(no subject)

[foolsguinea.livejournal.com]

I have been a moderate on gun control for years. I have tried, I really have. But when someone started (in the comments on this Brad Hicks post) by saying that need to keep up the trade in "AK's and AR's" because "we all know what comes next" if we pull them off the streets, and then tells me that we need guns to protect us from knives (which is swallowing camels to catch a fly), well....

I went out and walked the dogs, thought about it, came back and wrote this:

This reply is not going to be remotely nice. I apologize to Mr Hicks for the giant threadshit I am about to drop. But I respect Brad Hicks for his willingness to post uncomfortable conclusions about power (particularly in his threads on anti-communism in the church and its undermining of Christian ethics), so I'll say what I think, and you can see where I'm coming from.
_

I thought for a moment you were really stupid. More easy access to guns is supposed to make us safer? A gun that a little old lady can use to protect herself from young toughs with butterfly knives is one that a 10-year-old gangbanger can use to terrorize his neighbors.

What I see is a bunch of people who make up illogical reasons to avoid regulating the trade in guns to organized crime; a bunch of people who react in paranoia at any sign of stopping the flow of guns into the hands of Latin Kings, la M, Gambinos, Crips, and Bloods. It goes beyond fear or stupidity. This is the behavior of guilty men.

It is clear to me that we are very close to the day, if we are not there already, when every adult in rural white America is personally a beneficiary of the gun business of organized crime. And at that point, what can we say but that rural white America is itself organized criminals, and at war with the majority of Americans? Your intransigent commitment to selling weapons of terror and criminality to the worst among us not only makes you complicit in their crimes, but only makes the mythical "jackbooted thugs" of your fantasies more likely: a self-fulfilling prophecy, as we have no choice but finally to declare war back on the country folk who would like nothing better than for city folk to die at the hands of gangbangers.

I don't think you're stupid. I think you are, in your own small way, a supplier to organized crime, and all the rest is obfuscation to keep the blood money coming in.
_

Maybe I'm wrong. But those who are opposed to all gun laws are doing a damn good job of leaving me with that impression. Maybe you need to revise your behavior that leads me to think you are, effectively, the mob.

Yeah, tell me I'm full of it. But I'm done. No point in even being moderate with these people. They're so scared of the government, it's probably because they're doing something wrong and they know it. There were no black helicopters with jackbooted thugs coming for your guns back in 1992; there haven't been any in 20 years. But now I think, "If they're so scared of any regulation, what are they up to really?"

And I can't be the only one.

[I'm tagging this with "gun laws," "urban/rural animosity" which I just coined and probably won't display, and I'm adding a "racism" tag because duh.]

Comments

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure what your argument is. It sounds a lot like the arguments some use in favor of the Patriot Act - "why should you care if the government knows what you took out from the library? You got something to hide?"

Your argument is extremely emotional and doesn't give the appearance of having much in the way of a logical motive behind it. Do you have a logical argument against gun ownership, or is it more of a "well, I think these people are guilty, backwoods racists, and so no one should have guns?"

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I do have an argument against gun ownership if it's based on the view that having shotguns and assault rifles is any kind of protection against an evil government. There is no real protection in such a case. There is no good option, only bad, worse, and horrible.

[foolsguinea.livejournal.com]

I called the guy a mobster several times, I think it was pretty clear.

[rowsdowerisms.livejournal.com]

Funny I thought the a lot of the emotional paranoid arguments made were coming from gun nuts.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

Quibbling on one small part of your post, but I think there's a logical fallacy at play when you assume someone must be guilty of SOMETHING if they're "scared" of regulations. I don't know if it's a formal fallacy, specifically (help from other readers?) but it's the same logic that cops use when they insist that they be allowed to search without a warrant. "Well, you shouldn't mind unless you're HIDING something!" No. Constitutional liberties exist for a reason, and that reason isn't "letting guilty people hide things from police". The right to be secure in one's person and property (and, to an extent, free from governmental intrusion) is paramount. And I'm actually FOR gun laws (while still pro-gun ownership.)

--

As far as the guy's comment, I only partially agree with him; yes, there's a role for personal firearms when it comes to personal defense against criminals, and I think that role ought to be protected. But he's engaging in some pretty serious hyperbole. What harm does the 10-day waiting period, or "de-facto registration" do? We assume that any folks interested in owning a gun for home defense will still GET one, waiting period or not, and will have gotten the gun BEFORE a crime occurs. If you're moving to California and that ten day period is the difference between life and death, there are bigger problems going on than gun laws. If it's THAT dangerous, maybe you shouldn't move there.

But when someone's in the process of breaking into your home, the lack of a waiting period isn't going to magically make a gun appear if someone doesn't ALREADY have one. The waiting period isn't helping, or hurting, here. It has nothing to do with personal defense. He's equating sensible gun regulation (and opinions on whether it IS sensible can honestly, and in good faith, vary) with the banning of all firearms.

I also disagree that EVERY type of gun is required for defense. I dislike the argument that people NEED an AK-47 for home defense. Who the hell are they expecting? The Golden Horde of Ghenghis Khan? This doesn't mean I don't think people should have the right to own them anyway (maybe), but I just dislike his argument. We can make a case for AKs (or ARs, or whatever) but his logic of "YOU DON'T THINK ALL GUNS ARE APPROPRIATE FOR EVERY SITUATION I VOTE AGAINST YOU" is stupid.

--

But back to your initial point. Of the many gun owners I know, NONE of them is against all gun regulation. I'm not even sure that the guy you replied to is, really. That doesn't mean some folks aren't out there stockpiling ammunition against the imagined day when the aforementioned jack-booted thugs come and take away everyone's capitalism (hell, I read comments from these people every day all over the net) but I don't think these people are the problem. The problem is criminals who get guns, REGARDLESS of regulations. Show me a city with incredibly strict gun restrictions, and I'll show you a city where the organized crime elements have guns ANYWAY. And his point about police response times isn't an invalid one. I'm not saying regulations are bad, by nature (again, I'm in favor of registration, waiting periods, and even possibly restrictions on what kinds of firearms people can own), but at some point we cross a line where the regulations are doing nothing but hamstringing citizens at the expense of your aforementioned "organized crime". "Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt", and all that.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

If someone is being threatened, the waiting period can indeed be a matter of life or death.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

People have died due to waiting periods. Bonnie Elmasri was one. She had a falling out with her husband and wanted a gun because she feared he would do something. Under Wisconsin law, she had to wait 48 hours. Her husband killed her and her children the day before the waiting period expired.

We have instant background checks. Odds are, the type of people who get so infuriated they want to kill someone, already has a criminal history which would prohibit them from buying a gun or they would just find another way to kill the target.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The view that a few automatic rifles are going to be helpful if a modern Western state goes all Assad in Syria is bullshit. If the Western variety of the state turns into a totalitarian monster, a lot of stupid people are going to die very horribly and make the evil of the regime worse without any other effect. I realize that some people think that an attempt to play Afghanistan in the Midwest is actually viable, but the rich countries of the world aren't shitholes where the only law and order is the range of an assault rifle. If that blunt statement offends some wannabe rebels against The Man, so be it. Reality is not obligated to bend to our wishes, if we try to force that, we die horribly.

[caerbannogbunny.livejournal.com]

Actually, my favorite tale of modern resistance was the Chechens.

Admittedly, they were able to acquire RPG's reasonably well from Soviet and/or Russian stockpiles and/or troops that changed sides, but they seriously went to town on the Russians for quite a while.

Mostly with small arms.

For that matter, the Iraqi insurgency would probably be the first choice for many areas as emulatable resistors, mostly because many US veterans at this point are most familiar with their tactics. Some won't transfer over--suicide bombs, for example--but the rest is very highly accessible in a culture with access to high technology and various manufacturing skills.

In this case, rifles might be seen as the means to get access to other weapons (as in the Chechen example) or as a more elegant means in conjunction with IED production.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're full of it.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

In a discussion community like this, it's preferable to explain how.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Deep.

[caerbannogbunny.livejournal.com]

Ever watch chimpanzees? Or any primates for that matter?

Basically, groups are regulated by dominance and that can be through pure, mean, brute strength or through coalitions. And--what dominance means for individuals--is opportunity to make decisions. The more dominant, the more options. Typically, because there are risks to establishing dominance and primate memories tend to be long on such things, dominance is established once or so overtly, then maintained based on posture and memory until there's a real question about whether one has enough strength to dominate another.

What guns do in a group of otherwise social primates (like us) is essentially narrow the gap in strength between any two of them. It means also the cost of challenging dominance gets to be higher. This also means that coalitions tend to be easier to find because there's more primates with enough power to challenge even the strongest individual around.

So, if we focus on coalitions (social groups) whose values we would like to continue, we can more easily establish dominance over others that might want to take those opportunities away by making the potential cost to challengers very, very high. Coalitions including members with guns have an easier time of it. Coalitions with guns and values opposed to ours also have an easier time of asserting dominance over coalitions and/or individuals without them.

Which is why you have people really concerned about governments (coalitions with guns) that don't share their values and seek to assert dominance over them.

The solutions, of course, are either to have enough of a coalition to make dominance very costly, or to alter the values of the other coalition to match--or at least, not be antagonistic to--their own values. However, with the ongoing polarization of US political parties along social value lines, that's not likely to happen for enough of the people of the US to really tone down the fear.

So, yeah, good luck with that...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Chimpanzees have cultures dominated by contests for power whose end results include castration, dismemberment, and sometimes the loser being literally eaten by the winner. Orangutans have no social groups, their idea of sociality is Raep Taim. I am not joking about this, sadly enough. Gorillas, by comparison, are relatively nice. They care about each other and don't butcher each other at at any rate. There's no real comparison in this regard between apes and humans, and some degree where the comparison is insulting to apes. Chimps just rip each other to pieces, they don't create giant phalli with magic mushrooms and have a Mexican standoff with civilization as the hostage.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

The only gun trade we regulate is the legal gun trade. Criminal organizations are not getting their guns legally now, nor will they ever do so. The Latin Kings are not getting their AK's from WallMart. To conflate the use of guns by criminals with the right of a citizen to own and use a gun is a category error.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

So, none of the guns that end up in the hands of 'Latin Kings' are made by 'legitimate' businesses? This flood of guns in the hands of criminals, thats all from rouge states and criminal producers, right?

[foolsguinea.livejournal.com]

A little more of what I'm thinking and why:

I wasn't anti-gun. I had a favorite uncle who hunted.

I was for gun licensing and regulation. Sensible and moderate, I thought. On thinking about the issue, I came to believe that the best way to avoid an arms race between police, criminals, and law-abiding citizens was to ban types of weapons.

But what appears to be the entire population of rural America won't stand for that little thing, and they and their politics are making life more dangerous for the urban population, which is most of America.

So, why?

Do they just not get it?
When I was younger, I would have said, sure. Human stupidity is infinite. But I am now coming to believe that that's a cop-out. If that makes me more likely to believe conspiracy theories, or whatever this is (a social speculation, let's say), well, that's a risk I'm oddly willing to take. This overheated rhetoric about "gun grabbers" has gone on for twenty years; it must come from somewhere.

Are they trying to undermine gun control in the cities so gangsters kill us all?
Maybe. That's even arguably economically rational, in a competition-for-resources way. But that's kind of...abstract. People tend to get this exercised over something, this...spluttery, when they're hiding something they've actually done. When they feel guilty.

Or are they somehow benefiting from the gun trade?
Now I think I'm onto something. This would be a direct economic benefit. The more guns the gangsters need, and need constantly, the more chance there is that when times are tight you can sell off part of your gun collection to a gun dealer. Even if you're not getting laundered blood money directly, you're using that demand. And if you were trying to get the city folk to die in gang violence (the previous option) why wouldn't you do this?

It fits. It makes sense. Who's more economically desperate than farmers? Who has more of a gun collection?

Now, can tens of millions of rural families really be benefiting from a side trade with organized crime? The numbers don't add up. Or do they? What if it's also guns run to Latin America? And of course there have always been all the people who work in the legal gun & ammo manufacturing industry, who obviously directly benefit from gun violence. I'm just saying that the pool of people with an economic incentive in more gun violence is larger than we thought.

[foolsguinea.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not just saying that.

But an awful lot of people are trying to undermine urbanites' security for some reason, and I'm not sure it really is their own home security. I think it's money and racism, and that's a lot harder to beat than simple fear.

[foolsguinea.livejournal.com]

I would rather live in an America where the poor farmers are forcibly disarmed, and have to defend themselves with farm implements and big strong farm laborer muscles, than one where urban families live in fear of kid gangs with guns.

[il-mio-gufo.livejournal.com]

damn it, the way you worded that is sooO right!

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

Legalize Drugs and 'big' guns will disappear from the urban areas.

It's all the same trade and pipeline. Laws are not going to stop the flow of guns.

Seriously, if you want a real solution, ending prohibition will proved the simplest and quickest way to dry up the illegal gun trade.

[foolsguinea.livejournal.com]

I would add, open the borders and get all the human trafficking money away from the coyotes.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

I don't care about gun control either way. Both sides are just suffering from the same sort of delusions about efficacy.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

For instance, the left thinks gun control does something stop violence. It doesn't. All the statistical data and scientific analysis can't draw an meaningful correlations or links between the two. However, the right thinks that having guns makes them safer, when in fact all the statistical and scientific analysis shows the opposite to be the case. Of course, this is a simple application of common sense: where there are guns, there are more gun accidents, crimes of opportunity, and so forth.

The point is, gun policy is just a flailing useless CYA action to make people feel better about themselves. As with having guns. A flailing, useless psychological illusion that they make you safer. Everybody is out to lunch on guns.

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

I like limitations of firearms ownership and use. Allowing everyone and anyone to conceal-carry a handgun is probably constitutional, but it's not conscionable. For example the clinically depressed can and will use such weapons on the public as has been proven many times in the past. So I assume we agree there are certain parameters to firearm ownership, but where's the line? Well the limitations vary from state to state and from country to country. It's a restriction that requires consideration of the citizenry as to where their comfort level lies.

The second part is the insinuation that free and open gun laws are promoted and lobbied by those with the most to gain... er, profit. Well, this is probably true as well. It's an uncomfortable truth where the great myth is believed that the NRA is a citizen based organization, like a union is member based. Membership only legitimises such lobby groups but the fact is they are controlled by those who profit from their existence.

[il-mio-gufo.livejournal.com]

I don't think many really genuinely understand that when you live out in a rural part (i.e. out in the 'country'), you really should know how to shoot & you really should probably own at least one gun.....it's just safer. One Sheriff for an entire chunk of the country just cannot be in several places at once....just like Santa Claus can't either :x

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

If I ever move to a rural area I'll get a gun probably... so that my neighbors don't think I'm a noob.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

Anyone under 18 can not legally buy a handgun.

Your argument amounts to a false dilemma.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Fun fact: gang members have guns. Gang members die in disproportionate numbers. WHY NO GUNS WORK?

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

Some gang members live to shoot another day because they got the other guy first. Just sayin'.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Gun fans overwhelmingly have tons to say about protecting access to their lethal toys, but are woefully silent when it comes to helping the victims of gun violence.

No one is very excited about having to change a colostomy bag every few hours. And didn't it just do wonders for Gabby Giffords?

The gun manufacturers profit by flooding the market with weapons and we clean up the mess for the rest of our lives.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

Why do we speak of the victims of gun violence in terms of the manufacturers, and not in terms of the person wielding the gun? Instead, we advocate for leniency, understanding of their bad childhood, rehabilitating them. While those things have their place, why do we not say to those who are truly reformed (or on their way), "Here, you change the colostomy bag. You did this."

It isn't the firearm, it's the intent of the person holding it. But that's too hard to deal with.