Nice conversation derailer, though.

Example: California recently enacted a law to "create a powerful incentive for the firearm industry" by allowing citizens to sue them for "failured to implement 'reasonable' controls", by using a similar mechanism as Texas' bill that enables people to sue doctors who perform abortions.

Senator Portantino: "If Texas can outrageously use this type of law to attack a woman’s reproductive freedom, we can do the same thing in California to hold gun dealers accountable for their actions."

OP said:

> The tactic used to bring one to it's knees will be used to stifle other freedoms as well.

Which seems to be exactly what was done in California with its lawsuit legislation that was modeled after Texas'.

I can't help but agree with OP that this is a similar tactic of using lawsuits to bully people into compliance by draining their resources. It's an old tactic, but it's still unjust, regardless of the particular legal issue.

Well funded by people for selfless political reasons, not by large corporations: as the parent comment says, the situation with USA gun control is the exact opposite of MPAA-related entities suing citizens.

Meanwhile most firearm manufacturers are not super viable and the NRA gets almost all of it's money from donations below $1,000.

I think parent-poster's point is that there's a fundamental funding asymmetry between (A) a political-action group directly sustained by a current money-making industry and its future growth opportunities (B) a political-action group which is not and relies on ideological/altruistic donations.

In the case of media/DRM/piracy, the profit/politics nexus mainly lies with the big media companies and the RIAA/MPAA etc.

In the case of US-gun-stuff, the profit/politics nexus predominantly lies with the gun-manufacturers and NRA etc.

Firearms are not freedom of speech. Guns kill. Just like vehicles kill and are therefore subject to regulation (or outright prohibition in many spaces) above individual freedom.

I'm talking about whether it's justified to bully your adversaries with lawsuits in order to drain their resources. The particular legal issue doesn't matter--it's subverting and abusing the justice system.

Society has done a really good job of allowing people to pretend reality doesn't exist and not die for it.

See, in the past, you had to believe bears were not to be poked or you risked dying from poking a bear. At some point someone had to learn this lesson. Probably Bold Billy poked a bear, his buddy Timid Terry watched the bear eat him, then decided poking bears wasn't a good idea. Timid Terry then went back to the village and described what happened to Bold Billy, showed everyone Bold Billy's remains, and thus was their respect for reality both reaffirmed and their survival increased.

So then the village started teaching its children to be careful around caves and not to poke bears. Jackass Jerry grew up hearing stories by Timid Terry about the time Bold Billy helped a bear make it through winter by allowing said bear to partake of his flesh. Only Jackass Jerry never believed it, so one day, he decided to go poke the bear. Well, Jackass Jerry turned into Jambalaya Jerry and thus the bear once again get assisted in it's preparations for the winter.

And thus was the lesson taught by Bold Billy reinforced years later by Jambalaya Jerry, who wanted to make sure the rest of the village was kept safe by their understanding of reality.

---

Society in general has become so good at protecting its members that many of those members can survive despite believing things that are patently untrue. Today, Jackass Jerry may never have turned into Jambalaya Jerry despite the mistaken belief that poking a bear isn't dangerous. That's just how good the guard rails are.

The point is that your reasoning here is _PATENTLY_ untrue, but you've been allowed to rationalize your way into whatever feels right because the guardrails of society don't force a respect of reality on you.

In this case, the reasons for regulation are many and varied. Something NOT outright killing someone is not, nor has it ever been, a justification for letting it remain unregulated.

You disagree with the poster you responded to. And that's great, it's certainly within your rights to do so. But your rationalization of that disagreement is patently untrue and makes me wonder if we're looking at what would have happened if Jackass Jerry had never met a bear.

Imagine if someone argued theft should be unregulated because no one died.

If you wanna own a gun, great, but the regulations should be extreme - just like anything else hazardous, like motorized vehicles. I can't speed in urban areas just because "it's muh freedom of movement" and I haven't run anybody over (yet). Statistics are statistics and guns increase crime, violence, and death.

Also the current limits on arms are all unconstitutional. There's no question about it. But there is a whole host of things that are unconstitutional that don't seem to matter anyway, like social security and minimum wage.

They should have made the second amendment the first. Then I think you'd get it.

Pro-gun does fit the comparison much better, because there are obvious industry profits behind the lobbies - at the cost of violence and death.

edit: tired of this. i own lots of guns and have never killed anybody. i had this same argument with somebody else yesterday over financial KYC: we do not fight crime by stripping law-abiding Americans of their freedoms and subjecting them to increased state control.

Sometimes I'm glad I live in the UK (not often, mind)

Edit: seems to be the latter

https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2020/october...

If you compare to Canada which, compared to all Western countries besides the US, has comparatively lax gun laws and high firearms ownership rates and a similar overall culture:

  * US sees 12.21 firearms deaths per capita per year to Canada's 1.94.
  * US sees 4.46 homicides via firearm per capita per year to Canada's 0.52.

This pattern holds over basically all numbers relating to rates of violence at every level of division.

According to these statistics USA has only almost 4 times as many guns as Canada, suggesting that to a large extent "people kill people".

Also, the type of firearms owned are different. In Canada, firearms are mostly for hunting whereas in the United States, they are mostly for protection.

In Canada, less than 12% of firearm-owning households have hand guns whereas it is at 72% in the U.S. In Canada, 95% of firearm-owning households own long guns. Long guns are more inconvenient for committing crimes or murders than handguns.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/america...

https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/jsp-sjp/wd98_4-d...

regardless when will y'all understand citing death statistics will not convince us to ban guns? we oppose it because we believe it's wrong to restrict a basic freedom not because death figures are under some magic threshold where we'd support it if the number went over.

By this metric, the US is better off that much of South and Central America. I bet if the stats were normalized by deaths/100K guns instead the US would look pretty good. (~17% drop for US, as we have more guns than people, but every other country has significant increases)

I don't like this; I grew up with guns, but even I find the rabid fetishization of guns to be a sad reflection on our society, but I have precisely zero allusions of any change, any time soon.

That has nothing to-do with each other.

It's like saying i would happily trade the idea of country's to prevent wars.

For the simpletons it makes sense, for everyone else not.

Cute that you tried to call me simple, I guess.

Gun-Violence have other root's, the constant fear of being threatened, the media and the country who is the only one with a declining lifespan[1] (exceptions are country's with war). The Gun's are not the problem, the state of mind of this country is.

Howto change the US mindset to a positive future instead of a "near in the future zombie apocalypse's and jeff bezose's at the helm of it" i don't know.

But i know that having constant fear to have a "safe" life is not a good way of living, and maybe have look at you...your fear of schools shooting's...that would never come to my mind (for example in Switzerland...with full automatic military riffles in nearly every 20-35yo men closet).

It's the Culture (Dog eat Dog?), Media and Mind plus the politicians and the "military complex" because they LOVE IT!

[1] The US is between Ecuador and Malaysia year 2020 so without real Corona impact:

https://www.worlddata.info/life-expectancy.php

This is specialists work and there are a finite number of specialists in even large society. I propose that daylight rules, disclosure of funding and declaration of activity, would do quite a bit to take the threatening nature of this kind of thing away. Let groups work toward their political goals, yes. But in the open.

So you agree we should stop people from having free and easy access to guns?

Because I'm all about the freedom to send my children to school without worrying they're going to get shot.

Your children already are covered by laws against murder. Banning guns may decrease the rate of school shootings, but it won't guarantee they cease. You'll never live in a world worry-free of gun violence, especially now that anyone can 3d print them at home.

You can't then say "aha but the UK has more knife crime", because again, per capita, the UK has a tiny fraction as much knife crime as the US.

people have wanted to take our guns for a long time and this is just the latest cause to hang it on. ronald reagan tried it with racism. roosevelt and company tried it with mob violence. this is just the latest excuse.