America's Gun Control

@Florenz I always get that one wrong! No idea why. It's a choice between a Grizzly Bear with an assault rifle and a naked Red Neck. Somehow the Grizzly Bear always looks more sane.

America has all of those issues too, in most cases far worse than the UK, and you also have dozens of mass shootings every year.

Good god, the high and mighty snobbery on display, rednecks, dense, stupid apart from the coasts... the contempt is widespread, a huge problem in America which imo is a main driver in the culture war, which feeds into entrenched attitudes so nothing changes.

To Americans, asking them to give up guns is like asking Brits to give up cars. Look at all the car deaths, don't you care about children? But most people think, I like my car, and it might one day be necessary in an emergency. I keep to the rules and am careful and responsible and when my child is old enough I'll teach him or her too. Not like those lunatics who do xyz. Might even take a photo of them behind the wheel. Do we just accept traffic deaths as the price for convenience and freedom? - well, yes. We do. Yes I know it's not a perfect analogy, don't bother explaining that guns =/= cars. The risks/benefits are what I'm getting at here

Also, how, exactly? There are more guns than people, and more coming in via smugglers. 3D printing is another route. Why SHOULD the responsible gun owner be left unprotected when everyone knows the criminals, who perpetuate most of the shootings anyway, certainly won't.

There's crisis after crisis in America. The people are angry and demoralised - this shooter was. There's deaths of despair, economic precariety, opiates, fentanyl, rising crime, a hugely medicated population, troubled families. Its 20 years since Robert Putnams book Bowling Alone where he charted the decline in civic institutions, clubs, churches, local sports. And that looks like a golden age now.

There are definitely things that can and should be done - come on now Biden, your hand is on the wheel - but ordinary decent Americans are as selfish and stupid as the rest of us.

*right to BEAR arms.

Doesn’t help when a Republican state representative posts pictures like this of her family

*write

I think the problem is that while many Americans may support greater gun control, they have no confidence in the government (whichever party is in power) actually being able to make it work. It'd just lead to restrictions on law-abiders, criminals would still be able to get whatever guns they wanted, and the police would still be armed to the teeth.

Gun politics is really complicated in the US and I don't think it helps to right off the gun lobby as Red Necks, because if you never seek to understand their point of view, you will never get change. And change is desperately needed.

The French also have a constitutional right to bare arms, but they don't suffer the level of mass shootings in schools that the US does. It has become a cultural phenomenon in the US, chosen by attention-seeking, deranged narcissistic individuals. The rules on gun ownership are only one part of the problem.

We happily accept very different rules around gun ownership because we have a very different gun culture. The only people who own guns here tend to be farmers and other people who go pheasant shooting or who belong to a pistol shooting club. They are all part of a community that use guns together for a specific communal activity. You have to be a member of such a group to have a licence and no group is going to allow a mentally ill person to be a member. This means we have three layers of checks - police checks, medical checks and community checks. We see this as a means of ensuring safe gun ownership - like having a driving licence for using the roads. We don't see it as an impediment.

The US doesn't have this cultural backdrop and history. The number of weapons in circulation is vast. You could never impose our system without consent and there is no chance of that consent being readily available any time soon. I don't know what the answer is, but I would probably start with something much more limited than what we have. What I find shocking is that ordinary people can buy assault weapons. These are not designed for shooting a pheasant that you plan to eat later. They are designed solely for killing people. When the Founding Fathers of the US introduced an amendment giving Americans a right to bare arms, they could not have envisaged that such weapons would ever exist. There must be a line in the sand that can be drawn that allows people their historic constitutional rights, but does't allow unfettered access to very dangerous modern weapons.

Not many people are advocating for a total ban on guns, just greater controls on the types of guns that can be bought be the general public (e.g., assault weapons), who can purchase them (by closing legal loopholes that allow people to avoid background checks and raising the legal age).

Unfortunately, this ‘nuance’ is deliberately obscured by certain politicians and groups on the right, who paint any attempt to introduce any increase in regulation as ‘the Democrats trying to steal your guns’, even where polling shows that the majority of right wing voters would actually support proposed policy changes.

No it's not. You have young people who are largely rejected by society killing each other on the streets here as has been pointed out by many on this thread. Families in food poverty, fuel poverty, increasing inequality. Children drowning in the sea because this country won't let them in legally through safe routes with your multimillionaire PM chasing cheap votes chanting Stop the Boats. Your police system has just been proven institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic. Your house is on fire.

The UK has its problems, no one is doubting that, but they don’t have school massacres. The one in 1996 was enough to change gun laws.
Unfortunately the US isn’t taking any steps to protect their school children. The same messages are rolled out each time - usually ‘you have our prayers’ but still the deaths continue

But our house is in order. No school shootings for 27 years.

The US had nearly three hundred just in the last year.

So suck it up. Our house is in order. The US, on the other hand, is a trash can fire.

Of those who died from gun violence this year, 338 were teens and 60 were children.

This was from an article a few days ago.

I don't really understand how you could ban guns in the US. Who is going to take them away from the people who refuse to give them up? Who is going to stop people smuggling them in illegally? Prohibition didn't work, the "war on drugs" didn't work, how is a "war on guns" going to go any different?

Well actually no no u don't need to u can be genuinely concerned about other countries terrible events and equally upset about ur own countries problems. Being defensive Just shows the level of conditioning people have over the years where children die and its fine and normal. Pointing that out isn't a bad thing! It's a shame it isn't done morr maybe less children will die in future as its obviously going to keep happening. As horrific as that is.

If you dish it out you gotta take it.

People in the UK should get their own house in order before criticising other countries.

Yesterday's killer had seven guns. Seven! No one needs seven guns. They were bought legally, despite the killer's parents saying they shouldn't have guns as not stable.

There is no reason anyone needs to own seven guns.
Outside of farm owners and those who need to be able to protect themselves from large animals such as bears, no one needs one gun - let alone seven.

As for Christmas cards with the family, including children, holiday guns.... I simply don't get it. Since when did guns represent a happy Christmas!?!

Refer to*

You're being very high and mighty with your responses, chastising people for lumping everyone together, yet all your responses refer the english people as being all the same, so you're either a massive hypocrite, or just as stupid as the gun loving morons.

Take your pick.

Despite what Republican politicians and right wing media might tell you, a significant majority
of Americans do want increased gun control.

Even among Republican voters:

77% support universal background checks;
85% support preventing people will mental illnesses from purchasing guns; and
37% want to ban assault-style weapons.

Obviously the percentages are significantly higher across the population.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party (bought and paid for by the NRA) take extreme positions that often aren’t supported by a majority of their own voters. However, they are safe in the knowledge that most Republicans will continue to vote them based on other issues (which is why ‘culture war’ stories are usually at the forefront of right wing media).

I've often wondered what it was that broke the cycle of violence in Northern Ireland. For nearly 30 years both sides remained entrenched and justified another round of 'more of the same' as if this time it would achieve what all the previous times hadn't. And then, eventually, the Good Friday Agreement came and amazingly, almost all of the people on both sides voted for it.

What changed? I've a theory that it wasn't anything that happened in-Province. I think it was the Srebrenica massacre three years prior. For generations, both sides of the Northern Irish divide had deluded themselves that their perspective was the one that mattered and everyone else was wrong. Then, live on our tv screens, they saw what sectarian violence and neighbour killing neighbour looks like when it's someone else. It wasn't far away, alien, foreign ... it was people that looked like them, in some cases even people who went to the same churches as them and worshipped the same God they did. And they noticed that every single civilised part of the world was watching in utter horror at the depravity and cruelty of those pathetic, wretched people. And not long after ... I think the penny dropped. They realised that this was what the world must also be thinking of them. Their stupid parades and bonfires and marching across counties to be outraged by the mere presence of someone not all that different to them. Wretched, pathetic, losers. And they woke up, and changed. And that change has now lasted for almost as long as the Troubles did.

Americans will one day face the same epiphany. Apologising for them isn't saving them. They need to hear what the world thinks of them. That their society is depraved and full of wretched, pathetic, child-killing losers. That includes all the yee-haw gun-toting rootin'-tootin' varmint-hunting apologists. Willing to sit by and watch children die and do nothing about it just because they like shooting bobcats? One day, they'll notice the world sorrowfully shaking their heads and realise they are being held in utter contempt. Everyone is just waiting for the body-count to rise to a level that even they can't stomach and the penny will drop, they'll find a way to change, and everyone will wonder what took them so long. It's easy once you realise that everybody else thinks you are the stupid ones.

Not as easy as you might think. Read the second amendment.