Gun Control & RKBA

Not just Clinton's loss; a general edging of voters to Republicanism. Look at the graphs I linked to. First off, like I said, the gun-owners see through the AWB bullshit that is the first and foremost Democratic response to gun control. It makes them motivated to vote Republican because what they see is Democrats making up excuses to advance making gun ownership a privilege extended by the government instead of a right protected by the government. After all, handguns are used in 90% of gun-related murders and 50% of all murders annually, yet they're focusing on banning "military-style" weapons. They also get pissed at being blamed every time somebody is murdered with a gun. So they vote Republican. You ever wonder why poor rural white people with chronic health issues keeps pulling that Republican lever? Because they figure if the Democrats will bullshit so openly about things that are demonstrably false, they figure that Democrats are also full of shit about concepts that are less tangible and more abstract, like the importance of education, universal health care, labor unions, etc.

Yeah, there are other reasons, like evangelical Christianity and the load of con men and bullshit artists that get them voting against their best interests. But guns are a real, tangible thing that they can take apart, customize, practice with, and use, and when you tell people that they can't own an AR-15 with a pistol grip AND a telescoping stock anymore because it's "too dangerous", they discredit you as an ignorant person determined to stay that way because you don't like guns, gun rights, or gun owners. And they can be very single-issue on this.

Remember, if Gore can won his HOME STATE, or if 269 Florida gun owners hadn't felt threatened by Gore's (and the Democrat's in general) position on guns, he would have been the 43rd president, and not Bush the Leastest.

Also, I've posted about this before in other threads over the last few years. Some aspects of gun control I support, like universal background checks. But those ALWAYS get back-burnered to a new AWB and a magazine-capacity ban. It doesn't turn out anti-gun voters because anti-gun voters don't really care if there are limits and restrictions on a product they will never buy, but the gun-owners sure as hell will get motivated.



If we had President Clinton in 2016 and a comfortably Democratic Senate and House after the 2018 elections, would the Covid-19 pandemic in the US have been as bad? As I type this the national Covid count death count is 645,000. How many lives would President Clinton been able to save by responding an order of magnitude more effectively than Dump? How about Clinton and a supportive Democratic House and Senate? Half? A quarter? A third? That's between 161,000 and 232,000 people. So far.

Between 1985 and 2017, a total of 15,545 people were murdered with a rifle. Now, the actual number is almost certainly somewhat higher, because the Federal statistics record that there were 42,398 people murdered with "firearm, type not stated". But of the known types, 20,401 were with shotguns, 15,545 with rifles, and 254,507 with handguns. Of the known types, that's 5.4% with a rifle. So if you extrapolate it to cover the "not stated" guns in the same proportion, you get ~17,102 people murdered with rifles. Over 33 years. That's about 518 a year, on average, and not adjusted for population growth.

And of course, because the AR-15 and AK-47 and Mini-14 are subset of rifles, and "assault weapon" rifles are a subset of the AR-15 and AK-47 and the Mini-14, the number of people actually murdered with an "assault weapon" rifle is a lot lower than the 518 number.

Getting cleaner air saves far more lives than 518 a year. Getting better health care saves far more than 518 lives a year. Making birth control and abortion readily available... well, that probably saves more than 518 people I year. I don't know that for a fact but I do know we rank poorly in maternity deaths and infant mortality, and that one hospital in 7 is owned by the Catholics and they won't do a lot of reproductive rights procedures for religious reasons.

That 17,102 number represents 33 years of rifle deaths, or the last 3 weeks of Covid deaths. Like I've been saying, it's a lot of politics and political capital for very very little positive gain, IF AT ALL.

We can get more than "marginal" results by addressing the root causes of violent crime. We did a couple of big ones back in the 70s but even now we are seeing the crime rates creep up in the Republican states as their multi-decade war on birth control and abortion means more kids are coming to adulthood in crappy situations where violent crime is a way of life.

We need to get back in charge to make the social changes that nip crime in the bud: women's rights, education, clean air, food, and water, less poverty, better jobs, probably some kind of UBI. But we have to be in charge first!



Mass shootings are deadly because of the determination of the shooter and the location of the shooting. Taking away pistol grips and limiting magazine capacity isn't going to change the outcome, nor will it discourage the people that do that kind of thing. You have some sort of random insane person opening up at random time in a random place with an intention of killing random people. The place is usually some sort of retail location, which is basically a box with a limited number of doors. Unless a very brave person is in the right location to do exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, there's going to be a lot of injured and dead people until either the shooter flees, kills himself, or the cops engage him.

I don't pretend there's a solution to this problem. It's a problem that, formally, was virtually literally unthinkable. But starting in the late 80s when a mass shooting happened it started getting a lot more media coverage. Cable TV, satellite communications, the 24-hour news cycle, all this make a local event a national event. And then it gets discussed and analyzed and talked about until it's normalized. The internet and social media makes it worse because now the "lone wolfs" can connect in an ideologically bubble across a geographically huge area, and people can find others to talk about them long after their physical circle of friends and family have moved on from such discussions. What was unthinkable was now thought about and discussed... a lot.

But as I've proven above, a mass shooting may be a high-casualty incident but it pales in comparison to the number of people killed annually. About 400 people are killed per year with a rifle; that's about one every 22 hours. But somebody is killed with a handgun every 1.25 hours and with a non-gun weapon every 2 hours.

The Founding Fathers couldn't conceive of a lot of things, which is why we have to be flexible in applying the Constitution. For example, the 4th Amendment has been expanded to electronic media, and the 1st Amendment to blogs. A strict interpretation of the 4th Amendment would not protect the contents of my computer because the data isn't on paper!

And I'd really like to pick for myself what I think I need to defend myself, and not have you tell me, thankyouverymuch.



In our winner-take-all system and with gerrymandering, a relatively small number of votes can tip races. The Republicans are slowing shrinking in numbers but they keep slicing districts finer and finer to give themselves a bare majority, but part of winnings means TURNOUT. And the Democrats have handed the Republicans multiple clubs to be beaten with at the polls, all for policies that are at best marginally effective but will drive that extra 1 or 1 percent of Republicans to the polls to vote out the "gun grabber Demon-crat".

Regarding crime, non-gun crime fell as well, as well as non-violent crime. As I stated in a previous reply, the anti-pollution and pro-woman policies enacted around 1970 began paying off in about 1989 or so. Statistics indicate that most violent criminals are between the ages of 15-24. We stopped poisoning our kids with airborne lead from gasoline in the early 70s and as a result, when they grew up they were far less likely to be violent, dumb, and short-sighted (symptoms of lead poisoning). And when women stopped having to be broodmares, they were more likely to have children when they were mentally, emotionally, and financially ready to. So the pool of kids that were likely to become violent teenage criminals shrank sharply starting in the late 1980s and we saw a drop in violent crime as a result. I doubt it was planned or foreseen, but simply by doing the right thing, by recognizing women as sovereign over their bodies and trying to reduce pollution, we reaped massive benefits a generation later.

I doubt gun ownership fell that much, to be honest. It seems more likely that people stopped admitting to anonymous voices on the phone that they had guns in the house. Remember, some states required that "assault weapons" and "high-capacity" magazines be registered and a lot of gun owners are suspect of such lists. Gun sales have generally been increasing over the last couple of decades, even accounting for the nation's population.







Guns are also durable goods. If a person no longer owns a gun... where did it go? Stolen? Sold? Destroyed? New guns sales are up despite, supposedly, sizeable quantities of used guns flooding the gun shops.

What's the truth? I have no idea.