• kxh
    +8

    Whenever someone argues that gun control won't help the US, they always focus on one particular kind of incident. This one focuses on mass shootings, another on gun homicides. They use complicated definitions of shootings and technical definitions of kinds of guns to prove why gun control won't change that particular combination. If you instead focus on total gun deaths, shootings, homicide, suicides, accidents, then it's fairly clear to most of the world that isn't the US, that gun control could make a difference.

    • AdelleChattre (edited 6 years ago)
      +4

      A difference in what? If we’re supposed to examine gun reform proposals like we’re trying to see a Magic Eye picture, by crossing our eyes slightly and looking through the subject, I’ve gotta admit I doubt I’m going to be able to make it out. Most proposed gun reform solutions are based on faulty prior assumptions, ridiculous on their face, and would have no impact at all on the killings they’re supposedly meant to address. Squinting harder so as not to notice any of that seems to me to be avoiding inconvenient truth.

      Honestly, I’m interested in gun reform. Right up until what passes for policy proposals turn out to be so disappointing. Gun control is, for some, what anti-abortion is, for others. Both aim to take away basic rights to satisfy howling from the hills. That’s the kind of fact that I’m not convinced we should visualize away. Well, it occurs to me that one difference is that Republicans actually are succeeding in banning abortion. Meanwhile

      This march, this outcry, this juvenalia — forgive me for saying it — isn’t policy. Find policy that would’ve prevented the events that drive this hysteria, then maybe that can begin to change.

      • kxh
        +5

        No, idea. I don't live in the US. Where I grew up not even the police had guns. I was shocked when I first saw police with guns.

        In most countries, no-one is allowed to drive a car without being old enough, being medically and mentally fit, learning a whole bunch of rules, passing a test, having a license and they can lose their license if they do bad stuff or stop qualifying. Cars are dangerous but that is not their primary function. Guns are easily as dangerous as cars, and that danger is their primary function, why can't you have similar licenses for them?

        As long as people in the US don't trust each other, I can't see anything much changing though.

        • AdelleChattre (edited 6 years ago)
          +4

          C’mon, like Strayans trust one another! If they did, I wouldn’t hear so much about WestConnex. Next you’ll tell us everyone turned over all their guns when they were supposed to, and we know that’s not quite the truth. Protection is sometimes prudent, licensed or not.

          They say if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. Likewise, if gun reform were a Republican priority, every federal bill would carve away at arms rights in some way, no matter how slight. The budget would contain a provision that allowed federal gun registries to be computerized, instead of the pen and paper method current law requires. A bill declaring the sky is blue would have a rider that allowed the federal government to begin to consider doing science that in some way related to the possibility of gun reform in future. If need be, Congress would do nothing else for years but again and again pass gun reform knowing there was no chance of it being signed into law. You know, out of cynical determination, rather than cynical farce.

          For a country with more guns than people, there actually are things you suggest above. From the federal to state, county, and municipal levels of government, there are firearms licenses and permits and half-hearted measures of accountability and access control. It’s more a crazyquilt than a patchwork. It leaks like a sieve. For instance, the Confederacy still maintains an air force. These regulations are actively subverted and easily avoided in practice, but there’s far more regulation than you’d think if you saw only media play-by-plays. Marjorie Stoneman Douglas students have the best proposals for gun reform I’ve seen, if that gives you an idea how bad the rest are.

          Yes, there are bizarre loopholes and indefensible carve-outs, but then there are also unhinged gun control proponents as well that constantly reinforce their opposition’s determination to stop any and all progress on the issue. I’d say offhand that’s true of the recent march as well. Come to think of it, the sun coming up in the morning appears to cement gun nuts’ determination to protect their proxy phalluses. I would say arms rights, but when push comes to shove, these same goofs will legislate that shit out of existence in a heartbeat.

          Subjects like these are beyond the scope of a comment at Snapzu to cover, but allow me to make two quick observations. One, in Commonwealth countries like Oz, there may be a sense of the government as a benevolent protector that is not felt stateside. Two, if somebody gets too lippy about disarming Americans, they’re welcome to try it themselves, door-to-door. It’s like that fable about the mice that agree someone should put a bell on the cat. Nobody will even consider doing it themselves.

          • kxh
            +4

            C’mon, like Strayans trust one another!

            Well, no but we do trust that in general people are not going to pull guns on each other.

            One, in Commonwealth countries like Oz, there may be a sense of the government as a benevolent protector that is not felt stateside.

            Maybe we feel a bit more trust in our government but I have never seen that as a reason to have guns. Whatever guns citizens have, the government and defence forces have more and bigger ones. You really think that conventional light arms are going to cut it against a government? Come on! Until US citizens have their own nukes and delivery systems you are not going to be able to seriously bother your government.

            • AdelleChattre
              +6

              we do trust that in general people are not going to pull guns on each other

              A sense of security that lasts right up until they do. Granted, since 1996 massacres, spree and rampage killings in Australia do seem to rely on a mix of threats, arson, blunt instruments, automobiles, knives, as well as guns. Personally, I find people are better behaved when their calculus involves a significant chance of getting shot.

              You really think that conventional light arms are going to cut it against a government?

              Who said anything about taking up arms against the government? Where’d that come from? The Black Panthers had a great deal of success with their free breakfast and lunch programs, which are now taken for granted in American schools. Once they were infiltrated by the FBI, furnished with guns and enticed into crime, that was their undoing.

              Until US citizens have their own nukes and delivery systems you are not going to be able to seriously bother your government.

              Static defenders have very little to gain from nuclear hand grenades.