Once again for the cheap seats: the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
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No, you don’t. Only if you buy it from a dealer. There is no background check if you buy from a private seller. The so called “gun show” loophole. The loophole the right wingers are trying to protect at all costs.
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im so confused. here i thought conservatives had the corner on fire and brimstone and white men who like to scream from the pulpit, radio, and television screen. weren’t the liberals the bleeding heart too soft love everybody hippy dippy crowd?
is this some sort of millennial thing that im not familiar with?
for my part, i love facts. my positions (generally speaking) on policies about things like guns and policing come seeing those facts of our country’s current situation.
im not sure if im a liberal, or if i can speak for them, but i do believe in policies that curtail gun ownership and i do believe it’s past time to defund the police. and fwiw, it doesn’t feel like hatred to me. most times i just feel exhausted and sad over all the needless death and violence.
ive got friends and family in texas. this new law isn’t going to improve their lives
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they do!
endless campaign cash. voter suppression. locking up as many people as they can. gerrymandering. alternative facts. outright bullying and violence.
that’s pretty much all that’s working for them right now. even in texas.
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The things that right-wingers know liberals hate are not necessarily the same as the things that liberals actually hate.
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I misspoke. I meant to say “Someone who is willing/wants to harm cops is already willing to carry a gun illegally.”
At least one state senator in Nebraska trying to keep up:
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We have had this in Vermont for as long as I have been here (20 years). I think we were one of only two states (or maybe the only state) at the time that didn’t require a license to carry open or concealed. I think Vermont is probably the original “constitutional carry” state from before anyone ever thought to call it that. Yet Vermont a very safe state. So if a change in the law makes Texas unsafe, I suspect it speaks more about Texas and Texans than the law itself.
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Texas is already unsafe and this will not help.
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Do you really not understand that the social issues of a state with 1/10th as many people as Texas’ 2nd largest metro area might be different?
This is an unpopular law (most Texans don’t want it) that will unquestionably cause increased gun violence and related problems. And your response comes across as well this doesn’t hurt me so screw everbody else
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Isn’t it frustrating!?
r/peopleliveincities comes to mind.
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I’m sure Greg Abbott will repeal this law once it sees non-whites exercising this right.
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I don’t understand your response. I certainly didn’t say it doesn’t hurt me so screw you. I also don’t understand the tone of your response, “Do you really not understand…”
I believe what I was saying falls completely in line with what you are suggesting. All I said was that the law itself (the concept of carry without a license—which was something I had never even heard of before I moved here), doesn’t automatically mean crime goes up. Reading my post again myself, I said that if crime goes up, it speaks to something about Texas or the people (eg, population) there. Socionomics, population density, the way guns are perceived, cultural differences in how people perceive firearms and their role in society—I can think of many things that might make Texas different.
I have never been in a state with open carry. I was nearly 40 when I moved to Vermont and had never owned a gun. I was surprised to see the number of people that owned them and how lenient the laws were. I don’t even have an opinion on whether TX should or should not have this new law. That is not for me to decide—I’d leave it up to Texans for sure. I was just trying to offer a perspective that if that is going to happen in TX against people’s will, there is at least a reason to hope it won’t be as bad as imagined (it isn’t like we don’t have poverty, drugs, etc in Vermont—but it IS clearly different, as I noted).
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This is EXACTLY the thought that came to my mind as well.
If these people were more exposed to the consequences of their actions, maybe they’d behave a bit more responsibly.
So like we should just hope for the state of Texas and all of the people in it to disappear and be replaced with an exact replica of Vermont? Because that is literally the “hope” you are offering here and it’s kind of… I mean… what’s the point? Glad you like Vermont. I’ve never been there but it looks lovely in pictures. Mind if 10 or 20 million Texans move there? I’m sure it wouldn’t affect gun violence there. I mean it’s the same law so surely nothing would change, right?
The whole entire point is that this is a bad legal direction for TEXAS.
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No, just offering my hopes that it doesn’t go that way for you (violence-wise) and that sometimes outcomes aren’t what might be predicted at first glance (another person posted that Maine changed their law 6 years ago without an increase in crime). Since there have been a bunch of states that changed their laws (as I said, I think when I lived here, there was only VT and perhaps one other state with this form of gun carry law), it would be really interesting to see how those other states were affected by their new laws. Maybe some of those states are similar to TX demographically, maybe not. I am not naïve, but I do try to consider all the possibilities when it looks like I may be faced with something I don’t like. So maybe other states’ experiences could give hope or maybe their data could say Texas realy is screwed. Obviously, the answer, if most people are against the law, is to work to get it changed. I am happy to live in Vermont. I have in-laws in Texas, and I want the best for them and their safety (and everyone else’s too), although I would probably not be happy in any part of TX but Austin or maybe San Antonio, and even then, I don’t like hot weather and keep moving north most of my life to escape hot, muggy summers!
Thanks, it’s appreciated. But realistically shootings and gun suicides are likely to keep trending upwards in Texas for quite some time and we’ll all just have to live with it as best we can. It’s a state with a lot of people in it, cities that are rapidly expanding, rich diversity, a history of racial violence and oppression, and a very very crooked government. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us if we want it to be a safer place to live for everyone who lives here. I don’t expect this law to cause some kind of immediate watershed moment, but it certainly isn’t going to make any of the problems here better.
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[deep breath] So, if those things are beneficial, why not require them?
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id say citation needed.
it seems a theme of your posts that you believe that only people who have ill intent will use a weapon to hurt someone.
if that were so, there’d be no such thing as a Crime of passion - Wikipedia yet clearly it happens. there is also a Crime of opportunity - Wikipedia where – in the moment – if advantage can be seized a person will seize it. neither of these need pre-planning, and the presence of a gun increases both the severity and likelyhood of these ( so too crimes due to misapprehension, ex. thinking youre about to be assaulted. not to mention plain accidents. )
normal people commit a spectrum of horrific acts without pre-planning on the regular. restricting the tools to easily commit horrific acts can ( and does ) help.
just the existence of laws themselves also help – take the speed limit. yes, people still speed. or even deliberately use their vehicles to commit homicide. but, people behave within the defined range, and lives are saved. laws can help encourage people to be their best selves. deterrence ( not just punishment ) is a reason we have them.
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In addition to your examples, focusing only on ill intent excludes all the instances of self-harm via all-too-available firearms: those who use them to kill themselves, children who kill or injure themselves when they get access to poorly secured weapons, idiots who were never trained who shoot themselves by accident, etc.
But hey, all worth it so that fantasists can amass collections of firearms that make them feel like action heroes.
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