Guns shouldn’t be a right.
but part of what Tyr and Jeebus seem to be advocating is that it is just to hard to force a fix that too many people fundamentally diagree with (but guns are my American RIGHT). It is true in a very pragmatic sense, but it is also very frustrating to me.
Part of what i do is software development, so i certainly tend to think in terms of ‘that old software is fundamentally wrong, lets replace it!’, and so part of me just screams against the idea of accepting something is guaranteed to yield bad outcomes. it is like keeping on using that buggy product, even though every now and then it corrupts the data. (deleted a way too long and drug out analogy that doesn’t even make sense)
All i can say is, i really do think that guns are the problem, but sure, we can also try some other solutions. But solving peoples desire to murder is even harder than just getting rid of some of the murder weapons…
I mean… you can say they shouldn’t be a right, but you’d be wrong (tee hee). It serves a symbolic and practical purpose by saying that we as a people will not be ruled by tyrants, and giving us the means to defend ourselves against that eventuality. A huge part of American identity is the Revolution and throwing off the mantle of oppression, which wouldn’t have been possible without the average American citizen being able to pick up their rifle to fight for what’s right. I like the idea of that, and considering we’re not yet at the point that we don’t elect dangerously insane senile old white men into the highest office in the land, I’d kinda like to hold onto that kind of right, personally.
Symbolic, yes. Practical, no. Gun ownership would be equally effective against the rule of tyrants in modern America if the guns in questions were made out of cardboard and depended on the owner to make banging sounds with their mouths to signal that the other people should fall down.
Again, I disagree with this. See Afghanistan in the 1980s and Vietnam in the 1960s.
Guns and gun ownership are parts of an issue, sure, but a much much smaller part than the overall issue in my mind (we have more guns in the country than people, but we’ve not all been murdered yet). Tackling that issue is going to be difficult and hard, like you said, but I’d rather go after that than ban guns… and then ban knives… and then ban sticks and rocks… and then ban karate lessons… and then tackle the root cause. Let’s get the hard part done first and I think we’ll find that the smaller problems solve themselves to an extent.
Once the world rids itself of crime, hatred, and violence – sure, that’ll solve the problem. But in the meantime Australia banned and destroyed guns and their homicides have dropped significantly without having to wait nearly that long. Australia still has violence, mental illness, hatred, domestic violence, and even terrorism. It’s quite possible not a single crime was stopped by their gun ban. But the crimes that did happen had fewer victims, which is the entire point of gun bans. Frankly I’d have been much happier if all of our recent mass shooters were just as deranged and criminal as before, but were using one of those cardboard cutout guns instead of real ones. Failing to tackle the root cause never seemed so good.
So here’s the thing about Australia because it’s the new hot thing to bring up here (like when people point to Democratic Socialism working really well in tiny Scandinavian countries so why don’t we just do that?)… Australia had almost no mass shootings until the one that prompted their ban. Australia already had much less crime/homicide than the US, even before the ban. Australia had no Second Amendment or much of a gun culture as compared to the US. Australia has fewer people and far far fewer guns than the US and the main impact was on suicide rates. Australia is a continent surrounded by water, whereas America has two massive mostly-open borders to the north and south (and if you think the central/south American cartels are making a [literal] killing on drugs right now, just imagine if you just took all the guns from a country with a gun culture like the US has). In the end, like Scandinavia, Australia is a totally different country/culture/environment than the US, and what is good for the goose is not always good for the gander (though much like in Australia, homicides and gun crime in the US is the lowest in 50 years as well).