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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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OR....we could actually tackle the problem at it's core and create meaningful changes that would curb the violence over all without even touching guns:
Ending the War on Drugs
Ending Qualified immunity
Properly funding our schools and not just rich white suburb schools.
Build more schools and hire more teachers for proper pay so the class room sizes aren't 30-40 kids for one teacher.
Single Payer healthcare
UBI (at least start talking about it) once AI takes over most of the blue collar jobs.
End for profit prisons
Enforce the laws already on the books
Make sure there are safety nets for poor families so the kids don't turn to violence/gangs to survive.
Increase the minimum wage
Recreate our mental healthcare so kids don't turn to the internet for support. And to help veterans not end up as a suicide number.
Actively make a law to solidify Pro-choice rights. More unwanted children do not help our situation.
Banning Insider Trading for Congress
Term limits
Ranked Choice Voting so we can move away from a 2 party system
Very good, very nicely done list. Add to it strict gun control and it will be very close to perfect
Yea gun control isn't solving shit. We don't have a gun problem we have a society one...mexico has some of the strictest gun control out there but tons of deaths. Same with Brazil... it's society.
Yeah, let us just fix all the society problems real quick. Then we only have to worry abour kids killing themselves and each other with random guns lying around, some suicides, and very occasional family feuds turning murders. But that all is a very reasonable price to pay, those are just people, who the fuck cares.
Or we could just touch guns instead of pretending we only need to completely fix every aspect of our society instead.
450+ million firearms. When they effectively banned firearms in Australia...60% was the turn in rate. You know how many millions will be left? Which the majority will stay in the crimals hands? And that's if 60% handed them in. It's not happening
270 million fewer firearms sounds great. Australia's 60% turn in rate wasn't 100% and it worked, and having fewer firearms in circulation means fewer firearm deaths and fewer firearms available to criminals and a continual reduction over time as new firearms aren't added to the system.
Gun nuts just throw shit at the wall to see what sticks. Sometimes it's that all those guns aren't a problem, sometimes it's that it's too big a problem. You're just tedious.
Australia had around 1mil firearms in civ hands, they also didn't have anywhere near the level of violence we do. Those 270mil firearms will come from mainly people who collect them. It won't magically make the other 180mil safer. Most criminals get their firearms from straw purchases, not theft.
It's almost like they impact each other.
Great. Find a new goddamned hobby that doesn't end up distributing guns into communities through theft and careless transfers. Not to mention when one of those "collectors" just decides it's time to start killing people like the Las Vegas shooter.
Buyback should be paired with greatly restricted purchasing. Fewer and harder purchases with more tracking means fewer straw purchases and over time fewer guns. Machine guns are hard and expensive to get in part because you're not allowed to make or sell new ones.
Or, if you contend it's really just straw purchases that are the problem (and want to ignore the legally purchased guns used in crimes all the time), then lets lock that down. Register every gun, require background checks for every sale, and hold the last known owner liable if it's used in a crime and wasn't reported stolen.
So you're end goal is to ban guns completely?
Nah, people can still have hunting weapons as regulated by local ordinance and enjoy their right to bear arms in well-regulated militias.
That's not what the 2nd was for at all.
Yeah, now Australia is having their human rights stripped away at an alarming rate. What a victory for liberty!
Owning guns is "Human Rights". You guys are so fucking weird.
No, that sounds terrible
I wish you the best of luck in addressing that symptom in a society where such bans aren't commonly-supported, where the law isn't conducive to such, where there's such an incredible established base of ownership, and where "fuck the government and/or police" is the prevailing theme.
By all means, when you've discovered some way of meaningfully and feaaibly surmounting these, share with the class. You'll be the first to have done so.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will focus on the root issues - the pressures toward violence - rather than only caring someone decided to use a rifle to when finally pushed to the brink.
Sure. So do you mean fully legalizing all drugs for recreational use? Or just not cracking down on pot? Or something in between? I'd want to know exactly what you mean by this one, in detail.
Disagree. Dramatically limit Qualified Immunity, but don't eliminate it entirely. Sometimes violating a law is required in the process of enforcing other laws. So, only extend qualified immunity as far as the officer in question can prove to a jury that the officer's violation was actually required for law enforcement.
Since schools are run at the state level, the simplest way to do this would be to pool all the tax revenue ear marked for schools at the state level and distribute based on student population. Something like $X + $Y/student, as some costs are basically fixed but others directly scale with student body size.
The previous item would probably directly fix this for the worst outliers.
Obvious. Sure, it'll raise everyone's taxes but well implemented it would raise everyone's taxes by less than what they are already paying for insurance + copays. The rough part would be when it first happens, as a bunch of people who have been avoiding medical care that wasn't going to immediately kill them for financial reasons flood the system in the first months under it.
This is one of those things where it, something very like it, or some drastic change in the entire economic system is going to happen, and it would probably be better for everyone if it was well thought out. I'm personally fond of the idea of UBI + single payer healthcare, removing most other forms of public assistance aside from a few narrowly targeted programs (single payer eliminates most of your health care government programs, UBI replaces at least SNAP and TANF, etc). Then, eliminate the minimum wage, replacing it with a maximium wage (essentially the total compensation of the highest compensated employee must be no more than X% of the median employee or Y% of the lowest paid employee, whichever is lower - the C-suite can't get a raise without the workers getting one too).
Another obvious one.
Your literal first item is specifically about not enforcing laws already on the books, and the second is about limiting what an officer can do to enforce the laws already on the books. I assume you have specific laws in mind with this item?
UBI/single payer would already solve this.
This is very much a choose one or the other sort of thing - do you want UBI or a high minimum wage? Because they solve the same problem, and the UBI solution also doesn't indirectly harm people who were making more than the new minimum wage but not dramatically more.
This should have been done 40 years ago. Roe was a shoddy decision from a legal standpoint. While I'm pro-choice from a policy standpoint, Roe was never more than a band-aid and should never have been treated as more than a band-aid.
Another obvious one. Though that would make them easier to bribe, so that might require additional enforcement. Maybe make them keep their assets in a blind trust while holding office.
For who? Everyone? Just Senate? Just the House? All of Congress? SCOTUS? How many terms? This is one of those things where a lot of details are sorely needed.
Sure. Either Ranked Choice, Preference, or something else that approximates the Condorcet winner.
This is all pretty typical progressive policy positions but out of the entire list only 2-3 are actually about gun violence. No amount of term limits, ranked choice voting, or cracking down on Congressional insider trading is going to impact gun violence, for example.
I started reading your comment expecting to disagree with a lot of what you said but ended up doing the opposite. You seem like an intelligent person. Maximum wage in particular is something I've never heard of but seems good in theory. I could see this being easily circumvented by corporations just registering their different departments as their own businesses though.
That's just a question of implementation. You could easily do something like count wholly owned subsidiaries as part of the parent corporation.
The whole point of a maximum wage is that it essentially creates a curve for compensation - the more the top gets paid, the more at least half the employees have to be paid and the more the bottom employees have to be paid.
This means that huge corps like Amazon and WalMart have to pay substantially more to be able to pay what the executives they want will demand but small businesses operating on thin margins can get away with lower pay. Which means it simultaneously promotes small business and does a measure of wealth redistribution from the obscenely wealthy.
Also UBI and minimum wage solve the same problem and UBI does it better so it makes sense to go with UBI and drop minimum wage.
Ok... what do you tell the parents of children that will get killed in the meantime? Because your solution is a good way to solve the issue in 30 years.
30 years!? If the US does five of these things in the next 50 years I’ll eat my hat.
Stay strapped or get clapped?
Yeah, let's give guns to kids because clearly the solution to gun violence is more guns!
It's a joke hun. 🙂
Will they? How likely is a parent to actually have to have that discussion?
More likely than anywhere else in the world!
School shootings are rare even here in the USA. We've had 15 since columbine, still to many but acting like they happen every day is bullshit. Even NPR called it out with this article:
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent
Source on the 15? Because your article dates from 2018.
What's the leading cause of child mortality in the USA?
What's the leading cause of child mortality in the Canada?
I'm using both these countries because they're very close, geographically and culturally...
Hint: One starts with a G and it's not the same as the other!
Edit: By the way, I didn't bring up school shootings, just child death, funny you tried to switch it to school shootings only...
https://apnews.com/article/nashville-school-shooting-covenant-school-5da45b469ccb6c9533bbddf20c1bfe16
It's near the bottom.
And child death? More children drown in pools each year than die from guns. Cars are still the number one cause of children dying.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761
Nope, firearms... and have you seen that downward trend on car death as they're getting safer and safer? Yeah, things don't look great for the future of your argument bud!
And...
The database *does not include school shootings in which fewer than four people were killed*, which have become far more common in recent years.Monday's shooting at a private Christian grade school in Nashville marked the 15th time since 1999 that gun violence has left *four or more* dead in a school in the United States.2 dead and 10 more hurt? Not a mass shooting based on their definition.
Yeah... so you're wrong.
Oh and, that's just schools, funny that you assume that children deaths related to guns only happen in schools.
Cars are still the number one killer, the numbers they used for 2020 were flawed because of how they counted deaths of children via cars (1-15) and firearms 1-19.
On top of that, 2 dead and 10 killed on school grounds afterhours via gang violence is not a school shooting. A bus having its window broken with a pellet gun is not a school shooting...hell even NPR calls out the school shooting stats here:
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent
Keep being anti-2a it's not being repealed and more of us on the left than ever are armed and it will continue to grow. You can keep living in your white privileged suburban picket fence bubble, but the rest of us have to deal with our own safety and no amount of gun control is going to magically stop violence towards us.
Hell most of the anti-2a groups are also the ones who want to defund and dearm the police (I'm also for this, but I'm not delusional thinking gun control will make me or others safer).
"More guns, more safe"
Meanwhile we're looking at you guys from up here in Canada and going "You realize that you're all just lying to yourselves and making the problem worse, right? 🤔"
Heck, you have to keep going back to focusing on school shootings to try to have a point, that's ridiculous.
https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/child-and-teen-firearm-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-peer-countries/
Table one, where are the violent deaths from things other than firearms that brings other countries numbers to a similar level as the USA? Where are they? No fucking where.
Fucking hell I'm dealing with a Canadian idiot. Why do you care what happens here? You neutered your gun owners, deal with your problems you have there. You have plenty of violent gangs fucking up your cities.
Violent gangs that get their guns from where exactly? Oh, that's right, from the idiots in the States that need to compensate for something and own ten rifles that they don't keep safe and that get stolen and make their way to our country.
So yeah, you can fuck right off with your hard on for objects purpose built to kill.
Ah, you have nothing but hyperbole. Fair enough, this is about what I'd expected.
-Can't handle the truth? Guns are the number one child killer in the USA, it's the only country where it's the case.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761
And cars are just getting safer and safer, can you say the same about guns? Oh no, you can't, because killing is their purpose.
Which is largely irrelevant; try comparing our rates of child death by violence overall to other countries. I think you'll be surprised at how the US stacks up.
It's not irrelevant to what I was saying in the first place, that it's more likely than anywhere else in the world that you would need to explain to parents why their child got killed by a gun yet nothing is done to remove guns from people's hands.
So you add hyperbole to hyperbole? Interesting. I hadn't realized I was talking with such a deeply unserious troll. Fair enough, I expected nothing less.
None of this changes the mentally ills right to go shoot up a school,office,building or anything.
They do, however, provide the necessary institutions to reduce pressures and otherwise provide de-escalation options preventing those individuals from wanting to "go shoot up a school,office,building or anything".
That would be the entire point to addressing the actual underlying issues.