Security always a concern at a Central Florida theme parks

Precisely why I wear mirrored sunglasses wherever I go. And sometimes at home.

"I want a blinky-death-ray NOW, Daddy!"

I believe the attributes other than guns in the hands of the U.S. population that Gonch is referring to more lies with how predisposed to violence our country seems to be when compared to other industrialized nations. We, as a nation, have a lot of built-in social strife that stems from only being a free nation for privileged white males when this country was founded and needing to go through more violence in order to generate support for and ratify amendments for silly things like outlawing slavery, guaranteeing civil rights in writing (denying a states rights decision), women having the right to vote, etc.

In not-so-short words, our country has many festering resentments that other countries don’t contend with on such a large scale within their populations i.e. race, gender, religion, etc. that haven’t been addressed. Other causes for violence may be our country being created by the acts of a violent revolution leads to our country’s ideals of glory being so wrapped up in battle and conflict. Another contributing factor could be the unique position that the U.S. occupies as the world’s melting pot of cultures since there is no massive pre-existing population in this country outside of native Americans who, again, were violently decimated.

This is purely anecdotal but the U.S.A. is the world’s only nation whose national anthem mentions a weapon i.e. “bombs bursting in air”. This country prefers the more violent “American football” versus the pretty much universally accepted version of said sport on the rest of the planet. The most popular video games are first person shooters and top grossing films and TV shows glorify violence and not just of the gun variety. It is truly interesting how many folks get upset with a sex scene or flavorful words being thrown about on a movie or TV program but have no issue showing watching people getting run through with swords or bullets or crushed in a car accident.

The other big thing that I feel people forget is that human beings are still mere animals that have base instinct tendencies for violence that are mostly suppressed by the ability to be self-aware and have conscious control to override what our survival/greed-based desires tell us to do. I believe Philip Seymour Huffman’s character in the last Hunger Games movie explained this concept best with “We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.”

ApolloAndy said:

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.

But how safe would you feel if the other side still did and we had nothing to point back?

Arguably, the only reason the situation is one in which you feel safe is because we did at one time point them at each other - that balance of the natural order was restored.

ApolloAndy said:

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.

That would apply to guns if you just invented them rather than them having been around for hundreds of years, being a part of our country's culture, written into our country's constituion as a right and it's citizens already own more BDR's than there are citizens.

You're already so deep into the existence of BDR's that your argument doesn't hold up. They don't just magically disappear with a few new laws.

Vater said:

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.

Bans that are only in certain states are not effective if a person can cross state lines and purchase it easily. Fireworks are an example of that. Bans only have an effect if they are national.

Um...exactly. And short of repealing the 2nd amendment, a national ban will never happen.

Lord Gonchar said:

ApolloAndy said:

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.

But how safe would you feel if the other side still did and we had nothing to point back?

Arguably, the only reason the situation is one in which you feel safe is because we did at one time point them at each other - that balance of the natural order was restored.

ApolloAndy said:

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.

That would apply to guns if you just invented them rather than them having been around for hundreds of years, being a part of our country's culture, written into our country's constituion as a right and it's citizens already own more BDR's than there are citizens.

You're already so deep into the existence of BDR's that your argument doesn't hold up. They don't just magically disappear with a few new laws.

Sure, but clearly, less BDR's means less BDR violence. Are guns that different from BDR's that the best way to decrease gun violence is with more guns?

Can't say I put it so squarely on SCOTUS, but the amendment has undergone some re-interpretation:

ApolloAndy said:

Sure, but clearly, less BDR's means less BDR violence. Are guns that different from BDR's that the best way to decrease gun violence is with more guns?

I don't know - depends on the current saturation of BDR's. If there are more BDR's in circulation than citizens of the country, then no. Trying to reduce BDR numbers at that point isn't going to change things in any meaningful way. Don't expect violence to significantly decrease (or more specifically mass violence events decrease in number) by making it more difficult to obtain a gun legally.

Which is pretty much my whole take on it. I'll be the first to admit I don't understand the need for guns. But I also understand that given the state of things, trying to ban or regulate or whatever isn't going to make a real difference. They're here for better or worse. It's way more complex than the guns themselves and we should be looking at other aspects that can be fixed/controlled to reduce violence.

ApolloAndy said:

Sure, but clearly, less BDR's means less BDR violence. Are guns that different from BDR's that the best way to decrease gun violence is with more guns?

Not sure if a BDR has any non-violent uses but as its a blinky death ray, it seems unlikely. Not true of guns. At least not in terms of criminal violence. Indeed there are tens of millions of guns in the US that have never been used in any criminal activity and likely never will be. As a result, I don't think its accurate to say that less guns would necessarily mean less violence (and again I am assuming we are talking criminal violence here).

But I also don't think its accurate to say that more guns necessarily means less violence (or more for that matter). As Gonch and others have noted here, its more complicated than that. With other factors involved that are not easily quantified or addressed.

rollergator said:

Can't say I put it so squarely on SCOTUS, but the amendment has undergone some re-interpretation:

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials." — George Mason

_________________

And speaking of quotes, here's one from Cesare Beccaria from the essay On Crimes and Punishment:

“False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that it has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are of such a nature. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

I would encourage anyone that's interested in this debate to read Sam Harris' take on it:

The Riddle of the Gun

I think he's gives a level-headed breakdown of the situation from both sides. It's a good read.

Great article...almost. I don't take issue with most of it, but there are a couple points that left me scratching my head.

First, where he mentions that in NY and CA it's illegal to buy magazines that carry more than 10 rounds. "Here the path to increased public safety is reasonably clear" he says. Except that he essentially contradicts himself. He admits that criminals still obtain weapons illegally, so wouldn't it stand to reason that they'd also be able to obtain larger capacity magazines? Which would, again, leave law abiding folks at a disadvantage, only being able to purchase magazines with 10 rounds max. But even if would-be murderers only had 10-round mags, with any proficiency it only takes a second or two to reload.

Then this:

Getting a gun license could be made as difficult as getting a license to fly an airplane, requiring dozens of hours of training. I would certainly be happy to see policy changes like this. In that respect, I support much stricter gun laws. But I am under no illusions that such restrictions would make it difficult for bad people to acquire guns illegally.

I get that he would like to ensure that people who want to own guns to be proficiently trained, but the main problem I have with it is the fact that stricter gun laws just make it more difficult for law abiding citizens to obtain weapons and wouldn't change anything with regards to criminals obtaining them. Which he openly admits. So, again, those willing to be responsible and follow laws are penalized. These people are not the problem.

Granted, the one thing he does get right is when he prefaced the above suggestion with, "I do not know how we can solve the problem of gun violence." I don't, either, but that's not it.

Show me a way to truly make it more difficult for criminals to access guns that don't penalize those of us who are responsible, and I'm all ears.

Yeah, I kind of follow you, but I can't help but go back to the "I don't want to be a target thing." Sure, sometimes something exceptionally bad happens, like the Paris attacks. But I just can't rationalize that more guns = less violence because it makes everyone a deterrent. If there are fewer guns period, as is the case in most western nations, then there are also fewer available for the bad guys. How is that logic flawed?

Jeff said:

If there are fewer guns period, as is the case in most western nations, then there are also fewer available for the bad guys. How is that logic flawed?

Because of the overwhelming number of guns that already exist.

Even if you cut the number of guns in the wild in half you're talking 160 million instead of 320 million.

Can anyone really say, "Oh there's only 160,000,000 million guns out there. We're way safer now!"

I agree though that the numbers work in the opposite way too. We have 300 million guns. Are more really going to make us much safer? "We need 400 million guns! That'll stop a rogue shooter!"

And even if we make them harder to get or reduce manufacturing or anything you can possibly do to reduce the number being put out there, there's always shady ways to get them. I hate to keep going back to the drug thing, but it's such an obvious parallel to me. Drugs have been illegal for my whole life. Doesn't mean they don't exist or aren't easy to get.

It still feels painfully obvious that we're looking for the wrong answers. This shouldn't be able how people choose to kill, but why they choose to kill.

Lord Gonchar said:
Because of the overwhelming number of guns that already exist.

That always strikes me as a convenient defeatist argument. I put it with, "We need gas for cars," and, "Smoking is just what people do," and, "We can't just free all of the slaves." The argument is predicated on the notion that anything other than instant results is failure.

Sure, but eliminating guns in the US, while not technically impossible...is f***ing impossible, for all intents and purposes. And a world without guns is stupid, for precisely the reasons mentioned in the blog Bakeman posted.

But I think where you're getting hung up is that we're talking only about the number of guns. It's not "more guns=less crime" in the absolute literal sense...necessarily.* Rather, it's "guns in the hands of the right people=less crime." And that's been my argument since the beginning of this thread (though I guess I haven't made myself clear enough). Which is why I keep going back to the whole gun-free zone farce. They don't exist. You can't put up a sign and expect there to be zero gun crime for eternity. The only way to truly keep guns out of a certain location is to have armed security on hand...which is an oxymoron.

*But consider this: if the stats in the aforementioned blog are true that there is 22% less violent crime in the last decade, how does that logically make sense if the number of guns rises every year by the millions?

I don't really think it's a defeatist argument, but rather realistic. You simply can't retract that much of something simply because we decided it's what we should do. Anytime the conversation gets close to something like that I hear people talk about burying their guns in the backyard so no one can take them. Really.

The drug comparison is a great one, in my opinion. Because another factor that tends to drive harder in our society than any moral one we come up with is money. The revenue factor will keep them around, no matter who is buying them and how (legally vs illegally.)

The Colorado theatre shooter came up a couple of times and I wanted to share my thoughts about that, too, because I followed the trial very closely throughout. That guy was indisputably (from all sides and every person in the case) mentally ill. No question. And yet he still went to great lengths to hide what he was intending to do from the people he sought help from. In the documentation that he shared after the fact, he wrote that his interest was in killing people, not just shooting them. Had he not been able to carry out his plan with guns, he would have picked one of the other ways he outlined in this journal...or the way he set up his apartment with explosives in an attempt to stop first responders from being able to get to the theatre.

The point is that taking away some of the means will never stop the intent. It's like Gonch said above, it's not about how people choose to kill, but about why.

I still roundly reject the idea that because something is hard we do nothing. I realize the US has a lot of unique challenges, but I can't accept, "It works elsewhere, but this is not elsewhere."

(And by the way, I'm not saying I advocate total bans, I'm saying I hate the conversation stopping "that will never work.")

I don't even understand what we mean by more guns. Clearly, guns are readily available to anyone (good or bad) that wants them. It's not a supply problem. We're at the point where anyone that wants a gun has one, or at least can get one, and anyone that doesn't want one doesn't have one. So when we say more guns, are we talking about persuading more people to buy them that wouldn't normally be inclined to? Are we going around and stuffing them in the pockets of unsuspecting strangers?

Also, I think that mass shootings skew everyone's perception of how bad the problem really is. As Vater alluded to in the Sam Harris article, violent crime is on the decline and has been for a while now. Granted, mass shootings are traumatic events that can almost be considered a type of terrorism, given the effect that they have on society. But it seems to me that they ought to be put in their own category, separate from general gun violence, which is most often related to gang and drug activity and domestic disputes. Unfortunately, mass shootings are just something that crazy people do now, like some sort of macabre cultural phenomenon.