A long goodbye?

397 thoughts on “A long goodbye?”

1. I think it’s important to distinguish between sports as a participant and as an audience. Participating in sports is not only valuable as a form of exercise; it can also be a valuable part of the educational mission of schools. Team sports are obviously a way of teaching kids about the importance of cooperation and teamwork in achieving something no single member can do as an individual. And any sport can teach about setting goals, designing a realistic path to achieving them, and putting the time and effort needed into follow that plan. Those are really important life lessons, and there are plenty of kids who pick them up from sports when they don’t from regular classes. I feel that I learned more about hard work and persistence from sports, which were always a challenge for me, than from academics, which were often easy enough to be boring.
   Sports as an audience really is more about artificial tribalism than anything else. If you believe that tribalism is learned, I can see that you’d see sports fandom as a malign influence, teaching people all those negative lessons about subordination to leadership and devotion to the tribe over the general good. OTOH, if you see tribalism as a basic part of human nature, sports may be more benign, with the potential to substitute an artificial and meaningless tribe for potentially more dangerous ones.

2. Chomsky seems to want us to live a rather joyless life. After all, what he says about sports,

   For one thing because it — you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that’s of no importance. [audience laughs] That keeps them from worrying about — [applause] keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues]. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in — they have the most exotic information [more laughter] and understanding about all kind of arcane issues.

   could also be said about movies, music, theater, and so on. If he includes participation, then the indictment reaches further. I don’t think I buy this.

3. I think it’s important to distinguish between sports as a participant and as an audience.
   That’s a very good point. Sitting on your ass watching football does not actually give you a longer life.
   Participating in sports is not only valuable as a form of exercise; it can also be a valuable part of the educational mission of schools.
   If we’re talking about a division 3 school, then sure. But if we’re talking about a big-time division 1 football/basketball program, then no. There’s nothing educational about those programs: they’re just engaging in tax evasion and horrific labor law violations.
   If Harvard decided to buy a pro-football team (and they could definitely afford it) and then pay the players $40K/year, we’d all understand perfectly well what was happening: they’d be screwing over their employees and abusing their tax free status as an educational institution to make tons of money. But since they scream “amateurism” that makes it OK I guess.
   After all, what he says about sports, could also be said about movies, music, theater, and so on.
   I don’t know about that; people seem to devote a lot more time and energy to sports-watching than they do to movies, music, theater, etc. Obviously there are some die-hard folks completely obsessed with movies or music, but they’re not catered to nearly as much in our culture; compare the amount of air time given to sports on TV versus movies or music or theater for example. Or column-inches for newspapers. There are plenty of sports bars, but not so many movie bars.

4. RE: Turbulence.
   Movie bars? I think they’re called movie theaters.

5. There are movie theaters now that serve drinks.
   It’s a wonder that more of them don’t turn into shooting ranges mid-flick.
   I went to a movie and a 3-D firing squad broke out in surround sound with special effects blood all over my shirt and everything. I thought the ambulance trip to the hospital was a part of the movie too.
   I’m thinking lj’s observation that football is more of a spectacle now (with exhibitionist praying too to leaven the concussions) a la wrestling is on to something happening to the wider culture with the intersection of media, money, and this curious American (others too, but we seem to take it to sociopathic depths) obsession with winners and losers and ranking and judging and dominating and now humiliating and dissing the losers.
   The home-run steroid deal in baseball back in the mid-1990s and until recently was a market phenomenon much like the money shot in porn.
   Other sports succumb to it too, but the curious case of the Food Channel being converted from an instructional entertainment wherein real chefs kind of show us how to prepare a dish into sharply time-limited gladiator competitions (the pantries and refrigerators located far off set so the chefs, some of them roomy in the hips, running, colliding, and struggling over ingredients) and the bizarre ingredients (snail slime extract, birds of a feather – with feathers – , a hot dog, candy corn, and a giant cassava root from northern BORNEO) interspliced with the contestants dissing each other and then the music modulated to darkly minor keys as the judges spit the food on the floor and tell the chef he or she can go clean the restrooms now, not to mention the shamefaced Trump-walk back to the Green for Envy Room caught on film by a backwards-walking cameraman.
   Reality, baby.
   Is it any wonder Linda McMahon has run for national office twice?
   We would have daily body slams and unauthorized tag teams on the Senate Floor with CSpan featuring Congressman wearing Speedos going eye-to-eye at the weigh-in with, God help us, a scuffle breaking out before the main event filibuster.
   It’s right around the corner.
   Because the market speaks.
   I speak too.
   F”ck you, market!

6. We subsidize the spectacle without knowing it and whether we like it or not.
   http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/12/sports-tax-everyone-pays

7. I think it’s utterly absurd that we pay adults good money to play children’s games. I think it’s beyond absurd that we tax people to subsidize it.
   But I do wonder if our government would survive the end of the circuses; Would bread alone be enough?

8. “We would have daily body slams and unauthorized tag teams on the Senate Floor”
   Al Franken IS in the Senate now, isn’t he…

9. Those bench players and relief pitchers could be turning out precision-machined parts while they cool their heels waiting to get into the game.
   It used to be children manning the machines and adults reaping the reward before government got in the way.
   Now, children sit on their butts, some adults get paid billions to play children’s games and adult machinists are offered, in the case we’re discussing here, $10 bucks per hour to do what children might do for $3 per hour.
   It’s absurd all right.
   Nothing we can do about it though.
   re Al Franken, you elect “business” people like Linda McMahon and I’ll elect comedians like Andy Kaufmann and we’ll wonder if the neck braces are part of the show or … what?
   😉
   The Citizen Legislature.

10. I had in mind a discussion of the things that makes one sport popular and another sport not, but I don’t have anyone to blame for the fact that we are talking about the validity of pro sports in general but me.
    Now, this isn’t dismissing anything anyone has said, but a little pushback on the notion that sports is about tribalism. Roger notes that it may substitute for other forms of tribalism that may be actively harmful, which I think is true, but people dressing to the nines for an orchestra concert (or alternatively, dressing down for a grunge concert) seems to indicate that tribalism is shot thru any kind of mass gathering. Turb also notes that there are people who do absolutely who exercise vicariously thru watching sports, surely the worst of both worlds. But part of the thing about sports events is that people in general want events that allow them to share a feeling with other people. 2-1, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded and the grizzled veteran, or the rookie sensation, or even the player who just got called up, you have a situation that almost demands that you share the feelings of others (if you thought baseball was a crock, you probably wouldn’t be there or have the set on in the first place)
    Russell has often said he doesn’t understand why people like sports, and I’ve always wanted to try and explain my love for them, but in a deep sense, it is irrational and therefore inexplicable. But going to a concert and having a piece played like you’ve never heard it before, or even walking by a street performer and hearing a lick that makes you stop and say ‘wow!’ partakes of the same feeling, and organizing these experiences so that feeling can be shared is a lot of the apparatus not only of modern sports, but all entertainment. That modernity or capitalism or whatever you want to call it finds a way to package it and make a profit out of it shouldn’t really make sports the guilty party, I think that any kind of human striving can be packaged in a way that monetizes it (I always thought that the ABC show that pitted people from different sports doing athletic events was the precursor to shows like Survivor and trying to google the name of that show, I came across Battle of the Network Stars. The future was staring us in the face)

11. In the 1930s and 40′ horse racing and boxing were the most popular sports in America. Some race horses achieved star status equivalent to Michael Jordan.

12. @Turbulence: If we’re talking about a division 3 school, then sure.
    I was thinking more about high school, which Chomsky referenced in his quote. I think that’s about the level in sports where there starts to be an emphasis on sports as a spectacle for anyone beyond the families of the participants. I’d even say that it’s the level where the kind of thing Chomsky is talking about is the most significant. Children are forced to attend school, and in many secondary schools they’re coerced into being fans of the school team through things like pep rallies*. Primary schools don’t usually make such a big deal about sports, and colleges are both voluntary and varied, so students who don’t care about sports can choose a school that doesn’t emphasize them. Professional sports fandom is voluntary, even if, as some posters have pointed out above, financial support of the local team isn’t.
    In terms of popularity, I wouldn’t count football out. It’s still the biggest sport in terms of revenue, and I see no evidence that questions about the damage it does to players are having much effect on its popularity. I fully expect football to finesse the issue in much the same way they’ve avoided most of the serious fallout from PED abuse that rightly should have come their way. They’ll pretend to take the issue seriously, institute some rule changes to try to mitigate the most obvious parts of the problem, and declare that the problem is now solved. The media, which love football revenue, will happily repeat their claims that everything is fine and ignore future complaints about traumatic brain injury no matter how much evidence surfaces.
    *My impression from talking to my parents is that the coercive aspect of school sports fandom may have been at its peak in the post-War years when Chomsky was in school. Some of the stories they’ve told me sure sound like the kind of thing that would discourage an interest in sports in anyone who wasn’t already excited about it.

13. Turbulence,
    people seem to devote a lot more time and energy to sports-watching than they do to movies, music, theater, etc. Obviously there are some die-hard folks completely obsessed with movies or music, but they’re not catered to nearly as much in our culture; compare the amount of air time given to sports on TV versus movies or music or theater for example. Or column-inches for newspapers. There are plenty of sports bars, but not so many movie bars.
    All true, but I don’t think it changes the point. Chomsky’s screed doesn’t seem to allow for even a limited amount of time devoted to entertainment, nor does it recognize that some of us, like me for instance, enjoy sports in a non-life-consuming way.
    And while movie or music obsession is far less common than sports obsession, there are many who are obsessed with activities they participate in that “keep(s) them from worrying about things that matter to their lives.” To the extent that there are those who care a lot about playing chess or golf, for example, those games too seem to be subject to his criticism.

14. lj, I for one am not necessarily criticizing the sports themselves (you know I play ball 😉 ) nor really the effort to package or monetize the human striving per se, but rather the way now, more than in the past, it seems, so much of the striving, and not just in sports, is couched in terms of making sure the loser becomes the spectacle and is accorded the proper humiliation.
    Also, the packaging is lame. Attending a major league baseball game now is non-stop pretty dumb stimulation (a fan sent onto the field to catch a baseball shot out of a slingshot by the team mascot; silly interviews and trivia games with fans on the big scoreboard screen, etc. etc.) during moments (afforded us by the beautiful pacing of the game; yeah, I know, Proust and baseball, who can stand it? 😉 ) when baseball fans used to sit and discuss what had transpired during the previous inning or just look out over the emerald-green field and enjoy one’s own meditations amid the background noise of the crowd.
    Now the sound system and the pyrotechnics and the little-league mosh pit at home plate on the walk-off whatever in every single game makes me want to vomit my $8 beer, if it had cost less and I felt I could waste it.
    Baseball (and all other sports) has always been marketed. One of my favorite instances is Bill Veeck’s hiring of 3′ 7″ inch dwarf Eddie Gaedal to pinch hit for his team’s leadoff batter — once.
    That at least was interesting and fraught with the possibility that something could go dreadfully and hilariously awry.
    Wikipedia explains:
    “Gaedel was under strict orders not to attempt to move the bat off his shoulder. When Veeck got the impression that Gaedel might be tempted to swing at a pitch, the owner warned Gaedel that he had taken out a $1 million insurance policy on his life, and that he would be standing on the roof of the stadium with a rifle prepared to kill Gaedel if he even looked like he was going to swing.[9] Veeck had carefully trained Gaedel to assume a tight crouch at the plate; he had measured Gaedel’s strike zone in that stance and claimed it was just one and a half inches high.[9] However when Gaedel came to the plate, he abandoned the crouch he had been taught for a pose that Veeck described as “a fair approximation of Joe DiMaggio’s classic style,”[9] leading Veeck to fear he was going to swing. (In the Thurber story, the midget cannot resist swinging at a 3-0 pitch, grounds out, and the team loses the game).”
    I love that Gaedal got into the striving for a moment and nearly queered the marketing. If he’d only laid down a perfect bunt and then avoided (by dint of size) the swipe tag at first.
    Then you had the happenstance extra-curricular marketing of baseball (the only sport with a sense of humor IMHO) through its personalities — Mark Fidrych, Bill “The Spaceman” Lee, Jimmy Piersall running the bases backwards.
    Uecker. The best and funniest loser ever.
    Once, Casey Stengel as a player in the 1920s secreted a bird under his hat and when he ran to his outfield spot he doffed his cap to the bleacher fans and away the bird flew.
    He tried (or maybe he succeeded; I can’t remember) once to secretly arrange for a plane to fly low over the stadium outfield and a confederate aboard would drop a ball out of the plane, which he would catch one-handed.
    How would you score that?
    I can’t remember a recent funny moment on the baseball field.
    Maybe the steroids and the now all-pervasive packaging leeched all of the humor out their systems.
    As usual, none of this is on point.
    Bad marketing.

15. Chomsky, alas, may have gotten this one backwards. The current structure and prominence of organized sports may meet a need of the many to belong because our sense of powerlessness and alienation is overwhelming at times.
    Well that, and my chipping game sucks.

16. @bobbyp:
    IOW, sports are replacing religion as the opiate of the masses.

17. I think Chomsky is overstating by quite a bit. There’s no reason I can think of to assume that people, freed from the distraction of sports, would suddenly turn their attention to whatever Chomsky thinks is important.
    On the other hand…I think the creepy aspect of footbll for me is the stadiums. Too evocative of ancient Rome, gladiators and so on. Also mass chanting of any sort creeps me out, as do uniforms. It seems like a slippery slope downhill to the lose of self into a groupthink.
    I think there’s an actual high involved in the loss of self in a group activity. Many people like to lose themselves into a mass activity like dancing or screaming or chanting.
    People gotta participate in groups. It’s our nature as territorial pack hunters and gatherers. The trick is to maintain one’s own individuality within the group, rather than allowing oneself to be subliminated into it. So the creepy aspect of sports to me is the way some fans turn into podpeople for the duration of the game. But that’s also the creepy aspect of a lot of group activites.
    But that’s just my personal reaction. I remember back iin highschool I asked a girl why she like football and she replied that she liked being able to stand up and shout out loud.

18. I think the Chomsky argument is being taken a bit out of context. He’s specifically talking about sports in the context of mass media. And I don’t think it makes sense to talk about high school sports in that context; I mean, if you look at the evening news on NBC or read the New York Times, do you find a lot of high school sports there? Here’s the bit of the interview from just before LJ excerpted the earlier quote:

    Now there are other media too whose basic social role is quite different: it’s diversion. There’s the real mass media-the kinds that are aimed at, you know, Joe Six Pack — that kind. The purpose of those media is just to dull people’s brains.
    This is an oversimplification, but for the eighty percent or whatever they are, the main thing is to divert them. To get them to watch National Football League. And to worry about “Mother With Child With Six Heads,” or whatever you pick up on the supermarket stands and so on. Or look at astrology. Or get involved in fundamentalist stuff or something or other. Just get them away. Get them away from things that matter. And for that it’s important to reduce their capacity to think.
    Take, say, sports — that’s another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view.

    So yeah, Chomsky alluded to school sports as a way of fostering conformity to authoritarian systems, but his focus in that interview is a propaganda model about how elite media push ideas into the populace (consider the FISCAL CLIFF, which isn’t a cliff at all for example). High school tennis doesn’t intersect much with elite media as far as I can see.
    And I really don’t think that golf or movies have the same role in terms of consuming people’s attention. Movies don’t engender rivalries. We don’t have movie radio talk shows in every city in the country where movie afficionados phone in and argue with the host about recent films. But we do have sports radio.

19. Chomsky is probably overstating it, but isn’t football a very, well, militaristic sort of sport? I don’t watch it at all, but I’ve heard or read secondhand that there are commonly jingoistic displays at NFL games. True or not true? I’m asking, since, as I’ve said, I never watch football.
    Coincidentally our rector gave a sermon a few weeks ago about her husband’s experience as a coach for the kids in the local community. He had made it a point that every boy on the team got to play, and it was all about sportsmanship and only secondarily about winning. But the team started winning anyway. It got to the point where they were playing for the local championship and the game was tight and her husband got caught up in the moment and told one of the boys “Nevermind what I told you about passing and sharing and not being a gloryhound–just do what you have to do to win.” The kid gave him a funny look and instead played the way the coach had taught them all along. And they lost. Afterwards her husband apologized to the team for his lapse into the “win at all costs” mentality.
    So I guess the sort of lesson kids are taught in high school sports depends on what sort of lessons the grownups want to teach.
    And sure, if football were abolished it doesn’t mean people would join a union and start discussing how society should be arranged, but that doesn’t mean professional sports doesn’t suck up a lot of time and energy and emotion. I even agree with his high school football experience–I remember telling someone in the tenth grade that I didn’t care whether our high school team won or lost and this guy gave me a really ugly look. If one has a sense of humor about one’s sports loyalties then it’s harmless–otherwise maybe it is a way of teaching conformity or other bad values.

20. Some interesting points. The one I found most interesting was that the way sports were woven into the fabric of secondary education was probably different in Chomsky’s day than it is today is obvious in retrospect, but something I didn’t even think about until Roger noted it. At any rate, the way sports factors into things must be different for every locale and every high school, so it’s a bit of a thin reed to use as an example of indoctrination.

21. “IOW, sports are replacing religion as the opiate of the masses.”
    No, they’re the “Circus” part of “Bread and Circuses”. Welfare is the “bread” part. Any time you see the phrase, “Bread and circuses”, just read it to mean, “Welfare and professional sports”.

22. It’s a matter of context. I’m pretty sure Chomsky was addressing a group of former Jets fans.
    I read this yesterday while watching Houston beat Tennessee and hoping Pittsburgh would beat Baltimore. Happy endings all the way around.
    Plus, UT got beat, always a good thing, and the SEC championship game was everything a battle (go Military!) on the field ought to be. Yes, the language of football is very militaristic. However, fatalities are far more rare than, say, driving to work. There are no civilian casualties unless you count being on the losing side of a game or a bet.
    Sports transcends race, politics, class, gender, what have you. It’s fun stuff. Soccer is catching on big, major league baseball is dying and football is setting new heights. Want to strike up a conversation with a stranger? Mention the local favorite and comment on their season.
    Common ground is a good thing. Much better than political parties.
    Compared to any number of other obsessions, it’s relatively harmless, the players are amply compensated and, not to overstate the point, it’s fun and it brings lots of folks together.
    I played high school football and loved it. My team was pretty awful, but it was still great, going out on the field and going head-to-head with the best that the other school could field. I wish I’d been big enough and good enough to have played college ball, even knowing that what residual physical damage I have would have been amplified considerably, most likely.
    The line between passion and obsession is pretty gray. How one judges one diversion as worthy and another as not is, in most cases, just a matter of taste. Cage fighting is an example of an outlier that speaks to the worst in us. I can see where someone who does not understand football could see it as a less overtly violent subset of the same genre as cage fighting (if I’m using the correct term for that activity), but that is a product of ignorance. Every year, the quality of players’ protective equipment goes up, new rules are adopted to regulate the form and manner of contact so as to mitigate injury.
    It may not be your cup of tea, but it’s a huge amount of fun form millions and millions. Unless, of course, you’re a former Jets fan. Then, not so much.

23. However, fatalities are far more rare than, say, driving to work.
    If we’re going to ignore the horrific brain damage leading to dementia at ridiculously young ages, I guess that’s OK.
    There are no civilian casualties unless you count being on the losing side of a game or a bet.
    Kasandra Perkins looks pretty dead to me. Does she count as a civilian casualty?

24. Turb, I don’t ignore the past or the present. Which is why I mentioned improvements in equipment and rule changes calculated to mitigate injury. It’s a physical game, involving controlled violence and occasional serious, and rarely, very serious injury. Still, compared to driving to work–or working, depending on the occupation–and considering the physical nature of the game, snarking because there is injury ignores the fact that life presents a near-infinite range of injury/death opportunities.
    As for Kasandra Perkins, that is no different than any number of other tragic murder/suicides. You are confusing effect with cause. Last week, a college instructor was the victim of a murder suicide in Wyoming. Do you want to shut down colleges? Seriously.

25. Last week, a college instructor was the victim of a murder suicide in Wyoming.
    Are college instructors required, as a condition of employment, to repeatedly get concussions in such a way that causes significant brain damage which has been linked to extreme depression and homicidal behavior?
    Every year, the quality of players’ protective equipment goes up, new rules are adopted to regulate the form and manner of contact so as to mitigate injury.
    There’s no reason to believe that equipment or rule changes will significantly reduce the degree of brain damage associated with playing football.

26. Turb, ok, you don’t like football. Got it. Arguing by assertion isn’t convincing. If marijuana were shown to cause impairment leading to industrial and auto related accidents, would your views on legalization change? Not likely. You pick your issues and take your positions, but consistency doesn’t seem to matter. There are uncountable causes of injury, homicide, etc; singling out professional football is a product of bias, not meaningful analysis.

27. No, it’s not O.K.
    The foot dragging too by the football powers that be at all levels to employ technology and rule changes to reduce (the risk can never be eliminated) head trauma and its later horrific side effects is not O.K.
    But have I missed something here?
    Do we know yet that Jovan Belcher murdered his girlfriend and then killed himself because of neurological changes and damage resulting from head trauma sustained in his profession?
    Do we have Belcher’s autopsy results yet?
    I’m usually one of the few around here who makes up stuff on the run, for my own reasons. Probably because I’ve been hit in the head one too many times.
    I didn’t expect that from you, Turb, not that it matters.
    As an aside, and on a much smaller scale I play baseball and softball and there are those close to me (now farther away) who have suggested addiction to the sport may be at play here.
    I say I’m addicted to sunshine and reading too, but alright, I get it.
    Still, the high tech development of metal softball and baseball bats has had an appreciable effect on both games. In my own case, unless you are a professional softball player (I’m talking the top men’s leagues), there are now sharp restrictions on the brand of bat you can use in a game in nearly all leagues.
    Especially as we age (goddamned gravity), a 55-year old softball pitcher standing @50-feet away from a 210 pound Grendel wielding a piece of titanium sculpted by Northrup Grumman and launching high-speed softball surface to crotch missiles has resulted in a few dead 55-year old pitchers.
    Our hand-eye coordination, especially at night under the lights ain’t what it used to be, as we find out if we pitch when the line drive is already into the outfield before you can get your glove up to where the ball just grazed your ear going past.
    Plus, as an outfielder, it’s a little boring to stand there watching the entire opposing lineup launch towering home runs into the trees.
    They’ve changed the construction of the ball too, which has cramped my style too (leadoff hitter usually, but I could always launch one — still can on occasion given certain weather conditions — when needed with my old bat and the old crisper balls), but I go with the flow.
    Most smart softball pitchers in competitive leagues wear padding from head to toe like a hockey goalie.
    Then, there’s baseball with its outrageous velocities, but I play in a wood-bat league.
    I think high schools and colleges are going back to wood bats too for safety’s sake.
    Of course, the pitchers have weaponry too in baseball, which you find out after taking an 85 mph fastball directly in the kidney and then hoping you don’t spit blood once you hobble down to first (taking the long way around) yelling “Owey, owey” in your secret to-yourself inside voice.
    “That’s gotta hurt” says the first baseman, not making eye contact.
    “Flesh wound”, you croak, through your man-tears. You look around for Mommy, who suffers from Alzheimers now, as it happens, and not because of a football injury and who wouldn’t have much sympathy at this point anywho.
    The next day’s bruise has every horrid color in the rainbow in it with an emphasis on bile yellow and eggplant purple. Greens, of all colors.
    Call me crazy.

28. Um, McTex, did you read the Gladwell article I linked to? The magnitude of the effects I’m talking about are quite a bit higher than anything you’ve brought up. Do you really find that extremely high incidence of brain damage and early dementia in football players to be not a big deal?
    I don’t really feel inclined to follow you down a threadjack about marijuana and auto accidents because that has nothing to do with sports at all.

29. “keep(s) them from worrying about things that matter to their lives.”
    yes. that’s why we call them “diversions”, “pastimes [pass-time]”, etc.. sometimes not worrying about things for a while is exactly what people need in order to later deal with the things that worry them.
    fnck off, you boring old scold, Chomsky.

30. There’s no reason to believe that equipment or rule changes will significantly reduce the degree of brain damage associated with playing football.
    Often, such well-intentioned efforts may have the opposite of their intended effects. Football helmets are, at once, protection and weapons. (Pads, not so much – should they go back to leather “helmets,” which were more head pads than helmets?)
    Is it worse for boxers in the long run to wear gloves, resulting in fewer lacerations, maybe mitigating arthritis, but increasing the potential for brain trauma?
    Anyway, rule changes might help football, but they’d have to be so radical that football would become rugby (or something). You just can’t have large, fast men colliding at full speed that way without regular head injuries occurring.
    I like sports. I know it’s kind of pointless and silly, but I can’t help it. Since it doesn’t consume me, it’s not a problem, anymore than, say, watching Boardwalk Empire is.

31. Um, McTex, did you read the Gladwell article I linked to?
    No, the link didn’t go through. I tried it, though. If you have a better link, I’ll look at it, though it will likely be tomorrow afternoon before more time opens up.
    There are few injury-free sports. Football less so than others. All are voluntary.

32. Sorry about that McTex, I screwed up the link. Here’s the correct link.

33. You could also check this bit of wikipedia if you wanted the shorter version; I find Gladwell kind of tiring to be honest.

34. All are voluntary.
    I have more than a few friends for whom not playing wasn’t going to sit well with their fathers.
    Either way, “voluntary” covers a lot of ground and doesn’t excuse whatever voluntary activity one might attract people to with large sums of money. Why would you bother to bring up rule or equipment changes? The players are playing under current rules using current equipment voluntarily, no? So it’s all good.

35. There are few injury-free sports. Football less so than others. All are voluntary.
    But there are many where serious brain damage is rare and the result of events that do not constitute an integral part of the game. A batter might get beaned, but most go through an entire career without it happening.
    “Voluntary” normally implies informed consent – full understanding of the risks – by an adult.
    It’s hard for me to see how a high-school kid under social presures, and maybe even urging from his parents, possibly being told that the risks of brain damage are exaggerated, can be said to be a “voluntary” participant in football.

36. Turb, how many millions of men have played some combination of high school/college/professional football plus hockey, boxing, rugby? What is the incidence of CTE among this population?
    What you will find, without a doubt, is a much higher incidence of joint disorders among athletes, including joggers.
    Do you have stats on injuries sustained by bicyclists? Motorcyclists? Playing on a trampoline?
    The surprising news would be if there weren’t very serious injuries associated with a sport like football. Cervical spine injuries producing quadriplegia are as bad as any I can think of and I’ve known two individuals who sustained this type of injury playing football. I can find the same in other sports and recreational activities, including bike riding. Or, horseback riding/jumping.
    I have more than a few friends for whom not playing wasn’t going to sit well with their fathers.
    Fair point. That said, dangerous occupations, e.g. test pilots, deep water welding, etc, all command financial premiums and draw people for that reason. Trying to make any of these activities safer makes sense, regardless of current technology. We drove cars in the 70’s that were relative death traps compared to today. We still did it. Voluntarily.

37. What is the incidence of CTE among this population?
    We don’t know because the gold-standard CTE diagnosis requires an autopsy.
    But note that I was specifically talking about pro-football, not high school football and not baseball or basketball. Our best guess is that CTE is caused by repeated head trauma, so a player who racked up 20 years of intensive practice and play (high school + college + pro career) is going to have a much higher risk than some random guy who played a season or two in high school.
    Again, I think the risks we’re talking for pro-football players are just orders of magnitude higher than other sports or commuting to an office job or bicycling. Certainly, there are risks in everything, but when your risk of dementia runs 20 times the average (and that’s likely an underestimate)…something has gone horribly wrong.

38. That said, dangerous occupations, e.g. test pilots, deep water welding, etc, all command financial premiums and draw people for that reason.
    Those sorts of things have risks that are far more apparent. They aren’t problems that may be hidden for years, but that ultimately ruin someone’s life. And they aren’t done simply for entertainment’s sake.
    That’s not to say that no test pilot or deepwater welder has engaged in what ultimately was a wrong-headed or unjustified effort, but the argument for taking those risks is that there are significant material benefits to society to be gained from taking them. It’s not just for fun, and I say that as someone who couldn’t begin to guess how many football games he’s watched in person and on television, often with great interest, sometimes evidenced by jumping up and down, shouting, high-five-ing complete strangers, and all that typical stuff.
    We still did it. Voluntarily.
    Sure. But so what?

39. More evidence in Turb’s direction regarding Belcher and head trauma specifically:
    http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/12/the-death-knell-for-football-ctd.html
    Still, I can’t see a death knell (Sullivan goes off fully cocked again) for football because of this stuff. Not that it shouldn’t be a death knell maybe and not that I care one way or the other about the sport, but …. money and people like the sport, and money.
    I’d like to see soccer fan violence addressed more stringently too.
    I’d like to go to a hockey game some time (no, I wouldn’t, any sport that involves ice is not for me) and have government intervention breakout during the fighting.
    The change in football will come from the bottom up (high school parents pulling their kids from the sport as evidence mounts and coaches and schools keep ignoring calls for change) and from the top (professional active football players’ unions, foregoing the testosterone, saying “enough”).
    By the way, many high school sports coaches also encourage (usually by looking the other way) the use of supplements (creatine and such) by their players.
    Arrest a high school coach and it’ll stop.
    You know, government intervention.

40. Some information from today’s Globe.

41. Russell has often said he doesn’t understand why people like sports
    Just to clarify, the thing I don’t really get is the mass-spectator thing.
    I can definitely understand the appeal of playing sports. And I can definitely understand the appeal of watching sports that you actually play, or have played when you were perhaps younger and actually able to play.
    But the mass-spectator thing, and the sort of social / cultural ‘common bond’ via rooting for your favorite team, I just don’t really relate to.
    Not just a sports thing, I’m that way with pretty much anything. Don’t go to big arena concerts, have absolutely zero interest in big public events. I just don’t have that gene.
    I also have a thing where I’m just not that interested in things I personally don’t actually do, or that I can’t relate to something that I actually do. Probably says more about me than anything else, but there it is.
    This post has made me think about why I find football, in particular, so uninteresting. At first I was tempted to say the level of violence, but I actually enjoy watching boxing, so that’s kind of inconsistent.
    I think what turns me off about football is that it just seems like an exercise in massed brute force. It seems kind of brainless to me.
    I recognize that there is a strategic aspect to it, and that (at least in some positions) there is a need for thoughtful deployment of skill, but by and large it just strikes me as a bunch of really large people smashing into each other.
    To me, it’s not interesting.
    It’s also gotten to the point where every player’s job is just extremely specialized, which also seems less interesting to me.
    It just doesn’t seem like a particularly thoughtful sport.
    To each their own.
    Personal preferences aside, I do also think that football has gotten to the point where anyone who plays it can count on serious physical disability in later life.
    It’s true that NFL guys get paid a lot, but that seems kind of FUBAR to me. It’s a game, it’s entertainment, it’s a diversion. It’s not worth a lifetime of pain.
    And yeah, I like boxing better, but the same thing is true there as well.
    I like Chomsky a lot, but he really does occupy the role of village scold. Every village needs one.

42. Rules changes regarding tackles could mitigate the worst of the damage: the Heads Up Tackle.
    As far as shifts in sports, there’s some indication that football (the real thing, what Americans call ‘soccer’ 😉 may finally make the jump to being a top spectator sport in the US. If so, let’s hope that the US pays attention to what Germany has been doing in the Bundesliga with the 50+1 rule and financial fair play. Would be much healthier for the sport than the portable charlie foxtrot that is the EPL financial model.

43. Don’t go to big arena concerts, have absolutely zero interest in big public events. I just don’t have that gene.
    I do go to those sorts of events, but I get a feeling something like embarassment at any kind of top-down, organized mass participation – think national anthems, game, the popular song everyone is supposed to sing along with during a concert, fight songs, etc. It feels corny and phony, maybe even inorganic, to me and makes me uncomfortable, like I’m half an alien because I can’t go all-in like (seemingly) everyone else. I become a spectator relative to the spectators, watching them rather than being one of them.

44. Just ignore “game” in that list. Editing error.

45. It feels corny and phony, maybe even inorganic, to me and makes me uncomfortable, like I’m half an alien because I can’t go all-in like (seemingly) everyone else.
    ditto.
    peta dittos.

46. Whenever I witness an opposing baseball or softball team do a pregame all hands in the middle pep talk and Hooya! I want to headbutt the lot of them sans helmets, against doctor’s orders.
    Blech! Shut up and play!
    Same with the little league walk-off celebration at home plate in every major league baseball these days.
    Game over. Get off the field.
    Save it for the Food Channel.

47. “By the way, many high school sports coaches also encourage (usually by looking the other way) the use of supplements (creatine and such) by their players.”
    I must confess, I find this remark a bit puzzling. Why would coaches have to “look the other way” when players use supplements such as creatine? They are, after all, perfectly legal. We’re not talking anabolic steriods here, just components of food which have been concentrated.

48. I’m no expert, but in the case of creatine, specifically, there are ways of taking it that give a kid the weight and muscle gain he or she desires without harmful side effects, though the science is inconclusive.
    Too much creatine, on the other hand, can suppress the body’s ability to make its own and may cause kidney stones.
    You wouldn’t want a kid whose family has a history of childhood diabetes to be taking anything that would cause potential harm to the kidneys, which will be damaged eventually by diabetes.
    So, at the very least, taking creatine and other supplements, especially for an unsupervised kid (some thick-necked high school coaches may not have the best interests of the kid in mind), should probably be done under a doctor’s direction.
    Yes, supplements are legal.
    Anabolic steroids were legal too when Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Jose Canseco were taking them.
    I notice though, despite the legality, these guys weren’t broadcasting their use.
    Plenty of cheating is legal, but not perfect.
    For full disclosure, I’m from a family with three too many members who suffered from Type I diabetes, two of whom have said long goodbyes.
    A teenaged nephew, who suffered concussions in high school football as well, is now taking creatine to buff up for vanity’s sake. His Dad, who is my brother, and I were giving him the third degree a couple of weeks ago and counseled caution, given his family history.
    The kid said his high school football coaches (he graduated last year) encouraged all of the kids on the roster to use creatine and other supplements without regard to individual differences.
    I’m not his dad so it’s beyond my business, but I would have been asking the coaches if I could see their medical degrees, the a*sholes.

49. “You wouldn’t want a kid whose family has a history of childhood diabetes to be taking anything that would cause potential harm to the kidneys, which will be damaged eventually by diabetes.”
    You wouldn’t want a kid in that situation to be consuming large quantities of sugar, either, but we’d never speak of a coach “looking the other way” when a kid was drinking a glass of sweet tea.
    Coaches aren’t doctors, it’s not their responsibility to take into account ever metabolic peculiarity of the people the coach. At some point these things become the responsibility of the kid and his parents, and I’d say that, so long as the coach isn’t doing anything which would harm an average person, they’ve fulfilled their responsibilities.

50. FWIW, my two cents:
    It’s freaking insane for kids to be taking supplements to bulk up for organized sports. Legal, illegal, whatever.
    IMVHO it’s freaking insane for pros to be taking supplements, but they’re adults and it’s their life.
    And if there is anything on God’s green earth that coaches of youth or high school sports should be concerned about, it’s the physical health of the kids they are coaching.
    Not everybody is average, and in fact almost nobody is average. If a kids’ sports coach can’t be aware of, and sensitive to, the unique physical requirements of their charges, they shouldn’t be coaching.
    If they want to coach adults, they can take their shot at coaching pros. If they want to coach kids, they are *absolutely obliged* to act in the role of the responsible adult in the room, and that includes being aware of and sensitive to the particular needs of the kids who are in their charge.
    Seriously, WTF.

51. I get a feeling something like embarassment at any kind of top-down, organized mass participation
    peta dittos.
    Say what?
    it’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements — in fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism.
    Chomsky’s a cranky old lefty weirdo, for sure, and in this country the kind of critical analysis that he traffics in kind of went out in the trash with everybody’s undergraduate copy of “One-Dimensional Man” sometime around 1978.
    But if you want to know what he’s on about, consider HSH and cleek’s comments upthread.

52. Right on on the sweet tea, for f*ck sakes.
    Yes, the parents and kids should take responsibility. No kidding.
    But, I wouldn’t want a coach without machine tool training certification drill holes in my kid’s head to let out the stupid either.
    “I drill”, they might say. “What leaks out is not my problem.”
    Coach, I’d like to introduce you to my kid’s uncle, Joe Pesci. Coach … Joe Pesci. Uncle Joe, this here is my kid’s coach I was telling you about the other day.
    If the coach is encourages supplement use among teenagers, then he or she had better account for metabolic peculiarities, unless those words are too big for them.
    If the coach is looking the other way on supplement use, depending on the supplement I guess, then maybe he or she should at least be thinking about metabolic peculiarities among the idiots the idiot is coaching.
    And “50 Shades of Grey” should be called “Two Shades: Black and White, Case Closed” for the obtuse among us.

53. I’d be a lot more sympathetic to libertarianism if it wasn’t always presented as a total abdication of responsibility for anybody else on the planet.
    Real life doesn’t work that way. In My Very Humble Opinion.

54. If they want to coach adults, they can take their shot at coaching pros. If they want to coach kids, they are *absolutely obliged* to act in the role of the responsible adult in the room, and that includes being aware of and sensitive to the particular needs of the kids who are in their charge.
    But the real exploitation happens not in pro sports (where athletes get paid tremendous amounts), and not so much with high school (although it does happen there, for sure, and russell is totally right), but in college, where kids are “adults” but, really, very exploitable. I’m totally with Turbulence on Division I college sports. (And agree with him, I think, that Division III is more what it should be about.)

55. “If the coach is encourages supplement use among teenagers, then he or she had better account for metabolic peculiarities, unless those words are too big for them.”
    Heck, if he’s encouraging exercise among teenagers, he better account for the fact that some of them might have brittle bones. Or heart problems. Maybe they’ve got an aneurism ready to pop if they lift a weight.
    Or maybe they’re entitled to assume the kids they’re coaching are standard issue, no out of the ordinary medical problems, until they’re told otherwise, by the people who are actually in a position to know? The kids and parents?
    After all, these supplements aren’t crazy dangerous weird stuff, they’re just concentrated foods. They’re quite safe for normal people to use. Is the coach supposed to avoid using Gatoraid, for instance, just on the off chance one of the students didn’t admit to being diabetic? These supplements are as safe as that.
    No, libertarianism isn’t about abdicating responsibility. It’s about realizing where it actually belongs, instead of dumping it on third parties.

56. “Or maybe they’re entitled to assume the kids they’re coaching are standard issue, no out of the ordinary medical problems, until they’re told otherwise, by the people who are actually in a position to know? The kids and parents?”
    Maybe the kid and parents aren’t that rich or sophisticated and so haven’t had the kid checked for out of the ordinary problems that would be exacerbated by football.
    If every kid who participates in football has to bring a signed and completed medical form from his guardian saying his history of concussion, health problems, etc, that seems like a good way of handling it (and may be how it’s done). Why just assume everything is okay? Forms aren’t that hard to make and hand out.

57. What’s the deal with sports?
    1) When I lived in Boston, I loved that I could walk into any bar in the city – any bar – and sit down next to a bus driver or a banker or a garbageman or a professor of composition and have an in-depth conversation about who should be hitting second. You can’t buy that. Was I still rich/poor/whatever compared to my interlocutor? Sure. But for just a few minutes it didn’t matter.
    2) re: tribalism, above: sure. Also, for the vast majority of us, if everything is going well our lives are devoid of terrifying highs and lows. For the same reason that bored, comfortable persons create artificial drama (consciously or not), being a sports fan provides peaks and valleys beyond [not] getting to work on time, or [not] needing a new tire. That is non-trivial.
    Also, too, on the same note: even the most “civilized” group activity (as mentioned: going to the symphony or something) has an important element of ritual and communal let’s-set-some-time-aside-ness. This is also vital.
    The part where it’s a relatively safe surrogate for more violent/primal forms of tribal-belonging activities has some truth to it as well.
    3) Games are outstanding. I’m really a baseball-football guy. I don’t really like basketball (for example), mostly because I don’t understand it very well. I like games (see also Wittgenstein, various Surrealists). Games create a sort of agreed-upon alternate reality-inside-reality, for the duration of which certain rules apply, and cleverness and guile and wit and, yes, athleticism are used to out-whatever the opponent to “win.” Is it important? Of course not — which is precisely why it is. It can afford to be crucially fncking important because it doesn’t matter.
    4) Just like anything else that one can be interested in — for (personal) example: music, or pipes, or tea — once I turn my full attention to it, my full analytical powers, or however else you want to think about it, there’s an incredibly rich and varied number of things to ponder and discuss. I have the most wonderful weekly conversation with a dear friend of mine during the fall) the ostensible purpose of which is to pick the coming week’s football games. Not for money. Just for analysis and discussion. and more often than not we also end up solving the problems of the known world at the same time.
    The Invisible Pink Unicorn knows I’m not an athlete, but I am a sports fan/apologist.
    I’ve even been learning to understand soccer (“football”) for the past 6-8 years.

58. major league baseball is dying
    Communist.
    Anyway, not so. TV ratings are down, but attendance is very healthy.
    http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20121004&content_id=39483214&vkey=pr_mlb&c_id=mlb
    Major League Baseball announced today that the 30 Clubs drew 74,859,268 fans in the 2012 regular season, representing the game’s highest attendance since 2008 and the fifth best single-season attendance in Baseball history.

59. I am a complete sucker for team sports: pro-baseball, footlball, and basketball. First of all, sports are aestheitically beautiful. (Translation: “they’re cool to watch”). Not only the individual plays but the patterns of momentum that emerge wherein teams become more real than the individuals within them. Beautiful and engrossing: a distraction but also a cultural acheivement in it’s own right.
    Secondly, within the unscripted drama of winning vs. losing there is a chance to observe and celebrate human greatness, not so as to put the players on a pedestal but so that we can celebrate our greatness and see it reflected back at us (without, ya know, pillaging and stuff). I’m surrounded by talent, dedication, empathy, guile, etc but the context is so mundane and the achievements of ordinary people are taken for granted: my love for my species can be expressed in sport.
    So sports is a religion: it allows me to observe and celebrate aesthetic beauty and personal aspiration that is non-fascist and non-deluded (no silly stories). And, as bob and others have said, it builds community.

60. Next season in celebration after the final football game, I’m hoping my nephew’s former teammates dump canisters of creatine all over the coach instead of the customary Gatorade.
    I wonder if I couched my points about supplements in the anti-public school rhetoric of one-size-fits-all indoctrination of our kids by unionized elites running government schools whether that might gain traction.
    Or maybe instead of the coaches worrying over Gatorade addiction, what this country really needs is high school coaches carrying sidearms in the schools so that anyone requesting attention to metabolic peculiarities in their charges can be dispensed with on an as-they-come basis.
    I don’t spose either that there’s any hope of blowing this thread up by bringing up Jovan Belcher’s gun possession, or is it that guns don’t kill people, in this case Belcher’s girlfriend, concussions do?
    And ya know, he could just as well have strangled her and then strangled himself in front of his employer.
    Or maybe drowned her in a tub of Gatorade and then offed himself by aspirating the remainder.
    Never mind.
    I think I’ll take up fantasy blogging.

61. How many people die each year of pistol whippings? You could at least have the sense to obsess about bullets, not guns…
    Though I suppose it would be in order to admit that, were it not for OJ being able to buy that AK-47, Nicole Simpson would likely still be alive today.
    No, seriously, I’ve got a 45 revolver in my closet at this moment, and it has to date never woke in the middle of the night and gone on a killing spree. Am I to suppose it’s because it’s one of the rare moral 45 revolvers? Just too nice a gun to do anything like that? No, it’s probably because I keep it chained to the shelf; I enjoy the noise it makes thrashing around at night, it’s rather like wind chimes…
    We say guns don’t kill people, people kill people, because it’s true. No gun anywhere has ever committed a murder. Sometimes people do so, with guns, or tire irons, or what have you. But not guns. Without a person entering the picture, they just sort of sit there. Doubtless seething in homicidal fury, but at least it’s impotent homicidal fury, until picked up by somebody of the same mindset.
    Countme-in, this guy murdered this woman because he was homicidal. Why are you obsessing about the tool he used, instead of realizing the “he was homicidal” was the critical factor?

62. Obsessing?
    No, merely commenting on a blog.
    I was just experimenting to see what happens when a troll is fed creatine.
    Actually, I do have an obsession against the use of “killing” and “spree” in the same lighthearted phrase, but never mind.
    Well, not so much an obsession, but more of an obsession spree.
    I’ve never been able to skip and shoot simultaneously.
    No one else, I think, is in my tree.
    It doesn’t matter much to me.
    I guess I do wonder, without obsessing mind you, if more homicidal individuals had to go to the messy trouble of hacking their significant others to pieces, a la O.J., instead of taking the lazy man’s technological way out via guns, if the murder rate might drop further.
    But then you’d say Tutsi and I’d say Hutu and we’d call the whole thing off and meet again in the next thread.
    I wonder too if O.J. wished he’d opted for the AK-47 as he drove down the LA Expressway.
    There’s a racket coming from my closet too.
    I think my AK-47 just found my golf clubs and doesn’t want to pay the green fees.
    Speaking of obsessions, what does it mean when a guy wakes up every morning with Clete Boyer’s batting statistics from the back of his 1960 baseball card running through his mind?
    Clete Boyer?
    That can’t be good productivity-wise.

63. If every kid who participates in football has to bring a signed and completed medical form from his guardian saying his history of concussion, health problems, etc, that seems like a good way of handling it
    In my very brief organized youth sports career, this was the norm.
    If you’re the coach, you have assumed responsibility for the well being of the kids who have been placed in your charge, while they are in your charge.
    Nobody expects you to be a mind-reader, but it’s more than reasonable to expect you to be generally familiar with the particular health issues any of the kids might have, and also be attentive to how they individually respond to and hold up under physical stress.
    If you don’t want to do that, don’t coach.
    Also – my comments here reflect my views and my views alone. I recognize that lots and lots and lots of people – most people – enjoy watching, playing, and otherwise having to do with organized sports. I think that’s more than splendid. It just ain’t my thing.
    The only reason I wanted to chime in about it was to maybe unpack LJ’s passing reference to my general non-interest in sports a bit.
    I can’t name a single Red Sox pitcher, have no idea who the head coach of the Patriots is, and haven’t watched a Celtics game since the Bird-Parish-McHale days, but I’ll watch a weird old YouTube clip of Tony Williams playing the ride cymbal for, like, an hour, over and over. It’s my version of game highlights.
    See, like this. I’ve probably watched that thing a few hundred times at this point. It’s a one-minute graduate seminar. Instead of the sports bar, I hang out at some local with a good organ trio and no cover, and we talk for hours about which finger Tony is using for the fulcrum in that clip.
    And then we talk about how fulcrum-shmulcrum, it’s Tony, and any finger would do. He’d kill with a broomstick taped to his forearm.
    It still pisses me off that Elvin’s ride cymbals are not in the Smithsonian.
    Everybody’s got their thing, it’s what makes the world go around.
    And with that, I will stop jacking a very nice thread about sports with my rude cranky interjections.

64. Me too, except to add that the Red Sox are too ashamed of their pitching to let you know who they are.

65. If every kid who participates in football has to bring a signed and completed medical form from his guardian saying his history of concussion, health problems, etc, that seems like a good way of handling it
    My recollection from playing High School basketball (and for one brief, awful year, football) is that everyone had to have a physical from a doctor and bring proof of that to school before playing. Each year.
    On encouraging kids to take supplements, legal or otherwise, my recollection is that most, if not the vast majority, of the medical literature on how these sorts of things affect one’s body/metabolism/health/etc. is based on testing them with adults, for obvious reasons. Their affect on children/teenagers is thus generally unknown unless it can somehow be studied indirectly.

66. Brett: Countme-in, this guy murdered this woman because he was homicidal. Why are you obsessing about the tool he used, instead of realizing the “he was homicidal” was the critical factor?
    I don’t know what Count’s thinking. My thought is that I’ve never heard of murder-suicide committed via knife or, really, any non-firearm (I’m sure it’s happened, however). Shooting someone is much easier and more antiseptic than stabbing them to death. Indeed, my guess is the primary reason why there’s a lot of suicide following murder via firearm is that it’s way too easy to commit the latter.
    John Cole’s point in a post I can’t find was that, sure, a homicidal maniac with a knife is going to kill someone. But he/she is not going to to be able to off multiple-persons in the kind of mass killing we seem to see a couple times a year here in the US.

67. John Cole’s point in a post I can’t find was that, sure, a homicidal maniac with a knife is going to kill someone. But he/she is not going to to be able to off multiple-persons in the kind of mass killing we seem to see a couple times a year here in the US.
    Agreed. Someone intent on mass murder in a short period of time–as opposed to a serial killer, most of whom do not use firearms–can’t get there without one or more repeating firearms.
    So, depending on the scenario and the killer’s intent, when there is such a thing, maybe a knife will do, maybe it won’t. Guns are quicker, easier, don’t involve risky hand-to-hand encounters, all of that.
    I find the ongoing argument pointless. Even if you could reduce the murder rate by some percentage by outlawing every class of firearm, the number of guns in circulation renders the law meaningless. Forget the constitutional questions or the fact that no one is going to outlaw hunting rifles and shotguns (with a sawed off barrel, you get a handgun on steriods), there are so many guns out there that the discussion is entirely theoretical.
    Violence, including gun violence, is a fact of life. There is very little, if anything, that can be done to mitigate it at this point. Debating whether a particular bad person would kill if he/she had no gun available gets us nowhere because that is just one very small, non-probative data point in a quite large statistical universe.

68. Look, gun owners exist on a continuum, we’re not all alike. At one end, you’ve got batsh*t crazy mad dog killers, at the other end you’ve got the sort of people who actually go to trouble to evict flies instead of swatting them.
    At the one end, most uses of guns are undesirable. Heck, even self defense by the MDK leaves the world worse off, because the MDK comes out of it alive. At the other end, essentially all uses of guns range from socially neutral, (Sports) to desirable. (Self defense, and defense of others.)
    The essential problem here with gun control, and it was well known over 200 years ago, (And it’s the reason gun control studies tend to be published in medical journals, not journals of criminology.) is that the continuum is very heavily weighted towards the harmless end of the spectrum, (The vast majority of gun owners never do anything wrong.) and the Mad Dog Killers are the last people gun control laws disarm, not the first.
    So all the social costs come first, and the benefits come last, and it’s essentially impossible to reach the level of gun control where the people you most benefit from disarming get disarmed.
    So we’re talking about a policy which is simultaneously impossible to effectively implement, AND harmful when partially implemented.
    It’s as if the only way you had of getting rid of the influenza virus got rid of flu vaccines before it got rid of the flu.

69. the party of No We Can’t has spoken

70. “Look, gun owners exist on a continuum, we’re not all alike. At one end, you’ve got batsh*t crazy mad dog killers, at the other end you’ve got the sort of people who actually go to the trouble to evict flies instead of swatting them.”
    You don’t really think we must take into account this vast range of individual metabolic peculiarities, do you?
    Why, if I had a nickel …. aw, never mind.

71. cleek, that’s the kind of creative problem-solving that makes America great. Love it or leave it, my friend.
    Maybe one day Brett can give us a foolproof guide to telling which law-abiding gun owner is going to not be law-abiding at some point. Since, you know, most mass killings are committed with legally-acquired firearms. And since, when some asshole shoots up a car full of teenagers because they wouldn’t turn down their music, killing one of them, his lawyers says that “he acted as any responsible firearms owner would have.” (Apparently, “being a responsible firearms owner” = “being a rage-fuelled psycopath” and “leaving the scene of a crime you just comitted.” Sounds about right.)

72. McTx: Violence, including gun violence, is a fact of life. There is very little, if anything, that can be done to mitigate it at this point.
    As with head injuries in football, one might say.
    Guns are quicker, easier, don’t involve risky hand-to-hand encounters, all of that.
    And more seductive. The Dark Side, much like it they are.
    Brett: So all the social costs come first, and the benefits come last, and it’s essentially impossible to reach the level of gun control where the people you most benefit from disarming get disarmed.
    And to McTx: I guess my point was that it seems there’s something different about gun violence than, say, knife violence or hand-to-hand violence, and I’m wondering why that is.

73. The key to my football performance in high school was sweet tea. That might explain why I didn’t play, but still….
    There’s a pretty wide continuum of potential gun control laws, once you consider the various types of guns that exist, how restrictively a given law might regulate a given type’s ownership, and the geographical areas within which such laws might apply. The devil’s in the details if anyone wants to do any serious evaluation of the social costs versus benefits of a given proposal, rather than assuming that any gun whatsoever a responsible person might possess will be taken from that person by some generic, imaginary gun-control regime.
    Shorter version: How can society function without, frex, 100-round clips?

74. As with head injuries in football, one might say
    Not comparable at all, actually, given the intent element in gun violence and the incidental nature of football and all other sports injuries.
    And more seductive.
    For a very small minority of actual perps, perhaps, though it would be hard to quantify. You can’t seduce a mind that isn’t already pointed in that direction.
    I guess my point was that it seems there’s something different about gun violence than, say, knife violence or hand-to-hand violence, and I’m wondering why that is.
    I have no idea what you mean, given that there are a range of behaviors, circumstances and motivations in gun violence and in knife violence and in blunt instrument violence.

75. Brett,
    So all the social costs come first, and the benefits come last, and it’s essentially impossible to reach the level of gun control where the people you most benefit from disarming get disarmed.
    That’s quite an assertion. I suppose you actually have some evidence for it?
    Anyway, I don’t believe that gun types really care at all about keeping guns away from dangerous people.
    Read this, for example.

76. Anyway, I don’t believe that gun types really care at all about keeping guns away from dangerous people.
    Read this, for example.
    I suppose I could ask you for evidence to support the first sentence. The second sentence doesn’t; the issue is whether a VA person can declare a veteran incompetent or whether there ought to be due process, i.e. what civilians get which is a judicial proceeding at which evidence is taken.
    As for wanting dangerous people to not have guns, what reliable evidence do you have that a statistically significant number of ‘gun types’ don’t care about this?
    I own rifles, pistols and shotguns. I am happy to keep guns out of the hands of violent people and am open to any reasonable suggestions you might have.

77. I have no idea what you mean
    I try to stay out of the gun debates because pretty much anyone who has an opinion on the topic is pretty well dug in.
    That said, the freaking obvious difference between violence perpetrated by guns, as compared to almost any other means, is that it’s really easy.
    Point and click.
    You don’t have to come into contact with the victim. You don’t have to put yourself at risk. You are very very highly likely to do significant damage to, if not kill, the person you are shooting.
    If you want to kill someone with a knife, you have to walk right up to them and physically come into contact with them. Unless you know what you’re doing, you might not actually do them all the much harm, and you put yourself at risk. Plus, you’re going to get blood all over your clothes.
    Same or similar issues for strangling, neck-breaking, throwing out of windows, suffocating with a pillow, etc.
    Even running someone over with your car is harder.
    You point the gun at the person you want to shoot and you pull the trigger. Mission accomplished.
    Barring using a hand grenade or hiring somebody else to do the job for you, there is no easier way to harm or kill someone.
    Maybe poison, but that normally requires some level of planning and subterfuge, which not everyone can pull off.
    Guns are fast, and guns are easy. That is the difference.

78. Russell, I get that. In fact, I wrote upthread: Guns are quicker, easier, don’t involve risky hand-to-hand encounters, all of that.
    I am pretty sure Ugh is getting at something different, as in some kind of attitude or mental state or some other qualitative aspect of gun vs other violence. I am not clear on what he’s getting at.
    I’m a shooter. I know it’s easier to hunt deer with a rifle than a bowie knife.

79. As for wanting dangerous people to not have guns, what reliable evidence do you have that a statistically significant number of ‘gun types’ don’t care about this?
    The fact that any criminal or lunatic or terrorist can buy guns at a gun show (or any private sale) without passing any kind of background check? I mean, this makes it very easy for criminals/lunatics/terrorists to acquire guns, but requiring background checks for private gun sales is politically impossible because gun owners won’t tolerate it.
    Don’t you agree?

80. What Turbulence just said.

81. Well, Turb, my opinion is that, if a person has been properly adjudicated, with the right to a jury of their peers, to be too dangerous to own a gun, they belong in a prison. Because passing a law won’t keep them from getting a gun, any more than it will keep them from getting pot. And because if they’re too dangerous to have a gun, they’re too dangerous to have a ball peen hammer, too.
    Apparently you are satisfied that any criminal, lunatic, or terrorist, can get a gun without a background check, just so long as they’re doing it illegally.
    I just don’t see the point in burdening a civil liberty to that extent, for only the illusion of safety.

82. The fact that any criminal or lunatic or terrorist can buy guns at a gun show (or any private sale) without passing any kind of background check? I mean, this makes it very easy for criminals/lunatics/terrorists to acquire guns, but requiring background checks for private gun sales is politically impossible because gun owners won’t tolerate it.
    Don’t you agree?
    This is not statistically reliable evidence. The NRA lobbied congress to exempt private sellers at gun shows from performing background checks on purchasers. Arguably, this is because private sellers cannot effectively do so. Whether I agree with this argument, the NRA’s position is not demonstrated to be the representative view of ‘gun types’ unless ‘gun types’ has some kind of meaning other than ‘people who own guns’.
    Now, if you’d said ‘the NRA’ instead of ‘gun types’, I would not have commented.
    BTW, I’m not unsympathetic on the gun show thing. The last time I went to a gun show, roughly 15 years ago (looking for a particular model of shotgun back when I did a lot of wing shooting), I took my son, who was then 20 years old and an avid hunter and shooter. After about 30 minutes of scoping out the clientele, my son suggested that maybe we needed to revisit the 2d amendment. I wouldn’t go that far, but I’d require certified pre-clearance by the feds in order to purchase at a gun show. No doubt, gun shows are problematic.

83. I just don’t see the point in burdening a civil liberty to that extent, for only the illusion of safety.
    Which civil liberty? The right to keep and bear or the right to sell? One is in the constitution, the other is not. Nor is it implicit.
    I’m not a big fan of the NRA. Attend a gun show anywhere in Texas and tell me you sleep better at night knowing who is buying high capacity pistols, semi auto assault-style rifles and high capacity 12 gauges with 18″ barrels. It’s beyond creepy. I’m fine with proof of citizenship/legal authority to be in the country AND a card saying the purchaser has passed a background check.
    If you are OK with voter ID laws, it’s kind of hard to complain that a gun purchaser experiences undue imposition by being required to show he/she is not a felon and is not insane (not so sure how you show the latter) and not otherwise disqualified from gun ownership. After all, both voting and gun ownership are civil rights.

84. I didn’t think wondering about the trajectory of pro football in the public mind would get us to gun control, but there are a lot of things I don’t think will happen and often do.
    I have to say pretty much what Russell said, with an added emphasis on this:
    I try to stay out of the gun debates because pretty much anyone who has an opinion on the topic is pretty well dug in.
    If anyone wants an actual gun control post, write it up and send it to libjpn’s space on the gmail servers and I’ll put it up.

85. “If you are OK with voter ID laws, it’s kind of hard to complain that a gun purchaser experiences undue imposition by being required to show he/she is not a felon and is not insane (not so sure how you show the latter) and not otherwise disqualified from gun ownership. After all, both voting and gun ownership are civil rights.”
    You know what? Tell me that when they start running everybody in line at my polling place through the NICS. And the administration gets it’s jollies shutting the system down for “maintenance” on election night.

86. Tell me that when they start running everybody in line at my polling place through the NICS. And the administration gets it’s jollies shutting the system down for “maintenance” on election night.
    
    Never been to the Department of Licensing? Where the majority of people get thier ids?
    You must be joking.

87. lol, guns.
    sports today remind me of the Roman era. a method of crowd control and diversion from matters of high importance. that old bread and circus concept. Trojans, Gladiators, Lions, gosh the symbolism of Rome and the Empire is Football personified. a throwback or maybe a return to on purpose?
    member reading years ago how with so much serious stuff going on in society, sports was a was to disconnect from reality. serious business going on was way beyond the average guys’ range of possibilities anymore i gather. with the inability to stop the Elites doing what they have been doing for years now. thanks to our politicians, this as a diversionary tactic seem to be a perfect foil. lol
    also heard it was a way for men to find some way of feeling connected to other men without being threatening, aka “inappropriately” whatever that means. homosexuality is such a bad thing, apparently can’t have men get close except through “approved” measures. lol
    also sports allow men to amass knowledge and data and feel able to talk like a “knowledgeable” human, in respect the vast size and scope of the “complex” social world we live in. one way of feeling “good” enough in this overwhelming flood of info.
    what i have always not liked about sports was the Us vs Them concept that drives people apart, into separate tribes, that disconnect us into parts rather than “wholes.” how competition is against men working together to achieve goals. the separation of men apart from one another, and also the inherent one upmanship involved. the encouragement of being winners and lots of losers. and all that stigmatization if you’re not an athlete.
    one thing i really cant endure about football is the noise. i could watch football if the noise level were lower, just so noisy i can’t tolerate the decibel level that comes with it. i get a headache from TV football, without the sound i can watch football, otherwise, lol
    also wonder why those of us in society have to pay for with our tax dollars so some rich men can be richer at others’ expense. not like something for the common man, or society in general, unless you are a sport fan or one who will use the facilities everyone’s tax moneys pays for.
    one other point is the inherent “manliness” all males are subject to in the school system because of “collective” sports. “what, you don’t like sports? ” YOu some kind of sissy. and all the related non Male baggage that goes along with the Competitive Sports Society we are.
    just so much unspoken and tacit approval for sports that barely ever gets brought to the fore. the crunching of human bodies and the injuries are just the obvious “topics” of most converstations though.
    Hail Rome and the mighty Caesar!

88. Don’t you agree?
    Yes, in spades.
    In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess.
    if a person has been properly adjudicated, with the right to a jury of their peers, to be too dangerous to own a gun, they belong in a prison.
    This is freaking balderdash.
    There are about 10,000 reasons why, as a matter of public policy, it might be a good idea for someone to NOT OWN A GUN, and yet not be jailed.
    For a simple example, some people go to jail for acts of violence, and then, mirabile dictu, are released at a later time.
    Some people suffer from mental disorders such as psychosis, severe depression, or mania.
    We let these people have ball peen hammers because it’s not actually that easy to kill someone with a ball peen hammer. For one thing, you can run away some someone with a ball peen hammer.
    We also let them have ball peen hammers because there are many uses someone might make of a ball peen hammer other than doing physical harm to someone else.
    If you want a gun, have a gun. Live your life, have fun, it really doesn’t bug me either way.
    But don’t try to bullshit me that the prevalence of gun ownership in this country is, somehow, miraculously unrelated to the fact that Americans kill each other in remarkably large numbers.
    We live with an unusually high level of gun violence, and that is so in no small part because we love guns and own them in astounding numbers. I don’t expect to change that aspect of our culture overnight, or ever really, but I also am not blind to what it costs us.
    Do what you want, but don’t ask me to buy that NRA party-line horsesh*t.

89. You know what? I don’t give a bucket of warm spit what our level of “gun violence” is. Unmodified “violence”, maybe. But I don’t really care how it’s distributed across various categories of weapons. Dead is dead, you know what I mean?
    The fact of the matter is that levels of gun violence, like fist violence, club violence, knife violence, and so forth, vary enormously from place to place. You miss that if you look at state level statistics. You even miss it with county level statistics. You need to get down to the level of neighborhoods before you get the full impact of it: Levels of violence vary by three to four full orders of magnitude between the most peaceful, and the most violent, localities, even when those localities are under the same gun laws.
    So don’t try to bullshit me that a phenomenon that varies by multiple orders of magnitude with gun laws, and rates of gun ownership held constant, is being driven by guns.
    There are places where virtually everybody owns a gun, and you can leave your door unlocked in perfect safety. I used to live in one before I got laid off, and moved to someplace where guns were also common, and it was still a lot safer than the south side of Chicago.
    There are places where lesser percentages of people own guns, and the level of violence makes most war zones look safe. They tend, perhaps purely by coincidence, to have had stringent gun control laws going back a long ways.
    Gun controllers like to look at the crudest statistics possible, comparisons between whole nation states, because it lets them ignore those massive variations from place to place within nation states, and blame variations in violence which are trivial by comparison on just one of the many variables in play.
    Don’t ask me to buy the Brady Bunch’s party line horsesh*t, in other words.

90. don’t try to bullshit me that a phenomenon that varies by multiple orders of magnitude with gun laws, and rates of gun ownership held constant, is being driven by guns.
    I actually have no disagreement with your point here.
    I do not believe that the mere ownership of a gun someone transforms an otherwise peaceable person into a murderer.
    What I do think is that American culture is very violent, and violent culture + guns means a lot of people get shot.
    That’s not necessarily an argument for or against gun laws. I imagine it would depend on the gun law. It might be an argument in favor of trying to change the culture, but that’s a hell of a lot harder project.
    I also think that people who are perfectly fine with doing violence to other people are also quite often interested in owning guns, and in this country it’s extraordinarily easy for them to get them. I don’t see that as a good thing, for anyone, at all.
    What I absolutely think is pure folly is the idea that states and municipal governments may not make it illegal for folks who demonstrate an inability to behave responsibly, in any of a variety of ways, from owning a gun. Period.
    People with, for example, significant clinical mental illnesses can arm themselves at a level approaching that of a military fireteam. That is insane, period, and the folks who enable that at the public policy level are, IMVHO, irresponsible bastards.
    I’m sure that you and I are not going to agree on that point, probably ever.
    So be it.

91. “What I absolutely think is pure folly is the idea that states and municipal governments may not make it illegal for folks who demonstrate an inability to behave responsibly, in any of a variety of ways, from owning a gun. Period.”
    The argument is not over whether they can, but how they have to go about it in order to satisfy due process requirements. My position is that permanent denial of any civil liberty, ANY of them, must require a process comparable to a criminal, not civil, trial, including a right to a jury. Because permanent deprivation of a civil liberty is a typical criminal punishment.
    None of this taking civil liberties away on the basis of bureaucratic decisions or doctor’s opinions, or boilerplate orders by judges. Or based on plea bargains decades ago, where the plea did NOT involve lose of civil liberties, just a minor fine. (Lautenberg act.)
    You want to treat somebody like a felon? Do it by a process equivalent to convicting them of a felony. Not on the cheap.
    My other point, of course, is that it’s an utter fantasy to suppose that passing a law saying that somebody who’s walking the streets can’t have a gun, will actually keep them from having a gun. Really works effectively with drugs, doesn’t it?

92. I imagine it would depend on the gun law.
    Si!
    Really works effectively with drugs, doesn’t it?
    That’s because we have stupid drug laws. (That, and drugs don’t usually come in the form of fairly large hunks of metal. Pills, little bits of powder, leafy stuff that looks something like oregano, all of which are consumed – these aren’t durable goods.)

93. I should probably add that, if we didn’t have stupid drug laws, we’d have a lot less reason to be arguing about gun violence.

94. “There are places where virtually everybody owns a gun, and you can leave your door unlocked in perfect safety.”
    Brett’s point regarding regionasl disparities in the ratio of gun ownership to gun violence is excellent.
    Anecdotally, where I live I think everyone owns a firearm of some type – especially guns for hunting. The crime rate is very low and we don’t lock our doors unless we will be gone overnight. I can only recall two incidents of gun violence in the last ten years in the whole county. In one a hunter shot and killed another hunter (typical stupid hunting accident). In the other, a severely disturbed guy tried to commit suicide with a .22 pistol. He botched the job.
    That’s it.
    Saying that the prevalence of guns causes the prevalence of violent crime cannot be a fair statement.
    Even claiming there is a correlation is spurious *if* one uses detailed data points (like county level). Your R sq is going to be less than strong.
    “What I do think is that American culture is very violent”
    Apparently it is not (see above). Your statement might have more truth if you said American *urban* culture is very violent. Most gun violence is clustered in urban centers. There is a correlation between population density and gun violence.
    However, even this qualification does not make for the most accurate statement. More to the point would be that heavily minority populated urban centers, where drug dealing is a prevalent feature of lifestyle, are violent.
    Remove urban minority hard drug/gang culture and the gun violence rate in the US drops to unremarkable levels.
    Yes, there are still some crazy outliers like Cullumbine, but statistically the mortality of these incidents is close to the mortality of litghening strikes.
    So what do you want to do about it? What is the way of liberty, freedom, etc.
    Disarm everyone? Or deal with the issues of urban/gang culture and lunutics having access to guns?

95. http://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/gun-violence/
    BTW guns are used in about 68% of murders. So, of course, other methods (especially blunt objects and knives) are used in the remaining 32%.
    Is it so hard to imagine that if access to guns was restricted further that there would be at least a shift to about 50% homicides comitted with other methods?
    And then there would be a liberal outcry demanding knives and ballpean hammers to be banned?

96. McTx: I am pretty sure Ugh is getting at something different, as in some kind of attitude or mental state or some other qualitative aspect of gun vs other violence. I am not clear on what he’s getting at.
    I’m not sure I’m getting at anything different. As I (and you/russell/others) noted it’s very, very easy to kill someone with a gun. In fact, too easy.
    What evidence do I have that it’s too easy? Well, the number of murder/suicides via gun vs. other methods of violence. That is, there seems to be a great deal of “oh fuck, what have I done!!?!?” self-assessment associated with gun murders that then result in suicides as opposed to other kinds of murders.
    There’s also a certain “Respect My Authoritah!” associated with guns that, IMO, you don’t see elsewhere, that tends to violence.

97. As there has been in England, by the way.

98. Disarm everyone?
    Why would you ask such a thing? Has anyone suggested that?

99. Most gun violence is clustered in urban centers. There is a correlation between population density and gun violence.
    Too bad places like DC and Chicago weren’t allowed to deal with that situation.

100. per captia, the states with the highest amount of gun-related aggravated assaults? SC, TN, DC, DE, MO.
     per capita, the region with the highest amount of gun-related aggravated assaults? the south (the old south and the southwest).
     per capita, DC has the highest number of gun murders, followed by LA, MO, MD, SC.
     data

101. I find it hard to imagine that the substitution effect of bladed or blunt instruments for firearms in murders would be statistically significant. There’s a degree of intimacy and contact in that kind of killing that isn’t present when a perpetrator shoots someone.
     It’s a simple matter for some rageoholic to pull out a gun and escalate an argument into a murder, like in the story I linked to above. It’s a whole different thing to stab or bludgeon them to incapacitation, let alone death.
     If Brett is claiming a significant substitution effect in the UK, he’s gonna need a cite. Not that he ever provides them.

102. “Too bad places like DC and Chicago weren’t allowed to deal with that situation.”
     Huh?
     DC and Chicago have the toughest handgun laws around (excepting Bloombergville).

103. “I find it hard to imagine that the substitution effect of bladed or blunt instruments for firearms in murders would be statistically significant.”
     Well, once gun murders are sentenced and in prison they seem to readily adapt to use of shanks and shivs with lethal effect.
     “It’s a simple matter for some rageoholic to pull out a gun and escalate an argument into a murder…”
     That’s your fantasy opinion. A rageoholic (seriously, what’s that any how- would I find it in the DSM4?) by definition of “rage” would probably use any object/tool available. Plenty of people, especially women, are beaten, bludgeoned and stabbed by people that I imagine would meet your definition of “rageoholic”.

104. Is it so hard to imagine that if access to guns was restricted further that there would be at least a shift to about 50% homicides comitted with other methods?
     and is it so hard to imagine that a lot of those homicides would end up as assault? or that they wouldn’t be attempted at all?
     it’s pretty tough to road-rage-murder the guy driving next to you on the highway with a knife.

105. A rageoholic by definition of “rage” would probably use any object/tool available.
     Consider the recent case in FL where a rageaholic shot a teenager in a parking lot because he was playing his music too loud. Do you really think that guy would have climbed into the teenagers’ vehicle, clambered over the other teenagers, got into the backseat, and stabbed him to death if he had a knife but no gun?
     I don’t know the exact definition of rageaholic but I think anyone who shoots someone dead over the loudness of their music outside a convenience store definitely qualifies.

106. Did somebody fart? I smell something.

107. As there has been in England, by the way.
     I don’t think comparisons between western European countries and the US lead to a strong case for your side, Brett.
     Whatever garbled arguments you advance, their homicide rates are about one quarter of ours.
     You, and blackhawk, and anyone else can advance al sorts of explanations, but if you can’t admit that easy access to guns is a major factor in the discrepancy then your are just ignoring facts ypu find unpleasant.

108. http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?id=8770014
     http://www.stlucianewsonline.com/update-homicide-victim-was-savagely-beaten-to-death-eyewitnesses-allege/
     http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009-04-03/delhi/28033079_1_road-rage-pramod-youths
     http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/man-custody-wife-found-beaten-death-home-police-sources-article-1.1211826
     and so on and so forth, ad nuaseum.
     People, especially people in a rage, beat others to death all of the time.
     From a purely scientific perspective, you have to prove that “easy access to guns is a major factor” and that substitution of other methods for guns does not/would not exist. You have merely assumptions based on your own wishful thinking. You have not proof at all.

109. People, especially people in a rage, beat others to death all of the time.
     oh fer crying out loud.
     your link to http://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/gun-violence/ links to the data which shows that people shoot each other to death more than 10x more frequently than they beat each other to death.
     2004: 10,600 gunshot fatalities vs 759 blunt object fatalities
     2005: 11,000 vs 671

110. 10x huh? Is that like the difference between a terabyte and a yottabyte?

111. From a purely scientific perspective, you have to prove that “easy access to guns is a major factor” and that substitution of other methods for guns does not/would not exist.
     Is that true? Wouldn’t it be a matter of determining how substitutable other methods of killing and injuring are for shootings? Does it have to be zero? What if only half of the shooting deaths or injuries would have occurred by other means? Or a quarter? Or a tenth?
     Why would anyone go to the trouble of getting a gun when hammers and knives are so readily available? Doesn’t the logic go both ways?

112. cleek, it’s pretty dishonest of you to exclude the 2,147 homocides by knife and the 2,528 by other weapon in 2005.
     Let’s see 671 + 2,528 + 2,147 = 5,346
     So guns killed 2X as many as other weapons attacks not 10X.
     However, the data you cite states specifically that it is “homocides by weapon type”. Does it speak to homocides where no weapon was involved, such as a bare fist beat down? No. It does not. The bureau terms such crimes as “homicide by force”.
     Homocide by force accounted for approximately another 833 victims. Homocide by arson, another 116. Call it an even 1,000 total.
     Now we have 6,346 versus 11,000, less than 1.73 times more killed by guns.
     Considering the UK homicide rate of 1.1 versus the US rate of 5.4, reducing the US rate by half (removing all guns from the equation and assuming no substitution of other methods) the US would still have a homicide rate 3X the UK rate.
     So tell me again that guns are the problem and people are not.
     Fer crying out loud. It must be nice to avoid all facts and data so one can live out one’s life in the world of one’s opinions.

113. So tell me again that guns are the problem and people are not.
     “Both” is not an option?

114. “… that true? Wouldn’t it be a matter of determining how substitutable other methods of killing and injuring are for shootings?”
     Yes. You are right. How substitutable another method is must be considered.
     Anyone can fatally stab with a knife.
     Anyone can fatally crack a skull with a golf club.
     Anyone can fatally poison.
     Golf clubs and baseball bats can be used just as spontaineously as a gun and just as, perhaps more so, effectively.
     What amazes me about the so called mass shootings is that more people don’t get killed. A determined killer could kill just as many by walking into a high school with a bat and hitting people over the head.
     Moreover, a bomb, properly made, would do better than a machine gun.
     Some people here seem to think there is some sort of ickiness factor, like guns are easy because you shoot your victim from a distance, it’s impersonal, less messy, etc. than using a knife or club. Well impulse killers don’t stop to consider ickiness (right? They’re raging). Nor do serious premeditated murderers.
     A lot of gang bangers really don’t know how to use a gun properly. Resorting to bats and knives would require a culture shift for them, but I’m sure they’d make the adjustment and I think the death toll would ultimately be higher than what they accomplish with lousy firearm technique.

115. In reverse order
     Some people here seem to think
     Blackhawk, I would appreciate it if you exchanged your broader brush for something a bit more exact. No one has said this, and you are inferring this.
     cleek, it’s pretty dishonest of you
     This formulation could have been phrased as ‘I don’t think you are including…’ or ‘maybe you missed…’
     Both of these seem to be based on the fact that you sincerely believe you already know what people think. You don’t, so please avoid this sort of mind reading in the future.

116. point taken LJ. I will endeavor to be more circumspect in my wording.
     And what of our dear friend phil with his bodily function references? Is he conforming to ObWi expected level of discourse?
     Just curious.

117. Right blackhawk. A guy can just go up on a stage in a movie theater and start throwing knives and kill a lot of people that way.
     Is there some substitutability? Yes. But don’t be ridiculous. If someone comes at you with a baseball bat you can:
     1. Run away
     2. Try to fend off the blows, or wrestle the bat away
     3. Yell for help while trying either 1 or 2.
     A bullet coming at you doesn’t leave you with those alternatives.

118. A determined killer could kill just as many by walking into a high school with a bat and hitting people over the head.
     ?
     Some people here seem to think there is some sort of ickiness facto
     No, not ickiness. Just lower risk to the perpetrator, and all-around greater effectiveness.
     I note that there is no military in the freaking world armed with baseball bats. There is, no doubt, a good reason for that.
     Look, I believe we have more than arrived at the level of pointlessness.
     The US has an extraordinarily high level of gun ownership. It is, again, extraordinarily easy in the US for a private individual to obtain a gun, or even many guns.
     The US also has an unusually high rate of murder. And lo and behold, most of those murders are committed with guns.
     Your argument appears to be that there is NO RELATIONSHIP between these things. If gun ownership was not so widespread, we would off each other at more or less the same rate with candlesticks, like a nation of Colonel Mustards in our respective libraries.
     Who knows, you could be right.
     What is plainly in evidence is that (a) Americans own a huge teeming big old sh*tpile of guns, and (b) we shoot each other a lot.
     That’s in cities, natch, in rural areas we shoot ourselves. I guess if nobody else is around, our own heads are the best available target.
     In any case, those are the plain facts. Make of it what you will.

119. “Right blackhawk. A guy can just go up on a stage in a movie theater and start throwing knives and kill a lot of people that way.”
     No. But a guy could chain the doors of a theater and ignite a fire bomb inside. Or he could release some home made mustard gas. Or he could walk down an isle pithing unwitting viewers in the base of the skull with an ice pick. I’ll bet no one would figure out was happening until 6 to 12 people were killed. Let’s not forget what a few guys with box cutters pulled off, body count wise, a few years ago. Shall I continue?
     My guess is the bomb would be the most likely substitute for jammed assualt rifles in crazed maniac circles.
     “But don’t be ridiculous. If someone comes at you with a baseball bat you can:
     1. Run away
     2. Try to fend off the blows, or wrestle the bat away
     3. Yell for help while trying either 1 or 2.
     I don’t think so. Test it. Have a confederate wield something safe (maybe one of those plastic bats – whiffle bats). Tell him to attack you with it without unrestrained homicidal fury. See if you can escape without blows that would be bone crushingly fatal if the bat was real.
     Do this in several settings. In your house, in a parking lot, on a street.
     Go on. Seriously. Try it. I used to teach this stuff. I already know how it will turn out. Most always, you “die”.
     “A bullet coming at you doesn’t leave you with those alternatives.”
     Depends.

120. ughh….attack you *with* unrestrained fury
     “I note that there is no military in the freaking world armed with baseball bats. There is, no doubt, a good reason for that.”
     Yes. There is. But we are not talking about the military where you are laying down suppressive fire from 300 meters away (and causing remarkably few casualties depsite the number of bullets fired).
     We are talking about civilians murdering each other, which, even with guns, happens within a distance of a few feet.

121. Blackhawk, you should worry about what you can control (i.e. what you write) rather than concern yourself with what you can’t control. Otherwise, you turn this into a kindergarten classroom where you are constantly running to the teacher says ‘Phil hit me!’.
     Phil, there’s no need to rattle cages. Thanks

122. “I don’t think comparisons between western European countries and the US lead to a strong case for your side, Brett.”
     Doesn’t lead to a strong case for your side, either, if you don’t insist on making the analysis moronically simplistic. Do you really think the only difference between nations is their gun laws? Don’t you have these things called “confounding variables” you need to control for?
     Now, let me return to a point: The firearms homicide rate varies from place to place within the US by several orders of magnitude, even within jurisdictions having the same gun laws. An enormously greater variation than that between jurisdictions with different gun laws.
     That means that, even if gun laws/ownership is a variable influencing rates of firearms homicide, there are other variables hundreds of times more influential on the rate. If this weren’t the case, if only gun ownership and laws were influencing the rate, it would be very difficult indeed to explain why the city of Chicago has a higher, not lower, rate of homicide than Fargo North Dakota. 15 per 100K, vs 1, in some years zero, per 100K. Surely it can’t be that the rate of gun ownership in Fargo is a fifteenth that in Chicago!
     Now, I don’t know how deep your understanding of using statistics to test hypothesis goes, but let me lay it on the line: In the presence of really, REALLY strong confounding variables, it is essentially impossible to achieve statistical significance as to the effect of weak variables.
     And we know from US statistics, for an absolute incontrovertible fact, that there are variables driving homicide rates which utterly dwarf the effect of gun ownership rates and gun laws.
     The bottom line is, only two groups of people, in light of these facts, attempt to use international comparisons to ‘prove’ anything about the effects of gun ownership on murder rates:
     Morons and liars.

123. Well, and the utterly ignorant, too; But they’re generally being fed the comparisons by one of the first two groups.

124. International comparisons are dumb? IIRC, you were the one who introduced an international comparison, with an unsupported claim – despite your alleged statistical rigor – to bolster your argument. So suddenly they are useless?
     No Brett, I don’t think the only difference is gun laws.
     But it is certainly a difference. Now I do happen to know some statistics, and I do understand that there can be other variables involved. OK. So what? What are they? You haven’t identified one yet. And does their presence mean we should ignore gun law differences? Yet those differences are much stronger and clearer across countries than in the US. But let’s not talk about them, right? Because you don’t like what they imply.
     And what if those patterns in the US are replicated, on a smaller scale, in European countries? Do you think only the US has geographic variation in homicide rates? So some of these other factors are creating geographic variation there as well.
     Call me all the names you want, Brett. It doesn’t help your arguments.

125. I may not have identified WHAT the other variables are, (Mainly because I know what you lot would start screaming if I did.) but I have most assuredly demonstrated that there ARE other variables, and that they’re much more influential on the murder rate.
     Are there similar variations in other countries? Absolutely! The point is that a 2% variation in a confounding variable that’s 100 times as powerful as gun ownership will swamp the effects of gun ownership, whatever they might be. The demonstrated existence of vastly more powerful confounding variables requires that you control for them, and to a high degree of precision, in order to have any hope of detecting a variation based on gun ownership.
     And yet, when you see these comparisons, do you ever see that effort to control for the confounding variables, let along to do so to two or three place accuracy? No, you don’t. Rarely even do people making such comparisons even admit it’s necessary take confounding variable into account.
     Complicating the situation is the fact that the US is essentially the one, solitary outlier in terms of gun ownership in advanced nations. The experimental group has only one member!
     These factors all make international comparisons as a way to determine the effects of gun ownership effectively impossible to do in a meaningful fashion. They are nothing but rank propaganda, and generally know to be such by the people originating them.
     “IIRC, you were the one who introduced an international comparison, with an unsupported claim – despite your alleged statistical rigor – to bolster your argument.”
     No, I was not. I assume you’re referring to my comment, “As there has been in England, by the way.” It was in response to Blackhawk’s remark that, “And then there would be a liberal outcry demanding knives and ballpean hammers to be banned?”
     
     Doctors’ kitchen knives ban call
     Knife
     Doctors say knives are too pointed
     A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.
     Not a comparison, merely noting that his prediction had already proven out.

126. the US is essentially the one, solitary outlier in terms of gun ownership in advanced nations. The experimental group has only one member!
     And in homicide rates.

127. Yes, and if you have big control group, give the drug to one patient, and he dies, just exactly how certain, statistically, are you that the drug did it, and he didn’t just have an aneurism already?
     Desperately wanting to think something has been proven doesn’t make inadequate data into good data. You want to study the effects of gun ownership and gun laws, you need political entities with which independently vary guns and other things, and you need many of them to achieve statistical significance. Aren’t enough countries to do that.
     You can start to do it within the US, though, if you go to a level smaller than the state, like maybe congressional districts or zip codes.
     But even then you’ve got to be clear: There are other things besides guns effecting levels of violence, and those other things have a HUGE effect. You simply can NOT attribute every difference you see to guns.
     Not if you mean to be honest, anyway.

128. “Not if you mean to be honest, anyway.”
     OK, Brett, please take it down a notch, we don’t need the implications of dishonesty. And a general appeal for reasoned discussion, (preferably with links) is addressed to everyone. Thanks.

129. I didn’t mean you, specifically. Apologies if you thought otherwise.

130. The types of guns people have access to, however, does make a difference.

131. Brett, you might have gotten confused. I haven’t really weighed in on this thread, so I think that you might have me and Bernard confused and I wasn’t complaining about me being called dishonest. I was simply asking for more care in your formulations about being dishonest. Thanks for your attention to this.

132. Yay, sports!
     Wait, what?

133. A determined killer could kill just as many by walking into a high school with a bat and hitting people over the head
     Are there really people who actually believe this?

134. bob, sports are boring – except horse racing and boxing and cowboy action shooting.

135. Yes, there probably are people who actually believe this. I think they’d likely have to wait until class change to pull it off, though.
     Personally, my favorite example is that somebody could kill as many people driving an SUV off the road and over pedestrians. Or getting a job at McDonalds and poisoning the food.
     L.J., not confused. I didn’t mean you in particular, because I didn’t mean anybody in particular. That particular construction, “You could”, is a notorious flaw in English grammar.

136. “The types of guns people have access to, however, does make a difference.”
     So, the murder rate in some neighborhoods in Detroit is fifty or a hundred times greater than the rest of the state, because different types of guns are available in Detroit? How is this achieved? The Great Wall of Eight Mile, where everyone leaving the city is frisked, and kept from exporting their Vulcan miniguns to the rest of the state?
     Anybody claiming that guns drive murder rates has to cope with the fact that murder rates vary independently from gun ownership and laws, and by a huge margin. The gun laws in Detroit aren’t significantly different than rural Lapeer county, where I grew up leaving the door unlocked. Rates of gun ownership in Detroit couldn’t be much higher in Detroit than rural Lapeer county, you can’t get higher than 100%.
     Which means that, if whatever variable is driving THAT variation has, by coincidence, even a slight accidental correlation with gun ownership, it’s perfectly capable of spuriously producing the appearance of gun ownership causing murders.
     Even if that slight coincidental variation is between England and the US, rather than Montana and New York.
     I’d really recommend, if your concern is reducing murder, rather than just depriving people of guns, that you inquire into why Detroit is a more dangerous place than Lapeer. Because it’s simply impossible the difference is guns, and it *might* be due to something that we can effect without violating part of the Bill of Rights.

137. When all the sound and fury is over and done with, the question I’m always left with (and confounded by) is:
     Why do Americans kill each other so often?
     Gun, poison, run over with an SUV, baseball bat, throw out a window, or even any of Blackhawk’s perversely inventive examples. Whatever.
     Why do Americans kill each other so often? WTF is wrong with us?
     And it ain’t all gang-bangers. There are something like 16K-17K murders per year in the US, maybe 10% of them are gang-related.
     And it ain’t all murders, for that matter. In firearm deaths, specifically, suicides outnumber homicides.
     Americans kill themselves, and each other, in alarmingly large numbers. That seems like a problem, to me.
     I frankly don’t care if anybody owns a gun or not. I know so many people who own guns that I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else if I was going to worry about it.
     Guns, no guns, whatever. It’s the shooting ourselves, or other people, with guns part that I find disturbing.

138. Oh for crying out loud, Brett. Obvioulsy guns vary in how much damage they can do, as do bullets.

139. I’d imagine there is more chance of a person spraying bullets around a recreational baseball batting cage than bashing folks in the heads with baseball bats when the balky batting machines cause rage among the clientele.
     Since we’ve brought bats up as a weapon of choice on a par with the guns at Columbine, the high school (my house was two miles from the place that awful day), there is the real life incident in 1965 of Juan Marichal turning around in a fit of rage while at bat and trying to club catcher John Roseboro in the noggin with his bat that we could use as a jumping off point.
     I’m glad Marichal chose the bat as a weapon over a small concealed pistol, because I doubt Roseboro would have survived that one.
     In fact, we’ve had baseball bats in the hands of enraged baseball players for roughly a century and a half and not much has transpired in the way of killing.
     I’d be willing to conduct a social experiment in violation of the Bill of Rights of folks in certain sections of Detroit and confiscate all of the firepower and hand out baseball bats and SUVs and see how the murder rate fares.
     I doubt just “inquiring” about the more violent nature of certain sections of Detroit would do much to stem the murder rate.
     Let’s do a sort of opposite experiment to my Detroit deal and arm major, minor, and sandlot ball players with handguns (maybe keeping more high caliber guns in the dugout in a rack) and then take away their bats and see what happens.
     I suspect mass poisonings at McDonald’s would be more prevalent if we hadn’t, you know, “BANNED” various poisons from the vicinity of restaurants and such, though the following question does present itself: “Have you tried the McNuggets lately?”
     I’m sure restaurant poisonings and mass gangland SUV killings would soar if firearms weren’t so readily available.
     I suspect Johan Belcher’s girlfriend would be increasingly a little green around the gills and maybe experiencing some alarming hair loss right about now if he hadn’t possessed a gun.
     She’s be telling her doctor, “Yes, my boyfriend does all the cooking. Why do you ask? You know, now that you mention it, three times in the last few weeks Johan has backed the SUV into the garage at an alarming rate of speed too just as I was putting out the garbage. He’s been depressed lately and is still having dizziness from that concussion while playing last year. Don’t you go asking bout guns now, Doc, because it’s illegal in Florida for doctors to ask about guns in a private citizens home. And if you keep asking me bout SUV and poison use, I’m going to contact my state congressman.”
     Because it’s not rat poison in the food that kills people, it’s people that put rat poison in the food that kills people, though the rats would differ with that rhetorical formulation.
     A perfectly reasonable example, given the questions raised here.
     In closing, when the dreaded and deadly notorious flaw in English usage, “you could”, or its equivalents like “you should” or “well, you would, wouldn’t you” inadvertently go off in my hand around here when I’m in a fit of rage and specific individuals are wounded or killed by the shrapnel or the odd stray rhetorical bullets, FIRST I try banning (in violation of my own private First Amendment) that usage in my commentary (never works for long because the usage is in inexhaustible supply and is laying around and so easy to pick up in a fit of pique) and when that doesn’t work, I ban myself for awhile from these environs, although I’d admit to sneaking over to Balloon Juice for some recreational target practice during the down time.
     It’s not particular constructions of English usage that wound people, its people who wound people.
     You (arrghhh, not you, YOU!) could just as well have run lj over (collateral damage, i realize, you were talking to me, weren’t you 😉 ) with an SUV or put lye in his scrapple, but you didn’t because that particular English usage was so easy to use and carry on your person.
     This is fun.

140. I’m kind of shocked that Laura’s point about gun types is controversial. I mean, rural areas with low gun death rates tend to have a lot more hunting rifles. High crime areas with much higher gun death rates tend to have a lot more handguns than hunting rifles. Gun violence in Iraq? Lots and lots and lots of AKs.

141. Some might counter that the paucity of game, like deer, in urban Detroit, has made humans more tasty, since we’re trying to get to the bottom of this.

142. cleek, it’s pretty dishonest of you to exclude the 2,147 homocides by knife and the 2,528 by other weapon in 2005.
     dishonest? what the fnck?
     in the text that i quoted from you, you were talking about people beating each other to death. so those are the stats i typed out.
     don’t be an ass.

143. The bottom line is that Smith and Wesson reports quarterly earnings today.
     SUV sales are up too, so never mind.
     Go long rat poison. Short rats.

144. Resorting to bats and knives would require a culture shift for them, but I’m sure they’d make the adjustment and I think the death toll would ultimately be higher than what they accomplish with lousy firearm technique.
     At least the little kids down the street wouldn’t get hit by a stray knife or bat.
     Why do people bother to use guns so prevalently if all these other things are just as good? Of all the myraid ways one might try to kill someone else, why are guns used “in about 68% of murders” (according to Blackhawk)? If people would, were guns unvailable, simply move to other methods, in sufficient numbers to result in similar overall murder rates, why is the distribution of methods of killing so heavily weighted toward guns now? Most of the other methods are readily available, even moreso than guns are. (I don’t even need to take the bat with me to the mall. I can grab one of any type off the rack, after careful consideration of which would be of the best size and weight, and start swinging.)
     Look, maybe gun laws wouldn’t matter as a practical matter because people would just get guns illegally. Maybe gun laws are unconstitutional. Maybe there’s some other factor driving homocide/suicide by firearm in this country. But this crap about people just killing each other with bats and knives and poisons at the same rates they do now with guns is just plain stupid. It’s juvenile, like a junior high-level argument. It’s hard to believe that anyone would propose such bunk on this blog. I mean, WTF?

145. “I’m kind of shocked that Laura’s point about gun types is controversial.”
     I’m kind of shocked that a proposition for which there is no objective evidence would be claimed to NOT be contraversial. But confusion about the difference between correlation and causation IS endemic, isn’t it.

146. Personally, my favorite example is that somebody could kill as many people driving an SUV off the road and over pedestrians. Or getting a job at McDonalds and poisoning the food.
     And yet, here we find ourselves, where those two things (aside from the former being caused by drunk, elderly and incompetent drivers) are trivial in the realm of homicide statistics. Why, oh why, is that?
     That particular construction, “You could”, is a notorious flaw in English grammar.
     It can be fixed with a single word substitution: “One could . . .” It’s not a flaw at all, it’s user error.

147. I got hammered the other day and thought about suicide, but the cave was dark and the bats were hard to catch.
     So, life goes on.

148. “High crime areas with much higher gun death rates tend to have a lot more handguns than hunting rifles.”
     And hunting rifles are far more deadly than handguns; marginally (if at all) more cumbersome to use, orders of magnitude more effective. So that works against you.
     “don’t be an ass.”
     What ever. My point still stands. Guns only kill 1.74 times as many as other methods. Orders of magnitude count, so I am told.
     “Why do people bother to use guns so prevalently if all these other things are just as good?”
     Well, if someone is empty handed, then they can be easily killed with a bat or a knife. If someone has a bat or a knife, then you want a gun because you can distance yourself from the bat or knife. A gun allows one to kill from a greater distance. It’s an arms race.
     If I had to make a choice between a 9mm round to the torso or a full power wsing of a bat to head, I’d take my chances with the 9mm round.
     Guns are culurally, the American choice.
     “But this crap about people just killing each other with bats and knives and poisons at the same rates they do now with guns is just plain stupid”
     Your opinion only. Until recently, the Mexican cultural choice was the knife and lot’s of homicides in that country were done with knives, more than guns.
     Russell has arrived at the proper conclusion; Americans are violent and have a penchant for killing each other and themselves. Guns are merely the tool and removing them does not cure the penchant.
     Why the kill lust?
     Cultural. 1.America was built on violence. It’s part of our mythos. You can’t watch cable tv for more than a few minutes without witnessing a bunch of murders. Murder is every where in our American life.
     2. America has a heterogeneous population with significant economic disparities. Where we have enclaves of the same in Europe, we have violence. But Europe is more homogeneous over-all.
     But mostly 1.

149. And hunting rifles are far more deadly than handguns; marginally (if at all) more cumbersome to use, orders of magnitude more effective.
     Try shoving one into your waistband. And hunting rifles are more effective if you know how to use one. You’ve already mentioned that gang-bangers don’t. They just point and shoot according to their natural inclination, right? If you’re running low to get behind a car and blindly shooting backward for cover with one hand in a street melee, a hunting rifle will be for crap, besides being kind of hard to walk around town with.

150. Really, this is the same argument as the gun v. poison/bat/knife, just at another level. If hunting rifles are so much better, why do people (including cops!) bother with handguns?

151. Look, maybe gun laws wouldn’t matter as a practical matter because people would just get guns illegally. Maybe gun laws are unconstitutional. Maybe there’s some other factor driving homocide/suicide by firearm in this country.
     Yep, some things can’t be fixed. Human nature and the peculiarities of our particular and diverse* society.
     *’Diverse’ in the dictionary sense, as in ‘varied’, as in ‘made of many different types’ and not as in ‘diversity’ in the race/ethnic context.

152. Here’s an article on knife violence/homicide in Britain.
     http://www.mail-archive.com/firearmsregprof@lists.ucla.edu/msg00867.html
     It’s a real and growing problem. Guns account for only 9% of homicides there.
     It’s easy to just say substitution won’t happen because it helps your argument to do so, but the facts and history say it can and does.

153. My point still stands.
     OMFG

154. It’s easy to just say substitution won’t happen…
     I smell straw, and the lack of a middle.

155. I’d be open to Ted Nugent going into Detroit and doing a hunting rifle/crossbow trade for every single handgun and then collecting murder stats.
     As an aside, the House of Representatives voted to ban the federal government’s use of the term “lunatic” in all future medical and other pronouncements.
     The vote passed 398 to 1, with Louis Gohmert
     (L-word-Texas) the loner dissenter.
     Gohmert cited the added expense to taxpayers of changing the letterhead on his office stationary, printing up new business cards, and the fact that he kind likes it that the Speaker must say “The Lunatic from Texas cedes one minute of his time to the Lunatic from Florida” when addressing him on C-Span among the reasons for his vote.
     On the surface this has nothing to do with guns, but a few seconds of thought leads one to the question: “How we gonna know who to shoot first, or run over with an SUV, or poison when Texas secedes from the Union?

156. the cave was dark and the bats were hard to catch.
     So, life goes on.
     bobbyp FTW.
     Why the kill lust?
     Cultural.
     Glad to see you’ve come around.

157. The context of Blackhawk’s 9% figure, with emphasis added:

     Of the 839 homicides in England and Wales in the 12 months ending Nov. 28 — the most recent period for which Home Office figures are available — 29% involved sharp instruments including knives, blades and swords. Firearms account for just 9% of murders in Britain. The murder rate in Britain is 15 per million people.
     The U.S. murder rate is 55 per million, according to the FBI. Of those, 70% of murders were committed with firearms; just 14% involved knives or cutting instruments.

     Whose argument is this supposed to support, exactly?

158. “If hunting rifles are so much better, why do people (including cops!) bother with handguns?”
     Handguns are concealable, more easily carried while leaving the hands free and reasonably useful for encounters within a few feet of an opponent. With handgns there is less chance of stray rounds killing people and damaging property far from the scene. That’s why.
     Note that just about all cops these days also have shotguns and assualt rifles in their cars and/or at the station for the serious work.
     You’re really into an area that you know nothing about and it’s obvious to me that you’re wildly speculating and displaying considerable ignorance in the process.
     A hunting rifle with a scope is far more accurate than a handgun with its short sight radius and less stable platform.
     A bullet from a hunting rifle, say weighing 150 grains and traveling 2,800 feet per second is going to do a lot more damage and can do it from farther away than a handgun bullet weighing the same (or maybe less) traveling at 850 to 1,100 fett per second (depending on the caliber, barrel length, etc.
     The rifle will also much better penetrate barriers such as car doors, walls of houses, etc
     More of those pesky statiistics.

159. Agatha Christie’s
     Poison.

160. In answer to hairshirthedonist’s question regarding whose argument anyway.

161. “The context of Blackhawk’s 9% figure, with emphasis added………..Whose argument is this supposed to support, exactly?”
     Mine. Divide the US homicide rate by 1.74 (which removes the gun factor entirely) and we are still killing each other at 3X the rate of the British. Additionally, knifings are becoming a serious problem in Britian. Contrary to some here seem to think, people can and will kill with knives if denied guns.
     I think Brett’s statistical analysis is also absolutely correct. I really don’t see how anyone can argue with it other than on a purely emotional basis.
     Emotional outcries are not a good basis to develop or enact policy

162. Handguns are concealable, more easily carried while leaving the hands free and reasonably useful for encounters within a few feet of an opponent. With handgns there is less chance of stray rounds killing people and damaging property far from the scene. That’s why.
     Aside from the stray rounds, that was my point.
     Note that just about all cops these days also have shotguns and assualt rifles in their cars and/or at the station for the serious work.
     I know this. My father had a shotgun in his squad car.
     You’re really into an area that you know nothing about and it’s obvious to me that you’re wildly speculating and displaying considerable ignorance in the process.
     It may look that way to you, only because you seem to be missing the damned point being made at nearly every turn.

163. Divide the US homicide rate by 1.74 (which removes the gun factor entirely)…
     Before you go on about statistics, you should explain your logic here.

164. Emotional outcries are not a good basis to develop or enact policy
     And clearly gun advocates have absolutely no emotional investment in their position.
     I’ve never seen an argument about gun ownership, or the 2nd Amendment, or any other topic touching on firearms, where the opinion of anybody on the pro-gun side was moved, in any direction, by as much as a millimeter.
     People who are into guns are into guns. You might as well argue about whether small mouth or large mouth bass are the better game fish. Or who was the best captain of the Starship Enterprise.
     Folks who are into guns are *really really* into them.
     The US leads the world in percentage of households with guns (about 40%) and in the number of guns per capita (not quite 1 gun per man woman and child). Most folks that own any guns at all own more than one.
     We f***king love, love, love guns. Love them.
     If you want a gun, have a gun. It would be a really good idea if you also understood WTF you were doing so that you don’t kill somebody else while pursuing your hobby, so if you don’t mind get some training. But if you want a gun and aren’t a blatantly obvious criminal or psychopath, you most likely will be more than welcome to own one.
     All I ask is that you not bug me with talk about overthrowing the government, or being part of the 3%, or watering the tree of liberty. It just makes you sound like a paranoid lunatic. Enjoy your hobby and leave the rest of us the f**k alone, please.
     That said:
     The US *also* has a very high rate of death and physical harm by firearm. There are countries with fairly high rates of gun ownership – Norway, Finland, Switzerland – where that is not true. But here in the US, it by god is true.
     So, we are both deeply attached to gun ownership, *and* we are prone to offing each other at a remarkable rate.
     It seems fairly obvious to me that our high rate of mayhem by firearm is in some ways related to our extraordinarily high rate of gun ownership. Opportunity knocks, and all of that. There are, in fact, other ways to kill people, but guns are a really really really effective and low-risk (to the shooter) way to get it done.
     So, what in other contexts might be a regrettable act of assault, in our context yields a dead body.
     If you don’t see the connection, fine with me, and I’m not going to argue the point, because to me it would be like arguing about whether, frex, skiing might result in a broken limb or not.
     Life’s too short.
     But whether you accept that correlation or not, Americans are unusually prone to wreak mayhem on each other.
     IMO that is FUBAR, and is evidence of some deep problems in our culture and society.
     It would be, again IMO, worthwhile to look into that.
     In terms of the substance of the issue, it’s my understanding, from my limited exposure to the literature, that violent crime (with gun or not) is highly correlated to:
     income disparity
     poverty
     lack of education and opportunity
     So, maybe we should address some of that stuff.

165. “So, we are both deeply attached to gun ownership, *and* we are prone to offing each other at a remarkable rate.”
     But, are the two “we”s the same people?

166. russell, I couldn’t agree with you more. We are not only in the same grid coordinate, we are walking the same patrol.
     My objection is the gun control advocates’ utter conviction that eliminating guns will eliminate murder. As you say, there is something else – something deeper – going on in America besides gun ownership, that is leading to us killing each other. It’s something that you can’t legislate away.
     My only nuance is that as long as we have this other, apparently unadressed sick problem, I want to own and carry gun to protect myself from the people suffering from this homicidal malady. I object to a bunch of knee jerk legislate our problems away liberals telling me I can’t have a fundemental right to self defense because some criminal fool might abuse that right.
     I’m not, personally, that into guns. I don’t hunt. I don’t like killing animals for sport. I rarely even shoot targets any more. If the country was a safer place, or, even if I didn’t have to occasionally leave my safe environment and go to high crime areas, I might not even own a gun. I am not a gun nut as you might be imagining I am.
     Otherwise, I agree with you 100%.
     Instead of focusing on guns as the problem and missing the point entirely, we should be investigating why we are so violent and what we might do to alleviate that to some extent.

167. My objection is the gun control advocates’ utter conviction that eliminating guns will eliminate murder.
     Then you’re objecting to a position that is held by a vanishingly small number of people, perhaps no one at all.
     Instead of focusing on guns as the problem and missing the point entirely, we should be investigating why we are so violent and what we might do to alleviate that to some extent.
     No one is focusing on guns as the problem, just a problem, at least in the types and numbers we have in the US. And I, too, agree that we should be looking into why we are such a violent country. There is no need to miss any point.
     With that, can you explain your 1.74 divisor, Blackhawk?

168. But, are the two “we”s the same people?
     Unless you want to make the somewhat unlikely claim that gun owners never kill anyone, I’d say it’s clear that the two populations overlap.
     I have no idea if gun owners engage in physical violence any more or less than anyone else. I doubt it. In fact, I doubt that there is really any broad statement you can make about gun owners as a whole, other than that they own guns.
     What does seem likely to me is that if someone is inclined to do violence on someone else, owning a gun makes it easier for them to do so.
     No one is focusing on guns as the problem, just a problem
     Precisely.
     And, in fact, normally not “guns” in the abstract, but ownership of particular kinds of guns, and/or by particular people.

169. “My objection is the gun control advocates’ utter conviction that eliminating guns will eliminate murder.”
     The only folks who hold that utter conviction have been murdered already.
     It’s like the utter conviction by no-limits-whatsover-First Amendment advocates that if every individual owned a weapon and was permitted to carry it where ever they like that murder,, not to mention stereo theft and discourtesy on the highways, would be eliminated.
     Or it would be, if either conviction existed.
     My conviction that I favor knife, SUV, and mass poisoning murder over murder via certain types of firearms is no where near as utter as my conviction that maybe firearms are easier to use in the heat of the moment, despite Blackhawk’s conviction that he’d rather be gone after with a firearm than a baseball bat, a machete, or a hay baler.
     I think I’d rather shoot myself when the time comes than beat myself to death with a baseball bat, drink poison, or drown myself in a vat of hemlock pesto (yum, pesto) because the first method would be easier and less liable to allow me second thoughts as I proceeded.
     I might consider locking myself in an SUV and going the death-by-carbon monoxide route, but the FEDs have ruined that course of action with their damned emission regulations.
     Somewhere up thread I considered offing myself with a pair of tweezers in both eyes, but I couldn’t summon the conviction.
     But I’ll keep reading.

170. “With that, can you explain your 1.74 divisor, Blackhawk?”
     Guns kill 11,000 according to cleek’s FBI link. Also, according to the FBI non-gun/non-vehicular homicides are another 6,346. Thus guns kill 1.73 times as many as other methods. That’s 11,000/6,346 = 1.73. Certainly not a overwhelming damnation of guns.
     That said, I screwed up figure for what our murder rate would be compared to British if gun murders were removed and (a big “and”) there was no substitution. British murder rate = 1.1, US = 5.4. 66% of US murders done with guns. Reduce 5.4 by 66% and you have a murder rate that is still 2X the British. We are twice as murderous as British even with a total ban on all guns.
     At least I can admit when I am wrong. That’s a lot more than can be said for a lot of people that comment here.
     “No one is focusing on guns as the problem, just a problem,”
     What’s interesting to me is that there is ample evidence that violent medias (movies, video games, gangster rap, etc) definitely is a strong correlate, if not cause, of US violence.
     I am wondering if any of you legislate-it-all-away libs would be for censorship of the media in your effort to make the country “safe”. Hmmmm? Well?
     No one here has explained to me why I should not be allowed to have a gun to defend myself against my disproportionately homicidal fellow Amnericans.

171. FBI statistics also show that both murderer and victim are significantly more likely to be male and be between the ages of 17 and 25.
     In the interest of public safety should we monitor testosterone levels and castrate – chemically or by knife – all males in excess of a certain “dangerous level”? Maybe just lock them up until they’re 26?
     Just how far do you want to go with your public safety program?

172. It looks like young male is more highly correalted with murder than gun ownership.
     So? Remove them?

173. Just for the heck of it, I thought I’d take a stab (get it?) at the numbers from Blackhawk’s cite regarding UK and US murder rates, particularly murders by gun and knife.
     If you simply want to remove gun homicides from the US per capita stat, all other things remaining equal, take 55 and multiply by 0.3 to get 16.5. That puts the US murder rate at only 10% greater than the UK’s rate of 15. It also makes us way stabbier than the UK, jacking our stabbing percentage up to 47% (dividing 14% by 0.3), as opposed to their already super-stabby rate of 29%, though or total murder rate is only 30% of what it was.
     But, to be fair, the UK does have gun homicides, representing 9% of their total. So let’s throw enough gun homicides back into the US total such that they represent 9% of the total by solving x/(x+16.5) = 0.09 to get 1.6. So the new total is 18.1. Now we’re about 21% killier than the UK, and still stabbier as well, with a stabbiness of 42%, though our total murder rate is a third of what it originally was.
     Now let’s add enough gun homicides back in to get our stabbiness down to the UK levels. 29/47 = 0.62. So, if we divide 16.5 by 0.62, we get 26.6, meaning we’d have to add 10.1 gun homicides/M to our gun homicide-free rate of 16.5. Now our gun homicide percentage is 38%, still a lot higher than the UK’s. But our total murder rate is just a bit less than half of what it originally was, now that we’ve made ourselves equally stabby in terms of percentage of total homicides.

174. “Then you’re objecting to a position that is held by a vanishingly small number of people, perhaps no one at all.”
     That is clearly a delusional statement.

175. Crossed up, I see. Note that I’m using your cite for the numbers, Blackhawk, which accounts for the discrepancies between your post and mine.
     No one here has explained to me why I should not be allowed to have a gun to defend myself against my disproportionately homicidal fellow Amnericans.
     As far as I know, no one has suggested such a thing, which means there would be no need to expain it.

176. That is clearly a delusional statement.
     So you can demonstrate that someone has advocated the total removal of all firearms from the United States and that this person believes such will result in a zero murder rate?

177. “As far as I know, no one has suggested such a thing, which means there would be no need to expain it.”
     Then what have you and your like minded budies been jawing off about here for the past few hundred comments? Guns are bad. Guns kill. Get rid off guns and the murder rate will drop……seriously wtf?
     Just whining?

178. Well, if I said I think we should ban fully automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines and put tighter restrictions on handguns, would that mean you couldn’t own a gun and potentially defend yourself with it?

179. “Well, if I said I think we should ban fully automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines and put tighter restrictions on handguns….”
     I don’t if that mean I couldn’t own a gun and potentially defend myself with it?
     What restrictions on handguns are you considering?
     Personally, I think everyone who wants to own a gun, of any type, should have to demonstrate proficiency in maintaining it, understanding its mechanisms, understanding safety, marksmanship and self defense laws.
     Having done so they would be issued an unrestricted licsense to carry, nationally, in whatever fahion they desire; including concealed.
     I recognize, though, that my little scheme is a violation of the 2nd amendment. You shouldn’t have to be licensed to exercise a right.
     Better to have fire arm handling taught in K – 12 as a required class.
     Personally I could care less about high capacity magazines and assualt rifles, but I do think people should be able to own these. Very few crimes are committed with them. The fear they generated is just liberal panty wetting hysteria. I would want one of these if I ever thought we were facing the collapse of society or a coup d’etat by a dictatorship.

180. And what of our dear friend phil with his bodily function references?
     The fear they generated is just liberal panty wetting hysteria.
     Res ipsa loquitor.

181. I’m not looking to debate the merits of that proposal. I’m simply asking how that proposal prevents you from owning a gun and defending yourself with it. The point being that there are lots of different types of guns you might own and defend yourself with, aside from handguns and fully automatic weapons, and that you can do so without using high-capacity magazines.
     You seem to be assuming some sort of all-out ban on guns is being proposed, but there can be any number of proposals that fall short of that by varying degrees, and this discussion is relevant to at least some of them, probably most, which is what I and my like-minded brethren are on about.
     I don’t even have a strong preference for a given policy. The one I proposed is something that seems reasonable to me, though I’m not terribly confident it would do much in the end.
     I’m mostly interested in the quality of the arguments being made. I’m inclined to call out baloney when I think it’s what I’m seeing, regardless of my position on the matter or how strongly I hold that position.
     (BTW, I’m not particularly fearful and my panties are quite dry, thanks.)

182. “I would want one of these if I ever thought we were facing the collapse of society or a coup d’etat by a dictatorship.”
     One what, an assault weapon, a pair of panties, or a liberal panty wetter?
     Are you saying you and Brett don’t even experience just a little leakage, maybe a squirt, down there at the thought of gun confiscation by the state?
     Why is it we can always expect a little macho referencing of women’s underpants from the usual suspects during discussions about gun law?

183. “You seem to be assuming some sort of all-out ban on guns is being proposed, but there can be any number of proposals that fall short of that by varying degrees, and this discussion is relevant to at least some of them, probably most, which is what I and my like-minded brethren are on about.”
     Seriously, I can’t imagine what you are proposing other than an all about ban and confiscation.
     We already have cities like NY, DC, Chicago where it is damn near impossible to obtain a handgun permit. Possessing a handgun without a permit is a felony with a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 1 to 3 1/2 years depending on the city in question.
     Yet, these cities still have large numbers of murders by handgun and mostly these are non-permitted handguns.
     What more would you do, law-wise?
     Public beheadings of illegal gun owners and their extended families?
     What?
     Your thinking is identical to the thinking in the failed war on drugs.
     For certain reasons people want to get high and will obtain and use drugs despite draconian laws if caught.
     For certain reasons people want to obtain and, sometimes, use handguns despite draconian laws if caught.
     The gun or drug is just the tool and it can’t be eliminated unless the attitude of the tool seeker/user is changed.
     So, please tell me, what’s your plan? How and why would it work?

184. Blackhawk,
     Guns are bad. Guns kill. Get rid off guns and the murder rate will drop……seriously wtf?
     Um. Reduce the number of guns and the murder rate will drop. Yes.
     Go to zero, even if you eliminate guns entirely (which I see no one advocating)? No.

185. Also, I’m not going to let you slide on your fundemental assumption that guns = murder. As Brett has brilliantly demonstrated, the correlation is weak to absent.
     You are wrong, just plain wrong and not willing to even consider the possibility.
     There are plenty of areas of this country with high rates of gun ownership and extremely low rates of crime, esp. murder.
     Why should people living in these areas have their rights and lifestyle impinged just because someone wants to implement a doomed (doomed because it doesn’t address the real problem) policy to address the problem of a population a thousand miles away?

186. “Reduce the number of guns and the murder rate will drop. Yes.”
     really? i call bs on that.
     prove you’re right.
     reduce which guns? whose guns?
     let’s hear your plan then

187. So, please tell me, what’s your plan? How and why would it work?
     I’m not claiming to have one. Maybe we shouldn’t do anything. I just think you make flawed arguments sometimes, using poor logic, in support of your positions, and that you sometimes fail to understand the positions of others and the nature of the arguments for those positions. And you do it with style, no less.

188. HSD,
     “And you do it with style, no less.”
     You’re being facetious, I have no style.
     “I’m not claiming to have one. Maybe we shouldn’t do anything.”
     Well that was certainly anticlimactic (what she said?).
     Look, I too wish there was an easy way to reduce murder and maiming, especially among the young. I don’t think there is one.
     My own approach would be to look at the societal underpinnings of the whole mess. My gut tells me that the post modern media and broken homes and teenage pregnancies are more to blame than guns. I’d include racial tensions as well.
     I could be wrong too.

189. Seriously, I can’t imagine what you are proposing other than an all about ban and confiscation.
     Expand your mind.
     We already have cities like NY, DC, Chicago where it is damn near impossible to obtain a handgun permit.
     Actually, in NYC it’s not that hard if you’re buddies with the mayor.
     let’s hear your plan then
     Here is a simple proposal. I’m not arguing for or against it, I’m just curious to see what your reaction is.
     If you are criminally convicted of committing a crime, any crime, with a gun, you can never have a gun again.
     If you are criminally convicted of any type of physical violence against another person, with or without a gun, you can never own a gun again.
     In either of the two cases above, you may not carry or use a firearm and must temporarily surrender any firearm you own from the time that you are charged by a grand jury, until your case is decided. If you are found innocent, your right to keep and carry is restored, as are any surrendered weapons.
     If you receive a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia, psychosis, or any of a number of other delusional mental conditions, you cannot keep or carry a firearm until you are subsequently deemed to be of sound mind.
     Assume that all of this is state, county, city, or town law. Nothing at the federal level.
     How does that suit? Can we get that far?
     Too panty-wetting?

190. Pretty much all good russell, but nothing original there.
     “If you are criminally convicted of committing a crime, any crime, with a gun, you can never have a gun again.”
     Agreed in principle. I think that’s the law now. Maybe it’s not thoroughly enforced. However, law or not, bad guys will still obtain guns for bad purposes. So it’s good by me, but won’t make a difference.
     “If you are criminally convicted of any type of physical violence against another person, with or without a gun, you can never own a gun again.”
     Partial agreement. I would agree totally that anyone convicted of a felony for any type of physical violence should not be permitted to own a gun. Like the first point, I think that is law now.
     As for misdemeanor convictions, I am less in agreement. It would depend. I don’t think that someone who got cited for a simple fist fight when he was 18 should be barred from gun ownership 10 years later.
     “If you receive a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia, psychosis, or any of a number of other delusional mental conditions, you cannot keep or carry a firearm until you are subsequently deemed to be of sound mind.”
     Agreed. I would even remove that part, “until you are subsequently deemed to be of sound mind.”
     However, again, this is already the law.
     I actually think that the mental health condition as grounds for denial is one of the key components of any effective gun law.
     The problem is how to make mental health diagnoses, which are protected under HIPAA, available to sellers of guns and to LE.
     I say, set the privacy aside where gun purchase/ownership is concerned, but it’s a thorny issue.
     What say you on this latter point?

191. However, again, this is already the law.
     I imagine that it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
     What say you on this latter point?
     I believe there are a handful of situations where mental health professionals are required to disclose otherwise private information to police or other authorities. This would simply be another example of that.

192. I had a personal experience many years ago with an insane person and a gun. This guy was a paranoid schizophrenic and he had it in his head that I was a sorcerer and that I had put a curse on him. The curse was the reason he was hearing voices and suffering from other symptoms.
     He went to a gun store and purchased a .44 magnum and a box of hollow points. Fortunately, a friend of mine just happened to be in the store at the same time buying some ammo and he was aware of the crazy guy’s deteriorating mental status.
     he did know the crazy guy had been recently officially diagnosed. Had he known he would have alerted the sales manager and tried to halt the sale (the ban on sale to mentally ill persons is a federal law, but there has have been a diagnosis)
     As they exited the store, my friend asked the crazy guy where he was going with that big gun in his hand and the crazy guy told him that he was going to take care of the sorcerer that had hexed him.
     My friend called me immediately, not knowing that *I* was the “sorcerer”, but generally concerned because I had expressed, previously, my concern over this person’s thinking and behavior.
     I locked all my doors and made a .357 and a shotgun readily available, locked and loaded. I called 911 and explained the situation. I made up my mind that if the crazy showed up with that revolver I would aim at him and tell him to leave immediately. If he did not I would double tap him without further warning.
     The cops showed up and took a report. Then they left. Fortunately, the crazy guy never showed up. The cops found him later that night in a public park practicing his quick draw with the loaded revolver. He had accidentally discharged the weapon and put a bullet through an empty parked car.
     They confiscated his gun and ammo. They called me to tell me what happened. They wanted me to prove that he was a diagnosed psychiatric patient. I couldn’t prove it and he denied it.
     A few days later the cops gave him his gun and ammo back.
     Fortunately, again, the crazy guy apparently then traded the gun for some crack rock. Who knows where the gun ended up.
     I went to the gun store and exdplained what had happened since the sale. They acted all pissed off. My main point was that they should not sell that guy another gun. That they were on notice. They really didn’t like me coming in with that information or the threat of lawsuit. I stopped doing business with them.
     The presence of a diagnosis is self report on the federal form. That is wrong. A lack of felony record is self report AND verified by the background check.

193. “I don’t think that someone who got cited for a simple fist fight when he was 18 should be barred from gun ownership 10 years later.”
     I think a major point concerning this is that, prior to the passage of the Lautenberg amendment, it was fairly common to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges of violence even if you were innocent. The penalties were fairly minor, hiring a lawyer to contest them amounted to voluntarily subjecting yourself to a heightened fine.
     Then, years later, Congress decided to alter the consequences of plea agreements which had been entered into long before, ending up depriving of their 2nd amendment rights a huge number of people who were guilty of nothing more than taking a deal they weren’t aware would later be altered to their disadvantage.
     The other problem, of course, is, what is the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony? Used to be, that misdemeanors were petty offenses subject to a minor penalty, but never any long term consequences. It had never, prior to the Lautenberg amendment, been the case that you could lose a civil liberty on the basis of a misdemeanor conviction.
     Heck, part of why the Lautenberg amendment got upheld, was that at the time the courts weren’t admitting the 2nd amendment was a civil liberty. So they construed the amendment as taking away a privilege, not a right.
     On that basis, the degree of legal protection afforded the defendant in misdemeanor cases is substantially inferior to that given people charged with felonies. For instance, there’s no right to trial by jury in misdemeanor cases, as there is in felony cases.
     For this reason I seriously object to including in the punishment for misdemeanors something which traditionally was only imposed for felonies. Which, in large measure, defined the difference between a “misdemeanor” and a “felony”!
     You want to impose felony penalties, charge somebody with a felony, and let them have their jury trial.

194. So, what we are left with is:
     1. felony criminal conviction of harming someone physically
     2. maybe also felony criminal conviction of a crime where a gun was involved, with or without actual physical harm
     And maybe clinical insanity, if we can sort out the privacy issues, and the issues of who gets to decide if you’re actually insane.
     What I want to point out here is that all of this favors the rights of individuals to keep and carry firearms, over the interest of everybody else in the world in keeping firearms out of the hands of people who are arguably dangerous.
     And by “arguably dangerous”, we are including people who have actually hurt other people, just not badly enough to rise to the level of a felony.
     This is a basic social choice. There are different groups of people, with different interests, and we are preferring certain of those interests over others.
     This is being done on the basis of gun ownership being a fundamental civil right, which in turn is based on the current reading of the language of the 2nd Amendment.
     One consequence of all of this is that relatively more people will be killed with firearms, than would otherwise. You can dispute that until you are blue in the face, but unless you are preaching to a gun advocacy choir, you will likely not convince many.
     Net/net, our choice as a polity is to prefer that some dangerous people are able to arm themselves, rather than that any non-dangerous person not be able to do so.
     I’m not arguing good bad or indifferent here, I’m simply calling attention to the particular choice we have, collectively, made.

195. Why do Americans kill each other so often?
     It is surprising how seldom people kill each other in modern societies. 4.2 out of every 100,000 people were murdered in the US last year, in primitive societies it would have been more like 4,200. In many of those societies 40 or 50% of all deaths were by homicide.
     Since then there has been a long, slow decline in violence interrupted in the US only by the spike in violence in the 70s through the 90s. That’s the really interesting period, what caused it? Probably lead poisoning.

196. Russell, if you’re going to deprive people of civil liberties on the basis of their being “arguably dangerous”, you better have a proper procedure in place. We have such a procedure: Criminal trial for felony. Where the state can present that argument, to people who aren’t institutionally committed to accepting it.
     If you want to be able to turn people into the practical equivalent of convicted felons, without the tedium and inconvenience of a jury trial, what’s there to say, beyond, “Hell, NO!”?

197. I can assume if I ask you if that also refers to people’s right to vote, you’ll say “yes” but really mean “no,” right?

198. I’ll say yes, and mean yes.
     This is, I assume, where you argue that requiring somebody to prove they’re John Doe before casting John Doe’s ballot, is the equivalent of legally depriving John Doe of the right to vote?

199. Is requiring John Doe to prove he is not a pyschotic gun nut before owning a gun legally depriving John Doe of the right to own a gun?

200. Yes. I only have the right to cast one person’s vote. My right to own guns is hardly so specific.

201. You have the right to cast a vote under certain conditions, you have the right to own guns under certain conditions. Both are conditional.
     In sane locations you do not have the right to own guns if you are a psychotic gun nut.
     Now which has more serious consequences, a person trying to cast someone else’s ballot, something that will be detected if the voter being impersonated also shows up at the polls, and something that happens about as frequently as appearances of Halley’s comet, or a psychotic gun nut obtaining an AR-15 assault rifle, a Remington 12-gauge 870 shotgun, two 40-caliber Glock handguns and 6,000 rounds of ammunition?
     Which one of those worries you more?

202. Russell, if you’re going to deprive people of civil liberties on the basis of their being “arguably dangerous”, you better have a proper procedure in place.
     OK, that’s hard to argue with.
     Look, I’ve weighed in quite a bit on this thread without really tipping my hand as far as what I think would be, and would not be, good public policy.
     That seems sort of unfair, so I’ll fess up. I’m not really interested in debating any of this all that much, because when it comes to guns “debate” generally means everybody yells at each other and nobody changes their minds about anything. But, since I’ve asked others to lay their point of view on the table, I think I ought to do the same.
     First, I think the 2nd Amendment was originally motivated, more than anything else, by a desire that the government not be able to dominate the population as a whole by force of arms. I come to that conclusion from reading contemporary – i.e., 18th C – sources.
     I also think it’s reasonable for responsible people to own firearms for personal protection, hunting, sport, and/or any of a number of other purposes. The burden should be on folks who want to restrict that to demonstrate why the restriction is needed.
     All of that said, IMO it’s reasonable and correct for the ownership and use of firearms to be regulated by law, because they are f**king dangerous. I’m absolutely fine with private individuals being prohibited from owning automatic weapons, or explosives, or ‘firearms’ that shoot things other than bullets such as RPGs or bazookas.
     I’m also fine with people who have demonstrated an inability to restrain themselves from deliberately injuring other people from being deprived of their right to own and/or carry firearms. Felony, misdemeanor, whatever. If you are criminally convicted of doing physical harm to another person, I have no problem with your city, country, or state deciding that you don’t get to have a firearm.
     Ditto for people who have been clinically diagnosed as insane.
     My general feeling about rights is that they are extraordinarily important, that they are inalienable, but also that they incur responsibilities and ought not be exercised to the detriment of others’ enjoyment of *their* inalienable rights.
     For instance, the right not to be shot dead by a bully or a lunatic.
     I also think there is a line to be drawn between owning a firearm for hunting, sport, or self defense in the home, and carrying a firearm on your person any and everyplace you happen to travel during the course of your day. I don’t see restrictions on either concealed or open carry for folks who are not police officers or military as an inherent infringement on the 2nd Amendment.
     I grew up with guns in the house, I have many many friends and family members who own lots and lots of guns, and I have no particular problem with guns or gun owners.
     I do have a problem with the idea that the rights conferred under the 2nd Amendment trump any and every other public interest.
     Last but not least, it’s plainly clear to me that Americans kill themselves and each other at a disturbingly high rate. They do so with and without firearms, but mostly with. Enough so that it is, in fact, a public health issue, and so a public response seems, to me, appropriate.
     Really last but not least, it seems to me that what is appropriate in North Dakota or Idaho is not really a good fit for Brooklyn or Detroit, and vice versa. A little common sense goes a long way.
     That’s where I’m coming from, gun-wise. I don’t own a gun, have no particular use for a gun, am not particularly interested in guns, but we all have our interests, and folks who are into guns are no weirder than, for instance, those of us who are interested in hand-hammered cymbals made, of source, from Turkish B20 bronze.
     If guns are your thing, live it up, I have no problem with it. Shooting people, I have a problem with, and am completely in support of whatever will reduce that.
     Peace out.

203. First, let me admit that I have skipped quite a bit of this conversation. But, as usual, I am with russell…

     All of that said, IMO it’s reasonable and correct for the ownership and use of firearms to be regulated by law, because they are f**king dangerous. I’m absolutely fine with private individuals being prohibited from owning automatic weapons, or explosives, or ‘firearms’ that shoot things other than bullets such as RPGs or bazookas.

     Yes, there should be limits…

     Vercotti:Anyway I decided to open a high class night club for the gentry at Biggleswade with International cuisine and cooking and top line acts, and not a cheap clip joint for picking up tarts — that was right out, I deny that completely –, and one evening in walks Dinsdale with a couple of big lads, one of whom was carrying a tactical nuclear missile. They said I had bought one of their fruit machines and would I pay for it.

     But, just for completeness’ sake

     2nd Interviewer: Why didn’t you call the police?

     Vercotti: Well I had noticed that the lad with the thermonuclear device was the chief constable for the area.

204. This is, I assume, where you argue that requiring somebody to prove they’re John Doe before casting John Doe’s ballot, is the equivalent of legally depriving John Doe of the right to vote?
     In the absence of any legitimate reason to assume that John Doe is not John Doe, and in the absence of any significant number of alleged John or Jane Does casting fraudulent votes, yes.

205. The refusal to provide ID when asked is, in fact, a perfectly legitimate reason to assume the person before you claiming to be John Doe might not be John Doe. Perhaps rebutable reason, but the best way to rebut it is ID…

206. Russell, you use the word ‘regulate’ and ‘restrictions’. Both imply matters of extent, degree and reasonableness. Absolutists on any issue, e.g. see Phil’s comment that I address below, won’t take ‘yes’ for an answer. Somewhere in the middle, lies an answer.
     I don’t want to have to go armed because every bad-ass in town is also packing. I don’t want a fender bender to devolve into a shoot-out.
     Yet, I want to be able to take my pistol to the range or on hunting trip and not have to get the gov’t’s permission to do so. It isn’t enough that I am an ok person with no history of violence.
     PS–I’ve hunted successfully with pistols and they remain useful on hunts when, for example, a deer is wounded and has to be tracked into the brush. Wagging a scoped rifle through the brush is actually a somewhat unsafe activity. Carrying a sidearm in a holster is much easier and safer.
     In the absence of any legitimate reason to assume that John Doe is not John Doe, and in the absence of any significant number of alleged John or Jane Does casting fraudulent votes, yes.
     Phil, this won’t dance. I show ID every time I vote and I’ve never been refused. I fail to see how being asked to establish that you are who you say you are, that you are registered and that your reside in the precinct in which you are casting your vote is an undue imposition.

207. remember when “papers please” was shorthand for commie/nazi totalitarianism? but oh how times have changed. “conservatives” love love love them some “papers please”, these days. whatever it takes to keep out the bad elements, i guess.

208. I fail to see how being asked to establish that you are who you say you are, that you are registered and that your reside in the precinct in which you are casting your vote is an undue imposition.
     Showing an id card doesn’t establish that you are who you say you are. It doesn’t establish that you are registered. And it doesn’t establish where you reside. For a few dollars, I can get an id card that shows my picture with your name and address that will easily fool any poll worker.
     If we can’t get these most basic questions right, I doubt we can have a meaningful policy debate.

209. “I think the 2nd Amendment was originally motivated, more than anything else, by a desire that the government not be able to dominate the population as a whole by force of arms. I come to that conclusion from reading contemporary – i.e., 18th C – sources.”
     Hellelujah!
     russell, I am actually starting to really like you. You’re one ok guy (for a lib).
     Now, what has changed since the 18th C? Has governmental propensity for de-evolution into tyranny diminished?

210. I show ID every time I vote and I’ve never been refused.
     Why would you be refused if you show ID every time you vote? Were you using someone else’s ID, not registered, or in the wrong precinct? (I’m guessing not.)
     What if you didn’t have ID, particularly a state-issued photo ID, which it might cost you some amount of money and travel to get, especially if you were far more resource-constrained than you now are?
     I never show ID when I vote. I show up at the right precinct claiming to be me and my signature matches the one in the book. The matching signature verifies I am who I claim to be and, since I’m in the book at all, I’m registered and I’m in the right precinct. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.
     If someone else showed up claiming to be me, was able to match my signature AND I didn’t show up later to vote, alerting the Board of Elections that something was amiss and needed to be sorted out, I guess he might get away with it. The incentives relative to the risks escape me, however.
     Now, absentee ballots, not requiring ID, are another story.

211. Now, absentee ballots, not requiring ID, are another story.
     This raises a question. Voting systems are supposed to ensure that voters can’t prove how they voted to anyone; without this feature, your boss could force you to vote his way or fire you. Or someone could pay you to vote her way. But mail voting systems, especially the ‘everyone votes by mail’ systems used in OR and WA, destroy the secret ballot.
     Isn’t that a huge problem for the integrity of the voting system, at least compared to traditional polling place voting?

212. For a few dollars, I can get an id card that shows my picture with your name and address that will easily fool any poll worker.
     or
     What if you didn’t have ID, particularly a state-issued photo ID, which it might cost you some amount of money and travel to get, especially if you were far more resource-constrained than you now are?
     Which is it? Easy-peasy to commit fraud or an undue burden to show ID.
     “conservatives” love love love them some “papers please”, these days.
     Very persuasive. And articulate, too. Should someone have to show an ID to get a social security number? Non-emergency admission to a hospital? Purchase a firearm or get a drug prescription filled?
     Why the exception for voting? Why this and no other activity that routinely requires identification? If requiring an ID to vote is oppressive, why isn’t this true in every other instance?

213. Which is it? Easy-peasy to commit fraud or an undue burden to show ID.
     It is both. For law-abiding citizens, it is an undue burden. But for criminals, it is easy to bypass. With any security policy, we must analyze the effects on (1) innocent people who are not breaking the law and (2) criminals who are trying to subvert the system. A security policy that punishes (1) while doing nothing to stop (2) is just stupid; it literally makes us worse off.

214. Can we just stop pretending the recent spate of voter-ID laws being pushed in a big hurry was anything other than a calculated voter-suppression effort? They all but admitted it in Pennsylvania, where it was very, very clear that it would disproportionately affect poor blacks in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. It’s blatant horsesh1t.

215. Very persuasive. And articulate, too.
     and then you go on to demonstrate that i was perfectly correct.

216. Why the exception for voting?
     Why the exception for buying groceries, or going to the movies, or using a public rest room, or making phone calls, or using elevators, or going to the mall, or taking the bus? I mean, you don’t even have to be registered to do those things. (Hmmm, how does that registration process work, anyway?)
     The least they could do is require an ID, like all those other things you need an ID to do, but you don’t have to be registered for.

217. I still don’t see any evidence of ‘undue’ burden. Showing ID is an ‘undue’ burden in what way.
     Voter suppression? As someone affected by the laws passed in democracy, why don’t I have the right to know that the people who vote are registered and legally entitled to vote?

218. Many people don’t have ID or don’t have an appropriate form of ID. Moreover, requiring ID does nothing to stop criminals but it will stop perfectly legal voters from being able to vote.
     Do you understand that having an ID card doesn’t actually prove anything? Or do you believe that no underage person has ever bough beer or entered a 21+ club with a fake ID?

219. Just answer me a question, McK: What on earth was accomplished by either of the following?
     96-year-old Chattanooga woman denied voter ID
     86-year-old war veteran prevented from voting
     We’ve been over this. Lots and lots and lots of elderly people, poor people, and minorities do not have IDs. They don’t always have the documents needed to get them. They live in places where it’s difficult and inconvenient to get them, and in the states which have of late pursued Voter ID laws, they’ve made them even MORE difficult to get via limited locations and hours.
     What is being accomplished by that except for suppressing turnout?

220. As someone affected by the laws passed in democracy, why don’t I have the right to know that the people who vote are registered and legally entitled to vote?
     You can’t vote, or at least your vote won’t ultimately be counted, if your aren’t registered. And you can’t register if you aren’t legally entitled to vote. Like I said, if I show up and my name isn’t in the book, I don’t get to vote. Incidentally, I’m pretty sure, along with my signature, my birthdate is in the book, which also serves to provide some assurance that I’m who I am, given that I should appear to be of a certain age.
     I still don’t see any evidence of ‘undue’ burden. Showing ID is an ‘undue’ burden in what way.
     I don’t know why you don’t, when it’s been pointed out repeatedly here and elsewhere. Perhaps you’re wearing blinders of some sort.
     Voter suppression?
     You know, it’s just about the requirement. It’s also about timing. When you change the rules just before the election, even people who might be able to get the required ID if given a bit more time won’t be able to do so. That’s one thing that made the effort so blatantly about voter suppression.

221. I appear to have missed a “not” in the first sentence of my last paragraph. It’s not just about the requirement.

222. Maybe we should combine gun shows and polling places and kind of sort out the I.D. issues among the straw weapons buyers and the straw voters.
     I suspect the 96-year old Chattanooga woman could visit the weapons booth first and make a straw purchase and then wheel over to the voting booth and dare someone to ask her for an I.D.

223. I seek elegant, innovative solutions to intractable problems.
     In fact, the 96-year old woman could, if she lived in Colorado visit the all-in-one marijuana dispensary/gun show/polling place, buy a little weed, a weapon, and vote, sans I.D. and then cool her heels to await the Feds showing up and wondering where to start.
     Then, as they wheeled her out for questioning, she could ask THEM why in hell they didn’t mandate state health insurance exchanges.
     Our governance has seized up. No size fits anybody.
     Let’s start over.

224. As someone affected by the laws passed in democracy, why don’t I have the right to know that the people who vote are registered and legally entitled to vote?
     As you yourself once said on this very blog, “Declaring something to be a ‘right’ doesn’t make it so.” Whence would you imagine this “right” is derived, and how is it enforceable?

225. As someone affected by the laws passed in democracy, why don’t I have the right to know that the people who vote are registered and legally entitled to vote?
     Because:
     1. Such requirements unduly burden the right to vote of many legitimate voters, and hence disenfranchise a fair number of voters.
     2. There is no particular incentive for any individual to engage in voter ID fraud. How many people do you think are willing to bear the possibly small risk of being caught in order to cast two votes instead of one?
     Or
     As someone affected by the laws passed in democracy, why don’t I have the right to know that no one legally entitled to vote has been denied the chance to do so?
     It’s really easy. False positives, false negatives.

226. Meanwhile:
     http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/12/07/1298791/nra-perkins/?mobile=nc
     Frenchy Lapierre, not one to pee his panties, sh*ts all over the place.
     Question is, who holds the baby while the gunfight is going down?

227. 1. They burden it. Whether they do so unduly is what we’re arguing over.
     2. There’s exactly as much incentive for any individual to engage in voter ID fraud, as there is for a voter to vote. The payoff is the same.
     And what risk? Seriously? Based on all the trouble O’Keefe had, there doesn’t appear to be any risk at all.

228. But here’s the thing that puzzles conservatives, and drives the conviction on the part of many that the left is using impersonation vote fraud. (As absurd as it it, and that I agree about.)
     Lack of photo ID isn’t just a problem if you want to vote. You have trouble cashing checks, getting a job, boarding airplanes, the list goes on and on. Difficulty voting is probably the least problem somebody lacking picture ID faces.
     So, why don’t Democrats just respond by insisting on a major effort to get ID for those lacking it? It would be so much better for those lacking ID, than just giving them one, infrequent, activity they can do without it.
     A lot of morons conclude the reason must be to facilitate voting fraud. But I suppose you must have SOME reason for choosing the response which least helps those without ID.
     What is it?

229. So, why don’t Democrats just respond by insisting on a major effort to get ID for those lacking it?
     Well, given that the Real ID act was opposed by not only Democrats, but a lot of conservative groups, it would probably be more accurate to not simply place the onus on Dems. And there is also the Schumer/Graham Biometric National ID proposal that was floated in 2010, but as it was tied to immigration, it met resistance as well. And a little thought will lead one to the conclusion that an national ID would touch on so many issues and realize that it is not something that would divide neatly down party lines, as much as you would like to this it did.

230. Here’s the bottom line on the voter ID controversy: it’s a fake solution to a non-existant problem. There is no eveidence–none at all–that people who are not regisgtered are voting in numbers that influence election outcomes. Nor is there any evidence at at all that people are votig multiple times under multiple identities. The whole claim upon which the ID thing is based is another rightwing lie.
     I challege the people who believe in this lie to come up with an example of a person voting where they are not legally regisgtered–an example that is not some Brietbrat wingnut “testig the system”.
     There’s a logistical reason why the kind of voter fraud that IDs are supposed to prevent doesn’t happen anyway: its too difficult. In order to influence an election thousands of people would have to vote at multiple polling sites. ANd of course they would have to claim to be people who are on the register which means they would have to know the names there and would have to vote before the real voter showed up. IF such scams were actually happening it would be obvious.
     So that is not how election fraud is done. Elctio fraud is done they way the Repubicans tried to do it in Wiscosin, Ohio, and Florida: make it hard to register, make it hard
     to vote, hope that people will stay away.
     Or done the way the Republicans did it in 2004 with robocalls in multiple states that told voters flat out lies intended to change votes, discourage voters or confuse them about where or when they could vote.
     In other words suprresig the vote–as the ID laws are intended to do–is they way to manipulate the outcome of elections and its the Republica party that has been engaging in that kind of fraud as a matter of policy for years.
     Of course it doesn’t work if the Demcorats overwhelm the fraudsters with an excellent turn out campaign. But it is a measure of the immoralityu of the Republican party that Democrats can’tg just win elections–they ahve to win beyond the effects of Republican voter suppression.
     Anther way to cheat in an election is the way a Repubican auditor did it in Wisconsin: take the voting data home, run it through your own compugter and “find” just enough votes to effect the outcome of the election.

231. I would say that voter ID is a real solution to a problem we have every reason to suppose is minor. After all, to the (Presumably minor) extent it’s happening, voter ID laws actually DO represent a solution, as long as they don’t rely on silly forms of ID such as easily faked utility bills. (Hey, Patrick, thanks for the tips on how to do that!)
     But I would be utterly delighted were the GOP to drop it’s preoccupation with voter ID in favor of tightening requirements to get absentee ballots, and implementing a robust system of post-election audits to detect when fraud has actually taken place.
     I’m sure you’ll join me in urging this on our representatives, right?

232. Some of my best friends are gun nuts. They are normal, reasonable, competent people with a healthy sense of humor, irony, and logic. Except when it comes to “guns”.
     Their bottom line boils down to: “We need our guns to defend our 2nd Amendment rights.” Why they feel they can’t defend their rights, or anything else, with the knives or bats which they argue are just as formidable as guns, is a mystery. How guns can show up in cities with tight gun laws from places near and far which have loose gun laws, is something they pretend not to understand. Why registration of cars, licensing of drivers, and auto insurance requirements have NOT led to widespread guvmint confiscation of automobiles is … well, they can explain that: guns, you see.
     But the thing that puzzles me most is this: my gun-nut friends deny any connection between widespread gun ownership and the occasional schoolhouse massacre. They don’t argue that “gun rights” are important enough to be worth the cost. They deny the cost. I don’t get it.
     I suspect that geneticists will eventually discover why some people are gun nuts and some are not. At least, I’m fairly certain that neither logicians nor philosophers will ever figure it out. I’m not making a value judgement here. It may turn out that people like me, who LACK the gun-nuttery gene, are the genetically defective ones. If so, I thank my gun-nut friends in advance for tolerating my birth defect.
     –TP

233. I would say that voter ID is a real solution to a problem we have every reason to suppose is minor
     The problem is not minor. Too many black and Hispanic people are voting. That is a major problem for the Republicans, and voter ID is one solution to that problem.

234. “But the thing that puzzles me most is this: my gun-nut friends deny any connection between widespread gun ownership and the occasional schoolhouse massacre. They don’t argue that “gun rights” are important enough to be worth the cost. They deny the cost. I don’t get it.”
     Let me ask: How successful has the war on drugs been? If you really wanted, and didn’t highly regard your safety, (Say you expected to die, and wanted to go out with a fling.) do you think you could score some cocaine or heroin?
     Why do we think gun control couldn’t do anything to prevent schoolyard shootings? Same reason: The last person you’re going to be able to keep a gun from is somebody who doesn’t mind breaking the law, and doesn’t plan on living past their use of it.
     It’s been understood among criminologists for centuries, that gun control laws generally backfire. For the simple reason that the first people you disarm are the people who were least likely to do anything wrong with a gun, and the last people you disarm are the people most likely to do something wrong. So, unless you can somehow magically make all guns disappear, (Again, remember the war on drugs.) all you do is alter the balance of power in the criminal’s favor.
     Or to quote Cesare Beccaria, one of Jefferson’s favorite writers,
     “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 has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.
     Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty–so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator–and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer?
     Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve to rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventative but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.”

235. My analogy for gun controllers is this:
     Suppose you wanted to rid the world of the scourge of influenza. A noble cause!
     The cause of influenza is the influenza virus. Only an idiot could dispute this.
     So you set out to destroy the influenza virus wherever you find it.
     What a pity the easiest influenza virus to find is flu vaccine! Well, don’t let that stop you, you’ll finish the job eventually.

236. Let me ask: How successful has the war on drugs been?
     You have completely missed Tony P.’s point. We can’t start debating the merits of gun control until people admit that gun ownership has its costs – that there are some disadvantages to having a heavily armed populace.
     In your war on drugs example, if someone denies that there are any disadvantages to drug use, we can’t have a debate on whether prohibition is a good idea. You can’t argue with people who simply deny reality. If someone argues that there is no downside to the use of meth, for example, then we can’t talk about whether the benefits of legalizing drugs outweigh the costs. All we can say is that the person who argues that there is no downside to the use of meth is denying reality.
     Back on the gun control issue, when someone argues that one could kill just as many people with a bat as one could with a gun, they are denying reality. You can’t discuss the costs versus the benefits of gun control with them, because they deny that there is any downside to gun ownership.
     That what was I took as Tony P.’s point.

237. “Or to quote Cesare Beccaria…”
     Beautiful. Perfect. Right to the heart of the matter.
     Let’s now sit back and watch the libs say that Beccaria and Jefferson were crazy, stupid, etc.
     I wish libs would just come out and admit what is so painfully obvious, libs are weak, frightened children desperately looking to mommy (i.e. the govt) to protect them from the harshness of life.
     They seek a pampered challenge free/pain free utopia.
     Anyone who points out that life is not, and can never be, the utopia they crave is derogated in a temper tantrum like illogical emotional outburst reminiscent of the spoiled child that is told “no”.
     Here is a good summary of the liberal problem:
     http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/big_bird_liberalism_and_perversion.html
     This is where Phil and Turbulence, et al are coming from when they are shocked – shocked! – that someone might carry a gun for self defense because there are dangerous neighborhoods where one could get hurt or killed by indigenous criminals.
     They deny the danger. It doesn’t fit with their utopian dream.
     It’s where a otherwise rational russell is coming from when he says that guns to fight against govt tyranny is a ludicrous notion. In his world people just succumb. Because, afterall, why would “mommy” hurt her own children? Inconceivable – or at least too much cognitive dissonance to absorb.
     Fighting is scary and too ugly and generally uncomfortable. In fact even the thought of it is uncomfortable. So we are to not think of it. Bringing it up is “crazy”. Crazy being that which rocks the cradle.

238. “when someone argues that one could kill just as many people with a bat as one could with a gun, they are denying reality.”
     really?
     You are talking facts here. Proveable facts.
     If you are in a room with me and I have decided to kill you, you will be dead whether I have a bat or a gun.
     This could be simulated with paintball guns and whiffle bats and a video cam.
     Ditto, I’ll wager I could rack up as many “kills” in a high school with the bat as I could with the gun (that’s whiffle bat and paintball gun just to clarify. I have no desire to kill anyone let alone children).
     You explain to me why I could not.
     Just saying I can’t doesn’t count.
     What is your reasoning?

239. The moral of the story is that absent the weapons, the Columbine killers might have batted third and cleanup on the school baseball team as practice for the bludgeoning to come, Treyvon Martin’s parents should have had him vaccinated against Skittles addiction, and Cassandra Perkins would have successfully protected herself with the new 300-dose-clip poison dispenser.
     And let’s not forget that Thomas Jefferson, if he were alive today, might get a load of the tree of liberty and punish a slave or two for over-watering, all things, including technology, being equal from 1787 to 2012, am I right?
     There’s nothing to be done.

240. P.S. The right wing is not a better choice. They just want to institutionalize our sefdom and a fascist police state.
     The gun is symbolic as much as it is practical. Its ubiquitous ownership says The People have the same coercive power of life/death that the state does.
     If you can’t handle that, then you have no right to be Americans or even to call yourselves men. Move to France.

241. “I wish libs would just come out and admit what is so painfully obvious, libs are weak, frightened children desperately looking to mommy (i.e. the govt) to protect them from the harshness of life.”
     The bathroom is down the hall on your far right. Put those underpants in the basket for the laundry.
     “If you are in a room with me and I have decided to kill you, you will be dead whether I have a bat or a gun.”
     Yes, but can you hit the curveball? Also, I’ve already spiked the punch with a deadly poison.
     “Just saying I can doesn’t count.”
     Then we’re even.

242. Looks like Blackhawk picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

243. “Just saying I can’t .. etc”
     Sorry, my First Amendment, who I call Mother,
     misfired.

244. I see France.

245. “Looks like Blackhawk picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.”
     “The bathroom is down the hall on your far right. Put those underpants in the basket for the laundry.”
     As I was saying.
     Classic

246. Yup.

247. “Let’s now sit back and watch the libs say that Beccaria and Jefferson were crazy, stupid, etc.”
     So which is it, move to France, or say Jefferson was crazy, stupid?
     “If you are in a room with me and I have decided to kill you, you will be dead whether I have a bat or a gun.”
     This sentence may suffer from the grammar pitfall — “YOU” — that Brett pointed out somewhere or other recently.
     Or, do I need to put my drink down?

248. Even the Capchas are pointedly insinuative tonight.
     Have an excellent rest of your weekend, all!

249. They deny the danger. It doesn’t fit with their utopian dream.
     Project much?
     Cons are such pussies. They are so afraid of mommy that they fantasize about killing libs with wiffle-ball bats and paintball guns. They are scared of libs for the same reason that crows are scared of straw men: they can’t tell the difference. They worry that sane people will gang up on them, and see paranoia as the key to Utopia.
     There, that ought to offend actual conservatives. Whether they feel offended because I’m lumping them with Blackhawk, or because they lump themselves with Blackhawk, I can’t say.
     –TP

250. They don’t argue that “gun rights” are important enough to be worth the cost. They deny the cost.
     This is my take, also.
     FWIW.
     It’s where a otherwise rational russell is coming from when he says that guns to fight against govt tyranny is a ludicrous notion.
     Reading comprehension: get some.
     Ditto, I’ll wager I could rack up as many “kills” in a high school with the bat as I could with the gun
     We have entered the land of the risible.
     libs are weak, frightened children desperately looking to mommy (i.e. the govt) to protect them from the harshness of life.
     Seriously, kiss my @ss.
     Nobody gives a flying f**k how tough you are or how many high school kids you could kill with a bat.
     Nobody gives a crap if you want to shoot a gun. If you want a gun, get a gun. Have fun. Shoot somebody with it, and there will be an issue, otherwise live it up.
     To anybody in the f***king world who isn’t joined at the hip to the idea of private gun ownership without restriction, it’s dead obvious that more guns => more people get killed with guns.
     If you want to argue about that, fine, live it up, but it’s asinine.
     More guns means more people get killed with guns. In this country, anyway, and “in this country” is what we’re talking about. We don’t (most of us, anyway) live in Norway.
     If you want to argue that that is a price we pay for the liberty of gun ownership, folks might agree or disagree, but it’s a defensible position. Defensible here meaning “not insane”, or “not based on a total denial of reality”.
     If you want to argue that there is simply no correlation between the number of people killed with firearms, and the number of firearms that are available in the US, and the ease with which people can obtain firearms in the US, I would ask you instead to go outside and bark at the moon, because the two things are more or less equivalent, and if you go outside and bark at the moon it will be far less annoying to the rest of us.
     And to reiterate, NOBODY IS INTERESTED IN HOW MANY HIGH SCHOOL KIDS YOU COULD KILL WITH A BAT.
     Nobody.
     Thanks

251. Move to France.
     Seriously, this sounds better and better every day.

252. When people comment things like:”Back on the gun control issue, when someone argues that one could kill just as many people with a bat as one could with a gun, they are denying reality.”
     It makes me think that they are, indeed, “INTERESTED IN HOW MANY HIGH SCHOOL KIDS YOU COULD KILL WITH A BAT.”
     Killed with a bat versus gun. It’s a sick topic to contemplate. Unfortunately, due to the obtuseness of gun control cry babies, the possibility of substitution of guns for other means of homicide must be brought to the forefront. Gun controllers, risibly, believe that eliminating guns will eliminate homicide.
     “It’s where a otherwise rational russell is coming from when he says that guns to fight against govt tyranny is a ludicrous notion.
     Reading comprehension: get some.”
     Hmmmm.
     You said this up-thread,”All I ask is that you not bug me with talk about overthrowing the government, or being part of the 3%, or watering the tree of liberty. It just makes you sound like a paranoid lunatic. Enjoy your hobby and leave the rest of us the f**k alone, please.”
     What did I miss?
     “So which is it, move to France, or say Jefferson was crazy, stupid?”
     I’m sure you’re capable of both, at the same time.
     This:
     “If you want a gun, get a gun. Have fun.”
     Plus this:
     “To anybody in the f***king world who isn’t joined at the hip to the idea of private gun ownership without restriction, it’s dead obvious that more guns => more people get killed with guns.”
     = dishonesty.
     Because the obvious reaction from the govt-please-save-us crowd, to the equation that you propose, is that the gov’t ban guns.
     You know that.
     “Move to France.
     Seriously, this sounds better and better every day.”
     Au’voir. You’ll be welcomed, but not missed.

253. You want to die by post-its? Cause I can make that happen.
     And that’s a slow death.

254. Lack of photo ID isn’t just a problem if you want to vote. You have trouble cashing checks, getting a job, boarding airplanes, the list goes on and on. Difficulty voting is probably the least problem somebody lacking picture ID faces.
     
     Think about the groups of people most often demonstrated as disenfranchised or potentially disenfranchised by voter ID laws, then ask yourself how much check cashing, job hunting and airplane boarding they do.

255. You’ll be welcomed, but not missed.
     True story.
     My wife turned down a really, really good marketing consultancy gig in France a few years ago. Based in Paris, with access to an apartment on the Cap d’Antibes for weekend getaways.
     She turned it down because (a) my stepson was still in school and (b) I did not fly at the time.
     I could have spent the insanity of the GW Bush years with the love of my life in Paris. She would have been pulling down enough $$$ that I could have just hung out and played drums.
     Do you know that, if you play 10 gigs *in a f***king year* in France, you are entitled to say you are a musician by profession, and thus are entitled to the full panoply of French national benefits? Health care, unemployment insurance, the whole 9.
     I should seriously have just taken a few mg’s of Ativan, we should have found some English language school for junior, and we should have gone. Trust me when I say I have my regrets.
     “Move to France” is your idea of some kind of punishment, or some undesirable fate?
     Please don’t throw me in the briar patch.

256. “Do you know that, if you play 10 gigs *in a f***king year* in France, you are entitled to say you are a musician by profession, and thus are entitled to the full panoply of French national benefits? Health care, unemployment insurance, the whole 9.”
     That’s pretty nice. Maybe I’ll go.
     The point isn’t that France isn’t an ok place. The point is that it is NOT America. And that no one should be trying to turn America into France.

257. While I’m here, one thing not yet mentioned that needs to be is that minorities are about as positively correlated with murder rate as are guns. Especially blacks.
     Large enclaves of urban blacks is what the US has and that Europe lacks. Remove blacks and hispanics from the equation and our murder rate, despite all the guns, drops to about where Europe’s is.
     Not something big bird would like to talk about, but an important aspect of the issue nonetheless.

258. According to colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.pdf
     “The single best indicator of violent crime levels in an area is the percentage of the population that is black and Hispanic. ”

259. Not something big bird would like to talk about, but an important aspect of the issue nonetheless.
     Well, then, what’s your plan? My big bird would love to talk about it.
     (Maybe russell will fly to France, if blackhawk doesn’t manage to dig his way to China first.)

260. “(b) I did not fly at the time.”
     My glue is a discontinued brand from the 70s (made before party pooper libs had the govt intervene and force the use of less toxic ingredients).
     Pass me your address and I’ll send you a tube. A couple of good whiffs and you’ll be flying just fine.

261. “Well, then, what’s your plan? My big bird would love to talk about it.”
     I don’t have a plan. We screwed the pooch on day 1 concerning slavery and blacks in the land of the free. Now it’s like a curse that won’t we brought upon ourselves that won’t go away.
     The Hispanic gang/ crime rate is even more disconcerting in a way because they don’t have the legacy of slavery as an excuse. But a lot of that is probably due to the drug prohibition and Hispanics being involved in the black market trade. Legalize drugs and I think most of the Hispanic murder rate disolves.
     I’m just saying that the US love of guns is not the key to the murder rate. The minority issue is more fundementally tied to the problem. This needs to be noted.

262. I’m just saying that the US love of guns is not the key to the murder rate.
     I’d say it’s not, all by itself, the explanation, given the other countries with comparable gun ownership and much lower murder rates, but it’s a strong contributing factor. What can be done about it in practical terms is another question, but I’d rather not pretend it’s not (a big) part of the problem.
     I think ending the drug war would do a lot to lower our murder rate, particularly as gun violence is concerned. That might mean something other than *legalizing* all currently illegal drugs, but still. And I’m not sure why you would limit that remedy to its potential effects for Hispanics. I image it would do quite a bit to ease the disenfranchisement of a good many groups of people, blacks included.
     (I assume by the “minority issue,” you are referring to the way our criminal justice, social and economic systems disadvantage minorities.)

263. “(I assume by the “minority issue,” you are referring to the way our criminal justice, social and economic systems disadvantage minorities.)”
     No. Not in this case. I agreed that it is skewed against them in many ways, but murder is murder. Unless you want to tell me that most minorities in prison for murder are falsely accused AND that whites actually committed the crime.
     “And I’m not sure why you would limit that remedy to its potential effects for Hispanics.”
     That’s just my opinion. Nothing more. I have observed that Hispanic gangs are primarily involved in drug trafficing. Black gangs are involved in the same comerce, but I think they have a different nuance. I could easily be wrong.
     “What can be done about it in practical terms is another question…”
     Right. However, you have the same practical issue facing what you would do to eliminate guns.
     These appear to be intractable problems that we, as Americans, will just have to learn to live with.
     But don’t come after my guns. It serves no purpose.

264. It’s not a minority problem, it’s a subculture problem. It’s just that the subculture happens to be strongly correlated with race and ethnicity. But there are still white gang bangers and black dentists.

265. “It’s not a minority problem, it’s a subculture problem. It’s just that the subculture happens to be strongly correlated with race and ethnicity. But there are still white gang bangers and black dentists.”
     Ok. Agreed. I certainly don’t want to be mistakenly interpreted as implying that minorities are *all* gang banging killers. Obviously, a large % are decent law abiding hard working citizens.
     And yes, there are white gangs that every bit as homicidal.

266. However, you have the same practical issue facing what you would do to eliminate guns.
     That’s what I was talking about.
     It’s not a minority problem, it’s a subculture problem.
     I suppose you could frame a lot of things that way. The question remains – why does such a subculture exist? We’re still left talking about sub-populations that are put under different constraints than others, so the “subculture problem” and the “minority problem” are deeply intertwined. The sub-culture is one of disenfranchisement, which prevails among people who are disenfranchised.

267. Large enclaves of urban blacks is what the US has and that Europe lacks.
     Hey, somebody had to go there.
     I think the tiniest bit of homework will demonstrate that European cities are also plagued with “large enclaves” of folks with issues. Sometimes they even call them “blacks”.
     This is all a lot of horsesh*t anyway, because nobody is coming after your guns.
     I live in MA, which apparently has among the strictest gun control laws in the US.
     In MA, you have to have a license to own a firearm. A license for a rifle or shotgun only (class B) is issued on a “shall issue” basis. It can be denied if you have been convicted of some disqualifying crime, if you have been confined for mental illness, or if you have been either confined or placed under treatment for drug abuse or drunkenness.
     Barring any of those disqualifications, “shall issue” means if you ask, you get.
     A license to own or carry a handgun (class A) is harder to get. You have to be 21 or older, and the local police chief can deny the application at his or her discretion. So, if your chief of police thinks you are a famous @sshole, he might say “no”. I have no idea how frequently that does or does not happen. All of that is in addition to the class B restrictions noted above.
     Class A also gets you concealed carry, the right to keep a loaded shotgun in your vehicle, and the right to own and use larger capacity weapons and feed devices.
     If you are denied a class A by your local copper, you can appeal. Disqualifications for mental illness, drug abuse, alchoholism, and all but violent crimes are generally waived after 5 years.
     That is basically the MOST EXTREME gun control regime in the nation, at least at the state level. Some cities are stricter.
     If you don’t want to live under that level of tyranny, don’t live in MA. Nobody will make you.
     Of all the very real problems facing the nation today, widespread denial of the right to own a firearm does not come near the top of the list. It is, in fact, largely imaginary, especially if you extend “firearm” to mean “own a gun for sport and/or for home defense”.
     If you want to carry a loaded weapon, concealed on your person any and everyplace you travel, you may not get your wish in all jurisdictions. As far as I can tell, that is the full extent of the gun advocate’s complaint.
     Nobody gets everything they want.

268. Plus this:
     “To anybody in the f***king world who isn’t joined at the hip to the idea of private gun ownership without restriction, it’s dead obvious that more guns => more people get killed with guns.”
     = dishonesty.
     It took me a bit to get around to this, but the thread’s title works on yet another level, i.e. a long goodbye to Blackhawk. I previously explained to Brett that you don’t accuse other commentators of dishonesty. While this implied point is only available to people who read and consider all the comments, and is only a tiny objectionable point in his ouvre, Blackhawk has been warned previously. Enough is enough.
     Of course, being banned doesn’t mean that he can’t read the blog, so I encourage him to come by and check us out to see precisely when we dry up and vanish because we don’t have him to kick around.
     That’s all.

269. Not particularly interested in the sports post, which apparently morphed into a gun post, which apparently morphed into BH being banned.
     Oh, well, lj. It is true that drying up and vanishing might be a problem. Not that I’m supporting gun rights. My only disagreement with russell on this issue is that russell is so comfortable with the law being a state matter. I really would like to see every state (Federal law) be as reasonable as Massachusetts in controlling firearms.
     Baseball bats are for hitting baseballs. Guns are for killing. Not the same thing.

270. I suppose one does need to keep Napoleon’s maxim, “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” in mind, though I’d add “and/or ignorance”.
     I think the problem here is a failure to recognize that we’re not all alike, with the same motivations and inclinations. If you start out with the assumption that people are basically the same, you might easily conclude, “The average person has X% likelihood of using a gun to commit a crime, which means every person you keep a gun away from means X% of a crime averted.”
     If you understand that people have different proclivities, you realize that taking a gun away from one group of people might reduce crimes, but taking them away from a different group might increase crimes.
     As I’ve remarked above, criminologists figured out at least a couple centuries back that gun control was a non-starter, because you always disarmed the good guys first.
     But, if you think people are basically interchangeable in regards to their behavior with guns, I can see how that age old insight might escape you.

271. Brett, I don’t even understand who, or what point, your remarks are directed to.
     Not trying to beat this poor dead horse even deeper into the ground, I just don’t understand what this is meant to be a response to.

272. Their bottom line boils down to: “We need our guns to defend our 2nd Amendment rights.” Why they feel they can’t defend their rights, or anything else, with the knives or bats which they argue are just as formidable as guns, is a mystery. How guns can show up in cities with tight gun laws from places near and far which have loose gun laws, is something they pretend not to understand. Why registration of cars, licensing of drivers, and auto insurance requirements have NOT led to widespread guvmint confiscation of automobiles is … well, they can explain that: guns, you see.
     But the thing that puzzles me most is this: my gun-nut friends deny any connection between widespread gun ownership and the occasional schoolhouse massacre. They don’t argue that “gun rights” are important enough to be worth the cost. They deny the cost. I don’t get it.
     I’m picking on Tony P because he’s not a pussy. He can take it.
     Most lefties say they are fine with rifles and shotguns with minimal restriction and handguns under some ill-defined circumstances. Yet, the subtext of their statements suggests a very strict regime of firearms regulation would be just fine too.
     Thus, the angst of Brett and Blackhawk. The left lacks credibility on the subject of gun control. That it’s not an issue today, doesn’t mean it won’t be an issue the left pushes down the road. The current relative silence from the left on gun control is viewed as a tactical retreat, not a change in position. I tend toward this view as well.
     TP–your otherwise intelligent friends say they need their guns to protect their right to own guns? That’s the best these smart guys can do?
     How about: if a gov’t is willing and intends to take away our guns, that is the kind of gov’t we don’t want, need and which we will resist.
     Would you resist a gov’t that proposed to ban free speech, that closed churches, etc?
     Your point about cars, etc, doesn’t travel very far. First, no one is talking, yet, about taking away cars. If the left were making an all out pitch to restrict car ownership to promote using mass transit, the left would be out on its ass. The left has, far more so in the past than today, pitched gun control. Only at the outer limits of progressive environmental theory is the environmental left thinking about substantially reducing single family homes, establishing mult-family dwellings as the standard and moving the populace toward mass transit.
     Next, the cause/effect of widespread gun ownership = occasional school massacre. My recollection of the first major mass shooting was Charles Whitman getting up on the tower at UT back in the 60’s. He used hunting rifles as his weapon of choice. Before Whitman went on his rampage and going back to before the Revolutionary War, gun ownership was ubiquitous, yet mass murder was not. Your explanation?
     The number of guns in circulation grows every year, yet there is not a proportional increase in mass shootings.
     Your basic premise doesn’t hold up. The more accurate premise is this: relatively easy access to guns makes it very simple for deranged people to commit atrocities.
     The larger premise is that ready access to firearms creates a higher number of gun-related homicides, which is bad. Guns are an obvious factor in this phenomena, but not the only factor.
     Statistically, the atrocity rate is not a big deal. It is a fraction of firearms deaths, the majority of which, IIRC, are suicides. Using school or other mass shootings as a pretext for gun control would be like using deaths by drunk drivers as a pretext for prohibition, or something not to short of prohibition.
     I am not a gun nut but I don’t think the left is being completely candid about its gun control agenda. I’ve never been a member of the NRA. I don’t agree with their absolutist approach.
     But, the NRA’s view of the left and restricting gun ownership is no different than the left’s view of the thinking of many of us behind supporting voter ID. We are accused of desiring voter suppression and the left simply won’t hear anything else. The left sees the worst in us and the NRA et al see the worst in the left.
     Finally, I very seldom engage with BH. He has too much energy and is too much of a moving target. Plus, he gets personal.
     However, if this were grounds for banning, there are others here who are equally if not more out of line.
     The commentariat has the right to ignore BH and anyone else they think is out of bounds. Banning seems a bit much.

273. Unless you want to tell me that most minorities in prison for murder are falsely accused AND that whites actually committed the crime.
     That’s ridiculous. What I’m talking about is that someone with a more decent chance of becoming, say, an accountant is less likely to become a gang-banger. Unless you want to tell me that minorities are inherently more likely to be murderers, even though you admit that not *all* of them are gang-banging killers and that *some* of them are decent, law-abiding, hard-working citizens.

274. It’s easy, russell, Brett’s just sticking up for the right of more incompetent morons to kill their 7-year-old sons because they don’t know when to take the clip out. Isn’t that what America is all about?

275. I was explaining how it’s possible for somebody to actually believe that “more guns = more people shot”, despite criminologists having been aware that it’s nonsense for more than two centuries now. You just have to make a certain sort of mistake, and it seems quite reasonable.
     It doesn’t have to be a lie, IOW.

276. Napoleon is one guy who shouldn’t have been around guns, although he may have also been one of the few who could figure out a way to fully substitute the sword and cutlass.
     Cannons.
     Must have been cultural, although he WAS French.
     But seriously, I wonder if technology may one day help solve this dilemma.
     Perhaps a safety sensory coating on the weapon that could detect intent via the user’s hand, or a sensory device on the gun itself (or in a sight, for the distance shooter) that could disable the gun automatically if aimed at human flesh.
     Target practice and hunting would be exempt.
     We should have automobiles in a few years that can automatically avoid wrecks. Then you’d have the “Crash” afficianados out there to deal with, reprising J.G. Ballard’s erotic vision.
     Of course, we’d have that huge installed base of guns and cars, civilian and military.
     Aargh, the 3-D homemade weapon!
     It’s like the Middle East isn’t it?
     Just nothing to do.
     O.K. How about each weapon is in constant communication with a fleet of satellites which could instantaneously detect when a firearm is used against a human being and would issue forth with a laser beam that would fry the user’s brain.
     Administered through the U.N.
     Put that gun down!

277. And that’s why the death-by-gunshot rate in Australia is exactly, precisely the same as it was prior to Port Arthur.

278. If more guns DOESN’T mean more people shot, then fewer guns can’t mean fewer people shot and no guns can’t mean no people shot.
     Although that last was true before something or other A.D., when logic hadn’t been invented yet.
     The second assertion has been disproved in Japan, which has fewer civilian deaths by gunshot than you could fit in the front row of an Aurora movie theater.
     The murder rate in the Philippines (gunfire throughout the night in the major cities) dropped precipitously after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, so fewer guns, or guns buried in the backyard, again has been shown to result in fewer deaths via gun.
     Unfortunately, luxury shoes then proliferated at Malacanan Palace, but that may be tradeoff we can’t handle.
     Lots of guns and no bullets could mean lots of people knocked over the head with guns.
     Would no guns mean no fun or would no guns mean more fun?
     What if there was more fun? Would that lead to fewer guns and thus more murders until all we had was a few guns, too much fun and morgues filled to the brim?

279. Was lead paint cultural?
     Was the foot-dragging, to the extent that it existed, by anti-regulatory types and paint manufacturers regarding removing the lead, cultural?
     How much lead would we have to put in paint before people would grow up so crazy that they’d STOP killing each other all together?
     How is it that less or no lead in paint results in less gun violence but more more guns?
     Is the Second Amendment a cultural artifact, much like gun violence?
     Is there more death by gun violence now and recently per capita than there was the day in 177? when the ink was drying on the Second Amendment?
     If so, is it technology that has enabled the heightened death toll.
     Does your trigger finger get itchy when people ask too many questions, or is there a substitution effect for that special case?
     Maybe the Vulcan Grip.

280. “If more guns DOESN’T mean more people shot, then fewer guns can’t mean fewer people shot and no guns can’t mean no people shot.”
     This does not follow. Live vaccines are made of viruses, disease is caused by viruses; Does this imply that if you eliminate live vaccines, you eliminate diseases?
     You’re still doing it, insisting on reasoning as though everybody were interchangible, as though the effect of taking a gun away from any given person were, inescapably, the same as taking it away from any other person.
     As if disarming a member of the Crips, and an Eagle Scout, were the same thing.
     Sure, trivally, if every single gun on the face of the Earth were to magically vanish tomorrow, firearms deaths would drop to zero. This is why they call it “magical thinking”, because it requires a miracle to happen in order for it to work.
     You can’t take away ALL the guns. So it really does matter that it’s easier to disarm the good guys, than it is to disarm the bad guys.

281. it’s possible for somebody to actually believe that “more guns = more people shot”, despite criminologists having been aware that it’s nonsense for more than two centuries now.
     I appreciate the clarification. Thank you.
     I am in the camp that believes that more guns = more people shot. Believes is probably too strong a word, I assume it is so, because it seems (to me) the natural, logical, and intuitive conclusion.
     More cars, more car accidents.
     More guns, more people shot.
     At least, in *our particular social and cultural environment*, broadly construed.
     If you don’t mind pointing out literature to the contrary, I’d be interested in looking at it.
     Thanks!

282. …despite criminologists having been aware that it’s nonsense for more than two centuries now.
     Something demonstrating this would be a good place to start re: russell’s request for literature.

283. Something more than a quote from Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria-Bonesana, I should say. Something demonstrating that there’s been a consensus of some sort among criminologists in general over that last two centuries plus.

284. Vaccinating the entire population against polio was once thought to be magical thinking, too, but sure, you wouldn’t be able to take away all of the guns.
     Plus, the vaccine eradicated polio completely in most societies. Can we say the same about the more-guns-for-the-good-guys vaccine?
     We could take away all of the magical analogies, too, and see what happens.
     http://murderpedia.org/male.G/g1/gosch-lesley-lee.htm
     Brett, I don’t want your weapons. I’ve used guns, including military weapons, for what’s it’s worth, despite my total lack of interest or need for them now … and then, come to think of it.
     I see plainly that it is easier to disarm the good guys than it is the bad guys.
     I’m not Merlin and if I were, I’d pick up a gun and shoot Mordred probably, and then get me to a nunnery.
     But tell us what the limit is and whether there is any “advance” in gun technology (not surface to air missiles or grenades, etc) that society shouldn’t take measures against to make sure they don’t make it into the hands of the general population, or is this where arming oneself against the CRIPS leaves off and arming oneself against the government takes up the slack.
     One is polio and and one is cancer, I suppose, following the analogy.
     Since we are permitted to engage in the magical thinking that holds that Jefferson (it took him, what, three weeks to shift his position on the propriety of the Louisiana Purchase?) and Beccaria would hold precisely the same position on the absolute nature of the Second Amendment were they alive today, without exception, as they experienced the gun violence of just the past 40 years, what’s a little more magical thinking, for the sake of argument, on this internet thingy, where magical thinking flourishes like bacteria from all sides.
     Also, following the analogy, you could shoot all polio sufferers and magically get rid of the disease too.
     If the polio virus had its own Second Amendment securing its right to exist, what then?
     How about a vaccine against my analogies, or do you possess natural immunity, in which case some other OBWIers would like some of that, too. 😉
     Would you be in favor of sustained government sweeps of various armed cultural neighborhoods to confiscate as many weapons and take other measures to do away with the violence, if the government left law-abiding citizens and hunters alone?
     Or, if a few CRIPS could produce legitimate gun permits, would you call the whole thing off and actually find solidarity with their anti-government stance on this particular issue?
     What if some prominent CRIPS stepped forward and offered to accept and observe a societal ban on certain types of weaponry AND the government, at all civilian levels, accepted total disarmament of its agencies in exchange for you giving up the 100-capacity clip … just that one piece of equipment?
     Or does the Second Amendment somehow contain within its prolix phrasing a right to plink with those clips, regardless of any wave of the magic wand, that might be accomplished to reduce gun violence?
     How many more guns owned by the good guys will it take to further reduce gun violence by the bad guys, since that is the only acceptable and most effective method of reducing gun violence?
     Have the additional millions of guns purchased by the good and the bad guys since Obama was elected resulted in a corresponding reduction in gun violence and crime that can be attributed only to the increased amount of gun ownership?.
     If, say, Jim DeMint had been elected President in 2008, thus eliminating the perceived magical threat of weapons confiscation, and the rush to the gun stores had not occurred over the past four years, would there have been more gun violence/crime by the bad guys against the insufficiently armed good guys the past four years, which raises the interesting question, if magic follows magical thinking, of whether electing a liberal who is alleged to threaten gun confiscation but doesn’t follow through might be the best way of reducing bad guy gun violence we’ve discovered yet.
     That, and healthcare for many of the uninsured.
     Wait, that might cause some of the good guys to go off their kazip and perpetrate violence against faceless bureaucrats (aim for the whitelessness of their eyeless facelesses) and … well, that’s all for now.

285. I think Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks had a routine called “John Lott, 200-Year Old Man”.
     Also, technically speaking in the magical thinking game, using live viruses to kill viruses is cannibalism.
     Or is it suicide?

286. Say, Brett, who shot up that car full of teenagers I linked to upthread? Was that closer to a “member of the Crips” or closer to “an Eagle Scout?” This counts towards your final grade, so think it through. Extra bonus points if you can reference the phrase “excluded middle,” and a gold star if you can explain the point at which “law abiding gun owner” becomes “murder suspect.”

287. I detect some movement in Brett’s position, at least related to what I think is the center of the gun lobby. Often, when there is some shooting tragedy, you’ll get comments like ‘if more of those college students/movie theatre patrons/shoppers etc had been carrying, this might have been nipped in the bud’. Brett, on the other hand, is accepting that fewer guns does mean fewer firearm incidents, but he is basically saying that we can’t unsh*t the bed. But at least he is not suggesting that the answer is more guns. Baby steps, people, baby steps.

288. “Brett, on the other hand, is accepting that fewer guns does mean fewer firearm incidents,”
     I accepted nothing of the sort. I pointed out that depends entirely on who you happen to disarm, with the problem being you’re going to disarm the wrong people first.
     Phil, you go with the odds, nothing is 100%. Perhaps you think the fact that, every once in a long while, somebody gets vaccinated, and dies of anaphylactic shock, is proof we should do away with vaccination?

289. Do away with?

290. Just to expand my prior comment slightly:
     It seems to me that the analogy to what gun control advocates want, in the context of vaccination, would be a requirement that vaccination materials only be able to purchased from licensed vendors, and only administered by licensed medical practicioners.
     Just as a reality check, I checked the Brady site to see what they were demanding.
     They want the gun show loophole closed.
     They want an NICS check or its equivalent before firearm purchase.
     They want a limit on the number of handguns that can be bought at one time.
     They want assault weapons and large magazine weapons and loaders banned for personal use.
     I’m not arguing for or against any of this, I’m simply citing what they actually call for, on their website.
     All of this probably sets of alarm bells for a 2nd Amendment purist or a gun ownership advocate.
     None of it – none of it – amounts to a ban on gun ownership.
     If we want to debate this, we have to debate it in the context of what’s actually on the table.

291. B-hawk,
     While I’m here, one thing not yet mentioned that needs to be is that minorities are about as positively correlated with murder rate as are guns. Especially blacks.
     Large enclaves of urban blacks is what the US has and that Europe lacks. Remove blacks and hispanics from the equation and our murder rate, despite all the guns, drops to about where Europe’s is.
     Does it, now?
     See here’s something you may have just overlooked. Being an urban black or Hispanic is pretty closely correlated with being near the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole. RIght?
     So maybe, if we want a fair comparison of the type you are talkng about, we shoud eliminate from the European statistics the homicides, or a big fraction thereof, committed by people on that low end in those countries.
     Otherwise you hardly have a fair comparison, do you?

292. Government mandates vaccinations and licensure of their manufacturers and the folks who administer them, doesn’t it?.
     The FDA mandates a long series of tests and experimentation to detect efficacy and harmful side effects, because you never know when a live virus, or an analogy, might go rogue and turn on you, er …. one.
     Similar testing by government or its contractor testing facilities “might” turn up side effects from vaccination via unlimited gun ownership and use such as massive hemorrhaging and catastrophic blood loss, disfigurement, paralysis, and perhaps even death every once in a long while, or every seven minutes, whichever comes first.
     The (only) possible harmful side effects of vaccinations must be contained in small print barely readable on the packaging or in a fast-talking addendum to broadcast advertising.
     I don’t want to limit ownership of all weapons or vaccines, but is it any wonder little kids don’t want their “shots”.
     The government and society should come down hard on analogies and their proliferation.
     By the FBAI — the Federal Bureau of Analogy Investigation.
     The occasional simile, for target practice and plinking, would be tolerated.
     Poetry would be exempt, and the heavy armaments of metaphor should be confined to trained operators.

293. so Brett, you think more people should be armed, not less?

294. Sorry, that comment was a little too short and might be interpreted as pure snark. To expand a bit, Brett wrote
     Sure, trivally, if every single gun on the face of the Earth were to magically vanish tomorrow, firearms deaths would drop to zero.
     So, it stands to reason that if there were a way to randomly make half of the privately owned guns disappear, a similar effect should hold. This is opposite the claim that more guns will make a more peaceful society, because bad guys would be more cognizant of the consequences. So it seems that your acknowledgement of the possibility of magical thinking suggest that less guns means less firearm incidents, so it is only a question of implementation.

295. Phil, you go with the odds, nothing is 100%. Perhaps you think the fact that, every once in a long while, somebody gets vaccinated, and dies of anaphylactic shock, is proof we should do away with vaccination?
     I believe no such thing. But it’s very simple to determine that, if the police had to deal with a lot fewer rageaholics shooting up teenagers who won’t turn down the hippity-hop music, and morons shooting their sons, and crazy people shooting up movie theaters and political gatherings, they’d have a lot more resources to devote to the places where we know violent crime does tend to take place.
     It’s also simple to determine that increasingly liberal CCW laws mean more people getting guns who shouldn’t have them.
     Substitution effects don’t only happen with guns and whiffle bats.

296. “So, it stands to reason that if there were a way to randomly make half of the privately owned guns disappear, a similar effect should hold.”
     Maybe for a few hours, until the bad guys, who aren’t subject to waiting periods, restocked. Then we might be worse off for a while, until the good guys, who often are, had a chance to do that. What of it? You got a magic wand, to make this discussion relevant to anything beyond your rich fantasy life? Because, back in the real world, gun control laws still disarm the good guys first, and the bad guys last, if at all.
     Phil, it’s simple enough to determine that you’re going with what seems obvious to you, instead of the actual evidence. Which is that liberalizing CCW laws does NOT increase crime.
     “rageaholics shooting up teenagers who won’t turn down the hippity-hop music, and morons shooting their sons, and crazy people shooting up movie theaters and political gatherings,” are such a small fraction of the crime rate, they disappear into the rounding errors. They have no influence at all on the disposition of police resources. You may be a little deceived on this score, because every last incident gets reported, unlike normal crimes.

297. Brett, you were the one who invoked the idea that making guns disappear was going to reduce firearm incidents, not me. If you want to imagine a magic cornucopia of firearms so that folks could run up and restock, I don’t see why you can’t imagine that people could make gun shapes with their fingers and shoot people. You certainly seem to suggest that the answer to gun violence in the US is not ‘let’s have more guns’. Of course, if your NRA friends are going to ostracize you because of that, I can understand why you won’t follow your logic, but don’t blame me if you can’t do so.

298. Phil, it’s simple enough to determine that you’re going with what seems obvious to you, instead of the actual evidence. Which is that liberalizing CCW laws does NOT increase crime.
     In this thread, Brett does not know how to read, since what I said was “liberalizing CCW laws means more people getting guns who shouldn’t have them.” Or do you think the people I mentioned should have had guns? Clearly they were incapable of using them responsibly. Right?
     It does stand to reason that giving out more and more “shall issue” permits means more and more Type II errors, right?
     “rageaholics shooting up teenagers who won’t turn down the hippity-hop music, and morons shooting their sons, and crazy people shooting up movie theaters and political gatherings,” are such a small fraction of the crime rate, they disappear into the rounding errors.
     And yet at the end of each one is one or more dead people. Or do libertarians no longer believe that people aren’t just statistics or means to an end?
     They have no influence at all on the disposition of police resources.
     I can promise you they do. I can bring in an actual law enforcement professional here if necessary.
     You may be a little deceived on this score, because every last incident gets reported, unlike normal crimes.
     Haha, “normal crimes.” Keep clearin’ that bar.

299. I would concede that, say, banning fully automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines would not have a statistically significant effect on overall crime rates. But statistical significance if not the only consideration, noting the dead people Phil mentioned.
     I bring that up only because I think such a ban could be reasonably effective. It would not disarm the “good guys” (among private citizens), since they would still be allowed to have other types of highly useful guns. It would take some amount of time to reduce the numbers of the banned items to the point that it would be very difficult for some deranged individual to aquire them, but it could be done with enforcement along the entire supply chain, starting with the manufacturers. All-out bans of specific items are much simpler to enforce than conditional restrictions and regulations.
     Most guns aquired illegally by bad guys were once guns aquired legally by good guys, no? Or should we expect lots of black-market sales from outside the US to meet the demand specifically for fully automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines by criminals? Would that be a large market? (I ask in all seriousness.)

300. Something from Frontline.

301. I would concede that, say, banning fully automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines would not have a statistically significant effect on overall crime rates.
     Fully automatic weapons require a Class II Dealer’s License. Possession of same without such a license is a crime. So, you’re good there. “High capacity” magazines? What does this mean? On semi-auto weapons? Bolt action?
     What is an “assault weapon” and why is this different from a semi-automatic deer rifle? Magazine capacity, cosmetics?
     Pistols and shotguns, I am pretty sure, constitute the majority of ‘weapons of choice’ for bad people, regardless of magazine capacity.
     Leaving aside NRA absolutist extremes, rhetorical and otherwise, once you carve out fully automatic weapons, pretty much anything that is left has so many conventional, widely used as sporting arms analogues that definitional distinctions become meaningless. Which makes one of Brett’s points–unless you outlaw all guns, picking and choosing the few from the many creates the illusion of safety and accomplishes nothing.
     What worries not just the NRA types, but ordinary gun owners like me, is the sense that the current left’ish willingness to allow us our hunting and home defense guns is a tactical retreat. Much of the left would severely restrict and license all gun ownership if they thought they could get away with it. I can’t prove this to be true, it’s just something I know–kind of like Phil knows that I want to suppress minority voters by requiring proof of registration and eligibility to vote. This last is known as ‘sarcasm’, BTW.
     [It’s also simple to determine that increasingly liberal CCW laws mean more people getting guns who shouldn’t have them.
     Seriously? Where? Any state that tends toward a more liberal CCW regime already had an amply liberal purchase regime. CCW speaks to when and where a person can actually go armed, not who is permitted to purchase. Forex, in Texas, I can buy pistols all day long but because I’m not licensed, I can’t carry a concealed handgun. One has little if anything to do with the other.

302. Fully automatic weapons require a Class II Dealer’s License. Possession of same without such a license is a crime.
     In theory, but not in practice. Conversion kits for making an AR-15 fully automatic are quite common. And while possession of said converted weapon might be technically illegal, there does not appear to be any deterrent effect in practice.
     No doubt a fully automatic AR-15 is especially useful for hunting and home defence though.

303. I suppose it all depends on where you want to begin to draw the line of “high capacity” for magazines.
     If that line is below current standard magazines for, say, semiautomatic pistols such as the Sig P250 9mm (15 rounds in the standard magazine; 17 in a very slightly extended mag), you are probably going to run into problems. Many semiautomatic pistols carry over 12 rounds in the handle.
     Wherever you decide to draw the line, to what extent would it have made a difference in past incidents, having a law that prohibits large magazines?

     They want assault weapons and large magazine weapons and loaders banned for personal use.

     I am not sure what “loaders” means in this context. But I am much more ignorant about firearms than I ought to be.

304. once you carve out fully automatic weapons, pretty much anything that is left has so many conventional, widely used as sporting arms analogues that definitional distinctions become meaningless.
     For the record, I agree with this.
     the sense that the current left’ish willingness to allow us our hunting and home defense guns is a tactical retreat. Much of the left would severely restrict and license all gun ownership if they thought they could get away with it. I can’t prove this to be true, it’s just something I know
     There are a lot of people on the left who would like a license to be required to own any firearm. I don’t know how many, or if it’s “most”, but there are many.
     Whether that rises to the level of “severely” is, I think, in the eyes of the beholder.
     I definitely understand why such a requirement would be seen as a royal PITA, but I’m not sure that amounts to a meaningful restriction on ownership. Especially since many jurisdictions work on a “shall issue” basis, at least for firearms other than handguns.
     Speaking purely personally, I’m happy to draw the line at automatic weapons and not letting people who are demonstrably violent, crazy, or substance abusers own firearms.
     There are lots of inalienable rights you can lose through being violent, crazy, or irresponsible in your use of chemicals. I don’t see why the right to keep and carry is any different.
     I can also see a requirement for a license for concealed carry, or plain old loaded carry in public areas whether concealed or not, making sense in many jurisdictions.
     I’m just not seeing any of that as a violation of the founder’s intent.
     PITA, maybe. Unconstitutional, I’m not seeing it. And balancing the interests of different groups of people can be a PITA. I’m not sure it can be avoided.
     What I’d really appreciate would be if the NRA would focus more on teaching people how to operate their firearms responsibly, and less on making sure that every tweaked out nutcase on the face of the earth had access to a Glock 9 without restriction.
     But that’s just my druthers.
     So, here is a funny story:
     When the great Obamacare debates and town meetings were going on, lots of gun-toting patriots made news by attending while very visibly carrying their firearms.
     It’s unconstitutional for the feds to require anyone to buy an insurance product, or any damned thing!!
     One of the first federal laws requiring American citizens to purchase a good or service for the sake of the common good was actually passed in 1792.
     The item that every able-bodied male was required to purchase or otherwise provide for themselves was:

     a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder

     Militia Act of 1792.
     Congressmen were, of course, exempt. Plus ca change.
     I give myself a good laugh now and then wondering how our modern day patriots would respond to a federal law REQUIRING them to purchase a firearm.
     I think it would make their heads explode.

305. And while possession of said converted weapon might be technically illegal, there does not appear to be any deterrent effect in practice.
     Yeah, go figure, criminals are not deterred by the law. Yet, the tens of millions of gun owners who don’t own converted AR-15’s either are deterred or are simply disinterested in owning a fully automatic weapon. What percentage of homicides in the US are caused by converted or otherwise illegal fully automatic weapons?
     Speaking purely personally, I’m happy to draw the line at automatic weapons and not letting people who are demonstrably violent, crazy, or substance abusers own firearms.
     Pretty much already the case, with the proviso that someone has to be convicted of a felony or adjudicated insane to fall within the class of persons ineligible to own a firearm. ‘Substance abusers’ is a different issue since anyone who drinks more that .08 at some point in time is abusing a substance at that point in time. There is no process for adjudicating someone an ‘abuser’. I think you’ll have to let this one go.
     I give myself a good laugh now and then wondering how our modern day patriots would respond to a federal law REQUIRING them to purchase a firearm.
     Probably much more willingly than the modern left would respond to being universally conscripted and ordered to buy a firearm. Yes, I can see some exploding heads all right. But hey, it’s not a required purchase, it’s a tax!!

306. I am not sure what “loaders” means in this context.
     Sorry, all I meant by that was a large capacity magazine.
     My ignorance trumps yours!

307. Pretty much already the case,
     No, no it is not. Any criminal or lunatic can trivially purchase a gun in this country as long as they buy from a gun show or individual.

308. Pistols and shotguns, I am pretty sure, constitute the majority of ‘weapons of choice’ for bad people, regardless of magazine capacity.
     Why would you note this just after quoting my concession that bans on fully automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines wouldn’t significantly affect crime rates? The suggestion of such a ban was in the context of mass shootings by people not in their right minds, which still result in the deaths of innocent people, despite the statistical insignificance.
     “High capacity” magazines? What does this mean?
     High-capacity could mean more than 20 rounds, regardless of what it’s attached to, unless you can tell me how having something more than that is fundamental to regular and legitimate uses of firearms. In any case, the concept of a bright-line standard is nothing new, whether I have the expertise to draw the line or not.
     What percentage of homicides in the US are caused by converted or otherwise illegal fully automatic weapons?
     It’s extremely low, but we’ve already established that. Why shouldn’t it be beside the point, since no one really needs fully automatic weapons in the civilian world, anyway?
     …once you carve out fully automatic weapons…
     If that particular carve-out is what we’re talking about, why bring up a bunch of other stuff that you say is rendered meaningless once you’ve done the carve-out? It says nothing about the usefulness or meaningfulness of the carve-out, itself.

309. It says nothing about the usefulness or meaningfulness of the carve-out, itself.
     Actually, now that I think about it, the meaninglessness of further distinctions demonstrates that the carve-out is the most meaningful one possible.

310. There is no process for adjudicating someone an ‘abuser’.
     If your behavior while intoxicated is sufficiently noxious, there may well be adjudication.
     As far as “letting it go”, I can honestly say that I lose no sleep about it either way. In other words, whether my druthers end up enshrined in law or not is just not something I dwell on a lot.
     Life’s too short.

311. “since no one really needs fully automatic weapons in the civilian world, anyway?”
     Perhaps the definitive difference between a right and a privilege, is that exercising the former never requires a demonstration of “need”. If you’re throwing around words like “need”, you would seem not to have yet accepted this is a right. Excuse me if I consequently don’t take your opinion as to what laws would be reasonable seriously.

312. Excuse me if I consequently don’t take your opinion as to what laws would be reasonable seriously.
     Likewise, since I’m not sure where you find a right specifically to fully automatic weapons. Are you unable to bear arms without them? Is it possible that I know what a right is, and that I’ve read the text of the 2nd Amendment, yet I can still reasonably conclude that the right enshrined therein can be exercised in a reasonably full fashion, in light of other considerations, without fully automatic weapons being necessary?
     Given your logic, there’s no limit to what you have a right to where arms are concerned. So it’s rather hard to take you seriously.
     All of that silliness aside, what we were talking about was the practical matter of banning fully automatic weapons and whether or not people want them badly enough to break the law in sufficient numbers such that the ban would be ineffective in keeping them out of the hands of deranged mass killers. And, yes, that discussion was taking place knowing that mass killings don’t significantly affect murder rates.

313. Semi-automatic this time. I wonder about the clip, though.

314. “Likewise, since I’m not sure where you find a right specifically to fully automatic weapons.”
     The Supreme court has transmogrified a right to be armed similarly to soldiers, in Tench Coxe’s words, to “Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier,”, into a right to such sporting and self defense arms as the government had not already banned during most of a century during which the Court had refused to take 2nd amendment cases. Better than what the minority would have done, transforming it into no right at all. But scarcely an honest reading of Madison’s amendment.
     I find the right to automatic weapons in the fact that the federal government arms it’s soldiers with them, and an amendment intended to guarantee the right of Americans to be armed in the same fashion as the government’s troops. If the federal government doesn’t want us to have a right to own automatic weapons, they can furnish their army with flintlocks.
     Is the amendment’s purpose shocking to some today? Yeah it is. Doesn’t change that purpose. People who don’t like it have Article V available to them, I suggest they use it, instead of suborning the courts.

315. At least that limits what you think you have a right to arms-wise. But it still doesn’t justify this:
     Excuse me if I consequently don’t take your opinion as to what laws would be reasonable seriously.
     I can take the opinion in your last comment seriously, even if I don’t agree with it.

316. All I know is, I want my microton grenade launcher.

317. My ignorance trumps yours!

     Always the loser, me.

318. I love the idea that anybody at all knows or cares who the flaming shit Tench Coxe was or what he thought.
     So at what point does noise become a pattern itself. Pretty sure this is a record year for these things. I nominate Brett to to the homes of the victims’s families and tell them, gee, I’m sorry, but your loved one is a rounding error.

319. Seriously? Where? Any state that tends toward a more liberal CCW regime already had an amply liberal purchase regime. CCW speaks to when and where a person can actually go armed, not who is permitted to purchase. Forex, in Texas, I can buy pistols all day long but because I’m not licensed, I can’t carry a concealed handgun. One has little if anything to do with the other
     You are absolutely correct here, and I was very sloppy there. What I should say is that liberal CCW regimes lead to a lot more guys packing heat in public places who probably shouldn’t be, leading to the amplification of incidents that might otherwise lead to assault charges, ending in somebody dead. Oops, I meant “becoming a rounding error.”

320. Substance abusers’ is a different issue since anyone who drinks more that .08 at some point in time is abusing a substance at that point in time.
     Unless being occasionally buzzed or drunk is some definition of “substance abuse” with which most people – including treatment experts – are unfamiliar, this is just silly. Or maybe those people were perfectly OK up until the day their states lowered their DUI standards from .10 to .08, at which point they became substance abusers.

321. I’d have to guess I’m currently abusing, by that definition. Unless you weigh 500 lbs, you can’t drink many 7% ABV beers without going over .08 BAC.
     I wish I liked weak piss beer, but I don’t.

322. How did we get from Alzheimer’s to here? I forget. Was it something Chomsky said?

323. I dunno, bobby. I thought we were talking about football. *shrug*

324. “What I should say is that liberal CCW regimes lead to a lot more guys packing heat in public places who probably shouldn’t be, leading to the amplification of incidents that might otherwise lead to assault charges, ending in somebody dead. ”
     And your rejection of statistical significance amounts to an admission that you don’t give a damn that there’s no evidence this is really true.

325. So you think that absent having a gun on him, that guy upthread would still have killed that teenager in the car, Brett?

326. I think that quite a few people manage to have guns on them without CCW permits, and that population is rather heavily biased towards folks who would do stuff like that.
     And, again, you’re talking about incidents whose frequency is down in the rounding errors. Extraordinarily rare. You might have the contrary impression, due to the fact that every last such incident gets reported across the entire nation, but they’re still very rare.
     Now, if the media typically reported every case of a criminal illegally concealing a gun, and then shooting another criminal, the front page of your paper would look something like the classified ads. Might give you a slight sense of proportion, but it would render the paper useless for any other subject.

327. No, no it is not. Any criminal or lunatic can trivially purchase a gun in this country as long as they buy from a gun show or individual.
     Yes, and people can beat each other to death with crow bars, but that doesn’t mean they are allowed to do so. If you follow the dialogue, we are talking about who should be allowed to own firearms and who should not. People who should not do certain things often do them anyway. That is a distinct topic.
     The suggestion of such a ban was in the context of mass shootings by people not in their right minds, which still result in the deaths of innocent people, despite the statistical insignificance.
     Right, and most of those are with pistols and shotguns, or ordinary rifles, e.g. the first mass shooter was, IIRC, Charles Whitman shooting from the tower at UT. He used surplus military bolt action rifles, as I recall. So, the ban you propose is ‘feel good’ stuff for the most part. It won’t cure the mentally disordered. It probably won’t even lower body count, since the motivation for these types seems to be how best to up the casualty rate and then adjust their tactics accordingly.
     High-capacity could mean more than 20 rounds, regardless of what it’s attached to, unless you can tell me how having something more than that is fundamental to regular and legitimate uses of firearms.
     Such a limit would have no impact on me for one set of reasons, nor would it impact a hostile shooter–he/she would just carry more magazines. Actually, the larger the magazine, the greater capacity for a jam, so there’s that to think about. Also, the larger magazines are harder to conceal and limit movement and mobility to a greater extent. It’s all trade off and to very little in the way of a useful end.
     Why shouldn’t it be beside the point, since no one really needs fully automatic weapons in the civilian world, anyway?
     I certainly don’t. Way back when, when I did a lot of firearm product liability work, I associated with a couple of guys who were Class II licensees and they collected machine guns. I mean “MACHINE GUNS” like WWI and WWI models. I fired a couple of them. Collecting guns isn’t my thing, but I do collect neolithic and paleolithic stone tools and artifacts, so I get the collecting thing. One valid reason for owning anything, including machine guns, is that they have intrinsic value as something rare and historical. I have an Acheulean hand ax, supposedly authentic. It was the deadliest weapon of its kind for more than a million years.
     now that I think about it, the meaninglessness of further distinctions demonstrates that the carve-out is the most meaningful one possible.
     Yep, and here’s why: the reason why mass shootings by fully automatic weapons is rare is because, contra Turb, it’s hard as hell to get one. The reason to keep it that way is that whatever problem we have today with semi-auto’s, fully auto’s would make it a hell of a lot worse. Further, if full auto’s became ubiquitous among bad people, the police would need to be similarly armed, introducing further numbers of hyper lethality into the equation. This is one of the many areas where the NRA and I part company.

328. What I should say is that liberal CCW regimes lead to a lot more guys packing heat in public places who probably shouldn’t be, leading to the amplification of incidents
     The only CCW regime I have any knowledge of is Texas. I am pretty sure the incidence of CCW licensees in Texas shooting someone illegally is rare. Perhaps not unheard of, but comparatively vanishingly rare.
     Unless being occasionally buzzed or drunk is some definition of “substance abuse” with which most people – including treatment experts – are unfamiliar, this is just silly.
     Sometimes ‘silly’ is not the best choice of words. There is no process for formally concluding that someone is a substance abuser. The proposal is that substance abusers should not have access to firearms. So, how do you make that determination, and how do you define ‘substance abuser’ as the initial obstacle?
     So you think that absent having a gun on him, that guy upthread would still have killed that teenager in the car, Brett?
     I want to regulate and severely limit unions because a couple of union guys beat up someone who disagreed with them. I saw the video. It happened yesterday or the day before.

329. I think that quite a few people manage to have guns on them without CCW permits, and that population is rather heavily biased towards folks who would do stuff like that.
     But this guy did have a CCW permit, so what you think is hardly relevant here.
     And, again, you’re talking about incidents whose frequency is down in the rounding errors.
     So what? A life is a life. That kid’s was worth at least as much as yours is. Maybe more, since he had a lot more ahead of him than behind him.

330. Now, if the media typically reported every case of a criminal illegally concealing a gun, and then shooting another criminal, the front page of your paper would look something like the classified ads. Might give you a slight sense of proportion, but it would render the paper useless for any other subject.
     In Japan, it is front page news if a policeman finds discarded bullets. Seriously. When I lived in Sapporo about 18 years ago and having just returned to Japan, I remember that someone had found 3 bullets that were on the highway by a guardrail in the port town of Otaru. It was on the national news with pictures of the area cordoned off with police tape. This is just to point out that what you argue is not a given.

331. Sometimes ‘silly’ is not the best choice of words.
     “Silly” is the absolutely proper word to describe the statement, “Anyone who drinks more that .08 at some point in time is abusing a substance at that point in time.” Was someone at .08 a “substance abuser” when the legal DUI limit was .10? Is someone at .08 in his own living room once a week a “substance abuser?”
     The difficulty of determining whether someone is a “substance abuser” for the purpose of limiting their access to firearms may be a difficult one, but “was drunk once” is clearly far too low a hurdle.
     I want to regulate and severely limit unions because a couple of union guys beat up someone who disagreed with them. I saw the video. It happened yesterday or the day before.
     That’s nice. You also want to burden the right to vote despite the fact that in-person voter fraud is probably an order of magnitude less frequent than CCW permit holders shooting innocent people. Not sure where that gets us, but here we are.

332. I am pretty sure the incidence of CCW licensees in Texas shooting someone illegally is rare.
     The “illegally” in that sentence gets me wondering. Do they shoot a lot of people legally in Texas? If so, is that a good thing?

333. I want to regulate and severely limit unions because a couple of union guys beat up someone who disagreed with them.
     So do I, as far as it concerns union members being able to beat people up. I heard about some non-union guys beating someone up. We should regulate and severely limit non-unions, too.
     Well, unless the union guys hit whoever they beat up over the head with a rolled-up collective-bargaining agreement or a box of union dues or something like that. Then we’d have to let the non-unions off the hook.

334. heckofajob, second amendment. you’re keeping that militia damn well regulated.

335. Anyone else think there is bizarrely little in the way of fact coming from that story?
     Reports of up to 20-60 shots fired, but only two dead on the other end of the barrel, and only one injured. Odd.
     No name on the shooter. Also odd.
     No point there, other than it’s just weird how little we know about this.

336. police know his name but have not released it yet. he was 22. had a .223 semi-auto with a high-capacity magazine, which jammed.
     if he got that many shots off but only hit three people, he probably wasn’t aiming.

337. The proposal is that substance abusers should not have access to firearms. So, how do you make that determination, and how do you define ‘substance abuser’ as the initial obstacle?
     In MA, the bar for substance abuse is if you have been confined, or are under medical treatment for, substance abuse.
     For mental illness, it’s just confinement.
     So, a reasonably crisp definition.
     This is always a topic that brings out the poo-flinging, so it’s hard to talk about reasonably.
     But it seems, to me, that all or nearly all of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution are subject to regulation at federal, state, and local levels.
     IMO the burden is on folks who advocate for a relatively (or absolutely) unrestricted right to keep and carry to explain why guns should be different than, frex, speech, or the press, or the practice of religion, or privacy of personal effects and communication, or whatever else you want to add to the list.
     Guns are very useful devices, I applaud the founders’ insight in making sure access to firearms could not be denied to private individuals, if you are interested in guns and want to own some I think that’s great.
     They’re also extremely dangerous, and so there is an obvious public interest in regulating their use.
     There probably is no reasonable one-size-fits-all regime for regulating them, because Idaho ain’t Brooklyn. And, amazingly enough, we don’t have a one-size-fits-all regime for regulating them.
     Mission accomplished, I would think.

338. IMO the burden is on folks who advocate for a relatively (or absolutely) unrestricted right to keep and carry to explain why guns should be different than, frex, speech, or the press, or the practice of religion, or privacy of personal effects and communication, or whatever else you want to add to the list.
     Russell, I am unaware of any state regs that impair speech, the free exercise of religion, or the right to petition or other guaranteed constitutional rights. No license or other prior approval is required unless an actor wants to use public property to gather.
     If you want to make a comparison–and it’s not a great comparison–driving a car requires a license, but very little else. Prior convictions, other than DUI or repeated MV violations, are not an impediment, nor is a licensee required to show mental competency.
     Also, conflating the right to own and the unrestricted right to carry is flawed. Purists may think that every citizen has the right to pack a pistol into a bar or a football game, but the vast majority of us would dissent.
     What would you do with a former substance abuser or someone who had been committed, was treated and released? I don’t think the line is that clear, although I am in sympathy with the concept. Having said that, one of my best friends is an alcoholic and he and I hunted together for years. He was no danger to himself or others because he didn’t drink and hunt.
     The “illegally” in that sentence gets me wondering. Do they shoot a lot of people legally in Texas? If so, is that a good thing?
     Occasionally, an intruder is shot by a home owner, or a robber is shot by a storekeeper. In Texas and pretty much anywhere else, this is legal. It’s called justifiable homicide. Very, very few accidental deaths or injuries, or murders are committed by licensees in Texas. Firearms ownership in Texas is incredibly widespread and has been forever. When I was a kid, I would ride my bike through our subdivision to a large patch of woods with a shotgun and hunt all day. I was never stopped by the police, no one batted an eye, etc. That was in the mid 60’s. That’s all changed now. Not the gun ownership thing, but rather people have changed.

339. Does anyone have a read on what Tench Coxe might theorize today about civilian weaponry keeping pace with that of the military?
     (Other questions arise, too, like why did Tench Coxe have a name that sounds suspiciously like the name of a gay porn actor, but I suppose that might have been outside his area of theorizing too, the times they always be a changin.)
     Or is it that dead men never change their minds?
     Tench Coxe was also in favor of the Federal Government levying tariffs on the importation of foreign goods.
     He was a protectionist.
     What does a guy do if he’s done his damndest to keep up with current military arms technology to counter the superior force of the government in cases wherein he believes specific laws, in this case, tariffs, are counter to a well-watered liberty tree, and he believes maybe it is time to counter the law and the force with which it is enforced by the government with equal and justifiable violence?
     Or was Tench Coxe just a theorist of two irreconcilable theories?
     Also, “do they shoot a lot of people legally in Texas?”
     Well, as George Carlin inquired about the police officer who charged a guy with being “legally drunk” … “If it’s legal, WTF is the problem?”

340. When I was a kid, I would ride my bike through our subdivision to a large patch of woods with a shotgun and hunt all day.
     and i used to do this in upstate NY, with my .22 .

341. I am unaware of any state regs that impair speech, the free exercise of religion, or the right to petition or other guaranteed constitutional rights.
     You can’t yell “Fire” in a crowded theater.
     You can’t threaten other people with physical harm, or at least you can be charged with assault if you do so.
     Rastafarians can’t smoke weed with impunity.
     There are significant restrictions on animal sacrifice as practiced by santeria. There are about a million santeros in the US, so it’s not really a trivial example.
     There are significant restrictions on the nature, amount, and means of giving money or gifts to federal officeholders in the context of lobbying them, aka, petitioning them concerning your particular set of issues or grievances.
     Religious ministers are (supposedly) not allowed to endorse candidates for office from the pulpit. That’s more about retaining their tax-exempt status than anything else, but it is still a restriction on both speech and religion. So, a two-fer.
     I could expand this list, probably for days.
     No license or other prior approval is required
     Unless your channel of speech is broadcast media.
     Also, conflating the right to own and the unrestricted right to carry is flawed.
     Couldn’t agree more. Take it up with Brett.
     What would you do with a former substance abuser or someone who had been committed, was treated and released?
     In MA, my understanding is that the ineligibility is waived 5 years after treatment ends.
     For mental illness, it ends immediately upon release from confinement, with a doctor’s affidavit.
     See here.
     This stuff is not that hard to sort out. Especially if it’s handled at the state or local level.
     He was a protectionist.
     That was the predominant position of the time, and US policy for at least the first generation or two after the founding.
     Mid-19th C., too.

342. Regarding DUIs and substance abuse, I’d like to point out that Brett was correct way upthread (maybe it was another thread: I forget, every thread should start out with a reference to Alzheimers) when he pointed out that there are millions of people prosecuted in the U.S. for DUI and DWAI who have their job prospects (current and future) jeopardized.
     McKinneyTexas, if I recall, is also right, in most States, that drivers found guilty of driving under the influence or driving while impaired with B.A.L of .080 (proper decimal placement, I hope) or above, are, for all intents and purposes, once they are in the legal system, via probation, considered to be substance abusers, even though the charge is operating a vehicle while under, etc.
     He’s also correct that you’re Second Amendment rights are, or can be, at the discretion of the Court, taken from you for driving under the influence, .08 or above, but even lower numbers are up to the discretion of the arresting officer.
     If you don’t buy that, try telling it (to the Judge, as they say), to the poor sod at the probation department who accompanies you into the toilet to closely observe your very own intimate micturation into a tiny vial for your random urinalysis testing.
     Worse, don’t submit to a breathlyzer or blood test at the scene of the arrest (you are entitled to refuse, but the law doesn’t like that, not that the officer with the weapon is required to tell you that). Then, you are suspected, for the duration of your probation, of abuse of substances like meth, heroin, etc that you have only witnessed while watching “Breaking Bad” on TV.
     Then try entering Canada.
     The case can be made that, in the area of driving under the influence, at least where there is no victim via accident, etc, we live in a police state already (I guess police states are O.K. as long as they are administered at some level below the Federal)
     Where is Tench Coxe when you need him? It would be refreshing, for the sake of determining the end of the argument, to see a sizable and inebriated (is there any other kind) militia force undertake Tench Coxe’s nostrums.
     I’d like to see Tench Coxe stopped and hopping on one foot on a roadside chalk line and explaining to the cop that the weapons in his vehicle are merely his way of keeping up with the 7th Fleet, just to find out who exactly is full of sh*t.
     I’m not arguing drunk driving shouldn’t be an offense, but I could argue that since probation services and alcohol and drug counseling and testing have been outsourced by municipalities to profit-making private companies that the, uh, incentives to prosecute and punish, are perverse.
     We can also thank Mothers Against Drunk Driving for making a business out of silly people with BACs over .080.
     Not that they don’t mean well.
     What, Obamacare wasn’t enough for real action, or are the Tench Coxe enthusiasts just all hat and no cattle?
     When does the insurrection start?

343. your, not you’re, and vice versa.
     One’s, from now on.

344. “The “illegally” in that sentence gets me wondering. Do they shoot a lot of people legally in Texas? If so, is that a good thing?”
     Yes, and yes. Since you can only legally shoot somebody when it’s a pretty darn good idea to shoot them, is is almost trivially the case that it’s a good thing they got shot.
     Not, mind you, a good thing they needed to be shot. But that’s a separate matter.

345. Well, I was asking the guy who lives in Texas, but okay.
     So how many people do they shoot legally there? Is it more than in other places? If so, why?
     I thought all these legally armed people were supposed to deter criminals. I didn’t think the point was that the criminals would just keep coming only to be shot in large numbers.
     You sure make Texas sound wacky, Brett.

346. Do you really think you can deter criminals without occasionally shooting?
     Unfortunately, neither the states nor the federal government seem to keep reliable stats on self-defense shootings. (The federal government’s in particular are utterly fubared, totally unreliable, being based on initial police response, not final adjudication.)
     So, maybe that should have been, “Eh, I donno, and Yes.”, though “Yes and yes” is my distinct impression.

347. Do you really think you can deter criminals without occasionally shooting?
     Sure, all you need is a couple of bull mastiffs.
     Also, just wanted to note in passing that McK has an ACHUELEAN HAND AXE.
     That is an early stone age industry. McK has held an object held by someone sort of like us, only some hundreds of thousands of years ago. That is a direct connection to our earliest ancestors.
     It’s like having a Lascaux painting in your living room. Only more so.
     My hat is off to you McK, that is straight up amazing.

348. With the achuelean hand axe concealed on his person, I’ll bet McKt has never been accosted by homo habilis.

349. McK has an ACHUELEAN HAND AXE

     Definitely not the kind of implement our Founders had in mind.

350. Wow, so there hasn’t been a single case in Texas of anyone being shot who didn’t really need shooting but it was chalked up to circumstance, accident or castle laws and nobody was charged? That’s astonishing. And also stupid, and almost certainly wrong. Can you perhaps provide a single citation to back it up?
     Do you really think you can deter criminals without occasionally shooting?
     Uh, yes?

351. Achuelean hand axes are really quite amazing, and yes, holding something held by Erectus or who knows who is amazing. Two weeks ago I went on a deer hunt for the first time in several years. I was tracking a deer I’d shot and found a very cool, hand held knife. Over the years, I’ve found two separate flint mines where NA’s knapped their flint. Amazing stuff.
     Deterrence–among the types of cases I defend are 3rd party criminal responsibility cases. Deterrence is generally a matter of causing the bad guy to relocate for his crime. The fact of crime shows that some are deterred, others are not. There are a hard core few who will not desist until they die or are killed.

352. “Wow, so there hasn’t been a single case in Texas of anyone being shot who didn’t really need shooting but it was chalked up to circumstance, accident or castle laws and nobody was charged?”
     Likewise, there hasn’t been a single case in Texas of genuine self-defense which mistakenly got, successfully, prosecuted as a crime?
     What’s this obsession, in a world where we judge the success or failure of policies on the scale of averages, with whether there’s one single, solitary mistake? Of course there are going to be mistakes. The only way you avoid mistakes is not doing anything in the first place! But that’s often a really bad policy.

353. What’s this obsession, in a world where we judge the success or failure of policies on the scale of averages, with whether there’s one single, solitary mistake? Of course there are going to be mistakes. The only way you avoid mistakes is not doing anything in the first place! But that’s often a really bad policy.
     Spoken like a true activist government lefty. These very words, or others very much like them, have left my lips many times.
     No snark intended, I’m just struck by the big-circle-coming-around quality of the comment.

354. I’m just struck by the big-circle-coming-around quality of the comment.

     I have been struck by that very same sense of wonder, russell.

355. Then we–gov’t–should do everything?

356. Then we–gov’t–should do everything?
     Well, it seems like iPads, shoes, PVC and pop songs are being pretty well covered already, along with lots of other stuff. So, no, government (we? – pronoun trouble) shouldn’t do everything, so long as someone is doing something and managing pretty well at it.
     You know, unless you want to be issued government shoes or something, like those libruls do.

357. I want to know more about the hand ax, please.

358. Please note, Brett, my question was in regards to this sentence, which you typed. I’m going to bold it in the hopes that perhaps you read it twice:

     Since you can only legally shoot somebody when it’s a pretty darn good idea to shoot them, is is almost trivially the case that it’s a good thing they got shot.

     Asking you to re-examine your premises is, I know, a futile hope, but still, hope springs eternal. Unless you’re going to sit there with a straight face and claim that, as a general policy, “He stole $20” is “a pretty darn good idea” for shooting people.

359. McKT stated upthread:
     “I want to regulate and severely limit unions because a couple of union guys beat up someone who disagreed with them. I saw the video. It happened yesterday or the day before.”
     You mean you want the government to enforce “Turn the other cheek”, or do you mean after the union guy was pushed to the ground, you want him to be self-reliant and respond with a hand ax instead of his fists?
     And maybe follow up with a gun on the actual perp/FOX news contributor once he finds out the video has been heavily edited to erase the original assault before the punch was thrown and then shopped to FOX News for their anti-Union propaganda.
     Even the government wants to know what happened precisely.
     http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/12/steven-crowder-no-charges.php?ref=fpblg
     Accuracy In Snark is all I ask.

360. Of course there are going to be mistakes.
     One question that comes to mind is whether the mistakes are in applying the law or in making the law. People can do things “legally” under bad laws, but it doesn’t make those things “good darn good ideas.” (Let’s not veer into Godwin territory, though.)

361. I had said my “long goodbyes” to this thread, but it is remarkable how a dementia patient, thought near the end, can rally and have another good day or two.

362. or just darn good

363. The hand ax–it’s a very typical example of Acheulean technology. It’s reversible, I.e. it operates as a more blunt hammer or weapon or, held in reverse, the more pointed edge functions as a digging tool (I assume) or some similar purpose. I chose it from a selection of the owner’s inventory because it has an outer coating of limestone sediment, indicative of having been in a stream or other moving body of water. I keep it and an Acheulean scraper in a shadow box at our eventual retirement home. Next time we are there, I’ll take pictures and send them to you.
     Another cool thing are some pictures I took of some NA axe heads found on the same ranch at which I found the above mentioned hand knife. Want the pics? Send me your email. One of them is very similar to the typical Acheulean hand axe. All three appear similar to Mousterian stone tools, yet they are likely much more recent, by as much as 5-20 thousand years.

364. “dementia patient”, meaning the thread, not the participants.
     Accuracy in Snark.

365. Count–does someone have the unedited video the NYT refers to? The union guy clearly punches the the Fox guy. Are you saying the Fox guy took the first swing? Are you saying the the Fox guy’s obvious agenda excuses the union guy? Or that, because the Fox guy isn’t pressing charges, there must be some unknown justification for hitting him? I’d think, if there was physical provocation, the the union folks would bring this out. The limited video I’ve seen is not to the union movement’s credit. Nor is the rhetoric. Where is the ‘incivility’ outrage?

366. Where is the ‘incivility’ outrage?
     mine’s waiting for the rest of the story to be told.
     maybe union guy was standing his ground.

367. Cleek–duly noted.

368. You can’t stand someone else’s ground, cleek. But IANAL.

369. McKT:
     Apparently, yes, to the first question.
     http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/selective-editing-by-fox-news-contributor-revealed-by-fox-news/?smid=tw-thelede&seid=auto
     Maybe, to the second question. If it’s a FOX News editing operation, a la Breitbart, then we can count on it.
     “Are you saying the the Fox guy’s obvious agenda excuses the union guy.”
     If you’re including the FOX News guy or his accomplices allegedly knocking the union guy to the ground first, as part of their agenda, yes.
     The law may look askance no matter what the circumstance. As they didn’t seem to long ago (they looked the other way) when Nixon’s union thugs physically assaulted anti-war protestors, but that’s another Alzheimers thread.
     We’ll await the union guy’s side of the story. If we find out the union guy punch was unprovoked by prior violence, then I’ll come back here and happily concede the argument.
     Yes, no credit redounds to the rhetoric or the tearing down of the tents. Apparently only OCCUPY Wall Street tents can be torn down by the government, but I guess they can’t do everything in the area of tenting.
     Sometimes tent tearing down should be left to the citizenry. I kid, I think.
     I’m thinking the union guy’s fists had less of a chilling effect on the Michigan Governor’s political speech than the heavily-armed wags had on Democratic Legislators when they showed up several years ago to weigh in on Obamacare in Arizona.
     The latter was an explicit armed threat. But perfectly legal, as we say.
     If they’d raised their dukes and done a little shadow boxing, everyone would have run for the hills.
     Further, if I’m knocked to the ground in a similar situation, I’m going to be considering while I get up off the ground who I am dealing with. The perpetrator, in this case, being a conservative Republican operative, will, I assume, be carrying a concealed weapon.
     A fair assumption, given their rhetoric and actions.
     It may be that HIS assumption that pansy liberal me will not be carrying. That may or not be a mistake on his part, but I will say that my temper probably would get the best of me, weapon or not, and we might be back here after everyone is out of the hospital and the bullets have been removed to reconsider Brett’s question about how many guns is too many.
     Which raises the question? If either the FOX contributor or the union guy was legally carrying and used, what sort of discussion would we be having about weapons now?
     If someone assaults another, why not defensive gunfire?
     My person is worth more than $20, for the sake of argument. I’m actually worth roughly two cents and i give it all.
     “Incivility outrage.”
     I’d say the union guy is several bullet points behind the Michigan Legislature and Governor, and the Republican operatives who threatened both with uncivil campaigns if they didn’t pass and sign the legislation, on the incivility scale.
     Maybe the union guy thought, with Jefferson, Coxe, and others, that he was watering the tree of liberty with his fists.
     I’d like to witness the political incivility if a Michigan Governor signed legislation very strictly curtailing Second Amendment Rights in his or her State, before we synchronize our civility meters in our humble abode here at OBWI.
     So it’s settled. Fists should be confiscated but unlimited armaments are good to go.
     Not in your case McKT. 😉
     Thanks for the fascinating detail on the hand axe.

370. You can’t stand someone else’s ground, cleek
     the issue is: in the clip goin round, the first time we see union puncher guy, he’s obviously getting up off the ground with fox guy standing right in front of him, half-obscuring the camera. then, when union guy is up and regains his balance, he punches fox guy.
     i suspect that whatever put union guy on the ground is related to the fact that he punches fox guy as soon as he gets up.
     in other words: union guy might have been knocked down by fox guy and was fighting back.

371. this was my last captcha: “(212)-226-2255”
     it’s a safe retailer in NYC.

372. Hey, look, another one!

     A shooting involving two gunmen erupted at a Connecticut elementary school this morning, prompting the town of Newtown to lock down all of its schools and draw SWAT teams to the school, authorities said today.
     State Police confirm that one shooter is dead. A second gunman is apparently at large, sources told ABC News.
     The shooting occurred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, about 12 miles east of Danbury.

373. Be funny if it was a gun retailer.

374. “mine’s waiting for the rest of the story to be told.”
     How convenient; All the union has to do is not bother to produce any evidence, and you’re free to reject the evidence that actually HAS been produced. What if there’s no more to the story, to be told, and the situation is just what it appears to be? What then?
     You’ll be agnostic about what happened forever, for lack of any evidence to contradict what you’ve got…

375. Count, I’m looking for the unedited video. I see references to the fact that Fox’s video is edited with the further inference the the edit shows Fox man throwing the first punch, but I can’t find the full video. I do, however, appreciate the ‘wait and see’ attitude. Do you find the current leftish reticence/ desire for more info at odds w the Trayvon Martin episode?

376. Jesus. Apparently 27 dead, 14 children, in CT. The shooter is alleged to be a 20 year old father of a student. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

377. What then?
     Then the union guy ought to be charged with assault and battery.
     Do you find the current leftish reticence/ desire for more info at odds w the Trayvon Martin episode?
     To the degree that it’s at odds, that’s most likely because nobody’s dead.
     To provide some perspective here, the guy who has been trotting the video around apparently is uninterested in pressing charges, and has also apparently offered to settle things via a MMA style fight.
     It’s a clown show. Jump on board if you like, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself wearing a rubber nose.

378. Hey, look, another one!
     27 dead, 18 kids.
     Rounding error.

379. Jesus. Apparently 27 dead, 14 children, in CT. The shooter is alleged to be a 20 year old father of a student. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
     In this country? Unbelievable? Au contraire. Not only believable, but expected. And horrific. As is the reaction from The Usual Gang of Idiots:
     

380. Unbelievable? Au contraire.
     It’s unbelievable that we keep letting it happen. There’s really nothing to stop them.

381. This school shooting is Horrific. Horiffic! It’s evil.
     I don’t know what we can do about it either. If we confiscate guns only the law abiding will hand in their’s. The evil people prone to do these things will hide their’s to use on us some other day.
     So I can sympathize with phil and russell wanting to do something, but what?
     The genie is out of the bottle. As long as guns are here to stay – because I don’t think we can take them all away any more than we can tale away drugs – then I want my man to be able to have one to defend me and my children from crazy evil people.
     Does anyone think we could take away all guns so that criminals don’t have them either? I would be ok with that as long as no one has a gun. I think that anyone who thinks that all guns can be taken out of society is probably using the drugs that are also supposed to be taken out of society.

382. So I can sympathize with phil and russell wanting to do something, but what?
     Probably not the best moment to ask that question.
     Try again in a couple of days, maybe.

383. Russell, yeah, I’m not processing right now.

384. I’m processing. I’m processing the fact that we need a Constitutional amendment, and we need to confiscate weapons that can do this kind of damage. “Criminals,” you know, those quaint, old-fashioned people who have rational (if evil) motives, aren’t the issue here. The problem here is people who are nuts. And anyone who loves guns belongs somewhere in that category.

385. “So I can sympathize with phil and russell wanting to do something, but what?”
     1. Don’t ‘lock down’ buildings, preventing students from escaping.
     1a. Don’t keep first responders out of the building until you know the situation is “stable”, or whatever; People have died in past incidents because of this, who’d have lived if they got prompt medical attention.
     1b. Sorry, cops, just charging right in IS your job. Kind of like firemen don’t wait until the ashes cool.
     2. Encourage the staff to get training, and carry concealed weapons. Most such incidents, the guy just keeps going until somebody actively stops him, and generally not by “tackling” him.
     3. Do not, repeat, NOT, give the guy his five minutes of fame. Never refer to him at all by name, just as, “that clown”, or some other such anonymous nickname. Let him die unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

386. With all respect, maybe it’s time to give this topic a rest until folks have had a chance to bury their kids.
     Not trying to shut off the dialog, it just doesn’t seem like the right time. To me, anyway.
     There must be something else to talk about.

387. we need to confiscate weapons that can do this kind of damage

     Suspended between premature conclusions and the driving need to have this discussion about guns, is sapient.
     I’m all ears for what specific measures you think might work.

388. Not trying to shut off the dialog, it just doesn’t seem like the right time. To me, anyway.

     I think russell has the right of it, despite my last comment.

389. Life in prison with no parole for anyone who sells, possesses or manufactures a firearm.
     That would work.

390. As Russell said. Give it a rest for day or two. The issue isn’t going away.

391. With all respect, maybe it’s time to give this topic a rest until folks have had a chance to bury their kids.
     Really? What about tomorrow’s casualties, and their burials?
     Suspended between premature conclusions and the driving need to have this discussion about guns, is sapient.
     I’m not the one who is “suspended”. I’m happy to quit talking about it now, but I felt moved to express my anger. And no amount of waiting on behalf of today’s victims (what about Tuesday’s victims?) is going to help.
     I’m all ears for what specific measures you think might work.
     What will work is getting rid of the guns. That will now probably require a Constitutional amendment and an active effort to confiscate and destroy the ones that exist. That will work. Will it be possible with the number of gun nuts inhabiting the country? No. So, as we sit at their mercy, we are consigned to watching it happen again and again as if there were no solution.

392. Give it a rest for day or two. The issue isn’t going away.
     If we wait to talk about it until a few days go by without senseless gun violence, we will never talk about it.

393. Today was supposed to be the day we were allowed to talk about gun control re: the mall shooting

394. “Will it be possible with the number of gun nuts inhabiting the country?”
     Heck, were there not as many gun nuts as there are, we wouldn’t be discussing your proposals in the first place. But maybe the new thread is a better place to discuss who’s the real “nut”.

395. My current topic of interest is completely and utterly inappropriate for discussion at this time. So: someone else suggest one.

396. Heck, were there not as many gun nuts as there are, we wouldn’t be discussing your proposals in the first place.

397. Or, should I say, Brett is correct.