Conservative
A place to discuss pro-conservative stuff
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We are a Pro-Conservative forum. Posts must have a clear pro-conservative, or anti left-wing bias. We are interested in promoting conservatism and discussing things that might get ignored elsewhere. All sources are acceptable, however reputable sources with a reputation for factual reporting are preferred.
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Your rights end where my nose begins, and unrestricted gun access impedes the rights of others to live.
The founding fathers built that amendment in a time whith very different technology from today. Nowadays a gun can and frequently does mow down an entire room of innocent people/children.
If you care about the lives of your children you would do something to bring our death rates in line with the low rates of Europe. We have an almost ten times higher firearm death rate than European countries. The solution is not more unfettered gun access.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
https://www.statista.com/chart/27724/gun-deaths-in-europe/
The right to vote would like a word.
These 12 Defensive Uses of Guns Support Student’s Plea for Armed Self-Defense
Impedes the rights of other to live? Like the right of criminals to live and commit crime? Like rapists to live and rape? Like murderers to live and murder?
I know the statistics of gun deaths (mass shootings, firearm suicide statistics, general gun deaths in the US), but so what?
As BearOfaTime said:
Of course that was a reinterpretation of the Second Amendment that was unprecedented:
And then Scalia did his thing, and now guns deaths are rising and they are the leading cause of death of children.
But so what? It's enumerated and says don't infringe on it.
Criminals, armed with guns bought legally, or without a background check or stolen from a "responsible gun owner" whose idea of safe storage was in the glovebox of their car.
Rapists, like the domestic abusers who use their legal guns to threaten and intimidate their family, like the prominent Trump support that recently tried to execute his wife in the street.
Murderers, like the 80% of mass shooters using legal firearms or the majority of the remaining 20% using the unsecured guns of a family member.
But don't worry guys, in 3 out of 100 mass shootings, a good guy will kill them after they've only killed 3 or 4 people. That's only slightly worse than unarmed people!
What's really fucked in the head is that you haven't even realised that most people aren't like you and don't throb in anticipation at the idea of killing someone.
"If you don't want to be raped, just use your cool gun to murder them before they murder you with their cool gun, replacing one trauma with another".
What a shithole of a place a pro-gun utopia is.
Unless you can grok the concept of a violent event that was prevented being significant, I don’t think you’re qualified to weigh in on the ethics of deterrence.
It must be heartbreaking that nobody lines up to suck gun owners cocks whenever they save themselves from a problem they created.
The rates of property crime and sexual assault in America are practically identical to other wealthy countries.
You and your guns have done nothing to lower those numbers, but you've done everything you possibly could to enable hundreds of murderers and mass shooters every year.
Your family would be safer without you and safer still in a country where you couldn't vote.
Of course it was Scalia
If I didn't know better, I'd think this was an onion article because of how dumb it is. Children shouldn't need to defend themselves in the first place.
Yes. The unrestricted access to guns in this country has lead to countless deaths and mass shootings.
It is impeding on people's right to life.
I never alluded to crime being a right. If you can't make an argument without jumping to strawman arguments, then politics may not be for you.
People are dying. What do you mean so what? Do you have no empathy?
I think one of us is confused about who is saying/arguing what.
The constitution was built to be able to be changed. And it can be changed so that firearms are no longer the leading cause of death for children.
Hey Genius, he means College Students
College students basically are children, though I will I admit I only skimmed the article.
Regardless, nobody shouldn't have to defend themselves in the first place. There shouldn't be any threats at all.
This is a Just World Fallacy in which you assume the world is just, thus unsavory actions not be taken and anyone who dies is suspect.
Unfortunately the world is a dangerous place, and big cities, many of which are host to a lot of the universities in the country of United States of America, are typically the most dangerous in the first world.
Although there are many negative stereotypes but americans, especially American gun owners, people are more complicated than stereotypes.
There is a saying amongst responsible gun owners, and that the only good gun owners are the ones who hope that they never have to fire a single shot.
Gun ownership, especially for people who live in cities, is often a case of "Better to have it and not need it.."
Sure you have your gun nuts that masturbate over the idea of getting to legally kill someone who tried breaking into their house, people who may even be tempted to intentionally create an attractive nuisance in order to try to create the scenario which would still count as a murder charge by the way. However just like with every group, there are many sensible people who are gun owners, it's just the craziest tend to be the loudest.
Ah yes, the mythical "responsible gun owners". How do we know they're responsible? Why, because they promised us on the internet of course! They followed every completely optional safety rule! They loudly tutted at videos of people who didn't!
And the thousands and thousands of former "responsible gun owners" like the Ulvade shooter? They don't count, despite buying the same guns from the same stores with the same checks and same legal requirements.
This is a marketing slogan for the gun lobby, not actual wisdom.
Do you know what's even better than "having it and not needing it"? Just not needing it, like everybody living in comparable countries the world over.
Do you know what the crime rate is like in those cities? Basically identical across the board, except with a thousandth the gun violence. So what exactly are all these guns preventing?
If you want your family to be safer, the best thing you could do is move to a country with gun control and the worst thing you could do is buy a gun.
Can't just magically not need it by willing the Second Amendment away buddy
There are about 70 million gun owners in the United States. If it weren’t for the vast majority of them being responsible, every American would die of gunshot wounds in about 15 minutes.
The "responsible" part is entirely optional, at your own staunch insistence and every single person who commits a crime with a legally purchased gun was once one of your "responsible gun owners".
The Ulvade shooter was a former "responsible gun owner". The Republican donor who just tried to execute his wife in the street was a former "responsible gun owner". The man who shot a black child through his door, then tried to execute him as he lay bleeding on the ground was a former "responsible gun owner".
And where do the people with illegal guns get them? Why, from "responsible gun owners" of course!
Over a million "responsible gun owners" allow their poorly secured firearms to be stolen each year, because responsibility is optional.
Millions more conduct private sales without a background check, because responsibility is optional.
The dirty secret is that you don't care if they're responsible or not. You don't care if they don't know how to safely handle a gun, if they leave it sitting loaded in a drawer or if they sweep their friends 50 times each hunting trip. You don't care if they kill their wives or mutilate a room full of children beyond recognition.
The only thing you care about is that you will never have to prove you're responsible or be held accountable when you're not.
That's by design. The intentionality of that design varies person by person who's in charge. But the design of our society itself is most often to blame.
The design ought to be changed to one in which there is no danger.
And if you are that's great for you. But the reality is that the more a population owns guns, and the more unrestricted, the more untrained, the more deaths there are. Avoidable deaths.
And we should avoid them.
See I agree with you that there need to be more restrictions on guns, where I disagree is the belief that the existence of guns in and of itself is a problem and that people who carry guns for the Judgment self-defense purposes are automatically suspect.
Suspect is not the word I would use.
But regardless, guns objectively are dangerous, and therefore often a problem. Simply owning a gun increases the chance that you will kill yourself or somebody else.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/06/handgun-ownership-associated-with-much-higher-suicide-risk.html
https://apnews.com/article/science-health-homicide-d11c8f4ac07888b19309c3e1ff2ae3c9
So where on your graph of gun ownership versus death do the various government led massacres fall? I think it was two years ago people were massacred in Myanmar (where guns are prohibited), people are currently being massacred in Gaza (where guns are prohibited), a bunch of people at a music festival (which I would bet was a gun free zone) were massacred last week. Like you don’t have to reach very far into history before you run into governments and armies massacring unarmed populations.
Are those kinds of events counted in your data on gun ownership and gun deaths, or would they be considered outliers?
An outlier is something that is graphed. Government tyranny is not a part of the above metric.
But that doesn't matter much because:
Ukraine is currently getting mascaraed despite the population being one of the most armed in all of Europe.
If guns did something to prevent such massacres, then we would have noticed by now. But authoritarian governments do not care about how armed a population is, as evidence by Russia's complete disregard for how armed the Ukrainian population was. You cannot protect yourself or your family from a Russian airstrike with your gun. The Palestinians in Gaza cannot protect themselves from Israeli bombs with guns. Isrealis cannot protect themselves from Hamas rockets with guns.
Thinking that society is “designed” is a conspiracy theory of enormous proportions.
Society evolves. It’s not a theme park built by some central cabal.
I was not saying it was literally "designed" from some central cabal. It's been designed by countless parties, both within government office and outside.
Little bits of it have been designed maybe. In the same way you’d be designing the interior space of a warehouse full of chopped wood, if you were allowed to move the wood around. That’s designing and so is what people do to society but the basic facts of the matter are beyond anyone’s ability to choose, just like no matter where you stack the wood it’s gonna smell like pine sap and sawdust in that warehouse.
In not talking about anything small like that.
I'm talking about our city planning, infrastructure, education system, police, healthcare system, job market, labor law, corporate culture, the monetary incentives corporations have, etc.
It's all set up in such a way to produce terrible results. This country extracts from the poor and gives to the rich, it keeps people impoverished. It overpolices marginalized groups. It keeps people infirmed.
Some of it is intentional, some of it is apathy. But the end result is that crime rates soar. People generally don't commit crimes when they're well educated, well payed, healthy, etc. We should be doing everything in our power to effect the above systems to produce better results and therefore less crime rate.
Crime doesn't occur in a vacuum, it is absolutely within our power to minimize it.
What are you seven?
Consider this: somebody ought to tell nature about how “no threats existing” is a better state of affairs, because literally every organism in existence has weapons.
If it’s a better strategy to just “say no to threats”, nature wouldn’t waste enormous quantities of energy arming literally every living thing.
No.
This is a naturalistic fallacy.
That is objectively not true.
You have fundamentally failed to understand what I am suggesting.
Taking a subset of a political opponent's argument and showing how it's harmful is a core conservative rhetorical strategy. Look at this article from today about Britney Spears's abortion which argues against it because she had access to it, the liberal dream. If one person has access to abortion, and it causes problem, then it probably causes problems in the majority of cases.
In any case, my three links about gun statistics support your argument. I'm not strawmaning anything. I'm looking at it directly in the face and dismissing it based on the fact that the law and historical interpretation of the Second Amendment (as of 2008) establishes a right to bear arms. I assume the law is the final arbiter of all things permissible in society (except for all the laws I don't care to follow). Thus, having concluded that guns are permissible and desirable, I can rationalize backwards, finding evidence that guns support life in contrast to a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
The other day, someone pointed out that I was a troll from the previous conservative instance. They're not exactly wrong...but I don't discriminate. Liberals need to get better at handling conservative rhetoric. Because none of your arguments are effective.
I am well aware. I deal with it all the time.
If you have suggestions I'm all ears. Until then this is only a complaint with no solution.
I'm also not really here to convince conservatives.
The last two do, but I don't see how your first link comes to a pro-gun control conclusion.
No, prohibiting people from being armed impedes their right to live.
I carry a weapon because I was almost killed by a pair of boots once, worn by a man about 30 lbs heavier than me. I’m never going back to that situation, where somebody gets to decide whether I live or die just because they’re bigger than me.
My life is precious and I intend to keep it, and that’s why I carry a weapon. Nobody has the right to force me to be at other people’s mercy.
This is just a repeat of one of your other comments.
I never said otherwise.
Yet another dishonest gun grabber pretending like gun deaths is a remotely relevant statistic to go by. Probably because any actual relevant numbers like "homicide" don't actually support your agenda.
Any gun death is a gun death.
Homicides are bad.
Suicides by gun are bad.
My agenda is to reduce these deaths.
Cool. Guns are the tool, not the cause. You're looking at it backwards. Why do people commit suicide? Why do they kill others?
They're catalysts.
Simply owning a gun increases your chances of killing someone.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/06/handgun-ownership-associated-with-much-higher-suicide-risk.html
https://apnews.com/article/science-health-homicide-d11c8f4ac07888b19309c3e1ff2ae3c9
At best you're ignorant and at worst your intentionally lying because you'd rather people died than you had to actually prove you were a responsible gun owner. Either way, your "gut feelings" about suicide are demonstrably wrong.
Means reduction is a massive part of suicide prevention, at both a social and personal level. It's why they take away knives but not spoons, despite a determined enough person being able to kill themselves with basically anything, even gravity.
And do you know how many people who survive a suicide attempt go on to die by suicide? 1 in 10. Do you know how many people survive suicide attempts with guns? Basically 0.
Even your "it's a mental health problem" excuse is bullshit.
I know the motivation is to demand something impossible is done before you will even consider gun control -- in this case, accessible mental healthcare for every man, woman and child in America that can instantly cure them of complex problems far beyond even the most cutting edge medical science, so completely that they will never relapse for even a minute, delivered within a budget of $0.
But do you know what you're actually doing? Admitting that the American public are simply not healthy enough for such permissive gun laws to be safe.
So how about we just take your guns away and when you've finished building that impossible mental healthcare network, you can have them back.
So are me and my life property of the government then? If not, why the fuck does the government have a place in telling me what to do with my life?
Yeah how dare "the government" tell you not to go on a killing spree that targets children or threaten your wife with a gun if she tries to leave.
You can feign all the melodramatic indignation you want but your peers and politicians have shown over and over again how little they actually believe in the "freedom" you claim to value.
The majority of the pro-gun crowd staunchly vote Republican, the party that says you can't smoke pot or can't pay a consenting adult for sex and they can listen on your phone whenever they want.
And of course like every government, they also say you can't build your own home with your own hands, can't own land mines and hand grenades, can't drive or fly without a license, can't run a kitchen from a public toilet and a million other rules that the pro-gun crowd doesn't object to because they know there are massive public safety risks without those regulations.
But the moment someone suggests adding semi-automatic guns to that list, the pro-gun beat their chest and pretend they rule themselves as free and independent men who don't need no society.
And the moment a Republican in a gun-happy, right-wing state suggests banning gay or interracial marriage (again) or executing women who have abortions, they cheer furiously.
Not of your freedoms came from the barrel or a gun, nor your own hand, nor the people you support.
Lmao nice irrelevant rant.
In Colorado we recently voted to help people commit suicide if their circumstances suck enough, and I’m for that.
I think if you take away a person’s means of suicide you are encasing them in a prison of flesh. A person has the right to decide whether their own life continues and if your plan for suicide prevention is to remove the means, it just means you’re willing to force people to suffer fates worse than death.
Congratulations on one of the grossest pro-gun takes I've seen in a while. I'd genuinely love to know if you actually believed what you were saying and if not, if the morality of what you were advocating crossed your mind at any point. My bet would be that you're so far gone that it didn't, you just wanted to rush to defend guns.
Anyway, to address your misinformation: Colorado passed a "death with dignity" law that allows terminally ill patients to request assisted suicide.
Before that request is granted, they need to have a terminal illness, make multiple requests at least 2 weeks apart, be judged capable of making the decision and not in any way cooreced.
After which, they are given medication to end their life, rather than their husband or fathers AR-15 so they can spray their brains all over the ceiling, traumatising the people who find them, the people who clean up their remains and apparently bloodthirsty gun owners who wished they could have watched.
Every single person involved in assisted dying opposes the use of the word "suicide". These are people who want to live but don't have the option, so choose to go painlessly on their own terms, rather in agony in a hospital bed.
Actual suicide is an act of desperation. That's why means reduction and survivability play such huge roles -- if you can delay a suicide for even minutes, you dramatically increase the chances that people will reach out (or be discovered) and get the help they need.
Anyway, you've put dogshit where your brain and soul is supposed to go and if I found out that anyone in my life shared your opinions, I'd cut them from it immediately.
Please take advantage of this new public policy.
Yeah, nobody worth a damn believes your bullshit
What a shock, a gun owner that doesn't care about anyone who disagrees with him politically and is also homophobic.
I've never seen someone so proud of providing both the means and motivations for their childs suicide.
You have so much hatred in your heart.
Don't care, didn't ask
Evidently you care enough to respond.
Is that supposed to be an insult?
He's a reactionary. He's not smart enough to hurt your feelings without slurs.
Jesus christ man, I already told you.