I like the analogy of swimming pools. I don't _need_ a swimming pool, and having a pool by definition makes neighborhood children and visitors with children to my house less safe.
In fact, children under 15 are about 40 times more likely to die by swimming pool than by an accidental firearms discharge [0].
I still have a pool. There are reasonable laws about having auto-closing gates and a fenced-in yard. I don't see anyone clambering to tighten restrictions on assault swimming pools.
Likewise, semi-automatic, detachable-magazine-fed rifles are responsible for something like 2% of shootings. The only real place they have significance is in mass shootings. The only refute I have to, "but if we ban these rifles we won't have shootings" is that it would just happen through a different means. The Happy Land Fire killed 87 people, not a shot fired. Timothy McVeigh killed 189 people with fertilizer... and that was in 1995 -- under the "Assault Weapons Ban" of 1994.
I can't take a pool to the local cinema and kill everyone inside. It's an irrelevant comparison.
To be exposed to the risk of drowning in your pool I actually need to go to said pool. This is not different from exposing myself to any other risk of my own free will.
My free will has no bearing on if someone wants to bring a gun to a public place and murder me and everyone else around.
That's only a valid comparison to mass shootings, which are a tiny, tiny percentage of gun deaths.
By comparison, referenced in my other comments, if someone really wanted to kill everyone in a theater they could do it with a container of gasoline, or a pressure cooker. Newtown could have been accomplished with a sword, given the size difference of the attacker to the victims.
Anyone who wants to kill you can, with any number of objects readily accessible. This is only evident to some people when they think of an object like an AR-15 because they don't think about all the other ways they could be killed.
Lethality of all of those other methods is significantly below that of a semi-automatic rifle.
The fact more people are killed outside of mass shootings by guns is irrelevant. Mass shootings are a good enough reason to get rid of them, it's a risk people shouldn't have to live with.
> Lethality of all of those other methods is significantly below that of a semi-automatic rifle.
That's just not true. In Somalia, U.S. Army soldiers actually complained about how the AR-15 round (5.56 NATO) wouldn't take down enemy combatants in a single shot.
Compare that to, say, the bombs used in the Boston Marathon. It's a night and day difference. If you're trapped in a crowded nightclub that's on fire, your odds of survival are abysmal.
People survive serious gunshots every day with proper medical attention. One of the big issues in the Orlando shooting was the 3 hour wait before any of the victims got medical attention.
To be fair, that's either because the projectile wasn't capable of fragmentation--m193--due to velocity or other reasons and the lethality of the weapon depends on fragmentation.
> In fact, children under 15 are about 40 times more likely to die by swimming pool than by an accidental firearms discharge [0].
You know, it's not really the accidental discharges I'm worried about. It's the mass shootings.
Also, you appear to be misquoting that article. The 40x number is scaled by the number of pools/firearms, and so is saying "an individual firearm is less likely to kill a child than an individual pool" (although firearms are vastly more common than pools).
And, finally, that article uses "86 children killed by accidental firearm discharge in 2000" as its primary metric. The top google hit [0] for "How many children are killed each year by guns?" gives a value of 1,500.
It looks like the 1,500 number includes all deaths of children under 18. However -- without going into that particular dataset -- these numbers are normally inflated by gang violence and include 17-year-olds killed in shootouts with police. I'm certainly interested in more data, but it's hard to find summary datasets that aren't slanted.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. But I think those 17-and-unders are still children, and I'd prefer them alive and with a chance to regret their gang-banging ways.
The Happy Land Fire killed 87 people, not a shot fired. Timothy McVeigh killed 189 people with fertilizer... and that was in 1995 -- under the "Assault Weapons Ban" of 1994.
I don't understand arguments like this at all. Is the argument that "there are other bad things so we shouldn't tackle this thing"?
It's the substitution problem. The argument (seems to be), "If we ban semi-automatic rifles, that person who wants to kill all those people won't be able to harm anyone."
History has shown us this simply isn't the case. People who want to kill people will kill people with whatever means available. Happy Land, Oklahoma City, etc are just examples of this. I didn't see a huge push to ban pressure cookers after the Boston bombings.
Keep the guns available! I'd rather have someone come after me with a gun than with a pressure cooker or fertilizer bomb:
- The gun can be a symbol conveying intent. Possibly one can negotiate or leave the premises in time. In contrast a pressure cooker in a corner does not immediately tell me that someone is out to get me. That is, I can be surprised more easily by an exploding pressure cooker or fertilizer bomb. At least with the gun I know what's going on.
- Fertilizer, gasoline and pressure cooker bombs do not tend to produce predictable wounds and often produce fatalities. I'm more likely to survive if an angry man shoots me than if he blows me up with a pressure cooker. Also the trauma surgeons have a better chance of stitching me up. Finally I'd rather live the rest of my life with a bullet in my butt than a pressure cooker lid up my ass.
" I didn't see a huge push to ban pressure cookers after the Boston bombings."
You may not have noticed it but they were effectively banned from sale by all retail stores. I was tasked with buying a new pressure cooker not 3 weeks after the Boston bombings and I simply could not find one locally. After visiting all the local retail stores, I finally gave up and ordered one on Amazon.
> Is the argument that "there are other bad things so we shouldn't tackle this thing"?
I believe its actually "people can be killed without assault weapons, therefore restricting assault weapons has no benefit in protecting people from being killed". Which, ultimately, has the same basic kind of error in reasoning as "there are other bad things so we shouldn't tackle this thing", but its not precisely the same argument.
Right, they couple that with "…and it's also a constitutional right that our gov't believed—at the time—was important enough to put a blanket ban on themselves writing laws in the future to limit it."
Other than that, completely like "banning bad things".
As someone else pointed out about this post elsewhere, there are very few things that any of us actually "need" -- do you need running water and indoor plumbing? Or, to bring it a little closer to home, does anyone really need an outdoor uncovered pool, or a drink of alcohol?
But anyway, before this gets derailed, the point of the post was really about laying out the rationales for the AR-15, while openly acknowledging that many people will still find them insufficient. What I really wanted to do, though, is move the discussion away from the "rednecks with small penises" rut that it seems to be stuck in. The "need" phrasing was the framing I chose in order to hook into the "nobody needs an assault rifle" phrase that's repeated over and over again.
At any rate, again, I acknowledged up front that I wouldn't be able to convince everybody, or even most people, and that I was ok with that as long as people on the other side of the "assault weapon" debate could gain some new information about these firearms and their appeal to non-crazy, non-penis-size-compensating, non-military-fetishist normal people.
Thank you for writing this article. On balance, I disagree with the justification but it's so much more clear and thoughtful than the popular discussion about gun rights from either end of the political spectrum.
Hooking into the "nobody needs an assault rifle" refrain is important, in part because it is evaluated differently by people on each side of the issue. Because powerful weapons can actively project harm from one person to another, they are in a different category from other opt-in dangerous things like an outdoor uncovered pool and drinking alcohol.
Driving a car is frequently cited in these debates as one of those "you don't need it, but it is incredibly dangerous and causes huge numbers of deaths" activities, but I still think that gun ownership is a few steps higher on the risk-vs-utility scale, and therefore should be treated differently - there needs to be a dedicated debate that isn't sidelined by analogies to other risky activities. Those analogies complicate more than they clarify.
I don't think anyone disputes that there are many things that we do that we don't need to do. These are luxuries and desires and many are allowed and legalised and many are not.
However not all luxuries are created equal.
If indulging in your luxury creates circumstances where others are now at more risk then I don't think that is OK anymore.
Having deadly weapons broadly available definitely increases homicide and mass shootings, the evidence is irrefutable.
My point and many others is that luxuries are not rights, they are not things you need and as such should not be protected beyond general freedoms. However there is a cap on freedom and that is when it infringes on the freedoms or rights of others. In this case the right to be safe and the freedom to live life without fear of these sorts of horrible things happening.
> Having deadly weapons broadly available definitely increases homicide and mass shootings, the evidence is irrefutable.
Really? As I understand it, gun ownership has increased significantly over the last two decades, and homicide and mass shootings have gone down over that same time period.
It sounds like you think it's "obvious" that availability of firearms drives people dying from firearms, but the studies I've seen don't indicate a link.
Kind of like how availability of porn doesn't drive incidences of rape, even though intuitively, a person might expect that it should.
You're looking at the wrong statistic - the number of guns Americans own has increased significantly, but today only about 32% of American households have guns present compared to close to 50% in the late 1970s[0]. The same poll found 22% of individuals owned one or more guns in 2015 compared to 31% in 1985.
So you're saying that "people who want guns" have far more guns than they used to, and yet, gun crime has decreased?!?
That's not exactly a strong argument for increased gun control.
(FWIW The statistic that is useful isn't "gun ownership" across all cultures in the US, it's within specific sub-populations. There are huge discrepancies among violent crime across different sub-populations in the US, and without breaking them out, violent crime statistics make little sense, either individually or over time.)
Slice and dice how you like. Your implication that "more guns" == "less crime" is, at best, unproven, and your citation of incorrect trends doesn't change that. Conversely, the rest of the large, highly industrialized, developed nations with liberal democracies have tight gun control laws and homicide rates a fraction of the US's.
Also, I have no idea what your "porn is to rape as guns are to murder" comparison attempts to illustrate. I don't know how to point porn at someone and..well, that's as far as that needs to go. As syllogisms go, that's pretty damned broken.
> It's beyond conclusive that broad availability of firearms if not the cause is definitely highly correlated.
Based on my time hanging out at Slater Star Codex, the amount of shooting deaths varies in the US largely based on culture. If you take a country like The Netherlands and find the equivalent culture in the US, violent crime rates are basically identical—despite the fact that the US has far more guns per capita (within their respective, equivalent cultures).
Frankly, talking about the "US" as if it was culturally homogenous is so misleading that it's borderline unethical. Once you tease apart the statistics, guns don't stand out as a problem for certain cultures (again, AFAICT based on discussions with other people I trust).
Whether anyone "wants" or "needs" an AR-15 or any other type of firearm, the rest of us need to know that anyone around us with such a weapon has some basic competence in using it and is responsible enough to do so. I had to pass a written and and practical test and I have to show financial responsibility to operate a car. If you can do that with your AR-15 then I won't object to your having it.
I suspect you are a careful, conscientious, and responsible gun owner and would have no problem demonstrating this, but there are a lot of people who have guns who are neither careful, conscientious, nor responsible. I hope you won't mind having to demonstrate your competence so that society can stop the other people, the irresponsible ones.
And of course, you might say that even if we had such requirement to demonstrate responsibility, the irresponsible people would circumvent the system and have guns anyway. I'm sure that's true for a few, but it would remove many guns from irresponsible hands and it would give law enforcement a reason to arrest the others and get them off the streets.
I read an article earlier that pointed out that in police shootings in NYC that they hit their target less than 50% of the time. Unfortunately, even light training isn't enough. And short of sending everyone into the military for active duty in combat, most people won't be thoroughly literate.
It's about personal freedom and liberty... I'm in favor of them, even if I choose not to own one.
Yeah, I get his point that it's the best general purpose rifle out there. If you need to own a gun, it's probably one of your better options.
But I still don't get why you would need a gun. For the most part, we don't need to hunt for our food. We don't need to shoot targets either. Home defense, maybe, but there are other ways to be secure at home without weapons.
I do agree with his point that if you're going to argue against guns, you shouldn't pick and choose categories that are "ok". It's either we ban guns or we continue to live with them in our society.
Do you feel we should also disarm the police? In my mind there's no reason the police should have a firearm that doesn't apply to someone being attacked in their own home.
In a free society, the burden of justification should be placed squarely on those that would restrict your rights. You should not have to explain why you need something, the person telling you "no" should have to defend their position.
He mentions specifically a hunting scenario and the need to use a powerful weapon and also the ability to quickly issue a follow-up shot if the animal is only wounded, which is a humane action.
Just clarifying the point of the author, please don't project his views on me and mob me.
He didn't need to go hunting any more than I needed to go to the cinema last night.
The difference being that my going to the cinema doesn't impact the inherent safety of our society.
He wanted to go hunting. He wanted to use a powerful weapon while doing so.
I understand the desire to want things. I too think it would be cool to have a powerful weapon.
However I am also rational enough to understand that laws can't exist that grant me a powerful weapon and deny it to 100% of nutjobs.
So given the option between having a cool gun and living in a world where I may get shot to death in a cinema or club vs just not having the gun.. I choose to not have the gun and I think any truly rational person would come to the same conclusion.
Can you back up that figure please? I truly doubt 99.9% of hunters worldwide (you didn't qualify it) or even in the west hunt for 'luxury.' How long have you spent in a rural locale?
People "need" cars because much of western civil infrastructure is built around the assumption that cars or something similar will always be around.
I think you could argue that without cars everyone would be better off. Less pollution, people would save money on gas, more public real estate for parks, etc. not to mention less people dying from accidents.
Public transit, not to mention many jobs should be able to remote work. Before cars were very common it was also common to build communities around smaller shops that were closer.
There are a lot of people in and around NYC that would argue differently.
What about his needs to be safe (through the protection of his own guns)?
Or my need to be safe (through the protection of people who carries)? If someone walk into a theater and starts shooting, though I don't carry, I prefer that the guy next to me is the type to carry, and that at least half the theater carry too, so they can all drop that killer with 100 bullets at the door.
Only that he wants one.
Which is perfectly fine. However at the end of the day I don't think peoples wants should trump my -need- to be safe.