Monday, November 6, 2017

Vegas, Texas and Better Gun Control

Why does any normal American hunter / home protector need access to this gun?
Jerry keeps arguing for easy access to these weapons and I keep arguing against it.


Youngest killed was 17 month old girl...



66 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think it's because people have a death wish.

--Hiram

Anonymous said...

From what I have gathered in my reading lately, without delving too deeply, violence toward women is the one aspect that most highly correlates with mass shootings.

1) We must not allow those with ANY history of violence to legally purchase a gun.
2) I keep hearing the argument that people have the right to buy these semi-automatic assault style guns because they like to shoot them. Great! They can be kept under lock and key at shooting ranges. Make it a felony to have one in your home.
3) If it was only about mental illness, then other countries would have the same problem we do. They don't, so it's not.

Moose

jerrye92002 said...

Let's see. Yes, that is the gun. Millions of them are in law-abiding hands and yet shot no one at all last week.

You keep insisting that no one "needs" such a weapon. Just like a few bureaucrats in Washington get to decide what health insurance my family "needs." Why should YOU get to decide what anybody else needs?

Yes, this gun would be categorized as an "assault weapon" under the now-elapsed Assault Weapons Ban. It elapsed because it had "no detectable effect" on gun crime.

The guy broke several existing gun laws, including the one that said his domestic violence conviction should have prevented his ownership. Then he broke the law against murder 26 times. Surely one more gun law would eliminate the problem.

And let us not forget it was a nearby homeowner with a gun that put a stop to the rampage.

Look, I understand the desire to "do something." But that "something" ought to be something with some reasonable prospect for solving the problem, and sometimes that "something" just doesn't exist. Like this one.

Anonymous said...

For myself, I just avoid places where people are armed. I am ok with gun violence just as long as the butcher's bill goes to someone else.

--Hiram

Anonymous said...

As with health care, other countries have figured it out. I wonder why we can't.

The rest of the world has also figured out that something need to be done to combat Climate Change. The US is the only country not signed on to Paris.

Sad. Just terribly stupid and sad. We're being governed by idiots.

Moose

Anonymous said...

We have made decisions on things. We are basically ok with mass shootings. And we reject whatever scientific consensus on climate. And recently we learned that the notion that a lot of Japanese cars are made in America is just fake news.

--Hiram

jerrye92002 said...

I have recently discovered that much of what people know for certain just ain't so. Catastrophic manmade climate change, that socialized medicine works, and that guns cause murder are just a few.

And those people in Texas and Las Vegas and San Bernardino and Sandy Hook were ALL IN gun-free zones. It didn't help. Fortunately the rampage in Texas was cut short by an armed citizen with an "assault rifle."

Moose, you may be right about one thing. We are being governed by the idiots who respond to opinion polls of the uninformed and misinformed.

Sean said...

The biggest argument in favor of gun control has nothing to do with mass shootings, but rather with preventing suicide.

Anonymous said...

No, jerry, you've proved over and over again that your ideology trumps your common sense.

The rest of the civilized world has this gun death thing figured out. We, as a nation, are too stupid to get it right.

Moose

jerrye92002 said...

Considering we rank 100th in the world, give or take, in murder rate, I think we do pretty well. And if we would enforce our existing gun laws better, we MIGHT do better still. MIGHT being the operative word. It was the law that left those Texans in a gun-free zone.

Anonymous said...

Strawman alert!

I said gun deaths, not murder rate.

Moose

Anonymous said...

NYTimes Mass Shootings

Moose

Anonymous said...

Yes, that is the gun. Millions of them are in law-abiding hands and yet shot no one at all last week.

Sure, the people killed and wounded were only in the three figures. Less than a thousand. Isn't that price all of us should be willing to pay to secure the blessings of freely available assault rifles?

--Hiram

John said...

The self defense argument always makes me shake my head...

And that idiot Trump doubled down it...

As if people are going to be carrying around guns like the one shown in the post while going to Church, School, Concerts, etc.

jerrye92002 said...

How about defense of others? The neighbor had his "assault weapon" in his house, so what about that is so wrong? Why is Trump an idiot for recognizing the basic human right of self-defense? Don't you?

If you have been in Paris recently, you will notice large numbers of such weapons on open display, all over the place. The problem isn't the guns or that people carry them, it is the rare person carrying one with evil intent. And more of them in the hands of the law-abiding means a greater deterrent for the law-breaking.

John said...

I am happy to say I have made it back to the USA. I am sitting in the Detroit airport. Just one more flight to go !!!

Here is what our buddy Trump had to say...
NPR Trump

ABC Trump's Different Responses

"The policies of this administration focus much more attention on mass casualty attacks in which the perpetrator can be connected in some way to a foreign terrorist organization and therefore validate the administration's rhetoric on the need for a travel ban and stronger immigration enforcement,"

So apparently Trump wants to save innocent Americans from Outsiders, but if innocent Americans are killed by Americans then no policy change is required.

jerrye92002 said...

Moose, I said murder RATE, not total numbers. If 26 people are murdered in a nation of 300 million, that is far less serious than 26 people murdered in a nation of 7 million people. Neither is the less tragic, but the latter should be more "serious" and concerning.

And charting the number of guns versus the number of mass shootings? Which is the "independent variable" in such a chart?

John said...

And I am very puzzled by who all these hundred other people who would have died if the neighbor had not pulled out his gun and shot the suspect as he was leaving the church???

CNN Shooting Timeline

Anonymous said...

Not that many people are murdered by people using automatic weapons, I suppose. Thousands of concertgoers in Las Vegas survived the attack, and many of them weren't even wounded. It's all relative, I suppose.

Americans should take comfort that it's highly, highly, unlike that they or their children will be gun downed at at their church or at their school, a movie, or while attending a concert. Maybe the Republican policy of combining thoughts with prayers as a response to gun violence is more successful than many of it's critics think.

--Hiram

jerrye92002 said...

Hiram, nobody in recent weeks, in the US, has been murdered by automatic weapons; they have been illegal since the '30s. There ARE automatic weapons on the street, mostly in the hands of criminal gangs. They're still illegal, so only criminals have them.

And you are correct, such mass shootings are VERY rare in the US. There are more gun murders (about 60% of murders) every DAY, than were in the Texas mass shooting. If we need to "do something" about that, then didn't what we already did prevent the other 10,000 homicides this year?

jerrye92002 said...

John, your timeline doesn't much help. And if the neighbor is responsible for limiting or even preventing this tragedy, why do you want new federal laws that would prevent him from doing it?

John said...

None of my recommended laws would have prevented the heroes actions.

jerrye92002 said...

You would prohibit semi-automatic rifles with large clips, exactly what the neighbor had. Both he AND the shooter had "AR-type" weapons. And his response time probably WAS limited by the gun safe you would require him to have.

John said...

If he needed more than 15 rounds to shoot a guy 30 yards away... He had better spend more time at the range.

A handgun should have been adequate.

My rule does not require a safe, the owner is just responsible if their weapon is stolen.

John said...

And a 3 digit safe is pretty quick to open.

My daughter does it multiple times a day between classes.

And that is too slow they have push button safes now.

Anonymous said...

nobody in recent weeks, in the US, has been murdered by automatic weapons;

Well realtively few. Isn't this a small price to pay for universal access to assault weapons?

This is a fight I am not that interested in fighting anymore. I just play the odds, the objective fact that it is highly unlikely that I or anyone I know will be gunned down.

--Hiram

Anonymous said...

You said murder rate, but we weren't talking about the murder rate. We were talking about gun deaths.

In countries with fewer guns there are fewer gun deaths and lower murder rates.

Occam's Razor and what not.

Mooose

John said...

Moose,
Source please.

jerrye92002 said...

Actually, Moose's statement is factually incorrect and inconsistent. It is possible for countries with fewer guns to have fewer gun deaths, or MORE gun deaths. It is possible for countries with few guns to have lower murder rates, or HIGHER murder rates, which, if you look at the numbers, is largely the case. People get murdered and if guns aren't available, they get murdered by something else. And if there are MORE guns, there tends to be less crime and fewer murders.

Occam's razor states that the simplest solution is usually the correct one. In this case, the simple solution is the WRONG one. Guns don't kill people. They allow deranged criminals to kill people. We should outlaw deranged criminals.

Moose, YOU were talking about gun deaths, when the correct metric should be murder rate, the number of murders per capita, or "the odds" as Hiram references. At what point should "the law" balance the avoidance of mass shootings versus the personal right to self-defense? 1 in 100? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? Know the numbers before you decide.

Anonymous said...

The data doesn't really back you up, jerry, but yes, there are outliers.

And I'll take a page out of jerry's playbook and refuse to cite sources and assume that I am infallible.

Furthermore, this entire thread is about guns and gun deaths. YOU, jerry, brought up the murder rate...most likely to obfuscate...like a good NRA-bought, right-wing Trumpist.

Moose

Sean said...

The U.S. murder rate is considerably higher than other similar countries. It's about five times higher than the UK, Germany, China, Australia, and South Korea, four times higher than Sweden, three times higher than Canada, France, and Israel, more than double Belgium, and 50% higher than India.

Wiki: Countries by homicide rate

jerrye92002 said...

Sean, you are correct. But there are a lot of other countries and compared to them, we do pretty well. Not as well as we would like, but unfortunately we have an entirely different culture, for plus or minus.

Moose, a simple web search illustrates the fantasy of making gun murders illegal by simply making the guns illegal.

"Better gun control" would be a law that actually ACCOMPLISHED something in the direction of the desired goal. All the evidence suggests it doesn't exist. I hear a lot of suggestions, but none with a track record of accomplishment or anything but a vain hope of "doing something." We would all like that magic wand, but it is a mistake to believe that Congress has one.

Anonymous said...

Canada
Australia
Almost all of Europe

All with better outcomes because of fewer guns.

It's really simple.

Moose

jerrye92002 said...

Moose wishes us to believe that correlation is causation. So, how many drug gangs do we have in Sweden? Take out criminals killing each other, and our numbers drop by about 70%. How do we fare then? Real numbers, please.

Anonymous said...

Why? A gun death is a gun death. You're not interested in reality if you're not going to look at the numbers as they are.

Moose

John said...

Yes Jerry is in "de Nile" again...

I like to compare to:

Italy: .78
Germany .85
UK: .92
France: 1.58

All of which are pretty diverse and face many challenges. Then there are us USA cowboys... 4.88

The simple reality is that we have a culture that makes it easy for people to get and/or steal guns.

And guns make it easy to kill others and ourselves. And semi-automatic weapons with big clips make it even easier and quicker to kill large numbers of people.

Now I don't lose a lot of sleep when gang bangers kill each other, or even when adults kill themselves.

But this insanity of how many innocent bystanders and children are killed each year do indicate that we should do something differently.

John said...

Of course the NRA seems to see all those innocent children as an acceptable trade off for the right to:

- trade guns without background checks / registration
- own big clips
- and not be accountable for keeping their guns secure.

Laurie said...

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer

John said...

Excellent link.

Anonymous said...

The point is that there are so few gun deaths and injuries. Millions of people visit Las Vegas a year. Yet only five hundred of them were killed or wounded the other day. Isn't that a small price to pay so that each of us can own and operate an assault rifle?

--Hiram

Anonymous said...

Yes, Laurie's link is interesting. It's the same one I posted earlier, and it shows quite strongly that the reason we have more gun deaths and gun crime is because we have more guns. I don't know why that point is even debatable.

People talk about protecting themselves, but overall crime has been dropping for decades, so there's less need now than there used to be.

Again, we decided as a country a few years ago that the mass murder of school children was an acceptable price to pay for a 'freedom' that the rest of the civilized world doesn't recognize. If we weren't lost before Sandy Hook, we are now.

Moose

Anonymous said...

Too few people are gunned down in our schools, our churches, our shopping malls, our night clubs, our country western concerts, our work places, to justify even just a re-examination of our gun policies. I know that's hard to accept, but that's the political reality. It's time to move on.

--Hiram

jerrye92002 said...

"...it shows quite strongly that the reason we have more gun deaths and gun crime is because we have more guns."

Odd, that even allowing for the fact that Moose re-posts the NYT article, he reaches the opposite conclusion FROM that article, which is that it is our "culture" that creates the high murder rate.

And then chooses to dismiss the fact that every "gun death" is a criminal act, committed by a criminal, by criminal use of a firearm. And that laws against crimes do not prevent crimes. To believe otherwise is simply denial of reality.

Anonymous said...

Too few people in America are wounded or slain by automatic weapons fire to justify a change in our policy regarding such weapons. It's just a political fact of life.

--Hiram

jerrye92002 said...

"Too few people in America are wounded or slain by automatic weapons fire to justify a change in our policy regarding such weapons. It's just a political fact of life."-- Hiram

Hiram is right. And it is not only political reality, it is common sense reality. You do not set policy based on the 1 in a million occurrence. There is simply too great of a problem defining the unique characteristics of that occurrence to stop it, without "stopping" a lot of other occurrences which may be benign or even beneficial.

jerrye92002 said...

Oh, and they are NOT "automatic weapons." We are talking about SEMI-automatic weapons. The observation is still correct.

Anonymous said...

"And that laws against crimes do not prevent crimes."

I agree. Time to get rid of all laws.

Moose

Anonymous said...

Interestingly, it appears soldiers most often use their weapons in semi-automatic mode when killing.

Moose

Anonymous said...

For myself, I try to avoid iconic locations where gun violence is most likely to occur. Movie theaters on the weekend nights, country western concerts, churchesthe Mall of America, Paris. Places like that.

Automatic weapons add a lot to our culture. Let's try not to lose sight of that fact amidst the statistically insignificant carnage.

--Hiram

Anonymous said...

Oh, and they are NOT "automatic weapons."

If you oppose the legalization of automatic weapons, why are you in favor of access to semi automatic weapons? What's the x factor accounting for the difference? Particularly because semi automatic weapons can be easily modified to become automatic weapons?

Or are you insisting on a distinction that doesn't make a difference?

--Hiram

John said...

Hiram,
Excellent question. I keep asking Jerry that and he keeps avoiding it.

The simple reality is that our society does have the right, responsibility and authority to decide what citizens can own. Currently the lines is between 6 & 7.

And I predict that within 10 years it will move up to between 4 & 5 and I am fine with that. If those Level 5 & 6 weapons are not in the general population, they simply can not be used to kill innocent people by the tens or hundreds. Hopefully it happens sooner than later for the children who want to go to concerts, school, etc.

1 Revolvers
2 Semi automatic handguns (<16 round clip typically)
3 Rifles and shotguns (pump, bolt action, etc) (5 - 15 round clips)
4 Semi automatic rifles (<16 round clip)
5 Semi automatic rifles (unlimited round clips)
6 Bump Fire Semi automatic rifles (unlimited round clips)
7 Fully automatic weapons
8 Rocket Launchers, Explosives, etc

By the way, you never answered my question...

Are you truly advocating moving the line so the kid in the wheel chair could have fully automatic weapons or maybe a rocket launcher?

I mean they would really scary !!!

jerrye92002 said...

Hiram, the distinction is that automatic weapons are indiscriminate, rapid-fire, anti-personnel weapons. That is their designed purpose, starting with the German and French "machine guns" of WWI. They have been illegal in the US since Bonnie and Clyde, and it is illegal to modify a semi-automatic to automatic fire. (seems to me bump stocks fit that category and should be specifically illegal for that same reason.

John, and the right you are insisting on is the right to collective irrationality. If you believe that removing guns from the law-abiding public will prevent the law-breaking public from much of anything, you have a rich fantasy life.

John said...

Yep. Back to the old “machine gun” bad...

And rapid fire semi-automatic with 50 round clip is necessary.

And the denial that having those guns easily available in our society has any negative impact.

Too bad all those kids and other kids keep having to die to prove you wrong. :-(

John said...

Oops. Kids and other innocents.

jerrye92002 said...

OK, "all those kids" is how many, exactly, killed by semi-automatic rifles with large clips? Is it more than a tiny fraction of those kids SAVED by such weapons, or by semi-automatics in general? Is it even a noticeable fraction of those innocent kids killed by criminals with semi- or full-automatic weapons that they are not permitted to have? Yes, if the magic Peace Fairy descended on us and whisked away all the guns you don't like and changed the hearts of all evil-doers, it might work. And you would get $25 under your pillow for that baby tooth.

Oh, and Hiram, if you really want to be safe, stay out of gun-free zones. Ever notice there are no mass shootings at gun shows?

Anonymous said...

"Yes, if the magic Peace Fairy descended on us and whisked away all the guns you don't like and changed the hearts of all evil-doers, it might work."

I refer you once again to the rest of the developed world. No such magic was necessary there.

Moose

jerrye92002 said...

But we are NOT the "rest of the developed world," and they aren't us. You can WISH for magic to happen here, if you want. But legislation isn't magic.

Anonymous said...

if you really want to be safe, stay out of gun-free zone

The odds are in my favor. As I have said, for example, millions of people go to Las Vegas, but only a few thousand of them have come under automatic weapons fire.

--Hiram

jerrye92002 said...

Just to be sticklers on the terminology, those thousands of people were in a gun-free zone, and did NOT come under "automatic weapons fire." The shooter used semi-automatics.

Anonymous said...

Was the shooter in a gun-free zone?

Moose

Anonymous said...

Sorry...let me phrase that correctly.

Was the white terrorist in a gun-free zone?

Moose

Sean said...

Armed concertgoers would have been in no position to return fire at the 32nd floor of a hotel 1,000 feet away. And, in fact, given the mass confusion and the mistaken idea that there were multiple shooters at multiple casinos, having lots of folks with guns roaming around almost certainly would have made things worse.

John said...

Sean,
My point exactly. Rapid fire big clip rifles are attack / hunt weapons... Not defense weapons.

That is unless you are over watch in the country.

John said...

Jerry Please note I started calling them rapid fire rifles.

Does that make them seem safer to use in crowded confined spaces?

Now as I keep saying pistols are good for defense. One child being killed by these weapons is not acceptable.

Anonymous said...

Just to be sticklers on the terminology, those thousands of people were in a gun-free zone

Did the Las Vegas guy forget to check his gun at the border of the gun-free zone. Is this what the NRA is talking about when they say we aren't enforcing the laws on the books?

--Hiram

jerrye92002 said...

I think what the NRA is saying that stopping criminals from breaking the law by passing another law is doomed to failure. Have you noticed that, since those "no guns allowed on these premises" signs went up, there hasn't been a single liquor or convenience store hit with an armed robbery? :-/

Anybody remember how nobody could get booze during Prohibition?