On 2 April 2015 at 19:40, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:19 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 1 April 2015 at 20:50, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 1:40 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>>> I hope that isn't an April Fool! >>>> >>>> Well, this isn't rocket science... >>>> >>>> In 2013, it was more likely Americans would be killed by a toddler than >>>>> a terrorist. In that year, three Americans were killed in the Boston >>>>> Marathon bombing, while toddlers killed five, all by accidentally shooting >>>>> a gun. >>>> >>>> >>>> Because all those guns make you safer... >>>> >>> >>> Guns can be very dangerous, but like drugs there is no way to stop >>> people from obtaining them. It's already possible to 3D print one, and this >>> technology will only improve from now on. >>> >>> So how does every other country in the world manage to have less guns >> per person than the USA? Magic? >> > > Independently of Brent's remarks, with which I agree, my point is that > even if forbidding people from owning guns works -- and I'm sure it works > to some degree at the moment -- such restrictions become increasingly > ineffective as technology progresses. > Who suggested banning guns? Are guns banned in, say, New Zealand? No. Yet there are less per head, and less injuries and deaths caused by them, probably because Kiwis own guns only for the reasons one might expect - hunting, for example - rather than whatever reason it is Americans do (it looks from the outside like a sort of national fetish, a theory that the glamourisation of violence in many American TV shows and movies would seem to support). So, anyway, any comments that address the actual situation? > > Home 3D-printed guns are at the prototype level at the moment. Both the > designs and 3D printing technology will keep improving and becoming > cheaper. People are already experimenting with 3D printing ammunition. > The technology to make atomic bombs in your basement exists. So, should that be made illegal? What do you think? > > The trouble with trying to solve problems by restricting access to > technology (in this case firearms) is that, as technology progresses, the > laws have to become increasingly repressive to keep up. Preventing people > from owning guns will soon devolve into a multi-prong approach where you > have to restrict access to information on the Internet (if that is even > possible), regulate the sale and ownership of 3D printers, worry about the > availability of the common components that go into gunpowder, etc. For any > difficulty you pose, there will be eventually a technological solution, and > the only possible response from the regulatory mindset is to forbid more > things, until we need permission to do almost anything. > Now that we've got the straw men out of the way, I find my question still stands. So, why *does *the USA have so many firearms per head compared to anywhere else in the world, even a few was zones? And why does it have the highest rate of firearm related deaths and injuries per head in the first world, and close to the highest in the world (outside war zones) ? Once you've answered that, then we can argue about whether there's any reason to fix the situation, and if so how to go about it. But so far, the cart is before the horse. > > The real problem we have to solve is this: how to attain a society where > we can trust each other? > Stop glamourising violence, perhaps? As an exercise you could try watching some NZ films (say) that involve violence, e.g. "Black Sheep". Now try watching some US film that involves violence (too numerous to mention). See which one makes it look horrible and painful and nasty, and which makes it look kind of cool and sexy. Just a symptom, of course, not a cause. > Repressive regulation goes in the opposite direction and it misses the > point. Brazil is on the lower end of the scale in your map, yet is has much > more gun violence per capita than the US, which shows us that lowering the > number of guns per capita is not guaranteed to solve anything. > You think that Europe has repressive regulations as far as guns are concerned? Can you find any Europeans who agree with you (apart from the odd psycho-killer?) So far the only counter examples have involved India and Brazil. But restricting things to western democracies - Europe and America and Australasia, say - still shows up the same disparity. (It isn't too surprising that people in Brazil and India have different problems to people in the 'west', after all.) Oh, wait, I forgot Switzerland. But since I haven't yet been told if the map is wrong on that front, or if Swiss households have a lot more people in than American ones (or if Brent was mistaken, perish the thought) I can't really comment on that. > > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
