Don't believe your lying eyes (Enco)

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen,

Kool-Aid. Rev. Jim Jones flavor.

One, Rev. Jim Jones used Flavor Aid, not Kool Aid. The poor Kool Aid Man got a bad rap.

Two, you do know that only Rev. Jim Jones and his henchmen had guns in their ideal Utopia of Jonestown, not their victims, right?

(And lest anyone forget, decades before there were SJWs, CRT, BLM, ESG, and DIE, Rev. Jim Jones also smeared anyone who questioned him or opposed him as “racist.”)

And despite all the spurious claims made in this article, it never stops politicians or anti- gun celebrities from having armed security or even their own personal firearms. Doth protest too much, methinks?

• This reply was modified 2 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spacing

[UnseenParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

you do know that only Rev. Jim Jones and his henchmen had guns in their ideal Utopia of Jonestown, not their victims, right?

First, your premise is probably false for most of the victims who were devoted to Jim Jones and drank the poison willingly. I understand there had been dress rehearsals as well where they drank a harmless beverage to prove their loyalty to the cult.

Anyway, let’s accept your premise that at least some drank at gunpoint. Now, imagine there were no guns at Jonestown so there was no gunpoint.

Some in the January 6 mob  were armed. Were they they fabled armed citizens bent on protecting us from an oppressive Federal Government.Were they The Good Guys With Guns? I view them as Assholes With Guns.

If there are fewer guns and also some control over who has them the gun homicide rate would have to go down.

You can’t see that. It’s a sickness.

[UnseenParticipant]

So, Enco, guns make us safer? They do the opposite.

From the article linked at the bottom. The boldfaced words and phrases are hotlinks in the article that you can pursue on the article’s published page.

Guns can kill you in three ways: homicide, suicide, and by accident. Owning a gun or having one readily accessible makes all three more likely. One meta-analysis ”found strong evidence for increased odds of suicide among persons with access to firearms compared with those without access and moderate evidence for an attenuated increased odds of homicide victimization when persons with and without access to firearms were compared.” The latter finding is stronger for women, a reminder that guns are also a risk factor for domestic violence.

The same thing is true for accidents. States with more guns see more accidental deaths from firearms, and children ages 5 to 14 are 11 times more likely to be killed with a gun in the US compared to other developed countries, where gun ownership is much less common. About half of gun accident fatalities happen to people under 25, and some recent analyses suggest that the official count of gun accident deaths among children is understated.

”When 34 injury prevention experts were asked to prioritize home injury hazards for young children, based on frequency, severity, and preventability of the injury, the experts rated access to firearms in the home as the most significant hazard,” Harvard gun expert David Hemenway writes. The American Academy of Pediatrics has stated that “the absence of guns from children’s homes and communities is the most reliable and effective measure to prevent firearm-related injuries in children and adolescents.”

(Note: That is the full text of the following article.)

Living in a house with a gun increases your odds of death

 

[UnseenParticipant]

@Enco

Is there a connection between liking guns and fantasizing or acting out violence? Which party is pro-gun on the one hand and is constantly recommending murder and mayhem? Trump wants to hang former chairman of the joint Chiefs and touts the idea of shooting shoplifters extrajudicially. Kinda scary!

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen,

If you hold, as I do, that Human beings owning other human beings is wrong and that The Holy Bible and Al-Qu’ran are barbaric documents for not condemning slavery and even having rules on capture and treatment of slaves, then you also hold that adult humans are sovereign beings who own themselves and that children are little humans in training to become fully sovereign beings.

(And if you don’t hold to this, the legal question of who owns whom in the U.S. was answered 158 years ago to the tune of at least 618,222 lives.)

Now, if adult humans beings own themselves, then they have a right to take any risk they want with their own minds and bodies, up to and including taking their own lives.

And while suicide is indeed tragic and we should persuade people against it as a solution for solvable problems, it is simply no business of government to outlaw suicide or to outlaw things that may be used in suicide, including firearms. A government that outlaws suicide is saying that it owns it’s citizens and that citizens are government slaves. Nothing can be more Totalitarian than that.

Moreover, outlawing firearms to prevent suicides would be about as effective at stopping suicides as our long-standing and ever-continuing “War On (Some) Drugs,” which is such a smashing success. /Sarcasm. 🙄

As for deaths by firearms accidents, those have gone from 2500 in 1903 to 549 in 2021, a nearly 80 percent drop, according to The National Safety Council. You can download the chart on Historical Preventable Fatality Trends here:

HISTORICAL PREVENTABLE FATALITY TRENDS

Deaths by Cause

And this drastic decline in gun accidents took place even though population has grown and gun sales have doubled the number of firearms in civilian hands since 1994.

[UnseenParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

Now, if adult humans beings own themselves, then they have a right to take any risk they want with their own minds and bodies, up to and including taking their own lives.

You can own yourself without owning a gun the same way you can own yourself without owning a house (I’m a renter) or owning a car (I’m a public transit person) or owning a vial of ebola (which I don’t). Now, if we let everyone have guns that would make our society less humane and safe, if only because those guns would be falling into the hands of people who see guns as the go to solution for a lot of things as well as crazy people and people who wish to get rid of someone else. It wouldn’t make our society a better or safer place. All one needs to do is compare the places with high gun possession versus those that don’t. A high rate of gun possession makes everyone more likely to die a gun homicide. Living in a household with a gun makes women in particular far more likely to die a gun homicide.

I’m not sure what your point is about suicide. First, there are many ways of offing oneself and no one who really wants to die will be stopped due to the unavailability of a firearm, as you took great effort to emphasize. Your own statistics show suicide going down along with accidental gun deaths, but since gun deaths are rising, the result of the proliferation of firearms really has resulted in a statistical rise in non-suicides and non-accidents which means more gun murders.

 

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen,

Between talk like that from the Trumpistas and actual deeds of Antifa and the Burn Loot Murder crowd of the past 3 years, you’re making my case for me in defense of private ownership of firearms by people who just want to be left the Hell alone by everybody else.

And while shoplifting is not a capital offense, as a retail employee who has gone years at a time without bonuses because of these looting assholes, I would fully favor making looters wish they were dead.

Pillary them through the store in yolks or stockades and call out to the paying customers: “Hey everybody! This is why Dove Soap and men’s socks are in locked cases! This is why decent restaurants won’t locate near your homes and fresh produce stands have gone away! This is why you don’t have nice things!”

[UnseenParticipant]

Once again, and as always, you provide no evidence whatsoever that guns make a place a safer place to live.

It’s clear—and you might even admit—that living in a society safer from gun violence isn’t a value you give a flying fuck at the Moon about as long as you can feel safer hugging your gun.

Because the overwhelming evidence is that places with an abundance of firearms are worse places to live because they make gun homicides more common.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen,

I just provided you with evidence that more guns do not lead to more gun accidents. And I brought up suicide only because you did.

Other gun control freaks also bring up suicide often because they too think that other people’s lives are “resources” that belong to “society” and that suicide is depriving “society” of it’s fodder. I say in reply that every adult owns their own life and suicide is irrelevant to the issue of gun ownership. And Mrs. Grundy, Gladys Kravitz, and Karen can all go fly a kite.

By the way, Sweden has much more stringent laws than the U.S. regarding training for, and purchase, quantity, storage, and transportation of firearms and ammunition. Yet these laws haven’t stopped the recent gang warfare in Sweden, including grenade attacks:

Swedish PM summons army, police chiefs as gang violence rocks nation
Story by By Johan Ahlander •5d
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/swedish-pm-summons-army-police-chiefs-as-gang-violence-rocks-nation/ar-AA1hqSj8

Swedish Gun Laws

Sweden Gun Laws and Gun Ownership in Sweden

Moreover, France’s strict firearms laws didn’t stop the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo nor the crime endemic in the “No-Go zones” of Paris and other French cities.

Firearms Regulations im France–Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_France

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling

[—Participant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

Other gun control freaks also bring up suicide often because they too think that other people’s lives are “resources” that belong to “society” and that suicide is depriving “society” of it’s fodder.

Viewpoints on suicide are bound to vary considerably on either side of the gun control debate. Many, if not most people are concerned with preventable suicides—those that are the result of rash decision making in a period of mental/ emotional distress. Regardless of whether one believes a person has the right to end their own life or not, a person can hope a person doesn’t kill themselves over a state of mind that would have subsided enough for them to seek help if they had managed to wait it out a little longer. While there are many ways a person can end their lives, there is a peculiar relationship between firearms and suicide, handguns specifically.

By the way, Sweden has much more stringent laws than the U.S. regarding training for, and purchase, quantity, storage, and transportation of firearms and ammunition. Yet these laws haven’t stopped the recent gang warfare in Sweden, including grenade attacks…

No one is claiming all violence and extremism ends with tighter controls on firearms. Few even claim all firearm violence ends. What people are looking at is harm reduction. Sweden is alarmed over eleven firearm deaths in September because it’s a record. The US as of August 1 was averaging 118 firearm deaths per day for all of 2023. Even if we assume only ten percent of that US figure was from homicides—which is extremely unlikely and extremely generous to your position—the US still slightly edges Sweden out on per capita firearms deaths per day as a statistical average.

Do you understand the difference here? The long running status quo in the US is shocking in Sweden. And that’s slanting the numbers in your favour. A more realistic figure for US gun death homicides would be north of 30% or even 40% perhaps (was 43% in 2021). Sweden is reeling over far less gun violence than the US experiences ordinarily.

[DavisModerator]

Gun control advocates are hardly freaks. To support regulating extremely dangerous weapons is not freakish. It is utterly reasonable. I have lived in numerous countries where there are controls on guns. Surprise surprise, the number of accidents, avoidable last-minute suicides and gun homicides are extremely low. Keep in mind that all other forms of weapon based violence, accidents and avoidable last-minute suicides are at the same or even lower than American ones (involving weapons other than guns).

The number of weapons floating around is a lot less important than the controls on it. To be against regulating extremely dangerous weapons is deranged. It is utterly deranged. One simply has lost the ability to think with reason and is unduly influenced by some extreme ideology or attachment to guns if they can look at all the evidence showing minimal or no gun regulations, especially in a violent state/nation, leads to so much unnecessary suffering, with the only benefit being the illusion of protection and freedom, and still advocate it.

I think this conversation can progress no further and no one’s stance will change. If you want to have minimal regulations, so be it. Campaign for it and let your fellow citizens suffer the unnecessary consequences. You will not convince anyone here of joining you. Conversation ended.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by  Davis.

[UnseenParticipant]

Gun Safety Policies Save Lives

We compared gun policy across the country, scoring every state on the strength of its gun laws and comparing it with its rate of gun violence. In states where elected officials have taken action to pass gun safety laws, fewer people die by gun violence. Choose a state to see how it stacks up on 50 key policies, or explore a policy to see how much of the country has adopted it.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Davis,

I never thought I would change any minds on this subject. I’m just pointing out how fallacious and ridiculous the arguments are for gun control.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by  TheEncogitationer.

[UnseenParticipant]

@ Enco

I know you won’t change your mind because you are basically a kind of cult member.  You’re letting your mental dependence on guns rot your mind.

The evidence is that you can’t see that the states with the loosest regulation of guns tend to have higher rates of gun homicides. Any rational person, not in the grip of an obsession, could draw the obvious conclusion. The reason is that their eyes are not lying to them.

So, let’s try again: WHERE in the country is looser gun regulation resulting in a safer place to live?

[—Participant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

Davis, I never thought I would change any minds on this subject. I’m just pointing out how fallacious and ridiculous the arguments are for gun control.

Except you aren’t. You’re just building a field of gun-control scarecrows then going hog wild on a crusade against your own creations. Meanwhile, gun control advocates are standing off to the side scratching their heads asking ‘Are those scarecrows supposed to be us?’.

[Author]

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