I’ve never needed trigger warnings or safe spaces. Those are for sheltered college students. Wherever I am is not a safe space for some kinds of ideas.
I wish the fantasy Utopia of the left was reality — one in which criminals, evil people, and seriously mentally ill people obey the law. But that fantasy Utopia does not — and never will — exist.
No leftist who every lived in the history of liberalism has ever believed that. None. Not one single one. That fact makes 90% of your argument fall apart. That is an heirent problem with straw man arguments. They are weak.
Since criminals, seriously mentally ill people, and evil people will always live among us…what steps can we take to prevent future mass shootings?
Universal background checks will help with that, along with universal gun registration. Each gun should be issued with a title and liability insurance should be required at point of purchase. Somebody besides the families of the victims should pay for the funerals. These requirements should be retroactive so someone with an arsenal would need to register each weapon and acquire a title for each weapon along with insurance.
AR15s and other high-powered rifles should never be manufactured for use by anyone but law enforcement and the military. No civilian has a use for them other than murder. High powered rifles that are currently in use should be required to be dismantled and secured in a gun safe at all times or be destroyed. All guns should be stored in a secure gun safe to prevent theft. They should never be open and loaded in a public place — no concealed or open carry except for law enforcement.
Every gun owned by a criminal or crazy person was manufactured legally and sold legally. Criminals get their guns by having a “dealer” — a straw purchaser — buy the guns legally and then resell them to the criminal users. The “dealers” should be required to register each gun, have a title and temporary liability insurance in case the guns “fall” into the wrong hands. Those kinds of requirements would cool the jets of criminals who want to use guns in their crimes.
Crazy people usually fly under the radar and buy their guns legally. If high-powered rifles are unavailable for purchase by civilians, they will not have one. Lower powered rifles and handguns are less lethal. Since crazy people cannot be kept completely from guns, banning high powered guns will make their mass shootings smaller. At Sandy Hook, if 10 first-graders could have been killed instead of 20, I would take the deal.
The problem — for mass shootings, anyway…is the existence of “gun-free zones”.
almost all places in the US are gun free zones because guns are an anachronism with no practical use in modern society. If I saw someone at a restaurant or a festival with an openly carried gun who was not a uniformed police officer, I would leave the premises. Guns have no place in crowds or in places where people congregate. If I knew some of the teachers at school were carrying loaded guns, I would not allow my children to go there.
The argument that “the answer to gun violence is more guns” is only a winning argument for people who manufacture and sell guns — and nobody else. If you have a good guy with a gun and a bad guy with a gun that’s two revenue streams instead of one. If you don’t give a shit about the lives of human beings or anything but making money it’s perfectly logical.
And I would expect these laws I’m suggesting would save thousands of lives every year but would not completely eliminate gun violence. The polio vaccine does not cure every disease or medical condition known to man, but I still want it.
