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Hey TSG, you like quoting logical fallacies at people, right?

"The fallacy of relative privation, or appeal to worse problems, is an informal fallacy which attempts to suggest that the opponent's argument should be ignored because there are more important problems in the world, despite the fact that these issues are often completely unrelated to the subject under discussion."

This thread isn't titled "What are the most pertinent issues to be addressed to save the world." It's an article about gun control, and all of the statistics that you're throwing in people's faces about cancer and heart disease are painfully irrelevant. If you want to do something about cancer, then start a thread about stopping smoking. Better yet, why don't you get off the internet and go help down in the cancer ward? In any case, I think everyone would appreciate you cease these despicable attempts to shame people for actually giving a fuck about an issue.

Out of curiosity, Who owns guns here? I own a twelve gauge and a twenty gauge pump action shotgun and am looking to buy and handgun soon.

I really don't mind people owning guns, but I hate how gun activist pretend that they are absolutist on the right to bear arms, im amusing the vast majority of nra members will agree that nobody should be allowed to own rpg's or napalm. Yet so many people still resort to this type of simple minded rhetoric that any increase in regulation is unconstitutional and infringes on there rights.

But I do have the constitutional right to protect myself and my loved ones even from the tyranny of my own government. That is what Murica's constitution is about.

At this point I welcome a separate thread to discuss guns

Not gun control, just guns. What guns you own, what guns you like, cool gun facts etc.

Please by all means separate that discussion and leave this thread to be purely about gun control politics

dude if there's one thing i learned from this thread its that on knowyourmeme gun control is a more volatile issue then feminism.

I am seeing one guy who likes to use informal fallacies, and one other guy who believes keeping discussion civile is bullshit.

Outside of that, it's was going pretty well. Comment sections on this site about topics related to social justice are more painful to read.

As for myself, I'm siding with Algernon on page 1. Gun control is pretty strict here, so I don't know any better than getting through life without one. Why miss what we didn't have to begin with? To quote Algernon: "I don’t feel like my freedoms are being impinged upon whatsoever. If you grow up in a culture where nobody has access to guns, you don’t feel like they’re necessary."

It's also one of the reasons why I prefer to not live in the US. A country and culture where even the most irresponsible people can get their hands on tools able to kill fellow humans with ease, legally(!!!), is pretty scary to me. Only one person on this entire planet can convince me to move to the US, and that is the future miss RM.

But hey, you know…

'Murica, amirite?

Algernon said

And the guns are causing the violence; it’s irresponsible to suggest otherwise. The murder rate in the US is about 5 times as high as it is in Western European countries with strict gun control. You can’t attribute a difference of that magnitude to cultural differences alone.

Why is it that every single time people talk about Europe as an example of the correlation between gun control and crime rates that they neglect to mention Switzerland? In Switzerland, gun laws and gun possession rates are similar to those in the U.S., and they actually have a LOWER homicide rate than either the UK or the Netherlands. Well clearly the only sensible solution is for you guys to start adopting mandatory conscription and rifle ownership in order to meet Switzerland's impeccable standards! (You might also want to consider punching holes in your regional cheeses, that could help as well.)

Honestly, I'm getting sick of Europeans (And many Americans for that matter) quoting their crime statistics at us and insinuating that we're violent simpletons for not following their example. I don't think you should adopt Switzerland's laws, and I don't think we should try to adopt yours; Gun control is an area where I think it's absurd to suggest some kind of fix-all solution which completely ignores the historical and social context. The United States has a fundamentally different relationship with the gun from most of Europe where it has been primarily perceived as the means by which massed armies kill each other and therefore is of no relevance to the civilian in peacetime. In America, the gun is the tool of the individual and autonomous citizen by which he asserts himself against the imposed tyrannies of both nature and his fellow man. It is a symbol of his total dedication to as well as the pragmatic means by which he defends himself against those that would impede him in his pursuit of life, liberty, and all that jazz.

I believe that it is this attitude itself, even more so than the availability of firearms which that same attitude engenders, which is responsible for the school shootings. When Johnny Fuckwit decides that his school and/or peers are conspiring to keep him down, the available cultural narrative tells him that he is the heroic individual being oppressed by the hoarded masses, and it is now his God given prerogative to heroically take up a weapon and shoot that problem in the face. It's an extremely fucked up interpretation of an ideology that does have some nobility to it, but it comes from that ideology nonetheless.

What people need to understand is that this is just an ingrained pattern of American thought. It's the way our history and our stories tell us to perceive conflict, and it would be both extremely difficult and perhaps even ill-advised to try to remove it. The gun laws in this country can probably be made marginally more effective by prudent legislators, but it is VERY important for people to understand that changing the law can only ever have a limited effectiveness. We have to realize that the school shootings along with the general violence in America are symptomatic of some DEEP cultural and social issues, and I don't even know where to begin addressing that shit.

In Switzerland, gun laws and gun possession rates are similar to those in the U.S.

Except no, that's oversimplifying it. But that's not what we're here for.

Europe has 47 independent countries. You have some small dots like Liechtenstein and Vatican City, so let's be generous here and make that 40 independent countries of a notable size. Out of that 40, there is 1 country that has gun such unique gun laws: Switzerland.

Throw that in any outlier test, and it will drag out Switzerland as an outlier.

So when you then compare Europe to the US, it is reasonable to not include Switzerland in the comparison because it's such an unique outlier. This is a completely normal thing to do in analytics.

What Switzerland then does right what other countries (both in Europe and outside) do wrong is up for discussion, but we're not here for that discussion. But as you said as well, it would be unreasonable to believe the system of the outlier to work in the rest of Europe.

So a couple of days ago, on June 11th, there was another school shooting in the US. This was how the media replied:

Now you're free to call it an "ingrained pattern of American thought", but when a nation becomes so inert to public gun violence that they give school shootings a "Meh, who cares" reaction, then I find that a pretty fucked up ingrained thought pattern.

I'm not denying that we live in different cultures. American culture is something that allows guns, European culture not so much, and I don't think I could ever get used to an American system because it's not what I grew up in. But I think it's reasonable to say that the current American gun laws and thought pattern requires some change, which is something many Americans also agree on.

As you said, these are deep cultural and social issues, so it would be unreasonable to assume it can be fixed overnight. But ignoring it fixes even less.

@Random

Uh…I don't know anything about statistical analysis, so maybe you can better explain your point to me regarding Switzerland? My reasoning is that you are trying to provide a strong correlation between tight gun control and I am offering Switzerland as a strong counterexample to that trend. Switzerland has a sizable population, so it seems wrong to dismiss it as a mere statistical aberration.

Your representation of my point about school shootings coming from American culture and society is very crude. The vast majority of Americans remain appalled by the shootings, and black humor helps us cope. What I'm saying is that embedded in American culture is the idea that the appropriate response to a threat to the individual's personal liberty is violent rebellion. The violent response is what those ingrained American ideals are providing, and frankly, I'm not so sure it's an ideology that should be totally abandoned. I like my rulers to be a little afraid that there might be an armed uprising.

What we should be asking is what exactly is making these kids perceive their local schools as being such a threat. Perhaps it's because they see in them the horror of the modern industrialized state and the first step on a conveyor which will break their spirits and mold them into obedient slaves. It's not so crazy a thought; a lot of kids sympathized with Holden Caulfield when he called his school and his country a collection of phonies looking to rape the innocence of youth, and it's not hard to imagine him picking up a semi-automatic.

Now are the shootings a rational, just, or effective response? Of course not, but the correlation is there even if shooting up the actual school does little and less to fix the society. And if there's any accuracy to that conviction whatsoever, then maybe we should think twice before letting that mechanical Moloch take our guns away.

@Fifths
The reason to disregard Switzerland is because its data is so far off all the other European countries it can screw up what the picture looks like. For a quick and easy example, say we have five people. Four make thirty-grand. One is a billionaire. If we were to take the mean of the five people's salaries (That is, add up all the salaries of the people and divide by the number of people added.) we would do ($30,000+$30,000+$30,000+$30,000+1,000,000,000)/5 = $200,024,000. So we would walk away thinking each of those people earns two-hundred million-plus when really most are far poorer and one is actually better. That's what outliers do to data; They distort it and render it meaningless because one number waaaaaaaaaaaay outta' line throws us off track.
Switzerland is like that. It's highly unique among the larger European countries and because of that rare difference, it would make an otherwise simple pattern of, for the most part, tighter gun laws = less gun-related incidents into a more complex one. Not that it would have the power to instantly flip that around, but it could muddle things a little.
I believe I have stated that correctly, but feel free to say if I was off anywhere, RM or anyone else.
Personally, I think that if we aren't going to enact tighter gun control, the only other thing to do is focus on why we have so many shootings. Of course, the ones that get the most media attention are the sensational shootings by some psychopath with delusions of grandeur, but most of the gun violence that goes down in this country isn't like that. And those who are truly insane probably will attempt it no matter how difficult it would be to do since that's all they want to do in life. However, most criminals aren't criminals because they're the Joker and just enjoy the thrill of the hunt, unless, ironically, they're wealthy and bored and know they can get away with it and are just in it for the power trip. Luckily, most people aren't rich. Unfortunately, that leads to the much more common reasons, the Walter White-style story of being stuck between a rock and a hard place and having nowhere else to go and no way out and no way to provide for themselves or their family. Because related to having such a high gun-crime rate is that we have the most prisoners in the world. So now we have the full cycle:
1) Lots of poor people with no safety-net resort to crime to make a living.
2) They get arrested and enter the incarceration system for years and years.
3) That's thousands of people, most of which are minorities, costing a lot of money to just to rot behind bars, often not getting an education, not contributing to the workforce or economy, not desiring to become good citizens or trust the system since it abandoned them in the first place.
4) All the money that could go towards bettering the lives of our poorest people instead goes towards the prison-industrial complex or military-industrial complex.
5) Wind up back at the start, worse off each time.
A lot of European countries avoid this entirely by pretty much doing the opposite every step of the way, caring for their most vulnerable instead of spending billions on prisons or armies.
And there you have my left-wingnut conspiracy theory for what's wrong with America.
Also, Fifths, if the mention of Moloch is a Howl reference, nice use of high school literature in your argument. That's not sarcasm, seriously.