Gun culture in the US

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last_caress
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Re: Gun culture in the US

Post by last_caress » Thu Mar 25, 2021 3:17 pm

In a perfect world we could all carry 10 lbs. of C-4 and an RPG-7 to the supermarket, have a pile of AK-47's in the bed of our Toyota with a .50 cal mounted and 2,000 rounds of ammo for target shooting, but for now I think it's easier to take away the scissors than cure our cultural retardation.

But no need to dream friends, because that paradise already exists and it's called the middle east.

Ptah
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Re: Gun culture in the US

Post by Ptah » Thu Mar 25, 2021 4:32 pm

The other aspect of calls for gun control that is just pure face-palm material to me... any time you outlaw a thing, you create a black market for that thing. You don't even have to outlaw it, just regulate it, and you get nearly the same effect.

Look now at what we already have. Regulations/controls on guns -> bad guys have and traffic guns via black markets. More guns for them, less in the hands of the law-abiding folks. Congratulations, gun controllers, you've tilted the table to put all the guns in the bad guy's hands. The very same people who actually go out and kill folks in acts of gun violence each day after breakfast. (Gangs, drug runners, etc). These people make mass-shooters and serial killers look like tryhard wimps, by death-toll numbers alone.

This just shows that figthting effects rather than causes will just make things worse.

(Ps - stop regulating drugs, too. The combo of the "drug war" and "gun control" has had absolutely disastrous, ironically awful, backwards results, as such)

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Senseye
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Re: Gun culture in the US

Post by Senseye » Thu Mar 25, 2021 5:57 pm

Ptah wrote:
Thu Mar 25, 2021 4:32 pm
The other aspect of calls for gun control that is just pure face-palm material to me... any time you outlaw a thing, you create a black market for that thing. You don't even have to outlaw it, just regulate it, and you get nearly the same effect.
That's partly true. But it still creates a significant barrier to entry.

So in Canada for example, if you want to get your hands on an assault rifle, it's going to take some serious legwork. I'm not even sure how one would go about it, but I can speculate.

First you would have to create a relationship with certain elements of the criminal underworld (biker gangs or such). They are not just going to sell to anybody who walks up an inquires.

Second, you need a decent amount of cash. Like $5 grand or more (I have no idea really).

These two barriers alone make it difficult for the average crazy person. It can (and has been done) but the crazies involved usually have to plan their craziness for years or months in advance. That alone nips quite a few potential incidents in the bud (probably most of them in fact). The crazy are impulsive from what I can tell, they have psychotic breaks they can get over if given some time to cool off.

Not to mention the fact it would be much harder, and therefor much more expensive, and much less doable to get an assault rifle in Canada if the US didn't sell them like candy to everyone and his dog.

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jyng1
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Re: Gun culture in the US

Post by jyng1 » Thu Mar 25, 2021 6:46 pm

last_caress wrote:
Thu Mar 25, 2021 3:17 pm
But no need to dream friends, because that paradise already exists and it's called the middle east.
The middle east is safer than the U.S. my bro... https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandso ... n-violence

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starla
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Re: Gun culture in the US

Post by starla » Thu Mar 25, 2021 7:12 pm

jyng1 wrote:
Thu Mar 25, 2021 6:46 pm

The middle east is safer than the U.S. my bro... https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandso ... n-violence
This is a very male-centric view.

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DJ Drug Problem
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Re: Gun culture in the US

Post by DJ Drug Problem » Thu Mar 25, 2021 7:13 pm

last_caress wrote:
Thu Mar 25, 2021 3:17 pm
In a perfect world we could all carry 10 lbs. of C-4 and an RPG-7 to the supermarket, have a pile of AK-47's in the bed of our Toyota with a .50 cal mounted and 2,000 rounds of ammo for target shooting, but for now I think it's easier to take away the scissors than cure our cultural retardation.

But no need to dream friends, because that paradise already exists and it's called the middle east.

starla
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Joined: Sun Feb 14, 2021 12:28 am

Re: Gun culture in the US

Post by starla » Thu Mar 25, 2021 7:26 pm

Madrigal wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 3:38 pm
Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa. They spent all of yesterday not disclosing the name. That was just maddening. I saw the video of a bearded guy and assumed it could be a foreign terrorist this time.
To be fair, they don't want to disclose the name before 1) they are certain he was the shooter, which is not as cut and dry to determine as it may seem. And 2) before they notify his family and/or anyone else who lives in his household and arrange protection for them. #2 especially because he's middle eastern and probably a terrorist.

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jyng1
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Re: Gun culture in the US

Post by jyng1 » Thu Mar 25, 2021 10:53 pm

starla wrote:
Thu Mar 25, 2021 7:12 pm
jyng1 wrote:
Thu Mar 25, 2021 6:46 pm

The middle east is safer than the U.S. my bro... https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandso ... n-violence
This is a very male-centric view.
Probably.

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Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Re: Gun culture in the US

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Thu Mar 25, 2021 11:21 pm

Conclusion:

Let's bomb South Asia and the Middle East to save their women. A death from a drone stroke is so much better than a death from an honor killing, after all.
Last edited by Julius_Van_Der_Beak on Thu Mar 25, 2021 11:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Roger Mexico
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Re: Gun culture in the US

Post by Roger Mexico » Sat Mar 27, 2021 8:36 am

Madrigal wrote:
Sun Mar 21, 2021 1:10 am
jyng1 wrote:
Sat Mar 20, 2021 11:08 pm
We send them little babies and they send back 2,500 hardened criminals who commit the sort of crimes we've never seen here before...
This reminds me, it happened in Central America/the Caribbean during Obama. He had a really aggressive deportation policy, I think more than anyone else before him. He deported people who had been raised in the US and become criminals. This basically changed the face of a lot of previously peaceful Caribbean islands, and yeah, they began to see crimes that had never existed there before.

I keep hearing this (and it appears to be true) about the infamous MS-13.


Originally they were a minor street gang in Los Angeles in the early 90's, albeit based in a neighborhood with a lot of Salvadoran immigrants, and thus ended up with a lot of members who had been born in El Salvador but raised in California since infancy.


Though these accounts usually highlight a decision during the Bush administration (around 2005) rather than Obama, to deport prison inmates with foreign citizenship, for in effect exporting a large quantity of hardened LA gangbangers--with extensive knowledge of black markets/smuggling/etc. in the US and at the US/Mexico border--to a Third World country with an already dysfunctional, underfunded, corruption-riddled law enforcement system, and said LA gangbangers then had a fairly easy time muscling out native competitors for control of the drug-smuggling routes (mostly to end consumers in the US) that the Central American organized-crime world revolves around, thereby rapidly growing into a gigantic international mafia syndicate.



As far as the question of US gun culture in general, at this point I'm inclined to say it's just an eccentricity of our culture that I doubt I could really explain to a foreigner.

It's a consequence of militarism, but it's also a consequence of our culture's particular modalities of customary thought about "self-sufficiency" and "personal responsibility" in a much broader sense.

People don't want to feel like waiting for a cop to show up is their first, last, and only recourse in a violent-crime scenario--which honestly I can understand, to a point, even though it's not a concern I feel myself.


I can add that, anecdotally, I've known a fair number of other Americans who are quite skeptical of gun-control proposals and cite the example of British people panicking about "knife crime" and demanding stricter "knife control" laws--in the wake of the British gun-control movement getting basically their dream legislation passed in the late 90's--as ostensible evidence that A. restricting access to a particular category of weaponry apparently doesn't have much effect on overall rates of violent crime in general and/or that B. gun-control activists are really just "nanny state" supporters in a general way, who won't stop at demanding bans on guns if they succeed at banning guns, but rather continue to push an agenda of infantilizing, authoritarian state micromanagement of how the populace conduct the details of their personal lives.


(Which is just anathema to our political culture in a very deep-seated way, perhaps to an extent that isn't true of other countries that have been able to institute much stricter gun control policies than ours with, apparently, relative ease.)

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