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Can we not just tax the hell out of guns and especially ammunition so that it will pay for all the cost of worrying about those guns and their potential damage? Pay for all the policing needed around them, all the property damage, the loss of human lives etc. I especially think it should be on ammunition though. A gun is just a sculpture if it has no bullets.
In Canada if you own a gun it MUST be kept in a locked container anywhere but at the range. And you have to provide to the local police precinct a set of instructions so that they can walk into your house and find your gun using those instructions.
Guns don't kill people, bullets do. Yeah...it's got a ring to it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Caleigh
PLCAA advocates argue that this law only prevents frivolous lawsuits. But it is difficult to know what is frivolous on the fringes until something is litigated under common law principles of negligence and strict liability. Every other industry has to pay for legal representation for both frivolous lawsuits and lawsuits that make it to trial but are not successful. It's a cost of doing business, encourages caution, and laws that prevent frivolous lawsuits often pre-empt legitimate lawsuits.
http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-...-manufacturers
I like this article by Chemerinsky long before PLCAA that explains what the development of the common law might do for gun safety in design and distribution (and also prices of weapons).
I'm not positive about the statistics, but I think there are more firearm murders in Chicago in three weeks than there are in Japan for the whole year. There's something more rotten in Denmark (the USA) than the NRA. There a cultural phenomenon going on here. No matter what you do about registration, or gun locks or safety measures, there are still 300 million guns floating around.
I do think that if a "gang of eight" type committee actually sat down and could spend a few weeks brainstorming all the stats they could come up with the most reasonable and effective measures to bring these staggering statistics down, but then you'd have to actually implement the measures, in accordance with the second amendment. In the case of Badger Guns, which recently lost a six million dollar lawsuit, they had a recorded tape of the salesman telling the guy to uncheck the box on the background check that said "I'm buying this gun for someone else" ....
Making this a cultural war against the rednecks in the NRA is a mistake, IMO, Fox News always points out that the perps in Trish and Martin's news accounts are Hispanic gangbangers. I have no idea why the LAW AND ORDER people don't want to clamp down on the relatively small number of gun dealers that are knowingly arming street trash. Instead of Rachel Maddow leading the charge you should have Tom Selleck.
Asking for reasonable regulation is not "making this a cultural war," it is simply asking for more reasonable legislation. Spinning this simple plea as if it were a "war against rednecks" and making sure that in almost every post you characterize firearms abusers as "gangbangers" (whether you mean it or not) does reduce the issue to a culture war. This is what Fox News does. We don't have to accept their framing of the issue. It's not the children of gangbangers who are picking up their mommy's or their daddy's guns and accidentally shooting their toddler siblings.
Yes, I agree. It would be nice if some significant conservative politician would take up the issue and lead the charge. But because the extreme right wing, the tea party, the NRA and Fox News have made this into a culture war, no conservative politician can afford to champion the reasonable view. Any celeb who took up the cause -including Tom Selleck- would quickly be ridiculed by right wing media and threatened by anonymous, irate, internet "commentators".
Chicago marks the confluence of two incoming rivers of firearms; firearms from Wisconsin and Indiana. Are Chicagoans culturally inclined toward violence; or when a Chicagoan reaches the end of his rope -as happens to people regardless of their location- and he reaches for a something on which to take out his frustration, is it just more likely that the thing he grasps will be a gun? A gun in the home -no matter where that home is- significantly increases the probability of homicide or a suicide occurring in that home. Still the per capita rate of gun related deaths in Chicago has gone down since firearms have undergone somewhat stricter control there.
The U.S. city with the highest per capita homicide rate is St. Louis. Next is Detroit. Then Baltimore. This may suggest that factors that influence the per capita rate of homicide include not only the availability of guns but poverty, unemployment and systemic politico-economic divides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...by_murder_rate
Here are some modern safety ideas...(I copied and pasted them from a person commenting one of the news articles about the "Badger Guns" case)
http://www.intelligun.com/
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/sentinl-gun-lock/
...of course I am posting this with the realization that many gun owners don't even consider using basic, old trigger locks that have been around practically forever.
..but the first of the two (as long as it works) doesn't seem to hamper using the weapon in immediate self defense.
I would agree that "smart" guns of various sorts make a lot of sense; especially if you really want to keep a gun in the home because you feel insecure. I think it would likely diminish the chance of it being used by another family member in a moment of rage, or depression or just plain stupidity.
Others apparently don't agree. Remember back in May of 2014 when Andy Raymond -a gun dealer in Rockville, Maryland- decided to sell smart guns in his store alongside his usual assortment of firearms? He was hassled, his life was threatened and his family threatened to the point where he felt he had to back down and no longer offer them for sale. This incident was complicated by the fact that the governor promised to sign legislation that would make all other firearms illegal in Maryland should a smart gun become available. However, same thing happen to Belinda Padilla -a gun dealer in California, which had no such mandate complicating the issue. Belinda marketed smart guns in LA and was subject to endless harassment and threats to her life.
Gun enthusiasts opposed to the marketing of smart guns and biometric firearms will tell you they are the first step in a slippery slope to government regulation of firearms, the dissolution of the 2nd Amendment and the banishing of firearms. Of course slippery slope arguments are a logical fallacy and they can always be argued in both directions. E.g. I think once we are convinced that biometrics make a gun safer, we'll realize they can be used to make other weapons safe for civilian use too, for example: grenade launchers and shoulder launched missiles for starters. So how about it, NRA? Let's get behind this biometric thing. It'll be a boon for our 2nd Amendment Rights.
Yes Trish, I believe you have posted about that issue at the time...and I would like to say ' you can't stop progress (technology)'...and that's often true...but you can sure as hell slow it down. Patents for devices like that go back quite a ways. Putting in bills about smart gun technology before they were actively marketed is political grandstanding ...and only aggravated this issue, but over the top gun enthusiasts, just like like most OCD hoarders, are tone deaf to anything that might threaten their amassed collection.
The argument they make about retro fitting older weapons won't wash the longer and cheaper this technology sticks around...but we'll probably all be dead from old age before we see most weapons with this. A horse can't win a race if it isn't allowed to come out of the gate.
I think people would have to get used to smart weapons before they trust them and that might require a slow rollout. I've said I don't shoot guns but I can imagine if I had one that required a radio transmitter or a fingerprint authorization I would be nervous about it not working when I need it.
That's a natural fear with something you're depending on in a rare but serious situation. I wouldn't dismiss the idea of a safer weapon or think it was a plot to ban guns but I would be a bit nervous about an additional tech component to a piece of equipment I had used just fine up until then.
I also agree that legislation mandating smart guns is a really bad idea at this point because it would be better for people to start getting used to them...explore them and find them effective for self-defense and safety before they are a political battleground..so I agree with Fred on that.
I would like to weigh in on the culture wars commentary. The gun problem we have in this country crosses cultural and ethnic lines. Perhaps there are some rural communities where guns are more likely to be seen as a symbol of independence and a part of American identity and this is combined with a distrust of government. As a result any policy meant to increase public safety is resisted as an attempt to erode a civil right.
But we have a very long history in this country of very liberal gun laws and the result is that it's very easy to buy a gun, whether you're white, latino, black, or asian. A child of any race can shoot himself with his parent's weapons, and a depressed person of any background can decide to take his own life with a gun. It's not easy to pass laws that allow people to have weapons for self-defense but protect against these social hazards. Any law our legislatures pass is going to have only marginal impact at first. But that can't be an excuse not to act and on multiple fronts. The only actions that would have an immediate and profound effect on this problem would also infringe on people's right to own a gun....so it seems rather unfair that the more reasonable policies, whether background checks, safety features, more accountability in distribution would be attacked as not likely to make a difference. The differences will matter in the aggregate if we treat this as a serious problem.
Rather than fly off into my usual colorful prose, I'll just say that putting guns in the hands of idiots is BAD, and is usually a tragedy waiting to happen.
While seatbelts and refrigerators should be safe as possible, guns should be dangerous. That's what makes this topic so remarkable.
Difficult to know what the word "should" means. It's possible to make firearms so that children can't fire them. Yet every week since the year's start, children have been picking up firearms and accidentally shooting people. Should we continue to make guns that children can operate because guns should be that dangerous? Slick sayings and clever mottos do not an argument make.
Congresswoman............Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
Children SHOULD never be allowed to handle a gun. Unless you can make the 300 million guns that are out there now idiotproof, what can you realistically do? Unless you can convince 150 million Americans they're too stupid to own a gun, then it does not make a bit of difference what SHOULD be done, gunplay on the streets and accidental shootings are RED WHITE and BLUE.
The Japanese and Germans have much better gun violence stats than we do, but they also used Chinese children for bayonet practice, and gassed millions of Jews.
I hope Hillary jumps over gun control and channels her internal Bernie Sanders to fix the tax code. Guns are here to stay.
"Should" was your word choice, not mine. You said guns should be dangerous. Okay. My question is "How dangerous should they be? Citing how many guns are out there which are not child proof (as a biometric gun would effectively be, if it were programmed to operate for a unique licensed adult) doesn't answer the question, "Should we continue to make firearms that are not effectively childproof?"Quote:
then it does not make a bit of difference what SHOULD be done
No we cannot retroactively make all guns safe. Because of that sad fact tragedies will continue to occur on a yearly basis for many years to come. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean we shouldn't discontinue making guns that are so unsafe a toddler can fire one. We can start making safer weapons. We can also require non-biometric guns to have trigger locks and stored in a gun-safe. Of course, we can't go into every home and make sure people are obeying the law; but we can arrest or fine people when unhappy incidents alert us to the fact that a firearm was not kept locked away from children. We can hold people liable for the damage their weapons cause.
Agreed. Working people in both parties can understand economic inequality.Quote:
I hope Hillary jumps over gun control and channels her internal Bernie Sanders to fix the tax code.
Again, you're framing the issue way Fox News taught you to frame it. Of course guns are here to stay. No one is after your guns.Quote:
Guns are here to stay.
Considering they are designed to kill people, that's pretty dangerous, I guess.Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
I don't have a solution.
So to the question, "Should we continue to manufacture firearms that are not effectively childproof?" is your answer, "I don't know" ?
Okay let's try something simpler, how about we require every ammunition manufacturer to label every case of bullets with "CHOKING HAZARD" ?
This problem is real and way bigger than my personal opinion, as I stated a long time ago, I had one close friend who was shot and killed the first day of hunting season, and even closer friend's step-daughter was murder by a disgruntled co-worker on her first day back from maternity leave. That was a national story. Another schoolmate shot himself playing Russian roulette in high school.
If you manage to make guns baby-proof, you're still a long way from making them adult-proof.
Write a letter to your congressman. Live your Life.
This is the same argument as before. Failure to solve all the problems means we shouldn't address any of them. We shouldn't punish tax evasion because we won't catch all tax evaders. We shouldn't prosecute murderers as long as some go undetected etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by buttslinger
No, it means if you are wearing a dress right now, or you have an English accent, and you walk into a redneck bar and start talking gun control, you'll end up in the hospital. There are 300,000,000 guns in the USA right now. How do you address that? By all means, don't let me stop you from cooking up ideas how to make a gun that doesn't shoot, maybe half the country will buy them. But the other half won't. So you've changed nothing.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
The only flaw in my argument is that maybe I'm perceived as laughing at you, or talking down at you, or scolding you. That's exactly how the Conservatives feel when the intellectual branch of the Democratic Party talks guns.
I think my broader point is that there are much more pressing issues to deal with, like how to prevent World War III.
If you look at History from Cain killing Abel to Hitler murdering Jews by assembly line, the human race has much bigger problems than gun control. The Middle East problem is the problem that makes gun control look easy. They say the Garden of Eden was in the Fertile Crescent, in Iraq. It's possible the entire World will end there. If some crazy Iranian shoots an atomic missile at Israel in 10, 20, 50 years from now, game over, man. Game over.
I'm not saying guns are bad, oh well. I'm saying fixing the problem is almost impossible, it's been tried before. You end up with a drop in the bucket. It's about priorities. Number one, get Hillary, not McCain into the White House. She is in a position to actually do something. We ain't.
Of course. So we should continue to make guns that aren't baby-proof just because there are a lot of 'em already out there involving children every week in deadly accidents?Quote:
If you manage to make guns baby-proof, you're still a long way from making them adult-proof.
In other words don't bother you. I wouldn't, if you weren't so insistent upon engaging in this very conversation. I'm sorry you have lost so much. Having just a hint of where you're coming from I can sort of see how you might be pessimistic and depressed about the whole issue. I do write, phone and harass all my representatives (including my Congressman) and I find time to live too. Imagine that. You can write your Congressman too. It might make you feel better.Quote:
Write a letter to your congressman. Live your Life.
OK.......Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
Proof that it's not always the "person" who shoots the gun that's at fault...
"A woman in the US state of Indiana is recovering after being shot by her dog in a bizarre hunting accident, an environment official says.
The woman, named as Allie Carter, 25, was hunting waterfowl on Saturday in the north of the state, Jonathon Boyd, an Indiana conservation officer said.
She put down her 12-gauge shotgun but her chocolate Labrador stepped on it, shooting her in the foot.
To add insult to injury, the dog was named Trigger."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34644333
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...r-hunt-indiana
We need to arm all dogs: only a good dog with a gun and stop a bad dog -or a dog with a stupid owner- with a gun.
It's really irresponsible to just give every dog a weapon regardless of how many dog years he's lived or how many times he has committed an inside dump on the carpet. Your type of thinking is gonna get a lot of innocent dogs shot.Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
Do you feel lucky...
Attachment 888289
Cold dead paws?! Are you kiddin'?
Going back to a slightly more serious point, while it may not be possible to retrofit/modify all existing guns in the USA to make them safer, the motor industry has shown that it is possible to organise large scale recalls when their products have been proved to be defective/unsafe in some way.
"The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released new data today, tracking the total number of recalls over the past few decades. Across the industry in 2014, there were 803 vehicle recalls total involving 63.9 million vehicles, including two of the largest vehicle recalls in history."
http://jalopnik.com/these-are-the-10...ver-1689270859
http://www.investopedia.com/slide-show/car-recalls/
And of course this year, in the wake of the emissions scandal, VW will have to recall millions of cars to "fix" their engines. In the US it's around 500,000, but in Europe it amounts to around 8.5 million vehicles, with a total of about 11 million worldwide.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/02/vw-em...-congress.html
http://www.theguardian.com/business/...luntary-recall
I think I read somewhere in this thread that there are around 300 million guns in the USA, but that's no excuse for not making a start... Every single gun made safer is potentially a life saved.
Just off the cuff, I would say the difference between recalling cars and guns lies in the perception of the owners. Recalls rely on the owners and dealers of the recalled product to realize that it is within their interest to cooperate with the recall.
In the case of cars, owners understand believe that after they take their car to the dealer, have it worked on and bring it home they will have a safer and and better car. Dealers can be pressured by manufacturers to cooperate, but they also know it's better for business to be perceived as someone who has the customer's best interests in the fore. I'm not up on this, but I think that in the case of recalls due a car not meeting an EPA standard, fines can levied against owners who don't have compliant vehicles.
In the case of guns, owners do not think safer weapons are better( e.g. the NRA encourages people to carry with one in chamber so they can get the drop on criminals). They would perceive the recalls as an elaborate scheme to "take away their guns." Because of these perceptions, any dealer who cooperates would be perceived as a government toady and would likely lose business to dealers who don't cooperate with the recall. I can't imagine the hoopla (possibly violent) that would ensue should owners of non-compliant weapons be subject to a fine.
But I appreciate your larger point. Massive recalls of products to make them safer and better ARE possible. In the case of firearms, I'm afraid we'll have to recall some minds first.
Trish, I agree that there's a degree of "apples and oranges" when trying to compare cars to guns, but I'm glad that you picked up on my main point. Large product recalls are not only possible but happen on a fairly regular basis.
http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news...e-gun-c/npDBy/
Does this help with previous discussions of banning both cars and guns?
Thanksgiving week in the U.S. of A.
Nine injured, three murdered as gunman, shoots up a planned parenthood in Colorado Springs. Says he was riled up listening to Fox News.
At a Waffle House in Biloxi, exercising his Louisiana given right to carry lit up a cigarette. When he was informed by the waitress that Waffle House has a policy against smoking he pulled out his 33mm and shot her dead.
A volunteer guard at an Oklahoma "Muslim-Free" gun-store shot himself in the foot.
These are just the highlights.
Ahh, the price of sweet liberty.
God Help America
Guns with history...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nAfWfF4TjM
“They might have guns, but we have flowers”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkM-SDNoI_8
Get angry, get even
Mass shooting left 14 people dead at a social services centre
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34991855
Because of political pragmatism I have only once or twice stated my own views on guns. Personally I think it is pretty rare that an armed person would ever be in a position to stop a massacre unless that is their profession (armed security, police officer etc). I think it is also pretty rare that someone will stop a home intruder with a gun. In my view, if we did not have a second amendment and we made gun ownership an onerous process with a strict licensing requirement, these acts would be pretty rare.
I do interpret the second amendment as protecting the right of individuals to own weapons subject to few limitations. I'm just not sure that's a good thing. If guns were contraband, and someone with a screw loose would have to go through weeks of training and certification to own one, we'd save thousands of lives I think. Yes there would still be a black market for weapons, but I am not sure our lawful armed citizens are putting a stop to much criminal activity through vigilantism or even self-defense.
I've actually stated this before, but I feel a bit dishonest pretending that I actually think incremental change is all we should desire...personally I think we should desire a lot more, but will achieve a lot less.
So what did we learn from the Berdoo Masacree?
Do not buy your ethnic friend a gun if he asks you.
If you do shoot up a Christmas party, have an escape plan. Don't drive home.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8oJs57bhiI