So the Uk had exactly one mass school shooting in the last century.
So altho technically you are right- that no mass school shooting have taken place after the Dunblane massacre, which started the push to ban handguns, none took place before that.
It’s like the man who runs the noses of the lion outside the British Library- by doing so he keep lions out of the UK. Have there been any recent wild lion attacks in the UK? See? Ipso facto.
of course the Cumbria shootings took place afterwards, the guns bans didnt stop a dozen people from being gunned down. But they werent in a school.
And of course all the Killings in Ireland, even tho part of it is part of GB- aren’t counted, you know.
It is interesting how many people are willing to tear out part of the Bill of Rights because, well, they dont own guns, so let’s get rid of them. Some posters here on the SDMB have claimed it’s perfectly Ok to speak freely to the police during questioning since 'they were not guilty of any crimes"…:rolleyes:
But yeah, who cares about the gun owners and their rights?’
*"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.*"Niemöller
Sometimes I worry how big a shooting spree it would take for there to be true gun-control upheaval change. We’ve had dozens killed and that hasn’t dented the issue. Would it take 500 dead in one spree to do it?
Perhaps. I’ve long said that anything that makes firearms more useful for defense would make them useful for offense too. That’s just part and parcel of the deal as they are a force multiplier.
So what would prevent people from stealing locked firearms and doing illegal things with them? Let me guess, a ban right? Is confiscation in there too?
First - these aren’t military surplus grade weapons. I know you may believe it to be so, but it’s not. And what would your proposals do related to this incident? Will your proposal stop firearms from being stolen and used for nefarious purposes?
I’m just going to respond to this part, because it applies to your whole post. I haven’t assumed anything. I suggest you re-read my post that you are replying to based on the words that are there, rather than what you think is there. The rest of your post is also pretty far out there since it’s based on nothing I’ve said.
Sure. There are 300M+ firearms out there. Do you think those should be confiscated? I may have enough for my progeny for the next several hundred years. Should those be confiscated?
I don’t think your description is accurate. For example, I personally don’t have a problem with legal reasonably regulated gun ownership, but I support repealing the Second Amendment. I am not impressed by all the finger-wagging about potential slippery slopes to fascist tyranny, because I think that the Second Amendment is obsolete and purposeless in a modern society in ways that aren’t true for the rest of the Bill of Rights.
I don’t want to get rid of guns (though I certainly think we should regulate them better): I want to get rid of the delusional paranoiacs who create “gun rights culture” in this country. I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with people liking guns and liking to own and shoot guns, as long as they do so responsibly. But I think there’s a whole lot wrong with self-described “patriots” constructing elaborate political-masturbatory fantasies about how their possession of guns means they are a bulwark against tyranny and an essential protector of the nation’s fundamental liberties and so forth.
Defense-of-liberties-wise, they ain’t shit, and any truly motivated tyrants could roll right over them whenever they chose. Their gun ownership is a hobby for their own enjoyment, and to a more limited extent a practical measure for personal self-defense against crime. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
What is a problem is their reckless disregard of reasonable safety measures because such measures might interfere with their adored self-image of themselves and their guns as Crucial Defenders of Freedom and similar bullshit. The Second Amendment is what supports their dangerous and destructive delusions, so the Second Amendment should go. The guns themselves, or at least many of them, can stay.
This sort of self-glorifying victim-culture whining is exactly the kind of dangerously inflated pomposity I’m talking about. I personally care quite a lot about the rights of gun owners, but I think their currently recognized constitutional right to own firearms is ridiculously archaic and should be abolished. I remain completely skeptical about their self-serving doom-laden prophecies that fixing this old legacy bug in the Constitution will necessarily result in the removal of other rights that still actually serve a socially useful purpose.
A gun ban would not only be politically impossible at the present, it would be colossally ineffective. American culture is a gun culture – a culture that celebrates and mythologizes violence, and in particular gun violence. That’s the source of the problem of shootings – the ubiquity of guns makes shootings much easier, quite obviously, but it’s impossible to address this problem of guns being incredibly easy to access without massive changes in American culture. America as a culture will not accept any significant restrictions on the availability of their (our) precious guns.
I don’t know what the solution is exactly – how do you change a culture in a directed and focused way? Obviously that can and has been done (i.e. America is less patriarchal and racist than it was in the past, even as these are still very significant problems), but I don’t know what public policy can change that, though I do think at the margins various gun control proposals (large magazine ban, expanded background checks, targeted bans on certain characteristics that can make mass shootings even deadlier) might have a tiny but positive effect on shootings. But even at best, these might just reduce the average body count of school shootings from 10 or whatever to 7, or something like that.
Probably an enormous amount. Guns are very powerful weapons, an order of magnitude more powerful than any other weapon a person can get their hands on. They are lightweight, portable, ranged weapons that can kill with a single attack.
Will people still commit violence? Of course they will, they’re people. They’ll just commit that violence with far less powerful weapons.
No, there is no good short term solution that is acceptable to the American public or possible under the present constitution.
I also get that your particular guns are probably never going to be killing innocent humans and I think we should take that into account. Any solution would have to be a long term evolution over generations and should not be indiscriminate.
What prevents it in other countries? One of the major factors is relative scarcity. There is such an incredible abundance of guns in the US, and they are so widely celebrated at gun shows, gun shops, and personal collections that they’re almost impossible to avoid. Whereas in most countries, a thief who breaks into a random person’s home is unlikely to find a gun there, whether locked or unlocked. It is, therefore, no big surprise that a significant proportion of illegal guns in Canada come, not from theft, but from our neighbor to the south, the gun capital of the universe. Countries that don’t have this issue, like the UK, tend to have far fewer guns even among the criminal classes.
As for bans and “confiscations”, you seem to be imagining a world where some very arrogant lawmakers impose gun restrictions, bans, or whatever, against the will of the people. That’s not how it works. As discussed below, the way it has to work is just the way it worked with tobacco: a gradual, incremental change in culture so that instead of gun worship, the culture evolves to one where people mostly just don’t want the dangerous nasty things around unless they absolutely need to have them. I really believe that the gun culture is on the wrong side of history. Sometimes, as with the health care debacle, the US is just a little slow in catching up with the rest of the world.
I’m beginning to detect a pattern of gratuitous snark here. Is it your contention that gun control advocates are hypocrites who are not genuinely concerned about the unnecessary loss of thousands of lives each year to gun violence, many of them children? If so, please tell us what you think gun control advocates are really concerned about.
You’re absolutely correct about the need for a massive culture change. But I think the culture change around tobacco smoking is encouraging evidence that it can be done, with the role of enlightened lawmakers being at least as much to promote and advance these changes as to actually legislate restrictions and prohibitions, though the two work together, with legislation gradually nudging the culture.
Watch any movie or TV show from the 50s, say, and one is amazed at how much the tobacco culture has changed. Pretty much everybody smoked, and they smoked everywhere. Cigarettes were glorified as a sophisticated adult activity, they were advertised everywhere, and ad agencies made fortunes just from designing eye-catching cigarette packaging.
What happened was gradual, incremental, and effective. Cigarettes were never “banned” and they weren’t “confiscated”. One of the early initiatives was removing the smoking section from airplanes, which airlines were happy with because the smoking would gum up their ventilation systems about as badly as it was gumming up the smokers’ lungs. Then you couldn’t smoke in restaurants, or bars, or workplaces. You could still smoke if you were so inclined, just not inside any public places. So smokers would gather outside the front doors of their workplaces, until the stench became problematic and people entering and exiting the building complained. So now smokers had to furtively move away into the darker recesses outside the building, with signs warning them to stay away from the doors.
Meanwhile, tobacco companies could no longer advertise, and they could no longer sponsor certain events (or in some cases, any events at all). Cigarette packages began to bear health warnings. Talk about eye-catching design that made ad agencies tons of money: this is what cigarette packaging will soon look like in Canada – basically one giant illustrated health warning, with the brand name in plain type on a small part of the package.
At the same time as all this was going on, tobacco companies were being sued – successfully – for billions of dollars for the health problems their products were causing.
So I think the moral of the story is that a multi-pronged approach on many different fronts slowly and incrementally transformed the tobacco culture from one in which smoking was widely accepted and even celebrated, to one where people began to wonder why they would need the vile, nasty, dangerous things. If you had told a smoker back in the 50s what the smoking world would look like in 2019, they’d probably have thought you were crazy, and would likely be adamant that no one in a free country would accept such restrictions. But the reality is that although there are smoking activists who condemn such policies, most people are supportive of the policies because most people no longer smoke, and the ones that do recognize the dangers. My contention is that the gun culture, like the tobacco culture, will eventually be viewed as having been on the wrong side of history.
I think what **DrDeth **means is that there are some gun-control advocates who are hoping for a “one step back in order to make several steps forward” type of event. That while the killing of 500 people in one giant spree would be a tragedy, it might the long-awaited catalyst for major gun control that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
Tobacco doesn’t have the same utility that firearms do. They provide individual benefit, but any single cigarette isn’t’ going to be life changing. Cigarettes aren’t used daily to defend the lives of the populace. Cigarettes aren’t a right guaranteed in the constitution. Cigarettes don’t last for over a hundred years. Basically, the comparison is not apt.
But I take your point. When the CDC engaged in a propaganda campaign against firearms, they also analogized tobacco as a model to follow. It’s also quite apparent that the idea of going after gun culture is becoming more popular in gun control circles. It’s also why even small incremental forays need to be smashed and exposed for the ulterior motives that they represent.
And what would that have done for the incident in question? How would a background check prevent firearms from being stolen and used for nefarious purposes? This is an example of why it seems like gun control advocacy groups seem to celebrate when a tragedy occurs, they do what I’ve seen referred to as a “blood dance”, happy to use any incident as a springboard to launch into advocacy for unrelated policies on the backs of the tragedy. It would be like in reaction to a high profile suicide, Everytown comes out against high capacity magazines.
The only thing that prevents this incident is a ban and confiscation. Unless that is the proposal on the table, then anything else is either woefully misguided or a ruse to get on the path towards a ban and confiscation. It could be both.
I’ll go out on a limb here and propose a few things that would change the culture here:
Be inclusive (and all that entails) You bring up racism, and while racism is very much changed since Jim Crow, we now have a ton more advocates for more and more and more changes since it now has traction. But this isn’t really inclusive. You can blame those who are probably ‘racist’, scared or some other reason that they feel threatened when they are told that even though they haven’t been racist at all, that THEY are part of the problem.
This is also a HUGE problem in regards to our political factions. Divisive policies, divisive parties, keep themselves in power and pretty much fuck everyone else. This is the point where you probably go ‘nuh uh, not MY party, and not MY policies’
You (general you) are not only part of the problem, you are making it worse.
We have too many folks telling us about problems and not very many telling us about solutions (that don’t directly fly in the face of some other people)
Fix the economic distress. For some amount of people, this is telling them to go get a job, and some job skills that will be useful. For others, its paying more in taxes. For some it’s getting the political parties to stop being divisive (Good Luck!) For the middle class, it’s getting them to agree to keep getting the shit end of the stick.
Get the media to stop being hyperbolic. Stop giving attention to all the bad shit and change the narrative. The 24 hr news cycle was possibly one of the worst things to come to the world in the past 50 years.
Upon re-reading this, the problem is politicians and policies aimed at dividing the country so they stay in power.
Abolish political parties and the power that goes with it.
That the CDC engaged in a propaganda campaign, or that they analogized tobacco? Here’s an article from Reason. I could have pulled the quote from anywhere, but this is a decent read:
I’ll read the whole thing later today, but your excerpt sounds like somebody at the CDC wanted a propaganda campaign, not necessarily that the CDC went ahead and implemented one.
