We can't solve this problem because we're all talking about highly theoretical and utopian solutions that don't account for actually existing realities.
The left says "no guns". The right says "more guns".
The US constitution says "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Yes, there's a preface about a well regulated militia, and yes, people were using muskets when it was written, but the Supreme Court has ruled that this confers an individual right to possess modern firearms.
And the Supreme Court is even more right-wing now, and likely to force blue states to loosen their gun laws to look more like red states.
So maybe we'd have a more productive conversation if we talked about what's possible in the actually existing United States instead of dreaming about Australia's successes, because there's zero probability that we'll be able to learn from Australia.
Australia isn’t really a success at solving the underlying social issues. Except for managing to take away the guns. Which I personally believe was a massive overreaction to an event that provided convenient political capital that politicians wanted to spend so they were seen to be doing something about the tragedy. We also implemented insane gun control laws involving such bull shit as regulating gun shaped toys based on how scary they look… it’s absurd.
I doubt that even with our previous level of gun ownership we would have had the same outcome either. We have a social healthcare system that at least provides some level of mental health support and our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power. While this may have eventually changed with greater cultural homogenisation to American content via the internet, I’m unconvinced that it would have ever been the same as we see in America today.
The school shooting problem is very very American and i suspect it has a lot to do with cultural contagion brought on by the 24hr news media circus whipping everyone into obsession every time there’s a tragedy.
I think the way we regard guns in Australia is important. They are dangerous objects that are either used for work, or as a hobby by a small number. To a very large extent we don't worship or slobber over them.
I've fired a gun on three occasions (I was an Army Cadet, I quite enjoyed the experience) and have handled realistic replicas (backstage on set of a theater show). In both settings they're treated as risky objects. You are handed the gun, you use it, and then you hand it back to be locked up.
My grandfather is the only person in my family I know who ever owned a gun. He used to keep it in the cupboard under the stairs. He handed it in to police to be destroyed long ago - he felt that he didn't need it, and that the most likely outcome of keeping it was an accident that he would regret.
Personally, I'm very happy to live without guns around. If I do want to shoot, I would be able to comply with the regulations in my state fairly easily. It's a bit of paperwork but no worse than, e.g. acquiring powerful lasers, or being allowed to enter an aerodrome for flight training.
I didn't know this, but the Australia gun ban, just removed certain types of guns - about half the latest data I saw.
Australia still has plenty of legal guns around. And it's clearly still a problem with illegal guns. Not as big a problem as the US, but still a big problem.
"But the latest crackdown did little to shift attention from the body count: in the past 18 months, 13 men have been shot dead in a western Sydney turf war and there is no end to the bloodshed in sight."
>Australia isn’t really a success at solving the underlying social issues.
Definitely- the most recent mass shooting committed by an Australian national didn't even occur on Australian soil, but in Christchurch, NZ.
>our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power
As opposed to the US, whose cultural relationship with school shooters sees them made Person of the Year by a popular nationwide magazine. Their media reports stories of "Could [popular movie] result in mass shootings?" throughout the time it was in the theaters to the point you'd wonder if it was actually part of a marketing campaign.
Not actively promoting this particular kind of crime or the people who commit it would indeed be a good start to eliminating it but why do that when there's money and political hay to be made over it?
There’s 24hr news most places around the world now and there’s been 24hr “global” news channels for decades too…
But it’s not the same as American news. For one thing American news is weirdly musical… like why the hell does all American news come with a subtle soundtrack trying to obviously steer my emotional reaction to what I’m seeing? Other places add music too in plenty of places often for the same reasons but it’s not the same level… American news basically has a soundtrack going almost all the time, it’s excessive and blatantly an attempt to manipulate the viewers emotions.
Do you have some examples of that? I don't recall any broadcast or cable news having a backing track. Many use sounds and music to introduce a segment, but I don't think any are running music in the background of the regular broadcast.
I don’t have any clips off hand and really don’t want to subject myself to an unnecessary dose of US news media haha… You are right about it not normally being played behind the in studio talent, but you can pretty quickly notice the semi-permanent background track once you start using paying attention to how they construct a “packaged segment” that has been pre-recorded and pre-produced, ready to cut to from the in studio talent.
It’s way more obvious when it’s a wedge issue like gun rights, drug legalisation, abortion, or anything political.
"The left" is not a monolith. There are plenty of leftist gun owners. It's a practical thing rather than a weird obsession, so it doesn't get as much press.
> It's a practical thing rather than a weird obsession, so it doesn't get as much press.
I don't know about that. I know plenty of people on the left that have gun 'obsessions'. I think it's just culturally unacceptable for them to talk about it. Here in Eastern Massachusetts, pretty much everybody (who doesn't tout their minority right-wing victim status on the back window of their pickup truck) will tell you they are anti-gun; but if you feel them out carefully, a good number of them will quietly admit they own guns and enjoy shooting. There are many, many hidden gun collections here.
In response to the idea that muskets were less dangerous I share the following copypasta
Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
> The left says "no guns". The right says "more guns".
The left actually says "more background checks", though there are an unreasonable group that goes for absolutely no guns.
There's also the questions about what to do with aftermarket triggers that allow for burst-firing or even fully-automatic firing, which are legal right now (and were used in the Las Vegas mass shooting attack). Banning certain items (ex: large-capacity magazines, trigger-mods, bump-stocks and the like) would still be an improvement.
The important bit is that each item here is a legal issue.
* Bump-stocks, yes or no?
* Trigger-mods, yes or no? (Especially the ones with burst and/or automatic fire modes).
* Magazines, what size should we ban? Is 10 bullets enough? 30 bullets? 100 bullets?
* Should bullets be regulated in general? We regulate larger-capacity bullets (ex: 155mm artillery shells aren't exactly sold in the streets, nor are 30mm autocannons). So where do we draw the line there?
Its not like mortars and grenade launchers are commonly available at gun stores. We have drawn the line and cutoff many kinds of weapons from normal use within this country. If we draw the line a bit more towards background-checks and removing the "automatic-weapons" (bump-stocks and trigger mods) from legality, that probably will help our country out.
I think all of those should be legal. Fully automatic weapons are already legal, they’re just insanely expensive (~$15K for a full auto machine gun) and require a bunch of NFA paperwork to take legal possession.
There are legitimate uses for light trigger actions to minimize disturbance from the finger pull. It isn't hard to bump fire such a gun if you hold it loosely. It would be nice to see the full auto mods to handguns made illegal and manufacturers were forced to modify their designs to impede them. There isn't a legitimate use for mag dumping such a weapon.
Auto sears are illegal. Possessing one is a felony with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. No legal civilian-owned full-auto firearm has been made since the 1986 ban.[1]
There's really no way to make a semi-auto firearm that impedes full auto modification. Full auto is the default behavior. It's the trigger disconnector that makes a handgun semi-auto. That said, full auto isn't very useful. It's inaccurate and eats up ammo quickly, necessitating reloads.
>Full auto is the default behavior. It's the trigger disconnector that makes a handgun semi-auto.
This isn't true for any modern rifle or pistol design- the absence of the disconnector just means the gun stop working (hammer follow). You need additional parts to ensure that the gun works properly in full-auto; this is accomplished by a secondary trigger (the 'auto sear') that trips the hammer/striker after the bolt closes.
>There's really no way to make a semi-auto firearm that impedes full auto modification.
The only designs that work this way are all already classified as machine guns in the US, so they aren't made/sold there any more.
Hammer follow can easily cause a gun to go full auto.[1] Yes it's not as reliable as a sear designed for full auto, but it can work surprisingly well on blowback actions.
The original comment was about handguns specifically, and was likely a reference to auto sears on Glocks. The combination of striker-fired and reciprocating slide makes it very easy to trip the sear at the right time, giving you better reliability than simply disabling the disconnector. This tweet has a useful diagram showing how Glock auto sears work.[2]
The ATF did restrict the manufacture of new guns that fire from an open bolt (since they are trivially made full-auto), but old open bolt guns aren't classified as machine guns.
On the other hand, we should be so lucky if more mass-shooters try to use full auto. There are very few situations where that would result in more deaths rather than less.
The fully-automatic question comes up because of pragmatism and practicality. The guy used 1000+ bullets to fire upon a crowd. You physically cannot do that if you only had semiautomatic.
I wonder if this might have been more deadly if he had fired fewer shots but deliberately aimed each of them at a person. The percentage of wounded survivors in that shooting was atypical.
These aren't the choice you'd use for a planned mass shooting. The problem is gang bangers killing more innocent bystanders with the latest gun fashion.
After three such incidents involving children in Minneapolis in a short period last (?) year I mused on how it would maybe be a good idea for someone to start a nonprofit that brings gang members to gun ranges to train them. I think we'd all rather they kill each other than bystanders.
I wish you hadn’t made your quip about the left saying “no guns”, because it isn’t important at all to your central point, which is that structural issues in the US prevent meaningful progress on gun control regardless of whether it’s good policy or the majority of people want it.
But you have like five people responding to that “left no guns” thing specifically, instead of to your real point, which is absolutely correct and the heart of the issue.
Here in Canada the "left" liberal government made it much harder to get a gun license. Then proceeded to mandate the vaccine, fired unvaccinated employees, denied them their EI, and banned about 6 million Canadians from flying to this day. When some truckers protested, they suspended the charter.
I can see how many Americans would want to hold to their guns in light of the behaviour of governments over the last few years.
They didn’t “mandate the vaccines”, they required their employees to get vaccinated. If you didn’t want to receive a safe, effective vaccine that billions of people around the world have also received, you had the “freedom” to quit and find another employer.
Oh, also? Has anyone actually been fired by the federal government? A cursory search shows 1800 people are on unpaid leave, but they haven’t been terminated. 1800 people out of an estimated 320k employees.
Please spend 15 seconds looking up what "the left" is actually arguing for before speaking in public about it. Because you appear to not have any idea.
Hint: it's what 92-96% of the US public consistently agrees with. Background checks without loopholes, for instance.
I would think that percentage would change if people knew what they were agreeing to. “Remove loopholes to get around background checks? Absolutely! Force private owners to report to the government who they sell a gun to, leading to a registry all all gun owners? Maybe not…”
Just curious, but have you ever purchased a firearm?
Background checks are standard procedure. I'm not sure what "loopholes" you are referring to. Usually this refers to private party sales. Do you want private party sales banned?
People often describe the fact that there isn't a background check for private sales in most US states as a loophole. Attempts to add such a requirement in some states, such as Washington have been clumsy and burdensome but it does seem like a good idea in principle.
The Left is more than willing to take incremental harm-reduction approaches to manage America's gun addiction instead of going cold turkey, but even that is not an option thanks to the USA's anti-democratic Senate.
We can't solve this problem because we're all talking about highly theoretical and utopian solutions that don't account for actually existing realities.
The left says "no guns". The right says "more guns".
The US constitution says "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Yes, there's a preface about a well regulated militia, and yes, people were using muskets when it was written, but the Supreme Court has ruled that this confers an individual right to possess modern firearms.
And the Supreme Court is even more right-wing now, and likely to force blue states to loosen their gun laws to look more like red states.
So maybe we'd have a more productive conversation if we talked about what's possible in the actually existing United States instead of dreaming about Australia's successes, because there's zero probability that we'll be able to learn from Australia.