Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[GE Morton]

GE Morton: Article is behind a paywall, so not clear how "assault weapon" is defined.

The term is clearly defined in the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 (which expired in 2004), the effectiveness of it was the focus of that study.

"The 1994 act made it “unlawful for a person to manufacture, transfer, or possess a semiautomatic assault weapon." Weapons banned were identified either by specific make or model (including copies or duplicates thereof, in any caliber), or by specific characteristics that slightly varied according to whether the weapon was a pistol, rifle, or shotgun."

Yes, I know what the act banned. What was not clear was whether the article you linked had adopted that definition. The point of the comment was that any semi-auto rifle or handgun can be fired as quickly as those banned; the latter are no more dangerous than former. The defining characteristics of the banned weapons were largely cosmetic.

Can't comment on the substance of the cited study, since it is behind a pay wall. But I'd be interested to know how well the authors controlled for other variables.

Only if you consider murder to be a "minor issue." A lot can happen in seconds, many people can be murdered.

Not "many." A few more, perhaps. But you're hardly reaching the root of the problem.

[Sy Borg]

The root of the problem is that there are too many guns. Now nothing much can be done about it.

Hence, OECD countries with fewer guns tend to have fewer murders and, especially, fewer mass murders. The impact of mass murders goes beyond numbers. These events brutalise entire communities.

[GE Morton]

Let's quote you again since you seem to think people lack the capacity to check on your dishonesty.

Semi-automatic weapons, which require a separate trigger pull for each shot, constitute virtually all modern firearms. Even a 1880 Colt .45 six-shooter is a semi-automatic weapon. They can hardly be called "uncommon."

So why did you not acknowledge the extra dangers of semi-automatics to Felix at the time?

Hmmm. First you accuse me of "giving the impression that semi-auto weapons are no more effective than older guns." Now it is "not acknowledging the extra dangers of semi-automatic weapons."

Well, the main reason was that the comment you are psychoanalyzing was a response to a question as to whether semi-autos were uncommon. It was not about their effectiveness --- being commonly chosen and used for lawful purposes being the criterion adopted by the Supreme Court.

You implied above that semi-autos are no big deal, just business as usual.

No, I made no implication about how "big a deal" they are. The issue at hand was whether they are covered by the 2nd Amendment.

Yet the founding fathers did not speak of the right to pack semi-automatic machines of war in cities. No doubt you will find another misleading rationalisation.

You should perhaps read the excerpt from the Heller decision, quoted above --- or the entire decision --- for the response to that point (which Justice Scalia called "frivolous").

[GE Morton]

The root of the problem is that there are too many guns. Now nothing much can be done about it.

That is not the root of the problem. Several studies have shown no correlation between gun ownership rates and homicide rates. Here is a recent one:

"The study, published Monday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, examined firearm ownership on a state-by-state level from 1990 to 2016. It found that while firearm ownership was associated with rates of gun homicide involving intimate partners and other family members, there was no significant association between gun ownership rates and the rates of other kinds of gun homicide, such as those involving friends, acquaintances and strangers."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/us/g ... stics.html

[GE Morton]

PS: Domestic violence homicides account for about 12% of all homicides.

[Felix]

Greta said: This is a plea for you (i.e., GE Morton) to make at least some small attempt to be even-handed and honest instead of arguing like a prosecutor or defendant, conveniently leaving off essential bits of information to create false impressions.

You know that ain't gonna happen!

I've decided there is no point in replying to any more of GE's posts, you just can't have a reasonable discussion with someone so disingenuous. He only accepts evidence that will confirm his bias and will deny, revise, or ignore any that contradicts it. The funny thing is, this debate tactic is completely apparent to anyone who understands the issue under discussion, but he persists in it never-the-less, without even noticing that he has lost all credibility.

[Sy Borg]

It is frustrating, Felix. All that is required is basic honesty in debate. I especially dislike the approach of trying to find tiny (alleged) technical flaws in posts and then using them as a weapon like a politician instead of focusing on the main thrust of what people are trying to get across. Before you know it, you're stuck in three concurrent arguments of fragmented prose, none of which matter a jot.

The fact is that more gun ownership equals more gun deaths. More switch-knives would mean more knife deaths too. This should not be under debate at all.

[Mark1955]

The fact is that more gun ownership equals more gun deaths.

Sadly I'd suggest that Switzerland disproves this. Every adult male in Switzerland has an automatic rifle as part of his military equipment [they really do beleive in a well constitued militia], but gun crime in Switzerland is very uncommon. The problem in the US is the psychological profile of the population, which is the result of the nations, sadly, violent, racist and individualistic culture.

[Belindi]

The fact is that more gun ownership equals more gun deaths.

Sadly I'd suggest that Switzerland disproves this. Every adult male in Switzerland has an automatic rifle as part of his military equipment [they really do beleive in a well constitued militia], but gun crime in Switzerland is very uncommon. The problem in the US is the psychological profile of the population, which is the result of the nations, sadly, violent, racist and individualistic culture.

Individualism benefits commerce. Racism benefits the ruling elite class. The ruling elite class gets its power from commerce.

[Steve3007]

Clearly the authors of the Constitution did not consider all of its provisions timeless and immutable, or they would not have included an amendment procedure. But they no doubt considered some of them more fundamental than others, particularly those declared in the Bill of Rights. Surely among the latter would be the principle of self-defense, upon which the 2nd Amendment rests.

Yes, asserting the right to self-defence, as a very broad general principle, would seem on the face of it to be self evidently justified.

The key phrase in the quoted sentence is "prima facie." The Court has upheld laws restricting possession of machine guns, rocket launchers, and other "bearable" weapons. The real test is whether the weapon is well-suited and broadly favored for lawful purposes, such as self-defense, hunting, target shooting. Semi-auto rifles and handguns qualify by that test.

I don't have enough experience of hunting to be able to comment on that one. So I'll take your word for it. But it strikes me that the question of whether any given weapon (or other device, like a shield) is well suited for the purpose of self-defence depends entirely on the environment in which one lives. The greater the number of other self-defensive weapons out there the greater the need for one to carry a weapon oneself, and this is true even if all parties refer to their weapons as defensive. I think that's what's normally referred to as an arms race.

It would be pretty hard to argue that the right of self-defence is not fundamental. If it is not, is anything? If it is, then it would also be hard to argue that rights to the most effective means of exercising that right are not also fundamental.

I agree that it's hard to argue against self defence altogether. But it doesn't follow that there is a simple, unqualified right to the most effective means of self defence. Why? The main reason for this is that it's pretty difficult to manufacture an object whose only possible use is self defence. Shields maybe? But even the wearing of body armour is sometimes seen as an aggressive act. The guy who did the mass shooting in Ohio was apparently wearing it. So what's wrong with that? Clearly he's just trying to protect himself against attack, right? How could that ever be seen as a bad thing? Why would wearing it be reported in the media as something troubling and sinister? Obviously because it indicates that in his particular case its purpose was to keep him alive for long enough to kill more people. His shield was effectively a weapon of attack, or part of a system of attack.

We see a similar thing on a larger geopolitical scale as well as on an individual scale. Most countries' governments have a "department of defence". I don't know of any that have a "department of attack". They all claim that their only motive in developing and maintaining various weapons systems is purely defensive. NATO, for example, in recent years has claimed this of "missile shields" deployed in Eastern Europe. But Russia still objects because they know perfectly well that calling your weapon a "shield" and claiming that its only purpose is to stop enemy missiles from causing harm doesn't alter the fact that it upsets the delicate arms balance and escalates the arms race. Claiming that it's purely defensive is irrelevant. Everybody routinely claims that. Just as everybody nowadays (it sometimes seems) routinely refers to their enemies as terrorists, draining the word of real meaning.

It seems to me that at the heart of any disagreements on this subject is the points from which we start. On this and other subjects you clearly start from the position of individual liberty and make various arguments to support your position that nobody has the right to impose losses on another unless that other person is an immediately demonstrable threat to someone else's individual liberty. On the subject of weapons, with both individuals and nations, this means that any player can arm themselves with essentially anything they want so long as that thing has a possible defensive use and so long as they claim their motive to be purely defensive. But we all know that in the case of nations the resulting arms race isn't generally regarded as desirable. Governments try to come to agreements to de-escalate. Doesn't it make sense to try to also do the same thing in the case of individuals?

[Steve3007]

It's interesting to note the trouble the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has got into by tweeting this:

In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.

On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…

500 to Medical errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via Handgun

Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/us/n ... index.html

Looking at his comments as simple factual statements without trying to extrapolate anything from them, or read between the lines, or wonder why he chose to point out these particular facts, he's right isn't he? Obviously we do regard some deaths, and some means by which those deaths occur, as being more significant than others. Massively so. We don't see death statistics as merely data. We don't do a simple Utilitarian style assessment of numbers. Despite the apparent prevalence of mass shootings in the USA, the number of people actually killed and injured by them is still small compared to the number who die by other means, yet they get a lot of coverage.

One interesting thing to me is the amount of coverage they get here in the UK. On the BBC's flagship 3 hour morning radio news programme (Today on Radio 4) yesterday about half of the time was devoted to this story (when normally almost all of it would be devoted to Brexit!). On the face of it, this might seem odd considering it happened in a foreign country thousands of miles away and involved a few dozen deaths.

But we all know and understand that it's not as simple as that.

Poor old rational physicist Neil fell foul of the naive idea that if you simply state a fact you can't go wrong. Maybe somewhere else he explained the philosophical point he was seeking to make, but Twitter doesn't allow much room for that.

[Steve3007]

That's interesting Steve. I think it compares a constitution to holy writ. I agree that Islam is wrong when the Koran is viewed as eternal and not historical. In each case, that of the Koran and that of the Constitution, I think the spirit of the law underlies the words. The spirit of the law is only to be found when the historical origin of the holy writ are understood, understanding the spirit of the law is not easy but requires a lot of learning.

Yes, in both cases (religious holy texts and Constitutions) it seems that any chance we have of extracting long lasting principles of government from them, that stand the test of time, is dependent on not taking them literally but trying to work out from the context in which they were written what principles they might embody. We've all seen the absurdities of literalism particularly relatively recently in Islam, with, for example, Afghanistan under the Taliban where (I've read) men could be thrown in prison for failing to wear a beard the length of a clenched fist (because that was supposedly the length of Muhammad's beard). That could have come straight out of The Life of Brian!

[GE Morton]

I especially dislike the approach of trying to find tiny (alleged) technical flaws in posts and then using them as a weapon like a politician instead of focusing on the main thrust of what people are trying to get across.

By "tiny technical flaws" do you mean logical errors and factually false premises? By "the main thrust of what people are trying to get across" do you mean dogmatically held opinions to which one is emotionally or ideologically committed but which are not supported by evidence?

The fact is that more gun ownership equals more gun deaths.

That is NOT a fact. I've given you one study, which you dismissed. It probably will do no good to provide others, but I'll try:

Here is a table of homicide rates by country. The US has, by far, the world's highest rate of gun ownership, but it's homicide rate is less than half the global average. The countries on the right half of the graph have homicide rates many times higher, but very low gun ownership rates.

https://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/up ... ntries.jpg

Here is another comparing rates among US states:

https://politics.stackexchange.com/ques ... -causation

These rates are compiled from public sources. Anyone with a spread sheet can grab the data and run the correlations.

But feel free to cling to your dogma and ignore the facts.

[GE Morton]

But it strikes me that the question of whether any given weapon (or other device, like a shield) is well suited for the purpose of self-defence depends entirely on the environment in which one lives. The greater the number of other self-defensive weapons out there the greater the need for one to carry a weapon oneself, and this is true even if all parties refer to their weapons as defensive.

Oh, that is clearly not true. The number of weapons out there bears no relation to the risks posed by them, except perhaps for accidental shootings (for which owning one's own weapon would do little to prevent). For example, if 50% of people owned firearms, but the rate of gun crime was very low, the other 50% would have little incentive to acquire their own firearm. It is the rate of gun crime that spurs gun sales, not the mere rate of ownership.

I agree that it's hard to argue against self defence altogether. But it doesn't follow that there is a simple, unqualified right to the most effective means of self defence. Why? The main reason for this is that it's pretty difficult to manufacture an object whose only possible use is self defence.

That is true. But it is also true of almost everything else --- almost anything can be misused, including for criminal purposes, from prescription drugs to automobiles to computers to claw hammers. Do we ban everything that can, if misused, cause harm? Some will respond to this with, "But guns have no other purpose than to kill people." That is not precisely true --- they are also used for sporting purposes --- but sometimes killing people is justifiable, namely, in self-defense, which we agree is a "fundamental right."

But even the wearing of body armour is sometimes seen as an aggressive act. The guy who did the mass shooting in Ohio was apparently wearing it. So what's wrong with that? Clearly he's just trying to protect himself against attack, right? How could that ever be seen as a bad thing?

It is a bad thing whenever you're trying to protect yourself against resistance to violence you have initiated.

Claiming that it's purely defensive is irrelevant. Everybody routinely claims that. Just as everybody nowadays (it sometimes seems) routinely refers to their enemies as terrorists, draining the word of real meaning.

Throughout history people have sought to dehumanize their perceived enemies, by labeling them with all manner of odious epithets. Rarely do those epithets literally apply.

It seems to me that at the heart of any disagreements on this subject is the points from which we start. On this and other subjects you clearly start from the position of individual liberty and make various arguments to support your position that nobody has the right to impose losses on another unless that other person is an immediately demonstrable threat to someone else's individual liberty. On the subject of weapons, with both individuals and nations, this means that any player can arm themselves with essentially anything they want so long as that thing has a possible defensive use and so long as they claim their motive to be purely defensive. But we all know that in the case of nations the resulting arms race isn't generally regarded as desirable. Governments try to come to agreements to de-escalate. Doesn't it make sense to try to also do the same thing in the case of individuals?

The analogy doesn't quite work. Reducing the numbers of missiles, tanks, bombers, aircraft carriers, etc., may reduce the risks of war. Reducing the number of firearms will not necessarily reduce the risk of crime, for two reasons --- you will not likely be able to disarm the criminals; they will not voluntarily surrender their weapons, and we have no good information as to who has them and where they are. Secondly, even if, assuming the impossible, all firearms could be confiscated, the criminals would still carry on their depredations with other weapons, and a firearm would remain the most effective means of defending against them.

[Sy Borg]

I especially dislike the approach of trying to find tiny (alleged) technical flaws in posts and then using them as a weapon like a politician instead of focusing on the main thrust of what people are trying to get across.

By "tiny technical flaws" do you mean logical errors and factually false premises? By "the main thrust of what people are trying to get across" do you mean dogmatically held opinions to which one is emotionally or ideologically committed but which are not supported by evidence?

No, your "corrections" are rubbish too and I just can't be bother playing with your constant trickery and strategically withheld information any more.

No one is more dogmatic on this board than you are. No one even comes close, mate. Look in the mirror before throwing rubbish around,

You start threads to reinforce your dogma rather than approach questions with a sense of philosophical enquiry. I doubt you are even capable of recognising philosophical thought. You would just reframe it to push your red cap political beliefs.

The fact is that more gun ownership equals more gun deaths.

That is NOT a fact. I've given you one study, which you dismissed. It probably will do no good to provide others, but I'll try:

Here is a table of homicide rates by country. The US has, by far, the world's highest rate of gun ownership, but it's homicide rate is less than half the global average. The countries on the right half of the graph have homicide rates many times higher, but very low gun ownership rates.

https://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/up ... ntries.jpg

Exhibit A of GE Morton's dishonest approach. No mention that the chart includes developing countries, ignoring their relevant social and economic issues.

Why did he not mention this caveat? Because he NEVER mentions caveats. Like a politician.

As for comparing US states, never mind the porousness of borders and the fact that it's irrelevant.

The chart GE Morton fears and will not post is the one that compares gun ownership and gun deaths in OECD countries.

I wonder why he didn't mention that chart and pretended it didn't exist? Can anyone help me understand why he would not include this most critical pieces of graphical information?

Best to just hope no one picks up your tricks, eh GE? I let your dodgy gaming go for years in the hope that you would grow up and become honest. Not any more.

Just another wannabe red cap politician. Nothing to see here, folks.