shaelit:

shaelit:

“Cars kill more people than guns! What’re you gonna do, regulate cars next?”

You idiot. You moron. You utter buffoon.

Cars ARE regulated. 

The permit test. The permit. The practice year. The regulations on how many hours you have to drive and at what hours and with whom. The driving test. The license. The requirements regarding insurance. License renewals. Road laws. Highway laws. Speed limits. Seatbelt laws. Carseat laws. Laws against drinking and driving and other forms of intoxication. Red lights. Not passing in intersections. Right of way.

WHO can drive and WHEN and HOW and WHERE are all regulated, because yes, a car in the wrong hands can kill a person. Just like a gun.

Oh but wait, there’s more!

I, as a licensed driver, can’t drive anything I want. I can’t drive a motorcycle. I can’t drive a speedboat.

You know what else I can’t drive? One of these.

To drive a semi-truck, I would need a Commercial Driver’s License or CDL. There are age limits involved, as well as required hours of training and study. There’s a written test and a driving test. There are also medical requirements.

And even if I passed all that, you know what I STILL couldn’t drive? One of these.

To drive a semi loaded with hazardous materials, you would have to get a federal H endorsement added to your CDL. And to get that, you have to jump through even MORE hoops, including another written test and a background check.

So yeah, guns should be better regulated. Any Joe Blow shouldn’t be able to stagger down to a gun show and get himself a sweet piece without some oversight. 

And ESPECIALLY no one should be getting their hands on a semi-automatic assault rifle like an AR-15, aka the Hazardous Semi Truck of guns. There are professional reasons that a person might need clearance to handle and own such a weapon, but not a civilian. Not an unscreened rando off the street.

Try not to be such an utter wanker that you place the mere potential of a power-boner over the lives of actual children like those killed in Parkland, Sandy Hook, and elsewhere.

Let’s tick off some of the dumber attempts at rebuttals I’ve seen since this post passed 20k notes. (I expected to become Tumblr famous for my wickedly painful head canons, if anything, y’all. What the heck.) 

In case your reading comprehension never made it past first grade, please recall that the above post specifically addresses the legality of semi-automatic and fully automatic assault weapons, such as AR-15s, the weapon used in Parkland, Las Vegas, and other recent mass shootings.

“You can still drive these illegally.”

Yeeeeeees? That’s literally a fact for every conceivable human action in the world. I can purchase ricin illegally. I can rob a bank illegally. I can attempt to enrich uranium illegally. I can break into your house and fill your bed with spiders illegally. The key word there being illegally. The point is to, y’know, make it illegal, with consequences like jail time.

“Guns have more regulations than cars!”

A mentally disturbed teenager who was too young to buy a beer or rent a car was able to buy a military grade weapon that killed over a dozen people. The man who killed 58 people and injured over 500 BY HIMSELF in Las Vegas owned at last count forty-two guns, not including his various magazines and exploding rounds. Many were fully automatic or semi-automatics that were modified to become fully automatic, as well as having grossly modified magazine capacities. Try again.

“More people are killed by cars than by guns!”

1) More people are killed by dogs than by polar bears. That’s how statistics work. The more there is of something, the greater chance that it will have a larger effect. There are more cars than guns.

2) The primary purpose of a car is to transport a human and/or cargo from Point A to Point B. The primary purpose of a gun is to kill. Intentionality is key.

“It’s my Second Amendment right to own a gun, you fascist!”

Don’t use big words you don’t know the definitions for. I’m not taking your gun, you overcompensating wanker. I am making a specific point about a specific type of military weaponry that has no business being owned and operated by civilians. Bypassing the argument that 2A was written in the time of dang muskets, it allows you to own *a gun*. It makes no argument as to the legality of specific types. Machine guns have been federally banned since 1986, and yet you somehow still are able to cradle your security blanket 9mil all you want.

“You’re discriminating against hunters and people who need guns for protection!”

Honey, breathe. Deep breaths, in and out. I’m pretty sure you don’t hunt with AR-15s, and even if you did, that is not the only hunting weapon available to you. You don’t protect your home with an AR-15. An AR-15 is a military grade weapon with a dangerous magazine capacity that is used by law enforcement and soldiers. I’m not taking your grandpappy’s shotgun.

“Anyone wanting to cause violence would just use a knife instead!”

“Why are we regulating nuclear warheads?? Anyone wanting to cause violence would just use a gun instead!” Do you see how stupid you sound? There is always a way to hurt other humans. That doesn’t stop us from minimizing the amount of damage one person can do.

“We don’t need gun control, we need better gun regulation!”

What… do you think… this is??? We are advocating using regulation to control who can legally own a weapon that can murder dozens of people in seconds.

“It’s your fault if your kids can’t defend themselves.”

There were six-year-olds killed at Sandy Hook. SIX YEARS OLD.

“The world is a dangerous place. You can’t stop evil.”

So why do you own a gun?

“This is a dumb argument, why do people keep making it?”

Because you’ve yet to combat it with anything of substance.