Minimum wage hikes chew through profits and profits are pretty much the #1 legislative priority because that's the primary concern of those doing the campaign financing.
Same reason gun control wont happen no matter how many people get killed - ultimately its because gun manufacturers would lose money.
American politics is the art of trying to shape public opinion just enough to be compatible with the desires of campaign financers.
I'll multiply that by 10 to guesstimate privately held companies, local gun stores, and the rest of the long tail. So let's say we're at $43 billion for the whole gun industry in the US.
Isn't that kind of podunk scale for an industry to have a rock solid hold on US politics? Snapchat alone is valued at $72B. Ford is $80B. Pfizer is $330B. Dollar General is $51B. Heck, Office Depot is worth more than S&W or Ruger.
I would assume if normal,everyday citizens started banding together to buy votes the corporations would up the ante and price us out pretty quickly, but as things stand right now there's no point without competition. Power of the free market baby!
Even smaller companies that don't make a product with a major govt/ military contract often have contracts as secondary suppliers of 3rd party or military spec'd parts, like scopes, mounts, triggers, etc.
A buyer could shut down a company that holds such a contract, but then it would just go back up for public bid.
Additionally, military standards for ammo are very high, and companies make money selling "factory seconds" (that don't meet military qa/qc, but are otherwise fine) to the public, which is an included perk of these govt contracts. And isn't a negligible fraction of required production.
So even a hypothetical buyer that would meet its contractual obligation to the govt would do so at an additional cost compared a company selling seconds and surplus manufacturing capacity.
In short, the market won't change without major policy change, no matter what major players might be hypothetically bought and shut down.
This isn't true in practice. Sure, company stock is not as great as the almighty US dollar, but can be used to purchase other companies, and its valuation directly affects how much cash the company can raise.
relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
>all donations to all candidates, all lobbying, all think tanks, all advocacy organizations, the Washington Post, Vox, Mic, Mashable, Gawker, and Tumblr, combined, are still worth a little bit less than the almond industry. And Musk could buy them all.)
> As rich as Elon Musk is, he’s only one of five hundred billionaires, and some of the others are even richer.
Not when a Constitutional Amendment makes that industry "too big to fail" because its thesis on the necessity of the right to keep and bear arms depends on there being an industry manufacturing arms to begin with (at least at modern scale,) and when the industry overwhelmingly supports one political party, driving animosity with fear-based rhetoric against the other.
You just don't have the same intersection of identity politics, culture and even religion with any other industry in the US that you do with guns, even if the money spent elsewhere is greater.
You mean at the dawn of the industrial revolution, before which, you know, everything was craft built?
The Second Amendment does very much depend on the existence that industry, because if the government were to allow small arms manufacturing to fail, it would be de facto abridging the people's right to keep and bear arms. It's the only industry that has to exist in the US, by fiat.
I think this kind of monolithic homogenous group is fiction. I hear the same thing from other people about tech. Both sentiments lack a nuanced perspective.
The amount of guns purchased by "gun nuts" reminds me of the stats on alcohol consumption: something like 80% of alcohol is consumed by alcoholics.
So you can mobilize a very rabid base politically.
Also, the gun manufacturers are tied in with the military and the diplomatic powers that be of the US (aka THE power brokers of the US government and the world).
This is ... derailing. If Americans didn't love guns, they wouldn't go and buy guns. There is close to 400 million unregistered firearm in the USA. I don't think it's only Republican's. The companies who make guns will try to protect their business but at this point they are just secondary.
Also both Canada and Finland are in the top 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
A person with a gun is not necessarily dangerous. An idiot with a gun is. An idiot without is still as dangerous.
just adding some facts here -- 1.2% of gun deaths were accidents https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/aug/21/jason-miya...
It's the same as all code having bugs, regardless of whether the programmer was skilled
Depends on what you mean by gun control though. Many (myself included) are pro 2nd Amendment so it's not just the gun lobby/NRA who oppose some (not all) regulation.
I guess my point is that gun control (whatever that means) won't happen not only because of gun lobbyists but because many Americans support gun ownership.
It didn't happen in Australia or New Zealand or the UK even though gun enthusiasts exist in all of those countries.
Idk exactly what you mean by organic, but if it means what I think you're trying to say, idk what's more organic than creating the Second Amendment which was created long before there were gun lobbyists.
> It didn't happen in Australia or New Zealand or the UK even though gun enthusiasts exist in all of those countries.
America is a different country isn't it?
I think the whole debate over gun control is not as important as people make it out to be, so I don't have a huge dog in this fight.
That said, 2A was not interpreted (at least by the courts, but also it seems from historical research, in public discourse) the way it has been until the late 90s and early 21st century, particularly in DC v. Heller.
Historically, there was generally broad latitude given to cities to have arms restrictions going back to the 19th century. My guess is that the crack epidemic and associated things in the late 80s and 90s is what shifted attitudes here.
None of those countries enshrine as law the concept of self defense in the form of gun ownership, though. The "right to bear arms" is considered the fundamental way to protect against tyranny in the United States. One of the founding fathers (Jefferson?) even posited that revolution was a responsibility of the people when a government became too overbearing.
Couple that with the Judeo/Christian concept of "value of life" and you have a people (who, though not Christian in practice, inherited these worldviews) that believes life is sacred and will fight for even the ability to defend themselves and others. Do note that the Judeo/Christian worldviews that benefited the West have been attacked and eroded over the last century and a half, and that the sanctity of human life is actually a big question mark for many. But there remain a staunch few that will continue to hold to their ideals.
We must also keep in mind that the most likely person to be killed with a firearm is the person firing it-- ie suicide. Furthermore we have to question what percentage of the ~37% of gun deaths as murders would be curbed by gun controls, particularly what percent of those murders will happen via an illegal firearm or just some different weapon (are we going to have knife control, poison control, strangle control...)
IMO America has a (largely male) mental health issue more than a murder/firearm issue, I suggest we treat the root not the symptom. How? apropos to the thread one potential solution is we might give people some economic hope via a good working wage. (Perhaps it's not the right solution, but still emphasize the roots not the symptoms)
some sources for food for thought:
[1]: https://bigthink.com/the-present/switzerland-high-gun-owners... Switzerland has lots of guns but few mass shootings
[2]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/aug/21/jason-miya...
[2]:
Additionally, even if profits were a moot point, the 2nd amendment is a culture war wedge issue that runs bone-deep for the average American.
Take away the profit margins and have a few more mass shootings and I imagine the 2nd amendment would melt away as easily as the 4th did.
The 2nd amendment will never go away as long as conservatives use it as a wedge issue. It's far too important as leverage, and they've been incredibly successful in cementing it further into law even very recently. My state just passed Constitutional Carry into law this year.
In the US, States can regulate, even those without strong ties to manufacturers. The fact that many haven’t makes me think the 2A is a bigger issue than profits.
I also think trying to pin the 'culture war' on gun companies is bizarre. Are you from the US? Your take on this seems like something you would see on MSNBC.
It’s...not.
> If money from Bloomberg or Soros helps you win
Neither Soros nor especially Bloomberg are or especially fund the left; Bloomberg is center-right, Soros is, frankly incoherent; while, yes right-wing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories focus on his funding of organizations to the left of the Republican platform, among the organizations he funds are ones like Cru, the organization known as “Campus Crusade for Christ” before its recent rebrand.
(The Democratic Party is a center-right to center-left coalition party, where dominant power is held by the center-right, neoliberal corporate capitalist faction.)