That wasn't a strawman. I asked a question. — Thorongil

Come off it. Your question contained a controversial assumption about my position, and that's what I was objecting to.

I agree that there are restrictions on the means of self-defense, but I don't think that extends to banning all guns. Why do you think it does, if indeed you think that? — Thorongil

I don't think that it does. I think that it should, and I suspect that you know why I think that.

If there are no non-war-like weapons, and it doesn't seem that there are, then you're just against weapons per se, which would seem to indicate your opposition to the possession of any means of self-defense. — Thorongil

No, I clearly said, for example, many handguns don't qualify as weapons of war.

You clearly regard "war-like" as a negative quality in itself. — Thorongil

It's negative depending on context. It's not negative in a war setting.

No, I clearly said, for example, many handguns don't qualify as weapons of war. — Agustino

I think a gun qua gun qualifies as a weapon of war.

It's not negative in a war setting. — Agustino

And I say it's not negative in other settings.

I don't think that it does. I think that it should, and I suspect that you know why I think that. — Sapientia

You're just stalling here. Why do you think it should? And no, I don't know why you would think that, but I can guess. If your reason is "because people use guns to kill other people," that's not good enough. People use lots of things to kill other people that you don't think ought to be banned. I would also counter by pointing out that 1) a large proportion of gun deaths are due to illegally acquired firearms by individuals who have criminal records and that 2) there is an enormous number of defensive gun uses each year, a number that dwarfs the number of deaths by guns, so that 3) to ban guns would be to take away guns from nonviolent, law abiding citizens who may have used them to protect themselves.

I think a gun qua gun qualifies as a weapon of war. — Thorongil

No. That's not what I meant anyhow. You can clearly see how, say, a pistol is very very different from the AR-15 with a bump stock. One can be used to EASILY kill many people at once, while the other cannot be used that way.

You're just stalling here. — Thorongil

If by that you mean I'm hesitant to rehash the whole debate from scratch, then bingo!

You have failed to provide examples of situations in which such guns like the AR-15 are necessary for self-defence for an average civilian, and you're just refusing to see that a basic pistol isn't the same as an AR-15 with a bump stock in potential to kill.

Fair enough.

Cannot? What are you talking about? There have been plenty of mass shootings by means of pistols.

Cannot? What are you talking about? There have been plenty of mass shootings by means of pistols. — Thorongil

Yeah, so what? That doesn't mean pistols are as capable of killing a large number of people as the upgraded AR-15.

But they are. People have done just that with them.

But they are. People have done just that with them. — Thorongil

No, they're not. This is just outright BS. Do a thought experiment - which weapon can kill more people faster? The answer will be clear. Of course, it's also possible to kill a lot of people with a pistol, just more difficult. So what I said is true:

That doesn't mean pistols are as capable of killing a large number of people as the upgraded AR-15. — Agustino

I asked a question. I agree that there are restrictions on the means of self-defense, but I don't think that extends to banning all guns. Why do you think it does, if indeed you think that? — Thorongil

I answered this several posts before. Self-defence merely says you may answer force with force and it won't be unlawful (within reasonable bounds). That principle says zero about gun rights.

which weapon can kill more people faster? — Agustino

There are handguns that, under certain circumstances, will kill more people faster than an AR-15.

Define "force" and you'll see that it says quite a lot about guns.

Examples?

The 9mm Glock would be one. That's what the Orlando shooter predominantly used once he got into enclosed spaces, for example.

Your suggestion that guns are necessary for any definition of force is silly beyond belief and demonstrates your apparent ideological investment in a certain outcome instead of rational deliberation. Self-defense is a Roman legal doctrine from the 6th century. Vim vi repellere licet. How many guns did they have back then? :rofl:

Guns exist today and they didn't in the past. I fail to see how this fact disables the right to own and carry them for self-defense. The natural right to self-defense wasn't invented by the Romans. It applies to human beings as such. A hunter gatherer who defends himself with a sharp rock against someone or something threatening his life is as justified in doing as the Roman who defends himself with a steel Gladius and the modern individual who defends himself with a gun.

I had in mind grenades, tanks, attack helicopters, fighter jets, bombs, machine guns, RPGs, etc when I made my comment. Civilians don't have access to these quintessential weapons of war. — Thorongil

Have you, or anyone on this thread, asked WHY is it that in a country that has a 'right to bear arms', that these arms are banned from public ownership?

The 9mm Glock would be one. That's what the Orlando shooter predominantly used once he got into enclosed spaces, for example. — Thorongil

You got to be kidding me :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:


If you think this one is as effective at killing a large number of people as the AR-15, then you're just kidding yourself. Given the same amount of time and the same situation, the AR-15 will kill more people.

Given the same amount of time and the same situation, the AR-15 will kill more people. — Agustino

The Orlando shooter disagreed, and he had a large death tally.

Also, I said that a handgun, under certain circumstances, is better than an AR-15, which is true. Handguns are, in the words of someone who knows more about guns than you or I do:

1. More concealable.
2. Ammunition and firearm are lighter, allowing shooter to carry multiple pistols and ammunition.
3. Less moving parts, therefore, less opportunities to malfunction.
4. More accurate at close range with less recoil.
5. Harder to disarm an active shooter, especially if the shooter has no "real" training or understanding of "Pie" with regards to clearing a room.
6. Barrel won't overheat as quickly.
7. Less recoil for faster target acquisition.
8. Requires less skill to operate with efficiency.

Vim vi repellere licet. — Benkei

A quick survey online yields these translations: it is permitted/lawful to meet/repel force/violence with force/violence. Permitted and lawful are not the same thing; meeting and repelling are not the same thing; force and violence are not the same thing.

I find this too:
"Vim vi repellere licet, modo flat moderamine inculpatae tutelae, non ad sumendam vindictam, sed ad repulsandam injurlam";

translated, "It is lawful to repel force by force; but let it be done with the self-control of blameless defense, not to take revenge, but to repel injury."

(http://legaldictionary.lawin.org/vim-vi-repellere-licet-modo-flat-moderamine-inculpatae-tutelae-non-ad-sumendam-vindictam-sed-ad-repulsandam-injurlam/)

The latter has the hallmark of sense on it, at least as I understand sense.

Much of the reasoning in this thread has been of the sort one can only charitably call opportunistic. Self-defense is arguably a fundamental right. As such a right it stands as a general principle. As a general principle it is without any specific substance. There is no right to any specific means of defense that can be derived from the principle. Further, it imposes no duty of defense, nor even authorizes defense. It simply says that you may undertake defense and the defense undertaken must comport with certain standards,else (implicitly) you run afoul of the law!

It will be clear to anyone who looks that this standard is not consistently applied in the US. Some states have stand-your-ground laws, others impose a duty to retreat, if retreat is possible. My understanding leans towards there being no right for an individual to shoot - or harm or threaten - anyone, for any reason. It's not a right in itself. Under the right circumstances the shooter can/should be free from prosecution for shooting, but that the act of shooting places the shooter "under the gun" of the law until the matter is resolved.

Does anyone disagree with this so far? (If you do, please review your disagreement to make sure it actually applies to what's written.)

Next, gun ownership. My view is that gun ownership cannot/should not be universally banned. My view is that in some areas, under some conditions, it (gun ownership) can be banned.

That leaves a) what kinds of guns, and for what purposes. And b) what controls or regulations may govern guns and how they're used.

Either you allow all guns, or you restrict the kinds of guns in some way. Either you allow all purposes, or you restrict the purposes in some way. Either you have no controls, or you have some controls, in some way. Anyone who thinks that Heller v. District of Columbia removes all restrictions needs to read it.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf

The point of all this is that people already own guns, and guns are already controlled in all manner of ways. All that's left is tuning or fine-tuning existing controls, and creating controls that may be needed. And it may be useful to keep in mind that no provision of the constitution, or any law, however absolute and unequivocal, can stand against the larger interests of the community, just as no larger rule can stand against the immediate needs of the community.

If this analysis stands, then it's clear that most of the noise about gun control is just noise and nothing more than noise. One moves beyond the noise when one becomes reasonable, a person who reasons.

That leaves the question as to what is reasonable.

Benkei offered this, on page 30:

Based on the interpretation by the Supreme Court, let's get on with actual laws:

1. prohibition on concealed weapons;
2. felony and mental health checks, no sale on a positive;
3. registration of gun owners;
4. qualification - a gun test like a driver's license, failed? you don't get a gun;
5. a limit to the number of guns one person can own;
6. prohibition to carry guns in public places;
7. prohibition on dangerous guns to include fully automatic rifles. — Benkei

These seem pretty good for a start. Any discussion? Or will it be just noise.

1. More concealable. — Thorongil

Nothing to do with its capacity to kill a lot of people quickly.

2. Ammunition and firearm are lighter, allowing shooter to carry multiple pistols and ammunition. — Thorongil

Same as above.

3. Less moving parts, therefore, less opportunities to malfunction. — Thorongil

:confused:

4. More accurate at close range with less recoil. — Thorongil

Yeah, but when someone just wants to kill people, accuracy isn't so important as other factors - like being able to spray a lot of bullets quickly, covering a large area.

5. Harder to disarm an active shooter, especially if the shooter has no "real" training or understanding of "Pie" with regards to clearing a room. — Thorongil

Hmm, sure. But again, this has nothing to do with the potential of the weapon. The one has greater destructive potential than the other.

8. Requires less skill to operate with efficiency. — Thorongil

Not true. It's harder to hit a target with a pistol since firing rate is slower. Close quarters it doesn't make much difference, but at some distance it does.

The one has greater destructive potential than the other. — Agustino

You've not demonstrated this claim.

Have you, or anyone on this thread, asked WHY is it that in a country that has a 'right to bear arms', that these arms are banned from public ownership? — charleton

What country are you talking about?
If you are speaking of the USA, what exactly do you mean by "banned from public ownership"?

Guns exist today and they didn't in the past. I fail to see how this fact disables the right to own and carry them for self-defense. The natural right to self-defense wasn't invented by the Romans. It applies to human beings as such. A hunter gatherer who defends himself with a sharp rock against someone or something threatening his life is as justified in doing as the Roman who defends himself with a steel Gladius and the modern individual who defends himself with a gun. — Thorongil

Non sequitur.

You argued that self-defence is an argument for the right to have guns and this is simply false. I said, all the right to self-defence says is that it allows you to answer force with force. You cannot derive any right to hold any type of weapon from this principle and definitely not merely due to the existence of a weapon, which you seem to argue above except I need to extricate it myself as I don't really see any argument just an attempt to deflect from your silly comment before. If we accept your line of thinking then stopping at guns would be entirely arbitrary and we might as well include grenades and anti-personnel mines as those exist too.

The only thing we can conclude from the right of self-defence in relation to guns is that if they are legal to have it is probably acceptable to use them in self-defence, provided the force used isn't excessive.

Your comment about the Romans not inventing self-defense is not what I said, in any case irrelevant and incorrectly assumes the existence of natural rights.

What country are you talking about?
If you are speaking of the USA, what exactly do you mean by "banned from public ownership"? — ArguingWAristotleTiff

...I had in mind grenades, tanks, attack helicopters, fighter jets, bombs, machine guns, RPGs, etc in the USA

The one has greater destructive potential than the other. — Agustino

You've not demonstrated this claim. — Thorongil

There's this?

[The AR-15] shoots a .223 Caliber or 5.56 mm round at roughly 3,300 feet per second, which is about three times the muzzle velocity of a typical Glock pistol.

The AR-15's effective firing range is also more than 1,300 feet at the least, whereas a typical Glock's firing range is just over 160 feet.

Chipman, the senior policy analyst at Giffords and former ATF special agent, told Business Insider that the AR-15 is so powerful that they weren't allowed to carry it during indoor raids because the rounds travel so fast that they could penetrate a victim, then a wall, then a bystander through that room.

...

But so many mass shootings become mass shootings "because the AR-15 was used," he said, adding that the damage the weapon does to the human body pales in comparison to a handgun. [my note: in context it's clear that the writer meant to say that a handgun pales in comparison to the AR-15]

"I've talked to ER physicians," Chipman said. "Rifle rounds are so devastating to the human body."

Also this?

ALL GUNS CAN kill, but they do not kill equally.

Compare the damage an AR-15 and a 9mm handgun can do to the human body: “One looks like a grenade went off in there,” says Peter Rhee, a trauma surgeon at the University of Arizona. “The other looks like a bad knife cut.”

A bullet with more energy can do more damage. Its total kinetic energy is equal to one-half the mass of the bullet times its velocity squared. The bullet from a handgun is—as absurd as it may sound—slow compared to that from an AR-15. It can be stopped by the thick bone of the upper leg. It might pass through the body, only to become lodged in skin, which is surprisingly elastic.

The bullet from an AR-15 does an entirely different kind of violence to the human body. It’s relatively small, but it leaves the muzzle at three times the speed of a handgun bullet. It has so much energy that it can disintegrate three inches of leg bone. “It would just turn it to dust,” says Donald Jenkins, a trauma surgeon at University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. If it hits the liver, “the liver looks like a jello mold that’s been dropped on the floor.” And the exit wound can be a nasty, jagged hole the size of an orange.

These high-velocity bullets can damage flesh inches away from their path, either because they fragment or because they cause something called cavitation. When you trail your fingers through water, the water ripples and curls. When a high-velocity bullet pierces the body, human tissues ripples as well—but much more violently. The bullet from an AR-15 might miss the femoral artery in the leg, but cavitation may burst the artery anyway, causing death by blood loss. A swath of stretched and torn tissue around the wound may die. That’s why, says Rhee, a handgun wound might require only one surgery but an AR-15 bullet wound might require three to ten.

Then, multiply the damage from a single bullet by the ease of shooting an AR-15, which doesn’t kick. “The gun barely moves. You can sit there boom boom boom and reel off shots as fast as you can move your finger,” says Ernest Moore, a trauma surgeon at Denver Health and editor of the Journal of Trauma and Acute Surgery, which just published an issue dedicated to gun violence.

Handguns kill plenty of people too, of course, and they’re responsible for the vast majority of America’s gun deaths. But a single bullet from a handgun is not likely to be as deadly as one from an AR-15.

If we accept your line of thinking then stopping at guns would be entirely arbitrary and we might as well include grenades and anti-personnel mines as those exist too. — Benkei

Then you haven't actually been reading my comments carefully. You don't understand my argument, which is no substitute for thinking it invalid.