Almost Retired wrote:From someone who calls himself "Indianbronsnan" via substack:
“In the Land Cruiser Jeep with the MAC-10 by the seats”
But don’t get too smug, L*beral. Because where the conservative impulse might be stupid, the unexamined moderate and left wing position on guns is (Please Use More Appropriate Word). It manages somehow to have even less merit, on technical and moral premises.
For starters;
Almost all US firearms murders happen in a few cities, perpetrated by young black men with lengthy prior criminal histories, using illegally obtained handguns, and next to no one is killed with ‘assault weapons’.
i.e. laws about long guns are irrelevant to homicides in the US, the caricature of an angry white guy with a gun is only that, a caricature, and laws which materially penalize the criminals causing America’s gun problems will be laws which disproportionately incarcerate blacks (specifically young black men), and more laws restricting legal gun ownership, particularly in jurisdictions with both lots of gun laws and lots of young black men, are not going to help at all.
You have a few options:
you can take my word for the facts that I’ve stated above:
buy my top subscription tier and receive reams of data about it, if you want
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you could do what most Bien-Pensants do; take offense and ignore it
And the popularity of option three is really the core problem because a huge amount of dissembling in the debate on guns in the US, as it rages between sets of more or less educated, well-to-do white people, is that the left conflates two different issues—the schoolyard spree shooter and the street criminal of the city.
This happens because in polite company it feels a whole lot more acceptable to complain about white men with AR-15s than the typical person who murders other people with a gun; a young black kid with a pistol aged about 17, in a city.
Here’s an exercise you could try:
With this FBI UCR data in hand, calculate the percentage of people in the US murdered with a rifle of any kind, and those killed by hands, fists, and feet.
American gun violence becomes acute and high pitched in the summer, going back to a tanpura-style drone in the rest of the year. Predominately black neighborhoods suffer, as almost exclusively black teenagers are initiated into gangs with shootings, settle their trivial beefs over girls, drugs, and ‘respect’, and engage in a cadence of anti-social criminality, using guns they strictly never purchase or own legally, circumventing all kinds of local, State and Federal laws.
Consider this piece by Mother Jones: US Mass Shootings, 1982–2022. They claim there have been…128 mass shootings since 1982, with 1,036 deaths, or something like 0.2% of all homicide deaths in the United States over the past forty years.
But that’s quite strange, because EveryTown says that “there have been 277 mass shootings in the United States, …1565 people shot and killed.” since 2009.
~130 mass shootings over forty years, or over 270 in the last thirteen. This is quite the discrepancy. In a country of 340 million people, we have maybe three “mass shootings” a year or more than twenty? What’s going on? The answer of course, is EveryTown included America’s long running low-intensity warfare between usually black, sometimes Latino, gang members killing each other (and bystanders), and Mother Jones didn’t. When you look at America’s violent crime rates with an honest racial lens, you get a different picture of the country’s safety.
You may expect a link to Stormfront, but you’ll have to settle for The Economist:
Guess how we do in PISA Math, Science, and Reading scores vs Europe & Asia..
White America sits comfortably below the OECD average; Latvia is more violent.
And it’s not a poverty thing, either. When mainstream media does try to talk about poor White Americans (who outnumber the poor of any other racial group combined, by the way, and whose poor occupy the poorest counties in America, by the way), they are begrudgingly forced to admit that in “Appalachia: The big white ghetto”, “the overall crime rate throughout Appalachia is about two thirds the national average, and the rate of violent crime is half the national average.”
White America is absolutely awash in guns, and has been since the country’s founding. Its Revolution was fought with the hunting arms of its rebels, its bloody Civil War and World Wars and later conflicts were fought, and still are fought overwhelmingly, by White American Men from the poor places in America where guns are part of manhood, brawling is common, but crime is rare.
There’s really no reason anymore to suspect that more gun laws are going to make a difference in America’s genuinely bad inner-cities because there’s just no way to enforce them without offending the sensibilities of most progressives.
It’s been tried, you know — it was called Stop and Frisk. It worked. It was tossed.
And it’s not as though progressive demands stop at making American cities more dangerous indirectly via failures to adopt good policies which may be insensitive. Thanks to everyone’s favorite Esperanto speaker, George Soros, America’s cities are filled with DAs, prosecutors, and police chiefs who think criminals are good and cops are bad, and that arresting criminals for murder is racist, etc. Perhaps the worst case is one Larry Krasner, the DA of Philadelphia, whose campaign was bankrolled by Soros to pursue criminal justice reform.
^This...
As a black man, it is embarrassing to admit, but it is the cold, hard, truth.
When I was a FUDD gun owner, it was all feelz. I would say things like: "
I don't think anyone needs more than a shotgun. Why does anyone need an assault weapon? I think mags should be capped at 10 rounds. I feel all ammo should be tracked. I fine with new laws that force registration or confiscation or additional taxes, it is for the greater good. I don't care what Scotus said about Heller, I still think we should ban guns unless designed and used for sport shooting or hunting. Why won't those ammosexuals compromise (and get nothing in return)? Why won't they think of the children?"
But as a gun owner looking into different weapons, it became obvious that I would have to open my eyes to the truth, and admit reality. Who is committing all the gun violence, and why should people NOT committing the gun violence be blamed?
How are all these infringements that I was OK with actually FIXING anything? Half the stuff I was OK was explicitly illegal and/Unconstitutional. (Newsflash folks, Federal gun registries are SPECIFICALLY forbidden by law. Taxing ammo is unconstitutional. FOID requirements are unconstitutional, but people or states/counties/cities press on anyway).
Honest question. Why would a rural gun owner in Montana willingly give up what they have because some political hack is conflating issues and blaming them for gun violence in Chi-raq (or NY, Los Angeles, Philly, Detroit, Memphis, Houston, DC or Atlanta), while those actually committing crimes are provided with get out of jail cards for "reasons"....only to be back on the streets and committing more crimes within days? All while demanding "Defund the Police" and "Ban Assault Weapons"....knowing that neither one of those are going to solve the core problem. It is easier to blame someone else instead of having that uncomfortable conversation.
A lot of folks know deep down know that this is true, but don't want to admit it. That's OK, I'll admit for you.
Once I found myself in the crosshairs of illegal and unconstitutional "muh feelz" laws, it was the final slap in the face, wake up call I needed. I have no desire to see kids murdered, or to see guns shops on every corner, but having a nervous phone call with a gun rights attorney tends to provide one a certain amount of clarity, and leads to one doing a 180 on a lot of former beliefs which can make one damn near a single issue voter now.
I've committed no crimes and I'm not the source of the problems, so I'm not budging another inch. I want my damn cake back (most gun owners understand this reference).
Jealousy is a sickness.......get well soon....
