Krush on 20/5/2016 at 21:43

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Well faetal if guns are so utterly useless on "the street," then why do police carry them?

Tomi on 20/5/2016 at 21:53

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Which only confirms that you're an arms industry sheeple! :D

Muzman on 20/5/2016 at 22:24

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It's a common argument but it's not really true. It makes that base level mistake of rounding all (or even more severe) unlawful behaviour into "crime" done by things called "criminals". It implies that if you are in any way inclined to break the law then you see all law breaking equally and will do just about anything, and the notion seems to virtually posit "criminal" as a personality type. (and in some debates I've had I'd swear "criminal" was a thing on par with demon or vampire or witch. I doubt it's so in this case, but it has happened).
This doesn't hold at all in looking at the vast spectrum of perps, the relationship of crime and criminality to the law and so forth.

It ignores that on some level people who commit a crime are mostly rationally self interested. Stupid perhaps, cruel, morally reprehensible, possessed of really poor information to fuel this rationality; yes. But certainly not some sort of devil-may-care nihilists or intractably anti-social in every case. Those people do exist, but there's less of them than you might think.
So if laws exist that make sure getting a gun for the commission of crime and/or using one in the commission of a crime are pretty severe and they are, or have a reputation for being, effectively enforced then that's a factor in whether someone uses a gun to commit a crime or even decides to commit one full stop. Heck, your more seasoned types (people who might actually deserve the tag of 'criminal') will actually factor in the police response to them and possible defenses down the road as part of the 'plan'. Probably not a comforting thought to law and order types, but remember that this is about the relative necessity of shooting and being prepared to shoot as a risk factor in a given society.

The second prong of this approach is that if you enforce gun restrictions effectively and punish defectors and so on, part and parcel of that is that actually getting the things in the first place is very difficult too. This is something people seem to leave out and just assume the supply will be largely unchanged. Well it shouldn't be. The thing about "criminals" just getting illegal guns because they don't care about laws is faulty for those two reasons; as mentioned they do actually care about laws, just maybe less than we'd like, and they will have a great deal of difficulty getting them without attracting some attention. Illegal guns have to come from somewhere and they generally start out as legal ones.
At that idea a lot of people just throw up their hands and say there's too many, you'll never get them etc etc, short of jackbooting your way into every home and other such hysterics. This is a silly attitiude. I've been interested to see that gun buybacks are occasionally done in the US and they do pretty well. People are pretty keen to turn in a few guns for cash in some places, pulling them out of sewers and such. They don't care. If you stem supply while doing that kind of thing you're well on your way.

All of this is in some ways missing the larger and perhaps more important point that the 'criminals' argument is a pretty big distraction over all, founded in some gang warfare paranoia it would seem (which has had some solid validity at certain times and in certain places, it must be said). It ignores how many bad things are done by legal gun owners (by the US's occasionally lax standards), obsession with self defense in some street incident or home robbery completely sidesteps guns used in domestic abuse, suicide and just plain regrettable drunken stupidity among other things.
If you reduce the guns in a community you get less of this stuff, across the board. People say you can't cure this stuff by getting rid of guns. Absolutely. But they become a lot less deadly, less dangerous to those in the vicinity and just plain inconvenient by comparison. It makes law enforcement's job handling these things a whole lot safer too.
It's a simple argument, once we get away from fallacious notions of criminal behaviour. Actually implementing it in somewhere like the US (don't know about Canada really. Doesn't sound like it's all that needed) is not so simple of course. But this is about the arguments and the logic that underpins them.

heywood on 20/5/2016 at 22:47

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Well, this thread predictably fell into the well-worn debate about gun policy.

How about we try to share experiences instead? I’ll start.

My earliest shooting experience was plinking with a BB gun in my grandparents’ yard. Like any young boy I thought it was fun. Soon I convinced my Dad to get an air handgun and we set up a range to shoot pellets in our basement. He kept ours locked away, but a lot of kids in our neighborhood had air rifles and some managed to take them out unsupervised so we would go plinking in the woods. The kids who had been taught about guns were always careful, but every once in a while some neighborhood jackass would shoot another kid, fortunately always with a single pump of air so nobody really got hurt.

Where I grew up, every boy had to have toy guns, and playing with BB guns was sort of a rite of passage. What about other parts of the world? Were toy guns ubiquitous in your youth as well?

My first experience with a real gun was in my grandfather’s basement when I was about 12. He had built a bullet trap for shooting handguns down there. My grandfather had a nice collection of guns. I can’t remember them all, but I do remember a M1 Garand and a vintage Springfield that my Dad beautifully restored.

When I turned 14, my parents splurged on my birthday present and gave me a Churchill Windsor 20 ga SxS uplands gun. At the time, 14 was the minimum hunting age in New York State and so I started hunting that year. Despite the English brand, it’s actually Spanish made and looks pretty with scroll engraving on the receiver. When I turned 16, I got another nice birthday present, a Remington 870 Magnum with slug barrel. That was the minimum age for big game hunting and I started hunting deer that year. BTW, 3 inch Magnum slug rounds are brutal and not that accurate either. After switching to 2.75” rounds and adding a small scope, I could take deer down cleanly up to 70 yards. When I was 20, I got a pistol permit, which was an ordeal to get in New York and took 9 or 10 months. A year or so later I switched to hunting deer with a hand me down Smith & Wesson 686, a .357 magnum with 8.5” barrel and Leupold scope. That was much nicer to carry around the woods and about as accurate as the shotgun.

I still have all three but haven’t added any since then. I haven’t shot any of them in probably 10 years, in part because I’ve moved around a lot and have had to leave them in storage. Also, I stopped hunting in my mid 20s because none of my friends hunted and I never picked it up again. It seems like the people I meet who are into hunting are people I don’t relate to otherwise so I don’t have anyone to share the hobby with.

I’ve never really gotten into target shooting. I was in the military and so I had small arms training and would occasionally shoot at the range on base. And then when I was living in Boston, my wife and I briefly joined a club and shot in their indoor range a couple times. Maybe once or twice with my in-laws at their fish & game club. What I really miss though is trap and skeet shooting. That is pretty fun.

I have a couple of friends who carried and I think the rationale was more about just exercising their right rather than wanting it for protection. They both stopped after a while. Safely carrying a loaded firearm and being trained and well-practiced to use it is a big burden. I don’t want to live anyplace where I would feel the need to carry a gun for personal protection, but I acknowledge those places do exist within the USA, just not around here.

Volitions Advocate on 21/5/2016 at 00:16

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I don't think every criminal is the same, but I do thing criminals with guns can easily be lumped together without much consideration to the details. If somebody is worried about a person obeying the law with the proper training to carry a firearm, you should be worried doubly so for somebody who really feels they need it, who gets a sense of empowerment from it, because of their activities.

I understand the dilemma about CCW holders potentially missing, but it's no bigger a problem than when the police do it. Much less frequently than the police do it as well. So how do you weigh the issue? This is why I said I like to talk about this rather than scream about it. There is no perfect solution.

I don't agree that gun buybacks do much. The police for the most part, depending on where you live, dislike guns so much they wont tell somebody that if they want to get rid of a legally owned gun, they can sell it to somebody else who will give them more money for it than the police will, who will just destroy it. For a potentially violent criminal who has done a violent crime, it's also a pretty easy way to dispose of evidence with no questions asked. I don't like the argument where you just throw your hands up in the air and say "you'll never get them all." but there is an element of truth to it. What I don't give any credence to, however, is the argument that all illegal guns were legal at some point. That's like victim blaming a rape victim for the way they dress. If a firearm is stolen, it's 100% on the person who stole it, and they need to be caught and the firearm recovered. Nobody WANTS their gun stolen. This isn't even touching on the fact that much of the bloodshed that is happening in the middle east is being done with guns that the US government bought for Afghan fighters in the 80s. I'd be willing to bet a large portion of illegal guns originated with a government purchase, I'd be willing to bet the guns used at both attacks in Paris probably have origins very similar to that.

The real issue I have is with Law enforcement and government going after the people who proved they are trustworthy. I have no issues approaching somebody holding a firearm to talk to them or shake their hand, but so many people just go by "see a gun, call 911," and are so terrified of the sight of a gun, that even hunters are confronted by police with their guns drawn. I have seen this happen locally, even appeared on the news talking to them about how I viewed the situation.

There's so much to talk about with this issue, I mostly just wish that people could have a real conversation about it. We're not doing too bad here, but Heywood is right, these discussions all usually end up in the same place. I grew up around guns, used them to feed myself, used them for stress relief, and see a great potential for good in them. If you didn't grow up around the culture and understand what kind of place they occupy in the minds of those who see and use them often, you probably wont understand it, you will probably see an attitude you don't understand and misinterpret. Why a gun over something else? This might play into the idea of a feeling of empowerment, but it is an equalizer. The smallest woman confronting a large man can put them on a level playing field. They are the best tool for the job, simply because they really are the best tool for the job.

There are too many ideas even just brought up in the last few posts that I can't respond to all of them coherently. I'm already just writing in a jumble of run-on sentences, and I really should focus more on my studies than these discussions. But I'll say that I think its silly that we give a 19 year old who drives a truck for Brinks a gun to protect the banks money, and we have such a problem with a school teacher being offered the chance to prove their proficiency, and safety with a firearm, to carry a gun on their person to protect our kids. The horror displayed at such a thought is ludicrous to me. So a maniac like Lanza can do what he wants for several minutes until the police arrive.

Triggers don't pull fingers, and not all gun owners are George Zimmermans. Certainly not in Canada.