See, this dishonest style of posting isn't going to fool anyone. I dunno, maybe you think it's a clever dodge or whatever, but everyone reading is going to walk away knowing you support a US overthrowing Marduro.

Good luck getting a constitutional amendment passed.

Pretty sad gotcha. Good for Luckbox if he supported Guaido.

More anti-Maduro than pro-Guaido. Fly is running off a post in the Venezuela thread where I said Guaidó seems solid. That hasn't aged all that well which is fine.

That clearly wasn't the point. But an effort was made, I guess.

OK, thanks. It is still reasonable to believe that it can happen if people work for it.

What, prohibition did not work? It was my first thought, but you do not have to address the efficacy of the solution, if the solution is practically impossible.

You need to find a way for people to devalue their guns, culturally. I do not think fear and vilification does the trick.

Deleted it because it's a derail I didn't want to get into.

Your whole take on the gun debate is just elaborations on how nothing can be done. Gun control has worked in literally every country that has tried it. How about you just shut up and get out of the way of people doing the work?

What the ****? I just gave you a solid start point.

I still think what I think, which is that I'm fine watching a Joe Rogan segment for a few minutes and then I need to turn him off. But yeah I'm skeptical still.

Whilst I agree with the obvious point that guns are a necessary tool which could (and very much should in my view) be removed, I think they also are part of the cause. The fantasy to kill lots of people is fuelled by the ability to do it, the making of realistic plans to do it and hearing about others having done it.

Remove the guns and the desire to commit mass murder may even disappear completely and the fleeting thought may not take hold. In memetic terms, the very idea of mass murder will become less fit.

I agree, you remove all the guns, you reduce the prevalence of mass shootings (and mass murder). That's great. Now, as I pointed out with MrDeflection, you need to convince people to devalue their guns, cultrually. I do not think fear and vilification will do that (which seems to be the current tactic). If you do not have a way to do that, I could be MrDeflection and say you full of **** and are not concerned. I'm not like that though.

My doubts about removing all guns is centered on the basis there are 300-400 million of them...are you going to criminalize people who keep their guns? If you do, do you think that will create an issue, especially with how criminal laws disproportionately affect minorities?

The best way to do it, is to base it on devaluing ownership of a gun within those families who value it, for cultural reasons. How are you going to do that? That's hard task, just as hard as removing prejudices and racism inside the home.


As far as making things more restrictive, I've acknowledged that will impact homicide rates, but it's not going to impact mass shootings, due to most of them being planned well in advance. However, I'm willing to support any gun control you want to implement. I do not care about people having guns.

Which leads us to how are you going to implement stiffer gun control? Win the debate, and influence more gun owners to your side? That is great idea! Calling them a bunch for racist, murderers, and such is not the way to do it, which is what is happening.

That's why I do not think effective gun control will be implemented. I'm happy to be proven wrong, when it occurs and has the expected efficacy. Gun politics currently do not influence my vote personally, because the rhetoric on it is too divisive to really get any sort of consensus to do anything meaningful.

I'd agree with you about the name calling thingy (fear and vilification of people who disagree you may call it) as it's so ridiculous but taking on the NRA for example is a good idea.

Beyond that, like everything, it has to be political solutions and you can't start with the endpoint. Pressure has to built on the 2nd amendment alongside pressure for more gun control and that pressure has to be in the form of policy. The culture changes alongside political solutions.

Removing all the guns may take a very long time. I think that matters far less than people think. Removing the right to own a gun and increasing gun control laws is not the same as criminalising all the guns that are out there. However it's impact will be huge from day 1 and not least because a new generation will not have access to them in the same way. Over time the problem of existing guns will become a lot more tractable.

For example on some of this. If a new generation don't have guns then some who would have had guns and would have advocated for guns will now not have guns and will advocate for not having guns. The culture can change incredibly quickly as it did with smoking.

Juan would enjoy her video from today. It's on feminism and hits a few of his talking points on femininity and masculinity but she ties it into big picture views and argues that there is an agenda behind it. Emma Watson appearance even.

See, this is the wrong approach. How many real moderates belong to the NRA? It's like the entire focus on the left is on the extreme end of the gun lover movement. And if you do attack the NRA, start a dialogue, and start with very small concessions, compromise, and build on that. Again, that's not what occurs, it's basically calling the NRA and it's members, murderers. If the left wants to be the party of inclusion, it has to include people they despise.

I speak as a foreigner but as I understand it the NRA lobbies hard for guns. Afaik they are a legitimate and necessary target. It's a political organisation that has to be taken on politically.

I wouldn't target their members at all - with them we should of course have a reasonable dialogue.

So did Spiderman kill Mysterio or not?

The NRA claim to have 5million members - do you consider all of them to be on the extreme end of the movement? And as for trying to get small concessions/compromise, that is essentially what Obama tried to do for 8 years and the NRA pushed back against literally any sort of restriction, no matter how small. The attitude towards the NRA and its members didn't just start for no reason, it built over time as people saw their complete unwillingness to compromise on anything.

As far as changing culture goes, chezlaw is right that the best way to do it is to simply pass legislation. It won't change things immediately but over a couple of generations it can make a huge difference. A policy similar to Australia would probably be a good way to go about things; which as I understand it involved a phased buyback of guns where the government paid people who voluntarily gave up their guns and over time reduced the amount paid out so that people were incentivised to hand over guns quickly. This was done along with increasingly stringent application of legal restrictions on gun ownership and a few decades later the entire cultural attitude towards guns has changed.

Honestly though it's pretty hard to imagine anything actually being done unless the NRA's influence over Republicans is reduced in some way or Democrats win a super majority in the senate and both of those things seem impossible currently.

Edit: Just realised this is the media thread rather than gun control thread. This discussion should probably move to the correct thread.

Yeah maybe well named can do the honours and move it. There seem to be guns everywhere and we need some control

I understand the tempation to dismiss Qanon, here is why we can't
WaPO pimping qanon. I've called it official disinformation but it's hard to argue that too much here because nobody but perhaps one person believes it anyways. But everyone else is ignoring it. This WaPO piece says we can't ignore it, but most of it is nonsense because it's wapo.

Always claiming to be superior, morally correct, standard liberal thought process.

OMG LOL

/thread