Communities around the U.S. have seen shootings carried out with weapons converted to fully automatic in recent years, fueled by a staggering increase in small pieces of metal or plastic made with a 3D printer or ordered online. Laws against machine guns date back to the bloody violence of Prohibition-era gangsters. But the proliferation of devices known by nicknames such as Glock switches, auto sears and chips has allowed people to transform legal semi-automatic weapons into even more dangerous guns, helping fuel gun violence, police and federal authorities said.
The (ATF) reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.
The devices that can convert legal semi-automatic weapons can be made on a 3D printer in about 35 minutes or ordered from overseas online for less than $30. They’re also quick to install.
“It takes two or three seconds to put in some of these devices into a firearm to make that firearm into a machine gun instantly,” Dettelbach said.
we need less non bolt action guns please.
If people with criminal records and a history of mental illness can’t buy firearms, maybe they should also be barred from buying 3D printers or fabrication technology which could be used to build weapons. Surely that’s a better alternative than dead kids.
gun thread, lemme hit you with some easy unsourced stats real quick.
About a third of all people who attempt suicide will never attempt it again, about a third will attempt it pretty repetitively, and about a third fall somewhere in the middle, where they engage in multiple attempts, but stop after the 5th or whatever. This is to say that suicide is mostly a spur of the moment decision and most people who attempt suicide aren’t completely committed to it as a course of action. It’s mostly a decision that’s made as a result of being kind of fed up and believing you have no other options in your life, it’s not a conscientious, committed kind of philosophical position, most of the time. I think there’s some sort of minor study about a bridge in, I wanna say canada, where they set up a net underneath one bridge, and another bridge about 20 minutes away didn’t have a net set up underneath it. Still, the suicides went down by about the amount you would expect to see, had you just eliminated all the suicides taking place on the bridge with the net. The people committing suicide weren’t willing to drive about 20 minutes to dive off of a different bridge, it was just something they sort of did in the moment.
So, that’s all a pretty good indication that limiting gun access to the suicidal would be a relatively helpful thing to do. The most counterargument I’ve heard against this is that, regardless of that, we should still have free access to guns, and they shouldn’t be regulated by the government, because our right to guns trumps everyone else’s right to not be successful in killing themselves. I don’t think I need to tell you that this is a kind of disgusting viewpoint.
I think we can also probably say that the same would be true of gun crime broadly. There are multiple factors going into gun crime, like housing prices, redlining, drug trafficking, mental illness, sure. One of these factors is also guns. Taking away any of these factors, including guns, not just lead to a reduction in gun crime, but would probably lead to a reduction in crime overall. A reduction in crime overall with no substitution in the form of increase knife violence or other forms of violence or crime.
It’s much harder to secure your illegally owned high value property, in drugs, if it is more expensive and harder to access a gun. If it’s more expensive, that eats into your profit margins. This alone would probably cut down on violent gun crime, and drug related violent crime more broadly.
I also feel like I’m taking crazy pills whenever people talk about how if you limited access to guns, people would just switch over to knives, and knives would be equally as effective. No they wouldn’t! You have to be extremely fit and trained properly to wield a knife effectively, and even then, two or three people can easily overwhelm you and jump on top of you. People can more easily outrun you. If you wanted to try and make the leap from one technology to the other, I would think people would compare guns more to IEDs, since there’s obviously more of a similarity there in terms of effectiveness, but obviously it’s much harder to secure your drugs with IEDs, or to rob someone with a pipe bomb.
The most compelling argument against gun regulations, and especially more extreme gun regulations, is that it’s really hard to get them passed, and especially at the federal level, which is what would really cut down on their trafficking. You also have a problem with law enforcement, since most law enforcement, and probably federal law enforcement, wouldn’t really be willing or effective in stripping americans of most of their guns. You’d probably see more success with something like limiting ammunition sales or gun manufacturing, but you’d obviously expect to get lobbied against pretty hard, and, at least if you were to limit gun manufacturing, you’d only expect to see results on that maybe 10+ years down the line, in decades, and, depending on how that was passed, you might just see it get repealed before you could see anything from it.
Of course, the caveat with all of that is that most americans are actually perfectly willing to conform to, and vote for, reasonable restrictions on guns. This includes universal background checks, mental health checks, wait periods, obviously limiting things like automatic capabilities and magazine size (though to what extent this limits unlawful use, I’m not quite sure). Probably at the farther end I’d guess americans might vote for requiring licensing from gun owners, and secure handling and transportation, like most european countries, which might limit unlawful use by limiting theft.
I think also lots of gun owners are straight delulu when it comes to how effective their gun might be. They come up with lots of little hypotheticals and heuristics to try and train for, but in a gunfight, it is usually the person who shoots first who wins, the person who has the element of surprise. If you’re getting robbed at gunpoint, you’ve already lost. You almost have to wield your gun like a lunatic, brandishing it at people for intimidation, in order for it to be an effective form of self-defense (this is illegal in most places). There’s also the idea that open carry can prevent crime, but that it might also mark you as an easier, higher priority target, so I’m kind of skeptical of it. Maybe it’s better for home invasions or something, but that’s not a particularly high likelihood anyways, and you have problems with wall penetration and such. Most home robbers are going to want to hit your place when you’re not in it anyways.
I’m a gun owner who carries a firearm. I think different people and areas have different needs.
There are no children in my household, fist off. If there were I wouldn’t have guns and ammo in the same house. It’s just not safe. If a child comes to my house, the ammo goes to the car.
But I live over 30 minutes from the nearest police station. We have firearms for defense from predators, invasive animals (e.g. hogs), etc… Yeah, they could be used against people, but that’s not really something we’re worried about. We don’t even lock our doors.
That being said, I do carry in town. I also have a spare set of clothing, full set of mechanics tools, a fire extinguisher, first aid kit, and an AED in the van. I like to be prepared wherever I go, and other than the AED all of those tools have come in handy in an emergency.
I don’t like going into details about the time I had to pull my gun because I hate how right-wing nut jobs seem to celebrate the fact that I needed one as justification for all the other hateful things they do. Suffice to say I was being assaulted and the gun ended the situation without me having to shoot the assailant.
Yeah - I don’t carry the toolbox or fire exringuisher my body, but a handgun is almost never necessary in a few minutes. And of course if someone breaks into my van and steals my impact wrench it’s annoying. If they steal a gun that’s much more serious.
I think we have some major work to do to cut back on violence, and some gun reforms are part of the answer. The things that I think would have a lot of impact on gun crime with minimal impact on lawful gun ownership are improving NICS and opening it up for civilian use. Right now if I want to sell a gun to a friend or relative I can’t run a check to see if they’re legally allowed to own one. This would also be the first step towards universal background checks.
But background checks aren’t enough. There need to be record-keeping laws for individual sales that are no different than those from a dealer. The idea is kill straw purchases while improving traceability, which is the biggest issue we have with the current system.
What we have now is half of a brilliant compromise. A federal gun registry is a red line that gun owners will not cross. It’s the most important necessary precursor to mass firearm confiscation, and it’s a hard no. The fight over that is why it took so damn long to get background checks in the first place.
But we want to be able to trace guns used in crimes, so we require manufacturers and dealers to track the sales. If a gun is used in a crime, law enforcement can get a warrant and go to the manufacturer who can look it up and point them to the distributor who can point them to the retailer who can point them to the buyer. It’s a system that allows any specific gun to be tracked, while preventing the government from having a registry.
The problem is that record ends at the first sale. The buyer can sell, trade, or gift that gun without a background check and without keeping a record. It’s the major way that guns illegal in a given state get there.
It also eliminates the “gun show loophole” which is a very misleading name, since it’s actually just a “private sale loophole.” Licensed dealers are still required to do a background check and 4473 for gun show sales.
Waiting periods don’t do much. Someone wanting to commit suicide can rent a gun at the range more easily, and it happens more than you think. The federal waiting period from the 80s was simply a placeholder until NICS got up and running that gave more time for background checks.
One issue that needs resolving is NICS needs to finish background checks. There are 3 standard results when running a background check: Approve, Deny, and Delay. Approve and Deny are self-explanatory. Delays occur when there’s a partial match. Since NICS just uses 3 items (name, date of birth, and state of birth) for the check partial matches can occur, especially if the buyer has a common name - it’s especially common with Hispanic last names since there’s a lot of Raul Hernandezes out there.
When there’s a delay, the gun can be sold without a response in 3 days, though more and more stores are instituting a policy that it needs an approval before the sale. This is because most Denys are initially a Delay, and sometimes (rarely) it takes a week.
But the rub is half the time NICS simply doesn’t follow up on a Delay, or they do it in 6 weeks. Any firearm transaction must be finished within 30 days of the initial background check, so if they take 6 weeks a new background check has to be started. I had a friend named David Jones who couldn’t purchase a gun from lots of dealers because NICS always took longer than 30 days to respond.
And finally the biggest issue with NICS - Identity Verification. NICS needs to be able to verify that a person exists. Right now a fake or mispelled name (whether the misspelling is in the database or on the 4473) will work 100% of the time since all it checks against is a blacklist. A $50 fake ID shouldn’t allow someone to buy a gun.
Totally correct and a pretty good solution, I wish more gun owners were as responsible as you sound, and I wish we could take more steps towards a reality in which they are. Realistically, I don’t really want to eliminate guns altogether, I like guns perfectly fine, they’re great plinking devices, they’re great for controlling the populations of invasive species, they’re mechanically, and sometimes historically, fascinating devices. What I prefer more is just a world in which those are the roles that guns take, rather than guns having like, such a fucked up pretense of reality, a pretense of utility, in self-defense. Rather than being an economic engine of political fearmongering. Mostly, I find this type of shit to be incredibly annoying, because my small town is constantly flooded with people who wholeheartedly believe the militarized self-defense chaff around this stuff, but have also never been to any large city in america, and are totally incurious about what the root causes of crime might be. Their concern for the world stops at the end of their fingertips, anything out of reach for them. Anything that doesn’t directly intersect or connect to them, is something they don’t give a shit about at all. It’s myopic, it’s selfish, it’s a mentality that is not conducive to a good society, much less, a society at all. That’s it, that’s my little spiel on that.
I didn’t think much about gun rentals at ranges, that’s a pretty good point. It is still probably the case that waiting periods, I suspect, would cut down on suicides for the same reason I stated previously, right, making guns harder to access for the suicidal will cut down on, not necessarily even suicide attempts, but suicide lethality. Being able to walk into any walmart in the 40’s and blow your brains out with a shotgun for probably less than 20 bucks is kind of, a very convenient method of suicide. It’s like the suicide booth from futurama, almost. Still, the point is taken well, and it’s probably a better point for more stringent precautions at rental ranges to prevent such outcomes. I don’t really know what those would end up looking like. I’d imagine a lot of those generally would end up falling into the middle and latter categories anyways, of suicide, and I would assume they’d be more due to things like ptsd and stuff like that.
I’d also imagine a lot of that is just from NICS being kind of an underfunded thing, but a more thoroughly automated and more publicly accessible database would be a pretty good solution to that, I would think. I’d also think that, more than being totally publicly accessible, it would probably need to be accessible more to local law enforcement and local government, and maybe between private parties if it were verified by credentials, more for protection of personal privacy. Sort of in the same way that buying a used car works out, in lots of states. God damn if that isn’t super inconvenient when you buy a car from the 1970’s with the original title, though. Certainly there’s quite a lot of room for improvement with NICS, but yeah, it’s very hard to kind of, push in any direction, in that respect, because it’s hard to move away from the propaganda about whatever you might pass being a violation of personal freedom and privacy and yadda yadda ya.
A lot of ranges now have a rule that non-members cannot rent a gun unless they are with someone else or brought a gun of their own specifically because of suicides.
My local range still had an incident where a guy brought his new neighbor to the range for some “guy bonding” just so he could shoot himself. Someone who puts that much effort into it is probably pretty committed, but also fuck him for using his neighbor like that and putting everyone at the range through the trauma of someone shooting themselves in the head. Dude survived, though.
As for privacy, I think there’s a solution. Someone should be able to run a background check on themselves in NICS and when it’s approved it can generate a kind of “redemption” code that they can share with others for 30 days (the maximum time a NICS check is good for). Then the seller can run that code and name in combination to verify they’re an approved buyer.
It’s like 2FA for background checks.
What frustrates me endlessly is that so many people who understand the industry refuse to acknowledge its dangers, while so many of the most powerful anti-gun people simply don’t know anything about the firearms they’re trying to regulate. So we end up with either nothing changing at all, or idiotic laws that are actively harmful.
In California, all newly-designed handguns are required to have a feature that literally doesn’t exist. The guns are supposed to stamp their serial numbers on the primers. No new gun has been added to the California approved handgun list in over a decade because if it, which is why some guns that have been redesigned to improve safety and prevent accidental discharge are illegal, where the old pistols that may fire when rattled are still being sold new.
New Jersey had a law mandating that once a major gun manufacturer released a handgun that had electronic smart features to prevent unauthorized people from firing the gun that any gun without that feature would be illegal to sell. So, New Jersey basically prevented those guns from being developed by telling manufacturers their sales would tank on every other model if they ever tried.
On the other side, Texas started permitless carry. I live in Texas and that shit is idiotic. I keep my handgun license current because people should be trained if they’re gonna carry. When I took my first LCH class, there was a woman who couldn’t hit the silhouette target frame (2’x4’) at 3 yards. She obviously failed the test, but now she’s allowed to carry without a license. That’s incredibly stupid.
So… What’s your plan for any of those scenarios where someone wants more than just to run off with your phone/wallet/car?
(Keeping in mind the that cops have zero obligation to stop a crime in progress if there’s any potential risk to them, leading to scenarios like this: https://youtu.be/jAfUI_hETy0 )
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but: there are defense tools that are simultaneously less lethal than firearms, while actually more effective than firearms for self defense.
Elaborate, please.
There are lots of situations where fire arms aren’t good for defense.
They need to be aimed.
They need to be loaded.
They are not allowed in some places/They have specific transportation requirements which preclude them from bring brought to some places.
They can kill/ grievously wound uninvolved people.
They aren’t effective for summoning help.
Someone wielding one in self defense can be reasonably misidentified as an aggressor.
Not every defence device has these deficiencies.
Not every defence device has these deficiencies.
So which do you propose?
Pepper spray can deal permanent damage to one’s sight and sense of smell, and affects everyone nearby.
A shocker can kill a person with heart problems.
A traumatic pistol may just not be enough, it’s like a device to punch a person in effect.
A knife requires training and won’t help against a stronger attacker likely.
Can you name viable alternatives, and what’s your personal plan?
Copying my reply to someone else because much of it is relevant here too.
I didn’t mean to suggest that there was something without any of those drawbacks, so I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear about that.
I’m not going to propose a one size fits all solution.
But I think people should consider the situations they are most likely to find themselves in, and make considered decisions.
I don’t think guns are likely to be the best choice very often.
I’m not that interested in discussing what I do personally for safety, because every situation is unique.
My question is for someone passionately arguing against keeping a gun for self defense, with the implication being it’s law, and so regardless of training and care and personal circumstances.
The pro-gun crowd doesn’t just blanket recommend guns for everyone in every situation either, so my question is specifically about how those worst case defensive scenarios are envisioned by people who eschew the idea of personally owning guns.
So a criminal about to get involved in a very high risk situation is going to depend on 3D printed parts for the only thing that could possible help him get the thing done…what happened to Joe schmoe? Oh his Prusa didn’t print correctly so he go shot by the popo… 🤔 Sounds controversial.
It will only get worse as batteries improve and printed rail guns become trivial to make and difficult to detect.
So cool, always wanted one. They are not very energy-effective though.
Good. If a beligerent has one of these we can at least do something about it, as opposed to “legal” weapons of mass murder.
America is the land of mad max.
And yet we’re seeing a drop in gun related deaths after it spiked during the pandemic:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/1999-_Gun-related_deaths_USA.png
It’s too early to call this a trend, but assuming home conversion to full auto is getting common, it has not yet correlated with a rise in gun deaths.
I don’t think it will for an important reason: full auto actually sucks. Most people don’t know how to use it and tend to spray bullets while hitting nothing. Even the AR15, which has relatively low recoil, is not very accurate when you hold down the trigger like that.
One exception is the 2017 Las Vegas shooting (which was a bump stock, but effectively the same end result). He was shooting into a large crowd where every bullet was all but guaranteed to hit someone. Most mass shootings aren’t like that.
The way the military uses full auto isn’t necessarily to hit anyone, either. It’s to force the enemy to keep their heads down so your side can maneuver into a better position. That’s not how a lone mass shooter would operate. They don’t have a team where that tactic makes sense.
The way the military uses full auto isn’t necessarily to hit anyone, either. It’s to force the enemy to keep their heads down so your side can maneuver into a better position
The military from what I heard doesn’t. They use burst mode to improve the chance of hitting something, but not waste too much too easily.
It depends
Not all weapons have a burst mode. Often though, militaries prefer controlled bursts of full auto, but it depends on the role and weapons system. Machine gunners are more likely to go full hog than a rifleman for example, but that’s assuming that all soldiers do the most optimal choice in any given situation, which just isn’t true.
If I was told correct info I think even the armed forces dont like full auto outside of specific use cases like mounted guns with hundreds to thousnads of rounds in boxes and for supressing fired from rifles with detachable mags. If you really wanted to mow through a crowd for some ungodly reason a semi auto (not pump) shotgun with buckshot shells and a detachable mag would work as well as full auto rifle in an intermediate cartridge.
Yes, there are fewer gun related deaths. But there are more mass shootings and guns have become the # 1 killer of children and teens. Source
this is false, this stat deliberately counts 18 and 19 year olds as “children” and purposefully includes gang related violence. great example of using statistics to sell a story.
how many gang members are going to surrender their firearms after a ban?
Where did you find that? Because the info states … “Of the 6,192 children and teenagers under 18 who were shot in 2023, more than 1,600 died.”
your source links to this source of data, which only goes up to 2021. The table clearly states they’re counting 15 - 19 year olds.
that 6,192 number appears to come from the gunviolencearchive site, but I don’t see any source for their data other than claims that “suicide data provided by CDC”
further, a simple search of the claim “guns number one cause of death in children” will find a lot of valid critiques of this claim.
No it doesn’t. For the stats on kids it uses this source from 2024.
yes I know, I mentioned that in my comment. can you tell me where on that page it indicates their source of data?
Here …
I’m not sure what your point is. So what if gun deaths are down since the pandemic? Viewing the chart you submitted as evidence we can pretty much just trace a continuation of the trajectory in gun deaths straight to where they would have been from before the pandemic to after - so they’re still trending upward overall. Also, the article doesn’t postulate an increase in gun deaths, just that modded guns are likely being used in crimes.
Who cares what the military does? These aren’t military users, and they’re using automatic fire to spray bullets in gang turf wars or whatever. They’re not known for taking the time to aim, and are just fine with taking out little kids or bystanders.
Overall, I have no idea what you’re trying to prove except “Look over there!!” and your points ramble all over the place.
Fact is that if more bullets fly probability says more people are gonna get hit. Maybe not today, but tomorrow.
Guns with conversion devices have been used in several mass shootings, including one that left four dead at a Sweet Sixteen party in Alabama last year and another that left six people dead at a bar district in Sacramento, California, in 2022. In Houston, police officer William Jeffrey died in 2021 after being shot with a converted gun while serving a warrant. In cities such as Indianapolis, police have seized them every week.
So again, not sure what you sound like you’re tying to minimize or dismiss. Full auto isn’t a problem? I can assure you that you’d feel differently if you were downrange in a shopping mall and someone decided to fire one up.
Overall, I have no idea what you’re trying to prove except “Look over there!!” and your points ramble all over the place.
I’m not the person you’re talking to, but this sentence makes you an imbecile saying that if somebody’s smarter than you, it’s their problem.
You might consider that if you just discard opinions of people competent in the subject, such as military and, well, usual gun nuts, the end result is not worth much.
The conclusion is that mass shooting deaths would actually go down if we just let people use full auto. It’s a counterintuitive result, but it’s all there.
/s? Because if not that’s the biggest line of horseshit I’ve ever heard in my life. What do you plan on doing, allowing only Imperial Stormtroopers access to guns? SMH…don’t bother replying.
The (ATF) reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.
What’s the increase in gun violence due to these weapons?
I fucking hate anti-gun reporting. It’s all biased shit for tribalistic morons.
If only we could collect more accurate gun violence data.
I wonder why that’s not possible?
Must be those anti-gun people.
Here’s the anti-gun people making it much harder in 2014- https://www.propublica.org/article/republicans-say-no-to-cdc-gun-violence-research
Here are those gun haters doing it in 2018- https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/11/gun-violence-research-714938
And here’s those second amendment ignorers doing it again last year- https://giffords.org/articles/house-gop-just-voted-to-ban-cdc-gun-violence-research/
In fact, I hear those horrible gun grabbers have been doing this since the 1990s. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/06/1235409642/gun-violence-prevention-research-public-health
Thank god for gun advocates who would never be in favor of such a thing or vote for anyone who would be in favor of such a thing!
This is actually a bit of a misrepresentation, The Dickey Amendment says they are allowed to study gun violence data, but not allowed to advocate for gun control. Congress further clarified this in 2018, because the CDC had decided that studying is too close to advocating and they were scared of getting in trouble, and earmarked $25 million for the study of gun violence - just not the advocation of gun control.
Of course, there’s also no shortage of groups that are allowed to push an agenda, like Giffords’, Everytown, Mom’s Demand Action, etc.
The Dickey Amendment says they are allowed to study gun violence data, but not allowed to advocate for gun control.
Which gets hairy depending on who is in the White House, we “gun control would reduce fatalities” morphs from an observed statistical truth into a statement of advocacy depending on who is running the department
Of course, there’s also no shortage of groups that are allowed to push an agenda
Just always from the outside, where they can’t affect policy.
Sure, but if they say “here is the gun violence data” instead, they’d be fine. Tbh your statement while it may be true does sound a little advocate-y, therein may lie your misunderstanding.
Just always from the outside,
Sure, like the NRA.
where they can’t affect policy.
Ehhhh…like the NRA? Seems to me groups outside of regulatory agencies can indeed still influence politics.
Sure, but if they say “here is the gun violence data” instead, they’d be fine.
Right. Because that data can then be manipulated by cagey legislators to mean whatever they like. If the agency producing the data comes out with a clear declarative “The conclusions we reach from the data is X” it becomes more difficult for a Louie Gohmert or Sarah Huckabee Sanders to claim “Even the CDC agrees that more guns are good” without getting some kind of easy media push back.
Sure, like the NRA.
So you’ve got a federal agency that’s forced to defer to the NRA on the question of publicly available statements on gun safety.
Ehhhh…like the NRA?
The folks with the biggest pile of financial contributors setting the standard for good gun habits makes about as much sense as telling the FDA to let pro and anti-smoking advertisement agencies argue over the safety of cigarettes.
And by that same coin some Warren or Pelosi can claim the opposite, just because the cdc itself can’t advocate using the data doesn’t mean others can’t.
The NRA is a federal agency? So Wayne LaPierre is a government official now? News to me. Seems to me they aren’t, but are in fact a real world example of a non-governmental entity affecting politics, which is supposedly not possible according to your refutation of me saying there are other groups that are allowed to push an agenda.
And by that same coin some Warren or Pelosi can claim the opposite
That’s not an argument in favor of censoring the CDC. Two lies do not get us closer to the truth
Sure yeah, THAT’S the problem
Right now the Second Amendment is untouchable to regulate and expanding its coverage.
The problem is the convert to automatic things and not the motivation to kill a bunch of people that has been apparently increasing and almost always carried out with non-converted semiautomatic weapons.
It is the scary looking things.
The problem is
the convert to automatic things and notthe motivation to kill a bunch of peopleDon’t know where you’re going with the rest of your comment, but that part is the sine qua non of our violence problem.
Without the prevalence of guns, the motivation isn’t as much of an issue. Prevalence of guns isn’t a huge deal if there is a low motivation to use them to murder people. Both are necessary for the issue to be as bad as it is in the U.S.
Without the prevalence of guns, the motivation isn’t as much of an issue
I think the normalization of murderous intent, (and how it manifests itself in lesser forms of violence) is a much bigger problem than murder.
I think that suicide is twice as large a problem as homicide.
I think suicidal ideation (and how it manifests in depression and self harm) is a much bigger problem than suicide itself.
I don’t think anyone with the motivation to murder or kill themselves is “cured” of that disease by taking away the guns. I think it masks the symptom, while the disease festers and grows.
Can we not do both? Metaphorically - and literally - stem the bleeding? Sure, people will switch to knives, trucks, whatever else. However, as countries who have heavily regulated firearm ownership recently, like Australia, have shown, violent crime goes down significantly once it becomes much harder to access firearms. Some of this does actually boil down to psychology - there’s a heavily-studied mental disconnect between pulling a trigger to shoot at a human being, vs physically assaulting a human being with a knife or blunt object with intent to kill. This says nothing of the fact that knife wounds, blunt force trauma, whatever, are all MUCH easier to deal with on a medical level, and the fact that you can’t stab or beat 30+ people to death in a short span of time the way you can shoot people with a semiautomatic, magazine-fed rifle.
This says nothing of the fact that knife wounds, blunt force trauma, whatever, are all MUCH easier to deal with on a medical level, and the fact that you can’t stab or beat 30+ people to death in a short span of time the way you can shoot people with a semiautomatic, magazine-fed rifle.
Taking guns affects gun crimes.
Addressing the societal/cultural/economic issues affects guns, knives, bombs, cars, bludgeons, and barehanded crimes.
Knives are used to kill three times more often than rifles.
To answer your question, yes, we can do something useless and pointless, and address the societal issues, and work the actual problem.
What we can’t do is just the useless, pointless something, without addressing the social issues, and expect anything to actually improve.
We must enact universal healthcare. We must fundamentally address economic disparity with a punitively high top-tier tax rate like we had until the 1970’s and 80’s. We must address food insecurity, housing insecurity.
We must soften or eliminate criminal sanctions for non-violent offenses, and we must throw away the key for habitual violent offenders.
before we ban every object that can be used by a sufficiently motivated person to cause harm.
Just guns, you don’t hear about mass bludgeoning with candelabra. It’s always guns, no need to bring in what aboutism, the US has one problem when it comes to murderous intent, and it’s guns.
Sure let’s work on mental health too, but keep your eyes on the ball, it’s the guns.
Did I say mental health? It’s not mental health. It’s socioeconomic despair. It’s a societal issue, a cultural issue.
You want to see a strong correlation with violence? Look at age of motherhood. The mean age of women when they have their first child.
Australia and Europe commonly wait until they are in their 30’s to have children. The average child in these areas is raised by mature, economically stable adults. Murder rates in these areas are a tiny fraction of the world rate.
Compare to Central and South America, where the average mother is 18 to 22, and the murder rates are large multiples of the world rate.
The correlation holds true across nations, across regions, across cities, across demographics. If you know the age of a motherhood in a given area, you can predict the homicide rate in that area. If you know the homicide rate, you can predict the age of motherhood.
Contrast with guns, where the nation with by far the highest access to guns in the world has a homicide rate well below the world average. The rural areas of that nation have near universal gun ownership, yet the violence is clustered in impoverished areas, where the majority of the population doesn’t actually have guns.
Turns out it’s not actually the guns. It is the motivations of the people carrying them. When those people are figuratively beaten into submission, living paycheck to paycheck with no legitimate prospects, no way to get ahead, saddled with debt, no equity… Violence is not a gun problem. It’s not a mental health problem. Violence is what happens when you systematically subjugate people, and some of them decide they don’t need to obey. Violence is a socioeconomic problem. It is a cultural problem. More specifically, it is a problem of corporate culture, where people do everything they can to take everything they can from everyone they can, and give back as little as they can to as few as they can.
We need universal healthcare. We need to eliminate food insecurity. We need to eliminate housing insecurity.
We need to restore the protections we had against 19th century robber barons. Specifically, we need to reinstate a confiscatory top-tier tax rate. The only people that businessmen hate paying more than workers is the IRS. A confiscatory tax rate forces them to choose between the two.
We need to kill the concept of “renting”. We need to create a owner-occupant credit against residential property taxes, to hold them where they are, or lower them slightly for anyone living in their own properties. A “landlord” who wants that tax credit will have to issue a “land contract” (rent-to-own arrangement, recorded with the county) or a private mortgage to secure the occupant’s credit against that property’s taxes. The occupant will then be paying a fixed rate for the duration of the contract, and will be earning equity.
It is much more feasible to fix those three factors than to enact any form of gun control, and any of those factors will reduce violent crime far more than even a total confiscation could ever hope to achieve.
Yes, without guns it is slightly harder to kill people. Now, how do you plan to take their guns when they can make them in a day on a 3d printer?
Bruh this was already hashed out in his post. Not even a comment, literally in the
post you responded tooriginal post.
Why not both?
That is what I’m saying, it is both motivation and the already easily available semiautomatic guns that are the problem. The scary automatic conversions are a distraction because they sound and look scary, even though they are used in very few mass shootings.
Just like silencers and the ‘assault weapons’ baloney that didn’t address the majority of gun deaths which are caused by pistols even after suicides are excluded.
Gotcha, last sentence sounded a little bit pro-gun though hence my response. I still think the ease of access is the main issue, by far. I would probably be dead if I was american as I could’ve easily got a cheap 9mm to off myself during the worse times. It was easier to reach out than to buy a glock and I seriously think it saved my life.
“It is the scary looking things.” Sounds pro gun?
Weird.
Kinda dismisses the real criticism people have with guns yeah. They are not advocating against them simply because “they look scary”.
Bro I saw this show called Dr Stone and they legit show you how to make a gun in that show. It’s fucked up that they’re showing that in cartoons
People want to watch things other than Teletubbies
Maybe, just maybe guns are actually the problem.
Clearly the obvious step is to totally legalise fully automatic weaponry with no limits on firing rate or capacity, so that the good guys can buy them and then the problem will solve itself
You know they’re not illegal in the majority of states, right? The main thing limiting access is cost, but even then it’s no more than a used car. Yeah, you have to go through the NFA, but that’s hardly more difficult than a normal NICS check, just pay the $200 and wait for the okay.
Best get rid of the NFA then.
Yes please!
Eh, even Mac10s are going for 12k USD or so, nowadays, and that’s not exactly the most quality of fully automatic guns. They are a little closer to the price for a new car, I guess.
I wonder how quickly can the Glock switch be destroyed, like after using it. It’s just plastic/filament, right?
Gosh, I mean what could guns NOT fix?!??
I dunno, throw more guns in, I guess…
Guns can not fix the darkness I feel. Yet. I’ll keep buying them until they do.
Where’s politicalagitator, who swears I’m wrong about this because gun laws are effective?
