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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.
It seems to me that there are many ways we could 'reformat' our conception of gun ownership in a way that would preserve the ability of 'the people' to bear arms while making them less available for use in crime or mass shootings (or suicide), but I find it incredibly unlikely that the current American gun culture would find it at all tolerable.
The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.
The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.
Mass shootings are, frankly, more analogous to terrorism than ordinary crime. Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder. Nevertheless, carrying a gun because you might get jumped by terrorists is hard to justify.
All fair points. I shouldn’t let my frustration get carried away.
I am coming to think that any solution has to start from such a “reformatting.” When I was in college, there was a triple murder in town, some kid killing his family. It was big gossip for a couple days. But that was it. No Discourse about changes to be made, and certainly no national headlines. That “normal” sociology covers it just fine.
Is it possible to push mass shootings into that category? If state-level media mentioned it in passing and national-level didn’t at all, that might help bring public perception in line with the actual lack of threat. I’m not sure.
I would be interested in hearing what other “reformat” options you have in mind. I could see reducing personal ownership, but instating city and state arsenals and training would fit the idea of a “well-regulated militia.”
Let them keep happening without doing anything :v
I'm being facetious but also not - as far as I can tell, most mass shooters are pursuing notoriety or revenge against society, so if the broader reaction is a shrug, the appeal will fall off. But you can't persuade people to act like that, which really only leaves acquired exhaustion.
Not terribly far off that. Club/civic organization/municipal-centric models preserve recreational uses and keep ownership away from direct federal control while making it harder for guns to leak out to criminals, would be mass shooters, etc... If the revolution kicks off, you can all raid the club's ammo locker on the grounds that we're past enforcing gun laws, but in the mean time if Psycho Dave wants to go for a drive with a pair of rifles and 25,000 rounds of ammunition his club mates can see that and step in. I don't care if people want to own assault rifles or go hunting, but I also have a pretty negative view of everyday carry of firearms, especially open carry.
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