I don’t know whose words these are, but they seem applicable:
“If not this, then what? If not now, then when?”
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The best time to enact reasonable gun control is several generations ago.
The second best time to do it is right now.
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Yeah, well the tens of millions of owners clearly don’t see at as “a true abomination on the face of the earth, which sole purpose is killing as many opponents as fast as possible”.
You’re not wrong. Of course I still disagree on the logic of it.
My guess is that if someone told 1994 you that Trump would be President your reaction would be the same.
FWIW, that reaction probably would have applied to a lot of his friends/supporters as well.
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or, maybe adding some restrictions, forcing him to take more time would have caused him to pause and seek help. or, maybe someone along the line would have noticed his aberrant purchasing behavior and helped to stop him,
we can spin hypotheticals all day.
easy access to guns equals easy access to death: by suicide, by homicide, by accident.
moreover, if you want to change the attitude about safe and responsible gun ownership in america: you take the simple acts of licensing, registering, insuring, educating.
you make it a serious and thoughtful act, not a casual one. you ritualize the behavior instead of making it a free for all.
speculative ignorance – spinning what if fantasies atrocity after atrocity – doesn’t outweigh the objective facts established by gun regulation and responsible ownership in country after country around the world.
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I really kind of want to see a semi-automatic banana now.
Would it fire bananas? There aren’t banana seeds…maybe spent peels? or tarantulas!!!
True.
Not everyone agrees that automatic guns (or semi-automatics made more automatic) are for killing.
You know what you should do?
Do politics. Without them, if necessary.
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Squeeze to fire, try not to slip on the empty cases.
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It isn’t hypothetical to say “the same laws for cars applied to guns won’t prevent this example of misuse”. Period. There is no check or balance to stop it.
Now, if the guy was a felon then you could say “background checks would have stopped his legal purchase”, and you would be right. There is a check to stop it because of a flag. Now he might go around that check, but at least said check would trigger due to said condition.
Implementing car-like regulation doesn’t enable any new check system that this guy would have set off. Period.
Sigh - the vast majority of owners are safe and responsible. He didn’t accidentally commit mass murder. These people aren’t the problem.
So the problem with high profile mass murders and street level crime is they just haven’t taken the act of murder serious enough or thought about it enough? 0_o
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by starting. somewhere.
unless you think everything is just a’okay and peachy keen in the states. start. somewhere.
let me lay out the alternative to gun control, the right wing’s prescription for addressing gun violence:
- increased security: metal detectors at every school and every public event. tsa everywhere.
- police militarization: give cops bigger and better guns so they can kill bad guys faster. more swat raids of people’s private homes.
- increased police immunity: let the cops go after whomever they think the bad guys might be. ignore search and seizure laws. don’t prosecute cops when they kill somebody. give them all possible leeway
- increased surveillance: reduce the need for warrants. track all meta-data. track all cars. create software to monitor for unusual behavior. encourage neighbors to report suspicious behavior to the appropriate authortiies.
- increased incarceration: lock up more bad guys and potential bad guys and keep them there ( ideally in private prisons ) for as long as possible.
as i see it, these are the options.
the other option: keep letting people die. seems a non-starter.
is there something i’m missing in the equation here?
[edit to add]
incorrect. as i said. simply look at the objective facts based on what has worked in other countries. it’s not hard. we know what works.
no. the problem is that the rest of us haven’t take regulation seriously enough. that’s literally the whole point.
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I keep typing and re-typing responses to this…NONE of them are appropriate. Quitting while ahead.
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Sometimes that is best. 
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well, it was a slippery slope from the beginning.
(haha. I’d apologize for that, but nope…given all the other news this week. I’m a little fruity. Not apologizing for that either.)
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Hey, you take your potassium however you like, love.
Puns not guns; for when you want to put someone down in a fun way.
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It may be true that some of the common-sense strengthening of registration and background check requirements that would have made a difference in so many other shootings may not have made a difference for this specific individual, but you many be forgetting one of the most important laws we have for cars: mandatory insurance.
The market forces of requiring insurance to compensate any victims of a gun-owner would lead to high premiums on the riskiest individuals, and potentially discourage purchases of some of the weapons and accessories (such as high-capacity magazines) that are most capable of killing large numbers of people, if insurers were even willing to insure those weapons at all. Worst-case scenario for requiring insurance: same number of murders, but the victims and their families get some compensation so at least they don’t need to worry about medical bills or funeral costs.
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As nuts as the idea of adding more firearms to the equation is, I’m starting to think that only 2 possible scenarios will actually lead to any meaningful change:
One would be starting an initiative to arm all minorities and ‘Others’ above the age of 18. Though that might seem counter-intuitive, 5 will get you 10 that the gun laws would start changing mighty fast.
The other scenario isn’t legal or even remotely sane: but if a massacre of the horrific magnitude of Las Vegas were to happen at an NRA convention, with the perp directly thanking the NRA and all the congress critters who oppose gun control as their accomplices, that might have some sort of effect.
Note that I’m not wishing for such a horrible thing to happen - that’s just how crazy this whole mess has gotten; no matter how many times these tragedies happen, no matter how high the body count, all people do is argue themselves blue in the face and nothing ever changes.
SMH
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It is, because you’re the only one arguing for taking the relevant transport legislation, doing a literal find|replace for motor_vehicle|firearm and driver|firearm_owner. The kind of research, legislation, and registration associated with motor vehicles is subtly different to the research, legislation, and registration associated with motor vehicles.
No one (except Ford) looked at the Pinto and thought “welp, nothing we can do about this except immunise Ford from liability.” No one looked at airbags and though “neat idea, except there’s literally tens of millions of motor vehicles out there, and we can’t retro-fit them all”. No one looked at the steadily rising rates of vehicular mayhem in the middle of last century and thought “Gee. That’s a shame, and it’s just a fundamental law of nature that the number of deaths must continue to inexorably rise as the number of drivers, vehicles, and miles-driven continues to rise.”
No one who mattered thought those things, despite all of them being really big problems. Why are firearms different?
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Actually, that was an extremely common line of thinking back then. Profoundly mistaken, but common, especially among those that had a profit motive to sell fast cars. Consumer advocates like Ralph Nader really had to open a lot of people’s eyes and change a lot of minds before regulations were put in place to turn the situation around.
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