‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only...
theonion.comPosted Oct 14, 2022, 6:56 PM UTC
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theonion.comLaw abiding gun owners should be railing against this. They claim to love their guns more than innocent lives. We have way too many guns in the wrong hands.
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Everyone knows "The Onion" is satire right???
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Everyone knows satire is often the best way to honestly present the ridiculousness of idiots, right?
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Give everyone a gun. Simple solution.
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Does it tho? Sounds to me that if it's in the news it's not that regular.
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It isn't ... It is right up there with that crazy teen who cut his mother's head off and walked around with it a few years ago. Crazy people do crazy shit every now and then. I think it is a form of denial to think that such evil can be completely abolished.. although I appreciate the sentiment.
If they looked, I think the onion would find such evil things happening rarely in other countries as well.
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Canada has some of the strictest gun laws and next to impossible to get a gun, but they continue coming into the country from the ports of call from other countries. If people want a gun, they will get a gun. This "kid" shot his brother with a shotgun, probably with slugs and the other people. What happens now is mass stabbing in other countries I worked for a grocery retailer in Canada, and there was a mass stabbing in the distribution center. https://globalnews.ca/news/3276289/surveillance-video-from-jayme-pasieka-murder-trial-shows-knife-purchase-just-before-stabbings/
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To be fair, almost all the guns in Canada come from the US.
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Eh that's a bit of a weak argument. It's essentially "Humans are violent" which we've known forever.
I think the best argument is the civil war one brought up in this thread. If legislation is passed banning firearms in the US there wpulf literally be a schism. Splitting the US. Only problem is one side owns like 90 percent of the firearms. It'd be a short war. Unless the military suddenly decides to flip and become anti gun.
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Ummm... plenty of liberals/democrats own guns too. We just don't go on and on about it.
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A majority of the military are conservative and swear an oath to the Constitution
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I mean, there is a way: get rid of the second amendment. That's the only way it's going to happen, and we'd more likely have another civil war first than that happening.
Ideally, I'd like to see a complete handgun ban (with some exceptions), and very high restrictions on long guns (including mandatory safety, but maintaining access of them to the general public). But you know what? I know that's not going to happen. Because the 2nd amendment doesn't allow it.
Instead of being unproductive and fighting over gun bans, we CAN do things right now to significantly impact gun violence: Invest in education, lift people from poverty, and provide better access to healthcare.
Completely agree. This is what has to happen, but somehow such common sense measures are controversial and often get called ’socialism’. To be honest, I think accepting these tragedies as a part of life is as close as we’re going to get.
But these things don't produce Republican voters, so it's not really a starter
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Even if it did allow it. there are 300+ million guns in the United states. If you could confiscate one gun every minute of every day it would take you the next six hundred years to get them all.
Table top CNC and 3D printing are also dropping the skill level required to make a gun to nil, and that's not going to stop. In 20 years you'll see the tech needed to manufacture a gun from start to finish in the garage of every home in America. Anybody with a cad file, a spool of Zytel thread and some decent steel will be able to fabricate a firearm in a few hours.
This is the same conservative theory about why nothing can be done about climate change.
But sure, and recently a District court ruled that the law that guns have to have serial number is illegal.
Oh well, thoughts and prayers.
Never mind we have lots of exceptions to the 1st Amendment for the protection of the people. Or the fact that we've altered the Constiution by passing the 18th Amendment and then repealing it when it didn't work.
Climate change denial has zero in common with the ownership of arms.
This is basic math. To confiscate weapons you have to take them by force or get people to voluntarily surrender them. You're not going to be able to do enough of either under US law to make even a small dent.
And the assumption in this hypothetical is that you can violate *several* of the amendments in the bill of rights with impunity, that nobody can make more firearms and you turn the United States into a fascist police state that can go door to door around the clock taking whatever it wants with absolutely no resistance.
Does that seem realistic to you? Does that sound like a society you want to live in? Because anything you inflict on someone else can be turned upon you eventually.
The reason you cannot successfully ban firearms in the United States is the same reason why we couldn't ban liquor or Drugs: market demand always creates supply.
As long as people want firearms, you will never, ever get rid of them no matter what laws or constitutional amendments you're able to pass. Gun owners aren't just going to fall meekly in line because you threaten them with the law, that's not who we are as a people. A lot of them will openly defy you including local and even state level authorities.
Quit wasting time and effort on a policy that has the least possible chance of success. You can't have what you want and you will never get it.
Instead, put your effort behind something meaningful like studying the psychology of mass shooters, detecting them and stop them in the early stages of their radicalization.
By the time the only thing standing between mass murderer and their victims is obtaining weapons you're almost certainly too late. You're hanging your hat on a demonstrably failed policy that provides the least margin for success.
If conservatives were passing bills that allocated money to mental health and social welfare then everyone would be more apt to let the 2A love slide but we most certainly cannot stop trying to regulate firearm ownership if we aren’t doing a damn thing otherwise
Look at what Australia did after the Tasmanian massacre in 1996. It's not impossible. It's doable if you don't have snowflakes in office who like being owned by the NRA. They like the money too much.
https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2016/07/07/massive-noncompliance-with-safe-act/
Take a look at a similar act in NY, one of the bluest states in the Union. "Massive Non Compliance"
But Australia barely has the population of Southern California. The level of effort to do this in the US is a losing proposition.
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The point in banning any type of weapon or restricting its access is not to get rid of them over night but over time there will be less and less of them available to the public. Less guns available results in less gun crime overall and that is just a fact. Fully automatics can be obtained with the proper licenses but how many people do you know who own one? Not very many, because of the laws restricting their access. That is the point. Simply throwing your hands in the air and saying that the US is just too far gone to do anything about it is just an asinine take.
No it's not. If you believe you can do it, you'll do it. Never say never.
But that didn't stop anything.
They've never had another mass shooting in 26 yrs
If guns are so easily made, why don't many people in Japan, The Netherlands or other prosperous countries that are absent of firearms in significant numbers, make them in their garages or homes?
I addressed that.
Historically, while firearms are not super difficult to make they still require a degree of machining that most people don't have the incentive or patience to acquire. most times it's simpler to just steal them or acquire them on the black market.
The difference between then and now is the tools available to the end user. I visited and old school gun smith using 1960s machine tools to make hand made civil war replicas. He had a garage full of milling machines about the size of a washing machine or bigger that each did specific things and required a certain degree of skill to operate. Traditionally that's how you made firearms, you hand crafted each little part.
But that's not what big commercial manufactures like Colt and Smith & Wesson do. They long ago converted to CNC mills that do the entire milling process by computer. You feed the machine metal, and it cuts your steel to whatever your the specs in your CAD file say it should be. Block of metal goes in, a finished slide or frame or barrel comes out.
What I am telling you is that while these used to be very large machines that were very expensive, that is no longer the case. They are getting smaller and cheaper every year.
I have seen a budget device that is designed specifically for hobbyists to mill handgun frames and AR-15 lowers and such that runs for about 5000 or so. It's the size of a PC.
This removes about 95% of the skill you need to become a basic gunsmith because it's fire and forget. You load up the CAD files and the machine mills your steel to exacting specifications, like wise 3D printing, the machine does the work for you.
There's still a learning curve but it's flattening out as these machines get better and cheaper, and it's only really a matter of time until they're completely idiot proof and all you need to do is just press buttons.
Because they have a radically different socioeconomic cultural and political environment to the United States. Guns do not create crime, they are a symptom of crime.
I can't comment on the Netherlands intelligently but I know Japan very well. I still speak the language a bit, I spent a lot of time studying the culture, I lived there and I even had the opportunity to talk to a guy from the Ministry of Justice about policing over there. (yes, I was a huge Weeb back in the day, I even studied the blade when the other peeps were dating girls.)
Japan doesn't have guns or the same sort of gun crime we have in part because of a history involving 200+ years of being ruled by a completely fascist totalitarian government that spied on everything it's citizens did and went out of its way to murder anybody who laid their hands on a weapon. You literally could not travel from one part of Japan to the other during the Edo era without being interrogated at a check point every step of the way. You had to have travel documents to go everywhere.
This was only reinforced by the second world war and the occupation. While Japan is a democracy, they're still a pretty authoritarian state that is legally invasive in their citizens lives to a degree that would not be tolerated by Americans.
They are also largely culturally homogeneous, their country is relatively prosperous and has a decent socioeconomic system. They are on average better educated particularly when you compare the lower class citizens from both countries.
In short, there's not a lot of incentive for your average Japanese to be out there gang banging, they generally do not experience the same level of poverty our citizens suffer from.
You do have the Yakuza, and yes they DO have guns which they acquire illegally, and so do some of the Ultra Nationalists, but the penalties for merely possessing a firearm are pretty draconian and it's a lot harder to just fire a hand gun and get away with it.
People talk to the police, they report crimes, they cooperate and testify. There's no "Anti snitch" culture there.
The cops largely broke the Yakuza a few years back. What's left of Japan's iconic gangsters has come to realize you can steal more with a briefcase than you can with a gun and they're now huge into white collar crime, fraud, pyramid schemes and all that sort of thing.
The bottom line is most of this is intrinsic to the people, culture, time and place. They don't have a violent culture so they don't have a lot of violent crime.
The US does have a violent culture and a lot of guns, but the problem is rooted in the violent culture. Prisons maintain absolute control over inmates but they still find ways to kill each other on the regular.
In short, if you want a peaceful non-violent culture you must address all of the issues created by social injustice, poverty, racism. We don't, and that's why we have mass shootings in the numbers we do.
But these are difficult, complex issues that would require a lot of money, time, and sacrifice to address. It would require a wide range of systemic changes.
And most importantly, it would absolutely necessitate raising taxes on the wealthy, which is why it never happens. Rich people do not care about 14 dead children in a school, they care about their bank balance. So they will throw gun control slogans at you all day and all night while not spending a dime on our mental health care system or social safety net.
Banning guns costs them nothing. Healing society would be very expensive. They're more than happy to let as many of us die as it takes to keep them in the style to which they have become accustomed.
Wow, thanks for all the thought that you put into the response, which is refreshing compared to many that I read when trying to have this sort of discussion. I have to wonder why we can't adopt some things that seem to work well in other cultures and apply it to our own culture. Perhaps Japanese culture isn't the best comparison to the US. I think you at least acknowledge the cultural difficulty we are working with here.
Another example I thought of is Switzerland. They have their firearms there, but they have a much better sense of responsibility in using them than we do here in the USA. I am not fond of firearms, but I don't necessarily have to personally agree with others' lifestyles when that involves an affinity for firearms, but if their citizens have the choice to own firearms and be responsible for them, yet don't have the level of violence, especially mass violence that we have, I think that evidence is pretty compelling that it maybe it can be done with certain parameters.
It's when we see so much constant and senseless violence in the US, so unpredictably, I cannot accept that and have no patience for anyone who can or who values firearms over human life. I certainly don't have any patience for is the group of corrupted and compromised politicians, bought and bossed by those padding their pockets, who won't acknowledge that there is any problem that is attributable to how such a large percentage of the US so cavalierly views firearms and violence in general, and refuses to even consider doing anything differently about it.
Except the Republicans, while screaming that it isn't a gun problem and is a mental health problem will still vote against any and all measures to improve mental health care, or expand access to Healthcare in general and they they damn sure are not going to entertain any ideas about lifting people out of poverty or investing in education. In fact they seem to be on an all out attack against education as a whole.
Every country has mentally ill people or poor people regardless of how good their socialistic programs are or education is. They don't have these mass shootings any more cause of legislation that was passed for common sense gun laws.
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No, they just have mass stabbings instead.
Of all the conservative talking points that get trotted out in these debates, this is by far the dumbest.
It’s tied with “only old people died from the fake virus.” I mean yeah that’s true it effects older people more but I don’t just indiscriminately hate old people and want them to suffer or die a painful death so I could go to a bar in April 2020
Where? A baseball bat or knife won't do damage an uzi will do.
Mass stabbings don't have the same number of deaths that a gun causes.
Banning guns will work about as well as banning drugs. People that want a gun will still be able to find one.
You’re right. We should continue with our “thoughts and prayers” plan, as it’s working wonderfully.
It may not be perfect, but at least it is a solution that doesn't cause more harm than the problem that it is trying to fix.
It's hard to imagine anyone actually thinking that's a solution rather than a joke, but I guess that's why we're mired in this abyss.
Nobody's really explained to me, in a way that makes any sense from a public health perspective, why the current NFA laws are OK but anything else beyond that is the start of tyranny.
I mean, I guess there are people who don't agree, but they seem to end up on compounds in Eastern Oregon or Idaho.
The current NFA laws are not ok and already are well along the path towards tyranny.
What is the point of more laws when prosecuters will not enforce the laws currently on the books?
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I don't see a significant difference between shooting 5 people, knifing 5 people or running 5 people over... or how changing the constitution would prevent any of those from happening.
What guns do cops get to keep in this ideal gunscape you envision?
It’s hilarious that people talk about this option like it’s a fantasy world when it is a reality in almost every other developed nation.
It's hilarious that people want to defund cops, hold them accountable for all the violent shit they do, then also think they are the only ones that should have guns.
You're proving how insanely out of touch you are, you need to leave your echo chamber my man. People who want the police defunded absolutely do not want "only the cops to have guns", if you guys still dont believe that leftists own guns then I'm not sure what to tell you.... not to mention average cops in most civilized nations dont walk around packing deadly weapons
Are you trying to say you want to shoot up the cops now?
I’m not sure what you are trying to imply if not…We currently see corruption and bad police shootings. Even though we have guns, people aren’t going around killing police because there are civilized ways of having accountability
Other nations don’t have 300 million guns
…and that’s why they don’t have as many mass rampage shootings….
Squirt guns... In a perfect world cops would be the first ones to lay down their firearms. Lol
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Lol. Tool.
This is some deeply stupid shit you said
How is any of what I said fascist?