Same is true of cars and probably a lot of other things. You can get a decent used car for $3k or a usable one for $1k. What kind of new car can you get for those prices?
So registrations are bad 100% of the time, because in a tiny percentage of cases it allowed total gun bans decades later?
That's the logic behind banning drunk driving. A small percentage of times a person drives drunk they end up killing one or more people, and society has deemed that to be an unacceptable risk.
You're trying to play both sides of the probability argument. On one hand, you're saying that a small chance of a bad thing is ok (gun ban leading to confiscation leading to totalitarian government), while on the other hand you're saying it's intolerable (gun ownership leading to murder). Let's look at this like a standard risk assessment. Let's say a human death has a value of 1. The 2010 murder rate (all methods, most recent I could find) in the US was 4.8 per 100,000 people per year; we can use that as a baseline for the current status of almost unlimited gun ownership. Rounding the US population to 300,000, we get a badness factor of 14.4 average deaths per year. Let's see what happens if we mandate registration. I'm guessing that after mandatory firearm registration we might have a 1/100 chance per year of switching to a despotic totalitarian regime. Such regimes have been known to massacre hundreds of thousands or even millions of their own people. Let's be conservative and assume 100,000 deaths over a decade for a badness factor of 10,000 per year if totalitarian, factor in the 1/100 chance of that, and we have a badness factor of 100 average deaths per year attributed to mandated firearm registration. Of course the numbers will come out differently if you adjust my guestimates. Now what ever the output number is (it could be 10 if you figure 1/1000 chance instead of 1/100), we are assuming at this point that all civilian firearm murders would cease. Even if this were true, what percentage would be replaced by murder by other means? History shows us that there was murder long before there were firearms. Murder may be committed by car, knife, rope, poison, rock, bare hand, false incrimination, and many other methods. So even if we could reduce the badness factor of registration to less than that of the status quo, we would also need to show that a lack of firearms would reduce the overall murder rate to less than the difference. I think that would be very difficult, as I would expect the overall murder rate to increase without civilian firearms for self defense use.
The fact that only a tiny percentage of gun owners use their weapons in anger is irrelevant by your logic, as long as they can, they should be prevented from ever owning guns.
I know this analogy is tired, but it's still valid: A small percentage of people use their cars in anger. Should all cars therefore be banned? The disjoint between this ban and my ban on firearm registration, is that the damage resulting from misuse of a car is fairly limited (a few individuals) whereas the damage resulting from misuse of firearms registration can result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Taking the safety off my pistol while aiming it at you does not cause me to pull the trigger, it merely allows me to later pull the trigger. There is at this point no correlation between my taking the safety off and my shooting a person. Would you rather I keep the safety on? A lack of a registry functions as a safety, making it much more difficult for a government to collect firearms.
As a data point, Venezuela, which announced total firearm ban and confiscation recently, implemented mandatory registration in '06. http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/1812
Your logic is sloppy. I said registration preceded every seizure, not every registration was followed by a seizure. To clarify; for every seizure, there was first a registration. Therefore registration allows seizure, it is not causative. As for as the total bans following a revolution etc., when was the last revolution in England or Australia? Though in the case of Venezuela you appear to be right, and the socialists have recently come to power there. We'll see how that works out.
The problem with that is that in order to register your rifling pattern you have to register the gun. Historically, total gun bans and confiscation have always been preceded by mandatory registration. It makes it much easier for the government to know how many guns to collect from whom.
Making your own is of trivial difficulty; I've done it simply because I didn't want to wait for shipping when one broke. Are you going to ban private ownership of a lathe? Polishing an engraved pin will also be trivial. Can you ban private ownership of abrasives? Keeping a legal, marked pin in the weapon most of the time and switching out for an unmarked one when needed would also be trivial. I'm surprised more people don't do that with barrels; replacement pistol barrels for common makes are fairly cheap and readily available. Why not have a spare barrel and just swap out after a crime? The old barrel could be ground away, melted, dissolved, or otherwise destroyed easily enough.
There is also the matter that any limitation or condition is an infringement. Our firearms rights are already gravely infringed upon in blatant violation of the 2nd amendment.
I'm going to respond just in case anyone else reading this might share your opinion. please read slowly and carefully. 1. We're not talking about polishing the cases after they've been stamped. All that's needed is to polish the firing pin once, (ore use it enough to wear it smooth) and all brass fired with it after that point will not be stamped. 2. The worst thing would be to ban guns from the country. Time and time again it has been tried, and every time it results in a higher rate of violent crime. Sure you often have lower gun crime, but there are plenty of other ways to kill and maim people, evidenced by the increase in machete violence in Australia and knife violence in England. 3. The right to keep and bear arms is not a hobby, and it is for the collective liberty of all citizens. The primary purpose of the second amendment was to limit the power of the government over the people. If you prefer to live in a totalitarian dictatorship without personal liberty, please move to North Korea; they seem to embody your ideals.
A video of a murder is not illegal, but a snuff film is. The distinction is that the first would be a recording of something that was happening anyway, while the action in the second was performed for the purpose of recording it.
Not a fallacy when the option is actually binary. Should healthcare expenses be covered by the public? Yes or no. If yes, then those costs will rise to unmanageable levels unless personal habits are controlled. Add to this that personal freedoms are rarely if ever reclaimed once lost, even when the reason for giving them up goes away, and you have a control ratchet. Personal freedoms will one by one be removed in the interest of lowering healthcare costs. If you don't believe in this slippery slope consider how in the old days it took a constitutional amendment to allow the government to control what you could or couldn't drink.
Then perhaps healthcare shouldn't be a public burden. Why should anyone pay for anyone else's life choices? The options are two: remove public healthcare or remove the choices. Our society is moving rapidly toward the latter. The logical continuation is to determine an optimal course of action for every person at every point in time, and to punish them if they attempt to deviate from their orders. We will eat what we're told to and nothing else. We will sleep and wake when we're told to and at no other time. We will exercise, work, and entertain ourselves in the exact manner which we are instructed to. To do anything else would be selfish, increasing the cost to society. Think of the children!
If the wind happens to be cooperating, great. If not, you have to spend a lot of energy pushing that big fat blimp through the air. So sure, all the energy can go into forward movements, but it will take a lot more of it.
My experience is that handguns are a waste of time, and more dangerous to the owner and his/her family than useful.
Evidence that you don't know how to use one. Get some training; since you didn't grow up around guns I'm sure your dad didn't teach you. If everyone in the family has proper gun safety knowledge the risks are infinitesimal. On the other hand I do personally know people who have had to show a gun in self defense. Fortunately about 98% (IIRC) of the time a firearm is shown in self defense, that's enough to diffuse the situation without a shot having to be fired.
Slashdot Mirror
You may find yourself on a prison planet fighting an endless supply of criminals on top of a pyramid.
Same is true of cars and probably a lot of other things. You can get a decent used car for $3k or a usable one for $1k. What kind of new car can you get for those prices?
First, you draw a conclusion, then you deride any evidence that contradicts your conclusion. You sound like a young-Earth creationist.
So registrations are bad 100% of the time, because in a tiny percentage of cases it allowed total gun bans decades later?
That's the logic behind banning drunk driving. A small percentage of times a person drives drunk they end up killing one or more people, and society has deemed that to be an unacceptable risk.
You're trying to play both sides of the probability argument. On one hand, you're saying that a small chance of a bad thing is ok (gun ban leading to confiscation leading to totalitarian government), while on the other hand you're saying it's intolerable (gun ownership leading to murder). Let's look at this like a standard risk assessment. Let's say a human death has a value of 1. The 2010 murder rate (all methods, most recent I could find) in the US was 4.8 per 100,000 people per year; we can use that as a baseline for the current status of almost unlimited gun ownership. Rounding the US population to 300,000, we get a badness factor of 14.4 average deaths per year. Let's see what happens if we mandate registration. I'm guessing that after mandatory firearm registration we might have a 1/100 chance per year of switching to a despotic totalitarian regime. Such regimes have been known to massacre hundreds of thousands or even millions of their own people. Let's be conservative and assume 100,000 deaths over a decade for a badness factor of 10,000 per year if totalitarian, factor in the 1/100 chance of that, and we have a badness factor of 100 average deaths per year attributed to mandated firearm registration. Of course the numbers will come out differently if you adjust my guestimates. Now what ever the output number is (it could be 10 if you figure 1/1000 chance instead of 1/100), we are assuming at this point that all civilian firearm murders would cease. Even if this were true, what percentage would be replaced by murder by other means? History shows us that there was murder long before there were firearms. Murder may be committed by car, knife, rope, poison, rock, bare hand, false incrimination, and many other methods. So even if we could reduce the badness factor of registration to less than that of the status quo, we would also need to show that a lack of firearms would reduce the overall murder rate to less than the difference. I think that would be very difficult, as I would expect the overall murder rate to increase without civilian firearms for self defense use.
The fact that only a tiny percentage of gun owners use their weapons in anger is irrelevant by your logic, as long as they can, they should be prevented from ever owning guns.
I know this analogy is tired, but it's still valid: A small percentage of people use their cars in anger. Should all cars therefore be banned? The disjoint between this ban and my ban on firearm registration, is that the damage resulting from misuse of a car is fairly limited (a few individuals) whereas the damage resulting from misuse of firearms registration can result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Australia's Gun Laws: Little Effect: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1736501,00.html
As a data point, Venezuela, which announced total firearm ban and confiscation recently, implemented mandatory registration in '06. http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/1812
Your logic is sloppy. I said registration preceded every seizure, not every registration was followed by a seizure. To clarify; for every seizure, there was first a registration. Therefore registration allows seizure, it is not causative. As for as the total bans following a revolution etc., when was the last revolution in England or Australia? Though in the case of Venezuela you appear to be right, and the socialists have recently come to power there. We'll see how that works out.
The problem with that is that in order to register your rifling pattern you have to register the gun. Historically, total gun bans and confiscation have always been preceded by mandatory registration. It makes it much easier for the government to know how many guns to collect from whom.
That's why we have drones overhead watching us.
Making your own is of trivial difficulty; I've done it simply because I didn't want to wait for shipping when one broke. Are you going to ban private ownership of a lathe? Polishing an engraved pin will also be trivial. Can you ban private ownership of abrasives? Keeping a legal, marked pin in the weapon most of the time and switching out for an unmarked one when needed would also be trivial. I'm surprised more people don't do that with barrels; replacement pistol barrels for common makes are fairly cheap and readily available. Why not have a spare barrel and just swap out after a crime? The old barrel could be ground away, melted, dissolved, or otherwise destroyed easily enough.
There is also the matter that any limitation or condition is an infringement. Our firearms rights are already gravely infringed upon in blatant violation of the 2nd amendment.
I'm going to respond just in case anyone else reading this might share your opinion. please read slowly and carefully. 1. We're not talking about polishing the cases after they've been stamped. All that's needed is to polish the firing pin once, (ore use it enough to wear it smooth) and all brass fired with it after that point will not be stamped. 2. The worst thing would be to ban guns from the country. Time and time again it has been tried, and every time it results in a higher rate of violent crime. Sure you often have lower gun crime, but there are plenty of other ways to kill and maim people, evidenced by the increase in machete violence in Australia and knife violence in England. 3. The right to keep and bear arms is not a hobby, and it is for the collective liberty of all citizens. The primary purpose of the second amendment was to limit the power of the government over the people. If you prefer to live in a totalitarian dictatorship without personal liberty, please move to North Korea; they seem to embody your ideals.
A video of a murder is not illegal, but a snuff film is. The distinction is that the first would be a recording of something that was happening anyway, while the action in the second was performed for the purpose of recording it.
Not a fallacy when the option is actually binary. Should healthcare expenses be covered by the public? Yes or no. If yes, then those costs will rise to unmanageable levels unless personal habits are controlled. Add to this that personal freedoms are rarely if ever reclaimed once lost, even when the reason for giving them up goes away, and you have a control ratchet. Personal freedoms will one by one be removed in the interest of lowering healthcare costs. If you don't believe in this slippery slope consider how in the old days it took a constitutional amendment to allow the government to control what you could or couldn't drink.
Should I pay for your bad genes? I say I should.
Well I say you shouldn't.
Next will come the fat tax, then the caffeine tax. Where will it stop?
Of more concern to me are the neurotoxins. http://www.scribd.com/doc/29764505/Artificial-Sweeteners
Then perhaps healthcare shouldn't be a public burden. Why should anyone pay for anyone else's life choices? The options are two: remove public healthcare or remove the choices. Our society is moving rapidly toward the latter. The logical continuation is to determine an optimal course of action for every person at every point in time, and to punish them if they attempt to deviate from their orders. We will eat what we're told to and nothing else. We will sleep and wake when we're told to and at no other time. We will exercise, work, and entertain ourselves in the exact manner which we are instructed to. To do anything else would be selfish, increasing the cost to society. Think of the children!
If the wind happens to be cooperating, great. If not, you have to spend a lot of energy pushing that big fat blimp through the air. So sure, all the energy can go into forward movements, but it will take a lot more of it.
That way all energy can go into fighting the wind.
So when the data gets out could it be used to make fake fingerprints and irises?
What's the algorithm for a cat?
Ceiling cat now obsolete. Welcome copter cat.
My experience is that handguns are a waste of time, and more dangerous to the owner and his/her family than useful.
Evidence that you don't know how to use one. Get some training; since you didn't grow up around guns I'm sure your dad didn't teach you. If everyone in the family has proper gun safety knowledge the risks are infinitesimal. On the other hand I do personally know people who have had to show a gun in self defense. Fortunately about 98% (IIRC) of the time a firearm is shown in self defense, that's enough to diffuse the situation without a shot having to be fired.
Hidden cost, hard to quantify, doesn't show up on spreadsheets often.