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NY Bill Would Require Background Checks to Buy 3D Printers, Attempts to Target Ghost Guns
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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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.