Following the horrific acts of violence in Texas, I thought I'd share an attachment in the form of a screen grab from Rep Matt Schaefer's account on twitter...
Matt Schaefer is a fucking lunatic and should be strapped to a rocket and fired into the sun.
In the event of people not being able to see the attachment I've added, he basically says he's against even minimal gun control measures, such as back ground checks.
Now for the record, I think the proposed majority of gun laws passed are not enough!
The UK and Australia had complete bans after similar incidents and we've been ok since.
But to top of his lunacy he says we should pray for victims, yes because that will help, won't it!
Fucking idiot!
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Hungerford and Dunblane were turning points for the UK. There were voices arguing against stricter gun control even then, including as I recall Prince fucking Phillip,fucking tool, and it's a no brainer. Btw I hate these threads, as like abortion they seem to bring out the worst kind of hyperbole and rhetoric. Yes cars kill more people than guns, but that is not what they are designed to do, and yes knife crime is a massive problem, but banning all knives is an absurdly stupid idea if anyone gives it a moments thought. With the two most used analogies negated I look forward to someone pointing out you can kill someone with a rock, sigh.
Pragmatism is required, and stricter gun control and less guns axiomatically mean less gun crime. Which of course mean less deaths from gun crime.
Rant over.....
"Pragmatism is required, and stricter gun control and less guns axiomatically mean less gun crime. Which of course mean less deaths from gun crime."
The trick is getting some angel to magically make many millions of guns in the hands of criminal types disappear.
There is a much deeper problem. Mass shootings were not part of our history. The first recorded mass school shooting was in the mid 60s (even now according to FBI stats more people are killed by shovels, hammers etc than by rifles). When I was young in the 50s, you could walk into any sporting goods store and buy a gun. It was common to see rifles on racks in the back of pickup trucks. You could order a gun by mail.
Over the 7 decades of my life I'm convinced that the national culture has deteriorated. Probably irrepairably. The future does not look hopeful.
[Not specifically gun related, but even in elementary school, a lot of us would completely legally carry pocket knives (fun shocking young kids today telling them that). We also did not have locked doors on the school, no ID cards, no security cameras, no security guard or police presence. The occasional student fights were handled by teachers.. attacking the teacher was not even a consideration. Was this deterioration part of our 'cultural revolution'? Something has change. Something happened, social restraint against bad behavior appears to have collapsed.]
Do you think less guns available across the board will increase or reduce the number that end up in the hands of criminals?
I thought I covered this kind of facile analogy. Yes hammers and shovels can be misused as weapons, but guns are designed solely to be weapons, and it's absurd to suggest gun deaths are not going to be reduced because people will resort to using shovels and hammers. It's not a choice between the two, they are an aggregate, and of course it's equally absurd to think we could ban shovels and hammers.
Cultural attitudes do change, I too remember my first pocket knife, and no it would never have occurred to me to ever even consider using it as a weapon. It's not as if you can't simultaneously introduce strict gun control, and make an effort to change cultural attitudes towards knives. As I said pragmatism. Gun control works, and this is evidenced in multiple countries throughout the developed world. The UK acted after two very high profile mass shootings, and though it will never complete eradicate gun crime, it has made that type of mass shooting extremely unlikely. .
"Yes hammers and shovels can be misused as weapons, but guns are designed solely to be weapons, and it's absurd to suggest gun deaths are not going to be reduced because people will resort to using shovels and hammers."
That was not the point. The point was scale. The excitement over these exotic crimes, worrying about 'assault weapons', when they don't match a weekend in Chicago. Most gun killings are with handguns, almost ALL of those by people who have those weapons illegally. Not sure how you would make those guns go away.
So where do we start?
Should police have guns?
How about security guards?
How about law abiding citizens in high crime areas?
How about women who need to be out alone, under threat of rape?
How about people living where wild animals are a danger? (like my brother)
Where do you draw the line? Self defense comes down to windows of a few seconds.
[Apparently the UK criminals have substituted other weapons, they are getting into a panic resorting because of surging in makeshift weapons to bizarrely restricting even the purchase of cooking utensils]
"Not sure how you would make those guns go away."
With stricter gun control, limiting the supply or prevalence of guns will do this. It's a massive industry that earns billions of dollars. No one is suggesting it's going to be easy or painless, but blithely pointing out that other things are dangerous without really examining the context of those things, and their intrinsic value, or the practicality of limiting access to them is pointless, as I explained in my opening post. We need shovels, hammers, knives, and cars for example, so restricting access to them is impractical, the same cannot be said of guns, and especially of certain types of guns.
It's a cultural shift Americans will have to make if they want or care to reduce the likelihood of the kind of gun crimes we're discussing.
Your appeal that gun control will victimised law abiding citizens is roundly contradicted by countries that have strict gun control, and yet show substantially less violent crimes across the board. You're assigning causation in reverse. Criminals have guns so I want one too, is not a sound rationale for reducing violent crime, or we wouldn't need to be having this conversation, and the kinds of violent crimes you claim might increase with stricter gun control would be higher in those countries that already have such laws.
Well good then unless youd rather they had automatic weapons instead of a sharp spatula?
Dear oh dear, as I said these analogies are facile, though I'd like to see you properly evidence the claim. The last mass shootings in the UK occurred in the examples I gave, and are the very reason we drove through stricter gun laws. So this facile rationisation smacks of desperation to me.
Unless you think a rolling pin is equally as dangerous as a semi-automatic weapon, or think banning heavy cast iron pans is a sensible attempt to reduce violent crimes.
What about rape victims who can only defend themselves with a kitchen knife? Most rapes occur in the home and are generally by people you know...
See I can use facile analogies and make up stats as well.
All joking aside, I already explained why such analogies are not relevant to THIS discussion.
@NeverHappened
I need an M-29 Davy Crockett Weapon System for self defense.
Range 2.5 miles, yield, just a small nuke.
I fucking despair, I really do.
@Thread
Could... not... resist.. putting in my 2 cents.
Let us take this the other direction Rep Matt Schaefer:
So you are fine with anyone having free access to powerful assault rifles... so why not remove bans/heavy restriction on RPG's? I should be able to hop down to the store and if I got the cash buy an RPG right? I mean criminals have them too!
An assault rifle like the AR-15 can be easily modified to have 100 round magazines, and bump stocks to fire multiple times a second. Since you think everyone can and should have free access to that, why not RPGs? Seriously what is the difference?
Oh wait I know, an RPG could bring down your private jet there Matt Schaefer, oh nevermind.. I get it now, it could actually affect you... your bodyguards would not be able to jump in front of that one...Your bullet protection gear would be worthless. Never mind the rest of us that do not have bodyguards and bullet proof cars etc...
Of course people are correct in that the deaths from mass shootings is lower then x,y,z. (my personal favorite: energy drinks!) And yes the real bulk of violence done with guns is hand guns.
I don't foresee any new laws coming to cut down on guns. In this case I would suggest that all guns have a GPS system. then create a law that all GPS systems on specific products must be registered before owning one. This might be a loophole to get the guns registered. Then again I am no lawmaker and may be way off track and may interfere with other rights. Just an idea.
When one of these guns enters a school zone for example, an emergency response is sent to the proper authorities immediately.
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Ahem, I think that the guy should be sent to Sagittarius A*, the hypothesized supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy...
Wow! PRAYING away the evil! Fucking brilliant! Why didn't I think of that? Ya know, sometimes it is the obvious solutions that just slip right by unnoticed.
I believe hitchens said it during a debate Tin man, he argued something on the lines of... your child is stricken with an illness, be that cancer or something akin.
Do you a) leave your self in the capable hands of science, medicine etc...
Or b) you can pray!
I know which I would choose.