.

[nine naked men]

i like to think there's some horrible gang of knife wielding folk in britain who all use knife puns when mugging people and everyones really ticked off about it

 

"KNIFE to see you"

"have a KNIFE day"

"i'm only taking your money dont be so CUT UP about it"

"im on the CUTTING EDGE of robbing people technology"

 

etc

 

e - "what killed the dinosaurs? THE KNIFE AGE"

[sees_all1]

Oh Shiv, not that gang!

[Ember]

.

[Omar]

[Blyaunte]

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.

I'm not sure why you think this matters. It's a de facto ban on the purchase of knives by minors, especially as they are (unless I'm mistaken) forbidden to carry/possess the knives in public. Even buying a knife for use at home would be difficult, as getting the knife home from a shop would necessitate public possession.

 

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.

Given that they are already demonized as knife-wielding maniacs, there was no reason to further paint them as such.

 

Now, how well has the legislation met that aim? Are there honestly many minors who couldn't get their hands on a knife if they wanted one?

 

Having come late to the conversation, I am curious and seeking a clarification – are you advocating that gun control won’t work because, even if there were/are laws in place, people would still be able to acquire guns?

 

By that logic, there should be no laws against illicit drugs, because people are still acquiring them.

 

Ooh ooh! Let’s make drunk driving TOTALLY legal because people still drink and drive!

 

:rolleyes:

[Ember]

.

[Omar]

@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.

[Ginger_Warrior]

@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.

Citation needed. And I want bloody detailed statistics to make all those up, not a reliance on intuition and 'common sense' statements alone.

 

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, I'm just making the point: back up what you're saying.

[Omar]

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 of

how

much 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.

¹²

 

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.

¹³

 

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 from

all

the 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 objects

a

,

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 actions

a

,

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.

¹⁴

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.

[/hide]

[Blyaunte]

Having come late to the conversation, I am curious and seeking a clarification – are you advocating that gun control won’t work because, even if there were/are laws in place, people would still be able to acquire guns?

I'm asking an honest question. If a law is enacted with the purpose of keeping young people from having knives, I think it's important to determine whether the goals are met and whether the benefits offset any cost. I have made the claim that gun control cannot reasonably work to keep people from owning guns. There is no magic; even 100+ years ago, we had the technology to mass produce semi-automatic firearms; in the fairly near future, additive manufacturing may make it easier.

 

By that logic, there should be no laws against illicit drugs, because people are still acquiring them.

I do not believe drugs should be outlawed. The laws put in place obviously are ineffective at keeping people from having the drugs, and enforcement is not cheap. By criminalizing drugs, people who use or trade drugs are forced to deal with criminals and made criminals themselves. Those who are inclined to follow the law may be kept out of dealing, but this pushes profits up for those who are willing to disregard the law. Alcohol prohibition didn't keep criminals from having alcohol, drug prohibition isn't keeping criminals from having drugs, and I don't understand how any reasonable person can expect firearms prohibition to keep criminals from having firearms.

 

Ooh ooh! Let’s make drunk driving TOTALLY legal because people still drink and drive!

 

One of these things is not like the others. If I possess a knife, a gun, or illegal drugs, it's not reasonable to believe that I am a threat to others. Someone rolling two tons of steel at 70mph down a public road with impaired reflexes and cognitive ability can hardly make the same claim.

 

That said, I'd be in favor of decriminalizing drunk driving, as long as all liabilities remain in place in the event of actual damage.

 

I don't abstain from driving drunk because it's illegal, and neither do the people who drive drunk. I abstain from driving drunk because I'm not confident in my ability to not negligently cause damage to myself, my property, another person, or another person's property.

 

I always find it fascinating when people attempt to circumvent the necessity of law. Generally speaking it’s a clear-cut demonstration that they truly understand neither the idea of responsibility nor the concept of liability.

 

I may as well have asked “If people still kill people, then why have laws against murder?” But then you’d either troll some response that because “killing” is justified under certain circumstances, then there shouldn’t be laws against murder.

 

Trying to imply that, "simply because certain people will always circumvent the law, therefore such laws are useless" is a non sequitur. Youwill aways have people who will ignore laws, or try to argue that they shouldn't apply to them under certain circumstances. The point is that these laws are put into place to protect people from themselves -- which is precisely the reason why the U.S. needs gun control, and they need it now.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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”.

[Z_Berenice]

Hey guys, what's goi.... oh god... Well, it was a nice civil thread while it lasted.

[Ember]

.

[Z_Berenice]

Didn't we touch all of those points before? I'm guessing what you're all replying to since I got that poster blocked, but that's pretty much what we all talked in the first pages... Just don't feed the trolls please, this has been a nice and civil thread so far and I actually enjoy this discussion... Good lord, why some people feel the need to start nitpicking every single thing in hopes to get the thread derailed in their favor... (not talking about you Nyo).

 

Edit: just to prove how little some people know about guns (which also happen to be the same who are against them :roll:), I intentionally posted a mistake regarding type and caliber earlier in this thread, and nobody has spotted it yet... Figured somebody would by now, but nope... lol.

[Ember]

.

[Z_Berenice]

Edit: just to prove how little some people know about guns (which also happen to be the same who are against them :roll:), I intentionally posted a mistake regarding type and caliber earlier in this thread, and nobody has spotted it yet... Figured somebody would by now, but nope... lol.

To be fair, no one seeing it doesn't show a correlation between ignorance of guns and a desire to restrict them. I think there is generally such a correlation, but this doesn't really do much to highlight it.

Oh please don't get me wrong; I was just appealing to the "by that logic" method :roll:. I could've said something like "I know nothing about cars and I see news about cars killing people all the time, BAN CARS!" and get yet another branch of arguments that don't really prove much since I would be picking the berries I like and taking a decition ignoring the ones I didn't pick.

 

Props to Nyo for being the only one so far spotting the mistake :P

[Ginger_Warrior]

Even if somebody had spotted it, surely they could have assumed good faith and thought you meant the opposite without insisting on stalling the debate to call you out on it.

 

Seems like a very poor ad hominem technique to describe the arguer as ignorant, and not the argument itself as being based on ignorance.

[Z_Berenice]

Even if somebody had spotted it, surely they could have assumed good faith and thought you meant the opposite without insisting on stalling the debate to call you out on it.

 

Seems like a very poor ad hominem technique to describe the arguer as ignorant, and not the argument itself as being based on ignorance.

Did you spot it? You're assuming a result without knowing what that mistake might have meant...

 

Edit: Nyo is right tho, I was just trying to make a point, normally I just let these sort of things hover over people's heads; using them only branches the discussion further, like some people are doing...

[jasignhagj]

Just throwing this out there, would the Americans in this thread oppose requiring a gun license to buy and possess guns in the US, if it were easy to acquire by anyone who can legally own guns? The licensing system is one of the few thing I really like about Canada's gun laws, because it removes the need for background checks and requires a safety course so everyone with a gun should in theory know how to safely operate it (If you know your stuff already you can challenge the test). I understand some would oppose it because it is technically a barrier to owning a gun, but it streamlines the process once you've acquired it.

[Guest Smelly Paws]

I always find it fascinating when people attempt to circumvent the necessity of law. Generally speaking it's a clear-cut demonstration that they truly understand neither the idea of responsibility nor the concept of liability.

 

The point is that these laws are put into place to protect people from themselves -- which is precisely the reason why the U.S. needs gun control, and they need it now.

 

I think anyone would have a hard time reasonably disputing either of these points. You won't get a general agreement on them though. People don't like those nasty terms - Responsibility, liability and god forbid a government protecting people from themselves :ohnoes:

[Alg]

...Except that they've spent the last ten pages doing just that. Mostly by focusing on whether or not such laws actually work.

[Guest Smelly Paws]

Right...and the point was..........?

[Alg]

In this case, arguing that restricting guns won't do half of what everyone wants it to (And may in fact make things worse, depending on who you ask) regardless of how good an idea it may be on paper, because it doesn't actually address the causes of gun violence. The other posters can give a better explanation.

[Z_Berenice]

The other posters can give a better explanation.

We did. I'm guessing people like to skip the whole thread and post an already discussed point :roll:

 

 

Responsibility, liability

That's funny, those are the exact same reasons that grant you both gun permits over here; no shootings done with legal guns by law abiding citizens yet, hell not even by familiars, oh look hey! a handful done with stolen ones... but hey! look at the gun incidents that did happen, all done by ilegally obtained guns, wow! Who would have thought that?! So you're not reponsible and liable, don't get a gun then, other people are tho.

 

Seriously now, we already discussed this. I personally agree the U.S. should add the same psychiatric-test-before-getting-any-gun-or-gun-permit model we use, the problem is, when someone suggests that (as we already discussed before), they also come up with ridiculous terms classifying guns (my favorite one being "assault riffle" lol) or even putting a limit on magazines (or as the media loves to misinfo: clip).

[Guest Smelly Paws]

In this case, arguing that restricting guns won't do half of what everyone wants it to (And may in fact make things worse, depending on who you ask) regardless of how good an idea it may be on paper, because it doesn't actually address the causes of gun violence. The other posters can give a better explanation.

 

We did. I'm guessing people like to skip the whole thread and post an already discussed point :roll:

You volunteered to respond to respond to my post, I didn't ask you to. Besides, Blyaunte hit the nail on the head.

 

Responsibility, liability

That's funny, those are the exact same reasons that grant you both gun permits over here; no shootings done with legal guns by law abiding citizens yet, hell not even by familiars, oh look hey! a handful done with stolen ones... but hey! look at the gun incidents that did happen, all done by ilegally obtained guns, wow! Who would have thought that?! So you're not reponsible and liable, don't get a gun then, other people are tho.

 

Seriously now, we already discussed this. I personally agree the U.S. should add the same psychiatric-test-before-getting-any-gun-or-gun-permit model we use, the problem is, when someone suggests that (as we already discussed before), they also come up with ridiculous terms classifying guns (my favorite one being "assault riffle" lol) or even putting a limit on magazines (or as the media loves to misinfo: clip).

 

So, responsible people get their guns stolen. That questions responsibility as to who should really own them.

 

Question - Are people in your country liable for crimes committed with their gun e.g. If I had a licenced gun and it ended up in your hands and you committed murder, how liable am I?

[Z_Berenice]

You volunteered to respond to respond to my post, I didn't ask you to.

Nope, I was answering alg, don't put words in my mouth.

 

So, responsible people get their guns stolen. That questions responsibility as to who should really own them.

So does policemen, should we take guns away from them aswell?

 

Question - Are people in your country liable for crimes committed with their gun e.g. If I had a licenced gun and it ended up in your hands and you committed murder, how liable am I?

Crimes with stolen *legal* guns happened 4 times in here, but I already discussed that pages before (which I'm guessing you didn't even bother to look at). Crimes with legal guns by law abiding citizens never happened here.