It’s a cultural problem, and there isn’t one big solution, there’s a bunch of little ones. I say we need to try them all.
I’m with you as long as you don’t alienate my rights! ;D
Slavery is in the DNA of the country. We got rid of that eventually.
Slavery is intrinsically wrong. You are infringing on another person’s rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Owning a gun is not intrinsically wrong. Owning a knife or sword or machine gun or rocket launcher or nuclear bomb is not intrinsically wrong, for that matter. You can commit an action with them that is intrinsically wrong (or intrinsically right!), but ownership in and of itself does not register on that scale.
I think we should just make guns taste like bacon and then everyone would eat their guns and problem solved.
My work here is done.
I find this hard to argue with…
Just to flog this old, dead horse for some background to my point: in my interpretation, America and guns are inseparable. Rights “endowed by our creator” (whatever “creator” means to you) concerning keeping and bearing arms are acknowledged in the Constitution (not granted by it, but acknowledged by it as being intrinsic), and the gun culture here is more than in most other countries. They’re part of the DNA of the country, whether we all like or agree with it or not.
This adds a huge layer of difficulty to any legislation against firearms, and in my opinion, rightfully so: it’s very very easy to give up a right, but very very difficult (pretty much impossible without violence) to get a right back. It’s not really something you can “try out;” once they’re gone, I doubt we’ll get them back. In my opinion, that’s not acceptable.
That said, I am personally not against actually reasonable, common-sense gun laws, many of which are already in place: actual fully-automatic machine guns are prohibitive to acquire, we have ID requirements, license requirements (in many places), background checks (I’ve done them!), waiting periods (in many cases), and the gut feeling of the person behind the counter selling to you (if you look shady, you probably won’t be sold to; gun store owners have a livelihood to maintain after all). The issue is that in many many cases, the laws we have aren’t enforced properly and a lot of people slip through the cracks.
Pretty much anyone who’s used a legally-purchased gun in these crimes has slipped through a crack somewhere, especially in the background checks department, either because government bureaucracy is not exactly as communicative as it should be between departments, or efficient in any way even on a good day, and a lot of red flags are ignored, lost, or just not even reported (especially potentially dangerous mental health issues), or because a friend or family member trusts someone who shouldn’t be trusted too much.
We really need to focus on enforcing the laws we do have right now than just piling more on.
Uh… let me know if I actually addressed your question there. Haha.
JEDIT: Jeebus kinda said similar to what I was getting at. Thanks man.
There are two things that make me think that less access to guns would be a good thing:
- look at information from other countries, see how they have less guns, and less suicide/homicide
- consider what percentage of suicide and homicide is related to heat of the moment decisions. If you slow down that persons access to a gun by even 10 minutes, how many of those decisions would not be made?
Is that correlational or causational? Is it because of cultural differences? Population differences? Is it just because they have fewer guns? Better access to healthcare or mental healthcare? Better laws regarding domestic violence? Less gang violence? Less racism? Less poverty? More? There’s a lot to consider when comparing two countries that feed into suicide and homicide rates than just “they have fewer guns and therefore fewer deaths.” I also want to point out that I’m not arguing that less guns here wouldn’t equal less deaths because that’d be stupid. If we could completely ban driving and alcohol and drugs, we’d see less deaths there, too (and there’d be a much bigger impact than banning guns as well!).
You definitely would see fewer crimes of passion and spur-of-the-moment suicides, I won’t deny that at all. But when someone really wants to kill another person, or when someone is really sure they don’t want to live anymore… that’s not something that can be stopped by less access to a given implement. That’s the real problem I’m looking at here: how do we keep it from getting to the point where a certain tool is the issue?
This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.
Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:
A very flaky article. Basically “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things” 😉
Er… I don’t think that was the throughline at all.
I think it was more along the lines of “There is a problem but people are trying to put a band-aid on it instead of addressing the root cause.”
I missed the part where it diagnosed the “root cause” and came up with a solution.
I’m extrapolating from what’s in the article:
As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. I couldn’t even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?
However, the next-largest set of gun deaths — 1 in 5 — were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.
By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.
Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.
Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.
Even the most data-driven practices, such as New Orleans’ plan to identify gang members for intervention based on previous arrests and weapons seizures, wind up more personal than most policies floated. The young men at risk can be identified by an algorithm, but they have to be disarmed one by one, personally — not en masse as though they were all interchangeable. A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.
(Emphasis mine)
The root causes I identified here are: access to and stigma against mental healthcare, especially among older males (as we may be seeing in the Las Vegas incident); poverty, systemic racism, and other aspects of society that lead to gang violence; and low priority and intervention with regards to domestic violence among LE.
The solutions proposed in the article are, as written:
Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.
[…]
A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.
“We should just ban guns” is a really easy thing to say, but let’s face it, if all guns disappeared tomorrow, would suicide numbers go down substantially? Would gang violence be impacted in a meaningful way? Would domestic be curtailed in a major way? I sadly doubt it. You can say “well it would be less deadly” but to step away from my pro-gun bias for a moment, is “less deadly” really the goal here? You might slow down or even stop mass shootings with a ban, sure, but when we look overseas at methods used in mass killings, a cursory search shows more man-portable IEDs than guns. I feel like a bomb going off in the middle of the crowd in Vegas would have been a lot worse than what we saw.
The more important use of time and resources in my opinion is to find out what makes people want to kill a lot of other people and work on a solution to that before they get to the point where they’re choosing a weapon to carry out their plan. By that time, it’s already too late.
Dang I thought we were gonna talk about reloading.
This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.
Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:
A very flaky article. Basically “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things” 😉
Er… I don’t think that was the throughline at all.
I think it was more along the lines of “There is a problem but people are trying to put a band-aid on it instead of addressing the root cause.”
This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.
Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:
ironically, when discussing gun control in the past, I brought my concern about bump stocks. Unfortunately, my concern was justified. I would be curious what Ferris would say.
You were actually the first person I thought of when I saw this video, because I remember you asking me what I thought of bump fire stocks.
The gun community consensus is that a “Gat Crank” was used here (basically a little crank handle you attach to your trigger guard and crank like “ye olde gatlinge gune” in order to actuate the trigger faster than your finger likely could [but not as fast or as smoothly as an actual automatic weapon]), but the basic objective remains the same: simulate automatic fire with a semi-automatic weapon for fun at the range.
It annoyed me because A. I knew this was going to happen, and B. I hate things like that because the gun rights issue is contentious enough without people deliberately going in and stretching the rules and trying to see what they can get away with in a legal grey area, because then we end up in this kind of situation where something has to give and a lot of the time what gives are our rights.
Hopefully we see a nice ATF ban on Gat Cranks and Bump Fire Stocks and that’s the end of it. Good riddance.
Welcome back, btw.
JEDIT: Just looked at the pictures of the guns and it actually looks like a bump fire stock rather than a Gat Crank. Whoops.
Man I came in here ready to fight about guns but nothing really jumped out at me as something to rail against (except obviously disagreeing with the “ban all guns” camp).
YodaFan is making some good points, so props to you dude.
That Punisher trailer looks sick as hell. Really jazzed for that, and Thor for that matter.
I just saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2 over the last two days and really enjoyed it. Toddler Groot was just about as annoying as I expected him to be (especially in that way too long intro credits scene), but they were actually reserved enough that I didn’t totally hate him by the end.
I was worried we’d see a Teenager Groot in Infinity War, but I really hope they got that out of their system during the end credits. Stan Lee’s cameo was great in this one, too. Glad to see some Watchers and the larger cosmic hints we’re seeing so much more of now. We’ve come a long way since Iron Man in 2008.
Speaking of Iron Man, I really need to get into Spider-Man: Homecoming. I really need my Iron Man fix…
Hugh Hefner, 21
Dang, the playboy himself!
This is murrica and we stand for this song that was written during a war that was going on many years after our country was founded!
No. It’s not just a song. It’s the National Anthem of the United States of America. Its words have meaning. Its symbolism has meaning. It is not just a song. To rob it of its symbolism is to say that respect for one’s country is pointless and holds no value. It’s to say that the people who work and fight to give us the freedoms that we have were doing so without need nor purpose, and we do not honor them because who gives a crap.
But to show protest of injustice by sitting during the anthem is a legitimate form of protest, and is not inherently disrespectful toward the country itself so long as the purpose of protest is made plain.
The way I understand it is that the players are not protesting the anthem, they’re not protesting the wording or the imagery or the ideals and virtues and values it conveys that the country stands for, they are instead protesting the country because they believe that the country does not currently stand for the ideals and virtues and values set forth in the anthem.
What they are saying: “Hey, there is a disconnect in what we think and say that the country stands for, and what it actually seems to stand for, especially for people of color. We are acknowledging this in the hopes that it is rectified.”
What they are not saying: “Hey we hate the anthem and America and the veterans!”
This logic and nuance, of course, has all been lost in the conservative-driven distilled rhetoric that these people just must simply hate America and her values and everything she stands for, which is asinine to say the least, and completely shunts all attention away from the real issues, fabricating an entirely different straw man issue and ultimately solving no problems and only further dividing an already-divided populace. It feels like nobody stops to think or empathize anymore, it’s just visceral, gut, knee-jerk reactions and opinions fed to them by cable “news” channels with no thought in between.
In fact, from what I’ve heard, the whole reason it’s (usually) kneeling instead of just sitting on the bench and ignoring the whole thing is in deference to the veterans who served the country in defense of her values and ideals.
Personally, I think it is incredibly moving to see the mass kneeling going on right now (I’d be even happier if people weren’t intentionally or unintentionally misconstruing it and actually taking action to understand and empathize and reflect inwardly and make some changes, but that’s humanity for you). In a few years from now when it becomes a fad way to protest whatever (like Chyron said), maybe that’ll have worn off by then, but for now I approve.
JEDIT: Usually I hate Twitter threads and when people post them, but I’m going to break all these rules right… now:
https://twitter.com/cmclymer/status/900101086333292544
I respectfully disagree. I don’t think Jesus would ever talk that way.
I’ll allow it.
Good lord Trump is a massive steaming pile of shit. The saber is rattling so much that it’s starting to come apart.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrumpJust heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/911789314169823232
Who says shit like this? Jesus.
Just because it’ll make 005 mad: more Boba Fett. Lots more.
Make him the hero.
I hate you
You know you want it.
Just because it’ll make 005 mad: more Boba Fett. Lots more.
Make him the hero.
Probably the Last TV Seen thread. Either that or Random Thoughts. Doesn’t seem worth a new thread.
In the living room.
McCain is one of those guys who I respect a lot because of what he’s done and what he’s been through, but who I also disagree with vehemently on a lot of things.
Unfortunately he has a long tradition of saying how awful something is, voting for it, and then continuing to say how awful it is, without skipping a beat. Pay no attention to the maverick mouth, just watch the votes.
Valid. His record on past versions of this bill still stands, however.
Regardless, here is his statement on this iteration.
McCain is one of those guys who I respect a lot because of what he’s done and what he’s been through, but who I also disagree with vehemently on a lot of things.
Man, sometimes it feels like McCain actually reads all the faxes I send him.
… almost nobody here supports Trump. Or are you saying he was elected because the nation as a whole didn’t listen to you?
Something like that.
What.
I voted for Trump purely because Warb said not to.
Hungover. Eating cold chicken out of a tupperware dish and drinking a flat white from Starbucks. Ugh.
I’ve always felt that, the moment you make something “sacred” and “unquestionable” you immediately corrupt it.
