After the eighth school shooting in seven weeks – some gun control proposals

The Ar-15 is not a military issue riffle so yes uncommon in a combat zone. But a M-16 is a military issue riffle. And the reason the Ar-15 is popular with the second amendment crowd is that it is is a civilian M-16. Current laws means it's impossible or very hard to own a M-16. No good for fighting the man. So we say the Ar-15 is for "hunting" but it's really for combat. Even the man who invented the Ar-15 said yes this a war gun.

 

Yes I can assume how they feel about a concealed-carrier helping in an active shooter situation. You seem to be of the opinion that, though they approve of concealed-carriers, they don't want them to interfere with an active shooter. Is this your thinking?

 

No. I dont assume anything about the way law enforcement thinks.

You're obviously misunderstanding me so lets call it quits

 

They may have had central storage for government owned powder, but not for powder that was owned by individual militiamen. And not for powder that was owned by ordinary people for purposes of self defense against criminals.

An ordinary Glock 17 is appropriate for self defense and there is no justification for banning it.

Well, I'm certainly not going to disregard reality if they tell me to do so.

Unless the Second Amendment is repealed, it remains the law.

No. Reality is reality.

Stores have been required to record all gun sales on a Form 4473 for the past 50 years.

People still have self defense rights. No one has repealed the Second Amendment over the past year.

 

There are no civilian M-16s. There are semiautomatic AR-15s. You don't want to admit the difference. Nothing I can do about that.

However, I am interested in which NRA member said that if you don't let them kill with their guns, they will kill you. I'm paraphrasing something you have said. I can find the exact quote if you need me to, but I'm sure you recall saying it. So who said that?

 

However it does prove that registration failed at it's job.

Here's some data.


Gun Facts | Licensing and Registration | Gun Control

Also, the fact that Australia is doing well doesn't have any indication on whether regitration works. You have to prove that the regitration reduced crime.

They can only be tracked by legal transactions. If the weapon is stolen or lost, then there's no way to track it other than who was the last legal owner.

Aparently not enlugh as you seem to have a habit of excluding it when listing reasons why a person would want a firearm.

 

In the judicial system, truth is determined by an adversarial process, and whatever the trier of fact says is true is true, regardless of whether or not it's false. The judges are not supermen by any means, but in a system based on the rule of law, they have the final say on interpreting the Second Amendment. You have a right to your opinion, but ultimately, it's the judges' opinions that count.

 

The source of this "survey" is PoliceOne.com, which lists NRA as its partner. I've seen nothing that gives a clue how this "survey" was conducted. Was it a random sample? Was it drawn from the viewers of PoliceOne? Were the respondents able to self-select? How were the questions worded? Without such information, the survey is worthless--or worse, because it misleads the public.

 

I reject this philosophy. If someone in authority insists that a falsehood is true, that does not make it true.

If the courts decline to uphold civil rights, that does not prevent people from speaking out and denouncing their rulings as incorrect.

It also does not prevent people from voting politicians out of office if they pass laws that violate civil rights.

 

No, it doesn't. Denounce your heart out. Maybe someone will listen. Federal judges, of course, are appointed for life terms, so you won't be able to vote them out. Better hope there aren't more mass shootings. Your ice is getting thinner and thinner.

 

Federal judges aren't the people who pass statutes into law.

Not really. Our ability to vote gun banners out of office is as strong as ever.

 

Anyway for me it has been always a question of why people hold these views I mean it was very clear early on that the gun lobby arguments were not that good, but that didn’t seem to matter to them.

There seemed to be this deep seated emotional need even religious zeal that convinced them they were right even if they actually couldn’t defend their stance in any rational or reasonable way. So I wondered why that was.

I’ll post a slightly edited and abridged version of a post I wrote some time ago about this.

My theory is that there is a general attitude among many Americans that accepts threat of violence, intimidation and suppression as legitimate means of societal control and this mindset gets in the way of them actually working toward solutions to their social and political problems.

This is because that attitude colours the way they think about and view the world from personal interaction to how they see other countries.

They can come to see the world as threatening, they can feel intimidated and fear that they are or could be the victim of criminal, [economic, social] or political suppression.

This attitude can lead to a near paranoid outlook were everything and everyone is seen as a potential threat that is just waiting to attack or repress them. This taints the way they see the government, how criminality can be dealt with, how they see their fellow citizens, differing social classes, differing ethnic groups, and even differing political philosophies or ideas.

Within the framework of such a worldview guns seem attractive as a means of ‘equalising’ the individual against what they perceive as threats, it makes them feel that they are also ‘powerful’ and intimidating and that they too, if needs be, can deal with, in other words suppress the threatening.

The problem is that such attitudes can build up an irrational barrier between reality and myth, between what they see as prudent and sensible and what actually is prudent and sensible.

 

*

So where did this attitude I describe above come from, well here a few ideas I’ve had since I wrote the above and after many conversations with those that have shown signs of it.

One thing I noticed was that many of those that manifested the attitude also expressed Social Darwinist thinking. Now of course Social Darwinism is junk science and is deeply discredited but it still seems to have a strong influence especially in the US.

I would often be in discussion with someone that would express Social Darwinist ideas but then later in the same debate admit that Social Darwinism was junk science and rubbish, it’s that irritating habit that many of these people seem to have of holding and promoting ideas that even they know they can’t defend in any rational way.

Anyway Social Darwinist ideas and those that have grown out of them (like a lot of free market economic thinking) is based on view that competition and self-interest are the driver of society, the survival of the fittest (and in a gun context the survival of the better armed) and those that take advantage and hold onto it for their own gain.

It is a fight to the metaphorical death between competing individuals and groups, if a person is not winning and dominant over others then they are losing and face ‘extinction’. There is no ‘society’ there are just circles of self-interest from the individual to the family and out to the tribal grouping that the individual associates themselves with and these tribes are all in competition.

It is not a philosophy that encourages equality, tolerance, co-operation and communal thinking and problem solving, but it is one that is likely to instil deep seated fears about self-worth and ones position in society and to see ‘others’ as a threat.

It also encourages zero sum thinking, any ‘gain’ by one person or group diminishes their own position. It is something I’ve seen many times - welfare is seen as helping scroungers at the expense of the hard working (‘like themselves’), helping black people into higher education or work takes positions away from more qualified white people, helping women into higher education or work takes away places from men.

Also if someone thinks only in terms of competition and self-interest then they see all acts or proposed actions in the same way.

For example in the gun control debate those with such Social Darwinist ideas are unlikely to believe that those proposing gun control are doing it for the betterment of society as they claim because they do not think in terms of a society, one society, instead they see it as an attack from one tribe against their own. For them it is just one tribe seeking advantage and eventual extinction of their own. They fear that gun control is just a ploy to disarm them completely in a move by an opposing tribe to wipe them out.

This can explain the deep seated emotional need they have for their position and the almost religious zeal with which they oppose those arguing against them.

Yes it is totally irrational and unreasonable and based on very flawed Social Darwinist ideas but it is an entrenched mentality that is encouraged and manipulated by some to gain advantage because they also are infected by the same ideology, it is a reinforcement loop.

 

We just don't like having our civil rights violated.

I have no trouble defending my position with logic and facts.

 

You just don't like the results of the survey because it doesn't support your views, so you're doing the only thing left for you to do about it; you attack the source.

But in your rush to condemn it, you must have missed this:

PoliceOne’s Gun Policy & Law Enforcement survey was conducted between March 4 and March 13, 2013. More than 15,000 officers completed the survey, which was promoted by PoliceOne exclusively to its 400,000 registered members, comprised of verified law enforcement professionals. Only current, former or retired law enforcement personnel were eligible to participate in the survey. The survey sample size was broadly distributed by geography and rank in proportion to the U.S. law enforcement community at large. Respondents comprised a variety of ranks from departments of all sizes, with the majority representing departments of greater than 500 officers. Of those that took the survey, 80 percent were current law enforcement officers and 20 percent were former/retired law enforcement.

 

If the judges are calling an AR-15 a weapon of war when it clearly is not, then they are wrong. If a person supports their inaccurate view, then they are wrong, too.

 

It does in the minds of those who mindlessly bow to authority.

 

Oh, so now the cops are in cahoots with the NRA. Gotcha!

 

Has someone in your past attacked or repressed you with a gun or something, and now you are just waiting for them to attack or repress you again?