He was committed to a mental health facility for two weeks in the summer of 2023. He's talked about hearing voices. He's threatened to shoot up a National Guard station. He and his associates are well-known local right-wing militia gun nuts that "people knew to stay away from." None of that was sufficient to restrict his access to firearms.

I don't even really care about guns. I don't like them and wish there were far fewer of them, but if reducing the number and availability of guns is off the table, there's still plenty of room to work -- and if this political conversation had even one shred of honesty, we'd be working even with that constraint.

Even in gun policy, there's so much reform we could make to reduce danger that doesn't impact someone's ability to own a gun. For example, universal registration, repeal the Dickey amendment and fund research, impose strict liability to gun owners for crimes committed with their guns.

And most people seem to support red flag laws and universal background checks, but for some reason we can't expand those either?

Not to mention that it is a simple matter of fact that the US can and does ban all kinds of arms. And, aside from a tiny lunatic fringe, no one really thinks it is an issue. You can't just have and bring with you a fighter jet, a tank. You can't open carry explosive ordinance. You can't go to a gun show and buy chemical WMDs or bio-weapons. You can't drive around with a full machine gun mounted to the flatbed of your 3-ton pickup. We have rules that are uncontentious, and the idea that maybe some types of modern guns should be in the same category is fiddling with a line in the sand.

And guns are only a small part of the picture. We need poverty intervention and social welfare. We need consent-based policing and the better training that comes with it. We need to fix our urban design so people have better third places and are less isolated from one another. Yet if you try to do anything like this, the same people that fetishize guns will absolutely refuse to even think about it and will indeed try to roll back what does exist to make the problems worse.

At the end, it's a very two-sided debate. One side wants to test and try changes to make things maybe even just a bit better. The other refuses to do anything and would like for it to even be a bit worse.

"if only Americans were smarter" we can just leave it at that. This fucking country is full of idiots who will never do any good in this world because they're too stupid to even know where to start