re: #54 dragonath

I don’t go for censorship, but here’s a distressing fact:

VIDEO GAMES BOOST HEAD SHOT ACCURACY

What a wonderful culture.

I’ll grant cultural problems, but that assertion is 100% horse shit. I won’t get my wish, but I wish that we could discuss guns and what to do about them from a position where all sides are educated and in touch with reality. I saw some story in a big-name publication yesterday asserting that the Glock and Sig Sauer pistols the shooter was carrying “fire up to five rounds per second”. Now, that’s true if you are a highly-practiced shooter, but that’s a property of the shooter, not of the gun.

There are a lot of predictable aspects of reporting when it comes to anything gun-related that really irk me.

Guns (that aren’t damaged or stupidly modified in some way) don’t “just go off”. It doesn’t happen.

It’s really really really really hard to hit small, moving targets at anything other than very close range. If you’ve ever read about a (justified) police shooting and wondered, “why didn’t they just shoot him in the leg”, that means you have mistaken beliefs about the world that most likely come from movies and TV shows.

Pointing a cursor at something in a video game translates exactly zero percent into real-world shooting ability. Shooting accurately is hard. You can no more learn to shoot accurately from playing video games than you can learn to hit holes-in-one by watching Tiger Woods on TV.

Guns aren’t magic talismans. They don’t have minds of their own. They aren’t going to make someone do something they weren’t already going to do in the first place.

There are many other things, too, but why bother?

A lot of anti-gun people seem to be unwilling to hear that guns are actually really mundane and ordinary, as though conceding that somehow makes them less deadly, and less of a problem. News flash: all these massacres happened even though the guns involved don’t have supernatural properties. I don’t understand why people wouldn’t rather argue from a position of informed, literate competence rather than one of near-superstitious fearmongering. Being ill-informed and repeating misinformation doesn’t doesn’t help you make a case.