A thread wherein we discuss the equating of guns with violence

[Nuclear Unicorn]

PROSPECT HEIGHTS (WPIX) — Police say an "Ugly Betty" actor held his mother hostage and then murdered her with a samurai sword while screaming Bible passages Tuesday in Brooklyn.

http://www.wpix.com/news/wpix-samurai-sword-son-mother,0,490069.story

"Why," I hear some asking, "are you posting this here?"

It seems rather pointed that every time a gun is used to hurt an innocent person it is posted in this forum as a prima facia argument against guns.

But I am increasingly of the opinion this is a false equivalency.

It's simple math.

If guns = violence, then violence = guns.

Let us test the theorem.

[safeinOhio]

1. find the answers

in your duplicate post "Crazy person goes crazy".
Exact same post with different title. What's up with dat?

[carl lindsay]

2. Guns and Violence

Its right that guns are related to the violence, but the guns were not invented for creating the violence. the purpose of gun was for the self defense. these days its mostly used for the violence but some wise people use this for self defense only.

[LawnKorn]

4. "these days its mostly used for the violence" - you got something to back that up with?

Can I assume the vast majority of ammunition sold in stores like WAL-MART is used to shoot at people?

Check your figures again, most of the guns owned in the United States are rarely used at all, much less to commit a violent act.

[backwoodsbob]

6. I have fired off...conservatively...50,000 rounds in my life

have yet to use a gun for violence.

[spin]

8. I estimate 250,000 rounds at the minimum ...

and I never shot an animal or a person.

[DeadEyeDyck]

12. Jonah Hex would be proud

[spin]

13. Nah, compared to many shooters that I know thats very little...

I've been shooting for 50 years. The average would be 5000 rounds a year or just under 100 rounds a week. Obviously I didn't shoot every week but I usually shot 150 to 200 rounds every time I did go, which was usually once a week.

Many regular shooters I know go several times a week and shoot 150 to 200 and more rounds.

A competitive pistol shooter will far more rounds than I do.

[cleanhippie]

9. Can you prove your baseless assertion?

You stated "these days its mostly used for the violence but some wise people use this for self defense only". Can you prove that with valid studies and/or statistics?

I will wait...

[Nuclear Unicorn]

3. I had offered an explanation of this.

Placed in brackets at the bottom of the page explaining that very point.

I'm not certain why it does not appear.

Suffice it to say I was inconsiderate in an earlier choice of words. I was graciously given permission to re-post and chose to do so so as to preserve as much of the original post as possible in the event there were errors in logic or expression on my part. In other words, I did not wish to give the appearance that I refined/restated my inquiry after meeting opposition.

Generally speaking people who restate a proposition after it has been floored observe some weakness in their argument and instead of carrying the conversation wherever dialogue leads they instead elect to change the terms on which the debate is founded.

In common terms it is known as "weaseling."

I wish to avoid any appearance that I have done so. If there are errors in my original proposition I will accept them, provided they can be demonstrated; and my re-posting my OP verbatim (minus my earlier inconsiderate choice of words) I invite honest, full re-examination of my contention.

Thank-you

[billh58]

7. The editor for

this board interprets anything in brackets as an HTML instruction, and if it doesn't understand the instruction, it simply ignores the string. You may want to use "curly brackets" instead.

[Euromutt]

5. Short version, the previous thread was locked due to injudicious use of the word "crazy"

I'm guessing it was perceived as being offensive to the mentally ill. Be that as it may, Nuclear Unicorn's rather interesting proposition was thus left dangling for reasons not directly related to the proposition itself. And thus, the same question bears repeating, this time stripped of language prejudicial towards the mentally ill.

Claro?

[rrneck]

10. Well,

I don't think it's a false equivalency if we adjust the formula a bit:

Motive x Guns = Violence, then Motive x Violence = Guns. Or, to flog the metaphor and betray my lack of mathematical acumen, the common denominator is motive. Granted I haven't said anything unusual here; guns don't kill people and all that.

But I ran across an interesting article the other day that might be related.

http://mobile.salon.com/books/feature/2010/11/14/manthropology_interview/index.html

Up until about 20,000 years, Homo sapiens were very, very robust in comparison to what we are these days. It's not that we're so different from those robust Homo sapien males, but our bodies are actually geared up to respond to pressures that we don't get anymore. There's the example of aboriginal runners who, we know from fossilized footprints, could run as fast if not faster than Usain Bolt. And the reason why is that they did it from a very early age. The Greek trireme rowers could do feats that can't be duplicated by modern rowers. Greece was a very tough country to make a living in. Everybody walked everywhere. The people lived as shepherds, it was a very rough existence. Our bones are about 40 percent less mass than the bones of Homo erectus, but genetically ours are not that different. It's just that we don't get put under that kind of pressure. Arm bones of tennis players, for example, are almost as thick as those of Homo erectus.

There are some interesting statistics there about how hard people could work during the Industrial Revolution -- these rather small, malnourished men were able to wield these incredibly heavy sledgehammers all day, and the same phenomenon still applies to Nepalese hill porters. These little guys of about 55 kilos carry 90 kilo weights for about 75 miles over a period of days. It doesn't seem to have any degenerative effects on them as well.

If we were to match a modern Navy Seal against a Greek Hoplite and arm both with knives it wouldn't surprise me if the Greek ran his contemporary adversary down and gutted him like a fish. Any Navy Seals reading this may take issue and they may be right since there might not be any significant disparity of force between the two. That disparity becomes more obvious if we pair the Hoplite against a modern software engineer. Of course, if we arm our software engineer with an M-16 that disparity of force is resolved. Our Hoplite may be able to run twenty five miles an hour but could he think at sixty miles an hour? Or six hundred?

Modern men are wimpy because ancient men got tired of doing all that physical labor and invented machines to do it for them. That's why today guns seem to equal violence. If we want to do violence, the machine called a firearm symbolizes the device we use for that purpose. It's not the only device available, but it's the first one we think about.

And unfortunately that's when the thinking stops. Wrangling about the device either for or against it's use as a solution for human depravity fails to address the reasons for that depravity. "Guns are made to kill" and "Guns are just tools that propel projectiles" are merely two sides of the ideological coin. It is an ideology that is, at its base, materialistic and dehumanizing. It fails to take into consideration the reality of people's lives. That is a reality suffused with motivations that are much older than any device used for their actualization.

Our existence has become so relentlessly materialistic we have come to think that if we control the things in our lives we can control ourselves and others. That kind of control is limited at best. The solution to the problem is not found in managing the "what", but in understanding the "why". For that, statistics, economics, and jurisprudence are only aware of the horse after he is out of the barn.

Advocates on both sides of the issue need to stop thinking like technocrats and start thinking like human beings. And they need to start thinking of others as human beings as well instead of numbered parts in an a priori ideology.

They don't call it "the Humanities" for nuthin'.

[Euromutt]

11. Certainly, "guns" cannot equal "violence"

In the United States for over the past decade, firearms have been used in less than 10% of violent offenses each year, which means that logically, at worst, "all guns are violence, but only part of the class of violence is guns." At worst, because we also know that only a relatively miniscule fraction of the firearms in the United States are used in acts of violence. In 2009, there were 326,090 reported violent offenses committed using firearms (http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv09.pdf); even if each was committed with a different weapon, this still represents only about 0.126% of the estimated 300 million firearms in private hands in this country (a number which excludes government-owned firearms). So in 2009, even in the United States, ~0.126% of guns = ~7.9% of violent offenses.

I myself own ten firearms, of which only two might conceivably have been used to commit acts of violence at some point in their existence, though in the case of only one that is really plausible. The weapon in question is a Soviet Mosin-Nagant M1891/30 rifle, manufactured at the Izhevsk arsenal in 1943, and the acts of violence in question, if any, would have most likely have been committed against agents of the Nazi German state and/or countries allied with it. (The other is a "Yugo SKS," more formally an M1959/66 type 2, which might have been used in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, but judging by its condition spent most of its existence in a Territorial Defense armory in Serbia.)

And that brings me to the question of how, for the purposes of this discussion, we define "violence." I myself tend to define violence as the willful infliction of physical trauma (to a degree requiring medical attention) by one person on another, or the threat thereof, without regard to motivation (and thus the absence or presence of moral justification) for that act. Thus, I can use a firearm--or a bladed or bludgeoning implement, or any other weapon--to both offend or defend against another, and it's all violence. That's just part of my cultural frame of reference (much like, to the frustration of certain vegans, I don't have a visceral response to the word "flesh," because Dutch only has one word--vlees--for both "meat" and "flesh").

[Tuesday Afternoon]

14. guns are an object. violence is an action.

objects do not equal actions.

Therefore the theorem/premise is false.