People who don’t think American culture is a gun culture – a culture that celebrates and mythologizes violence, and in particular gun violence.
I think the celebration of violence is baseless.
Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? Lots of folks make comments like you have, and mostly I just pass on responding because there’s no point. But if you as you say want to engage in discussion, this is my effort to assist you in not coming across in a way that no one wants to engage.
Sure there is. Teach kids not to kill people.
Ah, the “abstinence-only” approach to gun violence. About as successful as “abstinence-only” approaches in other areas of education.
First, I don’t know what point you’re trying to make - when you say that the 2nd was still in the constitution my point is that it didn’t matter because CA could literally ban all the guns pre-McDonald and there was no recourse. CA does not have a right to arms in its constitution, so without McDonald, the fact that the 2nd is part of the constitution is irrelevant.
Second, Heller and McDonald didn’t override gun control laws in CA. Not even close. Each individual law in CA needed to be and still needs to be litigated. The gun laws in CA are very similar to what they were pre-McDonald, and in some cases more restrictive. So when you say that the 2nd should be repealed, it can only mean advocating for increased restrictions. The feigned play at reasonableness or honest discussion about tradeoffs seems like merely a fig leaf for increased restrictions.
Right – it’s not just guns and shooting people in movies and media. It’s something more than that – somehow, perhaps like a cultural sort of virus, the idea that broad grievances can be resolved with mass shootings has taken hold of some significant number of young people. But I don’t think that would even be possible without the substrate of a gun-loving, violence-loving culture.
I don’t think this is unique, by any means, to America, looking at history at large. Humans are incredibly violent, and only very recently (if at all) has violence not ruled large parts of most humans’ lives. But violence of this sort varies so incredibly widely between cultures and communities that it’s reasonable to wonder about whether and how the differences in culture could be related to these variations. We have no chance of combating potentially toxic elements of our culture if we aren’t even able to discuss this possibility.
On the first point, I guess we’ll have to disagree, but I see Canada (for instance) as a close enough culture to the US for valid comparisons. It’s been jokingly said that Canada is the US without the guns and with free health care, and there’s considerable truth to that, certainly enough truth that there are learnings to be had and not summarily dismissed as being of no interest whatsoever. And I’m not even sure that Canada is the best place to look to for solutions to either problem, but it’s definitely culturally the most similar, even to the extent of being exposed to exactly the same US movie and television content, should one be inclined to blame that for gun violence.
The claim in the context of gun violence that the US has 50 sovereign states is just completely objectively false. They may be sovereign in some ways, but there is absolutely no sovereign border enforcement, so there is a tremendous amount of gun mobility between the states. Effective gun policy absolutely has to be national in scope for precisely that reason. That fact also makes comparisons of gun violence between states completely useless.
How did I negatively characterize such people? Looking back, I couldn’t find a single word I said about such folks.
Do you think there is zero celebration (or mythologizing) of violence in our culture? If not zero, then any significant amount? Is it possible that cultural elements of this kind might have something to do with relatively high rates of violence in American society?
Okay. If you want others to engage, then I’ll kindly recommend that you be careful not to mischaracterize their arguments.
you think NOT killing someone is abstinence?
Repealing the 2nd Amendment very well may lead to increased restrictions, which I said up front I think is not a bad idea. But the true reason to support repealing it is not for the sake of increased restrictions—which would be extremely inefficient, given that there are far less unlikely and distant possible ways to increase legal restrictions on guns—but simply because it’s an anachronistic provision that serves no modern purpose except the promotion of gun-rights culture.
Uh, yes, of course: it’s when you abstain from killing someone. Do you disagree with this interpretation?
Wow! I think we just solved it! Pack up everyone, we can go home. No need to expend precious brain cells or worry that this might be a very complicated problem… it’s really that simple, and with this plan I’m sure we can solve this in no time at all! 
If the Second Amendment were repealed by a subsequent amendment, that would pretty much have to reflect a broad consensus about the (lack of) value of the right to keep and bear arms. Which is pretty much how the amendment process is supposed to work. Of course, a large majority of the states also have provisions in their state constitutions protecting a right to keep and bear arms–many of which are much more clearly worded as protecting both a collective and an individual right of the people to keep and bear arms, both for the general defense and for individual self-defense. But, if we get to the point where we’re on the verge of passing a new amendment to the U.S. Constitution to repeal (or effectively repeal) the Second Amendment, then I suppose a lot of those state constitutional provisions would have already fallen by the wayside using the amendment provisions of the various state constitutions.
The thing is, the anti-RKBA side has often been pretty disingenuous about “repealing the Second Amendment”. Right here in this thread, statements about the desirability (or even inevitability) of “repealing the Second Amendment” alternate with sniping at the Heller decision and talk of “a particular interpretation of the Second Amendment” (meaning “an interpretation of the Second Amendment as anything other than a meaningless inkblot”).
Actually repealing the Second Amendment wouldn’t necessarily destroy the rest of the Bill of Rights, no. Just interpreting it away, because you don’t like it (but can’t actually gain the consent of a broad majority of the American people) would be very dangerous to the whole constitutional order. But rather than actually doing the hard work of “repealing the Second Amendment”–passing new constitutional language about the right to keep and bear arms–it seems the anti-RKBA side just wants to get to get rid of a provision of the Bill of Rights by judicial fiat.
last chance to walk it back.
Worked for the schools I went to.
I posted previously that here in the UK, the beat police do not carry guns.
In addition, after a gunman killed schoolchildren and a teacher in Scotland in 1996, the UK banned handguns; no school shootings have taken place there since.
You’re just grabbing at random incidents to support your case.
Yes, Dunblane was the UK’s only school shooting. This was due to gun control laws passed here in 1903, 1920, 1937, 1968, 1988 and (following Dunblane) 1997 and finally 2006.
These measures have meant the UK has only had one school shooting. Sadly the US leads the World in such disasters.
As for other shootings, instead of just quoting a single incident, let’s look at total gun homicides. The US has about 75 times as many such deaths as the UK.
You didn’t address my point that due to gun control, our beat police don’t need guns. This obviously dramatically cuts down deaths by police shooting (a real problem in the US.)
Finally we did have a serious terrorist problem in Ireland. There were about 3,500 killed in about 30 years. Most of these were killed by bombs. I presume you don’t mind bombs being banned. :smack:
Why you think these terrorist atrocities have anything to do with civilian gun control is beyond me.
So schools where it hasn’t worked is because teachers failed to teach kids not to kill their fellow students?
We’ve done that in the UK. Only one ‘school shooting’ in our history - and the perpetrator was 43 (i.e. not a kid.)
Or perhaps it was down to a combination of teaching and gun control.
Look, I’m glad that there haven’t been any more school shootings in the UK. I’m glad that the gun control laws worked effectively in the UK. But I can scarcely think of a country less like America than the UK, despite the shared language. Different countries have different cultures, different laws, and different ideas about whether firearms should be allowed to individuals or whether the ability to use them should be delegated to government authority.
What was politically viable in the United Kingdom is not going to be politically viable in the United States, not at the current time anyway. As I think everyone in this thread is aware, guns aren’t the only factor that cause school shootings. And this thread, from its inception, has never been strictly limited to discussion of guns and gun laws.
If that’s what people want to primarily talk about, though, fine. It’s worth talking about. But since there are in fact other issues pertinent to the admittedly very serious problem of school shootings in America, I’ll just go ahead and bring up one POSSIBLE solution which might be able to help lessen this crisis, and is unrelated to guns: making an effort to increase participation in extracurricular activities like sports and clubs.
Imagine that the rate of gun ownership, and the “gun culture” of America, however that may be defined, remains exactly the same as it is now over the next 10 years. But imagine that during those 10 years, more of these boys - and let’s face it, it’s almost always boys - instead of sitting at home in their rooms on their computers or other devices, when they’re not at school, are, even just two or three days a week, spending time involved in some kind of productive activity. Whether it’s a sports team, an engineering club where they can work on machines, an outdoorsmanship class of some kind where they do some activity relating to nature, or virtually any other kind of activity you can imagine. Here’s something that I think is crucial not only to the mental state that motivates these shootings but to depressive and maladaptive personality disorders in general: when you’re DOING something, that is time that’s NOT being spent on just sitting around drowning in your own thoughts.
I’ve read enough backstory on enough of these school shooters to know that their lives are typically lacking in camaraderie and productivity. A focused effort to study kids with emotional problems, figure out how they can be targeted with opportunities to alleviate these problems by offering them some meaning in their lives, and allocate funds for some kind of nationwide mentorship program, could seriously reduce the number of potential school shooters. And, unlike gun control, there aren’t going to be millions of people shouting down this proposal. It’s something that anyone with any common sense should be able to agree on.
Pretty sure they have computers and the internet in the UK too.
It gives us the right to defend our homes with a weapon. It allows people to hunt for food.