Security always a concern at a Central Florida theme parks

Vater said:

I would argue instead that if places like Chicago eliminated their strict gun laws to allow law abiding citizens to arm themselves if they choose, we would see a decline in gun crimes within a few years.

Constitutionality (and fighting oppressive govts.) aside, I can't see how you come to this conclusion. More guns mean less guns will be used? I can't even begin to understand how that works. The solution to the cold war wasn't more nukes.

The "anti-gun nuts" never seem to go as far in policy discussions as the "pro-gun nuts" make them sound.

For example, "confiscation" is a word I expect to hear from LaPierre, but not from CSGV or any of the other groups like them...

For some reason, I'm reminded of our Cuba policy - we tried an embargo for 50 years with no results. If more guns really did make us safer, we'd have the safest country on Earth right now, wouldn't we?

ApolloAndy said:
I can't see how you come to this conclusion. More guns mean less guns will be used? I can't even begin to understand how that works. The solution to the cold war wasn't more nukes.

Look at Wyoming. Nearly 60% of the state's population owns guns (highest percentage in the US), and the state has one of the lowest percentages of gun crimes in the nation (0.9 gun deaths per 100,000 people). Compare that with DC where until recently handguns were completely banned: the lowest percentage of gun ownership in the nation and highest number of gun deaths per 100,000 people.

Those are the extreme ends of the spectrum, naturally, and there are of course a million other factors, like poverty, population density, urban vs. rural areas, and even race, that drive the equation, but more guns does not necessarily equal more gun crime. Likewise, fewer guns does not necessarily equal less gun crime.

I'm not even saying that we need to arm everyone, nor should we. I'm not even necessarily opposed to background checks, even though they've often been proven useless. But those who want to own firearms, educate and train themselves, and have gone through the necessary legal avenues to carry (concealed or otherwise), should be able to do so in more places. As I've said many times, in nearly every location where there has been a mass shooting (3 or more casualties) in the last half-century, it was either illegal or against policy for average joes to carry a firearm (this includes some of the military bases and Naval Yard of all places). I remember specifically in the Colorado theater shooting that there were I think two movie theaters closer to the nutcase's home that allowed guns, but he chose to shoot up the theater where a strict no-gun policy was in place. Gun-free zones are as much--if not more--of a joke as drug-free zones.

But besides that, gun bans are just as useless, and do nothing but penalize law abiding citizens (and yes I'm aware I sound like an NRA "nut"). But I can't dispute truth: cities like New York, LA, Chicago, DC, etc. all have (or have had) outright bans of handguns (even in the home), and gun murders still happen. So if I lived in one of those locations and wanted to protect myself from the criminals who bring in guns illegally, I'd have to become a criminal to purchase a gun. It's ass-backward logic.

Constitutionality (and fighting oppressive govts.) aside

My response above aside, constitutionality and fighting oppressive governments (redundant) are enough reason to me to legalize firearm ownership everywhere.

ApolloAndy said:

Constitutionality (and fighting oppressive govts.) aside, I can't see how you come to this conclusion. More guns mean less guns will be used? I can't even begin to understand how that works.

Interesting. I don't see how this isn't just common sense in many cases.

Here's a Gonchback to 2007. And I'm pasting it below in part in case no one clicks through:

------------------------------------

From the book Freakonomics:

It might be worthwhile to take a step back and ask a rudimentary question: what is a gun? It's a tool that can be used to kill someone, of course, but more significantly, a gun is a great disrupter of the natural order.

A gun scrambles the outcome of any dispute. Let's say that a tough guy and a not-so-tough guy exchange words in a bar, which leads to a fight. It's pretty obvious to the not-so-tough guy that he'll be beaten, so why bother fighting? The pecking order remians intact. But if the not-so-tough guy happens to have a gun, he stands a good chance of winning. In this scenario the introduction of a gun may well lead to more violence.

Now instead of the tough guy and the not-so tough guy, picture a high-school girl out for a nighttime stroll when she is suddenly set upon by a mugger. What if only the mugger is armed? What if only the girl is armed? What if both are armed? A gun opponent might argue that the gun has to be kept out of the mugger's hands in the first place. A gun advocate might argue that the high-school girl needs to have a gun to disrupt what has become the natural order: it's the bad guys that have guns. (If the girl scares off the mugger, then the introduction of gun leads to less violence.)

And later in the chapter:

Then there is the opposite argument - that we need more guns on the street, but in the hands of the right people (like the high-school girl above, instead of her mugger). The economist John R. Lott Jr. is the main champion of this idea. His calling card is the book More Guns, Less Crime, in which he argues that violent crime has decreased in areas where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry conceale weapons. His theory might be surprising, but it is sensible. If a criminal thinks a potential victim may be armed, he may be deterred from committing the crime...

...Then there was the troubling allegation that Lott actually invented some of the survey data that supported his more guns/less crime theory. When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry gun laws simply don't bring down crime.

--------------------------------------

I think that logic applies traditionally.

But we're talking all the fun of mass shootings for the most part, right? And I don't think the same 'balance' argument applies.

But what argument does?

Taking guns away from bad guys? How? I liken it to the war on drugs. Everyone still easily had drugs and it just made criminals out of responsible users. We're finally just coming around to the idea of how dumb that whole thing was. No reason to make the same mistake with the war on guns. I don't think making it harder to get guns stops shootings like this.

I don't think arming people stops shootings like this either (as we've seen) - although I get the idea that someone armed could in theory reduce the damage done in these situations...so maybe that alone is argument enough? Not sure I totally buy it even if I 'get' it.

What I do buy is - as ass backwards as it sounds - that it's not the guns that make the difference, but a multitude of other sociological factors. And maybe we're just looking in the wrong place for an answer in the first place.

"Banning guns" would be possibly marginally more effective than Prohibition was at keeping alcohol away from the public, and won't change criminals having guns. Instead, everyone else will become "criminals," and that's just dumb. I get trying to make guns harder/more annoying to acquire, but does that really slow/stop the criminals, or even the person who just comes unglued? Focusing on the guns themselves and how they're acquired is the easy answer, and of course you can always improve a process, but I agree with Gonch, that isn't where the answer really is.

Lord Gonchar said:

I don't think arming people stops shootings like this (as we've seen)

I mentioned it way, way up in this thread, but I dispute this. There have been multiple incidents where a legal gun owner thwarted a mass shooting, or potentially reduced the body count. These, and other self-defense stories, are rarely ever reported by the big media outlets.

http://controversialtimes.com/issues/constitutional-rights/12-times...with-guns/

I want to point out #3, which illustrates my point about how stupid (and dangerous) gun-free zones are:

A 43-year-old former student armed with a .380 handgun killed Dean Anthony Sutin and Professor Thomas Blackwell with point blank shots and went on to kill fellow student Angela Dales as well as wounding three others before being confronted at gunpoint by law students Tracy Bridges, a county sheriff’s deputy, and Mikael Gross, a police officer, after retrieving their personal handguns from their vehicles. The gunman was then apprehended by other students.

Gross and Bridges lost valuable response time accessing their handguns because of the law school’s standing as a gun-free zone.

Vater said:
Look at Wyoming. Nearly 60% of the state's population owns guns (highest percentage in the US), and the state has one of the lowest percentages of gun crimes in the nation (0.9 gun deaths per 100,000 people). Compare that with DC where until recently handguns were completely banned: the lowest percentage of gun ownership in the nation and highest number of gun deaths per 100,000 people.

Come on... that's the worst comparison ever. Take the state of Wyoming and make the population density higher, backfill generations of racial discrimination, make the schools all horrible, drop the average family income (adjusting for cost of living) to the poverty level, and then tell me you'll get the same numbers in Wyoming. This correlation isn't even remotely in the neighborhood of causation. If Wyoming is safer, I can assure you it ain't because of the guns.

Besides, it's easy enough to make the same argument, with [your country here], and I'm sure you can also argue that there is no causation.

Vater said:

Lord Gonchar said:

I don't think arming people stops shootings like this (as we've seen)

I mentioned it way, way up in this thread, but I dispute this. There have been multiple incidents where a legal gun owner thwarted a mass shooting, or potentially reduced the body count. These, and other self-defense stories, are rarely ever reported by the big media outlets.

Well, you've selectively quoted me as the rest of that line pretty much agrees with you - on reducing the damage, at least. I think in most cases of these shootings, the perpetrator plans on dying, so there's no incentive not to go on with plans. But yeah, the potential to reduce damage is certainly there.

But I kind of want to hit Andy's point again...

ApolloAndy said:

The solution to the cold war wasn't more nukes.

No. But both sides having nukes stopped one side from endlessly terrorizing the other.

Retaliation is a powerful motivator. It's funny how that's becoming less and less common sense in general these days.

Lord Gonchar said:

Well, you've selectively quoted me as the rest of that line pretty much agrees with you

Hmm...I noticed you edited your post, and don't remember reading the rest of the line. Did you add that afterward? If not then I completely glossed over it, so my bad.

Jeff said:

Come on... that's the worst comparison ever.

Speaking of selective quoting...did you even read the very next paragraph?

Eliminate DC and insert the states with the lowest percentage of ownership, compare those with the states with the highest percentage of of ownership, and with few exceptions my point remains. Which is exactly why I mentioned all the other variables that factor in that you just did.

Besides, it's easy enough to make the same argument, with [your country here], and I'm sure you can also argue that there is no causation.

I don't generally engage in comparisons with other countries, as most other countries haven't established gun ownership as a fundamental right.

No, I read the rest of your post, but you don't get to make an argument, disqualify it yourself kind of, then stand by your argument. "There might be causation" is not an argument.

^^No, I corrected spelling. I tend to just mash the keyboard when my thoughts move faster than my fingers. You can usually tell how passionate or delibrate my posts are by whether or not they've been edited.

...

...

...sometimes I just make typos.

^^My argument was in response to Andy's comment "More guns mean less guns will be used? I can't even begin to understand how that works."

In a general sense, yeah, I stand by my argument, because the numbers jive. As I said, I used the two extreme ends, based on the table here. But remove DC and sort those columns any way you like, and you will generally find a correlation with more guns=less murders.

So how do you respond to people who use the same argument with entire countries where guns per capita are lower, and their crime rates are lower?

It's a loaded question (heh), and I'd have to look at the other variables that could affect the outcome. But depending on the country, my response might be that it's an invalid argument, because unlike most other countries, in the US we have a provision in our founding documents that explicitly states the People's right to bear shall not be infringed, and yet despite that, we for some reason have certain states, cities, and other areas that have outlawed firearms of different types, or altogether, which as we've seen doesn't miraculously eliminate guns from being in those areas, and in fact by the very nature of guns being in those areas makes them entirely illegal and the people who own them, by the letter, criminals.

It also might mean, in countries where guns are altogether banned, violent crime by other means may have skyrocketed. But again, too many variables.

Lord Gonchar said:

There's plenty of people at the extreme other end that also have no interest in landing somewhere in the middle.

It's easy to snicker at "gun nuts", but it should be just as easy to do the same to "anti-gun nuts" I think.

You just described about 50% of my Facebook feed. I'm so smack dab in the middle that I could not even attempt to voice an opinion without being called horrible things from both sides. Which is why I don't. On FB or on CB. And why my FB feed consists mostly of silly irreverent posts mostly to entertain myself.

Lord Gonchar said:
No. But both sides having nukes stopped one side from endlessly terrorizing the other.

Retaliation is a powerful motivator. It's funny how that's becoming less and less common sense in general these days.

But I feel (and I bet the citizens of Moscow who have a significantly diminished nuclear arsenal also feel) a hell of a lot safer about nuclear holocaust, now that we don't have our nukes on a hair trigger pointed at each other all the time.

Lord Gonchar said:

From the book Freakonomics:

No, I get that. The same argument could be made about seatbelts. One could make the argument that if you put a giant steel spear in the middle of everyone's steering wheel, car accident fatalities would go down because everyone would drive super-duper safely and never go above 5 MPH. But I bet they wouldn't actually go down and I sure as hell don't want to drive around like that.

Imagine I invented a thing called the blinky-death-ray which allows you to kill other people by blinking at them. Clearly we will have less BDR based crime if I don't mass produce BDR's and hand them to everyone than if everyone suddenly gets a BDR for Christmas this year.

Not to interrupt, but where do I buy this BDR? I'm intrigued.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a BDR is a good guy with a mirror.