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Ultimately, guns are not very complicated machines. I'm making a semi-automatic rifle in my home office right now out of stuff you can get at a hardware store & some 3D printed parts, and I'm amazed at how simple it all is.
A lot of proposed gun control feels like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Even states with hefty assault weapon bans like California and Maryland still have plenty of legal loopholes allowing people to own semi-automatic guns, and gun manufacturers are finding more all the time. I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.
The fact of the matter is that gun control bills at the federal level will cost a lot of political capital. A federal challenge to the 2nd amendment will rally conservatives in the same way that the recent overturning of Roe caused a surge for liberals. This is to say nothing about enforcement: it's a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.
So, we can fight the uphill battle of gun control for perhaps marginal returns, or we can try to address the things that drive people to violence in the first place. And I'm not just saying "muh mental health" either; we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things making people angry and desparate and hopeless enough to kill people & themselves.
I firmly believe that addressing the material conditions that create killers will prevent more murders than any gun control bill, especially in the USA.
This is basically what they've done in most European countries. Plus, they have very strict gun laws and no gun culture. All of that equals close to no gun violence.
Yeah but the violence we do see in europe is typically widely spread knife crime and chemical attacks on people. The most complicated and unique terrorist attacks I have ever seen happen on European soil.
I'll take knife crime any day of the week over gun violence.
Can't kill 60 and wound more than 400 from a hotel room window with a knife.
On the other hand I'd much rather get shot than stabbed or splashed with acid.
It's not like the US doesn't have all that on top of the gun violence.
'Course, the last time a dude threatened to stab me by pulling a knife on me, I threatened to shoot him by pulling out a gun on him in return, and he decided the best outcome for all would be to walk away.
He was right, I didn't get stabbed, he didn't get shot, and I was able to walk into the hell that was "pandemic Walmart" unscathed, as a direct result of me being armed.
So, what you're saying is that Europe should just get a lot of guns to get rid of people threatening knife violence?
Dude, there's a reason why the US has lots of gun violence. It's because of the easy access to guns.
No guns = no gun violence.
No I'm saying no knives = no knife violence.
That's just not how it works, because knifes are not specifically designed to kill people. Guns are. Some guns are even designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
Some knives are for sure designed to kill people. You cutting potatoes with a karambit or balisong? Then there's arrows, or as I like to call them (as of this moment) shooty knives.
Furthermore, guns are technically designed "to fire a projectile" as knives are technically designed "to cut or pierce." The issue comes up with what is being fired or cut upon, which could be legal or murder in either case.
Furtherfurthermore, yes, guns do happen to be good at killing people, and sometimes that does need to happen as unfortunate as that is. We call that "self defense." Just so happens guns are the best tool for that job. Could I use a coin to screw in a flathead? Sure, but a screwdriver was designed to screw screws and as such is the tool I would prefer to use if I have to screw a screw.
The lengths to which people will go to defend their tools of death. School massacres? Who cares! Bowling alleys? Who cares! Shopping malls? Not my problem! Nail salons? Nah!
Unreal.
None of your listed scenarios legally count as self defense, perhaps you are confusing self defense with murder.
Did everyone clap and called you my hero before you woke up?
Har har, no but your mom went home with me.
Actually I was there for bread so I just bought bread after.
I see this sentiment a lot, and I mean, realistically, would you? Getting splashed with acid mostly equates to a flesh wound, maybe with side effects like blindness, or muscular numbness. There's necessary skin grafting and things of that nature, sure. But that kind of attack, generally, strikes me as having much less lethal potential compared to, say, a shooting or a stabbing. If you get a hole poked in your heart, you're basically guaranteed dead within a minute, and if you get a hole poked in many of your major organs, arteries, veins, you could bleed out within the next couple minutes.
Compare that to an acid attack, which, granted, is extremely unpleasant as it burns away at your nerve endings, but would seem much less likely to be lethal, and has a much more straightforward path to recovery, in lots of cases.
The likelihood of dying making horrible injuries more bearable. Do I want to live a long life horribly disfigured with constant pain due to nerve damage, or just get shot and have it be done and over with?
As for stabbing, if they hit a vital area that would make it less unfortunate, but just the idea of getting stabbed is deeply unpleasant, whereas the emotional reaction to getting shot is "well, I should've moved out of the US"
Like once in a decade chemical attacks, as opposed to weekly school shootings? Tough decision eh?
Mostly talking about the regular acid attacks that happen mostly to women and children
I'm confused, I'm from Europe but live in Australia. I read about a mass shooting in the states pretty much every week. Often children as schools seem to be a prime target.
Can't remember last time I heard of an acid attack in Europe. Got some source for this being a regular thing and an actual problem even remotely comparable to guns in the US?
Straight up false
There's hand-loading, and I strongly suspect that gunpowder is not the hardest component to manufacture.
Potassium nitrate and sulfur.
Gunpowder is the easiest part. The casing will be the hardest as you need pretty tight tolerances, but anyone who cares could have 50 trash cans full of cases in a week for a lifetime of reloading.
And if you don't have cases for reloading, you can always use a case less design, then it's just a matter of sourcing the projectile.
Of course there is always black powder, ball and cap, etc.
This is the truth, thanks for saying it.
Then they need to be arrested. Noone should be trusted with guns and other dangerous weapons or machines if they deliberately break the laws surrounding the ownership of them. We don't let people drive after they lost their licencse.
The estimates for the number of pistol braces out there ranged from 3 million on the low end, to 40 million on the high end. During the grace period to register braced firearms as SBRs without having to pay the tax stamp, the ATF received 255,162 applications to do so.
Even if we take the low number & account for folks destroying or converting their firearms, we can reasonably estimate a rate of non-compliance in the hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. There is a very real possibility that arresting all those people would literally double the already ludicrous US prison population overnight. In a country that already has a worryingly militarized police force, I cannot imagine the mass arrest of millions of armed people will reduce gun violence.
To that point, the people like to cite Australia's gun "buyback" program as a success...they only got about 20% of the guns. Now, you and I both know American compliance would be lower than that, but let's use that number for a second and apply it anyway. With 600,000,000 guns in this country, we'd get 120,000,000 guns taken leaving 480,000,000 guns. Whooooo.
Furthermore, while gun owners have dropped, guns per person has increased, and there's a burgeoning black market run by organized crime created by this ban. There also have been mass shootings since port arthur, and more mass killings without guns than that, too. Sure, they have "less than the US," but the success of that program is vastly overstated.
20% of 600,000,00 is 120,000,000, not 1,200,000!
Ah shit I done misplaced a comma! Let me fix that, thanks!
Logged gun ownership has dropped. You can still buy a gun off the grey market and never fill out a 4473
Afaik Australia does not have ATF form 4473.
I thought you were talking about America in the second half of your post. Gotta go back to reading comprehension class I guess
Ah lol it happens!
In the early 1900's Roosevelt sent federal officers to try to assess and deal with a form of slavery called "peonage" that was pervasive in the South. These officers were shot at and ultimately chased out. Roosevelt gave up on enforcing the law.
The US government has failed multiple times to enforce laws that law enforcement agreed with. Overwhelmingly, law enforcement does not agree with outright firearm bans. Why do you believe that firearm owners could be arrested for refusing to give up firearms? Like, from a logistical perspective, how would that work exactly?
Why every time someone is trying to explain to americans that what you have is not normal, is fixable, and it has been fixed somewhere else there's always some bullshit excuse like once in the 1900 hundreds their one thing happened once so there is no possible solution.
Europe doesn't have that. Australia had a problem with gun culture and it was fixed after one mass shooting that shocked the country. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/15/it-took-one-massacre-how-australia-made-gun-control-happen-after-port-arthur
I totally expect someone to come up with but but but US is different, because of the above: bullshit excuses. And because I post that story a lot when gun restrictions are discussed. Yes the US is different, start thinking about a similar solution, you sent a fucking man on the moon in the 1960, you can do this too.
Fixing US gun violence is trivial from a policy perspective. You tax bullets at an extremely high rate while also creating a social welfare system like Europe. This restricts the ability to execute violence while also addressing some of the biggest causes. But it's impossible to implement that because right wing terrorism is the point.
Right wing terrorism isn't a problem with America. It is America. It's how the system is supposed to work. It is the point.
Right wing terrorism keeps people traumatized. It ensures that anyone proposing a social safety net would be murdered. It is the extrajudicial extension of the oligarchy that controls America. What the government can't do, right wing death squads do instead.
If you stop mass shootings, you will destroy America. It isn't being stopped because it is intentional. It isn't being stopped because both parties, and, more importantly, the oligarchs who control them, benefit from it.
If you think you can stop gun violence in the US, you fundamentally do not understand what the US is. The KKK has been deeply involved at all layers of government across the US for generations. Today Aryan Brotherhood infiltrates police departments across the nation. The violence is the reality of America, the thing you think is America is just a facade.
America is colonial white supremacy maintained through terror, where guns are the primary tool of that terror. America is not normal, it's a two party dictatorship pretending to be a democracy. America is the problem, it cannot fix the problem anymore than Nazi Germany could have fixed their antisemitism problem.
Here you go. Another person that tells me it cannot be fixed, just it is for a new and different reason/excuse this time. I'll add you to the list, I also have a new excuse now!
Ok, so you, who have absolutely no context on the situation, keep being told that you're wrong by people who have context on the situation, and your responses is to record all the ways you're told you're wrong so you can gloat about how you keep getting told you're wrong by the ignorant people who actually have lived their entire lives in the place you know nothing about? Cool.
It's kind of like you're listening to the 5 blind people describe an elephant over the phone and you're like, "I have a cat, therefore you also have a cat. You need cat litter and everything you're saying is dumb."
America for Europeans is either Hollywood, major cities, or Europe with rednecks. You fundamentally do not understand the context. You keep comparing to Europe and Austrian, but those models don't work. Europe enclosed the commons generations earlier. It's not possible for Europeans to comprehend America.
I've driven for 6 hours straight with the radio on scan and not even found a signal in more than one part of the US. There are vast areas of nothing with no law and no possibility of control. The vast majority of the US is unpopulated. The closest analog would be Australia or Canada.
Except that Austria and Canada never had an economy that relied on chattel slavery enforced by "organized milita." That's what the "well regulated milita" is in the second amendment, it's slavers. Slavery and genocide are essential to the US in a way they aren't in any developed country. If you want to compare the US to something, you need to look at Brazil.
The US is more like a developing nation or a dictatorship than a democracy the way you think about it.
Americans have all heard the same things over and over again. Your arguments are old and bring nothing new. So what is it exactly you're trying to do here? What is the point if first hand information will change your articles of faith? Are you just trying to feel superior? Because coming in to a place, knowing nothing about it, and telling people they're doing everything wrong is a pretty old school European thing to do and it really isn't convincing anyone.
Pretty much. And it's bullshit excuses conflicting with each others, so yeah pretty fun. You guys have no idea what you are talking about, keep making up different convoluted reasons.
All while ignoring the obvious one gets ignored. It's the fucking guns, the sooner you get onto it, the sooner you sort out this mess.
Or keep thinking that it just can't be solved and spent time on lemmy philosophising why it can't. Fine with me either way I'm pretty safe.
I can't save you from looking like an arrogant idiot if that's what you want to do. Have fun with your life.
Look I'm sorry it's just that I argue about gun control in the US a lot and you wouldn't believe the bullshit I have to read.
Checkout my comments. Since we started, I had to deal, in another thread, that guns in the US cannot be banned or farmers would be robbed. And another person is trying to argue that if there weren't guns, you'd be riddled with acid attacks like Europe, apparently, is.
In fairness you make some good points about issues in the States. It's just that you mix up things a bit too much and you make it all a bit conspiracy. Keep it simple, work on limiting access to the thing that is used for shooting, and you might see a reduction in, well, shootings.
Other countries have done it. I know you think it's not the same, but it's not like you are working on a better solution anyway, might be worth a try?