

Jason Alexander on gun control - stevenleeg
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/if2nht

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bradleyland
I'm a gun owner. I don't own any "assault weapons" -- which is just a label by
the way, many hunting rifles are far more powerful and deadly than an AR-15 --
but for a long time I've been in support of the broad interpretation of the
2nd amendment. When tragedies like Aurora happen, it's hard for me to
rationalize my support of the 2nd amendment, because all the arguments I hear
from fellow supporters sound apocryphal. The problem is, all the arguments I
hear from detractors are just as bad.

Protection from, and ability to overthrow, the government is a pretty
laughable justification for firearm ownership these days. Let's ignore for a
moment the fact that gun owners would have to take a page from Al Quaeda to
have any meaningful chance against even a single branch of the U.S. Military
operating on their home turf. We can ignore that, because the government
doesn't need force to operate as they please. Since the beginning of
civilization, government has been about control, and a large part of control
is money. If the events of the last 8 years haven't convinced you that the US
government can do whatever they want with regards to monetary policy, I don't
know what to tell you.

There is a solid argument to be made that guns don't kill people, people kill
people. Switzerland comes close (not really, but they're one of the closest)
to the US in terms of guns per person, but they're still not quite at our
level. The Swiss have approximately 46 guns per person, where the US has 90
(Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_ownership_rate>). Yet, the Swiss
have a small fraction (less than 1/5th) of the gun crime that we do. If you
look at that list, you can see that there is either no apparent correlation
between gun ownership and violence, or that data is just all kinds of wrong. I
think it's the former.

So, let's accept that guns don't kill people, people kill people. We're left
to reach only one conclusion. America is has a disproportionately high rate of
murderous psychos. Let's throw away the Constitution for a moment (stop
laughing, I'm serious) and look at it from a strictly rational, problem
solving perspective. If you were presented with two groups of people, one
group had a low rate of murderous psychos, and the other had five times the
number of murderous psychos, would you arm the group with 5x the psychos? This
is a serious question, and there are two schools of thought with serious
answers. Both of these scenarios below grant that the measures taken will be
100% effective, which is a pipe dream, but let's play the game anyway.

Gun school: arm everyone. A murderous psycho is apt to think twice before
going on a murdering rampage if he's certain that everyone in the room is
carrying a gun as well. There is a near 100% chance that someone in the crowd
will fight back and the psycho will end up dead. Even if the psycho decides to
go on a rampage, they'll be stopped quickly and won't be able to harm many
people.

Anti-gun school: make it impossible to get guns. The murderous psycho will
have to resort to other means of killing people, like a knife or an axe.
Because these tools are cumbersome and require a close range to use
effectively, the number of people harmed is limited.

In reality, neither school is "right".

The gun school of thought has several problems, not including the fact that
most gun owners couldn't deploy their weapon effectively, even if they had
one. And no, I'm not talking to _you_ gun buddy who practices at the range and
in IDPA, etc. I'm talking about the statistical likelihood in a population
where everyone carries, which is a necessity for the gun school line of
thinking. Colorado has very permissive carry laws, but no one contested the
shooter on that day in Aurora. Other problems include the fact that there
would undoubtedly be collateral damage, and the fact that many murderous
psychos take their lives at the end of their rampage, so the threat of death
isn't an assured deterrent.

The anti-gun school faces the problem that there are 88 guns per 100 people in
the US right now. Do you really think that this many lawful gun owners are
going to just hand over their guns? Really? Stop for a moment, please....
Really? Even if they do, contraband weapons will remain a reality in the US
for a very, very long time. Then we end up back at the problem that guns don't
kill people, people kill people. Make guns hard to get, and people will start
improvising other means. The murderer in Aurora already exhibited the ability
to manufacture bombs. You can't outlaw everything.

So I see it this way: we have to arrive at a common goal. That common goal is
not going to be outlawing firearms, no matter how obvious it seems to you or
your favorite celebrity. It seems reasonable, but it's impractical and
politically impossible. You have to accept it.

If you want to accomplish something, you have to be clear about your goals,
then adopt methods that have the greatest likelihood of success. Clearly, our
goal must be to reduce the amount of violence in the US. Now we must decide on
the method. Taking away firearms is impractical and ineffective because A) you
can't expect to reduce the number of firearms in the US on any kind of
reasonable time scale, and B) murderous psychos will find other means to kill
lots of people. The only rational goal can be to have a hard look at _why_
there are so many murderous psychos and work together to reduce them.

I know lots of gun owners, and let me tell you, they're some of the most
caring and helpful people you could ever hope to meet. They own a gun because
they feel that it's the responsible thing to do. I have no doubt that would
any one of them have been in that theater, they would have stood up, drawn
their weapon and opened fire on the murderous psycho that day. That act would
have surely drawn the fire of the gunman, but they would have done it anyway.
These are not the people you should persecute. We should find a way to work
_with_ gun owners, not against them.

The term "murderous psycho" is not meant to be hyperbole or some kind of joke.
The people who commit these crimes are often psychopaths, by clinical
definition. They often go untreated, although not unidentified, until
something like Aurora happens. James Holmes' mother was not surprised when
contacted by authorities. Does this not seem like the most broken aspect of
this situation? And I'm not suggesting a witch hunt for psychotics. That won't
work any better than the war on drugs, or the war on firearms for that matter.
We have to open up the dialogue about mental illness. We have to start talking
about it as more than the punchline of a joke. A person who is sprialling out
of control needs to feel comfortable that they have somewhere to go and
receive help, not imprisonment.

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MrEnigma
I think the hardest part about this, is like Jason here a lot of people think
it's ok for people to own guns, but not get crazy about it.

Unfortunately there isn't great qualifications for defining what an assault
rifle is. You can do specific models, which then require lots of updated and
political maneuvering to keep updated. Length, speed, etc all end up catch too
many other guns.

We could do federally what california has done, and prevent magazines over 10
rounds, or do like Illinois and require a permit to buy ammunition,
unfortunately incidents still happen, and legitimate owners get upset over
what they perceive as draconian rule.

Ultimately I think banning something like semi-automatic weapons would be the
best in theory. But with 300+ million guns out there, with many of those being
semi-automatic, it might be kind of an issue. If you grandfather them in, then
you just drive the price up for these weapons. If you make it illegal
'overnight' you may make felons out a lot of people unknowingly.

One of things that has been going around, mostly because of Ebert bringing it
up. Is the idea that gun rights advocates say that these incidents can be
prevented by concealed carry, but Ebert points out none of the people in the
cinema shot back. Unfortunately the argument, and for the situation, that
specific theater specifically does not allow concealed weapons. Unfairly, and
I believe incorrectly gun rights advocates say that it happened there because
he knew everyone would be unarmed.

It's a very tricky situation. I think ultimately we need a better algorithm to
detect and flag situations like this. Which would also require massive
databases and registrations which people seem very against.

If these guns were illegal to obtain, it would also mean that he would have
had to actively be doing something illegal, unfortunately as it stands, if he
would have been stopped on the way to the theater, he would have been found
suspicious, but ultimately legal (assuming his guns were cased and such).

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lotides
I guess I'll be the voice of opposition here. Unlike a lot of you, I live in
Georgia and own guns. My family, friends and co-workers also own guns.

I currently only own a small 9mm handgun. I'm licensed to carry it concealed
on me and do frequently. To get that license, I had to have a clean record, be
signed off by a judge and have my fingerprints filed with the GBI and FBI from
the local sheriffs office. I've been vetted similarly to what any police
officer has gone through.

In the past I've owned a Bushmaster XM-15 E2S, a so-called AR-15 style
"assault weapon" probably very similar to what was used in the shootings. I
know a lot about weapons and the AR-15 platform in particular. To non gun
owners, they do look like scary black military rifles but they're only semi-
automatic (one round each time you pull the trigger) and are classified as
"varmint" guns for civilians. That means it's illegal to hunt large game (like
deer) with them a lot of places because they don't have the stopping power.
The reason our military uses the same round (5.56 NATO/.223 civilian) is
because they decided it was easier to give our troops a small round they can
carry more of than train them all to be proficient marksmen.

To be truthful, your average deer hunting rifle has a lot more stopping power
than an AR-15 and a skilled shooter can fire even a bolt-action rather
rapidly. It's a misconception that the AR-15 platform is any more deadly just
because of its appearance.

When politicians have tried to ban the AR-15 platform, they did it by picking
out features at random and trying to regulate any weapon with those features.
It's kind of a mess. For some reason they chose things like the handguard to
pick on, which keeps that barrel from burning your hand after its been fired
and the retractible stock which does nothing but allow you to adjust the rifle
to be more comfortable for different shooters body types. It's about what you
would expect when someone tries to regulate something they've made no attempt
to understand.

I can argue about gun from a million different angles but it comes down to
these things for me:

— Every living thing on this planet has some form of defense. We as humans use
tools. I don't see how you can possibly consider it smart to take away our
only method of defense without providing an adequate alternative. The last
time we called the police it took over 5 minutes for them to arrive and they
aren't responsible for protecting individuals (Warren v. District of
Columbia). That means you are responsible for yourself.

— Criminals will always be able to access the things we "ban" (see: drugs,
prostitution, et. al.) so any laws would only have an effect of disarming law-
abiding citizens.

— It's too late. We have as many guns in the U.S. as people. It would cost
billions in law-enforcement work to even collect a fraction of those. It would
also probably lead to a number of unnecessary violent encounters.

— It's treating the symptom. Humanity will always have violence but if you
really want to reduce these incidents we would work on the cause. We don't
know a lot about the most recent incident yet but we do have huge issues with
access to mental healthcare (and healthcare in general) in this country. We
also have large problems with poverty and cultural issues.

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jmcguckin
Jason's numbers are incorrect. Brady (the most anti-gun lobby) states that
firearms related homocides are 12,778 for the year they have statistics for.

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netpenthe
he wrote a correction, saying the 100k was for gun related incidents, not just
deaths..

13k deaths/year is still a lot

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beej71
It's my understanding that the definition of "militia" and what anyone thinks
the Founding Fathers meant by the Second Amendment is now largely irrelevant.
Didn't DC v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago settle this?

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dusit
Check out his twitter feed, and especially his retweets of critics... I don't
want to live on this planet anymore.

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realize
Those of us in the rest of the world really think America is crazy about this
issue. Perhaps Americans need to understand that the constitution is not a
holy document, it is the work of men and was created for a different time. The
2nd amendment doesn't make sense in a modern world.

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punee
Those of us in the rest of the world (since I, too, speak for the rest of the
world) don't really think America is crazy about anything. Perhaps those of us
in the rest of the world need to stop trying to lecture other nations about
what they should "understand."

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rsanchez1
Yes, George Costanza is the most authoritative voice on gun control laws.

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dusit
You know, trolls are not welcome here.

Go away.

