Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Another Mass Shooting in Texas
I have no idea what the solution is.
I mean, I do: intact Families and a culture that does not promote despair and rage.
But since that is not on the table, I have no idea. Taking away guns from citizens has never been shown to work in this nation. That seems to be all that is ever proposed.
Guns have always been in the hands of the people. Mass shootings are a sign of sickness in America as much as theft of AC parts. In the great depression, people did not rob infrastructure. We are sick and dying as a society.
Not enough people believe in anything but getting what is good for themselves or in hurting others because of their pain. It is the Republic of Rome in its last days.
Published in General
Might as well trim out some of the older amendments to make room for the rights to gender, healthcare, and an indexed living wage.
Also in Texas today, a motorist drove into several pedestrians killing seven of them. You don’t need firearms to commit mass murder.
Yes, I don’t mean in the economic sense, but rather the social, psychological sense.
Of course, they’re trying to take away individual transportation too.
Just that the availability of firearms is a factor in the frequency and deadliness of these incidents. If it were more difficult for these people to get guns, there would be fewer mass shootings. Not zero, of course, but fewer. And if they can’t get a gun and are still bent to kill a bunch of people, they’re less likely to kill as many with whatever other weapon they can find.
Not off the top of my head. I recall that Columbine shooter Eric Harris was on Luvox and the Las Vegas shooter was on valium. There are definitely more if you take the time to look into it.
Some kind of IED could easily kill more people, not fewer.
It’s really fun talking to DEMOCRAT GUN GRABBERS on twitter about this. lol
Yes, it would be very difficult to control entry to those kinds of places. Not much you can do as a practical matter and maintain the open atmosphere.
NEW ANTI-GUN CONTROL TALKING POINT. MORE GUNS = FEWER IEDs.
It’s extremely difficult to legally get a gun in NYS, yet gun crimes happen there with great frequency.
It’s extremely difficult to legally get a gun in Chicago, yet that city has earned the nickname “Chiraq” due to all the gunfire and gun crime. There was also a “mass shooting” there a few months ago.
It’s not as great a factor as you may think.
Depends on a lot of factors, I guess, but building such an IED, and successfully using it, is more complicated than just using a gun, and anyway, for whatever reason, that’s not what most of these people seem to want to do. They seem to like the idea of shooting people with guns.
You can go with the “easy access to guns for mass murderers saves lives because otherwise they’d kill more of us with bombs,” take, but I don’t think that will get very far.
Legal or otherwise, the availability is a problem. I’m not suggesting a gun control legislation solution. But logically, if you have these other problems – the violent culture, the mental health problems, declining institutions – the relative availability of firearms, through legal or illegal means, is not good.
Again, to be clear, this doesn’t mean some gun confiscation idea is the way to go. That won’t work and would turn millions of law abiding good people into criminals, aside from being unconstitutional. But let’s not act like it’s not a problem.
More guns equals less crime.
Outlaw gun free zones.
Prosecute straw purchasers. This will never happen of course..
Make sure the NICS system is filled.
Using that logic there must have been a real spate of these kinds of shooting in the 1920s when there were no gun control laws and guns were even more available than they are today. But there were fewer. Instead the worst massacre of that period was a bombing. Which by the way killed more people than the shootings in Nashville, Louisville, Allen – and today’s automobile mass killing in Brownsville – combined.
Time for this again:
One really needs to address the illegal means of getting firearms. Almost all “gun violence” is committed by those who, right now, are prohibited by law from possessing firearms. Sure, some of these “mass shootings” are done by people who are not prohibited, but these are not even a rounding error in terms of gun crimes committed in the U.S.
So what ideas do you have to stop, or at least slow down, the acquisition of firearms by prohibited persons?
Is it good for a lunatic to have access to guns or is that bad? That’s all I’m saying. Im all for non-lunatics having as many guns as they want. Again, if you have these other factors, as we do now but perhaps didn’t in the 20’s or other eras, easy access to guns is not ideal.
No one has any specific policy solutions.
See my earlier comment. Enforce the gun laws we already have, without mercy or restraint.
That’s what I mean.
“It” being the availability of firearms, however, you just pointed out that “it” is only problematic in the presence of other problems.
I understand what you’re saying and what you’re not saying, so I’m not accusing you of gun-grabbing. Yet your formulation has a flaw in it which amounts to a gun-grabbing rationale.
The presence of the other problems is exactly why we must not give an inch. Cold. Dead. Hands.
If TPTB are allowed to “solve” the problem (which will not get better) by disarming the lawful, then the next step will not be to review the effectiveness of gun-grabbing — that’s not why they want to do it in the first place. They will see what else they can trim from our liberties in pursuit of “solving” the problem, which they in fact have caused. It’s too valuable a problem for the government to ever actually solve.
So I’m simply dug in like Hell against any “common sense” gun regulation. I would rather live in a 100% armed society than a 0% armed society — one of these can actually be achieved. Crazies and bad guys getting blown away by their intended targets will go a long way toward solving the actual problem.
Heh. I knew Foo back when she had about 5 followers.
Either I’m dense, or you are.
How is that not a specific policy solution?
People always want to do something ***new*** and then they aren’t specific about what it is. Then you try to talk it through with them, which is a waste of time, almost every time. Nobody does the work except actual gun rights people.
There are already laws against lunatics having guns. Perhaps if we try . . . I don’t know . . . enforcing them first, before passing new gun laws that will not be enforced against the ones who motivated their passage.
Is is good for laws against lunatics having guns to not be enforced? That’s all I’m saying. Are you saying you support non-enforcement of existing gun laws? Because until we do enforce them making new ones is virtue signaling. Is that what interests you? Virtue signaling? If so, why?
The availability of the tools typically used in mass murders (primarily guns) do not seem to have increased enough in the 25 years that mass murders have been “a thing” to explain the apparent increase in such mass murders. So, apparently the tools are not the real problem. Trying to address mass murders by trying to control the tools is likely to affect mass murders only at the margins, if at all.
The real problem must therefore be something other than the tools (guns). Apparently something in the people. I have lots of potential causes in mind. But, they are numerous, and they’ve been growing for over a half a century, destroying much of the personal and social strengths that enabled a strong society. So we have the highly unsatisfying situation that there is no single solution to the problem of mass murder, and rebuilding in people and in society what we have taken more than a half a century to destroy will not come quickly.
By the way, as to the guns in particular, over the time that mass murders have become more common, other types of violent crime have decreased (well, up until three years ago). Some people credit an increase in the availability of guns as a contributor to this decrease in violent crime. So consideration is required whether, even if reducing the availability of guns did reduce the number of mass murders, whether such moves might have an unintended consequence of leading to an increase in other types of violent crime, and whether that tradeoff is warranted.
I agree. Especially politically, legislatively, nothing will completely solve it and every proposal has downsides.
This is why almost nobody should ever give an inch to any gun grabbers. They never make any sense. They don’t study the problem. Etc.