General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If it's about guns, cool. If it's about people, count me out. [View all]cthulu2016
(10,960 posts)And when people are discharging firearms I don't want to be around.
And people probably do discharge more firearms in the south and west. But lower population density does ameliorate the problem.
Conduct deer season in Central Park and... well, there's a Charles Addams cartoon in there somewhere.
Having lived in Washington DC during the 1980s I can attest that the gun problem is not merely about Republican survivalists reading The Turner Diaries. It was really scary! (And I have also lived through the sniper thing, which was with an M-16 variant, I think. So I have been afraid of most kinds of guns at some point or another, but I never felt the gun caused the sniper shootings because plenty of deer rifles would have been just as effective. He was killing with single shots and was using the quasi-military weapon because that was what the US Army had trained him to shoot with.)
I consider guns an issue that cannot be well defined in terms of the arbitrary dichotomies that naturally arise in a two-party political system. It is a terrible "us versus them" because there are 300 million non-symbolic guns out there.
An incredible number of people have a handgun somewhere in their bedroom. And frequently one bought from a friend that itself came from a burglary and so one.
I see assault weapons as a target of opportunity, a windfall for the NRA and all-around distraction from the problem of 300 million guns, not one of which would you or I care to be shot with.
I wish there was a way to turn the PR boon of these mass-shootings into something other than "how can we prevent these very atypical incidents?"
Because the AWB is way down any list of regulations to decrease the number of shootings. In the debate, I see it as a net loser. Galvanize the "take our guns" crowd, let the mushy middle think 'something' has been done, and all without meaningfully taking the guns.
The whole thing frustrates me, obviously.