The Goat Pen

1) I am not at all satisfied with the deaths and injuries from cars and am very frustrated by the slow rate of adoption of self driving tech. It’s the same issue where people expect perfection and lose out on incremental improvements. This is a big issue in my professional life and I talk about it all the time.

2) Defensive gun use is violent behavior. It’s not meaningless. It’s bad too. It’s a circular problem. We need to eliminate the circle.

but you wouldn't suggest getting rid of cars in favor of public transportation/mass transit


getting rid of guns is not getting rid of violent behavior

in the case of defensive gun use, it just makes the weaker prey to the strong

"its like Hedge telling me that someone can be a regular user of heroin and not become an addict. He can show me proof, but I'll never believe that making heroin legal is good for society. That's my calculus."

I would be the last person to tell anyone that a regular user of heroin won't become an addict. My position is that, like with alcohol and cigarettes, people should be free to become addicts if they want to, without fear of being put in jail for it. I just don't think that any more (or at most not many more) people would become heroin addicts if it was legal than already do, and possibly less. Certainly there would be less danger to the people who do choose to use it, whether they become addicts or not...

Cletus wrote:1) I am not at all satisfied with the deaths and injuries from cars and am very frustrated by the slow rate of adoption of self driving tech. It’s the same issue where people expect perfection and lose out on incremental improvements. This is a big issue in my professional life and I talk about it all the time.

2) Defensive gun use is violent behavior. It’s not meaningless. It’s bad too. It’s a circular problem. We need to eliminate the circle.

Statement #1 is absurd. Self driving tech is so far down the road it is not even plausible as a real solution. Efficient and affordable mass transit should be.

Statement #2 just baffles me. You do understand that when a gun is used for defense, it is usually because violent behavior is happening. It is not like Joe Blow pulls his gun on someone without cause. That is an offensive move. If Joe Blow uses his gun because someone is breaking into his house, car, or harming someone else, that is a defensive move.

You do realize over the past 2000 years, man has been invading and killing without the use of guns??? Romans didn't have guns. The Huns didn't have guns. The Persians didn't have guns. Africans didn't have guns when they were loaded on boats.

A weapon is a weapon. What man intends to do with the weapon is your REAL problem. Taking the gun of out someone's hand means nothing. We made it "safe" to fly with TSA. Tell me how is that working for the number of people who have been ran over in Europe with big ass trucks????

Understand the problem and not the tools.

"Africans didn't have guns when they were loaded on boats."

I bet they wish they had...

eCat wrote:but you wouldn't suggest getting rid of cars in favor of public transportation/mass transit


getting rid of guns is not getting rid of violent behavior

in the case of defensive gun use, it just makes the weaker prey to the strong

Actually, I would be very much in favor of some day replacing our cars with a public transport system fleet of on demand self driven cars. We definitely should have more mass transit in the US but the way our cities have grown and the population has settled means it's too late to really implement an effective solution that can scale. But, I think and hope that one day we will be less reliant on personal car ownership and one car per one person distribution.

Getting rid of violent behavior is not the goal. Conflict between people will always exist. But, no guns will really reduce the amount of damage in that conflict.

BigRedMan wrote:

Cletus wrote:1) I am not at all satisfied with the deaths and injuries from cars and am very frustrated by the slow rate of adoption of self driving tech. It’s the same issue where people expect perfection and lose out on incremental improvements. This is a big issue in my professional life and I talk about it all the time.

2) Defensive gun use is violent behavior. It’s not meaningless. It’s bad too. It’s a circular problem. We need to eliminate the circle.

Statement #1 is absurd. Self driving tech is so far down the road it is not even plausible as a real solution. Efficient and affordable mass transit should be.

Statement #2 just baffles me. You do understand that when a gun is used for defense, it is usually because violent behavior is happening. It is not like Joe Blow pulls his gun on someone without cause. That is an offensive move. If Joe Blow uses his gun because someone is breaking into his house, car, or harming someone else, that is a defensive move.

You do realize over the past 2000 years, man has been invading and killing without the use of guns??? Romans didn't have guns. The Huns didn't have guns. The Persians didn't have guns. Africans didn't have guns when they were loaded on boats.

A weapon is a weapon. What man intends to do with the weapon is your REAL problem. Taking the gun of out someone's hand means nothing. We made it "safe" to fly with TSA. Tell me how is that working for the number of people who have been ran over in Europe with big ass trucks????

Understand the problem and not the tools.

Self driving tech is much closer than you think. Trucks should be on auto-pilot now. The software is good enough to make a automated truck more efficient and safer than a human driven truck.
It's only a matter of time, and not that much time, until that's the case for most vehicles.

Is a gun the appropriate tool for these defense cases? In most cases, it's probably more than necessary. But, people have them so they use them. I'm not saying that violence and conflict can to go, just these stupid tools that escalate the violence to an absurd level.

So you trust Microsoft / Google to develop a self driving semi-truck that will be safer on the roads? So with all the news over the past 5 years of hackers basically breaking into anything and everything, doesn't concern you?

And your scale of violence amuses me. Violence is violence. IF someone is intending my family or myself harm, should I take a moment to consider the weapon they are using? "Wait a minute, you have a knife. Hold on, let me put my gun away, allow me to walk into the kitchen, and grab my own knife so we don't escalate the violence any further".

You know when it comes to my personal and family protection, I would rather be more prepared than the criminal.

Guns don't kill people, gun owners do.

Guns don't kill people. Husbands who come home a day early from a business trip do.

the thing about guns is it makes the spur of the moment homicide/suicide moment that much easier

50 years ago much harder to get a gun efficient enough to instantly kill-- much more likely one would get past the spur of the moment killing

200 years from now when weapons evolve into something much more lethal then we have today all those crazies that could only smite a few 50 years ago and a lot today will have the ability to wipe out many many more during their crazy moment then they can today

the cure might be to treat the crazys but we certainly have done a much better job arming the crazys for maximum bloodshed

crashcourse wrote:the thing about guns is it makes the spur of the moment homicide/suicide moment that much easier

50 years ago much harder to get a gun efficient enough to instantly kill-- much more likely one would get past the spur of the moment killing

200 years from now when weapons evolve into something much more lethal then we have today all those crazies that could only smite a few 50 years ago and a lot today will have the ability to wipe out many many more during their crazy moment then they can today

the cure might be to treat the crazys but we certainly have done a much better job arming the crazys for maximum bloodshed

Just a minor caveat - in '86 they effectively took owning a fully automatic weapon out of the hands of individuals. So when people talk about "military" rifles, the reality is that the average American cannot get the same type of weapons as the military. Now to the non-gun owner, its probably not a significant difference because to them , an AR-15 is a military grade assault rifle., but for me to own, say a 1935 Thompson Machine gun of the Al Capone era, the gun and license, if I were lucky enough to get one, would be around a $40K investment.

Of course when a kid shoots up a school with a semi-auto, no one is going to stop and say "wow, it could have been much worse if he had a full-auto", but they do say how much worse is it with an assault rifle versus some other kind of gun.

Correct, except I thought full auto rifles were banned back in the 30’s. There is no difference between the semiautomatic function of an AR-15 and the semiautomatic function of probably 90% of all the other rifles on the market. Hardly anybody has muzzle loaders or bolt actions. And it has been that way for a long time.

Professor Tiger wrote:Correct, except I thought full auto rifles were banned back in the 30’s. There is no difference between the semiautomatic function of an AR-15 and the semiautomatic function of probably 90% of all the other rifles on the market. Hardly anybody has muzzle loaders or bolt actions. And it has been that way for a long time.

it was called ironically enough the Firearm Owners Protection Act.

Kind of like the irony in the Patriot Act.

I doubt Banksy and I would agree on much but I liked this

I feel the same way about 90% of "the government"...

If you feel that way about "the government," then why are you a Democrat? "The Government" is their god.

No. I am. Yours too.

welcome to London

Um