There’s no opposition to reducing mass shootings, there’s opposition to a ban on semi-automatic rifles, which there’s a frequent push for. If you oppose prohibition, I wouldn’t say that you’re against reducing drunk driving deaths.
The fact that it’s an enumerated right in the Constitution is a significant detail, but I’ll disregard that for the purposes of the discussion. It’s usually a non-starter about gun policy.
Alcohol has uses? Such as? Medically? We could reserve alcohol for medical uses the way we do with illicit substances now like opioids. The point is, we could drastically cut down on thousands of deaths if we banned or heavily restricted alcohol, but instead we satisfy ourselves mostly with harsh punishments, checkpoints, other measures. And fatal alcohol-related crashes are down over the last few decades. So are gun homicides.
What I don’t understand is why everyone is satisfied with the progress on one but not the other. Why we look at alcohol-related road deaths declining and say, “Let’s keep it up! Looking good.” But when there’s a similar drop in gun homicides after numerous gun control measures over the years, it’s an outrage.
Prohibition of alcohol was tried in the USA but repealed, and dry countries still have bad car death rates (ostensibly from having really bad drivers – Saudi Arabia, I’m looking at you, for although you are a developing country, you have been a high income country for decades, so get your act together), so reducing impaired driving deaths in first world countries usually has come down to a combination of education, graduated licensing, BAC restriction, and enforcement. The USA isn’t doing too well compared to most first world nations’ traffic death rate per distance driven.
If I could wave my magic wand, I’d go with zero tolerance for alcohol impairment (not to mention other types of impairment, but that is for another discussion) while driving, including testing without cause of people driving and testing with cause of people shortly after driving, 0 or trace BAC applied to all drivers, accessible counselling, out-patient and in-patient treatment programs, alcohol education from age nine and continuing throughout elementary and secondary education, strong media and social media campaigns, allocate extra resources to states where there is a high proportion of high private vehicle use and high poverty ratesa (for the most part red states, and no, I’m not trying to make a crack at red states), and very strict application of driving prohibitions, including lifetime bans and criminal penalties for repeat offenders and serious offenders. In other words, treat it as a serious social, education and health problem, distribute resources to best effect, and absolutely keep the incorrigibles off the road (that’s why God invented cites, public transit and taxis rather than blanket alcohol prohibition).
Is it possible to put effective gun control in place that generally permits gun ownership, hunting, and recreational shooting? Of course it is. Just look about at most other first world countries. Hell, just look north to Canada where Americans flock to go hunting, where we promote hunting, where hunting is a major economic contributor, and where it literally puts much of the food on the table for a significant portion of our northern population. Although we have a lot of game wandering about, what we don’t have is religious fetish for guns enshrined in our constitution.
It is hard to change the belief of a true believer, and when it comes to guns, the USA is a true believer, reality be damned. Want to greatly reduce gun deaths over the years, and by doing so reduce the murder rate overall? Get serious in dealing with racialized poverty and get serious in dealing with your gun fetish. Until you do this, you will remain a disgrace.
Assault rifles are already banned. “Assault weapons”, otoh, are hard to define, and are used but very rarely in crime. Why ban something so rarely used?
True, but those are *incidental *to their primary purpose.
There are extensive measures in place, and more constantly being evaluated and added, to prevent *driving *while drunk - which, if you’ll recall, is the analogy you wished to raise. No one opposes them. We do recognize driving as being a necessity of everyday life, and need to make it as safe as we reasonably can. Guns are *not *a necessity of life except in a few well-defined arenas (hunting for meat, protecting livestock). Efforts to limit the damage they can cause are intensely opposed.
You’re entire post was well thought out, but I wanted to quibble with this. I don’t think you’re suggesting that road fatalities would remain the same if we banned alcohol, that all the people who would have died to a drunk driver would instead die to a bad driver. So the argument here is somewhat like the argument from pro-gun individuals that people kill each other in gun-restrictive countries anyway, with knives, trucks, and bombs, so banning guns isn’t the solution.
“Entertainment, dining, socialization. If used moderately.”
Are incidental to the purpose of getting drunk.
Drinking alcohol isn’t a necessity of everyday life either. I’m not asking why people don’t want to ban driving after a drunk driving crash, I’m asking why they don’t want to ban alcohol after thousands of drunk driving deaths per year. The reason I ask is because that’s exactly what people do when confronted with a comparable number of deaths by guns.
No, those *are *their primary use. It’s a little hard to say the primary use of a gun is murdering someone, when like one in 30,000 is used for that.
Many people think armed security is a necessity, as well as armed police. And of course two thirds of of American and the Supreme Court agree that home defense is a necessity of life and a right.
Actually they might. In the later stages of Prohibition, drunkenness more or less returned to it’s normal state, what with bathtub gin, speakeasies and ect.
I’d be curious to see how, 100 years later, Prohibition would go down. I feel like the underground element would of course be there, but that most people, those who just have a few beers on the weekend, would just quit.
Bing-fucking-o. For DrDeth and his ilk, and the rabid members of the NRA, firearm deaths are at an acceptable level, and they don’t care to take any means whatsoever to do anything that would reduce them significantly. Someone earlier in the thread admitted as much. They should all just say this and own up to it.
Right, somebody else’s death is acceptable to them as a price for somebody else to pay. Somebody abstract. Somebody not quite real. Somebody dismissible, not as important as the self or the family.
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