Omar
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Posts posted by Omar
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Guns vs other weapons - I'll assume that you mean 'weapons' as in knives etc. Give me something to work with. I've already asked for evidence about homicides. Let's start with that. What weapons dominate US homicides? We'll work it from there. If you ask me to compare guns with cars it doesn't work as I was asked to do because "a car can be used as an offensive weapon". Jason Bourne can use a biro pen as one so should be discuss those too. Do you see what I'm getting at here? It totally derails the topic completely and ends up with stupid conversations. I just know *Cough*
Apology accepted, but I'll let the people who actually know about guns make these points. Let me just focus on black markets:
Black Markets - Tough one. I believe that if you're going to ban something then follow it through. Better that than doing nothing at all. I think guns are too embedded in american culture to ban completely imo. If it was a ban I'd support it. You will get casualties as with anything like this. More deaths than currently - I've no crystal ball on the subject.It's not nearly as simple as following through. To take the example of drugs, absolutely nothing that has been tried hasn't gone completely wrong, as was the case when alcohol was illegal; you've got people in prisons for smoking innocuous bits of vegetation, just like you'll have shopkeepers in prison for defending themselves from burglars, or Z_Berenices incarcerated for defending their family from a dude with a machete. The state does not control society; that's creationism. The guns exist; now we need those who could be victims of attacks to be able to defend themselves.
To comparisons made between rampages using different weapons: note that the reason why shootings happen in schools is that you're not allowed to bring guns in. Note also that it's more likely that people will get struck by lighting. Considering how effective gun control would be, I think we should bump it down the list and focus on preventing lightning strikes.
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If something is irrelevant, you should be able to point out why. After all, if we use different words to denote two things, that is more often than not because they are not the same. Calling deflection tactics won't convince anyone other than yourself because if the argument was made in good faith (which is not something you can really know), your assertion will look like deflection tactics (see Alg's reply), especially considering you should be able dismantle his argument if it's false, but you chose not to.
So tell me: which characteristic of guns is it that separates them from drugs in such a way that banning the former won't create a dangerous black market, even though it has in the latter?
No. Arguments work like that when you have at least something comparable to work with. I don’t need to sit there and dismantle this type of thing because I use a little common sense and ignore it. If you want to sit there and debate cars vs guns or whatever be my guest. If I did you'd be on the usual bandwagons of screaming "off-topic" or "troll!".
No, I wouldn't be; I made a point regarding positivism in social sciences in this thread, so I'm not exactly in a position where I can criticize people for going off-topic. I don't understand what you're saying about having nothing to work with. Drugs and guns, how are they different in those regards that affect their exchange? It's a simple question, and we're having this exact type of discussion about how dangerous guns are in relation to other weapons, so why do you refuse to do it about this? There is demand for guns, just like there is demand for drugs; there is supply for guns, just like there is supply for drugs. In my mind that is all that is required for a black market to exist when the law gets in the way. But I'm waiting to be proven wrong.
Suppose that guns were banned in the US and that a dangerous black market, was created, costing us lives in the same way drug wars do, and more of them than before prohibition, was created. Would this not change your views about gun control? It seems evident to me that you and I are both getting at the same thing--we want to save lives--but don't agree on the method. What I'm telling is that I'm on your side, but you're not; what you will end up doing is just compounding the problem. Hopefully, this clears up the importance of the question.
PS: appealing to common sense is like saying "I just know".
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If something is irrelevant, you should be able to point out why. After all, if we use different words to denote two things, that is more often than not because they are not the same. Calling deflection tactics won't convince anyone other than yourself because if the argument was made in good faith (which is not something you can really know), your assertion will look like deflection tactics (see Alg's reply), especially considering you should be able dismantle his argument if it's false, but you chose not to.
So tell me: which characteristic of guns is it that separates them from drugs in such a way that banning the former won't create a dangerous black market, even though it has in the latter?
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Our discussion is about firearms. Using other items is deflection tactics from what we're talking about here.
a) So I imagine you don't use analogies and comparisons at all, correct? Really, if you wanted to show other items are irrelevant, you would point to an essential difference between guns and other items. For example, if I wanted to argue for nuke control but not gun control, I would say that a nuke is essentially a gun that is pointed at everyone simultaneously--a constant threat, whereas this is not the case for guns.
b) Please stop assuming people who don't agree with you have malicious intent.
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The same applies for gun control--in the same way nuclear weapons provide incentives not to start wars between nations for fear of mutually assured destruction, the existence of guns create incentives to avoid crime because of how much more dangerous it becomes. The Aurora shooter went out of his way to go to a theatre in which guns were banned, because that made it much less likely that he would get shot before murdering as many people as he wanted. When you disarm citizens, you make the law-abiding ones defenseless against those who were going to break the law anyway by attempting violent crime--getting a weapon illegally is not going to faze them.
The argument that more guns means more safety is, of course, total bollocks. You have more guns in circulation now than ever before and more gun violence as a result.
Correlation is not causation. Gun violence has been decreasing in the US since about 1992, if I remember correctly. The amount of users of Internet Explorer also. That does not mean that people murder each other out of anger about IE less and less. Norway and Iceland have liberal laws on gun ownership but they don't have the same problem as in the US.
Don’t you think that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to give LESS guns a try? It’s been tried elsewhere in the world and worked everywhere.
No, I don't. Just because you ban things, doesn't make them disappear; drugs and alcohol are a great example, but the same is true for anything that can be profitable, because when you make them hard to get, you make them more profitable to supply. If you're going to convince me that insofar as it's feasible, guns should not be allowed in the hands of citizens, you have to explain why this makes sense theoretically considering people respond to incentives, but somehow it doesn't end up happening in practice. You're never going to be able to pull this off in the US anyway with the amount of guns already in circulation.
P.S. ~ Not to mention that your “nuclear war” scenario is equally bollocks. The enduring legacy of the program of Mutually Assured Destruction was that it simply created an arms race that bankrupted two “superpowers”.
That's the whole point. Would you rather one of them nuke the other?
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It's standard economics. If you accept that profit and/or power are the primary motives of providers (which is not something you can know using empirical evidence, because motives are in people's heads), the rest follows pretty quick. That's not something numbers can help you with much. Number of drug-related deaths and potency can be measured, but that's about as far as we can go:
http://www.bbc.co.uk...merica-10681249
http://www.wired.com...igh-times-in-a/
[hide=Roderick T. Long and F. A. Hayek explaining that positivism in social sciences is misguided and why some things are known before looking at the world; not directly related to the topic at hand]
[A]ll propositions of economic theory refer to things which are defined in terms of human attitudes toward them .... I am not certain that the behaviorists in the social sciences are quite aware ofhowmuch of the traditional approach they would have to abandon if they wanted to be consistent or that they would want to adhere to it consistently if they were aware of this. It would, for instance, imply that propositions of the theory of money would have to refer exclusively to, say, "round disks of metal, bearing a certain stamp," or some similarly defined physical object or group of objects.That the objects of economic activity cannot be defined in objective terms but only with reference to a human purpose goes without saying. Neither a "commodity" or an "economic good," nor "food" or "money," can be defined in physical terms .... Economic theory has nothing to say about the little round disks of metal as which an objective or materialist view might try to define money. ... Nor could we distinguish in physical terms whether two men barter or exchange or whether they are playing some game or performing some ritual. Unless we can understand what the acting people mean by their actions any attempt to explain them, that is, to subsume them under rules ... is bound to fail.Take such things as tools, medicine, weapons, words, sentences, communications, and acts of production -- or any one particular instance of these. I believe these to be fair samples of the kind of objects of human activity which constantly occur in the social sciences. It is easily seen that all these concepts (and the same is true of more concrete instances) refer not to some objective properties possessed by the things, or which the observer can find out about them, but to views which some other person holds about the things. These objects cannot even be defined in physical terms, because there is no single physical property which any one member of a class must possess. These concepts are not merely abstractions of the kind we use in all physical sciences; they abstract fromallthe physical properties of the things themselves. ... [W]e do not even consciously or explicitly know which are the various physical properties of which an object would have to possess at least one to be a member of a class. The situation may be described schematically by saying that we know the objectsa,b,c,..., which may be physically completely dissimilar and which we can never exhaustively enumerate, are objects of the same kind because the attitude of X toward them all is similar. But the fact that X's attitude toward them is similar can again be defined only by saying that he will react toward them by any one of the actionsa,b,g,..., which again may be physically dissimilar and which we will not be able to enumerate exhaustively, but which we just know to "mean" the same thing. ...As long as I move among my own kind of people, it is probably the physical properties of a bank note or a revolver from which I conclude that they are money or a weapon to the person holding them. When I see a savage holding cowrie shells or a long, thin tube, the physical properties of the thing will probably tell me nothing. But the observations which suggest to me that the cowrie shells are money to him and the blowpipe a weapon will throw much light on the object -- much more light than these same observations could possibly give if I were not familiar with the concept of money or a weapon. In recognizing the things as such, I begin to understand the people’s behavior. I am able to fit [the object] into a scheme of actions which "make sense" just because I have come to regard it not as a thing with certain physical properties but as the kind of thing which fits into the pattern of my own purposive action. ...[A]s we go from interpreting the actions of men very much like ourselves to men who live in a very different environment, it is the most concrete concepts which first lose their usefulness for interpreting the people’s actions and the most general or abstract which remain helpful longest. My knowledge of the everyday things around me, of the particular ways in which we express ideas or emotions, will be of little use in interpreting the behavior of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. But my understanding of what I mean by a means to an end, by food or a weapon, a word or a sign, and probably even an exchange or a gift, will still be useful and even essential in my attempt to understand what they do. ...From the fact that whenever we interpret human action as in any sense purposive or meaningful ... we have to define both the objects of human activity and the different kinds of action themselves, not in physical terms but in terms of the opinions or intentions of the acting persons, there follow some very important consequences; namely, nothing less than that we can, from the concepts of the objects, analytically conclude something about what the actions will be. If we define an object in terms of a person’s attitude toward it, it follows, of course, that the definition of the object implies a statement about the attitude of the person toward the thing. When we say that a person possesses food or money, or that he utters a word, we imply that he knows that the first can be eaten, that the second can be used to buy something with, and that the third can be understood -- and perhaps many other things.This is the Austrian case for claiming that the laws of economics, and of the social sciences generally, are a priori conceptual truths. Concepts like "price," "unemployment," "money," and so forth are defined in terms of people's attitudes and actions concerning such items, so it is no surprise that there should turn out to be conceptual truths about how people will behave with regard to such items. The principles of economics thus turn out to have the same status as the principles of logic and mathematics.
- http://praxeology.net/whyjust.htm part 10.
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@Blyaunte: There should be no laws against the use of drugs because it compounds the problem rather than solve it. In fact, I think the only problem that would exist with regards to drugs if they were legal would be people harming themselves by taking the more dangerous ones. I can't help but not feel as sorry for them as for innocent kids getting caught in drive-by shootings.
There have been much more than 50000 people murdered in Mexico over the last decade because, in an effort to comfort people who feel others should not do whatever they want with their own bodies, governments in the Americas have passed laws that create incentives for people to commit crimes: by stopping law-abiding citizens from supplying drugs, the market is put in the hands of cartel-types; they enforce their own contracts instead of relying on courts, which is why so much violence is related to drugs. It also pushes people to supply much more potent substances--when alcohol was prohibited,people were smuggling moonshine, not beer, because it was so much more compact.
The same applies for gun control--in the same way nuclear weapons provide incentives not to start wars between nations for fear of mutually assured destruction, the existence of guns create incentives to avoid crime because of how much more dangerous it becomes. The Aurora shooter went out of his way to go to a theatre in which guns were banned, because that made it much less likely that he would get shot before murdering as many people as he wanted. When you disarm citizens, you make the law-abiding ones defenseless against those who were going to break the law anyway by attempting violent crime--getting a weapon illegally is not going to faze them.
The two are connected because making people enforce their own contracts in the market for drugs results in more gun violence. Get rid of the first and you'll solve the latter to a great extent.
The same does not apply to drunk driving. Laws against drunk driving don't create incentives for people to drive drunk, in no small part because there is no demand for drunk driving, which is not the case for guns or drugs. If you wanted to draw a comparison, you could say guns are like alcohol, and drunk driving is like crime committed with firearms. No one said murder should be legal.
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^This. You don't get disappointed when you don't have expectations.
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Then he was probably trying to get it in. Welcome to campus life.
As for hitting on girls in relationships, I'm alright with being a thief if and only if:
1) I'm in a good place
2) Their relationship isn't serious OR Their relationship is unhealthy
3) She's unhappy in her current situation
4) I don't like/have never liked the boyfriend
I'd say if a girl cheats then she's not happy/their relationship isn't serious/it isn't healthy, so it's not really a prerequisite as much as something you find out if you don't get a drink thrown in your face (does anyone do that? just thinking about it hurts my wallet).
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How many and how much though?
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I'd stress that the law is against anyone who sells a knife to an under-18 year old, not necessarily against the under-18 year old. The aim was to reduce the widespread availability of knives to that age group, given its association with gang culture, not demonize that social group as knife-wielding maniacs.
Gang violence is largely the result of paternalistic interventions in the drug market; when you make something people want to consume illegal, you create a black market in which people have to enforce their own contracts. You need to stop giving people reasons to commit crimes, not take away their weapons.
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Summer is right around the corner, does anyone have goals they want to achieve? I'm doing Starting Strength as soon as I figure out the logistics. I'm compiling a list of books I want to have read by the end of the summer, if I can get my hands on them that is. So far, I have:
Future Babble by Dan Gardner
Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard
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"just because there's a goalie doesn't mean you can't score"
That was actually the first thing to pop into my mind when I read his post >_>
I don't have a problem with it and I think the person in the relationship bears all the responsibility, but I don't think that's what G_W was aiming for, that's all.
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"The constitution is outdated and irrelevant."
It's timeless, you just don't understand what it's for.
"Home defence and hunting are not legitimate reasons to own a gun, the rate of gun crime in the US is far higher than countries without gun crime. Guns are implements designed for murder, there is no reason a person should own a gun. People do not need to worry about these sorts of things without guns."
Yes they are. Norway and Iceland don't have this gun crime problem and they have comparable laws. No they're not, they're implements designed to injure or kill people; that is not the same as murder; yes, there is a reason, and that's self-defence, collecting, and anything else you can do with a gun; you're right, but the guns are there, and making them illegal will just create a black market. Drugs are illegal, but they're far from having disappeared, aren't they? You'd think we'd understand that prohibition doesn't work by now. Speaking of which, maybe if you allowed people to put whatever they want into their own bodies, people wouldn't be shooting each other for control of a crack market.
"After guns are made illegal, there will be a three week grace period where people will be given the opportunity to dispose of their guns. They will be sold to a different nation, which will gladly take the US's second hand guns and then that money will be then used to fund American Charities."
Yay for theft!
"Anybody who has not handed in a gun will be punished severely. The jails are overcrowded anyway so the options are:
- Execution (little extreme but the death penalty is acceptable in the US)
- Amputation of hands (sounds severe, however: less severe with death penalty, ensures that troublemakers cannot use firearms, makes it known the to public that the person is dangerous, acts as a good deterrent)
- Deportation."
You want people to get shot for having something to shoot with? Are you deliberately ignoring the fact that the state gets its power from guns? If you're against murder, injury, and deportation in private interactions, then you can't be in favour of them in interactions with the government.
"These are rather extreme punishments, I accept that but I feel that it is necessary for the government to help make guns illegal which will prevent A LOT more murders in the future. In a way it's sort of like utilitarianism."
Utilitarianism is the dominant moral philosophy behind economics, and that science tells us your idea is going to blow up in your face. Something tells me "China" will just sell the guns on the US black market.
- Execution (little extreme but the death penalty is acceptable in the US)
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Sucks, but just because she has a boyfriend (which is not for sure), doesn't mean she's not into you. That probably doesn't change much about what you're going to do and I'm not saying "just because there's a goalie doesn't mean you can't score", but you may not have misread anything.
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I don't know about you guys, but I have no use for a stump of a post count. No offense, y_guy.
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I don't think people having a psychotic break are the best example of who deterrents work on. Chances are someone who was as far out it as he was wouldn't have backed down from a tank.
I wasn't saying a camera would have deterred him, just that people around him wouldn't have (and didn't).
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1) A dude was decapitated on a Greyhound bus here not so long ago.
2) You could just leave a bomb in a train, you know...
3) Notice the word "public" in "public transportation"?
K, first off, I high doubt bus cameras would have helped in any way for the bus decapitation. He was seen by plenty of people, and to my knowledge there was never any doubt about at all, in the slightest, about who did it.
Second example. Seems helpful here. At worst it's a minor obstacle for the bomber to overcome, at best it identifies the bomber.
Third. You have a very good point here lol. Supporting cams in public places but not on public transport? Lol.
I just mentioned the decapitation because it's pretty serious and people being around didn't stop it as he claimed they would. This goes back to his points on the gun control debate--it doesn't take 45 minutes for one person to do serious damage to someone else when they have a weapon.
In the second point, I do admit I'm unsure whether the camera could ever survive the bombing.
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I've only ever been told to stop once and I obviously didn't haha
That was me, correct? That was out of line and I don't remember why I did it.
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1) A dude was decapitated on a Greyhound bus here not so long ago.
2) You could just leave a bomb in a train, you know...
3) Notice the word "public" in "public transportation"?
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in Off-Topic
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