Alright, I'm not quoting the post because it was getting huge, but it's the last one where Manoka replied to me, alright? 
Firstly, you can't give me crap about being a bit glib with my opening post, when yours was suggesting we equip ourselves with forcefields 
Again, this was not a thread about 'all violence', it's about a school shooting, so whereas my post was relevant and on topic, yours seemed like another one to exhibit in the 'stupid $#@& Manoka says' gallery, but you're right, what does it even matter?
So, School shooting, that I'll remind you is the topic of this thread, would the kid have been able to get a gun and carry this out? Guns, being illegal, would not be basically everywhere, you would have to make your own or specifically go looking for an illegal gun dealer, who isn't going to have a shop that plainly sells guns. By no means am I saying it would be impossible, but it would be harder.
Comparing trying to ban air or water is not comparable to trying to ban guns, and that was a stupid example, as was atomic bombs, and if you didn't know it writing that, you're an idiot. You used comparisons to drugs elsewhere in your argument, why not use that? It's certainly a much more appropriate comparison. And then you followed it up with more good examples, like prohibition, as well. I'm not sure why you didn't use those to start with, instead of setting up invalid examples that you then had to justify using good examples...
As for the smuggling, sure, you may be right, I'm a little dubious about your tank figures, but that's not precisely relevant, and you did back up your drug stats, so good job there. However, the thing is, this isn't about whether cartels and gangs would still be able to obtain guns, we're talking about another school shooting, committed with a legal weapon taken from the killer's house, not a Mexican drug cartel.
Well, the conversation wasn't very important, I was just pointing it out. xP
But who cares if it's a school shooting; any loss of life is terrible, and if we're going to suggest a method to over-all reduce violence, it should be aimed at areas where we can be effective. If it makes it harder, but doesn't stop it, what have you really accomplished?
You'll focus on the 98% of the population likely to never commit a crime, while at least 50% is committed by organized crime. You'll not only be throwing away 50 times the resources to do so, but you won't really help much.
It's unknown how much crime is perpetrated by organized crime, but considering that most jurisdictions don't even record if it is or not, it's harder to establish any kind of direct connection. And yet it's nearly 50%.
You're about 50 times more likely to be struck by lightning than be injured or killed in a random mass shootings. You're about about as 50 times as likely to kill someone in self defense than in a mass shooting.
More importantly, there are 10,000 firearm homicides a year. And there are at least 100,000 cases of self defense with a firearm, but only 400 self defense cases a year. The reality is that guns make it so you don't have to kill as often, since they're so effective the enemy is likely to surrender; just pulling one out can scare away individuals.
To give another example, cocaine is incredibly hard to synthesize. It takes isolating the cocaine from the coca planet, crushing it into pulp, synthesizing the cocaine, concentrating it, and then preparing it so it's indigestible by humans in their proffered methods. Then, once you have this nearly pure cocaine, you have to find a way to store it, of which they usually use plastic coated in a particular kind of wax that won't dissolve in the human digestive track, or be picked up by drug sniffing dogs. After this, it's a matter of smuggling it several hundred miles across the rainforest and delivering across the border of the U.S. As of now, the Mexican military is outgunned by the cartels, and the cartels have the easy task of simply walking across an undefended border.
The Los Zetas are an organization that was formed after special forces troops deserted and joined a mercenary unit designed to protect and hual goods for the cartels. After a long enough period of time, and with enough military desertions, potentially more in their forces than the 200,000 some odd Mexican military currently actively fighting the cartels, they built up a force that uses violence to obtain it's goals. While recently 50% of their profits come from drugs, another 50% comes from guns, smuggling people, and general violent activities, including hits, robbery, kidnapping, and extortion; it used to be 70%. They are almost entirely ex-military, and have a significant amount of special forces, including from other country's. Over 1700 Mexican special forces have deserted the Mexican army. They get guns no problem. I guess my point is, these people are incredibly well trained, and extremely professional, and have no difficulty getting guns or drugs across the border. Your average criminal isn't buying guns from stores, they're buying it from the same sources that supply them with drugs, which are the cartels or their subsidiary groups operating in America, like MS13. Basically, any gang operating in America has to be getting cocaine from a few sources, since it's impossible to synthesize or even produce large quantities like this without being spotted. Due to their jurisdiction, we can't enter to stop it, so we face the forces going into the U.S. It's long been known that the Colombian military was directly involving in this kind of activity, and that now Guatemala is. Combined with the rampant Corruption of the Mexican military and even their government, as well as many others, and the high number of desertions as is, it's likely that there is a much bigger force coordination all this, with sophisticated laboratories, and large fields to grow goods in. These are coming outside of the country, and coming in. These same groups bring in sweatshop produced firearms that aren't traceable under U.S. standards. In fact, only about 8-12% of all firearms are traceable at all, and they can recover obliterated serial numbers and have chemical methods of retrieving traces on legally produced firearms, meaning they can at least find the manufacturer even if they can't find the store (and the manufacturer presumably has records to which store it sold certain guns to, and so on). Meaning that these individuals are getting guns and drugs from a sophisticated, likely government source, which breaks down on the small unit level once it gets to gangs, but it implies coordination in it's own right, which we already know exists.
These organizations are operating in a manner and producing goods that imply a level of sophistication beyond that of the U.S., regardless of the fact that we already have a pretty good knowledge on how organized crime operates. You can't have cocaine and ecstasy without an advanced scientific laboratory; we know there must be higher ups. And yet it's distributed like candy at party's; I highly doubt your average street thug is responsible for it's production, let alone smuggling it across the border, and yet these are the people distributing it to drug dealers. It takes coordination across many country's and borders and military's to get it here. And their effectiveness at fighting the police and terrorizing the population, and thus politicians into cooperating, is unparalleled. Even if they wanted to stop it they don't have the power to do so, so even good politicians find themselves wrapped up in this.
Basically, it goes beyond what a little gun store can provide. Or any law abiding gun store in the U.S. could provide.
There's really not a lot stopping guns from illegally getting into the U.S., and we basically already know their routes and origins. So banning wouldn't seem to do a lot of good in stopping the majority of violence, since we can't restrict access to illegal goods, which most criminals are arming themselves with. So at that point, you just leave civilians defenseless.
I guess another point is that there's no methodology to random violence. Those who want to kill people have the internet, and if they can't get a gun, it won't take much to realize they can just put gasoline in a beer bottle and throw it at someone to light them on fire. They could be drunk and do this.
If we take a look at one violent crime and then say, this guy did one thing, a violent crime rarer than being struck by lightning, and try to base legislation on that, it's not only completely arbitrary, but could set us up for failure. These people could one day, in theory, decide to blow up a building, of which every major explosive uses nitric acid as a sub component, which is relatively easy to get a hold of or make. And way more people could be injured by it. I guess trying to control completely random violence, which is rare in it's own right, is essentially futile. The reality is that any human being, anywhere, could decide to kill a bunch of people, and nothing stands in their way, since humans are so fragile it only takes a light nick to end decades of life. In fact, we're so fragile that living itself kills us, with aging. If 50% of people decided to strangle the person next to them, our population would be cut in half tomorrow. The only thing that prevents killing each other if we felt like it is our minds and our empathy. And with the number of stupid and evil people in the world, the whole planet is just one giant ticking time bomb. The Americans and the Russians have their fingers on the button and could wipe each other out, and the whole world tomorrow. It's only because we're so reluctant to act that we're all alive, and yet there are people out there who will kill, sometimes for no reason. No matter what you do, you're at the person next to you's mercy every moment of every day. And that's not really going away. Not until we have force fields. Attempts to control random violence, it's just, it's just not going to happen. And even if we made every perfect law in America that everyone followed, it doesn't mean the rest of the world would.
Edited by Manoka, 22 October 2013 - 10:28 PM.
