3 ms·

The stressors are mostly things faced by a great number of people. A few decades back there was the trope of postal workers being the protagonists of attacks b

by mc32 4y ago

The stressors are mostly things faced by a great number of people. A few decades back there was the trope of postal workers being the protagonists of attacks but that seems to have been addressed. (either screening better or the work isn’t driving them up a wall any more). But these new guys. I don’t know. Short of confiscating all arms and other means of violence (knives, pipe bombs, etc.) I think we can drive a different narrative in Hollywood, music, video games, the news, etc. It’s now a culturally learned thing. We’ve always had guns, but the mass shootings seem to be increasing faster than gun ownership (correct me if I’m wrong, not gun sales but ownership -as in one person buying ten isn’t 10 more owners but one, if he’d didn’t previously own one)

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
I think Chris Rock has the right idea. Smack a MASSIVE tax on ammunition. Make illegal ammunition a BIG crime. I'm talking ammo should be $50/bullet. "I've got that bullet on layaway, as soon as I pay it off, you're dead MF'er!"
- mc32 4y ago
  Ammo isn't hard to make (or smuggle in). If you tax it massively, there will be a black market for it. We see that with Tobacco and Marijuana --both of which have legal options with medium taxes and illegal but no taxes.
  - asdff 4y ago
    There will always be a black market for it, but making it harder to get means these crimes are overall less likely to occur. Consider the Monterey Park shooting. The killer used a gun they bought legally and was granfathered in, and shot ammo they also bought legally, to commit a crime of passion in the moment. This wasn't some criminal tapped into the underworld who would be able to source black market ammo. This was a pretty boring 73 year old man who bought it from the store. Take out that access to these weapons, and that crime would not have occurred in that manner. That being said, most gun violence in this country isn't of a mass shooting or a organized crime nature. Most deaths from guns are suicides. Half of all intimate partner homicides are from a gun. Just from having a gun present in the home, a women in an abusive relationship is now 5x more likely to be murdered. These aren't cases where people seek out illegal arms dealers, they happen because the gun is in easy access. There's a reason why this country faces so much gun violence compared to countries that have more sensible positions on gun ownership, and its because of the ease of legal access.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Go ahead and black market it. I get that. But guns... don't blow up. Ammo does. It's not reusable. If you ban guns, you can't get the existing ones to go away, but a gun is useless without ammo, and even if they hoard it, it will either be locked away as precious, not used, or if used, the supply goes down. Responsible owners won't want to use their guns. So they exist for home defense. For hunters, well, is shooting a deer worth $50 per shot? We'll see, but it doesn't preclude the sport entirely. Better be a better shot :-) And if you black market the ammo, it's yet another legal exposure for criminals and criminal organizations. So as flippant as the joke is, I think it has potential. Now for shooting ranges, that's tough. Maybe allow the ammo to only stay at a shooting range, but any ammo carrier outside of the shooting range is the same: very illegal. Maybe there can shooting range ammo that is far less effective (rubber bullets or even less lethal) that will still allow target practice.
thwayunion 4y ago
> as in one person buying ten isn’t 10 more owners but one, if he’d didn’t previously own one The culture of gun ownership has changed a lot in my lifetime. IMO the fact that it's now fairly normal to own a small armory is more significant than the total number of people who own more than zero guns.
- mc32 4y ago
  I think part of that is disposable money. Compared to any time before the 80s people can more easily afford a firearm.
  - asdff 4y ago
    They've become collectible. Some guns are pretty cheap too, a few hundred. If you spend a few hundred a year on new guns, probably the amount most people pay for hobby collections of any sort, you'd have a pretty substantial armory before long. Manufactures cash in too. You can get a bright pink pistol for example, if that fits your style.
asdff 4y ago
Sure, violence will likely always happen, since people can kill with just their two hands too. The thing with a gun is that its a lot different than most other ways of enacting violence, in the sense its a lot easier to be brutally successful with a gun and a lot harder to be stopped. The numbers of dead and wounded from some of these mass shootings are absurd. You'd have to be a decent bomb maker to get similar numbers, and the FBI tries to anticipate people like this by limiting access to precursors for example. We don't see very many bombings in this country anymore, so I guess their efforts work decently well. Likewise with a knife, maybe you'd slash a few people but a lot of people would be able to get away, and if someone comes with a blunt object that puts some distance between them and you, the knife might only hinder you. The gun though. You can get a Glock with a 19 round magazine and fire it as fast as you can press the trigger. You can even practice with this thing at the gun range all day until you are a crackshot. People can't get close to you to stop you. People can't run away from you as easily either. Even if someone else in the room has a gun, they'd have to somehow beat you on the draw while you already have a gun out cocked and loaded. That's why mass shootings usually only end after the shooter is entirely surrounded by swat in body armor, or they shoot themselves.

by mc32 4y ago

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

I think Chris Rock has the right idea. Smack a MASSIVE tax on ammunition. Make illegal ammunition a BIG crime. I'm talking ammo should be $50/bullet. "I've got that bullet on layaway, as soon as I pay it off, you're dead MF'er!"

mc32 4y ago
Ammo isn't hard to make (or smuggle in). If you tax it massively, there will be a black market for it. We see that with Tobacco and Marijuana --both of which have legal options with medium taxes and illegal but no taxes.
- asdff 4y ago
  There will always be a black market for it, but making it harder to get means these crimes are overall less likely to occur. Consider the Monterey Park shooting. The killer used a gun they bought legally and was granfathered in, and shot ammo they also bought legally, to commit a crime of passion in the moment. This wasn't some criminal tapped into the underworld who would be able to source black market ammo. This was a pretty boring 73 year old man who bought it from the store. Take out that access to these weapons, and that crime would not have occurred in that manner. That being said, most gun violence in this country isn't of a mass shooting or a organized crime nature. Most deaths from guns are suicides. Half of all intimate partner homicides are from a gun. Just from having a gun present in the home, a women in an abusive relationship is now 5x more likely to be murdered. These aren't cases where people seek out illegal arms dealers, they happen because the gun is in easy access. There's a reason why this country faces so much gun violence compared to countries that have more sensible positions on gun ownership, and its because of the ease of legal access.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Go ahead and black market it. I get that. But guns... don't blow up. Ammo does. It's not reusable. If you ban guns, you can't get the existing ones to go away, but a gun is useless without ammo, and even if they hoard it, it will either be locked away as precious, not used, or if used, the supply goes down. Responsible owners won't want to use their guns. So they exist for home defense. For hunters, well, is shooting a deer worth $50 per shot? We'll see, but it doesn't preclude the sport entirely. Better be a better shot :-) And if you black market the ammo, it's yet another legal exposure for criminals and criminal organizations. So as flippant as the joke is, I think it has potential. Now for shooting ranges, that's tough. Maybe allow the ammo to only stay at a shooting range, but any ammo carrier outside of the shooting range is the same: very illegal. Maybe there can shooting range ammo that is far less effective (rubber bullets or even less lethal) that will still allow target practice.

thwayunion 4y ago

> as in one person buying ten isn’t 10 more owners but one, if he’d didn’t previously own one The culture of gun ownership has changed a lot in my lifetime. IMO the fact that it's now fairly normal to own a small armory is more significant than the total number of people who own more than zero guns.

mc32 4y ago
I think part of that is disposable money. Compared to any time before the 80s people can more easily afford a firearm.
- asdff 4y ago
  They've become collectible. Some guns are pretty cheap too, a few hundred. If you spend a few hundred a year on new guns, probably the amount most people pay for hobby collections of any sort, you'd have a pretty substantial armory before long. Manufactures cash in too. You can get a bright pink pistol for example, if that fits your style.

asdff 4y ago

Sure, violence will likely always happen, since people can kill with just their two hands too. The thing with a gun is that its a lot different than most other ways of enacting violence, in the sense its a lot easier to be brutally successful with a gun and a lot harder to be stopped. The numbers of dead and wounded from some of these mass shootings are absurd. You'd have to be a decent bomb maker to get similar numbers, and the FBI tries to anticipate people like this by limiting access to precursors for example. We don't see very many bombings in this country anymore, so I guess their efforts work decently well. Likewise with a knife, maybe you'd slash a few people but a lot of people would be able to get away, and if someone comes with a blunt object that puts some distance between them and you, the knife might only hinder you. The gun though. You can get a Glock with a 19 round magazine and fire it as fast as you can press the trigger. You can even practice with this thing at the gun range all day until you are a crackshot. People can't get close to you to stop you. People can't run away from you as easily either. Even if someone else in the room has a gun, they'd have to somehow beat you on the draw while you already have a gun out cocked and loaded. That's why mass shootings usually only end after the shooter is entirely surrounded by swat in body armor, or they shoot themselves.