American gun politics and the Obama administration.

[skirtboy]

Recently, there has been a great deal of discussion in certain areas of the media about the ramifications of Obama's election on gun laws and politics in this country. While a considerable amount of this has been poorly-conceived, dogmatic drivel from certain sectors of the right-wing media, gun control has historically been one of the polarized issues between the two major parties, and it is interesting to consider in which way that tendency is likely to manifest itself.

Personally, I find it unlikely that there will be much substantive attempts at gun regulation during Obama's administration, other than attempts to revive the ill-conceived Assault Weapons Ban(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_Weapons_Ban), which was allowed to expire under the Bush administration, and is likely to be pushed in order to distance the incoming administration from the previous one. Even if Obama could be clearly labeled as "anti-gun" - which is highly difficult, as he's rarely addressed the issue in his political career -, neither he nor his Congressional allies could afford to risk offending a large voter block (a large amount of the votes were cast primarily for economic reasons, and he would lose support in traditional Republican strongholds if he were to threaten something considered to be a fundamental American right.) Further, no represenative or senator wishes to look ineffectual, so the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning D.C.'s handgun ban is likely to act as a brake on gun legislation (Backing a law that was later overturned can and has cost congressmen a few percentage points in reelection bids, which can be enough to decide a tight race.)

What are your thoughts?

 

[Dissonance]

What

how is an assult weapons ban a bad thing?  Like OKAY if you're going to go hunting you can use a pistol or rifle you're not going to use an auto to riddle a deer up with 50 bullets.  Same with personal protection I'd love to see you hide something that big on your person and even if you DID if you were in a situation where you had to pull your gun for protection it would most likely be a ROBBERY or something and in that situation a submachine gun would deal a lot of collateral damage to both the environment and the people.

No, assult weapons are gay.

 

[___]

The best defense against foreign invasion, street crime, or a power-grubbing authoritarian government is the threat of an armed populace. Our government, being comprised entirely of street thugs and authoritarian assholes, is naturally opposed to armament. Republicans are no different than democrats on this point, they just pretend they are when carpetbagging paranoids and rural people.

 

[Dissonance]

The best defense against foreign invasion, street crime, or a power-grubbing authoritarian government is the threat of an armed populace. Our government, being comprised entirely of street thugs and authoritarian assholes, is naturally opposed to armament. Republicans are no different than democrats on this point, they just pretend they are when carpetbagging paranoids and rural people.

That might've been true 100 years ago but with the way weaponry and technology is going an armed populace will pretty much do shit against seige weaponry.  I understand the whole DEFEND YOURSELF AGAINST THE STATE argument but it doesn't work anymore unless everybody fucking owns a tank.

Also I don't trust random faggots, ESPECIALLY in the USA, to own weapons.  Imagine if you armed everybody across the bible belt, you can pretty much say goodbye to every non-white, non-christian, and non-straight in the country.

 

[___]

Hey if resistance fighters in Iraq can build IEDs out of the crap they have laying around to bust tanks and military convoys, so could an armed populace against a theoretical military coup. They don't have enough tanks to hold a country the size of a large U.S. state together under oppressive rule, they wouldn't have a chance against an empowered public.

I am sympathetic with concerns over stupid assholes owning weapons, but you do have to remember the stupid assholes are not the only people who will have them. For every whack job there are a dozen non-whack jobs, and for every person in danger of lynching there are a dozen people who, given the weapons, training, and confidence, could provide a handy deterrent. You have to remember the principle of threat of equal force as a deterrent to violence doesn't just work for cops, in fact it works especially poorly for cops, because they're massively outnumbered and tend to lack respect from the lawless. Social ostracism and potential victims who make themselves 'hard targets' work especially well to deter everything but organized crime, which is what we really hire our own pet mafia - a.k.a. government - to deal with.

Furthermore gun control is never and has never been much of a barrier to weapon ownership for determined criminals, in the same way prohibition is not effective in stopping drug abuse. It only forces otherwise law-abiding people to deal with organized crime for self-defense and further empowers organized crime by providing them a bigger market and more demand. Even in countries where weapon control has been the rule for decades or more and lawfulness is deeply ingrained in the social consciousness, like Japan, organized crime still has no problem arming itself and other would-be criminals simply get creative with improvised weapons. It's not like you can take away every sharp object, heavy blunt object, and potential projectile in society, and even if you could criminals would just train in martial arts and still have an advantage of force.

 

[FlippyD]

With consideration to the main topic, a lot of pro-gun people get antsy when a democrat is voted into office because they're afraid their guns will be taken away. In fact, gun sales since the 08 campaign have seen a sharp increase because of Obama being a democrat. Gun makers however no that it doesn't matter who takes office because hardly any drastic ever happens.

As for assault rifles I hardly see any reason why anyone would need one practically, however I don't feel that means we can have none ever. I think a countrywide mandate on making the process of getting an assault rifle be as rigorous and thorough as possible for cases where owning an assault rifle might come up (i.e. pirates from Somalia shooting up the southeast for no reason.)

Imagine if you armed everybody across the bible belt, you can pretty much say goodbye to every non-white, non-christian, and non-straight in the country.

Except all the non-whites, non-Christians and non-straights would have guns too, and they're usually A, better shots and B, safer with them. The "targets" are the ones who would need the guns for protection and thus use them responsibly.

 

[skirtboy]

The "assault weapon" ban has nothing to do with assault rifles. The latter is a well-defined military term, while the former is an arbitrary tern does not exit outside of certain gun control laws. A weapon can be defined as an "assault weapon" if it has a certain number of features, nearly all of which are purely cosmetic. The only feature that has any validity  is ammunition capacity, which is not applied intelligently. For example, the Marlin .22 (the most popular small game rifle ever sold) is classified as and "assault weapon" in New Jersey, because it holds more then ten rounds of ammunition, despit the fact that the .22 cartridge is considered useless as a weapon in military circles, as it causes relatively little tissue damage (which is the reason it is used for hunting squirrel and rabbit). While politicians chose the term "assault weapon" to invoke the image of criminals walking down the street blazing away with AKs, the law had nothing to do with automatic weapons, which already were, and remain, illegal under federal law without a special permit.

 

[___]

Does the Marlin .22 have an internal magazine or something? In any case that's retardly arbitrary.

 

[Marcus]

Who cares?

This isn't targeted at you, Skirtboy, this is politics in general.  Why do people worry about shit that doesn't even matter?  Gun control laws?  THAT'S THE LEAST OF OUR WORRIES.  Our economy is down the shitter and we're worrying about stupid, pointless stuff like ABORTION and GUN CONTROL.  Don't get me wrong, homosexual rights and abortion laws are important to me but the economy is more important than caring about whether Sue Bob Murphy gets to buy a rifle without being hassled.

I don't want another auto-weapons ban.  I don't want any tighter laws on gun control.  Purchasing a fire arm and getting licensed are difficult enough.  It's the illegal selling of firearms we should be cracking down on.  People who purchase foreign weapons and sell them out of their trunk.  Buying a legal, taxable gun is part of the 2nd amendment.  I'm supporting the USA by purchasing a weapon.  Buying from black market dealers is terrible and that's what we need to stop.

And yes, i love guns.  Guns are fucking awesome.  Anyone who says guns suck has never held one and fired one.  I love going to the range and practicing my aim.  It's great.

 

[___]

Gun control might actually be important in the coming decades if we don't find the magic wand of Tenser's Economic Restoration. Increasingly corrupt law enforcement combined with lower budgets, higher unemployment, desperation, confusion, religious and racial tension? Yeah, good time to own an assault weapon.

 

[Marcus]

And all of those stem from economical issues.  Cops aren't paid enough, increased taxes cause the big businesses to outsource to foreign countries, religious tension stems from politicians focusing on pointless issues (like abortion and homosexual rights), and racial tension stems from the mess we call "US Customs" and how we're trying too hard to keep people out and not enough to educate and nationalize aliens.

Not everyone in the country is out to get ya but we Americans are quick to panic.  Incidents like Columbine and the Virginia Tech shootings are rare but when they happen we get into a frothing frenzy and start pointing our fingers and random people to "fix" something that was never a problem to begin with.  Shit will happen.  There's no way to avoid it.  Schools aren't getting shot up on a daily basis.  Hell, they're not getting shot up on a YEARLY basis.

But, the good ol' USA is king at jumping to conclusions.  Rather than restrict the importation of drugs and weapons or work with countries that are the hot spots of illegal exports to crack down, we'd rather take out the middle man.  The expendable guy.  Like chopping off the head of a weed, it doesn't work.  You take down a dealer, and three more pop up to replace him. 

The biggest fallacy with American thinking is that everything is an issue.  It isn't.  We, for whatever reason, cannot prioritize.  There are people who voted for a candidate based on their race and religion, not the issues they presented.  There are people who WANT to vote for a candidate because they support one thing, but they HAVE TO vote for the other candidate because of some sort of obligation (whether it's family ties, religious reasons, or personal reasons).  I'm conservative, but I voted for Obama because I know he rejects the horrendously retarded 700 Billion Monoply Money bill in favor of a plan that will actually strengthen our economy.

Once we pull out of this recession, then we can worry about minor stuff like taking away people's fire arms and ensuring homosexual couples can get a piece of paper signed that says the state recognizes they're living together.  Until then, nothing else matters.

 

[___]

And all of those stem from economical issues.  Cops aren't paid enough, increased taxes cause the big businesses to outsource to foreign countries, religious tension stems from politicians focusing on pointless issues (like abortion and homosexual rights), and racial tension stems from the mess we call "US Customs" and how we're trying too hard to keep people out and not enough to educate and nationalize aliens.

I agree with your overall point, and the bit about our immigration process, but the issue of corruption is a lot more complicated than just pay rates for cops. It stems from a wide variety of sources, from mismanagement to influence of the huge amount of organized crime that's sprung up thanks to drug, gun and immigration prohibition to simple human error and disregard. I would actually love to see cops paid more on the baseline (I worked with cops, and got paid less than they did, and for the job it really is not much) but that's not the cure for all our problems. As corruption increases though, the importance of an armed public becomes larger and larger. Their does need to be an ultimate consequence for a government when its political processes fail, and it needs to be occasionally hung over the government's head when it starts undermining those processes too much and too often.

Oh also, outsourcing is a much, much bigger topic too, but tax rate has very little to do with it. If you want to start one, by all means! However I don't think it's directly related to gun control so I won't comment further

Not everyone in the country is out to get ya but we Americans are quick to panic.  Incidents like Columbine and the Virginia Tech shootings are rare but when they happen we get into a frothing frenzy and start pointing our fingers and random people to "fix" something that was never a problem to begin with.  Shit will happen.  There's no way to avoid it.  Schools aren't getting shot up on a daily basis.  Hell, they're not getting shot up on a YEARLY basis.

But, the good ol' USA is king at jumping to conclusions.  Rather than restrict the importation of drugs and weapons or work with countries that are the hot spots of illegal exports to crack down, we'd rather take out the middle man.  The expendable guy.  Like chopping off the head of a weed, it doesn't work.  You take down a dealer, and three more pop up to replace him. 

Once again I think it's a lot more complicated than that. Border control and good foreign policy don't go very far in controlling the black market. It is pretty screwed up how our current system of incentives for law enforcement emphasizes quantity over quality, but even a good solution to that issue would not fix the huge holes in a policy based around prohibition.

The biggest fallacy with American thinking is that everything is an issue.  It isn't.  We, for whatever reason, cannot prioritize.  There are people who voted for a candidate based on their race and religion, not the issues they presented.  There are people who WANT to vote for a candidate because they support one thing, but they HAVE TO vote for the other candidate because of some sort of obligation (whether it's family ties, religious reasons, or personal reasons).  I'm conservative, but I voted for Obama because I know he rejects the horrendously retarded 700 Billion Monoply Money bill in favor of a plan that will actually strengthen our economy.

Once we pull out of this recession, then we can worry about minor stuff like taking away people's fire arms and ensuring homosexual couples can get a piece of paper signed that says the state recognizes they're living together.  Until then, nothing else matters.

Totally agree except on Obama's economics (another, slightly less bad kind of bad IMO), but I think it's off topic, so let's leave it for another thread.

 

[Cirras]

While owning a gun isn't a bad thing, anything beyond a handgun is nuts. Who needs a semi-automatic rifle to defend themselves?

 

[___]

The guy who's facing down a paramilitary death squad for violating some oppressive draconian law. Like, I don't know, the ones that show up when you don't pay your income taxes or grow a few pot plants in your backyard. The ones who shoot your dogs for fun, double-deal with the people they're supposed to be stopping, kill innocent people and non-resisting, non-violent offenders in brutal, illegal no-knock raids, and have otherwise been involved in hundreds of corruption scandals across the country.

What we're seeing here is the far side of what happens when you give a state too much power and then ask it to take away your only means of resistance; its goals start becoming twisted, its laws draconian, and its officials corrupt and self-serving. I'm not saying you need to take up arms against the government today, or even in twenty years, but we are down a definite path that a hundred other societies through history followed, and the last thing you want to do is make sure you have no way to fight back if the time comes because of irrational fears about what your neighbor wants to do with his weapons. You have much, much, much more to fear from a government with a license to kill, a giant cache of weaponry, and an increasingly violent and militaristic police force than you do from the guy down the street with the wild eyes and the trucker hat, or the gangbanger who would rather steal your wallet and shoes than work for them at McDonalds. Between the two of them, and every person like them in the whole world, they kill and harm a tiny fraction of the number of people killed and harmed by brutal, genocidal dictatorships who inevitably rise wherever the people are unable to defend themselves with equal force.