Another shooting in the USA. Remind me about the reason for having guns again. - by SubJeff
SubJeff on 6/9/2012 at 03:37
I'm loving this strawman. You've made up an entire little story in your mind for it about how much I earn and where I'd live and who my neighbors would be.
It's almost sweet, but just a little, how do you say? Craaaaaazyyyyy!
:)
demagogue on 6/9/2012 at 03:51
Anecdotal stories are never good arguments anyway. I'm sure you could cherry pick any situation you want to if you looked hard enough. E.g., I understood that many of the make-shift border shantytowns along the Texas & NM borders have basically thirdworld living conditions (I'm not talking about the normal towns you find as dots on a map, but the shantytowns) and all the violence from Mexico leaks into them very easily, and there are plenty of areas in inner-cities that have high crime & murder rates. But it doesn't make sense of most suburbs, where most Americans statistically live by a big margin IIRC.
The thing you should care about for the argument is the structural features, the stuff you get from statistics... violent crime rates, accidental death rates, deterrence factors, etc... When you change gun laws and other laws, those stats are going to fluctuate for a while & reequilibrate. You could think about it as each state just mixing the right cocktail of laws to minimize gun injuries & deaths from all factors, and that might be the most acceptable argument you could give to everybody that everybody could make sense of... Otherwise it turns into some battle of my values vs. your values & who can judge one's better than another's? You could just have a referendum and let it be decided democratically, but that would probably be next to arbitrary in leading to less gun violence so it'd probably be perverse... So that'd bring me back to the statistics as the only way you can really sell the argument to everybody that they can all accept.
june gloom on 6/9/2012 at 06:47
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
I'm loving this strawman. You've made up an entire little story in your mind for it about how much I earn and where I'd live and who my neighbors would be.
It's almost sweet, but just a little, how do you say? Craaaaaazyyyyy!
:)
I'm drawing these conclusions from
your posts and
your behaviour over pretty much the whole time I've known you. I love how you took away from my post everything but the salient point --
YOU HAVE A CRITICAL MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE UNITED STATES AND YOU'RE TOO STUPID AND/OR ARROGANT TO LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO LIVE HERE WHO TELL YOU YOU ARE WRONG.The next time you feel like telling an American about America, kindly refrain from posting and instead go fuck yourself with your forehead. I don't know how, just do it.
I have been calling you on this shit for (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=128000&p=1892561&viewfull=1#post1892561)
years. I really don't understand why you persist.
Renzatic on 6/9/2012 at 07:23
I gotta side with Deth on this one, Sub. You're being weird about this.
I'll tell you my experiences with guns as a citizen of these United States, living deep within red state country. I've been...all over. I have braved the deepest of the backwoods. Broken into every abandoned house and building I could find within a 30 mile radius. I have trespassed many a time. I have been to towns in Alabama that consists of 3 tarpaper shacks and a gas station, where I've been denied service because they don't like, and I quote, "nigger-lovers" (said without ANY trace of irony WHATSOEVER), and yet..
...I've never once had a gun pointed at me.
So yes, you're being irrational.
PigLick on 6/9/2012 at 07:35
ah why didya make me read that threat dethy, now I miss all those people who dont post anymore.
jay pettitt on 6/9/2012 at 07:58
Oh dear.
Subjeff, you're playing the man, not the ball. Tempting, granted. But if you want to claim that guns are bad the burden of proof is with you. "Yeah but how bad are they really?" is a good question.
To answer it, I think one would want to do some sort cost benefit analysis. The Penn & Teller argument, that chairs kill more people, ignores the fact that comparing apples to oranges isn't obviously advantageous and that chairs are also more common and convey more benefits. Would you rather live in a world without sitting or a world without guns? If you want to know how good/bad something is relative to other stuff, first you need to establish a way to compare different things that actually tells you something about what you want to know.
As an aside, I'd still also be interested in whether gun ownership endangers some people more than others. Police spring to mind.
SubJeff on 6/9/2012 at 08:56
Quote Posted by dethtoll
I'm drawing these conclusions from
your posts and
your behaviour over pretty much the whole time I've known you. I love how you took away from my post everything but the salient point.
The next time you feel like telling an American about America, kindly refrain from posting and instead go fuck yourself with your forehead. I don't know how, just do it.
This is all you have isn't it? I don't live there so I don't know. Blah blah blah. I love how you make assumptions about where I'd live and who my neighbours would be it. It's ridiculous.
I'd choose to have guns for my own protection. So what? Renz, it's good for you that you've never been threatened with a gun. I'm sure that's the case for many people, until one day it happens. I've never had a car accident but I'm still insured. I've never had a life threatening illness but I still have sickness insurance against my mortgage. And so on. Perhaps I take self defence more seriously than some. So what? dethtoll takes moaning about things more seriously than many others.
Really, you're bringing that up? Its true though - my opposite number in the US gets paid much, much more than me. And it's true for lots of things.
faetal on 6/9/2012 at 10:14
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
Would you rather live in a world without sitting or a world without guns?
It's obviously a fair point, but I do have to ask what the benefits brought by guns are again. As protection, they simply get matched by guns in the hands of criminals, the only difference between the prior situation of you both being armed with knives / bats is that to kill with a gun, you just need line of sight (within the gun's effective range).
I've been to a firing range and fired guns, it was fun, but not an experience I couldn't live without. Whenever I see police in airports with assault rifles or pistols, or when I walk past embassies and see army guys with guns, I shudder from the sheer destructive force of them. Machines which use controlled explosions to move pieces of metal at high velocity through a person's body in order to injure them, just does not fit my description of a positive thing.
jay pettitt on 6/9/2012 at 10:55
Sure, but as they exist your might have to consider lesser evils as positives. -3 + 5 = ? yields a different answer to -2 + 5 = ?
faetal on 6/9/2012 at 10:58
It is certainly a tangled mess thanks to the status quo being so gun-heavy. That said, as mentioned earlier, the guns aren't the problem, just a function of violent crime linked to low social health.
