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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. This was an central issue for me and as a previous gun owner (though never an owner of a semiautomatic rifle) a great annoyance -- all the talk focuses on banning sufficiently scary looking guns, and it won't notably reduce gun violence, and I doubt it will really change mass shootings that much because one can do an incredible amount of damage with a couple handguns in a close-quarters environment (see VATech). It's harder for someone totally untrained with a new handgun to be as lethal, but it's not as big of a difference as people tend to think. It's largely passing something to create the illusion of doing something because it's the only thing you can actually get the public on board with, but the primary effect is just to annoy hobbyists. The real purpose is to just gradually chip away at what's allowed. As time has gone on, I've become completely alienated from American gun culture and the refusal to make the slightest changes, so now my view is "gently caress it." Now I want all semiautomatic guns banned, and I really don't give a poo poo about the logic. BRAKE FOR MOOSE fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Jun 2, 2022 |
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Jun 2, 2022 14:31
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Xombie posted:Gun violence was not a major issue for voters while staring down the worst recession in 100 years, no. I assure you that people were more worried about the jobs and houses they were losing in 2008. If Democrats took their two month supermajority to tackle what were, at the time, a bunch of pet issues that weren't popular with voters, they wouldn't have just been beaten in Obama's first midterm, they would have handed a supermajority to the GOP. I generally have little interest in defending Democrats, but yes, there was no public interest in gun control then, let alone Congressional interest. The collective response to VATech was "meh?" Public support for gun control measures was at a low in 2008-2011, it was right after Heller, and despite this the right was going absolutely loving bonkers buying up guns. There was absolutely no way they would have spent time on something that controversial when they were already so busy failing at health care. If they were going to fix something that would end up heating up the culture war, they were going to go with something like the Freedom of Choice Act, which was far more popular with the base. We didn't see a revival of interest in gun control until Aurora and Sandy Hook caught our attention. Data: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx poo poo, it was so off-the-radar that they stopped a couple of the poll questions for a few years. BRAKE FOR MOOSE fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 14:54
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Blaming the public for being insufficiently concerned with Doing the Good Thing after the Democrats colluded to implode the economy is a cop out. Congress does plenty of things the public doesn't give a poo poo about. It's not blaming the public at all. It just was not viewed as an objective good by the base unlike other culture war issues like reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights, and Congress couldn't even make progress on those issues, so why would it happen? You absolutely can make this argument with a lot of Good Things, but with gun control measures, it's like asking why Congress didn't pass UBI in 2008. Mulva posted:What's that gotten you? Because the hilarious chart that just got brought up to defend the Democrats as "Gun control not even being an issue in 2008." also has those 2008 numbers being remarkably similar to....the current 2022 trend. Which has been trending downward for like 5 years at this point. So I guess what, the thing that is achievable given current priorities among the electorate as far as gun control goes is "Nothing", and threads over and we all go home? What direction do you imagine that poll would be going right now? BRAKE FOR MOOSE fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 15:17
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