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Aswad -> RE: 2nd amendment (7/23/2012 10:19:06 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
I don't know why people keep saying it as though it were some kind of self-evident truth.
It's not self-evident. What's fairly evident, however, is that guns are a familiar thing that people reach for. Presently, they have an easy way out, and it appeals to them. That route is almost deterministic. It has known, manageable properties. The losses are in effect constrained to an upper bound. The average case is probably closer to the worst case than for other means, but the worst case for guns is not nearly as bad as the worst case for many other methods.
quote:
You can kill with fertiliser, certainly (in the right - large - amounts).
Hardly large amounts, unless you're trying to affect a large area.
200 grams free air detonation within arm's reach will cause death from the pressure spike to the lungs. 15 grams close to the chest or head will cause death from direct tissue damage or concussive force. The reason we don't outlaw fertilizer of the sorts that are most readily converted to explosives is because the alternatives are worse, and not as readily bungled. These figures are for when the charge is properly detonated. Most of the time, it isn't, and a low order explosion results. This makes a fireball suited for film, which does damage sure enough, but far less of it.
Under the influence of the pressures from a high order detonation, glass and metal are for all practical purposes fluids. Those steel fire doors become a spray of a ton of hypersonic liquid. If it hits a sufficiently hard surface, it indeed splatters like water tossed on it would. But few surfaces are hard enough. They behave as if they were a thin sheet of fluid through which another fluid smashes, the spall scattering like if you'd slapped your flat hand into a pool of water. Soft tissues compress completely from the air pressure spillover alone, but if you happen to be in the path of the blast wave, bone is just another liquid at those pressures.
Guns can kill a man, as can explosives, or poisons, or fire. Large amounts of ammunition, suprisingly difficult to carry, can kill many men. Large amounts of explosives can throw half a building through a crowd. Large amounts of poison can kill anyone within the space affected. Large amounts of fuel can burn down a building and everyone in it. I've listed them in the order of descending difficulty, which happens to be the order of ascending potential carnage.
We're fortunate that the western world has largely forgotten the merits of these more effective means of killing.
In times past, it was more common to light things ablaze or use poison, not counting crimes of passion (which have extremely limited potential for carnage when carried out with a gun, though admittedly more than a knife or axe). Since then, guns have become bigger in the mind, but while their offensive capabilities have risen, it has not been by an order of magnitude. However, anyone can now get themselves a tank of CNG and the means to light it, or a fire extinguisher and a barrel of kerosene. And the ingredients for the creation of a toxic cloud (e.g. hydrogen sulfide, which has seen a resurgence as a means of suicide) are available at any mall at practically no cost. To say nothing of what one can do with actual reading and/or planning.
I'm not saying people bent on a massacre would reach for these other means if guns were denied them. Not right away.
I'm saying that once the trend was reversed, once the "established" means of mass murder was something other than guns, people would begin to reach for those other means. Just as they now reach for the established means, the gun. It wouldn't change much in the crimes of passion department, but it would be a whole different ball game in the mass murder department. As I said, not right away, because the idea of guns as the established means would linger a while, but it would change. And we would be far worse off for it in the end. Because you can diminish the damage of guns. You can do no such thing for the other means.
Every EMT and ICU out there knows how to treat a gunshot injury, and have the means on hand. Out of all the injured that didn't die at Utøya, for instance, only a couple of them died in the hospital. Many hardly have a scar now. Burn injuries are more difficult to treat. And the disfiguration is pretty much a given. You can't even tell right away how badly hurt someone is, because heating of the lungs is an internal injury of great importance and no hospital has the resources to scan a ton of patients at once. What hospital can realistically save all but a handful of over a hundred when instead of being shot they have been badly burned?
Poisons are even worse in some ways. EMTs have to keep their distance. Even police have to wait for enough masks to go in, as they're likely to be fatally poisoned themselves otherwise. Many will die while help stands right outside. And when they arrive, the hospital must determine how they have been poisoned to have a real chance at treating them, if there even is anything to be done. Many readily made poison gases are without known means to counteract the poisoning to an extent that would make any major difference to the outcome.
I shan't sully the issue with more than a brief mention of cost, and only because it's going to impact others. Gunshots are cheaper.
quote:
How many avatars have we seen that involve a big crate of fertiliser and nothing else?
Quite frankly, that's disingenuous.
For one thing, you know as well as I that such an avatar is going to light every warning light from here to Gondor.
A gun has uses beyond mass murder, and meanings well beyond it. More to the point, it is the symbolism of the thing. A huge Harley is a gas hog and a severe accident waiting to happen. But it is, among other things, symbolic of individual freedom, just as a gun can be symbolic of national, cultural or ethnic freedom. Like it or not, history has a lot of war in it, shaping the course of the world into what we live in. Moreover, just as the Harley is a "macho" symbol of power (ever see a peacock?), so too the gun can be one. And, inevitably, it has a certain phallic aspect to it to some, as well.
The one thing a gun does not symbolize as an avatar picture, ever, is mass murder.
Around these parts, although it only became interpreted that way recently, having a crate of fertilizer as an avatar would qualify for years behind bars according to §140 of the penal code ("inciting or condoning violence", the latter part having been excluded from the interpretation for a century up until the events of last year), whereas a gun simply wouldn't. We are used to associating them with hunting and sports, more than anything else. Personally, I am fond of rifles, but for the challenge and for the clean kill it can ensure in hunting for food (I would never hunt for sport), and I certainly hope not to ever be on the wrong end of one again. If memory serves, I have more reason to fear guns than you do. Apologies if I'm recalling incorrectly. Still, it doesn't bother me to live in an area that has a gun density on par with rural USA.
As for what you said about fear and liberty, I would argue that some modicum of fear is part of liberty.
Freedom from fear isn't liberty, it's material comfort, the hardest drug known to man.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
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