Nothing!
The social costs of massive weapon proliferation should be paid for by a surcharge on weapon purchases. The amount would probably be many times the weapons cost.
Yet another “solution” that doesn’t have a chance in hell of happening. Republicans and gun fetishists will label it a “back door banning” and it will never even come up for a vote.
There would not be a problem for gun owners who followed safe procedures. No violation of the second at all.
Not sure how you can say that. You’re the one saying anyone carrying a gun should be shot. How is that not an infringement on the right to bear arms? You’re defining the entire right away as “unsafe”. Maybe it is, but I doubt any court or legislature will agree.
(Not even mentioning the inherent contradiction in the fact that the only way to shoot someone carrying a gun is to carry a gun yourself. I guess you assume some people will be authorized to do so, and everyone will easily be able to tell the right person carrying a gun from the wrong person?)
Outside of expected circumstances (on a shooting range, in the woods during hunting season) yes. That is, if you’re serious about curtailing gun violence.
The ridiculousness of the American gun problem is well illustrated by the extraordinary rate of gun violence and mass shootings in the US compared to all other developed countries, and the casualness with which guns are treated. The story below is a good counterexample of how guns are treated in civilized countries. Just today in Toronto a man was reported walking through a neighbourhood with a rifle. Police received multiple 911 calls and converged on the scene. The man was arrested, and meanwhile four schools in the area went into lockdown. This is how it’s done if you want to control gun violence.
I’m not a big fan of open carry, but more because I think it’s stupid than that it should necessarily be illegal. As you point out, you’re mostly just endangering yourself. It’s not any more difficult to draw and fire a concealed weapon than an open one, and it means you’re not a target for every criminal and wannabe badass you run into.
Anyway, I’m not really coming at this from a conservative, right wing direction. I hold a very dim view of police, and I think their habit of shooting everyone with an object in their hand because it “might have been a gun” is open murder. And I think when they shoot someone simply for having a gun, which they do often and get away with it, that’s murder too. People are allowed to have guns. It’s not a crime or a threat to possess one. You start aiming it at people, then you’re a threat to be stopped immediately.
But the only people who can stop a guy with a gun is a guy with a gun. I’m not going to say “good guys” and “bad guys” here because we both know that’s bullshit. A lot of times, it’s the bad guys shooting themselves that stops it. Or maybe they just decide to stop and turn themselves in. And I suppose it is possible to disarm a heavily armed individual by hand or with a knife or club. But it’s a suicidal long shot every time. No, basically the only way to stop a gunman who isn’t stopping himself is to shoot him, or worse I guess if you have easy access to heavy artillery or bombs. But the vast majority of the time, it’s going to be a guy with a gun.
We’ve already established I generally think cops are bad. Not as bad as mass child murderers, obviously, most of the time, but they are overly violent, controlling, enforcing bad laws poorly and with great prejudice. But worse, for the purposes of this discussion, they’re poorly trained. Whether in marksmanship, weapons handling, rules of engagement, they’re just the lowest common denominator, at best. Probably every gun owner I know (which isn’t a whole lot, admittedly, I don’t run in those circles) would be better suited to protecting people from crime. Police are generally the people I trust least with firearms.
So I just find it baffling when people argue on the one hand that guns are far too dangerous to trust people to carry, and on the other that the way to fix the problem is to sic a million poorly trained, heavily armed and violently indoctrinated police on any innocent person who happens to have a gun, or something that might look like one.
That’s easy in a country that doesn’t already have half a billion guns and a second amendment protecting them. Or a heavily militarized police force that has been widely and deeply infiltrated by white supremacists for generations at this point. You really want to send that gang after anyone possessing a gun in a country with half a billion of them? Talk about oppression. That would make the drug war look like a utopia.
It’s not really all that easy. There are lots of gun nuts in Canada, but fortunately for the rest of us, not enough of them, and no powerful lobby for gun fetishists.
The police in the US are militarized only because so much of the population is also literally militarized with military-type weapons. It’s also why traffic stops can result in deadly shootings – by either side. Because guns are everywhere. The place is getting to be a war zone.
The example I gave illustrates in broad terms the ways guns are handled in every other developed country on the planet outside of the US. Every single one. It’s not unique to Canada. It’s a model that the US needs to work towards, even if it’s not fully achieved. The Second Amendment is an outrageous anachronism but even so, it need not be an obstacle at all to strong gun control. The main legal issues right now are the ridiculous misinterpretations of it (e.g.- Heller) by some of the far-right lunatics installed on the Supreme Court. It’s likely to get worse before it gets better. You have to think of gun policy reform as a multi-generational long game.
Next rightwing talking point: It’s those greedy teachers unions that are preventing us from protecting out kids.
From a Republican point of view financial burden on the schools is a feature of the plan not a bug.
More money drained → worse schools → less educated populace → more Republican voters.
I’m sure you’re correct. But I think you might have cause and effect backwards. Those countries don’t want guns. So they don’t use them, and are afraid if they see one. Americans want guns, and aren’t afraid to see one. The difference in regulation schemes is a symptom of that more fundamental difference, not the cause of it.
And “developed countries” always sounds like cherry picking to me. Can you define it? Why do you think it’s relevant to the question? Does this not work in undeveloped countries? Or is your definition of developed country “one who makes guns difficult to obtain and illegal to carry”?
Oh I’ve already seen that one
I think ‘developed countries’ have so many concrete and quantifiable similarities to our country that we can fairly safely assume that many sociological differences come down to priorities.
The US and other developed nations can, effectively do almost anything they want. It comes down to values and political will. Haiti, OTOH, struggles with basic infrastructure. Many countries on the African continent struggle with clean drinking water, sustenance levels of nutrition, and transportation/communication infrastructure – not to mention health care and primary education.
When you try to understand how desperately poor people live, you have to immediately and powerfully consider privation – their lack of choices.
So … how is X done … how does it play out … what are its measurable results … in a country that has the resources and the options that ours has … is a fair question to ask.
Comparing societal elements with countries whose GDP equates to $1-2/day per capita, and whose political systems are marked by civil wars and political coups … doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – particularly on this issue.
Where warlords are the de facto government and there is no rule of law to speak of … where daily life comprises tribal and/or civil war … where the corruption is at the top of every such list … what the people want doesn’t matter all that much.
It should matter more in our country, but it gets a lot worse in others.
Like the affluent in the US, the US itself has options that other nations simply don’t have.
Why do American cops kill so many compared to European cops?
Not saying this is relevant to the Uvalde tragedy, but we Americans have a bad basic rule there.
What does that mean, though? Many other developed countries have high rates of gun ownership, though none as high as in the US. The US has on average about 1.2 civilian guns per person, whereas Canada, Finland and Iceland have about 1 civilian gun for every 3 persons, New Zealand and Sweden about 1 per 4, France and Germany about 1 per 5.
Those differences aren’t really that huge, especially if you consider that the increasing number of guns per person in the US in the last few decades has coincided with increasing concentration of guns in a smaller percentage of American households.
I don’t think you can really validly say that as a nation, “Americans want guns” while “Canadians don’t want guns”, for example. About 26% of Canadian households own guns compared to somewhere between 37% and 42% of US households. That doesn’t qualify as “we want” versus “they don’t want”.
It’s just that there’s a very vocal minority of Americans that really really really want lots of guns in an extremely unregulated way.
Or it leads to shooting to kill because otherwise you’ll be seen as a bad shot, or a violator of departmental policy.
The psychology here could go different ways, and I don’t have any proof the way in Spain is better than the American way. I do find it questionable how super-sure American police trainers are that their way is the only reasonable one.
If the JR-15 is a giant spoof, it’s a pretty thorough one, since it’s been trademarked.
These are all problems right here in the US. Maybe that’s the problem, and not a lack of heavy enough discipline meted out by the guys with tanks and machine guns?
If anyone had asked me my proposed solution to gun crime, that’s what I’d say. End the drug war, and most other laws that encourage black markets, create a strong economic safety net so people don’t have to join gangs to make a living or afford their kids’ shots, and that alone would drop gun crime like a rock. It wouldn’t do much for school massacres, but as terrible as they are, I think they’re a fad, as I said before.
How did we stop serial killers and postal shootings in the 70s and 80s? We didn’t, really. Those crimes just stopped being cool among the violent, unhinged fringes of society, and they moved on to other shocking crimes instead, like the bombings which got somewhat popular in the 90s. School shootings are having their day now. Eventually they’ll be old hat.
My newspaper printed an op-ed today by criminologists studying these things. (James Densley and Jillian Peterson of Metropolitan State University and Hamline University respectively. Both in Minnesota, not sure of their reputation.)
They define “mass public shooting” as one where four or more people are murdered, at least one of those in a public place, and with no connection to some other underlying crime, like a drug deal gone bad or a gang war. By that definition there have been 13 mass public shootings since 1966, in which 146 people were killed and “at least” 182 injured. I don’t know how accurate those numbers are, but if they’re close, I don’t see how they justify a massive increase in the law enforcement and prison apparatus in this country.
They end the editorial with this:
Inspired by past school shooters, some perpetrators are seeking fame and notoriety. However, most school shooters are motivated by a generalized anger. Their path to violence involves self-hate and despair turned outward at the world, and our research finds they often communicate their intent to do harm in advance as a final, desperate cry for help. The key to stopping these tragedies is for society to be alert to these warning signs and to act on them immediately.
It’s vague and suggests no action items, but I think they’re headed more in the right direction than the folks asking for heavy militarized enforcement of average, peaceful people who just happen to own a gun. This is a public health and specifically a public mental health problem. (And do not take that as “mentally ill people shouldn’t own guns.” That’s crazy, but apparently a popular idea.) Public health is a big part of that “strong safety net” I mentioned earlier. People, especially poor people, are desperate and seriously traumatized at high and increasing rates. That’s the problem we should be pumping money into.
You and I are overwhelmingly in violent agreement.
I just offered a thought on why it isn’t inherently cherry-picking to compare ourselves to ‘developed economies’ on societal issues like this one 
Note last sentence:
I now see it is, as you and DavidNRockies correctly point out, more than a parody advertisement. And if the libs were owned, so were some gun culturists.
But I can’t find anyone selling it. And I came up empty doing a search for the supposed patent.
HOWEVER, if the JR-15 is eventually sold as described, it would NOT be the deadliest gun designed for use by children. Googling finds a widely sold Ruger Youth 10/22 Compact semi-automatic rifle that seems comparable to the JR-15 except for not having the supposedly patented tamper resistent safety.
P.S. If the patented tamper resistent safety was really good, stores that sold them could experience a boycott as happenned with smart guns. Wild speculation is that inept JR-15 marketeers, of a product not ready for commericalization, deliberately picked an own-the-libs advertising theme to balance how the satety feature would look to gun purists
This reminded me of something I saw many years ago…not directly on point but definitely showed a different police culture. I was in Amsterdam, it was pretty late at night. I witnessed a group of drunk foreigners (they sounded German, maybe 3-4) who surrounded a police car with police inside, starting pushing/rocking the car, and hollering, and taunting the police. They eventually stopped and walked on laughing. The police drove away. That was it.
I think about that police encounter often.
This is nonsense. We still have several postal-workplace shootings per decade in the US, although not quite as many as in the 1990s. Similarly, we still have active serial killers throughout the US.
We haven’t “stopped” any of this, and it most certainly hasn’t “stopped being cool” among violent criminals. It’s the media frenzy about such crimes that is now considered a bit old-fashioned and uninteresting, not the actual commission of such crimes.
Sure, someday the popular media will get similarly tired of having frenzies about school shootings. But if you think that that means that school shootings will stop happening, you’re kidding yourself.
I’ll take that proposal seriously when anti-gun-control conservative politicians actually start proposing and funding any such “money-pumping” into the public well-being. Until then, it ranks with “thoughts and prayers” and all the other distraction techniques attempting to deflect attention from better gun regulation.