Y
Yodery
Guest
Edited for inappropriate content
-
Welcome to Smashboards, the world's largest Super Smash Brothers community! Over 250,000 Smash Bros. fans from around the world have come to discuss these great games in over 19 million posts!
You are currently viewing our boards as a visitor. Click here to sign up right now and start on your path in the Smash community!
Connecticut shooting, gun control laws?
- Thread starter BarDulL
- Start date
The debate this shooting spawned really bothers me quite a bit. I hear all sorts of people claiming they have solutions, but what no one seems really interested in is the reality of what's going on. Like would gun control really help? I'm not really entirely sure either way, but what I am sure of is that almost no one in the mainstream media arguing about it knows at all. That Fareed Zakaria piece linked earlier (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/...7_1_gun-violence-gun-ownership-tough-gun-laws) gives a more detailed argument than most, and it's laughably insufficient. I'll use it as an example of how terrible this debate really is.
First of all, Zakaria makes this claim:
Since the rest of Zakaria's argument talks about firearm deaths (and homicides in particular) and not mass shootings, let me give several other plausible reasons. Many gun homicides are done for financial gain; America's higher than average wealth inequality will increase that incentive. America has a massive gang problem. We can argue about the causes of that (failed war on drugs, blighted inner cities, poor schools, lingering racial disparity, overflow from the political instability of our southern neighbor, a prison system that operates as criminal training grounds, etc.), but it's pretty clearly a significant factor that differentiates America and these other countries and certainly a driving factor in a high homicide rate. Geographically, America is far harder to police than these other countries. Japan is a small, densely populated set of islands. America is a vast, sparsely populated nation with two extremely porous borders with foreign countries. For that matter, you could consider differences in the judicial systems. America's judicial system respects the rights of the accused more than that of any other nation, and America protects its citizens against surveillance to a greater extent than most other countries. I support this because I like freedom, but it's obviously relevant in that it inhibits crime prevention.
Zakaria also does a little good old fashioned data cherry picking with his statistic about homicide rates in England and Wales. I hope the problem is obvious to everyone; "England and Wales" is not a country. The United Kingdom is a country, and it includes Scotland and Northern Ireland. I have this really funny suspicion that including those two would make the overall firearm homicide rate appear significantly higher (Northern Ireland has historic problems with this!). Of course, not including them is ridiculous; various regions of the US have region specific issues that increase the homicide rate, and they aren't excluded from the US numbers.
Similar cherry picking is found in the Australia statistic. We're told about a correlation between an enacted law and a significant drop in gun homicides. We aren't told several other things. We don't know what happened to the overall homicide rate (I doubt our goal is seriously to just make people die in different ways but rather to prevent death). We don't know what other changes in Australia happened alongside that. We also don't know, most importantly, what the average drop was across the developed world and in the US in particular. Violent crime is on the decline in the developed world and in the US. That it would decline dramatically in Australia over a long period of time (like 16 years in this case) is not surprising, and at best the argument is just incomplete but not telling us how much it would have been expected to drop if not for that law so we could see the difference. The fact that these rates are declining on their own also pretty much entirely discredits everyone arguing that there's anything wrong with kids today, but being discredited doesn't seem to stop them so whatever.
When you consider all that, Zakaria hasn't really made any case at all for gun control. That isn't to say that it definitely wouldn't work (his argument isn't so bad as to prove the opposite of his point!), but the argument he presents simply does nothing to establish gun control as a negative effect on homicide at all (and let's drop the "firearm homicide" thing please; homicide is homicide however it's done, and there have been mass killings done with bombs before that should be considered as a part of the phenomenon if that's what you aim to stop).
The sad part is that at least Zakaria tried to use some numbers and examples even if he did so poorly. Most people don't even bother with that. "It's just obvious that if there are fewer guns fewer people would commit shootings!" or "it's just obvious that kids being exposed to all this violence in the media and video games will cause these things" are what you tend to hear, and if you try to say things like "if everyone had a gun, they could defend themselves better", you get these nonsense emotional arguments about how they don't want to live in that kind of culture. No one seems interested in a serious, scientific approach to this problem in which you objectively analyze the data and devise solutions based off that. Whether claims are really true or not seems irrelevant as long as they feel intuitively right even though intuitively there's no reason anyone would want to shoot up a first grade class yet clearly someone did so maybe intuition is not reliable here. I don't pretend to have all the data; I don't think it would be easy to get a clear, objective picture unless we made a national project out of it. I do think that if we care even a little about 20 dead first graders and want their deaths to be a turning point toward a better future that instead of carrying on about how guns are terrible that we'd instead be searching for the real answers, doing the hard work of providing well-researched suggestions from a position of political neutrality with the sole goal of having a practical effect. If gun control is the answer after that, fine, but it may not be, and the cost of being wrong is high. I hope that the president's promised effort follows this sort of thinking; I sure know the media's "suggestions" are hopeless.
I will finish with this point, and it's a doozy itself. No one in politics can ever admit to being wrong. It would make perfect sense to try gun control, see if it works, and then keep it if it does and drop it if it doesn't. That's very scientific. The problem is that whatever happens, no side will ever admit to being wrong. If gun control works great, the pro-gun lobby will fight to the grave denying it. If gun control is a massive failure, we'll just hear that it didn't go far enough from the anti-gun crowd. This bias extends toward ignoring data points favoring the other position (there's plenty of data supporting both arguments really which is largely why a coherent whole picture is hard), and it really is such a mess that I worry that the best I can hope for is that we really do nothing since doing nothing is at least guaranteed to avoid making it worse and will not have any side effects. That's a pretty lousy thing to hope for: no response to repeated mass murder of the innocent, but so far I'm still waiting to see a reason to hope for better.
First of all, Zakaria makes this claim:
There are several problems. One is that this claim is never supported in any way. Are those really the only reasons? Maybe, but it's not obvious that they are. Two is far bigger; this has a big apples to oranges comparison that is relied upon for the rest of the article. It starts by giving hypothetical reasons for a mass shooting or shooting crime similar in nature to the recent event in Connecticut. The reasons it gives are designed around that sort of crime. Then it uses the analysis of that type of crime to generalize to all deaths by firearms, the majority of which have causes transparently different than a mass shooting such as the one in Sandy Hook. This is a major flaw in reasoning to say the least; I might go so far as to say that this argument coming from someone as smart as Zakaria constitutes blatant dishonesty. I could stop here on Zakaria honestly since this issue alone completely invalidates his entire argument, but I'll carry on since there are several additional blatant issues.
Since the rest of Zakaria's argument talks about firearm deaths (and homicides in particular) and not mass shootings, let me give several other plausible reasons. Many gun homicides are done for financial gain; America's higher than average wealth inequality will increase that incentive. America has a massive gang problem. We can argue about the causes of that (failed war on drugs, blighted inner cities, poor schools, lingering racial disparity, overflow from the political instability of our southern neighbor, a prison system that operates as criminal training grounds, etc.), but it's pretty clearly a significant factor that differentiates America and these other countries and certainly a driving factor in a high homicide rate. Geographically, America is far harder to police than these other countries. Japan is a small, densely populated set of islands. America is a vast, sparsely populated nation with two extremely porous borders with foreign countries. For that matter, you could consider differences in the judicial systems. America's judicial system respects the rights of the accused more than that of any other nation, and America protects its citizens against surveillance to a greater extent than most other countries. I support this because I like freedom, but it's obviously relevant in that it inhibits crime prevention.
Zakaria also does a little good old fashioned data cherry picking with his statistic about homicide rates in England and Wales. I hope the problem is obvious to everyone; "England and Wales" is not a country. The United Kingdom is a country, and it includes Scotland and Northern Ireland. I have this really funny suspicion that including those two would make the overall firearm homicide rate appear significantly higher (Northern Ireland has historic problems with this!). Of course, not including them is ridiculous; various regions of the US have region specific issues that increase the homicide rate, and they aren't excluded from the US numbers.
Similar cherry picking is found in the Australia statistic. We're told about a correlation between an enacted law and a significant drop in gun homicides. We aren't told several other things. We don't know what happened to the overall homicide rate (I doubt our goal is seriously to just make people die in different ways but rather to prevent death). We don't know what other changes in Australia happened alongside that. We also don't know, most importantly, what the average drop was across the developed world and in the US in particular. Violent crime is on the decline in the developed world and in the US. That it would decline dramatically in Australia over a long period of time (like 16 years in this case) is not surprising, and at best the argument is just incomplete but not telling us how much it would have been expected to drop if not for that law so we could see the difference. The fact that these rates are declining on their own also pretty much entirely discredits everyone arguing that there's anything wrong with kids today, but being discredited doesn't seem to stop them so whatever.
When you consider all that, Zakaria hasn't really made any case at all for gun control. That isn't to say that it definitely wouldn't work (his argument isn't so bad as to prove the opposite of his point!), but the argument he presents simply does nothing to establish gun control as a negative effect on homicide at all (and let's drop the "firearm homicide" thing please; homicide is homicide however it's done, and there have been mass killings done with bombs before that should be considered as a part of the phenomenon if that's what you aim to stop).
The sad part is that at least Zakaria tried to use some numbers and examples even if he did so poorly. Most people don't even bother with that. "It's just obvious that if there are fewer guns fewer people would commit shootings!" or "it's just obvious that kids being exposed to all this violence in the media and video games will cause these things" are what you tend to hear, and if you try to say things like "if everyone had a gun, they could defend themselves better", you get these nonsense emotional arguments about how they don't want to live in that kind of culture. No one seems interested in a serious, scientific approach to this problem in which you objectively analyze the data and devise solutions based off that. Whether claims are really true or not seems irrelevant as long as they feel intuitively right even though intuitively there's no reason anyone would want to shoot up a first grade class yet clearly someone did so maybe intuition is not reliable here. I don't pretend to have all the data; I don't think it would be easy to get a clear, objective picture unless we made a national project out of it. I do think that if we care even a little about 20 dead first graders and want their deaths to be a turning point toward a better future that instead of carrying on about how guns are terrible that we'd instead be searching for the real answers, doing the hard work of providing well-researched suggestions from a position of political neutrality with the sole goal of having a practical effect. If gun control is the answer after that, fine, but it may not be, and the cost of being wrong is high. I hope that the president's promised effort follows this sort of thinking; I sure know the media's "suggestions" are hopeless.
I will finish with this point, and it's a doozy itself. No one in politics can ever admit to being wrong. It would make perfect sense to try gun control, see if it works, and then keep it if it does and drop it if it doesn't. That's very scientific. The problem is that whatever happens, no side will ever admit to being wrong. If gun control works great, the pro-gun lobby will fight to the grave denying it. If gun control is a massive failure, we'll just hear that it didn't go far enough from the anti-gun crowd. This bias extends toward ignoring data points favoring the other position (there's plenty of data supporting both arguments really which is largely why a coherent whole picture is hard), and it really is such a mess that I worry that the best I can hope for is that we really do nothing since doing nothing is at least guaranteed to avoid making it worse and will not have any side effects. That's a pretty lousy thing to hope for: no response to repeated mass murder of the innocent, but so far I'm still waiting to see a reason to hope for better.
TheBluAssassin
Smash Apprentice
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2011
- Messages
- 75
I believe they should lower the age for carrying a handgun to five so next time something like this happens, the kids can defend themselves.
Tavitoes
Smash Cadet
My idea of preventions for these kinds of things is to stop selling all automatic weapons. You shouldn't be able to walk into Wal-Mart and buy a Death Machine or whatever. As for the other weapons (like handguns) you should have to present a whole buttload of information to buy it. (like your drivers' license, ID, etc.)
Then again people, remember, the gun was his moms. Not his. So making it hard for people like him to purchase guns wouldn't matter, because they could just get one a different way.
I think we just have to realize that this was indeed a tragedy, but there's nothing we can do about it.
I think we just have to realize that this was indeed a tragedy, but there's nothing we can do about it.
Tavitoes
Smash Cadet
Remember what I said. They should make guns, all guns, hard to get for ANYBODY, not just young people.
What if he had a friend that owned a gun and was able to get it legally?
See what I'm getting at? Let's not forget about unregistered guns either.
Conspiracies ahead:
When I was looking into the Illuminati a few months ago, I had read from someone that was in it (don't remember who though, I think it was Svali) that they were planning to ban guns, but not just out of the blue. They were going to make you want to give up your gun. Don't you think this is a perfect example of that?
Because of this tragedy, people are wanting to get rid of their guns.
I still think this whole thing was planned o3o
See what I'm getting at? Let's not forget about unregistered guns either.
Conspiracies ahead:
When I was looking into the Illuminati a few months ago, I had read from someone that was in it (don't remember who though, I think it was Svali) that they were planning to ban guns, but not just out of the blue. They were going to make you want to give up your gun. Don't you think this is a perfect example of that?
Because of this tragedy, people are wanting to get rid of their guns.
I still think this whole thing was planned o3o
Tavitoes
Smash Cadet
That is very, completely, the sad truth.
Alphicans
Smash Hero
Not that sad :/. All guns given up would be a great solution.
GwJ
Smash Hero
Holy Illuminati Conspiracy Batman. I'm going to ignore that Illuminati part and pretend it never happened.
That was a very Amazing (see what I did there?!) takedown of Zakaria's article, but I have to disagree in particular with this paragraph:
Choosing not to act out of fear or uncertainty is probably the worst thing that we can do, because this problem (or any problem) isn't going to fix itself or achieve some sort of stasis on its own. If the surge in gun sales is any indication, individuals are already deciding what they think is the best course of action based on their available information. Policy needs to be made as well, and from my perspective I'd rather see almost anything happen at a policy level rather than see tons more people buying guns.
The problem is that you can come to this conclusion about everything. We usually don't know what does work and what doesn't until the failures are staring us in the face, but that's not a reason to not try. We'll always have incomplete information and unintended consequences, and I honestly don't think having an agenda is such a terrible thing as long as that agenda is clear. The NRA certainly has one, and as insane as I think their press conference was, they at least presented a set of opinions and an actionable plan that we can debate and come to a decision on.
Choosing not to act out of fear or uncertainty is probably the worst thing that we can do, because this problem (or any problem) isn't going to fix itself or achieve some sort of stasis on its own. If the surge in gun sales is any indication, individuals are already deciding what they think is the best course of action based on their available information. Policy needs to be made as well, and from my perspective I'd rather see almost anything happen at a policy level rather than see tons more people buying guns.
Alphicans
Smash Hero
I am sorry AA, but based on that single quote you gave I feel you went WAY too far with your argument, and even straw manned him really heavily. Just gotta call it how I see it.
Falconv1.0
Smash Master
#HBC | Dark Horse
Mach-Hommy x Murakami
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2010
- Messages
- 3,739
You know what, I'm leaving this forum. Nobody would miss me anyway.
Biz_R_0
Smash Ace
- Joined
- Nov 27, 2012
- Messages
- 682
#HBC | Dark Horse
Mach-Hommy x Murakami
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2010
- Messages
- 3,739
Falconv1.0
Smash Master
You can't post insane things about the Illuminati and planned massacres of children without expecting to generate negative feedback,
That doesn't give the rest of you the right to be jerks though.
Biz_R_0
Smash Ace
- Joined
- Nov 27, 2012
- Messages
- 682
I know, I expected the usual responses, but those were just... e.e
I canceled my flight, I got trolled >.>
Falconv1.0
Smash Master
In what way were you trolled, serious question. What, because people being rude in the way they express disdain? That's what constitutes trolling?
Yes, we're trolling, not the guy who is ****ing claiming the Illuminati was behind a terrible school shooting, totally.
Yes, we're trolling, not the guy who is ****ing claiming the Illuminati was behind a terrible school shooting, totally.
No ones trolling. Everyone hates you. Go away.
Luco
Smash Hero
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2011
- Messages
- 9,232
- Location
- The isle of venom, Australia
- NNID
- dracilus
- 3DS FC
- 2638-1462-5558
@ Amazing Ampharos: I dunno, your last point has already been discussed but I was interested in wha your argument was focused around. I think that while putting retrictions on guns wouldn't stop crime, it'd help. It's harder to get guns then, bombs are already hard to get. Also I think at least i'd feel safer if the threats out there were knives and clubs rather than guns and rifles... at least I can run away from the former. Obviously the goal is to stop this kind of thing but we have to accept he whole, 'you can only keep evil at bay' thing. Make things harder to get and I think it would just make crime less likely. Also, Holder had a REALLY good point about people justifying their actions when they do this. It's a whole lot harder to justify it when the very act of buying guns is hard or perhaps even frowned upon. 
That said, I totally agree with you that we should at least trial this kind of stuff to see its effects.
That said, I totally agree with you that we should at least trial this kind of stuff to see its effects.
Actually it totally does.
TheBluAssassin
Smash Apprentice
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2011
- Messages
- 75
Guys, stay on topic.
Orange Fox
Smash Cadet
It was probably already stated but this event was not because of bad gun control laws. If there were armed Policemen on campus maybe the events could have ended different. Hope this doesn't happen again
Luco
Smash Hero
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2011
- Messages
- 9,232
- Location
- The isle of venom, Australia
- NNID
- dracilus
- 3DS FC
- 2638-1462-5558
No-one seems game to go through the past 15 pages do they? @.@