All-purpose gun legislation thread

legowarrior · 2016-01-08T18:11:17.000Z

Incendiary Lemon:

I don’t think it’s the NRA - the manufactures believe there isn’t much demand for such technology.

Personally, I would have concerns about reliability.

When we increased the drinking age we saw a sharp dip in the number of fatalities among eighteen year olds. We also so a corresponding increase in the number of deaths among twenty-one year olds.

By restricting access to firearms you may (or may not) reduce the overall fatality rate. You will see a shift in methodology - be it pills, hanging, or automobile. I think we should thus consider those implications before proceeding. Better yet, we should design a program that attacks not just the method but the root cause of suicides.

Nah, its the NRA. The manufacturers are scared shirtless from this organization as the politicians are. You can ruin your business if the NRA comes after you. A dealership was about to sell smart guns, and the NRA came down on him hard. Got death threats and everything. Why you might ask? NRA believes that smart guns are a back door to gun control. Once you have smart guns, it won’t be hard to convince most of the public to ban none smart guns. I mean, the worst stories you hear about are kids playing with guns and shoting themselves or others, so its an easy sell, since smart guns would limit that event.

Worse for the NRA and manufacturers, NJ is already printed and ready, since state law states that 3 years after smart guns are available, all non smart gun sales will be banned. Talk about gun control.

Anyway, I hope that Feds start buying a shit ton of them from a start up company, and we start seeing a shift. It won’t be the 100% ban that I dream of, or even the tight restrictions that just make common sense, but it would a start to a sensible future, away from the tin foil hat wearers that are crazy enough to think that a gun could protect them from the government, or believe that it will somehow make the safe.

Morons.

inactive_user · 2016-01-08T19:10:17.000Z

Is there anything the NRA doesn’t believe is a back door to gun control?

Pyperkub · 2016-01-08T19:52:08.000Z

Adam B:

Is there anything the NRA doesn’t believe is a back door to gun control?

No, because Obama!

Incendiary_Lemon · 2016-01-08T20:06:43.000Z

legowarrior:

Nah, its the NRA. The manufacturers are scared shirtless from this organization as the politicians are.

That would be a convenient thing for you to believe.

Worse for the NRA and manufacturers, NJ is already printed and ready, since state law states that 3 years after smart guns are available, all non smart gun sales will be banned. Talk about gun control.

NPR had a good piece on this, and how it’s actually stimied efforts to develop these weapons.

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/06/24/325178305/a-new-jersey-law-thats-kept-smart-guns-off-shelves-nationwide

legowarrior · 2016-01-08T20:43:26.000Z

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/01/08/3736523/smart-gun-obstacles/

The NRA organizes a boycott of anyone that even tries to make America Safe.

Strollen · 2016-01-08T22:01:46.000Z

LMN8R:

In Obama’s statement in talked about suicides as being the biggest cause of gun death multiple times. It’s not like he’s trying to hide that fact.

But a suicidal person will be a lot less successful if they don’t have a gun than if they do have a gun.

Much like how a person who wants to commit mass murder will be a lot less successful with a knife than a fully automatic rifle.

There appears to be virtually no link between gun ownershipand suicide rates.
So even though the US has a gun ownership rate 180 times greater than Japan, and South Korea those two countries have a suicide rate that is 50% and 140% higher. Some of the countries with tiny sucide rates (mostly Muslim) have large gun ownership. For instance India has almost 10x Pakistan suicide rate, yet Pakistan have ~3x the gun ownership of India.

It makes logically sense that reducing guns would reduce successful suicides, but there is virtually no data to support it.

olaf · 2016-01-08T22:56:51.000Z

legowarrior:

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/01/08/3736523/smart-gun-obstacles/

The NRA organizes a boycott of anyone that even tries to make America Safe.

Are you fucking kidding me? The military, law enforcement and consumers don’t want “smart guns” because it makes guns less reliable.

Timex · 2016-01-08T23:12:33.000Z

olaf:

Are you fucking kidding me? The military, law enforcement and consumers don’t want “smart guns” because it makes guns less reliable.

At this point, I believe that the technology in smart guns is pretty solid. I’m not sure why the notion would be assumed that it would have a significant impact on reliability, other than some idea that newer technology is always worse.

ddtibbs · 2016-01-08T23:23:30.000Z

Timex:

At this point, I believe that the technology in smart guns is pretty solid.

Based on what?

carltonbauheimer · 2016-01-09T00:38:45.000Z

Strollen:

There appears to be virtually no link between gun ownershipand suicide rates.
So even though the US has a gun ownership rate 180 times greater than Japan, and South Korea those two countries have a suicide rate that is 50% and 140% higher. Some of the countries with tiny sucide rates (mostly Muslim) have large gun ownership. For instance India has almost 10x Pakistan suicide rate, yet Pakistan have ~3x the gun ownership of India.

It makes logically sense that reducing guns would reduce successful suicides, but there is virtually no data to support it.

Topically relevant link: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-ownership-and-use/

Strollen · 2016-01-09T03:48:48.000Z

I found the CNN gun control debate to be pretty good. Here is the video The questions were good, and the President treated them fairly for the most part. I mostly agree with the Presidents proposals, and completely agree with his characterization of them being a very modest step. He did routinely duck the questions of “so how would of your proposal prevented any of the mass shooting.”

I think in no small part because in fact they wouldn’t have prevented any of them.

Fishbreath · 2016-01-09T05:12:21.000Z

Timex:

At this point, I believe that the technology in smart guns is pretty solid. I’m not sure why the notion would be assumed that it would have a significant impact on reliability, other than some idea that newer technology is always worse.

It isn’t. The one smart gun that was close to market a year or two ago was crap both as a gun and a smart gun.

The issue with smart guns generally is that gun people don’t want them and won’t buy them, so gun manufacturers aren’t interested in making them, so the only people who are really interested in designing smart guns are people who don’t understand what makes a gun good.

TimJames · 2016-01-09T05:33:14.000Z

Timex:

At this point, I believe that the technology in smart guns is pretty solid. I’m not sure why the notion would be assumed that it would have a significant impact on reliability, other than some idea that newer technology is always worse.

I can write off people like legowarrior and let him exhaust himself, but I’m surprised to see you struggle so badly with poor assumptions. Are you really so unimaginative that you can’t think of any plausible reason why people would be concerned, either about smart guns or the vague definition of mental illness?

Really, there’s such a thing as healthy skepticism. We’re not all Fox News drones programmed with talking points from the NRA. If you can’t understand why intelligent people might believe something, that’s a failure on your part. Educate yourself and try to see the world from another perspective. (And for God’s sake, don’t ask me to help you; it’s the weekend!)

Lynch · 2016-01-09T05:40:24.000Z

The Future always sucks for conservative folks. News at eleven. Gun laws in the US are going to change simply because they have to change.

Fishbreath · 2016-01-09T05:47:59.000Z

Lynch:

The Future always sucks for conservative folks. News at eleven. Gun laws in the US are going to change simply because they have to change.

The present always sucks for progressive folks. Gun laws will most likely not change in the way you’d like, going by recent historical trends, because there are way more single-issue pro-gun voters than single-issue anti-gun voters.

legowarrior · 2016-01-09T07:21:18.000Z

So, after reading Tim’s post, I realized that some of you will probably ignore the following linked post from Fortune Magazine, that goes into the history of smart gun, its reliability (.01% failure rate) and how the NRA went after gun makers that wanted to sell safe guns.

Fortune

Smart guns: They're ready. Are we?

The technology is available to limit the number of children who perish in gun accidents. That was the easy part.

Anyway, it’s a slightly longish piece, so take your time. I won’t quote anything from it, because I feel it’s disingenuous to ripe out parts of the article to support my point of view, because that’s all it would be there. There is more to the article than my point of view though, and I think it’s really informative.

TimJames · 2016-01-09T08:00:09.000Z

legowarrior, I won’t ignore your links because you posted them. I will ignore them if the content is trash, like your posts.

There are a couple paragraphs in this article that may help Timex, and the eye-rolling melodramatic sentences are kept to a minimum. (It’s difficult to read “If Armatix can persuade such a unit to adopt the iP9, the world will change” without laughing.) But any fan of liberty has learned to filter out little throwaway lines like that in mainstream journalism.

Personally, for any sort of P&R topic, whether it’s education or racism or abortion or smart guns, I imagine the world in a couple decades and a couple centuries. If the trend line is inevitable, I don’t worry much about it. Of course we’ll have reliable smart guns 200 years from now. I’d be happy to have a magical flawless one. I’m sure many people who don’t currently own a gun would be happy to own the same, which is why you don’t see universal support for them among the gun control groups. I don’t find them compelling at this point in time, and I’m naturally skeptical about mandates in general. There’s not a lot of juice in this topic.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

rshetts · 2016-01-09T08:25:43.000Z

Strollen:

There appears to be virtually no link between gun ownershipand suicide rates.
So even though the US has a gun ownership rate 180 times greater than Japan, and South Korea those two countries have a suicide rate that is 50% and 140% higher. Some of the countries with tiny sucide rates (mostly Muslim) have large gun ownership. For instance India has almost 10x Pakistan suicide rate, yet Pakistan have ~3x the gun ownership of India.

It makes logically sense that reducing guns would reduce successful suicides, but there is virtually no data to support it.

My problem with these stats is that they rely on the belief that gun ownership and suicide attempts have a causal relationship, in order to have any valid use in the topic at hand. So unless you believe that owning a gun makes you more likely to commit suicide, Im not sure what conclusion you are trying to draw. Suicide is a mental issue and not a gun possession issue, as your statistic bear out so a more important and useful statistic would be the percentages of successful gun suicides per attempts versus other methods.

Timex · 2016-01-09T09:15:50.000Z

Tim James:

I can write off people like legowarrior and let him exhaust himself, but I’m surprised to see you struggle so badly with poor assumptions. Are you really so unimaginative that you can’t think of any plausible reason why people would be concerned, either about smart guns or the vague definition of mental illness?

Really, there’s such a thing as healthy skepticism. We’re not all Fox News drones programmed with talking points from the NRA. If you can’t understand why intelligent people might believe something, that’s a failure on your part. Educate yourself and try to see the world from another perspective. (And for God’s sake, don’t ask me to help you; it’s the weekend!)

Oh, sure, I can understand why people would be skeptical of the failure rate of a new technology like a smart gun. But at the same time, I don’t believe that skepticism is currently fact based.

If indeed a smart gun had a terrible failure rate, that would be reason enough to reject it. But I don’t believe this is currently the case. And with the low failure rate, that should eliminate the issue for rational people. If the failure rate is exceptionally low, and yet is still used as any argument not only for not mandating the technology but for preventing anyone else from even using the technology? Via death threats to people who try and sell it? That’s totally irrational.

Aleck · 2016-01-09T09:41:13.000Z

rshetts:

My problem with these stats is that they rely on the belief that gun ownership and suicide attempts have a causal relationship, in order to have any valid use in the topic at hand. So unless you believe that owning a gun makes you more likely to commit suicide, Im not sure what conclusion you are trying to draw. Suicide is a mental issue and not a gun possession issue, as your statistic bear out so a more important and useful statistic would be the percentages of successful gun suicides per attempts versus other methods.

Check the Harvard link upthread. While Strollen’s link is interesting internationally, the Harvard link deals with US states and is a very interesting look at how different states (with different gun ownership rates) have widely varying suicide statistics. SPOILER: generally, the more guns per person in a state, the more “successful” (fatal) suicide attempts you have.