gd1"
Rifles are still used in shootings as evidenced by school shootings. Reducing access could reduce death. There is no need for legitimate ownership of a rifle in today's society unless you live out in the woods and shoot your food on a daily basis. You don't need it as a hobby and stores make food available. So, punishing legitimate owners may be the wrong way to look at it. They just aren't necessary, and the tradeoff is directly associable as a cost in human life. I don't know about the locks deal. I would think that to be a waste of time for the purpose of self defense as you'd want to have it ready as quickly as possible.[/quote]
They are used in some of the mass shootings, yes. Not all, though. Pistols show up as well. There isn't some defining line of pistols being safe or rifles not. I note that a previous firearm push was to ban pistols on the basis of folks not needing them, but of course, they'd be permitted to keep rifles. Or at least, that was the line at the time. So, of course, there's a lot of concern that if one were banned, and nothing changed, they'd simply come after the next target.
Banning rifles wouldn't do anything to fix the root causes here. Yes, it's true that in modern society, most of us don't have any need to hunt our own food. Doing that is definitely particularly foreign to an urban society. Hunting is definitely still big in the country, though.
The lock thing comes about as a result of an intersection of state and federal law. Both mandate a lock be purchased with the handgun. However, they mandate different kinds of locks. So, I end up buying two. Each law, taken individually, can be justified in that locks can be used for safety. However, the combined effect is irrational. There is indeed a tradeoff between locks and self defense accessibility, but in some cases, a lock is worth it. For instance, if you have small children in the house, you ought to properly secure your weapons. I don't have any kids, but I can open the safe fairly quickly, and I don't mind having a little bit of extra security, but locks and safe would also be largely redundant.
[quote][quote="Tyndmyr wrote:Usually it's a tool that has extreme importance in modern society (like a car) or it's something that is not directly used to kill masses of people (like a computer game in which case the people made their choice as opposed to not making their choice to be gunned down en masse).
Having a backyard swimming pool is a lot more dangerous to your family than owning a rifle.I don't think it would be easy for an owner of a pool to kill multiple people with their pool.
I don't think it would be easy for an owner of a pool to kill multiple people with their pool.[/quote]
Accidental drownings, mostly. Kids wander into pool, get stuck, drown. There isn't really a big push to ban backyard pools, though. I mean, sure, folks will advocate for safe use, but nobody feels a need for licensing, registration, or banning for safety reasons.
However, the point is that pools contradict your statement. A pool can cause death pretty directly, and is not a necessary thing to most lives the way automobiles are.
Mass shootings are fairly rare overall. They just get a lot of attention because the individual incidents are large. It's something akin to airlines. Air travel is, objectively, pretty safe. Actual death rates are quite low compared to, say, driving. However, when an airline goes down, it's all over the news for ages, and it's a big deal, often with many deaths at once. Thus, you have a lot of people who are afraid of flying, but give zero fucks about driving a car, and often can't even be bothered to use the turn signals.
It's not an essential freedom (and certainly one that I wouldn't think would be worth the directly traceable cost in human life). Guns should really only be used for self defense in a large number of situations. If it were a hobby like skiing or something where the cause of other people's deaths (who didn't choose it) was so directly associable then maybe it would be harder to associate. But the fact is that guns do facilitate killing. They are necessary for self defense, but not a whole lot of other things.
First off, as already noted, firearm ownership is generally not correlated with murder. And of types of firearms, long guns kill a great deal fewer people than handguns do.
Well, what makes a freedom essential? Target shooting is a really popular hobby, and is an Olympic sport(though I notice the media rarely makes a hubbub about the US winning shooting events).
Would banning, say, football be acceptable? Football matches have frequently resulted in sports fans behaving riotously, and hurting or killing people, and damaging property. Even disregarding injuries on the field, sports fans often manage to be quite obnoxious and injurious to society. Why is sport shooting not considered an acceptable sport, even when the rest are?