Some lists of “mass shootings” include only the public indiscriminate kind, which is what basically everyone thinks of when they hear the phrase “mass shooting,” but some do include actual gang violence (turf war) or other violence based around other crime (drug deal gone bad). Your red shirt blue shirt scenario is cute, but that would still probably be the public indiscriminate kind. The two phenomena are very different.
There was an article from a big US news source a few years ago about how there had been over a hundred school shootings in the US that year. Can’t remember which source. The list of events included many that happened near a school or on school property but only incidentally. There was at least one where kids shot a gun in a school parking lot when no one else was around. Of course that’s still a problem, but again that’s a very different phenomenon than a “school shooting” where someone tries to murder 20 students. That’s why I brought that up.
In short: You have to qualify to own a gun. Assholes don’t get guns. And by fullfilling the laws to own a gun you actually earn respect in your community.
I am member of a German gun club where the local population, the regional police and a couple of NATO soldiers train. It took me nearly one year before I even was allowed to touch a loaded gun, all through my 14th year I was basically just taught how to clean and repair my rifle, how to handle it, how to NOT use it, only then how to use it. And after ten months I was finally given a single bullet.
I am now 30. Nowadays my family owns and shares a Sig Sauer 200, locked inside the gun club. Everyone except my Mum shots around 25 bullets per month, once a year the whole gun club repeats basic training which includes mental health checks.
And after basic training we have special events. For example six years ago a local NATO garrison was massively downsized and so they offered us to use up their overaged surplus ammunition. I got to shot pretty much anything from 9mm to 7,62mm for basically free - we collected money for the victims of a local house fire so I put €50 into the collection.
Did I ever shot a gun outside the gun club?
Actually: Yes. When I was in the US I joined my Uncle on duck hunt. He was like “ok, hold the big rifle while I show you how to shot a duck using 12gd bird shot.” - he misses, I aim and shot the duck mid-air with a .308. I didn’t know ducks could explode, but yes, they can. I paid with a badly aching shoulder, I wasn’t used to those powerful cadridges any more. He looked angry at me and grumbled the plan was to eat the duck not turn them into fine mist. The other three ducks he left for me to shot and wondered where I had learned to operate a gun like that.
When I told him a US lieutenant taught me to operate exaclty the same rifle in my gun club he was like “WTF?”. I might mention the lieutenant immediatelly settled down in my town after his duty was over because he liked Bavaria so much and wanted his kids to grow up in a less crazy nation.
What are your views on ‘objects’ such as personal hand grenades or professionally made improvised fertiliser explosives?
I find it absolutely disgusting that I’m not allowed to turn MY innocent 4 wheel brumm brummm object in to a fun party popper object of devastation!!! It’s political correctness gone mad it is !!!
(Do I need the /s?)
Edit: “Not Qualified” is not the right wording. Because Qualification only plays a secondary role. It is all about the licence.
In Germany carrying a gun without the right licence would be illegal possesion of a firearm.
But wait, even if you have a licence you can get fined for illegal transport and handling of a firearm.
Carrying a conceiled small sidearm without a special permit is big trouble. Transporting a firearm without a locked enclosure and not seperated from the ammunition is also a serious offence. At home you need a locked container. All in all it got so complicated that my Dad stopped storing guns at home. He sold one and put the other into the gun club. The club is really helpful, we can lend legal transport containers and for guns which we are not allowed to move in public they offer transport services for a small fee, usually that means a police officer moves the gun in his free time using legal transport containers in exchange for a beer.
Classic case: Someone dies and you find a loaded pistol in his inheritance. You bring it to the police. You did three offences: Carrying a conceiled firearm in public, carrying a firearm without proper container, carrying a loaded firearm. The legal way would have been: Calling the police to retrieve the firearm. To be honest, the state attourney usually closes those cases rather quick as “minor incident without criminal intent” but you still get a serious talk.
There are some exceptions for old historic muzzleloaders which are often fired at historic events without bullets. We don’t have those so I don’t know barely anything about those rules.
I appreciate your perspective on this. What you describe is about more than just ‘assholes don’t get guns’, although that is a crucial aspect. The way your family owns just ‘a’ gun, trained for a long while before shooting, respect for following gun laws. This is the opposite of the usual experience around guns in the US. We as a culture in the US are careless and wanton with guns in general from what I’ve seen.
I was shown how to use a gun when I was 6 years old, my parents were responsible though so it was only an air pistol, but heavy duty, not airsoft. We had a shotgun, 9mm pistol and a .22 rifle in the house never locked up, didn’t even have a safe to lock them if my dad wanted to, and the shotgun was often stored loaded. When people here get together to shoot, it’s not odd to hand a loaded gun to someone that has never been to a range or even seen one fired before. Plenty of people are much safer than this, but I would guess my experience is the more common from what I’ve seen.
From what I can tell, most gun safety training in the US is a single sentence: Always treat it like it’s loaded, and keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
The target wasn’t elevated. We were elevated. I tried to explain that the duck was just taking speed to take off but honestly I don’t know the right English word for that maneuver. And as I hinted, I had fired the exact same rifle two years earlier at our gun club several times. Also, I paid with an aching shoulder for my recklessness.
It’s not that hard of a shot…ducks typically move in a straight line. It’s a dumb shot to take for sure, but it’s not an impossible one. If OP really has the training he says he has, I’d buy it.
I’d be surprised if it could even happen legally, there’s no reason to have a rifle with you to duck hunt. If DNR caught you you’d get a ticket for poaching ( you have a permit for ducks but you are out with gear to hunt deer ) and they’d keep the guns. Yes, even on private land.
Gang shootings often kill bystanders as much as ‘criminals’. Do you really think a 15 year old gang member in a rough place where shootings are common had a lot of choice? A lot of ‘gang shootings’ are by kids.
You seriously think mass shootings happen every single day of the week? Why the hell would I need a source contradict such a and insane statement? The problem these days is that a “mass shooting” is not some unprovoked crime by a nut job shooting up a school. It’s two or more people. That also includes gangland shootings between gangs. Current gun laws already completely restrict them from owning guns as criminals so I see no point in even discussing that.
You see no point in discussing that when there’s steps that can be taken to control the flow of guns to criminals? And you see no reason to discuss every other mass shooting?
In case you didn’t know, that was one of the original intents of the second amendment. The ability to fight against a government that has become tyrannical.
You seem to be forgetting that the military is made up of Americans. Americans who swore to protect the Constitution. Americans who overwhelmingly like the second amendment and guns. Also what the fuck is an F32? If you’re talking about planes like F35s or F22s then that would be a very bad choice. The military operating inside the US would definitely be unpopular and make for more insurgents.
Ah right, so explain how a group of even 50 well trained individuals, (no military careers among them, because that’s the point) is going to stop the US Military in the mountains of Appalachia? Between satellite feeds, drones, missile, artillery batteries, and armored vehicles like the MRAP, what exactly is an armed insurrection going to do? I would remind you that, over 100 years ago the us military was already good enough to win a war where nearly half the US went to war with itself, as a second military, and lost. They were, more or less, equally armed as their opponents in terms of weapons (each individual engagement was decided by skill and numbers, not by what weapons they used) and the south were blockaded into surrender. With the reunification, and 100+ years since it has only gotten stronger, to say nothing of the entrance of the Atomic and Digital Ages.
If the us government wants to stomp on the US people by force, it’s had the capability for over 70 years now. Since that time a re-examination should have happened to either reaffirm the laws and ammendments set forth, or altered them. You can’t reasonably say “then the military should not have X” because that puts the country at a disadvantage on a world stage.
These ammendments were written when it took 30 seconds or more to reload a black powder cartridge. These ammendments were written when you couldn’t send an object into orbit and hang there to watch other humans. It was written when slavery was codified and the norm. Since this document was written we have passed a dozen ammendments to it. Theres not “no way to change the second ammendment” there’s only people willing to allow it to be changed. Nowadays we don’t have issues with feeding colonies, or how to reach a gold rush in them-there moun’ns. We live in a time where more people live in new york city than the founding fathers wrote the document to rule over as a country.
The second ammendment, among the others, is outdated for a different time. It was written to prevent something that, quite frankly, isn’t an issue these days. At the time yeah it was all the rage to have yourself an Independance War because the governing country was oppressive. As was made apparent during the Civil War, and is true now - the average citizens uprising to overthrow the government for any reason won’t happen without military support anyway. And that means military hardware. You only get military hardware from defectors or thieves, neither of which are going to fight a us army base like it’s GTA to get ahold of it.
You bring up an interesting point about the Civil War and I want to ask before making a conclusion. Have there been times when the people “fighting against tyranny” were people that weren’t backwards? (i.e. Wanted to keep slavery, Jan. 6 insurrectionists, etc.)
I suppose the answer would largely be No. Not because they’re “backwards” but because the scenario 2a is alleging is that the government is unpopular and brutal, and deposing it is actually the popular public sentiment, but the government stays in power because of the “army” (as a whole combined navy/army because that’s what they had at the time)
A 2a argument would be like saying the current state of china exists because the average citizen doesn’t have a firearm.
Any ‘militia’ group like this is just going to get blown to bits by unmanned drones if it comes down to it.
Hypothetically speaking, the real path to resistance would be individuals figuring out ways to assassinate oligarchs and high ranking officials, and having enough success to instill fear in the rest of them.
That alone doesn’t work because even well-meaning people will use the power of the position for their own benefit eventually. We have tried slaying the leaders for centuries, we need to go to the root and eliminate the reigns by which they hold power, but it can at times be a pragmatic act of self defense still.
What does “the right of the people” mean? Because the militia (every able bodied man in the nation) should be kept well armed, we ensured the right of the people (everyone) to keep and bear arms.
That’s beyond stupid. You actually believe that? When you think mass shootings do you think sla nut job going into a school to kill people, or a drive by? Because that high figure is absolutely conflating the two.
You seriously don’t think there’s too much gun crime in the US? You seriously think that every person involved in every gang shooting has a prior record?
Sure, I’ll concede that there isn’t a mass shooting every single day of every week every year. Congrats you win. But if you think there’s nothing wrong with our current gun laws when we have the highest rates of gun crime, and if you think that even the occasional mass shooting involving little kids is just “the cost of keeping our rights” then frankly I see no further point in engaging with you. And don’t for a second think that means you’ve won, it means you’ve already lost to the propaganda machine and have accepted loss of life as the cost of doing business. I’m not well trained enough to deprogram you.
What the fuck gun laws do you make to keep CRIMINALS who are not allowed to own or purchase guns from doing so? Any new gun law will have no affect on the criminals. Only those trying to defend themselves legally.
Not all gun crime is committed by previously convicted CRIMINALS. Do you think a high schooler getting ahold of dad’s gun and shooting up their school has been previously convicted?? Mental health issues for sure but an existing CRIMINAL record is doubtful.
And the whole good guys with gun stuff is absolute bullshit. Fat lot of good it does when the “good guys” wait outside while a shooting takes place because they’re too scared for their own lives to put their “good guy” guns to good use. So I guess your feelings must basically be fuck the victims then? Would you like to blame the victims while you’re at it? They picked a bad day to show up to class, should’ve stayed home right?
Get your head out of your ass and your ass out of the sand. This definitely isn’t some clear cut easy issue, but if you ask me the answer to world record levels of gun crime isn’t to sit back and do nothing because it might take a gun away from some theoretical, law abiding good guy.
And mind you, I am a law abiding gun owner. I’ve done sport shooting and a little hunting since I was old enough to take hunters safety. And guess what. I didn’t have to do a damn thing for my gun. No application, no permit, no mental health evaluation, no background check… I literally don’t have a driver’s license because that is more difficult to obtain than a fucking gun! If that’s not fubar to you then IMHO you’re hopeless. Sorry to be that way but idk how you even get so deep up inside the NRA’s asshole and I’m definitely not diving in to get you.
I believe in the second amendment and I know there are responsible gun owners out there. That does not automatically mean that people should die just so that I and others like me don’t have to go through some fucking paperwork to obtain something designed to kill.
A significant number of guns used in crimes are stolen from legal gun-owners. With legal guns less prevalent, the people you refer to would have less access to them as well. You could require better care in storage of guns, so that they can’t be stolen as easily. You could increase funding for combating illegal gun trafficking. I’m not saying these are good solutions to the issue, but there are a lot of things one could do through the law to help keep guns away from criminals.
They also can’t be stolen if they’re carried around by the owner and used to kill the person threatening people’s lives. Not enough finding out these days. Too many gang members expecting to just get a slap on the wrist. If they start dropping like flies we would hopefully see less gang members fucking around.
How the hell does what I said have anything to do with per capita? The OP is an image claiming a mass shooting every single day of the week?. That has no correlation with per capita statistics.
Are you honestly telling me you believe that there’s a mass shooting every day? I don’t think there’s been enough mass shootings as people think of them to fill out the month in the last 50 years.
Source: A fox News opinion piece written by a guy driving through a city one time and heard a loud sound in the distance that could have been a gun shot.
There have been 41 school shootings in the 2020's in the United States where 3 or more people of been injured or killed. 160 total incidents with no restrictions on victim count.
Getting rid of guns isn’t the solution, we have 3D printers allowing anyone to make a gun at home. Banning guns won’t stop crimimals from using them. Criminals don’t follow laws.
Plus mass shootings aren’t even relevant statistically as a cause of death, but heart disease and car accidents are but I don’t see anyone up in arms over banning McDonald’s or Ford. I will never support any kind of infringement on my gun rights, no red/yellow flag laws, no national background checks, no mag capacities. Democrats just need to stop treating every mass shooting as an excuse to limit our 2nd amendment rights even more.
Sincerely, a guy whose been 3d printing almost half his life.
First, people are perfectly able to manufacture their own firearms without additive manufacturing of any stripe. Linking ghost guns to 3d printing is a red herring brought to you by technophobic morons and shit-tier journalism from a slow news day. You can buy the needed stuff at any big box hardware store, tools inlcuded, for less than a printer costs.
Secondly, while it is entirely possible to produce firearms with printers… the people who are able to do so, are completely capable of doing it the other way.
Third, 3d printing has a fully international community. Given that criminals exist in every nation; you’d see ghost guns…. Everywhere.
Finally, the vast majority of ghost guns were in fact legally manufactured, and either purchased through stupid-as-fuck private sale exemptions; using straw buyers; or were originally stolen.
So yes, improving gun control laws would in fact make a difference.
You’ll even see them all get together and celebrate with a picture of them pushing a bill that will only add more to the fire we are trying to put out…
Those guys aren’t me, but thanks for trying to put me into a box for easy handling. Keep your labels to yourself. I don’t do this bundle deal nonsense.
having guns is fun. hunting is fun. it’s also nice to know I can protect my property should someone try to perform a home invasion. guns are fun as fuck
are you dumb? thats not what I even meant, if you have ideal justice system and law enforcements, people doesnt need gun for their security, it happens even in so called 3rd world countries.
Where were the police when the police robbed me for everything I ever worked for and kept me in jail until I lied for them to let me out? Oh right. Wish I had a gun so they would be dead.
Well according to the Supreme Court, police have no duty to protect nor serve the public. Literally, they can watch you get murdered, watch the murderer get away, and still be 100% fine.
Police is for robbing people and slapping labels on them to artificially reduce their market value. They’re not gonna do anything about mass shootings because they won’t be there when they happen and don’t really care so long as their own friends and family are fed. They’re also not going to support disarming the population because they will lose that fight by numbers.
But again, not agreeing with republicans saying it’s more urgent than mass shootings, but it’s still an issue to be discussed and addressed, in a much less urgent way.
A huge issue existing doesn’t mean all the rest of the world’s problems are now irrelevant.
I mean, I and many others would argue it is a problem in competitive sports. You can’t really have a biological man and a biological woman compete in a physical field together…
There are many factors that you’re not considering, like when trans men beat cis women at the sport consistently because of a hormonal disparity. Being trans is not necessarily skin-deep and in many cases trans people do present a physiological difference.
biological woman
I think you mean cis woman. I promise it’s not a slur. lol
The point is that they need to shift their priorities. Not that they will because it’s all bought and paid for, so to distract people from the real issues, we gotta do something about trans people in sports.
People preventably dying on the daily vs muh TV game person has a penis.
It has taken on a life of its own and has been twisted to the breaking point by gun nutters. It is never enough for them and any push back is like pulling teeth. They have become the terrorist at this point and there is no reason to negotiate anymore.
See it from their perspective: every time they’ve given an inch, grabbers took a mile. If you want to get concessions you’re going to need to give some too.
Dunno, how do you convince a racist person not to be racist? A flat-earther that the world is round? An anti-abortionist that birth control is the most effective way to prevent abortion?
When women got the right to vote did they try and rationalize with the misogynist? Maybe they could meet them half way and say women only get half a vote instead of a full vote? Does that sound like a good compromise to you!
It is like every major social change could have never happened because they would have to “enforce what they thought was right”. Slaves would need to convince the slavers and find some middle ground. Maybe be slaves half the year to appease them.
The problem is your are not only dealing with someone who is wrong in the case of gun nutters but they are daring you to come get their precious guns threatening your life. It is in essence terroristic in nature. There is no compromise with terrorists.
So yes, we tell them they are wrong. We grow up and stop giving in to terrorists. Laws are changed but more importantly society changes. Those that can reflect on this and accept they were wrong change or maybe the rest all die of old age. We move on and get past this.
I am being deadly serious. You’re speaking on behalf of the authorities about an issue you don’t understand. No trolling here, I have called it what it is.
It will never be enough. Look at the responses in this thread and elsewhere. It will never be enough. There is no price too high that it won't happily be paid. There is no regulation small enough that it will be accepted. They have made that exceptionally clear.
There is no negotiation with them. You will never convince them. It doesn't matter if the regulation works or not.
I don't even think it's a might-makes-right issue yet. They have guns, sure. But that's still basically nothing in the face of government force.
My point was more along the lines of that in all of these gun control discussions, there are mistaken expectations from a lot of liberal people.
Liberals keep engaging in this conversation as if it were a negotiation between reasonable people trying to find common ground. That if the cost of a lack of regulation grows too high, that if they make the right arguments, that if they offer the right compromises, they can move towards moderate gun control.
But that's not what's happening. The gun lobby has repeatedly shown that any regulation, no matter how small, will be viewed the same way as a complete forcible disarming, and will be opposed with the same vigour. And that there is no cost of human life that will ever change that.
For the 2nd Amendment types, the conversation is already over. Everything they say is meaningless, because they don't actually care if what they say is true, they don't care if the regulation works or not. They are just saying things to shut down the discourse, and if you counter them, they'll just move on to the next point like nothing has changed. Because to them nothing has changed.
That’s not going to happen in the lifetime of anyone who can read this comment.
Because it requires more than a majority of Congress, it also requires 3/4 of the 50 states to vote to ratify it. Only takes 13 states voting NO to prevent it, and there are plenty more red states than that who would never give up our rights so foolishly.
While we should have better access to mental (and physical) health care, that’s probably not going to fix the too frequent “Someone knocked on my door so i shot them” murders that happen too often.
It also won’t solve the “and then the police shot him” murders.
There are a lot of things wrong with the US and its dominant culture. I’d say most of the blame and the blood is on conservatives. Which makes a kind of sense - if you have a shitty system and you are fighting to keep it as is, you’re probably a shitty person with shitty takes making the world worse.
If someone just thanos snapped away the conservatives, or at least the authoritarian subset of them, many problems would vanish overnight.
The “funny” thing about the police shooting people for having guns is that it essentially means Americans don’t actually have the right to own/carry guns. They only have the right to buy them.
They just claim they feared for their life and now they’re declared not guilty. There is no specific law saying they can just shoot you for having a gun, but there’s plenty of other laws, precedents etc. making it absolutely legal for them to shoot you for having a gun.
Even if you don’t have a gun it’s a problem, if you are are stopped by police for a random check^1. You are asked for your license and registration papers. You move your hand 1 cm to get it, cop suddenly realizes you could theoretically have a gun, then decides to shoot you first because self defense.
The possibility that literally everyone can have a firearm makes living there so much more dangerous compared to not having the option of shooting back whenever it would be needed for actual self defense.
^1 probability for random police checks has an inverse proportionality to the whiteness of one’s skin color.
We all know if that happened the democrats would fuck it up. They’d stop everything they were working on and set up conservation efforts for conservatives. They’d have musicians raise awareness of the unprecedented threat the conservatives are under and tell everyone where they can donate to those left griftless. The real shitty thing is that without the Republicans around to fuck it up it’ll probably actually work.
Oh I long for the day we can tour a historical conservative town reenactment.
“Over here, notice the giant American flag, and even more prominent Trump 2024 flag. On the other side, a comically large truck requiring a ladder to enter, believe it or not, these were often chosen for low fuel efficiency and modified for extra pollution. Up ahead we see a teenager who has just been kicked out of their parent’s house for being gay, a house containing a meth lab, six churches, and a neighbor wielding an AR-15 ‘just in case’.”
Healthcare is unobtainable for most, housing is now a pipe dream for most, prosperity falling apart, working until you die. “We need to incarcerate all the drug addicts and kill the crazy people”.
If only the mass shooters would just target the rich instead of the general public, but I agree with you. A Thanos snap on a good chunk of the conservatives would fix a ton of shit.
I guess it’s not technically unobtainable, it just puts you into financial ruin to utilize healthcare. I call that unobtainable if you’re trying to be financially responsible.
When I look at housing and I see that it has to consume %50 or more of people’s annual budget, that means young people need to earn around 115-150k/yr in order to become homeowners, and that’s only after banks have shifted the goal posts. Young professionals are also much more likely to be saddled with 30-65k of student debt.
When you combine that with the inflation spike that happened last year, and the rising rents, there’s many people earning only $25/hr but rent is $2k/month.
Just fucking good times. The next spike will probably be the suicide rates.
Republicans know multiple causes and contributions that lead to mass shootings, but none of them will support doing anything to address those causes because muh socialism.
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