quote:

ORIGINAL: epiphiny43
Can someone Please explain to me how laws threatening to put people in jail for owning or misusing firearms alters decisions by someone planning to commit suicide at the conclusion of their murder spree?

quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

quote:

ORIGINAL: epiphiny43
Can someone Please explain to me how laws threatening to put people in jail for owning or misusing firearms alters decisions by someone planning to commit suicide at the conclusion of their murder spree?

Well, I can think of one way in which this could happen. The first thing to get to grips with is that the line 'where there's a will, there's a way' - beloved of those who advance the view that, e.g., 'if he couldn't have done it with a gun, he'd have done it with a bomb' - doesn't characterise the bulk of what people do.

What does characterise most of what humans do is actually the opposite. That is, 'Where there's a way, there's a will'. For instance, I don't have a burning, day-to-day desire to visit Mars because I don't have the means to get there. If I did have the means, it'd no longer be a fantasy, it'd be a realistic desire.

Means dictate ends. I might have fantasised, once, about killing my headmaster. But without a serious means of doing that, the fantasy would never have become a real world plan.

You want a more apt example: go to a tool shop. Look at a power tool you've never seen before and find out what it does. Ever seen a 12 inch angle grinder? With one of those, you can literally cut a hole in a brick wall and put in a window. Now, do you have a new desire for a window in a particular wall in your house - where you'd never had that desire before? This is what tools can do. Tools are means, and means can create ends.

quote:

ORIGINAL: epiphiny43
Sorry, your analysis is specious and disconnected to the 21st century.

quote:

ORIGINAL: epiphiny43

Where does anyone with reading ability get the idea passing a law fixes a problem with human nature? The whole of human history says different. Unless I'm wrong, shooting children is already against the law?
There are real tragedies in life. Few fix. Insane people, cancer, the many political bullies about on the planet, and so on. What matters is what we can do CONSTRUCTIVELY that helps matters. The focus on laws in no way changes the disturbed people who take innocent lives for often incomprehensible reasons. What can we actually do about people who think mass killing is any sort of solution to their immediate problems?? Having an entertainment industry that Doesn't romanticize extreme violence might be a good step? But expecting restraint and responsibility in any profit driven industry is laughable.
Laws, like police, are reactive measures and do little or nothing to prevent criminal or insane actions, at best they change the tools used. The real solutions are much harder than one more feel good and ultimately useless law added to the current list of laws that aren't stopping insanity and tragedy. When ALL guns are forbidden and you still see news footage of gun death, what next? If $100,000,000,000 (BILLION!) of illegal drugs are crossing our borders yearly (What the govt admits to), how is any law or laws going to prevent people obtaining firearms? And what depth of police intrusion into our homes and lives is necessary to even actually lower the amount of gun ownership now in the country? My experience and the world wide issues with overzealous and unrestrained police make the current levels of mass violence in the USA in no way an excuse to risk losing All our freedoms in exchange for a false illusion of safety.

quote:

Can someone Please explain to me how laws threatening to put people in jail for owning or misusing firearms alters decisions by someone planning to commit suicide at the conclusion of their murder spree?

quote:

ORIGINAL: tazzygirl

I agree with most of what you wrote. My brain is fried after having been at this most of the day. Forgive me, I will take a fresh look tomorrow.

quote:

I never once said we should ban them.

quote:

I just truly do not see a need to have a gun around that shoots off a hundred rounds in x amount of seconds simply because an owner resents being put out of his way over wanting to keep citizens safe.

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen

What the fuck do you need with all of that?

quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

As far as I'm concerned, the duty of those in a community who are not overwhelmed by grief is to find practical solutions.

quote:

The death of Princess Diana here in the UK marked a watershed, though: at the point, it became abundantly clear that outpouring of emotions had ceased to be just a natural and unavoidable thing that we should all put up with, it was now the *required* thing to do; more than that, it was the most 'admirably human' thing to do.

quote:

This tragedy had its political causes; therefore it's going to require political solutions. If it's become somehow now 'tasteless' in this or that culture to seek out such solutions - then I'm more than happy to be considered 'tasteless'.

quote:

No worries. Sleep well and wake, tazzygirl.

quote:

You didn't call it that, true. But banning private possession of automatics was certainly implied. For practical purposes, that's a ban, with the upshot that people can still go somewhere to enjoy using the banned items, if they pay for it. Which is fair enough, I suppose.

quote:

I see a need to see a need to restrict as a consequence of the best solution to an identified problem that needs to be solved.

quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

quote:

ORIGINAL: epiphiny43
Sorry, your analysis is specious and disconnected to the 21st century.

It's an analysis that draws from social theories, as well as from psychology. It's also driven the policy of gun prohibition in the UK since World War 1. It worked then, and it still works.

American society *can* be different to what it is today. That can happen without the breaking of basic laws of physics.

quote:

ORIGINAL: VideoAdminChi

FR,

I have removed personal attacks, posts which made other posters the topic, and posts which violated the Forum Guidelines:

http://www.collarchat.com/m_72/tm.htm

This isn't a place to insult the kinks, preferences, lifestyles, etc. of others. If you don't like what another person enjoys, rest assured that there are plenty of others out there that probably don't like your activities either. Furthermore, baiting, harassment and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

This thread has reached the maximum amount of personal attacks and will remain locked.

VideoAdminChi

quote:

ORIGINAL: tazzygirl

Limiting the access of those guns. They are still privately owned. They can still be sold by the owner. They can still be used by the owner. They can still be shown off by the owner. The only thing that would change would be where they are kept.

quote:

There is more than one problem. Restricting access would correct more than one problem.

quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

Was it on this thread, or one of the others, that someone was talking about 'slave mentalilties' in relation to those who wanted to restrict gun usage, or some other species of half-baked quasi-Nietzschian old bollocks?

quote:

We can find an agreement on those grounds.

We can't find it on the "no need to X" type grounds.

quote:


ORIGINAL: Powergamz1

Dictate (v) to require or determine necessarily
Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionary

'Means dictates ends' in the manner you've described it (that the tens of thousands of suicides each year were *forced* to form the intent to kill themselves by the devices at hand) is an irrational superstition that goes against any form of science, including social or medical science.

quote:

ORIGINAL: tazzygirl

You lost me here.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aswad

Third and final attempt at writing and posting this reply (I write too quickly for the config):