Are Guns Cursed Items Possessed by Evil Spirits? The Left Seems to Think So.

First, if you haven't read my article on what worldwide statistics can really tell us about the gun control debate in the U.S., please go do so now!  It'll be worth it, trust the Pundit.


So in response to that, one of the more frequently leftist posters on theRPGsite made a perfectly genteel response, no calling me history's greatest monster or something like that, no regressive left bullshit for the most part, but one that showed just how out to lunch most leftists are. He fell back completely on chanting the standard leftist dogma on guns and repeating the same flawed assumptions, even though I'd just proved why they made no sense at all.

So here's what he said:
Objectively, it's really hard to compare gauge the effect of gun control laws, because violence rates are always different from place to place depending on a host of factors other than gun ownership. They also vary from year to year - and changes are different for different places. Like many people on both sides of the debate, Pundit selectively picks out some statistics that favor lack of gun control - while gun control advocates typically pick Australia or other places that implemented gun control after which violence reduced - which is correlation that isn't necessarily causation.


And my response is that there's a BIG difference: they use the stats to claim there is a causal link. I'm using the stats to point out proof there ISN'T.  If I was saying "these worldwide stats on gun violence prove that the less gun control you have the more safe a country is", then sure, you could accuse me of doing what they're doing.

But that's not what I did here. I used statistics on gun ownership and gun violence to show that having less gun ownership does not reduce the level of gun violence. I didn't try to show that correlation equals causation, I DISPROVED that very thing.


Then he says:

From my view, 
Within the U.S., I support closing loopholes for gun shows and private sales, waiting periods, gun registration (ideally national), locking laws, and buybacks of illegal guns. That's not part of some secret agenda to take away everyone's guns, but rather to enforce practice that most responsible gun owners do anyway. .


Why? How would ANY of these stop gun violence in the US? That's my point, there is no connection between rates of legal gun ownership and gun violence, and all you are listing above except MAYBE the very last one, would DO NOTHING to prevent gun deaths.

I'm not saying its some kind of secret government black-helicopter conspiracy, I'm just saying that all of these things are useless feel-good (well, feels good to the left) measure that ACCOMPLISH SWEET FUCK ALL.



Finally:
In part, my reasons for this is that the assumptions are wrong that "criminals" are a monolithic entity who will do everything in their power to get illegal guns and kill. A lot of murders are not committed by hardened criminals fully intent on killing. Likewise, a lot of suicidal people aren't completely committed on dying, and may change their mind if it's too difficult or if delayed.


Seriously? For the most part, you are wrong on both counts. It is possible of course that the guy who would have shot his wife dead might just end up beating her to near-death with a baseball bat instead; or that there is some pussy out there with a merely passing suicidal tendency that decides to forget all about it forever when he realizes he'd have to go buy a bunch of sleeping pills at WalMart instead of just blow his brains out.

But guns have no secret evil Cursed power that makes people around them more susceptible to want to kill. Nyarlathotep isn't whispering inaudible encouragement through the gun in the house that will cause deaths that wouldn't otherwise occur. The gun companies have not used dark rites and channeled Memnoch to cause impoverished black urban youths to kill each other at horrific rates, they're doing it because they're impoverished, and in gangs, and the guns they're using are almost all ILLEGALLY OBTAINED anyways.

I think this is a big problem of the left; they want to imagine that guns themselves possess some sort of spirit of darkness that warp reality around them to cause harm that would otherwise never have existed. Which is, you know, batshit nuts.

But since you attribute it to a fetishized problem ("Guns have an evilness to them that takes over people and MAKES them kill") you look for fetishized solutions ("we must exorcise the gun with registration and magazine limits! Then the evil spirit will be contained!").  The problem is, none of these work.


RPGPundit

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