
You Cannot Regulate Guns Unless You Know How to Use One - joeyespo
https://medium.com/@yishan/you-cannot-regulate-guns-unless-you-know-how-to-use-one-d129d0a82974
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stephenr
By that logic, you need to smoke crack before you can make it illegal.

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ori_b
You should definitely know how crack is used, it's effects, and how other
legal derivatives are used before trying to regulate it, yes.

Otherwise, you may end up banning a large number of cocaine-based anesthetics.
Or worse, ban rubbing cocaine in your hair while leaving it legal to smoke it.

This is the state of gun regulation right now -- many of the people trying to
ban guns don't seem to know the first thing about guns, making the regulation
likely to be ineffective.

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smt88
A better argument would be that you need to know how guns are purchased before
trying to regulate them.

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ori_b
And how would that work to prevent legislators from banning one of the least
dangerous forms of firearms?

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smt88
How does firing a gun tell you how dangerous it is?

The danger of a firearm is most likely a function of its rate of fire, the
likelihood that it will kill someone it hits, and not much else. The rate of
fire is a simple fact and can be learned without firing the weapon. The
deadliness of the gun is probably difficult to know for sure, and it certainly
wouldn't be obvious just from shooting it.

For example, is a low-power firearm with hollow-point bullets more dangerous
than a high-power firearm? Is a weapon that's easier to aim significantly more
deadly, or is that effect irrelevant once rate of fire is considered? I don't
know, and shooting guns wouldn't tell me.

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ori_b
Firing or handling a gun isn't critical, but it does make it clear the kind of
damage different kinds of guns will do to targets. Assembling and
disassembling them makes it clear how easy a crude gun is to make at home with
a machine shop. Handling it will help you judge how easy it is to conceal it.

And firing a police issue revolver will make it obvious how much harder it is
to fire accurately than a regular, civilian issued one (and possibly lead to
fixing the policy that ensures officers end up with guns handicapped to
endanger bystanders; I'm against police being armed with lethal weapons, but
if it's going to happen, I'd like them to at least hit their targets).

> For example, is a low-power firearm with hollow-point bullets more dangerous
> than a high-power firearm?

How does knowing how a gun is purchased tell you this? This seems to be
another argument _for_ teaching regulators against guns, and not against it.

The simple fact of the matter is that to effectively regulate guns, you need
to know about them. The legislation proposed to curb gun violence is (almost
invariably) written by people who are very obviously flying blind, and as a
result, the laws proposed are the equivalent of banning rubbing cocaine in
one's hair while leaving crack smoking legal.

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smt88
To be clear, I don't think either of these arguments (the original, or the one
I proposed as "better") are good arguments.

Like cocaine, guns are not that complicated. If lawmakers aren't experts, they
can easily have experts review their proposals and inform them.

The core problem with gun-related legislation is that we don't actually know
much about gun violence in the US in an epidemiological context. The CDC
hasn't been able to keep track of gun violence, and there isn't a good
centralized database for it. It could be that everyone having a gun would be
safer, and it could be that no one having a gun would be safer. We don't have
conclusive data to support either position definitively.

