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Friday, October 2, 2015

Pro-Gun Arguments are Ridiculous:

1.  It is absolutely ridiculous to assert that people should have guns so that they can revolt against their government.  A popularly elected government with a volunteer army backing it up, and you still need guns left to overthrow it?  The only reason to do that would be to create a minoritarian tyranny, not to fertilize the tree of liberty or whatever shit patriots shout.  Even if a minoritarian tyranny is a good idea in abstract, no amount of personal handguns will ever defeat the US army so not only is it immoral it's impractical to even discuss the ridiculousness of this concept.  No modern, first world, democratic government I can ever remember has been overthrown by handguns.  It's just a stupid, ridiculous fantasy world that has no business even entering conversation.

2.  Guns are not useful for self defense.  The bad guy also gets to own a gun and he gets to shoot first.  Results will be much like Greedo vs. Han Solo.  How did it work out for Greedo?

3.  It is possible to change a country from a gun owning one to a guns are banned one.  It has been done multiple times, successfully, all across the world.  America is no different from Canada, the U.K., Australia, etc.  If all these countries can disarm, so can we.  It does not take a sweep of everyone's houses.  You just stop selling new guns, gun parts, or ammunition.  Eventually all the old guns become too old to use and voila, you've cleansed America of guns.  Will this take a while?  Sure.  But better late than never.  If we can save lives fifty years from now only by starting to disarm now, then we still have a moral onus to do so.  That fifty years from now future will come.  And their lives still matter, even if they don't exist yet, we should be doing whatever we can to save their lives, even if we can't save anyone's life today.

In the meantime, police should be authorized to stop and frisk any suspicious looking man anywhere anytime.  If any of them are caught with a gun charge them with attempted mass murder and throw them away for life, as there is no longer any legitimate excuse for having a gun on your person anymore.  This will crack down on crime in the here and now and make sure that gun owners only keep their guns in their own houses where they can't spree kill with.  We also need universal public surveillance cameras with x-ray vision so that if anyone steps outside the house we can instantly check to see if they have a gun on them and if they do, bam, cop cars come rolling in instantly and they're charged with mass murder and put away for life before they ever reach their target destination.  No tolerance, no excuses, and there would be no crime.

4.  The 2nd amendment doesn't matter.  The constitution can be interpreted however we please.  We've done the same for all the other amendments, why is only this one sacred?

5.  Criminals don't have guns in gun controlled countries.  They just don't.  This is a pernicious lie.  Anyone who says this should just be shot for spreading misinformation.  Yes, it's possible to smuggle guns into a gun controlled area, but the penalties for having a gun on you in countries like that are so steep that criminals know better than to even bother and never actually carry a gun.  Even the mafia, the yakuza, and such sticks to 'no guns' policies because the police would be all over them if they dared.  Much less common street thugs, who have no access to smugglers and thus never get their hands on guns.

6.  Spree killing happens outside the U.S.  People illegally carrying guns still go on spree shootings in gun controlled areas.  Who cares?  This is a completely innumerate reply by retards.  It doesn't matter if it still happens once in a blue moon even in places with gun control enforced, what matters is if the rate of spree shootings goes up or down.  The answer is clear.  The number of people spree shot in America, the land of the free fire zone, is ludicrously higher than anywhere else on Earth.  Even controlling for America's population, the number of spree shooting incidents is far too high compared to places with gun control enforced.

7.  Demographics doesn't explain spree shootings.  Yes, America has tons of crime-prone minorities who up America's gun crime levels compared to, say, Switzerland, which has plenty of guns but practically no crime.  This is no excuse.  First off, if Switzerland can safely handle guns then that's fine for Switzerland.  I'm talking about what the gun policy for America should be, and we clearly cannot handle this freedom regardless of how well the Swiss can.  (Though apparently the Swiss have a problem with mass shootings just like we do, so I guess the Swiss example is pretty useless for gun advocates anyway)  We have a new spree shooting what seems like every day.  We have failed the test of whether we can responsibly carry guns or not.  It really doesn't matter who can do what elsewhere, obviously we can't mimic them.

8.  We cannot control crazy people preemptively.  We can only control guns preemptively.  The first time you realize someone is crazy is only after they go on a killing spree.  There are plenty of nice guys who everyone likes who suddenly go on killing sprees.  Likewise, for every antisocial introvert who goes on a killing spree and everyone says "I knew it would happen someday," there's a thousand others that act and talk and live just like that guy, and none of them do it.  It is impossible to catch the evildoer unless you rounded up and jailed something like half the male population of the USA for possible mental illness outbreaks.  Everyone's disturbed one way or another, not everyone goes on spree shootings.  We cannot address this from a mental illness standpoint.  There are simply too many possible suspects and not enough predictive power to guess ahead of time.  We aren't living in a convenient sci fi world where we can mind read when people are seriously violent and when they are just joking around or venting off steam.  Furthermore, most of the spree killers are not genuinely hallucinating schizophrenics.  They are not what you would label as mentally ill in the classical sense.  They are just violent, angry, normal people who suddenly snap and start killing. They're just like everyone else until the very moment they pull the trigger.  It's impossible to medically diagnose people like that.  They aren't crazy.   They're just evil.

9.  Terrorists may well still come up with ingenious plans to kill hundreds of people that are completely impossible to prevent.  That crazy German pilot managed to crash his plane killing everyone.  9/11 happened.  Breivik built a sophisticated bomb and then used guns he shouldn't have been able to get in a place that thought it was immune to gun violence.  There will always be lone outlier freaks who do massive damage we couldn't anticipate or prevent.  That does not mean we should just give up trying to prevent the crimes we can prevent and just let everyone join in on the fun.  For every determined and mad genius terrorist like the Unabomber, there are one hundred, one thousand idiot losers who want to play 'Joker' and can barely tie their shoelaces but still go out in a blaze of glory shooting everyone they know and hate.  Why should we let these total nobodies, these clowns, rack up dozens of kills as though they were supervillains out of D.C. Comics?  These people AREN'T supervillains.  They aren't mad geniuses.  They're just guys with easy access to guns who use said easy access to guns to kill innocent children.  That's it.  That's their whole ability list.  Take away their guns and they will not master the katana.  They will not build bombs.  They will not don spandex suits and wander the night.  They'll just stay at home pitying themselves and play more video games.

10.  There is no way to stop troubled violent men from going on spree shootings.  The allure is too vivid and there's basically no penalty for these people.  They want to die to begin with, so no threats or punishments will stop them.  Only preventing them from having the means to do their crime can stop the crime.  There is no way to preach these people back into being angels.  They are broken inside and nothing we say or do will ever be able to fix them.  They do not think or feel like the rest of us, and none of our words will reach them.  We cannot give them midnight basketball games and expect they'll suddenly cheer up and fit in with everyone else.  Some people are just evil.  Teaching them in school, church, or in the home to not be violent spree killers does not work.  Obviously, it goes without saying, people are told since birth to not be violent and not to hurt others.  If none of those words got through to them, nothing else we say will make a difference either.  The idea that we need some rebirth of spirituality in the country instead of gun control is absurd and obscene.  Germany, Japan and China are all essentially atheist countries and their crime rates and spree killing rates are infinitesimal.  God is not the answer.  Guns are the answer.  It's so freaking obvious I cannot believe I even have to make this argument.  IF YOU DIDN'T HAVE GUNS THERE WOULDN'T BE ANY MASS SHOOTINGS.  BY DEFINITION.

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