I’m opposed to gun control. But I’m wondering how to get past this hurdle with libs. Are there other countries with the amount of guns as the USA that don’t have these mass shooting problems? Is it a unique American sickness?
Seems to be
From what i understand, Switzerland has very lax gun laws (i'm fairly sure every able bodied adult man is issued an assault rifle as part of the citizen militia thing), but despite the swiss being very weird, they have barely any gun crime and afaik, no school shootings
There aren't really any other examples of places with comparable numbers of guns to the US that aren't an active warzone
To clarify my position, i am pro-gun, the US just has very serious mass shooter issues
Ah, that would make sense
I think they do allow ownership of the usual guns though, like handguns, shotguns, and semi automatic rifles
There is definitely an American cult of the gun. It's part of the civic religion. People believe wholeheartedly in all the Wild West mythos, even though it's all BS pushed by dime novels.
There's a reason the shootout at the OK Corral has been so heavily featured in American culture: because it was a huge outlier. If it was just another Tuesday in the Old West, we wouldn't have so many movies about it.
Having said that, I tend to go more practical: the horse has left the barn on gun control. There's hundreds of millions of guns in America. Gun control at this point is emptying an ocean with a teaspoon. So, instead of living in a fantasy world where we can legislate all the guns into the cornfield, recognize that unilateral disarmament is suicide by civility.
Or to put it another way: strict gun control on gun sales now just disarms leftists who are trying to catch up, as the right is literally awash in guns.
Or to put it another way: strict gun control on gun sales now just disarms leftists who are trying to catch up, as the right is literally awash in guns.
And this is why there's a such thing as under-the-table markets or buying unfinished gun parts and finishing them yourself.
We need gun education not necessarily more strict gun laws. What should happen is more strict requirements for safety and education classes to own a gun.
Also... Police kill like two orders of magnitude more people each year than mass shootings, so even if you can't come up with a counter to gun control you can at least put police in the front of the line for the firing squad. To use an expression.
I used to be a huge gun control lib and what helped break me out of it (along with being radicalized in general) was George Floyd/BLM.
If liberals can concede there is a huge problem with police disproportionately killing POC, a logical follow-up question is, "if you can't call the cops to help you because there's a high chance of them killing you instead, how are you supposed to keep yourself, your family, and your community safe?"
Maybe there would be some push back that they "don't need a gun" for that, but I still think it can be a good starting point.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/12/the-rifle-on-the-wall-a-left-argument-for-gun-rights/
Check out the book Loaded. It's not the best written book on gun culture but overall it was insightful. Basically no gun ban being proposed would stop school shootings because the guns in the proposed bans are almost never used in gun violence. Majority of gun deaths are suicides. Long gun deaths are like 1000 a year or something.
Why is this the hill you want to die on in a time of increasing right wing political violence?
Usually works.
Don't put the guns to your home, but to association lockers. Have people be 25 years of age before allowed to shoot stuff to shit.
There's no point. School shootings and mass shootings account for like, what, maybe 200 deaths a year, if that? And most of them have no realistic understanding of what full disarmament would cost in terms of bloodshed and lives, or any serious plan to achieve it. You're inevitably arguing against people's gut emotional response to watching children die on 24/7 cable news. If their response is "We must ban guns!" you're not going to argue them out of it.
