With the caveat that I have the luxury of looking at this from a 30,000 ft view. I try not to care about politics anymore but I know all the players.
I'm going to try to avoid starting a gun debate. The one thing everyone loves more than guns is debating about whether people should own guns. "Don't tell me what I can't do! But also, let me tell you what to do."
The history behind this is actually really fascinating. Guns didn't become an identity signaling mechanism until somewhere in the last 60-70 years. Check out
this podcast episode. It started with African Americans asserting their rights against prejudiced police - like most of our ills, it comes down to the original sin of slavery.
Caravan Ray wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2020 7:26 am
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The technical argument generally boils down to:
1. The commas: is the latter part ("the right to bear arms") dependent upon the first part ("being necessary to the security")? It's not even a well-formed sentence!
2. Militia: Even if 1 meant that, did "militia" mean what it means today? Back then, supposedly, it meant a more nebulous populous.
3. Where to draw the line: How much regulation is "infringement"?
4. Who are we securing security from? Who are we protecting? What is a free State? Is state equal to government?
A lot of pro-gun folks read the amendment this way: "An armed populace, being necessary to ensure freedom of the State (against the tyranny of the government, like the one we just seceded from), the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Caravan Ray wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2020 7:26 am
Does not sound to me like your Founding Fathers wanted Billy Bob to wander down to the PiggyWigg packing heat
This is true. They didn't live in this type of society - lots of social isolation and deterioration of local community. At the same time, Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." It's a callous and long-term view. We all want a quick and easy solution, but is there one?
A lot of people find it offensive that a criminal
could have a gun, but if we outlaw guns, then you cannot deter or defend against the criminal without being a criminal too. They also find it offensive that people want to regulate them as if they are the problem, but the majority of shootings don't happen around them or among people they know. Rural-urban divide.
Statistically, most shootings are in areas where people cannot trust law enforcement to protect them and they cannot trust their neighbors, and unfortunately it spreads like a contagious disease: gun ownership begets gun ownership. Are you going to tell those people they cannot protect themselves? How do you ensure safety? In fact: are you going to tell women they cannot have a weapon that equalizes them against men? It's easy to say we aren't going to have any guns in this wonderland to make things better for all of us, but that doesn't assure them as individuals. Without assured individuals, we can't get from point A to point B.
The pro-regulation argument usually pivots to "machine guns" and "assault rifles". Those are a kind of red-herrings. ("Assault" rifles are hunting rifles that look a little more badass to appeal to the common insecure man. None of them are fully automatic machine guns - we did ban those and you need a special license. Fun fact: you can buy a licensed one for about $10,000.) Most shootings are with handguns. High-profile mass shootings are with rifles and disproportionately impact middle-class white people. So, the pro-gun people accuse the pro-regulation people of being myopic or prejudiced. At this point, one option that is floated are smaller magazines or getting rid of semi-automatic weapons. The pro-gun people say that it's a slippery slope and that those are easily moddable things, and they won't solve shootings anyhow. The pro-regulation people want to do
something and if you don't want to do anything that is directly related to the regulation of guns, then you are a callous redneck.
I know Australia had an amazing gun buyback thing - to get that to work here, you'd need 1) everyone to agree to trust the government (lol), 2) serious border security , 3) significant increase and cooperation in enforcement at all levels of government. Any territory that cannot eliminate guns completely makes their citizens targets. To the point: most if not all of our mass shootings have been in gun-free zones, and cities that ban guns have a lot of shootings. Australia, like the UK, is basically a gun free island.
Even if you solve guns, you have to consider knives, the 3D printed guns that are popping up, or whether the mass shooter-types would use bombs instead.
TBH I think mass shootings and handgun shootings are different problems with different causes. I am skeptical that we could do anything directly with guns to solve either at this point, so I would look at the primary causes of each: mental illness, poverty, lack of community, trust in law enforcement. The American psyche is sick and nobody wants to agree on how to fix that. Such questions are more difficult. Quick and easy with a side of fries, please, and super-size it!
Caravan Ray wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2020 7:26 am
And now we now know the answer - you have elected Disinfectent Donny as your President.
Well, that's not really related to guns. In fact, he's made some regulations pertaining to guns. The thing is, the people that support him are OK with that as long as it is
their guy doing it.
There's a great sense of dissatisfaction and fear that people who aren't like them have been selling them out. "Middle" America never wanted us to be the world's moral superpower and have been saying around the dinner table for years: "why are we spending money building roads in Iraq/etc and not here?". Our politicians have failed to explain the importance of this to them - how we are stopping tyrannical nations from taking global power, how we are ensuring lucrative trade policies, etc.
Caravan Ray wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2020 7:26 am
What the fuck are you people going to do about it??
This is where I am going to
purposefully say some controversial things.
I think the two-party political system may be a good thing. We have an unspoken agreement going: Democrats want to do something at the government level, Republicans claim that government doesn't work, Democrats ignore them and make bigger government, Republicans prove that government doesn't work, and Democrats fix it (hopefully). Rinse and repeat.
We are
lucky that we didn't elect a competent authoritarian into the presidency. We elected an incompetent narcissist with authoritarian tendencies. The opposing party has made many promises about limiting the president's powers. If they keep those promises, then it was a good thing this buffoon came along otherwise we'd never fix the imbalance of powers. In other words: the two Americas are so afraid of each other that perhaps they might agree on limitations on government power, which is kind of how this great experiment started. (Trump's also caused Democrats to actually pay attention to local politics, and we have a record number of women as representatives. Sometimes a little bad causes a lot of good?)
In other words: Donald is like a vaccine: a weakened virus to train our immune system. If he doesn't give us autism, he'll (indirectly) make us immune to some democratic loopholes going forward... for a while.
Caravan Ray wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2020 7:26 am
This concerns me greatly. I have a lot on money invested in American companies. And I am seeing me investments eroded by a fuckwit that i didn't vote for.
IMO things are probably going to get a lot worse before they get better. His idiocy was driving stocks upwards before this pandemic. Like I said in the other thread, the real problem is that we don't have a unified plan and we're all arguing about it. Like guns, we can't solve a pandemic cleanly if we can't all agree to do it at once at the same time.