It’s honestly kinda wild how many comments here are in favor of cops kicking down doors to enforce this law.
I know, I know, Lemmy isn’t a singular person. But it’s rare to see the anti-gun crowd advocating for aggressive police action–apparently it’s okay just because they are gun owners?
I absolutely believe we’d be better off with less guns floating around this country, but that necessarily is going to be a slow generational shift unless you’re advocating for violent standoffs between well-armed citizens and an even more well-armed state.
Strong gun control requires a police state, and it's advocates are okay with this. Some of them (mostly suburbanites and the like) just imagine that that police state will never be directed against them.
Others are capitalists that actively want to inflict a police state on the rest of us, for their own benefit. It's a lot easier to break strikes and enforce "work discipline" when the working class is disarmed.
And some aren’t even strawmen…they recognize the police state is already directed against them and guns haven’t solved the problem…just made it easier for police to pull the trigger because they’re all terrified for their lives.
Personally, I’ve yet to see a single American successfully use guns to protect any other constitutional right from government infringement.
I have seen lots of examples like Waco and Ruby Ridge, where the government should have tried harder to deescalate, but in the end, everyone died. The closest example I can think of where the government did backoff was the Bundy standoff and all those guys were “defending” was their ability to let their cattle graze illegally on federal land because they didn’t want to pay for access like everyone else.
Personally, I’ve yet to see a single American successfully use guns to protect any other constitutional right from government infringement.
The Battle of Athens is probably the most uniquely clear-cut example of what you're asking for, unless we count the American Revolutionary War itself.
Other successful examples mostly involve activists using non-violent protest to push for change, while using firearms to protect themselves from violent reactionaries that would otherwise murder them. Notably, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. For a modern example, there's various "John Brown Gun Clubs" and other community defense organizations providing security at LGBTQ events against fascist groups that seek to terrorize event-goers.
It's also worth noting that resistance is often worthwhile even if it doesn't result in unqualified victory. For example, the Black Panthers' armed cop-watching activities saved a lot of Black folks from brutal beatings at the hands of the police, even if the organization was eventually crushed by the federal government.
I have seen lots of examples like Waco and Ruby Ridge, where the government should have tried harder to deescalate, but in the end, everyone died. The closest example I can think of where the government did backoff was the Bundy standoff and all those guys were “defending” was their ability to let their cattle graze illegally on federal land because they didn’t want to pay for access like everyone else.
It sounds like you might be in a bit of a filter-bubble. I don't mean any offense by this, it's a normal thing that tends to happen to people. If the news sources you read and the people you talk to don't mention these things because it doesn't mesh with their worldview, how would you hear about them?
This is pretty much uniquely American phenomena, even historically speaking. You might be in a filter / culture bubble and cannot see the outside perspective of it. You are a violent culture.
While it’s to true that we too often talk about groups of people like they’re individuals, it’s also true that very few people actually bother to have underlying principles for their opinions, much less stick to those principles when they get in the way of a short-term goal.
What the anti gun crowd doesn’t get is, saying you have a mental health issue blocks you from getting em, so people are going to bottle shit up because one moment of weakness might cost you your right for a lifetime. It actively discourages people from getting help.
It’s almost as if they don’t have a fucking solution at all.
Despite pointing to “evErY oThER cOUnTrY doEsNt hAvE a PrObleM” they haven’t thought about gun control implementation for 3 seconds.
It’s literally as bad as the conservative saying “do nothing” or “more guns solve the problem”. It’s equally as stupid as that, but the liberal crowd acts like they’re fuckin geniuses whilst giving their suggestions.
If someone is too dangerous to own a gun then they’re too dangerous to be loose in society anyway. They can always find some other means to hurt people.
Don’t know, I’m not an expert on that. But locking them in a dark room somewhere out of sight isn’t the answer. The whole “until they receive sufficient treatment” is the missing piece in the puzzle, because that doesn’t happen. That’s the part I’d like to see get fixed instead of spending money on torturing them.
It seems that they never intended to enforce this to current gun owners because they knew they wouldn’t comply. It is more of a measure that they will enforce going forward on future generations of gun owners.
At the very least, they should be slam dunks for crime enhancements. If they commit a crime, and the illegal firearm is found in their possession, that should tack on some hefty penalties.
We cool with police and government just barging into our homes and taking our property that we purchased legally with our own money now?
EDIT: FWIW, I misunderstood the title. I thought it was banned guns, not people banned from having guns (due to felonies, etc.). This is a bit different.
What makes you think it would be abused any more than warrants are right now?
Because time after time we’ve seen that when given new powers, new tools, or new technologies, the police abuse them.
They would absolutely use this power to terrorize their opponents by ransacking their homes, whether they owned a gun or not. I’m not sure that it matters because more than half of this country seems to be ok with living in a fascist dictatorship as long as the dictator happens to be on their ‘side’ for the moment.
Then you report it stolen as soon as you see that it’s gone
If it’s used to commit a crime before you report it, there should be huge penalties. And if you’re just falsifying police statements, that’s already a crime.
Just change “guns” to “cars” to see how ridiculous this position is. And cars are far more lethal per capita than guns are.
So you know, I’m in favor of much stronger gun control in this country, licenses, registration, insurance, training requirements, recurring training requirements, all that. But your line of thinking in regards to criminalization is counterproductive and not rooted in the reality of how society works.
Guns are designed to kill deer, ducks, and other animals that I want to kill. That they can kill humans is not intentional.
That argument isn't much different from the argument that cars are for getting around and that they can kill is not intentional. If you care about death, then by every metric you need to ban cars first.
Humans are animals and some people seem to like killing them. By all means, let’s mandate licensing and insurance to own guns. No one seems to have a problem with those being requirements for cars.
Billions of dollars have been and are being spent to make cars less likely to kill people. But they have actual uses outside destroying things, unlike guns.
As a liberal gun owner who carries a concealed handgun, I say bullshit. You can’t say that as a blanket statement. Handguns are meant to kill people, first and foremost. Military rifles are designed to kill people, period, because the military is not in the business of hunting. The vast majority of guns ever created were created to allow for easier killing of human beings. To argue anything else is disingenuous. I facetiously argued against that point in another post in this thread, but only to illustrate that the design is irrelevant to the usage. Nobody buys a handgun to kill deer or ducks.
I think you’re dodging the point. I already said I was in favor of stronger licensing, insurance, and training requirements in a failed attempt to avoid that rebuttal. If somebody steals something from me in the middle of the night while I’m asleep, something I was legally allowed to have, and they use it to commit a crime before I notice it’s gone, I should not be punished unless I was negligent in where I left it.
I also don’t understand the design argument. Cars are used to kill people efficiently all the time. Doesn’t matter if they were designed for it, they do it. If you want to go down that route, I would say the guns I own were designed to put holes in paper from a distance, because that’s all they’ve ever been used for. My guns, like my car, have a zero percent fatality rate. There are a lot of people in the world who can’t say that about cars they’ve owned. See how silly the argument gets?
Great, you’ve identified that there are going to be edge cases in what I said in a non-binding web forum. My point was that if your guns are stolen and you don’t notice or report it until the police show up weeks or months later you don’t fall under the “responsible gun owner” label that everyone loves to throw around.
Don’t play dumb dude, we all know what guns are designed for regardless of your own personal use. You can just as easily put holes in paper from a distance with BB or airsoft guns that are significantly less lethal.
You’re right, guns are designed to kill. I don’t own a gun to put holes in paper, I own it in case I’m ever attacked and I need it to defend myself. I was simply arguing that the design is irrelevant, and you disagree. Fair enough. But there are a lot of crazy motherfuckers out there. I live a 30 minute drive from three of the most infamous mass shootings ever perpetrated in the U.S., one of which was people being gunned down while shopping for groceries. So that’s why I carry one, not because I’m afraid (I’m not, the chances of that happening to me specifically are close to zero) but because it is happening, and if it does happen I want to give myself some small chance of saving myself and my loved ones. It’s still a tool of last resort because I know the most likely outcome of me shooting a criminal is me being killed by the police immediately afterward. I still want the chance to defend myself. But you won’t see me rushing into a situation to save strangers, because people have done that in my state and… been immediately killed by the police.
The real problem with making progress is that people who say they want more regulation usually don’t really want that, they want all guns removed from everywhere, period. And anyone who owns one is, by default, part of the problem. Gun control activists typically use the same strategies that anti-abortion activists use, to creep towards their eventual goal. I strongly suspect you fall into that camp. And I personally would love to live in that world, where guns don’t exist, but it’s a fairy tale. You’re welcome to hold those opinions but no meaningful change will come out of it. For a citation on that, I present to you: All of human history since the invention of the firearm.
I prefer to see solutions or regulations that work towards personal responsibility (recurring training requirements, with testing, at a bare fucking minimum), and other programs that remove the impetus behind most of these attacks, which is untreated mental illness. And that’s because there is no black and white fix to this problem. Excessive punishment, prison, or further empowering the police doesn’t accomplish it, any more than making homelessness illegal gets rid of the problem of homelessness. If that sort of thing worked, we wouldn’t have people sitting on death row. I believe that a much more effective place to spend money addressing this is on social programs that could help people from feeling like lashing out is their only remaining option.
I’d love to see something like the response in Australia happen in the U.S., but it’s clear that there are enough people in the U.S. who are okay with kids being shot to death in schools, and adults being shot to death in theaters and grocery stores, that it isn’t going to happen. So we have to use alternative tactics to make meaningful progress.
I know it’s a minority. But it’s enough (which is what I said), because they have been effective at stalling real progress on the issue. Not sure I understand how this relates to the civil war, unless you are just saying gun control is “the right thing to do” regardless of the will of the ammosexuals. Which I agree with.
They’re not the stalling gun control. It’s the 1% and corrupt partisan judges, as I said. It’s funny, the 1% drove us to Civil War over slavery the first time using ignorant rednecks, they didn’t learn their lesson, now they think because they’ve got guns no one else does. It’s a joke. The cops don’t want to actually put themselves in jeopardy to enforce laws. This will come to a conclusion one way or another. You’ve obviously swallowed their propaganda so I’m done with you
I did, which you keep conveniently avoiding. This entire thread you’ve avoided discussing the very simple very effective method of removing money from politics to solve this problem. 95% of the country want some form of gun control but the corrupt judges and 1% would rather stoke a culture war. Anything short of a ban, like every other civilized country, is a bad joke.
I see much more conviction from progressive citizens than conservatives who are terrified of going to the grocery store without an AR. I grew up with conservatives. They are cowards. The 1% with their constant propaganda instills that fear. People weren’t like this 30 years ago. It’s manufactured. You’re arguing their case. In the only country where this happens regularly.
If the gun was properly stored and secured it would not have been stolen. You must not be paying attention to justice in America. Many people are punished present day for crimes they didn’t commit.
Took 15 seconds to find an example. This was just one, I have read about similar situations in my state alone over the last couple years.
I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t store weapons safely. But your premise is false. That’s why I’m against this ‘punishing the owner’ line of thought when they are the victim of the crime.
The terrible state of the U.S. justice system is a whole other argument.
The whole license, insurance and registration is meeting in the middle. They should be outright banned. Anything beyond that is illogical and irrelevant. The narrative has been moved so far to the right, it’s not even discussed.
And since that’s not going to happen, nothing else happens to make things better than the status quo. You’re letting lack of a realistic, unilateral, perfect solution get in the way of making things better incrementally. Which is itself illogical.
If the Supreme Court wasn’t captured by partisan hacks controlled by Billionaires these regulations would already be in place, which makes your point moot
Well you keep using scenarios that aren’t congruent with reality. Lamenting “If only it was like this…” doesn’t accomplish anything. Yeah, things are not the way they should be. Let’s work to move it in that direction instead of waiting for some pie-in-the-sky magic pixie dust that will make all the guns instantly disappear.
If we as a country were really going to ban guns, it would have been done when the Democrats completely controlled the government under Obama. The truth is Democrats have no taste for that either, so they weakly push bills that ban ‘dangerous looking’ guns to pander to their base without effecting real change. Realists like myself would like to see incremental progress instead of pushing for and waiting for the thing to happen that’s never going to happen.
“Cool, then you shouldn’t mind if we search your entire property right now to prove that you don’t still have the thing you are explicitly prohibited from possessing. Or you can show us where you were boating when they were lost and we can charge you for the cost of the search if they aren’t there.”
There are lots of ways to hide guns. One person who is a legal gun owner who doesn't approve of the law can hide them for his friends. Do not assume Illinois is united on this, enough voters are to pass a law, but gun owners consider this a tyranny of the majority and are sticking together
In a lot of rural areas where guns are most common the police don't approve of the law. They won't ask for a warrant in the first place. If someone else asks for one they will give plenty of warning to the person to be searched - or they will just take the warrant and throw it away without searching. If forced to search they will ignore you moving guns past the front door when they knock, then when the door opens find no guns in plane sight in the front room and leave.
And then when there’s yet another mass shooting they’ll jump up and down about how we don’t need new laws because the person was already legally barred from owning them and we just need to enforce the laws that are already on the books.
That’s funny that you think the cops would do that. They only enforce the laws that are convenient for them.
Same thing happened in New York when they banned “assault weapons” and many of the sheriffs also said they wouldn’t enforce the ban. Vast non-compliance with the bans is what happened, and will continue to happen going forward.
Make it clear to the rest that they need to surrender their illegal firearms.
So when do the SWAT teams and National Guard roll into the seedy side of Chicago to do this to the Gang Members that are carting around illegal firearms? When the hell are Illinois Prosecutors going to start jailing the people that police catch with illegal machine guns?
That person at home who shouldn’t have a firearm is a a problem but they are far and away not the biggest problem and its not even close.
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