4 ms·

“We’ve tried nothing (about guns) and we’re all out of ideas” all over again.

by jama211 10mo ago

CamperBob2 10mo ago
We've tried about 20,000 gun-control laws, at last count. It must not be the guns. Same principle applies with cameras. The tool is not the issue.
- wffurr 10mo ago
  The rest of the civilized world doesn't seem to have a problem. Their stricter gun control laws seem to work just fine.
  - Insanity 10mo ago
    Yeah, it's obviously a gun control issue. But the US has such a deeply ingrained cultural association with owning guns, and thinking that this means "freedom" in case the government turns on the people lol, that I doubt banning them happens in our lifetime.
    - exasperaited 10mo ago
      You don't need to ban them, though. Isn't that the actual lesson at the end of _Bowling For Columbine_? That Canada has a huge number of guns and isn't so fucked up? What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns: Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain". (Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.) Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance". Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all". Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms. Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out. Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness. Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are. And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns. Make gun obsession weird again.
      - sudobash1 10mo ago
        > Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain". That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do. In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.
        exasperaited 10mo ago
        Polarization is the point. It is time to reclaim the idea that gun ownership is at best an unfortunate necessity and gun fandom is creepy shit.
      - Empact 10mo ago
        You act like guns some weird anachronism, but from my perch, it seems that the need for civilized people to maintain firearms is increasing, not decreasing. Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians? If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order. In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
        thunderfork 10mo ago
        "I need my guns to defend myself from the (((barbarian hordes)))" is exactly the kind of rhetoric that leads the rest of the planet treats gun nuts like the nuts they are. Unfortunately for the US, the US valorizes this particular psychosis
    - JuniperMesos 10mo ago
      https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-... > There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.
      - jama211 10mo ago
        A substack that tells you to “read Wikipedia” is not a valid criticism of the obvious.
  - stronglikedan 10mo ago
    The rest of the world does indeed have a problem, but the perps just use different weapons. It's not the guns.
    - exasperaited 10mo ago
      America has dramatically worse rates of knife crime than the western countries it likes to point at though. Doesn't that undermine your argument?
      - JuniperMesos 10mo ago
        Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Which countries do and do not count as part of the West in any case? People hold different opinions about whether e.g. the entirety of Latin America counts as Western or not, and the choice to include or exclude those countries makes a big difference in how the US compares in terms of relative violent crime rates.
        exasperaited 10mo ago
        > Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Oh indeed, but what I am referring to is the "knife crime in London" comparator that right-wing gun groups use. Knife crime in London is not as bad as knife crime in any comparable US city. It's about 40% as bad as New York and only 10% as bad as Dallas.
        jama211 10mo ago
        You make a good point! The US isn’t really civilised enough to compare it to countries with proper modern and safe societies, so why should it aim to those heights? If we just compare the US to other countries with issues of violent crime we don’t have to solve any problems at all to look acceptable.
    - jama211 10mo ago
      “The perps” gives away a huge flaw in your thinking, that people are inherently good or inherently bad and that “bad” people are motivated to do bad things always and will always find a way to do them and “good” people don’t. This is entirely incorrect and has been proven so false for so long that any further point made without understanding this should be dismissed out of hand.
  - JuniperMesos 10mo ago
    The exact definition of "civilized world" is doing a lot of work here. What specific regions or poltical jurisdictions do you think count or do not count as part of the civilized world?
    - cwillu 10mo ago
      ‹inserts the animaniacs “countries of the world” song here›
      - jama211 10mo ago
        Hahaha nice
    - CamperBob2 10mo ago
      The exact definition of "civilized world" is doing a lot of work here. As is "doesn't seem to have a problem."
      - wffurr 10mo ago
        I am sorry I don't have the precise statement about relative rates of gun deaths and mass shootings in the US vs the rest of the OECD. Here's a data point to ponder, firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761 This is not true for any other OECD country.
        JuniperMesos 10mo ago
        I wa surprised by this, because Mexico is in the OECD. According to https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1428691/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/..., the firearm-related death rate (including suicides and accidents) in 2022 in Mexico for children and adolescents (age 1-19) is 4.9/100k, compared to 5.9/100k in the US. But the overall homicide rate is 6.5/100k for Mexico vs 4.7/100k in the US. So this is consistent with Mexico being a more violent society than the US, but using somewhat fewer guns in the process (and the numbers are still pretty similar). There's also questions about how reliable the Mexican firearm homicide data is - a lot of these are presumably happening in cartel-controlled areas where Mexican government state capacity is limited, including the capacity to properly gather statistics.
- tietjens 10mo ago
  Ah no, I’m pretty certain allowing the sale of military-grade automatic weapons is the issue. That’s a tool for warfare, and you have deadly shootings every day.
  - zetanor 10mo ago
    My buddy saw a sign on a gun store where they had a "3 for the price of 2" promotion on M240 machine guns, like who in their right mind would need two of these, let alone three? They proudly displayed "No ID Checks" in their window lettering, too.
    - sheikhnbake 10mo ago
      At least part of this is a lie. A transferable M240 is like $400k-600k. And in order to sell those, they have to run a background check as an FFL which requires some form of identification.
    - CamperBob2 10mo ago
      No, he saw no such thing, at least not in the USA. You need to call him up and ask him why he lied to you, and ask him not to do that anymore.
  - sheikhnbake 10mo ago
    Automatic weapons aren't being sold en masse and are rarely used in violent crime. The most common culprits are regular hand guns. The banning of which would require draconian laws. Laws that would need to be enforced, failing a massive culture shift resulting in the vast majority of gun owners voluntarily turning in their arsenals.
    - tietjens 10mo ago
      You can down vote me but bump stocks are legal. The difference seems semantic. There are many, many steps that could be taken in the USA to reduce access to weapons before reaching outright banning. Obviously. And also the idea that banning handguns would be draconian is hilarious. Try talking to anyone from UK, ANZ, Europe, etc. No one is crying about too much regulation.
- sheikhnbake 10mo ago
  Prohibition has historically been proven to not work. Even so, the effectiveness of gun laws can't be measured when neighboring states don't have equivalent restrictions. Saying we have 20,000 gun laws and that they don't inherently work is somewhat misleading.
  - jama211 10mo ago
    You’re spouting straight gun propaganda. It has been proven over and over and over that gun restrictions work very effectively. Anything else it’s literally just a lie.
    - sheikhnbake 10mo ago
      The comment you replied to was calling out gun propaganda. When I said prohibition doesn't work, i'm talking about removing whatever the contraband is has been empirically proven to not work. Guns, drugs, and booze are too proliferated in the US to be effectively prohibited. Unless we can get every state on the same page with equivalent laws across the country, the debate is moot.
- jama211 10mo ago
  You haven’t tried shit, don’t lie to me. Most bad faith comment I’ve ever read in my life.
jama211 10mo ago
Aha, and there it is, look at them all…

“We’ve tried nothing (about guns) and we’re all out of ideas” all over again.

by jama211 10mo ago

“We’ve tried nothing (about guns) and we’re all out of ideas” all over again.

We've tried about 20,000 gun-control laws, at last count. It must not be the guns. Same principle applies with cameras. The tool is not the issue.

wffurr 10mo ago
The rest of the civilized world doesn't seem to have a problem. Their stricter gun control laws seem to work just fine.
- Insanity 10mo ago
  Yeah, it's obviously a gun control issue. But the US has such a deeply ingrained cultural association with owning guns, and thinking that this means "freedom" in case the government turns on the people lol, that I doubt banning them happens in our lifetime.
  - exasperaited 10mo ago
    You don't need to ban them, though. Isn't that the actual lesson at the end of _Bowling For Columbine_? That Canada has a huge number of guns and isn't so fucked up? What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns: Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain". (Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.) Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance". Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all". Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms. Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out. Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness. Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are. And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns. Make gun obsession weird again.
    - sudobash1 10mo ago
      > Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain". That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do. In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.
      - exasperaited 10mo ago
        Polarization is the point. It is time to reclaim the idea that gun ownership is at best an unfortunate necessity and gun fandom is creepy shit.
    - Empact 10mo ago
      You act like guns some weird anachronism, but from my perch, it seems that the need for civilized people to maintain firearms is increasing, not decreasing. Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians? If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order. In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
      - thunderfork 10mo ago
        "I need my guns to defend myself from the (((barbarian hordes)))" is exactly the kind of rhetoric that leads the rest of the planet treats gun nuts like the nuts they are. Unfortunately for the US, the US valorizes this particular psychosis
  - JuniperMesos 10mo ago
    https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-... > There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.
    - jama211 10mo ago
      A substack that tells you to “read Wikipedia” is not a valid criticism of the obvious.
- stronglikedan 10mo ago
  The rest of the world does indeed have a problem, but the perps just use different weapons. It's not the guns.
  - exasperaited 10mo ago
    America has dramatically worse rates of knife crime than the western countries it likes to point at though. Doesn't that undermine your argument?
    - JuniperMesos 10mo ago
      Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Which countries do and do not count as part of the West in any case? People hold different opinions about whether e.g. the entirety of Latin America counts as Western or not, and the choice to include or exclude those countries makes a big difference in how the US compares in terms of relative violent crime rates.
      - exasperaited 10mo ago
        > Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Oh indeed, but what I am referring to is the "knife crime in London" comparator that right-wing gun groups use. Knife crime in London is not as bad as knife crime in any comparable US city. It's about 40% as bad as New York and only 10% as bad as Dallas.
      - jama211 10mo ago
        You make a good point! The US isn’t really civilised enough to compare it to countries with proper modern and safe societies, so why should it aim to those heights? If we just compare the US to other countries with issues of violent crime we don’t have to solve any problems at all to look acceptable.
  - jama211 10mo ago
    “The perps” gives away a huge flaw in your thinking, that people are inherently good or inherently bad and that “bad” people are motivated to do bad things always and will always find a way to do them and “good” people don’t. This is entirely incorrect and has been proven so false for so long that any further point made without understanding this should be dismissed out of hand.
- JuniperMesos 10mo ago
  The exact definition of "civilized world" is doing a lot of work here. What specific regions or poltical jurisdictions do you think count or do not count as part of the civilized world?
  - cwillu 10mo ago
    ‹inserts the animaniacs “countries of the world” song here›
    - jama211 10mo ago
      Hahaha nice
  - CamperBob2 10mo ago
    The exact definition of "civilized world" is doing a lot of work here. As is "doesn't seem to have a problem."
    - wffurr 10mo ago
      I am sorry I don't have the precise statement about relative rates of gun deaths and mass shootings in the US vs the rest of the OECD. Here's a data point to ponder, firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761 This is not true for any other OECD country.
      - JuniperMesos 10mo ago
        I wa surprised by this, because Mexico is in the OECD. According to https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1428691/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/..., the firearm-related death rate (including suicides and accidents) in 2022 in Mexico for children and adolescents (age 1-19) is 4.9/100k, compared to 5.9/100k in the US. But the overall homicide rate is 6.5/100k for Mexico vs 4.7/100k in the US. So this is consistent with Mexico being a more violent society than the US, but using somewhat fewer guns in the process (and the numbers are still pretty similar). There's also questions about how reliable the Mexican firearm homicide data is - a lot of these are presumably happening in cartel-controlled areas where Mexican government state capacity is limited, including the capacity to properly gather statistics.
tietjens 10mo ago
Ah no, I’m pretty certain allowing the sale of military-grade automatic weapons is the issue. That’s a tool for warfare, and you have deadly shootings every day.
- zetanor 10mo ago
  My buddy saw a sign on a gun store where they had a "3 for the price of 2" promotion on M240 machine guns, like who in their right mind would need two of these, let alone three? They proudly displayed "No ID Checks" in their window lettering, too.
  - sheikhnbake 10mo ago
    At least part of this is a lie. A transferable M240 is like $400k-600k. And in order to sell those, they have to run a background check as an FFL which requires some form of identification.
  - CamperBob2 10mo ago
    No, he saw no such thing, at least not in the USA. You need to call him up and ask him why he lied to you, and ask him not to do that anymore.
- sheikhnbake 10mo ago
  Automatic weapons aren't being sold en masse and are rarely used in violent crime. The most common culprits are regular hand guns. The banning of which would require draconian laws. Laws that would need to be enforced, failing a massive culture shift resulting in the vast majority of gun owners voluntarily turning in their arsenals.
  - tietjens 10mo ago
    You can down vote me but bump stocks are legal. The difference seems semantic. There are many, many steps that could be taken in the USA to reduce access to weapons before reaching outright banning. Obviously. And also the idea that banning handguns would be draconian is hilarious. Try talking to anyone from UK, ANZ, Europe, etc. No one is crying about too much regulation.
sheikhnbake 10mo ago
Prohibition has historically been proven to not work. Even so, the effectiveness of gun laws can't be measured when neighboring states don't have equivalent restrictions. Saying we have 20,000 gun laws and that they don't inherently work is somewhat misleading.
- jama211 10mo ago
  You’re spouting straight gun propaganda. It has been proven over and over and over that gun restrictions work very effectively. Anything else it’s literally just a lie.
  - sheikhnbake 10mo ago
    The comment you replied to was calling out gun propaganda. When I said prohibition doesn't work, i'm talking about removing whatever the contraband is has been empirically proven to not work. Guns, drugs, and booze are too proliferated in the US to be effectively prohibited. Unless we can get every state on the same page with equivalent laws across the country, the debate is moot.
jama211 10mo ago
You haven’t tried shit, don’t lie to me. Most bad faith comment I’ve ever read in my life.

jama211 10mo ago

Aha, and there it is, look at them all…