Sauce: i hate it here
They are regulated, but there’s a lot of breakdowns in the system. People passing background checks who shouldn’t, prior offenders passing background checks because local cops didn’t report them to the feds, etc. The DC Navy Yard shooter years back literally had fired a weapon into his neighbor’s apartment before and still passed a background check to buy the weapons he committed the shooting with. I also think if you’re a parent and you leave your weapon accessible by your children, and they go shoot up their school, you should be held at least partially liable. As somebody who is former military, the civilian population gets away with a hell of a lot with regards to firearms. No federally mandated training standards, concealed carry licenses are haphazard and go state by state, and not all states recognize other states’ permits, no federally mandated storage requirements, etc. When I was in the military, if I wanted to go target practice on base with my personal weapons I had to register them with the provost marshal on base, keep the weapons and ammo separate in locked boxes out of my reach while driving to the range, etc. And if one weapon went missing the entire base was locked down; gates closed and nobody in or out until it was located. Civilians get by with way too much.
I think a lot of our problem is loose or missing standards at the federal level, which leaves each individual state to kind of make things up as they go along and not communicate properly with feds when things go wrong.
This is where Finland and Sweden excel. Because they have mandatory military service, everyone with a gun has been trained in all aspects of it’s use/care. Finland is one of the top 10 countries with the most firearms per civilian, and yet their rate of firearm deaths is minuscule in comparison to the U.S..
At this rate though, I don’t see how any meaningful gun regulation can be passed. The nra stopped universal background checks from being passed after Sandy Hook. I lost faith in republicans since then. They’re bad faith actors, that when faced with the prisoners dilemma, choose suicide.
For the lazy US has 3.5x more guns than Finland and 35x more firearm homicides (which, not to nitpick, is not necessarily the same as a firearm death). If us has a 10x reduction in firearm homicides to be more in line with their gun ownership they would go from being ranked 23rd (as of 2019) to 42nd or so, going below countries like Canada (although Canada’s gun crime is strongly linked with the us), new Zealand * and Sweden.
I’ll also point out though that Finland has stricter gun laws than the states, relavent to this post they have a minimum age of 20 to buy firearms. They need licenses and a justification to carry them around, and there are fairly strict storage rules.
* I realized that 2019 was the Christchurch mass shooting, which brought the rate from 0.2 in 2018 to 1.2 in 2019, so probably not very representative of NZ gun crime.
This is where Finland and Sweden excel. Because they have mandatory military service, everyone with a gun has been trained in all aspects of it’s use/care.
Article I Section 8 parts 15 and 16 empower Congress to require such training every member of the militia, and they have indicated that the militia is comprised of every able bodied male citizen, aged 17 to 45. (10 USC 246)
Congress can require training on safe handling. They can require training on the laws governing use of force in self defense and defense of others. They don’t need to mandate additional military or militia service to achieve this.
except for the bonkers idea that the 2a’s first 13 words for some reason don’t count.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…” and today’s non-regulated militia endangering the security of the free state are pretty fucking contrasting situations.
fuck all the gun nuts who love their fetish more than their country.
While I believe in common sense gun control I think that one thing people might miss when comparing America to Finland or Sweden is just how brutal America can be.
America is an interesting country, if you can stay on the gainful employment ladder you can have a lot of creature comforts and for a few people they get to go up the ladder and have a really nice life.
That ladder though is dangling over the mouth of a volcano and there are more ways to fall off then anyone wants to admit. There’s also a ton of people just barely hanging on.
Easy access to guns is a problem, but the fact that so many Americans are so crushed by the system we live under that violence and deadly violence are things people routinely turn to is also a massive problem. For a lot of working poor the system can feel a lot like running on a perpetual treadmill stuck at full speed. We retooled our economy towards service and knowledge jobs, a lot of people in that service industry make just enough money to scrape by.
There is not a single state in the nation where minimum wage affords a 2 bedroom apartment
So you have a large number of people that spend the vast majority of their time working difficult jobs rife with customer abuse. They earn just enough money to afford a place to stay and food (and a cellphone so people can sneer at them and say, oh you have a cellphone so you can’t be struggling). Mix that with a big pile of guns and violence is bound to happen.
We can take away the guns but I suspect Americans have the ingenuity to find other ways to do violence against each other.
