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Chris Fox's avatar

"we can't do *anything* about the real problem, which is the (mostly) men with pre-existing violence and mental health problems (that everyone knows about) being allowed to have guns."

Alas, were it only so. Yes certainly some of the shooters telegraph their intentions; Rittenhouse shot his mouth off about wanting to kill protesters and a friend caught his rant on video but the in-the-pocket judge ruled it inadmissible.

However. Thank back to all the times you've heard that the shooter was a mild and unassuming guy, kept to himself, last person one'd expect ... a lot of these shooters commit their first offense ever when one day something snaps and they go shoot up an elementary school. Red flag laws would mitigate, but they would not stop the mass killings.

On. The. Other. Hand. Australia in 1996 had the Port Arthur slaughter and, unburdened by a ridiculous Right To Keep and Bear Arms or an NRA, they banned assault rifles, or whatever you want to call the goddamn things, and in the 26 years since there have been no more of those events.

The Onion in one of their more unfunny routines regularly republishes this, with a few words changed:

https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1819576527

And make no mistake: the slaughter is not overplayed for clicks, the death toll in the USA is greater than in some countries' civil wars.

The gun nuts only see the news of such events in one way: as manufactured Fake News to create pretexts to disarm the populace so they will be helpless in the face of some hallucinatory "left wing" takeover where their kids will be taken away for gender-transition surgery and the FBI will come for their steel-belted radials and their beer. See Jones, Alex who went on his rage show and screams that Sandy Hook never happened.

Nope. Not enough to disarm those who have already broadcast their derangement. America is a country where the MMPI has to be frequently recalibrated because the center of sane <—> insane keeps moving toward insane.

I heard about an American couple that emigrated to Holland and brought their guns; after a fw years they realized how stupidly they'd been thinking and came clean with the cops, fortunately to a captain of police who in his discretion decided not to prosecute them. But it took them several years to absorb the new outlook.

I borrowed a gun for three days once, I was handling a lot of money and lived in a bad neighborhood. I couldn't stand having it around. Every time I got mad it crossed my mind, and I have pretty good impulse control but still I needed to return it and take my chances.

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Grow Some Labia's avatar

There are other contributing factors, for sure, like the disintegrating social contract, the social media divide, and rise and lack of control over fake news, conspiracy theories, mis/disinformation, etc., and income inequality and the skyrocketing costs of living, both of which get short shrift in the public debate about mass shootings, and crime overall.

We know a lot more about public shooters than we did back when they really got started forty years ago (not including the U of TX sniper shooter 15 years prior, I consider that an outlier) and the earliest ones were most often motivated by workplace rage (the book Going Postal details this quite well). Now they're getting younger and crazier and the ability to assault people with repeating bullets guns (not getting into the terminology again or it will trigger someone's lengthy guns definitions). What we *do* know is they often broadcast their intentions and no one pays attention. And sometimes they do and the cops move in to nail someone with all the goods on him indicating he was, in fact, planning a mass attack.

No, I don't want to disarm the populace, and I don't believe the 'slippery slope' nonsense, or we would all have *no* rights* because the laws we need (against murder, crime, lying, driving while drunk, etc.) would have been used to strip us of everything.

The ones who are shrieking about a fascist nation and jack-booted thugs coming for their guns and terrified that libtards and n-words want to destroy their rights are the ones most worried about losing them if we had saner gun laws, while keeping the 2A intact.

In other words, anyone with a history of violence, esp domestic violence.

I saw that Onion article when it came out, and yeah, the bitter sarcasm is just as resonant today as it was eight years ago.

Since we *do* have gun laws in some places that are stricter than before, and the questions rise up in the wake of each shooting, "Why was this guy allowed to buy a gun? How did he slip through the cracks?" maybe we should pressure law enforcement to enforce laws they probably don't agree with, because they too support the 2A *a little too much* and also because cops have a huge problem with domestic violence (the subject of my last article). How about we start legally going after the people who aren't doing their jobs properly?

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