GOP: Gentlemen Gentlemen this is a mental health issue which is we can't ban 2A rights.
Everyone: Ok then give us better mental health?
GOP: Nope that's commie talk. Just get Jesus. (Also shocked why people hate them)
GOP: Gentlemen Gentlemen this is a mental health issue which is we can't ban 2A rights.
Everyone: Ok then give us better mental health?
GOP: Nope that's commie talk. Just get Jesus. (Also shocked why people hate them)
I support the 2nd. I also support single payer healthcare, including dental coverage and expanded mental Healthcare services. Then again, I dont support Republicans.
If dems got off the 2A stuff they would get more voters ::cough cough:: Texas. I know people that are like yeah abortion is not a deal breaker for me but guns are. Mostly people who are too old to have kids anyway. I'm sure Mass shooting will go down once we have social nets to get people the help they need. Guns are like Cars. Fine when used by responsible adults baaaad otherwise. No one does these things because they have happy content lives.
I just wish Dems would stop trying to ban any guns, and not because I'm against gun control, but because it's a losing issue. It's never passing through this Congress, and if it ever did, the Supreme Court would strike it down. Given that that's fairly undeniable, why lose the people who organize and vote on this issue alone?
This has been said about many issues in the past. Effecting change isn't easy but giving up doesn't help. Americans support gun control. Only our crappy political system stands in the way.
On both sides, Republicans block any gun control, and Democrats only propose useless legislation
it's a losing issue. It's never passing through this Congress, and if it ever did, the Supreme Court would strike it down.
You know, that's exactly what people said about Roe v. Wade and about banning abortion.
Turns out that you can keep losing on an issue for 50 years, yet winning only once will drastically change the trajectory of the entire issue.
That's the opposite situation. Pro-life voters and pro-gin voters are the 2 largest single-issue voting groups in the country.
Look at it this way. If you swapped Trump and Biden's positions on abortion but changed nothing else, how many pro-choice Democrats would have voted for Trump?
Basically zero, right. Meanwhile, millions of pro-life Republicans would have flipped because abortion is the singular issue upon which they base their vote.
Guns are in the same boat. Hundreds of thousands of voters vote strictly based on their love of guns. There's no political advantage in the general election for being anti-gun, and the Dems are sacrificing a whole lot of seats to fight this losing battle.
Yeah nevermind that the constitution says "shall not be infringed"' If abortion rights were in the constitution there would be no way of banning it, just as it is with firearms.
Seriously. Pivot to mental health funding or something. At least that has a chance of passing and even if it doesn't cut down on shootings it will still help people.
It's also a lightning rod issue that turns more voters away than it attracts.
Sure there are staunch anti-gun people under the Democrats' tent but they're not the kind of people who will vote Republican if the party suddenly scaled back or ended its decades long futile efforts at gun bans.
On the other hand there are a ton of white working class voters on the suburban-rural fringes of swing states who would absolutely at least consider a Democrat if the party wasn't so easily cast as "gun grabbers and job killers who only care about minorities".
You get a pro-union, pro-legal-gun Democrat on a ticket who speaks on issues affecting rural whites as much as they do urban non-white voters (who are equally important), and you'd have a winner in many of these areas where they've been quite red, but not so rabidly Trumpy as other areas.
Even moreso if that's a change that happened at the party/platform level.
I feel like from a campaign strategy standpoint, guns are just a lose-lose for the Democratic party. Playing to a base that would be loyal anyway for other reasons, even if the party dropped that position completely (which would not only eliminate a deal breaker issue for rural Democrats but also eliminate a cornerstone of the GOP platform in "protecting the second amendment"). Unless they did a complete about face and suddenly became as cozy with the NRA as Republicans, anti-gun voters might be upset, but they're still voting blue.
After all there's still abortion, electoral reform, racial justice, the environment, education, foreign policy, infrastructure, legal weed, LGBT rights, healthcare, and a host of other issues where the Dems are still their people.
Plus if they focused on mental health and preventive measures they could maybe bring over some fire arms enthusiasts, who otherwise vote republican or atleast get them to not vote.
Mind you the effectiveness may be scattershot at times since its alot easier to get the guy going postal than it is to get the an ideologically motivated shitbag.
Republicans block efforts for increased healthcare of any kind let alone mental health. They also block preventative measures like red flag laws.
What do you propose? Just accept the massacres?
Advocate for shit that would actually change things.
Enforce our ban on domestic abusers owning firearms. We already passed it, but no one enforces it. It would eliminate a huge chunk of gun violence in the nation, but its not as appealing to the mob as the "assault style" ban.
What do you propose?
I guess I'd ask you the same question. I don't have a proposal because I don't think any of it will make it through Congress. And if it somehow made it through Congress, the Supreme Court would strike it as unconstitutional.
Short of voting out these members of Congress and balancing the court, there's no hope of reform. So drop the issue to appeal to more voters. Win more elections, balance the court, then you're in a position to effect change.
Also, AWBs are pretty useless. They tend to grandfather in existing weapons and they exclude handguns, which are the weapon used most often to commit murder. Magazine limits, which were in the 1994 law, were the only piece to show a genuine reduction in violent crimes.
You wanna fix American politics and with that nearly all other problems with it?
Stop the "winner takes all" system you have right now.
You'll get a hundred political parties that have to compete with eachother. People will start voting more because now there are parties they can actually agree with and you get rid of this "always nearly 50/50" bullshit and one big party that blocks any proposal to actually improve the country
Want to stop the bank on assault rifles? Good luck stopping 20 parties
It's called First Past The Post system.
CPG Grey has a series of fun videos explaining why we have shity politicians. https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/
Banning specific guns is pure theater, even if it passes. There's zero real safety in it.
Speaking on behalf of the rest of us, we think it would be cool if we tried to see if it would go differently before we just accept the opinion of random people on the internet with zero proven credentials to weigh in on the subject.
If that’s okay with you.
Nothing will change until it’s their grandkids who get mowed down.
Their grand kids don’t go to the schools that get shot up.
you ever notice that when a vote is 49-51 conservatives win whether they're the 49 or the 51? Or how if it looks like they're gonna lose the vote by a large enough margin to actually lose that they can just prevent a vote from happening at all? You ever wonder how the government dare call itself "representative" and then ignore something that 92% of us want?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republicans moved to block a ban on assault-style weapons put forward by Democrats on Wednesday, as the United States recorded the highest number of mass shootings for the second year in a row.
The motion, put forward by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, would have reauthorized the Assault Weapons Ban, which first passed in 1994 and expired 10 years later.
The ban covers certain semi-automatic firearms and large capacity ammunition magazines, and ushered in a decrease of deaths from gun violence while it was in place.
"The American people are sick and tired of enduring one mass shooting after another," Schumer said on Wednesday in a speech bringing the motion to the floor.
"Americans have a Constitutional right to own a firearm," he said in a speech on the Senate floor, arguing that the bill was about "trying to label responsible gun owners as criminals."
The most recent high-profile killing happened in Lewiston, Maine, where 18 people were shot by a U.S. Army reservist who committed suicide shortly after the shooting spree.
The original article contains 323 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 45%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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