[Discussion] How to enact Gun Safety

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The scope of this discussion is strictly options or suggestions on HOW to create policy and law and how to implement them in the US so as to reduce the number of guns in the hands of those who intend to use them for criminal purposes.

Whether or not those options should be explored is not under debate. The 2nd Amendment is not under debate nor under discussion. The assumption of the thread is that "gun control" law is necessary at this point and which policies and laws are good to pursue on the basis of putative results.

Foreigner speaking here. I'm Filipino. I have never been to the US, though I do have friends and family who are Americans.

First suggestions to kick things off:

All anti-personnel firearm weaponry will be illegal outside of police uses and police stations. To accommodate sport shooters, local stations will have ranges and armories that will house guns for sport shooting. Police will be present when these guns are in use. They are to be checked in and checked out, all accounted for, including ammunition.

All guns are to be registered to either owners or sellers. Owners and/or sellers will have Strict Liabilities whenever any one of their registered firearms is used in a crime. These are civil liabilities covering damages and medical bills.

30k people in the US die from car accidents every year. So we're spending tons of money making self-driving cars. We could see those deaths decreased to near 0 within a decade or two.

30k people in the US die from gun deaths every year. We're doing nothing. In most cases actively working against any restrictions, any technology, any research to make existing guns safer. It's insane.

I have little to add other than that Republican lawmakers on FOX News are arguing that you "can't legislate away evil" and that you can't punish law abiding people for one man's actions.

Those of you who have heard this and gone, "So wait, are Republicans against the Muslim ban and most terrorism laws now?" get a cookie.

Until you solve gerrymandering, campaign finance, abolish the electoral college, and few other things, nothing written in this thread will come true.

Stele wrote:

30k people in the US die from car accidents every year. So we're spending tons of money making self-driving cars. We could see those deaths decreased to near 0 within a decade or two.

Not to side rail, but this is a complete fallacy. It will take a decade or two just to get the infrastructure in place to even try to get access to self-driving cars especially since there's massive gaps across the country that still don't even have internet access.

As for the gun discussion. I don't think we'll ever see the 2nd amendment removed, but gun owners need to take a stand against the NRA and stop being additional mouthpieces for them. We can have our guns and have sensible laws.

This was from the other thread

Any law or anything that can make that number just 1 less is a win and we'd still have our guns. Obviously want more than that, but toting the NRA line isn't worth someone's life.

Sen. John Thune blames shooting victims for failing to ‘take precautions’ and ‘get small’ to avoid gunfire

“I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions,” he opined. “To protect themselves. And in situations like that, you know, try to stay safe. As somebody said — get small.”

... and the thread goes nowhere and convinces absolutely nobody, because you've chased away all the conservatives that you might otherwise have been able to talk to.

This is just a bunch of converts telling each other they're right. You'll collectively move your Overton window that much further left, and it won't matter in the least, because you're not talking to the people you need to talk to.

What’s the gun reform that Republicans have ever considered? In the last 30 years.

I'm center right and at this point even I support stronger background checks and possibly a national licensing process similar to what I understand Canada has.

As to how we will get there, I have no idea. My wife tells a story when she was an intern at the Washington State legislature, arguably one of the most liberal state governments in the US besides the vocal East Washington conservatives. Some of the Seattle reps introduced some tough legislation after the D.C. Sniper case because he had obtained his guns originally in Washington. The bill suddenly was squashed despite having the votes to pass. You see, even Seattle Democrats are scared as sh*t of the NRA dropping thousands in local races just to beat them.

As I mentioned in the Everything & Else version of this thread, I know one of the dead of Las Vegas, Stacee Etcheber, talked with her a few times; her husband's SFPD. I didn't know until today that she was indeed one of the fatalities because during the chaos of the the attack from what I understand she lost her ID and cellphone. I went to the hair salon she worked at where our mutual friend owned back in June during the local art and wine festival shut down all traffic there and I couldn't find a parking spot because despite the signs saying customer only parking idiots parked there anyway. Since the nearest parking spot was about twenty minutes walking distance from where I was trying to go, I said to myself, screw it, postpone.

So I reschedule, go back in a few weeks, run into the owner and Stacee, and they both tell me of vainly trying to fend people off out of their parking lot. Stacee went out there and confronted these idiots, including one guy saying he was going to get his nails done at their place, when she knew the place she worked at the complex was the only one who did nails and that their nail person was off that day. Hard to imagine that four months ago that a dumbass trying to steal free parking wasn't the worst thing she'd confront this year, but there she was at the concert in Vegas and lost her life as her husband did what he was trained to do to save other lives. What'd she do when the bullets were raining down? She did the same.

“When the shooting occurred, it was all about helping other people,” said Etcheber. “When my brother went out to help other folks and put her in safety and told her to run out of there, she didn’t run out of there. She came back and helped other people as well. That’s when they got separated. From there, we really didn’t know what happened. ”

Stacee Etcheber died a hero and I will remember for the rest of my life that I shook the hand and talked with a hero.

This interesting WaPo article was an eye opener.

The author used to write for 538.com and wrote about gun deaths in an article there. She came to some interesting conclusions.

TLDR: It complicated and there are no simple solutions.

Leah Libresco is a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site.
Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.
Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence.
A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.

Then I looked up guns on 538.com. I found this update to the site today:

Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence

If we focus on mass shootings as a means of understanding how to reduce the number of people killed by guns in this country, we’re likely to implement laws that don’t do what we want them to do — and miss opportunities to make changes that really work. Gun violence isn’t one problem, it’s many. And it probably won’t have a single solution, either.

The original article from 2016

I think that that's a good start - form a group of statisticians whose only job is to document and present all incidences of gun deaths as they are. You can't form policy without data. Just having the data around would be a step forward.

Congress will just block that too, considering the CDC is prohibited from doing that same research.

LarryC wrote:

I think that that's a good start - form a group of statisticians whose only job is to document and present all incidences of gun deaths as they are. You can't form policy without data. Just having the data around would be a step forward.

Which is why the first real step forward will be to overturn the ban on federal funds being used for gun violence research. This will, of course, require the steps Edwin already posted about before that can happen.

At this point, the only steps that are even remotely politically feasible are a mag limit and a bullet tax.

If you want to be taken seriously, please stop quoting this. The site that produces it does reasonably good open-source data collection, but in mass shooting data deliberately conflates "normal" criminal activity with shootings like Las Vegas. That doesn't help anyone, and supports the false idea that legal gun owners are mowing innocent people down left and right when they actually account for a only a tiny percentage of shootings - and many of those are defensive.

Personally, if you want to reduce violence, the most effective, practical solution is ending Prohibition and the War on Drugs. If you dig through the above site, you'll notice that the most shootings occur in very concentrated areas, among a very concentrated network of people. I've quoted this article before, but it's worth quoting again in this context:

In different times and places, violence in America has spread like a wave through different ethnic and racial groups, said Dr Gary Slutkin, a Chicago epidemiologist who has championed a public health model for preventing violence. In the 1920s, violence was concentrated among Irish American and Italian American populations, he said. In recent decades, it’s been more concentrated among African Americans. “There is nothing innate,” he said. “All people and peoples are susceptible.”
Aetius wrote:

If you want to be taken seriously, please stop quoting this. The site that produces it does reasonably good open-source data collection, but in mass shooting data deliberately conflates "normal" criminal activity with shootings like Las Vegas. That doesn't help anyone, and supports the false idea that legal gun owners are mowing innocent people down left and right when they actually account for a only a tiny percentage of shootings - and many of those are defensive.

It conflates shootings like Vegas where the victims were innocent with "normal" mass shootings where the victims deserved it?

Stengah wrote:

It conflates shootings like Vegas where the victims were innocent with "normal" mass shootings where the victims deserved it?

No victims deserve it. However, a drive-by shooting in Chicago has very different causes and possible solutions than Las Vegas, and lumping the two together into the same dataset is disingenuous at best. Reducing drug-related shootings is relatively easy, politically, and doesn't infringe on the rights of millions of Americans.

Just in case you needed to see how this murder machine was being marketed before this event.

Holy $&$?!

There isn't really way to have much of a discussion about guns with that mixture of near religion wrapped in a shell of the founding fathers mixed with unerring machismo. All power without any pesky humanity

Ego Man wrote:

Holy $&$?!

There isn't really way to have much of a discussion about guns with that mixture of near religion wrapped in a shell of the founding fathers mixed with unerring machismo. All power without any pesky humanity

I have seen far worse at gun shows.

Paleocon wrote:

At this point, the only steps that are even remotely politically feasible are a mag limit and a bullet tax.

I think it's useful to talk about ideas about gun safety regulations that would be acceptable to a wider swath of people, including gun hobbyists. It may not pass Congress, but having the ideas on hand is helpful. It'd be embarrassing to have control of the Presidency and Congress and not have any clue on how to create useful legislation.

But yeah, realistic steps are also quite welcome! Bullet taxes might be a good start, too. If you can't control the flow of guns, you could just control the flow of ammo.

LarryC wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

At this point, the only steps that are even remotely politically feasible are a mag limit and a bullet tax.

I think it's useful to talk about ideas about gun safety regulations that would be acceptable to a wider swath of people, including gun hobbyists. It may not pass Congress, but having the ideas on hand is helpful. It'd be embarrassing to have control of the Presidency and Congress and not have any clue on how to create useful legislation.

But yeah, realistic steps are also quite welcome! Bullet taxes might be a good start, too. If you can't control the flow of guns, you could just control the flow of ammo.

I would think that some sort of measure like exorbitant bullet taxes with exemptions for certified range use would be a fair compromise. If you want to shoot recreationally, great. Go to a range, buy the ammo there at a discount, and use it in its entirety or return the unused portion. Hunters don't need more than a handful of rounds and folks sincerely interested in "self defense" won't need more than a handful.

There is another approach to this issue that I think some view as a potential solution. That would be to purposefully arm the citizenry. Although there was no way for law enforcement to respond fast enough to alter the outcome in Vegas, if every person on the 32nd floor was armed, that room could have been stormed and the situation ended much more quickly. I think this argument goes that if criminals know that every potential target is armed and trained to shoot to kill, they would think twice. This would require a much more systematic approach, likely including gun training (and safety) as part of school curriculum and eliminating "no gun" zones like schools, hospitals and churches.

I'm not saying this is the right approach. It would actually be scary as hell. But I think that is the counter argument to the getting rid of or restricting guns approach.

Paleocon wrote:
LarryC wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

At this point, the only steps that are even remotely politically feasible are a mag limit and a bullet tax.

I think it's useful to talk about ideas about gun safety regulations that would be acceptable to a wider swath of people, including gun hobbyists. It may not pass Congress, but having the ideas on hand is helpful. It'd be embarrassing to have control of the Presidency and Congress and not have any clue on how to create useful legislation.

But yeah, realistic steps are also quite welcome! Bullet taxes might be a good start, too. If you can't control the flow of guns, you could just control the flow of ammo.

I would think that some sort of measure like exorbitant bullet taxes with exemptions for certified range use would be a fair compromise. If you want to shoot recreationally, great. Go to a range, buy the ammo there at a discount, and use it in its entirety or return the unused portion. Hunters don't need more than a handful of rounds and folks sincerely interested in "self defense" won't need more than a handful.

I feel like this would receive EXTREME pushback from the folks i know who are gun hobbyists, and i think that's really telling about how much this is really about hunting or home-defense.

edit:changed self-defense to home-defense

Docjoe wrote:

There is another approach to this issue that I think some view as a potential solution. That would be to purposefully arm the citizenry. Although there was no way for law enforcement to respond fast enough to alter the outcome in Vegas, if every person on the 32nd floor was armed, that room could have been stormed and the situation ended much more quickly. I think this argument goes that if criminals know that every potential target is armed and trained to shoot to kill, they would think twice. This would require a much more systematic approach, likely including gun training (and safety) as part of school curriculum and eliminating "no gun" zones like schools, hospitals and churches.

I'm not saying this is the right approach. It would actually be scary as hell. But I think that is the counter argument to the getting rid of or restricting guns approach.

A relevant article in which a pro-gun group reenacts the Charlie Hebdo attack with an armed civilian present

Docjoe wrote:

There is another approach to this issue that I think some view as a potential solution. That would be to purposefully arm the citizenry. Although there was no way for law enforcement to respond fast enough to alter the outcome in Vegas, if every person on the 32nd floor was armed, that room could have been stormed and the situation ended much more quickly. I think this argument goes that if criminals know that every potential target is armed and trained to shoot to kill, they would think twice. This would require a much more systematic approach, likely including gun training (and safety) as part of school curriculum and eliminating "no gun" zones like schools, hospitals and churches.

I'm not saying this is the right approach. It would actually be scary as hell. But I think that is the counter argument to the getting rid of or restricting guns approach.

A coworker (and dear friend) is at the Mandalay right now. He is staying, literally, in the room beneath where all this crap happened (31st floor).

The thought that some knuckledragging, self appointed "armed citizen" with a mail order bible college degree in krimnle justus would "return fire" has me thinking the prescription you described is probably the wrong one.

Docjoe wrote:

There is another approach to this issue that I think some view as a potential solution. That would be to purposefully arm the citizenry. Although there was no way for law enforcement to respond fast enough to alter the outcome in Vegas, if every person on the 32nd floor was armed, that room could have been stormed and the situation ended much more quickly. I think this argument goes that if criminals know that every potential target is armed and trained to shoot to kill, they would think twice. This would require a much more systematic approach, likely including gun training (and safety) as part of school curriculum and eliminating "no gun" zones like schools, hospitals and churches.

I'm not saying this is the right approach. It would actually be scary as hell. But I think that is the counter argument to the getting rid of or restricting guns approach.

Or, just imagine all of the concert goers whipping out their guns and firing randomly at the hotel where they thought the gun shots were coming from. Or hey, everyone who has a gun near them. And let's not forget the drugs and alcohol that shows up at concerts.

Trained and armed staff tried to storm the hotel room and were forced back by gunfire. The shooter had cameras on the hall and knew what was coming and was fully ready for anything.

There is as many guns as people in this country. That fact doesn't stop people from shooting each other despite the odds that there will probably be a gun in the vicinity that could be used to stop the crime.

I know you aren't proposing the idea but I am not sure that the solution proposed by the NRA and other gun sellers is the best idea

I know people may have taken my comment as snarky and unhelpful when I posted it last night, but Senator Thune literally proposed that people should "make themselves less smaller". Basically that we're too good at being targets.

So maybe the real solution to this is every American wears body armor constantly. Only then will we be safe AND free.

The training approach is to stop gun deaths from stupid handling. There is some merit to it. Replace "armed" with "trained:"

There is another approach to this issue that I think some view as a potential solution. That would be to purposefully train the citizenry. Although there was no way for law enforcement to respond fast enough to alter the outcome in Vegas, if every person on the 32nd floor was trained, that room could have been stormed and the situation ended much more quickly. I think this argument goes that if criminals know that every potential target is trained and trained to resolve active shooters, they would think twice. This would require a much more systematic approach, likely including gun training (and safety) as part of school curriculum and eliminating "no gun" zones like schools, hospitals and churches.

I'm not saying this is the right approach. It would actually be scary as hell. But I think that is the counter argument to the getting rid of or restricting guns approach.

This approach would not only require gun safety, it must also require a registry of all trained citizenry in militia groups, and it would mandate supervised regular live-fire and situation training for all adult citizens in the US.

Basically, you're militarizing the citizenry.

LarryC, it's cool that you opened this thread as a way to understand how Americans can deal with the seemingly endless barrage of gun deaths, but you have to understand, this is how we Americans want it. Certainly not all of us, and likely not even close to a majority of people on this site, but in general, we're really cool with it. Americans love violence. It's absolutely our favorite way of dealing with everything, and it's long been a part of our culture. We want representation in British government? Kill Redcoats until they leave us alone. We want people to pay taxes? Send soldiers to their whiskey stills. Want to free slaves? Burn cities built on the slave trade.

Obviously, the second amendment to the US Constitution was never meant to give people access to weapons of mass destruction when it was written, but the Supreme Court decided that the people wanted it to mean that, so now we literally have the right to own weapons that can kill a room full of children in seconds written into the document that defines our government. If we actually cared, we could propose a clarifying amendment to the Constitution that changes the second amendment to something actually relevant to modern weaponry. Instead, we say it's not politically feasible, or it's too hard. We could maybe work around the right guaranteed in the Constitution with some level of regulation that doesn't impede with that right, but it's too hard. We want to be able to kill each other; deep down, that is the American spirit.

Instead of offering thoughts and prayers, we should thank the families of those who get killed for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The dead are showing the world who Americans really are: a country of people who only care about those who directly affect their lives. Sometimes people have to die for bad reasons, sometimes people have to die for no reason, but in the end we all die, so why bother trying to make it harder for someone to kill someone else? It's totally pointless, isn't it? We have background checks, for all we know, the Las Vegas shooter had passed those checks without a problem. Who are we to say that he wasn't killing people for a good reason? Maybe they were politically different from him. Maybe they were poor, and he was trying to help them be free from poverty. Maybe they were all possessed by demons. We can't know, but it's not our place to know. It's only our place to say that we might object to who he shoots, but we support his right to shoot however he wants - or maybe that's the first amendment, I get them confused.

At this point, I just want Americans to start celebrating the killers, they are the true heroes showing us all what our country is really about. It feels more honest than offering thoughts and prayers and doing nothing.

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