Fooling the gullibleFollow

Why is gbaji the one making the logical posts in this thread. Shame on all of you.

Also I find the justifications/ideas presented for "banning assault weapons" cute and laughable.

Edited, Jan 4th 2013 11:10am by Deadgye

A red herring sure, but as I said before, hopefully it will be used to address the larger problem of broader gun control as a whole, and not just mass-school-shooting prevention gun control.

Ideally you could advocate gun control with rational statistics and not have to rely on appeals to emotion like Sandy Hook, but the general populace is stupid and so you have to play politics based on stupid, emotional factors. It'll be the Left's version of Bush using the appeal to emotion of 9/11 to get the Patriot Act passed.

So let's give more people the tool, right? ******* idiot.

No. Let's not take away the tool from people who aren't misusing it. Firearms are equalizers. The same aspect that makes them scary to some people (the ability for anyone with minimal training/skill to be able to kill other people relatively easily) is also its greatest positive aspect. It means that for the first time in man's history, the little old lady sitting at home isn't completely subject to the whim of any random person who wants to rob or kill her. When any potential victim may be armed, then the strong can't always prey on the weak. Sadly, we forget this important aspect of firearms in our fear of the occasional misuse of them. Worse, we pass laws making it harder and harder for potential victims to obtain them, thus limiting their use for defense, while doing absolutely nothing to prevent their use in criminal acts.


It's not a dumb idea to allow people to arm themselves if they want to. It's a dumb idea to pass laws trying to prevent them from doing so. Because the criminals aren't going to obey those laws, so all you do is disarm their potential victims. There's a reason why the biggest statistical crime effect from Australia's recent firearms ban was a relative increase in assault/rapes against women and assaults/robberies against the elderly. All you accomplish with these sorts of laws is make it easier for a criminal to succeed against a potential victim, and you make the traditional targets of violent crime that much more attractive to those criminals as a result.

That may be the most cogent well written re-stating of what you're told to believe that I've seen. Wrong on multiple counts both factually and logically, but still, let's all read it again and imagine a world where you don't attempt any math or analogies involving ***** or bruises.

Like this.

How do we do so when criminals aren't equipped with such weapons? You're arguing a false dilemma Smash. The same tools which we use to deal with crimes not committed with guns apply to crimes committed with guns. Insisting on a perfect solution for one set, but not the other is pretty silly.



And that's beyond pretty silly and has gone right into ludicrous speed.



Yup. So allow me, as a free citizen, the greatest ability possible to affect my own outcomes.



Yes. That is absolutely correct. We don't ban speech because some people abuse it. We punish those who do so (and guess what? We do so *after* they do so, so no pre-crime solution there either). You're doing a great job of arguing my position Smash.



Not sure what you're trying to say here. Sounds pretty, but that's about it. Can we agree that there's a whole middle ground between hand waving negatives away, and allowing negatives to so completely scare you that you do something even worse in response? No one on the pro-gun side argues that guns are perfectly safe, or that no one will use a gun to commit a crime. What we argue is that limiting the rights of all with regard to guns not only doesn't help protect us from the occasional misuse, but often makes us more vulnerable to such misuse *and* has the effect of being an infringement of rights. We should take actions which have the least impact on our rights, doubly so if they are similarly or even more effective.


But I never underestimate the consistency with which the political left will, when given multiple courses to follow, to always follow the one that involves the most infringement of rights regardless of the effectiveness in other areas. It's about the one true constant to that political ideology.

So the correct solution is to punish everyone who didn't go on a killing spree instead?



No one's forcing you to own a gun. But you do expect the police to be armed, right? So on some level, you accept that the existence of armed people upholding the law protects you. Why is it so hard to take that to the next step and accept that allowing law abiding citizens to own guns protects you from crime? Even if all it does is reduce the likelihood that someone will break into your home because that person doesn't know that you don't own a gun, you are still protected because of this.


The problem is that we only see the blatant examples of the very rare cases in which someone uses a gun to do something terrible, and we never see the every day positive effect that an armed populace has. But it's a pretty terrible mistake to toss one out in a vain attempt to prevent the other. Not only will it not work, but it will arguably make things worse in other ways that you have not even considered.



I agree. That's a tricky issue by itself, but no one's arguing that we shouldn't do so. But that also has nothing to do with restricting gun rights for everyone else.



Completely unworkable though. Are you including police in that? How about armed security guards? You're not allowed to work in those professions if there's anyone who might get a hold of you guns in your family, or your neighborhood? There's no way to do this. Sometimes, you have to accept that bad people will do bad things and unless you force everyone to live their lives in bubble wrap, you can't prevent them. The best you can do is mitigate them when they occur. And at the risk of repeating an argument I made in an earlier thread about this, the one common pattern we see in most of these types of shootings is that they end when armed opposition arrives on the scene. The faster that happens, the sooner the shooting stops. Given that people don't tend to start such shootings in close proximity to armed uniformed security/police, the best way to stop these shootings as quickly as possible is to allow people who are not uniformed to carry concealed weapons.

There's no way you can keep guns out of the hands of the occasional determined whack-job without keeping them out of the hands of everyone else first. That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater IMO.

Like not having them use guns to kill a bunch of people.

How do we do so when criminals aren't equipped with such weapons? You're arguing a false dilemma Smash.

Yeah, no. I'm not. I'm not sure if you just learned the phrase "false dilemma" or what, but it's not actually applicable as a response to anything you disagree with. Here's a false dilemma: "If we take away guns, then people will use knives, if we take away knives, they'll use sticks, if we take away sticks, they'll use fists. Do you want to cut everyone's hands off?"

What I asked was a simple question. Saying "we should try to have less crime" is nice, but completely fucking useless. Enacting stricter gun control laws may or may not reduce gun crimes, but there's an obvious logical reason to think it might, and really not much of an argument that it will increase gun crimes. It's an attempt to take action to solve a problem. Surely you can distinguish between that and "golly we should all wish really hard that people weren't so mean".

Can we agree that there's a whole middle ground between hand waving negatives away, and allowing negatives to so completely scare you that you do something even worse in response? No one on the pro-gun side argues that guns are perfectly safe, or that no one will use a gun to commit a crime. What we argue is that limiting the rights of all with regard to guns not only doesn't help protect us from the occasional misuse, but often makes us more vulnerable to such misuse *and* has the effect of being an infringement of rights

Not that I really care much, but you don't and never have owned a gun, correct?

Actually, that's a slippery slope fallacy Smash. Try to keep them straight.

A False Dilemma is when you present an argument in the form of "either A, or B", when there are other choices available. So when you argue that in the absence of a perfect means to prevent gun crime before it happens we must eliminate all guns, you are committing a false dilemma fallacy. You're saying that we either devise a perfect pre-crime solution to gun violence *or* ban all guns. There are other options though. Hence the fallacy.



And yet, that's how we deal with all other forms of crime, isn't it? It's exceptionally rare for a police officer to prevent a crime from occurring, yet we still have police departments, don't we? So it's a bit silly to argue that a course of action should be rejected because it can't prevent gun violence before it happens. But that's exactly the argument you made. We can't prevent robbery from happening. We can only punish those who commit the crime. Same for pretty much all criminal acts in our society.

If you want to make a broader argument about how we should approach criminal justice, by all means, go ahead. But don't treat gun violence as though it's somehow special or different in this regard.




Remove the word gun in "gun crimes" and it's a different issue though. Isn't the objective to prevent "crime", and not worry about how the crime is committed? We could ban blue cars, and pat ourselves on the back about how much we've reduced the rate of "blue car accidents", but that would be a really really silly way to approach the issue.



Except the proposed action has no likelihood of addressing let along solving the problem and involves a significant infringement of a long established right within our legal system. So forgive me if I reject it as a legitimate solution. The degree to which other law enforcement and investigative measures can be enacted which might have some minor benefit seems more reasonable, if for no other reason than they are less likely to both make us less safe from criminal activities and less likely to automatically infringe our rights.

Oh. Smash? Ironically, about the only thing that can actually prevent a crime from being committed is an armed potential victim. You proposed some sort of pre-crime solution by our police as the only solution to the problem at hand (other than banning guns), but we don't need an all-seeing government agency to stop crime. Armed civilians do a much better job, and don't require an infringement of our rights.


So instead of armed police in every home. How about allowing civilians to be their own protectors? Amazing concept, isn't it? Of course, it doesn't fit the big government ideology of the left, so it must be stomped as quickly as possible. Can't let people think they can take care of their own lives and their own problems, can we? How can we convince them to let the government do everything for them if that's the case?

Lol!

Ah, you.