America's Gun Control

It is desperately sad, and seems tragic to people outside the country, but I think unless you are American you will never really understand the whole 'right to bear arms' and 'constitution' thing. Let alone the huge complexities of the political situation.

The bottom line is that many Americans will value their right to own a gun over everything else, including the lives of people. Gun laws will never be changed. People will continue to die. I honestly don't think that it will ever change. I suspect that the vast majority of Americans believe that multiple deaths are a price worth paying to keep their guns.

So r u saying genuinely that ur right to own a gun is more important than live of a child and also the truma of the children who have been in crowfire but not actually killed. If u could be told that no one child would die in mass shootings (I know this is obviously not really going to happen as cannot be 100% true but hypothetical) if u gave up ur gun would u do it?

If you have a gun in your hand, you are not being responsible - what is that gun for - to use to kill somebody - hardly a responsible act.

https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/gun-deaths-by-country/

Gun deaths by 100k population. US - 4.21. Finland - 0.21

That's a very silly remark.
There are 10000s of responsible gun owners.

Well said! And they reckon we “don’t get it”. Along come the armchair America-experts because third-cousin Bob lives in Tennessee or they’ve been to Florida more than once. I give up trying to explain things. They don’t get it. And that’s fine, they don’t need to because they don’t live here. But don’t tell us what’s wrong with the country.

Remember: guns don't kill people, people kill people.

Can’t believe you posted that with a straight face.

No one is a responsible gun owner. A gun is a killing machine. Is life so bad that you feel so unsafe?
Sounds like you value the constitution more than the lives of school children.

You licence them and limit the sort of weapons they are allowed to possess. Shotguns and hunting rifles are perfectly legal in the UK, people hunt here too (I had roast pheasant on Sunday). No one needs to own an AR15.

That’s actually inaccurate. Proportionately speaking, when you take the number of people killed in a school shooting as a percentage of the population, even Finland has a bigger problem than here. There are a lot more incidents here, but we have a much bigger population than most other countries.

And the worst massacre in a school here (in terms of the number killed) happened without a single shot being fired.

Guns are our right, per the constitution. I’m a responsible gun owner. No more reason for me to give up my guns than there is for you to give up your car.

They hit those too. It's so commonplace that it rarely hits the news. School shootings do attract more attention from the media so you're more likely to hear about them.

They have gun crime, we have knife crime.

@Whammyyammy they have knife crime too, and their knife crime alone is worse than our knife crime, never mind the gun deaths. The US homicide rate (adjusted for population) is more than ten times that of the UK.

If the Second Amendment prevents gun control, why not restrict sales of bullets instead? As a very minimum they could all be stamped, recorded and traceable?

Well partly because the initial title of the thread (now changed) was a gleeful something like Are All Americans Stupid. I realise what this thread is about, but my point is that it's easy to point at other countries' self-inflicted damage while glossing over your own, which benefits no one.

And the answer to your question is that it's more complicated than just voting. American politics are really very complicated and it's impossible to understand them without a decently deep dive into Supreme Court decisions on the transparency of political funding and judicial appointments and campaign finance and lobbyists and secretly funded think tanks and media and social media manipulation and algorithms.

Just as many Americans are convinced to be afraid of governments taking their guns, British people were convinced to be afraid of immigrants taking their jobs and healthcare. Many of the same forces are at work behind both of those beliefs.

I'm reposting the article I just posted because I do think it's a useful beginning for anyone really wanting some understanding
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-second-amendment-106856/

There’s no shortage of threads on Brexit, NHS, U.K. on mn

This is about gun control which is an interesting topic in its own right.

No one has to post on it but I don’t see why the conversation always has to come back to things like Brexit and the U.K.

The US gun situation is problematic and despite some saying a majority want change it doesn’t look like that will happen.

I’m not sure why voting won’t lead to change though if many want it to

Ah - it's time for the 'all of America and Americans are the same and I know bc I went there once or my husband's, brothers, aunts godmother lives there' thread. Always a joy when these pop up. I really can't be bothered answering all the comments here but would just beg that people do some reading on how the American political system works - the difference between local and federal powers and influence, the constitution and amendments, the supreme court and Citizens United before commenting. There is a lot wrong about my adopted country (and a lot of people trying to fix it) but it's tough to have that conversation when people are answering without actually knowing what is and isn't possible.

There is no reason to give ordinary people access to assault rifles

You probably need rather more power than that. As I said, try actually finding some stuff out about them.

You need an assault rifle for that ?

That's a valid point but a different argument. For the sake of accuracy, the estimate is somewhere between 30,000 and 45,000, much of which is due to poor preventative care in the uninsured and that number is getting better due to the Obama/Biden insurance reforms. The NHS, meanwhile, is certainly doing its best to level the statistical playing field when it comes to a lack of preventative care.
*Many of the people dying from lack of healthcare, by the way, are in states controlled by the lawmakers who want no gun control as they are the same lawmakers who refused to accept federal funds to enact Obama's health care reforms to make it affordable/accessible.

But back to the initial point. The refusal to accept gun control is a self-inflicted population-level wound that is resulting in the deaths of innocent people. Brexit is a self-inflicted population-level wound that is resulting in the deaths of innocent people.

I am a huge gun control and believe healthcare should be available to all, by the way.

@Aaron95

I do not think a constitutional convention at this moment in time would go in that direction. Not a prayer of the 2/3s needed voting for that.

@LlynTegid

I would like those in the US Senate and House of Representatives who refuse to support gun control measures to be refused entry into the UK, if they want to come here. After all, they are condoning the killing of children in a way.

I agree those lawmakers are scum, but I really don't think they care in the slightest whether or not they're welcome in the UK. It's a small island of rapidly declining international significance. I think the only things of the slightest interest to them are Rupert Murdoch, GB News and Nigel Farage, all of which/whom are more than happy to go to them.

Try looking up feral pigs in Texas and tell me how you'd get rid of them otherwise.

Americans are no more generally stupid than any other population.
However, guns are part of their culture, and the mass shootings are accepted as part of their culture.
So despite the cries of ‘Thoughtsnprayersnprayersnthoughts’ and How Sad, nothing will change. The massacres will continue.
In the same way that the poster who is a gun-toting American waves bears and cougars at us as justification, without seeing that a rifle is a different choice to an automatic assault weapon. In the same way that other countries across the world offer possible solutions, they block their ears, wring their hands and bury their children.
The only real shock is when a mass shooting occurs and it’s not in the USA.

"So you go and live in an area where these wild animals have lived for thousands of years then shoot them for daring to come near you"

What, nobody in the UK ever gets rid of foxes or rats? Just because our wildlife is smaller and less dangerous doesn't make our actions different.

To be honest, as horrific as they are, mass shootings are statistically insignificant, hundreds of times more Americans die in single shootings than in mass shootings. And more often in Democrat governed regions than in Republican ones, which is partially why there's more impetus for gun control from the Democrat side than from the Republican side.