PSA: about 2/3 mass shootings are domestic violence related. If you want to fix mass shootings, start at fixing the household.
https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40621-021-00330-0
fix the household
Nice dog whistle for systematic problems with capitalism
Tons of lobbying money goes into making sure those laws never happen, shootings cause a rise in firearm sales. Rinse, repeat. Any talk of well regulated militia bullshit is just lip service to the useful idiots who keep them rich.
Rampant profiteering off of the backs of laborers for the sake of the few. You think those laborers have the ability to maintain a happy and balanced home life after being exploited by capitalists?
Because unchecked capitalism means paying people as little as possible to maximize profits, which means people are underpaid which causes undue stress at home which leads to bad shit happening.
easy and cheap ways to buy guns
create a system with no hope to move up in life when you’re poor
have a news media that creates paranoia, to sell ads
Yea it’s sooooo weird “How the FUCK is captialism the cause of mass shootings lol”
You can ABSOLUTELY make a good point about mass shootings being the result of mental health disorders or domestic violence, and we should ABSOLUTELY be doing what we can as a society to fix those problems… but we can’t ignore the 100% common denominator in literally every mass shooting… which is guns.
The rest of the world has deep, deep family problems, too. Yet doesn’t have these problems.
And a lot of it has guns too.
The biggest outlier with guns in America is the politicization and them.
Look at Scandinavia, where gun ownership is incredibly high and many firearm laws less-strict than in the US: It’s a region of the world that has most of its shit figured out, and having guns there isn’t a big deal because the rate of violence is so low.
Here in the US, we’ve got a broken social system, essentially zero mental health care for those who really need it, easy access to firearms, and hyper-politicization around firearms that pushes mentally-unstable people towards gun ownership.
When the unstable conspiracy-theory nutjobs hear liberals saying that gun ownership is bad they’re predictably start stocking up on guns and ammo - specifically the black guns the political left keeps trying to ban. And then they snap.
That’s how the guns that make up about 1% of overall firearm deaths started being used much more frequently in mass shootings.
We do need an honest national conversation about guns and their availability, but neither side of the political aisle is willing to really, truly be honest in their policies towards firearms. So we aren’t able to have that conversation and what we end up with is the worst of all outcomes.
I do wonder why mass shootings weren’t nearly as common before 1980s/1990s, when the United States had even less gun control than we do now. There is more to it than just access to guns for sure. Don’t get me wrong, I still think stricter gun control would most definitely help, but I wonder what other factors are causing the number of mass shootings to go up.
The rise of conservative media, probably. You’ve had decades of fox news and talk radio doing their thing, and now we have stochastic terrorism.
Couple that with the concentrated conservative efforts to reduce the quality of education in America - less educated people are more susceptible to those conservative media tactics. They can’t keep control over all of the craziness they peddle, look at the House of Representatives - they lost the plot and now we are stuck dealing with the shit show they cultivated.
When is enough going to be enough?
The 2nd Amendment was a mistake. It’s time to repeal it.
It will never be enough. Look at the responses in this thread and elsewhere. It will never be enough. There is no price too high that it won’t happily be paid. There is no regulation small enough that it will be accepted. They have made that exceptionally clear.
There is no negotiation with them. You will never convince them. It doesn’t matter if the regulation works or not.
I don’t even think it’s a might-makes-right issue yet. They have guns, sure. But that’s still basically nothing in the face of government force.
My point was more along the lines of that in all of these gun control discussions, there are mistaken expectations from a lot of liberal people.
Liberals keep engaging in this conversation as if it were a negotiation between reasonable people trying to find common ground. That if the cost of a lack of regulation grows too high, that if they make the right arguments, that if they offer the right compromises, they can move towards moderate gun control.
But that’s not what’s happening. The gun lobby has repeatedly shown that any regulation, no matter how small, will be viewed the same way as a complete forcible disarming, and will be opposed with the same vigour. And that there is no cost of human life that will ever change that.
For the 2nd Amendment types, the conversation is already over. Everything they say is meaningless, because they don’t actually care if what they say is true, they don’t care if the regulation works or not. They are just saying things to shut down the discourse, and if you counter them, they’ll just move on to the next point like nothing has changed. Because to them nothing has changed.
That’s not going to happen in the lifetime of anyone who can read this comment.
Because it requires more than a majority of Congress, it also requires 3/4 of the 50 states to vote to ratify it. Only takes 13 states voting NO to prevent it, and there are plenty more red states than that who would never give up our rights so foolishly.
It has taken on a life of its own and has been twisted to the breaking point by gun nutters. It is never enough for them and any push back is like pulling teeth. They have become the terrorist at this point and there is no reason to negotiate anymore.
See it from their perspective: every time they’ve given an inch, grabbers took a mile. If you want to get concessions you’re going to need to give some too.
In Germany we have on average more privately owned guns than most US states. Still… we had just TWO mass shooting in 20 years.
Why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08GbT5ZEs08
In short: You have to qualify to own a gun. Assholes don’t get guns. And by fullfilling the laws to own a gun you actually earn respect in your community.
I am member of a German gun club where the local population, the regional police and a couple of NATO soldiers train. It took me nearly one year before I even was allowed to touch a loaded gun, all through my 14th year I was basically just taught how to clean and repair my rifle, how to handle it, how to NOT use it, only then how to use it. And after ten months I was finally given a single bullet.
I am now 30. Nowadays my family owns and shares a Sig Sauer 200, locked inside the gun club. Everyone except my Mum shots around 25 bullets per month, once a year the whole gun club repeats basic training which includes mental health checks.
And after basic training we have special events. For example six years ago a local NATO garrison was massively downsized and so they offered us to use up their overaged surplus ammunition. I got to shot pretty much anything from 9mm to 7,62mm for basically free - we collected money for the victims of a local house fire so I put €50 into the collection.
Did I ever shot a gun outside the gun club?
Actually: Yes. When I was in the US I joined my Uncle on duck hunt. He was like “ok, hold the big rifle while I show you how to shot a duck using 12gd bird shot.” - he misses, I aim and shot the duck mid-air with a .308. I didn’t know ducks could explode, but yes, they can. I paid with a badly aching shoulder, I wasn’t used to those powerful cadridges any more. He looked angry at me and grumbled the plan was to eat the duck not turn them into fine mist. The other three ducks he left for me to shot and wondered where I had learned to operate a gun like that.
When I told him a US lieutenant taught me to operate exaclty the same rifle in my gun club he was like “WTF?”. I might mention the lieutenant immediatelly settled down in my town after his duty was over because he liked Bavaria so much and wanted his kids to grow up in a less crazy nation.
If you’d actually received as much safety training as you claim, you never would have taken a shot at an elevated target with a center-fire rifle.
The target wasn’t elevated. We were elevated. I tried to explain that the duck was just taking speed to take off but honestly I don’t know the right English word for that maneuver. And as I hinted, I had fired the exact same rifle two years earlier at our gun club several times. Also, I paid with an aching shoulder for my recklessness.
Absolute bullshit, nobody is shooting a duck mid-air with a rifle. Your story is fake and lame.
I’d be surprised if it could even happen legally, there’s no reason to have a rifle with you to duck hunt. If DNR caught you you’d get a ticket for poaching ( you have a permit for ducks but you are out with gear to hunt deer ) and they’d keep the guns. Yes, even on private land.
You shot a 308 round into the air? Isn’t that unsafe? If you missed the bullet could go anywhere.
What is the penalty if you are caught with a gun you are not qualified to have?
Edit: “Not Qualified” is not the right wording. Because Qualification only plays a secondary role. It is all about the licence.
In Germany carrying a gun without the right licence would be illegal possesion of a firearm.
But wait, even if you have a licence you can get fined for illegal transport and handling of a firearm.
Carrying a conceiled small sidearm without a special permit is big trouble. Transporting a firearm without a locked enclosure and not seperated from the ammunition is also a serious offence. At home you need a locked container. All in all it got so complicated that my Dad stopped storing guns at home. He sold one and put the other into the gun club. The club is really helpful, we can lend legal transport containers and for guns which we are not allowed to move in public they offer transport services for a small fee, usually that means a police officer moves the gun in his free time using legal transport containers in exchange for a beer.
Classic case: Someone dies and you find a loaded pistol in his inheritance. You bring it to the police. You did three offences: Carrying a conceiled firearm in public, carrying a firearm without proper container, carrying a loaded firearm. The legal way would have been: Calling the police to retrieve the firearm. To be honest, the state attourney usually closes those cases rather quick as “minor incident without criminal intent” but you still get a serious talk.
There are some exceptions for old historic muzzleloaders which are often fired at historic events without bullets. We don’t have those so I don’t know barely anything about those rules.
I appreciate your perspective on this. What you describe is about more than just ‘assholes don’t get guns’, although that is a crucial aspect. The way your family owns just ‘a’ gun, trained for a long while before shooting, respect for following gun laws. This is the opposite of the usual experience around guns in the US. We as a culture in the US are careless and wanton with guns in general from what I’ve seen.
I was shown how to use a gun when I was 6 years old, my parents were responsible though so it was only an air pistol, but heavy duty, not airsoft. We had a shotgun, 9mm pistol and a .22 rifle in the house never locked up, didn’t even have a safe to lock them if my dad wanted to, and the shotgun was often stored loaded. When people here get together to shoot, it’s not odd to hand a loaded gun to someone that has never been to a range or even seen one fired before. Plenty of people are much safer than this, but I would guess my experience is the more common from what I’ve seen.
From what I can tell, most gun safety training in the US is a single sentence: Always treat it like it’s loaded, and keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
There have been at least 2 mass shootings in Germany since March a simple Google search reveals. 🤔
Shouldn’t “mass shootings” include “mass”?
I mean a shooting with 0 dead surely doesn’t count as such and three people from a youth gang isn’t exactly a typical mass shooting either.
What do these two issues have to do with each other? I support gun control as well as fair sex-based separation in sports.
Stop that. Stop trying to have a reasonable stance in the middle.
Really though, I was under the impression that this was the somewhat reasonable stance that even progressive politicians have? I know that there’s scaremongering that DeMoCrAtS want big muscular men taking over women’s sports, tackling and hurting your daughters but I thought the actual stance was more along the lines of allowing the LGBTQ+ community to play sports while still allowing sports to be fair?
It definitely doesn’t seem like some super easy issue with a clear line in the sand that everyone will be ok with. And some of the scaremongering is certainly bigots being afraid of their children even interacting with someone that is LGBTQ+…
So, I’m legitimately curious, what are the actual stances of those on Lemmy?
Edit: keep down voting me while absolutely none of you are willing to engage and help educate me. I’m legitimately reaching out, asking, and trying to understand and all people can do is hit a down arrow. Fuck me for being an ally trying to trying to further my knowledge eh?
They’re related thanks to party politics. The party that talks about trans people in sports also rails against gun control.
Also, no one automatically knows what you mean when you say fair. Because of the nature of the debate, you don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt where people assume that when you say “fair” you only mean “trans women who have experienced male puberty need to undergo hormone therapy before being allowed to compete in women’s sports.” And even the people who politically advocate for that invariably wind up also supporting a ban on puberty blockers, or trans men in men’s sports, or never allowing trans women to compete no matter how thoroughly physically transitioned they are, or whatever other nonsense.
Bans are just not something that needs to be legislated. Sports organizations can self police in that regard. If anything, we need legislation to ensure trans people CAN compete in the gender category they identify as, with the sole exception of trans women who haven’t yet been able to medically transition.
Take chess, for example. FIDE just passed an insane set of rules around when trans women can compete in women’s tournaments, and how trans men have to give up any titles they earned while they were still presenting as female, but the gender divisions in chess are completely unrelated to inherent ability. The lack of women in chess is a cultural issue, like in STEM fields, not related to physical ability at all, and the women’s division ostensibly exists as an attempt to draw women to the game. What FIDE is doing is purely anti-trans, and there should be legislation keeping them from implementing that. I’ve no idea how that would work internationally, but the point is trans people need protection, not bans.
They’re related thanks to party politics. The party that talks about trans people in sports also rails against gun control.
And? Are you not allowed to support certain policies of one party and certain policies of another party? Especially if you live in a different country, so you’re not voting for either of them anyway?
In most sports, there is no such thing as “men’s” sports. You are allowed to participate no matter what you were born as and what you identify as. So why not just go there and leave women’s sports, which are explicitly created to make it possible to compete well without having been born with a male body, alone?
That said, I agree with you regaiding chess (which should not be considered a sport at all). There is no inherent advantage of having a male body in chess other than the general tendency of men to have a higher variance in most abilities.
Are you not allowed to support certain policies of one party and certain policies of another party? Especially if you live in a different country, so you’re not voting for either of them anyway?
I never even implied that. You came to a meme about American politics and asked how the two topics were related. Sorry not every meme is custom-made for you.
In most sports, there is no such thing as “men’s” sports.
… are you serious? All the most popular sports, running, swimming, weightlifting, football (American and the rest of the world), basketball, hockey, cycling… I decided to check out the Olympic’s website for some other examples and almost all of them have hard gender divisions. A few don’t but the vast majority are divided. Chess has an “open” and a “women’s” division as you describe, but again, it’s because the gap exists thanks only to a dearth of women playing the game in the first place. This is not the case in most sports. Trans women who have undergone sufficient hormone therapy do not have an advantage, and should be allowed to participate.
why not just go there and leave women’s sports, which are explicitly created to make it possible to compete well without having been born with a male body, alone?
People rarely just choose what they’re passionate about like that. This is an incredibly flimsy excuse to exclude people from competing in what they actually enjoy doing.
The issues are not opposing stances, no.
However the point of the post is that while children are being gunned down Republicans will go silent on solutions. However those same Republicans will gladly call on many other non-life threatening issues as a dog whistle or as a distraction tactic. They will ban every book, fire every openly gay person, ridicule every trans child - all because they are afraid of change. But they won’t even humor discussions on how to stop a child from catching a bullet.
Remember that time Trump banned bump stocks in a weekend, something Obama tried for 8 years to do? If not, here’s the NPR article on it
