Tigeraid lives in Canada, hence the outsider comment. Not from the "outside" of the gun community.Originally Posted by Crazed_Insanity
Tigeraid lives in Canada, hence the outsider comment. Not from the "outside" of the gun community.
Yeah, T. The scope of the discussion is American gun culture. I give more weight to insider opinions generally. I am happy to hear outside/foreign opinions on policy and other sociological observations from a public policy perspective though. I do draw the line when someone that doesn't live in that culture calls 42% of all American households a home for a murder or would be murder.
I certainly didn't read tigeraid's comment that way. He said that a gun expressly exists for taking the life of other living things. He didn't say gun *owners* expressly exist for taking the lives of other living things. Even if you mean a gun purely for self defense, part of that self defense is the threat of killing the thing threatening you.
I own guns purely for target shooting. I would never put myself in the position of defending myself with a .22 or .410 but I own both, and it would be inhumane to hunt with them (to me).
A gun of any kind is a tool. It doesn't have an absolute purpose for existence. Remember, his full assertion was that knives are okay because they do lots of things, but guns exist only to kill. That translates to "I use knives, but I don't use guns, so you can't use guns."
When attempting to clarify himself he got frustrated and doubled down on it in post 1628; "Surrounding it in a nerdy/tech-loving hobby doesn't change that fact." Without being able to back up his position he resorts to name calling and sarcasm. I have no use for that behavior.
You can engage him if you want but he doesn't bring any value to the discussion, imo.
That's all well and good, but where did he call you and other gun owners murderers again?
It's along the lines of "guns are solely designed to end a life."
Ergo, if you own a gun and have it outside an extremely specific criteria, your purpose to use gun is to end a life, and by proxy, murder.
Hopefully that makes sense.
Is hunting murder? Self-defense?
I took it as "it's harder to justify gun ownership than it is knife ownership, as knives have more uses, many of which don't involve killing things or practicing to be better at killing things." (Same gambit gets used a lot when comparing guns to cars). There's a whole world of healthy debate over whether guns are just "tools" that don't have a specific purpose, and it's fine if somebody does or doesn't want to debate that with someone else. But saying that tigeraid was calling everyone a murderer is, IMHO, disingenuous, especially sticking with that after he explicitly clarified that that's not what he was saying.
Last edited by Tom Servo; November 13th, 2018 at 07:18 AM.
It is taking a life, by definition.
By definition it's "the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another." It's a subset of taking a life. I mean, unless you're going with Morrissey's definition of it, but somehow I don't think that "meat is murder" is the definition we're running with here.
His comments were made in the context of guns being used to cause more murder than knives. It's on this page, you can scroll up and read it yourself in post 1614. He clearly came back and doubled down on it; "You're either killing things, or practicing to kill things." His effort to move it away from murder is backpedaling.
If you choose to interpret his phrase "task of ending a living being's life" outside of the context of mass killings of people with knives v. guns, we can do that. But you have to acknowledge you're moving the goal posts by doing so. Hunting animals is one of the most popular uses for firearms in America (and Canada). I am even happy to acknowledge that for much of the history of firearms they were used almost exclusively for ending life (hunting on the frontier was their primary purpose when the 2A was written); but, I don't live in those times and thanks to the advanced society we live in firearms have a myriad of uses that do not involve killing. The call to ban all guns robs me of that Constitutionally protected right and discussions of blanket bans are fairly blunt and useless arguments. We've covered that ground a lot here. He's entitled to his opinion, but most Americans find it silly.
To recap a back-channel discussion that parallels this one, I'd support anti-2A people more if they were better organized. They should be looking for incremental victories like repealing the Dickey Amendment. When there are blanket calls for gun bans these activists are very easy to tune out. Particularly when they're not even American.
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