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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7678 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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Just before Covid, a gun store was robbed in my town. I worked in a different gun store, so we got some of the inside scoop. Proprietor of the robbed store used to work on my computer whenever I fucked it up too badly. The shop was the shittiest one in the county, lodged in a former meat market. The robbers just pulled part of the roof off the building to get into the secure room.

Turned out to be the local high school football team. They stole around fifty guns, fifteen of which have been recovered some seven years later. The recovered guns have been used in at least three homicides so far. One was just recovered at a traffic stop this year, one killed a high school senior just after prom not two weeks ago. Perp there hasn't been identified or caught.

The kids who robbed the place were caught within days. It remains unclear exactly how many people were involved, at least two unnamed juveniles were processed, but shield laws prevent the public knowing anything. Three of the older kids were charged for the robbery, one got no time, other two got three and ten months respectively, despite not cooperating with police in the recovery of the firearms or identification of other perpetrators. Everyone involved was put into a youth criminal diversion program that released them without a criminal record.

The ringleader and one who got the most time, one Travontis (Drink!) Miller, was given the ten month sentence, but due to the protective nature of the diversion program, it will never be public knowledge that he plead guilty to multiple firearm felonies or how long he actually served of that jail term. What we do know is that he was out prior to December of 2021, because that's when he was arrested for a series of other crimes we're not entirely sure what happened.

He was charged with assault and battery (strangulation), robbery and domestic violence, but once again was given protected youth status despite being in his twenties by this point (the program runs until age 24). He also picked up charges of resisting arrest and being in possession of one of the stolen firearms from the original gun store case. These charges too were concealed under the diversion program.

So when people tell me that what we really need to cut down on gun violence in this country is to ensure that every state has a different magazine limit, or force used gun sales into stores, or ban AR-15s, or not allow gun companies to advertise, it makes me irrationally angry. This dude, when he hits 25, will have no criminal record and will be able to pass a background check to buy a firearm legally. At least until his next felony, which I don't expect to take long.

Below are two quote sets for those who didn't read the articles, first the prosecution in the original case:

At the June sentencing, Stevenson objected to Borrello’s indication that he would grant the defendants HYTA status.

“In this case, the defendants stole 50 guns from Showtime Guns,” Stevenson said. “Fifty guns. Only 14 of those firearms have been recovered as of April 8 of this year. And no surprise, Judge, all of them have been found in the hands of convicted felons. In fact, one of those firearms was used in a homicide in December in which an 87-year-old grandmother was shot in the face and killed.”

The judge wasn't interested, and had The Science on his side.

"It’s very clear science, evidence-based conclusions that the brain isn’t fully developed in young men until roughly around the age of the mid 20s,” Borrello said. “These gentlemen allegedly committed these crimes when they were teenagers, not even adults. If I learned one thing in handling juvenile lifers, it’s that we have to look at these things a little bit differently than we look at adults making the same poor decisions that these gentlemen may have made.”

But sure, the problem with gun violence in the US is that Billy Bob put a giggle trigger on his PSA.

Edit: added/fixed links

Edit: Added a CDC study of gun violence by ethnicity for support, as requested by mod. Honestly I've never looked it up until now, the below was just based on my personal lived experience.

Guns and blacks just don't mix well if you don't want a society with high gun violence.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7242a4.htm

If you have significant amount of blacks in your society then you must ban guns entirely and make possession a felony, or else aggressive and violently inclined black youth will eventually get their hands on guns through legal means or the black (pun intended?) market. It's unfortunate for the responsible gun users but it only takes a few people to ruin nice things for everyone else. Of course, this would require a constitutional amendment in the US so it's basically impossible.

You could also toughen up juvenile sentencing to reduce the age of adult criminal responsibility to like, 10 or something. If guns are still legal in this scenario then blacks will still have high gun violence, but at least their genetic pool will slowly improve over time. You might have to wait a few thousand years to get any benefit of lowered aggression through genetic selection though, much faster to ban guns.

If you're advocating for racially-based denial of rights, you might as well instead advocate for just expelling blacks from the country. We don't care to enforce our civilization on them in their native lands, why bother doing it here?

Not advocating at all for racially based denial of rights, as in gun ownership. Easier and non-discriminatory to ban gun ownership for everyone.

Same problem, why deny fundamental rights to a people who are capable of handling them for the sake of peoples who cannot? Even if you care about uplifting them (an idea I am sympathetic towards, if pessimistic of the chances of it ever happening), it’d be much easier to do once your own societal capacity is improved in their absence, like putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

I'm not too keen on expelling people who've been in the US since the British colonial days. Blacks were exploited as slaves, so even if blacks have problematic violence as a group it's a 'we broke it, we bought it' kind of issue in my opinion.

There's many problems with expelling blacks even if we were willing to do it:

Where are we expelling them to? Does any country in Africa have the capacity and/or willingness to absorb a massive foreign population? I don't think multiple African countries could do it sharing the population influx.

For blacks unwilling to leave voluntarily, are we using military divisions to drag them out of their homes and into a container ship? Seems like a genocide in the making.

Blacks were exploited as slaves, so even if blacks have problematic violence as a group it's a 'we broke it, we bought it' kind of issue in my opinion.

They've been "broken" since far before you involved yourself with them, and you can plausibly claim that the moral debt of slavery has been long since repaid by decades of wealth transfers in their favor.

Where are we expelling them to? Does any country in Africa have the capacity and/or willingness to absorb a massive foreign population? [...] For blacks unwilling to leave voluntarily, are we using military divisions to drag them out of their homes and into a container ship?

Quick plan I came up with in 5 minutes: seize some rural chunk of land on the West African coast (or anywhere really, in fact it might be better optics if it's not in Africa), create a settler colony there, then reintroduce transportation as a punishment for felonies following the Australian model. Considering that IIRC about 1/3 of black men will be charged with a felony in their lifetime, you could relocate millions of blacks while encouraging their friends and families to follow them in tow, all with plausible deniability for your ultimate motive. If push comes to shove, you can in fact just enforce your will on people, as has been the state of affairs for 4000 years and counting. It wouldn't be trivial, but if there's anyone who can pull it off, it's the white man.

All of this is coup-complete, of course, but so is ~every tenable solution to the problem.

Well, I agree that your proposal to expel black felons would improve the genetic pool quickly and reduce gun violence without banning firearms entirely. We may as well go further and simply expel all felons regardless of color, it would improve everyone's genetics and could be argued as a non-discriminatory policy. Also, for children over 10 who commit crimes that would result in a felony for an adult, we'd expel the child and both parents/guardians too. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to avoid 'underage' criminals as shown by @JTarrou and they would have more time to spread their genetics.

Instead of annexing land, the US might as well annex an entire country if the status quo is being discarded anyway. A non-nuclear power with poor international standing. I suggest Venezuela. Or Iran if we're willing to make the ground troops commitment anyway, may as well get rid of a long term foe.

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