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Well because here you can get treatment for your mental and physical illness without ending up in debt for the rest of your life
Accessing mental health services in the UK is a nightmare though.
Was in a deep depression. I have good Healthcare and tried to make an appt with a psychiatrist to take care of it.
6 month waiting list… I thought US Healthcare was supposed to be better than this?
Still cost me $300 when I finally got in too since it’s a specialist… Fml
It’s also a nightmare in much of the US if you are not rich or happen to have excellent insurance. Having to wait six months to receive a bill you can’t afford isn’t great.
Agreed. I’m just pointing out that it’s not lack of access to mental health services that’s preventing gun deaths in the UK, it’s lack of access to guns.
It’s basically impossible in the US.
I couldn’t leave the house for 5 years becuase I was terrified of people, and when I finally went to see a GP for help all I got was “well I can’t sell you a pill to fix it so I’m not going to do anything”.
Even when americans hate guns they can’t help revolving their entire mentality around them.
The best and cheapest possible treatment you can get here for mental illness is the kind you grow on your own sadly 🍄
The German police uses less bullets every year than the average policeman in the US.
Yes you read that right, the entire German police, all of them.
The UK and Canada have similar occurrences, but not in the vast number as the United States. We all understand the access to firearms is the problem.
Except for all the people trying to deflect blame from firearms by blaming mental illness. Without any will to actually address mental illness, of course.
It’s all about the access to firearms.
Other countries have easy access too, so no, that is not simply it. Look at Switzerland for example, where you can take your military service weapon home.
Military are trained to use it. Part of the issue in the United States is the lack of quality training for civilians and improper background checks. We should be checking for mental health disorders and other red flags like domestic violence and criminal activity.
So it is not all about the access?
The military service part is affecting the “access”
“your MILITARY SERVICE weapon”
Yes, it’s about access.
/facepalm
Try to keep up champ.
They literally already do that
The access isn’t as easy at all. It’s also the culture though. Nobody buys guns for fun or to show off, they aren’t toys, there are barely any gun ranges and you don’t bring your kid to it.
You maybe have a gun for hunting, it isn’t an assault rifle and you only pull it out when you do go hunting.
Why not both?
How do you effectively remove firearms from the equation at this point? Doesn’t the US have something like 120 guns per 100 residents? I don’t want to be the guy tasked with taking someone else’s gun away, that sounds incredibly dangerous. It also doesn’t seem fair to task someone else with that duty.
I won’t disagree that it’s a problem, but I don’t have a solution either.
Every country that currently has gun control laws, at some point didn’t have gun control laws and did have an armed population
They all managed to pull it off, the USA is unique in thinking this is an impossible task. And they haven’t even tried
Every country that currently has gun control laws, at some point didn’t have gun control laws and did have an armed population
Many of those countries had only an armed aristocracy, and they made those laws to keep firearms out of everyone’s hands before there were hundreds of millions of armed people.
No. All these countries had crap loads of guns. UK is a good example.
Interestingly enough, you can still purchase rifles and shotguns in the UK… you can even purchase an AR-15 or a Beretta ARX 160 legally in the UK so long as it’s chambered for .22LR and approved by the police. You just have to tell them it’s for a shooting club; not self defense.
When the UK passed their laws, it was more targeting handguns.
One of the biggest problems around guns in America is the culture. Dickbags seem to want to associate manhood with the usage of this one specific type of tool.
You can buy pretty much anything in the UK if you meet legal requirements. People have machine guns and even bloody tanks. But they have them for a good and valid reason and don’t go on killing rampages.
Guns regs don’t mean no guns. Gun regs mean no guns for idiots.
Yet you have provided no possible options as to take action. Nice work on the reply. 👍
Douche.
The answer was clearly “Try”
We haven’t even done that yet.
The path on how to start is clear enough. Voluntarily surrendering weapons, followed by mandatory, decades later we’ll see results. But I don’t think you’re the type to participate in gun control discussions in good faith.
The fact that real kinder eggs are illegal because of safety concerns and guns are not is mindblowing.
It is easier to get a gun in the states than it is to get a kinder egg with a little toy in it.
That’s an absolute lie. I can buy a kinder egg no questions asked online. You can’t sell them as food with plastic pieces inside them, though.
In most US states you have a huge amount of regulation on guns you need to be familiar with and of course it’s different state by state.
Try to cross the border into the states with a real kinder egg and then we can talk about where the lies are.
Try how? Go on, what can I do right now today to start fixing the problem? See if you can answer without an insult.
Read further down the thread.
Nah.
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Again, the point is we’re not even there yet. We can theory craft all we want, and you can poke imaginary holes in every measure taken. And in the end, you will still reach the conclusion of “if it’s not perfect, why try?” and nothing will change.
So, why bother? No matter what solutions someone brings to the table, you will not be satisfied.
I’ve yet to see a solution come to the table. That’s my point. There certainly are plenty of people making claims that it needs to be done, but no one to provide the “how.”
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You can’t, but in Canadian communities where firearms are more prevalent you see the same result. Mental illness and access to firearms is a huge red flag no matter where in the world you are.
Most places solve it with buy backs and slowly tightening the vice. So that people have both incentive and time to come to terms with it before it comes to a point where they would have to fight to keep them. The crazy gun nuts are actually more talk than action, despite how often they “say” they aren’t.
We saw a lot of those gun nuts actually take action back on 1/6/2021. I wouldn’t write them off.
Those weren’t gun nuts, those were Trump nuts.
A large percentage of them probably are, but they where there because of Trump, not guns.
That venn diagram is pretty close to being a circle.
On one side yes, on the other side not so much.
I guess it would be more of an oval at that point.
It’s the same people.
Not many, statistically. And I bet even fewer next time.
Are you counting on a “next time?”
I still would. It’s not like ignoring it has been making it better. Many other countries solved the problem exactly the same way. A steadily ratcheting buyback does work for 90-95% of gun owners. And yes you are left with the crazies that are most likely to actually do terrible things with their guns, but at that point they will already be criminals before they even shoot… so it makes things alot easier.
That’s another problem I have with simple baning of guns all your doing is disarming the responsible folk as what are you going to do with the people who fight back with said guns and what about the people who hide their guns or people that get guns illegally you have to remember that there are people that break the law
Historically, old America looks very different from the current one. I look at things like our transit network being entirely train-based, and now being completely car-based. That is a HUGE change driven by demand.
The point is just that large, glacial changes over many years are by no means impossible if we’ve set it as a target and there’s motivation. Nobody ever barged into a railway company’s office and said “We’re tearing up your lines by force and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
What kind of argument are you making here? Rail lines were torn up by force. Vehicle manufacturers bought up all the public transit systems in the US and destroyed them to increase dependency on cars.
And then they lobbied hard to make it illegal to cross roads outside of crosswalks, they lobbied for highways and road expansions, and manipulated the public into believing that real freedom comes from owning a car.
None of that was truly driven by real demand, the system was manipulated to increase car dependency to the benefit of the car manufacturers.
A part of the problem, not the only aspect.
Really? I’d say it’s a no Brainer. Easy access to firearms IS the problem.
Yeah that take is definitely a “no brainer”.
Not in the way you meant it, but still.
I mean it’s easily verifiable if you look it up that easy access to guns is the primary cause of gun deaths.
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There is no problem on earth that can easily explained by only one thing.
Underestimating problems is an easy way to earn political points while never solving the overall problem.
I would suggest you use more of your brain in the future.
Yeah, except all the research and data points to easy access to guns as the issue. But yeah, bone headed take for sure.
Define easy access… is that some mental defect teenager taking a gun from his parents gun rack?
I don’t think it’s a mental health problem per se - I think American society is sick.
And I don’t mean sick as in “something happened to you all” - I mean sick as in “you all willingly participate in it together”
There are plenty of other countries with guns who don’t have the same kinds of mass killings the USA does.
The problem as I see it is that so many Americans are just so fucking emotional about everything.
Everything’s a drama, or a story that needs to be be told, of a journey, or an underdog, or revenge, or a protector. Are musical montage. “I just have to tell you where I have come from” - “you just need ro know my roots”
Every disagreement is a fascist or a communist.
Nothing just “is”.
Everything has to have bullshit emotional content and context.
The trouble is none of you will ever see yourselves as part of the problem.
You’re in a narcissistic trap.
Liberals are 100% certain that “it’s the guns” and get absolutely high saying it.
But it’s not the guns. Canada has guns.
Loads of other countries have guns.
You’re all fucking hysterical.
TL;DR: it is the guns, but it isn’t just the guns. It isn’t any one thing and it isn’t not any one thing.
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it IS the guns. It’s hard / difficult to massacre with knives.
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it IS mental health too.
Canada, Australia, UK, etc have horrifically underfunded and backed up mental health care systems - but yes, still far better than anything in the USA.
- Canada has guns. Australia has guns. Neither has as many guns as the USA. Neither is as easy or cheap or widely available as in the USA. Restricting guns is what actually happens and is meant by your imaginary liberals and guns. They don’t mean that farmers shouldn’t have guns - they know that as a tool, they’re useful. I’m not saying hyperbole isn’t used (which pisses me off as much as you). But what I am saying is they’re right. It’s the guns. It’s the amount of guns. It’s the types of guns.
Which brings me to:
- using words like “hysterical” doesn’t help. It’s misleading, and plain wrong.
And yeah, I’ve gone off from your main point of “the USA is too emotionally extreme”. This is… not wrong, but I want to argue overly simplistic. I (and others) have described the USA not as one country, but 50 or so (I’m not sold on the Dakota twins) countries that are loosely bound by their xenophobia of everyone else more than anything else. The country wasn’t founded on a love of the USA, but the hatred of the UK.
I mean, the UK isn’t really that much different. Remember Northern Ireland and Great Britain? Scotland and England? If they had guns like the USA had guns… woo.
So, America being a drama, etc? You’re not wrong. It’s an ideology that was instilled at birth, and raised by capitalism - money from engagement, and emotionally trapped people are engaged. It’s a society/system created, used and trapped by itself.
And guns are what turns that bubbling cauldron into massacres.
And massacres make the emotional drama cauldron bubble more.
Get rid of guns, you get rid of a lot of stress and drama. You don’t solve all problems, but you solve one that is repeating and feeding the drama machine.
Sell the guns to South America/ Israel / wherever they want to ruin next, and use the money to fund affordable housing or something. Solved two birds with one stone!
PS: I’d love to see the USA fundamentally change in one big way: a stronger, standardised federal government. For example, let states do state elections however they want. But if you’re voting in a federal election, it should be the same forms, same design, same level of access everywhere in the country. If you can drive freely between states, driving rules and tests should be standardised (they basically are, rural vs city aside). Education? Anything which affects and creates a level playing field across the country, ie. federally, should be standardized. If a state wants to charge sales tax, and another doesn’t - that’s fine! That’s local.
In the same vein, remove weird voted-in positions, like judges and sheriffs. Emotional, populist,partisan involvement in roles that are supposed to be neutral and balanced is insane.
And the guns aren’t helping.
Damn, this should be copied and pasted to everyone arguing its not guns, you’ve covered basically ALL of the talking points incredibly well
Man, voted in positions sound so reasonable and logical and democratic, it’s a real bummer it doesn’t work in our current systems. You just end up introducing marketing to everything, ugh.
It is completely unreasonable in every respect.
Positions should be based on merit, not money (advertising) and popularity. Judges and sheriffs have to make judgement calls all the time, and I’d prefer to have people with experience and without bias (as much as possible), instead of bought and paid for. Also, accountable to the system, not just the next election.
I am very much oversimplifying it, and skipping some issues, such as other existing systemic problems - but in short: what’s popular is not always right. Like mobs.
Look, I don’t think it’s merely about mental health spend either.
I genuinely think that Americans are not very laid back.
It’s mir magic - some nations are more laid back than others.
You say the word “hysterical” doesn’t help.
But it’s what you need to hear.
Everything has to be coated with so much sugar you all get fat and the meaning is lost.
Yeah. That’s what’s it is. You’re just all always looking for drama and shit to get upset about.
It’s not more complicated than that. It doesn’t need everyone to sit down and get to therapy or make a TV show show about your pain.
It’s just that you’re all always looking for drama.
You are simply describing the effects of political and social polarization. I blame it primarily on a decades-long process of consolidation of wealth, influence and opportunity in the hands of an elite few, but no doubt there are other factors at play as well.
On the flipside I am very much opposed to any theory of the case that has it as being somehow uniquely American. It’s not an American thing; it’s a human thing that can happen in any country and has in fact happened in many countries throughout history. It does not require that we posit some kind of national hysteria that’s unique to Americans when we can, with far fewer assumptions, simply point to polarization.
Polarisation isn’t that bad in Europe. We take things in our stride better.
We’re not constantly freaking out over tiny things.
America seems neurotic.
Yes, polarization is the relevant factor, as I said. What part about this do you not understand?
It’s not as if Europe has a great record in this sense either. One look at the last century tells us everything we need to know about how susceptible European populations are to polarization.
Polarisation is absolutely that bad or worse in Europe. Poland and the UK are two good examples.
Oh, and holy shit, Germany, etc. with lockdowns and such with covid. They went nuts.
Oh, and how about riots in France every year? Come on. For a relatively small country, they flip out and set fire to things WAY more often than the USA does.
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Youre not entirely wrong, but I gotta say how funny it is to see a post complaining about how everyone blows each other’s positions way up fisish by saying American liberals want to take away all guns. I’m sure you can find an American liberal that says that, but they’re in a massive minority. Most of us would be very happy with Canada’s level of gun control. You have to take a gun safety class and pass a safty test for any gun, with an extra class and test and a license for hand guns and assault rifles.
Canada also has a system for helping people with mental health problems that doesn’t bankrupt the person.
Im pretty sure that’s exactly what the Democrats have been asking for for the last 30 odd years.
As an American who’s about as progun as you can get and still think the government has a responsibility to tax its wealthiest citizens and keep it’s poorest out of poverty, I’d welcome the same level of gun control as we apply to owning motor vehicles: license programs to ensure everyone who can legal own/operate one is familiar with safe use, practice and undergone a bare minimum level of mental evaluation so that a psycopath or sociopatn can’t just have a bad day to turn it on the general public. It would be a tough pill to swallow for some gun owners but if it was paired with removing a lot of the baseless restrictions (looking at you California compliant) with regular requirements such as yearly renewals and checkups with the ability for referrals to be made if a person starts acting in a way they could become a danger and law enforcement required to act upon it or face immediate termination if they were found to ignore it.
Combine that with single payer/universal healthcare with a comprehensive mental health for every citizen and it could lead to better diagnosing people suffering from conditions that could make them a threat to public safety and get them treatment that would hopefully help them live and not suffer from such conditions to say nothing of lower the chances for these violent outbursts.
Its a fantasy, yes I know. But the current system clearly doesn’t work, and prohibition and war on drugs has shown repeatedly that restricting everyone to stop the minority of abusers only makes a massive underground/black market for such things that actually makes it easier to people to abuse them in ways that are more difficult to track and prevent. I’d rather try to make the fantasy work than pursue a method I know is only goin to have short term benefits and long term problems.
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Yeah but there are lots of people saying it’s the guns (literally in this thread) - that’s basically what the OP is about. But even then the right wing acting like scared little babies about it too.
It’s just everything is turned up to 11 with you lot.
All the fucking time.
Says the person who wrote a comment filled with hyperbole and points taken to their extremes.
Where’s the hyperbole?
You use the word everything a lot and phrases like “you’re all”. That’s hyperbole. You can’t possibly know what all 330+ million people think or how everyone acts and are likely basing your views off what you see on social media or in the news, not real life.
Our propaganda machine is generational and runs deep.
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Insert Fight Club quotes. We’ve known for years. The American Dream is consumed by everyone from everywhere and when it doesn’t come true, no one knows what to do.
It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Meh. Many other people from many other countries believed it. I hear ya. It’s apt for today. But it didn’t used to be that way
It was always that way, things look great when you build on the beach, not so much when the tide comes.
Everything’s a drama, or a story that needs to be be told
Well you should ask yourself if you’re an outsider looking in through the lens of our media.
Because if you are, and you see us through our media, our media is very focus on profit generation, and gives a very ‘two sides fighting’ view of everything that is America, as that drives viewership and profits the most.
It’s from when I actually meet you lot. I won’t even date Americans now in my city - it’s just always some drama.
I’m sure not all Americans are like that and I’ve worked with some really cool ones - no doubt, but there’s definitely a culture of emotional drama that contributes to an unhealthy greater society.
It’s from when I actually meet you lot.
It’s a lot of Americans to have met to make a blanket statement like you did though.
I’m sure not all Americans are like that and I’ve worked with some really cool ones - no doubt, but there’s definitely a culture of emotional drama that contributes to an unhealthy greater society.
Well one thing to understand about America is there’s multiple/many cultures, not just one, and it depends on what region of the country you’re viewing. And then on top of that there’s two or three meta cultures.
Also, you’re not catching us at our best right now, we are pretty angry at each other here over politics right now, so try to consider that as well.
No one is perfect 100% of the time.
Americans you meet
You’ll find there’s a huge difference in attitude between what I call tourists and travellers.
Immigrants and expats too.
(In Americans outside of the USA)
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It also doesn’t help when we have fear mongering passing as legitimate news.
I mean sick as in “you all willingly participate in it together”
Not to detract from your well written comment, but there is something of a disconnect between the will of the populace and those who enact the laws.
I’m not talking about the laws. I’m talking about personality wise, you’re all so bloody emotional and feel everything is some important story or drama.
Well I’m describing the reasons why people may get “emotional and feel everything is some important story or drama”.
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well… it is a mental health problem. Plus culture. Switzerland has guns and just as many people with mental health problems as the rest of the ‘developed’ world, but almost 0 shootings.
On the other hand, guns don’t kill a lot of people in most european countries (even the ones with very little gun control)
I don’t think any European country comes close to the level of lack of gun control in the US though
I mean sure, the US has almost no gun control, but in austria for example you don’t even need a permit for a lot of lethal weapons.
I think it’s really a culture problem, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t regulate guns a bit
There are mountains of gun control laws in the USA. Saying the USA “has almost no gun control” is ridiculous.
Yet you can buy a semi-automatic firearm privately without a background check.
Yep that that will always be the case, regardless of what the law says. There is no way to enforce background checks on private sales without 24/7 video monitoring and analysis on every person, just like any other form of prohibition that doesn’t work.
Except for all the times it absolutely works, which is why the pro-gun community can’t buy landmines and RPGs.
It doesn’t matter how permissive their gun laws are, nor how few mass shootings they have under them – they have gun laws that are broadly agreed to be safe for the public.
This is true for every country in the world except America.
It doesn’t matter if they are more permissive because their “culture” is less bloodthirsty or because their mental healthcare is better or they banned video games and doors. They have the social risk under control.
When it turns out they don’t have the risks under control, such as following mass shootings in Australia and New Zealand, they change the laws.
They even loosen those laws occasionally to make things like hobby shooting at ranges more accessible.
None of that for America though! No matter how great the risks of their gun laws grow, no matter how clearly inappropriate they are for the current state of American society, the gun lobby demands that laws only get more dogshit.
So Republicans make it happen for $16 million a year and the pro-gun crowd cheer them on because they don’t want to be mildly inconvenienced to save the lives of people they don’t give a shit about.
they have gun laws that are broadly agreed to be safe for the public.
This is true for every country in the world except America.
So clearly you don’t know about current gun laws in the US. You must be willfully ignorant to think that America does not have gun laws that are broadly accepted by the public
“Broadly agreed to be safe for the public” isn’t the same thing as “broadly accepted by the public” but sure, I guess all the mass shootings, armed criminals and child suicides are just because you’ve made everyone so damn safe
Not what I said at all, try again
So clearly you don’t know about current gun laws in the US. You must be willfully ignorant to think that America does not have gun laws that are broadly accepted by the public
It’s literally exactly what you said, verbatim. Are we really supposed to trust you with guns and gun laws?
The US has a very strange and, in my view, troubled relationship with guns.
What transpires out is that most americans are still attached to the notion of solving problems at gun point and delivering justice through acute lead poisoning, like in the initial settling and further expansion of the country, with no care nor concern for rule of law.
If that were the case, you’d be able to point to a significant amount of daily firearm violence - above and beyond every other form of violence.
Finland, Ukraine(not including war). In some way Russia, where even if you don’t want, good unkle Voenkom will give you gun anyway.
Finland has quite strict gun control. Some dude got a big fine and gun taken away for improperly blocked (even if irreversible) ww1 era gun on showcase in some cafe or something
Oh. Ok.
I’m not sure how you’d argue a background check and being of age at a minimum as a lack of firearm control.
TBF it took Europe two wars and 100 million dead people to get that shit out of their system.
Yeah and the US never finished their Civil War.
Which European countries have very little gun control? I wasn’t aware of any european country in which anyone can just carry a loaded gun around in public for no reason.
CZ.
Wow, didn’t realise their gun laws were so permissive as to allow concealed carry for self defence, that’s unusual in Europe. You do still need a license though, which requires passing an exam, criminal record and health check, so not quite as lax as the USA.
Call it a mental health problem, a societal health problem, whatever. Unless we accept that wanting to slaughter the people around you is an unfixable natural quirk of some people’s human experience, then this cannot be purely a gun control issue.
This shit is a recent phenomena and I asked myself what changed since the 90s? That’s when this shit really started popping off…
Only thing I can think of is access to the internet. Before that, struggling kids were benign by themselves. But now they have open access to others like them, and they can foment together. Throw in copy cat behavior and access to guns, that’s the recipe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States
It really isn’t. They are happening more frequently, but that’s to be expected with the population boom that we experienced. There were mass shootings in the 1800s in this country, and that’s not counting anything we did to the native Americans.
Sounds good.
The gun control crowd can stop mass murderers, criminals and domestic abusers from buying legal, semi-automatic weapons (as well as dumbshit gun owners leaving unsecured firearms around to be stolen or used in their childs suicide).
This will keep everyone much safer while the pro-gun crowd get to work on curing every mental health issue forever, fixing wealth inequality, banning video games and schools with too many doors and whatever other things they think are the root of the problem.
Until they do, indiscriminately selling guns to people clearly isn’t working.
The fact that you keep arguing how much of a gun control issue it is amongst other contributing factors is almost as big if the reason as the lack of gun control. Its been more than 20 years since Columbine, grow the fuck up and start doing something, WHICH INCLUDES gun control
It includes more appropriately addressing actual underlying issues.
Personally, I don’t want to believe that wanting to brutally murder people around you is an innate human characteristic.
Everybody knows that sane, law abiding citizens become mass murderers the moment they hold a gun in their hands.
Yes, limiting access to the tools of murder will decrease murders caused by those same tools, but it does nothing to eliminate the murderous intentions of those people.
If we truly care about people’s well being we should be doing both, reduce the risk of senseless shootings and massacres (gun control) and assist those with murderous intentions and other mental health issues who, believe it or not, are also victims of our sick culture and so-called societies.Nah, we don’t very much need to worry about the murderous intentions, as long as they’re not able to put them into action.
That’s the problem, guns let people turn those intentions into actions very easily.
Fair enough, at least you are honest in your selfishness.
It’s better for all concerned. The would-be murderers have the opportunity to reconsider and seek help before they’re in jail for life or killed by the police.
The Nice, France truck attack resulted in more deaths than someone shooting pseudo-automatic high capacity magazine rifles into a crowd of hundreds of people from an elevated position for like 30 minutes straight in Las Vegas
People in Europe can easily enact their murderous intentions, they just seem to not have them at anywhere near the same scale
The fact that a bag o’ guns enables one lone nutjob to carry out an attack comparable to a targeted attack from an organized terror group / government kind of proves the point that guns are in fact the problem.
It doesn’t exactly take an organized terror group to rent a truck and get one single pistol, anyone with the will to do it could have committed that attack
Well whenever we have a massive problem with frequent mass killings involving trucks we can talk about truck control too.
I would argue that gun control is more immediately actionable and greatly reduces the capability of the mentally disturbed to commit atrocities of such scale at such a common rate.
Long-term? Yes, access to mental health care and a culture that encourages receiving it will help immensely. But that takes time and will ultimately not save nearly as many people as gun control would. We need both, but gun control can happen today.
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I’m not saying it will, I’m saying it CAN. If suddenly there were an armed militia of private liberal citizens who were protesting outside the capitol buildings and offices of enough pro-2nd amendment congresspeople, laws would be passed very quickly to make that not happen.
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Most of us don’t want to be murdered by the local police or CIA
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I would argue that it isn’t immediately actionable until we amend the constitution. Gun control is being stricken down all over the place, and honestly that’s an appropriate application of the foundational document. If you want real gun control, that is the high bar you need to cross.
Congress could absolutely amend the constitution and control access to guns faster than we could solve the mental health crisis.
If fires are happening because of so much gas around, and matches that people are lighting, you limit the amount of matches AND the amount of gasoline.
Have you ever seen anyone arguing against mental health help? Only one of the two solutions you mentioned has a bunch of idiot fighting against it.
You also can’t make mental health illegal overnight. People are born with mental health issues, it’s not something they buy at the store or grab from their fathers closet.
Ban guns, ban guns now. Fuck gun culture and fuck all gun owners (even the responsible ones)
I understand your point, but everytime I see someone pointing at mental issues, it just seems to be like they will point at anything except the guns. We can thoroughly take care of the more complicated part of the problem once the easy part has been solved and they are killing childrens with knives instead of bullets.
Have you ever seen anyone arguing against mental health help? Only one of the two solutions you mentioned has a bunch of idiot fighting against it.
No, the same group of people fights against BOTH the solutions.
Reagan is responsible for gutting our mental health infrastructure, and Republicans vote against increasing funding consistently.
They won’t support restrictions on gun ownership because they say the problem is mental health, but they won’t support spending on mental health either. (Most likely because they seem to oppose anything that would actually help people who suffer.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980
https://sociology.org/content/vol003.004/thomas.html
This last one is a ddg search - you can just pick which article you want to read about Republicans voting against mental health funding.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=republicans+vote+against+mental+health+funding
What if I want to hunt so I can eat meat without supporting factory farming?
Just playing devils advocate here, I agree we need gun control in the US. But saying “fuck responsible gun owners” seems pretty black and white.
It seems to me that the media loves to latch onto gun stories to further polarize the US. Divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book. Republicans don’t want anyone thinking. They want emotional reactivity and sensationalized, impulsive retorts with lack of reasoning from both “sides” and nothing close to nuanced thought.
Do you really think no one else in the world is hunting?
Copy any weapon possession law from another first world country and it’s already a great step in the right direction.
This is the perfect example of a strawman fallacy. I didn’t say no one else in the world was hunting. I asked a question. Interesting how your first reaction is to immediately attack a position I didn’t take. That’s what I mean about the impulsive responses.
In any case, which laws from which countries are you referring to specifically?
So, to summarize, your answer to the question is people should be allowed to own guns to hunt with restrictions?
This is the perfect example of a strawman fallacy. I didn’t say no one else in the world was hunting. I asked a question. Interesting how your first reaction is to immediately attack a position I didn’t take. That’s what I mean about the impulsive responses.
You asked a question that is very easily answered by looking at any other country. Which is why I referred to any other country.
Nothing about that is an attack lol
In any case, which laws from which countries are you referring to specifically?
Take Germany’s laws for example.
So, to summarize, your answer to the question is people should be allowed to own guns to hunt with restrictions?
Yes, in a model similar to Germany. Which means you can only purchase weapons made for hunting, you need to be a trained and licensed hunter, your weapons needed to be unloaded and locked away any time you aren’t hunting, no every day carry, etc.
I am one of these people who think the only meat you should eat is hunted by yourself. Not just because of the animal rights violations in the farming industry but also because birthing something to eat it is immoral in my eyes and I feel there’s a weight that comes with killing something. I don’t count hunting with a gun as hunting, its simply unfair, there’s no challenge and the animal doesn’t have a chance. If you can’t make it yourself in nature, you shouldn’t use it. I’m okay with bringing knives n all but I personally prefer to make them myself.
I need to specify fuck all gun owners because everytime, one comes out of the woodwork talking about how he likes the hobby and he keeps his gun safe. Well his hobby is leading to unnecessary deaths and he should grow the fuck up. If you want to eat meat without the factory, raise it, bow it, trap it, fish it or go vegan. People don’t deserve to die because of some snowflake that only eats wild game or some loser that built his whole personality on aiming a stick.
That being said, there is an easy compromise; no private ownership of guns. You want to have fun shooting clay pigeons, rent the gun at the range. You want to spend time with the boys shooting hogs, rent the gun at the hunting ground. But it’s a non starter because that takes away the whole power thing and that’s the real reason people are so obsessed with the damn things.
I guess people really can’t have this conversation without it being super emotionally charged. I mean, you can kill a person with a bow too, I don’t think that’s really a viable solution, it’s also a dangerous weapon. Anything you use to easily kill an animal can be used against humans, and arguably should be regulated too. And not everyone has the land, money, and resources to raise their own domestic animals for food.
Insulting people who want to ethically eat meat and anyone who owns a gun is what your going for here, but I don’t see where the “snowflake” remark comes in. It’s a big jump to say someone who wants to hunt to avoid factory farming has their entire personality built around it and to minimize their attempt at ethical food consumption by calling it a “hobby”. And saying “fuck all everyone who does X” is usually a pretty unhelpfully broad generalization that lacks scrutiny. You’re using the “attacking someone’s character” fallacy.
Renting a weapon to hunt seems like a decent solution, but who is qualified to rent or safekeep the weapons? Then they’re just in someone elses hands. What criteria do we use to judge who’s capable of renting them out?
My point is it’s a complex issue, and anyone who says it’s so easily solved by doing “this one thing” isn’t considering every angle.
The personality part is aimed at people that think having easy distribution of weapons is justified by their choice of hobby(not hunting but gun range).
You can’t kill a crowd of people with a bow.
The current ownership restrictions can be used for hunting. Anyone that clearly isn’t fit to use it doesn’t get to. The difference is it’s not sitting in someone’s closet where an innocent child, angsty teenager or jealous spouse can just pull it out. If you’re in the middle of a psychotic episode, the guy at the counter just won’t rent it to you.
You aren’t getting real responses because we’ve heard it all before. They are weak arguments, as if you didn’t know the simple difference between a bow and a gun.
So no, it’s not complex. Guns are dangerous, they are being misused. The negatives of everyone having access to them outweigh the benefits by a huge amount. Ban them.
Have you ever seen anyone arguing against mental health help?
Yes, several times. Even this meme implies that arguing for more and better mental health services as a solution to massacres is foolishly wrong. Also, another reply I got here says:
Nah, we don’t very much need to worry about the murderous intentions, as long as they’re not able to put them into action.
You also can’t make mental health illegal overnight. People are born with mental health issues, it’s not something they buy at the store or grab from their fathers closet.
I think you are a bit confused about what I’m suggesting here, or I’m not understanding what you mean with this.
Ban guns, ban guns now. Fuck gun culture and fuck all gun owners (even the responsible ones)
We can thoroughly take care of the more complicated part of the problem once the easy part has been solvedYou think banning guns is the easy part? History has shown us time and time again that prohibitions don’t work. Even if possession of a single firearm was punished with death people would still own and trade them as it happens with drugs in places where its punished with death.
Gun control or even prohibition is like a small umbrella under heavy rain, you dont get drenched but you still get wet. We need a raincoat, a hat and rubber boots.
To be fair, better metal health services is not an absolute solution either, there are plenty more stuff we should improve in order to achieve a real solution.Lol, guns aren’t an addicting substance thats consumed, you can’t make guns easily with veggies and a vat. It isn’t comparable to alcohol or the prohibition.
And again, it becomes clear that anyone arguing for other solutions just wants to keep their guns, they don’t actually care about the situation or how it’s affecting people.
Get a better hobby than aiming a stick at paper targets. It’s menial, pathetically simple and is leading to real problems for zero gains except to your ego. GROW UP.
It isn’t comparable to alcohol or the prohibition.
there’s a direct comparison.
anyone arguing for other solutions just wants to keep their guns, they don’t actually care about the situation or how it’s affecting people.
false dichotomy
you can’t make guns easily
wrong
Get a better hobby
It’s menial, pathetically simple and is leading to real problems for zero gains except to your ego. GROW UP.
Username checks out
Nope, fuck you. We will not ban guns, and there is nothing you can ever do about it. Our gun rights are set in stone.
I know it’s hard since you have built your personality around it and without guns, everyone becomes stridently aware how uninteresting you are but it’s necessary for society so deal with it.
Your snowflake feelings aren’t more important than innocent lives, loser
My feelings about it are irrelevant, and you have no idea about me except your strawman bad guy concept that you imagined. Ad hominem attacks are inherently weak.
I support all rights for all Americans, and will continue to do so perpetually. The US Supreme Court has confirmed the individual right to own firearms in triplicate, and the amendment that right is supported by will never be repealed since it requires 3/4 of the 50 US states to ratify. You can deal with that with your own feelings one way or another, which are also irrelevant to the facts of the matter.
You support all rights except the one to feel safe in public places.
The supreme Court is busy dismantling abortion rights, they are obviously not a beacon of sanity and justice.
Believe what you want but your little hard-on for gunpowder is costing innocent lives.
Also, get off your high horse. You started your reply literally with a fuck you, it’s a bit late to cry about me calling you a snowflake lol
Nope, you don’t get to speak for me. I alone represent myself and I have done so with my former statements of fact.
I will remain on this high horse because it was YOU who started with “Fuck You” to all gun owners. I responded proportionally.
Regardless of who started, it makes you a hypocrite to try to call me out on it when you exhibit the same behavior. That’s more my point.
Also, it’s not a good thing to stay on a high horse. The expression means you are being arrogant and snoby but you do you.
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Most gun owners live in a paranoid fantasy world with a hero complex. I’ve heard some wild shit come from the mouths of people who own guns. Many who do own them should have them taken away. It’s mostly brainwashing and less about mental disorders with these people.
… or anywhere else, except the USA.
It’s not even like Canada even gives a shit about mental health.
Apparently the Ontario prime minister had heard a out how much people were suffering post pandemic - - - and then cut funding to the point that people could only get 10 sessions with a consoler (not even a psychologist or anything special!)
wtf is a consoler
better be some kind of empathetic stripper
Non, it’s a guy, who plays exclusively on console.
if this is a consolor ship then where is the xbox?
chokes dude
chokes dude
Just can’t understand what passes for porn these days.
One only needs to walk around some neighborhoods in Vancouver (hello, Hastings!) to see how much Canada cares about mental healthcare
see how much Canada cares about mental healthcare
Canada, or anywhere else, people do care about mental health care, at least until they have to pay more taxes to take care of it.
I love on Vancouver and it’s very visible here how much people care about mental healthcare
And it does lead to mass shootings but Americans have to think they are special
Well there is another thing they all have in common…
They’re all dirty commies! At least that’s what Fox News told me.
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let me guess, you self identify as a centrist
Running statistical analysis on the data now. Preliminary results suggest video games as the main causal effect.
Are you sure it’s not Dungeons and Dragons and that heavy metal music?
And don’t forget about Tarot cards and Astrology!
Are you sure it’s not vaccines? Either the vaccine the shooter took made them do it, or if they weren’t vaccinated the vaccines in the people around them!
For the record, we have video games, D&D and tarot cards up here in Canada.
Oh, cool - we’re pretending there are no other differences between the countries listed, e.g. healthcare, social safety nets, etc. that may or may not have been shown to be an unavoidable majority of the underlying issues.
Gotta enjoy the meme circlejerk though, eh?
I always say that this is more cultural than anything else. Americans tend to be more gung ho and are ammosexuals who worship guns excessively. The Swiss have more guns per capita, they are legally mandated to own guns, but they have practically zero mass shootings unlike the US. I’m not deriding American people themselves, I’m just criticising how they handle and view guns. They can do whatever the heck they want, it’s their prerogative, but if one’s rights end with another then that’s going to be an issue. Just relax with the guns and emulate their Swiss brethrens who are self-disciplined about handling guns. Rights come with responsibilities.
Well. It’s partly a mental health problem, sure. But it’s not just that.
We’ve got a number of things going on that a lot of other countries don’t have.
First, guns are a civil right in the US. Multiple SCOTUS rulings in the last 20 years have affirmed that it’s an individual civil right, and not a collective one. (Which would be weird, since everything else in the Bill of Rights is about people, rather than the gov’t; the power to raise a military was already listed as a power of the gov’t in the constitution, so why would the signatories need to also specify that the gov’t had the right to arm the army that it had raised?)
Second, the US is one of the few developed countries that has extremely poor social safety networks. We have a low individual and corporate tax rate (again, as far as developed countries go), so we can’t pay for the kind of social services that other countries take for granted. We have comparatively high rates of poverty and a far larger economic inequality gap than most other developed countries.
Third, we have a declining public education system; we’ve been cutting public education, and putting more money towards selective schools, like charter and magnet schools (and, in some places, public funding for religious schooling), which decreases the quality of education. This shitty education system means that comparatively fewer people–and disproportionately black and Latino people–don’t have access to goo education, which limits their career prospects.
Fourth, we have a terrible, broken criminal justice system. We focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation, and people that go to prison often find that their opportunities are sharply limited when they get out, likely trapping them in a continued cycle of poverty.
The latter three things contribute to fairly high rates of violent crimes. The first factor makes crime much more lethal.
The truth is that the rate violent crime in the US is on par with violent crime in the UK or Australia (violent crime referring to forcible rape, assault/battery, robbery, and murder), with Australia having a quite high reported rate of forcible rape, the UK having a quite high rate of battery, and the US dwarfing their murder rates.
In regards to spree-killers, there’s not a single profile. The US Secret Service has looked at some thigns that are risk factors, but spree killers are so comparatively rare, and have such widely varied motives, that there’s nothing that they can draw definite conclusions on. When I say that these events are rare, what I mean is that commonly reported figures that claim daily mass shootings aren’t looking at spree killers, but are looking at ordinary crime–robberies, assaults–involving multiple injuries, rather than an active shooter that’s trying to kill as many people as possible. A running gunfight between gang member that sees 2 people killed and ten people shot isn’t what most people think of when they thing “mass shooting”; they’re thinking of something like the Mandelay Bay massacre in 2017, Pulse Nightclub, or Newtown, CT. Some of the people that are spree killers do have a real mental illness; the Aurora, CO murderer is schizophrenic. Many do not.
There’s not a quick, easy answer, because this wasn’t something that happened overnight. The idea that we’ve never had mass murderers prior to Columbine HS is just factually wrong, and Columbine has been 30 years ago now.
