Has the USA gone totally crazy?

The last poster who accused me of pushing a particular narrative had to issue me an apology yesterday.

I don’t post “disaster porn” either.

A few neo nazi annd racist killings happen and get threads and everyone loses their minds. Nobody ran to feedback forum though 2 weeks ago when I posted a thread about a trans shooter: tell me what narrative I was pushing then?

It's the standard right-wing 2d amendment deflection round one. It's farcical to compare traffic deaths in the US to Ireland. Far, FAR higher traffic volumes, densities, numbers of people driving, etc. Roads in Ireland would be at best backwaters in the US, the M series of roads is about on par with a good state system, nothing like an Interstate in terms of volume or capacity. Irelands road capacity wouldn't rank with a typical major city in the US, like LA or Phoenix or Houston.

Next up will be arguing the statistics, but really, it's the guns. Even little Serbia, with its recent outbreak of mass shootings, is talking about reducing gun ownership. That can never happen in the US, so dead people don't really matter.

Life has become cheap in the US. It's why at least 1 poster here, on one of the abortion threads, was cool with the percentage of women dying during pregnancy who could've been saved by abortion. Lives really don't matter.

Something like 20 million AR-15 type guns owned in the US (that's what's known about - after all, there's no federal register and many states are extremely cavalier about firearm purchase and ownership.) That's lots of hunting and home defense, uh-huh, with a military rifle.

So what happens to your gun law argument, when anyone can build something like an AR-15 in their own home without the need to use a gun store etc? How do you stop that?

How do strict gun laws prevent someone who is motivated, from fabricating something well away from the eyes of authorities and back round checks etc?

It will be like trying to ban knives... impossible.

We can still manage to better regulate conveniently mass produced and widely sold weapons though. Yes a very determined killer will 3D Print or manufacture anything but among the mass shooters the US has seen remarkably few of them would have had the wherewithal to manufacture their own gun or even reload their own ammo (heck most people reading this probably thinking I mean simply putting bullets into the clip, no, reloading of ammo).

I think you'll find they have banned the sale of more lethal knives in England due to the amount of knife related crimes in London in the past few years. You could also make building your own guns or certain type of guns illegal. Most citizens do not want to be on the wrong side of the law and I dont think alot of people would have the skill to create their own guns.

Comparing guns with any other weapon is a bit difficult tough given a gun is so easy to kill with and easy to use compared to any other weapon. Just last month a Virginia teacher was shot by her 6 year old student- guns are just so easy to do damage with.

thats what worries me the most about apartment living. This is timber construction. If police knock on my neighbors at 2 in the morning my head is resting about 10 feet away from their front door behind 2 inches of light wall. Not as if we don’t have news stories about cop shootouts turning deadly for bystanders in neighboring apartments. Bullets wizzed through neighbors units while they executed Breonna Taylor.

It's ridiculously easy to make a very dangerous knife in your shed with a bit of scrap metal. And there are many people who do it as a hobby, selling them privately. There are no shortage of sharp knives for any thugs out there who like to carry them. Makes zero difference if you ban them.

And it's going the same way with firearms. The knowledge, materials and tools needed to fabricate them are becoming easier and easier to acquire.... eventually it will make gun laws essentially null and void.

The conservatives in the US have always wanted to eliminate the gatekeepers that regulate and monitor gun ownership. And they're succeeding. Guns are not a complicated piece of equipment, and this makes it almost impossible to regulate their fabrication and distribution.

So much so, that I can see gun violence spreading to places that previously had no real gun culture or issues before. We've seen how knife crime can become a problem almost overnight in some places.

Where will you get the ammunition? You can, of course today in the US, buy all the materials to make your own bullets.

However, if your purchase of ammunition were regulated, and you tried to make it yourself, that falls short when it comes to modern gunpowder. Today's weapons don't run on black powder anymore, which is the only thing you can probably make at home, unless you're keen on learning to make your own nitroglycerin. Good luck with that, might not have to worry about the neighbors for all that long if you try it yourself.

Of course, you could build a few muskets or a Colt six-shooter or a zip gun. Not likely your home-made AR's gonna run on your home-made bullets.

Sorry but this is a poorly informed take. You can definitely reload ammo for modern weapons with materials purchased on the market. Nitroglycerin is simply included in the powder sold conventionally - that is literally modern gunpowder for you.

It's very easy to make ammo too.

The whole prepping community in the US has been mastering that art for many years now.

Regulating and banning stuff never works in the long run. We've seen this with so many issues in society... and big surprise it's been a giant failure with firearms too. And it will continue to be a failure, particularly because of how many industrious people are motivated to ensure it fails.

Which means society has no real choice, other than to focus their efforts elsewhere.

A very poor level of education twinned with a high level of blind zealotry, is a lethal combination.

It seems to me that there are in fact more than enough anti-gun thinkers and voters in the US, even in the crimson States, to out-lobby and out-vote the gun lobby and its acolytes. But if they are not minded to create a mass civil protest movement against the deaths of all these people, then their blood is on their hands too, as a manifestation of apathy.

What this will take, is nothing less than the scale of the civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War protests of decades past, yet there is basically no prospect of it.

The biggest contribution Joe Biden could make to his own legacy, is to sign executive orders banning semi-automatic long guns and high capacity shotguns and encouraging all Democrat Governors and State Assemblies to do the same, then face down the inevitable legal action and protest and in turn galvanise a grass roots anti-gun movement similar to what we have seen in the aftermath of Roe v Wade ending, which has seen brave representatives in red State legislatures actually go against conservative colleagues to protect women's health rights.

In fact, the most progressive thing that could have happened to abortion rights is for Roe V Wade to have been struck down by the USSC, because if forced people into action to get ahead of it instead of relying what was always a flimsy protection of case law rather than legislation.

Nothing less than a provoked action like this, around gun laws, will start the necessary change.

Five does seem rather young to be sure. But that said there is about 10 questions I would ask in an anecdote like that - including what kind of "gun" it actually was exactly - before I would comment or find it worrying. There is such a range of things that fall under the single word "gun" for a start. Hell - tongue in cheek here - I had a spud gun when I was 5. Satisfying little thing it was too. But there are other guns you certainly would not put in the hands of a 5 year old for all kinds of reasons including the damage recoil could do to their small frame.

I would also be curious what they actually meant by "bought her" a gun. There is just too much information missing to really respond to a story like that.

An example to kinda clarify what I mean by that:

My daughter is 12. Through a friend her and I have been learning to shoot pistols and rifles for some time now. We both really enjoy it. It started in my head when I saw this twitter post here 6 years ago from a you tuber I like - which sparked later some conversations with a gun owning friend of mine - which later again sparked us going out to try some ourselves.

When we do it however we are doing it solely with weapons owned by said friend. Which is fine by him and us. But in the end I am constantly using his weapons and putting wear and tear on them for free. What I could do - or could have done - is given money to that friend and said "Could you get a rifle for us that you keep on your site only for our use so every time we come we are using our own and not always using yours?".

Functionally nothing would have changed. We would still be going to the same place and doing that exact same thing. So nothing at all shocking. However if my daughter started going around saying "My dad bought me a rifle when I was 8" people would probably seriously double take and have quite a reaction because that sounds genuinely weird without background and context. That sentence uttered alone without a shred of context would likely sound bloody insane.

A lot of things do come down to what people even on this thread have termed "Gun Culture". I think there is a lot of nuance to have in conversations between looking at guns as being a problem in and of themselves and "gun culture". They are not - for me - even remotely the same conversation. There is also a phrase that I hear people reel off thoughtlessly but I think there is a lot of nuance and content to be found behind it which is that "The US has a mental health crisis that is disguising itself as a gun crisis".

Whatever is going on in the USA is to my mind vastly multi factorial. But our human minds really want and prefer a single point explanation or solution. I do not feel the USA is particularly uniquely "going crazy" however. One blog I read is posting daily updates on what is happening in Iran for example where everything from civil unrest to acid attacks on the faces of school girls are happening simply because women won't wear scarves on their heads when they are told to. Ok a massive over simplification of what is going on there perhaps - but it often feels like our species is going crazy - or has been crazy for a long long time - rather than specifically the USA.

These types tend to give themselves away (Youtube videos?) Again, if there were legislation in place restricting this behavior, problem solved. Criminalize what's criminal. It could be Congress decides its perfectly legal to print your weapons - as long as you put them in the national registry database (which of course is one of the things that most on both sides of the debate support, but the right-wing nutters prevent from happening).