Fooling the gullibleFollow

Well, others have brought up the rate or volume of various types of lethal force, and I'm always curious if people really want to save others, or ar primarilly responding on an emotional level to the nature of gun violence.
To me, its a necessary part of the discussion, because if we are actually trying to make the world a safer place.......we have to operate from reality.
In reality, most states are already kicking people out of prison early due to overcrowding/funding issues and no real discussion happens about how many "Technical" violations of gun laws actually result in significant penalties. Any discussion of new legislation must address application.
Many years ago most 7-11's installed cash "Drop Safes" put up tape measure next to the door for accurate physical description/installed video capture systems & (in calif. at least) put up stickers that said "Use a Gun go to prison" (supposedly an extra 5 yrs for gun use) but many robbers now dont even go to prison AT ALL. (and many in prison are being sent back to counties for hybrid probation).
I would love there to be a Biometric Scanner of some type that wouldnt allow a gun to be used in random homicidal fashion, but......

The mental heath discussion is also dangerously close to going back to the dark ages (one flew over the cuckoos nest days) before the MHA of 1983 & Habeus Corpus civil rights suits.

Number of world wars prior to nukes = 2.
Number of world wars after nukes = 0

The power of statistics.

If A is deaths via kicking and B is deaths via gunshot, it's still better to have the yearly murder rate be A than A+B, right?

Don't be silly, you missed the obvious implication that with a void of easy to get guns, the mighty shod foot will fill the killing vacuum, and crazies will kick large groups of children to death.

Cowabunga.

Put that to music and we might just have something !

Ban steel-toed boots...DUH

barely

Er... That's exactly what he's doing. He's comparing a proposed action (banning guns) to an end point in a string of such actions (chopping off people's hands), then arguing that since the end point is a bad idea that the proposed action right now must be. That's a textbook slippery slope argument.

"People" are. An incredibly small percentage of people aren't. But that's the same with anything in life. Do you have any idea how many millions of people legally own firearms in the US but don't go on shooting sprees? "People" tend to be vastly more responsible with their guns than they are with their cars, or their swimming pools, or household cleaners. But that would require actually applying a useful measurement for "responsible".



Hindsight is always 20/20.



Many people know. You are not one of them because you have chosen to remain ignorant about the issue at hand. He chose first graders, and that specific class of first graders because his mother had been spending more time with them than with him and he felt she loved them more than she loved him. This was not a "I'm going to take these guns that are sitting around and randomly pick people to kill with them" and then just happened to choose that school and that class on that day. He wanted to kill that class of kids. Period.

While there are spree shootings where the guns are clearly a part of the fantasy element of the event itself for the shooter, this was not one of them. His objective wasn't "go out in a blaze of glory, firing cool looking guns at terrified people". His objective was to kill those kids. In this case, the use of the firearms to do so was secondary to his goal. In the absence of guns, it's almost certain he would have come up with some other method.



Wrong. We know exactly why he did it.



Unlikely. What we know is that if his mother had not had a small ******** he would have used some other method. He might have obtained chemicals to make explosives. Or locked the doors and set fire to the school. Set a crack squad of trained wombats on a kill mission. No way to know what exactly he would have done, but he would have done something.

What we also know is that given the precise events which did happen, if there had been other people in the vicinity with firearms, many lives could have been saved without the necessity of draconian legal restrictions on the actions of our citizens.



Again. Hindsight is 20/20. It's terrifically easy to be an armchair Monday morning quarterback and talk about all the things other people should have known to do differently. But the harsh reality is that we can't assume that every other person in the world will make perfect choices every time. So what are we supposed to do? Restrict people's actions to such a degree that they can't cause harm to anyone else? How do we decide who to restrict? Who gets to make that determination? I really do see two paths to follow here. One in which we attempt to use the power of the government to restrict people's abilities until they can't hurt anyone else, or one in which we give people the freedom to defend themselves from the actions of others.


I just think that the former choice is a poor one because it perpetuates the very problem we're trying to solve. Limiting people's ability to harm others also by necessity limits their ability to protect themselves from the harmful actions of others. The promise that the government can protect us tends to fail when we do this, leading to more people being harmed in situations where they are not allowed to protect themselves. If we continue to respond to such events with yet more government restrictions, we just continue to make the problem worse. I'm not arguing for an extreme on either side, but simply pointing out that "ban guns until gun violence stops" is just as impractical as "give everyone a nuclear weapon". The correct course should be somewhere in between. I just happen to believe we've moved to far towards the "ban guns" side of the issue. Certainly, in the case of "gun free zones", we're making our children in school less safe, not more.


And as I've pointed out numerous times in the two threads we've had on this subject. Unless we're willing and able to repeal the 2nd amendment, we can't possibly enact sufficient gun control measures to prevent this kind of crime. Assuming we're not going to be able to do so, then we should look for other solutions than increase gun control.

You're stuck on the progressive nature of the hypothetical, and ignoring the purposefully limited choices of the logic which would lead to a 'false dilemma'. That doing away with the guns would do no good because they'd just move on to another <specific weapon>. Just because they list a bunch of weapons in a row doesn't mean in a 'slippery slope'.

The false dilemma.

"Banning guns is pointless because criminals will just use knives."

Edited, Jan 7th 2013 8:30pm by TirithRR

Speaking of logical fallacies, how many folks were killed in China in Decembers Stabbing Rampage. Or are you skipping my post because it is based on fact?

Yep, I'm sold. Guns for everybody!