Moderator Action: This thread has been merged into the gun control thread because the topics are similar, and we have a gun control/firearms quarantine. DIscussion of gun control, etc. is limited to this thread. --LM
There's a pretty consistent and overwhelming body of evidence that more guns equals more violence and death. I could literally type a post with about 100 links and images and still fall short of the decades of research. Here's some to start:
When guns go up, murder goes up, suicide goes up, domestic violence goes up, and mass shootings go up. When Connecticut introduced a gun permit law, violence went down in the state. When Missouri repealed theirs, gun violence went up. As a country, the US is pretty much average in the wealthy world in terms of violent crime rate, it's just that way more of our crime turns deadly because of guns.
100 people a day die in this country at the hands of a gun, with 60-66 of them by suicide. And for a country that claims to loooooooove its veterans, two dozen kill themselves a day with a gun.
The current political climate has seen a lot of really bold (by American) standards that have been missing from the liberal wing for decades. Plans like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All run into the simultaneous battle of popular opinion and a supreme court probably licking its lips to eviscerate grand progressive causes, and yet they still are promoted and broadcasted and fill the air waves. A really serious gun control platform - one that would actually work by, you know, getting rid of and criminalizing guns, - is... nowhere. The only presidential candidate who proposed anything really progressive was Eric Swalwell, and he polled lower than literally like everyone. I get that the topic seems completely and utterly impossible, roadblocked by not only congress, but the president, the supreme court, and their interpretation of the constitution, but it was Elizabeth Warren who just said "I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for."
Like every other candidate so far, when she was asked about gun control, she punted the question, and it remains one of just a few topics one of the candidates most bold and adamant about during this campaign has been completely punchless on. That hardly makes her alone.
The NRA is in financial shambles. Certain rudimentary and mostly surface level fixes have very widespread popular appeal. But doesn't it all start with someone trying to move the overton window? We got people to jump on M4A well before it was even in the realm of Democrat discourse, why can't someone do the same for guns? Why is the right to own some mass murdering machine more important than like, being able to exist in school? To not being murdered by your boyfriend? We have kids in literally cages. Our guns did nothing to stop that.
Anyways; please explain why you think Dems have crapped the bed on this subject even moreso than usual, what it might take to fix it, and if it's true that Sandy Hook was the end of any gun control.
