amusing varieties of responses to that 2nd amendment post
i don’t have time to answer all of them individually b/c honestly there are way better things to fill my day with, but in general responses are falling into:
- “your post containing absolutely nothing but the text ‘repeal the second amendment’ was clearly a detailed policy proposal containing all of the gun-related legislation you would like to see.” yes. definitely. so long, so clearly reasoned. it’s so lengthy that it’s unreasonable to think i might have any further thoughts on “things that might be necessary to address gun violence in america”
- “this means you want zero guns in america.” i didn’t actually say that? like, it might be a position i hold, it might not, but it’s not at all entailed by the original post. “there should be strict gun control legislation in place” =\= “there should be zero legal guns in this country”
- “lol good luck this will never happen in the current political climate.” ah, right, i forgot that it’s impermissible to ever argue for pie-in-the-sky visions of the ideal society the most extreme positions that anyone can ever argue for on any issue are only those that can be immediately enacted without any kind of cultural change whatsoever
- “there are gun owners out there who would rather start a war against their government than give up their machine guns.” you’re . . . not making a great case for responsible gun ownership, tbh
- “even if you succeed at removing all legal guns from circulation, there will still be illegal guns plus other ways for people to commit mass murder.” (special bonus points to the person who brought up the oklahoma city bombing to effectively argue “people can make bombs, therefore we shouldn’t do anything about gun violence.”) right, i keep forgetting. unless we can absolutely 100% completely eliminate a problem there is no point in doing anything do make it even marginally less bad lowering the odds of school children being shot down in class even slightly is a completely worthless goal since we cannot guarantee that all people will be perfectly safe from all forms of violence always
- “australia’s buyback program left guns in the country and did nothing to reduce rates of gun violence.” nowhere did i say that australia had a rate of zero guns per person, so moving on to the second half of that statement: it is true that real-world numbers are hella messy and that there can be any number of factors that affect rates of gun violence, making teasing out the specific effects of any one program/policy frustrating and difficult. (this is true more generally of studies of how firearm legislation relates to firearm deaths — correlation and causation can be deeply entwined and confounded, and since we can’t exactly run multiple trials of any given decade with variations in gun control legislation, separating the two can be difficult to impossible. science is hard.) that said: there is strong evidence that the australian ban+buyback program led to an 80% decrease in the firearm suicide rate, and weaker evidence that it led to a similar decrease in the firearm homicide rate (pdf). (one of the things making it harder to establish a link to the homicide rate is australia’s homicide rate being already relatively low; in certain jurisdictions, to find evidence of such a decrease, many models require there to be negative deaths per year, which is . . . obviously not a thing that can happen.) if you don’t like australia, there’s plenty of research in the united states that supports the idea that more guns = more homicides. japan, canada, and the united kingdom also suggest that low rates of gun ownership are correlated with low rates of gun death. there is also evidence from the contrasting cases of connecticut and missouri that tighter gun control laws are correlated with lower gun deaths. (that source obviously has a gun control agenda, but i trust them to not blatantly lie about the contents of peer-reviewed studies, and i trust researchers to do their jobs with a basic level of integrity.) according to politifact, about 71% of researchers actively publishing work on guns agree that tighter gun control legislation actually causes a decrease in the homicide rate. (12% disagree, but i can’t tell from the article how much of that is reticence to make strong claims of causation from largely correlative data. many of the scientists i know are very careful about that distinction, and very hesitant to cross it.) so like yeah, sure, establishing causation is hard, especially in the social sciences, but given the current state of research, i think it is entirely reasonable to believe that stricter gun control legislation will lead to a reduction in gun-related violence