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

Of course I don't, but it would be nice if you didn't instead accuse me of not asking any, you grunting, semiliterate simian.

I agree. I mentioned upthread that it's a twin challenge of mental healthcare and law enforcement. It looks to me, though, like the trend lines for law enforcement budgets are going the wrong way at the moment, particularly since every level of government is strapped for cash at present.

Yeah it's an unfortunate side effect of output gap and relentless focus on CUT THE DEFICIT UBER ALLES. I'd guess in Oakland you've probably got a side helping of institutional corruption that takes a bad situation that the vast majority of municipalities in the country are dealing with and turns it into de-facto free fire zones in the city's interior. Does anyone know if there's any good long-form journalism on just how things in Oakland have gotten that bad?

I think the better argument is that slowing the rate of fire provides the potential victims with more time to scatter. As you said in your post above: when you are under attack, seconds can matter. This is not to say that slowing a shooter's rate of fire in this manner is going to be perfectly--or even highly--efficacious. But it's better than nothing.

Wal-Mart sells a handgun safe that bolts to the inside of a dresser drawer with bolts that can only be removed from the inside of the safe, which at least tethers it to a piece of furniture and makes it difficult to carry away. It costs $50. I don't think that's an unreasonable amount to ask someone to spend in the interest of gun safety, unless we are to accept that any amount is unreasonable.

Look, it's okay to admit that you got caught up in posting and got emotional. But seriously, if your response is to go to insults, then I'm done. Perhaps we can more productively disagree in a different thread.

Right. Budget increases don't do a lot of good if they're going to corrupt administrators. Or even if they're just plain not good at what they do.

I think, with absolutely nothing concrete to base this on, that once it passes a certain critical mass urban decay probably becomes disproportionately difficult to counter.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Sure, buddy. I don't know how you got to thinking I threw the first stone here, or that I was the first to start slinging insults, or even that you didn't accuse me of not doing something I plainly did. But if that's what you're going with, have fun with it.

Maybe. There are areas here in NJ that were relatively awful for a generation and are now turning around. It's not impossible, but as far as I can tell it's expensive. In the cases I'm thinking of (Hoboken, Jersey City, and Asbury Park) that money mainly came from development. Hoboken and Jersey City have received a relatively large influx in investment owing to their proximity to Manhattan; eventually living in NYC got so expensive that people decided they'd deal with living in Jersey City or Hoboken. In Asbury's case it was pretty much the same deal; for whatever reason a sizable gay population settled in Asbury and invested (again) in real estate, which has helped improve the town. Of those three, probably only Asbury had suffered a level of decay similar to what Frank is describing, and it's a much much smaller city than Oakland (I believe it was less than 10k residents at its low point).

Interesting. One of the common knocks against gentrification is that the area then becomes unaffordable for current residents; what happened in, say, Asbury? What do you do if you don't have a super wealthy city next door to drive that kind of revitalization? Baltimore has tried revitalization projects of its own accord, with mixed success.

I had one of those when my guns got stolen during our first break-in. While useful for keeping kids away from handguns they're not real storage solutions. You're right that $50 isn't a lot, but $50 buys you about $50 worth of protection for your stuff. To be really effective against unwanted use or theft, a gun safe has to be huge, difficult to move, and expensive.

Like I said, I'm not against storage requirements if they're practically enforceable and take into account the varied living situations of the people they affect. My personal experience is that the most effective gun safes are roughly $1000 (cabinets and smaller safes need not apply) and a giant pain in the dick to have if you rent. I don't have kids or visitors with kids, so I don't personally see much of a need to have trigger locks/small safes around.

A good chunk of Asbury was straight up empty; the city was literally rotting. Now the way it's configured is that everything east of the main street is gentrified, and on the west side it's, well, still not all that pleasant. So the population was shuffled around, but I don't think anything was displaced. I do know that a lot of the criminal elements that made the city their home - mainly the drug trade - spread out to some nearby towns like Long Branch and Neptune.

But yeah ultimately it's a tough problem and not one I necessarily know how to fix. Now that you mention Baltimore, you got me thinking about the Wire and a bit more about Asbury. Asbury had repeated attempts at revitalization and they all failed, mainly because the city's civil infrastructure was corrupt as shit. The people running the city now are a lot more on the up and up, and the city's meeting with more success. Contrast with Baltimore which - if The Wire is to be believed - is rather corrupt. So ultimately I suspect good institutions matter.

Again, this is a "making the perfect the enemy of the good"-type argument. I agree that a $50 safe is probably a lot less effective than a large, heavy-duty safe that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. But either one of those options is a lot better than nothing. Thieves that break into your house when you are away are, as a rule, in a hurry. They typically look for stuff that is easy to find and steal. Even a $50 safe bolted to a piece of furniture may be more of a hassle than they care to deal with, and if you stack your underwear on top of the safe, they may not even find it in the first place.

Yes, Baltimore is corrupt as hell and it's a huge problem.

Yeah, so I guess the question now becomes how does one fix a corrupt city? I have no idea other than state/federal government comes in, tears down the existing civic infrastructure, and rebuilds from scratch. That's a problematic solution from all sorts of perspectives, though.

That said, if the choice hypothetically did come down to no law at all vs. requiring gun owners to shell out for a $1,000 safe, then I'd come down on the side of the $1,000 safe. I'm sympathetic to your situation, but not so sympathetic that I think that all public policy should hinge on what works best for you. Sorry.

And you're reliant on the superseding level of government to not also be corrupt, which is not a given. And the closer they are to the city government, the more likely they are to sweep problems under the rug, because they govern the way you want.

Yeah, to a degree you've got to acknowledge that any policy - whether it's guns or something else - is going to probably screw people around the margin. That's one of the ugly realities of any policy discussion; there are undoubtedly always people for whom the status quo presents a genuinely better outcome.

I think you may find that this just results in record noncompliance.

California banned open carry because scary black people

If proving ownership of an approved storage unit were part of licensing requirements, I think you'd find that it wouldn't. Would there be some people that flout the law, just as there are people that drive without required insurance? Sure. But, as with uninsured drivers, it would likely be a relatively small percentage of gun owners. Despite what the anti-regulation folks like to argue, most people generally do respect the law.

Heh, compliance is a whole other issue when it comes to gun policy. It seems that there's a whole bunch of self-professed law abiding citizens who are only law abiding insofar as they agree with the law.

I guess it's this: if we can accept that there is a significant percentage of gun owners who, despite being legal, are horribly irresponsible and that the fact that guns are obviously a deadly weapon and that in other areas where a commodity's potential for danger carries moderation (speed limits, controlled substance prescriptions, blood alcohol limits for driving), we can agree there needs to be some forms of moderation for guns.

So now we ask what moderation criteria can we place? And there are plenty of good answers in an ideal sense, the problem of course is practical sense. What's practical? What might succeed? I'd like to think mandatory licensing and classes would succeed, but I don't know enough to say if it would and of course, it's been centuries now where this hasn't been necessary in many places. It seems to me a big issue with what might succeed is that trying to, in essence, go back in time and account for every gun that's been sold/every gun owner who now exists and impose regulations on them would be folly at best, despite those being some of the most ideal practices.

So perhaps (I could be wrong) that leaves us with punishing inappropriate usage (long since enacted) and deciding to control (arguably) inappropriate dispensation. Again I think establishing training and licensing might be a clunky go at first, but it'd hopefully smooth out as the years went on as any kind of licensing has over time, but that's the long game.

People are concerned about the short game, and here is why we talk about magazine capacity limits and assault rifle et al bans. And to me, since we may only be able to ask, might this help, perhaps that if the presumptive answer is "yes" then we should give it serious consideration. Also an accessory question to this is, "How much would this impact the sport or hobby or whatever you would consider gun ownership?" Do these bans and limits handicap in some significant way? History is dotted with things where people had a freer rein over what they were allowed to do but the modernization of society has dictated tighter controls.

All that said, I wish I was hearing better concrete ideas from Washington, because if we were we might have a better piece of potential legislation to hang our hats on. and no I do not think that "Well this is better than nothing!" is enough justification.

I've watched The Wire!

The existing stock of weapons makes all of this really complicated. I guess you can attack the problem from an economic standpoint: mandatory registration of all firearms plus mandate that you carry insurance and/or levy a pigouvian tax on all firearms plus massive penalties and automatic confiscation if you're found to possess an unregistered/uninsured weapon.

You might be right, or it might drive more people to the secondary market -- I really don't know. There was an article in the Atlantic today specifically on the effect of the Obama administration's proposals on that market. The sense from illegal vendors was pretty uniformly that it would have no effect whatsoever on their business, and I wonder if the people you would most want to affect would be the least likely to comply.

Safe storage in the US would be about nudging people to keep it locked up so there's no accidental deaths; theoretically you could have legal penalties there. Anti-theft is a whole different barrel of fish.

Really cultural norms about safe storage is where the good results would come from. Laws would be a start on that, but you have to change a lot of minds. Kind of like the same way you need to convince people that killing each other is not a viable solution to their problems.

I'm all for going back to public mental health institutions. I think that they can be run humanely, and for some of the mentally ill, it is the best option. Certainly better than out on the streets -- I forget the actual percentage, but they are a decent chunk of the homeless population.

I'm for gun safes as requirement, though yes I understand they can be expensive, I think even a shitty $50 dollar one would help against a dumb teenage kid coming in and taking it. Tax breaks for buying a safe seem like a good idea as well, certainly makes more sense than giving someone a break for owning a second home.

I think we will always have a segment of the population that will need some way to protect themselves. Frank is a good example of the inner city issues, though the increase in law enforcement and public institutions would certainly help him in the long run. Small towns and rural areas are another example, when police response time gets to be measured in tens of minutes, that can seem like an eternity.

As for how we pay for some of this crap, lets shift some funding around (hello there military budget), and up the tax rate on the stupid wealthy.

I would probably be in favor of all of those things. Particularly gun registration and some form of mandatory liability insurance (both of which work fairly well for regulating the use of cars).

I'd be fine with making the entire cost of a gun safe, up to a certain ceiling, 100% tax deductible.

MY TWO CENTS

My opposition to magazine capacity restrictions is twofold: As already stated, I don't see them as having more than a negligible effect on any sort of gun violence outcomes, while just driving prices of pre-ban magazines way up and making a lot of money for shit-tards who stockpiled in the last few months. So I'm afraid that that coupled with the generally arbitrary cosmetic bans imposed by the AWB will simply result in a bunch of back-patting over ineffective (or negligible) legislation and calling it a day rather than spending time on legislation of the types that the President Obama proposed in his EOs. I was pretty impressed by his list outside of one or two points, but I don't even recall what they were, so there's an indication of just how much they bother me. Instead, we spend all of our time yelling about magazine caps and the AWB, which the vast majority of gun owners are opposed to [citation needed], while I believe that a majority of gun owners would be supportive of many of the measures on the EO. With the House being such a roadblock to any legislation, to pass anything will require widespread support from gun owners, and magazine capacities and the AWB won't be those things.

As FrankA told me last night, and jeffd hinted at, we should turn the ATF into the DMV. Not in terms of beaurocratic suckage, but by requiring licensing, testing, insurance requirements, etc etc etc, although I know that's been kicked around in the thread already. [edit: Ben Sones also just went there]

As an aside, I find this wholly emblematic of the AWB:

Hilarious text aside, that's a sling mount, not a bayonet or grenade launcher mount.

In theory over time they'd also reduce the (potentially problematic) stock of firearms out there. I'm going to descend into stereotyping a caricature here, but at the margins Joe Yahoo down in the Florida swamp is going to be a lot less likely to purchase his fourth AR15 if it's going to cost him an extra $1000 a year in insurance payments.

Er, why would "illegal vendors" be particularly likely to comply with any new law?

Sorry, I've been unclear. Of course they wouldn't. But if you shift more customers to them, and your policies do nothing to address their market, then you haven't accomplished much.

If all your customers who live in Super Safe Town, USA buy gun safes as a result, you haven't done much except give a gift to the gun safe industry. Meanwhile, if all the people who you really want to have a gun safer because they're the ones at risk of having their guns stolen say "fuck this, I'm gonna go buy a gun from Jack," that theft risk isn't lowered, it's just less visible.

Ultimately you address that via creating noncompliance costs. Basically you can make the same argument about state mandates to carry car insurance. Some people still go without it, but the cost of being caught (big fine, potential suspension of driver's license) is sufficient to get the vast majority of people to comply. Likewise with gun safes: if you're found to have an unsecured weapon, it's confiscated and you get hit with a million dollar fine. You can even layer further on top of that to taste, e.g., you're automatically criminally liable if your unsecured weapon caused any kind of injury or death, regardless of circumstances. I don't know what the actual "right" costs are (in an economic sense) to get to a given level of compliance (say, 95%), but such costs do exist.

I don't know about our local laws, but dad's guns were perfectly safe on top of the china cabinet.

I think the argument for small capacity magazines is the benefits to be gained when (or if you like, "if") there's general compliance; five round magazines, as in Canada, are surely unattractive for criminal use. The difficulty being that compliance (even in Canada) is a non-trivial issue, and in the US context where the bunker-dwelling community has been stockpiling for ages, you have all of these perverse interim results, and a presumption of initial uselessness as policy, and the expectation of a grandfather clause that would make both of the former problems a thousand times worse.

So you're left with a policy that has appeal but a policy arena that makes it likely to be a mess of a pyrrhic victory were it ever implemented. Certainly it'd be pretty pointless if there were a grandfather clause, and if there weren't it'd be unprecedentedly explosive politically. Also there's the side issue of handgun magazines, which, even in Canada, are still permitted 10 rounds.

Well, this is just the "Laws are useless because people simply won't comply with them" argument, which I've already said that I disagree with. Clearly, many people do comply with laws, otherwise there wouldn't be any point in having any.

You can disagree with it if you like, but I think it's better to design enforceable policies.

If three kids hurt themselves with a toy it's banned forever and forcibly taken off shelfs (and the manufacturers get sued, something that can't happen with guns)

And prevent numerous injuries and deaths due to children handling firearms. I'm more worried about the safety of the other people living in or visiting the home than I am about whether or not someone's gun is stolen. Over 20% of firearm injuries to children are accidental or self-inflicted; 30% of firearm deaths for children are accidental or suicide.


Unrelated: I found this study about gun-related crimes. It's from 1995, unfortunately, but has interesting data all the same.

That's a good point and a different problem altogether. I dare say the $50 bolt-in kind would be adequate for all but the most enterprising children.

I'm inclined to agree, at least for young children. I think the "enterprising" part gets more difficult to deal with as they get older (I'm thinking of determined suicidal teens), but it's a start.

On an anecdotal note, there's also the challenge of people who conceal-carry, such as my uncle who brought a loaded handgun strapped to his ankle to Thanksgiving dinner. At some point he either got tired of wearing it or realized he was too intoxicated to effectively use it, so he put it "in" his wife's purse, which was laying openly on the living room floor. Luckily there weren't any small children at that particular family function, but that doesn't change that he's a moron who put people in danger by leaving a loaded weapon lying around openly. I struggle to find a solution to that or similar scenarios, however, outside of changing our culture to make it okay to give people heat over doing stupid shit and not simply accept "b-b-but SECOND AMENDMENT FREEDOMS" as an excuse for said stupid shit.

I do too! I just think you are wrong about it being "unenforceable"--that is the crux of our disagreement.