“We’ve tried nothing (about guns) and we’re all out of ideas” all over again.
Same principle applies with cameras. The tool is not the issue.
What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns:
Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".
(Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.)
Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance".
Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all".
Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms.
Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out.
Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness.
Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are.
And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns.
Make gun obsession weird again.
That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do.
In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.
Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians?
If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order.
In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
If you encounter a failing justice system and your response isn't "let's fix the causes" but instead "thankfully I believe in convenient self-service executions", you aren't upholding peaceable society, and I suspect that a peaceable society isn't what you'd prefer.
Consider too that there are many documented cases of the authorities being incompetent to or unwilling to stop a threat, most recently in Bondi Beach, but also in Uvalde. Maybe they’re just not coming to save you?
I don't think you understand the nature of the "rape gang" problem —- what it actually refers to, how it works, and why arming a populace wouldn't do a thing to stop it.
Because the USA has this exact same problem (low-level organised crime gangs sexually exploiting naïve, broke or drug-addicted young teenagers in deprived settings) and gun ownership didn't fix it.
The "rape gangs" are not some roving crime phenomenon that turns up at your door and can be dissuaded by waving a gun.
So yes. Not only do we not extrajudicially shoot rapists because vigilante violence doesn't do anything useful, arming a whole population would not stop this problem in deprived environments in cities. It hasn't in yours.
How can you prevent these rape gangs from accessing the same weapons? They are not caught, prosecuted and banned from obtaining guns? Even if they are, there will be more guns to steal and circulate in either case.
The answer is laws, but you say they are not working perfectly. So rape gangs will be armed rape gangs next.
When I visited Stockholm ~17 years ago, all shops were displaying valuable items in steel cages anyway (e.g.: TVs were "locked" in heavy-duty steel frames to prevent "removal"), so the problem runs older than the immigration policy gained momentum.
I sincerely wish you to live the life you dream of.
Merry Christmas and happy new year!
Who are you to really say otherwise?
By the time the opportunity arises to actually do anything about it, a whole load of "conservatives" will be furiously denying that they ever were. In some cases to tribunals and commissions.
Nobody should give the slightest respect or deference to those ideals if invoked by anyone who supported the Republican party after "very fine people on both sides". There is nothing "conservative" about 99% of people who claim the label, and there's nothing moral about their position.
They can either organise with the gun fetishists or take the opportunity to separate from them. But there's no reason to suggest that conservatism in its true form has anything to do with looney gun fetishists who pose with guns in Christmas cards.
All of this can be done without changing the fundamental right to bear or own guns.
> There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.
Oh indeed, but what I am referring to is the "knife crime in London" comparator that right-wing gun groups use. Knife crime in London is not as bad as knife crime in any comparable US city. It's about 40% as bad as New York and only 10% as bad as Dallas.
As is "doesn't seem to have a problem."
This is not true for any other OECD country.
There are many, many steps that could be taken in the USA to reduce access to weapons before reaching outright banning. Obviously.
And also the idea that banning handguns would be draconian is hilarious. Try talking to anyone from UK, ANZ, Europe, etc. No one is crying about too much regulation.
They'll cite bump stocks as a threat.
And I say draconian in the context of existing American gun laws.
But real talk, I'm not a gun nut. I'm a leftist that believes the working class should be armed and as a society we need to move towards a system that does mitigate violence. Gun laws alone won't and can't do that. And unless we have a national divorce, I don't see effective gun legislation happening.
> While the FBI did break these down by weapon type, they didn’t differentiate between AR-15s or similarly patterned rifles, and grandpa’s bolt action deer rifle. All told, in 2019 there were 364 rifle murders, out of a total of 10,258 firearm murders, accounting for approximately 3.5% of total firearm murders. Nobody uses rifles to murder people because they’re big, bulky, difficult to conceal, and a handgun can do the job just as well.