Las Vegas shooting

[TGLS]

Felons are disenfranchised, but they can have guns?

[ORCACommander]

and i never said they should be

[TGLS]

Fair enough. I just think it's stupid.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I know its not elegant but here I am just going to bullet out my thoughts on the matter

Honestly I am not sure what you would call me on the political spectrum except to say I think both Republican and Democrat agendas are repugnant but libertarians are short sighted and naive in their goals.

the government can never keep you safe.

Well then, clearly we should stop wasting money on such fruitless things as anti-aircraft weaponry, the Coast Guard, and Firefighters since "the government can never keep you safe."

I know what to call you. A centrist, convinced that your refusal to "take sides" is the same as objectivity and a moral high ground.

[Archon_Wing]

While I'd agree that having firefighters and peace officers to maintain order is quite nice, I don't find it unreasonable to not have blind faith that they would protect your safety. (look at Katrina). We also have a president that sees saving lives as a budget burden.

We have a police force that hides corruption and has been granted powers to invade privacy and steal your stuff but unlike other criminals the law is on their side. Their goal is to protect the rights of the rich and powerful, and if it is convenient, you are safe too. Waging war on the black community while protecting neonazis. That is the norm. Openly supporting totalitarian governments while deposing democractialy elected ones. Monitoring anything can get their hands on. Some genocide to add to it: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog ... ed-states/

And we are hardly the worst.


And maybe we have it good too. Just look at Spain. Regardless of who is right, the police assaulting defenseless old ladies shows that police will always be protecting state intrests first. It can always be worse. If you're not rich, you simply are just another statistic.

[The Romulan Republic]

Felons are disenfranchised, but they can have guns?

Which, when you think about it, is really fucked up. Not just in the obvious "we trust you to wield a deadly weapon, but not to vote" way, but in the sense that you are restricting peoples' means to participate in the peaceful, legitimate political process, while providing them with easy access to fire power. Its almost incentivizing them to become terrorists, when you put it that way.

[Archon_Wing]

Most states allow felons to vote after they have finished everything. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_ ... nchisement

I assume they can't have guns in jail either.... I would hope.

Still you would think that weapons woukd be the greater danger here. And some places such as Nevada have such lax laws.

[LittleRaven]

How come when we're protecting against brown Muslim terrorists we can suppress just about any sort of civil liberty, but when every day gun killings happen from cranky racist old men to toddlers, suddenly the amendment is absolute and inviolate?

Fuzzy, when we violate the civil liberties of brown people, that ends up in court too. And more often than not, the violators lose....even when said violator is the President of the United States. Our system is far from perfect and is often frustrating, but it is working to protect everyone. We can't simply ignore parts of it that we don't like.

If Little Raven will forgive me for speaking for them, I suspect the intent was to be pragmatic and point out the very real challenges to making a significant change.

Nothing to forgive, GeekGirl. You are absolutely correct.

I admire Fuzzy's passion, but passion is of limited value without a clear understanding of where you are and where you want to go. And the reality of gun control in this country is...daunting. That doesn't mean we throw up our hands and do nothing, but it means we have to consider carefully where we want to spend political capital. It's not like we have unlimited amounts of the stuff.

Your article sums up a number of the problems, starting with the big one: We have an absolutely staggering number of guns in the country, millions upon millions upon millions. Even if we somehow managed to go full Australia and replicate their most successful buyback year after year after year...it would take us decades to get the numbers down to something reasonable to regulate. And that's assuming we completely shut down any more purchases of new guns in that time, which seems...unlikely.

Ok, so we're in a very, VERY deep hole. But hey, Rome wasn't built in a day. Accepting that this is going to take a very long time, let's get started! But get started with...what, exactly? It's easy to say that the government should do something. But coming up with an actual policy to stop things like Las Vegas is going to be very, very hard, because Las Vegas represents a very unusual case. Stephen Paddock appears to have been a man of some means, with a great deal of foresight and patience, who did not associate with any known radical groups. Stopping THAT kind of guy is insanely difficult, and trying base government policy off that kind of case is going to result in madness. We can probably design some policies that will do some good, but they have to work within the confines of the Second Amendment, and they're not likely to stop someone like Paddock. (fortunately for us, guys like Paddock are VERY rare)

And then there's the cost. I hate to be politically crass, here, but politics is going to be central to this endeavor, so it's irresponsible to just ignore it. And the sad truth is that gun control is political poison for the Democrats. Yes, it sells super well in coastal cities...where Democrats already win in droves. It goes over like a lead balloon everywhere else. The Democrats control just 6 state legislatures nation-wide, compared to the 26 fully owned by the GOP, and gun control is one of the biggest reasons why that's true. Now, I'm all for taking political risks if I can be convinced that we have an actual, rational policy that we have reason to believe will work, but I would like to see that first. Because we can't do anything for anyone if we don't have any power.

And finally...I really do believe we're on a clock here. 3D printing is here, now. 3d printed guns are here, now. Granted, printed guns right now are pretty chinzy. They work...sorta, but they're not comparable to modern assault weapons. You're certainly not going to kill 50 people with one. But technology only goes in one direction. Our printers will get better, faster, and cheaper. It will probably be decades before you can print a 3d gun with reliable killing power for a reasonable cost...but it will also take decades to drain the insane number of guns floating around our country. And we're not even talking about self-contained milling machines, which present a whole 'nother set of problems. The great thing about modern technology is that it's putting more and more power into individual hands, and the overwhelming majority of people will use that power for good. But there's always the possibility that someone will use it for evil. Preventing the latter without denying the former is probably impossible.

So the way I look at it, you have a country with hundreds of millions of guns floating around, a very significant portion of the population who like it that way, and best case scenario, you have about 30 years to try and do something about it before technology comes along and basically gives everyone the power to make a gun if they want to. And I find myself with a sudden sympathy for Saavik. Is there a win here I'm not seeing?

[Karha of Honor]

As someone used a rental truck from the company I work for to run over people Saturday night the intention to do harm to others does seem to be the core of the issue. The real world expression of the power fantasy of just murdering a great many people in a public places strikes me as a bona fide mental health AND cultural problem.

Cultural problem? How does the culture mainstream or otherwise endorses this sort of action?

White boys who kill lots of people get romanticized as bad boy anti-hero "lone wolf" figures, as far as cultural problems go.

Intention to do harm isn't the core of the issue. The core is how easy our shitty laws make it to do that harm on a massive scale. You can shoot a lot of people with an automatic weapon a lot faster than you can run them over or stab them to death.

indian movies do it, Frencjh movies do it, Korean movies do it i utterly fail what the fuck color got to do with it.
Rent a truck and you got your mass murder weapon.

I'm not talking about movies. I'm talking about News Reports. Every time a white guy shoots up a bunch of people, you can't swing a dead cat without hearing about how intelligent and sensitive he was, without seeing a shot of him smiling and being nice, hearing about his backstory, describing him as a troubled genius and lone wolf and basically anything they can do that will humanize and glamorize him rather than taking the advice of experts in the field and simply referring to him as "the _location_ shooter".

it's a giant country, there will be some firefights and the police is running wild in some cases and on some issues.

"Some". Yeahright. They are probably not comitting as many crimes as the entirety of the criminal underworld in the US, but they are right up there, along with Senators and Don Vito Corleone.

The idea that a few real life firefights involving police lead to mass shooters feeling empowered is nonsense.

I can't remember having written that, so where are you taking that from? My point was, that in a country where the police can arrest you for having done nothing, can permanently confiscate whatever they want without ever having to give it back even if you have done nothing wrong and kill people almost at will for the flimsiest of excuses and can get away with that almost always, is rotten to the core and one only needs to look back to last month, when Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, to see that there's an institutional problem. You know the country and society as a whole fucked up royally, when the gun-tooting nut-crackers who defend their right to bear arms by saying that they need them to defend themselves from their own government, have an actual valid point.

The US has real violence problem? It cetainly does not prevent people from seeing it as a tourist destination or one for immigration. So it must be more than tolerable.

Every other varblenecking klorbag in this gods-abandoned country has a private Rambo fantasy.[/b] This people lead dull, stressful lives, but they dream that SOME DAY, whether it's after the robot holocaust or when the Big Gummint comes ot Take Away Their Guns, they will turn into a frelling action hero, and the thought of not having enough magazines to take out a children's choir and a small concert afterwards is intolerable to them. How will they kill all the nameless evil henchmen if they don't?
These people banded together, took control of the NRA, bankroll our congressmen, and now it's a party of the holy far-right culture which must be protected at any cost because the goll-durn liberals oppose it.

That's why children have to do active shooter drills in our classrooms, and not in the UK classrooms or Australian classrooms or Japanese classrooms. That's why every time I walk into a movie theater I wonder if it will be my last.

And if the right would want to take away the second they would also be opposed.

What are you saying. That this is another "both sides are equally at fault" issue?

Why do we keep talking as if a real solution is IMPOSSIBLE when there are other major nations that actually HAVE solved the problem, including Canada with it's megalithic moose and Australia where everything except some of the sheep is trying to kill you? It HAS been solved. The solutions are real and proven by real-life experience. We just sit in an America First bubble, thinking and praying without actually putting two and two together.

You do understand that the US is not going back to the 50s in terms of public trust towards the government? It did not stope real hardcore mass murder people in other countries from committing it.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

As someone used a rental truck from the company I work for to run over people Saturday night the intention to do harm to others does seem to be the core of the issue. The real world expression of the power fantasy of just murdering a great many people in a public places strikes me as a bona fide mental health AND cultural problem.

Cultural problem? How does the culture mainstream or otherwise endorses this sort of action?

White boys who kill lots of people get romanticized as bad boy anti-hero "lone wolf" figures, as far as cultural problems go.

Intention to do harm isn't the core of the issue. The core is how easy our shitty laws make it to do that harm on a massive scale. You can shoot a lot of people with an automatic weapon a lot faster than you can run them over or stab them to death.

indian movies do it, Frencjh movies do it, Korean movies do it i utterly fail what the fuck color got to do with it.
Rent a truck and you got your mass murder weapon.

I'm not talking about movies. I'm talking about News Reports. Every time a white guy shoots up a bunch of people, you can't swing a dead cat without hearing about how intelligent and sensitive he was, without seeing a shot of him smiling and being nice, hearing about his backstory, describing him as a troubled genius and lone wolf and basically anything they can do that will humanize and glamorize him rather than taking the advice of experts in the field and simply referring to him as "the _location_ shooter".

it's a giant country, there will be some firefights and the police is running wild in some cases and on some issues.

"Some". Yeahright. They are probably not comitting as many crimes as the entirety of the criminal underworld in the US, but they are right up there, along with Senators and Don Vito Corleone.

The idea that a few real life firefights involving police lead to mass shooters feeling empowered is nonsense.

I can't remember having written that, so where are you taking that from? My point was, that in a country where the police can arrest you for having done nothing, can permanently confiscate whatever they want without ever having to give it back even if you have done nothing wrong and kill people almost at will for the flimsiest of excuses and can get away with that almost always, is rotten to the core and one only needs to look back to last month, when Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, to see that there's an institutional problem. You know the country and society as a whole fucked up royally, when the gun-tooting nut-crackers who defend their right to bear arms by saying that they need them to defend themselves from their own government, have an actual valid point.

The US has real violence problem? It cetainly does not prevent people from seeing it as a tourist destination or one for immigration. So it must be more than tolerable.

Every other varblenecking klorbag in this gods-abandoned country has a private Rambo fantasy.[/b] This people lead dull, stressful lives, but they dream that SOME DAY, whether it's after the robot holocaust or when the Big Gummint comes ot Take Away Their Guns, they will turn into a frelling action hero, and the thought of not having enough magazines to take out a children's choir and a small concert afterwards is intolerable to them. How will they kill all the nameless evil henchmen if they don't?
These people banded together, took control of the NRA, bankroll our congressmen, and now it's a party of the holy far-right culture which must be protected at any cost because the goll-durn liberals oppose it.

That's why children have to do active shooter drills in our classrooms, and not in the UK classrooms or Australian classrooms or Japanese classrooms. That's why every time I walk into a movie theater I wonder if it will be my last.

And if the right would want to take away the second they would also be opposed.

What are you saying. That this is another "both sides are equally at fault" issue?

Why do we keep talking as if a real solution is IMPOSSIBLE when there are other major nations that actually HAVE solved the problem, including Canada with it's megalithic moose and Australia where everything except some of the sheep is trying to kill you? It HAS been solved. The solutions are real and proven by real-life experience. We just sit in an America First bubble, thinking and praying without actually putting two and two together.

You do understand that the US is not going back to the 50s in terms of public trust towards the government? It did not stope real hardcore mass murder people in other countries from committing it.

But those measures in those countries DID stop real, hardcore mass murder people from committing mass murder. That isn't opinion. That is proven, solid, historical fact, unless I'm misunderstanding your sentence.