This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This isn't actually an argument. If you hold "people asking to ban guns" as an intrinsic evil, then your solution is to ban every gun before they do. If your actual intrinsic evil is "banning guns" then trading a ban on large weapons for a ban on small weapons is at worst net-neutral and at best (as I argued) allows for the better fulfilment of the socially useful properties of guns.
Also, most categories of misuse are linked to specific formats of weapons. A crew served weapon is great in a civil war, but not so great for robbing a convenience store. It's much easier to commit suicide with a pistol than with an M-1 Abrahms.
An assault weapons is a better defense than a pistol against any assailant you can see coming in advance-- and banning pistols makes it much easier to notice and be wary of criminals in the first place. Meanwhile, against an assailant that gets the jump on you, a gun-- and especially a small gun-- is worse that useless. Trying to pull one out is all too likely to transform a robbery into a murder-- either because the assailant will notice your suspicious motion and shoot you, or because a smaller weapon is easier to take away from you. The deterrent property of having a big, obvious weapons would result in net better outcomes than using cowboy kung fu to quickfire your pistol straight through your pants.
In sum, banning small guns and legalizing big ones would both save lives AND provide a bigger deterrent against government overreach. It's the ideal compromise between 2A advocates and gun control crusaders. I'm not being facetious here, this is my actual position.
I didn't spell it out, but it should be obvious. If it is appropriate to ban a class of weapons because they are the weapons with which "[m]ost crimes and accidents happen", then a successful ban on that class will result in another class becoming the weapons with which most crimes and accidents happen and are therefore OK to ban. Thus such a principle leads to banning all weapons.
The second part is not empirically true. As for the rest, no weapon that you don't have with you is much good for defense, and walking around with an AR-15 all the time is simply inconvenient. And even if you have it, presumably slung, the difficulty of bringing it to bear means a pistol-armed (yeah, you banned them, but they didn't listen) or even knife-armed attacker can far more easily get the drop on you.
If the slippery slope principle worked on guns, then banning military-grade weaponry would have resulted in banning all guns. But it hasn't. Because anyone who isn't a rabid partisan understands that it makes sense to ban particularly harmful types of weapons while allowing particularly useful kinds of weapons to remain in their owner's hands. My argument isn't fundamentally about banning weapons-- it's about rethinking which harms and uses are statistically greater.
Are you saying, "you lack empirical evidence" or "I have empirical evidence to the contrary." In the latter case, I want to see it. To pre-register, videos of good samaritans with guns won't convince me of anything, but some sort of statistical analysis pointing to a lower aggregate death rates for robbery + rape + murder victims would convince me. An analysis that only considers people who avoid getting murdered by having a gun wouldn't; due to the base rates of robberies + rapes vs murders, I suspect the reduced likelyhood of getting murdered in a murder would be far outweighed by an increased likelyhood to get murdered in a robbery or rape.
Yes, that's part of what would overall reduce gun crimes. Sure, some criminals would still have pistols-- but far fewer, compared to now, because so much of the demand would be absorbed by other kinds of weapons. In a country that bans guns, if you're going to buy a guy anyway, it might as well be the best fit for the job, so black market suppliers have plenty of incentive to exist and offer the right kinds of weapons. In a country that only bans small, concealable weapons, most would-be robbers still have access to larger weapons and would go for those over the hassle of finding a black market and buying a perfect pistol. That would in turn shrink the size of the black market and make pistols even harder to acquire.
They're still working on it. Maryland banned semi-automatic AR-15s, for instance, and many other states (including New Jersey of course) keep banning classes of guns.
There is no empirical evidence that "a gun-- and especially a small gun-- is worse that useless" in a any particular self-defense situation.
Or, this simply isn't true; it's a gun-banner just-so story. Or, worse, they cut down the long guns so they're concealable enough, and now you've got would-be robbers with more lethal weapons.
To clarify, I'm defining "worse than useless" as "likely to increase your net chances of death on net." I'm aware that there are situations where brandishing a weapon would de-escalate the situation, but virtually all of those situations also apply to having a visible large weapon. Meanwhile, if you get in a stickup because the robber is under the impression that you're unarmed, trying to pull out a weapon is almost guaranteed to escalate, not de-escalate, the situation. Most probably not in your favor, given who starts with a weapon in their face
just-so stories are explanations; this is a prediction based on assuming rational economic behavior. That's not a perfect assumption, but if you want to attack it, you can attack it on its merits rather than by handwaving.
Anyways, robbers can already get concealable weapons that are plenty lethal. Meanwhile, you can't exactly conceal crew-serve artillery no matter how hard you try. I think it's a very safe prediction that concealability would go down, even if weapon lethality would go up, and also that concealability is a larger factor in death rate than weapon lethality. The only exception to that is people starting a revolution or civil war, which I admit is possible, but the whole point of the second amendment is to let people fuck around and find out if they really want to. Having a world full of concealable, low-lethality weapons is just the worst of all possible worlds-- poor security, and no chance of overthrowing a corrupt government.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link