“Also, there is no way that the gun was a part of this crime! Guns don’t kill people. Only the mentally unstable people we goad into mass shootings with the weapons and ammo we sell them kill people.”
To play devil's advocate (and weather the downvotes for doing so), alcohol doesn't drive drunk, and most people who use it do so responsibly.
If a bunch of peeps who don't drink wanted to stop drunk driving, they would see the best solution as just banning alcohol. Its a simple solution and makes sense. Nations like saudi arabia have banned alcohol and have significantly less drunk driving incidents. It wouldnt make sense to them why so many people would resist such a simple and proven solution. If they won't ban it all then atleast ban the liquor, etc.
Meanwhile the people who drink responsibly wouldnt want to have to give up drinking just because a few idiots drive drunk. They would see the best solution as finding ways to stop people from choosing (or being able) to drive drunk, while still allowing themselves to use it responsibly, but that is a much harder thing to do.
Maybe we should have licensing and registration requirements for guns like we do cars... nobody on the "guns aren't the problem" side of the argument is ok with anything like that either.
Of course, it's illegal to buy alcohol under 21, and it's illegal for someone to sell it to you if you're obviously impaired. We have some restrictions about it.
I like your analogy. I'm just trying to refactor based on the NotJustBikes mindset of a well-developed city that has little to no requirement for driving a powered vehicle.
"Drunk person riding their bicycle into the canal and drowning" doesn't quite have the same impact.
That said, the Venn diagram of countries with cities designed primarily around car usage vs the countries with a serious gun abuse problem seems to intersect with just one country. So your analogy still stands.
Worst part about this shitty argument is that if they believe it’s a mental health issue then why are they so adamant about slashing spending for mental health programs and treatment 🤔
Haven't we had many records of "good guys with a gun"
Who pull out their weapon and then either get shot by police who mistake them for the shooter or put it back because they can't tell what's going on in the chaos?
Well here's some, 1 or 2 of which the police did indeed do that but tbh at least some other people were saved if not the defender. At least he actually did kinda die a hero even if the cops are stupid and trigger happy (what else is new?)
Out of nearly 560 mass shootings this year, we are looking at something ridiculous like less than 1% was a "good guy with a gun" that helped. And for some of those "good guy with a gun", they also end up dead from police shooting at them.
In other words, you're more likely to hope the shooter is struck by lightning.
This is why I never took the Republican Party seriously, even before the days when they came out as being domestic terrorists.
Anyone who is honestly more afraid of not having a gun than they are of not having a doctor, has the mindset of a 7-year-old who's Daddy just let him watch Die Hard.
Most of those "mass shootings" are gang violence, and when a shooter gets taken out by another shooter it's just part of the violence.
The mass shootings where the point is a massacre have a slightly better rate of "good guys with guns," but still admittedly not great.
It's completely irrelevant though, the point of the right to bear arms is so people can join a radical militia and help put down slave revolts, conquer land from the Indians, and fight tyranny, in the order of importance to the Founding Fathers.
You don't CCW to be some stupid fudd sheep dog. You carry so you have a force equalizer and so you can protect yourself and others around you...not to go hunting for someone shooting others.
Judging by her educational history and political present day, I'm guessing she's not fond of being lectured or otherwise informed by anyone about anything.
They could call it a "fnorplgleek" for all I care.
Until they figure out how to prevent any and all fnorplgleeks from having the ability to injure, main, or kill another human being when the fnorplgleek operator wishes to harm you unlawfully, they can expend 100% of their thinkbox time figuring out how to do so. Like, pin their wetware CPU to working out a solution. Interconnect them Borg style.
If the response is "well no, not like that" then we recognize that it's a compromise that continues to put victims in front of said fnorplgleek operators.
brb getting a "Down with fnorplgleeks" t-shirt made
So you wouldn't care if the legislation was written to ban anything that has the potential to kill?
Guns, cars, knives, bleach, rope all could fall into that category. See how words have specific definitions and actually matter quite a bit? Especially when the law is concerned. Why do you think there's different categories of homicide? Do you think manslaughter and 1st degree murder should carry the same penalty?
This is just bullshit GOP deflection whenever someone calls it what it is.The AR in AR-15 may stand for Armalite, but an AR-15 is still an assault rifle.
The U.S. Army defines assault rifles as "short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges.
And
...examples of intermediate cartridges are the 7.92×33mm Kurz, the 7.62×39mm and 5.56×45mm NATO.
Wtf, no she doesn't?! I don't need to know the details of how guns are named to see the effects they have. It's like saying you can only criticize someone running over people with a car if you can name the manufacturer's home country, completely absurd.
The people don't need to be taken seriously, the issue does. Arguing over semantics isn't helpful unless it's "Legislating against assault rifles won't do anything because that's not a thing. We need to ..." And the words after the ellipsis can't be "..do nothing."
The term comes from the military who wanted a lower calibration version of an M-14 (which was defined as a battle rifle. M14s are 7.62mm nato, m16s are 5.56mm nato)
The definition is a selective fire (semi auto, 3r burst, full auto, or whatever the preferred flavor is today,) chambered for an intermediate (5.56 nato) cartridge.
Assault weapon is the term that has no specific meaning, and is now used to refer to SBRs and other weapons based on or otherwise derived from the AR-15- more broadly any semi auto rifle with a large box magazine derived from a weapon meant for combat. (The 94 assault weapons ban followed the broader definition. More or less)
What ever you want to call them, AR derivatives need to be controlled. Especially SBRs.
Unless you know exactly all the specks of a weapon used to muder you, you aren't allowed to ask not to be murdered. It's that one simple trick that all murderers should remember
I know so many people who think they are helping by critiquing like this when they are not. And also expect a “thank you” for their destructive distraction. If there were a hell I hope they are the first to burn or freeze in it.
In this case I do think it’s a good response. Both sides have a boogeyman, but it’s time for The Final Nightmare. This time, Freddie’s dead. Or wait, maybe we want to avoid little Freddie being dead. My point is, many are intentionally talking at cross purposes, using loaded terms to invoke rage at their target rather than actually discuss what’s in their crosshairs. Someone needs to smack their hands with a ruler until they grow up.
While we do need a better way to limit the violence people commit with firearms, I have no better idea how but I know it starts with actually talking, using the same vocabulary, facing the same reality, finding goals we can agree on.
It starts by making your country better. More like in Europe here. It's like the US actively goes out of its way to punish people who weren't born with a silver spoon up their ass. The way the American systems work seem to me to be actively toxic to a regular person's mental health.
So you have a country full of a large population of people getting mentally damaged from unnecessary and avoidable stress in life... And THEN there are also loads of guns.
"But most gun deaths are from people using pistols to commit suicide" gee I wonder if that doesn't mean something, hmmm?
It is worth being conversant and properly educated about the things that are important to you if you want to engage meaningfully with people who disagree. That means knowing the vocab, syntax, and lingo.
For example, if you hate manga / anime / Japanese character retardation like I do, it's worth knowing the difference to tell people it's stupid on their own terms.
No, but if you say something like "if we would have just shot all those communists like hitler after world war 1 things would have been a lot better" people arent going to listen to anything else you have to say.
No, but you ought to know what some of the ideas were; conversant does not mean expert. It's only really necessary to use the right vocabulary if you want to change any minds, but it's STILL better not to use words that are actively incorrect (and are also painfully simple and germain to the discussion).
If the point is just to be loud and obnoxious for people who already superficially agree with you, by all means, throw all this out: you can just be really mad about Hitler's treatment of Jews in focus camps while he was the leader of Poland.
A garbage, labor camp of a country filled with selfish people who'd literally rather have the option to buy whatever they want than protect children from a continuous stream of violent death, when they aren't calling to further defund their schools to cut the taxes an actual society would require to function.
Oh, but I better root for the home team like its a fucking game, amirite? At this point, I'm rooting for climate change, AI, and all our other for profit monuments to greed to eat us and wipe the board clean.
Historians could only "uncover" this reason because it's buried under the actual reasons. All the rationale behind the constitutional amendments was highly documented at the time, public, and easily accessed and referenced.
Assault rifle means something, and there are very few of them in civilian hands, and they are (almost?) never used in crimes because they're so hard to get already. Making them harder to get would accomplish nothing. Assault weapon is the made-up term that is based more on looks than function.