Is this really the argument you want to try and defend? Equating guns with books?
> It is trivially easy for a criminal to get a gun, ev
a) A gun buyback program would mean anyone wanting to sell a gun could do so legally, removing the need to sell to someone else.
b) Register every gun. And the gun’s registered owner is required to pay an annual registration fee for each gun. If the gun owner or gun store / trade show etc. sells the gun to someone without transferring the gun’s registration, they’re still on the hook for the registration fee. If the gun is sold without transferring the registration - and registration requires proof of an address, utility bills in person’s name, and proof of insurance - and the new owner commits a crime with the gun, the registered owner is subject to additional penalties. Add a 40%+ federal + state tax on gun sales.
Owning a gun should be significantly harder and more expensive than owning a car.
You need to get fingerprinted to work in some finance jobs, FFS.
The people who want safety from guns shouldn’t be required to invent an impossible way to control guns, just to satisfy your desire to continue owning guns.
So if Alabama puts a 1000% tax on abortions, you are going to be okay with that and think it is constitutional, right? Or would the Supreme Court just be pulling something out of its ass if it struck down that law?
It simply amazes me that so many people on this board would gladly give away a right protected by the Bill of Rights for some magical feeling of safety that somehow by banning guns these people will just stop doing this.
I think we should just outlaw the internet and TV news so they quit getting the idea to shoot up places.
“should” has got nothing to do with it. You don’t have the votes to adopt your preferred policy and ignore the desires of pro-gun folks. You can accept that reality and work within it to achieve (some of) your goals, or you can stomp your feet and throw a fit and say ‘we shouldn’t have to’, but only one of those courses of actions is likely to lead to the sort of progress you apparently want to see.
Did you miss the part where I’m being asked to create an impossible thing? It is impossible to keep guns away from people who “shouldn’t have them” and let everyone else have them. It is not possible to do. There is no “reality” to accept there, it cannot be done. The pro-gun folks want gun control that is impossible to implement, which means they don’t want gun control at all.
Fine, but don’t fucking pretend that you would accept the right kind of gun control, but the meanie gun grabbers won’t propose it.
Any one with the desire to take away something (anything), especially a right enshrined in the Constitution, should be the one who has the burden put upon them to not only make it better, but to alleviate any potential problems without undue burden on the law abiding.
There have been (and still are) plenty of things for you to do in regards to them scary guns that you DO NOT DO, DO NOT PROPOSE, and DO NOT LEGISLATE.
Fix the crazy.
Fix the poor.
Guns are NOT the disease you seem to think they are. Hell, they aren’t even a symptom.
The crazy is currently occupying the White House and he’s blasting his crazy out on a daily basis creating more of these monsters all the time. How do we fix that right now?
Republicans don’t want to help the poor, so that’s a non-starter.
Any other ideas? For some reason we are the only country that seems to have this problem. Every other country has mentally ill people, every other country has poor people, yet only we have this particular problem. Why do you suppose that is?
Why don’t you give us the whole freakin’ list of everything else in the world that has to be fixed before you are willing to discuss gun control…if you are willing to discuss it at all?
No one has said they didn’t want to discuss gun control. What isn’t up for discussion is the banning of a Constitutional right.
If such gun control was well thought out, knowledgeable and didn’t harm the law abiding (and usually do nothing to the criminal), I’d be on board.
Airbeck,
I can’t speak for Republicans, but this conservative certainly wants to help the poor.
What I can’t abide though is creating a reliance on momma government to feed, house and support an entire strata of people simply because.
If there is a need, let’s fill it. Currently the way our safety net is structured, it creates reliance, and not on whom it should be on, the self.
I don’t think this is true. Show me numbers that this reliance is getting worse. I’ve asked for cites on this before without anything being offered. I think this is just GOP fear mongering and othering of poor people in an effort to slash the safety net just because they want more tax cuts. Where is the data that this is not only a big problem, but that its getting worse and is something we must address right now. I’m open to being convinced, but so far I’ve seen not a single piece of data that shows that this is actually a problem.
Also can you cite one piece of legislation that Republicans voted for with the purpose of helping the poor? Just one thing, and it doesn’t have to be GOP initiated, it could be a Democratic bill that more than a couple Republicans voted for. It should be hard to find one example of the GOP actually doing something to help the poor. I know you said you can’t speak for the Republicans, but it sure doesn’t seem to me like anything conservatives are interested in actually doing anything about.
We propose mental health solutions, we propose programs to alleviate poverty, and those are fought against by the same people who fight to keep guns in the hands of crazy people.
So, how about this, either you get on board with helping us to help the poor and the mentally unwell, or you stop trying to claim that we are the ones holding those up.
Seems that your solution to those problems has just been MOAR GUNS as well.
Funny how you guys always deflect from guns, want to talk about anything but guns, but then also refuse to follow through on the proposals that you think would be effective.
The only one I ever see who actually stands behind his proposal is DrDeth, with his desire to turn any gun debate into a call to repeal the first amendment, the rest of you make proposals that you would never actually support.
It’s more real now than it has been in the past - when people say they don’t want guns banned, or they respect just the 2nd amendment, that pretense is no longer viable because it’s quite obvious that gun advocates simply want murder, terrorism, and every other thing they can get away with.
Late to the thread, so apologies for repeating anything already said. My 2¢:
Neil deGrasse Tyson caught hell for pointing out that gun slaughters are statistically a very minor cause of death and for saying “Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.”
It does occur to me that gun deaths are different in one respect: they were on someone’s part deliberate. People will accept an astonishingly high rate of death from accidental causes- automobiles are proof of that. But one anonymous asshole poisoning bottles of Tylenol led to an uproar that completely changed how products were packaged. When people say they want to be safe, they primarily mean “from other people”.
“Gun Control” really means “gun ownership control”. It unavoidably means forbidding people from owning weapons because of what they might do with them. And legally/constitutionally that mean “no one should own a gun, or some kinds of guns, unless lawmakers (and by passive acquiescence, the voters) agree it’s OK to let them”. Gun control debates should be honest about this.
Libertarians believe that yes guns are for everybody, including those “others”. It demands that level of non-hypocrisy.
You are looking at it the wrong way. The numbers of deaths are probably not going to be major factors, to be honest. Think about it for a minute. For decades, people smoked like chimneys. Literally hundreds of thousands of Americans died from this…every year. Year after year. Decade after decade. Despite being told it WOULD kill a lot of folks, they continued to do it because they wanted too. Same goes for alcohol. Basically, the public (any public, not just Americans) are tolerant of some level of avoidable deaths for something they really want, whatever that might be. Until they aren’t. You see the change in attitude wrt tobacco today. It’s been a long, slow progression, but society has changed it’s collective stance on tobacco use over the past 4 decades. When I started work, people smoked in their offices, in their cubicles, at the water fountain, in conferences, in restaurants and on planes. Today, almost all of those are completely forbidden. You can’t even smoke at most bars today. And I think we aren’t at the end of that trend yet. I expect that, eventually, smokers will be down to only being able to smoke in their own homes…and maybe not even there.
What needs to happen is for a real shift in attitude of the majority of the American people and their view of guns and gun ownership to happen. Pointing out that X number of people die each year, either from regular murder or from these gun massacres isn’t going to shift that attitude, IMHO. For one thing, it’s been done to death. I’ve been hearing about how guns are bad and about the slaughter for as long as I can remember. The public is nearly as numb to this repeated and strident argument as they are to the gun violence itself. Pointing it on, yet again, and going through your list, yet again, will, IMHO, only reach the folks who already agree with you, not the folks who still think the right to keep and bear arms is worth the price we collectively pay wrt (possibly) avoidable deaths.
As I’ve said in the past and will continue to say in the future is what we need is a change in attitude towards gun ownership by the majority of the voting population. And I think it’s already happening. It’s just not happening fast enough for most of you. But the wheels of change grind very slowly…until they don’t. If you actually look back at gun ownership in the US, I think that today we are at an all time low wrt percentage of households who have a gun. And that figure, at least from my own recollection, continues to fall…and would probably fall faster except for folks who are trying to snatch those guns up before the public is ready to give them up on their own. Without banning tobacco we have a huge reduction in it’s use…and that’s pretty much voluntarily by the public. That’s what you need to have happen, attitude wise, for serious gun control to be a thing. Try and take something from someone and they will resist you and fight you. Get them to voluntarily give it up and you won’t have to fight anyone.