The Virginia House of Delegates approved an assault weapons ban on a party line vote Friday.
Fairfax County Democratic Del. Dan Helmer’s bill would end the sale and transfer of assault firearms manufactured after July 1, 2024. It also prohibits the sale of certain large capacity magazines.
“This bill would stop the sale of weapons similar to those I and many of the other veterans carried in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Helmer said.
Most Americans, myself included, don’t like giving up personal rights for “security.”
To draw a parallel that I figure you’ll agree with - far-right rhetoric is on the rise and I think we should do something about it. As much as I disagree with Nazi rhetoric, I absolutely don’t think the “solution” to this problem is banning pro-Nazi speech by law. We could easily point to Germany and say “well they had a massive issue with pro-Nazi speech. They banned it, no more Nazi rhetoric! It’s that easy!”
The root cause of far-right ideologies (or far-left for that matter) isn’t that free speech exists, it’s unhappy people radicalized by their living conditions and culture. Germans lived through a terrible economic depression after WWI, where a lot of people experienced homelessness and malnutrition. Fascism gave everyone a job and fewer people starved, plus they stood up militarily to countries that levied the economic sanctions which ruined their economy in the first place. From their point of view, fascism saved them. Fascism didn’t happen because the government allowed pro-fascism speech to occur, fascism happened because the horrible economic and world-status of Germany pushed people too far.
Have you thought about what the root cause is behind school shootings and other senseless killings? A cursory understanding of American gun rights and laws, and how they’ve changed overtime, proves that the existence of certain weapons platforms is absolutely not the root cause. My grandparents could have literally mail ordered full-auto machine guns to their front door, yet school shootings literally never happened. If public access to guns = school shootings, they would’ve been 100 times more frequent when your grandparents were kids.
Even if we poofed guns out of thin air, the people who would shoot children would still be around. This “solution” does nothing to treat them. It also does nothing to prevent others from becoming as jaded and sick in the head. The end result is still a bunch of radicalized, fucked up people who will lash out at society in other ways besides school shootings. Maybe when the start blowing up schools, stabbing kids, and running them over with huge F-150s, the DNC will start saying “Public access to fertilizer, pointy metal, and cars is the issue! No more fertilizer = no more school bombings! It’s that simple!”
You: American exceptionalism; " nah, if it worked ; we woulda already done it!"
Me: I’d rather fix the root cause issue that pushes people to murder children, instead slapping a bandaid over what is 100% a social issue. Maybe we should take real effort to stop climate change. Maybe we should better fund our schools and make college free. Maybe we should increase minimum wage so anyone who holds a job, regardless of what it is, can support themselves and their family. Maybe we should make medical care free. Maybe we should restructure our prisons so they focus on rehabilitation instead of cruel punishment and slave labor. Maybe then, our society wouldn’t breed people that murder children because they’re so upset and jaded after growing up with zero prospects of having a happy and fulfilling future.
But our politicians would lose power and money if they fixed these issues, so they’ll instead say that AR15s are what’s murdering babies and if you don’t support banning them, then you’re pro baby murder. And people like you will gobble it up.
Disregarding that “most” is probably incorrect and the long history of pro-gun candidates stripping rights from people, who cares what you “don’t like”? The south didn’t like giving up slaves. Hungry people don’t like rationing. We’re under no obligation to politely tolerate immoral, harmful things because you don’t like them.
Those are also some extremely dubious use quotation marks around security.
It’s inarguable that for most people, gun laws that actually work are vastly safer than selling guns to anyone who can fill out a form. Every single person who has ever been killed by a “responsible gun owner” (or a firearm that a “responsible gun owner” failed to secure) would have had better odds under gun control.
But the pro-gun community doesn’t care because “fuck you, I got mine”. Their security comes at everyone else’s expense – sometimes even at the expense of their own family.
Way more irrelevant that you realize. You’re not actually advocating “we should do something about extremism and mental health” like you think, you’re advocating "we should do something about extremism and mental health while continuing to maximise the violence they’re able to cause with easily accessible firearms.
Oh you mean the things we’re already able to do because there isn’t a self-absorbed death cult preventing it?
When car and truck attacks started happening, areas with a high number of pedestrians had vehicle blocking installed. The attacks never killed remotely close to as many people as semi-automatic weapons did but waned anyway.
Bomb attacks just aren’t happening, despite the pro-gun crowd constantly claiming they will the moment they stop selling guns to people with a history of abuse.
The reality is that building bombs requires far more time, effort and risk for usually underwhelming results. The Boston Marathon bombing killed three people. Sure, Timothy McVeigh still holds the scumbag high score, but where are the copycats? Probably in jail, since buying enough explosives to fill a truck gets you a visit from their feds.
Then of course the token “but knives!”, which only works if you don’t actually think about it. Terrorists aren’t choosing knives, even in the rare cases where a gun isn’t an option.
A moderately strong door can stop a knife attack. It’s much safer for a coo or armed guard to engage someone with a knife. Stab wounds are more survivable than gunshot wounds. Stabbing multiple people takes far longer and is more physically demanding, especially as they take wounds by being in arms reach.
Can we acknowledge just how low a bar the gun laws set when “someone stabbing as many school children as they can before they’re subdued or killed” would be a measurable improvement?
But I’ll tell you what: If you give gun control the same 20 years we’ve politely given your dogshit solution, every time a school is attacked you can come to us and demand solutions.
And I promise we’ll do better than blaming video games and gay people, taking millions of dollars of donations from knife manufacturers and staunchly opposing any revisions to the law for the rest of time.
So, what you’re saying here is that people are having to make choices about which rights they want. That’s not a very strong argument, IMO. I don’t like Republicans trying to strip rights from LGBTQ+ people, or trying to cram religion down my throat. I don’t like Dems trying to take my guns. Civil rights are civil rights, end of story.
Patently false. Theodore Kaczinski is perhaps the most famous one, but there was also the Weathermen, the Boston Marathon, at least one attempt on the World Trade Center, the McVeigh/Nichols bombing in Oklahoma City, the Columbine murderers had improvised bombs that failed to explode, women’s health centers, historically black churches… The list goes on, and on, and on. Bombs have been used in many, many cases, and in some of the worst mass casualty events in US history. (The Oklahoma City Bombing killed 168 people; the 2017 Las Vegas shooting killed less than half of that.)
If that’s supposed to be my view, then I guess yours is “rights are granted by slavers and rapists 300 years ago and may never be changed for any reason, even as public attitudes switch”.
Sure, we can play the list game if you want. You name a bombing, I’ll name a shooting and we’ll see who runs out first. If you want to play hard mode, we can limit it to the last 10 years.
So in in other words, the only reason anybody died at Columbine was because they had guns.
Sure, we can play the numbers game too. We can start at Oklahoma and count up “bombs vs guns” since. Honestly though, do we even need to? By your own admission, a single “responsible gun owner” got half way to a literal truck full of explosives that demolished a building.
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It’s just the pro-gun crowd. They can’t shoot people over the internet, so they brigade, downvote and drown out.
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