Shooting at Florida high school

What part of "they should have the option" are you not getting? If you or anyone else doesn't want to arm yourselves fine. But don't take that right away from someone else. Simple.

Then it's basically the same deal that's been in place with handguns.

then we'd get a significant segment of the population insisting that ANY limit on any weapon constituted infringement.

Translated: "the grammar is perfectly acceptable when I read my bias into it but your problem is reading your bias into it"

well, from the perspective of folks who'd love to have a rocket launcher for their "deer hunting" y'all have done a ton of compromising.

What your starting position is makes a difference to how one measures the extent of compromise

you keep saying this as if you don't realize that that I can't eat enough to clog YOUR arteries, I can't drink enough to rot YOUR liver, I can't smoke enough to give you cancer...but if I have a gun I can under the right circumstances make YOU dead

Whether or not the government should act to save me from myself is an entirely different subject to whether or not they should act to save me from a third party.

(and drunk driving is a weird thing to cite given that it's a pretty obsessively legislated against thing)

It's almost as if he's telegraphing "Gunlubbers are like drunk drivers...film at 11."

the problem with "99% of legal gun owners" (if one accepts that claim for the sake of discussion) is that (a) most proposed regulations are not designed to prevent legal gun owners from owning guns and (b) people who say "legal gun owners" don't want you to notice that a lot of killers were legal gun owners when they went off. That dude in Vegas? the one in parkland? the one in SC? and more - legal gun owners.

What the ACTUAL "middle ground tribe" wants is perfectly reasonable things that would do nothing more than mildly inconvenience legal gun owners, but the latter have been conditioned to yell "OMG slippery slope!!!" about virtually any restriction.

For example, Shoes noted earlier that in the last 30 years things like CC have proliferated across the country. In other words, in the 70's that was something NOT generally allowed to you and you were not, in those days, deprived of your constitutional freedoms. If SCOTUS said tomorrow "we're going to revert back to the legal structure that existed in 1975 in regards to guns and the 2A" you would not be deprived of constitutional freedom, any more than you were then.

THAT is "middle ground"

which is an example of how almost all "gun limit" laws are kabuki theater that is designed to look like "we're doing something!" without actually pissing off the folks that don't want them to do anything.

Which would be different from the way it is now?

Indeed.

And while at least some of those restrictions are fucking stupid, apparently none of them have been found unconstitutional so logically, less restrictive and more sensible restrictions being discussed in the wake of recent mass shootings should be things we can discuss without having to re-plow the ground of whether or not they violate constitutional rights.

Touche

What it's an example of is how you create a double-standard for exactly what the age of majority is, and simultaneously defeat the background check you yourself want people to go through in order to own firearms.

why would anyone assume restrictions on private ownership/use have anything to do with what cops can use?

oh indeed. But they "did something" while in reality not doing anything (and arguably making something worse)

"What's good for me is good for thee."

they absolutely would. There's a whole raft of things in this country that are supposedly worse when found in minorities rather than whites.

just to be a stickler for statistical sanity:

if 62% of gun owners are male then 38% are female and that's a significant deviation from 50-50, not "slightly" - it is approaching twice as likely male as female.

Also, whites are 72.4% of the population as of the 2010 census and certainly less than that by now.

Also, I spent too much time digging and I can't find any citation which supports that 80% figure. There is a great deal of data supporting a claim that a huge and disproportionate share of the murder rate occurs (both perp and victim) among black men in their 20s.

Analyzing that is a wildly complex task, having as much to do with systematic poverty as anything (it's difficult to study because it's difficult to find tightly packed majority white communities that experience the same level of poverty for comparison and THAT reality leads to an even larger and more complex discussion about why that circumstance exists) but at least one factor is that those young men are exercising the same mindset as other gun owners: "someone might shoot me so I better have a gun so I can shoot them first" which makes it more likely someone will get shot dead. And difficult for the third party to discern which, if either, was the "good guy with a gun" because the one who's still alive is almost certainly going to be convicted of murder.

Some other interesting statistics:
While there are an estimated 90-100 guns for every 100 Americans, only about 1 in 4 Americans own a gun
(that's skewed some by the fact that kids, institutionalized persons, and imprisoned persons count among the population but are by definition not armed)
The average gun owner owns 3
Of those, more than half own less than 3, 14% own as many as 8 (and upwards to as high as 140)
That 14% is 3% of the overall population and own half of all guns estimated to exist in the country
These are estimates based on surveys, with no systematic registration system complete accuracy is impossible.


As I've said before, I absolutely think sensible regulation has to respond to the ACTUAL issues and not the preceived issues and not just knee-jerk to a "ban all the guns" absolutist cult. But that applies to both sides. Just as it is bad policy to , for example, simply ban AR-15s because they've been high profile in mass shootings, likewise it is bad policy to insist that mag-limits violate the constitution (just one example) - a lot of stupidity on both sides.

or, alternately, because they believe it insulates them from the charge of racism.

kinda like why Trump let's Ben Carson hang around.

So drunk driving is "legislated against" yet it's not uncommon for a drunk driver to finally kill someone and damn if it isn't their seventh DUI. What good is making it illegal and taking away their license yet still keep arresting them & giving them a wrist slap? True, anyone can make a mistake. Make that same mistake twice and your ass should never see daylight for the next ten fucking years, with no fucking chance of parole/probation.

So, if they had no prominent black faces, they'd be racist. But if they have prominent black faces, well, they're just trying to cover for racism. Is that it?

You know how you show an organization is racist? Don't make unsupported insinuations. Show that they do or say something racist.

there's no statistical support for the idea that such a young woman with a gun in her home is less likely to be raped or otherwise attacked, and some which suggests the opposite

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/cultu...nra-dana-loesch-guns-women-self-defense-myth/

Not necessarily, no.

The point is that either explanation is equally plausible and thus neither proves anything at all.

well yes, it IS uncommon. Taken as a percentage of all trips taken by motor vehicle, the proportion which end in death or injury from a drunk driver is pretty damned small. And so much the more rare that the offender has previous DUI arrests. And the more strict the regulation the more rare it becomes.

And yes, I'm perfectly fine with dramatically stiffer penalties for repeat offenders.

But without evidence of racism, the claim that it's a cover for racism is totally unsupported. And, as charges of racism are so poisonous in our civic culture, they really shouldn't be used carelessly.

Bullshit.

Cite stats.

nevertheless, the existence of a (potential) token does not prove anything either way. Personally, I don't think the organization itself is systemically racist. Don't think there's a particular political advantage in it.But I've little doubt that like the GOP, an uncomfortably large proportion of the membership is.

Which brings me back to Carson. Trump is almost certainty a racial bigot (and other sorts of bigot) and a noticeable proportion of his most vocal supporters are proudly so...and yet the convenient presence of Carson can only be explained one way. The right has always found it helpful to elevate "convenient" black folks. Remember er those two black women (Diamond and Silk, IIRC) who slobber over Trump - youtube personalities like your guy, right? What precisely qualified them for that popularity?

One guess.

the same stats that 2A folks cite to prove how perfectly safe widespread gun ownership is (outside black males in their 20's) ALSO prove, by the same logic, how very unlikely you are to ever NEED to protect yourself from a gun-weilding baddie by using your gun . One can't really argue "look millions of us have guns and don't shoot people" and at the same time "I need my gun because every third asshole that comes along is trying to shoot me"at the same time


(also, off topic, I HATE the "mom needs to drive a tank because safety" bullshit too)

By the way, the constant 2A argument is that the very presence of a gun is a massive deterrent - bad guys don't try when they know the potential vic is armed - if that argument is true then your wife doesn't actually have to hit any target, just fire.

It seems to me lately that the NRA is back handedly trying to incite violence. I've been a life member since I was a kid. I haven't given it any thought for decades, but as soon as I can find my membership card, I'm cancelling it, because fuck them.