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

[Citation needed]

Minor derail: Your friend is seriously misjudging the relative safety of being a fireman, the on-the-job death rate for fire fighters is pretty much identical to that for police, and I don't think that accounts for long term health problems associated with being exposed to all kinds of lovely burning substances. Sheepherder can probably talk about that with excruciating wall-of-text detail.

Based on his friend's characterization of people who don't keep loaded guns close at hand as idiots, his friend seems to have a pretty poor grasp of risk in general.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, Thingiverse is cracking down on 3-D printable gun parts.

Honestly an ex-policeman is possibly one of the last people I'd take that kind of advice from; other examples would be long-time prosecutors or judges. These are people who by the very nature of their job spend most of their time around the small percentage of the population that are truly vile people. There's just no way that doesn't warp your perceptions to an extent about how common criminal behaviors are in an overall sense.

I'm more curious why Pacodeth registered on Monday solely to post in this thread. Whose alt are you?

I figured he was a random nut cruising for forums to spread his Very Important Expertise From A Guy He Knows Who's Totally, Like, An Expert, but I guess him being a trolling alt is pretty plausible too.

But, you know, don't underestimate the powers of somewhat dim angry people with time on their hands.

This was what I assumed had happened too, but clicking on his avatar says he joined in January.

Yeah, and he's posted in the League of Legends and a few other threads. He's legit.

Lol, so much paranoia! I'm a long time lurker, I play League of Legends with the Qt3 and Brokenforum guys, also a regular on the Minecraft server at one time. I am no ones alt.

The incident where the police officer mentioned protecting yourself when you are opening your car door or home door was during a lengthy presentation about campus safety, mixed in with a presentation by a company that was trying to win the bid for our campus security camera system. I was I.T. (hello fellow I.T. people!) and in charge of making sure the presentation equipment went swimmingly. All of that being said, a 3rd party recorded the presentation so that it could be shown to people that could not attend, if I can track down a recording of this presentation and they don't mind me sharing, I'll be glad to put it on here (but I'm not going to waste alot of time at work doing this). His comment was also stressed heavily towards our female audience members due to a recent rash of physical assaults and sexual assaults (not strictly rapes mind you) that had happened on the campus.

The ex-cop friend made this comment during a time when he was still a police officer and was working as a detective for the local P.D. I don't know why a cop who actually is putting his life on the line during confrontations and has to arrest and wrestle with and/or pull guns on people during the line of duty isn't seen as credible?

A give me a little break here, I'm not making this shit up.

I don't think that freedom of speech and the second amendment are equivalent rights. Freedom of speech is critical to the operation of a free and democratic state. Without relatively free speech, you cannot have a free society. Moreover, freedom of speech serves other ends: personal expression, exchange of information, and is required in a marketplace of ideas. Freedom of speech is enshrined in every democracy, in the United Nations declaration of human rights, and is absolutely central to political liberalism as a philosophy.

By contrast, the second amendment is a historical curiosity that is unique (as far as I can tell) to the United States. It provides none of the benefits that free speech provides. To the extent that the second amendment is said to have benefits, those benefits are largely hypothetical. There is no evidence that gun ownership is necessary as a check on government, and indeed the many free and democratic societies that don't have a right to ownership seem pretty conclusive evidence that gun ownership is not a necessary check. There does not appear to be any evidence that guns are an effective means of self-defence, and even less evidence that they, on balance, make the gun owner or his or her family safer. And while hunting is a great sport, so is football, but few would say that football should be enshrined in the constitution.

No, you're not making it up. You just neglect to make note of one of the leading groups in favor of gun control.

That's right -- police chiefs.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16530617

Shit! Entertainment averted.

We have, uhm, a record of undead alts.

This, incidentally, is part of the reason for the move to automatic/select fire weapons and large magazines in the military. Keep in mind that the M16 was designed during a period where most of the fighting was done by blacks poor white trash fighting age men with the exception of those committed to higher education. You can be a damn good shot with an M16, but you don't need to be.

Ha no biggie, I understand a bit of paranoia by this forums history (and the place which alot of this forum splintered off from). I just chose to come to this place to discuss firearms as I probably have more in common with alot of the people on this forum than others I might visit.

Umm, actually, a manufacturer can control the cycle rate of a semi-auto firearm very easily. The lock time, cyclical mass, throw of the bolt, and the energy/recoil redirected towards recocking the firearm all have a profound effect on the rate of fire. EDIT: not to mention, trigger weight and throw.

The easiest way to keep a fucker from shooting up a school is indeed limiting the ammunition on hand and ready to fire. The most extreme example would simply be restricting a person to a single magazine or clip when they're not at a range. Maybe it would suck for hunters fumbling around with loose cartridges in their pockets, but if five isn't enough to bag a deer maybe you should take up golf.

It would be interesting to see some sort of firepower capacity study on spree killings. Dunno if anyone has done so.

Exactly this. Free speech is a right because it's a) inherently important to the human condition and b) critical to the functioning of a free state. Gun ownership is a "right" because it is mentioned in the Bill Thereof, but there's no really good reason for it to be as far as I can tell, and given the founding fathers' decidedly mixed record when it comes to deciding what rights people are and aren't entitled to I'm not inclined to just take their word for it.

It's a natural extension of the right to defend oneself, a very Hobbesian idea. Also a very Hobbesian idea: the right for the rest of society to call for your extermination if you do not submit to the will of the masses and effect it via the edifice of the state.

It's not really Hobbesian, since Hobbes thought that the sovereign should have sole control over the police and army. Hobbes thought citizens had a right to self-defence only in the sense that the sovereign could not actually take away the desire of a person to protect himself or herself. Hobbes definitely thought the sovereign could (and should) take away weapons from the citizenry. He believed in an absolute sovereign with absolute power, after all.

This is a really unfortunate direction to take the argument. Inherent and critical and free are always negotiable to some degree; ask any of the countries that have successful liberal polities but with significantly different standards for freedom of speech. You're basically arguing a reverse Scalia, and that's a dead end. I find it's best to leave constitutionality to the after the fact rationalizations of lawyers once what can be done is passed, or at least to a separate debate from what is right or useful. But once you're invoking the founding fathers' mixed records selectively you've already lost.

You are morally in the clear defending yourself. The state is morally in the clear to hunt you like an animal if you are not willing to bargain away your rights to possess the means by which this is achieved to the extent which others in this society have also given up these means. There is no contradiction there, just social contract at work.

The prefatory clause in the second amendment, with it's talk of militias, seems very much to be a nod in this direction.

Worst sexual position ever.

I don't really agree; I don't think that the Leviathan has anything to do with what a citizen or a sovereign is "morally" entitled to do. There is a right to self-defence, but that right is a right of nature and not one that a sovereign ought to grant the citizen.

So in the state of nature, a person has a right to anything he or she can use to survive. A person has a right to "every thing, even to one another's body". The right to self-defence is a product of the state of nature, and not a legal right that emanates from the sovereign.

The other thing Hobbes says about self-defence (that I remember anyway) is this:

What he means by this, I think, is that you can never truly give up the right to self-defence, because if you are ever in the position where someone is trying to take your life, you are pretty much back in the state of nature and so you should do anything you can do to survive. The reason that people give up their rights in the state of nature in favour of the sovereign is to escape violent death; if faced with violent death, there is no reason to give up the rights in the state of nature, and so you have a right to defend yourself. But the sovereign has no obligation to give you the tools of self-defence, and would be perfectly entitled to take those tools away from you if he or she should choose.

I don't see any way of grounding a 2nd amendment right, or any legal right for that matter, in Hobbes.

e: I could also be way wrong about this. It's been a long, long time since I thought about Hobbes and I may be misremembering.

You're not misinterpreting Hobbes Alexb.

My argument would be that the second amendment, and specifically the reference to well ordered militias; is a recognition of the sovereign entity's monopoly on coercive force. At the same time, back when the document was drafted a militia was an instrument of a state government, thus the abbreviated modern English would read something like "The sovereign entity will maintain it's monopoly on coercive force via the auspices of the state government." I could just be talking out my ass though.

People, I just received new information that makes this all clear. Read this and everything will make sense again.

What the fuck did I just read?

Another insane person that thinks everything bad is a government false flag operation and mind control.

This is one of my favorite tropes. Just to name three!

I don't know. But now we've all read it, and that makes it better, right? RIGHT?

I must have missed it, but the word "sheeple" has to be in there somewhere, right?

I knew those damn banksters had to be responsible somehow. WAKE UP PEOPLE.

Nono, this isn't about sheeple. It's the full on "all bad things happen because GOVERNMENT MIND CONTROL"

Damn, it feels good to be a bankster.

I'm sad because I think bankster is code for Jew and it reminds me that Antisemitism is still a thing.

But it is a fun bunch of crazy isn't it?

A 11-year-old student brings a gun to school in Salt Lake City. He said that his parents thought it was a good idea for their son to have a gun in case of a school shooting.

Again, why did the child have access to the firearm? The parents should be charged with improper storage because that .22 pistol should have been locked away out of reach of a child.

Hey! Fareed Zakaria stated the same case I have using the same examples (Australia and China). That's plagiarism isn't it?

I agree with this idea stealing columnist, the solutions are not a mystery.

This is a long-ass post, but it's been brewing for a while. I haven't been able to get through all 22 pages of the thread so I'm probably repeating something here or there. Apologies.

It all fucking sucks.

That's really it. I'm just now getting to the point where I can think about this without choking up. I couldn't stop thinking about the Christmas trees in those parents' houses, with gifts for their murdered children sitting under them. Hell, they probably have the big "Santa" gifts hidden away somewhere. Just...what the fuck do you even do? How do you even go on? How do you change your planned Christmas dinner family get-together into a funeral for a six-year-old?

I'm trying to keep that from clouding my judgment on the issue, which admittedly is almost always "Fuck it, ban them all" in the aftermath of such an event. In the interest of that, I'll try to just organize things into a more intelligent breakdown.

It's not too soon. Fuck you. When this many kids die and after multiple shootings this year it's damn well too late to have this conversation. I don't care if you've heard it all before. If you can find me an example of where silence has been an effective tactic to enact change, please present it.

To all the idiots (not here, obviously) saying we need God back in the schools: Fuck you. Seriously. If God didn't stop a man from literally getting shot while leading a prayer in a church, then he damn sure didn't have anything to do with this.

One of the major issues with this discussion is the Second Amendment. We can talk all day about how much control the state holds over driving instruction and licensing, but the Constitution doesn't guarantee you (under even the loosest possible interpretation) the right to drive a car. It's not unlike the discussion on voter ID. Proponents say "Oh well you have to show your ID to get on a plane," but the Constitution doesn't grant land-owners the right to travel by plane (for obvious reasons, but still).

What will we do about it?

Talk about it for a while, then nothing. The House is under the control of the Republicans and the Democrats are too scared to pass anything with teeth anyway. We're stuck in this shooting gallery for at least the short haul.

What should we do about it?

Flowers makes an interesting argument with regards to the pro-life groups, and makes the (correct) point that the NRA and the gun manufacturers are an enormous juggernaut throwing money all over Washington. Pro-life groups have similar backing from deep pocketed religious organizations, but the individual agitators are out there because, frankly, this is their issue. They live it and breathe it and talk about it every single day. They wake up pissed off about it, and can't wait to yell at someone about it. There's really no such group on the gun control/safety side of the spectrum. That in mind, I think it's a little dangerous to suggest that anyone mimic the behavior of a group of people who seem to think it's acceptable to murder doctors to further their cause. I think that's probably the biggest divide on this and some other issues. They're willing to kill for their cause, their opponents aren't willing to die for theirs.

Banning high capacity magazines might be a start. Problem is, according to the reports, the Aurora shooter started with a pump action shotgun, switched to a high-capacity semi-auto M&P15 (a variation on the M-16), but that jammed after less than 30 of the 100 rounds he had loaded. The rest of the shooting was done with a Glock 22. Even without the M-16 he could have hit the crowd with up to 8 shotgun rounds (the max capacity on the Remington 870) before reloading, plus up to another 30 rounds total between the two glocks. Perhaps the more complete solution would be to ban guns with a high rate of fire and large magazines. That's a pretty big lift, though.

As for school safety, I don't have a problem with setting schools up with locking doors, and I think it's not too unreasonable to suggest that every classroom should be outfitted with a heavy duty door with a nice fat lock on it. Yes, it's attacking the problem from the other end, but sometimes we have to look at how to stop this from both sides.

Realistically, the way forward is an agonizingly slow process of finally pushing back against the gun lobby that has dominated this area of politics for so long. The people who fetishize guns would have to be marginalized as irresponsible or even dangerous. We'd have to wait for the Supreme Court to shift a bit more, and create a solid (and vocal) constituency of people who will elect and stand behind representatives who are willing to pass new legislation. Ultimately, the goal should be an amendment to the Constitution so the whole thing doesn't hang in the balance of the Court. I'm not suggesting a full ban, just a removal of the Constitutional rights to enable more sane discussion on how to proceed with the problem. Right now "IT'S MAH RIGHT" sadly trumps everything else, especially with the court we have now.

At the end of it, there's a very simple fact. Higher rates of gun ownership and access to guns = higher homicide rates. Guns make murder a simple affair relative to a great many other options, and having less of them around would without question be a positive thing for our society.

A minor side note on all of this: Are conservatives actually advocating that we require all the lazy, mooching, unionized teachers to carry guns around all day? I've seen some cognitive dissonance in my time, but that's pretty far up there on my list.