Yes, because that’s an attitude that’s going to get your gun-control legislation passed, enforced, and ruled constitutional.
Are you referring to drugs?
Of course they don’t want to legalize stuff. The War on Drugs has given them the broadest powers of search and seizure. It is an excellent excuse to exercise more control to keep evil drugs away from the children. Didn’t BB just have an article that police forfeiture actually eclipsed the amount of stuff criminals actually stole? The WoD has done more to erode civil liberties and target minorities more than any other program.
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I agree with you. Number of mass shootings is not the same as number of shootings, and is not the same as firearm-involved violent crime. I’m not sure how helpful it is to isolate this number. I’ll have to read through their site some more.
Well, they’re the National RIFLE Association, right? How about, then, they STFU about everything to do with firearms except rifles
Anyone can have one of those, or ten of those, with no restrictions. Fill your boots. Anything else, though …
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Classes (for those who want firearms, not the others) could if handled well reduce the proliferation of gun culture by doing what education courses often do, making it duller.
This might help reduce the fetishization of such objects in some people. The same way that while cars are exciting and sexy to most, the classes and testing are a bit of a bummer and often serve to burst the fantasy bubble that youngsters going into it have. The car becomes somewhat less of a status/power/penis/badge/symbol that it is held to be internally and more the tool that it is in reality.
That’d depend on the classes/testing being just as much of a sobering downer as a trip to the DMV. But there’d be a ton of responsible gun owners willing to do that, offsetting the many who would see the classes as an opportunity to promote gun culture. Chip away at the imagery that is currently prevalent, replace it with the mundane reality.
Just like anything else it wouldn’t do for everyone, but it’d do for many. As with other programs bent on educating people it would also create jobs, which are needed, and do it in a field many are interested in.
Just another tool in the shed, but as I say all the time, you got to build the shed by rejigging the nation’s social safety net with an eye to reducing poverty, promoting health and valuing people outside the metric of a dollar.
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Well, it might be useful e.g. to separate incidents of mass shootings from other types of violent crimes. This could be sensible if, for example, violent crime in general was in decline but mass shootings in particular are on the rise. It could suggest that mass shootings have a different suite of causes from violence in general, and it could be good to know that for any number of reasons.
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IKR?!, if I ever encounter Judge Scalia imma ask him what’s he got in his pocket, and if it’s a smartphone imma tell him he’s a fake ass punk for not rolling true and using a man with a horse to communicate across distances the way the founding fathers intended!
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Anything that involves social programs, taxes, or spending money on citizens to help them.
The NRA’s position on gun legislation is significantly farther to the right than the majority of American gun owners. I refuse to let them frame the terms of the discussion.
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That horse left the barn a long time ago. They spent over $30 million last year framing the terms of the discussion.
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do you know what happened in 2007? for me it looks like the effect of some regulation, but I could be wrong
And the correct response is “push back,” not “only consider measures that the NRA would enthusiastically approve.”
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There is no single gun culture. There are gun owners who wouldn’t give two shits about handgun or “assault weapons” bans. There are people who like and use guns, posing with them on face book with wad of cash and drug paraphernalia perpetuating the outlaw stereotype. There are sports shooters, tactical shooters, hunters, 4 Sundays a year shooters, women who have been raped/assaulted/threatened and refuse to be a victim. There are some who dress up in full authentic Cowboy gear and compete, or people who wear carbon fiber holsters and bright jerseys. There are the rednecks telling people to hold their beer and watch this, and criminals telling people to hold their beer and watch this.
Safety courses are a little dull, but practical use courses and sport shooting courses are actually pretty damn fun. But even after the boring safety courses people generally are not only more relaxed and confident about ownership, but prompted to learn more and get proficient. The taboo and mystery of the object is removed.
But yeah - maybe EVERYONE then should take the class, so non-gun owners could become more familiar with them, realize they aren’t so scary, and that actually a little fun to use. While I guess some gun owners see it as “a status/power/penis/badge/symbol”, honestly I see that being applied by non-gun owners as a stupid stereotype that doesn’t reflect the majority of reality.
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Culture isn’t the sort of thing that comes in discrete units in the first place. You could use this same criticism against the use of the term “culture” in pretty much any context.
Well I don’t follow the party line on a lot of things. Not all gun owners are Republicans. Social services serve a vital role and I was on benefits as a kid in the recession of the 80s. “Free shit for everyone!” doesn’t work either, but a social safety net and assistance is needed for many people, and keeping them at a level where they don’t have to resort to crime.
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Do tell or did you forget that I own guns?
Well, actually, it is called “Guaranteed Basic Income.”
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This is probably the simplest explanation for fewer automobile deaths starting in mid-2007:
http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/business/story/1.2891181
(Ignore the story, just look at 2007 on the graph)
(Also, interesting to consider as a partial cause of the 2008 financial crisis)
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And in fact that appears to be the case. I’ve just been reading the Wikipedia article on gun violence, which is an interesting read for folks who want to gain perspective on this. That article says that while gun violence as a whole is in decline, mass shootings in particular have been on the rise since 2007. But the definition of mass shooting is simply any instance where more than one person was shot. It’s broad enough that it sweeps in domestic violence, gang violence, hate crimes, crimes related to mental illness, etc.
It seems like there’s a correlation between high rates of gun violence and places with strict gun control laws. Puerto Rico and Washington, DC are good examples. Maryland’s gun control laws are similar to those folks are advocating here, but those laws seem not to produce very strong results.
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That’s why I didn’t want to endorse that metric – I think more rigorous definitions would be needed to tease out different kinds of mass shootings with different causes.
The Mass Shooting Tracker cited above only counts incidents with four or more victims. That seems to be a reasonable threshold to me, since a guy who stabbed four people to death would be deemed a “mass murderer.”
