That is a completely disingenuous response. You managed to hit every dogwhistle hot word possible. Domestic Terror. Oklahoma City. 9/11. Straw men. You even threw in a Hitler for good measure. As a country, the debate is over. We are apparently fine with it. We deserve everything we get.
A gun is a tool. The purpose of that tool is to kill. The other things you mention here are tools that have another purpose other than to kill. That is the main difference.
I'm guessing you meant your third sentence in disdain. We keep circling back to village idiot's point. We will have to accept some of the negative consequences if we want to keep our level of freedom with guns. I'm personally alright with that. Your chances of dying in a random massacre are up there with getting hit by lightning and the pure chance of getting killed by a assault rifle or rifle in general are WAY below numbers we as a society accept for other vices that lead to preventable deaths. I'm not even saying I'm totally opposed to any changes, I've mentioned my personal wish list of compromises (I'm am but a low internet poster they'll never see the light of day). Yet the democrats in congress shot down a reasonable compromise (if you believe in due process at all) and we are back to square one.
The problem still is that the compromises won't do anything. Let's institute universal background checks for every gun sale, even between private citizens. It wouldn't have prevented any of the recent massacres. As I pointed out earlier, background checks should have stopped two of the shooters from obtaining their weapons. What good will checking everyone else who is not intent on shooting up a public place do when the checks failed to stop the guys who did, or when the rest of the shooters passed the checks and bought guns legally? The answer is nothing. There is no reason to "compromise" for the sake of passing an ineffective law. To further my point, in order for background checks on private sales to have any effect, you must first register every weapon in the U.S. to establish a baseline for transfers. Good luck with that. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing when a gun was transferred between individuals, except that non-criminals will be afraid of becoming criminals by being caught in a sting operation for doing something that was formerly legal and still harmless - selling a gun to someone who has no criminal intent. Look, we cannot stop gun violence without first removing the guns from criminals. We cannot remove guns from criminals without first removing them all from non-criminals. We cannot remove guns from non-criminals without first registering and tracking every legally-owned gun in existence in the U.S. We cannot resister and track every gun without changing the wording of the 2nd Amendment, maybe including repealing it. If we are not willing to touch the 2nd Amendment, then there is no additional law that we can pass that will have any real effect on gun crimes. Anything short of that is useless and just a reaction to the demand to "do something." While "doing something" will make lots of non-thinking people feel better temporarily, until the next mass shooting raises cries to "do more!" it will have no effect on the problem.
Personally I think just setting up a portal for the public to run NICS checks themselves if they wanted would help to help decrease some random citizen from selling a gun a criminal. Again you'd say it'd be costly and ultimately as unenforceable as regulating straw purchasers to begin with. I think having the option is at least a compromise in this stalemate.
Basically, yes. Unless you can point to some legislation that made a real difference or suggest something that fits within the framework of the 2nd Amendment that will have a genuine effect, then doing nothing will give us the same result as doing anything else.
The only thing I can think of would be to have a massive buyback program that paid people ludicrous sums of money for whatever gun the dems choose to ban. It would be stupidly expensive and no one would sell. Because a massive confiscation program would be bloody as fuck.
Drunk driving kills just as many people as guns. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm And neither one of those is in the top 10 killers. Either one of those represents basically 1/20th of the single top cause of death. It's an emotional issue, not a logical, fact-based one. Unless a logical, fact-based approach is taken to this problem, nothing will be accomplished, other than political grandstanding in an election year.
Except for the part where one side is talking about inanimate objects and the other is talking about human beings. Though, personally I think "There are too many in America to get rid of them" and "Most of them aren't causing problems" are bullshit arguments for either issue.
Those stats show that driving not drunk driving kill as many people as guns in the states. That's probably a significantly different number (Drunk driving deaths vs Total driving deaths). They also show that guns are involved in a significant part of suicide and self inflicted deaths. I can't speak to the significance of that, maybe people who want to off themselves without access to a gun would step off a bridge or in front of a train instead and there wouldn't be a decrease in suicide mortality. I agree it's emotional, the media plaster's pictures of murdered kids, killers without remorse, with words like using Assault Weapons, Machine Gun. While the other side screams constitution, and you'll have to take these guns from our cold dead hands. There is a logical fact based approach that does work. Pass legislature that forces the public to get rid of all the guns, Australia did it and their levels of gun violence dropped off. But Australia has a different culture than the US. I don't see this working in the US, it's going to take a shift in gun culture where people will look at their guns and go I don't need this many and start getting rid of them. This would be a very long process, maybe something I might see in my lifetime.
His church has been asked to move. http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/ne...-to-move-church-somewhere-else/?intcmp=hplnws
I never quite got the whole "cars kill more/as many people as guns, why arent we banning cars" argument that always pops up after one of these events... If we are comparing apples to apples in that scenario does that mean the people saying that are OK with mandatory training, registration, licensing, testing and insurance in order to be able to access/purchase a gun legally? Cos if they are that certainly seems like a step in the right fucking direction. As to firearms related suicide dropping as a result of gun reform its actually quite difficult to draw a direct conclusion on that, heres a fairly well rounded review of that very subject in Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-...-and-suicides-john-howard-port-arthur/7254880 Its certainly part of the story and would definitely be responsible for some of the drop but its hard to say how much... what i am certain about though is that shooting yourself is a very quick, easy and final way to commit suicide and in the heat of the moment/depths of depression it makes the choice frighteningly quick... other methods not so much. Jump off a train or building? well you need to go find a train or building to do it from, maybe that extra time between thinking "i want to die" and getting to their chosen destination is enough for them to reconsider? If you really want to off yourself nothing will stop you, but if it stops even a fraction of suicides its a good thing IMO.
This might be cultural naivety on my part but wouldn't the part I bolded be the main driver for people to do the right thing and register their weapons? If most gun owners in the US are law abiding responsible people would they not do this voluntarily to avoid the risk of becoming criminals and allow them to sell their firearms legally at some point in the future? Or is the mistrust/fear of tyranny from government just to strong? I understand you wouldn't get all weapons registered, but if you registered the majority surely thats better than not registering any? EDIT: Of the gun owners on this board who would voluntarily register their weapons if such a law came into affect? (@Mods id be genuinely interested in a poll on this if thats something we could do?)
Well one is a protected Constitutional right and one isn't so there is always that. Comparing to other consitutional rights should we have a means test for everyone's say due process right? Or you know if it saves just one child's life. I'm actually shocked at the number of left leaning media outlets Ive read with pieces on the wrong headedness of the Democrats actions on this, wanting due processless terror list, and demonizing non supporters as terrorist sympathizers(something Cheney or McCarthey might do). This argument though is about parity in outrage. I like to use alcohol as a better example. We certainly have accepted the ills that come along with it. Drunk driving fatalities roughly mirror gun homicides in numbers. You don't hear SJWs screetching about its highly correlative effect on domestic abuse, a recent target of gun control advocates. The amount of criminality alone that can be atributed to alcohol consumption. Health concerns for the individual, to alcoholic's families, the societal health cost as a whole. The list is as endless as it is pernicious. Yet generally speaking it has only a simple age barrier restriction. Guns will always get more traction in the media though, these massacares are too visceral to ignore.
None of these comparisons are appropriate. Drunk driving, alcohol consumption, drugs, tobacco, accidental gun deaths. Everything mentioned is not a mass shooting. These are vices. There is a qualitative difference between someone making a poor judgement call and someone arming themselves for the sole purpose of perpetrating as many multiple murders as they can until the cops kill them. There is absolutely no comparison outside of war zone scenarios. Chicago gang violence isn't even the same, because it is generally an isolated territory and they are using illegal weapons. A mass shooting could happen anywhere and, at least the last few, have used legal methods to obtain weapons. Again, we are not talking about banning anything. We are not talking about eradicating accidental gun deaths. Nor curtailing consumption of the weapons except in cases of a very elite group of individuals who disqualified from purchasing a gun.