Its weird the types of sacrifices we expect kids to make with regards to survival. Like when a school shooting happens we wouldnt event consider banning assault rifles. Those kids dont survive. But if having a tracker on your kid marginally increases their chance for survival in the rarest of circumstances it’s totally out of the question to not have it.
This is absolutely not the case unless you believe what happened in China, Russia and Cambodia in the 20th century, governments murdering hundreds of millions of their own people, somehow magically cannot happen again. Orders of magnitudes more people have been killed by their own government when they lacked any means to defend themselves than have been killed by school shooters or armed criminals.
1. We're not talking about those places in those times that you reference. We're talking about today, presumably in the US, since we're talking about a "stupid law thought of 200 years ago" aka the 2nd amendment to the US constitution.
2. It is hilarious that some people believe that owning a gun is going to protect them in any meaningful way from organized, sanctioned government violence toward them. Maybe that was a reasonable thing to believe 200 years ago, but not today.
Regular people have zero need for assault/military-style firearms. This is the clearest of clear cases of something that does so much more harm than good that it's absurd that half the country has been propagandized into believing this is some sort of "freedom issue". It's sickening.
What is a military style firearm in this context? Because of the NFA, Americans already cannot own pretty much any fully automatic weapon the military employs.
It's weird to think as a society that we can build a walled garden around human nature. Mentally unwell people who attack schools will use other weapons if you somehow take all the "assault" rifles away and we've seen this in other countries who have tried it. When a school shooting happens we don't talk about psychiatric medication or prescribing practices for them.
The #3 cause of death is "accidental self inflicted injury." I'm not sure tracking children is the answer. You're just shifting the burden for risky behavior from the child to the parent through a radio with _zero_ redundancy. There's probably more useful ways to achieve this outcome.
> It's weird to think as a society that we can build a walled garden around human nature.
We literally can. We built lane assistance and airbags and cars that sometimes self drive because humans naturally are bad drivers.
We created fire alarms and automatic sprinklers because sometimes people forget about the thing in the oven.
We invented medication for mental illness and obesity. We invented padded rooms and rehab and all sorts of stuff.
Hell, we invented locks on our front doors.
Guns are one of the most dangerous things a person can own. You can kill someone by pointing a metal tube and pressing a button. It’s very hard to stop once that button is pressed. Almost any other weapon is a lot easier to stop and a lot harder to kill with. That’s why other places don’t have the same death rates as America.
> Guns are one of the most dangerous things a person can own
Actually it's an extension ladder.
> any other weapon is a lot easier to stop and a lot harder to kill with.
Where's your can do spirit now? We literally invented metal detectors and have dogs that can smell guns and explosives because sometimes mentally unwell people have weapons.
> That’s why other places don’t have the same death rates as America.
That's one possible explanation. It's very thin and there's much contrary evidence. You'd have to make a stronger case.
>> Guns are one of the most dangerous things a person can own
> Actually it's an extension ladder.
Fair point, but I think it's more useful to consider that an extension ladder is a tool designed for non-violent uses, and deaths involving extension ladders are (nearly?) all due to accidents.
Guns are tools designed to inflict injury and death. While many gun deaths are accidental, the guns in those instances are performing to purpose.
> We literally invented metal detectors and have dogs that can smell guns and explosives because sometimes mentally unwell people have weapons.
I don't particularly want to live in a world where we have to have metal detectors and dogs present at the entrance to any decent-sized building. That sounds pretty dystopian.
Do you know what an 'assault' rifle is? I only heard that term used by people who want them banned, who usually think this means automatic weapons, like the other commonly misused term machine gun.
The correct term that 'assault' has become an umbrella for is semi-automatic. That means 1 bullet shot for every 1 time the trigger is pulled. There are technically other guns, like pump-action, that require literal pumping of bullets into the chamber between each shot, or even powder guns which are extremely dangerous due to their inaccuracy and jamming (read jamming as: higher probability to explode during use)
'Assault' is used to try to demonify 'bad' guns but really at that point you might as well ban all guns, because the few remaining are useless.
Just be anti-gun instead of anti 'assault' rifle so you aren't pretending to support 'good' guns
Not the person you're replying to, but I fully support repealing the 2nd amendment and strictly regulating gun ownership, up to and including total bans on certain classes of firearms, magazines, and ammunition. I would also personally have no problem with a total ban on any kind of firearm ownership, but I don't think the evidence supports that a total ban would make us meaningfully safer than more targeted restrictions and regulations. But for the guns we might allow in my fantasy of a US with sane gun laws, every gun owner should be required to take both a safety course and general training course, and complete a practical skills exam before being licensed (yes, licensed) to own a firearm. That training should have to be repeated (perhaps an abbreviated version) at some reasonable interval, such as every year or two.
Regarding your nitpicking of what "assault" means, that's irrelevant. But to discuss it anyway: "assault weapon" has not become an umbrella for any semi-auto weapon. Semi-auto pistols, for example, are not what people are talking about when they want "assault" weapons banned. For people who don't really know much about guns, "assault weapon" means "a type of gun that someone in the military on a TV show or movie might have slung across their chest". An imprecise definition, to be sure, but in general I'd agree that no random civilian has any need for such a weapon. And any civilian who believes they have an actual need for such a weapon probably should not be trusted with one.
I do know people who own some of these types of guns. They're responsible, train, and treat the weapons with the respect and care they are due. But I still don't think they should have them.
Assault rifles are rifles designed for killing humans (as opposed to hunting rifles). Sniper rifles require training. Shot guns have limited range and take long to reload. Handguns are hard to aim and not that lethal. Assault rifles are unique in that they allow an untrained teenager to shoot accurately and kill a lot of people very quickly. That’s why people want to restrict access to AR-15 type rifles.
I hesitate to wade into these kinds of conversations but a lot of what you wrote is inaccurate.
Shotguns have a limited range compared to rifles but it’s still at least 50 yards so it isn’t going to matter. People hunt deer with them, they aren’t like shotguns in video games. They can also use removable magazines and be as easy to reload as any other semi automatic firearm.
There is not a single difference between a “sniper rifle” and a hunting rifle.
Handguns are not meaningfully less lethal than rifles against unarmed targets at close range. The mass shooting at Virginia tech was one of the worst and was done with handguns.
> Assault rifles are rifles designed for killing humans (as opposed to hunting rifles)
Every type of firearm was designed for killing people. Today’s “hunting rifle” was the standard issue infantry weapon in WWI and WWII. Russia is still arming some soldiers with what you would call a hunting rifle in Ukraine right now.
Getting shot by a handgun is not like getting shot by AR-15. Even at the same caliber the muzzle velocity of a modern rifle makes the bullet that much deadlier.
Prime Minister Robert Fico got shot three (?) times with a handgun and it now looks like he'll survive. Of course he got the best medical care, but still, it serves to illustrate my point.
With an AK-47 I cannot hit anything at 50 yards. The combination of kickback, terrible sight, rough trigger make it pretty hard to use effectively. It's one of the most popular weapons in war zones (doesn't jam, easy to repair, etc) but in my hands it's useless.
I understand we're dealing with shades of gray here. It's about making a policy tradeoff between how many legitimate uses a weapon type has (for example home defense, farm use, hunting) and how many victims it claims.
> Getting shot by a handgun is not like getting shot by AR-15. Even at the same caliber the muzzle velocity of a modern rifle makes the bullet that much deadlier.
Yeah I should have been more clear about my thoughts on this, my apologies.
Rifle rounds are unquestionably more deadly from a ballistic standpoint but at close range (25 yards or less, just for the sake of hypotheticals), before handgun round velocity falls off enough that they are ineffective, shot placement and how fast you can stop any bleeding matter much more than ballistics.
There aren’t many mass shooting events I can think off where it would have made a big difference if a pistol caliber had been used instead of a rifle caliber - it definitely would in cases like the Las Vegas concert though. That wasn’t an untrained teenager though so it might be outside of the scope of discussion anyways.
> I understand we're dealing with shades of gray here. It's about making a policy tradeoff between how many legitimate uses a weapon type has (for example home defense, farm use, hunting) and how many victims it claims.
Agreed and thank you for your very reasonable response.
