I’ve long lamented the fact that the very presence of a gun is enough to cause a police officer to successfully argue that they feared for their life, yet guns are something that every American has a right to possess. Why are police officers allowed to kill people who are exercising their rights? Why is it a good idea to have a right that causes such fear? Is this the best way to achieve the goals of our society? What are the goals of our society?
Out of all the problems related to the proliferation of gun possession in this country, “hypocrisy” is pretty low on my list.
You’re right about this, and certainly people who write gun-control laws should have a clear understanding of exactly what they’re prohibiting and permitting. But my chief point stands: even if gun-control advocates were entirely knowledgeable about the capabilities of different variety of guns, it wouldn’t make gun-control opponents any more receptive to gun control.
I think you, Heinlein, and the OP are thinking too small. Make anyone who is unarmed legally classified as animals who can be hunted for food.
This.
Most of what appears to be hypocrisy in US gun policy disappears when you view through this lens. Gun ownership is an essential tool for the the favored caste (“Whites”) to maintain relative power over the disfavored castes (non-whites, but most especially “Blacks”).
(Sorry for the double post)
Both are true! How is it hypocrisy to recognize this?
But that’s not really how it is.
It’d be more like saying that there is an amendment to the constitution that prevents any laws from being made about reducing CO2, and any attempt at doing anything about it is met with extreme hostile resistance from those who want to exercise their right to emit as much CO2 as they want.
So, in an attempt to do anything and to try to appease those who want something done about climate change, the only legislation that can be passed due to the resistance of the pro CO2 faction is to ban black smoke.
Of course, immediately emitters of CO2 and black smoke get around it by changing it to red and green smoke.
And what it sounds like when people claim that someone has to have a massive in depth knowledge about guns before they are allowed to express an opinion about them is that you don’t want to hear any negative opinions made about your guns.
I see plenty of people who are very well versed in guns who advocate for lessening their prevalence in their society. They are simply ignored by gun advocates in favor of nutpicking by finding someone that called a magazine a clip, and railing on about how this shows that gun control advocates don’t know anything about guns.
Really, every rifle round ever made was teflon coated? I learned something new.
If you are talking about steel or other hard metal core type of bullets, those are only looked to be banned in handguns, not rifles. It does make it a bit of an issue for ammunition that can be used in both, but in most cases, this exception ends up being granted. This does have the effect of lessening the use of the legislation, as it becomes easier for manufacturers and consumers to find loopholes to get around the point of it.
It is the pro-gun advocates that muddy the waters and definition on that one, specifically so that they can try to make the false claims as are on display here.
Anyway, whenever I hear, “This legislation is a step towards confiscation”, I see that as a bad faith, ignorant attempt at swaying public policy through fear and emotion, rather than actually on its merits.
And keeping guns out of the hands of the criminal and irresponsible would be a good step in the right direction. But with the pro-gun advocates fighting against any method of actually controlling where these guns are or where they go, or who they are sold to, or requiring even the most basic of due diligence in securing them against theft or misuse, there is no real barrier to anyone who wants a gun getting one.
These background checks are even more of “security theater” than the AWB that is so decried by gun advocates.
You know where I’ve yet to have ever seen a good public policy regarding guns come from? The pro-gun-rights movement.
Instead of working with those who would like to see less injury and death occur do the prevalence of guns in our society, they fight against any measure proposed, usually resorting to slippery slope arguments, or invoking “natural rights” as a way of entirely sidestepping the issue.
If the pro-guns-movement wants to be seen as actually wanting to reduce the damage that the objects of their advocacy cause, then they would think of solutions and ideas. After all, they are the ones that are knowledgeable about guns, so would know how, right? But all I ever hear from that side is that we can solve all the problems if we just had more guns in the hands of more people.
To the OP’s point, I do think that we should have more gun education in schools. We have toddlers and young children shooting themselves and others. A large part of this is curiosity, which I think would be better sated in a classroom setting under supervision than home alone with a gun found in the couch cushions. I also think that educating the children may help to educate the adults. There are too many adults who own guns who think that the couch cushions make a good hiding place, and they may end up learning through their own child that it is not.
It sounds as though active shooter drills are going to be a thing in schools from here on out, we may as well complete the education. We have fire drills in school, and we also teach them how to deal with fire at home. We have tornado drills in school, and we also teach them how to deal with severe weather events at home. Since we have active shooter drills, we should teach them how to deal with guns in the home.
I’d even advocate for shooting classes once they get a little older. Once again, a measure to sate a child’s curiosity in a controlled environment rather than unsupervised experimentation. Start off with a bolt action .22 rifle, and work their way up if they show proficiency and interest.
Before driver’s ed, there is Safety Town, which I am only now discovering was just a kinda local thing. I really thought it was so obvious a good idea that it would be much more widespread.
I think this is a dumb idea, or set of ideas. I disagree with the premise that “hypocrisy” is a significant portion of the real political / social conflict we have over gun ownership, and I also question the sincerity of the OP’s proposal. It has the tone of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, seems likely to be an over-the-top critique inspired by anger at the Kenosha verdict, and if so, it’s posted in bad faith because the OP has maintained the veneer of sincerity in subsequent posts. Taken at his word the OP also admits he fully believes his policies if implemented would result in more gun deaths, which means if genuine it’s an almost sociopathic set of proposals.
Most gun regulation should be decided at the State & Local level. There’s certainly some gun laws that make sense being regulated at the Federal level. National open carry or concealed carry isn’t one of them. I generally think that these issues are best decided by the States.
Many school districts are underfunded and have issues providing a basic education, the last thing they need is time being wasted on firearms classes, which will require likely new certifications by existing teachers, or bringing in outsiders who aren’t normal certified educators to teach the classes. To little real benefit. There is value in firearm education, I’d like to see it linked with first time gun purchases and gun ownership, but it has no real need to be universal and in every K-12 school.
More helpful than classes to familiarize Americans with the minutiae of firearms would be field trips to ERs and trauma wards to familiarize them with the damage that firearms cause to real people.
The problem is is that the 2A people don’t want that Federalism. They want for California to have to follow the same lack of laws as Texas. The don’t want states to pass laws, they don’t want cities to pass laws. They don’t even want private property to be allowed to set its own rules. They don’t want anywhere to be allowed to pass any law that could restrict what guns they can bring wherever they want to.
There doesn’t even need to be a presence of a gun, even the possibility of a gun is enough for them to make that argument.
We argued that point in a prior thread - San Jose CA gun tax law is a positive first step to rational gun ownership, and I still feel that boiling Gun laws to a city/county level makes for an excessive level of control as well as abuse. There’s going to be huge questions of jurisdiction, likely unconstitutional levels of restriction on travel, and a white elephant level of profiling abuse.
Having said that, I do agree that states self selecting based on the preferences of it’s citizens is probably the best solution, at least in a democratic nation, but will point out that the problem is the same as we have on a national level - we don’t always have a very representative government due to gerrymandering and it’s ilk. And the federal oversight (if in our current age of gridlock was even possible) is a very good idea, as individual states tend to go too far in both directions IMHO.
Okay, back to the OP. Since this thread ISN’T theoretically about gun control, but about possible hypocrisy in America’s cultural fascination about guns, I’d like to make three points -
-
Forcing gun ownership on and and all is a terrifying thought, I really don’t want someone with a mandatory 4 hours of instruction in high school being forced to own a gun, and who then panics at sounds in the night and shoots their spouse/child/bystander at the door. But we have addressed this upthread.
-
The second biggest issue (IMHO) with the gun culture in the US is that we glorify guns and violence without talking about consequences. I have lost track of the number of times where I’ve turned to someone after an action movie and make the point where everyone, including the ‘hero’ is going to jail for, well, forever, due to the people endangered, the lack of justification, and on and on and on. Most non-police action movies should end up with the ‘hero’ being arrested and dragged off to jail for a long, long interrogation and years of criminal and civil litigation. A mandatory trailing, perhaps in a government or social studies class talking seriously about the consequences of gun use, along with demystification of guns would be greatly welcome.
-
Okay, on to our truest hypocrisy (again IMHO). Gun safety. We’ve had several threads on this as well (including @Czarcasm and my discussion in Gun owner's liability when it comes mishaps involving their children) . Claims are made for the safety brought to society by gun ownership, but we have a terrible, terrible record of making the people in our home safe from our own firearms. It’s only talked about during the (sadly frequent) circumstance of a home shooting. Note, I am not talking about suicides which is an entirely different great debate. Yes, no home security is perfect, and yes, most new firearms come with a basic lock, but we are still terrible at getting people to use them, and the more secure systems are often overpriced which contributes to the class/race issues mentioned earlier.
Regardless of the overreach that the OP suggests, I still think it’s useful for us to consider ways to address the cultural underpinnings of the gun debate, even if I don’t think we are likely to find a way to deal with it in a legislative manner given that bipartisanship has become a dirty word for roughly 40% of the nation. Changing people’s hearts and minds is going to be a long, LONG road, but may be ultimately successful.
And I say this as a gun owner, with a concealed carry permit, who looks askance at the open-carry yahoos that do this as a political statement.
I disagree entirely that it is bad faith, but rather resignation, acceptance, and under the principle of harm reduction.
What would be best? No guns in the hands of anyone not qualified or stable enough to be trusted with one? We can’t have that, then next best is to make sure that everyone is familiar with, able to use, and has access to a gun to protect themselves from the unqualified and unstable people who will be getting ahold of them.
That such an act would have more gun deaths than restricting guns to qualified and stable people is not sociopathic, it is recognition that best practices of preventing guns from being in the hands of the unqualified or unstable is impossible given our gun culture, and is looking for the next best solution. What would be sociopathic would be accepting the number of injuries and deaths associated with guns as simply a price that society pays in order to make it easy and convenient for anyone to get a gun, and fighting against measures that would decrease that.
Sure, but are states and cities actually allowed to pass legislation restricting gun ownership? They can pass a little bit in some cosmetic fashions, and make some rules as to how they can be carried in public, but even those are being fought against, and will probably fold under the demands of the 2A crowd.
Not really. They teach other safety issues like fire safety, tornado safety, traffic safety, “stranger danger” safety. People even volunteer to come in and help teach these classes. MAybe the NRA can actually do what it was founded to do, and spend some of its energies in teaching firearm safety.
Unfortunately, guns are universal, and are in the homes of at least some of the students in every k-12 school.
This is a logical mess–“being against a policy that the policy proposer openly admits will cause more gun deaths is worse than the status quo”, what?
At present yes. About the only limitations to State and Local gun laws is they cannot enact pure bans, under Heller and a few subsequent cases. Now, we’ll see what the Supreme Court rules in the case out of New York and see how much that changes. But under current constitutional jurisprudence the States can do quite a lot. Localities, constitutionally, are a State matter–some State constitutions empower localities with home rule as a matter of State constitutional right, others the only power the localities have are ones the States grant them via statute. So it varies quite a bit from State to State how much power various local governments have.
Yes, really, schools are underfunded, and yes, really, they already do miss the mark in many districts with basic education. Adding another type of education to the K-12 public school system, when it would more appropriately be adult education simply makes no sense. I’m generally in favor of more restrictions on under-18 year olds even possessing guns aside from hunting, so a K-12 firearm class makes no sense to me. As for the under-18 hunters, every State in the union requires a gun safety course now to get a hunting license, unless you are grandfathered in (which only applies to people who are fairly old.)
No, guns are not universal.
You are correct; I should have been more comprehensive with my post.
What does this mean? I grant you that not every individual or household possesses a gun; in fact, only about 44% of American adults live in a gun-owning household. However, that doesn’t contradict k9bfriender’s claim that every US school community includes at least some gun-owning households. (I don’t know for certain whether that’s true, but it seems to be borne out by the claim in this 2017 article that “there are no gun-free US communities”.)
So it seems to me that if everyone in the US has at least some guns in their communities, that can be reasonably described as guns being universal. After all, not every American individual or household has a car, either, but we’d definitely call cars a “universal” feature of American life.
If you disagree, then exactly what do you mean by the term “universal”?
But before those 52 years, “Tommy guns” etc were certainly used in many mob crimes.
However- yes, after the tax and licensing was done, full auto owners had a exemplary record.
Not really, what happened was that the Black Panthers found a little used and little known loophole which allowed the open carry of UNLOADED guns. They paraded in from of the State building, and yes the legislature quickly closed that loophole. But I bet before that occurrence, 99% of the legislature would not have known that was legal. And if the American Nazi Party had done the same, the legislature would have moved just as fast.
Sure, this is America- everything can be laid at the feet of racism. And the old NRA, before states and city started passing draconian gun control laws, was mostly about hunting, not gun rights. The NRA found a new niche then.
The statistics are false. But as to the second part, you are wise.
Yes to both. As for guns, many tragedies would be averted if Kids had basic gun safety training. And if adults used locks and safes when kids are around.
The Second Amendment isn’t about preserving the right to defend oneself. The Second Amendment is what prohibits Americans from having and using the most effective tool for self defense.
Gun control laws work. Every other country in the world is proof of that. Gun control laws are a far, far more effective defense than a gun is. But we’re not allowed to defend ourselves that way.
Yep. Interesting story- one company did make bullets for the express purpose of penetrating the then soft body armor. They were not complete rounds, but bullets only, and ONLY sold to Police departments. And none were ever used to kill a cop.
Some laws were proposed which would define a “armor piercing (Illegal)” as anything that would penetrate a standard police vest- which indeed were most rifle rounds.
But as i said, those were bullets only, and only sold to PDs, and were rare and now no longer made.
If we were serious about reducing gun violence, then we’d have a federal limit on the number of handguns bought per month & year. Say 2 and 12. (with antiques, single shot, black powder and such exempted) and crack down on straw man dealers/sellers. Define the sale of so many guns a year as a “dealer” -say 20 (estates exempted) . So those straw man dealers- the #1 source of criminal guns- would be stopped. They couldn’t walk into Bob’s gun store during the 9mm handgun sale, buy two dozen and sell illegally to crooks… at a huge markup too.
Instead, we regulate "assault weapons’ which are used in a tiny tiny % of gun crimes. Silly, and ignorant.
I like those laws, but only the sort with Due Process, per the ACLU.
Certainly, they are the type of law that can be abused and so proper safe guards need to be in place while allowing for the removal of guns from dangerous people before they hurt someone.
Then you run into the issues of gun owners being confused about the laws, or not having the same protection in one state as another. NY has confiscated guns fro passengers luggage when the plane landed expectantly, iirc