The Great ILX Gun Control Debate

David Frum Is Making Sense

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-real-common-sense-tactics-the-debate-is-missing/542229/

should I even click

it's really very good. It summarizes some of the most maddening aspects of the typical contours of the gun control 'debate'. The core of the article is this:

Rule 1. The measures to be debated must bear some relationship to the massacre that triggered the debate. If the killer acquired his weapons illegally, it’s out of bounds to point out how lethally easy it is to buy weapons legally. If the killer lacked a criminal record, it’s out of bounds to talk about the inadequacy of federal background checks. The topic for debate is not, “Why do so many Americans die from gunfire?” but “What one legal change would have prevented this most recent atrocity?”

Rule 2. The debate must focus on unusual weapons and accessories: bump stocks, for example, the villain of the moment. Even the NRA has proclaimed itself open to some regulation of these devices. After the 2012 mass shooting in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, attention turned to large capacity magazines. What is out of bounds is discussion of weapons as in themselves a danger to human life and public safety.

Rule 3. The debate must always honor the “responsible gun owners” who buy weapons for reasonable self-defense. Under Rule 1, these responsible persons are presumed to constitute the great majority of gun owners. It’s out of bounds to ask for some proof of this claimed responsibility, some form of training for example. It’s far out of bounds to propose measures that might impinge on owners: the alcohol or drug tests for example that are so often recommended for food stamp recipients or teen drivers.

Rule 4. Gun ownership is always to be discussed as a rational choice motivated by reasonable concerns for personal safety. No matter how blatantly gun advocates appeal to fears and fantasies—Sean Hannity musing aloud on national TV about how he with a gun in his hands could have saved the day in Las Vegas if only he had been there—nobody other than a lefty blogger may notice that this debate is about race and sex, not personal security. It’s out of bounds to observe that “Chicago” is shorthand for “we only have gun crime because of black people” or how often “I want to protect my family” is code for “I need to prove to my girlfriend who’s really boss.”

Gun freaks claim they're armed against tyranny, but most fetishize the military & cops. They'll never rise up against the US police state.

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) November 6, 2017

end the private sale loophole institute UNIVERSAL background checks it's amazing that in 2017 this is somehow a controversial idea

but that wouldn't stop 100% of gun deaths so yeah let's not bother

I'm coming around to the idea of legalizing duels. Letting the aggrieved micropenised d-bags take each other out one/two at a time will be a slow process, granted, but also an effective one.

It wouldn’t take that long, half the country’s guns belong to 3% of the population.

Less than a quarter of Americans even own a gun at all

background checks that depend on the Air Force uploading dishonorable discharges ain't working, tho

Writing a bill w/ @MartinHeinrich to prevent anyone convicted of domestic violence – be it in criminal or military court – from buying a gun

— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) November 7, 2017

one of my college friends cowrote a similar bill in the WA state house of representatives:

https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1501&Year=2017

The gunman who killed 26 people in a rural Texas church on Sunday escaped from a psychiatric hospital while he was in the Air Force, after making death threats against his superiors and trying to smuggle weapons onto the base where he was stationed, a 2012 police report shows.

Police took the man, Devin P. Kelley, into custody at a bus station in downtown El Paso, where he apparently planned to flee on a bus after escaping from Peak Behavioral Health Services, a hospital a few miles away in Santa Teresa, N.M. He was sent there after being charged in a military court with assaulting his wife and baby stepson, charges he later pleaded guilty to.

The report filed by the El Paso officers says that the person who reported Mr. Kelley missing from the hospital advised them that he “suffered from mental disorders,” and that he “was attempting to carry out death threats” against “his military chain of command.” The man “was a danger to himself and others as he had already been caught sneaking firearms onto Holloman Air Force Base,” it added. The police report was published on Tuesday by KPRC, a Houston television station.

Later that year, Mr. Kelley pleaded guilty in a military court to repeated assaults on his wife and her son, a toddler, including one that left the boy with a fractured skull. He was sentenced to a year in a Navy prison.

welp thank god for the travel ban #maga

"Peak Behavioral Health Services" is not a name that meshes well with my ability to take things seriously on the internet

i like the juxtaposition i'm seeing of people saying "yeah not surprised he'd do something like this" next to "but we never heard anything unusual beyond the late night gunfire."

well yeah he murdered 26 people and broke a toddler's skull but he's not a "rabid animal" like that NYC terrorist was

aren't ppl convicted of domestic violence already not allowed to buy guns?

In cases involving an application of the Gun Control Act of 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court has rather broadly interpreted the term “domestic violence.” In a 2009 case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Gun Control Act applies to anyone convicted of any crime involving “physical force or the threatened use of a deadly weapon” against any person with whom the accused had a domestic relation, even if the crime would be prosecuted as simple “assault and battery” in the absence of a deadly weapon.

what we need to do is close the private sale loophole

something like this only happens because someone has LOTS of guns. they know they are never going to have any use for them except to blow shit up in their back yard. they want to be as destructive as the people on the walking dead or their fave video game and they are angry and want to die and why not see how many people they can kill before they die? it's like a competition now between suicidal idiots. it isn't going to end anytime soon.

And as long as gun toters remain in denial and think of it as a "people problem" and not a "people with guns problem," let alone believe it's just a matter of prayer and putting faith in the inherent goodness of men, it will never stop. In a WaPo piece on that Texan town, someone sad something like "so many people have guns, if guns were the problem this would be happening all the time." Well, how often does it have to happen, dummy?

Wisconsin Republicans and Gov. Scott Walker pass law to allow even toddlers to hunt with guns if they're accompanied by an adult; used to have to be 10 years old: https://t.co/hqbpvOC5Yk

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 14, 2017

Makes sense to me.

Small children would have a hard time lifting a rifle and keeping it steady enough to aim it at anything smaller than a barn door. Not to mention the recoil knocking them on their asses.

bear with me on this: let's say in a magical shake up of reality, tomorrow morning president trump comes out on tv locking arms with every member of congress and says "everyone, we are heartbroken, we are emotionally drained just like all of you after all of these tragedies for so many years and affecting so many lives, we all have kids and grandkids and can't bear for them to grow up in a world like this, and we have heard you loud and clear and we all agree it is time to take finally action, enough is enough. private gun ownership is now illegal in the us."

what happens after that?

let's find out?

we'll finally know that we're living in a computer simulation

bear with me on this: let's say in a magical shake up of reality, tomorrow morning president trump comes out on tv locking arms with every member of congress and says "everyone, we are heartbroken, we are emotionally drained just like all of you after all of these tragedies for so many years and affecting so many lives, we all have kids and grandkids and can't bear for them to grow up in a world like this, and we have heard you loud and clear and we all agree it is time to take finally action, enough is enough. private gun ownership is now illegal in the us."

what happens after that?

― sleepingbag, Thursday, February 15, 201

who the fuck are you

what happens after that?

The same magical force that moved Trump and the Congress to unanimity on this issue magically makes all private guns disappear, fixes climate change, gives everyone perfect teeth, and brings back Jesus.

yeah but does Jesus come back like he was at 33 and healthy or is it like Monkey’s Paw fucked up corpse Jesus

xp Alfred ??? been on this board ten + years we've interacted several times ???

or is it more like 'how dare you'?

the reason i ask is bc i was thinking about this all day. nevermind i guess.

is it more like 'how dare you'?

um, no. just that the question is so far from reality that it is a total waste of time to respond to it

like I keep reading ppl from other countries saying 'well after we had our one shooting 18 years ago we just banned guns and now it doesn't happen'

and i keep wondering how that would work here and why it would or wouldn't. i think the 2nd amendment is a catch 22

No wait it’s a golem Jesus made from all the guns

We're well past the point of no return re: gun ownership. Someone needs to invent a technology which remotely prevents guns from firing. Maybe we could make some headway. Until then, those of us who haven't yet been directly affected by gun violence just get to sit back and wait our turn.

like I keep reading ppl from other countries saying 'well after we had our one shooting 18 years ago we just banned guns and now it doesn't happen

like I keep reading ppl from other countries saying 'well after we had our one shooting 18 years ago we just banned guns and now it doesn't happen'

Mate, you are such a fuckknuckle. Do you know we had a pretty big issue with multiple mass shootings, organised crime gangs and shitlike that as much as you guys before we banned ours? It wasnt just the Port Arthur event - that was a straw/camel situation. There was also Hoddle St Masscre. Strathfield massacre. There were something like 15 mass/spree shootings in aus in the 80s. We had and have a pretty pro gun culture here too. But it STILL WORKED.

Sure we still have crime gangs, that shoot *each other*, and suicide is still an issue, but the endless mass shootings? The sort of thing that needs ASSAULT WEAPONS to happen? All stopped.

don't call me that, 'mate', who even says that, lol. and it may shock you that my public schooling here in the us didn't really get too in depth re: the history of modern australian gun violence and its rectification. the thing that prompted me to say that was a tweet similar to this one, re: the uk

The UK's deadliest mass shooting happened in Scotland, at a school. 16 children (aged 5-6), 1 teacher, and the adult shooter died.

Guns were banned within two years. It was 22 years ago, in March 1996. Since then, there's been one other mass (>2) shooting, in England in 2010.

— Matt Gemmell (@mattgemmell) February 15, 2018

i do think it's pretty amazing how this chain of events took place:

21 years ago now, we banned automatic and many semiautomatic weapons, made them illegal, had a nationwide amnesty on banned weapons being turned in, and had a gun buy-back for one year, one million guns were brought in to be destroyed and it cost $500 million raised by a one-off tax levy. Nobody much minded paying. No massacres since, gun deaths fell dramatically, gun suicides fell dramatically

which is beautiful and the whole reason i bumped this thread was to ask if anything like this could ever happen in america IF political opposition was somehow a non-issue, IF somehow the constitutional right to gun ownership is completely overcome by the will of the public or if the NRA or whatever else that is in the way somehow falls aside. tall order i know, but we... legalized weed? imagining the actual logistics of removing guns from people who have them specifically in the case of government overreach... i have no idea what it was like before the ban in au or if there's anywhere else in the world where guns are even close to so completely foundational as they are here.

i'm not a gun fan, never did anything with one and don't ever want to btw. i just agonize like everyone else thinking about if and how this country i live in can actually stop this epidemic. even if they stop selling new guns tomorrow that still leaves us with more guns than people, so at some point something has to happen where we lessen that number, right? the kinds of people who are stockpliling ar-15s, are they just going to drive up to somewhere and drop them off? what is the actual interaction that takes place?

fuck

Apologies if this has already been linked to - thought this was a good piece on the likelihood of America doing the same as Australia (ie not very), and how effective or otherwise gun controls have been in Aus:

https://www.vox.com/2015/10/5/9454161/gun-violence-solution

god, this whole subtext of "why can't we just think rationally about this???" i mean, gee, it's almost as if repeated exposure to mass violence erodes our capacity for rational thought or something

the NRA wing are way less rational also

don't call me that, 'mate', who even says that, lol.

and it may shock you that my public schooling here in the us didn't really get too in depth re: ...australia

yeah that kinda jumped out at me too

ANYONE who thinks tons of guns isn't an issue or that it is but we shouldn't try to do anything about it isn't thinking rationally

my friend's school (she's a teacher) went on lockdown due to a threat today (fortunately turned out to be false alarm)

Naive question, but is it possible that the general US public is uneasy about gun control measures, is because they worry about the consequences of angering the folks who have lots of guns?

i thought the general US public is for gun control?

i think i'm more alarmed by that scenario than most people i know, so i wouldn't describe it as any sort of consensus concern. but i do think a significant number of people with guns would go absolutely ballistic (god i hate how guns permeate everything, including language, sorry) if there really was a government-sponsored campaign to take away their guns. you now have multiple generations of NRA supporters who have spent their entire lives predicting that one day the government would come to take their guns away. if and when that happens, some of them are going to act in apocalyptic ways. it's frightening.

i think i'm more alarmed by that scenario than most people i know, so i wouldn't describe it as any sort of consensus concern. but i do think a significant number of people with guns would go absolutely ballistic (god i hate how guns permeate everything, including language, sorry) if there really was a government-sponsored campaign to take away their guns. you now have multiple generations of NRA supporters who have spent their entire lives predicting that one day the government would come to take their guns away. if and when that happens, some of them are going to act in apocalyptic ways. it's frightening.

― i remember the corned beef of my childhood (Karl Malone), vendredi 16 février 2018 17:58 (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

For that situation perhaps you can check how some countries coped with the disarmament of terrorist factions/on the fence civilians ie. Ireland, ex-Yugoslav and Basque Country. However that requires for some US officials to use other countries as models which haha why would they ever they are the United States #1 USA USA.

Yes, there are indoctrinated idiots who would destroy our country over their quite modern interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. And we should expect some more more outspoken opponents of this interpretation to become martyrs.

Gun violence is a problem that grown over generational time scales. We shouldn't expect it to resolve itself in shorter timespans. Its going to take a concerted effort from both government and media producers and consumers.

Government can close all loopholes in background checks, and institute the same fees and checks presently required for machine guns for any magazine fed rifle power semiautomatic firearm. This has no effect on hunters, or pistol owners, but does shut down the unregulated trade in assault weapons.

Media consumers can boycott tales where guns are used to resolve conflict, and the lasting, painful consequences of gun violence aren't portrayed. If you want your hero to shoot up a shopping mall, then the show has to visit the victims of his stray fire, or their families. Police procedurals must become more realistic.

Ultimately, gun collectors need to be subjected to the same sort of social derision we've applied to balding middle-agers in red sports cars. What are they compensating for? Are they really cowards? Surely 20% of the population won't share this view, but being subject to ridicule by the other 80% will take its toll.

Most spree shooters are 50 years old and younger. Maybe these alienated white males age out the spree shooter demographic, or eventually off themselves. But with decades of an effective end to the assault weapons market, with no social reinforcement of the view that guns solve problems, with a consensus that gun obsessions are as shameworthy as obsessions with child pornography (etc), we eventually shift the culture. And avoid the civil war.

xp Alfred ??? been on this board ten + years we've interacted several times ???

or is it more like 'how dare you'?

the reason i ask is bc i was thinking about this all day. nevermind i guess.

― sleepingbag, Thursday, February 15, 2018 9:17 PM

I live in Florida. I've been living this for hours. I'm sorry.