I admit my ignorance here, but what has been proposed that suggests gun confiscation? Or some 50-year plan of there being no guns in America? I've seen some stupid plans for banning specific types of guns, and I've seen proposals suggesting we make the gun buying process different, and something of a federal database for gun buying. I like the idea of a law that states if my gun is used in a crime, I am liable. If I sell a gun that gets used in a crime without going through the proper procedures, I am liable. It's my understanding that many places in the US have laws to this effect, enforced to varying degrees. I think it's kind of silly to apply Chicago gun laws to the nation, as well as Amarillo, Texas gun laws to the nation as well. So, the idea of a sweeping federal change seems ridiculous, because well...both of those extremes exist. I cringe a bit at the thought that my guns "protect me". I own guns, I like guns, and I doubt I could be convinced to give them up. But I also recognize that there isn't a realistic likelihood that I will ever draw on another person. There's an even smaller likelihood that drawing on another person will have a positive outcome for me, or even avoid something negative. And when you consider the statistical likelihood of an untrained, inexperienced civilian (or hell, even a well-trained and experienced cop) successfully defending an assault with a personal firearm, it's just as likely that I'll get struck by lightning on the 4th of July every year for 4 years. So the personal pro argument is not grounded in reality. Everyone I have ever met who has drew on another person and had to make the decision to shoot them questions it. Everyone I know who's shot someone or been shot at finds absolutely no humor, joy nor ego in it, most of them refuse to talk about it. Even the folks who carried during a riot and didn't actually do anything aside from 'visibly carry a firearm in an unstable situation' don't like to dwell on that experience. The folks who daydream about it, apparently can't seem to shut the fuck up about how they'd John Rambo a specific situation, but it strikes me as a similar vein to mall ninjas who simply never outgrew their fantasy. My understanding is I own a deterrent. I won't use it, but that's not necessary for it to deter someone from causing me harm. I'm at peace with that, and I think my family and neighbors are as well. It's highly unlikely that will change due to a different law, or a series of them in my lifetime. I think we have to acknowledge the purpose of the gun industry and it's influence. My guns are based on at most 100+ year old technology, and the past 25 years or so haven't seen a revolutionary amount of technology in firearms. Guns don't go bad. When you've got gun companies filing for bankruptcy, the politics of fear seem to take hold. Who benefits from the public believing there are government officials out there licking their chops about confiscating your property? Who seems to drum up these fears when sales sag? Why does the NRA double down in the face of a mass shooting, instead of quietly acknowledging the victims or even better, shutting the fuck up? What makes more sense: that a nation of armed, yet untrained civilians are somehow, by virtue of clutching a Colt every time they leave the house, keeping 300 million people in civil order that would otherwise be anarchy, despite being marvellously outgunned by the premier military force the world has ever seen and millions of police officers with unprecedented legal authority, firepower and technology? Or that every time someone in DC talks about gun control, the narrative is carried to extreme lengths to fabricate scarcity? We're seeing an industry of fear in action. Heart of hearts, God's honest truth: I like my guns. I will keep them. I'm not shooting anyone over the contents of my wallet. I'm also not buying the bullshit that an Obama-crat is going to somehow red-ink the Second Amendment out of commission. However, insulting a kid who watched a few of his friends get blown away by a psychopath is not a good look. I think the path forward is for gun owners to push for the legislation we need to ensure that everyone is responsible and safe. No legislation is bullshit: too many people are dying from this to do nothing. Bad legislation is reactionary and punitive. Good legislation will reflect the group of gun owners that are responsible, practical and realistic.
So, if legislators roll over and allow a ban on assault rifles and violent crime persists and school shootings persist. What will the answer be? Will it be that the legislation didn't work so it should be removed? Or will it be that we need mandatory firearms registration, we need to protect the kids? When that doesn't work will it be that the legislation didn't work so it should be removed? Or is it more likely that the response will be that didn't work, think of the kids, we should ban handguns. Besides, there is no reason to have a hand gun? When that doesn't stop violent crime because by definition, criminals don't obey the law and crazy just straight up doesn't care, what will the response be then? No more shotguns? The point is that intelligent thought and simple observation of other areas of the world restricting firearms ownership shows that violent crime doesn't stop, the weapon used just shifts and the only thing accomplished is that you have given Government more control without any measurable gain in security. I have friends from the UK and they are content to be the victim of violent crime because they say that the person will be caught and punished because they have CCTV everywhere watching them all the time. Sorry, I don't care for that reality, I don't like my Government enough to where I trust them or want them involved in my life. If that is what some people want, why not just move there? This dude and his buddies beg to differ.
I'm struggling to follow you here. First, what actual laws have been proposed with the purpose of disarming citizens? I consider the Feinstein video on par with Ted Nugent's suggestion we give each teacher 'nades and a flame thrower or whatever. The slippery slope argument makes very little sense to me, either. You can't make 300+ million pieces of private property disappear with the power of legislation and liberalism, in spite of the Constitution. The fact that every other episode of "Pawn Stars" has a working firearm that's well over 100 years old will attest to that: they aint' going anywhere. Are you saying that our right to own guns somehow thwarts Islamic terrorists? Not the trillions of dollars on war, the various agencies under DHS, or the cultural backlash after 9/11? I call bullshit on that my friend, I am far more likely to get shot by a resident of Baltimore, or just a plain old disaffected white guy than a terrorist that fits that description. I think the Muslim terrorists make a convenient villain, and not a credible threat. I mean, who else is a white, rural, Christian dude supposed to be afraid of? If you replaced the term "terrorist" with "Commies"... I keep saying this: the burden of crafting useful gun legislation is on those of us who own guns. Why? Because there is increasingly less validity to the arguments for having them. A free-standing militia? Against even a modestly equipped police force, it's laughable. Keene, New Hampshire has a fucking MRAP. What is Paw-paw's deer rifle supposed to do against that? Violent crime won't stop. Mass shootings won't stop. I don't think they can be stopped, that's not the point. The point is to ensure that the people buying, trading and selling guns are accountable and don't freely distribute them to make violent crime and mass shootings worse. Then we can say "these shootings are not the fault of gun owners, the solution to this problem lies somewhere else." Again, I think so much of this discussion is influenced by companies peddling fear.
It's paranoid thinking. The government can't confiscate 300 million of anything. Please consider the effectiveness of things like the ban on drugs....our ability to enforce laws is quite limited. It just doesn't sound realistic for our country. The government data bases are laughable....look at the Census. How accurate do you consider that program to be? I would wager that Facebook has far better and more precise data than the US Census. You think the NSA can dig through your digital underwear drawer and say how many guns you own? I can't envision the scenario where a government agent knocks on my door, says "I'm here to confiscate your weapons" and I hand them over. The excuses are myriad: database is wrong, sold em before this law took effect, lost em in a fire, melted them into sex toys, someone stole em, on and on. I would not oppose something to the effect of a title transfer of a firearm. We don't "know" how many people own what cars, we only know that when they are transferred or sold. If I am selling a gun, I want to be responsible and do the right thing to ensure I'm not arming a potential criminal. Even something that says, "hey selling a gun to this individual would make you liable and they come with the following warning signs" would be better than nothing, which is what we have now. Again, legislation is coming. This is too big a problem to do nothing about. To put it into context, any other thing that poses this much of a public health risk has been regulated for years now. So, the argument that nothing is the best solution is rapidly running out steam, especially in the face of a bunch of dead kids.
Bullshit. And that assumes you get the list in the first place. Canada tried to have a long gun registry and it never went anywhere other than costing us almost a billion dollars, only to get scrapped. We're not gun-nuts like you guys are in the US, and even we wouldn't voluntarily register our guns.
I immediately thought of the IRS. Using the above logic, the IRS should be able to get every single tax dollar that is owed and then some. After all, they have every private citizen's address, social security number, etc. To say nothing of every businesses EIN, business filings, etc. The reality is something very very different.
Rules are one thing, enforcement is something completely different. Ask any local police force. Case in point, Vancouver city council got laws passed that every bicycle rider had to wear a helmet after some guy died in a weird crash. The cops said, "please don't, we can't enforce it if you do". They passed it anyway, so there are now laws on the books to that effect, but it is not enforced at all because it's such an incredibly low-priority thing to worry about and they're too busy doing other things. I can only imagine the shit-storm over trying to find and confiscate guns from a vastly law-abiding populace who feels they have the constitutional right to have them. I would fully expect just about every lawman in the US to not want to have anything at all to do with it. On the up-side, I imagine they'd get more bike helmet tickets issued.
Not only confiscating existing guns - How do you go about ensuring that private citizens aren't building their own? I imagine there are plenty of militia groups (Have fun finding out how many there are of those, where they operate, etc) who have the ability to build their own ammo and firearms. Realistically - How do you go about dealing with that?
Other things that are regulated: driving impaired, junk food and sodas at school. In 2013, a total of 1,149 children 14 and younger were killed in motor vehicle traffic crashes. Of those 1,149 fatalities, 200 (17%) occurred in alcohol-impaired-driving crashes. Out of those 200 deaths, 121 (61%) were occupants of vehicles with drivers who had BACS of .08 or higher, and another 29 children (15%) were pedestrians or pedal-cyclists struck by drivers with BACS of .08 or higher. In 2016, 10,497 people died in drunk driving crashes – one every 50 minutes – and 290,000 were injured in drunk driving crashes. So, every day in America, another 29 people die as a result of drunk driving crashes. Teen alcohol use kills 4,300 people each year – that’s more than all illegal drugs combined. This info comes from the MADD website, who got their info from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration & American Journal of Preventive Medicine. MADD is not a government organization, but in the United States, the number of drunk driving deaths has been cut in half since MADD was founded in 1980. (I'm not giving them all the credit for that, of course, as auto safety, DUI laws, and other factors have contributed.) Also, more than one-third (36.5%) of U.S. adults have obesity. Obesity-related conditions include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer, some of the leading causes of preventable death. The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the U.S. was $147 billion in 2008 U.S. dollars; the medical costs for people who have obesity were $1,429 higher than those of normal weight. (That info comes from the CDC-NCHS.) People driving drunk and letting kids get fat are killing WAAAAAY more folks than school shooters.
They don’t need to go door to door to confiscate guns. Simply ban the transfer of them with no grandfathering. They’re already doing it for scary accessories. You can’t sell or bequeath them so if your family wants to keep after you die they become felons, I think it already applies to assault weapons in Cali or New York. Shit in Florida if you don’t turn in, destroy, or send out of state previously legal bumps stocks by I think October you become an instant felon. This is how you get around the “there’s already a bunch out there” question. It will be a scary precedent if the BATF reverses itself on bumpstocks, it’ll make them contraband similar to the possession of drugs, with no recourse for just compensation of items that were legal to own. Sure people can just not comply but taking them outside your house to use would be risking felony charges. If you don’t think the government could cobble together a list of gun owners with the records ffls have to keep. Your as naive as someone who you claim thinks Facebook can’t sway elections based on microtargeting.
www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-many-guns Relevant read on gun registry and the “list” of gun owners. I believe the government could make a partial list but there is no way confiscation takes place without massive breakouts in violence. It will never happen.
That's exactly my point. Alcohol is extremely regulated: you know exactly how much you can have before you're committing a crime, each jurisdiction has specific laws on it's use, etc. Of the thousands of gun deaths....how much do we know? Why is there no system to inform who purchases what firearms? We can determine which jurisdictions carry what amount of risk of death from drunk drivers. We cannot determine the same about gun deaths. I have no idea what the parallel to obesity means here. So, yes...being fat is unhealthy. So is being around drunk drivers. And presumably, so is being shot at. In other news, the sky appears blue today. I am not suggesting gun deaths are deadlier or a bigger public health problem than any other thing. I am saying that the absence of legislation to control them is an outlier. Every other thing I can think of that dangerous is heavily regulated. Banning the transfer of guns means....what exactly? You cause an underground market with hundreds of millions of items in circulation to flourish? You might make it illegal to sell them retail...but since when has that stopped capitalism? You can ban the transfer of child pornography, but I'm sure everyone searching the deep web for "cheese pizza" is just hungry, and no one makes money off of it. The government can compile a list, sure. Just like the census. Or the tax database. It would be functionally useless, incomplete and inaccurate at an alarming rate. So what?
A list of gun owners vs a list of guns are two totally different things. When the gun registry was trying to be a thing up here in Canada, every single one of my legal gun owning friends only registered about 10% of their guns, to make it look like they were complying. And those are white-collared, law-abiding programmers, accountants, etc. Again, you're all hypothesizing about how that gun registry would go down for you... we lived it, it failed miserably, and we don't have militias, or the 2nd amendment, or any of your gun culture. The real problem when it comes to gun crime is not in the actual gun ownership, it's in the stolen and improperly stored guns. Up here, if you get caught with guns that are not under lock and key in a safe that is bolted to the wall/floor, then you're in shit, and may well lose your firearms license. That in and of itself goes a long way to keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. I've seen people in the US treat guns like a pack of smokes... just leaving them around wherever, "just in case a gang comes smashing through the bay window while I'm watching Judge Judy".
When my friend goes to the gun range in the east end he transports his pistols to and from there in a locked and insulated briefcase kept in the car trunk. He ALWAYS has his license. He never gets lazy because it’s a lot of trouble if you get careless and caught. I’ve never seen them, because he never takes them out to show them off. That’s responsible ownership.
You're also only allowed to transport to and from the range, no stopping for dinner, etc (for handguns, anyway). There's no such thing as CCW here, only "expedient transport" to the range and back.
Just ignore them and carry on. Don't waste any time or effort on being angry or annoyed at them. Problem solved.
Well, the only difference is that one of those people is a lunatic, former rock star that hides out in the woods all the time; the other is a life-long legislator and lynch pin of former AWB. Only minor differences really. It's not like she is the only one either. No, I may have misunderstood what you were saying. I don't think firearm ownership in America thwarts terrorism. That part of your post I quoted previously, I took to mean that you think fear of Government tyranny and any attempt to fight it through gun ownership was futile. I used a picture of the Taliban as a representation of what untrained people with crude weapons and unbreakable resolve can do to the most advanced fighting force the world has ever known as an example that if push came to shove, the Government wouldn't win. The Taliban have pushed that fighting force to a decades long stalemate that cannot be won and won't be won. I agree about fear. Look at the media, they will have you believe that your children are as good as dead so long as people own firearms. On the flip side you are right, gun manufacturers use this to sell more firearms and the NRA calcifies further in their position. I know you keep saying the burden is on gun owners right now and I completely disagree with you. Some people don't like the Second Amendment so now we blame all firearms owners, most of whom are law abiding citizens, for the transgressions of crazy people. Will you take this same stance with Muslims? Will you blame the millions upon millions of Muslims for the acts of Qaeda and ISIS? Is the burden on them to reform their religion because of this crazy element that has weaponized their religion? If we want to crush the Second Amendment, why stop there? We gave away the Fourth Amendment but by your logic, let's rescind the First Amendment as well. The problem here is that when things go sideways our legislators cast the widest, most rudimentary nets- let's curtail gun ownership because of a school shooting. No nuance, no critical thought and everyone will go along with it because they are told to. You say yourself, this won't stop violent crime, so what are we doing punishing law abiding citizens for the acts of criminals? This country came about because people wanted to be left alone by their Government, you are advocating the opposite.
Again, I'm not seeing evidence of legislation. I'm seeing suggestions carried to illogical extremes, which fits the NRA's modus operandi and if you add a dash of "whatabout-ism", conservative politics. You're suggesting the Taliban is....successful in their mission, via an armed militia? Or that the Taliban was successful in defending against tyranny? Struggling to follow here...I mean I haven't watched Rambo 3 in a while, but they successfully outlasted the Russians thanks to us. And last I checked, we can kill anyone of the Taliban with impunity the instant we know where they are. If anything, it's the opposite point: they were much more effective combatants using bombs and airplanes than guns. The purpose of the NRA is to convert millions of people into single-issue voters. That's it. It's a damned useful purpose when your major political party is outnumbered, aging rapidly and forced to gerrymander to win elections. It's also great at selling imagined threats and violent fantasies to people who have no cause to harbor either, but will spend astounding amounts of money on security and personal protection to prevent things that won't ever happen, and wouldn't effectively resolve a situation if it did. How many times has your house alarm gone off and it wasn't being broken into? Disagreeing is fair, and I certainly see how you believe that....I thought the same thing a few months ago. My point is that the winds of change are going to blow soon, and I'd rather propose gun-owner friendly legislation that includes some reasonable measures to protect myself as a gun seller and citizen than some whacked out crazy shit like banning everything not mentioned in Biggie's "Ready to Die" album or the guns that scare people who've never owned them. I'd rather be listened to and contribute than put my head in the sand and say "nope, no legislation needed, the mass shootings will continue, no reason at all to think that needs to change" and then get up-fucked when the legislation changes that's horrifically stupid. I have no idea what you're saying about Muslims, and it reads like some extrapolation of a slippery slope where we ban guns and end up all married to geese and used tires get the right to vote. "If you don't like people getting shot, how do you feel about Muslims?" Huh? I can't be more clear about this: No one is taking your guns. No one is going to curtail gun ownership....in a nation of 300 million plus firearms, that's functionally impossible. No one can remove the 2nd amendment. No one is voting for legislation that "punishes" legal gun owners. These are all outrageous fantasies that feed a persecution complex and ensure you are pissed off. Literally no elected official that anyone takes seriously (even in this climate) would even write that kind of dumb shit down. What is being discussed is figuring out some sort of way to determine how to prevent people from buying guns with the intent of crimes/mass shootings. Maybe it's just a quick "hey government, I'm thinking of selling X gun to this dude...how likely is it he'll use it to murder a bunch of people?....Likely? And how will I be held liable for selling a gun to this person? Ok, not worth the risk." Maybe it's something that suggests the amount of time on a waiting list...."suicide watch 4 months ago, do not sell a firearm within 6 months of this date"? Maybe it's something completely different...but to say that there is no solution better than what we have now is again, rapidly running out of validity with each week's mass shooting. This country came about in the 1700's when you could die from diarrhea and in no small part due to slavery. So, yeah I think change from the original is fair in 2018. What are you even arguing here?