The UK poverty rate is the irrelevant data point I was talking about, but you're right, I was discussing the murder rate in my original posts because that's what the wiki article has and I guess my brain isn't fully switched on. I'm sorry, it's been a long day. I usually try to focus on overall violent crime because there is no doubt a difference in lethality between the US and UK.
Regardless - your graph still shows an upward trend linking poverty to the murder rate in the US. I would bet that you will also find that poorer cities in the UK tend to be more violent, but keep in mind the UK is also a more stable country than the US with generally better programs for the poor and unwell.
[QUOTE=Grenadiac;53168189]I usually try to focus on overall violent crime because there is no doubt a difference in lethality between the US and UK.[/QUOTE]
...And that's not something to be concerned about? If I had to choose between being wounded and dying I'd certainly pick the former.
[QUOTE]Regardless - your graph still shows an upward trend linking poverty to the murder rate.[/QUOTE]
Isn't sufficient to consider poverty a cause according to your own criterion.
[QUOTE=_Axel;53168197]...And that's not something to be concerned about?[/QUOTE]
Of course it is, but that difference becomes virtually irrelevant if you reduce the amount of people trying to kill each other to begin with, which is clearly an achievable goal.
[QUOTE]Isn't sufficient to consider poverty a cause according to your own criterion.[/QUOTE]
You are trying to link the amount of guns to the amount of crime. That's not valid. The fact that many nations exist with lots of guns but not lots of crime is the counterpoint to that. Violence levels in different cities are affected by many more factors than just "guns=crime," which is [I]what I've been arguing.[/I] Those high poverty-lower murder rate cities have more going on than just lots of or not lots of guns.
[QUOTE=Grenadiac;53168201]Of course it is, but that difference becomes virtually irrelevant if you reduce the amount of people trying to kill each other to begin with, which is clearly an achievable goal.[/QUOTE]
I beg to differ. You're a loooong way from reducing your crime rates to nothingness. In the meantime, reducing lethality could help a lot with alleviating the pressure said crime puts on the population at large.
[QUOTE]You are trying to link the amount of guns to the amount of crime. That's not valid. The fact that many nations exist with lots of guns but not lots of crime is the counterpoint to that. Violence levels in different cities are affected by many more factors than just "guns=crime," which is [I]what I've been arguing.[/I] Those high poverty-lower murder rate cities have more going on than just lots of or not lots of guns.[/QUOTE]
My point never was that proliferation was the sole cause, just that it was a significant one.
The same counterpoint you mention can be applied to poor and crimeless cities as well. In the same way that this counterpoint doesn't mean that poverty doesn't affect crime, your counterpoint doesn't mean that proliferation doesn't affect lethality.
[QUOTE=Kiwi;53168204]I am analyzing the last 2 pages of this thread to determine trolling. Stand-by.[/QUOTE]
The trolling part refers to his claim my data is irrelevant when he's the one who told me to process it in the first place. It seems he misremembered that part, so I suppose it doesn't apply.
[QUOTE=_Axel;53168222]I beg to differ. You're a loooong way from reducing your crime rates to nothingness. In the meantime, reducing lethality could help a lot with alleviating the pressure said crime puts on the population at large.[/quote]
It certainly could, but reducing proliferation in the short term is probably actually the hardest solution that's been put on the table. We have more guns than people in this country, literally, and there is absolutely no practical way to tackle that problem - if you consider it a problem, and I certainly do, to an extent - without basically unlimited funding, and certainly not without unfairly affecting a lot of upstanding people or setting off a lot of lunatics (who shouldn't have guns in the first place, and probably wouldn't if I had it my way)
[quote]My point never was that proliferation was the sole cause, just that it was a significant one.
The same counterpoint you mention can be applied to poor and crimeless cities as well. In the same way that this counterpoint doesn't mean that poverty doesn't affect crime, your counterpoint doesn't mean that proliferation doesn't affect lethality.[/quote]
There doesn't really seem to be any reliable provable link between proliferation and crime rates.
[quote]The trolling part refers to his claim my data is irrelevant when he's the one who told me to process it in the first place. It seems he misremembered that part, so I suppose it doesn't apply.[/QUOTE]
Again, I really am sorry for that. I'm used to arguing from a certain position and using new data while I was in a zombie state was a mistake.
Good on the kids I say, if my life was potentially at risk I'd be out of that school fucking sharpish.
[QUOTE=Scot;53164920]im sick of the mental health meme
it's a factor for sure but stop passing the buck onto a much more complex issue when an easily solvable one exists[/QUOTE]
Mental health affects hundreds of times more people than perceived loose gun laws, though...
[QUOTE=_Axel;53168183][B][I]and stop wasting my time.[/I][/B][/QUOTE]
I'm coming into this dry, but how can they be wasting your time if you're actively choosing to engage and reply?
[QUOTE=Grenadiac;53168239]It certainly could, but reducing proliferation in the short term is probably actually the hardest solution that's been put on the table. We have more guns than people in this country, literally, and there is absolutely no practical way to tackle that problem - if you consider it a problem, and I certainly do, to an extent - without basically unlimited funding, and certainly not without unfairly affecting a lot of upstanding people or setting off a lot of lunatics (who shouldn't have guns in the first place, and probably wouldn't if I had it my way)[/QUOTE]
I'm not sure how the sheer amounts of guns makes the task impossible. It makes it harder for sure, but the sheer reduction in lethality (which we've seen is astonishingly high) is most certainly worth it.
It wouldn't really unfairly affect upstanding people as long as they're compensated for turning in their weapons. I'm not certain if that's what your point is.
As for "setting off lunatics", that's not exactly a viable argument against a legislation, is it? That basically amounts to yielding to their threats. It's doubtful that their retaliation would be as impactful as the current proliferation is on lethality, anyway.
[QUOTE]There doesn't really seem to be any reliable provable link between proliferation and crime rates.[/QUOTE]
Read the post again. I'm talking about lethality, not crime rate.
[editline]2nd March 2018[/editline]
[QUOTE=Pyth;53168935]I'm coming into this dry, but how can they be wasting your time if you're actively choosing to engage and reply?[/QUOTE]
???
Have you actually read the whole exchange? At the time, his response to my taking the time to process the exact data he demanded was "you processed irrelevant data". At this point, my time was [I]already[/I] wasted because I tended to his request in good faith and was brushed off in return.
Grenadiac already admitted he made a mistake, anyway. What exactly is the point of you digging this up other than forcing in a quick zinger and stroking the pro-gun circlejerk?
Consider how expensive fair compensation would get with any kind of buyback in the US, though. It would quickly become unreasonably expensive. The average value of a firearm is probably somewhere between 700 and 1000 dollars. If we optimistically went with $700 per gun, then tried to reduce the number of guns in circulation to "just" half in order to match the next most saturated country in terms of proliferation, we would be compensating gun owners for roughly 150,000,000 firearms for a cost of $105,000,000,000. That's a hundred and five billion dollars that can't be paid out in credit or anything, we're talking cash upfront. I don't know if the treasury can even produce that kind of cash on demand.
It isn't impossible, but it's extremely expensive compared to the other options available which statistics suggest would ultimately be more effective.
Anyway, forcing upstanding citizens to turn in property they aren't committing crimes with IS unfair, if you ask me.
[QUOTE=Grenadiac;53171271]Consider how expensive fair compensation would get with any kind of buyback in the US, though. It would quickly become unreasonably expensive. The average value of a firearm is probably somewhere between 700 and 1000 dollars. If we optimistically went with $700 per gun, then tried to reduce the number of guns in circulation to "just" half in order to match the next most saturated country in terms of proliferation, we would be compensating gun owners for roughly 150,000,000 firearms for a cost of $105,000,000,000. That's a hundred and five billion dollars that can't be paid out in credit or anything, we're talking cash upfront. I don't know if the treasury can even produce that kind of cash on demand.[/quote]
That is quite a lot. But US military expenditures in 2017 alone amounted to 611 billion US dollars. The sum you mention is less than 18% of that. The US government is definitely capable of fielding that amount, especially if it's divided in several yearly buybacks.
[Quote]It isn't impossible, but it's extremely expensive compared to the other options available which statistics suggest would ultimately be more effective.[/quote]
That remains to be shown. Reducing poverty levels to below 5% would probably be just as expensive if not more, and we've already seen it isn't a sufficient policy to reduce murder rates to reasonable levels anyway.
As for other causes that could be countered, you haven't mentioned them yet nor demonstrated to what extent they impact murder rates, so we can't really conclude on whether these alternatives would be cheaper or more effective.
[Quote]Anyway, forcing upstanding citizens to turn in property they aren't committing crimes with IS unfair, if you ask me.[/QUOTE]
That entirely depends on whether gun ownership is worthy of being considered a right, which is what we were debating earlier.
[QUOTE=_Axel;53171792]That is quite a lot. But US military expenditures in 2017 alone amounted to 611 billion US dollars. The sum you mention is less than 18% of that. The US government is definitely capable of fielding that amount, especially if it's divided in several yearly buybacks.[/QUOTE]
US military expenditures aren't paid out on the spot in hard cash, they're on a credit line like everyone else throwing huge sums of money around. No bank is going to provide $105,000,000,000 for a gun buyback.
[QUOTE]That remains to be shown. Reducing poverty levels to below 5% would probably be just as expensive if not more, and we've already seen it isn't a sufficient policy to reduce murder rates to reasonable levels anyway.[/QUOTE]
Prior buybacks haven't been demonstrated to have any effect in the US or elsewhere (e.g. Australia) but there is a clear trend of stable societies not having these problems whether they have guns or not. Good social programs are a good step toward building a more stable society. Ultimately, causing people in poverty to feel like they don't have to fight the system just to survive will have an enormous impact. The US is also facing long standing racial discontent and other societal wounds which nobody really seems to be in a hurry to heal.
[QUOTE]As for other causes that could be countered, you haven't mentioned them yet nor demonstrated to what extent they impact murder rates, so we can't really conclude on whether these alternatives would be cheaper or more effective.[/QUOTE]
Have too. I direct you to my big post: [url]https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1593721&p=53132671&viewfull=1#post53132671[/url]
I think I mirrored it earlier in the thread, but maybe that was a different thread. Anyway, this post contains a look at problems and solutions. Nothing in there is a total fix, but it's a good start.
[QUOTE]That entirely depends on whether gun ownership is worthy of being considered a right, which is what we were debating earlier.[/QUOTE]
I would think that even if there was a mandatory NERF gun buyback. Making lawfully owned property unlawful and then confiscating it isn't really okay, whether you have some specific right to it or not, especially if you can't empirically prove that it's going to effect positive change.
[QUOTE=Grenadiac;53171824]US military expenditures aren't paid out on the spot in hard cash, they're on a credit line like everyone else throwing huge sums of money around. No bank is going to provide $105,000,000,000 for a gun buyback.[/QUOTE]
Why does it matter what the money is used for exactly as long as the government is vouching for it? Military expenditures don't exactly typically result in returns on investment, do they?
[QUOTE]Prior buybacks haven't been demonstrated to have any effect in the US or elsewhere (e.g. Australia) but there is a clear trend of stable societies not having these problems whether they have guns or not. Good social programs are a good step toward building a more stable society.[/QUOTE]
Haven't you said that proliferation [I]does[/I] effect lethality? It should logically follow that reducing it lowers it. Why doesn't it, then?
[QUOTE]Ultimately, causing people in poverty to feel like they don't have to fight the system just to survive will have an enormous impact. The US is also facing long standing racial discontent and other societal wounds which nobody really seems to be in a hurry to heal.[/QUOTE]
Those are genuine qualitative justifications, but ones that are hard to quantify. How can you link these causes to a measurable effect on murder rates and find out its extent?
[QUOTE]Have too. I direct you to my big post: [url]https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1593721&p=53132671&viewfull=1#post53132671[/url]
I think I mirrored it earlier in the thread, but maybe that was a different thread. Anyway, this post contains a look at problems and solutions. Nothing in there is a total fix, but it's a good start.[/QUOTE]
Those are all interesting solutions, but once again it's pretty hard to quantify and project their effects as long as we don't have a sturdy model for how those issues affect murder rates. So it would be hard to prove that they are cheaper policies/have more effect.
[QUOTE]I would think that even if there was a mandatory NERF gun buyback. Making lawfully owned property unlawful and then confiscating it isn't really okay, whether you have some specific right to it or not, especially if you can't empirically prove that it's going to effect positive change.[/QUOTE]
I don't really see why. Laws change all the time, as long as it doesn't retroactively apply to lawful gun owners and brands them as criminals I don't understand what would make it particularly unfair.
There are already laws in many countries that restrict where people can drive their cars based on how much they emit, and they're not even compensated in return most of the time. If we couldn't make previously lawful property unlawful then we couldn't enact a single environmental or health and safety policy. It seems like a pretty big stretch to make to me.
[QUOTE=_Axel;53171858]Why does it matter what the money is used for exactly as long as the government is vouching for it? Military expenditures don't exactly typically result in returns on investment, do they?[/QUOTE]
Of course they do. If they didn't, there'd be no military industry.
To clarify: it puts the government in debt but the individuals calling the shots are making huge personal profits, so they don't care about the mess they're making for the next guy. They get paid privately by contractors to steer the government into selecting their bids. A gun buyback wouldn't have that kickback effect for the politicians. To them, it's unjustifiable expenditure.
[QUOTE]Haven't you said that proliferation [I]does[/I] effect lethality? It should logically follow that reducing it lowers it. Why doesn't it, then?[/QUOTE]
In these countries people aren't really trying to kill each other to begin with. If people chose to do so, they would be more lethal, but they don't, as a consequence of having a stable society. If you have lots of attempted murder going on to begin with like the US does, firearms will make it more likely to succeed, but it will still go on with or without them.
[QUOTE]Those are genuine qualitative justifications, but ones that are hard to quantify. How can you link these causes to a measurable effect on murder rates and find out its extent?[/QUOTE]
Without direct access to more detailed statistics and statisticians' tools, it's hard for me to demonstrate specific links like that. All the information we have is pretty general. I fill in the blanks with experience and feedback from police officers and other people from other groups with a finger on the pulse of society.
[QUOTE]Those are all interesting solutions, but once again it's pretty hard to quantify and project their effects as long as we don't have a sturdy model for how those issues affect murder rates. So it would be hard to prove that they are cheaper policies/have more effect.[/QUOTE]
That goes both ways, so when all we can really do is look at general numbers and guess about details we have to tread lightly. That's why I haven't suggested and aren't interested in sweeping change on hypotheticals. Everything I've proposed can be implemented with some easily imagined positive effect as natural as dominoes falling without negatively impacting law abiding citizens in any meaningful way. At worst if anything I proposed didn't have a positive effect it wouldn't have a negative effect either; that's better than making a big sweeping change only to have it backfire in some way.
Keep in mind lawmakers also don't have access to better information - and if they did, they wouldn't read it anyway.
[QUOTE]I don't really see why. Laws change all the time, as long as it doesn't retroactively apply to lawful gun owners and brands them as criminals I don't understand what would make it particularly unfair.
There are already laws in many countries that restrict where people can drive their cars based on how much they emit, and they're not even compensated in return most of the time. If we couldn't make previously lawful property unlawful then we couldn't enact a single environmental or health and safety policy. It seems like a pretty big stretch to make to me.[/QUOTE]
Generally when you make something illegal, the law allows existing owners to continue owning that thing, which has been the case with virtually all gun laws in the US including the AWB. New environmental controls don't apply to older cars, either. But restricting where you can and can't drive a car is the government's right: they own the roads. They can't tell you, however, that you can't tool around in your own car on your own property, unless they seize that property from you, which would be unfair.
[QUOTE=Grenadiac;53171872]Of course they do. If they didn't, there'd be no military industry.
To clarify: it puts the government in debt but the individuals calling the shots are making huge profits, so they don't care about the mess they're making for the next guy. A gun buyback wouldn't have that kickback effect for the politicians. It's unjustifiable expenditure.[/QUOTE]
I wasn't aware of that, thanks. So essentially expenditure-oriented lawmaking will necessarily have a gun (and more generally military) industry favorable bias because of the conflicts of interest involved?
[QUOTE]In these countries people aren't really trying to kill each other to begin with. If people chose to do so, they would be more lethal, but they don't, as a consequence of having a stable society. If you have lots of attempted murder going on to begin with like the US does, firearms will make it more likely to succeed, but it will still go on with or without them.[/QUOTE]
Alright, so if it were possible, a buyback [I]would[/I] lower the effective murder rate by virtue of murders being harder to pull off.
[QUOTE]Without direct access to more detailed statistics and statisticians' tools, it's hard for me to demonstrate specific links like that. All the information we have is pretty general. I fill in the blanks with experience and feedback from police officers and other people from other groups with a finger on the pulse of society.
That goes both ways, so when all we can really do is look at general numbers and guess about details we have to tread lightly. That's why I haven't suggested and aren't interested in sweeping change on hypotheticals. Everything I've proposed can be implemented with some easily imagined positive effect as natural as dominoes falling without negatively impacting law abiding citizens in any meaningful way. At worst if anything I proposed didn't have a positive effect it wouldn't have a negative effect either; that's better than making a big sweeping change only to have it backfire in some way.
Keep in mind lawmakers also don't have access to better information - and if they did, they wouldn't read it anyway.
[/QUOTE]
Those proposed changes do seem less resource intensive than a buyback, so I would be supportive of them even if I'm not confident in them completely solving the issue.
That being said, I'm unsure of how a buyback could genuinely backfire.
[QUOTE]Generally when you make something illegal, the law allows existing owners to continue owning that thing, which has been the case with virtually all gun laws in the US including the AWB. New environmental controls don't apply to older cars, either. But restricting where you can and can't drive a car is the government's right: they own the roads. They can't tell you, however, that you can't tool around in your own car on your own property, unless they seize that property from you, which would be unfair.[/QUOTE]
I don't see why they couldn't make it illegal to drive a high-emission car on your own property. It's not like those emissions are tidy and stay within the bounds of your own backyard. Most industrial environmental and safety standards apply on machinery and processes that occur on company private property. Industries have had to ditch or modify previously lawful machines because they no longer respected the legislation. The government is fully within their rights to regulate what happens on private property, and I don't understand why you'd believe they aren't.
In any case, it seems to be a semantical disagreement you're having. Would you deem it fair if carrying a weapon outside of your own property was deemed illegal?
[QUOTE=_Axel;53171989]That being said, I'm unsure of how a buyback could genuinely backfire.[/QUOTE]
Australia's violent crime rate, despite having been falling for the prior decade, suddenly spiked in the year following their widespread buyback. That's a pretty tenuous link, I know, but I'd be concerned about what the immediate impact might be in a country where firearms are seen as tools of self-defense.
What research that has been done on buybacks [url=https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/12/gun-buybacks-popular-but-ineffective/1829165/]generally suggests[/url] that they're not an effective way of reducing criminal use of firearms:
[quote]The relatively small number of guns recovered isn't the only problem, Scott said. Buyback programs tend to attract people who are least likely to commit crimes and to retrieve guns that are least likely to be used in crimes.
Scott and others say violent criminals – the people who do most of the shooting and killing – steer clear of buyback programs unless they're trying to make some quick cash by selling a weapon they don't want anymore.
That means buyback campaigns more often end up with hunting rifles or old revolvers from someone's attic than with automatic weapons from the trunk of a criminal's car.
"They don't get a lot of crime guns off the street," said Matt Makarios, a criminal justice professor who studied buyback programs while at the University of Cincinnati in 2008. "You're only going to reduce the likelihood of gun crimes if you reduce the number of guns used in crimes."[/quote]
If we're entertaining the possibility of throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars on social programs, I'd much rather see it go to measures that we know will help, like universal healthcare and investment in our inner cities, rather than spend such an enormous sum purely on addressing the symptoms of our problems when it's not clear what effect it would even have.
[quote=_Axel;53171989]Would you deem it fair if carrying a weapon outside of your own property was deemed illegal?[/quote]
That's already exactly how it is in any state that bans open carry and doesn't issue concealed carry permits, I'm not sure what you're getting at.
[QUOTE=_Axel;53171989]I wasn't aware of that, thanks. So essentially expenditure-oriented lawmaking will necessarily have a gun (and more generally military) industry favorable bias because of the conflicts of interest involved?[/QUOTE]
Basically - anything based on handing contracts out to the lowest bidder will have contractors buttering up corrupt officials to choose them.
[QUOTE]Alright, so if it were possible, a buyback [I]would[/I] lower the effective murder rate by virtue of murders being harder to pull off.[/QUOTE]
Yeah.
[QUOTE]Those proposed changes do seem less resource intensive than a buyback, so I would be supportive of them even if I'm not confident in them completely solving the issue.
That being said, I'm unsure of how a buyback could genuinely backfire.[/QUOTE]
The buyback could backfire because criminals who already have guns aren't likely to turn them in for a buyback. Only law abiding citizens are going to go to a mandatory buyback to begin with. I offer Australia as an example of a backfire.
I am struggling to find the graphs I used to use for this, but the gist of it is, Australia had already had a very low and dropping gun crime rate prior to having any gun laws on the books at all. It had been dropping at a roughly steady rate all through the 80s. Their gun crime rate was already so low that the Port Arthur massacre by itself caused a noticeable spike on the chart in 93. After they cracked down on firearms and did the mandatory buyback, violent gun crime [I]spiked again[/I] - possibly because criminals kept theirs and were now able to use them on a freshly disarmed populace. After those criminals were brought to justice and the spike ended, gun crime resumed dropping at the pre-93 rate as if nothing had even happened.
Sorry I don't have a graph to support this. I don't know where it is.
[QUOTE]I don't see why they couldn't make it illegal to drive a high-emission car on your own property. It's not like those emissions are tidy and stay within the bounds of your own backyard. Most industrial environmental and safety standards apply on machinery and processes that occur on company private property. Industries have had to ditch or modify previously lawful machines because they no longer respected the legislation. The government is fully within their rights to regulate what happens on private property, and I don't understand why you'd believe they aren't.[/QUOTE]
Business and industrial regulation is on a separate layer from individual laws. As public actors, businesses are subject to a lot of laws that private individuals are not. The government can't prevent you from operating a high emissions vehicle on your own property because that power isn't vested in them - and that's true everywhere, even in Europe. Even if they could institute such a law, it still couldn't apply to vehicles that already existed prior to the law, because ex post facto laws are specifically illegal under the US Constitution.
Also, things like OSHA regulations are enforced with a carrot and stick method - there are perks for compliance which get taken away if you're out of compliance. If you're a private business and you don't try to get the carrot to begin with, you don't get the stick. In other words, fully private industrial sites are often OSHA nightmares because those rules don't apply. The only legal trouble you can get in in that situation is if obvious negligence results in an injury. That is also the case across Europe.
Example:
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI[/media]
Everything in this video is awful. The railway is unacceptably bad, well below government standards for public tracks, the locomotive is badly maintained and wouldn't be allowed to run on a public network, and the rolling stock is beyond unsafe, but since this railway is privately owned and the company is private there's nothing stopping them from continuing this nightmare for as long as they please.
Example 2:
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfRnQ7duJnA[/media]
Boiler room of the steamer PS Waverley out of Scotland. This is blatantly unsafe but since Waverley is privately owned and predates the invention of safety in general, she isn't subject to safety rules like "tiny catwalks with non-weight supporting decorative railings are not acceptable around gigantic rapidly moving crankshafts"
They let passengers down here while the ship is under steam, which would not be acceptable on a ship built today and operated by a publicly traded company.
[QUOTE]In any case, it seems to be a semantical disagreement you're having. Would you deem it fair if carrying a weapon outside of your own property was deemed illegal?[/QUOTE]
The government already decides where and under what circumstances you can carry/use a firearm outside of your own property or without permission of the property owner, so yes. While I disagree with some of those decisions, my disagreement is not on a basis of whether or not they have the right to do it.
OK then. I still don't see why it should be considered unfair to ban previously legal property though. It may have legal precedence against it, but I don't get the reasoning behind it.
As for the public/private distinction, that doesn't strike me as very reasonable either. Anybody is a public actor so long as they have an impact on public goods. The air and environmental resources being such a good, driving a high-emission car on private property makes you just as responsible for the consequences as an industrial actor.
When thinking about your response to this, keep in mind that gun owners view a gun like any other piece of property - the same as a car, or a DVD player, or a jar of jam. There are safety rules about them, but they have no special status as property - they're just things you own.
With that in mind, imagine you spent, I dunno, $1000 on something that interests you. The specific thing doesn't matter - what matters is it's your property. You paid for it, you've been paying for its maintenance, and perhaps you have special interest in this property's historic value or maybe it was in a movie you liked or you just enjoy using this property in a responsible manner.
You've been using this property responsibly for years; before you, your parents used the same kind of property responsibly, and their parents before them, and so on. You've never done anything illegal with this property and neither has anyone you know, but suddenly, that property is illegal, and you have to turn it in to be destroyed.
To you it doesn't matter what that property is capable of doing in the wrong hands, because again, you never misused it and had no plans to, yet here it's being taken from you (and you are a criminal if you try to keep it).
That's not fair. It doesn't matter if that property is a gun or a car or a video game or a bottle of whiskey; it's yours and you didn't do anything wrong with it. It isn't right for someone to come along and demand that you give it to them, even if they compensate you for it - especially if you're quite sure their reasoning is wrong and can justify that.
I know you'd feel burned if your government came and took your property no matter what it was; otherwise the concept of property wouldn't exist.
It's unfair because the people who can't use their guns responsibly get the short end of the stick. Take guns out of the equation - if someone was doing bad things with a computer, for example, would you like it if the government decided to confiscate all computers? You didn't do anything wrong, why should you bear the brunt of the punishment?
[QUOTE=Grenadiac;53172071]When thinking about your response to this, keep in mind that gun owners view a gun like any other piece of property - the same as a car, or a DVD player, or a jar of jam. There are safety rules about them, but they have no special status as property - they're just things you own.
With that in mind, imagine you spent, I dunno, $1000 on something that interests you. The specific thing doesn't matter - what matters is it's your property. You paid for it, you've been paying for its maintenance, and perhaps you have special interest in this property's historic value or maybe it was in a movie you liked or you just enjoy using this property in a responsible manner.
You've been using this property responsibly for years; before you, your parents used the same kind of property responsibly, and their parents before them, and so on. You've never done anything illegal with this property and neither has anyone you know, but suddenly, that property is illegal, and you have to turn it in to be destroyed.
To you it doesn't matter what that property is capable of doing in the wrong hands, because again, you never misused it and had no plans to, yet here it's being taken from you (and you are a criminal if you try to keep it).
That's not fair. It doesn't matter if that property is a gun or a car or a video game or a bottle of whiskey; it's yours and you didn't do anything wrong with it. It isn't right for someone to come along and demand that you give it to them, even if they compensate you for it - especially if you're quite sure their reasoning is wrong and can justify that.
I know you'd feel burned if your government came and took your property no matter what it was; otherwise the concept of property wouldn't exist.[/QUOTE]
Your example doesn't really appeal to me, I think you'd need to specify it a little more. I've already mentioned examples of property which, even when used privately, end up negatively affecting the public. I wouldn't deem it unfair to make it illegal if it was properly justified in such a way. Property isn't sacro-saint anyway, otherwise it wouldn't be fair for the government to require taxes. It's part of the social contract to make compromises on property.
The same applies for the health & safety nightmares you posted. Being private property shouldn't absolve industrials from any and all responsibilities. People end up being forced to work on these and deal with the associated risk by virtue of needing a wage to pay for their roof and food. Industrials are entirely responsible for any and all injuries and deaths that occur on their unsecured grounds and I wouldn't see any issue whatsoever with governments enforcing safety standards through legal threats. They can get fucked with a polearm for all I care.
Nobody's forced to work or travel on PS Waverley. :v: I'm using her as an example because I was just raving about her in Auxpics and she seems like a good example of something that appears blatantly unsafe but is tolerated because some dangerous looking things can be enjoyed responsibly.
They shouldn't have to make extensive nonhistoric refits to the ship for health and safety reasons - because at some point it ceases to be a historic vessel and loses its legacy.
They are still subject to responsibilities - but employees of private companies choose what risk level they're okay with. Waverley's crew accepts the risk of being maimed or killed by the antique triple expansion steam engines because they are passionate about the ship and her history and want to keep her alive for the next generation even at their own personal risk.
If unreasonable danger was present and ignored that resulted in someone being injured, there would be severe penalties. For example, if the train shown above jumped the rails and injured someone, the company would be in deep shit. But just operating it that way isn't illegal. The company takes its own measures to ensure that doesn't happen - which they're entitled to do as a private company. Just like publicly traded car manufacturers are now required to have ABS in their cars, but you as a private operator aren't required to leave it enabled if you don't want to for whatever reason - but if your choice to turn it off results in someone getting hurt, you'll be in trouble for it.
In a capitalistic society where working is required to live, you can't claim that an employee working a job is doing so entirely out of his own free will. That alone should be enough to require working conditions to be safe and reasonable, no matter the job in question.
Historical legacy shouldn't supersede employee safety either, for the same reason.
As an educated adult employee in such a society and more importantly a historian, I can assure you that I would love to work on a ship like Waverley despite the apparent lack of safety. It is absolutely a choice. Would you scrap that vessel and shut down heritage steam railways and begin breaking up classic cars in the name of safety? If not, you also have a line somewhere that represents an acceptable balance between safe and neat.
[QUOTE=Grenadiac;53172146]As an educated adult employee in such a society and more importantly a historian, I can assure you that I would love to work on a ship like Waverley despite the apparent lack of safety. It is absolutely a choice. Would you scrap that vessel and shut down heritage steam railways and begin breaking up classic cars in the name of safety? If not, you also have a line somewhere that represents an acceptable balance between safe and neat.[/QUOTE]
Good on you, it's admirable to be willing to sacrifice a bit of personal safety for the sake of historical accuracy.
But you can't possibly claim that every single employee working for private companies is as passionate about it as you are. If financial security is the one thing that tips the balance in favor of disregarding their physical safety, then said company [I]is[/I] effectively forcing them to take those risks, and the workers deserve protection in that regard.
[editline]2nd March 2018[/editline]
Regarding classic cars, I would be in support of banning their use on public roads if the associated safety risk is too great. I see no issue with people voluntarily driving them on private property though.
I can agree that if there's no other reason than penny pinching to sacrifice safety, sure, that company is in the wrong - and the law is already configured to punish penny pinching private companies when they injure people with safety violations.
The point of all this is that somewhere you have to find an acceptable danger level. Firearms can be enjoyed responsibly, and when enjoyed responsibly, no matter what type of firearm - from a single shot .22 all the way up to tank mounted autocannons - they present no threat to society at large. When you have an unstable society which permits weapons to fall into the hands of its least stable members, you have violence.
But that doesn't make law abiding members of that society criminals and it doesn't mean they should be held accountable for the actions of others. Confiscation, destruction, type bans - none of that is the way. Laws should be designed with a focus on punishing the criminal. Through no fault of my own, the future legality of my guns, regardless of antiquity or value, has been called into question, when [I]there is a better way[/I]. I could be deemed a criminal for refusing to be complicit in the destruction of historic antiques in my possession. And I'm not really OK with that.
If an FBI agent swung by and said "give me all your incandescent lightbulbs or go to jail cuz they're bad for the environment" I guess I'd probably give him the lightbulbs, even though I'd think that was stupid. But I'm not going to be as willing to let go of the guns and I don't think I should have to be. If it came down to it, I'd probably give up the AR-15, probably give up the Glock; they have no value to me other than what I paid for them... but I don't think I should have to. And it wouldn't end there.
I'd rather stabilize our society so everything can be enjoyed in safety. I think that's achievable within our lifetimes.
[editline]2nd March 2018[/editline]
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxN0WfFKLRU[/media]
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7fhBm1ouSU[/media]
[img]https://i.imgur.com/yvMC9B6.gif[/img]
It's not a question of companies penny-pinching or not, you misunderstood. A company could be neglecting safety standards for any reason and still be in the wrong. The point is that workers don't necessarily have a choice where they work, especially in the current employment climate, and as such can end up being forced to work in unsafe, dangerous conditions.
If we were talking about an hypothetical country where everyone is given a decent UBI, there would be no issue with companies using their own safety standards as long as potential employees are properly warned about them. But no such country exists. Thus all companies should be legally required to respect health and safety standards.
Companies being punished after an accident happens doesn't make it okay, by the way. That's like saying there's no problem with lots of murders happening as long as the murderers are punished for their crimes.
[editline]2nd March 2018[/editline]
As for the responsible gun ownership issue, I agree that it's a different situation in that a properly secured and used weapon isn't a threat to public safety. But if the most efficient solution to curb non-legal proliferation was a policy that ended up negatively affecting hobbyists, I [I]could[/I] consider it a necessary evil depending on how efficiently it would reduce deaths and injuries.
I admire your belief that stabilizing the US is possible within our lifetime, I do not share your optimism however. If anything, it looks to be going the other direction currently.
If it happened that it was THE ONLY WAY to fix this problem - yes. But I don't think it is and I don't find it palatable.
Again, I'm not really a hardline 2Aer - my concern is mainly for the impact this would have on historic weapons and collectors. I think I should be able to own my AR-15, but I'd give it up in a heartbeat if it meant my actual antiques were never put in jeopardy again, even if I don't think it's the right solution. The problem is there's no way to have that assurance.
An article currently near the top of this section about an amnesty in Australia involves some serious antiques that were turned in - among them a German WW1 MG 08 machine gun, one of very few remaining, even scarcer in working condition. The fate of that gun is unclear, but if it was destroyed, that'd be an awful shame. The modern guns I don't really care about - to restrict guns was Australia's prerogative. To actively destroy historic artifacts when other options are clearly on the table should be an international scandal.
I'd like to say that only time will tell but I doubt any of the policies we both mentioned are going to be enacted, due to the sheer stupidity of the political climate surrounding this issue.
[QUOTE=_Axel;53172217]I'd like to say that only time will tell but I doubt any of the policies we both mentioned are going to be enacted, due to the sheer stupidity of the political climate surrounding this issue.[/QUOTE]
I expect what eventually will happen is another pointless queef of an AWB that only punishes law abiding citizens and does nothing to stop criminals from shooting random people with whatever type of firearm they get their hands on. When gun crime is eventually curbed it will be a lucky accidental side effect of some other piece of legislation.
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