| Hiku said: 1. I see. But nothing I suggested would only affect mass shootings. Mass shootings are the subject so I'm mainly focusing on that. But sensible gun legislation has positive effects in many different fields.
Or do you mean that more organized criminal groups would arise as a result of this becoming a somewhat 'new' market? And thus they will arm themselves similarly to what other criminal groups do today? That would make sense. But I say 'new' because illegal guns and gun trafficking already seems to be prevalent in the US. And on that note, US law enforcement is constrained by insufficient laws to crack down on illegal networks that supply guns to criminals. Prosecutors who want to fight traffickers must rely on a law that prohibits “selling guns without a federal license.” This weak law carries the same punishment as trafficking chicken or livestock.
Some times I think about how much easier it would be if I just didn't care about less fortunate people outside of my 'tribe'/circle, let alone in another country, and I was a right winger and some of my biggest concerns were not wanting to put on a mask when I go to the grocery store, if I can use the N-word, and gender pronouns. Because some of these subjects I deal with as a progressive are really mentally exhausting, which is one reason I spend less time in this section than I used to. But I think you and I have discussed gun reform before. Though I don't remember the specifics of those conversations. 4. Right. But my argument was that civilians don't need to own the kind of weapons that are commonly proposed to be banned. 5. There's an overlap of politicians who advocate for universal healthcare, and sensible gun reform. And you're saying that the latter will be unpopular, and lower the chances of USA getting universal healthcare? But neither of these things happen for the same reason, imo. As long as corporate bribes are legal, and politicians accept them, they can't be trusted to act on the best interest of the people when it's a matter that affects said corporation. Anyway, if corporates bribes were illegal, and news agencies did not accept money from the tobacco/fossil fuel/gun/pharmaceutical etc industries, then gun support talking points would not echo as loud as they are today by people's favorite politicians and TV personalities.
And in case you've offered some earlier in the thread, you can just link that to me in the same sentence instead of just continually shutting down every suggestion I make. |
1. Right my point was more that gun control policy shouldn't be constructed to only optimize against a specific form of gun violence, i.e mass shooting. Policy that would be perfectly optimized for mass-shootings might have unforeseen consequences on other forms of violence (both state and extra-state violence) and a sound policy would probably have to treat gun violence as fungible between the different types/sources of violence and therefore be optimized to reduce aggregate violence, including state-imitated violence. It should also not omit the violence that the state does via police. This might mean that mass-shootings might happen sometimes (albeit hopefully at a smaller frequency), but it also means that other sorts of violence and aggregate violence doesn't increase to wash out the lives saved by preventing mass-shootings. I am not generally a utilitarian, but I can't see how we should solve these problems without taking a utilitarian approach. Because otherwise, we'll then all start considering which lives are more valuable than others, which is dangerous territory for a society and state policy to do. One of the problems with American society right now is that different lives are valued differently depending on whether or not the person is an agent of a state, their class, their race, their religion, and other identities. So any policy needs to not immeasurably lead to a significant amount more state-violence than the forms of violence it is aiming to prevent. Licensing isn't the sort of policy that would do this, but something like criminal possession charges would.
2. I believe that when they create networks to obtain weapons for profit -- which is all organized crime ultimately aims to do -- obtain profits for the top of the crime pyramid, they will more easily have on hand weapons they need and more easily use them in violence. Maybe only marginally more easily, but still more easily nevertheless. Most organized crime isn't done with legally owned guns because most participants in organized crime are felons who can't legally own a gun. Despite what many people think about the relative freedom of having guns in this country, police -- especially when it comes to non-white people, constantly are looking to associate BIPOC people with carrying a gun so that they can use it as a pretense to detain us. This isn't something that would initially change very much in a different legal framework where gun control were harsher (unless it lifted some limits on police.) But since there is a new profit-motive because the price of guns has increased, you're going to see organized crime re-organized or newly organized around those profit sources. And with more organized criminals, as there are more profits to organize around, there will be more conflict between competitors. And with more organized crime, there is more funding of and apologizing for police-originated violence and mass-incarceration to ostensibly solve said organized crime. Coupled with all of this are the negative effects of criminalization and how people born into highly-criminalized communities are more likely to become criminalized themselves -- creating a cycle of violence that can only be halted and healed with decriminalization.
Another aspect to it is that in a scenario of buy-back programs (not necessarily universal background checks or licensing requirements) you're going to have many legal gun owners selling their guns to organized criminals in one big or a series of big waves. Why? Because it is very unlikely that the amount the state is going to buy the weapons for is going to compete with what the criminals are willing to pay. And with things like sanctuary states and counties, a lot of this could go under the radar and/or will overwhelm federal police forces like the ATF, which are relatively small given the size of their jurisdiction.
3. From my experience, there are plenty of people who have implicit bias against non-white persons who support gun-control and vote Democratic. One of the more infamous examples is Michael Bloomberg and his quite racist stop-and-frisk policies. See: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/25/809368292/the-legacy-of-stop-and-frisk-policing-in-michael-bloombergs-new-york
Republicans are good at being explicitly racist, but there are many Democrats who are wise enough to keep their racism under the radar or who don't think of themselves as racists but still strongly support policies that disproportionately affect BIPOC people.
I personally am on the far-left -- an syndicalist/libertarian socialist if I were to label myself, so my positions are quite idiosyncratic in mainstream political discourse, but I do tend to support social democratic politicians when I vote.
4. Right, my point is that legislation that aims to ban AR-15's but doesn't aim to ban semi-automatic handguns is 1. not effective in achieving its goals as semi-automatic handguns can are often more lethal and 2. over-optimized toward solving mass shootings and not other, more popular forms, of gun violence.
5. I wasn't necessarily talking about politicians. I was mostly talking about voters. The topic that most clearly predicts party-association in the last decade or so is one's position on the gun topic. See: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-has-never-been-so-polarized-on-guns/
This wasn't always the case. There was a time where many pro-gun people in Appalachia and the upper-midwest voted for left-wing candidates, hell candidates to the left of the current Democrats. But gun-control is the ultimate cultural wedge issue in the U.S, and that is why about 40% of the Republican party supports universal healthcare but still votes for politicians who oppose it. Universal background checks are reasonably popular, but something like an assault weapons ban pushes single issue voters who would otherwise vote on their economic interests to the GOP. And if we can reduce most homicides indirectly, by solving the issues of poverty and mass-criminalization, why not do it?
6. I actually did offer constructive alternatives. My first post in this thread was a list of policies that would reduce gun violence in the U.S, and then later on in this thread I described a licensing system. I am very concretely against any policy that criminalizes more people for non-violent activity though. That is where my support is lost.
7. Fair enough.
