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Madner Kami wrote:Blaming the ATF, when it's Congress and NRA that interfere as much as they can, resulting in the fucked up status quo there is?
I'm not blaming the ATF. I'm saying the both sides are frustrated with the status quo. I have lots of gun owner friends. (I do live in Texas, after all.) They LOATHE dealing with the ATF. Whenever they want a new silencer, it's months of waiting and passing forms back and forth. They would LOVE to be able to fill out an online form, swipe their credit card, and take home their toy.
You phrase that as one question, but it's actually two.
The answer to the first question....why....well, if you've read my previous thread on the NRA, I have no idea what they're up to these days. It's like their leadership has gotten caught in some kind of feedback loop where they just keep running around in circles, but straying farther and farther into crazy each time. I'm really hoping they break out of it soon. I like advocacy groups, even though they all end up in uncomfortable places from time to time. But the NRA is going way beyond advocacy. Those gun owner friends I talked about? All of them have withdrawn their membership over the last few years. These are guys who happily spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on rifles, scopes, ammo, silencers...the works. And they think the NRA is nuts.
The answer the second question....how are they so successful...I think I actually know the answer to that one. Whatever its faults, the NRA has clearly mastered the KISS strategy. They keep everything super, super simple: They say no. It's not that they're uninformed...quite the contrary. They keep very up to date on what's going on. They make sure all their members know what's going on...and to say no. So when the Congressman asks his clerk what the mail breakdown was for a particular bill, he's going to hear 'Well we got 5 letters in support of background checks, and 289 in opposition.' Every. Single. Time.
As Republicans have proved so ably over the last 10 years, this is a amazingly effective strategy when to comes to blocking things. And it's just as amazing for the NRA as it has been for the Republicans at large. Of course, it doesn't translate well to actually making policy, but that's not what the NRA is interested in anyway.
I'm only agreeing with parts of what the NRA is preaching but the problem is like any big organization for rights, and the NRA is pro a civil rights, like any of the other groups, they've become this big company almost their their own in house politics. What goes best for their mindset might not entirely be what the people they represent wants. When it's hard politics, there's always compromises, which is why I'm not a member but I support one of the most powerful groups that is trying to make sure one of the most important civil rights don't get trample on in the face of emotional uproar.
This incident is worse because we still don't know the motive other than mayhem, which goes back to what I've said about other incidents, laws can't prevent crazy and using number of dead as a benchmark of seriousness doesn't work either. It really doesn't matter if it was 10 people vs 59 at this point. Each death is significant and we shouldn't be tallying all of them because we forget the individual case. The point is, a crazy guy did it. He killed himself so we no longer have a living man to blame or take to court to see justice so what's the next thing? We blame his methods when really we should keep focus on the underlying issue.
Previously I've argued against gun bans when mentioning both the UK and Australia and how incidents happen there all the time and what's the general answer? Not that many were killed or hurt. You see my point? Instead of focusing the cause, motives, the person of an event, people then accepts bad things happened and they did everything they WANTED to do about it when it comes to making useless laws instead of tackling the actual problems behind it. Then they ignore it and become numb to saying "oh it could of been worse if the guy had whatever else was available".
If you want to ask my opinion on the second amendment, I see it plain and clear. It's 2 parts. One talks about a paramilitary group that doesn't exist anymore in modern America and the second half refers to the people and their ability to be armed. Every single founding father from Jefferson to Adams agree with the statement as not for simply hunting or playing or anything else but simple a person has to right to have weapons and for whatever reason. Since they recently gain independence from an empire, it's to protect from a government and yes that government voted by people to force their rights to be taken away. To prevent tyranny and tyranny can come in many forms. We've lived in such an age of relaxation and mostly good fortune in the western world. Most of us have pretty good lives I believe. If you tell me that you're suffering while living in this part of the world, then you have never been to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, south America. We have it good here and the freedoms of expression, free thinking for the most part and relative safety have changed the mindset of the lives of the people that live here. Kids these days didn't grow up in the tail end of the Cold War where WWIII was a real scare. They weren't like my grandparents running from the Communists in China, fought the Japanese Empire, the scariness of the German Army. They don't know about the struggles of my ancestors, the Irish and how they were hated in America taking all the jobs. It's because none of us really live in that age makes us take this for granted, the things we have, for granted.
I know I'm off on a tangent but it all ties to your rights and how people who don't even exercise them or appreciates them, takes them for granted because most of us are living in a time where we do feel safe, where the horrors aren't at our door steps and only sound like ghost stories.
Very uncommon did a lot of us experience the feeling of helplessness that made us think...damn, I wish I had an tool to defend myself, or like some would cower and say "where are the cops" because I don't want to protect myself. And then blame the gun that the crook was using while begging for the police with their guns save your life and then deny others the right to protect themselves while you can live comfortably thinking you made some kind of real difference by sticking that no gun sign on your door like it's a magic charm to ward off evil spirits.
People who want to ban certain items without fully understand their purpose really shouldn't be making policies. I challenge any of your to go to a gun range, take a firearms safety course and listen to how guns are tools that aren't evil themselves. Devices that are novelties aren't instruments of mayhem and that's why no self respecting gun owner would actually use them practically.
They want to ban a piece of plastic that basically takes advantage of a person's arms of moving back and forth to make a gun shoot faster? Why not a stick? rubber bands? belts and a person's own finger?
This goes back to my argument of how would any ban actually stop anyone from committing crime? Going back in history when machine guns were first restricted and it didn't even slow down, let alone stop the gangsters and the mob from continuing to use them with disregard for the innocent, how the Clinton 1994 Assault Weapons ban didn't stop the North Hollywood bank robbers from using illegally obtained weapons and ammunition from causing mayhem or how the federal law that turns all K-12 schools into gun free zones punishable with jail time from stopping Columbine.
And my guess the rebuttal would still be "less people would die if guns are banned or heavily restricted", less people would die...and forgetting the fact that people will still die or rather accepting that people die and at that point failing to admit that they didn't change anything by calling for more gun control. They didn't stop people from going crazy or stopping the gang bangers of Chicago, where as of now have caused over 500 homicides this year and all with illegally obtained weapons with most being repeat offenders. How does a new gun law stop them when current ones designed to be very restricted have failed to?
"Adapt, Overcome & Improvise"
"There's a fine line between not listening and not caring...I like to think I walk that line everyday of my life."
Excalibur...you covered a lot of ground in that post, and I'm trying to figure out where to start.
Let me start with the simplest point: Why bother to just reduce the number of people killed if we can't stop the actual violence itself?
Because that means LESS senseless deaths. There will perhaps always be violence, cruelty, and evil, but if we can do something to REDUCE the power of people to do evil, we should at least think about doing it. Because yes, some people still die, but if I can make it so that some sick puppy takes out only 10 people instead of 20? That's ten more mother's sons, brother's sisters, and people who might do great things who can go home and live to tell the tale.
I'm going to ask it again. Why is gun control the ONLY issue where people say "Well, because we can't COMPLETELY eradicate it with laws, we shouldn't even try!"?
Don't pretend this is impossible. Other countries HAVE made a real change, that saved lots of lives. Don't tell me "it's not good enough so everyone should be able to keep armor-piercing rounds and AK47s." Did the examples I listed just bounce of your head? Japan, Australia, and the UK have had ZERO mass shootings in the past decade, while we have them so often that even the jokes about their recurrence are cliches!
That seems to be the main thrust of your argument.
Point two, shooters being "crazy".
No, they are not.
There is no body of evidence to suggest that mast shooters are more mentally ill than the rest of us. Mentally ill people are, statistically, more likely to be shot than to be shooters. You talk about ignoring the causes? I can give you a laundry list. Sometimes the shooters are nice enough to spout the reasons themselves, like "women can get away with being sluts" or "impending racial holy war".
And...you think we, because we live in the great land of America, all have it easy?
Easy for some. Hard for most. In some cities, for some people, at some rungs of the latter, the USA IS a third-world nation. Ask the people of Flint, Michigan if they have it easy. Suffering is not the exclusive province of sad-eyed foreign orphans in charity ads.
Speaking personally, I am suffering, and I can tell you about it in detail if you'd like.
Do you think we really feel safe? You talk of cops? There's a pretty large portion of this society that gets MORE scared when the cops show up, that WISH the cops won't show up because they will immediately escalate things from bad to worse. There are people who panic inside every time they get pulled over for a ticket, because they've seen the news videos where somebody just like them gets murdered when a cop panics at their unarmed self and empties his magazine into their face, then reloads and empties it again, and said cop is now on desk duty or paid leave.
From your description of this nation, you are either woefully ignorant, or willfully ignorant, of what life is like for millions upon millions of people living in this country.
"Believe me, there’s nothing so terrible that someone won’t support it."
— Un Lun Dun, China Mieville
Fuzzy Necromancer wrote:Don't pretend this is impossible.
Fuzzy, I'm not pretending. This is impossible.
At least, it's impossible with the electorate we have right now. I'll say it again...the Republicans own 26 state legislatures outright. Take a look at this map. See all that red? I guarantee you, in most of that red, a candidate cannot get elected without a very high rating from the NRA. That is how much people there value their guns. If you actually want to take those guns away, then you have to change the Constitution, and that means getting 3/4 of states (not the people!) to agree with you. 26 completely red states. 6 blue ones.
I assume you still believe that government power should stem from the consent of governed. If you do, then you have to accept that an awful lot of Americans want their guns. Before you change government policy, you have to change their minds.
Of course we know at least part of their claim isn't true since there were still a ton of loaded magazines stacked on the floor in the police pictures.
"Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough."
-TR
I read they have lied before, especially recently, about attacks in the Philippines and Bangladesh. Their power is disappearing, that's why they started to lie.
Usually ISIS always had some phone video where some person swears allegiance to them, so if they haven't published any, they are probably lying.
Yeah. To my knowledge, there is no more evidence for ISIS's claims of responsibility here than their would be if I claimed that Donald Trump was behind it. Its just ISIS engaging in some (clumsy) propaganda.
They used to be a somewhat credible source back then when Syrian war was more "hot" and they were competing with other jihadist groups over who is better. But ever since they power base there got pretty broken by everybody's efforts they are a lot more tattered than when they enjoyed their short lived time in the sun of holding territory in the middle of a civil war.
