I don't actually think at any point in this article did he really articulate why he "needs" an AR-15.
Only that he wants one.
Which is perfectly fine. However at the end of the day I don't think peoples wants should trump my -need- to be safe.
Only that he wants one.
Which is perfectly fine. However at the end of the day I don't think peoples wants should trump my -need- to be safe.
In fact, children under 15 are about 40 times more likely to die by swimming pool than by an accidental firearms discharge [0].
I still have a pool. There are reasonable laws about having auto-closing gates and a fenced-in yard. I don't see anyone clambering to tighten restrictions on assault swimming pools.
Likewise, semi-automatic, detachable-magazine-fed rifles are responsible for something like 2% of shootings. The only real place they have significance is in mass shootings. The only refute I have to, "but if we ban these rifles we won't have shootings" is that it would just happen through a different means. The Happy Land Fire killed 87 people, not a shot fired. Timothy McVeigh killed 189 people with fertilizer... and that was in 1995 -- under the "Assault Weapons Ban" of 1994.
[0] http://www.m1-garand-rifle.com/gun-safety/firearms-versus-sw...
You know, it's not really the accidental discharges I'm worried about. It's the mass shootings.
Also, you appear to be misquoting that article. The 40x number is scaled by the number of pools/firearms, and so is saying "an individual firearm is less likely to kill a child than an individual pool" (although firearms are vastly more common than pools).
And, finally, that article uses "86 children killed by accidental firearm discharge in 2000" as its primary metric. The top google hit [0] for "How many children are killed each year by guns?" gives a value of 1,500.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=How+many+children+are+killed...
I don't understand arguments like this at all. Is the argument that "there are other bad things so we shouldn't tackle this thing"?
I believe its actually "people can be killed without assault weapons, therefore restricting assault weapons has no benefit in protecting people from being killed". Which, ultimately, has the same basic kind of error in reasoning as "there are other bad things so we shouldn't tackle this thing", but its not precisely the same argument.
Other than that, completely like "banning bad things".
History has shown us this simply isn't the case. People who want to kill people will kill people with whatever means available. Happy Land, Oklahoma City, etc are just examples of this. I didn't see a huge push to ban pressure cookers after the Boston bombings.
That's not true, "assault pressure cookers" were banned—especially the scary looking ones. Problem solved!
Does anyone take this argument seriously? This is a genuine question - I find it difficult to understand how that argument seems compelling to anyone?
Of course there are lots of ways to kill people!
The primary use of fertilizer, gasoline and pressure cookers isn't killing. The primary purpose of guns is.
- The gun can be a symbol conveying intent. Possibly one can negotiate or leave the premises in time. In contrast a pressure cooker in a corner does not immediately tell me that someone is out to get me. That is, I can be surprised more easily by an exploding pressure cooker or fertilizer bomb. At least with the gun I know what's going on.
- Fertilizer, gasoline and pressure cooker bombs do not tend to produce predictable wounds and often produce fatalities. I'm more likely to survive if an angry man shoots me than if he blows me up with a pressure cooker. Also the trauma surgeons have a better chance of stitching me up. Finally I'd rather live the rest of my life with a bullet in my butt than a pressure cooker lid up my ass.
You may not have noticed it but they were effectively banned from sale by all retail stores. I was tasked with buying a new pressure cooker not 3 weeks after the Boston bombings and I simply could not find one locally. After visiting all the local retail stores, I finally gave up and ordered one on Amazon.
To be exposed to the risk of drowning in your pool I actually need to go to said pool. This is not different from exposing myself to any other risk of my own free will.
My free will has no bearing on if someone wants to bring a gun to a public place and murder me and everyone else around.
By comparison, referenced in my other comments, if someone really wanted to kill everyone in a theater they could do it with a container of gasoline, or a pressure cooker. Newtown could have been accomplished with a sword, given the size difference of the attacker to the victims.
Anyone who wants to kill you can, with any number of objects readily accessible. This is only evident to some people when they think of an object like an AR-15 because they don't think about all the other ways they could be killed.
The fact more people are killed outside of mass shootings by guns is irrelevant. Mass shootings are a good enough reason to get rid of them, it's a risk people shouldn't have to live with.
That's just not true. In Somalia, U.S. Army soldiers actually complained about how the AR-15 round (5.56 NATO) wouldn't take down enemy combatants in a single shot.
Compare that to, say, the bombs used in the Boston Marathon. It's a night and day difference. If you're trapped in a crowded nightclub that's on fire, your odds of survival are abysmal.
People survive serious gunshots every day with proper medical attention. One of the big issues in the Orlando shooting was the 3 hour wait before any of the victims got medical attention.
But anyway, before this gets derailed, the point of the post was really about laying out the rationales for the AR-15, while openly acknowledging that many people will still find them insufficient. What I really wanted to do, though, is move the discussion away from the "rednecks with small penises" rut that it seems to be stuck in. The "need" phrasing was the framing I chose in order to hook into the "nobody needs an assault rifle" phrase that's repeated over and over again.
At any rate, again, I acknowledged up front that I wouldn't be able to convince everybody, or even most people, and that I was ok with that as long as people on the other side of the "assault weapon" debate could gain some new information about these firearms and their appeal to non-crazy, non-penis-size-compensating, non-military-fetishist normal people.
I suspect you are a careful, conscientious, and responsible gun owner and would have no problem demonstrating this, but there are a lot of people who have guns who are neither careful, conscientious, nor responsible. I hope you won't mind having to demonstrate your competence so that society can stop the other people, the irresponsible ones.
And of course, you might say that even if we had such requirement to demonstrate responsibility, the irresponsible people would circumvent the system and have guns anyway. I'm sure that's true for a few, but it would remove many guns from irresponsible hands and it would give law enforcement a reason to arrest the others and get them off the streets.
It's about personal freedom and liberty... I'm in favor of them, even if I choose not to own one.
However not all luxuries are created equal.
If indulging in your luxury creates circumstances where others are now at more risk then I don't think that is OK anymore.
Having deadly weapons broadly available definitely increases homicide and mass shootings, the evidence is irrefutable.
My point and many others is that luxuries are not rights, they are not things you need and as such should not be protected beyond general freedoms. However there is a cap on freedom and that is when it infringes on the freedoms or rights of others. In this case the right to be safe and the freedom to live life without fear of these sorts of horrible things happening.
Really? As I understand it, gun ownership has increased significantly over the last two decades, and homicide and mass shootings have gone down over that same time period.
It sounds like you think it's "obvious" that availability of firearms drives people dying from firearms, but the studies I've seen don't indicate a link.
Kind of like how availability of porn doesn't drive incidences of rape, even though intuitively, a person might expect that it should.
The difference isn't just striking. It's actually pretty awful to think about.
It's beyond conclusive that broad availability of firearms if not the cause is definitely highly correlated.
Based on my time hanging out at Slater Star Codex, the amount of shooting deaths varies in the US largely based on culture. If you take a country like The Netherlands and find the equivalent culture in the US, violent crime rates are basically identical—despite the fact that the US has far more guns per capita (within their respective, equivalent cultures).
Frankly, talking about the "US" as if it was culturally homogenous is so misleading that it's borderline unethical. Once you tease apart the statistics, guns don't stand out as a problem for certain cultures (again, AFAICT based on discussions with other people I trust).
[0]http://www.cbsnews.com/news/number-of-households-with-guns-o...
That's not exactly a strong argument for increased gun control.
(FWIW The statistic that is useful isn't "gun ownership" across all cultures in the US, it's within specific sub-populations. There are huge discrepancies among violent crime across different sub-populations in the US, and without breaking them out, violent crime statistics make little sense, either individually or over time.)
Also, I have no idea what your "porn is to rape as guns are to murder" comparison attempts to illustrate. I don't know how to point porn at someone and..well, that's as far as that needs to go. As syllogisms go, that's pretty damned broken.
Hooking into the "nobody needs an assault rifle" refrain is important, in part because it is evaluated differently by people on each side of the issue. Because powerful weapons can actively project harm from one person to another, they are in a different category from other opt-in dangerous things like an outdoor uncovered pool and drinking alcohol.
Driving a car is frequently cited in these debates as one of those "you don't need it, but it is incredibly dangerous and causes huge numbers of deaths" activities, but I still think that gun ownership is a few steps higher on the risk-vs-utility scale, and therefore should be treated differently - there needs to be a dedicated debate that isn't sidelined by analogies to other risky activities. Those analogies complicate more than they clarify.
But I still don't get why you would need a gun. For the most part, we don't need to hunt for our food. We don't need to shoot targets either. Home defense, maybe, but there are other ways to be secure at home without weapons.
I do agree with his point that if you're going to argue against guns, you shouldn't pick and choose categories that are "ok". It's either we ban guns or we continue to live with them in our society.
See. That's the problem. I am not forcing you to own a gun. But you're forcing me NOT to own a gun.
How about we let everybody do what they want? You can choose not to own a gun. And I can choose to own a gun.
It's called freedom.
He mentions specifically a hunting scenario and the need to use a powerful weapon and also the ability to quickly issue a follow-up shot if the animal is only wounded, which is a humane action.
Just clarifying the point of the author, please don't project his views on me and mob me.
The difference being that my going to the cinema doesn't impact the inherent safety of our society.
He wanted to go hunting. He wanted to use a powerful weapon while doing so.
I understand the desire to want things. I too think it would be cool to have a powerful weapon.
However I am also rational enough to understand that laws can't exist that grant me a powerful weapon and deny it to 100% of nutjobs. So given the option between having a cool gun and living in a world where I may get shot to death in a cinema or club vs just not having the gun.. I choose to not have the gun and I think any truly rational person would come to the same conclusion.
Consider the cost of airlifting food to remote communities in Nunavut and you will understand the need.
I don't need a car. But that is because I am wealthy and am able to live very close to my place for work.
But there are people that most definitely -need- cars. If anything not needing a car is a luxury (atleast in my country).
I think you could argue that without cars everyone would be better off. Less pollution, people would save money on gas, more public real estate for parks, etc. not to mention less people dying from accidents.
There are a lot of people in and around NYC that would argue differently.
Or my need to be safe (through the protection of people who carries)? If someone walk into a theater and starts shooting, though I don't carry, I prefer that the guy next to me is the type to carry, and that at least half the theater carry too, so they can all drop that killer with 100 bullets at the door.