It’s the guns, stupid
Or “Holy shit, nobody should be able to legally own an assault rifle”
This is in response to Mike Dunham and his article “Everything I’ve Learned About Gun Control”
Because you have to pull the trigger each time you fire, there is no real difference between the lethality of a handgun containing a 10-bullet magazine and a fancy Call of Duty-looking “assault rifle” containing a 10-bullet magazine.
It’s pretty easy to survive a wound created by a handgun. It makes a hole, a tunnel and an exit wound (usually). If it doesn’t hit something vital, and they get you to the ER quick enough, you can survive. That’s why it’s always best to run away when someone points a handgun at you. Your hysterical running self will be harder to hit and the further away the more likely you are to survive.
An assault rifle (with or without scare quotes) will make a hole and then shatter anything nearby. You don’t need to be a good shot to kill someone. Hitting them anywhere in the trunk will most likely kill them. You can miss the heart by inches and still shatter the heart … and the lungs … and the liver … you get the idea. Dunham goes into some detail about this issue in a separate article.
Enforce the fuck out of existing laws and increase funding for enforcement. The federal background check system is widely seen to be under-resourced, so allocate more money to it.
do this by increasing the f**k out of taxes at point of sale and allocate the funds to better enforcement of existing laws. This works with tobacco and alcohol, two other major killers.
The ATF turns a blind eye to a lot of “private sellers” who are really just unlicensed gun dealers; better fund the ATF so they crack down.
The ATF by law must use paper and not computers for their records. The NRA wrote the law and then bribed lawmakers to pass it. The NRA writes most gun laws nationwide. It’s not a surprise that the ATF doesn’t want to waste time on “little fish.”
Make gun ownership at least as rigorous as car ownership. … Again, Republicans will kick and scream that this is an overreaction, so handle this shit in blue states where they won’t have power.
The NRA, who own most Republicans and a lot of Democrats, and who write nearly all gun laws, will kick and scream. Remember, they don’t give a shit about the body count or whose children die.
Currently, the Center for Disease Control is effectively prohibited from studying gun violence, even though it’s a major cause of preventable deaths in the U.S.
Yes, the NRA wrote this law and the congressmembers on salary passed it. The recent spending bill seems to have lifted the restrictions a bit.
But in fairness to gun rights advocates, many of the most famous mass shootings of the last few years wouldn’t have been prevented by additional gun laws. Marco Rubio made such a claim in 2015, and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column deemed it to be true.
yes, gun laws are so lax and irresponsible, it’s easy for a psycho or a criminal to buy a gun legally. That’s a feature, not a bug. The gun manufactures, and the NRA who are their employees, do not care. Psyhos and criminals are key gun-buying demographics.
And this intriguing Politico piece suggests copying the anti-tobacco “Truth” campaign which dramatically reduced teenage smoking rates. What if people actually realized that the presence of a gun in their home makes a member of their family more likely to die, not less?
This is an excellent idea I hadn’t thought of! Yes! a PSA campaign like tobacco!
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