Holy Gunfire Batman!

Harbourboy · Jul 28, 2012

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I've only ever seen an actual gun in real life on one occasion, and that was strapped to a cop I saw in California once. In my whole life living here in New Zealand I have never seen, let alone touched a gun. Not surprisingly, gun related deaths in this country are so rare, they make front page news.

Taluntain · Jul 28, 2012

Ineth said: ↑

The phrase "straw man arguments" is not indended to be used as a synonym for "arguments I don't like to hear", you know.
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Oh, I know, that's why I never use them as such.

Yes, I'm conviced they are.
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Right. And the fact that these happen so rarely to be almost unheard of does not shake your conviction in the slightest.

Apart from the fact that I believe your numbers are quite exaggerated (consider gang violence)...

You're introducing a logical fallacy here.

The fact that guns are the first weapon of choice in most massacres, tells us nothing about whether or not those massacres would also be viable if guns were not available (and hence the assasins would have to revert to their second choice). Nothing.
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Another straw man. We aren't discussing gang violence but mass killings by Joe Crazies. Actually, the logical fallacy is your inability to comprehend the fact that if you remove the means for easy ranged massacres, they become exponentially harder to pull off. By your reasoning, guns are somehow the only weapon on the planet that rational logic does not apply to. Where are your second-choice massacres in Europe? Or is your point that we don't have lunatics who want to kill other people here?

Quite so.

Which part exactly do you find difficult to imagine?

Explosives are probably the most difficult thing to acquire and use from that list, but still quite possible to get (can be home-made from household items, although not trivially).
It is noteworthy that in the case at hand, explosives were in fact available to the assasin.

Poison: Everything in this world is poisonous to humans if consumed in high enough amounts. There are plenty of things for which the lethal limit is small enough to make it possible to add it to people's food without them knowing it - including various houshold (cleaning) substances, and drugs you can get at the pharmacy.

Toxic chemicals which can fill a closed room in gaseous form and kill its inhabitants can, like explosives, be made from household items (although, again, you would have to know what you're doing).

Arson: Setting fire to a building while people inside are sleeping or locked in. (Used to be a historically very popular way to commit massacres before guns became cheap).

Sabotage: Getting a stage/tribune in a stadium/gymnasium to collapse under the load of many people by removing screws/dowels before the event, is entirely possible. So is sabotaging a car/bus so its breaks will fail.
In fact, destruction on a much larger scale would be plausible: For example, I once talked to a professor of civil engineering who explained to me that many large road bridges of a certain type could easily be weakened to the point that they would suddenly collapse during the next moderate windstorm - and this could be done (without being noticed) by a single person with no particular skills, and equipped with only a crowbar, a jab saw, and two or three hours of time. (I probably shouldn't reveal more details about this on the internet though... )
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The majority of what you listed above are classified as terrorist activities. And I'm sure I don't need to point out to you how much harder any of those are to pull off undetected post 9/11. They pretty much don't happen without highly trained terrorist (group) involvement and even the great majority of those attempts are foiled before they can pull them off. I think that it's obvious enough that that is not in the same league as Joe Crazy taking 5, going to the gun store and coming back packing a gun and ammo to start his private crusade. This is without dissecting your list further, because at least half of what you listed is such fantasy that nobody is even attempting to do it because it's so unlikely to succeed. Try setting fire to a building undetected and before the building is evacuated. Try walking into any restaurant kitchen and start sprinkling poison on the food. Try figuring out how to structurally weaken anything without your structural engineer consultant reporting you the police. Etc.

But that's the thing: This "proof" that "it works all over the world" simply does not exists.
You're conclusion is something you can only decude from looking at other countries, if
a) you don't care about statistical meaningfulness, and
b) you have already made up your mind about what the conlcusion should be in advance.

Not to mention that all of this doesn't even touch on another thing which hasn't really been mentioned much in this thread: The precedence of liberty and the constitution.
Unlike most European contries, the US is founded on the principle that coming up with a policy that you believe might potentially give some overall positive effect on society, doesn't automatically give you the right to trample millions of people's personal liberties in order to implement that policy. Personal liberties have a very high value in the constitution, and proposed restrictions on them should be backed up by very rigorous proof that the end justifies the means.
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The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. 'Nuff said.

(Of course, if someone has been indoctrinated into believing that their pudding simply tastes so much better because it leaves a bit of a sour aftertaste, no amount of common sense will convince them otherwise.)

Arkite · Jul 29, 2012

Ineth said: ↑

Also, consider the fact that there was already a localised form of gun control in place: Visitors were prohibited from carrying guns into the cinema.
What did that localised gun control accomplish? It made sure that those who did not indend to commit crimes had no guns on them (which they could have used to protect themselves in such a situation), while doing absolutely nothing to prevent the criminal from carrying out his murderous plans.
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This is a moot point. Even if somebody had snuck a gun into the cinema, the killer had full ballistic body armour from head to toe.

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Holy Gunfire Batman!

Harbourboy Take thy form from off my door! Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)

Arkite Crash or crash through Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)