maintain "the security of a free State" by ensuring that the government doesn't have a monopoly on force. Though it's worth considering another police state here: Tunisia, which had the lowest firearm ownership rate in the world (one gun per thousand citizens, compared to America's 890) when its people toppled a brutal, 24-year dictatorship and sparked the Arab Spring.

The idea that a person has to be made to suffer by the state because their admittedly small wrong caused a great loss seems wrong to me. You are using that person as a scapegoat, essentially, punishing him or her out of proportion to his or her moral blameworthiness in order to deter others. It turns the criminal justice system into a kind of horrible game of roulette, where many people engage in risky behaviour, and an unlucky few take on all the consequences of that behaviour.

I am extremely doubtful that punishing most bar fights (for example) very lightly but hammering down on those that end in tragedy is an effective means of deterrence. Humans are pretty bad at assessing probabilities, and are unlikely to make good cost/benefit analyses, especially in the heat of the moment. Far better to punish risky acts consistently and predictably, rather than heap punishment on the person who gets unlucky.

I also don't agree that "making the family feel better" should be a motivating factor in sentencing; should we punish an offender less if his victim had no family? Should we punish him more if his family is particularly bloodthirsty and needs additional punishment to feel satisfied?

I do agree that legitimacy is important. My suspicion, though, is that the more we encourage people to view criminal justice as an instrument of revenge, the more they see it as such. So in North America we have very, very severe penalties, but people still say they are too lenient and want even stricter penalties. A progressive justice system attempts to reduce the role of vengeance. And in any event, no amount of suffering on the offender's behalf is going to make the victim's family whole.

How is that unlucky? If you do illegal act X then there's a chance it may cause illegal acts Y and Z. So you had better think about your actions. Your alternative is mind boggling.

If I haven't been able to explain it to your staisfaction yet, I doubt I will be able to do so now, but I'll give it one more shot.

Say A, B, and C are in a room together. C is tied to a chair. A and B have a revolver with a single bullet in it, and are going to play Russian roulette. A spins the cylinder, points the gun at C, and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. B does the same, and again nothing happens. They pass the gun back and forth a few times, until finally B pulls the trigger, the pistol fires, and C is killed.

So A and B have both engaged in the same morally blameworthy behaviour which risked killing C. However, only B's act actually caused the consequence of death. The question becomes how should A and B be punished? In my view, they should be punished equally, since the blameworthy behaviour was the same.

No, I understand perfectly what you are saying, it's just...... different....

Have not read the thread because I don't hate myself enough. Sorry, y'all. I almost wanted to make a new thread for this, but it's probably not necessary.

MN GOP Solution To School Shootings: Arm Teachers

I am not making this up. The Star Tribune is the largest newspaper in the state; it's not some kind of satire site.

:(

Yes, fa-fa-fa-far better. But you've already said that once, why say it again? When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed.

This has been observed several times in this thread, because it's a bizarrely common belief among the right. It kind of makes you wonder how so many clearly insane people manage to function in society.

Not sure if this has been posted yet, but I imagine this will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout...rado-record-highest-background-174415554.html

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/12/on-metaphors-and-violence

Liberal blogger gets angry after school shooting, calls for Wayne Pierre's head on a stick, gets reported for making a death threat.

Can I report him for citing Urban Dictionary as though it were an authority on something?

Ta-Nahesi Coates has been musing on the idea of arming teachers.

Well if you think the idea of arming the teachers is offensively stupid, here's good old Megan McArdle with a plan to let children be their own first line of defense:

Don't any of these morons remember the NYC shooting last summer where eight innocent bystanders were accidentally shot by cops trying to take down the gunman?

If New York police officers, who complete regular firearms training, end up accidentally shooting bystanders, what makes the gun crazy crowd think that teachers will be more successful?

Damn, that is a ton of idiocy in one blog post there.

8-12 first-graders are not going to be able to "bring down" an adult even without a gun. What the hell is wrong with these people?

Christ.

To be fair being aggressively stupid is Megan McArdle's thing. It's telling that she eventually got the boot from the Atlantic.

No way, they finally canned her? I might actually resubscribe then.

They may pass training but how often do they shoot to maintain their skills? It appears that the NYPD officers broke the gun safety rule of not knowing what's behind their target before shooting.

The region police forces have a range set aside just for their use only at my hunting & fishing club. From the events calendar the Vancouver police ERT (aka SWAT) trains 2-3 times a month. I don't see anything for non-ERT members. The ERTs have to train constantly because they can't afford to make the mistakes those NYPD officers did.

Having a handgun means nothing if you don't know how to use it. You're more likely to hurt yourself or someone you care about if you mishandle it (eg. finger on the trigger).

From Facebook:
"So, a guy kills 26 people, including 20 kids, and it's a national tragedy and we need to take everyone's guns away, but when the government kills 76 people, including 26 children, at Waco, everyone's okay with it because they were a bunch of nutjobs?"

Not to mention that without training the first person you saw actually HIT by a bullet would fucking freeze the rush in sheer terror. Gunshot wounds are not something normal people are accustomed to seeing first hand, let alone children.

Do these people think we have police academies and military training to teach them just how to press their uniforms? There's a lot of work that goes into teaching someone when and how to shoot, as well as how to not lock the hell up under fire. Arming everyone or teaching children to rush certain threats (seriously, how do you explain "rush a gun, don't rush a knife, don't rush a dog/bear/animal" to a first grader?)

Is pre-K going to turn into toddler boot camp?

I thought schools are suppose to be safe havens for children? Republican politicians don't think so.

Wait, when was everyone okay with how Waco went down?

You first, Megan McArdle. We'll all be right behind you.

Relevant anecdote (with all the qualifications that an anecdote requires);

Gabby Giffords shooting: heroic (not being sarcastic, props to this guy) armed bystander tackled the dude who had just wrested the gun away from loughtner, assuming the guy with the gun was the shooter; bystander had not pulled his own gun for fear of being mistaken for a second gunman. Armed bystander states that having the gun made him feel secure while rushing in, even though he didn't end up drawing it.

He did have his hand around it ready to shoot and says he is very lucky that he made the right call in the second or so before it became clear.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2011/01/friendly_firearms.html

GOOD FUCKIN' LORD! CNN tries to tie Starcraft to the Newtown shooting by getting one professor to say that there is a link between violent video games and violence.

"There's a lot of evidence on both sides, we'll have to leave it at that."

I bet the shooter also listened to the hip hops and rock and roll.

Paul Bendix was shot in the neck by three strangers back in 1968, leaving him paralyzed for life. He writes about his relationship with an elderly neighbour who died and left him with his three handguns.

Doesn't CNN end all segments with that? Is that their new corporate motto?

So I'm wondering, in all this debate, what we actually can do to avoid another shooting like this. And I don't see where anything proposed that is gun control related is really doing anything. After all, the guns used were all legal, legally acquired. Outside of banning certain types of guns (or all guns), tighter gun control laws wouldn't solve this. I'm all for all gun sales (including private) requiring background checks. We can go back to the Brady laws that were allowed to expire. But none of that would have kept this guy from doing what he did. This case reminds me a lot of a number of other shootings, where we see parenting failures or at least failures of judgement on the part of otherwise responsible adults that lead to people who should not have had access to guns having them. And you can't legislate a solution to that without restricting everyone's rights.

Everyone in the United States should be able to pick one other person and tell the government to take away their right to own a gun. Nobody gets to know who picked who, and if just one person picks you, nothing happens. If two people pick you, no gun. If three people pick you, you only get to have your thumbs on weekends. May as well tape 'em down now, Brett.

In the alternative. Everyone in America gets to pick one other person, anonymously, that they trust to have a gun. If nobody trusts you enough with a pistol to use their pick on you, well, out of three hundred million people, I would be too embarassed to say anything. You have to go back to bow and arrows or rocks underneath a certain weight. If fifteen people pick you, you get to grow a moustache, at government expense, if necessary. (In the case of ladies or exceptionally well respected child actors.)

Also, to prevent abuse related to pick trading, if two people pick each other, they have to kiss. On the mouth. With tongue. If they refuse, they have to wear matching outfits for an entire year but they get to have swords and they can carry them anywhere even in Dunkin Donuts or at a hospital, as long as they are together. (It's called being best friends.)

I thought when you had nothing to say you kept your lips sealed.

The NRA has released a statement on the Newtown shootings:

Well that's a non-statement if I've ever seen one.

Press conference on Friday though so I guess I have something to look forward to dreading.

Add that to the list of all the meaningless statements they've made after every gun massacre in the past 15 years.

That second part is the part that would change, ideally. Gun control isn't really (primarily) about better enforcement of the gun laws we already have.

We can offer the government a trade. They can pass a law to restrict gun ownership, gun sales and such, but they have to repeal the Patriot Act. If we are going to give up some rights we should get back some of the ones we've already lost.