1042
Tim Walz says he's 'sick and tired' of prayers after Georgia school shooting
(www.thepinknews.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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easy: strict gun control. look at Europe.
Sadly that won't happen because Americans are special - and I say 'special' in that Midwestern-US, 'bless their heart' way
The US government tries to pass (or enforce) any meaningful gun legislation, a third of the country stamps their feet and tells 'NO!' and the gov't backs down. Rinse & repeat
basically the only way to get restrictions would be for several states to adopt a Black Panther Esque political party that has significant adoption and policing
You know what would immedately get us gun control? If that black panther party decided to spend their time guarding our schools. The “good guy with a gun” theory only it’s black and latino people guarding the schools.
Racism would get us gun control so fucking fast.
(And I hate how likely this is)
shiiiii it doesnt even get to us s'more like 2/3 of the country asks for (x) regulation, the govt starts making noises about regulating (x), a bunch of political ads come out to convince public (x) regulation is bad, contributions come from the (x) companies to the politicians regulating (x), business (x) is added to the commitee deciding rules for (x), regulation is watered down or outright defeated.
at almost no point in the process is the public will treated as anything other than a problem to solve.
Americans love prosecuting people, making new crimes is how we keep our prisons full. I fully expect a "reasonable lockup" law for gun crimes committed with unsecured firearms would play well.
You would think. But no. The line drawn by conservatives is to have no regulation at all.
Yeah but people always bring up the talking point "but over in Europe only the criminals have guns now! How can they defend themselves?"
However I really have to wonder... Where do criminals get those guns? 🤔
it's almost like they're pulling it out their asses
America has a gun culture though. While Europe doesn’t. In plenty of European countries you can get a gun license if you are willing to go trough the process and fill in the paperwork. It’s not super hard. Yet almost no one owns or wants a gun in those countries. And if they have one it’s usually a hunting rifle and not weapons for personal protection or target practice. If the US had the same gun rules as in Europe the demand for guns wouldn’t drop. Americans would still want a gun.
i was talking about serious restrictions and in-depth background check for everyone. nothing about gun culture. you can survive a little paperwork and a few months wait for a lethal tool.
Yeah and I was saying that even with those restrictions that Americans still want to buy guns. You brought up Europe. Europe doesn’t have a low gun ownership because of strict gun control alone. Europe doesn’t have a gun culture. The US needs a cultural change besides gun control.
Europe doesn't have 434 million guns already in the hands of civilians.
Buying and owning a gun should require a lot more than it does now, but this isn't going to solve this problem. It will, at best, slightly mitigate it.
you have to start somewhere
Germany wants to get tough on knife crime with stricter laws
shrug Definitely better than people being able to walk out of a 7/11 with a pair of 9mms, I suppose.
But at some level, this is a people problem, too. Social anxiety inflamed by fascist social media. A 24-hr news cycle that tells people they are being immiserated by evil foreigners. School bullying in buildings where you've got 40-60 student class sizes and teachers with barely more than a six-month certificate expected to manage the room. Rising rates of malnutrition, homelessness, and general poverty. And this endless deluge of people telling one another "The civil war is happening any day now".
You're going to have people freak out as a result. This is a pressure cooker of a social system and climate change is only going to make things worse. Whether its gun crime or knife crime or people just trying to bite one another in fits of rage, the volume of hate we've ingested combined with the commercialized scapegoating of anyone we're told its okay not to like means... Violence. You're going to get more violence.
How to defend yourself when attacked with a knife: https://youtu.be/kvlrnc7hlQI?si=DhxdyaCoE0qJPa7g
Yes, root causes need to be dealt with as well, but when violence does happen there's a world of difference between how much damage someone can do with a knife vs someone with a gun.
Sure. But you can play this game with lots of things. A fertilizer bomb can do far more harm than a hand gun. A shiv is more deadly than a fist.
By all means, regulate away. But the scary thing, at it's root, is the individual who has decided to throw their life away on some El Paso Walmart killing spree. Selling hand grades at Target won't make anyone any safer. But it's the media screaming about Latino Invasion and White Genocide that's got people really worked up to begin with.
I do believe that would actively make people less safe.
2 things can be true, and we can do both things. Deal with the root to cause, while also limiting access to dangerous weapons.
Doing either seems beyond the capacity of the modern electoral system. Popular ideas are incapable of permeating a lobbyist firewall in the legislature. Meanwhile, any act of violence just gets folded into our "War on Crime" which justifies more cops and more surveillance and more media hysteria around evil foreigners.
Europe also has things like universal healthcare and much less of an opioid crisis and whatnot. Without those, this wouldn't have been prevented -- the kid would've just used a knife or explosives or something instead.
i agree with specific point you're making about the cause of shootings being lack of healthcare access in the US. You are also correct in my opinion that all three things are necessary for a healthy society. I think you might be missing your own point here with a typical assumption i see thrown out by the media, that asking for one of those 3 things precludes our ability to have the others. In other words, that we can't advocate equally for all 3 at the same time!
The idea that it is impossible for the US govt to work on these things in tandem over DECADES (these issues are DECADES in the making) is pervasive, effective, and inhibits progress on any. So why does it persist?
Somehow while we know we should have them all, we are convinced to argue we cannot have one without the other first. Should not ask for one without the other more important issue first.
The thing i'm trying to say is, yes we can. The government is (yaknow, hypothetically) able to tackle multiple issues at once and anyone who gets tricked into arguing which one we should pick allows the big G to have an excuse for not working on ANY of them.
As you say, without all three the problems will not cease, they'll just change shape. All the more reason to advocate for each, always, until they're tackled, one by one.
I'm just saying that everybody loves to jump to the conclusion that the reason the US has school shooters when other countries don't is the 2nd Amendment, disregarding all the other differences that could also be part of the cause.
Or said another way, there are at least two reasons why school shootings happen: (1) because they have access to guns, and (2) because something is driving them to murderous despair in the first place. Banning guns does fuck-all to fix reason #2!
Frankly, it disgusts me that so many people see banning guns as some kind of panacea and don't give a shit about fixing the underlying problems.