School Shooting in South Florida

[dirtylemons]

Hiku said:

dirtylemons said:

Perhaps this is naive of me, but I honestly think that if a sincere and intelligent argument can be made in favor of a law likely to reduce violence, the majority would support it. You're never going to get everybody, but all you need is the majority in order to change the law.

I don't know if naive is the right term. Maybe it is. But this seems to not take take into consideration powerful forces rallying to misinform and oppose something.
If there is a proper intelligent argument for something, it's nothing that millions of dollars and unintelligent misdirection can't destroy.

Back in the day, only the children of rich families were allowed to go to school at all. Until parents stood up and said that their children deserved education as well. And so public education was born.
Would you say it's a coincidence that every single developed country on the planet reached the same conclusion when it comes to healthcare, except for one single country (USA) where multinational pharmaceutical corporation top the charts of highest grossing companies each year, and they are allowed to  'donate' hundreds of millions every year to politicians who 'just happen to' vote in their favor, news organizations, adds on TV and online, etc?
(By the way, prescription drugs are not allowed to be advertised on TV anywhere except USA and New Zealand)

Because if we look at the conclusion most people in USA reached according to poll after poll, most of them seem to favor some form of universal healthcare. Even among republicans.

http://www.newsweek.com/why-are-most-republicans-backing-single-payer-healthcare-584879

But no matter how many people want it, if they are mislead by certain usage of words, like you know how some people said they hated Obamacare because they have the Affordable Care Act (even though it's the same thing), or certain news outlets convincing people that Social Democracy is the same as Marxism Socialism, or climate change is a hoax while they get funding from the fossil fuel industry, etc, change won't come to pass. Because not enough people end up holding their representatives accountable. They re-elect them.

I'm certainly not against the idea of people needing to regularly pass some sort of test to maintain a gun license, as with a driver's license. Personally not a fan of having to join any club, and I'm a little wary about random police inspections. But again, I'm not against the concept in general.

With the way police some times, but sadly often enough, behave, especially in the US, the same thought crossed my mind when reading that segment.
Switching out the club part for required training would seem like a proper substitute.

My problem with the no-fly list being used as a measure for being able to legally purchase a gun or not is that there doesn't appear to be any clear way you get your name on the list or can prevent getting on it. Secret government lists as a means for restricting one's rights is where my paranoia really begins to kick in.

I'm not exactly sure what you were saying on the bolded part. Seems to be a typo in there. Could you rephrase that?

And I'm going to push back on the claim that a law was passed which helps mentally ill people get guns. Technically correct, but the specifics of the bill pertain to people who cannot manage their finances due to some mental disability. This is a very specific form of mental illness and I don't see why such people should be prevented from owning firearms, when their disability has nothing to do with their grasp on reality. Rather their ability to process numbers and the like. Admittedly, this affects such a small portion of individuals that it seems to be more of a political football, but I'm not against the law as it stands now.

From what I can gather, the "people who couldn't handle their finances" may have been a slight misunderstanding.
They are affected by this too, but it's not aimed specifically or exclusively at them, but at anyone who receives government funding for some kind of mental illness:

"The rule, which was finalized in December, added people receiving Social Security checks for mental illnesses and people deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs to the national background check database. "

Snopes explains it here:
https://www.snopes.com/trump-sign-bill-revoking-obama-era-gun-checks-people-mental-illnesses/

Basically, nothing changed because that Obama era bill had not yet come into effect before Trump rescinded it.

Maybe the current legislation as related to firearms works for Australia. If so, Godspeed. I'm no expert and only have the publicly available statistics at my disposal.

And as John Oliver pointed out, NRA lobbies money to defund public statistics about gun violence.
I don't know what else is going on, but we have to do a lot of research ourselves by looking at a lot of different places in this day and age.

I'm simply hesitant to assume that what works for one country would automatically work for another. Japan has a higher suicide rate than the U.S., but I wouldn't conclude from this that Japan needs to be more like the U.S. in order to reduce said rate.

I don't presume something that worked for another country would automatically work for the US either. But USA's gun statistics are comparable to third world countries (accounting for population differences) and think that something meaningful should be attempted in order to change that. That gun homicides have been dropping is nice, but what's going on is still mind boggling to people looking in from the outside.

Suicide, or violence involving one self of ones family is of course much more difficult to regulate. If a country should strive to be more like another, I would look at specific things they can learn from each other.

Again, I'm going to push back on one of these claims. The suicide rate in Australia saw a spike right after the new gun laws, then a drop, but has been consistently on the rise for the past decade or so. I don't know what correlation between the two there are, if any, but I wanted to point that out.
As I say, I'm not against trying new gun laws, provided they have a reasonably likelihood of reducing violence behind them. But with the continuing decline of gun crime in the U.S., I admit I'm more wary to stray from the current path, potentially risking an unnecessary spike in violence where one need not occur.

Interesting. It may have been that it was just gun related suicides that dropped, which in that case isn't useful, unlike the gun homicides that dropped without non firearm related homicides increasing.
I'm looking at some charts now and suicides in 2017 were about the same as in 1996, but slightly higher in 2017. I also read that 2015 had the highest rates of suicide per 100,000 people. I'll look into this more.

Purely a matter of opinion, but I think a one-on-one argument is virtually always going to be more effective than an information campaign, no matter how costly and widespread.

We're wading into different waters here, but I'll try to follow as much as I can.
On the universal healthcare issue, I'm torn as well. I'm not against taxpayer-subsidized healthcare for those who genuinely need it but would face an undue financial burden to pay out of pocket. What I am against is universal healthcare that automatically covers any issue a person claims to have. I'm not in the medical profession, but I have many acquaintances who are, and they all confirm my suspicions about hypochondria in the U.S. A majority, if not the majority, of people seeking healthcare (in the U.S., at least) are seeking attention and drugs whenever they just feel a little off. As if they're entitled to never be in pain or feel disturbed. Also, plenty of people are just reckless and I have no problem with expecting them to pay their own medical bills. But for something like breast cancer or anything which a person doesn't knowingly risk on their own, taxpayer money going to that is fine with me.
I'm also okay with people/corporations donating as much money they like to whoever, and I'm against the banning of commercials, whatever commodity they may be peddling (assuming it's legal).

I don't disagree at all about people not holding their representatives accountable. I admit I'm jaded with the whole thing, as I've only voted once in my life, and even then, I didn't really expect much, if anything, to improve. People seem to treat politics much the same way they do with sports fanaticism. Anything for their team. That hinders progress more than any information campaigns, in my opinion.

Sorry, what I meant about the no-fly list is that I don't know how one gets on it. If this information is publicly available, I'm not aware and haven't yet found it. Some articles listed 'possible' ways one could get on the no-fly list, but no concrete rules seem to have been released by the government. So the idea that the government can restrict a person's rights, based on a measure the citizen isn't even allowed to know, that seems very dangerous to me.

Looking at the original bill, the only people being used as a source to identify the affected individuals as mentally impaired was the Social Security Administration. I don't think they're qualified to say whether a person is a potential hazard to others or not. So using them as (seemingly) the sole basis for restricting a person's right to own a firearm seems like a wrongheaded way to go about it.

And I'm all for reducing gun violence, which is why I'm happy to see it steadily drop in the U.S. Yes, it's still significantly higher than one would expect from such a developed country, but I'll take what I can get. And it's also why I'm wary about making any potentially radical changes to the current laws when it seems we're already on the right track. I know that must sound like a harsh/extreme thing to say in the wake of so much violence, but looking at the big picture, I can only hope that the next twenty-five years see the same trends as the past twenty-five.