Ask the 'hero' and I know the bullshit meme you are referring to and it's bullshit.
News you won't see on CNN - School Shooting Hero properly lays blame
- Thread starter gwb-trading
- Start date
Ask the 'hero' and I know the bullshit meme you are referring to and it's bullshit.
Do you think that the government was successful in protecting the kids?
Because the next thing you want is to have rabid right wingers paint a bullseye on you after being used as target practice by one.
There’s no way the government at any level or all levels combined can prevent these shootings from happening because of the amount of guns in America. There simply is too many guns.
There’s something called critical mass in sustaining a nuclear reaction. It’s how we are able to predictably create nuclear energy. It takes levels of material reaching a certain threshold then the reaction is sustained. It’s the same thing with guns. We’ve reached a level of guns that it’s impossible to stop the shootings. It’s now at a predictable and sustained level.
The hero here is not wrong. Heightened vigilance and improved response to warnings is needed. His viewpoint, however, is going to do something he hasn't intended. It is going to serve the gun lobby as a deflection away from more effective measures, in all venues, of reducing the probability of mass shootings . Most effective of all measures, that could be adopted without violation of the Second Amendment, would be for the U.S. to adopt, word for word, Canada's gun laws. Canada, like the U.S., is a nation of guns, but the types of guns owned in Canada is very different! There is no excuse for not immediately banning sales of assault style rifles, as we did before, with additional bans on large magazines and bump stocks. Yet the Gun Lobby opposes this. There is no logical reason for having piecemeal gun laws and background checks. Yet the gun lobbyists oppose uniformity in the laws and universal background checks. They want to preserve all manner of loopholes, because that is what they get paid to do. We should not blame them. We should blame ourselves for letting them do this to us. They are inured to lost lives through gun violence. They get their way via political campaign money. They do it in the name of "freedom" and the "Second Amendment". We ought to call them on their subterfuge.
Oh, stow it already with the Canadian gun laws. They wouldn't work here - because you can't get all the illegal weapons off the streets. Go live in Canada if you love it so much!
Yah right. Nothing can work here except semiautomatic assault style guns equipped with bumpstocks acquired at a gun show.
I like how you want civil discourse on gun laws and then tell people to leave the country when they bring up an idea.
I used to think this as well, and when you say "prevent" you mean of course significantly reduce the probability. In fact, Lucrum had me totally convinced it was true that we could never do much about gun violence and mass shootings because there were just too many guns already and the Second amendment constrained us. But I have learned much more, and now I am convinced I was wrong. Logically the number of guns is a factor, but the types of guns and their distribution should be a far more important factor. The usual arguments are incorrectly phrased. The arguments should be probability based and take into account both the types of guns and their distribution among owners. Arguing that doing this or that will stop gun crimes is is a losing argument. The arguments must relate to probability. And of course any measure in the U.S. will be Second Amendment constrained. But this is, in reality, not a significant restraint. It has been falsely made to appear so.
For example, per capita gun ownership in Canada is estimated to be about half, or a little less, what it is in the U.S. It is easy therefore to blame the higher rate of gun crime in the U.S. on the much higher per capita rate of gun ownership. However this argument breaks down as soon as distribution is taken into account. And if the difference in gun laws in the two countries is ignored, than the arguments based on per capita gun ownership are no longer persuasive in the least. The gun laws are very different in Canada, as is the rate of gun crimes and mass shootings.. Just the number of guns divided by the population is far too crude a measure to allow any conclusion, but it does provide an attractive, but defective, argument for the gun lobby.
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