Senate Gun Control

Here is a picture of "responsible gun owners" and their Christmas card:



I don't care what anyone say Bob Costas was 1000% right when he said we have a "gun culture" on it hence why we have more guns then people in this country Seriously how sick and twist is this! And kudos on this school shooting dad for calling him out on it:



Anyone who wants to think MAGAers can be negotiated, reason or even co-exist with needs to stop dreaming and start living in reality.

 

All that family is missing are a bunch of brown shirts.

 

We're a society that's veered so completely into absurdity it's no longer even possible to parody or satirize ourselves effectively. That Christmas card is 100% satire-proof.

 

Plastic backpacks are some stupid nonsense and school shooting theatre. Half the time, certainly in my neck of the woods, metal detectors are in that same category of things that make it look like something is being done but are incredibly easy to simply avoid. The changes people want schools to make are not about preventing anything, just about looking like they're preventing something.

Not on the level of the way so many of the 'active shooter' drills are straight up unethical, but still, utterly pointless. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that schools mostly are prioritizing busywork, though.

 

It’s all about trying to shift the burden of prevention on everyone else but the people who buy and sell guns. It doesn’t matter whether it works so long as it diverts attention away from the overwhelming public health tragedy of gun prevalence.

 

It doesn't divert attention away, it focuses it and puts up a giant beacon to any kid about the way to act out. Society is doing a great job of teaching that if you want attention or to feel powerful, an effective way to do it is to shoot up your school.

I don't see it as much different from suicides as a contagion, except people actually take that one seriously. School shootings are fetishized, though, rather than treated in a proportionate manner.

 

If you see legal gun prevalence as the main problem, then you’re going to be fighting a losing uphill battle in America for the rest of your life. The problem with shootings in America is the culture around guns and violence; legal gun prevalence likely takes a backseat to illegal gun prevalence. The majority of crimes committed with firearms are by people illegally possessing those firearms.

It’s a hard line to toe: limiting the right to own firearms(and other rights) against preventing gun violence crimes given the culture of America and our relationship with guns. My opinion has evolved over the years:

When I was a college student and fresh college grad, I believed that guns should be banned. As I’ve matured, I realize that that is a fantasy in this country. People cite the fact that other countries have done it, but those countries are not America. Also, as I have grown and been exposed to firearms and gun owners and done more research into gun violence, I have not seen a convincing argument that the buying, selling, or ownership of guns is the primary issue.

It’s weird because I’m a liberal and I do believe that there should be more federal uniformity when it comes to tracking gun owners, establishing background checks that can be used across a shared database by law enforcement, and raising the age, federally, on owning a firearm(this last one I’m still iffy on because… well hunting.)

When conservatives talk about liberals wanting to limit rights in regards to owning guns, they’re right. I think, overall, the left is too willing to limit rights without thinking of the repercussions or, to put it better, the left doesn’t seem to care that there are responsible gun owners. As some of the arguments here have highlighted, some of you are completely okay with framing legal, law abiding gun owners as crazy or malicious, despite the fact that all we’re doing is exercising a right that this country has granted us.

 

Sorry for the double post. (I’m messaging on my phone and idk how to add this to my other post). But the very cringe and awkward thing to my eye about this post is that none of them have mags in.

*scratches head*

Maybe it’s the military part of my brain but…. An unloaded gun is basically a bat. Weird photo. Obvious cringe publicity post.

 

Honestly, that seems more responsible for what is entirely a staged photo with no intention to fire them.

 

Always remember it's the fault of liberals no matter what.

 

Huh? Are they liberal cause they aren’t ****ing moronic enough to arm teachers? What is liberal about them. Is it literally cause they are teachers and all teachers are liberals? Is it because they just want to blame liberals? Is it all of the above

 

Oh I guess my sarcasm didn’t come through. One of the most conservative people I have ever met in my life was a teacher. I was saying people like Fox assume all teachers are liberal.

 

I wouldn’t say that people are Valuing gun culture over human life. I think it’s that people don’t believe that the risk to human life grants the government the authority to limit gun ownership rights. Key word is limit. The majority of Americans support background checks (though what exactly is included in those background checks is another issue altogether), including conservatives. The majority of Americans do not support disarming the populace, including liberals.

That’s why I’m saying that banning firearms is a fantasy here: because we don’t want that. A select few people, like yourself, want that but it’s not a crazy right-wing ideology that Americans believe they have the right to own weapons and that that right should not be infringed upon. The debate is more about what policies can actually decrease gun violence as a whole and… I gotta say, over the years for myself as a very liberal person, popular liberal propositions do not convincingly tackle the problem while maintaining the balance of protecting gun ownership.

That’s why I believe the left has been largely unsuccessful in the past 20 years on implementing their gun policies. That AND the fact that the NRA has a stranglehold on any republican elected to public office which prevents them from supporting sensible gun policy legislation that EVEN THEIR CONSTITUENTS support.



Don’t get me started on the NRA…. If I had to rank the problems with America in regards to causes of our high levels of gun violence it would be:

1. The Gun Culture of the USA
2. The NRA

 

How long before school boards start handing out Bullet-Proof Vests with "Thoughts & Prayers" scrawled all over them?

 

We will have to respectfully disagree here. There are many items and practices that we allow in this country and around the world that cause a risk to human life, but we grant humans a certain level of autonomy, personal accountability, and respect to socially patrol themselves.

-we do not limit sexual activity among consenting adults (we’re getting away from it more because we know that it’s wrong) despite the fact that AIDS and STIs kills thousands every year
-we do not limit alcohol access for adults despite the fact that it kills thousands every year and destroys families
-European countries are, generally, applauded for their decriminalization and legalization of drugs that are still widely illegal across the world, despite knowing that drugs and drug violence can kill people

I don’t view any of the above as the proponents putting these things above human life. They are trying to find a balance, like we all are, between allowing humans to have freedoms while knowing that access to those freedoms can and will hurt people. In recent years, this is how I have started approaching gun policy as well.

 

These people have no idea how insane they all look.

 

Simple solution for the constant complaint about lockdown drills: schools stop doing lockdown drills and fetishizing school shootings. At this point, complaints over lockdown drills sound like people who start fights and talk about how someone else made them do that. The people forcing lockdown drills are not gun owners.

I think that alcohol in particular is a good example because for all the concern of "but you don't need that", while there are certainly situations someone can outline where having a gun would be helpful (preemptively, I'm not making a claim that in aggregate they would save more lives, just that circumstances exist where a gun can save a life), I have never heard anyone outline an example where having alcohol to drink can do that.

So I think one could quite easily say anyone that wants alcohol to be legal values their right to drink over human life since there's no need to drink, but it does very demonstrably harm (about 10,000 drunk driving deaths a year, and with a couple hundred kids killed by drunk drivers every year, people that got alcohol and then got in a car are killing far more children than people with guns that then got into a school). So if this is about numbers, drunk drivers are much larger threat to kids than school shooters (I suspect their own parents are a larger threat than both of those, but didn't look up those numbers).

 

I don't believe people should own guns. If gun owners want to change my mind, they will get better legislation passed as law so that I hear a lot less stories in the news about accidents with guns, domestic violence with guns and shootings that seem completely random with no particular targets. As long as nothing is being done to make me feel safe when I leave my home or my children are out and about, I will not believe people should own guns.

 

Photographs like that really drive home the difference in cultural outlooks towards gun ownership. As a European, I find the juxtaposition of a smiling family gathered around their Christmas tree and the firearms in their hands to be extremely jarring. Part of me thinks they’re doing it to get a rise out of “the libs”. At the same time, I know that millions of people will simply see a nice picture of a wholesome family exercising their right to keep and bear arms.