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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.
If you had a free hand, what WOULD you do about it? Other than police state stuff (in which I include effective gun control), I don't see what you can do. Having the FBI pay special attention to Hispanic neo-Nazis probably won't work.
no credit cards for gun sales- you don’t pick up the gun until the dealer has cash in hand. Persons under 25 need to wait two weeks before picking up semiautomatics.
media coverage of mass shootings is banned.
straw purchasers and felons in possession are automatically guilty of attempted murder, not the previous crimes. No plea bargains are permitted and there is a strong mandatory minimum.
gang members on the list of prohibited persons. Person to person transfers are prohibited and must be an FFL transfer.
insurance companies cannot attempt to incentivize businesses banning licensed concealed carry.
And is there any evidence the guy was a Nazi? He had gang tattoos but the speculation about white supremacist ideology comes from a patch on his jacket reading RWDS, which could be a bar, a mechanic shop, something left on the jacket from the guy who donated it to a thrift store, etc.
Almost all of those policy proscriptions is less likely to work for the simple fact that 3D printers go BRRRRRR
The median mass shooter is not an experienced gunsmith, or an accomplished 3d printer nerd, nor indeed experienced in any kind of small scale manufacturing at all. He’s a troubled but managed to keep his nose clean 19 year old NEET. Making it harder for him to buy guns is making it very difficult for him to acquire them.
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