On Wednesday evening, a rifle-toting gunman murdered 18 people and wounded at least 13 more in Lewiston, Maine, when he opened fire at two separate locations—a bowling alley, followed by a bar. A manhunt is still underway for 40-year-old suspect Robert Card, a trained firearms instructor with the U.S. Army Reserve who, just this summer, spent two weeks in a mental hospital after reporting that he was hearing voices and threatening to shoot up a military base.
While the other late-night talk show hosts stuck to poking fun at new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Thursday night, Stephen Colbert took his rebuke of the Louisiana congressman to a whole other level.
“Now, we know the arguments,” Colbert said of the do-nothing response politicians generally have to tragedies such as this. “Some people are going to say this is a mental health issue. Others are going to say it’s a gun issue. But there’s no reason it can’t be both.”
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I think the issue that a ban will take years to effectively cool the possession of assault weapons is not actually an issue worth stalling over. While a lot of people tend to look at a law as “if it’s not immediately 100% effective it is garbage” in reality if you call for a refund based recall it will take a chunk out of the total guns out there. Patience is nessisarily.
Seizures of weapons in illegal transport or market will eventually account for another chunk. Guns are regularly stolen from home break ins so a lot of personal arsonal will find it’s way into black markets. Over time when the things can be reported when used in gun clubs or spotted in the wild you take away a lot of the “fun” quotent of owning the weapons making surrender much more likely. The legal ramifications of finding the weapons in self defense cases motivates from another end. If you can’t use them for self defense then the argument of what the point of having them gets stronger. A lot of people own these weapons in part for the same reasons they do expensive cars - the joy of using them and the cashe of bragging and showing them off. While 2nd amendment stans might hoarde them for ideological reasons they probably are gunna be forced to make them hard to find and make sure they don’t mention them to young children who might narc on them making kids getting their hands on them less likely.
The more effectively useless and detrimental you legally make something over time you do wear away at the trouble and anxiety required to maintain ownership. What the US should aim for is long game de-escalation. If people don’t start the process it just means the payoff is gunna be that further down the road.
You seem to downplay significant factors.
If you could manage to swing such a thing and, through the course of the many years needed, get it through Congress - a laughable notion - and could withstand SCOTUS - more laughable yet - how much would it cost to actually implement such a buyback?
How many people do you believe would participate?
I think you significantly overestimated likelihood of any success from such a venture while you underestimate the political damage and lost political capital of such measures.
Oh? From what metrics and sources do you arrive at such a conclusion? This reeks of bullshit.
Could you elaborate on this? It makes no sense at all.
This, too, reeks of mere opinion and personal bias.
“2nd amendment stans”? How deeply unserious.
Probably seems to be doing a lot of lifting here.
The irony here is you’re correct about providing offramps but seem to entirely miss that the most significant factors aren’t related to the firearms themselves and certainly aren’t focused on those used in the minority of violence.
It’s beyond incredible you’re getting downvoted for providing rational observations and arguments.
It’s as if the thoughtless liberal migration from r/Politics has established a circlejerk here.
Look at all this naysaying bullshit. Honestly 99.9999% of people aren’t going to lose their life over having a gun or not. Maybe a few guns will remain hidden or in black market or whatever, but how many more school shootings will it take before we actually try something instead of just pointing out the reasons it won’t be easy and throw up our hands?
It’s disgusting and I’m tired of it.
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Then there’s no reason to ban them.
How it went is Australia (trust me, we had shitloads of guns, buddy) was, people who wanted to hand in the small selection of banned guns, did, the people who didn’t, didn’t. Then regularly the cops do an amnesty day, where you can hand in any illegal guns, no questions asked. If they change their minds. People still own guns. You don’t ban them all, just the unnecessary ones, and you regulate who can buy them, kinda like getting a really easy drivers licence.
Yeah, let’s discuss this.
What was Australia’s peak firearm ownership per capita? How many firearms owned by how many citizens?
Of those, what types of firearms were those made up of? How many were semi-automatic rifles or handguns?
How much money would be required to have bought them all out at fair price in Australia? Now, how about for the US?
I suspect your trust me lmao indicates a poor understanding of the differences between the relevant statuses of the two.
Mm hmm. What types of firearms do they own?
Are there no restrictions at all?
Ah, so there’s an arbitrary delineation of necessity and there are, in fact, bans? Interesting.
Fortunately, we already have this courtesy of the various disqualifiers from purchase.
Assuming we’re all talking about those legal firearms, anyway.