Likes: 
Faceplams: Me too.Originally Posted by DigitalChaos
I suspect it will just further the story that he had a real slanted view of reality and took innocent lives for what?
Active Member
Me too.
I suspect it will just further the story that he had a real slanted view of reality and took innocent lives for what?
Active Member
I mean, it's probably going to be the same shit as all the other statistical anomalies where someone loses their mind and decides to murder people.
My primary interest is to utilize the same lenses that were used in prior incidents. The lenses that try and lay blame on something and explain why we need to change X to prevent future incidents. Those lenses tend to be very selectively used because of partisan interests. So, it's good to always use them. It demonstrates the stupidity in a lot of them (calls for gun control, calls for putting more guns in public places, etc), but it also demonstrates a few that hold up under the majority of instances (better mental health care).
Bite me
Here's the article that was in the Chicago Sun-Times last week (thought it was Trib but it was Sun-Times).
tempus est umbra in mente
Every time someone talks about political dishonesty, you say something along the lines of:aaaaaabsolutely! Sanders seems to present himself as someone above the partisan bullshit though. He also frequently talks about how ideas need to be debated and discussed. So, here I am debating some of his.
"Welcome to every politician ever. "
Sanders has actual clout in that regard, and it's not because he's fabricating an image. You take issue with him here with his uninformed take on gun show loopholes...
Pretend you're a politician for a second... someone running for president. What would you suggest would be the best way to change our laws regarding guns to most effectively prevent dangerous psychotic people from getting access to them? And on that point, what would you suggest is the primary reason why the United States has a hugely disproportionate rate of public shootings compared to other "first world" countries?
And no, I'm not bumping the "gun talk" thread. Fuck that noise. Just end the discussion by proposing what you would like politicians to propose. Done.
Last edited by Jinsai; 09-03-2015 at 04:48 AM.
Active Member
Then you should read my last few posts, because the conversation has been ended... according to your requirement.
And I'll be splitting additional gun posts to the gun thread. So, yes, you'll be bumping the gun talk thread.
Active Member
This topic started from the video posted of Sanders. I think it's still on topic. I'm no mod, but go ahead, I'd love to hear your response here. Otherwise, you'll be proving @Jinsai 's theory that until we can have a proper discussion on both sides of this issue as to how to resolve it, nothing is going to change and innocent people are going to continue to die.
Active Member
done! I'm happy to talk about gun control as much as anyone wants. I just don't want to derail other threads with it. @allegro yells at me all the time for derailing :P
Active Member
Like I said, if Sanders mentioned a "private sale loophole" I wouldn't have called him out for dishonesty.
Well, that depends and what you are trying to change. What is your goal? Since you are talking about this in relation to @Jinsai's post... let's look at that:
So the ultimate goal seems to be stopping public shootings. The reason it needs to happen is because "the US has hugely disproportionate rate of public shootings compared to other first world countries."
As I mentioned earlier, you need to look at per capita rates, not just comparing totals per country. Saying that the USA consumes 5000% more meals per day than Norway means absolutely nothing if you don't factor in the population difference.. But, per capita is exactly what @Jinsai is referencing. The problem with Jinsai's statement is that it factually wrong. For instance, USA's rate of rampage shootings is not disproportionate. Norway, Finland, Slovakia, Israel, and Switzerland all have higher rampage shoot rates than the USA. But that doesn't help push gun control. That's why they would rather say that the USA has 40x more rampage shootings than any of those countries without ever addressing the population differences.
So my "solution" to public shootings is: Firstly, it's not a statistically important problem that needs solving, and certainly not something that would warrant impeding fundamental citizen rights. Second, if you do want to "solve" it, you need to realize it isn't specific to the USA and the solution lies outside of guns. You'd want to look to things like mental health.
So, this is the point in the conversation where the problem gets rephrased by Jinsai so that there is some other justification for additional gun control. And that's because the goal isn't to fix things like shootings, but to increase gun control.
@Dra508 , if you have an alternate question than Jinsai was posing, please post!
Last edited by DigitalChaos; 09-04-2015 at 11:40 PM.
Active Member
So you think it's a concidence that out of the 12 countries listed on that biasely selected list, the US the only country with permissive gun policies that has more than 3 occurrences.
Also, it's pretty damn ridiculous to put in Norway with a population of 5M who had 1 event that unfortunately had so many victims and say "see Norway has a higher rate of rampage shootings than us" and make all sorts of correlations.
Active Member
"Biasely" selected? looool. It's fucking sorted by rate. Are you that dense?
Clearly, the concept of per capita vs raw incident rate went WAY over your head if you immediately revert back to pointing to raw rates. Even Jinsai was talking about rates. god damn
Active Member
If you want a reason for why societal problems are so hard to fix, it's this... right here. The complete inability to look at any issue and figure out how much it impacts a set population before prioritizing the problem or creating a solution. A voting population who doesn't have a rudimentary understanding of statistical analysis.
BUT THE USA DRIVES MORE TOTAL CARS THAN ANY OTHER FIRST WORLD COUNTRY!
Last edited by DigitalChaos; 09-05-2015 at 12:14 PM.
Active Member
Using your broken logic, you are saying is that if Norway had 314M pop. like the US then it would have had about 66 occurrences with fatalities totaling 4817 since it's a simple matter of higher population.
This is so fucking weak man. loool
Thanks for reminding me why I stopped posting in this thread.
Maybe if you start using your brain instead of jerking off with a gun in your other hand, you'd become more civilized.
Active Member
^ You sound exactly like a climate change denier.
Active Member
Using statistically trivial data, it's stupid to try and project out like that. Just like it's stupid to try and claim that it's a problem that needs to be solved. I'm sorry you can't handle fundamental statistical analysis.
Active Member
You think innocent elementary school kids getting mowed down is not statistically important?
They were important. Important that there needs to be discussion. Waving our arms around saying our rights are going to be impeded so much that nothing gets done, makes us an embarrassment to civilized society. Not proud Americans who value life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those kids don't get to pursue happiness, do they? But you get to buy a gun, your liberty is preserved.
The 2nd amendment just hurts my head sometime. What happened to bearing arms in a well regulated militia? Define regulated militia of 2015?
http://www.knoe.com/home/headlines/2...324043481.html
Active Member
Ah, so logic rooted in data fails... So let's appeal to emotion!
You need to understand how important this is. People who fail at risk analysis are the same type who gamble their money as an investment. The large majority of heavy gun control advocates also fit this mentality. So do climate change deniers, anti-vaccine types, proponents of dragnet surveillance as an anti-terrorism tool, people who fear ISIS, etc
I'll address the 2nd Amendment verbage when im back at my laptop. SCOTUS has spelled out the answer in painstaking detail. In short, the 2A applies to everyone, not just a modern day militia.
Active Member
Yes, because we're talking about humanity here.
Active Member
bullshit.
You are using dead children to try and appear morally superior. I'll go right back to statistics to prove it. The number of children killed in rampage shootings is incredibly small. It's one of the lowest ranking causes of death for children. (Spoiler: this is where most people decide to shift the scope of the problem instead of follow it through to a conclusion) If you actually gave a shit about saving the children, you'd know (without looking it up) how many children die per year in the US (hint: it's measured in tens of thousands) and you'd know the leading causes of death for children.
Instead, you focus on a near-zero risk because you saw something emotional on the media. That will really help all the dying kids! Not only do you pick one of the smallest risks to target, but you pick the one that there is virtually no way for the country to further reduce the risk. I haven't even started on the externalities from any imaginable proposed changes. It's likely that you'd cause MORE damage than you could ever hope to solve due to the externalities (Especially with emotionally constructed solutions). If you were honest, you'd see that you are standing on the graves of children just to promote gun control... the gun control comes first.
If you take time to understand the data, you'll notice that the only places that have statistically important gun-related problems are in very specific locations in the country. Those are also the ones that you can actually help. It's concentrated in areas that have poverty and education problems. Those are "the children!" that you need to focus on if you want to make improvements to humanity.
Active Member
I don't even understand how people can feel OK about having guns in a house where kids are present. I'm paranoid enough about general garden implements
Active Member
Every time someone flaunts some stupid pro-gun rhetoric, a kid dies. Literally.
Friday, 3-year old boy shot under mysterious circumstances in his home (I bet it was accidental, which makes it worst).
Saturday, a 9-year old shot and killed, 3 others injured (including another kid)
Yes, emotions should be involved because kids are dying. I don't know what kind of person you are but I'm a human. Other than evil and bad people, I don't know anyone would sit idle after Sandy Hook and don't admit that you have A SERIOUS FUCKING PROBLEM WITH GUNS.
No matter how you try to spin your stupid numbers in favor of your ridiculous pro-gun circle jerk, the fucking reality is that kids are getting shot in your country almost every fucking day by guns.
You're the one who's ignoring the facts. You are the denier here.
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/24/9183525...nce-statistics
Oh but fuck me, your "per capita" is lower than Slovakia who had one shooting in 5 years, which happened to kill 8 people. Jesus Christ...
You know that you're goddamn wrong about this issue.
I'm outta here.
Active Member
^ and there is the shifted scope definition that I said would happen. It's the perpetual drift you'll always see in a failing position. If there is such an obvious problem, you shouldn't have to constantly shift the definition of it.
Your new data (a vox article with sloppy and shallow data) suffers from the failure of pretending that gun homicides are more important than all other homicides. Deaths are deaths. And once again, If you take time to understand the data, you'll notice that the only places that have statistically important gun-related problems are in very specific locations in the country. It's concentrated in areas that have poverty and education problems.
You'll find that I am not spinning data. You'll find that my approach is pretty damn simple and is extremely consistent. As I mentioned a few pages ago you should always look at per capita and in most cases you need to consider all mechanisms behind a death statistic. That shit isn't hard. It's how just about any effective societal issue is solved. It's only hard when the data doesn't match your motives (aka most gun control justifications).
Last edited by DigitalChaos; 09-07-2015 at 12:24 AM.
Active Member
Do you feel safe with pools, dogs, cleaning supplies, stairs, plastic bags, electrical appliances, bath tubs, knives, and cars in a house when kids are present? Those things present pretty large risks to children too. The solution is, of course, the same: don't let your kid get into shit that can hurt them. I think more than half of all accidents that kill children happen in the house.
Stubby Member
Your last several posts have been about this: that statistically the number of kids killed by guns is small in comparison to many other sources of potential danger.
Let's leave aside the obvious, but valid, argument that we don't have to attack dangers serially, and only move on to the next one when the previous most dangerous thing is resolved. We can do things in parallel, and there are actions all the time to mitigate dangers from pools, dogs, cleaning supplies, stairs, plastic bags, electrical appliances, bath tubs, knives, and cars.
What your argument fails to consider, I think, is the balance of utility.
Pools, dogs, cleaning supplies, stairs, plastic bags, electrical appliances, bath tubs, knives and cars are all incredibly useful things. We get efficiency, productivity, joy, and sometimes even increased safety itself from these things. Society is incredibly enriched by them. Without them we'd be far worse off. The fact that they - like most things - can be dangerous is offset (in society's view) by how much utility we get from them.
I would argue that guns provided this same utility once upon a time, when we needed to hunt our food (though even this was only ever true of rural populations). They no longer provide anything like usefulness that can be measured against the suffering they cause. A small, vocal, powerful proportion of Americans judge they get sufficient utility from guns to warrant keeping them around, but the rest of American society - and the rest of the world - disagrees.
Bite me
The thing is, there is nothing we can DO about this.
We cannot revise our Constitution. Can't and won't happen. Ever. We have had numerous U.S. Supreme Court decisions to back that up. Plus, there are already an estimated 30 million guns in this country. At least. The task of getting rid of them is something we could not handle. So people have to move on from the fantasy of getting rid of guns in the U.S. It is impossible. Legally and logistically.
As far as the dangers of guns, that is something parents have been taught that they can control. Lock up firearms in homes, just like you would any other dangerous item.
But there is no I.Q. test for gun ownership. Or parenthood.
Sadly, we cannot totally "prevent" the mentally ill from obtaining guns, any more than we can prevent drunks from driving motor vehicles (drunk drivers kill thousands of people per year, 10,076 deaths in the U.S. due to drunk drivers in 2013, compared to 11,208 homicides by gun in 2013). We can try every preventative method possible, but they can still skirt the system (e.g. steal a legally-owned gun, lie on an application form). We can't protect everyone all the time.
Also, the U.S. is just a relatively violent, stupid society.
However, it's peaceful compared to Honduras.
This country is big, sprawling, heavily-populated, and it never lost its Wild Wild West mentality, nor will it ever.
It is just a reality we accept.
Mass shootings might be partially thwarted with the banning of high-volume magazines; the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly stated its opposition to (and refusal to support) same; the Second Amendment, as the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly points out, contains the words "well regulated."
Which is why we can't legally own grenades, rocket launchers, machine guns, etc.
Last edited by allegro; 09-07-2015 at 07:52 AM.
Active Member
I've never thought we could get rid of guns (which is not to say that I wouldn't support that, I would). I think gun ownership is like... a part of US culture. Not to say that everyone owns a gun, that that the "right" to own a gun is considered to be a fact. I believe that if we tried to change that there would be a pretty horrible and likely violent outburst from some people. I basically agree with everything allegro just said.
We should have strict, STRICT, gun control laws. I logically don't understand why people oppose this. I get that they get all frothing-at-the-mouth MY FREEDOM about this, but like... ugh. UGH.
Bite me
While gun control laws are generally a great idea, gun control laws don't really do anything to totally prevent the scary things that people want to prevent. Handguns were banned in the City of Chicago for over 30 years, yet gun murder rates were some of the highest in the country. Bad guys don't use legal routes / methods to get guns; they can't; most of them have felony convictions, which prevents them from legally buying guns. Our best efforts at a national database is too easy to thwart by palming money to greedy people on the take (including dirty gov't agency reps). Red tape slows down or fucks up the system, as we saw with Dylan Roof.
And crazed NRA reps yell "slippery slope" (e.g. high-volume magazines) even when the SCOTUS itself has ruled that no slippery slope exists, mostly because the NRA exists to bring in CASH to sustain itself; without that Chicken Little Slippery Slope, it can't rake in all that donor cash.
However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't use our very best efforts to TRY to regulate the sale of guns and ammunition (as is allowed per the Second Amendment). IMO, this means banning online sales, nationally. IMO, it also means a national background check database (cross-checking for Orders of Protection, etc.)
Yes, there are flaws in the system; there will always be flaws in the system. But having NO system, or an inconsistent fragmented system, is worse.
Last edited by allegro; 09-07-2015 at 10:14 AM.
Active Member
That's 1 of the 2 things I've been saying. The other point is that the rate of public shootings (aka the risk for an individual becoming a victim) in the USA is on par with "the rest of the world" ... if not lower. So even though "the rest of the world" doesn't believe there is utility in guns and has increased their gun control... it hasn't reduced the risk of public shootings.
I disagree that utility is diminished enough in guns that you should just start taking them away... but IF you are going to argue for this then you NEED to also prove the utility in the change. If there is no reduction in risk for then there is no point. And phrases like "balance in utility" are completely empty if you don't address the utility in the change. (scope has, thus far, been defined as mass shootings/rampage shootings/school shootings by Jinsa/Dra508/Deepvoid... there are much better places to focus when it comes to guns though, as I've said many times).
Last edited by DigitalChaos; 09-07-2015 at 01:15 PM.
Active Member
There is a very small chance we could amend the Constitution to at least partially nullify the 2nd amendment. It's low, but I'd say the chances are probably higher that I'd see that in my lifetime than anyone in my family would be involved in a public shooting, for instance :P
When did this happen? You mean within a few states? Out here in CA, I don't think any of the gun legislation had an impact on mass shootings. They seemed to follow national (and even somewhat global) continual downward trends.
Active Member
It's even worse than this. NICS (national background check system) has been in place for almost 20 years now. The entire time you have been able to circumvent it with a simple fake ID. It's because the system ONLY checks to see if you match a list of bad guys. This could easily be fixed by checking if the ID is valid or simply switching the reference database to a list of people who are OK to purchase guns. It's been known for a very long time and nobody cares to fix it. Every time someone proposing mandatory background checks ontop of NICS I bring this up. Politicians don't seem to give a shit about it. They'd rather pass something more popular than functional. (this is one of my suggestions right here, @Dra508 )
There is a threshold for a federal system being so shitty that a per-state system is going to allow for something much better. I think our federal system is currently below the bar for it to be made a requirement for all states.
Active Member
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93767
"All it takes to get around Brady law background checks on gun purchases is a home-made fake I.D., according to a new government report. Their success rate was 100 percent."
Reply With Quote
