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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Not on that guy's side, but he didn't strictly say that we shouldn't have those laws.
He said that if you're siteing a case where we did have those laws and a bad thing happened as an example for why we need laws like that in place to stop the bad thing from happening, it falls a little flat.
Not that the idea of having laws like that is bad, but citing individual cases is flawed, as no amount of regulatory structure will ever prevent 100% of cases.
To frame it a different way, I could argue that there's literally no country on earth with strong enough gun laws, because there's no country with zero gun deaths. I could argue that we need random searches of people homes to try and find guns, or imprisoning people who talk about guns, because the current laws clearly aren't good enough because people are still getting shot. Doesn't matter if it was only 1 incident in the past 30yrs. Still happened, so we need stricter laws.
That's obviously an absurd level of hyperbole, and I want to reiterate that I'm all for regulation on firearms. Just wanted to point out that the core argument here is unideal.
The guy said "would have done so regardless of what laws were in place".
As in, this happened, and there are already laws, so there's no point in stronger laws or more restrictions.
That's like saying "Sure, there are hundreds of fatalities in this factory, but they already get 10c fines whenever there's an at-fault accident. The accidents would have happened regardless of the fines! There's no point in higher fines since the fines have shown they're not working!"
That's all valid, but I think you've missed my point.
While I disagree with "the laws did nothing so why have laws," I also disagree with, "the laws didn't work, so we need harsher laws." Both are flawed logically.
There is, in fact, a level of restriction that goes too far in the name of preventing crime. We could lock everyone in jail for instance, as people in cages can't commit crimes (ymmv). That's obviously a bad idea though, for many reasons.
And I'm with you. I think we need to evaluate what that right balance is. What I was pushing back on was the idea that, "if there's even one gun death ever, then the laws didn't go far enough, and we need more restrictions," which I took to be the sentiment of the OP. That lack of nuance worries me is all.
I don't know if the gun laws that were violated were good enough or not. I didn't look them up, tbh. But you can have all the laws in the world, and have them be completely useless if they aren't properly enforced. Maybe the laws are actually good, and the enforcement mechanism is flawed? Maybe both are good and this is just an unfortunate side effect of it being impossible to police everyone all the time. Or maybe the laws themselves are flawed and the OP is right that something needs changing. I don't know. But I do know that it's a big issue with a lot of nuance, and that a knee jerk reaction of "we need more laws" is unhelpful at best and detrimental at worst.
I don't know what you mean by "logically". There's no "logical" way to determine what will work. This is a matter of human nature, not logic. But, science strongly suggests that harsher laws do work when it comes to guns. Places with strong gun laws have been clearly shown to have fewer gun crimes. That doesn't necessarily work for everything. During prohibition, strong laws forbidding alcohol did somewhat reduce alcohol use, but it definitely didn't eliminate it, and it dramatically increased crime due to smuggling alcohol. For guns, the picture is much clearer. When they're harder to own legally there are fewer gun crimes.
In this case it's more "we need the same laws as the rest of the civilized world, which doesn't have all these problems with gun crimes".
I really think we're just having two completely different discussions here mate. I don't disagree with what you're saying. I never did.
I also don't know that I think it's worth the time to hash out at this point. We're just talking past each other.