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Aswad -> RE: Gun Control and mass murder, one does not eliminate the other. (12/15/2012 9:47:53 PM)
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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
I know you see my orientation is a potential hinderance in such discussions, but, rest assured, I am thinking of maintaining as many freedoms as possible while maintaining the freedom of life as well.
Potential. Not certainly. And I'm not saying it's limited to those of a particular orientation.
But there is no such thing as freedom of life, there's the "right" to life, two very different things.
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The same questions can be turned around, even twisted a bit. Is the life of your fellow citizen more or less valuable than your right to own a possession?
I don't need the "right" to own a possession. I need the freedom to live.
My life, and the lives of my fellow citizens, are less important and less valuable than freedom, by far.
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My concern is not unfounded.
The concern is not unfounded, agreed; have I ever claimed differently?
What I've pointed out is, I know Israel, Norway, Finland and Switzerland have very high gun ownership rates, yet as your graph shows, they also have very few gun related murders. Which tells me there are more important factors at play than just the number of guns out there, and that if we want to make headway, we need to hit a nail on the head on the first try. Not necessarily a perfect hit on the ideally chosen nail, but it needs to be a good hit on a nail that will carry some weight properly. Or else there will be a major backlash, and lost opportunities for improvement.
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Being required by law to secure all weapons shouldnt even cause a person to blink.
I agree.
My only complaint as to Norwegian gun control is that it's beurocratic and limits gun ownership to homeowners in practice. Both of which can be resolved without any reduction in the positive effect of the gun control measures in place up here.
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No, nor would I put you in harm's danger of having someone else do so if I could find a way to avoid it.
Thing is, I rather you take a swing at me than at my freedoms.
And, in some cases, taking a swing is necessary, I just want us to agree that it should be with some reservation that we do.
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Americans are 20 times as likely to be killed by a gun than is someone from another developed country.
I've pointed out that this statistic doesn't surprise me at all, but it isn't enough for a strong conclusion.
Norway has about half as many guns as the USA, per capita. The disparity between 1:2 and 1:20 is staggering. It seems very likely that another factor is more important here. What immediately comes to mind, based on comparing the Scandinavian countries, is that there's a correlation (not necessarily the only one, but there is one) between income and gun related deaths here. Seeing as the US has a very poor middle class by our standards, and a very different income distribution, and is only now starting to get some basic necessities for a larger segment of the population, it doesn't seem far fetched to suggest that a lot of the remaining 1:10 disparity might be made up by these factors.
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At what point does your rights to posses supersede someone else's right to be safe?
"Rights" are something accorded by the State. In order to posit a "right" to possess, you need to take away the inherent freedom to do so in the first place. What we're talking about, is the State according the "right" to be safe, at the expense of an inherent freedom (e.g. it will require active measures to accord a "right" to be safe, but possession requires no such thing), and doing so when other measures might in fact be more effective, to boot.
I'm not saying we can't do that, I'm saying it's a question of when the State gets to strip you of something, when your freedom can be taken away, as a citizen of sound mind and innocent of any crime, and that in my opinion the answer should be one that starts from the position that taking away freedoms is a desperate measure, not to be undertaken lightly.
Indeed, I've said we probably should impose storage requirements.
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Note, I said possess, not own. No one is taking away ownership.
Ownership is a legal concept, one that emanates from the State, not its people. Possession is a natural concept, one that emanates from the person and is in essence inalienable. Ownership without possession, as a mandatory arrangement, is meaningless. And untidy, too, as what you're talking about is more a matter of leasing than of ownership.
Incidentally, though I normally wouldn't bring it up, the gun industry employs quite a few people. It's no secret they make a living off the prevalence of guns. Since socioeconomic factors are more significant, I would want to see some numbers on how much of that goes back into the general population as wages and taxes before considering a ban on automatic weapons, simply to double check that it won't have an unexpected backlash (I don't think it will, because I think those bastards are too greedy to be paying enough to make a dent, but it is something I think we should check out).
I don't think we'll come down on different sides of the issue of proper storage and banning automatics. I just happen to think it's very important to approach this reluctantly, and with a great deal of thought put into the question of whether or not this can be justified in terms of rational public management, i.e. whether it will solve a well defined problem in an effective and necessary manner. If you abandon that principle, and allow the gov't to get in the habit of doing so, I'm quite certain that you'll end up regretting it.
Besides, imagine what kind of nutjob the GOP will offer the next election, and then imagine a bunch of people making a single issue vote on the gun control platform, where the GOP is bound to go for a reversal of anything that didn't work. We don't want a backlash here. A good solution is required, one that is agreeable to a majority, sufficiently so that it won't cause the election to become a disaster.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
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