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It’s amazing how often today’s experts can be wrong.
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@Greyparrot
Bruh ur thread titles read like a Timcast video title.
Anyway, what are your thoughts on this?
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@ebuc
They { USSR } also invaded Afghanistan.
Afghanistan also could not defend itself militarily, and had no nukes at the time (not that I trust them with any). Your point?
Again peace keepers are like dogs, they only bark, until they bite, and given murphys law, that, anything that can occur { go wrong } given enough, time will go wrong
What Murphy's Law does not cover is how many incidents would happen over a period of time. We should not fear the rare and unlikely to the point we begin to make things inherently more likely even likelier. We have thousands of cities in this country where a mass shooting could happen, yet only a few happen every month across the country. Meanwhile, the amount of countries in the present and in history that have disarmed their people is few, but among them are some of the most corrupt governments in the world and world history. A government is more likely to oppress its people after disarming them than a mass shooting is to happen in a given city on any day (in addition, mass shooting statistics are often inflated with shoddy criteria, but that's beside the point).
Indeed, one could use Murphy's Law to argue anything based on the possibility of something terrible happening. For an extreme example, one could argue that we should ban planes, given that with enough time, someone will hack into all of them and cause every plane in the sky to fall. For a non-extreme example, one could call for a ban on cars because of car accidents.
Life on Earth cannot happen without risks. They are unavoidable. If we want to minimize risk, we must see what the risks and likelihoods are in our proposed scenarios, not just the current one.
Everything we do is a cost/benefit analysis. To me, the benefit of collective self-protection from a tyrannical government is worth any of the violent crimes we have now that happen with the weapons of our choice, especially when they can happen with any weapon, or almost anything improvised as a weapon. Furthermore, the idea of a benefit of security at the cost of freedom is a false pretense. Even if we are to miraculously secure ourselves from violent crime, us giving up our freedom will result in a lack of security from government tyranny.
It's as the saying goes: Those who give up liberty for safety, deserve neither. And as I would add: And they will have neither.
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@ebuc
And yet, Russia’s leash snapped after Ukraine got rid of the bombs. Interesting, isn’t it?
Again, apply that to US citizens owning guns.
Mind you, I’m not a huge foreign policy guy, but if you’re going to use foreign policy as a model for domestic policy, keep in mind the implications of your example of choice.
If I’m being honest anyway, it’s hard to argue some that countries removing nukes during the Cold War means we should get rid of our domestic guns. So even if the removal nukes helped things in some cases, keep in mind that foreign policy is not the same animal as domestic policy.
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True nothingness is beyond our comprehension.
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@ebuc
^^^ forgot to tag, my b
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Ukraine is one of those who dismantled them. Yay Ukraine.
I know we’re talking about bombs and foreign policy with your example here, but you do realize there is a real chance Ukraine never gets invaded today if they had some now, right?
It’s crazy how even a nation can make itself a target once it disarms itself, isn’t it? Now think about this concept as it applies to individuals and guns in the US.
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@n8nrgim
The dude may have also been drunk.
From this article:
Vianey Balderas, who lives across the street from the family, said she first heard gunshots that night when a few people were outside. About 20 minutes later, Balderas heard about five more gunshots, then another 10, she told The Post.“When I heard those gunshots, I didn’t think anything of it because in this neighborhood everyone has guns. Every weekend you hear gunshots,” she said in an interview in Spanish.“People shoot in their backyards, after they drink alcohol, men take out guns at house parties and shoot the ground.”
I find it funny how this article tries to place so much attention on the AR-15 (even laughably claiming it has “a unique ability to destroy the human body” as if no other weapon could do that), yet only has this little blip about the clear cultural issues at play here.
I bring these up because no, gun control will not stop things like these, or even reduce them. Criminals don’t follow gun laws, nor do they work to keep black market prices high for anything more than a short period of time, and we don’t even know how desperate criminals are to get their hands on one. If they’re desperate enough, no price will deter them. What will help is addressing cultural issues.
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@Lemming
Just work for money for college.
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@Tejretics
I respect you for doing this. Tournaments are cool and generate activity, but they take time to host.
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@oromagi
Off topic, but why do you refuse to capitalize the Is in your title?
Just curious. It’s a little strange to me.
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It’s almost summer, and college has been a pain this far. But, I’m doing fine grade-wise. I’m ready for summer.
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@DebateArt.com
@Bella3sp
Good idea! Mike, you think you could code this?
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He's a media man. I doubt it.
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Also, I like how it's free to play and I don't have to buy anything. I'm not going to, either. The non-free skins look cool and all, but I don't care.
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Tried it out. It's pretty good. Started with DPS and am having a lot of fun. My main heroes are Bastion, Junkrat, Soldier, and Ashe.
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@whiteflame
@Bullish
Good luck!
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@cristo71
Yeah. What I find interesting about this is the latter article makes mention of legal ways to obtain a gun in Australia, showing that it wouldn't even happen with a complete gun ban, it happens easily with even "common sense" gun control measures.
Also, this part from the article is interesting:
Professor Bright said Australia's illegal firearm problems not only needed policing solutions, but also directed action to change embedded culture and behaviour.He pointed towards a Queensland government-funded program designed to help men leave the criminal life as an example."The task is: How do you make firearms less appealing to young men? How do you provide young men with alternative dispute resolution strategies that don't involve having guns?" Professor Bright said."How do you provide opportunities for men currently in the criminal life to get out of it if they want to?"
The idea that the gun violence problem in Australia is a product of cultural issues mirrors exactly what I was saying about how gang culture in the US is responsible for so many of our gun deaths.
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ANNOUNCEMENT: Plans have changed. Bullish will be the representative and Whiteflame will be his backup.
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@cristo71
The economic argument is half-baked.
1. If you're going to make an argument about the law of supply, you should also take into account the law of demand. Higher prices will make business profitable, and therefore more people will get in on the action, increasing the supply. According to the laws of supply and demand, when supply increases but demand remains constant, prices fall.
At best the prices would only work as a deterrent temporarily, until an equilibrium is reached. While the prices will likely still be slightly higher in the end, it won't be enough to deter black market sales, not by anything significant.
2. Demand may not be lower, even when the prices are high. While the prices will affect the demand, it won't be the only factor. Consider the citizens' supply of guns. If they just got their guns confiscated, they'll have none, and they're going to be in the market for new ones.
In addition, if a country cannot trust their people overall with firearms, and they take them away, there will be people who have never owned a gun that will be motivated to get one upon seeing the government do something so tyrannical.
Finally, criminals that do buy guns can cause more havoc now that their victims are unarmed. This will also cause many citizens to turn to the black market.
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@whiteflame
@Arapocalypse
Aight, you're my backup then.
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@ILikePie5
Don't you know? It's not a Title XI violation if you're competing against a real woman! How dare you question trans rights' to exist?!
Jokes aside, it's dumb. I know women's sports are generally less competitive, but stuff like this doesn't help. Or maybe it does, in that it generates buzz. Either way, I can't imagine the real women enjoy competing against men. Which is understandable, or course.
Did you see that photo of Lia Thomas at the start of the event? It went a little viral since he was several feet ahead of the women off of the opening jump into the pool. It illustrates why this whole thing is dumb perfectly.
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Current Mafia:
N/A
Signups:
N/A
In the Hopper:
N/A
On Hold:
Earth - Skyrim Mafia
Mharman - Indie Games Mafia
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RM quit the site and Speedrace has been on hold for a really long time, so Imma remove them from the on hold list.
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@Sir.Lancelot
I used to host a rap battle tournament on DDO. I'd always get 8 sign-ups but only half of them actually participated. I stopped hosting it after 3 runs. I don't remember who won all of them; I only remember someone named Jonbonbon won the second one.
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Anyone have the time to be my backup? You likely won't have to do anything unless I miraculously make finals.
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@Lemming
"Flexible" is a good reason. But for me, I found it easy to memorize.
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@AustinL0926
Yes.... that's why I'm posting about it lol
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@Lemming
In chess, I'd often use the same opening movements,
This is why nearly all of the games with white on my Chess.com account open with the London System.
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@cristo71
Businesses are costly to start- this would be no different. If they achieve their goals (whatever they are) with them, they will see it as worth it. Especially if those goals include crimes against law-abiding citizens specifically.
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@cristo71
That’s irrelevant since the price will be worth it for those that want one to commit crimes.
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Discussing which guns are banworthy and which ones aren't is useless since criminals don't follow gun laws.
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@whiteflame
I can do it, but only if I get one of the later games in Round 1.
If I somehow make Round 2, I’ll need one of the early games, ideally the first one.
If by some miracle I make finals, I’ll need to be subbed out.
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@Sidewalker
Smart guns as a technology could one day dominate the market. I have no problem with this either, as a 2A advocate.
You can say that we're a bunch of crybabies who never compromise, but all I see is non-stop crying from the left about the fact that we have them, and repeated pushes from the left to increase gun control measures the second we give them any compromise. If we're going to compromise, we need the left to honor the compromises and stop pushing for more.
My point here is, that at the end of the day, you and I could argue endlessly about who's crying and who's unwilling to compromise. None of it will be productive.
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@badger
How many child murders before you consider gun control?
That assumes gun control is the answer. It's also an emotional argument when you consider how rare those events actually are. They are horrible, but to look at those events and say we need such sweeping policy changes is absurd. If you want a solution to these problems, we should examine the data rather than having the fearful response of "see gun, ban gun."
Says who? You're about equal with other developed nations on the crime index.
Are you talking about overall crime or gang violence here?
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@badger
A nail gun. He was a carpenter, after all.
Anyway, if you want a simple answer, we are the first world country with the worst gang problem.
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@badger
Gun violence in America isn’t that simple of an issue. There are many factors at play.
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@badger
And yet USA inexplicably has 5 times the murder rate of any first world country
And the data suggests it would be even worse if we got rid of guns.
If you're going to be passive-aggressive with comments like "imagine posting this," at least tag me next time.
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@Double_R
Yes, every gun death also has a 'presence of a gun' element to it.
Which becomes irrelevant when you address the human element. Again, with your scenario, the whole thing could've been prevented with better storage, and possibly better parenting.
The difference generally speaking is that gun safety advocates understand this full well and make no attempt to refute it. 2A advocates meanwhile often argue implicitly or explicitly that the presence of a gun is not the issue, that instead is all about the people involved.
You have yet to prove the latter thinking wrong.
More important, however, is your framing of the issue here. Your argument falsely pits the ideas of the 2nd Amendment and gun safety against each other when they, in fact, go hand-in-hand. The 2nd Amendment protects our right to bear arms, and gun safety advocacy tells us to be safe with the firearms we have the right to own.
Ideas of gun safety are the reason we have lock boxes and safeties, and why we practice trigger discipline and proper storage. They're the reason we keep our guns pointed at the floor or at the sky, and why we make sure to unload our guns before storing them. They're the reason for innovations in smart gun technology as well. They are not the reason we see calls for gun control legislation. That kind of legislation is from anti-2A ideals that posit humans cannot be safe with guns in the first place, therefore, such legislation is incompatible with ideas of gun safety.
In a similar vein, the 2A does not condone improper storage and technique with firearms, it only posits that we cannot trust the government to regulate those sorts of things (and guns in general). In fact, the words "well-regulated" found in the 2A are referring to the idea of proper gun training, not regulations on guns. This is because the whole 2A is based on the idea that any government that can disarm its people for the sake of power eventually will.
The fact that you can always find a person to blame (the parents in this example) is irrelevant to the fact that without a gun in the picture no child would have ended up dead. So when people say "guns don't kill people" that statement is just plain wrong in any meaningful sense.The two elements (the person and the gun) will always be present in every gun death. The 2A advocate strategy is to pretend only one is to blame and then argue that one should be the person and not the gun (because how do you blame an object?). That's just childish simpleton nonsense. We need to look at the whole picture.
If you want to look at the whole picture, we can look at what happens when we address improper gun safety to remove the specific human element causing the problem versus what happens when we address the fact that there was a gun in the house in the first place.
If we remove the gun from the household, we still have a child that does not know the danger of certain objects, and parents that cannot store dangerous objects properly. What is there to stop a child from harming or killing themselves or someone else with a kitchen knife, power tool, or something else? You can talk about how firearm deaths among children are more common than any of those, but that doesn't change the fact that the core issue still remains. You may have saved the child here, but it comes at the cost of having a gun to defend the household, and you've done nothing to negate the possibility of a different accident.
If you take improper storage out of the equation, the gun still exists, but the child never got to it in the first place. Furthermore, with proper storage involved it's safer to assume that other objects around the house would be stored properly. The same concept applies for better parenting. Here, the core issue is resolved. You have saved the child, you still have a gun to protect the household, and you've lowered the odds of another kind of incident.
Therefore, we can conclude that human behavior matters more than the presence of a gun.
It's at this point where you would probably talk about how much more common gun deaths among children are than knives and power tools. It is here, however, where I will point out that gun-related accidents that result in a child fatality are not as common as you think they are: You've made an inconsistency in your presentation of data (that I failed to catch last time I replied to you).
This whole hypothetical is about a child accessing a gun and killing someone with it in an accident. However, the data you've cited to prove that this is a more common issue includes other gun-related child fatalities that are not the result of the kind of accident you've described.
In 2020, around 6 per 100,000 children died as a result of firearm-related injury, putting firearm-related injury as the #1 cause of death among children. That much is true. However, this statistic is almost completely comprised of homicides and suicides, incidents that are not what you've described here. This is important because these things are significantly more difficult to prevent by removing guns from the equation than an accident like you've described. A murderer will use other weapons for murder (that being gracious in assuming they won't obtain contraband firearms) and a suicidal person has ample other methods as well.
The other issue with blaming the parents is that there was no malice involved here, just irresponsibility. But human beings are inherently irresponsible, so while the criticism is valid in any individual scenario, it is not a valid argument when we're debating public policy. The argument there is essentially that human beings need to stop being human beings.
Humans will always be human beings. On that, we agree. To say that we cannot significantly reduce these incidents through education, however, is incorrect. As I cited in my last reply, a study found that a good fire safety course can significantly reduce incidents where children start fires. Common sense would tell us that a good driving course helps to prevent accidents as well (need I go find a study for it?). The same logic can be applied here: Proper gun education will result in a decline in these types of incidents. No gun control needed.
If someone urgently needs a gun that is all the more reason to not sell it to them. That's literally the point of a mandatory waiting period.
I suspect you're saying this because you think someone who urgently needs a gun is suicidal, or of the criminal element. This is only half of the truth. Consider the fact that there are many people who urgently need a gun because of crime in their neighborhood, or a threat they may have received. Should these people who are trying to get guns for self-defense be forced to wait for weeks, sometimes even months, to be able to defend themselves?
Again, the criminal or suicidal person had ample other methods. The people who are in these situations don't, since criminals don't follow gun laws. These laws only create scenarios where a person feels forced to turn to the black market to get their hands on a gun, or put themselves at greater risk. And no, you can't expect to have a police officer to guard your house every night. The saying is every bit as true as it is commonly spoken: When seconds matter, the police are only minutes away.
Everything we do is a result of a cost/benefit analysis. Guns are a contentious issue because they are a frequent cause of unnecessary deaths in this country, while the benefits of having so many guns out there and so easily accessible is minimal.Lighters are far more useful and necessary to the functioning of our society and cause no where near as many casualties. The idea that we would put all of these requirements in for lighters is therefore every bit as absurd as it sounds.
Minimal? The presence of guns as a natural deterrent for a tyrannical government is reason enough to justify having so many of them in this county. A tyrannical government can shed far more blood and end far more lives than the current collective of criminals we have in this country.
But since you're so concerned about all the current deaths in this country that involves guns, I add the other point that guns are likely used to save more lives among the populace than they are used to end to my argument here.
The idea that we should pass all these gun control laws, or ban guns entirely, is just as absurd as it would be for lighters.
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@Intelligence_06
I think unratedness should be for serious tournament debates, personal challenges(such as the topic of Barney not accusing Novice of following him) and rap battles, music battles, etc. The rest should be rated though because they are all the same kind of streetfight here.
If I ran a serious tournament, it would be rated because tournament performance is still a good measurement of skill, and the opportunity to gain elo could be a serious draw.
For everything else, I get the point. I just found that troll debates are a fine usage for the unrated category.
That is literally how the noobs learn. That is how I grew up the ranks. I started up as a noob and immediately get slammed by large names such as RM and Oromagi. Then I try to imitate their styles and then I win. A system where higher rankers could debate against noobs would actually filtrate more resilient noobs to keep debating(I mean, that used to be all of us here). Forced unratedness is not good for any new accounts in the long run.
Yeah. This was the thought that convinced me as well. This is kinda funny, but I was first convinced of this line of thinking in a separate issue.
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@Double_R
It showcases that the idea that guns do not cause deaths is nonsense.
It doesn't. Every gun death has a human element to it. Even in your hypothetical, there needed to be a parent who stored the gun improperly, and child who likely wasn't parented correctly.
The point of the hypothetical was to refute a concept.
I understand that, but your hypothetical fails to do so. If you want, you can have a hypothetical where the gun breaks itself out of the box, walks itself over to a human, and shoots them. That would be an example of a gun killing someone.
If we really want to get specific on this one hypothetical, we could require a gun safety class to be completed before allowing someone to purchase a firearm, as just one example. Would that stop this from ever happening? No, but would almost certainly reduce the number of these types of incidents.
That is a good argument in favor of requiring those courses. I will be on board with this if the process is quick enough for someone who urgently needs a gun.
Guns are the number one cause of death in three US for children. Where exactly is being burned to death on that list?
Not very high up, but that is irrelevant. Surely you could save some lives by passing lighter control, no?
Alternatively, we could have entire campaigns telling parents to keep their kids away from lighters, and kids to stay away from lighters. Couple that with improvements in child safety mechanisms, and we could have a decrease in the rate of those types of incidents.
I argue that proper gun education and the rise of smart guns (as I've begun to research- it looks promising) could contribute to a decline in adolescent gun death rates.
Will it decline overall? I can't say, since there are many other factors than just the guns themselves that contribute to adolescent gun deaths. Even then, tackling those other factors would be far more effective than sweeping gun control, just like tackling the root causes of poor fire safety (with education and innovation) would be more effective than lighter control. Point is, there's more to object-related deaths than the object itself, especially in this case, where the presence of a gun is not the root cause.
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@Greyparrot
I get that, but it's better to make an original thread than this. This is just forum spam, and now you've basically encouraged Roosevelt to do the same. :/
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