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Ok so... i'm often seriously confused about what safety people actually care about.
I understand fear of handguns a handgun is an easy to procure object in a hurry that allows someone to commit a crime suddenly and violently.
But it seems any type of premediatated or planned operation is just super legal and easy to get? (except of course using it to commit a crime is obviously very illegal)
Nitromethane is freely available for purchase, which can be easily made into very dangerous chemicals using stuff you can buy in the hardware store. From there we have other things, while you have to either break the law or DIY it for a lot of parts you can make your own drone (or just use a kids RC helicopter toy, seriously it may not work for heavy payloads but you'd be shocked at how far you can go with mediocre toys these days.) and drop an explosive on anyone. You can also make actual war crimes in your basement by mixing iron powder, and sulfur then heating it, sealing it in a glass bottle with water as it builds up H2S. Alternatively if you want to make cyanide gas, buying sodium cyanide (i'd be willing to post links but I don't want this forum to actually get in trouble with the FBI, I already got searched once) and mixing it with sulfiric acid is doable (and ok like hyper dangerous beyond belief and you would have to basically get rid of it the moment you make it but....)
Again the delivery mechanisms for this stuff isn't complicated and the main limiting factor of these does not appear to be that obtaining the means of violence is hard it's that anyone smart enough to do this is also smart enough to realize that violence is a bad idea.
The safety people are concerned about is usually downstream of their political paranoias and conspiracy theories.
Middle class fratboys are "rape culture", but afghan hill people are "diversity of consent". etc
The left-wing focus on guns is mostly a dodge to redirect public anger over black crime and liberal judges throwing violent criminals into the population at law-abiding Republicans who own guns. If only Billy Bob couldn't buy an AR, DeQuarious wouldn't be shooting LaShontrakayze with a Kel Tec.
Yeah, “rape culture” is a thing to the extent you don’t ask further questions as to who is committing the raping, or the raping can be blamed on white males with plausible deniability. A similar example is how #StopAsianHate quickly died when it became too undeniable who was actually committing the acts of Asian hatred.
When black men commit gun homicide it highlights socioeconomic inequities and why we need to fight for racial justice and impose greater gun control.
When white men commit gun homicide it highlights white male entitlement and why we need to combat white male privilege and impose greater gun control.
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I think this is applying conflict theory where mistake theory would be more appropriate.
Handguns are, in practice, orders of magnitude more dangerous than long guns, looking at (murder, suicide and negligent) death tolls. The difference between America and other broadly pro-gun countries like Switzerland and Canada is that America has ubiquitous legal private handgun ownership, and lots of people shooting themselves or each other with said handguns. The pro-gun movement in America largely consists of people who routinely carry a handgun for personal self defence (or would like to if it was legal in their jurisdiction). And they (you?) are winning politically.
And yet the anti-gun movement's best argument is to point at spree killings and call for bans on scary-looking and/or high-powered rifles, because blue tribe normies who are susceptible to anti-gun messaging are not actually worried about the chav-on-chav shootings going on in the rough parts of their own cities, they are worried about the spree shootings they see on TV.
If the anti-gun left were serious, committed gun-grabbers at both the elite and mass levels, I don't think they would be so stupid about guns. I think normie fear of spree killings is very real, is largely driven by media amplification (which in turn is driven by if-it-bleeds-it-leads incentives, not partisan bias), and is grossly disproportionate to any real threat. But the pro-gun right don't have a very persuasive response to it - the real argument they believe is "one classroom of dead kids in a every 4-5 years in a country of 300 million is a good tradeoff for the advantages of widespread rifle ownership for shooting sports, hunting, rural home defence, and tyranny prevention." And that is a non-starter in the public debate because most people are innumerate. [FWIW, I think the tyranny prevention argument is mostly bullshit and I still think the tradeoff points in favour of broadly legal long guns. But if I got my sense of how common spree killings actually are from the MSM, I wouldn't]
tl;dr - the reason why the debate about long guns isn't as one-sidedly pro-gun in the US as it is in Switzerland is because normies overstate the risk of spree killings, not because of a conspiracy of evil gun-grabbers.
I would have to disagree with this. The anti-gun types could get a lot of concessions and/or enhancement of their credibility if they agreed to national shall-issue concealed carry. The data is pretty overwhelming that automatically issuing concealed carry permits to anyone who passes a background check does not result in a significant increase in crime.
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The Brady campaign is currently a numerate, cogent, reasonable organization aimed at gun control supported by the data(they didn't used to be, but they are at the moment).
They are not popular or influential, because gun politics in the US is 100% partisanbrained conflict theory. The NRA and the Brady campaign are both doing things that meaningfully(but perhaps not massively) reducing gun deaths with things like safe storage campaigns and range instructor training. They're not the most popular organizations on either side.
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If only this innumeracy applied to "a few dozen mauled kids every year in a country of 300 million is a good tradeoff for the advantages of widespread
dog piss, dog shit, dog slobber, dog barking, dog dander, dog odorwhatever people see in these things."I think conflict theory is apt here. At the end of the day, if most people liked guns at even 0.1% of their emotional investment in dogs, they'd overlook the tradeoffs too. Some people just really like guns and are fine with a couple classrooms paying the tradeoff ("Some of you will die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make"). Other people don't care at all about owning guns, so for them no societal cost is really worth it. But a blanket gun ban costs these people absolutely nothing. They were never going to own a gun anyways. Ask them how many babies mauled by dogs per year is acceptable before they're willing to let the government take away their precious doggos and you'll get a very different attitude.
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In the United States, gun control is so conflict theory that nobody even tries to convince anyone anymore. When Democrats get power, they simply implement all the gun control -- Virginia demonstrates this perfectly. Anti-gun states have been banning AR-15s (most popular RIFLE in the US) and Glocks (most popular pistol) left and right. Republicans, being divided on the issue, sometimes reduce gun control, sometimes do nothing, and sometimes increase gun control. But the convincing stage is long since over.
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You make some good points, but I don't think it quite addresses the, as you say, unseriousness of the anti-gun left. They used to lean much more deeply on the crime angle, but there are too many fatal weaknesses to that take for it to be effective in a less controlled/favorable media environment. The normies get upset about spree-killings, but not in a way that obviously and naturally leads to blaming the tool. One can easily imagine a slightly different world where the mass media blame was displaced onto, say, SSRIs, possibly with a "greedy, overprescribing pharma companies" angle. But the pattern for sprees is something hitting the news bigly once every 2-3 years, with maybe a few copycats in the following weeks, and then most everyone goes back to not caring. That doesn't translate into political will.
The reason there are safety people at all seems much more driven by outgroup dynamics. Gun are red tribe totems, and attacking enemy totems is always a fun time.
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