I don’t know anything about LR, though I did forget Baltimore and Memphis.
Also, the #1 source of gun violence: people killing themselves. Without guns, most of them would probably use another method. But still, mental health is something both the right and the left have near zero understanding of or will to fix.
I can’t Google it, but we had a case where a guy violating several paroles killed a kid at an ATM machine. He should have been serving 40 years from other violations. Last year a guy with a shotgun was forcing his way into homes and robbing the residents.
As long as those guys have access to firearms, I want it, too. 
Oh. You gun control guys should totally do that. You would double the number of gun owners within a month.
A moonshot?
A giant infrastructure plan, that brings tons and tons of manufacturing jobs to all the states that need them, especially for the non-college-educated males. And for all the hurting working class towns and cities, strategize and implement ways to restore a lost sense of community. Some of these people are angry, scared, even wounded, and its not much of a stretch to link some of the gun enthusiasm to displaced power needs. I think those measures would help. Getting them the help they need would then allow more rational discourse on guns.
Sure, but manufacturing jobs don’t come about in a vacuum; there has to be something to make, and somewhere to sell it… where you can compete with stuff made somewhere with cruddy labor laws and microscopic wages.
That’s the crux of that issue; short of direct subsidies to make uncompetitive industries competitive, governments can’t just hand-wave jobs into being.
Based on what I’ve seen, gun violence is frequently misconstrued. Not that it’s something we don’t need to worry about or remedy, but rather that people conflate the mass shootings with the larger epidemic of gun violence, when in fact, they’re very far apart socioeconomically.
The majority of gun deaths are by and within the black community- something like 55% of gun deaths and killers are black, which is only about 13% of the population as a whole.
So if I was going to decide where to spend my money for something like this, spending it on strategies to decrease it in the black community would be by far the best bang for the buck.
Okay, moon shot level?
You can start by downsizing that gigantic inefficient military of yours in order to pay for a decent healthcare system that includes mental health services under its proviso. Productivity in workforce and general happiness will go up, mass shootings go down. Seriously, other countries in the world have had boogeyman socialist healthcare for decades and they aren’t in ruins. Get over your world leader this world leader that capitalism is the truth unhinged tunnel vision exceptionalist crap. This is big, big, big. Funding healthcare with military dollars also has the added benefit of reducing the ‘heroes with guns’ attitude as I see it that has infected large parts of the political, law enforcement and entertainment industries.
-*But without our bloated military scary china will take over! Nobody will think we are tough! We won’t lead the world in truth, freedom or justice anymore!! SOCIALIST HEALTHCARE WILL BEGIN THE SPIRAL!!! *
**(Puh - Leeze. Ergh. The rest of the world looks down upon your healthcare system with derision, confusion and sadness and the overdrawn snake oil vending contract dominated money pit that is your military as terribly embarrassing.)
**
Second, scrap the current definition of arms in the constitution or perhaps the right altogether. Bandaid moment here people just do it. Make semi automatic rifles and pistols restricted - rural land owners in bear country can buy at a premium price semi auto rifles under permit, suburbanites cannot. Tough titties gun lobbyists you will need to profit elsewhere, big high capacity semis and pistols are just not needed in a civilized nation except under very narrow conditions.
-*But without a right to bear high powered guns at all times, we are going to surrender to the vast tyranny the rest of the 1st world currently suffers from!!
Third, initiate a gun buy back scheme the likes of which the world has never seen. It will cost billions but just do it. It has worked for other countries. Trade your semi auto in to the govt no questions asked for hard, hard cash. Not an overnite cure, but it starts the ball rolling and has fantastic results a few years down the track.
Fourthly, Public campaigns to deal with cry baby whinge lord gun nuts and their asinine straw man bulldust. Plaster the gun manufacturing industry in expensive red tape and watch it circle the drain pipe along with all of the ninja save ma home from drug addicts rubbish that your country is obsessed with. Grow up.
It would be more accurate to say that without a gun right to hand, many people would not attempt suicide because the impulse would die while in the planning stages, others would botch the plan because of how complicated it was, others would try and fail. Having a point-and-die machine right in your nightstand makes suicide an easy impulsive choice.
Many people who try and fail to commit suicide at some crisis point go on to be deeply grateful they failed.
Maybe for some. But “many”?
Among the western/first world countries of the world, high suicide rates include Lithuania (>2x the rate of the US; some guns), Latvia (quite a few), South Korea (2x, almost zero guns), Japan (zero), Poland (low), etc. They manage.
How about you adopt Chris Rock’s Bullet Control idea? Make it so expensive to buy enough bullets to have a massacre, that doing so alone is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that you’re about to go off the deep end and kill a lot of people.
“Oh shit, Bob just maxed out all his credit cards to buy 5.56 ammo! Call the SWAT team!”
Sigh, you start by poisoning the well, and falsely characterizing the issue. The issue is NOT "*gun *violence’ but violence. Period.
Gun control certainly is not in any way a solution as gun control in the uSA has never had a significant effect on violent crime.
You have to have a special license to purchase a machete, fertilizer, or a car? (in some areas yes, you do have to have a drivers license to buy a car, but in many you can BUY one and oWN one but not DRIVE one on public streets.)
Markers will do little.
The WW ONE rifle, the .303 Enfield, a bolt action rifle- can fire 30 rounds a minute. It is not semi-auto rifles that are causing mass shootings. They are just easier.
That’s called magic. Such a technology doesn’t exist. And yet CA and NJ are trying to legislate magic. And ballistics tracing is a pseudoscience that only exists in Hollywood. You can conclude that gun x probably fired y. You can’t narrow down to a particular model and cross-reference sales or any CSI carp like that.
You might remember Norway in particular. That was particularly bad because it was an enclosed area with minimal chance of escape. I think you’re right though, we have a problem that goes beyond availability of weapons.
No he didn’t. Highlighted that in particular, but not exclusively.
Part of the problem is that the gun violence is NOT evenly distributed. It’s heavily clustered in the black community- among black men in particular. The third graph on that page is extraordinarily telling.
This implies to me that as politically incorrect as it sounds, the problem lies very squarely with black men, not the legions of otherwise responsible gun owners. Figure out what about black men makes them dramatically more likely to murder or be murdered, and you have your solution.
If you’re willing to throw moonshot money around, I’d forget the gun and legalize all drugs. Start handing out opiates in precise doses and high quality and it should sharply cut the number of overdoses.
Cite to show that race is a biological trait please. Because the scientific consensus is that it is a myth, and purely a social construct (even if the effects are very real)
Unless you can provide evidence for this your argument fails to stand.
The evidence seems to better fit the argument that unequal treatment under the law, and systemic efforts like red lining due to the myth of race has limited African Americans economic opportunities and thus they may be more likely to enter the underground economies. Note that a huge portion of gun violence in the united states is drug related, where individuals to not have access to the normal legal system for the resolution of disputes, which leads to the use of violence in some cases.
But feel free to provide me with any cite that shows that being labeled ‘black’ means anything biologically. I am quite confident that you will find that the reason being ‘black’ infers anything is because the people who labeled you ‘black’ in the first place did so to through you under the bus.
Perhaps you’re unclear on the “moon shot” premise? The lack of such a technology in current existence isn’t exactly a hurdle, given the OP.
Well, I was with you until here. No question - excluding the white male mass shootings - black-on-black is the issue.
Skin colour is not the problem. Hundreds of years of discrimination, racism and lack of understanding are at the root of a clusterfuck of socioeconomic factors that lead to, say, a 16-year old kid on a street corner absent a social safety net with his gansta family, virtually no education, no training, no skills, no access to society, going home to a shared bedroom in a run down property with other children and one hopelessly overwhelmed parentally under-skilled adult.
I wasn’t trying to say something racist and imply that there’s something fundamentally wrong with black men biologically that makes them murderous, or that there’s something with their victims (also, overwhelmingly black) that makes them more prone to victimization.
What I was trying to get at is that some sort of blanket policy that hits the entire populace equally, or one group (say… gun owners) disproportionately isn’t going to be nearly as effective as trying to mitigate whatever it is within the black community that causes the undeniably higher murder and victim rate vs. the other racial/ethnic communities.
And you hit the nail on the head- it’s NOT a biological thing; it’s something within the black community- poverty, etc… But I would think the black community is large enough and not impoverished enough (about 25% vs. 15% in the nation as a whole) to account for that level of gun violence. There’s something else going on within that community, and I don’t know what it is. Honor culture? Glorification of violence? Acceptance of violence as a problem solving method? I sure don’t know.
But whatever it is, identifying it and mitigating it is where the government would do well to spend their money.
I think the middle class Black kid that tried to mug my Wife admired gangsters, burglars and dope dealers when he was a kid as I admired cowboys and astronauts.
After going to Boot Camp and swearing off a life of crime, “Never again!” on his Facebook page, he took up residential burglary. On parole for that, he assaulted a young woman and is now doing time for everything. From comments at the prison, he will do all of the time and try to learn how not to get caught.