This is not to disagree with Quiggins other points. I would say that the gun laws in Australia have been seen as quite successful, and are popular with a clear majority of people. I will leave the arguments over statistics to those desperately trying to prevent their introduction into the USA.

It’s whether or not “I want to shoot a bad guy” obtains, that most starkly distinguishes the gun nuts from the rest of us…

I also have an issue with your petty comment about ‘Fox News factoids bearing no relation to the truth’. Do you even watch Fox News? I do and it was there that I learned about Australia’s gun control laws and their success. Charles Krauthammer even went on to say that a similar law could work here, but it would not be implemented because of the politics of the government taking people’s guns.

The Democrats added a ‘Grandfather Clause’ in the 90′s ban that allowed people to keep their current guns and the recent bill proposed by Diane Feinstein also has a Grandfather Clause. Guns laws that don’t remove guns from the streets are useless and only good for politicians who want to be seen as ‘doing something’.

I’d recommend you look into your own bias that you make ‘drive-by’ put-downs on an entire group of people whose sole reason to be together is that they are employed by News Corp. Is this an anthropologist blog or am I mistaken?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/us/as-pheasants-disappear-hunters-in-iowa-follow.html?ref=us&_r=0

“I don’t want to be shot” is an opinion that tells me what that person wants, but with absolutely no idea of how they think you should get there.

Well, yeah, but what the person wants is a very important question that we can’t skip over. While everyone wants to avoid death, there are other things some people value more–they’re willing to accept the increased chance of dying in order to enjoy some benefit. Automobile driving being an obvious example.

It’s important that people without the expertise to answer the second question “how should we get there” aren’t excluded from the first question “what do we want”. The second question must remain subordinate to the first–we can’t let the people who have the most information and resources about an issue (e.g. financing of large banks, deep-sea extraction of oil, oversight of intelligence agencies) be the only ones who have a say in it–their interests aren’t necessarily the same as the rest of ours!

Consider: if there’s debate over whether or not a constitutional right is indeed at stake, you might still defend a strong interpretation of that right by citing a vital social purpose best served by your interpretation. That is, if someone argues that no constitutional right is at stake in some case (and thus regulation only requires a rational basis), you could reply that whether or not the right in question is constitutionally protected, it does serve a vital public purpose that can best be achieved by protecting that right. In essence you’d be trying to show that regardless of whether the right is constitutionally enshrined, the kind of argument that does defend constitutional rights – those that survive strict scrutiny – also defends the right in question. Indeed, you could dispense with the attempt to show that the right survives strict scrutiny, and simply try to reject the regulation on grounds that it has no rational basis. An obvious way to pre-empt that gambit is to deny any such vital purpose that can only be served by respecting the right in question, and showing that regulation does indeed have a rational basis.

An example of what I mean: it seems debatable that relatively unfettered civilian access to certain weapons — those with features tailored for combat applications — really is vital to maintaining “a well regulated militia … necessary to the security of a free state.” If strict regulation of access to such weapons isn’t obviously a violation of the second amendment, then the critic could avoid that constitutional debate by claiming that even if no constitutional right were at stake, strict regulation doesn’t have a rational basis. To pre-empt that argument, showing that these weapons, if not strictly regulated, pose grave threats and have no redeeming social value is an obvious way of establishing a rational basis for strict regulation.

In California, any center fire rifle may be used in hunting, but it is generally acknowledged that the .223/5.56 has a shorter range and less stopping power than the traditional .30 rifle, which was not coincidentally the standard issue infantry weapon in both world wars. There has clearly been a change in military practice since then, but it’s far from clear why that ought to be pertinent to hunting.

My point was that assault weapons are designed for rapidly killing large numbers of humans, which our society strongly discourages, rather than for acceptable practices like hunting or target shooting. They aren’t reasonable means of self-defense in any credible scenario. There’s a better gun for any legitimate purpose.

In sum, there is a strong case that they are utterly without redeeming social importance. If we ever get around to restricting them, we clearly need to focus more on functional elements, like semiautomatic operation and large magazines, than on cosmetics like flash suppressors or bayonet mounts, but some if not all of the appeal clearly derives from the military look and feel. It might be enough to say that no semiautomatic rifle may have a pistol grip, which turned out to be such an essential selling point that it was universally retained in products manufactured under the 1994 ban, but is not typical of hunting or target shooting guns.

Taking away the death-dealing fantasy may well reduce the appeal of the product. Wouldn’t that be a shame?

“For political reasons, gun control on the order of that achieved in some countries will not be implemented in the US on a national level any time in the next decade…”

I doubt it will take a decade to get reaonable gun safety laws passed.

Polling in the U.S. was running strongly against legalizing same sex marriage less than three years ago, and now…

Similarly, much as I may wish it counted in this regard, my opinion of Wayne LaPierre is neither informed, useful or credible if a decision is being made whether or not to institutionalize him. It’s just “an opinion”.

Would the people acting this way more likely be the ones with opinions, or the ones with informed opinions?

Who can say? They might have very detailed opinions on the legitimacy of various reasons for having a gun or an abortion, and there’s no reason to expect those reasons to be symmetric. On the one hand, a gun is an instrument that could be used to kill someone, while an abortion must destroy an embryo or it isn’t an abortion. (An abortion is an act, a gun is a device for performing an act.) On the other hand, an embryo isn’t necessarily a person while children killed at Sandy Hook certainly were. Also, the burden of being denied a firearm isn’t like the burden of carrying a pregnancy to term.

And, of most relevance to the issue of whether it’s legitimate to have an opinion of something over which you don’t have perfect knowledge, everyone can be threatened by guns, not everyone can be threatened by abortion. You don’t need to know very much to have a stake in a gun discussion: “I don’t want to be shot” would suffice.

Now translating that preference into policy requires us to take specific facts about guns and crime into account. But talking about one opinion being more “credible” than another gets it wrong, I think–the person who knows that they don’t want to be shot and not much else may not be capable of writing good legislation by themselves, but any decent legislation would still take their (very reasonable!) desire to avoid death by firearms into account.

“I don’t want to be shot” doesn’t tell us how to achieve our goals, but it tells us what our goals should be. It’s a perfectly credible opinion–one that many of us gun owners have come to wish we had listened to more often.