Ok, so you want to get rid of all gun sales tracking and instead replace it with a universal basically OK-or-not-OK system where all sales are checked simply to make sure the buyer is not a criminal or in some other legal matter?
Yes. I want to do this because rather than spitball or theorize that it would do nothing, I want to put it to the test, because it is the least-invasive thing to do and mollifies people who find the fact that anyone can buy a gun in a private transaction an insane proposition. Either it does nothing and has no effect, and that is proven, or it does have an impact, in which case it does a social good with minimal impact on gun owners. Right now, the expense and hassle of going to an FFL to handle private transactions is a pain in the ass.
Two things. One, just because there are penalties for someone for misreporting potential mass shootings does not necessarily mean they're not going to misreport. Especially if the punishment is light, or especially if the report can be made anonymously. "Well, they can't be anonymous then." you say. Alright. What if someone breaks into the system and gets a list of everyone who reported a mass shooter? Or what if someone gives a false identity in the report? A little outside the scope of the common criminal, yes, as getting a new SSN is practically impossible without connections in the SSA. But organized crime? I could see them pull it off and with regularity too. What a great way to get the government to disarm your target before you go after them. Also, what are you going to take as evidence? Photos can easily be doctored. Maybe a video? But stuff can be planted. Maybe a jealous ex decides to take away your right to defend yourself from them.
Yeah and consider the alternative, what we have now, in which PEOPLE ARE BEING GUNNED DOWN EN MASSE. The potential for abuse here is theoretical in nature (entirely possible), but the mass shootings are
actual. And would abuse of this system be an overwhelming counterweight to the nightmare we have now? We won't know until we try. This business about "any legislation whatsoever could go horribly wrong" is a kind of conservatism which retards progress and ties us to a perpetual status quo -- a position I was once okay with. I am not okay with it now. I am willing to take risks to fix the current situation. There is a vast middle ground between reckless and impetuous legislative activism and a kind of conservatism in which we experiment with nothing.
100% of all legislation either abolishing restrictions or implementing them is argued against in this fashion. The logic here is the
exact same logic they use any time Constitutional Carry (a change to the status quo) is proposed - in this case, it's akways "blood will run in the streets" and everything will go terribly if we abolish permits. Of course it doesn't. The same is true in reverse. Not every proposal for a law which restricts behavior is the start of a slippery slope, nor is it doomed to fail because people can think of theoretical ways in which it could.
I am willing to take risks to fix the shitshow we have presently, and I think other people should, too.
The second thing is, say someone IS a real potential mass shooter. And alright, you take his guns away. So what are they gonna do? Well, gee-wizzers. Guess the mass murder plan is a no-go. Nope. They know they don't need to carry a gun. They just need to murder in a very public manner. So in essence, you've stopped nothing. And the only way to do so would be to just arrest him there. But then, that's going right into pre-crime, and I'm sure we've all seen Minority Report.
Once in a blue moon some terrorist runs a car into a crowd (like that shitbag in Charlottesville), which is the usual go-to in this argument. (There's also Japanese stabbers).
But this is comparatively rare. The fact remains that if all of these other forms of mass murder were so tempting to mass murderers, we'd see their use a whole lot more often, but we don't.
Guns make this simple and effective. This argument that people will always, in all cases, kill as easily as they do without guns is just not something I buy anymore. Either guns are the best and easiest way to murder a lot of people, in which case doing what we can to prevent access to them by maniacs is a good idea, or guns are not special at all, in which case why are Second Amendment advocates so damn wound up about them? Keep and bear a katana.
I have never liked this argument. I think guns are special, and are as special as means of self-defense as they are of murder. As to the following point you make, they may well have meant "and bowie knives too," but they were clearly thinking about guns. The concept of laws banning the carrying of blades probably never occurred to them simply because every kitchen in this country has now, and probably always has had, dangerously sharp knives.
Guns are special. You can kill offensively or defensively in other ways, but there's a reason people choose guns, and the expense in obtaining them.
The technical definition of the word, "arms" in the constitutional and historical sense both means "anything that a man wears for his defense, or takes in his hands as a weapon." So they weren't just talking about firearms, although I'm sure those were very much on their mind as well when they wrote that amendment. Regardless though, firearms ARE powerful, and they do grant individual power (as opposed to, say, a nuke which is an extremely indiscriminate weapon that only has legitimate uses beyond terrorism on the global stage), so I'm not going to argue that they aren't effective. They are. But now, here's a question for you. Would a shooter be nearly as ballsy if they knew they were walking into a meatgrinder where everyone in the location he chose was packing?
I reject the premise of the question. Even in places like where I live which has Constitutional Carry and a really strong gun culture, it's only a small number of people who pack and will ever pack.
And I don't think the reason is philosophical so much as practical: carrying a gun and managing it like when you go to the shitter is a
serious pain in the ass.
In my home state, my state org is constantly trying to do away with rules prohibiting carry in specific places -- like they want any place which seeks to ban arms - say, courthouses (which prohibit carry), to have mandatory gun storage lockers, minimally (a position I agree with -- never leave a gun in a car). They've chipped away at rules in school parking lots, with some success, too.
But it seems to imply an idea that every classroom and mall and factory and anywhere a shooting can occur will have ample people walking around with firearms, a scenario I not only think is practically unrealistic, but represents a regression to the State of Nature and a dystopia: we should not live in a world in which people feel compelled to carry guns everywhere because this many people are flipping out and going on murdering sprees.
We are regressing to that world. Everyone has a theory of how to fix it. More social services, better parenting, and gee whiz if these people would just fear the flames of hell like in the old days, they might be dissuaded from mass murder (well, except for the ones who think they're doing God's will by slaughtering people, of course.)
Or, we can experiment with pragmatic laws which may or may not have an effect, rather than undertaking the herculean changing everyone's consciousness. We can do that. I am not opposed to the central idea you seem to be presenting here: far better to change people, than to take risks with the sorts of things I'm proposing. I'm saying I don't think that is practical, or possible.
Consider this: We are, presumably, both pro-gun people. We are arguing on this point. It is unlikely either of us will convince the other on this fine point. (I don't mean this as pessimistic, but I've been online for four decades now and persuasion - both persuasion I've attempted, and the many attempts at persuasion others have tried - is rare).
Now imagine changing the very basis of how people interact with the world. Imaging getting a society which increasingly views life as cheap to start valuing it again. Or getting people to believe that -- and I think this is important -- civic life, and social life, is important. Meaning: you can be just as much of an individualist and engage in time and effort to improve your community without catching collectivism and winding up in the hospital.
I don't know how to do that. But I can imagine some of these "half measures" as you call them, at least being tried. And the ones I am proposing are, I believe, the least intrusive possibilities when you look at all of the other anti-gun legislation out there.
They can only cause this much damage because the little shits know they will most likely have helpless targets that can't defend themselves. Rather ironic in a country that has the right to defend oneself codified directly into the constitution. It's almost like... We're supposed to use those arms to... Defend ourselves too.
A lot of them probably assume they're going to be gunned down at the end of their rampage. They are going out in a blaze of glory. Some think they'll be martyrs. It is unclear to me that a person willing to do this sort of thing is at all scared of encountering resistance. It is also unclear to me how many gun owners are likely to risk their own lives in the event they can exit the scene.
Right now, the "out" here for people who take this position is that most of these slaughters occur in places were guns are prohibited. That may be relevant. I am unwilling to leap to the conclusion, however, that if you got rid of "no guns allowed" policies (which only good guys follow), that the outcome would be different. Maybe. But also maybe not.
Scot Peterson, a former Broward County sheriff’s deputy, faces charges of neglect of a child, culpable negligence and perjury, the authorities said.
www.nytimes.com
That guy was being
paid and stayed away.
And we're not even talking about all the shooters that have been stopped directly by absolute chad gun owners who were conceal-carrying. But those don't get reported...
The best place to watch this unfold is here:
r/dgu: A subreddit dedicated to cataloging incidents in the United States where legally owned or legally possessed guns are used to deter or stop …
reddit.com
This tracks, in real-time, defensive gun use, and I think it does it well by linking to local media (as opposed to anecdotes or summaries by pro-gun media). What becomes clear is the anti-gun argument that guns are rarely used for defense, based on some old study, is seriously flawed. Any time I've pointed an anti-gun person there, they've refused to comment in response. They argue with me right up until I point them there and I want them to account for it, then they suddenly end the discussion.
The only thing I would say here is that, often, social policies are proposed, and it turns out, they were actually half-assed and/or designed to pay off a bunch of corporations instead of actually helping people.
But isn't this the same argument as "the gun lobby" (meaning the gun industry) is pushing for all liberalization of gun laws? This may be true in some cases, but it is not a reason for paralysis, any more that the fact that Sig or Glock benefits from a pro-gun policy is not, in and of itself, a reason not to pass it.
There will always be some public hysteria. The media has gotten real good at stirring things up. I will say though, with the advent of Kyle Rittenhouse, it looks like people are finally beginning to get super pissed at this now.
I think the anti-gun crowd really made a tactical mistake when they tried to shoehorn the Rittenhouse debacle into their ready-to-go narrative. The trial was a disaster for them, and it was not a disaster because of bias or public sentiment. It was a disaster because they think in a very specific paradigm about white guys with firearms, and this didn't fit...at all. They know undecided/uncommitted people in the middle watched this and it didn't go well for them.
First of all, Rittenhouse came off as this squeaky-clean (if naive) kid, and was difficult to dislike when he took the stand, and man they really tried. Then there was that disastrous moment with Gaige Grosskreutz (not a good person -- people who haven't, should read about this guy's past to see what kind of a bastard he is) where he admitted to drawing first.
But you can tell a lot about how intellectual dishonesty works was after this disaster, how unwilling people were to say, "We got this, and Rittenhouse, entirely wrong." The damage went beyond gun control as a policy position -- the damage was that the dishonesty of the narrative here was on full display for everyone to see. People weren't buying the "white supremacist vigilante Rittenhouse" frame at all. You get the sense even people pushing it didn't actually buy it.
I understand this, but I must reiterate... Rights are not taken away for ANY reason.
Well, they can't be, right? They can only be infringed. They are inalienable, and even a lot of the conservative (as opposed to libertarian) gun movement doesn't get this: a prisoner in North Korea has the same rights as any American. They are simply infringed to a much more brutal degree. I've never felt this was moot or academic.
I will often hear conservatives claim a person gains or loses rights when they cross a border -- their nationalism shows -- and they don't. This is a radical concept, but it is the only way I've ever been able to think about rights. Because if people are indeed "endowed by their creator" with "certain inalienable rights," those rights don't disappear when they cross borders. I don't think God's an American, that David Bowie lyric notwithstanding.
Because if it does, it means rights are just privileges granted by the state; dad giving us the car keys, or taking them away when he catches us drinking his whiskey.
The question is when it comes down to the spirit of a right, and constraining those rights, and these exist (for example) in the form of time and place restrictions on the First Amendment, and for good reason. You can't simply set up loudspeakers anywhere you want and scream your protest in any direction, in whatever volume you want, and you can't directly incite violence, or libel someone either. (Incidentally: you
can shout fire in a crowded theater -- that reasoning was overturned, and people who use that argument for infringing rights would be appalled if they saw what that argument was used to justify: imprisoning people for handing out anti-draft literature, a position most of them would most certainly not agree with.)
These are not counterbalances or a taint or poison: they constrain rights into proper context. For this reason, if a shoulder-based nuke was to be developed (since you mentioned that) - one that could be kept and bore - I do not think it would fall under the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment does not specifically mention defense; it only implies it, but we assume the "for defense" aspect of that right is there even though it isn't mentioned. We also assume that the enumerated right doesn't only apply in the context of the well-regulated militia, even the "unorganized" one, because if it did, you could ban hunting and target shooting out of the context of militia drilling. Hence the right definitely has contours. And I say that in the same manner it is not intended to restrain the government from requiring background checks, since there are people who clearly intend to use firearms outside the contours of that right.
There MUST be a line. There has to be, or else it's a free-for-all. As Tony Stark put it, we're in a system that has become comfortable with zero accountability. There is no doubt. But I would also say that these half-measures aren't really the answer.
No other measures are possible. Or, at least, there is no lobby of people who claim to care really deeply about the Second Amendment and their rights organizing to, I don't know, parent better, or whatever it is you think would fix this issue. As for common crime, fixing the depravations (and economic oblivion) of blighted parts of cities and depressed rural areas seems essential, but it is notable that there is a strong inverse correlation between Second Amendment advocates and people who believe we ought to be expending tax dollars on doing so.
A whole bunch of libertarians have shown up in the pro-gun world in the past 25 years, but I remember before that a lot of the people who were pushing the authoritarian drug war, supporting constitutional amendments to ban flag burning, pornography, and dildos, made up the bulk of the movement, and they're still there.
The louder people scream about freedom, sometimes, the more suspicious I become of them.
Bekijk je favoriete video's, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.
www.youtube.com
If we're really gonna fix things, we need to start over. There are so many problems now that are piled on to other problems that are piled on to other problems, and it's now a system where even if you fix one thing, another problem next to it tends to corrupt it.
This is possible after complete societal collapse, and only in that regard. The mass movements everyone wants to happen never happen. Americans have been waiting for various ones since the end of the Civil War. The late 19th and early 20th century Left wanted to topple capitalism. They got the 8 hour day. That's nothing near what they wanted, but it's not nothing either.
The US Constitution, only one of the many limitations on what government can do, is written specifically to create stasis (I don't have a link handy but there's a famous Antonin Scalia interview where he makes this point that this is a feature; not a bug.) Starting over is the equivalent of saying, "Ban rain on game day." - a good idea, but, also meaningless.
The only other option other than these "half measures" is the status quo, and I find this much death intolerable, as do many other people. People are always waiting for mass upheavals, collapse. Agorists believe crypto and black market activity will do it. The left prattles on about "late capitalism" (Marx thought the collapse was an inevitable product of historical momentum). The defining feature of the current system is in all aspects it is configured to preserve itself. Debord called this "The Spectacle."
For example, the background check system. Maybe fine on paper. And yet in execution, it fails.
How do you figure? Over 300,000 sales of firearms were denied by NICS in 2020. You would need a Schrodinger's Cat box and a way of observing the other timeline to prove that those 300,000 denials didn't have any positive impact on crime or mass shootings. They are also a minor inconvenience at best (I've done them about a dozen times).
Records show the number of people stopped from buying guns through the U.S. background check system hit an all-time high of more than 300,000 last year amid a surge of firearm sales
abcnews.go.com
You can say, well, a whole bunch of those people just bought one on the black market or in a private sale, but again, this is a theory, not a reality. Possibly true. Possibly not. You need the other timeline to prove it; or some kind of scenario in which you make a perfect copy of America, and have two Americans - one in which you abolish NICS, and one which you don't, to prove the point.
I'm urging experimentation - not any sure thing.
Or how about giving schools more funding? Fine on paper, but instead, all the funding goes to the building or to "administrative fees".
I question whether a well-funded school filled with apathetic students, and more importantly, absent or inattentive parents who don't give a shit is better than a poorly-funded school with attentive parents and students, but that's another topic. Still, without experimentation and measurement, how can we know for certain?
The problem with establishing
causation ("this policy led to this specific outcome") rather than correlation is it is an in for anyone who despises any particular policies to point and say, "Correlation is not causation!" But, of course, lack of proof of causation is also not the same thing as absence of causation. It is a measurement problem. There's nothing metaphysical about it.
My larger point being if I could go out into the street in front of my house and sing The Internationale at the top of my lungs, and then we somehow measured that the murder rate dropped, and I did it again and the same thing happened, I'd be willing to do it from now until the end of time.
I guess at this point, I'm just waiting for the whole thing to collapse so we can start over and living my life to the fullest before that happens.
I've kind of concluded that to really understand the system, you have to understand that it is engineered to not make this possible. A Russian co-worker of mine once said, in response to some kind of libertarian boilerplate I was into in those days, "Welfare is the bribes we pay to the working class not to revolt." He meant that he found the prospect of even discussing its abolition ludicrous on face. I disagreed with him then. Not so much now.
Consider the current crop of leftist and how utterly sad they are compared to their forebears -- how utterly unlikely it is that not only will they not topple capitalism, but will barely cause it a slight inconvenience. The same is true of every other kind of radical. The will to up-end society -- to tear it down, or to rebuild it -- is part of the Spectacle we're trapped in: the McResistance, a brandable, monetizable phenomenon people can point to and say, "See: the extremists may criticize the system all they want." Look at Occupy Wall Street. All of that explosive direct action, perhaps, caused (at most) a butterfly to flap its wings on the other side of the world, but capitalism bled not a single drop of blood. Nor did the WTO at the Battle of Seattle in 1999.
I feel like, if you think things will collapse under the weight of the system itself, know that there is a deep incentive for millions of people to prevent that from happening at all costs. As I've said to my friends on the left: the genius of capitalism is the way it entangled the working class with corporate profits, because even if you could convince a worker to take strike action against his employer, it will only take someone to remind him that his pension or 401K will also suffer if he, himself wins.
No one wants to upend anything. They want a quiet life of financial stability.
If you're not left of center, if you're on the right, know that the status quo is similarly heavy iron. Dense like a black hole, so not even light can escape. People who think they're really going to permanently ban abortion will learn this in due time.
You could waste a whole lifetime waiting for the collapse.
I understand the desire to start over; it is natural and healthy and it comes out of genuine disgust for the present and these layers of problems you describe. A house of cards or complex of bullshit with a weak foundation.
I just think wiping the slate clean and starting over is not possible. If it were, the amount of carnage it would entail in reaction may well mean you wouldn't get what you wanted anyway.
They're all the same anyway really. They're always some variant of:
"Society no good. TIME TO KILL KIDS!"
"The lizard aliens are watching us, man!"
Yes but
Look, some of us are telling the truth about this one. Holy crap, you should see me when I step out of the shower. No mass shooting for me though; I have a mirror to stare at in wonderment and awe.
Maybe a mixture of the three. In the end though, mass shooters are terrorists born out of both terrible life decisions and (very likely) terrible parenting. And yes, I feel very comfortable making that blanket statement.
Some of it is that, but some of it is also the willingness mildly dysfunctional people have to latch on to simplistic explanations about their current condition. Like I used to believe the NAP was enough -- it isn't; fortunately, that particular simplistic rule from which, I thought, all politics ought to spring, was harmless: merely, insufficient.
The difficulty here is that even people like Dylann Roof believe in their hearts that they are good guys. White supremacists think there is a genocide being committed against their race, and what they do in response to this, is heroic. The same is true of Islamic terrorists. The same was true of Propaganda-by-the-deed anarchists. And Ted Kacyzinski. I found Industrial Society and Its Future electrifying. I still think he's a murderer who belongs in prison.
This is not possible for society to process this currently: everyone thinks they're a good guy, but people pick frames for understanding the world and latch on to it like a dog with a chew toy, impervious to counter-arguments, for the same reason people get into cults.
Anti-cult "exit counselor" Steve Hassan talks about this in a good book called "Combatting Cult Mind Control." He was a Moonie. What he says is that people develop a "thought-stopping technique" such that, when they begin to question their own paradigm (or leader who is creating it), they have a kind of circuit breaker which stops the thought. People tell themselves that doubt and questioning their own idea of the world, or right and wrong, is the work of "the devil" or somehow serves an evil opposition, so that doubt itself becomes a kind of "barbarian who got through the gates." "If I truly believed in this, I wouldn't doubt." But this extends far beyond cults, into ideology, and while it is easy to convince people it exists in cults (or religion, broadly), it is very difficult to get people to say that the same is true of ideology.
The number one thing I want selfishly for the world, is for people to wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say, "I know I am full of shit, in some way. Some deeply-held belief I have is completely wrong, or incompletely developed. I know this because I have changed my mind in the past. How can I, in good conscience, believe that in 20 years I will not look back on me, right now, and think, 'How could you have been so wrong?'"
If we can get used to doing this, a lot of these social pathologies will fall away.
THIS WAS REALLY LONG.
SORRY.
But reality is complex enough to justify it. At least for me. A golden god.
Man, I am not cool enough to be in the same room as me.
