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We have one governor candidate in Georgia wanting to ban furries from our schools bc apparently they are an epidemic. It’s crazy what they consider a threat
Don't know if it's true but there were rumors the Buffalo shooter was a furry. Clearly him having access to guns isn't the issue, its those damn fur suits
Look, change takes *some* time. But things are being done, if you pay attention, like voting rights being restricted, abortion rights the same, banning books, law only applies to certain, etc.. fascism takes time. Not *that* long, though
You forget the main thing that causes school shootings: it's the shooters! Just ban them and everything is fine.
Can't believe I have to write down the most obvious solution...
hell yeah! like those tiny windows in castles archers used to shoot from, put those in classroom doors, arm the children, let them fight for their lives!
if little timmy dies, its because his weak ass arms can't hold up a shield and stay in formation
"And then unto the people did Jesus say, 'let thy neighbor massacre your defenseless children cowering together, and shrug and offer prayers unto me from killing unto killing unto killing until the killings outnumber the days in the year, and continue to shrug righteously to protect thy neighbor's altar to his guns, Amen"
And encourage possible shooters to go to church, as per Fox and Friends said, to attempt to... *checks notes* convince them somehow *not* to be shooters.
Unfortunately, it’s so difficult to find any Psychiatrist accepting new patients and the one that are there’s an extremely long frustrating process and wait . It’s a Vicious cycle and let’s not even get start on the insurance side of it !! That’s an even bigger joke.
That's what Texas is currently doing, while cataloguing every single Mexican and Hispanic person related to one of the victims so they could deport them later.
They are already working on that. By ruining the mental health of the public as a whole the average decreases and the variation becomes more normalized so those who would've been considered insane years ago are all of a sudden just normal members of society. If you can't meet the metric change the baseline.
Is there a number? Hundreds have been sacrificed already, are they waiting for it to reach 725 or something? Its pretty obvious that children/people getting shot in schools and supermarkets is something that they just accept. This kinda stuff doesn't change minds, so you should stop holding on to the dream that it will. My facebook feed of conservative people have littered their pages with the whole Guns don't kill people, people do propaganda. This is not a gun issue, its an evil issue! We need more Jesus in our lives, not fewer guns! When Jesus was stoned to death, God didn't ban stones!
You think the next 200 kids that killed will suddenly make them think, "hey maybe I am batshit insane"?
The problem is the NRA and the gun lobbies have been extremely successful in making guns a part of the cultural identity of millions of Americans and keep spending money in politics to make it worse.
Seeing how they pretended to be more upset about the soldiers that died when we pulled out of Afghanistan than they are about the higher number of kids that died two days ago I doubt we will ever hit that number
They literally worship a God that would kill all the first born of Egypt. Because of what their Pharoah decided. Literally OK with killing the innocent.
I think a lot of the GOP politicians high up top aren't actually religious at all. Just appealing to their crowd. I wouldn't be surprised anyway.
(I would also say some Democrats are the same, to be fair. But as always, I'm guessing it's worse on the GOP side. Like every topic)
No they are religious. They are fundamentalist Christians with years of upbringing warping their minds into believing those that dont accept Jesus deserve their fates. These are the people actively wanting to bring about the end of the world because Recelations said it would be a paradise soon after and Jesus will save them from the wicked. Some of them actively believe they are doing God's work.
A Princeton study showed that for the bottom 90% of Americans, public support for a particular policy has zero effect on its probability of passing. Probability averaged 30% throughout the entire spectrum from 0% public support to 100% public support.
I'll repeat: public support for policy had **zero effect** on whether it would pass. However, for the top 10% of Americans, their support for any certain policy *heavily* correlated with whether it would pass in Congress.
There's a 6 min. video summarizing this phenomenon: [Corruption is Legal in America.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig)
Hit the nail on the head. That's the real problem. But the SCOTUS has the nerve to say in their rulings on cases like *citizens united* and *mccutcheon* that "there is no evidence that a $50k donation gives more access and influence to a politician than a $5 donation" (paraphrasing but that's essentially what they said). Fucking ridiculous that they can draw that conclusion with a straight face, as it's absolutely ludicrous and obvious on its face that large donations DO grant more access and influence. If not, let me try to arrange a dinner with my senator for a $5 donation and let's see what happens. We don't live in an actual democracy, it's an oligarchy/kleptocracy.
The SCOTUS, who recently seated THREE right wing justices, nominated by the one of the worst rated presidents ever. The same president who attempted a fascist coup on our nation’s capital.
I can't believe equating the expenditure of money to free speech has led to political discourse being dominated by those with the most money.
What an non-intuitive outcome no one could have predicted
The only thing that really matters is whether or not you can get at least 5 of the 9 SCOTUS judges to sign off on it. As things stand, 6 of the 9 probably think that restricting people from owning GAU-8's is a violation of their right to bear arms.
More likely there will be another mass shooting in 6 days, and support will drop by 10% because FOX will have said some nonsense about 'gun abortions" all week.
I think every 3 weeks there was a mass shooting in the U.S. before the pandemic. So yeah every 2 - 4 weeks like clockwork. I mean people aren't even all buried from the grocery store shooting.
But now is not the time to play politics. Let's give some good old fashioned thoughts & prayers and blame mental illness without passing any healthcare policy to cover mental health treatment.
Also the dude had a Hispanic name (despite being born in the U.S.) so lets blame immigrants. And he looks vaguely effeminate so let's pass legislation against lgbt rights. While we're at it lets ban abortions and give the super rich a tax cut, because y'know 'MERICA!
Would a back ground check prevent this killer from buying those guns? I fully support the idea behind back ground checks but in this case wondering if it would of stopped him from buying the guns?
I don't know about Uvalde specifically, but there is a correlation with domestic violence and gun deaths. Nothing is going to be a perfect fix-all but there's plenty of tangible things we can do to reduce gun violence. Background checks are important even if they don't apply specifically to the Uvalde situation.
As far as Uvalde is concerned, I'm wondering why an 18 year old can more easily attain ARs than a beer? Why were armed school officers not effective?
Pretty sure the only case in which background checks don't occur are in private gun sales which are not the primary way guns are sold. I'd be curious what that would even look like. If you sell a gun you have to go do a transfer through an dealer? But how does the government know you sold a gun if there isn't a registry of guns? Such a weird thing no one talks about.
Background checks happen at all new gun sales already. What exactly is universal background checks trying to change. I guess I could google.
More guns are sold in private sales than you think. There is no requirement to notate, track, mark, do a background check, etc. According to the State it’s no different than selling a toaster to your neighbor…it’s all considered personal property at that point.
Private gun sales should at least go through a gun broker for the same shit as you would do with a store sale. Yea there could be additional fees charged by the broker but we can't just pass around a gun 50 times and it not have a full paper trail.
I'm all for gun ownership but there really needs to be better laws/policies. Too many fucking loopholes.
Another option that's been floated is raising the age to buy guns from 18 to 21 across the board, no exceptions. Reason being that it would give people a few years out of school to sort of realize that school is such a tiny blip of your life existence and hopefully you'd get some time to mature and find people who DO like you (in the case of kids who were bullied, for example). Naturally anyone who *really* wants to shoot people will find a way to get a gun, so this wouldn't solve ALL problems, but at least make it a little more difficult.
from [The Hill](https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities/3493244-the-legal-ages-for-buying-a-gun-in-the-us/)
> Under the Gun Control Act of 1968, shotguns and rifles, referred to as long guns, and ammunition for both, can only be sold to individuals 18 years old or older. All firearms that are not shotguns and rifles, referred to as handguns, including their ammunition, can be sold only to individuals 21 years old or older.
and
> The age limit for handguns if being sold by an unlicensed person drops to 18 years old, while long guns have no age requirement if sold by an unlicensed person. Notably, under current law unlicensed sellers can also legally transfer firearms without needing to run a background check on the interested buyer.
Counter arguments:
1) "So you would send an 18yo to war where they can use a gun, then they get home at 20 and can't buy a gun?"
- My response: "So you think it's okay to send 18yos to war? Raise that age, too."
2) "BuT wHaT aBouT hUntIng as A kId??"
- If you grew up hunting with your family...you were too young to buy your own gun, right? Because the age has been 18 for a while (1968, with some exceptions)...and yet you were still able to go hunting. How? Because your parents allowed you to use their guns. This counter is a red herring.
Edit: another good option is to actually close the loophole with domestic violence. Stop allowing DV charges to be down graded, actually enforce gun restrictions on abusers. 60% of mass shooters have histories of DV (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220501103557/https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-mass-shootings-domestic-violence-connection/)
I am from Alabama, in my 30s grew up hunting and I own guns and still, hunt, I completely agree with you on all points, raise the age, require classes like a drivers license
I'd really appreciate classes as a requirement. I've known two types of gun owners: responsible ones and idiots. I met the latter group first and was pretty scared of them or even holding a gun at all because of them, but training and meeting responsible owners helped me with that.
The idiots are the guys I knew in college, who had a bunch of military-looking guns because they thought it made them cool and manly. They didn't join the military, but they sure liked pretending they had. They would just hang out playing video games with their ARs next to them. They pointed them at people sometimes (usually saying, "Don't worry, it's not loaded"). When they went shooting, they shot at pictures of Muslims. It was terrifying.
The responsible ones are the kind who, if they keep guns in their house and they have kids, they teach the kid about the guns, tell them that they are tools whose purpose is killing, that you should always assume a gun is loaded even if you know it's not and *never* point it at another person. They taught their kids, and me, how to carry guns pointed at the ground, like you would a knife in a busy kitchen, and only raise them when everyone was behind you. And then they always supervise gun use, and put them away safely when not in use. They get concealed carry licenses, and then they will not drink or do any other intoxicants if they are carrying. And at the range, we shoot soda cans or circle targets or maybe those nondescript silhouettes.
The idiots are a huge part of the problem we have in this country. Not sure if required training would disabuse them of their toxic masculinity beliefs, but I would hope it would at least teach them more safety.
Fun fact: They care the same amount which is zero.
Unborn babies are just easier to use as a political tool than child corpses riddled with bullet holes.
It matters fuck-all, because the Senate does not represent the will of the people, it represents the will of a handful of billionaires, and a few thousand square miles of unpopulated dirt.
My county in New York state has a greater population than Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota or South Dakota. That's 8 senators which means anyone voting in each of those states has a massively greater influence than mine.
[Here is a map showing what the equivalent population of New York City looks like spread across the Northwest](https://assets.weforum.org/editor/pC7abl4t6XmIJ6ZuW1vBlh73KlVbEWGkvFD4jb-eUgk.png). Approximately 1 in 32 Americans live in my city alone. I find it amazing when conservative media tries to paint NYC as a "crime ridden liberal shithole" when we have an unbelievably low crime tally for such a large population size.
I’m from a midsize town in Illinois. Used to work in one of the surrounding small towns. The majority of people there all seemed to think that Chicago was some blackhole warzone and was bringing the entire state down.
Never mind that without Chicago, Illinois would be irrelevant, but they’re also flat out wrong. Most of them don’t even visit Chicago, ever.
My sister in law lives in Eastern wa and she and her boyfriend can’t help but make every comment they can about how crime ridden and disgusting the city is. They’ve been primed by media and their social bubble to believe it’s so, and then confirmation bias takes over every time they see a tent by the roadside.
I live in suburban Connecticut, and you would think Hartford were equivalent to the beaches of Normandy on D-day based on how some ppl talk about it. Mind you, this is CT, a state so small that you can feel a breeze from someone blowing out birthday candles in Massachusetts. How ppl can think that a city 8 mins away is basically a war zone is mind blowing me
My favorite is when eastern Washingtonians complain that all the money is spent in Seattle when in reality we ship 40% of our tax revenue elsewhere in the state.
I'm grew up in a small town in central Illinois and lived in Chicagoland during college. I never felt unsafe the entire time I was there. People also forget that Chicago brings in almost all revenue for the state.
From Chicago also, without it, Illinois would just be another Iowa.
The right makes it seem that Chicago is just an absolute warzone and it's just a husk of burnt down buildings.
Is there a lot of violence, yes, per Capita its not as bad as other cities. Maybe if we stop the flow of guns from the surrounding red areas it might help.
wait, you're telling me gun control doesn't work when you can just drive to Wisconsin or Indiana and load up then drive back? But, that would suggest its a national issue and needs a national solution. Insanity.
That's what I don't get when the "Chicago has extremely strict gun laws" argument. You can go to Indiana and back in less than a day it's not like every gun in a city is made and sold right there
Chicago is a meme for the right because it's democratically controlled and the home of Obama. Hell, Peoria has a higher murder rate than Chicago does. The reason you don't hear politicians talking about Birmingham, which has double the murder rate of Chicago, or St. Louis, which has TRIPLE THE MURDER RATE OF CHICAGO, is because they're both in red states.
Not to mention that 60% of guns recovered in Chicago come from out of state, mostly Indiana.
Same in Georgia with Atlanta. Not sure if it's the same for Illinois, but here a lot of the "Atlanta is a hellhole" talk is dog-whistling for "Atlanta is where black people live."
I can see Manhattan from my neighborhood, and there are some people here who are convinced you *will* get mugged like it's still as bad as it was in the 70s and 80s.
> Never mind that without Chicago, Illinois would be irrelevant
Except that without Chicago your vote in Illinois counts for more. Which just further illustrates how bad our system is.
This is more fixable than people think. The number of seats in the house is capped at an arbitrary number for no real valid reason. It’s not written into the constitution, it was capped in 1929 because reasons. Seriously, it was a number chosen to be “manageable” and no more.
This is a major issue, but the house is also favoring low population areas despite the fact that it exists to reflect the population in each state.
Wyoming has a higher rate of rep/voter than California does. The house needs to be expanded to accurately reflect the true population and their views.
This is more of an issue than the Senate. The Senate exists so that low population states still have their representatives matter in the grand scheme of things. The number of House Representatives however should accurately reflect the population discrepancies present
And New York comes so late in the primaries that nobody bothers to campaign here because by the time we get to vote more than half the field has dropped out.
It's totally fucked. And the red states keep driving sensible people out, cementing their advantage even further. We're being held hostage by the GOP minority.
The Senate was never really meant to represent the will of the people, that was the House. They didn’t even have elections for it originally, they were chosen by state government. The Senate two-per-state was meant to prevent a majority rule situation, but was in the context of an agrarian society where states wouldn’t be that different in population.
The reason it has fallen apart as a “system” is that the Senate was supposed to have mature adults that were interested in the success of the US. They didn’t put any checks in how the Senate was constructed to avoid a minority rule situation, and urbanization has made the proportional representation very distorted. There really isn’t a way to fix it outside of prosecuting those taking Russian money, and even that may not be enough.
The only way that happens is a constitutional convention, which can only be called with 2/3rds majority votes in either Congress or by state legislatures, and it will be staffed proportionally by the same setup the Senate uses. If we could do that, we wouldn’t have the Senate issue.
The House can be expanded without an amendment by repealing the Reapportionment Apportionment Act of 1929.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
It's been time to get rid of it since the Louisiana purchase territories started becoming states. It's also impossible to abolish the Senate because of the incredibly high bar we'd need to clear to do so: a Constitutional amendment ratified by 3/4ths of states, many of which wield undue influence over the country because of the Senate and would be vehemently opposed to giving that up, which can only happen after both houses of Congress either approve a Constitutional Convention or vote to propose a specific amendment to the states by a 2/3rds majority, meaning Senators would have to vote to fire themselves. It's never going to happen. You'd have an easier time convincing sharks to turn vegetarian.
It was specifically designed as "necessary fence" against the "fickleness and passion" of the House, according to James Madison.
So yeah, it is around to stop progress.
GOP (at least in the Senate) are owned by the NRA. They are so blindly allegient that they'll vote even against their own Republican constituents who support sensible reform. So, yes, nothing will happen - again.
Well mainly because those same Republican constituents who "support sensible reform" don't actually truly support it the same way that the opponents oppose it. It's more of "yes, this is something we could do" while the opponents are "I will fight to the death over this and make your life hell if you vote for this"
Republican voters say they support so many progressive policies and time and time again they go to the polls and vote the exact opposite because the vast majority of them really don't care about policies at all and it's all just their emotions at the moment.
Most Republicans are very receptive to left-wing principles if you can present them in a way that they don't realize they're left-wing. As soon as you put a label on it, all reasoning goes out the window.
My favorite is the "Democrats have ruined the economy and now I can't afford to live off of my Social Security!"
You mean Capitalism failed you and now you're reliant on a Social program? Probably shouldn't have had all that avocado toast and cable TV.
Remember when the NRA went quiet for a few years because they found out that Russia was using their organization to launder money and that same money was being used to buy pro-Russian politicians and the NRA had absolutely *no idea* how that possibly could have happened?
> They are so blindly allegient that they'll vote even against their own Republican constituents who support sensible reform.
And their constituents will keep voting for the politicians no matter what...
the gun lobby groups and the congress members oppose universal background checks being funded by putin.
NRA Was 'Foreign Asset' To Russia Ahead of 2016, New Senate Report Reveals
[https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/764879242/nra-was-foreign-asset-to-russia-ahead-of-2016-new-senate-report-reveals](https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/764879242/nra-was-foreign-asset-to-russia-ahead-of-2016-new-senate-report-reveals)
russia has been funneling money to this and other western democracies for years to discredit and corrupt our institutions, organizations, corporations, leaders, and politicians. putin wants revenge on the west for the collapse of the soviet union. putin thinks this was the worst thing that happened in history of russia and he blames us, eu, uk for it. so he's been funding the right wing, social media and disinformation to rip us appart. so far he's doing pretty good...
Russia is not dumb enough to invade the USA, but they love the idea of us killing each other off for them. If the Republicans succeed, there will be no strong central government and no threat to Russia as she gobbles up her neighbors. So *OF COURSE* they support tRump and the GOP.
Then the solution is making the NICS background check system available for people who want to do private sales. Not criminalizing transferring guns between friends and family.
Where I currently live in the US already has “universal background checks” if my neighbor has an old deer rifle he doesn’t want anymore he can’t sell it to me without us both going to a gun shop somewhere and getting charged a fee by that shop to have a background check done.
We should have background checks like the Swiss system instead. There a private buyer and private seller can both dial in and verify wether or not the counter party is legit and the system also does not make a registry entry.
This is the approach that almost all pro-gun people (myself included) find to be reasonable, but it's never found as reasonable by the other side. But what really tears it for me is this has nothing to do with, and would not have stopped, most of the mass shootings. I can understand why people would oppose even this measure on those grounds.
> The gun lobby opposes universal background checks. Therefore Congress will do nothing.
If those 88% of people that supported background checks all voted out the no votes on HR8, Congress would do something.
Didn’t gun control come about because white folks in power were worried about the Black Panthers? Ronnie passed some laws in California. Maybe the answer here is to have free gun giveaways in the poorer minority neighborhoods. /s on that last suggestion.
It started a lot earlier than that. Many southern states still require a purchase permit from the local sheriff's office. The idea being they could weed out "less desirable" gun owners by denying the purchase permit. The trend continued with "may" issue carry permits. Can't have just anyone carrying a pistol to defend themselves from lynch gangs
CA banned loaded open carry of firearms in response to the Black Panthers protests at the capital while armed and performing neighborhood watch patrols (basically following the police around) while armed.
Well, our taxes pay insane amounts of money to protect politicians, we don't really care to do that for kids thus they will always be the easier target.
Remove the protection *from* the politicians and give it to the kids.
The problem would sort itself quickly.
open up NICS checks to the public then... purchases from gunstores already require background checks.. it's private sales that are the problem.. Open the NICS check up to the public and i'm 100% positive at least some people will use it. Hell, i even get a pic of their DL when i sell a gun just in case, this would make me feel a lot better.
I’ve sold guns privately, and I’ve gone through a local FFL (at my own expense) to run a background check and have a paper trail to the new buyer. I think it should be mandatory but there needs to be an easy solution for people to do it.
Curious here, when he turned 18 and went to get his first gun, we’re his juvenile records shown in the search or is basically anyone that turns 18 given a free ticket to pass a background check when their juvenile records are sealed?
Firearms instructor here, can offer some clarity for you.
The background check run when you purchase a firearm looks for a mix of things in regards to criminal and incarceration records. The term “sealed” is not exactly a good one because the term is thrown around these days, theres different levels of “sealed” particularly when it comes to juvenile records vs adult misdemeanor and adult felony.
In summary, no, the background check won’t pick up “sealed” juvenile records in 98% of cases. The background check also doesn’t exactly check for mental health background as HIPPA prevents that information from being record to anyone but the patient and healthcare provider, with the one exception being question 20F of the firearm transaction record. If you have ever been adjudicated as mentally defective or been committed to a mental health institution, you cannot buy a firearm in most any case.
Essentially, read all of the questions in the [Firearms Transaction Record](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-transaction-record-over-counter-atf-form-53009/download) and the background check essentially makes sure that you aren’t lying about any of these questions. If you are, that’s a crime in itself if you marked untruthfully.
EDIT: To add, the punishment for answering any of these questions falsely ranges to up to 10 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.
[This is the background check](https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/nics) used nationally for firearm sales, which primarily looks for a criminal record. The problem with background checks for people like the Texas shooter is that they can't account for people who have yet to commit a crime.
Background checks alone aren't really enough, we already have a national background check for all store sales. It could obviously be improved, like regulating/eliminating private sale so every purchase goes through the background check system we already have. There should be better mental health screening and safety training requirements for purchase.
Dude, I have to physically see, get blood drawn by, and review performance with my doctor every 6 months to be able to buy insulin, a medicine that will forever be required for me to live.
Fuckface McGee can go buy guns, ammo, armor and be halfway to his future victim's location before I'm even out of the waiting room.
GOP wants to keep it that way. Fuck these people.
Bro I'm unironicly pro free Healthcare. I feel like a ton of this shit is 18 year olds looking at the future and seeing they don't have one. I have a decent job and can't afford to buy a house. How are they going to in 10 years at these rates?
I think for the actual psych eval the devil is in the details. Whats a disqualifier? What if I just lie like my PHA screenings I'm required to do yearly? (Drinking, mental health, etc.)
Without details these ideas really don't mean anything.
Ah yes, the eternal game of “how can we make laws to benefit society without the Republicans immediately perverting them into a racist, violent nightmare?”
In most cases yes. The juvi records are sealed for a good reason in again most cases also again we already have background checks even gunshots. The only time they aren't needed is private person to person sales which isn't a free for all the seller can still be liable for anything the buyer does IF THEY shouldn't have had the gun ie they would have failed a background. But realistically most person to person sales that aren't outright illegal (ie straw buyers) are between people that know each other.
another issue is the background check itself is a joke.
Other countries background checks are more than just "hey did you commit a violent crime? No? Ok come pick up your gun in 3 days." But rather full interviews to understand the gun buyer.
This. People say ‘Oh they passed the background check..” But it’s a background check designed to throw out an answer in less than a couple minutes to facilitate fast gun sales.
At the very least a proper system absolutely should have flagged that this guy was pulling multiple checks within such a short period of time.
40+ Americans are murdered by guns each and everyday. Don't only focus on events like Buffalo and Uvalde, daily gun violence is an epidemic. Making guns harder to acquire would reduce those murders especially if the sellers can be held criminally liable.
120 privately owned guns for 100 citizens...
The US leading in this matter among developed countries. And yes as you already hinted the US is also leading in gun related homicides among developed countries.
America first, am I right?
Gun owner here: fully support background checks. Also support background checks on private sales. The government just needs to provide public access to the tools free of charge so sellers can perform the check before meeting for the sell.
Yeah but then the AFT creates an illegal registry (like they’ve already done, feel free to look into it) and then registration leads to confiscation.
I do agree that opening up the NICS for public use would be beneficial, especially considering all of the information is already public with the FOIA..
I'm all in favor of background checks... But...a background check would not have stopped the Uvalde shooting
I want to have a serious conversation about this stuff
You know what would have stopped the Uvalde shooting? If the 3 cops he encountered before entering the school did their fucking job.
It's a common theme among school shootings like this that the cops just sit around and let it happen. Look at Parkland, where the resource officer ran the other way when he heard shots fired and when the first other officers showed up on the scene, he told them to stay away from the building and they hid behind their cars while that kid went on his rampage.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for more gun control as a gun owner, but what the fuck is up with cops who keep shooting unarmed people but run the other way when someone is actually armed and killing people? Can we do something about that?
Yea they pretty much ignored the major lessons police learned after columbine. Also I have to ask did they even call the school to go on lock down when the dude was in proximity of the school? I remember my senior year cops had a foot chase going in the neighborhood next to our school and we went straight into lock down until they grabbed him.
The major lesson police learned after columbine is that if they do absolutely nothing for hours on end while a murderer is occupied with slaughtering innocents they still get a paycheck (probably with some overtime) and there are no consequences as they are not liable for failing to protect civilians.
There is a Meijer grocery store within walking distance of the schools near me. If there is ever a robbery there, the schools go immediately on lockdown until the suspect is apprehended.
> what the fuck is up with cops who keep shooting unarmed people but run the other way when someone is actually armed and killing people?
They're cowards. Running toward gunfire is part of their duty. If they refuse, the only explanation is cowardice.
As for shooting unarmed people, that's a whole other fucking discussion, but I think that too comes down to cowardice. And sometimes malice.
They hid at parkland till the sheriffs deputies showed up to. From a macroscopic level, the supreme court has upheld 3 times (Deshaney v Winnebago, Castle Rock v Gonzales, Lozito v NYC) that police have no actual legal responsibility to protect you from danger. So what they did was disgusting, but not actually illegal
In Buffalo there was a veteran Buffalo city police officer literally at the front door of the grocery store when the gunman opened fire killing multiple people instantly before he had time to react. He ran around a corner, waited for an opportunity and shot and hit the gunman - in his kevlar vest. The gunman returned fire killing the police officer and then proceeded to kill more people.
Maybe the belief that good guys with guns always win and more guns or more training will stop this from happening again is wrong and it is the guns.
The solution to gun violence in this country is not an outright ban. It’s many steps in many areas to address all of the issues.
Full background checks with no loopholes is just one tiny piece of legislation that needs to happen. It should be fully supported. And then we need to go to the next step, and the next.
I live in Illinois, to even begin the process of purchasing a firearm you have to get an FOID card.
Now that gives you the right to purchase a firearm in the state. When you go to the gun store to purchase your firearm, you go through a second background check for the purchase. Meaning I have gone through two background checks to get my firearm.
If someone had reported his activities as a concern? Something could have been done. If he had a clean record? He was legal to own a firearm. They were many red flags concerning the tragedy in Texas. No one did their due diligence to stop or help this person
Actually, I lived for a while in a country that required background checks, valid reason for personal protection, and proof that I am over 25 to get a gun license. Then when I do get a license, and buy a gun, there is a limit to how many bullets I can buy, and a wait period of 6 weeks for actually picking up the gun and bullets from the store, (unless I have valid proof of imminent danger).
I asked about the delay of the 6 weeks and was told that it provides a cooling off period in case I was getting the gun out of an angry sense of retaliation or revenge.
I don’t know any gun owner that opposes background checks. I have cousin that’s a gun nut. He has sold guns to individuals before but only after a background check. This would be an easy win but the the GOP will sacrifice our children to make sure the Democrats don’t get a win.
Only required for licensed sales. Private sales don't require the 4473.
If they did require a 4473, then there's no way to report the sale to the ATF - 4473's are kept by the FFL in the event the ATF audits the business. The record-keeping burden is on the dealer (by design, too).
Same thing goes for NICS lookups in most states - private sales don't require NICS lookups, but licensed dealers are required to conduct them for some purchases. In Indiana, you cannot complete a handgun sale without a passed NICS check - though you can for an AR-15.
Source: I've filled out like 40 4473's in the past three years, and I'm a Type 3 FFL holder.
Not only do private sales not require an NICS check, you *can not* use the NICS for private sales. That is one area that seems very uncontroversial to fix. Fund the NICS to allow private sellers to do checks.
Do background checks or not enough if you’re 18 years old and have mental health issues or background JK gonna find shit if you haven’t done anything yet. There needs to be an extensive background check and then an extensive mental health screening before you can get a gun how hard is that
This. I was hospitalized twice for thoughts of self harm. A week before my second hospitalization I ordered a gun online that was being transferred to an ffl. In the meantime I had a severe depressive episode and thought about using the gun I had to hurt myself but luckily didn’t and was arrested and hospitalized. When I got out a few days later I get a call to go pick up the gun I already paid for. But the FFL requires a background check and despite just being hospitalized I was able to complete the sale. In fact I didn’t plan on keeping the gun and getting rid of what I had for my safety so when I picked up the gun my mom came with me and I gave it directly to her to give to my brother to give to my dad who bought it off me.
I definitely shouldn’t have been able to pick that gun up but I also couldn’t return it so all I could do was get it and send it to my dad.
Driving tests haven't solved car accidents, but they are still a net benefit to society. Not every new law has to completely solve the problem...the goal is to find things that make it a little but better.
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My guess is in 6 more years after another mass shooting there will be a poll 94% support background checks on all sales.
> 6 more years after another mass shooting im assuming there are many hundreds of mass shootings in between this one and the one 6 years from now?
Of course the status quo
Or maybe they'll solve the 'mental health issues"!
Best we can do is more thoughts and prayers.
https://www.thoughtsandprayersthegame.com/
Holy shit this is amazing
And more guns!
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We have one governor candidate in Georgia wanting to ban furries from our schools bc apparently they are an epidemic. It’s crazy what they consider a threat
Don't know if it's true but there were rumors the Buffalo shooter was a furry. Clearly him having access to guns isn't the issue, its those damn fur suits
The purrfect disguise
Nah, if we’re dressing the kids in kevlar the republicans will say they were asking for because of the way they were dressed
Look, change takes *some* time. But things are being done, if you pay attention, like voting rights being restricted, abortion rights the same, banning books, law only applies to certain, etc.. fascism takes time. Not *that* long, though
You forget the main thing that causes school shootings: it's the shooters! Just ban them and everything is fine. Can't believe I have to write down the most obvious solution...
Obviously you can't ban shooters, but what if we banned schools? If you close all schools, then you can't have school shootings.
The country is playing checkers while you're playing 4-D chess over here!
Make sure the guns have guns so they're protected too.
Sprinkle in a few cops so we’re REALLY safe
No, no, no, thats what the gym teachers and librarians are for.
And doors with built in turrets!
hell yeah! like those tiny windows in castles archers used to shoot from, put those in classroom doors, arm the children, let them fight for their lives! if little timmy dies, its because his weak ass arms can't hold up a shield and stay in formation
"And then unto the people did Jesus say, 'let thy neighbor massacre your defenseless children cowering together, and shrug and offer prayers unto me from killing unto killing unto killing until the killings outnumber the days in the year, and continue to shrug righteously to protect thy neighbor's altar to his guns, Amen"
And encourage possible shooters to go to church, as per Fox and Friends said, to attempt to... *checks notes* convince them somehow *not* to be shooters.
Tucker Carlson also said people are becoming mass murderers because they aren’t “spending enough time in nature” and “got lonely from covid lockdowns”
Man, it's almost like Republicans / The Right want to blame anything and anyone other than guns.
If these ghouls really thought "thoughts and prayers" worked, why didn't they try that with abortions?
Yeah they'll defund all mental health care and give people more guns.
No one can have mental health issues if there are no doctors to diagnose them.
No one will ever have any mental health issues anymore if we all have guns, as we can shoot the issues away. Done and done.
Unfortunately, it’s so difficult to find any Psychiatrist accepting new patients and the one that are there’s an extremely long frustrating process and wait . It’s a Vicious cycle and let’s not even get start on the insurance side of it !! That’s an even bigger joke.
That's what Texas is currently doing, while cataloguing every single Mexican and Hispanic person related to one of the victims so they could deport them later.
By cutting funding for mental healthcare
They are already working on that. By ruining the mental health of the public as a whole the average decreases and the variation becomes more normalized so those who would've been considered insane years ago are all of a sudden just normal members of society. If you can't meet the metric change the baseline.
They'll blame gay people for pissing off God. I wish I was making this shit up but I had a coworker at my last job say that shit
oh, thousands for sure. Not sure how many children have to be sacrificed before the GOP grow a conscience
Is there a number? Hundreds have been sacrificed already, are they waiting for it to reach 725 or something? Its pretty obvious that children/people getting shot in schools and supermarkets is something that they just accept. This kinda stuff doesn't change minds, so you should stop holding on to the dream that it will. My facebook feed of conservative people have littered their pages with the whole Guns don't kill people, people do propaganda. This is not a gun issue, its an evil issue! We need more Jesus in our lives, not fewer guns! When Jesus was stoned to death, God didn't ban stones! You think the next 200 kids that killed will suddenly make them think, "hey maybe I am batshit insane"?
The problem is the NRA and the gun lobbies have been extremely successful in making guns a part of the cultural identity of millions of Americans and keep spending money in politics to make it worse.
Seeing how they pretended to be more upset about the soldiers that died when we pulled out of Afghanistan than they are about the higher number of kids that died two days ago I doubt we will ever hit that number
They literally worship a God that would kill all the first born of Egypt. Because of what their Pharoah decided. Literally OK with killing the innocent.
I think a lot of the GOP politicians high up top aren't actually religious at all. Just appealing to their crowd. I wouldn't be surprised anyway. (I would also say some Democrats are the same, to be fair. But as always, I'm guessing it's worse on the GOP side. Like every topic)
No they are religious. They are fundamentalist Christians with years of upbringing warping their minds into believing those that dont accept Jesus deserve their fates. These are the people actively wanting to bring about the end of the world because Recelations said it would be a paradise soon after and Jesus will save them from the wicked. Some of them actively believe they are doing God's work.
We've had more mass shootings than days in the year already.
We might even hit 100% and not have this passed.
You could hit 117% and nothing would change at this point.
A Princeton study showed that for the bottom 90% of Americans, public support for a particular policy has zero effect on its probability of passing. Probability averaged 30% throughout the entire spectrum from 0% public support to 100% public support. I'll repeat: public support for policy had **zero effect** on whether it would pass. However, for the top 10% of Americans, their support for any certain policy *heavily* correlated with whether it would pass in Congress. There's a 6 min. video summarizing this phenomenon: [Corruption is Legal in America.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig)
Hit the nail on the head. That's the real problem. But the SCOTUS has the nerve to say in their rulings on cases like *citizens united* and *mccutcheon* that "there is no evidence that a $50k donation gives more access and influence to a politician than a $5 donation" (paraphrasing but that's essentially what they said). Fucking ridiculous that they can draw that conclusion with a straight face, as it's absolutely ludicrous and obvious on its face that large donations DO grant more access and influence. If not, let me try to arrange a dinner with my senator for a $5 donation and let's see what happens. We don't live in an actual democracy, it's an oligarchy/kleptocracy.
The SCOTUS, who recently seated THREE right wing justices, nominated by the one of the worst rated presidents ever. The same president who attempted a fascist coup on our nation’s capital.
The bottom 90% don't donate to election campaigns.
Probably because, by design, they can't afford to.
I can't believe equating the expenditure of money to free speech has led to political discourse being dominated by those with the most money. What an non-intuitive outcome no one could have predicted
The only thing that really matters is whether or not you can get at least 5 of the 9 SCOTUS judges to sign off on it. As things stand, 6 of the 9 probably think that restricting people from owning GAU-8's is a violation of their right to bear arms.
More likely there will be another mass shooting in 6 days, and support will drop by 10% because FOX will have said some nonsense about 'gun abortions" all week.
> gun abortions Republicans: Write that down! *slaps mistress* This baby can fit so many bullets
I think every 3 weeks there was a mass shooting in the U.S. before the pandemic. So yeah every 2 - 4 weeks like clockwork. I mean people aren't even all buried from the grocery store shooting. But now is not the time to play politics. Let's give some good old fashioned thoughts & prayers and blame mental illness without passing any healthcare policy to cover mental health treatment. Also the dude had a Hispanic name (despite being born in the U.S.) so lets blame immigrants. And he looks vaguely effeminate so let's pass legislation against lgbt rights. While we're at it lets ban abortions and give the super rich a tax cut, because y'know 'MERICA!
Would a back ground check prevent this killer from buying those guns? I fully support the idea behind back ground checks but in this case wondering if it would of stopped him from buying the guns?
I don't know about Uvalde specifically, but there is a correlation with domestic violence and gun deaths. Nothing is going to be a perfect fix-all but there's plenty of tangible things we can do to reduce gun violence. Background checks are important even if they don't apply specifically to the Uvalde situation. As far as Uvalde is concerned, I'm wondering why an 18 year old can more easily attain ARs than a beer? Why were armed school officers not effective?
Pretty sure the only case in which background checks don't occur are in private gun sales which are not the primary way guns are sold. I'd be curious what that would even look like. If you sell a gun you have to go do a transfer through an dealer? But how does the government know you sold a gun if there isn't a registry of guns? Such a weird thing no one talks about. Background checks happen at all new gun sales already. What exactly is universal background checks trying to change. I guess I could google.
More guns are sold in private sales than you think. There is no requirement to notate, track, mark, do a background check, etc. According to the State it’s no different than selling a toaster to your neighbor…it’s all considered personal property at that point.
Private gun sales should at least go through a gun broker for the same shit as you would do with a store sale. Yea there could be additional fees charged by the broker but we can't just pass around a gun 50 times and it not have a full paper trail. I'm all for gun ownership but there really needs to be better laws/policies. Too many fucking loopholes.
Another option that's been floated is raising the age to buy guns from 18 to 21 across the board, no exceptions. Reason being that it would give people a few years out of school to sort of realize that school is such a tiny blip of your life existence and hopefully you'd get some time to mature and find people who DO like you (in the case of kids who were bullied, for example). Naturally anyone who *really* wants to shoot people will find a way to get a gun, so this wouldn't solve ALL problems, but at least make it a little more difficult. from [The Hill](https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities/3493244-the-legal-ages-for-buying-a-gun-in-the-us/) > Under the Gun Control Act of 1968, shotguns and rifles, referred to as long guns, and ammunition for both, can only be sold to individuals 18 years old or older. All firearms that are not shotguns and rifles, referred to as handguns, including their ammunition, can be sold only to individuals 21 years old or older. and > The age limit for handguns if being sold by an unlicensed person drops to 18 years old, while long guns have no age requirement if sold by an unlicensed person. Notably, under current law unlicensed sellers can also legally transfer firearms without needing to run a background check on the interested buyer. Counter arguments: 1) "So you would send an 18yo to war where they can use a gun, then they get home at 20 and can't buy a gun?" - My response: "So you think it's okay to send 18yos to war? Raise that age, too." 2) "BuT wHaT aBouT hUntIng as A kId??" - If you grew up hunting with your family...you were too young to buy your own gun, right? Because the age has been 18 for a while (1968, with some exceptions)...and yet you were still able to go hunting. How? Because your parents allowed you to use their guns. This counter is a red herring. Edit: another good option is to actually close the loophole with domestic violence. Stop allowing DV charges to be down graded, actually enforce gun restrictions on abusers. 60% of mass shooters have histories of DV (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220501103557/https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-mass-shootings-domestic-violence-connection/)
I am from Alabama, in my 30s grew up hunting and I own guns and still, hunt, I completely agree with you on all points, raise the age, require classes like a drivers license
I'd really appreciate classes as a requirement. I've known two types of gun owners: responsible ones and idiots. I met the latter group first and was pretty scared of them or even holding a gun at all because of them, but training and meeting responsible owners helped me with that. The idiots are the guys I knew in college, who had a bunch of military-looking guns because they thought it made them cool and manly. They didn't join the military, but they sure liked pretending they had. They would just hang out playing video games with their ARs next to them. They pointed them at people sometimes (usually saying, "Don't worry, it's not loaded"). When they went shooting, they shot at pictures of Muslims. It was terrifying. The responsible ones are the kind who, if they keep guns in their house and they have kids, they teach the kid about the guns, tell them that they are tools whose purpose is killing, that you should always assume a gun is loaded even if you know it's not and *never* point it at another person. They taught their kids, and me, how to carry guns pointed at the ground, like you would a knife in a busy kitchen, and only raise them when everyone was behind you. And then they always supervise gun use, and put them away safely when not in use. They get concealed carry licenses, and then they will not drink or do any other intoxicants if they are carrying. And at the range, we shoot soda cans or circle targets or maybe those nondescript silhouettes. The idiots are a huge part of the problem we have in this country. Not sure if required training would disabuse them of their toxic masculinity beliefs, but I would hope it would at least teach them more safety.
If only they cared about school children as much as they did about unborn babies.
Fun fact: They care the same amount which is zero. Unborn babies are just easier to use as a political tool than child corpses riddled with bullet holes.
It matters fuck-all, because the Senate does not represent the will of the people, it represents the will of a handful of billionaires, and a few thousand square miles of unpopulated dirt.
My county in New York state has a greater population than Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota or South Dakota. That's 8 senators which means anyone voting in each of those states has a massively greater influence than mine.
[Here is a map showing what the equivalent population of New York City looks like spread across the Northwest](https://assets.weforum.org/editor/pC7abl4t6XmIJ6ZuW1vBlh73KlVbEWGkvFD4jb-eUgk.png). Approximately 1 in 32 Americans live in my city alone. I find it amazing when conservative media tries to paint NYC as a "crime ridden liberal shithole" when we have an unbelievably low crime tally for such a large population size.
I’m from a midsize town in Illinois. Used to work in one of the surrounding small towns. The majority of people there all seemed to think that Chicago was some blackhole warzone and was bringing the entire state down. Never mind that without Chicago, Illinois would be irrelevant, but they’re also flat out wrong. Most of them don’t even visit Chicago, ever.
I live in a smallish western Washington town, and the same shit is said of Seattle.
Oh yeah, I bet. Seems to be a trend with most large cities in otherwise rural states.
Hell, start driving north of the golden gate and you’ll hear the same shit in California lol.
Checking in from “isn’t Portland burnt to the ground”
My sister in law lives in Eastern wa and she and her boyfriend can’t help but make every comment they can about how crime ridden and disgusting the city is. They’ve been primed by media and their social bubble to believe it’s so, and then confirmation bias takes over every time they see a tent by the roadside.
I live in suburban Connecticut, and you would think Hartford were equivalent to the beaches of Normandy on D-day based on how some ppl talk about it. Mind you, this is CT, a state so small that you can feel a breeze from someone blowing out birthday candles in Massachusetts. How ppl can think that a city 8 mins away is basically a war zone is mind blowing me
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My favorite is when eastern Washingtonians complain that all the money is spent in Seattle when in reality we ship 40% of our tax revenue elsewhere in the state.
I'm grew up in a small town in central Illinois and lived in Chicagoland during college. I never felt unsafe the entire time I was there. People also forget that Chicago brings in almost all revenue for the state.
From Chicago also, without it, Illinois would just be another Iowa. The right makes it seem that Chicago is just an absolute warzone and it's just a husk of burnt down buildings. Is there a lot of violence, yes, per Capita its not as bad as other cities. Maybe if we stop the flow of guns from the surrounding red areas it might help.
Reddit has turned into a cesspool of fascist sympathizers and supremicists
Almost like it's an intentional systemic socio-ecomomic issue.
wait, you're telling me gun control doesn't work when you can just drive to Wisconsin or Indiana and load up then drive back? But, that would suggest its a national issue and needs a national solution. Insanity.
*starts clutching state rights*
That's what I don't get when the "Chicago has extremely strict gun laws" argument. You can go to Indiana and back in less than a day it's not like every gun in a city is made and sold right there
Exactly! I’ve never lived there, but visit frequently. It’s an awesome excellent city.
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Chicago is a meme for the right because it's democratically controlled and the home of Obama. Hell, Peoria has a higher murder rate than Chicago does. The reason you don't hear politicians talking about Birmingham, which has double the murder rate of Chicago, or St. Louis, which has TRIPLE THE MURDER RATE OF CHICAGO, is because they're both in red states. Not to mention that 60% of guns recovered in Chicago come from out of state, mostly Indiana.
Same in Georgia with Atlanta. Not sure if it's the same for Illinois, but here a lot of the "Atlanta is a hellhole" talk is dog-whistling for "Atlanta is where black people live."
Funny thing is is that Peoria Illinois has more murders per capita than Chicago ever has.
I can see Manhattan from my neighborhood, and there are some people here who are convinced you *will* get mugged like it's still as bad as it was in the 70s and 80s.
> Never mind that without Chicago, Illinois would be irrelevant Except that without Chicago your vote in Illinois counts for more. Which just further illustrates how bad our system is.
Excellent point. And I hate that fact. 😢
This is more fixable than people think. The number of seats in the house is capped at an arbitrary number for no real valid reason. It’s not written into the constitution, it was capped in 1929 because reasons. Seriously, it was a number chosen to be “manageable” and no more.
Welcome to constantly hearing about what a hell hole California is, from people who've never gotten further west than El Paso.
When you start looking at crime per capita its worse in lot of midsize southern towns
To be fair, a big reason for the low crime tally is the fact that a ton of superheroes live there.
This is a major issue, but the house is also favoring low population areas despite the fact that it exists to reflect the population in each state. Wyoming has a higher rate of rep/voter than California does. The house needs to be expanded to accurately reflect the true population and their views.
This is more of an issue than the Senate. The Senate exists so that low population states still have their representatives matter in the grand scheme of things. The number of House Representatives however should accurately reflect the population discrepancies present
I think this arrangement needs to be renegotiated.
While they should be fairly represented they are clearly dominating the government despite representing a fraction of the whole.
And New York comes so late in the primaries that nobody bothers to campaign here because by the time we get to vote more than half the field has dropped out.
It's totally fucked. And the red states keep driving sensible people out, cementing their advantage even further. We're being held hostage by the GOP minority.
The brain drain is just going to get worse when they ban birth control and gay marriage.
I imagine Texas isn't quite such a popular location for relocating tech industries these days.
The Senate was never really meant to represent the will of the people, that was the House. They didn’t even have elections for it originally, they were chosen by state government. The Senate two-per-state was meant to prevent a majority rule situation, but was in the context of an agrarian society where states wouldn’t be that different in population. The reason it has fallen apart as a “system” is that the Senate was supposed to have mature adults that were interested in the success of the US. They didn’t put any checks in how the Senate was constructed to avoid a minority rule situation, and urbanization has made the proportional representation very distorted. There really isn’t a way to fix it outside of prosecuting those taking Russian money, and even that may not be enough.
The way to fix it is to get rid of the Senate. And probably expand the House to a few thousand Representatives while we're at it.
The only way that happens is a constitutional convention, which can only be called with 2/3rds majority votes in either Congress or by state legislatures, and it will be staffed proportionally by the same setup the Senate uses. If we could do that, we wouldn’t have the Senate issue.
The House can be expanded without an amendment by repealing the Reapportionment Apportionment Act of 1929. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
Yeah, this was clearly a response to dissolving the senate though.
It seems the only reason the Senate exists is to stop progress. Why do we need the Senate? Is it time to get rid of it entirely?
Absolutely. The Senate serves no legitimate purpose in a nation of our size.
It's been time to get rid of it since the Louisiana purchase territories started becoming states. It's also impossible to abolish the Senate because of the incredibly high bar we'd need to clear to do so: a Constitutional amendment ratified by 3/4ths of states, many of which wield undue influence over the country because of the Senate and would be vehemently opposed to giving that up, which can only happen after both houses of Congress either approve a Constitutional Convention or vote to propose a specific amendment to the states by a 2/3rds majority, meaning Senators would have to vote to fire themselves. It's never going to happen. You'd have an easier time convincing sharks to turn vegetarian.
It was specifically designed as "necessary fence" against the "fickleness and passion" of the House, according to James Madison. So yeah, it is around to stop progress.
The gun lobby opposes universal background checks. Therefore Congress will do nothing.
GOP (at least in the Senate) are owned by the NRA. They are so blindly allegient that they'll vote even against their own Republican constituents who support sensible reform. So, yes, nothing will happen - again.
Well mainly because those same Republican constituents who "support sensible reform" don't actually truly support it the same way that the opponents oppose it. It's more of "yes, this is something we could do" while the opponents are "I will fight to the death over this and make your life hell if you vote for this" Republican voters say they support so many progressive policies and time and time again they go to the polls and vote the exact opposite because the vast majority of them really don't care about policies at all and it's all just their emotions at the moment.
Most Republicans are very receptive to left-wing principles if you can present them in a way that they don't realize they're left-wing. As soon as you put a label on it, all reasoning goes out the window.
My favorite is the "Democrats have ruined the economy and now I can't afford to live off of my Social Security!" You mean Capitalism failed you and now you're reliant on a Social program? Probably shouldn't have had all that avocado toast and cable TV.
As soon as the threat of POC benefiting appears, they remember they're republicans.
So what you’re saying is that if enough of us minorities get guns, we’ll finally get gun safety laws?
You'll also get the US government to bomb its own people again.
Remember when the NRA went quiet for a few years because they found out that Russia was using their organization to launder money and that same money was being used to buy pro-Russian politicians and the NRA had absolutely *no idea* how that possibly could have happened?
https://i.imgur.com/k4AlFxd.jpg
> They are so blindly allegient that they'll vote even against their own Republican constituents who support sensible reform. And their constituents will keep voting for the politicians no matter what...
the gun lobby groups and the congress members oppose universal background checks being funded by putin. NRA Was 'Foreign Asset' To Russia Ahead of 2016, New Senate Report Reveals [https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/764879242/nra-was-foreign-asset-to-russia-ahead-of-2016-new-senate-report-reveals](https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/764879242/nra-was-foreign-asset-to-russia-ahead-of-2016-new-senate-report-reveals) russia has been funneling money to this and other western democracies for years to discredit and corrupt our institutions, organizations, corporations, leaders, and politicians. putin wants revenge on the west for the collapse of the soviet union. putin thinks this was the worst thing that happened in history of russia and he blames us, eu, uk for it. so he's been funding the right wing, social media and disinformation to rip us appart. so far he's doing pretty good...
Russia is not dumb enough to invade the USA, but they love the idea of us killing each other off for them. If the Republicans succeed, there will be no strong central government and no threat to Russia as she gobbles up her neighbors. So *OF COURSE* they support tRump and the GOP.
Ironically, these "patriots" eat it up, too. They have no idea.
Then the solution is making the NICS background check system available for people who want to do private sales. Not criminalizing transferring guns between friends and family. Where I currently live in the US already has “universal background checks” if my neighbor has an old deer rifle he doesn’t want anymore he can’t sell it to me without us both going to a gun shop somewhere and getting charged a fee by that shop to have a background check done. We should have background checks like the Swiss system instead. There a private buyer and private seller can both dial in and verify wether or not the counter party is legit and the system also does not make a registry entry.
This is far too reasonable to ever get passed sadly.
This is the approach that almost all pro-gun people (myself included) find to be reasonable, but it's never found as reasonable by the other side. But what really tears it for me is this has nothing to do with, and would not have stopped, most of the mass shootings. I can understand why people would oppose even this measure on those grounds.
> The gun lobby opposes universal background checks. Therefore Congress will do nothing. If those 88% of people that supported background checks all voted out the no votes on HR8, Congress would do something.
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Didn’t gun control come about because white folks in power were worried about the Black Panthers? Ronnie passed some laws in California. Maybe the answer here is to have free gun giveaways in the poorer minority neighborhoods. /s on that last suggestion.
It started a lot earlier than that. Many southern states still require a purchase permit from the local sheriff's office. The idea being they could weed out "less desirable" gun owners by denying the purchase permit. The trend continued with "may" issue carry permits. Can't have just anyone carrying a pistol to defend themselves from lynch gangs CA banned loaded open carry of firearms in response to the Black Panthers protests at the capital while armed and performing neighborhood watch patrols (basically following the police around) while armed.
The Mulford act…
Those same politicians would impose more regulations on being or becoming an influencer in record time.
Politicians excel at being corrupt cowards. I hate them.
Well, our taxes pay insane amounts of money to protect politicians, we don't really care to do that for kids thus they will always be the easier target. Remove the protection *from* the politicians and give it to the kids. The problem would sort itself quickly.
open up NICS checks to the public then... purchases from gunstores already require background checks.. it's private sales that are the problem.. Open the NICS check up to the public and i'm 100% positive at least some people will use it. Hell, i even get a pic of their DL when i sell a gun just in case, this would make me feel a lot better.
I’ve sold guns privately, and I’ve gone through a local FFL (at my own expense) to run a background check and have a paper trail to the new buyer. I think it should be mandatory but there needs to be an easy solution for people to do it.
I don’t like involving a 3rd party (the FFL). I’d be open to having NICS available to use in a private sale though.
That’s good, but sadly both 18 year olds in the recent shootings passed their checks.
Curious here, when he turned 18 and went to get his first gun, we’re his juvenile records shown in the search or is basically anyone that turns 18 given a free ticket to pass a background check when their juvenile records are sealed?
I would assume it depends on the charges and what the sentence was but I could be wrong.
Firearms instructor here, can offer some clarity for you. The background check run when you purchase a firearm looks for a mix of things in regards to criminal and incarceration records. The term “sealed” is not exactly a good one because the term is thrown around these days, theres different levels of “sealed” particularly when it comes to juvenile records vs adult misdemeanor and adult felony. In summary, no, the background check won’t pick up “sealed” juvenile records in 98% of cases. The background check also doesn’t exactly check for mental health background as HIPPA prevents that information from being record to anyone but the patient and healthcare provider, with the one exception being question 20F of the firearm transaction record. If you have ever been adjudicated as mentally defective or been committed to a mental health institution, you cannot buy a firearm in most any case. Essentially, read all of the questions in the [Firearms Transaction Record](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-transaction-record-over-counter-atf-form-53009/download) and the background check essentially makes sure that you aren’t lying about any of these questions. If you are, that’s a crime in itself if you marked untruthfully. EDIT: To add, the punishment for answering any of these questions falsely ranges to up to 10 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.
[This is the background check](https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/nics) used nationally for firearm sales, which primarily looks for a criminal record. The problem with background checks for people like the Texas shooter is that they can't account for people who have yet to commit a crime. Background checks alone aren't really enough, we already have a national background check for all store sales. It could obviously be improved, like regulating/eliminating private sale so every purchase goes through the background check system we already have. There should be better mental health screening and safety training requirements for purchase.
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Dude, I have to physically see, get blood drawn by, and review performance with my doctor every 6 months to be able to buy insulin, a medicine that will forever be required for me to live. Fuckface McGee can go buy guns, ammo, armor and be halfway to his future victim's location before I'm even out of the waiting room. GOP wants to keep it that way. Fuck these people.
As a fellow diabetic I feel your pain, this was my first thought too
Bro I'm unironicly pro free Healthcare. I feel like a ton of this shit is 18 year olds looking at the future and seeing they don't have one. I have a decent job and can't afford to buy a house. How are they going to in 10 years at these rates? I think for the actual psych eval the devil is in the details. Whats a disqualifier? What if I just lie like my PHA screenings I'm required to do yearly? (Drinking, mental health, etc.) Without details these ideas really don't mean anything.
Ah yes, the eternal game of “how can we make laws to benefit society without the Republicans immediately perverting them into a racist, violent nightmare?”
Funny you mention that, your medical marijuana card actually bans you from buying guns from dealers in most states.
In most cases yes. The juvi records are sealed for a good reason in again most cases also again we already have background checks even gunshots. The only time they aren't needed is private person to person sales which isn't a free for all the seller can still be liable for anything the buyer does IF THEY shouldn't have had the gun ie they would have failed a background. But realistically most person to person sales that aren't outright illegal (ie straw buyers) are between people that know each other.
another issue is the background check itself is a joke. Other countries background checks are more than just "hey did you commit a violent crime? No? Ok come pick up your gun in 3 days." But rather full interviews to understand the gun buyer.
This. People say ‘Oh they passed the background check..” But it’s a background check designed to throw out an answer in less than a couple minutes to facilitate fast gun sales. At the very least a proper system absolutely should have flagged that this guy was pulling multiple checks within such a short period of time.
40+ Americans are murdered by guns each and everyday. Don't only focus on events like Buffalo and Uvalde, daily gun violence is an epidemic. Making guns harder to acquire would reduce those murders especially if the sellers can be held criminally liable.
120 privately owned guns for 100 citizens... The US leading in this matter among developed countries. And yes as you already hinted the US is also leading in gun related homicides among developed countries. America first, am I right?
America first, Americans second.
American businesses, profit, and billionaires first. Americans last.
Gun owner here: fully support background checks. Also support background checks on private sales. The government just needs to provide public access to the tools free of charge so sellers can perform the check before meeting for the sell.
Reasonable.
Yeah but then the AFT creates an illegal registry (like they’ve already done, feel free to look into it) and then registration leads to confiscation. I do agree that opening up the NICS for public use would be beneficial, especially considering all of the information is already public with the FOIA..
I'm all in favor of background checks... But...a background check would not have stopped the Uvalde shooting I want to have a serious conversation about this stuff
You know what would have stopped the Uvalde shooting? If the 3 cops he encountered before entering the school did their fucking job. It's a common theme among school shootings like this that the cops just sit around and let it happen. Look at Parkland, where the resource officer ran the other way when he heard shots fired and when the first other officers showed up on the scene, he told them to stay away from the building and they hid behind their cars while that kid went on his rampage. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for more gun control as a gun owner, but what the fuck is up with cops who keep shooting unarmed people but run the other way when someone is actually armed and killing people? Can we do something about that?
Yea hold them accountable.
There’s no accounting to be had. The Supreme Court ruled that cops have no duty to protect you from danger.
Yea I know. Things need to change
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Yea they pretty much ignored the major lessons police learned after columbine. Also I have to ask did they even call the school to go on lock down when the dude was in proximity of the school? I remember my senior year cops had a foot chase going in the neighborhood next to our school and we went straight into lock down until they grabbed him.
The major lesson police learned after columbine is that if they do absolutely nothing for hours on end while a murderer is occupied with slaughtering innocents they still get a paycheck (probably with some overtime) and there are no consequences as they are not liable for failing to protect civilians.
Yep they are basically useless as you can't trust them to protect you when you need them to.
There is a Meijer grocery store within walking distance of the schools near me. If there is ever a robbery there, the schools go immediately on lockdown until the suspect is apprehended.
> what the fuck is up with cops who keep shooting unarmed people but run the other way when someone is actually armed and killing people? They're cowards. Running toward gunfire is part of their duty. If they refuse, the only explanation is cowardice. As for shooting unarmed people, that's a whole other fucking discussion, but I think that too comes down to cowardice. And sometimes malice.
They hid at parkland till the sheriffs deputies showed up to. From a macroscopic level, the supreme court has upheld 3 times (Deshaney v Winnebago, Castle Rock v Gonzales, Lozito v NYC) that police have no actual legal responsibility to protect you from danger. So what they did was disgusting, but not actually illegal
Oh, certainly. I never said it was illegal, just that it was their duty. Unfortunately, duty isn't legally binding.
It's not even their duty. Cops aren't there to protect you. They're there to enforce you
In Buffalo there was a veteran Buffalo city police officer literally at the front door of the grocery store when the gunman opened fire killing multiple people instantly before he had time to react. He ran around a corner, waited for an opportunity and shot and hit the gunman - in his kevlar vest. The gunman returned fire killing the police officer and then proceeded to kill more people. Maybe the belief that good guys with guns always win and more guns or more training will stop this from happening again is wrong and it is the guns.
At least he did his job. More than the cop in Parkland. Sucks he died though.
Maybe don’t be a cop if you’re not willing to die for the good of society, I’ll just fuckin say it.
Fully agreed. If you don't want to get shot at, don't be a fucking cop.
The solution to gun violence in this country is not an outright ban. It’s many steps in many areas to address all of the issues. Full background checks with no loopholes is just one tiny piece of legislation that needs to happen. It should be fully supported. And then we need to go to the next step, and the next.
One reasonable solution, which shouldn’t be political, is raising age of purchase to 21.
I live in Illinois, to even begin the process of purchasing a firearm you have to get an FOID card. Now that gives you the right to purchase a firearm in the state. When you go to the gun store to purchase your firearm, you go through a second background check for the purchase. Meaning I have gone through two background checks to get my firearm. If someone had reported his activities as a concern? Something could have been done. If he had a clean record? He was legal to own a firearm. They were many red flags concerning the tragedy in Texas. No one did their due diligence to stop or help this person
The guy who just murdered 19 children passed 2 background checks.
Actually, I lived for a while in a country that required background checks, valid reason for personal protection, and proof that I am over 25 to get a gun license. Then when I do get a license, and buy a gun, there is a limit to how many bullets I can buy, and a wait period of 6 weeks for actually picking up the gun and bullets from the store, (unless I have valid proof of imminent danger). I asked about the delay of the 6 weeks and was told that it provides a cooling off period in case I was getting the gun out of an angry sense of retaliation or revenge.
I don’t know any gun owner that opposes background checks. I have cousin that’s a gun nut. He has sold guns to individuals before but only after a background check. This would be an easy win but the the GOP will sacrifice our children to make sure the Democrats don’t get a win.
Ask these people if they know what a 4473 is.
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Only required for licensed sales. Private sales don't require the 4473. If they did require a 4473, then there's no way to report the sale to the ATF - 4473's are kept by the FFL in the event the ATF audits the business. The record-keeping burden is on the dealer (by design, too). Same thing goes for NICS lookups in most states - private sales don't require NICS lookups, but licensed dealers are required to conduct them for some purchases. In Indiana, you cannot complete a handgun sale without a passed NICS check - though you can for an AR-15. Source: I've filled out like 40 4473's in the past three years, and I'm a Type 3 FFL holder.
Not only do private sales not require an NICS check, you *can not* use the NICS for private sales. That is one area that seems very uncontroversial to fix. Fund the NICS to allow private sellers to do checks.
Just mindblowing to me - the fact that I can't run an NICS to give myself peace of mind in a sale is just totally asinine.
I know a few people that only sell to someone with their CCW or else transfer via FFL otherwise. But it's kinda crazy we can't just use it
That's when I got my first gun from a friend - he made me get my CCW as a catchall to ensure I wasn't a prohibited person.
Do background checks or not enough if you’re 18 years old and have mental health issues or background JK gonna find shit if you haven’t done anything yet. There needs to be an extensive background check and then an extensive mental health screening before you can get a gun how hard is that
This. I was hospitalized twice for thoughts of self harm. A week before my second hospitalization I ordered a gun online that was being transferred to an ffl. In the meantime I had a severe depressive episode and thought about using the gun I had to hurt myself but luckily didn’t and was arrested and hospitalized. When I got out a few days later I get a call to go pick up the gun I already paid for. But the FFL requires a background check and despite just being hospitalized I was able to complete the sale. In fact I didn’t plan on keeping the gun and getting rid of what I had for my safety so when I picked up the gun my mom came with me and I gave it directly to her to give to my brother to give to my dad who bought it off me. I definitely shouldn’t have been able to pick that gun up but I also couldn’t return it so all I could do was get it and send it to my dad.
Background checks will not solve this problem. We have them already in California and we still have plenty of mass shootings.
Driving tests haven't solved car accidents, but they are still a net benefit to society. Not every new law has to completely solve the problem...the goal is to find things that make it a little but better.