The Thread Where We Discuss Guns and Gun Control

[Sommerswerd]

This thread is wild! Also... I'm not "D" while currently "UI/WI" so... carry on, I guess?

Server liability laws don't come into actual play unless a drunk leaves the bar and gets into a crash where people are injured or killed.

So one way I conceptualize the utility of "Dram Shop" laws is... the hypothetical person, driving home, at night from work, on a late shift, with the bare minimum insurance on their vehicle, because that is all they can afford, who has never had so much as a traffic ticket.... who is hit by an uninsured drunk driver and catastrophically injured.

Now this person cannot collect anything to pay for their medical bills from the uninsured drunk driver... and because they have minimum insurance, the insurance they have is woefully inadequate to cover their medical needs from the accident. So the business/establishment that served the drunk driver alcohol becomes another possible source to provide money to pay the person's medical bills.

As an aside, I'd love to hear folks thoughts on this.

 

[Birdjaguar]

That is why it is a good idea to have uninsured motorist insurance.

https://wallethub.com/edu/ci/uninsured-motorist-coverage/9647

 

[Farm Boy]

Yeah, there are a lot of good ideas that we should make people pay for. Why would they need to drive while not flush with cash? Used cars are cheap and affordable, I hear. Why would they begrudge the totality of not so optional good ideas? Obviously something socially wrong with such a regressive. But yar, bad business is bad. A better heeled one would have profit margin to spare from their 401ks to be socially responsible, or whatever capital investment lingo is of the day.

You want people to overbuy insurance for those that can't? Sure, that's what insurance is for. Build it in as a necessary baseline of all policies and subsidize this governmental regulation. Insurance is supposed to smooth economic volatility, not put in a baseline participation history.

 

[IglooDame]

You were the first person that weird I met on the internet, so it really stuck with me! (And I came to CFC wanting to cure aging!)

Also, I'm giving the thread an opportunity to get back on track. Have you changed your mind since then?

*checks our join dates* Yep, those were the days, eh?

I've not had any reason to change my mind, no.

And anyone hoping for any further amending of the US Constitution, sorry, it just seems inconceivable for the next decade or three. As far as the 2nd Amendment, this is why:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx (plus the complete partisan gridlock of DC lately).

Are there any proposals on how to reword/rewrite the 2A? Aside from either deleting it entirely or removing the "well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" part?

 

[EgonSpengler]

And anyone hoping for any further amending of the US Constitution, sorry, it just seems inconceivable for the next decade or three. As far as the 2nd Amendment, this is why:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx (plus the complete partisan gridlock of DC lately).

Are there any proposals on how to reword/rewrite the 2A? Aside from either deleting it entirely or removing the "well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" part?

I agree, there's zero chance of an amendment to the amendment in my lifetime, and I think it doesn't matter (much) what the popular opinion is. I'm not aware of any proposals to revise it, but I haven't looked. It's pure fantasy, and would be politically damaging to any politician who proposed it, with not enough upside. Even the Giffords Law Center, which is focused on gun laws, doesn't seem to bother even addressing the idea (although I've only skimmed their site). There might be some semi-serious paper on the idea out there somewhere, purely as a thought exercise.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Are there any proposals on how to reword/rewrite the 2A? Aside from either deleting it entirely or removing the "well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" part?

Americans are too much in love with gun violence and using guns as a tool to solve problems for any chance of change. If school shootings cannot change peoples' minds, nothing will.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Americans are too much in love with gun violence and using guns as a tool to solve problems for any chance of change. If school shootings cannot change peoples' minds, nothing will.

I don't think it's that simple.

Pew Research Center, 13 September 2021 - "Key facts about Americans and guns"

According to some polling they did last Spring, Americans rate "gun violence" as the 5th-most concerning problem, very close to a number of other things. The cost of healthcare is #1, by a margin, then the federal deficit, violent crime, illegal immigration, the Covid pandemic, and gun violence are all pretty close. (I'm curious how the distinction between "violent crime" and "gun violence" was explained to respondents.) Overall, 48% said gun violence is "a very big problem", 24% said it's "a moderately big problem", 22% said it's "a small problem", and 6% said it's not a problem. As you might expect, there were massive differences between constituencies, pretty much all of them predictable. 82% of Black respondents said gun violence is "a very big problem", but only 39% of Whites. 73% of those leaning Democratic said it's "a very big problem", while 18% of those leaning Republican said so. 57% of White Republicans said it's either a small problem or not a problem at all.

Still, 72% of all respondents said it's at least a moderate problem. 53% of Americans say laws should be stricter (which is down from 60% two years ago), 32% say the laws are "about right" (up from 28%), and only 14% say they should be less strict than they are (up from 11%).

The poll didn't include a question about cracking down on "ghost guns", but even among Republicans who are themselves gun owners, 65% support requiring background checks for private sales and for sale at gun shows. Roughly a quarter of Republicans who themselves own a gun support a ban on "assault-style" guns and on high-capacity magazines. (In both cases, support among Democrats and non-gun-owners is higher; Republicans who own a gun are the least-supportive group of all these ideas.)

This poll didn't ask about holding manufacturers responsible, or about restricting permissible advertising, or anything like that. It also didn't ask about the 2nd Amendment.

I'd be interested to some kind of analysis of the influence of the gun lobby on policy, and of the representation in Congress of these various constituencies. My hunch is that the pro-gun side of the debate is over-represented in the halls of government, but I don't have any numbers, that's just my gut sense of things.

 

[Lexicus]

Are there any proposals on how to reword/rewrite the 2A?

I see two different routes.

1) get rid of it.
2) add a couple paragraphs describing the militias and how they are supposed to work, and make clear that gun ownership is only a protected right in the context of the militia.

 

[Spidernova]

Don’t forget that suicide is included in gun violence stats, which doesn’t seem right to me.

 

[Lexicus]

Don’t forget that suicide is included in gun violence stats, which doesn’t seem right to me.

Suicide should absolutely be included in gun violence stats. It is gun violence. It is something we should seek to prevent.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I see two different routes.

1) get rid of it.
2) add a couple paragraphs describing the militias and how they are supposed to work, and make clear that gun ownership is only a protected right in the context of the militia.

Getting rid of it would be the way to go. Then we could get down to actually having conversations about guns in our society, without having to defer too much to what the Founding Fathers thought about guns in their society, and without proponents being able to stymie the conversation just by citing the 2nd. One worry I would have with revising it is that it could open a whole, new thing for everybody to argue about and further distract from the important conversation. I can start the debate already: I haven't given a ton of thought to a revision, but off the top of my head, I think I might remove the bit about the militia, not expand on it.

 

[Farm Boy]

Raise that fence Lex. Maybe some barbs.

 

[Lexicus]

Raise that fence Lex. Maybe some barbs.

Government-guaranteed guns and militia training, but only to people who join the paramilitary wing of their local trade union council

 

[Farm Boy]

Not the fence I was talking about. I meant the one holding in the seething despair. Monetizing it from both ends.

 

[Lexicus]

Not the fence I was talking about. I meant the one holding in the seething despair. Monetizing it from both ends.

I assume that by "monetizing it" you mean using marketing to convince unhappy men that their problems will be solved if they spend $1500 on an AR-15?

 

[Sommerswerd]

I assume that by "monetizing it" you mean using marketing to convince unhappy men that their problems will be solved if they spend $1500 on an AR-15?

Is is that much? I'm not looking it up because I don't want gun shopping getting added to my Big Brother algorithms

 

[El_Machinae]

Is is that much? I'm not looking it up because I don't want gun shopping getting added to my Big Brother algorithms

Not necessarily, but if you want the shoulder thing that goes up, yes.

Don’t forget that suicide is included in gun violence stats, which doesn’t seem right to me.

Suicide should absolutely be included in gun violence stats. It is gun violence. It is something we should seek to prevent.

Both of these resonate with me, which I translate as "if you're including suicides in your graph/chart, I think that information should be placed very apparently".

Like, either "incl suicides" in the title or such that suicides themselves leap out as obvious. But this is a "know it when I see it" thing. It's an important variable in any such chart, given its dominance in total gun-related deaths.

 

[Farm Boy]

I assume that by "monetizing it" you mean using marketing to convince unhappy men that their problems will be solved if they spend $1500 on an AR-15?

Nope. That wouldn't be the one for this fence.

 

[Berzerker]

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/police-experiment-reveals-alec-baldwin-163737648.html

Baldwin says he didn't pull the trigger but he might have pulled the hammer back and it slipped or he let it go

thats what I thought happened when he denied pulling the trigger

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Americans are too much in love with gun violence and using guns as a tool to solve problems for any chance of change. If school shootings cannot change peoples' minds, nothing will.

School shootings should not be a driving factor in decisions about gun control. They should be weighted a tiny amount against gun crimes in general.

Better would be to address what makes people turn into shooters for general crime, but we're in the 190s without useful policy discussion, so I don't anticipate it.