I would ban everything on the basis of proof that it has a legitimate use. Ie a man with a knife has a legitimate use for it, so does a farmer with a shotgun, but noone has a legitimate use for a automatic weapon, or a cruise missile. If they can prove there is one then they should be allowed

I would also ban conventional warfare

"We can all agree that the presence of a million land mines between North and South Korea is not a bad thing."

Yeah it definitely is a bad thing. The fact that people are at war with each other is a bad thing. The fact that somebody felt necessary to invent landmines is a bad thing.

The landmines make invasion less likely, which means fewer deaths. So yeah, it's good they're there.

SYnapse is not too fond of prison walls and barbed wire, either...after all, it isn't nice that we have criminals and treat them so mean...

On face value only

I do not understand your comment. Perhaps I have not had enough coffee - care to elaborate?

And, to be clear, I really hope that *nobody* is too fond of prison walls and barbed wire, and the fact that prisoners get treated mean...in fact, I'm not too fond of the fact that we have prisoners...not too fond of the fact that we have criminals...not too fond of the fact that we have crime.

Would you agree?

I suggest this: As a nation, I think we should decree that people be nice, and stop committing crime.

Further, is all blessed hope that this idea will really catch on fire (shameless plug for pending movie? I think not...) I think that we should probably just go ahead and tear down the prisons, fire the prison guards, fire the police officers and close the courts.

After all, I'm fairly certain at this point that it is the precence of these various legal apparatus that are causing all the crime and filling the prisons.

If we would simply elminate all the legal apparatus of justice and punishment of crime, I'm fairly certain that to a man and woman, all citizens will simply cease to commit crime.

There is a Prison-Industrial complex which is driving a large part of the current state of mass-incarceration, largely though it's relentless push for the continuation and expansion of the racist drug war.

I realise that you were trying to be sarcastic, but there is actually a grain of truth to what you were saying, despite the fact that you appear not to realise it.

@ SYnapse

"but noone has a legitimate use for a automatic weapon, or a cruise missile. If they can prove there is one then they should be allowed"

I *have* an automatic weapon, and I *legitimately* use it for target shooting and home defense. I'm sure there's numerous airmen and sailors that *legitimately* need cruise missiles. The entire point of cruise missiles is to minimize or avoid lingering over/in hostile airspace/waters, which in turn saves the lives of airmen/sailors.

"I would also ban conventional warfare"

Yeah, because the Kellogg–Briand Pact worked so well. We had a whole lot of peace (except in Spain) from 1928-1939. Then we had the bloodiest conflict in human history.

As long as a group of humans have something that another group of humans wants, there will be war or violence of some kind. War is just a more large-scale, organized and regulated form of robbery, battery/assault, murder, et cetera. War is as awful as it is inevitable, but war is better than chaos. At least war has some rules which are frequently followed. No one shoots from underneath a white flag or uses hollowpoint ammunition.

@ mendax

Just curious: Do you favor the legalization of all drugs for recreational and medicinal use?

mendax - Your feeble attempts to insult me are wasted. If you want to talk about the Prison-Industrial complex and the 100% failed war on drugs, then let's have at it. You clearly have no idea where I stand on such matters for you to attempt to be insulting.

I'll even discuss with you the Military-Industrial complex while we are at it.

And from there, we can start talking about something that is probably dear to your good liberal heart, the absolutely failed "War On Poverty" which simply enslaves a growing section of our society to a political class that promises them just enough to survive in exchange for pulling "D" every couple years (with or without ID to prove who you are...)

-----

SYnapse has this tendency to make utterly ridiculous and meaningless states. "War is bad..." and thinks on the merit of that statement we should eliminate all weapons.

Of the many ridiculous things that get said on these forums, that form of thinking ranks amongst the top. It is the simple-minded thinking of a child - it is the logic of, say, a 3 year old who's thought processes don't go beyond his or her immediate environment, and more often than that his or her immediate bodily/emotional needs.

So if SYnapse wants to play a child's game, I will play it with him, to see if maybe with a little parallel logic we can shake him from his idiocy (and I mean idiocy in a clinical manner, not as an insult - for a grown man with such childish thinking strike of clinical idiocy)

[id·i·o·cy: ˈidēəsē/ noun noun: idiocy; plural noun: idiocies 1. extremely stupid behavior. as in "the idiocy of decimating rain forests" synonyms: stupidity, folly, foolishness, foolhardiness, ignorance;]


It is the same sort of logical trap used to demonstrate the wrong-thinking of the gun-banners: Wherein you demonstrate that quite clearly, in any and all cases, a rapist is solely responsible for his or her actions. No dress, no environment (such as a party), no outside influence (such as alcohol) reduces or excuses the activity of the rapist...and yet when a man murders another man with a gun, you all want to blame a gun...

@gunfighter: yes I do, though I would keep the trade regulated.

@ Krellin: Sorry it's taken me a whole day to respond to you, I've been busy. Now, let me do my best as an imperfect human with a reasonable but not flawless mind, to respond.


"As a result of the rape - which rape frequently occurs in the above described situation - nobody calls for the elimination of parties..."

How would you eliminate parties, exactly? To call for the elimination of informal social gatherings would be to propose something more-or-less impossible. It would not be feasibly possible to "eliminate parties".

"The rapist is held solely responsible for his actions, even though any thinking person will understand that mitigating factors - alcohol, for example..."

Alcohol is not a mitigating factor. If it was, the courts would give lesser sentences to rapists who were drunk, compared to rapists who were sober. That would, of course, be outrageous. If I were to get drunk and rape someone, and I would not have done it sober, it would be my fault for allowing myself to get so drunk I could not control myself. Alcohol is not a mitigating factor in rape cases and you should not describe it as such.

"Can you agree to that? Because if you can agree to that -- that nobody calls for the elimination of any anything which facilitates the act of rape -- then likewise guns are the same"

Guns are not the same, for the reasons I have already explained.

"No gun causes anyone to kill anyone."

I have never said this. I have never said that guns *cause* people to kill people. I have never argued that guns are the cause of violence.
(Unless, say, a gun owner is attacked by someone trying to steal his gun, but that's not a typical case...)

"It is the unstable mind that consumes too much alcohol and finds himself in a fight in which weapons are brought to bear."

That's true. I agree with you. But take away the gun and you go from a situation where you have a drunk with a gun, to a situation where you have a drunk with a saucepan. Which situation is more likely to end in a fatality?

"But in no case can a reasonable person blame the gun."

That's fine. I wasn't.



Note:
I would like to say one thing, Krellin. Your tone in the last day or two, in the more recent exchanges in this discussion, has been much more sensible and polite, and as a result I have much more interest in engaging fully in the debate with you. Thank you for that - I hope it stays this way.

Guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people with their guns.

Guns don't kill people. Bullets kill people.

^Except in the event of an extreme pistol-whipping.

Bullets don't kill people. Excessive disruption to vital organs and/or blood loss kills people.

We don't need fewer guns, we need better bodies.

I advocate an international Eugenics program become humanity's primary goal to end the problem of gun violence.

Jamie - Alcohol doesn't date rape people. People with excessive alcohol in their blood streams rape people with lower thresholds for personal conduct and/or safety awareness because of alcohol in their blood streams rape people and/or get raped. <and/or if he's lucky...>

Excessive disruption to vital organs and/or blood loss doesn't kill people; the resulting lack of oxygen to the brain kills people.

Bottom line....we will never get rid of guns, so the entire discussion on banning guns is frankly childish and a waste of time (imo). Banning alcohol is a stupid discussion because we will never remove alcohol from the American pubic that demands it.

Thus, instead of having ridiculous extremist discussions, rational people (and I am equally guilty of being irrational) ought to discuss common sense solutions that limit the availability and minimize situations in which gun violence / alcohol-fueled date rape occur.

Common sense solutions are those solution that do do not pound nails with a steam roller, and thereby punish normally law-abiding citizens in order to *maybe* curb the violence of the lawless....who, mind you, already show a willful desire to ignore laws when you seek to put more laws on the table to stop them from breaking the laws tht they already are breaking.

@ mendax

Me too, but I would NOT regulate the trade. The market can self-regulate.

ewwww....hecks...thinking he has the final say in the matter. So I accept the challenge, and I'll one-up you with religion:

The lack of oxygen to the brain resulting from excessive blood loss due to severe bodily trauma from bullets doesn't kills you people. Death without Jesus kills people forever.




<yeah...ok...it's a bit of a miss even from a religious standpoint maybe...but it's out there now... :P >

@Krellin,
You misplayed that one. You should have said, "Lack of oxygen to the brain doesn't kill people; the resulting inability of cells to produce adenosinse tri-phosphate and eliminate waste electrons kills people."

I'm sure there's another step from there, but my knowledge of cellular chemistry (and my understanding of the corresponding wikipedia page) has now been exhausted.

@hecks -- meh...I'm an old fart, and that last time I took physiology and learn biological process was....<...hmmm...calculating....abacus abacus...hmmm...> 24 years ago.

Anyway, I still say that my meta-phsycial answer would be an acceptable next-step in the game.

Not to an atheist.

meh....well, as an atheist, what is life? Surely there is a meta-hysical discussion regarding death that even an atheist can get in to ... I'm presuming it will get in to conservation of energy, etc. You need not be religious to have a discussion of "what is the mind" and what does it mean to be alive and a conscious being and what happens to the collective stuff (physical and energy stuff) when someone dies.

Or not...

Life is precious to an atheist, because it's all he has. If there's no afterlife, life is everything.

However, that's a topic for any number of other existing threads. We needn't pollute this oh-so-productive-and-intelligent thread with such well-worn ground.

hecks ....nawwww....let's discuss it right here. if we can maybe keep pushing back the end of life ad infinitum, then the discussion of whether or not guns kill people becomes moot.

Awwww heck, we all are gonna die. Does it really matter if you die tomorrow from a gun shot wound and the subsequent infinite regression of system failures, or if you live a few more years and die a horrible painful death by bone-eating cancer?

The universe is (by some scientific guess) 13.8 billion years old, and by any measure of knowledge will continue infinitely in some manner (based upon my understanding)...at any rate, your life is therefore infinitely small in length compared to the total duration, and since at some point our sun will fail and the earth will die, the chance of your physical existence having any lasting impact on the universe is pretty much zero, nothing, nada....

so...really now...who gives a rat's tooshie about whether or not you die by gun or horrible, painful bone eating cancer some years after you didn't get shot?

So, if GF wants to take his high-caliber automatic weapon to the shooting range, and that makes his dismally short life in the universe a little bit more special for him, I say go for it.