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DanLoder: your friends son would also be alive if your friend had kept his firearms in a safe or vault.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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@themadheather:

"Solely, to injure or kill -- and it's not always accidental."

Buy a dictionary and look up "deterrent".

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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[cont]

Okamoto: [...] or more preferably, makes the gun-owners responsible.

So if I have alcohol in the house and my kid gets into it, gets drunk, and dies in a car crash... is the bar set to a different height? And if so, why?

Or am I somehow granted absolution because alcohol is ok, but guns are evil... and it's not really about the loss of life at all?

All of Ms. Okamoto's arguments are more about criminalizing ownership of guns and less (or not at all) about saving lives.

I find her intellectual dishonestly shameless.

Okamoto: We need to have people who are responsible gun owners.

Why not just require responsible parenting? That would solve the drugs, alcohol, and vehicular death issues all at the same time... except that it's not easily done.

So until the real root-cause issue gets fixed, she's happy to use guns for the purpose of her grandstanding.

DL Nelson: The NRA is distinctly not a safety focus or training organization.

News to me. Should people turn in their NRA Range Safety Officer and Firearms Instructor certifications since they aren't not bona fide?

http://www.nrahq.org/education/training/rso.asp

Okamoto: That I have no idea.

Yes, I'll say.  She's not considered the serious, real world issues and practicable solutions to those problems.

Okamoto: A background check for a felon is a joke.

Ah, so what she's saying is that felons might be in positions of public trust handling financial records, medical and pharmaceutical supplies, caregivers to our young children, managing critical infrastructure and transportation... and she's not worried about that. Just whether they can buy a gun through a firearms dealer.

For a minute I was afraid she might be tilting at windmills.

Ms. Okamoto is a poster child for cognitive dissonance.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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Rothenfluch: "Did you feel fearful of an intruder in your home in Germany also?"

Wow.  Who said his decision was based on fear?  It sounds to me like your guest is very well informed and made what was a rational, well reasoned decision based on his situation.

Okamoto: "Every shooting is preventable. [...] Had this been in Portland [...], the gun-owner would have been charged."

Does Ms. Okamoto even listen to herself?  She states that the shooting would have been preventable, then goes on to contradict herself by conceding that the shooting would have happened anyway, but someone would have been punished.  In this case the owner, not the shooter.

And that's very telling of her mindset: that owning a gun is a deviance that needs to be deterred through punishment.  This has nothing at all to do with stopping people from being shot, which frankly she has no idea how to do. Her answer clearly indicates that.

Okamoto: Guns are made to kill people. [...] Cars are not.

So actually following this reasoning, people will kill each other intentionally because that's what they want to do, and this is difficult to prevent since you first have to convince someone not to kill someone else. Unintentional accidents with cars are therefore infinitely more preventable (since no one wants to accidentally kill someone else), as well as statistically an order of magnitude greater in deaths.

So why would Ms. Okamoto focus on the more difficult goal with the lower rate-of-return?

Because it's not about valuing life, it's about not liking guns.

Okamoto: The gun lobby does not work on making guns safer.

First, this is patently false. The NRA puts a lot of resources into the "Eddie Eagle" firearm safety program for children, as well as other safety fora such as "young hunter safety education", etc. Second, it's those who claim to be for greater safety that fight the most vociferously against firearms training in our schools and childrens' clubs.

Why? Because they want firearms eradicated from our way of life, and anything that makes them a more sustainable part of our way of life (including saving lives) is anathema.

Okamoto: Then why can't we have some type of law that prevents children from having access to weapons?

Outstanding question.  Perhaps when she figures it out, we can use the same answer to stop children from having access to alcohol, prescription drugs, contraband drugs, dad's stack of Playboy's, etc.

The point isn't that the problem is guns.  The problem is that children--and teenagers in particular--are extremely curious and tend to get into whatever they can.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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