Fewer guns would take a TON of money out of the firearm (and related) industry. Nuh-uh. Not in America. In America we:
Privatize profit and
Socialize loss
So the “solutions” (that aren’t) to the gun problem have to create more profit at the taxpayers’ expense: bulletproof clothing, arming teachers, arming students, armoring buses, hardening schools, ballistic backpacks, anti-personnel mines in the hallways of K-12 buildings, snipers, hi-tech security systems, more School Resource Officers, trauma surgeons, etc., etc.
All of us … spend countless billions … in a never-ending game of Reactive Public Policy?
Or we could start chipping away at the 400,000,000+ guns in private ownership in the USA.
As you’ve alluded: this is a politically feasible change. Banning handguns but not high caliber weapons wouldn’t make sense. So we’d be talking about overall gun control, which remains untenable in much of the US. (or to put it another way: we’ve been trying to legislate gun control for decades with minimal progress)
Arguably there just isn’t need for people to own these weapons. You can make an argument for handguns or shotguns for self-protection and rifles for hunting. Anything else is a stretch.
We may as well legalize grenades because there just might be a time where intruders have bunkered down in a room with heavy artillary and the only way to protect the family is to clear them out in one go.
Assault weapons might be a minority of all mass shootings but they are frequently used in spree killings. If we could reduce only the incidence of those killings, while not doing much for gang violence, that’s still a great benefit to society.
True. And as a cis man, I’d be totally on board with this. I don’t need or want a gun, and Americans in general, including me, would be safer if no men could carry guns.
You do realize that you are taking about residential areas of cities, must of whose residents aren’t members of gangs, right? I think i mentioned in another thread that when i used to regularly dance in a neighborhood next door to a neighborhood with a lot of gun violence, i followed them for a while. And a lot of the victims were people like an elementary school girl sitting in her living room doing her homework when a stray bullet went thru the wall and killed her.
“Spree” shooters aren’t usually ideologically motivated. “They were possessed by demons” carries as much explanatory power as anything else, in most cases.
Right wing extremists are a separate category, part of the ideological killers. The best numbers I’ve heard are that those are about 56% right wing, 21% islamist, and 21% left wing. (Leaving a few randos, with weird ideology.)
Only the right opposes refusing to enforce laws for illegally carrying firearms. I mean, there are dumb, excessive laws that are counter-productive. A man in my town lost his gun in the school auditorium. It seems to have slipped out of his pocket when he was there for a political event. (Town meeting, not a partisan event .) It was found by a random parent during a school music recital or something. Yes, it was a loaded gun just sitting between two seats in the auditorium.
There’s a mandatory minimum sentence of a year in prison, which resulted in the prosecutor dropping charges altogether, when a more sensible law would have allowed him to pay a fine and lose his license to carry, or something like that. And yes, an urban Black man might have ended up in prison for a year. But that’s not a “it applies to us”, issue, that’s an “it’s a stupid law” problem.
I disagree. Long arms are harder to conceal, and have more legitimate uses, like killing vermin (important for farmers), and hunting. And they are pretty decent for recreational shooting. I would support laws that restrict hand guns and magazine size, but don’t significantly restrict ownership of long guns.
Yup, that’s the bottom line. Kirk was arguing in bad faith.
By “high caliber” I meant assault weapons. Often on gun hobby forums the term “assault weapon” is verboten, but this was probably a clumsy choice of alternative.
Anyway, yes, I’d agree that a ban on handguns might make more sense than trying to ban rifles.
But I think assault weapons is the one that makes the most sense: the case for why they are needed is much weaker than other types of firearm.
Of course, one could argue that “need” is irrelevant, and they should be covered under 2A. But, by that token, why can I not buy grenades or bazookas at walmart? Why are my rights being infringed?
“Assault weapons” are perfect for hunting deer. Or for shooting the deer that are eating your crops. There’s a reason rural gun owners are annoyed by urban restrictions on them.
But you don’t need a large magazine for that. In fact, if you miss the first shot, the animal is probably gone.
Maybe true but that idea is wrong. A mass shooting is very simply shooting where a “mass” of people are shot. It has nothing to with the motivation of the shooter, whether they knew their victims, had a manifesto, etc. And the fact is mass shootings happen all the time in America, that’s a a huge god-damned problem, we should be taking about it.
If you want to come up with another term, like “spree shooting” to just describe events like Sandy Hook or Vegas Strip shootings, that’s all well and good.
But if some pro-gun talking head says we don’t have mass shootings all the time because the mass shootings listed involved brown people or a husband killing their family, they are lying.
I interpret Charlie Kirk’s words as simple racism. He’s trying to make it look like the major cause of gun violence in America is courtesy of “gang violence” which is code for black people (and others he doesn’t like such as any immigrants bearing sufficient melanin). So in his logic, take away the black people and undesirables and your gun problem goes away. I would not be surprised if he would present this as a solution to incel shootings as well, since the “gang members” won’t be stealing all the white women/jobs/opportunites any longer.
But supposing for some reason we wish to parse gun violence through the lens of Charlie Kirk’s racism (hey, look at that, it’s an alt-right version of critical race theory!), I still think there are too many gang shootings and too many incel shootings and they are both problems worth solving. However, I think both problems are difficult to solve without doing some difficult work on society itself. And both problems are pretty much impossible to solve while the USA is awash in a sea of assault weapons that are cheaper and more readily available than mental health treatment or any flavor of the American Dream that doesn’t involve shooting people.
You can buy these things but not at Walmart. A commercial product not being available absolutely everywhere isn’t an infringement. Walmart has no obligation to sell everything.
I wasn’t singling out walmart, it was a rhetorical device. My point was that it is extremely difficult to buy explosives and no-one seems to have a problem with that, because most people appreciate how dangerous the world would be if anyone could trivially buy devices that kill dozens of people. Thus illustrating the arbitrariness / absurdity of the popular interpretation of 2A.
Now, it’s good you have given me the chance to clarify on one point though, because I have been using the word “ban”. This was because I was responding to posts within that framing, discussing bans of X versus Y.
My opinion though, is that bans are largely unworkable at this time, but I would like to see assault weapons where grenades are today: really hard to get, requiring first long term ownership of smaller firearms with no evidence of irresponsible usage or storage, and no arrests / drug use / mental health issues in that time.
(And FTR it’s not merely that you need to go to another shop than walmart to buy grenades: there are required permits, fees and registration, both for the manufacturer and the buyer. Most manufacturers will not sell to private citizens)
And getting any firearm should require licensing. So I am talking about tiers of difficulty.
It’s not going to happen any time soon, but it’s more likely than an outright ban, and could be an acceptable middle ground for a country that may never give up its guns.
I can agree with this as long as the state isn’t forcing, pressuring or otherwise making it extremely onerous for something you have a right to own to be sold by commercial entities.
What “safe and practical use” does a handgun have? As best as i can tell, their only function is to kill people at medium-to-close range.
In contrast, the neighbors just used a lot of explosives to remove a giant rock on their property so they can build a patio and also get access to the rest of their back yard. That was safe and extremely practical. Okay, they hired experts to do the blasting, but my point remains. There are lots of useful and non-lethal things people do with explosives.