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Fucking Guns

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  • ClimacusClimacus Shipmate
    Terribly sad. :heartbreak:

    Is the NRA suing states for passing laws they don't like a common thing?

    Off topic, but that is a part of the Trans-Pacific free trade agreement that worries me. Corporations suing governments. Seems a slippery slope to me. I know the NRA is an organisation, but I felt a link to this when I read about it.
  • Climacus wrote: »
    Is the NRA suing states for passing laws they don't like a common thing?

    Activist groups of all stripes suing states over laws they think are unconstitutional is a common thing.

    That's rather built in to the process - some state (or municipality, or ...) passes a law that group X doesn't like. Group X thinks they have a case that the law is actually unconstitutional rather than just something they don't like, so they find test case Y (a person who is prevented from doing something by the new law) and sue demanding relief.
  • Alan Cresswell Alan Cresswell Admin, 8th Day Host
    The courts should have a role in balancing government, to rule on the constitutionality of any law introduced by government. So it is appropriate for individuals, organizations or businesses to be able to test things through the courts.
  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin Emeritus
    edited March 2018
    Here we'd ask for a judicial review, which sounds a lot less abrasive than "suing".
  • As Gore Vidal is reputed to have once said: "As one gets older, litigation replaces sex."
  • As Gore Vidal is reputed to have once said: "As one gets older, litigation replaces sex."
    Hmm. Not sure it would go down well with my wife if I sued her.
  • ClimacusClimacus Shipmate
    Thanks Leorning Cniht, and Alan and Doc Tor for the information.

    As per Doc Tor's comment, it was the "suing" that shocked me. Did seem abrasive.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    mousethief wrote: »
    As Gore Vidal is reputed to have once said: "As one gets older, litigation replaces sex."
    Hmm. Not sure it would go down well with my wife if I sued her.

    Indeed, but would it go down better or worse? /scarpers as fast as his short middle aged legs will carry him.
  • RossweisseRossweisse Hell Host, 8th Day Host, Glory
    I wasn't aware that anyone was claiming banning guns would get rid of them all. It would mean that getting hold of a gun would be much more difficult, taking ingenuity (eg: to make one), or money and contacts to buy one illegally. ... It would mean that a teenager who has a row with his girlfriend would almost certainly not be able to just go up to his room, get out his arsenal of guns and blow away a dozen kids at school.

    And that's why we need to do what we can to limit the number of semi-automatic weapons out there.

  • Wesley JWesley J Circus Host
    'Gun-trained teacher accidentally discharges firearm in Calif. classroom, injuring student' during a gun safety lesson (!), says the Washington Post:
    [...] The father said the teacher told the class before pointing the gun at the ceiling that he was doing so to make sure his gun wasn’t loaded, something that can be determined visually.

    “It’s the craziest thing,” [Mr] Gonzales [, the injured student's father,] told the [TV] station. “It could have been very bad.” Gonzales said he learned about the incident when his 17-year-old son came home with blood on his shirt and bullet fragments in his neck.

    “He’s shaken up, but he’s going to be okay. I’m just pretty upset that no one told us anything and we had to call the police ourselves to report it,” the father told the TV station. [...]

    Not good.
  • Wesley J wrote: »
    'Gun-trained teacher accidentally discharges firearm in Calif. classroom, injuring student' during a gun safety lesson (!), says the Washington Post:

    Not good.

    There was a video doing the rounds a few years ago of a cop doing a "gun talk" to a bunch of teens. He takes out his service pistol, says something like "nobody in this room except me is professional enough to handle this gun", and promptly shoots himself in the leg.

    It's easy to point at these people and explain what they did wrong (and it's true that both are basically idiots). But the thing about humans is that they will make mistakes, and the goal for designing systems is to make them trap these mistakes before they cause a problem. So if you have, for example, a water filter that has a specific orientation, you design its fittings so that it can only be connected the right way around.

    This kind of thinking seems completely absent from these discussions.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    I'm having trouble reconciling the phrases "It could have been very bad" and "bullet fragments in his neck". That doesn't qualify as "very bad"? Is it only "maybe, kinda-sorta bad"? WTF?

    I mean, I understand that it could have potentially been a lot worse, but I think we're already in "very bad" territory when the words "bullet fragments" and "neck" get put together in a sentence.
  • Alan Cresswell Alan Cresswell Admin, 8th Day Host
    More guns = more accidents involving guns.

    And, I'm with @Crœsos , an accident with a gun is already very bad.
  • Crœsos wrote: »
    I'm having trouble reconciling the phrases "It could have been very bad" and "bullet fragments in his neck".

    "Bullet fragments in his neck" is a quote from the boy's father. From the account provided in the article it seems to me to be far more likely that what hit the boy were fragments of ceiling plaster/tile/other material that fell down after being broken when the bullet hit them, rather than bits of the actual bullet itself.

    Still far from a good thing, of course. But given all the other gun-related injuries and fatalities we've discussed on this thread and its predecessor it definitely could have been a lot lot worse.
  • Climacus wrote: »
    Is the NRA suing states for passing laws they don't like a common thing?

    Activist groups of all stripes suing states over laws they think are unconstitutional is a common thing.

    That's rather built in to the process - some state (or municipality, or ...) passes a law that group X doesn't like. Group X thinks they have a case that the law is actually unconstitutional rather than just something they don't like, so they find test case Y (a person who is prevented from doing something by the new law) and sue demanding relief.

    And, to be fair, when the ACLU sued the federal government over the travel ban, that's when I pulled out my checkbook to make a contribution. So it does swing both ways.
  • Crœsos wrote: »
    I'm having trouble reconciling the phrases "It could have been very bad" and "bullet fragments in his neck". That doesn't qualify as "very bad"? Is it only "maybe, kinda-sorta bad"? WTF?

    I mean, I understand that it could have potentially been a lot worse, but I think we're already in "very bad" territory when the words "bullet fragments" and "neck" get put together in a sentence.

    And that a student was sent home at the end of the day in that condition, rather than being sent to the ER to be checked out, and the parents notified. Seriously?!?
  • And that a student was sent home at the end of the day in that condition, rather than being sent to the ER to be checked out, and the parents notified. Seriously?!?

    It's just a flesh wound. :naughty:
  • Presumably, it's cheaper to deal with a dead body in Usania, than an injured one.

    :fearful:

    IJ
  • OhherOhher Shipmate
    And that a student was sent home at the end of the day in that condition, rather than being sent to the ER to be checked out, and the parents notified. Seriously?!?

    It's just a flesh wound. :naughty:

    And -- theoretically, at least -- the condition (foreign matter, whether shell frags or ceiling tiles, inserted violently into student necks) is not contagious and therefore offers no danger to other students. It's all part of the NRA campaign to normalize the notion that school, like all other locations in the US, should be a place where we are forcibly taught to defend ourselves by shooting at anything which moves in case it later turns out to have posed an actual challenge to our 2nd amendment rights. Or, you know, threatened our existence.

    If only the CDC were allowed to collect info on gun violence; we might discover it actually IS contagious.
  • jbohnjbohn Shipmate
    There was a video doing the rounds a few years ago of a cop doing a "gun talk" to a bunch of teens. He takes out his service pistol, says something like "nobody in this room except me is professional enough to handle this gun", and promptly shoots himself in the leg.

    DEA agent. He later sued the DEA because the video made the rounds.

    Video here.
    It's easy to point at these people and explain what they did wrong (and it's true that both are basically idiots). But the thing about humans is that they will make mistakes, and the goal for designing systems is to make them trap these mistakes before they cause a problem. So if you have, for example, a water filter that has a specific orientation, you design its fittings so that it can only be connected the right way around.

    This kind of thinking seems completely absent from these discussions.

    This.

  • Alan Cresswell Alan Cresswell Admin, 8th Day Host
    So, how to design a gun so that accidents can't happen? Maybe start by designing them so that they don't contain explosives in confined spaces and can never expel a small piece of metal at high velocity.
  • More guns = more accidents involving guns.

    And, I'm with @Crœsos , an accident with a gun is already very bad.

    I'm having some difficulty with the concept of "Accidents with guns". If you have a gun then it will only discharge if the trigger is pulled. It will only discharge the way it is pointed. I suppose there is a miniscule chance that the gun will blow up, sending bits of gun and ammo in all directions, but that's pretty rare. Anything else is not, IMHO, an accident.
    So, how to design a gun so that accidents can't happen? Maybe start by designing them so that they don't contain explosives in confined spaces and can never expel a small piece of metal at high velocity.

    Guns are about as accident-proof as is possible, beyond exploding in the hand of the operator. Firstly, they do not fire unless the trigger is pulled, the round exits in a pre-determined direction and (in all but a few cases) there is a safety catch.

    That leaves careless and malicious use, which are all too common.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    edited March 2018
    sionisais wrote: »
    Guns are about as accident-proof as is possible, beyond exploding in the hand of the operator.

    That's debatable.
    Federal law imposes no design safety standards on domestically produced firearms. That is because, unlike every other consumer product produced in the US, firearms and ammunition are exempted from the health and safety standards set by the federal Consumer Product Safety Act. As a result, many firearms are manufactured and sold in the US without undergoing appropriate safety testing and without including basic safety features.

    Can you imagine how many other industries wished they lived a legal universal devoid of consumer protection laws? This is one of the key indicators that the NRA serves the interests of gun manufacturers, not gun owners. Gun owners would probably benefit from not having their weapons accidentally fire or explode. Gun manufacturers, on the other hand, prefer not to be legally liable for such things. The NRA has consistently opposed any kind of product safety regulation being applied to firearms.
    sionisais wrote: »
    Firstly, they do not fire unless the trigger is pulled, . . .

    Also debatable.
    But the customer complaints, and more than 75 lawsuits, have alleged the [ Remington Model ] 700 is susceptible to firing without the trigger being pulled. At least two dozen deaths and more than 100 injuries have been linked to accidental discharges involving the 700’s trigger mechanism.

    Lawsuits which have to proceed under liability laws other than the Consumer Product Safety Act, it should be noted.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    But even if we take the somewhat questionable assumption that guns only ever function as designed, there are a bunch of questions that the whole "arm the teachers" movement seems to be avoiding, despite the fact that they're obviously germane to the idea of armed teachers.

    First, does the school's insurance policy cover shootings by teachers? What about shootings by firearms belonging to teachers that have somehow gotten into someone else's hands? The answer to this question is typically "no", which then suggests the next question: "how much would premiums increase to include such coverage?"

    It goes out from there.

    Who is liable in the case of an accidentally discharged firearm?

    Who is liable in the case of a deliberately discharged firearm that hits an innocent bystander?

    Who is liable in the case of a deliberately discharged firearm that hits its intended target who is mistakenly thought to be a danger by the shooter?

    These are the kinds of questions that a serious policy would address, yet these are also the kinds of questions those advocating arming teachers tend to avoid like the plague. And there are even uglier questions, like "What happens if one of these armed teachers is named something like 'Philando' or 'Tamir' and some helpful citizen reports to the police that they just saw someone with a gun going into the local school?"
  • sionisais wrote: »
    I'm having some difficulty with the concept of "Accidents with guns". If you have a gun then it will only discharge if the trigger is pulled. It will only discharge the way it is pointed. I suppose there is a miniscule chance that the gun will blow up, sending bits of gun and ammo in all directions, but that's pretty rare. Anything else is not, IMHO, an accident.

    In Human Performance terms, an "accident" is a thing you didn't want to happen. By your standards, almost nothing is an accident.

    By actual useful standards, if I am flying a plane and push the "wings fall off" button because it was next to the intercom button and I pushed the wrong one, then
    1. It was an accident
    2. The fault is in having a "wings fall off" button easily accessible
    By your standards, the wings only fall off if you push the "wings fall off" button, so it's working as designed. You only want to call it an accident if the wings spontaneously fell off.

    Your kind of "blame the operator" thinking is a direct cause of the rate of industrial accidents being higher than it should be.
  • A friend in a different context discussed the text of the #2 amendment, which also references militias. With the additional information that the constitutional interpretation, not the text, changed to empower individuals versus militias, to "bear arms". It was likened to the original wording of "all men are created equal", which at the time, obviously didn't mean black and brown people who were enslaved by the equal men.

    So the court and suing problem is the political manipulation of the courts which interpret such things? And if a court determined something about guns, the judges could be replaced by others who interpreted it back again? Sounds just a little suspect.
  • Designing gun safety hardware is actually quite a challenge. For most systems and in most cases, a fail-safe that just decides not to operate if its not certain that it is safe is a perfectly sensible thing. For guns which people want to use in self-defense, failing-safe is a problem. In cases when you actually need the gun in self-defense, not going bang when required is just as bad as going bang when not required.

    (For hunting, or shooting targets, this isn't true.)

    On the other hand, we can reasonably look at the systems. Apparently, Mr. Shooty-Teacher was not authorized to bring his weapon onto school property, was not authorized to remove it from its holster, and was not authorized to use his (usually loaded) weapon in a student demonstration. So he didn't just shoot the ceiling by being stupid, he violated procedures in multiple ways. Why did that happen? Was the school culture supportive of following such procedures? Did Mr. Shooty think the procedures didn't apply to him, because he was a reserve cop, and so somehow magic?

    Was there a written HA for the use of such a dangerous tool in a classroom? I suspect not.
  • Crœsos wrote: »
    sionisais wrote: »
    Guns are about as accident-proof as is possible, beyond exploding in the hand of the operator.

    That's debatable..

    Indeed it is

  • cliffdwellercliffdweller Shipmate
    edited March 2018
    Meanwhile a close friend posted a message on Facebook today that he was locked with fellow students in a classroom at his univ due to a reported shooter on campus. An hour or so later we learned it was a "swatting" incident. Things are taking a dark turn
  • Guns kill. Do you want to kill someone?
    Do you seriously think that someone who comes at you with a gun is going to give you time to get yours out to defend yourself?

    A knife you have to get close. A gun can kill at a distance without contact.

    Look at the number of children who get hold of parents etc. guns and and kill or maim because they don't understand. No one talks about that.

    Why do you need an automatic weapon - are we at war?

    Why don't those that want to have guns go to a field with all the others who want guns to defend themselves (ie kill someone else), and just have a shoot out.

    We haven't got over the wild west - "hey ho Silver and away!!!"

    Maybe we would solve the problem!
  • Another day, another school shooting. Kid takes a gun to school, shoots a girl he had some kind of "prior relationship" with, whatever that means, shoots another boy, then was shot and killed by school cop.

    Once again, if angry people can put their hands on a gun, this will keep happening.
  • sabinesabine Shipmate
    Is anyone going or know someone going to a March for our Lives rally/march tomorrow? We're supposed to have a winter storm, so ours has been moved inside the Statehouse. Large space under a big dome with three floors if balconies. Shout be very loud.
  • NicoleMRNicoleMR Shipmate
    Hopefully going to the New York City one.
  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Jim Wallis talked about wind changers. As opposed to the normal political approach of testing which way the wind of opinion was blowing.

    I think Emma Gonzales may be a wind changer.
  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    edited March 2018
    Sorry about the advert which precedes the talk. It is a small price to pay.

    Here is the gut-wrenching power of stillness and silence

    I've been around a long time and I can't recall anything as evocative. I just hope a lot of people sitting on the fence get it. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.
  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    edited March 2018
    (And some editor edited out the silence....)

    So you can find a better link here.

    Just scroll down.
  • sabinesabine Shipmate
    edited March 2018
    Edited out the silence?? That was the most powerful part.

    Our's was moved into the Statehouse because of a winter storm (8 inches). The Capitol police had only one door open with a security scanner, so the line wrapped around an entire city block. Our group waited an hour in the snow coming down, and some waited much longer. But it was worth every minute of the wait when we got inside. Can you imagine what several thousand people sound like inside?? Priceless.

    Meanwhile, there were men with assault rifles pacing back and forth by the line outside. Can you imagine how unsettling that would be for a young person. What did those guys need to prove? Oh yeah, theirs are bigger.
  • Barnabas62 wrote: »
    I think Emma Gonzales may be a wind changer[/URL].

    Where can I send a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize?

    This woman is amazing.

  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    sabine

    Totally agree. The silence and the grief together were profound.

    I think it costs her a lot. I hope the media machine does not try to professionalise her. It is the creative sincerity which is speaking through her obvious pain.
  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin Emeritus
    I've seen pictures - presumably not photoshopped - of people turning up to the anti-gun violence rallies with open carry AR-15s.

    At least we know who the dicks are now.
  • NicoleMRNicoleMR Shipmate
    I am so glad I live in New York City. The counter protesters that I saw, only about three of them, were limited to rather stupid signs.

    The march itself was amazing. I was at the Million Mom March against gun violence back in 2000, in Washington, DC, and this was even more awesome, I think.

  • sabinesabine Shipmate
    Doc Tor wrote: »
    I've seen pictures - presumably not photoshopped - of people turning up to the anti-gun violence rallies with open carry AR-15s.

    At least we know who the dicks are now.

    They were real AR-15s at our rally
  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin Emeritus
    Well, damn.
  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    Emma was amazing.

    Re counter-protests with guns:

    I've been a little worried about that. Also about law enforcement, with all their known problems with protestors, and possibly feeling conflicted about gun control.

    Plus kids who probably have PTSD from whatever shooting they survived. (AIUI, some folks from Columbine are in the movement, too.)

    With so many people under pressure and with strong emotions...

    :eek: :votive:
  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Attempted intimidation tells you all you really need to know. Bullies are cowards. You don't need much of a moral compass to work out who was being brave.
  • cliffdwellercliffdweller Shipmate
    edited March 2018
    Barnabas62 wrote: »
    sabine

    Totally agree. The silence and the grief together were profound.

    I think it costs her a lot. I hope the media machine does not try to professionalise her. It is the creative sincerity which is speaking through her obvious pain.


    From what I saw not just of Emma but the entire leadership of the Parkland group in their 60 minutes interview last week, they're really savvy to the attempts of others to co-opt their movement. The whole lot of 'em give me hope. I expect Emma to be the next Congresswoman from Florida

  • Golden Key wrote: »
    Also about law enforcement, with all their known problems with protestors, and possibly feeling conflicted about gun control.
    Individual officers may be conflicted about gun control. I have never heard any official statements from police departments, unions, etc. that have been gung-ho about private ownership of combat-scale weapons.
  • Simon ToadSimon Toad Shipmate
    edited March 2018
    Grats Americans, and good luck in the coming struggles. Roll on November. I expect to see the whole country smiling when I arrive on the 10th.
  • I did plan to arrive earlier and vote myself. I was going to do my best John Wayne and when they arrested me, start yelling, "Trump told me to vote. He said it would be OK".
  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    mt--

    I don't think I have, either. But, at protests, there's usually someone, on any side, who makes a mistake, does something stupid, or is perceived to do something stupid. And it falls apart from there.

    Plus I gather that if one cop is in trouble, even self-caused, the others go into support her/him, especially with a "mob" that seems to be out of control. They learn to protect each other on duty every day. And there's a good chance that will kick in at a protest.

    FWIW.
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