Surely you see that this is the same kind of emotional appeal the original commenter is decrying. "Tools made to kill" and "less dangerous hobby" aren't dispassionate statements of fact.
That may seem like pedantry, but a huge number of guns aren't design to be used in anger, fired at a living thing, or will ever be purchased for the intent of firing at a living thing. I own a shotgun exclusively for shooting at clay targets for example, and I have no intention of ever pointing it at a living thing. Firearms used for sport are frequently explicitly designed for use in sport rather than being designed for combat, self defense, or hunting.
What if you become suicidal? Your current intentions will be subverted by your own emotional state.
Bringing paedophiles into the conversation in the first place was misdirection. And I resent your attempt to use my correction of an implication you introduced in doing so to support your argument.
Becoming suicidal is something that happens to a lot of people. Spontaneously gaining a shitty paraphilia is not. Spontaneously gaining a paraphilia and losing your morals is a completely fictional situation constructed purely to dodge a valid point; that's disingenuous arguing.
I can well believe that people going through a depressive episode, who are contemplating suicide, are more likely to commit suicide if they have easy access to a gun, above and beyond other potential weapons such as knives, blunt objects, water and high places. Guns take minimal planning, and don't involve overriding nearly as many instincts.
If you want to be right, instead of just winning an argument, focus on the weakest parts of your argument and the strongest parts of your opponents' arguments. You dodged from suicides to "shoot[ing] people" via a deft "think of the children", which is not arguing in good faith. You want to think yourself already right; you don't want to become right if you're not already.
Personally, I'd rather err on the side of freedom than safety. There are alternatives available to us that don't infringe on freedoms so much, such as universal health care and increased treatment options for mental illness, which I think would be very much preferable. I think this argument extends to encryption such that encryption can be used for nefarious ends, just as guns can be used for nefarious ends. There are definitely parallels. How much freedom do we want to trade, how far do we want to take this thing?
If you want perfect safety from suicidal tendencies, consider going under a 24/7 watch and having your hands tied. For some extremely severe cases, this may be warranted.
But there's no reason to subject the rest of the population to the same measures.
A gun is designed to kill. Anything else you do with it is just practice to kill more effectively with it.
Every Man Has The Right to Utility Dynamite!
At that point, there is little difference between between a military officer having access or a citizen having access.
So it's really not about weapons in and of themselves that the rest of the world is puzzled about this American debate, not about the supposed cruelty of everyday people (nobody believes that). It's really about the fact that carrying a gun to work is a very slippery slope, even if the gun is in the car. Same idea with not carrying dangerous explosives if you can help it, the risk is too high compared to most perceived benefits.
I think the self defense argument is very much biased by the fact that once others have guns, you may feel threatened not carrying yourself; conversely if no one carries you'd rather it stayed that way... It's a snake eating its own tail from both sides.
The truth is, it's actually not normal people carrying that kills a lot in the US (although child accidents are statistically too high compared to eg Europe or Asia iirc). It's really the problem of gangs etc. Most lethal shootings are statistically related to someone's lifelong "job", not everyday honest people. But removing guns from wide circulation means we don't have e.g. teens shooting others anywhere else in the world, nowhere near the same magnitude, which is a troubling fact. Indeed, it's the person that holds the gun that counts, and young minds shouldn't have access to guns in that regard. Not enough control yet, it's a biological fact.
[1]: France, but it's the same culture in most western EU countries afaik. Not sure about those closest to the Russian federation but I'm inclined to think they generally agree with us on the matter.
[2]: Hunting is certainly midly popular here in rural areas, and those who voice criticism are 99% about the animal cruelty angle, they couldn't care less if the killing was done with knifes or arrows instead. The gun angle is just not a thing in most countries where guns are effectively banned from regular society but obviously totally accessible for sports: it's OK, really.
Guns are not a prerequisite for feeling threatened. The self-defense argument is based on the fact that two arbitrary people armed with guns are much more likely to be evenly matched than two disarmed individuals. In particular, habitually violent individuals tend to be much more experienced at, and prepared for, unarmed combat than the general public. Skill with firearms also benefits from practice, of course, but almost any armed individual would at least stand a chance of winning against a determined attacker, whereas someone without extensive martial arts experience would be unlikely to successfully defend themselves in hand-to-hand combat. Guns represent an equalizing force.
Additionally sport shotguns typically have long barrels (I believe because pushing the sight farther away from the shooter's eye has been shown to improve accuracy among other things), are heavy because weight is less of a concern, and typically lack accessory mounting points (eg for ammunition holders, flash lights, other shit) because they are unnecessary and throw off the balance of the gun which may reduce accuracy. Competition guns are also frequently configured to fire a different type of ammunition which produces less recoil for the user and puts less strain on the shoulder over long bouts of practice. This ammo may do less damage to what it hits, so it would be less appropriate if you are trying to kill a person or a large game animal.
If you are asking "what's the difference between any gun optimized for sport vs one optimized for killing things?" then what you're effectively asking is "what's the difference between a computer optimized for hitting an overclocking record vs a server optimized for running your mission critical thing in production?" Nuanced rifle differences are out of my wheel house as I don't shoot rifles much, but the biggest difference from a design philosophy perspective is the performance:reliability trade off. If your rifle fails in a competition setting, that sucks but you're not going to die. If your rifle fails in combat while someone is shooting at you, you have real problems. Like servers, rifles designed for military or self defense use are therefore designed to operate correctly under a much wider range of conditions because they can't fail, and they sacrifice accuracy to meet that requirement. The most obvious example would be the AK-47 which is notoriously reliable to the point where it's a meme due to its simple mechanism and loose tolerances, and not nearly as accurate in standard configuration as many other rifles, even other rifles used by armed forces.
The other obvious difference is fire modes in a military setting (this is obviously context dependent). There is no need for burst fire (one trigger pull firing multiple bullets) or full auto fire (holding down the trigger yields continuous fire) in a competition setting because those fire modes are mostly used for scaring your enemy and getting them to stop shooting at you. You're not interested as much in hitting them, just suppressing them. You don't need to suppress a paper target because a paper target isn't shooting back at you.
If I look at your question literally, it's a hard question to answer because anything can be used to kill someone. What's the difference between a tank and a truck that a terrorist uses to run over people?
And you can do the same thing for anything. I could easily contend that "less dangerous hobby" is factually incorrect because there are plenty of more dangerous hobbies not being prohibited, like drag racing or skydiving. And we had the whole discussion in the other thread about "tools made to kill."
People assault for sport too. And people would make all kinds of illegal things for craftsmanship if they could.
Store of value seems particularly like a stretch.
They are tools for killing. To what extent is it correct to regulate them is the question.
If you want some economic evidence of purpose other than killing, notice that the vast majority of firearms are never actually used to kill anyone, nor do their owners desire to kill anyone with them. Then explain how their owners nonetheless derived enough value from them to justify paying hundreds to thousands of dollars for them.
> People assault for sport too.
Assault is already, independently illegal.
A law against killing people with guns is redundant (killing people is already illegal), but a law against not killing people with guns is incoherent, so what evil is left to prohibit that isn't already illegal?
> And people would make all kinds of illegal things for craftsmanship if they could.
But they can, that's sort of the point. Since individuals can manufacture them on their own regardless, isn't it better that they be available to the people who follow the law and not just the people who don't?
> Store of value seems particularly like a stretch.
There seem to be a fair number of second hand firearms dealers who make their living from it.
It's perfectly cogent to own a gun, not with any intent to kill, but to establish a power dynamic, such that one could respond with deadly force if necessary [1]. This is how America projects its military power across the world, through 400+ bases and several aircraft super-carriers, with the majority of that force going unused. It's still a projection of power, and still subject to moral scrutiny; but having a military base parked outside Qatar, just in case, is not the same thing as "that military base is a tool for invading Qatar".
I get your core point; weapons being deadly is the whole point, and even weapons acquired purely for deterrence can lead to a positive feedback loop of escalation, resulting in violence that would not have occurred otherwise. And humans are not purely rational actors; there's a simple numbers game, where the more guns are in a populace, the deadlier a small number of maniacs or extremists are going to be. It's not a problem we should ignore, and it's frustrating that NRA hardliners seem to be fine with doing so.
I don't own a gun, and I'm in favor of something resembling "common sense gun control", as well as other harm reduction interventions (particularly universal mental health care); at the same time, I consider effective self-defense to be an inalienable human right (I don't declaw cats, either). But to say that guns exist only to kill is a little overly simplistic: to take another example, North Korea acquired nukes not to use them, but to dissuade the U.S. but ever thinking about instigating regime change. They know using them can only result in their immediate obliteration; yet owning them tilts the game-theoretic dynamic in their favor.
[0] Aircraft and drones somewhat change the dynamic on this, but we can consider those out of scope in a 2A debate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credible_minimum_deterrence
You might event continue such a statement with something like "guns are a tool to kill, but it's not clear that their existence has lead to more killing than if they didn't exist."
The interesting data is what happens following the passage of gun control legislation. The proponents are always happy to point out that the number of murders involving the specific weapons being prohibited goes down, but no kidding. The real question is the effect on the overall number of murders (i.e. the ones that didn't just use a different weapon), and in particular the effect over and above the existing trendline. (You don't get to just take credit when the existing long-term trend of declining violent crime rates continues, you have to move the needle more than it was already expected to move.)
But the effect turns out to be little if anything. It turns out murders tend to be caused by things like drugs, gangs, domestic disputes or revenge moreso than access to firearms. People will use a gun if they have it, but there are a hundred different ways to kill a man and taking away one doesn't change much. Also, a disproportionate number of murders are committed by gangs with no qualms about using prohibited weapons anyway.
It actually has a more significant effect on suicides, because some of the most popular alternative suicide methods aren't as effective (as opposed to the most popular alternative homicide methods which mostly are). But we already separate known suicidal people from guns (and shoelaces etc.), and it seems like the better answer there should have more to do with addressing the fact that so many people are suicidal so that the question of which method they might use becomes irrelevant.
America definitely has a serious problem with violence in general and we can't just blame Chicago or whatever other flavor of the day the NRA has picked.
More than 77% of homicide victims in the US are male.
Target practice is just practicing getting better at killing.
Crime deterrent is threatening to kill.
It's valuable because it's good at killing.
It's a well crafted killing machine.
It makes one feel less vulnerable because you hold the ability to instantly kill someone.
Why deny the gun's purpose is to kill? It seems to imply you think it's bad to kill people, as if we could demonstrate that yes guns are only good at killing people, it might risk your guns being taken away? Seems the strongest rhetorical position is one that argues in favor of the gun's ability to kill and why people should be allowed to have that ability.
I enjoy target and clay shooting but I believe they are simply metaphors for the gun's original purpose which is to shoot living things.
We're kinda off track the original topic here though :p
That is to say, whether or not you do something safely has no bearing on whether or not something is designed for killing.
Explosives are used by the military to kill the enemy, but you follow all the tenants of explosives safety when you're blasting on a construction site too.
Seems pretty farfetched given that nearly all of the people who shoot targets neither intend to nor actually do ever kill anyone.
Would you argue that the purpose of a baseball is killing people because it's practicing getting better at throwing a rock? To say nothing of javelin.
> Crime deterrent is threatening to kill.
Would you say that the purpose of the criminal justice system is to put people in jail and it fails if it manages to deter crime and then doesn't actually have to put people in jail?
> It's valuable because it's good at killing.
Why can't it be valuable because it's good for target shooting or for deterring crime?
> It's a well crafted killing machine.
That's just assuming the conclusion. If it's a killing machine then it's a well crafted killing machine, but if its purpose is to look pretty (or look scary) or satisfy local cultural norms or make a political statement, then it's a well crafted political statement.
> It makes one feel less vulnerable because you hold the ability to instantly kill someone.
Which is a similar situation to serving as a deterrent -- it succeeds even when you don't use it to kill anyone. Especially then.
> Why deny the gun's purpose is to kill? It seems to imply you think it's bad to kill people, as if we could demonstrate that yes guns are only good at killing people, it might risk your guns being taken away? Seems the strongest rhetorical position is one that argues in favor of the gun's ability to kill and why people should be allowed to have that ability.
Killing might be a purpose of a gun, but it's being alleged that it's the only purpose. Which still doesn't make sense given that it's mostly not what they're actually used for in practice.
Killing people isn't even a purpose in general, or if it is then it's a bad one. A purpose is a motive, not a means. Nobody sane has a motive of killing for no reason. Plenty of sane people have a motive of winning a sporting event or not getting robbed.
This is why "guns are for killing" is political rhetoric. Killing is bad and everybody knows it, so if guns are only for killing then guns are bad. But if guns are for deterring crime or similar, deterring crime is good and not deterring crime is bad. It's a much harder motive to argue against because it's a legitimate motive, whereas killing for no reason is just a strawman.
The baseball comparison doesn't stand: in the hands of an adult, a great deal of work is involved in killing someone with a baseball. Threatening to kill someone with a baseball doesn't immediately give you power of life and death over them - they can fight back or run. And in the hands of a child, the baseball is harmless, no matter the harm the child wants to mete with it.
A gun is none of those things. A toddler can kill in an instant with a gun, and this has happened, and will continue to happen.
Guns are for killing. Of all the things just about any American to handle, they are the best at killing. If we stop letting people walk around with guns, there's nothing they could carry instead with even close to the level of accessible (a toddler could use it) killing power.
Like I said before, maybe try acknowledging that and arguing from their killing power perspective? I think there are strong 2fa arguments regarding the ability of minorities to defend themselves that center around the gun's design in making it extremely easy to kill people.