Gun control

Are civilian guns a any level of deterrent? I'm not sure that's the right question. You can either deter the state or not. I'm not sure if annoyance registers in any meaningful way.

If some militia broke off and tried to form Freedom Land, or whatever the f, the government would definitely work with private companies for signature strikes. They already do partner in such a way, more or less. They've got everything on everyone. Ed Snowden showed us that. Why do you think the eye of Sauron focuses mainly on the domestic population? You think they care if you search for small tits or big tits? No they are set up to attack anyone who gets out of line and if they cared about guns we wouldn't have them.

Okay but the state would have to determine it to be worth while for whatever reason to seize a half a billion guns from a bunch of rural rednecks who actually fear that exact thing.

The govt working with private companies to carry out strikes on something this large is pure tinfoil hat territory. Just because they've worked with them in the past to gain communication, is a whole other situation than using that information to illegally go against constitutional barriers with an insane level of military strikes.

Also, the people who work at these private companies, and the people who would be trained to actually do the large scale military disarmament would be disarming and killing their friends and neighbors. It isn't practical.

A hypothetical US' tyrant is more likely to arise from a coup than some widespread campaign of terror. Due to massive power of the executive branch in the US, an autocoup is the most likely scenario and most likely during a time of controlling all three branches of government. It would not necessarily be enough that your party controls all three branches.

In the most successful auto-coups, there are more people debating whether there has been a coup than people opposing it. The number of guns in the populace in such a scenario probably isn't all that relevant.

As for remaining in power, this is where some people miss the point. In democracies, remaining in power hinges on active support. You actually need to convince people to not go out there and support you. In authoritarian regimes you just need to convince them to not go out there and oppose you. That can be through a Hungary-style soft takeover of courts, press and institutions, a Russian-style mafia regime that makes it dangerous and illegal to not support you or a hybrid like Turkey. In every one of these three scenarios, the minted ruler can still be quite popular.

The number of guns won't determine the odds of success of that kind of coup but it will determine what the dictator can do in the (sometimes long) phase when he just executed the "soft coup" , increased his powers, started to remove constitutional rights and so on.

It is far harder to enact full scale totalitarianism (the actual disaster you want to avoid) if every household could be armed.

Not even any t&p, sad.

Well they’re college students so they’re probably indoctrinated and had it coming

Linda McMahon will fix that with her views on A-1

Were any Teslas harmed?

Look this is just the price of freedom and learning in America but only if you learn things Dear Leader thinks aren’t too diverse or woke

Sounds like the FSU shooter was a white supremacist

Onward and upward worrying about mental health!

Where is the discussion about the phenomena itself???

These mass shootings keep happening and there is no discussion, I think absolutely no discussion at all (that I've seen), about why it is happening. And that should be even more of a reason to ban more types of guns because you are really saying that we don't understand the phenomena at all and if you don't understand it then you have no plan to stop it at it's root cause, leaving the only way to deal with it at the proximate causes, a principal proximate cause being access to weapons.

Saying someone is a white supremacist is basically saying they are a stupid loser, in a literal not even pejorative sense, they have lower cognitive ability and low material success.

Part of the anxiety and tangle of pathologies I think leads to these outbursts has to do with perceived social status. I wasn't around in the 70, was a little kid in the 80s, but I got the sense from the general era that people were content being unexceptional. Like in the 70s you could just be a carpenter or a dog catcher and that didn't come with much self-imposed or societal stigma. I think people came to terms with their own mediocrity so much easier going not too far backwards from the current moment. Like you could be a mailman and have a 4 bedroom house in the 60s or 70s. Now it's like damn I'm a little weird looking and not great in school therefore my life has no value so I'm going to shoot up some people I've never met before in a public place.

If this many people are doing mass shootings how many people ideate on doing them, and how much more societal wide mental strain is going to send tons of those people over the edge? We can't even imagine the end of capitalism so we need to imagine making the insanity it causes less lethal.

What is even the point of discussing the phenomena?

The root cause is we have technologically evolved 1800s weaponry to creating semiautomatic weapons of efficient death that have no logical or justifiable reason in being in the hands of everyday citizens

Those who advocate for the proliferation appeal to the constitution which clearly mandates they have access this kind of weaponry while the same people think things like protected speech, protest, due process and literally birthright fucking citizenship that that same constitution grants are not rights that anyone should be afforded

I'm going to roll with it that you are arguing in good faith, which I do believe, so a couple things.

When you mention the 70s and 80s, gun crime per capita was higher then, than it is now. Also, from the looks of it, it looks like you had a slightly higher poverty rate then than now - which is probably still the #1 cause for gun violence.

The months after covid completely and unsurprisingly caused gun violence to surge and peak in 2021 and it looks to be mostly dropping since then for a lot of the same reasons.

But gun crime is too high, and people are to damn hysterical, in large, to be around those things. So what ideas you got to fix that?

An effective military needs people who fantasize about murder regularly

Its probably a complex combination of poor mental health, easy access to firearms, a culture that glorifies violence and doesn't generally value real life, a culture that generally shames sex, poor social standing, being poor, and other societal pressures

The NRA are bad and unrealistic people. But they when they say guns don't kill people, people kill people, there is some truth to that. We can and should cancel the part of the formula for this which is access to lethal killing machines. But it's even worse that we are producing the type of people who resolve to do this and we are producing them en mass. These people, this particular pathology, was nonexistent until relatively recently. The behavior making the headlines is just the tip of the iceberg. As drawn out in the movie Bowling for Columbine, the question is why does this happen here and not in other places where guns are available. We can confront the problem from multiple angles but the mental health aspect is far and away the deeper problem.

I'm not talking about all gun crime. Robbing someone at an ATM can be a rational response to a financial predicament. Getting out of a Hummer and shooting someone you've never seen before is mental illness. I mean, you got a Hummer as a 20 something and you just want to throw away as much human life as you can in some crashout scenario? The rising incidence of this indicates some mechanism producing very high levels of mental illness. But nobody seems to be even separating out the phenomenon itself, instead focusing on the access to guns or the heinousness of the shooters as individuals.

I think we have a pretty good understanding why people "snap" or w/e you want to call it when otherwise financially secure people go postal.

...Id imagine a % of it is the much higher rates of substance abuse and meds

...social isolation and loneliness, which played the part in the surge after covid.

...online alienation, reinforced nihilism that could validate dangerous thoughts.

...existential emptiness...like i've said before, people need goals in life and they needs things to work for and to progress towards.

But as much as I personally love shooting and collecting guns ... people, as a whole, have become too ****ing stir crazy - especially since covid, and a lot of those people shouldn't have the capability to get one.

FRT's no longer illegal I guess

They should have written a law that had a a limit on number rounds per minute not on just being able to squeeze the trigger with a single pull firing multiple rounds

Taking the side of those that wrote the constitution were smart people , I guess they didn’t think they had to go that far in details to prevent the logical idiocy and I terpretation we see today.
They figured population in general get smarter with time .

Ps: it’s hard to foresee technology in far future too .
Laser gun soon ….

Right to keep and bear arms...
'Arms' is forward looking. It doesn't classify, specify or describe types of weapons for a reason.

ahh, finally, the idiot argument...

Are you saying that the definition of “arms” was intended to evolve with the times?

We should all have nuclear weapons too …

Given it had already evolved in the past, yes?

Otherwise they would have specified what was allowed.

An interpretation anyway should always err in restricting government powers (that's the entire and only reason for the existence of a constitution to begin with) unless otherwise explicitly written.

So if there is any doubt about which weapons people can carry, unless there is some specific explicit limitation, none apply.

The above would be textualism.

Under originalism instead, you have to check their intent when they wrote that.

And the intent of the 2a was clearly to be able to defy government soldiers (specifically federal ones) if they went rogue and acted against the population of the states.

So whatever weapon(s) soldiers have access to, private citizens need to have access to as well, so that the soldiers can't have an easy time butchering the population if they go rogue.

The explicit reason for the existence of the 2a was fear a standing army could go rogue / be used by elected leaders to achieve tyranny. That's in the papers they wrote when discussing the topic, this is uncontroversial.

You can think it's a bad thought process, or something not needed anymore, but that's why it was put there. And until amended that's how it should work to limit government intrusion into private life on that topic.

Under eversive, leftist interpretation philosophies, if it's obvious (to leftists) a part of the constitution should change because society changed, they can interpret it that way. No matter that's what amendment rules are for, takes too long and they don't have the votes for that, so they "interpretate" leftism as the source of constitutionality.