njlauren
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Joined: 10/1/2011
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quote:
ORIGINAL: PandoraFoxxx
Banning guns will no more stop gun violence than Prohibition stopped the drunk and disorderly. I'm sure someone somewhere has probably said that exact phrase, but it's still true.
@Guage I agree but I don't really find it disturbing - they're a whole lot more on point than 99% of news anchors; and probably 10x smarter. There's a lot to be said for memorizing tirades vs reading points off a teleprompter. I'm also a fan of the fake news because the majority of the time it allows me to come to my own conclusions about how I feel about this or that - and spurs more research if I need more information. I can see where you're going with that though - we need better sources. More nuetral sources. If wishes were horses I suppose.
Oh wait, most people [who watch real news] don't like to think. My bad.
Actually, Prohibition provides a direct analogy to guns and what probably should be done about them. Prohibition, like arguments about guns, came about for very real reasons, abuse of alcohol was a major societal problem (I am leaving the religious wackjobs out of this one, with the demon rum crapola). Before Prohibition, alcohol was almost unregulated, not unlike guns in many places, and the consequences were many. Bars and Saloons could be open any time they wanted in most places, and the number of bars and saloons was not regulated either, and more importantly, bar owners could serve someone booze until they couldn't pay any more or became unconscious. Prohibition in large part gained traction because of the scope of the problem, and it was quite real.
With guns, there is a direct analogy, the loose gun laws in many states have led to tragedy,whether it was the crazy Korean kid in Virginia, or the 70% of guns pulled off the streets of NYC that were bought, legally, in a couple of states with notoriously lax laws. In Georgia you can basically walk into a gun store and fill up your trunk, friends of mine in our corporate office who are gun owners told me basically that it wasn't all that much different than buying a hammer at home depot or an electric drill.
With both guns and prohibition, outright bans are disaster areas, besides with guns the constitutional question, the other problem is there are legitimate reasons to own them, and people IMO have that right.
With alcohol, what Prohibition ended up forcing is what should have happened in the first place, and that was regulating it. Everything from alcohol content, to establishments having liquor licenses that both forced those with the license to police their selling of alcohol (cutting people off who were too drunk), setting hours of operation, and also limiting how many establishments there could be and how close they could be to each other and so forth, and it worked, that regulation helped cut down what had been an epidemic.
The same model IMO should be applied to guns. I think that people have the right to own guns, but there is also a strong case for regulation. You buy a gun and try selling it in the black market and it gets traced back to you, you are dead meat, and none of this "oh, I lost it" or "Oh, it was stolen bullshit"...if you didn't report it missing or stolen, then you are assumed to be liable. Joe Billy Bob fills up his trunk in Georgia then goes up to a city and sells the guns in the black market will think twice, because he won't be able to say Sheeet, I musta lost it or it done got stolen", not going to fly. We have more accountability in many cases with cars then we do guns, cars have to be registered in all 50 states, as do boats on navigable waterways, but in many states you don't need to register them at all. What regulation does is demand responsibility, and the position of the nutjobs at the NRA that guns should be without burdens is ludicrous, to say the least, when we require that kind of accountability with cars and boats. And before some loon cites how many people die in cars each year compared to gun violence, don't, because it is a bullshit argument. If you look at how many cars are out there and how many miles cars are driven in this country each year, the auto fatality and injury rate on a usage basis is a fraction of what guns inflict in a given year if you measure usage versus injuries and deaths.
Prohibition failed to clear up the problems it was enacted for, the regulations that followed prohibition that didn't exist before it, did, and it is very much the same way with guns. As far as the redneck kooks who think they are amassing their arsenal to fight the government and therefore need to be able to buy guns and ammos without any kind of restraint, I think we would be better served giving Wayne La Pierre and the rest solid doses of lithium and seroquel, they need it.
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The ignorance of liberals - 
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