Pemalite said:
sc94597 said:
I am a POC. My family are BIPOC. I still have concerns about gun laws because of how they are used to harm people who look like me and my family, even if we are non-gun owners, such as the examples I provided. I was genuinely asking about how enforcement of a ban would work without disproportionately harming people who look like me and my family, and you respond with a very yt perspective about hunting deer with no intentions of addressing these questions.
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1. That's the issue. There is this "Binary" line in the sand.
The gun control legislation itself shouldn't discriminate, here people of different ethnic/cultural backgrounds don't really suffer any more or less with or without guns... But one thing is for sure. They are certainly less likely to be shot dead.
One of my roles as a first responder is extrication's where we assist the ambulance service... And after all these years I can count how many "incidents" involved guns. - None.
Growing up as a kid in the 80's, guns were everywhere, even my own father had a double barrel shotgun in his garage that I often played with. (No ammo of course.)
Fast forward to the late 90's... And every child after that is highly unlikely to ever see a gun in real life... And it doesn't matter what cultural/ethnic/minority you are, it's just safer for everyone.
sc94597 said:
There is estimated to be about 400-600 million guns in the U.S. The majority of them are probably semi-automatic weapons at this point. That is a gun to person ratio of between 1.2 and 1.8.
Controlling the supply of guns is just not logistically possible at this point.
It would be easier to:
- Work on reducing wealth-inequality and eliminate homelessness and poverty.
- Pay to have a school psychiatrist evaluate every student and have free-at-the-point of use mental healthcare for everyone in primary and secondary school (at least, ideally for everyone.)
- Reconstruct social clubs that allow people to form physical connections beyond their family and in which a person is more likely to be de-radicalized or re-adjusted to society. Historically local churches did this, but the U.S population is secularizing. Right now the problem is that young people in the U.S experience what Durkheim called Anomie. This is either because rules are too rigid and alienate them or because there is no normative structure at all.
- Reconstruct the education systems so that students don't feel alienated. See: Ferrer movement and Francisco Ferrer as an ideal model.
- Decriminalize all drugs and other non-violent "crimes."
- Aggressively dox and put maximal social pressure on fascists and other hyper-nationalists.
- #6 but for Incels and other radical misogynists.
Introducing every point on this list would be easier (and likely have a greater effect on shootings) than reducing the supply of guns in the U.S. Solving these problems would also solve many other social problems in the U.S as well.
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2. Start with Gun Control first and then work your way back. It's the source of the issue, you attack issues from the source.
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1. Right, laws shouldn't affect people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds differently, but we aren't talking about some ideal implementation of the law or even the intent of the law, which might on paper seem perfectly egalitarian. We are talking about the actual implementation of the law -- how the law is actually enforced in the actual real-world institutions that exist. The American political and legal institutions are unique enough that they have been able to preserve white-supremacist effects even if on the surface they are liberal (read: racially-egalitarian or color-blind) in content.
While not being shot is indeed a primary concern everyone has in the U.S, there are other concerns that people in marginalized spaces (and even those who aren't) have for their well-being. The likelihood of being shot in a mass shooting (or otherwise), even in the U.S, is still quite a bit lower than the likelihood of seeing yourself or a relative discriminated against by law-enforcement on the pretense that you have a weapon, or being a victim of a non-lethal but organized crime, or being impoverished because the community you grow up in is seen as "crime-ridden" or many other less-than-lethal but still undesirable positions to be in. It is a lot like being more concerned about being in a car accident than a plane crash. A plane crash is almost certainly worse than being in a car accident, but you are far more likely to be in a car accident so your more primary concern is to make sure you are safely driving or riding in a car.
2. I actually see it as the inverse. Poverty, misogyny, racism, and various other social maladies are the motivations for almost every shooting, but also the sources of other problems. Solving these problems solves not only shootings but also other strong problems in American society. If you don't have severe poverty, people don't turn to organized crime to survive. If you don't have widespread misogyny, especially in the form Incels express it, radical misogynists don't exist to kill people out of their self-loathing and anger. If you don't have widespread white-supremacy, white supremacists don't exist to kill people out of their fear and anger. These are the sources of the issue. Without them, people wouldn't be motivated to engage in the violence in the first place.
