most people agree that owning a knife is okay, but owning a nuclear bomb is probably not.
(I would use something less ridiculous than nuclear bombs, but I’ve met republicans who think grenades and tanks should be legal too, so there are some wild people out there).
Finding the line to draw in the sand is the hard part.
I think Scalia drew the line somewhere around “bazooka”
Yes, I agree. But I think there is an inherent tension between individual rights and collective rights. Finding the balance is the tough part.
ETA Ninja acknowledge JSM.
Enhanced Police presence outside my kids elementary school today. Just made me sad that this is needed.
Might be somewhat ninja’d by Cooke, but here was my thought: it depends on the lens you’re viewing it from.
If you’re from the standpoint of “we’re trying to reduce the chances of someone opening fire on a group of people and killing a large number of them” then it’s a liberal [to society] position. If you’re in the “trying to eliminate the possibility of dissent when government decides to unilaterally impose unpopular decision-making on the masses” then it’s authoritarian.
If you’re in the gun fetish crowd, anything that reduces your ability to obtain any weapon you want, regardless of its form, is authoritarian. That’s a group that, much like the entire Republican Party on a growing number of issues, you can never have a rational conversation with on the subject.
I would caution against focusing on a specific model of firearm (the AR15, in this case), and focus on how particular features or attributes of weapons cause them to rise to the level of endangering others.
For example, if memory serves, Canada severely restricts (to borderline prohibition) firearms that can use centerfire ammunition in a semiautomatic manner because of the increased lethality of that combination. Rimfire ammunition is less dangerous and sufficient for target shooting or plinking (uses where semiautomatic use makes sense, once you’re familiar with the activity), while game hunting requiring the increased “oomph” of centerfire ammunition isn’t necessarily an activity where semiautomatic operation is necessary (although it does make it easier/less of a challenge).
One of the difficulties with things like assault weapon ban legislation is that all-too-often they are written to ban particular models that “look scary”, or that were used in high-profile ways due to their popularity rather than particular features. Advocates for such measures lose credibility when they can’t really explain why certain models are to be banned, while other functionally similar models are not to be banned. And if/when such bills become law, side-industries pop up to create variants that are legal under the letter of the law, retaining most of the desired features/functions.
Gov Abbot said the Uvalde shooting was part of a larger mental heath crisis and not related to Texas gun laws. Several prominent National republicans made similar claims about the Buffalo shooter.
So when is Gov Abbot proposing Texas legislation to expand coverage and funding to address this mental health crisis?
When are the Federal Republicans proposing similar National expansion of mental health coverage, treatment and funding?
It won’t be a problem after abortion is outlawed and millions more babies start flooding out of a shrinking number of delivery rooms across the U.S., because they’re all going to be white and perfectly healthy with no problems at all.
Certainly no problems that government policies that do away with welfare and assistance to needy kids might create. Definitely no problems that society hoists on them. It’ll be a goddamn white man’s utopia. Hell, within 10 years we won’t even need hospitals because all the black women will have died off and life expectancy will soar.
Thanks for the enlightenment. I never had a gun more powerful than a single shot 22 caliber rifle to shoot varmints so am not very sophisticated on guns.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-school-shooting-victims-were-killed-in-one-classroom-11653484041
I’d agree that if politicians are going to blame deficiencies in mental health care, they need to step up and do something about it.
I read on CNN that this guy engaged with the school resource officer and it took at least 30 minutes for the guy to be neutralized after he locked himself in the classroom and obliterated an entire fourth grade class.
30 gd minutes. And this is a school that had on staff a good guy with a gun. Fourth graders, man. My son is a fourth grader. What kind of hell did those kids go through?
price per bullet should be $5K i say
I read that the shooter was in the school for an hour before they killed him. That’s after armed officers saw him and failed to stop him going in. Can’t imagine just hiding until backup comes while kids are being slaughtered.
Seems the “body armor” thing was also way overplayed. He apparently had a vest but with no ballistic plate in there so he was unprotected.
It is always impressive that unemployed teenage drop-outs always somehow have dough for ARs, pistols, hundreds of rounds, and body-armor. I suppose he used credit. Which makes me wonder who if anyone paid for them?
I was wondering the same thing.
The rifle used in the Texas elementary school shooting is known as a “DDM4 Rifle.”
AR-15-type rifles can be purchased for as little as $400, but the Daniel Defense rifle is on the high-end of around $2,000 or more. These rifles can also be financed, with customers paying less than $100 a month.
According to pictures of the shooter’s guns posted on Instagram, he appears to have purchased a battery-powered holographic sight that typically sells for around $725 …
and 375 rounds of ammunition.
He bought two rifles, so around $5,200 including sales tax. Can an unemployed 18 year old really get that much credit? Could he save that up from his job at Wendy’s? Were his grandparents skeptical of banks and simply kept that kind of cash around the house?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/live-updates-superintendent-heart-broken-today-84951141
It’s unpopular to say, but there exist people who belong in mental institutions.
There also exist people who merely require to be forced against their will to take their anti-psychotic medication.
I don’t know if this particular person falls into one of those two categories, but certainly there are people who do. One of my family members is included in my estimation. Thank goodness this family member hasn’t attempted to buy a gun. The family member has assaulted other family members though and there is almost nothing that the police or anyone else can do about it.
I say almost because after a violent episode the family member will be sent by the police to the psychiatric hospital and forcibly put on meds and released. Family member is fine for 1-18 months until reaching the decision (without any input from a mental health professional) that the meds are no longer necessary. Family member again becomes violent off the meds. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I know the institutions Reagan closed in the 80s were rife with abuse, but some people need that level of care, minus the abuse of course.
I think you might be able to pick off a few moderate Republicans for things like raising the legal age to 21, and universal background checks with stiff penalties for selling to someone who didn’t pass a background check or failing to appropriately report something that belongs on a background check. (I think that was an issue with a mass shooting 5 or 10 or 15 years ago… guy should have failed the background check, but passed because someone screwed up in reporting something.)
That won’t stop all mass shootings, but it wouldn’t materially infringe on most people’s right to bear arms and it would at least make it materially harder for some people to commit a mass shooting.
I don’t know that stricter limits on magazines will go very far.
Hmmm, preliminary indications are “no”.
If there wasn’t meaningful change after the slaughter of white kids in white America, sadly I don’t see brown kids in a town so close to the border that the talking heads would sweep to practically being Mexico making a difference.
I think we’re all capable of killing people under the right conditions. You can’t prevent temporary insanity.
I thought about killing my bullies when I was in school. None of us are really that normal.