There's a lot of cyclical debates in the US that are globally pervasive. People in the jungles of a pacific island who have never seen an outsider's face, and live as if it were 10,000 years ago still have opinions on US politics relating to abortion, freedom, and guns.
Now I like to occasionally banter with people online about their wrong opinions regardless of which side they're taking on these issues. I've found my opinions quite fluid over a period of years, from unconditionally liberal to something more adult, a blend of liberal and conservativism. But with that muddy terrain comes a lot of uncertainty in my views, too.
I am simply not sure about abortion rights and issues. I couldn't say repealing Roe V Wade or whatever was objectively good or bad. I might lean one way or the other in principle, but within that is a whole mushroom cloud of nuance that is never really debated, and deliberately mis-reported.
The same applies to freedom, drugs, guns, the border, and economics.
My interest has never really been to solidify an opinion, but to organize the bullshit and throw it in the shredder. This requires people to challenge my opinion, for me to fight back, and update accordingly.
When it comes to the gun debate, there's a lot of bullshit, and you don't have to be an American who has experienced a life in America to know what bullshit smells like (hint: It smells a lot like the USA, a whiff that floats across the Pacific and Atlantic).
So I hear you demand to hear my current opinions. What do I think about Gun rights in the US?
Banning guns is just not an option
People on the right are constantly whining that the government is trying to steal their guns. In some ways, that might be true, by reducing capacity, or gun types, even perhaps with direct attempts to straight up ban them all. But it isn't going to happen and I think deep down everyone on both sides knows that.
What politicians tend to do is politics 101 cookie cutter stuff: over-demand (lean far to the left/right), and compromise a middle-ground (act closer to the centre). If you say 'Ban guns!' and get outrage, dial it back and say 'ok fine just get rid of grenade launchers'. They'll creep one way, the next government will creep the other way, and nobody really quite reaches the ban hammer.
Trump did things (or will do things) a little different, as he pushed to the point of grating across actual legislation, providing a robust test of the constitution and all the layers below. But it's essentially the same thing. Aim for the stars and if you're lucky, you might land on the moon. Aim for the moon and you'll come crashing back to Earth.
Now, perhaps if reality was wildly different to what it is now, it's possible we'd see a world where the majority of US citizens vote to repeal the second amendment, and things start moving in that direction. But the idea of getting guns banned now, in the current universe, is pretty laughable.
The political division in the US is trending in the direction of civil war. Granted, that's pretty much certainly not going to happen beyond talk, but it's a trend direction. You hear whispers of it among the dissatisfied. In what world does anybody think this is the most likely time people will see a mass shooting and think 'ok forget all my beliefs and threats to my freedom, take my gun'.
Even putting politics aside...
I was watching a YouTube documentary last night about Kensington, a neighbourhood in Philadelphia. The streets are the absolute quintessential painting of the US drug problem. Without even focusing on individuals per se, the host walking through the streets is protected by fully armed locals, the streets behind him littered with hunched over fentanyl zombies, some of them dying at any given time in the day. Not a cop in sight, probably due to the risk of stepping on the needles that raise the average altitude of the streets by a few centimetres.
Do people think a federal ban on guns would make these decrepit slums of the US safer?
Hasn't there been a war on drugs for decades? Where is that war? I didn't see it in this cop-free documentary of 'people' openly overdosing on the sidewalks. A billion dollars per year spent on drugs in that neighbourhood alone, presumably the pawn shop industry is thriving there.
It might seem sensible to get rid of guns from the view atop the plethora of ivory towers scattered across California and New York, but across the majority of the States, that concept simply makes no sense.
The interesting thing is, both sides, left and right, agree that mental health is a huge issue in this debate. Yet little seems to be done about it.
Fun fact, over 50% of deaths by guns in the US is suicide. It's hard to say whether that number will be reduced and replaced with merely attempted suicides by means of becoming permanently paralysed jumping off things instead, but it's hardly solving the issue of suicide if all guns just Thanos-style clicked out of existence. So before you even start, it's already 50% inefficient.
The AI I use for these pictures is the literal worst
For your classical random mass shootings which make up a small minority but blasts the most impact, which one of these killers were mentally stable and just decided to do it one day?
For gang-related shootings - turf wars and the like - which of those guns are legally obtained, or obtained with hunting deer in mind?
We can't always simply blame the underlying causes, for sure, but Americans also need to acknowledge that putting all your effort into banning guns is as deceptive a distraction tactic as the abortion debate and the race & gender debates. A ban won't happen because everybody knows it's won't actually solve anything.
At best, it might reduce the angry dad who has lost everything to a backstabbing wife and wants to take it out on society by shooting her first, followed by the kids and himself. This man would have legally acquired a gun, and if they were banned, he would no longer have that opportunity.
He would simply stab them and axe up a school like they do in China, instead.
For the rest - 50% suicides, and 30% or whatever gang violence and random massacres - they are going to have a plentiful flow of illegal guns in the same way those in Kensington (hell, even the entire prison system) have a steady supply of fentanyl. The only difference is nobody is gonna be around to protect you because the police have been defunded and painted over with ACAB graffiti to the point that they all resigned.
Personal Conclusion
The Gun problem in the US is exactly that - a problem. A huge one. It's actually beyond madness that it is as bad as it is.
But, like closing the barn doors after the horse has bolted, it's too late. And y'all need to accept it. Nobody disagrees, left or right, that the underlying causes are what needs to be dealt with, the sickness that the US is suffering. It's just, for some reason, not as newsworthy when there's a slow, steady stream of suicides and drug-related cardiac arrests passing by thousands of times per day.
Perhaps when the political divide has healed up again with some more common ground, fewer 104-year-old's leading the charge and the government actually take bipartisan measures to dissolve the drug, economic and mental health epidemics, the discussion can be re-opened, tentatively, softly, and gradually.
But while the majority of the country believe the other half is a literal enemy worse than that of the Soviets and Nazis because either they don't respect the screaming, self-diagnosed anxiety humans in blue hair dye, or they don't respect the gun-toting, bible-bashing hicks guzzling gas and melting icebergs for a laugh.
As they said years ago, love him or hate him, Trump was a symptom of something far more concerning. The fact he's the current favourite to return says a lot about how little anyone is ready to listen and learn from each other.
But hell, what do I know? I'm British.
Ok admittedly, this one's pretty great
Here in South Africa we have far, far fewer legal guns than in the USA, but we actually have more gun deaths per capita. Many cops are corrupt and sell or rent firearms to gangsters or hitmen here. I believe we also happen to be the world leader in fatal stabbings.
The countries with the highest gun deaths per capita in the world are actually places where it is very hard to acquire a gun legally... places like Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico.
Mass shootings are obviously horrific, but they seem to be a relatively new problem when you consider that there have always been lots of guns in the USA... I think the thing that is new is access to the internet and the dark web that can radicalize people - this is a very tricky thing to admit, because I'm generally a believer in free speech and as little censorship as possible. The world is becoming very polarized, and if people cannot discourse freely and respectfully - it leads to an "us" vs "them" mentality... and eventually "they" must die - Hitler perfected that. Now any white supremacist / radical Islamist / who-else can do the same via the internet to impressionable minds...
Yeah it's just part of the systemic problems that are acknowledged and simultaneously ignored.
The freedom aspect is really difficult. It would, at a utilitarian level, function better as a privilege that can be awarded and revoked depending on conditions. But unfortunately we happen to be human so we're stuck in a catch 22.
With these 'rights' I like the idea I heard of basically having a varied political mindset at different levels, from your kids and household, to friends, local area, state, nation.
Making somebody conservative or democrat or whatever from top to bottom doesn't really make sense, and probably a large factor on why everybody is so divided to begin with. It's an all or nothing binary. Children in their parents home or school don't have a right to bear arms or to speech. And that makes sense. I dunno. It's hard.
As for South Africa... I've seen, and heard, things I really wish I didn't over there. I'm not sure how widespread the lawlessness is there but in some areas, the police have zero power. It's wild... Hope you're safe where you are.
Life is very winding, sometimes there are some government policies that we can't accept, it's very complicated to explain what we feel. I love this good post brother
I suppose it's the biggest problem with being a democracy, there will never be 100% agreement
The people will never get a chance to vote on the amendment. You need overwhelming majorities in both houses to bring an amendment forward. Even after that, you need an overwhelming number of state legislatures to approve. With our divided society, that ain't happening, ever. A gun ban would never fly in any case. Guns have been part of the American psychology since day 1. They are part of the hunting culture. Part of the wild west, frontier mentality. A ban on assault rifles and gun restrictions is more feasible, but not an amendment because of the reasons already stated.
Given a choice to vote on gun restrictions, Americans would approve, according to the latest Gallup Poll.
Is the U.S. in a decline, socially, culturally, and economically? Possibly. Donald Trump's popularity may be a symptom. If we look at the rise of extremist leaders in the past (i.e., Mussolini, Hitler), these gained popular support during times of profound national stress.
As for the rest of your laundry list of our ills--be skeptical of what you see in media. Remember that news is filtered by the news reporter. We are a divided society in many ways. One way is our quality of life. I drive around, for miles, and see no drug addicts. See no poverty. Yet, if I wanted to, I could find a neighborhood not far away where these are common. Is this not true of the UK?
Homelessness, on the other hand, visits all communities. This is a conspicuous symptom of social and economic distress that seeps through everywhere, it seems. The homeless are not only among us. Increasingly, they are becoming us.
Well, no argument from me, @mobbs. Just more thoughts.
Yeah I think restriction, even a non-trivial percentage of republicans would agree is a good compromise. But weirdly it seems a majority of voters don't get representation in this regard? I guess the system of a Republic works a little differently.
Oh I am, all the time. Bringing the drug documentary in was not to imply that it was the case in all of the states - far from it. But the reason it exists in the first place is one that really has no excuse, and I actually think we're publicly lead to believe it's less of a problem than it really is.
The fentanyl crisis is exactly that, a crisis which has rapidly skyrocketed, with a 26% increase of deaths by overdose from this one specific drug from the year before - close to 70,000 completely avoidable deaths of young, otherwise healthy adults. This kind of level is uniquely American, and 4-5x worse than the UK (which even so is already a major problem). We don't really have entire neighbourhoods left to OD at their own discretion, at least not when I was last there XD.
That's a thought provoking image... I find it strange in a country like the US where housing is so cheap, could be even cheaper, and arable land is more plentiful than pretty much anywhere on Earth. Eesh
14 Republicans out of 435 members of the House of Representatives voted for some form of gun control last year. House of Reps is split almost evenly with a slight Republican majority.
15 Republican senators out of 100 senators voted for some form of gun control last year. Senate is split pretty closely. with the slimmest Democratic majority.
I think Republican support for gun control is rather trivial in the U.S.
facepalm
Though I wonder, do you reckon it's a little murkier than just good vs evil here, and that the legislation is just poorly written or overly broad, or allows some kind of constitutional breach, yadda yadda?
Are both sides just playing wrong to stay in power by satisfying voters in barely symbolic ways while getting big paychecks under the table? These things are weirdly legal in the US so it should be available knowledge lol
Politics is dirty. In order to get to the level where one is in the House or the Senate, so many deals have to be made, that virtually everyone is compromised by the time they get there. It's not the politicians who are at fault, but the people who elect them. I am so discouraged by my fellow citizens. Does anyone study history? Does anyone know anything about civic?
I taught history and government (which is sort of civics). I'm not sure these are even required courses anymore.
But what do we do? Give up? Stop voting? Stop caring? We choose the best horse we can in each race and hold our noses. Is it very different in the UK, or does everyone have to compromise to get to a serious post?
I think the politics in the UK is pretty broken but in very different ways. There's a lot more backstabbing and sycophancy, as each pathetic party and leader bends with the wind without a single conviction to speak of in order to stay in power. Right wing parties can and do float far left if they think it'll give them a few more months without being fired or elected out, and vice versa. It's all about immediate short-term gains, while throwing the long term under the bus.
Compromise is one thing, but this is on another level.
Coalitions are also very likely meaning a third small party gets an exaggerated influence whether or not it lines up ideologically with the main party or any of the citizens. Another kind of compromise that just doesn't work very well usually, and encourages short term vision.
So now, we're all enjoying the long term consequences of that, which is crippling for everyone in all regards.
I suppose this is fairly similar across European democracies but the main difference is that the UK's literally has no idea what they're doing since Brexit left them without Brussels to do everything for them lol.
But yeah, I guess it's hard to compare with US politics, despite how the UK seems to want to become a mini shadow of the US in every regard
Yup, you are right about politicians being compromised, including republicans. I say that as a GOP voter. Nearly all politicians are compromised regardless of the party, which if you ask me is why things are so polarized in America right now.
Guns aren't the problem in the US - Americans are the problem. ;D
'Americans are the problem' is the most bipartisan statement in the nation hah