Just to repeat myself, as I do about every six months. The brouhaha in Tennessee looks different when you know the real story about gun control. To be clear, I support the right of people to protest and say any damn fool thing about gun restricting they want even if they are legislators and inciting crowds. (Though that may have some limits. It's hard to believe people are that concerned about public safety when... never mind. You either understand this or you don't.)
There is zero evidence that the gun legislation they want to enact does anything worthwhile whatsoever. Zero. When you tell people that - and I have heard psychologists, and social workers, and whatever interact with this data time and time again, for decades - they don't believe you. They think whatever real-world data you are citing must be just some isolated statistic, some anomaly, and you don't really understand that they are talking about if we could just make it harder for criminals...if we could just make people stop and think for a day or two...if America could just get over its love-affair with guns...all of this would FINALLY start going away. I will simply state again that none of the "common sense gun legislation" proposals actually are commonsensical. What they mean, in the end, is that they want to restrict a right for no reason whatsoever, just feelz.
So I hope you understand, just a bit, why the gun rights people are a little touchy, maybe even too touchy on the subject. They believe you aren't really thinking about the issue and they don't trust you. Further note, as I always say: I am not a gun owner. I have no dog in this fight except reason.
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There is the disarming of America that the tyrants want.
For the "regular people", I think that a lot of it is just virtue signaling. In his black little heart, Congressman Melmac knows that his bill is going to not have any effect but he can go to his constituency and say:
See that law? That law has my name on it. I tried to DO SOMETHING about the gun "problem" Vote for meeeeee...
You and I can see this for what it is but that sort of politicking seems to play well to the urban peanut gallery.
The intersection of 'defund the police' and 'outlaw the most widely owned firearm in the US' is 'we want our political opponents disarmed'. Yes, a lot of people are getting there because feelz but there are some who know exactly where it's going.
I don't like guns. Their purpose is to kill things. Not something I will do, and as a loud and unrepentant trouble maker, something that might get me killed.
Now today in my game, I will seek and polish weapons, to a silly extent, just for fun. A stupid strong Daedric Hammer will get an Absorb Health enchantment. ;) You can't reflect Absorb Health, well not usefully, while many other Enchantments can be reflected. More than a couple of seconds of Paralyze can be a real problem. ;)
The demands being made in Tennessee aren't intended to solve problems, as you know; they're not even intended to become laws. Tennessee's General Assembly has veto-proof Republican majorities in both chambers and a Republican governor; it is one of the most pro-2nd Amendment states extant. Voters there have plainly stated their intentions and the legislature understands them. There is no possibility of this grandstanding producing any legislative changes.
So in a way, it doesn't matter that there's no evidence it would work. It isn't intended to work in the first place. It isn't really intended even to be tried. It's just a placeholder for... something else. One might speculate about what the real point is, since it isn't this.
From the always-worth-reading Don Sensing:
https://sensingonline.blogspot.com/2018/02/mass-shootings-is-not-method-and-wishes.html
I like that Christopher B and Grim brought us to this with some clarity. I don't think "they want to disarm us and some of them are entirely conscious of this." I think there is something a bit like it happening, but that's a good spot to step back. If it is not deeply true, that sentiment is paranoid. One might decide, in the face of that, that the sentiment is true enough that actual paranoia is justified. Which it is sometimes, because there are terrible places in the world. https://www.thefp.com/p/from-slavery-in-north-korea-to-jeff. I have sons from Romania and friends from there after all. I am not blind to that possibility. Yet I think it is a break point where one has to step back and examine not only what is possible, but what is probable.
Here is where it turns gray. Most gun controllers at least believe about themselves that they don't have serious objection to hunters and target shooters, and merely think that the "self-defense" contingent are overestimating their personal danger and creating additional danger for the rest of "us" by carrying guns around and talking about them and keeping everyone on high alert, and a little European calmness* would benefit America. They think the serious encouragers of violence are relatively few, but all you ignorant rednecks are increasing out collective danger dramatically and don't realise that. They believe that THAT is the danger in you. Mostly.
As I write this, I remind myself that this may be a perspective biased from being in New Hampshire, with widespread gun ownership and cultural tolerance even from people who say "Uggh! Hunting! Shooting helpless creatures!" Even Vermont, where "even liberals own 2-3 guns" as Howard Dean once said, doesn't have a "we want to disarm all of you dangerous bastards" attitude. If I lived in a blue/red invert like Austin or Minneapolis I might see it differently. Actually, I do have my suspicions about Hanover, even up here. Yet I was also online with liberals a lot until quite recently, and I'm just not seeing many who even think, let alone say out loud, that they have to disarm all their opponents or widespread violence will result. They believe things could escalate to widespread violence because conservatives do not read the clear signals that there are Dangerous People out there who Must Be Stopped!
Their other possible motives, as Grim asks us to be alert to, is not disarming their opponents, because they are much more narcissistic than that. They want to move up in status among friends, other liberals, Democrats, faculty/nonprofit/denominational headquarters or whoever. I think conservatives badly overread cheap personal ambition as tyrannical impulses. They want to be a Big Kahuna in their own neighborhood rather than be a bit player supporting a dictator.
*They have not absorbed much about Manchester, the banlieue's, Lyon, Malmo, etc, never mind Eastern Europe or southern Italy. They believe a myth, yes. But they do believe it.
The other side of it as well is that those Republican politicians who pass gun control (eg Rick Scott in Florida after Parkland) are not given any credit for doing so. There is always a demand for more laws, more restrictions.
And in Rick Scott’s case, he had the usually chorus callously criticizing him this week after he shared that his friend was killed in Louisville. The truth doesn’t matter.
I keep trying to formulate a comment, and then re-reading what you wrote and seeing that I'm not adding anything, merely repeating what you said so well.
Also not a gun-owner.
Having lived in countries with much more strict gun control, such as outright bans on all private posession of handguns, and carrying of knives of any practical sort outside the home or workplace, I consider this a slippery-slope issue: What follows is prohibition of self-defense generally, and law-people are routinely charged for wounding those who attacked, attempted to rape, or attempted to abduct them, because their response in a state of adrenaline-rush was deemed by people not involved to be 'disproportionate' to the force used against them by the miscreant.
If they were serious about reducing the violence and the killing they would go back to mandatory minimum sentencing for all criminals found guilty of using a gun in the commission of a crime and similar for felons found in possession of a firearm after they get off/out. They won't do that of course because the numbers would make it instantly obvious who was doing the crime and who was going to jail and they'd howl themselves hoarse about "racism."
If you really want to cut down on people shooting other people for no or random reasons the other way would be terminate the sale of 9mm ammo. I don't know how that flies wrt to 2nd Amendment but I'm sure California has already tried it. I was there when they were flirting with making ammo makers put in individual little tags in the rounds so they could track the shooter. Made me laugh.
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