The Heroic Gunslinger Fantasy

[patrick jane]

Is it? There was a time in American history when people open carried all the time. It wasn't long before many towns instigated check your gun laws. If open carry is such a good thing, why did so many cities and town write laws to stop it?

Saloons and gambling; sparse law enforcement. Most towns sprung up around mining, railroad areas and thus were filled with young rowdy men.

 

[Granite]

Maybe because Marshal Dillon and his fellow sheriffs could handle the bad guys. Times have changed. There aren't enough law officers and the ones who are out there are being targeted by the bad guys.

This is so disconnected from reality it's borderline troll material.

Cops are militarized, have tanks, shoot people with impunity, and we're supposed to believe they're the ones who are put upon?

 

[Granite]

Is it? There was a time in American history when people open carried all the time. It wasn't long before many towns instigated check your gun laws. If open carry is such a good thing, why did so many cities and town write laws to stop it?

Better yet, ask why the relative rate of violence was so low. Ignore Hollywood; the actual history of the old west is remarkable for how little bloodshed was to be found. Shootouts were the exception.

Folks could be trusted to check their arms and not go berserk. What does that tell us about the mentality then and the mentality now?

 

[bybee]

You realize that in today's scene everyone would have to submit to the same testing...to be fair of course! Either everyone gets a Blue Ribbon or no one does!
This would very efficiently label every citizen according to someone's arbitrary standards or normalcy.
We shall live in a veritable beehive of hexagons...or is it octagons?

It is interesting that some posters here did get the nuanced meaning in this post!
Thanks for the positive feedback!

 

[Dan Emanuel]

...the actual history of the old west is remarkable for how little bloodshed was to be found. Shootouts were the exception.

Folks could be trusted to check their arms and not go berserk. What does that tell us about the mentality then and the mentality now?

:thumb: (http://www.theologyonline.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4477775#post4477775)

http://www.theatlantic.com/national...-are-taking-longer-to-grow-up-but-why/265750/
http://www.if.org.uk/archives/5461/...ew-emerging-adulthood-life-stage-be-supported
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2012/12/20/why-millennials-arent-growing-up
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1018089,00.html


DJ

1.0
​

 

[Granite]

It is interesting that some posters here did get the nuanced meaning in this post!
Thanks for the positive feedback!

Did you seriously give your own post a thumbs up?:chuckle::jump:

 

[PureX]

Its over the top to call that bribery, PureX. Its what lobby's have been doing for century's here. Lobbying the government is greatly regulated and fully legal, and I.M.O. very beneficial and effective.

Wow! What planet are you living on?!?! I call it bribery because that's exactly what it is. Just because the legislators taking the bribes made it legal doesn't make it magically disappear. And it hasn't been going on for a century, it's only been going on with impunity for about the last 30 years. And now it's far worse since the Supreme Court made it legal for corporations to pay for political campaigns. We are living in a full on oligarchy, now, where a few very wealthy business conglomerates can own every candidate in an election, so that it makes no difference who we elect. And they will control whomever we elect throughout their time in office if they want to be able to run for re-election. We also have lobbyists that are ex-legislators being paid millions of dollars by corporate sponsors to promise the current legislators millions of dollars when they leave office to write and pass their sponsor's pet legislation. Which they do, routinely. In fact, it's gotten so bad that the lobbyists actually write the legislation themselves, and simply hand it to their willing congressmen or senator to get passed into law, in most cases without them ever even having read it!

Stanford did a study recently to determine the relationship between the will of the American people and the actions of the American legislature and found that there is now NO MATHEMATICAL CORRELATION AT ALL between what the American people want or don't want in terms of legislation, and what the legislators are actually passing into law. NO CORRELATION AT ALL. Democracy in the U.S. is statistically dead. Our government is now completely controlled by a very small number of very wealthy elite. And if you don't understand this, or stand in flat out denial of it, then I don't know how to communicate with you, because you have created your own reality.

If some people find it valuable enough to lobby the government, why should they be punished for putting there money where there mouth is?

Are you seriously asking me what's wrong with paying politicians to rig the system so that gun manufacturers can increase their profits from gun sales to potential killers?

And why should we believe that those who are so against the way thing's are done now, are serious, when they themselve's don't take the time and effort and expense to lobby the government themselves?

Because it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to buy off a majority of congressmen, and the families of the victims of gun violence don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend buying politicians. Nor should they have to if we were living in a democracy. The whole point of having a government is that they protect us from each other, and from outside threats. If our governments for sale, as it currently is, they are not protecting us from anyone who can pay them off. And they aren't. They aren't protecting us from the oil conglomerate, or the health care conglomerate, or the banking conglomerate, or the arms conglomerate. And as a result we are being systematically robbed, and in some instances killed by these conglomerates and their limitless greed; though unnecessary wars, pollution, poverty, and political corruption.

Typically, this is the same type of behavior we'd expect from somebody whose just complaining, but who is unwilling to pound the pavement and recruit to get more butt's in the seat's.

You don't seem to understand that democracy is dead when politicians are owned from the moment they choose to run for office until long after they leave. If you try to run for a seat in the Congress with a gun regulation platform the gun manufacturer's lobby and the NRA will sponsor your opponent's campaign and spend millions to see you defeated. And if you win, they will continue to fight you your entire time in congress, so that you will not be able to get any of your preferred legislation passed, and they will sponsor your opponent again if you run again. They have very deep pockets and they don't play fair and if you buck them they will stop your political career before it begins, or soon thereafter. Which is why you almost never hear any politician speak against the gun lobby. And the rare few who do are either lame ducks or living in New Hampshire.

The more I think about this "rule of law" argument your trying to make, the more I'm shaking my head in disagreement, because they're are so many country's with much lower murder rate's, who also have a weak rule of law.

Then they are not a population flooded with guns. Because when a population is flooded with guns, and has no or little rule of law, then gun violence rules. If you don't understand this, it's because you're trying very hard not to. And frankly, the fact that you can't understand that the U.S. government is being corrupted to the point of having become an oligarchy tells me that you only see and understand what you want to see and understand about the world. And that troubling.

Its not just the rule of law, but organized crime, that cause's higher murder rate's.

Organized crime is what results when a country has no rule of law. Organized crime is rule by violence.

The United State's is closer in proximity to other country's with organized crime problem's, like Mexico, and it get's worse the farther south you go. Europe is protected from this by the Atlantic Ocean, and the U.S. is not. The U.S. border has alway's been very porous; by design. And once again, we find that organized criminal's are exploiting our libertarian stance on thing's like defending your own life the way in which you see fit, and in allowing free passage in and out of the country.

It has nothing to do with geography. A nation us either ruled by laws or it's ruled by violence. The United States is ruled by laws, but our laws are now for sale to the highest corporate sponsor. And so we have no rules governing guns, and our society is consequently flooded with them. We do have the rule of law, generally, so we are not a society ruled by violence, but we are nevertheless a very violent society because of all those guns.

Firearm's make killing easier, we agree with each other on that.

Not just easier, but also more likely. The more guns there are among a population of humans, the more gun deaths there will be, because guns make killing people fast and easy to do. Plain and simple. And if there is also no rule of law, or a weak rule of law, then the violence will become the rule of law, and gun death will become commonplace. It's just common sense.

The question is; given that firearms exist today; what should we do about them, statutorily?

Since the population is already awash in guns, the solution is that we need a very strong rule of law to minimize the violence. We need to regulate who can legally own guns, and who can use them, and how and when. Eventually, over time, there will be fewer and fewer of them around, because they will be a nuisance to own.

why should my ability to defend myself and my family against a criminal/terrorist be handicapped because of "angry drunk's?"

As the regulation of guns takes hold, you will have less and less to fear. And frankly, the likelihood of you being attacked by the angry drunk or terrorist now is minuscule, unless he is you, or a member of your family, already, and you have a gun in your house.

Shouldn't we instead of punishing me, punish the angry drunk? He is the 1 whose angry and drunk. He is the 1 who shouldn't even touch a firearm, not me.

Stop whining and do what's right, and do what will work. This isn't all about you. It doesn't matter who's fault any of this is. It matters that we do what needs to be done.

I am hearing you. My point is that 1 thing is terrorism, and the other is violent crime but not terrorism. It is terrorism that we must be especially wary of, because terrorism take's away our free choice and force's us to act in accord with what the terrorist wanted us to do in the first place, which was to do thing's that make our live's worse, and spreading fear, and punishing ourselve's even though we are the victim's of terrorism, and not its perpetrators; but this is how terrorism works. You sow the seed and the seed grows and spread's and pretty soon the victim's are living live's far worse than before the terrorist struck. This is what terrorism aims to do to its victim's.

This is mostly BS. Terror is a determinant of the victim. There are no terrorists, or everyone is a terrorists, depending of your fear level. This isn't a fear issue, it's a pragmatic issue. The more guns there are in a population, and weaker the rule of law, the more gun violence there will be. This is a given. So if we want to minimize the gun violence, we need to strengthen the rule of law, and shrink the number of guns out there. It's that simple.

The best way to do that in the U.S., while maintaining the second amendment right to bear arms (to the degree that this is possible), is to regulate gun ownership and use with an effective and enforced set of regulatory laws.

Short of banning firearms --repealing the Second Amendment --I don't see how we can legislatively solve the problem you're trying to solve.

You seem to be working very hard at not seeing this. To be honest. Because all sorts of reasonable possibilities have been offered on this and the other gun threads.

It's too difficult to figure out who is a danger to themselve's and to other's, and who is harmless.

We don't have to. All we need to do is determine the likelihood of abuse. That isn't that difficult. People who are likely to abuse guns will likely have already abused them, or will have already abused other rights in relation to public safety. Like driving drunk, stalking, domestic disputes, public intoxication, a history of emotional outbursts and odd behavior, and so on. They can also be tested as part of the licensing process.

And I don't think it's right to allow anybody to look at medical records.

Forget it. That cat's already out of the bag, anyway.

Firearms are known as force equalizers. While they give the bad guys greater lethal force, they also provide innocent people with the ability to stand up to the bad guys, and, depending upon there training, and preparedness and discipline, they can (and do!) prevail. Sometime's. In these other country's, the good guys have no chance. Unless they've got a framing nailer laying around, already connected to the compressor, that is already turned on.

The only thing that has ever protected anyone from "the bad guys" is the rule of law. Because the rule of law is the force of unity. It is the good people banding together and outnumbering the bad guys. And it works because there are far fewer bad guys in the world. And even though the bad guys are vicious, and willing to do whatever they want to get what they want, they are always vastly outnumbered. So the good people unite, and create laws and police to enforce those laws, and the bad guys are kept at bay.

The solution to gun violence is not more guns. It's having an effective rule of law. That's how good people protect themselves. It is through anarchy that the bad guys always win.

 

[bybee]

Wow! What planet are you living on?!?! I call it bribery because that's exactly what it is. Just because the legislators taking the bribes made it legal doesn't make it magically disappear. And it hasn't been going on for a century, it's only been going on with impunity for about the last 30 years. And now it's far worse since the Supreme Court made it legal for corporations to pay for political campaigns. We are living in a full on oligarchy, now, where a few very wealthy business conglomerates can own every candidate in an election, so that it makes no difference who we elect. And they will control whomever we elect throughout their time in office if they want to be able to run for re-election. We also have lobbyists that are ex-legislators being paid millions of dollars by corporate sponsors to promise the current legislators millions of dollars when they leave office to write and pass their sponsor's pet legislation. Which they do, routinely. In fact, it's gotten so bad that the lobbyists actually write the legislation themselves, and simply hand it to their willing congressmen or senator to get passed into law, in most cases without them ever even having read it!

Stanford did a study recently to determine the relationship between the will of the American people and the actions of the American legislature and found that there is now NO MATHEMATICAL CORRELATION AT ALL between what the American people want or don't want in terms of legislation, and what the legislators are actually passing into law. NO CORRELATION AT ALL. Democracy in the U.S. is statistically dead. Our government is now completely controlled by a very small number of very wealthy elite. And if you don't understand this, or stand in flat out denial of it, then I don't know how to communicate with you, because you have created your own reality.
Are you seriously asking me what's wrong with paying politicians to rig the system so that gun manufacturers can increase their profits from gun sales to potential killers?
Because it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to buy off a majority of congressmen, and the families of the victims of gun violence don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend buying politicians. Nor should they have to if we were living in a democracy. The whole point of having a government is that they protect us from each other, and from outside threats. If our governments for sale, as it currently is, they are not protecting us from anyone who can pay them off. And they aren't. They aren't protecting us from the oil conglomerate, or the health care conglomerate, or the banking conglomerate, or the arms conglomerate. And as a result we are being systematically robbed, and in some instances killed by these conglomerates and their limitless greed; though unnecessary wars, pollution, poverty, and political corruption.
You don't seem to understand that democracy is dead when politicians are owned from the moment they choose to run for office until long after they leave. If you try to run for a seat in the Congress with a gun regulation platform the gun manufacturer's lobby and the NRA will sponsor your opponent's campaign and spend millions to see you defeated. And if you win, they will continue to fight you your entire time in congress, so that you will not be able to get any of your preferred legislation passed, and they will sponsor your opponent again if you run again. They have very deep pockets and they don't play fair and if you buck them they will stop your political career before it begins, or soon thereafter. Which is why you almost never hear any politician speak against the gun lobby. And the rare few who do are either lame ducks or living in New Hampshire.
Then they are not a population flooded with guns. Because when a population is flooded with guns, and has no or little rule of law, then gun violence rules. If you don't understand this, it's because you're trying very hard not to. And frankly, the fact that you can't understand that the U.S. government is being corrupted to the point of having become an oligarchy tells me that you only see and understand what you want to see and understand about the world. And that troubling.
Organized crime is what results when a country has no rule of law. Organized crime is rule by violence.
It has nothing to do with geography. A nation us either ruled by laws or it's ruled by violence. The United States is ruled by laws, but our laws are now for sale to the highest corporate sponsor. And so we have no rules governing guns, and our society is consequently flooded with them. We do have the rule of law, generally, so we are not a society ruled by violence, but we are nevertheless a very violent society because of all those guns.
Not just easier, but also more likely. The more guns there are among a population of humans, the more gun deaths there will be, because guns make killing people fast and easy to do. Plain and simple. And if there is also no rule of law, or a weak rule of law, then the violence will become the rule of law, and gun death will become commonplace. It's just common sense.
Since the population is already awash in guns, the solution is that we need a very strong rule of law to minimize the violence. We need to regulate who can legally own guns, and who can use them, and how and when. Eventually, over time, there will be fewer and fewer of them around, because they will be a nuisance to own.
As the regulation of guns takes hold, you will have less and less to fear. And frankly, the likelihood of you being attacked by the angry drunk or terrorist now is minuscule, unless he is you, or a member of your family, already, and you have a gun in your house.
Stop whining and do what's right, and do what will work. This isn't all about you. It doesn't matter who's fault any of this is. It matters that we do what needs to be done.
This is mostly BS. Terror is a determinant of the victim. There are no terrorists, or everyone is a terrorists, depending of your fear level. This isn't a fear issue, it's a pragmatic issue. The more guns there are in a population, and weaker the rule of law, the more gun violence there will be. This is a given. So if we want to minimize the gun violence, we need to strengthen the rule of law, and shrink the number of guns out there. It's that simple.

The best way to do that in the U.S., while maintaining the second amendment right to bear arms (to the degree that this is possible), is to regulate gun ownership and use with an effective and enforced set of regulatory laws.
You seem to be working very hard at not seeing this. To be honest. Because all sorts of reasonable possibilities have been offered on this and the other gun threads.
We don't have to. All we need to do is determine the likelihood of abuse. That isn't that difficult. People who are likely to abuse guns will likely have already abused them, or will have already abused other rights in relation to public safety. Like driving drunk, stalking, domestic disputes, public intoxication, a history of emotional outbursts and odd behavior, and so on. They can also be tested as part of the licensing process.
Forget it. That cat's already out of the bag, anyway.
The only thing that has ever protected anyone from "the bad guys" is the rule of law. Because the rule of law is the force of unity. It is the good people banding together and outnumbering the bad guys. And it works because there are far fewer bad guys in the world. And even though the bad guys are vicious, and willing to do whatever they want to get what they want, they are always vastly outnumbered. So the good people unite, and create laws and police to enforce those laws, and the bad guys are kept at bay.

The solution to gun violence is not more guns. It's having an effective rule of law. That's how good people protect themselves. It is through anarchy that the bad guys always win.

Bad guys don't give half-a-rat's-hind end about the law!

 

[PureX]

Bad guys don't give half-a-rat's-hind end about the law!

What you mean to say is that the bad guys don't care about anyone else's well-being (which the laws are written to protect). And that's exactly why the good guys have to band together to defend against them. Because the good guys do care about the well-being of others. And the way we do that is through the rule of law. And through the organization of government. It has been this way since the dawn of mankind. We can live under the rule of laws that protect us all from each other, or we can live by the rule of violence, and submit to whomever has the biggest guns.

 

[Yorzhik]

All of that to avoid answering a single question. Are you going to continue to weave elaborate smoke screens or are you going to answer my question?

OK, you made me look. Pat yourself on the back.

Still, though, there was not a single question mark in the post I was responding to. Was the question, "have you stopped beating your wife?"

 

[bybee]

What you mean to say is that the bad guys don't care about anyone else's well-being (which the laws are written to protect). And that's exactly why the good guys have to band together to defend against them. Because the good guys do care about the well-being of others. And the way we do that is through the rule of law. And through the organization of government. It has been this way since the dawn of mankind. We can live under the rule of laws that protect us all from each other, or we can live by the rule of violence, and submit to whomever has the biggest guns.

I believe in the rule of law. The thought of anarchy terrifies me.
But, I have no intention of leaving myself defenseless.

 

[bybee]

What the hell is your problem?

Please do not use that kind of language.

 

[Dan Emanuel]

...I have no intention of leaving myself defenseless.

You won't be defenseless though! When seconds count, remember that the police are only minutes away!


DJ

1.0
​

 

[Granite]

I believe in the rule of law. The thought of anarchy terrifies me.
But, I have no intention of leaving myself defenseless.

Where do you think you live?

 

[PureX]

I believe in the rule of law. The thought of anarchy terrifies me.
But, I have no intention of leaving myself defenseless.

You are defenseless against a great many things in life. And the list of things that are likely to hurt you right now has a great many things on it ahead of anything that you could thwart with a gun.

You are simply not being even remotely realistic, or reasonably proportioned in your response. You have invested the idea of owning a gun with a perception of self-protection that you don't really have, and don't really need. And I wouldn't care, except that you then want to project your own irrational fear and fantasy of protection onto the rest of the nation. And people are dying as a result of you and others doing this.

It's sad that you can't understand that, and address your fears more realistically, instead. Because this isn't all about you.

 

[bybee]

You won't be defenseless though! When seconds count, remember that the police are only minutes away!


DJ

1.0
​

Sadly, if an intruder get's into your home you cannot wait for the police.

 

[CabinetMaker]

OK, you made me look. Pat yourself on the back.

Still, though, there was not a single question mark in the post I was responding to. Was the question, "have you stopped beating your wife?"

I never asked if you stopped beating your wife or anything resembling it. Here is what I asked:

Should a person with a "mental condition" that would strongly predispose them to committing a mass murder, or any murder at all, be allowed free access to guns?

 

[PureX]

Sadly, if an intruder get's into your home you cannot wait for the police.

The problem is that the chances of an intruder coming into your home with the intent to harm you are far smaller then the chances that they will break into your home while you aren't there and take your gun. You could put the gun is a safe, to try and stop that from happening, but then you'd have to get it from the safe to protect yourselves with it, which would probably take more time then you'd have if that feared intruder broke into you home intending to harm you.

Also, the odds of you shooting yourself with the gun are significantly greater than the odds of an armed intruder coming in to shoot you with his. So the actual facts involved in having guns in the home for self-protection just don't correspond to the fantasy we all seem to have about it. Because bringing the gun into the home actually increases the chances of someone in the home being shot with it, rather than decreasing their chance of being shot by an intruder.

 

[Granite]

The problem is that the chances of an intruder coming into your home with the intent to harm you are far smaller then the chances that they will break into your home while you aren't there and take your gun. You could put the gun is a safe, to try and stop that from happening, but then you'd have to get it from the safe to protect yourselves with it, which would probably take more time then you'd have if that feared intruder broke into you home intending to harm you.

Also, the odds of you shooting yourself with the gun are significantly greater than the odds of an armed intruder coming in to shoot you with his. So the actual facts involved in having guns in the home for self-protection just don't correspond to the fantasy we all seem to have about it. Because bringing the gun into the home actually increases the chances of someone in the home being shot with it, rather than decreasing their chance of being shot by an intruder.

People keep proving this fantasy CabinetMaker's talking about remains alive and well.

 

[PureX]

People keep proving this fantasy CabinetMaker's talking about remains alive and well.

And apparently it's intractable. I'm amazed at how deeply ingrained it is, and how resistant people are to any assertion that it's unrealistic!