While I do think this situation is tragic all around, I feel the need to post the definition of “Joke” from Wikipedia:
“A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means.”
And so I think his comment was an absolutely valid joke. You can joke about horrible things and still remain respectful. Actually it’s a very therapeutic and didactic thing to do, if done right.
my point is the golden rule of tragedy + time, and how you failed that equation, but whatevs. no one is sayin ya cant be gross, and im allowed my opinion.
“Hopes and prayers, constitution ties our hands, we’ve done all we can do, it’s the parent’s fault, he played too much red dead redemption, if all the bus passengers had guns this wouldn’t have happened….”
Start taxing the SHIT out of ammo, Chris Rock had a great idea, we just need to make it law.
This is a gun thread. But if you’re implying that taxing gas has not stopped Americans from driving big ass trucks, realize that the USA does not nearly tax gas as much as other modern nations and in fact we subsidize it. In most other countries few people drive big ass trucks precisely because it’s so expensive.
Ammunition reloading is already alive and well in America and an amazing money savings versus buying new. Saved brass is paid for an smaller caliber rounds are cheap, like a dime per bullet (.223); ultimately it would spread dirt cheap methods of self production and selling brass casings as something innocuous like “paper weights”.
Gun nuts always find a way to circumvent law. See defining “assault rifle” for example.
I concur. I used to work in the service industry in a non gun friendly state and still ran into two guys who made their own ammo. Also sold to friends.
“Was that wrong? Should I have not done that? I tell you I gotta plead ignorance on this thing because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing was frowned upon, you know, cause I’ve worked ridden in a lot of offices busses and I tell you people do that all the time.”
Irresponsible parents are a fact of life. Please stop deflecting from the problem that has a very simple solution to the one that isn’t going away ever. Keep the fucking guns away from children…
13 yesr olds usually aren’t held criminally responsible for their actions because they don’t understand the value of life or consequences of their actions etc. so maybe they should’nt be given guns to take on the bus or wherever. But Im Australian. Never seen a gun or heard a shooting.
This same person told me in another thread that the reason guns should be legal in the U.S. is protection against bears and mountain lions- which almost never attack anyone. Like less than 100 times in the last 50 years combined. They can’t even come up with a good argument for adults to have guns.
Pistol shooting practice is typically done at no more than 25 yards, while hunting rifles can more comfortably do a longer range. Sure, you can hit with a pistol at similar ranges (especially with a larger caliber as you propose) but rifles are better for controlling the recoil and typically more accurate. If the goal is to actually hit, and in particular kill painlessly, a rifle is the better tool.
I do know of people who hunt with handguns, but it is definitely rarer. I honestly don’t have any issues with hunting if you eat what you hunt. If you just do it to massacre an animal and just leave it where you killed it, fuck you, but I have no issue with responsible hunting practices.
That said, it’s my understanding that bow hunting is the fastest, and thus most painless way of killing an animal.
That is completely False.
I have shells that will cause a 3 to 4 inch cavitation hole when they hit something causing a large amount of damage and blood loss that will kill with any hit in the chest area.
With a bow, even if you hit the heart it will still take time, especially if you miss and then it is bleeding, suffering, and you have to track it.
At top skill in both I would say it is a tie in that both have the potential to kill instantly, a bow is more likely to harm than kill at lower skill levels though.
Tbf I carry a rifle any time I go in the woods damn near.
I love nature but am terrified of bears and I want a big firecracker, if it comes down to trying to use it on a bear that wants to fight I am probably already fucked and I know that.
If it makes you feel more secure, I won’t judge you, but you should know that-
Statistics suggest there have been over 180 fatal bear attacks in North America since 1784. While the majority of these fatal attacks have been carried out by wild bears, some are the result of bears held in captivity.
Statistics like this are bunk. If I’m camping in the forest my chances of having a bad encounter with a bear are astronomically higher than drowning in a bathtub. Context is everything when it comes to your specific risk profile.
Used to have to shoot cottonmouths and copperheads all the time when I lived out in the country. We were too far from a hospital to chance it with poisonous snakes. Glad we moved
Which is a valid argument because people out in the country can get bitten by snakes and be too far from a hospital. The only time he mentioned poisonous snakes was when he said people need guns to protect themselves from rattlesnakes in Dallas.
Snake/rat shot is designed for this task. Basically small shotgun pellets in a handgun cartridge. I’d think it a rather small target to aim a regular bullet at.
Honestly it doesn’t really matter. The second amendment does exist, so some arms in the hands of the populace will be allowed unless we amend our constitution.
That said, we can draw lines based around what kinds of weapons. And something like a bolt action rifle or pump shotgun can be excellent for hunting, but very difficult to conceal or commit any kind of mass shooting with.
It’s semi-autos that are specifically capable of high rates of fire and quick reloads, and that become dangerous. We can regulate some of those arms the same way we regulate access to tanks, jets, nukes and chemical/biological arms.
As a longtime SAR guy --I’m in my 50s-- I always tell people to carry a gun in the backcountry if that’s what makes them feel safe, but just know that you’re far far far more likely to get in trouble from things like weather, terrain, rivers, meltwater, falling, exposure, hypothermia and just the elements in general than you are from any animal. The risk profiles aren’t even remotely close. This is true even in places like Alaska where almost everyone is armed. As far as I’m concerned, a gun is dead weight. Lose it and concentrate instead on carrying the ten essentials and knowing how to use them
When I was 14 and hanging out with 2 friends, 1 of
them grabbed a shotgun and started waving it around. This was a veteran’s gun, he knew better than to make it so accessible. It took us a full minute of screaming at him to get him to put it down. Had his finger near the trigger, pointed it at us, the whole 9 yards. We live in super gun friendly state where we should’ve known better and all 3 of us had properly held and used firearms.
No. 13 year olds should never, ever have access to a gun. Do you seriously want to give a hormonal young teen a weapon and ask them to show restraint?
I recommend practicing and daylight on residential streets before you try out higher speed roads at night. get used to what it's like to have to react before you think you need to. start with a small amount of alcohol and work up.
wrong. just because you don't like my position (and helpful suggestions) doesn't mean i'm a troll. your insinuation i am acting in bad faith is, itself, bad faith.
Alright, you seem to have identified the problem now what do you think the solution is? Gun violence seems to be the worst in the areas with the most guns, is that just a human issue?
Not who you replied to, but I personally feel it’s more than just guns.
It’s the culture around guns, the worship of guns, the lack of better conflict resolution skills, the rise of extremist echo chambers, and harmful rhetoric online.
Even the “come and try to take them” and “fuck around and find out” attitude implicitly says that guns are going to solve whatever conflict people have and that it’s a valid solution equal with other options. The rhetoric doesn’t tell people that it’s the option of last resort for conflicts.
We need to change our culture, our respect for guns, and ultimately give people better tools for solving conflicts. The solution isn’t necessarily more laws, they can certainly be a part of it, but we aren’t going to legislate this problem away.
If you are a gun owner, promote better safety with firearms. Call out those who treat them irresponsibly. If you are around those that act like they are the solution to all problems, give them shit for it. Make them realize it’s not a proportional response to kill someone for a minor disagreement or property theft. Call people out who brandish their firearm - it’s not a de-escalation.
Realize that not everyone is a threat and trying to harm you or your family. The people who are going to harm or kidnap you are so incredibly rare that you are unlikely to ever encounter them. And the situation where you don’t have any other options but to kill them is even rarer. Most situations you can find a way to just leave. I’m not saying that there aren’t dangerous people out there, but the vast majority are generally nice people that just want to live their own lives.
If you aren’t a gun owner, take a safety class and learn a little about them. You don’t have to like them or own one, but try to understand that there are many who do enjoy them. The majority of gun owners aren’t the ones causing issues.
As a society, put more time and money into healthcare and particularly mental healthcare. Work to raise people out of poverty and remove the socioeconomic pressures that lead many towards crime. We need to spend more time with each other, see things from each other’s point of view, and break down barriers between each other. We need to be more empathetic. We need to learn to accept losing in disagreements. Make it okay to be wrong.
Some of these arent truly concrete steps, but more of an ideal we need to work towards. But ultimately, it’s our culture that needs to change. Our culture treats them as a solution to problems and that’s why we see them used for even the dumbest of issues like a blocked aisle on a bus.
That’s… A take for sure. By all means, take your kid hunting and target practicing that young, instill good practices in them, but there’s a big gulf between that and a teenager ever being in the situation in the article.
I’m not saying it’s all of your culture. I’m sorry if it came across that way.
But it certainly is a shockingly large and loud part of it, and the lawmakers clearly have zero intention on stopping it, because not enough people want more restrictions.
About six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) favor stricter gun laws. Another 26% say that U.S. gun laws are about right, and 15% favor less strict gun laws. The percentage who say these laws should be stricter has fluctuated a bit in recent years. In 2021, 53% favored stricter gun laws, and in 2019, 60% said laws should be stricter.
Our disproportionate political representation is a huge part of the issue, and our media representation is very good at burying it. So you’re not wrong, but it’s certainly fair to say there’s more to it.
I’m not saying that people who want law changes aren’t the majority, I’m just saying it’s not enough to actually change the laws (even if there is a small majority for it).
Things generally don’t just happen whenever the public gets to 50% + 1 person support. Support generally has to be higher before things get pushed through.
It’s not just parenting. There are crap parents worldwide, yet this only regularly happens in one place.
E: downvote all you want. Remove my comment if you want. You know it to be true. This is a US thing. Stop worshiping your guns.
And if you are to have them, keep them in a safe, inaccessible to children, when not in use. The fact that this is a controversial statement to Americans is insane.
You can’t just handwave away gun problems as “oh it’s the parent’s fault, nothing can be done”
if you arent personally going into people’s houses and taking their weapons away from them, then preventing them from buying more weapons, then you cant expect anything to actually change.
Yes it does. People under 18 getting hold of firearms and behaving like idiots with them is something that gets reported on frequently in the US and pretty much the US alone.
But sure, name all these other places where this happens on a regular basis.
E: lmao. Straigh up lies in the retort. Asia and Africa don’t have gun problems. Even the most violent place in Africa has a gun violence rate of barely over half of the US’s. Fair enough on central America.
That’s absolutely not true. Data shows the only countries with higher gun deaths per capita than the US are all central and parts of South America. E.g., India’s per capita gun death rate is 0.56 vs 4.12 in the US.
You literally made that up. It’s the US and a few unstable countries in South America.
South Africa, one of the highest homicide rate countries in the world, with a murder rate 6.5x higher than the US, has half the gun homicide rate of the US.
India has has 1 gun homicide per 100k. The US has 11 per 100k.
But yeah. Keep telling us how everywhere outside of Europe and Australia is like this. It’s BS.
Really only South America (actually mostly central America and Brazil) and South Africa, Mali and Somalia fit into that stereotype. The rest of Africa and all of Asia (except Thailand, which is still significantly lower than the US) have very low rates of gun violence.
Lmao how America-brained do you have to be to say that thinking 13 year olds having guns is a bad thing is “pearl clutching”
No. 13 year olds should not have guns.
And I’m from Asia you nitwit. I speak a couple of Asian languages, as well as a couple of European ones, such as the one I’m speaking now.
Asia does not have a gun problem. Africa does not have a gun problem. You made that up and tbh it just sounds like racist dog whistle - “those uncivilised darkies and slit-eyes are violent savages! Their children have machine guns! No I don’t have any proof, don’t ask!”
South America yeah, particularly Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia. And so does the US. Forgive me for having higher expectations of the highest GDP country in the world than I do of fucking Venezuela.
Children should not have tools designed expressly for quick and easy murder. If you think otherwise, cool. Have a good think about it next time you’re on the bus and a child shoots you when you do something to mildly inconvenience him.
Gotta give you credit, it was very clever of you to link to an article without any real stats, but which makes it sound really rife.
It was a good try, but no.
United States: 11 gun deaths per 100k.
South Africa: 6 gun deaths per 100k.
South Africa is the most violent place in Africa by far, and isn’t representative of Africa at all, and still has a gun homicide rate that’s roughly half of the US.
Never said it wasn’t rife. I said you cherrypicking possibly the most violent country out of all Africa and Asia, but making sure to pick an article where it didn’t actually tell you the gun homicide rate (because it’s much lower than the US’s), was a laughable move.
It is rife. It’s just over half the US’s gun homicide rate, which is huge.
What part of this aren’t you getting? Is there something you’d like explained to you? Would it help if I tried to use fewer, shorter words?
I mean, you’re giving us the standard American Exceptionalist rigamarole. If conservative doesn’t describe you, maybe reflect on the kinds of things that you’re saying that would convince people otherwise.
We’re counting state violence now? Are you sure you want to include that statistic in defense of America? Our military has a 7-figure body count so far for the 21st century…
It’s not guns, it never was done. It’s lack of good education, farming it out like it’s just some subscription thing. People aren’t learning practical information in schools. We don’t teach kids how to think, or how to deal with anger in their mind. And they get up and they grow up to be these idiot full grown adults who don’t know how to think past them not liking a person because of skin color, they go with their first wins because they’re idiots, they get a hold of guns because only idiots need guns. And then they do something stupid. Thinking it’s just guns is fucking stupid. Guns don’t hurt people people do blah blah blah, it’s true people suck now. They’re dumb they don’t read and they should shoot themselves in the head next time
People from other countries aren’t just intrinsically superior to Americans. We haven’t all trained our kids to be paragons of virtue. It’s that any American can trivially get a gun.
I had my own gun and access to guns as a 13 year old. Hunting, target practice, etc. It’s not an insane age to have firearms.
That said, I was raised to respect the fuck out of the danger inherent in a gun, and I used mine to kill deer for food, not kill people I had a mild disagreement with.
Edit: Well fuck me for being born into a different environment ig. Mass downvoting someone for offering a different perspective is healthy for an online community /s
I hunted, shot targets, and protected the farm from predators and varmints safely for years because I was taught religiously and throughly since I was a small child what the responsibilty of wielding a firearm is. Firearms are tools designed to end lives, and they are very, very good at it. There are no take-backs, no do-overs. Each time you touch a firearm, a life could end, and you NEED to be absolutely 100% certain it’s the life you mean to take.
It’s a great crushing weight that many adults, much less 13 year olds, should not be trusted with, but some 13 year olds can bear that responsibility well, as I did. There were never any accidents, because there could not be accidents.
One thing that I constantly have to remind myself is that people I’m debating with live a vastly different life experience. So many people who are so antigun clearly live in an urban or suburban environment and cannot fathom living somewhere rural enough that defending livestock from predators or hunting for food is a fact of life.
And some that are so pro-gun live in rural areas and don’t get the issues that dense populations where guns are cause issues.
Personally, I don’t think guns are the main problem. It’s the culture around guns, the worship of guns, the lack of better conflict resolution skills, the rise of extremist echo chambers, and harmful rhetoric online.
Even the “come and try to take them” and “fuck around and find out” attitude implicitly says that guns are going to solve whatever conflict people have and that it’s a valid solution equal with other options. The rhetoric doesn’t tell people that it’s the option of last resort for conflicts.
Gotta love being down voted because “America bad” mixed with “guns bad”
Lemmy sure is a weird mixture of people wanting to arm themselves (or allow others to arm) against an increasingly fascist state while some want all guns to be gone forever and think voting and talking is the only way to enact change. These types are also usually the ones who complain about peaceful protestors being mildly inconvenient to others, and shrug their shoulders when the people they watched beat another person nearly to death get a slap on the wrists because “that’s justice for you, whaddaya gonna do”
And it really depends on which group gets to the comments first as to how the votes and conversations go.
A properly run society with good living conditions, social programs, medical/psychological care absolutely can have guns, and there are several examples in europe alone.
I’m a leftist that’s cool with guns and was raised around them, and technically, not legally, owned my first gun at 11.
A 13 year old still should not have access to guns anywhere in public without adult supervision. I get hunting, I get protecting the farm, etc. None of those involve taking a gun on public transport though.
And yeah, America bad. If this was even remotely a significant issue anywhere else, we could say otherwise, but it’s not.
The biggest part of gun laws is checking for responsible ownership. You are allowed to get hunting guns in most of the countries that the right says “ban guns”. They just have common sense checks, like do you have training at a shooting range, do you understand gun safety, do you have a gun safe, are you not a psychopath prone to fits of violence? Your upbringing wouldn’t be any different because your parents were responsible and would have passed all those checks.
This is about not giving a gun to every dumbass yahoo that stumbles into a store. The household this kid grew up in obviously wasn’t responsible because this kid has unsupervised access to a gun.
Kids much younger than 13 know right from wrong, and are capable of understanding the harm they can cause. I don’t want to live in a society that thinks the problem here is “13” rather than “psychopath”.
Societal expectations for teens are far too low. We infantilize tweens and teens. We set our expectations so low that even when they outright murder someone, we blame everyone else.
If he’s murdering people at age 13, he learned how to be a scumbag criminal before he could talk.
The problem here is untrained, unrestricted and unsupervised access to guns. You’re right that we don’t want psychos owning guns in general, not just 13 year olds. Look up the steps to getting a gun in Canada, you just need to take a safety course and pass some background checks. That’s to add assurance that gun owners know what they’re doing, and aren’t psychos. In this case the kid had unrestricted access to a gun without supervision, because his parents were either untrained to understand proper storage, or irresponsible. Training is a big part of keeping guns out of the hands of people who have not been verified to be responsible to own a gun unsupervised, like this kid.
The problem here is a 13-year-old actually, seriously, wanted to kill someone. Not just got angry or frustrated. It wasn’t unintentional, negligent, or accidental. He deliberately and knowingly decided to kill.
Take away the guns, and the bigger problem remains.
No, we absolutely should not be stereotyping every 13-year-old because this irredeemable piece of shit happened to be that age when he decided to kill.
Well fuck me for being born into a different environment ig. Mass downvoting
Are you sure that is the reason? Maybe it could be that posting that 13 is a good age for gun ownership in a thread about a 13 year old who used it wildly inappropriately? You are entitled to think what you want, I just personally find it a little distasteful everytime there is a gun death to make justifications about the system that allowed it to happen. I imagine others agree.
Eh, I feel like most people wouldn’t disagree with the statement “it’s insane to allow 13 year olds to own guns”, and the argument of “well I owned guns at 13 and I turned out fine” isn’t a strong one.
Agreed. My kids are younger than 13. They know how to access our guns, some are even considered thiers though legally they can’t own them. They’ve hunted and shoot regularly. Would any of them ever carry outside of a situation like hunting. No fucking way. That stuff lives in a double locked safe when not in use. We are Canadian though and perhaps a different mindset when it comes to guns, their uses and access.
I got beat regularly, and my stepfather at the time used to do stuff like make me wait in the basement for 30 mins, then he’d slowly walk down the stairs with his belt unbuckled so we could hear the jingling in each step, then he’d tell us some scriptures and say this hurt him more than us.
Then if you cried right away it was faking, but if you held on too long it was you being rebellious and stubborn, so my brother and I learned to start faking our cries after the 6th or 7th hit.
I told that to friends as an adult as what I thought was a kinda funny story, and they properly realized I was abused in a somewhat sadistic way and pointed it out to me.
They weren’t calling me out for having a different environment, they were correcting my incorrect belief that it was normal or acceptable.
People are doing the same for you. You made it out safely, but giving unstable teens access to guns is definitely a risk that probably shouldn’t be taken. Survivor bias isn’t an excuse to say it’s fine.
Hahaha we sound very similar. I’ve definitely told stories like that to my close friends thinking they’re funny and they’re horrified.
The sight or sound of someone, especially a man, taking off their belt still triggers the ol’ CPTSD decades later lmao.
Anyway, that was a great example. I grew up in a similar place with similar gun culture as them, and had to figure out for myself what you mentioned in your comment. I definitely think a bit of that is at play here.
It is legal to hunt at 12 years old in some states.
Edit: I bought enough trigger locks for all my long guns and pistols for under $100. There is no excuse not to have them installed and I live alone. My guns are also in a locker as well as trigger locked. My ammo is in a different room in a safe box screwed to the closet floor from inside the locked box. All this was well under $200 including the gun locker.
I doubt THAT’S why the kid had a gun. It was easier to buy one in my high school than to get one as an adult (even with a good income) where I grew up in NYC.
I don’t think there’s an age limit for hunting in my country, either. I did have a couple of shotguns for the purpose.
To get a license for them I had to pass an exam identifying all game, even by silhouette. And I had to pop in for a quick interview at the police station before applying for a weapon’s license.
I feel like those hoops would filter out 95% of those looking to get weapons fpr illicit purposes. In the case of a handgun, you’d need to show a long-lasting interest in either range shooting or hunting game that hide in dens.
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