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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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If you had a free hand, what WOULD you do about it? Other than police state stuff (in which I include effective gun control), I don't see what you can do. Having the FBI pay special attention to Hispanic neo-Nazis probably won't work.

I see value in both @hydroacetylene and @huadpe’s answers. A little police state is not a bad thing—not when police are the raison d’etre of the state. The problem is incentivizing them to remain little.

I don’t see a way to let police preempt shooters without also letting them preempt and inconvenience anyone else. The Tang China tack, punishing police for false alarms? There’s no way to know what could have happened. Red flag laws? It helps if civilians have to bring the accusation, but still, there’s incentive to confiscate first and ask questions later. Police will always be incentivized to disarm the populace. It makes their job strictly easier.

Tribalism makes this all worse. So long as Our Team is getting disarmed and Their Team is doing the disarming, both sides are correct to recognize the incentives. I don’t know if it’s physically possible to depoliticize this. Changing how the media reports gun violence has to be a start. “If it bleeds, it leads” has never been in the public interest.

In summary: I don’t have a good answer, and think that most mainstream ones are pointless or counterproductive. It’d be nice if we never talked about it, but anyone aiming at an innocent was immediately drone-struck. We’re so far from that world that I’m not sure what is best. That’s why I’m venting here instead of, I dunno, running for office.

Yeah, but other than making you feel less icky seeing people with guns in public, what does banning open carry actually accomplish? I can't think of a single mass shooting that would have been prevented by such a law. Has a mass shooter ever been misidentified as a lawful citizen peacefully open carrying? This is exactly the sort of "I can't identify any way this would actually help solve the stated problem, but it would make me feel better emotionally" policy suggestion that makes gun rights supporters distrustful of "compromise" legislation.

Hell, your first suggestion for a reasonable compromise to alleviate the problem of mass shooters is to... moderately inconvenience a group of shockingly law-abiding people in a way that has no plausible impact on mass shootings but does prohibit a lawful activity that you already dislike for unrelated reasons anyway. This is why gun rights supporters aren't interested in compromise. If every suggested "compromise" for decades takes the form of a pointless restriction that seems almost deliberately designed to do nothing but antagonize you, eventually you stop giving your opponents the benefit of the doubt that they're operating in good faith.

Discharging a firearm in your front yard is not an example of open carry. I would be absolutely shocked if what he did was not already illegal under current law, and on the off chance it wasn't, why not ban the dangerous and concerning activity he was actually engaged in rather than a much broader activity that almost exclusively penalizes law-abiding individuals?

Discharging a gun in your front lawn without a good reason (self defense), is already a crime in the vast majority of jurisdictions (including that person's according to some reports). Which would make this another example of "just enforce the law you losers" cases.

At least in rural areas it's pretty frequently legal to engage in target shooting on private property: as far as I know in Texas it's legal to discharge firearms on your own property outside of city limits provided you're at least 300 feet from neighboring occupied buildings. Within city limits it's generally a local law issue. Rifle and shotgun shots (presumably mostly for sport or hunting) are not an uncommon sound if you start wandering backroads.

Which would make this another example of "just enforce the law you losers" cases.

As far as I can tell, the suspect in question wasn't in the US legally, and thus couldn't have legally acquired the firearm in question.

How would visit from the police stop him from murdering the family, exactly?

This is, of course, completely ignoring the fact that your top policy suggestion, taken in the most charitable light, would do absolutely nothing if he was shooting a gun in his back, not front yard (because then there is no way to see it as open carry).

Really, your comment is an extremely clear example of how the policy proposals of gun control people only serve to annoy the out group, and have very little effect on actual criminals.

He wasn't stopped by the many other laws he violated. Assuming enforcement of your specific policy will not suffer the same problems as laws related to immigration or deported foreign nationals not being allowed to purchase firearms is special pleading.

I don't think you should be able to show a firearm unless you're in a place / circumstance where you can legally discharge that firearm.

Could you clarify? The place you've described is "any place", which doesn't disallow non-uniformed shooters, and the circumstance you've described is "with justifiable belief in an imminent unprovoked threat of death or grievous bodily harm", which does disallow police officers and security guards at any time before it's too late to go get a gun.

And it makes it so that if you see someone strapped, you can know it's a problem and run/call the cops/etc.

Sadly, this rule would only be reliable if certain false prerequisites like "concealed carriers' clothes never shift the wrong way" were true. There are a lot of people who never want to open carry but who also never want to go to jail (or worse; IIRC I read about this in the discussion of a CCW holder killed by police) for not concealing well enough.

Sure. Under my rule, you can concealed carry in public, but you can't pull out your weapon until and unless there is in fact a justifiable belief in an imminent threat. You can open carry if you're allowed to hunt in that area or if it's a range or somewhere else shooting is allowed.

This would also have the effect of making it a crime to open carry a gun inside your own home, in any city or county that bans shooting within the municipal boundaries.

Sure. Under my rule, you can concealed carry in public, but you can't pull out your weapon until and unless there is in fact a justifiable belief in an imminent threat.

This is supposed to be the rule for police and security guards already in most places.

All of that said, a society of high interpersonal violence and crime is I believe inimical to liberty

But "wrong door" shootings and the popular type of mass shootings where a disaffected person kills a bunch of strangers are a small percentage of homicides. And it's possible to have high gun ownership but low homicide rate -as low-homicide portions of the US or high gun ownership parts of europe show. The US's crime rate should be much lower, but thinking about mass shootings, wrong door shootings, or civilian gun prevalence as ways to lower it is mistaken, imo.

If we posit the world where the guns are removed, you've just made it so that physical prowess is solely determinant of success in violent encounters.

Which is to say, you're making females less able to resist male attackers, or allowing organized groups to terrorize individuals more freely, or make it harder for the old and infirm to defend themselves.

This leaves aside the generally observed tendency towards government tyranny become gradually (or suddenly) more harsh against disarmed populations.

And of course probably going to see a rise in Cars as tool of mass homicide

Second, I don't think it's true that there's a correlation between stricter gun laws and backsliding on democracy or basic civil rights, and I'd like you to support that claim.

What if it happens that the right to keep and bear arms is a basic civil right?

I don’t think we’d be looking at (at least in the first two generations) a low-gun USA. As a practical matter, no one knows where the guns are; they’re not registered and a fair number of states are constitutional carry states meaning that you don’t have to have a CCL. People aren’t going to simply surrender the guns, and nobody knows which houses to even check. The stuff you can find in a constitutional carry state are people who have memberships at shooting ranges and old guys who bought a state deer tag. At best you’ll get shotguns and old deer rifles, not AKs. So being fair to the argument, Australia and Japan, where nobody has guns is probably not the probable outcome. It’s going to be a country that still has a lot of guns (and even in places where guns aren’t officially allowed, it’s easy enough to get one, see Chicago or New York or DC — guns are highly restricted but you can easily get one if you need it) just not in the hands of the law abiding citizen.

My thought (and it will never happen) is a massively overwhelming show of police force. If you can reduce crime and especially violent crime by 15-20%, a lot fewer people will even want guns except for plinking beer cans (and hopefully not on a movie set) or maybe hunting. In the 1960s when crime was low, the most common form of gun was a hunting rifle. People didn’t want more than that because there wasn’t much gang violence, theft, or rape. You could walk down most city streets and be perfectly safe. You could let your kids play baseball in an empty lot without much fear. People want guns now because we no longer live in the kind of society where you can trust your neighbors to do the right thing, where the biggest fear was your kid getting a little drunk or maybe getting cigarettes at the bowling alley. If you can get crime that low, you won’t need to fight to confiscate guns because people who feel safe in their homes won’t want guns.

The rise in crime in the 1970's happened across the first world, and it didn't lead to a demand for liberalised handgun laws in any country except America.

and it didn't lead to a demand for liberalised handgun laws in any country except America

It didn't really even lead to a demand for liberalized handgun laws in America over that time either- it would take until the mid-to-late nineties for licenses to carry concealed in public to become rubber-stamp affairs (and another 20 after that would be done away with entirely), and that was also in the midst of a ban that limited the number of permissible rounds to 10 (admittedly, the '94 AWB and its 10-round limit predate even the chunky 90s-00s subcompact handguns which barely hold that many rounds in the first place).

To be fair, it also took until the late '90s for the largest English-speaking countries to completely destroy the concept of gun ownership in general; the bans in UK and Australia (and to a point, Canada) all came after the US' AWB.

This I'm a bit skeptical about because we did get crime quite low by the 2010s and it didn't do much of anything to tamp down gun culture and purchases.

They were still high by international standards, and there was an entire political coalition promising to enact soft anarcho-tyranny on the issue.

Were gun trends in the 2010s driven by the recession? Or by the rather passionate response to Democratic administrations? Obama was a bogeyman on a lot of CW issues, and I think that confounds the issue.

Regardless, much as I’d like to smash crime back down to 2011 levels, I don’t think we can reduce gun culture without disentangling it from the red/blue split.

I fully agree with your sentiment except in one part: Increasing the amount of police won't decrease the prevalence of crime long-term. Increasing the quality of police training and integrating police more tightly into communities might do some good but ultimately crime isn't a matter of a lack of crime-prevention in the narrow understanding of the term. Reducing crime effectively requires adjusting cultural, social and imo most importantly economic variables. The reason switzerland has a much lower homicide rate while having a comparable rate of gun ownership to the US isn't that switzerland is a draconian police state.

As a practical matter, no one knows where the guns are; they’re not registered and a fair number of states are constitutional carry states meaning that you don’t have to have a CCL.

The government knows where all the guns an "instant check" were required for are. Yes, they're supposed to destroy the records; they don't. And even if they did, the NSA would keep a backup. That accounts for a lot of them.

Are there stats on relative frequency of such crimes in e.g. Japan or Australia?

Cherry-picking 2 of the most docile societies on the planet won't work here. It's pretty obvious that people become much more susceptible to knives and bats wielded by men in gun-free societies.

Women generally don't like guns, despite them being a great equalizer. They should still have the option to avoid ceding the power to effectively defend themselves because of biology.

And even then, I suspect we may have to revise Japan's "docile" rating if they keep trying to kill their Prime Ministers.

But Australia is very culturally similar to the US, and is by no means a docile society.

Ehh, maybe if you think of the sort of rural bogans and bikie-types we might stereotypically associate with Australia, but as a Yank, I'm under the impression that that really isn't the case, and they have a Deep Blue Tribe there (probably helped by the fact that Australia only has like four major cities).

I do think Australia shares quite a few similarities with the Anglo world, but almost nowhere else folded as quickly or completely to COVID restrictions, gun control, and wokeism. I don't deny that an island nation has effectively instituted gun control (even if there was, IIRC, a minor uptick in non-gun violence as a result).

Australia is absolutely as rule-abiding a society as Japan; the rules are just different. Look at the treatment of speed limits for a trivial example.

Do we see those effects in societies which have almost no guns available? Are there stats on relative frequency of such crimes in e.g. Japan or Australia?

Japan has virtually no violence to speak of at any rate, so I don't know what you'd even expect to measure, there.

But suffice it to say, there is a reason The Yakuza can function so easily. They have the capacity for coordinated violence, and your average citizen has no means to resist them even if they wanted to.

Of course, in Mexico the Cartels also function pretty easily but engage in far, FAR more violence than the Yakuza do... despite guns also being nominally banned there.

So perhaps the problem is more that Mexican culture and Japanese Culture have different norms around the use of violence.

This gets to the REAL point at issue: the driving force of violence in any given nation is NOT the availability of weapons.

First of all, I'm not certain the armed populace are not themselves being tyrannical or supporting tyranny. History is littered with pro-tyranny rebellions against the government such as the US Civil War,

I'm going to resist my first instinct to accuse you of bad faith and just ask:

How is a nation actively choosing to separate itself from a government that it no longer wishes to participate in, and to thus secede from participation in said government "pro-tyranny?"

By this literal, exact logic the original American revolution was also 'pro-tyranny.'

Armed defenders of liberty against state tyranny is one possible dynamic, but armed forces of tyranny against the democratic state is a pretty common one too.

Seems like a good reason to allow pro-democracy forces to keep weapons? I dunno what examples you're thinking of in particular.

Second, I don't think it's true that there's a correlation between stricter gun laws and backsliding on democracy or basic civil rights, and I'd like you to support that claim.

North Korea, 2009:

"N. Korea enacts rules on regulating firearms"

North Korea has had a gun control law since 2009, recently obtained data showed Monday, in what was seen as an effort to tighten control over the society at a time of power succession.

Venezuela, 2012:

"Venezuela bans private gun ownership"

Afghanistan, 2021:

"Taliban in Afghan capital Kabul start collecting weapons from civilians"

Saudi Arabia, 2023 (timely!)

"Saudi Arabia announces new gun laws, restrictions on ownership"

Even if we don't assume that banning guns = slide into tyranny... the actual tyrants seem to think that banning guns is helpful to their ends.

Here's a fun exercise for you, can you point out any country that is heavily tyrannical and has very little democracy or protection of basic civil rights... and yet allows broad gun ownership?

Seems almost facially obvious to me that banning civilian-held guns is a DEFINING FEATURE of tyrannical nations, and that ONLY places with functional democracies (e.g. Switzerland) end up having permissive guns laws.

Saudi Arabia, 2023 (timely!)

"Saudi Arabia announces new gun laws, restrictions on ownership"

But... Saudi Arabia has been a tyranny for its entire existence. As far as I've understood, it's not likely to get more tyrannical by any standards we'd generally consider tyrannical. Nevertheless, they appear, by these laws, to have allowed (and still allow!) some form of handgun ownership.

Monarchy is not the same thing as tyranny, and if you're referring to their laws regarding social issues, consider that this is what most people living there might actually want.

Ages ago I heard a clip where a western reporter interviewed the Saudi king. He asked why doesn't he just make women equal to men under law, he's the king after all and can do whatever he wants. The response was seemingly a tangent about how much he loves his subjects, and how highly he values their opinion and values. The (Facebook, I think) commentariat couldn't make sense of it, and the reaction was an overwhelming "what the fuck is this dude on about?", while to me he was pretty clearly saying "If I pass a law like that, my people will string me up by my feet".

Now, how much does that have to do with gun control, I have no idea, but one shouldn't assume a government is a tyranny just because there's an absolute ruler.

Here's a fun exercise for you, can you point out any country that is heavily tyrannical and has very little democracy or protection of basic civil rights... and yet allows broad gun ownership?

Nazi Germany would be the most obvious answer - Weimar-era gun laws were repeatedly relaxed by the Nazi regime (with an initially de facto but later de jure exception for Jews) as part of their remilitarization of Germany and ownership of long guns by non-Jews was entirely deregulated in 1938. A lot of the friends and relations of the Gypsies, homosexuals, socialists etc. who the Nazis persecuted would have been armed. Didn't make any difference - the Nazi regime was a paradigmatic case where the answer to "You can have my gun when you prize it from my cold dead hands" would be "Very well, let's do it your way"

And of course, if a determined population actually sticks to their guns in this way, they at least improve the casualty ratio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising

But yeah, had they thrown down their weapons at the start, there'd probably have been less death overall.

Warsaw is notoriously not in Germany. The Polish nation-in-arms had already been defeated on the battlefield long before Hitler thought about the Holocaust - the fact that the Germans would win a violent conflict was already settled, as was the fact that they were willing to use the necessary force (including much bigger weapons than the rifles armed civilians rely on) and brutality to do so.

The claim that "civilian-owned guns are a useful tool of resistance to a foreign invader" is a very different one to "civilian-owned guns are protective against the domestic government turning tyrannical". The first claim seems like it should be answerable as a matter of military history - FWIW my uneducated view is that since about 1900 civilian guns have not been a problem for an invader able and willing to use tanks and aircraft against troublesome civilians, and that effective resistance to foreign invaders has tended to rely on "bombs" (IRA car bombs, VC claymore traps in Vietnam, IEDs in Iraq) rather than guns. I think the second claim is never going to be settled for the reasons we are seeing on this thread.

the driving force of violence in any given nation is NOT the availability of weapons.

So? It would be absurd to suggest never taking any action on one cause of an ill just because it happened not to be the most important cause. As long as it's a significant factor it's worth doing something about.

How is a nation actively choosing to separate itself from a government that it no longer wishes to participate in, and to thus secede from participation in said government "pro-tyranny?"

I don't think he was saying the action of secession was pro-tyranny, merely that rebellions can incidentally also be 'pro-tyranny', which is hard to dispute in the case of the U.S. Civil War, given what was being fought over.

As long as it's a significant factor it's worth doing something about.

If it's not the most significant factor, then almost by definition you shouldn't be prioritizing it.

My position is that there are at least a couple more significant factors that are studiously ignored when it comes to this issue.

merely that rebellions can incidentally also be 'pro-tyranny', which is hard to dispute in the case of the U.S. Civil War, given what was being fought over.

I don't think there was any stated intention for the Confederate States to extend their authority over any other nations, so hard to claim they were 'tyrannical' with regards to the North, nor that they were somehow flouting the actual laws of the country at the time.

And to the extent they were tyrannizing their own people, well you're hardly going to suggest that slaves enjoyed expansive gun rights, are you?

i.e., my point, that tyrannical powers generally prefer disarmed populaces.

If it's not the most significant factor, then almost by definition you shouldn't be prioritizing it.

My position is that there are at least a couple more significant factors that are studiously ignored when it comes to this issue.

This circles back to our comments above on tractability.

well you're hardly going to suggest that slaves enjoyed expansive gun rights, are you?

No but the point is that an armed population, if they are ever able to resist the state, will not always be doing so to benefit of the population. As another commentor has observed, the latter and post-Reconstruction era South would have been a much freer place were the entire population disarmed.

tyrannical powers generally prefer disarmed populaces

Maybe true, but I don't think it holds any lessons for modern day America.

If we are looking for a US example of pro-tyranny armed citizens rebelling against the government, then the first Klan and the Redeemers (my history is not good enough to know to what extent these were meaningfully different groups) are a more clear-cut example than the Confederacy.

But surely if it is the culture's perception of violence which has the greatest impact you should put more work into that? If we rework America into a more conservative culture like Japan we could solve the issue and keep gun owners happy, then everyone wins.

Well not really because gun control is, at least from a policy perspective, relatively tractable, and from a political perspective many good measures are well inside the Overton window. 'Reworking America into a more conservative culture' will never happen, at least not whole cloth and not in a way where the results will be easily predictable and definitely translate into a more stable society.

relatively tractable, and from a political perspective many good measures are well inside the Overton window. 'Reworking America into a more conservative culture' will never happen, at least not whole cloth and not in a way where the results will be easily predictable and definitely translate into a more stable society.

This is an interesting position to take given that we can literally look at Japan and see that they have something resembling a 'more conservative culture' and attendant low rates of violence.

So we are now facing a question: WHY can it never happen in the U.S.?

If it is in-principle possible, why is it dismissed out of hand?

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It sounds like there are a bunch of post-Soviet countries with permissive handgun laws. Plus a couple like Russia which want to keep that locked down.

Also most of South America.

It doesn't seem like a zero gun society there resulted in more assault on women or the elderly.

Not when you pick one that just doesn't have any violence to measure, no.

How the heck to you expect to establish a correlation with ANYTHING when there's scant data to use?

Mexico nominally bans guns but totally lacks the capacity to enforce that, and is quasi anarchic in many places.

Hence why Mexican Citizens should probably be allowed to own guns.

Do you have examples of a free country adopting these laws and that allowing the rise of tyranny?

I mean, I would consider both the United Kingdom and Canada as examples of this. Canada has never had high rates of violence, and yet they have gotten continually stricter on guns. The U.K. is unironically a clown show about it, coming after Kitchen Knives now. <30 years from when they banned handguns for civilians and they're now claiming can't be trusted with a fucking bread knife.

Canada in particular is very "iron fist in velvet glove" about it.

And then they do shit like shut off your bank account if you protest.

If unilaterally seizing the private property of peaceful citizens isn't tyrannical, I don't know what is.

The whole issue is that you're asking me to demonstrate a free society that gave up guns and THEN became tyrannical, when my whole premise is that:

A) Societies which allow civilian gun ownership are less likely to ever become tyrannical (again, see Switzerland)

B) It requires a tyrannical state to actually enact and enforce gun laws in the first place.

So my examples are things like the Taliban seizing power again and immediately confiscating weapons or Venezuela banning guns then kidnapping citizens en masse and further clamping down on dissent.

Tyrants don't trust their citizens with weapons. So they inevitably end up confiscating weapons from civilians.

That's what happens in tyrannies. The get more, not less tyrannical over time. So the solution is to maintain all safeguards that prevent falling into it in the first place.

And civilian firearm ownership seems to be a reliable one.

The U.K. is unironically a clown show about it, coming after Kitchen Knives now. <30 years from when they banned handguns for civilians and they're now claiming can't be trusted with a fucking bread knife.

Despite what you have been reading there is no systematic ban on ordinary domestic knives in the UK. There is a ban on swords and machetes -- as there is in many countries -- and you can be have a knife confiscated if you are carrying it outside your home under suspicious circumstances -- as you can in many countries and most US states.

Canada in particular is very "iron fist in velvet glove" about it.

And then they do shit like shut off your bank account if you protest.

You're theory being that if the truckers were armed the Canadian government would have been... less harsh? If anything that would surely make them come down like a ton of bricks.

You're theory being that if the truckers were armed the Canadian government would have been... less harsh? If anything that would surely make them come down like a ton of bricks.

They would have had to commit to actually exercising force and seeing blood in the streets rather than pussyfooting around and closing bank accounts.

My theory is that the Canadian government would be less likely to implement tyrannical policies if they had to worry about an armed populace, generally.

Why should we expect them to treat the next protest any more nicely?

After all, the whole reason the truckers protested in the first place was the imposition of vaccination requirements,

And of course, they continue adding more firearms restrictions apace, despite not having suffered any actual attacks.

It's almost like they just want to ban the guns irrespective of any direct statistical justification.

And I don't know WTF to make of their current approach to Euthanasia policy

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Go directly to statistics jail for comparing violent crime in the US when large parts of the country were under COVID restrictions to Australia after COVID restrictions had ceased. If you use the 2019 US figures, it doesn't change the story - the US assault number was 1.7% instead of 1.4% - still well below the Australian level.

IIRC last time I looked it up, UK stats looked similar (assuming US FBI and UK Home Office statistics are a reasonable comparison), but I don't feel like digging for it now.

The equivalent victim-survey based crime numbers are the Crime Survey for England and Wales (I didn't bother looking for Scottish or Northern Irish numbers, but they won't materially affect the UK-wide average). The latest (almost entirely post-COVID restrictions) overall victimisation rate for violent crime is 1.35% - i.e. somewhat below the US numbers. The CSEW does not break down individual types of violent crime because the sample size isn't big enough to produce reliable numbers.

The other thing I looked at, more as a sanity check that the data was comparable than for information, was whether the contribution of domestic violence was the same. Both the US and Australia have about a 20:40:40 ratio of domestic violence/acquaintance violence/stranger violence. The UK talks about "domestic abuse" which is clearly something completely different because the rate is higher than the overall violent crime rate.

Incidentally, can any Aussies on this board let me know how you can have that level of violent crime and not end up with the kind of national freakout about it that the US and the UK go in for?

I was thinking about the national lockdown in Australia which ended in May 2020, but looking at this list of local lockdowns, it looks like Sydney and Canberra spent about 2 months of 2021 under lockdown and Melbourne about 3 months.

Looking at 2019 makes most sense until we have a full year of post-COVID data (which the UK just published, but the US and Australia don't seem to have yet)

More comments

  • no credit cards for gun sales- you don’t pick up the gun until the dealer has cash in hand. Persons under 25 need to wait two weeks before picking up semiautomatics.

  • media coverage of mass shootings is banned.

  • straw purchasers and felons in possession are automatically guilty of attempted murder, not the previous crimes. No plea bargains are permitted and there is a strong mandatory minimum.

  • gang members on the list of prohibited persons. Person to person transfers are prohibited and must be an FFL transfer.

  • insurance companies cannot attempt to incentivize businesses banning licensed concealed carry.

And is there any evidence the guy was a Nazi? He had gang tattoos but the speculation about white supremacist ideology comes from a patch on his jacket reading RWDS, which could be a bar, a mechanic shop, something left on the jacket from the guy who donated it to a thrift store, etc.

Truly, Nazi's and white supremacist are a very diverse and eclectic group.

My theory; Being hispanic means he can be racists as hell and never get called on it, hence the various online postings. With racism being keyed only to white people, everyone in the media makes the assumption that he's automatically white with no research on the matter.

Very low-hanging fruit, but here are Ian Miles Cheong and Tim Pool beclowning themselves in the face of this, and Elon Musk getting real close to it.

I hate to rely on Twitter-mining of social media, but yeah, sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one.

Almost all of those policy proscriptions is less likely to work for the simple fact that 3D printers go BRRRRRR

The median mass shooter is not an experienced gunsmith, or an accomplished 3d printer nerd, nor indeed experienced in any kind of small scale manufacturing at all. He’s a troubled but managed to keep his nose clean 19 year old NEET. Making it harder for him to buy guns is making it very difficult for him to acquire them.

Most other Western countries seem to be dealing with that problem adequately.

Define "adequately."

There's already been at least one attack using such a weapon.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/3d-gun-print-germany-synagogue-shooting-stephan-balliet-neo-nazi-a9152746.html

And they're popping up with increasing regularity across Europe too.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/justice-home-affairs/news/europol-keeps-wary-eye-on-threat-from-3d-printed-guns/

Only in September, Icelandic police said they had arrested four people suspected of planning a “terrorist attack”, confiscating several 3D-printed semi-automatic weapons.

The same month, Spanish authorities discovered an illegal gun-making workshop of a man in his forties in the Basque Country.

That find followed two other such cases in the country in 2021.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63495123

Police are seizing 3D printed weapons in greater numbers. From the start of last year there have been 21 recoveries of weapons, a "significant increase" on previous years, though still small compared to conventional weapons, Mr Perfect says.

Do you think this becomes more or less common in the coming years?

And let us be specific: how many shootings using these sorts of weapons would have to occur in other countries before it wasn't adequately dealt with?

Insofar as in toto most Western governments control the supply of guns pretty well despite the apparent threat of 3-D printed guns. Some individual instances of them being used hardly disproves that picture.

Yeah, so you're either skilled enough to do it, or reckless enough to willingly sell such guns to unstable, weird people you don't know.

The whole thing with 3D printers is the skill required is minimal, so long as you can operate a computer.

And more to the point, the cost is usually much lower.

or reckless enough to willingly sell such guns to unstable, weird people you don't know.

That's... generally how black markets work, yeah.

The whole thing with 3D printers is the skill required is minimal, so long as you can operate a computer.

You're out here saying anyone who can operate a tablet or a gaming console can also make a FGC9 without major issues or help ?

I'll also note here that Breivik tried to buy a gun at a 'black market' in Czech Republic and failed miserably.

Not that there isn't one, but you have to be a criminal to access it, which the average spree shooter isn't,

Most of this I'd class as police state stuff, and most of it wouldn't help for these sorts of mass shootings. Straw purchasers are a different problem, ordinary criminality. Two week waiting periods don't help with people who plan (which is a lot of these mass shooters).

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