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Comment by buggythebug | Hacker News Reader

The problem I find with lots of politicians is not balancing both short term and long term solutions.

Republicans: mental health is definitely an issue that needs to be solved in regards to guns but that's a long term solution - we also need a short term solution of preventing people who shouldn't have access to guns in the first place.

Democrats: There are racial issues in this country that can be solved in the long term through education and investment in communities. That being said crime is crime, and we also need a short term solution of arresting and prosecuting people who commit crimes - no matter what their circumstances are. Reform NOT defund the police.

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> we also need a short term solution of preventing people who shouldn't have access to guns in the first place.

The republicans are that way because a lot of measures to "preventing people who shouldn't have access to guns in the first place" use the large hammer of just banning guns for everyone instead of only those who should. Now they are scared of any attempt to do anything because historically it has taken away guns from safe gun owners who just enjoy them.

There is also the moral hazard: who decides who is safe to have a gun - with careful work you can take guns away from people you don't like.

"safe gun owners who just enjoy them"

Exactly, this is most important point that people forget. It's all about freedom.

Personally I'm a safe cruise-missile owner who just enjoys it. Who are you to tell me what to do. If I wanna fire my cruise missiles in my own backyard I'm gonna do it. It's my God-given right. Sure, some people use their cruise missiles to blow up schools, but cruise missiles don't kill people, people kill people. We should just get every school to have a cruise-missile shield, and accompanying cruise-missile bunker. Discount coupons included free in the biology literature package.

> Discount coupons included free in the biology literature package.

Come on now, your post seemed reasonable until the very end; there would never be a discount.

It is an interesting situation because an honest opinion - "the benefits outweigh the costs" - is going to make the people saying it look like monsters (dons flak jacket).

There is a reason that the US has anomalously high HDI, income and wealth stats for a country that large. It is because they are all in on freedom, letting individuals better themselves if they can think of a way and putting lots of roadblocks in the way of government (one of which is allowing ordinary people to arm up to the teeth). Trading away that freedom will probably a regression to the mean and worsting circumstance. Out of control governments are much more likely to leave trails of corpses behind them then rogue gunners.

>There is a reason that the US has anomalously high HDI, income and wealth stats for a country that large.

To put another way, every country with higher average per capita GDP than the US (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...>) has a population smaller than that of Orange County, California.

There's no way one can look at the existing situation and realistically think that gun owners are some sort of persecuted minority, that voting bloc is the golden sheep of the republican party. There's a bit of a distortion field here where we as a country have not been able to pass any sort of meaningful gun control measures in decades, have some of the loosest gun control regulations outside of third world countries, and have significant repeated issues with gun violence. Yet somehow a small but significant group of people have become locked into this messaging as if there's any validity to it and have become single issue voters.

Really the two groups who benefit and perpetuate this are from this are the gun industry, who has spent lots of money propagating this messaging over decades, and politicians on the right, who are able to with one hand to fill their election coffers with industry funds and with the other have a reliable bloc of voters that will never vote democrat.

> "Really the two groups who benefit and perpetuate this are from this are the gun industry ... and politicians on the right ..."

And those who want to want to own firearms of course: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem... There's significant ownership of firearms among suburbanites and urbanites and there's significant ownership of firearms among moderates and even among the left. And, of course, purchases of firearms, including first time buyers, increased during the recent pandemic: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-12-21/....

Continuing to blame the traditional conservative bogeymen and ignoring that there is broad support for firearm ownership by the voting public is just sticking one's head in the sand. Until that unwelcome reality is faced and legislation crafted that the public wants (e.g. not bans), gun control is going to remain stalled.

Do you realize you are agreeing and providing supporting evidence for the point I was making? There is significant gun ownership in this country and support for guns. The idea that gun owners are some persecuted minority is ridiculous.

"They are coming for your guns" has been consistent messaging put out by those with an intrenched interest with no basis in reality.

> There is also the moral hazard: who decides who is safe to have a gun - with careful work you can take guns away from people you don't like.

Yeah, that's my biggest problem with the "in the wrong hands" wording, far too often those words have been code for "in the hands of black people".

Pretty much any seemingly reasonable requirement we come up with can be manipulated this way. It's a lot like voter IDs, where the problem is that you can get them at a DMV for free, provided you can take off of work and drive 50 miles to the nearest DMV because the republican governor shuttered the ones near black neighborhoods.

Unfortunately I think the only solution is going to come in the form of applying restrictions to everyone. As someone who believes in the second amendment for a variety of reasons, and who owns firearms, I've come to the conclusion that this is preferable to the status quo.

We could actually do a lot without gun restrictions by simply limiting supply. 13 million a year domestic gun production is simply too much, and not all of those guns are being smuggled into Mexico and Latin America.

> We could actually do a lot without gun restrictions by simply limiting supply.

Which would drive up costs, which would again just make it a thing only the wealthy effectively had access to.

So? Right now any 18 year old can scrounge up $300 to buy a gun. We make it too easy.

Gun control obviously isn’t working, so let’s just ratchet down the supply instead. We just don’t need 13 million new guns a year in this country.

> Republicans: mental health is definitely an issue that needs to be solved in regards to guns but that's a long term solution - we also need a short term solution of preventing people who shouldn't have access to guns in the first place.

There are over 300 million guns in the US. I don't think there are any "short term" solutions with that many guns.

Sure there are. We know that lots of mass shootings are committed by people who go buy assault weapons and entire arsenals legally, even though there are multiple obvious red flags that should have prevented it. A lot of these people, to put it rather mildly, are not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Even very basic legal provisions would keep them from getting those guns. They'd then have to get them via means that make it a lot more likely for them to get caught.

We KNOW this from page after page of examples where sensible gun laws immediately decreased gun violence, in short order.

Some statistics here to back your claims would be nice. I'll consider over 20% of mass shootings done with legally bought weapons as sufficient to cover "lots of mass shootings". And how you count what a mass shooting is is relevant as well. If you include all the gang violence, like many sources do to boost the numbers, that will wildly skew the results on how many illegally obtained weapons were used.

The figure is actually 77%.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/us/politics/legal-gun-pur...

You’d already know this if you spent even two minutes investigating. And the claim holds up no matter how you choose to define a mass shooting. If you want to restrict it to only the most deadly and infamous mass shooting incidents, the percentage actually goes UP.

Don’t take my word for it, Google it yourself and read five or ten good sources. The proof is overwhelming.

Awesome I appreciate the link! I do appreciate it when the link isn't to a pay walled news site and it goes directly to the paper they're citing from even more though. I believe this is the paper they were citing from[0] (correct me if I'm wrong, I couldn't access the site because of the pay wall, and I don't feel like going to my PC to get around the pay wall right now).

I would like to point out a few interesting tidbits from the data and inject my opinions after the citations.

> Most individuals who perpetrated mass shootings had a prior criminal record (64.5%) and a history of violence (62.8%), including domestic violence (27.9%). And 28.5% had a military background. Most died on the scene of the public mass shooting, with 38.4% dying by their own hand and 20.3% killed by law enforcement officers.

It's interesting that out of the 64% that had a prior criminal record, they somehow were re-released which allowed them to commit a mass shooting. Something is wrong here. It seems like we're holding people with less severe crimes in prison for too long, and the ones who should have stayed in prison are being released too early.

> Of the known mass shooting cases (32.5% of cases could not be confirmed), 77% of those who engaged in mass shootings purchased at least some of their guns legally, while illegal purchases were made by 13% of those committing mass shootings. In cases involving K-12 school shootings, over 80% of individuals who engaged in shootings stole guns from family members.

I'm not sure what this means exactly, but it's interesting to me that they phrased it this way "77% of those who engaged in mass shootings purchased at least some of their guns legally". This seems to indicate that of this 77% who purchased some of their guns legally, they may have purchased the guns used to commit the mass shootings illegally. I don't know why they phrased this this way, but it seems to indicate these individuals may have purchased guns farther back in the past legally, then been barred from buying guns, purchased more guns illegally, and then used those illegal weapons.

> Nearly half of individuals who engaged in mass shootings (48%) leaked their plans in advance to others, including family members, friends, and colleagues, as well as strangers and law enforcement officers.

It's very sad to me that almost 50% of these cases could have been avoided! In some of these cases, law enforcement knew about it in advance, and it still happened.

When you actually read the data directly from the sources, and avoid a right wing or left wing propaganda outlet, and you form your opinions on your own, you may be surprised about the statistics.

But don't take my word for it, Google it yourself and read the actual papers that did the research. The proof is quite ambiguous, and it seems like there's lots of variables that could have changed these outcomes.

[0]: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/public-mass-shootings-da...

I read NIJ's paper as well. It backs up what I said, completely.

Gun laws work. Have worked, do work, will work in the future if passed now.

Yeah those sensible gun laws in Chicago - some of the strictest in the country mind you, seem to be working really well. /s

The problem is short that weapon ownership is established as a right in the US - not a privilege. This makes it much harder and less palatable to regulate. It's been done, but there's tons of court cases where strict laws were overturned after a lengthy court battle...that and there's enough people in this country that will vote out any lawmaker who goes after firearm ownership.

This is why lawmakers faff around with stupid ineffective solutions like "a firearm cannot have any of these features" instead of something more "common sense" - odds are it's been tried, and repealed or overturned.

As they should be. Things like a 1,000% tax on weapons that leave them only available to the wealthy and the politicians should be immediately disregarded.

Indeed. Even "keep them out of the wrong hands" is likely to essentially be "keep them out of the hands of black people" after certain law makers set the criteria.

For some reason I figured HN was immune to the classic gun talking points. Maybe clarify what you mean by "assault weapons" as the general populous does not have easy access to what could be construed as "assault weapons". Not even law-abiding citizens. Despite the warnings of the Founding Fathers.

"A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies." ~ George Washington

Military supplies. Not "civilianized" equipment.

> For some reason I figured HN was immune to the classic gun talking points.

People on this thread are using the word "literally" as a source for their claims, I wouldn't expect too much from this site, at least highly political threads.

I imagine another america: one where every able-bodied teenager is trained to use a gun, how to clean it, and store/operate it safely. And they spend some amount of time in a militia group (the leaders can keep an eye to identify the folks who seem dangerous), and ultimately, every able-bodied adult keeps a gun at home for homeland defense.

I have no idea how it would work in practice, but I think it might go a long way to address how people operate with guns.

Sounds like a dream come true to me, and once again, the OGs.

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them." ~ Richard Henry Lee

"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty .... Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins." ~ Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined. The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun." ~ Patrick Henry

To be clear, I want these militias for defence against external invaders, not to protect people from the US government.

There will inevitably come a time when they are one and the same.

>I have no idea how it would work in practice

What you describe is basically Switzerland and Israel.

Right. But trying to do this in the US (which is very different from those two countries in many ways) could fail entirely for reasons that wouldn't apply at all in those.

Please don’t waste intelligent people’s time with the usual right-wing bullshit about how an AR-15 is radically different from military hardware and should not count as an assault weapon. Doesn’t pass the laugh test.

They are not select-fire. They are not assault rifles. Being intelligent with code doesn't make you knowledgeable on firearms.

Are cities with traditional lock-em-up prosecutors doing better at reducing crime?

When was the last time a prosecutor got recalled because they failed to reduce crime by locking a lot of people up?

The 'mental health issue' is a symptom, not a cause. Personally, I believe the cause is public schools. Boomers and Gen Xers didn't have to do standardized testing, they had meaningful break periods between classes, could leave school for lunch or just hang out outdoors. Not everyone was pushed into excelling for some college track type education.

Now, you have someone that's had a lifetime of anxiety because they couldn't perform academically (which will get you shunned by your peers) with little to no prospects in life. Add in social media where these people can see their peers going to tropical islands, college parties, just living a nice life they'll never attain, and you've tipped the scales into driving someone mad.

So, if you want to solve the 'mental health' problems, you need to fix what's causing them. We're human beings, not robots. We don't need to be locked in classrooms and have performance measured 8+ hours per day for our entire childhoods.

> Republicans: mental health is definitely an issue that needs to be solved

If this were true, they would have proposed legislation to fund healthcare.

He's addressing each party, not describing each party's beliefs.

The commenter is comparing a core GOP belief: Minimal gun control with a fringe Democratic belief: Defund the police.

Any comparison of the parties can't be done in good faith.

This does not seem like a charitable interpretation of the point OP is trying to make.

"Defund the police" is more of a Republican parody of Democrats than anything else. It's a Fox News slogan. No substantial portion of the Democratic Party supports this, or ever has.

But it's a great way to lie about your political opponents to keep anything rational from being done about gun violence or other issues.

The slogans "Defund the police" and even "Abolish the police" were in fact quite common in BLM protests and the like. They're not something that Fox News just came up with to ridicule Democrats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police

https://rsc-banks.house.gov/democrats-push-defund-police

Plenty of prominent Democrats quotes here that say otherwise.

Hmmm

‘Defund the police’ is what you see on the signs at democrat protests.

When you get in a discussion, it’s not quite what they mean, but that just means it’s a stupid slogan where you have to redefine every word to get at what you mean.

Human politics and all…

I don't understand what you mean.

It's very clear that Republicans don't actually believe that improving mental health or mental healthcare is actually a solution to gun deaths, but only use it as a distraction from improving gun regulations that are desired by over 80% of Americans, including a majority of gun owners.

Democrats on the other hand actually do understand that mental health issues are a part of the gun problem, and therefore provide solutions to tackle it both by improving mental health care access, as well as improving background checks to prevent those with mental health issues from accessing lethal weaponry easily.

It is true - doesn't mean they're going to do anything about it, though.

Or increase the money spent on caring for unwanted babies given to adoption since that seems to be the only recourse they deem acceptable

What does “funding healthcare” mean in this context? I ask because, in my experience, most of the people on the left use the term healthcare with the implication of adopting ‘single payer, free at the point of service’ - something far too radical for Republicans to support.

It means any kind of idea to fund healthcare. Repubs have brought zero to the table other than cutting taxes. And cutting Medicaid expansion (reducing funding for healthcare) in Repub states.

In general, “fund x” means a wealth transfer from wealthier people to poorer people to pay for “x”, and Repubs have no track record of this outside of military/police/security ventures.

Wasn't the ACA essentially the Republican plan? I didn't follow it closely, but I remember hearing at the time that Obama basically went with their plan, as it was the only way he could get some kind of health care reform passed.

If Republicans believe that healthcare for working adults is best covered by the private sector, then the government doesn't need to do anything to fund that. If the government did take it over, there is no guarantee it would include mental health aspects or if it would just expand sick care to all. There are a lot of assumptions that a government funded plan will be the exact plan everyone wants, but that is very unlikely, because everyone wants something different.

ACA is not the Republicans’ plan, they solidly voted against it. See Senate vote by state:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act

ACA only happened because of Democrats pushing for greater access to healthcare, but also had to heavily compromise to win the votes of a couple senators who had insurers’ interests at heart.

The ACA started as a Heritage Foundation plan, and it was implemented by Mitt Romney when he was MA gov. Republicans also added over 100 amendments to the bill that were accepted (and which watered it down significantly from what Democrats wanted).

Republicans didn’t vote for it largely as a political strategy to not be seen as giving Obama a “win”.

But the other poster is right that the ACA was essentially the “free market” conservative version of universal healthcare.

Whatever the history might be, I cannot label legislation that Republicans lockstep voted against and Democrats voted for as Republicans. And that Republicans have tried to dismantle ever since it was passed by Democrats. Even Romney would not pass as a Republican now, and definitely not anything that came out of Massachusetts in mid 2000s.

And certainly, if Repubs had control of Congress in 2008, they would have never passed ACA, or any other broad wealth transfer mechanism like it.

As I understand it mental healthcare as it exists right now literally cannot handle a large influx of patients. Good mental health professionals are often no longer taking any insurance since the demand is so high and they can not deal with the hassle. So simply doing something like government insurance for everyone will not help the situation.

> Good mental health professionals are often no longer taking any insurance since the demand is so high and they can not deal with the hassle.

Everybody deals with hassle, they just need to get paid for it. People that need mental healthcare have no money to pay for it. Why would smart, capable people go to work in a field where the pay is not commensurate to quality of life at work?

Simply doing something like paying people in mental healthcare competitive wages would help. Why would it not? Money serving to incentivize is the basis of our society.

Given that the US already has the highest health spending per capita I feel dumping more money into it is a horribly inefficient idea. At some point you run out of people to tax to get that money from.

This defeatist attitude is why only wealthy employed people have access to good mental healthcare right now.

We can't throw our hands up in the air and claim it's impossible because there's more than 1 problem. We have to fix both problems.

Isn't that the point of the original comment that started all this? You can't simply shove a band aid on top of the mental health problem and expect it to magically get better in a year. This is a complex problem that will require a complex long term solution which will itself take a while to show results.

"Government insurance won't help the situation because other problems also exist" isn't a reason against government insurance. We should have government insurance, and if that creates problems, we should fix those too. It's not unusual for a solution to exacerbate another problem, which can often get it fixed more quickly.

If government insurance were to create a shortage of mental health care workers, then one way or another we need to get to more mental health care workers. It would be nearly impossible to wait for a proper number of employees before giving everyone coverage. You'd end up with an excess of supply.

>You'd end up with an excess of supply.

There's already a lack of supply.

Yeah but it's an entirely separate problem. If you solved the supply for the current demand, and then gave everyone access... you wouldn't have immediate supply anyway. What's the point of waiting?

Government healthcare (medicaid/CHIP and medicare) have gone up consistently over the decades (especially medicaid, even as a percentage of GDP). [0]

The US spends more than any other country on public health care per capita than any other country in the world. Over 50% more per capita public expenditure than the runner up Norway. [1]

I don't know if money is the problem

[0] https://www.crfb.org/papers/american-health-care-health-spen...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...

That could be 95% spent on extending 80+ year olds lives for 6 months. But pay for mental healthcare workers is bottom tier, especially since the government does not have an incentive to properly reimburse work done for poor people.

Certainly, there are huge issues with laws around involuntary commitment to mental institutions also and the legal costs there, but I figure the first step is creating the quality mental health institutions in the first place.

It is also possible this is simply an intractable problem (I think the needed expenditures are far too big to be politically palatable), so we will just trend towards a situation where those that can afford to, erect walls and security and whatnot around their lives, like other countries with large gaps in poor and rich.

The government takes all the worst 40% of customers (the poorest and the old) out of the pot, socializes them - leaving the free market to profiteer on the customers who need the least care. The generally healthy 26-65 year olds should be pooled in.

Medicaid requires you basically give up your house - and most health plans normal people have come with deductibles too high to actually use. So poor folks don't seek preventative care until it's too late, pushing up prices for everyone.

The whole thing is unconscionable, and the price tag you point to is a function of massive structural inefficiency and not something to be proud of. Canada provides healthcare to 100% of the population for half the per-capita cost. Norway, 66% of the per capita cost.

There is no true free market for healthcare, anywhere. A free market requires voluntary agreement between buyer and seller, but regional monopolies saying 'pay up or I'll let you bleed out on the floor' ain't it.

Sorry, this DA getting fired means nothing. The DA cannot solve everything by themselves.

What I find twisty about both parts of what you said are:

1. Ronald Reagan was the Repub who defunded and shuttered mental health facilities in California, so I'm not sure how Repubs will manage to solve mental illness issues without tripping over this inconsistency and that it reeks of big government/state funding/social support.

2. One of the things that supposedly impacts African American families is the loss of father's to incarceration, so even if you pump in education and money, you've got a family life missing a second parent and the negative outcomes associated with that.

>2. One of the things that supposedly impacts African American families is the loss of father's to incarceration, so even if you pump in education and money, you've got a family life missing a second parent and the negative outcomes associated with that.

There's nothing "supposedly" about it; of course an absent father has an impact. And you're right, money isn't going to fix a cultural problem.

"Republicans: mental health is definitely an issue that needs to be solved in regards to guns but that's a long term solution - we also need a short term solution of preventing people who shouldn't have access to guns in the first place.

Umm... you have those parties completely backwards.

It's Democrats (not Republicans) who are for gun control.

It's Republicans who want to arrest and prosecute people regardless of their circumstances, and are more opposed to defunding the police.

I got that initial impression too but I think parent is actually addressing each party and saying, there’s room for them to change their sacred stances.

Oh, I get it now. Thanks for pointing that out.

I think that the OP could have made their point less open to misinterpretation by writing something like:

"To Republicans I'd say..."

and

"To Democrats I'd say..."

I think the poster is addressing those parties correctly, and asking them to support short term measures that differ from their longer term approaches, to maintain public safety until their preferred longer term approach bears fruit. (poster’s opinions not necessarily mine)

You would think that red flag laws would be a common sense compromise and was even supported and passed by Republicans in Florida. Even that went too far for the NRA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_law

Red flag laws often have some or all of these problems.

-No Due process for the accused, so guns are simply taken from innocent people and the first they know is when a cop shows up.

-No process to return taken guns or ammo after a specified period.

-Doesn't prevent acquiring new weapons.

-Little or no credibility requirements for red flags.

-These laws often don't require any sort of conviction or charge, so it's a lot like civil asset forfeiture in that it takes things from innocent people.

They also seem to be applied for political purposes. Laura Loomer (Republican congressional candidate that got cancelled) is banned from owning a gun.

lol - their solutions are actually perfectly balanced. Both parties are not doing anything about this problem - at all. It’s been this way for decades and there is still no reform.

>Republicans: mental health is definitely an issue that needs to be solved in regards to guns but that's a long term solution - we also need a short term solution of preventing people who shouldn't have access to guns in the first place.

Translation: anyone that even has an anxiety disorder is just one step from turning into Mister Hyde and going on a rampage, so instead of dealing with guns by reducing the number of them in the population we'll just scapegoat people with emotional and other sorts of mental problems instead.

This is what I'm thinking. I don't fully understand the regulations in place on emotionally-distressed people, but I do know for a fact that one of the questions on at least my last form was along the lines of "have you been checked into a mental institution."

At what point does someone with mental health issues lose their rights? I mean we're literally barring them from one of their constitutional rights, because they're depressed. I can come closer to understanding schizophrenics that don't know what's reality and what's not (that's a recipe for disaster), but merely being checked into a facility?

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