Starker on 19/2/2018 at 16:36
Clearly there are limits to the kinds of weapons people can have and I would presume that certain groups are prohibited from having one (children, criminals, etc). What makes the limit on the number of guns a person can have different?
catbarf on 19/2/2018 at 22:15
Quote Posted by Starker
What makes the limit on the number of guns a person can have different?
From a purely practical standpoint, I don't see the point. As heywood said it's generally not the people with a lot of guns who are careless with them, and petty criminals and mass shooters alike rarely use as many weapons as your average three-gun competitor possesses. I get what you were saying before about making guns something significant, not a commodity to be handled carelessly, but I don't think a hard cap would accomplish that anywhere near to the same degree that changing the purchase process could.
Tony_Tarantula on 20/2/2018 at 02:02
Biggest obstacle to that line of argument is that numerous recent shootings have occurred where the person in question SHOULD have been either prohibited from having access to a weapon or committed according to existing procedure, yet officials failed to do what they were supposed to do.
How do you counter the impacts of laziness, internal politics, and general bureaucratic incompetence from undermining the effect of these systems?
I'd argue that this is starting to reach a crisis point. We are now literally having dozens of people at a time DYING because incompetent or lazy bueaucrats couldn't be assed to perform the basic requirements of their jobs.
Quote:
Some people will make knee-jerk assumptions on why this tragic event occurred for political purposes, but I would ask you all not to lose sight of the fact that these children were gathered in a convenient place of learning. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and now Parkland Florida. Education is at the root of all these tragedies.
High-powered assault rifles don't kill children, schools do.
Not entirely.
There's a REASON that nutjobs go after schools: it's because the real motive is to get as much attention as possible, and they know that killing children will result in the maximum possible publicity. If they're enrolled at the school it's generally a sexually frustrated, emotionally and socially stunted male who wants revenge for suffering associated with his own social isolation....which in many cases could easily have been preventable by a strong father-figure teaching them how to manage their own emotions
Another interesting trend is that all of the shootings perpetrated by students (that I'm aware of) occurred at PUBLIC schools. There may be something to that. The person who noticed this seemed to believe that this is due to something about public schools but my first guess would be that the biggest difference is that children at private schools are much more likely to live in a functional, two-parent home environment.
*****
And this one REALLY deserves a separate post, but since that's the rules, it goes here:
Look at the 18 Grievances that were sent to KGIII in the Declaration of Independence. If you do not see the correlation with the beginning of the Constitution, you most likely have a poorly informed opinion. If you cannot see which civilizations were the basis for the use of the Latin words "militia" or "republic," I am just not interested in any opinion resulting thereof. If you don't know why those words were used, you should at least know they were used with careful deliberation. At no point were words thrown in arbitrarily to fill space. We like to apply our moral codes to people of the past, but that simply is a poor perspective to utilize. In the Roman Republic, the only people who comprised the pre-Marian Republican armies were land owning citizens, who PROVIDED THEIR OWN WEAPONS AND ARMOR. Let me repeat that: PROVIDED THEIR OWN WEAPONS AND ARMOR. The whole point was to ensure that senators wouldn't vie for power and usurp it through the exploitation of the legions. How do you keep each other in check? By using a system that does not keep a standing army, which the United States is not supposed to have, and we use the appropriation loophole to bypass.
Starker on 20/2/2018 at 05:25
Quote Posted by catbarf
From a purely practical standpoint, I don't see the point.
Reducing the number of guns? Less guns on the market would be a good thing, no? And if you had to get a license for your guns, that would also help with things like straw purchases.
catbarf on 21/2/2018 at 15:52
Quote Posted by Starker
Reducing the number of guns? Less guns on the market would be a good thing, no?
Well, it seems like a really roundabout way to reduce the number of guns on the market, since you're only addressing the small minority of owners who keep a bunch of guns. As well, those collectors tend to amass and collect and hang on to them.
The trend, if we assume that the polls are accurate and not a reflection of gun owners being less willing to self-identify, indicates that fewer Americans own guns but those who do own more guns, so what we're seeing is a concentration into the hands of fewer people and therefore less distribution among the populace. If you put a cap on that, then those gun owners will be forced to put something on the market every time they want to buy something new.
Those guys tend to prize old, rare, valuable things, so ordinary guns like modern rifles and handguns are going to be the ones that wind up on the market. If they're desperate to get rid of those guns to 'free up' their collection, that will drive down prices too. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me like a hard cap on how many guns someone could own would result in a market where guns are cheaper and more widely available.
Quote Posted by Starker
And if you had to get a license for your guns, that would also help with things like straw purchases.
Yeah, I can agree with that, although the straw purchase issue also has an element of non-enforcement that I think needs to be addressed regardless of whatever other safety measures are implemented. I'd fully support a rigorous licensing system, front-loading the background check process and being comprehensive enough to avoid people falling through the cracks like we've seen in multiple recent incidents, provided it was handled on a shall-issue basis for the reasons heywood described.
This doesn't surprise me at all, and might partially explain why the aftermath of the most recent shooting seems more heated than usual.
nickie on 21/2/2018 at 16:19
Quote Posted by catbarf
. . . indicates that fewer Americans own guns but those who do own more guns, so what we're seeing is a concentration into the hands of fewer people and therefore less distribution among the populace.
I heard on one news site the other day that 50% of guns are in the hands of 4 or 5% of the people.
Starker on 21/2/2018 at 16:43
Quote Posted by catbarf
The trend, if we assume that the polls are accurate and not a reflection of gun owners being less willing to self-identify, indicates that fewer Americans own guns but those who do own more guns, so what we're seeing is a concentration into the hands of fewer people and therefore less distribution among the populace. If you put a cap on that, then those gun owners will be forced to put something on the market every time they want to buy something new.
Those guys tend to prize old, rare, valuable things, so ordinary guns like modern rifles and handguns are going to be the ones that wind up on the market. If they're desperate to get rid of those guns to 'free up' their collection, that will drive down prices too. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me like a hard cap on how many guns someone could own would result in a market where guns are cheaper and more widely available.
A hard cap was not quite what I was thinking of. More like a regulatory barrier where you have more obligations when you own more guns.
heywood on 22/2/2018 at 16:09
I would love to see an organization do a data mining exercise and generate histograms showing the number of shootings as a function of the number of guns used per shooter, as well as the number of shooting deaths as a function of the number of guns used per shooter. Then we could have a serious debate about whether limiting the number of guns a person can own would reduce shooting deaths. My hunch is that there are very few cases where it might have made a difference. The only one I can think of is the Las Vegas shooter, who had an armory in his hotel room. But even there, I'm not sure how many he actually used.
One complaint I have with NRA lobbying is that it shut down most government sponsored research. They would argue that previous government research (e.g. by the CDC) was biased, but it has to be more objective than the cherry picked facts and creative definition of terms that we get from the advocacy groups now. I don't see how we can come up with effective gun control policy without data. Right now, it seems we're stuck debating measures that feel good to public opinion against what gun owners might be willing to accept, and what's missing is an assessment of whether they are effective. At least with health care and tax policy, we have the CBO to make an independent and empirical prediction of the effects.
Starker on 22/2/2018 at 20:04
Indeed, and studies into gun violence and gun suicides in general are sorely lacking too. After all, the shootings are really only a tip of the iceberg. I can't believe that there are no measures that would reduce the frankly insane amount of gun deaths US has for a developed country.
I think that even without the shootings it would be a good idea to reduce the number of guns, though, as they a very handy tool for murder and suicide and accidents. I mean, in most years toddlers kill more people in the US than terrorists, apparently.
