Quote:
Originally Posted by Inso0
I think it's more an artifact of the argument that nearly all of gun deaths are due to pistols, and the people who own AR-15s for whatever reason they choose to, don't feel like they should be punished for the sins of the pistol owners.
I don't own any guns nor do I want to, but I can absolutely see their point, and it's not wrong.
If we decide it's better to irritate literally millions of Americans just to theoretically save a few dozen lives every couple years, then it's also very easy to argue that you're still just picking on the AR-15 when there are so many other more impactful changes that could be made.
Banning AR-15s is absolutely a toothless feel-good measure to take if your stated purpose is to impact gun deaths.
Not all gun deaths contribute linearly to some uniform measure of impact. You argument is like saying only 3,000 people died on 9/11 therefore terrorism is really a threat we need to spend a lot of resources on in order to protect lives, 3,000 being a super small proportion of our total population. We reorganized our society around the 9/11 attacks because the motive and the perpetrator matter independently of the raw number when it comes to deaths.
Gun violence from gangs and domestic disputes are almost like deaths resulting from a certain caste of people opting into a very dangerous game of tag. Of course that's not the enlightened way to view it, but that is closer to how it is actually viewed, the implication being it doesn't have much of an effect on many voters. Mass shootings however, of which there were over 600 in 2020 (defined by a shooting event with 4 or more people injured), can, especially when they happen in a vey public space, have wide ranging influences on public behavior and safety measures/expenditures.
Banning or seizing weapons designed to produce mass casualties is also an opportunity to further build the apparatus needed to have more general control over what weapons people can access. The thing is that the economic mechanisms which are making people crazy from deprivation, isolation, alienation, anxiety, etc. are not going to change. Our government is seized by corporations and even highly intelligent followers of politics, such as people ITF, are all but blind to that or the implications of that. So violent behavior is only going to get worse. Unless we are going to put calming therapeutics in the water supply we are going to face an increasing need to limit individual offensive power.
We might as well start with seizing these military assault rifles.