Chas_P, on 2022-June-27, 18:30, said:
Which prompts the question once again, "Who's fault was it?" A 36 year-old male lunatic goes into a Subway and blows away a 24 year-old female whose only indiscretion (in his view) was putting too much mayonnaise on his sandwich. It's heart-rending. It's sickening. But I still don't view it as the NRA's fault.
That reveals a very simplistic worldview: one in which there is no such thing as multiple causes, or subtlety in any form.
Nobody says that the NRA was responsible for that man being so unbalanced that he killed somebody because he didn’t like the mayo and only an imbecile would think that was the point.
Equally only an imbecile would miss the point that the easier it is to obtain and carry firearms, the more likely it is that some unbalanced individual (whether due to illness, personality disorder or substance abuse) will find himself (and it’s almost always a male) in a situation in which he has possession of a gun and uses it.
The NRA has spent millions and millions of dollars lobbying against any attempt to restrict the number and availability of firearms in the US. In doing so they have persuaded politicians to ignore the wishes of the majority of Americans who support stricter gun laws than have generally existed…including the wishes of many gun owners.
Only an imbecile would assert that the NRA’s lobbying has not resulted in the current sad state of affairs in terms of ready access to guns that exists in the US.
Thus, the NRA has contributed to the prevalence of this sort of gun violence even if it cannot be said to have directly caused this incident or, indeed, any particular incident.
But fewer guns, and making carrying guns outside of one’s home or a firing range or a hunting trip (or on other legitimate occasions) more difficult would undoubted reduce the chance that any particular individual, caught up in momentary rage, would have a gun on him. He might punch the other person, or just yell obscenities. I suspect the Subway server would have preferred that outcome.
The irony is that you post your stupidity on a bridge website. Bridge is a game of probabilities. The argument that the NRA bears some degree of responsibility for the prevalence of seemingly random gun violence is based upon probabilities. Imbeciles, being incapable of understanding anything other than concrete reasoning, often can’t follow this sort of reaoning.
As I say…only an imbecile would argue against this
You argue against it
QED
I do not mean that I think this guy is literally an imbecile. I’m expressing my frustration with the sort of thinking reflected in his posts. I don’t know him other than from his posts here, which imo do not reflect well upon him.
Further edit. An honest pro NRA argument might be that ‘I see the right to own and bear firearms in public as more important than the costs of so doing. Yes, unfortunately there will be more deaths and injuries of and to innocents, but that’s a price society should pay to preserve these rights’
I’d disagree but at least we’d know where our differences lie. In contrast, the argument that an organization dedicated to fighting efforts to control gun violence through limiting gun rights has no responsibility for gun violence seems to me dishonest as well as patently false.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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