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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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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.

I see value in both @hydroacetylene and @huadpe’s answers. A little police state is not a bad thing—not when police are the raison d’etre of the state. The problem is incentivizing them to remain little.

I don’t see a way to let police preempt shooters without also letting them preempt and inconvenience anyone else. The Tang China tack, punishing police for false alarms? There’s no way to know what could have happened. Red flag laws? It helps if civilians have to bring the accusation, but still, there’s incentive to confiscate first and ask questions later. Police will always be incentivized to disarm the populace. It makes their job strictly easier.

Tribalism makes this all worse. So long as Our Team is getting disarmed and Their Team is doing the disarming, both sides are correct to recognize the incentives. I don’t know if it’s physically possible to depoliticize this. Changing how the media reports gun violence has to be a start. “If it bleeds, it leads” has never been in the public interest.

In summary: I don’t have a good answer, and think that most mainstream ones are pointless or counterproductive. It’d be nice if we never talked about it, but anyone aiming at an innocent was immediately drone-struck. We’re so far from that world that I’m not sure what is best. That’s why I’m venting here instead of, I dunno, running for office.

Yeah, but other than making you feel less icky seeing people with guns in public, what does banning open carry actually accomplish? I can't think of a single mass shooting that would have been prevented by such a law. Has a mass shooter ever been misidentified as a lawful citizen peacefully open carrying? This is exactly the sort of "I can't identify any way this would actually help solve the stated problem, but it would make me feel better emotionally" policy suggestion that makes gun rights supporters distrustful of "compromise" legislation.

Hell, your first suggestion for a reasonable compromise to alleviate the problem of mass shooters is to... moderately inconvenience a group of shockingly law-abiding people in a way that has no plausible impact on mass shootings but does prohibit a lawful activity that you already dislike for unrelated reasons anyway. This is why gun rights supporters aren't interested in compromise. If every suggested "compromise" for decades takes the form of a pointless restriction that seems almost deliberately designed to do nothing but antagonize you, eventually you stop giving your opponents the benefit of the doubt that they're operating in good faith.

Discharging a gun in your front lawn without a good reason (self defense), is already a crime in the vast majority of jurisdictions (including that person's according to some reports). Which would make this another example of "just enforce the law you losers" cases.

At least in rural areas it's pretty frequently legal to engage in target shooting on private property: as far as I know in Texas it's legal to discharge firearms on your own property outside of city limits provided you're at least 300 feet from neighboring occupied buildings. Within city limits it's generally a local law issue. Rifle and shotgun shots (presumably mostly for sport or hunting) are not an uncommon sound if you start wandering backroads.

Which would make this another example of "just enforce the law you losers" cases.

As far as I can tell, the suspect in question wasn't in the US legally, and thus couldn't have legally acquired the firearm in question.