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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.
It seems to me that there are many ways we could 'reformat' our conception of gun ownership in a way that would preserve the ability of 'the people' to bear arms while making them less available for use in crime or mass shootings (or suicide), but I find it incredibly unlikely that the current American gun culture would find it at all tolerable.
The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.
The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.
Mass shootings are, frankly, more analogous to terrorism than ordinary crime. Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder. Nevertheless, carrying a gun because you might get jumped by terrorists is hard to justify.
Correct. Since the entire history of gun control regulation has shown that advocates of gun control will never admit to a policy failure. Any violence that occurs is ultimately because there was insufficient gun control in place, thus no failure is actually a failure of gun control policy, it is instead a failure to go far enough.
California has some of the most stringent gun laws in the country and also one of the higher murder rates. To say nothing of fucking CHICAGO. You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms, and you also can't find many places with a higher murder rate. They've tried heavy gun control and it didn't help. So can they admit that gun control has failed in this instance?
If there are no circumstances under which they'll admit the policy is failing, then in what sense can they be said to be acting in good faith?
Every single compromise gun rights advocates have made previously has been met with demands for further compromise, and nothing is offered in return.
Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.
The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...
You see the subtle error in reasoning here?
And because those instances are given outsized attention by the national media, who has every intention of maximizing the fear felt by their viewership.
But that's a fundamentally different problem. If it weren't terrorism it'd be something else.
Thought experiment: Set aside the 2nd and 4th amendments for a second. Suppose the United Stated banned civilian firearms, all of them. No manufacture, no sales, no ownership. All citizens must surrender their guns to the authorities. Anyone who has ever posted a gun on social media gets their house searched for contraband. Children are taught in school about the importance of turning in their parents if there are guns in the home. What does the murder rate look like in Chicago a year later? How about 10 years later? Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?
Ah, so we'd further entrench the meme of Stop Snitchin'.
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Well Chicago schools aren't exceptional for their ability to educate children... https://www.foxnews.com/media/chicago-democrat-sounds-alarm-55-schools-report-no-proficiency-math-reading-serious
Most of the murder in Chicago is drug or gang related, I expect they'd switch to knives, clubs, acid or machetes. Murder rate would be lower of course and I very much hope that adopting East German style intensive policing means that gangs are wiped out as well. But it's not neccessary to suppress everybody if you're just trying to suppress the problem people.
The root cause is the gangs and the drugs. Just wipe them out, not all gun-owners everywhere.
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If we're going to demolish civil rights, why don't we start by reinstating stop-and-frisk, and see what effect that has on the crime rates? Maybe actually lock up felons in possession?
I'm not willing to countenance a massive reduction in rights when lesser reductions are taken off the table purely in the interest of racial balancing.
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I mean,
See my other post about conservatively estimating that we could expect around 50,000 LEO casualties in trying to enforce a gun confiscation program.
PLUS the fact that guns can be 3D printed now, so it's not sufficient to confiscate those already in circulation.
I might concede this if you concede we would probably see an increase in vehicular-based massacres
Since nothing in your hypothetical has actually dealt with the issues that make mass shooters want to kill people, we have full reason to expect many of them will merely shift methods.
And if we accept the idea, for arguments sake, that we could toss out our civil rights in the name of achieving lower crime, then maybe the example of El Salvador represents a much MORE EFFECTIVE path we could follow to achieve a similar impact on violent crime.
So perhaps it looks really suspicious to zero in on the Second Amendment and impacting the rights of huge swaths of peaceful citizens in your zeal to bring down the crime rate, when there are readily conceivable alternatives that are less intrusive?
Thought experiment: let's just ignore the fourth and fifth amendment and massively incarcerate the most violent members of Chicago's population. What does the murder rate in Chicago look like a year later?
I flat-out do not believe this. At most you would get about 10 LEO deaths on the first day, and then the military gets called in to put down the insurrection. Rules of engagement are always optional. "There is absolutely no difficulty in using any level of the American security forces against the barbarians."
Can you 3D print gunpowder?
I do concede that. The standard economic result is that when one good is banned, some of that demand goes towards a substitute good, but not enough to completely make up for it. I would expect the new rate of vehicular massacres to be somewhere between the current rate, and the current rate + the gun massacre rate. I also suspect that "massacre-prevention software" would soon become standard on cars if this became an issue.
Oh, I am absolutely not advocating for large-scale gun confiscation. I am simply pointing out that it is both possible to do, and that it would achieve it's primary goal of reducing gun murders (and murders in general).
I think @gattsuru or Beej once pointed to a furry who had figured out how to make guncotton at home all electrochemically and such, so...sort of, yes.
Cathode_G! (cw: sfw as explosives can be on direct link, but the rest of his feed does have furry porn) Absolutely fascinating guy.
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It isn't actually that hard. It's simple drawn brass. https://www.petersoncartridge.com/technical-information/drawing-brass/
In addition, you can actually just turn a cartridge on a lathe from brass bar stock. Or mild steel. Both will work and while it's not as efficient as drawing brass, all you need is a lathe.
And each cartridge can be reloaded multiple times with equipment that is basically ubiquitous in the US.
I guess you'd be incentivizing revolvers though.
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True Velocity has apparently nailed it down for .308 and .50 BMG. The recent-ish US Army trials that produced the XM5 and XM250 almost had the 6.5x51mm be adopted in a polymer case.
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Cathode_G does also have a non-corrosive primer (as above, link has no nudity, but be prepared for furry porn elsewhere on his feed) recipe, though most disposable guns in a highly restricted regime will probably just stick with the corrosive but dead-simple matchhead.
Primers are also kinda like the lye in cathode_g's guncotton formula; they have too many industrial and home uses to effectively ban. Even China still has them in common use for construction. If you don't want to bother with chemistry or corrosive primers, there's literally millions of these things out there.
Brass cases are obnoxious, but I'm not convinced they're the right decision rather than the available one. SuckBoyTony's done some interesting things with manufacturing polymer cases, and there's a lot of design space ignoring cases entirely that's largely unexplored because it makes so little sense these days. If you're custom-casting and electroplating bullets in mass, you could start experimenting with wacky designs like the Daisy V/L, Activ-style shells, or gyrojets, or truly caseless ammo... but unless you have absolutely no access to spent brass, it's mostly just coming up with new ways and reasons for the ATF to shoot your dog.
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There is a 3d2a guy working on electronically primed polymer cased ammo. Very much a hobby project on a shoestring budget. One of the NGSW program entries used polymer ammo but the army went with Sig (to go with their Sig pistols and Sig LPVOs), you can buy polycased 308 ammo right now. The other area people go to for impractical is barrel rifling which at this point is mostly solved with electrochemical machining, at least for the lengths of things like the FGC which are designed around zero access to firearms parts regimes.
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How does the military respond to disparate Americans shooting at LEOs knocking on their own doors?
Again a question of scale. How precisely do you expect the U.S. to successfully occupy itself?
Good. Then we can agree that gun deaths would decrease under a heavy gun control regime (although likely a massive spike given the aforementioned issue with enforcement) but there's as always the question of whether that simply results in further encroachments by the government once it has taken this step.
Simply put, I don't want to live under the rule of a government that doesn't trust its' citizens enough to allow them firearms.
If you shoot at the cops, they know your address. After the first week all patrols will be accompanied by Predator drone air support. You'll have two Hellfire missiles crashing through your roof in minutes after opening fire. If they can't get officers to shoot at Americans in person, they can sure as hell get some loyal private to sit at the drone terminal in Alexandria.
So "shoot while they're knocking at someone else's door" is the equilibrium strategy, then? At least "one of us got shot before we killed the shooter" can be spun as a heroic story; "one of us got shot before some kid at a desk bombed innocent people" (not to mention the crime scene where evidence of the bullet trajectory used to be) is the sort of thing that makes you look for a better job than "sucker who draws fire on the civilian-bombers' behalf".
And that's assuming no other collateral damage, which is ... a stretch. The 1985 MOVE bombing was horrifying enough to show up in the news last year, even though all the "this is unconstitutional", "pay millions of dollars to the victims", etc. decisions were made decades ago. This does not scale up.
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And when friendly fire or kid bits end up on national news?
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You know this is comical. Its like when Biden says something like, "what are you going to do about nukes." You can't fricken drone strike a single family house (let alone a single person's apartment) without causing mass collateral damage. Plus, the fact is you can't just siege Joe in 1F until he shits himself to death when there are 10000 Joes, nor can you snipe him when he leaves 1F without eviscerating all the other civil rights that exist. You'd be treating suspected gun owners worse than indicted criminals skipping bond.
All, in the end, probably for little benefit. Ask thyself, would the average gun control advocate accept this compromise (assuming it was ironclad): You get 10 years of doing your thing. But, if in year 10 the homicide rate of America is greater than any of Germany, England, or France all gun control laws enacted since 1900 are repealed permanently. Would they accept? Of course not. Nor for 20 or 25 years. Probably not even 50. This would all be rational, even though most of them would be dead, or nearly so at T=50. Because they would lose that bet. I mean, unless they engaged in a massive genocide program and somehow managed to gerrymander that to not be included in homicide.
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Gun control in Chicago has failed. Specifically, it's failed to control access to guns, which are regularly used to commit crimes. The question of whether or not reduced access to firearms would have an impact on crime rates is not answered by Chicago. And, of course, there is the evergreen fact that one of the most crime-ridden part of the country is the Deep South, which has permissive gun laws and a hoplophilic culture. With that in mind it's hard to take idea that the solution is yet more guns seriously.
No. You're going to have to spell it out for me. The number of times of a tragic misunderstanding, accident, or interpersonal dispute involving a fire extinguisher led to severe injury or death is functionally zero. If your fire extinguisher had a greater chance of exploding and killing you than it did of stopping a fire, keeping one in your kitchen would be dumb.
And to be frank, for most people a home fire extinguisher is a prop.
I agree. The actual underlying problem is culture - most Americans have a weirdly positive view of violence, of which the aforementioned hoplophilia is merely one manifestation. That doesn't change the fact that weapons are a major facilitator for homicide (and other crimes and suicide), else people wouldn't bother. Not to mention, mass reeducation is likely to be both unpopular and of dubious effectiveness, so the policy remedies in that direction are pretty weak.
There is some dispute about that re the Capitol Putsch, which would fall under the most literal definition of 'interpersonal dispute'.
Are you referring to the completely made up and fake story about Brian Sicknick being hit with a fire extinguisher? Well, if your point is that people can lie to provide fictional evidence in favor of their policy goals, you certainly have made it.
That's why I said there was "some dispute" regarding the matter.
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The South isn't notably more hoplophilic than e.g. Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, or Alaska. Those all have loose gun laws.
Indeed, the South has LOWER gun ownership rates than those named states.
And yet those states are significantly less violent than the national average, let alone the South.
So if you're trying to claim a correlation I would bet you can find a stronger one than that.
This is kind of the glaring issue in the U.S., where homicide rates simply do not follow from gun ownership rates on a state-by-state basis. And violence is, of course, concentrated in cities. So in practice, gun control laws punish suburbs and rural areas for urbanites' bad behavior.
Quite unfair, no?
The point is that because an event is rare that doesn't mean that a precaution against it is unjustified.
I suspect that house fires are actually rarer than most violent crime these days. The rate of deaths due to fire is certainly on the decline
And yet, the impact of a fire, if it happens, is massive enough that the risk probably shouldn't be ignored. Clipping the tail risk is a good idea.
You wouldn't dismiss somebody as a paranoid wacko for keeping fire-suppression tools around should the need arise, even if the odds are infinitesimal.
But it is seemingly easy to say that a guy who keeps a gun around is being paranoid, without even grappling with the actual risk imposed if you do happen to be victimized by a criminal.
So mitigating the risks of harm due to fire = keeping a fire extinguisher around.
Mitigating the risk of harm due to crime = ?
Thinking stochastically, there are steps you can take to minimize the risk of crime/fire happening, but given how much damage can be done, and given the fact that you can never get the risk down to zero, what steps is it reasonable to take?
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This is ridiculous. One cannot prove anything with one or two data points. To take just one example, here is some tentative evidence that permitting decreases homicides, and RTC laws have the opposite effect. I'm obviously not saying that just because there's a study here you have to agree with me, but at least engage with the literature rather than saying 'look at Chicago' and calling it a day.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29785569/
Fire extinguishers do not impose wider social costs.
Different thing, but you seem to be framing this as a fault of the media but surely if there is blame to be assigned here it has to go to the consumer, given that the media is surely just satisfying the demand for such news which we all demonstrate by consuming it as much as we do.
Chicago is such a useful example of the people who claim to want to solve the nations' problems absolutely failing to achieve any of their stated goals, though!
Its like, you can't solve violence in your own city, and attempt to externalize the blame for this fact, and then claim to be in a better position to solve violence on an national level than the people who live in the less violent areas! Chicago is itself a refutation of the efficacy of it's own policies.
I'm not certain what data you would, in particular, find convincing, but consider that the major source of firearms DEATHS in the U.S. is suicide. If you want to save lives, THAT is where you need to start.
And there are multiple countries that have strict gun laws and much higher suicide rates. Japan and South Korea as glaring examples here.
This suggests that, again, guns are not the driving or decisive factor here, and it would probably be better to investigate root causes rather than going after firearms directly.
Would you support a ban on matches, lighter fluid, and fireworks, or other implements that can be used for arson? There's definitely a wider social cost there.
My point is that the extinguisher is there to defend against a low-probability but high impact event. You don't have a fire extinguisher because you genuinely think it's likely that you will have to put out a fire, but if a fire does break out it can burn down your entire house and/or kill people. So the precaution is fully warranted.
Likewise, you don't carry a gun, in most instances, because you think it's likely you'll ever be accosted by a violent criminal or mob... but if violence does break out it can destroy your belongings and/or kill people. So the precaution is fully warranted simply because of the fact that when violence does break out it can have outsized impact.
There's little evidence that a person who is legally carrying a firearm on their person imposes a 'wider social cost' in this respect, incidentally
That wasn't my comment.
No isn't because one data point cannot prove that. For all we know, Chicago may well have even more violence than it does already if gun control was relaxed. It may not of course, but simply pointing to one city proves nothing. Numbers are your friend.
Also, I will reiterate that it's very difficult for cities to control guns on their own, national or at least state level action is much more effective.
I agree that gun suicides are very important to tackle! That why I support ERPOs and waiting periods which have been shown to effectively prevent suicides.
Again, this proves nothing.
Are they mutually exclusive? Governments aren't limited to one policy response per issue.
Probably not because the social cost of the arson facilitated by those items probably doesn't outweigh the value we get from their benign applications.
Well they do, in part a) firearms are not tied to a person and more firearms in general circulation is bad for public safety, and more importantly b) even if they were SDGUs aren't that great compared to the average, and in consequence the expected utility for even a legal owner is negative given the facilitation of an easier suicide, accidents etc.
I'd like to see you apply this calculation to firearms.
Given that the uses for hunting, sport/recreation, and the occasional self-defense are necessarily far greater than the uses for criminal activity.
There are approximately 15 licensed million hunters in the U.S.
10 million who do sport shooting (these numbers probably overlap).
So on the one hand we've got literal millions who use guns for 'benign' applications (assuming you don't have some serious objection to hunting).
On the other other, around 50,000 deaths/year which involve firearms in some way.
So what would you estimate the 'social cost' of those 15 or so million people who use firearms without harming anyone being unable to hunt is?
This is excluding DGUs, now.
Not clear to me why we think it absurd to ban matches (50,000 burns require hospitalization every year, 4,500 burn deaths per year) just because it makes it harder for people to light candles, but civilian-owned guns are somehow inherently dangerous to even own.
This seems obviously confounded by factors that contribute to suicide and accidents independently of gun ownership.
So I find it doubtful that for the median gun owner it turns into a net negative, even if we see on the lower end of the bell curve that accidents and suicide are an actual risk.
In the same way that owning a pool makes it WAY more likely you or a loved one will die of drowning, and yet there are fairly easy precautions one can take to mitigate those chances (learn to swim, learn CPR, fence in the pool, provide life vests) to almost zero.
Hard to say of course, but bear in mind none of the potential restrictions mooted by any mainstream figures in the U.S. would seriously damage hunting or shooting for sport in the U.S. After all we still have both of those in Britain.
So I find it doubtful that for the median gun owner it turns into a net negative, even if we see on the lower end of the bell curve that accidents and suicide are an actual risk.
In the same way that owning a pool makes it WAY more likely you or a loved one will die of drowning, and yet there are fairly easy precautions one can take to mitigate those chances (learn to swim, learn CPR, fence in the pool, provide life vests) to almost zero.
We make policy for aggregates, not individuals. Whether for some people owning a gun might be a net positive is irrelevant, society-wide they seem to do more harm than good which is the relevant point.
Can you tell me what you think shooting for sport looks like?
Because substantially all of the restrictions proposed would impact it.
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You also still have mass shootings in Britain even with the limited type of firearms you can legally acquire there (.22s are still plenty fatal if you put enough of them into the target; that's fundamentally what buckshot is), to say nothing of more general mass casualty events typically involving trucks. Of course, you'll never fully ban shotguns, because you have enough politicians and backers that have ludicrously-expensive H&H products to get away with that- I don't believe that this is "making policy for aggregates, not individuals".
In fact, Britain appears to be so incredibly violent that the nation takes placing a bunch of restrictions on kitchen knives seriously as well and has significant numbers of soldiers and heavily-armed paramilitary on patrol (more liberal European countries have this as well, of course). Maybe it's a good thing the gun law in that nation in particular is largely "no".
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Dont forget to add in the deaths from pools. Or seed oils.
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