It's fringe behavior in Europe because the desire for guns in Europe isn't the same as it is here. There's also a lot less racial tension and unrest in those countries, as well as a lot less money to be made using violence, and a lot less open space for practical uses of rifles. You can't just hand wave away all of these factors.

Thayer,

Can you list just a few of the causes I get get behind that will significantly reduce gun violence? I'm on board ending the drug war already.

Sounds like the solution is to attack American's desire for guns then

I guess we do that by getting rid of the black people.

We could also do that by not teaching people from 3rd grade on that it's their God given right to own a gun because the GOAT founding fathers said so.

I see my list needs a minor updating based on this afternoon's posting.

Things That Are LOL
- Guns
- Thayer

Hope this helps

End the industrial military complex, disarm the majority of the police force, enact a living wage.

Im not following

I'd say in general the teaching of children is a major problem here that parents and society neglect to do, yes. All mammals and all humans until very recently spent the majority of their childhoods learning from elders. Now? Not so much. They are essentially penned with likewise peers.

I think that's more a culture problem though not a "sign a law" kind of problem.

See here's where my socially liberal, fiscal conservative tendencies come in. How does raising the minimum wage help things?

What Conservatives claim their fiscal policies are: Cut taxes on everybody, cut govt spending, decrease size of government.

What Conservative Fiscal policy actually is: Cut taxes on everybody (but way more for rich people), increase government spending through pumping tons of money into the military, claim they're balancing the budget by cutting 1/20th of spending increases from social programs for poor people, run up massive amounts of debt. Claim Fiscal Responsibility!

I have a masters in sociology where I focused on social inequality. There is perhaps no stronger relationship in the inequality literature than the positive correlation between inequality and violence.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...-finds/262438/

Also, the line from the right that low taxes = economic success is just pure bull****.

First on Thayer's list of reasons why guns are desired was racial tension.

you are implying that raising the minimum wage helps to solve inequality and I'm not sure that is true

I think raising the minimum wage would be terrible in some aspects and meaningless in others, for a lot of the economics 101 reasons. I'm saying simply take all this ridiculous spending on ridiculous things and just give it to citizens for being alive. We're nearing an automated future where literally a vast majority of humans will not be economically +EV, finding/forcing jobs on them is just dumb and makes things cost more, while keeping parents away from their children doing pointless things to stay alive. Just give everyone $20k a year or something with an opportunity to make more if they so desire.

Yeah, but to borrow from DVaut, telling a Republican that their party isn't fiscally conservative is like telling a Bud drinker that it's not actually the king of beers. Fiscal conservatism means whatever the GOP says it means, and that means screwing the poor and enriching the military industrial complex.

In no way was I suggesting what you have presupposed, it's just simply a (sad)fact of heterogeneous societies.

Closing the income inequality gap will definitely lead to a lot less urban gun violence (and help a ton of other things too). That's why I'm all-in on BERNIE. He's the only one who gets it and it's basically all he cares about.

Of course I'm afraid that the government sucks and increasing it's scope is scary, but then I remember that every other candidate is going to do the same exact thing so might as well go with the guy who might also help improve quality of life too.

This article is just hogwash. Economic disparity will always increase when the value of labor decreases, it has nothing to do with income taxes. Taxes almost inherently stifle growth. Citing GDP as something important when government spending is counted in GDP is just silly. The best way to increase GDP is to print everyone a trillion bucks, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

There are arguments for a progressive income tax but it's not for economic reasons.

Yeah, that's true. Didn't mean to do that. It may or may not be true imo. But it does seem highly likely that providing a living wage, which the min wage usually isnt, would do wonders for decreasing violent crime.

My main argument for raising the minimum wage is that we can set standards for our citizens as a nation. Our standard for how we value labor has been steadily decreasing for 50+ years now. People use the argument against unskilled labor that "anybody could do it" but the point is that somebody still has to. A reliable employee who shows up on time to do their job consistently ought to be rewarded with a wage that allows them to live above poverty without further government assistance. Those unskilled laborers still make a valuable contribution to our economy and our society and it is our responsibility as a nation to take care of our own citizens.

We talked briefly about how stupid Republican budget policy was. Bernie's is monumentally worse. Promise the world, don't come up with a plausible way to pay is awful.

Massive tax cuts for a rich and deficit spending to pay for two wars seemed to be the problem there. Forget bubbles, the economic policy in the first W. Bush term was basically "smash and grab."

I'm pretty far left, but I don't believe being left-wing economically is necessarily and absolutely right. I do believe it is right for this particular time and place, with the wealth consolidation and starkly increased inequality of the last 35 years. And as others have pointed out, Republican fiscal policy of late has been "cut taxes for the rich, shred services for the poor, spend on donor industries." It isn't "conservative" in the traditional, classical meaning of that term, at all.

But that is just fallacious. All it does is disincentivise the employers hiring of labor and make more people jobless, as well as making things cost more. Society would be much better off just giving people money rather than giving people unproductive jobs for both economic and cultural reasons. 40+ hour work weeks just to stay alive is disastrous to the children, to stress and to health. If we could keep people just staying alive at 0 hours a week(which we can) think about how much better off our society would be. People could learn actually useful trades on their own time, spend more time raising their children, etc. Monotonous work just for a paycheck is the past, not the future.