Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

Background checks are to make sure that the gun buyer isn't a felon (or have one of a couple of other disqualifiers). That's it. Gun clerk calls in to NICS, runs name against database, NICS gives thumbs up, thumbs down or a delay if there's a name conflict or something that requires double checking.

It takes 5-10 minutes in laissez-faire gun states, it's not an impediment to crimes of passion.

I honestly want it to be hard to get a gun as it was for me to adopt a child. Background check, fingerprinting, medical exam, elaborate questionnaire, home study, two day seminar, decision finalized by a court of law, etc.

If you want to hunt - and I know a lot of people who love to hunt and want them to be able to do so - you can, you just have to jump through a shitload of hoops over several months to do so.

but then THE GUMMINT decides WHO gets to have A GUN AND WHO DON'T - CONNECT THE DOTS MANNNNN

quite honestly i feel this is a crisis of legitimacy for the US government, both state and federal, because it is evident now that the NRA has tacitly, over decades, undermined the state's claim to a monopoly on violence to the extent that it cannot now be asserted even in the face of events like this

We need a nice, long list of the things people commonly do which are more heavily-regulated and involve more hoop jumping than buying a gun. And that people somehow, against all the odds, manage to trudge their way through as a matter of course without screaming about their rights as a 'Murrican.

i miss the brash old milo z haha

As a non-American with quite a lot of reasonable non-gun-mad American facebook friends I've noticed that they are constantly interacting with with the sort of frothing at the mouth libertarian NRA assholes I'd cross the road to avoid. Is ILX a good place to ask why these very nice people are still still friends with said assholes? Because I'm sure as hell not going to ask on facebook (again)

We owe them money. / They owe us money.

Being friends with incorrigible, unreconstructed, complete and utter assholes is as American as baseball.

iirc we invented baseball

pic.twitter.com/F6KVc6YHPX

— Jane Levy (@jcolburnlevy) October 3, 2017

Family/friends from like high school/workmates. I dunno. I don't interact with those people but then I have a very low tolerance for people who opt for frothing over reasoned and respectful argument/disagreement.

a lot of my family are like this, which is why i don't speak to any of them and have removed most of them from fb.

I see there's been some inter-left debate on twitter about american gun laws but I think just about everyone of sense can at least agree on an assault weapons ban. I think that would be a good place to start.

teh way this shit rewires your brain is just crazy too.

I went to a show at a local seedy metal club in Winter Park, that was clearly oversold (Fire depts woulda shut the shit down). and in addition to Great White spinning in my head, I kept thinking to myself "where are the exits if a shooter comes in" and trying to identify them. I do this all the time.

we were onstage in Scotland when the Bataclan thing happened. Usually my soundman stays out in the house after the show but we came off to find him in the dressing room glued to the laptop - he'd been offered the gig running sound on that tour, but hadn't been able to take it. Three days later we played our continental shows, after a fair bit of debate about what to do; there were soldiers with machine guns strolling the venues, the night after we played Belgium they locked the whole town down, if we'd've left our hotel an hour later we wouldn't have been able to make our next gig.

At the Belgian show, mid-song, somebody entered the hall from the right side of the room and walked pretty fast to the other side. It registered with me & my bassist, we looked at each other: is something up? The soldier were there in the crowd the whole time, you couldn't miss them.

It's true that it's good practices to know: where will I run if something happens, how will I protect myself, am I in touch with my priorities? but it fucking sucks dick to have to be thinking, in places where people gather to share the experience of music: ok, all this great communal energy aside, how will I keep from dying if shit goes south? And it makes you think, wow, we as a species have made a pretty poor show of things, looking at it from several different angles.

fuck - sorry about that - my first post got the "blank screen" thing and I c/p'd too much. if anybody wants to edit plz do

lol. where do you want it chopped?

Is this the first case of a multimillionaire perpetrating a mass shooting?

I thought you were trying to make a statement about how nothing has changed in 10 years and that history repeats itself.

Profound

lol. where do you want it chopped?

right where I was quoting Neanderthal - after "add a post" - everything prior to that is what was on my screen when I c&p'd lol thx

ty anonymous mod!!

A trip down mass murder memory lane

I'm kinda done with the FB arguments. they all seem to devolve into "how's your socialist utopia Venezuela working out for you?" and "oh you can't have guns in Germany and it's basically a fascist state"...this is stupid.

god I love it when people whip out venezuela

I'm hearing the "its a waste of breath trying to change gun control laws, the country is awash with guns on the black market" argument a lot on FB

I do welcome all of the recent exit-checkers to the hate-crime fueled cloud of paranoia I've lived with my entire life as I now feel less lonely.

ilx commune in venezuela gets daily closer

who'll be doing the plumbing, that's all i wanna know

Ur mouth

tailpipe man

how do these people do with the same argument about opioids

isn't their argument about opioids "let em die"?

That is a common one, yes.

so no one knows of any other wealthy mass killers like Paddock, i suppose

Are you setting one of us up for a Bush/Cheney/Clinton/Obama layup?

i don't even know what that means

Guys, help, what is baseball equivalent of "layup?"

Anyhoo, 'twas a joke.

can of corn

"can of corn"?

nice

I know what a layup is.

I just meant our presidents obv know how to mass-murder with style.

(for more, see Perrin twitter)

Not on your life.

I see there's been some inter-left debate on twitter about american gun laws but I think just about everyone of sense can at least agree on an assault weapons ban. I think that would be a good place to start.

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Tuesday, 3 October 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Its elegantly put together here:

Being non-white and non-conservative/far-right AND unenthusiastic about American gun control isn't actually all that weird.

— Zoé (@ztsamudzi) September 10, 2017

I am pretty anti-gun in a perfect world but in the actual world we live in, I have been seriously contemplating getting one since November of last year, precisely because of the reasons outlined in that Twitter thread.

you have children, don't do it

stop fucking saying this to me

Well this isn't a surprise:

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-las-vegas-shooting-live-updates-at-his-local-starbucks-vegas-shooter-1507060195-htmlstory.html

This weird binary between "ban all guns" and "do nothing" is what's so infuriating about this. I think people should be allowed to own guns, but also be mandated to take classes, do safety checks, and purchase some sort of liability insurance. You know, like you have to when you want to drive a car. And no dumb honking automatic rifles.