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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.
First off, getting apples to apples comparison of violent crime between the UK and US is difficult due to differences in standards and reporting practices. For example, it my understanding that the UK only records a death as "intentional homicide" if there is a suspect and then has separate categories for manslaughter and suspected foul-play. Whereas the US records all three under the single header homicide before breaking it down by degree. When one digs into the numbers one finds that most of soundbites and examples cited in the media about US violence relative to the UK are playing fast and loose with this distinction. IE comparing all gun deaths in the US (including accidents, suicides and those shootings ruled lawful) to the specific subset of "intentional homicides" committed with firearms in the UK.
Second off, and kind of related to the point above, the more "red adjacent" an American is the more likely they are to question the validity of "gun homicides" as a metric. Sure if you could somehow Thanos snap all the guns in civillian hands out of existence gun crime would likely be dramatically reduced, at least temporarily. but what of it? There seems to be this underlying a assumption behind a lot of these posts that a person killed with a knife, or lynched by a mob, is somehow less of victim. For my part I don't see how that can be, KIA is KIA.
The cynical bastard in me can't help but suspect that a lot of this is downstream the progressive affinity for external loci of control and the broder millue of secular post-modernist nonsense. When some strapping schitzo with a dozen prior arrests kills Granny by bashing her head in with a brick, or pushing her into the path of an oncoming train nobody panics because it's all part of the plan. The posts about focusing on mental health and how "we all live in a society" were already written before the corpse was cold.
Meanwhile if Granny pulls a revolver from her purse and plugs her would be killer center-of-mass, or some bystander intervenes and drops him. Everyone loses their minds.
The simplest and most straight forward argument in favor of "liberal" gun laws is in the old saw, God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.
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