President says ‘epidemic of gun violence is tearing our communities apart’ after mass shootings in Philadelphia, Fort Worth, Baltimore and Chicago
According to the Gun Violence Archive, 21,782 Americans have been killed in shootings halfway through 2023.
I know that’s not 100% mass shootings, but that’s still a stunningly bleak number. Rounding up from the .97 that’s five human lives every hour of 2023 up to July.
That’s the price we pay for freedom.
/s
That’s a fucked up amount of people damn
Shaping up to outpace automobile deaths. Not to imply that our rate of automobile deaths isn’t also totally unacceptable, especially compared to peer nations…
It’s bad, but after watching over a million Americans die of COVID while (seemingly) half or more of the country refused to take - or often even acknowledge - the most basic of preventative measures… Well, I just don’t know any longer.
Shootings are far less deadly, and that’s a much more murky subject as there are plenty of justifiable reasons to own a gun. You also have to wonder how many deaths are Darwin Awards, or justified self defense… It’s just an incredibly complicated subject compared to “hey guys, let’s wear masks.”
How much of that is suicide?
Is there an acceptable figure?
Try the other way around: how much gun control would impact in the total suicide number?
Look at what happened when England reduced CO access by switching from coal gas to natural gas.
Over time, as the carbon monoxide in gas decreased, suicides also decreased (Kreitman 1976). Suicides by carbon monoxide decreased dramatically, while suicides by other methods increased a small amount, resulting in a net decrease in overall suicides, particularly among females.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/saves-lives/
Suicide is often a matter of convenience. If it’s harder to kill yourself, many people are less likely to do it. I suspect reducing access to guns would reduce suicides just like it did with coal gas.
This article is about assault weapon bans, which are not exactly the go-to for suicide.
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This is the sad reality. Gun violence is generally committed by sick people. Similarly, I saw this chart a few years back on Australian gun/knife violence. The plots are mirrored. Violence is sort of static.
That plot is in percentage. Of course violence is static. Because 100% of homicides are violent. Let’s see total number of homicides per year.
Edit: To clarify, if gun and non-knife homicides dropped to zero, and knife homicides dropped to one, that plot would show knife homicides skyrocket to 100%. The plot isn’t demonstrating the trend you think it is.
It’s much more likely to survive a stabbing than to survive a shooting.
“A new Johns Hopkins Medicine analysis of national trauma data shows that trauma patients were four times more likely to die from gunshot wounds and nearly nine times more likely to die from stab wounds before getting to a trauma center in 2014, compared with rates in 2007.”
That doesn’t mean what you think it means. You are not twice as likely to die form a stab wound, if you are treated quickly fort a stab wound you are much more likely to survive compared to a gunshot wound. You need to look at the incidence of death percentages:
“(Gunshot wound: early, 2.0% vs. late, 4.9%; Stab wound: early, 0.2% vs. late, 1.1%)”
So a stab wound if treated early has a 0.2% chance of death compared to a gunshot wound which has a 2% chance of death, meaning gunshots are 10 times as deadly. Under late treatment its 1% chance of death for stab wounds, and 4% for gunshots, so gunshots are 4 times as deadly.
Even late treated stab wounds are half as deadly as early treated gunshots. Gunshots are far more deadly than stabbings.
The loser of a knife fight dies in the street, the winner dies in the hospital.
I don’t recall the origin of that or whether that’s the exact wording but the general idea at least has stuck with me.
If you run away from a guy with a knife, you have to outrun the knife-wielder. If you run away from a guy with a gun, you have to outrun the bullet.
About half, it was 54% in 2021. The problem with an assault weapons ban is it will do almost nothing to gun violence. More people are murdered with hammers every year then with ar15s. The vast majority of US gun violence is performed with regular pistols.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
If they actually cared about the problem instead of just publicity, then they would look at banning pistols of all magazine capacities instead of rifles. If they wanted to do something acceptable for both sides of the aisle that could eliminate up to 40% of gun violence, they would prohibit people with domestic abuse charges from owning firearms. (See The Problem with Jon Stewart).
Or they could address the core problems facing people at the bottom of the economic scale, like hunger and mental health amd healthcare, the problems that make them desperate and emotional. Banning guns to prevent murder is akin to banning alcohol to prevent drunk driving. It works, but it hinders the majority of law abiding citizens all because a small percent of people misuse it.
The sad truth is they dgaf. So they do publicity shit like this that doesn’t matter.
Those numbers are intentionally misleading, they are using people that killed themselves to prop up the numbers. It’s disgusting.
And those shouldn’t count? Do you have any idea how much easy access to guns increases suicides? Many, many suicidal people would still be alive without the easy access to guns in the US. It’s one of the easiest and painless ways to kill yourself.
Things like suicide are far more related to a lack mental healthcare and the stigma around getting help than weather or not people are allowed to own firearms. Not everyone has those kinds of problems. An assault weapons ban is certainly unrelated to those seeking self-harm and most crime.
Look at suicide rates in England when they switched from coal gas to natural gas. “Sticking your head in the oven” was an incredibly accessible and effective way to kill yourself.
When coal gas was taken away, all suicides dropped.
Over time, as the carbon monoxide in gas decreased, suicides also decreased (Kreitman 1976). Suicides by carbon monoxide decreased dramatically, while suicides by other methods increased a small amount, resulting in a net decrease in overall suicides, particularly among females.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/saves-lives/
Since gas ovens are still commonplace around the world and not a major suicide device, maybe were just looking at simple correlation specific to a time and place. Just like school shootings in the US are a terrible trend, suicide by oven may have been a terrible trend in England. I don’t disagree that the net effect of removing the popular tool can be significant, I definitely question if a similar result can be relied upon. Removing the gas may have just been a wake up or societal redirect that happily resulted in fewer suicides.
Coal gas, as in “artificial gas” (as opposed to natural gas) is no longer used in residential environments basically anywhere. It’s literally 50% carbon monoxide and much more toxic than natural gas which is what modern ovens use.
It is impossible to kill yourself with coal gas if you don’t have access to it. People can and do still kill themselves with carbon monoxide by leaving their cars on in a closed space, but that takes more time and effort and people have time to contemplate their decision and change their mind. This is a good thing.
Also, I’m not sure I understand your point about it being a trend. The data shows that total suicides dropped, not just suicide by oven.
What came first, the chicken or the egg? Meaningless semantics; both are at play when it comes to someone that is suicidal. But I can assure you, suicide rates would be positively (downward trend) impacted by any sort of gun ban. I am speaking as person who has been suicidal. If I had had access to guns at certain points in my past, I likely wouldn’t be here today.
Glad you’re here, and I’m glad you’re in a better place. Take good care of yourself.
Thank you. :)
K, not everyone has those kinds of problems and a ban would prevent everyone from owning a gun. That would be a bit like banning booze or cars because some people are drunk drivers.
Banning guns won’t get anyone any treatment which seems vastly more important than prevent one kind of means some people may or may not seek out on their own.
why are you framing the conversation as if folks are deciding between better mental healthcare or getting rid of guns, when the conversation is about getting rid of guns or not getting rid of guns
are you misrepresenting what the conversation is actually about for a specific reason?
If you think there’s any real conversation around “getting rid of guns” you are simply engaging in fantasy.
There will be no “getting rid of guns” in any of our lifetimes in the USA. Our rights to bear arms are practically set in stone with multiple SC precedents confirming the individual right that the Constitution gives us, and recent additional precedents show the sitting court interprets the legality of limiting those rights as an extremely narrow thing.
Even if all the above were not the case, the simple logistics of the matter are that we have 400 million guns in private hands, mostly unregistered, distributed across the USA. People will simply keep them no matter what you or the government tells them.
Not sure which part of “if you don’t have access to a gun, then you literally can not shoot yourself” isn’t connecting in your mind, but it is interesting to me that it’s almost like people subconsciously fight themselves to avoid arriving there.
England saw a decrease in suicide rates in the '60s & '70s last century when the levels of carbon monoxide in the natural gas supply were reduced. As a result of this change, people stopped being able to easily commit suicide by sticking their head in the unlit oven and turning it on.
It’s not like these people were institutionalized and physically prevented from harming themselves. Making means of suicide too really available seems to allow people to kill themselves who otherwise would not attempt it.
Reducing access to guns- besides the obvious decrease in homicides - will likely cause a noteworthy reduction in suicide, too.
a gun makes it incredibly easy to end someone, including yourself. It takes the killing out of killing and I can promise you that makes a massive difference to the number of both killings and suicides.
So we ban pain killers too? Cleaning chemicals? Rat poison?
The gun didn’t make you kill yourself. Not getting help killed you. Stop chasing the guns, they aren’t the the problem. The problem is that so many people see them as a solution and they need help.
I am so tired of seeing this braindead take being used as any sort of “gotcha”.
try to travel a bit, see the world.
One can do both.
A new assault weapon ban, while ultimately not a cure, would at least stem the tide until real effective change can be enacted.
We’ll never fix our problems all at once, in grand sweeping actions. It comes in steps, which takes time. We just need to not destroy ourselves in the mean time.
Of course, that also means actually enacting that slow change, and not just paying lip service as a distraction from issues that are happening now.
My main point about an AWB in relation to suicides was more that people aren’t using those kinds of weapons for suicide. The kind weapons these laws are trying to describe aren’t even commonly used in crimes. The main reason they’re talking about assault weapons now days is because targeting handguns first kinda stalled. That and the marketing works better for them.
There are things they could do that would be effective but it would be other left wing policies that would address root causes. The issue with that is those things seem to be even more of a lip service thing and it’s kinda hard to bumper sticker that shit.
So you agree it’s mostly political theater, on both sides? All the proponents of “gun rights” are just as pointless and theatrical as the gun bans they oppose? That coming out, guns blazing (as it were) against these measures is just another way to stir up an uninformed and apathetic base to action against the “liberal elite”?
Most of these measures are relatively toothless anyways, they affect tiny portions of the population, most of which just won’t be able to purchase new weapons of that style, at least until the gun manufacturers find loopholes, as they always do.
There is political theater going on but with gun control laws they’re not going to even stick due to lawsuits. Effectiveness is questionable as well.
The laws do not affect a tiny portion of people though. Lots of weapons that fall under the idea of an assault weapons ban are extremely popular and common. Then such laws would affect future buyers including people who do not have the opportunity to buy something now or didn’t think to. Definitely a problem for someone a decade from now who was too young or wasn’t into firearms yet. Like that the whole point of the ban right? Stopping people from being able to own something.
The “loopholes” aren’t. They’re just making something that is in compliance. The problem is they don’t know how to define what they want to ban and the ban isn’t actually effective for the results they claim.
48.8k people died from gun deaths last year. 54% were suicides, 43% murders, 3% other Of those murders, 3% were with a rifle. (Source was pew research)
630 rifle deaths out of 48.8k
All an assault weapon ban will do is make felons out of otherwise law abiding gun enthusiasts, and chip away at a right guaranteed in our constitution.
Nearly 50k deaths is tragic. We do need to do something about it. But banning guns does not fix the mental health issues, the income disparity, or the lack of education and social services in predominantly black or Hispanic neighborhoods, which contribute to these violent behaviors in our society.
And if you’re only concerned about the deaths, consider how drug overdoses outnumber gun deaths by more than 2:1. Maybe we should make drugs illegal instead. Wait…
There have been less than 15 mass shootings since 2012 in the US where the shooter used an “assault rifle”. An “assult weapons” ban wouldn’t stem the tide at all. This proposed law would be like banning semi trucks because a few drunk driving incidents involved a drunk semi driver.
It stemmed the tide back in the nineties, before it was repealed in the last decade.
But that’s honestly beside the point. Because everyone seems to just be against any kind of legal action against firearms, but most opponents of these measures can only point at vague options regarding “mental health” as an alternative… then balk at supporting any measures resembling it.
It’s a dogwhistle that is frankly a tired ploy for populist politicians to throw at their base to distract them from real issues.
We must fight against the “evil” gun bans because if we don’t fight against that, people might recognize how shit we are at our jobs and actually do something about it!
As I stated in my comment, I know it’s not a cure. It’s not even a very good stopgap. But at least it’s fucking something. Which is more than can be said than by all the people whinging about “constitutional rights”.
Why do pro gun Republicans always use mental health as an alternative reason for excessive firearm suicide rates, and then are nowhere to be heard from when someone proposes universal mental health access.
I’m a pro-gun leftist but, yeah, a lack of mental healthcare is an obvious issue when talking about mental health problems. There is absolutely no rational way for you to claim intentional suicide isn’t a mental health issue.
If the issue was just guns existing you’d quickly be able to pass any gun laws you wanted due to the lack of gun owners. Plenty of people do not have mental health problems that would require them to be disarmed. No one is getting any treatment just because a gun ban got passed.
What I don’t get is why Democrats don’t call their bluff and try to create public healthcare options with the stated goal of preventing violence and issues related to mental health.
Explain why they don’t count as gun deaths please.
Gun deaths aren’t the number that’s important. Homicides are
If one of my family or friends shot themself or was shot due to the negligence of a “responsible gun owner”, I would consider that important.
Accidents are different than intentional suicide.
Does it matter that Kurt contain shot himself in the head any more than layne Staley OD’d on heroin? No, it doesn’t.
Take the shotgun away and contain would just find another way to kill himself
I’d say that the immediate effectiveness of a shotgun blast to the head means that suicide by firearm is harder to save someone from than from an overdose. Narcan is ineffective against buckshot.
You’re missing the point. He wanted to die. He will find a way. You can ‘save’ him only so many times before he succeeds.
Also, if someone wants to die, who are you to tell them they aren’t allowed?
What’s important isn’t up to you to decide. A gun death is a gun death. They ALL count.
I think the main reason that some people are against counting suicides and accidental deaths is because it puts the lie to the narrative of the responsible gun owner.
Every time someone shoots themself in the head, or a toddler shoots a sibling, it’s because of an irresponsible gun owner. Usually an irresponsible gun owner that considered themself to be a responsible gun owner.
And every gun owner considers themself to be a responsible gun owner.
Everyone is a responsible gun owner until they aren’t. It’s all anecdotal. Just like how every time there’s a news story about a person that went psycho and murdered their family- there’s always an interview with a neighbor that says they were the most mellow person they ever knew.
ALL gun owners think they’re the responsible one, and the bad one are irresponsible. It’s how they’re able to rationalize the ideology that guns are good.
Personally, as someone who thinks guns can be dangerous to everyone in anyone’s hands (even the most experienced and safe can have a heart attack or find themselves in some other situation where being safe with their gun might suddenly be lower on the priority list than others around you might like it to be), I don’t like including suicides in that stat because it makes it easier to disqualify.
It’s just the way our minds work. If one has a position they believe in and some conflicting information comes up, unless they want to believe otherwise, they’ll latch on to any angle they can to disqualify it.
Including suicides makes the stat very easy to disqualify. They can be painful but they aren’t scary and don’t seem random when they aren’t close to home, plus that whole line of thought that they’d just find another way if they didn’t have guns.
Though, also personally, I don’t see why accidental gun deaths should be disqualified. If anything, they are worse than deliberate murders and assaults, because that “find another way” argument applies to deliberate attacks but doesn’t to accidental shootings. Accidental shootings are 100% “the only reason anyone died here was because there was a gun present”.
I don’t like preemptively weakening my position based on what I expect unreasonable people to do. If someone wants to talk about how they think suicides don’t count, I’ll be happy to have a conversation about why they think someone who kills themself with a gun is a responsible gun owner.
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Suicides aren’t avoidable in the same way as gang bangers shooting each other in the streets
My dogs are howling like they heard something. Funny, I didn’t hear anything.
Just because you want to take guns away from black people doesn’t mean you need to attack me
Suicide is not what first comes to mind when someone talks about gun violence or shootings. Nobody said they don’t count - just that it’s misleading.
It isn’t misleading at all. A gun death is a gun death to anyone who doesn’t have a bias.
It’s just many of those deaths probably would have occurred anyways wether there is a gun ban or not.
There are lots of ways to commit suicide, guns are just convenient. Now some of those deaths probably wouldn’t have happened because they may be spur of the moment decisions in a dark period, but many still would have.
Not like the deaths of children who find their parents gun in the closet or the deaths of 5+ people in a grocery store with an automatic weapon.
While it’s true that some of the people that kill themselves with a gun would find other ways, the majority wouldn’t. MOST suicides are spur of the moment, and having quick access to a deadly weapon makes those attempts far more successful. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/06/handgun-ownership-associated-with-much-higher-suicide-risk.html
Damn you’re cold. That’s 21,782 people’s lives we’ll never get back. Just this year. And we’re going to sit here debating whether their life is worth including.
No empathy like conservative empathy.
These disingenuous folks will tell you these folks would’ve killed themselves anyways, but they say nothing about the fact that most people kill themselves over financial or medical hardship while they shrink the social safety net to be just big enough to catch CEOs with golden parachutes.
Bias? The point is that you’re not as likely to just be randomly shot at the street as those statistics might make it to seem.
For me, it’s not about fear it’s about empathy. Seeing that number I didn’t think “oh no I’m going to get shot.” I thought, “that’s a lot of lives lost and families and friends impacted for the rest of their lives. A lot of permanent loss for the country. How can we have a meaningful impact that number?”
Yeah no I 100% agree that those numbers are insane and if it was my country I’d definitely want something done about it.
It’s just that these statistics are often pulled out when talking about mass shootings for example and in that context including suicides and gang violence is a bit misleading in my opinion especially when the “true” numbers are just as horrific on their own.
I think in the US a lot of murders probably get classified as suicides, accidents, and self defense to avoid launching an expensive, dangerous investigation, so I would also say that suicides are overreported.
Is there any evidence to support this, or is it just what you think?
Proof? no, if there were proof our data would simply have to be better than it is. Are there a lot of statistical and geographical tendencies working against this data that are easily pointed out, yes.
The biggest ones: suicides usually occur in places where the body will be discovered and people who commit suicide tend to want to be found.
Homocides tend to be covered up more often or occur in more remote locations; lots of unsolved homocides end up as missing persons, especially in less dense areas. A few are staged as suicides or accidents.
So there’s absolutely a tendency for the data to skew in certain directions. This isn’t even addressing more chaotic problems liks a lack a lack of qualified coroners, incentives to not charge police who just riddle people with bullets, etc.
To be clear I can’t stand the carnage and think it’s one of the country’s biggest faults. That being said, I’m not sure how what you’ve presented shows suicides as over reported. Suicide in a place likely to be found results in more accurate counting of suicide not extra deaths counted as suicide. Homicides being counted as missing persons doesn’t over count suicide, it under counts homicide. Police shootings actually likely under count suicide since no police shooting is going to be labeled “suicide by cop”. The qualified coroner thing is actually pretty crazy and a lot of places require little or no actual pathology knowledge, so who knows.
All this to say when we boil these tragedies down to numbers, when the discussion is assault weapons bans, suicides probably don’t belong in the discussion. Disproportionally few suicides are committed with guns targeted by assault weapons bans. That doesn’t remove suicide from the gun deaths discussion at all. If I might offer an unsubstantiated opinion of my own, I believe suicidal people are probably more likely to benefit from mental health intervention than the serial killers who are mass shooters. (Which is the only acceptable solution to the right, not that they’re willing to pay for it.) Those a-hole attention whores ARE increasingly using guns that would likely be targeted in an AWB, and they’re doing it because it helps grab the headline and gets the president to talk about how terrible what you did was. In the meanwhile this is going to remain political fodder for politicians and cannon fodder for the rest of us.
It's disgusting.Yes, people dying preventable deaths is disgusting.
They are definitely not misleading. They break it down in the same page by suicide, accidental killing, and etc. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
So it’s 9,611 as non-suicide deaths. That’s 51 per day and 2 per hour.
Wow. So, following those numbers, if you buy a gun, it’s more likely you’ll kill yourself than you’ll kill others.
That’s generally true. Your gun is more likely to kill yourself or a loved one than an intruder of any sort.
By far, especially when you consider that a user can only commit one suicide but multiple homicides. Also, suicide is often a tragedy of convenience. The easier it is to accomplish, the more likely a person in a bad place mentally will try. Firearm accessibility eliminates any logistical barriers that might slow a person long enough for them to reconsider.
What’s the acceptable number of murders for you in this scenario?
What are the acceptable number of murders before you’d support banning in knives? Or bats?
Plenty of knives are banned despite being much less capable weapons than firearms. And lots of them having way more utility than firearms in our lives.
You mean like the ban on switchblades in many places?
Is it? Gun violence from suicide is equally a problem. I wouldn’t characterise that as a shooting exactly though.
They also count criminals shooting criminals!
I think it’s a fair number to include, but you are right in the fact it inflates the total compared to how the Gun Violence Archive counted it prior to 2020. The number was closer to 15,00 annually with roughly 22,000 in suicides. Bad numbers any way you put it.
Jfc are you a troll? A bot?
A human being can’t be this stupid and also figure out how to broadcast it to the rest of the world.
Obviously nothing can be done to change this. There is zero things the government can do to stop gun violence. It must just be an inherent part of life
Accurate reporting
I’m actually I’ll have you know that there was a mass shooting in France one time the last 25 years and therefore that shows that gun churches don’t help, according to my conservative cousins
That Philly shooting - you know it was a white shooter cause the police didn’t discharge a single shot.
keep talking and not doing anything i love it and ive loved every other time a shooting occurs and this same shit happens
Americans keep voting for Republicans. They want the death.
Americanspro-gun voters keep voting for Republicans. They want the death.The problem is pro-gun people just happen to be overwhelmingly Republican.
I used to be “sensibly” pro gun. As in, “it’s important to give people that right, but with proper controls in place.”
Increasingly, I want our country to have nothing to do with guns. The actual sensible position is very strict gun control. There’s very little reason a person should own any firearm outside of a hunting rifle in extremely controlled circumstances with extensive checks and records.
The US has 120 guns per 100 people, the highest in the world. The next highest? Yemen at ~53.
The onion said it best (every time there’s a new mass shooting), “No way to prevent this, says only nation where this regularly happens.” We can’t lie to ourselves that it’s not the lack of gun control that allows all of these shootings.
If I could snap my fingers today and make all the guns in the US vanish, tomorrow we’d be talking about IED’s. I think the root problem is that americans have been squeezed to the brink and are losing their fuckin minds.
Thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans don’t even need people to vote for them in order to win elections. Hurray for democracy!
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Truly sad isn’t it?
As opposed to all the other shootings, which made good sense and improved general happiness for all affected.
Round and round we go
c/nottheonion
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Just a random thought, what if instead of going after guns, the administration came down on high-caliber ammo instead?
Like, just put heavy barriers on the production of 9mm and higher-sized ammunition to the extent the only bullets available in the market for the general public are .22 LR and below, which are less lethal in general. If not anything else it would bring down gun deaths at least.
Their main argument is that there are more than enough guns in circulation already and a ban on them would only affect the “good guys” while the bad guys will get their guns illegally. Well, those guns are useless without their cartridges, and at some point the country will run out of them if no new ones are produced.
As a bonus, choking out the lethal-ammo supply chain won’t even violate anyone’s 2A rights.
Two major issues here. One ammunition is an arm and protected by the 2A. You know that people can just cast bullets out of lead like people did for centuries before the popularization of the cartridge right?
How effective would the casted bullets and cartridges be in general? Is it very easy to make quality ones that won’t spoil the gun itself?
How easy would it be to scale them up? I confess, I don’t actually know much.
Also, does implementing production quota limits amount to violating 2A? Isn’t the amendment about securing the rights of the public to own firearms, and not securing manufacturers from regulations?
When the government disarms first then we’ll talk.
Can you please expand on your idea here? How do you think that should play out, what would the consequences of the government disarming be?
What alternative solution do you propose to deal with non-government gun violence?
We all know that if and that’s a big IF democrats passed a gun control bill there will be instant lawsuits and eventually thrown out for being unconstitutional. Which for many in the US it is. Its pointless at this point.
“We should all just resign to the ever growing possibility that we could be shot and killed while going about our daily lives. There’s nothing to be done about that.”
SHALL. NOT.
Should currently incarcerated criminals should be allowed to own guns?
Yes.
Wow. I didn’t know that the bar for “responsible gun owner” was so low.
Well it’s not like they’ll be allowed to take it into prison with them.
So you support gun-free zones? That seems a lot like an infringement on the right to bear arms.
nah they probably should tbh
At this point I feel like Biden and most dem reps have no intention of any gun control. They call for assault weapon bans again, it’ll get bogged down in arguments over what constitutes an “assault” weapon, nothing will get passed and people will forget about the shooting. They can tell progressive dems they tried, and they can tell conservative dems they havent actually banned any guns.
Ban automatic guns to start off.
Ban automatic guns to start off.
“automatic” - not sure if you realize it, but every automatic in this country is HEAVILY regulated behind stamps and they cost an absolute small fortune. They are also pretty much never involved in mass shootings. They’re more of a gangland modded trigger type gun.
So I presume you actually mean “semi-automatic” here… and if that’s the case, that’s basically everything but pump-action shot guns, lever-action & bolt rifles, and revolvers. Now… there’s no shortage of any of those, but semi-auto dwarfs that in terms of sheer volume of guns in the United States. And are you saying ban them all going forward? Or ban them all retro-actively? The former would be a herculean effort. The latter, you’d likely start an actual domestic war over if you got it anywhere near actual law.
I’m just here to educate, BTW. https://www.stonekettle.com/2015/06/bang-bang-sanity.html is a fantastic read. I recommend it for both gun-owners and gun-haters alike. It’s the first real-world solution I’ve seen that I think both could find fairly reasonable.
I appreciate the link, that is probably one of the best suggestions I’ve seen on gun laws.
right, semi-automatic, my bad, any autoloading gun. Ban on sales going forward, new and used.
The reality is that this is unlikely to happen even for what are colloquially coined “assault weapons” again - though it happened once, so I suppose it might… I recommend reading the article and I try to post it often to get the word out to more people. The best part is that it’s likely to trigger hard left gun haters and hard-right gun fetishists alike, but lands on solid, pragmatic ground that I think most reasonable people in the US would agree with (and to, should it be pursued for law). All without banning anything and this is noted in the article since bans don’t really work for the intended purpose when there are already hundreds of millions of guns like this for sale/trade in the US after such a go-forward ban.
alright, I read the article. As far as I can tell it’s not proposing anything relevant to gun violence in America.
You’re right it’s unlikely to happen, in the same vein its unlikely the US will stop having third world levels of gun violence. The majority opinion of guns in America is admiration, and that’s both the cause of all our gun violence, and the blockade to any efforts to address that violence. All I can do is be one opposition voice and try and convince others. What Americans are used to isnt normal in the rest of the developed world, and measures that are considered unachievable fantasy here are reality elsewhere.
I’m genuinely curious why you think that article does not propose anything relavant to gun violence. It’s entirely about gun violence. And it’s using conservative mentatlity, especially “Personal Responsibility” as well as NRA’s own rules to recommend new laws governing that personal responsibility. And more to the point it’s about changing (over time) exactly the mentality you point out about guns in the us. So I truly don’t understand how that’s not a practical starting point. The liklihood of removing guns entirely from the US like the UK or other countries is slim to none given the 2nd Amendment and political climate, and so to me that’s tilting at wind mills.
All that being said, the analogy of drunk driving and the efforts to pass laws to force responsibility there have had both a massive impact on number of drunk driving incidents and certainly deaths. You can’t stop people from violating the law, but you can hold them accountable is the point and now in the US after 40+ years of DUI/DWI laws, constant messaging, and consequences, you can see that minds have changed and society with it. People used to drink and drive as a matter OF COURSE - that just doesn’t happen many places anymore in the US. Nobody took away cars, ability to drive, ability to drink, but you combine those and you’re likely getting put in Jail. Certainly if you do it more than once. I’d characterize it as people now caring about this on a whole in society where in the 50’s/60’s/70’s it was rampant.
Full-auto isn’t banned? Are you sure you know what laws are needed if you don’t know the current laws?
Nothing tells you exactly how much a person knows about guns than them suggesting a law.
Also have them define assault weapon, that usually shows exactly how much thought they put into it.
Also ask them to define the AR in AR-15… Usually telling
Fully automatic firearms are not banned in all states but heavily regulated. They are used in basically no crimes though because of extensive background checks, registration process, and cost. A really shitty one is several thousand dollars, one that someone would actually desire is tens of thousands.
Legal full-auto access is mostly not a thing due to cost. There is a partial ban in that new full-auto can’t be imported or manufactured for civilians. That directly affects the cost and thus only available for the rich or companies with the cash and paperwork.
it’s not, but I did mean semi-auto
Legal full auto is effectively banned for the commoners. The only ones legally available are ones that were in civilian hands when partial bans went into effect. It’s as banned an AWB with grandfathering would be a banning things.
A ban and confiscation of semi-autos would be on a vast majority of firearms. Certainly a vast majority of modern firearms and commonly owned firearms. There is a good chance if a person only owns one firearm it’s a semi-auto. Especially today when the most common reasons for ownership include self-defense. Then people would just buy lever actions and revolvers as the next best thing. Actual criminals before such a law would continue not following laws after. And then there is home manufacturing which gets easier everyday.
Yeah, lot harder to mass murder with lever action. And you still get to hunt, and defend yourself, but folks will be a lot less likely to commit armed robbery in the first place without a semi auto.
Also youve got a fantasy world in your head where criminals are hiding out in their hidden crime bunkers and going to criminal store to get equipped with illegal weapons. No, most weapons for crimes are obtained legally and all of this is way less organized than you think.
I don’t care about hunting. Crimes were done without the things you want to ban and would continue after.
Criminals would get things they need from Home Depot and computer type stores. It doesn’t take as specialized equipment as you think. Also straw purchases and a black market is a thing. Criminals with a record aren’t obtaining them from an FFL.
No, crimes are definitely committed with semi automatic guns
It’s not something they can do. Republicans control the House. Dems simply don’t have the authority, if they did you might actually see some real action…
Until the Supreme Court kills it.
Just once I’d like to see the corporate Democrats play political hardball against the Republicans the way they do against progressives.
Perhaps you mean semi-automatic guns? Automatic guns are exceedingly rare, very expensive and effectively never used in any type of gun violence short of war. If you do mean semi-automatic, with no qualifiers, you are now banning many guns that most ban advocates promise they aren’t coming for, “grandpa’s hunting rifle”.
Yeah i meant semi automatic. No one needs to be able to kill as many times as they can pull a trigger. If you miss your first shot when hunting youre probly not gonna get any better shots.
Confiscation isnt feasible, it would have to just be a ban on future sales and resales. So grandpa keeps his rifle
As is the tradition
Here’s an idea: all new guns must only be operable by the person who purchased them after going through rigorous background checks. This will be done using fingerprint technology. The gun simply will not fire unless it is in the right hands.
So a technology that doesn’t exist?
Fingerprint trigger locks already exist, they are just not built-in to guns yet (as far as I know.)
That’s not at all the same thing as a requiring a fingerprint to fire the gun on ever shot. Even if the technology existed (it doesn’t) a gun is a life or death safety tool. Needing to use your gun and having it fail because of some stupid fucking fingerprint sensor is a deal breaker.
I agree that would suck. It would have to be a reliable feature that does not put the user at risk.
It does exist. https://youtu.be/2cRm9BMxl90
It’s not really that easy unfortunately. You can essentially 3D print gun parts now, and you can buy parts separately to make kits pretty easily to get around any kind of restrictions like that.
If it is so easy to 3D print guns or put together the parts, how is it that gun control measures in other countries are still effective?
Like Myanmar where gen z is fighting their government partially using 3d printed guns. There are even glocks frames available for printing. The Orca AR just came out, the KF 5 a printable MP5 recently came out for printing.
It would make it harder for high schoolers and dumb criminals to shoot up schools, unless they are sophisticated enough to build their own guns. Increasing the barrier for entry would not be a bad idea.
Never thought about it until now, but it’s because they also don’t have access to ammo or ammo making materials in most of those countries. Ammo control is actually the effective part of a gun control plan I guess.
Effective?? Hahahhahah
Lol, fuck no
Only if the government replaces all of its weapons with unreliable biometric smart guns first. I refuse to accept a status quo where the United States government is better armed than its citizens.
Um, the US government IS better armed than its citizens. Also, I would say ideas and behavioral controls are more effective at controlling citizens than weaponry outside of a war.
People are out there stockpiling weapons thinking they are free but they are mentally and behaviorally controlled by the media.
I know, and I’m not happy about it. The government disarmed my forbears before implicitly enabling mob violence against them, so… Come and take it, cold dead hands, etc.
The thing is, they will.
Long before we hit a threshold where it’s morally acceptable to shoot dead agents of the state, they will have taken away your gun. There’s just no dimension where the guns in the hands of private citizens are what scare off tyranny.
And let’s be honest, tyranny is happening right now and the armed populace stands by and watches. Desantis is actively pursuing genocide against trans and queer people. Texas is forcing people to risk their lives carrying dead babies to term. Police continue to gun down black people at rates hugely beyond other racial groups. An actual criminal that called for a coup is running for president. And the “well-organized milita” does nothing. Aside from when they actively participate in that very tyranny.
What “well-organized militia” are you talking about? If you’re referencing the 2nd Amendment, it mentions a “well-regulated”, meaning well-equipped, militia consisting of the people of the United States. Nearly a century of the federal government consolidating power has weakened the militia, but it should still fear crossing lines that the people won’t tolerate.
Sadly, the acts of tyranny you mentioned are mostly applauded by the armed demographic and largely opposed by the same group arguing for Americans to be disarmed. If they armed themselves and became proficient in their weapons of choice, perhaps it wouldnt be so easy to ban abortion, abuse the power of the state, and lead a coup against the democratically elected government.
Just sayin’.
A century ago the right to bear arms was barely protected the way it is today. The modern absolutist version of it didn’t exist until recently. Prior to modern weapons hitting their marketability and becoming extraordinarily widespread alongside a general decline in the national welfare in the form of vast wealth inequality, crushing systemic oppression, a collapsing environment, creeping fascism, and a failed financial system that not just lost its ability to lift people out of poverty but now holds them down in it… it just wasn’t really a problem.
And again, there is no fear or reprisal and never was any from the feds. Not once in modern life has the federal government refused to enforce its laws, just or unjust, over fears of someone’s armed status. When some guy out on a ranch was armed to the teeth and refusing to comply, the feds showed up in force to put that shit down. The only real law enforcement response to all the guns is that cops are more likely to shoot first and assess threats second than they once were. The real result of how widespread guns are is the average person being less able to defend themselves against unjust actions of the state because they are dead.
Meanwhile, people – people like you – are treating the actual tyranny going down like someone else’s problem. Blaming the victims for not strapping. Instead of doing something about it. You aren’t showing up to defend the weak. That isn’t really what your guns are about. They’re just totems and fetishes that represent beliefs you don’t have the courage to act on. It’s a power fantasy, but not one you’ll act on.
All these facts together are how I know that the right to bear arms is all about self-defense and not at all about a check on government power. Not to even mention the myriad historical documents including the Constitution itself that make it blindingly obvious that there is no right to commit sedition or rebel.
I’m not even super anti-gun. I don’t like them much, but don’t really give much of a fuck about bans, especially in the face of the impossible political task represents. But I sure would love the folks who love guns to actually step forward and help advocate for policy that WOULD address the problems of violence that don’t take guns away. Gun policies like universal registration/training, removing policies that protect sellers and manufacturers from liability, and collecting national statistics on violence (instead of forbidding it, because these stats should show guns make the world safer if the lobby isn’t totally full of shit), investigating domestic terrorist organizations, and all these things. Not to mention desperation interventions like education, better urban design, mental/physical healthcare, and labor reforms that can remove root causes of violence. Things the average gun lover stands firmly against. I suppose because they want the guns being used.
Of all the wealthy nations, we have by far the highest levels of inequality. The rise of excessive economic inequality can be fairly closely tracked with the rise of violence and mass shootings in the United States.
I believe that reducing inequality and making life here less of a gamble will be most effective at reducing violence and suicide, without weakening the protection of the 2nd Amendment.
