That’s not clear at all. The US has more anti-gun-violence activists than anywhere else in the world.
There is some amount of friction, different in each country but not zero anywhere, between “what people want” and “what is the law”. Do you think North Koreans prefer living under a corrupt dictatorship? Why don’t they just make the dictatorship illegal?
That’s an extreme example of course: the US political system is closer to European-style proportional parliamentary systems than it is to North Korea, but it’s still very different from them, and in many meaningful ways is not actually a democracy.
I believe fully automatic assault weapons and machine guns should be available for purchase, new, just like any other weapon. (Fully automatic weapons are legal to buy and own right now in the US, if you pay a $200 stamp tax and wait 9 months for the ATF to process the paperwork, but you can only buy "NFA" regulated machine guns that were registered in 1986 or before ... which means they're all collectors items now, and the cheapest machine guns are $15-20k and up).
Most people I know would like to see the existing laws enforced, and don't want anything new passed or put in place.
The missiles are separately regulated, and likely not legal for private ownership. Missiles and high explosives are licensed and legislated for separately.
Any weapon that’s part of a standard infantry soldiers load out should be available, new from the manufacturer. I don’t have a problem with the background checks that are required for a class 3 weapon, like an m16 or a Thompson sub machine gun (https://dealernfa.com/product-category/machine-guns/all-tran...), but as it stands only wealthy people can still afford to purchase them.
In my local community groups I see people demanding metal detectors be installed in our schools.
This is in response to: An attempted murderer being chased by police, going into a school he doesn’t belong in, barricading himself inside and murdering children.
It’s feel good security theater. If you’re in the middle of a killing spree you’re not going to stop because of a metal detector. If you’re dealing with kids bringing weapons to school, that’s different — but the responses to this event from people local to me are about 90% make-believe security.
"Regular" gun violence with handguns is another story.
To use a real world example: Columbine was a failed school bombing because their detonators didn’t work because the product they used for the detonator’s changed between their testing and when they purchased the final “real” devices.
The guns were intended to keep everyone terrified and in place until the bombs could kill everyone.
A fluke manufacturing change to the product (I think a clock) between their detonator tests and their actual attack is the only thing that stopped nearly everyone in the school from being killed that day. They even set a bomb outside of the school to kill the first responders when they arrived — again, it was a horrible tragedy, but what happened was so much less than what was intended.
If people haven’t gotten motivated enough after literally decades of this shit, I find it really hard to blame the law.
However, there are 50+ Senators, disproportionally representing low population, rural states, that are beholden to the NRA and its illegal funding and mis/dis-information campaigns.
There are Senators today suggesting that schools be turned into prison-like places (Cruz with his "one door in and out" nonsense), that others are suggesting arming teachers, while ignoring the fact that the school protection officer and local law enforcement engaged the murderer in this school shooting but failed to apprehend or stop him and the SWAT team took 40 minutes to engage the murderer and eliminate the threat.
People have been marching and protesting and demonstrating continuously and yet there is a specific party, the Republicans, and specific lobby groups, that have stopped any change.
Well, there's the political interpretation (NRA lobbying) and the factual interpretation as well: "low population rural states" i.e. where guns are used for hunting & self-defence (low population but also huge, so low density, so the nearest police/neighbours are so far away you can't always rely on their help)
THANK YOU! Say what you will about those supporters but the fact they went that far to support something they believed in (albeit dumb honestly) is admirable.
Meanwhile the people with actual good values are just sharing senators' edgy tweets thinking that makes a difference.
Most people exist in the expansive middle ground between regurgitating Tweets and insurrection.
People do care, and they do protest and march, and like most protests anywhere it does not change anything. Sorry but you seem to have a very naive view of the effectiveness of protests.
By the way, the pro-Trump protests didn’t achieve anything either (other than furthering the US’s slide into bitter ultra-partisan division and total erosion of trust in institutions). Notably, they did not successfully enable Trump to remain president. So what is your point?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australi...
And still has regular shootings in Sydney due to gang violence.
It is entirely consistent. Law and order is something conservatives claim to support, so it is logical to want to remove instruments of crime and disorder. The fact that we can find it surprising now tells more about the intellectual trajectory of conservatives over the years. To the point that modern mainstream “conservatives” would have been seen as quasi-fascist rabid nationalists just 20 years ago.
Because other people don't have this problem. And when you get right down to it, they have megaphones and placards, while their opponents have guns. Amazingly, the gun owners have more political power.
My views on gun ownership are complex and don't fit neatly into existing pigeonholes - I'm very much in favor of the right to own weapons, but also in additional social responsibilities that ought to accompany that. I have a lot of sympathy with the gun control crowd even though I disagree with many of their arguments, but the fact is their tactics are simply not working. Unfortunately they don't want to change their approach because they're so locked into the moral dimension of their argument that they're unwilling to consider any other approach. Likewise the 2nd amendment absolutists are so intransigent that they keep retreating to a hardline position of 'shall not be infringed! shall not be infringed!' and then complaining about how unreasonable their opponents are.
Can you elaborate on this? Everyone I know has been citing the UK
Great company while pretending to be "the leader of the free world."
I am the furthest thing from a US ultra-patriot who thinks we’re the greatest country in the world, so please don’t ascribe other people’s opinions to me.
Tangent: other than their moderately elevated murder rate, what’s wrong with Uruguay? Is that supposed to be an example of some kind of uniquely shitty country by global standards? (It’s a bad one, if so — Uruguay is a wealthy and highly developed liberal democracy.)
What specifically makes you assume that the US should be doing substantially better than Uruguay or be held to a higher standard?
Well, you don’t really need activists if you don’t really have a problem. So it is not really surprising that countries with saner gun control policies have fewer activists.
Also, the number of activists does not correlate with the opinion of the people overall. Even though the US is not perfectly democratic, the situation does seem to reflect how a majority of states and a large fraction of the people want to live. This is utterly terrifying to us watching from the other side of the pond, but that’s the way it is.
