I lose my cool when people say the same old lib talking points about how awful mass shootings are and how we need "common sense" gun control. It's the combination of smarmy :maybe-later-honey: :maybe-later-kiddo: attitude and unwillingness to consider the implications of policy, or the history of similar disarming of leftists and vulnerable groups. So I get a little hot and I bully them. Then, they play the "actually I'm [member of vulnerable group] " or "my sibling died to gun violence" card. Great so now I'm an asshole.
Am I wrong to bully people for shallow thinking and smug attitudes. Do I stoop to their style of rhetoric playing up atrocities like the Shanghai Massacre of disarmed leftists by the KMT or how cops kill and abuse black people with impunity after disarming the Black Panthers with the Mulford Act? These fools think these cops will protect us? It's so frustrating.
idk maybe they're just radlibs in leftist spaces
Both of you seems to not really get that capitalist systems exploit social problems that it creates for its own benefit. The contradictions inherent in gun culture create opportunities for capitalists and politicians, while dividing principled opposition -- but you just keep bullying allies who disagree with you. I don't know a single freethinking person whom "bullying" would work on. Maybe your arguments are grounded in some fact or compelling moral argument that people were sort of on their way to internalizing, so that a natural outcome of of the person's conscientiousness and intelligence is to reach some of the same conclusions we, as scientific socialists, have already determined to be true. But there is noone who I would ever want to work with who folds when being bullied, what happens if they get arrested? Now the guy you bullied into being a "leftist" is being bullied by the cops to give up your working group.
I love this community but the whole "bullying works" thing is pushed by operators and (I'm sorry I love you but) vegans. It doesn't work. You know what works? Explicitly non-violent, explicitly armed community defense. Pacifists are real principled until they start getting shot at by reactionaries. The group that defends them wins them over to the necessity of armed defense. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/deacons-defense-and-justice/
Struggle. Not bullying. Leftists arguing isn't struggle. Leftists fighting together, is. Sorry for the lecture, but gun culture is designed to be a mindfuck rife with contraditions. There isn't a right or wrong side in this particular example. there are only right and wrong tactics conditioned by the demands of the struggle. Peaceful protesters should be able to be defended by principled, sometimes armed, comrades. Armed groups should be able to do peaceful and unarmed protest if necessary. Its not the guns that protect us, its our principles and camaraderie first. Without those we point the guns at each other, and the enemy delights
gotta disarm the police and the klan (same picture ik) first then i'll consider telling people at risk of getting pogromed to disarm.
I agree but that's the last thing that would happen until this constitution gets thrown out.
There will be no common sense to gun control. Just cite the mulford act or all the current medical cannabis users who are barred from owning firearms.
Americans are soo gunbrained. The way Americans talk about guns and how rest of the world talks about it is very different. This thread feels very surreal.
We, the US, could have half of our guns disappear and still be roughly tied for the most guns per capita
Guns are central to US identity from its very inception, and selective gun control laws have been used the whole time to arm the colonizers and disarm the colonized. It's silly to act like the US isn't in a unique bind on guns
The US isn't in a unique bind about guns their government is just captured by industry
You just said we're not in a unique bind on it, and then described the bind
name another country in the same bind as the US is on guns
Having a government captured by industry isn't unique, the fact that in the US the gun industry is one of them is a distinction without a difference, not some Gordian knot no one can figure out how to untie.
Instead of championing movement to counter that power we have very cool leftists repeating gun industry opposition to basic levels of gun control.
Also, it's not some fucking gordian knot. We know how to untie it, it's just that it involves replacing our entire government
In the meantime, more criminalization in the US is just more criminalization
yeah, you can't name another because there isn't one
I mean it's third most populous country and has more guns than people. I think that itself makes U.S. quite unique. China and India don't come anywhere close.
It's a weird, really bad situation. The distribution of guns in the US is strange, with gun-hobbyists holding a lot of them, particularly assault weapons. We have "licensing" programs for "illegal" weapons that allow you to own and use them if you're rich, meanwhile we sentence weed dealers to mandatory minimums for just possessing an otherwise legal handgun when they fall victim to a sting operation
The US is ontologically evil is what I'm saying
I think a lot of them just aren't in the US, honestly. Even a lot of left-sympathetic people in the US don't really grasp how the US has always used its gun control laws to enforce white supremacism, but I figure it's especially uncommon knowledge elsewhere
Lol at the one useful answer being the confirmation bias answer.
let's start by labeling leftists as terrorists and take theirs. then let's label minorities as criminals and take theirs. label trans people as mentally ill and unfit for gun possession.
That's how it works in the US with it's current laws, constitution, and enforcement. Rules for thee but not for me. In-groups for whom the law protects but does not apply, out-groups for whom the law applies but does not protect.
nationwide buyback & amnesty program, strict licencing and criminalisation thereafter.
the idea that all comers can get their hands on a gun is fucking wild to me, usa is a small arms manufacturer's wet dream
The answer isn't more guns
buybacks are the quickest route to taking all the guns from the underprivileged and economically underserved minorities while leaving all the guns in the hands of the middle class and petit bourg white supremacists who have the fun bucks to spare. Gun control is good and well but buybacks are an incredibly bad solution
The answer to what?
Anyone with a 3D printer and internet can make a gun now. The cat is out of the bag. Criminalize it all you want, criminals will still do it.
The answer has nothing to do with gun control.
anyone with some pipe fittings can make a slam gun too. That doesn't mean semiautos should be easily accessible, nor that you should just accept the consequences
I don't want to just accept the consequences. I want to address the real causes and solutions to antisocial behavior, instead of us playing whack-a-mole with different configurations of plastic and metal.
And semi-autos are printable too.
absolutely, that's the right way to do things. again, idk, y'all are strapped to the teeth already, I don't see a way of undoing that without further bloodshed, you're all so attached to your instruments of death.
Like yes, root causes and solutions, but in the meantime, what?
You being armed does nothing to help your neighbour, nor better living conditions for anyone. Someone in crisis (or power, or both) having access to firearms does little to deescalate or address the situation either.It does help. An armed leftist stopped the Normandale Park shooter in Portland. The actual kind of gun control that can get passed in the US won't stop right-wing violence against us. It's up to us to arm, train and protect each other.
I want private gun ownership to be abolished and to be able to go down to the range and shoot an automatic AK with the mates, like you can in Vietnam, but I don't think I want the United States of America to be taking guns away
My problem is that they say that shit and then don't do anything about it. There probably wouldn't be a single issue that would be easier to build a mass movement around and yet they sit on their ass and repeat smarmy lib talking points like that's going to do anything. Any popular energy on this issue is immediately filtered into backrooms where the Democratic party and the pro gun control lobby guzzle down tax deductible billionaire money to sustain their bourgeois lifestyles. Bring it to the masses and into the streets and I'll take the issue more seriously.
Yeah I'm in the states. I'm saying like every progressive issue it gets taken over by the politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats and nobody even tries to build a mass movement around it.
I'm slightly opposed to gun control but had something like March for our Lives actually been a sustained movement it would have been cool. Instead it turned into a lobbying group. This seems to always happen with gun control in particular.
I see what you mean now thanks. I don't see it becoming a mass movement because the masses aren't on board. Too many Americans own guns and believe they would be less safe without them. It is a movement of young people who can't have guns, have no experience with them except the fear of being shot, which I completely understand. Then of course billionaires don't want an armed working class, I'm sure they don't want mass shootings either (who does), but their material interests align with that. On the other hand, there's other capitalists whose material interests benefit from civilian gun sales.
Say "Under no pretext" then when they disagree they are a silly person whose opinion can be discarded and there's no point to further conversation. We can't win them all.
Embrace Leninist thought:
Trotsky has sent in a silly letter. We shall neither print it nor reply to him.
Another Internet thread about guns in the US, another chance for me to say these two simple truths:
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The pigs will not disarm themselves.
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The pigs will not disarm their fascist drinking buddies either.
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Snappy, but if you were to organize the biggest and most grassrootsiest gun control campaign in US history, you would still stand no chance of disarming boat dealers and their murderous failsons
Oh I am well aware, if sandy hook didn’t get it done nothing will. You can’t appeal to the morality of that which has no morals.
It's constantly astounding how the US can make the most out of every opportunity to become worse. Elementary school gets shot up? Must be a hoax to take guns away from white christian men
i'm rather a fan of the practical appeal when talking with liberals here in the US.
it's the third rail of our politics -- touch it and you loose. It doesn't matter what you argue or how recent the latest shooting. Gun control is a loosing policy. Everything else you run on can be overwhelmingly popular. But people will ignore that if they hear you talk about gun control. Liberals can holler about the 'utopian' demands of the left all they want, non of it is more unrealistic than gun control in america.
If they push back and ask what to do about mass shootings, point to the mental health crisis. Socialized medicine has the potential to address the cause of mass violence -- tighter weapon control is and always was just a band-aid.
have yet to see any good leftist anti-gun talking points tbh. they all seem to be either from other countries and don't understand our material conditions, or people who still have liberal takes on it (read: smug moral superiority).
not gonna tell someone in australia to get armed, so don't fuckin try to draw some backwards causal link between queer people in the US getting self defense and fascists shooting schools.
The Rev Left Radio episode that came out semi-recently is a pretty good discussion on this topic. They outline some regulations that could help to curb violence within the current system while recognizing that this policy often disproportionately affects minority populations.
