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

This is the classic trap people fall into when responding to this from a pro gun control perspective. You may well believe that a standard that hinges around celebrity and status primarily as a justification for having a gun is a reasonable way to approach the subject, but it's going to get you crushed in public conversation. I'm sure you understand why it sounds like "different laws for little people" when you frame it that way.

I think it's a lot easier to recognize that normal people are hypocrites, and we do things when we are afraid that don't hold up to principle or that we might not like to look back on when things calm down. In this case what she did was legal (as opposed to the classic "I promote family values during the day but at night I like to do drugs off people I pay for sex") so it's not a big deal in that sense. But it is a big deal in that it means she has to re-explain why she changed her mind when it comes up, and that she has to be willing to make the big connections to the systemic sources of the fear that drove her to that. I'm not convinced she's done that successfully, and while it's not a particularly exciting tangent for me, it's one of those things where she should own it or it will be used against her, and rightly so. The

I had always understood her opposition to guns was largely informed by her experience being in the office when Dan White assassinated Moscone and Milk in 1978, hearing the shots, finding the bodies, etc.

http://www.calbuzz.com/2012/12/how-difis-past-shapes-the-ban-on-assault-weapons/
Then there was that whole 101 California thing, which was a Big Deal here. I don't think changing her mind = being a hypocrite, necessarily. I'm not her biggest fan, but this isn't why.

"Perhaps he was shot while posting it."
"Yes but if he was dying he wouldn't take the time to hit Post Reply!"

I was being glib with my point.
However it's pretty apparent that public people, especially controversial policy makers, need more protection than your average Joe so her having a gun is understandable whereas Sally Soccermom taking her gun to her son's soccer game is not.
I'm specifically thinking of that incident years ago with the mother who took her gun to her daughter's soccer game and then sued for "emotional distress" after a sheriff took it away. She was later shot to death by her husband in front of their children.

I don't think it's so hypocritical to say that you don't think it's OK to carry guns, but that if other people are allowed to, you might want to as well.

Otterloop's Soccer Mom references;

http://articles.cnn.com/2009-10-08/...1_deleo-neighbor-second-amendment?_s=PM:CRIME
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2009/10/gun-toting_soccer_mom_is_shot.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/09/melanie-hain-gun-carrying_n_315291.html

What *is* actually hypocritical is a philosophical question largely beyond the scope of the conversation, but if she doesn't build a bridge beyond "here's a bunch of anecdotal tragedy I saw that had guns in it" she's not making a case for policy so much as personal preference.That is, I can understand why it's not hypocritical to decide you don't like guns as a result of x event, but it makes for what has been consistently taken apart as poorly framed policy. It's not like James Brady lacked strong personal anecdotes.

I don't have strong feelings on her one way or another, but it goes along with the fact that (to non-NRA gun owners like myself) she seems to embody the ineffectual gesture-oriented approach to gun control that the NRA has effectively neutralized and made the face of gun regulation generally. This thing about her CC permit is going to keep coming up, it's going to keep seeming like a trump against all of her points in the popular conversation, and she owes it to the cause she seems to care about to own the narrative. If she can't make the distinction between laws meant to address exceptional tragedies and laws meant to address gun crime generally, then it's not going to be difficult for others to use that in opposition.

I brought up hypocrisy out of empathy, not as a criticism, curious as that may sound.

Ah, I always wondered why she was so on about it.

This is what's pissing me off about the image making the rounds on Facebook, etc. showing Obama surrounded by secret service men with arrows pointing to "gun", "gun", "gun" and then a macro-like text below declaring that what's good enough for him is apparently not good enough for Your Children. My response so far has been (paraphrased): Your Children aren't nearly as important as the office of the President.

I like making friends on Facebook.

The President also kind of has to deal with real attackers, with say, rocket launchers, not some dipshit looking to mug him.

I acknowledge there are a number of sound statistical and practical reasons why the same level of preparation for violence is not appropriate for random person versus Important Famous Person. What I'm trying to get across is that you are basically writing NRA press releases about scheming liberals for them by focusing on who "really" needs protection in the wake of shootings of random people's kids. It's precisely because they want to provoke that response that they are throwing out all that bait about good guys with guns and the like.

Oh sure, not arguing there. Just that the President is probably the one guy who can claim a special exemption from anything.

But nothing in my post was in response to a shooting of random people's kids, or any shooting for that matter, so your point is moot at best.

Internet nerd pet peeve here, but can people take a couple seconds to summarize the point they're making with the videos they embed because that's 17 minutes total. If it's confirming Eric's statement, I don't need to watch it. If it's not, maybe I would want to.

That was in response to Jason's post. Obviously, I was commenting in terms of the reason that this conversation is happening right now.

Hey if every person who wants to own a gun is willing to pay for the same training a Secret Service member undergoes to carry that firearm, then more power to them.

http://news.yahoo.com/york-newspaper-list-more-gun-permit-holders-uproar-120534293--finance.html

Apprently this idiotic newspaper is going to double down and print even more names and addresses of gun owners in NY. I wish I could understand what they are trying to accomplish with this.

If only they explained their reasons in the article!

As the writer of the article himself owns a gun, but for whatever reason did not disclose his address for everyone to see (he doesnt live in the counties the newspaper is releasing), I don't take what he says the reasons are seriously.

If everyone knows who has a gun, then there's no objection to the government having training requirements which would have the effect of letting them know who has a gun. It's desensitization to a threat. The liberties that people cherish and the way they excercise them change over time. Also, it will alert people to the fact that there are borderline pantshitters being issued permits to carry guns every day. Think about it this way, I would trust Houngan with a concealed weapon at a baseball game, but I would worry that if you had a gun you would try to eat it and throw the bullets in a field to grow a war tree and once you broke all your teeth you'd try to fix it by drinking orange juice because you are a moron.

TLDR;

SPEAKING OF NOT TAKING SOMEONE SERIOUSLY.

HEY-OOOOOO.

And also, Brett, what kind of dipshit are you that you think people should be allowed to waltz around the goddamn town secretly carrying deadly pistols and you aren't even entitled to know about it? I mean, really. You aren't a teenage girl and this ain't your diary. It's a list of people who routinely go armed with deadly weapons and no badge. How is it not a matter of public record that certain individuals were issued a certain type of permit? You can get a list of caterers authorized to possess nitrous oxide, you should be able to ask the government who thinks they are some kind of goddamn cowboy.

If you use that gun in home defense, the funeral you attend may be your neighbors. Those rounds can go through a lot of shit. There are options when it comes to what you want a round to do when it hits a target. Someone who likes talking about that kind of stuff can fill people in.

Several years ago an ex-coworker buddy's first floor apartment was broken into when thieves smashed the sliding door. They grabbed a laptop, Xbox 360 and some other things before a neighbour seeing what made the sound spooked them.

When my coworker told me that the cop who took the robbery report had suggested to buy a gun I got angry. I told my friend that advice is stupid because 1) he has a wife and a newborn (at the time), 2) he's not trained to properly use a gun, and 3) he could accidentally shoot a neighbour. I stressed the last part to him because he lives in a neighbourhood of low-rise apartments.

He and his family moved to another suite on the second floor a few months later.

I don't agree with informal campaigns that seek to name and shame gun owners per se, because I don't think that's something that should be imposed without legislative action and I generally lean towards privacy as my default position; I'm sure the paper is trying to spur such a legislative debate by doing its list but it's kind of a fine line to walk (and you can bet the details like not listing their own writer are going to count for double, and then suddenly it's Feinstein all over again). I would also oppose a gun registry because I haven't found the evidence in favor of the trade-offs it represents compelling. I'm willing to reconsider that if we can get over the barrier to epidemiological analysis that the hard gun advocacy position currently provides, but I would say that putting the registry approach cart before the data horse is going to be a really hard sell generally.

I don't know what the cost-benefit looks like for concealed carry permits, but on the surface that seems like a reasonable thing to publish in public by default.

Tl;DR: 5.56x45 NATO or .233 pretty much blasts holes in shit too. In fairness to Eric, a shotgun is not much better if your load is designed for anything larger than birds.

Brett is Muir

IS WERY EXCITING

That's quite the ant-Obama / anti-progressive / anti-union cartoon site...

If anything, those websites of gun owner information should be making people question the availability of information these days, not gun registration.

A gun registry needs to be state accessible for informational purposes, the proposition isn't "tell everyone everywhere who has a gun", it's "make registries mandatory so that the cops know who has what legally"

We can make websites full of easily accessible personal information because the giant moral question of the information age is "we can do this, but should we?", and anonymity is rapidly eroding to dust while people debate what net neutrality means. But this has nothing to do with the government, it mostly has to do with advertising and marketing data combined with an easy way to rapidly correlate data points.

slightly off topic rant, I know. But let's face it: with the information available online these days if you outlaw easily searchable databases of user information, only outlaws will have them.

A drunk gunman shot and killed three people in a Swiss village.

A Time article on Switzerland and its gun culture.

I think this is the biggest difference between the US and the Swiss (and Canadians) -- the emphasis of gun responsibility and safety as well as cultures of individuality versus culture of social support. Unlike Americans I don't think the Swiss or Canadians have a fear of authority ("The government is going to take away my guns and my freedom to believe in a magical bearded man in the sky!")

(emphasis mine)

I'm getting rather tired of people on my Facebook feed comparing gun deaths to automobile deaths. Hey guys, before we compare them, how about we make it so you have to register every gun, license every gun, license the shooter after they take a safety course and an exam given by a certified instructor, and then require them to have shooting/gun insurance.

I suppose they could be making the argument that if we stopped licensing drivers and cars and got rid of insurance that driving and car ownership would be safer...

There's a chart floating around that would completely dismiss the argument, it basically shows that automobile fatalities have steadily dropped since like 2005, while gun deaths have been on a steady rise. It showed up on my facebook feed, I'll have to dig for it.

Ah, from Slate:

This is in no way intended to be a snark reply and I know that you mean well, but there's just one thing that I have to tell everyone, again and again, when the topic of Switzerland'n'Guns crops up: Don't. Really, just leave us out of your disscussions, debates, arguments etc.
I myself am very much in favor of pretty much any form of gun regulation, but any attempt to drag the CH into a debate about gun control in the USA is at best unhelpful. The two are simply too dissimilar, not to mention the apparent mythology that's been built up around Switzerland'n'Guns in some circles and the plethora of half-truths and disinformation out there.
But I guess after whining about others I should try and rectify this situation, so here goes: The most important thing, IMO, is this: Switzerland has no gun culture. We have, if you will, a military/militia culture, all mixed up with a culture of direct democracy, volunteering, somewhat confused patriotism etc to make one wonderful, rather distasteful but very swiss soup. Those millions of guns in Swiss homes that you hear so much about? They're actually the property of the state, not of the person responsible of keeping it in their home. This is not just empty semantics, because it also means that a.) you're not supposed to actually use this gun for, well, anything.
b.)You don't even get, or are allowed to have, any ammunition for your army rifle.
c.) In quite a number of cantons you even have to deposit your designated army rifle at the armory
d.) The whole situation is far from non-contorversial e.g.:http://www.beobachter.ch/justiz-beh...aft_privater-waffenbesitz-hat-sich-ueberlebt/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendum,_2011
http://www.amnesty.ch/de/laender/europa ... nd-fakten/
http://www.sp-ps.ch/ger/Medien/Communiq ... te-gibt-es
There have been in the last few years actually been a number of restrictions and it seems like public opinion is slowly, but surely, turning it's back on the whole military tradition thingy, weapons included.
So that are some of the probably most important points that I could come up with in the last five minutes. In addition to that, there's also the fact that the USA has still considerable more weapons going around than in CH, even with the whole poor, sad, so often misunderstood milita-thingy:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country

So yes, tl;dr: Please don't talk about Switzerland when it comes to guns, unless you're really really well informed and in that case, why'd you want to bring it up?

Err, seemed to somehow have missed this the first time around, but it's far from the first time that I've heard it: The whole carrying guns around in public thingy? "Nobody bats an eye [sic] when someone decides to go walkies with their gun!"

Bull-fucking-shit.

Per capita graphs are IMO generally more effective and frankly accurate illustrative devices.

"Yes, motor vehicle deaths have declined since 1999 but they are still (according to that graph) higher than guns."</devil's advocate>

Babe Ruth, baby.
Babe Ruth.

Skeptic author and neuroscientist Sam Harris, an avid shooter himself, posted his thoughts on gun control.

I brought up Switzerland as an example of another country that has high gun ownership (like you mentioned minus the mandatory military firearms (without the military ammo)) and relatively low gun violence, much like here in Canada. It was meant to show the difference in cultures and mindset (socially and with firearms).

Of course, with you as a Swiss you have a better understand of the laws and gun culture than I do, much I like I would with Canadian gun laws.