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[nenjin]

I'd rather help fix what's wrong with my country than just give up.

[Sirus]

That, and frankly I don't know where the hell my family would even go. As far as I can tell (admittedly without the benefits of genetic testing) we're mutts of mixed European descent with a few other ethnicities mixed in for flavor. We don't have any strong cultural ties, no known relatives in other countries except for a cousin who recently moved to Japan with her husband (active military). What other country would take us?

For my family, it's less "America: Love It or Leave It" and more "America, Love It or Not". We're stuck here for the foreseeable future, so we might as well try to make things better.

[EuchreJack]

Get over yourself, it's a single purpose tool, the purpose being hurting/killing. Sry 100% sounds like youngling hurt my feelings in debate so now I am team nazi.


It doesn't concern you? Fine go live your life instead of defending positions that are supposedly not yours.



Tell me one thing you can do with a gun that's constructive. And jfl at dissuasion, dissuade by threatening likely lethal violence? Legit. But if someone is so angry he's screaming he wants to break jaws, that's scandalous.

J
F
L

1) You can reduce overpopulation of Deer by hunting them. Overpopulation of Deer leads to more auto accidents. They also taste good and you can't usually find their meat in stores.
2) Ever heard of Rabies? Animals carry that disease. You can get Rabies if they bite you. It's vital that you kill them from a distance. And if they do bite someone, you need their body to test for Rabies.

[Starver]

What other country would take us?

Asgardia.space?

[MrRoboto75]

1) You can reduce overpopulation of Deer by hunting them.

Deer die when they are killed.

[Frumple]

Can is pretty different from "can do well" or effectively and whatnot. From what I understand most efforts to curtail deer populations via hunting just don't work very well, both relative to other means (especially relative to other means like predator reintroduction) and compared to dedicated, organized efforts (i.e. not rando mchunterson given a licence and a missing or enlarged quota). So, like. It's a sorta' yes, but shittily.

... pointedly, though, a great deal of the reason it's even necessary is because firearms enabled folks to trivially murder the normal checks on deer population, so. Feel free to make the argument they don't get credit for halfass cleaning up a mess they made :V

[None]

In my experience, even having the opportunity to emigrate stems from a series of lucky breaks made after putting yourself out there, and that's a process that starts at at least a thousand bucks to get there and habitate and additional thousands to get through paperwork. I got very lucky once overseas, and then I got homesick and bungled that opportunity.

And then covid happened.

Now, I'm rounding up to thirty years of age, continue to scrape the lower end of job requirements (assuming my job is even valuable or specific enough for hire), and am currently living the experience that I do not need to be located anywhere near where the office is located to do my job effectively, as I am a totally remote employee. Lucky break, that, too.

Why sponsor a visa for someone when there's no perceptible work benefit to having them on your continent? You need to be exceptional and you need to have money. Frankly, I'm not exceptional, just lucky with continuing good health, opportunities, and wage, and that's likely not enough to get me out of this country.

And, of course, we're all still at the behest of corporations sponsoring us for the permission to leave our country.

I know this and I despair knowing that very nearly each and every one of my friends lives close to paycheck-to-paycheck and they'll never, never, have the scrounge to leave the country for good if they wanted to.

"Love it or leave it" isn't an axis. It's a demand to submit to America, knowing that 'leave it' is an impossibility to those who would be mad enough about the state of the nation to enact change or betterment for oneself.

[MrRoboto75]

I honestly guarantee most of the boomers that spout such "why don't you just leave" drivel never actually get as far as to actually consider logistics.

[Rolan7]

Most of them, but some of them might "generously" want to make another Liberia (or that proposed African state that some Civil War era abolitionists wanted to deport the freed slaves to).

[martinuzz]

America could be a great counrty. Sadly it isn't.

I'd like to visit it someday. but no fucking way I'm going to a country where civilians are allowed to carry guns. That's just... tooo insane.

[Starver]

I still do a double-take when I see the police with guns.

Though it triggered (NPI!) me more when on the continent (e.g. when I lived in Berlin) and saw normal-looking officers on the U/S-Bahn with hip-holsters, just checking for the Schwarzrad, than when I'm in one or other major shopping area these days and there's a couple of kitted-up guys[1] wandering the area.

I don't know if it's time (we've had the likes of 7/7, in the years since I was so much abroad) or the thought that it's "These guys are special!" (and also "Don't stare, don't stare!"... then "Don't look like you're deliberately not staring!"[2]) that meant I can tolerate the idea of speeding projectiles being just a few small tweaks of fingers away or something.


On the American issue, there was an interview broadcast (over here, for the benefit of us Brits) with some guy in a shopping area parking lot in the town of the school that had just suffered the tragedy. He explained that the two guns in his car were "because of the border issues", although I don't think it was the Mexican Army he was talking about. And I don't know how much Southern Border gun smuggling goes on (possibly more goes outwards?), but it's probably people (of whatever origin) locally armed and out to commit home invasions/carjackings for... whatever gang-related reason those furriners get involved in.

The problem is that there are a lot of guns out there because people know there are a lot of guns out there. The demand for guns isn't going to go away while there's others with guns, and those people (legitimately or otherwise) will want to have guns because the people that they might be in conflict with like to have guns. And the reason for that is...

No, there's no real good way of dealing with the reinforced feedback-loop. You don't have Superman able to persuasively gather up everyone's weapons in a big bundle and hurl them into the Sun, in one fell-swoop. Which is not to say that I think it's not worth worrying about, the whole messed up gun-culture, just that I know what it's like to not see any reason to arm myself, and then hear about your average suburban couple who don't "collect" guns, but happen to have 80-odd of the things "for home protection"[3][4].

And while the UK (except NI, but ironically like Eire itself!) is an 'unarmed police' country[5], like Norway, Iceland and New Zealand, all but these and a further 14 nations seem to have habitually-armed cops and yet for some reason this does not deter criminals. (Or suicides.)

Spoiler: And then there's interesting comparisons like this... (click to show/hide)

...though it's just one of those things presented, I haven't checked what figures it uses (I wonder who is at 0.6ish deaths and 9ish guns?) it just passed across my view recently, in another context.

[1] All kinds of kit on their vests, i.e. cuffs, asp, spray(s), secondary radios, which many patrol officers might have. But with some sort of glockish thing holstered as well as an obvious taser. And, most visibly, toting calmly but carefully some H&Kish weapon. 

[2] Then "So, right, what on earth do I do to not look like I'm carefully trying to not look like I'm trying to avoid attention, so that I don't... Oh, they've gone.  Where have they gone? No! Don't go and find them again! Just go and get that print cartridge/whatever, that was the only reason you came here..."

[3] Probably just hidden all over the place, in case of need, like in Mr And Mrs Smith. I mean, once you have more than two guns in your hand, your markspetsonship and trigger-control is going to suffed.

[4] Though the average seems to be only 1.2 guns per person, so in a three-child family home the true average is 6 guns, enough for Poppa to go Guns Akimbo while Momma, Mary-Ellen, little Bobby and baby Jake get just the one each, when the Zombie Apocalypse finally happens. Meanwhile, the UK has 1 gun registered for every 30 people (surprising, I'd have added another order of magnitude, at a guess, but if that's including shotguns on farms, etc...) and an estimated additional illicit gun for every 60 of us (ditto, but that still means a total gun-density ~4% that of the US).

[5] Barring specialists, that is. Who have been asked/forced/mistaken to kill only a single figure of people they confront, in each of all the years I can find data on (with around 5,000 armed officers undertaking 15-20k active operations per year), and in some years none at all...

[MaxTheFox]

Harder to have a mass stabbing or beating than a shooting. I’d call that a win. We can’t change human nature, but we can mitigate the amount of damage it can cause.

Instead of being like “we can’t stop people getting mad, might as well let them arm themselves to the teeth as well.”

But we can't have that. If you ban guns in America, there will be an insurrection that will kill more people than the bill would save. Assuming the bill even passes (it won't).

You will get people stabbing or beating up other people in anger instead.

That's a clear improvement, ain't it? The latter are helluva lot less deadly.

I agree with that, actually. But see above. It's not happening. Better mental health is unlikely, but more likely. That is what activism should focus on.

The kind of person we need to be afraid of is the myopic ones who go around with murder ideations in their heads all day, ie you.

The only killings I truly wish for currently are those of Russian government officials.

I doubt they went in hot rage. Rather cold determination. IDK maybe they yell a lot while shooting but I doubt it.

That is also mental issues.

Know for a fact, right. Are you going to share your sources on that one? Utter nonsense.

We weren’t talking about school shootings, we were talking about people snapping. You do not need anger issues to attack someone.

Most people do not have ready access to a gun, so most people aren’t going to respond by shooting someone they get angry with, but angry people do stupid things, even if they only lose control momentarily. That is literally all it takes, and guns make it so much easier to kill in those moments.

But I was talking about school shootings. The conversation was about school shootings and how to hypothetically prevent them. Quit moving the goalposts.

So why were you talking about emotions and how you know for suresies that the vast majority of the billions of people on the planet are incapable of losing control if you’re only interested in school shootings?
Because most are indeed incapable of losing control enough for a school shooting. A sane person doesn't stay in an anrger spiral long enough. That was my goddamn point.

Possibly because conversations are organic and change dynamically as they progress?
Good excuse for moving the goalposts. If you want to change the subject then say so.

Or do you just want to “win” the conversation?
I want to win the original subject.

Blanket banning guns will do more harm than good, and that is what you will need to do to prevent people just snapping at someone. You will get people stabbing or beating up other people in anger instead.

Would you rather be shot or stabbed?

Would you rather be shot or punched/kicked?

Of course the latter, but if you believe America will ever regulate guns to a major extent, you are naive.

[EuchreJack]

So, a large amount of US case law protects the right to Americans having guns. Those cases cite the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
The text of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

So, MaxTheFox is correct.

[hector13]

Jiminy Christmas it’s like arguing with a child.

[Frumple]

But we can't have that. If you ban guns in America, there will be an insurrection that will kill more people than the bill would save.

That's not even a remotely a given, actually. A gun regulation schema that actually brought US gun deaths down to the level of other relevant countries would save multiple tens of thousands of lives, per year. An insurrection would have to kill a whole hell of a lot of people (which itself is questionable, given the nature and amount of folks actually willing to start murdering people if someone tried to disarm them) for an actual effective gun ban to not pay for itself in blood pretty rapidly.

Like... seriously. Over the last few decades firearms have racked up like a 7 digit body count in the US -- around 1.5 million since the late 60s. It's been like two or three civil wars worth of bodies over that period. Multiple combined world wars in terms of american causalities. More than every single military conflict the US has been involved with since 1776. More than a covid (for now, anyway, probably). 2020 alone was about 15 9/11s stacked on top of each other. An insurrection would have to be one hell of a thing to kill more than a gun ban that actually worked would save. The mountain of corpses the US firearm industry has helped build and continue to grow is pretty goddamned large.

So, a large amount of US case law protects the right to Americans having guns. Those cases cite the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
The text of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

So, MaxTheFox is correct.

I mean, bright side, the current SCOTUS seems intent on proving that case law means fuckall, so by the time there's enough people willing to do something about the issue the US right wing can't sabotage the process, we probably won't have to care about it much. The 2nd has a lot of room for interpretation if you have the means to jam that interpretation down everyone's throat, heh. The current horseshit one is pretty recent, legally.

It wouldn't surprise me if, once the Gen X/boomer crowd stops being politically relevant, there actually does come about a fair amount of firearm regulation, and enforcement. Tolerance of the state of things in regards to that is dropping pretty damn hard among the younger generations that are the primary ones eating the bullets over all this shit.