In your opinion do you think the U.S. will ever come together and put out some real sensible gun laws?

NO!!! I used to think that someone would come up with a reasonable law that would work, but now I realize that no one wants a reasonable law…They just want to be able to shoot someone that dares to look at them cross eyed!!!

Maybe a trial law to experiment would be easier to accomplish. Each side gets a chance to temporary change the laws. Maybe a law banning hand guns for a year and see what happens with crime. Them a law requiring all adults to open carry; to see what happens.

^ Good idea, but I don’t see that one happening!!!

Squeek, the laws are meaningless in the face of widespread availability. Here in San Francisco, fireworks are of course illegal but from the last days of June through the 4th of July you can’t hear yourself think for the cacophony of cherry bombs firecrackers and other explosives. And nothing illustrates the lessons about the law versus availability like the drug laws, say for example the opioid and meth epidemics. Don’t worry, you in Canada are in for the same gun thrills we enjoy here. You may not reach the plateaus we achieve in Baltimore or Chicago, but our weapons surplus is coming your way. Depend on it!

Never, because a large swath thinks that the only sensible regulation is no regulation. And they are backed by loud, powerful, and moneyed lobbying groups.
Even if a miracle should occur, and such laws are passed, enforcement will be on an “oops-i-forgot-to-enforce-them-winky-face” basis.

Probably not. Giving up liberty for safety is not the American way. Never has been.

Oh, really.
Must have missed all those patriots storming the white house, when the japanese americans were put into concentration camps.
Or after the “Patriot Act” was enacted.
Or when the TSA was established.
Or when the NSA spying was revealed.

@ragingloli Point taken. None of those affect us normal Americans though.
Still have our guns and anything else we want. My friends dad still shoots a canon every 4th.
You shatter our illusion of freedom, thats when it hits the fan.

In many ways, you are less free than other western countries.
But as long as you have “your guns”, you do not mind living in a dystopia.

@ragingloli just as a point of contention, I actually did write my congressmen prior to and following the Patriot Act. I also wrote them about the NSA Spying…again…both before and after it was released that it was being used to spy on Americans. Just the idea of the PRISM program is horrible and needs to be abolished.

Never. Anything along that line will always be too little, too late.

I think the problem with questions like this is that it assumes there are sensible gun laws…gun laws that are realistic and would address the problems of gun related homicides. Basically, if you remove the suicides (which gun laws don’t stop) and gang related murders (which gun laws don’t stop) and police shootings (which gun laws don’t stop), you have very few gun related homicides in this country. And we already have many, many laws about murder and armed robbery and other crimes that involve guns. People that commit these murders aren’t going to care if there are laws against the guns. And if you look at many of the mass shootings, the shooters obtained the guns legally. They bought them legally, passed background checks and had all the proper permits.

Once again YOU enforce my argument regarding laws banning guns. They are useless once the numbers reach a tipping point. Take any branch from the tree of epidemics afflicting us, opioids, speed, prostitution—doesn’t matter. The numbers tell the story. You can make the argument that the rising murder rate is a measure of our population of dysfunctional people. You cannot make the argument that the rising death rate is about dysfunctional people WITHOUT guns. My point is that there is no rise in the levels of dysfunction among us. The rise is in the number of dysfunctionals with access to guns. THOSE are the numbers that will turn your town into Baltimore. The argument that the tool is irrelevant is disproven on its face with the simple observation that the gun is far and away the weapon of choice. And don’t fall for such nonsense as “knives kill more people than guns”. The trick with this one is that it might be true world wide, but it certainly IS NOT true here.

Mankind will reap his just reward sooner or later no mater how many guns there are and/or who has them.
Amen!

Interesting arguments you try using. Unfortunately you miss key points which makes you look either purposely deceptive or a fool. I’ll leave it to the audience to decide. Here is a graph of gun related homicides for the time frame of 2006 through 2017.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/249803/number-of-homicides-by-firearm-in-the-united-states/

Now if you look, gun related homicides were pretty steady for most of that period, dropping from about 10,000 down to about 8300 in 2014. But then you see a pretty good step change from 2014 to 2015 and then again to 2016. Suddenly, in the last two full years of Obama’s administration gun deaths jumped up to over 11,000. Trump gets elected and the numbers start down again. But if you look even further back, you find gun related homicides have been dropping since around 1996. The graph I showed in my previous citation is even a little misleading since it only shows a relatively small time frame. Here is an article that tells more detail

https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/here-are-8-stubborn-facts-gun-violence-america

So you are partly right…the numbers do tell the story. The problem is it isn’t the story you wanted to tell. But you are wrong about rising gun death rates and you are off base on the belief that if you banned guns today all the criminals would suddenly give them up.

So to answer my own question, the answer is NO.
Anti-gun people think that ban them all is the answer, yeah that will work think every gangster and thug will just give them up??
Good one.
Those same people say gun laws don’t work because criminals don’t care about the law.
I would like to think there is a solution that would put a stop to these mass shootings, but sad to say I don’t see one, be nice if these people could get mental health care before they decide to shoot a bunch of innocent people, but don’t see that happening any time soon as well.
And please stop comparing other countries to the states, we in Canada have horrible shootings up here as well, not as many but our population isn’t near what the states is.
England has shootings to and they have very restrictive gun laws.
Criminals would love an out right ban on firearms , makes them safer to go about their business, think about that.

Antibiotics are useless against viruses, but that is not an argument against using them at all.
No one who advocates for strict gun laws ever claimed that it would be 100% effective.
That is a strawman that the opponents concocted to dismiss it out of hand.

@ragingloli and no one that advocates for strict gun laws can actually explain how they will stop criminals. They cannot explain why some of the areas in this country that have the strictest gun laws around have the highest gun murder rates to go with them. To put it into your terms, antibiotics are useless against viruses but they can still make things worse by using them when they aren’t going to be effective.

@ragingloli How did Hitler use disarmament to wipe out the Jews easier?

When the only weapons are in the hands of the ruling class and military, it doesnt end well for certain groups of people. Kapisch?

We built it into our Constitution intentionally based on history.

Hitler actually made it easier for most Germans to get guns.
The reality is, that it would have made no difference if Jews had been armed.
They would not just have had to deal with the Army and the paramilitary SA and SS, but also with the brainwashed rest of the Germans.
Just like the so-called 2nd amendment people would actually be supporting a fascist takeover.
Look at the militias, and the so-called “oath keepers”. For 8 years of Patriot Act and TSA thuggery and NSA spying, and the Guantanamo Concentration Camp, not a peep from them.
Then they got active when Obama became president.
And now that Drumpf is in power with his child concentration camps, they just play along again.
Do you think it would make any difference for those children to be armed?
Or would you just use that as an excuse for your inevitable “they were asking for it” spiel?

@ragingloli Most people-except Jews.

@ragingloli. Pay no attention to seawulf’s nonsense about no one being able to explain why the areas with the strictest gun laws have the highest incidence of gun related crimes. There isn’t a law enforcement agency in a single one of those places which wouldn’t tell you that it is the concentration of weapons in the places concerned that drives the the shooting rate. The laws were enacted with the hope of countering this, and you can see how well that works. Thanks again seawulf for making my case!!!!

Or how about this:
The racist treatment, excessive violence and outright murder against black people at the hands of racist cops is a fact.
If black people started to arm themselves en masse, and defended themselves against cops with lethal force, how well do you think that would go for them?
And more importantly, would you even acknowledge that they are defending themselves?
Would you support them?
Or would you just see them as thugs murdering cops, and that they deserve to die?

Ahhh…so it is the COPS that are committing all the murders! Now you have solved it! What a waste of time. Here’s a clue….black people are the biggest committers of murder of black people there are. It isn’t racist. But I understand you need to hang onto your idiotic beliefs…the beliefs that are not based in fact and are, in fact, racist in nature.

@ragingloli Do you believe the US has disarmed the black race?
Did you see BLM and the many real racist cops get busted?

Senate Bill 5, post Ferguson, changed the landscape here permanently. Not sure what you’re getting at?

I see unarmed protests, being decried by the right as racist, traitorous and terrorist, and cops, being protected by a complicit system, getting away with a slap on the wrist, if not getting away scott free.
Just answer the question. What would happen if black people actively started shooting back?

@ragingloli They do every day and night some places. Some die some dont.

Anyone who aims at cops are risking death, me included. What does that prove?

The right to peacefully protest is a protected right. The right to violent protest is not. You know that.

Whether the outcomes in black communities have racist overtones is irrelevant to my point about the availability of weapons and the crimes which will result. The 2 are direct reflections of one another.

@KNOWITALL
At least now we know, on which side you would have stood in ‘38.

@ragingloli
Probably still too soon for a German to preach disarmament to an American, ma’am.

@KNOWITALL
Au contraire, mon cheval. Not soon enough.

@ragingloli Tell that to 6 million Jews. Probably not real funny.

My take on the fear driven necessity to stash arms as protection from the government is simply that the impulse is leading to the elimination of any possibility of the government protecting us from ourselves. THAT’s what this amounts to.

@stanleybmanly
Government does not need to disarm the population at large to stay in control.
All they need is to shower the populace with propaganda, so that they willingly support any repressive actions and legislation.
Worked in Nazi Germany, worked when establishing the “Internment Camps” for citizens of Japanese descent, worked during the Cold War and the Red Scare, worked post 9/11 with the patriot act, nsa, and guantanamo and abu ghraib, working like a charm now with the child concentration camps.
And the ones that fall for it, do not even realise it. That is the beauty of it.

@ragingloli and yet you support the side that creates most of the propaganda. Why is that?

@ragingloli This one is exceptional in SO many ways. No one can possibly be this dense and yet competent to read and write. A personality exhibiting such traits so consistently must be manufactured.

There are plenty of sensible gun laws, but too many insensible humans.

Haha, never going to happen because some of those fuckers have rocks in their head & long for the good ol’ wild west days.

@stanley Actually he’s a vet. You should thank him for his service, which allows you the privelage of speaking your mind.

@ragingloli You are such a fan of the crazy little man.

“The side that creates the most propaganda”?

Predicting the future is a fool’s game. Working towards a better future is far more productive. So I am interested to know how does unrestricted access to weapons of mass destruction by idiots, criminals and the psychologically disturbed make our future better?