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

I'm surprised it didn't end with "...and so I blew his fuckin head off and now he doesn't rifle through my trash anymore."

I'm certainly not advocating firing guns off into the air, but as an aside Mythbusters seemed to pretty conclusively show that the terminal velocity of a falling bullet was not high enough to kill someone. They admitted there was a chance it could, but also noted that in most cases where people are struck by bullets "fired into the air" it isn't clear where they were fired from.

Was it the terminal velocity of a vertically dropped bullet, or a bullet on a parabolic arc, which many bullets "fired into the air" would be. I imagine that depending on the angle a bullet was fired at the return velocity could still be high enough to kill and that you wouldn't need to be that far off vertical for this to be the case.

<too soon to /gus?>

Things that have been said in this thread:

1) Gun Safety is Important

2) A gun is a tool, not a toy

3) It is a tool for killing things.

There is no logical paradox here. Teaching people how to use and respect a tool (instead of making the tool less effective) should lead to less accidental death and injury. Newtown might not have been stopped by gun safety (even if the mom kept the guns locked and unloaded, I would say) but other accidents would be. And we have lots of gun accidents in the US.

This is only a paradox if you assume that the training would be focused on making gun owners better marksmen, when I think most folks that suggest mandatory training are talking about safety training, with the goal of reducing accidental shootings.

I think you have a valid argument for needing a firearm for self-defense, but at the same time I'm not really seeing how many of the proposed restrictions inhibit your ability to defend yourself. You brought up magazine capacity as an example; do you honestly feel that you need more than seven rounds to intimidate box cutter guy into leaving you alone? That's a sincere question--it seems like you are saying that you do, and I would like to hear your reasoning. Or alternately, would storage safety requirements (such as requiring that guns be kept under lock and key when not on your person) be a major inhibition for your use scenario? Why?

This, too, is unhelpful unless you are prepared to hang everyone in Frank's situation out to dry. The name of this thread is "Can we please just admit that maybe gun control is a good idea finally?" which looks a whole lot like it's looking for a policy discussion. A comment like this says, "Most people don't need guns, we know you might, but too bad because most people don't."

Also, I don't think "guns are useful for average citizens" was a statement on the table before you put it there.

Frank, you say you can't get a C&C, but could you just walk your dog with your gun in your other hand? I usually think that these 'brandish publicly' people are assholes, but in your case if it might dissuade people from running at you with box cutters, maybe it'd be an okay idea.

If you don't have a shot, you shouldn't be shooting. Fear is understandable, but so is the reality that every round goes SOMEWHERE and a non-zero number of people are killed by stray rounds. This is why the idea of using twelve rounds to stop an attacker is bad: 8-10 of those rounds went somewhere other than your target, or you put entirely too many rounds in your target. Making up for shitty firearms training with volume of fire is a solution for a combat zone, not an urban neighborhood.

On a gaming note, this is one of the reasons I loved ME1: they're the only sci fi instance I can think of where they bring up the point that all of that ordinance fired in space has velocity, so if you miss it's basically going to travel comical distances until it hits something.

Most deaths I see listed from "falling bullets" are children, which may explain the difference in lethal velocity?

You might want to revisit that episode of Mythbusters. They determined that a bullet fired straight up will tumble and lose its spin, thus falling at a lower velocity than it went up. So it was Busted. However, a bullet fired at an arc can maintain its spin and velocity, thus being fully capable of delivering lethal force. So they called the myth Plausible. Then they spoke with a cop who told them about a case where someone had been struck in the head and killed by a bullet fired into the air some distance away, leading the Mythbusters to declare the myth Confirmed.

FrankA, I'm sorry that you're living with such a bad situation. I apologize for my remark which upon re-reading does sound snarky and perhaps smug. I do continue to feel that average citizens should not be expected to defend themselves; I understand that in your area and experience, you feel you must. (Paranthetically, I don't actually support 100% bans, just regulating the fuck out of guns.)

I was also wondering about the open-carry issue. Is that also illegal or is it just tactically unwise?

You might want to get a restraining order vs. your homeless guy. http://www.courts.ca.gov/1044.htm Based on what you've said, you would certainly qualify for one. Of course, a restraining order won't do anything if the cops don't show up when it's violated. However, it is not impossible that "guy is violating court order" will get better response than "guy is acting crazy and threatening in front of my house." Perhaps more importantly, getting the order and reporting violations will build a record so that if you do have to shoot the guy, the relevant law enforcement official will shake your hand instead of opening an investigation.

I wasn't going to respond to this, because it's pretty clearly just trolling, but since the thread has moved into a discussion of individual experience vs. policy I wanted to take a shot at you.

FrankA Like it or not, this thread has been very clearly discussing guns as a nationwide concept - I'm sorry that you live in that situation, but I honestly don't know what you're expecting because it sounds like you are expecting immediate solutions. There are none, bar moving, and meanwhile I'm sure there is a statistically significant number of people in Oakland who live in a similar position without even the (relative) capacity to get out of there you're looking to exercise. So if you got a gun and scared the guy off, great, you'd be safe again, except there would still be a crazy violent hobo man now roaming different streets. Your problem is an individual consequence of a systemic fault; Either we can fix the fault or let individuals deal with the consequences, and I know which one I would prefer. Jason McCullough are there any studies you know of that compare the costs of treating the homeless mentally ill vs. dealing with the results of them on the streets?

I should note that I am learning useful things from this thread, even if mostly lurking. I tend to be heavily on the side of gun control--and pretty damn strict control of it--myself, but I hadn't actually considered situations like FrankA's before, because...well, I didn't realize we had those sorts of situations in this country. (I call that ignorance, not idiocy, on my part, but others are free to disagree.)

My reaction isn't to think that gun control is a bad idea on a nationwide level, but to kinda come to the realization that when an area is that massively fucked up, it totally makes sense why people would want to have access to guns for self-defense, and have reason to believe it'd actually be more good than harm in their circumstances. It's like treating tuberculosis with a cough drop, given how little it addresses the core problems, but if someone is hacking constantly and a cough drop's the only damn thing they're able to get at to treat the symptoms, well, yeah, I can totally see how "But there's a bigger problem at hand!" would seem insulting. Of course there's a bigger problem at hand; fixing it is a bit outside the scope of the cough drop validity discussion.

That said, it's also a useful mental note for me in this way: if someone is in a situation where owning a gun is, overall, going to make them and/or their family safer rather than more at risk, that's a sign that they're in a situation that is hideously fucked up and which really needs a lot of attention to the other issues at hand. So I should keep that in mind when discussing this sort of issue with people. Of course people who are living in hideously unsafe areas with incompetent police forces and daily threats of violence aren't going to feel they can rely on the basic level of civilization and government protection for safety, because they're living somewhere that isn't actually reaching a basic level of civilization.

Fuck you, I'm not trolling. I agree that the real long-term "solutions" are massive improvements to both mental healthcare and law enforcement. But no one I've yet seen has proposed any kind of workable, specific plan to deliver either of those things, nor has anyone managed to convince legislatures anywhere I know of in the country to allocate the funds for such a plan. They can come up with and implement a proper, well-funded solution, or Frank can buy a Glock. I know which one is more likely to happen.

No it doesn't. Not being a fucking idiot yields proper respect. People can go through the motions of training to get their hands on a gun with zero intention of respecting said gun.

I'm not one of those "FULL LOAF OR NOTHING" people, but hyperbole doesn't help. Let me fix this:

I'd say that's very likely. But not all firearm deaths are preventable. Stupid people who receive proper training are still stupid.

Nope. California banned open carry specifically because of those idiots.

Magazine capacity is so funny to me, because it's such a meaningless thing to anyone with a modicum of firearms training and people treat it, alongside 'assault weapon bans', like a magical cure for mass shootings. Our deadliest mass shooting was carried out with pistols and ten/fifteen round magazines aplenty. Columbine too.

Practically, I know that magazine limits do not matter. I know this because California is a state with a 10 round magazine limit, and yet it is awash in 15, 20, and 30 round magazines sold under the guise of 'rebuild kits' for existing pre-ban magazines. I'm not saying that I find this an agreeable solution, but magazine size prohibitions are not really the kind of thing I think of as being productive. There are millions upon millions of 'high' capacity magazines in this country, and unless you confiscate them all and ban the manufacture of any components that could be used in them, they're not going anywhere.

On one occasion my home was almost invaded by multiple people from multiple entrances. One came to my front door and tried to force entry while another did the same at the back. In a rather comical affirmation of the stupid things 'gun nuts' say, it was my yelling to my girlfriend "GET A GUN" that made them run away. (OPD never responded to this call, by the way) In that situation I would have been more than happy to have more than ten rounds in both my rifle and my handgun.

I'm not in favor of storage requirements, mostly because I've found that those seconds matter and that real gun storage is expensive and prohibitive for anyone who doesn't own a home.

You do realize that those two solutions are not mutually exclusive, yes?

I was talking beyond FrankA's anecdote and making a larger point because what the hell else are you going to talk about with an anecdote. Of course, if your response is I DEMAND A DETAILED PLAN, RIGHT NOW that's not exactly engendering discussion either, but I would prefer to give you the benefit of the doubt at this point and we could go on to discuss our mental health care plan. For instance, I think the passing of Obamacare means it is possible to get something done, especially as state services have been drawn down dramatically in the last few years. If the states won't do it, then the feds should.

Ah, ok. Thanks. Obviously "everyone should move away from high-crime areas" isn't a general solution or even a specific solution, I was just curious what the blockers were.

It's especially interesting to me because until the first big shouting match we had on this where I was an idiot, on the Trayvon Martin thing, I literally cannot recall ever talking to someone who was 1) a gun owner and serious about it and 2) had a plausible need for self defense. There's this strange situation where it seems 90% of the people talking about it have no need, because they're rich white guys in the suburbs, and the people in high-crime areas who should carry either don't own or don't talk about it.

The online demographics no doubt make this worse, but for example, twitter, which has a lot of poorer black men posting on it, is not exactly overrun with them speaking as gun enthusiasts concerned about the terrible gun control plans of Obama.

I'm not sure people treat it like a magical cure. I sure don't. The issue is, if we hand-wave away any measure such as this as "well it won't stop gun violence en toto," then we're essentially saying we're not going to bother to take any measures and people dying by gunfire is just the way life is.

Also the key phrase there is actually "modicum of firearms training" which nobody is required to have to own such weapons in most states, which I won't argue is more concerning than their existence to begin with.

Ultimately this is one of the rhetorical bait-and-switches employed by the pro-gun side (though in FrankA's specific case that's not what he was doing). It comes from the same place as the "What are you gonna do next, ban knives?" genre of of argumentation.

Frank's situation certainly sounds awful and it's an anecdote in favor of relaxed controls on firearms possession. As pointed out though, the root cause of the situation is government at all levels pretty much abandoning parts of Oakland. From a social problem perspective, the solution there should be don't abandon Oakland to anarchy, rather than ignoring firearms as a social problem.

Imagine you have unlimited funds at your disposal. What does your ideal mental healthcare plan look like? I don't have any idea what the basis of an effective plan is. How do you deliver it to the enormous number of people who need it? How about the portion of the homeless who are mentally ill? Do you have to just build it and hope they come? A lot of mentally ill people don't want to admit it to themselves or anyone else, if they know at all.

If we could come up with an idea of what the ideal is, we could start figuring out ways to bring it in line with what we're actually prepared to fund. Right now there's no starting point at all.

Getting the funding to actually make a dent is another huge challenge. I heard a figure along the lines of $25 million for mental healthcare being tossed around in connection with the Obama plan but I don't really know if that's accurate; if it is, it's almost certainly laughably inadequate, unless good national mental healthcare programs turn out to be much cheaper to administer than I suspect.

This line gets dropped a lot in these conversations, so just to get it out of the way: I have considerably more than a modicum of firearms training, and I'm at least willing to consider regulations on magazine capacity. Is it a magical cure-all? Of course not. I see very few people arguing that it is, however, aside from those presenting an anti-regulation argument that hinges upon making the perfect the enemy of the good, as you are doing here:

There isn't really a good answer to the argument that the law will be useless because people won't follow the law. It does beg the question, however: Why, then, do we have any laws at all? My counterargument would be that I think that the majority of people are generally law-abiding, and that a restriction combined with a discontinuation of the legal manufacture and distribution combined with some sort of buyback program would at the very least make them a lot less common. It would take time, and it would never be completely effective, but that is not, by itself, a compelling argument for not doing it.

To put it another way: do you feel the same way about fully automatic weapons? Because the restrictions on those, too, are not (and probably never can be) fully effective. Automatic weapons are out there, and there are certainly people that possess them illegally and don't care. There are plenty of legal weapons that can easily be converted to fire automatically. Should ease restrictions on the ownership of fully automatic weapons?

The key point of this anecdote, at least to me, is that what made them run away was the threat of a possible firearm. In my mind, this is the main value of a gun for self-defense: as a deterrent. If that situation had devolved into an actual shootout, the number of rounds that you had in your rifle would have made little difference. Because if people are swarming you from multiple directions and don't care that you are shooting at them, then you are probably screwed anyway. If they do care that you are shooting at them, then you aren't likely to have to fire more than once or twice to send them running.

A home storage requirement would not necessarily prohibit you from having a gun on your person when you are there; it would ideally (in my mind) be a measure for ensuring the security of firearms when they are unattended. If you regularly have people trying to force their way into your house, this may be to the benefit of your own safety, as well!

I'm all for good policy discussions, but you should probably recognize that we're not going to solve the problem that is the sorry state of mental health care in the United States here on Broken Forum. Especially not in the Sanctum!

You could say much the same for nearly any public policy topic. Should we shutter the forum?

No, but we could start by asking questions instead of demanding answers. Such as: jeffd, wasn't there an effort to push homeless people off the welfare rolls in the last dozen or so years? Do you know how effective those programs were at keeping the violently ill off the streets?

I certainly don't think so! But the tone of your posts makes it seem as if you believe that since we don't have the ability to solve a complex social problem, we shouldn't even try.

Heck if I know! From what little I gather the main change in terms of the mentally ill is that once upon a time we used to spend a lot of money locking them up in institutions. That was expensive - not to mention a kind of shitty thing to do - so we stopped.

Sure, to be fair, I'm not trying to hand-wave the notion away. I'm pretty uninvested because, like I said, there are plenty of practical workarounds for people who feel that they would require something more than ten rounds in a magazine, and because I don't particularly care what this measure comes up with.

But, I don't think I've ever seen a compelling argument that magazine size limits would do anything to limit gun violence OR specifically address the problems of mass shootings. A prepared shooter (like in a mass shooting) doesn't really care if he has to reload that often. My favorite argument in its favor is the "but if they reload they can be tackled!" which sounds an awful lot like some of the fanciful imaginations of 2A fanatics.

This conversation has come a long way from the whole "You should get rid of your girlfriend and dog and move!" that thread evolved into.

I'm not saying that people with training wouldn't consider regulations on magazine capacity at all. I'm saying that training negates a lot of the theoretical limitations of magazine capacity. That's all. Oh, and that people do treat it like a cure-all, even in this thread, but I'm not accusing anyone specific of doing so.

Again, not intended as an answer to the law being useless, just intended as perspective on what practically happens under the effects of magazine capacity laws. I realize it's going to take some extra effort to get that I'm not coming at this from the POV of most 'pro gun' folks with these points, but I'd appreciate it.

I'll answer that this way: I'm personally totally okay with requiring a tax stamp or other certification, like what we require for assault rifles (please stop calling them assault weapons, they're not) for owning 30 round magazines. But I'm pretty permissive on lots of stuff. Legislation and administration doesn't bother me because I'm a responsible owner, but restrictions on access and prohibitive legislation does.

I don't want to get too into this and have it descend into nerdery, but volume of fire is a not-insignificant factor in the outcome of any gunfight. Lots of things I've read point to it as the key factor. I am personally loathe to consider firearms a deterrent, because I refuse to use them that way. Brandishing and deterring is problematic in many self-defense scenarios and I'd rather not start descending the hypothetical path too much.

I'm fine with that, but I still think it's especially difficult for non-home owners and relatively low income people to do - I can't afford a good gun safe, nor can I safely tether any affordable safe to the duplex I rent. I'd want any legislation that involves storage requirements to include some sort of allowances for those kind of circumstances.

Oh, well, poop. My (limited) experience is that mental health care really depends on long-term solutions - lots of therapy, adjusted meds, decent living accomodations - but I can easily see how that moves from "get them off the streets into safe place to be taken care of" to "get them off the streets."

Is there an economic argument for this? How much do we pay in homeless shelters, repeated ambulance rides and hospitalizations, and how much would preventive, effective care ameliorate this?

Those are all really good questions that I don't have the expertise to answer. My gut feeling is that a humane regimen of mental health care for those who don't have the kind of existing support structure (family, job, etc) would be hideously expensive.

Like the one I asked you four posts up, which you have thus far declined to answer?

I think trying to solve them is the only viable long-term solution, which is the thrust of the question I asked above, which was: freed from all financial constraints, what produces good results? In contrast, I am trying to find a way to read your post in a way that isn't pooh-poohing the idea of discussing the issue, and I have been unsuccessful this far. Perhaps that is a failure on my part. But I don't think so.

But I have yet to hear such a plan, I am skeptical of the legislators' willingness to fund it, and I am wary of dogmatic pushes to remove, in the hypothetical interim, the only other obvious tools at the disposal of people suffering the consequences.

EDIT: In any evaluation of my tone, please keep under consideration that this particular barrage of posts was kicked off when I was accused of trolling. I think in my place you might find accusations like that... aggravating.

Sorry I missed this one - apart from the problematic expectation of the relative legal costs of any self defense case (I asked a lawyer friend this week. He said to count on 60k in legal fees even if I'm totally justified and protected, which is considerably more than I make in a year) the issue is that while he knows where I live and knows my name, I don't know his and can't file the restraining order paperwork without it. Can't very well issue a restraining order for "that crazy fucker with the box cutter".

I'll tell you honestly (because I agree with you about compelling arguments), the worst part about all of this is we have no good statistics because apparently the NRA had them suppressed. We could know these things but we don't, now we're just spitballing.

Well I know you know that's not me and I am hoping for a variety of measures because I know that that is what it'll take, if anything at all will have any hope of working.

Do you think this is like, a burn, or something? Do you want me to also pull a plan for solving inequality out of my ass? Why don't you pretend I wrote something you disagree with here and continue frothing at the mouth long after I had made my attempts at normal conversation. oh, whoops, too late

Huh. Now I'm wondering what people did last century/in smaller communities. Did they really just shut up their crazies in the attic? Who paid for the sanatoriums back then? I'll be back with some answers, hopefully.

I know that personally I'm willing to just listen to compelling lines of reasoning without accompanying data, but I still haven't seen any that have swayed me.

And I know that we need a firearm lobby that isn't the knuckle-draggers in the NRA. I'm skeptical of any claims that name them specifically as being the cause behind a lack of research into shootings, mostly because I don't think they have that kind of reach, but they're still a bunch of useless fucks.

Alright, we're just talking past one another. Basically I agree that we should be exploring how we might expand the existing safety net to serve the needs of those with mental illnesses. I have no idea what adequate care would look like and I don't even know what the scale of the problem is. I also think that specific to FrankA's situation, the problem is less inadequate mental health care for crazy-box-cutter-guy, and more the fact that the PD takes six hours to show up, when it shows up at all. It really sounds like Oakland is in a situation where parts of the city are de-facto abandoned by the government. That's an absolutely unacceptable situation that ought to be remedied.

They absolutely have that level of reach; and arguably they had more in the 1990s (which is when they went on a holy war against federal research into firearm-related deaths). Back then you had Democrats who were cozy with the NRA, now those types are an endangered species in DC.

From what I gather basically yeah they shut them in the attic. My father grew up fairly poor in Elizabeth NJ, and he's told stories about some of his friends "wacky" relatives that were largely kept behind closed doors (wacky is his preferred term for the mentally ill; I've tried to explain why he should maybe use something different). That was in the 1950s-1960s; I'd guess if you go back 100 years previous you'd see largely the same thing.

Oh and while I'm spamming the thread: mag cap limits seem like one of the typical non-solutions that forms an ineffectual bridge between "We need to do something" and "Nothing worth doing is politically possible." I guess in theory having smaller magazines might slightly cut down on the body count in mass shootings but the reality is that those events are such outliers and so rare that it's almost impossible to create policies generalizable to addressing them, other than total firearm ban + confiscation.

Maybe not now that they've shot themselves in the foot (haw haw) as far as public support goes, but they did at one point.