The One Gun Control Measure That Gun Rights Advocates Should Support
I’m a huge gun rights advocate. I’ve been shooting and collecting guns since I was twelve. I got my first AR-15 thirty years ago, at age sixteen. I joined the Marine Corps Reserve at seventeen and became an infantry weapons repairman and marksmanship coach, and later was a tank crewman, cavalry scout and human intelligence collector in the Army National Guard. I’m an Iraq and Afghanistan combat vet. I’ve been a cop for over twenty years, and for a few years was one of my department’s Response to Active Shooter instructors. I’ve attended advanced weapons training through the military, my police department, and as a writer for BreachBangClear.com. I’ve fired tens of thousands of rounds out of everything from .22 pistols to ARs to heavy machine guns to sniper rifles to an M1A1 Abrams tank’s 120mm main gun.
Engaging multiple targets at a Vehicle Close Quarters Battle course
Attending a 1MOA Solutions Precision Rifle course
In addition to reviews of guns and accessories, I’ve written numerous articles about citizen response to active shooters, tips for new concealed carriers, the importance of the 2nd Amendment, realities of gunfights, the stupidity of magazine capacity limitations, the need for armed teachers, and the public’s legitimate use for military-style weapons (conversely, I’ve also beaten up on the stupid fools who thought they were “helping” by walking into Chipotle with ARs and SKSs). I’ve defended the 2nd Amendment my entire adult life, and was even defending it in my childhood.
I don’t defend the 2A because it makes me money. I don’t sell guns or get paid to teach shooting skills. I defend the 2A because I’m a student of human behavior and history. I know that the incredible peace, freedom, security and prosperity we enjoy is an anomaly; conflict and tyranny have been the norm for most humans for most of our existence. An armed populace, rather than hope or wishful thinking, is a good deterrent against external aggression and an excellent defense against internal oppression.
The 2A guarantees our right to keep and bear arms, for incredibly important reasons. It does not, however, require us to be blind and stupid. It doesn’t mean we should ignore obvious warnings from aspiring mass killers, like last week’s high school shooter.
Photo credit goodhousekeeping.com
In many previous mass shootings, there were no clear prior warnings. Some vague danger signs may have been recognized afterward, but often, as with the Las Vegas shooter, nobody had any idea whatsoever of the shooter’s plans, and the shooter had no criminal or mental health history. But the Florida massacre was carried out by a teenager who announced his intention to be a school shooter. And he was still able to legally buy a gun.
Of course, we all know the two tips to the FBI about the shooter’s statements weren’t properly followed up. But what if they had been followed up? Depending on the jurisdiction, simply saying “I’m going to be a professional school shooter” isn’t necessarily an arrestable offense, isn’t necessarily a felony, and isn’t necessarily enough to justify an involuntary mental health commitment. So it’s plausible that even if the FBI had investigated, and confirmed he had made the statements, and that he talked about murdering people, and that he introduced himself as a future school shooter, and that he had a history of erratic behavior, he still would have been able to legally buy an AR-15 to murder people with. I say allowing a known aspiring mass murderer to legally buy guns is blind and stupid. And I think most of my fellow 2A supporters would agree.
Or let me put it this way: if a radical Muslim extremist posted online that he believes in violent jihad against the Great Satan and praises the Paris terrorist attacks, would it make sense to let him legally buy an AK? How many gun dealers, if they knew about his plans, would sell him one? Few to none, I’d think.
So is there a way to legally prevent gun sales to those types of people, without infringing on the 2A rights of the innocent? Yes. Does supporting the 2A require us to support gun sales to people who are telling us they want to commit murder? No.
I’m not talking about banning the AR-15, advocating confiscations, repealing the 2A, or any nonsense like that. I’m not suggesting anything that would affect the tens of millions of legal, peaceful gun owners who we live and interact with every day. What I’m suggesting is that when someone tells us they’re buying a gun to commit a crime, especially a crime like mass murder, even if they haven’t broken the law or been committed, we listen to them. I’m proposing that we put laws in place to make those threats part of the background check system, and stop those wannabe murderers from legally buying a damn gun.
No, I’m not saying creation of such laws will be easy, or simple. I recognize the danger of a slippery slope that leads to further gun restrictions. I know legions of gun control advocates stand ready to exploit any opening toward their ultimate goal of “domestic disarmament.” I also know that not every mass shooter legally buys a gun, and this proposal won’t stop all mass shootings.
The Las Vegas mass shooting
But I also see seventeen dead kids and teachers. I see a shooter who told us what he was going to do. I see that current laws allowed him to buy an AR-15 to commit the mass murder he was planning. And I can’t imagine anyone arguing that nothing should be changed, that if the shooter’s clone showed up at a gun store tomorrow he should still be able to buy a gun. So I’m talking about laws that would stop some mass shootings, or maybe only a few, or maybe only one. You can’t convince me the lives saved in that one mass shooting aren’t worth it.
We can talk specifics later. Right now I just want intelligent, reasonable people to discuss solutions, pitfalls and roadblocks. Hopefully I’ll get my fellow gun owners and 2A advocates to agree with the principle, that it’s possible to enact laws to prevent aspiring (yet not convicted or committed) murderers from getting guns, without stopping the rest of us from getting guns.
I welcome any and all intelligent, informed opinions, whatever they are.
Chris Hernandez is a 23 year police officer, former Marine and retired National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com and has published three military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve, Line in the Valley and Safe From the War through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at chris_hernandez_author@yahoo.com or on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ProofofOurResolve).
Filed under: 2nd Amendment | 165 Comments
Tags: active shooters, Florida school shooter, gun control
chrishernandezauthor 
Whether it would be a good idea or not, it runs afoul of the 1st Amendment.
Understood, but should we ignore open public comments about intent to commit mass murder?
Not sure you are right there Scot. The 1st Amendment doesn’t mean you can say absolutely anything you want with zero repercussions.
Here in Florida, a direct threat to kill someone can constitute an assault, although there are conditions that apply (available means to carry out threat, and reasonable fear by victim). While this doesn’t apply to the shooter’s youtube statement (not a direct threat, means not available etc.) It does show that a threat to physically harm others CAN be taken seriously, and CAN constitute a crime. So I would think that reasonable laws could indeed be worded to allow someone making such a statement to be taken into custody on the strength of that threat and evaluated to see if they are a danger to others. Such a thing would include a hearing in a court, and therefore rights could legitimately be restricted thereby.
The two problems I see with the idea are:
1) Good luck getting lawmakers to create reasonable laws to do this. Any more, (and probably always has been) law makers seem to focus more on political over-reach and grandstanding than actually making laws that might work.
2) The would-be shooter might not be deterred anyway. Procuring weapons by illegal means isn’t impossible, or perhaps switching to some other form of killing. Vehicles, bombs, etc. This would, of course, depend on how motivated the bad guy is.
One the more serious issues with what you are proposing is exactly the political process. It seems (to me at least) that the gun confiscation crowd would only allow something like this into law if there were attached to it many tentacles that give them a further ability to make their vision a reality.
Even something as seemingly innocuous as a comprehensive federal database of gun owners, has ability to turn into the very vehicle to enable confiscation and criminal charging of gun owners in just a couple of moves on the chess board of gun policy.
I think we should look in another direction. I believe that we need to get the American people to see violence in a different light. Tim Larkin talks about “The Paradox of Violence” (Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is… it is the only answer.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HROsqfsJkx8
Violence is not evil – evil is evil. Violence in direct opposition and defiance of evil is … good.
I propose that we establish a Federal School Marshall program that prempts local and state gun laws across the country. My FSM program would give a *Federal* concealed carry license to teachers that:
1) Want to participate
2) Pass extensive background checks and psych evaluation
3) Undergo Tactical Training During their summer break for initial qualification, and yearly updates.
If a potential shooter knew there could be not just one, but perhaps even several trained concealed carry holders (and they have no idea who) in addition to armed and uniformed resource officers or security guards – perhaps this will reduce the number of incidents. And at a minimum it could reduce the numbers of injuries and deaths if it does.
So, we turn schools into armed camps. Fine.
But what are you going to do about malls and theatres and parks and churches and nightclubs and any public place were people congregate?
Put a metal detector on every door of every building in the country? Put armed guards in every public place?
I’ve got a better idea: ban these goddamned weapons of war, confiscate the ones in private hands, and melt them down.
Why do we all have to either live in the prison of your gun fetish or die from it?
No … exactly the opposite. We allow competent, law abiding citizens to be armed and defend themselves, and others. Period. No fences. No metal detectors. But allow men (and women who are so inclined) to be dangerous and disciplined to uphold the good and hold the line against evil.
Your foolish over-reaction is typical of someone that reacts emotionally and without measured reason.
Violence is a fact of human existence, and since man started using tools violence has been used for good or evil. Presently, only the evil are allowed to have the tools to met out violence. We need good people with the tools to deal with violence for good.
How many lives are you willing to see ended to accomplish this end? Specific numbers, please, because the cost would be much, much higher than we are currently paying.
When was the last time you saw an Air Marshall you could identify on a flight? Oh – that’s right. Never.
Which Air Marshall are we talking about, the one whose gun fell out on the cabin floor? The one who fell asleep and when he did, his jacket fell open revealed his Sig .pistol? Or the one who took out his pistol and showed it to my #1 FA because he wanted to impress her enough for a date? Or the one who was so fat and wore such a tight shirt/sweater you could clearly see the outline of a pistol?
I saw them all, during my career as an AA pilot.
Veritas, you really should take a deep breath before hitting the “Post Comment” button….
I was replying to Sean H. Not you. I am a pilot also. It is certainly possible that people in certain professions that end up on a plane a lot can see that happen – but out of the millions of people who fly each year, it is very very rare. I fly as a passenger frequently, and I look to see if I can recognize Air Marshalls – have never been able to identify one. I feel confident that Sean the troll has never seen it either.
Not sure if you were intentionally ignoring my point, or if you are just ignorant of the beam in your eye…
You know what I do? I jump out of airplanes for sport. I climb cliffs as tall as skyscrapers with my bare hands, too. I surf twenty foot waves.
Talk about risk.
And you know what? My dick ain’t so small that I need a machine gun to compensate me for what God didn’t give me.
I’m reminded of that Marine Corps General who was a close relative who was sent to Gitmo back when I was a boy. He discovered that officers had taken up the fashion of carrying swagger sticks as they strutted around the base.
Being a D-Day veteran, he was offended.
So, he issued a memo to everyone:
“If you need a swagger stick, carry one.”
There was not one to be seen the very next day.
If you need a gun, carry one.
According to Sean, any lady being threatened by a stalker is just looking for a penis substitute. I guess according to Sean she should just take getting raped and beat to death like a real man, or something.
I’ve never said any such thing, I don’t say any such vile thing, and I resent you twisting what I do say into approving of rape and sexual assault.
Why don’t you have the decency to argue with my points instead of hiding behind the skirt of a theoretical woman you had to conjure out of thin air?
We used to call cowardly creatures like you pussies. In fact, I still do.
Pussy.
It may have escaped your notice, but court houses and police stations (let alone firing ranges and gun stores) are “armed camps” by your definition, and to date, no one seems inclined to show up at them and start blazing away.
Let alone trying one shooting a month there for the last year.
So if you’re going to do headless chicken hand-waving about “armed camps” when common sense walks up to you, then the answer is…what?
You’re perfectly willing to have criminals turn schools into SHOOTING GALLERIES full of other peoples’ kids, but the suggestion that we salt some good guys in there with the means to end these things early and you hyperventilate.
Well-played.
The FSM idea is outstanding. I didn’t clarify in my essay, but I definitely advocate hardening schools by adding armed personnel right now. Any further legal solutions can be pursued after step 1 of adding armed security to every school. And hopefully that security would be in plain clothes.
I am sick to death of watching our political leaders and gun people offer nothing but “thoughts and prayers” to the victims of these horrors while they do not a thing but demand ever looser gun regulations.
You know what I want you gun people to do? Stop with the thoughts and prayers and admit what we all know to be true: all of those who’ve died and all of those who are going to die must die so you guys can own and swan around in the streets with these hellish things.
Can we at least tell the truth about the reality of guns in America?
You can start, any time. You haven’t done so yet.
Sure I have. You and I both know that not a bloody thing is going to be done about these slaughters, because as long as we allow people to buy things designed to blow human bodies apart and kill as many as possible in as short a time as possible, and make it absurdly easy to buy them, then these things are going to happen.
They cannot be stopped. You can’t put metal detectors and guards on every door of every public building in the United States, so we should tell those kids in Florida and their families tough shit, that’s the price of guns.
And we should do the same thing in a few days when the next mass murder happens, be it at a church or a theatre or a nightclub or a school or a park.
We should tell people the truth about guns and what they mean in this country.
How could you possibly have a problem with that?
Let’s see, where to start?
If these weapons are designed to kill as many people as possible in a short period of time, why do we issue them to police officers?
Guns are not designed to blow human bodies apart. They are designed to expel a projectile at high speed in an aimed fashion. The choice to blow human bodies apart rests with the operator. Key fact here: Almost every operator of these firearms will go to his grave without ever blowing a human body apart.
Well, we issue them to police officers because upon occasion, they have to kill people.
As for these guns blowing bodies apart, I spoke with some who responded to the carnage at Sandy Hook. They said many of those children had been blown apart, and the same thing is being said about Florida.
“Occasionally, they have to kill someone.”
Occasionally, so do the rest of us.
“Someone said”
Yeah, that’s definitive. Talk to an ER doctor or combat medic about bullet wounds.
“Key fact here: Almost every operator of these firearms will go to his grave without ever blowing a human body apart.”
And yet somehow, more than a hundred thousand people are going to be shot this year, and thousands of them are going to be killed.
And what’s the solution? Why, more guns, of course. Expand concealed and open carry. Arm teachers. Arm church attendees. Allow people to carry guns into concerts and malls and nightclubs and just about anywhere people congregate.
And at the same time, make the purchase of guns designed to kill as many as possible in the shortest possible time as easy to buy as can be.
Not only that, but allow people to spend a hundred bucks and buy a device that lets them shoot not sixty bullets in a minute but six hundred.
And I’m the crazy one?
1) All firearms deaths this year, including overwhelmingly suicides, will number about 30K.
Not “a hundred thousand” in any year since the Pilgrims landed.
The number of homicides numbers are around 10,000/yr.,
(Most of them in city-wide “gun-free” zones like Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, D.C., and NYFC. Funny how that works, huh?)
making it the 21st-ranked cause of deaths annually, after abortions, heart disease, cancer, tobacco, obesity, medical errors, stroke, lower respiratory disease, other accidents, hospital-associated infections, alcohol, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, influenza/pneumonia, kidney failure, blood infections, drunk driving, unintentional poisonings, all drug abuse, and prescription drug overdoses.
But hey, lump in suicides and actual accidents with murders, and bootstrap it to 100K people shot, because that’s intellectually honest, right?
You can have your own opinions, but you don’t get to have your own made up pseudo-facts.
2) If guns are so deadly, and “blow human bodies apart”, how come less than one in three shootings is fatal?, and 66% of those are people holding the guns to their own heads.
When other people are doing the shooting, guns only kill people 1 time out of ten. That doesn’t sound so lethal, does it?
3) Describe for the class how “absurdly” easy it is to legally purchase a firearm. Whenever you’re ready.
The last three times news media ‘tards tried to make the point, from a dearth of experiential knowledge of the process, their purchases were shut down.
Their epic fails were a point of great humor amongst those on our side.
4) We put metal detectors at every airport in America without a problem.
We put them at every courthouse.
They’re at countless banks, and every federal building.
We put them at frickin’ Disneyland.
We’re not talking about putting them “at the door of EVERY public building in the country”, just schools.
(But hey, way to move the goalposts again.)
So why is putting them at schools so problematic for you?
Don’t you want kids to be in a safe place?
Shouldn’t guns, knives, etc. be stopped before they get in the door?
Or is it that you think children deserve to die?
Is it that you hate kids??
Or just common sense?
Only the per capita death rate from mass shooting incidents is much higher in Europe where you basically can’t even get guns. The per capita rate in France is nearly 4x that in the US. Good lord get some data and use some logic. Geez.
https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from-mass-public-shootings-in-the-us-and-europe/
Sean, you’re free to comment, but you’re not helping. The essay was written by a guy willing to support new gun control measures, many of the commenters are calmly discussing possible problems and suggesting solutions, and you’re hysterically attacking the exact people you should be reaching out to. There will be no confiscation. There will be no pile of melted-down AR-15s. There *may* be new and effective laws, if you work with gun owners to implement them. But it sounds like you’re much more interested in shrieking about your own moral superiority than getting anything done.
It’s kinda like talking to a wall Chris. His kind aren’t capable of reasoned, unemotional debate on this subject. Unfortunately, it’s a trait he shares with a large percent of anti-gun lawmakers. Which is why we will never have reasonable (real reasonable, not the crap they pretend is reasonable) laws passed that might actually help the problem.
Actually, I think Mr. Sean here may very well be being honest in his comments. Not so much the actual claims, but the emotions. He probably really is upset about it all. With politicians, I’m convinced that a lot of them don’t really WANT to find a workable solution. Notice, whenever a shooting happens, they push for laws that wouldn’t have done anything stop the shooter, and avoid talking about solutions that might actually work. If they pass laws that mitigate the problem (notice, I didn’t say fix. Humans are humans, hate and violence aren’t FIXABLE problems), they will have lost a tool for generating political power.
Dude, I’m NOT “interested in shrieking about [my] own moral superiority than getting anything done.”
What I’m doing is expressing my rage that the solutions – the only real solutions – you guys propose is yet more guns, in more hands, in more places.
Sure, you’ve said some potentially useful things about tweaking the laws to prevent clearly disturbed people from buying guns.
But the real core of your solution is what it always is with you guys: more guns.
Guns are the only product that I’m aware of for which the solution to the harm caused by people using them is more of them, more gun sales, and in more hands and in more places.
It’s as if tobacco people said that the solution to tobacco related disease is more tobacco use.
And maybe ID checks so kids can’t buy them.
There is simply no mechanism to identify and deal with people who might decide to slaughter their fellows, and to create one would cost tens of billions of dollars and require the creation of a national mental health care apparatus with powers that probably couldn’t pass constitutional muster.
I agree with you that there will be no ban of these hellish weapons. The gun industry, their lobby, and those like you who want these things have control of the political process, and those of us who don’t want to live in a place flooded with guns and people carrying them everywhere we go don’t have a say in it at all.
I’ve asked gun people any number of times “how can I tell if the guy behind me at Starbucks who’s carrying a gun is a “responsible” gun owner or a lunatic or evil or just intoxicated?”
And the answer is always the same: “you can’t, and if it bothers you, then get your own gun or hope that the people in line with you have theirs.”
Really?
Well, when I was sixteen, a blind drunk relative mistook me for a burglar, pointed a loaded gun at my head and tried repeatedly to shoot me. Fortunately, she was to drunk to disengage the thing that kept it from firing.
When I was 19, a friend of mine put a shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger on Christmas night. We still don’t know why.
My half sister’s cousin killed his brother when the boy came to his house drunk and tried to break into the front door.
My brother and his wife and two college students working the late shift at a diner narrowly escaped being shot when two hoodlums invaded the restaurant, forced them to lay on the walk in cooler’s floor while they debated killing them after robbing them.
So, you see, it’s not an idle question to me. Guns have been in my life my entire life, and not one time positively.
Finally, one other thing: it’s not just schools. It’s just about any public venue where people congregate, from concerts to parks to theatres to nightclubs to churches.
Do you really think we could put metal detectors and armed guards at the door of every public building in the United States?
So, yeah, you can call be hysterical. You can call me anything you like.
But what you can’t call me is wrong. This country is a slaughterhouse because people are allowed to buy things designed to kill as many people in the shortest possible time and we ain’t going to do anything about it except flood the country with millions of more guns.
And that’s the sad and bloody truth.
How can your right to own these things trump the right to life of the tens of thousands who are going to die this year and every year going forward?
Here’s where your ideas fall apart, dude: It would only (maybe) prevent a few of mass murderers, like the guy in Florida from buying guns.
But the Columbine shooters had never raised the suspicion of anyone. Neither had the Las Vegas shooter.
Not only that, but in the Sandy Hook horror, even though your proposals would perhaps have kept him from buying his guns, it wouldn’t have stopped his mother, who bought the weapons. She was not mentally ill, just stupid beyond belief.
I don’t think there’s any practical way to use mental health systems to stop most of these things because quite often, the shooters haven’t presented red flags except for perhaps being considered aloof and weird. Neither of those things are rare, and most of the time, they’re just a sign of aloofness and weirdness, not murderous intent.
But since you say I should work with you gun people to find a solution, and my desire to ban the things isn’t going to happen, let me throw out some other solutions:
Make it mandatory that a person buying things like AR-15s undergo a psychological evaluation and a full background check.
Require anyone buying these things undergo training and achieve certification. Part of that would be evaluating their fitness to own such things.
Make background checks mandatory for all gun sales and transfers, period.
Stop allowing people to buy these things via the internet.
Require people who own such weapons keep them in locked safes and hold them responsible if their children or relatives use them to commit violence.
Ban bump stocks and any kinds of devices that allow high powered magazine loaded guns to be turned into something very close to a fully automatic weapon.
And BTW: I read your site pretty often because while I often disagree with you, I do believe that your a decently spirited creature who doesn’t want guns to be used irresponsibly.
Thanks, dude.
Actually, you’ve got a trifecta going:
you’re wrong, you’re hysterical, and you can’t logically approach the problem. This is why you’ve brought in fallacies and nonsense by the truckload, and why you’re flailing in mud up to your chin trying to get anyone here to think you’re anything but just another deranged lunatic, whose knee-jerk irrational hoplophobia shouldn’t be indulged.
You’ve made the mentally unbalanced leap from “I don’t like guns” to thinking your choices, from personal trauma and an inability to use reason and logic to deal with the issue, should be applied to everyone not so handicapped and burdened.
This is why you only get one vote in a republic, and why there are trained mental health professionals to help you deal with your mental problems in a more appropriate manner.
Some people, right in this discussion, have had guns pointed at them, and pointed them at other people, and can still discuss the situations calmly and rationally, appreciating past events for what they were, rather than seeing them as the universe telling them to go on a mission to stamp out all the monsters in their walking nightmares.
(For an examples, house fires and auto fatalities outstrip gun violence in many years over time. Yet rational people – even those who’ve been burned or been in crashes – don’t live the rest of their lives trying to get rid of cars or matches. That’d be psychotic.)
We call them grown-ups.
Ranting non-stop in the opposite direction demonstrates who you are rather succinctly.
Yeah, you got me: I’m a snowflake libtard and my views are hysterical and aren’t worth even considering.
Hell, I don’t even have an arsenal, so why should anybody even consider the concerns of libtard pussies like me?
Dude, I get it: you gun people own the day and your demand to be able to own the most lethal weapons and go swanning around in the streets is guns in America.
And pussy ass libtards like me are a laughingstock to real he-men like you.
But you know what? There are millions upon millions of people like me, who’ve lost loved ones to murder and know that the moment they learn of that, it’s the most spirit shattering thing that will ever happen to them, and who learn that that jagged and unbearable hole in their spirits where the one they loved used to be will never heal.
So yeah: call me an idiot. Call me a faggot. I don’t give a fuck what you call me.
But don’t call me a liar, because I say this horror will not end, because of people like you, who want these things more than you want people like those slaughtered by them to be alive.
Can you not at least say what is true?
Sean,
I appreciate your opinion and your compliments. Seriously. But I have to ask, if you already acknowledge that the guns won’t be confiscated, what do you think should be done? Short of magically making all guns instantly disappear, you can’t stop shootings. Since we can’t do that, and this country won’t tolerate mass confiscations, the guns are here. So now what?
I say we take steps to keep them away from the clearly dangerous, and harden targets to prevent the ones who slip through from killing more innocent people. Of course those solutions aren’t perfect, but neither is standing by and wishing the problem away. It’s not going away.
Hey Chris, I did post some ideas earlier, but perhaps you missed them. I’m reposing them here.
And thanks for allowing me to say what are clearly very unpopular things here.
Here are my suggestions:
Make it mandatory that a person buying things like AR-15s undergo a psychological evaluation and a full background check.
Require anyone buying these things undergo training and achieve certification. Part of that would be evaluating their fitness to own such things.
Make background checks mandatory for all gun sales and transfers, period.
Stop allowing people to buy these things via the internet.
Require people who own such weapons keep them in locked safes and hold them responsible if their children or relatives or friends use them to commit violence.
Ban bump stocks and any kinds of devices that allow high powered magazine loaded guns to be turned into something very close to a fully automatic weapon.
Chris,
When you engage these trolls using logic, facts, a more than passing knowledge of history, tactics, metallurgy, physics and morality, it’s like you’re wrestling with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig loves it (because he’s getting paid.).
Cheers.
James
Sean, get serious.
Nobody’s discounting you because you’re a liberal, or for your sexual orientation, or even for your obvious hoplophobia.
We’re discounting you because your facts are lies, your arguments are irrational, illogical, and based entiorely on pure emotion and feeeeeeeelings, not sense, and because you think by sheer rpetition, no one will ntocie any of the foregoing problems with what you espouse.
Nice try.
But we’ll just require a special mental health evaluation to exercise a Constitutional right. The Supreme Court is going to that that idea.
(BTW, every semi-automatic firearm operates “like an AR-15”, for over 100 years. There’s nothing magical about it, nor does buying or owning one indicate some deep psychosis. Unlike wanting to ban them.)
When you submit proof that you’re sane, we’ll listen to your free speech.
You’ll need another sanity check to practice your religion. Or not to.
Gotta be fair.
And you’ll need to prove you’re sane before you can exercise your rights not to self-incriminate. Or be secure in your person and papers. Or anything else in the Bill of Rights.
Not because it makes sense to require some special mental qualification above citizenship to exercise a right that exists before the Constitution was ever written, but is protected by it, but because you think that’s a reasonable standard. You’d be laughed out of federal court for that idea in about a hot minute.
Then, before you can speak, about anything, you’ll need special speech, writing, and logic training. We can’t have anyone just flinging words out there all untrained.
And you’ll need a law degree before you can have a jury trial, or refuse a search of yourself or your home; we don’t want someone clueless trying to understand that whole process. Because your Constitutional rights are inherently dangerous.
And as an obviously clueless newb, it’s clearly news to you, but no one can “buy these things over the internet”.
So maybe not getting talking points from people who don’t know their back end from a hole in the ground isn’t a good idea either. All you’re doing is parading some fairly epic utter ignorance there. Just saying.
Laws holding owners responsible for their weapons are already the norm.
And Ed McGivern’s finger (Google him) would qualify as an unlawful device, by your vague descriptions.
But bump stocks are a waste of time, except to turn ammunition into noise in a hurry. For that matter, so are most full-automatic weapons, as anyone who’s actually fired them knows. They make the weapon less accurate, and hence actually less deadly.
BTW, fully automatic weapons have been severely restricted since 1934 (special application, months-long wait, $200 tax fee, for each and every one), all new ones banned since the mid-1980s, and not a single legally registered and owned one, AFAIK, has ever been used in a criminal shooting in the last 84 years. Having a price tag upwards of $10K@, along with the process, kind of puts a damper on squandering them for a killing spree.
And sadly for your position, nothing you’ve gone off about would have done even one single thing to stop this shooting, or likely, any other one.
Pretty much like the other 30,000 gun laws on the books.
That’s because crimes are committed by criminals, who amazingly have no problem whatsoever with ignoring pieces of paper and metal signs telling them that what they want to do is bad.
It’s on a par with putting a sign up telling your dog or cat not to pee on the carpet: pointless, and stupid. And hard on the carpet.
The problem is, school kids aren’t carpeting, so doing stupid and pointless things isn’t a very clever way to go about protecting them, but it’s the only instrument in your one-note band. Maybe, consider changing your tune.
The rest of us would rather look at things that will work against criminals.
All the things you want merely make things a flaming PITA for people who obey the law, while affecting criminals not one bit.
And trying it more, harder, faster, after it’s failed time after time has got people who’ve already jumped through 200 hoops because of stupid people’s feeeeeeeeelings on this topic less than enthusiastic about trying number 201.
So, knowing that nothing you want would do anything constructive, we have to wonder, why is it that you want it anyways?
Is it simply because you’re that ignorant of the reality?
Or because you’re so evil that you just don’t care?
There simply isn’t a third option.
I really do have serious reservations about using Constitutionally-protected speech to deny access to another Constitutional right. Not all speech is so protected but the exceptions are narrow, see Brandenburg v. Ohio. How much scary talk is required to trigger a NICS denial, and who decides?
This is a serious concern, and shouldn’t be brushed aside lightly. What happens when a decorated veteran blogging about their struggles with PTSD says something not political correct and their right to bear arms is abridged?
Or simply discussing that the whole point of the Second Amendment is to protect the private citizen’s ability to kill government employees should it someday become necessary.
Yup – another good point.
On the PTSD point, having PTSD doesn’t necessarily make someone dangerous or violent. And it’s a tricky issue, because so many vets claiming PTSD are simply lying for the free money. I don’t have a whole hell of a lot of sympathy if their lies come back to bite them.
Nobody should be denied for being politically incorrect. I’m talking about people who talk about committing murder. Use Cruz as an example. “I’m going to be a professional school shooter” isn’t a statement we should ignore.
It’s also a prosecutorial nothing-burger.
Who actually employs people to shoot up schools?
Nobody?
So he may as well have said he wanted to be a professional elephant juggler or compete at the rodeo in the rattlesnake round-up.
You’d have to question the guy, with all the Fifth Amendment trimmings, and then he lawyers up, and clams up, and all you’ve proven is that you can haul people in for saying dopey but vague things, waste time and resources, and accomplish nada. (And probably just educate him to shut up until the day he goes to a school and does the deed.)
We live in a constitutional republic, with a Bill of Rights.
There’s no where to go with this but spinning one’s wheels in the mud.
If a guy says “I’ve bought a M9000 Blastemup shooting iron, I have a sack full of loaded magazines for it, I’ve trained with it, and tomorrow I’m coming to waste every kid at XYZ School during recess” you have an actionable cause to make an arrest.
“I’m going to be a professional school shooter”, even tattooed on his forehead, only tells you the guy ain’t right in the head (like multiple classmates already knew), but not to the point you could even legally get him placed on a hold for a psych eval, on that basis alone. Prior restraint is unconstitutional, because we can’t do pre-crime, and even being crazy has to meet finite definitional limits before you can legally intervene.
Cruz, from that one FB post, never came close to meeting that standard.
He may well have from other data, with incidents at school when he was a student, or in one of those 30-odd visits by the local sheriff’s office, but unless they cough up the details, we don’t know if they ran into the exact roadblocks I mention, or simply screwed the pooch on what should have been psych holds, restraining orders, and/or criminal prosecutions.
But we’re pretty sure he shot 50-60 kids, killed 17 of them, and TPTB had 40 bites at that apple and couldn’t make a case before it happened.
There’s two ways to make that not happen ever again:
A) Gut the Bill of Rights, or
B) Harden schools the hell up, in every possible way.
“B” has the triple recommendations of being the greatest good for the greatest number, being legal, and being the smartest way to go about this.
The fact that it gives knee-jerk holophobes conniption fits, while icing on the cake, is just a happy serendipity.
You know, you pointed up the essential truth that lies at the heart of this thing: you can’t detect anywhere near all of those who are evil or crazy enough to commit mass murder with guns they can buy as easily as they can buy cigarettes.
And yet, your solution is to “Harden schools the hell up, in every possible way.”
As if that would fix it.
And as if that would deal with all the other places where these things happen.
So, are you proposing to “Harden [every public place in America] the hell up, in every possible way?”
Of course not. It can’t be done.
And since that’s your entire solution and that’s bullshit, why not do what I say, which is admit that since people like you want to own these hellish things and that’s the end of that and the argument is over, let’s stop kidding ourselves, and tell the victims of these things “tough shit?”
Why can’t we tell our fellow Americans the simple truth?
Sean, you like to spew that pseudo-fact out there like a pigeon decorating a statue, but where, pray tell, do you have to show multiple IDs, fill out a four page federal form, undergo a criminal background check, and in many states undergo a mandatory waiting period before you can have a pack of Marlboros?
I’ll wait while you marshal that non-existant example.
But yes, hardening schools up would fix it.
Tell the class how many shootings there are at courthouses, with armed deputies and metal detectors at the doors?
So you’re saying that juries and judges are more valuable than kids??
“All the other places where these things happen” outside of schools are called life in the real world.
People get killed, violently, in every country on the planet, every minute of every day, since Cain and Abel, and outside of Democrat hellholes like Chicongo, DC, or Baltimore, the rates in other countries are horribly worse than here.
Only someone both utterly ignorant and untraveled in the big wide world would be unaware of that simple fact.
But here, for the last 30 years, nearly every state has allowed people willing to jump through even more hoops than you’re crowing for to get a permit to carry the means to defend their own lives from the thugs that reign where that basic right is denied.
It hasn’t gotten us the wild west, it’s actually drastically reduced crime over than time-frame, everywhere except in gun-free zones like schools, where 98% of all mass killings occur.
That’s not bullshit, it’s reality, but you’re apparently allergic to reality, and instead spew bullshit like “easier than buying a pack of cigarettes”.
That’s demonstrably sheer psychotic lunacy, which frankly is all you’ve brought to the topic since you joined the conversation here.
We get it, you don’t like guns, and you’re crazy.
You win the Biggest Antigun Nutbag award.
Now go and stick your silverware in the light socket for your special prize.
Just because you’re too crippled and/or unwilling to take responsibility for protecting yourself in the big wide world, you don’t get to remake society into your hellish version of anti-reality just so *you* feel safe.
This country is about more than *you*.
Sorry if that’s news to you, but if it is, then “tough shit”.
Life, is.
Deal with it as it is, or find someone who can help you to do so.
You want therapy, not discussion. And you desperately need it.
Work on dealing with that truth, and let America look out for itself without your “help”.
““All the other places where these things happen” outside of schools are called life in the real world.”
I get it: you and your fellows are OK with people being slaughtered if that’s the price that must be paid so you guys can own these things.
I don’t want to even argue it anymore. I get it: those kids are simply dupes of the Saul Alinsky left and they can be ignored.
And if you believe that their grief is genuine, that’s just the price of FREEDOM.
I get it: their friends had to die so you can have the freedom to own whatever kind and as many weapons as you wish.
I get it.
I just want you people to fucking say it;
And BTW: Chris Hernandez author, https://chrishernandezauthor.com/
who owns this site, asked me to say what solutions I had, and I twice posted them.
He’s never answered me. I’m guessing that’s because he holds me in as much contempt as you do.
I absolutely DO NOT. I’ve just been busy with work and family.
Well, you twice asked me to propose my solutions to these horrors, and I have, but you’ve never answered. Instead your readers have called me every kind of pussy ass snowflake, so I assumed they were speaking for you.
Are you telling me that’s not true?
You came out pretty hard against gun ownership right off the bat and have been giving as much as you’re getting. I figured you could handle yourself. I’m not jumping in to defend my pro-gun friends either.
Ease up, Sean. I’d be happy to buy you a beer someday.
First of all, I do appreciate that you allow me to say what is absolutely heresy here, but I wish that after asking me what policy suggestions I had to counter yours, that you would have responded.
But no matter.
As for gun ownership, I’m not opposed to it at all. My American grandfather and my beloved brother both had guns before they died.
But they didn’t have things like machine guns, nor did they run around in the streets with them.
They weren’t so afraid of life that they felt naked and unprotected unless they went to the local grocery with enough firepower to storm Omaha Beach.
And neither of them thought that every kind of weapon should be legal and that to restrict the ownership of them was tantamount to a Russian style tyranny.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to take your gun out of your house and somewhere else, it had to go in the trunk of the car, never in the cabin.
Today, we’ve got idiots with machine guns slung over their shoulders crowding into stores, probably because the Lord didn’t give them as much as He did the dudes they see on porn sites.
I don’t care if you own guns, or for that matter, what you do with them.
As long as I don’t have to worry that you’ll kill me at the movies or when I’m at Starbucks or at a concert.
Is that too much to ask?
FWIW, I’m totally on board with you about the morons carrying rifles into restaurants and stores. I wrote several articles attacking their stupidity. I was able to briefly scan your proposals and my gut reaction was that they would be ruled unconstitutional. I’m not ignoring you, I’ve seriously just been busy.
I’m confused: why, given that you clearly believe in open and concealed carry, be offended by those guys who go out in public carrying rifles? I’ve not seen those things you wrote opposing them.
Yes, at least some of those things I proposed are almost certainly unconstitutional, especially given that conservatives largely rule the Court.
But I suspect that your proposals are as well.
So, given that, and given that we’re not going to do anything to ban or restrict access to high powered high capacity rifles, and given that we cannot put metal detectors and guards on every door of every public building, my point I think is valid: we need to simply face the fact that these horrors are going to continue to happen and we’re not going to do anything except what we always do.
Tied up at the moment, but please google “open carry Chris Hernandez.” I’ve written several essays attacking the movement.
I took your advice and read some of the things you wrote about open carry. Mostly I agree with you.
Especially that part about people being frightened by people carrying guns around them. I am one of them, and when I mention that I am afraid of people with guns because of nearly having been killed and of losing several people I know to gun violence, the surprising thing is how many tell me to go blow, that if I’m afraid of people strapped in public, either I shouldn’t go out or get my own gun, because I have no right to be free from the fear of being killed, that their right to carry these things trump’s my “wants,” as one of them put it here on your site.
What so many of your fellows don’t realize is that more than two thirds of Americans don’t own guns and are increasingly alarmed and infuriated that we are expected to tolerate the insane levels of violence and that the one thing that’s totally off the table in the discussion is greater regulation of guns and even banning those designed specifically to kill as many people in as short a time as possible.
The day after the Parkland massacre, during a press conference, Paul Ryan trotted out the threadbare lie that now is not the time to discuss guns, and then astoundingly described the “Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act” which makes it legal for anyone to carry a gun anywhere in America, including states with strong guns laws as “a good self defense bill.”
I submit to you that our dismay and fury is going to translate into action, that we’re not going to continue to accept so many wounded and killed and the only real response from our governments is ever looser gun laws.
The reciprocity act DOES NOT allow anyone to carry a gun anywhere. It recognizes other states’ concealed carry permits in other states. That’s all.
What it does is allow a person with a concealed carry permit to carry that weapon into any state or city, even those like New York, which does not recognize any state’s concealed carry permits.
What that means is that if you have a concealed carry permit, you can carry that weapon in this City, even though allow it except in case of direct need, such as certain kinds of licensed couriers or security guards.
So, under this law, you can carry a gun into Times Square or Central Park and even though New Yorkers don’t want people carrying guns in our public places, we’ll have no say in it.
So, how is that any different from what I said?
You said it would allow anyone to carry a gun anywhere. That’s objectively false.
OK, yeah, I phrased it inartfully. But you do agree that it allows anyone with a concealed permit to carry their weapons in the streets of cities and states that do not allow such things, yes?
I do not want to have to worry that people form gun states who’re in Times Square or the Park are carrying lethal weapons and my be insane or evil or just drunk.
If you want to allow that it in Texas, that’s your business. But this isn’t Texas and we don’t want your guns in our streets.
I’m pretty much neutral on it. If everyone with a carry permit can carry everywhere, cool. If states want to reserve their right to determine who gets to carry in their state, cool.
I wish you weren’t so agnostic about forcing people in states with strict gun laws to allow people from states with lax gun laws to have to deal with people carrying lethal weapons in their streets.
You asked me to consider engaging with gun people and yet you guys always take guns off the table and your only real answer to gun violence is more guns.
You know, what you gun guys don’t get is just how many of your fellow Americans have become weary of the argument that we can’t do anything about guns except arm more people and maybe tweak background checks but that’s it.
We’re getting sick of it in fact, and don’t think that the current Republican party’s slavish adherence to the idea of guns over anything else is eternal.
Not while people can vote in this country it isn’t.
70% of Americans according to polling want sensible restrictions on these weapons and where they can be carried.
We are not going to surrender our well being and our safety to the idea that “an armed society is a polite society.”
I admit it: I hate guns and would ban every fucking one off the earth if I could.
But I know I can’t.
But I’ll be damned if I have to surrender the joy of living in this City to the fear that someone from a gun state may decide to kill me in Central Park just because those of you who are willing to accept that risk in your cities and states want to put me at the risk you think is reasonable.
NO.
Sean, I have a question for you. You said:
“I do not want to have to worry that people form gun states who’re in Times Square or the Park are carrying lethal weapons and my be insane or evil or just drunk.”
Do you mean that:
– You aren’t worried now, but that the proposed reciprocity agreement would cause you to be worried?
or
– You are worried now, and you have a set of proposals that will eliminate your worry?
Either way, you’ve retreated from reality. Just because there are laws surrounding the use/carry of firearms in NYC, doesn’t mean they are now, or will be, obeyed.
And frankly, what you remind me most of is a 8-13yo who just doesn’t like the way the world works, and believes that some magical legislative fairy dust will fix things.
What’s worse is that what you want to do is to remove the right to self-defense from innocent people, and leave them at the mercy of anyone bigger/stronger/faster than they are.
Aside from my earlier bit of advice to ponder the adage that “An armed society is a polite society”, I’ve got a couple of others for you:
“When seconds count, the police are only minutes away”
“God made man, Colt made him equal”
Firearms, of whatever type, and however scary they look, are nothing but tools, and are used for good or ill by whomever wields them.
Time to grow an adult pair (balls or tits, depending on your sex), and learn that the world isn’t fair, that bad people exist, and that the possession of tools doesn’t turn people into evildoers.
Kurt
Kurt, to answer your questions in order:
1. No, I don’t worry now when I’m in Times Square or Central Park or the subway or indeed just about anywhere in this City. And I go all over, at any time of day or night.
Sure, there are hoodlums about, but they mostly shoot other hoodlums and leave the vast majority of us alone and I don’t hang in hoodlum neighborhoods or buy drugs off of hoodlums or deal with hoodlums in any way.
And yeah, there probably are people with concealed weapons in public places here, but it’s rare and if you’re caught with one, it’s a mandatory prison sentence, so most people don’t.
2. Yes, I would definitely worry if people from gun states were allowed to carry guns in this City.
The only time I’ve ever felt my life was in danger was when a legal and usually responsible gun owner got blind drunk, mistook me for a burglar, and almost killed me when I was sixteen.
3. You can attempt to insult me by saying I’m a child looking for “legislative fairy dust,” but the fact of the matter is that the fewer guns there are, the fewer gun crimes and gun violence there is.
And while we’re on the subject, by your logic, because some small segment of the population will disobey them, we shouldn’t have laws at all.
4. I believe this whole self defense thing is either a red herring or you guys live in a barbaric place or something, because I’ve lived in Florida, California, North Carolina, and (mostly) New York, and I’ve traveled to many other states as well as Canada and all over Europe, and I’ve never known anyone who was so afraid of their fellows that they carried guns when they went out of doors, nor did I feel I needed one.
I can’t understand how you can be so afraid of your fellows that you must have the means to kill on you and be ready to kill at a moment’s notice.
If you want to have a gun to protect your home, that’s your business. But when you insist on carrying those things around me and I have to worry that you might kill me for any reason whatsoever, then it becomes my business, and we’ve made the decision here that we don’t want people running around this City with guns.
If you and the people where you live don’t mind people with guns in the streets, then do it.
But leave us out of it.
5. Finally, I’m a dude and I already have a pair. And yeah, I know there are bad people in the world, which is why we have laws and cops.
And the only people I’ve ever known who threatened to kill me or did kill themselves or their own loved ones were “good guys with guns” who either made a tragic mistake or were simply drunk.
If you’re so worried about your safety, then you should worry most about the people you know who have guns, because most people who are shot are shot by people they know.
I freely admit that I hate guns. The scare the hell out of me. But I also know others don’t feel that way and they have right to own the things.
But I don’t go to places where people carry them in public and I don’t want New York to become a place where they do.
1) You can attempt to insult me by saying I’m a child looking for “legislative fairy dust,” but the fact of the matter is that the fewer guns there are, the fewer gun crimes and gun violence there is.
– Ah, no, research says just the opposite. See the research by Kleck, Lott and others.
2) And while we’re on the subject, by your logic, because some small segment of the population will disobey them, we shouldn’t have laws at all.
– Again, no. That is not the conclusion to draw. The more reasonable conclusion is that citizens should have the means to protect themselves from those who don’t obey the law. And, before you say that’s what the police are for, you should realize two things:
–A) The police are, at best, a post facto, reactive force. They do not prevent crime. If you’re lucky, they solve crime.
— B) As has been upheld by the Supreme Court in multiple decisions, the police are not constituted to protect citizens – they are there to preserve the public order, and the safety of individual citizens takes a very distant second place
1) I believe this whole self defense thing is either a red herring or you guys live in a barbaric place or something, because I’ve lived in Florida, California, North Carolina, and (mostly) New York, and I’ve traveled to many other states as well as Canada and all over Europe, and I’ve never known anyone who was so afraid of their fellows that they carried guns when they went out of doors, nor did I feel I needed one.
– I’ve lived my adult life in the Puget Sound region, including Seattle. It’s hardly a barbaric or savage place, and has a crime rate comparable to NYC. And yet, I’ve had my briefcase snatched from me at a bus stop in downtown Seattle,, had a knife pulled on me while driving taxi in South Seattle, and my home in rural King County was been burgled while I as at work. I guess you’re just lucky.
2) If you want to have a gun to protect your home, that’s your business. But when you insist on carrying those things around me and I have to worry that you might kill me for any reason whatsoever, then it becomes my business,
– You persist in ignoring the facts, and in this case the fact is that those who legally carry have a crime rate that is a very small fraction of the general population, smaller even than the rate of crimes committed by police.
3) If you’re so worried about your safety, then you should worry most about the people you know who have guns, because most people who are shot are shot by people they know.
– That’s only vaguely true, because it counts homicide committed between criminal acquaintances. Hang around with stupid people doing stupid things, and get stupid results. Quoting you: ” there are hoodlums about, but they mostly shoot other hoodlums and leave the vast majority of us alone and I don’t hang in hoodlum neighborhoods or buy drugs off of hoodlums or deal with hoodlums in any way.”
I’m truly sorry that your grasp of reality is so poor, and that you don’t understand your rights and duties as an adult and a citizen. I guess you haven’t been mugged by reality yet.
I hope than when you are, the cost isn’t too high to those who surround you, but it seems that’s the only way you’re going to learn.
-30-
Kurt
But “I want to be a jihadist and die as a martyr for allah” is constitutionally-protected free speech. If you personally knew someone was saying that, would you sell him your gun? Would you think anyone else should sell him a gun?
The entire issue is a 1A minefield, but I don’t see how we can advocate ignoring someone’s own warnings about what they intend to do with their guns.
No, I wouldn’t sell Jihadi Joe a gun, and I can speak with some confidence on that since in my days in retail I once refused to sell a gun to a guy we’d watched having a vicious argument with his significant other for the previous half hour in the parking lot outside the store. He was probably OK and I probably did him a disservice and another day we might chuckle over the optics of the situation while I made the sale, but that day I didn’t want to take the chance.
There’s a world of difference, though, in rendering somebody a prohibited person on the basis of no actual, adjudicated disqualifying behavior. Committing felonies or selected misdemeanors, using drugs, doing whatever you did to get a dishonorable discharge, those are all illegal acts. Saying stupid things that don’t trip over Brandenburg isn’t.
A very reasonable concern, and why I wouldn’t back such a scheme unless it involves due process.
One detail that seems to get overlooked a lot is that the per capita death rate in the US is lower than a number of European countries. Countries that basically have outlawed guns.
https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from-mass-public-shootings-in-the-us-and-europe/
This gives the lie to the narrative that restrictive policies are the answer.
A suggestion worth discussing Chris, but I’m not sure how to implement it effectively without becoming a civil rights issue.
Even if you can’t arrest/confiscate based on such statements. it’s possible a visit from the local LE could at least put him on notice that he is on their RADAR, and might…might be a deterrence, to some.
And even if something is implemented to legally take action, there needs to be a way to adjudicate and appeal decisions or we end up with something like the No Fly List; you don’t know you’re on it until stopped at the gate, you don’t know why you’re on it, and you have very little to do to be cleared off of it. Any system needs to be transparent and have legal remedies to keep false reports from ex-spouses, vindictive neighbors, etc. from cluttering up the system (perhaps penalties for knowingly making a false report? Again, I don’t know. Proving malice vs an overabundance of caution can be difficult)
I think the most effective thing we as country can do right now is tighten up on the reporting from state and local LE into the NICS and look at how to incorporate mental health information into the system, as that seems to be the biggest gap in the system as I understand it.
It won’t solve the problem, but it will be an incremental improvement, and, as the anti’s are fond of saying, “if it saves one life”.
Understood, and I’m concerned about the potential for civil rights abuses as well. There would have to be an appeal option in order to have due process. But again, if a guy says he wants to be a jihadist and die as a martyr for allah, we’re idiots for selling him the AK to do it.
Legally speaking, in regards to the jihadi or other potential perp announcing on social media what they’re going to do and then purchasing a legal weapon, I agree. Remove their ability to ‘legally’ purchase a weapon. For what that actually accomplishes (not a whole lot), great step.
Let’s take this a step further in logic: Generally speaking, the potential combatant (the jihadi wannabe) v. the demented ‘mass shooter’ (making pronouncements on social media that may or may not be serious) would procure their weapons through different channels, don’t you think? The school shooter bought his, and a jihadi might just get his from sources unknown.
Here’s a thought for the general public and/or gun owners: Respect the BOR as written, and if someone has to be restricted from purchasing or owning a certain type of weapon, withhold the ability of non-citizens (immigrants/migrants/whatever) to legally purchase firearms until after they attain citizenship, and screen those new citizens very closely (previous criminal records in countries of origin, etc, and enforce existing law). If they violate the law with a violent crime (shooting) that is not justified, prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. Period.
Something else that is NEVER done, and should be, is when someone announces they’re going to do something, believe them, and have local, state, or federal law investigate and take action. Then, law enforcement should be held criminally accountable for their own actions (or lack thereof) as with the FBI and the Cruz warning that went unheeded, along with the local PD who made 39 calls to his house in the year preceding. Every single FBI agent who knew of the threat and did nothing should be held legally accountable, fired, lose all benefits, and then prosecuted for malfeasance at the least and accessory to murder if possible. Their lack of action actually allowed the shooting to occur. Local PD personnel that made the visits and ‘didn’t see a problem’ should be held to the same consequence. These weren’t ‘mistakes’….these were grievous examples of derliction of duty.
Having the average citizen lose yet another constitutionally protected tool does absolutely nothing and sends absolutely no message of deterrence to those who may consider an act like Florida or to those sworn to ‘protect and serve’ for not doing their job. And when it comes right down to it, Florida happened because law enforcement did not perform their sworn duty.
My .02
Chris,
Clearly there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but…
Your articles and media reports of school shootings strongly suggest that the killing stops when armed people show up. Part of the argument for CCW is, and I believe it is valid, the presence of unknown armed citizen acts as a deterrent to violent crime.
I would suggest that over a summer volunteer teachers would attend, at school board expense, police officer training class and on completion be sworn in as special officers with only one function: to take into custody a school shooter using required force at any school function, activity or building in their system.
They would carry both badge with identification and firearm. Their identity would be known only to the principle, assistant principle and each other. Yearly qualification and additional training would be required. Neither school board nor parents would know these identities, but everyone would be informed that a number of teachers were sworn officers and are armed.
I believe this would make schools a less attractive target to school shooters.
While people argue that there are liability issues, these issues exist fro because of the shooter even if nobody responds to them. I have recently found out that at least one insurance company is in favor of authorized armed church members at all church functions. Even if no one responds to they are still on the hook for everyone injured and killed. It seems they believe the presence of an armed responder, even with minimal training, will reduce the death toll and their hook.
As one of the church council member told me, the company requested they purchase an additional policy at a yearly rate of less than $100.
If we were to magically stop all rifle sales, there are so many rifles out there now such acts would be ineffectual. Go door-to-door collecting weapons? I don’t think anyone actually believes that will work. Would parents complain about armed teachers? Sure, but they do now and children still die. Would students complain? I knew a woman who didn’t like associating with a peer group that contained her cousin. See, he was a police officer and was required to carry off duty, so yeah some students will complain about being around armed men and women. even when it’s for their own protection.
Are there reefs where this can run aground? Damn straight, but we need to do something constructive.
I would also support raising the age limit on rifle ownership to 21, but this will fail to stop any committed shooter. I’ve read too many reports of both rifles and pistols stolen from parents, relatives or neighbors.
No, what is needed is the presence of an arm good guy.
I’m totally on board with the presence of multiple armed good guys at every school. I’d even dispense with the additional training and go with the Utah method: if a teacher has a CHL, they can carry without even notifying their school district. And the world hasn’t ended.
Another fine article, Chris.
Something for the nation to consider seriously: restoring funding to careful scientific research, by the CDC and others, on the problem of gun violence. I think many people have taken the first step toward solving the problem: acknowledging that there is one. Defining the problem, describing it, evaluating corrective and/or preventive measures, and thoughtfully applying the knowledge can then follow, if the will exists in the necessary places.
And that will needs reliable information. As Mark L. Rosenberg, the author of the article cited below, writes, “… [I]t is irresponsible and even dangerous for lawmakers to change gun policies without knowing what measures are both safe and effective. ” (In the article, Mr. Rosenberg makes it clear that by “safe”, he means “protecting the rights of law-abiding gun owners”.)
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/18/whats-missing-from-the-gun-debate-217022
Thanks for your articles, Chris, and thanks to the providers of thought-provoking posts.
Anytime, thanks J. I’ll check out Rosenberg’s work.
There is plenty of “careful scientific research” on firearms and crime. It’s been done by economists and criminologists.
The CDC was blocked from advocacy research largely because it was advocacy research.
Who reports it? (Homeless drug addicts? Ex-wives? Jealous lovers? Unhappy customers? Nosy neighbors? Video game opponents? Cranks on the ‘net?)
To whom?
How is it verified?
Rebutted?
What due process protections are included?
How hard are you going to hammer those who make false allegations?
Haven’t a thousand incidents, and now innocent victims’ deaths at the hands of idiotic, trigger-happy, and abysmally poorly trained police officers, from “SWAT”ing innocent people (not to mention millions of false allegations in divorce courts) taught us anything??
You’d literally be instituting an entire prosecutorial investigation and court system apparatus to verify or debunk Facebook posts.
With money from….where?
And we have so many police investigators, prosecutors, and judges, with so little to do, that we’re now going to make a superior court or even federal case, with all the judicial trimmings – or else it’s tyranny – out of everything said on the Internet???
Why stop there?
Why not just have a microphone on every person’s cheek, and run everything they say past a Board of Government Approval?
We could put a Bluetooth wireless GoPro on every citizen 24/7/365, to see that they’re not up to no good while we’re at it?
What could go wrong with that?
You know the answer to that, and so does everyone else.
I agree with the sentiment – no FFL would sell a weapon to a guy who said outright and on the spot that he wanted to stick up bank or liquor store, either – but it’s ripe for abuse from the get-go.
Or else becomes as toothless as depending on the potential criminal self-reporting himself, like on a 4473.
It will never work, and if it does, it will only do so by violating a fundamental and unalienable Constitutional right.
Watch, or re-watch Minority Report. With legal commentary from Alan Dershowitz or Clarence Thomas. Pre-Crime is a unicorn that should never be chased.
Far less invasive and constitutionally fraught with peril is common sense, as you yourself have noted in advocating for trained and armed teachers and administrators.
We protect or leaders, banks, and vital installations with men with guns;
we “protect” our children with signs. (A 1990 Joe Biden brainstorm, btw.)
The FBI dropped the ball (surprise, surprise) on this. They missed their bite at the apple. But had they gone in full-court press, what would have changed? Likely nothing, except two agents wasting a day’s work they could have been working on more productive leads. And that’s immutably true, even with knowing in 20/20 hindsight what this troll was planning to do in his head. Without far more than the paltry posting, he was off scot-free, even if the FBI had knocked on his door the next day.
He simply says
“I was making a (bad) joke; I wasn’t serious.”
“I meant as a photographer, shooting with a camera.”
“I was just jerking someone’s chain, I had no serious intent to do anything illegal.”
Or any of 100 other explanations, and bam, he’s done. case closed, waste of time.
I wish the FBI done the job we pay them to do, and had gone out there to see if he’d have stepped in it with both feet, so they could haul him in, but then I’d also like a winning Powerball ticket and the phone number of the Playmate of the Year.
The sheriffs were at this nutjob’s house 39 times prior to this incident.
One more visit about a FB post would probably have accomplished nothing. (Unless they screwed up in one or more of the other 39 visits.)
But somebody shooting him in the head during his rampage – say the football coach, but with a school-legal CCW and a .45 – would have solved his problems forever.
QED
I know you’re sincere about this, and none of us wants to see dead kids again if there’s any legal way to prevent it.
But any “solution” that violates the Bill of Rights is de facto and de jure a cure monstrously worse than the disease.
I can’t see any way to make things work appreciably better than they do now by investigating every utterance everyone makes 24/7/365, other than people doing the jobs they’re paid to do in the first place.
My 2¢.
And the question had to be raised. Keep plugging away.
P.S. How’s the next book coming?
Aren’t we due for a teaser?
I can tell you that police are tracking down online posts about violence now, and have been for years. We can’t ignore those threats, even if they don’t yet prevent someone from buying a gun. All I’m proposing is that we listen when someone says they’re going to commit murders. I don’t think you’d advocate selling an AK to the guy who says he wants to fight in the jihad and die as a martyr for allah, and I don’t think we do more damage by taking him seriously than by selling him the gun.
There is a potential for abuse, but that potential already exists. People file false reports all the time now. What I’m proposing wouldn’t change that.
And yes, I definitely advocate armed presence at every school. That’s step 1, everything else follows.
P.S. I’m a few chapters into the next book, but not ready for a teaser yet. I may have to go back and rewrite the entire prologue. I never know where the hell these stories are going to take me.
That’s what I expect them to do.
And then they drop the ball, and a Parkland happens, and the moronic yammering from the retarded baboons starts all over again.
But there are limits to what can be done by taking threats seriously, codified in the Bill of Rights.
Most grand schemes crater on that wall, as they should, but the problem comes when someone figures “If we just try it harder, it’ll work this time.”
Keep wrestling with the inspiration.
If it was easy, anyone could do it.
I find it sickening that you say “And then they drop the ball, and a Parkland happens, and the moronic yammering from the retarded baboons starts all over again.”
You know what? I don’t give a flying fuck what you think of me. I don’t care what you call me.
You know why? Because I know what losing a beloved to murder is like, and I don’t give a flying fuck that it doesn’t mean dick to you, OK?
Since I know that you guys own the government and the argument and those of us who hate guns and what they mean in this country are contemptible creatures with no power to do a thing about any of it, all I’m asking is for those like you to man up and tell the victims of these horrors tough shit, that their loved ones had to die so you can buy and swan around with those things.
Can you not at least be honest enough to say that?
I wasn’t talking about you, nor referring to you. I don’t know you from Adam.
(Unless the shoe happens to fit; that’s up to you to decide.)
Nor does your anecdotal personal experience confer anything special on your opinions. Rather the opposite, in general experience.
I’ve never had my testicles slammed with a sledgehammer onto a hot grill either, but I don’t need to experience it to know that it wouldn’t be enjoyable.
So your clever riposte is 0 for 3 so far.
And maybe, take that boulder-sized chip off your shoulder.
It’s news, obviously, but everything isn’t about *you*, 24/7/365.
Unless the voices really do talk to you, in which case, seek help.
The victims of these horrors didn’t have to die, but they did, solely because of do-gooders who thought a metal sign outside a school would confer magical protection from crazy and evil people, and the only reason that’s the case going forward is because lunatics can’t admit that was stupid idea, has failed repeatedly and cost dozens to hundreds of kids their lives, and yet they still won’t think about reversing that asinine policy.
That’s Einstein’s exact definition of insanity.
Can you not at least be honest enough to say that?
Or did you want to go for 0 for 4?
So, those 17 teenagers who were killed were not because a disturbed person was allowed to buy a weapon of war but because guns are banned in schools?
And of course your solution is what it always is: sell guns to more people to carry into the schools and in public.
Funny how the answer to gun violence is always more guns in more hands in more places, ja?
While I’m sure most Americans don’t agree with you, the gun industry and their lobby and the politicians they own sure do, and let’s be honest: that’s all that really matters and looser gun laws are the only thing that ever happens in response to the horror of gun violence.
What seems the most reasonable seems to be howling insanity.
If you happen to know anyone who contracted tobacco related disease from smoking, do you know if their doctors told them that the only real solution would be for them and those around them to use more tobacco?
Just curious.
Sean, You like so many seem to think that ‘gun violence’ is a thing separate from ‘violence.’ As if somehow, people that intend to act violently will either decide not to, or be unable to without guns. That’s not real world.
Your explanation of your suicide attempt is moving. And if you had chosen to hang yourself in a less public place you would have succeeded. In Japan, in Aokigahara forest people commit suicide by hanging often enough that there are signs as you enter the area trying to encourage people to rethink. It appears, from the studies that I am aware of, that suicide is means independent. What matters is the seriousness of the intent.
Also, it is not true that there is a causative connection between the availability of guns of any type and rates of relevant crimes, even the firearms related rates of those crimes.
Scott,
First of all, I didn’t choose the Rambles in Central Park because if was a public place. If you know the area, then you know it’s a dense forested area and a person can be standing by you ten feet away and you not be able to see them.
I chose the Park for very personal reasons. It was the place where me and my boys frolicked and thought of as our wonderland and I wanted to die as close to them as I could.
But forget all that. That was a very private and hard moment for me and you clearly misinterpreted it and I don’t want to discuss it any more.
But I do want to talk about the other things you said, and some of the things I’ve learned of and heard on this string:
Yes, I do separate gun violence out from most other kinds of violence, and for good reason:
Guns are almost unique in that they are designed to kill as many people in the shortest possible time and are deliberately absurdly easy to buy and modify into weapons to allow one to kill far more in a much shorter time than almost anything else a typical person can lay possibly hands on
In most of this country, you can literally go down to the nearest gun store and legally buy in 20 minutes the means to shoot hundreds of people in less time that it took to buy it.
You can drive to the gun store, buy what you want, and then drive from the gun store to the place you wish to perch and slaughter as many as possible until you’re somehow stopped and do it all in less than an hour.
And there’s an entire industry and lobby and political party apparatus that is determined to ensure you have that right and access.
Doing that with explosives or learning how to fly a jetliner into a skyscraper takes longer and the checks on all that raises the chances you might be stopped and neither the explosives industry nor their lobby nor the politicians they own would cut your throat to keep you from changing access to those things.
But guns are different, aren’t they?
Those are as easy to buy as cigarettes. And the NRA would cut your throat to keep anything from changing that incredibly powerful and profitable arrangement.
In this country, if you’re planning to slaughter a concert or a school or nightclub full of people, the gun store clerk will help you take the means to make history out to the car for you if you can’t carry it all at once.
I’ve said here and more than once that we are not EVER going to do a single thing to restrict access to these hell weapons, nor where they can be carried.
You won’t accept any restrictions on these hell weapons, nor where they can be carried. Not one restriction, not if it in any way inconveniences you from buying or carrying them.
And your side owns the government.
So, what are we arguing about?
I’ve known it since I was a teenager, guy: In America: waffen über alles.
I have no illusions that there is going to be anything done to stop the slaughter.
What I’ve said and posted here is really just a means of expressing my despair at how sick of my country’s death weapon fetish I really am and to say how much I hold gun absolutists responsible for it all.
So, guy, I don’t know what we’re arguing about.
The way I see it, we both agree on how it’s all going to play out.
Sean, Obviously, the location in Central Park was a public place, else the ‘people’ that rescued you would not have been there.
Like so many on your side of the issue, you endow guns with special powers. And blame them. That’s sad.
It’s also sad that you don’t realize that the primary reason that draconian gun control laws haven’t been passed nationally since Clinton’s ugly-gun ban is because the voters toss gun grabbers out of office.
I can go down to the local gas station and buy, without any type of check, enough gasoline to burn down a nightclub. In fact, one of the major mass murders in the US was committed with gasoline (killed more than most so-called mass shootings). Then there was the OKC bombing, sure they’ve supposedly made it more difficult to purchase fertilizer, but not to the point that someone intent on mass murder couldn’t get enough.
You appear to believe that the tool is the problem, when the problem is actually the individuals who are intent on both killing and fame. Those who are intent on killing, will find a way to do so.
And it isn’t waffen über alles, it’s Freiheit über alles.
One more thing, Sean. You seem to think that the NRA spends enough money to ‘buy’ politicians into acting against the wishes of their constituents. The ‘gun lobby’ such as it is, doesn’t spend anywhere near as much money lobbying as a number of other anti-gun organizations.
The NRA is successful because they help candidates who already hold views that the NRA likes, and mostly because voters vote for candidate who favor gun rights.
A repeal of the Gun Free Zone act is the only thing that has a possibility of helping.
It’ll help, but it’s not the only thing.
We can (and should) argue about the constitutionality of placing temporary restrictions on those making threats, until we can better determine the true level of risk. Yes, there is plenty of room for abuse; it will happen. But it’s a step in the right direction–that being towards enforcement of existing laws and away from confiscation. COULD such laws be used to deny access to lawful gun owners? Yes, probably, depending on how the laws are written. We’ll have to be vigilant.
But those risks are worth it if helps more non gun-owners understand that the issue is social and logistical, not material. We can steer the issue in a direction that benefits all of us, even though nobody gets everything they want. Mainly what I want is to not lose my gun rights, while also reducing these mass shootings. Weapon bans don’t work; social measures might, if we’re serious about them, and if we take a hand in them.
Sure. Let’s put a temporary restriction on a person who’s made some kind of threat no matte how vague, for a few hours until somebody can (hopefully) figure out if it’s real.
But – as with the greatest mass shooter in American history, the Las Vegas shooter – if he reads clean on the shitty and as full of holes as a Sandy Hook first grader and not worth much background check, then let’s sell him as many near battlefield grade weapons he wants, with all the trimmings, meaning 7,000 bullets and things that turn those near battleground weapons into actual battleground weapons, and just to show how neighborly and eager to serve our customers exercising their Second Amendment rights we are,
Let’s help him carry the means to shoot five hundred people and kill 58 to his car.
again, you look to GOVERNMENT to take responsibility and act when its OUR problem. government’s job is to: a) protect our rights, not infringe them, and to b) protect us from OUTSIDE threats. its up to us as a society to pull up our panties and do what has to be done within the limits set by (a) above. this means taking action, not making laws. so, what works? we know from Israel and from countless foiled plots that good guys with guns are about the only thing proven to stop bad guys with guns. period. however, our pansy assed society won’t man-up and arm the guardians of our kids for 8 hours a day. face it, evil people will get guns or whatever their weapon of choice regardless of laws. laws won’t stand between them and our kids. GROW UP AMERICA.
Great maybe all the LEO agencies can purchase fleets of long black sedans with blacked out windows, call them Black Ravens.
Penalizing people for posting while drunk (or stupid) isn’t going to fly, nor should it.
If we really want to stop school shootings, we need to change the culture in a very specific way – we need to normalize the everyday possession, carry and handling of firearms, and turn down the fetishization surrounding it.
Probably the best way to do that is two-fold: 1) encourage all school staff to carry during the day, and 2) implement firearms training and competitions for school-age kids.
Kurt
Sure. Turn America into an armed camp, with a machine gun in every pot and everybody on a hair trigger and ready to blast away at a moment’s notice.
Excuse me. A leaf just dropped in my garden and I need to go spray the place with gunfire just in case that leaf is the advance warning that my home is about to be invaded.
What is wrong with you people?
Chris, found your website via Aesop’s. Like what I see so far.
Sean – see the link to the JPFO’s Genocide chart for the 20th century: http://jpfo.org/pdf02/genocide-chart.pdf
How did that work out for the 85+ million souls exterminated? Think there were a few who thought at that time gun controls were being implemented in their respective countries that “it could never happen here”?
The 2A does not confer any rights to gun ownership. It is listed in the BORs as a constraint on our government. We are all born with the God given right to defend ourselves. Period.
My thoughts and prayers go out to those who lost their lives in the Parkland shooting.
“My thoughts and prayers go out to those who lost their lives in the Parkland shooting.”
Please allow me to convey the same message to you that those kids and everyone else of us who’s lost loved ones to gun violence, the same message we’re all conveying to the lying ass politicians who offer their “thoughts and prayers” and not another thing: blow them out your ass on the way to the gun store, creep.
Well quoted Rob
Sean, Your critically thoughtless ad hominem attack on Rob is your intellectual tapout on this topic.
Of course, you failed to address the question of genocidal extermination from totalitarian, despotic regimes. You can do the maths. This is the fly in your confiscation try. You open up all the risk of malevolent .gov.
Fifty to a hundred million disarmed and exterminated. Mao, Stalin/Lennin, Armenia, Nazi Germany, Pol Pot Cambodia, Hutus and Tutsis in Africa, North Korea…….
You lose on this one Sean. Your confiscation argument is myopic.
I suggest you read Mas Ayoobs book Deadly Force as an excellent primer on the moral, ethical and legal use of deadly force in self defense.
Sean,
Methinks you need to meditate on an old piece of wisdom – “An armed society is a polite society.”
Puffing up what I said into a strawman isn’t making your case.
Kurt
You know, I’ve been all over Europe, and they have very polite and much safer societies and they don’t have a third of a billion guns in private hands.
But again, I’m sure my arguments that we should have sensible gun control and put weapons of mass destruction beyond use falls on deaf ears here.
The only real solutions you guys ever offer is that we need more of these weapons, carried into more places.
As I write this, the NRA is releasing a statement that raising the age to be allowed to purchase assault weapons from 18 to 21 is a nonstarter.
Ditto for bump stocks. We need more of them, not bans on them.
Why should the two thirds of Americans who don’t own guns have to worry that they or their beloveds will be killed just because you want these weapons and want to be able to swan around in public with them?
I’m going to ask you the same question I ask a lot of gun people: how can I tell if the guy behind me in line at Starbucks armed with a Glock is a “responsible” gun owner or maybe insane or evil or just intoxicated?
Do I have the right to walk the public streets free from the fear that any one of those sporting guns might just decide to use me to make history?
1) You know, I’ve been all over Europe, and they have very polite and much safer societies and they don’t have a third of a billion guns in private hands.
– We are not Europe, and I’m glad of it. Our culture is different. I think you might find it useful to read “The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy”, by David Kopel
2) Why should the two thirds of Americans who don’t own guns have to worry that they or their beloveds will be killed just because you want these weapons and want to be able to swan around in public with them?
– Wrong question, and probably bad data. I’m pretty sure that it’s far more more than 1/3 of adult Americans who own firearms, and the more relevant question is “Why should those who don’t want to face up to the duty to protect themselves and their families deprive those who are brave enough to do so the tools to perform the task?”
3) I’m going to ask you the same question I ask a lot of gun people: how can I tell if the guy behind me in line at Starbucks armed with a Glock is a “responsible” gun owner or maybe insane or evil or just intoxicated?
– Not always easy, but I have a couple of suggestions: “The Gift of Fear”, Gavin DeBecker and “Left of Bang” by Patrick van Horne and Jason A. Riley. More to the point is this: There are no guarantees in life, Grow up and accept that. Living in Condition White is a sure ticket to an early grave, even if you never meet a single gun wielder.
4) Do I have the right to walk the public streets free from the fear that any one of those sporting guns might just decide to use me to make history?
– No, you don’t. What you have is the right to defend yourself and innocent others. I’d discuss the nature of rights vs. wants, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion.
Kurt
I appreciate the fact that you and some of others here are quite clear that those of us who don’t wish to live in a society where people wander the streets with the means to kill us doesn’t mean dick, and that if we don’t like it, we should either suck it up or get our own guns.
I appreciate that you guys will accept no limitations on the kinds or numbers of weapons you can own, give to anyone you like, and carry all over the society, and that we who want restrictions on this stuff should just go blow.
I’ve been hearing that from people like you for years.
So, I only have one other question for you: where do you live that’s so dangerous that you don’t feel safe unless you have on you the means to kill someone at a second’s notice?
I live in New York City, a place with nine million people in a region of twenty million, and I use the subways and trains to travel all over the place at any time of the day or night and I’ve never felt that I need a semiautomatic gun on me when I go to the store at midnight for milk.
Is where you live really that lawless? Are you so afraid of your fellows that you must have the means to kill them available to you every waking moment?
Sean,
Go back to Europe, and stay there, please. America don’t need another pussy like you. While you’re at it, take all the other pussified boys with you.
It looks like you would have learned by now, absolutely nobody is listening to you. Just take your hoplophobic ass and GO!
“those of us who don’t wish to live in a society where people wander the streets with the means to kill us doesn’t mean dick”
Sean, that’s the first thing you’ve gotten right (accidentally) here since you blundered in.
There is no society on earth, anywhere or any time in its entire history, where you could wander the streets where no one had the means to kill you. Anyone who thinks otherwise is utterly delusional.
So the fact that you want to actually move to Oz and live in the Emerald City does not, in fact, mean dick to anyone living here in reality. But it is a sign of a pretty severe clinical psychosis on your part.
You really should seek professional help. Your contributions here point out with blistering clarity the fact that, psychologically speaking, you’re nothing but a bag of cats in your head, with access to a computer keyboard, and this issue is far too emotionally fraught for you, so you’re not helping anything by getting yourself all wound up and acting out on total strangers.
When I can use any three of posts for a clinical treatise on textbook paranoia, borderline personality traits, PTSD, and delusions, I’m not just stringing those words together. You need some regular couch time, and probably two or three serious prescriptions.
Go back to your doctor and tell him you’ve still got a few more issues to work through.
Given that there are something on the order of 100,000,000 gun owners in America, and somewhere between 350,000 and a half billion firearms, you’d think we’d do the bloodthirsty mayhem thing better. I guess we’re just not competent at being leering knuckledragging killbots. Drat those gun owners for being such a pack of sober, responsible people.
Sean, I wish you well, I really do. You’re ineffectual, you can’t convince anyone of anything, your policy preferences will never become law, and you’ll spend your life running in circles with your hair on fire, but at least you’re good for a chuckle.
Yeah, I know. Being agonized and sickened over losing loved ones to gun violence is good for a chuckle at the gun store, ain’t it?
Well, you know how us libtard snowflakes are. Hell, we ain’t worth even considering, are we.
Are we are is Americans who’ve lost people we love to violence and it’s the fault of those we loved because they didn’t have their own guns and weren’t faster on the draw.
What the fuck is wrong with you people?
No, you aren’t worth considering, because you’re hysterical, immune to rational argument, insist on arguing in bad faith, and you smell bad. Get this straight: you’re proposing curtailing my rights in pursuit of a policy which will fail to make anyone any safer, and we won’t have that. You don’t get a vote on the subject. It’s not up to you. We don’t give a damn if you don’t like or are afraid of us. You can’t shame us. You can’t force us. You don’t have a clue how to persuade us.
In short, you don’t matter. I only type this because my regular chew toys are hiding and you’re a rather dull and repetitive substitute.
Maybe it would just be easier to teach people to kill each other with wild abandon and since that’s already happening in America, the smartest among us should just buy gun company stocks and vote Republican.
That’s easier, dude, and besides, it’s moving with the tide instead of against it.
Fortunes get made moving with the tide, never against it.
I don’t vote Republican (or Democrat), nor do I own any gun company stocks.
Actually, I agree that we should teach everybody how to kill each other. At one level, it’s called being part of the unorganized militia, and at another it’s called self-defense, and is a set of skills every adult should have. Instruction should begin at some stage in grade school
Kurt
Guys,
I appreciate all the comments, please keep them coming. Sorry I was tied up all day and couldn’t respond as much as I should have.
In a sense, all of this is totally pointless. Wanna know why?
Because today, with hundreds of the kids who lost friends and who survived the latest gun massacre looking from the gallery, the Florida voted 71-36 to refuse to even debate banning military grade weapons like the AR-15 that teenager was able to buy in fifteen minutes and then use to slaughter 17 people and wound 15 more.
There it is: our government won’t even talk about banning any kind of gun, or any accessory, such as the bump stock the Florida shooter used to wound 500 and kill 58.
I get it: the only solution you gun people will offer is more guns in more hands in more places.
And the government you and the gun industry and their lobby control is working overtime to answer your dreams as much as they can.
What do I mean?
They are working to make it legal for you to carry guns anywhere in America, even in those states that restrict it.
It’s called the “Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act,” and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnel and Donald Trump are determined that it become law this year.
What is the “Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act?”
Well, what it says is if you have a concealed carry permit, then you can carry your gun into states and cities that don’t allow concealed carry, such as my own New York City.
It means that if you live in one of the about a dozen states that allow you to “carry” your gun after you buy it without any further kind of license or training you can carry it here, in my City, be it Central Park or Times Square or on my block, and there’s not a bloody thing we who live here can do about it.
“It makes concealed carry permits like drivers licenses,” as the ones pushing it say.
So, even though I chose to live in a place where people are not allowed to swan around in the streets with lethal weapons, now you people are going to insist that I do.
I don’t think you people know how much you people are repulsing and angering us who don’t want to live in the prison of guns in America that you all dream of.
Sean,
You make massive assumptions and live in faux safety bubble.
There are people with knives all around you in NYC. Deadly tools, just one you are completely desensitized too. Guns too. Just head over to unsavory areas.
Why dont you go tell some gang felons your feeling on guns. See what they have to say? They are frequent illegal users. Against law abiding citizens.
Go tell it to the Sureno shitbird.
No? Right.
You’ll troll law abiding gun owners and heap derision and scorn because its safe to do so. Again, go tell it to Mr. Prohibited Person Felon who’s carrying Mexican AIWB (appendix inside the waistband – look it up).
LTC holders in Texas are 4x more law abiding than regular folk. The number jumps to 6x for CHL holders in Florida. Your more blood in the streets wailing…..is just that.
Moreover, we cant even have a discussion on this. You cant legally articulate and scale force out of a wet self defense paper bag.
Name five violent forcible felonies and the three conditions which you must meet to use immediate deadly force to protect yourself or a loved one. In any state at any time. With any tool.
Like.
A gun.
This is a rhetorical question because you wont answer it.
__________________________________________________
As far as Chris’ original question. I second Aesop’s issues. He nailed it.
First of all, I live in New York City and have for half my life. I travel all over this City, at any time of day or night, and I’m not afraid.
Sure, you can get assaulted. I have been. Many years ago, by a group of black teenagers who hated young white guys. They brutally beat me, and if I’d had a gun, I might have killed every one of them.
But then I would have been a killer, and I have no wish to be such a one as that.
Someone I loved deeply was murdered, and whatever else I may do in this life, I don’t want to inflict what that murderer did to my beloved and to those of us who loved him. That wound never heals. It always with us and never far away.
So, despite the fact that I have, as the song says “lived in a brownstone, lived in a ghetto, lived all over this town,” I don’t live in fear and I don’t need a damned gun.
Which is your choice to make FOR YOU. You don’t get to make that choice FOR ME, or for anyone else. Nor do you have the right to decide what tools I may use to defend myself and my family.
Where do you live that you’re so afraid that you insist on the right to carry lethal weapons in public?
Are the people around you in public really so threatening that you need to be able to kill them on a second’s notice?
And are there any guns you think shouldn’t be legal to own? I ask because I get told by gun people all the time that no, we shouldn’t ban the devices that turn semi automatic rifles into machine guns, that there should be no restrictions on the kinds and numbers of weapons one can own and carry into the streets.
The other day, someone sent me a video of a bunch of guys “open carrying” AR-15s slung across their shoulders and Glocks in hip holsters.
I guess that sounds like paradise to you, ja?
So may I assume that you’re so afraid that you are willing to accept the more than one hundred thousand shot and nearly twenty thousand dead as just the price of you “protecting” yourself and your family and if we don’t like worrying about you and those like you swanning around in public with guns, we should either go blow or get our own gun?
The answer to gun violence is more guns.
Is that the argument?
1) Where do you live that you’re so afraid that you insist on the right to carry lethal weapons in public?
– Among humans. Let me explain: When I was much younger, I worked nights as a taxi driver (during a period in my neck of the woods when several were murdered), as a clerk at a 7-11 (and was assaulted by someone who thought they should get a free half case of longnecks after dropping the one they purchased in the parking lot) and in a couple of retail stores (and I stopped shoplifters several times). I’ve learned that the human animal is capable of anything, at any time. If you think you can sleepwalk your way around where you live, you are wrong, and might well be dead wrong at some point.
2) And are there any guns you think shouldn’t be legal to own? I ask because I get told by gun people all the time that no, we shouldn’t ban the devices that turn semi automatic rifles into machine guns, that there should be no restrictions on the kinds and numbers of weapons one can own and carry into the streets.
– No restrictions. If you can afford it, you should be able to buy it – all the way up to main battle tanks, and beyond. See the quote [1] at the end of my reply.
3) The answer to gun violence is more guns. Is that the argument?
– Almost, but not quite. It’s a bit more complicated than that. Think “herd immunity”, and perhaps “deterrence” among other things. I’ll lay it out a bit for you: A tiny proportion of the population commits the large majority of the crimes – something around 1-2% who commit as much as 80%. If we increase the number of people who are carrying, willing and able to defend themselves, we increase the likelihood that the 1-2% will run into someone who can and will defend themselves.
But finally, all of this is only secondary. As I alluded to above, crime prevention and response is not the main reason why the Second Amendment was instituted. It was instituted as a bulwark against tyranny. If you are between the ages of 16 and 60, you are a member of the militia. This is something that this country has forgotten in the past 150 years, and which I hope we resurrect soon – the culture of the gun. Getting people used to carrying, handling, using and maintaining firearms is of utmost importance.
I can do without a standing military [2,3], if we have a real militia, which means the majority of adults are familiar and comfortable with firearms.
Kurt
[1] “Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man gainst his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American…. [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.” (Tench Coxe, The Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.)
[2] “A standing army is like a standing member. It’s an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.”
―Elbridge Gerry
Source/Notes:
Constitutional Convention (1787)
[3] “What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.”
―Elbridge Gerry
Source/Notes:
House of Representatives, Amendments to the Constitution, 17, 20 Aug. 1789
Hey, I’ve read what your fellows here have to say, I’ve debated them, and now, I think it’s time for me to drop out, because it’s all devolved into name calling and insults and I have a life outside of calling people names on the Web and I hop ya’ll do, too.
And I also know that I can’t possible win an argument with any of you unless I agree that the only solution is for all of us to buy guns and carry them everywhere we go in this life.
But I do wish to leave you and your fellows here with a wish and advice:
Don’t ever change.
Continue to dismiss my and other’s concern’s about living in a society with people swanning around with machine guns and maybe about to kill us in public and when we worry whether one with such things is either a “responsible” gun owner or insane or evil or maybe drunk, dismiss our concerns and call us liberal snowflakes and pussies and tell us to either stay indoors or man up and get our own guns.
Push for more laws so you can buy ever more lethal weapons and carry them into more places.
Continue to make guns the centerpiece of your politics, and say that if people in schools or theatres or concerts or churches or malls or parks or nightclubs want to enjoy being alive in those places, they either need their own guns or designate someone to have their guns and be at the ready to kill at a moment’s notice.
Please. Don’t. Ever. Change.
You may not understand this, but as long as people can vote in this land, your position is doing more for my side than you can possibly know.
So tomorrow, when you go for coffee or a breakfast biscuit, please make sure to open carry your AR-15.
I can’t really improve on Kurt’s response, except in a single spot:
“The other day, someone sent me a video of a bunch of guys “open carrying” AR-15s slung across their shoulders and Glocks in hip holsters.
I guess that sounds like paradise to you, ja?”
Yes.
I’ve done this, although the models of gun were different. I don’t usually lug a rifle around on foot without good reason, like for a rally, but I almost always have a concealed revolver on my person. I don’t generally open carry but only because my truck is irritating to get in and out of with a protruding holster and the less I handle the gun between putting it on in the morning and taking it off at night, the better.
So you’re not afraid, even though you’ve already been severely beaten once yourself, and lost a relative to a murder?
That’s what most folks in the rest of the country call being a “slow learner”, and what most professionals call “psychotic delusions”.
But nobody’s forcing you to have a gun.
(Another delusion destroyed.)
So you can go on about your business now.
There’s really nothing else for you to contribute here.
And believe me, you haven’t.
“It makes concealed carry permits like drivers licenses,”
Or like gay marriage licenses?
Except no one ever slaughtered dozens of people with a gay marriage.
And BTW: the Supreme Court ruled that you have the right to own a gun to protect your home, but that local and state governments have the right to regulate the carrying of those things in public.
Here in New York we have severely restricted the right to concealed or open carry, and yet the Republicans are determined to allow people from loose gun states to carry their weapons on our streets and there’s not a thing we can do about it.
So, your desire to carry lethal weapons means you get to carry them into Central Park or Times Square and that’s the end of it?
Your right in your state to carry guns in public supersedes our right to decide that we don’t want those things carried in our public spaces?
Guns über alles?
1) Except no one ever slaughtered dozens of people with a gay marriage.
– True, dat. I have no problem with gay marriage, seeing as how my gay brother has been married longer than I have with his one marriage than I have in my four marriages.
2) And BTW: the Supreme Court ruled that you have the right to own a gun to protect your home, but that local and state governments have the right to regulate the carrying of those things in public.
– Even the Supremes can get it wrong (think Dred Scott, among others), and they are on this one. They didn’t pay attention to history or the wording of the 2nd. They missed the part about “shall not be infringed”, and the reasoning behind the 2nd.
3) Here in New York we have severely restricted the right to concealed or open carry, and yet the Republicans are determined to allow people from loose gun states to carry their weapons on our streets and there’s not a thing we can do about it.
– Yep, almost the same as letting people from loose car states come drive on your streets, but better. You might wish to examine the death rates from firearms in those loose gun states, and compare them to the death rates from firearms in NY City. Heck, might even prove instructive to look at the overall homicide rates.
4) So, your desire to carry lethal weapons means you get to carry them into Central Park or Times Square and that’s the end of it?
– Yep. You’re finally catching on. Private property is different of course, but if the owner doesn’t want me there armed, then I’m not welcome at all.
5) Your right in your state to carry guns in public supersedes our right to decide that we don’t want those things carried in our public spaces?
– You don’t have that right. You don’t get to dictate how I run my life, as long as I don’t harm or threaten you – by which I don’t mean hurting your feelz merely by having a firearm in my possession, because that neither harms nor threatens you.
6) Guns über alles?
– No, Freedom über alles. Guns are just part of that.
Kurt
“Except no one ever slaughtered dozens of people with a gay marriage.”
Yeah, no.
You might want to catch up on the whole AIDS crisis; I think it was a little more brutal on that population than you seem to think.
Or we could just ask Rock Hudson or Freddie Mercury.
But hey, if you want to make gay marriage only legal in states that vote it into law, and make it stop at their state lines too, and do the same thing with driver’s licenses and such, we can talk.
What you’ve done in NY is to severely infringe on the Constitutional right to self-protection, and you don’t get to have a different US Constitution in NYFC than the rest of the country.
All the Reciprocity Act would do is to bring NY back into the United States, however painful or distasteful you personally find that prospect.
But it’s still not forcing *you* to carry a gun.
So you’ve got no beef with it.
You can continue to swan around care free, defenseless, and irresponsible, and hope that the next time you’re getting jacked up, someone else will do for you what you’re incapable and unwilling to do for yourself.
Or, not.
That’s why it’s called “freedom”. But it’s a two-way street.
Sean,
Do you realize you are walking around people armed with guns every day? Just because you do not see it doesn`t mean they are not carrying. For decades people have armed themselves regardless of the law. Because they keep the gun concealed you never see it. Cocaine and heroin have been illegal for how long? Yet there isn`t a city in America where you can`t score some if you want it. Go take care of the drug problem and then come back and talk about guns.
I’m sure there are people carrying guns in the streets here, but just as with your comparison to cocaine, it’s not something common precisely because it’s not legal.
We don’t want people carrying lethal weapons in our public spaces, especially people who only had to pass an instant background check and nothing else having the means to kill us should they decide to for any reason.
I get it: you think carrying guns in public is fine. I don’t most New Yorkers don’t.
So, my thought is that you people out there live your lives as you wish and we’ll do the same.
Sound like a plan?
And if the answer is no because you wouldn’t feel safe here unless you were allowed to carry the means to kill us, then may I suggest you vacation somewhere else?
One other thing, Mike: yeah, there are guns everywhere, which is why every day in this country, there are about 315 people, shot and wounded or killed or who commit suicide with guns.
I’m sure you think of yourself as a responsible gun owner, one of the “good guys” with a gun.
And I don’t doubt you are.
But so was the relative of mine who tried to kill me when she mistook me for a burglar because she was blind drunk and walked into her front door when I was sixteen.
And so was my friend who put a shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger on Christmas night when we were 19.
And so was my half sister’s cousin, who mistook his drunk brother for a burglar one night and killed him.
Have you ever gotten intoxicated? Really, really lost your temper? Misjudged a situation as dangerous when it wasn’t? Thought of killing yourself?
No?
Well, it happens every bloody day in this country, about 315 times.
And I want to live in a place where that’s as rare as we can make it.
You have the right to own a gun to protect your home or target practice or hunt or for any other reason you wish.
But the Supreme Court has said that states and municipalities have the right to regulate the carrying of those things in public, and we don’t allow it.
Why do you think your view should supersede the wishes of the huge majority of the nine million New Yorkers?
Sean,
I’ve been debating writing this, but I don’t think one view has been addressed fully.
You keep mentioning your friend that committed suicide. I’m sorry you’ve lost a friend, and I’ve been there with talking a friend out of suicide (thankfully successfully) and having relatives kill themselves (with a rope in one case, not sure in the other as the parents are still in denial that it wasn’t an accident and won’t discuss the details 30 years later) and the ongoing deaths of my brothers and sisters in the veteran community.
But I consider it totally irrelevant to this discussion.
While suicide is almost always a stupid, selfish, irresponsible, inconsiderate permanent solution to a temporary situation, it is also the absolute right of any person to go down that path.
At the bottom line a person’s life is their own, and no one, not family, friend or government has any right to _force_ someone to keep living if they don’t want to. (I’m agnostic, so not particularly concerned what any particular deity has to say on the subject).
So, the fact that someone used a firearm to exercise that absolute right is, to me, irrelevant to the discussion.
That being said, I have no problem with trying to talk someone to keep them from killing themselves (laws against suicide are worse than ridiculous). But the impact of their decision should they decide to end it is of no consequence to the fact they have that right.
As for myself, I’ve never considered it for myself other than in hypothetical scenarios (trapped in a burning vehicle or building is about the only non-military reason I can come up with why I would seriously consider it).
I hope you don’t take this as an attack. It’s simply another perspective to consider on this one subject. I could go on about your other points, but I don’t want to distract from this point.
First of all, no, I don’t think of what you said as an attack and in fact I’m glad you took the time to say it. I appreciate thoughtful discussion, especially about vital issues such as this.
I mostly agree with you about suicide, with a caveat: sometimes, life can seem so bleak that it can very hard to see it clearly and people end up doing something they might not had they had the support or time to think about it or work through it.
I know this because I did try to kill myself. It was in February of 1992. My ex lover had been murdered by the guy he left me for and I had just attended the trial, my current lover had just died after slowly drowning over seven weeks from a lung infection caused by AIDS, and he and I had lost 34 people we knew and cared about the year before, some of them people I’d been close to since grade school.
So one day, I got up, bought a rope from a store, tied a halyard knot in it and the other end to a tree, put the thing around my throat and stepped off a boulder in a wooded area of Central Park.
I dropped about three feet and it was instantly the most intensely painful and terrifying thing I’d ever experienced. I tried to get the rope off or pull myself up but couldn’t.
As I blacked out, I remember thinking “it’s over. Finally, it’s over.”
But it wasn’t. I came to laying on the path, surrounded by people. They had seen me and took me down from there.
I was terribly angry at them because I knew I couldn’t do that again and I couldn’t live here anymore.
But, thanks to a lot of effort by loving friends and time, I gradually came to love and laugh and live again. It took years.
I still carry the holes in my spirit where the ones I loved so much once were, but I have learned to carry the weight of that. Some days, that’s not easy and some days, I doesn’t hurt so much.
I mention this in a discussion about guns because had I owned one, I would have used it in my house that day.
And I would have wanted to.
And you’re right: it would fundamentally have been my decision alone.
But, in the years since, I’ve built a life on the ashes of the world I used to love that was destroyed and had I died that day in the Park, I would have missed some truly sublime people and things that make life the incredible thing it is.
xI’ve learned since that day how incredible selfish what I did was. Not only would my already suffering loved ones had yet another horror and loss to survive, but the people who found me in the Park would have been hurt terribly.
That’s what guns can do: make it so easy and quick that in an instant, you can do a thing that can’t be undone and tear a hole in life and in the spirits of everyone around you.
My friend who killed himself – who’s name was Matthew – was found by his parents Christmas night when they returned from a party.
My dad, who is a CSI dude with the local PD, responded to the scene. He told me about it the next day – the 26th – which is my birthday. I went over to have dinner with him and he told me all about what he’d done the night before. He went into great detail.
When I asked him the name of the boy, and he told me, I was devastated to realize I knew him, that we’d spent much of that year frolicking and laughing and climbing things together.
We’ve never known why he did it.
So, I guess here’s where I am about this and guns: I hate the damned things, as I’ve said, but I do understand that people want them and have a right to them.
But that comes at a terrible price,
I think we should do everything we can to reduce that price, from building a real mental health and suicide prevention apparatus to universal background checks with no exceptions, and yes, banning some of those terrible things people are using to slaughter so many in just a few minutes.
It drives me crazy that this slaughter goes on and on and every time it comes to the national consciousness, we all play the same roles:
Liberals yap about gun control, conservatives say it’s not the guns, politicians dither and bob and weave, and most obscenely, people worried about bans flock into stores and strip them to the walls, making gun profits soar and this whole thing becomes a hugely profitable thing for some and unbearable misery for millions.
It happens every damned time, and it’s going to happen again in a few days and then again a few days later, and we aren’t going to do a single thing to stop it.
I wish we would. We owe it to ourselves and those who’re going to pay the price of guns in America.
Thanks for taking the time to discuss it, dude.
Dear All,
I’m pretty much an outsider, because I don’t live in the US, and don’t know in-depth about all the circumstances – please take that into consideration.
What I see, and what my perception is from Europe (Hungary) is something like this:
-School shootings only occur in the U.S., roughly speaking every other month
-Getting a firearm is absurdly easy – you can even buy on the net
-Almost everyone can get a gun, if wanted and if determined to get one – there’s no real limit
-You can buy ammo or guns in the hardware store, which is also ridiculous
-it’s nice that laws are so strict in the U.S., that a police officer can shoot the perp on a personal decision – and they do (no offense intended – our police officers are bound by law so much they are afraid of using their gun due to the extensive investigation following gun use – and with the idiotic laws shielding the perp, not too many of them want to take the risk, rather they use non lethal).
Here, mostly because the strict regulations and the heritage of communism, almost NOBODY can get a weapon for personal use, even if a LEO or military. In those very rare cases, psych eval and other eligibility critera must be met, like ammo cases separately from gun cases, separate keys, etc, with random checks, and re-evaluation. (Hunters can have rifles only, with similar evaluation)
I understand both sides. From the gun owners’ point, the 2nd amendment is a basic right so embedded into society that a harsh regulation would strongly feel as a restriction to freedom. Especially that armed citizens are not too easy to be pushed over – see my previous comment on communism. From the other viewpoint, it’s too easy to get a gun, and most of the owners are definitely not the responsible types. My opinion is that some regulation must be done, if you don’t want to sacrifice some of your children every year. It just needs to be accepted that the Wild West is over, and the second amendment was made in the 18th century. The gun lobby also seems to be too strong on influencing your politics. I suggest studying the effects of the Australian gun law changes as well.
I hope my outsider view can give you something valuable to think about, this is the only reason I commented – not to start a flamewar.
As an outsider (that is, someone who lives outside the country), you’ve got an incomplete and incorrect set of data.
1) School shootings only occur in the U.S., roughly speaking every other month
– No, that’s not correct. School shootings are much more rare than that.
2) Getting a firearm is absurdly easy – you can even buy on the net
– Almost true, but not quite. While you can order/buy one over the Internet, it must be shipped to a licensed dealer, and before you can receive the firearm you will still be subject to the same background checks and forms that would be required if you actually bought it from that licensed dealer.
3) You can buy ammo or guns in the hardware store, which is also ridiculous.
– Well, yes, you can, but that hardware store must have the same licensing and file the same forms, and do the same background checks as the other licensed firearms dealers.
4) Almost everyone can get a gun, if wanted and if determined to get one – there’s no real limit
– That’s true, even in your country. It’s just that in our country, we recognize the individual right to do so, and don’t criminalize what shouldn’t be (mostly – by which I mean that there are *lots* of rules, regulations and laws governing who can and can’t purchase firearms, and under what conditions).
5) it’s nice that laws are so strict in the U.S., that a police officer can shoot the perp on a personal decision – and they do.
– We’re working on that. The rule of the “Reasonably Scared Cop” is starting to come under scrutiny.
6) From the gun owners’ point, the 2nd amendment is a basic right so embedded into society that a harsh regulation would strongly feel as a restriction to freedom.
– Not really, That is, it wouldn’t merely “feel” like a restriction to freedom, it “would be” a restriction of freedom.
7) From the other viewpoint, it’s too easy to get a gun, and most of the owners are definitely not the responsible types.
– There are over 300 million firearms in private hands (possibly over 600 million, but that’s open to debate). If firearms owners in this country weren’t responsible, the carnage would be far greater than what you see in the news. This is not to say that there isn’t crime committed by people with firearms in hand, but generally folks who own firearms in this country are very peaceable people, slow to anger, and slow to violence.
Frankly, as I’ve stated elsewhere in this thread, we need more firearms, fewer restrictions on carry, and a broader and deeper gun culture (and one way of achieving that would be to start training children as young as 8, or perhaps 12, in school, on marksmanship, safe handling and maintenance of firearms, as part of the normal curriculum).
Kurt
Pete,
School shootings are far less common than that. You have to be careful where your data comes from. Mike Bloomberg’s AstroTurf organizations are not reliable sources. Mass shootings are statistical outliers, even here. They are a tiny fraction of firearm homicides. Most of those are felons killing felons in urban areas, and laws don’t have much effect on them.
It’s very easy to buy a gun lawfully, if you’re not a legally prohibited person. It’s easy to buy a gun unlawfully if you’re any kind of person, and that’s true anywhere. Europe seems to have a better black market than ours, with select-fire rifles and grenades. We don’t have stricter controls because we view firearms ownership as an individual right, and the idea is to ensure that the average citizen is a match for the average soldier. We hold to the principle that you can limit the rights of people who demonstrate by their actions that they are unworthy of trust, not because of what we fear they will do. Most gun control schemes fall into the latter category.
Also, you can buy guns at hardware stores only if they are also federally-licensed firearms dealers. Anyone engaged in the business of selling guns must have a license, and the oversight is significant. Ammunition you can get in convenience stores in some places.
Allow me to explain the why our nation’s founder’s put the Second Amendment there in the first place.
The American Constitution is all about the concept of Separation of Powers. One single entity with sole control of a government is a recipe for tyranny, no matter if it’s an Emperor, Junta, Party, ect.
So, our Constitution separates that power between a President, a Congress, and a Supreme Court, with strict limits on each, and so that each branch can check the actions of the other branches.
There’s also the basic assumption that all the powers of our government come from the consent of the governed- there’s no special group of autocrats, party functionaries, members of a particular family that is appointed by blood to rule over the USA. Instead, the Citizens decide who is to represent them.
Alas, history has shown that even a representative government can be taken over by demagogues or charlatans. Should the government be the sole possessor of arms, it can become the sole arbiter of power. The bloody history of the 20th century shows what happens when a government alone has that power.
By recognizing the right of free citizens to possess arms as well, you have another separation of powers. The government no longer posses the sole means of using force. It’s a final check on tyranny.
As we say here, first the soap box, then the soap box, then the jury box, and then the ammo box.
Just curious:
How did that Hungarian restricted firearms thingie work out for folks in Budapest, long around 1956?
Just curious.
I thought I’d flog this dead horse a little more.
After reading all the comments to date and having a chance to listen to the media talking heads some things become obvious.
Extreme polarization of ideas and political beliefs is to be expected. This ranges from “make gun ownership illegal” to “ensconced tactical fire teams in schools”. It is the middle ground that has the potential to have solutions. The belief that a violent shooting spree is a non-typical event in America may be true, but it is of such horrific consequences that it attracts the news media, politicians and well-meaning people who want to improve and prevent the situation.
My local paper reports that Florida is considering a law that would allow the police to involuntary hold anyone who might hurt themselves. A number of people have addressed the legal and social problems associated with that. Personally, I’m horrified that two officers could show up on my doorstep with a writ for my arrest on the grounds that someone believes I might be dangerous. Of course resisting such arrest might be used as proof that you are dangerous.
Our fictional gun salesman is certainly right to not sell a tool to someone who indicates they will commit an act of violence with it. I would expect this reaction from the car salesperson to cashier selling hammers. But to expect them to follow on social media all their potential customers is just unreasonable. Few people purchase a tool of any sort and proclaim to the seller that they are going to harm someone with it.
Flagging NICS with evaluations of individuals based on interpretation social media is just a bad idea.
Metal detectors in schools? While it is reported that my hometown uses metal detectors in some schools, I see it as a major problem. The people demanding action would pale if you told them they need to pony up another $500 dollars every year in taxes to pay for metal detectors, upkeep and repair as well as personnel trained to run them and make an arrest. These demands always come with the unstated assertion that someone else will foot the bill.
So what options do we have other than to shrug our shoulders and walk away from this problem?
Let’s admit the solution is going cost money and create pain. Then….
Raise the age for gun owner ship for all guns that fire a projectile (includes airsoft) to 25 years. Numerous studies have shown that children don’t always understand the long term consequence of their actions until their mid-twenties. I have known youths who were Olympic caliber shooters. They shot their parent’s firearms in the presence of their parents or legally appointed guardians. I don’t see this as hardship or infringing on 2A rights.
Allow trained teachers to carry in schools if they choose to. We can iron out the training requirements later. Those who equate this with living in an armed camp should realize that they already are. Armed criminals don’t obey the prohibitions and legal CCW is a fact of life in most communities.
Increase the training for teachers to better communicate with students and insure that students know they will not be punished for revealing/reporting other students who disturb them. Teachers need to be able to communicate to guidance counselors and school officials their documented concerns of troubled youths in their school.
What is done with this information? Certainly parent/guardians should be notified. Inquiring as to what steps they are taking to help their child is not unreasonable. Guidance counselors should be able to recommend the names of professional help to parents. Failure to see a change in the student or action on parent’s part should result in notifying the local police to determine if previous acts and activities do make the suspect a danger to himself or others. Many city and states have the ability to request an order of involuntary confinement from a judge for the purpose of mental evaluation. From there legal action could occur if needed. This also means we, the taxpayer must pay for it.
And what about the ones that slip through? The ones that mask their thoughts and behavior until tragedy strikes? These people will always be with us. Re-read the section on CCW in schools.
Now, see? Substantive proposals that offer material for compromise. Pay attention, Sean, you’re unlikely to learn anything but there’s always hope.
Here’s a counteroffer. I’ll support this whole package if we raise the age for sales by licensed dealers to 25. I’m concerned about a gap between the onset of legal adulthood and the age floor for ownership. A parent or guardian who cares enough to teach their charges to shoot ought to be able to make them a gift of something to defend themselves with. Not everybody lives at home until 25.
So you’re for partial citizenship?
It’s okay to have an M-16 at 17 and kill people in Iraq for Uncle, but it’s not okay to own one in Peoria on your own?
If you can’t be trusted with a rifle, why should we trust you to vote?
Or drive a car? (Let’s recall the jihadi in Nice who killed 86 people and injured nearly 500, with a truck. That’s worse than five school shootings for the price of a gallon of gas.)
Or drink alcohol?
Or get married and be a parent?
So let’s be consistent: we’ll move all of that to 25.
Because 0.0000001% of Americans were whacktards who shot up schools.
And hey, if we’re going to take all that away, and move adulthood to mid-20s, we can’t, in good conscience, put them in the military. So no military until you’re 25.
And thus no Selective Service registration until you’re 25.
So no college loans until you’re 25. (It’s the law. Fair is fair.)
Of course, we aren’t going to get nearly enough volunteer recruits any more, so we’ll have to bring back the draft, and it’ll probably be universal: everyone has to serve from age 25 for four years.
Boys and girls. Equality, it’s what’s for breakfast.
And from HS graduation until you get drafted, you’ll be saying “Would you like fries with that?” a lot, and riding the bus everywhere.
For seven years. Mom and Dad will really go for that one.
You won’t be able to get any job that OSHA considers dangerous, because you’re not an adult.
That should be popular.
Then you can go to college, when you’re nearly 30, and/or settle down, get married, and have kids. When most women are entering the “at-risk” stage of pregnancies.
So there’ll be a lot more kids with birth defects, and infant mortality will climb. government – which means everyone of us- you’ll pay for that, too.
Yeah, this should work out real well.
Dear Kurt, Rustygunner, Frank,
Thanks for the clarification and answers, it helped a lot better understanding the subject.
@Kurt&Rustygunner: As I’ve stated, this is a perception, not based on solid data whatsoever. This means that if a school shooting happens in the U.S., and I’m talking about it with people, these are the points coming up. We see school shooting as a genuine US thing, even that we know that shootings occur everywhere in the World. So I might be wrong on factual things, but this is what it looks like from the other side of the Atlantic. Regardless, I’m not challenging the facts You’ve said, because you’re the ones who live there not me, and your society is affected, not mine.
I think that there are some very good ideas that can be a ground for a later consensus between the parties.
For example raising the age for sales. Or considering that “official adulthood age” is not equal to “responsible gun owner’s age”, especially for the Peter Pan generation, where rights come without responsibilities.
Training and CCW in schools for teachers seems to be a good idea too.
Maybe there’s room for training for the teens about the psychological/social effect of a gun accident, from people who had that kind of experience, and willing to tell. The goal would be to teach them about the responsibility of gun ownership/use, and the most dangerous course of action on misuse.
I also think that evaluation should be frequent, and any criminal offence (the threshold is debatable of course) would revoke the right to own/buy a gun (maybe for a time period if no offence happens, can be given back?)
I don’t think that more guns would be a solution, because I think there are already a lot of guns circulating in wrong hands. Saying “generally folks who own firearms in this country are very peaceable people, slow to anger, and slow to violence” is nice, and I frankly believe it, but the point is to somehow restrict the bad guys and potential bad guys from getting one. The question is how to do it without 1. restricting the good guys’ freedom 2. building a police state where everybody is suspicious.
What do you think about finding the root causes of a teen transforming into a shooter, and try to cure that simultaneously?
Related J.B. Peterson on the Columbine shooters:
The problem with laws to restrict bad guys who commit crimes with guns is that there are already laws that do that, and the bad guys, being criminals, ignore them. A realistic assessment of the situation is that the genie is long out of the bottle as far as restricting the supply of guns is concerned. There are just too many in circulation, and no law that stands even the remotest possibility of being executed will change the fact that people willing to break laws to obtain weapons illicitly can get all the guns they want easily. All you can do from a legislative and regulatory perspective is tighten the screws on people like me, and we aren’t having that any more.
As to mental health evaluations and official permissions and such, well, no. To begin with, there’s very little predictive value in mental health screenings. Just because someone has a mental illness does not mean they are likely to become violent. Add to that, the process would be overseen by politicians and bureaucrats, which means ideology becomes a factor. No thank you very much. As to permission, well, owning the firearms it pleases me to own is a right, not a privilege, and I am not obliged to prove to anyone that I am suitable. Punish me for evil or seriously irresponsible acts, but I will not ask “mother, may I?” Ever again.
The NRA has an excellent gun-safety program for schools called “Eddie Eagle.” Watch heads explode in much of the country if someone tries actually teaching that course. The “pretend guns are a bad dream until you see one, then panic” method of firearms safety is preferred. There are a lot of reasons kids might shoot up schools; fatherlessness, the stress of modern life, the attention we pay to such incidents, and many more. There’s no single, simple cause, and no easy solution. Punishing the innocent for the misdeeds of a few is not part of any solution.
The guns have been here for well over a century, and school shootings weren’t a problem. A lot of older Americans, my father included, will tell stories of him and fellow students commonly bringing guns to school as a matter of course. Some, to hunt after classes, others for officially sanctioned events.
And for a number of decades, an American could buy a gun from a catalogue, and have it sent right to his home, no checks at all- this ended in 1968. This included surplus semi-auto military arms, such as M-1 carbines.
It’s not the guns.
As I recall, Lee Harvey Oswald bought his gun from a catalogue.
I get it: you guys will never, EVER accept any limitations on how and what you can buy and carry, and those of us who don’t want to live in the prison of your idea of America are just liberal pussies who should either shut up or man up and get our own guns.
And I also get that the more than a hundred thousand shot and the nearly twenty thousand killed every year are just the price of freedom we have to pay so you and your fellows can have nearly a third of a billion guns in America.
Trust me: those kids in Florida and the families in Sandy Hook and the people how lost loved ones or were killed in Las Vegas and all those who’ve lost their beloveds to gun murder in this country, which amounts to more than have died in the last fifty years than have in all our wars in our entire history get it:
That’s just the price they and we have to pay so you can go into a gun store and emerge a few minutes later with enough firepower to fight on Omaha Beach, which you need to feel safe when you drive ten minutes to the Seven – Eleven for a quart of milk.
So, given that, I have only one question: where do you live that’s so lawless that you need all that death power to protect yourself as you go through your day?
Question for you- List 10 countries who, since 1900:
-were not invaded by a foreign power
-were not threatened by imminent foreign invasion
-did not have a civil war
-did not have a dictatorial government
This boy must read and re-read his comments for days and pat himself on the back for pretty turns of phrase. What a shame there’s so little logic behind it.
Unfortunately for you, Sean, “our” idea of America is the same one the Founders had, 230+ years ago.
We call that the law.
Bummer for you, huh?
But I hear no one has guns in Cuba but the government and police.
Maybe you should move there.
You shutting up would be a good second alternative.
And you keep “forgetting” that most (2/3rds) of those 100K shot, shot themselves, and a good number of what’s left were the exact bad guys doing bad things everyone should want to get shot, like the kid that shot up the school last week, and who unfortunately wasn’t shot by anyone.
But gun murders (your phrase, your fault) amount to less than 250K in the last 50 years, so less than the number of just those KIA in WWII by itself, and vastly less than the dead “in all our wars in our entire history”.
You’re on the Internet, so you could have found those facts out yourself in a couple of mouseclicks, if facts mattered to you.
So once again, we’re left to wonder if you’re just too stupid to care about being truthful, or just so evil that spewing such monstrous lies doesn’t matter to you.
And once again, there’s no third option for you.
So you may as well stop.
BTW, I live in anytown, not the Big Horse Apple, and I had to have that firepower in my hands to stop a rape in progress right outside my front door, in broad daylight, on a weekend.
The neighbors and bystanders did nothing. No one in ten houses of twenty apartments came out to see, or help. No one.
The cops didn’t even get out of their car (when they arrived half an hour later).
But the woman who was tackled, held down, and nearly (but not) raped, and her brother, didn’t accuse me of being bloodthirsty, evil, murderous, scared, or any of the other vile, entirely unjustified, and frankly ridiculous assertions you’ve made about everyone who’s called out your lies and psychosis on this forum.
They just said “Thank you”, and I said “You’re welcome”, and then we all went on with our lives.
Sorry your sympathies seem to lie with the rapist in that tale, but there it is.
Look, I get it: nothing I say here is going to mean dick. I’m a librul snowflake, a New York faggot.
The fact that I was nearly killed when I was sixteen by a drunk relative who mistook me for a burglar and a dear friend killed himself with a gun on Christmas night when we were 19 and that my half sister’s cousin killed his brother by mistake and that my most beloved brother and his wife (along with two college students) were nearly killed by two hoodlums with guns, and beyond my life, all those shot and wounded and killed by guns don’t mean dick, does it?
What does, ALL that does, is that you have the right to go into a store and emerge minutes later with as many guns of any kind and ammunition that you can carry to your car and later, swan around in the streets with.
Dude, I get it. I really do.
I’m going to take he liberty of posting this twice, because I thing it bears repeating:
Look, I get it: nothing I say here is going to mean dick. I’m a librul snowflake, a New York faggot.
The fact that I was nearly killed when I was sixteen by a drunk relative who mistook me for a burglar and a dear friend killed himself with a gun on Christmas night when we were 19 and that my half sister’s cousin killed his brother by mistake and that my most beloved brother and his wife (along with two college students) were nearly killed by two hoodlums with guns, and beyond my life, all those shot and wounded and killed by guns don’t mean dick, does it?
What does, ALL that does, is that you have the right to go into a store and emerge minutes later with as many guns of any kind and ammunition that you can carry to your car and later, swan around in the streets with.
Dude, I get it. I really do.
So you don’t mind Trump having sole authority over all weapons, then?
No, you still don’t get it, Sean.
It’s not because of your politics.
It’s not because of your sexual orientation (which no one could care a fig about).
It’s not because of where you live.
It’s not because of how you feel.
It’s not because of what happened to you, your family, your friends, or your fragile psyche.
None of those irrelevant things “mean dick” in this discussion.
What matters is because it’s the law.
(Stop, go back, and re-read the preceding sentence until it sinks in.)
The Constitution. Verbatim, black-letter law.
In fact, it even pre-dates the law in the US Constitution, and resides in Natural Law going back to the dawn of mankind.
You could look it up.
Seriously.
(Judge Silberman’s elucidation of natural law rights in Heller was simply brilliant, and masterful, as was Justice Scalia’s opinion upholding the decision, and both are online a gajillion places, even to people for whom speaking logic and historic precedent is like explaining Chinese calculus).
So in comparison to all that, no, your personal experiences and precious feeeeeeeelings about guns don’t mean dick in comparison to the essential human rights of 320M living Americans, and generations of them both past and as yet unborn.
That’s the difference between a constitutional republic, and your childhood nursery.
Glad we could clear up that troubling confusion for you.
Now if you had something to contribute from that starting point, with points and facts relevant and germane to that discussion, by all means, feel free to jump in with it. If only for the novelty of the approach.
And if, by some accident of history, you possess a high school diploma, or god forbid, any educational degree or certificate beyond that, return there immediately and demand a full refund of your tuition, and/or immediate remedial education in basic American civics, for cause.
You may even have legal grounds for a lawsuit in that respect, and I’d be happy to write you quite the monumental amicus curae brief in support of any claim you make in that respect.
I’m not going to bother with your personally and deliberately insulting crap, because I’ve already addressed that before.
But I am going to address one point:
“It’s not because of what happened to you, your family, your friends, or your fragile psyche.
None of those irrelevant things “mean dick” in this discussion.”
You make my point EXACTLY: it doesn’t matter to you that guns have been a horrific influence in my life or millions of our fellows.
All that does matter is that you be able to buy anything from a pistol to a weapon of war and be allowed to strut around in the streets with it, if for no other reason than you get to show us what a big man you are.
Well, see, I may be unusual, but I’m OK enough with what God gave me between my legs that I don’t need a fucking machine gun to compensate.
But keep on swanning around with these hellish things. Trust me, it’s helping.
Two thousand one hundred eighty-two miles per hour.
That’s nearly one thousand miles per hour faster than Concorde crossed the Atlantic.
And that’s how fast the bullets that slammed into the teenagers at the school in Florida were traveling.
Not only that, but those bullets are designed to tumble, meaning that they tore holes in those kids nearly four inches wide.
At Sandy Hook, the first responders said that many of the first graders were literally blown apart.
This is the reality of the weapons that the NRA and the Republican party says can’t be outlawed because it’s needed for self defense by “law abiding Americans” and to ban them would infringe on gun owner’s Second Amendment rights.
This is the central point of the lie that is guns in America.
And the common sporting 12 gauge shotgun is capable of making wounds far, far worse than any .223 Remington.
That tumbling bullet thing? Guncounter BS. In fact, the AR family has a reputation in the US Military as being underpowered, with terminal effects far less than that of the AK-47’s 7.62×39.
And both are far less powerful than pretty much every single hunting cartridge, from the old .30-30 Winchester to the .30-06.
Five hundred fifty miles per hour.
Over two hundred miles an hour faster than the TGV “Bullet train” crosses France.
That’s how fast the musket balls that Redcoats fired slammed into the colonists on Lexington Common in Massachusetts Colony were travelling.
Not only that, but those musket balls were over 2/3rds of an inch around, and over ten times heavier than the bullets used in the Florida school shooting, meaning that they tore holes in limbs so big that any wound in any extremity meant a certain amputation, and nearly any torso hit besides a slight graze was a death sentence.
After the battle, the witnesses said that many of the wounded were bayonetted with steel spikes over a foot long, or clubbed with rifle butts bigger than axe handles, too.
Pistol balls were equally powerful, and frequently pistols would be double-shotted, delivering two holes for one shot.
That was the reality of weapons when the Founders wrote the Second Amendment, and decreed that government had no right whatsoever to infringe on their ownership or carriage by any citizen, anywhere, at any time, for any lawful purpose or reason. Because otherwise every person would be at the mercy of the tyrants running the government, and savages, and every highwayman and cutthroat looking to take their money and their lives.
That is the central point of the truth that is guns in America.
So yeah, bullets go fast, and do a lot of damage.
In other news, fire burns and water is wet.
Is that all you’ve got, Sean?
Oh, then that makes being able to buy a thing that can do that sixty times a minute OK.
You’ve convinced me.
Now, go tell those kids and adults who lost their friends and beloveds an children that the gun the shooter used wasn’t as bad as it could have been and the Second Amendment and you, while you’re sorry, matter more than their beloveds and the only solution is more of them, in more hands, and in more places.
Maybe the ones who lost the ones they loved should stop at a gun store on the way to the cemetery and get a gun.
JA?
Even in places where guns are banned, you still have mass shootings. Or have you forgotten Mumbai, Charlie Hebdo, the 2011 Norway mass killing?
And violence with guns still happens in other locations with gun bans.
And you know what? People don’t need guns to violently murder other people!
Sure, those things sometimes happen in other places. But they aren’t mind numbingly common the way they are here.
But as I’ve said here and more than once, I get it: we’re NEVER going to stop it, because your “right” to own these hellish things easily trumps the right of the hundreds of thousands who’ve died and the untold thousands who will die just this year and every year going forward to their life.
All I keep saying is that I just want you people to fucking admit that and tell the ones who’ve lost their beloveds to suck it up and bugger off.
Can’t ya’ll at least man up and tell the bloody truth about guns in America?
“Can’t y’all at least man up and tell the bloody truth about guns in America?”
We have been, stupid. Reading disability much?
you know what? Given how woke so many in this country and how sick so many of us are that we should NEVER talk about banning weapons of war, perhaps you all here should ask if the NRA operates and Old Whore’s Home for the politicians we’re going to turn out in November and seize this argument from the gun industry and the small number of fanatics who demand that we never talk about guns after a slaughter.
For the past two years, the Left has told us that Trump was Literally Hitler. They’ve incessantly told us that his election was exactly like that of Hitler getting elected in 1934. That we are going to see concentration camps and loss of rights and bad stuff happen.
Then, after the election, many on the Left dressed up in black guerrilla outfits, called themself the “Resistance”, have called for revolution, posted signs about “bashing the fash”, waved communist flags and photos of Che Guerra.
And well before that, the Left called police officers racist and pigs.
And now you are more than comfortable with that same Trumpenfurher and those same racist cops having sole control over arms in the USA?
Is Trump no longer Hitler? Was all that guerrilla dressup just cosplay? Are the cops now no longer racist pigs longing to shoot innocent black men with their hands up?
You, Sean, are a fool. The only way you can get the kind of confiscation in this country is to take out the Second Amendment, and you are no where close to having the votes to do that. But, do it by extra-Constitutional means, and you are very likely to face either a civil war, or a some other new government unfavorable to you and yours.
You see, if your class, group, political party, whatever- if you will not keep arms, you will not keep power. Mao noted that “power grows from the barrel of a gun”, and he was right. History is replete with examples of ruling classes who disdained the use of weapons, and were replaced by those who didn’t. Because if you make a separate group of people in a country who possess weapons, eventually they are going to stop following the orders of those who don’t.
And since I seriously doubt that you are going to be one of the people to don body armor, pick up your own M-4, and go door to door to search for guns, well,
Hey guys, I have an idea!
Let’s ask every Republican politician in power if the NRA is going to open an Old Whore’s Home they can retire to after we throw them out of office in November.
Be passionate. Be an Eagle. Vote against guns 2018
Good luck with that plan.
Come back and see us in November after the election, and bring a healthy appetite for crow.
Maybe some therapy and Rx meds between now and then would help you out in the meantime.
I’ve got an idea, and it’s one I and a hell of a lot of my fellows in New England and on the Pacific coast are talking about:
Let’s break up this country. Let’s allow New England and the Pacific Coast go our own ways, and the rest of you can restore the Confederacy or whatever you want to do.
I’m not saying that just because of guns. I’m talking about the simple fact that we are not the same kind, and don’t agree about anything involving public policy, from protecting the natural world to financial inequality to guns to just about everything.
So, let’s have an amicable divorce. Let’s revisit what Lincoln should have left alone.
I’m betting that many here will finally agree with my New York faggot ass, ja?
I’m not joking. Let’s do this.
Sure, as long as you allow the parts of New England and the west coast who think you’re all fruitloops go THEIR own way. The Jefferson people deserve their statehood, and not all of the Northeast is batshit crazy like NYC or Boston.
Sure thing.
Oh wait, no can do, Sean.
Once again, you and your ilk run headfirst into the brick wall of the US Constitution.
“New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.” – US Constitution, Article IV, Section 3
So I guess that idea is a non-starter too.
Because once again, you want to do something that’s been explicitly outlawed in this country for 240 years.
How…surprising.
Reflex, or deliberate intent?
At any rate, go back to your high school and ask for a tuition refund.
But in trying to make this Lincoln’s fault for waging a war not to part with one square foot of US territory, it’s refreshing to see you happily throw all black people under the bus (and back onto the plantation) in your ceaseless quest for Utopia.
I’m thinking they might have something to say to you about your clever scheme.
Your ideas may play there in downtown Brooklyn, but I’m thinking they’ll be a tough sell in Crown Heights or up in Harlem.
You’d be surprised how many of us here in the Northeast, blacks included, would be happy to revisit the issue.
The simple fact of the matter is that we have less and less in common with those in the South or the West, the coast excepted.
It’s legal in almost all of the South to discriminate against gay people, for instance. You might think it’s illegal to discriminate against anyone, but that’s simply not true. Gay people are specifically exempted from most state and federal anti discrimination laws because conservative Christians and their political fellows have fiercely resisted it.
Not only that, but the South has been at the forefront of resistance to every effort to expand and extend liberty and full equality in this country’s history, and that has not changed.
So why not consider breaking up the country? It wouldn’t have to be a fight, and we could maintain friendly relations.
But we would have separate governments, and that would probably allow both societies to function again.
Since we’re talking about guns, you guys could buy and carry guns anywhere you like, even into church or bars or arm first graders and we could make gun ownership as controlled as it is in England or most of Europe.
Why not explore the idea?
I ask because the idea of the Republicans forcing us to allow people to swan around in our public areas with lethal weapons is going to be a red line. We’re going to fight that with everything we have.
And don’t mistake my opinion for mine alone. The idea infuriates the huge majority of my fellow New Yorkers.
We don’t care what you do out there. But you don’t get to do it here.
The story goes:
The old man was dying and so he called his three sons to come home and handed each a bundle of faggots (For god’s sake it means sticks!) and asked each to break the bundle. None of the sons could. No matter how they tried the bundles resisted their best efforts.
The old man told them to untie the bundle and try each stick. All three sons found they could eventual break every stick in their bundle.
The point is we are stronger together then we are apart. And despite your suggestions and my (and other conservatives) dreams that California and several of the eastern seaboard states would wash away, we are better together. I and most of us know that dividing the country into small independent countries is a sure recipe for disaster.
And while I would urge you to stay and work constructively to resolve America’s many pressing problems, there are many other democratic countries that have the gun control you seem to be desperately seeking. I suggest you study these countries and their problems and determine if you want to work for constructive change here or immigrate.
I think we need to go back further than politics, gun control and social media. Parents could be more diligent in noticing strange, angry or anti-social behavior in their children, threats verbally or on social media, and they need to be sure guns are totally inaccessible to their kids. Also, you could eliminate “copy cat” killers if the press was less active with their television reporting or eliminated saying the name of a killer over and over again when these tragedies occur. Teachers could also be more observant and report unusual or strange behavior in children who don’t seem to have any friends.
So Friday, the Florida voted down an assault weapons ban, then held a moment of silence on the 17th day since 17 students were killed, then voted down a bill that would have allowed students who are afraid of guns to opt out of classes where teachers carry them.
Following that, the NRA could be heard purring.
I think the analogous law to Chris’ idea is the one making it illegal to threaten the President. You make a rash comment on Twitter or Facebook, and you get a visit from the Secret Service. Happened to a few people after the 2016 election. As far as I know, not everyone (or most, even) are charged or convicted. But it does let the Secret Service head off potential real threats. And it hasn’t been judged to run afoul of the First Amendment.
The same could be true if you threaten to commit mass murder. The parameters of what counts as a threat would have to be very clear, but if your statements meet them you get a visit from the FBI who can take that information to a judge to decide whether you might be the real deal or not, and whether that should prohibit you from getting NICS approval. And maybe that prohibition is temporary, say a year, and the FBI would have to present their case again to a judge to renew the prohibition.