The last post generated quite a bit of discussion. That really got out of hand quick. Brick killed a guy.
I learned above all that because I operate under a ridiculous pseudonym, I’m not to be taken seriously. Why someone would spend so much time debating someone they don’t take seriously is beyond me but whatever.
Anyway rather than continuing what I see as a mostly (like 99%) pointless argument with people who have made up their minds, facts be damned, I’ll just link this and be done with it. It’s the opinion of someone ridiculously knowledgable about gun law, stats, tactics, etc. I encourage pro-gun and anti-gun people to read the whole thing. It’s enlightening.
The irony in this post is staggering.
“Why someone would spend so much time debating someone they don’t take seriously is beyond me…” That’s because you don’t understand why I made the comment about your name in the first place. Unfortunately for you, the SOP here is not explain things that others don’t understand because this isn’t a place for discussion, only sermonizing.
“People who have made up their minds, facts be damned…” You don’t include yourself in that category? You refuse to address direct questions or answers to your own questions. If you want people to see things your way, you’re doing a terrible job.
My last comment to your previous post has been “awaiting moderation” for five days. I suspect the same fate is in store for this one. The problem is I’m not the gun control nut you think I am or want me to be. I have several ideas that I think will both allow responsible citizens to enjoy their guns as well as protect people from getting shot. If people like you who know more about guns than I do would be rational and tell me which ideas are viable and which aren’t, we could have a pretty fruitful conversation. So far you and Dennis are coming off as stereotypical “gun nuts” with hints of paranoid conspiracy theorists.
But hey, it’s your blog, so if you want to keep on posting one-sided links, suppressing your commenters and mocking them on Twitter, go right ahead.
Too bad no one else will get to read this.
I’m curious, Jason, do you always go around insulting people you don’t know and mocking them because you disagree with the points they’ve made? You seem content to accuse me of having done so, but refuse to acknowledge your own kettle is black.
What answers would suffice for you? Again, I addressed your questions directly and you dismissed them as irrelevant or worse. You claim the moral high ground because you assume you’ve had it all along and that anyone who disagrees with you is a gun nut and prone to paranoid conspiracies.
No, I think the problem here, as I identified days ago on Twitter, is that you have a preconceived notion of what the right answer looks like and you will not be satisfied until everyone consents to your notion. What you dislike here is that there are people–millions of them actually–who disagree with your notion for principled reasons you reject and ignore.
A conversation, by definition, has to go two ways. You say it’s us who are not willing to have that conversation. What conversation, exactly, are you willing to have?
I have never interacted with you on Twitter so I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I was referring o the Mayan conversation in which you used my comments here as jokes. Which is cool, except that neither of you have actually addressed them.
You are wrong that I have a preconceived notion of the right answer. I have some ideas that I think are viable, but as I have said over and over, may not be. I welcome any suggestions.
You have not answered my question about what uses one would have the Bushmaster rifle Lanza used. I asked again in the comment BN won’t approve, so it’s not entirely your fault.
I felt the FBI talk was getting off-track because it relates more to an outright ban which I do not favor, as I have also repeatedly said.
If I have mocked or insulted you, then I apologize. You have made repeated suggestions that the government acts violently and intentionally against its citizens on a regular basis and that is a bit paranoid in my view. I’m not sure what else you could be referring to, so if that’s it, then I’ll refrain from framing you that way if we can have a real discussion that doesn’t devolve to “I know more about guns so your ideas are automatically invalid.”
You may not believe it, but I actually do want to understand your position as well as help you understand mine.
Jason, I was referring to the “I think it’s impossible to debate with anyone who’s basic idea is that a ban is the only option.” comment on Twitter. The Mayan posts were really in jest and never made with you or anyone else in particular in mind. I’ve been having these very kinds of debates so often recently they’ve all kind of blended together in a way.
You are right that I have made repeated mentions of government excess because those are the same concerns I believe the founders had when they framed the 2nd Amendment. As a student of both history and the modern world, I have witness the swiftness with which otherwise well-intended people and institutions can become tyrannical without even meaning to. To me, armed citizens acting as a bulwark against the potential of government oppression is not paranoia; in my view, it’s a practical acceptance of potential reality.
That just previous observation speaks specifically to what use a Bushmaster rifle has in the hands of a civilian: balancing the right to use force, or perhaps more accurately, as a balance against the excessive use of force. I grant that it has fewer other practical purposes than other kinds of rifles, but I also know that it is regularly used for hunting and for sport. To draw a parallel, there was no difference between the muskets the Minutemen used to kill Redcoats and the ones they used to hunt with. They were the same weapon.
If you dismiss the balance of force concern as paranoia or whatever, then there is nothing else I can really say. As I said before, millions of people have whatever life experience and worldview that has caused them to come to the same conclusions. At the very least, it seems wise to consider they might be onto something.
As for what could be done, I tend to come down on the side that the answer is not much. Nevertheless, I do think there are practical problems with modern gun ownership laws that should be addressed. I think–I may have stated this before but I don’t recall–that there needs to be a licensing system for gun owners that allows them to purchase currently legal firearms up to whatever restrictions are currently in place. I think documented training, including range time, should be part of that licensing system.
It occurred to me after my previous comment that the reason, as far as I can tell, that this whole idea of civilians owning rifles like the Bushmaster seems so strange to so many people is because the idea of what a well-regulated militia is supposed to be also seems strange.
Most people think the National Guard is our modern equivalent to the Revolution-era militia, and really that is not true. Militias were almost entirely local affairs, raised by townships or cities and under, most of the time, very local control. Militias were used for a variety of purposes that often extended beyond military duties by their localities.
The problem is that the states and the federal government systematically dismantled the original militias for a variety of reasons, but the militia idea did not go away. Instead, it went underground and ceased to be well-regulated.
A big part of the way we could fix a big part of the problems we have with firearms in the US is to return to a well-regulated militia model. The people have the guns (and a lot of other tools and skills), so why not put them to use?
Now you’re talking. While I think we disagree on the level of necessity of “well-regulated militias” these days, I absolutely agree with your view on how they should be structured. A group of civilians with no connection to one another and no organizing force does not constitute a “well-regulated militia.” To me, that phrase is of the utmost importance when it comes to the spirit of the Second Amendment. I also understand that some people don’t see it that way.
I do think that restricting (not outright banning) access to certain types of guns is a realistic measure, with the understanding that nothing–not increased training and licensing, not armed guards in every classroom, not a complete firearms ban–is going to erase mass shootings. They are going to happen.
That’s why I feel that in a situation like CT, Lanza’s mother should not have been able to own that particular gun. I know there a lots of ideas about what an “assault” weapon is, but to me (and I admit I know little about guns) it seems that the only criterion should be the number of bullets that can be fired in a certain amount of time or without reloading (I imagine there’s a term for that). Once that benchmark is determined, I would suggest (as I’ve said before) that anyone who does meet certain mental health criteria not be allowed to purchase or have reasonable access to guns that exceed that benchmark. Lanza’s mother would not have been able to legally own that gun because her autistic son lived with her. Is it perfect? No, but I think it’s better and not so restrictive as to be a huge problem for responsible gun owners.
I would also encourage some kind system (like a gun key or other technology–not sure what is out there or what has been tried) to make it more difficult for someone other than the owner of a gun to use it. Again, this is not perfect, but could be helpful in these situations.
I’m not crazy about arming teachers, but that’s mostly based on what teachers I know have told me. They just don’t want that kind of responsibility. I’m not against some sort of increased security for schools and am open to armed guards.
I don’t want to dwell on this but to say that the comments made in your Mayan discussion (which I totally get was in jest) were made with no one in particular in mind is hard to believe considering that most of them were verbatim from my posts (with necessary subject matter adjustments) as well as things like “I don’t take you seriously but I’ll post a dozen comments on your blog.” Again, I get it, you were frustrated with me and it was a fun back-and-forth at my expense. But I find it more insulting that you would pretend it wasn’t about me. I guess that was a little long for something I don’t want to dwell on.
More importantly, the other comment, that my “basic idea is that a ban is the only option” is just not true. I really think I’ve been beyond clear on this. I did offer the ban of assault weapons originally, but ultimately I was just hoping to start a discussion. I was totally prepared to back off of that if someone made a compelling argument. I’ll admit that I thought the term had a more concrete meaning than it apparently does.
I also want to make sure you understand that I am not against or fearful of all gun owners. I spent most of the day with people who don’t even know for sure how many guns they have. But you know what? I’m not worried about them one bit (even if they do have some odd political beliefs). Most of their guns are for hunting and they also do some target shooting. One that they showed me was an old military police revolver from the 50s that has never been fired. The other was something called an “Airlight” (I think), also a revolver. And they never once talked about the destructive power of any of their guns. The ones that do worry me. They just get too excited about it.
Jason, really, I do understand why would would have taken that Twitter thread personally, but you really do also have to understand that I have been having this same debate with, at a minimum, dozens of other people over the past few weeks, including on other blogs and elsewhere. What you have to say on this subject is virtually verbatim to what dozens of other people have to say on this subject. In fact, it’s verbatim enough that I regularly forget what I said to who where when debating this topic. The specificity to you is only superficial, I can assure you. I’m sorry if you feel like I am insulting you by making that claim, but it is, at least for me, true. I cannot speak for BN here.
I understand your desire to limit firing rate, but I can tell you as a gun owner and user that firing rate between reloads is the wrong thing to focus on if you really want to limit rate of fire. Any firearm with an exchangeable magazine can be reloaded in about a second-and-a-half by anyone who is even moderately competent with said firearm. At worst, it takes a couple of seconds.The change in the amount of rounds fired with three 10 round clips or one 30 round clip is negligible, especially with a weapon designed to be easy to reload like the Bushmaster. Such a limit is one designed to make people feel better that does not correspondingly make the weapons safer. The evidence from various shootings where the shooter stopped to reload is pretty clear on this subject.
As for Lanza himself, I am not sure what if any limitations to gun ownership would have stopped him this case. My understanding is that Lanza had never been identified, medically or professionally, as a psychological risk. In fact, and again as I understand the case, the fact that his mother was pursuing that designation is what may have pushed him over the edge. I agree that his mother made what turned out to be terrible choices given the problems her son obviously had, but the law, even the laws people want to put into place, would not have prevented her choices in this case. If there is other evidence, I’d be glad to hear it.
Now, this is not to say that I do not support tighter screening and regulation of firearms ownership for people who may be a threat to themselves or others. In fact, most states already have such laws, but they are either weakly enforced or not enforced at all. That’s why I support a licensing system as opposed to a background checking system. Licensing, especially when coupled with a requirement for documentable training, would help everyone where background checks tend to be vague and incomplete.
I do wonder one thing though: what else should one talk about if not destructive power when talking about a firearm? That seems to me like talking about a car without talking about horsepower or breaking distance. A firearm, in my estimation, is a tool with a particular purpose, just like a car. I don’t own one to look pretty on a shelf but because I may have to use it, and because I many have to use it, I need to know what it can do. (Full disclosure: I run a large sustainable farm, so firearms regularly factor into my work)
Looking at it again, it was pretty much exclusively BN who parroted my comments. Since he’s obviously not going to participate in the discussion he started (twice), we don’t need to talk about it anymore.
I do like your idea of making it more of a tiered licensing system like we have for automobiles. More training/testing for more powerful guns. I just feel like there are some manufacturing concepts that could too. I’ve mentioned some kind of gun key a couple of times. Do you think that’s at all viable? Has any similar approach been tried before?
I’ve read several reports that mention people identifying Lanza as being autistic, having Asperger’s or at least exhibiting characteristics consistent with those conditions. I’ve also read somewhere that he tried to buy a gun that week and was denied. If his mother, with whom he lived, had also been restricted, then the incident could have been less severe or perhaps avoided altogether.
Perhaps I should be more clear. There are certain people I know who start conversations about their guns with no prompting and proceed to discuss nothing but destructive power. If I was showing interest, then yeah, that would probably a main topic, but these are completely one-sided conversations and I find that kind of unsettling. “Hey I have this gun and it can blow a cow to smithereens!” That’s a hell of an ice-breaker. On the other hand, I find “collectible” guns that others own to be quite interesting. But really, it’s more about the person than the gun. There are plenty of people who creep me out that may not even own guns.
Jason, there are many ways to make civilian owned firearms “safer” than they are now (I use the quotes here because we are, after all, talking about firearms). Indeed there are various kinds of locks, safes, and trigger mechanisms that would make them harder to shoot. A lot of gun owners see them as defeating the point of having the gun, but I suspect people who don’t own firearms don’t care.
From my point of view, the fact is that there are more than 310 million guns in the US owned by tens of millions of people and the great majority of them–I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say more than 99 percent–never harm a human. Quite a few of them never get fired at all. If one measures the safety of firearms by number of units versus number of people killed by them, thousands of other things are far more dangerous.
In fact, according to various federal agencies, deaths of any kind by firearms don’t even rank in the top 25 causes of death in the US (even including deaths as a result of suicides) and crimes involving firearms have plummeted in the past twenty years.
I am saying all of this because, to me, it illustrates how the gut reaction of the call to more strictly regulate firearms in the wake of the CT shootings is a response to the specific event, not the inherent danger of firearms to the general population. Given everything we know about the CT shootings to date, virtually no regulation other than an outright ban where the shooter’s mother’s guns had been seized by the state would have prevented what happened.
This is especially true give that, while Lanza may have been autistic, all the evidence says that he had never been formally diagnosed in such a way that it was included in any public records about him. As far as I can tell, no doctor, school psychologist, or law enforcement agent ever identified he had a problem and entered that fact into the record. That fact is key. Laws already exist in CT to prevent people like Lanza from purchasing firearms. He wasn’t in the system because of that (my understanding is that he was denied a purchase because of a police record that had nothing to do with his psychological state).
Now, pretending for a moment like he was, we then reach the other part that is so troubling: punishing people for guilt by association. What are the limits to banning people from doing something because they are somehow associated with someone else who might do something bad? For instance, if I am associated with someone who manufactures methamphetamines, should I be banned from purchasing pseudoephedrine? Perhaps that is a reductionist example, but I think it serves the point.
I will say that I am against any such limits because, frankly, nearly every person in the US fits into that definition somehow without even realizing they do. It would be far better to make sure that people like Lanza don’t slip through the cracks so both they and their caretakers understand what is at stake than to try to stop such things by punishing people for crimes that haven’t been committed.
Because, frankly, not even most people with mental disorders commit acts of violence like Lanza. We’re talking about, literally, single instances in populations of tens of millions. Again, I think the reaction is more to the nature of this specific crime than to a larger threat.
And in the end, your last observation is the most important one: it’s more about the person. Adam Lanza slipped through the cracks. A whole bunch of people who knew he was in trouble failed him. That failure ended in unimaginable tragedy. If we need to focus on anything, it should be to prevent such failures from ever happening again.
Jason,
I just noticed your comment was in the filter. Believe it or not few people actually comment here so I don’t check it very often. I didn’t even realize anyone had commented on this post because I hadn’t checked the site since before Christmas. As you’re not a robot spammer (AFAIK) I approved the comment. Just because I ignore doesn’t mean I suppress.
And yes, I have been ignoring because I feel this particular discussion is pointless. There’s a reason I rarely talk about political things and I’ve discussed it on this site in the past – a reason I ignored when I made the initial post the other day much to my chagrin. Ultimately it boils down to why bother? I asked for ideas from the pro gun control crowd that would have prevented aurora or sandy hook. The most reasonable discussion I ended up having started out with two or three distortions of my point and straw men that I didn’t fall for. By the time we got past that we had a decent conversation. The problem is that I don’t have the patience many (like Denny) do in making the same arguments over and over – it’s like talking to a wall, which is why I posted the link in this post.
You may call it one-sided but if you read the whole thing I expect it will be difficult to argue with many of his points; frankly – because the guy knows what he’s talking about way more than any of us do.
If you took my snark in this post and on Twitter personally, then I apologize. It’s just what I do when I get irritated. If you are who I think you are I hope you know I have a great respect for your writing even if on this issue I think you’re horribly wrong. And if you’re not who I think you are, then I’m confused.
I’m just going to go back to writing about video games and movies.
Bacon,
At first I assumed you just weren’t checking due to the holidays but when I noticed you had made another post, I wondered how you wouldn’t have then noticed that there was comment waiting. Oversight I can understand, so please forgive any comments made in frustration. It did kind of derail that discussion though.
As far as Twitter, what bothered me the most was not being made fun of (karma has to even the score somehow right?) but that my comments were being mocked without first being seriously addressed. I responded to your car analogy and was/am a little disappointed that you bailed on that. I will agree that things didn’t go well at first here and will accept responsibility for my role in that.
Unlike you guys, this is only conversation on this topic that I’m involved in and there’s a reason for that. I was hoping that here I’d find some open, unconventional thinkers (on both sides of the issue) and together we could focus on realistic solutions that aren’t either “Nobody can has guns!!!!” or “Everybody can has whatever guns!!!!!”
I think too many people equate “gun control” with taking away guns. But really, Dennis’ licensing idea is a form of gun control and that’s the kind of thing I’m interested in.
One thing I read last week that really made a lot of sense was that the pro-gun types respond to any talk of gun regulations the way pro-abortion types respond to any talk of abortion regulation. They don’t want to let the camel get its nose into the tent, so to speak. The camel being abolition, either of gun rights or of abortion. That makes a lot of sense to me. I’m not trying to show an equivalence as far as the validity of those positions go – just the tactics.
The fact that even the most collegial discussions I’ve had on the topic have involved a lot of hand-wringing, strawman arguments, and distortions makes it easy to get on edge too.
Also, I seriously didn’t see your comment until yesterday. The comments do show up on the wordpress dashboard when I log in like I did when I wrote this post. The problem is that I’m so used to no one reading or commenting that I don’t pay any attention to it most times, because the most recent comment is usually from like six months ago. Trust me, I’m not one to try and silence anyone on here or tilt the playing field underhandedly.