Seems weird to ask why cocaine is illegal, I’ll try to stop assuming some of your questions are rhetorical.
In a literal sense, cocaine is illegal because society decided it wasn’t necessary to have.
Yes. The other option is to pass a law before anyone has actually done it. Eg, it is now illegal to blow up Saturn.
There is reactive and proactive change. Proactive change that isn’t reactionary would mean it hasn’t actually happened yet. If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s guesswork that a law even needs to be passed
Time for a 5-why. Why did society determine it wasn’t necessary? Also, just because something isn’t “necessary”, is not a reason to outlaw it. i.e. bullet proof vests aren’t “necessary”, but they are legal.
This is 100% a great point. This is exactly what I’m after! Sure it seems ridiculous right now, but use your imagination. I think so many people are lacking in their imagination (which is required for a valuable PFMEA). For a practical example, have you heard of guys in silicon valley etc. pushing laws against AI?? Why? nothing has happened…yet. They are absolutely right on the ball for bringing it up right now.
You say guesswork like it’s a bad thing. What’s wrong with preventing something that hasn’t happened yet? I mean fuck, isn’t that the greatest possible way to approach issues like this? We can always repeal a law later if we feel it’s not needed.
Not having done cocaine myself to speak to the benefits, but with the side effects of death etc I can’t imagine it was a hard debate. Value relationship doesn’t seem to have a lot of check boxes in the positive column
My imagination is the reason it seem ridiculous. Best case scenario (to me) a govt passing laws that don’t have an impact are a blatant waste of time and money
Because I don’t trust the fine members of our govt, or our nation (almost especially our nation), to correctly guess about what may need to be illegal in the future.
How many people do you know who agree the govt should be spying on Americans without a warrant? I’m yet to meet a single one, yet the Patriot act remains unchanged and neither party has made it vocal that they intend to change that.
Repealing a law is DIFFICULT (rightly so). Passing a law should be equally difficult. Guesswork from a bunch of washed up old white guys doesn’t make me hopeful, it scares the shit out of me
You’re reasoning at a complete elementary level stating the obvious (it would be better not to have mass casualties) as if it denied what I said in any way - what you’re saying is that, basically, you’d rather wait for an utopian impossible scenario where all mass casualties are avoided 100%, that will never happen, while mantaining the current shitty status quo.
The factual proof is that you should ask yourself, if you were a security guard with a taser, if you’d rather tase someone armed with a knife or someone armed with a gun or rifle.
The obvious and instinctive answer should enlighten you on why firearms, on themselves, have a lethality risk (especially for mass murders) much higher than the various alternatives people are debating in this thread.
I wasn’t aware of this event but it kinda proves my point that killing people with a knife is not as easy as killing them with a firearm. The point is not about making every single dangerous person on the planet inoffensive (you can’t), just giving them fewer ways to kill other people.
A declining rate doesn’t imply that the problem doesn’t exist. If you take an amount that was, give or take, “a fucking lot” and reduce it by 31%, it would still be “a fucking lot”. Might be a cohincidence but you don’t hear of mass shootings outside of the US, and might be worthy to note that no other civilized country has the same firearms politics and easy access that US has.
I see that you tried to compare (once again, like someone else did earlier) a terrorist attack to a school shooting. You took the example eight men armed with blades and fanatically intentioned to kill, forgetting to think how many deaths there could have been if they were armed with firearms. And forgetting to think how a single kid armed with a knife is not comparable to eight men.
This is just basic logic and common sense, really.
If you want some proportion, seven terrorists armed with firearms and grenades killed 130 people and injured over 400 in the Paris attack, just to remark how obviously different are firearms and blades in terms of lethality:
At the end of the day, mass shootings happen in America, that’s a fact. Mass shootings are not terrorist attacks, if that wasn’t clear. The reasons and modalities are different. The correlation between easy access to firearms and mass shootings is more than obvious, it’s not like when lunatics try to force a correlation between vaccines and autism.
By reading some of the posts here, it seems that some people would be happier to think that guns (and guns culture) have nothing to do with it and that, basically, America is a society producing mentally ill, unstable psychotics who would, one way or another, try to kill as many people as possible.
Not sure which of the two options is worse honestly.
I’m glad you see the error in the logic my statement was meant to illustrate. I suppose you also find it ridiculous that atlas insinuated I didn’t value human life because I mentioned how bad knife attacks can be. He literally insinuated I didn’t care about human life enough because I said knife attacks are horrible. If he can do that I can make the same sort of ludicrous accusation.
People die from all sorts of legal things/substances etc. that remain (rightly so) legal, so I can’t accept that as a good reason. I would be willing to argue there is value for cocaine and other stimulants, in fact, some are even prescribed by drug de, er, I mean doctors. I had my 2 cups of coffee today and I’m quite productive (minus participating in this thread lol), I’m smart enough to keep it under a lethal dose, but there have been others who weren’t as careful, yet coffee/caffeine remains legal!
And what are your thoughts on working on legislation for AI (you know, the part of my post you happened to ignore, I’ll assume it was an accident) right now in order to prevent problems in the future?
I ignored it on purpose lol. I don’t have nearly enough knowledge of the AI landscape and it’s capabilities to speak to legislation around it. Any comments I made about it would be guesswork
Edit: HOPEFULLY if any legislation is passed, it’s done in a reactive way to knowing the capabilities and threats of AI
and yet you speculated on the motivations for the prohibition of cocaine … odd how you would seem to confident on that speculation and not so confident speculating on AI … even more interesting when you admitted that you have no real knowledge of cocaine or its effects…hmmm sooo odd
So we’re just going to ignore historical facts that don’t jive with the notion that:
?
Prior to 1934, there wasn’t a national fettering (sound dirty, lol) of certain firearms, correct? I could certainly be wrong I’m not a legal scholar by any means.
Then Haynes V. US made it a moot point as it was unenforceable.
Okay, so then your original statemen about the GG was wrong:
It certainly did happen.
Did it keep criminals from owning and using Tommy guns?
How could you possibly know that it was perfectly acceptable by the people of the time? Because the Firearms Act of 34 passed? So did the Patriot Act…
My point is that people may have been just as up in arms about the passage of NFA.
To defend the nation against all threats both foreign and domestic.
I don’t think Mat Best et al are excited to kill someone. They’re messing around.
Of course, and I’m confident mostly everyone agrees.
I think you’re reading too much into interent bravado. No one (not literally no one there are phycho out there) wants to have to defend their home.
Oh, no. I don’t think it’s new.
It goes back even further than that and I’d argue the idea that American’s/Englishmen didn’t own military weapons is a new(ish) concept.
1911s - check
Various revolvers - check
Muskets - check
The gun that won the west ie Winchester Repeater Rifles - check
Tommy Gun - check
AR15’s that look an awful lot like M16 (Vietnam) to M4s (now) - check
It’s even possible private citizens owned canons pre-revolutional; although, I can’t find a non-suspect source on that one. We also know commercial vessels were converet to war ships when needed.
So, ya, I’d say it’s been a pretty connected to the Amercian way of life.
I own a number of firearms and, amazingly, I haven’t told a single person today… No one I work with knows I own a firearm. Most of my extended family doesn’t even know.
Don’t know how fast he was going, but there’s at least one example I can think of.
Ohhhh, the safety need is different.
Sure, that’s fair enough.
Well, we like to be # 1
You said the problem is obviously guns. Violent crime with a firearm has declined as the population has increased. So, no, it’s not obvious that it’s the guns.
I never said the problem doesn’t exist. Obviously a problem exists or we wouldn’t be here talking about it.
No, I didn’t. No where did I compare school shootings to acts of terror.
Sorry, I don’t have a crystal ball.
Cool story, bro. How about this one
1 man 19 dead 26 injured.
Here’s 1 man 8 dead 13 wounded
Here’s a piece of shit that killed people with a truck and then a knife
Re: Paris Attack
19 hijackers killed 2,996 and injured another 6,000 with planes.
Like I said in the post to Activities Guy, that was intended to inform.
You can take it as you like, but saying that “there is no proof…” as I quoted is simply not true.
This actually is true though, and I feel deserves a much deeper examination, which does not preclude some measures of controlling the availability of fire arms.
Believe me- I’m tired of this crap. I’ve seen enough in my personal life to conclude that gun ownership is not for everybody, and also believe that most people that carry for “just in case” are exceptionally under equipped and have not thought through the scenario.
As I’ve pointed out in this thread and others-
Lets say you see yourself as “the good guy with a gun” in an active shooter scenario. Do you really want to be the guy with a gun when the cops show up to an active shooter call? Do you really think you can pull off that shot through all of the chaos and not make the situation worse?
I don’t.
edit: Also, as an aside on the subject of dumb gun owners- I keep seeing people bloviating on facebook about how they have guns and they aren’t blah blah blah…
Great. Now anybody that wants to knows whose house to rob and exactly how to fuck you up should they so choose. Very smart!
Guess I’m done too, since there’s really someone comparing the the rampage of a man killing 19 disabled (<keyword) people with a knife and a man killing children in elementary school with a knife to a random kid killing tens of young able bodied adults with firearms, while denying that firearms have anything to do with the difference in mortality rate. And while still throwing terrorist attacks in the equation like if they were the same thing.
As expected, it’s a moot point trying to point out that easy access to firearms perpetuates the firearms culture that perpetuates the easy access to firearms. I live a few miles right under Switzerland so I have a clue why shit doesn’t happen there, one of the reasons is that, other than the cultural difference, guns are not handed to anyone anytime like in America. There’s a whole different level of screening.
I see that AI safety was mentioned, I’d be interested in a thread on that if people want to get into that topic. Just read a book on it and there are a lot of predictions about what our AI overloads will be like. Much more fun than a gun debate.
My father-in-law (just over 60 years old, recently retired) has recently purchased his first-ever firearm.
His cited reason was that the saw a break-in on the news (like three towns over, but still) and decided that he wanted to have a weapon for home defense. My wife and her sister, both women of child-bearing age, pointed out that we are all going to have small children around for the next couple of years, and they would be nervous about letting their kids wander the house if he owned a firearm (regardless of your feelings on gun ownership, I think that’s a reasonable question for expectant mothers to ask their father as they’re getting to the age where they will be bringing toddlers over to Poppy’s house). He said that he would keep it unloaded and locked in a gun safe under the bed. Now, I’ll defer to you responsible gun owners to set me straight, but color me a little skeptical that a 60-year-old totally untrained in the use of a firearm who keeps it unloaded and locked under the bed is going to do very much in the “home defense” department if, heaven forbid, someone does break into their house (not that this matters to some people, but they also live in a pretty wealthy suburb where break-ins are not a very common thing).
I remember discussing it with my wife, and our agreement was that if he wanted a weapon so he could go out and shoot with the boys (now that he’s retired, he needs hobbies) that made perfect sense, but we weren’t really buying the “home defense” angle.
