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isn't what you think you've identified:
You might see the windmills you are tilting at are just..folks, real people, nice people. Our points aren't contradictory. Guns can be a problem, life happens, we need to find better solutions to our very real problems. And picking apart what a person says, without seeing the whole, on purpose, is intellectually dishonest.
I mean, I have to imagine that you can imagine how nice it is to be given personal advice by someone who is busy calling you intellectually dishonest, for starters.
First, I don't come here looking for personal advice. I don't consider it serious discourse to inform me that I'm tilting at windmills, particularly without offering anything to back up the assertion or even give it some meaning. And I can assure you that some of the people in this particular locale are really not nice at all.
And second, if someone is going to call me intellectually dishonest, I generally expect that s/he will, again, offer something to back up the assertion.
If I can see your point, and acknowledge its validity, you could do the same in return.
If only I'd seen you doing that.
My point was pretty simple. Even if we accept the disease analogy -- that firearms violence is a "symptom" of a problem, and not a problem (and I don't actually accept that holus bolus, but have tacitly done so for the purpose of argument) -- it is appropriate and sometimes even essential to treat the symptoms as well as the disease, and even to treat the symptoms before or instead of the disease, when no cure for the disease is readily available.
And your response was pretty much to entirely ignore everything I'd said, and "respond" as if I'd said something quite else. And pronounce a few tried-and-trite, but hardly true, truisms: "You can't keep weapons out", e.g.
And now here we have more of the same:
Sadly, as I'm sure you know, there are a lot of people who think that just making a law against something is sufficient, and there are those who are hoping the rest of us will buy that.
And that has something to do with something I said? With something anyone here has said?
Real problems need solutions, not meaningless legislation.
Unless all legislation is by definition meaningless, you don't seem to have made a point here, let alone offered any fact or argument to support whatever assertion you might have wanted to make.
If you make a law you should be able and willing to enforce it.
Dandy. Did you have a particular law in mind, as an example of the good, the bad or the ugly in this respect? Again, was this in response to something I said, or to something said in this thread?
The law makers in this country are using the window dressing of gun bans to mask the core problems.
Again, a sweeping statement that I see nothing behind.
Our expiring ban on assault weapons and sensible gun regulation are two different things. And I think you know that.
Nope. I would say that your regulation of what are called assault weapons is one component of sensible firearms control. I don't necessarily think it's a particularly effective one as it stands, or even among the top three most valuable ones, but I'd say it's hard to argue that it isn't better than nothing.
So, go ahead and with quibble with inconsequential points.
And I guess here's where I say: go ahead and give me a few more characterizations of what I've said rather than acknowledging or responding to the substance of it.
It's a shame because you're smart, you can do better.
Gosh, it's a shame I already have a gold star, or I'm sure one would have just shown up in my copybook. Does this mean I'll get an A- if I try a little harder but for now have to settle for a B, 'cause you just know I have so much more potential that I need to live up to?
Or are you just bored and really don't care about this at all?
I suppose that was an insinuation in the form of a rhetorical question, something we see a lot of down here. But what the heck.
Actually, yeah. The choice was this or a particulary tedious bit of work that now has to be done in the morning ... oops, it's morning.
But I can't say I don't care about it at all. If you'd spent more time here, you'd know some of the reasons.
I voted for handguns in the poll -- I usually don't vote in these polls, because they usually address specific aspects of specifically USAmerican public policy, and I generally decline to express, and often to have, an opinion about such matters. In this case, the question was not specific to USAmerican public policy, it was simply a request for opinions, so I answered.
Widespread easy access to handguns plainly has a far more deleterious effect on a society such as yours and mine than could reasonably be expected to result from easier access to assault weapons. And widespread easy access to handguns in the US has a far more deleterious effect on my own society in Canada than easier access to assault weapons in the US could be expected to have. So my opinion relates both to my own society and to US society, because in the latter case I and my society are negatively affected by public policy in the US and I feel quite entitled to have, and express, an opinion in that case anyway.
The fact is that I know quite a bit whereof I speak, and have and take an interest in many of the issues that are central and peripheral to firearms control. Neither I nor you live in utopia at present, or are likely to in the near future. Firearms deaths, injuries and crimes are a reality, and a problem. So are interferences in women's right to an abortion (in the US, anyway), and oppressive treatment of public assistance recipients (yup, we've had a fair bit of that up here too recently), and the effect of money on electoral outcomes -- the other issues you dismissed as sideshows. (Actually, you would seem to have been comparing negative discourse about "welfare leeches" to pro-firearms control discourse, and I take exception to that, of course, as being palpably ridiculous and simply inflammatory.)
Unless you have a revolution on offer at a good price and with good odds of success, I'm not really prepared to agree that we just shouldn't worry about exacerbations of those problems or try to do anything about them. An inequitable society in which women have reproductive freedom, public assistance recipients are not condemned to grinding poverty, thousands and thousands of people are not victimized at gunpoint and electoral outcomes are not bought and paid for is better than an inequitable society in which none of those things are true.
Damn, I sound like a liberal. Somebody smack me.
Of course, if I lived where you live, I'd likely be putting more of my time and energy into bringing about a universal public single-payer health care system. But I've got that ... and absolute reproductive freedom, and a social safety net that hasn't dumped all its beneficiaries onto the street, and quite excellent campaign financing regulation, a pretty low level of firearms victimization, and an all-round decent, tolerant society, not that any of these things don't need improvement.
But the threats to what I've got are mainly external: illegally trafficked firearms from the US killing people on my streets, a rising risk of spillover terrorism because of US foreign policy, and a whole range of social and cultural and economic and environmental "public goods" at risk because of mainly economic pressure from the south: the insurance companies that want a piece of our health care market, the media that want a piece of the culture-defining information/entertainment market (a piece of those markets? ... what am I saying), the huge energy consumption markets sucking at our resources, the "right to work" states leaching our jobs, the bogus and illegal barriers constantly erected against our exports. All with the complicity of our own governments, of course -- but without you, there'd be nothing for them to be complicit with or in.
So yeah, I'd be really very pleased if you'd solve some of those big problems you refer to, whatever you might have had in mind. Not just for selfish reasons, of course; y'all deserve good stuff, eh? But in the meantime, I think you also deserve not to be getting killed, injured, robbed and terrorized by firearm quite so much, and I think our life up here would be the better for it if you down there did something about that "symptom" while you're waiting for the revolution.
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