Well I can say I haven’t changed my stance. I want assault weapons and ammo to be banned, 
% background check, including mental evaluations, rescinding of the stand your ground laws and ban on concealed weapons.
The issue is tougher than either side wants to admit. It isn’t just freedom and it isn’t just disarming. It is balancing the interests of all in a diverse nation.
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Ours is a very large and diverse country. Despite mass shootings and highly publicized gun violence most people will never personally experience gun violence. A lot of people think gun violence is the other community’s problem. Frankly a lot of people in the white community think of gun violence as a black problem. This is probably made worse by local action news every where.
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We have a mass media that promotes gun violence in many, many ways including TV, movies, local Action News and Cable Networks that run loops of mass shootings day after day.
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Most deaths by firearm (2 out of 3) are self inflicted so we are really talking about around 10,000 firearm homicides a year. Way, way too many but we are a nation of over 300,000,000 people.
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Gun violence is a big culture war issue for politicians. Both sides make money and gain influence off gun violence. That NRA and gun industry make money not solving the problem is obvious, but don’t forget the politicians on the other side who turn out for funerals in the black community but the next day rarely ever do anything positive to improve community policing and improve the lives of teenagers.
This issue is not going to be solved until Americans decide to solve it and they aren’t as long as both sides profit from not solving it. Address inequality. Address poor policing in black communities. Improve education. Take the money out of the NRA. None of it is going to happen until we tell the politicians to start solving problems. Help every young person find a job with value and a future.
Gun violence is still way, way too high. Something reasonable needs to be done to reduce it. The most reasonable solutions are to remove easy access to handguns. Serious background checks should be mandatory.
Beyond that we have to remember that we are a big diverse nation. We are never going to talk people into giving up their hunting rifles and shotguns. By the way that has been proven over and over again in countries with strict gun laws. Even England permits long guns if you have a reason to have one (and reasons are as easy as belonging to a skeet club.) Many are convinced by our media they need to walk around armed to protect themselves from the random muggers that don’t exist. Tell Action News to pay more attention to city council meetings and less to stray shootings.
Oh, here is my own pet hobby horse. Teach young people how to shoot. Take the glamour out of it for them. I know that sounds crazy but in large swaths of America guns are viewed as tools for sport and hunting, not as weapons to kill people. Part of the reason for that is rural people learn how to hunt and shoot from an early age. They don’t think of the family shotgun as a weapon to use against the kid next door.
I guess it would be wrong to call for concealed and open carry in legislative galleries.
Clearly it’s too soon.
The profit motive drives this insanity. Under President Obama people were stampeded to stock up on guns and ammunition and ridiculously high capacity magazines because some marketing genius told people they were going to lose their guns to a Black President. Now we get the Armageddon scare of nuclear war, and post war survival will require an even bigger butt load of guns and accessories because capturing Mormon food stashes will be very competitive. Through the years the marketing pitch has changed to accommodate whatever scared people at the moment; Bad Guys With Guns ™, Chicago, Black on Black violence, Mexican rapists, and my personal favorite, active shooters in crowds.
We get whatever it takes to create and stimulate a market for a product that needs serious regulation due to its inherent dangers. That whatever it takes jive has preempted any legislative relief and so allowing pols to say we have just the right amount of mass shootings and murders. People who lack a BS detector agree.
Seems as if the 2nd Amendment Worshipers could be reined in a bit if we focused on the words “well-regulated militia” and insist that there be standards for what “well-regulated” means as well as what “militia” means legally. The gun-fellaters hate the “well regulated” part because it implies oversight of some kind, and accountability of some kind; they want neither. Indulging their paranoia and rage is what this is and always has been about.
You would have to get the Supremes to reverse themselves. I think it was Scalia who decided that the two clauses had nothing to do with each other and were just randomly spliced with a comma because the founders didn’t understand how to write english.
Amerika
Is this a great country or what? We love us some Gunz
I think what you are saying is that something is going to have to happen deep within our culture, like the changing attitudes towards smoking. I agree that making guns and ammo more difficult to obtain is a good idea, but I’m not sure that it would have made a difference in the case of the Las Vegas shooter. He appeared to everybody as perhaps “eccentric” at most, but that is not a mental illness.I just don’t know of any filter he could not have slipped through.