Good luck demonstrating this.
Of course, I wasn’t commenting on nutcases; I was talking about your run-of-the-mill violent criminals.
There are no good reasons to own lots of guns.
Just a hint: this argument will work on neither LPFab nor myself. Inasmuch as we support a default policy position of “freedom,” an absense of “good” reasons for behavior isn’t going to convince us to outlaw it. Starting from the position that personal preference (i.e., economic freedom) is unimportant, I could, for example, fairly easily demonstrate that collecting automobiles should be illegal. Or, for that matter, collecting anything. There are objectively negative results (leaving out jobs creating whatever is being collected) of collecting anything, and no objectively “good” reasons to do so.
This is because “good” is completely subjective. What you mean is that you see no good reason to own a lot of guns. Fortunately, freedom doesn’t mean everyone doing whatever Detritus IX thinks is good.
Firstly, you’re never going to be fighting with more than one gun. Having extras is just ridiculous.
Again, cars. Or, say, anything else.
Second, there’s no reason at all for you to own milspec gear except for armed insurrection. Trot pointed out the sheer ridiculousness of wanting an assault rifle so that you could mow down rioters. Wake up. You are not Duke Nukem. You are not the guy in Postal. You are not Judge fucking Dredd.
I am going to address this issue specially, and I am going to try to address a failing that runs throughout this post. That is, it is utterly clear that you have no concept of the use of guns in relation to personal/property defense. A person does not buy a gun so that he can shoot criminals, even if the purpose of the gun is purely self-defense. The gun is for deterence, plain and simple.
Now, let’s talk about rioters. Let us say that you own a small store in a major city. It is probable that your entire life is in this store; it represents your entire net worth. Suppose that a riot occurs, and rioters are looting/burning/destroying stores. So, you wish to stop a large number of people from destroying your life. What do you think will stop this crowd of people: a pump action shotgun, or an assualt rifle? The purpose of the rifle is not to shoot the rioters; in fact, shooting rioters would be illegal anyway, so your first hope is just to get them to go away. The purpose of the rifle is to convince them to do this. You cannot defend a building from a crowd with a shotgun, and crowds know this. You can, however, defend that building with a rifle.
You want to collect guns? Fine. Get the chambers filled in so that they’ll never fire another shot.
You want to go hunting? Keep your guns at the lodge. And rifles only, punk.
Again . . . cars. Also, “You want freedom? Go to hell.”
You want some home invasions statistics?
In 2% of home invasions against gun owners, the owners of the house get to use their gun against the intruder.
It is more than twice as likely for the criminal to take the homeowner’s gun and shoot him with it
In the vast majority of cases, the gun remains in a drawer somewhere while the robbing or the raping or whatever goes on unimpeded. How useful.
Unfortunately, none of this is relevent. The important question is: do stricter gun laws increase or decrease the number of home invasions? Because what you have shown is that, for the average intrusion, the result will be the same whether or not a gun is owned. Therefore, if break-ins go down when gun laws become less strict, then less strict gun laws are better than more strict gun laws.
And, empirically, home invasions do in fact go down.
This, again, is because the purpose of a gun in your home is not for you to shoot criminals. It is to convince criminals not to come into your home in the first place.
Next, most violent criminals are poor. They cannot afford to buy guns. How, then, do they get guns? Well, most of them are stolen from the homes of people like you. That’s right, the vast majority of guns on the black market are brought into circulation thanks to itinerat gun-nuts.
So . . . ? The solution to this is better gun security within those homes. The impossibility of eliminating guns will be discussed more later.
Also, guns in homes add a whole new level of deadliness to domestic disputes. Look at statistics on violence in the homes of police officers, who are forced to keep guns at home. Instead of cooling off, pull out your gun and blow the bitch’s brains out! A means of dealing certain death at your fingertips changes everything, and not for the better.
Unfortunately for you, this argument hinges on a very small number of cases. The number of crimes that are stopped through gun ownership is far greater. And, by the way, not all uses of a gun for self-defence occur within the home(or even most, or many . . . I mean, invading a home is pretty idiotic, and as such most robberies take place either outside, i.e. muggings, or inside businesses).
Finally, your arguments are all empirically denied, as has been pointed out. Look, if you will, to the UK, or Canada or Japan, or especially Australia, which recently implemented gun control (and don’t try to respond with that retarded myth about gun murders increasing in australia after the ban. Snopes.com has already debunked that, and besides: the Australia institute of criminology has statistics that tell a different story.)
This geographical argument is senseless. Look, if you will, at Russia or Brazil. Or, on the other end of things, take a quick look at Switzerland. Or look within the U.S. Where are there more gun laws: Washington, D.C. or Wyoming? And where are there more murders? Or look at major cities in the western (or “gun-nut”) United States versus those on the eastern side of the nation.
You, right now, are like a church official proclaiming that the world is flat, after Magellan has just finished sailing round it. These other countries watch Dead Alive and play GTA III, and yet don’t go killing each other with guns. Because they don’t have them. No matter how logical you may consider your arguments, they have still been proven wrong. You have a less valid argument than fucking creationists.
I have never blamed the murder rate on GTA III, or any other media. But, I’m sorry, you’re just wrong. There is no reason to expect that murder rates in different nations, or even in different parts of the same nation, can be sensibly compared. The only important facts in this debate are the changes in crime rates after serious changes in gun restrictions. Notice that what are important here are crime rates, not just murder rates. There is no reason to expect murder rates to substantially change, since murders are already commited with illegally owned guns, and murder is one of the more difficult crimes to defend against. It is a lot less likely that you will be able to defend yourself against an attempted murder than an attempted robbery.
Good thing that you can’t grow guns in your back yard. Or that poor columbians can’t raise guns as a cash crop. Or that guns can’t be easily hidden.
Can’t be easily hidden? How about by taking them apart and packaging them in with machine parts? Further, guns, unlike drugs, cannot be searched for by dogs. Also, by quantity the demand for criminal guns is far lower than that for drugs. Even if smuggling guns were harder than drugs, and it isn’t, demand would still be easily met. And even if guns were illegal plenty would still be made (for police, here and abroad; for militaries; for countries with less restictive gun laws).
Drugs are a whole different ballgame. They are wanted by teens for disposable pleasure, rather than for long term security by middle-aged adults. There is an entirely different network of supply and distribution.
Can we say “false analogy?”
No, we can’t. Of course the supply situation is different; guns a legal and drugs aren’t. Remember prohibition? The network for supply and distribution of alcohol changed (and rapidly) to accomodate the new laws. There is no reason to suspect that the change would be any different for guns. Further, it wouldn’t be your average adults looking for guns for self-defense; go to a place where guns a illegal and see how many otherwise law-abiding individuals own them. It would be criminals, and criminals, on average, know quite a bit about the supply and distribution system for drugs.
I supported the war in Afganistan. But as soon as it stopped being glamorous, we forgot about them. Afganistan is sliding into a pit of tiny autocracies, our warlord allies showing their true colors at last. The ‘democratic government’ has no power once you get a few miles away from the capital.
We got bored and abandoned an entire fucking nation. And surprise, surprise. It’s going to the crapper.
Things take time. The world is not magic. A functioning democracy in the capitol will allow for the spread of that government, with foreign support.
Let’s get a source on that, chum. Because the prevailing view is that Rumsfeld told the CIA what he wanted them to conclude, and made them do it. British and American intelligence personnel have been speaking up across the board about how there was no credible intelligence, but that the political leader couldn’t have cared less.
Really . . . was he in there telling them that when Clinton was President? Did he tell German intelligence also (they say Saddam would have been nuclear within five years)? Of course intelligence personel are coming out now; they look like idiots, and they are covering their asses.
Why should we assume that he had WMDs? Because he was the kind of guy who would have wanted them? You’re just grasping for straws. This is truly pathetic. It would be idiotic in the extreme to assume WMDs with nothing more than the word of Ahmed Chalabi.
Why shouldn’t we assume that he had them? Because he was such a nice, honest fellow who had fully accounted for all the weapons he had in the past? Further, it is undeniable that he had the knowledge and resources to cook up a sizable batch of biological and/or chemical weapons. The time required to make such weapons, once you are in possession of the requisite items and expertise, is not significant. So, a much more logical conclusion is that he destroyed the weapons just before the war, as it would be easy to recreate such weapons later, after the U.S. had pulled a Vietnam-style retreat under domestic criticism.
Uh oh, a minute ago, you said that we attacked Saddam because he was a threat to the United States. Hmm. Now we are fighting for Justice!
I would never claim that he was threat to the U.S. He was a threat to international stability, but even instability is not a threat to the U.S., excepting economic concerns. Of course, Hitler wasn’t a threat to the U.S. either. Saddam could have created and/or sold weapons to terrorists, who would then use them against the U.S., killing large numbers of people. But killing U.S. citizens does not really put the larger “United States” in danger; no one is about to destroy the U.S. At the same time, I would rather that those citizens weren’t killed, and I would rather that international stability were maintained, so I would rather that Iraq be under a government less liable to make and use such weapons.
Except that we didn’t know about the killings until after the war. Why? Because we had no post-gulf war intelligence on Iraq. We had no idea what the fuck he was doing. Which is why it was idiotic to attack him based on guesses and rumors.
“Well, we don’t know exactly, so he’s probably just holding tea parties and charity balls.” Don’t be stupid. It was far more responsible, in the absense of large quantities of information, to assume that his behavior was the same as before. This is why prisoners up for parole have a hearing; the default assumption is that their behaviors have not changed, and without credible information to the contrary theyt are not released. Of course, lack of information is its own kind of intelligence; the U.S. knows, and knew then, that the situation inside Iraq wasn’t great, so a total lack of political dissent is a pretty disturbing sign. Beyond that, those few Iraqis who were able to escape the nation gave pretty disturbing accounts of what was taking place within. So, it isn’t as though the U.S. knew nothing.
As for nukes, though it is, of course, impossible to prove a negative, just before the invasion, Saddam agreed to allow U.S. troops to do weapons inspections. This may have turned out to be bullshit, but the fact that the Bush administration ignored the offer shows that they regarded the time before the war as mere public relations pacification rather than any real deliberation.
No one has said that Saddam had nukes. He may have wanted a nuclear program, but nukes are expensive and hard to create. What the U.S. maintained that he had was chemical and biological agents.
Of course the administration was not deliberating war for that whole time. Look, if you expect each new administration to start from scratch on foreign policy, you are being foolish. Bush knew that Clinton, and before him Bush Sr, had wasted over a decade playing with Saddam. The U.S. wasn’t going to put up with his nonsense. The time before the war was for two purposes: try to convince the rest of the world to support the war (obviously impossible; once these countries knew we would act with or without their support they knew that they could effectively get the benefits if a world without Sadddam and reap the domestic benefits of thumbing their noses at the U.S. at the same time. Of course they weren’t going to support the action), and give Saddam one last chance to avoid war. His midnight offer of inspections, an offer that did not meet the demands made of him, was rightfully ignored.
Oh, and if you read the New York Times, then you’d know that new evidence has come to light suggesting that Saddam planned the whole thing so far. He let his army crumple like a wet paper bag while hiding millions, if not billions of dollars, and secreting conventional weapons around iraq in pockets for his autonomous guerilla cells. He then planned his hiding carefully.
If you think about it, it was the only viable option for him in the face of overwhelming US power on the battlefield. But we played right into his hands. Because our country is run by fucktards.
New evidence? This has long been the opinion of many conservatives, myself included. Of course that was his plan; how would you propose the U.S. could have stopped him from carrying it out? “Oh, Saddam might do something smart to make this harder on us, he might not fight a conventional war like an idiot, I guess that we shouldn’t remove him from power after all.” Doesn’t that sound pretty stupid? This is still not a very difficult or dangerous fight, in objective terms. The only thing that “plays into his hands” is behaving as if this strategy is suprising (instead of obvious), brilliant (instead of obvious), and a serious danger to U.S. success (instead of, well, not a danger), thereby fulfilling the final element of the strategy, the element you so cleverly omitted to mention: U.S. retreat due to domestic political pressue, pressue being formented by people like you. And, actually, the U.S. did try to escape this outcome by attempting to kill Saddam directly the night the war started, as well as other times during the war itself. That the U.S. failed is more a matter of bad luck than of U.S. leaders being “fucktards.”
One can be opposed to Saddam and also opposed to idiotic uses of unilateral power to violate other nation’s sovreignity. And our views have been validated by the aftereffects of the war and our failure to fix up Iraq.
Failure? In a period of months? How long were we in Germany? How long in Japan? Fixing things takes time. Dear god, you are like a pampered child. “Mommy, it’s hard, do I have to?”
Nation’s sovereignty my ass; we are restoring sovereignty to the nation by removing power from the hands of the dictator that had been running it.
Also, note that our attack on Saddam caused North Korea to (quite rightly) feel threatened. Diplomatic talks collapsed and they went nuclear. They are a real threat to world security, and their populace suffers far more than the Iraqis ever did. Pity the current administration is only interested in antagonizing them with tough-guy posturing.
They were already nuclear! For Christ’s sake, pull your head out of your ass. They’re worried? Good! Maybe they’ll stop using their citiznes as slaves and threatening to invade South Korea. So, we didn’t pay them their bribe money to keep lying about their nuclear program, and as such they stopped lying. Excuse me for not being upset. Yeah, and pity about the current administration, since Clinton’s coddling stupidity worked such wonders on that nation.