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Mike McPhate reports in The New York Times that two home shopping industry veterans, Valerie Castle and Doug Bornstein, are set to premier GunTV, a new 24-Hour shopping channel for guns, that aims to take the QVC approach of peppy hosts pitching "a vast array of firearms," as well as related items like bullets, holsters and two-way radios. The new cable channel hopes to help satisfy Americans' insatiable appetite for firearms. The channel's forthcoming debut might seem remarkably ill-timed, given recent shootings at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs and at a social services center in San Bernardino, California but gun sales have been rising for years, with nearly 21 million background checks performed in 2014, and they appear on track to a new record this year. The boom has lately been helped by a drumbeat of mass shootings, whose attendant anxiety has only driven more people into the gun store.
The proposed schedule of programming allots an eight-minute segment each hour to safety public service announcements in between proposed segments on topics like women's concealed weapon's apparel, big-game hunting and camping. Buying a Glock on GunTV won't be quite like ordering a pizza. When a firearm is purchased, a distributor will send it to a retailer near the buyer, where it has to be picked up in person and a federal background check performed. "We saw an opportunity in filling a need, not creating one," says Castle. "The vast majority of people who own and use guns in this country, whether it's home protection, recreation or hunting, are responsible .... I don't really know that it's going to put more guns on the streets."
Critics suggest that Gun TV could make the decision to purchase a weapon seem trivial—on the same level as ordering a Snuggie or a vertical egg cooker. "Buying a gun is a serious decision," says Laura Cutilletta, senior staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "If you are going to buy a gun for your home, it's not a decision you should be making at three in the morning because you are watching TV."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by isostatic on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:03PM
Those people are just as dangerous in a world without guns.
I see the argument that the cat is out of the bag and the prevailence of guns means, however to suggest that a mentally ill person with a knife is just as dangerous as a mentally ill person with a gun is beyond the realm of "stretching it a bit" into "pure fantasy".
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday December 11 2015, @02:29AM
I think it's cute you assumed a knife. Quite frankly, that's "pure fantasy" right back at you. Also, you put words in my mouth. I never suggested a knife was as dangerous as a gun, and in fact, made no comparisons about weapon choices at all.
What I suggested was that mentally ill people are just as dangerous regardless of the prevalence of any one particular weapon. Let's use the Oklahoma bombing of that Federal building (Timothy McVeigh??) as an example. Just like I said, that mentally ill person was just as dangerous in our world with a gun as he was without.
Guns are not the only readily available tools for mass murder. They're chosen as a matter of preference to be more direct and upfront in explaining their mental illness to the world.
Pure Fantasy would be a world in which "all the corners are padded" and the most dangerous weapon was "this very intimidating pillow". At that point a mentally ill person isn't that much more dangerous than I am. We don't live in that world. We live in a world where I can make tools for mass murder that don't involve anything near a gun.
Pretty please, let's explore the reverse. Please demonstrate that a mentally ill person is *as dangerous* as one who isn't in a world without guns. I contend that you can't, and regardless of the presence of guns, these people will still be just as dangerous.
Until.... you remove all:
1) guns of all types
2) all knives over certain dimensions and types not required for domestic work.
3) Nuklear anything
4) Castor beans make Ricin, so no Castor beans.
5) Cars. That's a multi-ton object moving at speed
6) Fertilizers & Chemicals. Regulate and monitor the living crap out of this, lest you fail horribly.
7) Scores of plants that can be used to mass produce toxic substances
8) Pencils. Remember Joker in the new Batman movie? Yeah. Pencils are dangerous objects, although I'm struggling to figure out how to kill hundreds with them. Gimme a minute.
9) Potatoes & Grapefruit. I can freeze them and fire them from a shoulder mounted exhaust tube with sufficient velocity to penetrate a brick wall. The crewed Grapefruit Death Cannon could probably take out dozens of unprotected civilians at a time.
You see now? Guns are simply popular, that's all. The dangerous part truly is the mental illness, nothing more. If it's happening more and more often, then you need to solve the problems of mental illness, not trying to "child proof" the world. The latter truly being the realm of Pure Fantasy.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by linuxrocks123 on Friday December 11 2015, @05:16AM
The primary unstated, false assumption you are making in your argument is that the people who commit crimes using guns are all perfectly rational people able to make long-term plans and delay gratification while designing well-thought-out plans to kill as many strangers they have no personal beef with as possible.
A few are like that. People like the Unabomber are like that. The "best" (worst) Islamic terrorists are like that. Those people are extremely scary people. They are also, thankfully, extremely rare.
Most shooters are not like that. The reason is that choosing to kill a lot of people you have no personal connection with, or even those you do, is not generally a rational thing to do, either from the perspective of pure self interest or of the greater good. Therefore, most random shootings are not well-thought-out decisions. They are emotional decisions, made by people with poor emotional control. These people will not look up how to cook ricin on the Internet, buy the ingredients, put on goggles, and run a little chemistry lab so they can poison the world. By the time they've gotten to the supermarket, their anger will have subsided, and they won't feel like killing people anymore.
That said, the executive function of people making rash, stupid, emotional decisions is not completely compromised. Once the person has decided, "I'm going to go kill some people now!", the rational executive part of the brain says, "Okay, hmm, how should I best do that?". They're not going to go pick up a pillow and start charging people. They're going to go for a gun, if there's one available. If there's not, they'll go for a knife. If there's not that, maybe they'll go for it with their fists, or maybe the executive will say, "This is impossible to do right now." and successfully fight the emotional id for control.
It is for these flawed humans that the availability of guns matters. The ones who, on a whim, basically, decide to kill their ex-spouse, boss/coworkers, or just ... random strangers. These will pick whatever is the most effective weapon THAT IS IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE TO THEM.
If that's a gun, we can get up to 30 or so dead people each time before the shooter is killed. If it's a knife ... 10 injured, maybe 2 or 3 dead.
What I just said isn't the end of the gun control debate. You can make a rational argument that there are so many guns in the US, and their ownership is so legally protected, that full gun control isn't practically possible, so let's at least make it so the good guys can have guns, too. But that's not the argument you made. And the argument you made ... is bull.