But Seriously...

Wrong. He’s not pointing a gun at you.

 

So the Indianapolis FedEx shooter was a brony.

https://denvergazette.com/wex/india...cle_fe81cb67-01f7-5afe-ad32-eb16c775a93a.html

Sad part (aside from being a brony) is that his parents tried to get him some help previously.

 

I thought I'd read he'd been committed to a facility, and his shotgun was confiscated. Last I checked being adjudicated pretty much barred you from buying a firearm, so where'd he get the rifle?

 

this example is my argument for background checks on private transfers — ANY gun transfer, for that matter. I’ll take it a step further and say there should be legal liability on the gun owner if he even lends it out to someone and they do something criminal with it (even like at a shooting range, he gives it to someone to try out, that person has a background and turns and shoots his girlfriend with it). There’s a reason I am so cautious with who is allowed to use my firearms, even around me, and even with immediate family. Only one you know for sure about is yourself.

 

I'll only loan mine out if the person is literally going shooting with me that day. They don't leave my sight. Only my closest friends even know what is in my gun cabinet, and I bet they only really know about a few. There might be five people on the planet I would let use my guns without me around, and they have their own so would not need to. Dad, brothers, two best friends of 25 years, that is it.

 

I go shooting with a good friend and I know everything in his gun cabinet, unless he’s added something recently, but when I shoot with his guns its with him, and he provides them to me at the range, not out of his cabinet to transport on my own. I don’t think he would ever let anyone use his firearms without him being present. There’s just too much that can go wrong and too much liability.

 

oh, yeah to clarify: I will NEVER loan mine out as far as out of sight. I meant like as far as someone else shooting it with me, going hunting with me, or even holding it.

 

1. Which recent crimes were committed by people who bought a firearm privately and would have been excluded from purchasing through a dealer? What real effect would background checks on private sales have?

2. In order to enforce background checks on private sales, we must first establish where all the guns are - i.e., registration for every private firearm in the U.S. This will never happen. Background checks through dealers work because there are multiple parties involved and each party up to the end user has an interest in following the law by keeping track of the firearm - manufacturer, distributor, shipping companies, dealer.

3. I'm all for passing laws that will actually reduce crime, including mass shootings of innocent, random victims. Unless someone can point out some particular circumstance I've missed, I will argue that private background checks will have basically zero effect on crime. It will, however, get a lot of otherwise law-abiding middle-aged white guys caught in stings set up by their sketchy friends in order to get a reduced sentence in some unrelated crime. I hate hearing the term "common sense laws" because all it means is that lots of people think it's a good idea. I would prefer to pass effective laws.

4. In 2019 there were 66% more suicides (23,941) by firearm than homicides (14,414) by firearm. Between 1982 and March 22, 2021, there have been 975 victims killed by mass shootings. It gets our attention because it's terrifying and random, but it still really doesn't happen that often. Reducing the firearm suicide rate by 10% will save more than twice as many lives in one year than eliminating all mass shootings in the past 20 years.

 

What ZZR said, I concur.

However, it's not as simple as "saving the largest amount of lives", because to be honest, we don't really give a shit about the suicidal beyond their immediate circle. Mass shootings, it can be argued, are a form of terrorism, and man, do we give a shit about stopping that.

Also, there's a huge gap between "medically crazy" (ie, depression, anxiety, schizo, etc.) and violent. I'm depressed because (gestures at everything), but no meds, no threat to harm anyone, and lifelong gun owner. I'm also just over 6 years since a suicide attempt I made with a gun I bought at a pawn shop. Had it been successful, the argument wouldn't have been "oh, the guns were to blame", it would have (rightly, in my opinion) been a lack of mental health resources, support in a variety of forms, and some crippling life circumstances that I had no help with at a friend/family level. Had a gun not been an option, the attempt would have been made using some other thing (debatable, but some logic to it).

I emphatically do not agree with the notion that someone decides how crazy is too crazy to own a gun for a host of reasons. Crazy is fine, taking a good hard look around this motherfucker you SHOULD be crazy. Violent is not fine, and that's a harder thing to pinpoint, identify and control. Considering the tiny percentage of gun owners that commit mass shootings, any restriction on the whole is more likely to have hundreds or thousands of false positives in the name of "prevention", and I don't see how that is going to be acceptable any time soon, especially with the lack of precision. In terms of crime prevention, it's the gun owner's equivalent to "stop and frisk": sure it may work, but the negatives associated with the overwhelming number of false positives are going to get a lot more attention than the crimes supposedly prevented.

Taking a good hard look at the field of psychology, it's a terrible idea to use some of their work to determine gun policy.

The issue with the violence isn't necessarily the guns, they are just slightly more convenient than a bomb, poison, a knife, or a vehicle to commit these acts.

I don't think you can restrict a gun supply for the tiny minority of violent incidents that are mass shootings, not when it's so ingrained, and when there are hundreds of millions of firearms available in circulation already. It's not a supply issue, it's a mental health and a violence issue. To some extent it's a radicalization and a community issue as well.

 

Without question, we are a country in desperate need of therapy and higher education. But we're not about to pay for that, either.

 

I think a lot of this comes from our decline in community and social capital (again, "Bowling Alone" by Putnam is the major pop-science book on this).

Therapy and higher ed isn't sustainable for all 330 million of us, and they aren't nearly as helpful as we'd like them to be.

If you're thinking about harming yourself and others, you don't think you're wrong...you don't see yourself as a victim, or a victimizer. Most of the time, the violent see themselves on the side of the righteous. History is written by the victors, no? Of course we were justified in whatever horror we visited upon you, otherwise why did God annoint us with victory? Of course we were justified in our killing of Iraqis, we are the righteous. Of course that cop is allowed to kill that unarmed civilian, and of course it's legal....he's upholding the law!

You need someone in a position of trust to intervene and correct your thinking. That can be a therapist or a teacher, sure. It can also be a friend, a church-goer, a parent, a coworker that you have time/inclination to hang out with. All of those people are simply less present in our lives, on average, than they were a few years ago. They are more distant, have less influence and are trusted less. Perversely, we have less privacy online and more in our actual personal lives: houses have gotten larger for "entertaining", but the most common effect is families isolate in different corners of the house with ample room to avoid disturbing one another. Work consumes more of our lives, not just in terms of the 8 hour work day, but commuting to it, preparing for it (in terms of education, training, etc.), and it's providing less security in both a real (financial) sense, but also a communal sense. I don't have time to go bowling with colleagues after work, and given how easy it is to be accused of harassment or impropriety, I avoid socializing with coworkers as much as possible.

It's not that the guns are too easy to get, it's that there are too few people in our lives that indicate guns aren't a solution to whatever problem we're facing.

Also, with a lack of community, there's a void. The people willing to fill that void often aren't exactly angels: in some areas, this is how gangs are literally formed. It's how cults are formed. And we're seeing now, it's how online radicalization is fomented.

 

The decline of "family" is a dangerous concept, because what that means to most people is a stereotypical nuclear family and a return to 1950's values that simply cannot happen (y'know, with all the racism, sexism, homophobia and rampant unreported abuse). I think we're in the early to middle stages of figuring out how to support people and families who consciously choose not to do the traditional nuclear family for whatever reason, and we're wildly behind the trend because I think it was early 2000's where we crossed the threshold of more kids being part of "broken" families (ie, where parents aren't married & don't live together) than the opposite.

For lack of a better term, it's the lack of someone in your life willing to slap the shit out of you when you start to talk about/act in the direction of violence. Family, friends, church, coworkers, therapist, teachers, whatever. In the Big Lebowski, Donnie and the Dude had to talk Walter down and put his gun away. Now Walter is less likely to have those people, that kind of interaction, and much more likely to have online echo chambers encouraging him to fuck with the Jesus. The gun isn't the issue, it's a constant in either scenario. The lack of social 'brakes" to stop or slow violence is what's diminished. In my opinion, those brakes could have been applied in a lot of different places, at different pressures and by different people, and so it's harder to pinpoint their absence.

 

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1384590883585236992

 

i bet he gets handed both second degree charges, acquitted of third degree murder.

we’ll see how appeals go. I would be very worried if I was a small business owner in the greater twin cities area.

 

Guilty on all charges.