this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Okay so full answer from a real keyboard. Please consider this one to supercede the last one which was written on my phone on my way to sleep.
First- addressing your argument:
I argue there ARE NOT would-be bombers out there saying 'I really wanna blow some people up but I can't get explosives, my reign of terror ended before it began :(, curse you explosives licensing schemes! Guess I have no choice but to get a job and therapy.'. Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil.
But there's a sliding scale. The more determined someone is, the more stringent restrictions it will take to stop them from getting whatever they want. There's a limit to what's practical, and a higher limit to what's possible. Look at prisons- the most secure, controlled, patrolled environment in the world, and yet prisoners still get drugs and weapons and cell phones. Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil, but assholes are more likely to settle for whatever's convenient.
So by 'if 7-11 started selling dynamite', that means drop the difficulty of acquisition to zero. And in that sense, of course there'd be more bombings- both because 'Dynamite sale! 12 sticks for $12' posters in the window would bring bombs closer to peoples consciousness, and because you now cover the entire scale of determination.
Second, my argument:
Bombs are a bad analogue because you can't use a bomb defensively. If someone threatens to bomb my car, having my own bomb won't help me much. And a bomb isn't directed, it's broad destruction that harms everything in its vicinity (buildings, people, vehicles, etc). So I can't use a bomb to defend my home from an intruder as I'll just blow up my own house & family; I can't use a bomb to defend against street crime because I'd blow myself up too.
A gun however CAN be used defensively. It doesn't harm everything in the vicinity, just whatever you shoot at. The gun doesn't also harm the shooter, doesn't also harm everybody nearby. I can shoot the intruder or street criminal without also harming myself or my family.
So consider Night City, or any similar society where you can assume everyone you meet is armed. In that society, much like in ours, you have two classes of people. There's the criminal class- which includes the main character V. They go about their illegal actions, using violence against anyone who stands in their way. And there's the average people. In a game like CP2077 or GTA, the average people are the NPCs that populate the city but with whom you have little or no interaction other than stealing their cars or wishing they'd get out of your way.
Obviously we'd like to disarm the criminals. But as people who don't follow the law, that's easier said than done.
When in the beginning of the game you hear the news report that there were 87 murders last week, notice that it's talking about gangs and cartels, not innocent bystanders? Art imitates life.
But now consider the NPCs. Imagine if every time you had to steal a car, the owner would try and shoot you, and if you shoot back then random bystanders would shoot you. Would that impact your willingness to steal cars? I think it would, you'd go looking for parked cars to avoid firefights.
And that's why I say having a mostly armed society is not an awful thing.
After you wrote it, did you read it?
First part: 'Laws never work because crime is magic. Okay, practical obstacles work. Actually I agree completely and making a bad thing easier makes it way more common.'
I hadn't even brought up how capitalism can make problems worse on purpose. You went out of your way to make that a gimme. And thanks a bunch for bringing up prison, which is the best possible example of everyone wanting something (escape) and approximately zero people achieving it.
Stopping crime is not pass/fail. The existence of a crime doesn't negate how much good was done, by forcing every asshole who wants to do a terrorism to gamble their fingers on redneck engineering contraptions intended to explode in someone's face.
Second part: 'Nobody gets hurt in a mass shootout over a carjacking.' You can't even imagine assuming everyone you meet is unarmed. Like most places.
I think you're filling in the blanks a bit and putting words in my mouth.
I say practical obstacles work to screen out the 'low hanging fruit'. It's like metal detectors at the airport- screens out the random idiots, but not the dedicated terrorists. Trying to screen out the terrorists just gives you the TSA which costs billions and offers little of value above the standard metal detectors and xray machines of 1990.
There's two things that would stop another 9/11-- locked cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know to rush a hijacker rather than cooperating. Security is a distributed decentralized problem, and centralized solutions rarely work for that.
As for prison- my analogy was pointing out the futility of trying to stop people from getting items they want. It doesn't work for drugs, it doesn't work for guns. You'll disarm the good people and the bad guys will stay strapped. And smuggling drugs into prison is a LOT easier than smuggling people out.
I'm all for reducing the number of guns criminals have. I just think it's a bad idea to reduce the number of guns good people have even more. And since a law only affects the law-abiding...
If you read this comment of mine there's minimum of 55k defensive gun uses in the US, probably more like 300-350k. The law will directly affect those. Not every one would become a murder, but that's a lot more victims of various types of crimes. And of the 10-12k firearm homicides per year, how many are committed by people who aren't legal to own a gun in the first place? An awful lot.
I CAN imagine a place where everyone I meet is unarmed- I live more or less in such a place. Connecticut, USA- I only know a few people who own guns but almost none of them ever carry, and I almost never carry myself.
I was making a specific point that you've sidestepped- that if a criminal had significant fear that their victim would be armed, there'd be less crime. That if in GTA random NPCs shot you for stealing cars, you'd probably steal fewer cars. Do you disagree with that?
Locked cockpit doors are also practical obstacles, numbnuts.
"Futility" is pass/fail thinking. We absofuckinglutely keep most prisoners from getting most things they want. If your standard is literally nobody and never ever ever, yeah no shit that won't work. But I feel no need to defend the assertion that most people in prison are left wanting.
Don't talk to me about systems if you think 99% success equals failure.
You want magic.
The only reason it's sooo easy for "criminals" to pull guns from behind their ears is the comical abundance of firearms. Where the fuck do you think the black market comes from? There's no secret factory churning out bad-guy-specific firearms. Burglars find guns lying around, muggers take guns from victims, straw buyers look like "good people" - and there's more guns than humans in America. There's a gun and a half per person. How the everloving fuck are you "for reducing the number of guns criminals have," if not by reducing the number of guns available?
I didn't address 'what if carjackers thought randos were armed' because what happens is, they shoot you first.
Most illegal guns today are stolen or straw purchased, because that's the easiest and cheapest way of getting them and it requires very little transport.
Let's assume you made civilian gun ownership totally illegal. The math changes- they get a bit more expensive, they get shipped in from overseas along with the drugs. Or they get made locally- a gun isn't that hard to make in any decent machine shop. Certainly easier than making drugs. And unlike the drug lab, the machine shop has a legitimate 'day shift' use so it doesn't have to hide in a basement.
But you yourself said there's 1.5 guns for every person. That doesn't go away overnight you know. Even if you could get support for broad spectrum civilian disarmament, the criminals won't give up their guns and they'll just start importing or making more.
If you want to stop crime, of any kind, you have to stop the root causes. Stopping drunk driving by banning alcohol didn't work in the 1920s. Stopping gun violence by banning guns won't work today. You need to go deeper- look at where most gun violence comes from (gangs and drugs), and address that. It means education, jobs, a war on poverty, and it costs a hell of a lot more than just signing a law. But it would actually improve our society.
Or effectively prevent them, or reliably prosecute them, or-- what, suddenly you understand game theory? When it's convenient?
This is stupid. We can make things harder, and they happen less. Some obstacles work better, some goals are worth more effort, whatever. You don't get to pull this motte-and-bailey horseshit. You went from declaring all self-proclaimed criminals will always always always get all the guns they want, to acknowledging that cost / complexity / time / consequences prevents a ton of access that would happen if there were no obstacles, to sort of mumbling and hand-waving that changes won't change anything because imports and stockpiles and Jesus Christ have you ever seen a foreign country?
Even the solution you treat as a worst-case extreme is wrong. Almost nobody wants to ban all guns. That is a right-wing ghost story. But buyback programs, registration, and serial-number tracking can reduce guns available to the black market, and chase down the pathways guns take to get there, without stopping any particular ammosexual from collecting greasy toys.
Perhaps nobody overtly wants to ban all guns in the sense of making all guns illegal. There's always a 'reasonable' proposal. But it overall feels like a roll back strategy, like the US tried to roll back communism in the cold war- pick at the edges until there's none left.
A buyback program IS a ban by the way- it's just confiscation with compensation. 'You can't own XYZ anymore so we will confiscate it from you, but we'll give you some money.
The real issue though is that guns aren't hard to make and therefore the black market effect will be minimal. Look at illicit marijuana (pre-legalization) as an example. Lots of it was grown in Mexico then smuggled in. Then hydroponic/airponic tech got better and cheaper and instead it was grown in attics and basements closer to where it would be sold. So now the drugs smuggled in are drugs that require lab processing like cocaine or heroin. But if (hypothetically saying there was no legalization) you made home-grow setups illegal, that wouldn't stop anyone from doing it anyway.
Same is true with guns. For under $500 you can buy a device that turns a half-machined block of metal into the main part of an AR15 rifle. For $5k-$10k you can buy a CNC machine that will turn a solid billet of metal into most parts of a gun. And unlike a drug lab, unlike even a basement marijuana grow op, all these devices can be presented as 'legitimate use' with very little prep- just clear the gun CNC file out of the machine and that's it. Way easier than marijuana (which takes weeks to mature and then must be harvested and packaged). So you could do this in a legitimate front business with a 'night shift' crew.
So I argue even if you greatly restrict civilian firearm ownership, the real criminals who commit the majority of gun homicides and gun crimes will have unimpeded access to guns. The same gangs that right now trade in stolen or straw purchased guns, will instead trade in imported or home-machined guns.
Pot will grow in any wet ditch, and we still stop a lot of people from doing it.
You're not listening. We're right back at the start: you're arguing something can, theoretically, sometimes happen, so there's NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER versus making it trivial. Nevermind the countries where violent gangs having a gun is noteworthy, versus the ridiculous abundance in the US making law enforcement assume every rando might be packing. Nevermind that simple registration and licensing would let us disarm "real criminals" of their illicit firearms, whenever the fuck we discover possession, instead of having to wait until they use them on someone. You want to hand-wave thousands of dollars in industrial equipment, to say wildly different circumstances must stay exactly how things work now, because you think crime is magic and change is impossible.
Making something harder makes it happen less.
It's not fucking complicated.
If your only metric is "never," no shit you'll fail. Thankfully that would be stupid. Less is enough.