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Notes -
ongoing shooting in lewiston, maine
reportedly 22+ dead, 60+ shot. shooter is rumored to be an ex army guy. perhaps shaping up to be the next las vegas massacre. stay safe and prepare for the gun control debate to be revved up full force tomorrow
As it should be? Deeply tragic event downstream of stupid policy choices should definitely result in discussion of those policy choices.
Eh. We already have a bunch of examples of shootings, and also a bunch of examples of reasonable usage of guns for self-protection.
It will ramp up the discussion, but primarily among people who aren't tracking it. Hearing that X bad consequence happened doesn't actually give you much new information! It certainly incites the public, which can cause change in good/bad directions, but I consider that an antifeature of how common news media showcases events.
(Ideally, it should be a thing of: you can go read some big summary from different viewpoints, which has statistics for various interpretations of events but also estimated statistics + reasons for why doing XYZ is better than doing ZYX. You'd read these occasionally to get more information about your beliefs, and then use that to decide how you vote. But we don't have decent versions of these.)
Sure, but the idea is that one particularly shocking event can be a useful springboard to discuss the wider policy issues that contributed not just to that incident but to many others like it. This happens across all sorts of issues.
The basic setup of the debate is that the liberal right side is saying "liberty and somewhat-greater protection against tail risks outweigh some small amount of mass shootings" and the nanny left is saying "any amount of mass shootings outweighs any amount of liberty, and tail risks are negligible in the modern world".
You can probably tell what side I'm on there, but both sides do have points.
The "springboard" is really more of a lever; the nanny left knows that the liberal right's argument looks even more insensitive than usual immediately following a highly-salient mass shooting, so it increases the salience of mass shootings* and it makes sure to discuss policy in the immediate aftermath. This is an effective demagogic tactic, but ideally the purpose of theMotte is to try to rise above demagoguery.
*NB: there are some people on the liberal right who say that the nanny left deliberately increases the number of mass shootings. I think that's an overstatement and an Ideological Turing Test failure. I think that making mass shootings a salient thing and making them seem commonplace does probably increase their prevalence, but that this is not really an intended thing on the nanny left's part.
If this is demagogic then so is literally all of politics and I would hope gun control advocates don't put their gun down first, if you'll pardon the pun.
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I am once more struck by how cookie cutter spree killings have become in the US. You'd think we'd see more truck rentals after the Islamic extremist killings using them but I suppose that doesn't get you time magazine covers and your face shoved in mine like this guy has been.
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On the one hand, mentally ill people shouldn't have access to firearms. On the other hand, they can do like Andreas Lubitz: hide their diagnosis and avoid treatment because they like flying/shooting too much to give it up.
Countries that have firearm registries can afford to cycle all licensed owners through psych evaluation every few years, but I don't think this is achievable in the US, which doesn't even have annual checkups for regular health issues.
One the issues here is that he was schizophrenic and Vetrans affairs should have been responsible for his treatment. But they didn't want to be and just released him.
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Being frank, a good chunk of the US wouldn't trust this not to be weaponized against them. Given the institutional capture of psychology by the left, I can't really say I blame them.
There's a deep conflict where the left doesn't want to institutionalize people and the right doesn't want to take away the self defence rights of free men.
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Even if people did trust the system, I don't think it would work. The Thatcher-era UK had a health service that enjoyed near-universal public confidence, police who enjoyed universal confidence among the subset of the public who were likely to be legal gun owners, and a gun culture that supported strong gun control. Even so, we couldn't keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill people who weren't supposed to have them. After two spree killings in 10 years (both using handguns, which was the norm for spree killers pre-Columbine), both by people who had gun licenses but should not have done, we banned private handgun ownership and banned private ownership of firearms other than shotguns designed for sporting or agricultural use.
I do not think you can have a system where any given type of gun is generally available to law-abiding citizens but does not end up in the hands of crazies.
And you still got mass shootings and other more general terror attacks after that, obviously, so it didn't fix the problem and wasted a bunch of time, money, and life. Of course, the "clearly 1 Stalin wasn't enough, how about 50 of them?" ratchet-tightening is proposed, and then it happens because Something Must Be Done(tm), and then it happens again, etc.
When gun owners point out "compromise means we get nothing", this is what we mean. The compromise is supposed to be "if we agree to these restrictions you stop fucking coming after us, because mass killings are going to happen either way" but every time for the last 100 years we've been Defected upon, so the only option is to Defect right on back. Ball's in their court; they could make the first move and fix it, but while we don't hate them...
Part of the problem is that gun rights advocates really have no solution to this other than “it’s the price I’m willing to pay for freedom”, which clearly isn’t compelling to those who don’t own guns and who don’t think gun owners will imminently defend them from the tyranny of the federal government) and so don’t “benefit” from this right.
On other issues, “both sides” have “solutions”. On crime, the left has their asinine restorative justice or ‘crime is a problem of inequality’ or whatever bullshit, which is obviously stupid but acknowledges that the problem exists, they’re not mostly saying “yeah I accept current crime rates are fine and they’re the price I’m willing to pay, forever”.
Gun rights advocates compare things to cars or whatever, but even there the industry is clearly working toward self driving, and deliberate vehicular attacks on civilians are rarer than shootings anyway. There is a nonchalance among gun rights advocates that is grating. Personally, I think they should use the NRA’s lobbying strength to push for a massive reversal of deinstitutionalization. Lock the crazies up for life, and I’ll become the staunchest gun rights supporter in the country. This would also solve the homeless issue.
But...they do directly say this. Reparations are a forever thing, and the class they want those reparations to go to commits the vast majority of the crime, therefore they're willing to allow them to commit crimes.
And then, of course, in 2020 they went out and committed, aided, and abetted a massive amount of crime in support of that goal. So while they might claim it's "only temporary" I have no reason to believe that their permanent solution is going to be any different (of course, that depends on your definition of crime; if they re-define a [n action that is a crime, from the classic liberal viewpoint] so it's only a crime when race X does it, which they explicitly state they believe, and then the trendline goes down... has crime objectively decreased?).
Well, yeah- if the Federal government's not fully on my side and I'm worried about getting attacked by backwards gun owners I'd be afraid too, especially if I use and approve of the use of political violence to get my way. Besides, it would be even worse if they had control of the Federal government, because they could take the bureaucracy (that always imposes the rule changes my enemy wants as quickly as it does for the rules I like) and maybe even resist it once I take the government back.
I'd be fine with this, especially because we have an oversupply of people who a.) want to do social work and b.) are all on hair-triggers for any kind of abuse, so I'm not as worried about Nurse Ratched or "lobotomy is a solution to literally every problem" as I would be in the '50s. We might have to revisit it in 60 years if b.) stops being true, but it'll solve the problem for a couple of generations at least.
(Of course, there's always the possibility that, just like in the Soviet Union, China, Australia, the EU, and the UK, you get dissidents being gulag'd for hate speech- it always seems to get used on the liberals eventually and there are more of those on the [current] right than the left- so I don't trust the Right has enough trust in government to build a system that the Left would then be looking for any excuse to turn on the Right, as the Left thinks opposition to their policies is a mental defect anyway. So does the Right, of course.)
Outside of the last 20 years gun rights advocates have accepted every compromise and received nothing in return so yeah, I'd be nonchalant about pressing the "Defect" button too. We have no trust that what we do now won't be abused in the future (for instance, the Swiss do background checks in a secure and private way- but they also have social consensus that guns are fine so they can get legislative and executive co-operation, whereas New World countries obviously lack that, which leads to inches given becoming miles taken in a direction that coincidentally never favors the pro-freedom side).
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I'll accept the nonchalance of gun rights folks over the bad faith, willingly under-informed righteousness of the gun control people. When you haven't done the basic homework to know that saying "thirty magazine clip" is nonsense, I can't respect your credibility or good faith in the argument. Much less when you start extending squishy gun aesthetic terminology to other weapons (what the hell is a military style knife?)
The emotional-memetic takeover of the firearm debate is pretty much complete. It's actually a non-issue in the popular consciousness. When it does matter, in SCOTUS rulings, the court is moving ever towards more permissive gun laws because it's literally the second amendment to the Constitution. It's a bit paranoid and jaded, but I have the thought that when your average twitter warrior launches something like "another mass shooting in the U.S., when will we learn?" their fatalism is actually a tacit admission that they don't want to push the issue because they know where that ends up in the judiciary. Phrased differently; they don't want to legally fuck around and find out.
Plus one to @2rafa's support for re-institutionalization. It's yet another bizarre walking contradiction on the left; "Everyone needs therapy. You should go to a therapist!" only applies to PMC pseudo-depression and anxiety. When you're so schizophrenic that you can't see, on the other hand, it's "people have the right to be unhoused on their own terms!"
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The point is that neither do the gun control people.
And the other side remains uncompelled. Doesn't that prove "having solutions" has nothing to do with their reaction?
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The last time I saw stats on this Psychiatry (which would be making these decisions in most jurisdictions) is the second most liberal specialty in medicine. That said political beliefs aren't going to be really relevant here, even pro-gun/right leaning (of which their are a ....few but they do exist) Psychiatrists are going to heavily lean towards restricting gun rights, the reason being liability. If your choices are "take away his guns" or "somehow be liable for a 30 million dollar judgement even when you didn't do anything wrong," they'll take away the guns every time.
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And that’s the rub- a large majority of gun owners support licenses, registration, etc etc. The government just isn’t trusted to do it and well no one else even can.
if we're talking about the US then no they don't; you see wild variance depending on question, poll, and polling firm with a wide variance in quality of polling
and even then, I would like to see what you're using to make this claim where "a large majority of gun owners" support "licenses, registration, etc etc" either as a group or each one of those individually
but even if it were true, "gun owners" aren't the ones stopping gun-rights violations; it's embedded gun-rights activists who form a substantial portion of any center-right political organization and who have a demonstrated ability to punish politicians who defect so they typically don't
the majority of states now have constitutional carry and it first passed in states where your typical gun owners do trust their state level executive bodies
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This is why my pie in the sky fantasy has always been vesting local gun clubs, democratically operated by local gun owners as a QUANGO to perform all licensing. Require that all gun owners attend classes and meetings with the club. They will notice the weirdos, and will be incentivized to disarm them because they are in the community.
I think this would be reasonable, except that I still don't think gun rights activists would go for. Pretty much the only limitation on "shall not be infringed" that is widely recognized is that they don't think prisons have a right to carry guns while serving their sentence.
A large majority of gun owners support a compromise wherein restrictions on the kinds of guns a person can own are greatly loosened in exchange for making it harder to buy guns. This isn't on offer, and most gun owners know that "compromise" here means "we get nothing", but I'd wager that the typical gun rights activist leans towards the views of a typical gun owner.
Even me, not personally knowing any blue tribers, don't know anyone who would oppose licenses assuming the license granting authority was seen as not-hostile to gun rights and appropriate compromises on the kinds of guns you can buy with them were granted. There's legitimately more opposition to laws against concealed carry in bars or to safe storage requirements.
No, we don't. I want no restrictions on the kinds of guns and no restrictions on who can own them. Licensure of fundamental freedom is simply wrong.
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being against licensure or registration is in the basic talking points of every major gunrights organization; a recent example is constitutional carry which has now been passed in the majority of states with the first ones passing in places where few see the state level bodies as "hostile to gun rights"
your claims about "a large majority of gun owners" let alone "gun rights activists" is not remotely my experience
having been involved in gunrights orgs across a number of states getting important wins with concealed carry and then constitutional carry as well as being involved in gunrights lawsuits, I haven't a clue how this could be a true statement without torturing the condition "was seen as not-hostile to gun rights" to the point where it couldn't exist in the real world
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If you think that's reasonable, you've never had to deal with local club politics. Small group politics is terrible.
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The fact that this is the most reasonable solution more or less guarantees it will not happen.
Well, that, and equity audits preventing them from doing their jobs anyways.
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I wonder what the equivalent of sluggish schizophrenia would be for the Anglophone West in the 21st century. Trauma Response Undermining Mental Perception? Kleptomanic Anxiety Resulting from Endocrinological Neurosis? Chemically Habituated Unconscious Dissociation? Gestalt Agoraphobia Manifesting in Manic Onanistic Nightmares?
Nice
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Anticipatory traumatic anxiety disorder or something like that.
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So basically two weeks worth of murders in Chicago. I want to live in a world where these events are not news and the constant drumbeat of urban violence is.
This is how news works. Obviously if this was actually a one-off freak occurrence then I agree it would be relatively unimportant, but it stands as a particularly stark example of a broader problem which actually is important - which is to say America's gun problem. You could make this criticism of almost any famous event. 9/11 has already been mentioned, but for a different example take the murder of Samuel Paty. That was only one man killed (plus the perpetrator), but it even became a famous event outside of France as it gained a symbolic relevance surrounding the general issues of Islamic extremism and integration.
I think this is revealing. Is the problem guns or is it murders? Because these mass shootings are a very small percent of overall murders.
If you listen to the news, they seem to think it's very important to stop these mass shootings. But there is little talk about the huge increase in murders in nearly all major cities. Progressive news outlets are not concerned with actual murder numbers, they just want to stop gun nuts (the outgroup) from having guns.
Well it's both. Guns contribute to the murder problem (not just mass shootings but generally), but also to suicide, overall levels of violence etc.
Lazy and uncharitable. Even if you reject them, there are reasonable, and to my mind persuasive, genuine public safety rationale behind restricting gun ownership, so why not talk about those instead of navel-gazing about how much your own outgroup are out to get theirs'.
As a blue tribe urbanite, I am not a gun owner, nor are any of my family or close friends.
My point is that, if you care about people dying, then why not focus on the things that kill orders of magnitude more people than mass shootings? To name a few: Heart disease, diabetes, urban violence?
I agree with this. And in fact, I support greater enforcement against people who carry unlicensed guns. Putting people who have illegal guns behind bars would greatly reduce gun violence, more than any legislative action. Here in Seattle, people who commit multiple felonies and are caught with illegal guns are often put back onto the streets with charges dismissed. As a result, 2023 will set the record for the most murders ever committed in the city.
As to banning guns entirely, the second amendment is my mind prevents that.
Well guns are part of the urban violence, for one. In terms of other issues, maybe there are more important things (but consider what policy response you would propose for obesity etc. - are there any ones which would both have a shred of support and make a big difference)? However guns are certainly a sufficiently important problem to be worthy of some national debate. The West ought to talk about traffic deaths and heart disease more, but in America ideally at the expense of culture war fluff like trans issues rather than something genuinely important like guns.
True, but so would many conventional gun control measures like ERPOs, and indeed just reducing the overall ownership of guns. American should be doing all of these.
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What you're calling 'the constant drumbeat of urban violence' is just the normal stochastic process of people who know and interact with each other sometimes being violent towards each other (plus a semantic fence drawn around a part of that phenomenon for rhetorical reasons).
We can talk about whether those rates are too high or too low, and what policies could change that number, sure.
But it's not really newsworthy because it's mostly normal stuff that happens everywhere (at different rates) in one form or another. And people know how it works, what their risks are like and where teh danger comes from, how to avoid it, etc..
Incidents like this are newsworthy because they're unusual, unexpected, spectacular, and can happen out of nowhere to just about anyone simply going about their day.
I guess that's my point.
These mass shootings are not newsworthy. They are neither high impact (heart disease / urban violence). Nor are they novel (9-11 / space shuttle blowing up).
Imagine if every time a person was shot in South Chicago we made a national news story out of it and decried the left-wing politicians in Chicago who enable this violence. That's what's happening with these mass shootings. It's mostly political noise.
I dunno, I would agree that they're blown out of proportion, but I'd also argue they're at least somewhat newsworthy.
Again, it's really really salient to me that I can control my diet and exercise to avoid heart disease and I can not associate with mentally unstable people with guns and not drive drunk/always drive defensively and etc. to protect myself from a lot of known risks that kill a lot more people than this every year. Generally speaking, anything where there's clear and well-known methods I can look up to limit my risk, I fee may be very important, but not newsworthy.
Whereas things that just kill you out of the blue for no reasons as you're going about your day, or especially that kill a lot of people at once, feel newsworthy to me as an unexplored risk that I don't have much control over mitigating for myself. It feels to me like that makes it more of a topic of public conversation and public policy because I can't reasonably take personal responsibility to avoid it.
You probably just have different intuitions about what makes something newsworthy, which is totally fine. I'm just saying how it feels to me, I don't know how generalizable it is.
I don't think "I can't control this, but I can control those things" actually works here.
You can not drive drunk and always drive defensively, but you can't always stop the drunk person blasting through the red light from T-boning you unless you stay off the roads altogether. You may say you can control your diet and exercise, but how well do you, and what do the actuarial tables say about your actual risk of heart attack?
If you want to reduce your chance of being killed by a spree killer, it's not like there's nothing you can do. You can carry a firearm and train with it. You can avoid "gun free zones" that can't actually enforce their self identification. You can come up with plans for escape/counter ambush in case of a spree shooting. You can wear body armor, and avoid the kinds of large gatherings where these things happen. There's a lot you could do, it's just not always convenient to reduce risk, and you can never reduce risk to exactly zero.
Your theory would make sense if it were concealed carriers who were freaking out about spree shooting, having already taken steps to mitigate risk and being in relatively less control of their remaining risk. What I tend to find though is that it's people who are opposed to concealed carry who tend to be more concerned about spree shootings, and that points more to "don't want to have to consider doing the things necessary in order to mitigate this risk" as the actual driver of this concern.
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9/11 was basically a month's worth of traffic fatalities, and yet I find it hard to credit the idea that it shouldn't have been newsworthy.
Why is no one talking about this?
State-backed violence is scalable in a way that traffic accidents or random homicides isn't - if an empire takes one of your state's villages, it's going to take more unless can you fight back - whereas if an earthquake takes one of your villages ... that sucks, but it's just nature, being angry about it doesn't accomplish anything. So 9/11 is noteworthy and worth harshly responding to in a way that traffic fatalities aren't. However, the response to 9/11 was absolutely overdone and poorly thought through in no small part due to the awakening of previously-suppressed national passions and desire for war it caused, and thus could be described as 'too newsworthy'.
"Insane people doing mass shootings" doesn't have the same scaling issue, though. There are already sufficiently strong incentives against doing it that it just doesn't happen that much, and those who do it are mostly insane or stupid. "Mass shootings" and "school shootings" get way more attention than they should by any reasonable metric.
And, yes, the mainstream media does talk about urban violence. What grandparent was pointing to, though, is that they don't emphasize it as much as mass shootings or racism violence, and that they're very resistant to the kinds of solutions that'd actually solve urban violence, such as expanding and empowering police and active and paternalistic intervention to change culture.
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Sure, but 9/11 only happened once and involved flying planes into a building. That's new and shocking.
Another news story about a crazy dude shooting 20 people? Big whoop. I officially don't care.
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The difference is that people don’t really care when gang members in Chicago kill each other, they do care when people uninvolved in crime who live in middle class or wealthy places get killed randomly.
The vast majority of homicides in the US are things you don’t need to worry about as the average middle class white or asian person. Mass shootings of this kind (or school shootings, or the Las Vegas thing, or Islamist terror attacks on office buildings or a marathon finish line or whatever) trigger a fear and panic response because the people affected are not the kind of people who are the victims of regular violent crime very often.
I bet the homicide rate for white Chicagoans who make more than $100,000 a year is not high enough to be concerning.
I understand this is as a valid reason for why the average middle class American should be more concerned by a mass shooting of this nature rather than gun violence, but in terms of warranted magnitude of concern, I concur with @jeroboam that it rounds out to about zilch.
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I don't think that explains it entirely. Middle class white Americans need to be worried about heart disease, not mass shootings.
These shootings won't take 0.01 years off my life span.
It's the sensationalist aspect combined with the ability to push a left wing narrative about "gun nuts" and "America bad" that makes these stories run. Personally, I'll continue to mash the "don't care" button hard.
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Apparently fire arms instructor, Army reserve, just recently spent 2 weeks mental institution? https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1717374410795934053
If true, this guy reported those voices, got briefly institutionalized, and then... what happened? Stopped taking meds (if he got them), and then shot up three+ places?
Isn’t the problem that SCOTUS hugely narrowed over time the reasons why someone can be institutionalized indefinitely over the late 20th century? I remember reading that somewhere.
Deinstitutionalisation come more from public policy than court rulings.
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The main legal challenges at SCOTUS level are O’Connor v. Donaldson (must be a danger to self or others, or incapable of surviving outside of institutionalization, not just mentally ill) and Addington v. Texas (must be 'clear and convincing' proof), both in the 1970s.
There's some internal discussion from ACLU-driven lawsuits, especially at lower courts, where this was meant to add so much paperwork as to make commitment impractical (see Scott's My Brother Ron summary), but while I can't speak of how serious their strict ramifications are for this case, in general a lot of the central examples in favor of institutionalization would still be readily and easily proven under these standards. The bigger issue's just that institutionalization and longer-term involuntary commitment became culturally untouchable.
Short-term holds are wildly available and, thanks to the Scylla and Charbydis of standing and mootness doctrine, especially difficult to challenge even when due process is missing entirely. My go-to example is Pennsylvania's Section 302 commitments, which can hold people for up to 5 days based on a petitioner's statement and a single doctor's signature. This tends to be the biggest issue for gun ownership, since some police use it as a glorified drunk tank and it counts for Pennsylvania law if you try to buy a gun, but there's been other abuses, and it's basically impossible to challenge.
But most psych offices and legal spheres will avoid calling for long-term commitment without a criminal conviction, even in cases where dangerousness is pretty obvious.
I think it might be helpful to lay out how this looks from the medical perspective. Every state is a little different but the broad strokes are pretty similar (although some differences can be substantial - most states will allow commitment only if a threat to self/others but some will also add "property" to the mix. Likewise the extent to which "not taking care of oneself" matters for threat to self).
It's also worth noting that you'll hear a lot of horror stories about commitment and mental hospitals but it's almost always (well these days at least) signal boosting rare events or stemming from people who are in denial about the fact that they have mental illness, which is most of the sickest patients (because if they had insight into their illness they would take medication, stay out of trouble and uh not be sick). I uh cough cough have nothing positive to say about the ED portion of this though.
So okay.
A patient comes to the attention of health care - the police bring them in, the patient brings themself, family brings them in, roving outreach social workers find them etc etc. They are seen by some combination of social work, ED physicians, and Psychiatry (depends on state and setting). At that time a patient might be sent home, asked to stay voluntarily (or the patient asks), or committed. The involuntary commitment generally involves some form of VERY short hold until additional resources can weigh in (ex: 24 hours for you to get two psychiatrists to say "yup"). Then that turns into a longer but still short involuntary commitment. For purposes of gun restrictions and other things it's triggered here. You could be high as shit on PCP, get committed for a day, then discharged and it's still an involuntary stay.
This creates all kinds of strange interactions - a suicidal 18 year old college student who wants to go home and study or a cop (who would lose his job) might be HEAVILY encouraged to sign in under a voluntary status even though staff isn't supposed to do that (if the patient is not voluntary they are involuntary...) because everyone wants to avoid long term repercussions for the patient. The facility may also "convert" an involuntary stay to a voluntary one in situations like the PCP guy. No idea how that is supposed to work legally but it seems to be extremely common practice.
Once someone is committed under an involuntary status the process of getting them out of the hospital starts. This has all kinds of tensions, yes hospitals benefit from having patients in them, but insurance isn't going to pay forever and the patient will have periodic court hearings and in many jurisdictions the conversation with the judge goes something like "yes he threatened to fuck your mother to death yesterday, but what has he done today?"
Therefore most people who have their commitment upheld and/or get sent to a longer term facility are generally very sick, aggressively malingering (think homeless person who wants to be off the street) or a huge pain in the ass (think borderline personality disorder patient who probably wont kill themselves but keeps insisting they are suicidal). At that point these people typically get transferred to a longer term or state facility to attempt stabilization/await someone ballsy enough to discharge. Sometimes creative things will happen like discharging to the police.
Sick people will absolutely be held more or less indefinitely if it's really necessary, but again if someone has two good days before their court hearing they might get sent home by the judge even if the patient's family brings them straight back to the ED an hour later (a sad but hilarious thing I saw many times in medical school while in an inner city hospital).
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Oof, so does anyone want to lay odds on whether the dominant narrative becomes MK-Ultra, or controlled opposition/this is why we need "red flag" laws?
How is it controlled opposition to talk about policy responses which might actually improve things?
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Now that the House has a speaker they can go right to work on gun control laws (that most likely wouldn't have helped here)
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Yup. I'm about a half hour south of the event and it is a mentally ill ex army guy that heard voices this summer telling him to shoot up an National Guard base in Saco (the last town I lived in before my current one). He was committed for 2 weeks and released, his twitter like feed is in the gun nutbar right wing zone.
He is currently at large with a night vision scope somewhere approx.. 20 miles north of me. Maine doesn't see events like this and we normally think of ourselves as the safest place to live in the country. Doors unlocked keys in the cars and all that jazz. This is going to rock the state for a while. We have been pretty middle of the road pro-gun (like vermont) because there is no gun crime, or really much crime of any kind. This could change that. Heck I was pretty indifferent as an avid hunter. But does anyone really NEED an AR-15 with night vision and thousands of rounds?
This is a small state where everyone knows everyone. There won't be too many completely untouched by this. My very good friend who moved from his home state of Maine to Colorado of all places just texted to say his half brother and sister just lost their uncle at the bowling alley.
That sounds like the kind of thing where you don't need it often, but when you need it you really need it.
If you give them up as a society because you haven't needed them in a while, then they won't be there when you do. Ask Israel about how that one went for them.
You think the people at the rave would have all brought their AR-15s with them? Some rare people in their homes might have taken a few terrorists with them but it wouldn't have changed the result.
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Gonna be some fireworks.
Also same day Jewish students are being locked in their school because a pro-Hamas group decided to confront them.
https://twitter.com/stopantisemites/status/1717300476524322969?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
So I don’t think the anti-gun people are gonna win.
Is the implication here that everyone being armed would somehow improve the situation linked to in the tweet?
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