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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
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.
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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