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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (57176)	2/20/2018 11:39:25 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 361083

Dave likes to bring up his childhood and guns. And he wonders what has changed since then. My childhood was similar. I was raised in a small(ish) town in East Texas. Lots of people hunted and had guns. My father liked to hunt in his younger days, my mom experienced a bad event when she was a child and forbade guns in the house else we likely would have had a rifle. But, my grandparents lived on a farm and had a couple of rifles, so I did go shooting on occasion. And there was no shortage of BB and pellet guns. But guns were treated differently. They were tools with certain uses. Except for a small minority, protection from other people was not one of the uses that would even occur to most. And they worked security or were traveling salesmen who often carried large sums of cash. That is different now. Despite crime being at the lowest level, if not lower, since those days, there are people who get a gun for protection. Guns have also been raised to some sort of totem, as an early ad for the AR-15 put it, "here is your man card". Now, guns are seen as protection. Despite having one in your house makes you 3 times more likely to die of gun violence. Usually by your own hand, but also by a family member. And that is also despite the fact that the odds of being a victim of violence is at a very low point, and the probability of that is still declining. As to your question, making semi-automatics highly restricted would have little impact. Other than engaging in mass killings, the zombie apocalypse and highly contrived scenarios like "imagine a dozen or so blah people, hopped up on bath salts, break into your house, intent on killing your family", it would make no difference.

To: Lane3 who wrote (57176)	2/20/2018 11:43:29 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361083

>> In the interest of "proper analysis," I'll ask once again. If they were gone overnight, what about our lives might be missing or newly harmful? For me, nothing at all. I would in no way be affected. But for those who use them, however, they do, their rights under the 2nd Amendment would have been taken away without any real reason (because we have no evidence they are "the" problem). Some people just collect them; does that give less stature to their freedom to own the weapon? I don't know. I won't attempt to put the words in your mouth but one COULD argue, "We're taking away a person's right to enjoy shooting his AR15 at the range in exchange to save the lives of school children." But that argument does not hold water because there is no evidence that it will save even one school child's life. If there were, then we could at least discuss that trade off. Here, even that isn't a viable discussion. The argument that we will respond to future data points by changing the legislation strikes me as fantasy. We did that before with assault weapons and here we are again. I would ask, "How about we ban first-person shooter video games?" Who would be harmed by that? The idea that a kid exposed to 30 or 40 hours a week of it, over a period of months or even years, might not be desensitized to violent acts is strange to me. Charles Whitman (Texas Tower shooter) was autopsied and found to have a brain tumor which some doctors believed caused his behavior. Everyone has something. Lots of these kids have been on modern antidepressants which may be part of the problem or a mere symptom of the underlying cause (depression). I don't object to making changes but I question the efficacy of doing so based on a public outcry following an emotional event like this. And without a provision for metrics which can provide information as to the effectiveness of it so that if it is determined the AR15 wasn't the problem, those rights can be restored.