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aniviron posted:The US has very weird gun laws. Most of the proposed legislation responding to the past decade of mass shootings as well as ATF rulings focus on restricting rifles by disallowing various features or imposing other forms of inconvenience on owning a rifle. Overwhelmingly, however, shooting deaths are the result of handguns, not rifles, and there is almost never any pistol regulation. The FBI's 2020 statistics list 8029 handgun fatalities, 4863 unspecified gun deaths, and 455 rifle deaths. Compared to other forms of homicide ( knives ~2k, unknown 1k, unarmed 600, clubs 400 etc.) this strongly suggests that the way to reduce gun violence in the US would be to regulate pistols, but at both the state and federal level this is largely not what is happening. It's because there's reasons to own a handgun that are seen as legitimate. The intention behind most national-scale American gun laws isn't to target the most dangerous guns, but rather to target the guns with the least political support. Broadly speaking, gun owners fall into three general political groups: people who want a compact and portable weapon for self-defense (and/or crimes), hunters and sport shooters, and gun nuts (and militia types) who start shouting about the Constitution when you ask them what practical use they could possibly have for automatic rifles with high-capacity magazines. National-level gun legislation, such as the Assault Weapons Ban, generally seeks to split the gun lobby by exclusively targeting that last group while going to great lengths to avoid offending the other two groups. It was a strategy that worked great up until the political realignment of the 70s and 80s, when the NRA (traditionally concerned mostly with hunters and sport shooters) was taken over by that group.
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Jun 2, 2022 14:15
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Harold Fjord posted:cross posting this because it's a great example of how suddenly everyone seems to be forgetting that correlation is not causation. If you forced all the collectors to go down to five gun max each we'd still have a mass shooting problem. I don't think anyone is saying that large gun stockpiles are directly causing mass shootings. However, large gun stockpiles are an easily-quantified symptom of America's uniquely permissive gun laws, as well as a symptom of the rather unique existence of a gun-obsessed cohort that blocks political action even when classrooms full of kids are shot up.
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Jun 2, 2022 18:18
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Koos Group posted:Well, that's probably also true for other collectible items. If someone manages to somehow commit a mass killing using only Yugioh cards and Pokemon plushies, then I don't want to imagine how many thousands of people they could have killed using actual weapons.
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Jun 2, 2022 19:12
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It's worth noting that gun control laws do pass. Not necessarily at the national level, but states have been more active on gun laws. Even red states! https://twitter.com/OsitaNwanevu/status/1532775413084303360 There's been ballot propositions and such too. The lack of action at the national level is regrettable, but Congress sandbags on pretty much everything. State and local governments, at the very least, are taking things more seriously and finding fewer obstacles to action.
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Jun 3, 2022 19:18
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"Oppressive governments disarm the populace" and "all gun control is preparation for oppression" are not the same statement, and the latter does not necessarily follow from the former. Yes, oppressive governments often disarm the populace, but lots of non-oppressive governments have disarmed the populace too, because having a heavily-armed populace tends to interfere with having a strong, stable central government. That's not always shorthand for brutal government oppression! For example, disarmament is often extremely helpful in allowing a national government to assert control over overly powerful and belligerent local power-holders (such as warlords or organized crime). Ultimately, the role of gun policy is to define the relationship between local, lower-level power-holders and the more distant higher-level power holders. Gun control would tend to shift the monopoly on violence more toward the latter, while permissive gun policy would tend to empower the former at the expense of the latter. Which is better depends on their relative political positions. For example, the lack of any serious effort to disarm the South after the Civil War was a key factor in the failure of Reconstruction, as the well-armed Southern whites could quickly retake local dominance by force whenever the federal troops weren't around. On the other hand, just fifty years later, those same well-armed Southern whites were happy to impose discretionary gun control laws that allowed local authorities to control who could own guns (just as they were happy to impose discretionary voting laws that allowed local authorities to decide who could vote). ToxicSlurpee posted:When the Nazis took power Hitler disarmed sectors of the population especially the Jews. They also disarmed the countries they conquered. Himmler specifically said "Ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as having guns doesn’t serve the State." Before that the Weimar Republic began gun registry which was then used by those in power against political opponents pretty specifically. We know what happened after that. When the Nazis took power, Hitler didn't really do anything about gun laws. The Nazis didn't pass gun laws until five years after Hitler took power, and when they did, they're generally considered to have loosened control of guns. The Nazi gun laws reduced the number of guns that required licenses, expanded the number of groups that were exempt from the gun licensing requirements (for example, being a Nazi Party member automatically entitled you to acquire a handgun without needing to get a permit first), loosened the age limit, and so on. Eight months later, they issued an order banning Jews from having any deadly weapons (including not just guns, but knives or clubs as well). But this was in late 1938, after Kristallnacht, and therefore was clearly not a necessary factor to enable oppression of Jews. Rather, historical takes I've seen (there aren't a ton, because the idea that the Nazis were pro-gun control was invented by a NRA lawyer in 2000) generally seem to consider this measure to have been part of a larger propaganda campaign to convince the larger German public that Jews were dangerous and needed to be further oppressed. The Viet Cong were a lot better armed than your local gun store. Between captured weapons from the French military and ongoing supplies from the Soviets and China, they had plenty of military-grade equipment. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was won with heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns, not handguns.
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Jun 6, 2022 03:55
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The Lord of Hats posted:I'm strongly in favor of gun control, to make my position clear from the start. That's already the current state of affairs. The War on Drugs has a bunch of anti-gun stuff baked directly into it. First of all, existing US law makes it illegal for anyone who's been sentenced to more than a year in prison to possess firearms, and thanks to the existing biases in our law enforcement system, about one-third of black men are convicted felons. This naturally played a part in policies like stop-and-frisk and other police practices involving the police inventing excuses to pretextually and preferentially search non-white people. It can also be involved in other sorts of police-state excesses - for example, I recently posted somewhere about a case where police officers were monitoring the social media accounts of black men with criminal records, saw one post a picture of himself at a firing range, and sent him to prison for illegal firearm possession. Second of all, many state and federal drug laws impose an increased sentence if the person being charged possessed a firearm, even if it wasn't involved in the crime in any way. For example, in US v Denmark, Fosque Kinte Denmark (who, in a sting, sold meth to law enforcement agents over Facetime) was hit with a weapons enhancement because guns were found in his house. Even though the government found no evidence that the meth had ever been in his home, and found no evidence that the guns had been with him when he shipped the meth, the mere fact that guns were present in the same house he made the calls from was sufficient to add a dangerous weapons enhancement to his drug trafficking charges. As a Court of Appeals put it: quote:Besides the drug paraphernalia on the first floor, the Government does not have any evidence that Denmark ever had meth in his home. Moreover, the paraphernalia and the guns were found in different rooms and on different floors. Denmark essentially argues that these facts resolve the case. Which brings us to point three: the courts wholly endorse the idea that there's a connection between drugs and guns, and will frequently expand the power of law enforcement and prosecutors to tie the two things together. For example, cases like United States v. Guerrero have established that under drug trafficking charges you can be hit with a weapons enhancement because one of your co-defendants had a weapon, even if you didn't know they had a weapon. According to the courts, firearms are a "tool of the trade" for drug dealers, and therefore it's "reasonably foreseeable" that someone involved in the transaction would have a gun. As such, the courts consider it extremely implausible to say you genuinely thought that none of the people involved in the drug deals owned a gun. Or as another example, take State v. Guy, where the Supreme Court of Wisconsin found that it's legal to frisk anyone suspected of drug crimes because weapons are a "tool of the trade" for drug dealers (that one comes up a lot in drug cases), because "the violence associated with drug trafficking today places law enforcement officers in extreme danger", and because "Several cases have found that drug dealers and weapons go hand in hand". And just to bring up a fourth angle, let's not forget how much more latitude the courts give to cops when they claim the presence of a firearm or even that they suspected the presence of a firearm, to the point where "I thought I saw a gun" is already a magic phrase that essentially makes murder legal. Cases like Philando Castile, shot simply for informing the officer of his legally-possessed firearm, just go to show that the Second Amendment is already a whites-only right - and the NRA's long silence in his case is an example of how the gun lobby already only cares about gun rights for whites. That's what it comes down to. There's already strong gun control policies in place against African-Americans. Gun control is already run pretty much exactly like the War on Drugs - in fact, the two are often coupled tightly together. And you sure as hell don't see the NRA or the gun lobby lining up to get any of this poo poo repealed. The question now is whether we're going to apply all this poo poo to white people too, or if we're going to maintain the status quo of applying anti-gun policies exclusively to non-whites.
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Jun 6, 2022 18:09
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Liquid Communism posted:You might want to update your understanding there. Between Cliven Bundy and company's little standoff out west and the Jan 6 insurrection, the will of the US government to crack down seems to have softened immensely. The enthusiastic support of a significant part of the political establishment and law enforcement community. During the 2014 Bundy standoff, Nevada's junior senator publicly called them patriots and personally called up BLM to tell them to stop being mean to the Bundy clan, and Nevada's governor backed the Bundys as well. And as for the Jan 6th insurrection, they literally had informers and co-conspirators in the administration and inside Congress itself. And even then, both movements have so far completely failed at their objectives. The best they've been able to accomplish is "only some of them went to jail, instead of all of them". Not exactly a successful insurgency! mobby_6kl posted:Ok guys help me understand, so there are two options here. Either it's possible to achieve something against the government through (threats of) armed resistance, or it's not. I'm confused about the implications of either conclusion that you're getting at. Is one or the other a good or a bad thing? Which one supports stricter gun control? It can be possible or not possible, and it can be good or bad. It depends on who is attempting to achieve what, and how much support they have among local, state, and national populations and power-holders! This is because the primary political impact of gun ownership is in the relationship between lower levels of government and higher levels of government. Depending on the relative positions of those different levels of government, guns can have a positive political impact or a negative political impact. Probably the number one case of a successful insurgency against the US federal government would be the southern slave states during the Reconstruction Era. But that had the overwhelming support of the local armed populace of trained military veterans, as well as the solid support of local law enforcement, local politicians, and powerful and influential state figures. Moreover, this successful insurgency happened in the wake of a failed armed uprising against the federal government. Instead, they found success by avoiding direct conflict with federal troops. They got much more mileage out of using force and terror to consolidate their political power in areas where federal oversight was weak, and then using that political power to reduce the will of the federal government to intervene in the South, allowing them to expand their political power even further, in a general feedback loop that continued until they were able to gain enough federal political leverage to force the withdrawal of federal troops.
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Jun 6, 2022 18:36
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Bishyaler posted:Hundreds of *attendees* have been arrested. Not hundreds of organizers. If hundreds of movement members have been arrested - putting them under the complete control of the government and the courts - then it seems like their guns have not been very helpful at resisting government control! What the government chooses to charge them with is besides the point. Who the government chooses to charge is besides the point. What charges the courts choose to convict on are besides the point. What matters is that their guns are doing jack poo poo to keep them out of the government's hands. No matter how well-armed they were on the day of the original event, the government has been able to track them all down, gather extensive info about each of them, and swoop in to snatch each of them up one by one when their guard was down. When they're sitting in prison, completely disarmed, waiting helplessly for the government to decide how hard it's going to go after them, it's quite hard to say that their guns are doing anything at all to protect them from the government.
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Jun 7, 2022 13:03
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Liquid Communism posted:This push for gun control is going to be exactly what gets the gun industry out of the slump, you realize. Did Obama run on gun control? I don't remember it being a significant part of his 2008 campaign (in fact, I recall him shying away from gun control, given that Heller was pretty recent). "I'm not going to take your guns away" was an oft-repeated line of his on the campaign trail, and he actually praised the Heller ruling. Despite this, gun sales shot through the roof as soon as he was elected. Yes, the perception that gun control is coming drives gun sales...but this perception is largely independent of whether there's actually any gun control coming. Obama's campaign was largely devoid of gun control rhetoric, yet the NRA called him "the most anti-gun president in history" and created websites like gunbanobama.com. They claimed that he would totally ban gun ownership if elected, and they accused him of plotting to stack the Supreme Court with judges who would overturn the Second Amendment. Chain letters were circulating claiming Obama promised at a campaign event that he would pass a "national no carry law". Obama's actual policies and actual campaign platform didn't matter. What he said on the campaign trail didn't matter. Whether or not he was going to propose anti-gun legislation didn't matter. What did matter was that the NRA was in bed with the GOP, and they were willing to say whatever it took to make sure the GOP won - even if it meant making poo poo up.
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Jun 8, 2022 04:56
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Mulva posted:I could walk the steps fairly easily, it's an extension from our current de facto slavery in the monetization of the prison work system and the existing restitution laws. A few rulings is all it'd take to say that forcing someone to work to pay off their debt to the community after incarceration is fine and a racist leaning justice system and you too could have your own black servant again! The only real argument against it is "We've moved past that and it'd never happen.". It's not a particularly tricky legal loophole if you wanted to do it. You just need to be kind of evil and willing to throw out the law. A lot of Republicans want to do it. That's who we are as a culture. "But I'm not!" you might say, and be right, but that's not a what a culture is. It's all of us in aggregate. What happens in spite of those that oppose it defines us as a people. Not you *as a person*, but as a culture. You can be opposed to the standards of your culture, but it does not stop being your culture simply because of that. You describe this as a hypothetical chain of events that could potentially happen if guns were banned, and suggest that judges could create the ability to do it by judicial fiat with no countermeasure against it. This is largely wrong. This is something that did happen for much of the Jim Crow era. It was called "convict leasing". There was no need for judges to create the right to do so, since it didn't violate the Thirteenth Amendment in the first place. The reason it doesn't happen now isn't because "we've moved past it", nor is it because of gun ownership - it doesn't happen now because the states which did it eventually passed their own laws making it illegal. To resurrect the practice, the states would need to repeal those laws. None of this has anything to do with guns, and having access to guns didn't stop it from being possible in the first place.
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Jun 30, 2022 15:02
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Mulva posted:Or they'd just have to rule that <blank> overrules state law. Like they just did. With guns. And the argument wasn't that "If you take away guns they'd do this". It's that this is who we are, with or without guns. If the states want to resume convict leasing, they'd repeal the laws. If the states don't want to resume convict leasing, then a judge can't force them to. Even if you assume full constitutional calvinball rules are in effect, it's difficult to see how a judge could possibly compel an unwilling state government to do that. And all this stuff about the nature of the American soul seems like pure conjecture.
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Jun 30, 2022 16:06
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Mulva posted:They can absolutely force them to allow it to happen on a federal level inside their state, and rule that their laws on the books are illegal. They can't physically force everyone to take part, but they could absolutely universalize it's legality in the country on some level. And I defy you to tell me that it's not the sort of thing this Supreme Court would do with a Republican majority and a Republican in the White House. Because I don't think anyone can tell me a limit to what they would do that they are absolutely sure of. We are in the stage of chaos, where we won't know what the limits are until they are hit. *If* they are hit. I don't even know what to say. You're suggesting that the federal government might want to forcibly impose slavery on prisons over the protests of Southern states, who fight it in the courts to preserve their on-the-books anti-slavery laws, only to be overruled by federal judges who declare that it's unconstitutional to ban slavery? I suppose you're correct in that there's no hard obstacle that would definitively prevent this, but it's so incredibly counterfactual that it's hard to have a clear conversation about it. The federal government being more eager to reinstitute slavery than the deep-red former slave states doesn't really make sense, the profits of convict leasing aren't as attractive to the federal government as it would be to tight state budgets, and there's something to be said about how even the former slave states of the Deep South willingly gave up convict leasing on their own long before the end of Jim Crow. But why bother getting into the details of it if it doesn't really have anything to do with guns or gun policy in the first place?
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Jun 30, 2022 18:38
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Harold Fjord posted:Statistics don't apply cleanly to people as individuals and insisting that people treat themselves statistically is an absurd fantasy. I was more disagreeing with notion that they look at all those statistics and then just weigh them against how much they want to shoot someone in self-defense, this general approach of using stats to govern your individual choices is not persuasive no matter how much you insist that it's the right approach, and since the statistics don't apply cleanly I don't think it is. The idea that suicide statistics are somehow being skewed by "people with a history of suicidal ideation" doesn't really make any sense. This is just a variant on the "gun violence won't happen if we don't sell guns to violent people" way of thinking that inspires proposals for weak gun control. Refusing to sell guns to people with a violent criminal record won't stop people with clean records from making their first violent crime a mass shooting. And refusing to sell guns to people with a documented history of suicidal ideation won't do anything to help people who already had guns before they started feeling suicidal ideation. People like to think that they're an exception to the statistics, but the fact of the matter is that they aren't.
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Jul 20, 2022 16:50
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Professor Beetus posted:Simmer down thread. I know it's a heated topic but surely you are all adults capable of discussing these things without throwing around personal insults. If you just want to vent there's plenty of other places on the forums for that. Do we need to? Only around one-third of Americans own guns. If a majority of those gun owners support stricter gun control, then the anti-control group is a pretty small slice of the population. If that small group possesses the political power to block gun control, then the right approach isn't necessarily to convince that small group, but rather to look at the factors that cause that group to punch well above its weight politically. An obvious conclusion to jump to is regional bias, but I don't think the numbers work for that. Even in overrepresented and gerrymandered rural areas, gun owners make up less than half the population. I don't think the numbers work out. Even among the Republican base, a majority call for stronger gun laws. What is it, then? Usually, in my opinion, these come down to strength of belief and willingness to take action based on that belief. For example, Pew Research found a few years ago that just 18% of Americans want gun laws to be less strict...but that small group is significantly more likely than the rest to contact politicians and public officials about gun policy. Moreover, gun owners are much more likely to contribute money to organizations that lobby on gun policy, and while Pew didn't explicitly divide that question up by for/against, Pew generally found that (unsurprisingly) gun owners tend to skew more pro-gun than non-owners do. So even though the anti-gun control contingent is relatively small, they're pushing much harder politically. And while Pew didn't directly ask about voting behavior, I think it's a fair guess that someone who feels that gun ownership is essential to their sense of freedom or even a core part of their identity are likely to be single-issue gun voters who prioritize gun policy above all other issues. Meanwhile, it's pretty clear that even if a majority of people say on a poll that they support stricter gun control measures, many of them don't prioritize it over other issues. A fair portion of Republicans support some level of gun control, but they're still happy to vote for candidates who oppose gun control - they prioritize other issues over that one.
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Jul 20, 2022 19:16
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It's worth noting how far "self-defense" can stretch in some people's minds. For example, the case of Tony Earls, who accidentally shot and killed a 9-year-old girl, and claimed he was defending himself from a robber who'd held him at gunpoint. https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1549537030375440385 Just from the tweet and the lawyer statement, it sounds pretty cut-and-dry, right? He was confronted by an armed robber, shot at the robber, and accidentally hit someone else as well. Except that's not what happened. He was caught by surprise and held at gunpoint before he knew what was going on. He handed over the money, and the robber walked away with his money. Even though he wasn't able to pull out his gun, he got through the encounter safely, just minus some money. And if he hadn't had a gun, things would have ended there with no one getting hurt. The exact details of what happened next are seemingly disputed, but the conclusion speaks for itself: quote:Earls first shot at the robbery suspect, who was fleeing on foot, and then at a pickup truck he thought the robbery suspect had gotten into. The vehicle’s occupants, a family of five, were not involved in the robbery. The juvenile victim, a rear seat passenger, was struck during the shooting. As the robber was leaving, Earls grabbed his gun, got out of his car, and initiated a new confrontation with the robber, resulting in him firing at the robber several times. And then when he lost track of the robber, he shot at a nearby vehicle, thinking that it might have been a getaway vehicle. Except it wasn't a getaway vehicle at all - it was a family taking their kids out for pizza. There's a lot to unpack there, in terms of how the mentality of "self-protection with a gun" got a child killed. The initial robbery happened without him being able to pull his gun out at all. It's only after he wasn't being held at gunpoint - in other words, after he was no longer being threatened (and was no longer acting in self-defense) - that he was able to introduce his gun into the situation, and it had an entirely negative impact. Even though the robbery went without any actual violence, bringing out his own gun allowed him to initiate violence, even from a distance. It allowed him to continue violence even at such a distance that he was losing track of his target's position, and it allowed him to attack a vehicle despite having no idea who was in it. If he and the thief had both had knives instead of guns, the initial robbery wouldn't have changed much - he was surprised at close range and held at weapon-point before he knew anything was wrong. But in the aftermath, it's unlikely that he would have been able to attack the thief afterward, and he certainly wouldn't have been able to kill an innocent bystander by randomly attacking a pickup truck. The gun introduced danger where none existed. His gun helped him feel safe and secure - and because of that feeling of security, he felt safe initiating a violent encounter and trying to kill a man just to get his wallet back. It's an example of how carrying a gun "for protection" can make situations more dangerous than they would have been otherwise. And yeah, this clearly wasn't a self-defense situation. He was already well beyond self-defense when he shot at a fleeing robber, let alone when he opened fire at what he thought might have been a getaway vehicle. But it was a gun that he was carrying "for protection", so it's still very relevant. It's an example of how "protection" can stretch and warp in a chaotic situation. And the grand jury bought his self-defense claim and got him off the hook for charges, too (the cops are now looking for the robber, who will presumably be charged for the death even though there's no evidence that he fired even a single shot).
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Jul 20, 2022 22:25
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Mulva posted:So what? This guy was an rear end in a top hat. Agreed. The world is full of dumb assholes. We should restrict the availability of firearms, to make it more difficult for dumb assholes to kill people like this. Because as shown here, carrying a gun "for protection" and using it "in self-defense" isn't always as simple or straightforwardly good as it sounds.
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Jul 20, 2022 23:44
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