https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-44a7cfb990feaa6ffe482483df6e4683

“Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the close-knit town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.

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Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting, arriving while police were still gathered outside the building.

Upset that police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.

“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done.”

“They were unprepared,” he added.

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Carranza said the officers should have entered the school sooner.

“There were more of them. There was just one of him,” he said.

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Also note: 40% of the municipal budget is spent on the Police Department in Uvalde. 

What is the purpose of police again? Oh yeah to enforce property law and a decayed class/caste system. That was their purpose when the first public police departments were created in the 19th century and always will be their purpose. 

My point wasn't that the amount of guns correlate with shootings proportionally. My point is that it is much harder to create a shortage of guns when there already is nearly a 2:1 ratio of gun : persons. Also the U.K's gun:person ratio is .05:1 not .5:1. So even if we stop the production and sale of all new guns there would still be a thriving black market, and it becomes much less likely that you'll see prices on the order of $32,000 in the U.S like you do in Australia. Prices are going to go up, but not that high. $32,000 is about how much a fully-automatic weapon costs right now on the non-black market, and there are only about 600,000 of those circulating. There are about 50 million AR-15 style rifles and about 300 million semi-automatic guns (including handguns) comparatively. The scale of the problem is just so much larger and requires a much more aggressive response than a few buyback programs and fines. And while mass-shooters might be deterred, most gun violence in the U.S isn't in the form of mass-shootings, but organized-crime relating shootings. Organized criminals aren't going to be deterred, and actually benefit from a thriving black market in weapons. So we might solve the 1% of gun deaths that happen in mass shootings, but make the 50% of gun deaths that happen in organized crime worse if a thriving black market is created. 

There are also many other differences between the U.S and other developed countries besides this issue. The fact that there is no universal healthcare, the fact that many states are underfunding schools, the fact that children are more likely to deal with homelessness or other severe poverty that will traumatize them, the fact that parents are struggling with economic problems to such an extent that it is hard for them to pay attention to the needs of their children, the fact that there is severe racial hatred and a still ever-present racial caste system, the misogynistic incel movement that is present among adolescent men who are bullied, the fact that there is little trust between government and the citizens, the militarization and aggressive police forces that aren't trusted, the opioid epidemic, mass-incarceration and felonization, etc. The U.S is indeed exceptional, but quite often in bad ways that makes solving a problem like this very difficult. 

You cite Japan. Japan had strict gun control laws before even the Meiji Restoration. These laws were pretty much extensions of their strict sword-control laws. Mass ownership of weapons never caught on in Japan because it couldn't. Pandora's box wasn't opened in Japan like it has been opened in the U.S. 

So yes, we can try to reduce the number of weapons in the long term (say, 20+ years), but in the short to medium term are we just going to do nothing else? All of the other recommendations I provided could be implemented much more quickly and would have much of the same effect as reducing gun supply. 

In the US, all disputes will be solved with the best tool for killing a man which is the gun. Already in states like Texas and Ohio, anyone get a conceal carry without a license. As the saying goes, guns are not the problem people are. Guns just like any tool allows those people to deal maximum damage in a short period of time.

1. Yeah, I really don't think violent crime is going to go low until the material incentives of violent crime are solved first. It is interesting that the Emma Goldman essay I cited is about 100 years old, and even then she references a statistic that isn't much different from the statistics we see today. 

"The most horrible aspect is that our national crime is murder, not robbery, embezzlement, or rape, as in the South. London is five times as large as Chicago, yet there are one hundred and eighteen murders annually in the latter city, while only twenty in London. Nor is Chicago the leading city in crime, since it is only seventh on the list, which is headed by four Southern cities, and San Francisco and Los Angeles. In view of such a terrible condition of affairs, it seems ridiculous to prate of the protection society derives from its prisons."

I suspect the difference is the fact that London (and the U.K in general) has had policing by consent since the early 1830's, making theft, robbery, and rape just as prevelant as in the U.S cities, but murder less desirable due to crime not necessarily needing to organize as rigidly to confront and capture aggressive police forces. And with less organized crime, there are fewer "gang wars." 

My main support for Class 3 is that having well-trained state militias could be useful given the current rising threat of fascism and fascist coups in the U.S. I am not really confident the U.S is going to last the next half-century and having a tradition of state-militias could mean protection from more fascist post-U.S republics. It could also embolden the fascist republics, but there isn't much that can be done in that hypothetical situation other than take in migrants and have strong militias against the fascist republics. That is why access to Class 3 is conditioned on one's membership with a state (organized) militia or certified gun club. 

2. Typically the restrictions due to mental illness are if somebody has in the past shown that they are a threat to themselves or others by being involuntarily institutionalized. Most data I have seen on this is that mentally ill people are not necessarily more dangerous, it is only when they self-medicate or don't seek treatment that there is a strong predictor of violence. If a mentally ill person never showed themselves to be a threat to others or themselves, and they are regularly seeking treatment (such as through prescribed medication) it isn't clear to me that they should be restricted. Same thing for substance abusers. If a substance abuser sought treatment and is continuing their treatment, then likewise they shouldn't be restricted. Usually the people who are most vulnerable to gun violence are the mentally ill and substance abusers, and since they can't rely on police (because of ableism and the criminalization of drugs) it isn't clear that we should make them more vulnerable. This is why decriminalization of drugs and the defunding of police are really important parts of gun reform as well, in my opinion. You can't make the people most vulnerable to gun violence even more vulnerable without giving them alternative mechanisms of seeking help without significant costs.  

3. I am personally a prison abolitionist and see the prison systems as incapable of being fixed. At this point they are organized slave-labor so that certain corporations can get cheap labor for a few dollars rather than pay workers minimum wage (or a market wage) and so that former criminals are limited in their employment options and therefore will work for low wages upon release. But again, this position only makes sense when one thinks the majority of crimes are for material reasons and that if the material reasons are solved people won't commit as many crimes (rape and sexual assault being an example of a not quite material crime.) I do have the caveat about restricting the right for highly likely recidivism cases though. Maybe during the probation/parole period one doesn't have their full rights, but after that they get them back? I am not comfortable with the current status-quo where judges may (and not shall) issue a restoration of rights upon asking. 

Of course these are all minor details really, compared to the general principal. 

Yep. That’s one thing people don’t seem to grasp about the US. When the only, or even the most easily accessible, tool in your toolbox is a hammer, every problem will look like a nail. 

1. My point was that mass-shootings only make up about 1% of all gun deaths. Even if mass shootings were solved entirely (there was never a mass-shooting again) 99% of all gun deaths are from other sources. 

2. During alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition organized crime rose because these cartels and gangs could make profits by selling these items in the black market. When organized crime rises, disputes are resolved through violence between these cartels and gangs. If there is a large supply of semi-automatic weapons, and there is no legal sale of semi-automatic weapons, then organized criminals see a new mechanism to make profits. And since these organized criminals are also weapon-smugglers or even producers, like with drug prohibition and alcohol prohibition, they'll resolve their disputes through -- maybe even more so -- through gun-warfare. About 50% of all homicides in the U.S are gang-related, induced by drug prohibition. We've been slowly, but surely, decriminalizing drugs in the U.S, state by state, which will hopefully eliminate this organized crime, but if gangs can just switch to weapon sales then it becomes a significant problem. This wasn't an issue with fully-automatic weapons because there were only 600,000 of them when they were banned, and never was a high demand for them. But semi-automatic weapons are the highest demanded and produce weapon-type and there are probably something like 300 million of them in the U.S. If the goal is to eliminate gun homicides (regardless of where they originate) this is a problem. This is also why the best gun control probably isn't to ban guns, but to license their sales, which is why I do support some sort of licensing system. 

3. Many organized criminals are children fending for themselves, as young as pre-teen age.



Many of them have children and are desperately trying to take care of them but have no other mechanism to make enough money either because they have a criminal record and therefore can't get a decent job, are in a multi-generational cycle of poverty where they didn't get a decent education or didn't have a stable home-life, and/or some other reason. Many victims of organized crime are people who have nothing to do with the organized criminals but are caught in between the warfare. Many victims of organized crime are victims who police wrongly profile as organized criminals and kill. Given that you're not American and I don't know your background I am not going to suggest that this is the case with you, but often people who say things like this do so because the disproportionate share of people who die from organized crime related shootings are not-white whereas middle-class white people only worry about mass-shootings, suicides and accidents when it comes to gun lethality. 

4. Most gun deaths related to organized crime are from semi-automatic handguns, not AR15's. 

5. So far I haven't talked about the political element, but I will now. You can likely form a coalition that gets us a more egalitarian material reality in the U.S -- including universal healthcare but many other things. That coalition is much harder to build the stricter the gun control you advocate. It's an unfortunate truth, but for many people they'd rather vote for gun-ownership than bettering their material well-being. 

6. The relevance is that a country like Japan never had to enforce their strict laws on people who already owned the weapons, because very few people did own weapons. So it is logistically much easier. This is not the case in the U.S. And whenever one talks about enforcing a ban or firearm possession charges one needs to consider the race and class elements of enforcement and the fact that American policing isn't the same thing as policing in other countries. Gun control therefore will have to look quite different in the U.S than what it looks like in Japan unless you want to exacerbate class and race inequalities. 

7. All of these issues intersect. 

Another thread about the issue of enforcement and why gun control policy (again not to say nothing can be done, see: previous posts on licensing that give alternatives to criminalization) needs to consider enforcement. 

" Right. But my argument was that civilians don't need to own the kind of weapons that are commonly proposed to be banned."

This. Hunting guns are single bolt action and don't require 45 bullets a minute. Nobody would hunt by spraying bullets. Other hunting guns, small game, would be shotguns, again not 45 rounds a minute.

Personally protection, 6 shooter revolver, conceal carry. Again 45 bullets a minute is not required.

Home defense, buy a shotgun, again 45 bullets a minute is not required.

There is ZERO justification for people to own a gun that shots 45 bullets a minute and which has a 30 to 60 round capacity, with fast clip change. There just isn't.

And while their are enforcement concerns to work through...  at the very least stop future sales.  If not that, for the love of God raise the age to 21.

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. 

1) Again, I am more than comfortable with pushing holistic crime reduction measures. My only argument is that gun control should be part of that, and until we reach a point where we are able to control crime, we shouldn't allow ownership of certain types of weapons. 

As for the argument regarding militias, I simply don't think that this could ever go well. If we are to task the citizenry with violence in certain circumstances, then we are leaving it up to them when violence is necessary. I feel that the greater damage of fascism is something like January 6, where an anti-government group is able to exploit that expectation of violence to create terrorism. It seems much less likely that guns will somehow be used to protect freedom and process and much more likely that guns will be used to stifle freedom and process. 

2) I think both of these ideas (mental illness and substance abuse) come back to the idea of demonstrating non-recidivism. If someone is committed, they shouldn't get to walk out of the institution and purchase a gun. They should have to demonstrate for a period of time that they are mentally stable and are managing their mental state to a reasonable extent. The same should be true of substance abusers. They should need to demonstrate for some time that they are no longer dependent on substances before they are restored their firearm owning privileges. You say "If a substance abuser sought treatment and is continuing their treatment, then likewise they shouldn't be restricted", but this seems to imply that they need to demonstrate continuing treatment for a reasonable period of time before full restoration of rights, so I'm not entirely sure what the argument is here unless I'm misunderstanding you. 

As for your point regarding firearms for protection, there is generally little evidence that firearms are particularly good at this. Often, firearms increase the likelihood of being victimized by a crime, not reduce it. As such, I don't feel that it is accurate to state that these laws would make people more vulnerable. 

3) Out of curiosity, in a post-prison society, what should be done with murderers?