Quote:
Originally Posted by spence
This is where you have to decompose the issues. A suicide may be different than a mass murder suicide. Different weapons, different considerations.
People love to push the stats around, see, see most deaths are by handgun not assault weapon etc...this just kills the dialogue.
Do we want to reduce gun violence or just ignore it?
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No, pointing out that most gun deaths or injuries are by handguns, does not kill the dialogue. It expands and clarifies the dialogue. The dialogue that you propose is strictly about AR types or large magazine capacity. It is that dialogue that deflects from and kills the larger dialogue of what to do about gun violence. It is that larger dialogue which has gone on for a long time but has been compressed to the AR dialogue because AR types create a greater (unwarranted) emotional impact. Emotionally driven dialogue is more effective in achieving the desired outcome of the overall "problem" of gun violence than is the mere recitation of statistical numbers.
The current mantra, which you and others have repeated over and over, is that "no one" wants to take away hand guns. Just the scary ones. Look how much the scary ones can kill at one time!
Logically speaking, hand guns, re the gun violence problem, are the bigger problem. Emotionally speaking, the scarier types are a more effective way of riling up enough of the population to persuade lawmakers to "do something."
But the descending order of types of guns needed to be gotten rid of in order to solve the overall problem goes something like: OK, we took care of the fully automatics, now lets take it one notch lower on the scary scale and get rid of the semi automatic, then, because the overall problem will remain virtually the same after we get that done, we can get back to dealing with those nasty but bigger problem, the hand guns.