this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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What about gun owners who support restrictions and bans? There is a small group of us. Also gun owners who need to have them for their job as police, security, or soldiers? Farmers and Hunters have legitimate reasons, too. The government are never going to give up guns. Neither will criminals. The cat is out of the bag on them. We will never be done with guns until a better alternative is developed like the phasers from Star Trek or something. So saying fuck people for just owning a gun is a bit shortsighted, at least in my opinion.
What about gun owners who support restrictions and bans? Sorry, I'm over here busy caring about DEAD CHILDREN. I don't give a fuck if you want to keep your happy fun times playing with dangerous weapons as if they were toys. Grow up, this is bigger than your hobby.
It's crazy how many activities are available to us in this modern age that don't involve potential death.
Obviously, I'm not talking about police or the army. I don't care about farmers and hunters, they can learn to trap it, bow it or fish it.
How many innocent people are you willing to cut down so you can have your fun. Put a number on it. Less than 100 school children per year and we get to keep our guns? Sounds gross doesn't it?
People need kidneys, it's sad but decreed yet this Senator's hoarding one more than she needs I offer this bill and I hope you'll vote "aye" Unless, of course, you just want PEOPLE TO DIE!
Traffic deaths have many crying with fear Over 30,000 people are dying each year this modest change I propose must be applied Unless, of course, you just want PEOPLE TO DIE!
Alcohol deaths are exceeding comparisons Black people, white people, Native Americans We need to ban alcohol, it can't be denied Unless, of course, you just want PEOPLE TO DIE!
Murders are bad. They have no defenders yet many are committed by repeat offenders I say lifetime in prison, whatever the crime unless, of course, you want PEOPLE TO DIE!
These car deaths I mentioned are terrible stuff It just doesn't seem that one seatbelt's enough Either vote for my act so that fewer will cry Unless, of course, you just want PEOPLE TO DIE!
The carbs. The container. We cannot ignore Whipped cream's killing more people than ever before This bill would be passed and be ratified if those people there didn't want PEOPLE TO DIE!
None of those things are remotely comparable to guns lol. Nice try but adults are able to easily spot rhetoric.
I don't understand what the kidney one is about.
Cars are central to our society, it would collapse without it(although I'm completely for phasing them out). Their main use is transport, not killing people.
Everything else you mentioned only affects the person using it and killin isn't their main use. My neighbor can't kill me because he's mad about his job and is eating too much whip cream.
Guns are made to kill. People are using it to kill innocent people. No one needs a gun(except certain professions and I'm clearly not talking about banning it for then). Go back to posting pictures.
Nice try but adults are able to easily spot rhetoric.
Are you okay there buddy?
Your argument against gun ownership by tying it to deaths not caused by the overwhelming majority of gun owners is a rhetorical technique.
The person you’re replying to has been putting “argumentation for me but not for thee” examples pulled from your comments in big giant letters.
It isn't. There's nothing rhetorical about saying that something is so dangerous no one should have access to it, even if they are "safe" with it, because of the risk it posses to society.
Whats the rhetorical principal involved here?
He's also just being immature. He's spamming me, replying to the same comment multiple times, quoting what I'm saying in bold as if it's an argument. One of his replies sitting in my inbox is just him saying "fucking liberals" lmao. The guys is clearly an idiot, no need to defend him.
So there’s two things here, first, arguing that something almost 100% safe is dangerous because people have been hurt or died when it was involved is absolutely a rhetorical technique. It’s famously one of the ways people talk up the various satanic panics. That doesn’t mean your wrong or shouldn’t feel how you do, but it’s what you’re doing.
Second, he’s playing to the crowd because he recognizes that arguing online is a spectator sport. Neither you nor him are trying to convince each other, you’re trying to convince the people reading along. What he’s doing when he says “fucking liberals” is speaking directly through the mic hanging from the rafters. It’s what happens before he does the moves everyone watching knows by name: The CIA Already Admitted It stunner, the Armed Agents Of The State turnbuckle slam and the People’s Elbow (that one was just too good to pass up lol).
If you feel like he being immature it’s because you’re being clowned on. He may be an idiot, but he’s making you look like a fool.
Although I agree with most of what you said, guns are inherently not safe.
We are talking about something that is 100% unsafe and needs to be carefully handled at all times. Simply goofing off with them can get you killed. And on top of that, they are being used to maliciously hurt innocent people and a tool for crime.
Yes, the shootings and accidental discharges are the outliers, but I never pretended any different. I'm saying those cases are enough to justify real bans, that the 99.9% of "safe" gun owners need to deal with it and accept the small sacrifice. There is a clear and direct link to how easily accessible guns are and the abnormal amount of shootings. If I was asked to give up my paintbrushes to stop school shootings, I would in a heart beat.
The few cases are enough to justify broad policy changes. Not everything is anecdotal fallacy just because it doesn't happen often, that would make all our safety measures and precautions based on rhetoric.
I’m not gonna try to convince you because like I said, an argument on the internet is for the reader, not the participants.
If you truly believe that guns should be banned, people shouldn’t have them and recognize that most gun owners will refuse, have you considered how would be best to go about disarming the American populace?
Id ban all sale of them and offer generous buybacks. You can't actually disarm a population, everyone just ends up saying they dropped their gun in a lake.
I'm guessing you have some thoughts on this, where do you think the line is? What regulations would you accept?
A generous but non compulsory buyback program would have the same effect as the nfa, disarmament of people in direct proportion to their wealth and income. Would it be alright with you if only rich people who weren’t swayed by the high prices on offer were armed? Currently in America that’s how ownership of fully automatic firearms, suppressors and rifles and shotguns with barrels shorter than 16” are handled.
How would your ban on sales apply to private party sales?
The rich can have more guns for a bit, it would only last a generation. Id outlaw all sales private or public, anybody inheriting a gun wouldn't be permitted to use it.
The only guns would be state owned, for employees or to rent out at ranges and hunting grounds so people can still keep it as a hobby.
Basically phase out the private ownership of guns inside a generation or two. It's not perfect and would definitely piss off a number of people, a lot of which would find workarounds but I don't see a better way to do it.
How would inheritors of guns be prevented from using them? How would you prevent private, undocumented sales?
Are you saying you’d ban hunting on private land?
I’m not asking little “gotcha” questions to “get you”, but to try to slowly make it clear how big of a project a firearm ban in America would be. My hope is that you’ll recognize the high cost and low chance of success makes a firearm ban a worse way to approach stochastic violence than simply improving conditions for people who perpetrate it.
Not having a shooting every week is worth whatever we have to pay.
There's no perfect solution but doing nothing is definitely the worst option. In any case, it's easier to get rid of guns then to cure all mental health issues. Saying things like improve conditions as a solution is just hand waving in my opinion.
If you’ll indulge me, the lemmy markup for big text isn’t something I know so you’ll just have to imagine it’s a header:
Behold, the liberal vision for your future: it’s easier to disarm the poor than to improve their conditions!
It’s not as satisfying when the words are little.
The fundamental problem with your position is that it relies on outright dismissal of any possible improvements to American society.
If you approach any problem with the supposition that nothing can ever get better then of course your only course of action is to restrict people and no matter what complexity you’re up against that proposition of restriction will always be the best option. After all, a better world is not possible.
Society has always been improving, life's a lot better than it was 20 years ago. Improving to the point where shootings stop is seriously heavy. Mental issues are way more complicated than blanket gun bans.
You are dismissing my solutions as being too hard and too costly, while not really being critical of your own offerings.
Mental health issues clearly needs to be prioritized more but you can't wave a magic wand and ban depression. Not to mention that there are hundreds of different aspects that bring about a shooting. They all involve guns but the reasons that brought the person to the brink are always different. Sometimes, it's literally just racism (which is arguably a mental health issue but you get my point).
What you are saying is the equivalent of "Don't ban guns! Cure America of everything else instead".
It's such a tall order it's literally meaningless. Im not saying society can't improve but that the difference between our solutions is the difference between planting a tree to get out of the rain and buying an umbrella. And mind you, I'm super willing to try to improve society, but right now, we need an umbrella because we are getting covered in blood and it sucks.
The thing I keep failing to convey to you is like it or not America has nearly 300 years of gun ownership deeply ingrained in its culture and banning guns would be as big of a social change as providing basic income, housing and healthcare if not bigger.
To give just one example of many, we don’t have any expectation that the police will protect us. I don’t mean that policing is an inherently oppressive system of hierarchical violence based on slave patrols, but that our court system has literally ruled that the police don’t have any requirement to protect us from crime. We are expected legally to protect ourselves against violence.
What kind of changes would that society need to make if suddenly only criminals had guns (I can see why people love to deploy that one, it slaps)?
That’s just one small aspect of how guns are a part of America and while I appreciate your desire to cut through the gordian knot, I hope it clarifies some of what makes your deceptively simple proposal problematic.
If you want to dive into the type of anger you’re gonna see, think about how nfa stamp havers and other license holders would be affected. When Jim gets visited by the cops he goes to the range with, even if they don’t open up saying “you don’t have your guns anymore, right Jim big wink” he can still claim to have sold or lost them and be fine. When Nancy gets visited by those same cops she doesn’t have any capacity to lie, because as an owner of nfa items or a c&r license holder she’s required to keep records of not just her guns and suppressors and sears, but also their disposal. Despite having dutifully submitted to a much more in depth background check, extensive waiting period, surprise inspection, additional taxes and mandatory record keeping, Nancy can’t just lie and say her guns fell off the truck or that she already sold them. The atf agent has a list of serialized components she’s responsible for.
The person who followed all the rules faces harsher penalties!
What I’m trying to make clear is how complex, cumbersome and expansive such a seemingly straightforward policy would be even if everyone agreed to comply. When you factor in the lack of full compliance it gets even harder to endorse and when you say “what would you have me do, improve society?” it becomes plain old silly to do all that work when you could get the same results by providing housing, income and health care to all with the added benefit of now having housing, income and healthcare.
I don't see why it has to be one or the other. Getting rid of guns is just one step towards a better society. We can have a higher minimum wage, healthcare and also not have citizens walking around with rifles that came decimate a crowd.
Lazy cops aren't a reason to have every citizen armed. It's laughable to bring up criminals since they are only armed because of how easy guns are to aquire. Nobody is getting held up at gunpoint in fucking Canada. And if they did, it would be with a gun we sent over the border.
And ya, it's complex but when has that ever been a reason not to do the right thing? We send people into space ffs, and again, less complex than curing society of stress.
Ask yourself, and I mean really ask yourself what guns are bringing to your life that's so worth it.
And no, it's not safety because having so many guns around, statistically half of them in the hands of people with below average intellect, inherently creates a very unsafe environment and it also makes sure all the criminals have guns as well.
The police don’t have a duty to protect Americans because they aren’t trained, equipped, managed, selected for or expected to under the law, not because they’re lazy. And that’s just one example of the major structural basis for American society that’s predicated on firearms. I don’t think it’s a good thing, but I do think people who claim gun bans are feasible need to address it.
Think of it like this: you’re saying we need to turn the car left, and I’m saying that there’s a dense forest there. It’s not a reasonable response to just reiterate that we need to turn left and that it’s possible to do complex things. You gotta have a way to get around or through the trees.
Six days ago there was an armed robbery in Toronto. People were literally held up at gunpoint. That’s the first result of my search for “Canada armed robbery” and there were a lot more results. Canada has gun crime and it’s easy to find statistics for.
One aspect of this we haven’t touched on (isn’t there someone you forgot to ask?) is weather the state even wants to pursue a blanket ban at all. On some level, being able to filter the flow of guns lets the state control what kind of propaganda comes with ownership. When they’re legal, gun owners are likely to associate them with truth, justice and the American way (it helps that we live in a racist settler colonial state where gun ownership is seen as positive membership in the settler class and gated appropriately). If they were all illegal then who knows what kind of ideas would be attached to those guns. Insurrection? Communism?
What I’m seeing with the way you’re expressing your thoughts is a kind of “starting with the answer” and trying to figure out the justification. I remember it from the healthcare discourse after the 2008 election.
“Alright, we got into office. Time to enact mitt Romneys healthcare plan from the 90s!”
“But you ran on single payer”
“Well, that’s too complex and expensive”
“But the plan you’re suggesting is just an additional layer of complexity and expense on top of what’s already there”
“Yeah but we can’t get anything else through congress”
You have the presidency and all three branches and a majority of Americans support some form of universal health care”
“This is what you’re getting, shut up.”
It’s completely tangential to our conversation, but maybe don’t lean on intelligence based arguments for safety. Measurements like that have their basis in phrenology and race science and are discredited now. You shouldn’t need to fearmonger about the average person having firearms especially when they’re overwhelmingly safe.
name a profession you think needs a gun more than the working people need guns, please.
That's easy since working people don't need guns.
Infantryman, swat, police(but the UK policemen don't have them so probably not after a few years of a gunless society), ice cream truck driver
they do if a landlord tries to evict them or the pinkertons try to break their strike.
fucking liberals.
Lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLqKXrlD1TU&pp=ygUVbG92ZSBtZSBpJ20gYSBsaWJlcmFs
Did you read my comment? I said I would vote for restrictions or bans. That means I would give up my gun. I am not the reason guns are so freely available in the US. Since that's the way it is, I figured I'd face reality and learn how to use them. It's not a hobby, I live in a place with a lot of gun crime. I would prefer if they weren't so easy to get, but here we are. I'm going to continue to choose to live in objective reality here, and if/when restrictions or bans are actually feasible in this country I'll be all for it.
You are naive if you think there is no legitimate hunting use for them. I don't think you understand how important hunting is in certain parts of the US. It keeps the ecosystem from collapsing in more rural places.