I am not going to pretend that there are any easy federal legislative fixes that can stop mass shootings. I think we should consider looking at what Australia did when they had a mass shooting in the 1990’s because they seem to have succeeded in greatly reducing gun-induced mass casualty events. But we are not Australia and we have a lot more guns floating around in our country than they ever did. We also have the Second Amendment, a gun-loving conservative Supreme Court, a Republican-led Congress, and the National Rifle Association. So, I can kind of understand a headline that says that Washington DC has no answer for the tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina.
But there are people in our nation’s capital and in our Congress who have ideas. They can’t get a hearing.
Let’s put it in the simplest terms. The Republicans control Congress and our highest court. They don’t want to do anything to restrict gun ownership and generally want to expand gun ownership and relax the rules at every level of government that govern the ownership of guns.
They have more than sufficient power to block any ideas from even getting a vote, let alone becoming law. They don’t even need gun-friendly Democrats to help them with this. And there are plenty of gun-friendly Democrats, whether because they agree with conservatives on the issue or they’re afraid that their constituents do.
So, there’s nothing that can be done at this moment in time on the federal level, at least legislatively, to try to stop the next mass casualty event. Despite the president’s protests, this is the “new normal.”
If that’s acceptable to you, I guess you’re satisfied that you live in a country where these things happen on an almost routine basis and you prefer it this way to having a government that can interfere with the commerce of firearms.
If this is not acceptable to you, however, I won’t blame you for feeling impotent and filled with frustrated rage. Even with a willing Congress and a sensible Supreme Court, we would struggle to find the right policies to stop bad people from getting guns in this country. But we could try some things out and see how they work.
All I ask is that you direct your frustration and your rage at the people who really deserve it, because there are plenty of politicians who are willing to experiment if only they had the power to do so.
I don’t care about the Second Amendment, but the direction this government is taking regarding privacy, terrorism, incarceration, police brutality, empire-building and mainly, CORPOCRACY, leads me to think that a nation of 300 million guns might need them in the hands of their citizens.
Rich people SHOULD worry about night sniping through their gated walls, police about their exposure, legislators about those who are starving on their watch.
Indeed they should. Bring it on.
yeah, because those are generally the people who are getting shot every day in this country.
The thing is, the vast majority of the rich people were able to get the hell out of Dodge when the Soviets and Guevara-ites and Khmer Rouge came looking for a scapegoat who fucked up their country. And were able to throw up walls of sociopolitical and physical protection while they planned their escape.
It’s a nice fantasy to think that the powerful assholes who stoked the superiority-inferiority complexes and eliminationism of the violent mobs will die an ironic and karmic death at the hands of their rabid dogs, but other than the French Revolution when has that ever happened?
well, you’re right there with that guy in SC thinking that’s the answer to your personal problems
or, let me put it another way: you’re right there with that guy in SC that your response to your personal grievance concerning your take on some world situation. you’d say, it’s not anonymous killings that are the problem but that they’re not aimed at your preferred target. you could always move to Somalia btw . or, are you thinking that on this blog everyone will line up behind you on this?
○ Oligarchs, corporatocracy and the United States
Think of it as America’s original sin. Every mass shooting puts a bullet in American Exceptionalism. It shames us. It knocks us down.
Humility… is a virtue. America must be taught a lesson. And so we suffer… And we will continue to suffer until we learn this lesson… until we learn humility. More suffering please.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
so now you’re a theologian? you at Ken Langone’s School of Theology?
When Americans stop waging war all around the world, I will take your moral sensibility seriously.
http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/people-do-violence-because-their-moral-codes-demand-it/
amateur!
The problem is not guns. The problem is economic and social. And rather honestly, I benefit from that problem. So do all the upper middle class and upper class whites in this area of VA that turned it blue. All liberal as hell on social issues, but you will pry our economic power from the gold grip of our dead hands.
That is the problem. Until it’s rich fuckers getting killed, we don’t care and we won’t. More social liberalism, paired with greater economic neoliberalism. Use the money from the second to get the first.
And if a few eggs crack… oh well! They don’t make six figures and they don’t live in the best and bluest areas of major coastal cities, flyover people, flyover problems.
And I should not, while I care when it’s monorities that get killed. If it turn into monster the voters that don’t vote for my team, bonus points. And I’m able to put my personal horrors with the issue aside for political gain and marginalizing my enemies.
Income/wealth inequality in the UK is comparable to that in the US.
Police in England and Wales Went Two Years without Fatally Shooting Someone.
US homicide by gun rate: 2.97; US gun ownership rate: 88.8. The numbers for England/Wale: gun homicides 0.07 and gun ownership 6.2. (US homicide rate: 4.7; UK homicide rate: 1.0)
Sure looks like guns are the major problem in this country.
I believe it’s Switzerland which also has a high ratio of weapons amongst it’s citizens as each person out of military service gets to keep his Swiss pistol in his home for
protectionquick mobilisation.U.S.A.! U.S.A.! WE ARE # 2 !!!
My first want is to repeal the 2nd Amendment confiscate all the guns and melt them down.
That’s obviously not going to happen so then what?
I would also do a massive national gun buy back program after this was put into effect to try and get a large portion of the guns off the street as possible.
Most of that, with the exception of gun liability insurance, already exists in some form nationally and/or locally. Only minimally effective because enforcement is difficult and costly.
A high percentage of gun owners and their lobbies really hate the registration, training, and background checks of these efforts. That conflicts with their paranoia about government and adherence to their notion of libertarianism.
We’ve also seen how the gun nuts freaked out when pediatricians began asking the parents of their patients if there were guns in the home. iirc the gun nuts put the kabosh on public health effort.
I don’t know if there is a “Goldilocks zone” between ammosexuals and the majority in this country. But if there is, the majority needs to engage in a major rethink to find it.
It may be laws here and there but this is going to require a nationwide solution because how easy guns move around the country.
The insurance thing would be the hardest but could easily be sold.
The gun nuts are a minority, we’d just have to break through but most people would think that some of these things are common sense.
Most people in this country don’t own guns; therefore, it’s sort of a no-brainer that they would consider gun control legislation as “sensible.” Problem is that we’ve been doing forms of this for decades with little to no improvements.
The number of households that own guns has declined significantly since 1973, but the number of guns sold annually has increased and guns per capita has increased.
There might be better ways to tackle this than what we’ve been doing.
What Duncan said:
*These “deciders” being the NRA (lobbyist for gun manufacturers and dealers), politicians beholden to the NRA, and the minority of Americans that own guns.
The US homicide by gun rate and the not infrequent mass shootings doesn’t change the political equation on guns — regardless of how horrific a mass shooting is and how loudly the gun control advocates repeat their argument.
What gets far less attention is how freaking much money gun violence costs:
The emergency medical costs alone for shooting victims is one reason why US per capita medical costs far exceed medical costs in other countries. Those costs are passed right on down to all of us in one form or another instead of being imposed on, you know, the people that love their guns.
For the moment my argument is with the philosophy that the Bill of Rights has only at most two amendments — the 2nd and the 10th.
I’m getting to the point of thinking that one has to bring down gun deaths without legislative restrictions first and create a situation in which people will get tired of hauling them around everywhere.
The debate we should be having is how to create that kind of situation instead of how to get legislators to create a possibly ineffective half-measure of a law. The gun lobby has made legislation one of the threats that they can use to goose gun sales, but they have also made a kind of fear a means of goosing gun sales.
It is not self-evident that one needs to have a gun anywhere in this country. At least not for self-defense. It has become that way be perpetual repetition of that wisdom and corresponding packing.
well, you’re right there with that guy in SC thinking that’s the answer to your personal problems
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