Personally, I would be wounded by a bolt action rifle, although the individual using the bolt action rifle many use high caliber rounds would cause a ton of suffering later on and I would slowly bleed out. But would rather have that compared to a instant death, from a semi-automatic weapon and my body gets mutilated.
I really don’t think this is a reasonable place to start with such an issue. Common sense would say having a firearm, in a world of firearms, is a protective measure and a reasonable one. Perhaps we are neither of us common.
Well, that’s an opinion i couldn’t possibly share. I’ll leave it at that.
As explicitly outlined, gun ownership did not cause, lead to or even significantly contribute to Breona’s death. Incompetence did. This is an extremely illogical way of assessing the situation.
Are you sure you’re not being wilfully reductive, to the point of not actually engaging in the real-world issue? People are shot after being robbed all the time. Not every scenario is the same, and plenty call for return fire.
If someone comes at me (or my children, my wife or dog) with a gun, I am going to put the threat down. End of story. I don’t give a shit what the guy wants. You come at me like that, I will defend myself. Dangerous? Sure. That’s because someone came at me (or my loved ones) with a gun. Not because I have one on me. There is no way to adjudicate this one though: every scenario must been seen as a “what if” in both directions, so I’m happy to let that go and just rest on my personal view of it. I have to say, it sounds like you’ve never been faced with such a situation. Similar with your thoughts on hunting. They seem to rely on anthropomorphizing animals, and demonizing anyone who wants to kill animals for food - which is entirely normal.
Is this meant to be coming across as a bit unserious? Suggesting that “suicide is due to gun ownership” is untenable in the extreme. This would suggest that more than half of all suicides would simply not happen if the USA didn’t have wide-spread gun ownership. I’m unsure I need to explain how unscrupulous that is? People choose to commit suicide. Guns do not choose to carry those suicides out. If what you’re trying to say is people would be more likely to fail using other methods, that’s obviously true but does not, in any way, suggest what you have claimed here. I wonder if you’re open to revising this a bit…
Which supports my run-down. The other stats are as I noted (this one seemed superfluous given it was directly related to law enforcement and not civilians, whcih is clearly a different conversation).
Nonsense. If the police had not been fired upon, they probably would not have fired. This is obvious. You are simply dissembling.
I don’t need to revise anytbing. The statistics you quoted (a 10% reduction in gun ownership leads to a 2.5% reduction in suicides) suggests that reducing gun ownership DOES lead to reduced suicides. What part of statistical analysis do you fail to understand?
What crap! I’ve been robbed at both gun point and knife point. I didn’t have a gun, and I wasn’t harmed. If I had a gun and tried to defend myself, I would doubtless have put myself at greater risk. As far as hunting is concerned, anyone who needs a semi-automatic to hunt a deer is an incompetent hunter. I’m not “demonizing” anyone, except for you for being rude and illogical, as demonstrated by this quote (“[quote=“AmadeusD, post:15, topic:2151”]
using Breona Taylor as a crutch here is morally repugnant”
[/quote]
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Some people have a need to eat.
Davey Crockett hunted with his muzzle loading “Ol’ Betsy”. Surely modern hunters can make do with the powerful bolt-action hunting rifles available to them now. Maybe if they need semi-automatics, they should invest in target practice, instead.
Feel free, but I’ve been over this now and made the case, pretty sharply, against your position. The response to your take here is if they had gone to the right apartment, the legal gun owner would not have had to defend his property against what amounted to intruders at the time. Without hte incompetence, the guns are irrelevant. Suggesting this is “nonsense” seems to indicate you’re not really having a discussion, but attempting to brow beat.
Well, that explains you quite well.
Ok bud. I think its time to step away from the keyboard.
How about atom bombs for the same reasons?
The risk of being killed by accident or reckless use is then not just something that happens to people who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Everyone dies.
In case you don’t want to allow private citizens to own and use atom bombs, then why would you allow semi-automatic rifles? They are more destructive in the wrong hands than ordinary rifles.
I don’t think anyone should own atom bombs.
That’s good, and yet the military is allowed to have/use atom bombs. So why shouldn’t private citizens be allowed to have/use them for the exact same reason as you say?
Is the reason just that with atom bombs among citizens you will almost certainly become the victim of accidental or reckless use, and with semi-automatic rifles you don’t care if a lot of innocent people become victims as long as you can evade it?
No, it’s that nukes are far too destructive and imprecise. One would destroy himself, his family, his property, and others long before he would protect them. It defeats the purpose of a weapon.
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I agree, yet several nations have atomic bombs, and some have used them as weapons against private citizens. Two times even in 1945.
I’d say semi-automatic rifles also defeat the purpose of a weapon, especially in densely populated places. Far too many innocent people lose their lives when you allow private citizens to have and use such powerful weapons.
It’s a lot harder to reduce the number of reckless individuals than it is to restrict their access to lethal gadgets.
Would you allow state officials and militaries use them? I ask because no amount of private recklessness is comparable to the history of state violence. The Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine, for instance, is but one example where conventional weapons were used to eradicate human beings on an industrial level. So-called “democide” surpassed war as the leading cause of non-natural deaths in the 20-th century, and presumably many semi-automatic weapons were used.
Far too many innocent people lose their lives when you allow government officials to own and use such powerful weapons.
Yes. A state that serves its people should have monopoly on the use of violence.
I agree, but no amount of powerful weapons among private citizens will stop democide.
Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia…
You are trading a certain, continuous, daily increase in violent deaths for a highly speculative, almost non-existent chance of stopping a future democide.
It’s better to focus on democratic control systems that reduce the risk of governments turning against their citizens.
I’m trading nothing. Rather, I’m refusing to trade my god-given rights for a piece of mind.
Violent gun deaths is your measure. I was just showing that the one class of human beings that you’ve decided could own these guns are in fact the greatest perpetrators of violent gun deaths throughout history.
For instance, just in January of this year, Time magazine reported that 30,000 Iranian protestors were murdered by the government in just a few days, mostly with small-arm fire and summary executions. You don’t think the numbers would have been different had those civilians been allowed to own guns?
I dont know the answer to that question.
However it would be more instructive to look at the statistics for the USA last year. How many deaths were caused by police. Its about 5 per cent of the total
In the Uk police shootings are between zero and a few dozen.
No, where’s the historical evidence to support it?
There’s plenty of evidence on how bad regimes respond to increased resistance: e.g. collective punishment, public mass executions etc. Imagine today how much a regime knows about its citizens via social media records etc. You’d have more people killed, and the regime can call it “necessary to prevent civil war”.
Private citizens couldn’t even start a civil war unless they get parts of the military on their side.
Most people end up drawing a line somewhere. If grenades could be trivially bought by anyone, at every convenience store, the world would be a stupidly dangerous place.
I’ve yet to hear anyone advocate for that world.
And yet all the arguments of the OP, and most other pro-gun arguments could be applied to it. Maybe the only way to protect my family from intruders is “fire in the hole!”? Maybe I need a flamethrower, or some sarin?
I’m not going into hyperbole to mock pro-gun arguments, but just to show that black and white statements of liberty, or self-defence don’t work, and in practice, aren’t actually held by anybody. We need to accept that we all draw lines and we should be making nuanced arguments for why X level of danger is an acceptable price for society to pay.
In terms of my own view, I think a good start would be for the difficulty of getting a weapon to increase with its threat. So maybe to buy a semi-auto you need to be over 25, no convictions, completed a firearms safety course, owned a regular firearm for 5 years+. Something like that would be a sensible direction for america, if this hadn’t been forced into a wedge issue.
The history of revolution, rebellion, and resistance prove the opposite.
The groups of the French resistance did just that. They refused to be conscripted into slave labor or bow to the occupation, so they formed a rag-tag band of resistance fighters which would later become a formal paramilitary force. The went on to be pivotal in the liberation of their country, particularly when they started using Sten sub-machine guns.
All human beings are capable of organizing, and being endowed with the honorific status of “official” does not automatically make one better at it.
Then why should a military or police force use such weapons? I wouldn’t mind a nuanced argument for why X level of danger is an acceptable price for society to pay.
Basically, should one person have unreasonable and unnatural strength and resulting ability to kill another person or several with ease?
It’s a fair question. Hearkens back to the oldest written form of law: Hammurabi’s Code. Supposedly ordained by the gods so as to “prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.”
Should any person born or who otherwise ends up significantly larger, taller, or stronger be kept under lock and key? Perhaps forced to wear a harness whensoever in public that the common man can unite and grasp hold of and restrain their power over them? Should said “stronger” folk be subjected to significantly higher penalty for hypocritically and cowardly abusing their advantage—an advantage they had little to no part in achieving—against those without (ie. those smaller or “normal”)? These are all good questions. Until they are resolved globally and across the board, I’d question the man who does not see the value of someone demonstrably “weaker” from being able to defend himself from an unprovoked attack by someone “stronger.” He who jests at scars has surely never had a wound.