> It's time we start legislating based on empirical evidence instead of lofty ideals.
I would take anti-gun people more seriously if they actually paid attention to what this entails. For one, anti-gun enthusiast would stop going on about "assault rifles", because only around 200 people a year in the US are killed by rifle homicides. It's totally negligible. Less frequent than blunt instrument homicides. Yet, that's exactly what anti-gun people focus on.
Sometimes you have to eat an elephant one bite at a time. If guns weren't such a charged issue then more of us would advocate to directly outlaw private gun ownership. Guns add little value to people's lives and are likely to amplify poor decisions into death and serious injury.
This is a facially absurd claim to make based on the extremely motivated behavior of tens of millions of Americans.
> are likely to amplify poor decisions into death and serious injury
For a very questionable definition of "likely". As someone who actually performs explicit risk calculations, I am vastly more worried about hundreds of other risk sources to which I have daily exposure.
People should pursue risk mitigation strategies which are efficient at the margins, if at all.
I would capture marginal utility by making life more risky and less fearful, so I'm certainly not going to accept the piss-poor risk reduction returns of going after assault rifles.
Do some research on who is actually dying, who is killing, and with what weapons. I think no honest and well-adjusted person who does that can agree with popular gun control initiatives.
Spoken like someone who lives in a city where you can't use a gun. There is a reason why guns laws are unpopular in rural areas: guns are very useful in rural areas. There is no way to safely shoot a gun in a urban area (except a few gun ranges), so any possible use is dwarfed by the danger.
For a more concrete example. My father in law lives in Michigan. His house is seated next to 40 acres of forest. There are often coyotes and other wild animals that will approach his house when they're hungry. If you're unaware, coyotes will hunt, stalk, and kill cats, dogs, and small children.
To protect my children (3-5 years old) and his dogs, he shoots them.
In my beautiful 3rd world country (yeah we remained non-aligned during the cold war), Tigers and Leopards have a tendency to come near human settlements and attack domesticated animals.
Over here, killing animals (apart from chicken, fish, duck etc, which people regularly eat) is illegal. That means your can't kill snakes, deers, wild pigs, crocodiles and you certainly cannot kill Tiger, Leopards etc (because they're kind of endangered...).
If you do and they find out, you're going to jail. It doesn't matter whether the aforementioned wild animals killed your animals or humans.
So what do you do if presence of wild animals have been detected? You tell the authorities; they'll set traps, capture the animal, and release it to the forests.
By the way, recently, there was an appeal to the government to declare wild boar as pests, so that it can be killed because wild boars destroy crops and stuff. Government declined, because if the boars are killed, the big cats would starve.
This might all seem strange, but over here tiger/lion/leopard population was dwindling in the last century. But their population is now at a healthy level.
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About the gun situation here: nobody really has guns. Except very few maybe. There's plenty of crimes, but those don't involve a gun. Guns definitely would not be a solution to minimize the crime situation here.
Over here coyotes are not endangered, and deer have an overpopulation problems such that without hunters they will eat all their food by the middle of winter and then starve to death.
Snakes protected though, as are wolves. There is a problem with people killing them anyway. They are not the major animals rural people target - because they are endangered there are not many.
> You tell the authorities; they'll set traps, capture the animal, and release it to the forests.
This is something that they used to do over here. Then we discovered that when you release wild animals far from home they don't know their way around, and so they have trouble finding enough to eat, where to drink, a place to live. They are thus not in great physical shape when they encounter whatever lived there already and so are easy kill. Predators are either lone or pack animals - either way a stranger is something to kill. As such releasing a trapped animal is cruel. Unless you find a place where there is nothing else of the type, but even then we have to ask about if they have the correct genes, turns out animals of the same species get natural selection for DNA that helps in their location.
Professional hunters can cull over populated animals, and for deer that meat can be sold or donated to shelters. Still not a compelling reason to keep saturating the country with guns, IMO.
Quite a narrow case, and it still requires careful attention in order to shoot the animals. Perhaps there are more practical alternatives with fewer externalities like fences, traps, scents, motion detecting lights, noise deterants, etc.
None of your suggestions work, animals are smart enough to figure them out in time. They work for a month at best.
Traps are the best bet of your list and are a lot harder to use. And then you still need to kill the animal, release is cruel to the animal and harmful to whatever is naturally where you release it
Tiered gun ownership. You can own revolvers, non-semi automatic rifles at the base tier. You also need to file a reason for gun ownership and accept liability for misuse of your firearms. Your teenage kid kills himself with your revolver, you're on the hook for manslaughter.
Uvalde police confronted the shooter outside but feared being outgunned by the AR-15 : they eventually let him in and took an hour before entering the classroom just for that reason.
So yes, it did make a difference (and also shows that "let's arm teachers" is a ridiculous solution)
I am not convinced actually. The shooter was in the classroom for an hour with ammunition. If assault weapons weren't available, he'd have bought multiple revolvers. Hell, I'd argue that the gun related deaths in 1920's were much higher with revolvers than today with assault weapons.
Assault rifles account for only 3% [1] of total gun related deaths. But it is what anti-gun folks focus on as a scape goat. Foolish, emotional, knee-jerk thinking because it is a "Big scary looking weapon". We all lose because the focus is on something mostly ineffective. Perhaps, we can focus our energy on other aspects than "Big scary" weapons.
Have you taken a look at CA AR-15/long-gun laws? It is the most useless regulations one can conceive (finger guard, 10 round magazine, breaking-gun to reload). All it takes is 2 mins to reverse the CA-compliant changes. The lawmakers are fooling us with ineffective policies that don't do anything to prevent these shootings.
Perhaps we can argue about number of children killed in this incident, but the sample size is 1 and standard deviation is infinite.
The shooter would not have been barricaded in the room for so long if he wasn't able to spray high-velocity rounds at the police. You know those penetrate body armor without ceramic plates and police do not wear ceramic plates.
Revolver rounds would not penetrate, and a carbine would allow him to be flanked much more easily.
EDIT: laws keep honest people in line, but they also give us the ability to punish the dishonest.
Maybe we have a common ground: Police going “Jee man, dude’s got a big scary weapon” and affecting the hopes of conjuring any bit of courage left in them to bust in and eliminate the threat.
> For one, anti-gun enthusiast would stop going on about "assault rifles", because only around 200 people a year in the US are killed by rifle homicides. It's totally negligible. Less frequent than blunt instrument homicides. Yet, that's exactly what anti-gun people focus on.
Yeah, for some reason people keep going on about the ability for any 18 yo nutcase to go into a shop and buy a military-grade weapon designed to shred organs beyond all repair*, enabling them to efficiently slaughter as many school children as possible before terrorized and outgunned LEOs finally have the guts to take them out.
These pesky humans and their dislike of living in fear of violent death for their children... Can't they just think about this in spreadsheet terms and look at the totally negligible numbers, like the rest of us psychos ? C'mon...
What's "reasonable" from an informed perspective vs. an uniformed perspective are vastly different. There are already limits on ammunition and they don't work.
Well, first I should clarify that I mean some states have various limits on ammunition and magazine capacity, and that does not help those states with regard to homicide statistics.
Secondly, do you think that is unreasonable amount of ammunition? What kinds of legal limitations would you propose?
For reference, that's about enough ammo for one person for less than an hour of time at a gun range. Any responsible gun owner is going to be at the range with some regularity, and would go through at least that much in one day.
1. People don't just practice at formal ranges. Some have personal property where they practice. There are also competitions and events of all sorts in which copious ammo is needed.
2. You can actually make your own ammo (usually by using used casings from previous ammo)
3. In times of civil unrest (like the riots of 2020) 50 may be nowhere near enough. In high pressure situations it may take a full clip/magazine to take down a single opponent.
4. I am not a hunter, but I somewhat doubt 50 rounds of ammo would be enough for hunting.
5. The vast majority of people with copious ammunition are law abiding citizens, and so this would involve a confiscation and restriction on the behavior of citizens who have not and will never commit such crimes.
6. Considering how poorly we've done and restricting access to weed and other drugs, I see no reason that any such legislation would actually be effective.
1. Register to buy more ammo, or buy it over the year. I said monthly.
2. Good, I'm totally aware of this and aware of the limitations.
3. Show me where people were forced to defend their property by filling someone with bullets in the 2020 (riots, your word). No standard magazine holds 50, so your argument is not in good faith.
4. It's plenty, Hunters worry about noise from shooting, cost (if they are hunting for food), and the environment. They don't fill the forest with lead.
5. Nobody said confiscation, build your stockpiles. This is about selling/reselling.
6. Sure, people feel the same about those; they have a similar risk. (sarcasm)
random mass shootings are so horrific that we should do something to make them less lethal. Even if focusing on hand guns instead would statistically save more lives.
I would take anti-gun people more seriously if they actually paid attention to what this entails. For one, anti-gun enthusiast would stop going on about "assault rifles", because only around 200 people a year in the US are killed by rifle homicides. It's totally negligible. Less frequent than blunt instrument homicides. Yet, that's exactly what anti-gun people focus on.