Mega-Thread: Gun Control Thread

[Edge-]

https://news.yahoo.com/family-says-f...213221643.html

Eyo where are the Second Amendment advocates on this shit? Shouldn't the NRA be all up in this lawsuit as a legal use of force in a "stand your ground" state? I mean we've seen that you can follow someone around then assault them and then shoot them in self defense and that's fine. You can lure folks into your garage by leaving it open and then shoot them and that's fine too. So is arguing with your girlfriends ex-husband, getting your gun, continuing to argue, and then shooting him on your front porch.

"Stand your ground" laws continue to mystify and confuse me in general because there are very few circumstances where a gun owner can't retreat or otherwise avoid confrontation, yet they largely receive fairly expansive protections for their use of firearms.

Curious why similar protections weren't extended to William Wilson. The NC law doesn't give gun owners a duty to retreat, so if they were actually trying to run him and his girlfriend off the road - which is definitely a life threatening risk, or a risk of serious personal injury - then it stands to reason that NC's fairly expansive "stand your ground" law would have covered this use of a firearm.

It touches upon broader issues including race, but I'm still curious where the gun rights advocates are on this case. They usually come out of the woodwork to support other shooters like Kyle Rittenhouse, but maybe they're just doing something white that Wilson can't do.

[Endus]

https://news.yahoo.com/family-says-f...213221643.html

Eyo where are the Second Amendment advocates on this shit? Shouldn't the NRA be all up in this lawsuit as a legal use of force in a "stand your ground" state? I mean we've seen that you can follow someone around then assault them and then shoot them in self defense and that's fine. You can lure folks into your garage by leaving it open and then shoot them and that's fine too. So is arguing with your girlfriends ex-husband, getting your gun, continuing to argue, and then shooting him on your front porch.

"Stand your ground" laws continue to mystify and confuse me in general because there are very few circumstances where a gun owner can't retreat or otherwise avoid confrontation, yet they largely receive fairly expansive protections for their use of firearms.

Curious why similar protections weren't extended to William Wilson. The NC law doesn't give gun owners a duty to retreat, so if they were actually trying to run him and his girlfriend off the road - which is definitely a life threatening risk, or a risk of serious personal injury - then it stands to reason that NC's fairly expansive "stand your ground" law would have covered this use of a firearm.

It touches upon broader issues including race, but I'm still curious where the gun rights advocates are on this case. They usually come out of the woodwork to support other shooters like Kyle Rittenhouse, but maybe they're just doing something white that Wilson can't do.

The gun rights advocates are never consistent on this shit, because the goal isn't an armed society, it's an armed ethnic elite, and a disarmed and subjugated everyone else. They're pro-gun the same way the Nazi Reich was, for "good German citizens" at the time.

[Ted Mosby]

Guns are good.

[Deus Mortis]

https://news.yahoo.com/family-says-f...213221643.html

Eyo where are the Second Amendment advocates on this shit? Shouldn't the NRA be all up in this lawsuit as a legal use of force in a "stand your ground" state? I mean we've seen that you can follow someone around then assault them and then shoot them in self defense and that's fine. You can lure folks into your garage by leaving it open and then shoot them and that's fine too. So is arguing with your girlfriends ex-husband, getting your gun, continuing to argue, and then shooting him on your front porch.

"Stand your ground" laws continue to mystify and confuse me in general because there are very few circumstances where a gun owner can't retreat or otherwise avoid confrontation, yet they largely receive fairly expansive protections for their use of firearms.

Curious why similar protections weren't extended to William Wilson. The NC law doesn't give gun owners a duty to retreat, so if they were actually trying to run him and his girlfriend off the road - which is definitely a life threatening risk, or a risk of serious personal injury - then it stands to reason that NC's fairly expansive "stand your ground" law would have covered this use of a firearm.

It touches upon broader issues including race, but I'm still curious where the gun rights advocates are on this case. They usually come out of the woodwork to support other shooters like Kyle Rittenhouse, but maybe they're just doing something white that Wilson can't do.

For this case I think there are a couple things that made him lose. Those being he fired a warning shot(possibly several) under the truck, as people know this is a no no, the second is the fatal shot happened when the truck was ahead of him and the bullet went through the back window into the back of the girls head. It would be a completely different scenario if it went through the side window(driver trying to run him off the road), or through the front window if the car was coming towards them. Instead with the other car ahead of them he had other options he could of taken. He also did not report the shooting. The police department released a statement looking for info and someone called in saying their friend Rigdon(Wilson's girlfriend) might know more about it and while police were talking with her Wilson happened to call.

[Edge-]

Instead with the other car ahead of them he had other options he could of taken.

I will again note that NC's "stand your ground" law has no apparent duty to retreat, so this detail should be irrelevant in the trial.

Other points are fair context. I'm just interested that Second Amendment groups seem to have sat this one out when they've jumped into many similar sounding cases.

[Deus Mortis]

I will again note that NC's "stand your ground" law has no apparent duty to retreat, so this detail should be irrelevant in the trial.

Other points are fair context. I'm just interested that Second Amendment groups seem to have sat this one out when they've jumped into many similar sounding cases.

I would hope in other stand your ground cases that if the person shot was walking away and was shot in the back of the head that the person who shot would be charged. I am fine with having the right to stand your ground, however it should not qualify you to shoot someone in the back. I really wish there was some dashcam or video of the incident. Stuff like this makes me want to get a dashcam system for my car so it is not a he said she said case. Because with no damage to Wilsons car, and the fatal shot going through the back window it made it an uphill fight for Wilson to prove that it was stand your ground.

[Spectral]

I doubt anyone's tried to use a stand your ground defense while in a moving vehicle. On the face of it, putting a round through the back of someone's head while they're in a separate moving vehicle doesn't really pattern-match to something that would fit for an affirmative defense. I suppose the ambiguities of the situation and conflicting testimony saved him from a murder charge. Without seeing the full body of evidence presented at the trial it probably doesn't make much sense to have a strong opinion on the case.

Despite what is (apparently) a common belief, laws empowering self-defense don't actually create a get out of jail free card for reckless use of firearms. Even in the event of a legitimate use of force, you're going to be in a legally dicey situation.

[Grinning Serpent]

I will again note that NC's "stand your ground" law has no apparent duty to retreat, so this detail should be irrelevant in the trial.

Other points are fair context. I'm just interested that Second Amendment groups seem to have sat this one out when they've jumped into many similar sounding cases.

Obviously, it's because there's a *lot* of latent racism in those groups. Generally, it's because people are taught that if you aren't running around screaming slurs and looking for a suitable branch to hang someone from, you're not racist - even though anyone with an education (not that the US is doing well on that front...) knows otherwise.

To the uneducated rank and file in these groups, they simply don't notice or realize that they're being racist, and that the only time they support gun ownership for people "not like them" (whether politically or ethnically) is when they're effectively treating those people "not like them" as tokens. You have a Black friend, there's no way you're racist! Right? I imagine the organizers knowingly guide this stuff, though.

I'm generally in favor of stand your ground laws - not because I think that people should be blasting at the first provocation, but because a "duty to retreat" in official legal terms creates a whole lot of problems, and can lead to scenarios where the victims are punished for defending themselves. We can look at other nations with "duty to retreat" in their laws for examples of this, particularly if the victim used a weapon or sometimes even just a chemical deterrent like pepper spray to defend themselves.

I do think that gun culture in the US is extremely toxic and unhealthy and glorifies violence, though. I think that shooting should be the absolute last resort, the very last thing you do when you genuinely believe your life or the life of another is in imminent danger. But to me, that means you do *not* take warning shots, you don't brandish and attempt to intimidate with it. You either leave the gun in its holster or safe, or you draw it and shoot to kill, with no in-between. Warning shots are especially problematic in urban areas, because bullets don't vanish - they keep going until they hit something, and that could be another person or someone's pet. Anyone firing warning shots was never given proper defensive training.

[Edge-]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...cies-rcna52887

Texas: Where schools are sending students home with DNA test kits so that their bodies can be more easily identified should their heads be blown to bits. It's purely voluntary and the language around the law that authorized these kits doesn't explicitly state it's because it's hard to identify a child who's had their head blown off in a school shooting and that it's pretty traumatic to bring in the parents to identify the mangled corpse as their child, but it sure does seem like that's why this is being done.

I guess this...is a normal, perfectly fine, perfectly healthy thing for a developed nation to be doing. Sure, I got fingerprinted by the cops when I was in primary school so they could totes dust for prints and find me if I was kidnapped (not really, but it sure made parents feel safe!) and I think there can be a general consensus that while not all may be comfortable with that decision that's a fairly reasonable precaution to take. Assuming a competent police force, at least.

But hey, I guess parents needing to stop to fully consider the notion that the state, rather than do everything possible to keep their child safe at school, is simply saving them from needing to look at a mangled child's corpse and say, "Yes, that's my baby. His face is gone, but those are the Sonic the Hedgehog shoes we sent him to school in and that's the ketchup stain in his pants we told him to change."

Many of the children gunned down inside Robb Elementary were not easily identifiable as a result of their catastrophic injuries.

This is the only "problem" that the bill and DNA test kits are designed to "solve". Not actually keeping the children from being murdered in school, which remains a uniquely commonplace problem in America.

[Attackrabbit]

That is absolutely disgusting :/

[Edge-]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...hool-rcna53715

Three people are dead, including the gunman, after a shooting at a St. Louis high school Monday morning sent multiple people to hospitals, police said.

Chaos unfolded shortly after 9 a.m. when authorities learned of a shooter with a long gun inside Central Visual and Performing Arts High School. The school and the Collegiate School of Medicine & Bioscience, which is in the same building, were placed on lockdown.

...

The names of the gunman and the two victims were not released. One of the victims is a woman and the other is a teenage girl. Both were killed as a result of gunshot wounds.

And the school shootings continue. I do wonder if Missouri will follow Texas's lead and, rather than take any actions to prevent these kinds of shootings, will simply send students home with DNA test kits so their parents can keep a sample. Just in case their kids head gets blown to bits during a school shooting and they need the DNA to quickly identify the child so the parents don't have to come in and identify the mangled body unless they want to.

America remains unique in how commonplace school and mass shootings are, and also unique in having a Second Amendment. But I keep getting told these things have nothing to do with each other, so I'm left to conclude that, apparently, my fellow countrymen (and mostly men) are just super duper murder horny all the fuckin time.

[Edge-]

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/25/us/st...ooting-tuesday

600 rounds of ammunition, multiple high capacity magazines. The school had security checkpoints, it had metal detectors, and it had security guards. They were not enough to prevent people from dying, at best they prevented more death and that's about it. Security guards aren't armed, but then again it's kinda not like, a normal/good thing to need armed security guards at a fuckin school in a developed nation?

So instead we have a dead 15 year old student and a teacher that sacrificed themself to protect another student.

“I absolutely commend my students for their response,” Faulstich said. “Even in the moments when they were hearing gunfire going on all around they stood quiet and I know they did it to keep each other safe.”

Must be fun to have a generation with kids traumatized from having to live through avoidable mass shootings.

I'll re-share The Onion article that does the rounds whenever these shootings happen. They haven't reposted for this yet (they seem to have reduced how often they post it since it was getting so overplayed with our frequent mass/school shootings), but this is the Uvalde edition: https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-p...s-r-1848971668

Because really, we are the only nation where this is a problem, and we are also the only nation that claims we just can't do anything about it and the tens of thousands of gun deaths annually, including children, are just the price we pay for our Second Amendment. Apparently lots of folks are perfectly fine with others paying that price.

[Edge-]

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...-sale-blocked/

This story is sure turning out interesting.

Shooter's initial attempt to purchase a gun was blocked due to a background check (good!) so instead, he just purchased from a private seller.

And further, his mother called the police after finding the gun and tried to get them to take it because he had a history of mental illness and she was concerned for his safety. Well, Missouri has no red flag laws so there was absolutely nothing the cops could have done.

We have multiple points of failure here that could have saved lives. Yet there still just seems to be nothing, no new ideas, no innovative concepts, just nothing we can do to avoid school shootings and mass shootings on a regular basis. I'm still left to conclude that maybe we Americans are all just secretly super murder horny or something.

[Grinning Serpent]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...cies-rcna52887

Texas: Where schools are sending students home with DNA test kits so that their bodies can be more easily identified should their heads be blown to bits.

I'm convinced it has nothing to do with shootings, but more about authoritarian bullshit. Same reason for the fingerprinting you mentioned. It puts people into the system early, before they really understand why or how it's being done, and once you're in the system... you're in it for life.

Remember all those stories about people doing one of those dumb DNA test kits because they wanted to know what part of White People Land they came from, and how it would later go on to completely fuck them when the feds used that DNA for something else? Yeah...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/25/us/st...ooting-tuesday

600 rounds of ammunition, multiple high capacity magazines. The school had security checkpoints, it had metal detectors, and it had security guards. They were not enough to prevent people from dying, at best they prevented more death and that's about it. Security guards aren't armed, but then again it's kinda not like, a normal/good thing to need armed security guards at a fuckin school in a developed nation?

So instead we have a dead 15 year old student and a teacher that sacrificed themself to protect another student.

Because really, we are the only nation where this is a problem, and we are also the only nation that claims we just can't do anything about it and the tens of thousands of gun deaths annually, including children, are just the price we pay for our Second Amendment. Apparently lots of folks are perfectly fine with others paying that price.

600 rounds isn't even enough for a day at the range, and those are standard capacity magazines, not "high capacity." If it's literally sold with the rifle, that's *standard* capacity. You don't get to redefine what something is or isn't to push a political agenda. For a rifle like the AR-15 and its cousins, "standard" usually means 15, 20, or 30 round box magazines. "High capacity" would be something like a 100-round drum or something, purchased aftermarket. "Low capacity" might be the 10-round or 5-round magazines required by law in some states.

We definitely have a lot of gun deaths, but we also have a lot of incidences of guns being used defensively. Even the very lowest, reliable estimates from Giffords (an avowed anti-gun outlet) places it at around 68,000 uses annually, up to around 125,000-215,000 for more liberal interpretations of the data. We will, obviously, discard the idiotic "2-3 million!" crap that Kleck shit out because there's no way people are using guns to *prevent* crimes at a rate nearly 10-20 times the violent crime rate.

Just addressing suicides would strike roughly 2/3 of those gun deaths from the register. Why are people choosing to fellate their shotgun, and what can be done to address that? Sure, maybe adding a 24-72 hour holding period for first-time gun buyers *might* have some impact on impulse suicides ("waaah, lost my job/my girlfriend was fucking another dude, I'm gonna end it all!" type stuff), but I don't know how reliable that "might" is. And you run the risk of royally fucking someone that's buying a gun because they feel the need for protection *immediately* (woman being abused by her boyfriend/spouse, maybe.)

The total deaths from mass shootings, accidental shootings, etc are a negligible portion of the remaining 10,000-12,000 gun deaths. Accidental shootings could be mitigated with community outreach and informational campaigns, together with maybe something like a tax break or refund for people who buy gun safes and other safe storage methods.

Dealing with mass shootings is going to be a lot thornier of an issue and not really something that gun control can address.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihQ-j6eALGc

Paul Harrell recently made a series of videos exploring the causes and issues of addressing mass shootings via legislation. He's long-winded but his reasoning is pretty sound and while his channel is pretty much all about gun stuff in one degree or another, I've never found his stuff to be full of the usual macho bullshit crap a lot of "gun channels" have.

The biggest problem towards legislating against mass shootings is that they don't often have a single motive in common, and we have so many guns in circulation that new gun laws are pointless. Obviously, you can't have a shooting without guns, but we have quite a few more guns than people in the US, and methods for fabricating functional, effective guns (as in, guns that can fire more than one or two shots before breaking, or aren't otherwise a glorified pipe with a shotgun shell in it) at home become more sophisticated and accessible every year. You can't close Pandora's Box, and even trying to is just wasting everyone's time and political capital.

We also can't legislate against the predatory and frankly unconscionable way that media outlets report on mass shootings, either. We know the copycat thing is a relevant element in many of these shootings, but we can't *force* media outlets (by law) to be more responsible with their reporting. Not without getting rid of that pesky First Amendment, anyway... which, frankly, I'm rather fond of myself. I think a hundred dead children a year is a small price to pay for making sure that particular amendment stays safe and sound.

If you want to post the Onion article, then you should also ask yourself a question: if we're not the only country with a lot of guns, relative to most countries, why are we the only country with a mass shooting problem? Canadians own *tons* of guns (something like 36 guns per 100 people, which is a *LOT* more than most other countries), yet they don't have a problem with mass shootings. Aussies didn't have a mass shooting problem prior to Port Arthur, continue to not have a mass shooting problem, and now have more guns in circulation than before Port Arthur.

It ain't the fucking guns, my dude.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...-sale-blocked/

This story is sure turning out interesting.

Shooter's initial attempt to purchase a gun was blocked due to a background check (good!) so instead, he just purchased from a private seller.

And further, his mother called the police after finding the gun and tried to get them to take it because he had a history of mental illness and she was concerned for his safety. Well, Missouri has no red flag laws so there was absolutely nothing the cops could have done.

We have multiple points of failure here that could have saved lives. Yet there still just seems to be nothing, no new ideas, no innovative concepts, just nothing we can do to avoid school shootings and mass shootings on a regular basis. I'm still left to conclude that maybe we Americans are all just secretly super murder horny or something.

The problem isn't a lack of ideas, it's a lack of political interest in doing anything about them. For example, we've known for a *long* time about the "boyfriend loophole" (basically, while it is prohibited to own a gun if you are convicted of domestic abuse, it only applies to spouses or people who are cohabiting with the victim, and/or when a child is involved... so a mundane "boyfriend beating his girlfriend" in the process of moving to "boyfriend murdering his girlfriend with a gun" skips through), and virtually no one of significance is going to reject a bill that seeks to punish domestic abusers... but neither side's politicians have made a genuine move on this. Every single fucking time this loophole has been addressed in a bill, there's also a bunch of *other* bullshit involved that guarantees the bill gets scuttled. But then those Democrats or Republicans can grandstand and claim that, well, *THEY* took action to *PROTECT OUR VOTERS* but if it weren't for those *other* assholes telling them no, it'd happen!

Or you could just, you know, do your fucking *job* and write a bill that is *just* addressing that loophole with absolutely nothing else in it, and it would fly through Congress like greased shit, because fucking no one likes domestic abusers and we *know* there's a very clear line between "abuse victim" and "murder victim" when the boyfriend gets a gun involved. Well, okay, the cops and cop unions would fight against it, since cops come home and regularly beat their wives after a hard day of beating brown people and shooting dogs - but they're married, so they wouldn't get through the loophole anyway.

I'm curious - why didn't the mother just take the gun to the PD and report it as lost and found? The cop shop would have taken it into custody and that gun would have fucking disappeared, just like virtually all personal property tends to disappear when pigs get their hands on it ("cash? what cash? we didn't find no cash, you must be high on something.") And it's not like you get a receipt when you buy a rifle out of Ol' Bill's camper van in the back of a QuikTrip parking lot, nor would Ol' Bill give a shit if you lost it.

Like, yeah, I get it, the pigs should have at least investigated after her claims, but... expecting the pigs in this country to give a fuck about anything but themselves or the people in power who keep them happy is pretty naive at this point. Red flag laws wouldn't have mattered, and there's a thousand and one problems with those laws to begin with, so I'd rather we stop propagating them.

[Edge-]

https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/lo...a-8781c390584c

"The red flag laws have never been in place in Missouri," Parson said. "You got a criminal that committed a criminal act, you know, and all the laws in the world are not going to stop those things."

Yet there appear to be laws elsewhere in the world that are successful in making school shootings exceptionally rare and not a regular occurrence like they are in the US.

The US seems to have a crisis of a lack of imagination.

[Grinning Serpent]

https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/lo...a-8781c390584c



Yet there appear to be laws elsewhere in the world that are successful in making school shootings exceptionally rare and not a regular occurrence like they are in the US.

The US seems to have a crisis of a lack of imagination.

Red flag laws have way too many issues for me to ever recommend them as a solution. You also can't effectively legislate against someone that doesn't care what happens to them after the fact.

If a dude wants to kill another dude, and doesn't care what happens to them after the killing, no amount of laws is going to stop them from doing that.

[Endus]

If you want to post the Onion article, then you should also ask yourself a question: if we're not the only country with a lot of guns, relative to most countries, why are we the only country with a mass shooting problem? Canadians own *tons* of guns (something like 36 guns per 100 people, which is a *LOT* more than most other countries), yet they don't have a problem with mass shootings. Aussies didn't have a mass shooting problem prior to Port Arthur, continue to not have a mass shooting problem, and now have more guns in circulation than before Port Arthur.

It ain't the fucking guns, my dude.

No, it's the ready and open access to guns. The reason Mexican cartels largely buy their weaponry legally, in the USA, then smuggle it back into Mexico.

Yeah, Canadians on average own tons of guns. But you need a license to buy one. And handgun licenses, in particular, were heavily regulated (about to become nonexistent, basically). Those guns Canadians own are primarily intended for hunting. Self-defense is not considered a legitimate grounds for owning a gun, in Canada, and self-defense laws don't permit escalation; if someone breaks into your house, in Canada, you're not permitted to shoot them in self-defense. That would be murder.

The weapons mass shooters want to buy aren't easy to buy, here. Most Canadians don't own a gun, especially in urban areas. And you're licensed up the yin-yang to get to that point; you can't just be an angry kid and go buy a gun, wait a week for papers to clear, and then shoot up your school.

Plus, while "36 guns for every 100 people" looks like a lot, it's nowhere close to the USA's "120 guns for every 100 people". Americans own roughly twice as many guns per capita as the second-most-armed nation on the list; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estima...ita_by_country

And that's unfair, because that second country is the Falkland Islands, and their total population is 3,000 people.

The American figures are insane. There is no reasonable explanation that justifies the scale of gun ownership and gun use in the USA. It is the guns.

[Edge-]

I'm convinced it has nothing to do with shootings, but more about authoritarian bullshit. Same reason for the fingerprinting you mentioned. It puts people into the system early, before they really understand why or how it's being done, and once you're in the system... you're in it for life.

Yeah...that's a hard no. Fingerprinting kids, while mostly pointless, is a long existing thing done to make parents feel safer just in case their kid gets kidnapped. Has nothing to do with authoritarian bullshit.

Same goes for the DNA testing, which isn't registering the kids DNA in a local database, but rather letting parents keep it at home. You know, in direct reaction to the apparent fact that some children's corpses were so mangled that DNA verification of their identity is either necessary period, or necessary to avoid requiring the grieving parents having to identify a faceless corpse because those are their child's Sonic the Hedgehog shoes.

Remember all those stories about people doing one of those dumb DNA test kits because they wanted to know what part of White People Land they came from, and how it would later go on to completely fuck them when the feds used that DNA for something else? Yeah...

Completely unrelated and has nothing to do with the DNA "services" being offered in TX.

600 rounds isn't even enough for a day at the range, and those are standard capacity magazines, not "high capacity."

Granted it's been a while, but I don't think I shot anywhere near that many rounds when I went to the range last. But hey, people are all different and that's fine.

But like, the shooter wasn't going to a range. And 600 bullets in the context of a potential mass-murder event is a lot of bullets.

If it's literally sold with the rifle, that's *standard* capacity. You don't get to redefine what something is or isn't to push a political agenda. For a rifle like the AR-15 and its cousins, "standard" usually means 15, 20, or 30 round box magazines. "High capacity" would be something like a 100-round drum or something, purchased aftermarket. "Low capacity" might be the 10-round or 5-round magazines required by law in some states.

This is the kind of pedantic shit that really, honestly, actually, doesn't matter. It's like saying we need better car safety laws and having gearheads come out and argue that you can't even draw an alternator from memory so your opinion doesn't matter.

We definitely have a lot of gun deaths, but we also have a lot of incidences of guns being used defensively.

Often, because the individual engaged in a crime also has a gun due to how easy they are to acquire in this country.

Even the very lowest, reliable estimates from Giffords (an avowed anti-gun outlet) places it at around 68,000 uses annually, up to around 125,000-215,000 for more liberal interpretations of the data. We will, obviously, discard the idiotic "2-3 million!" crap that Kleck shit out because there's no way people are using guns to *prevent* crimes at a rate nearly 10-20 times the violent crime rate.

The undertone of this argument is, "We live in a violent nation where the state has lost the monopoly on the use of force, so we're essentially living in the wild west where it's every man, woman, and child for themselves". Which is, as I'll repeat, big "failed state" shit. You don't see this in literally any other developed nation.

Just addressing suicides would strike roughly 2/3 of those gun deaths from the register.

It would be, and that would be great!

Why are people choosing to fellate their shotgun, and what can be done to address that?

There's fairly extensive research on this and most of it points back to ease of acquisition. Guns are a very "easy' way to commit suicide in general compared to many other options, and largely easy access to firearms, including being able to purchase many same-day depending on where they live and where they're buying from, increases the risk that individual attempting suicide considerably.

Sure, maybe adding a 24-72 hour holding period for first-time gun buyers *might* have some impact on impulse suicides ("waaah, lost my job/my girlfriend was fucking another dude, I'm gonna end it all!" type stuff)

Man, you seem super nice what with downplaying people struggling with mental health problems and may potentially be suicidal. Really nice. Real stand-up guy, buddy.

And you run the risk of royally fucking someone that's buying a gun because they feel the need for protection *immediately* (woman being abused by her boyfriend/spouse, maybe.)

Alternatively: What if there was no right to a gun to begin with and the barrier to purchase one was high for everyone? Is there nothing we can do to improve laws and police behavior around spousal abuse? Is it just something that's unsolvable globally without people being able to buy same-day guns? IS this just rampant in every other developed nation without a Second Amendment?

The total deaths from mass shootings, accidental shootings, etc are a negligible portion of the remaining 10,000-12,000 gun deaths.

Compared to what in other nations, out of curiosity?

Accidental shootings could be mitigated with community outreach and informational campaigns, together with maybe something like a tax break or refund for people who buy gun safes and other safe storage methods.

Hardly, just asking people nicely to be responsible won't work, it's never worked. It doesn't work now. We'll still have idiots not properly storing guns so their kids get their hands on one and kill a sibling, parent, or themselves. We'll still have idiots playing with guns and shooting themselves or others unintentionally. Because "just ask nicely" has never been effective in preventing behaviors.

Dealing with mass shootings is going to be a lot thornier of an issue and not really something that gun control can address.

So literally no other nation has solved this problem, then? There's no other countries we can look to for policy ideas on how they avoid having rates of gun violence/death and mass/school shootings like we have in the US? Nothing at all?

Obviously, you can't have a shooting without guns, but we have quite a few more guns than people in the US

Mandatory registration of all firearms and licensing (with training and periodic renewals, just like a drivers license) of owners, with failure to comply resulting in the confiscation of the individuals weapon. It's not as if reducing the number of guns in circulation is impossible or unprecedented in the world. IIRC Australia essentially did just this - reducing the number of guns in circulation as people voluntarily gave up many after the horror of the Port Arthur massacre left only 35 dead and 23 wounded.

and methods for fabricating functional, effective guns (as in, guns that can fire more than one or two shots before breaking, or aren't otherwise a glorified pipe with a shotgun shell in it) at home become more sophisticated and accessible every year.

Does this technology only exist in America or something? Why is this a uniquely American problem?

Make this shit illegal and prosecute individuals violating this law hard. They used the gun they made in a crime? Cool, enhanced charges and sentencing.

You can't close Pandora's Box, and even trying to is just wasting everyone's time and political capital.

This isn't Pandora's Box. Unless Pandora's Box was unleashing the murderous American spirit and we as a nation really are just much more violent and murder-hungry than the rest of the developed world.

We also can't legislate against the predatory and frankly unconscionable way that media outlets report on mass shootings, either. We know the copycat thing is a relevant element in many of these shootings, but we can't *force* media outlets (by law) to be more responsible with their reporting. Not without getting rid of that pesky First Amendment, anyway... which, frankly, I'm rather fond of myself. I think a hundred dead children a year is a small price to pay for making sure that particular amendment stays safe and sound.

We can agree that media coverage of mass shootings isn't exactly helping, but that's hardly the problem to begin with since a majority of these mass/school shootings have resulted in zero evidence that they were inspired by others short of a few right wing nutjobs. The Las Vegas mass shooting at the country festival? We still literally haven't the foggiest clue why that happened.

For example, we've known for a *long* time about the "boyfriend loophole" (basically, while it is prohibited to own a gun if you are convicted of domestic abuse, it only applies to spouses or people who are cohabiting with the victim, and/or when a child is involved... so a mundane "boyfriend beating his girlfriend" in the process of moving to "boyfriend murdering his girlfriend with a gun" skips through), and virtually no one of significance is going to reject a bill that seeks to punish domestic abusers...

You mean except "gun rights" groups and Republican politicians? Except those people who are the ones that have either prevented such legislation from passing (until recently at the federal level) and been extremely vocal in their criticisms when it's passed at the state level, like when Oregon did so in 2018 and gun rights groups including the Oregon Firearms Federation.

Or you could just, you know, do your fucking *job* and write a bill that is *just* addressing that loophole with absolutely nothing else in it, and it would fly through Congress like greased shit, because fucking no one likes domestic abusers and we *know* there's a very clear line between "abuse victim" and "murder victim" when the boyfriend gets a gun involved.

While it passed through the Senate without issue, I will note that 190 Republicans voted against the bill (mostly) closing the loophole and doing a whole lot of nothing else: https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2022212

So it only "flew" through Congress because Democrats control the House.

I'm curious - why didn't the mother just take the gun to the PD and report it as lost and found?

Wouldn't that be theft and filing a false police report? I mean, when you need help with a potentially dangerous situation you usually go to the cops and like, the cops are usually supposed to do something.

But not in a state where they're straight up prevented from taking measures to promote public safety. This isn't a failure of the mother, who did things right, this is a systemic failure.

Like, yeah, I get it, the pigs should have at least investigated after her claims

Again, no they can't have investigated. Because there are no red flag laws allowing them to do so.

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Red flag laws have way too many issues for me to ever recommend them as a solution. You also can't effectively legislate against someone that doesn't care what happens to them after the fact.

If a dude wants to kill another dude, and doesn't care what happens to them after the killing, no amount of laws is going to stop them from doing that.

Damn man, criminals intent on breaking the law will break the law anyways so we shouldn't have laws that they'll just break anyways?

Man, I guess we'd better throw out the whole-ass code of law we have. Speed limits? Criminals are gonna ignore those, get rid of them! Laws punishing kidnapping? They're gonna kidnap if they want to kidnap, the law clearly isn't stopping all kidnappings so there's just no reason for it.

See how silly this line of "logic" is?

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No, it's the ready and open access to guns. The reason Mexican cartels largely buy their weaponry legally, in the USA, then smuggle it back into Mexico.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-mexico-border

To back this up yes: American gun laws, and Texas's gun laws in particular, are literally responsible for helping arm Mexican cartels.

About 70% of guns seized in Mexico from 2014 to 2018 and submitted for tracing had originally come from the US, according to officials with the American bureau of alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives (ATF).

[Grinning Serpent]

Yeah, Canadians on average own tons of guns. But you need a license to buy one. And handgun licenses, in particular, were heavily regulated (about to become nonexistent, basically). Those guns Canadians own are primarily intended for hunting. Self-defense is not considered a legitimate grounds for owning a gun, in Canada, and self-defense laws don't permit escalation; if someone breaks into your house, in Canada, you're not permitted to shoot them in self-defense. That would be murder.

None of which is relevant to mass shootings. Mass shooters very much do not care one whit about what the laws say.

The weapons mass shooters want to buy aren't easy to buy, here. Most Canadians don't own a gun, especially in urban areas. And you're licensed up the yin-yang to get to that point; you can't just be an angry kid and go buy a gun, wait a week for papers to clear, and then shoot up your school.

Last I checked, it's pretty easy to obtain a pump-action shotgun or bolt-action rifle in Canada. Do you think you can't murder a bunch of unarmed, unaware, defenseless people with those? Let alone children?

Do you think that a legally obtained gun can't be used for murder or something? Just because someone is sane and happy and healthy *now* doesn't mean that they can't flip their gourd and decide to go gun down random bystanders some day.

That don't seem to happen very much in other countries, though, even ones where it's comparatively easy to obtain and own guns (compare Canadian gun access to, say, British or German gun access.) Do you *actually* think it's because it's hard/impossible for people in those countries to obtain a black plastic semiautomatic rifle? That owning one of those slowly corrupts the owner's mind like the fucking One Ring until they turn into Gollum and decide "I GOTTA SHOOT SOMETHING OR I'LL DIE"?

Plus, while "36 guns for every 100 people" looks like a lot, it's nowhere close to the USA's "120 guns for every 100 people". Americans own roughly twice as many guns per capita as the second-most-armed nation on the list; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estima...ita_by_country

And that's unfair, because that second country is the Falkland Islands, and their total population is 3,000 people.

The American figures are insane. There is no reasonable explanation that justifies the scale of gun ownership and gun use in the USA. It is the guns.

Again, no, it is not. You're a smart guy, Endus. You know what outliers are in statistical analysis, surely. America is a *very* obvious outlier. So you pull it from the pool, because leaving outliers in skews the results. Then you look at the remaining data. While we're at it, you could tweeze it down to only OECD countries, or only western countries, or only first-world countries. Depends on how precise you want the comparisons to be.

[Edge-]

None of which is relevant to mass shootings. Mass shooters very much do not care one whit about what the laws say.

Yet there are lower rates of gun violence and mass shootings, no? So are Americans just more murderous than Canadians, you think?

Last I checked, it's pretty easy to obtain a pump-action shotgun or bolt-action rifle in Canada. Do you think you can't murder a bunch of unarmed, unaware, defenseless people with those? Let alone children?

How many mass shootings are done with a pump action shotgun or bolt action rifle in the US? How many are done with automatic or semi-automatic weapons?

Do you think that a legally obtained gun can't be used for murder or something? Just because someone is sane and happy and healthy *now* doesn't mean that they can't flip their gourd and decide to go gun down random bystanders some day.

Why do other countries that have no Second Amendment and have strict requirements for gun owners not see high rates of gun violence and mass shootings, then? Again, are we Americans just more murderous? Because you're not providing any alternative explanation here.

Do you *actually* think it's because it's hard/impossible for people in those countries to obtain a black plastic semiautomatic rifle?

Do I think? No, that's what the data consistently shows and studies conclude. Easy access to firearms is one of the primary drivers of firearm related violence. It's why places like Chicago, despite strict gun laws, still has gun problems. Because getting a gun outside the city limits it considerably easier and it's a pretty short trip.

Again, no, it is not. You're a smart guy, Endus. You know what outliers are in statistical analysis, surely. America is a *very* obvious outlier. So you pull it from the pool, because leaving outliers in skews the results. Then you look at the remaining data. While we're at it, you could tweeze it down to only OECD countries, or only western countries, or only first-world countries. Depends on how precise you want the comparisons to be.

So...should we compare to third world nations where our levels of gun-related violence are similar? That's embarrassing for a world superpower, and ostensibly the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world.

Also, yes we can compare these nations. That America is an outlier is the fuckin point of the comparison, my guy.