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The left pursues stricter gun control. Safety nets. Mental health services.
Conservatives fight to prevent those things.
You literally have two parties, one of them known for being neutral and looking for solutions, and the other known for deflecting and scapegoating... and you still have people not seeing the difference. And people think coalitional governments are good. We can't even handle 2.
Oh look, another "both sides" useful idiot.
Fun fact: one "side" has no desire at all to curb gun violence in the USA. They just get upset when their stochastic terrorism backfires.
If the issue really is the radical left, why aren't there also issues in leftist countries?
America has a pretty impressive social firewall around it, we don't get to see what its like in other countries. The average median American voter believes countries like Sweden and Norway are nations of unpopulated wilderness with old-fashioned, quaint villages where people wear silly hats and bake nice desserts for tourists.
Republicans*
There was a cartoon/comic/image I saw back in the trump shooting. About how they realised the shooter was a white guy, and the audience breathes a sigh of relief saying 'race war postponed'.
I wonder what will happen if "the wrong type of person" is linked to a mass shooting, and what will happen next.
A lot of these contests just a points game, but in this case if one particular side is able to dominate the narrative then they'll use it to actually hurt people.
So I get the game is stupid, but is a game where real people can get hurt.
90% of the time it’s maga
Well yeah but that one time it was a trans person, so they have to fix that problem first before they tackle the real issues.
Closer to 97 iirc
More specifically Christian Nationalists.
It’s the same picture.
Most people in the US already know the government isn't going to do shit about the shootings. In fact, any attempt to do so is met with hostility and constant pushback.
The fuck you want me to do about it, go door to door rounding up all the guns by gunpoint? We're living under a dictatorship and 150 million of us are completely insane
I mean, tbh, we have over 600,000,000 guns and trillions of rounds of ammo in ~45% of the pop's hands, no registry to know who/where those are, and at those numbers we're a larger "force" (no organization) with more guns and ammo than most of the world's militaries combined (and larger/more than ours "alone," well, combined with our police actually). Sure they have the fancy toys, but..
You'd have to go door by door and search literally every house AND somehow make sure the people to be searched don't stash shit before you get there with someone who has been searched, and you'd have to get them all (not miss one hidden in floorboards), AND you'd have to restrict home depot purchases going forward, AND somehow not get smoked by a "cold dead fingers" ass motherfucker, all so we can make sure our totally not fascist government is the only one possessing arms.
Good fucking luck. Even if someone could which is a big if, idk if they should considering that last bit.
If the political temperature was about a thousand degrees cooler, it would be trivial to create a long-term buyback program and a lot of sensible laws and a simple registry for responsible owners.
I had to sell my entire firearm collection when I fell into hard times and didn't get close to what I paid for them, if they had a program that paid even 75% of a gun's value you would have people lined up around the block to sell off their shitty old handguns and rifles they never use.
But america will never, ever, ever let go of their weapons as long as everyone is afraid of their neighbors and their government.
That's a big if too lol. But even then AUS' buyback only got about 700,000 firearms handed to the government, at the cost of over $700 million to taxpayers. At 600,000,000 guns, that'd be $6.E11 if ours cost the same as theirs did in '96. Something tells me we don't have scientific notation money just laying about.
And historically in the US buyback programs only do get those shitty revolvers and Jimenez arms, at best someone prints a bunch of chairmanwons or DIAS and exploits the system.
Then we'd need to define what the sensible laws are, and somehow make it so they're not abused, which is easier said than done.
And tbh they have good reason to be afraid of their government. Less so neighbors, but them too sometimes, shit gets violent over here, and sometimes you do need to protect yourself.
I mean...
To fix it we need free and available mental healthcare, a population with something they don't want to lose, or reasonable gun laws.
None of those things have a chance of happening right now with the current government.
Even if trump passes gun control of some sort it's not going to be reasonable. And that's the only one of the three that are plausible.
But right now no one wants trump to pass any gun laws. Even if Dems get House/Senate in midterms, trump will veto anything reasonable.
I’m skeptical of the idea that this can mostly be boiled down to mental health (or at least that mental health reform alone is a valid fix) and not social issues. Mental health is certainly a component, but if we actually listen to psychologists they’ve been saying that the massive amount of news around shootings makes further shootings more likely. There’s also no diagnosis or mental illness attributable to the majority of mass shooters to treat to begin with.
Using the Kirk shooter as an example, according to his friends he was incredibly deep into channer-style irony poisoning. What is therapy supposed to do to fix that? You can’t therapy someone into better mental health if they don’t want it.
Not trying to jump down your throat or anything, this is just one of my regular soap boxes.
Imo it's part of a larger project along with criminalizing homelessness to attack people with mental illness.
If you go on reddit or other social media it's not in common to see people calling for a return to whatever to their mind imagines as old school mental institutions with forced institutionalization for anything they don't like
You can give the people in Gitmo 24/7 access to a psychiatrist, but they're still gonna be depressed because that is the logical result of their condition...
I wasn't saying:
Do any of these things and it will 100% solve it, ignore everything else
I could have specifically said that, but I figured people would be able to understand that on their own. I didn't say today was Monday either, some things you just have to have faith in the reader
The APA has repeatedly claimed that mental health is not a major factor in mass shootings.
I actually almost completely forgot that APA is an actual psychology association, not just people who decide how papers should be formatted.
I don't think "mental healthcare" is a silver bullet (pun intended) to fix the problems. That's not going to fix the consolidation of power and wealth. That's not going to get people shorter work weeks, and more quality time with friends and family. That's not going to break up the media megaliths that profit from anger inducing feeds.
Health care will help, but the problem is conservatism and it's shitty brother capitalism.
Actually, this wasn't such a thing until the Kirk shooting and the entire right wing decided in 20 seconds flat that every Democrat murdered Charlie Kirk. So they'll be getting a more fact based version of that for the foreseeable future. We're sick of taking the high road.
Nah, every school shooter have been defaulting as Muslim since forever and more recently trans, until it was found that, once again, it's a cis white boy.
Letting the Trump administration be in charge of disarming Americans seems like a poor move for everything and everyone except the regime.
Like anyone will rise up against the fascists. Most of the gun enthusiasts are siding with them.
most of the liberal or leftist gun enthusiasts i know take great pains to not advertise anywhere that they own and use firearms.
I would bet there's more ready to do that than you are assuming there are. Either way, if you're an American you should be figuring out how to join that team now.
Sometimes they just announce the identity before they even know
That's going to be the norm for this administration. The only thing that "matters" is the very first thing to be said. All the media blindly run with it and the Reich wing media won't do a correction later on if it's proven to be otherwise.
vomits guns
In my country the news mentioned that is was the third shooting in 24 hours. That is America alright.
The culprit is American culture, and most people feed the beast that creates it. Maybe it's time to detach from Americas values and lifestyle.
As an American...
I would love to. Please get me the fuck out of here!
don't stop your enemy when they're making mistakes.
if the far right wants to cannibalize itself, they can go for it.
We're so far past that. We're at the brink of the military being forced to choose between following their oaths or obeying the administration
But sooner or later, hopefully, people will see the pattern. All the political violence is coming from the right... Every time. They just lie, every time
Have I been missing something?
The recent shooter of Charlie Kirk didn't write any manifesto or anything like Luigi Magione. Both had massive impacts and people are just waiting for this shooter to tell them what to be angry and do something about it, but in reality it'll just confirm what they think but most won't do a single thing to act on these manifesto. I believe people should actually act in their own little way to make things better. Be that what you dedicate towards, form community with others. Create social networks of caring about the people near to you. Volunteer in events, participate in organizing.
There has to be more than just anger that boils till the water evaporates.
Since the Kirk shooting, there has also been the ice shooter any now a church shooter.
I think the day of the church shooting (the more recent one) there were two other mass shootings.
It is quite odd to become numb to this. I remember coming home from school and seeing the columbine shooting on every channel, it being a discussion for weeks and months.
They used to be rare enough to be named. Now they are so common I have to qualify which recent church shooting I’m talking about. I saw a headline recently that just said “3 mass shootings today” and I didn’t even bother to find out the details.
The details barely ever change, the response is always the same nothing, the people in power just don’t care. Over time even if you do care you just become exhausted. There’s literally not enough time to process one mass shooting before the next.
And now fascism has arrived and has decided it wants to make war against the citizens, so it’s a bad disarm. The loudest gun owners are excited about this turn of events, but they aren’t the only gun owners.
Part of me thinks this is all to the benefit of the owner class. A scared population is easier to control, just promise them safety. An isolated population that has no third place to go to due to the threat of violence is easier to exploit. They don’t fix it because it’s working just fine for them.
Yeah kirk was weeks ago. This is America, blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne
Honestly, with the church shooting, most of what I saw outside of here was people most doing the old arguing about less guns vs more guns and the usual pro-gun people complaining that making it "political" by talking about preventing such things is rude along. But also there is a political movement that is responsible for like 80% of such non-state violence (and also at least the one that publicly celebrates things like police and ICE violence). And I was immediately primarily interested in how the narrative about identity/motives would go...